Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site

Posted on June 9, 2021 by admin

Quoted in the pamphlet that the National Park Service gives out at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo is a characteristic TR thing to say:

“It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way; but it would be far worse to be morbid about it. Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is to it.”

On September 14, 1901, the site was the house of Ansley and Mary Wilcox, friends of Theodore Roosevelt, when he took the oath of office there as 26th President of the United States. TR had hurried there from the Adirondacks when word came that President McKinley was dying.

We arrived ahead of lunch on May 30. One docent and two other staff members were there. That was all. The docent thus gave us a personal tour of the house, which is part house museum and part museum devoted to TR and his presidency.

It’s a handsome mansion, typically of those that used to stand on Delaware, though in a little need of paint these days.

Delaware Avenue, once Buffalo’s Millionaire’s Row, is still characterized by large houses, many of which are now office buildings for attorneys and accountants and such. There are also places where mansions probably used to be, but which were lost to time. Directly across the street from the former Wilcox house is a chain pharmacy.

TR stands in bronze on the grounds. The work is surprisingly new, completed only in 2015 by sculptor Toby Mendez.

Photography was allowed inside, and while I’m not always inclined to take pictures inside house museums, I wanted to take one of the room in which TR took the oath. Most of the items are period-specific but not actually owned by the Wilcoxes.

“No definite plans had been made for swearing him in,” Wilcox wrote, “and it had not even been settled where this should be done. The first suggestion had been to take him directly to Mr. Milburn’s house, there to be sworn-in, but this had been objected to as unsuitable, while the body of the president was lying in the house. So he was asked to go to my house to get lunch, and immediately at arriving and being equipped with borrowed clothes, more appropriate than his traveling suit, he insisted on starting for Mr. Milburn’s house, to make a call of sympathy and respect on the family of the dead president. This was done, and by three o’clock he was at my house again…

“The room [the library], not a large one, was far from full, and at the last moment, the newspaper men, who were eager for admission, were all let in, but were prohibited from taking any photographs…

“The new President was standing in front of the bay window on the south side of the room. Others had fallen back a bit when Mr. [Elihu] Root spoke. After his response, Judge [John] Hazel advanced and administered the oath… The written oath, which Judge Hazel produced…was then signed. Then President Roosevelt made the announcement of his request to the cabinet to remain in office. The whole ceremony was over within half an hour after the Cabinet had entered the house, and the small company dispersed, leaving only the six Cabinet officers with the President, who at once held an informal session in the library.”

The Wilcoxes died in the early 1930s, and afterwards the house was used as a restaurant until the 1960s, when it was in danger of demolition, as so many historic structures were at the time. Fortunately, the citizens of Buffalo didn’t let that happen, and 50 years ago the house opened as a museum.

Visiting this particular national historic site made me wonder how many there are. Quite a few, Wiki tells me: 87, most of which (76) are National Park Service units, with 11 as affiliate areas, though I’m not sure what that distinction might mean on the ground.

How many have I visited? Only 14, counting the latest one, though I’m not entirely sure about two of them. Clearly I need to get out more.

Downtown Buffalo

Posted on June 6, 2021 by admin

Last Sunday morning, May 30, we were up fairly early and spent time in downtown Buffalo. I had a walking route in mind, inspired by a walking tour map I’d seen on line, but we pretty much disregarded that and used the “hey, what’s that building over there?” technique to set our path.

After parking in a garage, the first thing we spotted was Millard Fillmore. In bronze.

A work of New York City sculptor Bryant Baker, from the early 1930s, next to Buffalo City Hall. Naturally, President Fillmore has attracted the ire of removalists, who want to take his memory to task for signing the Compromise of 1850, especially the odious Fugitive Slave Law, and for being the standard-bearer for the Know-Nothings. Not for being mentioned as a mediocre president in song and story.

Fillmore’s on the southeast corner of the building. On the northeast corner is the Baker bronze of Grover Cleveland, who was mayor of Buffalo before he was ever president.

