A little history
Since we plan on living in Zion for a very, very long time, I’m interested in learning the town’s history! So I picked up* the Zion Images of America book (there’s over 7,000 Images of America books – maybe they have one for your town?!).
The Zion Historical Society contributed a lot of the photos and information for the book, and it mentioned they have even more at their building – the Shiloh House – where founder Dr. John Alexander Dowie lived. I’m excited to visit the Shiloh House at some point with Steven. The photos and town history will be interesting, but the house looks really neat, too!
I’ve only read a few pages of the book so far, but it mentioned that Dowie completely planned out the town layout before “the first spade broke ground” in the early 1900s. The town streets are on a easy to follow cardinal grid. I’d been wondering about the street names, and read on the Zion Historical Society page that the east to west streets are named in alphabetical order after places and people from the bible (the north to south streets are numerical). Avenues and boulevards also have biblical names, except two that are named for Scotland – Dowie’s birthplace.
It’s fascinating that the town was completely planned out from the get go – it shows Dowie really had grand intentions to build his religious utopia (according to Wikipidea, Zion is named for Mount Zion, in Israel). But was he successful…? The town was founded in 1901 and bankrupt several years later! And it sounds like it had a lot of political turmoil (what town doesn’t?!). Time to read more!
*Oops, since this is a blog, I have to tell you this means I bought this with my own money off of Amazon.
Based on the articles showing up in my Feedly, the Oscars must be this weekend! We had a fun Oscars party two years ago, missed them last year to watch Downton Abbey, and this year… we don’t even have an antenna to watch them! Ha! We’ve been without cable/antenna since we moved on December 5th to the rental! I’ll have to watch clips of the highlights, later.
We did see two of the films nominated for Best Picture – Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Martian. Honestly… Mad Max was my favorite film of the year. Until I saw Star Wars, of course. It was so unique and engaging. And thoroughly entertaining. I’d love to see it win! No idea where it stands compared to the others, though. I’d like to see the rest of the nominees at some point. We’ll have to rent them on Redbox! We suspended our Netflix disk subscription (still use streaming) shortly after the December move because we didn’t take the time to sit down and watch our disks like we used to.
Themocracy
Very interesante!! I wonder if there is a book on OP? I will have to check!!
UGH Mad Max. Hated it. -.-
I bet there is!!!!
Ha ha, I remember that you did 🙂
Turns out, I’ve never even heard of the movie that won!
I wondered if you’d watch them this year. Do you guys miss having regular cable at all?
Me either! Ha!
I don’t miss it! Steven misses watching the news in the am, but he uses the CBS app on Apple TV for it 🙂
I haven’t watch any of the Mad Max movies but now am curious because of all of the awards.
I’ve only seen the newest one. But they really put A LOT of effort in to it. I am not surprised it won what it did!
Wow, so Zion is a relatively new town, I guess! (or maybe older than your old town?)
I missed the Oscars, but…meh.
re: your * point, I didn’t realize you had to do that! I thought it was the other way — if you do a review, you have to reveal that it was provided. Eek, I hope I haven’t been messing this up!
Hmm, I am not sure when Round Lake was founded! I didn’t care to find out much when I lived there! Ha! I wonder if it was early 1900s, too? Eh.
There are tons of rules for blogging and most people don’t follow them. If you do receive something for free you are supposed to say it at the top and bottom of the post. And I can’t remember where I read about revealing you spent your own money on something… I just put it all out there since many bloggers seem dishonest about it and it makes me nuts. (Like, why I am reading about generators when you don’t own a home?! 😉 )