Mimsy Were the Borogoves

The map and the sign for the Kothmann Homesite both indicate that it’s in a place called Art. If there is any such place, the only evidence of it I saw was two businesses with “Art” in front of their name that don’t appear to ever be open. If you’re looking for a nearby town to help you get to this marker by way of navigation, it’s just before Mason when going west on Texas 29.

There are not a lot of opportunities to get lost in this part of Texas. State Highway 29 goes where it goes, and if you choose to go off of 29 you will know it immediately.

Kothmann Homesite is possibly the most fascinating of the sites I visited on this road trip. The Liberty Hill Cemetery is filled with old tomb markers, and somewhat overwhelming because of that. The Kothmann Homesite and Cemetery is a low stone fence and a tiny enclosed cemetery in the middle of nowhere (or, perhaps, the middle of Art) on a lonely stretch of road on the drive between U.S. Route 183 and Interstate 10. Bertram, Burnet, and Llano are far behind you, and the promised oasis of Mason is still ahead.

It’s a small cemetery surrounded by a low stone wall.

Kothmann Homesite and Cemetery

Heinrich Conrad Kothmann (1798-1881) and his wife Ilse Katherine Pahlmann (1810-1905) and their family sailed from Germany to Indianola, Texas in 1845. Among the first families to settle in Fredericksburg, the Kothmanns were issued a 640-acre land grant in Mason County in 1848. In 1856 they moved to Art and were among the first immigrant families in this area. A trained cabinetmaker and musician, Kothmann began ranching and acquired another 640-acre tract of land.

Located on their former homestead, the Kothmann Cemetery is all that remains of the original ranch site. Containing only five graves, all of Kothmann family members, the graveyard began with the burial of Heinrich Conrad Kothmann in 1881. His wife Ilse is buried beside him. Their son Karl, the first of their family born in Texas, is buried here along with his wife Katherine (Hoerster) Kothmann. A fifth unmarked grave is thought to be that of a grandchild.

There is a lot of story in those three paragraphs.

Is this Art?

This was about 10:30 on a Tuesday, and neither of the stores were open. Nor was there a list of hours.

The Kothmann family has, at least until recently, held regular or semi-regular reunions. These large reunions fascinated people outside of Texas at least as much as people inside Texas. The first mention of their reunions that I found was a very simple entry in the Richmond (Virginia) News Leader of July 19, 1929:

HUGE FAMILY REUNION.

MASON, Texas, July 19.—(AP)—If past gatherings are any criterion, the three-day family reunion of Heinrich Kothmann’s family will be a monster one. About 500 attended the last two reunions, during which the women slept in a barn and the men under a large tent.¹

The problem with this is not that the handwriting is bad on this note (it is).

The problem is this bookcase is full of them.

One of my resolutions this year was to start focusing on the cookbooks I already own rather than acquiring more. Whenever I buy a new cookbook, I make a note of the recipes I’d like to try most and put the list inside the front page. This means that most of my cookbooks have a postcard or notebook sheet listing the recipes I find interesting. When I want to try out a particular cookbook, I am easily reminded of what I thought was interesting about it when I bought it.

But if I want to look for a particular recipe among all of my cookbooks, that becomes an obviously more involved process. So, I decided to convert each of those paper lists into a single searchable file on my computer.

Typing that sort of thing into a database cell by cell is time consuming and annoying. It requires paying attention to the screen rather than just typing. I decided to use a faster format for typing desired recipes book by book, and then write a quick script to convert that fast format into a tab-delimited file for import into a database or spreadsheet.

As with most of my quickie text conversion scripts, that faster format looks a lot like Markdown.

Here’s what the source file ended up looking like:

That is, I type the book title once, and the year the book was published; then, page numbers also only get typed once. Special recipes are marked with an asterisk at the start of the line. It’s very fast. I was able to do a full bookcase, a half bookcase, and the display shelf by the dinner table, all in just a few days by typing during my spare moments here and there.

The script turns that format into a file more readily readable by apps such as Google’s spreadsheet, or any database program.

Today is National Potato Day. Why not have some potato chips or hash browns, and top them with one or both of these easy-to-make dips/sauces? They’re great on chips, on a baked potato, or in a potato salad—or with just about any vegetable or thick stew. I also like them on toasted bread, such as Eddie Doucette’s potato bread.

I’m winding down the Semiquincentennial posts, but if you’re not, consider Thomas Jefferson’s potato pie for this potato day as well.

The Joy of Chips Dip

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Irma S. Rombauer
The Joy of Cooking (1943) (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 8 oz yogurt
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tbsp butter
• ¼ tsp coarse salt
• ½ tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1-2 tbsp nutritional yeast (optional)

Steps

1. Finely chop garlic.
2. Fry garlic in hot butter over medium-low heat until golden brown.
3. Pour into the yogurt and mix well.
4. Add Worcestershire, paprika, yeast, and salt, mixing well each time.

