jimsjournal
Art along the bike path -- 12/03/06


I went for a ride along the bike path today, down through Peace Dale and into Wakefield. Even though it was around noon, the December sun could only get high enough into the sky to imitate mid-afternoon at best. The tall bare trees along the side of the bike path turned the slanting sunshine into a strobe light effect: sun * shade * sun * shade * sun * shade * sun * shade. Very disorienting to have a bike ride take on the visual aspects of a late seventies disco.

I had stuffed my camera into a pocket of my nylon shell jacket and I stopped to take some pictures of a stained-glass mural the size of a small billboard along the bike path in Peace Dale.


It depicts the village of Peace Dale, showing the village roads and some of the more notable buildings.

Here are a couple of closer views of the mural. The first shows someone riding a bicycle on the bike path. The other shows the Neighborhood Guild building, a social and educational center providing a gymnasium, a fitness center, classrooms for art and music classes and tutoring, etc.

Peace Dale was founded as a mill village, a center for textile mills filled with water-powered looms.
When I first moved here and saw the old mill buildings and picked up enough local history to know that most of the mill owners were Quakers, I assumed that the village got its name from their Quaker pacifism. (See my entry about the historical house tour -- the first house shown belonged to the son of Peace Dale founder Rowland Hazzard and the last one shown belonged to Isaac Peace Rodman, another prominent mill owner.)

Actually, Rowland Hazzard had married a woman named Mary Peace and he named the village in her honor.




Blasts from the past -- selected entries from the archives for this date:


Okay, here we go with entry number three -- But I really need to get them posted earlier in the day -- I think posting them late in the evening means few people will see them. A brief introduction....
A brief introduction to anyone who wanders in here for the first time from the Holidailies site -- I'm a middle-aged (*cough* okay, 63, but I don't look a day over 62) guy who lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian ("Jill" -- 24 yr old college student), son Jeremy (21 yr old college student), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandson Sam. I'm a former programmer/systems analyst who got into doing software training and currently works from home doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-based training courses. I've been writing this online journal since 1996.



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