Looks like we’ve hit the mid-July stride of chamber of commercial weather, with low 80s F for highs, high 60s for lows, for some days ahead. On the other hand, standard forecasts don’t include smoke, which could well make a comeback in the coming days.
It was a rainy May and June, bringing the flow of the Fox River fairly high by the time last month that we took a short walk nearby, largely under the flush of greenery.
As mentioned, we visited the Fabyan Forest Preserve in Geneva, Illinois one Saturday not long ago. The holdings — formerly part of the estate of George Fabyan (d. 1936) — include land on both sides of the river, and a large island accessible on both sides by footbridges. The view from the island.
We didn’t go there this time, but rather lingered on the west bank, around the Fabyan Villa, which we toured, taking in the bogus mummy. FLW did some renovation on the property, a fact well emphasized at the museum.
One view from the villa toward the Fox. If you’re going to build near a river — or any flowing body of water — give it some height.
Fabyan collected a lot more, including European artwork, back when that was doable.
Once upon a time (probably), the Fabyan kitchen served New Era Potato Chips. Glad to see it. The memory of the same such can at the Cuneo Museum is a minor delight for me.
Back when food processors crowed about have food science on their side. These days, that might get them MAHA’d into consumer skepticism.
Outside, more features, including a ruin from Fabyan days. I understand that the Roman-themed pool on the island has mostly been reclaimed by the river. This wasn’t part of the pool. A out-of-place gatepost, from the looks of it.
More evidence of the passing wave of Egyptomania.
Looking a little worse for roughly a century of wear.
The Internet might be more vast a wasteland than the worried Newton Minow could ever imagine, but its oases of information – actual information, to judge by internal consistencies, linkable references and good writing – continue to amaze. For example, Mummies.com, which has lists of Egyptian mummies in the United States.
I went looking for such a site because of a recent encounter with a mummy. Or rather, a “mummy,” but we’ll get to that later.
This figure is on display at the Fabyan Villa, which is part of the Fabyan Forest Preserve on the west bank of the Fox River, in Geneva, Illinois. We visited a few weeks ago. Both the villa and the “mummy” are legacies of George Fabyan (d. 1936), who has been fated to go down in history – in a small way, but more than most people – as a wealthy eccentric. One of his eccentricities, like William Randolph Hearst writ small, was collecting eccentric artifacts.
A sign near the mummy-shaped artifact says that modern examination has proven it to be a fake. Whether George Fabyan knew this or not is an open question.
Remarkable thought, that there was once a market for mummies so brisk that counterfeiters made bank. It wasn’t called Egyptomania for nothing.
An anecdote from Mummies.com about a real mummy (Harwa) in possession of the Field Museum, which has 33 mummies, tells quite the tale:
Harwa’s adventurous afterlife is one example of how things have changed. In 1939, he became the first mummified person to fly on an airplane, and he was taken to a Broadway show upon his arrival in New York City. On display at the New York World’s Fair for two years, he then returned to the Field Museum after getting lost in the luggage and being sent to San Francisco.
There’s streaming service comedy gold in that, say 10 episodes: the misadventures of the promoter hired in 1939 to take care of the mummy, and his oddball assistant, who also happens to be a bombshell of a woman. High jinx ensue. The mummy is misplaced, more than once. There are various shenanigans on the airplane, and on Broadway. A rival promoter tries to steal the mummy. Weird things happen at the World’s Fair. Nothing supernatural, though one or another of the characters might worry about the Curse of Harwa — which a publicist make up. Maybe even a guest appearance by Col. Fabyan, who wants to buy the mummy. Of course, the actual Fabyan was already dead by then, but this is TV we’re talking about. You know, the outclassed wasteland.
At Cantigny in late May, I wasn’t feeling that photo urge. Yuriko was, at least when it came to flowers in arrays.
And as singles.
We go to Cantigny every few years, usually in late spring or early summer, a time of exuberant greenery and, of course, vivid flowers. Not a flowerbed is idle.
This time, I did take a few snaps of some of the Cantigny buildings and landscapes. Such as the former McCormick manse.
Some long views of the grounds.
As the publisher of a great metropolitan newspaper, back when there were such things, Col. McCormick had the scratch to keep the place running. What are tech barons doing these days with their lucre? Nothing so fine.
It was a small puzzle. The building in front of me was called a “fire barn.” Not something you hear very often, and in fact I wondered whether I’d ever heard of the term before. The standard term is, of course, fire station. But it didn’t take long to work it out: horses are known to be kept in barns; the fire engines in Elgin, Illinois, used to be horse-drawn; so a barn to keep fire-department horses – and naturally other equipment – would be a fire barn, even after fire engines became horseless.
