In our retirement we are have decided it is time to leave the bubble of Ithaca, New York and see what America is really about. We invite you to join us as we learn about people, places and the natural history we experience in our travels.
After going to the Jimmy Carter presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, we stopped for lunch at the famous Manuel’s Tavern just down the road.
This restaurant and bar has been run by the Maloof family since it opened in 1956. They pride themselves on being a place that welcomes everyone- where, according to their website, “one can find, at any given time, a broad cross-section of American culture rubbing elbows at the bar, discussing the news item of the day, arguing the merits of a sports team, or espousing the idea of the century. Here a doctor, a plumber, a lawyer, an electrician, a student, a journalist, a salesman, a politician, or a construction worker can feel comfortable–accepted for who they are, known by their name or what they drink.” According to our server, David, since the place opened it has also been racially integrated, with Manuel refusing to follow Jim Crow laws of segregation.
Manuel became deeply involved in Democratic politics in Atlanta and Georgia. His political career dovetailed with the Tavern, which he said let him listen to the man on the street. He passed away in August of 2004. Still, he is fondly referred to as the “Godfather” of Georgia Democratic politics.
The pictures on the wall attest to the fact that major political figures and celebrities regularly drop by the Tavern. President Obama stopped by to play a game of darts and President Jimmy Carter was a regular. It is also a place for the press to gather. During the 2022 Senate run off between Democrat Ralph Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, Joy Reid, from MSNBC set up shop at Manuel’s Tavern to cover it.
If you find yourself in Atlanta, we recommend a visit to Manuel’s Tavern.
This is the first time we have been to Atlanta, Georgia. Here are some of our observations:
• Atlanta looks like a modern city with few historic buildings. Of course, this is in part because of Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War, when many buildings in Atlanta were burnt to the ground, although it is a myth that Sherman burned the whole city. Lack of historical preservation laws and aggressive urban renewal razed the rest.
• Atlanta is a majority minority city with Black or African American making up 48% of the population in 2021, Whites 39, Asian 5%, Latino 2%.
• There are a lot of hot tricked out cars here, that you don’t see in Northern cities we visited. We also learned what a slingshot motorcycle is.
Slingshot Motorcycle
• Good food can be had in Atlanta. Last night we dined at Mary Mac’s Tea Room, a famous soul food restaurant established in 1945. The walls are lined with pictures of celebrities who have dined there from James Brown to Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden. The best fried chicken, collard greens and peach cobbler I have ever had.
We have been in Asheville, North Carolina for a couple of days. I have to say, Ithaca has nothing on Asheville as a hippy haven! We have been enjoying walking around town seeing the sites.
Every Friday night they even have a drum circle in a downtown park.
These pictures are of the historic Grove Arcade, a huge indoor mall built in 1929. The first floor of the building (which is a whole block) is stores, the second floor is offices and the top floors are luxury apartments. In 1976, it became the first indoor mall to be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
YMI Culture Center in Asheville houses art galleries, classes and performances in African-American cultural art and history. It was founded in 1893 in the Black business district as the Young mens Institute to give Black people a safe place to gather. Here is an interesting article about The Block and efforts to bring back a once thriving Black business district.
And of course there are the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains with Mt. Mitchell, (elevation 6,684 feet) the highest mountain east of the Mississipi, which we can see from our hotel room.
I can understand why many Ithacans choose Asheville as their escape from winter instead of Florida.
We are now in the heart of coal country in southern Virginia near the Kentucky border. Almost all of the small towns carved out of the steep mountains are decreasing in population and struggling to replace coal as an economic engine for the community. The large coal companies have left for places like Colorado, leaving small outfits like the one above.
In the 1880s, coal deposits became the dominant resource utilized in the area. Immigration trends and economic conditions across the country attracted many people to the area for work, including African Americans and Irish, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian immigrants. In the 1970s, the change in regulations and the OPEC oil embargo drove up the price of coal and created a boom for the coal economy in the region. New mines were opened and existing mines expanded. The boom lasted until 1983, when coal prices declined, mines were opened in western states in the U.S and mining technology reduced the demand for coal miners.The boom turned into a bust. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3590402) As our country attempts to deal with climate change, regulations have been put in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect public health. And coal is being replaced by lower-cost natural gas and renewable energy sources.
So what are these communities to do? They are isolated, with no population centers close by to attract new business customers or commute to new jobs. There are still jobs in the lumber industry, confirmed by all of the log trucks we passed on the mountain roads, although this industry is in decline as well. And they do have another major rural employer in Wise County, the prison industry. Virginia’s two highest security “super max” state prisons are located in Wise County: Red Onion State Prison, opened in 1998, and Wallens Ridge State Prison, opened in 1999.[3](Wikepedia). According to a local former miner we spoke with, many former coal miners have become prison guards. But this is not keeping the towns thriving. There are many boarded up stores and signs of decline.
