Sorry for the poor quality of this picture. These sculptures came from a park in the middle of a new apartment community in Silver Spring. For some reason developers seem to be all about placing new sculpture in front of their properties. We’ll explore this phenomenon for a few posts.
Yesterday’s panorama reminded me of this wide shot of Sugarloaf mountain. Though the perspective of this shot makes it difficult, if you’ve seen it before you can recognize instantly that Frederick and Montgomery counties’ big mountain has a distinctive notch in it that makes it recognizable from the surrounding areas.
I don’t always travel with the same camera. So sometimes I forget about the special features of one individual camera. On Saturday, I remembered that the tiny camera I had brought has a really neat panorama tool. So I tried it out and I think it worked well. You can click into today’s picture to see the whole thing.
MDP took a trip to see the O’s on Saturday. It was predicted to be so hot that it was difficult to get rid of some extra tickets we had for the game. However, with a win and a with a generally good home team crowd, you barely felt the heat. As you can see on the screen the official temperature of the game was 101 degrees.
Ok we will continue to sporadically post some more shots from Taylors Chapel, but we’re going to post a less depressing Friday sports shot.
I always enjoy seeing these baseball shaped plaques along Eutaw street, which denote where players have hit balls over the right field wall. This has always been a favorite despite the fact it wasn’t hit by an Oriole becasue it seemed like such a feat at the time to not only hit a ball over the wall, but over the flag court and the street and to hit the warehouse 8 feet above the ground. Granted this was at the All Star home run derby, not a real game, but still….
Early graves in this church followed a typical pattern of progression through time. The earliest wouldn’t have any symbols, but then you would see a symbol of Death’s head. A little later you would see cherubs, then followed by the design of an Urn and Willow. These progressed as customs across the country were being affected by new religious and somewhat political thought. Here in the graveyard of a single denomination church it’s effects are still seen. This example shows just a willow tree so it’s at the tail end of the period where these styles were found.
The great thing about Taylor’s chapel aside from it’s historic significance as a building is the graveyard behind it, which contains samples of grave design over the course of two centuries. This is a concept I knew little about until I visited with Bryan who studied historic preservation and who provided today’s photo. The symbolism on gravestones evolved through many different phases, and MDP will try to give some examples of the early and most significant ones. Today’s marker is later than some of the others and it shows a finger pointing in the air, which symbolizes the hope for this person in heaven.
A few weeks ago when we visited Mt. Pleasant Golf Course, we skipped past a significant landmark. However, that’s exactly what happens every time you enter Mt. Pleasant golf course, you pass by Taylors Chapel. The chapel was built in the 1853 by the Taylor Family, who owned the Mt. Pleasant Plantation. The chapel is significant because it’s one of only two such private chapels left in the City of Baltimore. It’s also important because its interior is decorated with frescoes which remain in tact today.
Sorry for the missed posts last week. I would like to say they were caused by some sort of technical issue, but the only issue was the scheduling of time at MDP HQ. This week we’re back with some interesting historical areas.
Yesterday MDP was driving down I-270, which if you follow it all the way, requires you to cut through the battlefield of Monocacy. So, we’ll start off this week with a monument from the battlefield. This one was placed here on the centennial of the battle.
We are posting a special shot today from last year’s Chompy, the Discovery Channel shark that takes over their headquarters building during shark week. They have announced that chompy won’t be coming out this year. So that new zoom lens I bought is now totally worthless.