Not all Southerners believed in slavery before the Civil War, including many wealthy landowners who owned slaves themselves. One such was a prosperous widow named Hannah Coulter, who acquired the beautiful Chatham plantation, located across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the 1850s. Coulter specified in her will that upon her death her 92 […]
It has been said that when President Abraham Lincoln met author Harriet Beecher Stowe, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” While there is some debate as to whether or not those words were ever spoken, there is no question that Stowe’s famous book Uncle Tom’s […]
We have always loved exploring small town museums and have spent many delightful hours doing so over the years. Maybe it’s some kind of voyeurism to be able to look into the lives of people you never knew, in a community you’ve never been to before. We always come away feeling like we know some […]
Back when we were teaching at Life on Wheels we spent a lot of time in southern Kentucky since one of our venues was at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. So it kind of felt like old home week when we were visiting our friends Tom and Barbara Westerfield just south of there in […]
Just a short blog post today. Terry and I got home last night from an eleven day road trip that took us from our home in Edgewater, Florida to Alabama to visit my son Travis and his wife Geli, and then just north of Nashville to meet up with long time RVing friends. From there […]
Well, I had hoped that by now Steve the computer would be a piece of gutted history collecting dust on a shelf in the garage, or better yet on its way to a recycling place or wherever condemned computers go when they die. But Steve’s going to get a reprieve, at least for a little […]
Yesterday was a very frustrating day for me. As you may know, I am into genealogy, and the National Archives in Washington D.C. is the repository for a tremendous amount of information about our country and our people. Among the things to be found at the Archives are the original Civil War pension files for […]