Commemorating the Civil War

There are times, when traveling, that we must fly in to a city, spend a few days there, and depart. But when you see a place in this way, the sense you get of that place is disconnected from the space that it inhabits. You don't get a sense of how far the place is from its neighbors, from its rivals, from its mountains or rivers or coasts. I prefer a mode of travel that is itself a journey: fly into a city if necessary, but travel from there to another place, and depart. To travel overland, be it by train, by car, by ferry, on the surface of the Earth gives you a much deeper appreciation for the context of a place, and how it fits into the space of the world, in relationship to other places.

As with space, so with time. This commemoration of the American Civil War should not be a sudden occasional glimpse of some stuff that happened an arbitrary amount of time ago, but a way to understand the context of the unfolding events of the past, and their relationships to each other, by making an analogy to the timestream that we experience every day. It's low-bandwidth approach to appreciating history: rather than observing deeply for a short period of time, observe shallowly for a long period of time.

Five months and 150 years ago, in November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, and beginning in December, led by South Carolina, the Deep South seceded and seized local federal bases and depots. In the uncertain months of early 1861, South Carolina repeatedly called for the evacuation of Fort Sumter, and the first shots of the war were fired in January to drive off a steamer attempting to resupply the fort. Lincoln took office on March 4, and eventually sent ships to resupply the fort. The morning after the first ships arrived on April 11, Confederate batteries opened fire, and the Civil War began. Virginia seceded on April 17; Robert E. Lee resigned on April 20 to go south; and a week later West Virginia seceded from Virginia. In May, Arkansas and Tennessee seceded, and Kentucky declared neutrality. Not until July was the first major battle of the war fought, at Bull Run, as Washingtonians picnicked.

In the western theater, Kentucky's neutrality would hold until September, when Confederate and Union forces attempted to secure the Ohio River valley at the river's mouth. But the major battles of Kentucky and Tennessee happened in 1862, when the Union captured Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in February, pushing the front south to the Tennessee River, and the Confederacy was turned back from the Kentucky campaign at the Battle of Perryville in October.

In November 2010, by contrast, the Republicans made significant gains in the House in the midterm elections, and the country's political attention has been focused on conflicts over government spending, federal debt, and military action in the Maghreb. Months will trickle by in the ongoing debates, as the country drifts closer to the 2012 presidential elections, already underway. It's been a similar amount of time from the 2010 elections as from Lincoln's election to Fort Sumter.

So, there are a couple of blogs launched to overview the commemoration of the Civil War as it proceeds: The Long Recall, a period blog of the Civil War, A House Divided at the Washington Post, and Disunion at the New York Times (timeline). A snippet:

Charleston Harbor, S.C., April 9, 1861
After months of anxiety and expectation, there came at last a day of terrible clarity. For months, a single question had preoccupied the men of Fort Sumter’s beleaguered Union garrison, from their commander down to the lowliest private: what would the Lincoln administration do? Would it yield to Southern coercion and evacuate the fort, sending a signal to the world that it was ready to negotiate with the secessionists, and perhaps even let the slave states go in peace? Or would it send reinforcements and supplies to Charleston Harbor — and in so doing, quite possibly touch off civil war?

...the garrison had remained in a bizarre position of both power and powerlessness. One the one hand, as [fort surgeon Samuel Wylie] Crawford realized, they could at will change the course of American history, with a single cannon shot from one. On the other hand, Fort Sumter, which had looked so commanding and impregnable on their first arrival, was beginning to feel less so. On all sides of the harbor, they could see new artillery platforms under construction, cannons being wheeled into place, and in the distance bayonets flashing like a heliographed message, as recruits marched and counter-marched on the beach. Major Robert Anderson, the Union garrison’s commander, expressed it for most in the garrison when he wrote that he felt like “a sheep tied watching the butcher sharpening a knife to cut his throat.”

The Civil War Trust has an animated map of the battle of Fort Sumter, among others. Public, professional, and amateur historians are writing many other blogs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ) and lists ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ).

Images: National Park Service Fort Sumter Historic Images

EDIT
In Why They Fight: Civil War Re-enactors and the Battle over Historic Sites (Time), Gregg Segal has a series of photos of Civil War re-enactors in the modern locations of battles.

Baylor University has a digital version of the War of the Rebellion Atlas.

Appalachia, island continent

During the late Cretaceous, shallow seas divided what is now North America into several continents. Much of the east lay on the island continent of Appalachia. Here's one map of 75 million years ago.

Here's another, drawn from National Geographic's 1993 "North America in the Age of the Dinosaurs" map. It's in their print map collection under North & South America, here.

