Blue Highways: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

As we continue into North Carolina, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) begins a quest to find information on family history, specifically his namesake William Trogdon, a patriot during the Revolutionary War.  We'll go along with him, and I'll look at more of my own search for my family history.  We'll also touch on Chapel Hill and its attractions.  Click on the map to see how far we've come!  Comments from readers are always welcome!

Book Quote

"As soon as I could, I took state 54 to Chapel Hill, a town of trees..."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 1

Downtown Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

The name of Chapel Hill draws up memories for me of watching March Madness college basketball when I was younger.  Every year, it seemed, the University of North Carolina was the team to beat and was in the Final Four.  I would agonize in the days before the shot clock when they got ahead and then put into practice their Four Corners offense, in which they would simply pass the ball around the corners and not take a shot for minutes at a time until the clock ran down.  They were the team I hated to see win.  Nowadays, they still field good teams, but my sports hatred in college basketball has switched to Duke, just down the road.

LHM simply stops in Chapel Hill to find a library to find information on his ancestor.  He describes it as a city of trees, but otherwise does not spend much time there to find out what the city is like or about.  In my search for information on my grandfather, which I started writing about in my last post, I did something similar.  While driving on a business trip from Milwaukee to the East Coast, I made a detour down to Akron, Ohio to see if I could find any information.  I remember it was a dark, rainy day as I found the main public library.  I went to Akron because my grandfather's death certificate said that he was born in Akron, so I tried to look up a birth record.  Unfortunately, I coudn't find one, and later learned that birth records were somewhat sketchy in the era in which my grandfather was born.  If a birth was in a hospital, there was a better chance of finding a birth record.  But if it was at home, there was practically no chance of tracking one down.  I also learned during this time how difficult it was (this was just before the Internet became really popular), to use census records.  They weren't indexed, just "soundex"ed.  In other words, you could find people whose last names began with "h" but they weren't alphabetized.

LHM was looking for information even earlier than I.  The internet was really a future dream at the time.  At least he was looking for someone who was considered a patriot.  If you try to find ordinary people, the run of the mill person who didn't really make a name for him or herself, the opportunities to find information about them were very limited.

Now, genealogical databases are everywhere on the internet, and some are enormous.  The biggest one on the internet is Ancestry.com, which has ties with the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints.  For a subscription, or even for free, you can find information on individuals past and present that past genealogists could only dream about.

I often wonder, now that everything is being digitized, stored on drives and discs, and fully accessible through databases, if anonymity is a thing of the past.  I can look up information about pretty much anyone I want.  Unless they are completely "off the grid," something will turn up.  Sometimes it is helpful information, sometimes embarrassing.  Totally by accident, for instance, as I was doing some research on Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) for my job on the internet, I happened across an arrest report of a person I know.  Should I have known about it?  The fact is that I might have never have learned about it if the internet didn't exist.  In some ways, knowing about the arrest puts the person in a different light for me and brought out an internal response of concern, but my awareness of the situation may be embarrassing to that person.

I'm not sure if access to so much information is a good thing.  I know that when I need such information, it is helpful to have it.  When I don't want the information, or I don't want people knowing mine, it is frightening to know that someone could get information that is embarrassing or inimical to my interests.  But I bet if William Least Heat-Moon had access to such information when he made his Blue Highways trip and stopped at a library in North Carolina town he called a city of trees, he would have probably had an easier time finding information on William Trogdon.

If you want to know more about Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill and Orange County Visitors Bureau
Chapel Hill Magazine Blog
Chapel Hill News and Advocate (newspaper)
Chapel Hill Watch (blog)
Independent Weekly (alternative weekly of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill)
Town of Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Wikipedia: Chapel Hill

Next up:  Ramseur, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAfter a long trip, we leave Tennessee and enter the state that was first in flight.  We are also just over 1000 miles from the start in Columbia, Missouri, and we move from Part 1, in which we were traveling east, to Part 2, in which the road in Blue Highways takes a southeasterly swing.  In this post we'll whip around Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) doesn't have much to say about these two places as he doesn't pass through them on blue highways, but on the hated interstate.  However, he does start thinking about family history.  I will too.  Click on the map to see where these cities are situated.

