Memorabilia Moment – Page 28

Winston-Salem’s profitable pairing: tobacco and wagons

In a state with notoriously rough roads, the Nissen wagon — a lighter-duty counterpart of the Conestoga — played a crucial part in early production and distribution of tobacco.

Founded in 1834, the Nissen Wagon Works grew to cover more than 600 acres in Winston-Salem’s Waughtown community. By 1919 it was turning out 50 wagons a day. I was surprised to learn that production continued into the 1940s — who was still buying wagons that far into the automobile age?

Pictured: a celluloid pocket mirror from the collection.

http://ncmarkers.com/Markers.aspx?ct=ddl&sp=search&k=Markers&sv=J-71%20-%20NISSEN%20WAGON%20WORKS

Happy 70th to Kannapolis’s founding father of funk

“When talk turns to great musicians born or raised in the Carolinas, a name that rarely comes up is George Clinton, the godfather of funk and architect of today’s rock and hip-hop.

“To be sure, Clinton, who was born in Kannapolis [on July 22, 1941], didn’t begin blending doo-wop and rock with his early band the Parliaments until his family moved to New Jersey…. But Clinton’s childhood in this gospel-rich area of North Carolina surely had an effect on the music that was playing in his impressive brain — at least as much of an effect as the Carolina in James Taylor’s mind.”

— Rock critic Mark Kemp in The Charlotte Observer (Aug. 15, 2003)

Pictured: A pinback button from the collection promoting Clinton’s 1993 single “Paint the White House Black.”

The Short Lived Monument to Elisha Mitchell

Today marks the 154th anniversary of the date on which Elisha Mitchell is believed to have died. Mitchell, a professor at UNC, fell about 40 feet to his death after apparently slipping on a precipice by a waterfall that now bears his name. The UNC professor was in Yancey County to measure the altitude of a mountain then known as Black Dome. Mitchell had recently come under attack from Congressman Thomas Lanier Clingman for his claim that Black Dome was the tallest peak in the eastern United States. Clingman claimed that another mountain in the Black Mountain range was taller.

Mitchell was last seen alive at about noon on June 27, 1857. He dismissed his son Charles, who had accompanied him on the survey trip, and told him that he would meet him two days later. While Charles Mitchell headed toward an inn in a nearby valley, his father set out in the opposite direction to meet guides who had worked with him on a survey of the peak in 1844. When Elisha Mitchell did not appear for the rendezvous with his son, local residents mounted a search party and scoured the mountain. Mitchell’s body was found July 8 at the base of what is now known as Mitchell Falls. His claim to having identified the tallest peak was later borne out and the 6,684 foot mountain today bears his name.

Although originally buried in Asheville, Mitchell’s body was re-interred at the top of Mount Mitchell in June 1858. The burial site was marked by a simple cairn until 1888 when the monument pictured in the postcard was erected. Fabricated of white bronze in Connecticut, the memorial was packed in seven cases weighing a total of 1, 041 pounds and transported by train and wagon to a spot about 10 miles from the peak in early August. The nine-piece monument was then unpacked and fastened to poles so that a team of men could carry it the remainder of the way to Mitchell’s grave. On August 8th the group was forced to abandon a “wigwam” in which they were sleeping and take shelter under a rock overhang as a violent thunderstorm raged overhead.

Describing the storm several months later in a speech published in The University Magazine, team member William B. Phillips wrote:

The thermometer fell to 40 degrees F., the wind blew with a violence unknown in these lower regions, while the incessant and blinding sheets of lightning lit up the sombre gorges to right and left and before with lurid and ghastly flames, and each neighboring peak echoed in thundering reverberations the shoutings of the great storm king….

On Thursday, August 9th, however, the sun rose majestically from behind the sharp outline of the Pinnacle, gazed for a moment upon that cowed and shivering group and then betook himself to his daily task of warming and beautifying the earth.

