The year was 1970. The occasion was the annual Phoenix Home and Garden Show. The opportunity was to open my great grandfather J.E. Thompson’s 46-year-old Rancho Joaquina estate for public viewing. The problem: It was a mess, inside and out. In stepped the local chapter of the American Institute of Interior Designers, along with The […]
Archives for June 2012
The Judah P. Benjamin Files: The Treacherous Touch-the-Wig Tour
My self-appointed mission: To drive all the way to New Orleans for a special viewing of clothes belonging to my third grand uncle Judah P. Benjamin. With any luck, the Touch the Wig tour would end with a precious co-mingling of DNA so that genealogists would know I’d made the vital connection many years from […]
The Rough and Rocky Road to Peter’s Rock
It took a good two hours of calling around the Covington, Va., area to find someone with the foggiest notion of where Peter’s Rock might be found. Local history books said the historic site was out on Highway 311, just past the entrance to the Alleghany Cemetery. But no Alleghany Cemetery shows up on Google […]