History By GPS podcast is here!

Hey,

Check out our new podcast called History By GPS. It started February 14,
2023, and is in weekly posts exploring history and culture GPS location by GPS
location. Our first season highlighted the American Southeast, and the show is
planned to expand from there.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Red Circle, and other platforms and at HistoryByGPS.com. So come on over, and we’ll talk a little history and travel.

Show Notes page for the program.

If you know a location with history that should be highlighted, please let us know here or at HistoryByGPS@gmail.com.

Stay tuned! 

– JD Byous

The Cup and Anne Frank

For Anne Frank, the British 11th Armoured “Black Bull” Division arrived too late. She and her sister died a few weeks before the camp’s liberation.

Anne Frank 1940

I would not know that tidbit of history were not for the cup. I had studied many battles and World War II, but somehow Germany’s Bergen Belsen concentration camp got past me.

“The cup” is how I’ve always referred to my pewter and glass drinking utensil. Actually, it’s more like a trophy tankard or a beer mug. Years ago, an estate sale company hawked the property of F.B.B. Noble.

The advertisement listed it along with two others of a similar design. I liked what I saw and ordered two, one for me and one for my buddy, Dave, who lives a continent away. I knew he’d like it. He, too, loves history.

The cost for both was $12.50, $6.25 each. The shipping fee was more than the price of the cups. Where the other one went I’ll never know. I wish I’d bought it too.

The cup.

Inscribed on the curve of the face is “Peshawar District, Point to Point, 1937, Dismounted Team Race.”

I had no idea what a point to point race was.

After a quick check on the internet, I found that it was either some kind of computer connection or a cross-country horserace. The latter seemed more logical given the time frame.

It appears to be a steeplechase, a long-distance horse race. That I knew. Out west where I was born and raised cross-country racing was common.

My family has a lineage of horsemen. Horseshoes and hoof tracks replace the commas and parenthetic marks in the story of my family’s history. I was apparently out of school when the talent was handed out to my cousins. But I am from the culture and remember what our people do.

And Peshawar? Another Google check found that the British occupied the Peshawar District from the eighteenth century until 1947. It was a section of India back at the time recorded on the cup. It’s Pakistan today; Peshawar is in the wild, dangerous, northwest.

It’s a place near the Afghanistan border about seventy miles east of Jalalabad. Bin Laden, members of Al Qaida, and the Taliban used to hang out there when things were hot across the border. I guess the Taliban still does.

One-hundred miles down the road to the east is Abbottabad, where Seal Team 6 and Rob O’Neil caught up with Osama and punched his clock — three times in the head. Peshawar has always been a lousy place for westerners to visit. They don’t like us.

The horsemen of 1937 were members of the 2nd Battalion, Highland Light Infantry, who were riding through that dangerous territory, hell-bent for victory. They were not liked either. I can understand.

The riders’ names were Lt. Col. H.P.M. Berney Ficklin, Lt. R. Bramwell Davis, and Lt. F.B.B. Noble. Seems the British and their military officers prefer multiple and hyphenated names. When the war started the men were all promoted.

The Lieutenant Colonel’s team won again the next year but with a substitute for Bramwell Davis. Eventually, all three men became Generals. Noble was made a Brigadier, and the other two became Major Generals.

When the British invaded Sicily, Major General Berney Ficklin commanded the 5th Infantry Division. After D-day and Normandy, the American-made Sherman tanks of the British 11th crossed the Rhine River and rolled into Anne Frank’s concentration camp. It was April 15, 1945. Lt. Col. Bramwell Davis, Major Freddie Noble, and the Highland Light Infantry were a few miles away.

Berney Ficklin was back in England warming a desk chair, a casualty of Field Marshal Montgomery’s constantly rotating cast of commanders. The Field Marshal believed all of his commanders should walk on water — just as he did.

Major General Berney Ficklin, center with pipe, and officers of the British 5th Infantry Division at Sicily. Photo courtesy Truman Library

The connection between Anne Frank, the cup, and the three horsemen is through the story of that concentration camp where she died. It hinged on Berney Ficklin’s role dispensing justice that followed the war.

He was assigned a job as President of the Military Tribunal for the Nazi war crimes at Bergen Belsen. The trial started in November 1945. Under his management, the tribunal found twenty-two of the Nazis guilty.

