The Georgia State Capitol

Posted on November 8, 2022 by admin

It’s been a good year for visiting U.S. capitols. Four all together: Utah, Nevada, California and most recently, Georgia. I believe that makes about 40 exteriors over the years, about 30 of which I’ve ventured inside, and not counting two provincial parliaments in Canada. Not sure about a few of those, because memory is an uncertain thing.

The Georgia State Capitol is in the thick of downtown. It has an impressive dome.

The painted copper statue that looks so small from the ground is known as Miss Freedom, dating from 1889, only a year after the capitol was completed. It’s about 26 feet tall, weighs over 1600 lbs. and is wearing a Phrygian cap, a detail one has to read about to know.

Fittingly, gold leaf from near Dahlonega, Georgia, adorns the dome. One of these days, I need to visit that place, to take in the historic mint. I’d toyed with the idea this time, but stuck around Atlanta instead during the day or so after the conference. The capitol was the first place I went when I had some free time.

The legislature isn’t in session now, and besides, a capitol is an office building — and a lot of people don’t work as much as they used to in offices. So the place was practically deserted. I wandered around the quiet marble halls, a design by Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham of Chicago, no less.

The rotunda. Plain, but still worth a look.

The chambers. Closed, but with nice big windows to peer through.

The capitol also has a museum aspect to it, as many capitols do. Including something I’d never seen before in any capitol. Or anywhere that I can remember. A two-headed calf.

The unfortunate beast was born in Palmetto, Georgia in 1987, a nearby sign said. Other curiosities were on display at the capitol, too, but none quite so curious.

Or maybe this is.

It took me moment to realize it was Jimmy Carter, as governor. That isn’t quite the face the nation outside Georgia got to know in the late ’70s. Also, it’s odd that there’s no mention that Gov. Carter went on to, you know, some other office. Even the California capitol acknowledged that Ronald Reagan was more than governor for a spell.

Besides Jimmy, there’s a decided mix of other historic personages on display, some too famous to need naming. A chronological posting:

Interesting, but I was more delighted to find Button Gwinnett. Not only has this been a year for visiting capitols, but for Button sites too.

“Brief but brilliant was the career of Button Gwinnett, Revolutionary Patriot,” the bust says, emphasis on brief.

Guess I need to visit the Button Gwinnett House someday, to really be a complete Button tourist. Or was it really his house?

Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, Sacramento

Posted on November 2, 2022 by admin

Urban churches are often locked when no service is imminent, but on the other hand, sometimes a side or rear door is open, while the main doors won’t budge. That was the case at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento.

A fuller view. The nicely written Wiki entry is worth quoting a bit:

“Among the first of thousands to seek his fortune in the Sacramento region during the California Gold Rush, Patrick Manogue had aspirations that differed from many of his fellow fortune seekers. His goal was to earn enough money to finance a trip to Paris, where he planned to enroll in seminary college and become a Roman Catholic priest.”

So he did, eventually becoming Sacramento’s first Catholic bishop in 1886.

“Inspired by churches he’d seen in European plazas, Manogue worked to secure property just one block away from the State Capitol, with a dream of building a cathedral in Sacramento. Manogue modeled the cathedral after L’Eglise de la Sainte-Trinite (The Church of the Holy Trinity) in Paris.”

The building, design attributed to Bryan J. Klinch, a San Francisco architect of Irish birth, was dedicated in 1889.

“Traditionally, cathedrals are built with the main altar on the east end, to reflect ‘Jesus coming like the rising sun in the east,’ ” the cathedral web site says. “While the exterior of the cathedral is Italian Renaissance, the interior was fashioned after the Victorian style of the day. Much of the decor was painted in a style called trompe l’oeil….”

Above the altar hangs a 13-foot crucifix with a crown overhead that is 14 feet in diameter, with a combined weight of almost a ton. They are held up by aircraft cables.

Side chapel art.

A little detail.

