New Harmony, Indiana, Part 1

Posted on October 28, 2020 by admin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the walls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opera House.

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

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

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

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

Two Southern Illinois Towns: Cave-in-Rock, Equality

Posted on October 27, 2020 by admin

The USPS uses the hyphens in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois. I saw the post office in the town and I documented the usage. Other signs around town were about evenly split on using hyphens.

After we visited the state park of the same name, I took a walk around town, mostly along a short stretch of Main Street, while Ann lounged around in the car.

The town’s actual main street seems to be Canal Street, but Main — which parallels the Ohio River — features the post office and Cave in Rock United Methodist Church, which doesn’t bother with the hyphens. Actually, according to the sign out front, the church doesn’t bother with “Cave in Rock” at all.

Rose’s Kountry Kitchen. Not too busy, but it was Sunday afternoon.

The River Front Opry House. Not sure if anything goes on there anymore.

Some pleasant-looking houses.

Also, art bicycles at various points near the street.
A small group of residents, acting informally, installed the bikes, reports KFVS-12. Civic-minded folks, from the look of it.

Something else about Cave-in-Rock: From 2007 to 2013, the annual Gathering of the Juggalos happened at nearby Hogrock Campgrounds. See SNL for a parody of an infomercial advertising the Gatherings of that period. Also, see a report by the FBI on the Juggalos. I have no idea whether it’s accurate, or whether the G-men had a burr up their butts for no solid reason.

Picture that, a town of 300 people inundated by 10,000 Juggalos. Guess they figured that Juggalo money spends too, despite the risk of damage to the town. Not the only hint of Insane Clown Posse I’ve run across this year.

Between Harrisburg and Shawneetown is the village of Equality, Illinois, pop. about 500. We drove down its main street, W. Lane St., then turned onto N. Calhoun St. Near the intersection of those streets, a restaurant called the Red Onion looked almost pre-pandemic busy.

Not far along Calhoun, I saw a place I wanted to stop.

The Equality water tower rises over the former site of the Gallatin County courthouse. The town was county seat for a while in the 19th century, but eventually lost that distinction. The building, later used as a school, burned down in 1894.

Under the tower is a sizable but timeworn memorial.

It honors Michael Kelly Lawler, born in County Kildare, Ireland, but who came to Gallatin County, Illinois, as a boy. A veteran of the war with Mexico, Lawler spent the Civil War in the western theater, most notably as a brigadier general leading Union troops during the Vicksburg campaign.

The state of Illinois erected the memorial in 1913, a good many years after the Gallatin County hometown general in blue had died. A plaque on the memorial lists E.M. Knoblaugh as the sculpture.

A simple Google search uncovers little about him, except the fact from the 1915 edition of Report of the Auditor of Public Accounts that the state of Illinois paid him $688.02 for service as a sculptor, and $4,210 to erect the monument, or $4,898.02 all together. In current dollars, more than $128,000, so he presumably did well in the deal.

Besides that, whoever he was, he did a fine job, especially on the relief, a lifelike visage that looks like it might have been restored sometime recently.

Cave-in-Rock State Park

Posted on October 26, 2020 by admin

Snow this morning. It didn’t stick, but it did remind us all of the cold months to come.

At the beginning of 2020, works published in 1924 finally entered public domain in the U.S. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain noted some of the better known works now available to all.

“These works include George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ silent films by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and books such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.”

Plenty of obscure works are now available as well. One I have in mind is The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock by Otto A. Rothert, published in 1924. Rothert (1871-1954) was secretary of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, and apparently took a strong interest in regional history

The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock can now be found in Google Books. I haven’t read it all, but I have sampled some of it. Such as the first few paragraphs.

“This book is intended to give the authentic story of the famous Cave-in-Rock of the lower Ohio River… and to present verified accounts of the most notorious of those highwaymen and river pirates who in the early days of the middle West and South filled the Mississippi basin with alarm and terror of their crimes and exploits.

