My father was born and raised on the island of Maui and one of the rituals of my childhood was summer treks to  my paternal grandparents.  And one of my favorite Maui memories was swimming at Iao Valley, in a pool fed by the freezing cold springs coming down from the mountains.  I didn’t care that my grandparent’s house sat next to a beautiful beach lining warm waters.   Their beach didn’t come with a story of the dammed waters and ghostly warriors who haunted the valley.

Today is Kamehameha Day, a public holiday in Hawai’i to honor Kamehameha I, who eventually returned to Maui and permanently conquered not only it but the rest of the islands and became the first ruler of the united Kingdom of Hawai’i.   In Hawai’i, Kamehameha Day involves parades, concerts and hulu competitions over several days.  And it generally all starts with the draping of leis over two statues of King Kamehameha — one on the island of Hawai’i at Kamehameha’s birthplace and the second in front of ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu.  The birthplace statue was created in 1878 by Boston sculptor Thomas Ridgeway Gould, and the Honolulu statue is a copy that was made when they thought the original had been lost at sea while being transported to Hawai’i.

The lei draping tradition came to DC when a second copy of the Gould statue was presented to the U.S. Capitol in 1969. Each state is allowed to have two statues (of notable citizens of its state) displayed in the Capitol building complex.  Here’s John Swigert of Colorado, an Apollo 13 astronaut, watching some hula dancers rehearse.

The statues representing Hawaii are St. Damien of Molokai and King Kamehameha.  Damien is in statuary hall, under the Rotunda of the Capitol.  King Kamehameha is in Emancipation Hall, which is the ticketing area of the Visitor Center.  His placement in the lowest public level of the Capitol complex is, in part, a structural strategy: made of bronze with a granite base, he is one of the heaviest of the State statues.

The Hawai’i State Society of DC sponsors the ceremony, which involves not only the lei draping, but lots of hula and traditional music.  It also involves the Hawaii congressional delegation, who must get a resolution passed through one of the houses of Congress in order to allow space in the Capitol building to be used for the event.

In return to getting the space, the congress people are allowed to speak.  All the speeches this year were boilerplate politics, except for the one by Eni Faleomavaego, the U.S. congressman from Samoa (he was raised in Hawaii).  He had the best line of the day, when he said that it was very appropriate that a Hawaiian should be standing at the entrance of the food court.  Here he is (with the red lei), singing an impromptu duet with Peter Apo, Vice Chair of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.  You can see ”restaurant” behind Kamehameha.

The DC Kamehameha Lei Draping happens annually on whichever Sunday in June Emancipation Hall is available.  The ceremony is open to the public so if you’re interested in going, start checking the Hawai’i State Society webpage in May for details.

The last week in April was Virginia Historic Garden Week, during which about 250 public and private historic houses and gardens are opened for tours. It is a fund-raiser for the Garden Club of Virginia.  Gardening is Patricia’s thing and we were happy to find Garden Week participants on our path home from North Carolina.  Public houses (like Bacon’s Castle and Smith Fort Plantation) are on the Historic Garden Week tour list, but they seemed to have the regular tour, garden week or not.  I was particularly excited about Brandon Plantation, however, because the house is usually not open to the public.

The instructions in the Garden Week brochure said to write for a tour.  There was a snail mail address.  Trying to remember the last time I send a personal letter through the postal service, I wrote and got a polite (email) response.  She would be happy to show us Brandon.  She signed herself “Mrs. Daniel,” a bit of formality unexpected in the States in the 21^st century.

I made an appointment for 9:30.  We showed up after 10.

In case y’all had forgotten, we are in the South.

In the entry hall of the house, we found an older woman with a blond bob, wearing jodhpurs-looking pants and a quilted vest.  I knew that she was Mrs. Daniel,  because she looked like someone who would sign herself “Mrs. Daniel.”  She had an old money “it” factor that Ralph Lauren only wishes he could sell.   I was right — it was Mrs. Daniel and she owned the house.

She was with a tour group but stopped to speak with us.  I apologized profusely.  “I have a bus tour coming any minute,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting, you can join them.”

No, we wouldn’t mind.  We expected to be told to go away and never darken their doors again.  We happily wandered the formal gardens, which had a bit more going on than had the ones at Bacon and Smith.