Many of the towns are trying to attract outdoor adventure tourists. A big attraction now is atv trailing that takes advantage of the steep mountain trails; we saw that in several towns they allow atvs on the town streets. It is not at all clear that many of these towns will make a come back, although not for lack of effort. We met Jim, a lawyer in Williamson, WV, who was working hard on bringing the arts and other tourist attractions to Williamson. It is clear there is a great deal of effort expended to recreate these tiny towns.
Our first stop was in Paw Paw, West Virginia to visit John’s high school friend Reed, and his wife Deborah. They live in a beautiful and remote area outside the tiny town of Paw Paw (population 410 in 2020), with a commercial area consisting of small restaurant, gas station, Dollar Store, like our town of Enfield in upstate New York, although we don’t have a restaurant. Paw Paw is named after the fruit tree that is native to the area. This entire area of the West Virginia is quite rural, although is only a 2 hour drive to Washington DC, which attracts people with money wanting to purchase or build a second home. They have to drive 40 minutes to buy groceries or get medical care.
Paw Paw is known for the Paw Paw tunnel through the mountain, The C&O Canal Company started work on the tunnel in 1836 estimating that it would take 2 years to build; it was built to save them from digging 6 miles of canal on the Potomac River. The canal’s main cargo was coal, brought from Cumberland Maryland and stops along the way to Washington DC. Due to riots, labor strikes by the Irish, English and German workers, fund shortages and difficulty digging through loose shale, the 3,118 ft tunnel through the mountain was not finished until 14 years later. It sounds like it might not have been such a great investment. When the tunnel finally did open, there were often bottlenecks because it was impossible for boats to turn around or pass. Today the hiking trail through the tunnel is maintained by the National Park Service.
Another interesting fact about Paw Paw is that that grammy award winning Texas swing band, Asleep at the Wheel got their start on a farm in Paw Paw. West Virginia.
After traveling on one lane mountain roads through isolated West Virginia for most of the day, we spent the night in Charleston, West Virginia, a surprisingly large city, with 210,605 residents in the larger metropolitan area. It is now the capital of West Virginia, which once was part of Virginia. I found the West Virginia’s beginnings to be surprising and interesting. Once again I am reminded that we can and should learn from history in this time of political turmoil.
Political divisions between the eastern agricultural Virginia and mountainous western Virginia were present from the beginning of the revolutionary period. The Virginia Constitution of 1776 hampered western political participation by placing property-holding qualifications on voters and officeholders and allowing for disproportionate eastern political representation. Confronted with a tax code that benefited slaveholders and large landowners and eastern reluctance to dedicate taxes for western internal improvements, western Virginians clamored for reform from the beginning. This set the stage for the creation of a separate state.
The development of western Virginia industries (iron, coal, salt, and oil) that largely relied on free labor emerged in sharp contrast to eastern Virginia’s slave-based commercial agricultural economy. By the early 19th century, salt brines were discovered along the Kanawha River, and the first salt well was drilled in 1806.[13] This created a prosperous time and great economic growth for the area. By 1808, 1,250 pounds of salt were being produced a day, and the Farmers’ Repository newspaper began publication.[14] An area adjacent to Charleston, Kanawha Salines (now Malden) would become the top salt producer in the world. Later, coal became central to economic prosperity in the city and the surrounding area. The emergence of an economically motivated western antislavery ideology threatened relations between the eastern and western Virginians. (encyclopediavirginia.org).
