Category Archives: US History

The 39th Annual Elgin Bluff City Cemetery Walk

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In September, during the Elgin House Walk, I found out that the 39th Annual Elgin Bluff City Cemetery Walk was coming up on the last weekend of the month. That sounded good. For me. Yuriko wasn’t interested, so on Sunday the 27th, I made my way solo to Bluff City Cemetery in Elgin.

I’d missed the previous 38 walks, but I had visited the cemetery before – 12 years ago. Long enough that another visit would not go amiss. It’s a good-looking cemetery.

I remember liking the sloping contour of parts of the cemetery. I still do.

As well as the scattering of mausoleums.

The cemetery was founded in 1889, in time to receive a good many old soldiers who did their part of the Union.

Along with veterans of other wars, even the one with Spain.

Bluff City is still active, with newer arrivals too.

The tour took groups of about 15 people to the graves of notable Elgin residents, where a volunteer actor, dressed in period costume, played the person. Such as William D. Nichols (d. 1891).

Note that under his name is “Frontier Guards.” The actor, David Santori, told us about the guards, who were an impromptu armed group assembled in the spring of 1861 in the dicey first weeks of the war to protect President Lincoln, before a more formal guard of actual Union soldiers could be dispatched for that purpose. Nichols was an engineer and inventor, but his membership in the guard is what he wanted to be remembered for.

Here is Miland Gieske (d. 1984), who as a young man in 1920 survived a building falling on him when a tornado struck Elgin. A fellow named Thomas Rieser played him, and a harrowing tale it was, too. Gieske spent most of his career working in a funeral home, and the actor said his near-death experience gave him considerable empathy with the bereaved.

Other permanent residents of the cemetery evoked by the tour included Louise Logan (d. 1972), who organized relief during the Depression (played by Bernadette May or Tameron Keeffe); Trygve Rovelstad (d. 1990), a noted Elgin artist who designed, among other things, the U.S. Bronze Star medal, the 1936 Elgin Centennial half dollar, and the Pioneer Family Memorial on the Fox River (Steve Delaney); Nora Wagner (d. 1923), who, along with other young women, repaired a washed-out major Elgin road in 1908, as officialdom dilly-dallied at the task (Thea Delaney); and Jessie Sauceda (d. 2001), who arrived in Elgin as a child when she and her family fled the chaos of the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s (Estela Macias-Bonner), who all had to work out how to thrive despite the not-so-benign neglect of the rest of the community for some decades, and did.

My own favorite was Dr. Alban Mann (d. 1943), city physician and a force for public health (played by Don Gingold). In 1916, he figured out the source of a typhoid outbreak that killed 26 residents: the Elgin National Watch factory.

“The source of the contamination was traced by Dr. Mann to a leaky valve, which separated water from the watch factory’s reservoir on Watch Street and water taken from the river,” the Elgin Historical Society notes. “The leaky valve allowed river water seepage to contaminate water pumped to drinking fountains throughout the watch factory building.”

That incident came up during the talk about his life, as you’d expect. “Dr. Mann” also expressed astonishment that people are still skeptical about vaccines, which I’d say is a reasonable assumption about how the good doctor would react, were he magically aware of goings-on in our time. As has been pointed out, Dr. Mann, there’s still no vaccine for stupidity.

Bee Boun in Silver City

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Rain to end September and begin October. Generally not heavy, just persistent for two days. As if on cue for the first of the month, a handful of trees here and there suddenly displayed streaks of yellow. Every day there will be more of that, until there isn’t any.

After visiting a run of Milwaukee churches last Saturday morning under a warm early fall sky, we were inspired to find a Laotian restaurant. The place, Vientiane Noodle Shop, calls itself Laotian-Thai on its menu, probably because everyone knows about Thailand, while far fewer about Laos, such being the dismal state of geographic knowledge. A lot of the menu was also Thai, but it included Laotian specialties. Such as this.

Bee Boun. Also transliterated Bie Boun, apparently, but anyway a rice vermicelli-based dish that’s majorly delicious.

It was good to support the restaurant in general, but also because there is major construction on its street, National Avenue, that might be interfering with its trade volume.

Naturally we’d parked on a side street (Shea Avenue) and walked to Vientiane Noodle Shop. At the intersection of National and Shea – which meet at a 45-degree angle – is a triangular pocket park featuring plantings and a bench, along with some artwork fixed in the ground, dated 2007, and seeming to reflect the neighborhood population during its history through “welcome to our community” in various languages, if the German is any indication.

