Caching in Memphis and GREAT BBQ 4/11/2009

Mom and I decided to go into Memphis today to do some caching seeing as we felt the traffic might not be to bad as it was the weekend.....well we were right as there was hardly any traffic at all on the downtown streets. Our first cache was at Memphis's oldest cemetery the Zion Christian Cemetery which also was Memphis's first cemetery for black people. Zion Cemetery was established as a burial ground in 1876 by a black fraternal and benevolent organization called the United Sons of Zion. The organization was founded by Rev. Morris Henderson -- one of Memphis' most influential and progressive Christian leaders -- who founded Beale Street Baptist Church and was himself buried on Zion's grounds. Prior to the establishment of Zion Cemetery, Memphis had no large-scale burial ground for African-Americans. Their burials were primarily restricted to private family plots, church graveyards and designated areas of white cemeteries. Members of the United Sons of Zion died off, and cemetery shares were inherited by various individuals. The last surviving shareholder, Eva Christian, deeded the property to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1980s. The property was handed over to the church without any budgetary provisions, prompting CME to develop a board to oversee the restoration of the cemetery. Influential citizens buried at Zion include Thomas F. Cassels, an assistant attorney general who served in the Tennessee General Assembly in the early 1880s; Charles Hooks, a truant officer and grandfather of civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks; and Dr. Georgia Patton Washington, Tennessee's first black female physician. Washington served as a medical missionary in Liberia and established a school in Monrovia and with her 2 sons died of an illness there. At her own request, a magnolia tree was planted at the doctor's grave site. That original magnolia still blossoms over her grave. We did see Washington's grave site after finding the cache and also the cemetery's founder who was Rev. Morris Henderson who established the cemetery with other former slaves in 1876. He died in 1877. Also buried there is the grave of Thomas Moss who was among three black businessmen lynched here by a white mob in 1892. Their deaths prompted journalist Ida B. Wells's influential anti-lynching campaign. The cemetery is 15 acres and supposedly has over 22,000 graves buried in the thick overgrowth and weeds. There was at one time a project underway to clean and clear all the brush and weeds but it looked to us as it had kind of stalled.
Our next cache took us to another old cemetery in Memphis for a 5 stage multi-cache. Elmwood Cemetery is one of the most beautiful historic cemeteries in the South. Established in 1852 as a rural garden cemetery, it has 80 acres of rolling grounds, flowering dogwoods and crepe myrtles, ancient towering trees, and impressive memorials among winding paths and lanes. Fifty Memphis gentlemen committed $500 each to purchase land and establish a new cemetery 2.5 miles from town in 1852. Originally consisting of 40 acres, it was expanded after the Civil War to 80 acres. In the 1870s the original corporation was dissolved and Elmwood became one of the oldest nonprofits in Tennessee. Since then, Elmwood Cemetery has become the final resting place to over 75,000 inhabitants including mayors, governors, madams, blues singers, suffragists, martyrs, generals, civil rights leaders, holy men and women, outlaws and millionaires. Veterans from every major American war are buried here at Elmwood Cemetery. Colonel John Smith, who fought in the 6th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line during the Revolutionary War, was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in 1894 after being moved from another cemetery. Over 1,000 Confederate soldiers and veterans are buried in the section of Elmwood Cemetery known as "Confederate Rest." This section is marked by a tall shaft bearing a trophy of flags and topped with a finial of cannon balls. Twenty Confederate generals and two Union generals, some of whom also served in the Mexican War rest here. Confederate General A.J. Vaughan had 8 horses shot out from under him in battle. Union General and Mexican War veteran W. J. Smith served with the 6th TN Calvary USA and later became a key member of the Howard Association during the Yellow Fever Epidemic. Elmwood Cemetery tells the history of this region. Some of this history includes the famous and the infamous. Civil