Potato chips and chip dip are a lot like hot dogs and buns: there’s always one left when the other runs out. I’m the kind of person who runs out of dip long before I empty a bag of chips. What I need is a jar of endless dip! So I was overjoyed to find that Irma Rombauer’s chip dip in The Joy of Cooking isn’t just easily-made and easily-proratable but also very flavorful.

Work to a smooth paste:
Roquefort cheese or soft cream cheese
Season it with:
Worcestershire sauce
Paprika
Spread it on:
Crispy potato chips

You can use this popular melody for The Rifleman’s Song at Bennington.

Sunday is the 199^th anniversary of the 1777 Battle of Bennington. I marked the 198^th last year, in the run-up to 2026, with Samuel B. Young’s 1819 commemoration speech. I first ran across the battle, however, unknowingly: from a song called “The Rifle” in Jerry Silverman’s How to Play the Guitar. It’s a rousing song and a striking demonstration of how Americans have always celebrated new technologies. And that’s what I meant to write about last year, before I discovered that the song was more commonly attributed to the Battle of Bennington.

So for me, at least, it’s fitting to bookend my Sestercentennial Year with Bennington, by finally getting a period melody down for this wonderful song. This is the end of the Sestercentennial celebrations on my blog, although not in my personal life.

This is also the official end of the Padgett Sunday Supper Club’s centennial-ish recipes. Some will continue throughout the year, and beyond. There are so many wonderful recipes in those centennial and bicentennial books, as well as in American Cookery and Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book. But they’ll be there because they’re great recipes, not because they’re great centennial recipes.

Some of the founders were very much techies. I already wrote about how Jefferson incorporated technology into his kitchen. But one of the most relevant new technologies during the revolution was the rifle. Rifled barrels had much greater range than smoothbore muskets, at least twice—and up to three times—the range of older long guns. The rifle’s precision shooting was very suited to the tactics of America’s Indian-style wilderness fighters such as Francis Marion.

“To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a special lecture at The University of Texas at Austin, followed by a moderated Q&A with questions from students.”

“I was proud to say that I was American by birth, and Georgian by the grace of God.”

Clarence Thomas delivered a wonderful hour-long lecture on the Declaration of Independence, touching on the Founders, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God.”

Is that stone from the granite quarry?

Further west from Liberty Hill on Texas State Highway 29, toward Buchanan Dam (and past the wonderful boudin kolaches at Gude’s Bakery), are the Confederate-era Salt Works and the later nineteenth-century granite quarries.

C.S.A. Salt Works

Located between Tow Valley and Old Bluffton, 15 miles NE, since 1935 under Lake Buchanan.

During the Civil War made salt for table, curing meat and hides, feeding cavalry horses.

A day’s boiling in 100 iron, 250-gallon kettles produced 20 to 30 bushels of salt. Cooled, sacked and hauled out, this met Texas’ wartime shortages.

First Llano County District Court was held at Salt Works. Stagecoach stop was nearby.

Brine here was from Cambrian Sea Waters trapped 500 million years ago in sand and strata. Indians led first settler here.

(1964)

If I’m reading this right, this marker is commemorating something we can’t see: the Salt Works has been under Lake Buchanan since Lake Buchanan was created in 1935 with the building of Buchanan Dam. If you look closely at the photo you can see the water in the distance.

Granite Industry in Llano County

Throughout Llano County, large granite outcrops exist. The first granite quarry in Llano County opened in 1888 on the Llano River. When the railroad arrived in 1892, the demand for granite rapidly increased. Italian Immigrant Vincenzo Fantozzi Petrick came to Llano County, established a quarry and provided stone for use in Texas’ coastal jetties. When Buchanan Dam was completed, men and materials were diverted to the war effort and work at Petrick’s quarry declined. Llano’s granite can be seen in the state capitol, the University of Texas at Austin, the Federal Building in Kansas City, Missouri, and in many monuments across Texas. Quarries owned by Petrick contributed to Llano County’s Success.

(2014)

“In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! As if it were afraid that nobody would.”

A little something for your August 4 enjoyment. Bradbury wrote this in 1950 for Collier’s, and then included it again in The Martian Chronicles of the same year. The story begins on August 4, 2026, and ends on August 5.

For the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury chose to increase the timelines by 31 years, changing this story’s date from 2026 to 2057. This, despite Bradbury often saying that he was not a science fiction writer. Given the retro nature of technology in his stories even for the time, this made no sense. It only served to make the stories less compelling by making the technology outdated instead of fantastic.

Wonderful story, nonetheless.

The best time to start reading Mark Steyn was twenty sod-bollicking years ago. The second best time to start reading Mark Steyn is right now.

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