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Sanilac Petroglyphs: Preserving the past for the future

Carvings of archers, animals, and other mysterious images at Sanilac Petroglyphs State Park survive to document prehistoric Native American life and rituals for future generations, even as weathering and carved graffiti threaten to obscure this account of early Michigan.

I first visited the petroglyphs years ago with a cousin from California who wanted to see the carvings. We found them, after a two-hour drive to the petroglyph park, locked behind a five-foot fence (which proved no match those determined to see the carvings). The petroglyphs already showed signs of wear and vandalism that continue to concern state officials, the area's Native people, and archeologists.

Over the years, state officials tried protecting the carvings while providing access. Tim and I visited the petroglyphs several years after my first visit, and a sign on the fence instructed visitors to knock on the door of a nearby farmhouse and ask for a gate key if they wanted a closer look.

Docents greeted visitors during our latest visit to the site last year.

Sanilac's petroglyphs remained hidden for many years as vegetation obscured the 1,000-square-foot sandstone rock containing about 100 images.

Fires across the region in 1881 claimed one million acres of forest and 282 lives, but fire also revealed these petroglyphs that geologists determined to be 300 to 1,000 years old.

Sandstone is soft, so Native Americans easily carved figures into it. The stone's softness meant that subsequent generations found it easy to add their own names, doodles, and other graffiti. You can still readily see some of the petroglyphs at Sanilac, but modern-day graffiti and years of open exposure makes it difficult to see some of the fainter images or differentiate some original carvings from newer graffiti.

State officials tried to protect the Sanilac petroglyphs over the years, but discussions about jurisdiction and funding further protective measures continue to be a concern.

The site was under private ownership for many years, and Native Americans from a reservation in nearby Caro summered there as late as 1900.

The Michigan Archaeological Society purchased the land containing the petroglyphs in 1966, deeding it to the state five years later.

The wooden canopy and five-foot-tall fence I saw when I first visited offered the only protection for the carvings until seven years ago, when the state installed a 12-foot-tall chain-link fence to secure the petroglyphs when there was no onsite supervision.

An article in The Detroit News by Jim Lynch (May 21, 2011) covered the debate surrounding protecting the site, and questions about who should do so.

No one is sure what tribe did the carvings, but members of Saginaw's Chippewa Tribe feel a special connection, and responsibility, to the site, treasuring the petroglyphs and the ancestral wisdom they represent.

Area archaeologists, who say the tribe wants sole control over the petroglyphs and the 240-acre state park at the site, worry about maintaining access to the site and express concern that private ownership would limit scientific study and interpretation of the carvings.

Michigan's Department of Natural Resources currently pays about $15,000 annually for basic upkeep at the site.

Some state officials and archaeologists would like to see a glass enclosure to protect the prehistoric carvings, but with a projected $300,000 tab for such a structure, don't look for it any time soon.

The petroglyphs are still well worth visiting.

The approximately 1/4-mile-long trail to the petroglyphs pavilion is level and accessible for most visitors. The pavilion is generally open to visitors during the summer and staffed with interpreters 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday or by appointment.

Best petroglyph viewing times may overcast days when visitors can use a flashlight to highlight the images, as interpreters did for us when we visited the site last summer.

An easy 1.5-mile interpretive trail loops though forests and past remains of a 19th-century logging camp and historic Native American settlements. The trail is open 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. daily.

Interpreters told me the park has open house events at the petroglyph pavilion in June and August. The first summer open house in 2011 is 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. on June 25 and includes kids' crafts and history displays.

The local Chippewa tribe holds celebrations each summer (set for June 18 in 2011) when they gently cleanse the petroglyphs and offer cultural lessons in the Anishinabe language.

Check out the nearby Thumb Octagon Barn and Agricultural Museum when you visit the petroglyphs.

Want to learn more about the history and culture of Michigan's Ojibwe and other Midwest Native Americans? Check out Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest by R. David Edmunds, The Ojibwe of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota by Janet Palazzo-Craig, or Art of Tradition: Sacred Music, Dance, and Myth of Michigan's Anishinaabe, 1946-1955 by Gertrude Kurath, Jane Ettawageshik, and Michael D. McNally.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Bad Axe

Roadside firsts in Michigan

Michigan lays claim to national firsts like the first mile of concrete road, the first painted centerline, the first electric traffic light, and the first roadside table.

