Road Trip – from the Emerald Coast to Georgia and Home!

I joined some friends at Naveree, FL, just east of Pensacola. An area I’d only driven through before.

The sand is so fine, it’s just like sugar. I’m not really a beach person, my idea of a perfect day at the beach is having a condo with a balcony overlooking the beach, where I sit. Which is exactly what we had. But if I WAS a beach person this is where I would come. The beach stretches from Fort Pickins all the way to Destin which is about 50 miles. Wow.

Our condo was about 20 miles from Pensacola and Pensacola was a surprise.

Pensacola is a nice city, not what I expected. I guess I expected the typical Military town and it was not that at all. There is a nice historic district with beautiful old homes. The city is 450 years old, and they have historical markers and a trail you can follow throughout the city. They are proud of their history and have all kinds of references to it.

The Downtown is quite large and has nice shops and a great farmers market every Saturday. The arts are alive and well with an opera house, art museum, all kinds of art classes and more.

The first thing I saw in Pensacola were these two arches by Peter King. He has made large arches, gates, fireplace surrounds, kitchens, and more! I took a workshop with him in about 2008 and did this clay sculpture that hung outside my E Front house afterwards.

Walter Anderson Museum of Art, Gulf Springs, La

I’d never heard of Walter until my friend Nancy told me about him. What a talent and inpiring artist and writer!

He studied under several modernists and won a Packard Award for his animal drawings. He spent a summer in France where he saw cave paintings which influenced his drawing style. His brother Peter opened the Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, Mississippi (which is still in existence) in 1928 on property that belonged to their parents. Walter moved to Ocean Springs  and worked as a designer for the pottery. He designed for the pottery until his death (work he really did not want to do which frustrated him and contributed to his mental health issues). 

In 1941 he and his wife moved to her family estate Oldfields, which freed him of some of the responsibilities of the pottery and he began to paint once again. 

The piece I loved the most is the « Little Room » which was moved to the museum in its entirety. He never let anyone into his studio, the little room, and after he died his wife had the lock cut off. They found this painted room. The mural takes you through twenty four hours depicting the perfect day.

He did a lot of other work as well, furniture, sculpture, and as mentioned, pottery.

And his writing!! Among his most vivid writings are logbooks recording his travels by bicycle to New York city in 1942, New Orleans in 1943, China in 1949, and Costa Rica in 1951.

But what was of the most interest to me were excerpts from 90 journals he wrote about his trips to Horn Island, just off the Mississippi coast. 

Plus Ocean Springs is a great little town.

Ohr-OKeefe Museum

I wasn’t so crazy about Biloxi, the waterfront is full of casinos but there is the Ohr-OKefe Museum. The building was designed by Frank Gehry and is devoted to the Gulf coast’s cultural past & potter George E. Ohr. The campus is quite unusual, as are all of his buildings (like the Guggenheim (Bilbao, Spain) I saw a year or two ago.

When the towns people worried about his cutting down the large live oaks he responded that he did not cut down trees he incorporated them into his designs.

George Ohr called himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi. His looks added to that reputation. While during his lifetime he was able to make a living with his work it wasn’t until after his death that he really became famous and the value of his work soared, so typical! It’s interesting that George wrote to the Smithsonian on an umbrella stand he had made « The Somebody that made this pot was born at Biloxi July 12, 1857 and is GE Ohr. » (Paraphrased). Ohr hoped that the Smithsonian would purchase his body of work. They turned him down. It’s ironic that now a beautiful collection of his work is in this museum, that is part of the Smithsonian, and is named after him!

I was also thrilled to discover the work of New Orleans artist James Michalopoulos. I love the way he doesn’t worry about straight lines and upright structures. In fact he says his style is inspired by the music of his city. His buildings dance!

Katrina pretty much wiped the waterfront of Biloxi clean, you can still tell what happened by the bare strips of land from the downtown toward Ocean Springs. They have a memorial near the Ohr-OKeefe Museum to the storm.

Fortunately the Downtown of Ocean Springs was mostly spared by the storm.

Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site, Milton and Bagdad

Northeast of Pensacola on the edge of the town of Milton is where Florida’s largest antebellum industrial complex, the Arcadia Mill was located. It was the site of a water-powered business that included a sawmill, lumber mill, gristmill, shingle mill, cotton textile mill, and bucket and pail factory. The facility was in operation from 1830 until 1855 when the two-story textile mill burned. The complex included a dam over a quarter of a mile long and about 15 feet high, which formed a 160-acre man-made pond for holding hewn timber and controlling the flow of water to the mills. During the Civil War, several skirmishes were fought in the Arcadia Mill area between Union raiders from Pensacola and local Confederate defenders, and a small Confederate cavalry force frequently used it as its base

You can still see remnants of the complex. Although the mill facilities were abandoned after the 1855 fire, the large dam remained and appears to have been destroyed by the Confederates during the war in order to prevent any use of the site by Union forces. Arcadia Mill contains a visitor center and museum, and an elevated boardwalk through the archaeological remains. It was fascinating to walk on the boardwalk and read the story as I went. The signs « watch out for bears and poisonous snakes » makes you think about the people that built it all and lived with the snakes and bears.

