Happy 100 Years, Arizona!

On the morning of Feb. 14, 1912, the headline of The Arizona Republican read "The 48th State Steps into the Union." George P. Hunt became the state's first governor shortly after Joe Melzer and Hazel Goldberg became the first couple to get married in the new state. Phoenix only had 11,300 people back then, slightly smaller than Tucson's 13,900. 100 years later, Phoenix has grown to 1,445,632 people; 520,100 folks call the Old Pueblo home, including us.

It's a cloudy morning in Tucson, 53 degrees, quail sing in the chaparral. Clouds cover Tanque Verde and Rincon Peak and a train creeps parallel to Interstate 10 in the distance. The Catalina Mountains rest in fog. A Gila woodpecker is raiding our hummingbird feeder. A wet winter called the flowers and leaves back early, a pair of cactus wren are building a nest in an abandoned woodpecker hole high up on a saguaro. They're lining it with mourning dove feathers. Just like they did in 1912. And 1812. And 1712.

The Arizona Republic, still the state's flagship newspaper despite the slight name change in 1930, celebrates the state's birthday again after 100 years. Read all about it!

Whitmansexual

Walt Whitman

Cold Splinters mentioned the poet Antler today and it reminded me of a poem of his I've been meaning to post for awhile. According to the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the powers of a great poet to speak the truth have no bounds, can boldly encompass all he or she encounters, and lay bare the hearts of things, the truth of things. Here's an example of the powers of a great poet to capture, not from Whitman, but from Antler writing about Whitman.

Whenever I teach or discuss Walt Whitman, conversation always seems to find it's way back to the poet's sexuality (look, it's happening again...). In once sense, discussing Whitman's homosexuality reaffirms what we should all already know - that our heroes, icons, and leaders of previous generations included gay men and women, even if they weren't able to publicly fulfill their romantic and emotional lives. We should celebrate Whitman's sexuality as an integral part of our understanding of the poet, and, by extension, remember to embrace homosexuality as a creative and generative force in American culture. Of course no one is wholly their sexuality, this is true for Whitman as well. As a teacher and student of literature, I've struggled to meaningfully situate Whitman's sexuality in respect to the totality of his writing and his aura. Luckily, Antler found the words and put them together for us in his poem, "Whitmansexual," reproduced below. Be sure to check out more of Antler poetry here on his website.

Whitmansexual

Whitman was a mansexual,
      a womansexual,
A grasssexual, a treesexual,
      a skysexual, an earthsexual.
Whitman was an oceansexual, a mountainsexual,
      a cloudsexual, a prariesexual,
A birdsongsexual, a lilacsmellsexual,
      a gallopinghorsesexual.
Whitman was a darknesssexual, a sleepersexual,
      a sunrisesexual, a MilkyWaysexual,
A gentlebreezesexual, an openroadsexual,
      a wildernesssexual, a democracysexual,
A drumtapssexual, a crossingbrooklynferrysexual,
      a sands-at-seventy-sexual.
Whitman was a farewell-my-fancy-sexual,
      a luckier-than-was-thought-sexual,
A deathsexual, a corpsewatchsexual,
      a compostsexual, a poets-to-come-sexual,
A miracle-sexual, an immortalitysexual,
      a cosmos-sexual, a waiting-for-you-sexual.

Happy Birthday, Tucson!

 

It's the City of Tucson's 236th birthday! Here's a fun essay about it in the AZ Daily Star.

Summer vacation is over so I'll be back in front of the computer more, making me more likely to post something every now and then.

Hemingway's Elephant Gun for Sale

Looking for a new gun? Do you have an extra $150,000-200,000 lying around? If so, you're in luck. Ernest Hemingway's 1913 .577 caliber, double barrel Nitro Express elephant gun is for sale! This is a big gun, weighing in at 16 pounds. It was made by English gun makers Westley Richards, who continue to make some beautiful firearms even today. This particular gun accompanied Hemingway on a safari in 1953.

Read more on Garden and Gun and check out some more photos too. Auction starts March 14 through James D. Julia!

