Gregory House at Torreya State Park

Over spring break I visited Torreya State Park near Bristol, Florida. My extended family used to have reunions there each summer, which were huge affairs with lots and lots of fantastic home-cooked food.  We haven't had a full-scale reunion there in decades, but I did have a family reunion / unofficial "hooding" by my Ph.D. mentors.  Torreya is consequently a special place for me, and I wanted to tour the Gregory House, which I had not done since I was a child.

The weekday tours are at 10 A.M., and since we had to drive a little over an hour to get there on time, we were a little early.  It was a slightly nippy morning, and the sun was still low enough to keep this clearing in shadow.  When I walked to the brink of the slope, I startled some deer that had been feeding there.  I really love this view!

The Gregory House is an antebellum "big house" from a nearby plantation.  It was not, however, built on this bluff; it was built across the Apalachicola River on much lower ground, convenient to river traffic.  This made it vulnerable to damage from flooding, and in fact the house was in pretty sad shape when the CCC moved it to its current location.  It had been abandoned since 1916, when the last surviving daughter of the original builder (if I remember the relationship correctly) finally died.

This is the front room.  That wooden post on the dresser is one of the few items original to the house; it was to hold the planter's top hat, and it is made of Torreya wood.  You won't be able to get one of these for yourself -- the Florida Torreya is listed as critically endangered.

This bed is another item original to the house.  It belonged to the last resident owner, the daughter mentioned above.

This trunk belonged to one of the Gregory men who fought to repel Yankee aggression.  You can see it in the corner of the bedroom above.

This is a "courting table".  A young couple could court until the candle burned to the top of the candlestick.  The parents could adjust the candle higher or lower, depending on whether they approved of the suitor or not.

When I was very young, all the talk about how old this house is made me afraid that it might collapse at any minute, and I refused to go up these stairs.  Today their most notable feature is the low railing.  Mr. Gregory was not a tall man.

Here's that view again, this time from the balcony.  As you can see, the sun has risen noticeably by this time.

This view from the balcony looks down onto a trail to some Confederate gun pits.  During the war, a chain was strung across the river to hold any enemy boat until the cannons could sink it.  

The trail used to go down past the gun pits to the river, cross in front of the clearing, and come back up the other side of the lawn.  The last time I went down that trail was during graduate school, and the part near the river was in danger of being destroyed by erosion as the river meanders.  My understanding is that trail has been re-routed, and is now somewhat easier on the way back up.

By the way, our tour group was very small:  just the ranger, one couple in their 50's, another in their 60's, and my dad and me.  One of the tourists was a photographer who really, really wanted to be told that the Gregory House is haunted.  The ranger's first answer was, I think, his most honest answer:  "No, it isn't."  Since the photographer kept badgering him, though, he started to adjust his story to what the tourist wanted to hear. 

• "Well, I've never seen anything, but some people are more sensitive, and they pick up on things I don't."
• "While the house was abandoned, it was sometimes used by tramps.  The story is that one time they got into a fight over cards, and one of them was murdered right here on the staircase."
• "Don't tell her I said this, but the other ranger refuses to come in here alone, even to change a battery in the smoke detector."
• "She's said that she will be working in the office and hear the sound of children playing, but when she looks out, no one is there.  But we all think she's a little nuts."

Of course, I have no way of knowing if it is haunted or not.  What I can say is that I've been in a number of buildings with much creepier feelings to them:  for example, both the Keith Albee and the Frederick here in Huntington, and definitely the older wing of the old Science Building at Texas A&M-Commerce. (The old Science Building has been torn down; I do not mean the new building that was put up around 2005.)

The Gregory House, on the other hand, is just a charming old house.  Apparently the idea once was to restore it as a bed and breakfast.  It would have made a fantastic bed and breakfast, and for several reasons -- interior doors, a few electrical sockets, and even an inside bathroom have been added; the bottom floor had to be completely replaced; few of the furnishings are original; and the site is not its historical location -- such a use would not be destroying a pristine relic of the antebellum South.  People who wanted a relaxing stay in an historic building with a great view would get it, and those who wanted to believe they were sleeping in a haunted mansion could no doubt convince themselves that that was what they were doing, too.

