Tuesday 9 February 2010

Monday 8th February 2010 - With a Little Help

          My trip to the Art Gallery has borne some surprising fruit.  One of the people who took me commented (you probably saw it) that I might have misunderstood the ownership note on the Glasgow map.  They say that the Tutwilers were (are?) among the gentry round here, so they might have been the owners of Glasgow.
          So it's off to the courthouse for another look.  And closer inspection shows that the surveyor was called TH Tutwiler, and the "property of" says EM Tutwiler.  So I go chasing EM through the deeds, and strike gold in no time at all.  The first deed I look at has EM selling a lot to one Nash Jones, describing it as being in the "Town of Glasgow".  The neigbourhood is full of people called Glasgow, and this Tutwiler decides to call his town Glasgow.  Why would he do that?
          This first lot was sold on the 27th April 1893.  Interestingly, the Adamsville map was entered into the record on the 11th May 1893, and the Glasgow on on the 18th May, so they were running neck-and-neck.  No doubt Adamsville won out because of where the railroad went.  Tutwiler laid out a subdivision in Adamsville the previous October, and called it Glencoe, so he must have had some Scottish connection, even if it was only a marketting ploy.  (By the way, the Adams who laid out Adamsville was called William Minus Adams, a name I've never encountered before.  Oh, and he couldn't write.)
          [I would show you a picture of the deed, but my cables are in all the wrong places.  This lack of WiFi is going to cause me problems.  I now have a set of pictures which exist only in the camera.  If I don't get to load then up to the Google server soon, something will go wrong.]
 
          Later that night, I'm out on my WiFi crawl, with Silver watching over me.  In Ruby Tuesday's, the boys at the bar want to talk politics, but can't.  I sense that it's because they know they can't use certain words: the language they learned at school is simply no longer used.  So they settle into sports, and the general conclusion of the evening is that we would all do what Tiger Woods did, if we got the chance.  Actually, they didn't say "chance", they said "good fortune".  But I'm sure they only said it at all because there were no girls there.
          I finish the WiFi crawl within walking distance of the motel, so I can abandon Silver if necessary.  I have no sooner settled into my favourite beer when a grown-up lady policeman parks herself beside me and tells me walking is the only acceptable option: so much for Silver's discrete coughs.  She is part of "Animal Welfare", which I think, in the old days, would have been called the "Dog Catcher".  I examine her,em,  shoulder patch closely, and notice it has the letters "RWH" written very small at the bottom.  Sadly, she doesn't know what it means, but she phones a friend.  "Return with Honour", she says.  They've reduced their motto to an acronym.
         

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