A retirement travel blog.
We arrived in Madison, WI yesterday. It was wonderful to see son, Sebby and have dinner with his new girlfriend Jayne.
We are staying at the Mendota Lake B&B, which has become our home away from home in Madison. https://mendotalakehouse.com/
We like the relaxed atmosphere, locally sourced, organic breakfasts and comfy accomodations. We recommend the Mendota Lake House B& B if you find yourself in Madison!
In Oberlin, we saw evidence of climate positive actions, movement toward sustainability and use of renewable energy. It seems that Ithaca has a rival in that regard. Oberlin is one of just three C40 “Climate Positive” cities in the U.S. recognized by the Clinton Foundation Climate Initiative and the U.S. Green Building Council; the other two are Portland, OR. and San Francisco, CA. The Oberlin Project, a joint project of Oberlin college and the city , has the following goals:
We stayed at the Oberlin Hotel right on campus across from Tappan Square in the heart of the city and campus. In addition to being a solar/geothermal building, it is unique in sharing a building with the Admissions Office, which undoubtably is a great convenience for families looking at the college.
Today we stoped in Oberlin, which is a beautiful college town with an inspiring beginning. It was founded by a Presbyterian Minister and a missionary- Rev. John J. Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart. They became friends while during the summer of 1832 in nearby Elyria, when they realized they were both disillusioned with the new towns and cities were being “settled by greedy, ignorant people who did not follow God’s commandment to love their neighbors”.(Oberlin: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow). They shared a vision of founding a community and college based on their religious beliefs. In 1833 , on 500 acres of donated land in the wilderness and financial help from generous benefactors, they founded the town and college. The college was to accept Blacks and women, a first in the United States.
The first Oberlin President was Asa Mahan, an abolitionist with controversial views. “Mahan was appointed President of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute on January 1, 1835. Things did not go smoothly, however. He was a passionate man with strong views, and a stronger personality. His views on ‘perfectionism’ and abolition opened the college to criticism. He thought his colleagues lukewarm, and they thought him excessive. His fellow staff tried to remove him in the 1840’s but did not succeed until 1850.” (Healing and Revival, 2004)
The college and community seem to have thrived on progressive causes and social justice to this day. The founders succeeded in attracting young families, students and financial support. The motto of the school was “”Learning and Labor” because students could work in the community in lieu of tuition. This attracted students who were eager for an education, but could not afford tuition, a concept unique to Oberlin at the time.
We stopped at the Oberlin Heritage Center, which includes the Monroe House, of Italianate architecture, built in 1866. James Monroe (1821- 1898) was born to a Quaker family who raised him with strong humanitarian values of abolition and pacifism. As a young man, Monroe was convinced by William Lloyd Garrison to use his oratorical skills to speak out against slavery. He traveled with Frederick Douglass on the abolitionist lecture circuit. Douglass respected Monroe because he not only spoke out against slavery, but also against racism. If Douglass was refused meals and accommodations because of his race, which happened often even with white abolitionist allies, Monroe refused their offers also.
The Oberlin Heritage Center also includes the original Oberlin school house, which defied Ohio “Black laws” at the time by serving children of all races together.
I am sure if I look hard enough, I will find serious hypocricies that defy these auspicious beginnings, however, I desperately need to believe in the ability of communities to live up to their ideals, so I am going to leave it alone!
We took a little detour south to swing through Ohio Amish county. It was a beautiful fall day to drive through beautiful countryside.
We learned so many things including: most Amish homes have beautiful flower gardens in their yards; horses working in unison (which we have seen before) is truly amazing to behold; Monday is wash day- every house had laundry on the line; local “English” (Amish term for all non-Amish folks) are pretty cavalier about passing buggies on the road.
Speaking of buggies, we came across a sales lot for new buggies. Guess how much a new buggy costs? If you guessed $2,800, you would be correct- not sure what trim level that includes though! Did you know that buggy’s have metal wheels? Not such a smooth ride, I imagine. We also learned that electric bicycles are very popular with the Amish.
We drove into Berlin, Ohio, which we were told was the heart of Amish country. What we did not expect was tacky tourists traps and gifts shops. It reminded us of Lake George, but to be fair, we also found authentic Amish foods, handmade furniture and crafts.
The final thing we noticed was an architectural style for barns we have never seen. There were many barns that looked like this, with shutters rather than windows. We were not able to get any answers on the history of this style. Let us know if you have answers!
