Book Review
Tracing a T to Sebring
Denny Gibson

This book is an odd one that probably doesn’t deserve a review in even this little corner of the internet. On the other hand, this little corner is just about the only place where its oddities can be discussed. It is identical in concept to 2021’s Tracing a T to Tampa. Both tell about retracing an Ohio-Florida trip 100 years after the Model T Ford-powered originals. There are two huge differences, however. The Model T trips were undertaken by my great-grandparents and modern knowledge of them comes from my great-grandmother’s real-time reporting. For the 1920 trip, her writing covered the drive to Florida, significant time in the state, and the drive home which included some real sightseeing in the east. Only 48 handwritten pages exist from the 1923 trip and that barely gets them to Florida, covers very little of their time in the state, and none of the drive home.  The second big difference between the two books is that Tracing a T to Tampa contains a fair amount of background on the travelers and the times in which they lived. That information does not appear in Tracing a T to Sebring.

Both “Tracing…” books have obvious personal and family connections. Among the reasons for publishing both books was a desire to preserve Granny’s letters and make them available to the family. But the story those letters tell is of interest well beyond the family. Anyone curious about early auto travel or just life in the 1920s in general can probably enjoy them. I would like to think those same people can enjoy the expansion and updates I have tacked on. Actually, I guess I really only believe that about the first of the pair. It’s not impossible for people unrelated to Frank and Gertrude to enjoy this oneway tale of their second Florida trip. Nor is it impossible for it to be enjoyed by people unfamiliar with the “…Tampa” book. But I do think it’s not very easy. It really is a sequel and one that almost requires reading the earlier work to appreciate. It also helps if you have some idea of who Frank and Gertrude were. This book is clearly in a niche more deeply than any of my others. My relatives and/or folks who read and enjoyed Tracing a T to Tampa will probably like Tracing a T to Sebring. Everyone else, not so much.

Tracing a T to Sebring, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2024, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 62 pages, ISBN 979-8875936098.

Available through Amazon.

Reader reviews at Amazon and Goodreads are appreciated and helpful and can be submitted regardless of where you purchased the book. All Trip Mouse books are described and signed copies are available here.

Book Review UnStuck Stephanie Stuckey

I am more familiar with Stuckey’s signs than their products. As a kid, I probably didn’t even know the company existed since my family did not travel much. They were still going strong when I started doing some traveling on my own and I believe I bought gas at their stores a few times along with a pecan log roll or two but there was very little money in my travel budget for candy and none at all for rubber snakes. By the time my own fortunes had improved to the point that snacks were regularly permitted on road trips, Stuckey’s fortunes were headed in the other direction. The main reason that I am familiar with Stuckey’s signs is that I drove by a bunch of them. Many, maybe most, were for stores that were closed.

I first became aware of Stuckey’s rebirth when friends in Indiana became resellers of the company’s products. I made a point of stocking up on pecan goodness when a couple of road trips had me passing nearby. One of those trips was to a conference where Stephanie Stuckey was speaking and where I met her briefly. I have been looking forward to this book’s publication since then and thought I had a good idea of the story it would tell. It turns out that I had the basic outline down reasonably well but I was missing a ton of details and there were some genuine surprises. There was even a mystery of sorts.

The first part of the story is not particularly unique. An ambitious and creative man builds a very successful business through hard work and the help of friends and family. At the height of the company’s success, he sells it to collect his well-deserved rewards. Plopped into the world of faceless corporations, the company survives but becomes faceless itself. It is a fairly common tale that usually continues with more decline and eventual disappearance. That’s where this story becomes different. It’s where it becomes worth reading. UnStuck is a well-written telling of the uncommon story of a third-generation’s retrieval of the family business.

William S. Stuckey, Stephanie’s grandfather, founded the company in 1937 and sold it (actually merged with Pet Milk Co.) in 1964. It remained a significant presence on the American roadside into the 1970s but corporate shuffling led to the brand’s serious decline before the decade was over. William S. Stuckey, Jr., Stephanie’s father, stopped the downward slide when he repurchased the company in 1984. Stephanie took over in 2019. Those are the bullet points on a company timeline with lots of space in between. UnStuck fills in much of that space with an understandable focus on the post-2019 years.

Stephanie’s father had great success in politics and served five terms in the U.S. Congress. She had her own success in politics with fourteen years in the Georgia state legislature. When Stephanie’s dad brought the company back to the family, he said it was based 80% on emotion and 20% on finances. There is little need to break Stephanie’s reasons for buying the company down by percentage. It was almost certainly 100% emotion. She had wonderful memories of her grandfather and road trips that included stops at stores bearing the family name. I have little doubt that a sizable percentage of the emotion behind the purchase was pure nostalgia.

