Northern Indiana Dash

Posted on July 6, 2022 by admin

Ah, high summer.

That’s in Dallas. I’m not there. Today’s high here was 79 F., a dip from a hot and muggy 90s-day on Tuesday. Several degrees of latitude will make that difference.

One of these days, the times might catch up with Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, leader in the Revolution and scourge of the Northwest Territory Indians, but for now, you can find him on horseback in bronze at Freimann Square in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a work by Chicagoan George Etienne Ganiere (1865-1935).

We gazed a Mad Anthony for a few moments as part of our trip through northern Indiana. I wanted to take a short trip over the long Independence Day weekend, but I didn’t want it to consume the entire three days.

So on Saturday, we left in mid-morning and made our way to Fort Wayne, where we stayed overnight. On Sunday, we returned across northern Indiana to get home, which took up most of the day.

We arrived in Nappanee, Indiana, for lunch on Saturday. I’m glad to report that Main Street Roasters (not so new anymore, it seems) makes a fine pulled pork sandwich. Yuriko said the ingredients in her Cobb salad tasted very fresh, and I sampled some, and agreed. The place was doing a brisk business.

We figured the main source for both fresh pork and fresh greens was the Amish farms in the area. Nappanee is considered the focus of one of the country’s larger Amish populations, though that’s a little hard to tell in a casual look around downtown, which isn’t so different from other Indiana towns its size (pop. nearly 7,000). Out away from town, though, you can see from the road farm houses and other buildings, clustered closer than in other rural areas, which is characteristic of Amish settlements.

In town, Plain People in carriages rolled by now and then. Some female store clerks wore the small head coverings common among Mennonites. The Amish tourist attraction in Nappanee known as Amish Acres closed in late 2019, and a more upmarket property re-opened the next year — in an example of bad timing, though it seems to have survived — as The Barns at Nappanee, Home of Amish Acres. Maybe all those extra words are going to cost you more.

Across the street from Main Street Roasters (and not Amish Acres).

On Sunday, our first brief stop was at Magic Wand, home of the Magicburger, which can be found in Churubusco, Indiana.

We didn’t have a magic burger, but rather shared a strawberry milkshake to go. Among strawberry milkshakes, it was the real deal. The real tasty deal, straw-quaffed as we speed along U.S. 33.

Churubusco was a name I took an instant liking to. The town fathers apparently read in their newspapers about the battle of that name, and wanted the town to borrow a bit of its martial glory. According to some sources, it gets shortened in our time, and maybe for a long time, to Busco. I also noticed references to the place, on signs and the like, as Turtletown. Really? What was that about? I wondered.

The Beast of Busco, that’s what. Quite a story. A giant among turtles that the townsfolk never could quite capture. I haven’t had this much fun reading hyperlocal history — lore — since I chanced across a small lake in Wisconsin that is supposedly home to an underwater pyramid. Turtle Days was last month.

Another spot for a short visit on Sunday: Warsaw, Indiana. It’s the seat of Kosciusko County, with a handsome Second Empire courthouse rising in the town square.

Designed in the 1880s by Thomas J. Tolan, who died during construction, the Indiana Historical Society says. The project was completed by his son, Brentwood S. Tolan.

The square sports some other handsome buildings, too.

Warsaw is also home to a garden the likes of which I’d never imagined, and the reason I stopped in town, days after spotting it on Google Maps and then looking it up: the Warsaw Biblical Gardens.

The brainchild of a local woman back in the 1980s with access to the land. “It would be no ordinary garden — not a rock garden, nor a rose garden, nor a perennial garden — it would be a truly unique and beautiful Biblical Garden,” the garden’s web site says.

“Actually, we say ‘gardens’ because the Warsaw Biblical Gardens has a variety of areas: the Forest, Brook, Meadow, Desert, Crop and Herb gardens; the Grape Arbor; and the Gathering site. Warsaw Biblical Gardens is ¾-acre in size, and there are very few gardens like this in the United States.

