Wednesday, July 31, 2019

A Pair of Missouri Museums (Days 4-5)

Kitchen wares recovered from the Arabia.

While in Kansas City, we saw a pair of museums that I think one can find only in Missouri.

Our first morning there, we went to the Steamship Arabia museum. The museum centers around the contents of a steamship that sank in 1856. Its contents were remarkably well preserved under the silt of the Missouri River and recovered in an excavation in the late 1980s. The steamship was travelling up the river with provisions for more than a dozen general stores in various frontier communities. So what was uncovered is a vast collection of housewares and tools indicative of mid-nineteenth-century life.

Trash or treasure. You can decide that for yourself. For me the answer is pretty obvious.







What was perhaps strangest about the museum was that it is a for-profit institution run by the families who found the boat back in the 1980s. This lends it a rather odd feel. At times the aesthetic is like that of the touristy businesses that inhabit Gettysburg. Yet at the same time, I sensed that the history is pretty legitimate. A historian and researcher employed by the museum guided us around and it was obvious to me that she wasn't on a script. She fielded questions with a trademark midwestern twang (I loved the folksism she shared about the Missouri river (too thick to drink, too thin to plow). The artifacts were artfully displayed. And the museum was candid that they relied on visitors like us to pay their admission and spread the good word.

The items, by the way, were quite ordinary. Lots of boots. Lots of tools. Lots of dinnerware, most of it fairly plain. It was a time capsule of ordinary home goods from 170 years ago.

Plain but abundant goods. Casualties of a disaster on the river. Retrieved by modern-day fortune seekers. A tale that seems like Missouri to its core.



A second museum that made me think much about this state was the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, something Sam and I took in together late on Tuesday. The first formal organization of the Negro Leagues took place in Kansas City. And throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Negro League teams from the city were among the best in that circuit of baseball.

I learned a lot there with Sam. The fragmentary and evolutionary nature of the leagues. The pride with which the community looks at its stars. The aspects of the sport which were, sadly, exploitative (the Negro Leagues' teams never played in a venue owned by black business owners and the rents they sometimes had to pay were steep).

So what did this have to do with Missouri or Kansas City? I love that just a few blocks away one can still drive by the Colored Y.M.C.A. building where the first league came into existence. There's a mockup of a baseball field there. Kansas City was also the city where players could most often find decent lodgings, and where a second-generation owner of the Monarchs did some rather remarkable deeds to keep alive the sport in the depths of the depression.

I was sad I couldn't take photos inside the museum. One of the most memorable exhibits in it was what they call the field of legends. It's a small-scale baseball diamond. At each position there is a bronze statue of one who may have been the greatest to play the game. Standing next to life-sized statues of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, set against a green outfield fence with retro advertisements invites some goosebumps.

And then driving by it on the way home and having a catch with your kid is an exhilarating one.





Cahokia (St. Louis Day 3)

St. Louis from atop Monk's Mound at Cahokia.

Sam and I play quite a bit of one the older version of Sid Meier's Civilization on the computer at home. It's no wonder the theme from that game franchise, "Baba Yetu," was on my mind so much as we visited our last site in the St. Louis area, Cahokia.

Sherry and the kids at Monk's Mound. 

Sam atop Monk's Mound. 

Cahokia is the location of an ancient Native American city. Before it's collapse sometime around 1300 or 1400, it boasted a population that may have been as great as 30,000. According to our guide, it wasn't until 1800 that another city north of Mexico had a population that large.

Not much remains of the city. None of the structures. However, several prominent mounds remain. These mounds had been either flat-topped hills the were platforms for important buildings or round-topped mounds used for burial. A few peaked-roof mounds were also there. The state of Illinois has made it a State Park and has an interpretive center there.

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Cahokia in Civ IV

Certainly this is a site right down Sherry's alley. It's also a wonderful place to explore with my Civilization sidekick. This goes beyond the cute fact that if one plays as the Native Americans in that game the capital is named Cahokia. The site shows what geography made possible: the city was situated on bottom land, or a flood plain, where agriculture was feasible for a civilization before 1000. The tale of these people also show the limits of what geography could provide. The mounds there are earthen: stones and rocks weren't sufficiently abundant to build structures that were more permanent. The site is also a great testament to how extensively people and goods could move in the centuries before Columbus.

A recreated village at Cahokia.

The interpretive center there was well done though a little dated. Displays did a very good job explaining what made the metropolis important and connected the emergence of a city there to a sophisticated sense of culture. One display, in particular, intrigued me with an explanation of what nutritional content different early crops provided. The museum's neatest exhibit was a sample reconstruction of a village.

