There’s actually a nice little Christmas night market going on by the National Portrait Gallery. It’s like the German ones except without mulled wine.
This town is ridiculously expensive. The average salary is $83K, which neatly inverts the average of $38K where I live (in neighboring Swain County, it’s $29K). As a result prices are sky high, and since they all live off tax revenue taxes are too.
They can thereby afford nice stuff. And they inherited a lot from earlier, better generations of American leadership. Here’s DuPont Circle’s memorial:
It honors an admiral from the DuPont family who is credited with making the Union blockade of the South effective during the Civil War. That was a real trick, and a large reason for the Union victory. Most people don’t know how badly the Navy was prepared for the war, or that it lost so many sailors— and fully half the Marines— to the Confederacy. He was aided by some significant missteps by the Confederate government, but it was still a real accomplishment.
The DuPonts were important to North Carolina too; there’s a state forest named after them not too far away from me. They did well for themselves and their government, both of which profited from their work. Not so much the people, who are still poor but paying their taxes.
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I have a friend who owned a hotel on Lake George after finishing up in American Samoa and skiing for the Army. (Interesting life...)
He and his wife divorced and he suddenly had to make much more money for retirement. He moved to Tyson's Corner and now works on Minotaur. He explained to me "I had to move from the Shire to Mordor."
I recommend the following book as a history of the Union blockade. Kevin Dougherty is the author of
Strangling the Confederacy: Coastal Operations in the American Civil War The author points out that the blockade was part of General Scott's Anaconda plan.
Another book related to the blockade, which focuses on a county on the North Carolina coast, is Wayne K. Durrill's War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion. The book points out that the county was rather divided in its sentiments about the war.
Having family on both sides of the conflict, the Civil War has long interested me.
Rather interesting that of the two books I recommended, one has an e-book price of $2.99 and the other has an e-book price of $53.
“The book points out that the county was rather divided in its sentiments about the war.”
Nowhere more than in North Carolina, which provided more soldiers than any other state — but to both sides.
My family was also on both sides. Two of my cousins helped burn Atlanta, where I was born around a century later.
Another book I read on the conflict, though not on the blockade, was Lorien Foote's The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy. What impressed me was that it wasn't only black Southerners that assisted escaped Union prisoners, but also a fair number of white Southerners. More precisely, white North Carolinians. Which again points out that North Carolina was greatly divided.
I don't recall if I recommended this BBQ place in Alexandria or not. It's called Rockland's BBQ and is on Quaker Lane, a little side street off the main drag. You might accidentally catch their annual "Grills Gone Wild" where they serve exotic meats. The year I was there for it, they had Yak burgers, Bison Sausage and Ostrich Fajitas.
Thank you, Mike. My favorite BBQ joint in town is called Hill Country, which is also the only half decent bar in the city and a place to catch Texan live music acts stopping in on the Austin-Nashville- DC-NYC circuit.
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