Buffalo City Hall is a famed bit of architecture, for good reason. Chicago has a handsome city hall, as does New York City and other places, but I’ve seen none more impressive than Buffalo.

Local architects Dietel, Wade & Jones did the soaring art deco design, with completion in 1931. I’ve read there’s an observation deck on the upper floors, but it was closed on Sunday. Actually, most of downtown Buffalo seemed closed on Sunday. A 24/7 city, it is not.

City Halls faces Niagara Square, which has been a focal point for the city for a long time, and continues to be in the news.
The obelisk is the McKinley Monument, designed by the architects of the 1901 world’s fair, Carrere and Hastings.

East of City Hall, facing Lafayette Square, is the Liberty Building, developed in 1925 for Liberty National Bank.

At one time the bank had been German American Bank, but the bankers thought better of that name during the 1910s dust-up in Europe. Just to hammer home the patriotic point, there are replicas of the Statue of Liberty atop the building.

The Rand Building, completed in 1929.
One M&T Plaza, completed in 1966 and looking every bit of it. A design by Minoru Yamasaki, who’s best known for the destroyed World Trade Center in NYC.

A detail of Ellicott Square, designed by Charles Atwood of D. H. Burnham & Co. and completed in 1896. The lobby is supposed to be like the Rookery in Chicago, which would be high praise indeed, but the building wasn’t open for a look.

The splendid Guaranty Building, originally the Prudential Building, also completed in 1896. A Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler tour-de-force.

Across the street from the Guaranty is St. Paul’s Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York. Richard Upjohn, who designed Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan, did the original design in the 1840s. After a bad fire in the 1880s, Robert Gibson did the renovation.

The Sunday service was in progress and we sat in for a while, with a good view of the resplendent interior.

Those were the buildings we had energy for. Some details along the way, such as the Buffalo city flag.

In the street across from the cathedral are Toynbee tiles.

Been a while since I’ve seen any. The last time was St. Louis, maybe 20 years ago. An examination of the spot on Google Streetview tells me that these particular tiles appeared after 2011 but before 2015, and one of the tiles says 2013. So they might not be the work of the original tiler, whomever that might be, but does that even matter? The obscure oddity has a life of its own, and it’s good to know that they’re still being created and you can still see them with your own eyes.

Shuffle Off To Buffalo

Posted on June 1, 2021 by admin

Just back yesterday evening from 72 hours in Buffalo. Roughly. Not quite 72 hours over Memorial Day weekend and not quite all in Buffalo, though we were in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA the whole time.

Three days isn’t enough to drive to Buffalo from northern Illinois and spend a worthwhile amount of time. Like Pittsburgh, that would be a four-day venture. So we flew. First time since early 2020. Except for mandatory masking at the airports and on the planes, everything was about the same as it used to be, including holiday-weekend crowds. One of our flights was on a Boeing 737 MAX-8, and clearly we lived to tell the tale.

We, as in Yuriko and I, arrived late Friday night and made our way to Amherst, New York, a Buffalo suburb, where we stayed. We were up early the next morning to spend most of the day at Niagara Falls State Park. I was fulfilling a promise I made in 1996, when we arrived at the falls in March to find the American Falls still frozen. I told her we’d come someday when the liquid was moving again, and so we did.

That wasn’t the whole first day. I discovered that nowhere is very far away from anywhere else in this corner of New York state by driving north along the Niagara Gorge, stopping at Lewiston and Fort Niagara, and then returning to Amherst.

On Sunday, we weren’t up quite as early, but we made it to downtown Buffalo in the morning for a walkabout. As promised by various sources, the city has some first-rate architecture, most especially Buffalo City Hall. Late in the morning, after a brief stop at Tim Horton’s — they’re everywhere in metro Buffalo — we toured the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, formerly the Ansley and Mary Wilcox home.

