The Great Winter Garden

Small Farms in "The Great Winter Garden"

My research for an exhibition this coming February has led me to a pamphlet, Small Farms in “The Great Winter Garden” published in or about 1915 by the Carolina Trucking Development Company, owed by Hugh MacRae, in Wilmington. The pamphlet’s purpose is to describe and offer for sale farms and homes owned by the company—with illustrations, facts, and statistics aplenty—as part of its larger effort to create agricultural colonies in the area. What interests me at this stage of my digging is the slogan, “The Great Winter Garden,” created by the Bureau of Soils of the United States Department of Agriculture.

"Map of Eastern States showing location of Narrow Belt Along the South Atlantic Coast designated by the United States Department of Agriculture as the "Great Winter Garden."

A map inside the pamphlet illustrates its geographic range along the mid and southern Atlantic coast; I am trying to determine the date of its origin, and how widely the slogan may have been adopted. Initial explorations are yielding minimal leads. I’ve only located one thus far: an article entitled, “Truck Soils of the Atlantic Coast Region” by Jay A. Bonsteel in the Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1912, which includes the same map used in the pamphlet. Do you know of other items or references to The Great Winter Garden?

“Bumptious Bill” reveals his charms

Whether it is a blessing or a curse I am not sure, but my mind often flashes on photographs I’ve seen when something I hear triggers its mental image. When I heard on the radio that William F. Buckley, Jr. died last Wednesday, the photograph below instantly filled my mind’s eye.

Buckley

Incorrectly labeled “October Forum / October 1970” on its back, the photograph depicts Buckley, seated in the center with his trademark clipboard, during his visit to Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on December 9th of that year. He was the final speaker in the series “Students and Politics: The Election of 1970” held during the fall semester. The Carolina Forum, represented on stage by its chairman Peter Brown, sponsored Buckley’s participation in the series. At the podium is Professor George V. Taylor.

Buckley Cartoon The Alumni Review for January 1971 described the scene that evening. “There was more audience than room in Memorial Hall. The crowd of 1,800 spilled out the windows onto the lawn outside the auditorium.” In a campaign year when President Richard Nixon was continually taunted and jeered by, as Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop (a previous speaker in the series) had described them, “Kids [meaning] those obscenity-throwing radicals who show up at every rally.” The spillover UNC crowd, made up mostly students, was “friendly, interrupting the well-known conservative for applause and laughter at his occasional dry wit”—despite the Daily Tar Heel cartoonist B. Cumming’s call to witness “a good fight” sans dictionary.

Buckley’s 1970 trip to UNC was not his first. The Carolina Forum invited Buckley to speak on Monday, 10 December 1962 on the topic of “Freedom and the Welfare State”; instead he spoke about, as the Daily Tar Heel described it, “a relation of conservatism to present policies.” Buckley essentially read an article he wrote for the January 1963 issue of Playboy that was coincidently available for the first time that very day— unbeknownst to Buckley until someone asked him to autograph a copy after his speech.

Afterward, a month-long supervening furor arose that made the national press. By week’s end the Dialectical-Philanthropic Society censured Buckley “for use of vulgarity and poor taste.” The Carolina Forum threatened not to pay Buckley his $450 speaker fee, which was much larger than Forum speakers usually received, for deviating from his planned talk. Some critics saw more value in buying the equivalent number of copies of Playboy to distribute around campus. Buckley wrote a long letter to the Daily Tar Heel in which he noted that the 1,000 attendees who paid fifty cents paid less than the one dollar cover price of the magazine. He referred to the Di-Phi Society as the “Old Lace Society” and quipped, “Would you refuse to invite the January Playmate to Chapel Hill because she had already revealed her charms? Strike that. I forgot about your Dialectical-Philanthropic Society. No doubt it doesn’t permit Playmates at Chapel Hill.”

May 1925: Carolina Coal Company Mine Explosion

This Month in North Carolina History

Coalglen1
News & Observer. [Raleigh, N.C.] 29 May 1925.
At 9:40 in the morning on May 27, 1925, a massive explosion shook the town of Coal Glen, N.C. “All at once, we heard this big noise, like booooom, and black smoke just boiled and rolled up in the sky,” recalled Margaret Wicker, who was a young girl at the time. The blast came from the Deep River Coal Field, where local miners were working nearly a thousand feet underground. The explosion, probably touched off by either coal dust or natural gas, was devastating: fifty-three miners were killed.

Ben Dixon McNeill covered the catastrophe for Raleigh’s News & Observer as a correspondent and photographer. His first-person accounts appeared on the newspaper’s front page for five straight days and included a retelling of his descent into the mine on May 31st. Seven photographs accompanied his articles on May 28th and 29th; the two images displayed here appeared in the latter issue with a caption that stated the photographs “need no explanation.”

