A treasure from the 1970s: Chagall’s America Windows at the Art Institute (1977). They’re out there, those treasures from that time.
In order from right to left.
Here’s a thought for the 2020s: Odious antisemites need to knock it off. As in, shut up. Then again, “odious” is already packed into “antisemite,” isn’t it? So that counts as a redundancy.
Details from the America Windows.
The museum was busy on Saturday, but I had the windows practically to myself.
I might be misremembering, but I believe the Uffizi Gallery had a hallway that featured busts of every Roman emperor, plus a good many of their wives, down at least to Severus Alexander (d. AD 235), in chronological order. I spent a while there, looking over them all.
The Uffizi array included famed and long-lasting rulers (e.g., Augustus) but also obscure short-timers whose biographies tend to end with “assassinated by…” (e.g., Didius Julianus (d. AD 193), the rich mope who bought the office from the highly untrustworthy Praetorian Guard and held it for all of 66 days in 193).
I thought of all those emperor busts when I took a look at Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius on Saturday. 
Second century AD, no doubt part of what would later be called propaganda: the effort to let the Roman people feel the presence of their rulers. These two busts are among the ancient Roman artworks on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, along with works by Greek, Egyptian and other peoples.
It isn’t a huge collection, though sizable enough. If you put together the ancient art found at Art Institute and the Field Museum and the Oriental Institute Museum, that might be a British Museum- or Pergamon Museum-class collection, but no matter. I always enjoy strolling around the Art Institute’s ancient gallery, which is back a fair ways from the main entrance, in four rooms surrounding a peristyle-like courtyard, though that is a story down.
Besides emperors, you’ll see emperor-adjacent figures, such as Antinous, done up as Osiris, 2nd century AD of course.
Beloved by Hadrian, Antinous took a swim in the Nile one day in AD 130 and drowned. Hadrian founded the nearby city of Antinoupolis in his honor (it’s a minor ruin these days) and proclaimed him a god — the sort of thing a grieving emperor could do in those days.
A Roman copy of a Greek statue of Sophocles, ca. AD 100.
Hercules, 1st century AD.
My cohort learned of Hercules through cartoons. Could have done worse, I guess.
A story never animated for children, as far as I know: Leda and the Swan, 1st or 2nd century AD. A story that nevertheless reverberates down the centuries.
Who doesn’t like ancient mosaics? I like to think these 2nd-century AD works were part of an ancient tavern that served food.
A sampling of Greek vases are on display as well. These black-figure works are from the sixth century BC, probably for storing wine. In vino veritas, though in this case that would be Ἐν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια (En oinō alētheia), and I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look that up.
I always visit the coin case. Here’s a silver tetradrachm minted in the 2nd century BC in Asia Minor, depicting Apollo. Such detailed work for something struck by hand.
Then there’s this — creature.
Statue of a Young Satyr Wearing a Theater Mask of Silenus, ca. 1st century AD, the museum sign says (and he’s putting his hand through the mask). You need to watch out for those young satyrs. They’re always up to something.
On Saturday, I made my way to downtown Chicago, while Yuriko created this most delicious Christmas cake at her occasional cake class.
I rode the El part of the way. Not many people are masked these days, unlike subway riders of a year ago (at least in New York). But there are a few.
Another mark of the shifting tides of pandemic: a storefront on a downtown Chicago street.
I didn’t doctor that image. A white rectangle was painted on the sign. Note that it went from Free Covid Care — though surely they meant testing, not intensive care — to Covid Care, as federal subsidies dried up, to For Rent, as business dried up.
Before long, I came to my destination: The Art Institute of Chicago.
The Art Institute and I go back a ways, and I’m sure I’ve been there more than any other art museum, or maybe any museum at all. Remarkably, I know the date of my first visit: May 17, 1981, during my first visit to Chicago. I haven’t consistently keep a diary over the years, but I did then.
That day I mostly remember spending time at an exhibit called “The Search for Alexander.” I might or might not have known it at the time, but the exhibit had opened just the day before.
A few years earlier, the wildly popular “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit had set the stage for the museum megashows of today, with their crowds, high prices and timed tickets, but most of that was still to come in ’81 (and there were other memorable legacies of Tut, too).
