Category Archives: My Caboodles

My Caboodles — Chapter 6
OST Zero Milestones

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How tough could it be? There are only three of them, and they are all on a single historic auto trail. Granted, the auto trail runs all the way across the country and there is a marker at each end but that just means there’s some distance involved. Collecting another three-member caboodle seemed like something that should be rather straight forward and it would have been at any time other than the summer of 2014.

There was an International Route 66 festival scheduled for Kingman, Arizona, that year. I planned to attend and, never one to seek out shortcuts, decided to first drive the Old Spanish Trail from Saint Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, California, then work my way back east to the festival.

1. The first one was pretty easy. It’s a hundred yards or so north of Castillo De San Marcos on the opposite side of San Marco Avenue (US-1). It can partially be seen from the street but you need to enter the small park that houses it to see and read the plaque. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, part of an old Spanish “colonial trail” but the eastern terminus of an early twentieth century named auto trail.

2. The second one sits outside San Antonio’s city hall and is also pretty easy to find and photograph. It is near the midpoint of the 2,750-mile-long route but is still labeled a “Zero Milestone”. The best reason I can think of for this is that the Old Spanish Trail Association was headquartered in San Antonio and considered this the starting point for trips to either end.

3. But that 2014 trip hit a snag when it reached the western end of the OST. The picture at the top of this post shows what I saw when I pulled up to Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego. The plaza was in the middle of a multi-year redo that had caused the marker to be moved to a warehouse. The first picture at left, taken through a gap in the fence, shows the area where the marker would reappear in May 2016. The second picture shows the marker in November 2016. Although the marker is commonly referred to as a Zero Milestone, it is inscribed Pacific Milestone. Here are somewhat readable views of the south, east, north, and west sides.

As it turns out, the situation in 2014 may not have been a blip but the new normal. The Pacific Milestone is once again absent. In addition to marking the western end of the Old Spanish Trail, the stone also marked the western end of the Lee Highway, named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee. There are references to extensions leading to San Francisco and New York City but those may have been on paper only and were not a consideration when the stone was placed. The inscription on the stone’s east side specifies Washington, D.C., and San Diego as its endpoints. The logo in the center of that inscription contains the word “Lee”. As reported here, the stone’s connection to the Confederacy triggered its removal from the park in June 2020. This is a caboodle that may never be seen again.

My Caboodles — Chapter 5
Preble County Covered Bridges

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The Caboodles series was conceived as something to fill in otherwise empty weeks with subjects from completed outings. But, like every other rule connected with this blog, that was far from ironclad, and about halfway through Tuesday’s visits to the eight covered bridges in nearby Preble County, I realized that I would have a legitimate caboodle at day’s end. I decided to use the designation in the weekly post to create the blog’s first-ever real-time caboodle.

Once upon a time, there were approximately 3,500 covered bridges in Ohio. More than 95% of them are gone but that still leaves nearly 150 standing. Eight of those are just to my north in Preble County. On Tuesday, I headed to the county seat of Eaton and had breakfast at the cleverly named and jam-packed Eaton Place where I’m quite certain the waitresses knew everybody’s name but mine. From there I headed to the nearest of the bridges barely a mile away.

1. Roberts Covered Bridge is one of only two Preble County Covered Bridges that are closed to traffic but its claims to celebrity go far beyond that. It is one of only six remaining double-barreled covered bridges in the country and is the oldest of those. The only covered bridge of any sort that is older is the Hyde Hall Covered Bridge in New York, and it is older by a mere four years. Roberts Bridge, obviously the oldest in Ohio, was built in 1929. The Hyde Park Bridge was built in 1825. The bridge was moved here in 1990 from its original location south of Eaton.

2. I’d entered approximate coordinates for each of the bridges into my GPS and proceeded to visit them by heading to whichever was closest. That method next took me to the Christman Bridge a little north of Eaton. Numerous bridges were damaged by a major storm in 1886, and one man, Everett S. Sherman, was contracted to rebuild fifteen of them. That helps explain why the Roberts Bridge is the only pre-1886 bridge standing and also explains why six of the currently standing bridges were built by Sherman. He built this one in 1895

3. The Geeting Covered Bridge was built in 1894 to replace a ford and foot log over Price’s Creek. Floor beams have been broken by overloaded trucks and in 1969 an over-height truck took out some of the roof but the bridge has been repaired every time.

