Paperwork enthusiast seeking new frontiers of paperwork. Former submariner, former Peace Corps Volunteer. Opinions, thoughts, and comments reflect no actual persons, living or in the Navy.
This was all the way back in May, but I went to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival along with my super amazing wife and her super amazing mom! This post is titled “III” because it is now I suppose de rigueur that I write about the festival when I go to it. We went back in 2022 and 2023, but hadn’t been able to go in the intervening years because of course we were in Sierra Leone.
As was totally expected, we had a lot of fun going to the festival this year. The most interesting thing is that this year we frankly felt a bit rushed. The previous years it had felt very easy to see everything at the festival and at some point it just felt natural to head on home. This year however we knew we needed to stay until the very end. My super amazing wife you see had entered a sweater into the knitting competition, and the only way to get your entry back was to pick it up at the very end of the festival, after 4:30pm on Sunday. I was foolishly a bit worried what we would do all afternoon while waiting for knitting entry pickup time to roll around.
That’s not Ted Cruz announcing, that man has earned the hat.
What the difference was I don’t know. I don’t think the festival had expanded all that much in the intervening years. Maybe we just had more to do. Upon arrival we head on into the gate and of course the first thing we had to do was to see how my super amazing wife faired in the competition. Alas, she did not get a ribbon. This was due to two factors, one being that there were some absolutely amazing entries in all the knitwear and wool-related competitions (they also had like rug-making and art felting and a whole host of things) so it was always going to be tough. The competition area always has stunningly gorgeous pieces that people have created and even though it is kind squirreled away at the far end of the exhibition areas you should always make sure to check it out. The other factor was strategic – she had entered a sweater she was knitting anyways, one that was mostly a solid color with a small ribbing of colorwork around the collar. This unfortunately meant it had to be entered into the colorwork category, going up against sweaters entirely made of colorwork, and so was probably disfavored among its peers. But none of that really matters, she got a thrill out of participating, and it was fun to see her handiwork up there on display.
Another new thing for us we made sure to see was the parade of sheep breeds. This has been going on for the duration of the festival but we hadn’t stopped by before. That was a lot of fun to watch. It is pretty much what it sounds like. In the central show arena the announcer introduces each breed of sheep before it gets trotted out, more or less willingly, and shown around the arena. There are also some fun facts being centered mostly around the breed’s history and the relative qualities of both its wool and its carcass. You know what sheep look like, fluffy things with four legs, and I have seen plenty of sheep breeds at this point, but it was different to see them all lined up with each other. I knew that Shetland sheep were small but you don’t understand how tiny they are until they are standing next to something like a Lincoln Longwool.
One particular sheep breed we learned about at the festival was the Hog Island sheep, pictured above (the top of them anyway). That was exciting for being something of a local breed; turns out modern-day Mt. Vernon got themselves a flock for their closeness to what George Washington would have kept. My super amazing wife got herself some Hog Island sheep wool roving to do some spinning later, which brings us the next major thing we needed to accomplish, which was looking at e-spinners. She wants to get an e-spinner as a more portable version of the slightly more traditional wheel she currently uses (an upright model from Ashford), and so wanted to check out some in person. These, turns out, are very expensive but there were some nice more affordable models. She did not walk out of the festival with a new wheel but she got a feel for some of the relevant features.
Then of course there were the other standard things you have to do at the Sheep & Wool Festival. We saw some of the sheep dog demonstrations, amused as always by watching just how excited the sheep dogs are to sheep dog sheep. All they want in the whole world is to round those suckers up. We also had to have some lunch, the only major decision being exactly what kind of lamb we were going to morbidly eat. We’ll eat fish at an aquarium, and we’ll eat lamb at a Sheep & Wool festival, unafraid to look either animal in the eye afterwards. I went with a lamb Milanesa, my super amazing mother-in-law with a lamb pita, and my super amazing wife with lamb mac n’ cheese, if I am remembering correctly. Then we had to check out all the vendors of which there were very very many. Our collective was only in the market for a bit of yarn this year, but was keeping a keen eye out for other accessories. I got some pewter buttons for the sweater my super amazing wife is going to super amazingly knit for me (even though I have been mostly recently bumped farther down the to-do list in favor of a baby blanket for her best friend). We resisted in the end buying some more sheep cheese.
And after having checked out even more sheep it was all-too-soon time to pick up the sweater from the craft competition and go home. I don’t know the next time we’ll be able to visit this particular festival but no matter where we go my super amazing wife will find a way to visit a sheep & wool or a yarn festival so there will be more fiber content on this blog in the future, don’t worry.
One of the places we were excited to visit upon our return to DC was the Folger Shakespeare Library. Both me and my super amazing wife have a deep connection to Shakespeare and the Folger library, despite neither of us having been able to visit before (it was closed for renovations last time we were living in the area). In college she had participated in Shakespeare festivals and played several of the roles and thought deeply about the plays and their meanings. I, on the other hand, have seen the complete works of Shakespeare (abridged) in middle school, and much later I went out on I think two dates once with a woman I dimly remember working at the Library. We also of course have both been to the Globe.