I don’t think the Alexander exhibit counted as a megashow, since I don’t remember paying extra, or dealing with a crowd. But I do remember being impressed by the art and artifacts from the time of Alexander of Macedon, especially a wreath of gold fashioned to look like oak leaves and acorns, held by fine gold branches that vibrated ever so gently in the mild air puffs of a climate-controlled display case.
On Saturday, I once again spent time with the museum’s ancient art, but also lingered in front of the Chagall’s America Windows and in the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, which I almost always do, as well as taking a long look at the Thorne Miniatures, which was by far the most crowded gallery I visited, though this time I didn’t go into the Impressionist rooms, which always pack ’em in.
Wherever you are, Saturday’s a busy day at the Art Institute.
A scattering of people wore masks.
Many more wore beards.
Museum workers were working.
As befitting my age, I spent a good few minutes on the museum’s benches. That gave me time to fiddle with my camera.
Oops.
I sent this card to my brother Jim in December 1994, on the day that we visited Windsor Castle.
The British postmark is where it should be. The USPS thoughtlessly postmarked the image. Nice going, USPS. Just another example of disrespecting postcards.
As this account of the 1992 Windsor Castle fire says, only two of the castle’s artworks were destroyed by the fire, not including the one depicted on the card, “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” (Cristofano Allori, 1613) which was part of the Royal Collection at Windsor. It still is.
At the time, I didn’t know anything about Allori or the painting. The Royal Collection Trust notes: “According to his biographer Baldinucci, Allori painted this work in part as an autobiographical account of his love affair with Maria de Giovanni Mazzafirri, which ended badly. The figure of Judith, Baldinucci claimed, resembles ‘La Mazzafirra,’ the servant in the background her mother, and the severed head of Holofernes is a portrait of the artist himself.”
I had seen “Judith I” (Gustav Klimt, 1901) in Vienna earlier that year, and of course the story of Judith came up in my studies, but I also didn’t really know how popular Judith was in artistic depictions. This I found out later. Nothing like a story of deception, a fetching feme, a drunken fool and a beheading to inspire art, I guess.
As for the work at Windsor, most recently — as in, last week — I read how it came to be in the Royal Collection. Acquired by Charles I, probably from the Gonzaga collection, Mantua, the trust says, which lead me to read further about the Gonzaga collection. If I had heard about it before, and I might had, I’d forgotten.
The long and short of it is that the House of Gonzaga, after much effort, put together a splendid art collection, only to sell it when they needed cash — to King Charles in the late 1620s, well before that monarch’s grim fate, in a deal facilitated by one Daniel Nijs.
The lesson here? Postcards are educational.
Today was probably the last warm day of the year. For the next week and then some, at least, the chill will be on. Lunch and dinner were on our deck.
On the morning of October 15, a warm, clear Saturday in Atlanta, I got up early (for me) and walked from my short-term rental apartment in the Mechanicsville neighborhood to Garnett Station (on Marta’s Red and Gold Lines), mostly via Windsor Street, which was quiet and largely devoid of people.
From the station, I took the train to Peachtree Center, after which I spent time in Centennial Olympic Park.
The CNN Center is adjacent to the park, so I went there for a look too. Also, to find a bathroom, since the management of Centennial Olympic Park, in a gesture I take as hostile to the public at large, hasn’t bothered to re-open the park’s public bathrooms that closed during the pandemic emergency.
CNN employees can ride that tall escalator through a model Earth.
Soon after, I went to catch a streetcar — called a tram on the maps — which stops just outside the park. But I had a little time before the next arrival, so I looked around. In the vicinity of the park, you can see this building, whose name or address I didn’t bother with. Its Pac-Man-ish features, which appear to be the profile of a bold bird, move.
Then it changes its pattern, and they move some more.
The Ferris wheel Skyview Atlanta, another feature of that part of downtown, wasn’t moving yet.
After a short ride, I arrived at the streetcar stop near the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park and Preservation District.
I have the MLK park service publication in front of me. Don’t let anyone tell you that QR codes are better, NPS. The paper pamphlet unfolds in a way a smart phone image cannot, and it allows things to jump out at you in a way they can’t.
