Tim Murphy

Reporter

Tim Murphy is a reporter in MoJo's DC bureau. Last summer he logged 22,000 miles while blogging about his cross-country road trip for Mother Jones. His writing has been featured in Slate and the Washington Monthly. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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How Maple Sugar (Almost) Saved Civilization

—By Tim Murphy

| Sat Jul. 3, 2010 11:41 AM PDT

Cooperstown, New York— Yesterday I alluded to a theory in the late 1700s, among a certain kind of abolitionist, that the discovery of maple sugar could end the slave trade. And then, just like that, I never returned to the subject. Well here goes: Basically the idea, explained in detail in Alan Taylor’s Pulitzer-winning William Cooper's Town, was that, since slavery was at its most entrenched in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, any sort of shift in the market for sugar—say, by extracting a new kind of sugar from maple trees—would crush the sugar colonies. Fix the market, in other words, and the market will fix the problem. Or something.

The idea that maple sugar could end the slave trade by replacing cane sugar is a bit like saying that whale oil could eliminate demand for offshore drilling by replacing crude. If Cooper—father of Mark Twains least favorite novelist, James Fenimore—really wanted to end slavery, he might have started by freeing his own slaves. Nonetheless, Taylor tells us, Cooper convinced his old-money Quaker friends in Philadelphia to fund the venture, which turned out about as well as you might expect. The comparatively tiny harvest of maple sugar in Cooperstown was mostly ruined on the trip down the river, and those who tried it decided they like cane sugar better anyway. So much for that. There was also the inconvenient but irreversible truth that for Cooper’s more expansive land speculation to succeed, people would have to chop down said maple trees. So maybe that wasn’t such a great idea. Anyways, now you know.

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"You Have to Live in the Country to Feel the Country"

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Jul. 2, 2010 6:26 PM PDT

Fort Ticonderoga, New York—Our road to Ticonderoga, site of Ethan Allen's critical Revolutionary War victory, was complicated by the minor detail that, as of December, said road no longer exists. The only functional bridge over Lake Champlain from Vermont was condemned last year, and, in the fashion befitting cookie-cutter baseball stadiums, subjected to a controlled demolition on local television. The night the bridge closed down, the ferry at Larrabee’s Point stayed open all night to receive the excess passengers. It was, says Nina, the storekeeper at the Orwell, Vt. convenience mart, "a pretty big deal." We take the ferry instead. The Crossing: (Photo: Tim Murphy) The Crossing: (Photo: Tim Murphy)

I'm headed to Ticonderoga both because of Allen (more on him later), and because of my lifelong fascination with #2 pencils. And although I don't end up going into the fort, I do meet Evan Zgonis. Zgonis, 68, of Dracut, Massachusetts, flags me down near the park's entrance. He sees my Red Sox shirt, I guess, which makes us brothers. As we talk, a band of college-age redcoat re-enactors are practicing the flute at a pair of picnic tables.

His grandkids are about to start elementary school, where they'll learn US history for the first time. He wants to give them a head start "I was here for my kids," Zgonis says. "And now it's the turn for my grandkids. Americans, they have to know their own history."

A Sense of Where We Are: Today's Map

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Jul. 2, 2010 6:52 AM PDT

View Westward Expansion in a larger map

Outside South Wallingford, Vermont— For those following at home, here's a quick look at where the route has taken us so far. I'm driving through Vermont today, where I'll be considering such weighty questions as, "what is Ethan Allen's legacy in the 21st century?" and "Did people really think maple syrup could bring an end to the slave trade?"

The View From My Windshield: "World Guy"

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Jul. 1, 2010 12:35 PM PDT

World on a String: Erik Bendl, 48, of Louisive, KY, is pushing this to-scale (maybe) model of the Earth from Washington, DC to Maine to raise awareness of Diabetes (Photo: Alex Gontar). World on a String: Athol, Massachusetts— "World Guy," aka Erik Bendl, 48, of Louisville, KY, is pushing this to-scale (maybe) model of the Earth from Washington, DC to Maine to raise awareness of Diabetes (Photo: Alex Gontar).

We're Not in Boston Anymore

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Jul. 1, 2010 11:12 AM PDT

Athol, Massachusetts— Thirty minutes past Leominster ("home of Johnny Appleseed," or more accurately, "the place that Johnny Appleseed ran away from") on Route 2A in Athol, we've officially, definitively, started our trip. We passed the house three times before we finally pulled into the driveway. It was the sign that stood out, I guess: "Need Prayer? Stop Here." Because the point of the trip is to talk to people, and because, as prepared as we are, there's no way we'll make it three months without at least a little bit of heavenly help, we pulled over. A woman named Robyn came out to greet us. She'd lived in town for seven years, driven west by rising housing costs, but the weekly prayer groups are more recent occurence. A year ago, "He showed me the sign," she says, speaking of the Lord. In a good week, seven people will stop by to join her and her husband; some are regulars, some just pop in off the highway unannounced. "I'll meet people in town and they'll mention the sign and I'll say, 'that's me!'"

From here it's on to the Mohawk Trail, west to North Adams and up into Vermont.