The neighborhood is known as Silver City. As many times as I’ve visited Milwaukee, that was a new one to me. It’s largely Hispanic these days, with Hmong and other groups also living there, and seems to have followed a common evolution in that regard, beginning with various European ethnic groups more than 150 years ago giving way to other groups as the decades passed.

Why Silver City? A site called Neighborhoods in Milwaukee (and others) offers an explanation. Sounds like folk etymology to me, but never mind:

Silver City got its name in the mid-1890s when area laborers working in the developing Menomonee Valley factories were paid in silver coin. When the workers circulated the silver among the area’s 24 taverns, the name “Silver City” began to appear in Milwaukee newspapers.

Silver was circulated everywhere in the 1890s, so that doesn’t really cut it. Old newspapers using the name might hint at a nickname for the area created by anonymous newspapermen for some lost reason – who can say? That kind of uncertainty adds interest to a neighborhood, if you ask me.

St. Vincent de Paul Parish & Ascension Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

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The church participants in Doors Open Milwaukee typically provided visitors written descriptions of the church and the church’s history, on actual sheets of paper. Good for them, in this over-digital age. I picked them up for future reference – as in, right now – and the one for St. Vincent de Paul Parish was rather long on the various priests associated with the parish (and two Congressmen who went to church there), with less about the church building, though it does say that the current one was completed in 1900 in a Renaissance Revival style by architect Bernard Kolpacki (d. 1900, so this was probably his last project among a number in Milwaukee).

This church, too, was originally for a Polish congregation.

The sheet offers information about Rev. Wincenty Lewandowski (d. 1900), who founded St. Vincent de Paul Parish. He had felt it expedient to leave the German Empire in the 1870s due to Kulturkampf and all that jazz, making his way to Ohio at first. When he got there, he got to work. The sheet notes the following glimpse of something that could use a little more detail:

Bishop Richard Gilmore sent him to Toledo, Ohio, where he would found St. Hedwig Parish in October 1875, and St. Anthony Parish in 1882. For reasons unclear in the surviving records, many were opposed to Lewandowski at Saint Hedwig, his multiple reassignment requests to the bishop were denied, and the situation devolved in June 1885 into a bomb being discovered under the rectory and a riot breaking out between parishioners. Lewandowski resigned and departed for Milwaukee.

Other sources mention the 1885 church riot in Toledo, and the fact that St. Hedwig in that city was torched the next year. Religious-inspired violence is one thing, but church riots are considerably rarer on these shores. Yet Toledo isn’t the only one I’ve encountered while visiting churches – there’s also the story of the former Cathedral of All Saints of the Polish National Catholic Church in Chicago, which not only involved an ecclesiastical riot, but schism thrown in mix for that extra volatility.

Impressive stained glass.

For the items below, I had my AI program remove the glare. This is one of the genuinely useful things that it can do, but I have to be careful to tell it not to change anything else in the image, because it has a tendency to “improve” things. Sometimes it does so even if I tell it not to, but for these two, nothing was changed.

Next door. Probably the rectory. An ivy-covered rectory.

The last church of the day was Ascension Lutheran Church.

Services in English and Spanish, as you’d except. And that third one? Hmong, it turns out.

On the door.

I don’t know that DHS goons would specifically be looking for Hmong – which would be an act of base ingratitude, among other things. Probably just the usual brown folk. Raiding churches: what a good way to win hearts and minds.

Ascension Lutheran dates back to the 1850s, in this case founded by Norwegians. The current sanctuary dates from 1923.

The church sports a number of memorials, as churches often do, but this pair was a little unusual.

Good to see a presidential site, however minor. United Spanish War Veterans: not an organization one hears much about anymore, but it lasted until 1998, a few years after the last veteran member passed, namely Nathan Cook, U.S. Navy, who died in 1992 at 106. A successor org, Sons of Spanish American War Veterans, is still around.

St. Anthony Parish & St. Hyacinth Parish, Milwaukee

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Rain coming tonight, then a cooling trend, as they say in the weather biz. For me, that meant lingering on the deck in the upper 60s F. early this evening, while I can, eating dinner outside, drinking tea. In the background, blending with the sound of crickets, were the pleasant sounds of a youth-league baseball game, which also happened to be visible in the park behind my back yard. All sensations that will disappear with oncoming fall.

