Save the Date: Moffett Field Bay Trail Opening

The San Francisco Bay Trail Project, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project invite you to celebrate the completion of the Bay Trail at Moffett Field

Monday, September 20, 2010 :: 10:30 a.m. – noon

Arrive by 10:30 a.m. for shuttle to event site in Sunnyvale.
Bicycling to the event is encouraged.

A formal invitation with details and directions will follow.
Please share this information with others who may be interested.

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• Stevens Creek Trail news: Trailblazer Race & Trail Walk Sept 26

Please mark your calendar: Sunday September 26 is the 16th Annual Trailblazer Race and Trail Walk, our major fundraiser and get-out-on-the-trail event. It typically draws 1,000 participants and volunteers and we hope you will be there this year to celebrate the trail and help support our work to extend and improve it.

Online and mail-in registration is open at www.stevenscreektrail.org and there is a $5 discount for early mail-in registration through Sept 13. Proceeds benefit the Friends of Stevens Creek Trail and Wildlife Corridor, the only organization dedicated to extending Stevens Creek Trail and wildlife corridor from the bay at Shoreline Park in Mountain View to the hills above Cupertino, connecting to mountain trails going on to the Pacific coast.

We also need many volunteers to help out at the event and they receive a free race t-shirt, water and snacks. Volunteers please print out and complete the same race registration form from our web site at www.stevenscreektrail.org. Then send us back the hardcopy by regular mail or a scan by email.

The Trailblazer is a morning of fun, healthful activities for the whole family. All events start and finish alongside Stevens Creek Trail at 1065 La Avenida Avenue. This is the Mountain View campus of Microsoft Corporation, the host and presenting sponsor. The 10K & 5K USATF certified races are scenic, fast and flat. Runners head north on Stevens Creek Trail. The 10K Race circles most of Shoreline Park while the 5K Race enters the park and then turns back.

The 3mile Trail Walk is scenic and mostly level. It goes south on the trail to Evelyn Avenue and returns. Free children’s races follow on grass and sidewalk. Free food, water, and entertainment are provided. A drawing for valuable prizes is held for registered participants.

The Friends of Stevens Creek Trail is the only organization dedicated to extending Stevens Creek Trail and wildlife corridor from San Francisco Bay to the Santa Cruz Mountains. Stevens Creek Trail was started in 1993 and currently extends 4.5 miles from Shoreline Park to Sleeper Ave in Mountain View. Cupertino opened its first section of trail last summer. Los Altos and Sunnyvale are studying possible routes.

The Friends is a 501(C)3 nonprofit that organizes public and private trail support, trail and creek clean-ups, and education programs. Individual cities along Stevens Creek actually build the trail, but it takes many years of preparation and work behind the scenes to achieve that. Increasing public awareness, support, and consensus must come first, which is what the Friends does. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Aaron Grossman, Race & Executive Director

Friends of Stevens Creek Trail

22221 McClellan Road, Cupertino, CA 95014

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I did look, at that time,look for shapefiles i could use, geospatial data that would show the “dance of county lines.” I could find digitized old maps, but no consistent set of line data.

Today i discover,

“he Newberry Library is pleased to announce the completion and release of its Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, a dataset that covers every day-to-day change in the size, shape, location, name, organization, and attachment of each U.S. county and state from the creation of the first county in 1634 through 2000.

Useful details are :

The data are organized by state and are available online in four versions:

* Viewable, interactive maps (electronic analogues to printed maps) on which the historical lines have been plotted against a background of the modern county network

* Downloadable shapefiles for use in geographic information systems (GIS)

* Downloadable KMZ files for use with Google Earth

* Downloadable and printable PDF files (each full-page frame shows a map of a different version of each county, with the historical boundaries displayed against a background of the modern county network)

Supplementing the polygons and maps for each state are chronologies, commentary on historical problems, long and short metadata documents, and a bibliography.

The project began in 1988, with principal funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. Additional support came from the Newberry Library, which also served as headquarters, and from other foundations and individuals. The Newberry Library is the copyright holder; all files of the Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries are free for use under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License.

For genealogists, the website itself will be a rich resource.