The park there also makes it possible to climb the most prominent mound, called Monk's Mount. Sherry, the kids, and I had a chance to go up there.

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Our visit to this site marked the end of our time in the St. Louis area. We were there about an hour more than we intended (what else is new) but then had time to make our way to Kansas City that afternoon.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Vacation Days 2-3: St. Louis

The old federal courthouse in St. Louis. It's a building framed by the arch. It's also where the court case that eventually became Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error v. Sanford was first heard. 
Driving to St. Louis consumed our whole first day of vacation. It was the first of four long travel days we have planned. Another comes Thursday when we trek from Omaha to Rapid City. The third will be from Medora to Willmar. The final one is the odyssey home. In the Odyssey.

Ugh. What a dry way to start out a post. Let's talk about what we did with the day and a half we did have in St. Louis.

The Wainright Building in the downtown. First skyscraper west of the Mississippi.
The new federal courthouse. The kids were struck by its unusual design. 

St. Louis is a neat town. Different from others I've been to. I'll be candid, the downtown seems to be a little bit in limbo. The Rams' decision to move from the city means that a particular corner of the downtown is missing a significant tenant. Also, there's a good number of government buildings clustered down there, which means on non-work hours there's not a lot going on.

But the city is about more than the downtown. And "downtown" is a bit more undefined than it is in, say, Philly or Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the better example (it and St. Louis are similar in size). We drove to other parts of the city Saturday afternoon and found some really neat neighborhoods. I guess what I'm saying is that the things to see in the city aren't as centralized as I had expected.

Busch Stadium as seen from the observation deck in the arch. 
Caroline and Sherry look out an observation deck window.
In the tram heading up. 

Sam and Caroline await the arrival of the tram, car two. In some ways it felt like we were in a science fiction film.

Our first priority was seeing the Arch which is part of a National Park Service site memorializing westward expansion. Our morning at the Gateway Arch National Park exceeded my expectations. There's a museum at the foot of the arch that does a rather comprehensive job setting westward expansion into it's context. It's a new museum and the interpretation is top notch, the exhibits fairly interactive.

The arch itself is a fantastic structure to visit. A tram made up of claustrophobic five-person pods whisks you up the 600-some feet to the observation deck. I'll admit that I felt a bit of panic as we got into the pod for what was advertised as a four-minute ride. However, the door to our pod was glass and it actually helped me to see staircases, wires, and other artifacts of construction go by the window. The view from the top was superb.

The Park Service also makes it a point to do some interpretation about the Dred Scott case at that site. Of course I enjoyed that, seeing the complexities of that case, getting some perspective and context on why the suit happened and worked its way through the courts in the way that it did. I don't know how much Sherry and the kids enjoyed that, though.

The Cathedral Basilica.

The interior, looking toward the rosette window above the vestibule.

After lunch we ventured out to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, a surprisingly wondrous church. The outside featured a Romanesque style but the interior was very Byzantine in appearance. It made me think of a distinct feature of architecture in St. Louis: a lot of fancy tile work. Buildings just seem to feature a bit more ornamentation than I've seen elsewhere. I wonder if this speaks to a certain immigrant tradition: the city was perhaps a magnet for craftsmen who plied that field.

I think this was what they called the Biblical Garden in the temperate zone. 

Stumbling upon a vintage base ball game at a park and taking a stroll through a botanical garden rounded out our day. I don't know how this happened, but our kids love botanical gardens. Strange, huh.

Our nighttime activity saw us go to a site many told us we had to do, the City Museum. It's an old factory that has been converted into a menagerie of mazes, tunnels, and challenges. Supposedly all of it comes from recycled or repurposed materials. It's a popular attraction and a lot of folks were there. We might have erred in going in the evening, for we didn't have as much energy to crawl, squirm, and otherwise struggle in an impossible environs as we should.

The one exhibit deemed too unsafe to be open. 

We crawled through that one plane. Terrifying.

And now I seem to be waning in the energy to write more about our St. Louis adventure. So I'll close for now. There's more to talk about though, for Sunday morning we visited something pretty neat before leaving the city.

In radio, that's called a tease. See you soon. 

Saturday, July 27, 2019

Vacation Day 1: The First Travel Day



Well, that worked better than I had expected. Our vacation began with a day of driving. We left Lansdale at about 5:15 am and arrived out here around 7:30 local time. We were on the road about 15 and a half hours.
We arrived too late to get good lighting at the Arch.

Both breakfast and lunch were consumed while we rolled along. Sherry had them both packed up. A dinner stop in Effingham, IL provided a good meal and a break from the car. 

The kids after finishing their meal.