Stephanie’s grandfather was known within the family as Bigdaddy. Six boxes of Bigdaddy’s papers play a very big role in Unstuck‘s story. How the new CEO studied spreadsheets and packed aging inventory into Mystery Boxes to return the company to profitability is interesting but it was what she learned from those papers that would let her move beyond that. They gave her some insight into how Bigdaddy viewed Stuckey’s, the company, and how he attacked problems. She cites his “two lessons in resilience — surviving World War II and the bypassing of his stores.”

I and many other fans of old roads are conflicted about the interstate highways. We appreciate their ability to make travel faster and safer but regret the damage done to small businesses in the towns they bypassed. Stuckey’s was not exactly a small business at the time the interstates appeared but it did depend on traffic through those towns. Bigdaddy used the upheaval as an opportunity to redesign and relocate his stores and establish a partnership with Texaco that made those stores “a one-stop shop”. The papers in those boxes did not provide specific answers to any of the company’s problems but they did reveal and encourage a truly open-minded way of looking at them.

That open-mindedness may or may not have figured into a board meeting described in UnStuck where “brand identity” was discussed. Thinking that Stuckey’s is “all about pecan snacks and candies” might seem natural but some serious reflection said otherwise. Stephanie had been visiting many of the surviving Stuckey’s stores and licensees and sharing some of the details on social media as a form of free advertising. That generated some responses almost none of which were about snacks or candies. 99% of the stories people shared with her were about road trips that just happened to involve Stuckey’s in some way. Most of Stephanie’s own childhood memories of Stuckey’s came from road trips. People may know that Stuckey’s sells pecans but they identify the company with road trips! Despite my limited experience, I do too.

I mentioned a mystery of sorts. Maybe not everyone reads dedications but I usually do. At the very front of UnStuck, I read that it is dedicated to John King. I had no idea who John King was and eventually learned that when she started writing this book Stephanie Stuckey didn’t either. Among other things, John King appears with Bigdaddy in a photo featured in the Stuckey’s company’s 25th-anniversary newsletter. John King is Black. After considerable effort, Stephanie learned that her grandfather and John spent a lot of time together during the company’s early days but not much else. In particular, she found no evidence that he was ever rewarded for what appears to have been significant contributions. That was not an unusual situation in the South in the early twentieth century which is also something Stephanie addresses in the dedication. On the other hand, there are several references in the book to the fact that Stuckey’s was never segregated which was sometimes possible only because the stores were outside the official limits of sundown towns. It is something that many people remember about the chain to this day.

The prologue imagines William Sylvester Stuckey thinking to himself after a pecan stand customer calls him crazy, “But that’s what it’s going to take to make it.” Stephanie finds herself thinking the exact same thing when she considers that people might think her crazy for buying what she had recently referred to as a “dumpster fire of a business”. The book does talk about pecans somewhat. It explains that the name comes from pacane, an Algonquian word meaning “nut that’s hard to crack”. Guess it runs in the family.

UnStuck: Rebirth of an American Icon, Stephanie Stuckey, Matt Holt (April 2, 2024), 6.25 x 9.31 inches, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1637744789
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Under the Catalpa Tree
Jim Grey

Like pictures? It’s got ’em. Like variety? Got that too. There are enough pictures to fill a deck of cards or a weekly calendar, which is not accidental. The premise for the book was writing an article to accompany a photograph every week for a year. That could very well be a student assignment in an overly long writing course and in a sense it is. Jim Grey assigned himself the exercise to, as he says, “strengthen this muscle”. He is referring to the writing muscle which can surely benefit from practice just as much as a musician’s skill or an athlete’s strength.

Even though photographs are at the heart of Under the Catalpa Tree, the book’s subtitle mentions only “stories and essays”. I’m guessing that is at least partially because only the stories and essays needed to be newly created for the book. The photos already existed from Grey’s many years of photographing the world around him. He doesn’t explain how the photos were selected. I am sure it was not completely random but there is tremendous variety. They range in quality from slightly fuzzy black-and-white snapshots taken years ago with a yardsale camera to crisp color images taken with high-end gear and well-developed skills. Some photos are digital but film is the source of many of the images since Grey collects — and heavily uses — film cameras. Among the subjects are family, friends, cars, houses, nature, and an abbey in Ireland.

Of course, the subjects of those stories and essays are as varied as the subjects of the photos. Some essays are tightly tied to the photo they accompany and describe exactly how the photo came to be and the thoughts it invoked. For others, the photo is essentially a jumping-off point for some more or less unrelated observations. In both cases, the thoughts and observations tend to be rather insightful.

A detail I appreciate is laying out the book so that all images are alone on a left-hand page. That happens naturally when the text occupies a single page, which is common, or three pages, which is not. There are quite a few two-page essays where a blank is used to get things back in synch. Totally worth it, in my opinion. Those pages, by the way, utilize Amazon’s premium paper which has the photos looking their best.

With all the variety I have mentioned a couple of times, it is not easy to nail down a concise description of Under the Catalpa Tree. The best I can do is this: An illustrated set of glimpses of one Indiana resident’s memories and thoughts from the end of the last millennium and the beginning of this one.

