Abandonment Issues: Chemong Farmhouse - 1818 Lee Cemetery

A few posts back, we found our protagonist exploring an abandoned hospital in Peterborough, Ontario. While exploring Peterborough, jerm found a few other interesting abandonment's, including a small elementary school (which we will delve into in a future post), and the Chemong Farmhouse - 1818 Lee Cemetery.





The two car garage and workshop attached to the back of the house are wide open. The weight of the snow resting atop the garage door has ripped it from it's track and it hangs precariously.







On the other side of the climbing hole, darkness enveloped. Around the corner, the click of a flashlight revealed a kitchen. The table sits awkwardly in the middle of the room. Tea towels and cleaning supplies stand out amongst the debris. A little further in, the light from the climbing hole had faded to nothing. A car seat, a Sobeys shopping cart and a kids plastic pool furnish the living room. In the darkness of these dilapidated abandonments, delicate steps are taken, or lives can be lost. The heartbeat races, adrenaline pumps. Wonder and excitement overcome, and you feel like a kid again. The house is quite small, he realized as he approached the front door. Ignoring the staircase that would lead him upstairs, he instinctively turned the lock on the front door, and reached for the doorknob. It opened, filling the front of the house with natural light and filling his ears with a stinging creaking noise. Darkness and unknown hazards tend to make a person a tad high strung, but the natural light calmed him down. It also revealed what appeared to be solid floors and no real hazards.

He wandered that first floor again, re-taking all of the pictures he had just painstakingly taken with a flash in the blackness.











Then he headed upstairs. A pink bathroom, clean and shiny. Two bedrooms, walls torn apart. 'THE STONERS Closet' is written on a closet door. Inside is a bench, an ashtray, a candle, and a couple of roaches and beer cans. He laughed when he opened that door. The attic is open but not worthy of note.













He rested his flashlight atop a light fixture, creating the illusion of electricity. He also illuminated a light bulb with his flashlight, attempting to give the illusion in the photo that the light bulb itself is creating the light. Basically, he's starting to learn to use and play with his camera in new ways, instead of pointing and shooting at street art. And he's having the time of his life.





A dip into the basement was next. Creepy, as is always the case in farmhouse basements.





A paved pathway now slices through the property, a popular hiking trail. On the other side of this pathway, on the southern edge of the property, near tiny fragments of what was once a fence, stands this cross...



The house sits empty, with it's cross. Over time, the farmland has morphed into a consumer capitalist carbon copy of every other neighborhood in North America. Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and several other box-stores have encroached. A failing mall was also built adjacent, a mall doing so poorly that we may all be exploring it soon.
Today, amongst the hustle and bustle of shopaholics and a steady stream of traffic, this house sits empty, with it's cross.

In our next post, we will find ourselves climbing and crawling in an abandoned file factory along the shores of the Ganaraska River in Port Hope. Followed by a trip to Hamilton, and then a trip to Vancouver, and then a trip to Ottawa, stay tuned my friends.

***EDIT***

"The property was settled in 1820 by the Lee family and the graves are of John and his son Thomas. I believe there is another grave along that path that is marked with a small glass brick set atop a slightly larger stone marker. I believe it is marked Smithson and may be a childs grave. Most of this is from memory as i can no longer access the info i once had on it."

-Otonabee (UER member)

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jerm IX videos

Worlds are colliding.

Street art, poetry, hip-hop and urban exploration are my passions, and this week they all culminated into these three videos. These jerm IX songs were written and recorded in 2002 and 2005 over jacked beats. The videos consist of urban exploration footage i've filmed spliced with images of my street art.

jerm IX - prescription kills
urban exploration of st. joe's, an abandoned hospital


jerm IX - delineate from a to b
urban exploration of abandoned marmora mine


jerm IX - never no
urban exploration of toronto's abandoned kodak 9 building


more to come.

Abandonment Issues: Marmoraton Magnetite Mine

Descending into pitch blackness, that's where i found myself at the end of the video. Concrete chunks crunched under my feet. Concrete chunks that once made up a substantial portion of the outer wall. An outer wall once barricaded by thick metal bars. But no more. Apparently between my two visits to the Marmora Mine, someone somehow removed the bars and destroyed a sizable portion of the wall. Fortunately, it was a jerm-sized hole. Once inside, the scattered remains of concrete chunks rested atop the rusted metal staircase, and menacingly thudded to the ground below with bellowing echoes, as my feet blindly kicked them over the edge. I descended all three stories of darkness, alone, but i'm getting ahead of myself.