Happy Birthday, Arizona

Not only is today Valentine's Day, it's also Arizona's 99th birthday. President Taft officially made The Grand Canyon State the 48th in the Union on Feb. 14, 1912. Feb. 12 was originally slated as our first day as a state, but it conflicted with Lincoln's birthday.

I don't know why, but this picture looks like a perfect metaphor for Arizona's 99th birthday. I like it.

Arizona Sales Tax Token

As a New Englander, it cracks me up when Arizonans complain about taxes. Not only are Arizona's taxes low, they're regressive and misplaced. While there is a tax on food and clothing, there is no tax on mining machinery, salon and spa treatments, donations to private schools, and country club memberships. Like any civic minded community, Arizonans realize that it's better to have nearly the lowest per-student-spending in the country than to inconvenience Cadillac driving Snowturds from Michigan.

Stupid as our state taxes might be managed today, impecunious numismatists can find something interesting in the state's tax history. Tax tokens were common in many states in the 1930's when sales taxes really began to come into play across America. My brother, a very knowledgeable coin collector, gave me this on when I went home for Christmas.  Back then state governments looking to raise revenue from sales taxes faced a problem with the currency. 80 years ago you could actually buy things for a few cents. If the sales tax was 3% and something cost only 10 cents, the merchant couldn't give appropriate change. The solution was to charge the purchaser and extra cent and give them change in tax tokens redeemable during future purchases. Each token was worth 10% of 1 cent, or 1/1000 of a dollar. All those fractions of all those pennies added up for the states that used them, but people didn't really like carrying extra coins and doing all that math, so the tax tokens were soon discontinued. They were coins minted at the state level worth less than a penny. They were fairly common and are still easy to find today. Tax tokens even have their own collectors' society, the American Tax Token Society.

Ghost Town Mine, AZ

On Halloween weekend, me and Erin and our friend Katie had the opportunity to visit one of Arizona's best preserved mine sites/ghost town. I found the site in a book and did some research online to find out more information. Through the ghosttowns.com forums I learned that this particular mine was on private property and that trespassers were particularly unwelcome. A little more searching and I contacted the owners and set up a time to visit the mine.

I never used to have an aversion to trespassing. If I visited a place that was privately owned, I'd only take pictures and I would never, never, never sue anyone for a risk I willing took upon myself. Still, as I get older I find worrying about getting caught really stressful and it's disrespectful to go onto someone's private property (though I don't feel the same about trespassing on public property - public means public). This time around, I'm really happy that I contacted the owner, as he not only gave us permission to visit the mine, he personally escorted us there and gave us a tour full of great stories and historical facts. Though the mine site is in several ghost town books and online, I've decided not to reveal the site name or owner's name here. This site is his childhood home, his family is buried there, and he's made some very nice improvements to one of the buildings so he can spend his time out there in his own personal, quiet, solitary spot in the desert hills. He did us a big favor and he seemed happy to do it, but I didn't get the impression that he was ready to share it with many people. So, here I'll refer to him as "T" and I'll retell some of the stories T shared with us.

Today this shack wears it's struggle against the elements proudly, but time's been hard on it. The desert is a really harsh place. Between the sun, the torrential rain and hail storms, pack rats and other industrious animals, and, at the mine's elevation, snow, desert structures require considerable maintenance. Older photos of the mine that I've seen online and that T showed us featured several more buildings.

T grew up in this house and he told us about how his mother had a piano brought way out there. It must have been amazing to hear the piano echoing in the desert hills. The mine opened in the late 19th century. T's family acquired it in the early 1900's and it remained open until the 1970's. It's a shaft mine that produced a lot of copper and silver. You can see machinery from the mine at the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum.  T donates the cool stuff he finds to museums so everyone can appreciate it.

Here's a few pictures from the house:

Across from the house is the cook's building, the building where the miners ate. At one point, the mine had 250 workers. It's so quiet out there now it's hard to imagine hundreds of people and tons of industrial machinery grinding away under and above ground, but it was a considerable operation. The bunk houses burnt down and the main factory was dismantled, but the remnants of the structures make it clear that they were pretty big. T has adapted and modernized one of the structures into a great cabin with running water and a flush toilet. There are some feral cats that live out there, too, and they got all excited when T showed up. He feeds them and looks after them. The picture at the outset of this post is of cook's building. It was full of a lot of old stuff, so we didn't photograph inside. Here's a couple other shots of it.