Not long after, I came upon a man looking lost.  “Do you know where the tours start?” he asked.

“In front,” I said. “Are you the bus group?”

He looked relieved.  “Yes.”

“She’s expecting you.”

He made his way back through the boxwoods to the front and on the way picked up about 15 others.  We followed them.  Mrs. Daniel was waiting on the porch.

The original 5000 acre property was acquired by John Martin in 1616 and was named Brandon after his wife’s family.  Martin sold it to a Richard Quiney (claim to fame: his brother married Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith) in 1635 and Quiney sold it to Nathaniel Harrison in 1720.  Nathaniel was brother to Benjamin Harrison III, who was ancestor to the Harrison presidents.  The property remained with the Harrisons until 1926, when it was sold to Pennsylvania banker, Robert W. Daniel, Sr.  Daniel had Virginia ties: he had been born in Richmond and was a Randolph.  The property is still almost 4500 acres and a thriving agricultural (corn, wheat, soybean and timber) business.

The house was built in 1765 and family lore has it that it was designed by Thomas Jefferson.  But what late 18^th/early 19^th century Palladian in Virginia doesn’t make that claim?  If he did, he was 22 at the time.  There’s no evidence that he did.

That’s the back of the house, above.  It looks exactly like the front of the house (in the picture at the top of the post), except for the bullet holes.  How’s that for a teaser?

The house has 7773 square feet, with 7 bedrooms and 6.5 baths.  The tour consisted of three rooms on the first floor – the entry way, the parlor, and the dining room.  No photos in the house but there’ll be a link to a website with pics at the end of the post.

“The age of houses like these is past,” Mrs. Daniel sighed.  “In fact, this one will be for sale in a couple of weeks.”  Her husband, former U.S. Congressman (VA-R) Robert Daniel, Jr., had died last year and I guess their children were not interested in carrying on.

She read the history off a sheet of paper, and supplemented it with stories about the family.

There was a dumbwaiter in the dining room.  “The kitchen is in the basement,” Mrs. Daniel said.  “I’d put the food in the dumbwaiter and yell to my husband to let him know that the food was on its way up.  When he was growing up here, they had lots of servants to do that sort of thing.  We didn’t.”  She may not have had lots of servants, but I can’t imagine that she kept up a 7773 square foot house without some kind of staff.  And she just didn’t strike me as someone who did her own cleaning.  She did at least have a housekeeper, who was helping with the tour.

At the conclusion of the house tour, we went out of the back of the house.  There were bullet holes surrounding the back door, made by the Union during the Civil War.  “Someone asked my husband why he didn’t fix it,” Mrs. Daniels said.  “He said it was because he still bore a grudge.”

You may remember that our weekend road trip started with a visit to the Titanic exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  By odd coincidence, it turned out that we wrapped up our trip on a Titanic note: Robert Daniel Sr. was a Titanic survivor.  His first wife, Eloise (Mrs. Lucian) Smith, also was a survivor.  They met aboard the rescue ship Carpathia (her husband died in the sinking) and married two years later.

Brandon Plantation — the house and farm — goes up for auction on June 26.  It has been appraised for $10.3 million, which seems underpriced.  You can see photos of the property, including interiors, on the auction website.

I kid.  It’s just that the true story of how Bacon’s Castle came to be named is equally … reaching.  Nathaniel Bacon lead colonists in a 1676 armed rebellion again Virginia Governor William Berkley that became known as Bacon’s Rebellion.  During the rebellion, some of Bacon’s troops occupied the house (Bacon himself never set foot on the property) and — based on archeological finds — spent a lot of time drinking in the wine cellar. That’s the tenuous connection that gives the house its name.  No attempts to explain the “castle” except by Wikipedia, which says that because it was occupied by troops, it was considered a “fort,” which is almost the same as a “castle.”  Really?

Bacon’s Castle is the oldest datable brick house in Virginia, built in 1665 by planter Arthur Allen.  Arthur Allen’s son was a stanch royalist, which is how he came under attack by Bacon’s troops.  Bacon lost Bacon’s Rebellion and the house returned to the Allen family, where it stayed until 1844.  It’s now owned by Preservation Virginia, and is open to the public.  It is, says Preservation Virginia’s website, “one of only three surviving high-style Jacobean structures in the Western Hemisphere.”  The other two are in Barbados.