This past Sunday, the weather was all over the map, much like we have been of late. Waves of light snowfall glistened in the small rays of sunshine peeking through a dark cloud cover. Occasionally, a remarkably blue sky revealed itself for a few brief moments, only to be swallowed up by the blackening clouds, again and again. Massive clusters of icicles were clinging to the walls of the open pit.







The buildings themselves are merely shells of rusted metal and a conveyor belt, wrapped in yellow fragments of shattered asbestos siding. It appears that vandalism by rocks is the likely culprit for the broken asbestos siding. Most likely youths that were unaware that it was made of asbestos and that asbestos is only harmful when it is disturbed.







The long hallway into the sky houses a conveyor belt and a walkway. The conveyor belt is still somewhat in tact, but the walkway has been dismantled in some places to discourage people from climbing it. My fear of heights can be paralyzing at times, and this day had a couple of frightful scares. I ascended the long hallway into the sky, climbing and maneuvering through welded metal obstructions, and hanging on for dear life as i traversed the areas where the walkway has been removed. As i got too high for comfort, i started to rush, that's when it happened. A large piece of metal fell to the ground in front of me, a grate from the walkway. I froze in full-on panic mode, watching it fall for seconds and then disappear completely into the deep snow. I held on so tight that i could feel the cold of the metal bars through my gloves. Then i turned around, scared, and ever so slowly descended the long hallway to the ground.









Inside the building with the jerm-sized hole, several large machine parts were left to rust. Above the hole, there is a control room with a green door, that can be climbed up into.









And so here i was, descending into blackness. The first floor down was illuminated by the holes at the top of the staircase, beyond that, the darkness and nothingness overwhelms. Me clicking my flashlight on and off in some sort of mental masturbation. Pointing my camera into pitch blackness and shooting whatever happened to be in frame.





Here's where the other scare took place. After going through this doorway and turning right, i came across a set of closed green doors with shattered windows. As i pushed them open simultaneously and stepped forward into this new room i quickly realized that there was no floor and it was a straight drop into the room below. I spun around, reaching out my arms, and my camera swung around my neck and smacked me in the chin. I thought about my mom in the following moments, spanking me with a strip of plastic race car track because i was doing something stupid. The cameras parenting technique was not heeding results however, as i ignored its plea, and continued traveling downward.





Around the corner and up a short ladder, the light completely disappeared. With the click of my flashlight i found myself standing on a mound of dirt with a wheelbarrow rusting to the point of disintegration before me. Around another corner my flashlight caught something huge, a rusted machine with a ladder, which of course i had to climb.





Continuing downward I realized that this machine was three stories deep underground, and was connected to a large spinner on the ground floor, high above. Pitch blackness and rusted metal machinery was all that was to be seen on the lower floors. Well, that and the frozen mass of water leaking in through the ground from the open pit lake that is directly adjacent. The conveyor belt also connects here.







I ascended slowly, with very little use of my flashlight. Brief flashes followed by tentative footsteps, growing evermore confident. I started to jog when i saw the light beyond the wheelbarrow, then remembered about the wheelbarrow, which i would have tripped over if i hadn't stopped. Down the ladder, up the stairs, into the light, around the corner, up the stairs, into the light, through the hole, I kissed my wife.

After an hour or so of photographing and exploring further on ground level, we began the trek down the rounded hill of the open pit. Since the mines closure, underground streams and accumulation of rainwater have filled two-thirds of the open pit. In fact, it is now officially classified as a lake. The snow was much deeper on the haulage roads into the pit, which slowed us down. The frozen waterfalls of icicles were very blue when viewed up close, a sign of the oxygen within.



This sign that is conveniently located on site has all the information about the mines history.



here are some more photos from the Marmora Mine...





















******EDIT******

**October 2014**

After standing vacant for decades, the remaining buildings at the Marmora Mine site were demolished in the summer of 2014.

click here to check out all of jerm & ninja IX's ABANDONMENT ISSUES