On Saturday, a nice warm early fall day, we first made our way to St. Anthony Parish in Milwaukee as part of the Doors Open event. Once upon a time, a German congregation.

Wonder how many buildings are still around whose development was delayed by the Panic of 1873? There must be some. St. Anthony at least is one, not being consecrated until 1882, and even then the interior wasn’t completed until around the end of that decade.

The Germans built something suitably German, a Gothic Revival Hallenkirche, whose nave and side aisle ceilings are roughly the same height.

The last mass in German must have been sometime. These days, one Sunday mass is in English and two are in Spanish.

Not far away at all is St. Hyacinth Parish.

In this case, a legacy of a Polish congregation, an Italian Renaissance style done in Milwaukee’s Cream City brick, and another development of the 1880s.

Henry Messmer [d. 1899], a Swiss immigrant, did the design.

These days, three masses are in Spanish, one in English, none in Polish. Time flies, neighborhoods change.

St. Joseph Chapel, Milwaukee

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For a mid-sized city, Milwaukee has a remarkable number of historic churches. Every late 19th- and early 20th-century ethnic group of any size supported a number of churches, in the case of Catholics and Protestants both. Germans, for instance, built both Catholic and Lutheran edifices in quantity, as did Poles, without that Lutheran component. Many of their Catholic parishes are now majority Hispanic, and it these that we largely focused on during our visit to Milwaukee.

We managed to visit five such churches on Saturday during the most recent Doors Open Milwaukee.

As fine as all of these churches were, one stood out: the recently restored St. Joseph Chapel, a Romanesque Revival structure on the grounds of St. Joseph Center, a convent that’s the international motherhouse of the School Sisters of St. Francis, which was founded in the 1890s. The chapel is tucked away in the convent complex, which itself is tucked away in a Milwaukee neighborhood.

All those churches built ca. 100 years ago or more needed to be designed, and in the case of St. Joseph Chapel, the sisters tasked Peter Brust and Richard Philipp, two of the busiest architects in Milwaukee at the time, to do the job. And what a job they did.

st joseph chapel

Of course, any building of this kind is more than the work of talented architects. Unnamed artisans in Austria contributed the mosaics on the walls, such as Christ Giving Peter the Keys, which is behind the altar, or the Parable of the Ten Virgins, one of the side mosaics. My photos do them little justice to their intricacies and especially the artful use of the color gold for flourishes that enliven the images. I haven’t seen mosaics of this caliber since the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, though these aren’t neo-Byzantine.

The floor mosaics are also worth a good look.

Behind the main altar is the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration. A chapel within a chapel, I suppose. It is every bit as sumptuous as the nave.

Depicted under the angels surrounding the monstrance are notable Franciscans, I understand, including Sts. Francis and Clare kneeling. Yuriko asked about the fellow in red, and it took a while to work it out, but that seems to be St. Bonaventure, who was a cardinal too, and a writer of considerable energy, which might account for the book in his hand.

The Jerusalem Tilt

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When I was busy doing one thing and another today, I got distracted by a short video that depicted a state-border-lines-only blank U.S. map, a short stock clip on a site I use sometimes. As the video played, the states were filled in, in various colors, as you see on maps. They were filling in by tiers nationwide, northern tiers down to southern tiers. Roughly. Very roughly.

So I wanted to create my own animation of the states filling in. That’s a novel reaction for me, supported by AI tech that just might be up to the task. Or is it? Jury’s still out on that, but only because the jury is lazy. Anyway, I would have the states color up in order of their accession to the union (and the Dakotas can both change at the same moment), or ratification of the Constitution in the earliest cases.

I’m also too lazy (at the moment) to check for such videos that already exist. I don’t need to check, I’m sure they are out there. I don’t want to see another one, I want to create one.

More than that, I want a twist: east should be up on the map. So the parade of state accessions would fill (very roughly) top to bottom, though of course there are certain exceptions to that, such as the West Coast states. Still, the growth of the U.S. would trend downward as the eye registers it. Why not? Think of it the original orientation, or maybe the Jerusalem tilt.

I imagined that at least drawing such a simple map wouldn’t vex the young, energetic AI programs loose in the world now. Why, I could do that with a simple natural language prompt. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Prompt:

blank map of united states, no words, tipped so that east is facing up.

