Showing posts with label wagon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wagon. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Monday, November 10, 2025
An intact ceremonial chariot unearthed at the Pompeii archaeological site is being hailed as the first artifact of its kind ever found in Italy, a unique find - which has no parallel in Italy thus far - in an excellent state of preservation
The chariot was meticulously uncovered since its discovery on Jan. 7, 2021 inside the portico of a stable outside the walls of the main settlement.
"This new find is even more special for being an ornamental (rather than utilitarian) vehicle found not disassembled in a burial or depicted through artistic convention on a relief, but as it was on the day of the eruption," Eric Poehler, a Roman archaeologist and Pompeii specialist who wrote a book on the city's ancient traffic systems.
It's believed the chariot was likely used for celebrations and parades and may have also carried new brides to their homes. The treasure was nearly lost to looters, who had dug more than 260 feet of tunnels in and around the site. But it was discovered thanks to the thieves after police came across the illegal tunnels in 2017.
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
You're likely to be familiar with "American Gothic" but have you seen the other interesting paintings that Grant Wood (1891-1941) made? Or heard of the ice wagons?
Grant Wood, Death on Ridge Road, 1935
As automobiles became more prevalent in the 1930s, so did car accidents. Ridge Road outside of Stone City was notoriously dangerous. The scene here closely resembles Jay Sigmund’s accident while traveling to visit Wood at the Stone City Arts Colony in 1933.
Shortly after his car wreck, Sigmund penned the poem Death Rides a Rubber-Shod Horse.
In 1934, Wood was hired as the head of Iowa’s Works Progress Administration (WPA)
For the state of Iowa, Grant Wood was the director, and he developed a team of artists who he felt were best qualified to paint the murals for Iowa State. He hired Christian Petersen, not to work on the library murals, but to carry out the commission Petersen had already obtained from President Hughes.
The PWAP lasted only a little over four months and employed only about 30 Iowa artists. Each artist was paid about $25 a week and most of them did not work for the entire life of the Project. Most of the artists who produced work for Iowa State did, however, maintain their PWAP employment over the four months. A few of them even continued working after their funding was guaranteed, so sincere was their zeal to complete the art they had started.
The PWAP lasted only a little over four months and employed only about 30 Iowa artists. Each artist was paid about $25 a week and most of them did not work for the entire life of the Project. Most of the artists who produced work for Iowa State did, however, maintain their PWAP employment over the four months. A few of them even continued working after their funding was guaranteed, so sincere was their zeal to complete the art they had started.
Wood borrowed his theme for When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow from a speech on agriculture delivered by Daniel Webster in 1840 at the State House in Boston.
Webster said, "When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization."
Wood had planned to create 17 mural panels for the library, but only 12 were completed. The panels were devoted to agriculture, mechanics and home economics.
In 1932, Wood helped establish the summer activity, Stone City Arts Colony
Inspired by prominent artist colonies in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Woodstock, New York, they leased 10 acres of idyllic Iowa farmland.
Archives of American Art called it a place where artists could “study together, work together, and play together.” Many colony residents lived in old ice wagons, some of which they painted with as much care as was given to any canvas.
It lasted only two summers due to financial challenges.
The tuition and room and board collected from students fell far short of paying the colony’s outstanding bills, and the colony ended its 1933 session in debt by almost $1,500.65 Ultimately, with the help of a grant from the Carnegie Corporation—a grant originally meant for the colony’s purchase of the Green estate in 1933—and the personal wealth of one of Wood’s friends, John C. Reid, the debts were eventually settled a year later.
This is Grant Wood, putting the finishing touches on his ice wagon painting, the scene includes mountains, streams, deer, and an Indian standing on one summit peering into the distance
Wood was no stranger to living like a gypsy, because he'd left he family farm at age 10, and had been a soldier in the Army in WW1.
To proclaim its discovery of a troop of artists camped out on an Iowa hillside in the summer of 1932, the Christian Science Monitor focused on the colony’s housing challenges
Indeed, housing for the hundred or so colony participants was in short supply in the tiny village. The bulk of the colony was located near the crest of a hill overlooking the village as it straddles the Wapsipinicon River.
There the colonists planted their artistic flag on the former estate owned by nineteenth-century quarrying mogul John Aloysius Green. The sturdy stone buildings Green left behind—an ice house, barn, water tower, and, most elaborate of all, the “Green mansion” itself—served as a combination of studio, gallery, and instructional and living space.
In the large Green mansion, female colonists roomed on the second floor, while male colonists bunked upstairs in the attic. The men who did not fit in the attic or could not afford the rooming costs pitched camp nearby in tents, or— as its most famous resident, Grant Wood, did—in old ice wagons hauled from Cedar Rapids to serve as temporary shelter.
Grant Wood, the Iowa-born artist who just two years earlier had made a name for himself with his now famous work, American Gothic, was the faculty director in 1932 and lived in one of ten ice wagons high above the village.
