Revealing What Has Been Hidden in Front of Our Eyes

This is the first part of a new on-going series called “All Over the Place Via Your Suggestions” where I will continue to research your suggestions, and follow the many clues you all provide that helps to uncover our hidden history.

In Part 1, I will be focusing on the suggestions of Silvester Gardiner and Gardiner, Maine; photos from the area around Tulsa, Oklahoma; and California’s Channel Islands and Santa Catalina.

I am going to start out by taking a look at MM’s suggestion of Gardiner, Maine, and its namesake Silvester Gardiner, saying that there was something wrong here, as a lot of rich British people come here in the summer to hide at that old mansion on 1,700 acres.

Will get back to the old mansion in a bit.

This suggestion particularly piqued my interest because I mentioned another Gardiner, Lion Gardiner, in my last post about “Recovering Lost HIstory from the Estuaries, Pine Barrens & Elite Enclaves off the Atlantic Northeast Coast of the United States.”

Lion Gardiner was an English engineer and colonist, who in 1639 founded the first English Settlement in New York on Gardiners Island in Gardiners Bay between the North and South Forks of Long Island.

First, a little bit about Silvester Gardiner.

Silvester Gardiner was a wealthy physician, pharmaceutical merchant, and land developer of Maine, who was born in 1708 in South Kingston, in what was known at the time as the “Colony of Rhode Island and Provincetown Plantations.”

In the history of colonialism, plantation was a form of colonization where settlers would establish a permanent or semi-permanent settlement in a new region.

Not only were settlements and settlers being planted in a new region from somewhere else, this plantation system of the colonizers quickly laid the foundation for slavery on large farms owned by “planters” where cash crop goods were produced.

The word plantation first started appearing in the late 1500s to describe the process of colonization, like the Plantations of Ireland in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, during which time we are told the English Crown confiscated land from Irish Catholics and redistributed the land to Protestant settlers from Great Britain.

The British Plantations of Ireland replaced the Irish language, law and customs with those of the British, created sectarian hatred between Protestants and Catholics, and Northern Ireland is still part of Britain to this day.

After studying medicine in New York, London, and Paris, Silvester Gardiner opened his medical practice in Boston, where he lectured in anatomy and promoted the inoculation for small pox, for which he proposed and established a hospital in Boston in 1761.

Come to find out, a small pox epidemic had broken out in Boston in the spring of 1721 that lasted until the winter of 1722, in which there were around 6,000 cases of small pox reported in a population of around 11,000, with 850 deaths reported.

The use of inoculation was introduced during the 1721 small pox epidemic, and considered a milestone in the history of vaccination.

Cotton Mather, the powerful Puritan preacher who was significant in the origin of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, was credited with introducing inoculation to the colonies, and promoting it as the standard for small pox prevention during the 1721 epidemic.

Inoculation is defined as introducing into the body a dose of biological material, known as inoculum, like an infectious virus in order for the body to generate an immune response to it.

Small pox was a deadly contagious virus transmitted from person-to-person through the respiratory tract, causing flu-like symptoms and disfiguring rashes covering the body.

We are told that the naturally-occurring small pox virus was eradicated by 1980 because of a global vaccination program.

The epidemic of 1721 was the deadliest of a series of small pox epidemics in Boston throughout the 1700s.

The British physician Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine, which was for small pox, given to the first person in May of 1796. 

Jenner was a Freemason, becoming a Master Mason in 1802, and the Grand Master of his lodge from 1812 to 1813.

Okay, so there’s the small pox inoculation and apparent freemasonic connection to be found with Silvester Gardiner, as well as his connection to the pharmaceutical business as a merchant.

What else is there to find?

He was said to have been a generous contributer to the construction of King’s Chapel in Boston, said to have been built in 1754, with its uneven, unlevel appearance from front-to-back.

He also purchased over 100,000 acres, or 400-kilometers-squared, on the Kennebec River in Maine for settlement, where he founded the city of Gardiner.

Silvester Gardiner became the principal proprietor of the Kennebec Purchase through the old Plymouth Patent, which had been established by the Council of New England, an English joint-stock company that was granted a Royal Charter to found colonial settlements along the coast of North America that existed between 1620 and 1635.

Largely the creation of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a military commander and Governor of the Port of Plymouth in England who was called the “Father of English Colonization in North America, it provided for the establishment of the Plymouth Colony, the Province of New Hampshire, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New Haven Colony, and the Province of Maine.

The city of Gardiner was founded as the Gardinerstown Plantation in 1754, at the confluence of the Kennebec River and Cobbosseecontee Stream, and the location quickly became utilized for water-powered mills, and Gardinerstown became the regional economic hub.

Gardiner became a city in 1849, and was a major industrial town, complete with industries like shipping, lumber, tanning, and shoe-making.

Gardiner was connected by railroad in 1851, and beginning in the 1860s, paper mills flourished, as well as a commercial ice industry between the 1880s and 1920s.

By the 1960s, Gardiner’s economy plummeted with the closure of mills.

Gardiner subsequently became a bedroom community for the surrounding population centers of Augusta, Bath, and Portland, well-known for its restored antique architecture.

In 1980, the entire downtown became a listing from Kennebec County on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is a nationally-accredited Main Street Community.

Oaklands Castle in Gardiner, Maine, is on land that was granted to Silvester Gardiner in the 18th-century, and developed by his grandson Robert Hallowell Gardiner, who was also the grandson of Benjamin Hallowell, the founder of Hallowell, Maine.

The castle was said to have been built in the Gothic-Revival-style and designed by British-born architect, and first President of the American Institute of Architects, Richard Upjohn between 1835 and 1836 in the early stages of his illustrious architectural career and credited with the promotion of the Gothic-Revival-style.

Robert Hallowell Gardiner was also a Trustee for the Gardiner Lyceum School, the first vocational trade school in the United States, and specialized in farming, agriculture and other specialized trades of the 19th-century.

The school was established in 1823, and dissolved less than 10-years later, in 1832, for financial reasons.

It was incorporated in 1822 by an Act of the State of Maine, and its Directors were associated with higher education.

There was a set of laws printed in 1825 on how the school was to be regulated, which an existing copy still held by the Library of Congress.

Just can’t help but wonder if this was a prototype for something.

One more thing before I move on to the next suggested place.

There is an interesting connection coming up between the Gardiner family and the Trinity Church, and I am interested in this from what I have found out about Trinity Church in other locations in past research.

First, Silvester Gardiner was buried under the Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island.

The Episcopalian Newport Trinity Church congregation was founded in 1698, and the current church said to have been designed by Richard Munday, based on Sir Christopher Wren’s designs in London, and built between 1725 and 1726.

Notable parishioners of Newport’s Trinity Church included Cornelius Vanderbilt II and John Jacob Astor VI.

Silvester Gardiner’s grandson, John Sylvester John Gardiner, was a rector of the Trinity Church in Boston from 1805 to 1830, and the “best known and most influential Episcopal clergyman of Boston.

Interesting to note the following about the prominent clergyman’s children.

His son, William Howard Gardiner, was married to the daughter of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a wealthy merchant, smuggler, and slave-trader from a Boston Brahmin family, members of Boston’s traditional upper-class.

His daughter, Mary Louisa, was married to John Perkins Cushing of Boston, a wealthy American sea merchant and opium smuggler, and nephew of Thomas Handasyd Perkins.

Trinity Church in Boston was founded in 1733, and the current Trinity Church building said to have been built between 1872 and 1877, and designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson.

Trinity Church in New York was established in 1697, after King Charles II approved the charter for a new Church of England in Lower Manhattan.

The construction of the current Trinity Church in New York on Wall Street was said to have been constructed between 1839 and 1846, and designed in the Gothic Revival style by Richard Upjohn, the same architect who designed the Oaklands Mansion in Gardiner, Maine, for Robert Hallowell Gardiner.

Where I am going with this is that in doing the research for the “Who is in the National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Congress” series, some prominent members of Trinity Church in different cities have come up, like physician and freemason John Gorrie of Florida.

And what came out about Trinity Church from looking at Gorrie’s story was the Corporation of Trinity Church.

The Governor of New York in 1697, Benjamin Fletcher, established the Church of England as New York’s official religion, and leased property in Lower Manhattan that was known as the “King’s Farm” to the newly established Trinity Church, and eight-years later, Queen Anne granted the entire parcel of land to the church outright, and the Episcopal parish was located at corner of Wall Street and Broadway.

With the Queen’s grant, Trinity Church became the second-largest landholder in New York, after the Crown itself, and this set-up Trinity Church to become the wealthiest in the North American colonies.

This is a scene of Trinity Church from Broadway in 1915.

Even today, Trinity Church is one of the largest landowners in New York City, now under the name of Trinity Real Estate.

In 1894, the Trinity Corporation was exposed by a New York Times reporter to have substandard living conditions on their Charlton Street properties.

And in doing the research for this right now, I found out that in July of 2018, the Walt Disney Company acquired the rights to develop 4 Hudson Square to become the new site of Disney’s New York operations from Trinity Church Wall Street.

Now, moving along to Oklahoma.

KF of Tulsa sent me a number of photographs she has taken of Tulsa and the surrounding area.

First, photos she took in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in a neighborhood in the vicinity of the First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow and the Bass Pro Shops.

She took these photos in the Stone Wood Hills neighborhood of Broken Arrow.

And she took these from around the Bass Pro Shops…

…including this one of a strikingly pyramidal shape on the right, seen even more clearly when compared with a similar view of the Great Pyramid of Giza on the left.

She also checked out the Creek County Landfill in Jenks, Oklahoma, outside of Tulsa…

…and sent these photos she took of the view of it from the road.

This is a good place to insert my experience with Oklahoma landfills.

I was living in Oklahoma City between 2013 and 2016, and it was here during this time that I started waking up to the ancient civilization in the landscape all around me.

Everything that KF has shared with me hits home because I saw the same things once my perception of the landscape had shifted.

One day, I really noticed a massive, flat-topped shape rising in the landscape on the eastern side of the Oklahoma City, and I decided to drive to it to see what it was.

On my way to that site going east, I passed this sign at 2831 23rd Street NE, advertising Kemet Plaza.

This is the relationship between the location of Kemet Plaza, and the location of where I was going, which as it turned out, was a landfill site.

So it turned out that after I left Kemet Plaza, the site I was looking for was quite close by, at the corner of 23rd Street Northeast and Sooner Road.

On one side of it, the west side, is an energy site.

On the east, the southeast side…is a landfill operated by Waste Management.

There are two more just like this in OKC – one is in South OKC off of 240, and the other is in West OKC, in Mustang, Oklahoma. There is another one north of OKC, in Enid. Same idea.

They look like ancient earthworks that are being harvested for energy and also used for dumping trash.

Lastly for this post, MS suggested that I look into Santa Catalina Island, one of California’s Channel Islands.

First I will take a look at the Channel Islands.

California’s eight Channel Islands are located within the Southern California Bight.

Besides the Channel Islands, the Southern California Bight includes the Coronado Islands and the Isla de Todo Santos of Baja California, coastal southern California and the local portion of the Pacific Ocean.

The bight is described as a significant curvature and indentation along the coast between Point Conception to just below San Diego, at Punta Colonet in Baja California, and that the waters offshore have complex current circulation patterns, with cold, southward flowing waters seen displayed in blue in this satellite image of Sea Surface Temperature, and northward flowing warm waters in yellow and orange.

The four North Channel Islands of San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and Anacapa were said to have been a landmass at one time called Santarosae.

What we are told is that they are the remnants of an ancient landmass off the coast of present-day southern California prior to the end of the last ice age, and that Santarosae lost 70% of its landmass because the sea rose from melting glaciers, leaving a huge submerged landscape that is currently being explored by scientists.

Santarosae is called “California’s Atlantis” by some.

It is interesting to note that around 2001, a geologist discovered a lost island in the Santa Barbara Channel.

Believed to have been submerged for 13,000 years, going underwater towards the end of the last Ice Age, he named it Isla Calafia, and identified it as being located half-way between the Santa Barbara Harbor and one of the existing North Channel Islands.

It was 31-miles-, or 50-kilometers-, long; 3-miles-, or 5-kilometers-, wide, and rises 660-feet-, or 201-meters, from the bottom of the Channel.

So this information about the Isla Calafia ties-in to Queen Calafia, or Califia, the legendary Amazon Queen of the island of California, and for whom California and Baja California was named.

So what we are told about California being an island is that it was one of the most famous map-making errors in history, with the error being reproduced on countless maps during the 17th- and 18th-centuries, despite contradictory evidence from various explorers.

The legend associated with the Island of California was that it was an earthly paradise, like Atlantis or the Garden of Eden.

The first grammar text for Castilian Spanish was published in 1492.

It was the first book dedicated to the Spanish language and its rules, and the first grammar of a modern European language to be published in print.

In our historical narrative, the year of 1492 was also the year of the Fall of Granada in Moorish Spain…

…and the year of Columbus’ first voyage.

Almost 20-years later, in 1510, we are told the first known mention of the Island of California was in the fictional novel “The Adventures of Esplandian,” a novel by Castilian author Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo describing a fictional island named California that was inhabited by only black women, and ruled by Queen Calafia.

Here is a passage from the book:

“Know that on the right-hand of the Indies, there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.”

Where did that idea come from?

Calafia’s life and place in history is described as entirely fictional, though she is depicted as the spirit California, and symbolizes an untamed and bountiful land prior to European settlement.

Queen Calafia’s name was said to have been likely formed from the Arabic word “Khalifa,”or “Caliph” in English, for the religious state leader of a “Caliphate,” a Muslim political-religious state.

And to throw something else into the mix, the Chumash, the name of the original inhabitants of the North Channel Islands, is also a Hebrew word meaning a Torah in printed or book bound form.

So we have a reference to a Muslim political-religious state, ruled by a woman, is found in the same location as the actual word in Hebrew for the Torah given to the indigenous tribe of Central Southern and Coastal Regions of California, including the North Channel Islands, also known as Santa Barbara Group, of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Anacapa.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but perhaps not.

If it is not a concidence, then what might this signify?

My money is on they were one and the same in the original Moorish civilization, and that those behind the New World Order separated everything out in order to create discord, division, and disharmony, and that all of the Moorish symbolism was taken over, their works and legacy falsely claimed, and/or given a darker meaning by association with certain things that were not the original meaning.

Before I go further into California’s Channel Islands, let me point out some similarities so far to what I found off the Atlantic northeast coast of the United States with what I am seeing here.

I have found the Southern California Bight on the Pacific Coast and the New York – New Jersey Bight on the northeast Atlantic Coast…

…there are underwater canyons adjacent to the Bights in both places – the Hudson Canyon on the east coast, one of the largest underwater canyons in the world, and numerous canyons off the coast of the Southern California Bight.

My question remains the same: Were this canyons always underwater?

And are they natural or man-made?

Bear in mind, the Grand Canyon in Arizona has formations with Egyptian names, like the Isis Temple, the Osiris Temple, and the Temple of Set, and that these formations and others correlate with stars in the Orion Constellation.

An article appeared in the Arizona Gazette in 1909 that an explorer in the Grand Canyon had stumbled upon Egyptian artifacts, but news about the discovery disappeared from public view shortly after it was published, and it has been called a hoax ever since.

Also, there are estuaries along both the Southern California Bight and the New York – New Jersey Bight.

Estuaries are defined as partially-enclosed, coastal bodies of brackish water, which is water that is salty, dirty & unpleasant, with one or more rivers flowing into it, and a connection to the open sea.

There is sheared-off, unstable-eroded-looking landscape in both places, like as seen on this stretch of coastal road beside the Southern California Bight on the left, and the Aquinnah Cliffs on Martha’s Vineyard, which is also where the headquarters of the Wampanoag Tribe of Martha’s Vineyard is located on their historical land.

And while the Council of New England and the Church of England were busy colonizing and settling New England starting in 1620, the Vice-Royalty of New Spain and the Catholic Church did the same thing after the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521.

Central Mexico became the base of expeditions of exploration and conquest, in what became a huge area that comprised the Spanish colonization of the Americas, including California among many other places.

In 1542, explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo landed in San Diego Bay on behalf of the Spanish Empire…

…and we are told became the first European to set foot in California, exploring the California coast starting 1542.

According to the historical narrative, Cabrillo died on Santa Catalina Island in January of 1543 from an injury to his leg that became infected and gangrenous.

Among other things bearing his name, there is a Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego commemorating his landing in San Diego Bay.

To put Cabrillo’s exploration of California into historical perspective in our timeline, in 1540, two years before Cabrillo explored California, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull forming the Jesuit Order, under the leadership of Ignatius Loyola, a Basque nobleman from the Pyrenees in Northern Spain. 

The Jesuit Order included a special vow of obedience to the Pope in matters of mission direction and assignment.

The same year, in 1542, Pope Paul III established the Holy Office, also known as the  Inquisition and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Also in 1542, St. Francis Xavier, a co-founder of the Jesuits, landed in Goa on the Indian subcontinent, where some believe he requested the brutal Goa Inquisition, established, we are told, to enforce Catholic Orthodoxy in colonial-era Portuguese India.

The following year, in May of 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” offering mathematical arguments for the heliocentric, or sun-centered universe, and denying the geocentric model of the Earth-centered universe of Ptolemy, which the heliocentric model superceded, meaning that while once widely-accepted, current science considered the geocentric model inadequate.

By the end of May of that same year, Copernicus was dead.

So both Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, first explorer of California, and Nicolaus Copernicus, author of the heliocentric universe, were contemporaries, and died in the same year.

Like India’s St. Francis Xavier, California had its own “Missionary Saint” in the form of St. Junipero Serra, who was credited with establishing the first Franciscan missions in Mexico and California between 1750 and 1782.

Posthumous honors for him include Sainthood in 2015 and he represents the State of California in the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Congress, along with Ronald Reagan.

Serra was nicknamed the “Apostle of California” for his missionary efforts, but before and after his canonization, his reputation and missionary work was condemned for reasons given like mandatory conversions of the native population to Catholicism and atrocities committed against them.

Now, back to the Channel Islands.

Of the eight Channel Islands, five are part of the Channel Islands National Park and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary – all of the North Channel Islands plus Santa Barbara Island, situated at the center of the Channel Islands.

Interesting to note that in 1969, the third-largest oil spil in the history of the United States, known as the Santa Barbara Oil Spill took place in this area, when an oil rig exploded 6-miles, or 10-kilometers, off the California coast inthe Santa Barbara Channel , and tides washed the oil onto all four of the North Channel Islands.

The South Channel Island group is comprised of the islands of Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, San Clemente, and Santa Catalina.

Santa Catalina Island is the only one of the eight Channel Islands with a large, permanent settlement.

Let’s take a look at Santa Catalina Island and see what comes up.

Part of Los Angeles County, Santa Catalina Island is located 29-miles, or 47-kilometers, south-southwest of Long Beach, and west of San Diego.

The Tongva people, also known as Kizh, were indigenous to the South Channel Islands and the Los Angeles Basin.

Just like what happened on the northeast coast of the United States with Algonquin languages like Mohegan, the spoken language of the native people of the region died out in the early 1900s.

Santa Catalina’s first European contact was said to have been with Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo on October 7th of 1542…

The collapse of the Tongva society and culture of the region was initiated with the founding of the San Gabriel Mission in Los Angeles County in 1771 by the Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra.

The Spanish initiated forced relocation and enslavement of the native Tongva people under the mission system to secure their labor, and some of the nicknames of the San Gabriel Mission in San Gabriel California is the “Queen of the California Missions,” and “Mother of Agriculture in California.”

The Spanish Mission System of California is sound A LOT like the English plantation system of New England.

Back to Santa Catalina Island.

On the south-side of the East End of Catalina Island, we find places with such names as Church Rock, Silver Canyon, China Point, and a ridge seen extending out into the ocean waters, looking like there is more of the island going on underneath it.

Church Rock is a large rock jutting out of the ocean just off-shore on the East End, and is a popular dive spot.

Silver Canyon is one of the largest canyons of several on Catalina Island.

And come to find out, there were large mining operations on Santa Catalina Island, including Silver Canyon, from about 1863 (mid-way through the American Civil War) to the 1920s.

A short-distance up the coast from Silver Canyon is China Point.

Today a dive site, China Point got its name as the location of a camp on the back-side of the island for smuggling Chinese immigrants after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by the U. S. Congress in 1882, barring all new immigration from China for 10 years.

This is what we are told about Avalon, the only incorporated city on Catalina Island.

George Shatto, a real estate developer from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the first owner of the island to try to develop Avalon into a resort destination.

He purchased the island in 1887 for $200,000 from the Lick Estate of James Lick, a real estate investor based in San Francisco who arrived in California in January of 1848.

At the time of Lick’s death in 1876, he was the wealthiest man in California, and his real estate holdings, besides all of Catalina Island, included a considerable part of Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, and a large ranch in Los Angeles.

Shatto was credited with creating the settlement that became known as Avalon, and building the first hotel there, the Hotel Metropole, between 1887 and 1888, and that the island first opened for tourists in 1888.

By 1891, Shatto was having financial problems and defaulted on his loan payment for the island, and Santa Catalina Island was returned to the James Lick Trust.

In 1892, Shatto was said to have built the Shatto Mansion in Queen Anne-style architecture in Los Angeles.

George Shatto was the only person killed in a train crash near Ravenna, California, in 1893…

…and he was interred in a pyramid-shaped mausoleum at the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.

In 1891, the Banning Brothers purchased Santa Catalina Island from the James Lick Estate.

They were the sons of Phineas Banning, a wealthy California entrepreneur known as the “Father of the Port of Los Angeles.”

The Banning Brothers were said to have fulfilled the dream of George Shatto of making Avalon a resort community with the construction of numerous tourist facilities.

However, in 1915, a fire was said to have burned half of Avalon’s buildings, including six hotels and several clubs.

Subsequently, the Banning Brothers were forced to sell the island in shares starting in 1919.

Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr, was one of the main investors who purchased Santa Catalina Island’s shares from the Bannings.

Wrigley bought out most of the other shareholders to become the controlling shareholder in the “Santa Catalina Island Company.”

Wrigley then invested millions into building needed infrastructure for attractions to the island.

This included the Catalina Casino, which was said to have been built starting in 1928, and first opened in 1929.

The Catalina Casino houses things like a movie theater and a ballroom.

The movie theater still has its original pipe organ intact.

The acoustics are so good in the Catalina Casino’s movie theater that someone speaking on the stage can be heard without using a microphone and be heard clearly by everyone in the 1,154-seat capacity auditorium.

The Catalina Casino’s ballroom is the world’s largest circular ballroom, with a 180-foot, or 55-meter, dance floor that can accommodate 3,000 dancers.

Wrigley even brought the Chicago Cubs to Santa Catalina Island for their spring training starting in 1921, which lasted through 1951.

Santa Catalina Island in California’s Channel Islands is known as a playground for the rich and famous off the Pacific coast of southern California, like the prime and luxury real estate found around the estuaries lining the Atlantic Northeast Coast of the United States, including Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons of Long Island.

This fascination and interest the wealthy elites have long had with islands and estuaries on both coasts is noteworthy, leaving me to wonder why they are so obsessed with these places.

Personally, I think the wealthy globalist controllers have been and are lording and gloating over their take over of what was an ancient, beautiful, and advanced worldwide Moorish civilization that existed up until relatively recently, and they covet the very special places to this civilization.

Not only that, I think this whole civilization was what we know as Atlantis, or Atlantean, and not just found in the Atlantic Ocean, with its roots in Ancient LeMuria, or Mu, hence the name “Mu’urs” or “Moors” given to these ancient people.

I think the coastlines of the world got slammed by whatever caused earth’s landmasses to submerge, causing estuaries and wetlands like these worldwide, and that the “Sinking of Atlantis” took place much more recently in time than thousands of years ago, more like hundreds of years ago, and that it was caused by a deliberately created cataclysm or cataclysms by malevolent beings who had a plan to takeover the Earth’s original civilization for their own benefit.

There are countless examples of what I am talking about, but here are a few examples I have encountered in my research:

Up the Pacific Coast from California, in Portland, Oregon, there is a visible star fort point at the Smith & Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, which is now the location of the Bybee Lakes Hope Center for the homeless…

The Wirral Peninsula and the River Dee estuary separating northwest England and Wales, and a place where comparatively little water occupies such a large basin.

Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula was said to have expanded greatly as a result of the Industrial Revolution…

…and was the location of the first street tramway in Great Britain in 1860, and trams ran in Birkenhead until 1937.

The submarine Yonaguni ruins off the coast of Japan’s Yaeyama Islands.

When I first learned about Yonaguni several years ago, a few years before I started doing my own research, I distinctly remember the argument being made that these were natural formations.

Why the effort cover-up of what are clearly man-made structures?

The last example I want to provide is the chain of low islands and reefs called Adam’s Bridge, also known as Rama’s Bridge, or Ramsethu, which separates the Gulf of Mannar from Palk Bay between India and Sri Lanka.

The Pamban Bridge, a railway bridge, connects the town of Mandapam in Tamil Nadu with Pamban Island and Rameswaram to the Indian Railways, ending at the Indian side of Adam’s Bridge.

It was said to have been constructed between 1911 and 1914, which was the year World War I started.

Described as a masterpiece of engineering, it has a movable section midway that is raised to allow ship and barge traffic to pass through.

So, were we actually capable of engineering feats like these based on the technology we are taught existed that at those times?

In Palk Bay, you can take a ferry across, in the same general location as the sunken parts of Adam’s Bridge, to Talaimannar, on Sri Lanka’s Mannar Island, and catch the train on to anywhere you want to go in Sri Lanka.

Other examples of advanced railroad technology crossing estuaries is found in New York City’s Jamaica Bay, called a partially man-made and partially natural estuary on the western tip of Long Island, and containing numerous marshy islands.

There is a rapid transit line of the New York subway system that operates here, the IND Rockaway Line that runs between the Aqueduct Racetrack Station terminal, close to the airport, and crosses Jamaica Bay to the Rockaway Park-Beach 116th Street Station terminal.

Also, historically at the Great Egg Harbor Estuary in New Jersey, where this old postcard shows the Atlantic City and Shore Railroad crossing a two-mile, or 3-kilometer, -long trestle bridge in the Great Egg Harbor Bay, and was part of an interurban trolley system in New Jersey that served Somers Point and several other cities between Atlantic City and Ocean City in the years between 1907 and 1948.

The reason given for the end of its operation was a hurricane damaging the viaduct in 1948, and fixing it was cost prohibitive because of the decline in trolley use.

There are many more estuaries, wetlands, and undersea ruins around the world, but this should give you some examples about why I believe the “Sinking of Atlantis” was a relatively recent occurrence, and that we have been given a brand new historical narrative superimposed over the original infrastructure and civilization to tell us what happened.

I am going to end this post here, and will continue to investigate your suggestions in the on-going series “All Over the Place via Your Suggestions.”

I was taken to the area around the Great Egg Harbor in New Jersey by a viewer who suggested I look into a specific place on the Great Egg Harbor River.

Now, swamps and bogs are not the first thing that come to mind when I think of New Jersey, but those are the first things that jumped out at me when I looked up the place the viewer suggested.

This area is part of both the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the New York-New Jersey Estuary System.

I am finding a lot of noteworthy things here, and I have found that when looking at the subject of estuaries and pine barrens, there is way more to this subject than what meets the eye on a superficial glance as you will see, and I am going to make the case that these are ruined lands that were once part and parcel of a thriving and sophisticated worldwide Moorish civilization that we have not been told about, and there is an accompanying fascination and interest the wealthy elites of American society have long had with this region.

Viewer FG suggested that I look in to the Weymouth Furnace in Atlantic County, New Jersey, on the Great Egg Harbor River.

FG said that the area where it is located is now a county park.

Seeing the map of the Atlantic County Parks along the Great Egg Harbor River, I am going to expand my focus, and take a look at what is between Lake Lenape and Penny Pot Park, with the Weymouth Furnace in-between.

I will start at the Weymouth Furnace.

This is what we are told.

The Weymouth Furnace was said to have been an iron furnace built in the early 19th-Century.

The iron was produced at the furnace from “Bog Ore” mined in the surrounding swamps.

The mined “bog ore” was then transported on pole-propelled barges along canals.

Iron castings, stoves, pots, pans, pipes, cannon & cannon balls were made at the Weymouth Furnace.

The iron foundry was closed in 1862 (during the American Civil War) and replaced by a paper mill until all operations ceased around 1887.

So, for starters, the iron came from “Bog Ore” that was mined in the surrounded swamps.

Sounds suspicious to me!

What’s “bog ore?”

This article on the federal government’s National Park Service website regarding “Southern New Jersey and the Delaware Bay” says the following about iron works and bog ore:

1. Iron foundries were best located along rivers and creeks in unsettled and heavily-wooded land for the wood and charcoal needed to generate the intense heat required for iron furnaces;
2. Bog, also called meadow, ore is found throughout New Jersey, especially in the southern counties, and that it is produced from the interaction of decaying vegetation and soluble iron salts, creating bog-ore-beds that replenish themselves over time.

Just as a point of information, in case one would think that the existence of naturally-occurring iron beds is the only explanation for “bog ore,” the Iron Pillar of Delhi in India is famous for the rust-resistant composition of metals used in its construction, and said to have been made 1,600 years ago, an example of advanced knowledge of iron-work having been around for quite a long time.

What about transporting the “bog iron” on barges in canals?

Well, there are definitely canals in the Great Egg Harbor area…

…and New Jersey in general.

New Jersey’s Morris Canal, for example, was a wonder to behold.

It was hailed as an ingenious, technological marvel for its use of water-driven, inclined planes.

It was said to have been completed in 1832 to carry coal across northern New Jersey between the Delaware River and the Hudson River. It was closed in 1924.

The builders of the Morris Canal also used a sophisticated power house technology, pictured here, to power the water turbine that was set in motion to raise or lower cradled boats on the inclined planes by means of a cable.

Even with the advanced technology of the Morris Canal, mules were needed to be used to pull the canal boats in places on the Morris Canal in the historical narrative we have been given.

I need to reel myself in for a moment and focus on the Weymouth Furnace that brought me here to look because there are so many different directions I want to go off into regarding things that I am seeing here.

FG commented that the Weymouth Furnace is a 70-ft, or 21- meter, square brick chimney coming out of stream beds with no openings.

The furnace is buried below, with stone arches and span spillways that housed two water wheels.

It is a sophisticated construction, with iron pipes , bolts and combined heavy large block foundations with many brick walls.

Now to look at the Great Egg Harbor River.

The Great Egg Harbor River is a described as a major river that crosses the largely undisturbed Pinelands, also known as the New Jersey Pine Barrens, so-called because of the nutrient-poor, sandy and acidic soil that supports pine trees, orchids and carniverous plants.

It is interesting to note that the New Jersey Pine Barrens contain ruins…

… and ghost towns, like Batsto Village, which we are told was the site of a bog iron and glass-making center from 1766 to 1867, consisting of 33 buildings and structures, including a mansion, gristmill, sawmill, and workers’ homes.

Two other places in the northeastern United States have Pine Barrens – Long Island Central and Massachusetts Coastal.

More thoughts on these particular locations shortly.