The Folger Shakespeare Library is really quite an institution to have in DC. If it’s not the top place for scholarly Shakespeare research in all the world it certainly has to be the most substantial. Listing off the superlatives from the Wikipedia page, it has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of Shakespeare including 82 copies of the First Folio (really more than anyone could reasonably need), the world’s third largest collection of English books printed before 1641 (now that I copy that over I wonder who is tracking that), and, among many, many other things, Henry VIII’s childhood copy of Cicero’s De officiis. All somehow nestled behind the Supreme Court instead of you know England or something. And for all that if I wasn’t such a Shakespeare scholar myself I’m not sure I would have known about it.
A First Folio with writing in it by a girl named Margaret c. 17th century.
Now that we were back in DC, on a cold December day we went up to Capital Hill to check out this magnificent Library. The public area of the museum is not too terribly large. On the bottom floor there is a museum that talks of course about Shakespeare. They have a big display with a number of their collection of First Folios, and that is neat to see. I mean they got a whole bunch of the things. Around the first folios is a smattering of other artifacts. One thing I hadn’t realized about the library is how they use the First Folios to do a bunch of scholarship on what should be something like a definitive version of each of the plays. The plays have each undergone edits and had transcription errors or changes from edition to edition, but with so many early copies the Library can synthesize these. They have then published really nice editions of each of the plays, and what else is that they are available online. Here’s Macbeth, for example.
On the left are Ira Aldridge’s lines from Othello which he hand-wrote and autographed to Dr. Edmund Schebek, c. 1853. On the right is an etching of Aldridge dressed as Othello c. 1854. This display was significant to me mostly because we had previously gone out to see Red Velvetat the Shakespeare Theater Company.
We had two actual things bringing us to the Library that day. The first and more minor one was a printing press demonstration, done like they would have done to print up the First Folios (they really like the First Folios at the museum). The most significant thing that my super amazing wife and I learned is that the paper had to be wet. An interesting and important detail, that. Then the big thing we were there for was a talk all about old writing utensils and calligraphy, which was pretty neat. After a talk on various stuff they had pulled out (as expected) old fashioned writing utensils, like fountain pens and silver tips or something along with calligraphy manuals and we all got a close-up look. The biggest thing I was thinking about is how hard it must be to curate the Shakespeare Library, like where do you draw the line at what counts as Shakespeare-related? But that is why the curators are professionals.
A booke containing dieurs sortes of hands : as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands by John de Beauchesne, 1602. It contains examples of different handwritings (“hands”) of different scales of fanciness for every occasion.
Other draws of the Folger include the café (called the Quill & Crumb, a great name) and the Library itself. Both are done up like grand Elizabethan halls. Initially I wondered if Folger hadn’t bought up some hall in England and shipped it over, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are beautiful. Having gone to Yale, which itself is all Oxford cosplay, I am always a bit thrown off by 20th century folks pretending like its the 16th but I suppose it keeps the craftspeople employed and that is a good enough reason.
The Folger Shakespeare Library reading room.
And that was the Folger Shakespeare Library, or that visit anyway. They have a nice little gift shop and if you are in the area looking for a place for a coffee, it is worth going to the Quill & Crumb. The other thing about the Library is that they have a whole theater. Some months later we went to go see As You Like It and that was fun. The theater itself is a really nice space. It is small and designed to look a bit Elizabethan, maybe something like the Blackfriars Theater would have looked like. We were in probably the worst seats but they were not bad, and the physical chairs themselves felt pretty luxurious after some of the other theater seats we have been in. We also wound up in the action during the play as some of the actors came up right next to us for a part of it. The production itself was good as well, set sorta kinda in DC as opposed to a kingdom and a forest. There was a running gag where the actors would notice the unicorn painted on fabric draped across the ceiling. It is a really great theater for a play and I would look forward to seeing another one there.
I am a bit late in the game to be talking about this, but all the way back in December my super amazing wife and I went to go see a travelling exhibit at the National Gallery of Art titled “The Stars We Do Not See.” It comprised of works by indigenous Australians and it was phenomenal.
The style of the works were all so new to me, comprised of motifs we hadn’t seen before coming from a tradition we were unfamiliar with. I think the closest thing they looked like was all the tingatinga art we saw in Tanzania, with repeating designs based in nature. All the dots made for an entrancing way to create the image. It’s not exactly pointillism, and for some of the works each dot (in some cases painted with a brush made of human hair) represented not a portion of an image but a star, all connected throughout the universe.
Really the cultural context probably rendered the art impenetrable, but it was still transfixing. A sign in the exhibition was careful to explain that the works derived from twin concepts of Country and Dreaming. Country is “more than just landscape” it is “the nexus of land, skies, waters, knowledge, bodies, and Law,” and “understood to be closely tied to personal identity.” Dreaming meanwhile is the era before Country, “when Ancestral beings shaped the world, created life, and established the Laws…” More importantly, since the knowledge of Country and Dreaming is sacred and is often secret to outsiders, shared only with community members, the exhibit had to make sure to specify that everything on display was “suitable for public viewing and none of the information described in the labels is culturally restricted.”
The first sets of works were these eucalyptus tree trunks covered in designs. That was such an interesting canvas to use. With the trunks being so tall and thin the motifs stretched up and down and to get a sense of it all you of course had to walk all the way around. Displayed together they created a forest of meaning.
