The Ex-Capital Birthday Weekend, Part 7 of 10: William Henry Harrison Slept Here

March 21, 2023 By Randall A. Golden in Indiana, Travel Tags: birthday, Branham Tavern, Corydon, Indiana, photography, photos, road trip, tourism, travel, William Henry Harrison, William Henry Harrison Log Cabin Leave a comment

A two-story log cabin that used to be various businesses but is now an old-timey museum.

I’ve run across a few websites that think the building once known as Branham Tavern is still a working tavern to this day. Whoops!

I’ve never thought of President William Henry Harrison as one of this blog’s patron saints, but in prepping this entry, it dawned on me that we’ve name-checked him enough times in our travels to make our own clipfest. We’ve run across representations and mementos from his life in several attractions to date:

The Tippecanoe Battlefield Museum, which commemorates the 1811 conflict with the indigenous that’s regarded as his most memorable fight scene, for better or worse
His final resting place at the base of an obelisk near a trailer park outside Cincinnati, OH
His genuine autograph at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums, also in Ohio
Mingling with multiple Hoosier subjects in a mural at the Indiana Statehouse
Rendered in bronze as one of 43 Presidential statues occupying street corners in Rapid City, SD

Admittedly we blew our chance to collect a complete set when we visited Vincennes in 2020 and failed to stop by Grouseland, his old mansion. As I recall it was closed at the time of our visit for renovation and/or pandemic. Maybe we’ll rectify that omission next time we’re in the area. In the meantime, our visit to Corydon added another of his previous residences to our veritable Ninth President Collectors’ Checklist, not that we consciously keep one.

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Lafayette Vignettes, Part 4: The Legacy of Tippecanoe

March 27, 2020 By Randall A. Golden in Indiana, Travel Tags: battlefields, birthday, history, Indiana, Lafayette, photography, photos, road trip, Tippecanoe Battlefield Museum, tourism, travel, William Henry Harrison 2 Comments

How we used to make lit-up battle simulators in the days before computers.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Once upon a time in 2019 Anne decide she wanted to celebrate her birthday with a jaunt around the city of Lafayette, an hour northwest of our Indiana home. She cobbled together a short to-do list of things she wanted to see, not lengthy but enough for a leisurely afternoon — a bit of Indiana history, a bit of downtown tourism, and a bit of healthy walking…

On some of our past road trips we’ve visited battlefields at Antietam, Gettysburg, Saratoga Springs, and Chattanooga. The farther east we drive, the more battlefields become a tourist attraction, tragic parts of our nation’s history commemorated either with small markers or with full-fledged parks, depending on the enthusiasm of their local historical societies and the performance of their fundraisers.

Indiana doesn’t have quite the same wartime history as, say, Virginia or New York or Pennsylvania. Back in the early days when we still had land wars on American soil (or future American soil, as it were), not many armies wanted to march or drive out this far just to pick fights with large gatherings of opponents en masse. This was centuries before our vast highway system was invented to enable racist posses, drive-by shootings, interstate serial killers, and the occasional militia.

Indiana has one (1) Civil War battlefield down near Kentucky. We also have a handful of markers noting minor battlefields here and there, many of which involved assorted tribes who were there first, and a disproportionate number of which also involved William Henry Harrison. One of them has a museum.

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