Back to the Great Egg Harbor River and Lake Lenape.

This is what we are told about Lake Lenape.

The lake was formed after the construction of a dam in May’s Landing around 1847, with the land having previously been an apple orchard.

Interesting to note the megalithic stones used in the construction of the dam.

Then that in 1854, the first railroad was built in the area between Camden and Atlantic City.

Then in regards to the Lake Lenape Park, it was said to have first opened in the early 1900s.

Named for the indigenous people who lived here, Lake Lenape Park features Lakeside Manor, a popular wedding and special event venue…

…and an historic lighthouse next to Lakeside Manor.

We are told the Lake Lenape Lighthouse at May’s Landing never actually served the function of a real lighthouse, and that it was built in 1939 with hand-tools and the help of some neighborhood children.

Made of wood, is 65-feet, or 20-meters, – tall, and it was also known as the “Singing Tower.”

It may be torn-down in the near future but I could not find confirmation that this is definitely going to happen.

So that’s Lake Lenape Park on one side and Atlantic County’s Penny Pot Park and Preserve is west of the Weymouth Furnace Park on the Great Egg Harbor River.

Part of the New Jersey Natural Lands Trust, the land Penny Pot Park is on was once slated for the development of a large, corporately-owned industrial plant.

Located along the Atlantic Expressway and having access to freight train service, twenty-five acres of the were cleared and wetlands altered by ditches.

Business plans changed, and the land in the Pine Barrens that was donated in 1997 has been reclaimed by nature, turned into habitat for wildlife and plants, and a starting place for kayaking and canoeing on the Great Egg Harbor River.

The Great Egg Harbor River flows southeast from near Camden, entering the Great Egg Harbor about 5-miles, or 8-kilometers, southwest of Atlantic City.

The traditional land of the Lenape people, also called the Lenni Lenape and the Delaware Indians, was said to have included: present-day New Jersey; eastern Pennsylvania along the Delaware River watershed; New York City; western Long Island; and the Lower Hudson Valley.

According the history we have been taught, everything changed for the Lenni Lenape who lived here after Henry Hudson sailed up what is now called the Delaware River in 1609, and this painting depicts what we are taught to believe about all the original people of this land – they were hunter-gatherers living off the land, and framing the European colonizers as the builders of infrastructure and civilization in the so-called New World.

I am going to continue to give you examples from here of why that narrative doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and also about the fascination and interest the wealthy elites of American society have long had with this region.

So let’s take a look at what they tell us about Atlantic City.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, the location was the summer home of the Lenape.

Then in 1783, Jeremiah Leeds built the first home here.

But it was not until 1850 that the idea of this becoming a resort location was conceived, and the first hotel here was said to have been built in 1853.

What became known as “Atlantic City” was incorporated in 1854, the same year that train service began on the Camden and Atlantic Railroad mentioned previously, and providing a direct link to Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

The first Atlantic City Boardwalk was said to have been built in 1870.

By 1874, an estimated 500,000 were coming to Atlantic City each year by the railroad, and we are told that there were so many people coming to Atlantic City by 1878 that the decision was made to build the Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railroad was constructed to accommodate the increased ridership.

Then, in order to accommodate the increasing number of tourists coming to Atlantic City, massive hotels like the United States Hotel sprang up.

And all of the new railroad lines that were popping up betwixt and between these large population centers and the South Jersey shore were going right through the desolate, swampy and forbidding pine barrens.

Today there are abandoned trains and railroad lines found throughout the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Atlantic City’s Steel Pier was said to have been built by the Steel Pier Company that first opened in June of 1898 as an amusement park built on a pier.

Called the “Showplace of the Nation,” it was one of the most popular entertainments in the United States for 70 years.

The Steel Pier continues to operate as an amusement park to this day.

Other examples of the original Moorish-style architecture in Atlantic City included the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, which was said to have been built between 1902 and 1906, and demolished in October of 1978…

…and the Hotel Windsor, about which I can’t find any information to speak of, but presumably long gone.

This is an old postcard showing the Atlantic City and Shore Railroad crossing a two-mile, or 3-kilometer, -long trestle bridge in the Great Egg Harbor Bay, and was part of an interurban trolley system in New Jersey that served Somers Point and several other cities between Atlantic City and Ocean City in the years between 1907 and 1948.

The reason given for the end of its operation was a hurricane damaging the viaduct in 1948, and fixing it was cost prohibitive because of the decline in trolley use.

This whole area is part of the New York – New Jersey Harbor Estuary System, which forms one of the most intricate natural harbors in the world, as well as being the busiest port in the world as the Ports of New York and New Jersey are contained within it.

An “estuary” is defined as a partially-enclosed, coastal body of brackish water, which is water that is salty, dirty & unpleasant, with one or more rivers flowing into it, and a connection to the open sea.

Also known as the Hudson-Raritan Estuary, it is described as a harbor system of bays and tidal rivers where the Hudson, Hackensack, Rahway, Passaic and Raritan Rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean.

To the southeast, the Lower New York Bay that is part of the harbor system opens into the New York Bight in the Atlantic Ocean.

The New York Bight is described as a roughly triangular indentation along the Atlantic Coast of the northeastern United States from Cape May, New Jersey, to Montauk Point on the Eastern tip of Long Island.

“Bight” is the term given to a concave bend or curvature in a coastline.

The Hudson Valley Shelf, also known as the Hudson Canyon, is an underwater canyon that begins at the shallow outlet of the estuary at the mouth of the Hudson River, said to begin as a natural channel.

The size of the Hudson Canyon is comparable to the Grand Canyon, the largest known canyon off the East Coast, and one of the largest underwater canyons in the world.

My question is: Was this canyon always underwater?

And is it a natural or man-made landform?

With regards to the possibility that the Hudson Canyon was man-made, and since the Grand Canyon was mentioned in comparison to the Hudson Canyon, it is important to mention that the Grand Canyon has a few notable points of information to bring up here.

One is that the Grand Canyon has formations with Egyptian names, like the Isis Temple, the Osiris Temple, and the Temple of Set, and that these formations and others correlate with stars in the Orion Constellation.

Another is that an article appeared in the Arizona Gazette in 1909 that an explorer in the Grand Canyon had stumbled upon Egyptian artifacts, but news about the discovery disappeared from public view shortly after it was published, and it has been called a hoax ever since.

The New York – New Jersey Harbor estuary system opens to Long Island Sound to the northeast.

Long Island Sound is a tidal estuary and marine sound of the Atlantic ocean.

A sound is the term given to a smaller body of water connected to a larger sea or ocean.

From west to east, Long Island Sound is 110-miles, or 180-kilometers, -long, and runs between the East River in New York City, along the North Shore of Long Island, to Block Island Sound.

Block Island Sound is a 10-mile, or 16-kilometer,-wide strait that separates Block Island from the coast of mainland Rhode Island to the east, and to the west, it extends to Montauk Point on the eastern tip of Long Island, as well as Plum Island, Gardiners Island, and Fishers Island, all in New York State.

More on these places in a moment.

So those are the basics of what we are told about the make-up of the New York – New Jersey Estuary.

Now I want to connect this information to the bigger picture puzzle pieces that are coming together about this region.

The first thing I want to bring forward is the ruined looking appearance of the shoreline from the South Jersey Shore on up through the Southshore of Long Island, which is the same thing as the New York Bight mentioned previously.

Here’s a closer a look at the South Jersey shoreline up to the New York-New Jersey Estuary System, so you can get a better view of what I am referring to…

…and then what the shoreline looks like going from the New York – New Jersey Estuary System across Long Island to Montauk Point.

And in spite of the marshy and wetland quality of the landscape hereabouts, this whole area is prime and valuable real estate that is, among other things, coveted by the very wealthy in our society.

This part of the world is highly prized by those of wealth and prestige.

More about this in a moment.

I have one more big-picture puzzle piece to share before I start to break this region down into smaller parts to show you its attraction to the very wealthy, and what appears to be this area’s its role as a significant place on the Earth’s grid system.

Here is the graphic I presented previously showing the location of the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, Central Long Island, and Coastal Massachusetts.

There seems to be a linear relationship between these three Pine Barren ecosystems.

Here is the linear relationship on Google Earth when I searched for the Pine Barrens in New Jersey; the Central Long Island Pine Barrens; and the Coastal Massachusetts Pine Barrens, also known as the Plymouth Pinelands- the pin is placed where that search term for each popped up.

So I am going to start breaking down this region into smaller parts at Plymouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, the location of the Southeastern Massachusetts Pine Barrens Alliance.

It so happens that this is the same Plymouth that was the location of the Plymouth Colony, the Pilgrim settlement founded in 1620 by the Pilgrims after they journeyed from England to the New World on the Mayflower, seeking religious freedom, as we are taught and celebrate every year in the United States at Thanksgiving.

This is the Plymouth Rock Monument in Plymouth.

The current classical monument housing was said to have been designed in 1921 by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White.

There’s a whole long back-story to Plymouth Rock itself, including there was no record from the pilgrim fathers themselves about landing on a particular rock; attention was first brought to the rock that became Plymouth Rock in 1741 when plans were being made by the residents to build a wharf that would bury it, and an elderly man came forward and said that was the “one” based on what he had been told by his father who had been there when the Pilgrims landed; that the rock had been moved and split and all kinds of stuff; and that the current Plymouth Rock is estimated to weigh ten tons.

One more thing related to the Pilgrims before I move on is the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the northern end of Cape Cod that I was made aware of by a viewer.

It was said to have been built between 1907 and 1910 to commemorate the first landfall of the Pilgrims in 1620 and the signing of the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor.

It is a bell-tower, and the tallest, all-granite structure in the United States, and said to have been modelled after the Torre del Mangia in Siena, Italy, which is said to have been designed in 1309.

Back to the Southeastern Massachusetts Coastal Pine Barrens, or SEMBP.

The Southeastern Massachusetts Pine Barren Association is headquartered at The Center at Center Hill Preserve in Plymouth.

The SEMBP on land extendeds from Duxbury to Provincetown along the Cape Cod Bay shoreline, covering Cape Cod, the Elizabeth Islands, Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard, and inland includes Southeastern Massachusetts, including Plymouth and surrounding communities.

We are told the geologic foundation for the rare Pine Barren ecosystem of Coastal Massachusetts was the result of outwash from the last glacial maximum, which took place somewhere between 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, and left thick glacial deposits of sand and gravel.

This brings us to a series of noteworthy islands off the coast of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York.

First, the Elizabeth Islands, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts.

The Elizabeth Islands are a small chain of islands off the southern coast of Cape Cod, on the southern edge of Buzzard Bay, and is separated from Martha’s Vineyard by Vineyard Sound.

They were formally laid claim to and settled by colonizers in the name of the British Crown in 1641, and named for Queen Elizabeth I.

That same year, in 1641, Thomas Mayhew the Elder of Watertown, Massachusetts bought the Elizabeth Islands – along with Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket – from the Earl of Stirling, William Alexander, who was involved in the Scottish colonization of Port Royal in Nova Scotia and Long Island, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, naval, military commander, and Governor of the Port of Plymouth in England.

Gorges was known as the “Father of English Colonization in North America.

All of the Elizabeth Islands, with the exception of Cuttyhunk and Penikese, are privately-owned by the Forbes family, a wealthy American family of Scottish descent long prominent in Boston.

The family’s original fortune came largely from trading opium and tea between North America and China in the 19th-century.

Forbes family members include businessman John Murray Forbes, among other things a railroad magnate and President of the Michigan Central Railroad, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad in the 1850s; and John Forbes Kerry, present-day politician, and the Secretary of State in President Obama’s second administration, and currently the U. S. Special Presidential Envoy for climate.

Martha’s Vineyard, an island located south of Cape Cod, is a popular summer colony for the wealthy.

Martha’s Vineyard, along with the adjacent Chappaquiddick Island, another small island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard called “Noman’s Land,” and the Elizabeth Islands together comprise Massachusetts’ Dukes County.

First, a little bit about Martha’s Vineyard.

Martha’s Vineyard, as of the 2010 Census, had a year-round population of approximately 17,500 people, and in the summer months the population grows to somewhere around 100,000.

In a study by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the Cost-of-Living on the island was found to be 60% higher than the national average, and the cost of housing 96% higher.

The origin of the name is unknown, though it is speculated that it was named after a “Martha” relative of the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who led the first recorded European expedition to Cape Cod in 1602.

Also known originally as “Noepe,” the island was referred to as “Cappawock” in the 1691 Massachusetts Charter, and which is retained in the name of the “Capawock Theater” in Vineyard Haven.

Vineyard Haven was named the #1 most expensive town in the United States by Lending Tree in 2021.

When the European colonizers arrived, the island was inhabited by the Wampanoag, the Algonquin indigenous people of eastern Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.

There is something interesting to note about the Algonquin language.

It is extremely hard to find this kind of information because of the hunter-gatherer theme going on with indigenous peoples of North America in the narrative, but I found an example in the written language script of the Algonquin Mikmaq people of Nova Scotia, and it is that of an apparent connection to the Egyptian language script.

The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, or Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard is one of only two federally-recognized Wampanoag Tribes, the other one being the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, headquartered in Mashpee on Cape Cod.

The Wampanoag on Martha’s Vineyard are headquartered in Aquinnah on the southwest tip of Martha’s Vineyard, part of the lands where they have lived for thousands of years which were dispossessed by English settlers encroaching on their lands.

Aquinnah, which was incorporated as a town named Gay Head, between 1870 and 1997, is the location of the Aquinnah Cliffs.

The Aquinnah Cliffs, with streams of red and orange clay mixed with sand, were said to have been formed by glaciers millions of years ago.

Not buying what they are selling.

These cliffs have a sheared-off-looking quality to them, like there is much more to this story.

The Gay Head Lighthouse located here was featured in the 1975 movie “Jaws.”

There is an interesting, and lengthy back-story to the Gay Head Lighthouse.

But long story short, at one time there were more buildings here.

Then only one, which looks like there is possibly more to it under the ground.

And that in 2015, the lighthouse structure was moved because it was perilously close to the eroding cliff edge.

Chappaquiddick Island is a small peninsula that occasionally becomes an island, and part of the town of Edgartown, on the eastern end of the Martha’s Vineyard.

Well, if you ever wondered where the Chappaquiddick of the infamous incident involving Ted Kennedy and an overturned vehicle containing the body of a woman back in July of 1969, it was right here.

The small island called “Nomans Land” is located three-miles off the southwest coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

It was used as a practice bombing range by the United States Navy between 1943 and 1996.

“Nomans Land” was transferred to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1998, at which time it became a wildlife refuge, and closed to all public use.

The island of Nantucket is 30-miles, or 50-kilometers, south of Cape Cod, and together with the islands of Tuckernuck and Muskeget, constitutes the Town and County of Nantucket of Massachusetts, and like Martha’s Vineyard, a summer colony for the wealthy.

The name Nantucket was said to have been adapted from a similar-sounding Algonquin name for the island of the indigenous Wampanoag people.

The National Park Service cites Nantucket as being the finest example of a late 18th- and early 19th-century New England Seaport town, and was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1966.

As mentioned previously, Nantucket was a purchased by Thomas Mayhew the Elder from the Earl of Stirling, William Alexander, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, as a “proprietary colony,” meaning it was a type of colony owned by the Crown in which charters were granted to companies, groups or indivduals, who then selected the governors and other officials of the colony.

In 1659, Mayhew kept one share for himself, and sold an interest in the island to nine other investors, for the sum of 30 pounds and two beaver hats, and each of the ten original owners was allowed to invite a partner.

The total number of shares in the island increased as they sought to attract skilled tradesmen to come and live on the island for at least three years, and European settlement of Nantucket began in earnest.

Nantucket Island was perhaps best-known for the historical importance of its whaling industry, particularly during the 18th- up to the mid-19th-centuries.

The Great Fire of 1846 devastated the downtown business hub of Nantucket, starting in a hat store and completely destroying more than one-third of the heart of the community and economy, and leaving many homeless, in poverty, and causing them to leave the island.

Great fires (and floods for that matter) destroying the central business districts of cities and towns around the world were quite common in our historical narrative, seemingly as a way to either destroy the original infrastructure, and/or take credit for the building of it afterwards, and as well as to deliberately cause disruption and displacement.

Now moving west along the Pine Barrens line, we come to Rhode Island, where we find Newport…

…and Rhode Island’s Block Island.

Newport is a seaside city in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, located 33-miles, or 53-kilometers, southeast of Providence.

The Narragansett people are an Algonquin tribe of Rhode Island.

Here is an historic photo of the Narragansett.

Their language died out in the 19th-century, though the tribe has been trying to revive it using written source material.

Across the Narragansett Bay from Newport, in the town of Narragansett, we find a stone masonry building the Towers, said to have been built between 1883 and 1886 by the ubiquitous architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White as part of a Victorian-era casino and social-elite resort facility.

Also known as the “Twin Towers,” it is all that remains after a history of disasters, including fires and hurricanes.

Newport was first incorporated as a town in 1639 by a group of nine founding English colonists, after the Colony of Rhode Island had been established in 1636 by Roger Williams, and only six-years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630.

Bellevue Avenue in Newport is known for its “Gilded Age Mansions.”

One definition that I found of “Gilded Age” is that it was a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in the United States from the 1870s to 1900.

Another definition is that it was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the northern and western United States.

Perhaps the most famous of these “Gilded Age” mansions, said to have been built between 1893 and 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II in Newport was known as “The Breakers.”

It was said to have been patterned after a Renaissance Palace, and built with marble imported from Italy and Africa, as well as rare wood and mosaics from countries around the world.

The U. S. Navy has a significant presence here, including Naval Station Newport…

…and during the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, Newport was the location of “Summer White Houses.”

Next, a look at Rhode Island’s Block Island, in the Block Island Sound I mentioned previously that is adjacent to Long Island Sound of the New York – New Jersey Estuary System.

It is 9-miles, or 14-kilometers, south of the Rhode Island mainland, and 14-miles, or 23-kilometers, east of Long Island’s Montauk Point.

Block Island was named for Adrian Block, a Dutch privateer who was employed by the Dutch East India Company who charted the area in 1614.

New Shoreham is the only town on Block Island.

Block Island School is the only school here, teaching students from kindergarten through 12th-grade.

It was said to have been built in 1933 to replace five, one-room schoolhouses, and still use today, with some architectural changes over the years.

Mansion Beach today is a secluded beach on the island’s northeast coast, known for its white sand and big waves.

It was so-named because there was a mansion once here, said to have been designed by Massachusetts architect Edward F. Searles as a dream home for he and his wife, the widow of San Francisco Central Pacific Railroad magnate Mark Hopkins and constructed between 1886 and 1888.

Searle’s wife, Mary Hopkins Searle, was often referred to as the richest woman in America, and shortly after they married, she bequeathed him her entire fortune.

Searles was one of those architects credited with the design of other monumental architecture, including, but not limited to, the interior design for the Kellogg Terrace, known today as Searles Castle, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, said to be one of America’s great masterpieces of gothic and Neo-Renaissance architecture built in 1883 by Stanford White of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, the same architectural firm credited with the classical design of the Plymouth Rock Monument.

Sure looks to me like Searles Castle sits atop a star fort base, compared with Fort Loreto, a star fort in Puebla, Mexico, on the right.

Searles was credited with the design of the giant nave which still houses one of the largest pipe organs built in a residence in the United States.

At any rate, after having been abandoned for years, the Searle Mansion back on Block Island burned down in the 1960s, and was never rebuilt.

Block Island has thirteen distinct beaches.

This rocky beach is a clothing optional beach below the Mohegna Bluffs, which like the Aquinnah Cliffs back on Martha’s Vineyard, have a sheared-off-looking quality to them.

The huge rocks found here also look megalithic, like they were shaped and cut.

The island’s Southeast Lighthouse is situated atop of the Mohegna Bluffs.

The Southeast Lighthouse was said to have been built in 1874 in the Gothic Revival architectural style.

It is considered one of the most architecturally sophisticated lighthouses built in the United States in the 19th-century, and is the tallest lighthouse in New England.

Things in common with the Gay Head Lighthouse on the Aquinnah Cliffs back on Martha’s Vineyard include:

A top-heavy appearance and ground-level windows, making it look like there is more to this structure hidden underground…

…there used to be more buildings here…

…and this lighthouse was apparently moved away from the edge of the bluff due to  erosion as well.

Hmmmm.

“Curioser and Curioser,” as Alice in Wonderland famously once said.

The current Block Island North Lighthouse built of granite and iron was said to have been constructed in 1867, which would have been two years after the end of the American Civil War.

The lighthouse was deactivated in 1973 and acquired by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

After being neglected for years, in 1984, the lighthouse and two-acres of land were sold to the town of Shoreham for $1.

It was renovated and first re-lit in 1989, and a museum opened in the first-floor in 1993, and then re-lit again in 2009 after further restoration of the light itself.

Before I move on to Long Island, I want take a look at the other islands located in Block Island Sound, which are Plum Island, Gardiners Island, and Fishers Island, all in New York State.

Plum Island is an island that is part of Southold in Suffolk County, New York, and located in Gardiners Bay, off the eastern end of Long Island’s North Fork peninsula on the eastern end of Long Island.

Plum Island is owned by the United States government, and access to it controlled by the U. S. Department of Homeland Security.

We are told Plum Island was called “Manittuwond” by the historical indigenous Pequot Nation of Connecticut.

This opens up a murky area regarding the people who lived here because their true history has been suppressed in our historical narrative.

The Pequot Nation is indigenous to Connecticut.

The Pequot Nation was classified extinct by colonial authorities after the Pequot Wars that took place between 1636 and 1638, effectively decimating them as a viable tribe, as survivors were either sold into slavery to colonists in the West Indies or Bermuda, otherwise taken captive, or absorbed into other tribes.

Of 5 Pequot tribes in existence today, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe is the only one that is federally-recognized…

…and, for example, the Eastern Pequot Tribal nation is state-recognized but not federally-recognized.

Mohegan-Pequot was an Algonquin-language spoken by the Mohegan, Pequot, and Niantic people of southern New England, and the Montaukett and Shinnecock of Long Island.

The last living speaker of Mohegan-Pequot died in 1908.

We are told that historically Mohegan-Pequot did not have a writing system, and that the only significant writings came from European colonizers who interacted with speakers of the language.

I am quite sure that James Fenimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans,” first published in 1826, was an early novel introducing and reinforcing the new historical narrative.

Back to Plum Island.

So what we are told is that the Montaukett Grand Sachem Wyandanch of eastern Long Island was said to have sold Plum Island in 1659 to Samuel Wyllys, the son of Connecticut’s governor George Wyllys, for “…a coat, a barrel of biscuits, and 100 fish-hooks.”

Plum Island is only 17-miles, or 27-kilometers, south-southeast of Lyme, Connecticut, the place which gave “Lyme Disease” its name.

The origin story of the disease goes like this:

A mysterious ailment afflicted a group of people in and around Lyme, Connecticut, in the 1970s, and that the cause of Lyme Disease was found to be a form of spiral-shaped bacteria transmitted by the bite of a certain kind of tick.

Lyme Disease causes symptoms like a rash, flu-like symptoms, joint-pain and weakness, among others.

Coincidentally…or not…there is a National Disease Center on Plum Island, which was established in 1954 by the United States Department of Agriculture.

The facility maintains laboratories up to biosafety-level 3, which involves microbes which can cause serious and potentially lethal disease by inhalation.

Fort Terry on Plum Island was said to have been built in 1897 as part of the Harbor Defenses of Long Island Sound, and used intermittently through the end of World War II.

Then in 1952, Fort Terry became a military animal and biological warfare research facility, and in 1954, moved to civilian control as mentioned previously.

The granite lighthouse on the western end of Plum Island, said to have been built and in-service in 1869, looks a lot like the North Lighthouse on Block Island, but unlike the North Lighthouse, it is not open to the public, and access to the Plum Island lighthouse is controlled by the Department of Homeland Security for community stakeholders on a case-by-case basis.

The Plum Island Lighthouse is on one side of “the “Plum Gut,” the mile-wide entrance to Long Island Sound, known for having extremely strong tidal currents.

There is another Lighthouse on the other side of the “Plum Gut,” called the “Orient Long Beach Bar Light,” at the easternmost end of the Long Island’s North Fork.

It was said to have been destroyed by fire in 1963; rebuilt in 1990; and reactivated for navigation in 1993.

Next, I am going to check out Gardiners Island in the Block Island Sound.

Gardiners Island is a small island located in Gardiners Bay between the North and South Forks of Long Island.

The island has been owned by the Gardiner family since 1659, when Lion Gardiner, an English engineer and colonist who founded the first English Settlement in New York here, and said to have purchased it from the Montaukett Grand Sachem Wyandanch, this time for “…a large black dog, some powder and shot, and a few Dutch blankets.”

Wyandanch died that same year, and after his death, the title of “Grand Sachem” went into decline and was eliminated by the colonists after they conquered the region of what was known as “New Netherlands” at the time.

What I am able to find in a search is that the title “Sachem” was the title given to a Native American Chief, in particular the chief of a confederation of Algonquin tribes.

“Sagamore” was the title given to a chief or leader of the Algonquins.

This selection from William Wood’s book was of a map showing the plantations along Massachusetts Bay, and the word or name Sagamore is showing in several places.

William Wood’s book from 1639 was entitled: “New Englands Prospect” and called “A true, lively and experimentall description of that part of America commonly called New England; discovering the state of that Countrie, both as it stands to our new-come English Planters; and to the old native inhabitants. Laying down which that which might enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling reader, or benefit the future voyager.”

While not under the jurisdiction of the Colonies of Connecticut or Rhode Island, Gardiners Island did fall under the jurisdiction of William Alexander, the 1st Earl of Stirling, who had been given Long Island by the King Charles I of England in 1636, and who required that Gardiner gain approval of his land grant, which he did in 1639 with a royal patent giving him the right to possess the land forever, and given the title of “Lord of the Manor.”

Gardiners Island is a little over 5-square-miles, or 13.4-kilometers-squared, and has more than 1,000 acres of old growth forest, considered by some to be the largest old-growth forest on the northeast coast of the United States.

Passed down through the Gardiner family for over 380-years, the Gardiner mansion on the island is considered to be the oldest family estate in America.

The windmill on Gardiners Island was said to have been built in 1795, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Next, Fishers Island is a part of Southold, New York, at the end of Long Island Sound, located in close proximity to Connecticut and Rhode Island as well.

Named Munnawtawkit by the Pequot, it was said to have been named “Vischer’s Island” by the Adrian Block in 1614 after one of his companions.

John Winthrop the Younger, son of the Massachusetts Bay Colony – which was established in 1630 – founder and Governor John Winthrop, received a grant of Fisher’s Island in 1640.

Winthrop the Younger, who first became Governor of Connecticut in 1657, was said to have used the island to raise sheep and wool, and make bricks, and that after his death, his son leased the island to a farmer from England who established the system of cultivation on the island that was used for the next 200 years.

The island was privately held by the Winthrop family until 1863, then owned privately by others until 1879, when a joint-commission for Connecticut and New York reiterated the New York had legal title to Fisher’s Island, even though it has closer ties to Connecticut because of its proximity.

Between 1783 and 1909, brick-making was the only industry on the island because of the clay-pits there, and at its peak in the 1880s, the brickyard was believed to be the largest in the country, with a production capacity of 18-million bricks per year.

Horse-drawn railroad cars were used to transport clay produced by hundreds of miners wielding shovels to the brick presses.

Okay, so that’s what they tell us, anyway!

Since the 1920s, Fishers Island has been a playground for the social register set that includes the Rockefellers, duPonts, Whitneys, and Roosevelts, and two-thirds of the island is off-limits to everyone except residents and their guests.

The social centers of Fishers Island are two private, exclusive clubs that rarely allow outsiders in – the Fishers Island Club and the Hay Harbor Club.

The Fishers Island Club is located near the eastern end of Fishers Island, and has an 18-hole golf course, said to have been designed by Seth Raynor and opened in 1926, that was ranked in 2009 as ninth in “Golf Digest” of the top 100 golf courses in the world.

The Hay Harbor Club was established in 1909, and is on the western end of Fishers Island.

Among other things, it has a 9-hole golf course said to have been designed by George Strath and opened in 1898.

There is a good view of the Race Rock Lighthouse from the Hay Harbor Club.

The Race Rock Lighthouse is on Race Rock Reef, a dangerous set of rocks on Long Island Sound, and the site of many shipwrecks.

The light has been automated since 1878.

It was said to have been designed by American author, artist and engineer Francis Hopkinson Smith, and built between 1871 and 1878.

Smith, along with being a prolific wrter and painter, was also credited with building the foundation for the Statue of Liberty.

Fishers Island is surrounded by nine smaller islands, like the privately-owned North Dumpling Island, where the North Dumpling Island Lighthouse is located.

The North Dumpling Lighthouse was said to have been built in 1849, then rebuilt in 1871, and deactivated in 1959.

The navigational aid replacing the lighthouse is the metal tower near the lighthouse.

How about all those megalithic stones!

And are those columns I see?

There is a lot more to find here on Fishers Island, but I am going to move on to Long Island where there is a lot to find as well.

Suffolk County on Long Island’s East End is comprised of six main townships – East Hampton; Southampton, which includes Westhampton; Shelter Island; Southold; Riverhead; and Brookhaven, and includes the Long Island Central Pine Barrens.

I am only going to highlight a noteworthy thing or two found in these places as there is so much to find in eastern Long Island.

The towns of East Hampton and Southampton together are what are known as “The Hamptons,” another one of the historical summer colonies of the wealthy elite in our society.

The township of East Hampton is on the eastern end of Long Island’s South Shore.

East Hampton includes the following hamlets: Montauk, Springs, Wainscott, Amagansett, part of Sag Harbor, and jurisdiction over the privately-owned Gardiners Island.

The hamlet of Montauk is on the eastern end of Long Island’s South Fork.

The Montauk Point Light is on Turtle Hill at the easternmost tip of Long Island, and not only was it said to be the first built within the State of New York, it was said to be the first public works project in the new United States having been authorized by Congress because the port of New York City was the first in the nation in volume in foreign shipping, and shippers were said to have needed a lighthouse at the end of Long Island to guide them along the south side into New York Harbor.

It is said to be the fourth-oldest active lighthouse in the United States, and also a privately-run museum.

We are told that construction of the lighthouse was authorized by the Second United States Congress in April of 1792 under President George Washington, and that Ezra L’Hommedieu, a prominent lawyer and politician local to the area, chose the location and designed the lighthouse, and that the lighthouse was built between July and November of 1796.

The U. S. Army took over the lighthouse during World War II, and opened Camp Hero, or Montauk Air Force Station, in 1942, adjacent to the lighthouse.

The remnants of Camp Hero are said to be four gun-battery casements, emplacements and concrete fire control towers at the nearby Camp Hero State Park today.

Now, here’s something interesting.

Camp Hero on Montauk Point is alleged to be the location of the Montauk Project, a series of U. S. Government projects with the purpose of developing things like psychological warfare techniques, like MK Ultra, and time-travel research, among others.

We are entering a place on Earth where so-called “Conspiracy Theories” abound, and the Montauk Project is the first of several examples.