Under the Catalpa Tree: And Other Stories and Essays, Jim Grey, Midnight Star Press (January 1, 2024), 8.25 x 8.25 inches, 156 pages, ISBN 979-8869992697
Available in paperback through Amazon or as a PDF direct from the author here. 

Book Review
America’s Greatest Road Trip!
Tom Cotter and Michael Ross

It’s a simple concept. Position yourself at the southernmost point in the continental United States then drive to the northernmost point in the U.S. accessible by road. The former is Key West, Florida. Deadhorse, Alaska, is the latter. The two are separated by a little over 4,000 miles as an extremely hardy all-weather crow might fly. Limited to traveling on the earth’s surface, Tom Cotter and Michael Alan Ross clocked 8,881 miles in making the connection. The difference is easily justified. Tom and Michael had more fun than any crow could even dream of.

Tom Cotter is best known as The Barn Find Hunter from the numerous books and videos he has produced about automotive treasures found in barns and the like. He is also a road-tripper whose adventures include a cross-country Model T drive documented in a book I reviewed here. Michael Alan Ross is a very successful automotive photographer whose work filled that Model T book. On that Model T drive, MAR, as he is commonly known, drove a chase vehicle. This time he and Cotter share the driving and space in the small camper they tow.

That camper was a new Basecamp 16X on loan from Airstream. The tow vehicle was a 2021 Bronco Outer Banks on loan from Ford. As Cotter tells it, he got the Bronco by telling Ford that Airstream had promised him a camper and he got the camper by telling Airstream that Ford had promised a Bronco.

Very early in the trip, the travelers broke one of the few guidelines they had established by jumping on I-75 while still in southern Florida. This is at odds with the “backroad USA” called out in the subtitle and Cotter readily admits that it is “cheating”. But it is understandable. With everything that lay ahead of them, there was a natural urge to leave the familiar behind and get on with the exotic. Before leaving Florida, they returned to the planned program by leaving the interstate for US 27.

They clipped a corner of Georgia, then crossed Alabama (with a stop in Muscle Shoals) before turning north in Louisiana to reach Tennessee. They entered Missouri via the bootheel and maintained a west-by-northwest course through that state and Kansas with appropriate adjustments to take in the big ball of twine in Cawker City. Then it was a little more directly north through Nebraska and the Dakotas with a Memorial Day pause at the Black Hills National Cemetery in South Dakota. There was a different sort of pause at the North Dakota line. Despite all of Cotter’s past travels, he had, at this point, visited just forty-nine states. North Dakota was number fifty.

North of Bismarck, Cotter and MAR picked up US 2 and headed west. That might not be the most direct route to Alaska but there were friends near Seattle and, as any good road-tripper knows, anything can be “on the way” if you look at it just right. Hitting Glacier National Park and the Going-to-the-Sun Road might have also been a factor in route selection but the scenic road was not yet open for the summer when they arrived. There was, of course, plenty of great scenery even without Going-to-the-Sun, and plenty of interesting people, too. 

Cotter and MAR both had friends in the Seattle area but swapping hellos was not the only reason for making that a target. The two travelers had planned for a month-long break in the middle of the trip to attend to their day jobs and visit family. The Bronco and Airstream would be left with friends while they flew home and back.

With the break out of the way, it was time to enter Canada and head for the beginning of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Cotter had a recent (but not quite current) edition of The Milepost with him. The Milepost is published annually and is close to indispensable for anyone traveling the Alaska Highway. That road is its primary focus and its initial reason for being but it now not only covers the Alaska Highway but just about every path for getting to and from it. That includes coming from Vancouver which is what Cotter and MAR were doing.

British Columbia and the Yukon Territory contain the bulk of the Alaska Highway with only the northernmost two hundred miles or so being in Alaska. Cotter reports that any pride associated with returning to the U.S. was short-lived and declares this “absolutely the worst roads” they had driven so far. The Alaska Highway officially ends at Delta Junction but Fairbanks is easily reached on what is sometimes seen as an extension, the Richardson Highway.

The Airstream was left with a cousin while Cotter and MAR tackled the final stretch to Deadhorse in the Bronco. Several aspects of this trip reminded me of my own 2016 drive to Alaska but perhaps none so much as the mention of “a mandatory pit stop at the Hilltop Restaurant north of Fairbanks”. Even though I did not drive north of Fairbanks on my own but used a commercial tour company to visit the Arctic Circle, we had breakfast at the Hilltop before hitting the Dalton Highway.

My visit to the Arctic Circle had been a one-day there-and-back affair. Cotter and Mar spent a night on the Dalton Highway in Wiseman and two nights at the end of the road in Deadhorse. Just reaching the end of the road would be enough for most people but Cotter went above and beyond by joining the Arctic Polar Bear Club with a dip in the 40°F Prudhoe Bay to bookend his dip in the “warmer than my morning shower” water at the start of the trip in Key West.

