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Object of Intrigue: The Hidden Hillary Clinton Bench

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Early '90s Hillary and Socks, sitting patiently in storage. (Photo courtesy of Christine Louw)

The 13—soon to be 14—presidential libraries administered by the National Archives across the United States have unique approaches to commemorating their respective leaders. But all have something in common: incredibly wacky presidential gift collections.

These sections are where you’ll find items made for presidents by members of their adoring public—the JFK library, for example, has a portrait of JFK carved into a peach pit, while George W. Bush's gifts exhibit features a pair of handcrafted cowboy boots painted with a mini White House and the initials "G.W.B."

The museum at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, is no exception. But one of the most offbeat gifts given to President Clinton is an item that the public cannot see. It's a four-foot-long, three-foot-wide wooden bench painted with convincing trompe l’oeil portraits of Hillary Clinton and Socks the cat as they appeared in the early '90s.

“The bench was given to the Clintons in 1996 by an admirer from Chicago who bought it at a gallery there,” says Christine Mouw, Museum Curator at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. How it got there, however, is a mystery: "The details of the presentation weren't recorded."

The full provenance of the chair may be unknown, but the artist, Phillip Grace, was a man with an intriguing backstory. According to the Spring 2005 issue of Texas Christian University's TCU Magazine, Grace, a "six-foot-four lumberjack of a man," meandered through studies in nuclear physics and marketing in the '60s before becoming a protocol officer in the Air Force, then switching to politics in Texas. Following a difficult divorce, Grace took a trip to Australia, where he visited parliament house in Canberra and encountered a striking portrait of the Prime Minister. “It was so regal and elegant,” he told TCU Magazine. “It was incredibly beautiful, and I knew right then that I wanted one for myself."

Despite a lack of experience in art, Grace began experimenting with self-portraiture and then moved onto painting friends and members of his family. Then he visited the furniture department of a Neiman Marcus store in Texas and had a revelation. 

"It seemed so obvious," he said to TCU Magazine. "All these years, most of my portrait subjects were sitting down for their paintings. I looked at a chair one day and thought that the chair itself looks like a seated person."  

Thus began Grace's foray into trompe l'oeil chairs, which offered, in the words of a New York Times article in 1990, “the great opportunity to sit in your own lap.” During the early '90s, Grace created made-to-order chairs in the likeness of his customers. In 1991, after Neiman Marcus featured the $6,000 chairs as bespoke his-and-hers presents in its notoriously over-the-top Christmas catalog, Grace began taking orders from across the country. He also painted celebrities, then gave them their chairs as gifts. Michael Jordan, Julia Chang Bloch—the U.S. ambassador to Nepal from 1989 to 1993—and Barbara Bush were among those depicted. (Like the Hillary bench, the Barbara Bush chair is in storage at the George Bush Presidential Library. Susie Cox, a curator at the museum, calls it "a favorite of the collection.")  

In 1994, Grace proved his artistic bipartisanship by completing the chair portrait of Hillary Clinton and Socks, the Clintons' cat. After being purchased in Chicago and given to the Clintons while they were still in the White House, the bench ended up on display in the gifts section of Bill Clinton's presidential museum when it opened in 2004. It has since been rotated out of public view.

Phillip Grace died in January 2015 at the age of 72, just under three months before Hillary Clinton announced her 2016 presidential bid. As for Socks, the former First Cat passed away in 2009 and is honored at the Clinton Presidential Library gift shop, where you can buy a bracelet with his portrait on it for $18.

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It's all an illusion. (Photo courtesy of Christine Louw)









Starving Felons, and Other Lessons from Prison Archaeology

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The view from an observation tower built to accommodate tourists who flocked to Old Newgate. (Photo: Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office)

William Stuart didn't really mind sleeping 50 feet underground in a dank abandoned mine or being in close quarters with felons—the ticks and fleas were fewer in the subterranean world and the temperature stayed fairly cool and constant. But what he hated about life at Old Newgate Prison was the food, or lack thereof.

Stuart was a relentless con man and counterfeiter who wreaked havoc throughout New England and Canada before landing at Old Newgate in East Granby, Connecticut. When he arrived in shackles in 1820, he expected to be served coarse cuts of beef and bread with the texture of flint. But he didn’t think he deserved such small portions. While he watched the prison keeper run a side-business selling fat skimmed off the inmates’ meals, Stuart claimed he wasn’t given a third of the food he needed to survive the day.

Though Stuart’s roguish autobiography, published in 1854, offers a rare firsthand account of what life was like inside Old Newgate, he is an imperfect, if entertaining, narrator. But new evidence found at the site of Old Newgate suggests that Stuart wasn’t embellishing how miserable it was to dine there 200 years ago. Archaeologists recently discovered animal bones bashed for every last scrap of nutrition and a crude fork and knife made out of nails—signs that the prisoners weren’t given enough food or even any utensils to eat it with.

“It’s too bad Paul Newman isn’t alive anymore,” says Karin Peterson, museum director of Connecticut’s State Historic Preservation Office. “I could just see Stuart being played in a movie by someone like Newman.”

“Stuart is clearly a character and you have to wonder, was he playing some of this up?” says Sarah Sportman, a zooarchaeologist. “And I don’t know, I’m really starting to think that his account might have been more accurate”—at least with regard to the terrible food situation. Sportman works with Archaeological and Historical Services, a Connecticut-based company that was contracted to excavate at Old Newgate. The prison, which was shut down in 1827, is now a state-owned museum, but it has been closed to the public since 2009 after the walls of the guardhouse were found to be cracking and near collapse.

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 The cover from "Sketches of the life of William Stuart: The First and Most Celebrated Counterfeiter of Connecticut" (Photo: Public Domain/Google Digitized)

The ongoing restoration effort has offered archaeologists a rare chance to explore layers of dirt on the property that haven't been touched in nearly 200 years. In 2013, Sportman and her colleagues excavated test pits and trenches in a terrace just west of the guardhouse to salvage whatever archaeological remains might be hidden in areas that will be disturbed by the reconstruction. 

“We have found more in the little test pits that they did than we have found ever before,” Peterson said. Most of the material comes from a layer of trash that dates back to the period between 1790, when the brick guardhouse was first built, and 1819, when the building was expanded. There are bits of broken pottery and glass, but the animal bones—primarily from beef, pork and sheep—are most interesting Sportman because many of them look like they’ve been smashed open and processed again and again. 

“It’s something you tend to see in starvation contexts,” Sportman says. “You eat the meat and then you bash the bones open to get the marrow and then you boil them to get all the grease out. You can just keep going back to try to get every little bit of nutrition that you can.” These so-called signatures of starvation were recently identified on animal bones found at an 1846 campsite of the ill-fated Donner Party and a 1870s Chinese mining camp in western Montana called China Gulch—two places where there’s historical evidence that people were starving.


Old Newgate, the name nonewithstanding, was America’s first state prison when it opened in the early 1770s at the site of the failed Simsbury copper mines. The underground tunnels and shafts were repurposed to house prisoners, and the name Newgate was presumably intended to stir up forbidding associations with the notorious Newgate prison in London. But Connecticut’s version quickly became something of an embarrassment. The first prisoner, John Hinson, arrived on December 22, 1773, and escaped just 18 days later with the help of a rope tossed down the mineshaft by “a woman to whom he was paying his addresses.” It was the first of dozens of jailbreaks. A burglar named Richard Steele pulled off a record three escapes. A guardhouse was eventually built directly over the entrance to the mine. Inmates burned it down on three separate occasions before the state finally decided to construct a sturdier guardhouse out of brick in 1790.

article-imageArchaeologists excavated shovel test pits on the terrace west of the guardhouse. The ruins of a prison building that was constructed around 1824 can be seen in the background. (Photo: Sarah Sportman/AHS) 

Stuart never managed to escape himself, but he took particular delight in tormenting his prison keeper Captain Elam Tuller. Though he dressed in respectable military garb complete with epaulets on his shoulders and a sword on his side, Tuller was a brute, a despot and “an unfeeling Nero” in Stuart’s estimation. The two men butt heads constantly. When Stuart was caught making counterfeit coins using melted down pewter buttons and a mold made out of soap, he told Tuller, “I was sent here for counterfeiting, and I shall lose my skill unless I do a little at the business,” to which Tuller replied, “Stuart, I believe that you are the devil.”

Stuart’s chief gripe with Tuller was that he provided the prisoners with grossly insufficient food. At least according to Stuart, Tuller was $500 in debt before he became prison keeper, and after being in charge of Old Newgate for six years, he had not only paid off his debts, but collected another $12,000 from the state that he was supposed to spend on the prisoners. He bought cattle, had it butchered and took the best cuts for himself. He ordered the cook to scrape “every particle of grease” from the pots of the inmates’ food and was able to sell 3,000 lbs. of tallow yearly. “I and my fellow prisoners have picked the bones all bare for a meal, and often it would not be two tablespoons-full,” Stuart wrote.

The prisoners at Old Newgate typically climbed out of the mines at 4 a.m. to make liquor barrels, nails and other goods. When Tuller demanded that Stuart and his fellow prisoners start making three barrels instead of two a day, Stuart pushed back and refused to work at all, arguing that he wasn’t given enough food. “Tuller, we are half starved, and have not strength to work,” Stuart claims he told the prison keeper. “The government are not aware that the prisoners are dying with starvation and you are getting rich from us.”

As punishment, Stuart was locked up in a dungeon for 12 days, given only bread and water. He was so enraged afterwards that he tried to arrange a revolt. He thought 70 fellow prisoners had his back, but only three joined him when it came time for the insurrection. Stuart was seriously wounded in his battle against the guards—he was shot in the groin and stabbed several times—but he eventually exaggerated his injuries enough to bid for his release from prison in 1825. The day he was discharged, Stuart tossed his crutches and went straight to the nearest tavern. “Had I known that you could move about so easily, I would have kept you here as long as grass grows and water runs,” Tuller told him.


article-image   A knife and fork crudely fashioned out of nail rod were recovered during the 2013 excavations around Old Newgate’s guardhouse. (Photo: Sarah Sportman/AHS)

 Stuart wasn’t the only one writing at the time about starvation conditions. The English author Edward Augustus Kendall, who published several volumes about his travels through the northern United States in the early 19th century, paid a visit to Old Newgate and was fairly horrified at what he saw. The prisoners didn’t get a break from making nails to eat; Kendall watched as the inmates were tossed their food while chained to their workstations. Pickled pork was “thrown upon the floor and left to be washed and boiled in the water used for cooling the iron wrought at the forges.”

Utensils gathered from Old Newgate support that vision. The archaeologists also found a very primitive fork and knife made from nail rod, the raw material the prisoners used in the workshop. “I can just see a prisoner who wants to live more like a civilized human being taking what’s at hand and fashioning a crude fork,” Peterson says. The prisoner’s alternative would have been eating with his hands.

Peterson says archaeologists rarely have the funding to dig at historic sites in the United States purely for the pursuit of knowledge. The current archaeological work at Old Newgate is entirely dictated by the restoration project; Sportman and her colleagues are only digging up the historic areas that have to, under preservation laws, be excavated before they’re bulldozed and covered up with new support beams and other building materials.

“We can’t come up with a dream plan and say we want to dig here and here and here,” Sportman said. There is not too much archaeological literature about the diet at prisons from this time period, Sportman said. Still, whatever remains are found at Old Newgate could one day prove whether the conditions at the prison were really that unique.

 

article-image The prison yard at Old Newgate today. Beyond the gate is the roof of Luke Viets’ tavern, which benefited greatly from the prison. It got business from guards, tourists such as Edward Kendall and even prisoners with a bit of cash. Stuart spent ten dollars of counterfeited money there before getting caught. (Photo: Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office)

article-image Inside the prison ruins. (Photo: Heather Katsoulis/Flickr

"Newgate represents a shift in how you treat criminals, how you treat people convicted of bad crimes," says Peterson. "Historically, especially in New England, people were punished physically. They could fine you. They could put you in stocks. Instead of giving you a scarlet 'A' on your clothes, they would literally brand your forehead. They would cut off the top of your ear. And then they would let you go. The idea of incarcerating people to pay their debt to society is an idea coming out of the Enlightenment Age of Europe, and Connecticut decides to try this."

More excavations may take place this summer at Old Newgate. Peterson says she is personally most excited to find out what’s under the stones that line the floor of the 1819 addition to the guardhouse. Archaeologists already pried up one of the blocks to get an idea of the condition of the soil sealed underneath, and they discovered something that, for Peterson, was better than King Tut’s gold: a diminutive playing die.

“Stuart talks about gaming,” Peterson said. “We can’t prove that this was owned and made by a prisoner who lost it between a crack in the floor—and probably was very annoyed because he couldn’t win that roll of craps because his die disappeared—but it has to be. It’s miniature. It’s the type of thing that you could easily conceal on your body if they did a body search.”

The die, with little carbon-colored dots, is hand-carved out of animal bone—perhaps hinting that bones at Old Newgate could have another life after they were exhausted for all of their nutritional worth.

“What could bring out the life of the prisoners more vividly?” Peterson said. 

 








Exploring the Underground Railroad, in Brooklyn

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article-imageA statue of Henry Ward Beecher by Gutzon Borglum in the garden of Plymouth Church. (Photo: Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock.com)

Walking today through the tiny neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, from the Manhattan views offered by the Promenade, past the rows of historic brownstones and tree-lined streets, you will find an old church tucked away on Orange Street. Organized in 1847, Plymouth Church is one of the oldest congregational churches in New York.

And, at one time, it was among the most controversial.

Designed in the style of a New England barn and decorated with stained glass from the workshops of J&R Lamb,and Louis Comfort Tiffany, it is hard to imagine that once this serene place of worship was at the fierce and volatile center of the fight to abolish slavery. What is even more remarkable is what lies hidden underneath it, one of the principal stops on the Underground Railroad.

The church’s ideological stance was established in its very beginning, when church leaders recruited the inspirational abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher to be their first preacher.

article-imageA photograph of Henry Ward Beecher c. 1875 (Photo: Falk 949 Broadway/Public Domain /Wiki Commons)

Already by 1848, Beecher was well on his way to becoming, as one biographer put it, “the most famous man in America.” Having preached in the midwest for 10 years, he carried the nontraditional look of a frontiersman. He wore his hair long, and his flamboyant oratory style was filled with slang and street talk. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,  “the privilege of partaking of the spiritual food which Mr. Beecher so spicily serves up hedbominally for his congregation.”

From from the beginning of his ministry at Plymouth, he was a devoted abolitionist. “I will both shelter them (fugitive slaves), conceal them or speed their flight” Beecher promised, “and while under my shelter, or under my convoy, they shall be to me as my own flesh and blood.”

With his powerful theatrical oratory he was renowned as one of the pre-eminent speakers of his day. So much so that Lincoln invited him to deliver the address at Fort Sumter, saying, “We had better send Beecher down to deliver the address on the occasion of raising the flag because if it had not been for Beecher, there would have been no flag to raise.”

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A wood engraving of Plymouth Church c. 1866 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The existence of this church, and what lies beneath its floor, have not gone totally unacknowledged. Devoted parishioner and long-serving member of the choir, Lois Rosebrooks has been serving as director of history ministry, giving tours by appointment as well as curating its own exhibit. We arranged to meet on a Monday afternoon, in a pew with a small silver plaque indicating that this is where Abraham Lincoln came to worship on February 26th, 1860. Such was Plymouth Church’s standing, that it remains the only church in New York which Lincoln attended.

article-imageLincoln's pew is marked with a silver plaque. (Photo: Plymouth Church/Flickr)

Rosebrooks pointed out that while Beecher was the public figurehead, the fight against slavery enveloped the whole church. By its very definition, a congregationalist church was run by its own members. Not answerable to outside ecclesiastical supervision in the way say a Catholic church would be, it was the perfect independent group to lead the fight against slavery; prominent New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan freed the slaves held on the Amistad. Beecher’s sister, Harriet wrote one the 19th centuries best selling novel, the controversial anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin


The first thing one notices about the Plymouth Church is its unorthodox interior. There’s no central aisle down which a bride would walk to the altar. Instead the church was designed, on purpose to resemble a theater: A stage juts out into the rows of curved seats.

