Bragg Family South

We have been in Rhinelander for almost a week now. We arrived last Friday, just in time to participate in a couple events on the weekend. First, on Saturday morning, a Budweiser Clydesdale team arrived in Rhinelander for some promotional business, and Hope, Grandma Rose, and the kids went into town to check it out. These horses are impressively large, and this one team is hauled around in three semi-trailers: The other big event over the weekend was my 20th high school reunion. Hard to believe that the crowd of cranky old folks there were the young go-getters of 1988! Really, we had a good time visiting with people, many of whom I hadn't seen in the last 20 years. Monday turned out to be a really pretty day, so we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and drove to the Porcupine Mountains State Park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We hiked along the Presque Isle River for a bit: and went to the mouth of this river as it enters Lake Superior. The kids had a ball throwin...

On Friday of this week, I took a half-day off, and we drove down to Lake Village, Arkansas, to look into something we'd seen advertised for some months now-- Lakeport Plantation. The Lakeport Plantation is the only remaining plantation home along the Mississippi River still standing in Arkansas. Arkansas never developed the widespread plantation culture, as was seen across much of the South, but there were a number of such places (at least until the Civil War). This particular plantation got its start in 1831 when the Johnson family moved from Kentucky to start a new life on the Arkansas frontier. The Lakeport Plantation home was built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson, son of the original settler. By the time of the Civil War, Lycurgus (I have no idea how to properly pronounce this name) owned over 4,400 acres of land and 150+ slaves. The picture below shows the Lakeport Plantation home as you drive through the cotton fields--this land has been in continuous cotton production e...

Well, I survived another week at the Arkansas Archeological Society's summer dig. We were at a location called "Jones Mill" again this year--this is a site near Malvern , Arkansas, dominated by mid-Archaic deposits (perhaps 4-6 thousand years old) produced at a stone tool workshop. In the upper layers of the site, there are more recent features and artifacts dating from a few hundred to 1000 years old or so, then the Archaic workshop, and perhaps even earlier occupations before this. At this workshop, the prehistoric peoples would take novaculite (a type of silica rich stone) and make tools and other artifacts out of this highly useful rock. The picture below is of my hand holding the broken base of a dart point--this point had almost been completed, but then broke in the last formative stages, and hence was discarded for me to uncover thousands of years later. The picture below here is a view of a scatter of stone tools, broken points, bifaces , and other artifact...

For those of you interested in higher quality pictures so you can make prints, note that I have updated the links on the sidebar of this page. I now have a Flickr account to post these pictures to, and I will try to update them more regularly with higher resolution images (so they won't look so pixelated if you try to print them). Not every blog posting will have every picture placed here--only the best will make it. I have put some fairly low resolution images here for now for people to get accustomed to this site--expect better images soon!

We arrived safely in Monticello yesterday evening after another long trip home. As usual, the kids were real troopers, putting up with seemingly endless miles of highway and often grumpy parents. During our last few days in Rhinelander , we had much better weather, and we tried to take advantage of the sun and somewhat warmer temperatures. Here is a picture of Kenny and Beth playing miniature golf on that course just north of town on Highway 17: Hope had a little less luck, as can be seen with her ball retrieval style: and I was a good sport, as always: My brother Bob came back up after working a couple days in Madison, and we spent some time working on my 1968 Dodge Charger, as well as going on a canoe trip on Thursday. We canoed down the beautiful Tomahawk River about 20 miles west of Rhinelander . Here's Bob surveying a rapid that we portaged around: and here's a scenic view of the river: The stretch of the Tomahawk River we canoed is nice, if somewhat shallow and rocky. Wha...

Kenny and Beth enjoy the rain... but they really enjoy a sunny beach! While waiting for the weekend, we had a nice picnic lunch at Buck Lake, a county park just south of Rhinelander . The afternoon was not hot (mid-70s) and somewhat breezy, but after a week of cool, rainy weather, this was quite a break... Stephen had a lot of fun kicking his feet in the sand--a new sensation for him, I suppose. My brother Bob arrived early, and the kids and I had fun chasing baseballs... With it being just Stephen and I right now, it seems hard to believe that this house was so action-filled this weekend. Sunday, in addition to being Father's Day, was Mom and Dad's 40 th wedding anniversary. To celebrate, all 6 kids, spouses, grandchildren, and significant others gathered over the weekend here in Rhinelander . The following picture is from lunch on Saturday, which was chaotic (even missing a few people): Yes, even Michael ( Hurlburt , my sister Lisa's son) got into the action... We ha...