Gets right to the point, doesn’t it?

The California State Capitol

Posted on October 31, 2022 by admin

Halloween looked the part this afternoon: cool and misty, almost clammy. By dark, 22 kids had come by. Twenty-two in ’22. We gave away full-sized candy bars.

This isn’t the California State Capitol.

Such is the zeitgeist that someone, somewhere could claim that it is, and that nefarious persons — lizard people, even — are up to no good inside, and it would have some chance of being believed, at least by a fraction of the population.

I won’t be that person. That’s the Golden 1 Center. It happens to be in Sacramento too, and I happened to see it. I will say that it has some interesting detail.

Design by AECOM and Mark Dziewulski Architect, the arena was completed only in 2016 and is home of the Sacramento Kings, a team originally formed 99 years ago as the Rochester Seagrams. The development of Golden 1 Center was a “long-running and convoluted… drama,” according to the Sacramento Bee.

Anyway, this is the state capitol of California. It has interesting detail of its own.

San Francisco architect Reuben S. Clark, clearly inspired by the U.S. Capitol, designed the building, which was constructed between 1861 and ’74. Sacramento had been state capital since 1854, apparently picked as a midway point between where the action was in early U.S. California, namely the Sierra Nevada gold fields to the east and the port of San Francisco to the west.

The building is currently undergoing renovation. The park behind the capitol, which takes up many whole city blocks, was entirely closed off by a temporary wall (ah, that’s where the lizard people are scheming).

Too bad. I hear it’s quite a park. But Lilly and I could get into the capitol itself, via a temporary covered walkway through a construction site, and through metal detectors.

If there’s a rotunda, the thing to do is look up at it.

State capitols tend to feature portraits of governors, and California is no different. Some are more recognizable than others, though I imagine even Arnold’s fame will fade over the coming decades.

On the other hand, Minerva isn’t likely to fade from her fame among classicists, eccentrics and a few schoolchildren.

Minerva and not Athena because the signs with this depiction of state seal (mounted in the capitol) called her Minerva, and besides, Athena has been associated with another place for thousands of years.

A few other details about the seal. The bear is a California grizzly which, despite being important to California symbolism, was hunted to extinction. There are 31 stars, the state being the 31st to join the union. A miner toils for gold, and ships connect California to the rest of the world in the early days.

Why Minerva? She was born fully an adult from Jupiter’s brow. As for California, it was born fully a state, skipping territorial status.

Donner Memorial State Park

Posted on October 26, 2022 by admin

Crossing the Sierra Nevada near the Donner Pass is fairly easy in our time, if you have a motorized vehicle, as I did earlier this month when I drove from Reno back to Sacramento. I-80 takes you right across.

Unless, of course, traffic is heavy enough to come to a standstill. Then you might have time to take pictures.

Still, you’ll face nothing like the impediments that the Donner Party encountered in the winter of 1846-1847. Their story is well known; accounts of desperate days and cannibalism have a way of piquing people’s interest.

The Donner Party’s agony is, in fact, much better known than (say) the journey of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, led by mountain man Caleb Greenwood, who in 1844 were the first successful wagon train to cross the pass. They didn’t have an easy time of it, but they made it.

I didn’t know about Donner Memorial State Park till I visited this part of the country, since I’d forgotten exactly where the Donner Party had encountered their ordeal. But when I saw the state park on the map, as well as everything else named for the Donners, I realized that it was here.

The park is just off I-80 not far west of the California-Nevada line. I resolved to go take a look.

As a memorial park, I expected a memorial. This one isn’t far from the entrance.

One of its plaques notes that the height of the memorial’s plinth is 22 feet — which was the depth of the snow that trapped the wagon train.

That isn’t the only plaque in the park honoring the Donner Party. Along one of the park trails is another plaque listing all of the members. Those on the left two columns died that winter. Those on the right two columns survived.

Both memorials are the work of the Native Sons of the Golden West, installed even before the state park was established in 1928.