War historian Shelby Foote was buried here in 2005. Elmwood tells many stories of the Civil War including the liaison between Mrs. Jessie Mc Kissack Peters and Confederate General Earl Van Dorn that ended when her husband, Dr. George Peters, shot Van Dorn to death. Dr. and Mrs. Peters later reunited and are buried together. Another Confederate soldier, "Kit" Dalton, joined Quantrill's Raiders, a group known for their guerilla tactics. After the war, Dalton rode with the outlaws Frank and Jesse James, but was later pardoned and pledged to change his outlaw ways while living his last years in Memphis. Memphis means music to the world. Famous big band leader Jimmie Lunceford rests at Elmwood. From the 1920s to the 1940s his orchestra was known for its distinctive two-beat swing in clubs from Harlem to the west coast until his sudden death at age 45. One of many blues singers to perform on Beale Street in Memphis, Lillie Mae Glover, took on the name Ma Rainey II and was the acknowledged "Mother of Beale Street." She sang with artists such as B.B. King, the Blues Alley All Stars, and the Black Dots. Another woman who blazed her own trail was Evelyn Estes. At age 21, she made the newspapers around the country in 1927 when she rode her horse alone from Memphis to California. One Memphis newspaper called her "Calamity Jane's Little Sister." The number of gravestones with dates in the 1870s tell the tragic story of a disease that brought the city of Memphis to its knees. Yellow fever raged through the community many times, but the epidemic of 1878 was the most horrific, with 5,150 people dying in a span of just two months in the summer of that year. At the height of the epidemic, Elmwood was handling fifty burials a day, and the gravediggers were hard pressed to keep up. In an area of Elmwood Cemetery designated "No Man's Land," 1,500 yellow fever victims were buried in four public lots. The Yellow Fever Epidemics brought a time of great tragedy and suffering, but also of compassion and inspiration. As more than 25,000 fled the city, some brave souls came to Memphis to aid the victims. Many became victims themselves. The Howard Association, a group of dedicated volunteers, recruited doctors and nurses and raised money for relief efforts. From doctors like Dr. R. H. Tate, and African American physician who came with 7 other Ohio physicians and died of yellow fever three weeks later, to priests and ministers to nuns who are known as the Episcopal Martyrs of Memphis they gave their lives. Among this list of martyrs are some names that may surprise you, such as Annie Cook and Emily Sutton, who were "fallen women." They dedicated themselves to the care of the sick only to sicken and die themselves. Many have heard of the sinking of the Titanic which took the lives of 1,523 passengers, yet few are familiar with the worst maritime disaster in the history of our nation that occurred on the Mississippi River the night of April 27, 1865. It is estimated that the explosion and sinking of the steamboat Sultana killed more than 1,700 people. In addition to 100 civilian passengers and 85 crew members, there were over 1,500 recently released Union prisoners of war aboard a steamboat that was loaded more than six times her legal capacity of 376. Unlike the sinking of the Titanic, the Sultana tragedy was overshadowed by the events of the time: the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14. Many Union soldiers who never made their long awaited journey home now rest at the National Cemetery in Memphis, and three other victims are buried here; a mother, her seventeen-year–old daughter, and an assistant ship's steward. In 1989 a monument was erected in Elmwood Cemetery in memory of those who died on the ill-fated passenger steamer. The first stage took us to the Elmwood Cemetery historical marker, the second stage to the grave marker of Mattie Stephenson, referred to by many as "The Martyr of Memphis" for the compassionate role she played during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1873. While serving as a Red Cross volunteer and nursing the helpless victims, Stephenson herself contracted the deadly disease and died a few days later at the age of 17, the third stage took us to the marker of the Sultana tragedy, the fourth stage to a Confederate General and then it was off to the fifth and final stage hidden in a hollow tree in the cemetery. Along the way we passed several of the other graves sites such as the Confederate Rest, the Yellow Fever Epidemic and "No Man's Land."