The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president resulted in the secession of seven Southern states and on February 13, 1861, Governor John Letcher opened Virginia’s own secession convention. During the convention, Lincoln’s inaugural address, the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina (April 12 and 13), and Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers led to the passage of the Ordinance of Secession on April 17, 1861. Nearly two-thirds of the votes against secession came from northwestern Virginia. VirginianSouthern Unionists, who aimed to repeal the Ordinance of Secession that Virginia made during the American Civil War, won their fight to succeed from Virginia and remain part of the Union when West Virginia was admitted as a U.S. State on June 20, 1863 (https://encyclopediavirginia.org)
John S. Carlile, an Unconditional Unionist at the Richmond Secession Convention stated, “For several days before the Convention passed the Ordinance of Secession, it was absolutely besieged; members were threatened with being hung to the lamp posts; their lives were jeopardized; the mob was marching up and down the streets, and surrounding the Capitol, and everything was terror and dismay.”[5]
Carlile continued to impeach the legitimacy of Virginia’s referendum on secession. “Immediately upon the passage of the Ordinance of Secession, in every county, as far as I can learn, a systematic reign of terror was inaugurated.” Throughout the state, “irresponsible persons assembled, under the name of ‘committees of safety’, who [told Union men] that they must leave the State… All Union men were admonished that they would be prosecuted for treason.” Carlile then described the days leading up to the referendum: ” Before the day of election arrived we see the troops from South Carolina, Georgia and other Southern States, placed all over the eastern and southern parts of the States running up into the valley, and in some parts of Western Virginia. In those parts of the State freedom of election was completely suppressed, and men who dared to vote against secession done it at the hazard of their lives. Thus, sir, you see the concert by which secession has been inaugurated and carried out in Virginia; and we see that same spirit that reigned in it from the beginning… TREASON…”[5]
On June 13, 1861 Carlile introduced to the Wheeling Convention “A Declaration of the People of Virginia.” The document declared that under the Virginia Declaration of Rights, any substantial change in the form of state government had to be approved by the people via a referendum. Therefore, the Secession Convention was illegal since it had been convened by the legislature, not a referendum, and all of its acts–including the Ordinance of Secession–were ipso facto void. It also called for a reorganization of the state government, on the grounds that all state officials who had supported the Ordinance of Secession had effectively vacated their offices. On June 19, delegates approved this plan unanimously.
The next day, June 20, the convention selected new state officers for what came to be called the Restored Government of Virginia to avoid confusion with the pro-secessionist government. Francis Pierpont of Marion County was elected governor. On June 25, the convention adjourned until August 6. President Lincoln and Congress swiftly recognized the Restored Government as the legitimate government of the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.
On October 8, 1869, Virginia voted to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as part of the requirement for being readmitted to the Union. The act readmitting Virginia to the Union and its representatives into Congress was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on January 26, 1870.
In this time of political turmoil, it is important that we learn from history.
Well, even though we have had little winter this year in upstate New York, we are heading South in a week. This time we will explore West Virginia and follow the civil rights trail in Georgia and Alabama before we head to Florida. Stay tuned!
Today we drove through Cherokee, North Carolina, where the Eastern Band of Cherokees is a sovereign nation in Western North Carolina, with its own laws, elections, government, institutions, and schools. Though it has relationships with the United States federal government and the North Carolina state government, the Cherokees are self-governed and autonomous. In the early 1800’s, the Cherokee adapted the tribal governing structure to include a written constitution. Cherokee courts and schools were established and, in 1821, a Cherokee scholar named Sequoyah invented a written Cherokee language. (visitcherokeenc.com)
Located in Cherokee, North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were once part of a much larger Cherokee Nation population. However, in 1838, after gold was discovered in Georgia, President Andrew Jackson, ignoring the decision of a U.S. Supreme Court judge that his “Indian Removal Act” was unconstitutional, forced 16,000 native peoples on a 1,000-mile march into Oklahoma—the infamous Trail of Tears, during which between 25% and 50% of the Cherokee tribe died. (visitcherokeenc.com) The Cherokee Tribe became divided into what is known today as the Cherokee Nation and United Kituwah Band, located in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band, made up of those who remained and rebuilt within North Carolina’s Qualla Boundary. (ebci.com)
The Cherokee are a resilient people. In spite of attempts by the U.S government to exterminate the Cherokee as a sovereign people, they survive and even thrive in North Carolina. Some members, who made it to Oklahoma, turned around and walked back home. Others are descended from Cherokee who managed to keep land they owned and did not march West. Others hid in the mountains and refused to be relocated. In 1850 the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians numbered approximately 1,000. Presently, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is a sovereign nation with over 14,000 members. (visitcherokeenc.com)
Today, Cherokee people do not live on a reservation, which is land given to a native American tribe by the federal government. Instead, in the 1800’s, the tribal members purchased 57,000 acres of property. This land, called the Qualla Boundary, is owned by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and kept in trust by the federal government. The tribe financially pays for schools, water, sewer, fire, and emergency services without assistance from the federal government. Cherokee schools teach the Cherokee language. In fact, the New Kituwah Language Academy teaches only in the Cherokee language.The New Kituwah Language Academy’s program statement is quite inspiring:
You can click here if you want to learn some basic Cherokee.