Some results were perfectly acceptable maps, or a little flawed, but still with east to the right. As usual.

Note that the aspect ratio is narrow. I figured that would give the map room to expand in an east top/west bottom direction, rather than have a conventional north top/south bottom squeezed into the frame. Oh, well.

Other generated images inexplicably closeups of west or east.

With geographic features. Because I didn’t specify all of the United States? Because I didn’t specify no geographic features, though I’d think, using natural language like I do, that “blank” covers that pretty well. And, come to think of it, United States pretty much means the whole thing, unless otherwise specified. This is the sort of nuance that, so far, eludes AI, making image generation a sometime crap shoot.

This one — what to say?


I ran that phrase through a couple of search engines (manually) in case it was something I missed, since I miss things all the time. But it doesn’t seem to be, which means my imagination can run with Bussers for Mitich. Could it be that a class of sentient robot servants — nicknamed Bussers from one of their first jobs and proudly calling themselves that — finally won the right to vote, and are supporting Mitich in the 2076 elections?

Back to the maps I wanted to be oriented with east up. These below were giving it the old electoral college try, with east clearly trying to point upward, but no go.

They kept getting stranger. Or rather, to be completely accurate, the odd maps were mixed in seemingly at random.

At least that one is east/up. I think. But it isn’t a map of the United States. Some united states, maybe, but in some other reality.

Then there were the smash maps, I call them.

Which have their own interests. You can imagine they were the result of a different North American map created by the last ice age. Or you can image some alternate universe United States. Man, Virginia really got dismembered by the war in that last map, didn’t it?

This is just part one of my efforts to create a map with an east orientation. From here, I’ll try modifying the less eccentric maps. Or I’ll make one myself by tilting a pre-drawn map with my basic image editing program, and then see if AI can handle filling in the states in historic order. This will have to wait, though. I have a life to live this weekend.

Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis Lithuanian Catholic Mission

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By chance today, I heard part of a radio report about basketball in Lithuania. Seems that Lithuanians are keen on the sport, at levels of devotion usually seen for soccer in other countries. There is also a basketball program at the Lithuanian World Center on this side of the Atlantic, namely in suburban Lemont. Not a surprise, since the center is home to about 50 Lithuanian organizations.

We encountered the remarkable Hill of Crosses at the center in July. Within sight of the hill is a church building of a distinct modernist cast.

One of less-known works of Charles Murphy (d. 1985), Chicago modernist, whose highly visible portfolio includes One Pru Plaza, McCormack Place, the Daley Center, and the original terminal in O’Hare and some of the later ones, too.

Looking every bit 1964. Not built for Lithuanian World Center – that was still more than two decades in the future – but as part of D’Andreis Seminary, a Vincentian Catholic seminary.

After the seminarians bugged out, the Lithuanians bought the property and invited the Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis Mission to use the church, where they say mass and administer sacraments and so forth. Apparently the Diocese rents the structure from the center.

The stained glass might be in English, but masses are in Lithuanian, I understand. It’s all very Chicago, even if it’s in the suburbs.

A Few More Elgin Houses

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Saturday was warm and we finished the day after seeing the Elgin Castle. That left three more houses on the tour unseen. Elgin is only about 20 minutes away, half an hour in thick traffic, so we decided to return on Sunday for the last three houses, since our ticket was still valid for them. The weather had turned overcast with periods of light rain.

1100 Spring St.

My own favorite among the three, tucked away between its street and a slope leading down to the Fox River, though that view was mostly obscured by greenery this time of the year. Its yard is lush, especially near the front-yard sidewalk.

Influenced by English and Dutch Colonial designs, the booklet notes, and owned by a series of well-to-do Elginites since 1902, including a bank president, a doctor, an attorney, other local company presidents and an opera singer (the booklet doesn’t offer more detail on that last one, alas). More recently, as in now, the house belongs to an Illinois state rep and her teacher husband.

1100 Spring has a terrific picture window looking down toward the river – or will, when the leaves fall – which is a testament to expertise in glass production, and whatever kind of glass-cleaner the current residents use. Another only slightly smaller window faces the back yard. That space itself was the picture of comfort, a part-flagstone, part-grass turf punctuated by a sizable hammock strung between a couple of mature trees that lord over the yard.

259 River Bluff

Not a FLW. But Prairie Style was a popular style in 1915, and it does echo a lot of FLW.

