Mason County Historical Society Museum – Shelton, Washington

Mary is no longer available for RV traveling, but we remain good friends.
Because we have 4,000+ postings, I’ve invited her to continue posting entries on this blog.

I’m currently in my 21st year of full-time RVing and my lifestyle is changing, For more info click Here

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The motorhome is parked at VFW Post #7498 in Port Hadlock, Washington.

 

 

(Note: I’m currently a little discombobulated right now. My normal mode is to blog what I experienced yesterday. Right now, I’m several blogs behind my experiences. I expect to be back in my normal mode within a couple of weeks.)

 

 

While in Shelton, Washington last week, I visited the Mason County Historical Society Museum. You can visit their website by clicking this link…

http://www.masoncountyhistoricalsociety.org/

 

 

Here are some photos that I took…

 

 

As always you may left click upon an image to see an enlarged view and then click once again to see an even larger view…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see the other 20 photos I took by clicking the below photo…

 

 

 

 

 

Mason County Historical Museum – Shelton, Washington

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can read about Shelton, by clicking this link…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelton,_Washington

 

 

 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed the photos!

 

Yesterday was cloudy/sunny and 68 degrees. Forecast for today is cloudy/sunny and 68 degrees.

Enjoying nice weather is another joy in the life of a full-time RVer!

The red dot on the below map shows my approximate location in the State of Washington. You may double left-click the map to make it larger…

Enjoying 65-75 degree temperatures with low humidity most of the year is a primary joy in the RVing lifestyle!

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”…Albert Einstein

My current travel rig is a 2006 Fleetwood 26′ Class A Motorhome and a towed 1986 Ford Bronco II, Eddie Bauer Model. This photo was taken in the desert at Slab City near Niland, California…

On October 27, 2012, I created a two-minute video titled America The Beautiful. The music America The Beautiful is by Christopher W. French. The photos, which I randomly selected, are from the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Washington and West Virginia (not shown in that order)…are mine. Yup, That’s me standing in front of the Post Office in Luckenbach, Texas…Y’all!

Click this link to start the video. Make sure you have your speakers turned on and go to full screen asap.
http://youtu.be/FfZUzEB4rM8

If you would like to see my YouTube videos, click this link… http://www.youtube.com/user/JimJ1579/videos

There are more than 700 photo albums in my Picasa Web Albums File. To gain access, you simply have to click this link… https://picasaweb.google.com/jimjrver

If you have not checked out my Ramblin Man’s Photos Blog, you can do so by clicking this link…http://ramblinmanphotos.wordpress.com/

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All original works copyrighted – Jim Jaillet 2016

MOTHERLODE GHOSTBUSTER.

The setting was anything but ghostly and I’m a major skeptic, anyway. Calaveras County’s old courthouse and jail in San Andreas was a temporary home to wild and dangerous characters during the gold fevered 1800’s. Here, members of the historical society gathered sociably for wine and beer before dinner in what was once the jail yard.

The walled yard is made of native stone, mortarless, and is called dry wall; now over-grown with vines, and beautiful. I spent a lot of time here when I wrote historical features in the 1980’s. Black Bart, the  infamous poet bandit was kept in the jail.  And judge Gotttschalk committed suicide inside the courthouse. Tour guides point to blood spattered books in the law library from his suicide. The building has  been declared haunted by people who have worked here over the years.

Records indicate several inmates were buried “behind” the jail. No one knows whether there was a body under a broken headstone left from 1882. The top of the stone was missing and then rebuilt from pictures. The first court house was a tent. The second one, made of wood, burned. The fine old brick building is too small for a modern court and has been turned into a showplace museum by the Calaveras County Historical Society.

The Historical Society removed an unused public oven from the gold rush town of Calaveritas in 1994 and rebuilt it in the courtyard. Community ovens were made from native stone and held together with mud from heavy clay soil. Ovens like this one hold up well if covered over by a roof. The oven has drawn members to meet in warm months outdoors for pizza, home-baked bread with a salad pot luck, or chicken bargeques. It takes about three minutes to cook a pizza in this oven and they are delicious.

I sat with Sylvia and Cliff Edson, a local restaurant owner who just bought an old Victorian and is restoring it while living in it. They are dealing with ghosts, or several spirits in their house. Sylvia gets frightened by them. Cliff has had the house blessed several times, and is a believer. They don’t upset him. They were stunned to find out the subject of the meeting was The Paranormal. They hadn’t read the notice about who the speaker would be.

I have no idea how many pizzas Clyde Weddell made that night. He made three types, sausage, pepperoni and pesto with sun-dried tomato.  Absolutely delcious.

When Clyde makes pizza, he tosses it into the air. I was never quite able to catch the pizza in the air, but it was fascinating to watch him work. As it got dark, he donned a headlight.

After dinner, we listened to Rick Panzarina talk about debunking and validating ghosts, or paranormal presences in old buildings, businesses and private homes. He turns most of the seekers away, after determining they are only interested in sensationalizing their claims. He says, a good ghostbuster doesn’t  ask for money to investigate your ghost because then, they would always find a ghost.  He uses lasers, 11 cameras, video equipment, and high tech sound equipment. He gave results of having investigated the ghosts in the Court House and other places where he has found evidence of paranormal activity. The blood on the books, if it is blood, did not belong to Judge Gottschalk.  All he had to do was look at the date Gottschalk killed himself, and the date the books were published to know the “spatters” couldn’t have been from his death. He could find no para-normal activity in the Courthouse. He explained in detail how wooden floors make popping sounds that closely resemble footsteps. He and his team of seven people do not allow whispering. They address any presence in a loud voice and ask it to declare itself. They got one very clear “Hi!” Once, out of about 50 buildings. They do not play to sensationalism. Some people would rather have their “fun” reputation than have a ghostbuster disprove any paranormal activity. And, for tourism in the Motherlode, that is quite all right with the locals. Almost every old hotel in the area claims to have a ghost. It is soooo fun!  I’d love to have a ghost in my house. Wouldn’t you?