Eleven, including the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, were sentenced to death and eleven more went to prison. Ten others were acquitted. Kramer and his henchmen were hanged one after the other on the same a cold-ass winter day a few weeks later.

At Bergen Belsen, Kramer and his Nazis were responsible for the deaths of 36,000 people, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, POWs, homosexuals, and political prisoners. When the Allied forces arrived, over 13,000 corpses lay strewn about the compound, left to rot by the officers and guards who threw their arms up in surrender.

I would not have known that important historical snippet without the cup – about its connection to the death of Anne Frank and the atrocities at Bergen Belsen.

A monument to Margot and Anne Frank at Bergen Belsen. Wikipedia

Today the silver-buff pewter tankard sits on my desk as a reminder of the Greatest Generation and their fight against the German fascist, Adolph Hitler, and his National German Socialist Worker’s Party.

The mentally-twisted cult is often naively known, on-the-street, only as “The Nazi Party.” People do not connect it to socialism nor to the destruction and death the system can and usually does, deal.

Oh, the fourth horseman noted on my buddy’s cup from 1938? That was Lt. John Fraser Brand who was later promoted to Captain.

Ironically he died September 3, 1939, the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. He was fighting Nazi Arab allies in Israel.

He is buried in the British War Cemetery in Ramla. He was twenty-nine years old.

When I drink from my cup, I always toast the Highland Light Infantry and the men who rode to win. Full or empty, it holds an amazing history.

I have one hell of a cup.

– JD Byous

Videos are easy?

Making videos are easy, I was told.  They’re not.  They’re work… I mean, lots of work.

Working with Trustees’ Garden in Savannah, I’ve had the pleasure and job of finding the history of the ten-acre site that was the first British-Crown sanctioned experimental garden in North America.  The history of the site has been astounding when one finds the things that took place there and the people associated with the spot on the eastern side of the Historic District.

There is so much history I’ve started declaring it to be, arguably, the most historic piece ground in the southeastern United States.  I qualify by saying, “If it isn’t, then it is definitely a most historic ground.”

The video…

First, the script must be written, condensed, and (semi) memorized.  Then film the narrative.  Then finding illustrations for which permissions can be gained.  Then the editing.  It’s a bunch of work… and I loved every minute.

It is fitting that a short video introduce the site.  But saying that is like trimming 286 years of intense activity into a seven-minute YouTube post.

I didn’t.

I can’t.

So here’s what I was able to cram into that length of “air time.”  Take a look and give me your opinion.

– JB

© J Byous Company, All rights reserved 2019

 

 

The Savannah San Francisco Connection

Matthew Hall McAllister

        McAllister in San Francisco

 

In 1850, and few yards offshore from the eastern end of Savannah’s Yamacraw Bluff, forty-nine-year-old Matthew Hall McAllister sailed down the river on his way to the boomtown of San Francisco. In five years, a street less than one-half mile away would carry his name.   The smell of salt air and marsh mud hanged on the air as he saw visions of shining gold nuggets beyond Savannah and beyond the horizon three-thousand miles to the West. He had given up on the city of his birth. For the Georgian and local leader, it is time to move on. Fifteen miles to the south, on the Ogeechee River at Strathy Hall, were his cousins who would make history later. That branch of the family would be known for Fort McAllister and the end of the Union Army’s march through the state. Hall, as he was known, would stay in touch and for the meantime, the family ties will reach over a continent and remain.

After serving in the State Senate, Hall ran as a candidate for Governor of Georgia. He lost. He had served as mayor of the city a few years earlier, and as far as credentials go, his were admirable. In 1799 his father had been mayor and had presided over the dedication of a new Exchange Building at the end of Bull Street, a milestone in the city’s history that ushered in an age of prosperity. On his mother’s side, his grandfather, Thomas Gibbons, had also served in the office. Savannah was Hall’s birthright, a part of the genetics of his family. McAllister’s family roots may have tangled and interwoven through the city’s history, but now they were balled up, stashed aboard ship, migrating to California where a new life beckons.  The West had called,  His golden illusion wasn’t in the placer and hard-rock, yellow metal that others were seeking. For him, it was in the law and litigation and legislation that controlled legal tender. Gold may be where you find it, but law books and their content are where you find the real riches, power, and influence. His wife and children traveled with him to settle in the new boomtown on the bay but Georgia politicians convinced him to sail home for one last attempt to gain a US Senatorial seat. But, again, he lost.

