The Iowa State Capitol

Posted on October 8, 2025 by admin

Think of the 50 state capitols as, collectively, a giant free museum of U.S. history, complete with grand buildings and a collection of artifacts with some consistent themes, such as images of elected officials, relics of war, and memorials to officially worthwhile individuals or causes. Some capitols explicitly have museum cases or whole museum floors, with a wide variety of stories and items from a state’s early years.

The collections can be a little staid. But sometimes, oddities are tucked away. Not too often, but there was that time I saw a two-headed calf at the Georgia State Capitol, or the miniature Western movie set at the Utah State Capitol. Or a bust of President Benjamin Harrison, carved from a tree stump. In Idaho. Then, at the Iowa State Capitol last month, this fellow.

Last time I visited the Iowa State Capitol, I arrived about 10 minutes after it closed. So I — we, Ann was with me – looked at an assortment bronzes on the grounds, including the memorable (and mammary) Mother Iowa, and admired the gold-leaf dome. This time around, Des Moines was the destination for my first day of driving, September 4, and I was determined to see the interior.

It’s a grand edifice, as capitols usually are.

A series of architects oversaw the design, including Chicagoan John C. Cochrane, who also designed the Illinois State Capitol and, less well known, the handsome stick-style All Saints Episcopal in Chicago.

I’d forgotten that four smaller domes flank the main dome, forming in quincunx of domes. I understand that Iowa is the only such five-domed state capitol in the nation. I’m not sure how important that distinction is, but it is a distinction.

On a clear day, there’s a good view of downtown Des Moines from the capitol steps (and sundial). It was a hazy day, the result of Canadian wildfires.

I arrived before closing, and experienced the grandness of the inside. Such as murals.

Allegories done in mosaic. Law, for instance. There was no backing up further to get a fuller image of Lex, since that would be over the edge of a balcony.

The House of Representatives.

The Iowa State Law Library. The most gorgeous of the spaces, I thought. Just like canyon pictures, an image does no justice to the brilliance of the place itself.

Note that the skeleton is behind glass in the Law Library.

What’s he doing in the Law Library? Showing how strict the library used to be about returning materials late? (Or the smartass answer: “Nothing, really.”)

The sign on the case says, This skeleton was originally purchased by the medical branch of the State Library of Iowa to checkout [sic] to Iowa medical educators and students as a learning tool. When the medical library dissolved, the skeleton remained on permanent display with the State Library’s collection. Archaeological experts determined the remains are male, 45+ years old, European ancestry.

Check out a skeleton from a library? Learning that such a thing ever happened was worth the effort, all by itself, to get to the capitol.

The dome is a little unusual, too, a little more representational that you usually see.

It features a memorial – in this case to the Grand Army of the Republic, with the name of the organization, a 13-star flag, and the dates 1861 and 1865. Considering that the development of the current capitol happened between 1871 and 1886, a GAR memorial of some kind isn’t a surprise, and I suppose the organization had the political heft at the time to get such a prominent spot.

Wiki tells me that more than 76,200 Iowa men fought for the Union out of a population of nearly 675,000 (in 1860), and about 13,000 died for it, two-thirds of whom by disease. Iowans supported the Union by about as lopsided a margin as imaginable. Seventy-six residents of Iowa are known to have served the Confederacy, and very likely most of those had recently moved to Iowa from the South.

Kansas Mud (Or, Three Places in Kansas I Had Practically to Myself)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by admin

I returned home from Colorado via Kansas, heading eastward from Colorado Springs on September 22. I took this is a sign that day that I had, in fact, reached the western border of Kansas, created at the time of statehood in 1861.

An 1855 map of “Kanzas” and Nebraska.

It would be cool if the spelling Kanzas had caught on. As it stands, “z” is used only once in all the state names, in Arizona.

The current Colorado-Kansas border is fairly close to 102 degrees West of the prime meridian, but actually follows 25 degrees West of the meridian that once cut through the Old Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, as fixed in 1850, assuming the initial surveys out in remote Kansas-Nebraska were accurate. Until later in the 19th century, and not officially until 1912, it seems the U.S. wasn’t having that limey prime meridian; or the froggy one through Paris. (And I was amused to read that for a long time the French referred to Greenwich Mean Time as “Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds.”)

I spent my first full day in Kansas seeking out obscure sights. In western Kansas, there really aren’t any other kind.