There’s an overview of the history of each and every county: consider this example of Early County, Georgia. To create a link to the overview of the particular county within the document for the state, use the Index of Counties and Equivalents. For a statewide understanding of county boundaries, consider the Consolidated Chronology of State and County Boundaries

I would think that every USGenWeb county editor would want to link to this resource for their county to support their existing county mapping resources.

For cartographers, neocartographers, and genealogists, there is good documentation to help users understand the different resources offered by the site.

For a quick look at the data outside of the interactive map on the website, one can use Google Earth:

Since the KMZ file is time-coded, the Google Earth time slider will automatically appear. This time slider can then be used to view the boundaries at a specific date, or to view an animation of the state’s boundary changes over time. The time slider properties can be adjusted to modify the animation speed, or to view a smaller time span in more detail.

With Google Earth, it is possible to compare the historical county boundaries with geographical features such as rivers, lakes, and mountain ridges. The historical boundaries can also be compared to a large variety of layer information available in Google Earth, such as streets, populated places, and modern administrative boundaries.

I know i have loaded data that began as KML into my GPS unit in the past: i don’t recall whether it was just lines and points or if it has included boundaries. Given a GPS unit that could load boundaries, i can imagine it being very useful to be able to take the historical county boundaries with one while traveling on research.

I hope the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License will not put off too many folks. I’m passionate about copyright issues, but I am not a lawyer. I’m a fan of the work Creative Commons does to facilitate the rapid dissemination of ideas in our culture, in a manner that matches the technological speed of delivery. Personally, i like the “ShareAlike” clause. To explain how the clause works, if someone took one of my photos of my cats and added captions, they too must offer their captioned image of my photo under the same license. I’ve often simply used Attribution-ShareAlike, because i am not likely to have commercial interests threatened by any use of my offerings. If someone wanted to use my map of Georgia in their book or their blog that has advertisements, they can as long as they offer the image with attribution.

The Attribution and ShareAlike clauses are instructions to the person copying or creating a derivative work; the “noncommercial” clause in this license creates a test. As a reminder: the presence of a Creative Commons License does not remove fair use rights. It’s interesting, however, to see the spectrum of uses between “non-commercial” and fair use.

To start with non-commercial use, consider USGenWeb. USGenWeb does not have ads, does not charge, and explicitly states that it is keeping information freely available for genealogists. The reproduction and redistribution of the historical county boundary line data by USGenWeb is in the clear. Ancestry.com would not pass the non-commercial test, and fair use would never allow reproduction and redistribution of full data sets.

Is non-commercial use always easy to determine?

Creative Commons noncommercial licenses include a definition of commercial use, which precludes use of rights granted for commercial purposes:

… in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

This may seem pretty clear cut, particularly when considering a website that has advertisements on it. But what if the advertisements merely subsidize the cost of the servers? The Creative Commons has published a study where creators and users were asked to classify certain uses as commercial or noncommercial. [PDF and data available from here.] It’s an interesting read. One point they bring up is how differently creators and consumers judge the question above if the website is for a nonprofit entity.

So what of the work of genealogists for hire? A cartographer producing a map for a book? A scholarly paper? It’s worth considering that many uses of this county boundary data by a genealogist or cartographer may easily fall under Fair Use, not the CC license. From Wikipedia:

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test. [See the article for the four part test.]

Some “Fair Use” uses will enable monetary compensation: fair use can be “commercial” in the sense that a reviewer may excerpt from a work in a review for which the reviewer receives monetary compensation. Using a few county boundaries in a map on a website that is supported by advertising may be considered fair use. An analysis of fair use and GIS data can be found here. Despite the saying that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission, if you were to have any questions, contact the Scholl Center Staff at the Newberry Library. I rather expect that they don’t bite.

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I’ve also been using MacFamilyTree for an aesthetic view of the data. We’d purchased it in the distant past and an upgrade last year was less expensive than other highly recommended Mac specific applications.

When i started using Porticus and Mac Ports recently, i discovered Gramps. Porting the GEDCOM from GenealogyJ to Gramps was not straightforward as there were unicode characters in my GenealogyJ file that were incompatible with Gramps. Going through MacFamilyTree caused more problems, the most egregious was that MacFamilyTree renumbered individuals and sources. Since i’ve used the individual, family, and source numbers as a key for saving documents and images, that’s beyond an inconvenience. I spent some time scrubbing random UNICODE characters from the GEDCOM using my texteditor and was able to get to a GEDCOM file Gramps could load.

