Did you know President Howard Taft had a cow that grazed on the White House lawn? That John Adams raised silkworms? Or that William McKinley raised roosters and Herbert Hoover, an opossum? Read the rest of this entry »

When I visited Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, it was hard to imagine that the bloodiest day of the Civil War occurred on these lovely rolling green fields.

But battle scars still mar the landscape where more than 23,000 soldiers died on September 17, 1862. The bloody conflict marked the end of General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North and prompted President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Read the rest of this entry »

When we spotted a huge orange contraption outside a cornfield near Thurmont in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, my husband, Doug, and I detoured to investigate. Read the rest of this entry »