This steeple is all that remains from the First Methodist Church. An earth cache at the location focused on the limestone. Jane occasionally attended services here.A series of caches near the Tennessee River took us to this walkway.Very small caches are classified as “micro” in size. A clever cache owner hid his cache inside a microwave inside an oven in the woods.
A cache with multiple locations celebrated the birthday of SuperNate, a local cache owner, and had us looking under the collar of every lamppost in the parking lot of a neighborhood WalMart. Turns out the final location was the same location as the first: The hint for the second location was in a pill bottle under a lamp post collar. The final log was in a tiny metal tube attached magnetically to a screw in the top of the lamp post collar. Sneaky! [If you’re not familiar with lamp post collars, you probably didn’t know until now that many of them lift up.]
This device constructed by SuperNate revealed a cache’s final coordinates when the correct combination of numbers was selected. There was no paper log for the final location of Nate the Great’s cache. The finder simply signed the pipe with markers provided.When we saw this cute bird house outside a beauty salon in Dalton, Georgia we thought we’d found the cache container we were seeking. Turns out the cache was hidden in a second bird house a few feet away. The creator’s wife came out of the beauty salon and chatted with us. She recommended we find another cache her husband, a fireman, left at the firehouse in Dalton.This cache was hidden in an unused fire hydrant. We had to solve a puzzle to get a combination to open a lock securing the hydrant.This is the Huff House in Dalton, Georgia. It was built in 1855 and served as the headquarters of General Joseph E. Johnson, Commander of the Army of the Tennessee. At this location in 1864, General Patrick Cleburne proposed arming enslaved people in exchange for their freedom. Other officers soundly rejected the proposal as a violation of the principles upon which the Confederacy was founded. Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered any mention of the proposal to be suppressed.While caching in Ringgold, Georgia we saw this commemorating the 56th anniversary of Dolly Parton’s wedding in Ringgold May 30, 1966. Meadowlawn near Tunnel Hill, Georgia served as headquarters for Major General William T. Sherman as Union troops began their campaign for Atlanta.Grounds of Meadowlawn, also known as the Glisby-Austin House.The bent rail in this picture was found in a creek in 2011 and is thought to have been placed there in 1864. Troops would pry rails loose from their crossties and then place the rails over a burning set of ties to render a railroad unusable. Such ties were known as Sherman’s neckties.Confederate General John Bell Hood was said to be brave but reckless. His left arm was badly wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, and his leg was so badly injured at the Battle of Chickamauga that it was amputated four inches below the hip. The surgeon sent the leg along because he didn’t expect Hood to live and he thought man and leg should be buried together. The leg was buried in September of 1863 in Tunnel Hill, however, and Hood became a cotton broker and died in 1879 of yellow fever.The Silverdale Confederate Cemetery is sandwiched between two businesses but was once close to hospital supporting General Bragg’s Army. 155 soldiers are buried here; the names of most of them are unknown.The cemetery was purchased from a farmer in 1904. The stone wall was constructed in 1926 and the arch in 1934. The National Cemetery is depicted in this watercolor from around 1870. The cemetery was established December 25, 1863 by General George H. Thomas. It was many times the size of a typical national cemetery of the time–120 acres. It was designated Chattanooga National Cemetery in 1867. By 1874 almost 13,000 interments had taken place; the names of almost 5,000 of them are unknown.Upright headstones mark the graves of soldiers whose names are known; 6-inch square posts mark the graves of soldiers whose names are unknown.Until 1873 only soldiers and sailors who died during the Civil War were buried here.One of the markers in the National Cemetery commemorates a raid led by James J. Andrews, a civilian from Kentucky. Andrews and 20 soldiers from Ohio infantries stole the locomotive “General” from Kennesaw, Georgia in April 1862 and headed north toward Chattanooga, burning railroad bridges, cutting telegraph lines, and tearing up railroad track as they went. They were captured and tried. Andrews and seven others were hanged, some were exchanged, and some escaped. Some of the raiders were the first to be awarded the Medal of honor by the U.S. Congress for their actions. The incident was the subject of the 1956 Disney film “The Great Locomotive Chase”. About 2/3 of the way up Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga is the house built by Robert Cravens, an iron master. His first house was built in 1856 but it was destroyed during the Battle of Lookout Mountain in 1863. A sign at Cravens House shows how the area looked after the battle. Cravens later rebuilt the house.There are monuments here at Cravens House, on top of Lookout Mountain, on Missionary Ridge, and at Chickamauga Battlefield showing the positions of Illinois troops during the battles. Dave’s great-great grandfather Christian Immer served with the Illinois infantry.The Incline Railway has operated on Lookout Mountain since 1895. With a maximum grade of 72%, it is one of the world’s steepest passenger railways.The two cars on the railway are counterbalanced. As one car moves down, it pulls the second car up.Point Park is a ten acre memorial park that overlooks the Lookout Mountain Battlefield and the city of Chattanooga. A ranger described Indian removal from the area and the battles around Chattanooga.The Tennessee River and ChattanoogaThe Tennessee River, Dave, and JaneThe New York Peace Memorial was erected by the state of New York as a tribute to peace and reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans after the war.This is an image from a webcam in the Chattanooga Convention Center. There are only about 100 webcam geocaches in the world so when one is available, we make getting it a priority. At a webcam, there’s nothing to find or sign–we had to screen capture our image on the online feed from the webcam. We won’t embarrass Jane by mentioning that she walked through this lobby on the way to her high school reunion in September without giving the webcam a thought.
August 4, 2022 Vermont’s oldest geocache was closer to our campground near Albany, New York than our campground near Montpelier, Vermont so we treated it separately from other Vermont geocaches. Besides, it was harder to Read more…
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