Finishing the Caches in Louisville 4/27/2009

After we found the cache at the Louisville Slugger Museum we drove down to the riverfront and did a Earthcache where you had to get some information and take a picture. There were several statues there along with some inlaid plaques which were very interesting.
Then we drove across the river into Jeffersonville, Indiana for 2 virtual caches the first being a 21' metal sculpture commonly referred to as "The Lady". Actually the sculpture is "The Winds of Change" but is more commonly refered to as "The Lady." It was commissioned in the summer of 1983 by Larry Myers, owner of a now-defunct rail road business at the location.
The commission went to the then 18 year old Denise Freville, who took the work on as a summer job and worked on the project the summer after her graduation from high school and on breaks from college. Denise did the design work, for which she was paid $5-$6 an hour, and employees of Mr. Myers' business volunteered their time to do the metal work.
The work took a little over a year to complete. The approximate $30,000 cost was born by Mr. Mysers' business. Also at the site was a huge sculpture of a scales which was also made from salvaged material. The cross beams, for instance, are over 100 years old and come from a bridge in Clarksville, TN.
The other virtual cache was at the Howard Steamboat Museum also in Jeffersonville. We had to find the paddlewheel from a steamboat and get some information about it.
The Howard Saga. In 1834, nineteen-year-old James Howard started a shipyard on the banks of the Ohio in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and began to build his first boat, Hyperion. During its three-generation, 107-year history, the Howard Shipyard would put over 3,000 vessels in the running waters of the Ohio and establish the largest inland shipyard in America. The story of the hard-working Howards and their famous riverboats, fortunately, is not lost to us. Rather it is being preserved and presented today by the Howard Steamboat Museum, housed in the century-old Howard mansion, a remarkable artifact in its own right.
The massive 22-room Romanesque Revival mansion was built adjacent to the old Howard Shipyard in 1894. Its location made it easy for Howard's stable of craftsmen to help in its construction and their fine hand is evident in the interior gingerbread woodwork and the grand staircase, so reminiscent of those built in the elegant Howard steamboats. Visitors will admire the mansion's sumptuous late-Victorian interior, but if they are river and steamboat enthusiasts, they will get lost in the museum's collection.
Among the many artifacts on display are items from the legendary Robert E. Lee, the Natchez and the Howard-built J. M. White. The largest single artifact is the shaft of the original paddlewheel of the Delta Queen. The museum also has a collection of 4-5,000 photographs, a large collection of shipbuilding tools and documents, and numerous paintings (including several works by Harlan Hubbard), full ship models and half breadth models from the steamboat era.
When James passed his shipyard to his son, Edmonds, in 1876, it had already struck a reputation for the finest steamboats, and Howard quality was in demand. At times, Edmonds had to turn down contracts or bid ludicrously high. Such was the case when the San Francisco-based Alaska Commercial Company wanted three packets and a towboat for the booming Klondike gold trade. Flooded with work in 1897, Edmonds made an outrageously high bid only to find it accepted! On his watch, Edmonds oversaw the construction of the famous J. M. White (1878), the most luxurious cotton packet to ply the inland rivers, and the City of Louisville (1894), which still holds the speed record for the Ohio River.
Howard control of the shipyard ended in 1941, when it was purchased by the US Navy for WWII construction of LSTs, sub chasers and other ocean-going vessels. But the venerable Howard tradition of shipbuilding at the site continues. The yard is now occupied by Jeffboat, Inc., a subsidiary of The American Commercial Line Barge Service, which has built such riverboats as the Mississippi Queen (1973) and the General Jackson (1985). Jeffboat recently launched the $17 million, 310-ft City of Evansville, the newest product of "the oldest continually operated inland shipyard in the country."
Then it was back across the river to Louisville for our last 3 caches all virtuals. The first cache was at Thomas Edison's house in the Butchertown section of Louisville. Louisville's Thomas Edison House is located in historic Butchertown, a neighborhood which has been known as the center of meat production in this city for over 200 years. It was also one of the areas Thomas Alva Edison called home during the years he lived and worked in Louisville.
Edison came to Louisville in 1866, at the young age of 19, to work as a telegraph key operator. With his skill at receiving telegraph messages, Thomas Edison had little difficulty landing a job with the Western Union located on Second and West Main Street -- about eight blocks from this home. Apparently, Louisville was also experiencing a shortage of telegraph operators at the time.
In August 1866, Edison and two fellow telegraphers left for New Orleans where they planned to board a steamer bound for Brazil. When they arrived there they found the waterway shut down because of a recent riot. Edison decided to return to Louisville where he took up residence at East Washington Street in fall 1866.