Epidemic diseases caused great concern for nineteenth-century Tennesseans. Subject to outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and dysentery, people lived with the stark reality of disease-induced death, especially in the growing urban areas where sanitation was often poor. For residents of West Tennessee, and particularly Memphis, yellow fever posed the greatest threat. The disease caused fevers, chills, hemorrhaging, severe pains, and sometimes a jaundicing of the skin, which gave yellow fever its name. The trademark of the disease, however, was the victim's black vomit, composed of blood and stomach acids. Although its cause was unknown until 1900, yellow fever was transmitted from person to person by the female Aedes aegypti mosquito. Sailors on ships from the Caribbean or West Africa, from which the disease most likely originated, docked in New Orleans, where mosquitoes spread the disease from the infected person to the local population. River traffic carried yellow fever up the Mississippi Valley as long as mosquitoes were available to transmit the disease from human to human. Reprieve came only with the first frost. Although Memphis had been exposed to yellow fever in 1828, 1855, and 1867, nothing prepared the city for the devastation the fever brought during the 1870s. An 1873 epidemic claimed 2,000 in Memphis, a number which constituted at the time the most yellow fever victims in an inland city. In 1878 a mild winter, a long spring, and a torrid summer produced favorable conditions for the breeding of Aedes aegypti and thus the spread of the fever. When New Orleans newspapers reported an epidemic in late July, Memphis officials established checkpoints at major points of entry into the city. The efforts at quarantine were not extensive enough, though, and, in any event, most likely came too late. Yellow fever cases were probably developing on the fringes of Memphis as early as late July, and by August 13 the first death was reported in the city itself. With the horrors of the 1873 epidemic fresh on their minds, roughly 25,000 residents fled the city within two weeks. The fever raged in Memphis until mid-October, infecting over 17,000 and killing 5,150. Over 90 percent of whites who remained contracted yellow fever, and roughly 70 percent of these died. Long thought to be immune to the disease, blacks contracted the fever in large numbers as well in 1878, although only 7 percent of infected blacks died. While there is still no consensus among experts explaining this racial disparity in mortality rates, it is likely that repeated exposure to yellow fever over many generations in West Africa provided many blacks with a higher resistance to the disease. Fleeing Memphians encountered quarantines throughout the South. Some of these, like the one at Jackson, Tennessee, were successful in keeping the disease from spreading. But like the attempts at quarantine in Memphis, most of these efforts were not thorough enough. Hardest hit were the Tennessee towns along the various railroads leading out of Memphis. Germantown, Moscow, Milan, Collierville, Paris, Brownsville, Martin, and LaGrange each experienced staggering losses relative to the size of their communities. Traveling along the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, the fever even spread to a swampy slum district of Chattanooga, causing 8,000 of the city's residents to flee. Long after cold weather brought relief from the fever, Memphis still felt the effects of the epidemic. Yellow fever exacerbated the already dismal financial situation in the city to the point that the legislature revoked the Memphis city charter in 1879. The fever also contributed to substantial declines in the Irish and German communities as well as the general population. Despite all the horrors, however, the impact of yellow fever on Memphis was not all negative. Leaders of the black community were able to use their numerical advantage during the fever to place blacks on the police force as patrolmen for the first time in the city's history. Contrary to the prevailing trend in other southern cities where blacks disappeared from police forces soon after Reconstruction ended, blacks remained on the force in Memphis until 1895. Perhaps most importantly, after yellow fever visited the city once again in 1879, Memphis leaders embarked on ambitious sanitation reform. Although the fact that yellow fever did not strike the city in epidemic proportions again is less the product of sanitary reforms than of the immunity acquired by many in the Mid-South during 1878, the new sewer systems and better water supply did do wonders for public health as a whole, particularly in preventing outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases.
Our next cache a multi-cache where we had to visit the first Congregational Church in Memphis and get some information from the historical marker and use it to figure the coords for the final stage. Congregational churches are Protestant Christian churches practicing congregationalist church governance, in which each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs. Many Congregational churches trace their descent from the original Congregational Church, a family of Protestant denominations formed on a theory of union published by the theologian Robert Browne in 1592 and arising from the Nonconformist religious movement in England during the Puritan reformation. In Great Britain, the early congregationalists were called separatists or independents to distinguish themselves from the similarly Calvinistic Presbyterians, and some congregationalists there still call themselves "Independents". There are difficulties in identifying a specific beginning because Congregationalism is more easily identified as a movement than a single denomination, given its distinguishing commitment to the complete autonomy of the local congregation. The idea that each distinct congregation fully constitutes the visible Church can, however, be traced to John Wyclif and the Lollard movement which followed after Wyclif was removed from teaching authority in the Roman Catholic Church. The early Congregationalists shared with Anabaptist theology the ideal of a pure church, which made adult conversion experience important for full membership in the church, unlike other Reformed churches. As such, the Congregationalists were a reciprocal influence on the Baptists, differing from them in that they counted the children of believers in some sense members of the church unlike the Baptists, because of baptism. In the United States, Congregationalists include the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which were organized in union by the Cambridge Platform in 1648. These settlers had John Cotton as their most influential leader, beginning in 1633. Cotton's writings persuaded the Calvinist theologian John Owen to separate from the Presbyterian church, after which he became very influential in the development of Congregationalist theology and ideas of church government. Jonathan Edwards, considered by some to be the most important theologian ever produced in America, was also a Congregationalist. The history of Congregational churches in the United States is closely intertwined with that of the Presbyterian church, especially in New England where Congregationalist influence spilled over into the Presbyterian church. The first colleges and universities in America, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst, all were founded by the Congregationalists, as were later Carleton, Grinnell, Oberlin, and Pomona. Without higher courts to ensure doctrinal uniformity among the congregations, Congregationalists have been more diverse than other Reformed churches. Despite the efforts of Calvinists to maintain the dominance of their system, the Congregationalist churches, especially in New England, gradually gave way to the influences of Arminianism, Unitarianism, and transcendentalism. Thus, the Congregationalist churches were at the same time the first example of the American theocratic ideal and also the seed-bed from which American liberal religion and society arose. Even still, many Congregationalist (and now UCC) Christians consider themselves to be Reformed first. We got our information and found the final stage quickly.
