Hoisting Cement

This photograph is essentially dying, crumbling to powder due to age and poor handling in the past. It's evidence of how transient our memories of the past can be. When they're gone, there is no replacing them. Long before modern cement pumps, this is how construction was done.

The cement mixer in the lower left of the image is a Koehring Mixer, which helps date the image a bit. The Koehring Company was started in 1907 to manufacture cement mixers, and was the first to develop a steam-powered, portable mixer (a photograph of an almost identical mixer can be seen here on Robert Grauman's Photobucket gallery). The Koehring company's product lines were owned by different parent companies over the years, but the name lasted until about 1987, when then-owner Northwest Engineering acquired Terex, and discontinued the Koehring and several other brands.