RIP: Rural Indexing Project

February 11, 2025 9:18 AM

"Rural communities are dispersed across the American landscape. The buildings and streetscapes in these places are a repository for visual trends—historical, architectural, and social—that relate to aspects of commercial, municipal, and private life. Rural Indexing Project (RIP) documents these trends as they exist in the built environment."

It looks like the project ran from 2010 through 2019. "Roughly 1,200 communities in 25 states have been documented..." in the form of clear, simple squared-off photographs of buildings and signage, with minimal presence of cars and people. While the project was active they traveled primarily throughout the central US, plus southwest Colorodo, southern California, and Hawaii.

If your jam is midcentury vernacular architecture and signage, here you go.

posted by at by (13 comments total)

And even though their acronym is RIP and they seem to be no longer traveling right now, you can still follow them on Bluesky (and maybe other places, this is where I see them) and get a random rural image every few days.
posted by jessamyn at 9:35 AM on February 11 [5 favorites]

New London, MO appears to be every small town in Missouri
posted by scruss at 11:06 AM on February 11

FROG LOTS
posted by whuppy at 11:33 AM on February 11 [4 favorites]

Wow. This is amazing.

I'm actually a little bit pleasantly surprised at the pair of hands on the Luverne sign in these days of erasure.

I love The Ole Hotel and just feel like I could write a dozen novels set there.

I love the way old buildings make me feel the presence of people before me, so many things that have happened in the world.

This is exactly my jam, at by, and I am so grateful to you for this. Added to my bookmarks for repeat browsing.
posted by kristi at 12:28 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

FROG LOTS seemed like it might have been another sign that got reconfigured by pranksters. Gemini slapped that down though: No, there aren't any possibilities to make two words using all the letters in "froglots" exactly once. The reason is simple: "froglots" has nine letters. You can't divide nine letters evenly to make two words. One word would have to have an odd number of letters, and the other an even number, or vice versa. There's no combination of letter counts that would work.
posted by drowsy at 2:54 PM on February 11

Doh! my bad. user error. still working on it…
posted by drowsy at 2:56 PM on February 11

Roadside Architecture is another awesome repository for this kind of stuff, and they are still actively posting.
posted by Sanicula at 4:01 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Once I got to visit a rare books collection that focused on architecture books, and in that collection was a multi-volume accordion bound turn of the previous century photographic building indexing project of the city of Nagasaki, ordered by the Emperor several years before the war. It captured fishing villages, community piers, markets, seafood processing businesses, boat repair shops, restaurants and bars, schools, temples, homes, all this life before the destruction. It was the most eerily beautiful book of ghost buildings I've ever seen and I think about it a lot. This made me think of that.
posted by Stanczyk at 4:43 PM on February 11 [4 favorites]

Stanczyk, this is nothing like the very cool thing you were talking about, but my brain nevertheless popped it into my conciousness:

The Illustrated Directory of San Francisco
1894
... drawings of the downtown buildings in San Francisco in that extraordinary age

(I would love, love to see the Nagasaki project you saw. Wow.)
posted by kristi at 10:26 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

I, and my dad, came from different small towns. He would have loved this, had I known about it before he died in December.

What a phenomenally nifty post. Thank you for it!
posted by ChrisR at 11:29 PM on February 11

This is wonderful for anyone (me) whose treasures the vernacular and the mundane and the quotidian. Great post!
posted by scratch at 3:11 AM on February 12

RIP indeed. While I'm sure there are many exceptions, rural America seems like a collection of mostly sad, empty places these days. There's a Youtube channel called Joe and Nic's Road Trip (SLYT) on which Joe, sometimes accompanied by his wife, drives through small towns across the country. I don't know if they look for the most desolate places, but most seem nearly abandoned, with main streets full of empty storefronts, and houses collapsing into the underbrush. This was surprising to me at first, but I guess it shouldn't be. As fewer and fewer people were needed to work on the surrounding farms, it was inevitable that these towns would empty out.
posted by Pararrayos at 7:56 AM on February 12 [1 favorite]

For people who like stories about rural life (though in Canada and not the US) you might enjoy Still Standing which is a short show where Newfoundland=born comedian Jonny Harris visits small struggling communities and looks into what makes them tick and how they're making it work and does a gentle stand-up bit about it. It's upbeat, charming and funny.
posted by jessamyn at 11:09 AM on February 12 [1 favorite]