“All the criminals herein treated made their headquarters at one time or another in this famous cavern. It became a natural, safe hiding-place for the pirates who preyed on the flatboat traffic before the days of steamboats….

“A century ago and more, its rock-ribbed walls echoed the drunken hilarity of villains and witnessed the death struggles of many a vanished man. Today this former haunt of criminals is as quiet as a tomb. Nothing is left in the Cave to indicate the outrages that were committed there in the olden days.”

The book also tells the tale, in four chapters, of the exceptionally murderous Harpe brothers (or cousins), a bloody story deftly summarized by the late Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene some years ago. Enough to note here that the Harpes and their women roamed western Tennessee and Kentucky around the beginning of 19th century, murdering and robbing as they went, but especially murdering.

They spent some time among the blackguards at Cave-in-Rock, but were forced to leave after they threw a man bound to a horse to his (and the horse’s) death off the cliff’s edge above the cave for fun. Even river pirates have their standards.

In our time, and in fact since 1929, the cave has been the central feature of Cave-in-Rock State Park. Not quiet as a tomb, quiet as a minor tourist attraction. It isn’t part of Shawnee National Forest, but some of the national forest lands are nearby. Note the sign isn’t a stickler for hyphens.

The park is near the small town of Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, which is walkable distance to the south from the park. We arrived at the park on the afternoon of October 11.

You park in a small lot and climb 50 or so steps uphill, to a crest overlooking the Ohio River, sporting picnic shelters and tall trees. Views from the crest, looking across to Kentucky.

From the crest, you go down more stairs most of the way to the river’s edge. The cave entrance is under a high cliff and a few feet higher than a small beach on the river.
Looking back up at some trees lording over the edge of the cliff.

A few more steps and you’re in front of Cave-in-Rock. It’s an apt name.

Soon you’re inside, looking out.

It doesn’t go too far back, at least not that I know of. Graffiti, mostly painted signatures, is prominent on the roof of the cave.

J. & B.C. Cole were here in 1913, pre-park and probably dangling from a rope over the cliff edge. The more recent Marty and R.S. were here in 2011, and probably had rappelling gear.

Old Shawneetown

Posted on October 21, 2020 by admin

If you drive east from Carbondale along Illinois 13, you’ll pass through a number of towns connected by that four-lane highway: Cartersville, Marion and finally Harrisburg, after which the road narrows to two lanes. That was our route on the afternoon of October 10.

There’s a branch of 17th Street Barbecue in Marion, with the original in Murphysboro, Illinois. It’s a barbecue joint of some local renown. I can’t remember when I first heard about it. Some Internet list, probably, but anyway I knew about it and decided to get lunch there in Marion.

Meals on the road in 2020 have involved takeout in all cases, either to eat in the car, or our room, or when possible at an outdoor public picnic table. We found a table in a small park in Marion to eat our 17th Street ‘cue.

We both got barbecue pork sandwiches. The meat was fine, but whoever made the sandwiches shorted us on the sauce, so the meal was a little dry. I’d be willing to try the place again if ever I’m down that way, but I’m going to insist on sauce.

The eastern terminus of Illinois 13 is Old Shawneetown on the banks of the Ohio River. Too close to the river, and thus prone to flooding. The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937 finally drove most of the residents away to found a new Shawneetown a few miles to the west. But Old Shawneetown isn’t a ghost town in our time, since 160 or so people live there, just the residuum of a larger place.

The town’s main intersection.
The original Shawneetown had its moment, a little more than 200 years ago, when it was home to a federal government land office for the Illinois Territory, and as a transshipment point for salt extracted nearby. During the famed 1825 tour of the U.S. by Gen. Lafayette, Shawneetown was on his itinerary, surely marking the town’s peak of fame if not population.

Peaked too soon, looks like. No railroad passed through Shawneetown in the following decades, at least by the time this map was published in 1855. That tells me that Shawneetown never really prospered after the land office and salt mine closed.