Once loaded, i needed to provide Gramps with a full path to all the images in my repository before it could find them.

Last night was the first time using Gramps. I love how well i can cross-link events now: the first thing i added was a census event. Instead of cutting and pasting the details from individual to individual, i could link the same event to all the family members in that household. Other data elements, like places, clearly become rows in a relational database, and the ability to go in and clean up the data is clear. While the panes in which one enters data aren’t immediately intuitive — particularly the elements that are tied to the event vs the elements that are tied to the person — the richness of association and detail quickly becomes clear.

I’ve tried the roundtrip back to GenealogyJ: Gramps breaks the file name for the media images with a concatenate tag that GenealogyJ doesn’t understand. This is regrettable. Other than that, it seems that the export format is suitable so I feel comfortable making Gramps my data entry application for some time now.

The biggest temptation is going through and scrubbing up the place names, unifying events that are now unique across individuals, and making sure the sources are well established instead of continuing forward with research.

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Following up on the March news about PG&E tree cuts is this article, mostly about San Jose tree trimming, but mentioning, “Dozens of trees under power lines on the Stevens Creek trail in Sunnyvale are also in jeopardy, and PG&E is seeking a city permit to cut trees that had been regularly trimmed.”

Santa Clara Valley Water District Master Plan

Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD) has begun accepting public comment on its Flood Protection & Stream Stewardship Master Plan. Two meetings were held, June 9 and 14, to provide an overview of the process and to engage stakeholders for feedback as the master plan process unfolds. The project’s background, as shared on the meeting flyer, is:

The existing Flood Protection & Stream Stewardship Master Plan was last updated in 2000, as part of the voter approved Clean, Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection special parcel tax. The plan’s funding structure has a built-in sunset date of 2016. The sunset of the parcel tax allows for the evaluation of program effectiveness, reassessment of community needs, and the potential for additional new projects in the future. This Flood Protection and Stream Stewardship Master Plan project is the beginning of the evaluation and reassessment process.

They also note

For more information, contact Luis Jaimes at (408) 265-2607, ext. 2576, or visit our website at www.valleywater.org and use our Access Valley Water customer request and information system. With three easy steps, you can use this service to find out the latest information on the project or to submit questions, complaints or compliments directly to a district staff person.

The Santa Clara County Creeks Coalition is advocating for the importance of the restoration of our local creeks to be “Living Streams” [PDF] and urges the Santa Clara Valley Water District to make Stream Restoration a higher budget priority. This Master Planning document development period is an opportunity for this advocacy.

Salmon Protection Bill

With support from Sierra Club and others, AB 2575 (Chesbro) has passed the Calif Assembly and moved to the state Senate for consideration. The current history of the bill can be reviewed at the TotalCapitol.com site. One summary of the bill can be found at AroundTheCapital.com, the one i received in email is as follows:

Would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFIRE) to implement a pilot project for the improved protection and repair of the riparian zone in watersheds with listed anadromous salmonids.

Stevens Creek Trail

The Mountain View Voice noted, when reviewing US Representative Anna Eshoo’s list of appropriations and funding requests, the following trails related requests, “$4 million to extend Stevens Creek Trail over Highway 85 into the Dale-Heatherstone area” and “$4.8 million for a pedestrian bridge over Highway 101 in Palo Alto that helps connect Palo Alto’s residential neighborhoods to Mountain View businesses near Shoreline Park. Bicyclists have complained about the danger of riding over the nearby San Antonio Road overpass, which lacks bike lanes or sidewalks.”

The Mercury News reported on the retirement of Cupertino’s Ralph Qualls Jr., the city’s public works director who oversaw the Stevens Creek corridor restoration in Cupertino.

Hangar One, Moffett field, and the bay

As always, the Moffett User’s Blog, is the best source for news. Steve Williams posted Representative Eshoo’s letter in concern regarding the Navy’s plans to demolish the Hangar One “cork room” and has the agenda for the 8 July Moffett Restoration Advisory Board available.

