Out bright and early this morning running errands. I got stuck in traffic, but I did not get lost a single time. It’s still a little unsettling to not know where you’re going most of the time, but that will pass with time and driving around.
There are two creature-of-habit things I’m dealing with driving around here. Going into the city, requires a mental adjustment. Fortunately, high-speed highway driving is as second nature a feeling as I can have in a car. Growing up around amateur hour at Talladega will do that for you. But the ebbs and flows, the changing of lanes and the many distracted drivers, it reminds you to take a deep breath and re-grip. The other thing are the intersections around us. Owing, I am sure, to historical property lines and what not, there are a great many intersections that don’t meet at neat right angles. It just requires a weird craning of the neck, is all. And, like any new input, it is new.
But, errands safely run. All things achieved. The maps app was 100 percent successful. I didn’t even break a sweat, owing to the milder, seasonally appropriate temperatures.
I forgot to share these photos yesterday, just glimpses of the season. We have some tomato vines out back. And these are delicious.
In fact, I’m behind on eating tomatoes. Hang on one sec.
…
OK, five small, delicious, tomatoes eaten as a late night snack. I’ll have more to pull out of the miniature garden tomorrow, I’m sure. (And they are so, so, good.)
We have a wonderful array of black-eyed Susans.
And this hydrangea, I decided this afternoon, just looks more impressively beautiful by the day.
How hydrangeas didn’t get some mystic lore attached to them is an enduring mystery. This one is tall and fairly glows.
Less beautiful, in a traditional sense, but no less attractive for it, is this water tower I found today. The way this was situated, I think it might have been in service to a private business rather than a community. And, as water towers go, it is fairly small one. It is in the of a small, closed down ice cream facility.
I saw a store, just yesterday, advertising this ice cream brand. Having put these things together, I might stay away from that altogether. I would not want any water that comes from that tower today, but I hope it stands there blazed in deep rich tones of rust, for a long time.
Anyway, I saw that water tower after a left turn on today’s bike ride. I rode 36 miles this afternoon, because my mileage needs to make some big jumps. But the weather was good, the roads were generally in great condition and I saw only two regrettable drivers, despite finding myself on two different busy roads.
Mostly, it was just beautiful agricultural countryside.
I also found myself on a lot of empty roads. On quite a few, in fact, I didn’t encounter any cars at all. Like this one. There’s marsh to the left, a canal on the right, and the river a little farther off. And for the entire seven minutes I was on this road, I was entirely alone.
Later, I found myself on a sleepy road that was covered by a dense tree canopy. That particular bit of road was riddled with potholes. It was just warm enough, and the katydids were singing their late afternoon chorus and some boggy water somewhere nearby was giving off just a hint of a fragrance. It felt almost like being in some of my favorite places back home.
There was another point to today’s ride. I figure I may as well start tracking down the markers. New county, new goals and all of that. I found a site that lists 115 markers in this county, so we will likely be at this for a while. Easy content!
The last two times I did this, I used a separate microsite. It was extra work and never drew a lot of traffic, so I’ll just put them here. And we’ll use a slightly different premise. Previously, it was just the photos. But, as I find interesting information that compliments the markers, I’ll add them here.
So, let’s look at the first two, and perhaps we’ll learn something interesting as we do.
There’s nothing in this patch of grass, nestled in a fork in the road, except this marker and a flagpole that, today, was flying no flag.
I haven’t found a lot, on my first pass, about how many local boys joined the AEF for the Great War, but I did just learn that the home front was mightily changed during that era.
Industry boomed at the DuPont Powder Works once World War I broke out, and Salem County changed forever. DuPont opened the Powder Works at Carneys Point just south of Penns Grove in 1893 to create smokeless gunpowder for the Spanish-American War, but World War I dramatically increased the need for munitions. Workers from around the United States, as well as immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland, Ireland, Germany, and other countries, flooded into Carneys Point, Penns Grove, and Pennsville to work at DuPont. Between 1910 and 1920, Salem County’s population increased by about ten thousand, compared to a typical increase of one thousand in prior decades. Carneys Point’s population jumped from 744 to 6,259, while neighboring Penns Grove’s population increased from 2,118 to 6,060. During World War I, the plant employed a high of over twenty thousand people. To accommodate the influx of workers, DuPont built temporary housing, barracks, and bungalows, and even put up tents to house the workers. With dramatic increases of students, Penns Grove and Carneys Point expanded and built new schools.
In 1917, DuPont started the Dye Works (renamed Chambers Works in 1945) at Deepwater in Pennsville Township, initially focusing on creating dyes, an industry previously dominated by war-torn Germany. The Chambers Works became a worldwide leader in organic chemicals by discovering and creating materials such as Teflon, nylon, and Freon. DuPont remained a major employer for the rest of the century, with high wages that continued to draw both locals and new residents to Salem County.
I found a museum site that listed 19 men who served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. Perhaps there were more. Surely the other services had local boys amidst their ranks, too. And, owing to the proximity of the coast, and the river, I’m sure I’ll eventually run across some home front defense force mentions, as well.
On the other end of the same road, there was this marker.
In the background, the local high school. This marker is on the high school’s front lawn. I imagine that’s both boring and horrifying to the kids going to school there, if they ever notice it at all. But, perhaps it is also an appropriate place for such a marker.
There’s at least one other Vietnam memorial nearby (at a middle school, which … ) and from that I gather that 11 local soldiers were killed in that country. There’s a Facebook group for that particular display, and someone has uploaded photos of some of those men. But they’re boys. Even in fatigues they look young.
As we go along, and as we discover markers devoted to more specific people and places, our details here will no doubt improve. Possibly as early as next Wednesday! I have already mapped a route for the next dozen or so markers. At this rate I can wrap them all up by sometime in 2025. Unless something else historic happens around here.
