Texas to Virginia March 2025

 

We left Texas by a sort of mid-southern route that took us through Natchez, Mississippi, a small city with beautiful buildings on a bluff overlooking the river.  We arrived late afternoon in time to be silhouetted by the sun setting on the Mississippi.  

 After walking a bit in Natchez our innate suspicions began to sneak up on us.  How is it that all the amazing-ness of Natchez came to be, especially in a town with an early 19th C history of rowdy Kaintucks starting a long walk home along the Natchez trace to Tennessee and Ohio and other points north?  And when just 5 miles away we were Harvest-Hosting at this Bethel Church in Vidalia, LA.

Yep, this is the church.  Very nice pastor and thus a great place to Harvest-Host.

 A tiny National Historical Site called Forks of the Road let us in on the secret-- In the first half of the 19th Century Natchez was the epicenter of the Mississippi Slave Trade, supporting their huge cotton industry.  It was the second largest slave-trading center in the South. Even a cholera epidemic that shut down slave trading in the town didn't interfere.  The slave-trading site was moved just out of town to a place where the road forked.  All that's left is a sign and a concrete pad that was used somehow to auction slaves who were in iron chains.  The site originally had dungeons and barracks.

The Forks of the Road is nothing more than an  important informative sign, the concrete auction block.

An example of the several preserved 'plantation' houses of Natchez.  They are gorgeous and almost surely built by enslaved Americans.

Another stunningly beautiful building in Natchez is the St. Mary's Catholic Church.  We were able to document that the bricks used to construct it were made  with enslaved labor. 

Part of the adventure of #VanLife is to approach most places with a 'when in Rome' attitude. So we duly dined on shrimp étouffée in this unassuming old house  called the Magnolia Grill, right along the Mississippi. The view was. stunning and  the étouffée so impressed us that I recreated a plant-based version. Mine is good, too!

 

Not sure we should admit spending an afternoon in Laurel, MS, because we'd have to admit that we may have watched an episode or two of HGTV's Home Town --  We snapped  a shot of the 'workshop' seen during the show.  It is only used for the show -- the rest of the work is done in a factory.   The actual addresses of the houses that have been renovated are not published, but the streets where they are located are.   We drove around and gawked.  It was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  The houses are pretty, just like on TV.

 Gee's Bend, Alabama was our next target.   Forgive a total geek-out here.

Gee's Bend (soft G) is so named because the Alabama River forms a true horseshoe bend and in doing so traps a small tear-dropped shaped piece of land that is separated from the 'mainland' on 3 sides.  The folks who live there are descendants of about 20 slaves brought there by Joseph Gee to farm its rich Black Belt soil.   In order to cover their children or their walls to keep drafts out or many other uses, the Black women of Gee's Bend used scraps and old clothes to quilt.

The quilts were and still are unique and beautiful, and many hang in museums world-wide.  The first one I saw was in the African American Museum in downtown Washington (now under attack by the Trump administration).  I was hooked! Not so much on quilting, although that's pretty amazing, but really on the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of these women and of the history of strong women that it brings into focus. I bought a book and started looking for a way to visit that actual little town where women preserved this heritage.

That's how a very rainy Monday found us to be the only vehicle in line for  the ferry that would take us across the Alabama River to Gee's Bend. Thunder and lightning prevented the 20-minute voyage.  Grrrrrrr.    We did have a nice chat with the Ferry-Master who told us all about his grandchildren and noted that Baby Beluga looked big enough to live in.

Not to be deterred, we drove for about 40 minutes to the single road in and out of the Gee's Bend and followed it to the little visitor's center at the ferry terminal on their side of the river.  

We had thought a walk through the visitor's center would let us wait out the rain, but not to be:  They told us we couldn't come in.  Could we come back in a bit?  They were in a meeting with an Italian Museum Curator.....

So Baby Beluga took us along a very poorly-marked Heritage Trail along which were life-sized framed digital photographs in front of houses where a quilter had made that particular quilt.  Each had a placard and a history and each was amazing, even if read standing ankle deep in mud with rain pouring down.  I totally geeked out over the stories of the quilters and their quilts, so you are lucky there's only three pictures here.

And speaking of geeking out, I met Lue-Ida McCloud, one of the current quilters in Gee's Bend. She greeted me inside the visitor's center when the meeting ended.  I was honored to have a picture with her. 

 

The current quilt in the visitor's center.  They go out to museums and are sold frequently.  The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond has quite a collection-- something to look forward to on our next visit east.

In a much sunnier Georgia, The Ida Carson Calloway Memorial Chapel was worth the stop at the Calloway Gardens in Pine Mountain.  The gardens are beautiful, all the azaleas were in bloom, the grounds are lovely (and huge) for sure, but the chapel -- small, sited along a creek, and full of stained glass windows that depict the seasons was magnificent.

That led us to the best part of the trip -- Seeing our friend Karl Katterjohn in Asheville, North Carolina. And we had such a good time meeting him for breakfast and chatting that we didn't take any pictures.  Feel so bad about that!  Karl -- you're the best and we're sorry we didn't take the pics!  

Then a straight shot to Northern Virginia, with a stop for lunch at the Blue Wing Frog in Strasburg, VA.  This will definitely make our favorites list this year in our Plant Based Restaurants category.  Best veggie chef ever!  

Yes, it looks humble and it is, and most good plant-based restaurants are.  As we  commonly find where good whole food is served, Blue Wing Frog is the life's work of a couple  teamed together determined to  make the world a little healthier, friendlier, and serving important food!  

WOYAYA

 "Never Doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
(Margaret Mead)