Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
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| Tom Rosser |
(HistoryNet) Francis Gary Powers, Jr., the Founder of The Cold War Museum (http://www.coldwar.org/), announced today that the museum had found a physical home. The Cold War Museum will lease a modest size two story building and secure storage facility at Vint Hill, located in Fauquier County, Virginia, less than 30 miles from Washington Dulles International Airport. The lease was signed on December 1, 2009 with the Vint Hill Economic Development Authority, the owner of the 695-acre former US Army communications base.
Powers is the son of Francis Gary Powers, a CIA pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960. The senior Powers was held in Soviet custody until 1962, when he was traded for Rudolph Abel, a Soviet KGB agent who had been captured by the United States. Continued
Photos: Nightening, Library of Congress
"Shows how farmers in Rockingham County, Va. improved their businesses by forming cooperative enterprises. R.1. Farmers conduct business at their cooperative general store, gas station and milk plant. R.2. They work together to plan and build a new poultry plant. A typical board meeting illustrates how the cooperative organization functions."
(Baltimore Sun) If your only exposure to Colonial Williamsburg occurred in the company of a busload of unruly middle-schoolers, you owe yourself a return visit during December, when the air is cooler, the streets are quieter and the town is dressed in its holiday finest.
... But since the 1930s, when workers were paid $1 a night to baby-sit the burning candles in the windows of the houses on Duke of Gloucester Street, Colonial Williamsburg has been the scene of a decorating competition that has only escalated despite the stringent rules that the materials used must be from nature and available in the 18th century. And, since the historic attraction began rethinking its mission in the mid-1990s and changed its lecture approach to a live theater teaching model, there is plenty happening in the Colonial city, with programs, music and events geared to the holidays. Continued
Photo: Scene of Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg, Virginia, with soldiers and wagon train, William McIlvaine, 1862. (Library of Congress)
(Wikipedia) Elizabeth Arnold Poe (1787 – December 8, 1811) was an English-born American actress and the mother of the American author Edgar Allan Poe.
Eliza Arnold was born to Henry and Elizabeth Arnold in London in the spring of 1787. Her mother was a stage actress in London from 1791 to 1795. Henry died in 1789 and, in November 1795, only mother and daughter sailed from England to the United States, arriving in Boston, Massachusetts on January 3, 1796. Continued
(Wikipedia) ... 611's last official day of being under steam was December 7, 1994, the 53rd anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. Between Salisbury, North Carolina and Roanoke, Virginia 611 displayed black flags on the run. That evening, upon arrival at Schaffers Crossing in Roanoke, its fire was dumped for the last time. Continued
Photo: Historical American Engineering Record (Library of Congress)
(NYTimes) ... Disenchantment is Poe’s intellectual theme as well. He scorns the Transcendentalists and other American writers with their visions of transformation and possibility. He rejects ideas of moral uplift. The New World holds no promise. But the Old World, in which so many of his stories are steeped — the realm of old families, cultivated tastes and long traditions — is also corrupt and rotten.
Poe seemed to enshrine reason as the only plausible authority, creating in his famous detective stories an archetypal model later used by Arthur Conan Doyle. Poe’s hyper-rational detective Dupin is a master of reason. But he uses it to lay bare the brutish, disruptive forces lying underneath its polished surface, just as he deduced the existence of the rampaging orangutan on the Rue Morgue. Poe’s madmen are singularly rational. His reasonable men are singularly mad. Reason is not to be fully trusted. Continued
Photo: Library of Congress
(Baltimore Sun) From the time before English colonization until the dawn of the 20th century, the American chestnut was one of the most magnificent and beneficial trees in Eastern North America. Capable of reaching immense height and thickness, it provided not only food in the form of its nuts but tannin for treating leather and a hardwood prized by furniture-makers and carvers for its straightness and strength. Then, in 1904, chestnuts in New York City were found to be infected by a deadly form of Asian fungus to which the native trees had little resistance. By midcentury, the resulting blight wiped out some 4 billion trees - more than 99 percent of the chestnuts in the Eastern United States, Carver said. Continued
Photo: THIS GHOST FOREST OF BLIGHTED CHESTNUTS ONCE STOOD APPROXIMATELY AT THE LOCATION OF THE BYRD VISITOR CENTER. Skyline Drive (Library of Congress).