Rosebrooks led the way behind the stage and a pipe organ that for many years was the largest in the United States. In the corner was a white door, and behind it, a narrow staircase underneath the church. Down the stairs, was a small ante-chamber with a bare earth floor and a heavy, cast iron door that at one point someone had written on in chalk “please keep closed.” The chamber led, in one direction to the opening to a tunnel.. In the other sat a large brick room, the air dry and cold, with dirt underfoot. A cavernous room, divided by old red brick archways, some charred from an old fire, the cavern led off into other, darker and more undisturbed chambers.

 

article-imagePlymouth Church interior. (Photo: Tony Fischer/Flickr

We were standing in one of most secretive places in America, hidden under the streets of Brooklyn Heights. This was one of the most important stops on the Underground Railroad, so much so it was known in hushed voices as “the Grand Central Depot’.”

This was the sanctuary underneath the church. With its low ceiling, it would have provided a perfect holding place. As Beecher claimed, “I opened Plymouth Church though you did not know it, to hide fugitives….I piloted them and sent them toward the North Star, which to them was the Star of Bethlehem.”

Returning to the antechamber at the foot of the staircase, a long narrow tunnel lined with wooden paneling gave off onto more smaller brick rooms, with the same archways and earth floors. In a 2007 New York Times article, Rosebrooks explains, “They were hidden in the church, we assume in the basement as that would the the safest place for them.”

article-imageUnderneath Plymouth Church. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

The Underground Railroad is thought to have been responsible for the safe passage of as many as 100,000 slaves fleeing the South. Couched in secrecy and the railroad terminology of “stations”, “conductors” and “depots”, the Underground Railroad delivered escaping slaves through a clandestine system of sympathetic safe houses. With its proximity to the bustling docks of the East River only a few blocks away, the sanctuary crypts under Plymouth Church were ideally placed to be at the forefront of the Railroad.

Beecher’s involvement with the Underground Railroad started when he returned to his parish house located next door to the church to find a freed slave, Paul Edmondson crying distraught on his doorstep in 1848. Edmondson told Beecher of how his two young teenage daughters were being sold into slavery and headed for New Orleans as “fancy girls” He begged Beecher for help.

Slavery might have been outlawed in New York beginning in 1799 law (with all slaves legally freed by 1827)  but the city was far from safe for free blacks. New York merchants and bankers dominated all aspects of the South’s cotton industry. Historian Frank Decker estimated that, “forty cents of every dollar paid for cotton ended up in the pockets of New York businessmen.” Organized gangs of slave catchers were dispatched from the South to track down and recapture escaped slaves. Their nefarious missions were authorized by Congress and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 that held that any found slaves “shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” The slave catchers didn’t confine their task to purely escaped slaves, but would often attack free blacks and sell them into slavery. It was amidst this treacherous atmosphere that the abolitionists of Plymouth Church went about their work.

Led by prominent underground railroad conductor Reverend Charles B. Ray, a group of abolitionists in New York had  formed a “Committee of Vigilance” earlier in 1835 with the express mission of helping escaped slaves; “our first and practical business is to take charge of all escaping slaves......placing them where the slave pursuer can neither find nor molest them.” As Decker notes, “those seeking help knew how to locate people who would help.”

And the principal stop of the underground railroad was to be the hidden basement crypts of Plymouth Church.


In was in this atmosphere that Beecher accompanied Paul Edmondson to an abolitionist meeting held in the Broadway Tabernacle. What happened on the stage of the auditorium that night was as unorthodox as it was extraordinary; taking charge of the meeting Beecher held a slave auction for the two teenage girls, only a slave auction in reverse. Using his oratory talent and skill for the theatrical, Beecher pleaded with the audience for money with which to pay for the two girls. But rather than be sold into slavery, they were buying their freedom. Mocking actual slave auctions Beecher described the attributes of each girl. Patrolling the stage as though he were a boisterous slave auctioneer, he beseeched the crowd, “I would be ashamed if it were written down that such an assembly was gathered here......the poor pittance couldn’t be raised.” As the fervor inside the Broadway Tabernacle reached fever pitch, Beecher exhorted. “who bids? a thousand......fifteen hundred.....two thousand...twenty five hundred! Going, going, last call....gone!” And with that, Beecher and the generosity of the crowd saved Paul Edmondon’s daughters from a life of prostitution and slavery down in New Orleans.

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A painting showing Henry Ward Beecher and Pinky. (Photo: Courtesy Plymouth Church)

Encouraged and inspired by the evening, Beecher brought his “mock slave auctions” to the congregation at Plymouth Church. From below the stage, the Grand Central Depot continued its secretive work delivering escaped slaves to safety while above ground, Beecher’s ministry grew and grew. In these days before the Brooklyn Bridge, so-called “Beecher boats” ferried thousands across the East River to hear him preach. He thundered across the stage stamping on the actual chains that had held John Brown. He conducted more and more slave auctions, persuading the congregation to buy freedom for slaves. The most famous auction occurred on February 5th, 1860, when Beecher and his congregation bought the freedom of a 9-year old slave girl from Washington DC, Sally Maria Diggs. Nicknamed Pinky, Beecher called her to the stage, telling the gathered congregation that she was due to be sold to the South for $900. As Beecher conducted his rousing mock auction the collection plate was passed around until over $1,100 was raised. Amongst the contributions was a ring given by local poet Rose Terry. Beecher took the ring and placed it on Pinky’s finger, telling her “with this ring, I wed you to freedom.”

Documenting the church’s work below street level is, of course, much more difficult than that above it. By its very nature, the Underground Railroad’s history is largely oral. If caught aiding a fugitive slave, the members of Plymouth church would be threatened with $1,000 fines or a year in prison. Beecher himself was threatened repeatedly. One letter to the church contained a drawing of a lynching and a note saying, “Henry Ward Beecher, here is the fate of all traitors. We are making a rope for you.”

But in the face of such violence, the members of Plymouth Church fought tirelessly to help the escaping slaves. In his memoirs, written in 1880s, Committee of Vigilance leader, and conductor on the Underground Railroad Charles Ray explicitly mentions that fleeing slaves were taken to and hidden at Plymouth Church. With no attic, closets or secret rooms, it seems likely that the slaves were given sanctuary in the chambers underneath the church. “With no written records, this is our assumption,” says Rosebrooks.

There is, however, evidence for the mock slave auctions, although the exact number held at Plymouth Church is unknown. The church records of the treasurer account for at least 7 groups of people between 1854 and 1860, and that the monies raised to buy their freedom ranged from $500 to over $10,000 for one woman and her seven children.

Today Plymouth Church remains a thriving ministry in the heart of old Brooklyn Heights. As well as an attached school, the church maintains a well-appointed exhibit telling the story of the remarkable events that took place here, both in public and underground. Perhaps the most remarkable artifact in the exhibit is the plain ruby set in a ring of 18 carat gold that Rose Terry gave to Beecher on February 5th, 1860 and which Henry Ward Beecher placed on the finger of Pinky, buying her freedom. Pinky moved to Washington, D.C. where she grew up to become a teacher helping to educate liberated slaves and married a lawyer. She returned to Plymouth Church in 1927 for the church’s 80th anniversary and gave the ring back to the church. It tells the story of a brave congregation that stood up against the evils of slavery led by their charismatic preacher Henry Ward Beecher. And of the secret chambers underneath the church which are still there today.

Interested in seeing the Plymouth Church and the Underground Railroad for yourself? Book a tour!

article-imageExterior of Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn. (Photo: Tony Fischer/Flickr)

 








FOUND: A Portrait That Just Might Be William Shakespeare

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Is this what Shakespeare looked like? (Image: Screenshot via Country Life)

This might be Shakespeare's face, as a 33-year-old, after he had written A Midsummer's Night Dream, but before he wrote Hamlet.

It's a detail from a figure drawn into the frontispiece of a famous 16th century work of botany, John Gerard's The Herball. Mark Griffiths, a botanist and historian, was working on a biography of Gerard and started trying to identify the people pictured in the image. At least four, he deduced, were real people—there was Gerard and his patron, Lord Burghley. The third figure was a famous Flemish botanist. The fourth, Griffiths argues in Country Life, a venerable British magazine, is Shakespeare.

Griffiths' evidence comes from what the Guardian describes as "an elaborate Tudor code of rebuses, ciphers, heraldic motifs and symbolic flowers." The identities of Lord Burghley and of Shakespeare, Griffiths says, were encoded not just in the plants around but in symbols beneath them."

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The code. (Image: Screenshot via Country Life)

The details of Griffiths' discovery are contained in a Country Life article; though some Shakespeare scholars are skeptical—there have been claims to finding Shakespeare's portrait before—Griffiths did enlist an Oxford English professor to help verify his theory. 

Bonus finds: A new species of aquatic pillbug, a 1,400-year-old wine press40,000 bees living under the floorboards in Queens

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.








The Ghost Of Bruce Wayne’s Real-Life Namesake Haunts Pennsylvania

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article-image A print of General Anthony Wayne, 1878 (Photo: Library of Congress)

In the far west of the Philadelphia suburbs, just before the affluent Main Line area turns into horse-breeding farms, there is a grand mansion that sits with very little fanfare on a small street opposite a golf course. It’s called Waynesborough, and it’s the historic home of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, the namesake of dozens of towns and townships and forts and other assorted places throughout the eastern United States. In this part of Pennsylvania, just a few minutes’ drive from Valley Forge, Anthony Wayne is a ghostly presence. Teenagers have awkward teenage dates at the Anthony Wayne theater, conveniently located in the town of Wayne. There are other towns called Waynesburg and Waynesboro. That golf course is part of the Waynesborough Country Club. Streets, schools, and businesses bear the name of Wayne.

And yet history teachers rarely give lessons about the life of “Mad” Anthony, a man whose military career spanned two wars, whom DC Comics decided was the ancestor of the fictional Bruce Wayne, and who is supposed to be haunting a highway that criss-crosses the entire state. Even weirder: Mad Anthony is buried in two places. Not two ceremonial graves: parts of him are literally buried in two totally separate graves, hundreds of miles apart.

Anthony Wayne was born to a wealthy family in what is now Paoli, Pennsylvania, my hometown, about 45 minutes west of Philadelphia by car. His family home is an enormous Georgian estate, all white pillars and stone, which remained in the Wayne family until a few decades ago. Anthony’s early life was varied; he was a surveyor in Canada, he worked at a tannery, he went to the college that would become the University of Pennsylvania (though he never graduated). But he found his calling at age 30 in the military, and quickly rose through the ranks.

article-imageA Keystone Marker for Wayne, Pennsylvania (Photo: Doug Kerr/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

“He was very militaristic,” said Bill Lange, park ranger and education coordinator at Valley Forge National Historical Park, the site of the famous revolutionary war battle where Wayne fought.

The myth of the Revolutionary War goes that the unorganized, untrained regional militias were responsible for upsetting the uptight, predictable, and preening British Army. But Wayne wasn’t a militiaman—in fact, he scorned them.

“Wayne was famous for his ferocious attacks, but he was very well read in military history and tactics, and really took being a soldier seriously,” said Thomas Fleming, author of How Mad Anthony Wayne Won The West.

article-imageWaynesborough home of General Anthony Wayne, near Paoli, PA (Photo: Smallbones/Public Domain/WikiCommons

Wayne was, in fact, a professional, which was in rare supply in the fall of 1777, when the Continental Army seemed to be on its last legs. On September 20th, the Wayne-led troops in his hometown of Paoli were silently slaughtered with British bayonets in what’s alternately known as the Battle of Paoli or the Paoli Massacre. That winter, camping out in nearby Valley Forge, the troops were hungry and miserable, wondering what they were even doing there. Dozens deserted.

Enter Prussian-born American strategist Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who preached fierce loyalty, lockstep training, and, well, a firm dress code. The soldiers at Valley Forge lacked the most basic of clothes, and it became Wayne’s job (among others) to find clothing. Eventually Wayne became obsessed with looking good on the battlefield, even earning yet another nickname, “Dandy Wayne.” He once wrote to George Washington: "I have an inseparable bias of an elegant uniform and soldierly appearance, so much so that I would rather risk my life and reputation at the head of the same men in an attack, clothed and appointed as I could wish, merely with bayonets and a single charge of ammunition, than to take them as they appear in common with sixty rounds of cartridges.”

article-imageMajor General Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus, Baron von Steuben by Ralph Earl, c. 1786 (Photo: Public Domain/ WikiCommons) 

Von Steuben turned out to be right; after surviving the brutal winter of 1777-1778, armed with better training and a new set of duds, the Continental Soldiers were a whole new army. Wayne even led his division to a mirror-image defeat of the Paoli Massacre at the Battle of Stony Point, on the Hudson River north of New York City, using a silent bayonet charge in the night.

That kind of attack earned him the nickname “Mad Anthony” Wayne. Probably. In fact it’s not totally clear how he earned that name. Both Lange and Fleming told me he got the name from bold military moves and general bravery (he often served on the front lines of his own battles), but there are other theories relating to his legendary temper, cursing ability, and propensity to use violence on, or even kill his own men for stepping out of line.

A common theory holds that he was given the nickname by a sort of freelance spy and friend, who, upon behaving improperly at camp one night, was whipped thanks to orders from Wayne. The spy screamed that Wayne was “mad, mad.” 

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 General Anthony Wayne and his men shown attacking a British fortification in 'The Battle of Stony Point' by J,H. Brightly (Photo: Library of Congress)

After the war, Wayne moved to Georgia, where he tried and failed for about 20 years to farm some land he was given. Luckily, there was a new war afoot, against various Indian tribes in what’s now Ohio, who had banded together to fight off the U.S. The tribes were a victim of some horrible chess playing; there was a clause in the Treaty of Paris that declared that all “indigenous lands” set up by the British would revert to American ownership at a certain time, so the Americans set out to reclaim what they saw as legally theirs.

The tribes found this ludicrous, that a treaty they had no part of could decide which of two foreign parties owned their ancestral land, and successfully repelled a few local American militias. George Washington, annoyed with the amateurish militias, brought his friend Mad Anthony up from Georgia.

Wayne landed in Pittsburgh and set about training the lousy group of soldiers he found there. “He had half of his army paint their faces all kinds of stripes and things like that, and then he sent them out into the forest,” said Fleming. “And then the other half attacked the first half, and the first half had orders to scream and yell and curse. They did this time and time again and soon enough they weren't afraid.”

After priming his men for semi-racist Indian attacks, he went into Ohio and successfully slaughtered huge numbers of Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near what’s now Toledo, thus ending that period of Indian rebellions. Here’s where things get weird. On his way home, Mad Anthony realized he was dying of gout, thanks to his lifetime diet of wine and rich foods. He made his way back to Pennsylvania as soon as he could, but died just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, in the far northwest of the state, tucked up against the Great Lakes. He was buried there in December of 1796, but he did not stay there for long.

In 1808, only 12 years later, his relative decide they want his body to be buried at the family plot in Radnor, a few miles down the road from Paoli, but over 300 miles from Erie. So the same doctor who pronounced him dead was tasked with digging him up and transporting him. The doctor open his casket and found that the body was in surprisingly good shape, except for one leg, which had rotted. This was far from ideal: it was a long trip back to Radnor, and the recently exumed body would rot and stink most unpleasantly. The solution was gruesome.

The doctor carved up the body into smaller pieces and threw them in a pot of boiling water. The theory was, when you throw pieces of a chicken in water to make soup, the chicken meat falls off the bones and soon you have clean bones, which, says Lange, were really what Wayne’s family wanted to bury. This wasn’t that uncommon of a tactic; corpses were sometimes shipped from the U.S. to England, and the boiling technique was used to get clean bones then as well. Anyway, the doctor buried everything that came off the bones, including the knives used to scrape the bones clean and the pot used to boil them, back in the grave in Erie. The bones were sent southeast to Radnor.

But at some point in the journey, some of the bones were lost. “When the box arrives in Waynesborough, it's not, um, complete,” said Lange. “There's not a complete body there, some of it's missing along the way.” Nobody knows whether those bones made it back into the Erie grave ,or whether they simply fell out of the coach on the way to Radnor, but legend sides with the latter. In fact, legend has it that every year, on Wayne’s birthday (New Year’s Day), Mad Anthony Wayne haunts the path his skeleton took on its way home, looking for his lost bones. That path is now U.S. Route 322.

