Grain Elevator in Tuscola

My family and I spent the past three days in Champaign and travelled to several

 nearby sites in rural Illinois. One of them was Tuscola, a neat line of authentic, small

 brick buildings situated around a grain elevator and a railroad. Grain elevators are a 

commonplace in southern Illinois and can constantly be spotted along the horizon, but 

Tuscola was my only chance of actually being able to frame a shot of one from a 

reasonable distance (even though I forgot to switch my 50mm to a wider lens and was

 pressured by my family to just take a picture and move along). Most other southern

 Illinois towns are situated around grain elevators, but Tuscola had a diner and a couple 

collectibles shops that were worth getting out of the car for.

There's a very eloquent description that poet Carl Sandburg wrote about grain elevators 

on Chicago's skyline but I can't find it, although I did find a passage in his "City

 of Big Shoulders" poem where Sandburg alludes to grain elevators and railroads 

playing key roles in Chicago's economic rise. In a sense, grain elevators are poetic. 

They're rural skyscrapers, out of place in their farmland setting as grimy, 

concrete, antiquated economic engines for a gleaming city. Like Roman ruins, there's

 something monumentally dead about them that connotes a non-modern (and in this

 case non-urban) labor intensive system which seems altogether alien nowadays. There's 

also the design element to it too, with the verticality of the grain elevators awkwardly

 protruding out of an extremely horizontal landscape.

Tuscola

Taken in November 2012