Thursday Dross

Posted on November 5, 2020 by admin

After a cold second half of October, temps have trended warmer in early November. So much so that I had lunch on our deck today, and expect to tomorrow as well. It can’t last. But it’s nice to sit out there and forget about the national hubbub — which I can’t do during my working hours, as paying attention to it as part of my job.

Here’s an article about the House of Tomorrow at Indiana Dunes NP, which we saw last month. A good short read, except for one thing: no date on it, which is a pet peeve of mine. It’s obviously not that old, since it refers to the recent designation of the national park, but you shouldn’t have to rely on internal evidence to date an article.

When I posted about Pounds Hollow Recreation Area a while ago, I forgot to include the short falling leaves video. Here it is.

We’re past peak here in northern Illinois, but some of the trees are still ablaze, and some still wilted yellow-green. Sitting out on the deck was pleasant enough today, except when a leaf-blower kicked to life noisily not far away. Will future generations ponder that leaf blowers were ever a thing? Hope so. As far as leaves go, let ’em stay where they fall on your lawn. They’re nutrition for next year’s grass.

In Shawneetown, Illinois, the new town that is, you can see a memorial erected about 10 years ago. The wave of such memorials, I believe, will continue into the 21st century.
It’s a tribute to the original group of black families who moved from Shawneetown on the river to Shawneetown three miles inland, where they would start life anew, after the devastation caused by the 1937 flood.

It includes a map of the nearby neighborhood and all the names of the black residents who lived there. The other side has a more general black history of Shawneetown, noting that a segregation-era school stood on the site of the memorial, presumably for the black neighborhood’s children, but it doesn’t say that. The school closed in the 1950s.

All a little wordy, but not as prolix as the Norwegian Settlers State Memorial.

Near the memorial is a rectangular gazebo. Without corners. Or is it really a gazebo?
When Ann and I saw the abandoned Texaco station in Old Shawneetown, I asked her if she’d ever heard the Texaco jingle. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but the point of jungles is to bury themselves deep, so it’s coded in my synapses somewhere.

Most Americans my age would know what I meant, but considering that Men Who Wear Texaco Stars are long gone, I didn’t expect her to know. She didn’t.

Later, I showed it to her on YouTube, where it’s a standalone video (and also the grist for truly stupid local TV news).

That made me a little curious myself. When did that jingle first air? As it turns out, 1962, as a snappier tune compared with, for example, what the singing Men With Texaco Stars did for Milton Berle 10 years earlier. The jingle was also incorporated into later Texaco songs, such as this one sung by Ethel Merman.

As jingles go, “You Can Trust Your Car” is memorable indeed. The story of the copywriter (and composer) who came up with it, one Roy Eaton, is even more remarkable. Aside from being a talented concert pianist, he was the first black creative at a major ad agency, joining Young & Rubicam in 1955 and later working for many years at Benton & Bowles, before founding his own company. He’s still alive at 90.

So memorable that it was the basis for an anachronism in a 1977 episode of M*A*S*H (see the trivia section at the bottom of the page).

The Ricki Lee Jones song “Last Chance Texaco” (1979) includes an example of a reference — to the jingle — that was perfectly understandable when the work was new, and perfectly mystifying to later generations.

Your last chance
To trust the man with the star
You’ve found the last chance Texaco

One more Texaco fact: John W. “Bet A Million” Gates was an early investor in the ancestor company of Texaco.

Now I’ve Been to Havana

Posted on November 4, 2020 by admin

Through the marvel that is Google Maps, I located Chinatown. That’s a restaurant in Havana, and we got food to go there for lunch on October 17. Havana, Illinois, of course, a town of about 3,000 on the east bank of the Illinois River.

The streetscapes along the north side of Main Street, including the restaurant. It runs east-west, so has a terminus at the river.
The former Mason County Bank. Now it seems to be partly occupied at least by World of Color, a painting service. Havana is in Mason County, and in fact is the county seat.
Formerly handsome, now dowdy. Ghost lettering is toward the bottom, but I can only make out BROS.

