Hercules - Canton, OH

What do Henry Ford, blocks of ice, and dozens of dead bodies have in common? Answer: this place! Hercules is one of the largest factory buildings that I've ever been in. It's somewhere around 660,000 square feet, and parts of it date back to 1875. This is one historic building. It was used as an ice house before modern refrigeration, and they even stored bodies in the basement during a Cholera outbreak in the late 1800's. Later on Henry Ford purchased the building and built engines here. Most recently it was used as a haunted house; and plans to develop the factory into condos, retail space, and a banquet hall have been on the table for the past few years but for financial reasons those plans have yet to manifest.

Today the building sits vacant, almost completely empty, and wide open. Massive rooms stretch on and on, mazes of catwalks, and stairwells, and a dark and creepy basement that once housed the bodies of those claimed by the Cholera epidemic. It's difficult to image all of these empty rooms full of machines and the hundreds of employees that used them day after day to build some of the best engines the world has ever known.

The future is still uncertain for this behemoth of a building, but I'm hoping that someone will save it's turn of the century industrial architecture and bring it back to life.