That’s not the end of the ghostly elements of Anthony Wayne; Waynesborough itself is said to be quite haunted, both by Wayne himself and by the wife of his great-grandson, who died in a fire on the top floor in 1899. Allegedly women, and only women, have been able to hear ghostly screams, crying, and glass breaking.

Oh, and the Batman connection: In the DC Comics universe, Bruce Wayne, Batman himself, is a direct descendent of Mad Anthony Wayne. Bill Finger, one of the co-creators of the character, named Wayne not after John Wayne, as is commonly thought, but after Anthony. “Bruce Wayne's first name came from Robert Bruce, the Scottish patriot,” wrote Finger. “Wayne, being a playboy, was a man of gentry. I searched for a name that would suggest colonialism. I tried Adams, Hancock ... then I thought of Mad Anthony Wayne.” 

article-imageGeneral Anthony Wayne Monument in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (Photo: slashvee/Flickr) 








Everything Dies: 8 Graveyards For Anything But Humans

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Visit here on Obscura Day! (Photo: Jen Lukehart)

Spoiler alert: we're all going to die. But we need not despair, because we're not alone! In fact everything dies in its time. As the universe slips elegantly and inexorably towards entropy, even our goods and possessions become distressingly irrelevant and riddled with decay, experiencing a sort of life cycle of their own. And just like with living beings, inanimate objects have graveyards all their own. All across the world, planes, trains, automobiles, phones, and even spaceships have been discarded in less than sentimental makeshift cemeteries. There may not be any epitaphs or flowers, but these eight material graveyards are no less beautiful than any human boneyard.


1. GREAT TRAIN GRAVEYARD
Uyuni, Bolivia

article-imageThe Great Train Grave-Robbery. (Photo: SkareMedia)

Sitting out on the world's largest salt plain, is the final resting place of a number of 20th century locomotive that are slowly falling apart in the salty wind. Left to die in the barren Bolivian salt wastes by their former British owners who created the tracks that run through the area, the trains now serve a more beneficial function than when they were in operation. The rusting hulks are now one of the leading tourist attractions in the area, drawing much needed travel dollars to the area. The old trains have long since been stripped and vandalized, but these remain some beautiful corpses.    

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These trains never looked this good in life. (Photo: SkareMedia)

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That sunset is being a bit showy. (Photo: SkareMedia)


2. BAY OF NOUADHIBOU SHIP GRAVEYARD
Nouadhibou, Mauritania

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Ghost ship. (Photo: jbdodane on Flickr)

Sitting off the coast of Mauritania's Bay of Nouadhibou are an army of deteriorating ships that were simply abandoned because it was cheaper than taking them apart. Generally when ships are put out to pasture, they are broken down so they don't contaminated the waters as they decay. However this process isn't cheap and in Nouadhibou, the lax governmental controls on the procedure led to a number of cheapskate owners of these vessels simply sail them into the bay and walk away. However this corruption has resulted in a beautiful breakwater made of dead boats. while there has been some negative environmental impact, some of the ships have also become home to a variety of species of fish. As always death fuels life.

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Ships. Wrecked. (Photo: Sebastián Losada on Wikimedia Commons)

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Go home, boat. You're drunk. (Photo: Sebastián Losada on Flickr)


3. FAST FIBERGLASS MOLD GRAVEYARD
Sparta, Wisconsin

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That mouse will eat your dreams. (Photo: Jen Lukehart)

The Fiberglass Animals, Shapes, and Trademarks (FAST) company has been making decorative figures and mascots for years. As a part of the process, a mold is created that essentially looks like a creepier version of the final product. Not wanting to waste a form that could be reused in the future, the company simply deposits old molds in the field behind their factory. As they have accumulated over the years, this fiberglass graveyard has become home to a wild menagerie of lifeless beasts ranging from sharks to mice to dragons, all looking not unlike oddly shaped headstones. However the dead here are not buried, they are just sitting out on the surface.  

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It's like if Medusa was really into roadside attractions. (Photo: Jen Lukehart)

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The plural is "Jaws" is just "Jaws" (Photo: Jen Lukehart)


4. BÅSTNÄS CAR CEMETERY
Varmland, Sweden

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Yer cars covered in moss. There's yer problem.  (Photo: hrnick)

This secluded car graveyard is home to countless, scenically overgrown wrecks, but woe be it to anyone who thinks of stealing from the rusting collection of automobiles. Slowly assembled by a pair of reclusive brothers living on the Swedish/Norwegian border, many of the cars that can be found throughout the woods and out front of their house are said to have been left in the country after World War II. Photographers are a regular site in the graveyards, and the brothers don't seem to mind, but they have posted this warning,

This car cemetery is private property. You may still look, take pictures but DO NOT take away parts. Do not destroy or in any other way disrupt this place. If you open a car door, please shut it again so the next visitor get the same experience as you did!! For info: after about 30 burglaries this year I'm fed up with it! I've made traps in the buildings so if you get hurt or die, I DON'T CARE! Remember in this place no one can hear you scream...

Pretty harsh for a graveyard.  

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I'm not sure what that sign translates to, but I'm going with "Nothing Creepy Here." (Photo: hrnick)

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This trunk IS junk. (Photo: hrnick)


5. RED TELEPHONE BOX GRAVEYARD
Carlton Minniot, United Kingdom

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Can dead phone boxes talk to ghosts? (Photo: Andy Armstrong on Wikipedia)

Once a ubiquitous icon of the English Empire, the red telephone box has faded from its once glorious notoriety, and many of the old booths have been abandoned hundreds of scrapyards and storage sites. One of these dumping grounds can be found in the northern England village of Carlton Miniott. Here, hundreds of the crimson icons can be found, paint chipping, and metal rusting. They are stood in rows and piled on top of one another like a big, red, mass grave. This telephony cemetery can be seen as graveyard not only for these obsolete bits of technology, but for a bygone era of English history as well.   

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Phone with no home. (Photo: Les Chatfield on Wikipedia)

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A mass telephone grave. (Photo: David Rogers on Wikipedia)


6. 309TH AEROSPACE MAINTENANCE AND REGENERATION GROUP
Tucson, Arizona

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Now, where did we park? (Photo: Niteowlneils on Wikipedia)

Known rather tellingly as "The Boneyard," the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group on the Davis-Montham Air Force Base in Tuscon, Arizona is home to thousands of decommissioned aircraft, lined up in neat rows just like a military cemetery. The massive field of dead birds contains almost every type of American aircraft ever flown after World War II. From B-52 bombers to 707 passenger planes, the graveyard is an eclectic collection of airplanes that one could quite literally get lost in. Not to sound ghoulish, but many of the planes are harvested for parts to repair military craft that are still in use. This field of the dead is as much a chronicle of 20th century flight as any museum.   

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When you're a jet, you're a jet til your last dying day. (Photo: Tungsten on Wikipedia)


7. NEON BONEYARD
Las Vegas, Nevada

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Looking for old neon signs? You just hit the jackpot. (Photo: Avoiding Regret)

As the saying goes, nothing gold can stay, and this even true of the glittering lights of Las Vegas' inescapable decorative signage. When large signs are take down they are often carted off the to the city's Neon Boneyard to rust away in the company of their strange, colorful brethren. Hundreds of signs covered in vintage bulbs or shaped-neon are stacked countless deep, creating strange valleys of deceased advertising. A number of famous signs such as the original sign for the Stardust Hotel can be found in the steel cemetery, but most are just the final reminders of businesses that no longer exist. Sin City has led many people to an early grave, but none of them looked as cool as this one.  

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That shirt is having a great day. (Photo: Avoiding Regret

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This sign just collects regular dust now. (Photo: 
Avoiding Regret


8. SPACECRAFT CEMETERY
Pacific Ocean, New Zealand

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This graveyard is a bit hard to visit. (Image: Google Maps)

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the spot known as the Spacecraft Cemetery, but that is because it is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Even spaceships need to die, and when they do, they have to be buried somewhere where their exotic technologies and materials don't fall into the hands of rival countries or worse. So rather than just leaving them in orbit like so much space junk, many larger craft are commanded to fire themselves to the bottom of the ocean just off the coast of New Zealand. Decommissioned satellites, containers of astronaut poop, and even the entirety of the Mir space station can be found lurking in the depths of the cemetery, waiting to be discovered by some far future grave-robbers like so much pirate's treasure.     

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One day the International Space Station will be at the bottom of the ocean. (Photo: NASA)

Visit the FAST Fiberglass Mold Graveyard on Obscura Day 2015,  May 30th!








The Opium-Smoking Author Who Lived With Pygmies in Congo

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A portrait of Emily Hahn taken in Shanghai by Sir Victor Sassoon c. 1937-1937 (Photo: DeGolyer Library, SMU)

This is the fifth part in a series about early female explorers. Previous installments can be found here.

Described as "a forgotten American literary treasure" by The New Yorker, Emily Hahn was an engineer until it bored her, a Red Cross worker in the Belgian Congo until she decided to walk across East Africa on foot, an opium addict and mistress of a Chinese poet in Shanghai until Hong Kong came calling, and a truly prolific writer who would become a pioneer in the fields of environmentalism and wildlife preservation. 

A rarity among adventurers, Emily Hahn wasn’t born into moneyshe was the daughter of a suffragette and a Missouri dry goods salesman. Known as “Mickey” to friends, Hahn joined an all-male class at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1926 and became the university’s first woman to graduate in mining engineering. She spent an unfulfilling year working in the “guys only” world of oil geology, just to prove that she could, before promptly taking off with a female friend on a 2,400 mile road trip across the US, both of them disguised as men. 

Then came the Great Depression.

In 1930, Hahn left the U.S. for the Belgian Congo, because "I was young and impulsive, because I'd always wanted to." She worked in a hospital for the Red Cross, lived with a pygmy tribe in the Ituri Forest for two years, hiked alone across East Africa, fell in love with apes, and, of course, wrote spectacularly about the whole experience 

article-imageView of the Bund, Shanghai, 1936 (Photo: Everett Historical/shutterstock.com) 

Back in America and more than a little bored, Hahn sailed to Shanghai in 1935. This trip was meant to be no more than a vacation en route to West Africa. Instead, she would live in Shanghai for eight years and become a celebratedif eccentricfixture on Shanghai’s wild social circuit, dining with millionaires like Sir Victor Sassoon and appearing on the society pages accompanied her pet gibbon, Mr. Mills, suited up in his diaper and miniature dinner jacket. 

In Shanghai, Hahn found an apartment in the heart of the Red Light District on Kiangse Road. She loved this “crowded, screaming street” that, during her time in Shanghai, would become not just synonymous with brothels but with the fashionable set of poets, artists, and thinkers she flirted with. "I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the choice,” Hahn wrote in her 1944 book, China to Me.

Hahn supported herself with her writing and became the lover of the Chinese aristocratic poet and publisher Sinmay Zau. Together they founded the English-language magazine Candid Comment, “devoted to bringing about more mutual understanding between East and West by means of literature,” and Hahn found herself swept into the world of the Chinese elite . . . and opium dens. 

"Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China,” she wrote.  

article-image (Photo: Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University) 

Quitting opium two years after she first tried it, in 1940 Hahn moved to Hong Kong just before the outbreak of WWII. Here she had an affair, and a daughter, with Charles Boxer, the chief spy of the British secret service. He was captured by the Japanese during a 1941 attack and held as a prisoner of war until 1945. On his release, Boxer and Hahn swiftly got married, and later had another daughter.

However, domestic life was not for Hahn. In 1950 she took an apartment in Manhattan, got a staff writer position at The New Yorker, and created a life that balanced nine months in New York City or traveling on assignment, with three months in England with her family. 

Over the course of 72 years, Hahn would write 52 books and hundreds of articles and short stories, flitting seamlessly from genres as varied as memoir and history, humor and cookery, and writing about subjects as disparate as D.H. Lawrence, diamonds, apes, and the history of bohemian America. The whole world delighted her. 

“She moved from here to there and everywhere, like some kind of beautiful, multi-colored and quixotic literary butterfly,” wrote her biographer, Ken Cuthbertson.

Emily Hahn died in Manhattan in 1997, at the age of 92. 

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(Photo: Courtesy Open Road Media)








Mountains Aren't the Shape You Think

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article-image'Comparitive shapes and heights of mountains' by Ambroise Tardieu and and Louis Bruguiere, 1817 (Photo: Wellcome Library, London/CC BY-SA 4.0)

What is the shape of a mountain?

We're taught to think of a mountain as a cone, more or less. A pile of earth that slopes ever-upward to a sharp peak in the sky. On a piece of paper, a mountain might be represented by two straight lines that lean against each other. Snow-capped. Simple.

Imagine "mountain," and a place like Matterhorn might come to mind:

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Matterhorn .(Photo: Transformer18/Flickr)

But, as a new study in Nature Climate Change shows, the shape of mountains is much more complicated. Every mountain might eventually end in a peak, but on the way up, it might flatten into expansive plateaus or set from a sharp increase into a slow incline towards the top. By analyzing the area of mountain ranges as elevation increased, Princeton doctoral student Paul Elsen and his colleague Morgan Tingley (now an assistant professor at University of Connecticut) identified four different shapes that describe how mountain ranges behave. And, they found, the traditional "pyramid" shape, that fits Alpine mountains like Matterhorn, actually describes only a minority of mountains.

Elsen first started thinking about the shape of mountains while trekking in the Himalayas, in India, where he's conducting research on the biodiversity of birds. "I'd been hiking up these really steep slopes," he says. "At the top, they flattened out and led to these broad, expansive highlands. There are still these triangular peaks that emerge, like Everest. But you get these incredible views, at these plateau areas that are still high in elevation."

These plateaus, Elsen thought, defied the simplistic notion that mountains slope steadily upwards, decreasing in area as they rise. As soon as he came down to resupply, he started analyzing topography data, first for the area in which he was working and, later, for ten most expansive mountain ranges in the world—the ones that take up the most area.

Even in that small initial sample, he saw three distinct patterns of how mountain ranges are shaped as they inch higher. Eventually, he and Tingley would analyze 182 mountain ranges and identify four shapes that describe how mountains' area increases with elevation: diamond, pyramid, inverted pyramid and hourglass. In total, more than two-thirds of ranges did not fit with what they call "the dominant assumption in ecology and conservation"—that mountains' area simply decreases with elevation.

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Mountain ranges have four distinct shapes. (Image: Paul Elsen, Morgan Tingley, and Mike Costelloe)

 

Instead, mountains move upwards in distinct ways. Most commonly, they follow the "diamond" shape—the area available increases, until about midway up, when it gathers into peaks. The Rockies are diamond-shaped mountains: 

article-imageRocky Mountains (Photo: Zach Dischner/Flickr 

Almost a quarter of mountains ranges have an "hourglass" shape, where they slope steeply upwards, before flattening out into broad, high plains. The Himalayas fit this pattern:

article-imageThe Himalayas (Photo: Koshy Koshy/Flickr)

 Less commonly, mountain ranges behave as "inverted pyramids," in which they become less and less steep as they rise. China's Kunlun Mountains are an example:


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Kunlun Mountains (Photo: Chen Zhao/Flickr)

Many mountains ranges—a little less than a third—do follow the ur-mountain pattern of pyramid growth, though. The Alps are pyramid mountains:

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The Alps (Photo: jonas.wagner/Flickr)

Ultimately, these shapes matter most for the animals that live in these ranges—and are being driven upwards by climate change. As the world warms up, species that have etched out a niche at a particular elevation are expected to move upwards, chasing the temperature they prefer. In theory, there's no upside to being pushed to higher elevations: eventually, any creature that's headed up the mountain reaches the top and has nowhere else to go.

But what Elsen's work shows is that, for some species, moving upwards might have some advantage—they'll have more space to spread out. "Just having available land area does not necessarily mean you’re going to be better off," he says. "You can be encountering an area that’s not suitable. There could be new competing species. All things being equal, though, if you have more area, it’s going to buffer against all these other threats." Knowing which species will be moving into larger areas and which will be facing bottlenecks, he says, can help cash-strapped conservationists focus their efforts on the places and creatures most at risk. For the rest of us, this new information has less life and death consequences—it just means we'll have to rethink how we imagine the mountains we dream of climbing.