“The term ‘biblical’ refers mainly to the fact that the plants, trees, flowers, herbs, etc., are mentioned in the Old and/or New Testaments of the Bible. These have been carefully researched to preserve the integrity of the Gardens’ uniqueness.

“The Warsaw/Winona Lake area of Indiana has a long religious history. That history begins perhaps with the Chatauqua times of Winona Lake, now being revived. [Really?] Many other famous historical religious figures made their home’s here, from Homer Rodeheaver to Fanny Crosby to Billy Sunday.”

I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look up the first two of those three. Regardless, it’s a stunning little place.

Go far — always good if you can manage it. But also go near.

South Bend City Cemetery

Posted on April 28, 2022 by admin

Oddly enough, our microtrip to South Bend last weekend wasn’t much of a trip to South Bend. Our motel was in the city, near the airport, and we drove through town a few times, but mostly we were in Norte Dame — which is a town besides being a university of that name — and Mishawaka.

Still, we had a few South Bend moments.

Also, on Sunday morning, I went by myself to the South Bend City Cemetery, because of course I did. On the way I took a short look at St. Paul’s Memorial Church (Episcopal), because of course I did.

With John 12:17 over one of the doors.

The cemetery is a few blocks away. Founded in 1832, with about 14,800 permanent residents, mostly from the 19th century, though I spotted a scattering of 20th-century burials.

An aside: I read this week that Kane Tanaka, regarded as the oldest living person, died at 119. Born in 1903. Though it’s clearly been true for a while, I just realized that means that no one who lived any time at all in the 19th century is still alive. No one whose age is verifiable, anyway.

Except in the sense that we still remember, personally, people who lived at least a little while in that century, such as my grandmother. Is someone not well and truly dead until everyone who remembers him or her is too?

South Bend City Cemetery, the entrance.

The cemetery office, I assume. Handsome little structure.

Not too many large memorials or much funerary art, but well populated by a variety of weathered standing stones. As usual, I was the only living person around. Not even groundskeepers on Sunday.

As I said, the cemetery’s pretty near St. Paul’s, which is in this image.

A handful of mausoleums. No name on this one.

A boarded-up mausoleum. Not something you see much. I like to believe that the cast-iron door that probably hung there went to a scrap drive and did its tiny part to defeat Hitler. But I also suspect that it might have been stolen one night instead.

Large to the small.

The worn, broken stone of Peter Roof, the first recorded burial. Roof, I understand, was a veteran of the Revolution.

There’s a poignancy in time eating away at memorials as surely as it did those memorialized. Worn lettering, old-time symbols, dark smudges of pollution and dirt.

Rust, too. Such is the condition of the GAR stars I saw. This is the kind of cemetery that would have them. Rusty, but they endure as a faint echo of the camaraderie of men who fought and won the day for the Union.

As you’d expect, at least one Studebaker has a sizable memorial. South Bend was their town.

The memorial has lasted much longer than the company of that name.

I didn’t come looking for the car-making family. I had someone else in mind: Schuyler Colfax.

Good old Vice President Colfax of Grant’s first term, famed in — well, neither song nor story. Still, his contemporaries thought highly of him. They must have. Not only did he get the main stone, he got this.

And this — close to our time, in 1978.

Order of Rebekah? Now you know.

Leaving the cemetery, I was glad to see that it’s on Colfax Ave. It’s a more modest street than Colfax Ave. in Denver, but South Bend is a more modest town.

Mishawaka Walks

Posted on April 27, 2022 by admin

Worth noting: U.S. Grant was born 200 years ago today in Point Pleasant, Ohio. There hasn’t been a presidential birth bicentennial since Lincoln’s in early 2009, which came on the heels of Andrew Johnson’s in late 2008.

Later this year, there will be another one: Rutherford B. Hayes, born in Delaware, Ohio on October 4, 1822. One cold day in the mid-1990s, I dropped by the Hayes home museum in Fremont, Ohio, sparking an interest in presidential sites that hasn’t abated. Good old RBH. President most likely to be mistaken for Benjamin Harrison in a lineup. After his bicentennial, it won’t happen again till Chet Arthur has his day in 2029.