Site of the Battle of Punished Woman’s Fork (Battle Canyon)

Serendipity on the road is your friend, if you let it be. That is, pay attention to signs. Driving north on the 23rd from Scott City, Kansas, on the highway US 83 – on which you could drive to Brownsville, Texas, if you had a mind to – I saw a small sign directing me to a battlefield of the Indian Wars, in this case the last skirmish between Natives and the U.S. Army within the borders of Kansas: the Battle of Punished Woman’s Fork.

This isn’t the sign I saw, but rather another one at a fork in the road, pointing the way to the battlefield, down an unpaved road.

Unhappy at being forced to live in Oklahoma, 350 or so Cheyenne headed north toward Montana in 1878. The U.S. Army gave pursuit and the two sides fought inconclusively at a lonely spot in Scott County. Lonely then, lonely now.

But not so remote that there isn’t a monument, with exposition.

The Cheyenne acquitted themselves well in the skirmish, and while they lost horses and food, were able to escape northward. Eventually some of the group – but not all – did indeed make it to Montana, and were able to stay. The incident is known as the Northern Cheyenne Exodus.

El Cuartelejo

I quote the following at length, because it’s well written, and also happens to be public domain material, published by the National Park Service. Read it while it’s still posted.

[El Cuartelejo] is one of the key sites indicating the far-reaching expansion of Spain beyond New Mexico and her interest in the Great Plains. It consists of the ruins of a seven-room, stone Puebloan structure, probably built by a group of Picuris Indians who in 1696 emigrated from New Mexico to live with the Cuartelejo Apaches. As early as the 1660s, friction between the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and the Spanish rulers and priests had caused groups of Indians to migrate to El Cuartelejo.

Spanish expeditions under Archuleta (pre-1680 Pueblo Revolt) and Ulibarri (1706) probably came to El Cuartelejo to return groups of Indians to New Mexico. In 1719, Governor Valverde led an expedition northeast from Santa Fe, visited the Cuartelejo Apaches, and learned from them of French penetration into the Plains. As a result, in 1720, the Spanish sent out the Villasur expedition, which passed through El Cuartelejo but was destroyed later by the Pawnees in Nebraska.

Archeological excavation of the site has produced only a few artifacts of Southwestern origin. The pueblo ruin and its typically Southwestern appurtenances — slab-lined hearths, grinding trough, oven, and the like — were directly associated with a material culture complex that was almost entirely Plains Apache. Either the Puebloans stayed in the area only a short time, or they readily adapted themselves to the everyday implements and utensils of the local residents.

I didn’t know all that detail when I decided to go to El Cuartelego. Just that it was the northern- and eastern-most pueblo, which was enough.

The site is within Lake Scott State Park, where I had considered camping the night before. My earlier camping experience on the trip, in Nebraska, while not terrible, was exhausting enough to put me off the idea. No more camping, I think, where I have to do absolutely everything myself. In any case, it was a good decision, since on the night of the 22nd, a sizable rainstorm blew through Scott County. I listened to the storm with some satisfaction in my rented room in Scott City.

The ruins.

More exposition.

Like at the battlefield, I had the place to myself.

Monument Rocks

During the planning for the trip, which naturally meant quality time with maps, I spotted a point-of-interest for Monument Rocks in western Kansas. Sounded interesting, and on September 23 I made the trip, again on unpaved roads. The rain the night before made the driving surface a little dodgy, but the roads, layered with gravel, were generally up to the task. I was rewarded with the sight of rocks that are, in fact, pretty monumental.

I didn’t quite have the place to myself. When I arrived, another car was there, occupied by an older couple. They left, and soon after that, two young men appeared in an SUV. But that was all.

Washburn U. in Topeka tells us: West of Castle Rock area in Gove County, Kansas, erosion has carved these chalk pyramids from what was once the floor of a vast inland sea. Also called Monument Rocks, this site is the first natural landmark chosen by the US Dept. of the Interior as a National Natural Landmark. This landmark in on private land. The owners are generous to share this site with the public. Treat it with respect.

This limestone was once the floor of a great inland sea, existing some 80 million years ago. The sea dried away over time and the rock was carved by elements of nature to create these formations, which now stretch up to 70 feet in height.

The rain the night before had also made mud all around the rocks. I should have taken the time to put on my better shoes for a walk near the rocks, but no. While making my way through the muck, I lost traction, and down I went, on my butt. Luckily, the soft mud cushioned the fall, which was more of a slide anyway, so I wasn’t even bruised.

The back of my pants were, however, coated with sticky, yellowish Kansas mud. So standing outside my car, I changed my pants. The two other visitors were in another part of the site by that time, so no one was around for the unwelcome spectacle. My shoes were covered with mud too, so much so that even a good soaking when I got home didn’t get it all off. When I wear those shoes now, I take a bit of Kansas with me.

