I Read Lies Across America Because I Love It When Other People Are Wrong

This log cabin is a lie!

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong by James W. Loewen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love little nitpicky bits of information, and I love tiny moments in history, so although I never really found my groove with this book, I did love learning all its little nitpicky bits of information and discussions of tiny moments in history.

I read the 1999 version of the book, not the updated 2019 version, so there is some outdated terminology that I hope has since been corrected, and I know for sure that there’s been positive progress in the depiction of some of these historical figures and events, as well. I was loaded for bear when I visited the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historical Site recently, ready to fight for Catharine’s due representation, only to happily find that it’s already there! Most of my tour of the house was actually about Catharine’s work, since she was the one most often home with the freedom seekers, and the docent was well-prepared to be peppered with all of my Catharine Coffin questions.

The Wikipedia page for the Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Site, at least, also now also indicates the “symbolic nature” of the log cabin inside that weird mansion-like mausoleum they’ve got on their premises--

--and relates a short version of the shell game-like history of its logs that Loewen goes into more detail about, but I remember that when we went there as a family I still thought after reading the info and viewing the exhibit that it was an authentic cabin--not Lincoln’s cabin, but someone’s proper cabin!--so Loewen’s criticisms were still valid then.

I was interested to read Loewen’s retelling of one of my other Special Interests in History, that time in 1924 when the Ku Klux Klan took over nearly every political office in Indiana from school board up through the governor’s seat. Loewen’s 1999 version lacked some of the nuance of the story that we know now (shout-out to The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland!), but I wonder if his synopsis is the first time that the tale had been told via mass publication? I don’t know if I really agree with his assessment that there ought to be some historical markers about the period, because it’s not really a place-based event--unless we want to put a marker at each of the Indiana Welcome Centers?--but I do wish that it was part of everyone’s general education, and especially part of Indiana history books. There are a few more important things kids can learn about in the fourth grade other than the Constitution Elm!

Parts of the book had some weirdly overt assertions of opinion that I’m not used to in a history text, and I also didn’t love most of Loewen’s first-person hijinks--he really did not need to write a passy-assy honest-to-god letter to the Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop omg how embarrassing. But hey, it’s closed now, so Loewen won!

After reading the book and looking at the pages that I’d marked, it’s clear that I was most interested, by far, in the lies that have been told me about the places I’ve lived, like Arkansas and Indiana, and the places I’ve visited. Combine that with the fact that this book took me a really long time to slog through, so much so that I only managed to finally finish it during a 54-hour power outage when I felt like I absolutely had to do SOMETHING productive sans electricity, and I think that what I really want is a Lies Across America travel guide! I want glossy photos, specific locations for each marker, and related interesting amenities, quirky things to see, and ideally even nearby sites with accurate information. Bonus points for corny on-theme buffet restaurants!

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All I Want Is To Irradiate Myself With Uranium Glass, and Other Small-Town Indiana Adventures

Our collective family favorite hobby is so boring that I'm honestly a little embarrassed to tell you about it.

No, it's not how we like to sit around a table and work puzzles while listening to audiobooks. That's genuinely awesome and not embarrassing at all.

It's embarrassing how much take-out pizza we eat, but that's not really a hobby.

Our hobby of making themed dinners and then watching movies while we eat is so cool that I don't understand why everybody else also doesn't do this weekly. Don't y'all WANT to be eating rainbow foods while sitting in your living room and watching Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? It's very fun!

This other hobby of ours is also very fun, but only in a very, very specific and highly-focused way, and probably only for us:

Basically, we drive to some seemingly random, poky little town and we just... poke around it? We get ice cream, check out the historical markers, browse the local shops, and exclaim over the most boring shit like, "Ooh, look at the limestone detail on that bank!" and "I wonder why they've got a Civil War cannon in their playground? Let's go climb on it!"

Just writing this out, it feels like an objectively awful way to spend a full day. The drive there and back is always ridiculously long, too, and requires verbally acknowledging every falling-down old barn and even slightly unusual farm animal we pass. This Sunday, y'all, we saw THREE miniature ponies! And a horse grazing in the same field with a bunch of cows! Many cornfields! A giant paintball arena out in the middle of nowhere cut out from the cornfields! Several threshing barns!

But I don't know, you guys. It is also, for some reason, a stupid amount of fun.

This particular adventure was inspired by Father's Day. We're also pretty obsessed with activity trails, either packaged ones like the Garfield Trail or ones that we DIY, like the indie bookstore trail that was my older kid's birthday gift a couple of years ago. We spent most of the pandemic doing a Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, and it might have been the thing that preserved my partner's sanity. He was PISSED when we finally completed the trail, sent in our passports, and all we got back were trucker caps as our prizes--acting bitchy about the prize is an important part of the tradition!

