Markers of History

…it can be all-consuming, and I real­ize now that I was fool­ish to expect to update the blog in the midst of that.

The movers will be with us tomor­row, and I hope that, within the next week, I’ll be back to reg­u­lar post­ing and Markeroni activ­ity. For over a week now, our old place has been with­out phone or Internet (which were trans­ferred to the new place) and we’ve been “com­mut­ing” to there, so noth­ing has really been rou­tine. Hopefully, tomor­row night when we start sleep­ing here, rou­tines will begin to return in our new setting.

Thanks for bear­ing with me, and until next time, happy snarfing!

Memorial and Statue
The Georgia Volunteer

Location: In park at Park Ave & Bull St, Savannah, GA 31401

Visited: August 13, 2009, 8:20am

Transcriptions of markers:

East face:

In grate­ful remem­brance of
Stephen N. Harris
who served his coun­try well
as a sol­dier and cit­i­zen
Private, Co. B 2nd Ga. Infantry
1898
Cdr. Worth Bagley Camp No. 10 Dept. Ga. U.S.W.V.
1932
Commander Dept. of Ga. U.S.W.V
1900       1931
Adj. Gen. United Spanish War Veterans
1928       1929
Chief of Staff, Council Of Adm. Ga. U.S.W.V.
1937       1938
His char­ac­ter and lead­er­ship inspired his
com­rades and fel­low citizens.

North face: [Spanish War Veterans’ insignia]

West face:

A trib­ute to that
Soldier · Comrade · Citizen
William L. Grayson
1870       1941
1st. Lieut. Co. “M” 1st Regt. Ga. Vols.
Spanish American War
Commander Department of Georgia U.S.W.V.
1925 — 1927
National Commander in Chief U.S.W.V.
1928 — 1929
His dis­tin­guished ser­vice has endeared him
to all vet­er­ans of all wars
1946

South face (front):

To those
Georgians who
vol­un­teered and
served their
coun­try in the
Spanish American
War

My impres­sions: This marker was high on my “want to visit” list for our trip to Savannah, because I found out about this through find­ing a Spanish-American War memo­r­ial in Portsmouth, VA and the link­age made by an edi­tor of The Historical Marker Database to other mark­ers that fea­ture The Hiker, by sculp­tor Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson.

It is kind of amaz­ing to see some­thing famil­iar and appar­ently unique (until one learns the fuller story) in two dif­fer­ent set­tings, nearly 500 miles apart. And that isn’t dimin­ished too much by the fact that I knew I would see it and had planned the visit in Savannah.

I remem­ber, early on in my days at Markeroni see­ing some­body refer to “their marker,” a marker near their home with which they felt a strong affin­ity. At the time, before I’d started being inten­tional about snarf­ing (and before I’d logged any mark­ers on the site), I didn’t really under­stand it. It clicked in for my last month, as I was in Portsmouth, VA for about the third time to find mark­ers. That day I was “on a mis­sion” to com­plete vis­it­ing a series of mark­ers (for the city’s Path of History), but my walk­ing route took me past sev­eral mark­ers that I’d pre­vi­ously snarfed…and there was a famil­iar­ity that made it almost as though I was pass­ing an old friend, because I had vis­ited these mark­ers, taken their pho­tos, tran­scribed them, and writ­ten about them. So, stand­ing in a park in Savannah, the first time I’d ever done more than drive through the state of Georgia, I felt at home…even though, I still know woe­fully lit­tle about the Spanish-American War.

Markeroni sta­tus: Not yet logged (and it appears I also did not log the sim­i­lar mon­u­ment in Portsmouth, VA yet).

Credit: Thanks to hmdb.org and their page on this mon­u­ment for their tran­scrip­tions of this marker.

