Honestly, I tend to forget about these guys quite a lot. I never owned anything by them and never saw them live. But for a few years around 1993 to 1995, they were on every mix tape that everyone made everywhere.

At the time, I think they sort of brought “screamo” to the forefront.

I remember by friends Bryon and Murray going to see them somewhere and when they came back, they were changed. This was probably 1994. After that, everyone dressed like old men. It’s true. I can’t remember why and I’m not really sure Lincoln was instrumental in this, but after they saw them play live, everything was different.

Lincoln was from Morgantown, WV (I had friends going there at the time, but I think I heard of them before that). Their first 7″ was on Watermark Records and their second two were on the now legendary Art Monk Construction records. Art Monk released some of the most amazing records of that time.

I’m still hunting down most of the Art Monk releases and still have none of the Lincoln releases. If anyone can help in this area, I’d be indebted to you (literally).

Lincoln released three records, all 7″s. I’ve been able to find MP3s of the seven songs.

Here they are for you now.

Watermark 7″
Union
Grade Curve
Stop Means Stop
Seed

Two Headed Coin (Split with Hoover)
Benchwarmer

Last 7″
Sugarloaf
Waterboy

Get them here.
I didn’t rip these from vinyl nor did I encode them. The quality, good or bad, isn’t my doing. Once I somehow manage to obtain these 7″s, I’ll rip them proper (as proper as I can, anyway).

You can listen here…

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= Union

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= Benchwarmer

March 9th, 1987 began as a routine day for Canandian National Railway engineer, Wesley MacDonald. His job for the day was to switch what he thought was 23 cars loaded ore cars at the Brunswick Mine. Due to a mixup in communication, he received 31 fully loaded up cars. As he pulled those 31 loaded cars behind two engines and began his dissent from the mountain, his brakes gave way due to the extra weight.

Through it all, he remained fairly calm. As the train reached 55mph, then 60, then 70 Wesley knew that he couldn’t make a quickly-approaching bend in the tracks. He contemplated jumping, but chose to stick with the train so that he could sound the horn to warn those up ahead.

He was less than a year from retirement.

It begins as the train’s conductor (still back at the mine) radios to Alfie, the dispatcher, “I think we may have a knee-deep situation on our hands. We’ve grabbed a bunch of cars back here at the mines and uh, we can’t hold them, she’s weighing on us there.”

Wesley himself radios in to give his assessment of the situation. “This is Wesley now. 50, she’s doing 50, and I’ve got no control of her…. An awful goddamn mixup if I ever can survive it.”

The train quickly reaches 70mph when the dispatcher asks Wesley, “is there no way that you can clear… get off of that train for the love of heavens?”

“I can’t get off her,” replies Wesley.

The dispatcher suggests that Wesley bail into a snowbank, but his conductor urges him to “stay with her,” though he adds “you’ll never make that corner.”

Wes concedes, “I don’t know which is worse.” Being so close to retirement, he adds, “When I get done with this they can put me on my fucking pension.”

The train, moving faster than 70mph miraculously makes it around the first corner. The next station has been warned, but Wes drives home the point, radioing, “Get the hell out of the way.”

As the dispatcher calls for an ambulance, Wesley’s radio goes dead.

“Are you on here Wesley?” The dispatcher has lost communication with the train.

The Assistant Superintendent radios in asking if he has communication with the train and that when they find him that nothing should be moved. The railroad is already trying to preserve the evidence, “Tell him I don’t want anything to move when he comes to a stop.”

Alfie responds, “Well… I… If he comes through that switch at Nepisiguit, Ben, I don’t imagine … er … I imagine he’s at a stop alright, in the woods somewhere.”

As railway workers reach the switch, they see that the train has derailed. The whole thing is lying on its side. But where is Wes?

—-

The audio of the communication between the engineer and the dispatcher, Alfie, (along with several others) has been preserved.

You can listen here:

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And down it here.

The transcript of the recording is here. I’ve found that reading along with the recording helps to understand exactly what’s going on.

In the comments section, I’ll add the conclusion of this crazy bit of railroad history.

