Explore a region that moves too fast for the businesses that shaped it.
Words by Luna Ward | Photography by Cameron Johnson, Mario Rossi, and Luna Ward | April 27, 2015
Halfway through the room, the floor drops out. The gaping holes in the brick walls create accidental doors. There’s no glass in the windows. And no ceiling. There’s ash in the fireplace, but likely not from a relaxing night in front of the flames. The building burned twice.
Hotel Mudlavia, once a high-end spa enticing the likes of famous boxer John L. Sullivan and writer James Whitcomb Riley, is now a pile of rubble off an Indiana country road. It’s just one of the many buildings across the Midwest that, after decades of serving locals and travelers alike, have been turned over to the elements. From the mills that created Minneapolis to the biggest brewery in Iowa, many of the buildings that shaped the Midwest have been abandoned for decades. Some are left that way. Others are being rebuilt and their history restored.
Hotel Mudlavia — Warren County, Indiana
Photographed by Luna Ward
For 70-odd years, visitors trekked to Indiana looking for a cure. Mudlavia provided the remedy, first as a holistic health resort in the early 1900s with its rheumatism-curing mud baths, later as an asylum for the physically and mentally ill.
But then Mudlavia burned. Twice. Each time the building went up in flames, Mudlavia came back a little less of what it once was. The first fire in 1920 destroyed Mudlavia Mud Cure and Lithia Water Baths. Then came the Depression, and Mudlavia never regained its grandeur. The owners tried after the first fire, but they managed to reconstruct only a small hotel. It was later repurposed into an asylum for the elderly and the mentally ill. Lastly, it made the strange evolution from asylum to restaurant. And in 1974, that burned, too.
Now, what’s left of the hallways is littered with teen “art work” and cheap beer cans. The only attempt to keep them out is a makeshift "no trespassing” sign. The words are spray-painted on a fallen tree that lies across the path to Mudlavia’s front door.
Mill District — Minneapolis
Photographed by Cameron Johnson
In the 1880s, Minneapolis’s Mill District was the biggest producer of flour in the world. For 50 years after their prime, they won the city the title, “Flour Milling Capital of the World.” Now the district is a mishmash of crumbling mills and high-end apartments as Minneapolis works to bring people back to The Mills District.
The mills fueled the development of the city in the late 1800s. They brought railroads and filled the river ports. The industrial development brought cultural development. But more than that, it brought people. People to work in the mills, train stations, and ports. The flour mills, including The Pillsbury Co. and General Mills built in the 1820s, were powered by the St. Anthony Falls. But in the 1930s, fossil fuels replaced water as the main source of power. The mills began to decline over the next 30 years. In the 1960s, they were abandoned, and the railroad tracks that supplied them were paved over and turned into parking lots.
In the past 15 years, Minneapolis has pushed to reclaim the buildings and return people to the mills. The Washburn "A" Mill — the biggest mill in the world in 1874 — is now a history museum. The Milwaukee Road Depot, which once brought people to the mills, is an ice rink. And many of the mills are luxury lofts. The mills are recovering.
Gardiner Consolidated School — Bouton, IA
Photographed by Cameron Johnson
Pieces of blackboard cover the first floor of the Gardiner Consolidated School. The layers of dust could be mistaken for chalk dust, if you ignore the crumbling brick and missing glass in the windows.
In his book, Iowa’s Consolidated Schools, George Brown reports that the school held 67 students from elementary through high school in 1922. Iowa began consolidating its rural schools in the 1890s. In 1894, Iowa had 13,433 schoolhouses — each considered its own district. The decline in the number of students in rural districts has forced the consolidation of thousands of schools in the last century — leaving only 338 districts today. The state wanted to modernize larger, centralized schools instead of managing thousands of small, rural institutions.
Maywood Home for Soldiers and Widows — Maywood, Illinois
Photographed by Mario Rossi
The Maywood Home housed women whose husbands died in every war — Civil to Vietnam — until the building was sold in the ‘70s.
Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic founded the Maywood Home for Soldiers and Widows in 1912. It was located in a large house in the town until the Ladies built the Maywood house in 1924 so women wouldn’t be homeless if their husbands had died in war. It held up as a haven for these widows until the 1970s, when the house was repurposed as a home for adults with mental illness. Maywood was constructed to be fireproof, but a kitchen fire forced its closure in 2003.
While the brick Georgian has been vacant for over a decade, there were proposals in 2010 to turn it into senior housing, or maybe a jazz club. But those fell through. Instead, in hopes of catching a new developer's eye, the community is taking the boards off the windows and restoring the forgotten back to its original splendor.
Dico Company — Des Moines
Photographed by Luna Ward
A hazardous chemical leak caused the Dico Company, which made wheels, brakes, and rubber parts, to shut down in 1995. A thousand feet of barbed wire protecting what’s left of the plant gives a clear message: keep out.
But the shuttered factory sits on prime real estate that is ripe for development: south of downtown on the Raccoon River, a stone's throw from Gray's Lake. The Des Moines Public School District has eyed the land for a new citywide athletic stadium. A developer considered the site for an amphitheater.
But the plant has been on the National Priorities List of properties with known or threatened releases of hazardous chemicals since 1983. That’s when federal and state environmental officials found a toxic chemical linked to cancer in Des Moines’s water supply.
For decades, the land has been tied up in litigation involving millions of dollars in fines charged to the plant's owner, Morry Taylor, who refuses to pay. He’s offering Dico’s 38 acres to anyone who wants to redevelop the plant on the condition that the EPA drops the fines and he is offered a tax write-off.
For now, the land sits idle. But the neighborhood nearby is becoming more alluring to developers, who envision lofts, hotels, stores, and business parks. Eventually, what is left of Dico will be razed. In its place an amphitheater or a high school stadium may stand among the new buildings taking over the old neighborhood.
Dubuque Brewing & Malting Company — Dubuque, Iowa
Photographed by Luna Ward
Today, “I fix you car goood” is on the marquee in front of what was once one of the biggest breweries in the country. And by far the biggest in Iowa.
The brewery drew 20,000 visitors on May 7, 1896 — its opening day. It made 300,000 barrels of beer yearly. The brewery, like many in the day, made sure it always had customers by opening local saloons. It couldn’t survive the passing of the Mulct Act, which prohibited saloons in Iowa in 1915. The Corn Belt Packing Co. took over the brewery in late 1918. The building was passed to a few other companies over the decades, none staying around long. It was left empty in 1978.
Now, Jim Krueger Auto & Truck Parts runs a small auto shop in the garage of the building. The shining hoods and fenders stand out against the building’s age. The upper floors of the brewery have become storage. But nothing about it is purposeful. Barrels and bureaus and desktop computers have gathered in the corners during this building’s 100-year reign on the corner of Jackson Street.