The Conspiracy-Theory Montauk Project was the inspiration for the Netflix show “Stranger Things…”

…which was originally billed as “Montauk.”

So far on the East End of Long Island, there was a known Biological Warfare Laboratory on tightly-controlled Plum Island just off-shore in Long Island Sound, and an alleged Psychological Warfare and Time Travel Research Laboratory at Montauk Point’s Camp Hero.

What else could there possibly be here on Long Island’s East End?

Let’s see what comes up.

Southampton, which includes Westhampton, is partially located on the South Fork, and stretches west along the coastline.

Southampton was founded in 1640 by a group of ten settlers from Lynn, Massachusetts, who obtained land from the Shinnecock Nation by signing a lease, and the town grew quickly and over the next few years, established an early whaling industry here.

The Algonquin Shinnecock Nation’s reservation is in Southampton, and we are told, among thirteen indian tribes on Long Island, largely based on kinship.

In 2005, the Shinnecock filed a lawsuit against the State of New York seeking return of 3,500 acres, or 14 km-squared, in Southampton, and billions of dollars for damages, challenging the State Legislature’s approval of an 1859 sale of 3,500 acres of tribal land.

The disputed land included the Shinnecock Hills Golf Course.

In 2006, the court ruled against the Shinnecock Nation, however, finding the lawsuit was barred by laches, or a lack of diligence or activity for making a legal claim or moving forward with legal enforcement of a right.

They did finally receive federal recognition in 2010, after a 30-year effort that included suing the Department of the Interior.

Their historic neighbors to the East on Long Island, the Montauks, or Montauketts, once resided in large numbers on the eastern end of Long Island.

In 1910, a Judge ruled that the Montauks no longer existed as a tribe and were disenfranchised from their ancestral lands.

Today the Montauk are actively working towards the reversal of this decision, as well as the revitalization of their language and culture.

Interesting to note there is a “Pharoah” surname amongst the Montauks.

This a painting of David Pharaoh of the royal family of the Montauk tribe.

He lived between 1835 and died on July 18th of 1878. He was buried in the Indian Field Cemetery on the old reservation lands on East Lake Drive in Montauk.

Princess Pocahontas Pharaoh was born on February 15th of 1878, the last Montauk born on the Montauk Reservation at Indian Field on Montauk Point, a year before the reservation was sold.

She was the youngest daughter of King David Pharaoh and Queen Maria Fowler Pharaoh of the Montauk Tribe.

The King of the tribe always came from the Pharaoh family.

Pocahontas Pharaoh was born in the middle of efforts by Arthur Benson and the Long Island Railroad to force the Montauks off their Land.

Benson purchased Montauk in October of 1879 for $151,000 and allowed the railroad to expand its rail service through it.

In 1897, King Wyandanch Pharaoh, Pocahontas’ brother went to court to try to get the Montauk land back and fought until 1910, at which time a New York court held that the Montauk Tribe was extinct and stripped the nation of its tribal lands.

Interesting side-note that at least in the Romance languages, the word for lighthouse includes the root sound of “Far”:

In Italian, the word for lighthouse is “Faro…”

In Spanish, it is the same word “Faro…”

In French, the word for lighthouse is “Phare…”

In Portuguese, it is “Farol…”

And in Romanian, “Far.”

They are spelled and sound like they are related to the word “Pharaoh,” which we are told was the common title for monarchs of ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty, starting in 3,150 BC, up to the annexation of Egypt by the Roman Empire in 30 BC.

Throwing this information in for consideration since both a lighthouse and pharaohs are found on Montauk Point.

Southampton is on the eastern side of the Long Island Central Pine Barrens, and the Central Pine Barrens Planning Commission is in Westhampton Beach, on the western side of Southampton.

…where you find the Westhampton dunes…

…considered prime land and luxury real estate for those that can afford it…

…and canals, like the Moneybogue Canal, which requires dredging to get rid of the sediment at the bottom of the waterway.

The Long Island Central Pine Barrens is called Long Island’s largest natural area and last remaining wilderness.

The Pine Barrens recharge a federally-designated sole source aquifer for Long Island’s fresh drinking water, which comes from groundwater wells.

Almost all of Long Island’s Peconic and Carmans Rivers, and their watersheds, two of the four major rivers here, are in the Pine Barrens.

The Peconic River drains an area between the Harbor Hill Moraine, flowing into Flanders Bay, and connecting to Peconic Bay, the bay between Long Island’s North and South Forks, east of Riverhead.

It originates in bogs and wetlands in Central Long Island, and is freshwater until it becomes an estuary in Riverhead, a town and township on the northern edge of the Pine Barrens.

The Harbor Hill Moraine that skirts the North Shore of Long Island was said to have resulted from advancing glaciers 18,000 years ago…

…and named for Harbor Hill in Roslyn, New York, the highest point in Nassau County, where the Harbor Hill Mansion was said to have been built between 1899 – 1902 for the telecommunications magnate Clarence Hungerford Mackay, and designed by Stanford White of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.

Next, I am going to take a look at what is found near the town of Brookhaven, which borders the Long Island Central Pine Barrens to the southwest.

The town of Brookhaven on Long Island is the namesake of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in nearby Upton, a U. S. Department of Energy Laboratory.

The Brookhaven National Laboratory is located on the site of the former Camp Upton, a U. S. Army facility first established in 1917 during World War I to house troops awaiting deployment overseas, and during World War II, it was used as an internment camp for Japanese, German, and Italian citizens living in New York or serving on merchant vessels, since the U. S. was at war with these three countries.

The Department of Energy National Laboratory was established in 1947, with a stated desire to “explore peaceful applications for atomic energy” after World War II.

The Laboratory has developed a broader mission over time, including: nuclear and high-energy physics; physics and chemistry of materials; nanoscience; energy and environmental research; national security and nonproliferation; neuroscience; structural biology; and computational sciences.

The research facilities of Brookhaven National Laboratory include the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the first and one of two operating heavy-ion colliders, and only spin-polarized proton collider ever built.

It is also said to be the only operating particle collider in the United States, as physicists study the primordial form of matter that existed in the Universe after what we are told was the “Big Bang,” a physical theory about an event that describes how the Universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature.

The worlds’ other operating heavy-ion collider is the Large Hadron Collider, also known as CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

In addition to the RHIC, the Brookhaven hosts the National Synchrotron Light Source II, designed to produce x-rays 10,000-times brighter than the original National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

We are told it supports basic and advanced energy technologies in a wide-variety of applications, from nano-catalyst-based fuel cells to economical use of solar energy in high-temperature superconductors in a high-capacity and high-reliability electric grid.

So, along with biological warfare research at Plum Island and psychological warfare and time travel research with the Montauk Project at Camp Hero, we have the Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island’s East End studying things likeatomic and high-energy physics.

Going in a southwesterly direction on Long Island, we come to the long and narrow Great South Bay.

The Great South Bay is described as a lagoon that is 45-miles, or 72-kilometers-, long, and has an average depth of a little over 4-feet, or 1.2-meters, and is 20-feet, or 6-meters, at its deepest.

I am sure there is a lot more to find here if I dig around, but I will share this book cover and say that during the so-called Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts, Roosevelts, Whitneys, Morgans, and Woolworths were said to have built summer mansions on the South Shore.

Southwest of the Great South Bay, we come to Jamaica Bay, called a partially man-made and partially natural estuary on the western tip of Long Island, and containing numerous marshy islands.

John F. Kennedy International Airport is on the northeast side of Jamaica Bay.

Interestingly, there is a rapid transit line of the New York subway system that operates here, the IND Rockaway Line that runs between the Aqueduct Racetrack Station terminal, also close to the airport in a short-distance, straight-line alignment, and the Rockaway Park-Beach 116th Street Station terminal.

West of Jamaica Bay, we come to Brighton Beach, where we find megalithic rocks strewn about on the beach…

…and the explanation we are given for faces amongst the rocks was that there was a mystery artist in the 1970s who carved them.

There were three major historic amusement parks with Moorish-looking infrastructure/architecture on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Peninsula west of Brighton Beach – Dreamland, Luna Park, and Steeplechase Park.

Dreamland was the third and last of the three original parks said to have been built on Coney Island in the early 19th-century, and founded by successful Brooklyn real estate developer and former State Senator William H. Reynolds as a refined and elegant competitor to the chaotic noise of Luna Park, opening in May of 1904.

The location of Dreamland was near the West Eighth Street subway station opposite Culver Depot.

Everything at Dreamland was touted to be bigger than Luna Park, including the larger Electric Tower, and four times as many incandescent lights than Luna Park.

Dreamland’s life on Coney Island was ended only 7-years after opening.

On May 27th of 1911, a fire started at the Hell Gate attraction the night before the season’s opening day, and spread quickly, completely destroying the park by morning.

Coney Island’s Luna Park was said to have opened in 1903, and operated until 1944.

We are told the park’s architectural style was an oriental theme, with over 1,000 red and white painted spires, minarets, and domes on buildings constructed on a grand scale.

All the domes, spires, and towers were lit-up at night with several 100,000 incandescent lights.

In the middle of the lake at the center of the park was a 200-foot, or 61-meter, tall Electric Tower that was decorated with 20,000 incandescent lamps, said to be a smaller version of the Electric Tower featured in the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.

Luna Park was accessible from Culver Depot, the terminals of the West End and Sea Beach Streetcar and Railroad lines.

Over the years, Luna Park would continue under different management, with constant changes.

The end of Luna Park came with two fires in 1944, one in August and one in October, which destroyed the park, and in 1946, the whole park was demolished.

There has been a Luna Park operating near the original location since 2010 that has no connection to the 1903 park.

Steeplechase Park on Coney Island was said to have been created by entrepreneur George Tilyou in 1897.

The entrance to Steeplechase Park had a grand archway, the top of which was decorated with four horses.

The park included over 50 attractions on its midway alone.

In Steeplechase Park’s history between its opening in 1897 and closing in 1964, there were things like fires, rebuilding, rides added, and so on.

The only remaining structure from Steeplechase Park is the defunct Parachute Jump, next to Maimonades Park, the location of a minor league baseball stadium.

When I was doing research for my recent blog post “Star Forts, Gone-Bye Trolley Parks and Lighthouses of New York’s Hudson River Valley & New York Bays…”

…I found that between the entrance to the lower New York Bay at the Atlantic Ocean to the locations around the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River alone, there were eleven historical star forts that are in pairs and/or clusters; five major historic trolley amusement parks; and eleven lighthouses.

I found a lot more up the Hudson River from here.

I even found the John D. Rockefeller Estate known as Kykuit near Tarrytown.

Situated on the highest point in Pocantino Hills, the Rockefeller Estate was said to have been built in 1913.

Continuing to track the coastline heading south down the Jersey Shore from Coney Island, we come to the Navesink Twin Lights on the headlands of the Navesink Highlands, overlooking Sandy Hook Bay, at the entrance to the New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.

Navesink was also the name of the Lenape people who inhabited the Raritan Bayshore near Sandy Hook in the scenic highlands in eastern New Jersey.

Much like the other stories we have been told about these places I have looked at along the way, the story goes that the Navesink lands were sold by Navesink elders to a group of Dutch businessmen for wampum and goods in March of 1664, the first and largest land sale deal along the Jersey Shore between Native Americans and Europeans, and that the Navesink received in return for their land things like 5 coats; one gun; 12-pounds of tobacco; and 10 gallons of liquor.

The Navesink Twin Lights were said to have been built in 1862.

The American Civil War is said to have taken place between 1861 to 1865, so we are expected to believe this solid masonry structure was built during war-time.

To the west of the Navesink Twin Lights on the Highlands overlooking Sandy Hook is a town called Sayreville, located at the mouth of the Raritan River where it enters Raritan Bay in the New York – New Jersey Estuary System.

Sayreville received its final naming from James Sayre, Jr, of Newark, one of the two co-founders of the Sayre and Fisher Brick Company in 1850.

Like Fishers Island, there are extensive clay deposits in the area, and the Sayre and Fisher Company quickly became one of the largest brick-making companies in the world.

Big companies including, but not limited to, DuPont established plants in Sayreville for gunpowder production initially in 1898, and later for paint and photo products.

The Raritan River Railroad operated freight and passenger service through here between 1888 and 1980, after which time Conrail took over rail operations.

This the logo for the Raritan River Railroad…

…and this is the logo for Rolls Royce.

The similarity between these two logos tells me these two companies were likely connected in some way. Besides the fact the logos look virtually identical, it brings to mind what I found in Derby, England.

I found Derby near the Algiers’ Circle Alignment as I was tracking it through England.

Derby is the geographic center of England, and the Derwent River Valley in Derbyshire is considered the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

Rolls-Royce is a global aerospace, defense, energy, and marine company focused on world-class power and propulsion systems, and its civil aerospace and nuclear divisions are in Derby…

…as well as the Railway Technical Center, the technical headquarters of British Rail, and considered the largest railway research complex in the world.

There are certainly interconnecting pieces of the puzzle to be found lying around these tidbits of seemingly disconnected information.

Were they all working together to bring already existing railroad infrastructure back on-line?

Interesting to note that I found the Ames Shovel Shop in Easton, Massachusetts, several years ago when I was tracking a long-distance alignment starting and ending in Washington, DC.

In 1803, the Ames Shovel Works was established in Easton.

It became nationally known for providing the shovels for the Union Pacific Railroad, which opened the west. It was said to have been the world’s largest supplier of shovels in the 19th-century.

Brothers Oliver Ames, Jr, and Oakes Ames (b. 1807 – d. 1877) were co-owners of the Ames Shovel Shop.

Oliver was also the President of the Union Pacific Railroad from when it met the Central Pacific Railroad in Utah for the completion of the first Transcontinental Railroad in North America.

Oakes was a member of the U. S. Congress House of Representatives from Massachusetts 2nd District from 1863-1873. He is credited by many as being the most important influence in building the Union Pacific portion of the first Transcontinental Railroad.

He was also known for his involvement in the Credit-Mobilier Scandal of 1867, regarding the improper sale of stock of the railroad’s construction company.

He was formally censured by Congress in 1873 for this involvement, and he died in the same year.

He was exonerated by the Massachusetts State Legislature on May 10th, 1883, the 10th-Anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

As we return to the New Jersey Pine Barrens following this linear alignment of Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens, there are a couple of more things in this area that I would like to bring to your attention.

Ong is a ghost town that falls on the Atlantic Coastal Pine Barren alignment, keeping in mind that the places pinned are where each term came up on the Google Earth search.

Ong, or Ong’s Hat, is a ghost town in the Brandon T. Byrne State Forest, and the northern terminus of the Batona Trail, a 53.5-mile, or 86.1-kilometer, hiking trail through the Pine Barrens.

Ong’s Hat was also considered one of the earliest, internet-based, conspiracy theories.

Ong’s Hat is also listed as the first Alternate Reality Game (ARG) on many lists of ARGs.

We are told that “Ong’s Hat” was a work of alternate-reality collaborative fiction, beginning back in the 1980s and embedded in various media to establish a backstory – like bulletin boards, xerox mail art networks, and zines – and that author Joseph Matheny concluded the project.

The Ong’s Hat tale is told about a group of physics and science professors from Princeton who ran chaos theory and quantum physics experiments from an ashram there to travel interdimensionally through a device called “The Egg,” and they were camped out in another world.

“The Egg” was said to have been developed by these physicists and scientists as a sensory deprivation chamber, and used by them to determine when a wave becomes a particle.

One day “The Egg” disappeared, and the young man within explained that in the seven-minutes he was gone, he had travelled to an alternate dimension of the Earth.

According to the story about “Ong’s Hat,” these experiments continued over the years, until the military threatened their research, at which time they moved entirely in to the alternate dimension, only coming back for supplies.

“The Egg?” Great Egg Harbor? I don’t know if there is a connection. Just curious….

What we are told is that Great Egg Harbor was named “Eyren Haven” in Dutch by the Dutch Explorer Cornelius May, for whom Cape May was named sometime around 1614 for all the birds laying eggs he observed here.

Philadelphia is located in close proximity to Ong and the New Jersey Pine Barrens, so let’s take a look at the Philadelphia Experiment and see what we are told about that.

World War II started on September 1st in 1939, and ended on September 2nd in 1945 – exactly six years later.  It is considered the deadliest conflict in human history.

Almost halfway through World War II, on July 22nd, 1942, the strange Philadelphia experiment was alleged to have taken place at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. 

Did the USS Eldridge just become invisible? 

Or did it go somewhere else? 

And if it went somewhere else, where might it have gone?

What was the real purpose of the Philadelphia Experiment?

What if the USS Eldridge went back in time, and created a rip in the fabric of space-time?

Personally I think it was a deliberate manipulation of the original civilization’s energy grid system in order to create a rip in the fabric of space-time, and that a new artificial timeline was somehow inserted.

At the very least, I believe this rip allowed great evil in the form of parasitic non-human souls to incarnate in human form on the Earth, and subsequently created the conditions for the world we are living in today.   More on this in a moment.

I have postulated for several years that the years 1492 and 1942 are the boundary years of a new timeline called Rome, with 1717 as the midpoint year, and a new history was grafted on to the existing infrastructure on the Earth, and falsely attributed in the new historical narrative. 

For some reason, the conspiracy theories I have mentioned of have come back into form to be consumed by the public as shows like the previously “Stranger Things” based on the Montauk Project, or movies like “The Final Countdown,” a 1980 movie where a time-travelling naval vessel in the form of the USS Nimitz goes back in time to the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th of 1941.

I think this is because the negative beings have to tell us what they are doing to gain our consent for their actions, but they don’t tell us they are telling us, and instead relying on such methods as predictive programming like this in order to gain our tacit consent (since we don’t know they are telling us something) rather than informed consent. 

Predictive programming is defined as:  Storylines, or even subtle images, that in retrospect seem to hint at events that actually end up happening in the real world.

As part of my journey going deep into this research, I was guided through a psychic friend in 2019 to look at Ireland in 1742 in my research.

As we were visiting, she received an image of Ireland that was white, cold and frozen on one side of 1742, and bright and sunny on the other.

So I searched for what happened in the year 1742 on the internet, and only two things came up.

The first was that Dublin, Ireland, was the location for the premier of George Frederick Handel’s Messiah on April 13th, 1742.

And the only other thing that came up was an extraordinary cold weather event in Ireland between 1740 – 1741, during which time, the Irish population endured 21-months of bizarre weather without known precedent that defied conventional explanation. The cause was not known.

And Handel’s Messiah premieres in Dublin right after the extremely cold, lethal weather event???!!!

So, who shows up within a few years after the Great Frost of Ireland?

Well, in 1744 Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in Frankfurt, Germany.  He established his banking business there in the 1760s, which became the start of an international banking family.

Starting out as a dealer in rare coins, his business grew to include a number of princely patrons, and continued to expand into an international banker and profiteer from the Napoleonic Wars.

Then on February 6th, 1748, Bavarian Illuminati-founder Adam Weishaupt was born in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. He went to a Jesuit school at the age of 7, and was initiated into Freemasonry in 1777.

Weishaupt’s radical views on Illuminism got him in trouble with the ruler in Bavaria when writings of his were intercepted and deemed seditious, and he fled to the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg under the protection of Duke Ernest II starting in 1784.

Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was born on July 15th of 1750, and was the progenitor of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line, which seeded the lineage of the new royals, primarily through first cousins Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, but also through direct marriage of this obscure ducal line marrying directly into other European Royal families.

King George V of Great Britain changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg & Gotha to Windsor on July 17th of 1917, supposedly due to anti-German sentiment generated by World War I.

In 1839, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was born in the United States, the progenitor of the wealthy Rockefeller family and considered to be the wealthiest American of all time. He founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870.

Shortly after I learned about the cold-weather event in Ireland, I was connected by someone to the mud flood community.

I learned about the fantastic research that is being done by people looking at their own communities and other places, around the world, at strong evidence that there was a cataclysmic event involving a massive flood of mud, as recently as 200 – 300 years ago.

It is being called a reset event, and that photographic evidence exists that buildings, canals, rail-lines, tunnels, among other things, were purposefully dug out after the event to the point where they could be used.

The explanation of a mud flood makes a lot of sense to me based on what I am finding and seeing.

A sudden cataclysmic liquefaction event creating a flood of mud accounts for how a highly advanced worldwide civilization of giants…

…could be wiped from the face of the Earth and erased from our collective memory.

I truly believe there was at least one worldwide cataclysm, but perhaps several, that was deliberately-caused by blood-line connected families.

They were shovel-ready to dig out enough of the infrastructure of the original civilization, with a free-energy-generating grid system that was perfectly aligned with the Heavens, to restart enough of that civilization so they could take control of the new civilization, its people and its resources, and then created the conditions to destroy the whole thing, which seems to be what is playing out right now in front of our eyes.

This was Paris on December 10th of 2022, after France beat England in the World Cup match in Qatar.

This journey looking at the estuaries, pine barrens & elite enclaves of the northeast coast of the United States has provided for me what appears to be tangible evidence for what I believe has taken place here, that this powerful area for the original advanced Moorish civilization got blasted through a leyline with tremendous energy artificially running through it, and this caused the land here to be ruined and sunk.

This makes me wonder if what we are told about the sinking of Atlantis took place much more recently than we have been led to believe in our historical narrative.

And it is very interesting to note how the wealthy elite are obsessed with this region and willing to live or vacation here for an exorbitant cost-of-living, even though it is in a ruined state from what it once was.

If all this sounds crazy, remember the old saying “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.”

We have been taught and told egregious lies from cradle to grave to get us to the world we live in today.

The parasitic and multi-dimensionally aware beings behind all of this want us to believe that suffering, sickness, misery, destruction, division, and death was and is our normal state of being, and not question what we have been taught about who we are.

They are the only ones who benefit because they energetically feed on Humanity’s negative emotional states, at the same time they have sucked up all the wealth of the Earth for themselves.

“Interesting Comments & Suggestions I have Received from Viewers – Volume 12” is the last volume in this multi-volume series that wraps up a lengthy compilation of work I have previously done in following the trail of clues pointing to our hidden history provided by suggestions from viewers, and before I start going all over the place once again in a brand-new series from the suggestions you all have provided, taking me to places I would not otherwise be looking or even know about to look.

CP suggested that I look into Vancouver and Long Beach, Washington.

The city of Vancouver in Washington State is located on the north bank of the Columbia River, directly across from Portland, Oregon on the south bank.

In 1806, Lewis & Clark visited the area that became Vancouver, calling it the “only desired situation for settlement west of the Rocky Mountains.”

Fort Vancouver was established as a fur trading outpost and headquarters for the Hudson Bay Company in the Columbia Department of the Pacific Northwest. in 1825.

The fort was a major center for fur-trading in the region, with supplies coming from London via either the Pacific Ocean or overland from the Hudson Bay via the “York Factory Express…”

…the main overland connection between Hudson Bay Headquarters at York Factory, established in 1864, as a settlement and was the central base of operations for the Hudson Bay Company’s control of the fur trade and other business dealings with the First Nations’ of what was known as the time as Rupert’s Land…

…and the principal depot of the Columbia Department at Fort Vancouver, said to have been built in 1824.

Today, a full-scale replica of the fort is open to the public at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

The Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest, incorporated, joint-stock merchandising company in the English-speaking world, having been chartered on May 2nd of 1670 by King Charles II on behalf of French traders who wanted to reach the interior of the North American continent via Hudson’s Bay, and British merchants and noblemen who wanted to back the venture.

The Hudson’s Bay Company was granted wide powers, including exclusive trading rights in the lands crossed by rivers flowing into Hudson Bay.

It is still in operation today as a Canadian retail business group operating department stores in several countries.

I am first going to take a look at was in situated around the old Hudson’s Bay Company Fort Vancouver and Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

The Hudson’s Bay Company Fort Vancouver is located right next to I-5 and the Pacific Highway Interstate Bridge, a pair of steel, vertical-lift truss bridges that carries the Interstate over the Columbia River between Vancouver and Portland.

The vertical lift spans of the bridge rise vertically while remaining parallel with the deck in order to accommodate shipping lane traffic.

Construction was said to have started in 1915 and opened in 1917 as a single bridge carrying two-way traffic.

I would like to point out that would have been in the middle of World War I, which started in 1914 and ended in 1918.

Plausible?

We are told the second bridge opened in 1958.

Pearson Field is located on the other side of the old Hudson’s Bay Company Headquarters.

It is the oldest continuously operating airfield in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the two oldest continuously operating airfields in the United States.

It is in the eastern part of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, and right next to the reconstructed fort.

The history of Pearson Field begins with the landing of a Baldwin Airship on the grounds of the U. S. Army’s Vancouver Barracks, the first Army base in the Pacific Northwest, in 1905 as part of a demonstration during the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.

Piloted by Lincoln Beachey, a pioneer American aviator and barnstormer, the airship was launched from the shore of Guild’s Lake in Portland, and travelled a distance of 8-miles, or 13-kilometers, setting an endurance record for flight at the time.

Directly across the Columbia River from Portland International Airport, Pearson Field’s only runway located directly below the final approach to one of the runways at the Portland Airport.

I am extremely interested in the extensive track trackage, the dark ribbons on this Google Earth screenshot, that I am seeing on both sides of the Columbia River at this location.

On the Vancouver-side of the Columbia River, there is a lot of rail activity paralleling the I-5 Interstate and the Columbia River.

The historic Vancouver Station, said to have been constructed between 1907 and 1908, and is still in use by Amtrak today by three different lines for passenger service.

The Vancouver Station is situated in a triangular junction arrangement of the three rail lines with a railroad switch at each corner, along with BNSF Railway offices, which provides freight services and has major railyards in Vancouver.

The Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 9.6 crosses the Columbia River into Portland just below the triangular junction.

The 2,807-foot, or 856-meter, -long railroad bridge, which was said to have been built between 1906 1908, has a swing-span which pivots on its base to let taller ships pass through.

The 9.6 in the bridge’s name refers to the distance between the bridge, and Portland’s Union Station, which was said to have been built between 1890 and 1896 in the Romanesque Revival architectural style.

While Portland still has a streetcar system, it is not nearly as extensive as the streetcar system that existed in 1904, the year before Portland hosted the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.

To put this in perspective, this was a view of Portland’s 3rd Avenue in 1904.

Lots of people walking; electric streetcars and electrical lines…and horse-drawn carriages. No cars yet. Mass production of cars didn’t come along until 1908, four-years after this photo was taken.

Oh yes, and the massive and ornate heavy-masonry buildings with columns and archways, and much more.

At one time in Vancouver’s history, the neighborhood of Sifton was the terminus of an early electric trolley operated by the North Coast Power Company that also served Orchards from 1910 to 1926, as part of the Orchards-Sifton Route that in part ran along Vancouver’s Main Street.

On the Portland-side of the Columbia River, there is also a lot of railway activity showing-up in the wester part of North Portland, all around the edges of what is called the Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area.

Along with the rail-lines, the Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area is surrounded by warehouses, port terminals, and commercial areas.

It is one the largest urban freshwater wetlands in the United States, and provides habitat for a wide variety of wildlife.

Wetlands, estuaries, marsh-lands, and the like are all on my radar of things to look for when I do research because I have come to believe they are not as advertised as a natural occurrence.

For example, when I took a look around the Smith & Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, I noticed a star fort-point-shape in the landscape.

The Bybee Lakes Hope Center is located on top of it, a homeless shelter since October of 2020.

Prior to that, it was the Wapato Jail, said to have cost $58-million to built, but which was never used as a jail because Multonomah County could not afford to operate it as such.

There is one more place I want to look at in Vancouver, Washington, before moving on to Long Beach, Washington.

The House of Providence was a former orphanage and school.

We are told that it was designed by Mother Joseph Pariseau of the Sacred Heart in the Sisters of Providence order of the Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and built in 1873.

As well as the name, not a particularly feminine-looking sister.

Mother Joseph led a group of members of her congregation to the Pacific Northwest, where they established a network of schools and healthcare for American settlers to the region.

In order to raise money for the construction of the House of Providence, Mother Joseph was said to have led begging tours through mining camps.

The House of Providence functioned as a school until 1969, and is an event venue today.

Mother Joseph was credited with the completion of eleven hospitals; seven academies; five schools for native american children; and two orphanages.

It is interesting to note that Mother Joseph was one of the two individuals chosen to represent Washington State at the National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Capitol building in Washington, DC, for her accomplishments.

Per CPs suggestion, now I am going to take a look at Long Beach, Washington, which has long been touted as the “World’s Longest Beach.”

Long Beach is recorded as having been started when Henry Harrison Tinker purchased a land claim in 1880, after which time he platted the town and called it Tinkerville.

Between 1888 and 1930, the Ilwaco Railway and Navigation Company, a narrow-gauge railway, ran-up the whole Long Beach Peninsula.

Between the advent of the automobile and financial difficulties, the railroad was abandoned by its owners on July 12th of 1930.

By the summer of 1931, the railroad’s physical infrastructure and rolling stock had been sold to a scrapping firm in Portland, and the rails and ties ripped up from the road-bed.

In its hey-day, Long Beach became a resort for the wealthy, where besides the Tinker Hotel, there was the historic Portland Hotel, which burned down in December of 1914 and was never replaced.

There was also the Driftwood Hotel, which no longer exists, but I can’t find a reference about what happened to it…

…

…and the Crystal Waters Natatorium, which featured indoor seawater pools for swimmers.

You can still see one of the “World’s largest frying pans” in Long Beach, an attraction there since the early 1940s.

Leadbetter Point State Park is at the tip of Long Beach Peninsula, and is a nature preserve and public recreation area.

Leadbetter Farms is a private resort, and is located just outside of Leadbetter Point State Park.

The Willapa National Wildlife Refuge borders Leadbetter Point State Park to the south of it, and is described as 11,000 acres, or 45-kilometers-squared of sand dunes, sand beaches, mudflats, grasslands, and saltwater and freshwater marshes.

The Willapa National Wildlife Refuge also has old-growth forests, like the ancient cedar grove found on Long Island in Willapa Bay.

At the southern tip of the Long Beach Peninsula, we find Fort Canby at Cape Disappointment State Park.

Fort Cape Disappointment was said to have been built on the northern side of the mouth of the Columbia River between 1863 and 1864 during the American Civil War, and was later known as Fort Canby…

…along with Fort Stevens in the same time frame on the southern side of the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, west of Astoria, Oregon…

…and Fort Columbia, just east of Fort Canby in Washington State, and said to have been built between 1896 and 1904.

We are told these three forts constituted the “Three Fort Harbor Defense System” at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Fort Clatsop is on the Oregon-side of the Columbia River, near Fort Stevens, and was where the members of the Lewis & Clark expedition built Fort Clastrop for shelter and protection, in the winter of 1805, and to officially establish the American presence there, with the American flag flying over the fort.

I looked on Google Earth to see if I could detect the remnants of a star fort on the grounds of the Fort Clatsop National Monument, which if one was there, the remnants of it are most likely covered by trees.

Next, I am going to look at Spokane at the request of DA & BM & MH69.

Several places there were suggested.

I am going to start at the Joe Albi stadium, a former outdoor athletic stadium that was primarily used for high school football, and is currently in the process of being demolished.

A middle school is planned for the former stadium site.