The St. Joseph River flows mostly westward through Michigan and into Lake Michigan, but it bends into Indiana at South Bend and its twin town, Mishawaka. Until recently I gave little thought to Mishawaka as a destination, but then I learned about its riverwalks. We arrived late in the morning on Sunday to sample one of them, the walk along the budding-verdant Kamm Island Park.

Downtown Mishawaka seemed fairly pleasant as well. It reminded me of some of the towns along the Fox River in Illinois — Aurora, say, or St. Charles, both of which hug a mid-sized river and consider it an amenity.

As well they should. Some views of Kamm Island Park.

New development has come to the area. Not sure I’d want to live there, but I’d probably get a kick out of renting one of the units for a few days.

One curiosity on Kamm Island that I didn’t think to take pictures of: the fact that small, colorful figurines and other items, plastic and ceramic, stand at the base of many of its trees. No group is the same. A planned art project or spontaneous whimsy? Homage to elves or the work of elves?

Across the river at Kamm Island is Battell Park, the city’s oldest park, which has its own trail and some features not found elsewhere, namely a rock garden built by the WPA. This is the view of the lower level of the rock structure.

After lunch, which consisted of takeout Chinese from a storefront near UI South Bend eaten at the picnic shelter of a windy park near the Potawatomi Zoo, we stopped at Battell Park for a look at the upper level of the rock garden. Water must flow through its channels some of the year, down to the river, but looks like it hasn’t started for the season quite yet. Still, it’s an impressive work.

As much as I laud the CCC — whose works I keep encountering, some stunning — I have to put in a word for the WPA and its wide legacy too. I grew up with one of its finest projects — the San Antonio Riverwalk — as well as our high school stadium, which once upon a time had a plaque denoting it as a WPA project. This is an excellent site for browsing its projects, along with the rest of the visible New Deal.

Upstream a mile or so from Battell is Merrifield Park, also in Mishawaka. That was the last place we visited in town before heading home, because we wanted to see one of the park’s smaller features, Shiojiri Garden (Shiojiri Niwa), dedicated in 1987. Small but enchanting.

“This garden was a gift to the city of Mishawaka from its sister city, Shiojiri (Nagano Prefecture, Japan),” Atlas Obscura notes. “The designer was Shoji Kanaoka, the same man who planned the Japanese gardens at the Epcot Center in Florida. It features a multitude of trees and flowers, including a grove of cherry trees. There are also two snow lanterns, four bridges, and a teahouse pavilion built in the traditional Japanese style.”

Nice. You might call it a pocket Japanese garden, and Mishawaka — and the world — are better for it.

Notre Dame Stroll

Posted on April 26, 2022 by admin

Along with the rest of northern Indiana, the campus of the University of Notre Dame is just beginning to turn green, with grass fully that color, and bushes and trees budding. We began our walk on campus on Saturday afternoon as one does, at a large parking lot. But the lot had good placement, not far from St. Mary’s Lake.

A nearby lake is St. Joseph’s. You’d think there would be a Baby Jesus Pond somewhere, but I don’t see it on the map.

Next to the basilica is Norte Dame’s magnificent Main Building. Serving as the administrative center for the school, the structure dates from 1879, replacing a building that burned down early that same year, and was designed Willoughby Edbrooke. Its gold-leaf dome was added a few years later, complete with a massive gilded statue of Mary atop it.

The interior looks pretty spiffy. Unfortunately, it was closed for an event. So we headed south along the well-manicured lawns of Notre Dame, eventually reaching the Eck Visitor Center and the Hammes Bookstore, which would be more accurately called the Hammes ND-Themed Clothing Store.

Jesus faces the Main Building.

This isn’t the Touchdown Jesus Notre Dame is known for, however. That, alas, we didn’t see (or First Down Moses, either).

Further down the lawns is the founder and first president of Norte Dame in bronze, created by Italian sculptor Ernesto Biondi and unveiled in 1906.