Carter Caves State Park near Olive Hill, KY

Eight days ago I made a brief outing to Carter Caves State Park in Kentucky.  It's only about an hour's drive from Huntington, and it has some nice scenery.  The weather has only recently started turning warmer, so I was in dire need of getting out; even so, I only arrived there around 5pm, after the Welcome Center had shut down and the last cave tour had finished.  That didn't much matter, though; due to the spread of white nose syndrome, all the caves with resident bat populations are off-limits, leaving only the X-cave and Cascade Cave, both of which I've seen several times.  

(Unfortunately, these precautions have not prevented white nose syndrome from being spread to Carter Caves.  I'm afraid its spread is unstoppable.  Attempts to stop it might still slow it down enough that bat populations could acquire immunity and avoid catastrophic crashes, though.)

That left a short stroll from the Welcome Center to a large natural bridge as my remaining option.  I've seen this many times, too, but because this is not a tour I can pause to appreciate the view.  I'm only getting used to having both an iPhone and a blog, with the implication that I should take pictures and post them, but I did chance to remember this time.

The foot path goes underneath the natural bridge.  Note that this is a very different kind of bridge than the one in Florida.  In that case, a surface river enters a cave for 100 meters or so before exiting on the other side, where it resumes as a surface river.  This example in Kentucky must have started out that way, but most of the cave has collapsed; also, to the untrained eye (that means me), it looks like the flow of this stream must have been much larger, at least episodically, in the past.  At any rate, here we have a surface stream passing though a mostly dry tunnel.

Here is another view of the little stream that runs underneath the natural bridge.  The stream may look tiny, but it flows at a good pace, and the many little waterfalls like the one you see in the foreground create a musical sound.

There are some nice colors in the rocks that make up the stream bed.

This is the other side of the tunnel.  The tunnel is actually quite short:  the two holes at the center left of this picture are also visible at the center left of the first picture.

Here is the path leading back to the Welcome Center.  Look, I realize that some people will think that this stream is little more than they can see in a nearby ditch, and that these flakes of limestone are no more romantic than flakes of concrete.   I only have a few responses.  (1) This limestone is very old -- old enough that, unlike the limestone of Florida, it contains no fossil shells.  To me there is something inherently interesting about rocks that were buried hundreds of millions of years ago that are only now being exposed by erosion.  If you can't wonder at either the beauty of the scene or at the age of the rocks, you're simply built differently than I am.  (2) This terrain is completely different than what I grew up with in Florida.  As a result, it will probably always have a slightly magical feel to it.  The same is true of snow.  I certainly get tired of the cold and wet, and I hate the bad driving conditions it can create, but part of me is still ten years old and thinks that snow is something rare and wonderful.  (3) What have you got against ditches?  I remember having a lot of fun playing in ditches as a child, especially when I would build a dam across the ditch but leave a tiny gap that the water would go racing through.  If I rarely notice the beauty of water running through a ditch any more, it's not because the beauty is not there, but because I have become too calloused to notice.

This picture gives a bit more context to the landscape in which the stream and natural bridge are found.  The Welcome Center is visible in the upper right-hand corner.  The stream continues for another 2 or 3 hundred yards before passing through another cave, this one fully flooded.  Several dozen feet above is the X-cave, though which the stream ran thousands of years ago before erosion lowered the valley floor.

Between the spot where I took this picture and where I took the previous picture, I saw several bats out hunting insects.  To the best of my memory, this is the first time I have seen a bat outside a cave clearly enough to be sure it was a bat.  These were feeding just at and above the level of the tree tops -- just close enough that I could make out the characteristic inverted triangle shape of a bat against the sky, as well as their jagged flap-but-can't-glide flight paths.  I think I've seen bats out and about in a few other places, but they were always so distant I could not be sure they weren't small birds. So even though white nose syndrome has made it to Carter Caves, at least some bats are still hanging on.