At nearly 3,300 acres, the park is much more than the memorials. I took advantage of some of the trails, passing through nice scenery.

Though not nearly as sizable as Lake Tahoe, Donner Lake is a fine alpine lake in its own right. Only a few people were around.

It was really pleasant at Donner Lake that day, October 4, clear and in the mid-70s Fahrenheit. Hard to image a late October day when the area was buried by snow, but they say the luckless Donner Party encountered an early snow that year. Then again, I just checked, and the evening temps in nearby Truckee are already dropping below freezing every day.

Carson City & The Nevada State Capitol

Posted on October 23, 2022 by admin

When visiting a place like Carson City, Nevada, you wonder how many other places are named after Kit Carson. That’s the kind of fleeting question that occurs to me, anyway, and sometimes I remember to look it up later.

I like the conciseness of Britannica on the matter, though it’s short on facts: “Carson’s name is preserved variously throughout the Southwest, including Nevada’s capital at Carson City; Fort Carson, Colorado; and Carson Pass in California.”

The National Park Service has naught to say about the mountain man’s naming legacy, so of course the place to go is Wikipedia. All easily checked facts, grouped in one place.

“Carson National Forest in New Mexico was named for him, as well as a county and a town in Colorado. A river and valley in Nevada are named for Carson as well as the state’s capital, Carson City. The Carson Plain in southwest Arizona was named for him.

“Kit Carson Peak, Colorado in the Sangre de Cristo range, Kit Carson Mesa in Colfax County, New Mexico, and Carson Pass in Alpine county, California, were named for him.

“Fort Carson, Colorado, an army post near Colorado Springs, was named after him during World War II by the popular vote of the men training there… Innumerable streets, businesses, and lesser geographical features were given his name.”

Apparently, so was Kit Carson Park in Taos, NM, and a recent move to change it was defeated for interesting reasons.

In Carson City, you can see the bronze Kit. He passed this way in the early 1840s, when he was guiding John C. Fremont.

The inscription: 1843-44, Kit Carson by Buckeye Blake, Commissioned by Truett and Eula Loftin. The Loftins, former casino owners in Carson City, donated the work to the state in 1989.

The statue is on the grounds of the Nevada state capitol, along with an unusual plaque imparting geographic information about Carson’s visits to the future state of Nevada.

Nearby is a man without any national fame, Abraham Curry.

His nickname locally is the “Father of Carson City.” Kit might have passed this way, but Curry stayed. Among many other things, he gave the state the 10 acres on which the capitol stands.

The capitol is a handsome structure, and wouldn’t look out of place as a county courthouse back east. If it were behind scaffolding.

The landscaping is unusual for a capitol, which tend to be clear of trees. Not so for Nevada.

Designed by Joseph Gosling of San Francisco, who is known for a scattering of works. The capitol, completed in 1871, wasn’t always surrounded by trees, such as about 150 years ago.

Inside, no metal detectors, though there is a uniformed officer at the desk. There’s also a bronze of Sara Winnemucca Hopkins.

There are a few of the design elements you see in U.S. capitols, but on the whole the capitol is restrained.

One space is given over to museum exhibits.

Featuring a number of artifacts you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

This is Guy Shipler (1913-96), once dean of the capitol press corps. Good to see a journalist honored.

The capitol is on N. Carson St. I took a stroll down that street and a couple of connecting streets. A number of state buildings cluster around Carson St. These days, this building houses the Nevada Department of Tourism.

Dating from 1891 as a federal edifice, it has variously been home to the Carson City Post Office, Land Office, Weather Bureau and U.S. District Court.

A few other Carson City buildings pleasing to the eye.

The Nevada State Museum includes this building, the former Carson City Mint. It was closed for Monday.

It’s important (to me) to list the coin types made there from 1870 to ’93. In silver: Seated Liberty dimes, 20-cent pieces, Seated Liberty quarters, half dollars, and dollars, Trade dollars and Morgan dollars. In gold: Half Eagles, Eagles and Double Eagles.

