Blue Highways: Crisfield, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

As people across the United States settle down today to tuck into turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce on this unique American holiday of Thanksgiving, I will reflect on some other unique relics of America: it's small town museums and monuments.  If you're traveling back from the holidays, consider stopping in to some of these places if you run across them on the way (and if they're open!).  If you want to see where you can find the Great Pyramid of Crisfield, locate it right here on the map!

Book Quote

"'...There's the sight of sights in Crisfield.'

"'Where?'

"'Right there.  The pyramid.  An exact scale model of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Cairo, Egypt.  Orientated exactly the same.  On the twenty-first of December, the tip of the shadow falls at the same compass point just like in Egypt - except for a small difference caused by latitude.'

"The Great Pyramid of Crisfield was six feet three inches high - not as tall as an NBA guard.  Goldsmith and his sons had designed and built the poured concrete monument to commemorate the national bicentennial; inside they had placed photographs, Nanticoke arrowheads, phonograph records, and other items."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

A photo of the Great Pyramid of Crisfield. Photo at the MarylandNewszap.com website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Crisfield, Maryland

Some of the most interesting places that I've visited, in my years of traveling in the United States, have been the monuments and museums that are found in small towns.  Unlike other places that you might travel to when you're making your vacation trips, these are purely local and often might seem to be only of interest to the local residents.  But you are missing out on a lot if you miss these sights.

The small-town museum, for example, is a vanishing piece of Americana that can range from informative to just weird.  Many of them look like someone just started collecting stuff, and put the stuff in the building.  The better ones are usually organized around a theme.  For instance, if a town made its name as a mining town then the ongoing theme throughout the museum would be one where mining is the common thread that links all the exhibits.

However, that is not always the case in the small-town museums.  Some of them look like someone just collected knick-knacks and other junk and called it a museum.  The theme may be lost or nonexistent.  There may seem like there is no rhyme nor reason to exhibits.  Examples of local minerals might sit in a display case next to a 1920s radio that sat in someone's house before it was donated to the museum, next to which is displayed a tire that was replaced on a celebrity's car as he passed through in the 1950s.  I know that some people get a little put off or even annoyed by such disorganization, but I don't.

The reason I don't get annoyed is because my life is often organized in that kind of haphazard manner.  In that kind of disorganization, I feel at home.  Also, when things aren't organized according to any kind of discernible system, you can find incredibly interesting and sometimes very strange things just by taking your time and poking around.  Perhaps, poking around in the dusty corners, you might come across a stuffed two-headed calf or sheep that was born on a ranch 50 years prior and which was taken to the taxidermist after its death, displayed at the rancher's home until he died, and then given to the museum.  Or, you might find something gross and disgusting sitting in a 70 year old bottle of formaldehyde.  Perhaps you'll find letters written from a town society girl at the turn of the 20th century, in language that was racy for the time, to the mayor with whom she was having an affair right under the nose of her physician husband and the mayor's respected wife.

Often these types of museums are presided over by one of two kinds of people.  Either they are extremely garrulous, willing to tell you about every little thing that happened in the town in the past 150 years, or they might be extremely introverted, and annoyed if you ask them even the smallest question.  The latter type of person seems to want nothing more than for you to leave so that they can go back to passing time with the ghosts and relics of their town's past.  Both types of persons seem to be relics themselves.  They seem to be an indelible part of these little museums, and they are as much on display for anyone who cares to visit as any of the other items scattered around the rooms.

In other words, you'll find the scrapbook of life in these small town museums.  As you walk through the dusty corridors, you'll turn pages of memories of little moments and what seemed at the time to be momentous events, frozen in time in a dusty, forgotten corner of a small town museum in an out of the way corner of a small town in a corner of a rural state.

Similarly, the small monuments to this or that in little towns are also filled with meaning, sometimes just not the meaning we can immediately understand.  There are always the monuments to the wars, which one can find in various little places.  Obviously, these memorialize townspeople lost in world conflicts.

But then, one can find things like the replica of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Crisfield.  If you wonder why the monument and time capsule was turned into a replica of the pyramid, so do I.  The answer is only in the mind of the creator.  When my wife and I were traveling across Florida, a state full of weird and strange things and creations whose full purpose were only known to their creators, we found a "Monument of States" in Kissimmee, where each state of the union contributed a rock to build a 50 foot or so high column.  It sits there, sort of forgotten.

