Happy 21st Birthday Dani !!!

April 1, 2010 is my niece Danielle's twenty-first birthday.  To celebrate this momentous event I am posting photos that I've taken of her (and her teammates) while watching her play goalie for Shenandoah University, where she is on both the women's field hockey team and the women's lacrosse team.  Happy Birthday Dani!

Hey, It's I Can't Decide a Theme Thursday!

Themes?  We don't need no stinking themes!  I'm just going to post a number of random photos and hope that you will enjoy them. If you can find a link or a theme in them, well more power to you.

                                               

Stonewall

 

National Archives

The Henry Hill plateau in the Manassas Battlefield National Park is one of the best spots in all of Northern Virginia to watch a sunset.  It's a terrific location to watch the sun descend behind the Bull Run Mountains.  This plateau is where Confederate and Federal troops clashed during the afternoon of July 21, 1861 in the struggle that became known as The Battle of Bull Run or First Manassas.

On this field is a monument the marks the spot where General Thomas Jonathan Jackson earned the nickname that he would become well known by: Stonewall.  As the Confederate troops were being pushed back by advancing federals, Brig. Gen. Barnard Elliott Bee, Jr pointed towards Jackson and his men, who were standing firm, and proclaimed, "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall" or words to that effect.  As they say, the rest is history.

All of the photos in this post are views that I've taken of the Jackson monument.

 

 

 

 

 

Old Barns

I always enjoy poking around old barns.  Old saddles, pitchforks, lanterns, feed sacks, wheels, boots...you never know what remnants from the past you might find inside.  I sometimes wonder about the farmers from the past who used these old structures and what they would think of me, a stranger to them, nosing through their old belongings.

                                                                                

                                                                                 

Another Year Winds Down

As the last few days of 2009 wind down, I thought that a sunset theme would be an appropriate way to finish off the year.  May next year find all of you healthy and happy!

-Hominy

 

 

 

 

 

Portici

                                            Library of Congress                     

Portici (pronounced por-tee-cee) was the name of an estate house located about 6-1/2 miles northwest of Manassas, Virginia that burned down during the Second Battle of Manassas in August of 1862.  The house was a large two story structure built sometime in the 1780's and was located on a high hill overlooking Bull Run.  The land on which Portici stood is now inside the boundaries of the Manassas National Battlefied Park in Prince William County, Virginia and while very little evidence remains of the original home, there are still some later built farm structures that exist as well as the graves of the family that lived there.

All of the photos in this post were taken on the land that comprised the original farm.