 |
| The red siding is the side of the covered bridge. The bridge abutment is fashioned from Mansfield sandstone. |
A stream in the area near Crawfordsville, Indiana is called Turkey Run. But a much broader area than the immediate area of the stream is known as Turkey Run.
Layers of sand at the bottom of the sea were compressed to become sandstone. This is the local Mansfield sandstone.
There is a metal plaque on the door of the house where John
Lusk lived. The house is near the Narrows point in Sugar Creek. The 1883 covered bridge crosses the creek
here at the Narrows. The plaque reads “To the memory of John Lusk who saved the
trees of Turkey Run.” The plaque is
labeled “The Nature Study Club of Indiana.”
What better thing can be said of a person than he "saved the trees." In so many cases irreplaceable trees have been lost. Thanks to John Lusk the trees of Turkey Run are living to this day.
"These forests were composed of about five hundred species of trees, all of them in some way useful to man, ranging in size from twenty-five feet in height and less than one foot in diameter at the ground to four hundred feet in height and more than twenty feet in diameter,—lordly monarchs proclaiming the gospel of beauty like apostles. For many a century after the ice-ploughs were melted, nature fed them and dressed them every day; working like a man, a loving, devoted, painstaking gardener; fingering every leaf and flower and mossy furrowed bole; bending, trimming, modeling, balancing, painting them with the loveliest colors; bringing over them now clouds with cooling shadows and showers, now sunshine; fanning them with gentle winds and rustling their leaves; exercising them in every fibre with storms, and pruning them; loading them with flowers and fruit, loading them with snow, and ever making them more beautiful as the years rolled by. Wide-branching oak and elm in endless variety, walnut and maple, chestnut and beech, ilex and locust, touching limb to limb, spread a leafy translucent canopy along the coast of the Atlantic over the wrinkled folds and ridges of the Alleghanies,—a green billowy sea in summer, golden and purple in autumn, pearly gray like a steadfast frozen mist of interlacing branches and sprays in leafless, restful winter." John Muir
What better thing can be said of a person than he "saved the trees." In so many cases irreplaceable trees have been lost. Thanks to John Lusk the trees of Turkey Run are living to this day.
"These forests were composed of about five hundred species of trees, all of them in some way useful to man, ranging in size from twenty-five feet in height and less than one foot in diameter at the ground to four hundred feet in height and more than twenty feet in diameter,—lordly monarchs proclaiming the gospel of beauty like apostles. For many a century after the ice-ploughs were melted, nature fed them and dressed them every day; working like a man, a loving, devoted, painstaking gardener; fingering every leaf and flower and mossy furrowed bole; bending, trimming, modeling, balancing, painting them with the loveliest colors; bringing over them now clouds with cooling shadows and showers, now sunshine; fanning them with gentle winds and rustling their leaves; exercising them in every fibre with storms, and pruning them; loading them with flowers and fruit, loading them with snow, and ever making them more beautiful as the years rolled by. Wide-branching oak and elm in endless variety, walnut and maple, chestnut and beech, ilex and locust, touching limb to limb, spread a leafy translucent canopy along the coast of the Atlantic over the wrinkled folds and ridges of the Alleghanies,—a green billowy sea in summer, golden and purple in autumn, pearly gray like a steadfast frozen mist of interlacing branches and sprays in leafless, restful winter." John Muir
No comments:
Post a Comment