That FLW vibe applied inside as well in the long, straight lines and Wright-like geometry of the walls. We saw only the first floor, since the stairs don’t have handrails of any kind. But the first floor was enough to show that the current owner, a retired airline pilot, has put a lot of effort and money into its restoration.

1044 Center St.

Dutch Colonial Revival, a fair way from New Netherland, both in space and time, but it does have a Dutch sort of shape.

Also tended for with great care by its current owners, only there a few years now, an architect husband and pastor wife.

What’s this?

We had exited 1044 Center by way of a back door and the small backyard, partly taken up by a modest, but handsome garage. Near the sidewalk, but still on the property, was an iron disk embedded in concrete.

An enthusiastic docent, seeing us looking down at the object, told us from the screen porch not far away, “That’s a cistern. You know, to capture rain water,” she said. Adding, “They were ahead of their time. Something we should all be doing,” in a pleasant but authoritative voice.

L.A. Baker & Co., Elgin. Something else to look up. An AI search offered some reasonable but not-too-hard to figure out speculation, namely that the company was one of the ironmongers down near the Fox, when the valley was alive with manufacturing, and providing at least one non-bogus link to a newspaper of the 1890s mentioning the company. A short but not too shabby Google search doesn’t turn up much. I expect his name lingers here and there in local legacy ironwork, and is seldom noticed.

A Few Elgin Houses

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Saturday was pretty warm as we waited in line in Elgin. More than one outdoor line, in the course of the afternoon. Not dangerously hot, just a touch sweaty. We’d arrived for the Historic Elgin House Tour. We didn’t have to wait more than 15 or 20 minutes to get into each of the houses. Not a crush of people, but a healthy number for a niche interest.

Think “concrete blocks” and the first thing you think of probably isn’t a good-looking house made from them. But there it was, the first house we visited on the last weekend: 909 Prospect Blvd. in that town. “A significant example of the American Foursquare architectural typology,” our informative guide booklet says.

Once upon a time – in 1912, to be exact – one John McBride owned the Elgin Concrete & Structural Co., and what better way to expand your market than build a handsome house from concrete blocks? To show what could be done.

Do a Google image search for “concrete block house” and all too many of them are concrete gray. The color associated with sterile, ugly places. I understand there might be other issues with concrete block construction, ones to do with insulation or other features I’m not qualified to comment on, but concrete gray just might be one reason concrete block houses aren’t so common in North America. Doesn’t have to be that way. John McBride could produce pleasantly green concrete blocks, in a pleasing array, a step above featureless rectangles glued together, and he could do that more than a century ago.

The next house was just down the street: 840 Prospect.

An “eclectic interpretation of Colonial Revival,” the booklet says. Just as handsome, in its way, as the concrete structure nearby. In keeping with the history of the neighborhood, whose anchor used to be Sherman Hospital, the docents explained that a long-time owner was a staff anesthesiologist who sold it to the hospital in 1986 when he retired, and when the hospital was looking to expand, razing some of the nearby houses. The hospital facilities were already long in the tooth in the 1980s.

The booklet says the hospital acquired the house in 1959 and implied the residence was a benefit of employment for the anesthesiologist. But anyway, a Sherman doctor lived there for three decades or so. A number of the other houses in the neighborhood were occupied by doctors or other hospital employees, and fortunately the hospital never got around to razing any of the neighborhood, but decided to build new elsewhere.

Part of the rules of the tour specified no interior photography. I can say that all the houses were to House Beautiful standards, if not quite that style: elegant or at least good-looking space, well adorned with handsome furniture and artwork and smaller household objects, yet definitely not cluttered. Still, each of them had clearly personal touches, such as photos of ancestors or children’s art, and were better living spaces for it.

How about a tour of an architecturally interesting, yet cluttered spaces? Don’t tell me there aren’t any. I’d pay money for that, too.

The first place we actually went that day was McKinley Elementary School, where you checked in and received the well-designed and informative physical booklet. Maybe it costs extra, but no phone-based guide could be as useful, because the format is so handy. The school beats the neighborhood houses we saw for age, with the original structure built in 1886 as Prospect Street School. Collegiate Gothic, the booklet calls it. (Huxley College is known for its Collegiate Gothic, I think.)

After the turn of the 20th century, there were additions, and the installation of modcons like electricity and indoor plumbing. Very soon after the turn of the century, it must have received its current name – in a nationwide spasm of school-, street- and other place-naming in honor of the slain president.

