Today was perhaps the most perfect day on the road we've had so far. Now that the sun has arrived on the plains, it appears to want to stay. Concetta and I got up at a comfortable hour, had a leisurely breakfast, and then moseyed into old Nauvoo to do some walking and photographing of the old-time buildings there. Our first goal was to visit the "Land and Records" building where I hoped to learn something new about my Mormon ancestors. We also wanted to visit some of the Chataqua-style businesses where the docents tell you how things were done on the frontier in the 1840s.
We arrived at the Land and Records office about 9:30 a.m., found a great parking spot for the rig right next to the building, and marched up to the door. There we were informed quite politely by the "sister" in residence, a self-proclaimed newbie, that we were just 30 minutes early to talk to the more experienced sister who knew all about the computers. She politely requested that we come back in a half an hour.
Okay, item one on hold. Leaving the rig right where we'd parked it, we set off to explore as much of the restored/reconstructed portion of old Nauvoo as we could before we had to reappear at Land and Records. Concetta's first choice was to visit the bakery shop, which, we had been informed by our bus driver yesterday, handed out free, hand-made cookies to all comers. Since I had no personal preference with which to counter free cookies, off we went. Naturally, the bakery was diagonally, just as far away as it was possible to get from where we were standing without falling in the Mississippi. No matter, we had to get our steps anyway.
This meant that a walk of about six blocks was in order. No problem, there were just tons of old houses and outbuildings along the way and my itchy camera shutter finger would get lots of exercise. Imagine old Nauvoo as a huge expanse of tree-shaded lawn, perhaps the size of a dozen football fields nestled in together, with maybe 100 structures scattered throughout. Most streets are pavement, a few are hard-packed earth, and all are narrow and rural-looking. RVs are classed as tour buses and are only allowed on some streets, but there's plenty of parking for your rig, well, unless you come at the height of the tourist season.
The first business that we encountered on the way to the bakery was a print shop. Oh, man, was I ever in heaven there, especially since I knew more about early printing than the docents who were printing business newbies by comparison. All the old equipment looked like it had been barrowed from Ben Franklin and not returned. They had the handset type cabinets. They had the ancient hand-operated one-copy-at-a-time printing press with the huge lever that you yanked over when your sheet of paper was in place. They had the hand ink applicator they called a "dauber," a name which I had never heard before. They even had much of the same letterpress equipment that I had been used to in the 1970s when I was a printer.
When I ended up in the printing business in 1974 it was on the tail end of working aboard a 60-foot motor sailboat for a year. Before that I had been a journeyman grocery clerk for Alpha Beta in California. But when I came to Carson City there were no grocery positions available, and I didn't even ask about any positions for boat crewmen. But when the employment office lady asked me if I knew how to type, and I told her I had worked for a time as a clerk-typist in the Navy, she stuffed a company name and address in my hand and sent me to Sierra Nevada Printing.
The company owner looked pretty skeptical when I arrived to apply for the print shop job of paste-up artist that summer of '74. "You're going to need to know a lot more than just how to type," Owner Jim Austin said.
I said, "I promise that I can master anything very fast."
Jim paused for a moment, slid a pipe out of his pocket and lit it, puffed a few moments, then pulled the pipe out of his mouth and said, "Okay, you're hired. No one has applied for the position, anyway."
And that's how I stumbled into the best job I ever had. It didn't pay well. It didn't include much in the way of benefits. But the work suited me right down to the ground. You see, I didn't tell Jim that I had two semesters of print shop, one in Junior High, and one in High School. I knew how to type, which meant I could run the computer typesetter with ease. I already had spent my youth doing paste-up in my own hobby interest areas so I was a natural for that task. And, I had a talent even more rare, I knew how to hand-set the old lead type used in 19th century print shops. Sierra Nevada Printing had at least 100 cases of handset type that they used in conjunction with their old windmill and vertical letterpress machines.
I didn't want to tell Jim that I had printing experience because then he might get his hopes up. Then, if I didn't like the job, I wouldn't have to stay. But stay I did for the next 18 months and enjoyed every second of it. But I had only come to Carson City for one reason: to earn enough money to go on another adventure. So at the end of 18 months I quit and left town and headed for the big city. But the big city turned out to be an alien place for me after living in lightly-populated Carson City. I stuck it out in Los Angeles for six months, then I moved back to Carson City and became a printer again. I remained a printer for almost nine years.
After our visit to the print shop, which I only reluctantly tore myself away from, we walked back to the Land and Records office and threw ourselves on the mercy of the head researcher. Though her manner was somewhat brusque at first, we soon saw that we weren't the only ones waiting for help. Soon all the computer workstations were filled and people were waiting in line to ask questions. Land and Record access to Mormon Church records was pretty neat and fast, though at first glance I didn't really see anything I hadn't found on either Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org (the Mormon site). But the researcher told us that we could put anything we wanted in the "stack" and at the end she would help us burn a CD. So I pulled up records for all the Mormon ancestral family names I could think of and put as many of them on the CD as possible. I even chose people of the same surnames I had never heard of just in case they had something important to say to me and were distantly related.