Looking back over what I’ve written, it seems I’ve been reviewing the trip rather than the book. Maybe there is at least a sense of it in the included thumbnail images. It has lots of MAR’s wonderful photos. The thumbnails offer hints of these although they don’t show that they are printed on heavyweight glossy paper which helps them look their best. Cotter’s words augment the photos (or vice versa) with details of the trip I have more or less summarized. Those words are at their best when telling about encounters with others. Some are people living along the route while others just happen to be traveling a piece of it at the same instant Cotter and MAR pass by. The ratio of the two sort of reverses itself as the trip progresses. Residents — some permanent and some temporary  — outnumber people actually in motion during the early portions of the trip but the situation is pretty much the opposite once the Dalton Highway is reached.

Some percentage of interesting people exists among both residents and travelers just about everywhere. Cotter manages to find them on a regular basis but he suggests that the percentage may increase toward the end of the trip. “Boring people generally don’t travel to Alaska’s outback,” he observes. I guess that means his job got easier the farther they traveled.

America’s Greatest Road Trip!: Key West to Deadhorse: 9000 Miles Across Backroad USA, Tom Cotter and Michael Alan Ross, Motorbooks (September 19, 2023), 9.45 x 10.71 inches, 192 pages, ISBN 978-0760381069
Available through Amazon.

A Hundred Looks at a Hundred Books

Last Wednesday’s post was the 100th book review published on this blog. Eight were of my own books and one (Book Review (not really), A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving) was, as the title proclaims, not really a review of the actual book. Still, that leaves 91 legitimate reviews of books I didn’t write and that’s many more than I anticipated when I posted the first review in November of 2011. The blog was just about three months old then. The About page says that the most likely subjects of books reviewed are “…those related to something I personally like such as old roads or cars.” That first review (Ghost Town of Route 66) clearly fits and I think the 100th (Walking to Listen) does too. It’s not about a particular road but it is about being “on the road” which seems close enough. Besides, the phrase is “such as old roads or cars” not “exclusively old roads and cars”. The truth is anything “I personally like” is fair game.

When I wrote that “old roads or cars” line, I expected the bulk of my reviews to involve one or the other but that has not been the case. An imprecise classification effort found only 5 reviews of books about or featuring cars. There were 32 about roads which means that 63 were about neither.

I was not surprised to see that only 9 of the books I reviewed were fiction. Books are either fiction or not but they can appear in more than one of my arbitrary subject categories. Those counts are:

  • 37 – history
  • 32 – road
  • 25 – memoir
  • 16 – photo
  • 15 – guide
  • 12 – travelog
  • 5 – cars
  • 1 – physics

I won’t even attempt a “Best of” lists but I do have some “Most Memorable” picks. That I picked several photo books did not surprise me but seeing that three of my picks involved motorcycles was unexpected. No Room for Watermelons tells of Ron Fellowes’ ride through fifteen countries on a 1910 motorcycle. Hues of my Vision, by Ara Gureghian, and The World from My Bike, by Anna Grechishkina, visually document their authors’ life on the road over several years. Living on 3 wheels (a sidecar carried his dog) ended for Ara when back problems made it impossible to ride. Anna’s travels were interrupted when her homeland was invaded and she returned to Ukraine to help in its defense. I hope with all my heart that there is a sequel.

Route 66 Sightings coverTen Million Steps - coverI clearly have a weakness for photo books but these two are also road books. In 2004, Joe Hurley took the steps and Travis Lindhorst took the pictures for Ten Million Steps on Route 6. Three of Route 66’s finest (Shellee Graham, Jim Ross, and Jerry McClanahan) collaborated on Route 66 Sightings which might be the best advertisement for a decommissioned highway you’ll ever see.

Outside the Wire coverEvery member of the trio responsible for Route 66 Sightings turns out plenty of exceptional solo work. Most of it is connected to Route 66 but this book from Jim Ross is an exception. It’s the story of his time in Vietnam. In my review, I said of Jim that, “What he does do is bring veteran skills to the telling of a rookie’s story.” I think that’s why this book is so memorable to me.

This is one of the five “car books” I counted. The car is a 1926 Model T that carries Darlene Dorgan and her friends on some wonderful adventures in the 1930s. Darlene’s Silver Streak tells of those adventures as well as the car’s modern-day restoration and display. I bought the book when I first saw the car on display which is probably part of the reason I find it memorable.

The count will not stop at one hundred, of course. In fact, a couple more are already in the works. One is sort of about a road. The other is not. I really see no reason to expect the mix of topics to change much in the future except for a probable decrease in the number of physics books reviewed. 

 

Book Review
Walking to Listen
Andrew Forsthoefel

Twice I have posted previews of books. This was the subject of the first one back in 2013. The second came along in 2015, and I believe it was posted with the hope of boosting a Kickstarter campaign to publish the previewed book. I’m not quite sure why the first preview was posted. Maybe I just felt an overwhelming urge to write something. It does happen. Whatever the reason, I was obviously quite impressed with the This American Life episode where I first learned of Andrew Forsthoefel and his recently completed walk, and I really expected the book to appear shortly. It did not.

