Warren G. Harding, Favorite Son of Marion

Posted on March 27, 2023 by admin

Marion, Ohio, a burg about 36,000 residents 50 miles north of Columbus, happens to be along the route we took south from Michigan on the second day of our trip, March 18. It also happens to be the hometown of Warren G. Harding, which pretty much guaranteed a stop there by us.

After his sudden and unexpected death in office almost 100 years ago, the nation’s grief for its popular president allowed for the construction of an impressive memorial, finished in 1927 and, as Wiki points out correctly, the last of the big presidential memorials (at least so far). Donations paid for it, including pennies from schoolchildren, back when a penny could actually buy something small rather than nothing at all.

We arrived at the memorial in the afternoon. It was cold and very windy. The structure is whiter than I’d think it would be considering its 90-plus years in the elements, but I suppose the good people of Marion keep it maintained. Warren G.’s the only president they’re ever like to produce, after all.

Its marble Doric columns rise to support an entablature, but not a roof. Harding reportedly wanted to be buried under an open sky, and this was architect Henry Hornbostel and his partners’ way to honor that request.

Warren and Florence Harding are indeed buried within, and under the open sky.

A few miles away is the Harding house, built in the 1890s at the time of the Hardings’ marriage, when he was a newspaper editor and publisher and she a wealthy divorcee. The Marion Star, his paper, is still around, though it’s a Gannett asset these days.

We arrived too late to tour the house, but you can wander around the grounds. Yuriko and the dog had enough sense to stay in the car while I did this, in a wind that felt like it was going to freeze my face off.

Still, I got the satisfaction of standing on the very porch where Harding ran his front porch campaign for president beginning in the summer of 1920, briefly reviving the late 19th-century practice. He would be the last president to do so (as yet, unless you count the zoom campaigning of Joe Biden exactly a century later).

Marion will probably never have a summer, or any other season, like it again. The world came to Marion in 1920, including delegations from groups nationwide to offer their greetings to candidate Harding, and presumably many other people who showed up to hear the speeches he gave on the porch or otherwise join the festivities.

Speaking from the porch didn’t mean a lack of attention elsewhere in the country. The Harding campaign had a small house built on the grounds, which still stands, for the use of the press covering him.

Behind the main house is the Warren G. Harding Presidential Library & Museum which, as any presidential museum does, tries to put a good face on its president and administration. I will give the place credit for mentioning the various scandals the period is known for, such as Teapot Dome.

It’s also forward in acknowledging that his mistress Nan Britton had a daughter with Harding, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, who died only in 2005. As well it should, since DNA evidence in the 21st century has fingered then-Sen. Harding as the baby daddy.

As for his other known mistress, the married Carrie Fulton Phillips, the museum notes, “when she appeared at Harding’s front porch campaign, Republican party members paid for the Phillipses to take a lengthy trip abroad.”

Still, a triumphant Harding is in evidence. At least while in campaign mode. Not bad for a compromise candidate picked by the 1920 Republican National Convention.

Events could have gone another way. Leonard Wood could have been the nominee in 1920 and gone on to the presidency. Or Frank Lowden might have been tapped. Or, had TR lived a little longer (d. 1919), he might have captured the prize and returned to office (at my age, TR had been dead more than a year).

Harding might merely be an obscure senator buried in a more modest plot in Marion, rather than an increasingly obscure president in a grand tomb the likes of which is completely out of style. But that isn’t how it happened.

Historians roundly deride Harding, and I believe there’s some basis for it, but my own estimation of the man himself inched up a notch or two when I read, per the museum, that Harding and his wife were avid travelers well before they occupied the White House. That was part of the impetus for the famed long trip that he took as president in 1923, and which was interrupted by his death.

I didn’t know that Harding called it “The Voyage of Understanding.” Quite a route.

Some of the museum’s artifacts are odder than others, including this one from the Voyage.

That’s a papier-mache potato, about a yard long, that the citizens of Idaho Falls, Idaho gave to President Harding when he passed through in 1923.

That That Nation Myglue is All Together Sitting

Posted on March 9, 2023 by admin

Sometimes I use an automated transcription service. I feed it an audio recording – say, of an interview – and it spits out a transcript. The service touts the power of its AI. All the rage these days.

I found a reading of the Gettysburg Address by Orson Welles on YouTube. Obviously, it’s an analog recording with some imperfections. I recorded it as I would a phone conversation – producing a tape that isn’t high fidelity, but easily understandable for an English speaker. Then I let the transcription service have it.

