Saturday, Aug. 22, we were off early, driving east towards are next stop, Columbus OH, listening to "Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War" , by Tony Horwitz. Between that informative & engaging book, a 3 part documentary on Ulysses S Grant we'd watched before we left Charleston, & a visit to the Lincoln Presidential Museum & Library in Springfield, IL, we felt we'd be ready to digest Harper's Valley, MD, the site of John Brown's Raid, & the 3 Civil War battle fields we were planning to viist: Antietam, Manassus, & Gettysburg.

Oddly enough, we were almost to Columbus, in a small town called Springfield Ohio, when the book related a meeting in that very place between John Brown, the abolitionist, & Frederick Douglass. Already, history was coming alive.

In Columbus, we visited "the Belter House, a lovely c 1850 house museum, which in many ways reminded us "The House That Jane Built", but was Italianate, not Federal, & a town house, not a farm house. It had been restored by a family member, who was intent on preserving the house as to what it was in the time period it was built.

The big surprise was a nearby topiary garden, where a clever landscaper re-created the George Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte. It was enchanting.

See our Album "Discovering Columbus, Ohio" for highlights of our visit there.