Paleontology of North America has some other world maps, including the Cretaceous. There are no dinosaur fossils from Kentucky in this period, but a few plant fossils. The Cretaceous saw ammonites and mosasaurs along the coast, flowering plants like willow and walnut in Illinois and Sequoia in Virginia, hadrosaurs in Missouri, New Jersey, and Tennessee, the sauropod Astrodon in Maryland, and Pteradon in Delaware. Fossil hunting in New Jersey was particularly important in the early history of paleontology, since the state from 1858 yielded the first nearly-complete dinosaur fossils from North America: the duck-billed Hadrosaurus and the tyrannosaurid Dryptosaurus (1, 2, 3)

Downtown eats in Indy

We're leaving for GenCon tomorrow. Yay!

GenCon is fun if you work it right, especially to meet up with old friends who live elsewhere. But I'm not a big fan of downtown Indy; it seems like what a suburbanite's idea of what a downtown should be like. It seems so sterile, rather than being an organic neighborhood where people might actually live. And it is completely overrun with generic chain restaurants.

We always go to the Ram (link), a chain brewpub with a location next to the convention center that has always made a show of welcoming gamer nerds. The Shake 'n Steak nearby is a little cheaper, but always super crowded, while the Einstein Bros Bagels (link) is decent for a breakfast. The food at the Convention Center itself is expensive and truly wretched. We've tried to eat elsewhere from time to time, but such experimentation has led to some terrible experiences, as when (desperately hungry late at night) we wandered into a Hooter's that served one of the most disgusting greasy fish and chips I've ever eaten.

So here's some preliminary research on restaurants near the Convention Center. Mostly I've been using the IndyEthnicFood.com map, trying to get information on places that aren't too expensive, too generic, or serve what we already eat too much of.

The place I've always wanted to go to eat in Indy is the Brugge Brasserie (link, map), ever since sampliing some of their beer at events here in Louisville. They brew some fantastic Belgians, as I recall. The brasserie is a gastropub serving Belgian and European food. At 1011 A.E. Westfield Blvd., however, it is way to the north in Broad Ripple about seven or eight miles north of downtown. This neighborhood, though, appears to have a bunch of great restaurants and all of Indy's independent brewpubs such as Barley Island (link) and Broad Ripple Brewpub (link).

Two years ago, it was really nice to have lunch at a Japanese restaurant after a couple days of Convention Center food and pub grub. The nearest Japanese restaurant is Mikado. A block east is Sushi on the Rocks (link, map, menu) which has lunch specials under $10. At 235 S Meridian St., it is between Georgia and South St.

Noodles & Company (link, map, menu) is a chain that offers a variety of Asian-, American-, and Mediterranean-inspired pasta/noodle dishes. It looks like a meal here runs about $5-10. At 121 W. Maryland St., it's right next to the Convention Center between Capitol and Illinois Ave. The Pita Pit (link, map, menu) is another chain that has various sandwiches for $5-10 and is open until 9 or 10pm. At 1 N. Pennsylvania St., it is just north of Washington St. and about a block southeast of the Soldiers & Sailors Monument. There's a couple of other places around Pennsylvania Ave. and Washington St., like King David Dogs (link) and Dick's Barbeque (link, map, menu) at 50 N. Pennsylvania Ave, which has meals under $10.

TaTa Cuban Cafe (link, map) sells Cuban sandwiches. At 137 W. Market St., it's about a block due west of the monument. Giorgio's Pizza (link) has sandwiches and calzones for just over $5 as well as pizza by the slice, and is on the eastern side of Monument Circle.

The nearest Indian restaurant that I can see is India Garden (link, map, menu). Most of its entrees range from $10-15. At 207 N. Delaware St., it's just north of Ohio St., about two blocks northeast of the Monument.

A non-metaphorical garden

Shortly before Christmas, we made an offer on a house, and we will close on it this afternoon. This would be the first time I will have owned property myself, which I can plant as I desire. I have gardened in many ways before: in many containers across two continents, in community garden plots, in neighbor's yards. But now Panglott shall have at last a non-metaphorical garden.

My plan for now is to spend the first year observing the plants that grow there now: to see their types, habits, and varieties; to watch the patterns of sun and water on the property; to mull future garden plans. There are a few patches of English ivy and wintercreeper to work on weeding out, and most of the trees appear to be weedy Ailanthus growing along the fenceline that I'll want to replace, but I hope for the first year to be mostly observation. With a small bit of land, it'll be worth the time to find the sunny patches as the sun shifts in the sky, to find the wet and dry patches, to slowly stress the weeds into oblivion, to plan a layout, and to drag out and savor the slow process of getting things the way I'd like them to be.

For a long time, I have been an avid gardener without any garden. Living in the U.S. and Japan and traveling in China and Europe, I've seen some really excellent and inspiring gardens. At present, I think there are three main traits I'll want to encourage in my yard:

Nativeness
The single largest threat to the environment of the continental U.S. is not global warming, or overhunting, but invasive species. Following more than a century of overhunting, clearcutting, habitat destruction, and pollution, one of the great environmental disasters of the 20th century was the downfall of the American chestnut. Two generations ago, the exotic chestnut blight wiped out four billion chestnut trees, the most commercially, economically, and ecologically valuable tree of the climax forest in the East. A generation ago, Dutch elm disease wiped out beloved elm trees across the country. And now that the emerald ash borer has entered Kentucky, ash trees will likely become virtually extinct in this part of the world for centuries or millenia to come.

