last weekend...

...I did a wee bit of sightseeing. Though it was "as hot as Hades," as they say down here, I took a little hike down an old Civil War trail to a Confederate encampment. There wasn't too much to see beyond the degraded wooden frame of a hut, but it was quite something to imagine hundreds of soldiers tramping through the same trail some hundred-and-fifty years ago.

The woods themselves were kind of spooky - very shaded and muted from outside sounds, with old (modern) wooden furniture and a burned-out car frame abandoned along the trail.

Then on to the Gilmore Cabin, a small log home built adjacent to Montpelier in the 1860s by a freed slave, George Gilmore.

I was actually surprised by the cabin's interior, which was much roomier and brighter than I would have thought.

There were a lot of touching details, like the actual buttons Mrs. Gilmore used in her work as a seamstress, childrens toys and dolls, and a little cloth checkerboard.

In the woods a few hundred yards beyond the cabin there was a group of Civil War re-enactors building a log hut similar, presumably, to the ones that had actually been there during the war.