By that time of his first voyage Savannah’s edge-of-the-river, War-of-1812 ditch and parapet at Trustees’ Garden had eroded and had filled with sand and discarded household debris. In the layers of trash and litter were fragments of butcher-cut bone, glass and ceramic shards, unrecognizable decayed nodules mixed between carbon lenses that tell of the firing of tossed household trash and plant clippings. At the top of the slope on the West, the British Revolutionary War trenches had filled with discarded bricks, metal, and trash. Times of war were behind. The need for defenses was out of mind and slowly filling out of sight.

As he sailed past, demolition work was underway to dismantle old Fort Wayne, a stronghold named for General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. Shovel by shovel, portions of the earthen stronghold disappeared the same way others on the site had in years past. As it stood, it’s a sickle-shaped earthen structure stretched one-hundred yards long arcing from the southwest to the northeast along the edge of the bluff. The “handle” section stood halfway down the slope in the center of the Trustees’ Garden, pointing to the intersection of Randolph and Broughton Streets. The blade-shaped structure led from the handle, around the bluff northward, arcing toward the intersection of Bay and East Broad Streets. The partial demolition of the fort was for progress, to take the city into the future with Savannah’s new manufactured gaslight plant. Some of the earth from the fort would fill a small terrace to hold a Gasometer tank that would rise and fall, expand and contract, regulating pressure and distributing fuel to the homes of the area. Reynolds street, laid out three decades prior to the American Revolution, was being rerouted around the bulkhead before it proceeded north to intersect Bay Street below the bluff. Gas was the modern way, the progressive way, the future for lighting, for cooking, and for heating. It epitomized the birth pangs of the industrial revolution, and Savannah is on the crest of the wave.

When Hall returned to run for the Senate, he sailed back by the site, the gas plant he saw had expanded to meet the need of the booming cotton and naval stores port. A new wall engulfed the first, looping from Bay Street, around and into the heart of the Garden intersecting with Wright Street that would become a drive and parking area for the Pirate’s House Restaurant a century later. Fort Wayne’s earthen mass was shoveled into the terrace and surrounded by a masonry wall, erasing the fort with only one brick-structured bombproof to tell of its existence though partially hidden. Except for the protective wall, the old fort is completely gone, recycled into a new fortress-looking bulkhead. During the excavation, crews found three discarded cannons from the Revolution era. Years later, gas workers would place them along the parapet creating an unintended prank that confused future generations into calling the wall, “Old Fort Wayne.” Paradoxically, the fort does remain composed of the sand-layered fill in the elongated, square enclosure. Two additional gasometers had sprung up, dominating the skyline of the bluff.

For Hall, the return was frustrating. After his loss, he again pulled his stakes and sailed for California. As he again passed Trustees’ Garden, the Savannah Gaslight Company facility is running at maximum output providing gas for cooking, heating, and especially lighting. The shanghai-prone waterfront of his embarkation was a priority for the City and for gas.  Wharf lighting was universally embraced in an attempt to stop the epidemic problem of the kidnapping of citizens and drunken sailors that awoke to find themselves aboard ships, miles from home. When Hall entered the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay on the other side of the continent, he found that three Irish immigrants, the Donohue brothers, had built gasworks there as well.  Their venture formed the first manufactured gas company on the West Coast using imported Australian coal to fire the ovens.  San Francisco, like Savannah, was growing.

In two years, Matthew Hall McAllister left his impression on his new home and became revered in San Francisco’s history. Few know of his connection to Savannah and his family history in the east. That historical mark was made when he was named the first judge of the Federal Ninth Circuit Count. His likeness is now enshrined in a bronze sculpture that stands near the front steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. A few yards away is a statue commemorating Abraham Lincoln. During the first year as a Federal Judge, he would meet and work with a young banker and Major-General of the California State Militia. They would help put down the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, a group of revolutionary elites formed to defy the law and take power in the city. The young banker-general would visit Hall’s hometown a few years later. Generations will remember and revile the day when William Tecumseh Sherman marched across Georgia and came to town.

 Bibliography

Survey of footing-soil stratification at Trustees’ Garden, J Byous Company/A.T. Dowd Research, 2015.

