Charleston, South Carolina

Reaching South Carolina meant reaching one of my goals for the year:  To have visited all 48 of the continental United States.  I still have Alaska and Hawaii left, but their distance from the rest of the States makes them ideal candidates for separate trips.  I had toyed with the idea of driving to Alaska from Washington State while on this really long road trip.  But when I learned it was 2000 miles just from Seattle to Anchorage, not counting any other touring of that state, I decided to pass.

So South Carolina = 48 States seen, a feat of which I am quite proud.

I split my time in Charleston between the old city area and an 18th-Century Plantation several miles outside of the city.

I'm glad I took many photos of Charleston and Savannah both, and am writing my memories of both, because I suspect that years from now, I might have a hard time keeping them straight were it not for my recordings.  They are both old, southern coastal cities.  Both are beautiful and have similar weather.  They're only about 100 miles apart too, and while I didn't look them up, they probably developed around the same time.  But I found I liked Savannah a lot more than Charleston.

Some homes in historic Charleston, S.C.

Charleston's old city is quite extensive.  One could spend hours walking around the town, and it's big enough that a trolley tour wouldn't be a waste either.  I walked, as the weather was nice and I really like walking.

More Charleston

But unlike Savannah, Charleston seems much more commercial.  It was lot busier than Savannah and had too many shops.  The historic Charleston City Market (pictured below), which looks pretty cool and was probably once a legitimate local market, is now filled with women's clothing stores and Christmas ornament shops (a sure sign that you're in a tourist town).  And wall-to-wall people.  Now that I think back, I was reminded of Georgetown in Washington, D.C.  It's pretty cool to look at and walk around in, but it's now overwhelmed by too many people and commercialism.

Charleston City Market

So downtown Charleston wasn't bad for an afternoon walk around town, but it didn't strike me as a place I'd want to return to.

Outside of downtown, however, are a handful of 18th Century plantation houses.  I visited Drayton Hall, and found it will worth the visit.  The property is owned by the National Trust, which chose to preserve the property rather than restore it.  That is, the property is maintained in good condition in the style in which it existed when the Trust bought it (in the 1980s I think?) rather than being renovated to look like it did when it was first built.

Drayton Hall

So there are a number of places on the property that show architectural details from different eras (and frankly, sometimes don't match very well) but it retains the authenticity of keeping pieces that were installed by the people who lived there, rather than recreating pieces from modern equipment or supplying pieces that were taken from other properties.

Inside Drayton Hall

I was unaware, until this visit, that most upper class southern plantation owners did not live on the property where the crops were grown.  Instead, most of them had homes on "small" plantations, but the crops and the accompanying slaves lived elsewhere.  This is true of Drayton Hall, which is where the family lived (but not true of the Kent Plantation House, which was a middle-class plantation).

Much to my delight, the Drayton property is home to a small african-american cemetery, where a few dozen (maybe more, records are scarce) people from the area were laid to rest from the 18th Century until the 1990s.  In accordance with the wishes of the last person buried there, who was also the main source of information about the graveyard, no efforts are being made to locate more graves or identify bodies.

"Leave 'em rest" was the request of the last person to be buried here.

Most graves are unmarked, or their wooden headstones disappeared long ago.

Georgia: Savannah

The other day trip that Reggie and Tawsha took me on was a trip to the coast to see Savannah.  What a nice city!  Like Seattle, I regret a little bit not staying there longer, but I was very pleased with the time I did spend there and would recommend it as a place to visit for a long weekend or something.

A home on the old town square

Downtown.

One of the reasons I liked it so much was that it wasn't completely overrun by tourists, the way a lot of older and beautiful cities are.  Savannah has a very prominent historic area, but walking around it felt like walking around a more ordinary residential/downtown-ish area.  There were other people, but it was pleasant and easy.  And very pretty.

The Cathedral overlooking the old square

Oh no!  :(

The part of town that seemed to me to be the business district was more crowded, but that felt good too.  It was people on their way home from work or maybe out for the evening.  Bustling, but not a madhouse.  And although I don't think it technically was part of the historic district, the business district was very unique, with its share of old buildings and unusual features, like this business that was built over an existing road:

See the street underneath?

We ate dinner at Moon River Brewing Company, a restaurant featured on The Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures.  Apparently, the restaurant is haunted, although we weren't lucky enough to see any paranormal activity.  :(  The food was pretty good, though, and Reggie and Tawsha tried their first ever flight of beers.  Tawsha and I liked the brew more than Reggie, but that's OK.  More beer for us!