Invasive species are bad for our local environment, and their spread is often aided and abetted by home landscaping. Some of Kentucky's least wanted plants are introduced from landscaping: burning bush, Japanese honeysuckle, English ivy, and the ugly, obnoxious, highly aggressive wintercreeper. Most of these plants are really pretty ugly, to boot. Louisville's otherwise very cool Riverwalk is absolutely choked with exotic honeysuckle and multiflora rose. There's more information at the Kentucky Native Plant Society or native gardening at USFS

Whenever I go out for a hike or bike ride in the woods or a park, I'll see a patch of English ivy or wintercreeper or honeysuckle beginning the process of taking over a patch of otherwise bucolic woods. It's depressing. And when I come back into the city and see those same plants infesting yards and gardens, it's still depressing. I'd rather, as much as is possible, stick to the plants and flowers common in the area of the Falls of the Ohio, the Ohio River valley, and the Eastern woodlands west of Appalachia. This is hardly a limitation: the Eastern forest of the United States is one of the most botanically diverse temperate ecosystems in the world.

Michael Pollan penned a diatribe Against Nativism 15 years ago, which raises some valid points, but I think this remains an interesting approach to gardening, in general.

Usefulness
If you're going to put in the work to grow a plant, there should be a purpose for the labor. Plants worth cultivating should serve us for food, for spices, for tea, or for useful materials. A tomato plant or two, and a window box full of mint are good; sunflowers and squashes have been grown here for thousands of years, and there are interesting opportunities to experiment with cultivating native plants for food, such as sunchokes or ramps (Allium tricoccum). American bamboo is a good structural material for crafts. Horsetails can be scouring brushes. Bee balm and yarrow make nice tea.

I've long been intrigued by the idea of Kerala home gardens: that every household would have a few trees that supply food to enrich the family's diet. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, we had a peach tree and an almond tree, which provided a fantastic wealth of fruit and nuts every year. We had more peach pies than we could eat. It was great.

This idea has been expanded to forest gardening and permaculture, which seems to be something of a treehugger buzzword. But layering perennial food-producing to mimic the ecologial structure of a forest could be a way to get a wealth of food with less work. I am a big believer in perennials, especially those that can fend for themselves. And the plants typical of our local forests can fit such a system well: a canopy of hickory, pecan, oak, black cherry, or persimmon (but sadly no chestnuts), beside which can grow pawpaws, sand plums, American plums, hazelnuts, or serviceberries. Below, in the understory, can grow native ferns for fiddleheads, mosses, and perhaps wild ginger. Sounds workable, but needs more research.

The things you should grow at home, given the work involved, are things that you want an overwhelmingly bounty of (you can never have too much homegrown tomatoes), or unusual things that are hard to buy in the store.

Aesthetics
And so my priorities are opposite of most. There are some flowers that I enjoy absent practical uses: coneflowers, asters, blazing star, wild roses, &c. And I have come to think "usefulness" should include "attracts hummingbirds and butterflies" (clearly, very utilitarian creatures), so: butterfly weed, meadow lily, trumpet honeysuckle, red columbine. Trumpet creeper is the best hummingbird flower, but very aggressive; I'd be hesitant to plant it, but would be satisfied if it's already there.

Photos: Top—Helianthus tuberosus

Benimoto (CC BY 2.0)

Second—Lonicera sempervirens

pellaea (CC BY 2.0)

Third—Prunus americana

nalilo (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Bottom—Aquilegia canadensis,

nicmcphee (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Indiana Forest Cover

A couple of years ago, I heard a great discussion of Indiana's forest management on Homegrown on WFPL. Bernie Fischer, of the Indiana Division of Forestry, explained that, prior to American settlement and colonization, Indiana had 85% forest cover and 15% prairie. By about 1900, it had declined to 7% forest. It has since rebounded to 20% forest, but very little of that is remaining old-growth forest.

It's a pretty interesting factoid, and an interesting interview overall. Here are some quotes from the episode, which I believe is the December 18, 2004, show; their Web site has been redesigned, and I can't find the link to the original.

BOB HILL: Speaking of woods, we'll go across the river to Indiana briefly, and talk to the man up there who's in charge of the forests, and find out how people can take care of their lands, and all of this information will be applicable to Kentucky residents, too. ..To help us out, we're going to have Bernie Fischer; he's been director of the Indiana Division of Forestry since 1990. As such, the former Purdue University professor and extension forestry specialist supervises 150,000 acres of woodlands in the state's 13 state forests, and also supervises the state's 18 district foresters, who will provide on-site guidance to private landowners. He also supervises the state's two seedling nurseries, which annually sell six million tree seedlings and wildlife shrubs. Bernie, welcome to HomeGrown...
...
JENEEN WICHE: Before we get into more, like, forest-related things, define a forest for me? Are there issues in terms of old-growth forests versus newer forests versus like, a natural sort of forest, and a plantation type of forest, do you know what I mean? Like, what is truly a forest?