So for this Father's Day, I found a giant culinary trail put together by a statewide non-profit. It's got not just ice cream, but tenderloins. Pizza. Diners, drive-ins, and dives. Pie! We all signed up for it, my partner picked our first location, and off we drove through the cornfields to Greensburg, Indiana, a town whose claim to fame is that it's halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. Which, just between us, it's like two hours from Indianapolis to Cincinnati so I don't know if that's really helpful? If you lived in the middle you'd still have at least an hour commute either way, not counting city traffic, and if you were just going from one place to the other, well, it's only a two-hour drive so why would you need to stop smack in the middle?

Also, I don't understand why that's what they're promoting when as soon as we got there and parked at the town square, THIS is what we saw!!!

They have a tree growing out of their courthouse roof! 

It was baffling and cool and charming, and honestly kind of better that there's no informational signage around at ALL to explain what you're looking at. You just look up, see a tree growing out of the courthouse roof, and exclaim and wonder over it like it's the olden days. You could also literally just miss the tree if you parked on the other side of the courthouse and/or never happened to look up, and then how stupid would you feel later if someone told you about it?

I looked it up later, and these TripAdvisor reviews are cracking me up:

Like, guys. That tree is not even there for you. You don't need to give it a 3 out of 5 rating just for existing!

And for some reason it made TrishA4 mad. Is she contractually obligated to pay for clock tower repairs or something? Did poorly maintained gutters once kill her loved one?

Well, we weren't mad. It gave us something to talk about while we ate our pork tenderloins and French fries in a beach-themed bar and grill that had faux tiki huts and people playing pool inside. I was excited about the poster for a KISS cover band coming through, until a kid pointed out that the poster was from 2015, dang it. 2015 Julie would have ALSO loved to see a KISS cover band! 

After lunch, we walked around the courthouse square, checking out the other nearby restaurants on the culinary trail--

--and then we all got completely sidetracked for over an hour in Pickers Paradise, an antique store on the square. Their uranium glass was a VERY reasonable price!

I haven't worked up the nerve to start my own uranium glass collection yet, but I covet it SOOOO bad. All I need to do is put some black lights in Mamma's old china cabinet, right? Or would I need to store everything in a lead-lined coffin and only take them out on special occasions?

Anyway, I didn't buy the uranium glass, sob, but I did buy a really nice molinillo that my older kid found in a bin of kitchen accessories and recognized from a workshop on the history of chocolate that we took together last month. And then my younger kid found a really nice vintage poster in a pretty frame, and when my older kid told me about a cast iron horse bust that she'd thought was really cool I was all, "Your Dad is already buying me and your sister stuff. Go show him your horse head!" And that's how on Father's Day my partner walked out of an antique store having bought everybody BUT himself a nice little present, ahem.

But we all hugged his neck and told him we loved him!

We walked over to see a nice stretch of historic storefronts that had been restored (and then left to get slightly neglected again, but charmingly so), but our last stop before we drove back through the cornfields was another point on the culinary tour, a genuine A&W!

We didn't realize that this was a place where the waitstaff would come out to your car--I guess it's from the Just Cruisin' section of the culinary trail--so she threw us off our ordering game a bit. And then after she'd come and gone we realized that there was apparently an entirely other menu of specials taped to the window of the building where we hadn't been able to see it, and of course it was chock-full of stuff that everybody would have rather gotten, ahem, so we all sort of sulkily sucked down our chocolate shakes and cream freezes. The younger kid bitched the most about not knowing they had coffee shakes, but she also ate every bite of her ice cream cone while she bitched so I think she'll be okay.

On the way back home, I was trying to research why on earth there was a tree on the courthouse roof, and I realized that the city of Greensburg has a Wikipedia page! At first it was fun, making everyone try to guess the city's population and the name of their county and when their first post office was built--I'm really fun to travel with! But then I had to be all, "Oh, shit, y'all! Greensburg used to be a sundown town!"

Ugh, we are ALWAYS running into that around here! We won't even go to Martinsville, another former sundown town, on purpose, because it still feels really racist there, and this November will actually be the 100th anniversary of the time that the Ku Klux Klan won nearly every election, from school board up to governor, in our state but then couldn't keep hold of their offices or get anything of consequence done because, you know, they weren't politically or administratively trained--they were just organized racists! Halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati would have been an awful place to have a sundown town, though, sigh. 