Helping to shape the Christian Science Monitor’s portrayal of the encampment as a gypsy caravan, Wood painted the outside of his wagon with a sweeping pastoral landscape in what would become his familiar style—fantastical scenes of sensually curving hillsides and farmscapes done in sharp, clearly defined lines. The other ice wagon residents followed suit
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/quarbullarchamer.3.4.1556810?journalCode=quarbullarchamer
FYI, Wood posed his sister and his Cedar Rapids dentist as the dour-faced figures in American Gothic
Monday, April 21, 2025
Wednesday, April 03, 2024
The Albatross was a glider conceived by Jean-Marie Le Bris, a French sea captain.
The wheels were jettisoned after lifting off, in 1856 he managed a flight of 660 feet, climbing to 330 feet. Takeoff speed was accomplished by being pulled by a horse drawn buggy. Hand and foot controls were connected to the wing and tail. This 1868 photo is the first photo ever taken of a flying machine.
Saturday, August 12, 2023
the unusual and enormous carriage from the forgotten 2006 movie The Fall, which had some of the most incredible location shots and cinematography of any movie not using CGI
about 100 slaves pull the wagon, which also has a slave in each wheel doing the hamster wheel thing
If you loved Baron Munchausen, Pan's Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, or The Princess Bride, you owe it yourself to see this movie. The astonishing locations in India are legendary
In 2000, its director, Tarsem Singh, gave us the serial killer film The Cell, which had a similar incredible visual style and dichotomy of regular and incredible scenery
Friday, April 29, 2022
Thursday, April 28, 2022
Monday, March 28, 2022
Georgia quail hunting dog wagons, a part of the quail hunting tradition that started about 1890-1920, because northerners bought up about 300,000 acres of forest, containing Thomasville in Georgia, and Monticello and Tallahassee in Florida, to hunt bobwhite quail
What Aspen is to skiing, Thomasville, a town of twenty thousand, is to bird shooting.
By 1897 Harper’s magazine had dubbed Thomasville “the best winter resort on three continents.” Downtown, where the railroad ended, a dozen hotels and twenty-five boardinghouses attracted Northern industrialists and socialites to spend the winter, away from the malaria-plagued Florida coast.
You may find plenty of quail hunting operations scattered across Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and elsewhere, but you will not find the number of properties and the quality of habitat that exist in Thomasville and the surrounding North Florida-Georgia plantation belt.
Approximately 150 private quail plantations are spread across the Red Hills Region’s 300,000-acres.
Thanks to the highest concentration of well-maintained bird hunting plantations in the South outside of Texas, Thomasville has been able to preserve traditional bird hunting in unrivaled scale and quality.
Authentic Georgia bobwhite quail hunting is exclusively from horseback and mule-drawn wagon.
A hunting party, includes all the support for an afternoon’s hunt — horses, dogs, trailers, mule wagon, huntsman, dog handlers, and wagon driver.
Wagons hold observers, the dogs, extra gear and guns, water for the dogs, additional pointing dogs, one or two retrieving dogs, and refreshments or a full lunch.
https://gardenandgun.com/feature/this-is-quail-country/
Time magazine in 1954 wrote that President Eisenhower boarded a plane for thirty-six-hour getaways to Thomasville, to hunt quail on Milestone Plantation, belonging to then Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey.
This 1954 photo shows President Dwight D. Eisenhower (center) with his Secretary of Treasury George Humphrey and dog trainer Ruphus Davis after a quail hunt on the Humphrey's Milestone Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia
A LOT of presidents and politicians have been invited to the plantations for bird hunting: https://nydovehunting.weebly.com/our-elected-officials-in-the-field.html
Coca Cola President Robert Woodruff bought Ichauway Plantation in 1929 for use as a 36,000 acre prime bobwhite quail hunting land
Plantations started hitching mules to the hunting dog wagon at the turn of the last century, beginning traditions that became more and more formalized during the 20th century in South Georgia
5 generations of the Hanna family have run the Sinkola Plantation, which pioneered quail plantations in the Red Hills Region since the late 1890s.
The side affect of the wealthy plantation/hunting preserves is that the hunting dogs and horses need the best veterinarians, trainers, and supplies.
For a good short video about it, see https://player.vimeo.com/video/384007391 I just don't want to try and learn enough coding tonight to get this sorted out to play on the blog
https://saportareport.com/how-georgia-gave-birth-to-the-cdc-and-helped-fight-malaria-part-2/archived-columnists/jamils-georgia/ngehttps://www.timesenterprise.com/news/bird-hunting-south-georgia-style/article_4ad53872-5947-57dd-b318-eadf24d0a368.html
https://goemaw.com/forum/index.php?topic=33231.25
https://goemaw.com/forum/index.php?topic=33231.25
Texas quail hunters use trucks, jeeps, etc that have been modified to be raised platforms, and I covered them in a post years ago https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2017/03/texas-quail-rigs-there-are-many-and.html
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
because so many Americans swarmed England in WW2, the father of Andy Summers, guitarist of the Police (80s rock group), bought a gypsy wagon to give his wife a home of her own, as there was nothing to buy or rent
at the edge of the River Wyre in Lancashire, his dad was stationed with the RAF in the north of England. Housing was in short supply and he purchased a Gypsy wagon
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