The Mountain View Voice noted, when reviewing US Representative Anna Eshoo’s list of appropriations and funding requests, that the following Moffett Field and baylands requests: $10 million to help restore Hangar One, $8 million toward cleanup of environmental damage left behind by the Navy at the former Naval Air Station, and $4.5 million for South Bay salt pond restoration, $2 million appears to be a request for the relocation of the main gate at Moffett Field, and $2.3 million for a new building for the 129th Air Rescue Wing’s Pararescue Jumper Unit.

Mercury Emissions from the Lehigh Cement Plant

Dr. Don Yee, of San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), presented on recent findings regarding Mercury deposition from the Lehigh Cement Plant on June 17th in Cupertino:

The study found that when the plant was operational, mercury deposited by precipitation was about six times higher at the study site than at the control site. When plant operations were minimized, mercury deposited by precipitation was about equal at the sites. To quote from the study’s conclusions, “Hg [mercury] emissions from the cement plant do not all enter the global circulation cycle and undergo long-range transport; Hg is also deposited within the vicinity of the cement plant through wet deposition.”*

*Article citation: Rothenberg, S.E., et al., Wet deposition of mercury within the vicinity of a cement plant before and during cement plant maintenance, Atmospheric Environment (2010), doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2009.12.033

In January, he presented at the RMP Annual Meeting: those notes are available here, and establish that the mercury measurements in the bay are not from New Almaden mining or coal plants, but a continuing process.

At the end of the month the Mercury News reported:

Lehigh Permanente cement plant announced June 23 that it has installed equipment to reduce mercury emissions by 25 percent.

The move is in preparation for tough new federal emission standards that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce by Aug. 3. The standards, which will set the nation’s first limits on mercury emissions from existing cement plant kilns, could require some facilities to cut mercury emissions by more than 80 percent by August 2013.

There are no relevant press releases available from the parent company.

Stevens and Permanente Creek Watershed Council

The June council meeting was a tour of Cupertino’s Blackberry Farm creek restoration. The August 4 meeting will be a visit to either Blackberry Farm or McClellan Ranch with “super bat guy” Dave Johnston, who will give a short presentation and then lead fols out to look for bats.

Shorts

* Friends of Stevens Creek Trail attended Sunnyvale Art & Wine Festival (5-6 June) in the children’s area featuring our “What belongs in the Creek?” a live-action game for kids. * Spring-run Chinook Symposium and Coho Confab July 22-23 * Biology instructor Bruce Heyer and teams of De Anza students test Stevens Creek for fecal contamination. Over the past year and a half, the De Anza team has found consistently high levels of contamination in Mountain View. [From SPCWC June 2010 newsletter] * The County of Santa Clara Parks and Recreation Department is seeking public input to guide the County’s future parkland acquisition efforts. Meetings are scheduled for 7-9 PM: 6 July Cupertino Community Hall, 12 July Morgan Hill Community Center, 14 July San Jose Mayfair Community Center. * There’s no Caspian Tern data for 2010 — why? *

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• Stevens Creek in the News: Mar 2010
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My relation to the Francks is through their daughter Catherine who married a Bush, and my father’s copy of Hardy Bush’s will from the the NC archives seems to support Catherine (or Katherine) marrying Hardy Bush. When Hardy Bush died, she remarried into the Blackshear family, and General David Blackshear’s memoirs recount her three children William, John, and Mary. William Bush is father of James Bush, settler of Early County, Georgia.

[1] p 30 of “Goffs/Goughs: Their Ancestors & Descendants” Spring 1990, VolX, No 2 Knoxville

To give back to the community that has documented so many graves in cemeteries and posted them online for me to travel to via the internet, i decided to document what i could on the steamy hot June afternoon. The photos are all posted on Flickr. If anyone has a site that does not require a yearly fee and would stay open for other genealogists over time, i would be happy to submit the photos there. Also, the photos are shared on Flickr with a creative commons license which means that i grant rights that the photos may be copied, reused and shared. If the “share alike” restriction is too onerous (ie: you wish to use the image in a work where you will retain all rights), please contact me.

I transcribed what i could, and am pasting the transcriptions in after the cut. Also, Franck references in the Eastern North Carolina Digital Library.

Other references found recently include:

* pp 197-200 North Carolina wills and inventories by Grimes, J. Bryan (John Bryan), 1868-1923, John Martin Franck’s will, endorsed 1745 [Note that daughter Catherine Franck is listed as Franck and not Bush: marriage to Hardy is after this date?]