But we're not going to spend our precious Father's Day talking about racists, so instead I went back to my most recent fun hobby of telling my partner, in detail, the entire story of A Court of Thorns and Roses so far. The drive was long, but this book is longer, because I had barely finished the part where everyone in Feyre's family had gotten fairy ensorcelled but Nesta, apparently because she's just too big a bitch to be ensorcelled, when we pulled back into our driveway. I put a pin in it until our next day trip!

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Enforced Family Fun Day: Punk Rock, Mystery Cemeteries, and Several Local Barns

I swear that I do not know what these guys would do with themselves if I wasn't around to always be suggesting fun family activities. It's definitely an insidious form of emotional labor, constantly finding and planning stuff to do and cajoling people out of the house to do it when they'd apparently be happy enough just holding the couch down all weekend, but the secret is that it's all for ME. *I'M* the one who likes to do family stuff, and stuff outside of the house, and I'd be bummed to go out alone. 

To be fair, I knew from the beginning that my excellent idea of hitting up the Monroe County History Center on a Sunday afternoon was only going to be a "fun" family activity for me. But hey, there's an exhibit on local barns! AND an exhibit on the local punk scene! And there's lots of bonding to be done in shared misery, but fine, we'll add in a walk afterwards over to the bakery that has delicious milk tea and crepe cakes by the slice. 

See? Family fun for all!

Alas, the teenagers were completely unimpressed by barns and immediately wandered off to gaze at John Mellencamp's guitar and such:

So they missed out on the excellent visual explanation of the difference between hand-hewn and milled timbers. This one is hand-hewn:

The milled one is in the background:

I thought this illustration of immigrants and where they settled was interesting, not just for what it shows about the spread of barn architecture, but also because it perfectly reflects my own ancestors' path from Ireland to Virginia to Ohio:

One of those early 1800s ancestors changed his last name in adulthood and moved far away from his entire extended family and down to Arkansas (of all places), and if you think I am not burning with curiosity about what brought that on then you have seriously underestimated my capacity for gossip.

Anyway, this was a really cool exhibit because it took all the old barns around the county that you always notice when you drive by and it wrote up a whole museum display about each of them:

My favorite part in each blurb is learning what each barn is up to these days. 4-H is POPULAR around here!

I like the Vernacular style best. That style is essentially just something along the lines of, "I need to build me a barn. A plan, you say? Who needs a plan to build a barn?" 

I see this barn the most, because it's over by the post office that's open the latest:

I'd mostly wanted to go to this museum to see the exhibit on the local punk scene. I feel like the punk scene was kind of on the wane by the time I got to Bloomington (although I swear I remember Pretty Pony), but, perhaps thanks to having a stellar music school here, there have always been plenty of indie musicians. My best memory is the time I used part of my grad school scholarship to sign up for a recreational yoga class, then halfway through the first class suddenly thought, "Huh, is my yoga teacher one of the Blake Babies?"

Why yes, she was! And if you think that I did not come to the next class with my Blake Babies CDs (Innocence and Experience is my favorite!) for her to sign... then you would be right, because I have always been and will always be way too bashful for that. 

ANYWAY, I'm super impressed by all the ephemera that the museum has. Flyers and set lists and receipts and zines are all the types of precious things that are so unlikely to make it into a museum, but THIS museum has a bonanza of items:

I'm equally impressed that the museum has such a substantial list of the punk groups that performed in Bloomington. That type of info is more ephemeral than their promo flyers, and yet the exhibit had five lines' worth of band names extending across the entire wall:

I VERY much wish they could have also had listening stations or some kind of way that we could hear the archival music, but I guess that would be a copyright nightmare.

One last very boring-to-everyone-but-me exhibit:

Notice all the cemeteries that are now in the lake. Once upon a time, my Girl Scout troop learned the whole dishy story of how that happened! 

Y'all KNOW how I feel about old local cemeteries!

I've got a couple more to look for now, thanks to this wall map:

This map says that there's another cemetery across the street from the Mt. Salem Cemetery--that's the one that has the 116-year-old guy--but on Google Maps all there is there is forest and an old quarry. Ten bucks says I get arrested this year for trespassing (wearing my high-visibility safety vest, of course, because hunters) in old limestone quarries!

After all that learning, crepe cake and milk tea really hit the spot:

It was the younger kid who first convinced us to try this place; she'd been wanting to try crepe cake FOREVER, and she was so stoked! Joke's on her, though, I guess, because it turns out that she doesn't super like crepe cake, and the first milk tea she got here was kind of weird, too (for the love of all that's good, keep your picky kids away from taro!), so now she's not into it anymore but the older kid and I love it so we keep dragging her here endlessly. 