During Edison's years as a telegrapher he became fascinated with improving the telegraph. Most of his early inventions were either improvements of the telegraph or similar machines, such as a fire alarm telegraph. In October 1868, about year after he left Louisville, Edison was granted his first patent for an electric vote recorder intended for use in the U.S. Congress. He was issued more than 125 patents related to the telegraph during the following years. Throughout his career he continued to turn to his experiments with the telegraph as inspiration for his inventions.
In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. The electric light bulb wasn't Edison's favorite invention, but certainly his most famous. Our light bulb collection consists of many varied types of early light bulbs and you will notice many of them have pointed tip ends. Gases were removed through the top of the bulb. Once a vaccuum was created the bulb was sealed at the tip.
This cottage was built around 1850 and, as a shot-gun duplex, originally had a solid wall running down the center of the structure. Only the most basic accommodations would have been afforded.
During his stay in Louisville, it is said that he befriended newspaper editor, George Prentice, of the Louisville Journal. In addition to trying to teach himself Spanish, he developed a new style of penmanship. His intention was to write characters that were blunt and vertical, suppressing all curls and fancy loops -- a simple manuscript-print that was more legible and would quicken his speed as a telegraph operator.
Some of the interesting artifacts found at Louisville's Thomas Edison House include both cylinder and disc phonographs, as well as Edison Business Phonographs. An Edison Kinetoscope, the first home motion picture projector, is also on display in the museum.
The next cache was at a bike, skateboard and roller blade park in Louisville and in fact just a few blocks from the Edison House. We did what we had to and it was off to the last cache located in Cave Hill Cemetery. Cave Hill is a old and quite beautiful cemetery, as cemeteries go, and we enjoyed riding around and seeing all the old headstones and mausoleums.
The city fathers did not have a cemetery in mind when they acquired part of the old farm that the Johnson family had called Cave Hill. The farm had a good spring emanating from a cave, but its stone quarries were of principal interest, particularly because the proposed Louisville and Frankfort Railroad was supposed to run through the property. As almost an afterthought, a few flat acres were to be surveyed off to balance the burying privileges at the west end of Jefferson Street.
Years went by and it became evident that the railroad would skirt the quarries. The fields were farmed by lessees and the old brick house built by the Johnstons became the City’s Pest House—an isolated home for patients displaced and suffering from eruptive, contagious diseases. Death was an all-too-frequent visitor to the Pest House. But this Death was in a different guise. It had not the finality and disgust the earlier Puritan concept had associated with it. Death was not to be abhorred and feared. It was full of promise, hope, and rejuvenation; and the sorrow associated with it was accompanied by joy and revelation. Death was merely a transition, and as such, a natural setting for burials became desirable. Asleep in nature elicited a much different feeling than being confined and neglected in shabby plots and yards that many times themselves spread diseases and compounded the problem. Their only saving grace was as sources of cadavers for medical schools.
When it came time in late 1846 to add the graveyard component to Cave Hill, the mayor and the city council apparently did not consciously set out to make a garden cemetery, which by then was a concept gaining popularity in the major cities of America. But, propitiously, they appointed a committee that selected a civil engineer who had firsthand experience of the emerging cemetery concept. Edmund Francis Lee (1811-1857) convinced the city fathers to utilize the natural features of Cave Hill which previously had been considered quite undesirable for burying purposes. To Lee, the old Cave Hill farm was perfectly suited for cemetery purposes. Its promontories would become the primary bury sites. The roads to these hilltop circles would curve gently following the natural contours. The intervening basins would become ponds or be planted with trees and maintained as reserves. The garden setting would be a natural backdrop for the lots and monuments and the cemetery would receive perpetual attention and could never be violated—stipulations never before provided. Here then was a place not to be shunned, but a park to be sought out for its beauty and the spiritual elevation gained from contemplating the collective accomplishments of its inhabitants.
In the Victorian period, personal wealth increased, as did family aggrandizement. The garden cemetery became the repository of symbols of success in the form of truly monumental art. The landscape gardener embellished the natural setting with exotic trees and shrubs while the marble sculptors and granite fabricators erected elaborate memorials to individuals and families. Cave Hill has been blessed by a succession of competent and innovative landscape gardeners, and Louisville has been a regional center for monument makers. The result is a rural, or garden, cemetery which has always been considered a model to emulate.
Our cache had to do with a cave that was located in the cemetery which has a long history also. Like any Pioneer, when William Johnston decided to build a brick house in the countryside of the fledging town of Louisville, he first searched for a good spring. He found one that helped feed Beargrass Creek, emanating from a large cave that kept it well protected. When surveyed by Edmund Lee in 1847, the spring was 11 feet above the creek, which was later made into a lake. The spring is protected by a sizeable cave which can be entered on foot for about 30 feet. Crawl space extends another 45 feet. However, footing is treacherous, and the cave is off limits and is 246' deep.