BERNIE FISCHER: We lump them all together, and any spot of ground out there that's probably over an acre of trees, we consider a forest. We assume it's not a place where you mow underneath, and you, it's more natural than that. But obviously, if someone plants a forest, and takes care of it and grows trees in a natural setting, we consider plantations just part of an extension of a natural forest.

WICHE: But aren't plantations...are those harvested?

FISCHER: O yeah, plantations. Now, people grow all kinds of forests for lots of reasons. And only one of those is harvesting. You know, recreation, hunting, all the other reasons. So thes forests have lots of reasons. But normally when people plant trees, they're planting them for a purpose, somewhere down the road, to harvest the trees.

BOB HILL: Bernie, we have a lot of forests in the southern part of the state here, but when you get above say, Seymour, off to Chicago, it's pretty much farmland. Now, was the state that way 300 years ago, or was all that land cleared at one point to make that farmland?

BERNIE FISCHER: It was mostly cleared. Indiana originally was 85% forested, about 15% prairie; and agriculture hit northern Indiana, and it was flat, and it was great soil, and they cleared it. And now we just have remnant woodlots here and there. The conservation reserve program has added some forest. We actually have counties way up in northern Indiana that are actually increasing in forest acreage as people are taking, say, marginal farmland and setting it aside and planting trees and putting it back in forest.

JENEENE WICHE: So how many acres in Indiana now is, the percentage is...

BERNIE FISCHER: Four and half million acres of forest land, about 20% of the state is forested. And that's from a low in the early 1900s of about 7%. So we've rebounded.

WICHE: So how much is state, how much is federal, how much is privately owned of those forests?

FISCHER: 85% is private, so private owners are the dominant player; federal's about 5%, state's about 5%, and other holdings, military and other things, are about 5%.
...
HILL: ...There's almost a poetic image to the old-growth forest, "Don't touch my land"; but that's pretty difficult for a private homeowner to do and see any success in a hundred years, isn't it?

FISCHER: We have basically almost no old-growth forest left. The reaction we get from a lot of landowners is, if a landowner owns, say, 40 acres, we find that landowner usually has a favorite tree or two out there that's already quite large, maybe at least an older tree, a hundred years old or whatever. And sometimes the landowner is most concerned about "What do I do to protect that tree? Not the whole woods, I like to go look at that particular tree. Because it's special: it's big, it has an odd shape, or whatever." So, you tend to, as a forester, very quickly pick up on that, and say "OK, I want to make sure I do something good for that area over there, for that tree, and the rest of the land has smaller trees on it, and they want them to be large over time. What can I do to make them grow faster?"

HILL: There is an old-growth grove up near Dale, the Pioneer Mothers Forest?

FISCHER: There's Pioneer Mothers...

HILL: It's a beautiful bunch of woods...

FISCHER: And there's a nice, there's also Donaldson's Woods at Spring Mill State Park; there are a few isolated holdings, but boy, they're small, and they're really rare and hard to find. But yeah, there are a few out there. There's also a few in Kentucky I've heard about, I can't give you off the top of my head, but you've got a few in Kentucky, too.

WICHE: So when you all go in to assist the private forest owners, landowners, is there also an understanding of the rest of the ecosystem in the forest, when you suggest certain types of management practices?

FISCHER: Yeah, we're always thinking about water quality, because forests are the best protectors of water. So if you're going to put in a road system, if you're going to do a timber harvest, we want to make sure that we protect the water, and usually we do that through what we call "best management practices". And those are generally so you keep ground disturbance to a minimum, and you direct water flows away from streams, so that the soil doesn't get into streams. A lot of landowners, their number one goal, when you ask them what their goal is, and they'll say "I want more wildlife". So you have to ask them, well, "What kind of more wildlife". But wildlife is, it really is an interest. And generally if you want wildlife, you want a variety of habitats. You want some big trees in one area, you want small trees in another area, maybe a brushy area, so that you get a variety of wildlife. Because wildlife for a lot of people means birds, and different birds like different kinds of habitat. So it's all-encompassing, and in fact, many landowners, if you have them list their goals, wildlife will be first, aesthetics will be second, hiking or whatever, which relates to those first two, might be third, and then maybe timber harvesting is fourth or fifth. So we are generally not talking about timber first. But we do talk about that too, because a lot of the landowners will say, "Yeah, but someday, my son's going to go to college, and I might need a little extra revenue, or...how can I do things right?" And most landowners want to do things right.

Fischer also discusses the procedures for helping private landowners manage their land, from a state's perspective. The foresters will meet landowners on the site and provide advice based on their goals, although long-term management for timber harvesting needs private foresters. He notes that as little as 10 acres may be sufficient for timber management and discusses the process of timber sales and harvesting on private land.