Namely, the Very Rev. Edward (Édouard) F. Sorin (1814-93), who also had time to found St. Edward’s University in Austin and have a mighty oak named for him. The plinth is inscribed with Latin, lauding Sorin.

South along the lawns is a raft of collegiate buildings with collegiate names: Sorin Hall, Lafortune Student Center, Hayes-Healy Hall, Walsh Hall and the Norte Dame law school. Formally, it’s the Eck Hall of Law. I was impressed by how new the building looked, despite its traditional stylings. It is fairly new: 2008, a design by Cardosi Kiper.

A lot of the buildings looked newish, which tells me that Notre Dame has the dosh in our time — or can source it from donors like Mr. Eck — for capital projects. As indeed it does: the university’s endowment is about $12.3 billion, putting it at number 8 on this U.S. News & World Report list.

That kind of money also buys some nice details, or at least it should.

Further on, the “bookstore” didn’t let you forget where you were.

Finally, I don’t want to forget Chaplain William Corby, who rates a statue not far from the basilica and Main Building.

A plaque near the bronze says: The first bronze sculpture of Chaplain William Corby by Samuel Murray was dedicated on the Gettysburg battlefield by Civil War veterans of the five regiments of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade. His statue is on the same boulder of Cemetery Ridge where he stood to give the soldiers General Absolution on July 2, 1863, the second day of the three-day battle

Minutes later the Irish Brigade went into action at Little Round Top and the Wheatfield. The Brigade lost 27 killed, 109 wounded, and 62 missing. Gettysburg’s individual statues are of generals, except President Lincoln, Chaplain Corby, and a civilian.

This duplicate statue was dedicated here in 1911. Father Corby was president of Notre Dame twice: 1866-72, 1877-82. He planned the Grotto, finished in 1896, and died in 1897.

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Notre Dame

Posted on April 25, 2022 by admin

Last Friday we had the first genuine thunderstorm we’ve had in a while, as opposed to mere heavy rain, complete with the necessary light and noise, plus heavy rain. Saturday dawned warm and sunny, a glorious spring day, made for going somewhere.

But first I loaded the back of my car with two old computers, two banker boxes of papers and an auto battery long since defunct, and took them to a drive-through recycling event organized in an enormous parking lot next to Boomers Stadium (formerly Flyers Stadium). Didn’t take long to dispose of these things, and it didn’t cost me anything, since I assume the recyclers will make something from the materials they gather.

After that, and packing a few things in the now-empty back of the same car, we drove east for a 30-hour trip to South Bend-Mishawaka, Indiana. We arrived at the campus of the University of Notre Dame mid-afternoon, parked in a large lot near the likes of St. Mary’s Lake and the Knute Rockne Memorial Gym, and made our way to a place I’ve wanted to visit for years: the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Notre Dame.

It towers over campus.

That’s as far as we got toward the entrance before being told that an ordination was in progress, and we’d have to come back when it was over, in about 30 minutes.

There’s plenty else in the vicinity. Soon we found ourselves at the university’s Lourdes-class Grotto, downslope from the basilica. We joined a fair-sized crowd at the place.

I think the last time I was there was on a gray, drizzly day in November maybe 20 years ago, making a brief stop on a longer trip whose purpose I forget. That day, there weren’t nearly as many people. Just me, actually.

Then we started wandering down the sculpted lawns of Norte Dame leading away from the basilica, but hadn’t gone far when the basilica bells started tolling. A joyous tolling.

Note that people are spilling out of the basilica, especially those many in white ecclesiastical robes. The ordination had concluded. Later, I picked up the program.

Three men were ordained that day: Drew Clary, Cameron Cortens and Gabriel Griggs. The cross and anchors on the cover are from the seal of the Congregation of Holy Cross, one of whose schools is Notre Dame.

A bishop soon emerged, who presumably would be the ordaining bishop, the Most Rev. Kevin Rhoades. He stood talking to the priests and others for a few minutes.

Soon people formally, but more ordinarily dressed, poured out of the church, and socialized outside for a while. Taking turns minding the dog, Yuriko and I took turns looking inside.

As splendid an interior as I’ve seen anywhere.

