Swamped with campaign mailings? We’ll take ’em

Lest you need reminding, Election Day is 26 days away. Candidates and their supporters are knocking on your door, calling you at supper time, and filling your mailbox with campaign literature. We have no way to protect your doors or keep your phone from ringing. But we’re glad to help with the mailbox clutter. As with past elections, we’re collecting campaign literature. Instead of dumping those mailings in the recycle bin (we hope you’re recycling!), send them to us.

Campaign ephemera from 1970s
1970s-era campaign ephemera from our collection.

Our collection of campaign ephemera includes more than 5000 items and dates back to the 1800s. We want to ensure that researchers in 2068 or, heck, 2118 are able to learn a little about today’s campaigns. We’re keen to document campaigns throughout North Carolina for General Assembly, U.S. House, and constitutional amendments. That’s hard to do from our spot here in the Triangle. Please help us. Hold on to those mailers, flyers and voter guides. Then when you can stomach the clutter no longer, send the material our way. The address is:

John Blythe
Assistant Curator
P.O. Box 8890
Wilson Library, CB#3930
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-8890

One final note. We like knowing about the yard signs, particularly ones that strike you as unique. Unfortunately, they take up significant space and it’s hard for us to store them. Before you send us the actual sign, would you mind taking a photo of it and emailing the file to us as an attachment? The address is blythej@email.unc.edu Please remember to tell us where and when you spotted it.

Carolina Elephant Token

Carolina Elephant Token

The Carolina Elephant token is the earliest known numismatic artifact that refers to the Carolinas.  It is dated 1694, before the 1712 separation of the Province of Carolina into North and South Carolina colonies.  The origin and purpose of the token remain enigmatic despite extensive research that includes a seminal article written by Neil Fulghum, founding Keeper of the North Carolina Collection Gallery.

The Lords Proprietors were ruling landlords of the Province until their descendants sold their interests back to the Crown in 1729.  The Proprietors’ early attempts to populate the Province met with little success, although there were incentives to migrate.

The token takes its name from its full-body image of an elephant on the obverse.  The reverse has the lettering: “GOD : / PRESERVE : / CAROLINA : AND / THE : LORDS : / PROPRIETORS . / 1694.”  The token is copper, 28 mm in diameter, and was probably struck at London’s Tower Mint.  The piece is about the same size and weight as the abundant half-penny tokens that circulated in late seventeenth century London, and this might be the source of its description as a “token.”  A token is a money substitute usually issued by merchants at times when government-produced coins were in short supply.  There is no evidence that it ever circulated in the Province of Carolina or that it was made for that purpose.

Fulghum’s article speculates that the token may have circulated in the Royal Exchange in London and at the nearby Carolina Coffee-House on Birchin Lane.  It is known that the Proprietors and their agents frequented these locations and gave weekly presentations about their colony at the coffeehouse.  The Carolina Elephant token might have been used as a promotional reminder to potential settlers of Carolina.  Holders of Carolina tokens might have been able to redeem the pieces for some offering or premium at the Birchin Lane establishment or at an affiliated company store.

The North Carolina Collection holds an electrotype copy likely produced in the nineteenth century and several modern souvenir copies.  Genuine Carolina Elephant tokens are quite rare, and this Artifact of the Month is an important addition to the NCC’s early North Carolina numismatic collection.

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.

What’s football without locker room chatter?

“Hindsight is 50-50.”

— Pittsburgh coach Walt Harris, defending his unsuccessful strategy in the Continental Tire Bowl. (2003)

 

“I kept looking for the city. It just wasn’t there.”

— Quarterback Joe Pizzo, who grew up in Los Angeles, remembering his first impression of Mars Hill College. (1986)

 

“When we tied Georgia Tech.”

— UNC nose guard J.R. Boldin, recalling “the biggest game we’ve won since I’ve been here.” (1992)

 

“I watch to see if the kick goes through. My wife watches to see if she gets creamed.”

— Robert Mercer, describing what it’s like to be a parent of aspiring Duke placekicker Heather Sue Mercer. (1995)

 

“I thought it was the third quarter.”

— Johnson C. Smith football coach Wylie Harris, explaining why he called for a punt with only a minute left in the game and his team trailing. (1983)

 

” ‘Think you might need some footballs?’ ”

— Dale Steele, coach of the first Campbell University football team in half a century, noting the equipment salesman’s one last question about his order. (2007)

 

 

Two N.C. Horse Shows are “Heritage” Events

Scene During Annual Blowing Rock Horse Show

North Carolina is home to two horse shows designated as Heritage Competitions by the United States Equestrian Federation (USEF). The USEF defines a Heritage Competition as a show that has been running for an extended period of time, makes a positive and important impact on the sport, and contributes to the broader community.

Both the Blowing Rock Charity Horse Show and the Jump for the Children Horse Show received the designation in 2014. As of 2016, only 22 shows out of approximately 2,500 USEF-sanctioned shows had the prestigious Heritage Competition designation.

