The last stop with my friend Dawn on our annual road trip this year was to Stockdale Mill, a restored and functional water-powered flour mill just west of tiny Roann in northern Indiana. Because of Roann’s annual festival in progress, mill tours were operating under extended hours. Our tour guide said that the mill was built in 1857 and ground grain until the early 1960s. New worker-safety rules did the mill in. There’s something inherently dangerous about large quantities of flour in a building made of wood. Flour dust is highly explosive.
I had my Nikon F2AS slung over one shoulder and a Yashica Lynx 14e I’m testing slung over the other. But as I write this, neither roll of film has been processed. I’m glad that my Canon PowerShot S95 was along, too, so I could share images with you more quickly. Not that there’s much to show, as I struggled to make useful images in and around the mill. Maybe some of my film shots will turn out better, but I’m not optimistic. As we passed through what had been the mill office, I spied this old fan. I’m fascinated with old fans, so I took a bunch of shots of it. This one captured the scene well enough.