The historic sites west of the James River in southeastern Virginia seemed to be (somewhat) on the road between North Carolina and home.  So we took an extra day to wander the area and see as much as we could, starting with Bacon’s Castle.

There were more people there than I expected, possibly because it was Virginia Historic Garden Week and Bacon’s Castle was on the Garden Week’s tour.  The house can be seen by guided tour only, and started with an intro by the tour guide.  We then went through all three stories of the house, starting with the servant’s sleeping quarters at the top and working our way down to where the kitchen once was, in the basement.  Be careful coming down the steps from the third floor to the second – one of the frequently told stories about Bacon’s Castle is that there’s a ghost who will push visitors down the stairs.

The thing I remember most about the house: there was a lot of 19^th century graffiti found when wallpaper was removed during restoration.  One says, in what looks like a child’s hand, “September 20, 1888. I am sick today.”  The husband of the last of the Allens to live in the house scratched a love poem to her in a window pane.

Preservation Virginia has kept the structure of the house as it was when they acquired it in the 1970s.  That means that 19^th and 20^th century alterations and additions remain.  If you look at the front of the house, in the photo at the top of this post, the original house is on your left.  In the mid 1800s, the two story Georgian on the right replaced a smaller structure, and the front door was moved to the hyphen.  You can see the shadow of the original door and pediment in the pop-out in the original part of the house.

There also were dependencies, including slave quarters, and a circa 1690 formal English-style garden.  Garden Week aside, it as a late spring this year and the gardens weren’t doing much of anything that third week in April.

There’s also one room of artifacts found on site.  No photographs allowed of the interior of the house and the guide was refreshingly candid about why.  “We want you to buy our book,” she said.

After Bacon’s Castle, we drove a few miles north to Smith Fort Plantation.  The sign on the door said something along the lines of, “Giving a tour.  Please wait for next tour.”  We wandered the garden.  Again, not much happening there, so we sat on a bench and enjoyed the afternoon sun.  Soon, the doors out of the basement opened and a group wandered out.  With them came the guide, who approached and invited us in.

The house was built in the mid-18^th century by a Jacob Faulcon and was bought and restored by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1930s. It’s a beautiful little brick Flemish bond brick building with original wood paneled walls and built-ins.   The guide explained that because it had always been owned by a class of people who couldn’t afford to renovate, the house had not changed much from the time it had been built.  The house is furnished with English and American antiques “mostly donated to us by various people,” said the guide (I think his name was Ed, but don’t hold me to that).

But the property’s claim to fame lies with the fact that it is directly across the river from Jamestown and was once the site of a fort built by John Smith in 1608.  The land belonged to Chief Powhatan and he gave it to John Rolfe on Rolfe’s marriage to his daughter, Matoaka (aka Pocahontas), in 1614.  The land eventually was inherited by their son, Thomas.

After the house tour, the guide encouraged us to visit the site of Smith’s Fort, down a narrow, pothole-ridden dirt road.  There isn’t anything there now except a mound and a sign that says, “On this site in early 1608 a new fort was built by the first settlers of the Jamestown Colony under the leadership of Captain John Smith for protection from Indian attacks and the Spanish.”

If you’re in the area and have time for only one tour, I’d recommend Smith Fort over Bacon’s Castle.  The house is a gorgeous little gem, and – the primary reason – the guide is amazing.  He seems to be a one-man visitor services department, and knew everything there was to know about the property.

UNC was the first public university in the US to enroll students (in 1795), giving it a claim to the title of the oldest public university in America.  Two other schools also claim the title: the College of William and Mary (which has the oldest founding date of 1693, but was a private school in the beginning and didn’t become public until 1906) and the University of Georgia (which received the first charter in 1785 but didn’t begin admitting students until 1801).  Private is not public and a college is not a college until it has students, so I’m siding with UNC.

Duke’s campus, with its gothic spires and old world airs, is famous for its beauty.  For my money, though, I much preferred UNC.  And my assessment had nothing to do with the fact that much of the campus is built in my favorite style of architecture (Federal).

