Mike Parsons picked a newly-printed card from his pocket and placed it in a weathered mailbox along a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. The crisp font explained his mission: He wants to revive the stories of abandoned homesteads and the families who lived there.
Parsons, a semi-retired heavy duty mechanic from Brandon, who worked in the sprawling nickel mines of northern Manitoba for 30 years, is now finding a new stride in life. He has exchanged the endless kilometres of dark, subterranean underground passages for the least claustrophobic place on earth: the wide-open Manitoba prairies.
Old barns, grain elevators, and homesteads once littered this land, but after years of being abandoned they are rotting fast, vanishing like the wind.
In 2025, Parsons moved south of the Arctic tundra of northern Manitoba to Brandon, where his parents had settled decades earlier. He began to spot signs of past life across the landscape, and was soon hooked.
“I was immediately enamoured with these echoes of a life and times I knew nothing about,” he told The Epoch Times. “Especially the intimate ghosts: the homesteads.”
Parsons has driven thousands of kilometres through the backcountry roads of southern Manitoba on scouting missions, photoshoots, or both.
In the Far North, everything is rocky and desolate. It holds no evidence of what came before. That doesn’t hold true for the Prairies.
“The prairies display their moribund icons of the homestead era proudly,” Parsons said. “These were where families had laughed and cried, loved and lost, prospered or perished.”
Because they lived near the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Scallions were able to load their grain directly onto the passing boxcars, thereby circumventing the local grain elevator and earning more for their grain. The companies that operated the elevators held a monopoly, and could force the farmers to accept lower prices for their grain.
These agrarian mavericks of the late 1880s lived like kings—relative to their day—powering their stone house and granary with electric generators in an age when single-room sod huts were common. Their 960-acre farm was called The Grange.
Parsons wanted to capture what was still standing with his Canon DSLR.
There was a time when he would have ignored the no-trespassing signs, but now he has developed a deep respect, even reverence, for these historic homes and their families. He honours them by seeking their permission to enter and document their history.
He scrounged for addresses, phone numbers, and emails. Living relatives of the families had to be somewhere.
He found a lead on the Scallions in the fall of 2025.
“I desperately wanted to see the house and create my own images of this one in particular before it succumbed to the elements,” Parsons said. “I finally tracked down a phone number.”
Later that week, he learned some ominous news: part of the house had finally fallen. But now, with permission in hand, Parsons stepped onto the land to see for himself and capture on camera what he could. He was relieved to find at least one stone face of the building still standing.
Photographing the disappearing Scallion home lit a fire in Parsons, spurred him on, and began a campaign. He had cards printed up, laying out his mission to record the ephemeral memories and the physical structures before they vanished.
“It was painfully clear they were disappearing at an alarming rate,” he said.
His efforts were generally well received.
Parsons has networked with the “abandoned community” on social media and driven thousands of kilometres. Local historians sometimes have answers. Living relatives offer stories, which he says are both rare and welcome, though “not always entirely accurate.”
Some chapters of history, he adds, “don’t seem to want to be revealed.”
Parsons picked up his first SLR camera (that he remembers) at age 18. He says he wasn’t a particularly good photographer and didn’t take the craft seriously until he “accidentally” captured his first photograph of the northern lights around 2013.
“I couldn’t believe the colours that had been revealed,” he said. “It was an epiphany.”
For a few years, auroras became his focus. He was featured in local newspapers and magazines around Thompson. Now retired, he has left the blazing auroras and claustrophobic tunnels of the north for the endless fields whose stories so enchanted him. He has captured hundreds of homesteads, sometimes crossing provincial and national borders to find structures melting back into the land.
“My first love is photography,” he said. “If I can preserve the house in a beautiful way, it feels like my way of giving back what it’s given me.”
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