Re-Creation and Recreation

Thrilled that cousin Pam was able to play with us today, we turned the tables on her when she asked what we wanted to see.  Since she lives in the DC area, Pam frequently serves as the congenial local tour guide to family and friends who visit the nation's capitol.  All too often, she probably sees the same sights over and over and cheerfully goes back when the next visitor wants to make the pilgrimage.  Since our two-week stay will provide ample opportunity to see the popular spots, we asked Pam where she would like to go.

As an area we had regretted missing on our Fredericksburg visit, Pam's choice of Chancellorsville was perfect.  We were surprised to learn today that Chancellorsville was not actually a town but a large brick house in the wilderness that served as a crossroads country inn and home.  Amassing his forces at the site before Confederates confronted them, Union General Hooker claimed the inn as his headquarters and hospital.  As the battle raged around them, owner Sue Chancellor and her six children took refuge in the basement of their home for four days until artillery shells set the house on fire and forced evacuation.  Union troops rescued the Chancellor family but numerous wounded soldiers died in the fire.
     
Occurring in the third year of an increasingly bloody war, Chancellorsville was one of the deadliest battles of the Civil War.  (Only Gettysburg and Chickamauga produced more casualties).  In April, 1863, a Union army of 134,000 assembled around the inn to face Robert E. Lee's dwindling army of 60,000.  Against an overwhelming Federal force, the Confederates counted on the audacity and military acumen of the fabled partnership between Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  Though their daring strategies achieved Lee's greatest victory, Jackson was wounded by friendly fire in the chaos.  Eight days later, when the general died of complications from pneumonia, Lee compared the loss to "losing my right arm," a portent proved accurate as Lee never again experienced military success at the same level.
     

Stonewall Jackson Shrine

Today we drove the 27-mile route of Jackson's ambulance from the battlefield to a local plantation where Jackson was transported to recover from his injury. The plantation office which served as his infirmary is all that remains of the once grand estate.  The small outbuilding has been preserved as it was when Jackson was taken there.  When the shrine is not open to visitors, windows provide a view into the sickroom still housing the bed on which the general died.
     
A poignant exhibit at the National Park Service's Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitors Center relates a personal story to illustrate how battle casualties shattered the lives of average families.  Married in 1859, Pennsylvanians John and Almira Patterson settled near Pittsburgh, where they had three children in the ensuing four years. An engineer by training, Patterson was a dutiful patriot who followed in the footsteps of ancestral Revolutionary War veterans and enlisted to fight for the preservation of the Union.
       
Wounded in combat in 1862, Patterson survived numerous other battles until Chancellorsville, where he was killed when a bullet struck his head. At home in Pennsylvania, Almira received news of his fate. With no job skills to support herself and her children, the widow was soon forced to sell the family home and move into a single room where she raised her fatherless children on a widow's pension.
     
The Pattersons' story is movingly told through photographs, excerpts from letters, and personal memorabilia, including a valentine sent to Patterson by his children and the rare wooden headboard that marked his temporary wartime burial place. This is the type of personal exhibit missing at Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy, where an overzealous effort to control bias has produced a sterile presentation of a heart-wrenching era.
     
After absorbing all that history, we returned to the excellent Foode in Fredericksburg for lunch before heading out on a trail for some letterboxing.  Though Pam bemoaned her lack of ability to follow the clues to a letterbox, we found her protestations just a bit disingenuous when she located four of the six boxes we found.
     

Pam locates yet another box

Thanks to Pam for taking the day to hike and hunt and historicate with us.  As always, the journey was so much more fun with her along for the ride.

From one Battle to Another

   
In Fredericksburg this morning, we went by the battlefield visitor center and picked up some maps and brochures to inform our driving tour of the battlefield park.  Ken made the unfortunate mistake of answering "no" when the eager volunteer asked him if he knew anything about the battles that took place in and around Fredericksburg.  Fifteen minutes and a thorough briefing later, we escaped with a well-marked map to ensure we didn't miss the site of even one minor skirmish.
   
Strategically situated midway between the wartime capitols of Washington and Richmond, Fredericksburg was highly prized by both sides and saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Civil War.  Over a period of 18 months, four major battles were fought in the area at a cost of more than 105,000 casualties.  The city itself wasn't spared either, sustaining significant property and structural damage from the bombardment.
   