Lunch that day was on Main Street at the Anchor Bar, which specializes in Buffalo wings and claims their invention, but in any case the joint didn’t disappoint. Afterward, Yuriko napped in the car while I spent time looking around Main Street, which includes Buffalo’s theater district and Saint Louis Roman Catholic Church.

Also, this mural.
Created by local t-shirt designer David Horesh and painter Ian de Veer, it’s highly visible when you’re traveling southbound on Main.

Could it be that current Buffalonians might not want millennials, or more importantly, tech-industry millennials with high incomes, to show up in droves to drive up prices for everyone else? Maybe. Not sure Buffalo has the tech ecosystem, as they say in the biz, to support such an influx. Then again, in the vicinity of the mural are places probably supported by people with at least some disposable income, such as Just Vino, the House of Masters Grooming Lounge, Hair to Go Natural, and Fattey Beer Co. Buffalo.

I had a mind to visit Delaware Park afterwards, since a Frederick Law Omstead park is always worth seeing, but we ended up sampling it merely by driving around it. Looks like a nice place to while away a warm afternoon.

By that time, Sunday afternoon, it was fairly warm in greater Buffalo. Rain had clearly fallen the day before we arrived, and cool air arrived afterward, taking temps down into the low 50s early Saturday, when we got to Niagara Falls. Did that matter? No. It wasn’t cold enough to freeze anything.

On Monday I got up early and visited the splendid Forest Lawn Cemetery, permanent home of President Fillmore and Rick James, among many others. Later, we drove to Lockport, New York and spent some time along the Erie Canal. As long ago as elementary school, I heard about the Erie Canal, but had never seen it. We also took a tour of one of the manmade caves near the canal, where rapid water flows formerly powered local industry.

Back in Buffalo for a satisfying lunch at Lake Effect Diner, housed in a chrome-and-neon diner car dating to 1952. Then we drove south via surface streets to Lackawanna, where you can see the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory, our last destination for the trip.

Why Buffalo? There was that promise to visit the falls, of course. But I also wanted to see Buffalo. My single previous experience there had been a quick drive-through in 1991 after I saw Niagara Falls for the first time, from the Canadian side. Every city of any size has something interesting. A lot of smaller places do as well. So we shuffled off to Buffalo.

A Couple of Hours in Freeport

Posted on May 3, 2021 by admin

The week after I returned from Dallas was second-dose vaccination week for all of us in our house. When I set things up in late March, the only first-shot appointments were at far-flung pharmacies in northern Illinois, meaning the boosters would be at the same places. By the time I got back, I had the sense that I could have rejiggered things to get shots closer to home. But I didn’t. I still wanted to go to those places.

Such as Freeport, Illinois, the only town of any size between Rockford and Galena, and actually much bigger than the latter (23,700 vs. 3,100). When driving into Freeport, I saw a sign advertising a Wrigley Field replica, or miniature, or something. It wasn’t hard to find after our vaccination was done.

Little Cubs Field, it’s called, which is used for Little League, T-ball and other events, and completed in 2008 by serious Cubs fans.

The bicycle in that picture belonged to one of about a half-dozen boys, all maybe about 10 years old, who were hanging out at Little Cubs Field when I arrived and started taking pictures.

“Are you a tourist?” one of them asked me.

“Yes, I’m just passing through,” I said.

“They always take pictures,” another of the boys said to yet another, not me. The first boy then asked where I was from, and I simplified matters by telling him Chicago. I got the sense that he felt that was quite a distant location. A reasonable thing to think at 10.

Off they went, and I took some more pictures.

A short drive away, in Freeport’s small downtown, is its Lincoln-Douglas memorial. I couldn’t very well pass that up.

Every place they had a debate has a memorial now. This was the first of the statues to memorialize one of the events, unveiled in 1992, but hardly the last. Chicago sculptor Lily Tolpo (d. 2016) did the bronzes. Both she and her husband Carl did Lincolns.

