Having a Blast

Published May 18, 2021, 10:00 AM

Some of the most entertaining curiosities are the ones that defy expectations. And both of today's subjects do that perfectly.

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Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Funerals are normally somber affairs. Attendees were black. Kind words are spoken about the deceased from loved ones and cherished friends. People cry and embrace one another during one of the most difficult times of their lives. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to say, stand up and shout a string of swear words among the grieving crowd. But that's exactly what happened at President Andrew Jackson's funeral. Before he became president, Andrew Jackson was a lawyer from the Waxhaw Settlement, right on the border between North and South Carolina. He served as a courier with his older brother during the Revolutionary War before going on to become a general in the War of eighteen twelve. Though he had served his country several times during his life, Jackson's reputation as a patriot has become tarnished today by a lifetime of racism and support for white supremacy. He was a staunch defender of slavery and the central player in the upheaval of Native Americans from their lands. It can be argued that Jackson's genocidal tactics undermined any of the good he managed to do as a soldier or as a president, even something like paying off the entire national debt, which he did in eighteen thirty five. But he was also notoriously tough, surviving two attempted assassinations and even beating his would be assassin within an inch of his life. There's a reason his nickname was Old Hickory, and it followed him until his death. Jackson passed away at his home in June of eighteen forty five, surrounded by family and close friends. According to one story, as his children cried that day, he looked up and asked them what the matter was and if he had alarmed them. He told them to be good and that he would see them in heaven. His heart gave out moments later, providing no one a chance to respond or say goodbye. Jackson was laid to rest at his Tennessee home the Hermitage on Sunday, June eighth. His funeral was attended by three thousand mourners who had come to pay their respects to the man they revered despite his many moral failings. Parades were even held in his honor. Presbyterian minister Reverend William Menaphee Normant presided over the services. At least he was supposed to. Another mourner named Paul, had chosen that particular moment to unleash a series of vulgarities, offending everyone within earshot. It wasn't as though people hadn't heard them before. Jackson himself was known to curse up a storm when upset or frustrated. However, a funeral was no place for such sentiments, even for a man as colorful as Andrew Jackson. After several minutes of interruption, Paul was escorted from the service to another room. According to Normant, he had grown excited by the number of people gathered and couldn't help himself. You see, Paul had grown up in the Jackson home, having been adopted in eighteen twenty seven, and became like another child to Rachel Jackson. Andrew's wife, Rachel died a year later in eighteen twenty eight. Paul was then left in the care of the rest of the family. After mister Jackson's inauguration in eighteen twenty nine, the president never forgot about him, though, and often asked how Paul was doing in his letters home. Once Jackson returned home after being president, he spent much more time with young Paul, who picked up on every word that came out of the man's mouth. Eventually, Paul took to repeating everything he heard, and oftentimes that included swearing like a soldier to anyone and everyone inside the house. It's not clear how long Paul lived after that. In the wild, they tend to have a lifespan of twenty three years. In captivity, however, African gray parrots can live as old as sixty. That's right, Paul was the only parrot ever forced to leave a president's funeral for hurling offensive words at the guests. Now that's what I call foul language. It's called the Roxbury Conglomerate. Now, if you ask me, that sounds like a nefarious corporation that's about to be taken down by a superhero. But the truth is that the Roxbury conglomerate is less conglomerates and more rocks. In fact, it's the bedrock under the city of Boston. It spreads out well beyond the neighborhood of Roxbury, though, forming the landmass under a lot of nearby neighborhoods and towns. Apparently, it's also sometimes called the Roxbury pudding stone, and while that makes me hungry, it gives an even less accurate impression of what it really is, unless you're a geologist who knows what a pudding stone is. That's not why the Roxbury Conglomerate has led to a misunderstanding, though far from it. In fact, in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, at a time when stone from the bedrock there was being used to build walls and foundations throughout the Boston area, there was a misconception that led to a hundred years of argument and debate. It started, as the paper said at the time, a few rods self of Reverend Hall's meeting house in Boston. They were blasting in the rock and collecting the stone fragments that flew away. It wasn't the safest way of clearing land and gathering stone, of course, but as the workmen were gathering the stone fragments, they saw something strange shining in the rubble. When they moved the stones aside and dusted them off, they were awestruck. What they had found was a metallic vessel broken into two parts. They guessed that, like the rock, it had been torn apart in the explosion. When they put it together, they saw the two pieces formed a silver bell shape about five inches high and six inches wide. As they showed it around, people started to make observations about it. The metal was clearly valuable, It looked like an alloy maybe of zinc and silver, and the craftsmanship shown was incredible, not just for the shaping of the object, but because it was highly decorated too. The sides were covered in silver scroll work, flowers lined in pure silver inlay, and wrapped in silver vines twisting around the contours of the bell. It was an incredible discovery, so incredible in fact, that its story was published in Scientific American that year, and they were just as befuddled as the men who discovered it. After all, the blasters told the magazine that it had been blown out of solid pudding stone fifteen feet below the surface. And here's the thing that formation of bedrock there. It's been dated to five d seventy million years old. If this little silver bell had somehow been caught in the flows of sediment that formed the Roxbury conglomerate, well then it was probably the oldest artifact ever discovered on Earth. The story was picked up in nineteen nineteen by writers looking for anomalies, and from there it's been told and retold from time to time. It's even been used as proof that aliens were around millions of years ago, or even that HP Lovecraft's Cathulu mythos was real. And as the story reappeared time after time, its reputation rested on its strangeness. No one who wrote about the silver bell shape in the eighteen fifties seemed to have seen anything like it, although people would end up calling it the Dorchester pot or Dorchester vessel, but none of the early discussions of the silver objects seemed to admit that it could have been something that mixed with the fragments of stone during the blasting and not before, especially when that blasting happened in the middle of an inhabited city. It was probably from the very beginning just a little misunderstanding. In the end, the biggest mystery is how the fragments of a tiny silver bell picked up in the rubble of the Roxbury conglomerate entertain speculators and storytellers for more than a hundred years. One thing I do know, though people ever since have had a blast trying to figure it out. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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