From the visitor center (exhibit pictured above), we went in search of a couple of letterboxes and then on a self-guided walking tour of the historic downtown area, where we saw numerous sites significant in the life of George Washington, who had a close association with Fredericksburg.  At age six, Washington moved with his family to Ferry Farm just across the Rappahannock River, where he remained until his late teens.
   

Ferry Farm

The Washington home no longer exists on the farm, nor did we see a single cherry tree, the legendary victim of George Washington's childhood mischief.  Ferry Farm is also the location where the young Washington was said to have thrown a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River.  Upon his father's death, George inherited Ferry Farm while his older brother Lawrence was granted a plantation on the Potomac River named Mount Vernon, a property George acquired when Lawrence died.
   
Washington's mother, Mary Ball Washington, also retains quite a presence in Fredericksburg, where she lived from 1772 until her death in 1789 in a home purchased for her by George.  Though we did not have time to visit it, the Mary Washington home is operated as a historic museum and is said to house antique furnishings belonging to the family.
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History on the Blur

On our way to Fredericksburg today, we decided to pause in Richmond to catch a couple of places we missed when we were there over the weekend.  Our first stop was the historic St. John's Church, the site of a famous speech.

Stratford Hall, the Lee family home

George Washington birthplace site

James Monroe birthplace monument

A Knack for Anachronism

Having heard rave reviews of Colonial Williamsburg for so many years, I felt we had to include it on our history tour.  Ken wasn't so sure.  "It's a tourist town," he asserted.

"It's living history!"  I countered.

"There are amusement parks there," he warned.

"But there are interpreters in period costume," I argued.  "It'll be like going back to colonial days."

"It's not like it's run by the National Park Service.  It's a tourist attraction," he cautioned.

 Finally we agreed that we had to see for ourselves before we eliminated a location with the web address www.history.org from our journey up the history highway.  And now we know.  It's a tourist town.

Yesterday afternoon we arrived in Williamsburg and hot-footed it over to the section called Colonial Williamsburg.  In this historic district, car traffic was appropriately prohibited and while we waited in line at the ticket booth we could see hundreds of tourists milling about in the village.  When it was finally our turn with the ticket seller, we asked why the nearly $40 admission fee.  She gushed about the opportunity to step into the village exactly as it was in the days when Patrick Henry served as governor in 1776, to watch craftsmen at work using colonial methods, and to hear colonials express their feelings about the British monarchy.  Adept at salesmanship, she was convincing enough that we forked over $76 for two one-day passes. 
     
As soon as we entered this authentic village, we marveled that the streets were paved with asphalt.  Who knew Williamsburg was such an advanced colonial town?  In the rest of the country, asphalt wasn't used to pave roads until the late 1800s. Electrical conduit snaked up the trunks of numerous trees, providing power to large light fixtures in the trees.  Again, remarkable developments for an authentic colonial town.
     
We needn't continue with the list of anachronisms, but there were plenty, including women wearing knee breeches and driving carriages.  The actors in period costume that we encountered were only in character when they were actively performing.  Maybe we've been to one Renaissance festival too many where the outgoing performers act as if they stepped out of the Middle Ages and want to carry you back there with them, but we fully expected that the staff of Colonial Williamsburg interpreters would remain in role so that guests might suspend disbelief and imagine they were actually speaking with a colonial, not just someone wearing a costume.  We were wrong.  Most of the actors we saw were just standing around idly and interacted only when visitors initiated it.

Just a handful of the 500 buildings in the village were accessible to the public, and many of those which were open served as shops.  It was a bit like a colonial version of the nearby outlet mall.  Though ticket prices didn't reflect it, perhaps late March is part of the off-season in Colonial Williamsburg because very few artisans were demonstrating their crafts.  Actually all we saw were a few ladies sitting on the steps embroidering and another pair weaving reed baskets.

The one dramatization we saw that approached fulfillment of the promised authenticity was a tour of the governor's palace.  Treating us as guests who would be attending an upcoming ball at the mansion, the guide provided insight into colonial life at the home of the British royal governor in the days leading to the revolution.
     

Governor's Palace

Perhaps the recreated village (only a few of the buildings are original) is an effective teaching tool for school kids, but we found it overpriced, pseudo-authentic, and decidedly commercial.  In hindsight, the admission fee we paid bought us only the 25-minute tour of the governor's mansion and access to a few lectures about colonial life by costumed speakers.  We would have obtained better value if we had just wandered the village for free.