“The church’s history dates to the 1830s when missionaries built a log cabin to house a chapel at the site,” Midwest Guest says. “Father Edward Sorin, founder and first president of the University of Notre Dame, built a larger log structure for the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by 1848…

Later in the century, Fr. Sorin tasked renowned church architect Patrick Keely to design him a grand edifice. A little too grand, as it happened.

“Father Sorin apparently experienced sticker shock when Keely submitted a design with an estimated completion price of $100,000 and enlisted his church’s pastor and a religious brother who was an amateur architect and builder to work with Keely to develop a more modest plan.”

Which they did. The Gothic Revival building that stood in front of me, with its bell tower poking the sky, lavish walls outside and in, heaven blue ceiling with gold stars and heavenly beings, was from a more modest plan?

An Urban Ruin Explorer

Posted on April 11, 2022 by admin

Almost a warm day. Certainly not a cold one, which felt like a relief. I didn’t have as much time outside as I wanted, though we had a good dog walk at dusk and I spent time after dark on the deck, drinking tea. Much cooler by then, but no wind at all. With a coat and cap, not bad for half an hour.

Just discovered Chris Luckhardt. A talented photographer and videographer with a specialty in urban ruins. At least, that’s my estimation of him after watching his video about looking around the abandoned City Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana. Quite a wander. I plan to watch some more of his work.

Trepidation would probably keep me from going to exactly the sort of places he goes, but I understand the impulse. A healthy sense of exploration that involves the near as much as the far.

12 Pix 20

Posted on December 22, 2020 by admin

Back to publishing on January 3, 2021, or so. Who knows, there might be snow by then.

Twelve pictures to wrap up the year, as I have in 2016 and 2017and 2018 and 2019, though this time around I won’t bother with a rigid, one-picture-for-each-month structure. They will be roughly chronological.

Chicago
Los Angeles

Azusa, California

Schaumburg, IllinoisWest Dundee, Illinois

Schaumburg, Illinois

Baraboo, WisconsinBeverly Shores, Indiana

Carbondale, IllinoisSchaumburg, IllinoisChicago

One bad apple

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all.

New Harmony, Indiana, Part 2

Posted on October 29, 2020 by admin

After wandering around New Harmony, Indiana, for a while and seeing many interesting things, it occurred to me that we hadn’t visited one of the places that I was curious to see, because I didn’t know exactly where to find it.

Google Maps in this instance didn’t know either. Or rather, I didn’t know exactly what the spot was called, to tell Google. The search engine isn’t a mind reader, not yet (but surely that’s Alphabet Inc.’s dream).

We spent time looking around an antique and knickknack store on the main street, since New Harmony, pop. 750, has some of the elements of a day-trippers town (like Fredericksburg, Texas). I found a candle holder I wanted to give as a gift, and after paying for it, I asked the woman behind the counter two questions.

One, where I might find postcards, since her store had none. She offered a suggestion, and another customer who had overheard us offered another suggestion, which turned out to be closer by and correct.

My other question: “Can you tell me where I can find Paul Tillich’s grave?” I’d read it was in town. Not in a cemetery, but a standalone location.

I can’t claim to be an expert on Paul Tillich, or even remember that much about him or his theological ideas. Whatever I might have learned during my collegiate religious studies had long been forgotten. Still, I figured I should drop by and pay my respects, and later do a little reading to refresh my memory.

She told me where to find him. We’d wandered by previously without realizing it, since he’s tucked in a grove of conifers forming Paul Tillich Park.

None of the stones in the pictures are his gravestone. Rather, they’re some stones in the park with Tillich’s words carved on them.

This is his stone.

A little hard to read, even when you’re standing in front of it. Turns out to be Psalm 1:3.

PAUL JOHANNES TILLICH
1886-1965
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit for his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

What’s Tillich doing in Indiana? Broadly speaking, he was another inadvertent gift to the United States from the Nazis, like Einstein or Thomas Mann or Billy Wilder or Walter Gropius. Tillich came to America in 1933 and held a number of academic posts in this country. Apparently he was taken with the history and setting of New Harmony.