Remediation of Former Manufactured Gas Plants and Other Coal-Tar Sites, Allen W. Hathaway, CRC Press, 2012.

The Story of the Ninth Circuit Court, San Francisco Call, Volume 78, Number 35, 5 July 1895.

Law in the West, edited by Gordon Morris Bakken, Brenda Farrington, Garland Publishing, 2000.

Oglethorpe: Between Heaven and Hell

Oglethorpe’s tree-fronted home is shown at the right on the northeast edge of Old Palace Yard.

He lived halfway between Heaven and Hell, Georgia founder James Edward Oglethorpe. His front steps on London’s St. Margaret Lane were downwind of the King’s fish yard that occupied a courtyard that opened a few houses to his right. The subsequent air often fogged his parlor and bedrooms with acrid, pungent punctuated smells that mixed with the sounds of morning-barking fishmongers, street merchants, and neighborhood workers. Around them, the clatter of knocking, squeaking wagons and carts rolled along the lane, bouncing over sparsely patched islands of free-stone pavers that dotted the long-furrowed thoroughfare.

At the far end of the market behind the rows of salmon, trout, and eel-laden stalls was the location of Hell, an eatery and watering hole once frequented by poet Ben Johnson and ridiculed by diarist Sir William Pepys.  The main entrance lured its customers down a stairway from the interior of Westminster Hall the way hookers call salesmen from an Amsterdam window — liquor lubricates opposition tongues.  It was known for being a “petty-tavern,” a gathering spot frequented by parliament’s lowly law clerks who boozed in a basement hollow that once housed the Kings’ torture chamber, thus warranting the Hadean label.

The Old and New Palace yards with Oglethorpe’s home marked with the red dot.

According to Pepys, the tavern was a “resort of disreputable characters and the most raffish of lawyers’ clerks.”  South, across the street to left of Oglethorpe’s house was Heaven, a more, but little more, up-scale tavern in a line of ramshackle brick and Tudor buildings running from west to east.  They blocked his view of the greater part of the Old Palace Yard like listing and leaning hung-over sailors lined across a deck of an outbound schooner. 

From there a few feet to the left and diagonally across the lane was another tavern, the Naked Boy and Star, which held the ground beside Westminster Abbey.  It served a slightly-more upscale clientele, Members of Parliament, poets, businessmen, lobbyists, and the occasional well-known Londoner.  Other Taverns in the area carried the trend with the names, Purgatory and Paradise.  A few doors away from the Star, at the corner of the Abbey, Geoffrey Chaucer had once lived in an upstairs flat near “The Poet’s Corner” where he was later interred.

Stepping from his portico, Oglethorpe’s route was “incommodious” as writer Henry Miles penned, noting that the lane in front of his home had “a paling of four feet high… placed between its single footpath and the carriageway, to protect the passenger from the carriages and the mud which they splashed on all sides in abundance.”  The wealthy in London, like everyone else, existed in a world of noise, foul smells, dust, mud, filth, and strewn garbage.  James held that rank in society — wealthy.

– Excerpt from an upcoming book by JD Byous

 

Sources

William Maitland et al, The History and Survey of London From Its Foundation to the Present Time: in Two Volumes, Book II, 1756, p 793: Rev. Mackenzie E. C. Walcott, M.A., Memorials of Westminster the City, Royal Palaces, Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, St. Peters’s College, the Parish Churches, Worthies, Streets, Modern Buildings, and Ancient Institutions, 1851, p 221.

Henry Downes Miles, The Life of Richard Palmer: Better Known as Dick Turpin…, London, p 79, 1839.

John Thomas Smith, Antiquities of the City of Westminster, London, 1807 p 68; Henry Downes Miles, The Life of Richard Palmer Better Known as Dick Turpin the Notorious Highwayman and Robber, 1839 p 79.

Henry Miles, The Life of Richard Palmer, London, p 78, 1839.

Doc Holliday Trail and Annie’s Tree – a story of darkness and light

Doc Holliday’s Trail and Annie’s Tree – a story of darkness and light.

Visit our main website at SoutheasternBound.net. We post history/travel every Monday, then photos/photo tips each Thursday.  Please click the Follow button (below right) for updates on Southeastern Bound.

