September 25, 2008: Ottawa

Today we are still in Ottawa. The fuel truck is coming back this afternoon to fuel up some of the new additional boats that have come in. But since we haven’t moved since we filled up, I guess we are good to go.

Our special outing for today was to catch a ride with Captain Moe back into Washington Square to take a tour of the Reddick mansion. William Reddick was an immigrant from Ireland who was a successful business man (made a fortune in real estate) and was an Illinois Senator. In his side yard was a two story visitor’s center that had originally been built as the caretaker house. Both houses were just finished at the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. At Riddick’s death he bequeathed the beautiful four story Italianate residence to the city to be used as a library and it was for 90 years. It now provides office space for various non-profits, and some of the rooms are restored as they would have been when he lived there. They were decorated in red and dark walnut with 19^th century furniture, white marble fireplaces, and beautiful carved and inlaid doors and molding. The most interesting piece to me was a small chair crafted of walnut turned spindles which was designed with diagonal side pieces by a furniture maker of German descent, Hunzinger. Many Victorian houses had their Hunzinger chairs by the fireplace as an accent piece. His design, which allowed the chair to fold up, was patented in 1836. Very cool – some one had to think of that first. This house had running water when it was built with a system for gravity delivered water from the roof.

After our brief tour of the Reddick house, we walked several blocks the Triple J Ice Cream shop to wait for our ride home. We had cappuccino milk shakes made by the friendly teen aged granddaughter of the proprietor. I had mine made with chocolate ice cream which they had never done before, but I told her that it was just a mocha. It was delicious.

We had an interesting history lesson from Captain Moe on the ride home. He has lived here all his life and he talked about the glass industry here. Because of numerous silica sand deposits Ottawa has been a major sand and glass center for more than 100 years. We had seen quarry operations from our boat and on our van ride to the Starved Rock lock this week. Buffalo Rock Park is built over a reclaimed quarry. One of its largest employers in the area is Pilkington Glass works, a successor to LOF (Libbey Owens Ford). Formerly the factory concentrated in automotive glass, but now it manufactures specialty glass. Ottawa sand continues to be extracted from several quarries in the area, and is recognized in glass-making and abrasives for its uniform granularity and characteristics. Apparently when the rock is crushed to sand, the particles are round. Ottawa sand was on board the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle for experimental purposes and this is the type of sand used in the mining of natural gas. We now think that the barge we saw loaded with white was sand.