September 2016 – Page 2

When UDC countered Lincoln with Jeff Davis

“More than 100 years ago, when few states had road departments [North Carolina’s dates to 1915], a group of women planned one of our country’s first transcontinental highways, a good deed that over the course of a century has become controversial.

“The road was planned in 1913 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. [The Jefferson Davis National (sometimes Memorial) Highway, conceived as a rejoinder to the earlier Lincoln Highway] would run from Washington state, through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, ending in Washington, D.C. It would be ‘beautified and historic places on it suitably and permanently marked.’

“Today, portions of that historic highway remain, dotted with UDC historic markers….”

— From “The twisted history of the controversial Jefferson Davis Highway” by Kelly Kazek at al.com (June 6)

As this 2013 account suggests, not much evidence of the Davis highway remains in North Carolina. Here’s how it once wended its way through Chapel Hill.

(Want to have a North Carolina road, bridge or ferry named for that special someone? Start here.)

‘North Carolina kidnapped Virginia barbecue’…!?

“[Author and blogger Joe] Haynes asserts that the popular North Carolina style is the result of a culinary crime, noting in [“Virginia Barbecue: A History”] that, among other things, ‘When settlers first moved into what is today North Carolina, it was known at that time as Virginia’s Southern Plantation.’

“In person, Haynes is more direct: ‘North Carolina kidnapped Virginia barbecue.’ “

— From “Where did barbecue begin? Virginia, he says” by Jim Shahin in the Washington Post (Aug. 28)

Curiously, Haynes’s book neglects to mention uber Virginian William Byrd’s backhanded acknowledgement of North Carolina’s barbecue primacy.

In search of Great Dismal’s slave-refuge islands

“The worse it gets, as I wade and stumble through the Great Dismal Swamp, the better I understand its history as a place of refuge. Each ripping thorn and sucking mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.

“We don’t know much about them, but thanks to [Dan Sayers], the archaeologist hacking through the mire ahead of me, we know they were out here, subsisting in hidden communities, and using almost nothing from the outside world until the 19th century….

“ ‘I was such a dumb-ass,’ says Sayers. ‘I was looking for hills, hummocks, high ground because that’s what I’d read in the documents: ‘Runaway slaves living on hills….’ I had never set foot in a swamp before. I wasted so much time. Finally, someone asked me if I’d been to the islands in North Carolina. Islands! That was the word I’d been missing’….”

— From “Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom” by Richard Grant in Smithsonian magazine (September 2016)