Staunton VA 6/26/2016

We had just one day available to visit around the Staunton, VA area.  We were really on the go but got to take in so much.  

We began with a car tour along the 'Sky Line Drive' in the Shenandoah National Park.  This park was dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 3, 1936.  We were surprised to learn that originally there was an attempt to ban all  blacks from this National Park and instead it was decided to develop racially segregated areas within this National Park (restrooms, picnic areas, lodges) with the area at Lewis Mountain being designated as the Negro only area. This was the norm at this National Park until 1950 when the park was finally racially integrated.  Most of the park access follows a ridge trail, used many years ago by both Indians and early settlers.  The views are spectacular and the trees are ever so abundant.

In the actual city of Staunton, VA we visited the birth house of President Woodrow Wilson and also his Presidential Library.  Sorry no inside pictures were allowed.  The Woodrow Wilson Presidential library is privately funded because only the presidential libraries from the administrations of Hubert Hover forward receive funds from the federal government for library maintenance. Woodrow Wilson we learned is our only President to have ever earned a PhD. and amazingly he accomplished that with a learning disability that today is believed was dyslexia.  Named at birth, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, he would later completely drop the Thomas name.  His father, the Reverend Wilson, made their home in the church Manse  which is also where 'Tommy' Woodrow was born .  We were surprised to learn that the church in addition to providing their family home also provided the family with 3 leased slaves one was a female cook, another a female nanny and the third a male manual laborer. We asked the tour guide about the church's provision of leased slaves and we were told this was not uncommon in this area at the time (both the leasing of slaves and the provision of slaves by the church).

Young 'Tommy' Woodrow was unable to read anything until the age of 10, but born with a well educated preacher father, he was continually pushed, despite his learning challenges.  His father is said to have taken him on learning tours and required him to write and provide speeches about these tours.  It is said, that he was pushed to write, talk and repeat until he performed both perfectly.  Woodrow Wilson eventually attended Princeton, got his law degree from the University of Virginia and his PhD. in Political Science from John Hopkins University. 

President Wilson, besides being the only US President to earn a PhD., he is also the last US president to travel his inauguration ceremony in a horse drawn carriage.  He is credited with starting both the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, establishing child labor laws and helping in the negation of the Treaty of Versailles.  In 1919 he received the Nobel Peace Prize  for being the lead architect behind the League of Nations and is thought to have minimized our involvement as much as possible during WWI.  He also pushed for Women's right to vote which was passed during his second term.  Less than an hour from here is Monticello which we are headed to tomorrow.

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah National Park

President Woodrow Wilson Birth Home
Staunton VA

President Woodrow Wilson Birth Home
Staunton VA

First Presbyterian Church
Church of Woodrow Wilson's Father, Rev. Joseph Ruggles Wilson
Staunton VA

Charlotte NC 6/23/2016

The weather in Charlotte, North Carolina is quite warm.  To beat the heat we headed out for an indoor activity and that was the Levine Museum of the New South.  We found this to be a very well put together museum.  We always find appreciation in museums that are well organized, concise, successful at gaining the interest of all ages and also create an interest for people to want to research more after they leave.  We felt that this museum hit that mark well.  The center piece exhibit is entitled 'Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers'.  This exhibit is a social historical journey through the economies that transformed this area from having the small farms following the Civil War, to developing America's main textile factory region, to now being the second largest American banking center.

The Civil War abolished slavery and also marked the break up of the large plantations into plots to be farmed by both white and black sharecroppers.  The large number of Cotton sharecroppers eventually drove the price of cotton from 25 cents a pound in 1860 down to 5 cents a pound in 1890.  The small sharecropper farmer became more and more in debt and unable to survive.  At the same time, the owners of the farmlands increased their economic power and began to invest in the building of textile factories.  The very people that gained their wealth off of the tenant farmers, lured these same farmers to their factories with promises of a new future and an escape from poverty. 

While most of the lives of these newly made factory workers improved from the desperate poverty they left, the owners of these factories were known to exploit these people once again.  And this new 'opportunity' was not available to the blacks.  While blacks were allowed to be sharecroppers they were not allowed to work in the Mill factories.

