Exploring the Heel of Illinois, or I do not Know Where I Am
Going through the Heel of Illinois or I do not Know Where I’m We had a destination whenever we started. It was the blue grass festival in Bean Blossom Indiana. This year was special because it celebrated the 100th birthday from the father of blue grass, Bill Monroe. We’d attended once before but never camped so we picked a sizable open field dreaming about some peace and quiet. This property used to be Bill Monroe’s home and farm where he lived and enjoyed making music with friends and fox hunitng. We followed the intense sound of strumming banjos and guitars to the stage. Soon we were taping our toes and reminiscing concerning the songs our grand daddies sang despite the fact that we grew up in Indianapolis far from the hills of southern Indiana. Dr. Ralph Stanley topped from the evening together with his rendition of “Oh Death, Won’t You Spare Me Over for an additional Year,” made famous within the movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? We made our way to our tent at about ten o’clock and lay out for any peaceful sleep. Unfortunately the kids on golf carts had other ideas. These were still racing round the field, revving their engines and shining their headlights into our tent when I finally looked at my watch. It read a shocking 2:30 a.m., and that we pulled up our tent stakes and headed for Nashville, Indiana along with a Comfort Inn were they were doing an audit and couldn’t access the pc. We finally got to sleep three in the morning.
The next day we were on our way to New Harmony a place in which the Rappites and Owens had tried to establish Utopian societies within the 19th century, to go to my friend, a painter who paints subjects in the nineteen fifties and architecture along old highways like US 40 and Route 66. Serendipitously she found an old drive-in restaurant on state road 66 and converted it into a studio. We enjoyed seeing pictures of James Dean, Hank Williams, women in full skirts and high heel shoes ironing with their new Steam-o-matic’s or admiring their snow white electric automatic washers or ranges. One couple danced around the kitchen in front of their new refrigerator appearing like they had just returned in the prom. Giant frozen treats cones atop tiny restaurants promised respite from the summer heat with no worries about fat or calories. Donrrrt worry about Chesterfields or Lucky Strikes either. No worries period. Just the promise of suburban bliss or Utopia 50′s style.
It is then that people strayed in the beaten path by crossing the toll bridge just a block from my friend’s studio over the Wabash into southern Illinois. Here was a different world which we’d unsuspectingly applied for the prior evening whenever we went to hear a folksinger in Grayville. Everything seemed fine if a bit surreal. He sang of a minor league baseball player who stayed in Lynchburg and ended up with a pinched nerve. Several songs later he launched into “South of Solitude” about entering into the labyrinthine roads of southern Illinois and becoming lost inducing the lyrics, “I don’t know where I am,” and ending using the lyrics, “I don’t know who I am.” We didn’t know after that it, but we would soon live the song. There have been a great total of nine or ten people in attendance, four who were some young German guys not paying too much focus on the singer. We weren’t too surprised to see them as southern Indiana abounds in descendents of German settlers and German restaurants. Travelers will never be too much from a good sausage and sauerkraut dinner. But here in Grayville the waitresses seemed quite surprised and happy to discover their whereabouts because they actually spoke German and were young and not way too hard about the eyes. We found out that they are in town to work within the coal mine for eight days and were enjoying some Grayville nightlife. The singer ended with some Dylan songs and the friend accompanied him about the harmonica. “That’s what you get for Loving Me” seemed appropriate to finish the set, and the German guys smiled and said goodbye in English.
The next day, at the suggestion of my pal, we ventured over the bridge again following a vintage Airstream travel trailor, which again lent an air from the fifty’s, into surreal southern Illinois again to see the Garden of the Gods. We had seen the main one of the identical name in Colorado Springs and were not expecting much in comparison. But we were pleasantly surprised by the beautiful and strange looking rock formations in the Shawnee National Forest. The wilderness area is over 3 hundred and twenty million years of age and includes over 3,300 acres of lovely old growth forest. The sediment rock in this area has ended four miles deep and the fractured bedrock has established some interesting rock formations that represent various objects like anvils, camels, and mushrooms. Next we traveled south to the Ohio River and saw Pirates’ Cave at Cave in the Rock. Two riverboats had been built coupled with burned here, however there was only the ferry taking cars and trucks over the river at no charge. As we reached the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, a truck by having an oversize load as an earth mover was waiting to board the ferry. I was glad we had crossed together with small cars.