I’ve known about the place for a long time. I knew girl in college from around Shawneetown, a coaxing elf of full Irish ancestry who grew up on a nearby popcorn farm. Gallatin County even now is a nexus of popcorn agriculture. Last I heard, she lived in Ankara with her French husband. People get around.

The main surviving building from the town’s storied past is the Shawneetown Bank State Historic Site, dating from 1840. Home to banks for about 100 years — they seem to have come and gone with various financial panics — it stands neglected these days.

It’s not the only abandoned structure in the neighborhood. A white Texaco station is catercorner across from the bank. If it were on U.S. 66, it might be a little museum. Maybe someone has that in mind. Though abandoned, the structure looks in fairly good shape, especially the sign.

There are a few plaques and other acknowledgments of the town’s history. Such as cutouts of Lewis & Clark, who passed this way just before there was a town.

I like to think that the Corps of Discovery made a stop here at the only gas station along their route.

As Lewis wrote in his journal, Nov. 6, 1803: Arrived at Swanee Txco Station. Pay’d owner 2 dollards for provisions, — Cheetos, other divers chips, Coke & Pepsi, choco bars etc. Men also bought provis. for own use Mr Wm. Jones store mger, reports recent visit by Indian band from furth. north. — buying his entr. stock of funyuns.

Down the street from the abandoned bank and the abandoned gas station is Hogdaddy’s Saloon, an abandoned entertainment venue, though not so long ago, from the looks of it.
What Old Shawneetown needs (in more normal times) is a music festival right there on the main street. If Bonnaroo can, so can Shawneetown. Something for the hipsters to discover, to put the town on the hipster map and attract hipster dollars. As long as they believe the place is authentic somehow, they will come. That way a place like Hogdaddy’s could make a go of it.

An embankment separates the town from the river, part of a levee system built long ago to keep out flood waters — in vain. The always interesting WPA Guide to Illinois (1939) tells the story better than any online source I’ve found (p. 436). For that book, the ’37 flood was a recent event.

“The town bore the yearly invasions of the Ohio unprotected until the unusually severe flood of 1884, after which it constructed a comprehensive levee system,” the Guide notes. “But in 1898, and again in 1913, Shawneetown was under water. In 1932, the levee was raised five feet above the 1913 high-water mark….

“But Shawneetown had not envisioned anything like the 1937 flood. By January 24 of that year, menacing yellow waters were slipping silently past the town, only inches from the levee top… Small groups of people huddled on street corners, terrified, waiting; the telephone service ceased; hemmed in by the ever-swelling Ohio, Shawneewtown flashed a desperate cry for help over an amateur’s short-wave radio.

“Responding to the call, a river packet and several motorboats evacuated the townspeople just as the waters began to trickle over the levee. A roaring crashing avalanche soon inundated the cuplike townsite…

“The 1937 flood marked the end of Shawneetown’s ‘pertinacious adhesion’ to the riverbank. Gone were the packets and keelboats which induced her to hazard annual submersion. Gone was the steady traffic of settlers, goods and singing rivermen. With the aid of the State, the RFC, and the WPA, a project is under way for transplanting the town to the hills 4 miles back from the river… The State plans to establish a State park at the present site of Shawneetown.”

Guess the state never quite got around to that, maybe because not everyone wanted to leave.

A stairway leads to the embankment’s top, which offers a view of the Ohio. Looking upriver.

And downriver, looking at the bridge that crosses over to Kentucky.

On the side of the embankment is a graffito. Any graffiti would be a little odd in such a town, but this would be odd anywhere.

Left by a passing bailiff with a can of spray paint?

Shawnee National Forest ’20

Posted on October 18, 2020 by admin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blazes of fall color rise in places.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dolce Far Niente and All That

Posted on October 1, 2020 by admin

Here’s an interesting list of words, if accurate, or even if not, and I suspect that’s the case for some of them (but I can’t know). Dolce far niente is a worthwhile concept: pleasant idleness, or the joy of doing nothing.

Such lists now appear periodically on line, and I believe they hark back to a pre-Internet book called They Have a Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases by Howard Rheingold (1988).