The Blowing Rock Charity Horse Show traces its origins to 1923, when Lloyd Manson Tate organized a horse show to entertain guests at the Green Park Hotel. Through the Great Depression, both world wars, the energy crisis and more, the show has grown and flourished. It is recognized as the oldest, continuous outdoor horse show in the United States.

1955 Blowing Rock Horse Show
1955 Blowing Rock Horse Show. Photo by Hugh Morton.

In its 95th year, the Blowing Rock Charity Horse Show is a USEF ‘AA’ rated show where competitors vie for cash prizes and points within the USEF points system. For three weeks a year in the summer, competitors and spectators alike enjoy the beauty of horse sports at a historic facility high atop the Blue Ridge Mountains.

As the longest continuously-held fundraising event for Duke Children’s Hospital, the Jump for the Children Horse Show is now in its 34th year. Also a USEF ‘AA’ rated show, participants compete for cash prizes and points over six days at the Governor James B. Hunt Horse Complex in Raleigh each fall.

A thrilling spectacle at the show is the Duke Children’s Grand Prix, a jumping competition with a top prize of $50,000. A number of Olympic and International team show jumpers have taken the prize over the years.

A Belated Happy 100th to JFK

We’re a day late in marking the 100th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth. But, on the principle of better late than never (that’s always been my view on gift giving and receipt), North Carolina Miscellany and its sister blog A View to Hugh share with you images of the 35th President.

Many of the North Carolina Collection’s images of Kennedy are found in the Hugh Morton Collection. Morton, less than four years younger than JFK, photographed Kennedy on several occasions. The photo above features Kennedy, at the time a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, addressing the North Carolina Caucus at the 1956 Democratic National Convention.

In 1961, as President, Kennedy visited Chapel Hill and spoke at UNC’s University Day celebration in Kenan Stadium. Morton was among the photographers who snapped photographs that day.

The North Carolina Collection’s photographic archivist, Stephen Fletcher, has shared the stories behind some of Morton’s photographs of Kennedy on A View to Hugh.

The North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives includes the works of other photographers who captured Kennedy on film. Burlington Times-News staff photographer Edward J. McCauley covered a Kennedy campaign appearance in Greensboro in 1960. The future president appeared with Terry Sanford (to his left and campaigning for Governor), Governor Luther H. Hodges and Senator Sam J. Ervin.

Photographs of Kennedy and his 1960 Presidential campaign opponent Richard Nixon helped the Charlotte Observer‘s Don Sturkey win recognition as National Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1961. In the photo below Kennedy is joined by U.S. Congressman Herbert C. Bonner and Sanford on a campaign stop at East Carolina University in Greenville.

Copyright is held by Don Sturkey. All use requires permission of Don Sturkey.

Word has it that our collections may include images of Kennedy captured by different photographers at the same event. One photographer may have even included another photographer in his shot. That’s for you to verify. Happy hunting!

The WWII History of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

During WWII, keeping up morale for American soldiers was a major national concern. The Library Section of the U.S. War Department, and later an organization called the Council on Books in Wartime, figured out a way to print contemporary titles inexpensively in a small paperback format that would also be easy to carry. The books were printed on presses used for magazines, so the text was set in two columns and each printed page usually included the text of four books. Once printed, the pages were cut apart horizontally. This process created paperbacks that were wider than they were tall. The covers of the Armed Services Editions (ASE) showed an image of the original book cover and noted whether the edition was abridged. Most were not. 

Over the course of the war, 1,322 books (some of which were reprints) were selected to be Armed Service Editions. The list of titles comprised many genres and styles, including fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. It included contemporary literature as well as classics. Though the Army and Navy had to approve the titles selected by the Council on Books in Wartime, there was much less censorship of the titles than might be expected. The program handed out more than one million copies of ASE paperbacks, each free to service members.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Armed Services Edition

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, standard edition

One of the books chosen for publication as an ASE was Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith worked for years as a playwright before writing her first novel, which was wildly successful. She wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn while living in Chapel Hill, but based the novel on her childhood in Brooklyn. This story of a young girl growing up in the tenements was surprisingly popular with soldiers, who sent lots of fan mail to Betty Smith in Chapel Hill. According to Michael Hackenberg’s “The Armed Services Editions in Publishing History,” Smith actually received much more fan mail from soldiers than she did from civilians, even though her book was very popular at home.

Because of its popularity, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of about 100 titles chosen for a second printing as an ASE. In their fan letters, some soldiers wrote that Smith’s book reminded them of their own childhoods in Brooklyn.

