Railside

The tracks are still here, but the trains no longer stop, and much of the elevator complex has been demolished. Mulliken was a farm town for about a century. There was a grocery store, a lumberyard, a hardware store. A church, a school, a barber, a library, a beauty shop, a couple bars, a restaurant that served breakfast. A gas station. A post office. And this grain elevator.

The lumberyard was already gone when I moved here in 1991. This feed, grain, & seed operation closed two or three years after I took these photos. The hardware failed around 2000. The school's been gone for years, as have the hair cutters. Boyer's no longer serves gasoline, though John can still fix your pickup. The grocery's evolved into a party store, and Farmers Tavern's been a full-service restaurant since the 80s. In many ways, now, we've become a rather distant Lansing suburb. We aren't entirely commuters--a surprising number of my neighbors work as plumbers, and these days our biggest local business is a general contractor. But the farmers ship grain, and buy seed, at Sunfield, or Grand Ledge, or Woodbury.

I miss 'em.