We are in Columbus, WI, about 30 miles Northeast of Madison, helping our son, Sebby and his girlfriend Jayne, settle in to their new house. Columbus is a sleepy little town with population, 5,540. It has above average schools and a cute little downtown. They moved in during a snowstorm and the neighbors were very helpful in snow blowing their driveway. So far it seems like a good move.
We stayed overnight in Aurora, Ill, a suburban city west of Chicago. We were surprised to see that it was a majority Latino city (primarily Mexican), which provoked me to look in to it’s history. I learned the story of Manuel Pérez, which illuminates some of the city’s history.
In 1910’s, Manuel Pérez was a young Mexican farmer with a small but growing family living in a central Mexican state. One day during the Mexican civil war, government troops rode up and turned their horses loose in his fields. The horses ate and trampled his corn, destroying months of hard labor. In disgust, he joined the rebels, but that was no better. Since the rebels were not getting paid, they lived off of the people, raiding villages and stealing their supplies. After 6 months he left the rebels, making him a marked man on both sides. He knew his only chance for survival was to flee. His father-in-law buried him, his wife and young son, Ben, in a load of hay and drove them to Northern Mexico where they successfully escaped. He spent several year working in American steel plants in Northern Mexico and eventually decided to emigrate to the United States. In 1919, Peréz and his family, following the harvest as a migrant farmworker, moved to the southwest United States. In 1923 a Perez family friend, who was working in Aurora, Illinois at the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q), told the Perezes that the CB&Q needed workers so much that it would pay the transportation of laborers willing to move to Aurora and do railroad work. The friend sent the family CB&Q passes and told them to bring others as well. The Perezes accepted this offer. and moved to Aurora in 1924. (The Community-Building Experience of Mexicans in Aurora, Illinois, 1915-1935 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40193974?seq=2)
These Mexican immigrants, in choosing the factory over the field, were the urban pioneers for their group. One of the major characteristics of the overall Mexican population between 1930 and 1950, contrary to popular stereotype, was their extensive, rapid urbanization. By 1930, fifty-eight percent of Mexicans resided in urban areas whereas by 1950, over seventy percent of Mexican immigrants and their children resided in such areas. (Jose Hernandez Alvarez, “A Demographic Profile of the Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1910-1950,” Journal of Inter- American Studies 8 (July 1966).
In Aurora, the railroad not only provided transportation from the Southwest and work building tracks, it also provided work building railroad cars and even provided housing in boxcar camps.
In the 1920’s Aurora was a regional industrial and railroad center for the surrounding farming communities in the Fox River Valley. Almost from its beginning in the 1830s, Aurora was a progressive, ethnically diverse town. From the 1850s up through the 1920s, a significant number of immigrant groups settled in Aurora. The predominant immigrant groups, as reflected in the 1910 census, were as follows: Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, Swedes, Irish, and Russians. Of course, many, other, smaller groups contributed to Aurora’s ethnic mosaic as well, and Mexicans started to arrive during World War I, continuing through the 1920s. Today Latinos are the largest ethnic group in Aurora, with Mexicans the largest nationality present.
It is interesting to note that the U.S. immigration laws in the 1920s were very strict in an effort to restrict immigration from Europe. There was an exemption for the Western Hemisphere, making Mexico a primary source of large-scale, cheap labor first for the Southwest farms, then the midwest industries.
Aurora was initially divided into two parts: East Aurora and West Aurora. Upon its incorporation in 1857, the two regions merged to create one city. The city’s industry was based around factories and the railroad, until the railroad shops closed in the 1960s, which led to the closure and relocation of other factories. This, in turn, led to an unemployment rate that climbed to 16% during the 1980s. Further development of the city also was a contributing factor to the decline of other areas of the city, which in turn led to heightened crime rates and gang violence. One good thing that did come out of this dark period was that the city was becoming very ethnically and culturally diverse.
During the late 1980s, the city began to make a comeback. More businesses opened and development spread following the construction of the Hollywood Casino in the early 1990s. Development continued through the 1990s and the population of Aurora continued to grow. (worldpopulationreview.com)Today Aurora is the 2nd most populous city in Illinois, after Chicago, with a population of 180,542 (2020 census).
Diversification is changing all of the rusty satellite cities of old into booming new “edge cities,” as the wealth of the Chicago suburbs spreads out to fill former farmland and joins with outriding urban cores. Each of these burgeoning powerhouses is developing a sizable minority population with roots in Latin America, and mainly in Mexico. “A river, a casino and Latinos. They all have these three,” Gonzolo Arroyo, the first Hispanic member of the school board in Aurora East observes, speaking of Chicago’s three older satellite cities: Elgin, Joliet and Aurora. (Chicago Tribune).
Perspectives on the Road 