1863

In a few minutes I'll step off on my run through the southside historic district of Corning, freezing my behind off as I run past blocks and blocks of perfectly restored old nineteenth century homes mostly occupied, as near as I can tell, by employees of Corning, Inc.

Many of the houses have markers placed there by the neighborhood historical society, providing the year in which they were built. We live in a big spooky mansion built by a Corning executive in 1890,

so we have one of those plaques right next to our mailbox.

Over the last few weeks, I've run or walked past many of these markers around the neighborhood. A couple are attached to favorite houses of mine, one a mansard-roofed beauty that appears lifted out of a children's book. Both state that the houses were built in 1863.

The fact that anyone was building houses in 1863 in the United States is jarring to someone mostly raised in the South. Around that time, our ancestral housing stock was mostly moving in the opposite direction. My family's place of origin, Yalobusha County, Mississippi, was in the midst of being raided by Grierson's cavalry around that time (John Wayne stars in a rather romanticized version of that foray, The Horse Soldiers). Much of what now comprises the northern Virginia suburbs was a shambles after two years of armies marching back and forth across its farms and towns. Within a year Atlanta would be reduced to a smoldering forest of chimneys. It was not an opportune time to attempt to build a family home.

And yet, up here it was like nothing happened. This is not to discount the colossal loss of life suffered by the Union forces during their four year sustained invasion of what had formerly been the southern United States. At the same time, the experience of the two regions could not have been more different. As an example, the Harvard-Yale Regatta skipped a couple years at the outset of the war, but by 1864 they were back rowing past Worcester, Mass., with classes in session and life perhaps eerily normal. That year's race took place barely two months after their fellow college kids from VMI staged a frontal assault to drive back an invading Union army in the Shenandoah Valley. Two very different worlds.

This place got bigger, stronger, more prosperous. The South found itself in a hole from which it only seemed truly to emerge when I was a young adult, well over a century later.

I think of the contrast this election morning, as the descendants of those oarsmen and cadets act out two very different identities. The decisions of the two societies descended from theirs lead down divergent paths. My old home seems bent on prolonging a pandemic by denying it is happening, and by displaying that problem with authority which, to one degree or another, a lot of us raised in the South carry with us. We do not gee-haw with someone telling us what to do. Along with that disdain for those in charge comes a distrust of professional expertise, perhaps descended from a mindset born of the Second Great Awakening, that we don't need some pointy-headed Bible scholar to walk us through a little critical exegesis--all are equally qualified to read and understand God's word, without any knowledge whatsoever of Biblical Hebrew or koine Greek or even a little basic ancient history. Sort of like all these days are social media epidemiologists.

And that mindset carries consequences. All one need do is strap on a pair of jogging shoes and trot around the block with me this morning to see what I mean. This place drips with prosperity, derived in large part from scientific advances only possible in a society that acknowledges the authority of processes and outcomes derived from a rigorous scientific mindset. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right--everyone may be entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts. Empirical reality always wins.

Go look for a historical marker anywhere south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, memorializing a grand house built between1861 and 1865, and you'll see in their absence a manifestation of this principle. Pretending a cavalier fantasy out of a Walter Scott novel was military reality in the industrial age got most of their houses burned down, and left them in the dust economically for over a century.

Houses will continue to spring up in the southern hills after this election, of course, but one must wonder how a science and information based economy can thrive in that climate. We may be on the brink of being left behind economically and socially, again.

But instead of fretting over that observation, let's wrap up with a shot of that rarest of moments here at Wyldswood North, Slane and Bulleit sitting still for a moment in Miss Peggy's lap last night. Obviously they were saving their strength for this morning's 2 a.m. romp through the apartment.

And so it goes.