Louisville's 1890s-1900s political machine

I've been digging around for some information on the end of electoral fusion in the Ohio River Valley and Kentucky, and there's a fascinating account of the machine politics of Louisville in the 1890s and 1900s in UK historian Tracy Campbell's book "Deliver the Vote" (also here). Campbell does a great job of making it a fantastic—and appalling—story. The juiciest passages are about Louisville boss John Henry Whallen, but Campbell has a great section earlier on the assassination of Kentucky governor William Goebel and the Goebel Election Law.

The Australian ballot is the secret ballot, and it seems Louisville was the first city in the U.S. to use it. Some of the stuff described here is really amazing. I'll quote liberally, but the best stuff is in the book:

Louisville is not a location that one normally thinks of as a cesspool of corruption. Quite the contrary, as the city that pioneered the Australian ballot, it is usually seen as progressive and mostly immune from the problems that plagued so many other areas.

...After Reconstruction, Louisville was Kentucky's largest city and the eighteenth largest in the nation. ...The city relied heavily on Ohio River commerce for its economic base and had a cosmopolitan mixture that included Democratic Irish Catholics and Republican African-Americans. Politically, the Democratic party effectively controlled the city as the memories of the Civil War persisted, and the winner of the city's Democratic primaries was effectively the winner of the general election in November.

Throughout the 1880s, Louisville had experienced a series of fraudulent elections. To correct the problem of repeaters, a Louisville representative, Albert Stoll, introduced a bill in the Kentucky legislature calling for mandatory registration in Louisville. ...His bill became law in 1884, but it had no effect on reforming the process.

...One of the members of the 1887 committee was Arthur Wallace, a Louisville state representative. After reading an article on the new secret ballot system used in Australia, Wallace approached some area judges to see whether a law mandating such a system could pass constitutional muster in Kentucky. Wallace's bill could not be applied to the entire state without amending the state constitution, so it affected Louisville's municipal contests only. When the "Wallace Election Bill" quietly became law in February 1888, Louisville became the first municipality in the nation to adopt the new voting method.

...By the 1890s, John Whallen, a young burlesque theater owner, became the acknowledged king of Louisville's Democratic party. ...Whallen once boasted that his burlesque theater was the real center of the city's political apparatus, a place he once described candidly as "the political sewer through which the political filth of Louisville runs."

...After temporarily losing control of city government in the mid 1890s, Whallen reappeared, helping his hand-picked candidate win the mayor's race, due in large part to a new method employed by followers of Whallen: police intimidation of African-American voters. When a prominent African-American attorney attempted to vote, he was confronted by a police officer who told him, "I have worn out four billies and I will wear this one out on you." Less violent means, such as clerks slowly checking registration lists, meant those wishing to vote in the heavily African-American Ninth and Tenth wards often waited hours to cast a ballot. Of course, many found that before they had reached the front of the line, the polls had closed. ...Without the strong arm of the police, Whallen's machine could not have controlled Louisville's elections.

Whallen's cronies used other methods to fight the Republican turnout among African-Americans. By 1900, the 28,651 African-Americans living in Louisville comprised nearly fourteen percent of the city's population. Although Democrats had not legally disenfranchised African-Americans in Kentucky as they had throughout the Deep South, electoral intimidation and fraud remained potent tools in the hands of people such as Whallen. The historian George C. Wright wrote that Whallen hired black "shadies to form Negro Democratic Clubs, which were little more than instruments of organized intimidation of African-American voters, and concluded that "Negro thugs, as much as anything else, kept blacks from viewing the Democrats as a respectable party." When that tactic failed, Whallen resorted to the well-tested strategy of appealing to white supremacy and the fears of what Republican victories might bring to Louisville's racial climate.

By the early 1900s, then, John Whallen directed the Democratic machine in Louisville. But he was not without his opponents among the city's Republican stalwarts, as well as a number of Democrats who resented Whallen using the city's political apparatus to increase his personal wealth and power. ...With the 1903 election fresh in their minds, disenchanted Democrats joined with angry Republicans to form a fusionist party which, with its combined strength, hoped to defeat the Democratic mayoral candidate, Paul Barth, in the upcoming 1905 election.

...The Whallen machine employed area criminals to intimidate African-Americans from registering, and understood that the illegal registration of "repeaters" had a dual effect: It could potentially crowd off from the rolls many legal voters, thus making the job of controlling the election that much easier. ...When challenges were made by Fusionists to some questionable Democratic attempts to register, a Louisville police officer named Roman Leachman threatened the challengers on several occasions. Leachman shouted that if an official "refuses to register another man, I will smash him in the head and kill him and I will come and throw his carcass into the street; he doesn't amount to anything." One official meekly inquired if Leachman was overstepping his bounds, and in revealing language Leachman underscored the reason for the police presence at the registration booths: "To hell with you. This means nothing to your crowd, and means four years for me, and of course I am going to look out for my own interests." The next day, Fusion workers were simply thrown out of their polling places and Democratic officials seized registration books and completed them in private.