The monument was erected and the last screws of the inscription plate turned on August 18. The plate reads:

Here lies in hope of a blessed resurrection the body of the Rev. Elisha Mitchell, D.D., who after being for 39 years a Professor in the University of North Carolina, lost his life in the scientific exploration of this mountain in the 64th year of his age, June 27, 1857.

Phillips writes that no ceremony marked the erection of the monument. His account of the transport and building of the memorial was delivered as a speech at UNC in October 1888. Phillips closed his address with these words:

This simple bronze monument will stand for many generations, overlooking the beautiful valley of the Catawba and the Estatoe, fronting the graceful outlines of the Linville Mountains and Grandfather, marking the spot where repose the remains of a great and good man, whose example shineth ever more brightly, and whose memory will ever be cherished at this venerable seat of learning, so dear to him, so full of memorials of one of the wisest and best of teachers. Si monumentum queris, circumspice!

While Elisha Mitchell is remembered in numerous ways today–the mountain, the waterfall, a building at UNC and the state’s scientific society–the monument pictured above lasted just 27 years. A victim to defacement by “irreverent visitors” (in the words of former Governor Locke Craig), the bronze memorial was blown down by the wind in January 1915. However, a plaque bearing the inscription cited above sits at the base of the observation tower on Mount Mitchell. Could it be the original?

Barbecue, basketball… and Siamese twins?

What is it about North Carolina and Siamese twins?

First came Chang and Eng (1811-1874), who were born in Siam, now Thailand, [corrected] and died in Surry County.

Then Millie-Christine (1851-1912), who were born and died in Columbus County.

Most recently British-born Daisy and Violet Hilton (1908-1969), who lived out their last years weighing produce at a Charlotte Park-N-Shop.

This celluloid mirror is from an earlier stop in the Hiltons’ heartbreakingly checkered show business career.

Josephus Daniels, managing editor at large

“At 79, famed Tarheel Editor Josephus Daniels last week staged a spry comeback on his lively, incomplete, partisan, aggressive, successful Raleigh News & Observer. After a nine-year absence (as Ambassador to Mexico) shrewd old ‘Uncle Joe’ Daniels had ‘enlisted for the war’ to replace his son Jonathan, who went to OCD [Office of Civil Defense] in Washington.

“By contrast to his smart, facile son Jonathan, wrinkled old Editor Daniels, in his black planter’s hat and elder-statesman tie, was a figure who easily evoked oldtime reminiscences. A full-fledged editor at 18, he had tangled in many a garrulous crusade against North Carolina railroads, tobacco and power companies. Great pal of William Jennings Bryan (of whom he wrote an 8,000-word obituary in six hours) and a hard-shelled Dry, he banned liquor on Navy ships.

“Last week Editor Daniels added a commentary on his Navy days: ‘Even when I was “absent without leave” from the sanctum during the eight years as Secretary of the Navy in the Woodrow Wilson administration,’ chuckled old Josephus, ‘I thought of myself as managing editor of the Navy rather than as a Cabinet official.’ ”

— From Time magazine, February 16, 1942

Time certainly went into adjectival high gear for the Danielses and their newspaper, but where’s the imagination in referring to Josephus as “old” three times in three paragraphs?

Pictured: Josephus and Addie Daniels on one of their annual photo Christmas cards.

Artifact of the Month: Made exclusively for the Carolina Inn

This entry is the first in a monthly series highlighting the artifacts held by the North Carolina Collection Gallery. The Artifact of the Month for June is a place setting of the Carolina Inn’s pine-motif china. The Gallery possesses a dinner plate, salad plate, bread plate, soup cup, and tea cup and saucer. The salad plate is shown above.

With its official opening on December 30, 1924, the Carolina Inn was meant “to provide for the special wants and comforts of the University alumni, friends of the University and their families, friends of students of the University and University visitors.” In his history of the Carolina Inn, Kenneth Zogry notes that “within ten years of its opening, the Carolina Inn transformed public accommodations in Chapel Hill and became a fixture in both University and town life.” Also, a September 1946 article in the Raleigh News & Observer claimed that the Inn “has become a Chapel Hill institution in the two short decades it has been serving the public.”