As soon as I unfolded it completely, the beginning of a sentence jumped out at me.
“In the twelve or so years that Martin Luther King, Jr. led the American Civil Rights Movement…”
Twelve years. Making Martin Luther King Jr. a bright meteor in American history, an illumination of the better angels of our nature, that’s over and done all too soon. Except that his legacy, his ethical bequest to the nation and the world, is hardly over and done.
The park captures the geography of Dr. King’s early life: a line from his birthplace and boyhood home on Auburn Avenue to his church — the church of his father and grandfather — also on Auburn, only blocks away.
When the King family led Ebenezer Baptist Church, it met here, a building now known as Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage Sanctuary. It was completed in the 1920s and restored in recent years to look like it did in the 1960s.
Not open. Some kind of maintenance going on, I think. I’d liked to have seen the inside.
This is the Horizon Sanctuary, a 1999 structure, where the church gathers now.
It isn’t part of the park, but on its border, next to the main visitor center and museum devoted to Dr. King and his times. The church isn’t a relic of the past either, its congregation robust these days. Its pastor, Sen. Raphael Warnock, is in the thick of trying to win a full term in the U.S. Senate.
Close to the historic church and also on Auburn, Dr. and Mrs. King repose in a tomb perched on a circular island, the focus of a deep blue reflecting pool running the length of a brick plaza. Promenade might be a better way to put it, considering that people were strolling the length of it.
An eternal flame on the grounds.
I spent some time in the museum. A fair amount to read and view, but the most poignant artifact was the wagon that carried his coffin.
Outside the museum, there’s a garden with a mouthful of a name: The Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream” World Peace Rose Garden.
Also on Auburn, his birth house.
It’s on the left. On the right is a book store and the museum shop. Tours of the birth house were already booked for the day.
“Auburn Avenue was the commercial, cultural, and spiritual center of African American life in Atlanta prior to the civil rights movement,” says the New Georgia Encyclopedia. ” ‘Sweet Auburn’ boasted a concentration of Black-owned businesses, entertainment venues, and churches that was unrivaled elsewhere in the South.”
The street had been renamed Auburn in 1893; originally it had been Wheat Street.
“During the next two decades, as restrictive Jim Crow legislation was codified into law, the city’s African American population became confined to the area between downtown and Atlanta University and to neighborhoods on the city’s east side, known today as the Old Fourth Ward,” the encyclopedia notes.
“It was during this period that Auburn Avenue first achieved prominence as a commercial corridor and became home to the city’s emerging Black middle class.
“Ironically, Auburn’s civic activism led to its undoing. As the NAACP and local voting-rights organizations, from their Sweet Auburn offices, lobbied state and local governments for an end to segregation, and as native son Martin Luther King Jr… led the crusade for civil rights before a national audience, the street began its steep decline. With the legal barriers to integration removed, many Auburn shopkeepers moved their businesses to other areas of the city, and residents began migrating to Atlanta’s west side.”
Historic No. 6 Fire Station, which is part of the park.
The NPS says: Built in 1894 in Romanesque Revival style, the fire station stood guard over the city for nearly 100 years. In the 1960s, it became one of Atlanta’s first racially integrated firehouses. It closed in 1991.
So before the ’60s, Atlanta firehouses were segregated. How nuts is that?
Besides sites associated with Dr. King, Auburn still features some shotgun houses, which mostly aren’t part of the park.
Plus some larger houses. This one is home to the Historic District Development Corp.
Eventually, I wandered beyond Auburn to a parallel street, Edgewood Avenue. It’s an active commercial street in our time, with various establishments.
Plus murals.
I had a late lunch of breakfast food at Thumbs Up, a diner. Its outside wall.
Eggs and pancakes, done up right. Worth the half-hour wait sitting outside.
One upon a time, gaming businessman William Harrah owned a lot of cars, maybe more than any single individual ever. The dosh to put his collection together came from Harrah building a large hotel and casino empire in Reno and other places in the years after WWII. Sources put the number of vehicles at around 1,400, but maybe that’s an undercount.
Harrah died in 1978. Eventually, most of his cars were sold at auction, but a nucleus of the collection remained intact and formed the basis of the National Automobile Museum in Reno. Intrigued by the prospect of seeing them myself, especially with the impressive Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in Fairbanks in mind, I arrived not long before noon on October 3.
