We had been keeping an eye on conditions along the Mississippi for a couple of months after the bad storms in the upper midwest earlier in the year. Our concerns grew as we saw all the swollen rivers we crossed in the beginning of our trip, and were confirmed when we saw that the lower level of the parking garage for the casino in Greenville was completely underwater. With forecasts for flooding to continue and possibly worsen over the next few weeks, paths along the river were no longer an option, so we decided the best option would be to bypass St. Louis and just take the train from Memphis to the first stop in Illinois and continue from there.
There was a silver lining to this decision: we could shorten our average day’s ride, and therefore spend a little more time exploring. We wasted no time in wasting time. We spent a leisurely breakfast at Jim’s Cafe, then John went back to relax while I went to the Greenville History Museum, established and curated by Benjy Nelken. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the area, and it was a joy to visit with him. He then directed me to the Hebrew Union Temple, a magnificent building from 1906 and once the largest Jewish congregation in Mississippi. The secretary, Anne Reynolds Walker, could not have been nicer to us…even driving to her favorite place to get us “hot tamales” for lunch!
Why the interest in Greenville’s Jewish history? While researching my mother’s Immergluck forebears, I found a Michael Immergluck, who was – if my research is correct (and it may very well be wrong) – my first cousin three times removed (the common ancestor would have been my great-great-great grandparents, which were his grandparents). Michael “died” in 1890 and was buried in Greenville. Here is the notice from the Greenville Times of October 18, 1890:
As we biked north out of Greenville, we went through Lamont. Kinda hard to imagine just inadvertently wandering through the field of fire here. We pulled over and ate the rest of our hot tamales on the porch of a church.
After getting some drinks in Benoit, we cut through the Dahomey National Wildlife Refuge (heard lots of scampering in the woods, but no sightings of anything other than vultures and roadkill), then took 61 from Boyle into Cleveland. We cleaned up then Ubered to dinner at Hey Joe’s (gotta like the name) and then back to the hotel.
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