Day 3 Hollywood Cemetery/ Appomatix Courthouse

Today 7am came a little earlier than it did yesterday and the allergies finally got to me. But the day went on. Today was the day of the grumpy tour guides for sure.We stared off the day at the Hollywood Cemetery. It was a beautiful Victorian Planned Cemetery.  There are 80,000+ graves and 2 more were being added while we were there.

  I saw this dog and just had to get a picture. A man had this dog cast in the likeness of a dog his children loved to watch over his children's graves. Sad, but it was a really neat statue and is apparently a nationally recognized statue.

 This is President Tyler's grave. At the time the he was just the VP, but when the President Harrison died unexpectedly there was no legislation on how the next president would be chosen. So he said," I am the President indeed," and everyone went with it.

This is President Monroe's grave that is affectionately called the "bird cage" for obvious reasons. 

 Here is a picture of the James River. I'm pretty sure I saw a badger running amongst the plant life down there...














This was a really cool group of stone tree markers, except for Frank down in the lower right corner. Frank left his wife and six children, so no tree marker for Frank...bad Frank...bad.

 Below we have  a picture of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis' grave. It was pretty cool.

Now we switch gears to the Civil War and the Appomattox Courthouse Village. Above we have the McLean house where Grant met Lee and the Union gave it's terms of surrender for the CS army to follow. It sounded like it was actually a pretty good deal. Soldiers got free travel home and were basically pardoned as long as they swore allegiance to the Union.

Below we have an outhouse, yes I sat on it and had my picture taken. Actual picture to come soon.

 This Cypress tree looked like a gigantic bonsai tree next to this grave. Not sure what happened to it, but neat looking all the same.

 This is the actual towel that was used at a white flag when the Confederate army surrendered. It really seemed like a testament to what bad shape the south was in at the end of the war.

 It was a really crazy day. We were told that we would have a tour guide at Appomattox, but when we arrived this Park Ranger went postal on us saying that we were wrong and wanted to see our paperwork and was quite rude to our group of 35. Well that wasn't smart to do that to a group of teachers, especially this group. Several comment cards got filled out and we got an apology and a bunch of free stuff! Sweet.

Even more interesting they had a place where you could look up and see if your ancestors were in the civil war. I found a J.G. Avara that lived in Galveston County and was part of the 12th Field Battery of Texas. So that spurred a whole new line of investigation for our family tree. I wrote a comment card about how helpful the bookstore worker was, so hopefully he will get some praise from his boss, especially in light of what happened with the other guy.