On Saturday, May 27, 2017, Dave and I drove down the Mississippi River, while Nancy and Darrell Moench, whom we were visiting, fulfilled their missionary roles in Nauvoo, Illinois. We stopped in Quincy, the town the Mormons fled to in the winter of 1839, after being chased by mobbers from their homes in Missouri. There is a monument by the Mississippi River, honoring Quincy citizens for sheltering the penniless, cold, and sick Mormons who crossed the Mississippi from Missouri in little boats and on foot, when the river turned to ice.
The Mississippi is wide and majestic at Quincy.
We visited the Quincy History Museum, which had displays about Quincy residents aiding the Mormons. When they regained their strength, the Mormons built their own city, upriver at Nauvoo.
It was Memorial Day, so the towns were decorated with flags.
Lincoln will never be forgotten in Illinois. There are placards and monuments, all over the state, documenting where he campaigned, slept, worked.
I love small town museums, with their treasures mixed with quirky miscellany. We spent an hour at the Hancock Heritage Museum in Carthage.
We checked out the two-headed pig, and everything improved after that.
Who knew that keys to the original Nauvoo Temple built in 1845 are stored in this funky museum?
There was also a large display about Lincoln's life and death, including mock-ups of his tomb and casket.
The museum included a selection of typical mourning clothes for the 1860s, when Lincoln died.
It also included a wall of photographs of local soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War.
Our next stop was Hannibal, Missouri, across the river. We had seen the Mark Twain sites on another trip, so we took a tour of the huge, Victorian mansions on the hill.
The larger mansion had 23 rooms and was built by a timber baron, from the days that lumber was cut in Wisconsin and Minnesota and delivered by barge to the sawmills of Hannibal and other river towns.
I love Victorian furnishings--the dark wood, red carpets, Tiffany glass, tufted couches and hand-crocheted bedspreads..
We then wandered downtown to the historical area, where a farmer's market was in progress. On the town square, there was a shoot-out by gunmen dressed in period costumes, as ladies in their hoop skirts and gloves watched the excitement.
Among all the inexpensive crafts at the farmer's market, we found one wood craftsman who made gorgeous mosaic cheeseboards from a variety of woods. I took one home.
As we drove north to Nauvoo, we were struck by the isolation of the farmhouses and their barns.
It was a scene out of Willa Cather's "My Antonia."
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