I begin thinking about growing some tomatoes last year and had been reading information about heirloom tomatoes. So I went to the seed stores and asked about them and if they carried any. Well they did not carry any seeds of most of the ones I had read about - Brandywine, Cherokee Purple and others. And as we talked I asked if their was any tomatoes native to Alabama when it was being settled. And no one knew. After some searching I found out that a tomato was cultivated in Alabama called the Jeff Davis. So I have been searching for 1) are there any tomatoes that are (where) native to Alabama. 2) What kinds of tomatoes my Grandparents grew (or might have grown - that would be the tomatoes by years) I also come up Rutgers and Marglobe - but no one remembers when they where introduced into Alabama. I wrote the guy that has the tomato radio show last year and he said he remembered Mortage Lifter being grown around their area but did not know when they where introduced to Alabama. I have even asked some of the seeds stores if they had keep records of the type of seeds they sold during those years and they did not. I was asking about okra also because Alabama Red used to be very popular here but isn't grown that much around here anymore (I did find seeds for them and plan on planting some this year) - then I stated looking for white lightning okra as I have heard that there was a white okra grown arounf here that was white and used for pickling but no one remembered the name after some searching found the one called white lightning but it looks like it isn't grown any more. I did find it's parantage is the White Velvet but it has a green tinge to it.

I'm all for natural wood! I would love this to be restored, but it is really in bad shape. The top where the decorative piece is came off on each side. I had to sand the area that it came off. There is a lot of veneer that is loose that I puttied and sanded smooth. Some of the veneer is actually gone. Just sanded smooth in those areas. The picture looks a lot better than it really is. In my opinion, there's no hope for it to be left in it's original finish. I would never do something like this to a piece I thought I could save. You really think it is that old?

Unlike fireplaces built today, which are either prefab or which are built according to known, predictable patterns, old ones were custom built. I think, therefore, the feasability of the kinds of alteration you are thinking about would best be judged by a trained eye. On the other hand, if your's is part of a subdivision of similar homes, ask neighbors about their fireplaces. If you haven't had a chimney sweep clean your chimney yet, which you should do, find one who is technically knowledgeable and, while he or she is removing the sot from your chimney ask him a few questions. If you've cleaned your chimney already, ask a local fireplace dealer for a visit and a free estimate.

Personally I think this entire notion of how hazardous lead is has gotten out of hand. The modern doomsday profits would have us believe if we sleep by an open window with lead paint on the sill that we will be brain dead in 6 months. I am 59 years old and I am thinking back to my childhood. I was born in 1947 and plastics were still in there infancy in those days. Even into the mid to late 50's our toys were made of wood (generally painted with lead paint), tin, potmetal and lead. One of my alltime favorite toys was an electric hotplate with a ladle to melt lead and a set of 8 molds to cast toy lead soldiers about 5" high. In those days we could run to the local hardware store and buy plumbers 1lb."Pig Lead" ingots for $.08/lb. (The same lead used to make the oakum & lead joints in sewer pipes.) When times were hard and my cousins and I didn't have any money we would run down to the grocery store on the corner. When people would go inside to buy groceries we would steal the lead wheel weights off their tire rims. Every boy in the neighborhood knew we had the molds and melting pot so it was not uncommon for 6 or 8 boys to congregate at our house and melt upwards of 10 lbs of lead in a day and repeat this 2 or 3 times a week. It must also be noted that when you poured the mold there was always a small piece of waste lead attached to the head of the soldier from the top of the mold that had to be cut off. Understanding that 7-10year old boys were not permitted to carry a knife and having no fancy metal shears the solution was obvious to us, we simply bit the piece of lead off and spit the excess piece of lead back in the melting pile. By the end of a days production all of us boys would have a light grey film of lead on our hands. At 12 years old my cousin and I acquired a mold to cast fishing weights and we had a fair summer business supplying fishing weights to men and boys alike by the local fishing hole only by now our volume had expanded to 10 to 20lbs of lead per day. When playing with lead got boring we would go behind the local HVAC shop and pull the old thermostats out of their trash bin. As soon as we got them home we would break them open to reveal the little glass vial mercury switch, which we broke open with a hammer and slide the mercury across a piece of newspaper into a puddle where we could then lift it an put the liquid mercury in a mason jar, of course in those days no one called it mercury, we called it "Quick silver" because you could dip a penny in the mercury then polish it between your thumb and finger to a high luster like real silver. Now while many of you may be appalled at that type of play I would like to make it plain that this was typical conduct of boys in those days. Are we all brain dead today? Not on your life. In fact, I recently saw a graph of scholatic achievement in the USA from 1900 to date. As one might expect the graph was very low from 1900 until the late 1930's where it began a slow rise through the war years (39-45) then it began a very sharp upturn. In fact the highest scholastic achievements in U.S. History occured between 1964 and 1966 then it took an instant spiral down and today the average is only slightly higher than it was in 1935. I graduated high school in 1965 and in 2005 at our 40th high school graduation anniversary they conducted a pole of our classmates. Out of the 306 students who graduated in our class not one had suffered any long term ill effects attributed to lead. Not bad for a generation that grew up with lead paint, lead toys, lead water pipes, lead solder on our copper pipes, extremely high lead content in the gasoline and oh yes, occassionally we even had real lead pencils in school, but we hated those because you had to lick the lead to make it write better. Another interesting fact that was discovered at our anniversary. Not one member of our entire class could even remember anyone having asthma in those days, but then when we grew up their were no home computers or video games. We were compelled to go out in the fresh air to play.