So at Elgin Fire Barn No. 5 Museum not long ago that I took an instant liking to fire barn. Even though they don’t house horses anymore, we’d do well to call our fire stations fire barns instead. A touch of poetry to an otherwise dry municipal designation.
Elgin No. 5 Fire Barn is a legacy of progressive ideas about fire suppression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, built in 1903 as a solid edifice showing how serious the city was about deploying the cutting edge of fire-control technologies of the time. The building was in service for almost all of the 20th century and, as often for these things, narrowly escaped demolition after 1990. But the citizens of Elgin ultimately didn’t want to part with it. Good for them. The barn is owned by a nonprofit these days.
Much space in the museum is for fire engines that once called the barn home.
Good old open-cab engines. The only other place you see them regularly are stylized versions on yellow signs warning motorists that a fire station is nearby. Otherwise, they are museum pieces. I remember editing an article for Fire Chief magazine 30 years ago in which the executive of a fire engine manufacturer said that even a special commission by a fire department for an open-cab engine — and he didn’t think it likely — would be declined.
The museum also holds an Elgin apparatus that had been retired before the building of Fire Barn No. 5, though in its mid-19th century heyday, this steam powered pumper was Star Trek tech, compared to able-bodies citizens trying to put out building fires with bucket brigades.
Speaking of advanced Victorian fire tech: the brass shapes of an alarm system based on telegraphy.
For a time in the 19th century, if you wanted a fire alarm telegraph system, you went to Gamewell. The name exists even yet as a unit of Honeywell.
We met Bob on the second floor. Well, “Bob” since my memory for names, never that good, isn’t improving with the years. A retired Elgin firefighter, Bob volunteered at the museum with a clear enthusiasm for the artifacts: the trucks, but also axes, ladders, a collection of helmets and turnout coats, department badges, photos of old-time firemen, documents and items and utensils used at the fire barn, considering that much time spent was there, between emergencies. Bob showed us around, since no one else was visiting the museum at that moment, and we had a good talk about the way things used to be, fire suppression-wise.
In front of the museum is a memorial to Illinois firefighters.
Part of the doughty school of bronzes, often depicting pioneers and soldiers and members of the CCC — and firemen ready to take on an emergency (though in this case, pre-SCBA, looks like). Doughty was definitely part of the job description.
The run of days from Juneteenth to July 4 at least, and even better to Nunavut Day (July 9), would be a fine time to slow down, like between Christmas and New Year’s Day, only warmer and without the mad runup to December 25. Back to posting around July 6.
Thousands of impressions flitter by on the road, most instantly forgotten when literally on the road – driving, you need to be in the moment, or else – or quickly forgotten, when “on the road” means you’re out and about somewhere that isn’t home. Still, a handful of details stick, even without photos. But photos help.
Maine
I call it “Self-portrait with Goth Prom.” Poster spotted in downtown Bangor.
In the Maine Statehouse, a flat-ish object of a different kind.
Lincolnville, on the coast of not far from Belfast.
Carnivorous whelks. I was frankly ignorant about carnivorous whelks, and glad to learn a little about them. Because what a great name for a snail.
Too bad I wasn’t hungry in Belfast. I’d have had tacos.
The Penobscot River and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. A literal and scenic highpoint on that part of US 1 as it winds through near-coastal Maine. The bridge includes an observatory, unfortunately not open in April. Driving over the bridge itself was another pleasure of coastal Maine.
Helen’s Restaurant in Ellsworth. Tasty fish and chips. Haddock, specifically. What do you take for a haddock? “Well, sometimes I take-a aspirin, sometimes I take-a calomel.” It was some years before I learned that calomel was something I’d never take in a million years.
Massachusetts
Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish, Turners Falls.
The church was closed. So was Poet’s Seat Tower.
As the tower appeared more than 100 years ago.
Shelburne.
Massachusetts 112 (Route 112) in Hamilton County. Car commercial driving.
Goshen Cemetery, just off Route 112.
Ohio
A solid bank building in Niles, across the street from where William McKinley was born. The Dollar Savings Bank Co. sounds like the kind of place that George Babbitt would mention, but distain in favor of a bank with longstanding ties to the best business men in Zenith.
An Admiral Dewey clock at the McKinley Birthplace Museum. A textbook case, that Dewey, of how fleeting fame usually is.
