Goose Creek Salt Works And Pioneer Village-Manchester, Kentucky

 

        

Jesse Cotton Cabin at Goose Creek, Photo by Kentucky Tourism

Today, July 6, 2023, my wife and I traveled to Manchester, Kentucky, primarily for two reasons: 1) to take a sizeable but short road trip and to buy Chow Chow from a Mennonite owned produce store in downtown Manchester.  I walk or do some other form of exercise every day of the year and when we are out of the house and the weather is decent I usually find a place to walk, a park, a sports venue, or some other setting.  Today, we wandered into the Goose Creek Salt Works and Pioneer Village just outside the heart of downtown Manchester.  We used to have a friend who lived in Burning Springs just north of Manchester but he has been dead for several years and we hadn't been back in Clay County for quite some time.  The site has a lot of historical value in the local area and in the history of the settlement of Kentucky.  There are about 4 log buildings on the site: two houses including the cabin in the photo above, another cabin, and two barns.  There is also a recently constructed stage with a couple of dressing or storage rooms which I assume is used for a variety of community events.  One of the cabins, the one above, can only be seen from the outside. The other cabin and the two barns are all accessible but have nothing in them.  One of the barns has a large livestock feed trough made from a hollow tree which is placed with the ends between the cracks in the logs.  But it is nearly six feet off the top of the ground and would have been inaccessible to any livestock except poultry or goats.  Perhaps it is placed that high to discourage possible thievery.  It is impossible to determine if it is of recent construction or authentic.  Sadly, a lot of cinder blocks have been used in setting the buildings up and they don't appear to be fully authentic for that reason.  There is a good two piece history of the salt works and setlement of the area with water proof text and photographic reproductions under a sheltering roof.  There are also two bronze plaques on the cabin above.  That is the entire Pioneer Village but it is worth seeing.

There is also a nice paved walking trail which runs along Goose Creek downstream beginning at the cabins with a sizeable grassy area which I assume is used for seating and perhaps picnicking during events.  The walking path becomes gravel a mile or more downstream from the cabins but it is nice and most of it can be accessed by a wheelchair.  But motorized vehicles are not allowed on the trail.  There is also a boat ramp and large picnic shelter downstream from the Pioneer Village which is accessible from the street.  But most of the trail is shaded by trees at least on the creek side and the lower portion is actually covered on both sides with birds and small game to be seen at times.  I encountered about a half dozen people while I was walking and my wife, who is in a wheelchair, stayed at the Pioneer Village reading while I walked and felt quite safe since the area is visible from nearby houses.  Happily, those houses don't literally adjoin the Pioneer Village.  If you are in Manchester and just want to eat lunch in a quiet spot or want to walk or see some history, it is worth the time.  You an also access Goose Creek in a couple of spots for fishing and I actually encountered one man who had ridden a bicycle to fish the creek.  I will probably walk there again if I am ever in Manchester which is as good a recommendation as I can give most places I visit for exercise. 

July 4, 2023, A Holiday With Hope For America, And A Great Deal Of Danger!

 

Today, July 4, 2023, is the second most important July 4th in the history of this country running just behind the first July 4th in our history, July 4, 1776.  That first July 4th is the most important in our history because it heralded the birth of democracy in America when the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, announcing the colonies' separation from Great Britain. Since that time in 1776, loyal American citizens have been fighting to institute, defend, and preserve that unequaled level of democracy which has always set the United States of America from other less democratic, more volatile, less universally democratic countries in the world.  

 

But this July 4, 2023, is the second most important Independence Day in our history because our democracy and all of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, both individual and collective, have been facing the most dangerous attack in their history ever since June 15, 2015, the day TRAITOR Trump announced his totally unjustified belief that he was fit to be the leader of the free world.  Since that June day in 2015, both TRAITOR Trump and his misled, gullible, destructive, dangerous, and TREASONOUS followers both inside and outside the Right Wing Radical Repugnican party have been attacking both our individual and collective democratic freedoms and expresssing their willingness to no longer defend democracies which are under attack all over the world but most importantly they want to abandon the defense of Ukraine and their fledgling democracy.  Yet, this July 4, 2023, is also a day of great hope and expectation because TRAITOR Trump has now been held financially responsible for only one of his more than 25 sexual attacks on female victims and has now been indicted for a small portion of his crimes against the United States.  TRAITOR Trump is also facing highly probable and even more serious indictments for his crimes against the government of this country which culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol which he incited his TREASONOUS followers to commit and for his widespread attempts, along with numerous other co-conspirators, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.  If TRAITOR Trump and his many co-conspirators are indicted, convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned for this long list of crimes against America and American Democracy, we will have literally saved both individual and collective constitutional rights in this country.  If TRAITOR Trump and his many co-conspirators go  on unpunished, unconvicted, and unsentenced, we will go on to lose nearly every democratic freedom which the constitution guarantees.  He has made on attempt to hide  his contempt for constitutional guarantees, voting rights, individual freedoms, rule of law, and the very documents which built this democracy.  