The memorial also featured a plaque on a rock.

Not just any plaque, but one dedicated by TR in 1903. A president, I believe, who understood the gravitas of the office he held. Probably felt it in his bones. Not all of his successors have.

We were about to leave, but couldn’t help noticing an ice cream shop next door to the memorial.

The Union Dairy Farms, founded in 1914 and serving ice cream since 1934. We couldn’t pass that up, either, figuring it had to be good. Was it ever.

The Presidents Day Storm: We Called It Monday

Posted on February 16, 2021 by admin

Another Presidents Day come and gone. The aftermath of the Presidents Day Storm of 2021 still lingers, especially down South. (I’d forgotten about the Presidents Day Storm of 2003, probably because it was NE and Mid-Atlantic.)

Around here we merely had more snow pile on top of our increasingly large drifts. About 6 inches in my neck of the suburbs, but other metro Chicago places got two or even three times as much. In any case, it’s accumulating. In some parts of my yard, the snow looks at three feet deep.

Indoors, I marked the day by taping a new postcard to the wall. It depicts FDR.

“During the autumn of 1944, Roosevelt received a letter from artist Douglas Chandor, proposing that a painting be created of Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, to document the allied efforts at the Yalta Conference in Russia,” the Smithsonian says about the painting.

“Chandor arranged a sitting for Roosevelt in early April, less than a month before the president’s passing. This portrait is a study for the larger painting, The Big Three at Yalta — a sketch of which appears at the lower left. Chandor also painted a life portrait of Churchill, which is owned by the National Portrait Gallery, but Stalin would not sit for his portrait. Thus, The Big Three at Yalta was never painted.

“Chandor believed that hands revealed as much of a person’s spirit as his or her face would, and therefore experimented with multiple configurations and gestures, scattered across the bottom of the canvas. Roosevelt, however, was dismayed by the attention Chandor paid to his hands, dismissing them as ‘unremarkable’ and likening them to ‘those of a farmer.’ ”

Interesting hands, but also an idealized face. I’ve seen photographs of President Roosevelt from around that time, and there was more than a hint of death in his face. The ravages of untreated hypertension, perhaps.

Speaking of presidents, one of our most recent Star Trek episodes was the one in which Abraham Lincoln gets a spear in the back. As Capt. Kirk said, it was a little hard to watch. So was the episode, though it wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered. Just mostly. I don’t feel like looking up the title. If you know it, you know it.

One interesting detail, though. Faux-Lincoln comes to the Enterprise bridge and, among other things, has a short interaction with Uhura. He uses a certain word and apologizes, afraid that he has offended her. To which, Uhura says:

“See, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”

Of all the many optimistic things Star Trek ever expressed about the future, that has to be the most optimistic of all.

Who Knows, I Might Live to See the 50th President

Posted on January 20, 2021 by admin

Time to dip into the well of presidential significa — don’t call it trivia — for obvious reasons. Much has been made of Joe Biden’s age, for example, and he is indeed the oldest person ever to be sworn into the office, besting his immediate predecessor in that regard as well.

Also, Biden was born before four of his predecessors, as was Ronald Reagan. I recall that once upon a time, Reagan was considered an old man for the job, taking the oath as he did at 69. Time flies, the gerontocracy becomes more robust. Kennedy was born after four of his successors, to look at the other extreme.

Then again, presidents are living longer than ever, along with the general population (well, until very recently). Jimmy Carter has made it to 96, topping that long-time champion of presidential longevity, John Adams, a good while ago now. Biden was just a young pup Senator when Carter was in office.

As of today, Carter has been out of office precisely 40 years, the longest post-presidential span. Herbert Hoover is still number two at 31 years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama might make it to 40 years: to Jan. 20, 2041 for the former and Jan. 20, 2057 for the latter, but they would be very old men by those dates, 94 for Clinton and 95 for Obama.