In segments, I’ve been watching Ken Burns’s documentary The West. It begins well before the Europeans come to America and continues through the early 1900s. Today, I am watching Episodes Three and Four.

All in all, it seems like a fair documentary. I don’t really know enough about the subject to tell how historically accurate it might be, but if it’s anything like his earlier The Civil War documentary, it’s accurate enough to give you a general knowing of what happened and entertaining enough to give you a desire to know more.

While watching, two different stories struck me.

The first was about Uriah Oblinger, a Union vet who took off to Nebraska to find land and start a life for his wife and baby. In his first letter home, he wrote…

October 6th, 1872
Dear Wife & Baby:
Well I suppose the first question you would ask me now would be, How do you like Nebraska? Wife, you can see just as far as you please here, and almost every foot in sight can be plowed. The longer I stay here, the better I like it. There are mostly young families, just starting in life the same as we are, and I find them very generous, indeed. We will all be poor here together. I am hunting a home for us where we can enjoy ourselves without being bothered doing as other people say. I can get along well enough through the week, but when Sunday comes I feel a little lonesome without you. Give baby a kiss — yes, 2 of them — and take one yourself.
Uriah W. Oblinger

A year later, he moved his whole family to Nebraska. They built a sod house and farmed the land, all while raising three children, all girls.

In 1880, Uriah’s wife, Mattie, was pregnant again. On the night of the birth, a family friend wrote…

February 27th, 1880
She was confined Tuesday evening about 4 ‘clock and about 8 o’clock she took a fit very sudden and never spoke after the first one. The doctors were compelled to perform a surgical operation by relieving her of the child. The Lord called for Sister Mattie this evening at 4:15 o’clock and she is now resting with the angels in Heaven. The child is also dead and will be buried with her some time Sunday.
Giles S. Thomas

Unable to cope, Uriah moved back east and remarried. He later moved his new family back to Nebraska.

The second story is a bit more happy. It is about a cowboy named Teddy Blue Abbot. He was born in England, but raised in the West. He took to being a cowboy while his family did not. Of them he wrote, “My family and I went separate ways, and they stayed separate forever after. My father was all for farming… and all my brothers turned out farmers except one, and he ended up the worst of the lot — a sheep-man, and a Republican.”

After a long cattle drive (and after getting paid), he remembered…

I bought some new clothes and got my picture taken… I had a new white Stetson hat that I paid ten dollars for, and new pants that cost twelve dollars, and a good shirt and fancy boots. Lord, I was proud of those clothes! When my sister saw me, she said: “Take your pants out of your boots and put your coat on. You look like an outlaw.” I told her to go to hell. And I never did like her after that.

After the demand for cattle dried up, Teddy had to head home. But, like Uriah and like many wanderers, that drive to keep moving couldn’t die.

“After I got home my father said to me one night: ‘You can take old Morgan… and plow the west ridge tomorrow.’ Like hell I’d plow the west ridge. And when he woke up next morning, Teddy was gone.”

Today is Sarah’s birthday and in honor of such a thing, I thought that I’d post her Halloween Mix.

A few weeks ago, she thought that it would be fun to make a mix on her own. I do mixes for Christmas (though not about Christmas) and she figured she’d make a mix about Halloween.

And I must say, it’s a very fine mix.

Here’s the track listing…

01 – Introduction
02 – The Creatures – Mostly Ghostly
03 – Meat Puppets – Vampires
04 – Whodini – The Freaks Come Out At Night
05 – Squirrel Nut Zippers – Hell
06 – Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me
07 – Ted Cassidy – The Lurch
08 – Duran Duran – Nightboat
09 – Handsome Family – Bottomless Hole
10 – Band of Horses – There Is A Ghost
11- The Cure – Lullaby
12 – Tarantula Ghoul and The Gravediggers – Graveyard Rock
13 – Danny Elfman – This Is Halloween
14 – Bobby Bare – Vampira
15 – Burned at the Stake
16 – DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince – Nightmare on My Street
17 – Theme From Gremlins
18 – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – I Put A Spell On You
19 – Don Hinson and The Rigamorticians – Riboflavin-Flavored, Non-Carbonated, Polyunsatured Blood
20 – The Simpsons Halloween Special Theme
21 – Tim Curry – Anything Can Happen on Halloween
22 – Griz Green – Jam at the Mortuary
23 – Rezurex – Devil Woman
24 – Farewell

Get the mix by clicking here!

