The march northwest must have been something for those surveyors working for Andrew Ellicott. If you have ever worked the rich red clay soil of Virginia, you will understand something of the clinging, clawing nature of the vegetation, and the spiny tendrils of the tough vines that snake around everything and can make the rush […]

Ok- I left you in the bar at Joe Theismann’s Restaurant with a sense of contempt for the fraudulent SW2 Stone, a bogus paean to the original national monuments of the Young United States. I was too busy to get back to it yesterday, since I was wandering around great Baltimore, the Charm City, looking […]

(The imposter SW2 District Boundary Stone, a blatant fraud in location and material. The cage is authentic enough, though.) The best thing I can say about SW2 is that there is a decent bar right near it. Joe Theismann’s Restaurant (1800 Diagonal Rd) is a fun sports bar, and recalls a time when there was […]

(High resolution photo by Stephen Powers, 2015.) If you are going to go look at some of the Stones and get a decent sample, I have a recommendation for you. Do the ones of the Southwest Quadrant. Most of them do not have stories with a lot of depth to them. They just are what […]

Gentle Readers, I warned you I was going to get back to this. Stand by for Stones! “May this stone long commemorate the Goodness of God, in those uncommon events which have given America a place among nations. Under this stone may jealousy and selfishness be buried forever. From this stone may a superstructure arise […]

I just startled myself when I typed the date. Jeeze, how the time flies. One minute you are wondering about whether the Stones are really cooler than the Beatles, and then you turn around and you are bitching about how puny the Social Security check is. So, no, I am not going to get to […]

It is here. I had the usual disorientation this holiday season. I lost the day after Christmas- I think. Or it could have been one of the other anonymous days not fraught with significance. This one comes with the obligation to make resolutions to make 2016 a better year, with all the necessary improvements to […]

OK, at dinner last night at the prestigious 1921 Room at the new Army-Navy Country Club we talked about the Stones of the District plans to nail the last unvisited stone- that being SE9. We didn’t know that a family member was in a really bad situation, but knowing wouldn’t make anything any better. That […]

Gentle readers, I intended to continue the District Stones saga this morning, but the following from an old shipmate startled me enough to change the production schedule. For those of you affected by the OPM data hack (as are most of the folks I know), please read the following horror story. I have frozen all […]

(Curiously, SW9 is the only one of the stones to be a National Historic Landmark. It is named for Benjamin Banneker, and is an “Intermediate Stone,” unlike the four which mark the cardinal points of direction. What is left is a one foot square sandstone block, extending about 18 inches above ground and probably about […]