New Salem and Washington Park

Jackie and I went to Springfield yesterday, to visit our old friend (and my officemate for many years) Chuck McCaffrey.

We had a great time. In the morning we went to Lincoln’s New Salem, a sort of reconstructed frontier town of Illinois in the 1830s. Except for their sad lack of exhibits on witch trials, it was excellent. In the afternoon we went to Washington Park, a public park in Springfield, which is a great park. Mostly it was just a chance to spend a few hours with Chuck—we don’t see him nearly enough—and a chance to do some walking.

Today, in order to make up for the woefully deficient coverage of witch trials in New Salem, we went to an exhibit at the Rare Book Room here at the University of Illinois Library called Fire Burne & Cauldron Bubble: Witchcraft at the Dawn of Modernity, which was mostly an exhibit of books that advocated and justified the witch trials in England in seventeenth and eighteenth century England and Scotland.