Appomattox so upset him that he… did nothing

“[A] North Carolinian, Dick Ragland, a man of a wealthy plantation family… swore an oath, upon hearing of Lee’s surrender, that he would not lift a finger to work so long as he lived.

“Ragland also vowed that he would never cross to the north side of the Potomac, or stray south of Atlanta, Georgia. Until after 1910 he tramped the South as a vagrant, shaggy and ragged, with a  pack on his back, carrying a long stick with a bayonet fixed on its end.”

— From “Our Incredible Civil War” by Burke Davis (1960)

Davis sources this item in neither his acknowledgments nor his bibliography, and when I asked him about it many years after publication he couldn’t recall it all (not surprising for someone who wrote 57 books). An Internet search for details was similarly fruitless.

Any Dick Ragland experts in Miscellany land?



Tonight’s forecast: 2 inches of link dump

— Sorry, Mr. Larsson, but Asheville readers prefer “Mayhem in Mayberry.”

— In Charlotte, Mark Twain flap has familiar ring.

— From a recently surfaced collection of Civil War pencil sketches (scroll down), 43 depicting North Carolina.

— “Firestarter” II?

Child labor law spurned as ‘Yankee doings’

On this day in 1903: In his biennial message to the General Assembly, Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock calls for legislation “in behalf of the children who are working in textile and furniture factories.”

Manufacturers, who have beaten back previous restrictions on child labor, want no part of Aycock’s proposals – “Yankee doings,” in the words of W.L. London of Pittsboro. “You let us alone,” says Moses Cone of Greensboro, “and the matter will come out all right.”

But Aycock’s vow to stump the state moves the manufacturers to compromise. The Child Labor Law of 1903 will prohibit employment of children under age 12 in manufacturing except in the oyster industry, where young shuckers are paid by the gallon or bushel. Children under 18 are barred from working more than 66 hours per week.

Link dump’s research untouched by decline effect

— If Western North Carolina was so big on Unionism, why weren’t its legislators?

— 18th century “stone” dollhouse from defunct Old Salem Toy Museum blows away auction estimate.

— I hadn’t realized that Pearl Fryar, the topiary wizard (and movie star) of Bishopville, S.C., had such extensive roots in Clinton and Durham. And he’s appearing Jan. 29 in Greenville.

— “Site of the nation’s first student lunch counter sit-ins”: Baltimore?

— Making the case for “a Rutherford Platt Hayes Day in Asheville.”

— J.B. Rhine, father of the “decline effect”?

Given names, given with imagination

“…. In the South, according to Urban T. Holmes of the University of North Carolina, Negro parents ‘have, for the most part, kept to standard names.’ But  when they depart from the standard they sometimes go even further than their fellow Methodists and Baptists of the dominant race. In Rockingham County, North Carolina, Mr. Holmes unearthed Agenora, Alferita, Artice, Audrivalus, Earvila, Julina, Katel, Limmer, Louvenia, Ludie, Mareda, Margorilla, Matoka, Orcellia, Princilla, Reada, Roanza, Venton Orlaydo and Vertie Ven….

“Medical men making a survey of Northampton County, North Carolina, staggered back to civilization with the news that they had found male Aframericans named Handbag Johnson, Squirrel Bowes, Prophet Ransom, Bootjack Webb and Solicitor Ransom, and females named Alimenta, Iodine, Zooa, Negolia, Abolena, Arginta, and Dozine.

— From “The American Language” by H. L. Mencken (1919, later revised)

Urban T. Holmes (a name that might itself have raised eyebrows among his subjects in Rockingham County) began teaching at UNC in 1925 and later was named Kenan Professor of Romance Philology.

Here’s a modern-day look at “African-Americans’…  tendency to buck more common names.”

Photo of a Ghost

I recently reprocessed the Louis Round Wilson Photograph Collection, which contains lots and lots of fascinating portraits from the late 19th-early 20th centuries (tintypes, ambrotypes, cabinet cards, and even a cyanotype). Among these treasures, I found one portrait that — much like the subject’s ears — really stuck out.

Ghost Elliott

On the back of this card-mounted photo is written: “Ghost Elliott, buried near Grifton, NC. A noted NC teacher and presumably an ‘infidel.’ He influenced Uncle Needham Herring of Wilson, Mrs. Cusight’s (?) brother.”

The photographer’s stamp on the front reads (I’m nearly certain) “C. Q. Brown’s Art Studio.” A look at Stephen Massengill’s Photographers in North Carolina reveals a C. O. Brown Art Studio in Mount Olive (in the book’s index, but when you go to the actual page it says “G. O. Brown”). The Mount Olive location seems probable, given its proximity to Grifton . . . so I’m guessing Massengill’s guide is in error on this one and that it should in fact be C. Q. Brown.