Nebraska Rocks

Posted on October 4, 2025 by admin

Pity the people whose job it is to promote tourism in Nebraska. Set ideas are notoriously resistant to change, at least over periods less than a generation, so I expect the idea “nothing to see there” is a constant battle for those who know otherwise.

I didn’t need to be persuaded. A drive across the state – a reward in itself, more about which later – takes you Carhenge (see yesterday) but also to terrain not generally associated with Nebraska.

At the western edge of the state, rocks. Big, impressive rocks that poke out of the still-flat ground, stubborn geological leftovers that refuse to erode as fast as the surrounding terrain. Natives, mountain men, trappers, and wagon trains across the prairie all knew about these rocks, knew that they marked a certain point in their journeys. I’m sure they were hard to miss.

Since 1919, the rocks a few miles from Gering, Nebraska have been known as Scotts Bluff National Monument. I arrived on the morning of September 8.

On this particular trip, the monument was an appetizer, ahead of the main course in Colorado. The Sandhills of Nebraska, which I’d just driven through, aren’t pancake flat, but waves of grassy hills with scattered outcropings of rock. After a drive like that, the Scotts Bluff seemed to appear suddenly, rising in your field of vision to take over half the sky.

I exaggerate, but only because that’s how I seem to remember it. An outcropping like that in the Rockies would be lost in the crowd, but here in western Nebraska it’s the star of the show.

The road leading to the monument, the highway Nebraska 92, follows the Oregon Trail at his point.

Scotts Bluff isn’t just a single bluff. A set of them, you might say. A road (yes, CCC built) provides access to the top. From there, any number of fine vistas ring the area. A fair number of people took the drive the same day as I did, but in no way did they amount to a crowd.

Scotts Bluff is no solitary outpost. Turning to the 1911 Enclopdaedia Britannica’s entry on Nebraska: “In the fork of the North and South Platte are the Wild Cat Mountains, with contours rising to 5300 ft., in which Wild Cat Mountain, long reported as the highest point in the state, attains 5038 ft., Hogback Mountain 5082 ft., and various other hills — Gabe Rock (5006), Big Horn Mountain (4718), Coliseum Rock (5050), Scotts Bluff (4662) &c. — rise to heights of 4500 to 5000 ft.

“In the extreme N.W. the White river and Hat Creek have carved canyons in deep lacustrine deposits, creating fantastic cliffs and buttes, bare of vegetation, gashed with drainage channels, and baked by the sun.”

East of Scotts Bluff not far from highway US 26 is a set of rocks known as Courthouse and Jail. There’s something to that name.

If Scotts Bluff was lightly visited, these two were almost completely empty. I stopped by on the afternoon of the 7th, and the only other people in the parking lot were sitting next to their RV, under a tarp, probably shooting the breeze over beer. So I had the trail to myself, though I didn’t go that far under the hot and copper sky.

Offering some views of its own.

Not far away in this part of Nebraska (at least by horseless carriage) is the better known Chimney Rock National Historic Site.

It was later on same day as Courthouse and Jail, and the heat was still on. Again, I didn’t want a personal heat event to interrupt my trip, so I didn’t go as close as the trails would have allowed.

I sent an image of Chimney Rock and a text message to old friend Tom J.:

The aliens decided that Devil’s Tower was a better site.

Then I sent this image from the Chimney Rock gift shop.

Tom answered:

lol. We never even played Oregon Trail and that’s still funny.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Posted on October 2, 2025 by admin

A vast stretch of mountains majesty well over the tree line, a complex mass of sand piled at the edge of rugged mountains, and the well-hewn cliffside relics of a people remote in time but whose presence endures – the first three national parks we visited in Colorado in September all rated as exceptional destinations. But I’m glad, simply because it was last on the clockwise loop I’d planned through the state, that Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park came last. It would have been a hard act to follow.

As a steep – and really deep – crack in the earth, the Black Canyon lives up its name, with most of the canyon cast in shadow most of the time, striking in its seeming darkness. But not pitch black all the way down its 2,000-foot cliffs. Far away, a whitish irregular ribbon runs through the gray bottom of the canyon, quickly recognizable as a river in quicksilver motion. The Gunnison, that is.