This is what we are told about it.

It is located on part of what was the U. S. Army’s Baxter General Hospital, a very large hospital facility which was said to have been built starting in 1942 to accommodate the expected need for military hospital services for all branches of the military, and grew to have 400 buildings and became a self-contained community.

By the end of 1945, the hospital was closed, leaving the city of Spokane with having to do something with the location, and during which time most of the buildings and equipment were sold to outside interests and removed. Part of the location became a Veterans’ Affairs hospital, and part of it was used to construct the new stadium

Taking only four-months to build, the stadium opened as the “Spokane Memorial Stadium” for high school football games.

The stadium was renamed in 1962 for Joe Albi, an attorney and civic leader in Spokane who led the fund-raising effort the construction of the stadium.

It was in use as a sporting and concert venue over the years, with its seating capacity of 28,646, until it was permanently closed in January of 2022.

The Old Flour Mill in Spokane was said to have been built in 1895, and one of a series of mills that were built along the Spokane River Falls, and described physical reminder of the importance of water power in Spokane’s history.

It didn’t become operational, apparently, until 1900, because of the property had become the subject of an international lawsuit because of issues arising from the way it had been financed.

The old flour mill was closed in 1970, renovated, and re-opened in 1973 as the office-retail-restaurant space it is today.

The Historic Davenport Hotel is still the Grandest Hotel in Spokane.

It is a luxury hotel in downtown Spokane.

The Davenport Hotel was said to have been commissioned by a group of Spokane citizens headed by Louis Davenport, the hotel’s first proprietor.

The architect who was given credit for designing the building was Kirtland Kelsey Cutter, and it was said to have been built in 1914.

Notable features included the first hotel air conditioning in the United States; a central vacuum system; and a pipe organ.

In 1985, the Davenport was closed, and the demolition of the grand building was considered.

However, a local property developer bought the building in 2000, and restored the Davenport to its former grandeur, and it reopened as a hotel in September of 2002.

The Patsy Clark Mansion in Spokane was also attributed to the architect Kirtland Kelsey Cutter, circa 1897 – 1898, having been hired by mining millionaire Patsy Clark to replace his mansion that had been burned down in the Great Fire of Spokane in 1889.

The mansion now houses a law firm and offers private rentals for small events.

The Spokesman-Review Tower in Spokane was said to have been built starting in March of 1890, and completed the following year, and became the home of the Spokane Falls Review Newspaper.

At one point, the building was home to two newspapers and a hotel, but by the economic downturn of 1893, the main newspaper became the competing “Spokesman-Review,” which continues to occupy the Review building in the present-day.

Manito Park in Spokane was established around 1904, with the Olmsted Brothers credited with the landscaping in 1913 as part of their plan for landscaping Spokane’s parks.

There was a zoo at Manito Park until 1932, when it was closed down due to funding issues created by the Great Depression.

Manito Park contains such attractions as:

Duncan Garden, said to have been designed and built in 1913 as a European-style garden, with a large granite fountain…

…the Gaiser Conservatory, a greenhouse which has one wing housing desert plants and the other tropical plants…

…and Japanese Gardens.

Next, HW suggested that I look at the Palouse geographic region, which is comprised of southeastern Washington, northcentral Idaho, and parts of northeast Oregon.

It is a distinct geographic region, and a major agricultural area, especially for wheat and legumes.

There are four main rural centers in the Palouse that are located geographically close to each other.

Three are in Washington State – Palouse, Pullman, and Colfax – and one in Idaho – Moscow.

Palouse is a small agricultural community today, with a population of 998 in 2010.

It was founded in 1874, and incorporated in 1888, the same year it was devastated by a massive fire.

Over the next decades, Main Street was rebuilt, becoming a major pioneer-era commercial district for the region.

Here are comparison photos of Main Street circa 1916 and circa 2006.

The railroad arrived in Palouse in 1888 with the Spokane and Palouse Railroad, part of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Then in 1903, the Potlatch Lumber Company, a subsidiary of Weyerhauser bought out several mills and timber stock in the region, including the Palouse River Lumber Company.

In 1905, they brought in the Washington, Idaho, and Montana Railroad that ran from Palouse to Purdue, Idaho.

Then in 1906, an Electric Interurban line called the Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad, ran from Spokane, through Palouse, to Moscow, Idaho.

The company slowly converted to bus service, and the last electric rail service to Moscow was in 1939.

Palouse remains a rich farming area today, with main crops of wheat, barley, dry peas, garbanzos, and lentils.

Pullman is the largest city in Whitman County, Washington, and was named after industrialist George Pullman, manufacturer of the Pullman Sleeping Car.

Settlers arrived in the area in 1871, and Pullman was incorporated in 1881.

Like Palouse, Pullman is a fertile agricultural area.

It is also home to the flagship and oldest campus of Washington State University, which was established as an agricultural college in 1890, and is also one of the oldest land-grant Universities in the American West.

Pullman is situated across four major hills which divide the city into nearly equal quarters.

The four hills are:

Military Hill, which was named for the Pullman Military College that opened in 1891 and burned down in 1893…

…Methodist Hill, which is now known as Pioneer Hill, with this photo taken from it of Pullman during a flood which devastated the region in 1910…

…College Hill, the location of Washington State University…

…and Sunnyside Hill.

With the first settlers arriving in 1870, Colfax, Washington, was incorporated in 1873, and named for Schuyler Colfax, Vice-President of the United States under President Ulysses S. Grant from 1869 to 1873.

Colfax was situated at the junction of the three railroad lines, as well as the confluence of the north and south forks of the Palouse River.

The Colfax Trail is a 3-mile, or 5-kilometer, local trail converted from an old railway line.

The former St. Ignatius Hospital in Colfax was said to have been constructed in 1892 under the supervision of Mother Joseph, and served as a hospital until 1964, and then as an Assisted Living home until 2000.

The former St. Ignatius Hospital was abandoned in 2003, though opened-up for ghost tours in 2015, and under new ownership since 2021.

The Palouse River flood of 1910 significantly impacted Colfax, and other cities in the region.

Among other things, the floodwaters left Colfax and Moscow cut-off from the outside world, without train and telegraph service.

The city of Moscow in Idaho is an agricultural and commercial hub for the Palouse region.

The first permanent settlers came here in 1871, with the first U. S. post office opening here in 1872, and the old post office and federal building pictured here was said to have been built in 1911…

…and today serves as the Moscow City Hall.

Moscow is the home of the University of Idaho, the state’s only University for 71-years.

The east-facing Administration building on campus was said to have been built between 1907 and 1909…

…to replace the original Administration building, which was said to have been built in 1899 after having been destroyed by fire in 1906.

There’s much more to find here in the Palouse, but there are two more places I am going to look at in Washington State.

MB brought Snoqualmie Falls and the Ballard Locks to my attention.

First, Snoqualmie Falls.

MB said that the Snoqualmie Falls are 100-feet, or 30-meters, higher than Niagara Falls.

MB said there was an incredible underground, built in-the-bedrock power plant under Snoqualmie Falls.

He said he was inside it back around Y2K, and said it had an ancient feeling, but all the electronics were either updated or being updated.

This is what we are told about it.

The Snoqualmie Falls Hydroelectric Plant 1 was completed in 1899, and was the first completely underground hydroelectric plant ever built in the world.

The story is that Seattle engineer Charles Baker envisioned the hydroelectric plant when he passed by the Snoqualmie Falls on the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway routinely during his work.

Baker became unemployed after the Panic of 1893, and sought to build the hydroelectric powerplant.

He received funding from his father, wealthy businessman, William T. Baker, and formed the Snoqualmie Falls Power Company, and bought falls and surrounding land in 1897.

And that’s how we are told the underground Snoqualmie Falls Hydroelectric Plant came to be.

Plant 2 was built in 1910 on the right-bank of the Snoqualmie River.

In Seattle, the Ballard Locks, also known as the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, is a canal-lock complex in the west-end of Salmon Bay in Seattle’s Lake Washington Ship Canal, and carries more boat traffic than any lock system in the United States.

It was said to have been constructed between 1909 and 1917 by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers under the direction of Hiram M. Chittenden.

The Fish Ladder was on the southside of the Ballard Locks enables the safe passage of salmon to their upstream spawning grounds from late spring to early fall.

One viewer suggested that I look into the Palacio Municipal Alamos, in Alamos in Mexico’s Sonora State.

This building is the Government Palace, said to have been built between 1877 and 1899, which houses the offices of the municipal government, as well as state and federal government. The viewer said “the preserved antiquitech tells it all!”

Often used as a flag pole, this type of rod or pole feature was typically found on historic photos of buildings, as well as tall, steeple structures, but in most cases have been removed if the historic building is even still standing, like at the Prescott Center for the Performing Arts, formerly the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Prescott, Arizona…

…and the Grand Theater in Salem, Oregon, the building of which in 1900 was credited to the International Order of the Odd Fellows, and served also as their Chemeketa Lodge No. 1.

Today it houses retail businesses, offices, and a ballroom, and other facilities rented for special events.

Inside the entrance of Alamo’s Palacio Municipal, there is a stage, a popular space for concerts, plays, and other gatherings.

Each office entrance is framed by painted wood Corinthian columns and an archway.

I decided to look around at some of the other places in Alamos.

The Iglesia de la Purisima Concepcion is the tallest building in Alamos, and the center of spiritual and cultural life in the silver-mining town of Alamos since its dedication in 1826.

The church and tower is framed by the archway of the Moorish Kiosk in the center of the Main Square of Alamos.

There is also a Moorish Kiosk in Hermosillo, the capital of Mexico’s Sonora State, said to have been brought from Florence, Italy, to the Plaza Zaragoza in the early 1900s, and located is between the Hermosillo Cathedral on one side…

…and the Hermosillo Municipal Building on the other.

The best-known Moorish Kiosk in Mexico is in the Alameda Park in the center of the Colonia neighborhood in Mexico City.

The person who gets the credit for it was a Mexican engineer named Jose Ramon Ibarrola.   He  is said to have designed it to represent Mexico in the New Orleans International Expo in 1884 -1885.  We are told it was transported there, as well as to the St. Louis Missouri Fair in 1904, and then subsequently came back to Mexico. 

Just curious ~ by what means could they have transported this huge, highly ornate structure, twice, in the late 1800s and early 1900s?

DX suggested that I look at San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.

San Cristobal de las Casas is considered the cultural capital of Chiapas in the Central Highlands of the region.

The city’s center is described as maintaining its Spanish Colonial lay-out, with red-tile roofs, cobblestone streets, and wrought-iron balconies.

San Cristobal de las Casas was designated as a “Magical Village” in 2003, and was declared the “Most Magical of the Magical Villages” by Mexican President Felipe Calderon in 2010.

The center of the city is it’s main plaza, the Zocalo, which has this Kiosk in the center of it, which was said to have been added in the early 20th-century.

The city’s Cathedral is located north of the main plaza.

The overall structure is said to contain European, Baroque, Moorish and indigenous influences.

The Neo-Classical Style Palacio Municipal, the City Hall of San Cristobal de las Casas was completed in 1893, and said to have been the result of remodelling a building that was there previously, but had been destroyed by fire in a 1863 that had resulted from riots between imperialists and republicans.

The individual credited with the remodelling of the Palacio Municipal was Carlos Z. Flores, described as a Neoclassical Engineer,who was also said to have been involved with the building of the Santa Lucia Church between 1884 and 1892, among other places.

Now, on over to England.

MF asked me to look at Whitehall Park in Darwen in Lancashire in the United Kingdom.

Whitehall Park first opened as a public park in 1879, and was added to in 1887, 1899, and 1902.

The park occupies 16-acres at the southern end of Darwen.

Features at Whitehall Park include:

The Catlow Drinking Fountain, described as a cast-iron drinking fountain donated by John Catlow and Sons to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII, the oldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and erected in 1906 over a natural spring.

The Lych Gate on Queen’s Road, also known as the “Wishing Well” entrance, connecting the park with the main road…

…and the Walmsey Sundial, said to have been donated in 1911, on the same day the Lych Gate was officially opened, to mark the coronation of King George V.

The Darwen, also known as Jubilee, Tower can be accessed via trails on Darwen Moors from Whitehall Park.

The 85-foot, or 26-meter-, high stone tower opened to the public on September 24th of 1898, and was said to have been built to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee under the supervision of architect R. W. Smith-Saville.

There is even a waterfall at Whitehall Park, surrounded by, and flowing over, a curiously built-looking wall structure.

Next, JM brought “Northumberlandia” to my attention, the “Lady of the North.”

The world’s largest work of Earth Art is 10-miles, or 16-kilometers, north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the Northumberland region of England.

The “Lady of the North” was completed in 2012, and made from one-and-a-half-million tons of Earth coming from the development of the neighboring Shotton Surface mine, as it was decided for the project to use the land excavated for the mine as a sculpture instead of returning it to the surface mine at the end of the project.

Other things you can find on the grounds of Northumberlandia include this, whatever this means.

American-born landscape designer Charles Jencks was credited with the design of the “Lady of the North.”

Jencks, who passed away in 2019, had moved to the United Kingdom in 1965.

Other landscape works attributed to him included these in Scotland:

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Dumfries…

…Jupiter Artland outside of Edinburgh…

…and the Crawick Multiverse in Sanquhar.

Now, bear in mind that this modern “Earthwork Art” is in a place that is covered with ancient earthworks, megalithic stone circles, and landscape art that looks just like this.

Among many others, you find it at places like Glastonbury Tor in southern England

…and Silbury Hill near the Avebury neolithic complex, called the largest prehaistoric man-made mound in Europe.

Avebury was one of the principal ceremonial sites of neolithic Britain, dating back to over 5,000-years-ago, as it was believed to have been constructed in the 3,000 BC time-period.

I find it interesting that a modern landscape designer was capable of doing exactly the same thing that ancient Britain’s builders were doing.

The “Angel of the North” is also located in Northumberland, in Gateshead. It is the largest sculpture of an angel in the world.

The “Angel of the North” is 8-miles, or 13-kilometers, south of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the opposite direction of the “Lady of the North.”

The “Angel of the North” is a contemporary sculpture that was completed in 1998.

I first learned about this sculpture several years ago, before I started doing my own research.

When I saw it, I thought it was really fugly.

It is located near the A1 & A167 Motorways, and the East Coast Main Line electrified railway, a key transportation artery between London & Edinburgh that runs parallel to the A1.

I am going to go out on a limb and say I don’t believe that all of this is coincidental. The “Lady of the North” on one-side of Newcastle and the “Angel of the North” on the other side of Newcastle, with a short-distance in-between them.

There is a hidden message/configuration going on here, and judging from the fugliness of the “Angel of the North,” I don’t think it is a benevolent one.

One more thing I want to make mention of in Northumberlandthat I thought was interesting before I depart here is that Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the cities around it are completely surrounded by national park land, to include:

Northumberland National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which contains Hadrian’s Wall, as well crumbling castles and forts…

…the Kielder Forest Park is adjacent to the Northumberland National Park, a forestry plantation which started planting trees in the 1920s, and which also has creepy artwork going on there.

The Kielder Water is also located there, a reservoir containing the biggest man-made lake in northern Europe.

The North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) is adjacent to the Kielder Forest, and is the northernmost section of the Pennine Range which runs north-south through northern England.

Its landscape is described as open heather Moors between deep dales, upland rivers, and hay meadows.

The Yorkshire Dales National Park is adjacent to the North Pennines Area of Natural Beauty.

The extensive limestone cave system in the Yorkshire Dales National Park are a major area for caving in the UK.

The Nidderdale AONB is adjacent to the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

The area is said to contain over 6,000-years of human activity, with almost continuous human settlement over this time.

The last National Park surrounding the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area in northeast England is the North York Moors National Park.

It seemed important to bring these parks, and their relationship to the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area to your attention.

Now, over to the States.

JS suggested that I look into Excelsior Springs in Missouri, located on the East Fork of the Fishing River.

The City Hall of Excelsior Springs today used to be the called the “Hall of Waters.”

This building was said to have been built between 1936 and 1937 by the architectural firm of Keene & Simpson, which would have been in the years between the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II>

The Hall of Waters was significant as being on the location of one of the only natural supplies of irono-manganese mineral water in the U. S. that was discovered in 1880.

The Regent Spring was said to have been discovered in 1881, a second iron-manganese spring in the area.

Here’s what we are told about the Regent Spring.

The waters of the Regent Spring were one of four Spring waters bottled by the Excelsior Springs Bottling Company, and was considered to be the strongest iron-manganese spring=water in the world.

The healing properties of this water were substantial, including prompt and permanent relief of things like all kidney and bladder problems, including Bright’s Disease; Diabetes, inflammation; rheumatism; and dyspepsia.

Long story short, by 1935, the well at the spring had been capped after having been piped, along with that of nine other private wells, into the Hall of Waters, and the wooden pavilion at the Regent Spring was demolished.

Altogether, four different types of mineral water were found in downtown Excelsior Springs, with more varieties than anywhere on Earth.

From the discovery the springs starting in 1881, Excelsior Springs was said to have quickly become the largest health resort in the state, with the town having electricity, a good sewer system and fine hotels.

The Elm Hotel illustrated in this post card was said to have opened in 1912…

…is still in operation as The Elms Hotel and Spa today.

Other fine lodging places in Excelsior Springs, like the Hotel Castle Rock…

…and the Chadwick Hotel are long gone.

RW suggested that I look at Mount Inge in Texas, saying that it seems a strange hillock in the middle of a flat plain…almost like it doesn’t belong or is concealing something.

Mount Inge is described as a volcanic plug of Uvalde phonolite basalt.

Some very interesting things popped up immediately around Mount Inge.

Mount Inge is a land feature found at the Fort Inge Uvalde County Park in Texas.

Fort Inge was said to have been first established as a base for U. S. Army troops in March of 1849 to protect the mail route from Indian Raids on the San Antonio – El Paso Road.

The foundation is all that remains of a limestone building that was said to have been the fort’s hospital.

Fort Inge was closed as a military garrison in March of 1869.

The location opened as a County Park in 1961.

Four groups of springs are found along the Leona River in a 9-mile, or 14.5-kilometer, -long stretch south of the city of Uvalde, known collectively as Leona Springs.

At one time, found at higher elevations, now they are nearly all beneath the surface of the Leona River.

One group of the Leona Springs is located in the Fort Inge Uvalde County Park, where there is what is described as an old irrigation reservoir, a popular spot for fishing and picnicking.

The city of Uvalde is located in the Texas Hill Country, 80-miles, or 130-kilometers, west of downtown San Antonio, and 54-miles, or 87-kilometers, east of the Mexican border.

Uvalde is the county seat, and was originally founded in 1853 as the town of Encina, but renamed after the county was organized in 1856 after a former Spanish governor of the region.

Uvalde was a stop on the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad, which operated from 1909 to 1956, when the railroad merged into the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1956.

The Grand Opera House in Uvalde, known as the Janey Slaughter Briscoe Grand Opera House.

The oldest functioning theater in the State of Texas, it was said to have been built in 1891, and one of Southwest Texas’ premier locations for plays, musicals, and cultural performances.

Next, SS asked me to look at Williams Lake in British Columbia.

Williams Lake is the second-largest city in what is known as the “Cariboo,” after the city of Quesnel.

The “Cariboo” region is in the Central Interior of British Columbia, and named after the caribou that were once abundant in the reigon.

While the story of Williams Lake is said to have begun thousands of years ago by the First Nations people here, the outside settlement of the area started in 1860 with the Cariboo Gold Rush.

The Cariboo Gold Rush started in 1858, when gold was discovered at Hills Bar.

Hills Bar was adjacent to Fort Yale on the Fraser River, founded in 1848 by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and today is the inhabited town of Yale.

At the time Williams Lake was being settled and organized, there were two pack trails leading to the gold mines that met in Williams Lake, which became the center of local government.

In addition to the courthouse and jail, a road house was established for the huge pack trains and freight wagon convoys that serviced the mining operations.

After the Cariboo Gold Rush days, Williams Lake was said to have been re-born in 1919 with the construction of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway.

The Roman Catholic Church established the St. Joseph’s Mission half-way between Williams Lake and the Roadhouse in July of 1867, and in 1891 it opened as the St. Joseph’s School, and Indian Residential School.

Over the 90-years it operated, St. Joseph’s became one of the most notorious of the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

In 2013, Orange Shirt Day was established as a memorial to the victims of the Canadian Residential School system that is observed nationally on September 30th every year.

RS suggested that I check out the Wickford stone in Rhode Island.

Originally known as the Narragansett Runestone, it is inscribed with two rows of rune symbols.

Here is what we are told.

The Runestone was originally in Narragansett Bay, but in 2012, the 2 1/2 ton runestone was stolen.

In April of 2013, the State Attorney General announced that the runestone was recovered after someone came forward with information, and it was taken to the University of Rhode Island School of Oceanography for testing, which never took place for fear of damaging the stone.

In October of 2015, the runestone was moved to Wickford for long-term public viewing.

R. S. also mentioned the Great Swamp Obelisk in West Kingston Rhode Island, saying it is a huge granite obelisk in the middle of nowhere in the woods.

Called the Great Swamp Fight Monument, it is said to be a memorial to a battle that took place during King Phillip’s War in the winter of 1675 between early English settlers and the Wampanoag people of the region.

Metacomet, also known as Philip, the sachem, or ruler of the Wampanoag, with growing tensions between the settlers and the people native to the region, was angered with the violation by the English of treaties and agreements, and built a coalition of various native tribes in what became New England.

The Narragansett tribe was seeking to remain neutral, and while the sachem Conanchet pledged to remain neutral on one-hand, did not respond to demands to turn-over any of the Wampanoag people sheltering in the Great Swamp, including non-combatants.

This was used as a justification by the Puritan Forces of the Confederancy of New England to strike a fort of the neutral Narragansett in the middle of the swamp.

Ultimately on December 19th of 1675, colonial forces marched from Smith’s Castle in Kingston…

… and attacked the over 1,000 Narragansett at the fort in the Great Swamp, and were crushed in that one-day by the United Forces of the Massachusetts, Connecticut and Plymouth colonies.

ERT asked me to look at Paterson, New Jersey, where she saw what looked to be a city-wide system of castle walls, moats and obelisk structures that look like chimneys.

In 1791, the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, helped found the “Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures,” which was said to have been established to harness the Great Falls of the Passaic River in order to secure American independence from British Manufacturers.

The Society in turn founded Paterson in 1791, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America.

The 77-foot, or 24-meter, -high falls and a system of water raceways that harnessed the falls power for the mills in the area until 1914.

There were dozens of mill buildings and other factories associated with textiles, firearms, silk, and the manufacture of railroad locomotives.

There were numerous breweries in Paterson, including the Hinchliffe Brewing and Malting Company.

Founded in 1861, this brewery produced 75,000 barrels of beer per year until it was closed in 1920 due to Prohibition.

This is all that remains of the Hinchliffe Brewery, what was once described as a “state-of-the-art” facility at 63 Governor Street, right next to the railroad tracks.

The Hinchliffe Stadium sits above the Great Falls of the Passaic River.

It is a 10,000-seat stadium said to have been built between 1931 and 1932, and used as a sports and auto-racing venue.

Left derelict for many years, the Hinchliffe Stadium has a $94-million restoration project currently underway.

Next, SC requested that I look into his hometown of Plano, lllinois, located in Kendall County, near Chicago.

The foundation of the city’s development was said to start with the production of the “Marsh Harvester” in the early 1860s.

The Marsh Harvester was a reaper and a hand-binder on which two men rode and bound sheaves by hand.

The “Marsh Harvester” led to the establishment of the Plano Manufacturing Company in 1863.

The Plano Manufacturing Company was one of five companies that were combined as part of a merger arranged in 1902 by J. P. Morgan to form the International Harvester Company.

The four other companies were the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, the Deering Harvesting Company, the Champion Line, and the Milwaukee Harvester Company.

The Plano Molding Company is headquartered in Plano, and manufactures fishing tackle boxes, plastic containers, storage units, and “caboodle” cosmetic cases.

An agricultural city, Plano is situated along a major trade route and rail artery.

The Plano Hotel is one of the oldest buildings in Plano, and was said to have been built in 1868 in the Italianate architectural style in the downtown commercial district at the corner of Main and West Streets.

I found a reference saying the historic building sat vacant for many years and was purchased in 2018 for renovation into either luxury apartments or office space.

Now I am going to take a look at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the request of MJW.

The American Swedish Institute is a museum and cultural center, dedicated to the historic role that Sweden and Swedish-Americans have played in American History.

It is housed in what is described as a turn-of-the-century mansion that was built for Swedish immigrants Swan and Christina Tumblad.

Swan Tumblad immigrated with his family to southern Minnesota in 1868, at the age of 8.

His parents were farmers, and in a rags-to-riches story, Swan left the family farm for Minneapolis in 1879, and entered the newspaper business as a type-setter for several Swedish-language newspapers.

He eventually became the publisher and sole owner of one them, and from which he became wealthy.

Swan met his wife Christina Nilsson, also an immigrant from Sweden, at an International Organization of Good Templars meeting, a fraternal organization that was part of the Temperance Movement promoting the avoidance from alcohol & drugs.

Notice the shared symbolism that the International Organization of Good Templars has with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

We are told that Swan Tumblad commissioned the building of a 33-room mansion for himself and his family in 1903, spending $1.5-million in the process.

Supposedly, the family moved into the mansion in 1908 until 1915, when they spent most of their time living in an apartment across the street.

Then after Swan’s wife died in `1929, he and his daughter moved into the apartment full-time and turned the mansion into a museum.

Hmmm. Nothing strange about that, now is there?!

The last place I am going to look at in this installment is the viewer suggestion of the Stonewall Jackson Training School, saying that it was a house of horrors where A LOT of orphans ended up.

The Stonewall Jackson Training School was in Concord, North Carolina.

Concord is just northeast of Charlotte, and is a place where distant cousins of mine live.

I can remember hearing the very noisy Concord Motor Speedway near my great Aunt Eileen’s house when my parents would visit there when I was growing up.

The Concord Motor Speedway was closed in 2019, and had the world’s fastest half-mile tri-oval.

The Stonewall Jackson Training Center was established in 1907 and opened in 1909 as the state’s first Juvenile Detention Center.

Of the original 800-acre campus, five-buildings on 58-acres are still in use today as a “Youth Development Center” and a “Juvenile Detention Center.”

The Stonewall Jackson Training School Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the designation includes 50-buildings and 71-acres.

Interesting to note that these historic buildings are in a derelict state.

The school was said to have been established to provide a place for troubled white youths separate from the adult prison population, and were generally incarcerated for minor scrapes with the law including school truancy.

In 1948, the state established a eugenics program at the school, and for the given reason of limiting feeblemindedness and improve the population, it was the site of the sterilization of six teenage boys.

North Carolina was one of the last states to perform sterilizations on people under state care.

I am starting a brand-new series called “All Over the Place Via Your Suggestions,” where I will continue to research your suggestions, and follow all the many clues pointing to our hidden history that are all around us and hidden in plain sight

I am also continuing to work on my “Who is Represented in the National Statuary Hall” series, with my research on part six of the series close to completion.

I was motivated to look into the National Statuary Hall in part because of finding historical characters like Mother Joseph Pariseau, featured in this post in Vancouver, Washington, that struck me as odd that they would even be in there, and I consider it the gift that keeps on giving as far as hidden history is concerned.

In this multi-volume series that is a compilation of work I have previously done, I am sharing suggestions and information viewers have shared with me, in their journeys and explorations, and these typically bring up related subjects that I have encountered in my own experience and research.

I am going to start with viewer recommendations of places in Tasmania.

“Walls of Jerusalem” In Tasmania?!

We are told the park got its name from geological features resembling the walls of Jerusalem.

Let’s take a tour, starting at Herod’s Gate.

Lake Salome is adjacent to Herod’s Gate.

The Pool of Bethesda is southeast of Lake Salome, between the lake…

…and what is called “The Temple” and “Mount Jerusalem.”

King David’s Peak…

…what is known as Solomon’s Buttress or Throne…

…are on the other side of the West Wall, across from Mount Herod and Lake Salome.

The East Wall runs between Mount Jerusalem and “The Temple,” to mention a few of the features of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park.

I believe the truth of the ancient civilization was hidden in plain site, and have come to believe that ancient infrastructure has been called natural in order to cover it up.

For comparison of similarity of appearance, there is a boulderfield on King David’s Peak in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park Tasmania on the left, and a feature actually called “The Boulderfield” in Long’s Peak in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park on the right.

Was there a Jerusalem in more than one place?

I found a reference awhile back that said the original Jerusalem was in Peru, but that it was called Heru-salem, or Hierosolym, and was said to be built by the Egyptians as their capital, and is where they “laid the cord” in Cuzco, and that the Temple of Heru in the Egyptian language is Medu Neter was Pr-Heru.  Peru. 

And was there a hidden connection between the Egyptians and Israelites that we have not been told about?

And does “laying the cord” pertain to the “Ceque System?”

The Ceque System, of which the Coricancha in Cuzco was the center, the most important temple in the Inca Empire, involved at least 42 ley-lines radiating out from this center.

Literature available on this topic suggests that it referred to the Inca empire, which was partitioned into four divisions, and the empire called itself  Tahuantinsuyu (“four parts”), and the boundary lines separating the four also radiated out from the Coricancha itself.

A chronicler of the time, Bernabe Cobe, wrote that the ceques were conceived as straight lines diverging radially from the Coricancha, the symbolic center of the world, and extending out into the cosmos. 

This picture of me was taken at the Coricancha on a trip I took to Cuzco with a group in 2018.

Those energetic effects the camera picked up on at the Coricancha only occurred in that one room in the whole place!

ZG sent me a couple of things related to Macchu Picchu, described as a 15th-century Inca Citadel located 50-miles, or 80-kilometers, northwest of Cuzco, first visited by Europeans in the 19th-century.

He shared footage with me that he took on a four-day hike on the way to Macchu Picchu many years ago, and brought the pyramidal shape he caught on film to my attention.

ZG also shared a link with the before-and-after photos of the excavation of Macchu Picchu, with the before photo having been taken by explorer Hiram Bingham before the major excavation of the site began in 1912.

Macchu Picchu is known to have a number of astronomical alignments as well…

…which is also the case with the Pyramids and Sphinx on the Giza Plateau in Egypt.

One more thing.

It is interesting to note that the Rothschilds purchased Jerusalem, in what became Israel, in 1829, and subsequently acquired considerable land in Palestine in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Just a few things to think about what really might be going on here as opposed to what we have been told.

The other place in Tasmania that was brought to my attention by WS is called “The Candlestick.”

“The Candlestick,” a popular destination for rock-climbers, is described as a 197-foot, or 60-meter, – high dolerite sea cliff.

This photo of the Candlestick got my attention.

It sure looks like there is a solar-alignment with “The Candlestick” in-between the surrounding cliffs.

Coincidence?

Let’s take a look at some other places.

Here is the moon in alignment with what is called Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona.

And another solar alignment with the Two Brothers Rock at the island group known as Fernando de Noronha off the coast of Brazil near Natal.

This is what is called Chimney Rock and Companion Rock in Colorado.