I have a copy of it around somewhere, bought fairly new. I don’t remember any of the words in it, except the concept of a ponte day. “Bridge” day in Italian, meaning a day off between the weekend and a holiday, an especially useful concept in that country since Italy doesn’t have a version of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, and holidays can fall mid-week.

I also remember the author appearing on the radio show Whad’ya Know? Maybe in 1989. I didn’t listen to it every week in those days, but fairly often. I understand that it ran as a radio show until 2016, and now exists as a podcast.

Just before Christmas 1989, I went to a broadcast of the show when it was in Chicago, at the Blackstone Theatre (these days, the Merle Reskin Theatre). Remarkably, I can listen to it again if I want. So far, I haven’t.

Today I was near the Robert O. Atcher Municipal Center, not far from where we were yesterday. Atcher, besides being mayor of Schaumburg from 1959 to 1975, was a successful country musician.

The trees are just beginning to turn.

Close to the Atcher Center are flowers. We’re in the narrow window when the trees are coloring up, yet some flowers are still blooming.
While on the grounds, I noticed a memorial I’d never noticed before. According to various news reports, it’s been there some years — how did I miss it? A plaque for a Schaumburg resident, René LeBeau, who died awfully young.
I must have heard about the crash of United 232 when it happened, but I had to read about it to remember. Quite a harrowing story. It’s a wonder anyone survived.

Thursday Postscripts

Posted on September 24, 2020 by admin

Beverly Shores, Indiana, pop. 600 or so, is completely surrounded by Indiana Dunes NP. One way to get to the town, or the national park for that matter, is to take the South Shore Line from Chicago. If you do so, the place to get off is at Beverly Shores station.
Since its renovation in recent years, the station also includes an art galley. Closed when we got there.
When I’m pretty sure no train is nearby, it’s hard to resist a shot of the rails converging off toward the horizon. The rails go on forever in a silver trail to the setting sun.

Arthur Gerber designed the station in 1929. “Gerber was the staff architect for Samuel Insull, who then owned the line, [and] it is one of several examples of an ‘Insull Spanish’ style used on the rail line,” writes historic preservationist Susie Trexler.

Insull must have been fond of the style. “Say, Gerber, old man, whip up some more Spanish-style stations.”

After all, look at his mansion, which is generally classified as Mediterranean.
Better known as the Cuneo Mansion, for its second owner, but utility magnate Insull had it built. Above are shots I took when we visited. When was that? I couldn’t remember till I checked. Ten years ago.

The fellow interred in the Beyond the Vines columbarium at Bohemian National Cemetery is Benjamin George Maldonado, 34, who died unexpectedly of an undiscovered brain cyst, according to a column in the Tribune by John Kass.

“The priest gave a great eulogy of Ben,” Kass quoted Maldonado’s widow as saying. “His urn had a baseball on top. We all signed the baseball that went into the wall. There were sandwiches and sodas, and we had a picnic. He was so young. A headstone would have been so somber.”

The man who created the columbarium, whom Kass also quotes, was Dennis Mascari. He’s interred there now as well.

My brother Jay is skeptical that the parade pictures posted on Sunday were taken in September 1967, he told me by email. Two reasons: yellow foliage and people wearing a little more than they would on a very warm Texas September day.

As Jay points out, mid-September is far too early for changing leaves. But I color corrected the images. In the original, faded now for more than half a century, it’s hard to tell whether the leaves are green or yellow.

In the color corrected version, some of the leaves look green, some yellow. I don’t know whether that reflects the original color of the leaves, or the color-correction process itself. So I’d say the leaf colors are inconclusive.

The clothes are a more compelling argument. The kid on the top of the station wagon is indeed wearing more than any kid would in high 80s temps, and so is the woman on the flatbed, and maybe the men leaning against that vehicle, who seem to be wearing long-sleeve shirts or jackets. Of course, the members of the band would wear their uniforms no matter how hot it was. I remember some sweaty times in my own band uniform, about 10 years later.