 

 









Pseudocides: 5 of History's Most Elaborate Fake Deaths

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article-image(Photo: Mr. Nikon/shutterstock.com)

The faking of one's own death, while popular in the annals of daytime soaps, is ill-advised. Whether staged as a means of escaping financial ruin, evading criminal charges, or just for an ego-pleasing lark, pseudocide rarely ends well. Once the "deceased" is found and the jig is up, the undead becomes a pariah, ridiculed by an incredulous public before facing jail time for fraud and misuse of police resources. 

Still, there is a certain daydreamy appeal to the faking of one's own death: for those who feel they have run out of options, pseudocide offers an enticing blank slate on which to write themselves a brand-new life. This is the context in which we view the behavior of the following five fellows, each of which planned their own false demises.

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Timothy Dexter and his canine companion. (Image from his poorly spelled 1802 book, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones)

"Lord" Timothy Dexter: The Egomaniacal Eccentric
As this gloriously detailed Priceonomics profile illustrates, Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Massachusetts, was one of 18th-century America's foremost oddballs. During the late 1770s, Dexter, who styled himself as a "lord" based on his own self-determined merits, managed to come into great wealth by buying up heavily depreciated currency that skyrocketed in value unexpectedly. Newly cashed up, Dexter built a lavish seaside mansion complete with 40 large statues of American heroes—including himself. (The inscription beneath his  likeness read: "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western world.” Having completed his formal education at the age of eight, Dexter had never studied philosophy.)

“Dexter gave himself up to his whims, was much of the time in a state of intoxication, and was constantly doing strange things," wrote William Cleaves Todd in his 1886 book, Timothy Dexter, known as "Lord Timothy Dexter," of Newburyport, Mass. An inquiry into his life and true characterDexter's oddness and egomania did not just manifest itself in false titles and craven idols. The man also recruited his own poet laureate to follow him around and extol the dubious virtues of his garish home and gilded horse coach.

In an ostentatious move that nonetheless acknowledged his status as mortal man rather than god, Dexter installed a mausoleum in his mansion, complete with a coffin handcrafted from the finest mahogany. This elegantly styled tomb was to be the location of Lord Timothy Dexter's funeral. But Dexter was impatient, and couldn't bear the idea of thousands gathering to mourn him without him being able to hear all the praise that would undoubtedly be heaped upon his lifeless body. So Dexter did what any rich, egomaniacal weirdo would do: he staged his own fake funeral.

Todd noted the particulars of the service:

"Some one was procured to officiate as clergyman, cards were sent out to invite the mourners, and Dexter watched the people to see how they were affected. He was satisfied with all except that his wife did not shed so many tears as he thought were becoming, for which, as the story is, he caned her severely after the ceremony.” 

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A portait of Aleister Crowley at the Abode of Chaos in Lyon, France. (Photo: Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr)

Aleister Crowley: Great Beast, Wicked Stunt
In September 1930, 54-year-old British occultist and self-proclaimed Great Beast Aleister Crowley traveled to Portugal with Hanni Jaeger, a 19-year-old German woman who was the latest initiate into his realm of sexual magick. While there, Crowley met and struck up a rapport with Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Increasingly frustrated with Jaeger—in his diary he complained about her "pathological fear and lying"—Crowley hatched a plot with Pessoa: he would stage his own death at Boca do Inferno, a coastal cliff formation just west of Lisbon.

Developed plan to utilize local scenery," wrote a cagey Crowley in his diary on September 21, 1930. His suicide note was addressed to Jaeger: "Wrote: I cannot live without you," he said in his diary. "The other “Boca do Inferno” [Mouth of Hell] will get me—it will not be as hot as yours."

Pessoa the poet was only too willing to be part of the hoax, both before and after Crowley's faked death. According to The Guardian, Pessoa "even earnestly explained how he had seen Crowley's ghost the next day."

Crowley turned up alive and well in Berlin three weeks later. Today, one of the rocks at Boca do Inferno bears a plaque inscribed with a Portuguese translation of Crowley's faux suicide note. (You can see it for yourself on May 30 as part of an Obscura Day tour!)

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Joan Pujol Garcia at 19, during his compulsory military service in Spain in 1931. (Photo: Fair use on Wikipedia)

Joan Pujol Garcia: The Double Agent
Joan Pujol Garcia's cause of fake death was an unusual one: malaria. But nothing about Pujol was ordinary. During World War II, Pujol was a secret agent for both the Allies (under codename "Agent Garbo") and the Germans (who knew him as "Arabel"), and played a key role in the downfall of Hitler.

Pujol's double-crossing career had an unlikely beginning. As the manager of a Fawlty Towers-caliber hotel in Madrid in 1939, Garcia befriended a Spanish duke who came to stay. As Mental Floss details, the pair made a deal: Pujol supplied six bottles of then-rare Scotch to the duke and his two thirsty aunts in exchange for a passport he could use to flee Spain. But escape wasn't easy. England had just declared war on Germany, and Hitler's advances across Europe made relocation perilous. Nonetheless, Pujol was determined to stick it to Hitler, as Stephan Talty writes in his 2012 biography on Pujol, Agent Garbo:

"Pujol had failed in almost everything he’d tried in his thirty-two years: student, businessman, cinema magnate, soldier. His marriage was falling apart. But in one specialized area of war, the espionage underworld known as the double-cross game, the young man was a kind of savant, and he knew it. After years of suffering and doubt, Pujol hoped he was ready to match wits with the best minds of the Third Reich."

By posing as a Spanish government official with a staunchly pro-Nazi stance, Pujol was able to secure a role as a spy for Germany. Instructed to go to England, Pujol instead went to Lisbon, where he used guidebooks about Britain to create false yet plausible reports for the Nazis. While in Portugal, he claimed to be traveling around Britain recruiting a network of anti-Allied spies.

By 1942, Britain had cottoned onto Pujol's repeated, effective feeding of misinformation to the Third Reich. MI5 welcomed Pujol into its spy ranks and brought him to England. During the lead-up to the Battle of Normandy in 1944, Pujol managed to convince Germany that an Allied attack would come in July at Calais. When it came in June at Normandy, 160 miles away, Germany was underprepared and had to scramble to redeploy troops. The resulting Allied battle victory was the beginning of the end of World War II.

In 1944, shortly after the Normandy invasion, Pujol received military decorations from both Britain and Germany—the Nazis were still unaware of the double agent's masterfully executed deceptions. When the war ended, however, Pujol feared exposure and punishment at the hands of the Germans. With the help of MI5, he crafted one last deception: a fake death. In 1949, the British Ambassador to Spain announced that Pujol had succumbed to malaria in Mozambique. 

Freed from his former life, Pujol hung out in Venezuela for the next few decades, only emerging back into the limelight in 1984, when Pujol visited the beaches of Normandy to pay tribute to the battle he helped plan. Pujol died for the second and final time in 1988, aged 76.

 

article-image(Photo: Songquan Deng/shutterstock.com)

John Stonehouse: The Fed-Up Politician
On November 20, 1974, British Labour politician John Stonehouse disappeared from a Miami beach. A pile of his clothing was all that remained of the man, causing authorities to conclude he had drowned or even been chomped to death by a shark.

Five weeks later, Stonehouse, alive and well, was arrested in Australia. A policeman initially mistook him for another missing Brit, Lord Lucan, who also went AWOL in November 1974 following the murder of his nanny. Given that Lucan was known to have a large scar on his right thigh, police ordered the undead man to drop his trousers in order to properly identify him.

Stonehouse's own rationale for his dramatic disappearance is certainly compelling. After being deported back to the UK, Stonehouse addressed the House of Commons with a 13-minute statement regarding his “extraordinary and bizarre conduct”:

“I suffered a complete mental breakdown, analysed by an eminent Australian psychiatrist as psychiatric suicide. It took the form of a repudiation of the life of Storehouse, because it had become intolerable to me. I assumed a new parallel personality that took over from me, which was foreign to me and which despised the humbug and sham of the past years of my life.”

Describing himself as a "broken man" with "lost ideals," Stonehouse nonetheless continued to serve as an MP until he was convicted of fraud in August 1976 and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. Released from prison in 1979 after suffering a trio of heart attacks, Stonehouse died for real from a failed heart in 1988. Documents released in 2010 revealed he spent much of the 1960s operating a spy for Czechoslovakia while also serving as a British minister.

 

Marcus Schrenker: The High Flyer Who Crashed to Earth

Financial advisor Marcus Schrenker was in a dilly of a pickle at the beginning of 2009. Years of dodgy business dealings had left him in serious financial trouble, and there didn't seem to be a way out. So Schrenker took a novel approach to the issue: he attempted to stage his own death-by-fiery-plane-crash.

On January 11, 2009, Schrenker took off from an airfield in Anderson, Indiana in his single-engine turboprop, bound—he said—for Florida. While over Alabama, Schrenker issued a distress call, saying that his windshield had been damaged and he was bleeding profusely. When military jets arrive to intercept the plane, they discovered it was flying with its door open, sans pilot. Schrenker had vanished. And the windshield was fully intact.

The turboprop eventually ran out of fuel and crash-landed in the Florida panhandle. By that point, Schrenker was already on the run, having parachuted into the wilds of Alabama. Police officers questioned him in the town of Childersburg, but Schrenker explained away his wet, dirty legs by telling them he had been in a canoe accident. The disgraced former financier ended up in a Florida campground, where U.S. Marshals found him in a tent with self-inflicted wounds to his wrists.

Schrenker is currently in an Orlando prison, having been convicted of securities fraud, deceiving the Coast Guard,  illegal destroying an aircraft, and operating as an unregistered investment banker. His projected release date is September 18, 2015.








Found: Giant Boulders Delicately Balancing on Comet 67P

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Comet 67P, on May 3, 2015 (Photo: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM)

From a distance, the cluster of three boulders on the face of Comet 67p look a little bit like pimples or warts.

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Look closely in the center of that square—see? (Photo: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

But they might be something actually amazing—rocks that are balancing on their ends.

On Earth, balancing rocks are created by wind and water, which slowly erode a stone until it's balancing on a tiny base. Or they were brought to their resting place by a glacier, which melted down until the rock hit ground and stayed.

The scientists who identified the rocks can't be entirely sure that they're balancing on end—after all, we're hundreds of millions miles away, looking at images taken by Rosetta, which is much, much closer but still taking shots from several dozen miles away from the comet. If the rocks are balancing, though, what put them in that position? Is it the rolling and tumbling of the comet as it spins through space? Or something else entirely? 

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(Image: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

One of these things, also, is huge—just about 100 feet in diameter. So, imagine a rock that would fill the space between home plate and first base on a baseball field, delicately poised upright.

Bonus finds: A letter from a Nazi commander to one of history's greatest double agentsgiant lake cratersa Meiji-era world map hidden on the back of a mirror

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 








Lake Palmer: Nashville's Accidental Lake

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Lake Palmer, in all its glory, circa 2009 (Photo: David Antis/Flickr)

Officially, Lake Palmer does not exist. And it's only one of many unnatural bodies of water around Nashville, Tennessee.

Lake Palmer is not a lake, and it is not named Lake Palmer. It is a hole in the ground, made in 2007, in the limestone that undergirds the city. It was supposed to be filled in by a mixed-use development. But nothing has ever been built on the site and, instead, the hole—which looks to span two or three acres—has been filled by rain, creating a body of water that at times has reached depths of maybe 50 to 60 feet deep.

Locals named it Lake Palmer, after Alex Palmer, the developer whose development never materialized, and it has been around so long that, as the Nashville Scene recently reported, Google Maps now recognizes that there is a water feature there (albeit an unnamed one).

It's starting to seem like Lake Palmer might be a permanent feature of Nashville's downtown.

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(c) 2015 Google - Map Data

"The first thing to remember here is that it’s almost literally in the middle of town," says J.R. Lind, a Nashville reporter who's covered the lake over the years. "It looks like a quarry, because it's all limestone. It's been about eight years since they broke ground, and all that was ever done was make an 80 foot hole in the middle of the city."

Nashville's actually quite used to unnatural lakes. It's in a river basin—the Cumberland River runs right through the city's center—but the lakes around town are man-made. Old Hickory Lake, which USA TODAY reports is "one of the state's best fishing spots," is a reservoir created by the Army Corps of Engineers. J. Percy Priest Lake, Cheatham Lake, and Center Hill Lake—all also created by the Corps. All in all, the Corps has created 10 lakes in the Nashville district. Even Radnor Lake, located in a natural area within the city limits, was created by a railroad company in 1914

But, unlike those lakes, Lake Palmer wasn't planned—it just happened. Originally, Palmer, the developer, had planned for two 25-foot towers, that would hold offices, retails, condos, and a hotel. By 2008, though, pretty much the only thing accomplished was "the digging of the hole in the ground," the Nashville Post reported. After that, the project was in limbo, until in 2012, the health care company HCA started planning to build headquarters for two of its subsidiary parts on the site. That fell through. Just this January, a new plan, to build an apartment complex, was in the works—but so far, nothing at the site has changed.

In the meantime, locals aren't necessarily getting to enjoy the pleasures of a downtown lakeside. The site's surrounded by a high fence and, Lind says, he's never heard of anyone trespassing (or seen any incidents in the police reports he regularly checks). In 2010, though, after a big flood meant water restrictions for city, public swimming pools and country clubs sent tanker trucks to suck up water from the lake to fill their own needs. "That's the only public function it ever served," says Lind.

Mostly, it's just an oddity—a point of public interest that crops up from time to time, or a worry when it gets hot and muggy and the lake starts to look like a particularly appealing breeding ground for mosquitos. "It's just something that we sort of shrug our shoulder at, and we deal with," says Lind. "The construction has stalled again, and we're entering our wet season. So I guess it'll just fill up."

Maybe one day Lake Palmer will disappear, and the original intention for the site—to have a building there—will finally be fulfilled. Or perhaps Lake Palmer will linger—long enough that Google even learns its name.

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Image capture July 2011 (c) 2015 Google 








The Atlas Excerpt: Banvard's Folly

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article-imageAn Illustration showing John Banvard presenting his panorama to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, 1849 (Photo: Courtesy Erkki Huhtamo, 'Illusions in Motion:  Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles', The MIT Press)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Each month, we’ll be sharing our enthusiasm for a book of recent or not-so-recent vintage that touches on Atlas Obscura’s central theme: the profound strangeness of our world. Our first installment of the Atlas Excerpt comes from a book I love dearly, Paul Collins’ Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World. Published in 2001, it's a collection of portraits of some of history’s most wonderfully misguided (and forgotten) artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The title essay tells the story of America's first millionaire artist, John Banvard, whose three-mile-long scrolling panorama of the Mississippi River was once once of the most famous paintings in the world. —Joshua Foer


Mister Banvard has done more to elevate the taste for fine arts, among those who little thought on these subjects, than any single artist since the discovery of painting and much praise is due him. —The Times of London

The life of John Banvard is the most perfect crystallization of loss imaginable. In the 1850's, Banvard was the most famous living painter in the world, and possibly the first millionaire artist in history. Acclaimed by millions and by such contemporaries as Dickens, Longfellow, and Queen Victoria, his artistry, wealth, and stature all seemed unassailable. Thirty-five years later, he was laid to rest in a pauper's grave in a lonely frontier town in the Dakota Territory. His most famous works were destroyed, and an examination of reference books will not turn up a single mention of his name. John Banvard, the greatest artist of his time, has been utterly obliterated by history.

What happened?

In 1830, a fifteen-year-old American schoolboy passed out this handbill to his classmates, complete with its homely omission of a 5th entertainment:

BANVARD'S ENTERTAINMENTS (to be seen at No. 68 Centre street, between White and Walker.) Consisting of 1/. Solar Microscope 2nd. Camera Obscura 3rd. Punch and Judy 4th. Sea Scene 6th. Magic Lantern Admittance (to see the whole) six cents. The following are the days of performance, viz: Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Performance to commence at half-past 3 P.m. JOHN BANVARD, Proprietor

Although his classmates were not to know, they were only the first of more than two million to witness the showmanship of John Banvard. Visiting Banvard's home museum and diorama in Manhattan, they might have been greeted by his father, Daniel, a successful building contractor and a dabbler in art himself. His adventurous son had acquired a taste for sketching, writing, and science--the latter pursuit beginning with a bang when an experiment with hydrogen exploded in the young man's face, badly injuring his eyes.