The different types of art used a range of different materials. Some focused on all natural materials, with earth pigments painted onto the tree trunks or pieces of eucalyptus bark. The advent of eucalyptus bark as a canvas is a fairly modern invention to allow the pieces to be mobile. Normally the designs would have been painted on rock walls or the like, and so immoveable. It’s in the piece above, Garak, that each dot is a star and each line the connection between the stars and everything else. Other works embraced other available materials, including stretched canvas and artificial pigments.
Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, 1980Closeup of the skeletal figure from Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country
The star of the show was probably the above work. The photo doesn’t capture it but it is monumental, stretching across a whole wall. In this one, Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country, the label tells me the “collaborative painting chronicles the artists’ deep connection to the Country while also referencing the dispossession of the Anmatyerre people, whose land was overtaken by the Napperby cattle station in the early 20th century.” What I like about it is although you can’t tell exactly what the whole narrative is, from the line down the middle and the different sections it is clear there is a narrative. Some of the designs have to do with foodways, and some clearly with even more grim topics. It is awe-inspiring in-person.
Another favorite piece from the exhibit was the above one, Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti. It was displayed horizontally, reflecting, the label says, how the artist Nakamarra painted it on the ground; it has no horizon or top or bottom. It was mesmerizing. Being displayed on the floor meant you could walk around it, and it seemed to change as you did. The rippling peaks on the painting makes it feel like you are flying over the landscape it depicts. It was stunned at how such a simple pattern of peaks could create a whole terrain.
And then finally for this blog post we have Erub Has a Bitumen Road Now, the name referencing the artist discovering that his home town on Erub Island had gotten a tarmac road. The piece does not have the same sort of aesthetic as all the other ones I’ve been going gaga over, but what it does have is a white cross in the lower right corner. According to the label, this symbolizes the event known on Erub as the “Coming of the Light,” which was the arrival of the London Missionary Society on July 1, 1871. I think so much about the LMS and its impact on modern Zambia. In these places, the Christianity espoused by the Society has become the deep-seated and meaningful beliefs of the communities, replacing and displacing, as the label notes, “traditional culture, language, and rituals.” For Naina the linkage he finds most significant is the line between the arrival of the LMS and the environmental and spiritual degradation symbolized by a road designed for cars. And yet that event is still referred to as the “Coming of the Light.” I suppose for all I know the name has become a consciously dark irony, but that juxtaposition is some insight to the Torres Islander version of a question I’ve wondered about in Zambia.
In the end, “The Stars We Do Not See” is a very powerful exhibition with gorgeous art and which leaves one with many things to think about. It has bumped Australia much further up the places I want to visit (though technically I’ve been before) so I can explore more the world of indigenous art there.
Towards the bottom of the peak, looking north-northwest over downtown Freetown and King Tom
After an embarrassingly long time we finally went up Leicester Peak!
To be clear it only took us like 30 minutes to walk on up to the top. So that was not embarrassing, but given it is just a 30-minute hike my point is why didn’t we do this earlier? Leicester Peak is, by a significant margin, not the tallest mountain in Sierra Leone’s Western Area. I have only just learned that the honor goes to Pickett Hill at 888 meters above sea level. I had thought it was Sugar Loaf mountain, which of course I previously climbed up, but that seems to only be about 735 meters. Leicester Peak is only about 565 meters. However what it lacks in height it makes up for in proximity, looming over Freetown. Elizabeth Melville in A Residence in Sierra Leone described the mountain as “bleak,” though that seems unfair.
Looking up at the transmitting station
A major part of the reason we had not hiked up Leicester Peak during our time in Sierra Leone is that for much of our time it has been a construction site. The World Bank is leading a tourism development project for the mountain, the main focus of which is the construction of a large viewing platform at the top. This Youtube video shows the site under construction (and welcomes potential vendors). As you can see it is going to be really nice when it is done. It would have been exciting to see it finished, but alas we will have left Sierra Leone before that is the case.
Since the viewing platform is still under construction, we couldn’t actually get to the very tippy-top of the mountain but a major advantage of the project already is that they have paved a very nice road that winds it way around the mountain. It’s got a lovely sidewalk which makes for an easy trip. And although you can’t get quite all the way to the top, the views are lovely nonetheless, the trip up providing a view in every beautiful direction of Sierra Leone.
Looking northeast over the town of Leicester and up the Sierra Leone river
The photos in this post are in altitude-order, starting at the bottom and proceeding to the top. We did the walk/hike just this past August, so still in the midst of the rainy season. It was sunny when we started though as we reached the top a cloud started rolling in, obstructing our view a bit. Oh well. The biggest impact of the cloud rolling in though is we did get misted on a bit. I have been doing all this reading about Victorian explorers with all their opinions about how intense sun or dampness affects their health and maybe it has affected me. After being slightly dampened by this early afternoon mist the rest of the day I felt weak and hot. Not even a good cuppa put me right. Or maybe I am just more out of shape than I thought, who knows.
Anyways, if you are in Freetown hike or at least drive up Leicester Peak, the views are beautiful. And I am excited to see what sorts of things get installed at the viewing platform. It will be a magnificent sight.
Looking south-southeast toward the town of Regent, with the Western Area National Park to the right
Way back in 2024 and right at the start of the rainy season (yesterday as I’m writing this) we went on a hike to Mambo Falls and it was a lot of fun!