Mining, as the Chilean mine incident recently reminded us, is very dangerous. The mine shaft was quite deep. There was a machine shop 600 feet down. T told us a rather terrifying story about how 13 men died working there. The men took an elevator down the shaft and into the mine. One morning, 13 men stepped in the elevator and started down. The elevator was controlled by an operator on the surface and the men in the elevator communicated with the operator by pulling a chord that sounded a bell. As the men were descending, they suddenly found that the mine had flooded overnight and they elevator was plunging them under water. The operator had stepped away from his post to use the bathroom and failed to here the bell. They all drowned. Here a some photos of the a workshop and some mining remnants.

 This is just a little side project mine around the area. The real mine shafts were covered up for safety and didn't look like much more than big sheets of wood resting on some cement.

 This is part of the foundation of the main factory. It's surrounded by a mountain of tailings. It's where they separated the copper or silver from the other rocks.

 Here I'm holding a rock core, a rock sampling that was used to test the rocks down the mine shaft.

T told us lots of other fascinating stories about growing up around the mine and the history of the mine itself. Exploring the mine area and the buildings was terrific, but meeting T was just as cool. I suppose if I owned amazing piece of American history, I'd probably enjoy sharing it with other people who appreciated it, too, but T (and his sister who I initially contacted) had no obligation to spend the better part of a Saturday morning showing some strangers around. I hope he understands just how much we appreciated it.

George L. Mountainlion

George L. Mountainlion was, not surprisingly, a male mountain lion who lived at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Actually, there were several George L. Mountainlions, each named in order - George I, George II, George III and George IV - like members of a royal house. Here on this postcard, George II sits next to the memorial for George I. The first two Georges were hand-raised and remarkably tame. They bonded with their human friends and met Museum visitors while walking on leashes.

George was very popular and received lots of fan mail. On kid wrote him a letter that confessed, "This is the first time I have ever written to a lion." Probably not a necessary confession. I would  liked to meet the person who makes a habit of keeping lions as pen pals. 

Poor George I had hepatitis and died only two years after arriving at the museum. He died at the San Diego Zoo in 1953. Here's what Bill Carr, the founder of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, wrote for George's memorial:

I freely give all sights and sounds of nature I have known to those who have the grace to enjoy not man-made materialism but God-made beauty.

The magnificent Arizona sunsets I have watched from my enclosure, I bequeath to all who see not only with their eyes but with their hearts.

To humans who are tired, worried or discouraged, I bequeath the silence, majesty and peace of the Great American Desert.

To those walk the trails, I bequeath the early morning voices of the birds and the glory of the flowering desert in the Springtime.

To the children who have enjoyed seeing me purr, and watching me turn my somersaults, I offer the precious gift of laughter and joy. The world so needs these things.

And lastly, I bequeath my own happy spirit and affection for others, to all who may remember me and my museum where for three years, I did my best to show people that I truly liked them. 
 
It's probably not a good idea to bring tame, large predatory animals around people and American museums and zoos don't do that very much anymore. Though these animals become "ambassadors for their species," introducing them to the general population endangers the animal and people. Where large predators are concerned, there's a fine line between the type of fear that keeps us safe in the back country and the type of fear that leads to the extermination of valuable species; the first is to be encourage and the latter, discouraged. I understand all this, but I sure would have liked to have met George and scratched his chin. He's reported to have liked that; it made him purr.

Here's a recent story on George from the Arizona Daily Star, a Tucson newspaper.

The Wickenburg Massacre

This monument commemorates the Wickenburg Massacre. On November 5, 1871, a group of Yavapai Native Americans attacked a stagecoach bound for California outside the town of Wickenburg in what was then the Arizona Territory. They killed six men on board and injured a woman and another man. The attack was likely in response to any number of injustices committed against the Native Americans, most likely the recent killing of 135 Arivaipa Apache at Camp Grant near Tucson.