Worse calamities lay in store. When Daniel Banvard suffered a stroke in 1831, his business partner fled with the firm's assets. Daniel's subsequent death left the family bankrupt. After watching his family's possessions auctioned off, John lit out for the territories--or at least for Kentucky. Taking up residence in Louisville as a drugstore clerk, he honed his artistic skills by drawing chalk caricatures of customers in the back of the store. His boss, not interested in patronizing adolescent art, fired him. Banvard soon found himself scrounging for signposting and portrait jobs on the docks.

It was here that he met William Chapman, the owner of the country's first showboat. Chapman offered Banvard work as a scene painter. The craft itself was primitive by the standards of later showboats, as Banvard later recalled:

The boat was not very large, and if the audience collected too much on one side, the water would intrude over the low gunwales into their exhibition room. This kept the company by turns in the un-artist-like employment of pumping, to keep the boat from sinking. Sometimes the swells from a passing steamer would cause the water to rush through the cracks of the weather-boarding, and give the audience a bathing .... They made no extra charge for this part of the exhibition.

The pay proved to be equally unpredictable. But if nothing else, Chapman's showboat gave Banvard ample practice in the rapid sketching and painting of vast scenery--a skill that would eventually prove to be invaluable.

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A portrait of John Banvard by Anna Mary Howitt, 1849 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Deciding that he'd rather starve on his own payroll than on someone else's, Banvard left the following season. He disembarked in New Harmony, Ohio, where he set about assembling a theater company. Banvard himself would serve as an actor, scene painter, and director; occasionally, he'd dash onstage to perform as a magician. He funded the venture by suckering a backer out of his life savings; this pattern of arts financing would haunt him later in life.

The river back then was still unspoiled—and unsafe. But the troupe did last for two seasons, performing Shakespeare and popular plays while they floated from port to port. Few towns could support their own theater, but they could afford to splurge when the floating dramatists tied up at the dock. Customers sometimes bartered their way aboard with chickens and sacks of potatoes, and this helped fill in the many gaps in the troupe's menu. But eventually food, money, and tempers ran so short that Banvard, broke and exhausted from bouts with malarial ague, was reduced to begging on the docks of Paducah, Kentucky. While Banvard was now a toughened showman with several years of experience, he was also still a bright, intelligent, and sympathetic teenager. A local impresario took pity on the bedraggled boy and hired him as a scene painter. Banvard, relieved, quit the showboat.

It was a good thing that he did quit, for farther downriver a bloody knife fight broke out between the desperate thespians. The law showed up in the form of a hapless constable, who promptly stumbled through a trapdoor in the stage and died of a broken neck. With a dead cop on their hands, the company panicked and abandoned ship; Banvard never heard from any of them again.

While in Paducah, Banvard made his first attempts at crafting "moving panoramas." The panorama--a circular artwork that surrounded the viewer--was a relatively new invention, a clever use of perspective that emerged in the late 1700's. By 1800, it was declared an official art form by the Institut de France. Photographic inventor L. J. Daguerre went on to pioneer the "diorama," which was a panorama of moving canvas panels viewed through atmospheric effects. When Banvard was growing up in Manhattan, he could gape at these continuous rolls of painted canvas depicting seaports and "A Trip to Niagara Falls." 

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View of a Daguerre diorama, c. 1869 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Moving into his twenties with the memories of his years of desperate illness and hunger behind him, Banvard spent his spare time in Paducah painting landscapes and creating his own moving panoramas of Venice and Jerusalem. Stretched between two rollers and operated on one side by a crank, they allowed audiences to stand in front and watch exotic scenery roll by. Banvard could not stay away from the river for long, though. He began plying the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers again, working as a dry-goods trader and an itinerant painter. He also had his eye on greater projects: a diorama of the "infernal regions" had been touring the frontier successfully, and Banvard thought he could improve upon it. During a stint in Louisville, he executed a moving panorama that he described as "INFERNAL REGIONS, nearly 100 feet in length." He completed and sold this in 1841, and it came as a crowning success atop the sale of his Venice and Jerusalem panoramas.

It is not easy to imagine the effect that panoramas had upon their viewers. It was the birth of motion pictures--the first true marriage of the reality of vision with the reality of physical movement. The public was enthralled, and so was Banvard: he had the heady rush of an artist working at the dawn of a new media. Emboldened by his early successes, the twenty-seven-year-old painter began preparations for a painting so enormous and so absurdly ambitious that it would dwarf any attempted before or since: a portrait of the Mississippi River.

When we read of the frontier today, we are apt to envision California and Nevada. In Banvard's time, though, "the frontier" still meant the Mississippi River. A man setting off into its wilds and tributaries would only occasionally find the friendly respite of a town; in between he faced exposure, mosquitoes, and, if he ventured ashore, bears. But Banvard had been up and down the river many times now, and had taken at least one trip solo as a traveling salesman. The idylls of river life had charms and hazards, as he later recalled:

All the toil, and its dangers, and exposure, and moving accidents of this long and perilous voyage, are hidden, however, from the inhabitants, who contemplate the boats floating by their dwellings and beautiful spring mornings, when the verdant forest, the mild and delicious temperature of the air, the delightful azure of the sky of this country, the fine bottom on one hand, and the romantic bluff on the other, the broad and the smooth stream rolling calmly down the forest, and floating the boat gently forward, present delightful images and associations to the beholders. At this time, there is no visible danger, or call for labor. The boat takes care of itself; and little do the beholders imagine, how different a scene may be presented in half an hour. Meantime, one of the hands scrapes a violin, and others dance. Greetings, or rude defiances, or trials of wit, or proffers of love to the girls on shore, or saucy messages, are scattered between them and the spectators along the banks.

Banvard knew the physical challenge that he faced and was prepared for it. But the challenge to his artistry was scarcely imaginable. In the spring of 1842, after buying a skiff, provisions, and a portmanteau full of pencils and sketch pads, he set off down the Mississippi River. His goal was to sketch the river from St. Louis all the way to New Orleans.

For the next two years, he spent his nights with his portmanteau as a pillow, and his days gliding down the river, filling his sketch pads with river views. Occasionally he'd pull into port to hawk cigars, meats, household goods, and anything else he could sell to river folk. Banvard prospered at this, at one point trading up to a larger boat so as to sell more goods. Recalling those days to audiences a few years later--exercising his flair for drama, of course, and referring to himself in the third person--he remembered the trying times in between, when he was alone on the river:

His hands became hardened with constantly plying the oars, and his skin as tawny as an Indian's, from exposure to the sun and the vicissitudes of the weather. He would be weeks altogether without speaking to a human being, having no other company than his rifle, which furnished him with his meat from the game of the woods or the fowl of the river .... In the latter part of the summer he reached New Orleans. The yellow fever was raging in that city, but unmindful of that, he made his drawing of the place. The sun the while was so intensely hot, that his skin became so burnt that it peeled from off the back of his hands, and from his face. His eyes became inflamed by such constant and extraordinary efforts, from which unhappy effects he has not recovered to this day.

But in his unpublished autobiography, he recalled his travels a bit more benignly:

[The river's current was] averaging from four to six miles per hour. So I made fair progress along down the stream and began to fill my portfolio with sketches of the river shores. At first it appeared lonesome to me drifting all day in my little boat, but I finally got used to this.

By the time he arrived back in Louisville in 1844, this adventurer had acquired the sketches, the tall tales, and the funds to realize his fantastic vision of the river he had traveled. It would be the largest painting the world had ever known.

article-imageAn excerpt from the Scientific American, 16 December 1848 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Banvard was attempting to paint three thousand miles of the Mississippi from its Missouri and Ohio sources. But if his project was grander than any before, so were the ambitions of his era. Ralph Waldo Emerson, working the New England public lecture circuit, had already lamented, "Our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts ... the northern trade, the southern planting, the Western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination ...." The idea had been voiced by novelists like Cooper before him, and later on by such poets as Walt Whitman. When Banvard built a barn on the outskirts of Louisville in 1844 to house the huge bolts of canvas that he had custom-ordered, he was sharing in this grand vision of American art.

His first step was to devise a tracked system of grommets to keep the huge panorama canvas from sagging. It was ingenious enough to be patented and featured in a Scientific American article a few years later. And then, for month after month, Banvard worked feverishly on his creation, painting in broad strokes: trained in background painting, he specialized in conveying the impression of vast landscapes. Looked at closely, this work held little for the connoisseur trained in conventions of detail and perspective. But motion worked magic upon the rough-hewn cabins, muddy banks, blooming cottonwoods, frontier towns, and medicine-show flatboats.

During this time he also worked in town on odd jobs, but if he told anyone of his own painting, we have no record of it. Fortunately, though, we have a letter from an unexpected visitor to Banvard's barn. Lieutenant Selin Woodworth had grown up a few houses away from Banvard and hadn't seen him in sixteen years, and he could hardly pass by in the vast frontier without saying hello. When he showed up unannounced at the barn, he was amazed by what maturity had wrought in his childhood friend:

I called at the artist's studio, an immense wooden building .... The artist himself, in his working cap and blouse, pallet and pencil in hand, came to the door to admit us .... Within the studio, all seemed chaos and confusion, but the life-like and natural appearance of a portion of his great picture, displayed on one of the walls in a yet unfinished state .... A portion of this canvas was wound upon a upright roller, or drum, standing on one end of the building, and as the artist completes his painting he thus disposes of it.

Any description of this gigantic undertaking ... would convey but a faint idea of what it will be when completed. The remarkable truthfulness of the minutest objects upon the shores of the rivers, independent of the masterly, and artistical execution of the work will make it the most valuable historical painting in the world, and unequaled for magnitude and variety of interest, by any work that has been heard of since the art of painting was discovered.

This was the creation that Banvard was ready to unveil to the world.

Banvard approached his opening day with the highest of hopes. Residents reading the Louisville Morning Courier discovered on June 29, 1846, that their local painter had rented out a hall to show off his work: "Banvard's Grand Moving Panorama of the Mississippi will open at the Apollo Rooms, on Monday Evening, June 29, 1846, and continue every evening till Saturday, July 4." A review in the same paper declared, "The great three-mile painting is destined to be one of the most celebrated paintings of the age." Little did the writer of this review know how true this first glimpse was to prove: for while it was to be the most celebrated painting of the age, it did not last for the ages.

Opening night certainly proved to be inauspicious. Banvard paced around his exhibition hall, waiting for the crowds and the fifty-cent admission fees to come pouring in. Darkness slowly fell, and a rain settled in. The panorama stood upon the lighted stage, fully wound and awaiting the first turn of the crank. And as the sun set and rain drummed on the roof, John Banvard waited and waited.

Not a single person showed up.

It was a humiliating debut, and it should have been enough to make him pack up and leave. But the next day saw John Banvard move from being a genius of artistry to a genius of promotion. He spent the morning of the 30th working the Louisville docks, chatting to steamboat crews with the assured air of one who'd navigated the river many times himself. Moving from boat to boat, he passed out free tickets to a special afternoon matinee.

Even if they had paid the full fee, the sailors would have got their money's worth that afternoon. As the painted landscape glided by behind him, Banvard described his travels upon the river-a tall tale of pirates, colorful frontier eccentrics, hairbreadth escapes, and wondrous vistas, a tad exaggerated, perhaps, but it still convinced a hallful of sailors who could have punctured his veracity with a single catcall. When he gave his evening performance, crew recommendations to passengers boosted his take to $10—not bad for an evening's work in 1846. With each performance the audience grew, and within a few days he was playing to a packed house.

Flush with money and a successful debut, Banvard returned to his studio and added more sections to the painting, and then he moved it to a larger venue. The crowds continued to pour in, and nearby towns chartered steamboats to see the show. With the added sections, the show stretched to over two hours in length; the canvas would be cranked faster or slower depending on audience response. Each performance was unique, even for a customer who sat through two in a row. The canvas wasn't rewound at the end of the show, so the performances alternated between upriver and downriver journeys.

After a successful shakedown cruise, Banvard was ready to take his "Three Mile Painting" to the big city. He held his last Louisville show on October 31 and then headed for the epicenter of American intellectual culture: Boston.

Banvard installed his panorama in Boston's Armory Hall in time for the Christmas season. He had honed his delivery to a perfect blend of racy improvisation, reminiscences, and tall tales about infamous frontier brigands. The crank machinery was now hidden from the audience, and Banvard had commissioned a series of piano waltzes by Thomas Bricher to accompany his narration. With creative lighting and the unfurling American landscape behind him, Banvard had created a seemingly perfect synthesis of media.

 

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Detail of advertisement for performance by John Banvard at Boston's Amory Hall, 1847 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

 

Audiences loved it. By Banvard's account, in six months 251,702 Bostonians viewed his extraordinary show; at fifty cents a head, he'd made about $100,000 in clear profit. In just one year, he'd gone from modest frontier sign painter to famous and wealthy man--and probably the country's richest artist. When he published the biographical pamphlet Description of Banvard's Panorama of the

Mississippi River (1847) and a transcription of his show's music, The Mississippi Waltzes, he made more money. But there was an even happier result to his inclusion of piano music--the young pianist he'd hired to perform it, Elizabeth Goodman, soon became his fiancee, and then his wife.

Accolades continued to pour in, culminating in a final Boston performance that saw the governor, the speaker of the house, and state representatives in the audience unanimously passing a resolution to honor Banvard. His success was also the talk of Boston's intellectual elite. John Greenleaf Whittier titled a book after it (The Panorama and Other Poems) in 1856, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about the Mississippi in his epic Evangeline after seeing one of Banvard's first Boston performances. Longfellow had never seen the river himself--to him, the painting was real enough to suffice. In fact, Longfellow was to invoke Banvard again in his novel Kavanaugh, using him as the standard by which future American literature was to be judged: "We want a national epic that shall correspond to the size of the country; that shall be to all other epics what Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi is to all other paintings--the largest in the world."

There is little doubt that Banvard's "Three Mile Painting" was the longest ever produced. But it was a misleading appellation. John Hanners --the scholar who almost single-handedly has kept Banvard's memory alive in our time--points out: "Banvard always carefully pointed out that others called it three miles of canvas. ... The area in its original form was 15,840 square feet, not three miles in linear measurement."

But perhaps Banvard was in no hurry to correct the public's inflated perceptions of his painting. His fame was now preceding him, and he moved his show to New York City in 1847 to even bigger crowds and greater enrichment; it was hailed there as "a monument of native talent and American genius." Each night's receipts were carted to the bank in locked strongboxes; rather than count the massive deposits, the banks simply started weighing Banvard's haul.

With acclaim and riches came the less sincere flattery of his fellow artists. The artist closest upon Banvard's heels was John Rowson Smith, who had painted a supposed "Four Mile Painting." For all Banvard's tendencies toward exaggeration, there is even less reason or evidence to believe that his opportunistic rivals produced panoramas larger than his. Still, it was a worrisome trend. Banvard had been hearing for some time of plans by unscrupulous promoters to copy his painting and to then show the pirated work in Europe as the "genuine Banvard panorama." With the United States success behind him, Banvard closed his New York show and booked a passage to Liverpool.

Banvard spent the summer of 1848 warming up for his London shows with short runs in Liverpool, Manchester, and other smaller cities. In London, the enormous Egyptian Hall was booked for his show. He began by suitably impressing the denizens of Fleet Street papers with a special showing. "It is impossible," the Morning Advertiser marveled, "to convey an adequate idea of this magnificent [exhibition]." The London Observer was equally impressed in its review of November 27, 1848: "This is truly an extraordinary work. We have never seen a work ... so grand in its whole character." Banvard was rapidly achieving a sort of artistic beatification in the press.