Over 90 % of the mill factory workers lived in mill villages that often consisted of 100 homes with the Loray factory planning 400 homes.  Each home was 3-4 rooms with a common area in the village to pump water and usually a church too. Mill owners intentionally built their mills with adjoining mill villages away from cities.  This enabled the mill owners to keep closer tabs on their workers and to exercise greater control over them than they might otherwise have.  If a mill worker disagreed with their manager they not only risked losing their job but risked losing their family home too.  Often the mill workers would only be paid in mill coins - coins that could only be used at the mill mercantile. The mill owner wanted their 'employees' to work hard and be well rested, and the owners would rap on a worker's door if they saw lights on after 9 PM.  Oh and the church was well funded too by the mill owner, and known to only preach factory owner friendly sermons.  Most in the family were required to work.  The men did factory manual stuff, the women did weaving and spinning and the children as young as 6 swept floors.  While the mill owners were in many ways exploiting the factory worker families, the mill community was tight knit and most felt that their lives had improved, or at least in the early years they felt this way.  

This prosperity waned, however, once mill managers began what was known as the 'stretch out system'.  This system required mill workers to produce more and get paid less and was the precursor to one of this area's largest labor union strikes, the Loray Mill Strike of 1929.  The strike began with 1800 workers walking off the job.  After a month, many of the workers could hold out no longer, but a few hundred workers continued to strike. Evicted from their mill homes, tent cities were erected nearby.  People were killed including the police chief.  And in the end, the union and its workers lost, with working conditions remaining basically the same.  The strike is a sad memory in this part of the country, so much so that even today only 11% of wage and salary workers in the state are union members. 

At this museum we also learned more history concerning some people with common names.  Stuart Crammer is credited with inventing air conditioning. However, his first efforts were not to make workers comfortable, but rather to optimize cotton mill production.  Cannon, as in Cannon towels built his first towel factory here in 1894.  T.A. Tompkins is credited with discovering something to do with all those cotton seeds, create cotton seed oil.  James B. Duke as in Duke energy began as the first company to mass produce cigarettes and eventually the first to realize that dams could be linked to Cotton Mills for energy. Belk, the nation's largest privately owned department store was begun by William Belk in 1888, just outside of Charlotte.  Today they operate 299 stores in 16 states but primarily concentrated in the Carolinas.

The last economy to emerge that was covered in this exhibit was the banking industry.  Charlotte was one of the first cities to allow branch banking.  Later, in the late 70's, North Carolina National bank tested a legal loop hole to cross state lines when they purchased some bank branches in Florida.  This move was upheld by the courts and is credited with being the founders of interstate banking. Today Charlotte is the second largest financial center in the United States.  

Finally, there was a visiting exhibit entitled 'NUEVOlution Latinos and the new South'.  Included in the exhibit was some of the works of Rosalia Torres-Weiner who is an art activist who is trying to make a difference in the lives of immigrant families. We both felt this exhibit did a good job of covering both the spoken and unspoken challenges of immigration for both legal and illegal Latinos as well as the resulting social issues of families being torn apart by partial family deportations, and children being deported that don't know any life or language other than that of the US.  The immigration issues we face are so much more complex than many realize and this exhibit touches on many of these complexities.  

Last we drove out to see Metal Metamorphosis.  Metal what you say?  It is a 22 foot high metal sculpture constructed of 14 tons of horizontal plates that move intermittently.  The artist is David Cemy, a Czech artist.  Below the picture is a link to a video of Metal Metamorphosis in action.

Cool Monument outside the Museum

Cool Monument outside the Museum

Cool Monument outside the Museum

What neat benches near the New South Museum

What neat benches near the New South Museum

Cannon' first bath towel...no terry cloth yet

1920

Wow, like check out the length of that christening gown

Mill Villages Coins

Banking in North Carolina

Sort of a cool display with a full size Man (in white)

NUEVOlution 

NUEVOlution 

Metal Metamorphosis.

See it in motion at this link:

https://youtu.be/pGCln17yUn0

Savannah GA 6/20-21/2016

We spent two short days in Savannah, GA. What beautiful southern charm and history fills this city. This time to Savannah we set out to see a few things new.