Started out OK, then…

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated.
We met on a great faculty have
come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who hear, feed their lives, that that nation myglue
is all together sitting, we should do this.
In a larger sense,
we cannot dedicate,
we cannot consecrate
we cannot tell
the brave men living and
consecrated far above our power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
I can never forget
it is for us, the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which failed here.
far so nobly advanced.
It is shrouded for us to be here dedicated to the great past remaining before us.
Honored
to take increased devotion for that was
the last measure of devotion.
We hired to resolve
these debts from outside in
this nation
shall have a new freedom
government
by the people,
for the people

Still a few bugs in the system, looks like.

To be fair, when I did this test again, but with the service transcribing the speech as it “listened” to the video play, the results were much better. Not flawless, but not bad.

The Former McLean County Courthouse

Posted on January 31, 2023 by admin

Now we’re in the pit of winter. Temps last night and into the morning dipped below zero Fahrenheit for some hours and didn’t rise much higher than positive single digits afterward. As of posting time, it’s 3 degrees F. hereabouts. But at least the roads aren’t iced over, as they are in parts of the South.

As far as I’m concerned, zero Fahrenheit is the gold standard for cold, as 100 F. is for heat. Thus demonstrating the genius of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit when it came to thermometry, though I don’t disparage those other men of science, Anders Celsius or William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin or even William Rankine.

Temps (F) weren’t quite as cold when I took Ann back to Normal on Sunday, and there was no snow, so the traveling along I-55 was easy enough. Once I’d dropped her off, I took note of the fact that it was still light. So I headed to downtown Bloomington, where I’ve spent some wintertime moments, and took a look at the former McLean County Courthouse, now home to the McLean County Museum of History.

Impressive. Design credit is given to a Peoria firm, Reeves and Baillie, who were busy in their time, it seems.

This is the third – or fourth – building on the site, depending on whether you count the restoration following a major fire 1900 (the small image is post-fire). Whatever the count, the building took its current form in the first years of the 20th century, and remained an actual courthouse until 1976.

For the last 30 years or so, the museum has occupied all four floors of the place. Ann told me she and some friends went there one day earlier this semester and found it worth the visit. I would have gone in, but it’s closed on Sundays. So I had to content myself with the sights to be seen circumambulating the building.

Such as war memorials.

It took considerably longer to get around to this one.

In Illinois, Lincoln Was Here plaques are plentiful.

Looks like Lincoln is still in Bloomington. Bronze Lincoln anyway, and those are plentiful in the Land of Lincoln too. Of course they are.

By local artist Rick Harney and dedicated in 2000. That’s the bearded, presidential Lincoln, so one that never actually would have made an appearance in Bloomington, but never mind. Lincoln is Lincoln.

Fort Mackinac

Posted on August 14, 2022 by admin

In 1780, the British commander at Fort Michilimackinac, which had been a French post on the mainland south shore of the Straits of Mackinac until the British had won it in the Seven Years’ War, decided to build a more defensible fort on Mackinac Island (and perhaps, one with a shorter name). He picked a bluff overlooking the lakeshore.

“Fort Mackinac, Michigan” by Seth Eastman (1872)

The fort stands there to this day, though in somewhat different form: a tourist attraction. As a tourist, I was duly attracted.

Note the Boy Scout. Turns out in visiting Mackinac Island, we were visiting a presidential site. It’s a slightly convoluted story, but well relayed by the island’s web site.

These days, a group of Boy and Girl Scouts raises and lowers about two dozen American flags across Mackinac Island each day during the summer. They also act as guides at the fort. The fellow at the entrance wasn’t the only one we saw.

He was the only one I talked to, however. Tried to, that is. I asked him why Boy Scouts were at the fort, and perhaps a career involving public interaction isn’t in his future, because he sputtered a few unintelligible words and looked at me as if I’d tried to talk to the guards at Buckingham Palace.

So I had to learn later that the flag-raising and other duties started “in 1929 when then-Michigan Gov. Fred Green commissioned eight Eagle Scouts from around the state as honor guardsman on Mackinac Island,” the island’s web site says.

The governor’s summer residence, by the way, is on Mackinac Island, very near the fort, though the house didn’t begin that function until 1944. We walked past it on the way to the fort.

Its formal name is the Lawrence A. Young Cottage, dating from 1902. Young was a successful Chicago attorney who had it built as his summer home.

