Huntsville, AL

[Caliga]

AAR, Part V

Saturday, April 26th
We had made several tentative plans to fill up our day on Saturday, but had to reconsider them all because a storm front had rolled into town and it was raining on and off all morning, making outside activities questionable.  Light breakfast in the room, and then headed off to downtown Huntsville to check out Constitution Village, which is a living history museum that recreates Huntsville in 1819, on the exact spot where the Alabama Territory wrote its Constitution thereby becoming the 22nd US state.

We thought we were going to have a private tour of the grounds, but shortly after the tour started an old guy from Little Rock showed up and joined us, but it was just the three of us and two tour guides (one handed us off to the other halfway through).  All of the buildings are reconstructions, but they're supposed to be exact replicas and they looked pretty damn good to me.  The tour started in a cabinet maker's shop where the convention actually met and wrote the constitution; the guy who had lived there died, and then his wife died and his children were sent away to be adopted, so the building was sitting unused at the time.  The shop was full of old woodworking equipment, and they let us run the equipment.  There was this huge flywheel thing I turned in order to carve grooves in a kitchen table leg, and another table saw you worked by pumping a foot pedal.  They had a collection of period childrens' toys in there too, including one that would have been hung on a wall, and consisted of a little wooden man you made walk by rhythmically pulling on two strings... the point being to teach children how to milk a cow.

Oh, they also had a handbill nailed to the wall that a negro apprentice had run away from the carpenter, and there was a one cent award for his return.

Next we visited the post office.  Back then, it worked very differently from the modern system.  First of all, you did not have to put stamps on mail you sent, nor did you put your letters in an envelope.  Instead, you simply folded the letter up and closed it with a wax seal, and the recipient paid for it.  Secondly, all the mail came to the post office and there were no mailmen to deliver it to your house... it was your responsibility to come to the post office to pick it up.  The way you knew you had mail was that, before every issue of the town's newspaper was printed, the printer would drop by the post office, take down notes about who had mail waiting, and would then publish it in the next issue of the newspaper.  The other neat thing I didn't know was that, because paper was an expensive commodity, people who needed to write a long letter but couldn't afford to buy lots of paper would, at the end of a page, turn the page 90 degrees and write over top of their original writing.  They had a reproduction letter there written like this and it's not terrible to read if you hold a ruler under each line of text.

[The Brain]

Neat.

[Malthus]

Oh, they also had a handbill nailed to the wall that a negro apprentice had run away from the carpenter, and there was a one cent award for his return.

A one cent reward? Even back then, hardly a bonanza. 

Must not have wanted him back all that much.

[lustindarkness]

Next we visited the post office.  Back then, it worked very differently from the modern system.  First of all, you did not have to put stamps on mail you sent, nor did you put your letters in an envelope.  Instead, you simply folded the letter up and closed it with a wax seal, and the recipient paid for it.  Secondly, all the mail came to the post office and there were no mailmen to deliver it to your house... it was your responsibility to come to the post office to pick it up.  The way you knew you had mail was that, before every issue of the town's newspaper was printed, the printer would drop by the post office, take down notes about who had mail waiting, and would then publish it in the next issue of the newspaper.  The other neat thing I didn't know was that, because paper was an expensive commodity, people who needed to write a long letter but couldn't afford to buy lots of paper would, at the end of a page, turn the page 90 degrees and write over top of their original writing.  They had a reproduction letter there written like this and it's not terrible to read if you hold a ruler under each line of text.

What if a person needed to mail a letter to someone outside of Hunstville?
BTW, I want to try the 90 degree letter myself.

[Caliga]

You would take it to the post office, give it to the postmaster, and then the next time a postal courier came to town he'd deliver it to the nearest city where in some (most likely very inefficient) manner it'd be handed off from one courier to another till it got to the destination town.  Little Rock asked about that and that's pretty much the answer he was given verbatim to the best of my recollection.

[Caliga]

Some pics now.  That teeny little figure at the base of the rocket is me, just to give you an idea of the size of these things.

Also, USA!  USA!  USA!
*fapfapfap*

[Caliga]

Me 'piloting' the lunar lander.

[Eddie Teach]

That teeny little figure ... is me,

That's what she said.

[Phillip V]

That teeny little figure ... is me,

That's what she said.

Also, USA!  USA!  USA!
*fapfapfap*

[11B4V]

Me 'piloting' the lunar lander.

Why you wearing a Knob shirt?

[katmai]

Me 'piloting' the lunar lander.

Why you wearing a Knob shirt?

Free swag cause of his wimmen

[Caliga]

Yeah, but I'd wear a Knob Creek shirt anyway.  Knob Creek

[Caliga]

AAR, Part VI

Saturday, April 26th
Next we looked at a reproduction house in which lived the town's newspaperman.  This house had two small servant rooms, one for his apprentice, and one for his family of slaves.... yep, that's right, the apprentice got a room all to himself that was the same size as the slave quarters.   In the slave quarters they had an ugly jar, which I'd seen before but never knew what the purpose of them was.  Basically, it's a big clay jar with an ugly face depicted on it, either painted on or molded on in relief.  The point of said jars was this: if you needed to store dangerous chemicals or medicines, and you had a bunch of slaves living with you, you couldn't just write "DANGEROUS" on it because your slaves couldn't read.  So they would put all that stuff in ugly jars and tell the slaves not to touch the jars with ugly faces on them. 

