Confederate monument gives nod to ‘our faithful slaves’

“On at least one Confederate soldier monument, that in Columbia, North Carolina (1912), one of the inscriptions included a statement ‘in appreciation of our faithful slaves.’  In the early 20th century several attempts were made to augment [such] localized efforts with a regional or even national monument to the ‘faithful old slaves’….But the more ambitious schemes never materialized….

“The Fort Mill [S.C.] monument remains unique as a representation of slavery, one that is deliberately comprehensive, including both house slavery and field slavery, female and male labor….”

— From Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America” by Kirk Savage (1997)

 

Industrial recruiters pinned hopes on Upton Sinclair (!)

On this day in 1934: In an unlikely industrial recruitment session at the Sir Walter Hotel in Raleigh, Chamber of Commerce officials from across the state discuss what to do if (in the words of The News & Observer) Upton Sinclair, the Big Bad Wolf of California politics, chases the Three Little Pigs and the rest of the movie people out of Hollywood.”

Novelist Sinclair’s socialistic gubernatorial campaign does indeed have the moguls in a swivet, but his big lead vanishes — in large part because of Hollywood’s ahead-of-its-time newsreel propaganda — and North Carolina will have to wait half a century to welcome its [recently shrunken] moviemaking colony.

 

R.I.P., Fats Domino, survivor of Fayetteville riot

Today’s rock ‘n’ roll fans wouldn’t think of the late Fats Domino — “Blueberry Hill,” “I’m Walkin’ ” — as an incendiary performer, but this isn’t 1956, when a riot broke out at his show in Fayetteville.  Police used tear gas to break up the unruly crowd, and Fats jumped out a window to avoid the melee. He and two other band members were slightly injured.

Wonder if he and Chuck Berry ever compared notes about their experiences in Fayetteville….

 

Charlotte Observer: Wave flag or be labeled ‘Hitler-lover’

“By late 1940 North Carolinians began to prepare for a war that was rapidly closing in on them. Charlotteans responded with a dramatic increase in patriotic fervor and reverence for the American flag….The Charlotte Observer attacked those who failed to display the proper zeal for their country: ‘Anybody who fails to contribute is in a fair way to be thought of as a Nazi-sympathizer, Hitler-lover or just a plain tight-wad and cheapskate.’ ”

— From “Home Front: North Carolina during World War II” by Julian M. Pleasants (2017)

 

Artifact of the Month: Audubon’s Great Carolina Wren

This sheet showing the “Great Carolina Wren”, from John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, published in 1826-1832, is in the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It came to the University with a bequest from Josephine and Mangum Weeks in 1981, one of 76 prints from Audubon’s astonishing publication. This print is the first of several that the North Carolina Collection will feature on its website.

The Birds of America is one of the pinnacles of book making. In the first place, it was printed on “elephant folio” paper, entire sheets of paper in the standard size for paper at that time, about 39 1/2 X 26 1/2 inches. Between 1757 and 1784, James Whatman I and his son James II had developed a process at their mill near Maidstone, England, for making heavy smooth paper of this size. By 1826 this paper, usually folded into smaller sizes, had become a staple for printing fine details of new type-faces, maps, technical drawings, and hand-colored pictures in books. Audubon eventually engaged two London printers, Robert Havell and his son Robert Jr., to use the full size of these sheets to reproduce his illustrations of American birds. It was the most elaborate and intricate such production ever attempted. Even as the project proceeded, lithography was supplanting engraving as the technique of choice for illustrated books. Audubon had caught a wave of etching and engraving at its crest.

Eventually fewer than 200 copies of the 435 elephant folio pages were printed and each was hand-colored in the Havells’ shop. During the more than six years it took to finish this task, the sheets were issued in sets of five (67 sets in all to make the total). Subscribers included scientific societies, universities, and wealthy people in America and Europe, including the kings of France and England. Most subscribers had the sheets bound in London into four volumes of 100 sheets each (with 135 for the final volume), which were then shipped separately in tin boxes at intervals of a year or more.