We stopped in Cuba, New York on Rt. 86 in Allegany County for a pit stop. I got wondering about the town, especially why it is called “Cuba”. The story goes that in 1822, the white settlers carved a piece out of a neighboring town called “Friendship”. and they needed a name for the new town. Someone suggested the Roman word “Cuba” that means “Goddess” or “protector of the young” and it was chosen for no apparent reason other than it sounds nice. This was a little disappointing as I was hoping for a much more interesting story and the name was not it. There was a cute covered bridge next to the gas station/ liquor store where we stopped. It is not big enough for a car. Any guesses what it is for?
If you guessed snow mobiles you would be correct!
I read that the town is best known for Cuba Cheese, Cuba Lake and the Seneca Oil Spring. Being ever inquisitive, we wondered about Seneca Oil Spring, of which neither of us had ever heard a mention. It is on the Seneca Nation Territory that starts just west of the Cuba town line and google knew the way. We came to a stone pillar next to a dirt road that said “1627 Seneca Oil Spring- First One Found in America”
Of course we took the dirt road and came to a parking lot and a walking bridge over a creek to the Spring.
The Seneca discovered the oil spring and kept the “mysterious and magical” substance floating on the water secret. They would dip their blankets in and wring them into brass kettles to collect the liquid. They used the oil for medicinal purposes, making body paints, and adding it to fires and torches to make them flare (nyhistoric.com). Their mistake was trusting a missionary Father Joseph De La Roche and telling him the secret of the spring in 1627, who wrote back to his people in France about it. This is the first recorded discovery of oil in North America.
The Seneca fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution in an attempt to oust European settlers on their land. The Seneca and other Iroquois nations were forced to cede most of their lands to the U.S. in the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794, , but the Seneca negotiated to keep 5 plots, including the Oil Springs. In the 1850s , the Seneca began a case to evict squatters, including Horatio Seymour, future New York Governor from Oil Springs Reservation in order to restore control and use to the tribe. Thanks to the efforts of influential Seneca leader, Governor Blacksnake, the state appeals court ruled in the tribe’s favor and the reservation was returned to the Seneca in 1861. Oil no longer comes from the spring, but the Seneca did build a casino on the Oil Springs Reservation.
Tomorrow we are embarking on another road trip to Madison, Wisconsin to visit our son, Sebby. It’s exciting to think about being on the road again. We plan to stop in Oberlin, Ohio, take a little detour down to Amish Country, then on to Madison. We’ll let you know what we find as we go!
I was perusing Peggy Jablonski’s book, Cape Cod Camino Way (June, 2021), that mentioned the Cobb House Museum in Brewster, MA. and the life and times of Captain Elijah Cobb (July 4, 1768 – November 21, 1848), who built the house in 1799. We decided to visit the Cobb House Museum. Here is a video tour of the house describing many interesting facts about the architecture and life in Brewster at the time, including rare picture of Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan, who stayed in Brewster several summers.
There is more to the story that is not mentioned in the video or in the displays. While there is no smoking gun, circumstantial evidence points to the likelihood that Captain Elijah Cobb and the many sea captains residing in Brewster were involved in the slave trade. While very lucrative, even at the time the practice was shameful and then illegal in Massachusetts after 1783. What evidence is there of a Cape Cod slave trade?
Meadow Dibble Hilley, a native of Brewster and founder of the the Atlantic Black Box Project (a grassroots organization researching and reckoning with the New England slave trade) dug into this question. She wondered why the symbolic gravestones of several Brewster sea captains said they died on the west coast of Africa, Havana, Port au Prince and other ports in the Carribean. What were they doing there? And many of the sea captains were building large houses in Brewster that now serve as inns and taverns. Where did all that wealth come from? She noticed in Captain Elijah Cobb’s memoir that he omitted mention of the last twelve years of voyages, a crucial time in the slave trade.
There is some hard evidence. Hilley found an 1819 board of health report in the New England Journal of Medicine that described an investigation into the September 1818 to July 1819 voyage of the ship the Ten Brothers. The ship sailed out of Boston (as most Cape Cod ships generally did) and spent the fall of 1818 in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa. Many of the crew contracted yellow fever and died, including Captain Joseph Mayo. Elijah Cobb, being a senior member of the crew, sailed the ship back to Boston by way of Martinique , in the Caribbean, to unload an “unspecified cargo”. Here is a quote from a Thoughtco article describing how the Triangle Trade system worked:
“New Englanders traded extensively, exporting many commodities such as fish, whale oil, furs, and rum and followed the following pattern that occurred as follows:
- New Englanders manufactured and shipped rum to the west coast of Africa in exchange for enslaved people.
