After returning to Decatur Alabama's Riverwalk Marina from our Seattle visit we kept our rental car for an additional day. We used the car to pick up a Christmas Honey Baked ham in Huntsville and tour the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. This huge museum is dedicated to the story of the development of rockets and the U.S. Space Program. Wernher von Braun and a team of ex-German scientists, brought to the US after WWII, were eventually brought to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville in 1950 where they and other US scientists developed most of the rockets and space vehicles used by the military and NASA over the next 20 years.
One of the crowning achievements of Von Braun's group was the Saturn V rocket that launched the moon missions. There is an actual Saturn V in a separate part of the museum and it is huge. You get some idea of the scale from this picture.
The Space and Rocket Center is also the home of the Space Camp that many youth attend every year.
We left Decatur on the 3rd heading west up the Tennessee River. On the second day we reached the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. This system uses three rivers and man-made canals to connect the Tennessee with the Gulf of Mexico. The first 234 miles is officially the Tenn-Tom Waterway with the last 217 miles the Black Warrior-Tombigbee. The whole Waterway was completed in 1985 and required moving more dirt that was moved to build the Panama Canal.
On the second day we reached the Tombigbee and turned south. The first marina right after the entrance to the Tombigbee is the Grand Harbor. One of their somewhat famous residents is the author of the river guidebooks series that we have been using for the last two months. Author Fred Myers keeps his 34' American Tug "Liberty Belle" at the Grand Harbor as shown in the left center of this photo. Fred's books on the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Tombigbee Waterway are indispensable guides for the waterways we have been traversing.
Parts of the waterway are man-made canals with a hill on one side and a high built up bank on the other. At various points where creeks or low areas empty into the Tenn-Tom the builders placed these attractive spillways on the sides of the waterway. I can only assume that their purpose is to break up and reduce the flow rate coming in from the side and also to aereate the water.
Whatever the purpose of these spillways they lend a certain artistic element to the banks of the waterway.
As we moved south anchorages were limited due to either the narrow waterway or shallowness of the few wide bays. This anchorage was just off the main channel near Aberdeen, MS. We had just gone up a long narrow winding channel to buy fuel at the Aberdeen Marina. The mile long channel never got below 6' deep but it was nerve racking winding around the mangrove trees following the private buoys marking the channel. The sunset view looks at a local park/recreation area right across from our anchorage.
On December 7 we reached the Columbus Marina where we were greeted by fellow American Tug 41 owners Dick and Nancy White. We had met the Whites at the 2008 American Tug Rendezvous and since we were both doing the Great Loop this year had kept in touch periodically. They are wintering in Columbus, MS. They had a car which they provided to us so we could shop for groceries, etc. We went with them to dinner and a presentation of the Messiah at a Catholic Church. The last day we toured Columbus which is the birthplace and early home of playwright Tennessee Williams whose home is pictured.
The Friendship Cemetery of Columbus was founded in 1849. An early ceremony honoring Civil War soldiers buried in Friendship Cemetery has been credited as the forerunner of the modern Memorial Day. More than 2,000 Confederate and Union soldiers are buried here. The Cemetery is also the burial place for veterans of every war starting with the Revolutionary War.
This weeping angel adorns the grave for the Reverend Thomas Teasdale. A resident of Columbus during the Civil War, he carried a note signed by Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Union President Lincoln supporting a request for funds for an Orphan's Home for the State of Mississippi that primarily took care of children whose fathers were killed by the union army. Supposedly Lincoln signed on the same note directions to the local Union General over Mississippi to provide aid. This document is the only one signed by the presidents of both waring countries.
With the Whites we headed a few miles north to the small town of Aberdeen founded in 1837 on land acquired from the Chickasaw Indians. It became a social center for plantation owners who built many expensive homes and cottages there. The Tombigbee River provided a transportation link for cotton shipments to markets. This community of 6,000 still has a functioning downtown with several nice restaurants.
Aberdeen showcases its delightful historic architecture. They have the some of the best examples of the Antebellum, Victorian, and Turn of the Century periods that we have seen. Their Architectural Driving Tour brochure has to be the best in the U.S. The brochure leads you past 49 structures while describing them in great detail. The brochure shows examples of architectural features and explains the terms. The brochure was so good that I am keeping it with the book, Identifying American Architecture, that we bought way back in Alexandria, VA. The house pictured is one of the Victorian period homes on the tour.
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