Southern Culture – Page 3 – Southern Sources

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.

Creators of the Month: John Charles Campbell and Olive D. Campbell

[Each month we feature a “creator” or one of the SHC’s manuscript collections. In archival terms, a creator is defined as an individual, group, or organization that is responsible for a collection’s production, accumulation, or formation.]

John Charles Campbell and Olive D. Campbell were missionary teachers in Appalachian Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama at the turn of the 20th Century. John Campbell received a research grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to study the mountain regions of the South in 1909 and soon became an expert on the economic and social conditions of the Appalachians. He was secretary of Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation in Asheville, N.C.; author of the Foundation’s survey of conditions in the Southern Appalachians; and organizer of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers.

His wife, Olive Dame Campbell (1882-1954) traveled with her husband; founded and directed the John C. Campbell Folk School and related cooperatives at Brasstown, N.C.; and participated in the formation of the Southern Highland Craft Guild. While working with her husband, she collected mountain ballads and, after his death in 1919, prepared the report of his survey for publication.

Their collection gives a good look into life in Appalachia in the early 20th century. Of particular interest, at least to me, are the volumes and the photographs. Olive Campbell kept diaries of her trips to locations in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. In these diaries, she describes things such as the kinds of food she ate, the houses she went into, and the people that she met.

The photographs are divided into two groups: loose photographs and photograph albums. The loose photographs are primarily images of John Campbell, Olive Campbell, and their families, as well as pictures of their students, their school, and trips that they took. The photograph albums have pictures of Appalachian mountain scenery, students at the Campbell’s schools, and people both at work and at leisure. In PA-3800/8, there is a “Photo-essay on illicit distilling operations in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee.”

The John Charles Campbell and Olive D. Campbell Papers are collection number 3800 in the Southern Historical Collection.

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.