4. It’s fairly obvious that this is the other currently standing bridge not open to traffic. The Dixon’s Branch Covered Bridge does remain quite useful, however, having been moved to the Lewisburg Community Park and put to work as a shelter house. Although there is a parking area right next to the bridge, I initially missed it and ended up walking across much of the park from another lot. That was actually a good thing since I would have otherwise missed this bit of artwork which I’m guessing is from storm-damaged trees.

5. The Warnke Covered Bridge is the northernmost in the county and is the last bridge Everett S. Sherman built. Apparently, it was not one of the jobs resulting from the 1886 flood but was undertaken to repair more localized damage due to an 1895 flood. In this case, repair meant a whole new bridge.

6. The Brubaker Covered Bridge is the only one of Preble County’s older covered bridges to have more than a single small opening in its sides, and even it wasn’t always that way. It is the covered bridge equivalent of stone ‘S’ bridges seen on the National Road and elsewhere. Construction methods of the time placed bridges at right angles to the stream they crossed which sometimes forced the roadway to curve as it approached the bridge. That wasn’t a big deal for pedestrians or horses but became a big deal when automobiles started flying along at tens of miles per hour. The greatly widened openings allowed motorists to see and be seen. There was a rack of Preble County bridge brochures at every one of the covered bridges but the one pictured at the beginning of this post was here.

7. Everett S. Sherman built the Harshman Covered Bridge over Four Mile Creek in 1894. Like most of the Preble County bridges, it’s on a nice straight road that provided a through-the-bridge view in both directions. And, also like most of those bridges, there is a mid-span opening that provides a nice up-the-stream view to anyone traveling slow enough to see it.

8. Had I spent some time working out a full route, I would have probably ended my bridge tour at the northern edge of Preble County then slipped into my birth county (Darke) to do some visiting. As things turned out I’m kind of glad that this was the last bridge of the day because it really is the oddball of the bunch. It looks modern because it is. It was built in 2012. It mimics nineteenth-century bridges in its use of the Burr Arch truss design. It is built of wood so the covering can be justified as protection just as it was in the nineteenth century. There are, of course, other ways of protecting wood today as well as other bridge-building materials. I’m not a fan but neither am I a hardcore opponent of bridges of this sort. It is hardly the only retro-bridge in the country. They are what they are.   

My Caboodles — Chapter 4
Lee Markers on Dixie Highway

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Like the Madonna of the Trail monuments in an earlier My Caboodles chapter, these, too, are a natural for me. Like the Madonnas, they are markers along the side of a famous historic highway that I have traveled. But there are significant differences. The biggest is that the primary purpose of these markers was not to mark the highway but to promote the memory of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. This aspect is discussed a bit more in an earlier post, Free? Advertising on the Dixie. In this post, I’ll just present the markers in the sequence I discovered them.

1. In 2008, when I stumbled upon this marker in front of the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina, I had no idea there were others. I was excited to find something with a Dixie Highway reference but even then I must have felt it was off-target just a bit. In my journal, I said, “At least it’s sort of a Dixie Highway marker.” On the morning of November 5, 2020, it was discovered that this plaque had been pried from its stone. Erected 1926.

2. Just a couple of months after discovering the marker in Marshall, I took my first picture of the marker at the NC-SC state line. By then I was aware of the eight markers in the Carolinas, but not of the two outliers. In October 2017, vandals pried the plaque from the marker and its whereabouts are unknown. The third photo was taken in December 2017. Erected 1928.

3. By January 2012, I’d learned of two markers outside the Carolinas. Discovering that one was less than 18 miles north of where I live was actually shocking. In August 2017, just a couple of months before the plaque was ripped from the NC-SC state line marker, this one near Franklin, Ohio, was the target of planned demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. The city shortcircuited things by removing the rock and plaque in the middle of the night. The monument has since been returned to public view on private property about two and a half miles north of its original location. Erected 1927.

4. On the second day of my 2014 Christmas trip, I reached all of the Carolina markers which included six I’d not seen before. Just as the second marker I photographed was barely inside the state’s southern border, the first one of this outing was barely inside its northern border with Tennessee. Erected 1928.

5. I believe of all the Lee-Dixie markers I must have driven by without noticing, I’m baffled the most by this one mounted in a huge brick base in Hot Springs. Erected 1926.

ADDENDUM 16-May-2024: This plaque was stolen in March 2022. Discussions by city officials over whether to replace the plaque with a replica or something different were continuing as of May 1, 2024. Discussions and plans have been hampered by uncertainty as to who owns the land where the marker stands.  