Thai milk tea and matcha crepe cake is the perfect taste combo!

And what's this week's (Enforced) Fun Family Activity, you ask? Well, last night three of us went out to a local theater production, then we met up with the fourth one for late-night tacos downtown. And tonight there's supposed to be a cabaret-style performance of a selection of songs from Sondheim's Assassins in a downtown bar that claims to be open to 18+ for the show. I have no idea how to act in a bar--do you get to order a cocktail, or are you supposed to stick to beer? If the latter, what beer do you get?--so that will be a fun adventure.

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Homeschool AP US History: A Family Field Trip to the Levi and Catharine Coffin House

 

Can I still call it a homeschool field trip if there's only one homeschooler in attendance?

Sadder question: will I still be able to call it a homeschool field trip when there are NO more homeschoolers in attendance? SOB!

For the moment, though, it's eyes forward, because I have one homeschooler in attendance, and that homeschooler is taking a deep dive into the Underground Railroad.

The worst thing about the AP history courses is they absolutely FLY through the material. The older kid's AP European History study crammed information into her so quickly that we had very little time to build context and make real-world connections, and to be honest, it shows in her middling retention of the material five years later.

I've addressed that problem with my younger kid by, in the case of her World History course, abandoning AP altogether and instead creating our own study, laser-focused on Ancient History, from the recommended college textbooks, and in the case of this AP US History course, focusing very little on exam prep and using that extra time to enjoy more immersive studies of select topics.

Such as the Underground Railroad! The kid has long been interested in the experiences of the freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad (thank you, Addy Walker!), and thankfully, located as we are in southern Indiana, we're within driving distance of several locations important to freedom seekers and relevant to the history of enslavement on American soil. 

But somehow, until Winter Break, we'd never been to the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad itself, the Levi and Catharine Coffin House!

Possibly because it's low-key in the middle of nowhere, but oh, well--that's why we bought a car with excellent fuel efficiency!

Catharine and Levi Coffin were Quakers, who moved to the Quaker community of Newport (it's now called Fountain City, but I didn't get around to asking why) in 1826. From then until they moved to Cincinnati in 1847, their work assisting freedom seekers on the journey north was an open secret. They evaded bounty hunters who knew there was something going on but could never catch them, and just in case they were caught, they never knew more than one other connection of the Underground Railroad in either direction.

The museum next to the house is just one gallery, but it has some really thoughtful exhibits. I really liked this recreation of the box that Henry Brown shipped himself within:

And we have a pair of shoes from William Bush, handed down through generations of descendants. I LOVE personal artifacts like these, and I think this is an example of why these smaller museums are so important. The bigger museums of the world, the Smithsonians and the American Museums of Natural History and the British Museums, have millions more objects than they know what to do with, so the only stuff that gets displayed is the canonical stuff, the stuff most vital to the understanding of the most people.

But smaller museums can show items that are not so much exemplars of the type, but are more personal, intimate, and meaningful to the local community that the museum serves. I might not give this pair of shoes a second glance if I was looking at them in a Smithsonian museum, nor would they probably be placed on display there, competing, as they would be, with thousands of other similar artifacts in better condition or belonging to better-known people. But knowing that these shoes came from a person involved in the history of this exact place, who worked here, was buried here, and whose descendants still partly live here, is always just the absolute most awesome feeling.

One thing that I didn't love about this museum was the noise level. While I was trying to read the sign below, there were at least two--maybe even three?--other audio things going on in the same gallery, all talking over each other. It might not even be noticeable if the gallery was full of people, but it was just the four of us rattling around in there, and I found the noise level nearly unbearable, yikes!

This map is interesting, though, because these paths to freedom look like they make a point of dodging around that entire south-central area where I live:

It would have been all forests and caves and small towns and pioneer settlements, so I don't get it. Must do more research!

Here's another cool map, this one of the town of Newport. I thought it was interesting that Levi Coffin actually owns a few pieces of property on this map. One is a store that sold only goods manufactured using free labor, but I forgot to ask what that really big piece of property on the far left of the map was. Dang it!

