Walking the Berkshires

Chelsea Moaning

News from across the Pond:

Three fans of English Premier League champions Chelsea were evicted during a match at Tottenham Hotspur and banned by the team for throwing celery onto the field.  Apparently this sort of hooliganism has become all too common with Chelsea fans, and the authorities had to put their foot down:

"Chelsea had warned their fans three days before the replay against throwing celery during matches, saying it was a criminal offence and that anyone caught could be banned.

The unlikely warning had followed referee reports which mentioned celery-throwing at two previous Chelsea matches and which were being investigated by the Football Association.

Though celery has recently been landing on the pitch, Chelsea fans have been throwing it among themselves, and singing an unprintable song about the vegetable, for more than two decades."

The English are not like us.  The BBC, after all, banned the Beatles "A Day In The Life" for the line "I'd love to turn you on" while we put Howard Stern in space. And I'm not at all sure we would consider this fan chant unprintable, though it is probably NSFW so you should listen on your own time. 

Be that as it may, it is safe to say that American sports fans wouldn't have any idea what to do with celery at a stadium, unless it's dipped in blue cheese as a chaser for Buffalo Wings. 

Random Reconnections

Blogging about genealogy is all about the intersection of individual lives with the past and present.  I enjoy working the experience of my various ancestors with particular events - those both celebrated and insignificant in the great scheme of things - into what I post and apparently a number of you find that interesting to read as well, even if they are no relations of yours.  Personal, eyewitness narrative is a particularly engaging way to animate history, if not always to sort out fact from fiction; for tales, as we know, often grow in the telling.

Still, there is something especially delightful about reading family history that is about your own family, and that is why collateral relations are more important to the genealogist than strictly linear lines of descent.  For one thing, the chances that that infuriating break in your family tree that has bedeviled you for years is addressed in the on-line pedigree of some 6th cousin, once removed, are far greater than anyone in your immediate family remembering who was the father of your Gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-great grandmother.  One has far more distant relations alive today than close kin, if only one knew where to look for them.  Sometimes, thanks to the serendipity of the blogosphere, they find you instead.

I have been thrilled and delighted by long-lost cousins rediscovering our family connections in genealogical posts I have written from time to time at Walking the Berkshires.  My 8th great grandfather, George Abbot (t), is a common ancestor I share with Bill West, and both of us have discovered mingled roots in Puritan Essex County, Massachusetts.  My post on Keeping Track of the Olmsteds introduced me to Jackie Hunt, a 5th cousin once removed from Missouri who provided additional archival and biographical material on our common ancestor Esther Ingersoll Olmsted.  Recently another relation has discovered this post who shares the same relationship to me as Jackie but a much closer relationship to her (2nd cousins) and I have had the pleasure of introducing them to each other. 

And today, a comment is posted to a post of mine from December - Dedication - by a distant cousin in France who must have been surprised to find a photograph of him, taken in the early 1980s, with my great Aunt Margie beneath a portrait of his ancestor William Weeks (who married the sister of my ancestor Sarah Gilmore in the early 1800s).  He was searching on line for his name and found his family history instead.  It is a marvelous way to make a reacquaintance.

So I'll continue to weave the stories of my long departed forebears into the tales I tell.  For many of you, I hope the material intrigues and holds your interest.  For others, my rediscovered collateral kin, it may turn out to be more like coming home for the holidays.

"Swin having a Ring in the noses Shall be accounted an orderly Creater": Laws Most Passing Strange

Thank goodness we have wise and forward thinking elected officials to provide the right law for any occasion.  As alluded to in the title of this post, the Town of Sharon, Connecticut at its very first town meeting back in the 1700's, promptly affirmed the good character of its nose-ringed swine.  This makes sense because none of those hogs had collars or licenses so there was no better way to tell the unruly stray from the law abiding resident pig. Nowadays, everyone and his sister has a nose ring so it's not so easy to separate the sheep from the goats.