6. The next marker in geographic sequence was the one in Marshall but the next new-to-me marker was in downtown Asheville where it shares space with the 65 foot tall Vance Memorial and a tribute to Drover’s Road. On the day I took my picture, someone had draped a shirt over one of the Drover’s Road pigs. At about the same time that the plaque was pried from the NC-SC marker, an attempt was made to do the same here. The bent corner in the blurry drive-by picture is evidence of that. The face was also badly scratched in a subsequent attack. On July 10, 2020, the marker was removed and put into storage. Erected 1926.

7. I failed to pick out the marker in Fletcher when I drove by it the first time but I did better on my second pass. On pass number two, I was able to spot it trying to blend into the shrubbery. Erected in 1926.
ADDENDUM 27-May-2023: I have just learned that the plaque was removed from this marker in October 2020. According to information here, the removal was initiated by the church where the boulder stands and the plaque was returned to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

8. The marker in Hendersonville wasn’t particularly hard to spot. It’s a tradeoff but I think I prefer a little tougher hunt and the shrub as background rather than the red car. Erected 1926.

9. Geographically, the next marker was the already photographed one at the NC-SC state line. That meant the next new-to-me marker was the lone South Carolina marker in Greenville. It’s actually a block off of the Dixie Highway but I don’t know whether it was moved to be with a group of Confederate monuments or was originally erected there. Aside from its placement, the marker is unusual in that it identifies a specific United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter rather than the overall organization which makes the plaque a bit taller than the others. It was also erected several years later than any other Lee-Dixie marker and several years after the Dixie Highway ceased to formally exist. Erected 1935.

10. I completed the caboodle several days later when I reached the only marker in Florida. It was placed about the same time as most of the others and the text is quite standard, but it is unique in other ways. The most obvious differences are the smooth marble base rather than a rough boulder and a plaque that appears to be made of steel rather than bronze. Lastly, the image of Lee is similar but not identical to the others. Erected 1927.

I had started towards home when I stopped at the Florida marker, but before I actually reached home, I drove by the Ohio marker just so I could say I saw all ten on the same trip.

My Caboodles — Chapter 3
Indiana Air Mail Arrows

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Like the first My Caboodles chapter, this third installment contains just three items. Some might consider it less than a full caboodle and I suppose, if a National Caboodle Association is ever formed, I might be called out on it. Here’s my thinking.

In the early days of powered flight, large concrete arrows were placed along the path of airplane routes as navigation aids. I was recently reminded of these arrows when Facebook (and real-life) friend Nick Gerlich posted a picture of an arrow in Texas. In his post, Nick noted that he had visited 47 arrows and had 78 to go. The fact that he mentioned a “to go” number indicates a plan, or at least a hope, of eventually reaching all 125 arrows that are known to exist today. What a great and natural caboodle, I thought, and I’ve a hunch that Nick just might reach them all, but I’m quite certain that I won’t. Some are in some rather remote locations that the much-fitter-than-me Nick will probably reach but which I wouldn’t even consider.

I’ve only seen three navigation arrows but they were all in Indiana, and, as benefits this series, they are all that exist in Indiana. The 125 arrows documented at Arrows Across America and scattered throughout the USA are an impressive and worthwhile caboodle but it’s out of my league. This is my blog and I make the rules. This post celebrates the three arrow Indiana sub-caboodle.

When created, the installations were originally known as Beacon Stations since their most important feature was an electric beacon mounted on a tower standing on the square pad in the middle of the arrow. The “feather” pad held a shed housing a generator if necessary. None of the Indiana arrows retain their towers, sheds, or fuel storage facilities.

1. This is arrow #6 of Contract Air Mail Route #24 which connected Cincinnati to Chicago with a stop in Indianapolis. It’s on private property southwest of Rushville and is the arrow shown in the Google Maps image at the top of this article. The route began about 65 miles away at the historic and still operating Lunken Airport. Embry-Riddle Company, which had been founded at Lunken exactly two years earlier, won the contract. Their slogan for the new service was “Mail Airly and Often.”

2. Arrow #7 of CAM #24 is about eight miles west of #6. It’s east of Shelbyville and also on private property. There’s a Google Maps view here. This arrow looks to be in the best shape of all the Indiana arrows. Most or all of the concrete arrows were constructed between 1926 and 1932. CAM #24 began operating on December 17, 1927, and I imagine the route’s beacons and arrows were in place in advance of that. It doesn’t look too shabby for being roughly ninety years old.