“Before his death in 1965, the philosopher Paul Tillich hoped to make New Harmony a center for his own teachings, and thus in a way fulfill the early ambitions of Rapp and Owen in making the town an example of spiritual and material concerns successfully united,” notes a 1978 New York Times article, which is worth reading all the way through. “The trust created Paul Tillich Park…”

Jane Blaffer Owen’s trust, that is, mentioned yesterday.

“Jane Owen’s charisma emanated from her spiritual liberality [also, maybe, her largesse]. She was profoundly affected by the teaching of the twentieth-century German-American theologian Paul Tillich, becoming by turns his admirer, student, and friend….” writes Stephen Fox in a magazine published by Rice University — also worth reading all the way through.

“In 1963, she persuaded Tillich to come to New Harmony to dedicate a site across Main Street from the Roofless Church for a park to be named in his honor.”

“On [Philip] Johnson’s recommendation, she had the New York landscape architects Zion & Breen design a natural setting of grassless berms planted thickly with spruce and hemlock trees, around which granite boulders inscribed with passages from Tillich’s writings and a bronze bust by James Rosati were installed. This is where Tillich’s ashes were interred in 1966.”

This is the Rosati bust.

We weren’t quite finished with New Harmony after visiting Tillich. We spent some time at the town’s labyrinth, formally the Cathedral Labyrinth and Sacred Garden and patterned after one in Chartres Cathedral. Another work of the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation.

We spent some time walking it. Ann had more patience with it than I did.

Finally, we approached the Harmonist Cemetery, or the Rappite Cemetery, a burying ground surrounded by a low wall. Outside the wall are an assortment of well-worn stones, dating from the 19th century but after the utopian experiments in New Harmony.

Many are illegible, but I could read the names and much of the info on this one.

JANE
Consort of
JOHN T. HUGO
Died March 11, 1846
Aged 27 years, __ months and 10 days.

“Consort” isn’t a word I’ve seen too much in cemeteries, but maybe I don’t go to the right ones.

Behind the wall are no stones, just a wide expanse of grassy ground.

There was nothing on site to explain that, but after a moment’s thought we speculated that the Harmonists didn’t believe in individual gravesites or markers, so we were looking at a mass grave. Later I checked, and that’s correct. Ann said that made the site unsettling, and I suppose mass graves can be, say if mass violence was involved. I don’t think that was the case for the Harmonists; just the result of the everyday dangers of living in the 19th-century frontier.

Note also the mounds. Apparently the area was home to Indian mounds before the Harmonists came, and so they must have considered it a natural for a burial ground. About 230 of the colonists lie there.

New Harmony, Indiana, Part 1

Posted on October 28, 2020 by admin

Almost all of our Columbus Day weekend trip — Italian Food Day, as Ann calls it — was spent in Illinois, but on October 12 as we drove north toward home, we crossed into Indiana for a visit to the town of New Harmony on the Wabash River, just across from Illinois.

The Harmony Society, originally from Württemberg, moved to the Indiana Territory in 1814 from Pennsylvania and founded the town. You could call the group utopian, but my impression (from only a dollop of reading) is that they were Lutheran separatists and chiliasts. Or you could call them Indiana Territory communists, since they held all of their property in common, before that meant being reds.

Even so, they made a go of it, prospering before selling the site and moving back to Pennsylvania in 1825 at the direction of their leader, George Rapp. “They produced quality products including textiles, rope, barrels, tin ware, leather goods, candles, bricks and much more using the latest machinery and technology available,” the Visit New Harmony web site says.

“Because beverages were in demand [I’ll bet] in neighboring and river towns, wine, whiskey and beer were produced in large quantities. The daily production of whiskey was about 32 gallons and 500 gallons of beer were brewed every other day.”

Welch industrialist Robert Owen bought the place in the 1820s, all 2,000 acres of it, with his own utopian experience in mind. His was a more straightforward failure.

