A Visit to the Adsmore Museum

Living history in Princeton, KY

Last Friday afternoon, I captured Isaac and took him on an excursion to Princeton, KY. Princeton is the county seat of Caldwell County, about 30 miles northwest of Hopkinsville. Our destination was the Adsmore Museum, a few blocks east of the Caldwell Courthouse square in Princeton.

It was our first visit to the Adsmore, and we didn't research the museum beforehand. On the drive over, we speculated that we might see an exhibit about the Night Riders and the Black Patch tobacco wars. We were wrong.

The Adsmore house, we soon learned, is a living history museum. It recreates a specific time and place in history. Currently, Adsmore is celebrating Easter and little Katharine Garrett's 6th birthday. Inside the house, the year is 1907, and everything is ready for the holiday and for a birthday party. The museum staff is dressed in costumes of the period.

Saturday Night Scrabble

New and old words

Keely and Taurus came for pizza on Saturday night, and after supper, Keely, Isaac, and I played a game of Scrabble on Keely's extra-large board.

Isaac played "LEET" and said it was an alternative internet language. It wasn't in the dictionaries we were using, and I had never heard of it. With some indignation and a bit of scorn, Isaac produced an Urban Dictionary definition of leet on his laptop and educated me.

Today, I looked up leet at www.dict.org and learned that it has some traditional meanings as well. It's another name for a pollack (a type of fish), and it also has some legal meanings.  If you don't see LEET on the gameboard, that's because someone added an F and made it "FLEET."

"POO" was also one of Isaac's words. Isaac thought I was picking on him when I checked to see if poo was in the dictionary. He shouldn't have worried. According to the yellowed pages of a 1961 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary that we had on the table, poo is a verb of Scottish derivation that means "pull".

I played "PENT" and the kids questioned it because it's usually heard as "pent-up". Of course, it's in the dictionary. Pent is an old variant of "penned", meaning "confined or caged". Really, would I try to invent a word, children? (Don't answer that question, please. It's strictly rhetorical.)

We didn't reach many of the quadruple word squares at the edges of the board. I think it was because Keely was hoarding all the good letters. (Just kidding, Keely!). Below, her letters at one point in the game -- nary a vowel amongst them. If she had known about the Scrabble Solver, she would have been wanting to use it!

Flea Market in Clarksville, TN

Rainy afternoon at the junk store

This Old Place is located on College Street in Clarksville, TN. The large brick building with full-front dock looks like it was once a feed and seed store.

An amusing summary of the flea market biz is posted near the door:  "We buy junk & sell antiques." It's amazing how junk is improved by a price sticker!

After Isaac and I looked at the antiques, collectibles, and junk on the first floor, we climbed the stairs to the loft and wandered through even more booths. The photo at the end of this post was taken from the loft, looking down onto the first floor.

While we were upstairs, the skies opened, and rain pounded down onto the building's metal roof. It reminded me of being in a barn. It was a pleasant place to wait out the storm .

I didn't find anything to buy, though. Knick-knacks and dust-catchers don't really tempt me. I don't need any more of them -- I have plenty already. My main weakness is books, but I didn't happen to find any that I liked, despite searching high and low.

Isaac is on spring break from college this week, so I have been running around with him. This was just one of our stops on Thursday afternoon. We visited several flea markets, thrifts, and antique shops in Clarksville and then went to the mall. I did find a good old book at another antique shop -- a history of Cairo, Illinois.

Picking and Stealing

Collectors compared

Isaac and I visited Hopkinsville's recently re-opened Peddler's Mall this afternoon. It's an indoor flea market, located in part of the old WalMart building. I've shopped there several times in the last couple of months, and I've purchased something each time. I'm trying to help the Peddler's Mall vendors and owners pay their rent.

Today, Isaac found a movie and a cache of Harry Turtledove hardbacks, and I found a little concrete statue for my flowerbed.

Soon I was standing in line behind a talkative, 60-ish woman at the checkout. She mentioned that she was paying $8 for a little glass candelabra that was worth quite a bit more. "What's it worth?" I asked her. "Twenty dollars?"

"More like fifty or sixty," she opined.

I asked if she watches the "American Pickers" show on History Channel. (In this show, Mike and Frank drive across the U.S., visiting people's hordes of old junk and collectible stuff. Whenever they like some object, they try to buy it at a cheap price.)

"Oh, yes!" she cried. "I love that show!"

Then she told me that when she was younger, she guessed she had done some picking. Back then, she said, farmers didn't care if you went into an abandoned house or barn and took what you liked. Nowadays, farmers were likely to shoot you if they caught you.

I was reminded of a yard sale I attended some years ago. Dozens of old wooden and cast iron tools, horseshoes, and other odd pieces were arrayed on the walls of the patio. When I commented on the collection,  the owner told me where it came from. When her kids were little, she drove out to the countryside with them on Sunday afternoons, and they went into old barns. The display on her wall was what they brought home from their raids.

I cringe when the "American Pickers" get great deals from people who don't know the value of their own junk. However, I give Mike and Frank (and their producer) credit for finding the owner, asking permission to look, and then making a cash offer. They are paragons of virtue, compared to the old heifer I met today and her kindred spirit with the cast iron collection. 

There's picking and there's stealing, and it's not hard to tell the difference.

Daffodils are Blooming

Spring glories