If there were no other people around, which happened sometimes at this park, you could hear the roar of the river. Faint, but distinct in its power. Mass snow melts and rushing tributary creeks enable the Gunnison to act (on a geological time scale) like a high-powered saw cutting through rocks that are unimaginably ancient. Before long, that is 2 million years, the river gouged the crack you see, exposing rocks 1,000 times older than the time it took to cut the canyon.

A single two-lane road snakes about seven miles along the south rim of the canyon (should I even have to say it? By the CCC), offering a string of overlooks. Not far from the park entrance, an overlook gives a taste of vistas to come. I might have named the place Gray Canyon, but that isn’t quite as poetic, is it?

Also, evidence of the fire that swept through the park in July, burning about a total of about 4,000 acres on both the south and north rims, along with some Park Service infrastructure. A number of trails leading away from the south rim overlooks were still closed when we visited the park on September 19, with signs disallowing access to charred grounds and slopes.

Fortunately for us, we were able to drive the South Rim Road and see what we could see at some of the overlooks. Unless you’re keen on some kind of lunatic climb into the canyon, that seems like a perfectly reasonable ambition. At the main visitor center on the road – which a ranger told us had barely escaped intact, through the efforts of hotshot crews – a path leads to scenic perch, built to accommodate casual visitors. It survived the fire as well.

Any photo’s going to be a pale image of this vista, but they will have to do. Believe me, it was a place to drop everything and gawk. And, even while safe behind rails, to experience a touch of vertigo. Nothing incapacitating, just an unsettling mental comparison between little you and the huge yawning drop.

A pointy ledge below. An opportunity for an Instagram death. It was hardly the only one.

Further down the road, a good view of the Gunnison. It’s hard to tell just by the images, but that’s around 2,000 feet down. Eventually, the water goes into the Colorado River.

Capt. John Gunnison is the U.S. Army officer and explorer who came to the canyon in 1853 as part of the effort to find a route for the transcontinental railroad. To sum up his conclusion, in terms he would have never used: Not through the Black Canyon, Secretary Davis. Are you kidding me? Later that year, Gunnison and most of his men got the worst of an encounter with some Ute warriors and, among other places, the river acquired his name as a posthumous honor.

I also have to say that Gunnison’s career also included surveying in the Upper Midwest, such as the Green Bay area, and that he surveyed the border between Wisconsin and Michigan. An underappreciated kind of achievement, I’d say.

None of the viewpoints were crowded. The Grand Canyon, this isn’t. The more accessible south rim of the Black Canyon isn’t crowded, even on a warm Friday afternoon, unlike the more accessible south rim of the Grand Canyon.

Near the end of the road is a view of the Painted Wall.

The stripes are not paint, of course, but pegmatite, an igneous rock that solidified after the surrounding rock did, for reasons that a geologist, which would not be me, might be able to explain. A sign at the viewpoint helpfully compares the height of the cliff (2,250 feet) to various manmade structures. The only one that would rise higher than the wall is Burj Khalifa, and that not by much. Note also that the top of the cliff, across on the remote north rim of the canyon, has absolutely nothing in the way of safety infrastructure. The cliff is a cliff, with gravity ready 24/7 to whisk the careless or suicidal to their doom.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a few more post-char landscapes: the sort that spread out from South Rim Road for long stretches. It would be a thrill of a road anyway — a little more thrill than I need, actually — with its sporadic few spots where the separation between the road’s edge and an enormous cliff was a single white line.

At the end of the road is the trailhead of Warner Point Trail. From the parking lot, according to a sign, the walk is 1,373 yards to the overlook at Warner Point. Near the sign, I heard a couple of young German men obviously working out the distance in meters (you don’t need much German to understand that). No matter how few people are at a U.S. national park, some are going to be Germans.

I preferred to work out the distances in miles. That would be nearly eight-tenths of a mile, so roughly a 1.6 miles there and back. Or 2.5 km for Euro-types. Better shoes on, poles in hands, hats on heads and water in a small backpacks, we set off on the trail. Yuriko and a few other people (including the Germans) got to Warner Point before I did , but get there I did.

The walk was partly on this kind of trail.

With a fair amount of this kind of thing.

Along the way, an impressive collection of deadwood that the recent fires missed.

With views of the agricultural valley outside the park..

Finally, the end of the trail at Warner Point.

When I got there, Yuriko was waiting. Two other people were there (not the Germans; as athletic sorts, they’d come and gone). Soon they left. So we had the vista to ourselves for about 10 minutes, until another couple came along and we left. When we were quiet, the only sound was the Gunnison far below.

