Black Monday in 1360

On "Black Monday" in 1360, a hail storm killed an estimated 1,000 English soldiers in Chartres, France. The largest hailstone recorded in modern times was in Aurora, Nebraska; it was seven inches in diameter, about the size of a soccer ball. Hail typically falls at about 100 miles per hour.

These facts now seem relevant because I weathered my own personal hail storm in Eatonton, Georgia!

This photo shows what the weather looked like about two hours before my storm.

This weather shows what the weather was like two hours later!

As soon as the hail storm finished I went out to the parking lot to check on my rig. Everything seemed fine. The wind and lighting continued to rage another hour or so, then all was peaceful.

The next day was a beautiful spring day. Here i am parked at Andalusia near Milledgeville. When I looked more closely I could see several little dents in the hood of the car!

Since that day I learned that I was very fortunate because hail can smash car windows and do severe damage just like it did back in 1360.

Where you come from is gone

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it." Flannery O 'Connor

Like this observation, O'Connor's stories are unique and unexpected. I am a fan of O'Connor's short stories and I was eager to see the places in Georgia that influenced her writing, especially the farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, named Andalusia. This picturesque 544 acre farm served as inspiration for several of her stories.

Her stories include misfits and murderers, thieves, illiterates and prophets. Her voice is now recognized as one of the most original in American fiction.

"Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic.

After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 at the age of 29 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She died in the summer of 1964 at the age of thirty-nine."

On the front of the house is a great screened-in porch with a set of white wicker rocking chairs that look out to white oaks, magnolias, hickories and pines. At the bottom of the hill is a large pond.

The house interior is now very close to the way it looked when Flannery lived there.

Behind the house are pecan trees and cedars as well as a place where peacocks are kept.

She wrote to a friend,"I used to say I wanted so many of them [peacocks] that every time I went out the door I stepped on one. Now every time I go out the door one steps on me."

Just a few miles up the road is the Georgia College in Milledgeville where she attended and which now features a special room in her honor.

Flannery with her mother.

I walked to the other side of this exquisite town from the College to visit Flannery's grave in Memory Hill Cemetery. The few tokens of respect left at her gravesite are testament to the ongoing relevance of her writing to her fans.

Now I have seen everything.

Alice Walker, born 1944, is a contemporary Pulitzer Prize-winning writer best known for her novel, The Color Purple which was adapted into a film and musical.

“One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker are both from Georgia; a generation apart, their birthplaces are only a few miles apart. O'Connor, an only child, came from a privileged family while Walker was the youngest of eight children was born to a father who earned $300/year as a sharecropping farmer.

This is the church Alice attended down the road from her home. The red sign in front is an appeal to save the building.

No parking around here in Alice's old neighborhood; I just pulled off the road when I finally located the area.

"Living under Jim Crow laws, Walker's parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner said to her mother that black people had 'no need for education." Minnie Lou Walker said . . . Don't you ever come around here again talking about how my children don't need to learn how to read and write." Her mother enrolled Alice in school at the age of four.

In 1952 Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye. Because the family had no car her parents could not immediately take her to a hospital for treatment. By the time they reached a doctor a week later she had become permanently blind in that eye.

Later Alice became valedictorian of her senior class and attended Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship.

When Alice left for college, her mother gave her a suitcase, a sewing machine and a typewriter. Minnie Walker told her daughter the suitcase was for independence, the sewing machine for self-sufficiency and the typewriter was for creativity.

All of the marked sites for Alice Walker are within about a mile along Wards Chapel Road outside of Eatonton, Georgia. The family graveyard is along the road also.

There is only a marker near the spot where Alice grew up.
It was moving to experience evidence of this accomplished writer's humble beginnings.

Walker's works primarily focus on family, community, culture and strength.

Athens . . . Where's the Parthenon?

Is that it?

Well, no, it's a performing arts space on the University of Georgia campus.

Is that it?

Hmm, the Garden Club building at the Botanical Gardens!

Guess what, banks, houses, public buildings, private buildings too, but especially the post office have neo-classical architecture in Athens, Georgia, resembling the real Athens Parthenon in Greece. And it is lovely.

Athens is located an hour northeast of Atlanta. I had read about the livability of this city and decided to try it out.

 

The 313 acres of the Georgia State Botanical Garden of Georgia is dedicated to indigenous flora and fauna; it is the place where I found the Garden Club, above, and beautiful children's sculptures, below. Too bad I was a few weeks early for spring, as you can see in the background.

I went to a program of storytellers at a small theater venue downtown, The Melting Point. The program reminded me of This American Life on Public Radio. Eight different people had prepared their true stories on the theme of "Saved". I enjoyed every one. This was the tenth show that had been produced with storytellers and I was fortunate to be in town for it. I was sitting by people in the audience who were just as entertaining and interesting as the people on the stage. Everyone seemed to like to talk and be very social. It was a memorable evening.

 

The Art Museum at the University of Georgia was very interesting primarily because I had a fabulous docent all to myself. Who knew? She was a recent retiree from Athens who loves art and made the collection come alive. No photos allowed inside, this is an outside sculpture made of old tires.

Is this the Parthenon?

No, it turns out to be an old plantation house that now hosts events like weddings.

Would you want to be married in this old house?

This is the sign in front of the house, in case you are interested.

At Sears, shopping for a new lawn mower

Guess what movie I saw in Athens?

Yes, Athens was so great. I loved being here.

Remains of the real McCoy -- in Athens, Greece, completed in 432 BC.