Dawdling along Grand River Avenue while heading home from western Michigan, we spotted this marker for "The Roadside Table".

The marker told a great story about how Ionia County Engineer Allan Williams placed a picnic table along a highway right-of-way in 1929, sparking a movement to place roadside tables throughout the country.

Some sources identify this site near Saranac, Michigan, as the first roadside park in the nation. However, the nation's first roadside park (and table) could arguably be one placed near Iron River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula a decade earlier than the Ionia table made its debut.

Herbert Larson grew up in Iron County, Michigan, trained as a highway engineer downstate at the University of Michigan, and returned home in 1914 to work for the Iron County Road Commission. He became the commission's engineer-manager, serving in that capacity for 39 years until his 1956 retirement.

In 1918, Larson drove to northern Wisconsin with friends one Sunday afternoon, intending to enjoy a roadside picnic. Private resorts lined the highway, so the group couldn't picnic along the road there. Larson knew enjoying such a picnic would be no problem back in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and wanted to do something to help keep it that way.

Larson heard about a plot of wooded land along U.S. Highway 2 in Iron County, four miles east of Iron River that was for sale. He convinced the chairmen of his county commission that the land would make a great roadside park and got permission to purchase the plot.

The county designated the land as a roadside park, and Larson installed a picnic table at the site.

Many sources identify this as the first, or at least likely the first, site specifically designed as a roadside rest stop in the world.

The Iron County Roadside Park resembles a lot of other Michigan roadside parks (like the Mesick roadside park in Michigan's northwestern Lower Peninsula pictured here) with rustic picnic tables, water pump, and pit toilets.

So, what about Ionia County's roadside table?

A picnic also supposedly sparked Williams' idea to place roadside tables in Ionia County.

In 1928, Williams reportedly saw a family trying to have a roadside picnic. The family used a large stump as a table, but the group had to eat standing up or sitting on rocks and the ground.

Williams had his road crew build picnic tables, using 2x4 planks salvaged from old guardrails sitting unused in the county's garage. They constructed tables and painted them green over the winter, installing the first one the next spring along old Route 16, three miles south of Saranac.

Motorists wrote to the state's Highway Department, thanking Michigan for placing the tables along the road. Department officials liked Williams' idea and authorized other picnic tables on highway right-of-ways throughout Michigan. Ionia County built tables for the state for many years, until the demand became heavy enough that the state took on the task of providing tables.

What about the claim that the Ionia Roadside Table was the first roadside table in the country?

Well, if you buy Michigan's definitions for Roadside Park and Roadside Table, Ionia could be home to the first Roadside Table.

Safety Rest Areas (or Travel Plazas or Welcome Centers) are generally along limited-access roads like expressways. They are open year round, have modern amenities like plumbing, and have parking for larger vehicles like semi trucks.

Roadside Parks are usually in rural areas, often open seasonally, and have limited parking, grills, picnic tables, trash cans, possibly with pit toilets and a map kiosk.

Scenic Turnouts, which can also be Roadside Parks, feature a pretty view.

Roadside Tables are...tables. A Roadside Table site may have room for a car or two to park off-road, a table or two, perhaps a grill, and a trash can.

By the mid-1950s, most states had roadside parks, and safety rest areas began appearing along the interstates.

So, there you have it. Michigan lays claim to the first Roadside Park and the first Roadside Table. Travelers appreciate roadside rests stops, and Michigan prides itself for its roadside hospitality in the form of parks, tables, turnouts, and travel plazas.

Check out my story, Potholes, patchwork and highway safety, about a tribute to highway workers at the rest area and welcome center near Clare, Michigan.

I appreciate a nice roadside park (or table), but my other road trip essential is a good map. Visiting Michigan? Check out the Delorme Michigan Atlas & Gazetteer and Hunt's Map Guide to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Where I live: Detroit Film Theater 2011 summer season preview

Have you always wanted to catch some of the hottest flicks at one of the coolest summer film festivals?