The true treasures are the little exhibits, monuments and museums truly off the beaten path.  Near Cedar Crest, New Mexico, you can find the Tinkertown Museum, which was the brainchild of an artist who created whole little worlds made up of carved wooden figures and found objects.  It has a cousin in the UCM (Get it?  You-See-Em?) Museum in Abita Springs, Louisiana which was modeled on the same idea.  Sometimes, people just put up their own little museums in their yard, like the Bone Lady near Cerillos, New Mexico (though I'm not sure that she is still there).  There are weird little places everywhere, like the National Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin or the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California.  I still remember stopping in Virginia City, Nevada, a major tourist trap made out of a picturesque former mining town, and just off the main strip where t-shirt and trinket shops reign, there was a Museum of Radio History that was small, unpretentious and fascinating.  My wife, just beginning to get into radio journalism, loved it.

I would encourage you, if you're ever traveling, to seek out these strange places and exhibits and marvel at the care and creativity that goes into preserving the past and creating for the future.  You can find a great guide to unique attractions at Roadside America's website.  I check it out whenever I head someplace just to see if there's a sight that is unique or interesting.  Get out there and see some of this stuff, all of you Littourati out there, if only because it's uniquely, fantastically and weirdly American.

Musical Interlude

What a find for this post!  Strange Museum by Paul Weller.  Go see a few of them, people!

If you want to know more about Crisfield

Baydreaming.com: Crisfield
City of Crisfield
Crisfield Area Chamber of Commerce
Crisfield Events
Wikipedia: Crisfield

Next up: Ewell, Maryland

Blue Highways: Woodstock, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

Sometimes it's very nice to stop in a quaint, picturesque, historic town and just hang around.  As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) gets the feel of Vermont in Woodstock, I'll look at historic towns and how sometimes they are what they seem, and other times they are not.  To locate Woodstock (sorry folks, not the Woodstock of concert fame), find your way to the map.

Book Quote

"It looked like the set for an Andy Hardy movie - things quaint in the manner of Norman Rockwell...Maybe the town wasn't the prettiest village in America, but if the townspeople wanted to make the claim, I wouldn't have disputed them.  It was Woodstock, Vermont.

"....the village lived by the tourist - the well heeled tourist.  But few places in the country fused tourism and town life so well.  In Woodstock, they were parts of the whole.

"If the village had a fault, it lay in both a hubris about its picturesqueness and in its visitors with new money and new facades...."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

Covered bridge in Woodstock, Vermont. Photo by "traaaacey" and seen at Tripadvisor. Click on photo to go to host page.

Woodstock, Vermont

I grew up in the shadow of a town like Woodstock.  I saw "shadow" because really, Mendocino, California wasn't a big place.   A few hundred people in a picturesque, New England village by the ocean.  Mendocino looked so much like a New England town that it was used as such for the Murder, She Wrote mystery series that had a long run on television.

But I didn't grow up there.  I grew up in Fort Bragg, it's more down to earth, blue collar, lumber town sister about seven miles north of Mendocino.  Where Mendocino was cute, Fort Bragg was gritty.  Where Mendocino was picturesque, Fort Bragg was utilitarian.  Where Mendocino had a great coastal access, Fort Bragg was blocked from the coast by a large lumber mill.  Where Mendocino was filled with "hippies," really counter-cultural artists, writers and musicians, Fort Bragg was filled with loggers, millworkers, fishermen, and other salt-of-the-earth types.

I wouldn't say there was a lot of animosity between the two towns, though one thing was clear.  The well-heeled tourists went to Mendocino and only really used Fort Bragg if they couldn't find lodging.  After all, while I was growing up the options to stay in Mendocino were limited.  Things were more expensive in Mendocino also - restaurants and lodging all cost more.  Now it's a little different.  Fort Bragg, since the closing of the lumber mill, has marketed itself to tourists, with much success.  Festivals, art, restaurants and other attractions, such as the Skunk Train, have managed to draw a lot of tourists to my home town.  Yet if I compare the two, Mendocino is still, by far, perceived as the more arty, counter-cultural, foodie, and picturesque of the two.  And, it prides itself on that.

I find it interesting that all the states that I have lived in or visited have some such type of town.  It is usually a town or village that has tried to keep a flavor of its historical and cultural past, or one epoch of its historical and cultural past, even if that flavor has been sanitized somewhat.  Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where you can see a colonial town with reenactments.  Cedarburg, Wisconsin.  Fredericksburg, Texas. Virginia City, Nevada.  Sometimes a state doesn't have to work too hard to maintain that cultural heritage.  In Shipshewana, Indiana cars mingle with Amish buggies on the main street, and men with straw hats and long beard and women with gingham dresses and bonnets knock shoulders with tourists in shorts and t-shirts.