There is a major Lunar Standstill event at Chimney Rock & Companion Rock in Colorado that takes place every 18-years, with a window of a three-year period, where the moon rises on the eastern horizon, and when the moon comes as far north as it possibly can, it is framed in the gap between Chimney Rock and Companion Rock.

This cyclic event is visible from the nearby Great House.

Chimney Rock is described as a “Chacoan Outlier,” a remnant of what was named the Chaco Culture after Chaco Canyon, and was a network of archeological sites primarily in northwestern New Mexico that dominated the region between 900 AD and 1300 AD.

It is interesting to note the similarities between these structures at Chimney Rock in Colorado on the left; Sacsayhuaman in Peru, on the top right; and Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, on the bottom right.

Here is an example of a sun dagger at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon.

There are three large stone slabs there leaning against the cliff which channel light and shadow markings on to two spiral petroglyphs in the cliff wall that form daggers of light at solstices and equinoxes.

Here are a couple of what would be considered more modern astronomical alignments.

Manhattanhenge is an annual event during which the setting sun or the rising sun is aligned with the East-West street grid of Manhattan on dates evenly spaced around the summer solstice and winter solstice. 

Recently, local historian John Fitzgerald discovered that the Basilica of St. John the Baptist in St. John’s, in the province of Newfoundland & Labrador, was positioned so that the sunrise of the winter and summer solstice align with very specific stained glass windows.

He found out that on the winter solstice, the sun rises almost directly in front of the building, and at the summer solstice, it goes down through the center window in the back of the building, behind the altar.

JP, who lives in Estonia’s island of Sauremaa that divides the Baltic Sea from the Gulf of Riga, provided me his findings of a triangulation between the island of Sauremaa; the island of Fernando de Noronha off the coast of Brazil; and Port Victoria, the capital of the island Republic of the Seychelles, located of the East Coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean; and in the center of the triangle is a volcano in N’Djamena, the capital of the African country of Chad.

I found a triangulated relationship awhile back between the islands of Bermuda and Fernando de Noronha in the Atlantic Ocean, and the Channel Islands in the English Channel.

All three places have a high-concentration of star forts for their small sizes.

SC suggested that I look into Bisbee, Arizona.

Bisbee is located 11-miles, or 18-kilometers, north of the border with Mexico.

Bisbee was founded as a mining town in 1880 that grew around the Copper Queen Mine in the Mule Mountains, the most productive copper mine in Arizona in the early 1900s.

The Copper Queen Mine was acquired by Phelps-Dodge in 1885, when the import-export company was expanding into the western frontier of North America in search of metals needed for industrialization.

Phelps-Dodge operated mines and railroads to carry its products.

This building was the Phelps-Dodge Headquarters in Bisbee, and today is the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum.

Phelps-Dodge was behind the Bisbee Deportation on July 12th of 1917, in which approximately 1,300 striking miners, their supporters, and citizen bystanders were illegally kidnapped by a posse of 2,000, and deported 200-miles, or 320-kilomters, away to a location in New Mexico, where they were unloaded and warned not to return to Bisbee. They were relocated with the help of the U. S. Army.

The reason was presented as decreasing threats to U. S. interests during World War I because the demand for coppper was high.

Though an investigation conducted in 1917 by a presidential mediation commission concluded the deportation was illegal and without any authority in law, no convictions ever took place.

An interesting side-note from past research.

Marcellus Hartley Dodge Sr, was the President of the Remington Arms Company, a company started and owned by his grandfather Marcellus Hartley, and a family member associated with the Phelps-Dodge.

Marcellus Hartley Dodge Sr married Geraldine Rockefeller, the daughter of William Rockefeller Jr, a co-founder of Standard Oil, and she was estimated to have her own fortune of $100 millon, and were said to be the wealthiest newlyweds in the country upon their marriage.

Other things of note in Bisbee.

Compare the similarity in appearance of Main Street in Bisbee on the top left; the Casbah in Old Algiers in Algeria on the top right; Stone Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan on the bottom left; and Hilgrove Street in St. Helier, the capital of Jersey in the Channel Islands, on the bottom right.

The “Annual Bisbee 1000 – The Great Stair Climb” in October every year involves a 4.5-mile, or 7.25-kilometer course featuring 9 staircases, totalling over 1,000-steps connected by winding roads.

It is the only outdoors stair-climb in the United States, and considered to be one of the most unusual events in the world.

The Works Progress Administration during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Era programs during the Great Depression were given the credit for building the stairways over old mule paths worn into the terrain from the town’s mining past.

Tombstone is located just north of Bisbee.

Tombstone is called the “Most authentic western town left in the United States…”

…where lawmen Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday faced off against cowboy outlaws Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLaury in the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral…

…and where the losing side lay buried in Tombstone’s Boot Hill.

While Tombstone today looks like a Hollywood movie set…

…historic photos seem to tell a different story, with the historic courthouse in Tombstone said to have been built in 1882, showing a tall rod at the top.

While the building still stands today as part of Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Site, the tall rod isn’t there any more.

This an historical photo of the interesting-looking Cosmopolitan Hotel in Tombstone back-in-the-day, with folks standing on what appears to be small make-shift balconies beside outside second-floor doors with otherwise nowhere else to go.

The year given for its opening was 1879…

…and the Cosmopolitan Hotel burned down in Tombstone’s devastating fire of 1882, which destroyed the town’s business corridor…for the second time in two years.

I also found this historic photo of the old Birdcage Theater, said to have first opened in December of 1881, and operated as a theater until it closed in 1892, during which time it gained a reputation as one of the wickedest theaters between New Orleans and San Francisco.

Today, the Bird Cage Theater building still stands, and is a popular tourist attraction in Tombstone, where you can take self-guided tours during the day, and guided ghost tours at night.

This photo was taken in 1939 in front of the offices for the “Tombstone Epitaph,” the oldest continually published newspaper in Arizona , founded in January of 1880.

The definition of epitaph is a phrase or form of words written in memory of a person who has died, especially as an inscription on a tombstone.

Just have to wonder if there is a double-meaning hidden here.

Interesting to note that the King Solomon Lodge #5 has had a presence in Tombstone since at least 1881, in the largest standing adobe structure still in existence in the southwest United States, and which also served in its history as an opera house, theater, recital hall and community meeting place.

The next place I am going to look at is a place suggested by EL – the uninhabited Wayag Islands.

They are part of what is called the Raja Ampat Regency of the West Papua Province of Indonesia, which straddles the equator…

…and which forms part of the Coral Triangle in the tropical waters around Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste.

The Coral Triangle contains the richest marine biodiversity on Earth.

EL visited there on a liveaboard scuba diving trip, in which they crossed the equator, and upon entering the “island” group, she said it felt like she was in an ancient city, that there was something not natural about these islands.

She said it’s very protected inside the islands and oceanic mantas use it as a nursery.

When I was looking for information about these islands, I encountered descriptions of them, like “lush vegetation clung to all but the steepest slopes of the towering islands,” and their “near vertical walls hung over the sea,” and “a challenging climb up steep, limestone cliffs.”

Outside of what you can expect to see and do on a day-trip to these islands, like sharks, barracudas, mantas, the vegetation, coral, scuba-diving and guided hikes, there isn’t much information out there on what we could actually be seeing here, so like everywhere else, we have to read between the lines and decide for ourselves what might be there.

I have discovered in my own field research that going to a place and experiencing it yields much more information than what can be found in an on-line search.

One thing I do know is that the colonial powers were very intersted in this part of the world, and Indonesia became part of the Dutch East Indies starting in the early 1800s, which had been formed from the nationalized trading posts of the Dutch East India Company and was one of the most valuable colonies under European rule.

The Dutch East India Company was the world’s most valuable company of all-time, worth $7.9-trillion as a stand-alone company.

Next, JM suggested that I check out South Bass Island and Gibraltar Island in Lake Erie.

Both Islands are part of Ohio’s Put-In Bay Township in Ottawa County, Ohio.

Put-In Bay is the largest township in Ohio, with an area of 108,344-acres, but with a population of only 763 people in the 2000 census.

South Bass Island is a popular recreation destination.

The island has a small airport, and is otherwise accessed by ferries and charter boats.

JM had drawn my attention to Hotel Victory on South Bass Island.

This is what we are told about it.

The construction of the Hotel Victory was started in 1892, and first opened in 1896, its launch having been covered in newspapers across the United States.

It was touted as the biggest hotel in America, and had 625 basic guest rooms and 80 suites.

It had elevators, an indoor swimming pool, efficient steam heating, and electrical lighting, with 3,000 incandescent light bulbs.

Hotel Victory had two dining halls that each could serve 1,200 guests in one sitting.

For a variety of reasons, the Hotel Victory closed and re-opened numerous times during its short existence, as on August 14th of 1919, a fire broke out on the third-floor and quickly spread throughout the whole building.

The local fire department raced to the scene, only to find-out, we are told, that they were outmatched by the immense blaze and unable to contain the fire, resulting the building’s total loss.

Today, all that remains of the once-grand hotel are parts of the swimming pool’s concrete foundations…

…and the thirteen-foot, or 4-meter, -tall Victory Statue that once stood at the Hotel’s entrance went to the scrap metal drives of World War II.

Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial is found on an isthmus on South Bass Island.

The world’s tallest Doric Column, it was said to have been constructed by a multi-state commission between 1912 and 1915 after having been selected as the winning design from an international competition.

According to our historical narrative, the memorial was established to honor Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who successfully commanded those who fought in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, and to celebrate long-lasting peace between the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

Gibraltar Island is a small neighbor to South Bass Island.

Gibraltar Island was said to have been named for its resemblance to the Rock of Gibraltar.

I don’t see it, but Okay!!!

Gibraltar Island’s Cooke Castle was said to have been constructed starting in 1864 by American financier Jay Cooke, who financed the Union-side during the Civil War, and developed railroads in the United States in the northwest after the war.

Jay Cooke was considered to be the first major investment banker in the United States.

The former Cooke Estate on Gibraltar Island hosts the Stone Laboratory of Ohio State University,the oldest freshwater field research stations in the United States.

QS suggested that I look into the Anza Borrego Desert State Park in California, where there are ancient shell reefs at the Ocotillo Wells…

…where there is the State Vehicular Recreation Area, an area used for off-road driving…

…and a 4 x 4 training course.

It is from formations with sea-shells like these that people surmised there was an ancient western interior seaway in what is now America’s Heartland.

The largest state park in California, it occupies one-fifth of San Diego County and parts of Riverside and Imperial counties.

Other features of the state park include Split Mountain, described as having been split in half by numerous earthquakes and the power of erosion from the Fish Creek Wash.

The Wind Caves are located close to Split Mountain.

The Wind Caves, with at least one of them having a nice solar alignment, are described as an awesome sandstone formation full of wind-eroded pockets.

The Arroyo Tapiado Mud Caves are also found here, in the southern part of the park, and only accessible by a 4×4 vehicle.

Entering the caves is described as dangerous, and it is not advised to go after it rains.

Mud…caves?!

There is a rock feature called the “Pumpkin Patch,” which is located near the park, just outside of Ocotillo Wells, a geologic phenomenon which resulted in rocks that look like pumpkins.

The process which created this was described as follows: these are concretions, which form when layers of sediment build-up around a nucleus, like a pebble or shell, and then erosion from wind and water expose these rocks.

And what is that I see in the background behind the Pumpkin Patch?

The Village of Borrego Springs is completely surrounded by the state park.

As an International Dark Sky Community, Borrego Springs has no stop lights, and limited lighting at night.

This is the Lutheran Church in Borrego Springs…

…for which I can’t seem to find a construction date and history.

During World War II, the U. S. Navy & Army had a joint-training center east of Borrego Springs, called the “Borrego Valley Maneuver Area,” where there were bombing stations, training stations, and rocket targets on what is described as barren desert, barren mountains and badlands.

This article came out in the San Diego Union Tribune in December of 2009, reporting on a project of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineer that would have taken place starting in 2010, to look for and remove unexploded bombs and artillery shells in hundreds of square miles of desert.

Also, according this map, the bombing practice area was located between the village of Borrego Springs and the Salton Sea and its Military Reservation.

The Naval Auxiliary Air Station Salton Sea was commissioned in 1942 and decommissioned in 1946, and little remains of it.

The Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, was a vacation spot in the 1950s & 1960s, with people coming here for swimming, sunbathing, waterskiing and fishing at a place known as “the fishing capital of the world.”

The Salton Sea went from being a lush vacation resort to an environmental disaster starting in the 1970s, when things started to go wrong, like floods that destroyed homes and businesses along the shore; uncirculating water turning saltier than the ocean; and algae blooms killing off the fish.

There is a restoration effort planned costing hundreds of millions of dollars that is getting underway this year, in 2022.

JI suggested I look into Adolph Sutro, and attractions he “founded” in San Francisco.

Adolph Sutro was a German-American engineer, politician and philanthropist who was the Mayor of San Francisco from 1895 to 1897.

He emigrated from Prussia in 1850, and moved to San Francisco in 1851, and left for Virginia City in Nevada in 1860.

He made a fortune in connection with the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, the first major discovery of silver ore in the United States.

He returned to San Francisco around 1879, and increased his wealth by large real estate investments in San Francisco, including Mount Sutro…

…Blue Mountain, which is today’s Mount Davidson…

…and Land’s End, in the Golden Gate Recreational Area today.

This is what we are told in our historical narrative.

Adolph Sutro opened his private estate to the public, building the Sutro Baths between 1894 and 1896…

…of which all that remains today of the Sutro Baths is seen here…

…and in 1897, Sutro was said to have built the second Cliff House in existence at this location, after the first one burned down in 1894, and the second-one burned to the ground in 1907…

…and that the Cliff House was rebuilt for the third time, and completed in 1909.

The building still stands today, but the Cliff House was closed at the end of 2020.

Other things you will find in the Golden Gate Recreational Area at San Francisco’s Land’s End include:

The Fort Miley Military Reservation…

…of which Battery Chester is a part…

..the Octagon House, said to have been built in 1927 as a lookout station.

…and Mile Rock Beach.

This location at San Francisco’s Land’s End is very close to the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Palace of Fine Arts.

The Presidio, a park and outdoor recreation hub today, was formerly a U. S. Army post…

…and the Palace of Fine Arts was said to be the only remaining building from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition, with nine other palaces said to have been built for the Exhibition having been demolished long ago.

SB suggested that I look into the history of San Anselmo in California’s Marin County.

Marin County is across the Golden Gate Strait from San Francisco.

I’ll start at San Anselmo, and then take a look around other places in Marin County.

In 1874, the North Pacific Coast Railroad added a spur line from San Anselmo to San Rafael, and a year later the railroad completed a line that ran between Sausalito and Tomales, and north to Cazadero by way of San Anselmo, which was known on railroad maps as Junction until 1883.

In 1907, the Northwestern Pacific Railroad took over the regional rail-lines, and there was electrified interurban between cities, including San Anselmo, and which was abandoned after the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937.

In San Anselmo, the tracks were replaced with roads, creating what has been described as one of the most haphazard intersections to drive in California.

All of the original Northern Pacific Coast (NPC) Railroad trackage has been abandoned.

This, for example was a former tunnel of the NPC Railroad, north of Keys Creek near Tomales.

SB gave me some noteworthy places to check-out there, including the Montgomery Memorial Chapel on the campus of what was the San Francisco Theological Seminary, and what today is the University of Redlands-Marin Campus.

Montgomery Hall and Scott Hall were said to have been completed in 1892 for the seminary, and are called West Coast examples of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural-style.

SB also mentioned Red Hill.

Red Hill was the meeting point of three 1840s Mexican land grants.

Red Hill was owned by Dr. Henry Dubois, who was said to have paid Chinese laborers to cut the zig-zag roadway, known as “Dubois’ Folly…”

…up and over to the Tamalpais Cemetery & Mortuary in San Rafael on the other side of Red Hill which he also was said to have built and completed in 1879, after an ordinance was passed prohibiting burials within the town limits.

Interestingly, Dr. Dubois, born to a wealthy East Coast family, and a grandson of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote in 1880 that he believed there were going to be many burials from San Francisco taking place here.

That’s interesting ~ I wonder why he believed that?

Like the Tamalpais Cemetery, the Marin Civic Center is located in San Rafael.

Frank Lloyd Wright was credited with the design of the main building, but that he died before construction started in 1960, and the construction of it was completed by 1962 under the guidance of his protege, Aaron Green.

Within the Civic Center complex, a Hall of Justice, Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, and Exhibit Hall were added in the following years, with all completed by 1976.

The front entrance to the Civic Center is controlled by a vertical-gate of gold-anodized metal.

Mount Tamalpais is the highest peak in the Marin Hills in Marin County.

It is next to the Golden Gate Recreation area.

Most of the Mountain is in protected lands, including the Mount Tamalpais State Park…

…the Muir Woods National Monument, known for its towering old-growth Redwood Trees…

…and contained within it is the location of a place Cathedral Grove…

…as well as the notorious Bohemian Grove.

The last place I am going to look at in Marin County is Sausalito, which is adjacent to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Mount Tamalpais.

Before the Golden Gate Bridge opened to traffic in 1937, Sausalito was a terminus for rail and ferry transportation.

The development of Sausalito was promoted by William Richardson, an English mariner who arrived in the area in 1822.

Richardson petitioned the Mexican governor at the time for a rancho in the area, which was granted with clear title in 1838.

Richardson got himself into financial trouble, and ended up signing the title of his land over to an attorney as trustee, in the 1850s, and Richardson was dead by 1856, from the given reason of mercury poison prescribed by his physician for rheumatism.

The attorney ultimately maintained control of the Rancho Sausalito, and sold the land in the 1860s to a consortium of San Francisco businessmen, who partnered to form the Sausalito Land & Ferry Company.

In 1868, the Sausalito Land and Ferry Company began running ferry service to San Francisco, with Sausalito serving as the southern terminus and ferry connection to San Francisco for the North Pacific Coast Railroad.

The original ferry service operated from 1868 until 1941.

Commuter ferry service was started up by Golden Gate ferries in 1970, along with the start of bus services to the ferry terminal.

I am going to end “Places & Topics Suggested by Viewers – Volume 11” here in Sausolito.

More to come!

This is volume 10 of a compilation of work I have previously done presented in a multi-volume format. in which I am highlighting places, concepts, and historical events that people have suggested to me.

First, I want to revisit some suggested places I talked about in “Interesting Comments & Suggestions I have Received from Viewers – Volume 5” because of a place in Turkey that came up in my feed that looked like two places I compared for similarity in Indiana and Australia.

Karain is 19-miles, or 30 kilometers, away from Antalya Province in Turkey.

It is described as one of the largest natural caves in Turkey.

Archeological excavations have been carried out here since 1946.

Karain Cave is said to have been used as a settlement 500,000 years ago.

What really got my attention when I saw the information about Karain Cave come up on my feed is the similarity of its appearance inside to Nawarla Gabarnmung in Australia…

...and I had compared the similarity in appearance between Nawarla Gabarnmung to the Seven Pillars in Peru, Indiana, in Volume 5 of this series.

Nawarla Gabarnmung is believed to go back 44,000 years as far as human habitation goes, making it among the oldest radiocarbon dated sites in Australia.

It is described as a rock shelter made by tunneling into a naturally-eroded cliff face, with thirty-six pillars supporting the roof created by natural erosion of fissure lines in the bed rock.

The Seven Pillars in Peru, Indiana, are held sacred by the Miami Nation of Indiana, which owns land on the south bank of the river directly across from The Seven Pillars, where they hold sacred ceremonies and heritage days.

The Seven Pillars are described as having been created over the centuries as wind and water eroded the limestone, carving the rounded buttresses and alcoves.

In Turkey, the Karain Cave, also known as the “Black Cave,” is located on the the east slope of Mount Katran in the Western Taurus Mountains.

It is described as a complex of limestone caves consisting of three main chambers, separated by calcite walls and narrow and curving passageways, which includes rock-cut steps.

There are also springs at the Karain Cave Complex, described as fine water springs where the travertine plain meets the mountains.

Travertine is type of limestone.

The Travertine terraces in Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey are called one of the most spectacular natural heritage sites in the world, and we are told made from the sedimentary rock deposited by mineral water from the 17 hot springs in the area.

Back at the Karain Cave complex, human habitation is believed to go back 150,000 to 200,000 years, to the Paleolithic Age, from the finding of part of a neanderthal cranium there…

…and a documented continuous human presence for 25,000-years, from the Mesolithic Age dated from 10,000 BC to 8,000 BC, to the Bronze Age, which is considered to have lasted from 3,300 BC to 1,200 BC.

The Greek inscriptions carved at the entrance to the cave complex are attributed to the Greek colonization of Asia Minor during the Iron Age, between 1200 B.C. and 600 B.C.

Other archeological sites found in the neighborhood of the Karain cave complex in Antalya include:

The Upper and Lower Duden Waterfalls.

Interesting to note the Antalya Airport is located between the Upper and Lower Falls…

…and that the Karain Cave Complex is right next to an elliptical track.

Personally, I think these were all components of an ancient energy grid, but we have been conditioned to think of them all as either 1) naturally-made, or 2) recently-built infrastructure.

Termessos is also close-by, considered one of the best-preserved of the ancient cities of Turkey, described as a Pisidian city.

Pisidia was a region of Asian Minor that corresponds roughly to the modern-day province of Anatalya in southwest Turkey.

Termessos was said to have been built on a natural platform at a height of 5,463-feet, or 1,665-meters, in the Taurus Mountains, and which includes a megalithic stone amphitheater, what are described as tombs of the western necropolis cut right into the rock face of Mount Solymos…

…and a rock-carved relief of Alcetas, with a missing face, known to history as a general who had served in Alexander the Great’s army, who was recorded as dying in Termessos in 320 BC.

The faceless carving of the general is interesting to me because it brings to mind Petra in Jordan, which was attributed to the Nabateans, an ancient Arabian people.

Like Temessos, Petra is known for it’s rock-carved tombs, and temples, in this case carved right into pink sandstone cliffs.

Was the rock-carving civilization of Jordan actually the same as the rock-carving civilization in Turkey, and not actually separate and arising independently of each other?

…and which also has faceless statues.

They are on the front of what is called “The Treasury” in Petra, which was perhaps best-known as a filming location for the Holy Grail Temple at the end of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Is this natural wear-and-tear over the centuries…or intentional disfigurement because there was something there we weren’t supposed to know about?

Like, perhaps, the Great Sphinx in Egypt with its missing nose?

Next, EC in California did a quick map search of the prisons in California, and she found star fort foot-prints everywhere!

Like both prisons in Delano, the North Kern…

…and Kern Valley State Prisons…

…the Avenal State Prison in Avenal California…

…at San Quentin, the oldest prison in the State, first opening in 1852…

…the Folsom State Prison in Folsom, California, which opened in 1880, and is the second-oldest prison in the state after San Quentin…

…and the prison Johnny Cash was referring to in his signature “Folsom Prison Blues” song from 1955 and from where he performed live in 1968…

…Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California…

…Lancaster State Prison in Los Angeles County…

…Wasco State Prison in Wasco, California…

…Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California…

…Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California, the only supermax prison facility in the State of California, primarily for violent male criminals…

…and Salinas Valley State Prison, in Soledad, California.

While I am in California, AD asked me to check out Paso Robles.

Paso Robles was historically known for its healing hot springs.

AD said there was a a massive bath house downtown where a city parking lot is today.

It would have been right next to where the Carnegie Library today, which is right across Spring Street from the Paso Robles Inn today.

The Carnegie Library in Paso Robles was said to have been built between 1907 and 1908 from a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation.

The original Paso Robles Inn featured a 7-acre garden; 9-hole golf course; library; beauty salon; barbershop; several billiard and lounging rooms; along with its famous spa, which attracted the luminaries of the day.

But, alas, tragedy struck this grand hotel in December of 1940.

A spectacular fire completely destroyed the “fire-proof” El Paso de Robles Hotel, though miraculously the guests staying the night escaped unharmed, with the exception of the night clerk, J. H. Emsley, who suffered a fatal heart attack after sounding the alarm!

This has been the Paso Robles Inn since 1942…

…which is also advertised as a haunted venue.

The Paso Robles Springs and mud baths were known at one time to be among the most healing on earth, from things like psoriasis and arthritis among other ailments.

This is a photo of the municipal mud bath in 1905…

…and the candy store that is at the same location today, with no mud baths to be found!

AD said the San Simeon earthquake cracked open the hot springs underneath the parking lot next to the City Hall and library, and they started flowing again.

Then the cover-up began all over again!

Next, DB suggested I look at Battery Point, a suburb that is immediately south of the Central Business District in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.

First, let me say that growing up in the United States, the first, and for many years, only, reference to Tasmania in my life was this guy on Looney Tunes cartoons on television – the Tasmanian Devil.

The Tasmanian Devil was a cartoon character based on the real life Tasmanian Devil, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial and native to Tasmania.

The Tasmanian Devil has been classified as an endangered species since 2008.

Like kangaroos, mom carries her babies in a pouch.

Tasmania is an island state of Australia, located 150-miles, or 240-kilometers, to the south of the Australian mainland, separated from it by the Bass Strait.

This is what we are told about Tasmania.

Tasmania got its present name from the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who first sighted the island on November 24th of 1642, when he was exploring in the service of the Dutch East India Company.

It’s European first name, however, became Van Diemen’s Land, when Tasman honored his patron Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies at that time.

The island was inhabited by aborigines from at least 40,000 years prior to the arrival of Europeans, when they settled the island starting in 1803 as a penal settlement of the British Empire, allegedly to prevent claims to the land by the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars.

The aboriginal population of the island was almost completely wiped out within 30-years from the time of European settlement, during a period of conflict between the 1820s and 1832 known as the “Black War,” as well as the spread of infectious diseases.

These are typical of the kinds of paintings of the Australian Aborigines that have come down to us in our historical narrative.

Let’s see what we find in Hobart and Battery Point.

First, I have known for awhile that there was an International Exhibition held in Hobart, which took place in 1894.

It was said to have been built on 11-acres starting in 1893, for a cost not more than 10,000 pounds because that was all the money that was available, for the International Exhibition that was held there between 1894 and 1895, and that the builders of it never meant to last, having been built of hardwood…and plaster and concrete to make it look more elegant, and it is long gone!

The Hobart Cenotaph is located on the Queen’s Domain, a hilly-area northeast of the Central Business District.

The Cenotaph is on what was at one time called the Queen’s Battery.

More on Hobart’s historical Batteries in just a moment.

The Hobart Cenotaph today is the main commemorative military monument for Tasmania, and is described as an Art Deco reinterpretation of a traditional Egyptian obelisk.

It was said to have been designed by Hobart architects Hutchison and Walker after the firm won a design competition for it in 1923.

While we are told it was originally designed to memorialize Tasmanians who died during World War I, it was later modified to honor those who died in all military conflicts.

Here is a Google Earth Screenshot showing the location of the Hobart Cenotaph and Queen’s Domain, in relationship to other nearby places.

Battery Point is just across a small harbor from where the Hobart Cenotaph is located, and south of the Central Business District.

It was said to have been named after three batteries of guns established there in 1818 as part of the Hobart Coastal defenses.

These guns were subsequently decommissioned, we are told, after an 1878 review of Hobart’s defenses found its location would draw enemy fire on the surrounding residential neighborhood, so the location was turned over to the Hobart City Council for recreation and amusement.

They were located in what is called “Prince’s Park” today, where there are a few above-ground remnants…

…but mostly underground.

Like the Paso Robles Inn, also reputed to be haunted.

The Alexandra Battery, on a point of land further down from Battery Point and also said to have been built as part of the Hobart Coastal Defenses, still has much of its original structure intact, and is still accessible to visit by the public.

The Kangaroo Bluff Battery was directly across the Derwent River from Battery Point in Hobart.

The first railroad lines on the island were established starting in 1871.

I think these were pre-existing, and the dates we are given was when they became operational after being made serviceable.

Today, there is only freight railroad transport in Tasmania, with the main cargo being cement, and no passenger services in operation.

Why would this be the case?

Today, in much of Tasmania, including Hobart, you can only experience the old rail trails by biking or hiking.

The next place I am going to take a look at was suggested by AP, which is Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, Australia.

The Queen Victoria building is described as a 5-story, late 19th-century building in Sydney’s Central Business District, said to have been designed on the “Scale of a Cathedral” by the architect George McRae, and constructed between 1893 and 1898.

…with its over 20 domes…

…and cathedral-style windows.

During its history, it has had some different uses, but primarily as retail space, which it is today…

…though the Queen Victoria building has been threatened with demolition at various time over the years, starting as early as 1959.

Makes sense, right?

More like make it make sense!

FM suggested that I look at the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London.

It is the front part of the St. Pancras Railway Station, which is a main terminal in London.

The architect credited with the design of the building, first known as the Midland Grand Hotel, was George Gilbert Scott, who won a design competition held for it, we are told, in 1865, and that it’s construction was completed by 1876, with four floors.

This is an illustration of the hotel showing 5-floors, which we are told it was planned to have, but not built to save on construction costs.

It is interesting to note in this photo of this massive building, you can see the slanted street and unlevel building features from the side-view.

The hotel has a grand grand staircase…

…and stately hallways.

Each room had a fireplace, yet at the same time rooms did not have bathrooms, which we are told was a convention of the times.

Apparently the original hotel closed in 1935 due to “outdated and costly utilities, and the need for an army of servants needed to carry things like chamber pots and tubs, and instead became office space for British Rail, who had plans to demolish the building until it was saved by a preservation campaign, though it sat abandoned for awhile starting in 1988.

The building was restored, and reopened as a hotel and apartments in 2011.

You too can have an apartment in the St. Pancras clock tower for only 4.6-million pounds.

LR suggested that I look into Dulwich College in London.

Dulwich College is a public school for boys, which includes day schools and a myriad of boarding schools.

Dulwich College was founded as a charity in 1619 as the “College of God’s Gift” by Elizabethan actor and businessman Edward Alleyn.

In 1605, Alleyn became the owner of the estate of Dulwich, and somewhere in there decided to establish a hospital for poor people and provide for the education of poor boys.

Between 1613 and 1616, a chapel, schoolhouse, and twelve almshouses were said to have been built.

The Lord Chancellor at the time, Sir Francis Bacon, objected to Alleyn getting the patent of incorporation necessary to be considered a college, and which he ultimately received from King James I, and which allowed the College of God’s Gift to be set-up as an endowment, so it was able to establish and aggregation of assets to support its educational mission forever.

The charity originally was comprised of a Master, a Warden, four fellows, six poor brothers, six poor sisters, and twelve poor scholars that were orphans ages 6 and up.

Known as “Members of the College,” together were legal owners of Alleyn’s endowment of the Dulwich manor and lands.

The business of the charity was conducted on behalf of these thirty members by the Master Warden, and four fellows, consisting of a chaplain, schoolmaster, usher and organist.

The Archbishop of Canterbury became the official Visitor, or overseer of the charitable institution who can intervene in the internal affairs of the institution.

Interesting stipulations made by Alleyn included that the Master and Warden be unmarried and of Alleyn’s surname, and blood if possible.

The Dulwich College Act of 1857 dissolved the original corporation.