By Jim Byous

At 6,000 feet above sea level, I am gasping for air.  I am also, as my father used to say, “getting old and soft.”  Now I’m only two-hundred feet up in my relatively easy three-hundred-foot climb on the Doc Holliday Trail to Glenwood Springs’ historic Pioneer Cemetery.  It sits on a lower ridge-bump of 8,095-foot-high Lookout Mountain that stands above and the Colorado city of around ten-thousand people.  My flatlander-endurance is poor in the thin air as I trudge onward.  The view is refreshing as I pause to take in the scope of the city below… okay… I stop to get my breath.  But, I gotta keep going, The Beckster is getting ahead of me on our upward trek to see the West’s version of outlaw/lawman, John Henry “Doc” Holliday’s gravesite.  He was born in 1851 in Griffin, Georgia but died in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  But where is he now?

Looking across the city of Glenwood Springs from the Doc Holliday Trail.

What awaits us at the end of the short journey is a controversy, but I want to see it.  Even though I am huffing and puffing I continue, The Beckster is tough, so must I be.  The view to the right is beautiful as I stop again to choke down a bit of thin air.  Clouds hang below the surrounding peaks as the occasional drop of rain pops onto my face.  The smell of sage and pine and moist air waft past at intervals as we walk the hard-packed, red-dirt and narrow rocky road.  A couple of walkers pass on the trail.  I assume they are local… don’t know.  Maybe they’re tourists too.  Locals often walk here.  Ahead is the evidence.  On a gnarled pinon pine hugging the upper bank of the cut, hundreds of colorful streamers twist and bob on the light breeze.

On the way down the hill, a walker passes Annie’s Wishing Tree, a prominent landmark in Glenwood Springs that is becoming famous around the world.

They are striking as they dance on a background of cloudy-grey sky and remind me of the prayer ribbons and flags you see in photos of Nepal along the route up Mount Everest.   These are wish ribbons.  Most were placed there by Annie Zancanella who lives just down the slope. In her two battles with cancer, she found solace in tying ribbons to the tree on which she played as a child.  “I spent my childhood playing on the mountain and walking with my father on his evening stroll up there,” she told me.  “Now that my family has all passed I still like to walk that trail daily and think of them and my happy childhood.”

She started putting ribbons on the tree, using them to represent her own wishes, dreams, and prayers in her fight against cancer.  After participating in a successful, non-traditional treatment program at Northwestern University in Chicago, she traveled to cancer centers in the USA to share her success story with university hospital students.  Collecting ribbons from young patients at those hospitals she brought them home and tied them to the tree.

“It was just pretty much my ribbons from my heart being put on it,” she says, “And then I realized that I needed to spread this happiness…”  She started taking bags of ribbons to the children’s hospital where she volunteered each month.  The kids would write their own wishes, dreams, and prayers for her to take back to the tree and tie for them. She would then take photos and show them to the kids.  Their words were on display for the world to see.  The project grew.

Annie’s Wishing Tree is a landmark along the trail to the Pioneer Cemetery.

Now others follow her lead by leaving wish ribbons, prayer streamers and mementos for others who are challenged by health issues.  Since that time she has continued to fight.  “I have had some more recent struggles with cancer but I’ve been able to keep a smile on my face and motivation in my heart.”

Ribbons were added by unknown hikers after Annie created the Wishing Tree.

I came to the hill looking for the story of death, of disease and of legend.  Now I’ve arrived to unexpectedly find a story of life, of adversity and of hope.  In my mind, I am attempting to blend the two narratives into one.  Annie is my daughter’s age.  Her story strikes a father’s heart.

The record of the tree is strikingly symbolic to the history and name of the route, The Doc Holliday Trail.  It’s antithetical to Annie’s story.  Holliday is said to have traveled to Glenwood Springs for the purported healing benefits in the springs of the area.  His sickness was then called consumption, now we know it as tuberculosis.  It was the reason he left his home and dental practice in Atlanta to start wandering the west in hope of a climate that would help or cure him.  His travels between Georgia and Colorado would be captured in legend; card games, gunfights, the OK Corral with Wyatt Earp, his death in a hotel room in Glenwood Springs.

The current marker replaced an earlier stone placed in the 1950s that had incorrect information. Cards, whisky, and tokens are often found at the site, left by admirers.

