Avenue A, Turners Falls, Massachusetts

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What’s this?

The first thing I saw on Avenue A in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, in mid-April was this sign. A small reminder of a bloody incident in a bloody war, all but forgotten – and I mean the incident and the war – outside of regional historians and eccentrics like me and, unsurprisingly, the descendants of the Algonquian tribes who were on the receiving end of a surprise attack by men under the command of Capt. William Turner in 1676 during King Philip’s War. Most of the Indians slain, mainly Nipmuc, were non-combatants, as neither side tended to make that distinction in that vicious war. Turner’s attack did not, however, go unanswered in real time: as he and his men were pulling back, they were beset by counterattacking warriors, who managed to turn the retreat into a rout, killing Turner, among many others.

All that I looked up later. In the moment I took a stroll on down the avenue, which is the main street of Turners Falls, an unincorporated village in the town of Montague. So it’s actually a neighborhood? Peculiar nomenclature, these New Englanders have, since I think of a village as a village and a town as a town, and one doesn’t get to be in the other.

According to the sign on the town office (above), the other villages in Montague are Millers Falls, Lake Pleasant, Montague Center and Montague City. So – Montague City is within the town of Montague? Massachusetts is just a little strange with its names, but never mind.

As a main street, Avenue A is lined with some handsome older buildings.

Good to see a small bookshop.

Other nearby retail includes Ed’s Barber Shop, the Country Creemee (ice cream), Ce Ce’s Chinese Restaurant, Kharma Salon, Booska’s Flooring, Waterway Arts, Mystic Pinball and the Upper Bend Cafe. Not exactly a day-trip retail selection, but elements of it are there.

Commercial artwork.

A relic of a commercial establishment long gone. About 100 years ago, A&P operated about 15,000 locations, including presumably one in Turners Falls.

Which only goes to show that retail empires rise and fall as surely as political empires, and are as little remembered as most of them. Keep that in mind next time you’re in a Walmart.

Public art: “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (2017). by Tim de Christopher, who used local red sandstone for the rock and Indiana limestone for the paper mill and barber shop — paper and scissors — representing the town’s industrial and social history. (The barber shop is on the right, the mill in the middle, and the rock on the left.)

A geometric mural.

An elaborate graffiti-style mural.

Or maybe actual graffiti. Details.

And a fire hydrant.

As peculiar as the local nomenclature. A metal udder.

Turners Falls Canal

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I can’t say I hadn’t been warned.

FirstLight describes itself as a “clean power producer, developer, and energy storage company.” Such as from legacy dams of the Connecticut River watershed, though some of those are coming down.

Luckily, the nearby waters didn’t make any sudden moves in the vicinity of my person that afternoon. I was near the Connecticut River at a place called Turners Falls (no apostrophe), Massachusetts. The sign is posted on a man-made island, in fact, created by a canal paralleling the river – Turners Falls Canal.

I’d crossed the Connecticut via a bridge, and the canal too, and parked on Avenue A in Turners Falls near the Great Falls Discovery Center, which is housed in restored mill buildings on the south edge of the canal.

Great Falls Discovery Center, owned by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, includes open habitat exhibits, fish tanks, and dinosaur fossils, and is generally geared to small fry. It does have a nice, if underutilized, exhibit space in one of the restored buildings.

I understand that “Great Falls” is an earlier name of the falls, now the site of a dam, and that a fellow named Turner led an attack on a native settlement on the river 350 years ago, leading to the renaming of the falls – more about all that later. A path from the center leads to the canal.

A rusty foot bridge across the canal.

Looks a little dodgy, especially when the flow is strong, as it was that day in the wake of heavy spring rain the day before.

But not dodgy enough to keep me from crossing to take in the views of the canal from the footbridge.

Turners Falls Canal, Mass.

The island, while accessible at that point, is desolate.

But it does offer a view of the dam and its associated fish ladder. A powerful flow that day.

Also visible: the bridge across the Connecticut that I’d driven a little while before, the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge, completed in 1938 and renovated in the 2010s. Gill is the town on the other side.

I crossed back and took a stroll down the footpath along the canal: the Canalside Rail Trail.

