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Things I Forgot to Mention at the Time

While we are on hiatus from the road, I went back and read over the blog entries I had written since September, and I realized that, like the Muppet Forgetful Jones, there were a few things I forgot to include in my blog entries. Or at least some things I could have mentioned about our adventures but didn’t, for whatever reason. So I thought I’d go back and add a few items of interest (I hope). 

Like Forgetful Jones, I failed to remember or
report on some semi-interesting events that
occurred while we were on the road

Starting at the very beginning, we had to vacate the newly sold house on Covedale Avenue before we were quite ready to leave town. We stayed overnight nearby at my sister and brother-in-law’s house that first night, thinking we could deal with everything we needed to at the storage place and then get on the road the next day. Wrong. So we stayed overnight at a hotel on the west side of town, which was surprisingly booked up for a Wednesday night in September. It turned out that it was the hotel being used for evacuees from a toxic train derailment in Cleves, Ohio. It was in the news at the time; a rail car heading for the INEOS ABS plastics plant on the river in Addyston overturned near the bridge over the Great Miami in Cleves, and residents nearby had to leave because of the risk from the chemicals.


The railcar leaking styrene gas in Cleves, September 2024
Photo from commondreams.org

We left town heading for New England the next day, leaving the evacuees behind at the Holiday Inn Express on Rybold Road, but over the next few months we sometimes saw some news about the consequences of the derailment. The company that currently operates the plant seem to be planning to close it down, and unlike the transition from Monsanto to Bayer and Bayer to INEOS ABS, it doesn’t look like another company will take over the site. Which may means curtains for the town of Addyston, which was originally founded in 1891 as a company town for a pipe foundry owned by Matthew Addy, who named the town after himself. It’s even on the National Register of Historic Places as an extant example of a planned factory town, providing housing and services nearby for the workers at the plant.


An old photo looking down the main street
of the company town Addyston, Ohio

With the plant closing, however, the town of Addyston, which had already contracted out its fire department quite awhile ago, and had recently even closed its police department, well know for speed traps, now faces the almost impossible task of functioning as an independent town with a lot less tax revenue. Currently there are talks with Cleves and the city of Cincinnati about whether Addyston will become part of one of those municipalities.

On to New England, in particular Falmouth, Massachusetts, at the base of Cape Cod. As on Martha’s Vineyard, the town of Falmouth is actually a fairly large area with some distinct villages within it, which are referred to as “census-designated places in the town of Falmouth.” One that struck my fancy was Teaticket, which sounds like something colonists might have needed to purchase hot beverages, hence leading to the Boston Tea Party. But no, the name had nothing to do with that. Although now it’s the place to find a Staples store and the Stop-and-Shop grocery store, Teaticket comes from the Wampagnoag word Tataket, or “main tidal stream.”


Teaticket, still on the main tidal stream
Photo from Wikimedia

Woods Hole is another census-designated place in the town of Falmouth; it’s also the location of the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the western terminus of the Massachusetts Steamship Authority’s ferry service to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. It was originally a whaling station, and the term “hole” in the name refers to it being a cove or small harbor—a sheltered place for ships to dock. Across the sound on Martha’s Vineyard, the ferry pulls in at Vineyard Haven, which was formerly called Holmes Hole.


Woods Hole, Massachusetts, harbor and Oceanographic Institute
Photo from Wikipedia; photographer Pam Wilmot

One more forgotten note about our stay on the Vineyard. I mentioned that we saw the general area where James Cagney had a home, on North Road in Chilmark. One friend of his, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, visited frequently and painted many area residents. Below is Benton’s portrait of Frank (Franklin Pierce) Flanders, a not-so-distant relative—a cousin of Mike’s grandfather.


New England Postmaster (Frank Flanders)
by Thomas Hart Benton (1925)

Frank Flanders was the postmaster of the Menemsha Post Office, which was also featured in an illustration by Steve Dohanos that appeared on the cover of the August 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.


Menemsha Post Office, Steve Dohanos (1949)

That’s some of the things I forgot to mention from the earliest part of our road-tripping. If I think of anything else from the later part, I may write another Forgetful Jones entry before we get back on the road again.

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