Once out of the Land and Records Office we once again set out for the Bakery to get our free cookie. It was a good walk alright, but before long we were queuing up for our molasses gingerbread coookie, which turned out to be a tad small for a hungry hiker, but nevertheless wonderful. Concetta learned all about frontier baking, which in this case took place in a special baking "house" in the rear yard to keep the main house from getting overheated in the summer. Then we took a tour of the grounds, saw the miller's wheels used to grind grain, and then headed for the building called the Family Living Center.
Inside the Family Living Center we were instantly dazzled! Arranged around the walls were many and sundry "hands-on" recreations of frontier skills and crafts. They had spinning, baking, candle-making, weaving, rope making, and barrel making, as well as displays of the tools used for each. Each display unit came complete with docents to gather you in and let you take part in their presentations. Concetta and I sat through the spinning session and learned even more about spinning wool and flax. It was here that I learned what the term "linsey-woolsey" meant, which I had heard and read for decades in my study of history. Linsey-woosley is simply a mixture of wool and flax, woven together. Since only the wool can be dyed colors, the resultant color scheme of a Linsey-woolsey blanket, for instance, will have blue or red-colored patterns on a cream-colored background. Flax will have formed the background and it cannot be dyed.
Next Concetta went to the baking presentation while I went to watch the rope maker in action. Most people I'm sure take rope making pretty much for granted, and never stop to think just how much industry might have gone into the craft in 1840. I was just enthralled as the demonstrator got a couple of kids in our tiny audience to help him make rope. They start by taking six strands of sissel, two to each of three hooks on a 12" disk at one end of the shop floor. The other three dual ends are tied to hooks on a much larger spinning wheel that has the ability to spin each two lengths of sissel separately. When the kid on that end spins the large wheel at his end it has the effect of twisting the two lengths on each hook at the other end until they are like three tightly twisted pigtails.
Then the instructor comes up with a piece of wood that had several hooks on it and snags the three sets of twisted mini ropes next to the smaller wheel. Then the child was asked to revolve the smaller wheel which had the effect of making the three sets of two twisted strands twist around each other. Then, as the youngster twisted, the instructor ran his piece of wood down the strands and toward the child with the big wheel. Every once in a while he'd have the child on the big wheel take a few turns to maintain tension on the whole assemblage.
I don't suppose many of you have followed this, which is probably due to my less than adequate description. But what resulted from all this "kid power" was a piece of perfectly twisted rope ready for duty on a covered wagon to perhaps tie a small barrel to the side. I was so impressed I even asked for a sample piece, which the instructor was happy to give me.
Next, while Concetta was attending the candle-dipping workshop, I went to find out how to build wooden barrels. Now I've studied barrel-making tools in the past so I wasn't a total novice, but once again I was totally enthralled with the docent's presentation of his craft. The thing that interested me the most was the fact that a cooper -- barrel maker -- used no measuring device to determine lengths of things. Since the period of apprenticeship for a cooper was four to six years, the docent said, they just "knew" what length to make barrel staves, which start out as just a billet of wood about the right length from which the craftsman splits the barrel staves.
Almost all the tools used to make barrels are specific to that craft, tools like curved draw knives and round planes for cutting the groove in the stays into which the barrel top slips. The docent told us that the two types of barrels are either wet or slack. Wet barrels will hold liquids without leaking. Slack barrels have seams not quite tight enough to hold liquids and are used for shipping goods like rice or beans.
But enough on crafts, before we left the Family Living Center Concetta had arranged with the baking demonstration to save me a piece of their homemade bread. Wow! I would really have liked a loaf of that great bread to bring back to the RV. "Nothing doing," Concetta said. "They're saving those samples for the afternoon's visitors."
Well, once again we had just run flat out of time. We either had to arrange for yet another night in our nearby camp, or we needed to get on the road. What we've found is that the places we visit are so very fascinating that we just don't want to leave. But if we did that we'd never get anywhere and would miss a lot in the process. So, after we'd had our lunch in the RV still parked adjacent to the Land and Records office, we turned our hood ornament south, picked up Route 96, and cruised back toward Keokuk, Iowa. Then, before we took the right turn and crossed the bridge to Keokuk, we turned left and headed east on Route 136 in the general direction of Springfield, Illinois. There we hope to do some more visiting with old Honest Abe, specifically the Lincoln Presidential Library that we had missed on our last visit in 2014.
Despite the fact that we didn't clear Nauvoo until around 1:30 p.m., we still managed to put in 130 miles and find a camp in Springfield by late afternoon. Now we're kicking back, bringing our travel dialogues up to date, and drinking some nice wine. Tomorrow we're off again, so stay tuned. Until then, we wish you Happy Travels!
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