The National Automobile Museum

Posted on October 20, 2022 by admin

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.

An 1899 Winton.

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.

Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park

Posted on October 17, 2022 by admin

Drive east from Sacramento on U.S. 50, and you will find yourself in Placerville, California. In its early mining days, the town had a different name that the current, more tourist-oriented town doesn’t shy away from.

Due process was for fancy-pants Eastern lawyers, it seems. Still, when it all happened more than a century and a half ago, mob justice adds to the colorful history of a place.

NDGW and NSGW? Native Daughters and Sons of the Golden West, respectively. Sibling organizations known for memorializing and plaque-placing in the Golden State. This wouldn’t be the last time I encountered their work. Members need to be born in California, and have included such notables as Richard Nixon and Earl Warren over the years.

Whatever its history of frontier justice, Placerville offers a pleasant stroll in an upper-middle tourist street in our time. I spent a few glad minutes in the labyrinth of books. How could I pass that up?

Go further east from Placerville, and you’ll find Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

The park occupies much of the town of Coloma, California. By the time I got there, just before noon on October 2, the air was dry, sky clear, and temps nearly hot. The terrain reminded me a good deal of the Texas Hill Country: scrubby and brown and hilly, but appealing all the same.

The park includes a reconstruction of the sawmill where James Marshall saw those golden flecks in the winter of 1848. The structure, anyway, since I don’t think including a 19th-century industrial saw (steam powered by this time?) was in the reconstruction budget.

There’s a stone-wall memorial on the actual site of the mill, not far away on the handsome American River.

I was surprised to learn that the river is only about 30 miles long, but enough to provide Sacramento with most of its drinking water, assuming enough snowmelt every spring.

James Marshall has a memorial in Coloma, but you have to climb a hill to reach it. Or drive a short, winding road that happens to be a very short California state highway.

The work of the NSGW again. In fact, the first memorial the org ever erected, in 1890, when the memories of Forty-Nine were still living memories for many. Marshall wasn’t among them. The honor was posthumous for him, and he reposes underneath the structure.

Still, nice view he’s got of the rolling and formerly gold-laden territory.

Not quite as far up the hill are a number of historic structures and an old cemetery. One is St. John’s, a Catholic church that held services until about 100 years ago, but where you can still get married.

John Marshall’s cabin.

Even more interesting, I thought, was a more-or-less intact mining ditch, countless of miles of which were dug in the effort to tease yellow metal from the indifferent earth. Later, many were (or still are) used for irrigation. I don’t think this one is; it’s just a gash in the earth.

The hillside cemetery.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, gold-bearing earth to gold-bearing earth.

St. John’s Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

Posted on September 28, 2022 by admin

What do we think of when we think of Milwaukee, the result of years of history but also modern lore, only a part of which involves anything as consciously planned as advertising? Beer.

Found on a wall at a food court at the former Pabst Brewery complex.

What do I think of? Beer, yes, but also the astonishing number of large churches for such a mid-sized city. Every time I go there now, I see at least one I hadn’t seen before, inside and out.

Such as St. John’s Lutheran Church, which has been a congregation since 1848. A year of mass movement of Germans out of Germany, for sure, though I imagine most of the original congregants were Germans already in Milwaukee. It was the last place in town that we saw as part of this year’s Doors Open event, arriving in the mid-afternoon on Sunday.

The current church building dates from 1890, a design by Herman Schnetzky and Eugene Liebert, two German architects who came to Milwaukee in the late 19th century.

Inside, a curious feature: lights running along the ceiling arches, added in the early 20th century. Over 800 bulbs, I read. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a church. Adds more than a touch of luminosity to the place.

The altar, hand-carved in Germany long ago.

Four prophets from the Old Testament: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.

