By Saturday morning, Katie was feeling a little sick, but we all went sightseeing anyway. We drove into the historic part of town and were so impressed: this small Mississippi town has over a hundred Antebellum mansions remaining, many of them on the national historic register. We drove the driving tour and saw dozens of homes like these:
This first one is for sale, if you are interested (no price sheet was posted).
Downtown historic Columbus was never subjected to the ugly rebuilding of the 50s and 60s that marred other old downtowns, and there were still pretty advertising signs painted on the sides of buildings, stuff like that.
This wall stretched the whole block wide and was covered in old ads.
This is the toy store where we met the owners, a couple who had travelled the country for years before their kids had gotten to school age. They told us about the Amish country of southernTennessee, which I now want to go visit, and of the husband's favorite place to eat in Columbus (the Jones restaurant, serving soul food for 40 years). Katie enjoyed their toy store while we chatted with them. The husband whispered that he'd like them to hit the road again, but they have elderly family in Columbus.
Our driving tour of the historic homes drove us by Lee Park, where we stopped so Katie could play. Or was it so Mark could play?
We tried to tour Waverly Mansion, an old plantation which is open to the public, but no one was there to give us a tour. Here are Mark and Katie on the grounds:
Photos are not allowed inside Waverly, but here is a shot of the pretty magnolia outside their windows:
Sunday we expected Mark to work and I to sightsee with Katie, but I felt sick as a dog and Mark had to unexpectedly fix something. What happened is, we were sitting in the RV after breakfast, and heard a loud knock. I thought maybe a branch fell on our roof. Mark leaped up and ran into the back of the RV, shouting for a towel. The water pipe had come undone, at our water heater. Thank goodness we were there and he recognized the sound! So he spent literally all day driving out to Lowe's (20 minutes at least each way) four times to get all the stuff he needed to fix the darn thing. But he kept in good spirits about it (until that last trip) and got it fixed better than new. Now we turn off the water when we go to sleep or leave the RV.
Monday we expected Mark to work, but he was sick and getting sicker. I was better, except very dizzy, so Katie and looked around some more, to give him space to sleep. That was the day I found out that an inheritance check had gotten accidently sent to a previous address of mine, and signed for there, by whoever lives there now. It was never returned to my uncle, who assumed I had gotten it. That made me a little sick, but as my uncle is a sheriff, I think it'll get straightened out...
Columbia has an old cemetary named Friendship, containing the bodies of locals from Revolutionary War veterans up to present. Katie is a sweetie pie when it comes to visiting cemetaries with me, and it was a nice one. Folks are still able to join their families in plots there, despite the 15,000 people already buried there. Also it has the distinction of being the birthplace of Memorial Day. Women from town here would gather one day a year to put flowers on the graves of the Civil War dead (there were many many of those soldiers buried here, 2200 from the Battle of Shiloh alone. Most of the men were from out of town and sent here to the hospital, where they subsequently died. There were even Union soldiers buried here for awhile, but reinterred above the Mason-Dixon line). Here are pictures:
Some of the Civil War graves
The beautiful weeping angel grave.
There were many carvings in marble and stone, like this little lamb. I don't know why modern folks don't want beautiful, sentimental graves like this anymore; now they are just plain, often without even dates, much less a beautiful poem, like the Victorian graves revealed. Here is a family plot looking like a forgotten chapel:
Japanese magnolias are in bloom now. Here is one in the cemetary, with a carpet of petals beneath it:
After the cemetary, I took Katie to lunch at McDonalds, since it's one of the few places where I could check my email (they had a hot spot there). I got an email from our friend Norma, who had gone to college in Columbus. She had asked someone at the university to give us a VIP tour. How cool! Katie was tuckered, so I dropped her off and toured the school. It is the Mississippi University for Women. In the Civil War, some of its buildings served as a hospital for Confederate soldiers and even some Union troops. I think the building here did:
The tour was wonderful: I was driven around to see the outsides and insides of many of their beautiful buildings. Unfortunately, I only took one picture, of the inside of their culinary school:
I was hoping to smell some great cooking, to make me forget my "Chicken Selects" from lunch, but they were not holding class at the time.
I left the tour feeling that maybe Katie would enjoy going to a small university like that some day. They only have about 2500 students, but much history and beauty.
That night, Katie decided to cut her own bangs. Thank goodness I suspected something was up, and got to her before she'd done much damage. I tried taking a picture; it came out a little goofy:
We decided to stay an extra day, so that maybe Mark could work on Tuesday, if he felt better, before we head for Oxford, Mississippi and then on to Arkansas. But Tuesday he got the news that all isn't well at his old workplace. They've just lost some important people, and for awhile, we worried over what that would mean to us and to them. But to get out and away from our thoughts, I headed back to Waverly to try taking the tour again.
A nice old lady gave me the tour. Her father had been the postmaster for Waverly when she was just a little girl, and delivered mail to the mansion (no longer a plantation at that time), for it housed the post office in its front room. It has some incredible stories, such as this: it was built in the mid 19th century, then abandoned in 1912 and left empty for 50 years. The relatives who left it did not even lock the door front. They decided not to bother; they didn't want anyone breaking down the door. For years during its abandonment, local kids would play in it and hunters would camp overnight in its grand, plastered rooms. It has a central hall which all the rooms attach to, and the central hall is four stories high! But in all that time, no one ever vandalized it in any way. There were 7-foot-tall French mirrors in the central hall, neither of which was shot at or broken during that time. There was a huge (four-foot by six-foot I think) mirror in the parlor, and antique chairs left there too. None of the marble mantlepieces were broken, and the building didn't even settle, or the plaster crack. The current owner (an 80-year old man) bought it in 1962 and started filling it with period antiques, during a time when you could get a huge rosewood Rococco canopied bed for $450. Recently, a similar bed sold in Mississippi for $70,000! The place is filled with 18th and 19th century imported antiques, and my mouth kind of watered at all the expense. THis isn't Newport, Rhode Island; this is a small town in the woods of Mississippi, it almost seems out of place to have so much wealth there. But it's easy to forget how it got there too. The Colonel who built Waverly was a rich man to begin with, and ingenious, inventing all sorts of things for his home, but also he had 1,000 slaves working for him, making him even richer on cotton. The cotton plantations are what made Columbus the beautiful town full of mansions that it is and was; the wealth didn't come from nowhere.
Today we are leaving the beauty of Columbus to see the college town of Oxford, Mississippi. We'll be driving on an ancient road used by Native Americans, called the Nachez Trace. I can't wait to reach it.