Some famous names come into play in relation to the Massacre. Up-and-coming Boston writer Frederick Wadsworth Loring was among those killed; the incident was also known as the Loring Massacre. Some in the northeast had been inclined to sympathize with the southwestern Indians, but, in killing a Bostonian, national sentiment turned against the Yavapai.  Initially, people questioned whether they were really Indians or Mexicans in Indian costumes. The killers used guns, but P.M. Hamel was also scalped. Here's an excerpt from The November 11, 1871 Journal-Miner:

"Five men, Messrs. Loring, Shoholm, Lanz, Hamel, and Salmon, who, eighteen hours previous left Wickenburg full of life and hope in the happy anticipation of soon again greeting their friends after a prolonged absence, lay side by side rigid in death and drenched in blood; the unavenged acts of a murder as dark and damnable as ever stained the hands of an assassin."

Famed Indian hunter, General George Crook, investigated the incident, but when he couldn't identify the actual perpetrators, he resorted to the usual form of frontier justice and sent Captain J.W. Mason to attack the Yavapai near Burro Creek. Many Native Americans died in the ensuing battle.

You can read a lot more about the Wickenburg Massacre here or here. The monument sits on Route 60 outside of Wickenburg, but apparently the actual site is off 60 down a dirt road.

Vulture Mine Road

Vulture Mine Road runs through Wickenburg, AZ and is named after the abandoned Vulture Mine outside of the town. Vulture Mine was the most productive gold mine in Arizona history.

On Sunday night, we drove from Glendale to Wickenburg and then followed Vulture Mine Road west for a long, long time. We eventually ended up about 50 miles west of Phoenix in an unincorporated town called Tonopah.

We set out to see the sunset and we found it. Here are a few of the photos we took along the ride. Of course, there are more on our Flickr page.

Happy 206th, Mr. Hawthorne!

From the reverse of this postcard: The Old Manse was built in 1769. It was the home of Rev. William Emerson and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "Nature" there. Hawthorne brought his young bride here in 1842 and made this charming residence famous with his "Mosses from Old Manse."

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4th, 1804. His name at birth was actually "Hathorne" - he added the w later. He rented his most famous residence, "The Old Manse," from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He and his wife, Sofia, raised their family there. They could see the the North Bridge, an important battle site in the first fight of the Revolution, from their back window. In fact, the house's builder and original owner, Rev. William Emerson, watched the fight with his family from the house.

We don't think of gothicism as an American tradition, but a review of American literary history quickly reveals a long line of Gothic writers from Charles Brockden Brown, to Poe, to Hawthorne, to James, to Faulkner, to McCarthy. Hawthorne's Gothic presentations of Puritans and early America have come to define our popular understanding of our founding more than perhaps any other writers. Sort of unfortunate, as the Puritans' better traits - such as egalitarianism and emphasis on literacy and education - have been overshadowed by Hawthorne's pictures of austerity. Still, considering his impact on our national consciousness, it seems appropriate that Hawthorne was born on the 4th of July.

Arizona Fashion PSA

I found this odd little video on Internet Archive. It's interesting that at one point Arizona had unique fashions based, as far as I can tell, on the traditional dress of Native American and Mexican women. Read more about the Squaw dress here. The video mentions the Arizona Fashion Council, which, according to this 1955 Ocala Star Banner article, consisted of "manufacturers and designers turning out colorful Southwestern fashions." The council consisted of 40 designers located across the state - Tucson, Phoenix, Wickenburg, Scottsdale, and even Douglas. The article discusses squaw dresses created by a Phoenix designer named Lloyd Kiva, a Cherokee from Oklahoma. it's a neat read, so check it out.

75th Anniversary of the WPA

On this day, May 6th, in 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was the biggest facet of the New Deal. In 1935, the WPA employed three million of the ten million jobless workers in the country. They built and fixed roads and bridges, hospitals and theaters, trails and lodges. Much of their work is still around and still being used. Instead of handing out welfare, FDR saw an opportunity to put people to work in ways that would benefit all of us and support the jobless at the same time. He gave them dignity with their money and in return they gave us infrastructure and great works of art. It showed that America could value work and culture at the same time and that with the correct leadership we could do great things together.

