Lost - Ruckersville, Virginia 

Airport Hotel, Charlottesville, Virginia 

The Airport Motel had already been torn down to make way for a Walgreen's Drug Store when I took this picture of the sign. When we first came here more than twenty years ago, the motel was already old and run down and renting rooms by the week. It was a low, white block structure that sat on a bank above the road. The bank was cut away and this corner today bears no resemblance to the corner occupied by the Airport Motel. The old sign was taken down shortly after this photograph was made.

Do not - Remington, Virginia 

I have a particular fondness for photographs that include signs and next week we will be looking at some pictures where signs play a prominent role. I hope you will stop by for a visit. Thanks for reading Photography In Place.

Thanksgiving morning, 1959

Before dawn, Dad and I sat in the kitchen, dressed in our warmest hunting clothes. The coffee pot was burping on the stove and we ate breakfast in a hurry. We wanted to be in the woods at first light.

In the woods near our house was a large sawdust pile, surrounded by stacks of rotting slab-wood. It was a good place to hunt and after breakfast we set off in the cold morning air together. I was twelve years old, and happy to have Dad all to myself for a few hours.

We split up when we got to the sawdust pile. I found a spot on a slight rise and sat down to wait for daybreak. The cold air settled around me. I could hear Dad moving on the other side of the sawdust pile.

It was going to be a good Thanksgiving. My grandmother was staying with us for a few weeks. When I was a small child, I called her Dash. Nobody knows where that name came  from, but it stuck. After my grandfather died, Dash moved around, staying with family members, making on and off attempts at housekeeping and being always unsettled. I loved Dash with all my heart and was overjoyed when she came to stay with us. Our small kitchen never seemed as cozy and happy as when I would come home from school and find Dash helping mother prepare supper.

The sky behind the trees on the ridge was getting light.  I sat and watched the sun struggle to shine through a thin layer of gray clouds. It always seems coldest right at daybreak. The Tastykake jingle kept going through my head. My mind was not on the hunt, but on our Thanksgiving dinner. My anticipation was heightened by the cold morning air.

Later that morning, I heard Dad coming through the woods. I could see his red and black flannel hunting cap.  The ear-flaps were down.  I walked around the end of a slab pile and met him under a large beech tree that had been left by the loggers. The squirrels had been cutting beech nuts and the ground was littered with their feast.

    "Did you see anything?" Dad asked.
     "No, sir."
     "Me either. Cold?"
     "I'm OK." I thought about Mom at home in the warm kitchen preparing our Thanksgiving dinner. I wondered if Dash was in the living room watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.
     "Well, I'm about to freeze to death." Dad said.
     "Me too."
    Dad jacked the shells out of his unfired shotgun. "Come on," he said. "Let's go home."

Woodshed at the Gilmore cabin - Montpelier, Virginia

George Gilmore cabin, 1873 - Montpelier, Virginia 

George Gilmore was born a slave in 1810 at Montpelier, the home of James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and 4th President of the United States. At the end of the American Civil War, Gilmore was freed and in 1873 he and his wife Polly built this cabin on land leased from Dr. James Madison, President Madison's great nephew. Archeologists believe stones and timber for the construction of the cabin may have been salvaged from an Confederate encampment that previously occupied this site.

The Gilmore family prospered and in 1901 purchased 16 acres of land surrounding their home. George Gilmore died in 1905 at the age of 95 and members of his family occupied the cabin into the 1930s.

Read more about Montpelier and the Gilmore family here.

Winter comes to the mountains - Madison County, Virginia

Even though Winter does not officially start until December, Thanksgiving marks the end of Fall. The fields are barren, nights are getting longer and mornings are covered with frost. Soon gray clouds will climb over the mountains from the west, heavy with cold winter rains, or the first flurries of snow.

Thanksgiving is the time to store up the fruits of the season and remember the smell of autumn leaves, but the sun is pale in the southern sky and the mountains look lonely and cold through the bare trees.