Then Things Changed

This scene isn't in the Palouse, but in central Washington, a stone's throw from the Columbia River. It's one of a kind and I decided to include it here.

I have a years-long project I call "Then Things Changed'. Most of those photographs are more documentary in character and wouldn't be the sort of thing you'd necessarily want to hang in your living room or office. But I feel this one is different. As I travel around, I'm constantly drawn to old, abandoned, or repurposed structures of all sorts. In the case of abandoned homes, I imagine families eating, laughing, crying, sleeping there, and I'm always left wondering why. Why did they leave? Was it financial hardship; moving on to better opportunities? I never learn the story.

In the case of this abandoned schoolhouse, I learned the whole story. I had seen a little photo of it, from a different vantage point, in a book on the backroads of Washington, and I thought it would be interesting to investigate. The area was first settled by Swedes, but the population gradually dwindled, and the two-room schoolhouse finally closed in 1959.

I arrived in mid-July, 2010, and was entranced. I shot until the sun set. I thought it would be interesting to shoot it at sunrise. So I returned the following summer. Unfortunately, the morning light didn't seem to do the scene justice. As I was standing there, a cloud of dust appeared in the distance (the road in the upper left of the photo), and a moment later a water truck was roaring toward me. I quickly covered my camera as the driver pulled up beside me. He was an older fellow, craggy-faced, missing his two front teeth, and he was going to water his cows just down the road. We started chatting about his knowledge of the area. Come to find out, he'd grown up nearby and had attended the schoolhouse as a child. The crumbling white building beyond it had been a general store, and before that, a small inn. He owned everything as far as the eye could see, about ten thousand acres. More stories followed about local families. What a treat! I sent him a print of this a few months later.

I detoured to the spot in 2019, on my way to the Palouse. Sadly, the building had crumbled to the point where it barely resembled its original purpose. It was bound to happen. I'd been very lucky!

There is a panoramic version of this print available that adds more left and right elements to the scene.