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Monday, May 20, 2019

Family Vacay VIII: Day 4--from Marion, IL to Owensboro, KY

Last year on our summer vacation, we visited Anson, Texas, where my great-grandfather, Gilbert Nathaniel "N.G." Ferrell was elected sheriff in 1908 at the age of 48, three years after his seventh child, my grandmother, Ida Ferrell was born. N.G. died in Anson in 1939.

This year, we are visiting Williamson County, Illinois, where N. G. and his wife, Sadie, were themselves born (Ferrell on February 20, 1860, and Sadie in 1868).

N.G.'s grandfather William Ferrell, his grandmother Susannah Jaily Barnes, and their son Ezra--my grandmother's grandfather--moved to Williamson County in 1839.

William was born in Fairfax, Virginia. By the time he was 22, he lived with his family 300 miles to the south in Wake County (county seat: Raleigh) in North Carolina. There, he married Jaily Susannah Barnes.

In 1813 William enlisted in Colonel John Coffey's regiment in Andrew Jackson's army and fought Creeks who were seeking to recover some of their ancestral lands.

After Jackson's army demolished the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama, Jackson forced the Creeks to surrender half of Alabama and part of Southern Georgia. William later fought under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.

By 1860, William was a 71-year-old farmer and miner, living alone with his wife Jailie in Williamson County. In the summer of 1865, he helped organize the Marion Baptist Church, which he served as an elder. He died two years later, in 1867, which his grandson N.G. was 7 years old.

I've included a fuller account of what I've learned about Ezra and William in a separate post at emiliosdad.blogspot.com.

After we left the Ferrell Cemetery in Williamson County, we headed to the Athenaum in New Harmony, Indiana, where Welsh textile manufacturer Robert Owen invested his fortune in an effort to build a model community based on rational thinking, cooperation, and free education on the banks of the Wabash River in 1825.

Pablo's vision for Utopia: "A harmonious society where resources are split evenly: food - power - houses - e..."[?].

At the Athenaum, we rented a golf cart for an hour. Though it was expensive, I consider it to be one of the best decisions we made on the trip. We could have easily walked to all of the destinations we visited, but it was more fun to take the cart (even though Emilio fell out at one point).

Featured stop: Philip Johnson's open-air, non-denominational "Roofless Church," built in 1960, was commissioned by a descendent of Robert Owen to honor the inspiration provided by vision for New Harmony. The Church occupies a city block. Johnson believed that only one roof—the sky—could encompass all worshipping humanity.

The parabolic dome at one end of the Church was built in the form of an inverted rosebud, tying it to the New Harmony Community of Equals, whose symbol was the rose.

Under the dome: Jacques Lipchitz's sculpture "Descent of the Holy Spirit."

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, New Harmony failed to meet Owen's expectations because most of the 1,000 people Owen recruited to populate the community "were misfits who ate his rations, argued over government, and were unable to perform the menial tasks vital to such a community." As a consequence, "Farms and workshops lay idle."

When Owen abandoned New Harmony in 1828, five of his eight children decided to stay on, along with some of the scientists and teachers Owen had recruited. According to Britannica, they developed "one of the most notable pre-Civil War cultural centres in the United States."

The Harmony Way Bridge (built in 1830) across the Wabash between Illinois and Indiana has been closed since 2012, but this welcome sign still awaits visitors from Illinois..

We are a family that digs labyrinths, and New Harmony has two of them: one is granite; the other is shrubbery-based.. This shrubbery labyrinth in "was originally designed as a place for meditation and reflection by the Rappites, an ultra-religious German society, in the early 19th century." A "vow of celibacy ultimately ended the community’s hope for survival." That's a Rappite temple in the middle of the labyrinth.

Not visible in these photographs: the swarms of gnats that protect the labyrinth from pilgrims who are less than patient. Their presence is somewhat detectable in the facial expressions of the Ruiz Benton labyrinthers.

After we left New Harmony, we had dinner at Arazu on Main in Evansville, Indiana.

We didn't know what the kids would like, so we ordered too much food. And then we ate almost all of it.

