Robert Pence

It sounds like they're serious about it, and I hope they succeed. They have some pretty good stuff to work with. What's the building in the second picture? Church? Former Town Hall? The style is reminiscent of mid-19th-century Presbyterian churches.

I seem to recall that every Republican president beginning with Ronald Reagan has tried to eliminate funding for Amtrak.

The primary campaign finally provided the motivation I needed to go to the Post Office and get my passport renewed.

This building has a nice facade, and it's disappointing when they do that with arched windows. I guess it's better than plywood, though, and it indicates that the space is still being used so maybe the building is getting adequate ongoing maintenance. They haven't butchered it, so there's always the possiblity that someday the windows could be restored.

I'm gonna' buy enough cheap booze to keep me blissed-out and oblivious until the campaign season is over. :drunk:

A few more: Not all bricks, not all vintage, but :-P Cincinnati OH Looks like there was something here, but it's mostly weathered away. Cleveland OH Columbus Dayton Lisbon, Ohio Middletown, Ohio Southwest Pennsylvania Brookville, PA Indiana PA Johnstown PA Reputed to be very good Not a painted sign; tile inlay, but I think it's pretty nice Pittsburgh PA Milwaukee WI That's all I got for now.

Summit Street laid claim to the title of Courthouse Courtesan, so I guess that leaves me as Courthouse Philanderer; I love many. I think Allen County's (Indiana) is pretty much unmatched for elaborate interior detail and color, and architectural elegance puts the one in Chillicothe is in a class by itself. I've had flings, too, with the Jefferson County Courthouse in Brookville, PA and the Marshall County Courthouse in Plymouth, Indiana, and my heart still pines for the Orange County Courthouse in Paoli, Indiana.

It would probably help if they'd run it through the horse one more time.

A few from my wanderings: Columbia City, Indiana Decatur, Indiana Frankton, Indiana LaGrange, Indiana LaPorte, Indiana Allegan, Michigan Hillsdale, Michigan Celina, Ohio

Wonderful photos! They have a real classic feel, and they show some iconic places.

... and to illustrate why balloon-framed houses are firetraps. They lay a sill atop the foundation and stand 18-foot or longer two-by-fours on it and run them all the way to the attic. All the intermediate framing is nailed to the edges of the wall studs, making an open flue from the basement to the attic. Once a fire gets into the walls, it goes like a blast furnace all the way to the attic and along the floor joists into the space between the first-story ceiling and second-story floor. With old, dry pine and fir lumber, the whole house is involved in a matter of minutes and there's no stopping it. Proper rehab should involve nailing fire-stops between the wall studs at the first-and second-floor levels, to keep fire from migrating both upward and into the cavity between the floor and the ceiling beneath it. Some houses got them when built, but not many that I've seen. Fire-stops along with fire-resistant insulation improve safety a lot.

I love the street-level cultural history tours. The bring back memories of walks we'd take when I used to visit my friend Greg around 20 years ago. Fabulous city!

OK! OK! I'll back off a little bit. I'd probably like #9 if it had two wood old-style garage doors side-by-side, instead of the one big wide vinyl one.

It doesn't suck as bad as Alvordton, I guess :wink:

Sweet. The river towns often have interesting character, and Gallipolis looks in a lot better shape that some.

... or maybe both, if you're lucky. I might just throw in a vintage truck or two here and there, too. :-D

It could be an undershot wheel, I guess, but in this photo (1977) it looks more like a breast wheel. From the spillover behind the wheel it looks like the water strikes it just about the axle or a little below. I'd guess that if the gate were fully opened, the water would strike the wheel just about axle level or slightly above. The present grist mill was built in 1930 to replaced an earlier flour mill that burned. The flour mill used turbines with eight feet of fall. That would have produced a pretty ferocious amount of power for its time. The appearance of the milling equipment gives away the comparatively recent date of construction for a stone grist mill. I haven't been back to Metamora since 1979. That might make a nice Sunday drive this summer; it's only about two or three hours away.

Overall pleasing area. Whose idea was this charming design?

Good stuff!

Jeffrey, Metal-turning lathes would have to go back to the early nineteenth century, and possibly before. I've never looked into that. In order to build any sort of sophisticated machines from castings and forgings, like steam engines and the machines that worked in large grist and flour mills and textile mills, lathes would have been essential. In the 1960s I worked in a small machine shop in Bluffton, Indiana, that did mostly sub-contract work for local manufacturers. Our machinery was whatever the cheapskate boss could scrounge up, and some of it was worn out or in poor condition. Next door was an ancient shop dating to the 1800s that had once included a foundry. It was a half-block-long timber-framed building with a lantern roof, no heat, and a dirt floor in it. The steam engine that once drove all the machinery via overhead line shafts still sat in a room off to one side, unused for many years, but many of the machines, dating to the 1800s, were still driven from the shaft that had been divided into sections driven by old-old electric motors. I think the man who owned the place was almost as old as the building and equipment. Sometimes we'd get a piece of work too big to handle on our machines, and we'd take it next door and use Abe's facilities. I recall one very large casting that I took over there to work it down to where we could handle it in our shop. There was this beast of a lathe that still ran from the overhead shaft. On modern machines the lead screw that's used for thread-cutting is driven by gears that can be changed to cut screw threads of varying pitches, most often with a lever or two and a change-gear box. This relic had pulleys and flat leather belts to drive the lead screw, and instead of change gears there was a stack of different-sized pulleys that could be swapped out. I scraped around in the hundred-year accumulation of grease and dirt on the frame and uncovered a brass plate that said, "Pond Machinery Co. Pat'd 1860." Even as a twenty-something, I was a technology history geek who wished for time travel. That day was about as good as it gets. I doubt if undershot wheels provided very much power unless the flow velocity was pretty high. Another possibility would be breast wheels, where the water strikes the wheel partway up the face; breast wheels are configured with a bucket-like periphery much like overshot wheels, except that they face the opposite direction. Turbines came into use around the Civil War, or possibly as early as the 1850s. They were popular in areas that didn't have the cascading water needed for overshot wheels, and could work with as little as three feet of head. They produced several times more power from a given flow of water than a wheel could.

I think it's extremely cute!

Darn Sweet. Cool, if strangely assymetrical, courthouse. Motorcycle Mama!

Oooh! Nice! Welcome! I'm sure lots of folks will be eager to see more of your work.

I was a late bloomer. That crap continued into my thirties. It's a wonder I didn't kill a couple of those SOBs, although I only fell a little bit short of it with one. He hit me first.

This falls in line with predictions that as energy becomes critically scarce and costly, nations will squander large amounts of it fighting for control of the sources.