"That Soil's Too Rocky By Far!": Mt. Pulaski, Illinois

VITAL STATS

Mt. Pulaski, Illinois

Population: 1,701

Area: 1.1 square miles

County: Logan County

Cast Members: Your Intrepid Blogger, Dr. Doctorman

In a way, we arrived at Mt. Pulaski* at the perfect time. It was July 4th weekend, and the town's 175th anniversary, so they were absolutely lousy with events and shennanigans and goings-on. But you might not know that in talking to some of the locals.

*- officially, it's "Mount Pulaski". But fuck that, I'm a busy guy, you'll get abbreviated and like it.

Here you can see some of the tents and stuff they had set up in the town square. You can also see Dr. Doctorman loping through the area, like a gentle mountain sasquatch, or perhaps the feared Wendigo.

We wanted to know what's going on. Fortunately, we saw this sign-

You probably can't read that, owing to our woeful public school system. But it's advertising a collection of needlepoint recreations of "all 43" Presidential homes on display in the Mt. Pulaski Historical Society.* Upon seeing this sign, Dr. Doctorman and I thought, "Yes, we are just hot enough to want to go into an air conditioned building to look at those."

*- 43? Yeah, I caught that, too. I figured maybe they were just properly counting Grover Cleveland, who was but one man, yet is counted as two Presidents. But no, they left out Obama. I tell myself it's just because he's only been in office two years. But it's probably because fuck that Kenyan anti-colonial marxist socialist muslim terrorist.

Here, here's a picture of the needlepoint houses.

LOOK UPON THESE WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR.

But here's the nuts thing: we asked some of the people in the Historical Society what was going on in the square. They said, "Well, nothing, really."

Here, look again at the square:

And the fine folks at the Mt. Pulaski called this "Nothing, really." Dr. Doctorman thought they were just batty (they were old enough that "batty" is the proper term). I, for a brief moment, held out hope that Mt. Pulaski was just a magical town that had so many festivals every weekend, this one couldn't hardly rate. I imagined parades every afternoon, history reenactments every night, funnel cakes for every meal.

But it was not to be. Today was a special event, as we'd soon learn.

Couple more notes about the Historical Society. This guy here is the inventor of Mt. Pulaski.

Blah blah blah, Old Joke.

The upstairs of the building was a legitimate museum of Mt. Pulaski history. I'm not gonna show you all of it because Blogspot's photo uploader is slow as balls, but this is cool- a little exhibit to the 1976 state champion basketball team.

If you asked me to picture a basketball team from a rural, mostly white town in the mid 70s, I'd come pretty close to this.

And then there's this. There are no words.

Dr. Doctorman and I then ventured out into the square. We passed this grandstand:

That bluegrass band announced that their next song would be "Rocky Top". Dr. Doctorman said, "Oh, hey, Rocky Top!" with so much enthusiasm, I was certain he was kidding. But then he started singing along.

So bottom line is, I guess I learned the words to "Rocky Top".

Oh hey, we saw another one of these. GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL.

But the centerpiece was the Mt. Pulaski courthouse. It was kind of the cliche of an old, unused historic courthouse, but that's fine. I thought it was still interesting.

Apparently, this is where Judge David Davis sat.

David Davis was kind of Abe Lincoln's right-hand man, politically. He managed his Presidential campaign in 1860, and sorta kept the home fires burning when Lincoln went to Washington (Lincoln, living back in the day before it was oh-so-terrible to give a friend a job, made Davis a Supreme Court Justice as a Thanks, Pal!) This, of course, was just as nerdy as Dr. Doctorman's Rocky Top moment, but I was doing it, not him, so it was fundamentally better.

So, this was nice. They had people dressed up as historic figures, they had old carriages and stuff out. They also had this:

They were painting a mural commemorating a race between a plane and a train that, I guess, passed through Mt. Pulaski? Or something? The mural doesn't really spell this out (nor does it say who won. Way to bury the lead, guys), but it's a fun little historical event, and I like that they're marking it by painting this whole mural in one weekend (well, hopefully. We didn't stick around).

So a lot of this was really fun, and I know Dr. Doctorman enjoyed himself. And yeah, the history aspect of this project is a big part of it. But I still felt like this visit was a little lacking. We didn't really learn much about what people do in Mt. Pulaski TODAY, y'know? I'm relatively certain they don't sit around talking about David Davis and the 1976 basketball team (do they sit around singing Rocky Top, though? Maybe).

We drove around the outskirts of town. We found Cross Bros., a John Deere superstore kinda place. My father has bought every single one of his lawnmowers from there, so I guess that's something.

But that can't be it. Alas, we never quite figured out what's going on RIGHT NOW in Mt. Pulaski. But we did see one clue:

Clearly, this was very relevant to our July 2 visit.