An earlier canal – dug early in the 19th century, just as the U.S. canal boom was getting underway – provided passage via locks around Turners Falls, and a boon to trade in the area. Railroads made that canal obsolete by the mid-19th century, so when the river was dammed, a different canal, a “power canal,” was created to provide water power for factories (the first canal, I believe, was submerged, but I’m not quite sure). Anyway, those factories are closed in our time, but their husks linger.

Waiting for the time when the area’s population is growing again — perhaps during a reverse migration from the too sunny South in the next mid-century — and these sturdy structures can be remade into residential properties.

French King Bridge

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In my experience, a bridge with a name is usually worth a look. So it was with the French King Bridge, which crosses the Connecticut River in Franklin County, Massachusetts. There was even a wide place in the road (Route 2) to park, so that accessing the pedestrian experience was easy.

Just to judge by the walkway, a middling pedestrian experience. There are worse, especially bridges with high traffic volumes, but also many more walkable ones.

Then there’s the view from French King. That’s worth the stop and then some.

Looking upstream, or generally north. The Connecticut rises in New Hampshire very near the Canadian border and reaches Long Island Sound near Old Lyme, Connecticut. People have been living in the Connecticut River Valley for at least 6,000 years.

French King is an arch (see image from below here), like the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, only a lot smaller and not nearly as high. But high enough: seems that MassDOT recently installed the cage-like bar structure at each edge of the walkways across the bridge because of people’s occasional but unfortunate habit of pitching themselves into the river, almost always fatally.

I know suicide ideation is a worrisome thing for those plagued with it, and I’m glad I’m not. But I believe most of us have anti-suicide ideations, as in, jumping off a bridge is not the way I would do myself in. Of course, I’ve ruled out all the other common methods as well.

Engineers at the time of the bridge’s construction thought highly of the design.

One thing leads to another online, and pretty soon I was leafing through web pages at the American Institute of Steel Construction. Such as this page – Featured Projects – by the National Steel Bridge Alliance, showcasing some cool-looking steel bridges: Lake Bridges over Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley; Lake Champlain (Crown Point) Bridge; Homestead Grays Bridge (Pittsburgh); Hope Memorial (Lorain-Carnegie) Bridge (Cleveland).

Bridge builders.

McClintic-Marshall was just warming up with the French King Bridge. Not long after, the company won a contract for the superstructure of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“The McClintic-Marshall Co., a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel Corp., bid $10,494,000 for the contract to build the steel superstructure,” notes the Pottstown Historic Society. “Of course, because McClintic-Marshall was located in Pottstown, the outcome of this bid was of enormous importance for the entire area… On Jan. 12, 1933, anxiety gave way to joy as The Pottstown Mercury announced “M’CLINTIC’S BIG CONTRACT TO BE SIGNED TODAY.”

Finally, the name. French King after a nearby large rock in the middle of the river of that name. Before the river was dammed, it rose prominently out of the water. That naming is vaguely attributed to passing Frenchmen but more seems like one of those go figure origins common enough in place names. Maps wouldn’t be quite as interesting without them.

Leominster, Massachusetts

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The highway Massachusetts 2 – locally called Route 2 – traverses the northern reaches of the commonwealth, from the Boston Common to the border with New York more than 140 miles away, or vice versa. I went west, fortunately not starting in Boston itself, but still slightly inside Route 128.

Once you leave the thickest of metro Boston headed westward, the route becomes more casually picturesque, mildly winding through mildly hilly territory, providing access to Massachusetts towns more and less pleasant, depending I suppose on the vagaries of their economic history. Not an epic drive of the kind you encounter high in some mountains or across wide bodies of water, but a satisfying one all the same.

Eventually you come to the western part of the state, as mountainous as it gets, and the road acquires appropriate twists and vistas. My favorite moment on the road was when I first drove it in 1989. I took one of those twists, and saw a suddenly appearing sign that said Entering Florida. Of course someone has posted a picture.

Florida, Massachusetts, that is, a town (pop. 671) in the Berkshires.

That was another drive. In April I traveled on Route 2 as far west as Shelburne Falls, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First I stopped at a rest stop on the way that reminds us that Johnny Appleseed hailed from these parts.

Indeed, John Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts before the Revolution, though he came to fame in the wild-and-woolly Northwest Territory (and its spanking-new states) and now reposes in Fort Wayne, Indiana under some apple trees.