(HMDB) The witchcraft case of Grace Sherwood is one of the best known in Virginia. She was accused of bewitching a neighbor’s crop in 1698. Allegations grew over time until the Princess Anne County government and her accusers decided she would be tested by ducking, since water was considered pure and would not permit a witch to sink into its depths. Sherwood’s accusers on 10 July 1706 tied her hands to her feet and dropped her into the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven River near what is now know as Witch Duck Point. Sherwood floated, a sign of guilt. She was imprisoned, but was eventually released. Sherwood lived the rest of her life quietly and died by 1740.
(Wikipedia) Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall (c. 1552 – 29 October 1618) was a English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer.
... Raleigh's plan in 1584 for colonization in the "Colony and Dominion of Virginia" (which included the present-day states of North Carolina and Virginia) in North America ended in failure at Roanoke Island, but paved the way for subsequent colonies. Continued
According to today's Richmond Times Dispatch, a manatee has been spotted in the James River. Could it be Ilya? According to what I've read online, manatees typically travel just 18-20 miles a day - Ilya's last confirmed location was in New Jersey on Friday. But maybe manatees can swim faster when under duress? Stay tuned.
Photo: Faster than a speeding blimp! Can manatees cover more ground than previously thought? (U.S. Department of the Interior, via Wikipedia).
(NYTimes) AS the heart of the old Confederacy, Richmond, Va., watched with envy as other cities like Atlanta and Charlotte became the economic and cultural pillars of the New South. But Richmond may finally be having its big moment: a building boom in the last few years has seen century-old tobacco warehouses transformed into lofts and art studios. Chefs are setting up kitchens in formerly gritty neighborhoods, and the city’s buttoned-up downtown suddenly has life after dusk, thanks to new bars, a just-opened hotel and a performing arts complex, Richmond CenterStage. Richmond is strutting with confidence, moving beyond its Civil War legacy and emerging as a new player on the Southern art and culinary scene. Continued
Photo: St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia (Library of Congress).
(NYTimes) Ralph Stanley is one of the last, and surely the purest, of the traditional country musicians. He’s such a stickler that he has no use for the dobro, let alone electrified instruments, and he’s not overly fond of the term bluegrass. He prefers to call what he performs “that old-time mountain music.” He plays the five-string banjo in the claw-hammer style he learned from his mother — or he used to, until arthritis caught up with him — and he sings in a raw, keening Appalachian tenor. Continued
Photo: Larry Miller, some rights reserved.
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) - Just as cold, damp weather couldn't quench John Brown's incendiary fervor, it didn't discourage those determined to follow the radical abolitionist's footsteps Friday, 150 years after he launched the raid that kindled the Civil War.
As many as 300 people, some in period attire, planned to march nearly five miles from a well-preserved log farmhouse along dark rural roads and across the Potomac River to Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. Continued
Photo: Steven Montana (after John Steuart Curry's "Tragic Prelude")
(Wikipedia) The Battle of Tom's Brook was fought on October 9, 1864, in Shenandoah County, Virginia, during Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley Campaign of the American Civil War. It resulted in a significant Union victory, one that was mockingly dubbed The Woodstock Races for the speed of the Confederate withdrawal. Continued
- Harry Gilmor, "Four Years in the Saddle."
Photo: General Custer saluting Confederate General Tom Rosser at the Woodstock races, Oct. 9, 1864 (Alfred Waud/Library of Congress).
(Wikipedia) The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued October 7, 1763, by King George III following Great Britain's acquisition of French territory in North America after the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War. The purpose of the proclamation was to organize Great Britain's new North American empire and to stabilize relations with Native North Americans through regulation of trade, settlement, and land purchases on the western frontier. The Royal Proclamation continues to be of legal importance to First Nations in Canada. Continued