In a paragraph at the end of the second book preview, I reported that I was still following Forsthoefel’s blog and there was still hope for the book but that my confidence was weakening. I eventually stopped following the blog and missed the book’s publication a couple of years later. A recent Amazon Associates change (They dropped support for links to images.) had me revisiting all of my reviews and making changes to many. That Walking to Listen preview required no changes but looking it over jogged some memories and I learned that the book had been published — about seven years ago — and was now available.

The recently completed walk that caught my interest back in 2013 was 4,000 miles long and had taken nearly a year. The book documents the journey in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways which means it is much more about people and experiences than places. Of course traveling by vehicle, as Steinbeck and Heat-Moon did, is a lot different than walking, which Forsthoefel did. There is a third book I often thought about while reading Walking to Listen. Ten Million Steps on Route 6 is the story of Joe Hurley’s walk across America. That’s closer to Forsthoefel’s experience but Hurley had a chase car that picked him up at the end of each day while Forsthoefel often slept right where he stopped walking in a tent he carried.

“WALKING TO LISTEN” was written on a small sign that Forsthoefel carried. It was a visual aid when explaining what he was doing. I suspect it gave more of a sense of mission to his walk than simply speaking the words would have. Maybe it made people less reluctant to speak into the small recorder that Forsthoefel used in interviews. Being twenty-three and fresh out of college probably helped too. The bulk of Walking to Listen consists of Forsthoefel telling his story in his own words although he does use some quotes from interviews in the telling. But every chapter is preceded by a verbatim transcript of a portion of one of those interviews. The person or persons speaking is identified along with the location and approximate date and the transcript follows. Some are very short excerpts. None are longer than a couple of pages but they do add a little “live-action” to the well-crafted retellings that fill most of the pages.

The “fresh out of college” situation I mentioned is one of the reasons for the walk. Graduation is sometimes seen as a time to access things before making the next commitment and so it was for Forsthoefel. He frequently referred to life after college as “coming of age”. He really was walking to listen and hoped to hear some advice. But there was another source of uncertainty in his life. His parents’ divorce had surprised him and left him unsure of his relationship with his father. He started the walk hoping to get some help with that too.

Although Forsthoefel wanted mostly to learn something about himself, he couldn’t help but learn something about the world just as the other three writers I’ve mentioned did. Sadly, one of the biggest things he learned in 2012 was the same thing Steinbeck learned in 1962: racism in the U.S. is quite healthy. It is usually more subtle and there might even be a little less but it did not go away during the intervening half century. Forsthoefel happened to be in Selma, Alabama, on Martin Luther King Day. One of the people he spent time with was the city’s African American police chief. Clearly, progress had been made since March of 1965. Yet, on his last morning in town, he runs into a man he had met earlier. There are others with him and at one point he whispers to Forsthoefel, “But some of them are still living in the past, if you know what I mean. So don’t bring up integration. Just play it cool.”

Forsthoefel also learned that generosity, too, is quite healthy. People of all sorts offered help that ranged from a single donut to housing and feeding him for several days. He was grateful for every helping hand, of course, while realizing that some of that help would not have been there had he been anything other than a young white non-threatening male.

The walk can be considered a success I think. Forsthoefel probably didn’t get as much advice on “coming of age” as he hoped but he did get quite a bit and the confidence that comes from walking solo across the country no doubt helped a lot. The relationship with his father also seemed to be in pretty decent shape when the walk ended. At least one person reviewing the book thought too much space was given to these personal issues. I thought they were discussed just enough to provide some understanding of why the walk was happening.

I did not read this book to help with my own coming of age or with parental issues. It’s a little late for both. I read it to get another person’s view of the country and I got that — at three miles an hour.

Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time, Andrew Forsthoefel, Bloomsbury Publishing (2017), 5.5 x 8.15 inches, 400 pages, ISBN 978-1632867018
Available through Amazon.


100th Book Review
Responding to that Amazon change I mentioned involved filtering the list of blog entries and learning I had written 98 book reviews. One more has been published since which makes this the 100th book review published on Denny G’s Road Trips Blog.

Book Review
The Pioneers
David McCullough

For the second time ever, I’m reviewing a book that was a recent “#1 New York Times Best Seller”. That’s two more than I anticipated when I started doing reviews on this blog. This one, like the other one (The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles), will be pretty shallow. There are plenty of reviews out there from high-profile professionals and an author with two Pulitzers to his credit does not really need a lot of praise from me. McCullough’s forte was (he died Aug 7, 2022) biographies (his Pulitzer winners were Truman and John Adams), and The Pioneers tells the story of the white man’s take over of Ohio through streamlined biographies of the men who led it. They are not household names like Truman or Adams. A few, such as Putnam and Cutler, might be household names in select Ohio households, but most would be recognized only by fairly serious students of regional history. The book is not organized around individual biographies. The tale of early Northwest Territory settlement is told chronologically with the lives of key figures smoothly embedded and expanded forward or backward or both without much interference with the flow of time.

