The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once quipped that, contrary to popular opinion, the most concrete things in the world are heady, complex thoughts, whereas it’s everyday modes of thinking and speaking that are abstract, detached from reality for their lack of specificity and rigor.
Put another way, what seems like “common sense” is actually quite abstract given its vagueness, whereas artistic or philosophical speculation is concrete.
As I stood in the ruins of the abandoned cement plant at Concreto, an important early 20th-century labor center north of Gas City, I couldn’t get Hegel out of my head, wondering if the operation worked both ways.
That is, was there something about concrete and Concreto that was intensely philosophical? Did the place have the power to conjure deep and intricate thoughts or memories?
CONCRETO was almost named “Madeline,” an homage to Iola Colborn’s fourth daughter. And in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” it’s a madeline cookie soaked with tea that prompts him to return to an intense investigation of childhood memories.
Concreto itself provokes memories of Allen County, launching one back to September 1903 when many people visited the little company town for the first time.
Many likely made the trip by way of the Iola Electric Railway, on a 10-mile track that connected Bassett, Iola, Gas, LaHarpe, Melrose, Layonville and LaGrange.
Probably more than a few saw the cement plant as an opportunity for work, one worth the risk despite harsh conditions not yet softened by labor laws and years of intense struggles on the part of unions and workers.
Indeed, the Concreto factory was a dangerous place, fraught with fires, explosions, and other novel forms of disaster.
Even the grocery store in Concreto (the town) caught fire, and burned to the ground in 1904.
In 1906, a fire broke out in the “south Griffin mill room” and caused $2,000 in damages.
Near what we thought might be that same room, Addie Thompson, who lives with her husband Jerry on the hill above the plant, pointed out to me where a tree had grown up and begun to lift a long rusted beam into the air.
Addie’s a stay-at-home mom to her son Thomas, and happens to be a Russian history buff as well as a reader of Trotsky.
Were she not home-schooling, at the time the factory was in operation she could have sent little Thomas to one of the many surrounding districts, perhaps Melrose, Sadietown or Lake View.
Mowing through the ruins on a John Deere gator, I marveled in awe as we passed bricked archways and structures resembling the remains of an ancient temple, many of the spaces once sites of back-breaking exertion as well as demise.
In July 1910, an enormous blast ripped through the plant killing Merlin Boyd, a chemist from Iola, and severely injured four others.