Then check out the Detroit Film Theater's summer season with its lineup of festival-worthy premieres, forgotten gems, and films from around the world.

The short summer season offers plenty of intriguing choices and here are a few that sound especially interesting to me.

The DFT hosts Oscar-winning film editor Richard Chew for a series of four double features that pair examples of Chew's work with classic films that inspired his editing. Chew will introduce the films and take questions from the audience after the showings, which include: the classic Italian film The Bicycle Thief, paired with the Chew-edited One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (June 9); the influential French New Wave film Breathless, paired with the Chew-edited I Am Sam  (June 11); the 1967 film The Graduate, paired with Chew-edited Risky Business (June 16); and the 1969 film Medium Cool with its then-revolutionary blending of fictional and non-fictional footage, paired with the Emilio Estevez directed and Chew-edited film about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Bobby (June 18).

The DFT's From England with Love series features a half-dozen premieres of edgy British films that include: Toast, the story of food writer Nigel Slater's childhood struggles,  which features Helena Bonham Carter and a soundtrack of Dusty Springfield tunes (June 11-12); Third Star, in which four friends embark on a road trip to Wales to discover adventure, dignity, courage, and what friendship truly means to them (June 24-25); and Africa United, which chronicles the story of three Rwandan children who set off to walk 3,000 miles through seven countries in hopes of attending a World Cup soccer match (July 15-16).

The Man Who Fell to Earth, a 1976 film starring David Bowie, was a daring examination of alienation in modern life, but most audiences only saw an American theatrical release which gutted almost 20 minutes of crucial scenes from the film, resulting in a version that confused viewers. Fans should appreciate the DFT's showing of the fully restored director's cut of this film (August 5-7 and August 14).

The 1948 documentary, Nuremberg, film captured story of the famous trial as it happened, showing prosecutors building the case against Nazi war criminals and recording the words of the defendants as they attempted to justify or excuse their actions from the witness stand. However, the U.S. government suppressed the film and the negative of the film reportedly went missing. American audiences can finally watch a 2009 restoration of the film, which runs at the DFT August 6-7.

The Scandinavian documentary Into Eternity deals with a different sort of devastation and explores the question of what to do with nuclear waste and how to insure that it doesn't pose a threat. The film, which the DFT calls "unexpectedly timely", runs June 17-19 and June 26.

And just to end things here on a more lighthearted note, check out the DFT showing of the 1934 It's a Gift starring W.C. Fields and Baby LeRoy. The film, added to the 2011 National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, runs July 16 at the DFT.

Check the DFT's full schedule and ticket pricing online.

Many of these flicks aren't available on DVD yet, and great movies are usually best on the big screen. But if you can't get to the DFT for a showing or want to own a film for encore viewing later, some of these films available on DVD include: The Bicycle Thief, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Breathless, I Am Sam, The Graduate, Risky Business, Medium Cool, Bobby, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and It's a Gift (as part of the W.C. Fields Comedy Collection).

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Visiting metro Detroit's Cranbrook Gardens

They say that April showers bring May flowers, so I'm hoping the May rain we've been having here in metro Detroit means we'll see especially beautiful flowers as this season at Cranbrook Gardens unfolds.

Cranbrook's 40 acres of gardens surrounding an Albert Kahn-designed manor home are part of a 319-acre National Historic Landmark campus filled with cultural, architectural and educational gems envisioned by George Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth in the early 1900s.

George, the owner of a successful iron-working company in Windsor, Ontario, married Ellen, the eldest child of the founder of the Detroit News, in 1887.

The couple lived in Detroit as they raised their five children and George moved into the executive ranks at his father-in-law's business. George also invested in other newspapers, building his own publishing company into the largest and most profitable publishing chain in Michigan.

The Booths loved their city gardens, but longed to move to an area where they could have larger gardens. In 1902, they purchased a dilapidated 174-acre farm in Bloomfield Hills, about 25 miles north of downtown Detroit, naming it for an English town where George's ancestors lived.

George worked with a series of notable designers, gardeners, and landscape architects to develop the grounds as the Booths' love of nature and belief that art belonged in every aspect of life guided the integration of architectural and landscape design at Cranbrook.

The Booths summered at Cranbrook until 1908, when they moved into the Kahn house.