 

TRAITOR Trump must be indicted for all his many crimes.  He must be convicted of all those crimes and he must be sentenced and imprisoned for those crimes if this country and our democracy are to survive.  If we wish to continue to be free people in a free country, these things must happen.  We must preserve our democracy and the first step toward preserving that democracy in the lifelong imprisonment of TRAITOR Trump and as many of his co-conspirators as the law enforcement and judicial communities can indict, convict, and sentence for their crimes in support of the greater crimes of TRAITOR Trump.  

Watching June Bugs Hatch And Leave The Ground

 

Someone I know in Knott County just posted on Facebook about having a large number of June Bugs in his yard after not seeing any/many for quite a while and reminded me of this little event I saw almost thirty years ago.  It involved a new hatch of June bugs leaving the ground. I was at the home of a local preacher, Gene Eason, who has long since left this area and retired. I was walking around in the yard and noticed a June bug walking up a leaf of grass. It sat there a minute, spread its wings out and shook them a couple of time and I realized they were wet. Then it flew off. A few seconds later another came up the leaf of grass and I realized there was a small hole in the ground below the grass they were climbing. I stood there and watched as several more came out of the ground, dried their wings, and flew away. It was the first time I realized that June bugs lay their eggs in the ground in late summer or fall and they hatch in spring or early summer, leave the ground, and fly away. What I told my friend in Knott County was that he has probably had a big  hatch in his yard.

In Eastern Kentucky, nearly all of us grew up catching June Bugs and tying a sewing string to one of their legs and flying them around when we were children.  It's not really a 21st Century kind of approved way to deal with nature but it was fun as a child. 

America's Ongoing Flirtation And Toleration Of Unfit Presidential Candidates

 

For many years, virtually since the beginning of this country, we have had a long list of totally unfit candidates run for the highest office in the land, guardian of the free world, President of The United States, and this year, heading into the 2024 presidential election cycle is no exception.  In 1856, just prior to the Civil War, when the issues which led to the war were building in the country, Millard Filmore who had ascended to the White House on the death of Zachary Taylor and proved himself to be totally unfit ran on the American Party ticket.  Filmore held office as a member of the Whig Party, their last leader, and then became the candidate of the American Party, known fondly as the Know Nothing Party, perhaps the most appropriately named political party in the history of the world, and pushed their anti-immigration platform.  Thankfully, Filmore lost and it is likely the history of America regarding both slavery and the Civil War turned out in far better hands in the long run.

In 1924, Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin ran on the Progressive Party ticket and garned about 16 percent of the vote in an election which was won by Calvin Coolidge who never amounted to much himself.  We will never know if the country could have been better off and, perhaps, have avoided the Great Depression which resulted because Herbert Hoover and the Republicans won the next election in 1928.  It is likely that, if LaFollette had served two terms, the country might not have been worse off than having Hoover serve one with it's resultant economic collapse, Hoovervilles, Hoover Boxes, and starving citizens all across the country.  

In 1948, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond running on a segregationist platform received about 2% of the total vote and America chose to retain Harry S. Truman as president after he had finally ended World War II by dropping the atomic bombs on China after succeeding FDR.  There is little doubt that Thurmond was far less qualified than Truman. 

In 1968, Alabama Governor George Wallace took up the segregationist banner after the US Supreme Court forced the racial integration of public schools across the country with the Brown vs. Board of Education case which still today is one of the most important and necessary cases ever heard by the Supreme Court.  

In 2000, it is highly likely that the candidacy of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader diverted enough votes from Vice President Al Gore to allow George Bush to win the White House.  Nader, who might have been very good for the country and its conservation policies had absolutely no foreign policy experience and was a far less qualified candidate than either Gore or Bush.  But his 2.8 million votes, which statistically seem to have come primarily from self-described Democrat voters allowed Bush to benefit from the highly suspect recount in Florida which set up the reprehensible Gore vs. Bush decision by the US Supreme Court which allowed Bush to ascend to the White House.  

