Two Odd Bits and a Teaser Hidden in the Footnotes
Every time we take a road trip I end up with a couple of odd bits that I think are fascinating but don’t quite justify an entire blog post. (1) For your amusement and edification I offer two of these today:
The shot tower at Dubuque , Iowa
My Own True Love went out of his way to take me to see the historic shot tower that stands in the industrial section of Dubuque, a reminder of an earlier time when lead mining was a major industry in the region(2) and lead shot was a critical element in military readiness.
As you can see from the attached photos, the shot tower isn’t visually intriguing. In fact, it looks a lot like an abandoned chimney. What made this worth the side trip was the explanation of how a shot tower works, something that both of us were curious about.
For those of you who don’t have a trip to the industrial section of Dubuque in your immediate future, here’s the scoop:
1. You melt lead into liquid.
2. You climb to the top of the shot tower with the molten lead. Or maybe you melt it at the top of the shot tower, which sounds safer. The explanatory panel left this step out.
3. You pour the molten lead through a copper or zinc grate, which ensures that all the shot is approximately the same size instead of breaking up into random shapes like homemade spaetzle.
4. As the lead falls from the top of the tower, surface tension shapes the droplets into spheres.
5. The shot lands in a container of water or sand at the bottom of the tower, which cools the lead and allows the shot to keep its shape.
The process was developed in 1760, after English businessman William Watts discovered that molten lead becomes a perfect sphere when dropped from a great height. (Which raises the question of why he was dropping molten lead from a great height. ) He patented the process, which replaced the slower, more expensive method of casting shot in molds.
2. This item, found in the small local history museum in Guttenberg Iowa(4)
There was no label, but it reminded me of the flash cards used to help plane spotters learn the shapes of enemy airplanes in WWII. According to the senior docent, who wandered in with his grandchildren while we were in the museum, it is a target kite, which was used for gunnery practice at sea in WWII. Who knew?
(1) Or I run out of steam. You might not believe it, but the Road Trip Through History posts require a different kind of energy to write. It’s easiest if I can write them in the moment, but that seldom happens.
(2) And speaking of running out of steam: the lead mines of Dubuque really deserve a blog post of their own. And maybe I’ll suck it up and write one. But not this week. This week we have other historical fish to roll in cornmeal and fry: in my Friday post I’m going to tell you about an exciting collaboration between your humble blogger and the wonderful Exploress podcast. (3) Don’t touch that dial!
(3) One of the best history podcasts out there in my opinion. Here’s the official description:
I love learning about fascinating women in history. But so often, it feels like I’m appreciating them in a cultural vacuum. I mean, what was it really like to be them? To live in their particular time, place, and circumstance?
Welcome to The Exploress, where we’ll go time traveling through women’s history, era by era, to explore their lives and their world, immersing ourselves in their lived experience. We’ll walk with women through their everyday lives, uncovering both the mundane and the bizarre. We’ll discover how they were expected to meet society’s demands to better understand all the ways they subverted them. We’ll go questing for the women behind the famous names we think we know, and meet ladies you’ve probably never heard of.
Give it a try. And if you like it enough to become a Patreon subscriber you’ll have access to a long interview with me about women warriors. That we recorded back in June, plus other subscriber only content.
(4) That’s not a typo. The town spells its name with two “t”s. Back in the nineteenth century, German immigrants voted to change the town’s name from the original Prairie la Porte to Gutenberg in honor of the man who invented moveable type. The town clerk was of French descent and annoyed by the change, so he inserted an extra t into the official documents. Local history is a wonderful things.
Road Trip Through History: The Sawmill Museum at Clinton, Iowa
The Sawmill Museum at Clinton, Iowa, was our last stop on this year’s Great River Road adventure—and a fitting stop it was. Logging was a recurring theme this year and last year. Beginning in Lake Itasca in Minnesota almost every local historical museum or GRR interpretive center has had at least one panel on logging.* The Sawmill Museum tells the story from the perspective of the people who milled the logs rather than the people who cut them. Or at least from the perspective of the people who hired the people who actually milled the logs.
The museum looks at the broader history of America’s lumber industry through Clinton’s local history, which is a classic example of an American town’s boom and bust, lumber baron-style. ** Located at a conjunction of the railroads and the Mississippi, Clinton was a powerhouse in the logging industry in the second half of the nineteen century. Between 1865 and 1900, one-third of the lumber produced in the United States was processed in Clinton. And because it was a lumber center, it was a center of other industry as well. The twin cities of Clinton and Lyons bustled with sawmills, flour mills, finishing mills, distilleries, carriage and wagon shops, and foundries.