For one thing, it went from being called the “College of God’s Gift” to “Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift.”

Another, it was divided into an educational part and a charitable part, overseen by a joint Board of Governors.

I am going into the details about this part of Dulwich College’s history because it seems very odd to me, and makes me wonder what was really going on with this charitable institution that we are not being told.

Dulwich College took on its present form when it moved to its present location in 1870.

Next, DC asked me to take a look at the Solent and Portsmouth in the south of England.

The strait between the Isle of Wight and Great Britain is known as “The Solent.”

It is a major shipping lane and recreational area for yachts and other water sports.

The Hurst Spit projects into the Solent Narrows, and is the location of Hurst Castle.

The Hurst Castle was said to have been built by King Henry VIII in the 16th-century, during the years between 1541 and 1544 as part of  part of a coastal protection program against invasion from France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire.

Then there are the Palmerston Forts on the Isle of Wight, called a group of forts and associated structures that were built during the Victorian Era in response to a perceived threat of French invasion.

They are called the Palmerston Forts due to their association with Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister during that time who was said to have promoted the idea.

There were approximately 20 of these Palmerston structures along the west and east coast of the Isle of Wight.

Like Fort Victoria was said to have been built in the 1850s to guard the Solent…

…and is located on the Isle of Wight in a position opposite from Hurst Castle on the mainland’s Hurst Spi

In addition to all the forts and batteries located on the Isle of Wight, other forts associated directly with the Solent include Spitbank Fort, which was turned into a luxury spa hotel with nine rooms from 2012 and until its closure in 2020…

…Horse Sand Fort, said to have been built between 1865 and 1880, and was sold to a private buyer in October of 2021…

…No Man’s Land Fort, said to have been built between 1867 and 1880, and also repurposed into a luxury hotel that opened in 2015 and it is apparently still operating as one today, unlike Spit Bank Fort…

…and St. Helens Fort, said to have been built between 1865 and 1878. It is privately-owned and not open to the public.

It is interesting to note that periodically the tide is low enough to reveal an old causeway, and typically when this happens, there is a mass walk of people out to the fort and back.

All of which were said to have been Palmerston constructions resulting from the 1859 Royal Commission on the Defense of the United Kingdom, a committee formed to inquire into the ability of the United Kingdom to defend itself from an attempted invasion.

The coastal areas of the Solent are estuaries and have status as protected lands, like the New Forest National Park on one-side of the Solent, which interestingly includes the Exbury Gardens & Steam Railway…

…and the Exbury Gardens are world-famous for the collection of Rhodedendrons and Azaleas of its Rothschild owners.

The Isle of Wight Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is on the other side of the Solent.

The Solent is known for having a double high-tide, having four tides a day, as opposed to two tides under normal conditions.

It is also at the midpoint in the English Channel, between Dover and Land’s End, and when Dover is at low tide, Land’s End is at high tide, and vice versa.

Portsmouth is an island-city located on the northeast corner of the Solent.

The only island-city in the UK, Portsmouth is located mainly on Portsea Island, a flat, low-lying island that is 9.5-square-miles, or 24.5-square-kilometers, and is the most densely-populated city in the UK.

The oldest part of the city, Old Portsmouth, is located on the southwest part of the island.

The Anglican Portsmouth Cathedral is located in the center of Old Portsmouth.

This is what we are told about it.

A wealthy Norman merchant gave land around 1180 AD to built a chapel to honor St. Thomas of Canterbury, a Christian martyr who had been assassinated around ten years previously.

Then the chapel became a parish church in the 1400s…and a cathedral in the 1900s.

We are told that in 1932, a sketch plan was submitted by architect Charles Nicholson that would extend the church to a size of a cathedral, and that he chose a “Neo-Byzantine,” and that by 1939, the outer aisles for the choir; the tower; the transepts; and three bays of the nave had been completed.

Then with the Fall of France in 1940, work on the “extension project” stopped, and during the course of World War II, the building sustained minor damage.

Then work began again in 1990 to finish the project, and that between 1990 and 1991, the fourth bay of the nave; western towers; tower room; rose window; gallery; and so forth were completed and the Portsmouth Cathedral was consecrated in the presence of the Queen Mother Elizabeth in November of 1991.

Portsmouth Cathedral has two organs.

The Nicholson Organ was said to have been installed in 1994, the pipes of which had been taken from an organ made in 1861 by John Nicholson originally for the Manchester Cathedral.

Then West Great Organ was added in 2001 to provide music into the separate space of the Nave.

The Portsmouth Cathedral is a short-distance from Gunwharf Quay.

The Old Gunwharf started out as an ordnance yard in 1706 on land that had been reclaimed from the sea.

Then the site was extended by reclaiming further land from the sea, to create the New Gunwharf around 1800.

Reclaimed from what, I wonder?

The definition of reclamation is an act or process of reclaiming, such as reformation, rehabilitation…and restoration to use.

Known now as the Vulcan Building, the Grand Storehouse of the New Gunwharf was completed in 1814, where a wide-range of ordnance weaponry were stored, including gun carriages, cannons, and cannon balls, etc.

Today it is Aspex Portsmouth, the leading contemporary art gallery in Portsmouth.

All of those pyramids on the front lawn are really interesting to me!

Today, “Gunwharf Quays” it is a shopping center.

Portsmouth is the location of HMNB Portsmouth, the largest Royal Navy base, home to, among many other naval-related things, two-thirds of the United Kingdom’s surface fleet.

The Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth was said to have been founded in 1495 by King Henry VIII, and are said to have the world’s oldest dry-docks dating from this time-period.

Dry-docks are used for the construction, maintenance, and repair of ships and other water-vessels.

So, the Royal Navy Base and the Gunwharf Quays-turned-shopping center are bringing Hamilton, Bermuda to mind from past research.

This map shows the location of the Royal Navy Dockyard that was located there.

We are told it was built by the British Royal Navy in 1795, and was once home to Britain’s largest naval base outside of the United Kingdom until it closed permanently as a naval base in 1995.

Now it is the home of the Clocktower Mall, hosting a variety of shops, boutiques and restaurants. 

I know there is much more to find here in Portsmouth, but now I am going to take a look at a place that was in Amsterdam in the Netherlands that was suggested by another viewer.

This was the “Palace of Industry.”

Described as a large exhibition hall inspired by the Crystal Palace in London, it was said to have been constructed between 1859 and 1864.

To put this into perspective, this would have been in the same time frame as the 1859 Royal Commission on the Defense of the United Kingdom that resulted in the construction of the Palmerston forts in the Solent and on Isle of Wight, and the American Civil War, which began in 1861 and ended in 1865 in our historical narrative.

There was even a large organ there that we are told was installed there in 1875 by the famous French constructor of organs, Aristide Covaille-Coll.

But alas, it was destroyed by fire in April 1929.

While buildings surrounding the Palace of Industry were spared from destruction by the fire, like the gallery, shops, and apartments, the main building was destroyed and never reconstructed.

The next place I am going to look at was suggested by JMG, which was the Fort Washington Avenue Armory in Manhattan.

The Armory is considered to be the world’s premiere indoor track and field facility.

The Armory is known for having the fastest track in the world, with more world records being set here than anywhere else.

It was said to have been constructed in the Neoclassical Style in 1911.

It was home to the 22nd Army Corps of Engineers; used to give licensing exams to architects, engineers, nurses and so on; and even used as a homeless shelter.

The campaign to renovate the building started in 1992, and since then it also houses the National Track and Field Hall of Fame besides the New Balance Track and Field Center, and hosts the largest number of high school and college invitationals in the world.

I wonder what it is about the Armory Building that makes it such a phenomenal track and field venue?!

Viewer JB suggested that I take a look at Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

Beaver Dam was said to have first been settled in 1841 by two men, and that the population had grew to 100 in two years, and that it received its name from an old beaver dam nearby.

The city was incorporated in March of 1856, the same year we are told the Milwaukee Railroad reached the area.

This depiction of Beaver Dam was circa 1867…as seen from the air?

How could that be possible given the technology we have been told existed at the time?

This is the Beaver Dam Community Library.

It first opened as the Williams Free Library.

The story about it goes like this.

In April of 1890, John Williams, a wealthy local businessman, offered to pay $25,000 to construct the library if the city paid for the land.

Done deal, and it first opened in July of 1891.

The library’s design was said to have been inspired by Henry Hobson Richardson.

I first encountered the Richardson Romanesque style of architecture in tracking a long-distance alignment through Easton Massachusetts, where I encountered the Ames Free Library.

Henry Hobson Richardson himself wasi said to have designed the Ames Free Library in Easton.

It was said to have been commissioned by the children of Oliver Ames, Jr, after he left money in his will for the construction of a library.

The building we are told took place between 1877 and 1879.

Henry Hobson Richardson was also said to have designed the Oakes Ames Memorial Hall which is right next to the Ames Free Library, said to have been commissioned by the children of Congressman Oakes Ames as a gift to the town of Easton, and built between 1879 and 1881.

The Ames Brothers, Oliver and Oakes, were an interesting pair.

Among many other things, they were co-owners of the Ames Shovel Shop in Easton.

It became nationally known for providing the shovels for the Union Pacific Railroad, which opened the west. It was said to have been the world’s largest supplier of shovels in the 19th-century.

Why would shovels have been so important for constructing the railroad tracks to open the west?

What if…the tracks were already there and just needed to be dug out?

The architect that gave his name to Richardsonian Romanesque, Henry Hobson Richardson, was said to have never finished his architecture studies in Paris due to the Civil War.

He also is said to have died at the age of 47, after having a prolific career in the design of mind-blowingly sophisticated and ornate buildings of heavy masonry.

Horicon Marsh is described as a silted-up glacial lake that is a national and state wildlife refuge.

I really think places like marsh-lands and estuaries were mud-flooded places that were ruined for civilized use.

You can see straight channels in this aerial photo of the Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin…

…just like you see straight channels in the Mississippi River Delta south of New Orleans.

I found this photo of what was called a drainage ditch in the Horicon Marsh circa 1914.

These Drumlins are found south of Horicon Marsh.

Drumlins are the grooves in the landscape, said to be hills formed by a retreating glacier around 12,000-years-ago.

The drumlins in Wisconsin brought to mind Malham Ash, described as a limestone pavement, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in northern England.

The definition of the word pavement is this: 1) a hard, smooth surface, especially of a public area or thoroughfare, that will bear travel; and 2) the material with which such a surface is made.

Malham Ash is at Malham Cove.

Malham Cove is described as a huge, curving cliff formation of limestone, with a vertical cliff face of 260 feet, or 79 meters, high, and was said to have been formed by a waterfall carrying glacial melt-water, also over 12,000 years ago like the Wisconsin drumlins.

Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam is a private, college prep boarding school, with a student population of 125 in the 2021 – 2022 school year.

It was chartered by the then-Wisconsin Territory Legislature in 1847 as the Beaver Dam Academy.

Originally Baptist school, it was renamed Wayland Academy after Baptist Minister Francis Wayland, who was also an educator and economist.

Wayland Academy Residence Hall looks like it might have had a steeple-like structure at one time, and there are below-ground windows at the front of the building.

Examples of architectural component removal that I have come across include the Grand Theater in Salem, Oregon, which was said to have been built in as an opera house in 1900 by the Odd Fellows, and owned by them, and today also has retail space, office space, and a ballroom as well as being still used as a theater venue.

…and the Old Lewis Hotel in McGregor, Iowa, only it’s now called the Alexander Hotel, minus the domes it had originally.

The Wayland Academy Field House is located directly across the street from the Residence Hall.

The circular Wayland Academy Field House sports a beautiful domed roof.

When I saw the term Wayland Academy Field House used to describe a sporting venue, it brought Cole Field House at the University of Maryland back to my memory. I grew up in Maryland.

This image of Cole Field House on the left definitely reminds me of an airplane hangar as seen on the right.

Historical photographs of airships in hangars are easily findable in an internet search.

This is what we are told about airships in our historical narrative.

Australian inventor William Bland sent designs for his “Atmotic Airship” to the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London where a model was displayed.

This was an elongated balloon with a steam engine driving twin propellers suspended underneath.

Then, in 1852, Frenchman Henri Giffard was credited as being the first person to make an engine-powered flight when he flew 17-miles, or 27-kilometers, in a steam-powered airship, and airships would develop considerably over the next two decades.

The era of the airships in our historical narrative was somewhere between 1900 and 1940.

The 1908 military science fiction book of H. G. Wells entitled “The War in the Air” was about entire cities and fleets destroyed by airship attack…

…and airships were used as bombers in military conflicts starting in 1912 and during World War I.

We are told their use decreased as their capabilities were surpassed by those of airplanes.

Sounds like the story we are about the superior capability of trains causing the use of canals for transportation to become obsolete.

Then, we are told the decline of airships was accelerated by a series of high-profile accidents, including the 1937 dramatic burning of the German Hindenburg passenger airship, which changed the narrative.

Now they were not safe way to travel, so of course they had to get rid of them for public safety!

This is a good lead-in to the viewer suggestions of the so-called Fantasy Arts of Steampunk and Capriccio.

Steampunk Art is described as a vision of the Victorian Age that never was, where airships fill the skies and steampower and clockwork make everything possible, combined with futuristic technological concepts.

Capriccio art is described as architectural fantasy in which buildings, archeological ruins, and other architectural design elements are combined in fictional and fantasical ways.

On the top left is an actual photograph of the view of Budapest and the Hungarian Parliament in the background from the Budapest Castle Funicular iand the top right is the Hungarian Parliament building.

The bottom left is a Capriccio Art depiction of London, with a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background, and the bottom right is St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Interesting side-note that the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London are oriented in the same direction.

My guess would be they are oriented to the cardinal directions, like the Pyramids of Giza as an example.

You even see this example of a beautiful fantastical-looking city-scape included in this official portrait from the 1950s of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

I truly believe the true history of the Earth is being shown to us through these artworks.

Next, RG shared information about the sinking of the Lady Elgin, saying it is so similar to the sinking of the Titanic and that the Lady Elgin passenger manifest was lost, so the exact number on-board was unknown.

The Lady Elgin, a side-wheel steamship, was said to have been built in Buffalo, New York, in 1851.

For almost a decade, the elegant steamship took passengers between Chicago and other cities on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior.

Apparently during the years she was in operation, the steamship was involved in a number of accidents, including, but not limited to, things like striking a rock in 1854 and being damaged by fire in 1857.

Then On September 6th of 1860, the Lady Elgin was rammed below the water-line by the wooden Schooner Augusta, and her sinking has been called the “one of the greatest marine horrors on record.”

The Lady Elgin was on its return trip to Milwaukee, sailing against gale force winds, when she was rammed by the Augusta.

The Lady Elgin’s captain ordered that cattle and cargo be thrown over-board to lighten the load in order to bring the hole above-water.

All of the efforts to try to keep the ship from sinking came nothing, as within twenty-minutes, the ship broke apart and sank quickly.

Of those 300 people, most were from the Irish community of Milwaukee, including nearly all of Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guard.

The Irish Union Guard was an Irish militia based in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, and who were at odds with the Wisconsin governor’s position.

The members of the Irish Union Guard had chartered the Lady Elgin for a quick-trip to Chicago.

It was said that so many Irish-American political operatives died that day that it shifted the balance-of-political-power in Milwaukee from the Irish to the Germans.

Well, there certainly seems to be some parallels between the sinking of the Lady Elgin in 1860, and the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, that resulted in changing the course of history.

The story goes that the RMS Titanic passenger liner sank on its maiden voyage in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15th of 1912, after striking an iceberg, and it broke apart and sank 2 hours and 40 minutes later.

More than 1,500 people died of the estimated 2,224 passengers that were on-board, resulting in the deadliest peace-time sinking of a super-liner or cruise ship.

Also, prominent people opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve were on board, including John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Strauss.

Then on December 23rd, 1913, the Federal Reserve Act Passed Congress, signed into law by Woodrow Wilson. 

It created and established the Federal Reserve System, and created the authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes (commonly known as the US dollar) as legal tender.

Food for thought.

ES put together a folder of images and information for me about Ottawa, Illinois.

The city of Ottawa in Illinois was incorporated in 1853, and is located at the confluence of the Illinois and Fox Rivers.

He said this town has some strange and/or important history.

Like, the city’s Washington Square being the location of the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate on August 21st of 1858.

The park was said to have been platted in 1831, and besides having a fountain and reflecting pool with life-size statues of Lincoln and Douglas situated in a plaza surrounded by limestone…

…the LaSalle County Civil War Soldiers Monument is located there, said to have been erected on September 21st of 1873.

J. O. Glover was the Mayor of Ottawa in 1858 when the first Lincoln-Douglas Debate took place.

This is a picture of his home, where supporters of Abraham Lincoln were said to have carried him on their shoulders after the debate in Washington Square.

Glover’s home on Columbus Street is no longer there, having been replaced by a parking lot.

Here is another photo from the time of the 1858 debate.

It was of what was known as the Eames Home, with Lincoln and Douglas appearing in it, where it was located at the corner of Superior and Paul Streets.

This particular house was said to have been moved from this location to a new location at 118 East Lafayette Street, which is actually right across the street from Washington Square where the debate was held.

At least this is what they tell us!

William Dickson Boyce was said to have built a home in Ottawa in 1913.

Who was he?

Newspaper & Magazine publisher William D. Boyce was the founder of the Boy Scouts of America, which was established in 1910.

The story goes that he was lost in a fog in London when he was approached by a young English boy scout who led him to his destination, and Boyce was so intrigued that he went on to found the Boy Scouts in America.

ES said there are countless old world buildings and Victorian-era style homes, though it seems much of it was destroyed or heavily modified from its original ornate design.

ES said the captions alone given in these images raise some eyebrows with some common themes like fires and war fundraisers, etc.

He included an obituary he found for the man his relatives told him owned the largest home in town (now demolished) and the local department store, Sidney Stiefel.

It seems his Stanley Stiefel’s father started the business in 1899 and before that his grandfather was a clothing manufacturer in Germany.

The fact that he was a Shriner and also an Elk caught ES’s attention, especially since each group has a lodge right in the heart of downtown.

This is a photo of the Ottawa Knights Templar circa the 1870s.

Knight Templar is the highest-degree in the York Rite of Freemasonry.

The photo of the Ottawa Knights Templar was said to have been taken in front of the Opera House.

Since a year is not specified for the photo, it is interesting to note that the first Opera House in Ottawa was said to have been built in 1872 and burned down in 1874.

Then the second opera house was said to have been completed in 1875. It was demolished at some point after this photo was taken in 1893 as part of a series of photos showcasing Ottawa.

This was a framed photo ES saw in a local funeral home of the Civil War General George B. McClellan showing the masonic pose of the Hidden Hand.

The Hidden Hand refers to the Freemasonic pose in this illustration, signifying “Master of the Second Veil.”

ES shared several other photos at the funeral home.

This photo is of an odd Civil War mourning dress ritual of the Order of the Confederate Rose.

The Order of the Confederate Rose is described as an historical organization whose purpose was to support the Sons of Confederate Veterans in their service to the South.

It was named after Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a successful Confederate Spy who lost her life by drowning in 1864.

And another was a group photo of the “Improvement Council.”

If ES had to guess, he said this Improvement Council was a controlled demolition/narrative group that decided who worked on things like getting the trolleys from horse drawn back to electric.

Electric streetcars started operating in Ottawa in 1889 and by 1901, there was an Interurban streetcar system running between towns.

Interesting to see this undated photo of the streetcar in Ottawa on a dirt-covered street.

We are told when the Federal Highway Act was passed in 1916, it marked the beginning of the end of the Interurban systems.

With the construction of paved highways and the mass production of automobiles, we are told that electric rail service decreased in popularity, and that by 1934, all interurbans were halted.

One last historical photo I would like share from ES was that of the Clifton Hotel.

Interesting to note what it says about the long porch with seating to view the Fox River…and the drain-pipe dumping sewage into the Fox River.

Next, PS suggested that I look at Skeleton Lake in India’s Uttarakhand State of India in the Himalayas.

Also known as Roopkund and Mystery Lake, it is a high-altitude of 16,040-feet, or 5,020-meters.

It is surrounded by glaciers covered by rocks and mountains-topped by snow.

It is called Skeleton Lake because there were hundreds of human skeletons found in 1942 at the edge of the lake.

The remains of approximately 300 people have been identified.

Studies of the remains showed head injuries, caused by round objects from above, so the cause of death has been attributed to which have been attributed by researchers to a sudden hailstorm.

Regardless, who they were or how they died remains an unsolved mystery in the present-day.

Going on to the next place.

SL encountered a Step Pyramid in Death Valley near Rhyolite Ghost Town in Nevada.

Rhyolite was a boom town that sprung-up after the discovery of high-grade gold ore there in 1905, and its last resident died in 1924.

Today, it is a place where ghostly-looking statues depict things like a Grim Reaper Last Supper.

DA wanted me to check out Spokane in eastern Washington State, eighteen-miles west of the Idaho border near Coeur d’Alene.

It is known as the Birthplace of Father’s Day because the idea was proposed by Spokane resident Sonora Dodd in 1909.

The Northwest Company’s Spokane House was established in 1810, a fur-trading post that was the first long-term settlement in what became Washington State…

…and the Northern Pacific Railway first brought settlers to the Spokane area in 1881.

The Northern Pacific Depot in Spokane pictured here was said to have been built in 1890, after the Great Fire of 1889.

The 1889 Great Fire of Spokane was a major fire in August of that year which affected downtown Spokane, destroying the downtown commercial district of the city.

Some of the things that we are told about it was that due to a technical problem with the pump station, there was no water pressure in the city when the fire began, and that firefighters demolished buildings with dynamite in a desparate bid to starve the fire.

After the fire, architect Kirtland Kelsey Cutter was credited with designing many of the city’s older Romanesque Revival-Style buildings, like the First National Bank…

…the Rookery Building…

…the Spokane Club…

…and the Davenport Hotel and Restaurant.

Spokane’s Riverfront Park occupies 100-acres, or 40-hectares along the Spokane River, encompassing the Upper Spokane Falls.

Officially opening in 1978, Riverfront Park is said to be located on the site of a former railyard.

Attractions include the Great Northern Clocktower.

The Clocktower is all that remains of what was the Great Northern Depot, which was levelled to make room for the Expo ’74 that was held in Spokane.

The Great Northern Depot and Clocktower was said to have been built between 1892 and 1902.

The Clocktower was almost levelled too, but was saved by a successful preservation effort.

The Monroe Street Bridge is a deck-arch bridge that spans the Spokane River, and was said to have been built in 1911 by the City of Spokane, and designed by city engineer John Chester Ralston.

Just a sample of the many things Spokane has to offer the historical narrative that jumped right out at me.

The last place I am going to look at is Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire, England, a place EK brought to my attention.

It was first incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867.

The Barrow-in-Furness Townhall and Clocktower was said to have opened in 1887.

The Furness Railway opened in 1846, and by 1850, extensive hematite deposits were found of sufficient size to open a steel mill.

That led to the creation of the Barrow Hematite Steel Company, a major iron and steel producer based here between 1859 and 1963.

By the beginning of the 20th-century, it was the largest steel mill in the world.

With Barrow’s location and steel supply, the Vickers Shipyard here developed into a significant producer of naval vessels, including submarines.

Vickers also was credited with making the first rigid airship known as R1, or “Mayfly,” in 1908.

But, unfortunately, it was destroyed by mishandling in the process of being moored.

By 1921, there had been 80 dirigibles constructed here.

In 1930, land for the construction of a second airship facility had been purchased on Walney Island.

It was turned into an airfield in 1940 with onset of World War II, with multiple uses by the Royal Air Force, including those involving airships.

The Walney Airfield was used extensively during World War II, after which time it fell into disuse until it was the 1980s, when it was used for passenger service by different airlines on-and-off again until March of 1992.

I am going to end “Places & Topics Suggested by Viewers – Volume 10” here on Walney Island in Lancashire, and more to come!

In this multi-volume series, I am following the trail of clues pointing to our hidden history provided by suggestions from viewers that is a compilation of work I have previously done.

I am starting the journey in this video in Sacramento, California.

The Joliet vertical-lift bridge I featured in the last video in this series…

…looked very similar to the Tower Bridge in Sacramento, California.

The Tower Bridge is also a vertical-lift bridge, and connects Sacramento and West Sacramento across the Sacramento River.

The construction of the Tower Bridge as a replacement bridge for the 1911 M Street bridge was said to have started in 1934 and first opened in 1935.

This would have been around the time of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II.

The original 1911 bridge was described as a “swing-through truss railroad bridge” that was determined to be inadequate as the result of Sacramento’s population growth doubling between 1910 and 1935, and the city’s concern for needing a better crossing over the Sacramento River in case of war.

Alfred Eichler was credited as the architect of the Tower Bridge, and its architectural-style described as a rare use of “Streamline Moderne,” a style of “Art Deco” that emerged in the 1930s.

The two towers of the bridge alone are 160-feet, or 49-meters, -high.

The Tower Bridge is part of State Route 275 which connects West Capitol Avenue and the Tower Bridge Gateway with the Capitol Mall in Sacramento.

The Capital Mall in Sacramento is described as a major street and landscaped parkway.

There is a similar linear and geometric relationship between the Tower Bridge, Capital Mall, and State Capital Building in Sacramento that we saw between the “Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Bridge,” also known as the “State Street Bridge;” the “Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Grove;” and the State Capitol Building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, also seen in the last video.

The former Drexel University Sacramento Center for Graduate Studies was in a building situated right next to the Tower Bridge at the address of 1 Capital Mall.

It opened in 2009, and started closing in 2015 to allow currently enrolled students to complete their studies.

It was then permanently closed.

The California State Capital at the other end of the Capital Mall from the Tower Bridge was said to have been designed in the Neoclassical-style by Reuben S. Clark, and constructed between 1861 and 1874.

Interesting to note that the American Civil War took place between 1861 and 1865 in our historical narrative.

The Stanford Mansion is in the neighborhood of the Capital Mall, and serves as the official reception center for the California government.

It was said to have been built in 1856 as a residence for Leland Stanford, a former California governor, and founder of Stanford University in 1885.

It was donated to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento in 1900, who operated a children’s home there until 1978.

There is a California State Government building called “The Ziggurat” in West Sacramento right next to the Tower Bridge.

The Ziggurat was said to have been designed to resemble ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats and built by The Money Store in 1997.

Since 2001, it has been leased to the state as the headquarters of the California Department of General Services.

The Ziggurat is illuminated at night on special occasions.

I touched upon the subject of the geodetic markers of the National Geodetic Survey used to synchronize all U. S. government maps in the last video, and I followed up on a comment for me to check out the Compass Meridian Stones in Frederick, Maryland.

They were established in Frederick, Maryland, in 1896 as the result of the work done by two surveyors, Lawrence Brengle and Thomas Woodrow, to accurately measure what was known as “Frederick Town” in 1820.

This helped others, we are told, to realize the importance firstly of precise and accurate surveying measurements, and secondly, of the establishment of primary reference monuments and survey calibration baselines.

The “Compass Meridian Stones” in Frederick are on opposite sides of the lawn of the old courthouse, which is now the City Hall, and established as a North-South baseline in Maryland that surveyors used to annually check for variations in their compasses here and were required to report them to the Clerk of the Court to register them.

Polaris, commonly known as the “Pole Star” or the “North Star,” is visible from this location, and the two stones have been measured to align with the north.

Polaris is famous for appearing to stand-still in the night sky while the northern sky moves around it.

When I was doing research for the “Compass Meridian Stones” in Frederick, I came across information about the Boundary Stones of Washington, DC, the oldest national monuments in the United States.

We are told the placement of these boundary stones took place after the Residence Act of 1790, a federal statute adopted during the second session of the first United States Congress, calling for the creation of a new capital city for the United States, and signed into law by President George Washington on July 16th of 1790.

George Washington appointed Major Andrew Ellicott in 1791 to survey the new federal city, and Major Ellicott hired Benjamin Banneker, a surveyor and astronomer from Baltimore County, Maryland, to assist with the survey.

In order to accomplish this surveying task, we are told that land belonging originally to the states of Maryland and Virginia was divided up, and a diamond spanning 10-miles in each direction was marked at each mile by a similar stone marker

This is the Benjamin Banneker: SW-9 Boundary Stone on the boundary of Arlington County, Virginia, and the city of Falls Church, Virginia…

…and found on the grounds of the Benjamin Banneker Park in Arlington, Virginia.

Next, JS suggested that I look at Fulton, Missouri, saying that there is a Church from the 1600s there.

JS came upon it looking for information on the Kingdom of Calhoun.

What is interesting here is that when I typed “Fulton, Missouri Church” into the search box, “Fulton, Missouri Churchill” was a selection.

Come to find out, America’s National Churchill Museum is located on the grounds of the Westminster College Campus in Fulton, Mussouri, commemorating the life and times of Sir Winston Churchill.

Westminster College is where Churchill delivered what is called the “Sinews of Peace,” also known as the “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946 in the historic gymnasium there, and the speech was said to herald the beginning of the Cold War.

America’s National Churchill Museum is housed in the Church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury, said to have been a church of Sir Christopher Wren’s that was built in the 1600s, and moved stone-by-stone to Fulton from the City of London starting in the mid-1960s.

The foundation stone was said to have been laid in 1966, and the last stone laid in 1967.

Then, after the transported building was reconstructed, it took another two years to recreate the interior of the church.

The Churchill Museum opened in 2009, and is located beneath the church.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like the story told about the old London Bridge in Lake Havasu, Arizona?

The London Bridge was said to have been built in the 1830s, and purchased from the City of London in 1968 by Robert McCulloch, an American businessman from Missouri, for a planned community he established on the shore of Lake Havasu in 1964.

McCullough was said to have the exterior granite blocks cut and transported to the United States, and that the reconstruction of the bridge was complete in 1971.

Back in Fulton, Missouri, there is another University, William Woods, established as a college in 1870…

…the Missouri School for the Deaf, established there originally in 1851…

…and still located there today…

…the Fulton State Hospital, which was authorized in 1847 and opened in 1851, and is the oldest public mental health facility west of the Mississippi River…

…and the Fulton Reception and Diagnostic Center State Prison.

One last thing to mentioned about Fulton is that the state’s only nuclear power plant, the Callaway Plant, is 13-miles, or 21-kilometers, southeast of Fulton.

Looking into the Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City, near Fulton, was suggested to me by MU, who said that it was the oldest prison west of the Mississippi.

It operated from 1836 to 2004, and was the state’s primary maximum security prison.

Like the Joliet Prison in Illinois and the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud mentioned in the last post, inmates were said to have been involved in the quarrying the stone on site and making the bricks used in building the Missouri prison in the 19th-century…

…and designed by English-born architect John Haviland, said to be a major figure in the design of Neoclassical architecture during the early- to mid-19th-century.

Today, the Missouri State Prison, like the decommissioned Joliet Prison in Illinois, is open for tourist business.

I was curious about the Kingdom of Calhoun mentioned by JS who came across Fulton, Missouri.

My search efforts for the term “Kingdom of Calhoun” are directing me to Calhoun County, Illinois.

Here are some things I was able to find.