I was inspired to stop in Leominster (pop. 43,800). First stop, St. Cecelia’s Church, whose construction began in 1931 and which was restored in 1983.

Good to see a church of that name; reminds me of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a favorite part of Rome for me (40+ years ago), though the Massachusetts church itself is rather different.

Some fine stained glass, designed in Spain, created in New Jersey.

Leominster has the sort of long economic arc (for America) one finds in the Northeast: agriculture to manufacturing to services, though those first two economic activities are to some degree ongoing even now. The town is prosperous enough to support well-kept and still-used downtown buildings.

I liked the handsome former train station, now retail.

Another church.

Not as vaulting as the Catholic church down the road, but still a handsome brick structure. I had to look into it: this church is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal association in the U.S.

Manufacturing in the case of Leominster meant a remarkable specialty in the 19th century and into the 20th: combs. Even more remarkable, a history of American comb making, published in 1925, is posted online, namely Comb Making in America, “An Account of the Origin and Development of the Industry for which Leominster has Become Famous to which are added Pictures of Many of the Early Comb Makers and Views of the Old Time Comb Shops.”

That publication date puts it in the public domain. Ah, there’s another setting for a streaming service limited series costume drama — among the cutthroat world of comb making in 19th-century Leominster. I don’t know that “cutthroat” is accurate at all, but who cares. Maybe two brothers fighting for control of their dying father’s comb empire, and their love for the same upper-class woman (who is anachronistically feisty), amid a backdrop of bitter labor agitation, with two labor leaders pushing for unionization, and their love for the same woman (a different woman, that is, one of the comb makers, but also feisty.). See, that wasn’t hard at all. Who needs AI to come up with ridiculous ideas?

The Forward of Comb Making in America calls Leominster the “present seat” of the industry in America: “The industry has changed this thriving town, which is about fifteen miles from Worchester and forty-five miles from Boston, from a small agricultural hamlet into an industrial center of more than twenty thousand people whose products are known throughout the world.”

In the early days, of course, making combs from animal horn and the like was a labor-intensive effort. A more modern industry arose with the invention of celluloid. Later came more sophisticated plastics and molding tech, and the expansion of the industry into other molded items. Such as Foster Grants and Tupperware, both of which originated in Leominster. A simple Google search reveals that there is still a plastics industry in Leominster.

I didn’t spend a lot of time in Leominster, so maybe I missed it. But where’s the giant comb or Foster Grant or Tupperware container in a prominent public place? Leominster officials and private boosters, get on it. Or at least invite the Wall Dogs to town to whip up some local history murals.

Mount Auburn Cemetery: The Stones

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The main gate of Mount Auburn Cemetery, an Egyptian Revival structure, was behind a temporary fence the day I dropped by. That’s only reasonable, as an object that needs periodic renovation.

I took a paper souvenir from the cemetery, one that’s given away: a detailed map and guide. An exceptionally detailed map and guide, I should add, including not only the vehicular roads that twist around the grounds (something like the roads in greater Boston), but all of the many, many footpaths, all of which seem to have names. Also noted are special features, including chapels, ponds, named knolls, the sites of 62 notable people buried on the grounds, plus the sites more than 20 notable memorials or works of funerary art. It’s more than anyone could take in during a short visit, or even a lot of longer visits.

That’s never deterred me. I parked near the entrance and set out, picking up the map at the visitors center and spending a moment at Story Chapel.

The chapel is named for Joseph Story (d. 1845), associate justice of the Supreme Court, colleague of John Marshall and, in as much as I know about the subject (not much), a titan of early U.S. jurisprudence. He was also first president of Mount Auburn and, when his time came, he was buried there, though that was among the many memorials I didn’t happen to see.

So many memorials. Some more conventional, but no less beautiful or impressive for it.

Some less conventional. Any grand cemetery needs a component of the unusual or odd.

A number of mausoleums, though perhaps not as many as you’ll see at Green-Wood or Woodlawn in the Bronx.

More modest stones.

Men who died for the Union.

A good many couples.

Mount Auburn Cemetery

A sad story, one of many.

Maybe a sad story. A little enigmatic, anyway.