The crowds and the money flowed in yet again. But to truly bring in the chattering classes, Banvard needed something that he'd never had in the United States: the imprimatur of royalty. After much finagling and plotting by Banvard, he was summoned to Windsor Castle on April 11, 1849, for a special performance before Queen Victoria and the royal family. Banvard was already a rich man, but royal approval could make the difference between being a mere artistic showman and an officially respected painter. Banvard gave the performance of his life, delivering his anecdotes in perfect combination with his wife at the piano; at the end, when he gave his final bow to the family assembled at St. George's Hall, Banvard knew that he had made it as an artist. For the rest of his life, he was to look back upon this as his finest hour.

His panorama show was now a sensation, running for a solid twenty months in London and drawing more than 600,000 spectators. An enlarged and embellished reprint of his autobiographical pamphlet, now titled Banvard, or the Adventures of an Artist (1849), also sold well to Londoners, and his show's waltzes could be heard in many a parlor. He penetrated every level of society; after attending one show, Charles Dickens wrote him in an admiring letter: "I was in the highest degree interested and pleased by your picture." To the other dwellers of this island nation, whose experience of sailing was often that of stormy seas, Banvard offered the spice of frontier danger blended with the honeyed idylls of riverboat life:

Certainly, there can be no comparison between the comfort of the passage from Cincinnati to New Orleans in such a steamboat, and to a voyage at sea. The barren and boundless expanse of waters soon tires upon every eye but a seaman's. And then there are storms, and the necessity of fastening the tables, and of holding onto something, to keep in bed. There is the insupportable nausea of sea sickness, and there is danger. Here you are always near the shore, always see green earth; can always eat, write and study, undisturbed. You can always obtain cream, fowls, vegetables, fruit, fresh meat, and wild game, in their season, from the shore.

Toward the end of these London shows, Banvard found himself increasingly dogged by imitators--there were fifty competing panoramas in the 1849-50 season alone. In addition to suffering competition from longtime rival John Rowson Smith, Banvard now had scurrilous accusations of plagiarism flung at him by fellow expatriate portraitist George Caitlin, a jealous painter who had "befriended" Banvard in order to borrow money. Banvard also found his shows being set upon by the spies of his rivals, who hired art students to sit in the audience and sketch his work as it rolled by.

We know that a form of art has permeated a culture when cheap imitations appear, and even more so when parodies of these imitations emerge. There is a long-forgotten work in this vein by American humorist Artemus Ward, which was published posthumously as Artemus Ward, His Panorama (1869). Ward spent the last years of his life working in London, and had probably attended some of the numerous panoramic travelogues and travesties that darted about in Banvard's wake. His panorama, as shown by illustrations of the supposed stage (which, as often as not, is obscured by a faulty curtain), consists of a discourse on San Francisco and Salt Lake City, often interrupted by crapulous bits of tangential mumbling in small type:

If you should be dissatisfied with anything here tonight-I will admit you all free in New Zealand—if you will come to me there for the orders.

This story hasn't anything to do with my Entertainment, I know—but one of the principle features of my Entertainment is that it contains so many things that don't have anything to do with it.

For ads reproduced in the book, Ward munificently assures his audiences that his lecture hall has been lavishly equipped with "new doorknobs." But Banvard's most serious rivals were not such bumblers, and so he had to swing back into action. Locking himself in the studio again, he created another Mississippi panorama. Where the first panorama had been a view of the eastern bank, this new painting depicted the western bank. He then placed the London show in the hands of a new narrator and toured Britain himself with the second painting for two years, bringing in nearly 100,000 more viewers.

What might Banvard have done with these two paintings had he placed them onstage together? Angled in diagonally from each side to terminate just behind the podium, moving in unison, they would have provided a sort of stereoptical effect of floating down the center of the Mississippi River. It would have been the first "surround multimedia." For all of Banvard's innovation, though, there is no record of such an experiment.

Not all of Banvard's time in London was spent on his own art. In his spare hours, he haunted the Royal Museum; he was fascinated by its massive collection of Egyptian artifacts. He soon became a protege of the resident Egyptologists, and under their tutelage he learned to decipher hieroglyphics—the only American of his time, by some accounts, to learn this skill. For decades afterward, he was able to pull sizable crowds to his lectures on the reading of hieroglyphics.

Banvard moved his show to Paris, where his success continued unabated for another two years. He was now also a family man: a daughter, Gertrude, was born in London, and a son, John Jr., was born in Paris. Having children scarcely slowed down his travels; on the contrary, he left the family to spend the next year on an artistic pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In a reprise of his American journey, he sailed down the Nile and filled up notebooks with sketches. But he no longer had to sleep with these notebooks as a pillow. He was now wealthy enough to travel in comfort, and he bought thousands of artifacts along the way-a task assisted by his unusual ability at translating hieroglyphics.

These travels were to become the basis for yet two more panoramas: one of Palestine, and the other of the trip down the Nile. Neither was to earn him as much as his Mississippi panorama; the market was now flooded with imitations, and the public was beginning to weary of the panoramic lecture. Even so, Banvard's abilities were greater than ever. One American reviewer commented in 1854 in Ballou's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion:

Mr. Banvard made a name and fortune by his three mile panorama of the Mississippi. It was one of those cases in which contemporary justice is bestowed upon true merit .... His sole teacher in his art is Nature; there are few conventionalisms in his style. His present great work is far superior in artistic merit to his Mississippi--showing his rapid improvement; its effect is enhanced by its great height.

Just eight years after his voyage down the Mississippi, he had become both the most famous living artist in the world and the richest artist in history.

Banvard returned to the United States with his family in the spring of 1852. He was a fantastically wealthy man, so wealthy that he could retire to a castle and casually dabble in the arts for the rest of his life. And at first that's exactly what he did.

The world's most famous artist needed an equally imposing home to live in. Accordingly, he bought a sixty-acre lot on Long Island and proceeded to build a replica of Windsor Castle. When the local roads didn't meet the needs of his castle, he simply built one of his own. He dubbed the castle Glenada in honor of his daughter, Ada; neighbors, who were alternately aghast and awed by the unheard-of construction expenses being incurred, simply dubbed it Banvard's Folly.

A reporter touring the site was kinder in his appraisal of Banvard's castle:

It has a magnificent appearance, reminding you forcibly of some of the quaint old castles nestled among the glens of old Scotland. ... There are nine offices on the first floor, as you enter from the esplanade, viz., the drawing-room, parlors, conservatory, anteroom, servant's room, and several chambers. The second story contains the nursery, school-room, guest chambers, bath, library, study, etc., with the servants' rooms in the towers. The basement is occupied with the offices, store-rooms, etc. Although the facade extends in front one hundred and fifteen feet, still Mr. Banvard says his castle is not completed, as he plans adding a large donjon or keep, to be occupied by his studio, painting-room, and a museum for the reception of the large collection of curiosities which he has gathered in all parts of the world .... it has been proposed to change the name of the place [Cold Spring Harbor] and call it BANVARD ....

Not surprisingly, the residents of the town failed to see the charm of this last proposal.

Still, Banvard spent the next decade in relative prosperity and modest continued artistic success. Indeed, his artistic horizons broadened each year. In 1861, he provided the Union military with his own hydrographic charts of the Mississippi River. General Fremont wrote back personally to thank him for his expert assistance. That same year, Banvard provided the illustration for the first successful chromolithograph in America. The process was unique in duplicating both the color and the canvas texture of the original illustration, which Banvard had titled "The Orison." The result was a tremendous success and helped assure his continued reputation as a technically innovative artist.

Banvard then turned his attention back to his first love: the theater. Amasis, or, The Last of the Pharaohs was a massively staged "biblical-historical" drama that ran in Boston in 1864. Banvard had both written the play and painted its enormous scenery, and was gratified by its warm reception among critics. It seemed to him that there was nothing that he could not succeed at.

Even as Banvard displayed his Egyptian artifacts to guests at Glenada, the role of museums was changing rapidly in America. By 1780, the "cabinet of wonder" kept by wealthy dilettantes had evolved into the first recognizable museum, operated by Charles Peale in Philadelphia. Joined later by John Scudder's American Museum in New York, these museums focused on educational lectures and displays--illustrations and examples of unusual natural objects, as well as the occasional memento.

This all changed when P. T. Barnum bought out Scudder's American Museum in 1841. Barnum brought in a carnivalesque element of equal parts spectacle and half-believable fraud—a potent and highly salable concoction of freak shows, dioramas, magic acts, natural history, and the sheer unrepentant bravado of acts like Tom Thumb and "George Washington's nursemaid." Barnum was not an infallible entrepreneur, but he was the shrewdest showman that the country had ever produced. Imitators attracted by Barnum's success soon found themselves crushed under the weight of Barnum's one-upmanship and his endless capacity for hyperbolic advertising.

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Barnum's American Museum, New York City, c1858 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

By 1866, Barnum's total ticket sales were greater than the country's population of 35 million. John Banvard, with a castle full of actual artifacts, could scarcely ignore the fortune Barnum was making just a few miles away with objects of much more questionable provenance. Goaded by this, he paid a visit to his old sailing partner William Lillienthal. It had been more than fifteen years since the two had floated down the Nile, collecting the artifacts that now formed the core of Banvard's collection.

With Lillienthal's help—and a lot of investors' money—Banvard was going to take on P. T. Barnum. Their venture was precarious from the start. Aside from the daunting task of challenging America's greatest showman, Banvard was hampered by his own inexperience. Years of panoramic touring and a successful play had convinced Banvard that he could run a museum, but he had never really run a conventional business with a staff and a building to maintain. In all his years as a showman, he'd earned millions with the help of only one assistant, a secretary whom he eventually fired for stealing a few dollars.

Lillienthal and Banvard financed the "Banvard's Museum" by floating a stock offering worth $300,000. In lieu of cash, they paid contractors and artisans with shares of this stock; other shares were bought by some of the most prominent families in Manhattan. There was one problem, though: Banvard had never registered his business or its stock with the state of New York. No share certificates existed for the stock. Unbeknownst to Banvard's backers, and perhaps to Banvard himself, the shares were utterly worthless.

Flush with the money of the unwary, Banvard's Museum raced toward completion.

When the massive forty-thousand-square-foot building opened on June 17, 1867, it was simply the best museum in Manhattan. The famous Mississippi panorama was onstage in a central auditorium that seated two thousand spectators, and there were a number of smaller lecture rooms and displays of Banvard's handpicked collection of antiquities. The lecture rooms were important, as Banvard had invited in student groups for free to emphasize the family-friendly educational qualities of his museum, as opposed to Barnum's sensationalism. The museum also had one genuine crowd-pleaser built right in: ventilation. Poor auditorium ventilation was a constant complaint dogging panoramist shows, and Banvard took the initiative to install louvers and windows all the way around his auditorium.

P. T. Barnum had met a serious challenger in John Banvard. One week after Banvard's opening, Barnum ran ads in the New York Times, crowing that his own museum was "THOROUGHLY VENTILATED! COOL! Delightful!! Cool!!! Elegant, Spacious, and Airy Halls." This was hardly true, of course; Banvard's building was far superior, and Barnum knew it. But Barnum had a grasp of advertising that not even Banvard could match. The rest of the summer was to see America's greatest showmen--and its first entertainment millionaires--locked in an economic struggle to the death.

With each stab at innovation by Banvard, Barnum would parry with inferior copies but superior advertising. Banvard had the Mississippi panorama; Barnum had a Nile panorama, probably copied from Banvard's. Banvard had the real "Cardiff Man" skeleton; Barnum had a fake. On and on the showmen battled throughout the summer, with the stage and the newspapers as their respective weapons of choice.

The struggle ended with shocking speed. Banvard was in far over his head; creditors were dunning him for payments, and shareholders were furious over the discovery that their stock had been worthless all along. On September 1--scarcely ten weeks after opening--Banvard's Museum padlocked its doors.

Banvard improvised furiously. The building reopened one month later as Banvard's Grand Opera House and Museum. Productions dropped in and out over the next six months--first a leering dance production, then adaptations of Our Mutual Friend and Uncle Tom's Cabin. None was successful. Unable to make anything work, Banvard finally leased out the building to a group of promoters that included--perhaps to his chagrin—P. T. Barnum.

Banvard spent the next decade with the barest grasp on solvency, and then only by quietly appropriating lease money that should have been going to shareholders and other creditors. He and his wife lived virtually alone on their rambling sixty-acre estate; they were down to one servant for the whole property. After his shoddy treatment of the museum backers, no New Yorker would want to invest in a Banvard enterprise now; he wrote two more plays only to find that no producer would take them.

If his financial ethics were suspect, Banvard's artistic integrity was suffering even more. The innovator had been reduced to plagiarism: first in his history book, The Court and Times of George IV, King of England (1875), which was lifted from a book written in 1831; and then again the next year, when he finally managed to write a play that opened in his old museum, now named the New Broadway Theatre. Corrina, A Tale of Sicily was not only plagiarized, it was plagiarized from a living and thoroughly annoyed playwright.

Humiliated and surrounded by creditors, Banvard desperately sought a buyer for his theater. P. T. Barnum, when approached, sent a crushing reply back to his old rival: "No sir!! I would not take the Broadway Theatre as a gift if I had to run it." When Banvard finally did unload his decrepit building in 1879, he had to watch its new owners achieve exactly where he had failed. As Daly's Theatre, the building thrived for decades before finally being torn down in 1920.

Banvard's castle was not to be as long-lived as his museum. Banvard and his wife clung to Glenada for as long as they could, but by 1883, their deep entanglement in bankruptcy forced them to sell it. It eventually fell to the wrecking ball, and virtually all their other possessions were sold off to meet the demands of creditors. But the Mississippi panorama was spared from the auction block--now worn from nearly forty years of use, and nearly forgotten by the public, perhaps it was judged to be worthless anyway.

Banvard and his wife were now both well into their sixties and had scarcely any money to their name. They packed their few remaining belongings and quietly left New York. The only place left for them was what Banvard had left so long ago: the lonely, far-off American frontier. He was returning as he had left, a poor and forgotten painter.

It was a deeply humbled and aged John Banvard that arrived in the frontier town of Watertown, in present-day South Dakota. He and his wife, the recent proprietors of a castle, had been reduced to living in a spare room of their son's house. Eugene Banvard was an attorney with some interest in local public works and construction projects, and occasionally the elder Banvard renewed his energies of yore by pitching in with his son on these projects.

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A bird's eye illustration of Watertown, South Dakota, USA, from 1883 (Photo: J.J Stoner/Public Domain/WikiCommons)

For the most part, though, Banvard retreated into his writing. He was to write about seventeen hundred poems in his life—as many as Emily Dickinson—and like her, he only ever published a few of them. Unlike the more dubious plays and histories that he had "authored," his poems appear to be original to Banvard, and sincere if not particularly innovative efforts. Taking up the pen name "Peter Pallette," Banvard wrote hundreds of poems during his years in Watertown, becoming the state's first published poet. One of Banvard's more sustained efforts, published in Boston back in 1880 as The Origin of the Building of Solomon's Temple, centered on the biblical brothers Ornan and Araunah. It opens with a standard Romantic invocation:

I'll tell you a legend, a beautiful legend; A legend an Arab related to me. We sat by a fountain beneath a high

mountain, A mountain that soar'd by the Syrian sea: When a harvest moon shewed its silvery sheen, Which called into thought the Arabian's theme.

The book's epilogue descends into a miscellany of details about English church building, Egyptian obelisks, and loony speculations about Masonic oaths, a subject of apparently inexhaustible interest to the author.

On a more practical note, Banvard also authored a pocket-size treatise titled Banvard's System of Short-Hand (1886)—one of the first books published in the Dakota Territories. He claimed the system could be learned within a week, and that he had been using it for years, keeping in practice by surreptitiously transcribing conversations on buses and ferryboats: "The author acquired the knowledge of shorthand precisely in this manner when he was but a youth .... He has many of these little volumes now in his possession and they have become quite of value as forming a daily journal of these times."

For transcription practice, Banvard included his own poems and pithy maxims, such as "He jests at scars who never felt a wound." Banvard had felt some wounds himself of late, and more were to come before his strange journey came to an end. But that same year, now into his seventies, he locked himself in his studio one last time, ready to produce a final masterpiece.