In 2008, the Radical Right Wing Repugnican Congressman Ron Paul ran for the White House on a platform which could have set social justice back a hundred years and lost soundly to President Barack Obama who led the country in eight of the most progressive years in the history of the country.  Sadly, today, the poorly qualified son of Ron Paul, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul holds a seat in the US Senate and still espouses many of the asinine idea of his father and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican Party.  

Since that election in 2008, nearly every presidential election has been loaded with Right Wing Radical Repugnican candidates who are grossly unfit to hold any position of public trust at any level including a second successful run by Ron Paul against Mitt Romney who can arguably be said to have been the last sane Republican to run for president.  

The 2016 presidential election was a total disaster for the country due to the fact that the Right Wing Radical Repugnican TRAITOR Donald Trump was able to illegally occupy the White House after being strongly aided by his Russian Owner Vladimir Putin whose computer hackers were able to steal about 80,000 votes total in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and literally steal a US election.  Today, he is already under indictment for having stolen a treasure trove of classified documents from the US government and is facing much more serious indictments in his unsuccessful insurrection of January 6th 2021, after he soundly lost his second consecutive election against President Joe Biden.  It appears higly likely that he will turn out to have been the worst TRAITOR in the history of the world.  

And, yet, the perpetual flock of unqualified, misled, and often larcenously motivated candidates continues to crop up.  The Right Wing Radical Repugnican Party has a long list of candidate headed toward 2024 who range from the mildly dangerous to absolute lunatics such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.  The only arguably qualifed among their long list of candidates is former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson whose politics is just as far to the right of center as any of the others.  The only good thing that can be said about this list of volatile candidates is that none of them has been indicted for crimes against the US government as their front runner TRAITOR Trump has.  

 

Yet, the Democratic Party is also sporting their own resident lunatic, Robert Kennedy, Jr. who is a rabid anti-vaccine ranter whose own relatives regularly speak out against his ignorance and insanity along with the great majority of Americans.  

Someday,  perhaps, the US will find a way to legally and appropriately prevent lunatics, Russian spies, common criminals, and even TRAITORS from being able to run for the highest office in the land.  Until that day comes, all we can do is vote consistently for the party which has had the lowest number of unqualified candidates in history, the Democratic Party.  But we must also realize that this year and Robert Kennedy, Jr. prove that even the Democratic Party is not immune from having  a resident nut.  

Biased Political Survey In The KY Governor's Race

 About an hour ago, roughly 5pm today May 31, 2023, I received a call for what was described as a political "survey" directed toward the Kentucky general election this year.  After the first qualifying questions such as "Are you registered to vote in KY?" and "Are you registered as a Democrat or a Republican?", I quickly realized that this particular "survey" was not an ethical, unbiased, empirical survey but was using numerous inflammatory statements which were being posed as questions but actually being only followed by the question "Does this make you more or less likely to vote for Andy Beshear?" All those negative prefatory statements were intended to create negative opinions of Andy Beshear and many of them were outright lies. I absolutely hate this kind of fake campaigning which is disguised as a survey since the typical poorly educated respondent is not very often skilled enough to understand that they are totally biased and goal directed instead of being intended to elicit and document accurate responses in order to compile legitimate statistical data without the survey administrator having done anything to create bias either intentionally or accidentally. They are not statistical instruments. They are campaign tools.  I immediately began to respond to all these inflammatory "questions" with the response that "This is a biased survey intended to create negative opinions of Governor Beshear by using outright lies about him and are doubtless being paid for by some Right Wing Radical Repugnican organization."  To the callers credit, she managed to get through the "survey" and at the end I left her somewhat unable to respond by saying "Now, if you consider yourself to be a decent human being, go out and get yourself an honest job."  She literally didn't know what to say.

These kinds of fake "surveys" are frequently used by candidates who know they are significantly behind in whatever actual legitimate polling they have access to and are far more often used by Right Wing Radical Repugnican candidates than by Democrats.  They are one of the worst aspects of modern election campaigning and are never used by honest, ethical candidates or political consulting companies.  They are based on lies.  They are intended to change the voters' opinions, not to gain knowledge of the voters' opinions.  They have absolutely no merit or value in a truly democratic election since their objective is to change an election from being democratic and honest to one that is undemocratic and dishonest.  They are not used by candidates who want to win on their own virtues.  In fact, they are generally used by candidates who have little or no political virtues and that is definitely the case in this election.  This poll was being used in support of Daniel Cameron who has supported a great deal of legislation intended to destroy individual constitutional rights in Kentucky.  They are truly the mark of an unqualified, unethical, and unworthy candidate at a time when Kentucky has the best governor in America, Andy Beshear, and that governor is holding a roughly 60% approval rating across all voter blocks.  Every voter in Kentucky should do the same thing I did if they receive one of these "survey" calls and confront the "survey" and the caller by calling them exactly what they are, dishonest and based on lies.  