* p 494-498 North Carolina wills and inventories by Grimes, J. Bryan (John Bryan), 1868-1923, “AN INVENTORY of the Estate of Martin Francks late of the County & Province aforesd Deceased as farr forth as is come to the Hands of the Executors & Executrix of the last Will & Testament of the Said Martin Franck taken this 14th day of June Anno Domo 1745″
* ROSTER OF SETTLERS WHO TOOK UP LAND BY GRANT IN ONSLOW COUNTY 1706-1800 – “Only the first grant is recorded under each name: as for this purpose he is counted a settler from that date. While not entirely accurate, the list gives an approximation of each settler’s arrival in Onslow County. Names and dates are accurate. The list includes names of persons prominent in the affairs of the Province who lived in Wilmington, New Bern and elsewhere, but who never lived in Onslow.” p 379 under “The White Oak” lists 1737 John Martin Franck — see http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/historyfiction/viewer.aspx?id=jpb&p=98 for map of the White Oak area.

Gravestone transcriptions from the John Martin Franck family cemetery, near Tuckahoe Creek, Jones County, NC

ELIZABETH / Daughter of / Richard & Elizabeth & ELIZABETH HOONGE (?)/ & Wife of/ John Martin Francks/ Born Mar 12 1803/ Died Apr 22 1857

SACRED / to the Memory of/ JOHN MARTIN FRANCK / Son of / EDWARD & ELIZABETH FRANCK/ BORN/ Oct’r 4 1800/ DIED / June 4 1868 / AGED / 67 Years & 8 Months / (motto)

[unknown] / wife of / J. M. FRANCK / BORN / MAY 6, 1805 / DIED / FEB 9 1875

Henry E Rhodes

MARY E / Wife of / Richard JR /HATCH/ Died / Oct 17 1851 / In the 2_ (27?) year of her/ age/ (motto)

IN / Memory of / HENRY RHODES/ WHO DIED/ OCT 8 184_ (1849?)/ 55 YEARS 8 MO / & 13 DAYS / (motto)

IN / Memory of / ZILPHA / Widow of / HENRY RHODES / Daughter of / EDWARD & ELIZABETH / FRANCKS / Born Nov 28 1798 / Married Apr 5 1821 / Died Feb 27 1864 / AGED / 66 Yrs. 2 Mos. 29 Dys./ (motto) [See p 91 of Commonwealth of Onslow; a history. “He had in 1857 married Hannah Rebecca Rhodes, daughter of Henry Rhodes and wife Zilphia Franck at Shines “Old Comfort” in Jones County.”

ELIZABETH / Wife of / Edward Francks / BORN/ Sep 5 1770 / DIED / May 5 1821 / Ag’d 51 Y’s 6 M’s

EDWARD FRANCKS / BORN / Jan 12 1763 / DIED / Nov 12 1814/ Ag’d 51 Y’s & 10 M’s

ELIJAH / Son of / Edward & Elizabeth Francks / BORN / Apr 12 1792 / DIED /Sep 28 1850 / Ag’d 58 Y’s, 6 M’s, 16 D’s

Henry Franklin Brown (1909-1983); Elizabeth Eccles Brown (1907-1999)

Henry Franklin Brown (1852-1913); Isaac Brown (1828-1904); Nancy Griffith Brown (1784-1852); Charity Giles Brown (1828-1895)

Franklin Daniel Cartmel (1964-1982) ; Franklin Bromley Cartmel (1935-1996) ; Elizabeth Brown Cartmel (1902-1965)

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From the Tryon Palace gift shop:

I purchased _New Bern 101_, an entertaining telling of a number of area stories. Of particular interest to me was the chapter on the Tuscarora War and the Lawson and Degraffenreid capture.

Allan D Watson, _A History of New Bern and Craven County_ seemed more substantial, and a good choice for interlibrary loan.

Collet Map, a 1768 map of North Carolina by Governor Tryon’s aide de camp in the battle against the Regulators. Shows Pollock (now Pollockville?) but not Trenton and roads out in the area that is Franck family land.

In the Governor Caswell museum I captured a detail of one of the maps on the wall there. In the Trent River area it has strong similarities to the Collet map which would have been from the same period.