Mambo Falls is apparently one of the more popular hikes in the Freetown vicinity because it isn’t too tough and at the end you get to visit a waterfall. When we visited we parked at J.J. Drive. There was a bridge there and several signs, though don’t cross the bridge, as that is not the way to the waterfall. Please do take note of (what I thought was) the very cool system of pipes that people are clearly using to bring running water to their houses, that is a super neat system:
You can’t really see it from this picture but I think this is a silted-up dam, with the blue pipes leading through a hole in what was the dam wall. There was infrastructure as part of the dam that I think would have led to water pipes, but now they have this system.
Instead head towards the spot in this link, which is closer to the trailhead, such as it is. Mambo Falls itself is also marked on Google Maps, so that should be helpful. Since the hike is rather popular everyone around will probably realize you’re trying to go to the waterfall and point you in the right direction if you get lost, and you can also ask for directions. Generally, go uphill.
Path toward the waterfall.
The other reason the hike is so popular, besides being able to see a cool waterfall, is that the trail and the waterfall area itself is maintained as a community project. As such there are signs pointing the way as well as delineating appropriate behavior at the falls. It also means that there is an entry fee to pay for this upkeep, and near the crest of the hill before the descent to the falls itself there will be a small hut where people collect that fee. When we went it was 10 Leones, or less than $0.50 USD at the time. Besides the trails, this meant that the falls area itself was well-kept (as we arrived a man was raking up some of the accumulated leaves), and there were even some small shelters to relax in.
Rules for the trail, in Krio.
The hike itself is not too tough, minus having to walk pretty much straight uphill and then straight downhill. It is much less steep than Sugar Loaf was and significantly shorter. Plus on the way there and the way back you get some incredible views of the valley where the waterfall is and of the ocean from atop the peak. Gorgeous stuff.
Looking down into the valley with Mambo Falls, which is just barely visible in the lower left. I took this picture though in admiration of the hillside farm in the middle.View of the Atlantic you get on the way back, with the Banana Islands on the horizon on the left.
Arriving at the waterfall we had fun doing the normal waterfall stuff, i.e. swimming around in the shallow pool at the base and getting sprayed by the water cascading down the rocks. In the pool as well there were cute crawfish-looking things that were actually pretty ready to fight; I am pretty sure one grazed my feet and I scampered off to the safety of dry land where they couldn’t get me. You’ll probably have company at the pool because it is a popular spot to cool off, but everyone is friendly.
And that was pretty much our hike; we spent about two hours total on the endeavor and it was a very fun way to spend a Saturday morning. Although the community does upkeep on the place if you do go remember to be polite and pack out any trash you bring and be respectful of the site!
Yesterday, (as of writing this), I hiked on up Sugar Loaf Mountain! It was fun and I am still exhausted. My super amazing wife was out of town and a group of people were going hiking up the mountain and invited people along. I was expecting a big crowd but there was not a big crowd instead there was a relatively small group of people who were all much much fitter than me and I spent the whole time struggling to keep up.
The trailhead.
The hike starts in Regent. If you want to do the hike yourself, the trailhead starts here. Follow what Google Maps displays as a road until the end and then keep going along the waterpipes and on up the trail. The picture above is the trailhead, at least how it looked the day we hiked it (at least two years ago as you are reading this), but Freetown keeps expanding its borders so who knows what it will look like when you give it a go.
According to the Visit Sierra Leone site, you are supposed to get a local guide and pay a small donation to hike on up the trail. As far as I could tell we didn’t do that and no one really approached us about it (not clear where one would ask for a guide), but it might be helpful to try to figure it out if you’re not going with someone who already knows what they are doing. The trail is supposedly marked, which is sort of true. It has definitely been marked many times. Hiking up we passed by arrows painted on rocks, paint on trees, and ribbons tied to branches. The trail itself was also usually pretty visible, though people have taken multiple paths around various obstructions, and it seems there are plenty of stories of people taking a wrong fork and winding up on the wrong mountain. If you haven’t seen a discarded water bottle in a bit, you’re probably on the wrong path.
Two guides were engaged, and about eleven o’clock I started, and was one and a half hours making the ascent. No one had been up for a long time, and the path was much overgrown, so that my guides missed their way twice. I never saw any thing like it. It was like going up a ladder, from rock to rock, up, up, at every step – at times pulling ourselves up by the bushes; at other places walking on an extended bare rock, with the inclination of a steep roof, while precipices of thousands of feet lay beneath. It was a very wearying effort, but we reached the top.
It hasn’t changed much (the trail was less overgrown than he described like I said above, but I think he did it closer to the rainy season). Since the internet said it was a marked trail I had expected, like, switchbacks. The straight-line distance for the trail is not even a mile, and before the hike I had been worried about how long a reasonably curvy trail up the mountain would be. Turns out the trail goes pretty much straight up from the trail head to the tippy-top, gaining (again as far as I can tell from Google Maps) 1000 feet of elevation in about 3000 feet of walking. Steep! I don’t think it would be too too bad if you were taking your time instead of running after people way more in shape than you, but there are definitely some slippery leaves and tricky bits. On the descent I resorted to crabwalking a few times. In the picture above you can see the rock faces our dear man George was talking about, but those were actually easy sections; the rock was grippy enough that you could just (“just”) walk up, though in the rainy season it might be much more hairy.
