Category: Family

Video of “Hearthside Cooking,” a lecture by Nancy Carter Crump

Today we share with you video of a lecture, “Hearthside Cooking,” given by Nancy Carter Crump on March 24, 2009 at Wilson Library, as part of the Southern Historical Collection Book Series. For those who were not able to attend the presentation, we hope this gives you an opportunity to enjoy the talk.  For those of you who did hear Ms. Crump speak, we hope you’ll enjoy it all over again.

[Note:  Due to YouTube’s file size limitations, the lecture is divided into six parts.  The video embedded here is included as a “playlist.”  You can toggle through the six parts individually, or simply hit play and let the six parts run through as a whole.]

Manigault Plantation Journal

The SHC has several wonderful projects available online that provide samples or portions of our collections, including: online exhibits, digitized historical images, maps, bound volumes, and other interesting online content.   Today we wanted to share one such project with you.  It’s called the Manigault Plantation Journal.  It’s found by visiting the UNC Library homepage, then clicking on Digital Collections.  Or you can go directly there by visiting this link:

http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/manigault/

The Manigault Plantation Journal, compiled by Louis Manigault between 1856 and 1879, includes information on plantation life, slaves and slavery, rice cultivation, market conditions, accounts, and other topics. Notes and memoranda kept by Charles Manigault regarding the plantations during the 1830s and 1840s were pasted into the journal. Pages of particular interest include:

  • A narrative of plantation life during the Civil War (pages 22-39)
  • A hand-drawn and colored illustration of Gowrie House (page 41)
  • A hand-drawn and colored illustration of the kitchen house at Gowrie Plantation (page 45)
  • A narrative of a post-Civil War visit to the plantations (pages 55-71)
  • A narrative of a trip to Scotland (pages 74-86)
  • A list of slaves, including their names and ages, who were sold at auction in Charleston, 13 January 1859 (page 140)
  • A photograph of “Dolly,” a runaway slave, and an accompanying description (page 179)

The image shown in this post is that photograph of “Dolly.”  The accompanying description and the offer of a $50.00 reward for her return are real and heartbreaking reminders of the cruelties of slavery.

The Manigault Plantation Journal is part of the Manigault Family Papers (#484).  An full inventory of the materials in this collection is available here.

Hearthside Cooking

[Over the next few weeks, the Southern Historical Collection will be sponsoring a series of booktalks (formally titled, “The Southern Historical Collection Book Series”).  The book series will feature authors of recently-published books that are based on research done in the Wilson Special Collections Library.  Topics of the presentations include: hearthside cooking, hillbilly music, and proslavery Christianity.  For more information about these three events, please see our news release on the main library website.]

As a teaser for the first booktalk, a presentation by Nancy Carter Crump, author of Hearthside Cooking: Early American Southern Cuisine Updated for Today’s Hearth and Cookstove (UNC Press, 2nd edition, 2008), we would like to share a wonderful foodways-related item from the holdings of the Southern Historical Collection.  The image shown at right is a page from an early-19th-century volume called “Recipes in the Culinary Art, Together with Hints on Housewifery &c.,” compiled by Launcelot Minor Blackford in 1852.

Launcelot Minor Blackford (1837-1914) of Virginia was a school teacher who served as a lieutenant in the C.S.A. 24th Virginia Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.  In 1870 he became the principal of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va.  Blackford was fifteen years old when he wrote this volume, which contains cooking and household recipes along with poems and advice.  His advice on how “To make good Children” is as follows: “Whip them once every day; and give them plenty to eat.  (One who has seen, and knows).”

This recipe book is a part of the Blackford Family Papers (SHC collection #1912).

I’m Southern and I’m talking about food, which means I am obligated to mention my grandmother!  Several years ago, before she passed away, my grandmother wrote down and compiled a notebook of her best recipes.  She called the collection, “Vera’s Vexing Victuals.”  One year for Christmas, each of her grandchildren received a copy of this notebook.  I still cherish my copy.  Who knows? It might even end up in an archive someday.

All this leads me to this simple question: if you could preserve one family recipe for eternity, what would it be?  Without question, I would preserve my grandmother’s recipe for chocolate silk pie.

Rev. James A. Felton: Montford Point Marine, Grassroots Organizer, Educator, and Family Man

[Today we feature the life and work of Reverend James A. Felton of Hertford County, North Carolina. The Southern Historical Collection is proud to be the repository that preserves a small collection of papers from the Felton family (the James A. and Annie V. Felton Papers, Collection #5161, finding aid). The following biographical note comes from the finding aid for the Felton Papers.]

James Andrew Felton was born on 6 July 1919 in Hertford, Perquimans County, N.C. After spending almost three years in the United States Marine Corps, he earned his B.S. from Elizabeth City State Teachers College (now Elizabeth City State University) and his M.A. from North Carolina College at Durham (now North Carolina Central University). He taught in the Greene and Hertford County school systems for 20 years, and, in 1965 he published “Fruits of Enduring Faith,” a story that dramatizes the human issues behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the mid-1960s, Felton and Reverend John L. Scott of New Ahoskie Baptist Church formed the People’s Program on Poverty, an African American organization created to study and fight poverty on the grass-roots level. Through his work in this program, Felton founded the first Family Training Center in the United States. During this time, he was also actively involved in organizations such as the President’s Commission on Rural Poverty, the North Carolina Family Life Council, and a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1980, Felton established the C. S. Brown School Auditorium Restoration Association to restore Brown Hall, a building that had been part of the campus of Chowan Academy, an African American school founded in 1886 by Calvin Scott Brown. The C. S. Brown Regional Cultural Arts Center and Museum in Winton, N.C., opened in 1986.

James A. Felton married Annie Vaughan on 3 August 1947. They had six children: James Andrew, Jr., Keith, Maria, Sharon, Michele, and Camilla. James A. Felton died in Winton, N.C., on 6 October 1994.

[To learn more about the contents of the SHC’s Felton Papers collection, please see the finding aid].