“Owen’s ‘Community of Equality,’ as the experiment was known, dissolved by 1827, ravaged by personal conflicts and the inadequacies of the community in the areas of labor and agriculture,” the University of Southern Indiana explains.

Yet the history of the town didn’t stop when the second experiment did. Scientific and other intellectual activity continued in New Harmony through much of the 19th century, and structures unusual in a Hoosier town rose throughout much of the 20th century. In our time, the restored 19th-century structures and the modernist touches of the 20th century make for an interesting amalgam.

We parked in the lot near the New Harmony Atheneum and started our walk around town.

“Clad in white porcelain panels and glass attached to a steel frame, the structure was the first major commission for the now internationally acclaimed architect Richard Meier,” Indiana Landmarks says.

“Built as a visitors’ center for the town [in 1979], the structure is designed to guide visitors along a specific route through the building, with overlaying grids offering frequent views of the surrounding buildings and countryside. From a spacious deck on the roof, visitors can look out over the town and take in views of the Wabash River.”

We would have done all that, but the Atheneum was closed — for Monday, not the pandemic. So on we went, a few leafy blocks to the Roofless Church.

The Roofless Church is behind this wall, one of four brick walls forming a rectangle.

Inside the walls.

The structure was erected by the Robert Lee Blaffer Trust, according to a plaque. Jane Blaffer Owen, Humble Oil heiress, founded the organization in honor of her oilman father, and she and her husband, Kenneth Owen, a descendant of Robert Owen, proved instrumental in reinventing New Harmony in the 20th century (she died in 2010, he in 2002).

“Further down North Street and through a gap in a brick wall there is hidden a modernist masterpiece by the architect Philip Johnson, completed in 1960,” says Atlas Obscura.

“It is called the Roofless Church and it says something about how much we expect our building to have roofs, that when people see the shingled structure in the images, they often say, ‘that’s silly, that’s a roof right there.’

“But the church is not simply that space, it is a city block sized footprint of which only a part is enclosed. The curved parabola dome is actually a protective cover for a beautiful sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz.”

Elsewhere within the perimeter of the Roofless Church are trees and benches and small gardens. The east wall has a gate.

We walked around a pond not far from the Roofless Church.

Near its edge is the Chapel of the Little Portion, built by the New Harmony Inn and Franciscan Brothers, and dedicated to St. Francis.

There’s a statue of St. Francis by the pond as well. I keep running into him. Actually, Francis and the Angel of the Sixth Seal by David Kocka.

New Harmony isn’t very large, so we wandered from the pond — past the MacLeod Barn Abbey — into the main commercial part of the town in a few minutes. There you can find some handsome restored buildings, such as the Johnson United Methodist Church.

The Opera House.

A commercial building, at least part of which dates from 1910.

A private house (I assume) with Asian design elements.

Rappite Community House No. 2, erected 1816-22.

If you own everything in common, you’re going to live in communal housing.

Shawnee National Forest ’20

Posted on October 18, 2020 by admin

During my break from posting, Arlo Stribling was born to my nephew Dees and his wife Eden in Austin. Congratulations to the new parents, here’s hoping the boy is a joy. Best regards to little Arlo, an emissary to a future my generation will not see.

On the afternoon of Friday, October 9, Ann and I went southward for a visit in and around Shawnee National Forest, which stretches in large patches — in typical national forest style — from the Ohio River to the Mississippi, or vice versa, occupying a lot of extreme southern Illinois. We looked around the east part of the forest. The weather turned out to be flawless for such a little trip, warm and partly cloudy.

We spent the first night in Mattoon, Illinois, continuing southward the next morning. The first place we went on Saturday morning wasn’t in southeast Illinois, but further west: Carbondale, visiting Castle Park, or more formally Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park, on the outskirts of town. Afterwards, we looked around Southern Illinois State University, and saw the nearby Buckminster Fuller House. A domed house, of course.

Heading east on Illinois 13, we eventually made our way as far east as that road goes, Old Shawneetown, a husk of a formerly much more populous place on the banks of the Ohio, and home to the Shawneetown State Bank Historic Site. We spent the next two nights in Harrisburg, Illinois, which bills itself as the Gateway to the Shawnee National Forest.

