Fort Monroe was a favorite destination of mine in my Navy years, and I visited the Casemate Museum often, since it was free of charge. Exhibits of the battle between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, which occurred in the Hampton Roads area near the fort, and the replica cell where Jefferson Davis was confined were my favorites.
Atop the fort along the old battlements was a walking path and, incongruously, a pet cemetary, complete with marble gravestones. I used to love going up there in the cool fall months when the air was balmy and the sky azure blue.
The most famous Jefferson Davis artifact at the museum was Davis's tobacco pipe, a handsome long-stemmed meerschaum:
(meerschaum is a porous white clay material found in Turkey. When carved into pipes it gives an especially cool smoke, and the white clay eventually changes color from being smoked, as this one obviously has)
4 comments:
So cool.
A friend of mine, when just a tot, helped his daddy out by cleaning his meerschaum pipe collection. They'd gotten dirty, he thought, and daddy would like them all bright white again.
And it's still free!!!
@ProudHillbilly: LOL. It would be like cleaning a career military NCO's coffee cup.
@Old NFO: Was there about 4 years ago, wasn't certain of the status since the Army left.
That is a really cool pipe
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