Book Quote

"Blood.  It came to me that I had been generally retracing the migration of my white-blooded clan from North Carolina to Missouri, the clan of a Lancashireman who settled in the Piedmont in the eighteenth century...

"Highway 421 became I-85 and whipped me around Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  For a few miles I suffered the tyranny of the freeway and watched rear bumpers and truck mudflaps."

Blue Highways:  Part 2, Chapter 1

Downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

This post is ostensibly about Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  Yet, as you may have learned, often my posts are not exactly about the places named.  When I read a book, places and images correspond to images and memories in my own life.  So in a sense, you are reading in this blog what I am thinking as I process those thoughts upon my own reading of Blue Highways.  LHM doesn't really say much about these places, and North Carolina is one of the ten or so states that I have never set foot in, so I don't have any experiences that I can add that would be of any value to you if you want to know more about these places.  I have assembled a few sites below so that you can explore for yourself.

The images that come to mind for me are located in the first part of the quote I cite above.  LHM realizes that he is tracing in reverse the route of his ancestors.  The search for one's roots has become very popular over the past few years, especially with the growth of the internet, which has allowed people to access each other's data and fill in gaps in history that may have existed for years.  Many people have become so good at finding bits of history and genealogical facts that they are almost like amateur family history detectives.

I became an unwitting beneficiary of this phenomena.  I'm going to touch on this story briefly and fill in gaps over the course of the next couple of posts.  The backstory is that I'm adopted, but I was always interested in solving a mystery about my adoptive father's own father.  We never knew much about him, and any records he might have had were lost in a fire.  His sons, my father and his brothers, never really knew much about his life prior to their births.  Their mother died when they were young, so they couldn't learn anything from her.  So, nobody knew where Marion came from, other than back east.

Occasionally, I would put his name into Google to see if anything would pop up.  There were mostly false leads, other people with his name that had no relation to the family.  But one day, about two years ago, I put his name in and got a hit.  Someone, in a genealogical database, had filled in his and his wife's name.  I contacted the person, and because she had an interest she embarked with me on a fact finding mission.  I filled in some gaps for her, and because she was passionate about geneaology, she was able to use those facts to find out more about my grandfather.  We learned that he apparently left a family behind in Ohio, came out to California, and married my grandmother and fathered my father and his brothers.  It was a sad story, because he left a fatherless child, Julian, behind.  I have recently made contact with a set of cousins in Ohio, descendents of Julian, a half-brother that my father and his brothers never knew they had.  Unfortunately, all of the brothers are now dead and never met each other.  But I was able to let my last surviving uncle know about all of this before he died, and my cousin let me know how much he appreciated my efforts to discover family history.

I still don't know what led my grandfather to leave a family, nor why he never told his sons about his past.  It all seems shrouded in mystery and pain and he apparently was not a happy person.  But a recent letter from one of my newly discovered cousins said that she hoped that old family wounds could be healed by this new contact.  I hope so too.

LHM, in his next couple of stops, will discover more about his own family history.  As an adoptee, I never really gave the importance of family history much consideration until recently, because my adopted family's history was never really my own.  I didn't know mine, that is, until I met my genealogical detective friend online.  I'll tell more about that as we move through the next posts.

For more about Winston-Salem and Greensboro, see below.  We're in tobacco country now, so you'll recognize some names.  Winston-Salem is the home of RJ Reynolds Tobacco, creator of some of the most recognizable brands of cigarettes.  Enjoy checking these places out!

Greensboro, North Carolina

If you want to know more about Winston-Salem and Greensboro

Dishing it Out (Winston-Salem food blog)
Downtown Winston-Salem (blog)
Eating Up Greensboro (Greensboro food blog)
Greensboring (blog)
Greensboro Convention and Visitors Bureau
Greensboro News-Record (newspaper)
Life in Forsyth (blog)
Salem College
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Visit Winston-Salem
Wake Forest University
Wikipedia: Greensboro
Wikipedia: Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem (blog)
Winston-Salem Journal (newspaper)
Winston-Salem State University
Yes! Weekly (Greensboro alternative newspaper)

Next up: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Jonesboro (Jonesborough), Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIt's amazing the little facts of history learned when reading this book.  First we learn of a secret Tennessee city.  Now we learn of the lost state of Franklin.  Click on the map thumbnail to see the location of this important town in the establishment of a forgotten American state.