Reggie & Tawsha

But the highlight of our day in Savannah was at the Bonaventure Cemetery.  It was founded in the mid-19th Century, so it's not the oldest cemetery I've seen, but it's definitely one of the most beautiful.  And the spanish moss dangling from all the trees adds to the feeling of being someplace spooky.

Bonaventure has a fair number of graves of Confederate soldiers:

And a sizable Jewish section:

In case you can't read this:  The ashes of 344 people killed by the Nazis.

Live long and prosper!

While many of Bonaventure's beauties are obvious, there are many little touches throughout the cemetery for those who spend time looking:

In my opinion, we need more headstones with character!

Georgia: Macon & Andersonville

If you've looked at my High Noon photos, you've seen me with Tawsha and Reggie, a couple of Warcraft friends who I visited for three nights in Macon, Georgia.  Most of my sightseeing in Georgia was not in Macon because Tawsha and Reggie have a very low opinion of their town and they were loathe to subject me to it.  Fine with me, as I was there to see them and not whatever city they happened to live in.

Reggie & Tawsha & two of their six pets

Reggie and Tawsha were extremely generous with their time and their care of me, especially considering Tawsha had a hurt knee and was on crutches the whole time.  They fattened me up with several home-cooked southern meals, and we went out to eat a couple of times at similarly fattening places.  (Tip for noobs:  In Georgia, when the menu describes something as "butter dipped," expect your food to arrive having been dipped in a vat of hot butter.)  The food was great but so much richer than I'm used to.  After a couple days, I was craving puffed rice.

Tawsha adds a can of cream of mushroom soup to her macaroni  & cheese.  Yum!

One of our two day trips was to the Andersonville Prison Camp, which was the largest Southern POW camp for Union soldiers during the Civil War and was apparently one gigantic hellhole.  (Huh, I just used the word "hellhole" as slang just now, but apparently, that's what everyone called the place.)  It was build to hold 10,000 people but quickly grew to hold 32,000.  Over its year plus of existence, 45,000 men passed through it, and about 1/3 died of disease or starvation.  Real crappy.

The grounds of the former prison camp.

A re-created corner of the camp walls and prisoner-made tents.

Andersonville is also home to the National Prisoner of War Museum, which we toured and which was pretty educational.  It covered POWs from all eras, with displays, letters home, official documents, etc.  I found a quote from and some information about Natalie Crouter, the author of Forbidden Diary, which was a diary she kept while a civilian internee of the Japanese during WWII.  The internees were not permitted to write anything or even keep writing material.  But she wrote anyway, on anything she could find, detailing her time in the camp.  She was also a friend of my grandma's, which is why I know her name and have a copy of her book (and which I will now finally make an effort to read).

After the civil war, Clara Barton and others took charge of moving the Union soldiers who were buried in mass graves near the prison to a National Cemetery right nearby.  So of course, Tawsha, Reggie and I toured that as well.  The majority of occupants of the cemetery are from the Civil War but some are from later times.  Unlike the other National Cemeteries I've seen, this one was notable for how tightly packed the graves are.  I'm guessing, but don't know for sure, that the people who moved the bodies were just overwhelmed with how many there were and couldn't plot out a normal graveyard.  Here are a few highlights:

These are all Union soldiers.  The six graves in the close-up of this photo were the leaders of the Andersonville Raiders, a group of prisoners who started stealing from, beating, and in a few cases, murdering other prisoners.  In response to the raiders, a larger group of prisoners asked their captors for permission to capture and put on trial the raiders.  Most raiders were given some lesser form of punishment, but the six leaders were put on trial sentenced to hanging.  Their graves are set apart from the other men who died in Andersonville.

In all of the National Cemeteries, there is only one "standard" gravestone that differs from the rest.  Here it is.  The dove is not original to the gravestone.  No one knows when it was added, why, or by whom.  Also note how tightly packed all of the stones are.

You know, before I set out on my trip across the U.S., I anticipated taking a lot of photos of falling-down barns, because they are really cool.  Turns out I didn't take a single photo of a falling-down barn, but instead took hundreds of photos of graveyards.  I'm not sure why I didn't realize my love of graveyards before this trip, but I sure do know it now.  My apologies to those readers who are not interested in headstones, because you've seen a lot of them in my blog!  :)  And for those who love them, you'll really enjoy my next post...  ;-)

Montgomery, Alabama

Seriously, if Alabama weren't one of those states that enacted stupid laws that do nothing but get legally employed foreign executives arrested, I'd think it must be a pretty nice place to live.  Montgomery seemed just as nice as Selma, although larger and with more to do and more dining options.

