Do you remember travelogues? Maybe I should be asking if you are old enough to remember travelogues because they haven’t been a thing for decades. When I was a high schooler in the 1980s, travelogues were events wherein people who had gone on trips to exotic places would bring back slides and present them with commentary for a public audience. This was at a time when PowerPoint and digital slide decks didn’t exist, so these…
As so often happens with blog posts, a number of little things come together to make a much bigger topic. Such is the case with today’s post. It started with a National Register nomination I was reading, was further reinforced by the mention of a local building in a city document, then developed into a full-fledged puzzlement followed by a really big question. Historic Structures with Non-Historic Additions I sit on the Minnesota State Review…
Johnny Appleseed – The Mythic Tree-Planting Hero Remember learning about Johnny Appleseed as a kid in elementary school? I do. For my readers who may not have heard about Johnny Appleseed, he was a guy from the past who, we were told, wore a tin pot on his head and walked all over the place planting apple trees in America. It’s a pretty vague mythic sort of tale. Where did this guy walk? In my…