Visiting the Ernest Warther Museum in Dover Ohio and driving around the Ohio Amish country were today's highlights. I found myself in Dover thanks to Ricky Bernstein's friend Bill Carlson, a professor of sculpture in Miami and part-time Otis resident, who suggested I visit the Master Wood Carver's Museum. He was spot on.
Dover is less than an hour south of Akron, and in a completely different world, situated at the entrance to a huge Amish community. Traffic on the side roads can be slow not because of trucks but because of the horse and buggies of the Amish, which is charming if you're not stuck behind one for too long. It was even fun to see all the horse droppings along the way.
The Wood Carver Museum in Dover is astonishingly interesting. It's a must-see for any fan of wooden sculpture or train buff. Warther's passion was recreating--in ebony or walnut with either bone or ivory--steam trains in painstaking, minute detail. The docent reported that engineers from the major American railroads would review his model trains with magnifying glasses and reported that every detail was absolutely correct. It would take Warther anywhere between three and 12 months to carve a train, the time dependent on the size.
Not only did Warther create hundreds of these spectacular model trains, but he carved knives, a business his heirs carry on at the site even today (where of course I had to pick up a few). His wife Frieda, not to be outdone by her husband, collected 73,000 buttons and made sculptures of them displayed now in what was his original small museum. The funny looking picture below is one of the walls in the museum which display her button sculptures.
I had lunch at an Amishesque restaurant in nearby Sugarcreek, and then meandered over to Berlin (BER-lin), where the main street is chockablock full of tacky Amish souvenir stores. Something of a disappointment but wandering the back roads was fun on a sunny day. I'd heard that Kidron (try to find it on your map) boasted a special hardware store called Lehman's, so I drove up to there to check it out. Lehman's is to hardware stores what Baba Louie's is to pizza parlors. Simply amazing. I saw the barbecue grill of my dreams. Here it is.
Getting out of the Berkshires into "the heartland" is fun, but somewhat disorienting. I'm not used to the universality of franchises. I try not to be condescending about the insidious infiltration of frachises all over the country (see, here I go being imperious without any effort) but it is daunting.
When I left the Hampton Inn where I stayed last night, I wrote down the surrounding establishmets in clear view: the Hampton Inn where I stayed, the Hilton Economy Express that shared the Hampton Inn's parking lot, McDonalds, Bob Evans, Burger King, Lion Garden, Target, Taco Bell, Burger King and Wendy's. Why, I wondered, did Hilton have two of its own properties next door to one another? And aren't some of those franchises owned by the same conglomerates? It's both confusing and depressing.
And then there's the whole food issue. The Hampton Inn where I stayed last night offers breakfast. After checking it out, I realized why we as a nation are so unbelievably overweight and why the next Farm Bill must be a Food Bill instead. Here's what the buffet offered: "bagels," English muffins, six types of sweet muffins, cream cheese, butter, jellies, Danishes, syrup, mustard, ketchup, toasted muffins topped with what looked like cheese and chopped meat, biscuits, apples wrapped in plastic, Very Old bananas, what was called "fruit salad," six different boxed cereals including Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes, two yogurts, one whole and one "lite," juice from a machine, and plastic utensils. I don't believe there was a single offering that was not industrial. It was depressing.
And yet, less than an hour away I drove through beautifully bucolic and almost franchise-free farmland. I have to mull this over and come to a conclusion about my biases.
In contrast to the industrial breakfast, the buffet at the Amishesque place where I had lunch looked and tasted freshly made. True, it was full of heartland cuisine--mashed potatoes, creamed corn, bread pudding, fried chicken, and the like, but there was delicious roasted chicken and tasty broccoli, too. There was a large salad bar with fresh vegetables, and you had to pay extra if you wanted dessert. I liked that.
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