Passing through northeast Ohio intrigued me greatly about that part of the state. Akron, Canton, Youngstown, Austintown — all places I can imagine going, and enjoying the visits. See ’em before the reverse migration really gets underway.
Further west, the drive on the Lincoln Highway (US 30) was a pleasure: mostly four lanes, rarely crowded. The flat farmlands don’t qualify as conventionally scenic, but the budding springtime fecundity has a lot to recommend it, even as a strictly visual pleasure: the bright greens of new leaves, the brown and grays of the fields recently plowed, small roads heading off usually at right angles to the main road, a run between Upper Sandusky and I-75 near Lima with few buildings of any kind, except distant farm structures.
Downtown Lima: the Allen County courthouse, seen from North St.
Looks like my kind of breakfast place. Closed on Sunday anyway.
Another North St. detail. Spiderman sitting on — something. A large scoop of strawberry ice cream?
Saint Rose Church in the hamlet of Saint Rose, not far east of the Ohio-Indiana line. A Cross-Tipped Church.
Pennsylvania
The hills at the edge of Punxsutanwney.
The drive west across Pennsylvania began across the Delaware River from Port Jervis, NY, taking US 209 southwest through part of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Bet the straight-ish, two-lane road is busier in peak recreation season in the Recreation Area, but in April, I booked along without encountering much in the way of traffic. Trees were still budding, but it wouldn’t be long before some stretches of the highway would pass through green tunnels. The sunlight was already casting green leaf shadows on the road.
Watch Groundhog Day, and the impression is that the festivities are held in the center of town — which they are, in the Punxsutanwney stand-in of Woodstock, Illinois. Go to Punxsutanwney itself and learn that the February 2 fest is a few miles from town in a place called Gobbler’s Knob.
One more Phil. Iron Phil.
The clerk at the Gobbler’s Knob gift shop took pains to let me know that the site, and the festivities, were overseen by a nonprofit, not the commonwealth. Outside is the nonprofit’s bus, or at least I assume that, probably used to ferry people from town to GK and vice-versa, to help deal with the popularity of the event.
I like a good local festival as much as anyone, but February 2 is a deal-breaker. Can’t Phil come out again on August 2 to predict how much longer summer is going to last?
One More (Indiana)
Miami Chief Francois Godfroy stands at the corner of Main Street and Huntington Street/Indiana 18 in Montpelier. Well, maybe it’s supposed to remind passersby of the chief more than actually depict him.
A Daughters of the American Revolution historical marker says: Reserved by U.S. to Chief Francois Godfroy of the Miami Nation of Indians by treaty at St. Mary’s, Ohio, 6 October 1818. 3,849 acres on Salamonie River at La Petite Prairie, Harrison Township, Blackford County: reserve lands sold 1827, 1836.
Waymarking says: “The statue was made in Venice, CA in 1960 for the Tom Wood Pontiac dealership in Indianapolis. Later it was in front of the Indian Museum at Eagle Creek Park In Indianapolis. After the museum closed, the statue (of more a plains Indian than a NE Indiana tribe) was obtained by Chief Larry Godfroy — a descendant who presented it to the City of Montpelier and they erected it as a monument in 1984.”
I’d never had any Moon Cheeze. Or even heard of it.
But I did eat Space Food Sticks from time to time in the days of Apollo and maybe a little after. As the ad says, Moon Cheeze was made in Wapakoneta, Ohio, hometown of Neil Armstrong.
“It seems to have been just regular American cheddar cheese,” Weird Universe says. “Only the packaging was special. It came in a container shaped like the state of Ohio.” In the ad above, it looks like an astronaut is drifting away from the safety of the Command and Service modules, like the (dead) astronaut did in 2001.
On the last day of my recent trip, I diverted a bit to Wapakoneta to visit the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, which I’d bypassed a decade earlier, and was rewarded for my effort when I saw the Moon Cheeze ad and a lot more.
It’s conveniently located near a Waffle House.
Worth the price of admission by itself: the Gemini 8 capsule, in which Neil Armstrong and David Scott nearly bought the space farm due to a malfunctioning thruster.
They survived, of course, and in fact Scott is still alive at 94. Besides Gemini 8, he flew on Apollo 9 and Apollo 15. Being seventh man to walk on the Moon doesn’t get you a museum, however; that’s reserved for being first. Fame is funny that way.
Neil Armstrong and David Scott. NASA public domain photo.
The museum isn’t large, but it does feature a number of good artifacts. The Smithsonian and the Kansas Cosmosphere shouldn’t have everything.
An H1 engine, which were used on Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B rockets.
Newspapers from around the world covering the Apollo 11 landing.