The presidential connection? In 1929, one of the charter group of scouts tapped by Gov. Green was none other than Gerald R. Ford.

The scout barracks aren’t far from the fort, either. We passed those after we left the fort.

Inside the fort.

Besides the scouts, there were a handful of somewhat older folk in costume. I told this fellow he was wearing a capital uniform.

Unlike the scout, he was talkative, and able to tell us in some detail about the uniform, though I think he was a little confused about my use of the term “capital” to mean “fine” or “excellent.” An apt term for a spiffy 19th-century uniform, if you asked me.

There are some terrific views from the fort, as a pre-modern fort would have.

The historic buildings include the post HQ, bathhouse, soldiers barracks, officers quarters, post hospital, a storehouse, guardhouse and more. The rooms were stocked with artifacts and expository signage. More modern spaces included a light-meal restaurant taking advantage of those terrific views, a gift shop and bathrooms (authentic 19th-century Army latrines wouldn’t go down well with the museum-going public, I figure).

The fort is, I’ve read, one of the few surviving more-or-less intact from the Revolution and War of 1812, when it saw action. Later, as British Canada receded as any kind of threat, Mackinac’s usefulness as a military post did as well, but it lingered as U.S. Army property until 1895.

By that time, much of Mackinac Island had been designated as Mackinac National Park. Astute NPS observers might object that no such park exists, and they’d be right. Created in 1875 as the second national park, Congress dissolved it in 1895 and turned it over to the state of Michigan, which created its first state park that same year out of the same territory, including the now-decommissioned fort.

After I saw the fort, I read the story of its U.S. commander in 1812, one Porter Hanks. Lt. Hanks surrendered the fort without a fight, as he was hopelessly outnumbered. He and his men were paroled by the British forces. Wiki, which seems to be reasonably sourced, picks up the story:

“Lieutenant Hanks made his way to Detroit and the American military post there. Upon his arrival, superiors charged him with cowardice in the surrender of Fort Mackinac. Before the court martial of Lieutenant Hanks could begin, British forces attacked Fort Detroit. A British cannonball ripped through the room where Hanks was standing, cutting him in half and killing the officer next to him as well.”

That’s one way to get out of a court martial, but surely not how Lt. Hanks would have wanted.

Natural Bridges National Monument

Posted on June 1, 2022 by admin

A question for very serious presidential history buffs: how many national monuments did President Theodore Roosevelt create? He was the first president with the authority to do so, since the passage of the Antiques Act of 1906, which was actually fairly late in TR’s time in office. Of course, he’d been instrumental in its passage.

Not a man for half measures, the president created 18, including the very first, Devils Tower in Wyoming, coming in at over 1,300 acres, as he took advantage of the fact that the law didn’t limit the size of the monuments. Some of TR’s national monument designations no longer apply, since they later became national parks, such as Petrified Forest, Lassen Peak, Mount Olympus and especially the Grand Canyon.

One by TR that retains its monument status is Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah. Created on April 16, 1908, it measures more than 7,600 acres, featuring some of the largest natural bridges in the Western Hemisphere. Natural Bridges also happens to be the first established of Utah’s many national parks and monuments, created about eight years before the National Park Service itself.

We arrived late in the afternoon of May 18.

As NPS entities go, Natural Bridges isn’t that large, and can be accessed via a ring road that passes within sight of three major natural bridges. At each, you have the choice of looking at the natural bridge from a viewpoint near the road, or following a trail closer to the feature. Each bridge also has a Hopi name.

Sipapu Bridge.

The NPS calls this a “mature” natural bridge, and it is the monument’s tallest and greatest in span. “It endures very little stream erosion because its abutments stand far from the stream,” the pamphlet says.

Kachina Bridge.

A little hard to see, but it’s the dark curve almost filled by a tree in my pic. It’s young, according to the park service, with canyon floodwaters still at work enlarging its span.

At the beginning of the trail to Owachomo Bridge.

We took a walk closer to Owachomo, about 20 minutes each way.

We encountered no snakes along the way to the bridge. I think we would have heard one before seeing it, anyway. Owachomo’s an “old” bridge, the NPS says: “The bridge may now have a fatal crack, or it may stand for centuries.”

Yep. We didn’t go quite all the way to its underside, since it was time to call it a day — an extraordinary day, as any day that includes Monument Valley and Natural Bridges and the Moki Dugway would be, but exhausting.