Mesa Verde National Park

Posted on October 1, 2025 by admin

In 800 years or so, will people come from significant distances to look at the ruins of my mid-century neighborhood? That doesn’t seem likely for any number of reasons. I’d be surprised if my own house survives until the next century, considering how good people are now at razing and rebuilding. But considering such a long span of time, there’s no way to know.

That’s the kind of thing I wonder about when facing structures of that age, especially those whose inhabitants are known mainly by the structures and other items they long ago cast off.

On September 17, we’d come to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park. To get close, you sign up and pay for a ranger-guided tour, which goes down stone stairs, along the edge of the cliff near the dwellings, and then back up some stone stairs (built by the CCC; does that even need to be said?). The elevation is 7,500 feet or so, but that didn’t cool things down that day. It was hot and sweaty.

A shot like that took some effort. We were hardly alone at Cliff Palace.

The ruins, which are most certainly near a cliff, are probably not a palace in the grand sense of a royal residence. More of a neighborhood, one of many in the vicinity, though the largest. Also, not quite as much of a ruin as it used to be. This is an image of the Cliff Palace from 1891, taken by Gustaf Nordenskiöld.

Not as long ago as all that, considering the age of the structures, but before TR inked the bill creating the national park, and back when you could help yourself to whatever was lying around, as the explorer (and photographer) Nordenskiöld apparently did, taking many items back home to Sweden. Eventually, the items made their way to Finland. A few were returned recently.

The ruins aren’t quite as ruined these days. The 20th century was a period of stabilization. Not as many artifacts got nicked either.

A kiva. The largest one at the Cliff Palace, I think. A religious site similar to others in the Southwest, such as at Bandelier National Monument (and now I know that was a kiva).

The canyon below the Cliff Palace. Imagine having to scramble up and down the walls regularly, to tend to fields or fetch water or escape from marauders.

Mesa Verde is of course much more than the Cliff Palace, since the park protects an estimated 5,000 archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. The main road through the park (built by the CCC, naturally) takes visitors to other overlooks. The dwellings of Spruce Tree House are sizable and also off limits these days, until the overhead rocks are stabilized.

More cliff dwellings. They are a little hard to see, but they are there.

On top of the main mesa, the road also goes through areas burned by wildfire at one time or another.

Flora always bounces back.

I had the vague idea that the inhabitants of the cliff dwellings disappeared mysteriously after about 1300, but visiting the park schooled me on more current thinking. They left, but there was nothing mysterious about it. Drought hit them, and hit them hard, so they migrated to find water and other sustenance. Persistent violence was probably a factor, too, as tends to happen in periods of strained resources. So it’s pretty clear that Ancestral Puebloans’ descendants even now live among the tribes along the Rio Grande, not too far away.

I also didn’t realize that the well-known cliff dwellings were only occupied for a relatively short time, in the grand scheme of native inhabitation: only about a century. Before that, most of the inhabitants lived atop the mesas. One such ruin is called Far View, which isn’t far from the road.

I heeded this signs and didn’t enter. But you can walk around the perimeter and imagine the passing centuries.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Posted on September 29, 2025 by admin

On September 15, KKTV in Colorado reported that Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain National Park was “briefly closed Sunday [the 14th] due to the wintry weather. This was first time snow and ice shut down the road since it reopened in May.”

We drove that road two days before, on the 12th. As the article notes, the “48-mile highway through the park is North America’s highest continuous paved road and connects the east and west sides of the park… [it] reaches 12,180 feet at its highest point. Alpine Visitor Center, where snowfall was caught on webcam, is located at about 11,796 feet.”

We’d spent the night before in Granby, Colorado, from the looks of it a growing town – complete with large rows of spanking-new townhouses – and from there entered the park from the western, or less crowded side. The eastern entrance near Estes Park, Colorado, has a more direct connection to the mobs coming from greater Denver.

RMNP is a place of majestic vistas. We came for that, and were not disappointed. But I was just as impressed by something we saw near the western entrance at a place called Holzwarth Historic Site, in the Kawuneeche Valley. A picturesque place.

It was the first place we stopped in the park, walking on a path through part of the valley. A small bridge crossed what looked like a creek.

A sign on the bridge informed us, however, that this was the Colorado River. A flabbergasting moment. I’d known that the Colorado rises in one of the remote parts of the park, but I didn’t know we were going to encounter the river – whose downstream will carve epic canyons and be dammed to the hilt for the water and power needs of millions of people – by crossing it on foot in a few seconds.

The Holzwarths ran a dude ranch on the site for much of the 20th century, before selling it to the Nature Conservancy, which eventually resulted in the area being added to the national park. A number of the dude ranch buildings still exist not far from the baby Colorado River.