Biden’s the first president from Delaware. That state had to wait a long time, considering that it was first state to ratify the Constitution. So far 19 states have been home to various presidents at the time of their election. Twenty-one states have been birthplaces of presidents. Florida Man has never been elected president.

Thus far, 14 presidents were born in the 18th century (ending Dec. 31, 1800, so Millard Fillmore counts), with James Buchanan as the last one; 20 were born in the 19th century, with Dwight Eisenhower the last of those; and 12 so far were born in the 20th century. According to the Constitution, that string has to continue at least until the 2036 election. Still, assuming the office continues as it has, and I certainly hope it does, the first president born in the 21st century may be out there somewhere even now.

And what was it about 1946? Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were all born that year. There have been a number of other years in which two presidents were born, but that’s the only triple year so far.

I didn’t think it very likely, and sure enough it didn’t happen, but it would have been interesting had Donald Trump resigned in the aftermath of the Capitol Hill insurrection. Just so Mike Pence could beat William Henry Harrison’s record for short time in the office. Also, so that Trump’s term wouldn’t be exactly four years. Eight years, four years, eight years, etc. That’s just not very interesting.

There have never been four presidents in a row who were in office for eight years each. Three in a row, yes. Most recently Clinton-Bush-Obama. Before that, Jefferson-Madison-Monroe. Trump’s loss means four in a row might not happen for quite a while, if ever.

I could go on and on about this. But I’ll end by adding that we’re back up to five living former presidents again, the fifth time that has happened. Because of improved longevity, four of those periods have been recent.

A friend sent me a link to this.

Seems fitting.

Debris Under the Tree

Posted on January 3, 2021 by admin

Another Christmas, come and gone. We opened presents in the morning that day, as usual.

Not as usual, we had a family Zoom in the afternoon. My brothers, and my nephews and their expanding families, Lilly, and Yuriko and Ann and I were all linked. A geographic diversity: Texas, New York, Washington state and Illinois. We had an enjoyable time, even if the connection was wonky occasionally.

Later in the day, our Christmas movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original version, of course. I hadn’t seen it in at least 30 years, but it was as good as I remember. The movie also inspired me to look up its source story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, originally published in Astounding in 1940. No doubt a copy of that edition is somewhere in the house in San Antonio, among my father’s sizable collection of SF. I’d never read the story before, so I found in on line. I did know about its unnerving, surprise ending, however. I heard about it from a college friend years ago.

Another New Year’s Day has gone as well, featuring ice precipitation on top of an inch of two or snow that had fallen a few days earlier. Not enough to rise to the level of an ice storm, but enough to keep us within our walls, occasionally listening to the tap-tap-tap of ice hitting the ground or roof, but mostly paying attention to electronic entertainment, or lost in a book or two, for me including American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham, 2009) that I put down this summer and which I’m finishing now, about half way through. Big things ahead: Old Hickory is going to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and go up against nullification, and win, along with a second term. He’s already set the Trail of Tears in motion.

Half Day Forest Preserve & Captain Daniel Wright Woods Forest Preserve

Posted on November 9, 2020 by admin

The weather over the weekend was brilliant, a cluster of warm, mostly clear days, an echo of this year’s golden summer. Today too, but it will end tomorrow evening with storms and cold air behind them.

Here in northern Illinois, summer 2020 offered mostly warm, mostly clear days that stretched into months, with just enough rain to keep the intense green of a wet spring still green as the summer wore on.

Such a fine summer, if you were lucky enough to enjoy it, came as if to soothe over the nervous energy and dread the near future emanating from the wider world, though I’m fairly sure the weather takes no interest in our concerns. Birds don’t either, but somehow they were singing just a little more cheerfully over the weekend. What’s up with that, eh?

This is how to give a presidential concession speech.

Two weekends ago, temps were cooler but not bad. Certainly high enough for a walk in a new forest preserve. New to us, and actually two adjoining forest preserves: Half Day FP and Captain Daniel Wright Woods FP.
The preserves are in Lake County. We started at the Half Day parking lot near a small lake, walked to the small lake in Captain Daniel Wright Woods, and came back the way we came.