Audubon insisted on using the full size of the paper in part because he intended to illustrate each bird, even the largest, in life size. Having committed himself to such large sheets, he often made use of the space available to depict his subjects grouped and also engaged in characteristic behavior. Even so, most small birds were printed from plates that were much smaller than the elephant folio sheets. In each set of five sheets, only the first used a copper plate the size of the paper; the second used a plate half that size, printed in the middle of the paper; and the remaining three used quarter-sized plates, so that half the width and height of each sheet around the centered image was left blank. UNC’s sheet with the Great Carolina Wren is an example of one of these small prints, suitable for small birds.

Like all other sheets in the Weeks’ collection, the Great Carolina Wren is no longer bound. At some time in its first 100 years this sheet had several inches of the blank paper around the image trimmed away in order to frame the image in a more balanced way. Although the trimming improved its presentation, it certainly reduced the value of this print. None of the other sheets in the Weeks’ collection, with one exception, has been trimmed so much. Despite its reduced monetary value, this example of Audubon’s Great Carolina Wren is in superb condition.

The two birds and the flower are compelling in several ways. For me, most important is the birds’ behavior. It is obviously early springtime, with the red buckeye in bloom and the male wren mounted on high to belt out his song. His full throat, fanned wings, and tense tail catch the bird’s stance so perfectly that his song almost bursts from the page. Audubon’s account of this species, in the first of his five-volume Ornithological Biography, published in 1831 soon after the elephant folio sheets, describes the song as “Come-to-me, come-to-me.” There can be no doubt that Audubon imagined the male addressing this fervor to his mate. We see her, coy as are many female birds, slipping through the branches below the male, apparently intent on her own pursuits.

The “dwarf buckeye, Aesculus pavia”, as Audubon notes in his text, favors “swampy ground” along the southeastern coastal plain. Audubon no doubt found it with the wrens in Louisiana at Bayou Sara along the Mississippi well above New Orleans. It was here, during 1821 or 1822 near Oakley Plantation (now the Audubon Memorial Park outside St. Francisville), that Audubon must have painted these wrens. His teen-aged assistant, James Mason, probably did the buckeye, although the overall composition was surely Audubon’s. At any rate, decades later Mason claimed that Audubon had promised to acknowledge his contribution in painting many of the plants in the backgrounds of the birds, although Audubon never mentioned Mason on the sheets for The Birds of America.

This dwarf buckeye is now usually called the red buckeye, to distinguish it from other dwarf buckeyes, although its scientific name remains the same. As for the bird, Audubon was the first to classify this species correctly with other wrens, by including it in the genus Troglodytes. Soon afterwards it was allocated within the wrens to the genus, Thryothorus. Alexander Wilson, Audubon’s predecessor in American ornithology, had recognized the bird’s similarity to other wrens but was confused by Linnaeus’s classification and, in his American Ornithology published in 1810-1814, placed it with creepers, in the genus Certhia. Surprisingly, the species had not been mentioned before by any American naturalist, with one exception and only in a cursory way. Wilson’s friend, William Bartram, had included it in his list of birds encountered between Pennsylvania and Florida in his classic Travels through North & South Carolina, etc., published in 1791. Confused about what kind of bird it was, he calls it “Motacilla Caroliniana (regulus magnus) the great wren of Carolina.”

Bartram included an asterisk beside this wren to indicate that it arrived in Pennsylvania during spring and returned southward after nesting. Wilson, however, could not confirm, “based on my own observations,” that it then nested in Pennsylvania. Audubon added from his experience that the species extended northward “nearly to Pittsburgh” and that a few were seen near the Atlantic coast as far north as New York. He himself found a nest “in a swamp” in New Jersey a few miles from Philadelphia. Nowadays, in contrast, the Carolina Wren nests as far north as Connecticut and occasionally Massachusetts. Like a number of other species in these days of global warming, the Carolina Wren has been spreading northward.