A sign below that, not visible in my pic, says Apple Ducklings Preschool, which I suspect isn’t a going concern anymore.

On the other side of Main is the former Havana National Bank building, repurposed as Havana City Hall.
Waiting for lunch, I had time to walk up and down Main, while Yuriko visited some of the uncrowded antique shops on the street. Crowding, I suspect, is seldom an issue in this Havana.

I took a quick look at the Old Havana Water Tower, uphill from where I started outside Chinatown.
Dating from the late 19th century, the brick water tower is not only on the National Register of Historic Places — detail here — but also is an American Water Landmark, a list I’d never heard of before. Old it may be, but apparently it’s still a functioning part of the local water system.

Not far from the water tower is the Mason County Courthouse.
By my way of thinking, that isn’t a courthouse. It’s an office building for minor bureaucrats. But probably not faceless bureaucrats, since most everyone knows most everyone else around here.

At least there are a handful of memorials on the grounds. One for the Civil War.
The World War.
One for Lincoln. If Lincoln so much as passed through a town in Illinois, stopping only to get a new feedbag for his horse and use the outhouse, there’s going to be a 20th-century marker acknowledging the event.
Downhill from my starting point is Riverside Park. It includes a large bluff overlooking a bit of green space next to the river. According to a plaque, the bluff is called the Havana Mound.
I won’t quote all of the plaque. Enough to say that it says the mound was the site of Mississippian and later Indian “activities,” as well as the first white settlement in Mason County. In the 1830s, a four-story hotel was built there, which also served as a trading post and post office. Of course, Lincoln used to visit. But it didn’t last long, since the building burned down in 1849.

The odd thing about that plaque is the language at the end: Erected in 1984 by Havana Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That’s the first Mormon plaque I think I’ve ever seen.

In case you’re arriving by river, the town has put out a sign.
We sat at a picnic table in the park at the bottom of the bluff, and ate our Chinese food. The park has nice views of the river.
Havana used to be an important river town, back when that was an important mode of transport, but these days it mostly sees barges and tugs.

Dickson Mounds Museum

Posted on November 3, 2020 by admin

Got up early to vote this morning, since I believe that visiting the polls for a few minutes isn’t any riskier than going to a grocery store. Also, I am just mossbacked enough to want to vote on election day, just as my parents and grandparents et al. did, though I don’t begrudge anyone else the vote at some other convenient time or place.

It only took a few minutes. Few other people were there at the time. I’ve seen more in mid-day, especially during the 2008 election. Only one thing on the ballot made me smile this year: Willie Wilson, candidate for U.S. Senate from the Willie Wilson Party. That’s the best name for a party since the Rent is Too Damn High.

A few miles outside of Lewistown, Illinois, is the Dickson Mounds Museum. As the sign says, it’s a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

We arrived just after it opened at 10 on October 17. I hadn’t visited any museums of any kind since the Getty Villa back in February, for obvious reasons. But I figured the risk of infection at a place like Dickson Mounds was very low. For one thing — the main thing, actually — almost no one else was there, even on a Saturday.

And I mean no one. Entrance is free, so we didn’t have to interact with the woman behind the entrance counter. There might have been a few other employees of the museum around, but we didn’t see them. As we were leaving less than a hour later, we saw a couple with a small child entering. That was it.

The main museum building.

Completed in 1972, it looks something like a set from Logan’s Run, only browner.

The museum is reasonably interesting, including a temporary exhibit of gorgeous prints by Audubon. Mostly the place focuses on the Mississippian peoples who lived in the area 1,000 years ago and more, and who, like a number of other peoples, left mysteriously before Europeans ever came to the Americas.

But the story of the museum itself is just as interesting if not more so, I think. For example, we were nearly 30 years too late to see any skeletons.

In the 1920s, a resident of these parts, one Don Dickson, started digging into Indian mounds on his family’s farm. He discovered skeletons. Lots of them. Maybe in the 19th century, such a find would have been unearthed and put into a traveling show, a seriously undignified outcome for human remains.