From the valley Trail Ridge Road, which is also US 34, heads upward. A look back at the valley.

Soon you reach Milner Pass on the Continental Divide, crossing back to the Atlantic side; we’d crossed to the Pacific side at Berthoud Pass the day before outside the park, on the way to Granby.

From there, the road takes you above the tree line. By that elevation, the warmth down in the valley is just a memory, as brisk chilly winds blow. The air was still above freezing that day, but not by much.

From one of the several pullouts on the road, a path through fields of alpine tundra.

Been a long time since I’d seen any. Back in the Canadian Rockies? No, Alaska. Still, a while ago. We’d reached autumn above the tree line, with the tundra turning.

The road goes on.

Who first built the road? There was none when Rocky Mountain NP became a national park, with President Wilson’s signature on the bill. Improvements came later, and of course they were by the CCC.

At the Alpine Visitor Center, parking was hard but not impossible to find. The views are good from there, but if you want the better vistas, you climb some outdoor stairs. Roughly 200 feet of them.

The air was cold and there wasn’t enough of it. Or so it seemed. I took my hiking pole, put on a sweater and cap and started up. I could have bought a small can of oxygen at the gift shop, had I known about it. I saw a woman, clearly older than me, coming up the stairs as I was headed down, pausing to inhale vigorously from such a can.

Yuriko and Emi made it to the top before I did, but by taking a number of breaks, I managed to get to there myself. Just another thing I should have done 30 (40) years ago. But even then, I’d have been tired at the top.

It’s that extra five feet that leaves you gasping, I think. No matter, the view was worth the gasps. Entirely. The images, as usual for this kind of vista, barely convey the scene in its glory. This is going to be a persistent reality over the next few days’ posts.

Enough to make you burst out with a rendition of “Rocky Mountain High.” If you had the oxygen. I have to say I was glad to repair soon to a lower altitude, one below the tree line. From the Alpine Visitor Center, the road heads toward the eastern entrance to the park, a good many miles away and several thousand feet closer to sea level.

Before we left the parking lot, we saw a fox — guess that would be an alpine fox, pointy snout, pointy ears, billowing with orange and white fur — trot onto the parking lot, as if it had a car parked there. A young ranger, presumably used to the elevation, took chase. Not to catch the fox, which would have been impossible, but probably to prevent the animal from getting run over. Roadkill is one thing, but parking lot kill would have put a small dint in the scenic wonder all around. Anyway, the fox headed for the slopes.

Not only was the air better below tree line, fall foliage was well under way, something we haven’t gotten much of even now here in northern Illinois, though it won’t be long.

One down, three to go. One of the marvels of Colorado’s four national parks is how different each of them are from the others, as we would soon see for ourselves.

Elkhorn, Wisconsin

Posted on August 28, 2025 by admin

Labor Day weekend again? How does summer vanish so quickly? Back to posting on September 2.

Once upon a time, one of the many First National Banks of the world stood in downtown Elkhorn, Wisconsin, complete with a sturdy bank interior common at the time. As seen in a postcard from the early 20th century.

Go looking for the bank these days, and this is what you find.

Once a bank, now a pocket park. The view from the inside, looking back at the facade.

There were no signs to indicate how the park came to be. A less imaginative act would simply have been to raze the old building in its entirety and leave a weedy gap in the downtown streetscape, hoping for redevelopment that might never come.

Inside the park is a sundial, dedicated to the memory of one Eidola Renner (d. 1983) of the Elkhorn Garden Club. Ah, garden clubs. The term makes me think of Khigh Dhiegh.

This must be her. The sundial – whose gnomon is missing, so it can’t function for telling time – has been there since 1987, so I assume the park has been there at least that long, if not longer.

I arrived in Elkhorn on a warm day in early August, traveling by myself in southeastern Wisconsin. It wasn’t too hot for a stroll around the town’s municipal square, home to a “government center,” a mid-century box, but not the storied old courthouse that should be there.

There was a tank. How many tanks are loose in Wisconsin?

Well-tended buildings near the square.

Every town has one of these, it seems.

What is that?

Public notice of an antique alarm system, that’s what.

Not the first one I’ve seen. This one was made by the O.B. McClintock Co. of Minneapolis. “In 1901 O.B. McClintock came to Minneapolis and founded the American Bank Protection Company, which produced burglar alarm systems,” explains a site called Lavilo. “After his resignation in 1908, he opened the O.B. McClintock Company to ‘manufacture electrical chime and clock systems,’ which he sold to financial institutions all across the United States.”