The Pioneers was recommended to me by multiple sources both in print and in person. The personal recommendations were made by people familiar with my interest in “local” history. The book is centered on Marietta, the first settlement in the territory. Despite it being on the far side of Ohio from where I live, it is a place I have visited many times. I recognized the names Putnam and Cutler and a few others but I knew just the basics about any of them. Instead of writing what I’ve already noted is unneeded praise, I’m just going to identify a few of the things this book taught me about my own extended neighborhood. 

I knew that Marietta had been named after Queen Marie Antoinette but I did not know why. From McCullough, I learned that the Revolutionary War veterans who named the town felt that she was more influential than anyone in getting France to support the revolutionaries.

In 1800, a square-rigged brig sailed from Marietta down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Less than a dozen years later, in 1811, the first steamboat on the river traveled from Pittsburgh to New  Orleans, with a stop in Marietta, in an astonishing fourteen days.

Even though the ordinance establishing the Northwest Territory seemed to rule it out, there was a proposal during the writing of the Ohio Constitution to permit slavery up to 35 years of age for males and 25 years of age for females. It failed by one vote.

There are many more, of course, and I believe that almost everything in The Pioneers is true. I had to slip that “almost” in there because I did discover one goof in the book. McCullough correctly writes that the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was killed in October 1813 by forces commanded by William Henry Harrison. He incorrectly states that this occurred “in Ohio’s northwestern corner”. The correct location is Ontario, Canada, at the Battle of the Thames.

I certainly don’t want to end this on a negative tone so I guess I’ll offer some praise after all. Anyone claiming to know anything at all about Cincinnati history should be able to tell how Mount Ida was changed to Mount Adams to honor John Quincy Adams following his trip to the city to dedicate the observatory there. McCullough tells of that trip and of Adams’ stop in Marietta during his return to Washington. A few residents of Marietta, including Ephraim Cutler, accompanied the former president from there to Pittsburgh. McCullough’s reporting provides a warm and personal view of Adams that I quite appreciated.

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough, Simon & Schuster (May 5, 2020), 6 x 9.25 inches, 452 pages, ISBN 978-1501168703
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Near Woods
Kevin Patrick

The year Kevin Patrick spent “connecting with White’s Woods” may have been, as a blurb on the back of Near Woods says “In the spirit of Walden” but the resulting products are not the same. Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond was an experiment in self-sufficiency and the book he wrote some years later documented its success. His observations of nature and seasons were generally used to support some aspect of his minimalist lifestyle and not to educate the reader. I suppose some of Patrick’s observations are also made to reinforce some philosophical viewpoint, but he is a lot more subtle and he helps the reader share the raw observation as near as possible. Exactly one-half of this book’s pages are filled with some excellent photographs.

The word “spirit” also appears early in the book’s text. There Patrick says it is written in the spirit of other nature books and mentions, in addition to Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, Cousteau, and others. I believe what he means is the sharing of observations as accurately as possible and in a manner that promotes a real appreciation of what is being observed.

I’m not all that familiar with many of the authors named but did find myself making some comparisons with an author and book Patrick does not mention. In PrairieErth, William Least Heat Moon makes a deep dive into a single county in Kansas. In some sense, Patrick’s deep dive into the 250-acre White’s Woods is closer to Moon’s product than to Thoreau’s but that comparison is also far from perfect. By trying to look at that county from every possible angle, PrairieErth can sometimes seem like a writing class exercise. Near Woods looks at its subject from a lot of angles but not, I think, every angle. Just the interesting ones.

Of course, Near Woods is better looking than either Walden or PrairieErth. To some degree, that’s just something that color photographs do for a book. But these high-quality and well-chosen photos do more than make the book pretty. They are the “raw observations” mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. The book’s design incorporates the photos wonderfully and helps make reading the book a pleasure. Every lefthand page contains one or more photographs. Righthand pages are all text. Captions are in the extra wide inner margins of the text pages. It didn’t take me terribly long to recognize the beauty of this. Every page turn resulted in a new image that could be studied as quickly or slowly as desired before tackling a new page of text.

Sometimes there is a direct connection between text and photo and sometimes the connection is loose or non-existent. At one point a loose connection led me to believe that Kevin had cheated me or at least made a major goof. One of the more interesting finds in White’s Woods is a quad-trunk tulip tree. I really wanted to see this oddity as I read about it but the pictures next to the text were of something else entirely. A photo of the tulip tree in winter appears a page or two later and I realized that this is the image on the book’s back cover. The front cover shows this extraordinary tree in summer. I wasn’t cheated and the goof was all mine. Doh!

Photographs show the woods through one year of its life and the four seasons are used to organize the book. The woods’ history and possible future are mixed into the reporting of seasonal changes to provide some very pleasant lessons in natural and human history, horticulture, geography, and geology.

Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest, Kevin Patrick, Stackpole Books (May 1, 2023), 8.5 x 11 inches, 258 pages, ISBN 978-0811772211
Available through Amazon.

Book Review Building the Bridges Along the National Road Through Ohio Cyndie L. Gerken

Cyndie’s done it again. As I began to write this review of Cyndie L. Gerken’s fourth book on the National Road in Ohio, I revisited my reviews of the previous three thinking I might come up with a better opening line but everything I saw just reinforced my initial thought. Cyndie has indeed done it again.

The words “accurate” or “accuracy” appear in the opening paragraphs of all three along with words like “precision” and “thoroughness”, and all those words certainly fit once again. In my review of the third book, Headley Inn and Cliff Rock House, I noted that it differed from the previous two by focusing on a small stretch of roadside rather than all of the state. That difference struck me again as I read Building the Bridges Along the National Road Through Ohio but in a slightly different way. The “Along the National Road Through Ohio” in the title tells us that this is something of a “return to form” but it occurred to me that the set of four is just a bigger version of something going on within each of the individual books. There is no denying that reading lots of details about lots of very similar things can become repetitious. In Marking the Miles… and Taking the Tolls… and again in Building the Bridges…, Gerken often intersperses human-interest style stories among the facts and statistics to help fend off boredom. Thinking of Headley Inn and Cliff Rock House playing a similar role in the series, despite having its own sets of facts and statistics, brought a smile to my face. It might have had just as much value in that regard to the writer as to the reader.

Although I certainly know better, I tend to instinctively think of big stone arches when I hear the phrase “National Road bridges”. One reason is that many of those stone bridges, some of them S-shaped, are still in existence. There were also many wooden bridges along the road but all were much shorter-lived. Building the Bridges… includes both. It identifies twenty-one covered wooden bridges built for the National Road in Ohio in addition to probably forty-some stone bridges. There were also well over a thousand stone culverts and one reason an accurate count of stone bridges is difficult to produce is that not everyone followed the same rules when distinguishing culverts and bridges. Span length was and is the distinguishing characteristic. Twelve feet, twenty feet, and no doubt some other numbers of feet were used to make the distinction and some reports did not distinguish the two at all.

Gerken talks about culverts vs. bridges in the introduction along with many other topics related to the Ohio National Road bridges in general and some that simply concern all bridges in general. Building techniques are described as are bridge types and bridge components. Thanks to an annotated picture of one of the Blaine Bridge arches, I now know what a voussoir is although I’ve no idea how to pronounce it. (Voussoirs are the wedge-shaped stones that form an arch.)

A chapter titled “The Builders of Ohio’s National Road Bridges” follows the introduction. Its opening pages contain information about the road’s Superintendents, how the road was divided, what contracts looked like, and similar subjects. Then comes fifty+ entries on individual builders.

After telling us about as many of the bridge builders as she could identify, Gerken touches on some of the iconic National Road bridges east of Ohio, including the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, before beginning a county-by-county trek across the state. Each county chapter begins with a thumbnail of the county and the National Road through it. A map locating the National Road bridges in the county appears very early in each chapter. Sections on each of the bridges and some of the culverts in the county appear also in east-to-west sequence. Just as some bridges east of Ohio were touched upon preceding the border-to-border coverage, a few in Indiana follow it. 

At a minimum, the location of each structure and what it crossed is given. The builder or builders are identified if known and, thanks to some pretty good sleuthing, many of them are. Beyond that, the information given for each bridge or culvert varies widely but it is a natural variation. For unnamed culverts over unnamed intermittent streams, location might be just about the only thing known. For major structures, lots of additional information might be included and usually supported by various graphics. Topographic maps are fairly common and there are lots of historic photographs and drawings. Plenty of modern photos also appear and if a structure is still standing there’s a good chance that the book contains a very modern picture of it taken by the author herself. Stories about events associated with happenings at or near a particular bridge can pop up anytime and are often fleshed out by reproducing contemporary reports.

The current status of each structure is always given if known. I’ve long been impressed with the number of National Road bridges still standing. Maybe I should be even more impressed after reading about all that failed and had to be replaced within a year or two of completion due to shoddy materials or workmanship. The number of contracts that had to be reissued after being abandoned by the initial winning bidder was also somewhat surprising. Building the first interstate was no simple task.

Ample anecdotes and news reports are mixed in with or printed beside all the facts and statistics. Some are funny and some are sad but almost all provide a glimpse into another time. I’ll share a piece of one that struck a chord with me. In her reminisces on the two-lane covered bridge over the South Fork of the Licking River, Minnie Moody describes a sound from another time.

What I liked was to go clattering through one lane of the bridge at the same time another vehicle was passing through on the other side of the center partition. Whang, bang, clickty-clack! With a roof over our heads the uproar was terrific.

I believe I have passed through a two-lane “double barrel” covered bridge but I’m not 100% certain. I am 100% certain that I’ve not done it in the presence of even one, let alone two, horse-drawn vehicles. I’m nearly 100% certain that I never will but thanks to Minnie — with the help of Cyndie — I have a pretty good idea of what it was like.