We have other very useful ordinances and statutes in Connecticut.  Here is one that will keep our Town Clerk from multitasking as a barkeep:

Chapter 545

Sec. 30-97. Town and probate records not to be kept where
liquor is sold.

Town or probate records shall not be kept in any room in
which alcoholic liquor is sold, nor in any room from which
there is direct access to a room in which such liquor is
sold. Any town clerk or judge of probate violating the
provisions of this section shall be subject to the
penalties provided in section 30-113.

One imagines that there were difficulties with this sort of thing back in 1949 when Chapter 545 went on the books, but it is hard to credit that there was once an outbreak of copulation on the job in Massachusetts taxi cabs, but something along those lines seems to have prompted a law that prohibits taxi drivers from making love in the front seat of their taxi during their shifts.  What they do in the back is, presumably, their own affair as long as the meter isn't running.  The Bay State also prohibits gorillas from riding in the back seat of any car, be it a taxi or otherwise.

While I would like to confirm the actual ordinances in question still exist, this site claims that:

"The New York City Transit Authority has ruled that women can ride the city subways topless. New York law dictates that if a man can be somewhere without a shirt, a woman gets the same right. The decision came after arrests of women testing the ordinance on the subways. A transit police spokesman said they would comply with the new rule, but 'if they were violating any other rules, like sitting on a subway bench topless smoking a cigarette, then we would take action.'"

It is important to know what rules apply or you are liable to become a common scofflaw unintentionally.  Hello to all my peeps in Brooklyn: "Don't let your donkeys sleep in the bathtub."  And none of you New Yorkers can get a divorce because of  irreconcilable differences unless you both agree to do so.  Good luck with that.

Without the will to enforce it, any law is just paper and ink.  But a little legal housecleaning appears to be in order.  Otherwise my gorilla and donkey are going to need to learn how to drive for themselves and find someplace else to sleep.

North Canaan's Doughboy

Civil War monuments are a familiar part of the New England landscape, granite sentinels standing guard over our village greens and traffic islands.  Communities across Connecticut started erecting these memorials even before the war's end, and given that enlistments of 8-10% of the entire town population were quite typical in that conflict, such civic recognition is not surprising.  Salisbury, Connecticut, with just 3,100 residents in 1860, is credited with 344 men serving in 21 Connecticut military units during the Civil War.  Consequentially, there is an impressive Civil War memorial in Salisbury, and others in towns throughout the Litchfield Hills, but my town is different.  North Canaan has a doughboy.

North Canaan sent its share of volunteer sons to fight in the south.  13 died during the war (6 from wounds, 7 from disease).  Six North Canaan men were wounded on one particularly bad September day in Maryland, but this was a drop in the bloody bucket at Antietam where CT regiments suffered 689 casualties, the most for the state in any day of the war.  The war hit home in North Canaan, but the town had only recently split off from its neighbor Canaan to the south and may have had other priorities and fiscal challenges in the years following the soldiers' return besides monument building.  Whatever the reason, we do not have a Civil War statue on our town green.  What we have instead is more unusual, and we are very proud of it.

Our doughboy statue is an original by sculptor E. M. Viquesney, one of just two that survive in our  state and just 134 originals known in existence across the country.  Viquesney's design, "The Spirit of the American Doughboy", with its outstretched arm clutching a grenade and striding across a pressed copper no man's land with tree stumps and twisted wire, was extremely popular for municipal memorials of the Great War between 1920 and the late 1930s.  After the Statue of Liberty, the Viquesney's doughboy is thought to be the most viewed example of outdoor statuary in the United States.

North Canaan built the pedestal for its monument before it decided on a statue in 1928:

"Shortly after it was built, the townspeople decided they’d like a statue. Before they were to make a choice at a town meeting, Bethel veteran Bill Glass donned his old uniform, obtained a rifle and climbed the monument to assume a Doughboy pose so the townsmen would know how a Spirit of the American Doughboy would look."

The other doughboy statue in Connecticut is in Bethel.