On our way to dinner the first night we were there, we met Lisa at the student union, and she took us through the older parts of campus and across McCorkle Place (aka the northern quad).  The oldest UNC buildings flank McCorkle Place.  Also there: the Old Well drinking fountain (photo above), originally the sole water supply for the campus and now the symbol of the university.

Buried in the middle of the quad (along with his wife and step-son), under a marble obelisk is Joseph Caldwell, the first president of UNC.  The marble obelisk replaced a sandstone version that had been the original monument to Caldwell.  After it was replaced, the sandstone monument was taken to the UNC cemetery and put on the grave of Wilson Caldwell, who had started life as the son of Joseph Caldwell’s slave and was himself a slave to David Swain, the second president of UNC.  Wilson Caldwell, as a leader of the African American community in Chapel Hill, was part of the delegation (along with Swain) sent to surrender Chapel Hill to the Union and ask that the town/university not be destroyed.  It wasn’t. That and fifty years of service to UNC wasn’t enough to get him his own monument, but he did get the hand-me-down from Joseph Caldwell.

Near the Caldwell monument is Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913.  Of course, there’s quite a bit of controversy over a statue honoring anything Confederate in the middle of campus and there’s been an ongoing campaign to remove him.

Also controversial: a marble and brass table commissioned by the Class of 2002 and inscribed, “The Class of 2002 honors the University’s unsung founders, the people of color bond and free, who helped build the Carolina that we cherish today.”  People complain that it’s in the shadow of Silent Sam.  People complain that its use as a table is disrespectful.  People complain that the figures are too small.  People just complain.

The town was built to serve the University and the University trustee’s developed the town around the campus.  So the University truly is in the middle of town.  The town’s main commercial road is Franklin Street, which boarders the campus to the west.  On that first evening, after our quick tour of campus, we took a walk — down Franklin past the restaurants, shops and student bars — to the town of Carrboro.  Remember what I told you about the UNC/Duke rivalry?

We had several excellent meals during our visit.  In Carrboro, we had dinner at the Spotted Dog.  Lisa is a vegetarian and half of the Spotted Dog’s offerings are vegetarian.  I had a great veggie burger.  The next night, we had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant on Franklin Street called Lime and Basil, then went up the street for frozen yogurt at the Yogurt Pump.  Lime and Basil’s vegetarian pho was to die for.

After dinner in Carrboro that first night, we headed back to Chapel Hill on a public bus.  Chapel Hill Transit has free buses traveling on fixed routes, including up and down Franklin Street.  We rode the bus from Carrboro back to campus, left Lisa there, and caught a taxi back to the hotel.

We chatted with our taxi driver and noticed a not-Southern accent.  We asked where he was from.  “New York.” What was he doing in Chapel Hill?

He had decided he needed a change, he told us.  So he got a map of the US, closed his eyes, whirled the map around, and put his finger down.  He was moving to wherever his finger landed.  It landed on Chapel Hill.

Did he like it?  He loved it.  The people are so nice and polite.  Very not-New York (his opinion, not mine).

When I got home, I tried the same thing and came up with…Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Uh…no.  I’m sure Michigan is a lovely place — it’s just that I’m a warm weather person.

I loved Chapel Hill, though, and will be dragging Mr. History Tourist down in the near future, on one of our pre-retirement scoping trips.

“Ohhh,” said Patricia, vaguely, “just looking around.”

“I didn’t want to tell her that we’re going to Duke,” Patricia confided to me, later.  For those who may not know, UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University – about twelve miles apart – are fierce rivals.

So of course, fate worked against her.  It was cold the next morning, much colder than we’d expected on a late April morning in the south.  “I might have to wait for you in the car while you walk around,” said coatless Patricia as we pulled into the Duke visitor center car park, behind their ecumenical chapel (which looks like a cathedral).  I know what you’re thinking, and mine wouldn’t have fit her.  She’s a lot taller.

“We can go to the gift shop and get you a sweatshirt or hoodie or something,” I said.

Patricia looked horrified, “Wear a Duke sweatshirt?  I couldn’t.”

“Maybe they have something that doesn’t say Duke.”

Ha.

We went into the Duke gift shop and searched and searched.  The question was not whether the clothing had “Duke” emblazoned on it – they all did – but whether the letters were large, huge or humungous.

“Can I help you?” a pleasant young woman finally asked us.