In 1909, George Booth approached O.C. Simonds, one of the era's most notable landscape architects, to help design the grounds at Cranbrook.

Simonds trained as an engineer at the University of Michigan, lived in Chicago, taught landscape design at the University of Michigan, and designed landscapes for countless Midwest sites, including: Iowa State University, University of Chicago, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, Detroit's Palmer Park neighborhood, and a section of Woodward Avenue through Birmingham (Michigan).

Booth worked with many designers and contributed many of his own ideas to the designs, so it is difficult point to any specific Simonds design at Cranbrook. However, Booth consulted with Simonds for more than a decade and adopted many of the landscape architect's ideas about using native plants wherever possible and designing based on the a property's natural topography, soil, and climate.

George Booth wanted the gardens to highlight the early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts style of his home English manor home, a vision particularly evident in many of the architectural features throughout the gardens.

While Simonds' ideas heavily influenced the landscape at Cranbrook, the gardens themselves heavily reflect the Booths' own interests and travels.

In 1915, the Booths visited expositions in San Francisco and San Diego where they purchased bronze cranes, a stone lantern, and a dwarf tree for their gardens.

In 1916, Booth began installing a blue-tiled fountain he designed with architect Marcus Burrowes and decorated with a backsplash created by noted Detroit tile artist Mary Chase Stratton. The "Rainbow Spring" fountain was one of Booth's favorite pieces, and I think it may be one of my favorites as well.

There more than 300 species of exotic and native plants throughout the gardens. Specialty gardens include an herbal garden, an Oriental-themed garden, a wildflower garden, a peony garden, and Ellen's Garden with plants in her favorite colors of pink and purple.

Heavy expenses threatened the future of the house and grounds after the Booths' deaths in the late 1940s, and some feared it would be necessary to subdivide the property. George and Ellen's son, Henry Scripps Booth, organized auxiliary groups in the early 1970s to help care for the gardens, find new funding sources, and grow the endowment his parents created to maintain the property. Today, the 500-plus-member Cranbrook House and Gardens Auxiliary continues to support the manor and gardens.

Cranbrook held stock in Booth's newspaper holdings. The 1985 sale of the Evening News Association to Gannett resulted in a major infusion of cash for Cranbrook's endowment, effectively saving the site intact for future generations to enjoy.

Visitors can tour the gardens from May through October. An Annual Spring Plant Sale draws gardeners from all over metro Detroit looking for unique plants, flowers, and wildflowers. The gardens are also a popular wedding venue.

Check out my story, Cranbrook Gardens Photowalk, and my Cranbrook Gardens Flickr set for more photos.

Want to learn more? Check out Landscape-Gardening by Ossian Cole Simonds or The Campus Guide: Cranbrook by Kathryn Bishop Eckert.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Bloomfield Hills

Things To Do
Detroit

Photo Friday: Sixties celebration in Canton, Ohio

It always feels a bit strange seeing things you remember from your childhood in a museum, but we had fun checking out this exhibit about life in the 1960s at the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio.

I remember walking down to the neighborhood party store to buy my Beatles trading cards (complete with the stale stick of bubble gum that came with the wax paper-wrapped, five-card packets), and wishing I was old enough to wear some of the colorful clothes like the outfits pictured here.

I'll be posting more stories in coming months about our recent visit to the museum and other attractions in the Canton-Stark area, but I didn't want to miss this chance to remind readers that the "Celebrating the Sixties" exhibit only runs through June 5.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

Thanks to the Canton-Stark County Convention & Visitors Bureau for their assistance with planning our recent visit to Canton and arranging for comped media passes to the museum.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

 

Thumb Octagon Barn and Agricultural Museum recreates life in rural Michigan

James Purdy's dream of recreating the octagon barn he saw as he traveled through Iowa near the turn of the twentieth century became a reality in Michigan's Thumb region, and today his barn is the centerpiece of a center showcasing Michigan's rural agricultural history.

We visited the barn because of my fascination with unusual architectural structures, and this building, beautifully restored and maintained by The Friends of the Octagon Barn, didn't disappoint.

