Miners - bless their hearts - have been known to weigh themselves down with rock while at work. For some reason or another, the owners of the mines frowned upon this practice. One way to prevent such activities was to make the men strip down and change clothes before entering and exiting the mine. While the practice continues today - even in coal mines - modern facilities often include showers and lockers.

Not so much then:

Some of the more remote places where good ore was found are difficult for the casual traveller to get to (or even know about) so souvenir collecting has been less intensive. This is the changing room of a silver mine barely in California just over the state line from Nevada. It's actually not far from well-known mines but requires some degree of effort to hike to (and find - lost behind brush and up a narrow canyon). I stumbled across it by accident long ago (and haven't been back since). There are no obvious roads to it and at the time I was there, the path - such as it was - looked like an animal trail; not a trail one would normally follow. I suppose at one time it was a burro path for hauling sacks of ore out to better opportunities for reasonable transportation. A very dry climate helped preserve some of the construction over the 100 years or so.

The entrance to the diggings is just through the door. Square head nails (aka "cut nails") helped date the workings; they were the primary nail used until about the 1890s when round wire nails became common. A bit of research suggests this mine was probably active for a few years in the late 1870s to early 1880s with fewer than a dozen men working it. The ore was good enough to construct this room and interior bracing but not enough to allow more extensive development and roads. I explored the interior a bit but the timbering was questionable and I decided I wasn't all that interested in exploring the ore face.

I used to like Cracker Barrel. I didn't eat there often but I enjoyed the food when I was there. I enjoyed the atmosphere, I even enjoyed the kitschy gift shop. I haven't been to one since before this kerflufffle - more from lack of opportunity than politics. It was still "Cracker Barrel" last time I visited.

Sometimes just knowing some little piece of my culture is there is enough even if I don't visit often.
I don't think I'll visit again.

Damn the DEI woke ...

Words of Robby Starbuck:

The American people are sick of having our culture and heritage stripped from us.

All these things that are nostalgic Americana are constantly being stomped on, and we're being told that there's something wrong with it, that we should be ashamed of it in some way, that it needs to be replaced with something more inclusive or more driven by these DEI characteristics," he continued. "I think people are just sick of it. We've had enough, and we don't want our whole country stripped down to where we have no semblance of, you know, that sort of nostalgic Americana culture.

I've been watching old late 50s/early 60s TV westerns with Mrs DT - turns out my foreign-born wife likes them (so do I - much better without commercials). Most of these have the advance warning "Outdated cultural depiction" and rated PG (violence, smoking, drinking). I guess good wins over bad, often by use of guns along with no "woke" elements is outdated but these shows were morality plays suitable for children of that era. I was of the later edge of the "hippies" and while some of it sank in, most of it did not (for example, I learned to despise Democrats when I heard McGovern speak). I guess that's me.

So I prefer to be outdated based on nostalgic American culture. It wasn't outdated nor nostalgic in the time I was raised; it's too bad those of today (and apparently so many of my generation as well) feel such morals are inappropriate and obsolete.

33 years ago now ... but nothing else has changed.