...In order for all of the corrupt figures in the Louisville election to do their jobs properly, money was a necessity. ...Fred R. Bishop, treasurer of the Democratic campaign fund, later described how he went about raising these funds. Candidates for various city offices were to contribute ten percent of their current city salary, while police officers contributed according to their rank... After acquiring the money from Bishop, the ward captains knew what to do with it. They spent part of their money paying city police officers and firefighters to take the day off to perform various chores in helping Democrats. More than twenty percent of the city's firefighters claimed they were sick on Election Day and were put to use on behalf of the Democratic campaign.

...In the 38th Precinct of the Third Ward, three armed men simply took the ballot box at gunpoint, loaded it on a wagon and carried it away. ...In the Twelth Ward, a former member of the fire department and devout Whallenite, John Barry, pulled a pistol on an election worker and demanded the ballot books. With the help of three policemen, Barry took the books to another location, swore in his own election workers, and proceeded to stuff ballot boxes with hundreds of his own votes.

Some of the abuses Campbell describes are just amazing by modern standards. At one point during registration, a worker accepted a glass of lemonade from a saloon owner and passed out; he realized he'd been drugged when his registration books turned up with a large number of forged names in them. Barth won the election, but in May 1907, the election results were overturned in court, and the governor named an interim mayor and municipal officials. But Whallen's candidate won for mayor in 1909 with a viciously racist campaign.

Solar eclipses in the Ohio River Valley

A mendicantbug post about searching WolframAlpha for eclipses alerts us to the upcoming major total solar eclipses in August 2017 (NASA) and April 2024. That'll be the last eclipse with a nearby totality until 2045.

The next lunar eclipse on the winter solstice this year and the 2012 partial solar eclipse may be visible just before sunset.

Perhaps WolframAlpha is more useful than I had thought.

A River of Stars in a Dark Sky

In Japanese, the Milky Way is known as "天の川 (あまのがわ)", the River of Heaven, because it appears as a mighty river of stars flowing through the night sky. Every summer, people celebrate "Tanabata", a festival that recognizes this phenomena.

Long ago, there was a princess named Vega, who was the daughter of the king of heaven. Every day, she went to the banks of the Milky Way River to weave clothes for her father. But since she worked so hard, she was very lonely. One day, she met a cowboy tending his herd on the other side of the river. His name was Altair, and they fell in love and soon got married. But after they were married, the princess didn't weave clothes for her father, and the cowboy let his animals wander all over the sky. This made Vega's father angry, so he banished Altair to the other side of the river to separate the couple. Each of the pair could only sit on opposite sides of the river and look wistfully at each other. But on one night every year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, the pair of stars are allowed to meet one another, since a flock of magpies agreed to form a bridge over the river with their wings.

This phenomena is hard to see, because of pervasive light pollution in the developed world, the extent of which is apparent in maps of Earth's city lights. In most cities, light pollution is so severe that only the very brightest starts are faintly visible, while in truly dark areas, the light of the Milky Way can cast a visible shadow.

The International Dark Sky Association advocates against light pollution. There are a few locations in the eastern US designated as a dark sky preserve, including Cherry Springs State Park in northern Pennsylvania. The park has annual star parties that attract hundreds of astronomers, which began in the late 1990s when individual hobbyists noticed an isolated black patch on nighttime satellite photos.

Similar maps can be seen at the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness. One of the largest patches of dark skies in the eastern US appears to be in eastern West Virginia in the Monongahela National Forest. This area is the heart of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which has the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope in a radio quiet zone at Green Bank, WV.

For nearer places, the DarkSky Finder is a Java application that works in Firefox. Near Louisville, the darkest sites are southwest of Leavenworth, IN, in the southeastern portion of the Hoosier National Forest and across the river in the corresponding section of Kentucky. There is a slightly darker area immediately west of Hazard, KY, around Buckhorn Lake (an area with a high incidence of communities with interesting names). There are some maps and brochures of the Daniel Boone National Forest for this area; the Redbird Crest Trail, especially the eastern side, is in the middle of this dark spot. The topo maps could useful as well; 17 is Buckhorn Lake; 44 shows the area around Thousandsticks west of Hyden; and the Redbird Crest Trail is on 11 and 28, centered on Creekville.

Why don't we have third parties anymore? The history of electoral fusion

I was looking into the history of the end of electoral fusion in Kentucky, and it seems that the Ohio River Valley was particularly significant in the end of electoral fusion and, consequently, the decline of third parties in American politics. Here are selections from a couple of monographs; RTWT. The "Australian ballot" is the secret ballot, printed at public expense. Previously, voters would use ballots printed by individual political parties.

Duverger's Law, Fusion, and the Decline of American "Third" Parties, by Howard A. Scarrow (The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 634-647):

During the latter half of the 19th century fusion candidacies were frequent at all levels of government. At the presidential level the first example is found in the election of 1856, when the American (Know-Nothing) party and the Whig party both backed the third party candidacy of Millard Fillmore. ...The last conspicuous example of a presidential fusion candidacy was that of William Jennings Bryan, who was the candidate of both the Democratic party and the Populist party in 1896.

