home sweet door

I was pretty excited to see the door to my own apartment. After many strange doors in strange hotels had been its stand-in, I was ready for the original. No strange bedspreads to be seen and no questionable continental breakfast either.

Not surprisingly, I've returned with one bag more than I left with. Gained items include a white cowboy hat, peach salsa, an alligator refrigerator magnet, and some postcards that still need to be sent (sorry!).

Serious questions remain - what will I do tomorrow without waffle house for breakfast? Who will give me strange directions to a campus parking lot? For the time being, I'll let all that wait and do some laundry that doesn't include a hotel room sink.
To the open road!

last working day and the grove

Today things went much better at Ole Miss. I found some interesting papers about local adaptations to national policies and some more contextual information. I think we are ending on a high note! I also took a walk through the quadrangle known as "the grove" where a major riot occurred on campus during 1962 when a student protest against the admission of the man who would be the university's first black student turned violent. Now, its a small, quiet, shaded spot with a marker for remembrance. Tomorrow I'll be back home which is an exciting thought. Its been quite a month of silly and awesome adventures. Thanks for reading along!

Ole Miss is a miss

Today we drove further into Mississippi to the University of Mississippi campus which, although it was under serious summer construction, was quite beautiful. Unfortunately, my time in the archive didn't work out quite as planned. The materials I was looking for weren't found and so I'm going back tomorrow to see if I have better luck. I read some interesting and not entirely related materials in the mean time and we are thinking about a movie tonight? Its the home stretch!

Little Rock

I spent today at the history commission and at the court house working to track down precise legal descriptions of addresses and public records about real estate ownership and litigation. Lots of leads started but still much more to find out about. I worked with very helpful records keepers who explained a lot to me about how public recording has changed over the decades. I still have much to learn. In the mean time, we've driven to Mississippi where I'll be at the university through the end of the week before heading back home. Photos today of the amazingly beautiful entrance dome at the Pulaski court house in Arkansas - it was a stunner.

treasures

Today I went to the state historical commission of the state of Arkansas. Their online catalog is called CARAT - which stands for the catalog of Arkansas Resources and Archival Treasures. I thought the name was cute and catchy and was a nice play on the fact that Arkansas has the largest open pit and publicly accessible diamond mine in the country. I was excited to find out that they really do have treasures -- at least when it came to my dissertation research. They had much more material than I'd expected and had all sorts of items that I'd never seen cataloged before. That was the upside. The downside was that the materials were too fragile for copying so I sat typing out pages and pages of documents today and will be going back tomorrow for more. So much typing means no exciting photos - maybe we'll be back to images tomorrow. :)

back to the grind

Monday's archive was at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The library had great materials and a super friendly and encouraging group of archivists. It was a long but productive day and when the archive closed we drove south and west to Little Rock. We knew we were heading south because Waffle Houses started reappearing. To get to Little Rock we had to drive through part of the Ozarks which were beautiful in the late day sun -- hence the above photo.

breakfast at a casino, losing a sandal

What a day! We started out with breakfast at the local Cherokee casino which was open early and served cheap and tasty food. No complaints there. We headed next to the grocery store to get supplies for our afternoon adventure on the Illinois river. Peanut butter? Check. Water bottles? Check. Sandals? Check. Ok, then we were ready to go. We headed up to Sparrow Hawk Camp where we rented kayaks and were on the river before 11am. The river, by all accounts, was slow and lazy and people wished us a "good float" down and mentioned nothing about needing to paddle, steer, or keep our kayaks upright. Needless to say, the floating wasn't only floating. About twenty minutes in, we fought our first battle with the river and both took on so much water we had to beach our kayaks and flip them over to drain them. In the first battle, we managed to hold onto both kayaks, both paddles, and the peanut butter but only one water bottle and, sigh, only one of my sandals. Over the next three hours or so we alternated between legitimate, lovely, and lazy floating down river and paddling like maniacs against the high wind that came up periodically and pushed up upriver. Much more of an adventure than we'd bargained for, but a great afternoon nonetheless, and who needs two sandals anyway?

Tomorrow its back to work at an archive in Arkansas and then we are only on the road through the end of the week -- its the home stretch!

to the rodeo

Today we drove south from Lawrence and back into Oklahoma on our way to Arkansas for more archiving on Monday. We landed in a small town outside Fayetteville and spent to tonight at a small rodeo. The weather was hot and sticky and stayed that way after the sun went down and the lights turned on. Photos tell the story better, but it was a real home town crowd with an announcer who knew the cowboys and cowgirls and sometimes their parents and grandparents, too. We learned about their rodeo accomplishments and other key points like the fact that one of the cowboys installed carpet and could help you out if you were looking to put some new ones in your house. A great start to the weekend. Yee-haw!

archive #4 of the week, state #4 of the week

Before we get into it, let’s do some quick tallies of the past five working days – drove approximately 1,050 miles over something like 18 hours to travel through four states to four separate university archives. We’ve gone from the gulf coast, through the swamp and into the wide open prairies; all beautiful but in very different ways. Its certainly not a pace to maintain in the long term, but we’ve managed to get a few days ahead of schedule before the weekend hits and the archives close down. Today’s archive visit was quite like yesterdays, a quick smash-and-grab job with a small collection of interesting materials – only six small folders-- but some really great finds. It was an exciting few hours. After dinner we went to the laundromat so we could start the weekend with really clean clothing -- not just washed in the hotel sink. Now we've made plans for a trail ride and a rodeo tomorrow so I say, let the weekend begin!

The photo, by the way, is of the early morning sky today as we drove from Oklahoma north into Kansas - wow!

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A!

