Over the past three years this site has changed platforms once and servers twice. It also has gone through some growing pains, false starts, and wrong turns. When I migrated the blog from WordPress.com there were some formatting errors that occurred in the earlier telecommunications history posts (embedded media not rendering correctly, etc.). Also, because of changes in Google Maps plugins over time, some of the embedded maps in older posts were broken.

After a couple of weeks of repair work, all of the graphics and other embedded media in the Western Union microwave network series appear to have been restored. The site has a new brick background –Catskill brick pavers from Savannah, Ga. — and better optimized photos. Gone are many of the posts that detoured from the site’s purpose: telling stories about the past. They diminished the site’s integrity and were a distraction from what I set out to achieve with this site.

New posts on the way cover recent past resources in the Washington suburbs and some fun ways to combine music with oral history. Future posts will be shorter and mainly will provide introductions and complementary information for blog posts and articles published elsewhere in edited sites, like the recent piece on a Southern poet’s home, and e-journals.

DSR

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In 1893, an acclaimed Atlanta poet built a fashionable wood home in the Atlanta Suburban Land Company’s East End subdivision. The two-story vernacular Victorian gable-front home with turned porch posts and spindlework stands out among its one-story cottage neighbors in Decatur, Ga.’s, Oakhurst neighborhood.

Former Hubner home. April 2012.

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Probably not. But this is the best one I’ve read in a while.

Wills and other probate instruments are pretty ordinary, almost formulaic, documents. Most of the time. I recently came across a will filed in 1942 in Decatur, Georgia, that deviated from the routine. The author  made the usual requests that his affairs be settled and his wife administer his estate. And then he got to the part where he directed his heirs to deal with his remains:

THIRD - I direct my remains to be clothed in plain apparel at a minimum cost and conveyed in as inexpensive coffin, casket, or receptacle as possible and cremated in Macon, Georgia, and my ashes returned, in a durable container, to my wife ….

FOURTH - I nominate my friends …. to elect one from their number to accompany my remains to the place of incineration and return with my ashes.

FIFTH - I direct my wife to pay the expenses for the disposal of my remains according to the foregoing prescribed manner, including the fare and transportation of one that attends my remains and returns with my ashes, but nothing for funeral services.

SIXTH - I request that my remains be disposed of without embalment if it can be done satisfactorily to all concerned.

SEVENTH - I shall die as I have lived, believing in the God of nature only, discarding the fairy tales of the Bible as nonsense, which have added many burdens of mental anguish to millions of people departing this life, who were never permitted to think rationally for themselves; hence I earnestly request that no preacher, priest or clergyman officiate at my funeral. I shall go the way of all life without fear of eternal punishment.

© 2013 D.S. Rotenstein

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In February I was invited to write a guest post for the Tikkun Daily blog on the impacts of gentrification in Decatur, Ga. It bridges the posts I wrote last year for the National Council on Public History blog and the article I am completing for one of the American Sociological Association’s journals. The Tikkun post attracted comment writers who live in Decatur and whose comments underscored the points made in the post about the class/ethnic disconnect between older residents — “stayers” or “community anchors” — and later-stage gentrifiers who map their values of wealth and homeownership onto people who have different value systems and who measure wealth and attachment differently.

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In October 1986 I spent a couple of days documenting a 20th century blacksmith shop that had been slated for removal in advance of a proposed shopping center development and highway widening. Located at the intersection of Due West Road and Dallas Highway (SR 120), the shop was the first of two Cobb County blacksmith shops I documented in 1986 and 1987. This is the second in a series of posts on the shops. Continue reading →

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