On Sunday, we drove the roads of the southeast part of the forest, climbed a modest flagstone path to a grand vista — the Garden of the Gods — hiked along a small lake surrounded by trees approaching their peak coloration, climbed a bluff via a CCC staircase, and visited a large cave entrance facing the Ohio River at Cave-in-Rock State Park.

Small, winding roads pass through the national forest, rising and falling, flanked alternately by walls of trees and expanses of flat farmland, post-harvest but before a winter freeze. Towns come in the sizes small, smaller and hamlet. In that part of Illinois, sometimes known as Little Egypt, small white churches are a common sight, more Baptist than any other denomination. Not quite as common, but enough in evidence were abandoned structures: farmhouses, gas stations, motels, restaurants and shops. If it were up to the people who put up political signs in that part of the country, the president would be re-elected by a wide margin. A smattering of Confederate battle flags were flying here and there.

Traffic is at a trickle on those roads most of the time. That made for easy, and sometimes picturesque, driving. Car commercial driving, I told Ann.

On Monday, Columbus Day Observed, that lightest, most gossamer of all national holidays, we headed home, with one major short detour into Indiana, to visit the town of New Harmony. The 19th-century utopian colonies there might have failed (two! count ’em, two utopian experiments), but the town has succeeded in being highly pleasant and intriguing everywhere you look in our time. Also, a famed theologian is buried there, in as much as theologians get fame.

As mentioned above, we didn’t spend much time in Mattoon. But early on Saturday I got up and looked around for a few minutes. The town looks frayed, buffeted by the contraction of U.S. manufacturing and the vagaries of the farming industry and the rural economy as a whole.

The town’s relatively greater prosperity in the early 20th century is reflected in its cemetery. A sizable place, the Dodge Grove Cemetery measures about 60 acres and has 20,000 permanent residents, including three Civil War generals and 260 soldiers from that war, one of whom is an unknown Confederate. There’s a story in that last detail, probably lost to time.

Blazes of fall color rise in places.

According to Find a Grave, only one of those Civil War generals counts as a notable burial in Dodge Grove, James Milton True, commander of the 62nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry. I like the other major item on his CV: U.S. consul in Kingston, Ontario in the 1870s.

That hints at some pull with the postwar federal government, probably based on connections he made during the war, or because he became a local politico who could deliver votes. Or both. Seems like a plumb diplomatic assignment in the 19th century: no language skills necessary, close enough to home that you can visit periodically, and no danger of catching malaria or some other dreaded tropical disease.

I didn’t see his grave. I didn’t know he was there till later. I did see the Pythias obelisk.

Erected by
Palestine Lodge No. 46
Knights of Pythias
In Memory of
Deceased Members
1929

I’ve encountered vestiges of the Knights before, such as in Atlanta, Illinois. I associated them with an earlier time, the sort of organization that George Babbitt might have mentioned in passing as having a chapter in Zenith. But no: the Knights of Pythias are still around, though at much diminished numbers.

Still around, and up with the times. “The Summer 2020 Edition of the Pythian International is now online,” the fraternal org’s web site says. “It includes information on the rescheduled Supreme Convention, Oct. 1-6.”

As I was about to leave, I spotted this stone.
A heartbreaker of a stone. Though I’m sure combat deaths didn’t quite stop exactly at 11 am on the 11th, since even modern armies with good internal communications can’t stop on a dime. Still, the day before the Armistice. Damn.

I don’t know why I’m surprised any more at anything online, but I was surprised to find a local newspaper account of Lawrence Riddle’s last days, though it doesn’t specify how he died (and this too: a niece that he never knew). In the article, the most attention is paid to Riddle’s participation in combat during the days before his death, charging a German machine gun position with four other men. They seized the position and brought back prisoners.

I wonder whether the Germans, eager to surrender at this point in the war, were making it easy for the raiders, or whether the Americans faced bitter-enders who were still playing for keeps. Either way, a clear act of bravery on the part of Riddle and the others.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Indiana