“When is it then?” Jay writes. “I don’t know. I know that the Denton HS band was one of many high school bands that participated in the NTSU homecoming — which sources online say was November 11, 1967 — but: (1) I have no recollection of a parade, only of marching in formation on the playing field, and (2) if there was a parade, it seems odd that it’s heading away from NTSU rather than towards it, as it appears to be the case here. Of course, the fact that I don’t remember a parade isn’t dispositive, nor is the direction.”

Ah, well. Guess we’ll never know for sure. The lesson here is to write the date on the back of physical prints. But even that is an increasingly obsolete bit of advice.

Here’s Nathan Myrick, founder of La Crosse, Wisconsin, whose for-certain public domain image I obtained. Founding a town is more than most people get to do.

It occurs to me that I’ve now visited all of the 15 largest municipalities in Wisconsin, and maybe the 20 largest, though I don’t remember visiting New Berlin, but as a Milwaukee suburb, it’s likely that I passed through.

Is that important for some reason? No. But for a state in which I’ve never lived, I’ve been there a lot. As an old Chicago friend of mine once said, one of the amenities of living in the Chicago area is access to Wisconsin. I agree.

The Century of Progress Architectural District

Posted on September 23, 2020 by admin

Tucked away on a small road paralleling Kemil Beach on Lake Michigan is the Century of Progress Architectural District, which includes five houses originally built for the world’s fair in Chicago in 1933. The houses were moved by barge across the lake after the fair, and are now part of Indiana Dunes National Park.

More about that shortly. First, the view from Kemil Beach, which is nearly as far south as you can go and still be on the edge of Lake Michigan. The day we visited was clear and sunny, but not hot — more of a moderate September warmth.
If you look carefully at the horizon at that place, the enormous buildings of the Chicago skyline are visible, but look as insubstantial as grey chalk marks on a watercolor.
Not far from the houses is access to the beach itself.

Not many people were out and about, even though it’s part of a national park. Then again, the beach was windswept, bringing in large breakers.
That sounded like this.

Perched right over the shore is the pink Florida Tropical House, designed by Miami architect Robert Law Weed to promote Florida living to fairgoers. Come be Florida Men and Women, that is.

Also perched over the shore is the Wieboldt-Rostone House, which showcased a building material called Rostone (limestone, shale and alkali). Design by Indiana architect Walter Scholer.

On the hill above the road are the three other houses dating from the world’s fair. One, the Cypress Log Cabin, was meant to showcase that building material, and hugs the ground so closely that it was a little hard to see from the road.

Another hillside structure, the Armco-Ferro House, was “an ode to the virtues of porcelain enamel and steel — expressed in the form of a prefabricated home,” the sign at the bottom of the hill told me.Finally, the House of Tomorrow, which is currently wrapped for renovation. Design by Chicago architect George Frederick Keck.

All in all, an interesting little neighborhood. That’s a fitting term, since people actually live in the houses, except for the House of Tomorrow, and someone will live there when the work is done. Signs asked visitors to respect the privacy of the occupants. Tours of the interior are given only once a year, I’ve read, though I expect that isn’t going to happen this year.

In a remarkably imaginative move on the part of a government agency — the Park Service, which owns the properties — the houses are leased for 30 years at no charge, provided the lessees agree to restore and maintain the properties in that period.

Bohemian National Cemetery

Posted on September 21, 2020 by admin

Back in 2004, I met Bob the crematorium operator by chance, and he showed me part of the facility he ran. The interior of this building.That’s the crematorium and columbarium at Bohemian National Cemetery on the Northwest Side of Chicago, one of the resplendent cemeteries in the city. Bob wasn’t around when I returned for a visit on Sunday, September 13, and the building was closed.

As usual even at a beautiful cemetery, few other living people were around. But it was sunny and warm, and I had a good look.

Since the last time I visited, something unique (probably) in any cemetery has been added: Beyond the Vines.

