Day 2 - Wild and Wonderful Again at DennyGibson.com

Day 2: December 22, 2021
A Marietta Day
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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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