Jamestown and Yorktown
Our experiences at Jamestown and Yorktown today were somewhat better, although anachronisms abounded at both places.  Perhaps because they haven't been given quite the hype of Williamsburg and the combined price for both places was half the cost of the Williamsburg tickets, we didn't experience quite the letdown at these smaller sites.  Admittedly the blonde Powhatan squaw with her hair clipped up in a contemporary barrette was a bit of a jolt, but after W'burg, we were getting accustomed to our apparent ignorance about historical details.
   
What we found most interesting and genuinely historical was the archaeological dig located at the original site of Jamestown and operated by the National Park Service.  At the more commercial "living history" Jamestown Settlement, with its recreated Powhatan village, James fort and replica ships, we saw many school groups, however, and perhaps this is the best use of these venues.
     
Yorktown also had its commercial side at the Yorktown Victory Center, with a recreated military camp staffed by costumed interpreters.  More compelling to us was the Yorktown Battlefield under the auspices of the NPS. 

With the critical role they played in our nation's history, these areas are certainly worth seeing.  The hundreds of thousands of visitors to the commercial sites annually attest to the popularity of that type of infotainment.  We found the authenticity of the genuine locations more to our liking.

QUOTE OF THE DAY  
"This reminds me of Disney World, except there they take you for a ride.  Here they just take you for a walk."    (Ken, about Colonial Williamsburg)

Hollywood Stars

We couldn't leave Richmond without a visit to the famed Hollywood Cemetery.  Named for its profusion of holly trees, this noted burial ground overlooking the James River opened in 1849 and is the final resting place for two U.S. Presidents, the only Confederate President, 22 Confederate generals, and more than 18,000 Confederate soldiers.  Our first stop was the cemetery office near the entrance where we obtained a beautiful, full-color map for $1 with a driving tour of noted locations.  A blue line painted along the edge of the road helps visitors follow the route.

In 1867, the women of the Hollywood Memorial Association raised $25,000 to erect Richmond's first memorial to the enlisted men who died for the Confederate cause.  The 90-foot pyramid of James River granite (pictured above) was constructed without mortar.  Legend has it that the crane used in the monument's construction was inadequate to set the capstone.  When no one responded to the call for men to climb the pyramid and manually guide the capstone into place, a local prisoner volunteered and was given his freedom after he succeeded.    

Richmond is for History Lovers

     
As the former capital of the Confederacy and the site of Patrick Henry's revolutionary "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, Richmond abounds in historical sites.  Our first stop this morning was the Virginia monument to the veterans who served in World War I.

L to R:  Cooper's hawk, great horned owl, red-tailed hawk, bald eagle

Lee's humble headquarters tent

Maymont mansion

Where the Nation Reunited

For the first time in a week, we awoke to rain this morning in Lynchburg. But Appomattox was only 20 miles away, and since we had taken a circuitous route to Richmond for the purpose of visiting this historic spot (and we had our rain gear along), a little precipitation would not deter us from our mission.
     

Clover Hill Tavern (reconstructed)

McLean House (reconstructed)

Surrender Ceremony

A Ton of Boxing Fun

     
As we ventured north on US-29 this morning, we were buzzing with excitement.  After finishing yesterday with 1,993 letterbox finds, we were pretty confident that F-2,000 would happen today.
     
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Despair
Despair who?
Despair tire is flat.
     
No, no, we didn't have a flat tire.  That's just a free knock knock joke that came with the clue to our first box of the day, planted fittingly enough by a boxer called Flat Tire.  Six more to go...
     
After correcting a false start on the wrong trail, we still hit a snag in Danville, Virginia, when we couldn't find the location of the next box we searched for in Angler's Park (pictured above).  Two miles of walking and an hour later, we were still at F-1,994.  Our efforts in the little town of Altavista didn't fare any better.  Zero for two, when both turned up missing.
     
Our bravado was wavering as we arrived in Lynchburg.  Luckily for us, Lynchburg seems to be a hotbed of letterboxing with more than 90 boxes listed in this city of 75,000.  "If we can't make it here..." I sang as we renewed our search.  Two boxes were said to be hidden near the "LU Monogram."  The what? 
     