Patricia told her, “I didn’t bring a coat and I need something warm.   But I can’t keep anything that says Duke because my god-daughter goes to UNC.  I’ll never wear it again, so I don’t want to spend much money on it.”

The young woman seemed unfazed by this blunt confession.  “I might have something for you here.”  She led us to the sweatshirts and came up with one in bright Duke blue, with DUKE in large letters on the front.  “Eighteen dollars.”

Sold.

“Don’t take any pictures of me with it on.  And definitely don’t post it anywhere.  I don’t want Lisa or her mother to see me in a Duke sweatshirt.”

Okay.

The school, started in 1838, was called Trinity College until 1924 when it received a huge endowment from tobacco billionaire James B. Duke and was renamed Duke University.  Today, it’s a mega university with several campuses on over 8000 acres.

The gift shop led out to “the Plaza” and after a few left turns, we ended up at the front of the chapel.  Built of North Carolina stone.  Finished in 1932.

Closed at 10 am, a sign in front said.  There was going to be a wedding.  It was 9:30, so we had time for a quick run through.

After the chapel, we went to look at the main library, next door, with it’s gothic reading room.  Very Oxbridge.  Or Hogwarts.

Our reason for being at Duke — the only thing that could have gotten Patricia (an avid gardener) to visit “the enemy” – was the Sarah P. Duke Gardens.  It was a short wander down Chapel Drive from the chapel.

Sarah P. was the wife of Benjamin N., brother of James B.  In the 1930s, a Duke faculty member convinced Sarah’s daughter to fund a garden in memory of her mother.  The gardens occupy 55 acres, with five miles of paths.  It seemed to be a community place: lots of dog walkers and joggers mingled with the tourists.

An unusual feature of the garden — at least one I’d never heard of – is an area within its grounds where people can scatter or bury cremated remains.  In order to (officially) have ashes placed there, you have to make a contribution of $25,000, which also gets you the name of the deceased (who must have a Duke connection) inscribed on one of the stones that line the gardens.   Ashes in public gardens can’t be as unusual a practice as I thought, though, because UNC also allows ashes in its gardens.  They only charge $350, however.  Something to consider if you need to decide which one to attend.

I remember a newspaper article, published several years ago, about the problem that popular historic estates had with people surreptitiously leaving ashes behind on their grounds.  Uncle Joe always wanted to be buried at Mt. Vernon.  So to Mt. Vernon and Monticello: Duke University has a fund-raising idea for you.

From the University, we went to the Duke Homestead State Historic Site and Tobacco Museum, about five miles away.  It’s where it all started for the Duke family.

Washington Duke, the 8^th of 10 children of a farmer, left home at aged about 21 to become a tenant farmer himself.  He married well, acquired land from his father-in-law, then started amassing land for himself.  He completed this house in time for his marriage to his second wife (his first died after 5 years of marriage) in 1852.

He started as a cotton farmer but when his cotton crop died, he turned, in 1859, to tobacco.  After the Civil War – during which he served in the Confederate army – he returned to the homestead and began turning their tobacco crop into smoking tobacco.  By 1873 the Dukes were producing 125,000 pounds of smoking tobacco a year and Washington was looking to expand.  The Dukes built a proper factory in downtown Durham, near the railroad, and by 1890, the Dukes controlled the largest tobacco company in the world.

The homestead, administered by the State of North Carolina, included the Duke house, his first three “factories” (which were really no more than large barns — you can see part of the third factory in the picture with the house) and a museum on the history of tobacco.  Above is Flo, a catcher in a cigarette factory.  Her job is to inspect and catch cut cigarettes as they rolled off the machine, and put them into a box.  She is not happy with her job and is wondering why she has to wear the silly hat.  Check out the shoes, though.  A little fancy for a production line uniform, what.

That description makes me smile.

North Carolina’s capitol was New Bern, on the coast, when the British occupied it during the Revolutionary War and North Carolinians decided that a capitol a little more inland might be a safer bet. Their legislators agreed to build a city specifically to serve as the State capitol.  The site they chose was mid-State and, more important, not far from their favorite watering hole: Isaac Hunter’s Tavern. Legislators in the 18th century, like those today, knew how to prioritize.