Looking at the map’s list of famous permanent residents, one thinks: “Right, I know him. And him. And him. And her. There’s another person I’ve heard of. And another. And I think I know that one – I do…”

On it goes. A short selection of those I didn’t have to look up: Louis Agassiz, John Bartlett (of Quotations fame), Edwin Booth, Charles Bulfinch, Dorothea Dix, Mary Baker Eddy (“discoverer” of Christian Science, the map says), Edward Everett (spoke at Gettysburg, was upstaged), Fannie Farmer, Felix Frankfurter, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Dana Gibson, Curt Gowdy, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Julia Ward Howe, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., B.F. Skinner, I.F. Stone, and Charles Sumner.

I could have spent all day looking for them, but mostly I didn’t. I did see Charles Sumner’s stone. People leave smaller stones. I found one and did too.

Near Sumner. I’d never heard of him, but I like that name.

Solomon Sias Sleeper (d. 1895), successful Cambridge merchant and local politico and philanthropist.

The map also lists impressive memorials. I found a number of those. Such as the Rev. Hosea Ballou Monument, honoring a Universalist clergyman (d. 1852).

A Civil War memorial, erected in 1872 — the only time I’ve seen a sphinx used for that purpose.

“The sphinx was chosen because of its ideal personification of intellect and physical force and its representation of the combined ideas of beauty and strength,” the notes on the map say. I know the sphinx has a very long history and comes with a lot of encrusted lore, but that sounds like a peculiar Victorian interpretation that didn’t really stick.

The Scots’ Charitable Society Lot.

An organization founded in 1657 in Massachusetts. It “aims to help people of Scottish heritage by providing relief to Scottish-American individuals and families in need, and by granting undergraduate scholarships to the Scottish-American community,” says its web site because it is still around.

Bigelow Chapel.

Named for Jacob Bigelow (d. 1879), second president of Mount Auburn.

Washington Tower. The highest point on the grounds, honoring George Washington. Designed by Bigelow in collaboration with architect Gridley J. F. Bryant. I didn’t have the energy to climb the hill and then the tower at that moment. Too bad. I understand the view of the Boston skyline from there is terrific.

A cenotaph for four members of the U.S. Exploring Expedition who didn’t return from the Pacific.

I was delighted to see it. In its way, as important as Lewis and Clark’s journey, and something I’m certain 99-point-more percent of Americans have never heard of.

Back to Joseph Story. He gave the dedication speech at the cemetery on September 24, 1831. It’s a long one, per custom of the time. Per custom of my time, a short quote:

Here, let the brave repose, who have died in the cause of their country. Here, let the statesman rest, who has achieved the victories of peace, not less renowned than war. Here, let genius find a home, that has sung immortal strains, or has instructed with still diviner eloquence. Here let learning and science, the votaries of inventive art, and the teacher of the philosophy of nature come. Here let youth and beauty, blighted by premature decay, drop, like tender blossoms into the virgin earth; and here let age retire, ripened for the harvest. Above all, here let the benefactors of mankind, the good, the merciful, the meek, the pure in heart be congregated, for to them belongs an undying praise.

Mount Auburn Cemetery: The Landscape

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The weekend I spent with friends in Boston in April wasn’t actually in Boston most of the time, but its suburbs, and not with my friends quite all the time. On that Saturday, late morning to early afternoon, I passed some warm springtime moments by myself in the thrall of Mount Auburn Cemetery, mostly in Watertown, partly in Cambridge.

Mount Auburn Cemetery

How is it that I’d never gotten around to visiting Mount Auburn Cemetery until 2026? What kind of cemetery tourist lets that one go for so long? This is the Ur of landscaped American rural cemeteries, acknowledged as the first one, established in 1831. Did I also mention that it’s drop-dead gorgeous? So to speak.

Mount Auburn is one of those rare cemeteries – like Arlington National outside DC or Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans – that attracts visitors even in our time. Not a huge number, at least when I visited, but a healthy trickle. Spring, I suspect, is a popular season there.

Arlington National inspires feelings of patriotism from as deep an historical well in North America has to offer; New Orleans’ tombs are dressed in mystery and garlanded with voodoo. What does Mount Auburn have? Landscaping of the highest order. A pattern by which all the following garden cemeteries can be judged: stones of great variety, plants equally various, and an alternation of flat and hilly contour.