A private dining room had been added to the Inn in 1930, and the nationally-known interior decorator Otto Zenke remodeled the room in the late 1940s and called it the Pine Room. Zenke also commissioned custom-made china from the Shenango China Company of New Castle, Pennsylvania for the newly decorated room. Shenango China had been used for the state dining services for Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, and in 1951, the company created two services for the Carolina Inn. One of these features a pine motif of a pine branch with cones and needles illuminated by the Carolina moon, which fit especially well in the Pine Room. UNC alumna Alma Holland Beers, the first woman hired by the Botany Department as a research assistant, provided the design work. The china service was used by the Carolina Inn for over thirty years. In 1979, the Pine Room was converted into a cocktail lounge, renovated again in 1995, and renamed the Piedmont Room. The Shenango China Company closed in 1991.

“Something Doing Every Minute. Miss It And You Will Regret It”

1916 was an eventful year for the town of Spruce Pine located in Mitchell County in western North Carolina. Not only did “the burgeoning town” witness the construction of its first brick building in Dr. Charles Peterson’s Spruce Pine Pharmacy, but major flooding of the Toe River on the edge of downtown occurred during the summer. The fall brought the Toe River Fair, described as “the best fair in this section of N.C.” With “big free acts day and night” and “band concerts afternoon & night,” the Toe River Fair was “the best of the best new shows.”

The North Carolina Collection has a broadside for the 1916 Toe River Fair that was designed and printed by the famous Hatch Show Print letterpress print shop in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1879 and one of the oldest working letterpress print shops in America, Hatch Show Print provided poster advertisements for vaudeville, circus, and minstrel shows across the country. Beginning in the 1920s and into the 1950s, the print shop specialized in posters for country music singers, such as Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, and Johnny Cash.

Where are you, Daughters of United Sons of N.C.?

This eBay item caught my eye. Handsome badge, grand name — but Google returns no mention of the Daughters of the United Sons of North Carolina (and only a 1932 tax reference to the United Sons themselves). I’m skeptical of the seller’s “Civil War Confederacy” designation.

Complicating the question is a ribbon in the collection from the Supreme Grand Lodge of the Sons & Daughters of North Carolina, a black fraternal society “organized mainly [according to a 1900 letter in the New York Times] for benevolent purposes — to foster a feeling of friendship and brotherly love among the North Carolinians in the North.”

Might these similarly-named organizations been related — or even the same? Is there an expert in Miscellany land?

A legislator’s lagniappe for life insurance

In addition to being a Chapel Hill insurance agent, John Umstead was the brother of Gov. William Umstead, the UNC roommate of Frank Porter Graham and, as a legislator, the impassioned reformer of the state’s mental health hospitals.

He seems to have given this paperweight-mirror to policyholders such as Mrs. W. S. Kutz. Insurance mirrors were a popular giveaway for several decades, but the signature is an uncommon device — likely printed on the stock design before it was covered in celluloid.

War’s over, schools tell Rebel mascots

To an alumnus of a school that only recently gave up its own retro mascot, these pinbacks from the collection bring back memories, if not exactly nostalgia.

Top and bottom: Cape Fear Academy, founded in 1967 in response to desegregation of New Hanover County public schools, called on imagery typical of the time.

In 2005, at the request of students, the school dropped the name Rebels in favor of Hurricanes. “Their concerns were not that they were personally offended by it,” explained Headmaster John Meehl, “but that in some public venues they felt shy about saying the mascot’s name.”

Middle: By contrast, here’s a Confederate of the “Southern gentleman” persuasion. Acknowledging its biracial student body, East Surry High School in Pilot Mountain shed Rebels in 1974. Interestingly, the old Rebel seems not nearly as defiant as the new Cardinal, who could moonlight as a phone app.