CHASING HISTORY ALONG AMERICA’S BYWAYS

By Kay Kennedy, #23282

History was not my favorite subject in school! Like most of my generation, I memorized dates and names, but little else slipped past the shield I put up to ward off absorbing too much boring stuff. One of the greatest benefits of RVing is discovering places we’ve only read about, bringing history alive.

If you give most Americans a list of questions relating to specific historic events, I’ll bet few can answer all of them correctly. For instance, do you know what prompted the Cuban Missile Crisis? Maybe you remember when, but do you know why? While we can’t RV to Cuba, we can remedy our lack of knowledge of history that took place on U.S. soil by going on the road to discover the past. We can visit places we learned about in school, as well as relearning stories we’ve forgotten (or never learned).

History is Hot

Now I’m finding that history is “hot”! It’s full of fascinating tales involving real people who often performed heroic feats to survive. Our mission is to visit the places we learned about as dry, boring facts in history books, as well as those made famous by more recent events. It’s easy to put these towns, cities, battlefields, schools, and homes on our travel itinerary as we see the country. There’s nothing like standing on ground where history was made to relearn the story.

The first historic spot we visited as RVers was Vicksburg, Mississippi and its Civil War Battlefield. I burst into tears as I viewed displays in the museum and toured the battleground. Here had lived people much like me, but who endured a living hell in underground holes beneath their homes as they waited for the war to end or the Union army to move out.

I had to wonder whether these people agreed with the Southern cause. Or were many merely victims in the wrong place at the wrong time?

As for the soldiers, opposing armies were close enough to observe the terror in each others’ eyes as they fired fatal shots. Then they fell asleep each night where they had fought so as not to lose their hard-won piece of ground. How did the men who avoided getting killed survive the ordeal emotionally?

Another sad remnant of early America is the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, along which thousands of Indians were forced to march after they were forcibly removed from their lands in the Southeast in 1838 and sent 800 miles west to Oklahoma Indian Territory.

You’ll find portions of it in northwest Arkansas and southern Missouri. Highways closely follow their tragic trail and are marked with official Trail markers.

In New England we visited Boston and the Freedom Trail, which took us inside some of the most important buildings in our nation’s history. Seeing where tea was dumped in Boston Harbor was fascinating, as well as visiting the USS Constitution, the most famous naval ship in American history. Launched in 1797, “Old Ironsides” is still commissioned in the U.S. Navy and occasionally sails at sea.

26 . ESCAPEES . Sept./Oct 2007 www.escapees.com