Our doughboy stands on the hill by the Episcopal Church near the site of the old town hall.  Every year our Memorial Day parade wends its way through town and down Main Street to the doughboy.  The barbed wire is missing from the stumps, but on the whole it has aged well.  I remember another Viquesney doughboy in Lancaster, PA  that had just the stump of a hand where the grenade should have been.  It has since been restored.

Our civic taste in war memorials has changed with each generation.  We seldom honor our veterans with   public statuary anymore, preferring instead the long rolls of honor and reflective granite, except in Washington, where both the Korean and Vietnam War memorials incorporate human figures and faces as well as those long walls of dark stone.  Viquesney's design was relatively inexpensive and mass produced, which may have contributed to its popularity.  But it was also assertive, standing upright and advancing across what must have been in reality a machine-gun swept field where the front had barely shifted during long years of trench warfare.  Both attributes appealed to those wishing to honor the veterans of the Great War, and so the citizens of North Canaan went with the doughboy.

Daybreak In Progress

My mother makes a very few very special quilts each year.  She has several in progress and today this picture arrived in the mail of one where the piecework is done and the binding and quilting await.

This is one of the those views that becomes part of the fabric of our lives, immediately recognizable and grounding us in place.  She has depicted the view looking north from the deck of the Upper Cottage over the roof of the Lower across Deadman's Cove on Monhegan Island, Maine.  My great Grandparents Raymond and Alice Barker purchased this property in the 1920s and it has remained a beloved summer retreat for generations of extended family members.  I hope that this summer I will be able to take my family to Monhegan after a five year's absence, and it will be Emily and Elias's first introduction to this enchanted place.

Mom's design captures a Monhegan sunrise, taking some liberties with its position but marvelously capturing its colors and the play of soft light and fleeting shadows at daybreak.  I love her landscape quilts and this one promises to be truly stunning.  I can almost hear the dawn chorus of gulls as the tide starts to ebb.  Mom says "it was fun to see if I could make it look real!"  For one who knows every speckled rock and forest fringe of this view, it is a breathtaking recreation.

Circles

"And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game."
                  - Joni Mitchell

Priceless

6 months of acrobatics class:  $250

4 tickets to a three-year-old's recital: $20

2 bouquets of flowers for dance instructors :$30

Watching my son do three somersaults in a Raggedy Andy suit:  Priceless.

Jekylls and Hydes: Too Much Information

The Carnival of Satire is up at The Skwib.  Find out how Superman should have ended and settle the debate over whether Batman is anything without his utility belt. 

And tonight my alter ego sterkfontein will once again do battle with the forces of evil in the mountains of Alterac in the Realm of Baelgun.  Mild mannered tree-hugger by day, fearsome dwarf warrior on weekends.  Wish I could grow a 'stache that curled like that.

Peace out, gentles all.  Everyone needs a hobby.  One of mine is hewing orc necks.

Spring Cleaning

There's been a whirlwind of activity in our household what with preparations for a family visit, a dance recital, and various children's parties over the weekend.  There's a foot of snow rapidly melting away outside and maple sap evaporating on the stove.  Mud season is upon us, and in a few short weeks there will be trout lillies in the woods and shad in the rivers - the latter don't make it up here above the Great Falls of the Housatonic but their cousins the herring are a welcome sign of spring down in SE Mass where my Grandmother lives.

Hurricanes Emily and Elias have been whirling dervishes in the close confines of our winter quarters -especially at bedtime - and are looking forward to mud puddles and swamp romps and spring peepers on warm rainy nights.  They are planning gardens and thinking about swim classes and train rides and the joys of distant summer.  I'd be happy to replace the snow shovel with a rake and throw the windows open to air out the house, but since we've only really had "winter" since February I don't feel as ready to let go of the season and as anxious for spring green as I normally do this side of the Vernal Equinox.  Not that I'm asking for more snow to shovel, but the deep freeze never really settled into my bones this year and I find myself strangely sad at the abbreviated winter and perfectly content to let Spring unveil its face at its own pace and time of choosing.