What I really find fascinating is that with all our technology, and all our modern progress, we still feel that it's important to have these historic, picturesque, quaint, throwbacks to an earlier time.  A time when there were few telephones if any at all, and televisions, computers and the Internet were not even a remote conception.  What is it in our psyche that preserving these time capsules, state by state, is so important?  Where I live, in Albuquerque, nobody would ever think of razing Old Town for new business today, even as most of the action takes place in the newer downtown or in the even newer Nob Hill district.

Even more interesting is that some places are so adamant in preserving some ideal sense of past that they actually cover up the real past, intentionally or not, to create that idealized vision.  Or sometimes, the actual past has been covered up already, and has to be resurrected.

For example, underneath many of the brown adobe-like walls of Santa Fe, for instance, are original brick and mortar buildings that were converted after a law passed in the 1950s mandating that all new and rebuilt buildings take on the pueblo adobe style.  While there has been important historic preservation of the actual adobe buildings that remain, many others that look adobe, especially the two-story downtown buildings, are not.  A building style, adobe, that was once considered backward and inferior to the false-front saloon style buildings of the old west, is now celebrated again and even mandated by Santa Fe law.  In this case, buildings that were historic in their own right were changed to reflect an even earlier history.

We saw this in California also, where in San Diego preservation of its Old Town has been very important for the city.  Yet in many ways historical preservation covers up much that was neglected.  My wife visited the Old Town State Historical Park museum, and most of the pottery was collected from New Mexico pueblos and is not indigenous, even though it might be similar to pottery once made in the San Diego area.  San Diego is also one of the earliest homes to a phenomena I have touched upon in other posts.  Helen Hunt Jackson wrote a wildly successful novel in the late 1800s about the Santa Diego area called Ramona.  It was a romantic view of the indigenous Native Americans of the area through the eyes of a half Scots-American, half Indian woman.  The novel was so popular it turned San Diego into a tourist destination, especially for its depictions of the Spanish missions and the "nobility" of the Natives.  To appeal to tourists, entrepreneurs marketed area attractions for their supposed connections to Ramona, including Estudillo House in Old Town San Diego which began to call itself "Ramona's Marriage Place."

This romanticized past, taking hold of the public imagination in a time when the Native American population of Southern California had been reduced by disease and the oppressive governments of Spain, Mexico and the United States, put San Diego on the map and sparked a rejuvenation of interest in saving what little remained of that earlier time.  Because there was so little, San Diego had to recreate that past, but since the past was romanticized, it never quite existed in that way to begin with.

By far, for me, the most successful and authentic representations of the past and of cultures have been in cultures that preserve themselves.  For example, some New Mexico pueblos have done very meticulously preserved their heritage because these places are where Native Americans still work and live using techniques that date a thousand years.  In Zuni Pueblo, Native women still cook bread in horno ovens.  In Sky City at Acoma Pueblo, the historic adobe town on the top of a small, 300 foot high mesa, about 30 families still maintain homes, sell art and pottery, and try to continue the lifestyle of their ancestors.

Other places around the United States have similar experiences - the Amish communities for example.  Sure, such places appeal to tourists with their arts and culture, and have been come destinations.  But these villages and cultures also strive to maintain an authenticity because the culture of those people, Native and Amish, depends on the survival of their communities.  That's the difference between the "cute" American towns that echo the past, and the places where cultures live in both the past and present.  If Mendocino, Williamsburg, Cedarburg, Virginia City or even Woodstock, Vermont disappear, American culture will survive.  If Acoma Pueblo, or Zuni Pueblo, or even Shipshewana, Indiana disappear, it will be a huge blow to these unique cultures that live in and around modern American culture, but also live apart from it as well.

Musical Interlude

There's been a number of songs about Mendocino, the village I mentioned above near where I grew up.  Here's a song, Talk to Me of Mendocino, performed by songwriting legends Kate and Anna McGarrigle with Scottish chanteuse Karen Matheson.

And for a more upbeat vibe, here's an old song by the Sir Douglas Quintet with their classic number Mendocino, performed on Hugh Hefner's Playboy After Dark television show in 1969.

If you want to know more about Woodstock

Billings Farm and Museum
Woodstock, Vermont
Wikipedia: Woodstock

Next up:  Mount Tom, Vermont