Calhoun County is a long, skinny county that runs along the Mississippi River border of Illinois and Missouri, and named for John Calhoun, the 7th Vice-President of the United States between 1825 and 1832, during the administrations of Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and the Calhoun family that was prominent in the area at the time.

The area’s population began to expand in the 1840s, we are told, with the arrival of German immigrant farmers.

The population of Calhoun County in 2019 was listed as 4,739.

The Pere Marquette Lodge in Grafton, Illinois at the bottom tip of Calhoun County, but actually in Jersey County, was said to have been built in the 1930s as by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

There are a number of family orchards in the southern tip of the county, like the Jacobs Orchard in Golden Eagle…

…and the Tom Ringhausen Orchard and Market in Hardin, Illinois.

The Joe Page Bridge in Hardin, Illnois, named after a local politician who lived between 1845 and 1938, is a vertical-lift bridge that links Greene and Calhoun Counties across the Illinois River.

It’s lift-span is just a little over 308-feet, or 94-meters, -long, making it the longest span of this type in the world.

The bridge was said to have been built in 1931 by an “unknown” builder, though the State of Illinois Division of Highways is given credit for the engineering & design work.

The Joe Page Bridge is the southernmost of three vertical-lift bridges on the Illinois River used by Illinois Route 100, which makes up much of the Illinois River Road, a U. S. National Scenic By-way.

The Florence Bridge, which connects the town of Florence, Illinois, to Scott County, Illnois.

The population of Florence was 71 at the time of the 2000 Census, and Scott County is the fourth least-populated county in the State of Illinois.

The Florence Bridge was said to have first opened in 1929…

…and like the Joe Page Bridge is also listed as “Builder Unknown.”

The northernmost of the three vertical-lift bridges crossing the Illinois River is the Beardstown Bridge, located at Beardstown, Illinois, between Schuyler County, Illinois, and Beardstown.

The current bridge was said to have been built in 1955, and rehabilitated in 1985.

I can’t find out much information on the Beardstown Bridge either.

SC suggested I look into the history of Chester, Illinois, who said that it is an old city that sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and that the creator of Popeye the Sailor, Elzie Segar, was from Chester.

Well, Popeye is the first thing that pops out about Chester in a search.

…as Chester promotes its status as “Home of Popeye.”

The population of Chester in the 2010 census was 8,856…

…and it is located 61-miles south of St. Louis, Missouri, on the Mississippi River.

I did a search for historical pictures of Chester, and here are some things that came up.

This an old postcard showing the Southern Illinois Penitentiary prison yards and Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Chester.

The Southern Illinois Penitentiary in Chester first opened in 1878…

…and since 1970 has been known as the Menard Correctional Center, and is the state’s largest prison.

The Chester State Hospital for the Insane was said to have been built between 1889 and 1891.

…and since 1975, still exists next to the Menard Correctional Center as the Chester Mental Health Center.

It is the only maximum security forensic mental health facility for those committed via a court order or believed to be an escape risk.

I found this postcard showing the Grand View Hotel in Chester after it was destroyed by fire in 1908.

The Chester Bridge crossing the Mississippi River was said to have been constructed between 1939 and 1942, and that only two-years later, it was destroyed by a severe thunderstorm on July 29th of 1944.

The bridge was subsequently reconstructed, and reopened on August 24th of 1946.

TB brought Altgeld’s Castles to my attention.

These are called Gothic Revival-style buildings at five universities in Illinois inspired by the Illinois Governer between 1893 and 1897, John Peter Altgeld.

The Altgeld Castles are as follows:

Altgeld Hall on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale was said to have been built in 1896…

…Altgeld Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a construction completion date of 1897…

…said to have been completed in 1898, what was known as “Altgeld’s Folly” is today the John W. Cook Hall…

…Altgeld Hall at Northern Illinois University, said to have been built between 1895 and 1899…

…and what is called “Old Main” at Eastern Illinois University, said to have been completed in 1899.

Next, I would like to share some information that I received from SD in northwest Missouri near Leavenworth, Kansas, who sent me these two photos of the Old Union Depot in Leavenworth.

She said the current building on the left, a community center today, appears to be an entire story shorter than the original train station, pictured on the right.

She said if you walk across the street and look on the other side of the black iron fence, you can see the first story below, but for whatever reason, the road was built up above the 1st story of the building.

She indicated Leavenworth is a strange town and said that the prisons, like many of the 1800s prisons I have been reporting on based on commenters’ suggestions, begs to be explored.

The Federal prison, or United States Prison Penitentiary Leavenworth, was said to have opened in 1903, and was the first of three first-generation federal prisons.

The other two federal prisons that ostarted operating as such around the same time as USP Leavenworth were in 1902 in Atlanta, Georgia…

…and USP McNeil Island in the Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington, which first opened as a prison in 1875, and then became a federal prison in 1904.

It closed-down as a state prison 2011.

The United States Disciplinary Barracks, the Department of Defense’s only maximum security prison…

…is located at Fort Leavenworth, the oldest permanent settlement in Kansas, and the second-oldest U. S. Army post west of the Mississsippi, having been built, we are told, in 1827.

You can find information about the existence of an underground tunnel system in Leavenworth in an internet search…

…as well as a mysterious underground city that was found beneath Leavenworth!

Leavenworth was founded in 1854, and became the first incorporated city in Kansas in 1855.

This historic photo of 5th Street in Leavenworth was presumably taken some time between 1854 and 1865, because I found it on the Kansas City Public Library page on the “Civil War on the Western Border.”

Next, PW sent me photos of the train bridge in Ferndale, Washington.

It is the BNSF Nooksack River Bridge. BNSF is the largest freight railroad network in North America, and Amtrak uses it as well.

PW said that while the bridge used to rotate, it doesn’t anymore.

He pointed out the of small wheels poking up from behind the exposed outside edge of a gear, just above the top of the concrete base.

Swing bridges are movable bridges that have a vertical locating pin and support ring as its primary structural support, and can pivot horizontally, allowing water vessels to pass through.

It has come to be known as the Ferndale Metallica Bridge because over the last thirty-years, someone has been painting Metallica logos on it.

PW said he’s looked around the bridge, and the year 1910 is stamped in the concrete underneath the bridge.

When I started looking for information on the construction date for the bridge, the only thing I could find referencing a construction date was that it was said to have first been built in 1890 and a replacement date of 1957, with a question mark.

Next, LL suggested that I check out Makran Coastal Highway in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province.

Balochistan is the largest, but least populated of Pakistan’s four provinces.

The Makran Coastal Highway, National Highway 10, is 406-miles in length, or 653-kilometers, running Gwadar in Balochistan to Karachi in Sindh Province, and was completed in 2004.

Prior to that, it was an dirt road.

The development of the highway was considered critical for the development of a port at Gwadar, with which, among other things, to ship the oil and mineral resources of the Central Asian Republics after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Here are some examples of sights you would see along a drive of the Makran Coastal Highway, to include the Great Sphinx; the Princess of Hope; and Buzi Pass.

The Great Sphinx, also known as the Balochistan Sphinx, or the “Lion of Balochistan,” is described as a natural rock formation that looks like a sphinx.

The Princess of Hope, also described as a natural rock formation, looks like a princess looking towards the horizon.

Both of these formations are visible from the highway’s Buzi Pass all in Pakistan’s largest national park, Hingol National Park.

The Pashtun tribal peoples are the primary inhabitants of a region including North and South Waziristan, the Khyber-Pakhtunkwha and Balochistan Provinces of Pakistan, and the Pashtun are also found in Afghanistan, in a region regarded as Pashtunistan, split between two countries since the Durand Line border between the two countries was formed in 1893 after the second Anglo-Afghan War.

The name sake of the line, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, was a British Diplomat and Civil Servant of the British Raj. We are told that together with the Afghan Emir, Abdur Rahman Khan, it was established to “fix the limit of their respective spheres of influence and improve diplomatic relations and trade.

Well, that certainly sounds good…but what was really going on here?

The Durand Line cuts through the Pashtunistan and Balochistan regions, politically dividing ethnic Pashtuns and Baloch, who live on both sides of the border.

But, really, why divide a people in this fashion?

The Pashtun are a tribal nation of millions of Afghani and Pakistani Muslims who also have a strong oral tradition that they are descendants of lost ten Tribes of Israel, and they refer to themselves as Bani Israel. 

Here is an example of a Pashtun textile piece showing the sacred geometric shape of a star tetrahedron in the center, also known as the Star of David…

…and two Afghani Pashtun lockets inscribed with the Star of David…

…and an ancient Afghan Torah in Hebrew.

So, according to the history we have been taught, how can this be?

What if we are talking about a worldwide civilization arranged like what you see pictured here (and in which you see an eight-pointed star contained within this configuration)…

The Rothschilds purchased Jerusalem in 1829, and subsequently acquired considerable land in Palestine in the 1800s and early 1900s.

If all of this is very confusing based on what we have been taught, it was absolutely meant to confuse, confound, misdirect and misinform us so we would instead fight each other and never know our true history by the Controllers who created the New World Order for their benefit, and not ours.

They took what was originally true, and then fragmented it and repackaged it to fit their agenda of world domination and control of Humanity and the Earth’s resources.

The controllers didn’t rewrite history from scratch – they rewrote the historical narrative to fit their agenda.

ML brought the Canfranc International Station, in the village of Canfranc in Spain in thePyrenees Mountains to my attention.

The Somport Railway Tunnel, said to have been constructed in 1915, carried the Pau-Canfranc Railway under the Pyreness into France between Canfranc on the Spanish-side and Cette-Eygun in French-side of the Pyrenees.

The tunnel was closed as a railway tunnel in 1970 after a freight-line accident damaged a key bridge in France, and re-opened in 2003 as the Somport Road Tunnel.

The railroad station on the French-side of the pass was closed in 1970 as a result of the same accident.

This location in the Pyrenees is a long-standing pass for pilgrim’s on the Way of Saint James, also known as “Camino de Santiago,” pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle St. James in northwestern Spain.

The French-side of this mountain pass is also the location of the Portalet Fort.

It was said to have been built between 1842 and 1870 on the orders of King Louis-Philippe I, the last Bourbon King of the Ancien Regime of France who ruled between 1830 and 1848, to guard this important border-crossing in the Pyrenees.

Interesting to note that when I was looking at Google Earth for the location of these places relative to each other, I found the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, where the rarely occurring phenomena of the interaction of neutrinos of cosmic origins, also known as dark matter, and atomic nuclei are studied.

The astroparticle physics laboratory is located in a former railway tunnel of Somport under Monte Tobazo, and accessed through the former Canfranc International Station.

The Canfranc International Station back in Spain was said to have opened in 1928 to serve as a major hub for cross-border, having been constructed in the Beaux Arts Architectural Style.

At the beginning of the second World War, Canfranc was a lifeline for Jewish refugees fleeing occupied Europe.

Then, in 1940, the infamous Spanish Dicator, Francisco Franco, gave Hitler a tour of the station, and realizing its logistical importance, subsequently took it over, and the Nazis used it, we are told, to transport gold that had been plundered across Europe, and after the war as a route to evade capture.

After the 1970 freight-line accident that stopped international traffic through thoe Somport tunnel, we are told the Canfranc Station remained open to serve some trains on the Spanish-side, though the massive building was neglected and fell into a derelict condition.

Around 1985 was when the underground laboratory was opened up beneath the station, and the European Union approved the funding necessary to renovate the derelict station building into a hotel.

Along with the railway station in Canfranc, Spain, ML also brought the Atocha Station in Madrid to my attention, saying it looked similar to the Cincinnati Union Station.

The Atocha Station, a railway complex that also includes a station for the Madrid underground rail system, is the largest railway station in Madrid.

The current station was said to have been built in 1892 to replace the original 1851 station which was said to have been destroyed by fire.

Another viewer, LG, recommended looking at the area around Kamloops in British Columbia…

…particularly along the Thompson River, saying that the terrain is unique, with flat-topped plateaus all the same height like it was cut off at the top.

I find the snaky, s-shapes of the Thompson River to be of interest, because I consistently find the same shapes in rivers around the world, like the River Thames in London on the left; the Brisbane River in Brisbane, Australia, in the middle; and the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba…

…as well as railroad tracks beside river, like these along the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon, which I found in conjunction with nearby hydroelectric dams…

…and railroads next to canals, like the historic photo of the Ship Canal from Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula on the top left; the Lehigh Canal in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the bottom left; and the C & O Canal at Point of Rocks, Maryland on the right.

SMJ asked me to look at Sierra Leone, specifically Freetown…

…and the “cotton tree,” saying that it s a significant energy charger along with the architecture of the structures around it.

So, I am going to start at Freetown’s Cotton Tree, and then take a look around the area.

The Cotton Tree, also known as a kapok tree, is the symbol of Freetown and Sierra Leone.

The story we are told is that Freetown was founded in 1792, after having been by a group of African-American slaves starting in 1787 who had gained their freedom by fighting for the British in during the American Revolutionary War who came to the area by way of Nova Scotia.

When these first settlers arrived from North America at what was later named “Freetown,” the legend is that they gathered around a giant tree above the bay and sang and gave thanks to God for delivering them to a free land.

Much of the population of Freetown is considered to be what is called the “Sierra Leone Creole People,” or the descendents of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean and African slaves in the western part of Sierra Leone between 1787 and 1885 in what became the “Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone” established by the British in 1808.

It is important to note the area was already inhabited by the indigenous Temne and Lukko people.

The Cotton Tree is still a place today where the people of Sierra Leone come to pray and make offerings to their ancestors for peace and prosperity.

These buildings are in the immediate vicinity of the Cotton Tree, which is located in the middle of the Central Business District in downtown Freetown.

The “Law Court” building which has housed the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone since 1960, and the building of which was credited to the Portuguese, who started arriving in 1462 after the area was first mapped by Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra…

…and the National Museum in Freetown is near the Cotton Tree.

The museum officially opened in 1967, in what had previously been the building which housed the “Old Cotton Tree Telephone Exchange.”

Looking for information on this led me to finding this historic photo of the “Cotton Tree Station” in Freetown.

We are told the construction of the railway started in 1896, and the first line opened in 1897, and that a number of other lines were opened between 1898 and 1907.

By 1974, however, the Sierra Leone Government Railway was completely closed.

Today, there are 52-miles, or 84-kilometers, of privately-owned railway in Sierra Leone, between the Port of Pepel and the Marampa Iron Ore mine.

This brings to mind the iron ore trains of Mauretania, some of the longest, if not the longest, in world, at 1.6-miles, or 2.5-kilometers, long…

…hauling iron ore, people and goods, 405-miles, or 652-kilometers between the mining town of Zouerat on the west side of Kediet ej Jill, the highest peak in Mauretania, through the Sahara Desert, to the port city of Nouadhibou on Mauretania’s coast.

This Google Earth Screenshot also shows the proximity of the Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat Structure, and an interesting-looking flow of the Sahara Desert going downward to the coast that intrigued me since I first came across it while researching a long-distance alignment that crossed through Mauretania.

I noticed this saucer shape next to the Cotton Tree on Google Earth and then came across the painting by Richmond Garrick which includes it.

I am not finding what it is, but it looks very interesting to me.

As with everywhere else, there is a lot more to uncover here, including the forts of Sierra Leone, which included Fort Thornton in Freetown, said to have been built by British between 1792 and 1805 and named after banker Henry Thornton, who was the chairman at the time of the Sierra Leone Company…

…and is the location of Sierra Leone’s most important state and government institutions, including the State House, which is the principal workplace and residence of the President of Sierra Leone.

I will leave Sierra Leone with this information that I have mentioned about Africa in other posts.

The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, organized by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, was said to have been convened to regulate European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany’s sudden appearance as a imperial power.

The outcome of the “General Act of the Berlin Conference” can be seen as the formalization of the “Scramble for Africa,” also known as the “Partition of Africa” or the “Conquest of Africa,” was the invasion, occupation, and division of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period between 1884 and 1914, the year in which World War I started.

The period of history known as New Imperialism is characterized as a period of colonial expansion by European powers, the United States, and Japan during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I am sure this was one of the motives.

There was a rich and proud heritage of its people throughout the African continent that has been removed from the collective awareness that was replaced with something quite different from what it originally was, as was the case worldwide as a result of the devastating effects of the policies and practices engaged in under New Imperialism and European Colonial expansion.

In Africa, along with everywhere else, the new narrative we have been given was and is based on lies.

Next, JM from Newcastle sent me two different sets of photos.

One set was photos he took of the upper-level buildings in Newcastle.

He found a lot of interesting things at the top-levels of buildings that typically go unnoticed.

According to the date on the left, this ornate stone-building came into being some time around 1835.

In two of these photos, he identified something he called an abstract version of the “Naga” demigod, making him wonder why there would be such a thing portrayed in his hometown of Newcastle.

JM also sent another set of photos with different styles of key-hole shapes.

Like the star Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York…

….with several KEYHOLE shaped Baseball fields close by…

…The Vatican from above showing the KEYHOLE shape…

…a KEYHOLE shape at Buckingham palace…

…The Pantheon in Rome from above which has the KEYHOLE shape on top of the buildings roof, in the form of a “Circle shape” with 2 lines going out at an angle.

Hmmm…interesting.

From above, the dome of the Pantheon looks similar that saucer-shape back in Freetown next to the Cotton Tree.

JM also sent this screenshot of the keyhole shapes known as Kofun, of what are described as megalithic tombs found mainly in Japan, but other parts of northeast Asia.

Shortly after JM sent me these keyhole shapes he had identified, I noticed a Keyhole Falls in Utah’s Zion National Park.

Next, HH sent me photos of this railroad structure on an unused railway road next to the River Stour in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, not far where he lives in England.

I am struck the bridge arches looking like a design that is typically found Cathedral doors all over the world, like the Lincoln Cathedral in England on the right…

…and the similarity both have to Walter Russell’s diagram showing what looks like a relationship between cathedral doors and octaves, the intervals between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency.

Walter Russell wrote numerous books outlining his vision about how the Universe works in the early to mid-20th-century, like “The Universal One” in 1926…

…and “The Secret of Light” in 1947.

Lastly, BR sent me this information about the Beloit Tower in Wisconsin, saying that they tried to tear it down over one hundred years ago, saying it was outdated, but they had to stop because it was “too well constructed.”

So, they removed the metal tank said to date from 1914 and the stairs from the in 1929, only 15-years after it was allegedly built…

…but left the rest of the tower standing after determining its demolition was too expensive to continue.

BJ brought Japan’s Hashima Island to my attention, saying that it was abandoned.

Hashima Island is located off the coast of Japan, about 9-miles, or 15-kilometers, from Nagasaki’s City Center…

…in-between Nakano Island…

…Takashima Island…

…and the Nomo Peninsula, the southern tip of the Nagasaki Peninsula, a large part of which contains the Nomo Hanto Prefectural Natural Park.

Interesting to note that the Nagasaki Dinosaur Msueum is right next to the Nomo Peninsula.

I am going to start my exploration with Hashima Island.

Hashima Island is nicknamed “Battleship Island.”

The island was known for its under sea coal mines, which were established around 1890, which operated during the rapid industrialization of Japan during what was known as the Meiji Restoration, which led to Japan’s rise as a military power, and the time period during which Japan adopted western ideas and production methods.

Between its opening in 1890 and abandonment in 1974 when the coal reserves were depleted, Mitsubishi developed a community in order to turn Hashima Island into a coal-producing powerhouse.

This included thousands of forced laborers in the early-20th-century primariy from Korea.

At the peak of its coal-mining production in 1959, there were over 5,200 people living on 16-acres, or 6.3-hectares, making it the most densely-populated place on the Earth at the time.

The only thing I can find out about Hashima’s neighboring island of Nakano is that it was a place in the 17th-century where hidden Christians were executed, and that no one is allowed to go to it today.

Takashima Island is an inhabited island, and is considered part of Nagasaki City.

Takashima Island was the location of the Hokkei Pit, the first coal mine in Japan to be mechanized by steam engines, and which operated between 1869 and 1876, and of which there are a few visible remains you can visit on the island.

Mitsubishi bought the coal mine on Takashima Island in 1881, which was the largest coal mine in Japan…

…and the mine was in operation until November of 1986.

You can visit the Takashima Coal Museum on your trip to Takashima as well.

You can get to Takashima Island by ferry.

There is a lot to unpack with these Japanese island coal mines. A third one was Sakito Island.

The first thing I would like to mention was the arrival of Thomas Glover, a Scottish merchant, who arrived in Nagasaki in 1859 as an agent for Jardine Matheson, a British Multinational Conglomeratefounded in 1832 and based in Hong Kong, with the majority of its business interests in Asia.

He established the Glover Trading Company in 1861 and was credited with building the Glover House overlooking Nagasaki Ironworks in 1863 as a based for his business operations in Japan.

Glover supplied machinery, equipment, ships, arms, and weapons to the Samurai of Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosu clans, who toppled the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate with the Fall of Edo on May 3rd of 1868, which marked the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, which restored imperial rule to Japan, and brought in a centralized form of government in order to strengthen their army to defend against foreign influence as we are told.

Edo Castle, the residence of the Tokugawa Shoguns, and a star fort, became the Imperial Residence in 1871.

It was during the Meiji era that Japan westernized and rapidly industrialized, leading to its rise as a military power by 1895.

Well, I don’t know about defense against foreign influence because it sure looks like there was foreign influence bringing all this about.

Back to Thomas Glover.

Glover played a major role in Japan’s rapidly emerging industrialization.

Among other things, he was involved in establishing businesses that would become part of Mitsubishi’s early growth and diversification, which included the development of the first coal mine on Takashima Island, as well as the Nagasaki Shipyard.

This print shows the Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki Shipyard circa 1910.

Also, when I was looking for information on the Takashima Coal Mine, I came across the article about the investment of British capital into the development of the Takashima Coal Mine, which played a crucial role in the rapid industrialization of Japan.

Not only that, there was the issue of forced labor to work the coal mines.

Imperial Japan formally annexed Korea into the Empire of Japan in 1910, and Korea was under Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945.

It is estimated that during the Japanese occupation of Korea, before and during World War II, there were as many as 7.8 million Koreans were conscripted as forced labor or soldiers during Japan’s imperial expansion.

There were also forced laborers coming into Japan from its occupation of China.

In 1933, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo in China.

The Last Emperor of China, Puyi, was first installed by the Japanese as the Chief Executive of Manchukuo, and he became its emperor in 1934, a position he held until the end of World War II.

Puyi’s life story is very sad, as is told in the 1987 movie “The Last Emperor” directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

Much more to find down this rabbit hole in Japan, but now I am going to take a look at the Bohemian Switzerland National Park at the suggestion of RAB13.

It is located in the northwestern part of the Czech Republic, and are part of what are called the Elbe Sandstone Mountains along the Elbe River on the country’s border with Germany.

…and on the German side of the Elbe is the Saxon Switzerland National Park.

Including the name of Switzerland to this region came about in the 18th-century from Swiss artists Adrian Zingg…

…and Anton Graff, who were reminded of their homeland when they saw it.

The symbol of Bohemian Switzerland National Park is what is described as the largest natural arch in Europe.

Right next to the largest natural arch in Europe is a hotel called the “Falcon’s Nest” in English, said to have been built in 1881 by Prince Edmund of Clary-Aldringen, of a princely Austro-Hungarian Family.

This part of the national park is privately-owned, with the arch being inaccessible since 1982 due to heavy erosion by visitors and the privatization of the hotel, which has limited visitation times for a fee.

What the “Falcon’s Nest” in the Czech Republic brings to mind is the Madonna della Corona Church near Verona, Italy…

…and the Tiger’s Nest Monastery in the country of Bhutan in the eastern Himalayan Mountains.

The Mariina Skala rock, described as a rocky hill, has one of the best views of the Bohemian Switzerland National Park.

We are told that the original wooden hut on top of the rocky hill was built in 1856 as a refuge hut and was also used as a fire observation tower…until it was badly damaged by a fire in 2005 and was replaced sometime in 2006, where it escaped damage from another fire three-weeks after it was replaced.

On the German-side of the Elbe, in the Saxon Switzerland National Park, you can visit the Bastei Bridge.

Built from Sandstone in-between a number of rock-formations, it is 1000-feet, or 305-meters, high.

The current bridge was said to have been built in 1851, to replace a wooden bridge that was built in 1824 to link several rocks for visitors.

Just 6-miles or 10-kilometers from the Bastei Bridge is the Konigstein Castle, described as Germany’s largest fortification on top of a rock plateau.

Castles and fortifications like these were built, we are told, to guard the trade routes.

This is a good place to bring in JF’s recommendations of Prague Castle…

…and Vysehrad Fort, which is also in Prague.

He said they are both built on top of the rocky hills, just like others we have been seeing, and he really wonders how the did it. Me too!

JF also said the underground of Prague is also very ancient, well built and simply amazing. Not a chance, it was built with a chisel and hammer.

NP sent me photos of the Astronomical Clock on Prague’s Old Town Hall.

First installed in 1410, it is the oldest astronomical clock that is still in operation.

The Astronomical Dial of the clock represents the positions of the sun and moon in the sky, and displays various astronomical details, and a calendar dial with medallions representing the months.

The figure of a skeleton called “Death” strikes the time…

…and there is an hourly show called “Walk of the Apostles,” of moving apostle figures and other sculptures.

HM79 asked me to take a look at Skellig Michael.

Skellig Michael, named after St. Michael, is a remote, rugged island off the western coast of Ireland.

It is described as a twin-pinnacled crag, which is defined as a rocky hill or mountain, with a steep and inhospitable landscape of 54-acres, or 22-hectares of rock.

So, let’s do a tour of the island to see what is at this inhospitable place.

The main boat landing on Skellig Michael is the East Landing at Blind Man’s Cove.

Once you’ve landed, there are 600 jagged rock steps leading up to the island’s monastery.

Once you reach the top, you come to a monastery built into a terraced-shelf, located 600-feet, or 180-meters, above sea-level.

The monastery contains things like two oratories, which are small chapels for private worship and a cemetery…

…crosses…

…six beehive huts…

…and what’s left of St. Michael’s Church, which is mostly collapsed with only its eastern window still standing.

Interestingly, there is a modern gravestone at the center of what has been identified as St. Michael’s Church with a dates of 1868 and 1869 on it, and erected for two children of one of the lighthouse-keepers.

There are two lighthouses on Skellig Michael.

The one still in use today is called Skelligs Michael Low Light.

We are told it was built in 1826, along with…

…the Upper Light, the use of which was discontinued in 1870 for the given reason of too much fog.

There is a helicopter landing pad on the island, these days for emergency-use only.

There was a hermitage on the opposite side of the island to the monastery, but access to it is restricted, and you need to make a prior arrangement to go there.

To get to the Hermitage, you go through Christ’s Saddle…

…and Needle’s Eye.

Skellig Michael was recently used for the filming locations of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in 2015…

…and “The Last Jedi” in 2017.

I am going to end “Places & Topics Suggested by Viewers – Volume 9” here on Skellig Michael.

More to come!

In this eighth volume of what will end up being a long new series, I am highlighting places, concepts, and historical events that people have suggested, and includes photographs, videos and other information viewers have gathered along the way and sent to me in their explorations and research of places close to where they live.

This series is a compilation of work I have previously done, presented in a multi-volume format.

Several viewers from Indianapolis mentioned the Crown Hill Cemetery to me, located about 3-miles, or 5-kilometers, outside of the city.

The main gate of the Crown Hill Cemetery is very similar to ones in Boston that I showed in the last video, like Forest Hill.

The Crown Hill Cemetery is the largest green-space within the Indianapolis Beltway, and the third-largest private cemetery in the United States.

It was established in 1863 at Strawberry Hill, whose summit was renamed “the Crown,” with the grave of Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley sitting right at the top of the crown.

I wonder why James Whitcomb Riley merited such a prestigious location for his final resting place for all eternity?

Let’s see what the plaque there about him tells us.

So, he is best remembered today, it says, for his poems that appeal to children and the child in all of us, such as “Little Orphant Annie,” which is not a misspelling, based on an orphan living in the Riley home in her childhood.

There are four stanzas in the poem, and in the first one, her character is introduced, and in each of the second and third stanzas, she tells young children about a bad child being snatched away by goblins as a result of misbehavior, with the underlying moral of the story in the fourth stanza, which was for kids to obey their parents or the same thing could happen to them.

Nothing weird about that right? Yeah, right!!

Oh yes, and this young girl in Riley’s poem was the very same one that the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” was based on, which eventually led to radio, television, Broadway and Hollywood productions about her.

Riley’s memorial plaque also mentioned his poem “The Raggedy Man,” about a German tramp that Riley’s father employed in his youth…

…and written, like “Little Orphant Annie,” in the Indiana dialect of the 19th-century.

Interesting that the “Raggedy Man” knew about giants and griffins and elves, though I have no idea what a “Squidgicum-Squee” would be!

Well, here’s one artist’s rendition of a rather terrifying-looking “Squidgicum-Squee!”

Was the Raggedy Man was the inspiration for Raggedy Ann?

Apparently the Raggedy Man and Little Orphant Annie both were, because the creator of Raggedy Ann, Johnny Gruelle, a family friend of Riley’s, was said to have combined the names of both characters into one when he applied for a registered trademark on the Raggedy Ann name in 1915.

Lastly, according to the plaque at his tomb, Riley was so beloved by the children of Indianapolis who used to come visit him on his front porch for lemonade, that they began donating coins to help pay for his memorial, and this tradition continues today…

…where the coins collected go to his legacy, the Riley Hospital for Children.

JG in Iowa mentioned visiting a lot of rural cemeteries with a friend last year, and among other things, found these tree-like head-stones in every graveyard.

She looked them up, and found out they came from Woodmen of the World, a fraternal organization and life insurance company.

Here’s what we are told.

Joseph Cullen Root founded the Woodmen of the World in 1890, as a secret fraternal benefit organization with a purpose of making life insurance affordable for everyone…

…and that from 1890 to 1900, every policy included a tombstone.

Alas, the cost of tombstones rose to the point that after 1900, members had to buy a rider on their insurance policy in order to receive a Woodmen tombstone.

By 1920, the costs of making these unique tombstones were so prohibitive, that they were discontinued in the 1920s.

Frequently, the tombstone had the Woodmen of the World (or WOW) motto “Dum Tacet Clamet,” or “Though silent he speaks,” inscribed on a round medallion.

Woodmen of the World still exists today, and headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska.

This is what their original headquarters building looked like, which opened in 1912.

It was the tallest building between Chicago and the West Coast before it was demolished in 1977.

…and their headquarters building today, said to have been built in 1969.

They still operate their radio station, WOAW in Omaha, which started broadcasting in 1923…

LBR said the image of the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston was reminiscent of the image used on the book cover of The Saturn Myth by David Talbott.

Now onto new subjects.

NA suggested that I come to Fall River, Massachusetts, and Newport Rhode Island.

First I will look at Fall River, and express huge thanks to RR and his son for the photos and the drone footage of Fall River.

RR sent me the following pictures.

Firstly, this is the Academy Building, also known as the “Academy of Music Building” and the “Borden Block.”

RR said that 1875 was one of the coldest winters ever in Massachusetts, and questioned that it was even possible that they could have built this the way they said they did.

