Our daughter Lillian and her fiancé, Jordan Friedman are planning a wedding for this fall. They haven't yet chosen the site for the ceremony. Today Lillian, with two of her close friends, Hillary Sawyer and Russell Evans with me and Sheila walked around the old waterworks building on Jackson Hill right in the heart of Rome. The city has remodeled the old building into an event center. They haven't hosted a wedding yet.
The old building has several things going for it, in my book anyway.
57 years ago our friend Michael Burton talked the city fathers into allowing the Rome Art League to host a coffee house for young folks in the deserted old building on city property at the top of the beautiful wooded hill off Turner McCall Boulevard above the Oostanaula River. Mike and Carolyn and their friends got busy hanging burlap to cover the rough walls, building a small stage in one corner, collecting small tables, borrowing sculpture from noted Rome artist MacLean Marshall to adorn the space, and recruiting for outstanding folk singers like, ahem, Terrell Shaw, Cleve Burton, Richard Ware, Gary Smith, Tony Baker and others.
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| Cleve Burton and I were probably singing something like "Ain't No More Cane On This Brazos" |
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| Tony Baker |
In the intervening years Jackson Hill and the adjacent Burwell Creek area has become one of my favorite places. So much so that when the city considered in the 2000s the idea of selling off part of the property to developers I helped organize a political action group, "Save Rome's Central Park," to oppose that.
Here are some of our pictures from to day.
You will find more here:
The Star Spangled Banner
And here:
And here:
And a little, very recently, here:
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