Reflections On Reading "Accordion Crimes" by E. Annie Proulx

E. Annie Proulx, or Annie Proulx as she is sometimes known, is one of America's best known and most successful authors.  She is the author of the short story on which the movie "Broke Back Mountain" was based and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for her novel "The Shipping News" in 1994.  This is actually the third of her works which I have read and yet I have not yet written about any of them on this blog which is an unjustifiable error.  At times, she is a wonderful writer and her prose can flow smoothly, interestingly, and in a manner which consistently draws the reader deeper into her works.  But, in my opinion, at times her work falls measurably short of her best.  I like this book as much or better than either of her others which I have read.  But I have to admit that I enjoyed the earlier reads enough to go back for another dip in this one. Perhaps part of that higher level of pleasure on my part comes from the fact that, as a child in grade school in Knott County Kentucky, I was exposed on a monthly basis to live gospel accordion music from Alma Heibert, of the two "Bible Women" who were allowed to visit each small, rural grade school in the county on a monthly basis as a part of their missionary work with Camp Nathaniel in the county.  As always when I mention my experience with these two women and that fact that missionaries were allowed to visit public schools in the county, I am morally and ethically bound to state that the fact that they were allowed to do so in public schools was a clear cut violation of the Separation of Church and State and never should have been allowed to happen. But, yes, I do have fond memories of having known those women and of accordion music.  

The main character in this novel is not a person but an accordion, hand made by a native of an Italian native who emigrated to the United State with the instrument he had made and eventually sold it.  The human characters come and go in the novel as the accordion passes from hand to hand, being used by members of different ethnicities to play the particular music of each culture as the instrument passes along its life.  The accordion is variously owned and played by Mexican Americans, African Americans, Polish Americans, Irish Americans, and other members of other cultures. Along the way during the story, Proulx weaves in a great deal of historical and musical information about accordions, their instrumental relatives, and many of the cultures which are historically connected to accordion music.  along the way, the instrument is loved, played, admired, and sometimes abandoned much as a human character might have been.  It is an interesting and unique method of constructing a novel and, I believe, is some of Proulx's best work.  In my opinion, the language and written structure of the novel is more skillful than that in either "The Shipping News" or "That Old Ace In The Hole" both of which I have also read and will, perhaps, also write about on this blog.  The accordion becomes a living, breathing character in the book.  It is more than just a musical instrument.  It is a delivery vehicle which deposits musical and cultural history at the reader's doorstep. It becomes the glue which brings all the other characters, cultures, and histories together.  And those histories are both documentations of cultures and of people, families, and individual and shared lives.  It is a book well worth reading, especially if the reader is not familiar with the work of Proulx it is a fine place to begin a relationship with the author and her work. 

Things In Kentucky Politics Which Make Me Puke!

 1) In Kentucky, registered Repugnicans now outnumber Democrats.  

2) All statewide elected officials in Kentucky other than the governor and lieutenant governor are Right Wing Radical Repugnicans. 

3) In Kentucky, we simultaneously have the best governor in America and one of the 3 or 4 worst state legislatures in America. 

4) In the past 8 to 10 years in Kentucky, we have seen more repressive, regressive, and repulsive laws passed than we had in the previous 231 years of our statehood.

5) In the last 6 presidential elections in Kentucky, the state has voted for the Right Wing Radical Repugnican in each of those elections.  In 13 of the last 15 presidential elections, Kentucky has voted for the Right Wing Radical Repugnican.  Bill Clinton is the last Democratic presidential candidate who won Kentucky.   

6) In Kentucky, 5 of our 6 congress members are Right Wing Radical Repugnicans and so are both of our US Senators.  

7) The Right Wing Radical Repugnican state legislature has been allowed to gerrymander congressional districts to the point that no reasonable, well qualified Democrat can be expected to win over even the worst Right Wing Radical Repugnican such as Thomas Massie.  The maps of the congressional districts in Kentucky make districts 1 and 4 appear as if they were laid out by a drunk. 

8) In Kentucky, most elections have voter turnouts of less than 50% of registered voters year after year.  

9) The current Secretary of State in Kentucky has promoted numerous laws intended to bring about extensive voter suppression with little or no public opposition from most of the groups the suppression is intended to harm such as minorities, the poor, the poorly educated, the elderly, the young, the medically fragile, and other at risk groups.