It was said to have been constructed in 1875 as a memorial to Nathaniel Briggs Borden by his family, and opened on January 6th of 1876 as the second-largest theater and concert hall in Massachusetts, as well as a venue for other large community events.

The building today is used for senior living apartments and retail space after being rescued from demolition plans in 1973.

RR sent photos of some of the interesting-looking gargoyle shapes found on this building.

Nathaniel Borden, the man who the Academy building was said to have been in memory of, was a businessman and politician from Fall River, who was born in 1801 and died in 1865.

In business, he was involved in textile mills, banking, and railroads.

In politics, he was a State Senator, a Representative in the U. S. Congress, and was the third Mayor of Fall River.

We are told that his father died when he was young, and his mother Amey was one of the first incorporators of the Troy Cotton and Woolen Manufactory, the second cotton mill that was established in Fall River in 1813 and built on her property. She died in 1817.

Then, at the age of 20, Nathaniel along with several others organized the Pocasset Manufacturing Company, a cotton textile mill.

The Pocasset Manufacturing Company was the origin of the Great Fall River Fire of 1928, which destroyed the mills and a large portion of the city’s business district along with it, completely wiping out five city blocks but not killing anyone.

This is a 1910 illustration of a part of Main Street which was destroyed by the fire.

RR sent this historic photo of Fall River looking north on Main Street, with the electric streetcar running, and relatively few people milling about a big city block.

The most famous Borden of Fall River was the notorious Lizzie Borden, who even though she was acquitted of the axe murders of her father and stepmother in 1892, her story is still alive and well in American Pop Culture.

…and if you ever have plans to travel to Fall River, you can always stay at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast & Museum.

RR also sent several pictures of St. Anne’s Church in Fall River that was said to have been built in the 1890s

This photo of St. Anne’s church sent by RR shows a very nice alignment with the full moon and the top of the church, smack in the middle between the church spires.

Reminds me of the perfect alignment of the sun with the top of the tower at Angkor Wat in Cambodia on the days of equinoxes and solstices every year.

He also sent photos of the building of St. Anne’s Church taken when it was said it was being built starting in the 1890s

He said the church was built with local granite and blue marble from Vermont.

Two last things from RR.

He sent me drone footage taken by his son.

The first drone footage shows the Braga Bridge, that carries Interstate 95 across the Taunton River between the towns of Fall River and Somerset, and the USS Massachusetts beside it, which is a museum today.

This second one is drone video footage of old church towers on Rock Street in Fall River. 

The next place I am going to look at is Whitman, Massachusetts, which was suggested by BA.

In the late 1930s, Whitman is the place where the chocolate chip cookie was first invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield at the Toll House Inn, which was a tourist lodge.

Whitman is located half-way between Boston and New Bedford, and travellers would be charged a toll when they historically stopped here to change horses and have a hot meal.

Ruth Graves Wakefield soon became famous for her lobster dinners and desserts at the Toll House Inn, which included the first chocolate chip cookies.

The Toll House Inn burned down in 1984, but its sign still stands today on Route 18.

Whitman’s history is deeply-rooted in the shoe-making industry, with over 20 shoe and related-factories in-town.

There are a few abandoned shoe factories left in Whitman, and some have been turned into condos, like the Bostonian Shoe Lofts.

BA mentioned that there is a beautiful park here, the Whitman Town Park, that was credited to the Olmsted Brothers for its present design in 1900.

This park has mounds…

…and a Civil War monument was added to the park, we are told, in 1908.

Now onto Newport, Rhode Island, and some other places in the smallest state in the United States.

Bellevue Avenue in Newport is known for its “Gilded Age Mansions.”

One definition that I found of “Gilded Age” is that it was a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in the United States from the 1870s to 1900.

Another definition is that it was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the northern and western United States.

Perhaps the most famous of these “Gilded Age” mansions, said to have been built between 1893 and 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II in Newport known as “The Breakers.”

It was said to have been patterned after a Renaissance Palace, and built with marble imported from Italy and Africa, as well as rare wood and mosaics from countries around the world.

“The Breakers” Mansion, as well as the city of Newport itself, is centrally-located on the Atlantic coast, between the eastern tip of Long Island, which is Montauk Point; Martha’s Vineyard; and Nantucket Island; and Plymouth, the landing spot of the Pilgrim’s on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.

I can already see I am going to have to come back here on another occasion and do a deep dive.

This is a good place to insert AF’s suggestion of looking into the Provincetown Monument.

Known as the Pilgrim Monument, it is located in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and was said to have been built between 1907 and 1910 to commemorate the first landfall of the pilgrims in 1620, and the signing of the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, in November of 1620 when the “Mayflower” was anchored in Provincetown Harbor.

A contest was said to have been held to design the monument, and the winning entry was a design based upon the Torre del Mangia in Siena, Italy, which was said to have been built between 1338 and 1348.

RS brought Woonsocket, Rhode Island to my attention, with the comment that Rhode Island has tons of massive polygonal masonry walls everywhere, and giant granite masonry on top of bigger and older giant block masonry.

RS lives near a bridge on South Main Street in Woonsocket, and said that it clearly wasn’t built recently, and even has a plaque stating it was “re-fixed” in the late 1800s.

I found great examples of the megalithic polygonal masonry walls in Rhode Island several years ago when I was tracking an alignment from Washington, DC, through Providence, the state capital.

Here are several photos of the megalithic polygonal masonry seen at Providence’s Waterplace Park.

CR suggested that I look at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where there’s a high school, library, and at least a couple church’s that are amazing, and that there’s a small one of these buildings in a cemetery in New Bedford near the high school over there.

Fairhaven and New Bedford are in the same general area that I have been talking about in this region of New England’s Atlantic coast, and are located right next to each other.

…and the two cities are connected by a swing-truss bridge, which swings open to allow fishing boats in and out of the inner harbor located here.

Here’s an old postcard showing the bridge “open”…and are those streetcar tracks on the bridge?

Sure looks like it to me!

And this was the only old photo I could find about the bridge with a streetcar actually showing in it.

This is the Fairhaven High School, still in use today, which opened in 1905, and said to have been designed by architect Charles Brigham, and donated by Henry Huttleston Rogers, one of the key men in John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust.

The Millicent Library in Fairhaven was said to have been designed by Charles Brigham and donated to the town by Henry Huttleston Rogers, in memory of his youngest daughter Millicent Rogers, who died of heart failure at the age of 17.

It was dedicated in 1893.

Both New Bedford and Fairhaven were deeply connected to New England’s whaling industry in the 19th-century, as whale oil was the primary source for lighting fuel for much of that time.

This is the “Whaleman” statue on the grounds of the New Bedford Free Public Library, gifted to the city in 1913 as a tribute to the whalers that made New Bedford famous.

The next places I am going to look at are in Connecticut are Candlewood Lake and Meriden from information provided to me by KO

First, Candlewood Lake, which is a man-made lake that is the largest in Connecticut, and the largest lake within a 60-mile, or 97-km, radius of New York City.

Some of the most expensive real estate in Connecticut is found around its shores.

Candlewood Lake was formed when the Connecticut Light and Power Company’s Board of Directors approved a plan in 1926 to create the first large-scale operation of pumped storage facilities in the United States, and they created the lake by pumping it full of water from the Housatonic River.

He said there was a city named Jerusalem beneath the waters of the lake, and while there isn’t a lot of information regarding this lost town in Connecticut, there are references to it available to find.

KO mentioned there is a Babylon, New York and New Canaan, Connecticut right close by, as well as a Bethlehem and Bethany.

Just an interesting aside for those of us who remember when the Amityville Horror came out in the late 1970s…

…I happened to notice Amityville is just down the road from Babylon on New York’s Long Island.

One more place of interest to note in Connecticut is Waterbury.

It was the location of Holy Land USA, a theme park said to have been inspired by passages from the Bible.

It was opened in 1955…

…and closed in 1985.

It reminds me a lot of Cappadocia in appearance, an ancient region in Central Anatolia of Turkey.

KO also sent me some photos from Meriden, Connecticut.

In this picture of what he called a florette, an elevation applique, there which looks like there have been modifications, with what appears to be another set of numbers beneath what is seen on the surface.

He said there is a deep scratch around where whoever scratched around the outside of the area and then used a chisel to somewhat sloppily prepare the surface for a new date and elevation, which was done with another tool, and engraved in a different style of text.

Meriden is located half-way between New Haven, Connecticut and Hartford, Connecticut.

This is Meriden’s City Hall, said to have been built in 1907.

The Soldiers’ Monument in front of the City Hall was erected in 1873, we are told, to honor those from Meriden who died in the American Civil War.

The monument is described as an obelisk having a granite base and the statue of a soldier on top.

Next I am going to look at Atlantic City, New Jersey, based on EB’s suggestion and photos he sent me.

First is a photo he sent me of the old fruit and vegetable market…

…that he said is now the location of Gino’s Pizza and Grill on Atlantic and North Carolina Avenues.

He also sent me pictures of what he thinks are the oldest churches in his area in the block of Connecticut and Atlantic Avenues.

Interesting the number of empty lots showing here too.

EB also sent me screenshots of old hotels in Atlantic City that were three- and four-blocks-long that were Moorish castles, like the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, which was said to have been built between 1902 and 1906, and demolished in October of 1978…

…the Traymore Hotel, said to have opened in its most recent form in 1906 and demolished in 1972…

…and the Windsor Hotel, about which I can’t find any information to speak of, but presumably long gone like the others.

The last image I am going to leave you with of Atlantic City is an old postcard showing the Atlantic City and Shore Railroad crossing a two-mile, or 3-kilometer, -long trestle bridge in Great Egg Harbor Bay, and was a type of streetcar system in New Jersey called an interurban that served Somers Point and several other cities between Atlantic City and Ocean City in the years between 1907 and 1948.

CZ sent me several Google Earth screenshots of Harrisburg, the State Capital of Pennsylvania.

Harrisburg is situated on the east bank of the Susquehanna River, only 107-miles, or 172-kilometers, west of Philadelphia.

Like with any place, there is so much information to choose from as far as where to look in Harrisburg that I am going to focus solely on what CZ sent me about the Capitol District.

The land that became Harrisburg had been purchased by an English trader named John Harris Sr. in 1719; John Harris Jr. made plans to lay-out a town on his father’s land; and the land was surveyed by William Maclay, John Harris Sr’s son-in-law.

The city of Harrisburg became incorporated in 1791; named the Pennsylvania State Capital in October of 1812.

The current State Capitol Building was said to have been designed by architect Joel Miller Huston, and built between 1902 and 1906 in the Beaux-Arts style of architecture.

The interior of the Pennsylvania State Capitol is described as having decorative Renaissance themes throughout the building.

It is part of what is called the Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex.

On the East side of the Capitol building is what is referred to as the East Wing, described as a 1987 extension of the Capitol building.

Flanking the East Wing are the North and South Office buildings,

The North Office building was said to have been built in Indiana limestone starting in 1927…

…and the South Office building in Indiana limestone starting in 1919.

We are told the oldest building of the complex is the Ryan Office building, with a construction completion date of 1894.

East of the North and South Office buildings, across Commonwealth Avenue, there are a pair of buildings situated across from each other at either end of the “Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Grove.”

I will be touching more on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Bridge that you can see the pylons of in the background momentarily.

The Forum building is on the south-side of the Memorial Grove, was said to have been built out of grey limestone, and featuring 22 bronze doors, between 1929 and 1931 in the style of an open-air Greek amphitheater, complete with a star map of the night sky depicting the zodiac and other constellations with over 1,000 stars on the ceiling…

…and on the north-side of the Memorial Grove is the Pennsylvania Treasury Building, said to have been a project of the New Deal Era Public Works Administration during the Great Depression built between 1937 and 1940.

The eastern-most portion of the Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex is the “Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Bridge,”or the “State Street Bridge,” which connects the complex to neighborhoods across the railroad tracks that run east of North 7th Street.

It is a 1,312-foot, or 400-meter, deck-arch bridge said to have been constructed between 1925 and 1930.

The State Museum of Pennyslvania is directly adjacent to the Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex…

…run by the state through the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to “preserve and interpret the region’s history and culture,” and includes a multi-media planetarium, and four-floors of exhibits covering Pennsylvania history from prehistoric times through today.

There’s more here to find just in this part of downtown Harrisburg, but I am going to stop at one more location in Harrisburg a couple of blocks north before I head out to other points on this journey.

CZ sent me screenshots of the Scottish Rite Cathedral and Masonic Temple of Harrisburg…

…with a tall obelisk on its grounds.

The 1,192-seat Theater and Ballroom at the Scottish Rite Cathedral is a popular community event venue.

And this seems to be the extent of what I am able to find out about it!

Next, on to a location shared by a viewer from South Carolina’s Lowcountry region.

7S sent me photos and video clips of “The Ruins,” a site he visited in South Carolina at the Palmetto Bluff Resort.

“The Ruins” located here are said to be remnants of the “Wilson Mansion,” described as a former getaway for wealthy northerners at the end of the “Gilded Age.”

They are located on property previously owned by a New York financier by the name of Richard T. Wilson, Jr, who was said to have built a four-story mansion with 72-rooms here in 1902, as a “home away from home” until it burned down in 1926.

Wilson’s in-laws included members of the Vanderbilt, Whitney, and Astor families, who were among the prominent guests that were entertained at Palmetto Bluff.

Compare the appearance of “The Ruins” at Palmetto Bluff Resort in South Carolina on the left with “The Ruins” at Holliday Park in Indianapolis on the right.

The following video is a compilation of footage 7S sent me when he visited there.

When he is taking close-up shots of the columns laying around, we are seeing a type of building material historically used in the coastal southeast called “Tabby,” comprised of lime, water, sand, oyster shells, and ash.

Now onto the Chicago area.

LH sent me Google Earth screenshots of several places around Chicago.

One was the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, located on the shore of Lake Michigan…

…and said to have been built between 1912 and 1953, and the second oldest Baha’i Temple ever constructed, and the oldest one still standing.

It was said to have been designed by French-Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois, who was said to have received feedback during a trip to Haifa in Israel in 1920 from the son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith.

Interesting how close in sound the name of architect Louis Bourgeois is to Louise Bourgeois, which was the name of the designer of the “Maman” sculptures, giant spiders that are found all over the world as discussed in previous “Short & Sweets.”

A small group of Baha’i in downtown Chicago were said to have first discussed the idea of a Baha’i Temple in the area in 1903, which was during the time that world’s first Baha’i House of Worship was being built in what is now Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, between 1902 and 1908.

It was said to have been used as a House of Worship for only 20-years before it was turned over to Soviet authorities, and then destroyed after that in what we are told was one of the deadliest earthquake’s in modern history.

LH also sent me a Google Screenshot of the location of the Scottish Rite Valley Chicago in Bloomingdale, Illinois.

Here we find the Scottish Rite Cathedral Headquarters Association, “telling the story of Free Masons and the Scottish Rite origins in symbolic interior and exterior spaces.”

LH aslo sent me a screenshot of the Medinah Temple on the north-side of Chicago.

It was said to have been designed by the Shriners’ architects Huehl and Schmidt, and completed in 1912.

It is described as “…a colorful Islamic-looking building replete with pointed domes and an example of Moorish Revival architecture.”

Currently the building is not being used for anything, but it originally housed an ornate auditorium with a seating-capacity of 4,200 on three-levels, and several organs.

It was the annual location for the performance of the Shrine Circus in Chicago for many years…

…and WGN-TV used the Medinah Temple for the live telecast of “The Bozo 25th Anniversary Special” on September 7th of 1986.

This just really reinforces the masonic connections between circuses and clowns that I am finding my research about the “Shapers of the New Narrative.”

I mean it’s not hard to find out things like comedian and clown Red Skelton was a Shriner when you look for it.

Next, MM sent me a link to an article about a mini-Washington Monument that is buried under a manhole near the 555-foot, or 169-meter, -high Washington Monument.

It is a Geodetic Control Point of a million control points used by the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) to synchronize all of the government’s maps.

Usually metal caps or rods driven down into the ground, the mini Washington Monument was said to have been placed in the 1880s as part of a trans-continental levelling program.

How and why did a 12-foot, or 3.5-meter, -high, underground obelisk become Geodetic Control Point in the first place?

This is a screenshot from Google Earth showing the exact alignment of North-South relationships between the White House and the Jefferson Memorial, located on the southeast corner of the Tidal Basin, and the exact alignment between the Lincoln Memorial to the west, through the Washington Monument, and to Capitol building on the East side of the alignment.

Also, the subject of a trans-continental levelling program by the National Geodetic Survey starting in 1887 sounds very interesting to me, and smells like gravy.

What I get a sense of from this information are the following implications about what the actual purpose of the National Geodetic Survey and its trans-continental levelling program might have been:

1. Were these original grid points of importance on the Earth’s original grid system
2. Does this geodetic survey actually provide physical evidence for flat earth?
3. Why did they call it a “levelling” program? Does this have something to do with re-setting the post-mud-flood world?

Some people don’t subscribe to idea that the mud event was actually a flood. I will make the point here to say that something definitely happened, and describe it as a mud event. It was a world-wide event that involved a whole lot of mud, however it happened.

Things like earthquakes at a high-enough magnitude will cause the surface of the Earth to liquefy.

Maybe it was an event, or series of events, that I believe were deliberately caused to create this incredible liquefaction event to take place for unimaginably great depths and distances.

But this event is typically referred to as the “mud flood,” which is how I first came to know about it and I still see evidence for a mud event everywhere I look in my research, no matter what actually caused the effects.

Interesting to note that the geodetic marker shown previously on the left reminds me of the marker I showed in my last Short & Sweet that was sent to me by KO, a viewer in Connecticut, shown on the right.

Interesting how they both show markings and years in a different font from the rest of the marker, with both making the point there is a $250 fine or imprisonment for disturbing the marker.

Hmmm. Strange.

Did someone tamper with these markers?

And if they did, who and why ?

And speaking of Washington Monuments, here are a couple more.

One is from a viewer sent me information about an obelisk next to Interstate 55 near Ridgeland, Mississippi.

She found a link from the Library of Congress explaining it’s purpose, but said some of us are only left with more questions than answers.

Called the Washington Monument Cell Phone Tower, What we are told is that this is a cellular-telephone tower whose obelisk design was felt to be more pleasing in design than the usual girders and antenna…

…in the same way that other communities hide cell phone towers in fake trees.

Another one is at Washington Monument State Park near Boonsboro, Maryland, on the Appalachian Trail.

I never went there, but I remember the signs for it because my parents used to go shopping for furniture when I was a child at a store in Middletown, Maryland, which is located near there.

It is a 40-foot, or 12-meter, -high stone tower, that was said to have been built to honor George Washington starting on July 4th of 1827, at which time the citizens of Boonsboro came together en masse, and by the end of the day, the tower was already 15-feet, or almost 5-meters, – high, on a base that was 54-feet, or 16-meters, in circumference.

Lastly, KH brought to my attention an historical funicular, also known as an incline railway, in Marseille, France.

We are told that it was built in 1892 to reduce the effort of scaling the hill that Notre-Dame de la Garde Catholic Basilica was built on top of between 1852 and 1864.

We are taught it was built over top of the foundations of an ancient fort on the highest natural point in Marseille…

…and that the funicular was demolished in 1974 after it was shut-down in 1969 because the advent of the automobile made it unprofitable.

JK sent me quite a few suggestions of places to look at in Joliet, Illinois

Places like the Joliet Central High School, said to have been designed by architect Frank Shaver Allen, complete with arches, castellated walls, and towers, and opened in 1901.

It is interesting to note that Frank Shaver Allen, a Joliet-based architect, was also credited with other secondary school buildings around the country, like:

The Sioux City Central High School in Iowa, said to have been built in 1892.

It was closed as a school in 1972 but the building still stands today and today is the “Castle on the Hill” apartment building.

The former Washington School in Appleton, Wisconsin, was said to have been built in 1895, and like the Sioux City Central HIgh School, also still stands an apartment building today.

At least these three are still standing.

But these high schools have all been demolished:

The East St. Louis High School, said to have been built in 1895…

…and the San Jose High School, as well as several other high schools that Frank Shaver Allen was credited with being the architect for in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Trenton, New Jersey; and San Diego, California.

It is interesting to note that Frank Shaver Allen’s home in Joliet, that he was said to have built in 1887…

…is considered to be one of the most haunted in the State of Illinois.

The Rialto Square Theater in Joliet opened in 1926 as a vaudeville movie palace.

Considered one of the “150 great places in Illinois,” today the Rialto Square Theater is a venue for musicals, plays, concerts, stand-up comedy, and other community functions.

The Ottawa Street Methodist Church was said to have been built by architect George Julian Barnes in 1909 on a Joliet limestone foundation.

Today it serves as the location of the Joliet Area Historical Museum.

The Joliet Railroad Bridge is a vertical lift-bridge…

…said to have been built in 1932, which would have been in the middle of the Great Depression, which was considered to have started in August of 1929 and lasted until March 1933.

The Dellwood Park in Lockport, near Joliet, was said to have been built by the Chicago and Joliet Railway Company to help promote ridership.

It opened on July 4th of 1905, and operated until 1938.

Today Dellwood Park is a 150-acre park with picnic shelters, playgrounds, athletic fields, skate-boarding and a disc-golf course…

…and there are a lot of interesting old stone ruins on the park grounds as well.

JK also directed my attention to the old Joliet Prison.

The prison was said to have been built by convict labor between 1858 and 1860, who quarried the limestone with which the prison was built.

During the American Civil War, which took place between 1861 and 1865, the Joliet prison housed prisoners-of-war, as well as criminals, and from the 1870s, we are told, the prison had contracts with local businesses.

Joliet Prison closed as a prison in 2002, due to budget cuts and the “dangerous and obsolete nature of the buildings.”

…though it is still open for tours to this day.

Joliet Prison was featured at the beginning of the 1980 Blues Brothers movie with Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi as Elwood and Jake Blues, where Jake was paroled from prison at the beginning of the movie.

CH sent me a link about the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

He said it looks like a repurposed castle to him, and a similar story is told about this prison also by inmates quarrying the stone to build the walls and parts of the facility. 

It first opened in 1889.

The greystone of the prison on the left at St. Cloud, Minnesota, immediately brought to mind the greystone of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, on the right.

CH said it is located right next to railroad tracks, and directly across the tracks and the highway, the Minnesota Highway Safety and Research Center is located, which has numerous circuit shapes on the grounds.

The Minnesota Highway Safety and Research Center provides the latest driver, safety, and traffic information, and is connected with St. Cloud State University as well.

Next, EK sent me an article in the Explore Ga magazine with a photo of a ruined mansion on Cumberland Island.

Cumberland is the largest of Georgia’s Sea Islands on the Atlantic coast, and located just south Jekyll Island.

Cumberland Island today has mostly marsh, mudflats, tidal creeks, campgrounds, and wild horses.

The story goes that the mansion on Cumberland Island was built in 1884 by Thomas Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie’s brother and business partner, as the Carnegie Family Retreat known as “Dungeness.”

What we are told is that a fire in 1959 reduced the mansion to ruins.

Jekyll Island, Cumberland Island’s neighbor to the North, has an interesting history of interest in it by the very wealthy. 

Even now it is owned by the State of Georgia and run by a self-sustaining, self-governing body. 

It became a retreat for the very wealthy in the late 1800s, and early 1900s…

…and was the place where the Federal Reserve System was created in 1910.

CR drew my attention to the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which are landmark skyscrapers in Detroit, Michigan.

The Guardian Building is in downtown Detroit’s Financial District.

It is a landmark skyscraper that was said to have been built between 1928 and 1929 as the Union Trust building, and today serves primarily as the office building for Michigan’s Wayne County.

It was said to have been referred to as the “Cathedral of Finance” due to the building’s resemblance to a cathedral.

CR said the energy in the Guardian is incredible!

The Fisher Building is in what is called the New Center, a commercial and residential historic district in Detroit.

Said to have been completed in 1928 in the Art Deco Style as a major work of the German-born American architect Albert Kahn…

…and financed by Fisher family by the sale of Fisher Body to General Motors.

The Fisher Building houses the 2,089-seat Fisher Theater…

…the headquarters of the Detroit Public Schools, and the studios of radio stations WJR, WDVD, and WDRQ.

Two viewers recommended that I look into the Garden of the Gods located in the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois.

I am going to start at the Shawnee National Forest because there are several places of interest there in addition to the Garden of the Gods, and then touch on a couple of other places in the surrounding area.

There is a lot to unpack here.

The Rim Rock Trail in the Shawnee National Forest is a 1.7-mile, or 3-kilometer, -long trail.

It is described as going around the rim of an escarpment before going down into a crevice in the rock cliff to the valley floor…

…and meandering through massive rock formations, which we are told are natural.

Does this place look natural to you, because it sure doesn’t to me!

More examples to come!

Jackson Falls are located in the heart of the Shawnee National Forest.

Jackson Falls are a popular rock-climbing and rappelling destination, with its bluffs and rock faces…

…and the popular 4-mile, or 6.5-kilometer, Jackson Falls loop trail.

The Garden of the Gods in the Shawnee National Forest is located right next to the town of Herod, Illinois.

I find it interesting that while there are a lot of biblical names in North America, I could not find a list of Herods in North America, including Herod, Illinois.

It is interesting to note we are told that the Garden of the Gods was never covered by glaciers because the advance of the ice sheets stopped just north of the Garden of the Gods.

Instead, the explanation given is that millions and millions of years ago, a thick layer of grey sandstone was laid down by geological conditions in Southern Illinois, and that this bed of grey sandstone was later uplifted and that the Garden of the Gods is part of an uplifted sandstone plateau…

…and that dramatic erosion patterns created what are called “hoodoos,” or tall, thin spires of rock, and other unusual formations from the sandstone, and have names like “Camel Rock,” “Anvil Rock,” and “Table Rock.”

The Illinois Iron Furnace is located at Karbers Ridge near the Garden of the Gods in the Shawnee National Forest.

It was said to have been built some time between 1837 and 1839 by two businessmen, and used to smelt locally-mined iron ore.

The use of the iron furnace ended completely in 1883, which effectively ended the iron industry in Illinois.

The Cave-in-Rock State Park is in the neighborhood, at the edge of the Ohio River on the Illinois-side…

…and Golconda, Illinois, is just a little ways downriver on the Ohio River from the Cave-in-Rock.

Golconda is interesting.

Said to be the first permanent settlement in Pope County, Illinois, in 1798, we are told it was named after the ancient city of Golkonda in India on January of 1817.

Okay, so how, according to the history we have been taught, would the settlers in 1817 have even known about the ancient city of Golkonda in India to begin with?

This would have been long before the development of mass communication and mass transportation!

What really caught my attention in Golconda was the “Golconda Lock and Dam 51.”

Today the Golconda Lock and Dam Houses are four vacation rentals…

…that are adjacent to what was part of the “Golconda Lock and Dam 51.”

Historically, Golconda was the location of “Lock and Dam 51” on the Ohio River, said to have been constructed by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers as a navigational aid on the Ohio River.

The Smithland Lock and Dam were put in operation in 1979, and the property transferred to the city when the dam was removed.

This is what’s left of it today.

I found this historic picture of the same place where it looks quite muddy to me!

Here’s a circa 1902 or 1903 photo taken from the Golconda Fort in Hyderabad, India, which I found awhile back when I was tracking a long-distance alignment through India.

It looks muddy in this photo to me too!

Golconda in India flourished as a trade center of large diamonds, known as Golconda Diamonds.

It has produced some of the world’s most famous diamonds, including the Koh-i-Noor, one of the largest cut diamonds in the world. This is a glass replica of it…

…because the original is part of the British Crown Jewels…

…and the Hope Diamond, a famous, blue-diamond that is on exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

Karnak, Illinois, is on the other side of what is called an Oxbow on the Ohio River, and almost directly across from Golconda.

It is a small village that had a population of 499 people in the 2010 census.

Well, there is nothing of interest to look at showing up for me in Karnak, but just 10-miles, or 15-kilometers north, just up the road from Karnak, is what is called Tunnel Hill in Vienna, Illinois.

Another Karnak, the Karnak Temple complex near Luxor in Egypt, is known for its gargantuan size.

The village of Makanda, Illinois, is 26-miles, or 42-kilometers, northwest of Karnak, and 8-miles, or 12-kilometers, due south of the city of Carbondale, Illinois.

Makanda is the location of Giant City State Park, which experienced the longest period of totality during the 2017 total solar eclipse, at 2-minutes, and 40-seconds.

Just north of Makanda and Giant City, the city of Carbondale is located at the exact center of both of the 2017 total solar eclipse and 2024 total solar eclipse paths.

Carbondale was said to have developed starting in 1853 when three men purchased a parcel of land because of railroad construction there, and named for the large coal deposit in the area.

It was incorporated in 1856.

The first train came through Carbondale on July 4th of 1854, travelling north on the main line from Cairo, Illinois.

Southern Illinois University first opened in Carbondale in 1874, and is the flagship campus of the Southern Illinois University system.

By the way, southern Illinois is also known as “Little Egypt.”

But, didn’t we just see Herod, Illinois, back at the Garden of the Gods, presumably named after the Judean King Herod in the Bible?

Well, according to the cover on this issue of “Ancient American,” there is evidence for Hebrew Archers in Ancient Illinois as well.

Things to think about!!!

Next, KM in California sent me a real estate listing she found for a star fort named the “Royal Fortress of the Conception” in the town of Aldea del Obispo in the Province of Salamanca in Spain near Portugal that is up for sale for 15,000,000 Euros.

It was restored starting in 2006 and opened in 2012, as the “Hotel Royal Fortress of the Conception,” until it went up for sale on the real estate market.

EC lives in California, and she passed along several pieces of information to me.

One was that she summited Mt. Shasta several years ago, and remembered that there was a massive boulder field on top.  

She said the whole mountain is gravel and climbing it was like climbing a vertical beach.  

She said there is a formation up there called Thumb Rock.

It is described both as a peak or pillar on Mount Shasta.

EC shared a screen-shot with me of some mysterious straight lines to the southeast of Mt. Shasta.  

She said it’s hard to find these in California because so much has been built over.

She mentioned Black Butte, describing it is a pile of rocks and boulders next to Mt. Shasta which she has also climbed.

She said Scott Valley is northwest of Mt. Shasta and features circle farms.

She directed my attention to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Fort Jones in the Scott Valley near Mount Shasta

Fort Jones had a population of 600 in the 2020 census.

Fort Jones was said to have been named after a frontier outpost less than a mile south of town, but there doesn’t appear to be anything left to be able to identify whether or not it was a star fort at one time with any degree of certainty.

EC shared some interesting lay-outs of cities in California that appear to have circuit-board-looking components, like in Los Angeles, just north of the La Brea Tar Pits…  

…and in Madera, CA.

She also shared photos of the old courthouse in Madera, which was said to have been built in 1900 out of granite quarried in Madera County, and the first significant public building constructed in Madera County.

The building’s original tower was said to have fallen in a 1906 fire, but it was rebuilt.

The county government moved out in 1953 when the building was deemed unsafe.

Today, it is a museum operating under the auspices of the Madera County Historical Society.