“The 24-foot-long brick monument offering peace to the ashes of Cubs fans is called ‘Beyond the Vines.’ It sits in perpetual sunshine at Bohemian National Cemetery,” reported the Chicago Tribune in 2009, when the cemetery erected the structure.
The front was was in shadow when I saw it.
Still, the purpose of the columbarium is clear.
There are still spaces for anyone who cares for one. This marker for this fellow, name partly obscured, tells a sad story of early death but also the endless optimism of a Cubs fan.
Bohemian National, founded in the late 19th century by the Czech immigrant community in Chicago, has a wide selection of funerary art.

A pharmacist’s stone? Looks like a mortar and pestle.

Civil War and World War(s) veterans are honored with memorials, as you’d expect, but the place also spares a thought for veterans of the war with Spain, erected in 1926. The plaque is in English and Czech.
Deep in the cemetery is Anton Cermak’s mausoleum, but I didn’t see it. A memorial I did see is to the victims of the Eastland disaster.
“The site was chosen because the cemetery on Chicago’s Northwest Side holds the largest number of victims from the disaster — 134,” the Trib says, reporting on the dedication of the memorial in 2015, for the 100th anniversary of the disaster.

Sparta, Wisconsin

Posted on September 15, 2020 by admin

After leaving La Crosse on September 6, we spent time driving some picturesque Driftless Area roads, but soon we were feeling the pull of lunch. That is, we wanted to find a place to eat. We arrived in Sparta, Wisconsin, and started looking around. Doing it the old fashioned way — not with a search engine or an electronic map, but by keeping our eyes peeled as we drove.

Sometimes you get lucky. Right in the middle of town, on W. Wisconsin St., we found Ruby’s. We stopped right away.

Ruby’s has a most traditional drive-in menu, with one exception.
Between the three of us, we ate a satisfying drive-in lunch: a chili cheese & onion dog, a grilled cheese sandwich, onion rings, cheese curds (this is Wisconsin, after all) and the unusual item: a walnut burger.

As the menu explains, it’s “seasoned walnut & cheese patty with lettuce, tomato, pickle & honey mustard on a whole wheat kaiser bun.” I had a bite. It was tasty. The menu also notes “the Historic Trempealeau Hotel” above the Walnut Burger description, presumably as its provenance. Naturally, I looked it up. The boutique hotel, dating from the late 19th century, is still around, on the Mississippi upriver some distance from La Crosse in a burg called Trempealeau.

Rudy’s also sports a fiberglass statue. A bear on roller skates.
Unlike Gambrinus, I suspect the bear is holding a mug of root beer. Rudy’s has a special section for that on the menu, including a root beer float, but not beer.

While we ate, I noticed another statue, much larger — or at least taller — than the bear. It was across the street catercorner from Ruby’s, in a park.

Of course I had to go see that, after we ate. The Sparta Downtown River Trail runs through the park.
At this point, a footbridge crosses the small La Crosse River, which eventually empties into the Mississippi in the city of that name.
On the other side of the bridge is the statue I saw from across the street.

It has a name: Ben Bikin’. Sparta, pop. just shy of 10,000, is the self-proclaimed Bicycling Capital of America. A nice local distinction. I imagined that Sparta might have been a bicycle manufacturing town at one time, maybe as long ago as the bicycle craze of the ’90s that popularized the modern bike. The 1890s, that is.

But no. “Sparta’s claim as the ‘Bicycling Capital of America’ is based upon the first rail bed in Wisconsin to be converted to bike trails between Sparta and Elroy,” says the city’s web site. That trail was completed in 1967, so fanciful penny-farthing statues aside, the town sobriquet isn’t that old.

In fact, I don’t remember seeing any more bicycles in Sparta, or dedicated bike lanes, than in any other small town. That is to say, not many. There is, however, a bicycle museum in town.

More than that: the Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bicycle Museum. I knew it was closed, but we drove by before leaving town anyway.
Slayton, the only Mercury astronaut who never flew in a Mercury capsule, grew up on a farm near Sparta. So he’s the town’s other attenuated claim to fame. The thinking must have been, best to combine the two into one (slightly) larger museum. Well, why not?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History