The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, itself a recent establishment by the 1830s, created Mount Auburn during a time of peace and expansion in Boston, with the violence of the Revolution barely in living memory and U.S. sectional friction deepening, but not to the strife it would become by the ’50s. The president of the society, Henry Dearborn (d. 1851), is credited with designing Mount Auburn.

The site, with its twists and minor vistas, turned out to be just the place for a revolution in burial practice. Dearborn must have had a gardener’s instinct for the reinventing the wooded hills, but he was much more than a gardener, and the cemetery is much more than a garden. And anyway, Dearborn just set the thing in motion nearly 200 years ago, in collaboration with landscape architect Alexander Wadsworth and botanist Jacob Bigelow. The cemetery, a place to recall lives that are over, is ongoing.

Since then, every stone, every planting, all the small decisions and actions that go into managing 174 acres with 100,000 or more permanent residents, have formed a national treasure.

The Peony Crop of ’26

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Consistent spring-like weather has arrived at last here in northern Illinois. So we took the opportunity late this afternoon to visit Volkening Heritage Farm, an open-air museum with structures dating from the 1880s. It’s part of the larger (135-acre) Spring Valley.

Spin the wheel of time back – not that long, really – and German immigrant farmers put this part of Illinois, the future northwestern suburbs, to prosperous use. The open-air museum of our time echoes that previous time. Not in each detail, but the facsimile is pretty good. There’s a vegetable and flower garden —

Volkering Heritage Farm

— and farm animals. Chickens, for example.

The windmill is missing. Has been for some years now, but I know it was there in 2012.

We noticed peonies near the farm buildings.

That meant that Spring Valley’s former peony farm, about a 10-minute walk from the former German farm, was abloom with peonies. Like cherry blossoms in other places and other contexts, they don’t last long. Some years we miss them all together, partly because the blooming isn’t quite fixed. One year, for instance, I visited on my early June birthday once and found an embarrassment of peonies. Other years, they are earlier. This is an early year.

So we walked some of Spring Valley’s various trails, themselves flush with spring green, toward the peony field.

Across one of Spring Valley’s creeks, still vigorous from the heavy late-night rain a few days ago.

The peony field.

The blooms.

Digital cameras make astonishing images sometimes, but still pale compared to an eye view.

Fill the Steins to Dear Old Maine

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One more bit of Maine: “The Stein Song.” Back to posting on May 26, when it might actually be warm around here.

Never been much of a Rudy Vallée fan, as if someone my age (or really, someone still alive) is expected to have an opinion on him – but “The Stein Song” is fun. The only school drinking song to top the U.S. charts, whatever that meant in 1930. Ah, the economy is slowing down. Time to drink.

The Maine State House

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Though state capitols tend to be grand buildings with opulent fixtures and decorous memorials, small surprises outside the official scheme sometimes await casual visitors. Such as rocking chairs at the Maine State House.

The building is perched on a hill, as capitols sometimes are, with a sizable porch with a long view. Obscured off in the distance is the Kennebec River.

That porch is a good place for rocking chairs, someone thought at some point; someone associated with the capitol in some way that made it a reality, so I suppose in that sense, the chairs are as official as memorial busts or portraits. I had a seat. I couldn’t very well ignore the obvious thing to do in a place where rocking chairs aren’t an obvious thing to have. Also, I get tired more easily than I used to. I took in the view.

Augusta was the last place I visited in Maine last month. I could hardly miss it on my way out of the state. For one thing, I’d been to Augusta, Ga. less than a year earlier. Mostly, I had a new state capitol to visit. A box to check. Thinking of it that way might perturb travel purists who insist that travel is about “expanding your horizons,” or “living like the locals” or some other vague nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with a few lists to consult along the way. Think of them as “goals.” Gives a little structure to an interest, and I’ve long had an interest in state capitols.

In this case, I was committed to meeting my friends that evening in suburban Boston, so as interesting as Augusta looked – especially the busy State St. on the way to the capitol – I only had time for one thing. The Maine State House was it.

