You may ask why my first stop today was in Whitwell Tennessee. You know if you saw the documentary film “Paper Clips”. Whitwell is a town of about 2,000 people 25 miles west of Chattanooga (though after crossing a state forest on an extremely winding road, it felt like it was in another state). In 1998, the middle school social science class had a segment on the Holocaust. They decided to collect 6 million paper clips, as Norway, where paper clips were invented (who knew?) wore them during WWII as symbols of resistance to the Nazis and solidarity with the Jews. Then the school obtained a cattle car from Germany and installed all the clips and other exhibits inside the train. Check it out online and look for the film.

I walked along the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, seeing several bridges, murals of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the headquarters of Unum (MetLife’s big rival in the disability insurance business) and the very sleek Hunter Museum of American Art. I planned to visit the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama, but was told it was closed by a secret service agent – I later found out that a guy named Pence was visiting. My consolation prize was the Huntsville Botanical Gardens. Then I had dinner with, did laundry and stayed over with my Uncle Mel and Aunt Barbara.

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Today’s song is “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynrd Skynrd.

A milestone on my trip. This morning I entered Tennessee, the first state I had never previously visited. 15 more new states to go.

I knew about the Manhattan project and Los Alamos New Mexico, but at an exhibit a couple of years ago at the National Building Museum in Washington DC I learned about the two other secret cities that were built up from scratch, Hanford Washington (which I will pass by later on in my journey) and Oak Ridge Tennessee. Then I took a class at Brandeis last fall about the Manhattan Project.

Today, I took a 3 hour tour of the Oak Ridge facilities. We saw exhibits in the buildings where uranium was enriched for the bomb on Hiroshima and plutonium was developed for the bomb on Nagasaki.

Two of my pictures below tell the human side of Oak Ridge. The church was used by the 3,000 residents of very small towns that were obliterated to create Oak Ridge. And a woman who came out of high school to work on the machine that stabilized the uranium finally found out over 60 years later that her work led to the bomb.

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I walked around the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville and visited the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture. Then I ended the day hiking in a nature center along the Tennessee River.

The song of my first day in Tennessee is “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”.

Rachel and I were in Atlanta today, in the company of a king who was taken down much too young and the longest-living president in US history.

The Martin Luther King Center includes the house in which he was born in 1929, the Ebenezer Baptist Church where his grandfather, his father and he preached, the graves of Martin and Coretta Scott King by a reflecting pool and a visitor center with good exhibits on his life and legacy.

The Jimmy Carter Museum and Library was a very-well designed story of Carter’s life and public service. He graduated from the Naval Academy and was commander of one of the first nuclear submarines. But when his father died, he went back to Plains, ran the family business and then was elected a state senator, governor and president. He and his wife Rosalyn have been extremely active since 1981 in negotiating peace treaties, eradicating diseases and publicizing mental health issues.

Then I dropped off Rachel at the airport and braved the downtown traffic long enough to take pictures of the former Olympic Stadium/Turner Field and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where the Patriots won the Super Bowl last month.

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Today’s song is “Gimme Gimme Good Loving” by Crazy Elephant – google it. It’s from 1969 and I probably haven’t heard it in 49 years but it came to mind because the first line is “From Atlanta Georgia”.

A leftover thought from yesterday. Before this trip, I had visited the sites of the beginning of the American Revolution (Lexington and Concord) and the end of the Civil War (Appomattox Court House, Virginia). In the last few days, I have seen the locations of the end of the Revolution (Yorktown, Virginia) and the beginning of the Civil War (Fort Sumter, off Charlestown).

This morning, Rachel and I had a very informative bus tour of Savannah, with its beautiful old buildings and its 22 squares (or parks), all named after important figures in the city’s history and all part of the original city plan laid out by James Ogelthorpe, the leader of the Geogia colony started in 1723. We learned that the two purposes of the colony were to make money from rice and cotton and to serve as a buffer between the other English colonies and the Spaniards who occupied Florida. Also, there was no slavery for a decade or so – and then economic factors took over.

At the Savannah History Museum, a man and a woman described Savannah during the Revolutionary War, and the man fired a musket when we were outside the building on the site of reportedly the bloodiest battle of the entire war.

We had wonderful seafood for lunch and dinner down by the river, watching both an old paddle wheel boat and a huge container ship pass by.

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Two more Georgia songs – The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia by Vicki Lawrence and Rambling Man by the Allman Brothers.

Rachel and I took a ferry ride to Fort Sumter. Several park rangers told us about the events during the Civil War there, when the Confederates bombed and then took possession of the fort from the federal government to start the conflict and the Union Navy blockaded Charleston harbor throughout the war. The black Massachusetts 54th regiment immortalized on the relief at Boston Common (and in the film “Glory”) were mostly killed during a Union attempt to retake Fort Sumter.

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We drove south into warmer weather in Savannah, Georgia. I started wearing shorts, hopefully for quite some time to come. We got a tour of Mishnah Israel, the third oldest congregation in the country (after New York and Newport). It looks like a gothic church inside and out – see pictures. We found in the lush Bonaventure Cemetery the 1918 gravestone of Joseph Price, my mother’s great or great-greatfather, who fought for the North in the Civil War, then set up business in Savannah and lived there the rest of his life. Finally, we walked and had dinner in the very lively section along the Savannah River.