Except for seeing a sign along the trail, we wouldn’t have known where one forest preserve began and the other ended, which was more-or-less at the Des Plaines River. First we had to cross that river.

I can’t see a name like that and not look it up later. Captain Daniel Wright, a veteran of the War of 1812, later became noted as the first white settler in Lake County.

Find-A-Gave has more. “Capt. Wright was active as a farmer and a cooper,” the site says. “He built his cabin when he was in his mid-fifties and in spite of the hardships associated with pioneer life, he lived to be ninety-five years old and is buried in the Vernon Cemetery in Half Day. A stone memorial was erected in his memory on his old farm on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue.”

Something else to look for next time I come this way.

Ottawa Sights (Not the One in Canada)

Posted on July 28, 2020 by admin

We arrived in Ottawa, Illinois, on Saturday in time for lunch. We decided on carry-out from Thai Cafe on Columbus St., which seems to be the only Thai joint in town. At a population of 18,000 or so, maybe that’s all Ottawa can support.

We took our food to Allen Park, a municipal park on the south bank of the Illinois, and found a picnic shelter. The river’s large and on a weekend in July, home to a lot of pleasure craft.
Sometimes, the river must be angry, such as on April 19, 2013. Got a lot of rain in northern Illinois about then, so I believe it.

Downstream a bit is the Ottawa Rail Bridge, which rates a page in Wikipedia. The current bridge dates from 1898, though it was modified in 1932.

Two large metal sculptures rise in the park, both by Mary Meinz Fanning. The red one is “Bending.”
The yellow one is “Reclining.”
“Fanning was the driving force behind the creation of the red and yellow steel sculptures at Allen Park by the Illinois River in Ottawa,” says a 2010 article in The Times, which seems to be a local paper.

“The 40-foot-tall sculptures, which weigh 17 tons each, were erected in 1982 and 1983 from parts of the 1933-built steel girder Hilliard Bridge that was demolished in 1982 to make way for the present-day Veterans Memorial Bridge. Fanning died of illness Nov. 4, 1995, in Ottawa at age 48.”

Just as you enter the park, you also see a wooden sculpture: one of artist Peter Toth’s “Whispering Giants,” which I’d forgotten I’d heard of till I looked him up again. The one in Allen Park is Ho-Ma-Sjah-Nah-Zhee-Ga or, more ordinarily, No. 61.

Looked familiar. I realized I’ve seen one before —
That one is Nee-Gaw-Nee-Gaw-Bow or No. 59, and we saw it by chance in Wakefield, Mich. about three years ago. Apparently the artist has put up at least one in each state.

Ottawa has a place in U.S. history mainly for two things. One that the town is happy to celebrate: the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. The other is the awful story of the Radium Girls, poisoned by luminous paint at a clock factory in Ottawa in the early 20th century. For a long time, there was no public acknowledgment of that incident. Now there is. But I didn’t know the Radium Girls have a statue in town (since 2011), so we missed that.

We didn’t miss the site of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which is in the shady, square-block Washington Park.
Lincoln and Douglas are there as part of a fountain to memorialize the event. They were cast in bronze in 2002 by Rebecca Childers Caleel.
It would have been more pleasant if the fountain were on, but maybe it was dry for public health reasons in our time. The noontime heat was oppressive, so we didn’t have a leisurely look-around the area as much as we might have otherwise. There are other memorials in the park, and plenty of historic structures nearby, forming the Washington Park Historic District.

Those buildings include the Third District Appellate Court Building (1850s), the Reddick Mansion (1850s), the Ottawa First Congregational Church (1870), Christ Episcopal Church (1871), and a Masonic Temple (1910). A few blocks away, the LaSalle County Courthouse looked interesting, too, but we only drove by.