Dickson had a different idea, however, one more suited to his time, when Americans were more mobile than ever. He built a private museum around the skeletons in situ and people came to see them.

Not that dignified an outcome either, but at least the archaeological value of the site wasn’t completely destroyed. According to the museum, University of Chicago archaeologists investigated the area for years.

In 1945, Dickson sold the site to the state of Illinois, which later built the current building and still displayed the skeletons for decades. By the 1980s, the indignity of that arrangement was more widely understood, so in 1992 the state sealed off the remains beneath the building. Visitors today would not know about them unless they do further reading.

(Do people say the museum is haunted? That’s all it takes for a place to be considered haunted, after all.)

The museum also includes a lot of undeveloped land. A number of well-marked trails cross the land, so we took a walk.

Second-growth forest, I suspect, if this used to be farmland. A large section of land was fenced off with a tall mesh fence. Archaeological sites that wankers might try to plunder? Could be, though nothing about the fence explained its presence.

Oak Hill Cemetery, Lewistown

Posted on November 2, 2020 by admin

Lewistown, Illinois, isn’t very large. Only 2,100 or so people live there, as opposed to Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown, which has a population of more than 5,000. I arrived for a look on the morning of October 17.

I hadn’t expected such a good-looking cemetery. The fall colors helped, but only added to the overall aesthetic of woody terrain, sometimes hilly, peppered with upright stones and funerary art.

As you’d expect, there’s a Civil War memorial.

It’s hard to see in this pic, but this is the entirety of the inscription, written on the stone bench:

IN MEMORY OF OUR PATRIOT DEAD
MDCCCLXI–MDCCCLXV

I didn’t know it until later, but the columns at the memorial were salvaged from the previous Fulton County courthouse, which burned down in the 1890s. When Lincoln came to town in the ’50s to speak, he stood on the courthouse steps between the columns, and so the town wanted to work them into its Civil War memorial.

In as much as Oak Hill Cemetery is known to the world, it isn’t for its beauty or a war memorial. Rather, Edgar Lee Masters took inspiration from it for Spoon River Anthology. Sometimes, I’ve read, very specific inspiration, since he knew many of the townspeople — such as the weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer and the fighter, to borrow language from the opening of the book.

“In the groundbreaking work, Masters, a onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, gives voice to more than two hundred deceased citizens of Spoon River who are laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery, known to the locals as The Hill,” wrote Laura Wolff Scanlan in Humanities magazine in 2015.

“Freed by the shackles of life, the un-living who ‘sleep beneath these weeds’ confess their deepest secrets, disappointments, frustrations, joys, and warnings to the living in the form of brutally honest free verse poems.

“In some cases, Masters barely changed their names. Henry Phipps was really banker Henry Phelps. Harry Wilmans was Henry Wilmans…

“Even though most names were fictitious, everyone in town knew exactly who he was talking about. Because of this, the book was immediately banned from schools and libraries in the area, including the Lewistown library.”

When Masters died in 1950, he wasn’t buried in Oak Hill, but rather in Petersburg, Illinois, which is close to Springfield.

The Lewistown library started stocking the book in 1974. After the death of everyone mentioned in it, and most of their immediate families, in other words. In our time, Lewistown claims the work as its own, since what else is the town known for, or could be known for? For the centennial of the book in 2015, the town held Oak Hill Cemetery tours, exhibitions and theatrical performances, according to Humanities.

For avid Spoon River enthusiasts, and there must still be a few, the graves of the real people associated with fictional counterparts are marked with numbers.

There’s a guide available that will tell you who’s who in the cemetery, according to their Edgar Lee Masters number. I am not enough of an enthusiast to look any of them up.

Still, I respect it as a successful work of literature about the residents of a cemetery. Interesting conceit. Sometimes I imagine that if the dead at the cemeteries could talk freely, I might hear some salacious bits. On the other hand, many of them might not have very much interesting to confess.

We had a copy of Spoon River in our library when I was growing up, and I read some of the poems then and a few later. The other day I happened across a radio version from 1957, which is worth a listen. William Conrad is always worth a listen anyway.