My first stop was at the Rosa Parks Museum, which is run by Troy University, a multi-campus school with one of its branches in Montgomery.

For those of you who, like me, watch college football and so know about the school but have no idea where it is, its main campus is in Troy, Alabama.

The Rosa Parks Museum is pretty small and is very tightly focused on the incident where Rosa Parks got arrested on a bus for not giving up her seat to white people, then the resulting bus boycott by Montgomery's black population (with help from much of its white population).  It was a good museum, and starts the tour with a "movie" of the bus Rosa was on, reenacting the confrontation, then moving on to stills and audio and other material about the boycott.  Among the more obscure facts I learned was that a group of white residents of the city (bus company owners, maybe?) tried to sue the black residents for not riding the bus.  I'm not sure what cause of action that would have been, but how weird is that?  The lawsuit didn't go anywhere, but I think it highlights the frustration the city and bus company must have felt at losing all of the revenue.

Now, I've got to complain about what we learn about Rosa Parks in school.  I feel I got duped about Rosa Parks as badly as I got duped about the Pony Express.  Maybe moreso, because Rosa and the bus boycott were really important events in the civil rights movement, while the Pony Express was an 18 month private boondoggle that cost its investors some money.  For example, I was taught that Rosa was a little old lade who was tired after a long day and she just didn't want to get up.  First of all, Rosa Parks was 43. That's 43, not 63 or 83!  Second, yes she probably was tired after a long day.  But she sure wasn't this helpless and defenseless little lady.  She was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.  And when she got arrested, some of Montgomery's most prominent civil rights leaders and attorneys came to bail her out of jail.  She wasn't an innocent caught up in a storm, but someone who was surely aware of the work of civil rights workers and concepts like civil disobedience and passive resistance.  Not that what she did is any less important; I can't imagine the courage it took to stand up to a busload of people yelling and police threatening.  But Ms. Parks wasn't the little old lady I learned about in school.

My second major stop in Montgomery was the Old Oakwood Cemetery, which has graves dating from the mid 1700s to the present.  On my travels this year, I've seen a few other cemeteries dating from the same era, but the carvings and decor of these gravestones were mostly quite different from what I saw along the New England and Canadian coasts.  The men at the cemetery's office gave me a handout about the cemetery (which I think, but don't know, that they got from the web, from some Alabama enthusiast's website).  One of the men also offered to guide my car to some of the farther-off parts of the cemetery, and wound up giving me an impromptu tour, which was really nice of him.  Here are some highlights, starting with the oldest marked grave:

The grave of a man who drowned in the river.  The grave is shaped like waves, and carries a warning not to swim in the river:

The very sad graves of four brothers who ignored that warning, and all drowned on the same day in the river:

The family grave of a woman and all seven of her children who died in an epidemic:

A Confederate soldier cemetery.  The Confederate flag these days usually stands for all sorts of ugliness, but I don't see a problem with it flying over the graves of people who died under it 150 years ago:

Old Oakwood's most famous occupant, Hank Williams.  It was nice of him to put a putting green on his plot like that:

For some reason, several french soldiers from World War II are buried here.  I don't know the story:

The old Jewish section:

And a handful of other interesting graves and markers:

Selma, Alabama

Spoiler alert:  As of the writing of this post, I have finished my tour of the South, a part of the country I had not been to before (other than New Orleans and North Carolina).  And of all of the places in the South I visited on this trip, I was surprised to discover that I liked Alabama the best!  Granted, I saw only two cities there, but I thought both were really neat and I got a good vibe from both of them.

The first was Selma, a small city in the middle of Alabama.  Although it's probably well-known for other things, a lot of people know about it because of the events of March 1965:  First the "Bloody Sunday" where 600 civil rights protest marchers were stopped on the town bridge and beaten with clubs and sprayed with tear gas; and second, for the successful march a few weeks later from Selma to Montgomery, where 25,000 marchers walked 50 miles to protest the lack of civil rights of Alabama.  If you remember the 1960s or took a history class, you'll remember that the Civil Rights Act was signed into law a few months later.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge

But Selma has more than just the famous bridge and a place in the history of the civil rights movement.  It's got a small and charming Old Depot Museum, with its collection of artifacts from all of Alabama's history (pre-Colombian era through the present).  It's one of those kitschy little places where the staff takes an enormous amount of pride in their work.  And the proprietor was happy to tell me about Selma and give recommendations for things to see and places to eat.