Spencer, Washington was hardly ever a town. The name may have been around since the 1880s, but the Post Office was only there from 1911 to 1918. A hotel was also there at the time and probably lasted into the late 20s or early 30s.

Not much seems to be remembered about Spencer.

But for some reason, this lost ghost town (all buildings and traces of the place are gone), has captivated me. I’ve spend hours pouring over old maps, searching for references to it and trying my best to figure out not only what it was but exactly where it was.

Spencer is somewhere in Moses Coulee, a canyon along US Route 2, about 20 miles east of Waterville in central Washington. No rail service ever graced this town. There was never a service station (that we know of) or a place to grab a bite to eat. But there was a post office and a hotel.

Yesterday, we set about to find them.

We met up with Dave (a fellow roadie from the American Road Magazine forums) who is also fairly obsessed with Spencer. After a tour of Douglas County’s fine museum and a fairly fruitless attempt at finding out more about the town (nobody seems to remember this place at all!), we all head out to the site.

Calder, Sarah, Dave and I tramped across the sage brush, trying to follow a road that has completely disappeared. A slightly later alignment of the Sunset Highway/Yellowstone Trail/US 2 is very accessible and open to traffic, but this old segment where Spencer lived is completely gone. Even traces of the road were impossible to find.

Thankfully Dave had programmed the plot points that he got from a small bit of map work that I did into his GPS. We followed that, even though we were pretty convinced we found a site. It had some oddly placed rocks and an old tree limb that Calder found (there are no trees out here – so that was suspicious).

The site turned out to be something (but impossible to say what). Still, we headed north, staying about .2 miles east of Jameson Lake Road and about double that distance north of US 2.

Looking at the 1915 map, I tried to line up the telephone poles and thought that we should head farther north. We pushed on, moving past where we thought it was.

Calder and Dave found a bit of metal from a can and I scurried off to find Sarah who found a clearing with no sage brush in it. Sarah’s find turned out to probably just be a clearing (though why it was clear, I don’t know). However, Dave found the motherload and we rushed back to check it out.

Dave’s find proved to us that he had found the site. He picked up a bit of glazed ceramic China which read “HOTEL” on in. This was it. It had to be.

Around Dave’s discovery (which I stupidly neglected to photograph!!), we spread out and found bits of glass, more china, tea pot handles, cold cream jars, medicine bottles and other various man-made things.

As we moved north (the debris field seemed to spread north), Sarah found an object that gave us a date! She picked up a piece of metal and said “is this a license plate?” Sure enough it was! Way to go, Smartz!

She had found a plate from 1916. That’s impressive. What a lucky find! This was now definitely the place. We also found an insulator from a telephone wire, which proves that there was electricity here and that we had found not only the hotel, but the road (and probably the post office, which was right across the road from the hotel).

This made all the hours of research worth it. I can’t believe we actually discovered an old town site. It may seem like a trifling and silly matter to most, but for Dave and me (Sarah and Calder too – they grew to share my obsession, especially when we started to find stuff) this was a very good day.

After the find, Dave had to head back, so Sarah, Calder and I did some more exploring of the Moses Coulee area and visited Dry Falls.

As soon as I get the exact coordinates from Dave, I’ll post them. I don’t expect a rush of tourists to take a pilgrimage to the old Spencer site, but if they wanted to, now they can.

I’d like to make some sort of small marker to indicate what’s there. I’d also like to find some old photographs of Spencer. I’d be willing to bet that they exist, if only we knew of some historical society that could help us out with that….

You can check out all of my pictures here.

*Edit – One thing I neglected to mention was how Spencer got its name. Nobody really seems to know. The person who runs the Douglas County Historical Society did a project on place names in Douglas County, but failed to come up with anything for Spencer. According to her research, nobody named Spencer lived there or owned properly there.