We left this morning from Bryan, Texas and drove about six hours north into sooner country to the Western History Collection housed at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Less than an hour outside Bryan, we stopped to explore a small town on the historic register, Calvert, Texas. It was beautiful in a run-down way and the strong sunlight made for some great photo opportunities. I've uploaded an unedited album to Flicker (click here), so I apologize for the dud shots but you can get a feeling for how gorgeous it was. From there we just drove and drove and drove until we got to Norman early enough in the afternoon that I could still make it into the archive before closing. It was another beautiful reading room with tall wood paneled walls and stained glass windows and, luckily for me, a great collection of materials. They have the collection listed, but the finding aid is not available online so I had no idea what I was in for but it was a real treasure trove of new information even though it was a small collection. Three cheers for Norman! Tomorrow we are off early to Kansas to see if again we can do a drive and an archive in the same day before the weekend takes us off on non-academic adventuring. What will the weekend hold? We are curious to find out, but are feeling inspired by all things cow-girl like rodeos and riding on horses. I'll keep you posted . . .

TAMU

Today was an archiving marathon, but I worked though thirteen catalogue entries most of which were unique materials not listed in catalogues anywhere else and I found all sorts of strange and interesting examples to study. This was certainly my most productive archive day so far in terms of amount of material collected. I took so many photos of material that I actually had to recharge my camera battery and start loading files onto a new SD card. Lots of archiving means not a lot of crazy local adventuring, so fun photos of Texas will have to wait until tomorrow when we head north into Oklahoma!

into Texas and Texas BBQ

We went for a long drive today through western Louisiana and eastern Texas to get to College Station. The drive was beautiful, much of it on elevated highways over swamp land. We avoided driving through Houston by taking smaller two lane highways through rural eastern Texas so there were many small towns and cows to look out through the window. We rolled into Bryan, the neighboring town to College Station around dinner time and met up with Isaac who is our gracious host during our stay here. He took us out for Texas barbeque at a landmark establishment called Martins. Delicious and full of character – photos above. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’m off to the Texas A&M archives.

baton rouge and the Bodies

I spent today in the beautiful reading room of the Hill Memorial Library on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. Although there was less material than I'd expected to find, there were some interesting examples to see as well as some more contemporary materials that I was surprised and excited to find. It was a quiet and easy day and so a great way to start our second week on the road. After the library was closed we had dinner with Bodies -- including the newest Bodie, Lydia who as you can see is a very sweet baby. It was lovely to see them all and to be welcomed into their home even as we are wandering around the south like lost vagabonds. Happy about our time in Louisiana and having seen some of its many cultures from Mardi Gras, to the Tigers, to gator farming we head first thing tomorrow into Texas where new adventures await us.

everything with a mouth bites

Today we stopped for a gator adventure on our way to Baton Rouge where we are spending the night before a Monday of archiving. We took an hour long tour of a alligator and turtle farm in Hammond, LA which was educational and stinky. Apparently, it was one of the first alligator farms and has been breeding from the same original pool of swamp-captured gators for the past 54 years. They also took us through cages of various other animals including an albino anaconda and a lizard related to the kimono dragon. One of the women on the tour asked if the lizard would bit, he told us that he believes that everything with a mouth can bite so its always best to be careful -- this was moments after he stood barefoot in a cage with a 10 foot alligator showing us how hitting it with a stick on the nose would get it to react. All toes and fingers in tact, we headed on our sweaty way where we were grateful for a shower and clean towels. Check out the video below for a taste of our afternoon. Keeping my fingers crossed for a great day tomorrow at the library.

Click here to see the video on YouTube

mobile Mobile

Today we traveled from Mobile, Alabama into Louisiana where we are now just north of Lake Pontchartrain. This morning we went to the Mardi Gras museum in Mobile which, as we found out, is the original home of Mardi Gras. They had costumes from many of the organizations who participate in the Mardi Gras parades as well as the gowns and trains of the Mardi Gras queens from various years including some all the way back to the 1920s. Come to find out, Mardi Gras was instituted in the form more recognizable to us after what our tour guide called the Northern Aggression (a.k.a. the civil war) and was a way that the old families of Mobile lifted their spirits after the Yankee occupiers (again, the tour guide’s description) had taken over. To this day, he told us, most of the Mardi Gras celebrations are lead by representatives of these old families and the semi-secretive organizations which make the parties and parades happen. To be sure, I learned much more about Mardi Gras than I’d ever imagined. From there, we had lunch in downtown Mobile and then headed west toward beautiful big skies and views of swampland. In truth, I’m glad to be gone from Mobile because the name had me so confused. I kept reading Mobile as mobile— so instead of understanding that the Mobile Convention Center was in the city, I read it as the mobile convention center as in one that could travel around. I also thought they had a mobile art museum and a mobile Mardi Gras celebration. I just couldn’t train my mind to read the mobile out of Mobile and so I kept on being confused about why they wanted to be able to move all of their tourist attractions and venues around. Hurumph. Anyway, we are heading to Baton Rouge tomorrow where I trust things will be simpler for me to read.

... and here I am in some mardi gras glasses :)

I'll be a smart chicken

We started today, as is becoming ritual, at a Waffle House and it was kind of like comedy hour. The waitresses were in rare form – one of them told us that she wouldn’t go to Mexico until she spoke fluent Spanish because she was sacred about what would happen if she didn’t know what people were saying to her “You can call me a chicken, but I’ll be a chicken. I’ll be a smart chicken.” With these words of wisdom we headed south until the roads stopped and we were looking at the gulf. It was a beautiful view – white sand beaches, big blue sky, and enough beach-goers to be lively but not so many that it was a zoo. We spent a few hours at the beach, grabbed a meal and headed west to Mobile where we are calling it quits for the night-- with the car full of sand and empty coffee cups which will have to be cleaned up tomorrow when we continue westward. Archiving begins again on Monday in Baton Rouge.