The tragedy helped to speed passage of the state’s Workers’ Compensation Act, passed in 1929. North Carolina was the forty-fourth state to pass such legislation.

Coalglen2
News & Observer. [Raleigh, N.C.] 29 May 1925.

Historical Background

The presence of Deep River coal was first noted in print in 1820 in a letter to the American Journal of Science by Professor Denison Olmsted, chair of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at the University of North Carolina. Olmsted, and later H. M. Chance in an 1885 report, noted that earlier uses of coal to meet local needs most likely dated to before 1775. The Deep River Coal Field is the only noteworthy source of coal in the state. There are some “sporadic deposits,” as Chance described them, in the Dan River region from the Virginia border southwest to Germanton on the border between Stokes and Forsyth Counties.

Attempts to develop commercial mining efforts in the Deep River Coal Field began during the early 1850s, and had a rocky history. The Western Railroad, chartered in 1852, was the first railroad to reach into the region. Completed in 1863, its purpose was to connect the coalmines centered at the village of Egypt (renamed Cumnock in 1895) to the riverside port of Fayetteville on the Cape Fear to the southeast. Coal was mined at three towns within a four-and-a-half mile band, all within close proximity of the Deep River: Egypt, Gulf (upstream to the west of Egypt) and Farmville (downstream and directly to the east of Egypt).

The mine at Egypt closed down in 1870 and remained flooded until 1888. Three years earlier, in 1885, H. M. Chance submitted his “Report on an Exploration of the Coalfields of North Carolina,” which identified two coal beds between Egypt and Farmville that might be worthy of thorough exploration, but doubted the likelihood of large scale production. Furthermore he did not believe further expenditures would be justified outside of the limited area. When Chance described Deep River Coal Field, he listed eight “Obstacles to Successful Mining,” he wrote:

In the Richmond coalfield great trouble has been caused by what is called spontaneous combustion. Judging from the similarity of the coals it seems possible that this same difficulty may obtain here. While this is a mere supposition, it is one that cannot safely be ignored.

The Egypt mine reopened in 1888 and ran continuously through 1902 after sizeable gas explosions in 1895 and 1900, and financial difficulties once again forced closure. In 1915, Norfolk Southern Railroad obtained the property and ran the mine under the name of Cumnock Coal Company, the word Egypt having become synonymous with explosions and failures. The company supplied coal primarily for railroad purposes and was a small operation. In September 1922 the Erskine Ramsey Coal Company purchased the company with plans to significantly enlarge the enterprise and its output. Around 1921, the Carolina Coal Company developed a mine on the site of the old Farmville village on the Chatham County side of the Deep River, less than two miles east of the Cumnock Mine.

There is some confusion over the name of the event. The News and Observer called the event the “Cumnock Mine Disaster” in its initial coverage and a negative envelope in the Ben Dixon McNeill Collection carries the same title. The Cumnock Mine, however, was not the mine where the accident occurred. Farmville was later renamed Coalglen, or alternately Coal Glen at a date not readily available. The disaster has since been referred to in association of one of these three nearby locations. The dateline in the New York Times is from Coal Glen.


Printed Sources:

“Red Sand Stone Formation of North Carolina: Extract of a letter from Professor D. Olmstead, of the College at Chapel-Hill, North-Carolina, dated Feb 26, 1820.” American Journal of Science, 2:1 (April 1820), 175-176.

Wilkes, Charles. Report on the Examination of the Deep River District, North Carolina. Caption title: Report of the Secretary of the Navy, communicating the report of officers appointed by him to make the examination of the iron, coal and timber of the Deep River country, in the state of North Carolina, required by a resolution of the Senate. [Washington, 1859.]

Report on an Exploration of the Coal Fields of North Carolina: made for the State Board of Agriculture. Raleigh, N. C.: P. M. Hale, state printer and binder, 1885.

Campbell, Marius R. and Kent W. Kimball. The Deep River Coal Field of North Carolina. Prepared by United States Geological Survey, in cooperation with the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey, 1923.

Coal Deposits in the Deep River Field, Chatham, Lee, and Moore Counties, N.C.: Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1952.

Reinemund, John A. Geology of the Deep River Coal Field, North Carolina. Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1955.

 

World Wide Web Sources:

Margaret Wicker: The Coal Glen Mine Disaster

The Coal Glen Mining Disaster

 

Image Source:

News & Observer. [Raleigh, N.C.] 29 May 1925.

Photographs cropped as they appeared in the newspaper. Originals in the Ben Dixon McNeill Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, North Carolina Collection, Photographic Archives.