Post by David Brearley

Three things Molly O'Halloran and I learned this weekend while visiting the Village of Vandalia, Michigan, for its Underground Railroad Days festival: 1.) Stephen Bogue, hero of the Underground Railroad in Cass County is a dead ringer for Mark Rylance (shown here playing Thomas Cromwell in the miniseries based on Hillary Mantel’s Booker-prize winning novel Wolf Hall). 2.) A century before the Supreme Court's federal Brown v. Board of Education ruling, at least ten one-room school houses in rural Michigan, in and around Cass County, were fully de-segregated with black and white students learning together. 3.) Chewie, our scruffy therapy dog, loves Lake Michigan’s sandy beaches but doesn’t care for the loud waves. (Just imagine how wigged out he’ll be when he visits his first ocean beach.)