Early winter of 2023

February 19, 2023

Since getting back from our "up north" holiday visit, Bragg Family South has kept plenty busy...between work and school, plus a little archeology on the side. Of course, this short set of pictures will make it seem like it was mostly me and Stephen staying busy...but I assure that both Hope and Beth have also kept up a frantic pace!

The picture above is Stephen standing next to a pretty good sized and old shortleaf pine in the Ouachita National Forest. Early in January, Stephen and I took advantage of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday to run out to the old Irons Fork Experimental Forest to look for and document some of the 1930s vintage research work that was done in this particular watershed. It was a beautiful if cold start to the day, which had us scrambling up and down some pretty steep hills...

As you can see from the picture below--we found most of what we were looking for! The rock retaining wall on the creek bank behind and in front of Stephen was one of these research installations, probably put in place in 1938 or 1939:

Much more impressive is the rock dam we found further up this drainage, which was installed about that time by the CCC:

In addition to looking for these archeological remnants, we also looked at the nature of the woods (I was scoping for things I could study for my Forest Service job as well). Saw plenty of old shortleaf pine, as well as some old oaks, gums, hickories...and these not-so-old claw marks on the bark of this shortleaf pine, left by a black bear cub that had scrambled up this tree in the past (it wasn't there this day!):

All in all, Stephen and I had a great day, and saw a lot of neat things!

Speaking of neat, below is a picture of Hope and my godson, J.M., who we joined with his parents and older sister in Ruston, LA, for a celebration of his birthday near the end of January. His parents, Joshua and Heidi Adams, had been on the UAM faculty for a while (when he and his sister were born), but have since moved to Louisiana Tech for their current positions. We miss having them around regularly, but they are only a couple hours away, so we do get to see them fairly frequently...

Our big event over the past couple of months was an ice storm that hit a good part of Arkansas in early February, which could have been a lot worse! We had some tree damage, and lost power at our house for a couple days (others were without power for a couple weeks!)

Just yesterday Stephen and I went down about an hour south of Monticello to help with an effort to screen the dirt dug out of an old "cistern" (large brick & concrete belowground water storage tank) that used to be a large plantation near Lakeport, Arkansas. The day started cool, but soon warmed up, and we screened a lot of dirt, finding things like glass, nails, broken ceramics, lots of brick and mortar, and some other artifacts that will be washed and cataloged later.