- The captives were taken on the Middle Passage to the West Indies where they were sold for molasses and money.
- The molasses would be sent to New England to make rum and start the entire system of trade all over again.
In the colonial era, the various colonies played different roles in what was produced and used for trade purposes in this triangular trade. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were known to produce the highest quality rum from the molasses and sugars that had been imported from the West Indies. The distilleries from these two colonies would prove to be vital to the continued triangular trade of enslaved people that was extremely profitable. Virginia’s tobacco and hemp production also played a major role as well as cotton from the southern colonies.”
When the Ten Brothers finally docked back in Boston, it carried more than molasses and sugar; it carried deadly mosquitoes that spread yellow fever through Boston. The Board of Health questioned Cobb about both the yellow fever and slavery, but cleared him of all suspicion in the end. Hilley, however, does not clear Cobb.
I bring this all up, not to sully the reputation of Brewster, but to finally get to the truth and acknowledge our whole history. Only when we tell the whole story and learn from the past will we be able to make amends and heal as a country.
We are staying in Truro, near the end of Cape Cod. I love it here because it is away from the commercial hubbub and traffic found further up cape. In Truro (located between Provincetown and Wellfleet) you will see quaint old cottages and natural areas, rather than commercial development. In fact, half the land in Truro is Cape Cod National Seashore, a national park.
As is stated in most school text books, November 21st, 1620 the Mayflower, with 132 people aboard landed in what is now known as Provincetown Harbor. On the second day, Myles Standish and William Bradford led a scouting party to explore what is now Truro. They discovered fresh water at Pilgrim Spring and spent the night on Pilgrim Pond. There is this plague at Pilgrim Pond commemorating the event:
What the plaque neglects to say is that they stole the Nauset people’s corn to use as seed corn. The corn was part of a Nauset burial ground, a sacred place, which they disturbed. Corn Hill, where the corn was found, is less than a mile from our cottage. The Pilgrims stayed for one month, then sailed across the bay to settle in Plymouth, MA. in an abandoned Wampanoag village called Patuxet,. They were incredibly thankful to find this village with shelter and corn already planted and a stream of clean water.
According to an article in Slate Magazine (Nov 20,2012):
“[The Pilgrims] were even more thankful when the first Native American strolled into their midst, smiling and saying in English, “Welcome!” According to Pilgrim-era writings, he told them straight away that the previous villagers “died of an extraordinary plague.” A few days later, Tisquantum arrived. Called Squanto by Pilgrims, he was born in Patuxet, abducted by Englishman Thomas Hunt in 1614, and missed out on the epidemic that killed his entire village. During his years in captivity, he’d learned English, and he was now attached to a nearby branch of the Wampanoag. The Pilgrim leader William Bradford was already aware of the death toll from “Indean fever.” His scouts had ventured inland and noted “sculs and bones were found in many places lying still above ground, where their houses and dwellings had been; a very sad spectackle to behould.” It’s estimated as many as nine out of 10 coastal Indians were killed in the epidemic between 1616 and 1619.”
Many people think that native people no longer live in Massachusetts. While the Nauset do not exist as a separate nation, their bloodline lives on as part of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, who number about 1,500 today. The Wampanoag became a federally recognized sovereign Indian nation in 2007. Four hundred years after the Mashpee Wampanoag in Plymouth, Mass. helped the Pilgrims from the Mayflower survive, they have been fighting to get their ancestral homeland back. Last week, they won a major victory in a ruling from the U.S. Department of the Interior that will give them substantial control of roughly 320 acres around Cape Cod.
It is so nice to be traveling again after a very long pandemic break! We are back at our favorite place in Truro, MA on Cape Cod. I met a female Atlantic Marsh Fiddler Crab (Uca pugnax) this morning. Watch the whole video and you will see her chowing down like the cookie monster. Yes, she is eating the mud, along with fungus, algae, microbes and decaying plant & animal matter (maritimeaquarium.org). Fiddler crab eating and burrowing helps keep the salt marsh clean and aerated. However, recent research has shown that crab burrowing may have a negative effect on climate change by releasing greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide and methane) sequestered in the salt marsh
Another fun fact is that fiddler crabs have gills for breathing underwater, but they also have a primitive lung, which allows them to live on land in damp ground for months (http://www.edc.uri.edu/restoration/html/gallery/invert/fiddler.htm).
