Finding Things to Do in the Rain and our Celebrity Ghost Tour

 Thursday, July 10, 2021

Yes, we are having a bit of on again, off again rain.  After a slow start we just decided to do a local road trip.  Our first stop was the home of Cyrus McCormik who invented the first successful mechanical reaper in 1834.  His new horse drawn reaper could harvest grain five times faster, with a small fraction of the physical effort.  His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father, Robert McCormick, Jr., with the aid of Jo Anderson, a person enslaved by his family.  This was done right here in his blacksmith shop on his farm, Walnut Grove.  We were also able to visit the grist mill and a surviving building that was a slave quarters.

This model of the reaper can and has reaped grain.

Blacksmith shop.

What is believed to be Cryus' original anvil.

Top floor of the gristmill.

A mill stone and inside the gristmill.

Scenes around the farm.

This was a day of gristmills.  We visited the Kennedy-Wade Mill.  This is Virginia's oldest operating commercial gristmill.  This mill is circa 1750.  The Kennedy family owned and operated the mill for over a century.  Thw Wade family purchased the mill in1882. They operated it for four generations.  It was then purchased by Jim and George Young in 1991 In 2016 the mill was purchased by John and Karen Siegfried, with the commitment to preserve and continue the 260+ year tradition of family owned and operated stone ground milling in the Shenandoah Valley.  In fact, we prchased two bags of mix from them.

On our way home we saw the Lone-henge, designed by Mark Cline.  This was somewhat ironic because we have a ghonst tour schedued for tonight with his Lexington's Ghost Tour. 

Lone-henge.

One more stop on the way home to do a bit of shopping.  Saw this outside a car wash.  Love our quricky.

Well we show up at the designated start of the Ghost Tour.  One other couple was there and we waited for our guide.  Low and behold it was Mark Cline himself.  We were thrilled.  We had visited his Foam-henge years ago and have seen and heard more about his art on YouTube so we were very happy to have him as our guide.  The ghost tour was so much fun.  He was very entertaining and because it was just a group of four, and we were all willing to follow  him anywhere, we had a longer tour than usual and I think it was really fun.  We did buy his book about the tour and he even autographed it for us.  We visited Stonewall Jackson's grave after dark.  Creepy spots like the site of the last hanging in Lexington and the story of the cook and the cat.  A doorway where a mysterious dog apeared for years and the home of Robert E. Lee.  He performed the collaspe of Lee just two weeks before he died.  He was a good story teller as well as a good impersonater.  We laughed and went ahh many times.