My curiosity piqued, I began madly Googling, but could find surprisingly little about this “noted North Carolina teacher” and “infidel.” In James Sprunt’s Chronicles of the Cape Fear River, 1660-1916 (p. 94, under “Public Buildings in Wilmington”), I found the following tidbit:

“The Innes Academy, later known as the Old Academy Building, was a great brick structure, the first floor of which was used as a theatre and the second as a schoolroom. In the latter, Ghost Elliott, a famous teacher in the early days, at one time taught.”

Then, in an e-book titled “Biennial report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina, for the scholastic years … [serial] (Volume 1896/97-1897/98),” under Sampson County, I hit the jackpot.

(The text below is cleaned up to correct OCR errors, but a few bloopers remain. Emphasis added).

“There was a school of some note at a place called the Kornegay House, in the eastern part of the county, not far from the site of Duplin’s old courthouse, about 1830, Dr. Fields being Principal.

It was superseded by Spring Vale Academy, not far from its site, which was a very flourishing institution, to the outbreak of the war, the pupils averaging about 80, sometimes reaching 100, from Sampson, Duplin, Wayne and Bladen. The teachers, successively, were Joseph S. Rhodes, George W. Johnson, Angus C. McNeill, Miss Bizzell, John G. Elliott, Solomon J. Faison.

Of these, John G. Elliott deserves special notice. He was at the University with James K. Polk, and walked fifty miles to the University in 1847 in order to greet him. He was a good classical scholar, eccentric in manner, devoted to his calling as a teacher and extremely charitable in giving tuition; high-principled, but agreeing with no one in religious views. He was a philanthropist-teacher. His personal appearance was peculiar. He was so thin and cadaverous that from his youth he was known as ‘Ghost Elliott,’ and, falling into the humor, he added “G.” (for ghost) to his Christian name. Rev. Dr. C. F. Deems describes him as he appeared in 1855: ‘Small, thin, washed out by multitudinous ablutions, built after the architectural design of an interrogation mark, with a disproportionately large head, the white hair on which was cropped to a length measured exactly the thickness of the comb, he was a man whose appearance attracted attention everywhere. In some departments he was very learned, and his [___] acquirements dominated his eccentricities and won for him the respect of a large class of citizens.’ I add that he was accustomed to ride intellectual hobbies. I remember him at the University Commencement of 1847, when President Polk and a brilliant collection of visitors were on the Plill [?], he would talk of nothing else than Greek adverbs and prepositions.”

So I ask you, readers, why has someone so “famous,” “noted” and influential in his time, and obviously such an unusual character, become somewhat of an historical “ghost”? Is there some cache of knowledge/information about John Ghost Elliott out there that I didn’t find?

-Elizabeth Hull

For Marshal Ney, life after death?

Still more phrase-frequency charts from the indefatigable Google Books Ngram Reader:

sweet tea

— Jesse Helms vs. Terry Sanford and Sam Ervin

— Old North State vs. Tar Heel State. Only now has Tar Heel State become the more common usage? There’s something here I’m not getting.

— redneck vs. white trash and hillbilly

Marshal Ney. His execution in 1815 apparently accounts for the first spike, his supposed reappearance as a North Carolina schoolteacher for the second.

Link dump pops first cork of year

— Revisiting the one-drop rule.

— Lost and found: Minor-league pitcher’s championship ring.

— Train station turned garage… turned train station?

— “In writing workshops I often see people trying to write Southern accents…. It should be done sparingly and only if…”

— R.I.P., Billy Joe Patton, last of the red-hot amateurs.

Reynolds to the rescue of Roosevelt

“Fueled by rage at Roosevelt and possessed of an attractive candidate [Wendell Willkie] to run against him….the GOP was gearing up — and shelling out — for a supreme effort….

“The [Democrats] had been outspent in every national election since 1920, and…never had the supply of funds been shorter than in 1940.

“The five great radio speeches by Roosevelt… that were to boost his popularity during the last days of the campaign would not have been broadcast had not Richard Reynolds [Jr.], of the North Carolina tobacco family, appeared on the scene with a last-minute $175,000 loan to pay for the radio time.”

— From “The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1)” (1982) by Robert A. Caro

It’s never too late to whitewash a front page

“North Carolina’s Wilmington Morning Star (circ. 17,866) went to press with a front-page picture of four Marine witnesses in the court-martial of Sergeant Matthew C. McKeon. As soon as the paper hit his desk, the editor on duty gulped and stopped the presses.

“He had failed to notice, in the shadowy impression on the Associated Press mat that supplied the picture, that one of the marines, Private Eugene W. Ervin of Bridgeport, Conn., was a Negro. The deskman met the crisis by ordering a pressman to take hammer and chisel to the press plate.

“Next morning Private Ervin’s ragged ghost haunted the spot where the Morning Star cut out the Negro and spited its front page.”

— From Time magazine, Aug. 13, 1956

Don’t miss the belated, bittersweet coda in this morning’s Wilmington Star-News.

Not a single surviving clipping of the infamous front page? Might the North Carolina Collection hold any evidence?