Another Camping Trip

[Eva Elisabeth]

Thank you so much, Herb!!!

Once you are in Key West and interested in CW history, after visiting Dry Tortugas don't miss the Hemingway house.
   
This is where Hemingway wrote his novels:
   
What does the Hemingway have to do with the CW? Well, it was built by Asa Tift (in 1851).
   
Asa Tift was the most notable salvager in Key West in those days and owned a large salvaging operation. His brother, Nelson Tift, was the founder of Albany, Georgia. In 1861, the Confederate Secretary of Navy, Stephen Mallory, sought Asa and Nelson Tift's help to build a naval force. He wrote to the Tifts:

"The department trusts to your patriotism, judgement, and discretion to produce the ship designed in the shortest time at the lowest price, and to act in the premises generally as if you were building for yourselves and had to pay the money out of your own pocket."

Because the Confederacy had no shipyards and only a few skilled shipwrights, the Taft brothers designed their warships, the CSS Mississippi, and the CSS Louisiana, to be build by carpenters using basic house building techniques. The Tift brothers were not paid for their labor. They also financed the ships to be built in Mobile, Alabama. After the North’s victory at Vicksburg, Nelson and Asa decided to blow up the ships rather than let it be captured by the Northern forces.

Like Lincoln, Hemingway loved cats, especially six-toed cats, after being first given such a cat by a ship's captain. Six-toed cats are sometimes referred to as "Hemingway Cats", and at the Hemingway house still live about fifty descendants of his cats (did you notice the one in the photo above?). On the counter of the museum shop sat the biggest, furriest cat I've ever seen (the Lincolns' would have loved it, I'm sure):
   

Another nice place to visit in Key West is Truman's Little White House:
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/presidents/...house.html