I know that the men and women who worked for the WPA lived in one of the most dire times in our history and they worked incredibly hard, but sometimes there's a part of me that believes I would set my time machine for 1935 if I could. I'd plant some trees and build some trails.

Homesick Yankee Rambling Part 2 - Worcester State Hospital

The remains of Worcester State Hospital's administration building sits and watches the hustle and bustle of Route 9 and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Built on the Kirkbride Model in 1877, it stood for over a hundred years before succumbing to a massive fire in 1991.

It's an iconic building in the area. I was really excited to find this postcard from 1904 that shows it with both wings intact. Kirkbride hospitals (named for their pioneer, Thomas Story Kirkbride) incorporate architectural design into a theory of psychiatric convalescence. Basically, the various wards were staggered in wings that moved diagonally back and away from a central administration building. The idea was that this design would allow the patients to see out the windows and have pleasant views and breezes. As their health improved, they would move toward the central administration building. The women's wings were often much longer than the men's wings, as it was mistakenly thought that women more often suffered from mental ailments. It was probably really just extreme boredom and depression from a society that left them horribly under-stimulated.

When we lived in Worcester, Erin and I visited the ruins of the hospital fairly often. It's a really impressive place. There were once many Kirkbride hospital in the Northeast and Midwest, but most have been destroyed. Some have been repurposed, which is great. About five years ago we took a road trip around the northeast and visited Kirkbride hospitals in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and, of course, Massachusetts. I'll post those pictures sometime when I'm homesick again, but for today, here are some more shots of Worcester State Hospital. To see inside, visit Opacity.

Blacktone River Valley

Reverse Reads: "New Blackstone River Dam on South Main St., at Globe Bridge Woonsocket, R.I."

From the National Parks Service site:

"The Blackstone River runs from Worcester, MA to Providence, RI. Its waters powered the Slater Mill in Pawtucket, RI, America's first successful textile mill. This creative spark began the nation's transformation from Farm to Factory. Today, the Blackstone River Valley is a special type of National Park - a living landscape containing thousands of natural and historic treasures."

I grew up on the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border in a town called Uxbridge. I taught at the high school there for several years too. The Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor runs through Uxbridge. When I was young the river and canal were in the woods and full of garbage, but then they made it a National Heritage Corridor, cleaned it up, and made it a park.

The old tow path where the mules walked to pull barges down the canal is now a footpath. It's really pretty. I used to take my creative writing classes down there and we'd sit in a meadow between the Blackstone River and Blackstone Canal and work on sensory writing.

Here are some photos I took there several years back.



This is the Stanley Woolen Mill, one of many mills that got power from the Blackstone.

Worcester Postcards

Worcester County Massachusetts and the city of Worcester were our homes for most of our lives. I grew up in Uxbridge and my wife is from the neighboring town of Douglas. It's a great place to live. The first postcard shows the Worcester Town Hall, which is where we got our marriage license (yesterday was our anniversary, which is what prompted me to post this) and the second is of Bancroft Tower near Salisbury Street. 

The postcard was sent on May 25 1907 to:
Miss S. W. Austin
202 Harold Street,
Roxbury, Mass

The inscription reads:
"Glad to hear from you and that you can be about again. Expect to be at home soon. Am going to Worcester today. M.A.A." 

The stamp is a really interesting and commemorates Captain John Smith who founded Jamestown in 1607.

Picture Day July 19, 1913

I don't remember where I found this photograph, but I'm willing to be it was the swap meet. The series is interesting. It tells a story of this boys experience. First, he's just sitting there, waiting for instructions. Then someone tells him to smile. Someone to his right gets his attention, perhaps mentioning that they should put the hat on him. In the next frame he's wearing this floppy white hat and being very good sport about it. Finally, he's looking over to someone with an expression that says, "Ok...enough is enough."



The back is stamped "The Ernst Studio." I can't make out everything that the stamp says, nor can I make out the name in pencil. The last name appears to be Garber. The Ernst Studio was open in Newport, Rhode Island from 1906-1965. You can read more about The Ernst Studio here. Was this photograph taken at that Ernst Studio? Of course, I can't be certain, but it's possible.