Here are the things that caught my imagination:
- The story of how a group of mill owners in Iowa and Illinois created a lumber empire by controlling both supply and production along the Mississippi—told in part by the lumber barons themselves in the form of a set of animatronic talking heads in conversation with each other. Effective story telling, though a little creepy.
- An in-house small scale milling operation, with seven volunteer sawyers who process trees into lumber, then turn it into wooden items for the museum’s gift shop. Nothing beats seeing the equipment in action
- Anne Paulina Crepin, a French woman who patented the first modern band saw blade in 1846. The band saw itself was invented by an Englishman, William Newberry, in 1809 but it didn’t work because existing blades couldn’t hold up to sawing. (A fundamental flaw by any standard.) Crepin’s design used a new technique for welding a blade that overcame the problem, making the band saw a viable tool.
- Crepin’s band saw was powered by a goat on a treadmill. Apparently animals on treadmills were used to power a number of small machines in mid-19th century America. Who knew?
Hopefully we’ll hit the Great River Road again in 2020.
* I still regret missing the Forestry History Center at Grand Rapids Minnesota. It was already closed for the season by the time we got there last year. One of the hazards of traveling in the fall.
**If you want to get a deeper understanding of lumber barons and other nineteenth century monopolists, the museum’s director, Matt Parbs recommended a book that’s been on my mental to-read list for a long time now: Richard C. White’s Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. Obviously it’s about railroads, not the lumber industry. But he suggests that the mind set is the same.
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Pro tip: If you walk around a small museum obviously taking notes, sooner or later at lease one member of the staff will come talk to you. This is almost always a good thing because they tend to be passionate and knowledgeable. They also can tell you the best place to eat lunch nearby. Always a hot topic as far as we’re concerned.
Road Trip Through History: The National Brewery Museum
Some museums are the road trip equivalent of a destination wedding: you plan the trip for the purpose of visiting that museum. Some museums are must-sees. (Though I must admit that we’ve missed a few of those on previous Great River Road adventures because of scheduling difficulties. *Sigh*) And others are a fun stop when they fall in your path. The National Brewery Museum in Potosi, Wisconsin, was in the last category.*
Here were some of my takeaways:
The museum used the history of thePotosi Brewing Company, which originally operated between 1852 and 1972, to tell two related stories: the effect of Prohibition on small breweries and the transformation of the American brewing industry from hundreds of local breweries to big national companies. The Potosi Brewing Company survived Prohibition, and the Great Depression, thanks to some smart choices about how to diversify. They were not so lucky when it came to the move away from local breweries.
Transportation was as much a part of the story as the beer itself, from horse-drawn carts to the interstate (As an aside, the Potosi Brewing Company was the only brewery in the country that owned its own steamboat, which they used to deliver beer to Dubuque. They also had room for 100 passengers and would take people on river outings, presumably with beer.)
An hysterical video about the use of cowboys in beer commercials, including one with John Wayne. As far as I was concerned, it was almost worth the stop all by itself. I watched it twice and was tempted to watch it a third time. (I tried to find an on-line clip to share, with no luck Instead I offer you this one, which is also pretty funny:
(REMINDER: If you’re reading this via email you may have to move to your browser to see the clip.)
Some unexpected history of brewers and WWII:
- Beer can production for public consumption in the United States ceased in 1942, because tin and steel was critical to the war effort. It took a couple of years, but the government finally realized that the ability to get American beer would be a morale booster to the troops. In 1944, the military contracted with 35 major breweries to produce bee in non-reflective olive-drab-colored cans.
- Advocates of prohibition, who obviously did not share the image of beer as a morale booster, saw the war as a second chance. Brewers fought back by printing and distributing informational materials such as civil defense manuals and booklets on how to handle air raids, blackout procedures etc. They also added special neck labels to beer bottles urging their customers to buy war bonds. In the face of such relentless helpfulness, prohibition advocates didn’t stand a chance.
Definitely worth the stop.
* If you’re seriously interested in the ephemera of brewery advertising, you should move the museum higher up on your personal list.
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Travelers’ tip: The National Brewing Museum is sponsored in part by the revived Potosi Brewing Company, which has a brew pup at the museum. Your museum ticket includes a pint of beer. The food is good, the beer is better. And the root beer is amazing.