3. This is CAM #24’s Arrow #8. It is at the Shelbyville airport situated northwest of town. It is separated from Arrow #7 by almost exactly eight miles which I’m guessing is some sort of standard. A Google Maps view is here. There are some visible differences between this arrow and the other two and I’ll offer up some guesses as to why. One difference is the painted surface rather than bare concrete. The arrows were originally supposed to be chrome yellow and my guess is that someone, possibly an airport employee, is maintaining the historical accuracy of the arrow. A rather obvious difference is the lack of a “feather” pad at the tail end of the arrow. Although it’s possible that a pad once existed and has been removed, it seems more likely that one was never there. Where an electrical connection was available to power the beacon, no generator was required which meant no shed and no pad. It seems reasonable to believe that electric power was available at the airport. A third difference that might not be as obvious is the square pad and the arrow being slightly askew. The beacons were thought of first and the idea of directional arrows came along a short while later. This is only a guess, but I’m thinking the pad for the tower was poured first and not aligned with anything in particular. When an arrow pointing to Indianapolis was added, its alignment differed from that of the pad by just a skosh.

My Caboodles — Chapter 2
Madonnas of the Trail

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The Madonna of the Trail statues were one of the first things that entered my mind when I initially started thinking of sets of things I had seen all of. When the era of named auto trails came to an end, a couple of the major auto trails undertook projects aimed at keeping their names alive for posterity. The Lincoln Highway was marked by nearly 2,500 concrete posts that literally guided travelers along the entire route. The National Old Trails Road Association’s project was, in some sense, less ambitious in that only twelve markers were placed; One in each state the highway passed through. The markers themselves were much larger and more intricate than direction markers and all twelve still exist at or near their original locations which makes seeing the whole caboodle possible. Photos of the statues follow in the sequence in which I first saw them with the exception of the photo at right. That’s a 2018 photo of the Madonna in Richmond, Indiana. Comments accompanying the pictures include the date of dedication, its position in the sequence of dedications, and the coordinates of its location.

1. The first Madonna of the Trail monument I ever saw was, unsurprisingly, the one in my home state of Ohio. It originally stood about three miles west of downtown Springfield but was moved a little closer to town in 1956 or ’57. The first picture was taken in 2004 at the second location. I never saw her at her original location. The second picture shows her at her current home in downtown Springfield where she moved in 2011. Dedicated 1st, July 4, 1928. N39° 55.496′ W83° 48.677′

2. Of course, there’s also no surprise in the fact that my second Madonna was the one in Richmond, Indiana. Not only are these two Madonnas the closest to me, I believe they are closer to each other than any other pair. The first picture was taken in 2004 on the same day as a preceding picture of the Ohio Madonna. The second picture, with a clearer and brighter Madonna and a new walkway, was taken just two years later. Dedicated 9th, October 28, 1928. N39° 49.835′ W84° 52.334′

3. In 2005, I ventured one state beyond Indiana to visit my third Madonna of the Trail monument in Vandalia, Illinois. A festival that I never did identify, was in progress in the former state capital when we arrived. As part of the festival, raffle tickets were being sold at the base of the monument which sits on the grounds of the old capitol building. Dedicated 7th, October 26, 1928. N38° 57.649′ W89° 05.671′

4. A month later, I added two Madonnas in the states just east of Ohio. The sightings occurred on the way home from a business trip to central Pennsylvania so that state’s Madonna, at Beallsville, was encountered first. Dedicated 10th, December 8, 1928. N40° 03.630′ W80° 00.776′

5. West Virginia’s Madonna of the Trail came next. It is positioned a little east of Wheeling. At this point, 80% of the Madonna monuments I had seen were situated on or very near golf courses and I began to think there might be some sort of symbiotic relationship between the two. Dedicated 2nd, July 7, 1928. N40° 03.362′ W80° 40.157′

6. In September 2005, I bagged my fourth Madonna of the year and sixth overall. The California monument is not near a golf course or any other open space. It is in the city of Upland in the median of a busy street near an intersection with an even busier street. I would, in fact, never find another Madonna and golf course pairing. Dedicated 11th, February 1, 1929. N34° 06.434′ W117° 39.073′

7. In 2006, I drove the full length of the National Road in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the legislation that first authorized it. That took me past all of the Madonnas east of the Mississippi but only one of those was new to me. It was also missing. A sinkhole had endangered the Bethesda, Maryland, monument prior to my visit and it was stored a few miles away awaiting site repairs. That turned into an opportunity for my absolute favorite Madonna of the Trail photo ever. I was able to get a shot of the lady in her rightful place in 2011. Dedicated 12th, April 19, 1929. N38° 59.046′ W77° 05.655′