The rescued barn and its agricultural museum gives visitors a real sense of the historical importance of agriculture in the area, but I also discovered that Purdy helped rescue the future of many families by proposing and lobbying for legislation that led to establishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to safeguard bank depositors' money.

Purdy was president of the Bank of P.C. Purdy and Son in Gagetown, Michigan, when it became one of the few Michigan banks to remain solvent during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Purdy joined a group of Michigan bankers who persuaded Senator Arthur Vandenburg to introduce legislation that led establishing the FDIC to help restore investors' shattered confidence in the U.S. banking system.

Purdy and his family lived on the farm, about 35 miles east of Bay City and one mile east of the Village of Gagetown, during the 1920s and throughout the dark years of the Great Depression.

In 1919, Purdy hired local builders John and George Munro to build a 15-room, Craftsman-style bungalow on his farmland. He moved there with his wife Cora and two daughters in 1922.

The home was luxurious for rural Michigan at the time, featuring three full bathrooms, a built-in ice box in the kitchen, and a large covered porch that the family used for parties and dancing when entertaining guests.

In 1923, Purdy hired the Munros to build the octagon barn, and they enlisted the help of the local high school principal and math teacher to help with the calculations they needed to master to construct the barn.

Round, or octagon barns, were popular in the U.S. from the mid-1880s until 1920. Advocates said they were cheaper to build than rectangular-shaped barns of similarly sized area because the circular shape offered a larger surface-to-area ration. Centrally located silos could help support the barn's roof while minimizing labor required to feed animals, and many felt simplified construction and lack of an elaborate truss system made the barns structurally stronger.

Purdy's barn has an 8,600-square-foot ground floor and a 5,700-square-foot loft. The barn rises to a height of 70 feet at the tip of its weather vane, and each side measures 42-1/2 feet long by 24 feet high.

The 14-foot by 14-foot doors on the east and the west ends were open during our visit, allowing a cross-ventilating breeze to cool the barn on hot days.

Multiple windows at different levels and angles originally allowed plenty of light into the barn while minimizing the chance of prolonged direct sunlight setting fire to hay stored there. The filtered light makes taking photos inside of the building a bit tough, but on the quiet day we visited, the diffused lighting lent a serene air to the building's interior.

The Purdys lived at the farm until selling it in 1942. Subsequent owners sold off parts of the land until just 80 acres remained when it fell into the hands of a bank in 1990.

In 1991, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources purchased the land to connect two separate parcels of the Gagetown State Game Area.

The DNR wanted to remove or demolish the deteriorated house and barn from the property, but local residents organized to save the structures.

A former owner placed the barn on the Michigan Registry of Historic Sites in 1977, so the state could not destroy it. The citizens' group began raising money and negotiated with the state to allow them to restore and maintain the site as an agricultural museum and educational center.

The Friends added several buildings at the farm over the years, including a one-room school moved there from nearby Sebewaing in 2005.

One-room school (center), One-room school museum annex (right), and the little building on the left...

...is exactly what you think it is!

Members of the Friends serve as museum docents and on-site caretakers, opening the site to the public from May through October. A two-day Fall Family Days festival draws 15,000 visitors each year for farming and craft demonstrations, homemade food, music, and more.

For another look at Michigan's agricultural history, check out my story Port Oneida Rural Historic District celebrates northern Michigan's agricultural heritage.

Want to learn more? Check out Barn Building: The Golden Age of Barn Construction by Jon Radojkovic, which includes a short section about the Thumb Octagon Barn, or The American Barn by Randy Leffingwell.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Bad Axe

Multimedia pioneer Lowell Thomas began life's journey in Ohio

I remember seeing a couple Lowell Thomas books on my mother's shelves when I was quite young, but I never knew much about the pioneering broadcaster and world traveler until my recent visit to the Garst Museum in Greenville, Ohio.

I vaguely knew Thomas as a globe-trotting journalist, but the museum's gallery dedicated to him gave me a new appreciation for his career as a multimedia pioneer. Considering Thomas' life-long fascination with emerging media and experimenting with it, I'm thinking he would be all over today's "new media", just as he was ubiquitous across multiple media platforms throughout his long career.