Auto museums are a fairly new interest of mine, spurred by my good experience in Alaska last year. And why not? I like good airplane collections and historic trains, too. If I’m ever in southern Germany again, I’d look at the Zeppelin Museum as well, because how cool is that?
The scope of the Reno museum is wider than the one in Fairbanks, considering that it has cars from the dawn of automotive travel through close to the present day, as opposed to a collection that extends only until the end of the 1930s. Quite a lot to see, beginning with the beginning.
That’s an 1892 Philion. I’d never heard of it either, and for good reason: this is the only one. There only ever was one, since it was never intended to be mass produced. The story of its owner is just as interesting as any of the mechanical aspects of the vehicle.
Achille Philion, a French acrobat and showman in the U.S. who called himself the Great Equilibrist and Originator, acquired a steam-powered quadricycle and had it modified, even going so far as to register a few patents associated with early autos. He used the car to draw attention to his performances, which involved — well, let a poster tell the story. Nothing really to do with automobiles.
According to the plaque at the museum, the car changed hands a number of times after Philion sold it, and it even made an appearance in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Other early autos at the museum include the 1899 Locomobile, one of the first production autos in the U.S., and another steamer. Cool name.
Auto design and innovation progressed quickly in the ’00s. Pretty soon carmaker Thomas Motor Co. created a car that could drive most of the way around the world: The 1907 Thomas Flyer.
As far as I’m concerned, this was the centerpiece of the museum. Sure, there are also dozens of cars from early motoring, sleek pre-WWII machines, mid-century racecars, and the Batmobile driven by Adam West, among many, many interesting vehicles.
Nothing tops the Thomas.
This isn’t an example of just any 1907 Thomas. This is the car that won the 1908 New York to Paris Automobile Race, traveling 22,000 miles by land and sea over 169 days, despite there being very little in the way of infrastructure to support such a drive.
“After this victory, Thomas auto sales increased for a period; however, by 1912, the company was in receivership,” the sign at the museum says, and the car was sold during the bankruptcy proceedings.
William Harrah found it in the early 1960s, neglected and forgotten, and authenticated its participation in the race in a most amazing way, namely by bringing George Schuster, who had driven the car to victory in 1908, to Reno. Schuster was 91 at the time (he lived to be 99), and “during the dismantling of the Flyer, [he] witnessed cracks in the frame and repairs he had made during the race, proving its authenticity. The Thomas Flyer was restored to the condition [it was] when it finished the race.”
Elsewhere in the museum is this.
It shows the route of the race.
Accounts of the race say the prize for winning wasn’t money, but honor and glory — and “a trophy.” The plaque at the base says this globe was indeed presented to the Thomas Motor Co. by the organizers, so I guess this is it.
One more legacy of the race: it inspired The Great Race. Among silly early ’60s epic-long movies, it’s one of the more silly (and could have been trimmed by an hour with no loss).
Moving on to other fine machines of the pre-WWI period. A 1908 Brush (gas), a 1909 White (steam), and a 1912 Selden (gas), respectively.
Those were just part of the contents of one room. Other rooms had more recent vehicles. Such as these arrays.
Here’s a 1956 Mercedes-Benz.
“[It] has a 6-cylinder OHC fuel-injected engine developing 240 hp with an advertised top speed of 146 mph… The car was entered in the 1959 Bonneville Salt Flats Class D speed trials and set a new record at 143.769 mph,” the museum says. Those doors are referred to as “gullwing.”
A ’53 Hudson.
The Hudson line lasted only until 1957. By that time, the company was known as American Motors Corp., which had a future ahead of it that included the AMC Pacer. I didn’t have one, but a friend of mine in high school did, and I remember it fondly. Maybe more than he does.
A ’47 Volkswagen.
Uncomfortably close to its origins as the people’s car of National Socialism, but never mind. Another high school friend of mine had a ’73 Super Beetle, and occasionally he took that car to places where cars really weren’t supposed to go. What a gas.
The museum’s collection also includes a fair number of less-than-standard cars. Take the three-wheeled, piscine 1937 Airomobile, for example.