Further down in the paragraph quoted above George describes wondrous sights but unfortunately on the day we hiked up it was more than a bit hazy with the tail end of the Harmattan. What we did see was still rather pretty, but given how pretty it was I can only imagine the sights when the skies are clear. The photo at the top was about 3/4 of the way up and was the best view of Freetown itself, while the photo right above this paragraph was at the summit (I tried smiling I promise but I guess this is the best I could muster so exhausted) looking south into the forest preserve. It’s a gorgeous landscape, so unlike the port side of Freetown which really isn’t far at all, and must be unlike anything else in Sierra Leone until you cross the lowland plateau and hit the hills 100 miles inland. Worth the walk even if it is a doozy!
This is the story of me trying to find Heddle’s Farm. Why did I go looking for it? Because it is there. Maybe.
Early on in our Sierra Leone journey I of course discovered the list of national monuments. In Zambia, it was a book about various national monuments published by their National Monuments Commission that had me out looking at a lot of stuff and then trying to document it on the internet so it was more accessible to other people. I wanted to recreate that here in Sierra Leone because it is fun. These sorts of things have just the right amount of mystery. The places are usually documented enough that you can find them but not documented enough where it’s easy. I should point out that this is about documentation. Someone knows where all these things are; they are written down in government archives somewhere or someone is in charge of going and looking at the things every so often. That someone probably works for the Sierra Leone Monuments and Relics Commission and I really need to get down there and talk to them but I usually have to work when they are open and I just haven’t made it yet. So when I am looking for things there are easier answers but the handicap makes it fun. This brings me to Heddle’s Farm.
Right away I wanted to go look at Heddle’s Farm. Probably what intrigued me the most was that, according to the Sierra Leone Heritage page I just linked to, it eventually became part of the botanical garden of Fourah Bay College. I like botanical gardens so once you find out one exists, you like gotta go. And maybe they sell saplings that I could plant. It also meant I thought it would make it easy to find Heddle’s Farm, I mean, I know where Fourah Bay College is and it’s easy to drive to and botanical gardens are large and easy to spot. Not so. I dragged my super amazing wife out one weekend to drive around the college (through and then back through again that is) to see if we could spot the garden. We couldn’t. Later that week I had her ask some local colleagues about it and they were vaguely aware a botanical garden existed but were not really sure where it would be. So that was a bit of a dead end.
Back on the Sierra Leone Heritage page it recommends that for further reading you turn to A Residence at Sierra Leone. So I did. I bought the book in hardcopy and had it shipped here and read the whole thing for clues to the location of Heddle’s Farm. The book itself is what it says on the cover, a series of letters and journal entries edited together into a day-by-day narrative of the author’s time living in Sierra Leone. During most of the time she stayed in the house that later became known as Heddle’s Farm, after Charles Heddle, who owned it for a while and was very successful. Not to detract from Charles Heddle, who has a significant amount of stuff written about him online, but after reading A Residence in Sierra Leone I wanted to know more about the author. Her name was Elizabeth Melville. She originally published her book as “By a Lady” (edited by the Hon. Mrs. Norton), I assume to avoid anyone featured in the book thinking she was gossiping about them. But googling around I can’t really find anything much about her, though like so many things in Sierra Leone clearly someone knows a significant amount about her, I just don’t know who and I don’t know where they wrote it down. So in an attempt to be helpful to future googlers, I present, based on everything I could find online about her,
A Biography of Elizabeth Melville:
Elizabeth Helen Callender Melville was born in Dunipace, Scotland, on March 14, 1818. In 1840 she moved with her husband and baby to Sierra Leone. Her husband was a judge on the Mixed Commission Court which examined whether seized ships had been part of the slave trade. The family had at least one furlough in England but returned there permanently in 1846. She published her book in 1849.
…and that’s it. Elucidating. Anyways out of reading the book there were a couple of clues. One is that she describes the house as being “at the formidable distance of half an hour’s ride” from Freetown, which I figured put it about a mile from what is now downtown. Another is that she describes looking over at Mount Aureol from the house (she spells it “Oriel”). She says “The hill to our right rises up very abruptly, shutting out the view of both river and opposite shore. It is much higher and still more difficult of access than this; although were a plank (could we find one long enough) flung across from our windows to the corresponding height on the other side, I think I could run across in five minutes.” From that clue her house is not on Mount Aureol, but next to it. When I looked at Google Maps for where Mount Aureol was, it showed me what I interpreted to be the area next to Fourah Bay College (at this point where I still thought a botanical garden was), so I wrongly took this as evidence the house was somewhere on the grounds of college. But since I already had been thwarted looking for a botanical garden on the grounds of the college, I searched for other sources.
