George Washington of Virginia, commanding general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and first President of the United States, had a dog named Sweetlips.
Unbeknownst to almost all Canadians, Prime Minister Mackenzie King was a spiritualist. In his diaries he speaks of séances with dead family members and friends, including his deceased mother, former prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, FDR (after 1945), and his dog, Pat, an Irish setter. They all gave him advice on political matters.
Warm Springs, in western Georgia used to be called Bullochville, after Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, the mother of Theodore Roosevelt and the grandmother of Eleanor Roosevelt. Warm Springs is where FDR died.
Folkston is a city in the state of Georgia, United States. With virtually all rail traffic that is headed to Florida passing through Folkston, the rail lines through the city have acquired the nickname “The Folkston Funnel.” As many as 65 trains a day pass through Folkston heading into and out of Florida, which some years draws ten times as many railfans as people who live in the city.
Folkston GA: 50 miles NW of Jacksonville FL, 175 miles ENE of Tallahassee FL, 120 miles S of Savannah GA, and 275 miles SE of Atlanta GA. In the 2010 census there were 4,148 folks in Folkston GA.
Folkston: For a number of years, Folkston was the self-proclaimed “Marriage Capital of the World;” Floridians who could not endure their state’s waiting period before tying the knot would cross the state line to wed.
The Reno of the east, so-to-speak?
The Folkston Funnel — cool trivia! The Folkston Funnel, images: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Folkston+Funnel+failroad&client=safari&hl=en-us&prmd=msvin&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0orWziNjYAhXRQ98KHSA6ArAQ_AUIFCgE&biw=768&bih=922#imgrc=aaTyw5erTelAJM:
Gretna Green is a village in the south of Scotland famous for runaway weddings. It is in Dumfries and Galloway, near the mouth of the River Esk and was historically the first village in Scotland, following the old coaching route from London to Edinburgh. It has usually been assumed that Gretna’s famous “runaway marriages” began in 1754 when Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act came into force in England. Under the Act, if a parent of a minor (i.e., a person under the age of 21) objected to the minor’s marriage, the parent could legally veto the union. The Act tightened the requirements for marrying in England and Wales but did not apply in Scotland, where it was possible for boys to marry at 14 and girls at 12 with or without parental consent.
Scottish law allowed for “irregular marriages”, meaning that if a declaration was made before two witnesses, almost anybody had the authority to conduct the marriage ceremony. The blacksmiths in Gretna became known as “anvil priests”, culminating with Richard Rennison, who performed 5,147 ceremonies. The local blacksmith and his anvil became lasting symbols of Gretna Green weddings.
Actually, Reno was the divorce capital, and Folkston was the marriage capital.
In play: The railway route from Sacramento CA to Folsom CA was one of the very first railways in California, and also west of the Missouri River. The Sacramento Valley Railroad operated from 1852 to 1877. The first president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad was future American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. Theodore Judah was the Chief Engineer of the Sacramento Valley Railroad. Judah would later become the Chief Engineer of the Central Pacific Railroad and the chief proponent of the first transcontinental railroad over the Sierra Nevada by way of Dutch Flat.
Folsom State Prison is California’s second-oldest prison, after San Quentin. Folsom was also one of the first maximum security prisons, and has been the execution location of 93 condemned prisoners over a 42-year period.
Since its admission to the Union in 1848, as the 30th State, the only execution carried out in Wisconsin was that of immigrant farmer John McCaffary, who was hanged on August 21, 1851 in Kenosha County for drowning his wife in a backyard cistern.
Capital punishment in Wisconsin was abolished in 1853. Wisconsin was one of the earliest United States states to abolish the death penalty, and is the only state that has performed only one execution in its history.
The last public execution in Canada was of a group of First Nations individuals who had participated in the Riel Rebellion of 1885. They were hanged in Battleford, near the current location of the Queen’s Bench court house. (If you go on the Ghost Tour of Ottawa, they’ll tell you that the execution of Patrick Whelan, the Fenian convicted of assassinating Darcy McGee, was the last public execution in Canada, in 1869. Eastern ignorance, I tell you!)
Not in Play:
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Battleford - I’ve been at the execution site.
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Gretna Green (post 37,301) - I’ve been there too!
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Railer13- good trivia! a belated welcome to the Boards, and to the Trivia Dominoes thread!
Not in Play:
Northern Piper: Thanks! I’m enjoying perusing the Boards and contributing to this thread. The twists and turns of the contents of the posts here are amazing!
Patrick Warburton, perhaps best known for playing Elaine Benes’s phlegmatic on-again, off-again boyfriend David Puddy, is now appearing in radio ads for Kia automobiles.
Actor Patrick Warburton played a NASA representative in an Australian film called The Dish (2000), about the Apollo 11 moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin. The TV signal from Apollo 11 was received by a dish antenna in an Australian sheep field.
Comment: one of my favorite movies; highly recommended!
The town of Dish, Texas, has had a fast-paced history. Founded in 2000 as Clark, Texas, the population agreed five years later to change its name to Dish, in exchange for ten years of free satellite TV from the provider by that name That deal has since expired, but the name remains the same. During that time, there were suspicions that public health was harmed by oil and gas wells, but government tests showed that the toxic levers were normal. But growth continues unabated, and the population has more than doubled from its 2010 census count of 201.
Besides Patrick Warburton, Sam Neill is the only other readily-recognizable actor in the movie, The Dish (2000). Most of the rest are Australian actors mostly unknown to the common American.
And that Sam Neill? He’s a Kiwi, a New Zealander. Though he was born in Ireland.
Comment: The Dish — one of my favorite movies; highly recommend! The Dish was the top grossing film in Australia in 2000.
The 1997 Aussie comedy film The Castle, about an ordinary Melbourne bloke successfully preventing his home from being taken for a public airport project, takes its title from the saying “A man’s home is his castle”. The film featured a friendly but bumbling lawyer long before the US cable series “Arrested Development” did. When the house that was used as the family’s vacation home in Bonny Doon came on sale, the property’s real estate agent reported that many people called and after requesting the vendor’s asking price, replied with a quote from the movie: “Tell him he’s dreamin’.”
Broadway Tower is a folly Castle on Broadway Hill, near the village of Broadway, in the English county of Worcestershire. The “Saxon” tower was the brainchild of Capability Brown and designed by James Wyatt in 1794 in the form of a castle, and built for Lady Coventry in 1798–99.
Lady Coventry wondered whether a beacon on this hill could be seen from her house in Worcester — about 22 miles (35 km) away — and sponsored the construction of the folly to find out. Indeed, the beacon could be seen clearly.
Not in Play: I absolutely love the name Capability Brown.
The bombed-out shell of St Michael’s Cathedral, which had the popular name of Coventry Cathedral, still stand next to its post-war replacement. It was destroyed in a series of Luftwaffe raids, called the Coventry Blitz, on the industrial city in 1940, 1941, and 1942. n his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British government had advance warning of the attack from Ultra: intercepted German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma cipher machine and decoded by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. He further claimed that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken.
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One striking feature of the new St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry is the huge bronze statue of St. Michael Subduing the Devil, mounted on an exterior wall. The St. Michael statue, by Jacob Epstein, is around 7 yards high and weighs 4 tons; the Devil, supine under the archangel’s feet, is probably 5 yards long. While the modern style of the statue and new Cathedral were questioned by some, they were accepted as a strong representation of the triumph of good over evil.
(One of my earliest memories is of walking down the steps at Coventry Cathedral and seeing the huge statues. I must have been 4 years old and was very struck by their strangeness and huge size.)