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If you live in Indiana, you probably remember Marsh Supermarkets. Founded in Muncie, the chain eventually grew to encompass 157 supermarkets, 154 convenience stores, three florists, two catering services, and a restaurant! I’ve been sharing digital drawings of shuttered Marsh supermarkets for more than a year now, but I recently took some time to snap some photos of the store that started it all.

We were a Marsh family through and through when I was growing up. My Grandpa Pop started unloading railcars in high school in the fifties and retired as Warehouse Superintendent in the nineties. Most of my family wound up working there, at least for a little while, before the Marsh family sold the business to a private equity firm. After eleven troubled years under Sun Capital Partners’ ownership, the chain declared bankruptcy and closed its remaining stores by 2017. Many were left to decay.

The Marsh I most remember from my childhood was one of them. Opened in 1979, the store was part of the company’s “New Taste For Supermarkets” program. The 50,000-square-foot building featured an angular greenhouse, projecting brick towers, and trapezoidal cutouts that were instantly identifiable. The company built at least two other supermarkets with the same design, in Castleton (now Bob’s Discount Furniture on Allisonville Road), and in Carmel (now the 502 East Event Center on Carmel Drive).

By 1996, Muncie’s New Taste For Supermarkets grocery was old hat in the face of Marsh’s “New Generation” superstores that sprouted up on Tillotson Avenue and West McGalliard Road. Marsh shuttered the supermarket I grew up with, but eventually brought it back under its discount banner, LoBill Foods. Sun Capital Partners closed the store for good in 2014.

It was under those auspices that I noticed it with a fresh perspective. I’d come across an article on Vice about a guy named Brandon Bird who traveled the country making impressionist paintings of Sears department stores. “It’s funny because [I’m] taking the time to do this thing that nobody cares about,” Bird said. “You look at it, and you’re like, Why did somebody make this?”

I enjoyed the post but forgot about it until the following summer when I was eating onion rings at a nearby Burger King. Marsh had declared bankruptcy, Grandpa Pop was sick with cancer, and I happened to look out my window towards the abandoned supermarket. I was struck by how the building seemed to divide its grim parking lot from the sky like a brick-and-mortar cigar band! I had Zesty Sauce dribbling down my beard, but my “Abandoned Marsh” project started that day: If Brandon Bird could document Sears, I could certainly document Marsh.

At first, I decided to do that by cutting simple shapes out of construction paper. Then I remembered that computers exist and decided to use Adobe Illustrator instead. All of the Abandoned Marsh images I’ve made started as 18×24 vector files in Illustrator, though I’ve rasterized and compressed them a little for upload here.

Since then, the first Marsh I drew had its parking lot fenced in when it became Affordable Family Storage. More recently, the facility has been rebranded as CubeSmart.