One interesting thing I found was the above picture, via the Library of Congress. I figured there could only be so many botanical gardens in Freetown, so that house pictured might be Heddle House itself. I was further encouraged when I noticed the house in the photo looks a lot like the house in the painting that graces the Sierra Leone Heritage webpage. I also, upon re-reading that webpage, noted that Heddle’s Farm is described as being “on the old Leicester Road.” I managed to figure out that the old Leicester Road is the that the Leicester Police Post sits on. I had also come across this Government of Sierra Leone Integrated GIS Portal, and you’ll have to do the zooming yourself but if you zoom in along that road there is a section labelled “Tree Planting” and ah ha! I thought. Botanical garden, trees, tree planting, Old Leicester Road, maybe I have found it, and with a picture of the location and of the house itself in hand maybe I could go find it. So I went out for another drive to hunt the place down, assured of success!
I was unsuccessful. I could discern no tree planting along the road, except for a sign that said “tree planting.” There were no old buildings or anything that looked botanical garden-like, and as I went down the road it got dicier and dicier to the point where I cut my losses and turned around, defeated.
Once I returned home, I puttered around and realized that although my idea of looking at a map for the location of Leicester Road was pretty brilliant, it was not brilliant enough. Between being the home of Elizabeth Melville and the current day, Heddle House spent some time as the home of the Forest Commissioner. I figured the Forest Commissioner’s house, being a government facility, would be on old maps, and I had already found some old maps of Freetown. Specifically, I had found a 1947 map of Freetown from here. Looking down at the area around Fourah Bay College, I discovered two things: one, that Mount Aureol is the hill that Fourah Bay College is located on, and two, a little marker labelled “Heddle’s.” Well! That settled it! This was the location of Heddle House, on the hill next to Fourah Bay College. For your handy reference, I think it is where this marker is on Google Maps. Now all I had to do was go look at it.
This was not as easy as I thought it would be. I knew from my Leicester Road experience that the driving in that area was not so fun, so what I really wanted to do was park at Fourah Bay College and walk over. Mrs. Melville describes riding up Mount Aureol from Heddle House, and I wanted to essentially do the opposite. I made the mistake of picking a Sunday for this adventure and found a rather large church gathering at Fourah Bay College that I was too embarrassed to try to sneak around so I could muck off into the woods. So I drove down the hill and drove back up the adjoining hill, where I thought Heddle House lay. This was encouraging, actually, because I found a stretch of road that seemed to have once been paved, perhaps in the colonial era, like you would presumably do so the forest commissioner can get up to his house. Eventually though I could go no further without (I felt) significant risk of the car tumbling over the side of the cliff, so I parked in front of a shop after asking the proprietor if it was okay. She was very friendly.
View of Fourah Bay College from what I think is the location of Heddle’s Farm.
From my parking spot it was still a bit of a hike up the hill and the most impressive part of the whole adventure is that there are very nice houses up there built with what look like very heavy building materials and I am stunned someone hiked all that concrete and building materials up there. A very nice view though! The picture at the very top of this post is from near the shop I parked at and was pretty encouraging that this was the spot. The tallest building in the right third of the photo is the Freetown City Council building, right smack in the middle of downtown and the oldest part of the city. At one point in her book Mrs. Melville describes being able to see Freetown from her window as if laid out in miniature, and yeah that is exactly what I saw from that vantage point.
What I had hoped to find at the top of the hill was some sort of historical marker. There are historical markers next to some of the other historical sites I have seen in Sierra Leone, so I was hoping that along one of the paths up there I would find one and it would confirm I was in the right spot. I never did. I was also hoping to find the remains of the house, and I didn’t find those either. For quite a number of years the house had been reduced to just its foundations, and I think even those are gone these days. If you look at the Google Maps link from before, in the area there is a large dirt patch which currently serves as a soccer field and a source of clay for bricks. Nearby is a trash pile and all around the area are homes that have sprung up on the hill as Freetown expands. There is also a communications tower on top of the hill. Various friendly people saw me wandering around and asked what I was up to. I showed them pictures of other historical markers and asked if they knew of something similar up there, to no avail. Some suggested I look over at the college and I went down that path a little ways but didn’t see anything. I also poked around the hill but the only historic-looking thing I found was a geographical survey marker:
Eventually I decided I wasn’t going to see any artifacts that confirmed this was the location of Heddle House but I walked away satisfied anyway. The area clearly matches the description, given the saddle-like nature of the hill, the view of Mount Aureol, and the stunning vista of Freetown laid out in miniature. It’s a beautiful spot and despite the fact I have no idea how people get building materials up there, as a living location it is certainly charming. I don’t think there are any remnants of the botanical garden left, which is a bit sad, but there are other things for Freetown and Fourah Bay College to devote their resources to. The people on top of the hill were very friendly and tried to help. If you’re ever in the area it is probably much more straightforward to go to Fourah Bay College or Leicester Mountain for the views, but if you do get up there they are very nice.
One final note while I’m talking about A Residence in Sierra Leone. At one point in the book Mrs. Melville is relating the story of the 1794 French attack on Freetown, as told to her by various eyewitnesses. Melville is recording this in a letter she wrote in 1846, a half century after the event. Relating the story, she describes how the French “scoured the town in search of stock, which they kept shooting at… books, plants, seeds, dried birds and insects, were torn, trampled upon, and scattered about; telescopes, barometers, thermometers, and an electrical machine shared the same fate…” A mystery (to me anyway) is what the heck she was referring to when she said “an electrical machine?” I mentioned the whole half century thing because the eyewitnesses must have been relatively young when they witnessed the attack, their memory could have been influenced by subsequent events, and Mrs. Melville might have interpreted something they said anachronistically. But with all that being said what 1790s “electrical machine” is existing in a colony that hadn’t been around for a decade at this point? What is this thing she’s referring to? Electrical thingies existed at this point and were popular (Ben Franklin flew his kite in 1752), but what would have been in the colony? It’s listed with weather-related equipment so maybe something to do with that? Or just a scientific novelty? If you know what they are talking about please let me know.