I had always wanted to see the Research Triangle area (Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Durham) so when Patricia told me that she wanted to go to Chapel Hill to visit her god-daughter at the University of North Carolina, I insinuated myself into the visit by offering to drive.

Our first stop was Raleigh. The good news is that downtown Raleigh has a lot of free stuff for tourists: the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the North Carolina Museum of History, the Capitol, and the Governor’s Mansion, just to name a few within a block or two of each other. The other good news (at least for museum supporters) is that – due at least in part to the fact that they’re free – they have a lot of visitors.

The bad news is that – due at least in part to the fact that they’re free – they have a lot of visitors. We started at the Natural Science Museum. Along with every school child in North Carolina.

I was there to see the Titanic: the Artifact Tour, a traveling exhibit that has since moved on (there are several iterations of the exhibit showing at the same time around the country, so please see their schedule for dates and locations). There was a fee for the special exhibit, so it was much less crowded than the rest of the museum.

As we entered the Titanic exhibit, they gave us a  “boarding pass” with the name of a Titanic passenger. Mine was  first class passenger Emma Eliza Ward, the 60-year-old widow of William R. Bucknell, founder of Bucknell University.  Emma was returning from France to the US with her maid, for her son’s medical school graduation.  According to the museum “boarding pass,” Mrs. Bucknell told her friend Margaret “the Unsinkable Molly” Brown, before they boarded, that she had “evil forebodings” about the ship.

At the end, we could see if she survived the trip. The Holocaust Museum in DC does something similar – we were given a card with a name as we entered, and we would find out at the end if that person survived.

There was a lot of information stuffed into a not-very-large exhibit. There were stories about the crew and passengers, general information about the ship, artifacts recovered from the wreck, ship models, full-sized mock-up of cabins and information about the salvage process. No photographs allowed. My favorite part: a large slab of ice that was part of a “touch the iceberg” interactive exhibit. Yes, I am 10.

Mrs. Bucknell and her maid survived the trip, as 97% of the women in first class had.

Across a courtyard was the North Carolina Museum of History. That was not as popular with the school crowd as the Natural Science Museum, which was a shame because the exhibits were very much targeted to children. You could milk a cow or pose as a Civil War soldier. Maybe the schoolchildren are scheduled for another day?

There is a chronological exhibit of North Carolina history on the first floor and exhibits on Carbine William, North Carolina sports and Latino life in North Carolina on the third.  The photo above is of a swim suit made ca. 1950 from Nazi armbands.  The husband of Fleta Calicutt of Raleigh, who made the suit, was an infantryman who brought home a bolt of uncut bands as a souvenir.

Also on the third floor: a special exhibit on pottery.  The man at the entrance of the pottery exhibit looked hopeful as we approached.  Then we saw the sign: entry required a fee and a separate ticket. I like pottery and would have paid to see the exhibit. Except. The exhibit was on the third floor and the ticket sales were on the first. We’d driven five hours from DC and made our way through two museums and we just couldn’t find it in ourselves to go down to the first floor to buy the tickets, then come back up to the third to see the exhibit. So we gave it a pass. The man looked sad as we turned away. Hint to museum staff: make the special exhibits signs more prominent. Or – radical thought – get the people at the reception desk to mention the exhibit as they give their introductory spiel.

When we were done with the museums, we wandered across the street to the North Carolina State Capitol building.  We sat on a bench in front of it and ate a late lunch while deciding whether to take the Capitol tour. The statue is of the three US Presidents who had been born in North Carolina: James Polk, Andrew Jackson (although Jackson himself claimed to have been born in South Carolina and the White House website sidesteps the controversy by saying that he was born in “the Carolinas”), and Andrew Johnson.

It was very late afternoon by then and both of us had hit a wall, so we skipped the Capitol and headed for our hotel.  We stayed at the Homewood Suites on the Chapel Hill/Durham line. It was an easy 20 minute drive from Raleigh and the hotel itself was great. The suite came with a living room/kitchen combo, and a separate bedroom. Breakfast each day, dinner Monday through Thursday, parking, and a shuttle to take you wherever you want to go within 5 miles of the hotel were included in the cost of the room.

The other kind are bare and dusty, filled with tumbleweed and cactus. Usually old, though not always. Graveyards, not cemeteries.

