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Dividend Two Directory 15
Page 07
BRACKEN, JULIA M. First prize for sculpture, Chicago, 1898; appointed on staff of sculptors for the St. Louis Exposition. Member of Arts Club, Western Society of Artists, Municipal Art League, and Krayle Workshop, Chicago. Born at Apple River, Ill., 1871. Pupil of Chicago Art Institute. Acted as assistant to Lorado Taft, 1887-92. Was much occupied with the decorations for the Columbian Exposition, and executed on an independent commission the statue of "Illinois Welcoming the Nations." There are to be five portrait statues placed in front of the Educational Building at St. Louis, each to be executed by a well-known artist. One of these is to be the work of Miss Bracken, who is the only woman among them. Miss Bracken has modelled an heroic portrait statue of President Monroe; beside the figure is a globe, on which he points out the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
Just beyond, upriver, lie ruins of the Ludwell House and the Third and Fourth Statehouses. In 1900-01, Col. Samuel H. Yonge, a U.S. Army Engineer and a keen student of Jamestown history, uncovered and capped these foundations after building the original seawall. A strange discovery was made here in 1955 while the foundations were being examined by archeologists for measured drawings. Tests showed that no less than 70 human burials lay beneath the statehouse walls, and an estimated 200 more remain undisturbed beneath the remaining structures or have been lost in the James River. Here may be the earliest cemetery yet revealed at Jamestown--one so old that it was forgotten by the 1660's when the Third Statehouse was erected. It is, indeed, quite possible that these burials, some hastily interred without coffins, could date from the "starving time" of 1609-10, when the settlers strove to dispose of their dead without disclosing their desperate condition to the Indians.
It is in France that we find the greatest wealth of relics of Cave-men. Sir John Lubbock has left us a description of the valley of the Vezere, where these caverns occur. The Vezere is a small tributary of the Dordogne. "The rivers of the Dordogne run in deep valleys cut through calcareous strata: and while the sides of the valley in chalk districts are generally sloping, in this case, owing probably to the hardness of the rock, they are frequently vertical. Small caves and grottoes frequently occur: besides which, as the different strata possess unequal power of resistance against atmospheric influence, the face of the rock is, as it were, scooped out in many places, and thus 'rockshelters' are produced. In very ancient times these caves and rock-shelters were inhabited by men, who have left behind them abundant evidence of their presence.
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