Liberty University's overbearing hillside monogram

Our confusion was banished when we saw the 500-foot Liberty University monogram dominating the top of Liberty Mountain near the campus.  After we tracked down the route to the top, we soon found ourselves at F-1,996.  Maybe this history would be made today, after all.
     
Two highly rated letterboxes by the creative North Carolina planter Wee 3 looked like good candidates, so we made our way to the former home of Anne Spencer, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance.  In addition to her successful career as a writer, Spencer committed great energy to the civil rights movement.  In her Pierce Street home, she entertained such notables as George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and W.E.B. DuBois.
     

Spencer garden

Somehow, Spencer also found time to indulge her passion for gardening. And what better place to plant a letterbox than in a beautiful garden?  Except that when we arrived at the hiding spot, the ivy that was supposed to be concealing the box had all been removed, and apparently the box had also.
      
Still stuck at F-1,996, we found the other Wee 3 box we were seeking at a local park, but when we opened it to stamp in, we discovered that someone had removed the contents and returned the container to its designated spot, something we had never seen before.  Both the afternoon and our enthusiasm were about depleted, and it was beginning to look as if tomorrow might be our momentous day, but we decided to take one more stab at 2,000 on the grounds of Spring Hill Cemetery.
     

Spring Hill Cemetery

Established in 1852, Spring Hill Cemetery became a center of action during the Battle of Lynchburg in 1864.  General Jubal Early, the Confederate commander, led Southern forces to victory from his command post in the southwest corner of the cemetery.  When he died thirty years later, then retired General Early was buried near the spot where his headquarters had been.

Things were much quieter there today than on that tumultuous day of conflict.  So quiet, in fact, that before we knew it, we had found one, two, three, four letterboxes.  F-2,000 at last.  And fittingly, the image in box #2,000 was a dog wearing a party hat ready to help us celebrate.  He even had a teeny tiny flask of champagne.  OK, there was no champagne, but he was wearing the party hat.

Now that we've made a little personal history, it's back to the history highway tomorrow as we visit Appomattox on our way to Richmond.

View from the LU Monogram

Best Dog Sign of the Day (Angler's Park, Danville, VA)

Anne Spencer Garden

Weaving Family Ties

Charlotte, NC to Greensboro, NC

As we love to do when traveling, we grabbed the opportunity to visit family members for the last couple of days.  In Charlotte, we spent an interesting day and a half with Ken's mother, Erika.
     


Though we know better than to publish a lady's age, suffice it to say, she has observed many changes in her lifetime.  She was born ten weeks after the 19th Amendment won approval, guaranteeing women's suffrage, and two months after the National Football League was founded.  Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, died when Erika was two years old, and now she communicates via e-mail.
     
We mustered up the courage to play a game of Rummikub with her, even though we can usually anticipate the outcome.  She calculates and maneuvers and strategizes until suddenly she has laid her last tile and the game is over, just when we thought we might have a chance.  And, as happens so often, this time she won again.
     

Hard to win against the Rummikub master

Leaving Charlotte, we drove to Greensboro to interrupt the weekly routine of Ken's sister Marion, her daughter Heather, and granddaughter Emma.  While our car went through a routine service at the local Acura dealer, Marion graciously swept us up and took us to lunch at a legendary North Carolina Triad restaurant.  Returning us to the service department just as our car was released,  she was off to pick up Emma from school and drive her to a piano lesson. Later we all met at Marion's for some tasty Thai take-out and a tad of talking time together.  Tomorrow we'll move on to Lynchburg, Virginia, on our way to Richmond.
     
ROAD NOISE

Letterboxing to the Max

Asheville, NC to Charlotte, NC 
     
Today we focused on a bit of letterboxing history.  After a restful night at Asheville's hospitable Homewood Suites, we visited Carrier Park to check on our oldest letterbox, Sister's Sixty.  Planted in December, 2008, when we celebrated sister Jeanne's 60th birthday in Asheville, this is also our busiest letterbox, having logged more than 60 finds.  It was time for us to revisit the box and conduct routine maintenance.
     
Sister's Sixty was planted on the banks of the French Broad River, concealed about three feet from the ground in a hollow tree next to a tall healthy tree on a walking trail.  As we approached that spot today, we were dismayed to discover that the host tree (to the right of the large tree in the photo above) had been hacked down to an 8-inch stump with sucker branches extending from it.
     