Some artwork. Looks like a spacesuit, but it’s a statue depicting Armstrong’s suit.
A painting from 1969.
It seems that the Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t report the alarming apparition of President Kennedy hovering over the lunar surface. Conspiracy theorists, take note.
Recently in Niles, Ohio, I had an encounter with one of the four assassinated presidents. If you go to the right place in that town (pop. 18,400), you can’t miss him.
Not just him either. Note the busts surrounding President McKinley, who are men associated with him in one way or another. Hay I knew; Bliss I had to look up.
The most direct route between Punxsutawney, Pa. and Lima, Ohio, passes pretty close to Niles. I had a little extra time, by design, on the second-to-last day of my recent trip. Niles happens to be the birthplace of William McKinley, and in our time, home of the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial and the McKinley Birthplace Home and Research Center – that’s two entities, a block apart.
The Birthplace Memorial is imposing and grand, another edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White.
The memorial has two wings, one a public library, the other an auditorium sporting McKinley artifacts, and a collection of flags.
William and Ida dressed, I believe, for his second inauguration in 1901.
As mentioned, the McKinley Birthplace Home and Research Center is a block from the memorial. It’s considerably more modest.
It’s also a replica, and apparently not a very close one, the original house having burned down almost 90 years ago. Still, looks are free (like at the memorial), so I had a look.
On display are a number of McKinley-adjacent artifacts. I liked the plates especially. One features the president himself.
Another features Admiral Dewey. How often do you hear about him any more? Even less than McKinley.
The president’s maternal grandmother’s gravestone is propped up against a wall. I suppose it was at risk of completely falling apart wherever it was, and (I hope) it was replaced in situ.
I liked this as well.
I looked up James Stevenson McKinley (d. 1847) on Find a Grave and that inspired me to look a little further into the McKinley ancestry. James’ father was David “The Patriot” McKinley (d. 1840). David’s father was John “The Wagonmaster” McKinley (d. 1779). John’s father was David “The Weaver” McKinley (d. 1760). That David’s father was James “The Trooper” MacKinlay (d. 1760), back in Ireland, at which point the nicknames peter out.
Up the road a piece from FDR’s home in Hyde Park, one of the Vanderbilts had a mansion built in the late 19th century on a gentle bluff above the Hudson. The river valley wasn’t an obscure choice by him or the elder Roosevelt or any of the other wealthy mansion-builders of the period. Pleasure travelers had started coming to the Hudson River Valley in the early 19th century, representing the first U.S. tourist boom.
They came for good vistas, for one thing. So did I.
“In the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole and others of the Hudson River School, travelers in the region encountered the nation’s first literary and artistic movements,” says a summary of The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1835 by Richard H. Gassan (2008).
In effect, those writers and painters were the influencers of their day, though not quite at the frenetic pace of, say, Instagram. I’ve decided not to worry about the influence of, say, Instagram on modern tourism. Overtourism is a real problem in a narrow range of places, and best dealt with locally, but most criticism of mass tourism is snobbery anyway: why, those people are going to all the wrong places for the wrong reasons and thinking and doing the wrong things when they get there! Bah.
The latest in my series on NPS fire hydrants. This one, a little worse for wear, is on the Vanderbilt site.
The Vanderbilts were known for commissioning mansions, of course, so many that I suggest they be known as the mansion-building Vanderbilts, like the Lighthouse-building Stevensons. Though not, curiously, the Commodore himself. He had other things to do, like amassing a vast fortune in the first place, and founding one of the nation’s great (ahem) universities.
Anyway, grandson Frederick William Vanderbilt (d. 1938) thought that the Hudson River Valley was just the place for a country estate, which it is, so he tasked McKim, Mead & White, architects to robber barons and other deep-pocketed clients, to design it. Frederick and his wife Louise clearly wanted a Euro-style palace on the Hudson, and that’s what they got.
The skylight was pretty cool, bringing in light all the way to the lowest floor through this aperture.
The effort to build and decorate the place must have been considerable, and I hope it provided wages for a lot of workers for a long time, both in the development and maintenance. But it’s a little sterile, for all its architectural pedigree.
Our guide — you need a guide to visit the interior, though the grounds are essentially a public park (and what a park) — said that the Park Service didn’t mind having the mansion, but the Vanderbilt site was more about preserving a long stretch of the right bank of the Hudson River and its views. As I took in some of those views, I had to agree.