Spoon River Valley ’20

Posted on November 1, 2020 by admin

The weekend after Ann and I went to southern Illinois, Yuriko and I went to Fulton County, also in Illinois, but closer to home. It’s southwest of Peoria, along the Illinois River. The Spoon River also runs through the county, until it meets the Illinois.

Why Fulton County? Marketing. At least that’s part of the reason. Every year, on the first two weekends in October, an organization called the Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive Association puts on an event called the Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive Fall Festival. I heard about it some years ago.

Visitors are encouraged to drive around the county, look at the fall colors, and drop a few bucks. The association produces useful online and (probably) paper maps of the county toward those ends. So over the years, tucked back in that big mental file of mine, Minor Destinations, I had the vague idea that Fulton County had especially fine foliage. No doubt the Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive Association would appreciate the fact that that idea had been planted in my awareness of the place.

This year, the association cancelled the event. We would have missed it anyway, since we went on the third weekend of October.

We got a late start on Friday, not arriving at Lewistown, Illinois, until after dark, which is where we stayed that night, returning home Saturday night after spending the day in the area looking around. As my wont, I was up early Saturday morning (October 17) to have a look around Lewistown, seat of Fulton County.

It isn’t long before you’re at the Fulton County Courthouse.

I have to say, this is a well-written plaque there in front of the courthouse.

A brief on a now-obscure part of Illinois history, told concisely and clearly. Mentioned in passing is the 19th-century Gelena (Illinois) lead rush, and the text makes a connection to Lincoln, as historic markers in Illinois like to do.

Bits of war surplus. Now memorial bits.

Always good to look at these kinds of plaques — this one was near the cannon — even if only a half a minute or so.

Across the street from the courthouse is First Presbyterian Church.

The town gazebo.

Or maybe it’s on church property. That would technically put it that very special class of gazebos, the ecclesiastical gazebo, early ruins of which can be found in Vatican Necropolis in the Vatican City, and in Constantinople…. There I go again, writing bogus gazebo history.

Nearby is the Prairie State Bank & Trust, looking like a going concern (it is), in a basic brick bank building. Make that a basic brown brick bank building.

It’s good when alliterations work.

New Harmony, Indiana, Part 2

Posted on October 29, 2020 by admin

After wandering around New Harmony, Indiana, for a while and seeing many interesting things, it occurred to me that we hadn’t visited one of the places that I was curious to see, because I didn’t know exactly where to find it.

Google Maps in this instance didn’t know either. Or rather, I didn’t know exactly what the spot was called, to tell Google. The search engine isn’t a mind reader, not yet (but surely that’s Alphabet Inc.’s dream).

We spent time looking around an antique and knickknack store on the main street, since New Harmony, pop. 750, has some of the elements of a day-trippers town (like Fredericksburg, Texas). I found a candle holder I wanted to give as a gift, and after paying for it, I asked the woman behind the counter two questions.

One, where I might find postcards, since her store had none. She offered a suggestion, and another customer who had overheard us offered another suggestion, which turned out to be closer by and correct.

My other question: “Can you tell me where I can find Paul Tillich’s grave?” I’d read it was in town. Not in a cemetery, but a standalone location.

I can’t claim to be an expert on Paul Tillich, or even remember that much about him or his theological ideas. Whatever I might have learned during my collegiate religious studies had long been forgotten. Still, I figured I should drop by and pay my respects, and later do a little reading to refresh my memory.

She told me where to find him. We’d wandered by previously without realizing it, since he’s tucked in a grove of conifers forming Paul Tillich Park.

None of the stones in the pictures are his gravestone. Rather, they’re some stones in the park with Tillich’s words carved on them.

This is his stone.

A little hard to read, even when you’re standing in front of it. Turns out to be Psalm 1:3.

PAUL JOHANNES TILLICH
1886-1965
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit for his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

What’s Tillich doing in Indiana? Broadly speaking, he was another inadvertent gift to the United States from the Nazis, like Einstein or Thomas Mann or Billy Wilder or Walter Gropius. Tillich came to America in 1933 and held a number of academic posts in this country. Apparently he was taken with the history and setting of New Harmony.