Another map, the Jedidiah Morse map, depicted the southeast US in 1789.

As a geographic note on toponyms, the text noted Caswell had land near Atkins Banks, present day Kinston, in then Johnston county.

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On Tuesday during the tech track, a discussion pm attributes was informed by the use case of the Hathi Trust project. Sebastien Korner, a programmer/analyst at the University of Michigan, presented an overview of the project.

HATHI TRUST is a partnership of CIC & University of California. It is within the University of Michigan and not a separate legal entity. (I recall from my copyright evidence days that the Michigan State law affords the state institution some shelter from risk that makes this point important. In the context of federated identity, however, this means the Hathi Trust inherits membership on InCommon and is bound by that legal trust framework.)

* http://www.hathitrust.org/

* 27 member institutions

* 98% of the content is from the Google scanning project, but an increasing fraction is locally scanned content. In particular there has been the addition of the University of California Internet Archive scanned content.

* Google Book scan: Institutions get access to the scanned & ocr’ed content independent of the Google interface – but only the institutions.

* 6 million volumes, 1 million in public domain; 2230 TB

* two online repository instances: Michigan & Indiana

* Project goals are for preservation with access, so the digital library features a catalog, page turner, collection builder, full text search, and a suite of APIs.

The last set of features is where the need for attributes in the authentication process is raised. Original authentication was through Michigan’s SSO service, allowing with “friend accounts” based on email address which simply had access to the “personalized collections” on the public domain material. (I think I understood that correctly.)

With so many library partners now, the Hathi trust wanted to expand their feature offerings to all their partners’ communities. The service wish list and corresponding attribute requirements were as follows:

1) Full PDF d/l of public domain Google digitized books if one is an authenticated affiliate of a partner institution – scoped affiliation.

2) Personalized features, e.g. collection builder – unique identifier & display name. This raises uniqueness & privacy concerns. The identifier may be unique in the affiliate institutions, but needs to be unique in the federation. (That seems easily solved by joining the ID to the institution identifier.)

3) Full text access to in-copyright works for authenticated persons with print disabilities. Attribute: entitlement. For this use case the authenticating institution has to certify both that the individual has a print disability and that they have checked out the book, which is owned by that institution. This health information would only be kept for the session.

The third service kicked off lively discussion about how an indication of “print disability” would be discovered. In this use case, the Hathi Trust could not take a self asserted attributed: the copyright exception law is narrow. While one institution knew that their Disability Office would have that data in the campus system, it was not in the data warehouse from which they released attributes. A campus privacy officer was adamant that releasing such information would be a HIPAA violation, even if the visual impairment was colorblindness. There was discussion of Federal requirements to provide compensatory access: how is that done without running afoul of HIPAA? Could the health information not be provided but the fact the institution grants a person accomodations? The privacy officer pointed out that still had risks.

The discussion ended without a clear solution, just the recognition that this is a specific case of the challenge of privacy and the risks and benefits of disclosure.

Other digital library mentions included Michael Conlon of University of Florida presenting the NIH sponsored project http://www.vivoweb.org/ and George Laskaris of NJEDge.Net discussing their video on demand system built on a Fedora repository with a “youtube” like workflow for faculty.

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I spent the past week attending CAMP & AdvancedCAMP, conferences of interest to me because of the focus on the InCommon Federation for federated authentication in the higher ed community in the US. There were some digital library tie ins, and I intend to write a bit about the conference.

After the conference, I joined up for a road trip with my parents to New Bern, exploring history. Some stops were personal history: visiting Rosewood, NC to see where I attended grade and middle school, and visiting T & W Oyster Bar where I first had oysters on the half shell in the early ’70s. State history included a museum that honored Governor Caswell, revolutionary soldier and delegate to Continental congresses; the Confederate iron clad gun boat, the Neuse; and Tryon Palace, a reconstruction of the colonial era governor’s palace.

Mainly, though, the trip was to connect with the colonial immigrants into the Neuse river basin who were the forebearers on my father’s side. My great aunt Irene had done a great deal of work documenting our Degraffenreid connections, but we came mainly in interest of tracking James Bush’s father William Bush’s family.