I managed to take a close look only at the former Congregational Church building.

Gothic Revival in brick. These days, the church is part of the Open Table United Church of Christ.

Prairie du Chien: Fort Crawford Military Cemetery, Trail of Presidents &c.

Posted on July 9, 2020 by admin

Not all road trips include visits to cemeteries or presidential sites, but I’m glad when they do. Our recent visit to the Driftless Area included both. On Saturday morning, I got up a little early to put gas in the car by myself. Yuriko knows what this means: I visit a local cemetery, too, if I can. She dozed on in the room while I drove a short distance to the Fort Crawford Military Cemetery, also known as the Fort Crawford Cemetery Soldiers’ Lot.

The entrance to the cemetery is a narrow patch of land in the residential section of mainland Prairie du Chien, with the burial ground at some distance behind an iron fence. Or maybe soldiers are buried in patch of ground, but I didn’t see any indication of it.

“Fort Crawford Cemetery is located on the former site of the Fort Crawford Military Reservation in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin,” says the National Cemetery Administration, which is part of the VA.

“There were two subsequent Fort Crawfords in Prairie du Chien during the 1800s. The original Fort Crawford, built in 1816, was situated adjacent to the Mississippi River. Repeated flooding led to its abandonment in 1826. Rebuilt on higher ground in 1830, the second incarnation of Fort Crawford operated until 1856.

“The first burials here were of the members of the 1st and 5th Infantry regiments stationed at the fort. The soldiers’ lot includes eight above-ground box-tombs that were likely erected by the regiments. The United States received the title for the lot in 1866. There are approximately 64 interments in the 0.59-acre soldiers’ lot…”

It’s sparsely populated.

With some of the inscriptions practically illegible.

Others were legible, but conveyed only anonymity. This looks like a latter-day stone, dedicated to an unknown. There were a sprinkling of these in the cemetery.

As I left, I spotted this near the entrance, attached to a boulder.

Just goes to show you how thorough the Daughters were. A memorial so obscure that no one has called for its removal? Not so.

On St. Feriole Island, I happened across a presidential site of sorts: Trail of Presidents. Trees in honor of presidents, arrayed in two rows to form a path, and originally planted in 2014.
I expected a tree planted for every U.S. president, which would have been the standard approach. But in fact the trees only honor presidents who visited Prairie du Chien either in or out of office, and includes two presidents of other entities besides the United States. I was surprised.

The full and semi-literate text of the sign at Trail of Presidents is here.

The honored U.S. presidents include: Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

For instance, President Fillmore has a white oak.
His plaque explains that he passed through Prairie du Chien when he was vice president in 1849. I haven’t ever seen anything about the travels of Vice President Fillmore — and out to the spanking-new state of Wisconsin that year would have been far afield — but I assume there’s some source for this buried in Fillmore’s papers, or maybe local news accounts.

The non-U.S. presidents? One was him again. He was stationed here, after all.

Also, curiously, Vicente Fox also has a tree, a red oak. “Vicente Fox attended Campion High School in Prairie du Chien in the 1960s,” the plaque says. “He then returned to Mexico.”

The last tree has been reserved for the next president to visit, so it isn’t too late for the most recent living officeholders.

One more Prairie du Chien sight I came across was overlooking the Mississippi, but not on St. Feriole Island. Rather, a statue of Marquette stands atop a tall column near the local chamber of commerce, and also not far from the bridge connecting Prairie du Chien with the town of Marquette, Iowa.

Rev. James Marquette, S.J.
Who discovered the
Mississippi River
at
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
June 17, 1673
This monument was erected
with
The solicited contributions
of generous citizens
by
The Business Men’s Association
Of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
A.D. 1910
Fred Herber & Son Architects

Unusual to see him called “James,” which doesn’t sound very French. We’ve seen him honored elsewhere around the Great Lakes; Pere Marquette got around, back when muscle power (yours or an animal’s) was the only way to do it.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Presidents