The only one ever built. “It failed to attract financial backing,” the museum explains drily.
Maybe the ultimate vehicular oddity is the 1934 Dymaxion.
Looks something like a Volkswagen Microbus except, of course, for having three wheels and an even rounder contour. Bucky was trying to smash paradigms, but no go: only three prototypes were built — and this is the only one still in existence. Still, revisionist thinkers closer to our time admire the Dymaxion. Well, maybe. Fuller’s house design didn’t catch on either, but it is interesting to look at.
The museum also has an impressive cache of cars used in movies and TV shows, such as in The Green Hornet, a modified 1966 Imperial, one of two created for the show by car remodeler Dean Jeffries.
A close replica of the DeLorean put to such good use in Back to the Future. More gullwings.
And of course — what could be better? — a Batmobile (a modified 1966 Lincoln).
An original George Barris Batmobile, the museum says, and you can see Barris’ autograph inside, along with those of Adam West and Burt Ward.
All together, the museum sports a fun lot of cars to see, even if you’re not too keen on all the technical specs. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that its collection includes plenty of other other car-related items. My own favorite were a line of vintage gas pumps. Rare to see anything like them in situ, but not impossible. Modern gas pumps pale (stylistically) by comparison.
After all, without gas, where are all those cars going to go? Unless they’re steamers. Imagine the advanced steamer tech we’d have now — we wouldn’t think a thing of it — if they’d caught on instead of internal combustion, or even developed in parallel.
After leaving Sault Ste. Marie around noon on August 4, we headed via small roads to Whitefish Point, a cape jutting from the Upper Peninsula into Lake Superior.
First stop en route, Point Iroquois Light, which overlooks the lake as it narrows to drain into St. Marys River. A light has been there since 1856, in response to the increased shipping through the recently opened Soo Locks. The lighthouse and keeper’s house are handsome structures, though the light was under scaffolding. I’ve encountered a fair number of such obstructed sights over the years.
Nice view of Whitefish Bay, too.
A good boardwalk walk.
We had lunch in Paradise. The UP town of that name, that is. We stopped there for lunch in 2006 and I’d like to say I had a cheeseburger. But the record says otherwise. Back then, I wrote: “I need to say I’ve been to Paradise. Paradise, Mich., that is, which is just south of Whitefish Point. In fact, I ate a whitefish sandwich in Paradise, and it was good, but not paradisiacal.”
I didn’t record the name of the restaurant in ’06, but I will this time, because it’s so much fun: Wheelhouse Diner & Goatlocker Saloon. (The owner(s) must have been in the Navy.) We ate in the back, in the saloon part, which looked pretty much like the rest of the place, with the addition of a bar. I had a whitefish sandwich again, because that’s the thing you do within spitting distance of Lake Superior, at least once or twice. I didn’t regret my choice.
Same as 16 years ago — can it have been that long ago, and still be in the 21st century? — we headed up to Whitefish Point after lunch. The star of the point is Whitefish Point Lighthouse.
The original light was built in 1849 as one of the first ones on Lake Superior and, as the lake’s epithet at this point attests — “Graveyard of the Great Lakes” — it was badly needed.
It’s also a fitting location for the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.
The museum doesn’t seem to have changed much since I wrote: “Front and center inside the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald… It’s hard to imagine the violence necessary to sink a ship big enough to carry 26,000 tons of cargo, but there she lies, in two pieces, on the bottom not far from Whitefish Point.
“But it was not an Edmund Fitzgerald museum. Along three walls were other stories of other wrecks, most costing some lives, and most so long ago that there’s no living memory of them — the Comet, Vienna, Myron and Superior City, just to name a few. Among the artifacts from these wrecks were the nautical things you’d expect, such as a ship’s wheel, anchor chains, or steam engine gages.”
Like the name plate from the Myron, lost in a November gale in 1919.
“More poignant were bits of flotsam like bottles, dishes, a candelabra and even a bar of soap in its late 19th-century packaging. Some of the museum’s benches were made from wooden planks from wrecked ships, with their name carved in it.”
This time it struck me how many ships sank after collisions with other ships. Radar was a real game-changer, but even so, it couldn’t prevent every wreck.