In preparing for this trip I had looked at county web sites, and the Jones County website listed the John Martin Franck house as a historical site. In asking after the location of the house, I was put into contact with a Franck descendant. My dad followed up, and halfway through the CAMP conference I found we had a family reunion to attend, cousins from before the revolutionary war.

We spent much of the road trip from Kinston to New Bern and in the area near Trenton on the small roads depicted on my dad’s 1:150,000 scale map, keeping as close to the Neuse as we could. I tried imagining virgin forest and clearing the land. Sunday morning in reading I realized my imagination had not considered the Native American population, and learned the grisly history of one of the hamlets we drove through, Fort Barnwell, established in the Tuscarora Wars circa 1713, very shortly after the Palatines settled New Bern.

We started the day walking around cemeteries in New Bern. I wondered about my ten minutes of Worship in the manner of Friends in the space once occupied by a colonial Episcopalian church – what must the colonial Quakers be doing in their presumably unmarked graves.

Then we headed out on the Trent River to join our distant cousins. As I navigated, Dad had me read from the few pages of Hardy Bush’s will, describing the land left to his wife Katherine Franck. We stopped at the fork of the Trent and Little Chinquapin Branch and observed the tanning stained waters.

Then cousins! With a delightful sharing of genealogical references, we chatted for a while. I have my flight to California at o’dark thirty tomorrow, so we did not linger, but left the pages of the will and departed with a map from a Mr Jones to guide us to the old John Martin Franck home and graveyard.

We’ll be home in time for dinner from my folk’s garden. I’ll post while I have signal.

ETA: corrected spelling to Palatines.

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As rains continued, many water districts declared the drought over including East Bay MUD and Contra Costa Water District.

Lehigh Southwest Cement Company

I received a report in late March (too late for the March report) of the results of an10 February EPA Contract site visit to the Lehigh Southwest Cement Company, which resulted in observation of a number of violations of the “National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), General Permit No. CAS000001 for Discharges of Storm Water Associated with Industrial Activities.” These violations included

Potential discharge of pollutants to waters of the state
Observed discharge of pollutants to waters of the state “A visible discharge of pollutants (i.e., sediment and/or other pollutants) into Permanente Creek was observed during the inspection….”
Inadequate source control BMPs [Best Management Practice]; slope erosion
Incorrectly installed and maintained dirt road and active erosion…

Most of the Violations required remedial action by April 15th. At the time i received the report, the only discussion i could find online was a memo from Carol Korade, City Attorney, to Mayor Wang and Members of the City Council of Cupertino [See p 7 of this PDF] This provided a good summary of the report:

On March 26, 2010, SFB RWQCB issued the Plant a Notice of Violation for
failure to comply with stormwater protection requirements. The Notice of Violation
provided that by March 15, 2010, the Plant was supposed to complete a water balance
survey for all existing plumbing and drainage at the Plant to cover stormwater, process
water, and waste water. Pursuant to the Notice of Violation, the Plant is required to
update its site maps to clearly identify all structural control measures that affect
stormwater discharges, authorized non-stormwater discharges, and run-on. Additionally,
by April 15, 2010, the Plant must implement and thereafter maintain best management
practices to: (1) eliminate discharge of pollutants from Ponds 9 and 17 into Permanente
Creek; (2) reduce sediment discharge into Pond 9; (3) prevent discharge of sediments
from slope erosion; (4) minimize exposure of pollutants to stormwater at a vehicle and
equipment shop and washing area; (5) eliminate prohibited non-stormwater discharges
relating to vehicles and equipment; (6) minimize exposure of pollutants to stormwater at
a concrete maintenance pad located at the Plant; and (7) prevent discharge of sediments
from the unstabilized Upper Quarry Road and areas around it.

The rest of the memo from the City Attorney discusses all the different regulatory agencies with jurisdiction over the plant, and may be interesting reading for those concerned about the plant’s operations.

In the Stevens and Permanente Creek Watershed Council May Newsletter (received May 14), it was announced that, despite prior expectations, the Lehigh Cement Company would not be making a presentation and answering questions at an upcoming SPCWC meeting.

Shorts

* Stevens and Permanente Creek Watershed Council presented their annual report at the April 7th meeting. *

Related items

• Stevens Creek in the News: Feb 2010
• Stevens Creek in the News: June 2010
• Stevens Creek in the News: Mar 2010
• Stevens Creek water levels
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