When teaching Avian Biology to undergraduates at UNC before my retirement, I used to make a lame joke, “How did the Carolina Wren get its name? It isn’t any more characteristic of North Carolina than anywhere else in the southeast, and it isn’t even sky blue!” The answer, as we have seen, is that Bartram associated it with his travels in the Carolinas, no doubt both North and South. Because it is such a drab, retiring bird, even the most adventuresome naturalists had overlooked it throughout the colonial period. Wilson was the first to notice its quixotic behavior, “disappearing into holes and crevices … then reappearing”, but Audubon’s image is the first, and perhaps still the greatest, likeness of its boisterous song and frenetic skulking. Despite its ubiquitous presence around homes throughout North Carolina, the Carolina Wren still escapes notice too often. Audubon to this day ranks as one of its keenest observers.

R. Haven Wiley is an emeritus professor in the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

NC rejected New England’s state-supported religion

“Except in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, both founded as islands of religious tolerance, the colonies had all maintained religious ‘establishments’ in which taxes on the whole population supported the local majority Christian church, usually the Church of England in the South and the Congregational churches in New England….

“Over the course of the Revolution…regional religious contrasts yawned wider as the southern states largely abandoned their church establishments, led by North Carolina and Virginia. North Carolina’s 1776 constitution forbade religious taxes and made contributing to or attending church a purely private and voluntary act….”

— From “The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy” by Jeffrey L. Pasley (2013)

Also prohibited by the 1776 constitution: clergy holding political office.

 

Pa is Goin’ To Take Us to the Big Rowan County Fair

Promotional post card for the 1909 Rowan County Fair.
Promotional post card for the 1909 Rowan County Fair.

If this year was 1909, then today would have been the day to head to Salisbury for the first day of the Rowan County Fair.  Being that this is 2017, the 66th annual Rowan County Fair was September 15th through 23rd.  That means the county’s first annual fair was in 1951—at least in its current incarnation.   Fortunately there’s an even longer history to the county fair’s history, because 108 years ago I would have asked my dad to go see Strobel’s Airship!

Advertisement for the 1909 Rowan County Fair in the September 20th issue of The Salisbury Evening Post.
Advertisement for the 1909 Rowan County Fair in the September 20th issue of The Salisbury Evening Post.

For 38 years State Fair didn’t see need for ‘colored day’

On this day in 1853: Raleigh hosts the first North Carolina State Fair.
The fair will be racially integrated until 1891, when segregationist pressures lead to designation of a “colored day.” However, blacks continue to attend in significant numbers each day.

.

To Truman from ‘a town where we have no freedom’

“January 24, 1951

“Dear Mr. President,

“How are you today? Fine I hope. I know you are wondering who is writing you. Well, I am a 15 year old Negro 10th Grade school girl. I am speaking for our History class since we are interested in the News and World Affairs….

“Every time war starts, members of the opposite race start talking about freedom. I am living in a town [Greensboro] where we have no freedom….

“Sincerely yours,

“Arlene Williamson”

— From “Dear Harry: Truman’s Mailroom, 1945-1953” by D. M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore (1999)

 

An engineering whodunit at Black Mountain College

“[Buckminster] Fuller’s most prominent invention originated at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College. Fuller arrived there in 1948 as a visiting architecture professor with an Airstream trailer full of geometrical models. Under Fuller’s supervision, students first tried to build a structure using venetian blind slats as trusses held in place via tension. It collapsed.

Kenneth Snelson was one of the Black Mountain students mesmerized by Fuller’s blend of design and futurism. Over the winter of 1948–49, Snelson built models whose parts were secured by taut wires, the balance of tension providing structural stability. Snelson showed Fuller his model. By the summer of 1949, the school’s students, guided by Fuller, successfully built a geodesic dome using metal curtain rods purchased at the Woolworth’s in Asheville….

“Fuller began to refer to the engineering principle Snelson had used as ‘tensegrity’ — a clever portmanteau of ‘tension’ and ‘integrity.’ He later patented this design concept just as he did the geodesic dome itself. Snelson’s name appears in neither patent application. (Fuller’s intellectual property claims notwithstanding, Snelson went on to have a successful career as a sculptor. His ‘Needle Tower,’ a 60-foot-tall tensegrity piece, sits in front of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.)

“Examples of simultaneous invention litter the past. In this case, the truth likely lies somewhere between Fuller’s ready opportunism and Snelson’s years of protestations….”