Lowell Thomas was born on April 6, 1892 in nearby Woodington, Ohio. The museum moved Thomas' birthplace, a two-story Victorian house, to its campus during the late 1980s. Visitors can tour it during summer weekends, although we were there too early in the year to do so.

The museum's Lowell Thomas gallery has plenty of photos and mementos from Thomas' travels, and visitors can watch video footage of Thomas in a pocket-sized theater.

The Thomas family moved from Ohio when Lowell was 8 years old, heading to Victor, Colorado, where his father was a doctor in the gold mining community. The Victor Lowell Thomas Museum celebrates Thomas's life and time there.

Lowell started working for the Victor Daily Record as a newsboy at the age of 10, becoming an editor for the paper by the age of 19.

Thomas earned degrees from five universities, including the University of Northern Indiana at Valparaiso and Princeton.

Thomas continued working as an editor with dailies in Chicago and several other cities, but wanderlust soon kicked in and he began traveling the world in earnest by the late 1910s, filming and writing about his experiences in a nationally syndicated newspaper column.

Thomas set out for Europe in 1917 with his new bride, Frances, and cameraman Harry Chase to report on World War I. He tired of harsh conditions and drab film footage he got at the Western Front, so his wife worked with the Red Cross in Italy while Thomas and his cameraman went to the Middle East.

It was there that he met T.E. Lawrence, a young British Army officer who wore Arab robes as he helped lead Arab forces during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule. The colorful Lawrence captured Thomas' imagination, and the broadcaster's arguably romanticized accounts of the exploits of "Lawrence of Arabia" made Lawrence a star and made Thomas millions of dollars.

Thomas created what was, for the time, highly original multimedia presentations where he narrated his travels from a podium in sync with photo slides and film clips. Lawrence's story intrigued 1920s audiences, and Thomas' presentations played to as many as four million people throughout the world.

Thomas' 1924 book about the subject, With Lawrence of Arabia, became the first of over 50 books Thomas authored during his lifetime.

Thomas began doing daily radio newscasts for NBC in 1930. His authoritative and impartial manner was a distinct departure from other popular radio newscasters of the time. Thomas decided to end each of his newscasts with a light-hearted story, a format that nearly every newscast since that time adopted.

Movie audiences became familiar with Thomas' voice from the many short newsreels he narrated that ran in theaters to accompany feature films during the 1930s.

Over the years at NBC, and later at CBS, he became the first newscaster to report from a ship, an airplane, a submarine, and a coal mine. In 1939, he simulcast his radio broadcasts on television, becoming the first to have a televised nightly newscast.

Thomas appreciated the flexibility radio offered to broadcast from wherever he might be in the world, and he continued his nightly radio broadcasts until he was 85 years old in 1976.

He produced and starred in television series during the 1950s and 1970s and became a Cinerama (3-D movie) producer. Check out the Internet Movie Database site for a listing of Thomas' work in movies and television.

Thomas became rich working as an independent contractor with his own sponsors, buying his own time on networks, and retaining ownership of his material.

Thomas' first wife, Frances, died in 1975, and the widowed Thomas married Marianna Munn of Darke County in 1977.

In 1980, Thomas visited Ohio for the last time, to speak to the local Business and Professional Women's Club.

He died in 1981 at his New York home at the age of 89. His widow Marianna returned to live in Dayton, Ohio, until her death at the age of 82 in 2010.

Many of Thomas' books are out-of-print, but you can still readily find his first book, With Lawrence of Arabia, online.

Want to learn more about Lawrence of Arabia? Check out Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Greenville

Photo Friday: Annie Oakley's grave site revisited

We first visited the grave of famed sharpshooter Annie Oakley after spotting a sign pointing to the site as we drove near Greenville, Ohio, in western Ohio.

The State of Ohio erected a historical marker next to the grave a few months after that visit in 2003, so we recently revisited Brock Cemetery to check out the marker honoring Annie.

Check out yesterday's story about our recent visit to the nearby Garst Museum and its Annie Oakley Center.

Find out more about Annie Oakley and her early life in Ohio with my story, Shooting Star from North Star, Ohio.