However, I came across a P.K. Spencer who ran for two county offices in 1888. He lost the election for Prosecuting Attorney (receiving only one vote), but won the race for Joint Representative (253 to 207). This info can be found here.

Now, exactly who P.K. was and what happened to him is anybody’s guess. I’m not even sure that Spencer was named after him. But it’s the only lead we’ve come across.

Calder is visiting this week and part of that visit is checking out some fun parts of Washington. Today we hit the Snoqualmie Depot and a section of the Yellowstone Trail highway that I’ve never been on before.

It was raining most of the day, but bits of sunlight broke through right when we needed them. At Snoqualmie, we found some great old steam engines and rolling stock. I’ve seen it before, but it was new to Calder. I found a great calendar of narrow gauge railroads (which I wish I would have picked up) and got Smartz a pressed penny (she was at work).

After the depot, we headed up to Snoqualmie Pass via an old alignment of the Yellowstone Trail that’s now known as Denny Creek Road. Smartz and I tried it in April, but the snow was five or so feet all around us that we decided to wait.

We attempted it again over the summer, but turned around for some reason. If we would have continued on, we would have come across an amazingly set of switchbacks with views of the valley and both lanes of I-90. Denny Creek Road travels between the interstate lanes. Pretty nifty.

We reached the top and then turned around and did it again!

I was looking for one of two known Yellowstone Trail arrows in Washington state and on the way up, I couldn’t find it. However, on the way down – there it was, just after a newish bridge with a wooden floor.

Mighty fine day!

One year ago today, Smartz and I pulled up the Pennsylvania stakes and started the fun journey across the country that would lead us to Seattle.

[If you click on the links, it'll take you to the photo galleries for each day. Tons of great pics!]

Our First Day on the road was short and very Civil War. I was my way of saying “so long” to my favorite east coast places. We hit Gettysburg, Cedar Creek (for the reenactment) and Antietam.

The Second Day, we drove through the Maryland panhandle and then stopped over for a good-bye at Rati and Dwija’s house. We stayed there for the night and for a whole day (the third day).

After the day off, we hit the road again. The Fourth Day started the actual trip. We decided to base the entire run around odd things that we could find without going too far out of the way. A corn field, rock garden and a memorial to a Native American chief were among the oddities we discovered this day.

The Fifth Day, starting in Richmond, Indiana, we discovered the world was flat as we sped through Indiana, Illinois and several other states that start with “I.” We followed mostly older two-lanes and discovered giant trees, old watch towers, crossed Route 66, the future birth place of James T. Kirk and quite a lot of other fun things.

After crashing on the floor of one of Sarah’s friends in Des Moines, we took off for the Sixth Day, discovering that western Iowa is pretty cool, even in the rain. We saw a bank hit by Bonnie and Clyde, the site of the first train robbery in the West, nearly got stuck in the mud looking for a tree in the middle of the road, saw a giant covered wagon, entered Nebraska and then hit a lot of snow.

A week into the trip, the Seventh Day brought us trains, old ghost towns, trains, a big boot, Carhenge, trains, buttes, Fort Robinson, trains, jackalopes, Hell’s Half Acre and one of the coolest motels I’ve ever stayed in. We made it to Wyoming.

The Eighth Day we started before dawn and caught the sun rising over the mountains. We traveled a lot of the same roads that I took during a couple days on Scoot 66. We saw more Jackalopes, more snow, Jackson Hole, a giant potato, the lava flows of Idaho, the first (very small) nuclear power plant, the Oregon Trail and ended up near Boise. This was a very beautiful day.

The Ninth Day was our last day on the road. It was a quick shot to Seattle, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t see some great things, like Baker City and an Oregon Trail museum, along the way.

We arrived in Seattle and into the loving arms of Ryan, Jaime and family who took us in for a few days until we found our own little slice of heaven in Seattle.

I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that we now live in Seattle. I’ll see a piece of mail or Mt. Rainier or the skyline and think “holy crap… we live in Seattle!” It never gets old.