Book Quote

"The 14th state in the Union, the first formed after the original thirteen, was Franklin and its capital Jonesboro....But history is a fickle thing, and now Jonesboro, two centures old, is only the seat of Washington County, which also was once something else - the entire state of Tennessee....

"Main Street in Jonesboro, solid with step-gabled antebellum buildings, ran into a dell to parallel a stream; houses and steeples rose from encircling hills.  After breakfast, I walked snowy Main to the Chester Inn, a wooden building with an arched double gallery, where Andrew Jackson almost got tarred and feathered, for what I don't know.  Charles Dickens spent the night here as did Andrew Johnson, James Polk, and Martin Van Buren (whose autobiography never mentions his wife)."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 19

Jonesborough as William Least-Heat Moon might have walked it

Jonesboro (Jonesborough), Tennessee

Tennessee is full of secrets.  That's the conclusion I'm coming to as we make this last stop in the state with William Least-Heat Moon (LHM).  I know that in the heady days after the Revolutionary War, nothing was completely settled and the United States had some precarious moments.  Lest we think that the new American country was in a love fest with each other and completely united, remember that the new country was rife with divisions.  Slavery was an issue that was beginning to be recognized as a major divide between states.  The new U.S. government, now faced with responsibilities of running a country, had to now impose its own taxes, and taxes were just as popular then as they are now, which is to say not very popular.

The State of Franklin was born out of confusion and frustration with the new federal government of the Thirteen States and anger at the government of North Carolina.  The federal government was deeply in debt, so North Carolina ceded 29 million acres of its territory in what is now Tennessee to the federal government to help out.  The people living in this area were deeply fearful that Congress would become desperate and sell the land to France or Spain.  When Congress didn't act on the North Carolina gift, North Carolina took back its territory a few weeks later.  However, the damage was done, and a group of counties got together and declared self-government.

They named their state Frankland, and petitioned the Congress to grant them statehood.  Seven of the thirteen colonies supported their petition.  However, they needed the support of nine.  The Frankland legislature then changed the name to Franklin, in order to hopefully draw the support of Benjamin Franklin, but this did not work.  North Carolina sent in troops and established a territorial government, and for a time two governments worked independently of each other.  Finally, the arrest of the leader of Franklin, John Sevier, and increasing attacks by Indians on area settlements led to a reunification with North Carolina, who could send troops to aid in defense, and the pardon of Sevier.  North Carolina later ceded the territory again to the U.S. government, and it eventually became the eastern part of Tennessee, of which Sevier was the first governor.

One person of later historical importance born in Franklin while it was a state was pioneer and participant at the Alamo, Davy Crockett.

I find it very interesting that a group of people, right after our country became independent, decided to secede from North Carolina and join the United States in the name of protecting their interests and freedoms.  Lest we think that the fledging U.S. was living high on the euphoria of defeating the British and becoming its own country, it is good to remember that we had our own problems and divisions.  The debt from the war was very high, leaving the new U.S. government in a position of having to impose its own taxes on the citizenry, who just finished fighting a war in part because of taxes.  Taxes were just as popular then as they are today, which is to say not very popular.

Freedom is an ideal with many consequences.  As a professor teaching American government, I constantly lectured on the balancing act between freedom and other ideals, such as order and equality.  The more freedom one wants, the less order can be maintained.  The more freedom one wants, the less equality can be achieved.  The more order one wants, the more freedoms will be taken away.  The more equality one wants, the more freedom is impinged upon.  This is the crux of our political battles today.  American conservatives cry out for more order.  They fund the military to protect the U.S.'s place in the world order.  They decry social freedoms as undermining the moral order.  Liberals demand more equality as the basis of freedoms.  They argue for raising the welfare of the poor and disadvantaged.  They push for equal opportunities for disadvantaged minority populations.  Demands for order and demands for equality both entail government interference in ordinary lives, and curtail freedoms.  Libertarians want to scale government back to its bare essentials, so that freedoms are maximized.  However, a country with many freedoms and little order or equality may lead to class warfare and/or a more dangerous, defend yourself world.  Government does many good things, and provides us with many services and protections that we take for granted.  Thus, maintaining the dream that is the United States of America involves a delicate balancing act.  The State of Franklin could not maintain that balance.  Seceding from North Carolina may have bought them freedom for a time, but they could not maintain order when the US Congress rejected their petition and then Indians began to attack their settlements.  Ultimately, they saw a better mix of freedom and order back under the jurisdiction of North Carolina, and eventually, the State of Tennessee.