Elvis at the Fox

If you were a teenager in Atlanta, GA in the 1950's, you might have passed by this woman with the umbrella on the way to buy your ticket to see Elvis at the fabulous Fox.

The Preservation Atlanta folks were offering free tours around historical Atlanta and I came to this one-time Shriner's headquarters built in the late 1920s. "It was a beautifully outlandish, opulent, and grandiose monument during the excesses of the jazz age. The mosque-like structure was complete with minarets, onion domes, and an interior decor even more lavish than its facade."

I am standing in the sheltered entrace to the theater in a line with lots of friendly people mostly from Atlanta.

Inside, this is the "secret" room inside the Yaarab Temple Shrine Mosque where non-members or women must never tread.

The lobby. "No space, furniture, or hardware escaped the gilt, tile or geometric designs. Men's and Ladies' Lounges, broom closets, and telephone booths were all emblazoned with intricate plaster, bronze, and painted detail."

"Entering the huge auditorium . . . visitors encounter an indoor Arabian courtyard with a sky full of flickering stars and magically drifting clouds, a striped canopy overhanging the balcony, stage curtains depict moques and Moorish rulers in hand sewn sequins."

It was made to look like a Moorish palace courtyard, and the architect's imagination took flight. Sitting in this auditorium I felt as though I were outside in Granada on a perfect summer night.

Lovely seats with the Fox logo! "Construction costs threatened the mosque from the start, so the Shriners negotiated a deal with movie mogul William Fox who was building movie palaces in Detroit, St. Louis, Brooklyn, and San Francisco."

Check out all the Moorish architectural designs -- very reminiscent of southern Spain where the Moors reigned from several hundred years.

This interesting place was great fun to see. Wish I had seen Elvis perform there!

Georgia: Victorian and Native American

I like beautiful libraries and this is one!

The Mary Willis Library was the first free public library in the state of Georgia in 1889. The free library was a revolutionary concept at the time when users were charged a subscription fee.

In the town of Washington, Georgia, it was built by Dr. Willis in memory of his daughter who is remembered in the Tiffany glass window.

A noted Atlanta architect designed the library in the Queen Anne style and it cost $15,000 to
construct.

There's Mary, forever young, in the stained glass window. The room inside was very inviting.

This is the Madison, Georgia, Courthouse, built in 1905 and still used as it was intended. Madison, is another antebellum town; it was voted prettiest small town in America in 2001 by a travel magazine and I might have to agree.

The Indian Rock Eagle Site is near Eatonton, Georgia. Constructed about 2,000 years ago, it was built up of thousands of pieces of quartzite laid in the mounded shape of an eagle.

This is the path to it with an observation tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

A fence is constructed around the Mound to protect it. I climbed the stairs to the top of the observation tower so I could see the flying eagle on the ground.

The bird is 102 ft. long from head to tail and 120 ft. wide from wing tip to wing tip. What prompted the early inhabitants of middle Georgia, who lived long before the rise of the Creek and Cherokee cultures, to build massive effigy mounds is a mystery; they appear to hold ceremonial significance.
There are two other sites in this area that I did not visit, with ancient bird shapes.

I liked the experience of being in the silence of the forest contemplating the significance of the eagle effigy on the ground.

Bulloch Hall

"Much can be done by law towards putting women on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with man including the right to vote, the right to hold and use property, and the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as the man. Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly."

From 'An Autobiography'
by Theodore Roosevelt

Now, there's a man ahead of his time.


March 7, 2013

I went to the 1839 home of Teddy Roosevelt's maternal grandparents where this President's mother grew up.

The Greek Revival mansion named Bulloch Hall in Roswell, Georgia (just north of Atlanta) was the setting on December 22, 1853 of the wedding of Mittie Bulloch to Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. The marriage was a gala affair with people coming for many miles and staying for a week.

 The newlyweds lived in New York City  
and had four children Anna, Corinne, Theodore, and Elliott.

Son Theodore became the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt's other son, Elliott, was the father of Eleanor Roosevelt who married Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt who had begun his presidency on reasonably good terms for a half-northerner president, had infuriated the South by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine in the White House. Consequently, he waited a few years until the episode blew over and finally saw Bulloch Hall for the first time while visiting the South in 1905. He was the first sitting President of the United States to visit the South since the end of the American Civil War.

 

This is a view of the slave compound from the porch of the mansion.

President Roosevelt and his wife Edith arrived in Roswell, Georgia on October 20, 1905. At Bulloch Hall, he spoke as follows:

"It has been my very great good fortune to have the right to claim my blood is half Southern and half Northern, and I would deny the right of any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every Southerner than I feel. Of all the children, the brothers and sisters of my mother who were born and brought up in that house on the hill there, my two uncles afterward entered the Confederate service and served with the Confederate Navy.

"One, the younger man, served on the Alabama as the youngest officer aboard her. He was captain of one of her broadside 32-pounders in her final fight, and when at the very end the Alabama was sinking and the Kearsarge passed under her stern and came up along the side that had not been engaged hitherto, my uncle, Irvine Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the other and fired the two last shots fired from the Alabama. James Dunwoody Bulloch was an admiral in the Confederate service. ...

"Men and women, don't you think I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty, whether they wore the grey or whether they wore the blue? All Americans who are worthy the name feel an equal pride in the valor of those who fought on one side or the other, provided only that each did with all his strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given to him to see his duty."

This is the view of Bulloch Hall from the garden on the side of the house.

The house was a headquarters for Federal soldiers during the Civil War's Atlanta Campaign. (Think 'Gone With the Wind')