Maine statehood was a process that “took 28 years… six referendums and a war before the District of Maine escaped the rapacious grasp (to some) of Massachusetts,” according to the New England Historical Society. But once the doughy Mainers had broken away, they needed a capital and a capitol. The more-or-less central Augusta for the former, and a design by Charles Bulfinch (d. 1844) for the latter. Bulfinch, who also designed the Massachusetts State House, was an architect of the early Republic, maybe the architect of the early Republic, as the starting point of Federal style.

Not the most ornate of capitols, but a pleasant design. Mainers of yore are honored in various spots, but a special place of honor is for Gov. Percival Baxter (d. 1969), who sounds like an all-around swell fellow. Baxter State Park way up in the northern wilderness is named for him, and for good reason: being personally wealthy, he was able to acquire the land for the park himself, which he gave to the state.

A number of portraits hang on the wall, also as usual for a capitol. One intriguing one: Jonathan Cilley (d. 1838). A Congressman from Maine who, as the sign under the painting says, was “victim of the last Congressional duel.” Shot by fellow Congressman William Graves over some arcane point of honor, he was. Quite the story.

Another story on the wall: Sgt. Harold Andrews, the first U.S. soldier from Maine to die in the Great War (November 30, 1917). An exact contemporary of my grandfather, and an engineer as well. Grandpa returned from France to have descendants, Andrews did not.

If for no other reason than to make the acquaintances of Gov. Baxter and Rep. Cilley and Sgt. Andrews, the Maine State House was a good box to check.

The thing about state capitols, though, is there aren’t many new ones left for me to visit. Got a few more provincial capitols — parliament buildings — however.

Green: interior visits. Orange: exterior visit only. Gold: uncertain. White: more boxes to check.

Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor

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It’s one thing to see Hannibal Hamlin’s bronze in downtown Bangor, but true vice presidential enthusiasts can’t leave it at that. The 15th Vice President of the United States also happens to repose in Bangor, along with a number of other Hamlins, at Mount Hope Cemetery.

He’s in the company of a lot of other Mainers, too.

Including a lot of 19th-century Maine politicos and nabobs, and silent screen actor Ralph Sipperly. Of course I had to look him up, even though I didn’t see his stone.

Wiki notes, ultimately citing the NYT for the theater anecdote: “Ralph Sipperly [d. 1928] was a comic and character actor who appeared in ten films (mostly silents) between 1923 and 1927. His most notable portrayal was as the barber in the Academy Award-winning film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

“During one theatrical performance of Six-Cylinder Love in New York in 1921, Sipperly, who played a high-powered car salesman, accidentally drove an actual automobile off the stage and into the first row of seats. No one was injured, though screams erupted in the sold-out hall, and one woman ‘became hysterical’ as people scrambled out of the way. The incident made The New York Times the following day, but apparently had no effect on Sipperly’s career.”

Mount Hope is credited with being the second U.S. cemetery of the rural cemetery movement. The cemetery organizers picked a partly wooded bluff whose slope rolls down to the Penobscot River. The first such rural cemetery was, of course, Mount Auburn in Massachusetts, which opened in 1831.

“At Mount Auburn, a large tract of land was converted into a romantic park with ponds, bowers, grottos, and a great variety of planting. It was consciously designed for the living as well as the dead,” the cemetery web site says.

“The City of Bangor was not long in following suit. Bangor became very much alive with the settlement of the Penobscot River Valley in the years preceding the Revolutionary War. In 1834, Bangor was declared a city. Among the citizens of Bangor came a strong sentiment for the creation of a new cemetery grounds for the burial of its dead.”

The new cemetery was opened in 1834, along the aesthetic lines pioneered in Boston. Climb the slope – I’ll admit, I drove on the road that snakes up that way – and you’re rewarded with a vista peppered with memorials.

Views of the river and the road that parallels it for a while, the epic US 2.

The cemetery extends further inland, all together totaling about 300 acres.

Aged and crumbly stones in mix, as usual.

Not a lot of large memorials, but some.

More modest memorials.

Actually, that isn’t the only memorial for Harry Merrill (d. 1924).

You have to wonder what the decision-making process was like among Harry’s family. Maybe they couldn’t agree on a fitting memorial, and one group went with a ground plaque, the other with a plaque-on-boulder?