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PARSONS, KAN. -- An unlikely pilgrimage is underway to Dwayne's Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful and still the most beloved color film. That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography came to an end Thursday when the last processing machine was shut down to be sold for scrap.

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have transformed this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides.

In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven directly here after flying from London to Wichita, Kan., on her first trip to the United States to turn in three rolls of film and shoot five more before the processing deadline.

Film hoarded and tucked away for decades

The artist, Aliceson Carter, 42, was incredulous as she watched the railroad worker, Jim DeNike, 53, loading a dozen boxes that contained nearly 50,000 slides into his old maroon Pontiac. He said every picture inside was of trains and that he had borrowed money from his father's retirement account to pay to develop them. "That's crazy to me," she said. Then she snapped a picture of DeNike on one of her last rolls.

Demanding to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a particular treatment of light that many photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras.

"Makes you think all the world's a sunny day," Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit "Kodachrome," which carried the plea "Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away."

As media around the world have heralded Thursday's end of an era, rolls of the discontinued film that had been hoarded in freezers and tucked away in closets, sometimes for decades, have flooded Dwayne's Photo, arriving from six continents. "It's more than a film; it's a pop culture icon," said Todd Gustavson, a curator from the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester, N.Y., in the former residence of the Kodak founder. "If you were in the postwar baby boom, it was the color film, no doubt about it."

Among the recent visitors was photographer Steve McCurry, whose work has appeared for decades in National Geographic including his well-known cover portrait, shot in Kodachrome, of an Afghan girl. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, the company gave him the last roll, which he hand-delivered to Dwayne's. "I wasn't going to take any chances," he said.

At the end, it was Dwayne's Photo

At the peak, about 25 labs worldwide processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne's Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

The status of lone survivor is a point of pride for Dwayne Steinle, who remembers being warned more than once by a Kodak representative after he opened the business more than a half-century ago that the area was too sparsely populated for the studio to succeed. Created in 1935, Kodachrome was an instant hit as the first film to effectively render color.

Still, the toll of the widespread switch to digital photography has been painful for Dwayne's, much as it has for Kodak. In the past decade, the number of employees has been cut to about 60 from 200 and digital sales now account for nearly half of revenue.

One of the toughest decisions was how to deal with the dozens of requests to provide the last roll to be processed. In the end, it was determined that a roll belonging to Dwayne Steinle, the owner, would be last. It took three tries to find a camera that worked. The last frame is already planned, a picture of all the employees standing in front of Dwayne's wearing shirts with the epitaph: "The best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome: 1935-2010."

If you'll notice the differences between a photograpic picture and the digital version of a turning propeller, in the old timey photo, you get a blur of blades, with digital, unless you step on it with a photoshop program, you get what looks like someone waving a metal window blind in the picture and video of a turning prop is a lesson in stop/start imaging instead of the expected 60 cycle version.