Such as that of the Edmund Fitzgerald, with all the modern equipment of 1975. The ship’s bell, retrieved from Superior’s ice-water mansion in 1995.
The Big Fitz bell isn’t the only ship’s bell in the collection. Another was from the schooner Niagara, which sank in 1897.
And how does one go looking for such artifacts? At least in the old days? Amazing that divers could do anything at all encased in such bulk.
All these things evoke history and loss, as they should. But I think none of the items are as cool as the museum’s Fresnel lens. Years ago, I wrote:
“Hanging near the ceiling was a second-order Fresnel lens, formerly the bright eye of a lighthouse elsewhere in Michigan but since retired… Meant to magnify light, and representing an important technical advance in the 19th century, a Fresnel lens is also an astonishing piece of glasswork.”
Yes, indeed.
“At first its overall resemblance to a human eye strikes you, but the more you look at it, the more the glassy curves and grooves and nodes emerge into an ensemble of glass pieces, arrayed like soldiers on parade.”
The museum also has a smaller, fourth-order lens.
Before we left, we took a look at the shore, accessed by a boardwalk.
Sobering the think of all the wrecks off in that general direction.
In 1780, the British commander at Fort Michilimackinac, which had been a French post on the mainland south shore of the Straits of Mackinac until the British had won it in the Seven Years’ War, decided to build a more defensible fort on Mackinac Island (and perhaps, one with a shorter name). He picked a bluff overlooking the lakeshore.
“Fort Mackinac, Michigan” by Seth Eastman (1872)
The fort stands there to this day, though in somewhat different form: a tourist attraction. As a tourist, I was duly attracted.
Note the Boy Scout. Turns out in visiting Mackinac Island, we were visiting a presidential site. It’s a slightly convoluted story, but well relayed by the island’s web site.
These days, a group of Boy and Girl Scouts raises and lowers about two dozen American flags across Mackinac Island each day during the summer. They also act as guides at the fort. The fellow at the entrance wasn’t the only one we saw.
He was the only one I talked to, however. Tried to, that is. I asked him why Boy Scouts were at the fort, and perhaps a career involving public interaction isn’t in his future, because he sputtered a few unintelligible words and looked at me as if I’d tried to talk to the guards at Buckingham Palace.
So I had to learn later that the flag-raising and other duties started “in 1929 when then-Michigan Gov. Fred Green commissioned eight Eagle Scouts from around the state as honor guardsman on Mackinac Island,” the island’s web site says.
The governor’s summer residence, by the way, is on Mackinac Island, very near the fort, though the house didn’t begin that function until 1944. We walked past it on the way to the fort.
Its formal name is the Lawrence A. Young Cottage, dating from 1902. Young was a successful Chicago attorney who had it built as his summer home.
The presidential connection? In 1929, one of the charter group of scouts tapped by Gov. Green was none other than Gerald R. Ford.
The scout barracks aren’t far from the fort, either. We passed those after we left the fort.
Inside the fort.
Besides the scouts, there were a handful of somewhat older folk in costume. I told this fellow he was wearing a capital uniform.
Unlike the scout, he was talkative, and able to tell us in some detail about the uniform, though I think he was a little confused about my use of the term “capital” to mean “fine” or “excellent.” An apt term for a spiffy 19th-century uniform, if you asked me.
There are some terrific views from the fort, as a pre-modern fort would have.
The historic buildings include the post HQ, bathhouse, soldiers barracks, officers quarters, post hospital, a storehouse, guardhouse and more. The rooms were stocked with artifacts and expository signage. More modern spaces included a light-meal restaurant taking advantage of those terrific views, a gift shop and bathrooms (authentic 19th-century Army latrines wouldn’t go down well with the museum-going public, I figure).
The fort is, I’ve read, one of the few surviving more-or-less intact from the Revolution and War of 1812, when it saw action. Later, as British Canada receded as any kind of threat, Mackinac’s usefulness as a military post did as well, but it lingered as U.S. Army property until 1895.
By that time, much of Mackinac Island had been designated as Mackinac National Park. Astute NPS observers might object that no such park exists, and they’d be right. Created in 1875 as the second national park, Congress dissolved it in 1895 and turned it over to the state of Michigan, which created its first state park that same year out of the same territory, including the now-decommissioned fort.