Letter to Betty Smith from September 23, 1944, Betty Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library

In a fan letter dated September 5, 1944, Charlie Pierce wrote, “I am a soldier some 1,500 miles from my beloved Brooklyn of which you wrote, so I know something of loneliness. Your book brought many hours of happiness to me – it was so human and so understanding.” Yet another soldier, Frank Ebey, called it simply, “that splendid book,” in his letter from September 1944. Perhaps it was the humanity that Pierce notes, more than a sense of place, which caused A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to resonate with so many ASE readers.

Betty Smith was not the only author with North Carolina ties to have a work published as an ASE. The program printed two of Thomas Wolfe’s novels, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.

Look Homeward, Angel, Armed Services Edition

Of Time and the River, Armed Services Edition

Student Protests over Time in NC Student Publications

Today over on the DigitalNC blog we’re sharing 10 examples of North Carolina student protests, beginning with the historic Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in on this date in 1960 and continuing up to 2012.

The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is located in Wilson Library and works closely with the North Carolina Collection. We’ll occasionally be cross-blogging some posts that North Carolina Miscellany readers may find interesting.

Campaign clutter? We want it

Flyer for Dr. Ralph Mcdonald
Ralph McDonald ran against Clyde Hoey in the Democratic primaries in 1936.

Election day is a mere 27 days away, so the robocalls should be interrupting your evening meals and the postcards and fliers will be filling your mailboxes. We, in the North Carolina Collection, can’t help make your evenings more peaceful. But we can relieve you of some of the clutter. As with elections past, we’re eager to collect campaign flyers, postcards and fundraising letters. Our collection of campaign ephemera now includes more than 5000 items and dates back to the 1800s. And we’re eager to keep it growing. We want to document campaigns across the state and at all levelsᾹlegislative, judicial, Council of State, Congressional and Presidential. That’s hard to do from our spot here in the Triangle. Please help us. Hold on to those mailers, flyers and voter guides. Then when you can stomach the clutter no more, send them our way. The address is:

John Blythe
Assistant Curator
P.O. Box 8890
Wilson Library, CB#3930
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-8890

One final note. We like knowing about the yard signs, particularly ones that strike you as unique. Unfortunately, they take up significant space and it’s hard for us to store them. Before you send us the actual sign, would you mind taking a photo of it and emailing the file to us as an attachment? The address is blythej@email.unc.edu Please remember to tell us where and when you spotted it.

Thanks for helping us document North Carolina politics.

“As Close to Magic as I’ve Ever Been”: Thomas Wolfe at Chapel Hill

Image of Thomas Wolfe smoking a pipe. The photo reportedly shows him during his senior year at UNC.
Thomas Wolfe during his senior year.
One hundred years ago today the tall, rather awkward, not quite yet sixteen-year-old Thomas Clayton Wolfe boarded an early morning train in Asheville bound for Durham. There he was met by his brother-in-law who drove him the twelve miles over to Chapel Hill to enroll at the University of North Carolina. Wolfe had longed to attend the University of Virginia. But his father had insisted he go to Chapel Hill, foreseeing a possible legal career and future in politics for his youngest child. Once at Chapel Hill, however, Tom quickly dove into both coursework and campus activities with a passion and focus that quickly made him among the most prominent and popular students on campus.

Upon arrival in Chapel Hill, Tom signed up for room and board at the three-story rooming house of Mrs. Mattie Eva Hardee, a widow originally from Asheville–$15 a month for board and $7.50 for a student’s half of a room. Writing to his brother-in-law a few days later, he declared the food “splendid” but the room rent “exorbitant.” His professors were “all fine fellows” for whom he hoped to “do well in all my studies and my guess is that I’ll have to ‘bone’ up on math.”

During the next four years, Wolfe would do well in his studies—as a junior winning the prize in philosophy for best student thesis and earning multiple A’s that same year from favorite professors Edwin Greenlaw in English, Frederick Koch in dramatic literature, and Horace Williams in philosophy. His achievements in student publications and as a leader of campus organizations were equally outstanding—assistant editor, then managing editor, and finally editor-in-chief of the Tar Heel student newspaper; assistant editor, then assistant editor-in-chief of the University Magazine; associate editor of the Yackety Yack yearbook; member of student council; author of and sometimes actor in plays performed by the campus Carolina Playmakers campus theater company; and class poet.

After graduating from UNC in 1920, Wolfe studied playwriting at Harvard, then moved to New York where he initially did some teaching at New York University. But soon he turned his legendary intellectual energy and passion to fiction writing. In 1929 his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was published, winning wide praise among literary critics and creating a sensation because of the thinly-veiled autobiographical nature of the book. The life and experiences of the book’s protagonist, Eugene Gant, are often unmistakably similar to those of Thomas Wolfe. In Look Homeward, Angel, however, young Gant attends the state university at Pulpit Hill, not Chapel Hill. But the sense of adventure, excitement, and intellectual stimulation he experienced there as described in Look Homeward, Angel, echo loudly the fond memories of Thomas Wolfe for a place and time he would later describe as being “as close to magic as I’ve ever been.”