Wednesday in Augusta Nov 29, 2006

This morning Linda and I went over to Westview Cemetery for the first time to locate the graves of her Grandfather and Grandmother Reid. We found their headstone and noticed it was the only one in this large grave plot. We soon found out from the office that 8 infants of theirs are buried here. Only two of their children survived to adulthood, Linda's father and his brother.


Here you can see the Powderwork Tower over at Sibley Mill. The grandparents' headstone is in the lower right corner.


After Linda's grandmother died, her grandfather married again to this lady who we had the greatest pleasure of meeting after we first married and yes, she was in a wheelchair (as the headstone states) and we remember her smoking a pipe! She was a very sweet and warm lady.


From the other cemetery we saw this headstone with our son's nickname on it!


Also saw this interesting headstone.


Sorry to throw another view shot at you.


Another shot of downtown Augusta from the Calhoun Parkway near our house.


I took this picture from our kitchen window this morning looking at the Calhoun Parkway that goes over the houses behind us on the other street. You can see a vehicle passing across to the right up there.


Throwing a Broad Street picture at you, taken in the era when cars were easy to recognize model and year (picture from the internet). That is the tall Confederate Monument in the median.

Here is a picture of an old post card showing Greene Street before the median was used for displaying the many monuments as it is today.


Personally I think this is a pretty picture of an Augusta Canal tour boat at the dock.


This gives you an idea how high the canal levee is. These steps are used by tourists to get up to the top of the levee to ride the boats.



My artistic picture of the day.











Here I am still standing, pausing to get ready to post some pictures next time on my walk to the post office and back. I'm gonna also call this one my artistic picture of the day. Noticed I have my coat buttoned one off! Duh!


This is a picture that I love showing Snowball sniffing BadBoy's feet because he had just come in from being out when he slipped out the door earlier.

Neat Headstones

It is so neat to see tombstones that have photographs as part of the headstone or more amazing the images are etched into stones. Here is an etched work where the two are together.


What is new to me is how the photographs are protected with little metal covers.


Here I have lifted the metal covers to reveal the photograph of a 16 year old girl that would not have been possible to know how very pretty she looked without this headstone feature.


Here the headstone has both the photograph and an etching.




I found this picture on the internet and it is the sister church of the Augusta Sacred Heart Catholic Church that was destroyed in the 1900 Hurricane in Galveston, Texas.

Cemetery and Butterfly

Yesterday morning Linda and I drove out to Grovetown, Georgia, which is on the outskirt of Augusta, to Bellevue Cemetery to locate her mother's Aunt Ruby and Uncle Tom Toole's graves. They came to see us one time when we were living in Miami. Their graves are at the bottom of the picture. They loved cats, too, and had several that we remembered when we visited them. Notice the Christmas Tree that someone has placed by a grave of a loved one.


This is the home of Butterfly McQueen that she owned but actually lived behind this house in a cottage in which she lost her life when it burned. That is a school in the back of her property and it explains how she was known to walk around the grounds of the school picking up all the trash and litters she could find to help keep the area clean. She was also doing the same thing up and down her street. I spoke to a gentleman across the street and couple houses up who told me yesterday morning that his wife and Butterfly were close friends and when his wife went out to ride her three wheel bicycle around the block, Butterfly always joined her but walked instead. He said she could easily afford a bike, too, but preferred to walk. He said she always wore long dresses down to the ground. It was so neat to be talking to someone who actually knew someone in GWTW.


This picture of her house as taken from the school grounds shows where her cottage was located possibly where the trampoline is (far right). This house is truly on top of the highest hill in this area and the views were quite impressive, possibly why she selected this to be her home.









Needless to say I am a fan of Gone With The Wind and anything connected with it. I also found out yesterday from the office to the black cemetery in town that she is not buried in Augusta but that her ashes were sent to New York. The gentleman I spoke to in the office said he was going to find out for me where in New York she is buried and will call me back. That would be information that NOONE knows about, not even on the internet.

Once a magnificent church, now a center for cultural events

One of the old buildings in town used to be a church and they have saved it by using it as an active cultural center for many different kinds of entertainment and social functions. One of the many windows that they have saved and restored to its original state is this one that I think is beautiful. I sometimes wonder what I might have become spiritually had our church had such awesome windows when I was very young and impressible. Remember those bare, empty walls of Shiloh Baptist Church? No wonder I starved to see those little Sunday School lessons that had such beautiful Bible pictures and that I still have today, over 60 years later! And my church actually taught that the Catholics were ungodly for having idols and symbols like in this old church. O, how the Devil must love the Baptists!


A picture (from the internet) of the church building, Sacred Heart Cultural Center as it is called today. It had a sister church building in Galveston, Texas almost identical but was completely destroyed in the 1900 hurricane that killed some of our relatives, our grandfather's brother Nola White, wife, and daughter and her family. Remember Arthur White? He went looking for their bodies for days on the waters in a boat and found them one by one.


A picture of the inside.








An internet picture of the Augusta Choral Society group. Notice the chairs. The Devil is not too pleased with those comfortable looking cushioned seats. O mine, are those backs slanted for better fit? O please, bring me a glass of water to revive me!