Bobby Joe and I re-entered the realm of consciousness around 10 AM. By that time I’ve usually had breakfast and done three courthouses! Partnership is plenty of fun, but not all that efficient for task orientation. 😀
Here’s what we accomplished this day:
We messed around in Palestine once we got re-oriented. “Palestine”, incidentally, is pronounced Pal-us-steen, not Pal-us-stine, making one wonder again how people ever learn English.
First stop – the courthouse:
We then hunted around town for a traditional breakfast joint…
We finally gave up on finding a “home-style” breakfast and went to the IHOP, distinguished for the world’s slowest breakfast service.
Bobby Joe and I finally began our riding day around noon (!), but before we could get out of Palestine, I spied this lawnmower graveyard. My father was obsessed with lawnmowers his entire life – and these pix are in his honor:
While I was out photographing them, a man came racing up in an old American land yacht to inquire if I wanted to buy any of them. Luckily I was on a bike and had to pass on the temptation…
More of Palestine on the way out of town…
We FINALLY got underway, headed due east to Rusk, seat of Cherokee County (the Cherokee all having been removed and relocated to reservations, mostly in Oklahoma, where one of them seems to have contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s gene pool).
Northeast from Rusk to Henderson, seat of…uh..Rusk County. Don’t ask me…
Along the way, I finally got a chance to photograph one of those neatly trimmed passages of the power lines through the pine trees – ubiquitous in the Big Thicket/Piney Woods area (which we are now back in…).
Conscious of the late start, we blew on from Henderson due east to Carthage, seat of Panola County and namesake, presumably, of Carthage, Greece. One of a number of so-named towns in this part of Texas.
We did not get to see it, but Carthage is home to the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, and both the great Tex Ritter and Jim Reeves were born and raised in the environs of Carthage, considered their home town. It is also, implausibly, the home town of Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first African-American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
Watching the sun headed down, we raced northwest to Longview, seat of Gregg County.
We did not get to do much in Longview, as the day was almost over before it had really begun, so we headed due east to Marshall, on the border with Louisiana, and seat of Harrison County. Marshall was once the gateway to Texas, and a major hub of the Texas-based Confederacy. In fact when Sam Houston declined to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, and lost his job as Governor of Texas, he was replaced with Marshall’s own Edward Clark. Marshall was also the capital of Missouri’s Confederate government-in-exile.
Marshall has a lot of nicknames, including “Cultural Capital of East Texas” (what if that’s true?), and “The Athens of Texas” (notwithstanding the REAL Athens, Texas being about a hundred miles to the west…
One thing for certain, though, and clearly the reason for being called the “Athens” of Texas, is the H U G E central plaza and equally gigantic courthouse:
Marshall also claims to be the “Birthplace of Boogie Woogie”, which I guess is a good thing that partially offsets its sad record as being one of the leading centers of black male lynching in Texas. I would not be surprised to learn that some of the boogie-woogiers did double duty as lynchees…
Y.A. Tittle, legendary QB of the San Francisco 49’ers, and George Foreman (BBQ grill salesman…oh, yeah, and Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World) are from Marshall.
The sun had now set, and we set out from Marshall to the north, toward Jefferson, seat of Marion County. This turned out to be the surprise of the entire trip.
The first surprise was that there were no motels on the north side of Marshall, so we just kept driving into the gloaming.
The second surprise came when we were about 3 miles from Jefferson – an INTENSE wave of humidity that was not rain turned all of our clothing, helmets, bike surfaces into a glistening, clammy mess. I’ve spent much of my life in tropical conditions, but never before encountered a transition this stark.
The third surprise was Jefferson itself. I had never even heard of it, but it is like a perfectly preserved little Texas-Louisiana river town from the 19th or early 20th century. We went first to the courthouse, which was shuttered for impending repairs, but we did the photo deed anyway, with Bobby Joe’s Harley and my BMW glaring at each other:
I then wandered around town on foot – these are the best of the MANY photos I shot there in the fading light…
Vernon Dalhart’s version (1924) of “Wreck” was supposedly the first million-selling country music release in American history, and the song has been recorded by everybody who’s anybody in country music, including Cash, Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and…the list goes on and on.
The fourth surprise in Jefferson was that it was almost dark, and there was nowhere for us to stay. We headed west out of town through intense blackness and towering pine forest. We could see lightning on the western horizon – we were driving straight into it but there was no other place to go, other than sleep in the woods. The lightning intensified as we drove, with huge bolts appearing right down the tunnel made by the pine trees, and each flash would illuminate all of the little reflective markers embedded on the centerline of the road. It was hairy in the extreme.
Our luck held out – the actual rain started about 2 minutes before we got to Gilmer and, barely wet, we whipped under cover at a gas station and waited while the storm raged. That only lasted about 10 minutes, during which we made a motel reservation that was barely a mile away. When the rain stopped, we scurried to the motel, where the lady proprietor allowed us to keep the bikes on the covered porch. We ate road food from the gas station opposite the motel, drank two (and two only) beers, and went to sleep early listening to Bobby Joe’s Bluetooth speaker and fine selection of weird music.
It was a magical end to a day that had begun with a rough hangover. Lesson learned. Welcome to Gilmer. I will do the road from Gilmer to Jefferson again one day, in the light…