Banks began telling the public the time quite a while ago (McClintock surely wasn’t the first). I’m of course old enough to remember dialing time and temperature, though I can’t remember which financial institution sponsored the service in ’70s San Antonio.

Elkhorn has a fine selection of downtown churches as well. Such as the First Congregational United Church of Christ.

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church.

St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Church.

Founded in 1841, back in Wisconsin Territory days, so “wilderness” was probably apt at the time.

Kenosha Walkabout, Featuring Franks’ Diner & Simmons Memorial Library

Posted on August 27, 2025 by admin

Always good to see their beaming faces.

The poster is on a window at Franks’ Diner, formerly an exterior window, but with an expansion of the diner many years ago, now facing the added section, where Ann and I had lunch on a late July Friday. Kenosha, home of Franks’, was another stop in our recent rambles around southeastern Wisconsin.

Finding Franks’ Diner was no serendipity. We’d been there, back in 2012. The Stooges, back in 1946. I’ll bet they were playing the nearby Kenosha Theater, which is still standing, but in need of restoration.

Not only is the 99-year-old Franks’ still there, it’s still dishing up dandy diner fare at popular prices. Back then, I wrote:

The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.

It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small room added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter.

That’s exactly the same as our July visit, except that people waited outside, since it was summer instead of winter and (of course) prices were higher. Once seated, I had the Garbage Plate. I’d skipped it last time, and I wasn’t about to miss it this time around.

2012: The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs.

The restaurant also supplies some reading material.

After lunch, we went a few blocks away and parked the car in the shade of large trees in Library Park. Ann waited in the car with the windows down – it was very warm, but not too warm for a few minutes of that – while I wandered around the immediate area, including a couple of streets of storefront retail in vintage structures.

Houses across the street from where we parked.

The nearby St. Matthews Episcopal Church.

The inevitable welcome mural. The 1970 Gremlin is an unusual touch. But they were made in Kenosha, so not that unusual.

At the edge of the park, a seated Lincoln. Sculptor Charles Niehaus (d. 1935) did the work. Just one of many that he did all over the place. The president has been sitting there since 1909, centennial of his birth, with restoration work done in more recent decades.

Nearby in the park, Kenosha’s Civil War memorial, called “Winged Victory” on electronic maps, a name that gets right to the point.

It’s Library Park because of the Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library, a branch of the Kenosha Public Library system, dominating its side of the park. It has a little more heft than most municipal branch libraries.

When it opened in 1900, the building formed Kenosha’s main library. Daniel Burnham designed it.

The Civil War veterans have their memorial outside. Great War vets are honored inside the library.

We’d happened on the Library Park Historic District, surrounding Library Park. The park itself goes back to the early years of Kenosha, when the land was a New England–style town commons. Forty-two properties, built from 1843 to 1930, form the district. A diner and an historic district: just the thing for a warm summer day stroll.

Downtown Waukesha

Posted on August 24, 2025 by admin

The other day I wondered how long it would take to count a million dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes a million times. That’s one of the dream images from “Minnie the Moocher.” Not just a dream, but an opium dream. After all, no sooner does Minnie learn to kick the gong around, does a vivid dream of wealth begin, all shiny and metallic, ending with:

She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes

And sat around and counted them all a million times

Let’s say half the dollar value is nickels, half dimes. That would be 5 million dimes and 10 million nickels. So 15 million individual coins. Let’s also say it takes a second to count each, just to keep it simple. That would be 15 million seconds, or 0.475 years (roughly, I shaved off a few places). Counting them a million times would thus be (roughly) 475,000 years.

Of course, if it’s an opium dream, the niceties of time and such don’t apply. Still, it sounds like a hellish task of a Sisyphean kind. But maybe it would be a heavenly task, if you have no sense of the passage of time.

I didn’t sit down to figure all that out until I was at my desk, but the question came out of nowhere during a short interstate drive just before the end of July, up in the southeast corner of Wisconsin. One destination that day, a Sunday, was downtown Waukesha, an outer suburb of Milwaukee, but a place with a distinct history of its own, where people came to take the waters once upon a time.

We spent some time near the five-pointed intersection of Main, Broadway and Grand, focal point of a handsome streetscape.

Now this is a set of buildings.

The Almont Building, whose original name was the Robinson Block.

“The core of the downtown, prior to 1856, consisted of freestanding wooden frame buildings, but a new era began after a massive fire nearly destroyed this northern section of Main Street,” the Waukesha County Historical Society & Museum says. “The Robinson Block was built in 1857 with fireproofing in mind and is the first Five Points building to use Waukesha limestone.”