After a life of hell-raising, gambling and fighting he would not “die with his boots on.” They say his last words, while looking at his bare feet, would describe the irony in dying in bed at the age of 36 years, “Now, that’s funny.”  He was destined to die a more gentlemanly death, shoeless, and in bed in 1887.  His burial in the Pioneer Cemetery on top of the ridge is a matter of opinion.  Others say he was interred in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Griffin, Georgia after his father had him shipped home to a family plot.  In any event, he left plenty of legend for both.

The marker in Glenwood Springs is referred to as a memorial since Doc’s exact location in the cemetery has been lost to history.  He may or may not be here, but still, the site and its view across the Colorado skyline is worth the hike as is a stroll through the rest of the burial

Holliday’s memorial stands at the overlook point of the cemetery.

 ground.  The area is a carpet of rocky, iron-red dirt, highlighted with short pinyon pines, cedars, sagebrush and white marker stones.  A smattering of lawn covers a central square of memorials and graves suggesting families still visit and care for those interred here.  If the cemetery were a ship, Doc’s grave would be the wheelhouse at the point of the ridge with the balance of the site stepping up the slope toward the top of Lookout Mountain.

There, up the hill from Doc’s spot, stands another marker for a well-known character of western lore, also the adverse of the symbolic tree.   Harvey A. Logan, 1867-1904, is known to most folks know as Kid Curry, an associate of Robert L. Parker, aka Butch Cassidy, and his partner in crime, Harry A. Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid.  Logan rode with Cassidy’s Wild Bunch at the turn of the 20^th century.  One account of Logan’s death says he shot himself in the head after being trapped by a posse in Parachute, a town forty miles to the west,

Up the hill from Holliday’s marker is the pauper’s section of the cemetery where Kid Curry’s stone is found.  If he is really there is disputed.

and was buried there.  Others say he was traveling through Glenwood Springs, became ill and died.  Either way, he died… somewhere in Colorado.  And, now there’s a marker for him in the paupers’ section of Pioneer Cemetery.

Time passes quickly as we survey the grounds.  The sky is looking more threatening.  I am tired and still slightly out of breath, it’s starting to rain.  The view is exemplary and the rain isn’t hard, but it’s time to go.  We need to say goodbye to Doc.  Local ghost stories tell how folks leaving whiskey or cards or tokens for Doc receive a “Thank you,” as they stand and listen quietly.  I have no whiskey, nor do I have a deck of cards nor trinkets.  Perhaps a compliment will work.

Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, part of Butch Cassidy’s gang, has a marker in the paupers’ section of the cemetery.

“He Doc!  You have a great mustache!”

I listen quietly as raindrops increase… nothing… not a peep.

“Wait,” I say…  I lean over the iron picketed fence, “That IS you, right Doc?”

Looking at The Beckster I say, “Doc’s not talking.  Didn’t work.  Well, back to the car.  I’ll try the same trick in Griffin, Georgia when we get home.”

She stares at me in mock disgust and turns to the trail to walk back down.  She has a knack for ignoring my jokes.

“But he really did have a great mustache,” I affirm, following her along the path.

She pays no attention to my explanation and continues on.  The lady has class.

 Looking down on the neighborhood rooftops I imagine driving a horse-drawn hearse up this route.  It would be a tight squeeze, but possible.  Was this the main route back in the day?  I don’t know but I do know that another route from Cemetery Creek and our start point is driveable by car, complete with parking spaces… but it’s blocked by a gate.  And, this walk is good, we need the exercise… no… really.

A carved stone plaque describes the residents of the necropolis including multi-racial immigrants and freed slaves.

We pass Annie’s Wish Tree again.  A long, magenta streamer catches my attention.  It reads, “1 Year Cancer Free * Annie 4/18/14 – 4/18/15.”    The young lady is an inspiration.  Now she is planning a volunteer trip to impoverished areas in Africa to help children in Tanzania.  When she comes home she will carry more ribbons that will blow in the mountain breezes – waving and asserting hope – 130 feet directly down the slope from Doc’s marker.  Doc Holliday’s Trail and Annie’s Tree are a story of darkness and light.

I hope Annie is doing well.  Her story now lives on with the others who are linked with the trail and the cemetery and the hill.  Her story gleams brightly among them as she illustrates as she says, “It’s an absolute goal of mine to continue to inspire others and for my wishing tree to bring happiness to all who stumble across it!”

