A Marietta Day
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Day 2: December 22, 2021 A Marietta Day Comment via blog |
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The first two nights of the trip are being spent in Marietta, Ohio, at the
Lafayette
Hotel where I have stayed before. This time
my room is a Cabin Room which is the
cheapest and smallest available. It really is rather small but is quite
sufficient for one guy who doesn't dance. I started the morning with some
pictures of the hotel's interior Christmas decorations.
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Then it was off to the
Campus Martius Museum. There are three floors of
exhibits at the museum. Entry is on the middle of those three and all
pictures in this panel are of that floor. The first three are of the house
where Rufus Putnam lived with his family from around 1790 until his death
in 1824. In 1795, the original 1790 house was enlarged with lumber from a
blockhouse that had been part of the fortification built by the Ohio
Company in 1788. Several items in the house, including the chairs in the
first photo, belonged to the Putnams. The second from the right tombstone
was Putnum's first. Bill was my guide at the house and I got much more
from him than information about the exhibit although that was considerable.
The remaining three pictures are from the lobby and Pioneer Wing. The focus is on the Ordinance of 1787, which established the Northwest Territory, and the territory's early settlers. |
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The first two picture here are of the upper floor exhibits illustrating
the "Innovation through Necessity" that let the settlers survive and
prosper.
The other two pictures are from the "Paradice Found and Lost: 1850-1970 (Appalachian Migration into Ohio)" on the lower floor. |
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One of the extras Bill provided was a suggestion to visit the nearby
Mound Cemetery. Most of the earthworks in the area
are Hopewell (50BCE-450CE) constructions but the mound around which the
cemetery is placed is an Adena (800BCE-100CE) burial mound. It somehow
made me think of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant line: "And we
decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than
bring that one up we decided to throw our's down."
There are more Revolutionary War officers buried here than in anywhere. The Daughters of the American Revolution maintains a plot honoring local Revolutionary War dead whose graves are not known. A readable view of the mound sign is here. Some Rufus Putnam's descendents thought his tombstone was a little too plain and replaced the one now displayed at the Campus Martius Museum with something more elaborate. The face of the stone is readable here. The Masonic plaque can be read here. Robert Taylor's burial was the first recorded at the cemetery. I knew that Jonathon Meigs was a governor of Ohio but it seems he was a whole lot more. |
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Bill also helped me understand the solstice sunset thing a little better.
He asked, as museum folk do, what brought me to Marietta. When I told him
about my goof on the sunset, he showed me a picture that he had taken at
the event. He has attended every year since it started in 2013. More
importantly, he used a painting in the museum to show the parallel earth
walls that the Europeans called Sacra Via. At
the time, I thought that the walls lined up squarely with
Quadranaou but learned from a
Google map and a visit
to the site that that was not quite the case.
The first picture is of Quadranaou from near Sacra Via. The second picture shows is of one of the streets that have replaced the earth walls with the other street in the background. The third picture was taken several minutes before sunset from the southeast corner of Warren and Third with the sun blocked by a tree to avoid flare. Although it is a day after the solstice, things haven't changed drastically. The last picture was taken from the middle of Warren Street just a the sun disappeared behind the trees on the far side of the Muskingum River. |
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Because the trees elevate the horizon at Quadranaou, I was back at my
hotel room in time to catch another sunset. I could have been taking sunset
pictures like this without even getting cold.
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With the sun really gone this time, I headed up the street for dinner. At
the Marietta Brewing
Company I snapped a picture of wall signs from my table and downed
a tasty mushroom & Swiss 'burger. A beer from another Ohio brewery
accompanied the meal but I followed that with a stout from MBC.
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Following dinner, I crossed the street to get a different view of the
brew pub, capture the hotel outlined in (year round) lights, and the
Christmasized entry.
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