Want to read more? Check out Annie Oakley by Shirl Kasper, The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (Oklahoma Western Biographies) by Glenda Riley, or Annie Oakley (a DK Biography) by Charles M. Wills.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Garst Museum, home of the Annie Oakley Center and more in Greenville, Ohio

The Garst Museum in Greenville, Ohio, is home to the largest known collection of Annie Oakley items in the world and, while Annie Oakley may be one of the most renowned folks from Ohio's Darke County, we learned about a lot of other fascinating people and events during our recent visit to the museum.

Visitors enter the museum through the front door of the Garst House, originally built in 1852 as an inn. The Garst family donated the home to the Darke County Historical Society for use as a museum in 1946, and today the museum has a collection of more than 300,000 artifacts and a complex with over 35,000 square feet of display space.

The Garst has military uniforms from the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard for every American military involvement since the War of 1812, with the exception of the Mexican American War during the 1840s.

One of the military galleries

Nearly all of the museum's military artifacts have some sort of connection to Darke County, including a collection of items from Lt. Commander Zachary Lansdowne, who died during an ill-fated flight of the Navy airship USS Shenandoah. The collection also has a large number of items from women in military service through the years.

Many visitors come to visit the Annie Oakley Center, opened in 2005 and renovated in 2010. The museum's collection of Oakley artifacts includes a lot of fun items like vintage Oakley-themed toys, posters from movies produced about her, and personal items she carried with her as she traveled the world demonstrating her shooting skill.

Annie Oakley's traveling trunk and personal items

Broadcaster and world traveler Lowell Thomas, perhaps best remembered for his travel-oriented television shows during the mid-1900s, also came from Darke County. A gallery showcases Thomas' prolific career in radio, television, movies, newspapers, and as a book author. Visitors can also tour Thomas' childhood home on the museum's grounds during summer weekends.

Crossroads of Destiny, a permanent exhibit opened in 2008, is a must-see for American history enthusiasts. The museum mounted this exhibit to bring attention to a largely forgotten story in the nation's history and to correct inaccuracies about the era perpetuated throughout the years in history books.

The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 paved the way for Midwestern settlement, and this exhibit traces events leading up to the treaty signing going back to the Paleo Indian period, proceeding through the signing of the treaty that involved 12 Native American nations and the United States, and the beginning of America's subsequent westward expansion.

The area in and around Greenville served as home to one of the largest stockade forts ever built in the country, a 50-acre camp that headquartered the United States Army from 1793 until 1796. The museum's four-foot by six-foot large scale model (1/64 inch = 1 foot) of Fort Greene Ville took about 15 months to create, and model maker Andrew S. Janicki used techniques like individually cutting each log in the model from small twigs using a small jig, according to a brochure I picked up in the gallery.

Detail of fort model

Historians and archeologists worked closely together on the exhibit that contains about 1,000 artifacts, the oldest dating back 14,000 years.

The museum funded a number of digs over the years. Many of the items in the Crossroads exhibit came from digs undertaken in 1994 and 1995 for the bicentennial of the treaty signing, which unearthed artifacts from the fort like weapons, ammunition, buckles, uniform buttons, tools, household implements, remains of the fort's blockhouse, and more.

The museum also has a section containing a recreated "village" of storefronts and homes, a collection of Currier and Ives prints, and more galleries devoted to area history.

Genealogists can find files related to nearly 5,000 surnames that include obituaries, newspaper clippings, legal documents, and family histories at the museum's genealogy library operated by the Darke County Genealogical Society.

Visiting the museum before the end of 2011? Download a buy-two-get-one-free admission coupon at the Discover Ohio site.

See my story, Shooting Star from North Star, Ohio, for more about Annie Oakley's life.

Want to learn more about the Treaty of Greenville and people in frontier Ohio? Check out The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830 (A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier) by R. Douglas Hurt, A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh by Allan W. Eckert, or Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne's Legion in the Old Northwest (Campaigns and Commanders) by Alan D. Graff.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Greenville

Ohio museum delivers postal history

I love specialty museums, so seeing a sign for the Museum of Postal History on a building in Delphos, Ohio, aroused my curiosity.

It turns out that this is one of only three museums in the United States dedicated to postal history. The other two are the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington D.C. and the US Postal Museum at the Post Office in Marshall, Michigan (yet another excuse for a road trip!).