Trackside Curiosities: What Ray Barker Saw Crossing the Rockies by Rail in 1888 and Where it is Now

My Great-grandfather Ray Barker wrote a memoir of a family trip across North America by train in the late 1880's.  He was 14 years old, and diligent about recording the smallest details of the strange and wonderful places they visited.  I'll spare you the exact dimensions of the California State House and the Morman Tabernacle - although his description of the latter as "something like the half of a lemon split lengthwise" is a marvelously revealing image.  Instead, here are just a few track side curiosities observed during the journey:

"...While we were at the depot we saw at one end of it a large section out of a Colorado tree.  We went up to it and read this inscription: 'This is the old Monarch, its age is 380 years, its circumference was 28 feet and its height 88 feet.  it was cut down in south Pueblo, June 25, 1883, at the cost of $250.  It was known throughout Colorado as the oldest landmark in the state.  During the Pikes Peak excitement this old tree sheltered many a weary traveler.  In 1850 there were 36 persons massacred by the Indians while camping near this tree.  Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, Wild Bill and other noted Indian Scouts have built their campfires under this tree.  it was said that 14 men were hung on one of its branches at different times.  The first white woman that died n Colorado was buried under its branches.'  After we had read it over we thought it was quite a relic..."

"...Papa, Lloyd and I took a bus this morning and went out to Hot Springs.  They were about four miles from the center of the city [Salt Lake City] and we passed them coming down from Ogden, but did not know it.  We arrived there a little after 11 A.M . and had a grand bath in the naturally heated water.  There is a large cave in the mountain side and the water bubbles right out and the cave is filled.  John Beck, the owner of the springs, has built large bathing houses with connections with the springs so that there is a big plunge and also private ones.  The water is a little over four feet deep and is always nice and hot.  I went over to the springs just where it came out of the mountain and saw it bubbling and steaming and nearly boiling.  If you take a glass of it and put a little pepper in it, it tastes just like egg broth..."

"...When we were about 35 miles from San Francisco we commenced to go very slow and all at once I noticed four large smoke-stacks at the sides of the train.  Then our train stopped and I went out to see what place it was.  There was some freight cars on the track beside our train and I climbed up on one of them and to my surprise I saw that were were on a great ferry boat and slowly crossing the Sacramento River.  I was thoroughly astonished at this for I never knew that a whole train of cars could get on a ferry boat.  A gentleman told me that this ferry boat was the largest in the world and that its capacity was 48 loaded freight cars, 24 passenger cars and four engines. It has four large side wheels and two engines.  Sacramento River is very muddy which is caused by hydraulic mining a good many miles up the river.  It is very wide though and it would be too expensive to run a bridge across so they use a ferry.  After crossing the river we came to a great swampy prairie all covered with prairie grass.  Off at the distance we saw a great prairie fire hurling great clouds of smoke into the air..."

And what remains of these scenes today?  One hopes the section of the Old Monarch survives in the collection of some historical society or museum, but the site where it stood for 380 years lies near the train tracks between C and D streets on South Union Avenue in the heart of Pueblo.  This was bottom land, and the historic photograph of the old tree looks like it may have been a cottonwood.  If so, it was a truly ancient one.  It reminds me of Holling Clancy Holling's illustrated children's classic, The Tree in the Trail.

The  Railroad Ferry Steamer was the pride of the Central Pacific.  It crossed the narrow Carquinez Straights between Benicia and Port Costa until 1930 when it was replaced by a railroad drawbridge.  The great ferry steamer "Solano" was towed to Antioch California the following year and scuttled to serve as a breakwater.  A 4th of July fireworks display on her decks set fire to the old wreck and burned her to the waterline in 1983.  The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum has a wealth of information about the ferry.

The site of Beck's Hot Springs, also called the Wasatch Springs Plunge, is now under Interstate 15 surrounded by oil refineries, junkyards, and scrap metal recycling centers.  Salt Lake City has recently restored Wasatch Warm Springs and its accompanying wetlands, now part of the city's expanding Warm Springs Park.