Dioramas and panoramas were no longer a novelty by 1886, and Edison's miraculous work in motion pictures was just over the horizon. If the art form hadn't aged well, neither had its greatest proponent--along with the usual infirmities of age and his ruined finances, Banvard's eyesight had worsened with age. His eyes had never been terribly strong since his childhood laboratory mishap. Still, even now he could muster a certain heartiness. "In his mature years his appearance was like that of many Mississippi River pilots," said one contemporary. "A thickset figure, with heavy features, bushy dark hair, and rounded beard."

Nonetheless, Banvard's family was uneasy with his notions of taking the show on the road one last time, as his daughter later recalled: "My mother and the older members of the family were quite averse to his giving it [the performance], as they felt his health was too impaired for him to attempt it." If the older members of the family were against it, one can imagine the solace Banvard took in his grandchildren, who were only now seeing the family patriarch revive the art that had made him rich and famous long before they were even born.

For his diorama, Banvard had chosen a cataclysm still in the living memory of many Americans: "The Burning of Columbia." Most of the capital city of South Carolina was burned to the ground by General Sherman's troops in a day-long conflagration on February 17, 1865. Banvard's rendition of it was by all accounts a magnificent performance. Even more impressively—in an echo of his humble beginnings--Banvard ran the diorama and a massed array of special effects as a one-man show. One audience member recalled:

Painted canvasses, ropes, windlasses, kerosene drums, lycopodium, screens, shutters, and revolving drums were his accessories. Marching battalions, dashing cavalry, roaring cannon, blazing buildings, the rattle of musketry, and the din of battle were the products, resulting in a final spectacle beyond belief, when one considers it was a one man show.

I have read of the millions expended in the production of a single modern movie, but when I remember what John Banvard did and accomplished in a spectacular illusion in Watertown, Dakota Territory, more than fifty years ago for an outlay of ten dollars, I am rather ashamed of Hollywood.

For all the spectacle, though, Banvard's day had long passed. Dakota was simply too sparsely populated to support much of a traveling show, and the artist found himself packing away the scrims, drums, and screens for one last time, never to be used again.

A few years later, in 1889, his wife, Elizabeth, died. They had been married for more than forty years. As is so often the case in a long companionship, the spouse followed not long afterward. A visitor to Banvard's Watertown grave will scarcely guess from the simple inscription that this was once the world's richest artist:

JOHN BANVARD Born Nov. 15, 1815 Died May 16, 1891

As word of his death reached newspapers back East and in Europe, editors and columnists expressed amazement. How could this millionaire have died penniless on a lonely frontier? Had they sought to get any answers from his family, though, they would have come up empty-handed. Unable to pay their bills, the Banvards all fled town after the funeral.

In their haste to evacuate their house on 513 Northwest 2nd Street, they had left much behind, and an auction was held by creditors. Among John Banvard's remaining possessions was a yellowed scrap of paper listing his unpd $15.51 bill for his own father's funeral service in 1831. Young John had spent his life haunted by his father's lonely death and humiliating bankruptcy. Sixty years later, still clutching the shameful funeral bill, he had met the same fate.

So where are his paintings?

His early panoramas of the Inferno, Venice, and Jerusalem were lost in a steamboat wreck in the 1840's. A few small panels are scattered across South Dakota; the Robinson Museum, in Pierre, has three. Two more are in Watertown: the Kampeska Heritage Museum has "River Scene with Glenada," while the Mellette Memorial Association has a hint of the "Three Mile Painting" with "Riverboats in Fog."

And what of the paintings that made his fame and fortune, the ingenious moving panoramas? One grandson, interviewed many years later, remembered playing on the massive rolls when he was little. But after Banvard's death, they lay abandoned to the auctioneer. Edith Banvard recalled in a 1948 interview: "I understood that part of it was used for scenery ... in the Watertown opera house." From there, she conjectured, the rolls may have been cut into pieces and sold as theater backdrops. Worn from decades of touring, and torn from their original context as moving pictures, they might have seemed little more than old rags. Not surprisingly, no record is known of what theaters might have done with them.

One persistent account, however, holds that Banvard's masterpieces never left Watertown at all. They were shredded to insulate local houses—and there, imprisoned in the walls, they remain to this day. 

Love this? Get the whole book here. From BANVARD’S FOLLY © 2001 by Paul Collins. Used by permission of St. Martin’s Press / Picador. All rights reserved.

 








Places You Can No Longer Go: The House of Detention for Women

FOUND: Two Horses That Stood Outside Hitler's Chancellery

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The Reich Chancellery, 1939 (Image: German Federal Archives/Wikimedia)

The last time anyone saw Josef Thorak's "Walking Horses," in 1989, they were outside of Berlin, in the middle of a sports field at a Soviet barracks in Eberswalde. Whereas once the two sculptures had stood guarding Adolf Hilter's chancellery, now they had been painted gold and riddled with bullets.

More than a quarter-century later, the horse sculptures turned up again, in southwestern Germany, in the Rhineland Palatinate. They were recently found in a warehouse during a raid looking for black market art. The two sculptures were reportedly being offered for sale at around $5.6 million.

Thorak, who was born in Austria but had a German father, was an official sculptor of the Third Reich—in 1944, the most expensive item Hitler bought was a bust of Nietzsche made by Thorak, historian Jonathan Petropoulos writes in The Faustian Bargain. It's not clear to what extent Thorak actually believed in Nazism: the SS thought him an "outspoken careerist," Petropoulous reports. Thorak died in 1952, not so long after the Nazi state fell, but he did succeed in creating art that's still notable—though not for its artistic merits. 

Bonus finds: the wreck of a famous Hong Kong military ship, a stolen bonsai, "severely pruned,", the oldest tools ever

Missing: A selection of rare art—including a Rembrandt etching and a Durer engraving—worth $600,000 all together, from the Boston Public Library's special collection

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 








Electroshock Machines and Einstein's Brain: Inside 3 Macabre Medical Museums

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An anatomical model at the Mütter. (Photo: istolethetv/Flickr)

Some people like to spend their weekends windsurfing. Others prefer to examine bits of brains, peer into jars stuffed with deformed body parts, or look at rusty surgical tools from the pre-anesthetic era. If you are among the ranks of the latter, there are three medical facilities in the U.S. particularly worthy of your attention.

Here's what to look out for at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, Indianapolis' Indiana Medical History Museum, and Boston's Ether Dome on Obscura Day 2015.

The Ether Dome, Boston

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Skeleton and stadium seating at Massachusetts General Hospital's Ether Dome. (Photos: Michelle Enemark)

The circular, 19th-century operating theater at the top of Massachusetts General Hospital's Bullfinch building is known as the Ether Dome. It was here that, on October 16, 1846, dentist William Morton performed the first public demonstration of a new anesthetic by administering vapors of diethyl ether to Edward Gilbert Abbott, a patient with a massive tumor jutting out the side of his neck. 

At the time, ether was an option for recreational drug use ("ether frolics"), but wasn't being used for its numbing properties during medical operations. Instead, patients needing surgery would prep for the procedure by drinking a whole lot of whiskey, taking a mallet to the head, or ingesting enough opium to make the ensuing pain more bearable. Surgeons were vaunted not for their precision, but for their speed—top Scottish doctor Robert Liston was famed for his ability to lop off a limb in under three minutes. (There was occasional collateral damage involved in this swiftness, such as the time Liston accidentally cut off a patient’s testicles when amputating his leg.)

article-imageRobert Liston operating on a patient (Photo: Wellcome Images, London

On that day in the Ether Dome in 1846, dentist/anesthetist Morton and surgeon John Warren were just hoping to get through the operation without any wailing or gnashing of teeth from their patient. A crowd of curious onlookers peered down from the stadium seating as Warren sliced into the tumor on the unconscious and unresponsive Abbott's neck. When Abbott awoke and confirmed he had felt nothing, a triumphant Warren turned to his audience. "Gentlemen," he said, "this is no humbug!"

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A replica of Morton's Ether Inhaler (Photo: Wellcome Images, London)

On Obscura Day you can stand on the very spot where Abbott's tumor was painlessly removed. You can also meet someone who was in the audience on that fateful day: Padihershef, a mummified stonecutter from Thebes. The Egyptian mummy, who died circa the sixth century BC, was gifted to Mass General in 1823 and has been watching over the Ether Dome ever since.

article-imageA re-enactment of the 1846 demonstration of ether as an anesthetic. (Photo: Library of Congress)  

Indiana Medical History Museum, Indianapolis

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The teaching amphitheater at IMHM. (Photo: Jbryan317/Wikipedia)

Located in the Old Pathology Building of now-closed Central State Hospital—which was known in the 19th century as the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane—the Indiana Medical History Museum is the oldest surviving pathology facility in the United States. 

The museum’s collection of 19th-century surgical tools is enough to induce light-headedness in those who possess a more active imagination. Civil War-era amputation kits, surgery sets from a time before hand-washing was standard, and barbaric-looking blood-letting devices paint are all very handy for making visitors appreciate the innovations of 21st-century medicine.

The hospital’s clinical laboratories, teaching amphitheater, and autopsy room have all been preserved to reflect their original 1890s state. On Obscura Day, gather in the amphitheater for a special presentation of items from the museum’s collection. Prepare yourself for human remains and an electroshock machine.

Mütter Museum, Philadelphia

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The IMHM chemical laboratory. (Photo: Jbryan317/Wikipedia)

It’s easy to be overwhelmed at the Mütter Museum: though it has a modest square footage, the shelves are crammed with rows of human skulls, jars of floating fetuses with birth defects, and lifelike wax models of dermatological conditions. Then there is the Soap Lady, her face captured in eternal, silent scream. And you can't look away from the melting skeleton, or the replica of a nine-foot-long distended colon packed with 40 pounds of fecal matter.

Given all of these striking sights, some visitors bypass the museum's nooks and crannies, where small treasures await discovery. Take, for example, the Chevalier Jackson Collection. Secreted away in columns of drawers are thousands of foreign objects that Dr. Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering Philadelphia otolaryngologist, extracted from people's throats, esophaguses, and lungs during his near-75-year medical career. Neatly arranged into categories, the items range from coins to buttons, bones, nuts, and even small toys.

Another exhibit that is easy to miss is the display featuring pieces of Einstein's brain. When Einstein died in 1955, the New Jersey pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey, removed the brain without the family's permission. When Einstein's relatives learned what had happened, they allowed Harvey to keep the brain on the condition that it be used for scientific research only. Einstein's brain sat in a glass jar for decades, until Harvey eventually dissected it into 240 pieces and created 1,000 tissue slides. A selection of those slides is now on view at the Mütter Museum, which is hosting a behind-the scenes "wet and dry" specimen-viewing session for Obscura Day.

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Slides of Einstein's brain. (Photo: Courtesy of the Mütter Museum, used with permission) 

What is Obscura Day? It's more than 150 events in 39 states and 25 countries, all on a single day, and all designed to celebrate the world's most curious and awe-inspiring places. To get ticket information on events at the Mütter Museum, Indiana Medical History Museum, and the Ether Dome on Obscura Day, go here.









The Race to Build the World's Greatest Supercomputer

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 article-imagePart of the Dutch supercomputer 'Cartesius' (Photo: Dennis van Zuijlekom/Flickr)

For the past two years, since June 2013, the top supercomputer in the world has been Tianhe-2. (Its name translates to Sky River—the Milky Way.) Tianhe-2 lives in Guangzhou, China, and on a benchmark test, it reached 33.86 petaflop per second. A petaflop is a measure of how fast a computer can perform—one petaflop/s is one thousand trillion operations, performed in an instant.

But Tianhe-2 may not stay at the top for long. This spring, the United States' Department of Energy announced that it was going to spend $200 million to build the fastest supercomputer in the world, by 2018. And when that supercomputer, Aurora, first starts up, there's no guarantee that it'll be on top for long, either.

All around the world, countries are competing to create the world's most powerful supercomputer—and to be the first to break into the next order of magnitude of performance, the exascale.

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Tianhe-2 supercomputer in Guanghzhou, China (Photo: Sam Churchill/Flickr)

"It's a race, analogous to the space race," says Horst Simon, Deputy Laboratory Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a cofounder of the TOP500 project, which regularly ranks the world's supercomputers. As with the race to space, there are many, parallel reasons for the world's governments to want to produce the best technology in this arena. "One is national prestige. There's scientific discovery, but also national security. And there are the economic spin-off effects," says Simon. "It’s a very competitive activity."

For governments, scientists, mathematicians and engineers, there's a long roster of reasons to want access to one of the world's most powerful computers. These computers are necessary to model giant systems, like the global climate, and tiny ones, like nanoscale materials and cell-level biology. They're used to understand how disease and supernovae work, and to imagine how the earliest formation of the universe might have happened. But these computers have also led to technologies that trickle down to the rest of us—supercomputers have brought us highly accurate weather forecasts, the programs that keep airplane seat fulls of travelers, and cars that behave better in crash tests. They've even been used to design consumer products from Pringles (modifying the chips' shape just enough keep them flying off the production line) to Pampers (by modeling the multi-phase turbulence and material accumulation of absorbent diapers).

 article-imageThe MareNostrum supercomputer, which is housed in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), Spain. (Photo: IBM Research/Flickr)

What actually makes a supercomputer super? It's always a bit relative: they must be more powerful than other computers at the time. Right now, they're generally created by running millions of processors in parallel. Cloud computing doesn't count, though: The physical components of a supercomputer must all be located in, essentially, the same room.

There's a real reason for that. Even though computers can coordinate with each other from across the world, it can take seconds for the data to travel from one place another. The world's fastest computers, though, work on a nanosecond level. "If you wait for data for two to three seconds," Simon says, "it's a billion times slower than what you do at the microsecond level. That ends the advantage of a big, spread out system."

Simon and his colleagues first started ranking the world's most powerful computers in the early 1990s. Japanese and American computers generally vied for the top spot; China first took it in 2011. (The list usually ranks systems created by governments and other public institutions—private companies, say, Google, might have more powerful systems but don't like to say so or have them tested publicly.)  Even so, America still has the most systems on the list, overall, with 231—almost half of the world's most powerful computers, although that number has been slipping, too. 

article-imageAn early supercomputer installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, c. 1970 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In the past few years, it's been harder to make big leaps. With enough money, it's possible to make faster and faster computers using the same technology. But that strategy is reaching its useful limits. As systems built with current technology grow bigger, they use huge amounts of power—so much that they're prohibitively expensive to run. In 2010, for instance, a U.S. Energy Department advisory committee found that running such a supercomputer on the exaflop level would require "roughly the output of the Hoover Dam"—which has the nameplate capacity of 2,000 megawatts and produces about 4.2 billion kW-hours each year, enough to power about 350,000 homes. In a more recent report, the advisory committee listed energy efficiency as the top challenge to making an exascale system.

Right now, Tianhe-2 uses 17.8 MW to reach speeds of 33.86 petaflops. While the U.S. government wants to beat that speed—creating an exaflop computer by 2023—the aim is to do it using much, much less power, within 20 megawatts. That means an exascale system will have to be an order of magnitude more efficient than current technology.

One way to make that happen is to decrease the physical distance between the system's components even further, by, for example, stacking the chips into small piles. "Every nanometer counts," says Simon. Another strategy would be to replace power-hungry copper wiring with much more efficient optical interconnects—which would save loads of power but mean fundamentally altering how the computer industry build its products.

That's one reason why it actually does matter who has the world's most powerful supercomputer: building these systems means pioneering new technology that will eventually trickle down to the devices that the rest of us use. But also, on a simpler level, it's just satisfying to have bragging rights: We have the world's best computer, and you don't.

On Obscura Day, visit Blue Waters, which, according to the University of Illinois, where it lives, is the fastest supercomputer on a university campus.

 








7 Bizarre, Real-Life Tributes to Fairy Tales

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Decoration on the Gingerbread Castle. (Photo: Amanda Petrozzini)

Fairy tales have not always been child-friendly. Their origins are often morbid, murderous and cannibalistic. However, it takes a special sort of city to decide to pay tribute to characters from children's stories instead of real-life historical figures. When done right, the results are as inventive and bizarre as any magical yarn. Atlas Obscura has rounded up seven notable monuments to the worlds of trolls, gnomes, mermaids, goblins and witches. 