...The introduction of the Australian ballot in the last decade of the century sounded the initial death knell for fusion candidates. The introduction of this ballot reform presented minor parties with the obstable of now having to gain access to the ballot by means of petition signatures, a burden not placed on parties which could gain automatic ballot access by virtue of having attracted a large number of votes in a previous election—that is, the two major parties. The decline of third parties in the United States has thus often been traced in part to this aspect of ballot reform. There was, however, another feature of the new ballot laws which has received insufficient attention... the new ballot laws presented a way for states to outlaw fusion candidacies. When the party-column type of ballot was authorized, the law could require that a candidate's name appear at only one place on the ballot. Where the office-block ballot format was introduced, the legislation could specify that a candidate have only one party label attached to his name on the ballot. By 1895 six states had enacted one of the other of these restrictions. By 1900 the list had grown to thirteen; by 1910 to twenty.

...From their very inception, anti-fusion laws were challenged in the courts by aggrieved candidates. Almost invariably, however, state courts refused to support the argument that the laws violated the respective state constitutions.

...Dissenting opinions, however, used equally righteous language to defend the fusion practice. Fusion candidacies, it was argued, were often the only way of defeating an entrenched and corrupt political machine. They also provided a healthy antidote to narrow partisanship; and they increased voter interest. In only one state, New York, did these latter opinions prevail. In 1911 that state's highest court struck down an anti-fusion statue which had been pushed through the legislature by Tammany forces stung by successful fusion campaigns in New York City.

It should be noted that electoral fusion was used in the 1933 election of Republican Fiorella LaGuardia and the eventual demise of Tammany Hall.

"A Place on the Ballot": Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws, by Peter H. Arsinger (The American Historical Review, 85:2, April 1980, pp. 287-306):

...at least one little-known development in the electoral reform of the 1890s involved a conscious effort to shape the political arena by disrupting opposition parties, revising traditional campaign and voting practices, and ensuring Republican hegemony--all under the cover of procedural reform. This development was the adoption of the so-called antifusion laws, which also altered the political behavior characteristic of the Gilded Age, with varying effects on the role of third parties, modes of political participation, and the electoral process itself.

Fusion, or the electoral support of a single set of candidates by two or more parties, constituted a significant feature of late nineteenth-century politics, particularly in the Midwest and West, where full or partial fusion occurred in nearly every election. ...if fusion sometimes helped destroy individual third parties, it helped maintain a significant third party tradition by guaranteeing that dissenters' votes could be more than symbolic protest, that their leaders could gain office, and that their demands might be heard.

...Nationally, the Republican success in 1894 led to the passage of antifusion laws by other states in 1895. ...Michigan Republicans, now in complete control of the legislature, reintroduced their anti-fusion bill of the previous session and pushed it into law. Although some judges described it as "unconstitutional" and "revolutionary," the state upheld the measure in the same partisan spirit in which it had been enacted--four Republican judges in the affirmative, one Democrat in dissent. The Ohio legislature, meeting in 1896, concluded this first legislative flurry with the so-called Dana law, an elaborate measure based upon the customary antifusion ballot requirement. In Ohio, the local focus of antifusion legislation seemed particularly evident, at least initially. In the recent Cincinnati mayoral election, the Republican machine of "Boss" George Cox and Joseph B. Foraker had been challenged by a fusion coalition of Populists, Socialists, laborites, and dissident Republicans that had nearly received the Democratic endorsement as well. Some legislative observers regarded the subsequent Dana bill, prepared by a Foraker Republican, as primarily designed to prevent just such unified popular revolts against machine rule in municipal elections.

...The Michigan and Ohio experiences were not lost on Republicans in Indiana, the state in which Mark Hanna feared fusion most. Hoosier Republicans made two unsuccessful efforts during the campaign to secure the effects of antifusion legislation without actually receiving such a law. ...The lessons learned in, and the opportunity presented by, the sweeping 1896 Republican victory led Republican-dominated legislatures in many more states to enact fusion laws quickly. Republican legislatures passed antifusion laws in 1897 in Illinois, Iowa, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Wyoming as well as in Indiana. As Republicans gained sufficient legislative control elsewhere, the law spread further: California and Nebraska in 1899; Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota in 1901; Idaho in 1903; and Montana in 1907.

Ending the effective cooperation of Democrats and third party groups was both the primary goal and the major result of these efforts. ...By preventing effective fusion, antifusion laws also brought an end to another major characteristic of late nineteenth-century politics--the importance and even existence of significant third parties.

See also footnote 44:

In addition, the Democratic legislatures of three Southern states also enacted antifusion legislation in the early 1900s, and controversy over the law actually provoked a riot in the Kentucky legislature. Thus, while the focus here has been on the Northern Republicans, the law was obviously regarded as serving the interests of the dominant party wherever it was enacted.