I’m glad I did… stumbled here.  For me, I think of my daughters and grandchildren and pray that they will have a measure of Annie’s determination and drive.

Doc Holliday’s story is dark and deadly.

Annie’s story shines with hope.

Annie has grit.

---

Here are other things to do and study in Glenwood Springs.

Nope… nope… well, maybe. The Glenwood Swing slings you out over 1300 feet of air space above the Colorado River.

In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt stayed at the Colorado Hotel in Glenwood Springs while on a three-week hunting trip. Legend says the teddy bear was born from on of his hunts here.

Actor Tom Mix starred in movies filmed in and around Glenwood Spings.

Fall in Glenwood Springs.

Ute Chief Colorow and some of his people.

One of the many hot pools in Glennwood Springs.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown has a connection to Glenwood Springs, having visited the Hotel Colorado.

Iron Mountain Hot Springs is renowned for its resort and spa.

A postcard featuring the Yampah Spa and Vapor Center c1900.

The Doc Holliday Tavern is a tourist draw in its own right and is a must-see when in town.

Our thanks to Glenwood Springs Chamber Resort Association for photos and to Annie Zancanella for background in this story.  We were not compensated for coverage of the location and attractions.  – JB

Visit our main website at SoutheasternBound.net

Please click the Follow button (below right) for updates on Southeastern Bound.

© J Byous Company 2018, All rights reserved

Beaufort, it’s a view to dine for.

Visit our main website at SoutheasternBound.net. We post history/travel every Monday, then photos/photo tips each Thursday.  Please click the Follow button (below right) for updates on Southeastern Bound.

By Jim Byous

Beaufort, South Carolina is Southern, small and sophisticated…. it’s a view to dine for.  The deck where we sit once jutted out over the water.  Today the water is two-hundred feet away, separated from the restaurant by yards and yards of twentieth-century fill dirt.  Since Gus, The Travel Dogg blogger is with us, we’re invited to the umbrella-covered tables in the back of the eatery… and the best views.

The pet-friendly deck at Beaufort’s Panini’s Restaurant is a pleasant waterside venue.

The 1919 Beaufort Bank Building, now Panini’s On The Waterfront Restaurant, still has one of Beaufort, South Carolina’s best vantage points of the harbor.  From our table, past the hoagies, Frogmore penne, and crab cake salad, the boats list lazily as the spring breeze flows in from the ocean to the east… sleep-inducing.  Tourists and locals rest in strategically-positioned porch-swings that deliver leisured views from Henry Chambers Waterfront Park.

Clams and Rigatoni in the center, Chicken Salad Panini on the left with a Meatball Parmigiana Hoagie on the right.  All with Southern sweet tea.  Life’s good.

The scent of the brackish water and marsh mud accent the aroma of clams and rigatoni that wait in front of me.  Dog friendly and a gluten-free menu…  I am in heaven.  Usually, they bring a doggy menu for the pups, but today they are out of the pup-centric treats.  Gus doesn’t mind a few nibbles of people food.

The harbor next to Henry Chambers Waterfront Park.

The spot is fantastic… but the history of the town is even better.  Beaufort was founded in 1711.  James Oglethorpe and the original settlers of Savannah and Georgia had stopped here on their way to start the new colony in 1732.  Though first settled by the English in 1670, the southeastern corner of what is now the United States, was still a frontier.  The reason for Oglethorpe’s visit was to create a new adjoining colony to prevent the Spanish from moving up the coast from Florida, a welcomed buffer for the Carolinians.

Bay Street in the downtown section serves as the main thoroughfare in the historic district.

Previously, in 1566, the Spanish created the nearby town of Santa Elena and stayed for 21 years.  Oglethorpe’s actions would act to nullify the Spanish claim to the area.  Before the Spanish, in 1662, French explorer and Captain Jean Ribaut brought a group of Huguenots to the same spot, creating the first Protestant settlement in what is now the United States.

Greek Revival architecture is common among the homes and businesses in Beaufort.

Ribaut left a few soldiers and sailed back to France to gather reinforcements.  The left-behind troops went to work and built their own ship which took them back to France as well.  Unfortunately, without a compass, they wandered their way eastward and resorted to cannibalism to finish out the trip.  It was the first ship built in America to cross the Atlantic Ocean… eventually.  The location of the town was found under a Parris Island Marine Base golf course.  The Spanish had built their town over the ruins of the French, which is… I am told… par for the Spanish.  A stroke of genius.