Fourth cache was a puzzle cache where you had to find 2 passages in the Bible and use the numbers in them and figure them into the final coords. I had done this already at the RV so all we had to do is find the cache, which we did. Fifth cache was a Sudoku puzzle I had to solve at the RV and then figure the coords for the final stage, also which we did and it was located in a small park in a hollow tree.
After we found that cache we drove back into Memphis and were going to a small crawfish festival in a parking lot of a small neighborhood but once we got out and walked over to it we changed our minds as the music was terrible, the rednecks were drunk already at noon and everybody was yelling and screaming so we left. We did go down the street to a small Memphis BBQ restaurant as they always say you can't leave Memphis without having BBQ and they were right as it was the best BBQ we had ever had. The baked beans also were fantastic and I can tell you both finished it all, with Muffy & Raggs's help. After we ate we drove around Memphis for awhile and saw quite a few interesting sites such as several older churches, the Pyramid Arena which is one of the most uniquely designed structures on earth. The 32 story Pyramid is the third largest pyramid in the world and soars even taller than the Statue of Liberty or the Taj Mahal. It is a 21,000 seat sports and entertainment facility which used to be home to the NBA Memphis Grizzlies and the University of Memphis Men's Basketball Program and is now well known for hosting national basketball tournaments, concerts, boxing, WWF wrestling and family shows. A few facts about the Pyramid which are very interesting are: it is on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi River, the arena is housed inside a 32 story stainless steel pyramid, paying homage to the Memphis' namesake - Memphis on the Nile River, this giant pyramid has more than a half million square feet of usable space inside, With a footprint larger than six football fields, The Pyramid's base covers 360,000 square feet, seating capacity is approximately 21,000 for concerts and just over 20,000 for basketball, twenty-six lower level luxury suites are located on the plaza concourse, and two additional suites are designed for disabled patron. Disabled seating is also available on all three levels of The Pyramid. It was quite a site as you can see by the picture. We also saw the Fed-Ex Forum now home to the Memphis Grizzlies and University of Memphis basketball program, several unique railroad overpasses, trolley cars, many many historical markers and of course St Judes Children's Research Hospital which was quite a awesome site as it consisted of many many different buildings and was closed only to those with business there.
One other interesting thing we saw was a small aprk in the city with a statue and historical markers concerning Nathan Bedford Forrest. Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 – October 29, 1877) was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. He is remembered both as a self made and innovative cavalry leader during the war and as a figure in the postwar establishment of the first Ku Klux Klan organization opposing the reconstruction era in the South. A cavalry and military commander in the war, Forrest is also one of the war's most unusual figures. A crude man who had made his fortune as a slave trader, was noted for his violence. He was one of the very few in either army to enlist as a private and end the war at the rank of general. Forrest discovered and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning the nickname The Wizard of the Saddle. He was accused of responsibility for war crimes at the Battle of Fort Pillow for leading Confederate soldiers in a massacre of unarmed black Union Army prisoners, but in the face of conflicting evidence was later cleared by the US Congress. After the war Forrest opposed Reconstruction policies and federal occupation by serving as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and commander of the Grand Dragons of the Realms. In their postwar writings, both Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee stated the Confederate high command had failed to adequately use Forrest's talents. If you really want to read about a unusual person go to the following web site and read about him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest

After we finished driving around we drove back to the RV and Mom did our logs and I showered and we watched the Masters for awhile. We went out and brought wings back for dinner, which by the way weren't to bad. Well that's about all for today and we will close and say we love all you guys and miss you very much. Mom & Dad