South Bend City Cemetery

Posted on April 28, 2022 by admin

Oddly enough, our microtrip to South Bend last weekend wasn’t much of a trip to South Bend. Our motel was in the city, near the airport, and we drove through town a few times, but mostly we were in Norte Dame — which is a town besides being a university of that name — and Mishawaka.

Still, we had a few South Bend moments.

Also, on Sunday morning, I went by myself to the South Bend City Cemetery, because of course I did. On the way I took a short look at St. Paul’s Memorial Church (Episcopal), because of course I did.

With John 12:17 over one of the doors.

The cemetery is a few blocks away. Founded in 1832, with about 14,800 permanent residents, mostly from the 19th century, though I spotted a scattering of 20th-century burials.

An aside: I read this week that Kane Tanaka, regarded as the oldest living person, died at 119. Born in 1903. Though it’s clearly been true for a while, I just realized that means that no one who lived any time at all in the 19th century is still alive. No one whose age is verifiable, anyway.

Except in the sense that we still remember, personally, people who lived at least a little while in that century, such as my grandmother. Is someone not well and truly dead until everyone who remembers him or her is too?

South Bend City Cemetery, the entrance.

The cemetery office, I assume. Handsome little structure.

Not too many large memorials or much funerary art, but well populated by a variety of weathered standing stones. As usual, I was the only living person around. Not even groundskeepers on Sunday.

As I said, the cemetery’s pretty near St. Paul’s, which is in this image.

A handful of mausoleums. No name on this one.

A boarded-up mausoleum. Not something you see much. I like to believe that the cast-iron door that probably hung there went to a scrap drive and did its tiny part to defeat Hitler. But I also suspect that it might have been stolen one night instead.

Large to the small.

The worn, broken stone of Peter Roof, the first recorded burial. Roof, I understand, was a veteran of the Revolution.

There’s a poignancy in time eating away at memorials as surely as it did those memorialized. Worn lettering, old-time symbols, dark smudges of pollution and dirt.

Rust, too. Such is the condition of the GAR stars I saw. This is the kind of cemetery that would have them. Rusty, but they endure as a faint echo of the camaraderie of men who fought and won the day for the Union.

As you’d expect, at least one Studebaker has a sizable memorial. South Bend was their town.

The memorial has lasted much longer than the company of that name.

I didn’t come looking for the car-making family. I had someone else in mind: Schuyler Colfax.

Good old Vice President Colfax of Grant’s first term, famed in — well, neither song nor story. Still, his contemporaries thought highly of him. They must have. Not only did he get the main stone, he got this.

And this — close to our time, in 1978.

Order of Rebekah? Now you know.

Leaving the cemetery, I was glad to see that it’s on Colfax Ave. It’s a more modest street than Colfax Ave. in Denver, but South Bend is a more modest town.

Mishawaka Walks

Posted on April 27, 2022 by admin

Worth noting: U.S. Grant was born 200 years ago today in Point Pleasant, Ohio. There hasn’t been a presidential birth bicentennial since Lincoln’s in early 2009, which came on the heels of Andrew Johnson’s in late 2008.

Later this year, there will be another one: Rutherford B. Hayes, born in Delaware, Ohio on October 4, 1822. One cold day in the mid-1990s, I dropped by the Hayes home museum in Fremont, Ohio, sparking an interest in presidential sites that hasn’t abated. Good old RBH. President most likely to be mistaken for Benjamin Harrison in a lineup. After his bicentennial, it won’t happen again till Chet Arthur has his day in 2029.

The St. Joseph River flows mostly westward through Michigan and into Lake Michigan, but it bends into Indiana at South Bend and its twin town, Mishawaka. Until recently I gave little thought to Mishawaka as a destination, but then I learned about its riverwalks. We arrived late in the morning on Sunday to sample one of them, the walk along the budding-verdant Kamm Island Park.

Downtown Mishawaka seemed fairly pleasant as well. It reminded me of some of the towns along the Fox River in Illinois — Aurora, say, or St. Charles, both of which hug a mid-sized river and consider it an amenity.

As well they should. Some views of Kamm Island Park.

New development has come to the area. Not sure I’d want to live there, but I’d probably get a kick out of renting one of the units for a few days.

One curiosity on Kamm Island that I didn’t think to take pictures of: the fact that small, colorful figurines and other items, plastic and ceramic, stand at the base of many of its trees. No group is the same. A planned art project or spontaneous whimsy? Homage to elves or the work of elves?

Across the river at Kamm Island is Battell Park, the city’s oldest park, which has its own trail and some features not found elsewhere, namely a rock garden built by the WPA. This is the view of the lower level of the rock structure.