The Nickell Building, as it looked recently, and long ago.

“Built by Addison J. Nickell, local businessman and jeweler, the first floor housed the U.S. Post Office from 1902-1914,” notes the WCHS&M. “The work of Waukesha architect C.C. Anderson, this Queen Anne displays a projecting oriel and corner turret capped by a domed roof: both are covered by pressed metal.”

Being mid-day, one bit of business to take care of: lunch. We soon found the friendly joint called Joey’s Diner.

Joey likes Betty.

Joey’s is next to an Italian restaurant, similarly casual, that I think was owned by the same fellow. He was everywhere at once all the time — running a restaurant is nothing if not busy, and he seemed to be running two — but toward the end of our meal, asked how it was. I answered enthusiastically to the positive about my simple but also delicious hamburger. He responded by giving us a slice of chocolate cake, on the house. Thanks, Joey.

The street has other (many other) examples of places found here and nowhere else.

Been a while since I’d seen a joke shop. Closed.

The last one might have been Uncle Fun in Chicago, which closed some years ago. Too bad about that, but at least Jest For Fun Joke Shop, which has been at this Waukesha location more than 40 years, is keeping the retail tradition alive.

Billie Creek Village

Posted on August 20, 2025 by admin

I don’t know whether it was a relic or a replica, but there it was, something we’ve all heard about, seen in drawings and as the stuff of metaphors: a dunce cap. I’d never actually seen one before that I remember, not as a physical object.

That is why you (I) visit such places as the open air museum Billie Creek Village in Parke County, Indiana. To be mildly surprised. Such as the time I encountered a can of White Star brand tomatoes with a hammer and sickle on it, or a Papua New Guinea battle shield sporting the Phantom, just to name two among many such little surprises.

The dunce cap was on one of the desks at Billie Creek’s one-room school house, used until the early 20th century, as usual for that kind of school.

Good old dunce caps. Sure, they go against the grain of modern thinking, antiquated as a one-room school, but we all can remember a few goofballs from our school days who deserved one, can’t we? As seen in a pic from the Library of Congress, dated ca. 1905, but with no information about where it might have been. Just a small school in the years before self-esteem was discovered.

The old school house at Billie Creek is one of 38 historic structures relocated from various parts of Parke County, Indiana, to about 70 acres west of Rockville on US 36. Originally opened in 1969, the place has had a series of owners and been through periods of abandonment, but since 2022 has been under management that seems to know what its doing.

That’s my thinking, anyway, since its refreshing informality perfectly suits the place. You go, you park your car, you wander in. No irritating timed tickets, no gouging entrance fee, no expensive yet mindless luxury goods and experiences that could be pretty much anywhere. Yet there is an economic model: Billie Village hosts events – one was going on when we visited around mid-day on a Sunday – and some of the buildings are also shops, and do sell luxury goods, in the sense that such handcrafts aren’t found in modern grocery or drug stores.

We supported the place by buying a few things, including (yes!) postcards. A few dozen other people were doing so by attending the event. I watched part of some sort of award ceremony as it happened at the village gazebo, and even asked one of the bystanders about what was going on, but couldn’t quite get the gist of it. The meeting seemed to be one of those Society of Creative Anachronism sorts of things, though not that specifically. Attendees wore fantasy- and history-adjacent costumes, mostly with that homemade vibe. One of those outings for adults who didn’t get enough playing pretend when they were kids, I guess. All well and good.

I hope that economic model keeps the place open, because one recipe for a good couple of hours on a hot weekend in July is visiting curious old buildings. Such as a couple of relocated churches.

One Catholic.

The other Baptist.

An early Parke County cabin.

The home of an Indiana governor, one Joseph A. Wright (d. 1867), in office 1849-57. A Rockville native son.

Here he is, just outside his house, in dour Hoosier mode.

As the Covered Bridge Capital of the Galaxy (or some slogan like that for Parke County), it’s no surprise that covered bridges can also been seen at Billie Creek.

A barn, weathered yet handsome.

Craft goods were for sale inside. So were books by a local author who was there, hawking them. He told me about the books, some sort of fantasy series, and I was curious enough about them to listen to him, but not enough to buy one, which I think left him a bit miffed. Such is the writer’s lot.

Behind the barn, goats.

I wasn’t able to test the notion that goats eat tin cans. But I already knew the answer: it’s a ridiculous myth, as this item in Goat Owner tells us.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History