The history of Franklin also reminds me of the impermanence of human institutions.  Sometimes this notion can be frightening or depressing.  Franklin didn't last very long, but it is part of a United States that has lasted for about 235 years.  Americans tend to see the United States as a permanent fixture, that we will always be a great nation, but this is not guaranteed.  The entirety of world history indicates that we will wax and wane, and one day disappear.  The Romans had a great empire for nearly 1000 years, yet today their cities are either crumbling away into oblivion or are living museums of impermanence.  In a 1000 years, the United States may not exist anymore, done in by war, pestilence, dwindling natural resources, climate change, or the breakdown of our political system.  Who knows what country or countries, if any, will occupy the geography we now claim as ours?  Perhaps the United States, like Franklin, will be forgotten except by a few - our passage marked by a faded plaque outside a crumbling capitol building in an ancient and deserted city once called Washington.

Yet I also find hope in our impermanence.  The idea that we can leave something that aids or advances humanity, and the potential that our screw-ups will be heeded or perhaps even be fixed after we are gone, makes me believe that there is some sense of cosmic justice.  It's not that what we do now doesn't matter.  It does to us, and perhaps it will to the next generations.  But in the end and on a universal scale, it probably doesn't matter that much, and in the end, as Julian of Norwich once said, all will be well.

If you want to know more about Jonesborough or Franklin

Franklin: The Lost State of America
Historic Jonesborough
History of Western North Carolina: The State of Franklin
Jonesborough Herald and Tribune (newspaper)
Jonesborough Online
State of Franklin History
Town of Jonesborough
Wikipedia: State of Franklin
Wikipedia: Jonesborough

Next up: Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Whitesburg, Bulls Gap and Chuckey, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapMore bang for your click today, as we'll go through three places, but unfortunately, they pass in the blink of an eye.  His goal is Jonesboro (Jonesborough in Google Maps), our next post.  I'm sure I'll have something to say about these two places.  To locate them, click the map thumbnail.

Book Quote

"Snow plastered the highway markers, so I watched the compass and guessed.  The road to Jonesboro via Whitesburg and Chuckey wound about hillocks of snowy trees and houses puffing chimney smoke.  It was like riding through a Currier and Ives monochrome.  Meadowlarks, fluffing full, crouching on fenceposts, held their song for the sun.  A crooked sign:  ICE COLD WATERMELON.

"The highway was once a stage route of inns, but the buildings that had withstood the Civil War weren't surviving the economics of this century.  East of Bulls Gap, surveyor's pennants snapped in the wind.  Another blue road about to join the times.  Taverns and creaky Gen. Mdse. stores (two gas pumps and mongrel on the porch) were going for frontage-road minisupers.  The rill running back and forth under the highway, of course, would have to be straightened to conform to the angles and gradients of the engineers.

"Highway as analog:  social engineers draw blueprints to straighten treacherous and inefficient switchbacks of men with old, curvy notions; taboo engineers lay out federally approved culverts to drain the overflow of passions; mind engineers bulldoze ups and downs to make men level-headed.  Whitman:  'O public road, you express me better than I can express myself.'"

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 18

Abandoned train station in Chuckey, Tennessee

Whitesburg, Bulls Gap and Chuckey, Tennessee

Whitesburg, Bulls Gap and Chuckey are but blips on the map and were probably seen as a flash as LHM drove through them.  What information I could find on them will be at the bottom of the page.