When James Oglethorpe founded Savannah as the Capital of his newly chartered colony of Georgia he was into the number four.  Four squares were to be built and four Utopian ideals were to be up held- No rum, no slavery, no lawyers and no Papists.  Georgia was the buffer between the colonies and Spanish Florida and Oglethorpe was afraid Catholics would be Spanish spies.  In 1748, the ban on Catholics was lifted (the liquor ban was lifted in 1742).  The Haitian Revolution in the late 1700's brought many Haitians not only to Louisiana but also to the Savannah area and most of them were Catholic. They along with the French are credited with starting the first Catholic Parish in Savannah, laying the first cornerstone for Catholics in Savannah in 1799.  The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist has a history of struggle that includes major hurricane damage  in  the mid 1800's and a devastating fire in 1898. The present Cathedral was rebuilt and dedicated in October 1900.  The inside is beautiful and the numerous stained glass windows, all from Austria are spectacular.

The Pink house was built in 1771 for James Habersham Jr., an early cotton factor in Savannah.  It is  one of the few buildings that survived the fire of 1796.  It now operates as a restaurant and tavern.

We had lunch at Mrs. Wilkes. A fun place, family style with close to 15 at each table.  Worth an hour wait in line?  Maybe when the weather is cooler.  But we were still glad we went.  Young Sema Wilkes started this boarding house in 1943.  Her granddaughter, who we met, is still running the place today.  Always fun to enjoy a bit of history, especially while enjoying a good meal.

Day two we went to Wormsloe and Tybee Island.

Wormsloe is the oldest standing structure in Savannah.  As you enter Wormsloe you traverse in your vehicle through over 400 Live Oak trees (1.5 miles long) that canopy the road. These trees were planted in the 1890's to commemorate the birth of of a son.  The Oak grove is incredibly picturesque.  Along a short trail is the Tabby ruins.  Wormsloe Plantation was originally established by Noble Jones in 1736.  It is located on the Isle of Hope in GA.

We also headed out to Tybee Island.  The dunes have been protected ( a good thing) and almost every ave. to the beach has a very long suspended walkway to get to the beach. There is a huge beach area and it is always fun to see the kids rollicking on the shore.

We also visited the Lighthouse on Tybee Island.  This is the first lighthouse constructed in Georgia.  It was done so at the direction of Orglethorpe.  The bottom 60 feet of the lighthouse date back to 1773 and the top 94 feet was added in 1867.  The walls of the tower at the base are an impressive 12 feet thick.  They claim that its light can be seen 18 miles out to sea.  This lighthouse is one of a few colonial era lighthouses still in operation today.

Across the street from the light house is the Fort Screven Battery.   It is quite large.  From 1897 - 1947 this battery was an integral part of Georgia's coastal defense.  

We are headed tomorrow to Charlotte, NC.  While this was a short stay, Savannah is always a beautiful place to visit and we highly recommend this city on your travels.

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
What a beautiful organ!

The Pink House

Fun Lunch

Wormsloe, GA

Wormsloe, GA

Tabby Ruins, Wormsloe, GA

Tabby Ruins, Wormsloe, GA

Beach at Tybee Island, GA

Seagull (like check out his tail feathers) at Tybee Island, GA

Battery on Tybee Island

Tybee island Lighthouse.  It was the first on the Georgia Coast 

erected in 1736, later restored.

Casa del Bientiempo (House of Good Times)- We Are All Moved in and Our Home is Coming Together

We are finally fairly settled into our new home.  It is nice to have our favorite things incorporated into our home, have new friends to share life with and so many activities, that it is often hard to choose between so many things we want to do.  Bob is golfing every week and Teri plans to take lessons when we return from our travels this summer.  It will be a bit hard to leave all this behind this summer, especially because it is getting to be real pool weather and we have been really enjoying our pool.  But there are still many places we want to travel to so we are off on our adventures in about a month.

We are headed to West Point, NY for a family reunion.  From there this year we plan to head to Newfoundland, with plans to travel through the entire island over a period of two months.  We plan to be back to posting on our blog during our travels, so stay tuned as more pictures and narration on our travels are soon to come.

In the meantime, we are posting a few pictures of our new home, after we have made this truly our home.  Enjoy the pictures.  We so love it here and love our new home too.