Louisville Public Records

If you're shopping for a home in Jefferson County, Kentucky, you can research properties by address and the owner's name. The one kind of information will get the other, and its pretty remarkable what you can find out by searching the online databases of public information.

The most useful ones are:

• Jefferson County PVA


• Jefferson County Sheriff's Office (Property Taxes)


• Jefferson County Clerk Online Land Records

There's also all kinds of interesting information on the Louisville Metro Government Web site.

Continental Drift

There are good maps of the prehistoric continents at the Paleomap Project, Mollewide Plate Tectonic Maps, and Paleogeography and Geologic Evolution of North America. The Silurian is particularly alien-looking, the continents assumed forms roughly recognizable to us after the K/T extinction, and the next supercontinent will form in approximately 250 million years.

It looks like what is now the Ohio River valley (west of Appalachia) rose from the ocean sometime in Devonian and early Carboniferous, after the Appalachian mountains formed some 450 million years ago. The limestone exposed at the Falls of the Ohio formed in a shallow sea during the Devonian about 380-325 million years ago. Interestingly, it appears much of southeastern Indiana, central Kentucky and Tennessee, and northern Alabama was the site of a large island (or peninsula) on the arid southwestern shore of Laurussia, the Old Red Continent, that ephemerally rose and sank into the ocean for 100 million years or so in a position roughly analogous to contemporary Patagonia.

The intrusion of the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous is the closest this area came to sinking since then.

Things to Do in Ohio, So They Said

Cincinnati lies along the north bank of the Ohio River, between where the Great Miami and Little Miami Rivers flow into the Ohio. Dayton is about 55 miles north of Cincinnati on the Great Miami River, and Columbus is 110 miles northeast of Cincinnati, where the Olentangy flows into the Scioto River, a relict of the Teays. The Miami Rivers are so named because prior to American colonization, the rivers were the eastern boundary of the lands of the Miami (1). To the east and south (in Kentucky) were the traditional lands of the Shawnee around Chillicothe and the lower Scioto.

The Carew Tower (441 Vine St) is Cincinnati's tallest building, and apparently it's panoramic observation deck is open daily.

Southeastern Ohio includes some of the most significant ancient archaeological sites of the midwest and Ohio River Valley, Serpent Mound, the largest effigy earthwork in the world, and Fort Ancient, a key site of the upper Ohio Valley moundbuilders. Near Serpent Mound is the Davis Memorial Nature Preserve. In central Ohio, there are several Hopewell moundbuilders sites (Great Circle, Octagon, Wright, and Seip Mound), as well as Flint Ridge and some Adena sites (1, 2). The Hopewell Culture National Historical Park is near Chillicothe.

The Ohio River Trail is a bike path running trhough Cincinnati that will connect to the Little Miami Scenic River Trail and eventually to the planned Ohio to Erie Trail, on which one could cycle on 453 miles all the way from downtown Cincinnati to Lake Erie at Cleveland. ORW also hosts the Ohio River Swim and Paddlefest.

The Bicycle Museum of America is way out in New Bremen, Ohio. I thought it had something to do with the Wright brothers, but they were from Dayton, where the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Resort Park, Paul Laurence Dunbar House, and SunWatch Indian Village are. The area around New Bremen has some remaining sections of the Miami and Erie Canal. Miamisburg Mound, the largest conical burial mound in Ohio, is south of Dayton, as is Fort Hill.

Morgan's Raid is the most significant engagements of the Civil War fought in Indiana and Ohio. The only remaining fortification remaining from the Civil War emergency defense of Cincinnati is Battery Hooper at the James A. Ramage Civil War Museum, which was filled in with dirt, in Fort Wright, Kentucky. The defense of Cincinnati was the occasion of the first bridge across the Ohio River there, a military pontoon bridge.

Cincinnati was one of the most significant links in the Underground Railroad and the western abolitionist movement. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was established in 2004. Other Cincinnati museums include the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Fire Museum (the nation's first municipal fire department was established in Cincy in 1853), the Cincinnati Museum Center of History and Natural History and Science, the American Sign Museum, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe house. Southeastern Ohio also includes the Ulysses S. Grant birthplace in New Richmond and boyhood home in Georgetown, the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce.

Here's the Best of Cincinnati 2009, including Urban Life and the hills.

There are plenty of state parks in Ohio. In the area around Cincinnati, the most significant state parks and natural areas may be Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, Caesar Creek Gorge State Nature Preserve, Little Miami State and National Scenic River, Little Miami State Park, Caesar Creek State Park, and John Bryan State Park, as well as Brush Creek State Forest and Stonelick State Park. Ohio's only national park is in the north between Akron and Cleveland.

It'd be something of a drive past Cincinnati, but we could always get some Kentucky flags and drive to Portsmouth, Ohio, to protest the theft of the Indian Head Rock by those buckeyes up there.