I Love New York Travel

Photo taken at the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, NY. It’s an interesting museum, a weird blend of modern art and ancient artifacts from the natives that lived and do live in New York State. Some of the stuff is beautiful, like the carvings of animals made from moose and deer antlers or lovely rustic log furniture. Others is a little strange, emphasizing the pagan roots of the Iroquois nation from long ago. I am all for preserving history but I am not fond of the emphasis on paganism. Errors and myths of the past are best left in the past. We can learn from history, to be sure. Do people really still believe that the earth sits on the back of a turtle?

Anyway, the museum is a good history lesson and the lady who is in charge of the place is amazingly friendly and outgoing. It was odd, seeing such a “cultural” establishment in the middle of the lonely forests and hills of New York’s lovely outback, Schoharie County.

I learned a lot while there. The arrowheads, for example. Now that I think about it, OH YEAH of course you can date the tribes by the shapes they cut arrowheads. But I guess I never thought about it until I visited the museum. The most ancient arrowhead (and therefore, tribe) appears to be the “Clovis” group as you can see in the photo. However, I watched a brief video at the museum about Indian archaeology and some suspect that there is an even older group that predates Clovis. Interesting!

It takes a lichen but keeps on tichen ticking.

I saw this odd-looking lichen while at the Steuben Memorial Historic Site in Remsen, NY. I’ve seen plenty of lichen in my day, but none that takes this pattern. It looks Celtic, which is pretty neat because the area here was widely settled by the Welsh after the American War for Independence. There’s a historic Welsh graveyard down the street, and even the water tower has a huge red griffin painted on it.

This land belonged to Baron von Steuben from Prussia– he came to America to help train the Americans how to handle the bayonet for the war for independence. After the war, Steuben stayed in America, and moved to the foothills of the New York Adirondacks (as yet unnamed). He sold some land to the Welsh settlers- not exactly title loans Ohio but this area was very wild and considered the American frontier in the late 1700s. Apparently, the Welsh love Steuben. They and the German Americans set aside this amazing area in dedication to his memory.

Taken from the old Joseph Smith homestead (yes, THAT Joseph Smith) in Palmyra, NY. We passed by the place and we stopped so I could snap a few photos. This is the upper floor ceiling. That’s how they held the roof rafters together, with wooden pegs. My own home, while not made of logs, also has roof rafters held together with wooden pegs. Here’s hoping they hold for a good, loooong time.

I do wonder, however, how often the settlers had to replace things like this. Honestly, the logs seemed rather slender and this wooden peg seems rather small… Palmyra is very close to Lake Ontario, home of the lake effect snow. I used to live east of here— some snowstorms would dump 5 to 7 feet all at once. Yikes, it would take a lot of custom challenge coins to rebuild a whole house after a roof collapse. :| Were these kinds of roofs secure, I wonder?