What draws me to these passages is the nature of the road that LHM is trying to convey.  Scenery that looks like Currier and Ives monochromes is one thing.  But the road serves as a gathering place.  Along the road, homes and businesses establish themselves, like cells along arteries in the human body.  Where homes and businesses congregate, towns and cities are established.  The road is a vital link between humanity and economy, and therefore the road itself becomes a metaphor at once for the similarity of human activity and interest, and the sameness of our motivations even in our differences.

LHM lifts a passage from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road.  In the poem, Whitman extols the road and all of its characteristics, from the physical to the metaphysical.  In this one passage, Whitman praises the public road as a means of common use:

Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference nor denial;
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas'd, the illiterate person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar's tramp, the drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,
The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town,
They pass - I also pass - anything passes - none can be interdicted;
None but are accepted - none but are dear to me.

In some ways, the road is truly the great equalizer.  It is the most public of our public works.  We argue over taxes for unemployment, government social programs and military funding, but nobody argues about the need for government to maintain the highways.  We all use them.  We all feel the joy of riding over smooth roads, and the jarring jolts of roads not well maintained.

However, how we use the roads has changed since Whitman's time.  Use of the road was at a slower pace.  You were only as fast as your fastest horse, and your horse would tire after a while.  In traveling the roads, one had to meet people.  One had had a bit more time to notice the variations in scenery and terrain.  One couldn't avoid talking to people on the roads.  There was more time to peruse businesses.  There was more need sometimes to depend on the kindness of strangers.  The road was not only a economic necessity, but a communal experience.

Now, cars fly by at 75 miles per hour on the interstates, and 55-65 mph on LHM's blue highways.  One can pass hours in an untiring car, limited only by the amount of fuel it can hold and the miles per gallon it achieves, without ever talking to another person.  In our self-contained, air conditioned cocoons, we can zip through towns and barely register them.  We need pay no attention to the businesses that make the livelihoods of local folks.  We may even get annoyed if we have to talk to anyone at all.

Progress smoothes out the rough roads, straightens the turns, fills in the dips and levels the rises, making sure that variation doesn't slow us down and makes us, as LHM says, "level-headed."  Any turns still left are gripped with hi-tech tires that allow us to get around them faster so that we can get where we are going quicker.  Stereo systems and GPS units and DVD players turn our attention from outward to inward.  The road is faster, more economical, and less communal.

I am just stating fact, not making a judgment.  This progress has fueled our economic progress.  We are a huge nation, which ordinarily might be an impediment to development and was to ours for almost a century and a half.  Our economic power, the biggest the world has ever seen, was built partly on the basis of our ability to move goods and ourselves over our highways and roads from place to place cheaply and efficiently.

And yet, in this progress, might we miss the big picture?  In zipping from place to place in our insular states, might we miss things that would be good for us to see, hear and experience?  Might we benefit from a slower pace?  Perhaps we don't want to go back to horses and carriages, but maybe we should take a blue highway or two, slow down, and let the road express us more sanely than we allow ourselves to be expressed normally.  As Whitman writes in Song of the Open Road:

Allons!  the road is before us!
It is safe - I have tried it - my own feet have tried it well.

If you want to know more about Whitesburg, Bulls Gap and Chuckey

Bulls Gap Railroad Museum
Civil War Battle of Bulls Gap
Wikipedia: Bulls Gap
Wikipedia: Chuckey
Wikipedia: Whitesburg

Next up:  Jonesboro (Jonesborough), Tennessee

Blue Highways: Morristown, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least-Heat Moon ponders, briefly, giving up his journey after a harrowing drive through the Clinch Mountains and a cold night in Morristown.  Luckily, he didn't quit, and we have more locations to scout.  Click on the map thumbnail to see where Morristown is located.

Book Quote

"I might as well admit that the next morning in smoky Morristown I was asking myself what in damnation I thought he was doing.  One week on the road - a week of clouds, rain, cold.  And now it was snowing.  Thirty-four degrees inside the Ghost, ice covering the windshield, my left shoulder aching from the knot I'd slept in.  'It is waking that kills us,' Sir Thomas Browne said three centuries ago.  Without desire, acting only on will, I emerged from the chrysalis of my sleeping bag and poured a basin of cold water.  I thought to wash myself to life.