After I saw the fort, I read the story of its U.S. commander in 1812, one Porter Hanks. Lt. Hanks surrendered the fort without a fight, as he was hopelessly outnumbered. He and his men were paroled by the British forces. Wiki, which seems to be reasonably sourced, picks up the story:
“Lieutenant Hanks made his way to Detroit and the American military post there. Upon his arrival, superiors charged him with cowardice in the surrender of Fort Mackinac. Before the court martial of Lieutenant Hanks could begin, British forces attacked Fort Detroit. A British cannonball ripped through the room where Hanks was standing, cutting him in half and killing the officer next to him as well.”
That’s one way to get out of a court martial, but surely not how Lt. Hanks would have wanted.
Parking in downtown Naperville on a sunny summer Sunday takes a little time, featuring as it does slow drives through a few full parking lots and passing by other lots that look full, while navigating the crooked grid of streets and keeping an eye out for a free flow of pedestrians.
I’ve been on worse parking treks. Before too long, we found a spot at Naperville Central High School, whose lot was open and no charge. To reach the riverwalk from there, you have to go around Naper Settlement, an open-air museum covering 12 acres and featuring historic buildings from the vicinity.
Unless you go into the museum, which we didn’t particularly want to, since we’d been there before. September of ’09, when we attended a pow-wow.
Then we found out that an art show was going on, with no admission to the grounds. So we popped in for a look-see.
“Since 1959, the Naperville Woman’s Club has presented a free art fair in the summer,” the Naper Settlement web site says. “The longest continuously running art fair in Illinois, this event brings a weekend of art and artistry to Naper Settlement in a free, fun, and family-friendly environment.” My italics.
Some nice work was for sale. We managed not to buy anything, remarkably enough.
In that first pic, he’s selling ceramic graters. Not something I would have thought of.
I was more interested in taking a look at the buildings, even though most of them were closed. The crown jewel of the museum, of course, is the handsome Martin Mitchell Mansion, which we toured those years ago. I didn’t remember much about Mitchell — just that he made money in bricks, many of which are evident in the house, and that his daughter was a dwarf who willed the property to the city.
The Daniels House.
Hamilton C. Daniels (1820-97) doctored in 19th-century Naperville. Wonder whether, toward the end, old doc Daniels was still a miasma man or he came around to germ theory.
The Century Memorial Chapel.
Formerly St. John’s Episcopal in Naperville, dating from 1864.
The museum also has some nice gardens.
Speaking of gardens, there was a special display of Victory Gardens. Boxes honoring the originals, anyway, and individual service members.
Something I learned from the signage: In 1943, seven million acres of Victory Gardens were planted, producing 40% of the nation’s fresh produce that year.
One more structure, though there are 30 all together on the grounds: the Murray Outhouse.
How many outhouses in the world are named? There have to be others, but there couldn’t be that many.
I did a quick look, and it seems that the Rockwell Inn, a restaurant in Morris, Illinois, closed for good sometime in 2013. I ate there in 1987, returning from Springfield from the first business trip I’d ever taken, and remember the dark interior, the very long and ornate wooden bar that had supposedly been at the 1893 world’s fair, and the fish — some kind of fish — cooked in a bag with almonds and spices, superbly done.
That was the only time I ever ate there. I gave it a moment’s thought after I’d visited the Grundy County Historical Society & Museum on Friday, which is in Morris.
If I’d thought of it while I was at the museum, I could have asked the woman at the desk, the only other person there, whether she remembered the restaurant. She might well have, or even pointed out a Rockwell artifact, though I’m pretty sure that the museum didn’t get the bar. I hope someone got it.
The museum has a lot of other things, though. That’s part of the charm of local, volunteer-run museums. Stuff. Such as items to remind us that Prince Albert is, or was, in a can.
Business machines of yore.
Clothes.
Things that used to be found in middle-class homes.
Farm equipment.
And some items specific to Grundy County industry. Coal has been mined there for a long time, leaving behind tools.
Lots to look at on a rainy, cold spring day, when you have a museum all to yourself.