Between the tour we took with museum staffer Patty Kline and email correspondence with museum director Gary Levitt, I learned a lot about postal history and Delphos' unique museum.

Levitt began collecting postal artifacts in 1993, shortly after becoming the Delphos postmaster.

By 1995, the Museum of Postal History opened in the Delphos Post Office.

Levitt retired from the postal service in 2007 as the museum outgrew its quarters in the post office, and museum officials purchased an 11,000-square-foot building in 2008. The building, originally built as a livery in 1902, allowed the museum to expand its exhibits.

"The horses were kept upstairs, and there was a ramp built up the back of the building so they could get the horses up there," says Levitt. "It was an implements dealership, and for many years, the city's recreation center. It was an Eagles lodge for several years, a restaurant, a fun house, a bar, and a dance hall."

Museum mural in progress

Work continues on the museum as volunteers renovate the building, organize exhibits, and work on several murals throughout the museum, including one that pictures the building in its original incarnation as a livery.

Levitt's ideas for the future include establishing a children's area at the museum with a kid-sized post office and the Wee Deliver literacy program.

There are plenty of stamps at the museum, but I think some of the most interesting exhibits involving stamps were displays of stamps mixed with related memorabilia like a baseball-themed display I saw during our visit. I thought that was a fun and imaginative way to look at stamps, and we started imagining the many types of themed shows you could develop centering on commemorative stamps and related memorabilia.

"There is something to interest everyone. We are not just stamps, but we do have hundreds of thousands of them," says Levitt, who enjoys the surprised reactions of visitors when they discover the museum includes many other items like antique postal vehicles, unique mailboxes, photographs, and a library.

I liked the museum's collection of postal vehicles, which includes horse-drawn wagons like the early 1900s Harrington Rural Free Delivery coach and quirkier conveyances like the 1959 Eschelman three-wheeler.

The Eschelman is one of only 59 produced. The quarter-ton vehicle could carry up to 500 pounds of mail, but postal carriers didn't like it because it tipped over easily (although they could right it nearly as easily by themselves). Carriers also didn't like the fact that the driver had to sit over the engine, inhaling exhaust fumes as they drove their route.

Levitt sees the "power of the written word" as one of the ways the mail service recorded and influenced our history, and some of the most powerful examples of this power in the museum are displays related to the Holocaust.

The museum's "Dear Cousin" exhibit follows correspondence between cousins, Max Schohl and Julius Hess. Schohl sought the help of Hess in Charlestown, WV, to escape Nazi persecution in Germany and immigrate to the United States. Schohl's story sadly ends with his death at Auschwitz, although his wife and daughters survived the camps and immigrated to the United States after World War II.

"In the ghettos and concentration camps, they had to make their own stamps or script and set up a mail system," says Levitt. "The Nazis were meticulous about having those interned to write to family members back home and tell them how well they were doing. Mail was censored as well."

The museum's collection also includes correspondence from passengers aboard the S.S. St. Louis during the infamous 'Voyage of the Damned' where 938 Jewish passengers sought escape from the Third Reich, sailing from Europe and back again after the United States' refusal to allow them off of the ship.

The museum is on the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental paved highway that connected Delphos to the rest of the United States in 1912. It was my idea to explore the western Ohio section of the Lincoln Highway that brought us to Delphos.

Admission is free, or just the promise that visitors will return and bring someone else with them as Levitt cheerfully says on the "Welcome" video played in the museum's lobby.

Museum hours are currently 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Thursday, 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. on Saturday, or by appointment.

Want to learn more about postal history and historical events portrayed on stamps? Check out An American Postal Portrait: A Photographic Legacy by the United States Postal Service, William J. Henderson, James Bruns and Carl Burcham or An American History Album: The Story of the United States Told Through Stamps by Michael Worek, Jordan Worek, Terrence W. McCaffrey and the United States Postal Service.

Learn more about the cousins, Schohl and Hess in And The World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned To The Holocaust by David Clay Large and the voyage of the S.S. St. Louis in Voyage of the Damned: A Shocking True Story of Hope, Betrayal, and Nazi Terror by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts or Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust by Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

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