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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Staircase Motif9/18/2006 01:46:29Today, continuing the drive West with my father, we stopped in St. George, a town on the southwestern end of Utah. It was not named after St. George of the dragon, but a Mormon fellow who planted potatoes along the migration route from Missouri to Salt Lake for the pilgrims to eat. It was founded as a cotton-growing colony on the order of Brigham Young at the start of the Civil War, when the supply of cheap southern cotton dried up. Then when the war ended, the cotton supply resumed and the town lost its source of income to the influx of cheaper southern cotton. In order to juice the economy, Young set the town to work on building a beautiful tabernacle, and then a temple, funded by the goods tithed from other LDS cities. These projects got the place on its feet. Young ended up liking the place so much that he built a winter home there and spent the last winters of his life in its dry desert air. Well it turns out that in that tabernacle are a pair of miraculous spiral staircases. Our tour guide told us that they brought out an engineering professor to analyze the structure of them with computer models and everything - he said that they were simply impossible. Yet there they are, standing of their own free weight! The guide also mentioned that other Mormon structures have such wonderous spiral staircases but I forget where he said they were. I think in one of the temples. This reminded me of a similar story I heard years ago on another westward car trip in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. There they have their own miraculous staircase. Answering the prayers of the nuns who needed access to their loft, St. Joseph himself seems to have appeared one day with a donkey and tools, built a free-standing spiral staircase that baffles modern engineers, then disappeared without pay or recognition. Could there be any connection between these stories? A fascination with spiral staircases in southwestern folklore? There is certainly an intrinsic mystique in the spiral form. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
re:The Staircase Motif - 9/18/2006 01:52:36
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re:The Staircase Motif - 9/22/2006 21:00:22
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re:The Staircase Motif - 9/22/2006 21:00:34
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