Still a school. The oldest continuously operating school building in Elgin, in fact, though I understand it will close in 2028 after a new school is completed not far away. I checked, and McKinley’s mascot is the Tigers. I’m sure they’re fond of their mascot. Still – what about the McKinley Gold Standards? Or if that’s too odd, the Goldbugs.

Pratt’s Castle, Elgin: The Return

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On Saturday we were among the first members of the general public to see the inside of Pratt’s Tower in Elgin, at least according to one of the docents, and no doubt he was right. But first we had to wait outside on the unpaved driveway. Even that vantage is usually off limits, but not this time.

The castle is a towering structure between the Fox River Trail and the river itself.

This time of the year, its 50-foot height is complemented by greenery, including a draping of ivy.

Not long ago I learned that Pratt’s Castle was part of the Historic Elgin House Tour, an annual event organized by the Gifford Park Association in Elgin. The tour operators thoughtfully provided a shuttle bus down the slope to the castle (and back up again), which can also be reached by the trail, still flush with green just ahead of fall.

A few months ago, I learned that the BTST posting of January 5, 2021 is persistently the second result of Google search for “Pratt’s Castle,” after Historic Elgin’s page on the subject. How that happened, I can’t say, since the ways of the Google algorithm are as a mysterious as the Sibylline Books. Still, I’m glad that I’ve been able to inform the few people who click through to my nattering about the castle, which I’m sure isn’t much known the further you go from Elgin.

Pratt’s Castle, Elgin

The entrance. Complete with a drawbridge and a portcullis. A docent told us that the drawbridge, a replacement for one that crumbled long ago, was completed just in time for the event.

The only level accessible to tour-goers was the first floor. There are five levels all together, connected by winding stairs that have a handrail on the wall but, unfortunately, no balustrade. We were informed that the other floors were similar in design, and that the very top of the tower, a turret, is reached by a wooden ladder. No doubt there’s a terrific view of the Fox River Valley from that perch, but I can see why we couldn’t go up there.

A nod to the long-gone collection of medieval artifacts that tower builder Harold Pratt used to keep in the tower.

A detail about Pratt’s construction methods. Clever.

The back entrance, where we exited.

Word is there are other inhabitable spaces in the crenulated structure behind the main tower, but it wasn’t open. The docent posited that the space, and maybe the tower, would make a terrific short-term rental property, with certain modifications. I’ll bet it could.

A small house of more conventional design is behind the castle, also part of the property. Just behind, the Fox River.

The property’s current owner, a nonagenarian named Paul Sommer, was reportedly on hand during our visit, but we didn’t see him. I’d have asked him a few questions, such as what do you know now about owning a medieval-style tower that didn’t you expect before you bought it in 1998?

The booklet the association created for the tour is a font of information, telling me that Sommer is the third owner of the tower, though with a structure like this, steward would be a better way to think of it. As he apparently does, putting much time and money into the structure’s continued existence. Good for him.

Though it evokes castle towers of Europe, England and France specifically, Pratt’s Castle is American in the sense that it’s the eccentric legacy of a single individual doing what he wanted to do with the fruits of his success: namely, Harold Pratt (d. 1979), an electrical engineer by vocation who had a serious jones for medieval times. Thinking of the structures he’d seen in those countries, Pratt set about building the tower in the 1930s. One opinion, according to the guide booklet, is that professional builders started the structure and Pratt finished it. In any case, it was largely complete by 1937, joining the ranks of individual-created North American structures, in the same spirit if not exact history as better-known works, like the Coral Castle or Watts Towers (East and West coast examples, those).

Unlike a stone European castle tower, Pratt’s is brick, but otherwise the structure sports a collection of features very much like a European tower, such as a crenellated parapet, with crenels and merlons. (A binary system: crenels, 0; merlons, 1.) A turret is atop the tower – the place reached by a wooden ladder – and some gargoyles are thrown in for good measure. Lancet windows, those narrow openings that come to a point, provide light and air and, in some other reality, the opportunity to shoot arrows from a relatively safe position. Here’s a term I’d never heard, and the castle has those too, near the top: arbalestina windows, ones particularly suited (I assume) for shooting your arbalest, a species of souped-up crossbow.

All very cool, if you asked me. Though built in a particular style, its history and placement make it one of a kind, making the world just a little more interesting.