We were now about the Trail of Tears which the original Americans have been instructed to take when their land was confiscated through the pioneer settlers. In 1830, Congress passed a bill permitting the removal of all native Indians living east of the Mississippi River. For the following twenty years, Indians were marched west to reservations in Arkansas and Oklahoma, including the bands from the Illini Indians in Illinois. Within the Fall and Winter of 1838-39, Cherokee Indians were marched out of Georgia and the Carolinas across Southern Illinois to reservations in the western world. It had been estimated that two thousand to 4,000 Cherokee men, women, and kids died during this one thousand mile journey west. It became known as the Trail of Tears due to the many hardships and sorrows it delivered to the Indians. The Buel Family told the storyline of the ancestor Sarah (Jones) Buel who gone to live in Golconda on Sept. 2, 1836. Two years later the Cherokees passed through Golconda. “My great-great-grandmother was acookin’ pumpkin an’ keepin’ track of her baby when she heard a strange noise outside. Before she knew it, the leading door popped open and there stood two Cherokee Indian braves just alookin’ at her….They’d smelled the pumpkin cookin’ as they went by, but my grandmother had not a way of knowin’ that. Finally, she understood the things they wanted, and those Indians were mighty thankful when she gave them a few of the cooked pumpkin. I ‘spect she was just as thankful when they left,” she added.*
Our trip in to Kentucky was mostly through farm country so we headed back to Illinois lured by Old Shawnee Town into the spotlight. When we arrived it was not only old but a ghost town. A massive Greek architectural style bank dwarfed everything else around the corner. We later learned that it was the very first bank to be chartered in Illinois in 1816. It had been also the first building used solely to accommodate a bank in Illinois and was adopted until the 1920s. Someone told us it had refused a loan to a bank in Chicago if this was first developing, because it didn’t think Chicago would be a successful settlement. HogDaddy’s bar was over the deserted street from the bank. An indication about the door said closed for that winter, but it was obviously closed for the summer too. We also learned later that the worse flooding in decades had closed the town down. Two wooden cut-out figures of Lewis and Clark indicated that they had passed through Shawnee town, however they looked as forlorn once we did whenever we discovered HogDaddy’s was closed. We drove south on vacation thinking i was about the Lincoln trail but wound up on a gravel road. Good sense might have dictated going back to the main road, but we desired to see the confluence from the Wabash and also the Ohio. We were soon lost in a labyrinth of corn fields. We had a deer and her fawn in the center of the street drinking from a mud puddle. We kept turning right when we must have turned left to return to the main road, but the river beckoned.
Then without warning our engine sputtered and stopped. Walking was out of the question in the heat and humidity. We waited hoping the engine would start but after 30 minutes, we tried with a tow truck. Luckily we were able to reach Triple A, but weren’t so successful in attempting to tell them were i was. “Well there’s a corn field about the right along with a forest on the left, and we were on Round Pond Road, then Long Pond road, after which Pond Church Road, then Big Hill Road.” In the end were calling, a farmer arrived, and that we flagged him down. He was a gift from Heaven as he had GPS and gave us our coordinates. Even more amazing was he knew the guy i was talking to on the phone personally despite the fact that he was in Indiana. They had developed together and also the tow truck guy knew the farms bordering the street where we were. The nice farmer stayed and talked to us before tow truck arrived. He had some sad stories about flooding in the region causing late planting and ammonia used in farming being stolen by people making meth. We had the sensation that people is probably not safe despite the fact that not even close to the large city. An even sadder story involved his son, who had served two stints in Iraq, returning home and drowning while swimming inside a quarry.
The tow truck guy soon arrived, greeted his friend, and invited us to climb in to the front seat of his truck. He continued the storyplot of woe stating that the economy in southern Illinois had been ruined through the politicians in Chicago even though some of them have been delivered to Washington. He also mentioned meth problems in the area acerbated by the bad economy and worse weather. We again felt like we didn’t know where we were, or possibly we had strayed into Mexico. However, if we crossed back to Indiana, he cheered up just a little naming various industrial sites that we passed such as Marathon and Bristol Myers Squib. Ethanol plants were prospering using the corn we’d been lost in. It seemed more industrialized, but not necessarily better. But in his opinion there were more business incentives offered in Indiana and better politicians. He was glad to relate his life story saying he’d thought about being a chiropractor but had chosen nursing. Burnout caused him to go into business as a service station owner. When his business in Illinois was not doing so well he asked God to give him an indication if he should move into Indiana and start a towing service. That night the rooftop on his filling station caved in. He now does missionary work every year in Honduras with the Baptist Church where his training as a nurse serves him and them well. He treats people for everything from parasites to gangrene.