8. On the west edge of Lexington, Missouri’s Madonna of the Trail became my eighth in May 2007. Getting to two-thirds of the caboodle took just four years but it would be another four years before I would even get started on the last third. Dedicated 4th, September 17, 1928. N39° 11.197′ W93° 53.177′

9. A two Madonna day started in 2011 with the monument in Springerville, Arizona. Here the idea of Madonna of the Trail monuments being given scenic pastoral settings really took a beating. This lady occupies a small plot adjacent to a MacDonald’s. The marker behind her identifies this as a stop on a historic driving tour. Dedicated 7th, September 29, 1928. N34° 07.993′ W109° 17.108′

10. The second Madonna of the day was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’d been in Albuquerque before but had missed the monument. I had previously driven through the city on Historic US 66 which was the National Old Trails Road successor in these parts but I had not driven the original pre-1937 alignment which had followed the NOTR and on which the statue had been placed. Another complication was that the monument had been moved to the north corner of the area it was in which put it nearly a block away from even the old Sixty-Six alignment. To make up for missing it on earlier visits, I’ve included a picture of Madonna with a friend. Dedicated 6th, September 27, 1928. N35° 05.572′ W106° 38.991′

11. The count stayed at ten for another five years. I reached the final pair on consecutive days in 2016. The Madonna of the Trail monument in Lamar, Colorado, is next to an old train station now serving as a visitor center. Dedicated 5th, September 24, 1928. N38° 05.360′ W102° 37.147′

12. In Council Grove, Kansas, the setting for the Madonna of the Trail monument is pretty open. It’s a bit reminiscent of the park-like settings of my early Madonna visits even though there isn’t a golf course in sight. Dedicated 3rd, September 7, 1928. N38° 39.724′ W96° 29.212′

ADDENDUM 14-Jan-2024: After gathering the coordinates of all the Madonnas for another project, I decided to add them here.

My Caboodles — Chapter 1
Corps of Discovery Forts

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With the “My Wheels” series coming to at least a temporary end, this series about collections of things I’ve visited is being launched to take its place as something to be posted when my real-time world fails to produce an article. The word “caboodle” occurred to me as I was brainstorming titles and I knew it was right the instant I checked the Merriam-Webster definition. The initial chapter concerns a very small caboodle that I didn’t even think of as a group until I had completed it. During its existence, the Corps of Discovery (a.k.a. Lewis & Clark Expedition) endured three winters hunkered down inside some fairly sturdy fortifications. It was while visiting my third, their second, that I realized I’d been to all of them. As the current list of potential subjects for this series is quite small, I’m hoping some memories or realizations will magically appear to lengthen it. Especially since it is being launched during a statewide Coronavirus related “stay at home” order that prevents most of the activities that usually spawn articles here.

1. All three Corps of Discovery winter encampments functioned as forts and that’s how two of the three were identified. The one that most closely matches our common concept of a frontier fort was not. The place where the corps spent the winter of 1803-4 was named Camp River Dubois. I’m guessing that the word “fort” was not used because the location was near Saint Louis in relatively civilized territory. It was here that they prepared for the journey that would begin in earnest in May of 1804. I visited the site less than a month after the two-hundredth anniversary of that beginning. This structure, as well as the others, is a modern recreation. The originals rotted away long ago.

2. In 2008, I found myself on the Oregon coast where the expedition spent its third and final winter away from home. Like many travelers today, Lewis and Clark would spend less time returning from their destination than reaching it and avoid a fourth winter lockdown. In their case, more downstream travel and less getting lost helped considerably. They had traveled as far west as they could and turned their footsteps to the east when they departed Fort Clatsop in the spring of 1806.

3. It was nearly eight years later when I unexpectedly realized that I was only about thirty miles from Fort Mandan and an associated Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center. I made the short detour, of course, and was able to look over an accurate reproduction of the expedition’s quarters during the winter of 1804-5. The explorers found the fort had been burned to the ground when they passed by here on their way home.

While studying a timeline of the expedition at the Fort Mandan site, it struck me that I had now visited all three of the Corps of Discovery’s wintering locations. Now, three-plus years later, when I needed a new supply of posts that could be made without regard for the date, I chose this set of visits, spread over a dozen years, as the subject for the first of the series. The actual visits are here (Camp River Dubois), here (Fort Clatsop), and here (Fort Mandan).