Zero Point

Things are starting to fall into a better rhythm regarding my art work after a busy summer.  My friend Jeff and I got out on a three day photography trip that we had planned for a year.  The destination was the very small, defunked, and virtually unknown town, Kent Oregon. The town officially has 9 27 residents, residing in a mishmash of modern country structures – an old but well kept shingled 2-room house, a rambling acre of land with structures from two different centuries, with the residents residing in a permanently stationary mobile home around back (with some great Jack Johnson drifting out to us), and the well fenced-in (out?) loony patriot with dozens of america flags painted and draped across the compound.  It’s a slightly uncomfortable place to work with a camera since we always had the feeling that we were well watched (a resident walked over to us to notified us that she’d written down our license plate number – welcome to Kent!).

We made the trip to Kent to photograph one of the most remarkable and unknown buildings in Oregon – the Kent Granary.  It was probably build around 1920 out of lumber hauled in on the old train line that passed through Kent on the way to Shaniko.  This train line was washed away in the 1964 columbus day storm and was never rebuilt.  The Kent Granary is roughly three to four stories high, build out of flat stacked lumber.  The enormous walls are just dimensional lumber laid flat & spike nailed together.  This build contains an enormous amount of lumber, weathered beautifully for nearly 100 years and is a fantastic photographic subject on all scales.

Kent Oregon Granary

This phone snap shows an incredible structure built for a single purpose – to store and protect the local oats and wheat harvest.  The odd tall narrow proportions and the remarkable stacked construction make for a very unique and rare structure.  The tall dark thin lines on the end of the building are the ends of two interior walls.  A long metal ladder hangs curved down the face.  A local told us it was in use up until just a few years ago, and this building sits next to the still very much in use concrete Kent granary (which has it’s own fantastic architecture and forms – but is much less rare).

I’ve been photographing forgotten buildings around Oregon for quite a few years now and I used to be shocked when I returned to a building and found that it had vanished.  [On this note, the Thompson Flouring Mill building in Shed, Oregon is now gone; however the  state bought

and preserved the mill proper about a mile east of town.  I photographed the Thompson storage building just after the state bought the Mill, but before it was open to the public.]  But now I know that is the pattern.  And unfortunately it is no different with this absolutely unique structure – it too is slated for destruction.  A local suggested we buy it and put a bar in the bottom and a brothel upstairs – we thought perhaps a microbrewery in the bottom with arts workshop space and artist-in-residence apartments upstairs.   Both just dreams.

I made a small hand-held video of the town panning around in a circle with a bit of commentary.  I will post this as soon as I figure out a way to do so that I like.

Below are a few more photographs from Kent.

Silo #42, Kent Oregon

Broken man, Kent Oregon

Modern silos, Kent Oregon

Dove and horse, Kent Oregon

Location

Kent Oregon is located about 8 miles north of the nearby town of Shaniko (which by-the-way, it’s “downtown” is for sale practically in it’s entirety for $380K – you get the very nice old 2-story brick hotel and everything else on that block including the restaurant and “RV park”.).  Shaniko is on Hwy 97, but Kent is just a stones throw east of Hwy 97.  The Kent Granary is the dark looming building, obvious from the highway.

Prints

I’ll be posting some prints from this trip in my architecture gallery in the coming months.

This entry was posted Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Oregon Travel. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.