Galena territory

October 14, 2005

We’re back from a few days near the old mining town of Galena in northwest Illinois. The town was named for the mineral Galena, a major ore of lead and silver (galena is the Latin name for Lead Sulphide). Seventy-five years ago, the mineral Galena was the stuff — the crystal — of crystal radio sets. My father no doubt used a Galena crystal in the radio set he built around 1920, and I did the same when I was a Boy Scout some 20 years later. Galena is a natural semiconductor, precursor of today’s silicon diodes, a component of almost all electronic devices. We’ve come from Galena’s lead mines to Silicon Valley.

I digress. Marilyn and I were visiting a time-share resort for a few days located in a 6,800 acre resort area south of Galena. If we had been there a week or so later, it would have been ablaze with fall color. Our brief stay was marked with clouds and fog, mostly, but it was a part of the state neither of us had seen and not too far from the “Little Switzerland” region of northeastern Iowa where I fished for trout in the 1960s.

The Galena area is beautiful, rolling woodland, punctuated with a farm here and there in the valleys, or with golf courses in the case of the resort area. The farm in the second shot is a beautifully manicured horse farm just adjacent to “The Territory.”