Yep. Cyndie has done it again. Building the Bridges… is quite clearly a valuable reference book for National Road fans but it’s something of a storybook, too. It has people in it along with the stones and lumber. The Ohio Genealogical Society hands out awards to several books each year. One of these is the Henry Howe Award which goes to a book on “Ohio state, county, or local history”. Each of Gerken’s previous three National Road books has won the award and I’ve a hunch this one will as well. Yeah, I think Cyndie’s going to do that again, too. 

Building the Bridges Along the National Road Through Ohio: A Study of Early Stone and Wooden Bridges Along Ohio’s National Road, Cyndie L. Gerken, Independently Published (May 14, 2023), 8.5 x 11 inches, 521 pages, ISBN ‎ 979-8393147471
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Southern Ohio Legends & Lore
James A. Willis

I met James Willis in March at the first-ever Frogman Festival which I reported on here. In fact, his “Frogman of Loveland, Ohio” presentation was one of the main festival attractions for me even though I almost expected to be disappointed by it. One reason for that was just my general skepticism of all things paranormal related but I also felt I had reason to be skeptical of Mr. Willis specifically. An online bio utilized for the festival begins with “Not since the Headless Horseman went charging through Sleepy Hollow has something come out of the Hudson Highlands of upstate New York as thrilling and chilling as author and paranormal researcher James A. Willis.” That struck me as rather pompous and I more or less anticipated an arrogant fellow demanding I believe in spooks and oversized frogs because he said so. That was not at all what I got, however.

Willis is not exactly timid or unsure of himself but his confidence is solidly backed up by knowledge. He is a long way from arrogant and even farther away from pompous. His presentation did not focus on how weird and mysterious a creature referred to as a “frogman” was but on verifiable facts behind the stories about it. I enjoyed his talk so much that I sought him out when it was over to buy this book containing more stories about my area of Ohio.

As its back cover tells us, Southern Ohio Legends & Lore is filled with “scary, mysterious and just plain weird stories” but Willis’ telling of those stories is, just like his festival presentation, replete with verifiable facts. I do not mean to imply that Willis solves every mystery or debunks every myth. There is a section titled “The Unexplained” and there are plenty of questions that remain unanswered in other sections as well. But those questions are not unanswered due to a lack of trying and I’m fairly confident that no known explanation is intentionally omitted. In addition, Willis does not resort to hyperbole or loaded language to make the stories scarier, more mysterious, or weirder than they already are,

The stories are divided into six sections: “Ghostly Legends”, “Legendary Characters”, “Legendary Villians”, “Legendary Places”, “The Unexplained”, and “Legendary Events”. Having lived my entire life in southern Ohio, I was already at least somewhat familiar with most of them. There are exceptions including all four “Ghostly Legends”. It is the only section where every story is new to me and it is the only section dealing more or less directly with possibly supernatural phenomena. I’m thinking those two facts might very well be related. I’m also thinking that this is the right place to mention that Willis is the founder and director of the paranormal research group The Ghosts of Ohio. I find it somehow reassuring that this is also the only section where that comes into play and even here there is no straying from the “verifiable facts” approach.

I don’t believe I learned anything new about any of the “Legendary Characters” but I appreciate the concise and complete descriptions. Willis’ reporting on John Symmes and his hollow earth theory is among the most even-handed and comprehensive I’ve read. Likewise, his tale of “Legendary Villian” George Remus where I did learn a few details for the first time.

“Legendary Places” combines a place I had never heard of (Athens Pentagram) with three that I am quite familiar with. That somehow makes it my favorite section. One of the three familiar places, the Loveland Castle, was the subject of a blog post here just last fall. “The Unexplained” includes the Loveland Frog that had been my introduction to James Willis. Three major disasters including the 1979 Who concert tragedy appear in “Legendary Events”. All are certainly legendary and make for interesting reading but do not really seem scary, mysterious, or weird.

Maybe I did not learn about a bunch of new places to visit or encounter shocking revelations about people or places not new to me but I did learn that James A. Willis is a stubborn researcher and a straight-shooting reporter even if he doesn’t seem as chilling as a headless horsemen. Those who have not spent three-quarters of a century in southern Ohio will almost certainly be able to expand their list of places to visit or add to the stock of stories they share with friends.  

Even I have added something connected to this book to my schedule. Another of the “Legendary Places” with which I am familiar is the site where three nineteenth-century attempts to establish Utopia failed. I read the chapter on Utopia while out to breakfast then, within minutes of returning home, I was presented with an online advertisement for Utopia: A New Musical premiering in a couple of weeks. I immediately bought a ticket because that is most definitely “just plain weird”.

Southern Ohio Legends & Lore, James A. Willis, The History Press (August 15, 2022), 6 x 9 inches, 144 pages, ISBN  978-1467151115
Available through Amazon.