Friday morning, finally!

43 degrees at 5:30 A.M. Bbrrrr!

The Autumnal Equinox The date when the Sun crosses the celestial equator (i.e., declination 0) moving southward (in the northern hemisphere) and night and day are of nearly the same length.



Just when Bostonians were ready to send the Sox to sea with the tea......

WCS Boys' Varsity Soccer at Sherburne-Earlville at 4:30;
Varsity football vs. Rome Catholic at Brothertown Stadium at 7:00 P.M.

There's no shortage of weekend activities! Run down to Sherburne this evening at 6:00 for a MUSHROOM presentation at the Rogers Conservation Center; stop at the Waterville Historical Society tomorrow morning to check out Fall Festival History Weekend tours. On Saturday there will be a FFHW tour bus leaving WHS at 9 am going to 5 historical sites including Madison County Historical Society, Mansion House and Brookfield Historical Society and others, ending at WHS.

Remsen Barn Fest

Wheel Days at the Madison County Fairgrounds.



Or you could take to the woods behind the High School, set up your easel next to Dead Pond, and pretend that you're Albert Bierstadt! Bierstadt was one of America's most famous artists and his paintings hang in nearly all of the world's most prestigious galleries. So what was he doing with his paintbox at Dead Pond? Well...........

Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1830. He studied painting in Dusseldorf and Rome (1853-57) before emigrating to America.

In 1858 he was employed by F. W. Landers to help him survey an overland wagon route to the West. His travelling companion was a young writer from New York named Fitz Hugh Ludlow whose even younger wife was ....... drum roll ...... Rosalie, the beautiful daughter of Waterville's leading citizen, Amos O. Osborn, whose impressive home stood right in the middle of Waterville, where the Post Office is now. As Bierstadt and Ludlow traveled westward, Ludlow spoke more and more of lovely Rosalie and the more and more he heard about her, the more Bierstadt wanted to meet her.

Shall we make a long story short? Ludlow was not the stable, stay-at-home husband that young Rosalie wanted, and after a scandelous courtroom divorce she married the wealthy Bierstadt in Grace Episcopal Church in Waterville in November, 1866.

On Osborn property was a small building that, according to the late Hilda Barton, had been the first frame structure in Waterville. Osborn turned that into a studio for his new son-in-law. In 1874, the Waterville Times reported that Mr. Bierstadt was a work on a very large canvas ---- and if you've been in the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington you've seen it. There's an excellent book about Bierstadt's life in the Waterville Public Library by Gordon Hendricks and - of course - you can just "Google" their names to learn more about Rosalie, Ludlow and Bierstadt himself. A good rainy-day project!