Our guided tour of the actual house was super interesting, and I didn't take more than a couple of photos only because I was too busy stumbling all over myself to pepper the tour guide with question after question. She wasn't prepared to speak about the artifacts in the house, all of which were of the correct era and had been donated by locals (inspiring SO MANY QUESTIONS in my heart!), or really much about the building and architecture of the house itself, but she was very game to answer all of my other questions about local law enforcement, the professions and later lives of the Coffin children and further descendants, the chain of ownership of the home after the Coffins and how it became a museum site, the possible education/literacy level of Catharine Coffin, speculation about what it would look like to make this historic house ADA compliant, what the neighbors might have known about what the Coffins were doing, the general information structure of an Underground Railroad chain, where the kitchen garden might have been located, the actual division of labor regarding caring for freedom seekers (mostly relating to my theory that Catharine did far more hands-on work than Levi did), etc.

This awesome little door, below, looks like it would lead to a little closet, and could easily be hidden by just stacking a couple of boxes or a bed against it, but it leads to a storage area that extends the entire length of that room. People could hide in it if the Coffins thought they were about to be raided. All four of us got a turn to crawl inside and look around:

I also really love this spring-fed cistern. There was no reference to it in any of Coffin's papers, and no physical evidence of it when the house came into the custody of the Indiana State Museum. Excavations uncovered it by surprise. 

It's theorized that the Coffins could use this cistern to collect part of the household water, in addition to the creek that they also used just a few yards from the house. That way, no matter how many people were inside the house, anyone spying on them from the outside would only see people going to the creek to fetch a perfectly normal amount of water perfectly suited to the number of official residents inside the Coffin house:

This was a really great museum and house tour, really interesting and really accessible to a wide range of interests and abilities. We were all completely engaged and fascinated, and afterwards, we spent a very late lunch at the Big Boy and a very dull two-hour car ride back home gossiping about it. I've not also got the Reminiscences of Levi Coffin on my bookshelf, and you know I cannot keep what I'm reading to myself AT ALL so I'm sure we'll all spend even more time gossiping about it in the next few weeks!

Here are a few other things that my teenager and I have done in support of her Underground Railroad study:

• audiobook and discussion of 12 Years a Slave
• trip to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

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I'm Too Old for Junior Rangers, So Now I Collect Passport Stamps

Disclaimer: you're actually never too old for Junior Rangers; I'm pretty sure every national park will let you complete the workbook, take the oath, and pin the badge onto your T-shirt at any age!

HOWEVER, for my teenager's nineteenth birthday, I wanted to give her something that might recreate, for her, that enthusiasm that she always seemed to feel as a child for earning Junior Ranger badges. She has a huge collection of them, and I think took a lot of pleasure in earning new ones. Exploring new national park sites was something we've always loved doing together, and we have taken MANY a detour or special trip just to hit a new park so she could earn a new Junior Ranger badge.

So what might incorporate the same kind of fun?

The National Park Passport Book, I hope!

And, because sending this kid away to college has made me realize how precious (and how ever more preciously few) are the activities that she and I love to do together... I bought myself the National Park Passport Book, too. Now we can collect passport stamps for every single national park site TOGETHER!!!

First up: a day trip to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, sneaked in just a couple of weeks before she went back to college for the semester.

It's been several years since our last trip to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, so I was able to tell my partner and the teenager all the same Lincoln gossip that I'd told them the last time, and they were able to pretend like I haven't also been telling this same gossip continually even when we're not visiting the memorial.

Fun fact: this area used to be a major breeding ground for the passenger pigeon. Sigh...

My favorite thing here, though, is always the living history farm!

The teenager was HORRIFIED to see me pull a couple of weeds in this garden. But hello, I would love it if some stranger would wander by *my* garden and pull a few weeds!

Here's the well where the family drew their water, now at the very edge of the national park site and bordering a residential street:

It was SO muggy when we hiked this trail that all we talked about was how on earth people managed without air conditioning back then. Did you know that until his dying day, William Faulkner refused to have air conditioning in his Mississippi home? Putting a window air conditioning unit in their bedroom was just about the first thing his widow did after his funeral...

Because I bought us the bougiest passport books, they also have spaces for national park stickers, which is apparently also a thing. Every year they publish a new set of ten stickers, each featuring a different national park site from a different region. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial had several sticker sets in their gift shop, including the 2009 set that includes a sticker for the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, so I bought us both that one and then spent part of the car ride home busily sticking my new stickers in their correct spots.

I dunno if I'm sold on the stickers, though... They'd be objectively awesome if the images were good, but they weren't always. If I had to guess, I'd say that every national park site has to submit its own photo, and the small sites with limited staff maybe don't always have someone on staff to take a beautiful photo? 

Stay tuned to see if I end up buying more of the stickers, and DEFINITELY stay tuned for the teenager's next big college break, when she and I are going to knock some passport stamps off our to-do list!

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