The male fiddler crab has one very large claw- the bigger the claw, the more attractive to the females. The males stand in front of their burrows, hold their claws like fiddles and wave them around while stamping their feet to attract females. I can see why this would be irresistible. If the female is interested, she will stare at the male, the male runs toward her, then back to his burrow several times, inviting her to join him. If she is interested, she follows him into the burrow, he blocks the door to the burrow and they mate (https://www.chesapeakebay.net/discover/field-guide/entry/fiddler_crabs).
The natural world is fascinating. I’ll report back with any other wonders we run across here, natural or otherwise.
We find ourselves near Ashtabula once again, thanks to a snow storm. I am reposting this post about Ashtubula.
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
We rented a cute little house for the week in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a suburb of Madison. We knew very little about Sun Prairie, except that it is in quite close proximity to East Madison, where our son lives, and it was where artist Georgia O’Keefe grew up in the late 1800s. It is a quiet, manicured town with a small historic downtown and well-preserved village square. A little research revealed that the population of 34,661, is growing fast with a 17% increase since 2010. (U.S. Census 2019 estimate). It is the second-most populous city in Dane County after Madison. It seems like a nice place to live with clean, well maintained streets and parks and a new high school being built- something almost unheard of these days. It Is mostly white, so it might not be welcoming for all, although it has some racial diversity. Seventy-five percent of the population is white (non-hispanic), 8% is Black, 6.7% is Asian and 5.3% are Latino. The top of the City of Sun Prairie website announces “Sun Prairie is seeking the development of a city-wide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program. We need assistance to identify blind spots and processes that perpetuate systemic injustice, and identify current successes, areas for improvement.”
Sun Prairie was recognized as one of the “Best Places to Live in America” for 2020 by Money Magazine. It is not cheap to live here, but it is not as unaffordable as many other places. The average owner occupied house in 2021 costs $261,700 and average rent for a 2 bedroom home is $1,100 (bestplaces.net). It gets an A rating on Niche- the school are excellent and the crime rate is low compared to the national averages. It scores 9 out of 110 for Most Diverse Suburbs in Wisconsin:” (NIche), which may not be saying alot cause it is Wisconsin. Overall, it seems that Sun Prairie is thriving and a nice place to live.
Ashtabula, Ohio
We stopped in Ashtabula, Ohio on our way home. It’s history as a prominent stop on the underground railroad and as one of the major Lake Erie coal ports back in the day, was intriguing. The city’s harbor has been important as a large ore and coal port since the end of the 19th century, and integral to the steel manufacturing that was developed around the Great Lakes.What a shock when we arrived. We were greeted by an abandoned ice cream shop when we turned off the Ohio Turnpike and things did not improve when we reached downtown Ashtabula.
Ashtabula downtown was for the most part boarded up. “Decline” is a word that comes to mind- the population of 19,597 in 2020, is in decline(-6.29% since 2010 according to the U.S Census) along with the harbor, roads, and buildings.
So why did one city, Sun Prairie, continue to thrive when Ashtabula declined? It is interesting to note that both cities have a similar racial make-up. According to the most recent U.S Census, the racial composition of Ashtabula is 79.6% white (non-hispanic), 8.8% Latino, 8.51% Black, and 4.2% multi-racial. Both cities were founded in the mid 1800’s by European settlers, although Ashtabula was not incorporated until 1891. One explanation for Ashtabula’s decline, is that it is part of the Ohio “rust belt” which suffered the loss of the steel industry. As steel mills were moved offshore, ore shipments via Great Lake freighters dwindled. And Sun Prairie is essentially a bedroom community for Madison, only a 15 minute commute away. Ashtabula is an hour from any large city with jobs such as Cleveland or Erie.
We saw signs of community revitalization on Bridge Street, near the harbor with new little coffee shops, restaurants and gift shops attracting tourists. The sidewalks were rebuilt and a row of condos was being built nearby. The reality might not be as thriving as the Bridge Street link above announces, but it is a start.
Another positive economic turn for Ashtabula is the construction of a new nodular pig iron plant in Ashtabula harbor. The plant, to be completed next year will be the only pig iron facility in the U.S. Pig iron is used to build high value metal components like engine blocks and landing gear. The plant is expected to create 100 permanent jobs.
While Ashtabula has a long way to go to until it is once again a thriving town, there is are glimmers of hope. Median home value is $54,200 (bestplaces.com)and average rent is $646/month. So for someone who is looking for a place to start out with affordable housing to be part of the change, it might be a good place to be.
Perspectives on the Road 