1. THE GINGERBREAD CASTLE
Franklin, New Jersey

article-image (Photo: Amanda Petrozzini)

Hamburg, New Jersey, is home to The Gingerbread Castle, a fairy tale-themed amusement park designed in 1928 for F. H. Bennett, the owner of a biscuit company. It was concocted by the Austrian set designer Joseph Urban, who drew inspiration from his own "Hansel and Gretel" stage-set at the Metropolitan Opera. The Gingerbread Castle quickly became a popular tourist destination after it opened in 1930, however by 1980 it had fallen into disrepair. While the property is currently fenced off, its salmon-pink gingerbread turrets are visible from the road.


2. HILL OF WITCHES
Juodkrante, Lithuania    

article-image(Photo: Rimantas Lazdynas/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

In the small island village of Juodkrante, Lithuania, there lies the "Raganu Kalnas," or Hill of Witches. It is a public trail which houses over 80 carved wooden sculptures of figures in Lithuanian folklore, such as witches, crow-monsters and devils. Each of the pieces were meticulously carved by hand starting in 1979. The arrival of Midsummers sees a program of traditional pagan celebrations taking place on the Hill of Witches. 


3. THE WICHITA TROLL
Wichita, Kansas

article-image (Photo: Andrea Allen/Flickr)

This sculpture, created by local artist Connie Ernatt, stares up from beneath a storm gate in Wichita. Installed in 2007, the gruesome seven-foot-tall creature is illuminated by a sickly green light at night, but is nearly invisible to passersby during the day time. 


4. WALKING TO BORÅS
Borås, Sweden 

article-image(Photo: Stuart Chalmers/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)  

Pinocchio, the wooden boy whose nose grows as he lies, was created by Italian author Carlo Collodi in the 1880s. Some 130 years later, a 30-foot bronze Pinocchio costing $11million was unveiled in the Swedish countryside town of Boras. But don't be fooled by the giant statue's pride of place: Pinocchio has absolutely nothing to do with Boras. Created by the major American artist Jim Dine, the looming Disney character was initially controversial due to its hefty price tag and the whiff of American imperialism, however since 2008 opponents have never succeeded in their quest to remove what is surely one of the most delightfully bizarre tributes in all of Scandinavia. 


 5. THE LITTLE MERMAID
Copenhagen, Denmark

article-image(Photo: News Oresund/Flickr)  

In the original fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the Little Mermaid suffers pain when walking, gets her tongue cut out, and then loses both her Prince and her life. The bronze Little Mermaid statue that sits forlornly by the water in Copenhagen seems to also be unlucky. Since 1964, it has been frequently vandalized and even decapitated. But unlike its Disney relative, the Pinocchio memorial (above), there is at least a good reason for the mermaid to have alighted on those rocks in Copenhagen: the author of the tale lived and died there, in 1875. 


 6. SOUGENJI KAPPA-DERA TEMPLE
Taito, Japan

article-image (Photo: Guilhem Vellut/Flickr

The Sougenji Kappa-Dera Temple in Japan serves as a shrine to “kappa,” a mythical creature found in Japanese folklore. They may look kind of cuddly, but these bi-pedal, turtle-like aquatic goblins are said to lure humans into water to drown them. Legend has it that neighborhood near the temple was apparently so plagued with kappa problems that residents built this structure to appease them. Inside, the altar is piled high with offerings of cucumbers, said to be the kappa's favorite food. 


 7. ELWOOD, THE WORLD'S TALLEST CONCRETE GNOME
Ames, Iowa 

article-image (Photo: Scott McLeod/Flickr)

Looking a lot like the 1980s television character David the Gnome, this 15-foot concrete garden gnome named Elwood lives in a leafy part of the University of Iowa’s campus. Until an 18-foot challenger surfaced in Poland, Elwood was seen as the tallest gnome in the world; his caretakers have since affixed the word “concrete” to that superlative (the Polish gnome is made of fiberglass). Created in a workshop in Wisconsin, this magnificent specimen weighs 3,500 pounds.








Minnesota: Land Of 10,000 Dessert Salads

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article-image Ingredients for Watergate Salad (Photo:Mark Pellegrini/Wiki Commons CC BY-SA 1.0) 

About 10 years ago, Emily Weiss' sister began making a very special salad that she learned from her in-laws. "It consists of Cool Whip, chopped Granny Smith apples, and chopped up mini Snickers bars," says Weiss, a food critic for Minneapolis City Pages and a native Minnesotan. "It is the very definition of a guilty pleasure. I hate how much I like it."

Snickers salad is not a creation of just one family, but a Minnesota standard, just one of a surprisingly large variety of "dessert salads" which maintain their place in the pantheon of Minnesota cuisine. These are desserts not often seen in the rest of the country, desserts consisting of various sweet things, typically pre-made or shelf-stable items like packaged cookies or canned fruit, suspended in a sweet housing of pudding, Cool Whip, whipped cream, Jell-O, or permutations thereof.

But why dessert salads? And why Minnesota?

Minnesota is historically dominated by just a few immigrant and religious groups, chiefly Scandinavians and Lutherans. That's beginning to change; the state has, for example, the highest numbers of Hmong people, who hail from the mountainous intersections of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, of any country other than the first three in that list, and more than currently live in Thailand. The Twin Cities boast plenty of fantastic, cutting-edge restaurants. But Swedish and Norwegian culture still dominate in Minnesota, and the persistence of dessert salads is likely due to the very particular way in which American culture distorts the tastes and traditions of any group who moves here.

article-imageSnickers Salad. (Photo: RoyalBroil/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dessert salads are typically large, served in big bowls, at gatherings and special occasions, rather than a regular family weeknight meal. "Midwestern, Lutheran, Scandinavian, it's like very hearty dishes, things you bring in a pan that will feed a lot of people, set it all on a table and everyone can feed themselves. I feel like having food that can be brought in a single dish is crucial," said Katie Heaney, a Minnesotan writer who has written about her home state for BuzzFeed. There are many different types, but with limited room for interpretation.

Common dessert salads include: glorified rice (white rice, whipped cream, canned pineapple, maraschino cherries);Watergate salad, sometimes known as "green stuff" (pistachio pudding, Cool Whip, canned pineapple, mini marshmallows of the type found in breakfast cereals); cookie salad (buttermilk, vanilla pudding, whipped cream, canned mandarin oranges, fudge stripe cookies); Jell-O salad (Jell-O, various canned fruits, mini marshmallows); the aforementioned Snickers salad; and the sole example that achieved national fame, ambrosia salad (whipped cream, canned pineapple, canned mandarin oranges, mini marshmallows, and shredded coconut). 

The easy interpretation of these dishes would be that they are holdovers from the 1960s, all Mad-Men era dishes long discarded by most of the country. But there's much more to the story. These are dishes that speak to the community, the traditions, the old country tastes and textures, and the climate of Minnesota.

Both Weiss and Heaney mentioned "church culture" when I asked them about dessert salads, a concept much stronger in Minnesota than in many other states because there are so few Christian denominations; about a quarter of the population identifies as Catholic and another quarter identifies as Lutheran. Over 90 percent of Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark are Lutheran, but only around 5 percent of the total population in the U.S. In those parts of Minnesota, Lutheran church events are the major gathering places for the entire community, and to feed a large group of people, it's not that surprising that people would lean towards products that can be easily obtained, that are easy to prepare, that don't go bad, and that are extremely cheap and filling. 

 

 article-imageJello Salad (Photo: Michael Lehet/Flickr

On the other hand, people gather everywhere, and generally they don't land on the same foods. Just ask a Texan about barbecue, a Jerseyite about red-sauce Italian, or a Virginian about blue crabs. These dishes have to come from somewhere. So where the hell did "Snickers salad" come from? 

Cool Whip and canned fruit may seem merely American, the product of an American love of convenience, corn syrup, and a nascent food culture that was heavily swayed by new technologies like canning and "instant" foods, but it's not hard to connect these dessert salads to more traditional Scandinavian fare. "Rømmegrøt, a thick and rich rice pudding-type dish popular with Norwegians and Swedes alike, has many things in common with these creamy salads and is eaten as a celebratory dish, even in the summer," says Weiss. And creaminess isn't the only texture involved here: Jell-O is perhaps beloved in Minnesota more than in any state besides Utah, which crowned Jell-O its state snack.

"The proclivity toward/tolerance for gelatinous things must come from, in some capacity, eating lutefisk, right?" says Weiss. Lutefisk is a traditional Scandinavian dish that grew from a preservation method: whitefish, usually cod, is soaked in a lye solution. The lye causes the fish's flesh to expand and break down its protein, producing a fish with a gelatinous texture. In few other parts of the western world is the texture of gelatin as beloved as in Scandinavia—and, in turn, in Minnesota. "Jell-O salad is not really considered a dessert," said Heaney. Instead it would be found on the table with savory dishes, like creamed corn, green beans, some sort of impressive meat (ham, maybe turkey), potato salad, and "hot dish," which is the Minnesotan twist on the casserole and often includes tater tots.

Only in a place used to eating gelatinized fish would strawberry Jell-O embedded with canned pineapple be considered an accompaniment to a main course. And seen that way it's easier to put aside circa-2015 food snobbery and see dessert salads for what they really are: A prime example of immigrant culture colliding with the new world of American convenience and coming up with something very weird. And probably delicious.








Found: The Most Luminous Galaxy Ever Seen

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An artist's depiction of what the galaxy might look like (Image: NASA)

The light from the galaxy WISE J224607.57-052635.0 traveled 12.5 billion light years before us humans detected it. But when scientists saw it, they determined that it was the most luminous galaxy ever found. The galaxy produces "the light of more than 300 trillion suns," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports—the product of "a very intense phase of galaxy evolution," in which the supermassive black hole at the center grew and grew.

NASA'S Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer detected a number of this sort of "extremely luminous infrared galaxy." This one is simply the most remarkable. What the scientists think happens is this: gas moves towards the central black hole, where, heated to incredible temperatures, it puts off intense light—some visible, some X-ray, some ultraviolet. But, when that light moves through the cloud of dust further from the center, it's transformed into infrared light.

Scientists on earth have found these galaxies by looking at infrared images of the entire sky which WISE was able to capture for the first time—its sensitivity is hundreds of times greater than the infrared satellite that preceded it, and so it's captured light emitting from celestial bodies that humans have never seen before.

Bonus finds: An unexploded bomb from WWII that Britain is strangely worked up about (possibly because it's near a soccer stadium); 29 mysterious metal drums

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 








How to Get Rid of Your Exotic Pet, No Questions Asked

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Scenes from an exotic pet amnesty in Florida. (All photos: Oliver Lee)

Hypothetical question: If you acquire a baby Burmese python and realize, too late, that it can grow up to 20 feet in length and can’t be contained by an aquarium, what do you do?

The answer, for Floridians at least, is Exotic Pet Amnesty Day.

This is the first event in Kissimmee, about a half hour’s drive south of Orlando; there are a number of tents set up on a grassy field outside the convention center in Osceola Heritage Park. The main tent, where the owners go to surrender their pets, is roped off with yellow caution tape and populated with veterinarians and volunteers for the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which hosts the event.

“The purpose of the program is to give exotic pet owners an option to surrender their pets,” says Cody Miller, Invasive Species Coordinator for the Nature Conservancy. “Pets that they can’t take care of, or have grown too large, and give them a way to surrender them that is safe and an alternative to dropping them in the wild.”

While there’s no strict definition of an exotic pet, the FWC defines it as any pet that isn’t domesticated—no cats or dogs. The sheer variety of animals available online is astonishing: a quick search turns up owners and private breeders selling zebras, capuchin monkeys, kangaroos, even a baby camel. And while most states now require permits or licenses of some kind for these rarities, enforcement is difficult, and many owners eschew them; it’s why, in part, the amnesty program doesn’t penalize owners for surrendering their pets and has a no-questions-asked policy.

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One of two Burmese pythons that were turned in.

Since the program began in 2006 they have received over 2000 animals, many of which are then taken in by pre-approved, experienced adopters. Though Florida continues to be ground zero for exotic pets—one volunteer called Miami the “Mecca” for the issue—it’s not the only one with the problem. On the Born Free USA website, which catalogues exotic pet incidents, there are over 2000 incidents recorded across the country. Last month, an unlicensed pet zebra bit off part of a man’s nipple in Oklahoma; just this week, an emu was caught running loose on a Georgia highway, causing traffic jams. And those are just the ones that were caught.

“You don’t have to let them loose,” says Miller. “A lot of times domesticated animals are not going to survive in the wild. They’re used to being fed. They’re not used to hunting. They don’t have that natural instinct. They’re going to get killed very quickly. So this is a very good solution.”

The other, and perhaps more pressing, issue is what happens when released pets thrive and become invasive. Approximately 26% of all fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals in South Florida are exotic—more than in any other part of the United States—and it’s costing the state more than $500 million a year to control the population. The Burmese python, in particular, has almost single-handedly decimated much of the native wildlife in the Everglades, causing alarming changes to the ecosystem.

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The lionfish, an invasive species. 

Next door to the adoption area is a tent featuring the lionfish, which in recent years has overtaken coral reefs and other shallow water areas around the state. Originally from the Pacific, it comes over in the ballast water of ships or through the pet trade, and by laying about 30,000 eggs at a time with no natural predators, it is quickly becoming dominant. There is a brochure at the table encouraging locals to catch them—the caption, underneath a photo of a snorkling, harpoon-wielding diver, reads “Be the Predator!”—and includes helpful tips on how to fillet the spiky and, apparently, delicious species.

At this point, a woman brings in a sickly-looking dog, balding in patches with long, uneven wisps of hair. Everyone watches as she wanders from tent to tent, carrying the dog in her arms.

“Is she trying to surrender that dog?” asks one of the volunteers, rhetorically. “ We’re not taking cats and dogs. But we do have someone from animal services.” A moment later, she seems to change her mind. “I’m going to adopt that dog. I can’t stand seeing animals helpless.”

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A nocturnal hedgehog naps through being turned in. 

The question of why people desire exotic animals is a bit complicated. As psychologist Lauren Slater, who spoke with Adam Roberts of Born Free USA, writes in National Geographic, exotic pet owners tend to fall into a few different categories. Some see their pets as surrogate children; others as status symbols. There are the impulse buyers, the collectors, and of course, those who simply love wild animals, often starting out as volunteers at organizations such as these.

Many of these types, it seems, are represented here today. A hedgehog, turned in early this morning, is a common impulse purchase; most owners don’t know that they’re nocturnal, and not an ideal pet for children. Behind the adoption tent are cages of various colorful birds, including one that contains more than twenty sleepy-looking conure parrots, all from the same owner. A silver fox, surrendered earlier in the day, has already been adopted by Charles and Kim Titterington, the husband and wife team behind Swamp Girl Adventures, a local non-profit that assists in the rehabilitation of animals and has a tent set up here. The fox is already in the back of their SUV—it smells strongly of skunk—and will join their wolf hybrid back at home.

“These are wild animals,” says Mr. Titterington. “They’re not pets.”

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A silver fox about to get a new home.

The Burmese pythons, of course, are the stars of the show. By mid-day, there’s been just one albino Burmese surrendered; when it arrives there’s a small rush as parents and children gather around. About an hour later, another arrives—this one fully-grown, with the trademark black and brown skin pattern—and the swarm of people forms again, their camera’s whirring-clicks capturing the team of veterinarians measuring and weighing the python as volunteers firmly steer away those who try to get too close to action. It’s suddenly clear why the caution tape is needed.

As devastating as the Burmese python has been for Florida’s ecosystem, it’s worth noting that invasive species come in all sizes, and are often spread by those who are unaware. “Invasive species are a national issue,” says Eleanor Foerste of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, one of the organizers of the event. “Every time someone moves they can be bringing gypsy moths from one car into another state. Then moths fly away and lay eggs, and we’ve moved the problem. It comes in at our borders but it crosses borders.”

It’s now early afternoon, and there’s a brief lull as the trickle of pet owners dies down and gives way to potential adopters. Just before the 2 p.m. deadline, a woman arrives with a kinkajou wrapped around her neck — it resembles a monkey but is more closely related to the raccoon — and hands it one of the volunteers, who, as a crowd gathers around him, takes into his arms and holds it against his chest like a child.   

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Kinkajou petting zoo

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Conure parrots after being surrendered.

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