This Thursday, Richmond Industry – Tredegar and The James River & Kanawha Canal

From FaceBook event page:

A Joint Event with the support of the Central Virginia Section of the American Society of Mechanial Enginners (ASME); the American Society of Metals (ASM), the Richmond Joint Engineers Council (RJEC), and the Penninsula Engineers Council (PEC), and the American Civil War Museum.

Several professional mechanical engineering societies have come together to sponser an evening of industrial history in Richmond!

The evening starts with a brief tour of Historic Tredegar, begining at 4:30 PM; attendees are free to explore the grounds until 5:30. The tour will be given by Nathan Vernon Madison, an historical consultant to the museum and co-director of The Richmond Economic History Project, a non-profit organization concerned with researching and digitizing the industrial, economic and infrastructural history of Richmond.

At 6:00 a social, with beverages, snacks, and Bottoms Up Pizza, will be held at VCU’s School of Engineering, with a lecture and presentation begining at 6:45, by Mr. Madison, regarding the history of Tredegar and its machinery, as well as the James River and Kanwaha Canal and the power it brought to the myriad of industries across Richmond in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Historic Tredegar
500 Tredegar St.
Richmond

VCU School of Engineering
401 W. Main St.
23220 East Engineering Hall, Room E1232
Richmond

4:30 – 5:30 PM Walk the grounds of Tredegar
6:00 – 6:40 PM Dinner/Social at VCU
6:45 – 8:00 PM Presentation at VCU

Tour at Tredegar is free, as is attending the lecture. A $15 fee is requested for anyone wishing to attend the social and partake in Bottom’s Up Pizza.

August 20, 1968 – Hendrix Plays The Mosque

Times Dispatch music review the next day:

He calls it the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and like it or not, that’s what it is.
Hendrix is a soft-spoken Negro. He plays his innovative style of music with two English boys, and While the sound is white, what Hendrix himself does is alternately intellectual or frenzied.
He was dressed for last night’s Mosque concert in bellbottom cerise pants. He also wore an exotically embroidered vest over a black shirt, two belts — one wide and gold — and three ornate rings. His carefully clipped hair stands high and round like a topiary tree.
Hendrix, who taught himself guitar by listening to old rhythm and blues artists, has put that style of music aside.
Instead, he has originated a music of his own, using amplifiers and electronics as a part of it.
The result is a lot of noise and harsh sound, but listen carefully and there are some startling musical effects emerging.
Such as when he uses the shrill sound of feedback as a key note in his harmony, or when the overtones that swell over and beneath his music become an intrinsic part of it.
Intricate Figures
Other than that, his musical understanding is shown in the intricate figures he weaves on the guitar, often holding the instrument tight against his chest, as if he were a human resonator. At other times he is strictly a sensational showman, as when he swings the guitar between his legs, or lifts it high and seems to chomp on it like an ear of corn. All time he keeps playing, never losing the thread holding the song together.
Between shows the 24·year-old sensation of Europe and the United States, was a warm, but shy person, tired from the hectic grind of one-night stands, on an eight-week tour, but happy to make his music and have it appreciated.
Traveling in the same musical package is a group known as The Eire Apparent, a group of terribly young and strangely dressed young men – one looked as if he had borrowed his Aunt Fanny‘s hat – who display a good deal of talent; and a three man group called The Soft Machine that features a topless drummer, a leather-jacketed organist and a guitarist, complete with Stetson hat, who looked like Cat Ballou, as he slumped over his guitar.
It was almost impossible to bear the music out front, as it was so amplified. But backstage, where the resonance wasn’t as strong, the music the two lesser—known groups made was much more palatable. Too bad they can’t give up those umbilical cords that tie them to their sound boxes, or at-least hear how they negate their own efforts with the amplification.
When the amplifiers are lowered, and the music emerges a bit more, one realizes that Hendrix is playing blues and protest songs, as much as he is fiery, possessing ones.
He dedicated “I Don‘t Live Today” to “all the self-appointed soldiers in St. Petersburg, Chicago, Vietnam and, or yes, the American Indian.” The song ends in a special effect like a catcall. His “Red House Blues” displayed his original harmonic technique around the old jazz form, but his version a squalling, wailing blues — the lament is there, but it is shriller. In fact, if the music is representative of Hendrix’ own soul, then his soul seems to be a shrieking and demanding a place in the sun.

More Than Presidents

From Hollywood Cemetery‘s FaceBook page:

Presidents Circle is known for the two United States Presidents that rest here, but there are also several other notables in this section.
Matthew Fontaine Maury (known throughout the world as the Pathfinder of the Seas), Joseph Reid Anderson (one of Richmond’s most influential citizens and founder of Tredegar Iron Works – the largest in the South), William Henry Haxall (one of the four visionary founders of Hollywood in 1847), Moses Drury Hogue (first pastor of Second Presbyterian Church in Richmond), and Lawrence Waring (an influential Richmond physician) are also buried here.

New Construction For Civil War Museum

The Times Dispatch has an article on new construction beginning at the American Civil War Museum at Tredegar:

The museum marks a major milestone on that path Monday, when it will break ground on a 29,000-square-foot main exhibit hall and collections storage and preservation center to be built into the hillside at the Tredegar site, incorporating the brick ruins of the old ironworks that powered the Confederate war effort.

The new museum building, at roughly $25 million, will feature a 75-seat immersive “experience theater” that greets visitors on the first floor that aims to tell the story, from all sides, of the war that almost pulled the United States apart. Key themes will revolve around individual decisions and how they were shaped by events.

10 Years of OregonHill.net and A Salute To John Murden

10 years ago on this date, John Murden created the first post for this website, a mention of a YouTube profile of Pine Street resident, Nathan Motley.

Murden started OregonHill.net because he saw the potential of community news sites after doing his Church Hill People’s News site for a while and wanted to help create more sites for more neighborhoods. In turn, this also played into the aggregation of these sites for RVAnews.com and today, SmallRichmond.com

At the time, as President of the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association, I was very interested in this because I was dealing with a very public controversy regarding VCU’s plans to encroach further into Oregon Hill. While the neighborhood had its own email discussion list (still going, by the way) and a rudimentary website for the neighborhood association, the new OregonHill.net allowed the neighborhood to have its own voice and respond to some of VCU-slanted media coverage. My own first post on this site was August 18, 2007 about Oregon Hill Home Improvement Council volunteers.

Anyway, part of the reason to mention all this is that John Murden has announced that he is planning to step down as editor of the Church Hill People’s News site at the end of the year. Of course, we wish him the best and salute him for all he has done for Church Hill and Richmond in general.

As for the future of OregonHill.net, we shall see. After writing over 4,000 posts, I would welcome new contributors or even assistant editors for the website. I have had a few in the past, but as Murden knows, not everyone sticks with it. More community advertising support would also be welcome.