A lot of museum artifacts are behind glass. Some really old, brittle and famous items are encased in an atmosphere of nitrogen, the better to extend their existence, I understand (and nitrogen anoxia sounds like an unfortunate accidental way to die). That might have been the case with the underwhelming display of the overwhelmingly historic Book of Kells. But in any case, glass interferes with our right as iPhone-carrying tourists to take really good pictures with almost no effort.
An example: a stuffed bird I saw in April.
The picture might be lousy due to the glass, but the artifact – and some other stuffed birds in the same case – did something a history museum ought to do: teach. I learned, looking there at a bird dead more than a century, that as a boy in the early 1890s Franklin Delano Roosevelt pursued a taxidermy hobby.
I’d come to Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York, the flush of spring, on my way home from the Northeast. I made time for the site because a visit had been impossible in October.
I understand that during FDR’s boyhood, the place wasn’t quite as wooded, but even so the trees (and thus birds) must have been plentiful. One of the paths on the grounds.
Views from the second story of the mansion.
Though the greenery obscures the splendid Hudson River, even a short look around gives you some idea why James and Sara Roosevelt thought building a residence here was a good idea, and why Franklin was deeply attached to the place all his life.
Is it important to know that boy FDR shot and stuffed birds (though he later had them stuffed professionally)? In and of itself, maybe not. I’ve heard about him all my life, read books about him and seen documentary films, and visited the FDR D.C. memorial, and somehow that detail never came up. Knowing about his short-lived taxidermy hobby doesn’t help me understand the New Deal or World War II any better, in as much as I know about those big-picture events.
Still, it’s a humanizing detail, and I believe that’s good to know about figures as famed and studied and lionized as FDR. It also allows for a bit of informed speculation about Franklin, a rich only child with an overbearing mother. By the time he was old enough to tote a gun, he probably needed to get away periodically from the mansion and its familial confines. Shooting birds out on the sprawling grounds of Hyde Park on the Hudson was just the ticket.
The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, which is the official National Park Service designation for the place, includes the mansion (Springwood, by name) and grounds, but also a presidential museum and library. The mansion is a mansion without being a Gilded Age exercise in ostentation.
It’s a big place, lots of rooms and some elegant décor (and stuffed birds), all original artifacts, so there’s no doubt it was a wealthy household. Still, even though it’s literally a museum in our time, in FDR’s time I doubt it felt like a museum at all, unlike some Gilded Age exercises in ostentation – and I’m thinking of the Vanderbilt mansion nearby, more about which later.
Best not to jump to too many conclusions based on the vibe of the mansion, but it does dovetail with the generally understood notion that FDR was self-assured and at ease in the upper class. No need for him to show off, any more than James and Sara did.
Speaking of James and Sara.
Note: the tour guide – you need to be on a tour to see the inside of Springwood – was perfectly forthcoming about the well-known fact (to historians) that the Delano fortune was built on opium.
Other artifacts of note included some of the president’s coping mechanisms — literal mechanisms — for his handicap.
The historic site also includes many, many depictions of FDR, as one would expect. Such as Franklin and Eleanor in bronze. Or just Franklin in bronze, or other materials.
Campaign material and other laudatory items are well represented in the museum.
Editorial cartoons. The president as a sphinx was especially amusing.
A chilling artifact: a fragment of a slug meant for FDR, fired at him on February 15, 1933 by Guiseppe Zangara.
“One of the wounded was William Sinnott, a detective who had frequently acted as Roosevelt’s bodyguard in New York City,” says In Roosevelt History. “Sinnott had just moved to Miami earlier that week when he was called to assist FDR’s security staff.
“The bullet fragment pictured above was removed from Mr. Sinnott’s wounded head. Ten other fragments from the bullet that struck him remained in his body. When visiting Sinnott in the hospital, FDR said, ‘You couldn’t hurt him, bullets just bounced off his skull.’ Mr. Sinnott was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1940 in recognition of his service that day. In 1946, Mr. and Mrs. Sinnott donated the bullet fragment in this specially designed presentation case made by Lambert Brothers Jewelers to the FDR Library.”
Historians don’t generally adhere to the Great Man school of history any more, but it’s nevertheless a fertile source of speculation to imagine how different things might be for the nation and the world had it been Roosevelt and not Anton Cermak who died in 1933.
Though he eventually died away from home, in Georgia — ah, another presidential site I must see — FDR came full circle to Hyde Park. First, the bed in which he was born.
Ultimately, his final resting place is on the grounds, along with Eleanor. Gardening had just begun when I paid my respects.
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.
The tip of the island, while accessible at that point, is desolate. The rest of the island seemed to be fenced off.
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.
