m-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i

Saturday we left for Mississippi on our spring break. First we visited the Meriwether Lewis Monument and burial site on the Natchez Trace where he killed himself. It made me sad because he accomplished so many great things but still thought his life wasn't worth living.

Then we went to Ivy Green, the home of Helen Keller, where we saw the closet where she locked her mother inside, and the famous pump where she "spoke" her first word.

Next day we went to a Civil War relic show in Corinth, and toured the Battle of Corinth, where we saw Battery F and Battery Robinett. Later we hiked to the Beauregard Line which is one of the best preserved Civil War earthworks in existence.

The Colonel William P. Rogers Memorial, Battery Robinett, Corinth . . .

Earthworks at the Beauregard Line . . .

We went to Shiloh the next day where we toured the battlefield and saw the positions held by the 9th KY and later saw a very big eagle's nest.

Marker for the 9th Ky Union . . .

Sadly to say the next day I was very sick. One day later I was up to going to Brice's Crossroads which was one of the most decisive routs of the Civil War where Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry put the "skeer" in a much larger force.

Then we went to what was left of the old Shipp place (a house built by Felix Grundy Shipp, my great-great-great grandfather) which is now piles of bricks and crumpled tin sheets full of nails. It supposedly was what the house in some Faulkner stories was based on, including Absalom, Absalom. Then we went to Rowan Oak, the house of William Faulkner, which looked almost like the old Shipp house. The next day we returned home.

(Above) The Old Shipp Place just a few years before arsonists burned it down and (Below) all that is left of the Old Shipp Place today . . .

Rowan Oak . . .