A iron-willed flamingo stands guard at the front of a Bay Street business.

The site is a short trip down the waterway from Beaufort toward the ocean.  Parris Island is a place where US Marines are proud to have been… and graduated… from.  Basic training there has hardened thousands of Leathernecks, both in times of peace and in war since 1915. As a result, Marine Corp caps and bumper stickers are easily found along Beaufort’s Bay Street which serves as the main thoroughfare and attraction in the Historic District.  On the other side of town is the Marine Corps Air Station.  This is a Marine-centric town.

The chief of Bay and West Streets soaks in the sun while waiting for the next tourist to pass.

It’s always been a military town.  The British had just finished barracks for soldiers in 1732 when Oglethorpe dropped in with his hundred-or-so settlers.  The travelers were given the new facilities to stay in while Colonel William Bull accompanied Oglethorpe on a scouting expedition to establish Savannah.  They joined their leader a few weeks later in 1733.  Soldiers and Sailors occupied the location until the end of the American Revolution when they were asked, not too politely, to leave.

In 1861, during the American Civil War, the city was captured by Union troops who held it to the end.  At that time the town was said to be void of white Southerners, leaving it to the black population before the Federal’s amphibious landing.

The John Cuthbert House, now known as the Cuthbert House Inn, was built in 1811.  During the Union occupation in the Civil War, it was owned by US Army Brigadier General Rufus Saxton. (Wikipedia)

One rebel resident had been in the thick of fighting before.  William Henry Cory had been born in Chapham England near London.  Before emigrating to Beaufort he had survived the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade made famous by poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson who wrote,

“Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward…,

and continues later,

“Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.”

The 1855 painting by William Simpson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava,” depicts the battle and cavalry charge in which William Cory participated.

In Cory’s new homeland he served as an officer in the Virginia Infantry in the Confederate Army.  He is buried in the St. Helena Episcopal Churchyard.  Beside his headstone are two flags.  One is the Union Jack, the other is the Confederate Battle flag.

How much is that Piggy in the window?  I fell in love with the swine.

I love the rocking horse too… but it won’t fit in a Ford Focus.

Today the town is a favorite of tourists from Hilton Head and Savannah.  Art shops, restaurants, and odds-and-ends stores line the main street.  They hold some very good art, great food and interesting treasures that I can’t live without but can’t afford.  There’s a rocking horse and pig that I have my eye on.  They won’t fit in my Ford Focus… oh, well.  I’ll have to pass.  Ooohh!  Ooohh!  It’s an Irish shop.  Irish tweed hats and shillelaghs.  Do I need them…? No… but I gotta look.

I’ll have to pass on the Irish hat.  Wool is too warm any time of year in Savannah… But the Beaufort hat on the basket head…  it’s mine.

We’ve also “gotta look” at the architecture.  Especially the old styles.  The Verdier House stands on the northwest corner of Bay and Scott Streets.  The Federal-style home was built in 1804 by a French Huguenot planter and businessman named John Mark Verdier.  To me, it looks to have a lot of Greek Revival features, but the former is listed in the guide books.  It was the Union Army adjutant general’s headquarters during the occupation.  Today it is a museum that displays the history of the town as well as household items of the era.

The vernacular Regency/Greek Revival home of Huguenot,  John Mark Verdier, was built in 1804.  You can find it at the corner of Bay and Scott Streets.

A few blocks to the north is The Arsenal that serves as the Beaufort History Museum.  Built in 1798 it houses paintings, uniformed draped mannequins, and docents eager to tell the stories of the area.  On the east is the Old Point neighborhood where antebellum homes sit among moss-covered oaks beside narrow, walkable lanes.  It’s worth the stroll.

Hint: For real Southern iced tea you must add the sugar to boiling hot tea, stir it until it dissolves, then cool it and add the ice. At Panini’s, it’s an unofficial umbrella drink.  Photos don’t lie.

If you like the South, sweet tea and old South charm, this is the place.  Sit back on Panini’s deck, watch the boats bob on the river, and enjoy a cool Southern iced tea.

Y’all come back.

 

 

 

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