"Outside, the spiritless people were clenched like cold fists.  A pall of snow lay on the city, and black starlings huddled around the ashy chimney tops.  Clearing the windows, I wondered why I had ever come away to this place and began thinking about turning back.  Could I?"

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 18

Morristown, Tennessee

Main Street, Morristown.

Quitting.  Nobody likes it.  But we often reach points where we think it might be the best thing to do.  When I decided to run a marathon, I trained for months.  By the time the marathon came about, I was really in the best shape of my life.  I was in my late 30s, and a 15 mile run was no problem at all.  26.2 miles, however, proved to be my undoing.  I was cocky and fast out of the gate.  I finished the first half of the marathon faster than I had ever gone before, and had peeled my shirt off to run in the humid New Orleans weather.  By 20 miles, I was on a sub-3 hour pace.  But I hadn't counted on the weather getting colder, so having my shirt would have helped.  I started developing cramps, and by mile 24 I was limping along and halfway delirious.  I couldn't make the last two miles.  I quit.

On the bright side, quitting was probably the best thing I could have done.  When I stopped, I was shivering (probably because I had lost enough body heat to be slightly hypothermic) and I collapsed in a friend's car and passed out.  But on the other side, I didn't finish a marathon that I had expected to finish.  I couldn't keep a pace at mile 24 that seemed so easy only 4 miles previously.  I kicked myself over and over again and labeled myself a failure.  My friends finished...why couldn't I?

So when LHM writes about quitting after a really hard drive and a hard night in the cold, I can understand him.  I feel every leaden movement he makes as he gets up in the 34 degree chill inside Ghost Dancing (his van, in case you forgot) and wills himself to wash.  I feel his lethargy toward forward movement as he asks himself if he shouldn't just aim the car on the freeway for a nice day's ride back home.

But even if it were for the best, he would have regretted it.  If one sets a goal, then one usually means to keep it.  Not keeping it implies a sort of failure, even if it were for the best of reasons.  The goal is left unattained, the grail is still out there.

I was afraid that my PhD studies would turn out in failure.  After all, I had the examples of lots of previous failures to overcome.  My father felt himself a failure for not rising above a certain level of management at the lumber mill, my uncle never attained his PhD in Political Science.  After I quit the marathon, I began to see my PhD pursuit in marathon terms, and wondered if I would ever attain it.  I was terrified by the example that my uncle set, in that he became a shadow of himself, the ever-present graduate student teaching classes until UC Berkeley wouldn't admit him any more.  He wasted away, never attaining his goal and never living up to the expectations of the people that supported him.

I got my PhD, and now I face a different situation.  I am having trouble landing a job in my field.  However, I this time, I am trying not to turn my situation into a marathon-like metaphor.  I am trying to look at it as one race among many, and if I don't attain the goal in this race, I can join another race where I might finish and perhaps even win.

How does this relate to LHM's stay in Morristown?  We all have our Morristowns, just like we have our Clinch Mountain hell-rides.  Our Morristowns are smokey and cold places where we ask ourself why we do what we do, and whether we should continue doing it.  We have Morristowns in relationships, Morristowns in our professional lives, and Morristowns will dot our path as we progress through our lives.  We may decide to drag ourselves up and continue on our chosen roads, or we may quit and go home.  Both of these can entail hurt and hardship, as well as regrets, but there are also rewards for each choice.  LHM decides to continue on, and Blue Highways was the result.

But sometimes, and I'm trying to keep in this in mind, our Morristowns might also lead us onto a completely new path.  After all, if we are taking stock of our situations, we might be inclined to be more open to new possibilities.  I hope that my Morristowns in my relationships will reforge themselves into something new, healthy and supportive.  I hope that my Morristowns in my professional life will lead me to a fulfilling career, and I hope that any other Morristowns I encounter will either push me onward toward my goals, or point me toward better ones.  Such is the underestimated value of Morristowns, and thank God for them.

If you want to know more about Morristown

City of Morristown
Morristown Chamber of Commerce
Morristown Citizen-Tribune (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Morristown

Next up: Whitesburg, Bulls Gap and Chuckey, Tennessee