As the last major sight on our DC Staycation tour, my super amazing wife and I visited the National Cathedral. We had been wanting to go for a while, but we hadn’t figured out the bus system until recently, so it was vaguely annoying to get to from where we lived. But since our time in the good ole’ U.S. of A. was running short we finally made the trip.
It was pretty nice? I dunno man I’m not much of a cathedral guy. They don’t do it for me. I like certain churches, but overall Christian religious structures just don’t have the pizzazz of like the one Buddhist temple I’ve seen in person (lots of gold and cushions and statues, good stuff). But one of the appeals of the National Cathedral after all of our recent Staycation touring is that it provided a convenient endcap to some of the stuff we had seen. One example is that the Cathedral, like many of the places we visited, had very nice floors. But a more concrete example is just the previous day we had seen Woodrow Wilson’s old house, and the National Cathedral houses a dead Woodrow Wilson:
Dead Woodrow Wilson
Speaking of racists, one intriguing display the Cathedral had going was about the former location of a stained glass window dedicated to Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. They took those windows down because, you know, hella racism, and they are in the process of replacing them with much better windows. It is always nice to see an institution being so thoughtful about racism, even if it is a century late or whatever. On a much different tone, also nearby is a Flying Buttress dedicated to the memory of Huldah Graeske Morris and George William Morris. I have previously told close friends and acquaintances that when (or if) I die I want a commemorative shoe buckle made in the spirit of George Washington, but upon seeing a commemorative flying buttress I immediately told my super amazing wife I want one of those too. A flying buttress! Who would have thought?
But back to tying this into our previous staycation adventures. Back in the Anderson House, which still has a number of centuries-old tapestries, there used to be even more tapestries. They were hanging in the ballroom, which is now these days decorated with some Japanese screens. After they died the Andersons donated those tapestries to the National Cathedral, so it was nice on this visit to round out seeing some of the Anderson’s old stuff we didn’t get to see when we visited their house:
The Cathedral was actually a fairly alright place for textile art. Besides the tapestries, the children’s chapel had all sorts of embroidery of like cute animals and other stuff that would appeal to kids (presumably, I don’t know what the kids like these days, maybe internet dancing? That could make a good tapestry). One thing they seemed really proud of was that in St. John’s Chapel they had all these kneepads decorated in needlepoints all about “noted Americans.” I picked a few of my favorites below, including John Paul Jones, who I assume is the namesake of the chapel, along with ole’ Bobby Fulton and one of my favorite authors Nathaniel Bowditch (who’s name is pronounced bao-ditch, not BOW-ditch, which should save you some embarrassment if you are ever trying unsuccessfully to impress the Commandant of the Naval Academy when you highlight the books he has on his bookshelf because you are so passionate about navigation):
Anyways that was the ground floor. You can also descend into the basement of the Cathedral, which has more chapels and the like and a sadly closed (while we were visiting) gift shop. But the two best parts of the chapel were first the towers and then the grounds. We only stumbled upon the fact that you could ascend up into the towers of the Cathedral because we noticed the elevators, but if you head on up you can get some really nice views of northwest DC from like the opposite perspective you (I) usually do because I have been up to the top of the Washington Monument twice and been up in the National Cathedral only the one time. It was very pretty when we were visiting in the summer with everything green! Make sure you go up if you visit the Cathedral:
After thoroughly exploring the interior of the Cathedral we head out to walk the grounds. It was pretty hot so we only did so much walking, but the best part of that walking was going through the Bishop’s Garden. It is “inspired by medieval walled gardens” with “terraced landscape features sculpture nestled amid plants of historical interest, native plants, and plants of the Bible and Christian legends.” So that’s neat. The fountains were tranquil and the flowers were pretty and the pathways picturesque and you got some nice views of the Cathedral (including the cranes doing repair work on the exterior which was very neat too) and it is a lovely little place to stroll. Make sure you don’t miss it while you are gawking at variousspace-related things.
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life by Jonathan Alter
Remote Corners by Harry Mitchell
Our continuing staycation non-journey brought us to the Woodrow Wilson House in DC. This is the house that Woodrow Wilson lived in post-presidency. We went because my super amazing wife is a fan of presidential sites and hey this one was there!
The tour we went on was the “Three Generations of Wilson Women” tour because in addition to presidents my super amazing wife likes women. Plus is was the only tour that worked with our schedule that day but we would have been delighted to go anyways. We were joined by a woman who was on her second Wilson House tour for the day along with three foreign women who I guess were hitting the highlights of America. I don’t know if the other tours the house offers focused much on Wilson’s politics but this one mostly skipped it in favor of telling the story of Wilson’s life via the women that surrounded him. And he seemed to have a pretty good chunk of women surrounding him. He had three daughters with his first wife and the tour also takes time to focus on Mary Scott who worked for the Wilsons along with her husband Isaac.