No wonder a find hadn't been reported on the letterbox since October of last year.  I was ready to pack up my disappointment and move on to our next destination, but Ken insisted on scouring the hollow stump, just in case.  And there it was!  Alive and well and in perfect condition, saved by some good samaritan.
     

Pisgah National Forest

Relieved that our historical box was intact, we drove west on I-40 toward a gravel road in the Pisgah National Forest.  We were in search of Max Patch.  Wikipedia says Max Patch is a bald mountain on the North Carolina-Tennessee border known for its 360° views.  It's a spot well known to Appalachian Trail hikers because the trail was relocated to cross over the mountain.
     
But our quest was for a letterbox named Max Patch.  In the April 1998 issue of Smithsonian magazine, writer Chris Granstrom described the activities of a group of hardy and intrepid British hikers who loved to hide and search for rubber stamps on the stark English moors.  Within weeks, his story, "They Live and Breathe Letterboxing", inspired the beginning of the United States letterboxing movement.
     
Placed on the mountain on April 26, 1998, by a member of the Sewanee (TN) Orienteering Society, the Max Patch letterbox is widely acknowledged to be the earliest letterbox in the United States.  An estimated 200,000 additional boxes have been planted since then, but none can match the allure of that first box.
     

Latest iteration of the original U.S. letterbox

Even though the container and the stamp and the logbook have been replaced at various times, Max Patch still beckons to boxers who want to share in this little piece of letterboxing history.  This legendary American original had been on our list for some time, and we figured there was no better time to find it than on this history hunting tour.  And what a thrill that moment gave us.
     
Now we have our sights set on box #2, planted in Bristol, Vermont, on April 30, 1998.
     
DAILY STATS

• Miles driven:  270
• Weather:  63° to 84°, clear to rainy 
• States today:  1 (NC)
• States this year:  12 (only 36 to go!) 
• Letterboxes found:  2
• Hairpin turns on NC-63:  87

Coming Through

Williamsburg, KY to Asheville, NC After locating a couple of letterboxes in Williamsburg, we meandered along KY-92 toward the Cumberland Gap.  Through valleys dwarfed by the surrounding mountains, hardscrabble houses teetered on the banks of the Cumberland River, reminding us that 29 of the nation's 100 poorest counties are located in eastern Kentucky.
    

Arriving at the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in the early afternoon, we stopped at the visitor center, where we learned a lot about this convenient geographical feature which played such a prominent role in the expansion of the American colonies westward.  Extending 150 miles wide from Canada to Alabama, the Appalachian Mountains presented a daunting obstacle to early settlers who yearned to move west.
    
Thanks to the efforts of surveyor Thomas Walker in 1750, European settlers discovered what herds of bison and parties of Cherokee and Shawnee natives had known for hundreds of years— a gap leading to the rich Ohio River bottomlands.  As the first Englishman to document his exploration of the area, Walker claimed naming rights and designated the cleft Cumberland Gap in honor of England's Duke of Cumberland, a military hero.
     

Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap (image from National Park Service)

After a 1775 treaty secured a large portion of present-day Kentucky from the Cherokee, Daniel Boone, a renowned hunter familiar with the area, was hired by colonial officials to blaze a trail west.  With a party of about 30 workers, Boone marked a path through the gap.
     
Eager settlers flooded into the Ohio Valley on this trail, which became known as the Wilderness Road.  By 1810, more than 300,000 pioneers had migrated westward by way of Boone's artery to the Kaintuck Territory.  Although a major highway was paved through the gap many years later, preservation efforts succeeded in rerouting US-25E through a Cumberland Gap tunnel and the gap was restored to its 1810 condition.
     

Cumberland Gap in 2012

As we hiked through the gap in our comfortable hiking boots, carrying our bottled water and cell phones, and knowing our automobile was nearby, we couldn't help marveling at the courage and fortitude of those who packed up all their belongings and set out on this journey of hundreds of miles on foot, not knowing what awaited them. Our hike led us only as far as the Tri-State Peak where the borders of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia meet. 
     

3 states ahead

The round trip to the summit was a mere 2.5 miles with an elevation gain of 700 feet, the return trip being considerably more relaxed than the uphill climb.  Views from the top provided suitable rewards, and we took the obligatory photos of ourselves spanning three states at the commemorative gazebo.