HIGHLAND HOUSE, LIGHT AND LIFE SAVING

For over 100 years Highland House held fast through battering storms and gales on a sandy point of Cape Cod Bay. Highland’s hosts offered a bit of friendly diversion to vacationers with grace and solitude and a million stars alight. How could you go wrong with  “…15 bedrooms and a bath…”  for only $8 a week room and board.  People traveled by horse, by carriage, then train and automobile to find this lovely Hotel at Truro for time away from home and congenial company.  The owners watched as literally thousands of other people joined them on their once lonely point looking out on Cape Cod Bay.
Today, it is operated by the Truro Historical Society. The huge main room shows no evidence of sagging. Built ‘hell for strong’ with no steel support or visible beams holding straight the ceiling and upper story. A grand inclusion to the Historical Register.

Now comes the good part. Its homey, here. Nothing stiff and formal. The rooms are filled with the practical appliances of a hotel; of tools, farm and fishing implements, shipwreck salvage, and household goods for turn of the century life.

I had never before seen a cheese press.
Nor a two-burner bake oven like this one with fancy blue doors.

Most of the bedrooms are available, furnished with beds and chairs and dolls and doilies and all manner of furnishings. Sometimes with stories and even portraits of the people who stayed here. No closets then. People brought their trunks and hung things in a corner set aside with a curtain.

Being a museum junkie, my very favorite item here was the amazing collection of hand hooked rugs. I think I counted ten of them. Many done before patterns were available. Just the tidy handwork of ‘waste not want not’, using scraps of wool.

I could have spent hours here. Much to appeal to men’s interests as well, life saving equipment, an ice saw, blacksmith tools, a set of old smoking pipes, one delightfully made with a bird claw holding the bowl. And stories, journals; an intriguing print of Grace Darling, one of the many heroic women lighthouse keepers who rowed out to rescue boaters in trouble.   Ahhh. Such a find.

As I left, I looked up at the quaint lace covered windows and imagined an elegant lady waving me goodbye. Or was it a ghost?
If you can stand a slug of pictures you can click my link at: http://picasaweb.google.com/1579penn/62210HighlandHouseLiveSavingServ#
(It also has pictures of the light house and Life Saving Museum.)
From Highland House, we walked to Highland Light, the oldest lighthouse on the island. We passed through the oldest golf course on the island, Highland Links, an area that at one time was the vegetable garden for the hotel.

The light house, built of red brick, (now painted white), in 1797, was the most powerful light on the Atlantic coast. It was reconstructed in 1857, and moved back from off the point by 453 feet in 1996 when the local people began fund raising to save it from falling into the Atlantic. Lighthouses are all automatic, now. This one has stairs of lace, several old lights on display, a gift shop and tour. You have an unobstructed view from up top to Portugal. Well, you can’t actually see Portugal, but no land stands between.

In 300 years of seafaring history off Cape Cod, 3,000 known ships were hammered to pieces by tons of raging water tossing “toy” boats into the treacherous rocks and bars of Cape Cod Bay. A grisly toll of nearly one wreck per month for 300 years. Cape Codders organized the first life saving service, the Massachusetts Humane Society. Unpaid volunteers, they couldn’t provide adequate service, mostly just a shelter with water and food for anyone who happened to wash up through the frigid waters. Lighthouse keepers would attempt to row out and help if they saw a ship in trouble.
Congress stepped in and began funding private organizations like the Humane Society, recognizing the need  for nationwide sea rescue on both coasts. In 1872, the first staffed life saving station was built on Cape Cod. Only one, Highland, remains to tell the story today.

A museum, nicely refurbished,  now has the original paint colors, stoves, (one arrived and was installed while we were there). Work and funding will eventually supply beds, tables and a newly built, wheeled cart that rolled the little rescue boats down to the shore when an emergency was at hand. A good film shows how the rescue workers trained and went to sea in a storm. the stations were located five miles apart on the north east shore of the cape.

One hundred and seventy-five thousand lives were save by the rescue service. Even more were lost in these frigid waters. This rescue service eventually was taken over by the government as the U.S. Coast Guard. Rescues are now performed by air. The cape became less dangerous when the Cape Cod Canal was built to carry traffic from New York and Boston safely from the rich fishing and whaling ports of Cape Cod.

During July and August, two nights per week, the museum has demonstrations of rescues using their breeches buoy. A life ring, with canvas breeches attached, was suspended from a life line shot out by the small cannon above to the ship in trouble. Rigged above the water from ship to shore, men were reeled in, one at a time.

We were lucky to meet Richard C. Ryder whose grandfather worked at Monomoy Station as a surfman. Richard wrote a book called Seashore Sentinel.
He told us that the U.S. government would fund food for the horse, in stations that had one, to help haul  the boat to the water, but would not buy the men their food or clothing needed for rescue. These men patrolled at night, walking the beech in winter 2 and 1/2 miles each way, often holding a shingle in front of their eyes to protect them from the blowing, swirling sands.
Amazing stories.