These guys from southern Illinois were a couple of the nicest guys I have ever met and representative of others who want to survive in spite of large corporations overtaking family farms and politicians passing legislation not favorable to smaller businesses, and they are retaining their values as good Samaritans as well. We also appreciated the 277,500 acre Shawnee national Forest using its diverse population of plant, animal, and bird life. It offers habitat to many endangered or threatened species and it is a beautiful spot to visit. It’s hard to think that el born area used to be covered by a shallow ocean and inhabited by sea creatures prior to the Mississippian people, the Illini and other Indian tribes, the French, British and finally settlers of English, German, Scottish and Irish descent, and even freed slaves arrived. If we travel to the Ohio River Valley in southern Illinois again, it will be to see Metropolis, the home of Super Man and Harrah’s Metropolis casino/hotel.
The tourist industry is big here also due to Kincaid, the home of a complex society that was area of the Mississippian culture. People first found its way to the Ohio River Valley around 12,000 B.C. The culture reached its peak about 1100 AD and a large city was built at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Its people built large earthworks and related structures, many of which remain. Mississippian culture regional centers arose throughout the Ohio minimizing Mississippian valleys, one at Angel Mounds in Evansville which we would visit later. The rivers were part of widespread trading routes. The French settled in the region in 1757 prior to the victorious British found claim the territory. Between the 1830s, Southern Illinois became referred to as Egypt or Little Egypt because settlers from northern Illinois came south to buy grain during years once they had poor harvests in the 1830s just like ancient people had traveled to Egypt to buy grain (Genesis 41:57 and 42:1-3). Later, towns in Southern Illinois were named Cairo, Thebes, and Karnak, as in the nation of Egypt. I was pleased to reach Evansville and turn our car over to Pep Boys.
The following day we rented a car and went to the Evansville museums about the riverfront and visited Angel Mounds. From 1100 to 1450 A. D., an urban area on this website was home to people of the Middle Mississippian culture, who engaged in hunting and farming on the rich bottom lands from the Ohio River. Several thousand people lived in this town protected with a stockade made of wattle and daub. Because Angel Mounds was a chiefdom (the house of the chief) it was the regional center of a big community that grew outward from this for many miles. Roving bands of Shawnee, Miami, and other groups moved into this area about 1650 A. D., long after the Mississippians abandoned the city at Angel. Later, white settlers farmed the land. Similar to the Indigenous peoples, these were lured through the rich soil and temperate growing season. Among the families to stay in Southwestern Indiana was headed by Mathias Angel. He’d a farmstead on the site of Angel Mounds from 1852 until his death in 1899. His brothers owned adjacent farms, and also the land remained in the Angel family until 1938.
Angel Mounds State Historic Website is named following this family. I’d participated in an archaeological dig near there during college at Indiana University. We lived at Angel Mounds and used the Glen Black Laboratory there. WPA workers had excavated at Angel Mounds during the thirties. There is a restored village along with a museum. We’d photographed the site using box cameras and developed large prints in the dark room. We’d used surveying equipment to locate our website in the center of an area. We found post holes that had been a home, bones, pottery, and even an inscribed stone that appeared as if a numbering system. Description of how the probably use today’s technology for example photography and GPS to find and study the ancient technologies of the inhabitants which included chipping flint spear points, decorating with wax resist pottery techniques, and basket weaving.
We ventured back to Kentucky again to Henderson to see the John James Audubon Museum. He had a fascinating life drawing birds, but left his devoted Quaker wife alone for years at any given time and finally needed to declare bankruptcy. He was a dedicated artist and the son later joined him in the adoration for recording birds and animals within the wilderness. This museum has a complete Double Elephant edition of Birds of America, the need for which is within the millions. It’s on display only one page at any given time, understandably. This museum was worth the eleven mile trip from Evansville. We had to laugh because every place we went on this trip appeared to be eleven miles from the previous place or, otherwise, a multiple of eleven. Eleven is our lucky number! We picked up our car from Pep Boys and headed home. The windshield wipers came on whenever we used the turn signal, but a minimum of the fuel pump was working, and we were on the road again. My next story may be about all the places our car has broken down and the opportunities it has presented to become familiar with people in the area proving that older vehicles get their advantages. Road trips within the Ohio Valley are always fun and provide numerous opportunities for enjoying nature, traveling through history and meeting fascinating people.