Trish Eklund is a writer who one day simply couldn’t write. Grief blocked her thoughts after her father, Jerry, died in 2014 from congestive heart failure. To move forward, she needed another creative outlet and found it when she passed by an abandoned Nebraska homestead.

“I became more and more obsessed with abandoned homesteads and barns,” Eklund said. “They’re quickly going away, being torn down, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. I’m their voice to share with everyone else.”

Eklund started a photo blog, which got the notice of a publisher. She published her first book, Abandoned Nebraska: Echoes of Our Past, in November 2018, and her second book, Abandoned Farmhouses and Homesteads of Nebraska: Decaying in the Heartland, in February 2021.

She continues taking day trips to the Nebraska countryside, sometimes returning to her favorites. Among them had been the Israel Beetison House in Ashland, an Italianate mansion built in 1874, until it burned down in April 2022 and was demolished a month later.

 Eklund drives a Kia and brings with her a Nikon, a Canon and Olympus mirrored lightweight cameras. She usually seeks permission before photographing homesteads.

“Sometimes newer owners will let you photograph them, but not inside because they may be unstable,” Eklund said. “The more rundown they are, they’re very
dangerous, with animal excrement, mold, asbestos.”

When she visits and sees an old tire swing outside, Eklund imagines kids playing in the yard, while Mom prepares supper.

Like Eklund, Joan Knoell of Seward County turned to photography of abandoned homesteads and barns after losing someone precious – in Joan’s case, her husband, Don, who died three days after New Year’s Eve 2013, three months shy of their 49th wedding anniversary. Knoell began her country drives as a way to fill her empty calendar. 

“I wanted to get out, go down the road,” Knoell said. “At first, I noticed two old buildings and started taking pictures.” Next she opened a Facebook group, Abandoned in Nebraska, later renaming it Abandoned Nebraska, where she posted her photos and invited others to do the same. The page now has 20,000 followers.

Knoell is fond of the 2012 book Home Held Up by Trees, written by Nebraska poet Ted Kooser, which weaves a wistful story of a single father whose two children grow up watching him dutifully tend to their prairie property. The father clears their lawn of the sprouts from the encroaching forest. The family is living the good life.

The children grow up and move away, and so does the father. With no one to stop the forest from advancing, it takes over, the trees gently lifting the abandoned and deteriorating home on its branches.

Knoell says the book perfectly captures the experience of driving her Chevrolet Equinox through the countryside. She chooses the back roads, away from modern development, and visits and visits again abandoned homes and barns that have become something like friends. She’ll stop and lift up her camera with a zoom lens, shooting from a distance. She doesn’t want to trespass.

Certain homes and barns became favorites, but eventually she would see in her own travels or in the photos that Facebook followers took that those buildings, those old friends, would be torn down, they would burn down, or they fell down. Like in the poet’s book, the good life meets the cycle of life.