Bragg Family South

What a busy spring!  Here (in southern Arkansas) in early May it is as warm in the late spring as it is on a hot summer day for northern Wisconsin, but earlier in the spring we tend to be cool and rainy, and this year has been no exception.  The image above is of Stephen and I on an adventure we took to southwestern Arkansas to look for some old cinnabar mines (more on those shortly).  You can tell by the fog in this image that our day was rather damp but not chilly... Kenny joined me (while on his spring break the first week of March) on a second adventure to look for these cinnabar mines--the picture below is of the canoe trip he and I made--in much better weather--to some islands in a reservoir to find some of these mines: Cinnabar is an ore of the liquid metal mercury, and some deposits of this ore can be found in parts of southwestern Arkansas.  In the 1930s and 1940s, attempts were made to commercially mine this ore to produce mercury, which had considerable va...

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 wa...

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and a happy new year--Bragg Family South certainly did!  The picture of the kids (and Bella, our cantankerous tabby) actually was taken just a few days back, right before Kenny returned to Michigan Tech to start his next semester. As always, we had a busy holiday season, full of music and events--such as the Monticello Christmas parade, pictured below (Stephen's high school marching band was in this parade, but I didn't get a good picture of him): We also helped with an educational/cultural program hosted by Preserve Arkansas (they are a statewide non-profit focused on preserving the cultural history of Arkansas), which was hosting a "Behind the Big House" program to recognize some of the contributions of the enslaved persons and their descendent communities who helped to build, maintain, and work behind the scenes of some of the big plantations operations in this state (see their webpage on this program for more details).  This...