“Before his death in 1965, the philosopher Paul Tillich hoped to make New Harmony a center for his own teachings, and thus in a way fulfill the early ambitions of Rapp and Owen in making the town an example of spiritual and material concerns successfully united,” notes a 1978 New York Times article, which is worth reading all the way through. “The trust created Paul Tillich Park…”

Jane Blaffer Owen’s trust, that is, mentioned yesterday.

“Jane Owen’s charisma emanated from her spiritual liberality [also, maybe, her largesse]. She was profoundly affected by the teaching of the twentieth-century German-American theologian Paul Tillich, becoming by turns his admirer, student, and friend….” writes Stephen Fox in a magazine published by Rice University — also worth reading all the way through.

“In 1963, she persuaded Tillich to come to New Harmony to dedicate a site across Main Street from the Roofless Church for a park to be named in his honor.”

“On [Philip] Johnson’s recommendation, she had the New York landscape architects Zion & Breen design a natural setting of grassless berms planted thickly with spruce and hemlock trees, around which granite boulders inscribed with passages from Tillich’s writings and a bronze bust by James Rosati were installed. This is where Tillich’s ashes were interred in 1966.”

This is the Rosati bust.

We weren’t quite finished with New Harmony after visiting Tillich. We spent some time at the town’s labyrinth, formally the Cathedral Labyrinth and Sacred Garden and patterned after one in Chartres Cathedral. Another work of the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation.

We spent some time walking it. Ann had more patience with it than I did.

Finally, we approached the Harmonist Cemetery, or the Rappite Cemetery, a burying ground surrounded by a low wall. Outside the wall are an assortment of well-worn stones, dating from the 19th century but after the utopian experiments in New Harmony.

Many are illegible, but I could read the names and much of the info on this one.

JANE
Consort of
JOHN T. HUGO
Died March 11, 1846
Aged 27 years, __ months and 10 days.

“Consort” isn’t a word I’ve seen too much in cemeteries, but maybe I don’t go to the right ones.

Behind the wall are no stones, just a wide expanse of grassy ground.

There was nothing on site to explain that, but after a moment’s thought we speculated that the Harmonists didn’t believe in individual gravesites or markers, so we were looking at a mass grave. Later I checked, and that’s correct. Ann said that made the site unsettling, and I suppose mass graves can be, say if mass violence was involved. I don’t think that was the case for the Harmonists; just the result of the everyday dangers of living in the 19th-century frontier.

Note also the mounds. Apparently the area was home to Indian mounds before the Harmonists came, and so they must have considered it a natural for a burial ground. About 230 of the colonists lie there.

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.

Pounds Hollow Recreation Area

Posted on October 25, 2020 by admin

The vista at Garden of the Gods in Shawnee National Forest was fairly crowded. A few miles away, the lake and the hiking trails and the bluff at Pounds Hollow Recreation Area were much less busy, though still in the national forest. After taking in the Garden of the Gods, Ann and I spent a few pleasant hours there early on the afternoon of October 11.

Near the parking lot is a small beach on the small Pounds Lake.

From there, a trail leads more-or-less southwest.

The lake’s still in view much of the way, and what a sight in mid-October.Tall trees mark the path as well.

Eventually the lake peters out into more of a wetland.
Leaving that behind, the land is covered with leaves this time of the year.

When the wind blew, more leaves cascaded to the ground.

Pounds Escarpment rises from the forest floor along the trail, with parts of it curiously mottled in black and white.

The CCC crafted some stairs to climb to the top. We climbed them.

It wasn’t all stairs. Along the path there were a few fat man’s misery passages, which I suspect were natural cracks enlarged and smoothed by CCC muscle power.

At the top of the escarpment is a viewing platform, not nearly as crowded as the Garden of the Gods.

In fact, we were the only ones there for a few minutes, taking in the wooded vista.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There