The Georgia Infirmary
State Historical Markers
Georgia Historical Society 2001.16

Location: 1900 Abercorn St, Savannah, GA 31401

Visited: August 13, 2009, 6:05pm

Transcription of marker:

The Georgia Infirmary
First African-American Hospital in the United States

Chartered by the Georgia General Assembly in 1832, the Infirmary was estab­lished “for the relief and pro­tec­tion of afflicted and aged Africans” under the pro­vi­sions of the last will and tes­ta­ment of Savannah mer­chant and min­is­ter Thomas F. Williams (1774 – 1816). Originally located south of the city, it was moved here in 1838. Its four­teen acres included sev­eral single-story build­ings and small farm tracts for veg­etable gar­dens. In 1904, the Infirmary became one of the ear­li­est train­ing schools for African-American nurses. In 1975, it became Georgia’s first day cen­ter for stroke rehabilitation.

2001.16     Erected by The Georgia Historical Society and The Georgia Infirmary, Inc.     25 – 9

My impres­sions: I am back from our trip to Georgia and I wanted to start with this marker, because it’s the clos­est one to the church where we spent most of our time in Savannah. I also like the fact that the site is still in use for pur­poses related to the ones that were hap­pen­ing more than 175 years ago. It also shows an evo­lu­tion of a site, not focus­ing exclu­sively on any one era. I also have to say that I really like the trans­parency evi­dent at the bot­tom of the marker. From what I’ve read, sev­eral states require a finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion to erect a marker. The fact that the infir­mary is listed along with the his­tor­i­cal soci­ety makes that clear in this case. Though I don’t know what the process is get the soci­ety in Georgia to put up a his­tor­i­cal marker, I def­i­nitely worry that (a) the finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion may be more impor­tant than cri­te­ria related to his­tory in deter­min­ing where mark­ers are placed, and (b) given that, in most areas of life, “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” I would won­der about whether the infir­mary had undue input into the marker’s text. (Again, I have NO knowl­edge of the pro­ce­dures involved, so I do not intend to cast asper­sions by this post, but to raise the issue that with money comes influ­ence and the reader is appro­pri­ately warned in this case.)

The week ahead: Tomorrow, I hope to con­tinue this week of posts about our trip to Savannah with a statue that I’ve seen called The Georgia Volunteer, which has a link to a statue I’ve pre­vi­ously posted about here in Virginia. Wednesday, I’ll write about a marker for a fel­low church musi­cian and com­poser. Thursday and Friday, some posts about some other stat­ues, and a spe­cial bonus week­end post will look at mark­ers related to Gordon House in Savannah.

One word of apol­ogy, there is a chance that this week’s posts won’t be quite as timely as I’d hope, because we are in the midst of mov­ing into a new place and for the next week, the old place (where we’ll con­tinue to be sleep­ing) no longer has Internet access.

I’d hoped to put a marker post out today, but that was not to be. (Isn’t that always the way on the day before you go on a trip?)

My wife and I are headed out of town first thing tomor­row morn­ing for my wife to take her vows as a novice in the Anglican Order of Preachers at their chap­ter gath­er­ing in Savannah, GA. I hope to have some free time that, if the weather’s good, may lead to my first posts about mark­ers out­side of Virginia on this blog.

I’ve also decided (after spend­ing some time yes­ter­day catch­ing up on my log­ging at Markeroni) that this blog needs to change a lit­tle bit. From the begin­ning, I’ve blogged about every marker I’ve logged on that site, and the back­log is now more than a month and grow­ing much faster than I can write about it. So when I return, I’m plan­ning to be a lit­tle choosier with post­ing, at least on a trial basis. That also means I would have a bit more free­dom to choose mark­ers (since, to date, I’ve been post­ing them sim­ply in the order I saw them) or to take a break from a cer­tain series of mark­ers if I would like to write about some­thing new. I also hope to move to a sched­ule of mostly a sin­gle post per day and not so many days with two or three posts, so that I can find time to research and write more in depth about some markers.

The first man­i­fes­ta­tion of these changes will prob­a­bly be a report on my trip back here, and if I get some marker-hunting time in, I expect I’ll make next week’s posts focus on the mark­ers from this week’s trip.

Thanks for read­ing! I hope you’ll find a his­tor­i­cal marker near you to read this week, and I’ll be back here with new con­tent start­ing Monday, August 17th!