Its impossible to shift a 100 lbs

It really is.

I know this because one of the items I measured this past Tuesday was a scale set on top of a hundred pound bottom.  It was nice enough to have that information stamped onto it. I also discovered that I can indeed lift 25 pounds quite easily, and I should be able to manage fifty without too much trouble. A hundred though... would not budge a centimeter.

In case you can't figure it out, I spent a lot of this past Tuesday measuring weights and scales. Mostly Cotton Gin Scales. Which, I found out from the director and measuring them, come in all sorts of lengths. More research will be done on those at a later point. I have four things to talk about today. Quotas, Owl's Hollow, Jim, and designing exhibits.

So, if you all read my Manageable Monday post, you may have seen that I wrote the number of items I currently have in the system against god knows how many items I don't. Because I feel like I'm moving so slowly through these items I've assigned myself a quota. I want to have at least a 100 items measured a week. I figure out of those 100 items I can probably get about 20 of them into the system. If I don't do the research on them, I can possibly get 40 items into the system in a week.As I move through the system, and hopefully get a friend or two to help, I'll ideally be able to move faster. It depends on what I'm measuring that day.

Onto Owl's Hollow. Never heard of it? Don't be surprised. We came upon the Owl's Hollow  name in a box full of Round Mountain Furnace slag and whatnot, which existed - the ruins still do - in Cherokee county. There was a rather large piece of Iron Ore purchased, according to the slip, from Owl's Hollow Mine. I asked the director about it but he'd never heard of Owl's Hollow, neither had anyone else working in the museum that day.

Now I know, from past experience with researching a graveyard on a county line, that county lines love to change! Or thoroughly confuse you. Owl's Hollow was a mine, no longer used, that used to be in Cherokee county but is now in neighboring Etowah county.  Probably, because I haven't done much research on it, the furnace would purchase the iron ore from Owl's Hollow mine and melt it down. My best guess is that nearby mines, like Owl's Hollow, were probably the draw for setting up numerous small furnaces in the area. Pretty cool right? Of course, also in the box, there was a fire brick which said it came from St. Louis, MO. So we still have another mystery to uncover, but at least we know what Owl's Hollow is.

Now the amazing thing is how we found out about Owl's Hollow. Jim, local historian and genius, was there the day I discovered the box. The director asked him about Owl's Hollow and when I got there on Tuesday Jim had a picture of the street that the mine used to be down and an article from 1971 mentioning a TAG railway excursion where you could visit all the stops along the line. Owl's Hollow was only mentioned once and with a list of names of various other places along the line. Now Jim is a genius because this man heard the director say Owl's Hollow and he thought a little and he said to himself; you know, I think I remember reading about Owl's Hollow in the paper in 71. Sure enough there was the article. Talk about a great memory! I definitely plan to borrow his brain later. I know what I wanna ask him about Friday if he stops in. There's this great Ice pick belonging to the James Ice Co. which I can only figure was local, since I poured through the Ice and Refrigeration volumes searching from Tennessee to Mississippi without a smidgeon of luck.

Last but not least. I've been offered a serious opportunity to design an exhibit for the museum. Friday, after I fill my quota, I'm going to read a little of the history of Cherokee county and see if I can't come up with anything for an exhibit. So far the only thoughts I have are to finish the jail cell exhibit downstairs, or to utilize one of the horrible cabinets to do an exhibit on farming. It'd be good to know how important farming was to the area. There's plenty of ranch equipment if I wanted to do something on ranching. Or maybe I can find some more stuff on those mines and can do something on those.

Till next time!

52/Thousands