After lunch, which consisted of takeout Chinese from a storefront near UI South Bend eaten at the picnic shelter of a windy park near the Potawatomi Zoo, we stopped at Battell Park for a look at the upper level of the rock garden. Water must flow through its channels some of the year, down to the river, but looks like it hasn’t started for the season quite yet. Still, it’s an impressive work.

As much as I laud the CCC — whose works I keep encountering, some stunning — I have to put in a word for the WPA and its wide legacy too. I grew up with one of its finest projects — the San Antonio Riverwalk — as well as our high school stadium, which once upon a time had a plaque denoting it as a WPA project. This is an excellent site for browsing its projects, along with the rest of the visible New Deal.

Upstream a mile or so from Battell is Merrifield Park, also in Mishawaka. That was the last place we visited in town before heading home, because we wanted to see one of the park’s smaller features, Shiojiri Garden (Shiojiri Niwa), dedicated in 1987. Small but enchanting.

“This garden was a gift to the city of Mishawaka from its sister city, Shiojiri (Nagano Prefecture, Japan),” Atlas Obscura notes. “The designer was Shoji Kanaoka, the same man who planned the Japanese gardens at the Epcot Center in Florida. It features a multitude of trees and flowers, including a grove of cherry trees. There are also two snow lanterns, four bridges, and a teahouse pavilion built in the traditional Japanese style.”

Nice. You might call it a pocket Japanese garden, and Mishawaka — and the world — are better for it.

Crossing the Bar

Posted on April 12, 2022 by admin

Warmish day, though I didn’t have a lot of time to spend out in it, other than walking the dog just before sunset. Windy but not especially cold then, but even better was the mid-day, when the sun came out and temps nearly hit 70 degrees F.

An editorial cartoon that assumed many, or at least some of its readers would know some Tennyson. Probably a reasonable assumption in 1945.

That came over the transom today in wandering around the online labyrinth. It is April 12, after all.

Small Slices of Historic Savannah

Posted on March 15, 2022 by admin

Nice day here in northern Illinois — mid-50s degrees F. by early afternoon, little wind and bright sun. I ate lunch on my deck today for the first time this year.

I haven’t read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), nor seen the movie based on the book (1997). Maybe I should, if for no other reason than we happened by the prime locus of the story during our visit to Savannah, as we passed through Monterey Square: the Mercer House, where one Jim Williams shot one Danny Hansford to death in 1981.

Quite a story. After four trials, Williams was ultimately acquitted of murder, though he didn’t live much longer after the acquittal. The story lives on, however, at least as something that still seems to attract tourists to Savannah.

“According to records from Visit Savannah, about 5,010,000 people visited Savannah in 1993, spending $587 million; in 1994, visitors increased to 5,029,000, contributing $629 million to the local economy,” the Savannah Morning News reported in 2019. “The following year, in 1995, visitor numbers jumped to 5,348,000 and spending increased to $673.4 million.”

Could be a coincidence, though the News notes another bump up in visitors after the movie came out, without citing any numbers. Besides, it’s completely believable that people show up at a place in the wake of a bestselling book or popular movie featuring the place, and the more lurid the story, and exotic the setting, the better.

We wandered by plenty of other intriguing buildings in Savannah, some on our guided tour, others by happenstance. Our guide had a knack for telling stories about Savannah history, which has its fascinations. But he wasn’t so keen on the architecture of the city, which is visibly rich and varied.

Within sight of Johnson Square is Beaux-Arts Savannah City Hall, designed by local architect Hyman Witcover and completed in 1906. We didn’t get any closer, but it was still easy to see the detail that I liked: the gold leaf dome, reportedly Dahlonega-area gold.

A building on Chippewa Square: the Philbrick-Eastman House, these days corporate headquarters for a chain of convenience stories.

“Built on one of Savannah’s original trust lots by Irish-born architect Charles B. Cluskey, the house features Doric columns, 14-foot ceilings, elaborate crown moldings and the original oak floors,” the company web site notes.

Also on Chippewa Square, 15 W. Perry St., built in 1867. You might call it an example of the garden-variety historic structures that populates so much of the historic district. Doesn’t make the must-see lists, but its like are still essential to the historic fabric of the city.

Just north of Forsyth Park on Bull St. is the Armstrong House, dating from 1919 and built for Savannah business mogul George Ferguson Armstrong. Or, as the current owner, hotelier Richard C. Kessler, is wont to call the place, the Armstrong Kessler Mansion.