The place is called the Woodrow Wilson House but it was really more the Edith Wilson house. Like I said Wilson moved here post-presidency in 1921 and then died in 1924. He had married Edith while president in 1915. She was 16 years his junior and a whopping 14 years older than his eldest daughter and outlived him by 37 years, dying in 1961. She very much liked being Mrs. Wilson (according to the tour) and spent the next few decades after Wilson’s death sprucing up the house and preserving her version of his legacy.
As house tours go, I guess it is a pretty nice house? I haven’t seen the inside of many of these sorta embassy row mansions so hard for me to compare. The staycation, besides featuring very nice floors also featured a good number of tapestries, including at least one large one in this house. The most popular spot was the lovely little sunroom at the top of the stairs that looked out over the garden, and as you can see it was a great spot for pictures:
The final detail I’ll note is that up in Edith’s bedroom I saw a statue and then a painting of Pocahontas which our guide hadn’t mentioned but from having recently gone to the Museum of the American Indian I had learned that a good chunk of well-to-do Virginians liked to claim descent from Pocahontas (nee Amonute). This caused problems when Virginia was starting to implement some hella racist laws saying anyone with non-white descent was going to be non-white, which would have included these well-to-do Virginians until the lawmakers included a carveout. Oh racism. Anyways I spotted these Pocahontas things and asked and one of those well-to-do Virginians claiming descent from Pocahontas included Edith Wilson, so there is some cross-museum synergy for you.
And that was pretty much the Wilson House. The staff there are passionate and are working hard to highlight the diverse aspects of the house and Wilson’s legacy though as long as we have a culture that glorifies “Great Men” you are only going to be able to do so much. Nice paintings though!
Another staycation site we visited was Anderson House. We first noticed the place during one of the Embassy Open Days they do in DC. We had wanted to see a bunch of embassies but turns out the lines for all of them were quite long and as we were wandering around we saw a sign for the Society of the Cincinnati and their free museum. We considered going in but were worried that something as serious and pretentious sounding as “Society of the Cincinnati” might be some weird right-wing dark money operation so we wanted to do some research before diving in. After doing that research it seems fine? Clubs like this are always going to be weird but this one seems relatively benign.
The headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati is now in the former house of Larz and Isabel Anderson. These were two rich people that got married. Man tell you what to be rich in the gilded age. There was a period of time, well-evidenced in DC and also the Met, when you could just bop around Europe and buy up large chunks of all the cultural history there. For the people offended on behalf of Europe, don’t worry, they did this in Asia too apparently, the house has tons of Buddha statues scattered all over the place in niches or in the back yard. The tour guide leading us around mentioned that the Andersons weren’t even religious particularly, “if they saw something they liked they just bought it.” I think The Great Gatsby is supposed to be about how this is all terrible and I suppose for most of the world it was but oh to be gilded in the gilded age.
The two big focuses of the house are Larz Anderson’s diplomatic career and his love of the Society of the Cincinnati. The only two uses the house ever saw were as the personal residence of the Andersons and then has headquarters of the Society. The house incorporates various bits of Society of the Cincinnati symbols in like the plaster work and the like, and after the Andersons died they left it to the Society to use as their headquarters. The single most interesting thing I learned on the tour is that the city of Cincinnati is named after the Society, and not directly after Cincinnatus as I would have assumed. On the tour they talk up the history of the Society a bit, but they’re not exactly trying to get you to join, because you can’t, sorry (not sorry).
As for Larz’s diplomatic career, again, man, to be rich. I guess he was really passionate about diplomacy, no knocking him there, but his storied diplomatic career around which he built is personality was like 8 years total? Very much a hobby. According to Wikipedia, he dropped out of law school, but since his dad had connections to the U.S. minister to the Court of St. James Robert Todd Lincoln he got a job over there as first secretary (this was his first job!) for three years and then went over to Rome to be the chargé d’affaires! Then he went on hiatus for like 15 years and then he is Minister to Belgium and then Ambassador to Japan for a whopping one day, later styling himself as “the first American to rise all the way through the diplomatic ranks from the lowest position to the highest.” Rich people never change. But since he was such a big fan of diplomacy once he built himself a nice big fancy house he let the State Department use it all the time to host fancy parties and the like so that was nice of him.
It is a very fancy house, and very gilded age in that I noticed there was a bunch of trompe-l’œil all over the place (see first pic). There was also fancy stuff all over the place, like 400 year-old tapestries and big ole paintings and a table that I thought was pretty neat which is pictured below. I think it was picked up by Isabel Anderson when she was doing the grand tour and features a tabletop made of tons of different bits of granite. Apparently the usefulness of this table is you bought it abroad and then when you came back to build your house you could use it to show your architects/builders which marble you wanted in various bits of the house. To be fair the house had some very nice floors (the whole staycation was a series of very nice floors), but I liked the table because it was like the day before at the Building Museum that I saw the different granite samples and so this was the same thing a century apart and that is neat I thought.
Anywho that was the Anderson House and the Society of the Cincinnati. Their temporary display while we were there was about the history of diplomacy in the house (all those nice parties the State Department threw there) which intrigued me and my super amazing wife suitably, and the house was certainly very pretty to look at. And since the tour was free, it was definitely worth the price.
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