Grant Birthplace — Point Pleasant, Ohio

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Roger

We didn’t want to make the trip home from Gatlinburg in one day, so we looked for somewhere to stop along the way. Which, for us, of course means dead president stuff.

Point Pleasant is a small town on the Ohio River about 20 miles southeast of Cincinnati. Ulysses S. Grant was born here on April 27, 1822. His father worked in a tannery next door. The family lived here for about a year after Grant’s birth.

After Grant’s death, the house was loaded on a railroad car and taken around the country for tours. It was brought back in 1936 and rebuilt on the original foundation, although much of the original material had been replaced by that time.

We were the only visitors. A feeble old woman charged us $3 each and gave us the “tour,” which means that she walked with us into the front room — the only part of the house that was there when Grant was born and gave us a five-minute talk on the house and the furnishings. Several things in the house belonged to Grant or his parents. (Hold your cursor over the photos if you’re interested.)

Since we were in the area and looking for something to do anyway, we’re glad we stopped. But we were glad we didn’t make a special trip to see the house. The five-minute tour wasn’t worth the $9 it cost the three of us to get inside.

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Saves Santa? Saves Bears? Saves Santa from Bears?

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Roger

As tacky as Gatlinburg has become, it’s nowhere near as tacky as Pigeon Forge, the next town up the road. I thought this particular storefront summed things up rather nicely.

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Back to Cades Cove

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Roger

I took a second drive to Cades Cove on Friday morning with some family members who hadn’t been on our first visit. I’d been telling them for a couple days about how easy it was to see wildlife there. This is the scene as we arrived at the very beginning of the loop drive through the Cove.

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Clingmans Dome

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Roger

On Thursday afternoon, we drove to Clingmans dome, the highest point in the National Park — and in the state of Tennessee. There’s a tower on the summit of the mountain and a steep half-mile path up to it from the parking lot.

It was a hot afternoon, but at 6,643 feet there was a pleasant breeze. With the heat came haze, and visibility was only six miles.

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Roaring Fork

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Roger

I was first in Gatlinburg when I was about 10, on an early spring vacation with my parents and another pastor and his wife. (The catch-phrase of the vacation, created by the other pastor to tease my father about his constant restlessness, was “Hurry up and relax.”) The town had its coating of tourism then, but it was much smaller and quainter. Every other business in town was owned by the Ogle family — from the resorts to the restaurants to the hill-billy broom shop. Most of that is gone. I saw the name a few places — an older, run-down hotel, some gravestones in the town cemetery and a farmstead in the National Park. We toured the farm on Thursday morning.

Here’s Noah “Bud” Ogle’s house.

Bud and his wife Cindy settled here in 1879 and their family, according to the brochure “became a prominent force in all phases of local life.”

We walked a winding trail through the woods, past the Ogle’s tub mill.

From the Ogle Farm, we took the Roaring Fork Auto Tour through stunningly-beautiful woods, stopping and getting out of the car whenever we saw something particularly amazing.

The occupants of two cars were standing along the road looking at this bear. We pulled over and got out, and soon there were about 20 cars jamming the narrow road.

A guy pointed out three cubs (he said there were three, I only ever saw one at a time, although I think I saw two different ones) high up in a very tall tree.

When we first arrived, the sow was about 30 yards off the road, down in a depression below our level, grazing through the vegetation on the forest floor. She paid no attention to the crowd of people gathering to watch her, but she kept edging closer and closer. When she got to within 15 feet, people started getting nervous and backing up. She was so close, I couldn’t fit her whole body into a photo with my camera on zoom. I never did see her look our way, but she soon turned and headed off up a rise away from us.

I was being cautious about being so close, but I also had this going for me — I’m pretty sure I could outrun several of the other people standing nearby.

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