Next we went into the print shop itself and we all got to take turns running the Ramage printing press they had in there.  Basically what you do is this: once the type is on the little trays which will press it into the papers (we didn't get to fill the trays), you put a piece of paper in a slot above them and then lower a flap made out of canvas over the paper.  Then, you turn a crank which slides the slot and flap panel into the press, and turn this other lever across the front of the press, which pushes it down onto the panel and inks the paper.  Apparently it took two days for the ink to dry back then, which is why the Huntsville paper only came out once a week.  They used to buy their ink when possible, but when the supply chain was disrupted (bad weather, Creek attack) they could make it themselves with linseed oil, soot, and glue if they had to.

The newspaperman also set up Huntsville's first 'library', and we visited that room, which had a single bookshelf with maybe 50 books in it.

The last house we looked at was the lawyer's house and law office, which was probably the least interesting one in that it was just like pretty much every other early 19th century restored house I've ever been in.  For some reason the tour guide wouldn't go upstairs with us (bad knees maybe?) and when we were upstairs we noticed that a pane of glass from one of the windows had been busted or blown out, so I guess it's good we went up anyway because they were not aware of that.

Before we left we checked out the gardens, which had a lot of herbs (sadly, no Mary Jane which I'm quite sure they would have grown) as well as apple, peach, and fig trees.

On the street outside there was a little area with park benches and a bunch of sets of footprints preserved in the concrete, one set of which belonged to Neil Armstrong.  I forget what that was doing there.

Downtown Huntsville is weird in that there are maybe a handful of 'modern' buildings (including the courthouse, which is and ugly-ass blocky postmodern building), but most of the buildings appear to be original 19th century homes and small offices/commercial buildings, most of which are in excellent condition.  Walking around there felt like walking around a small rural town, except there were no wide-open spaces.

[Caliga]

AAR, Part VII

Saturday, April 26th
After we got down at the Constitution Village we headed back toward our hotel, but on the way stopped at a fast food place called Jack's.  It's a regional chain in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia, but I'd never been to one before.  Princesca got a Big Jack combo and I got a chicken finger basket.  I tried a bite of her burger and it was ok but nothing remarkable--fingers were same.  The fries were really interesting, though... they seemed to be dusted with both a seasoning and cheese powder.  At one point I had to go up to the front to get some napkins and this dude was in the way.  I was like "Excuse me" and he said "No sir, excuse me sir" and later I had to go back for something else I forget now and he was just as polite the second time.  I thought people were polite in KY, but they're even moreso down there.

When we got back to the room we made contact with lusti and confirmed that we'd be meeting up later for dinner at Gibson's BBQ, which is supposed to be 'famous' for its sauce and coconut pie.  We hung around the room for a bit figuring out what to do later than night and then the next morning, and ended up deciding to visit Jack Daniel's Distillery on the way home.  We had originally planned to go to the Huntsville Botanical Garden, but it was raining off and on all day and on our way back to the hotel, we happened to pass it and at that time it was pouring down rain, so we ultimately skipped it.

Anyway, we got to Gibson's before lusti did and grabbed a booth.  Princesca was like "How will you know who he is?" to which I said "I've seen countless pictures, don't worry."  I didn't even need to see his face to know who he was, though... I recognized his car when he pulled into the lot about five minutes later.

I can't recall for sure but I think he recognized us immediately once he came into the restaurant.  Anyway, we had a good dinner.  The pulled pork was as good as what we'd had the night before, and Gibson's features the region's characteristic white barbecue sauce.  Princesca loved it, and while I thought it was good it basically tasted like vinegar to me, which you can get in a Carolina-style BBQ sauce without the mayonnaise that makes Alabama sauce white.  They had really good hush puppies there, too.  For dessert lusti and Princesca got coconut pie, which they proclaimed to be outstanding, and I got pecan pie... also fantastic.

THE LIST:  Believe it or not the Languishite who got discussed the most was Zoupa, and only because for some reason we could all remember his real name, but not his Languish nickname, so we spent an embarrassing portion of the meetup trying to remember (old people problems ).  Beyond him, we discussed past meetups we'd had, so some names that came up in that context were Yi, grumbler, Berkut, Tim, Wags, Meri, KRonn, etc.  lusti liked the story I told about Valmy when we met him; he was in Boston for a friend's wedding and agreed to meet us and Tim at a Mexican joint in Sudbury but didn't have a car so he walked like 10-15 miles.   IIRC Tim gave him a ride back so at least he didn't have to do that both ways.

lusti and Princesca also talked quite a bit about Disney World since she's as obsessed with it as Capturedfairy is.  At the end of the dinner he took a pic of a little Stormtrooper action figure posed with his pie.  I forget the backstory to that but he put it up on Facebook later and a ton of people liked it so it must be some sort of in-joke with his peeps or something.

[lustindarkness]

Yes, The List included everyone we have met and some of the facebook ones. Also just about every main character was mentioned. 

Stormtrooper has traveled the world with me. He was given to me by my kids to protect me during my first deployment. Since then he has traveled with me everywhere.

It was a very nice meet, food was good, company was better. I shall let you know when I head to KY, Harlan County I think it is, not sure when.