Those were the west transept windows. The east windows featured Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

An organist was practicing on the church’s sizable organ, a 2,500-pipe instrument. He had a nice touch.

The pastor was also around — a young man, maybe no more than 30, and not long out of seminary. Had a nice chat with him about the church and a bit about the various Lutheran groups, which I can never quite keep track of. A synod here and a synod there. He seemed like a personable fellow, which you really ought to be if you go into that line of work.

The Brewery District, Milwaukee

Posted on September 27, 2022 by admin

Our visit to Milwaukee on Sunday took us, in the mid-afternoon, to what it now is known as the Brewery District. Once upon a time — for a long time — Pabst was brewed there.

The sign hangs between some handsome buildings. On one side, the cream city brick Malt House, originally developed in 1882 and former one of the world’s largest brewery-owned malt houses, according to the district’s web site (who else would own a malt house?). Now it’s apartments.

On the other side, the Brewhouse Inn & Suites, a hotel that was once the brew house for the Pabst operations.

“The Pabst Brewery closed in 1996 leaving a seven-block area of downtown Milwaukee vacant,” the site says. “For over a decade, historic structures deteriorated until real estate developer and philanthropist Joseph J. Zilber purchased the site in August 2006.

“The results include seven apartment developments, three office buildings, two hotel properties, two breweries, restaurants, banquet halls and two public parks. In addition, the Brewery District is home to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health and No Studios, an incubator for the growing film industry in Milwaukee.”

Not that much of the district was open on Sunday. The spot participating in the Doors Open event was Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery, a retail complex formed from some of the old brewery buildings.

“Great care has been taken to ensure that Blue Ribbon Hall, The Great Hall, Captain’s Corner, Captain’s Courtyard, Guest Center, King’s Courtyard, and the original Gift Shop have all been restored to their original glory,” the separate Best Place web site says.

Enter one courtyard and there’s good old King Gambrinus.

Not actually that old, since it’s a 1967 reproduction, in aluminum, of an older wooden statue that had fallen apart.

In a separate courtyard, Frederick Pabst.

Died 1901. I saw his grave last year and his mansion some years before that. He was a beer baron among beer barons.

Farmers’ Market Near an Abandoned Shoreline

Posted on September 20, 2022 by admin

Still warm and sunny here, though punctuated by thunderstorms. I don’t think I saw them forecast — one Sunday evening, another this evening. They rolled through quickly, and didn’t even interfere with evening dog-walking.

On Saturday, I noticed this plaque in Lincoln Park. I didn’t remember seeing it before.

It’s in a good location. The ridge is very much visible from that spot.

Clark Street is to the right, beyond the edge of my image. At that point it’s the western edge of the park, but mostly it’s a non-grid North Side street, one I knew pretty well in my city-dwelling days. It was near my first apartment, and sometimes I took the No. 22 Clark Street bus places (occasionally all the way from downtown, but the El was faster).

In Chicago, non-grid usually means the street follows an Indian trace, and so it is with Clark, at least north of Chicago Ave. Other one-time Indian traces coursing through the North Side include Lincoln, Elston and Milwaukee Aves. The South Side has them, too, such as Ogden and Archer Aves.

In the Loop, Clark is park of the grid, and has been there a long time. Wonder how many people realize that it’s named for George Rogers Clark, whose sizable monument is pretty far away from Chicago?

Not far from Clark on the western edge of Lincoln Park, I happened across Green City Market, a large farmer’s market, in progress. It’s held on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the warmer parts of the year. It was busy.

Lots of tents.

Some wonderful-looking produce.

I don’t begrudge the farmers their direct-to-consumer sales, but the emphasis on “organic” and “pasture raised” and — I saw this — “regenerative agriculture” — got to be a little much. At least I didn’t see anything advertised as “curated.” It can’t be as simple as “fresh produce,” can it?

But that didn’t bother me too much. I enjoyed the band.

The tip in their bucket was the only money I spent in the park that day.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History