The Old Depot Museum

Detail of a quilt at the museum.

Most of the town (that I saw) was pretty blue collar, nothing too fancy.  The older part of the town, which I strolled around for a while, was pretty charming, but small.  For example, Selma's famous Songs of Selma park is only this big:

Yes, that's all of it.  I'm not sure what the big deal is, other than the great sign.  Don't get me wrong, it's cute, but um... where's the park?

I was pleased to find a couple of dining options with some real southern cooking.  My lunch was really tasty I was eating it, but I felt a bit queasy an hour later, probably because each item on my plate contained at least one stick of butter.  Yummy, but richer than I'm used to.

A lunch of butter, garnished with fish, fried okra, sweet potato fries, and hush puppies.  And sweet, sweet tea.

An interesting stop on my tour was the Brown Chapel AME Church, which was the starting point for the march from the aforementioned Selma-to-Montgomery march.  The church itself wasn't that interesting, except as a historically significant place in the civil rights movement.

But what made my stop interesting was there was one other person who stopped his car along the road to admire the church and its monument to Martin Luther King.  And this car was equipped with loudspeakers on the outside, blaring what sounded like a speech given by someone from the Black Power movement.  I really have no idea who it was, but it sounded like Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X or someone, kind of talking up how the black man has been kept down by the white man and how he shouldn't put up with it anymore.  It sounded kind of old, like 1960s era.  Again, that's a guess, but an educated guess.  It felt like a movie, that as I was looking at one of the monuments to the civil rights movement, that some random guy drove up in a car to play for me my own personal soundtrack to my visit.  Wish I'd asked him what he was playing.  Ah, well.

Vicksburg

Vicksburg Battlefield along the Mississippi River, like Promontory Point, Utah, is one of those places that doesn't reveal that people actually did something pretty important on that spot in the earth.  Vicksburg was a really important battle in the American Civil War and, along with ... some other battle that dad mentioned... Gettysburg, maybe? ... was probably the turning point in the war in favor of the North (I'm sure some Civil War buff will tell me I'm wrong on this.  That's fine, I'm more a fan of war of the Classical World).  But other than about 200 monuments added after the war, and a single paved road running through the park, there is really no sign that people were there, let alone fought a really major battle on the spot.  It's just a lot of grass and a lot of trees and some gently rolling hills overlooking the river.

A post-war memorial

Another post-war memorial

Had I known ahead of time that the visitors' center showed a movie about the battle, I would have stopped there first instead of last.  Because just driving through the battlefield, I found it nearly incomprehensible, at least at first.  While there are markers all over the park indicating where different groups of soldiers fought or gained ground or lost ground or planted a cannon, I didn't know anything about the overall flow of the battle, and so didn't know the significance of any one gain or loss or herioc stand.  Apparently the movie shows all of that.  /sighs at self for not watching the movie/  By the time I was about halfway through the park, though, I started to get a feel for things.  I'd seen enough markers and read enough of my brouchure that at least I could imagine where the major front was, and where the major forts and tactically useful locations were.

A tunnel built by Union soldiers -- one of the very few pieces of evidence that humans were around at the time of the battle.

Strangely, though, by the time I was through with my visit, I would have sworn that the South won the Battle of Vickburg, given how many signs and how many times my brouchure said something like "On this spot, the South pushed back a very weak Northern attack..." or "The North had 500 dead or wounded, the South had 8."  In the end, the battle became a siege and the South lost due to starvation rather than lack of military accomplishment, with the soldiers and civilians eating "mules, rats and even boiled shoe leather."  So the South won the skirmishes but lost the battle.

A Union gunboat that was sunk in the river during the war, and later salvaged and partially restored.

"Oh what a beautiful morning!  Oh what a beautiful day!"

Much to my delight, the Battlefield is home to one of the National Cemeteries.  It is the largest resting place of Union soldiers from the Civil War, although it is not the largest National Cemetery.  Interestingly, 75% of those interred in Vicksburg have never been identified, and are labelled with numbers only.  While this was not one of my favorite cemeteries on my trip, it was worth the stop since I was already at the Park.

Most of these are numbered, not named.