Sherry's pulled pork looked fantastic. 
For as much as a 13-hour drive can fly by, it flew by and I was pleasantly surprised at some of the tricks we used to make the time pass.

Sherry and the kids are working through a Rick Riordan novel on CD. While she drove they would play the novel through the stereo. 

I learned a lot from this wave of readings.

One of the best tricks for passing time on a road trip that I've seen in a long time. Thanks, Christopher.

I worked through many partially read issues of The Economist dating back to the beginning of the calendar year. A friend on my recent Europe trip brought a cache of New Yorker magazines he hadn't been able to get to so I decided to do the same with the two magazines to which I subscribe. I felt like I learned a lot on my ride (and now feel very happy to dispose of seven issues at a Missouri rest stop). 

Sam imported a game called word sneak from Jimmy Fallon's show, which helped pass some time as we traveled through Indiana and Illinois. 

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A rest stop in Ohio commemorates the National Road. 
I liked Ohio's way of welcoming and saying goodbye. 


There were a few ways in which the ride was refreshing and not just tiring. First, there was room in the car. We are allowing space for Joe to join us in Rapid City (Caroline's friend Marvin the sloth is using his seat in the meanwhile). The van does not feel like it's bursting at the seams as if often did when the kids were younger. The scenery wasn't dramatic, but pleasant. And the nature of the trip allowed us to keep the GPS away for the most part. We glanced at it occasionally (and that helped us avoid an ugly traffic jam in Indianapolis). But most of the day the directions were a simple as "70 West" and a GPS would've simply made it feel less like a vacation. 

Sherry navigates through downtown Indianapolis. 

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Anniversary Trip

Awaiting our house tour of the Hermitage mansion. 

In anticipation of our twentieth anniversary, Sherry and I took a long weekend to explore the Nashville area. We visited quite a few historical spots. Here are some indicative photos from each.

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The dining room at the Hermitage.
Andrew Jackson's Hermitage is the fourteenth presidential home Sherry and I have visited. It's also one of the best ones that we've seen. I put it up there with the two Roosevelt homes. Other visitors were there, which made it seem more lively, but it wasn't crowded in the way Mount Vernon and Monticello can be. The interpretation of the site was particularly good. They were honest. They addressed challenging aspects of his past. And they had great material. Andrew Jackson is a great, complicated story. There's personal drama. There's political drama.

Oh, and please notice how similar the general's paint scheme is to our own dining room.



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Nashville's Parthenon.
Not too much to say about this spot. It's a mock up of the actual Parthenon, erected as a temporary structure for Nashville's late nineteenth-century exposition. Made permanent. Now part of the Nashville urban park landscape.

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Me with the General Lee.

Is a trip to Cooter's Garage history or culture. Commerce, really. Cooter's garage is more of a memorabilia shop than it is a museum. But there is a General Lee there. And Daisy's "Dixie." And a police cruiser. And a museum of pop culture artifacts including several toys that Matt and I once had.

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Near the visitor's center.
National Park sites are among our favorite things to see. Mammoth Cave was a ninety-minute drive form the hotel. We got there just in time for the extended historical tour. The Mammoth Cave complex is far more extensive than I realized. Our guide did a great job making the cave come alive with stories. A lot of folks were at Mammoth Cave, just as there were a lot of folks in Nashville, but they were obviously from a different demographic. We were wise to have reserved our tour spot ahead of time. This site, by the way, has been on my to-do list for some time. It didn't disappoint.

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A former jail in Franklin, KY.
We had some time to wander Franklin, KY before a bourbon distillery tour. There's a historic jail there that we begged our way in to look at. It's hard to believe that at one time this prison held thirty-one inmates.

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First Methodist Church, Franklin, KY.
Strange spot on a history post, right? Sherry and I visited the Johnny Cash Museum on Nashville. I had some misgivings that it was a tourist spot rather than a museum, and perhaps it was, but I actually learned a lot about the artist. And I appreciated having an hour or so to get immersed in his life and work. The next day we stumbled on this marker in Franklin. Franklin lies right on the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. Its location made it a destination for many when the laws of the two states diverged. Weddings in the twentieth century. Duels in the nineteenth. I don't know what the twenty-first will hold for the border.


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Near the head of Natchez Trace. 
A failed attempt to eat dinner at Loveless Diner made it possible to see this gem. Natchez Trace is a parkway that winds for more than 400 miles through the deep south. It's something I hope to drive someday from stem to stern. That will have to wait a few years, though. One particular view in the first ten miles, though, was particularly gorgeous. About a mile beyond the sign you see above, there is an elegant double-arched bridge. Getting down off the parkway to see the bridge is wonderful. But the view from atop the bridge, looking up and down a green Tennessee Valley, is even finer.