“Designed by world-renowned Beaux Arts architect Henrik Wallin, the original Armstrong Mansion is the only Italian Renaissance Revival home in Savannah listed in the authoritative A Field Guide to American Houses,” the mansion’s web site says. It was restored in the 1960s by Jim Williams, he of such protracted legal problems in the 1980s, and the 2010s restoration undertaken by Kessler left it looking spiffy indeed.

In the Armstrong yard sits a copy of “Il Porcellino,” the bronze wild boar of Florence.

A remarkable number of copies exist in places as diverse as Sydney Hospital in Australia, Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, Country Club Plaza in Kansas City and a lot of other places, according to Wiki. I won’t bother to try to confirm all of them. Curiously, the page doesn’t list the one in Savannah.

Besides the Methodist church we managed to enter — just as Sunday services ended — we passed by a number of religious sites that were closed. On Bull St. is the Independent Presbyterian Church.

There’s a presidential connection. Maybe two. The original church on the site, according to the Georgia Historic Commission plaque on site, was dedicated in 1819 “with impressive services that were attended by President James Monroe.”

That church burned down late in the 19th century. The current church was completed in 1891, with the architect, William G. Preston, following “the general plan of the former structure,” the plaque notes, adding that “Ellen Louise Axson, who was born in the manse of the Independent Presbyterian Church in 1860, was married in 1885 to Woodrow Wilson… in a room in the manse.”

On Monterey Square is Congregation Mickve Israel, one of the oldest synagogues in the U.S.

The current Gothic Revival structure — unusual for a synagogue building — was designed by Henry G. Harrison and completed in 1878 (some interior shots are here).

The Jewish presence in Savannah, and indeed Georgia, started much earlier, when a group of mostly Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese extraction arrived in the brand-new colony in 1733. They had previously fled to London after finding the Iberian peninsula inhospitable (they did expect the Spanish Inquisition, it seems), and it was this group that organized the synagogue in 1735.

The first trustees of Georgia banned Jews (and Catholics) from the colony, but that had no more effect than banning rum, which they also tried to do. Gen. Oglethorpe apparently decided that he needed all the colonists he could get. The colonists apparently decided they needed all the rum they could get.

Another (tenuous) presidential connection is cited on the synagogue’s Georgia Historic Commission plaque:

“In 1789, the Congregation received a letter from President George Washington which stated in part: ‘May the same wonder-working Deity who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in the promised land — whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation — still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.’ ”

Man, presidents don’t write letters like that anymore.

We wandered by the Cathedral of St. John of Baptist twice, but found it closed each time. That’s too bad, since I understand the interior is striking, as depicted in this breathless description.

Religious émigrés founded this congregation as well, in this case those fleeing revolutions in France and Haiti in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The current building dates from the 1870s, when Ephraim Francis Baldwin designed the church in a High Victorian Gothic style. His was an interesting practice: he specialized in churches, but also railroad stations. There was growing demand for both back then, after all.

“The Church of St. John the Baptist became a cathedral in 1850 when the Diocese of Savannah was established with the Right Reverend Francis X. Gartland as its first bishop,” its Georgia Historic Commission plaque says. “The Cathedral was dedicated at this site on April 30, 1876. A fire in 1898 destroyed much of the structure. It was quickly rebuilt and opened again in 1900. Another major restoration took place in 2000.”

February Presidents

Posted on February 21, 2022 by admin

Almost forgot about “Presidents Day,” as AP recommends it be styled (no apostrophe). It’s fairly forgettable, especially when it’s an ordinary work day. As I’ve mentioned before, there isn’t any agreement among the several states about exactly what’s being celebrated, or what it should be called, though federal law specifies Washington’s Birthday.

Not such a bad thing, I believe. It’s Washington we’re honoring, not Kim Il-sung. Lockstep not required.

Those U.S. presidents born in February include not only Washington (22nd, N.S., 11th, O.S.) and Lincoln (12th) but also Ronald Reagan (6th) and famed short-timer William Henry Harrison (9th).

Of course, Washington and Lincoln get most of the attention. Often in the same image. This series dates from 1865. For obvious reasons.

Not an array that you see much any more in popular images of these presidents. The Victorians had different sensibilities, after all. The second one at least is an albumen print after a painting by Stephen James Ferris (1835-1915), a Philadelphia engraver, etcher, illustrator and portraitist.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: presidents