We have two good old songs for today- Georgia on my Mind” by Ray Charles and “Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight and her Pips.

Rachel and spring have both arrived. It was sunny and 65 today, with warmer weather coming tomorrow in Charleston and Savannah after that.

Today, we explored this beautiful southern city, highly recommended by everyone we know who have visited here. We had a morning historical walking tour with a lovely y’all-speaking tour guide named Salley. We had lunch at Fleet Landing outside on the harbor, where Brian and Tina sent us to get she-crab soup. Then a visit to 6 private homes and gardens, open to the public for the Charleston Preservation Society. Finally, a Gullah (the African-English dialect of the slaves, half of whom arrived in the United States through Charleston) gospel concert in a church. Then more seafood for dinner.

The 1920’s dance the Charleston originated here, so the song of the day is “The Charleston” by James P. Johnson, from the musical “Running Wild”. Also, Charleston was the hometown of Dubose Heyward, the author of the book “Porgy and Bess”, who turned it into an opera with those Jewish New Yorkers George and Ira Gershwin.

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To celebrate the first day of spring, Rachel flew south to join me for five days.

I saw the North Carolina state capitol and visited the North Carolina Museum of History across the street from each other in Raleigh. Then I picked up Rachel at the Raleigh-Durham airport. After having lunch, we walked up and down the Boardwalk for an hour or so at Myrtle Beach. Then after dinner, we arrived at our home for the next two days, Charleston.

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Since we drove through North and Carolina today, the obvious song of the day is “Carolina on my Mind”, by James Taylor.

I started the day with sunrise on the Blue Ridge mountains and ended with a lighted bridge over the York River in Yorktown. In between was history and recreations of the Battle of Yorktown and the settling of Jamestown.

The American history museum at Yorktown had a fascinating exhibit of eyewitness of the Revolutionary War period who lived long enough into the 1840’s to be photographed. The Jamestown Settlement museum emphasized the meeting of three groups – the English settlers, the Powhatan tribe already living there and the African slaves brought there to grow tobacco. There were also three outside exhibits – a reconstruction of the Jamestown Fort, a sample Powhatan village and replicas of the three ships that carried the original settlers. Historic Jamestowne is the actual site of the town, with lots of archeological work. Finally, a little hiking on the Yorktown battlefield, where the war that had started in Boston ended.

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The songs of the day are “Yorktown” (as in … the Battle of – 1781) from “Hamilton” and “Colors of the Wind”, from Elizabeth Warren’s least favorite film “Pocahontas”.

Tomorrow I pick up Rachel at Raleigh-Durham and we’ll drive to Charleston!

Definitely south of the Mason-Dixon line today, driving on winding roads through farms and views of the Blue Ridge mountains and Shenandoah river John Denver sang about yesterday.

I first visited Luray Caverns, with amazing formations and droppings and a “cathedral room” with an organ that uses stalagmites and stalagmites as pipes.

Then I visited my third and fourth presidential homes and/or libraries (the first two were Coolidge and Teddy Roosevelt) – James Madison and Woodrow Wilson. Madison’s Montpelier was built by James’s father, a wealthy tobacco farmer. James and Dolley didn’t have any children together, but she had one from her first marriage and there is oral history that James may have fathered a child with a slave, like his predecessor Jefferson.

Wilson was born in Staunton Virginia in 1856 in the parsonage house where his father was a Presbyterian minister. He grew up mostly in Georgia, which explains his less than stellar reputation in race relations.

Then I worked my way along the Blue Ridge Parkway, snapping plenty of pictures and taking a 5 minute hike on the Appalachian Trail- I have no idea how folks can do it for 5 months. I ended up having dinner and staying over in Lexington, Brian’s college town.

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Today’s song is “Shenandoah” by Tom Roush.

After driving the 3rd most miles of the whole trip yesterday, today will be the least driving, except for the consecutive days Rachel and I will be in Charleston and Savannah this week. That gave me plenty of time for my two stops.

Two nights ago, we sang in our Purimspiel finale “Don’t know much about history”. I doubt I will learn and enjoy history more anytime else on my journey as I did today in Gettysburg and Harpers Ferry.

In Gettysburg this morning, I first visited the Eternal Light Peace Memorial. In the picture below you can see FDR dedicating it in 1938 on the 75th anniversary and Union and Confederate soldiers from the battle in their 90’s or 100’s shaking hands. The visitor center has an excellent film and a sound and light Cyclorama show. Then I visited just a few of the hundreds of monuments around the hills and fields, the national soldiers cemetery where Lincoln gave his little “address” and the David Wills house in town where he stayed the night before and finalized his talk.

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We all know Harpers Ferry as the place where John Brown tried to raid the federal arsenal and start a slave revolt, but was captured and hung. But the city has had several lives – the first industrial automation (at a gun and munitions factory), the site of a race between canals and trains for access to the heartland of the country, the scene of the Confederates northernmost Civil War victory and the home of Storer College, the first primarily black college in the country The whole town consists of original and some reconstructed buildings with exhibits on all different aspects of living there. I ended my visit taking pictures of the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers.

Today’s songs are “Take me home, country roads” by John Denver and a bonus tune, “Take me back to Harpers Ferry” by Magpie (google it and enjoy!)