This table is covered with winning dishes. My favorites: the artichoke dip, the bruschetta, the flatbread, and the potatoes.

Hello, Kentucky!

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Family Vacay VIII: Day 3--St. Louis

On Sunday morning, we headed to Forest Park, where we visited the Missouri History Museum and learned mostly about the 1904 World's Fair.

The World's Fair popularized ice cream cones. And Cotton Candy. And Dr. Pepper.

It also provided the backdrop for the 1944 movie classic Meet Me in St. Louis, featuring the popular song that helped promote the Fair.

Scott Joplin wrote "The Cascades" for the Fair, but it was played on the concourse and not a stage, because ragtime was considered too radical.

The 1904 Olympics were held in St. Louis in conjunction with the Fair. Almost all the athletes who participated in the Olympics were from the United States, among them: German-American gymnast George Eyser, who lost the bottom part of his left leg in a train accident. He wore a wooden prosthetic during the competitions--and won three gold medals.

Marathoner Thomas Hicks of Massachusetts took rat poison (strychnine) mixed with egg whites and brandy during the race to enhance his chances of winning. He came home with the gold.

Hicks wasn't the first to cross the finish line, though. That distinction belonged to Fred Lorz, who rode in the back of an automobile for 11 miles of the route and was celebrated as the champion until his "joke" was revealed.

The Fair featured several "villages" populated by "savages" whose "primitive" customs helped persuade many fair-goers that Western imperialism was morally justified.

Geronimo (above) was given a temporary release from imprisonment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma so that he could be included in the Apache village. He signed autographs for a fee.

In the Inuit villages, the native performers were required to wear representative fur coats throughout the summer.

During "Anthropology Days" at the Olympics, a group of "'savages' recruited from the fair's international villages competed in a variety of athletic feats--among them a greased-pole climb, 'ethnic' dancing, and mud slinging--for the amusement of Caucasian spectators."

The largest of the villages focused on the many people and cultures of the Philippine Islands. Twelve-hundred Filipinos were brought to St. Louis to populate the exhibit. Six years earlier, Filipino patriots launched a rebellion against Spain, which had dominated the country for 330 years. As Spain began to lose its grip on the colony, the United States "bought" it from them at a discount rate.

Over the next four years, 5,000 Americans and 200,000 Filipinos died fighting for control of the islands before the Filipinos finally surrendered. According to Robert Rydell, author of All the World's a Fair, the Filipino exhibit at the Fair was designed to silence critics of President Theodore Roosevelt's imperialism (Mark Twain was one of the most outspoken of these critics.) As Rydell explains, "People from the Philippines, who were said to be in various stages of civilization or savagery, were put on display [at the Fair] with all sorts of accoutrements demonstrating that they would be more or less willing workers in an American empire."

Elsewhere in the Museum we took pictures in front of one of the two models of "The Spirit of St Louis" built for Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. The plane in the Museum was the back-up. Lindbergh moved to St. Louis two years before he made the flight. I don't remember reading anything in the Museum about the anti-Semitic ideology he espoused in the years before World War II began.

Elsewhere in the Museum, I read about St. Louis's 1917 "race riot," which, like the Tulsa "race riot" of 1921, was more a "massacre" than a "riot."

"The Spirit of St. Louis" behind Pablo was one of two identical models designed for Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic. This is the one he didn't use.

After we left the Museum, we took a walk through Forest Park.

The kids wanted to rent a paddle boat, so Mari volunteered to accompany them while I climbed the hill to take photos of my hand in front of some of the paintings in the City Art Museum.

On the way up, I paused to take a photo of my feet enjoying not paddling a boat.

After we left the Museum, we headed to Burger King. Several weeks ago, I heard a story on NPR about how the St.Louis-area Burger Kings have started selling "Impossible Whoppers," which are entirely plant-based, but taste just like meat. Nina, Emilio, and Pablo have never tried meat (except for a few accidents).

I filmed the taste-testing event, which felt a little bit like documenting Amish teenagers on a Rumspringa. I wish I had thought to give them a taste of Dr. Pepper (they haven't ever had carbonated drinks, either).

