Up until this month, I had never taken a solo trip except to visit someone, usually a relative. I had developed a burning desire for a little adventure of my own, so I started looking around for something I could afford and do easily in a weekend. I did an internet search for literary landmarks in the Midwest because that’s how I roll. This is how I came to know about the Carl Sandburg Historic Site in Galesburg, Illinois, along with the Songbag Concerts they hold every month. One of my favorite poets! Perfect!
Musicians Sunshine Regiacorte and Casey Foubert performed the weekend I was there, sharing a mix of original pieces and covers of some folksy tunes. As a bonus, Regiacorte has a series of songs based on Emily Dickinson poems. Sandburg-Dickinson was the literary experience mashup I didn’t know I needed.
I recommend the experience even without the Emily part. Many of the exhibits have as much to do with Sandburg’s political activism as his writing accomplishments. In school, I was taught about the fog coming in on little cat feet. But he had fire in his belly to right the wrongs of worker exploitation and racial injustice.
See this example of a poem about child labor:
They Will Say
Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
And then of course, there are his poems about nature and songs in eggs, etc. So his work is multi-layered.
Other delights I found in Galesburg:
A brand spanking new public library building! I respect a community that supports its library.
The Galesburg Railroad Museum, where I took a tour of restored rail cars led by a retired third-generation railroad worker. This man knew everything but everything about the history of railroads and how to present it in an engaging way.
An arboretum with a story walk.
For a town of about 30,000, there was a surprising amount to do. A good time was had by all one of me in the travel contingent.
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Nomadic Noesis 