One reason this site was chosen was for the vein of ironstone as seen in the last photo above. It contains a substantial proportion of an iron ore compound from which Iron can be smelted. We picked up pieces off the ground!

Milton and Bagdad are interesting small towns near the site. There is a great little railroad museum and a butterfly house with a vivarium for the butterflies. The railroad Museum does not have a lot of cars or locomotives but it has a lot of other things including a large model train layout featuring may local buildings. While in Milton we took a ride on Blackwater Bay, the guide was very knowledgeable and we saw nesting Osprey and Heron.

There is a little left of the Historical Florida State Route 1, (the original Dixie Highway and also part of the Old Spanish Trail). The highway went from Jacksonville, FL to the Pacific Ocean in CAt was built in 1921. It was the first section of paved road in West Florida.

In 1927, due to the new state requirements for wider roads, 4.5’ concrete shoulders were added on each side of the curbing. A very short section of it can still be driven on, which I did, the rest is a walking and biking trail.

Fairhope, AL

I made a quick trip to Fairhope, AL just across the bay from Mobile. It was founded in 1894 with an interesting charter. It was a wintering spot for artists and writers including Clarence Darrow and Upton Sinclair. The heron sculpture below was in the Eastern Shore Arts Center. A great space with lots of galleries and classes.

The second photo above of the odd, round building is called Tolstoy Park. Henry Stuart from Idaho was diagnosed with TB and was advised to move to a warmer climate. Sight unseen he bought ten acres outside of Fairhope in the woods. He built this round house ( 14 ft in diameter) in 1925, looking for a simple lifestyle after being told he only had months to live. Well he ended up living there for 22 years!

The third photo depicts a “castle” across from the Eastern Shore Arts Center.

If you wonder why I travel so much, I’ve had wanderlust since I was a child but a lot of the time I go because I’m looking for inspiration for my artwork, I have a curiosity to learn about new things and other times its to run away from the day to day and from the news. When I travel I totally check out from my real world, Often the days before I leave I think I’ve got too much to do to be going away or I don’t feel like going but the moment I drive out the door I forget all about it.

Montgomery Museum of Fine Art

After leaving Navarre I stopped in Montgomery AL at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art. It is in a beautiful building in a beautiful setting on the edge of the city.

The collection of paintings isn’t that interesting in my opinion but they do have an Andrew Wyeth, a Sargeant, a Hopper and one of the 62 versions of Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks. They DO have a great collection of contemporary glass. And they have a lovely sculpture garden.

The glass figure shown below is by North Carolina glass blower Rick Beck. I used to carry his and Vals work at Carolina Creations.

Elberton, GA

I stopped to see friends in Eatonton, GA. I’ve visited them before and wrote about it in a previous blogpost. It’s not far from Madison which is my favorite town in Georgia, it even beats out Savannah for me!

We got to tour the Uncle Remus Museum and learned all about the author, Joel Chandler Harris. He had a rocky start but was fortunate to be invited to live with Joseph Addison Turner at Turnwald Plantation where he heard stories from the plantations slaves that were the inspiration of many of his stories. His history is fascinating as was the Museum. No photos are allowed in the Museum but the outside is very charming. The building consists of several slave cabins from Putnam County and is similar to the one occupied by Uncle Remus, the character in the books by Harris. One end of the cabin depicts the fireside of Uncle Remus where most of his stories were told. First editions and artifacts from the 1800s are on display. The stories of Uncle Remus have been published in at least 27 different languages. Harris died in his home in Atlanta in 1908, at Wren’s Nest, which is also a museum.

I also went to the Georgia’s Writers Museum, also in Eatonton. There are nine important writers from this area. In total, more than 90 writers from across the state are recognized at the Georgia Writers Museum for their literary success by receiving the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame induction, the Georgia Author of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award, or the Townsend Prize. Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, and Joel Chandler Harris are all from within 20 miles of the town. It was much more interesting that I had anticipated.

Going Home

I intended to take a circuitous route home via Blue Ridge and Dahlonega Georgia, and Brevard, NC but it was raining and my work was piling up so I decided just to go home. But before that I stopped at the Savannah River Site Museum in Aiken. I had never heard about it. Unfortunately it was closed on the day I was there but I will certainly stop the next time through. You can also take a three hour tour of the Savannah River Site.

This is a description of it from their website…

General Information About SRS
The Savannah River Site (SRS) is a key Department of Energy (DOE) industrial complex responsible for stewardship of the environment, the enduring nuclear weapons stockpile and nuclear materials. More specifically, SRS processes and stores nuclear materials in support of the national defense and U.S. nuclear non-proliferation efforts. The Site also develops and deploys technologies to improve the environment and treat nuclear and hazardous wastes left from the Cold War.

The SRS complex covers 198,046 acres, or 310 square miles, encompassing parts of Aiken, Barnwell and Allendale counties in South Carolina, bordering the Savannah River.

Where to next? A quick visit to Winston-Salem, then a week in Michigan then a month in Europe!