In the town of Chandler, a southern suburb of Phoenix, is one of the latter. I found it listed on a web list of Phoenix historic sites and was happy to find it a just few miles from my brother’s house.

The Goodyear Ocotillo Cemetery is in the middle of a 520 acre planned community called Fulton Ranch.  There’s a little green park-like seating area in front of the cemetery, and a new brick wall (clearly recently built by Fulton Homes, the company that developed Fulton Ranch) around it. A plaque hangs on the wall outside:

And this stone in the park:

During World War I, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company leased 8000 acres in Chandler to cultivate cotton to be used for military airplane tires. A community, made up of Goodyear’s agricultural workers, developed there.  In 1943, Goodyear decided to move its operations to a larger plot of land west of Phoenix and after it did, the community petered away.  Left behind was the cemetery, a three acre plot with about 250 graves.

If by “preserved” Fulton Homes means “we didn’t remove the bodies or simply build homes on top of them,” then I suppose they preserved the cemetery  By any other definition, “preserved” is an overstatement.  The property is clear of trash and overgrowth — the website of the local newspaper has pictures of the Fraternal Order of Police having a clean-up day there in 2008 — but not much else has been done with it.

Most of the graves were just mounts of dirt with some evidence — a broken wooden cross, a plastic flower stuck in the ground — that it was a grave.   There was no uniformity to the existing markers — clearly every family was on their own.

I only saw a few with discernible names and all the names were Hispanic. Goodyear had segregated its workers – Hispanic, Native American and Anglo — so perhaps this was the cemetery for Hispanic workers. None of the write-ups say.

There were a couple of graves that seemed to have some recent activity.

It would be nice if the development company or the community or the Goodyear Tire Company took this cemetery on as a restoration project.  While it is good to see it clean, it would be better if the broken grave markers were fixed and up righted.

The title of this post is a line from one of my favorite plays: A Streetcar named Desire.  The wrought iron grave markers reminded me of New Orleans.

This time – while the rest of the family was busy with preparations for my niece’s wedding — I snuck away to search for some History Tourist worthy sites.  Pickings were slim, but I managed to find a few.  This is the first of them.

The Arizona state capitol building was completed in 1901, when Arizona was still a territory (Arizona became a state in 1912) and was home to its legislature — territorial and state — and its governor. The legislature moved out in 1960, when it got two new buildings flanking the capitol building, and the governor moved out in 1974 when he got a new executive building. The old capitol was restored and opened in 1981 as the Arizona State Capitol Museum.

There were four floors of exhibit.  Some samples:

The first exhibit, on the first floor, is of the USS Arizona.  There are pieces of the ship salvaged from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, and ship items that had been removed at various points before the war.  One of the “removed before” items on display is the USS Arizona’s battleship silver.  Apparently it was the thing in the early 20th century for the people of a state to donate money and buy a silver set for the use of the captain and officers of the battleship bearing the name of their state.  Arizona’s was made by Reed and Barton and officially presented to the ship in 1919.  The set was removed from the USS Arizona in 1940, before it left for Hawaii, which is the reason that it still survives intact.  The punch bowl is copper and silver, copper being one of Arizona’s main products.

The second floor had offices restored to the way it was in the early 20th century.

 That’s suppose to be the first governor of Arizona, George W. P. Hunt, in his office.  To  the left is a picture of him, courtesy of Wikipedia.  They did a pretty good job with the mannequin.

The historic Senate chamber with a gaggle of school children.  There were only a handful of adult tourists there, but several school groups.

A story I’d never heard before:

In 1957, rumors started that the Arizona State Capitol was going to be renovated.  Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived in Arizona at the time, decided that he wanted to design the new one.   Below is a model of Wright’s design.  Sadly, State government budget shortfalls killed the plans for the new building.

When they got around to building new offices in 1960s and 70s, they definitely did not use Wright’s design.

That’s a copy of the Liberty Bell in front of the capitol.  No, I don’t know why it’s there other than … well … it’s the Liberty Bell.

Anyway, I took my pictures and came away with the idea that I’d write a short blog post about it. That was until I saw Transplanted Tatar’s blog post about the cherry blossoms and got serious blog envy. Great post, exquisite pictures.

So I’m going to cheat and send you over there for your cherry blossom fix. Enjoy.