After dinner, we headed to Williamson County, Illinois, birthplace of my great-grandfather's grandfather.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Family Vacay VIII: Day 2--Miami to St. Louis

Our first stop is the George Washington Carver National Historic Site in Diamond, Missouri, which is just outside Joplin.

Carver was born into slavery here in the 1860s.

When George was very young, he and his mother were kidnapped. The man Moses Carver hired to hunt them down brought George back, but George never saw his mother again.

George Washington Carver died in 1943. He is buried at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Moses Carver and his wife, the slave owners who raised George, are buried in this cemetery. .

After the Civil War, George left the Carvers' home to seek an education when he was 10-12 years old--about the age that our kids are this summer.

Carver supported himself by working as a servant, a hotel cook, a laundryman, and a farm labourer. In 1879, he witnessed a lynching in Fort Scott, Kansas that haunted him for the rest of his days.

Carver was working as a farmhand in Minneapolis, Kansas when he finished high school in his late 20s. He moved to Iowa to study art and then transferred to Iowa State Agricultural College (later Iowa State University), where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a master of science degree in 1896.

When George returned to the visit the Carvers in later years, they lived in this house, which was built in 1881. Over the course of our trip, Mari read us excerpts from a 2015 biography of Carver by Christina Vella. She recommends it.

Our next stop was the Polymath Educational Cafe in Marshfield, Missouri. As I remembered it, the cafe was only open to 2 pm on Saturdays. When I realized we would just make it before closing, I called to confirm that we would be able to eat there if we arrived shortly before 2. The owner said "sure." It was only after we arrived that we realized that the Polymath Educational Cafe actually closes at 1 pm on Saturdays. She stayed open an extra hour to offer us a vegetarian feast.

After we checked in to our hotel in downtown St. Louis, we headed to the City Museum, which is open until midnight on Saturday night. The "Museum"--which was highly recommended to us by Lisa, Norah and Melissa--did not disappoint.

All we knew going in was that it had a 10-story slide.

I can now report that 80% of the Museum is a multi-story indoor/outdoor playground featuring slides, tunnels and mazes.

That's Nina in the photo above, demonstrating impressive bravery by climbing through a sky cage-tunnel several stories above the ground.

Describing the Museum as a playground undersells the imaginative work that went into its construction. Notice the school bus peering over the corner of the building in the photo above. The Museum is also a playground for the eyes.

Pablo and Emilio exited one side of the basement and emerged some minutes later from underneath the jaw of a giant white cave whale.

Later, Emilio and Nina appeared briefly among the stalagtites in one of the cage-tunnel's arteries.

The whale's tongue and throat provide one entry way into the cavern maze.

Pablo has always been a very flexible boy.

Part of the 15% of the museum that was not playground included a modern art exhibit that featured a sculpture by KAWS (not pictured here).

The museum pizza was surprisingly tasty.

Pablo and I didn't discover the dragon's lair until after I saw it in on a postcard in the bookstore on our first attempt to exit the building. We went back in to find it hidden in the cavern maze.

Our decision to visit on a Saturday night was a wise one. They say lines can be quite long during the day, but we did not encounter any during our visit. We left shortly before 11 p.m.

Friday, May 17, 2019

Family Vacay VIII: Day 1--Ada to Miami

Family Vacay Eight is planned to start as soon as Mari gets home from school on Friday--which is also the last school day for the kids--but we're not entirely ready to go as soon as we'd like.

We are happy to get some miles under us, even though we don't quite make it out of Oklahoma before night falls.

For the record, destinations 1 through 7 were:
One (2012): Arkansas;
Two ('13): Santa Fe/Glorieta;
Three ('14): New Mexico/Colorado/Kansas;
Four ('15): Louisiana/Mississippi/Tennessee;
Five ('16): South Dakota/Montana;
Six ('17): Europe;
Seven ('18): Los Angeles/Grand Canyon.

Eight: This year, our destination is the city where Nina, Pabi and Emi were born. Along the way, we'll add three new states to the kids' "been there" list.