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Judge Rules Bill of Rights Belongs to North Carolina On January 23, 2004, the State of North Carolina moved another legal step closer to recovery of its long-missing original copy of the Bill of Rights. Chief Judge Terrence W. Boyle of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina ruled that the disputed document belonged to the State as a public record. However, he ordered the U.S. marshal in Raleigh to retain possession pending final resolution of any appeals. Even-tually, State officials hope to transfer the Bill of Rights to the State Archives, to resume the rightful place of honor from which it was removed 139 years ago. The priceless document has a mysterious and peripatetic history, much of it spent out of the public eye. It is one of fourteen original copies of the proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution—collectively known as the Bill of Rights—prepared by three federal clerks in 1789. A copy was scrivened for the governor of each state to peruse as the adoption of the twelve amendments (only ten of which were then approved) to the Constitution was debated; the other copy was for the federal government. After the ratification of the first ten amendments in 1791, North Carolina retained custody of its copy of the document for the next eight decades. The secretary of state kept the Bill of Rights with other valu-able state documents in the State Capitol. In April 1865, as Gen. William T. Sherman’s victorious army passed through Raleigh in relentless pursuit of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s retreating Confederates, a soldier from Ohio along with his comrades removed numerous official documents from the State Capitol. The unidentified thief later returned with his unusual spoil of war to his home in Tippecanoe (present Tipp City), in Miami County, Ohio. Approximately one year later, the veteran sold his trophy to Charles A. Shotwell, who then lived at the county seat, Troy. Carolina Comments VOLUME 52, NUMBER 2 APRIL 2004 Published Quarterly by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, missing since 1865, was recovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last March. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Attorney General’s Office and Karen Blum, N.C. Department of Justice.) 3 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S A Message from the Deputy Secretary Culminating nearly a year of intense legal maneuvering, federal judge Terrence Boyle ruled on January 23, 2004, that North Carolina should get back its original copy of the Bill of Rights. Out of an abundance of caution, how-ever, Judge Boyle ordered federal authorities to retain cus-tody of the document until the case is finally adjudicated. While Boyle’s decision is not the final chapter in the document’s 139-year saga, it underscores two important principles. The first affirms that North Carolina will not pay to have its public records returned. The second principle rein-forces the first: public records created by the state belong to the people of North Carolina. Ownership of those documents cannot be alienated with-out legislative approval. Over the years leaders of the Office of Archives and History have maintained those principles, often in the face of criticism, or when expediency might have dictated a different course. This agency’s responsibility for managing the state’s public records is mandated by G.S. 121 and G.S. 132. Before 2003 North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, which was stolen from the State Capitol by a Union soldier in 1865, had come to light three times. In 1897, Dr. Cyrus Thompson, the North Carolina secretary of state, learned that the state’s copy of the Bill of Rights was on display in Indianapolis, Indiana. Working with the Indiana secretary of state and a newspaper publisher, Thompson tried without success to secure the document. In 1925 the Bill of Rights appeared again. When an agent tried to sell the docu-ment to the State of North Carolina, Robert B. House, secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission, refused. He argued that “title to it has never passed from . . . North Carolina to any individual.” The Bill of Rights next surfaced in 1995 when a lawyer tried to open negotiations for its purchase. Officials of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources again declined to buy back a public record that belonged to the people of North Carolina. Judge Boyle reaffirmed those principles in his decision. He specifically cited North Carolina v. B.C. West Jr. (1977) to make his ruling. In that case the North Carolina Supreme Court had decided by a vote of five to two that public ownership of records could never be broken. The case centered on two colonial legal documents signed by William Hooper when he was a Crown attorney. Hooper later signed the Declaration of Independence. The West case established a precedent for the return of public records to the custody of the state. As an immediate consequence of that decision, a letter dated August 26, 1790, from President George Washington to the governor and Council of State also was returned to the state. In that letter, Washington welcomed North Carolina into the Union upon its ratification of the federal Constitution. The driving force behind the West case was Dr. Thornton W. Mitchell, then state archivist. His courage, foresight, and resolve ensured that the state’s public records would always belong to the people of North Carolina. At this writing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has not ruled. The case could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Office of Archives and History looks forward to the day when it can receive the Bill of Rights and celebrate its return with the citizens of North Carolina. Jeffrey J. Crow Some thirty years later, Shotwell was working in the Board of Trade Building in Indianapolis, Indiana, proudly dis-playing the unique relic on the wall of his office. On May 10, 1897, the Indianapolis News ran an article about Shotwell and his souvenir that, in the journalistic fashion of the day, was picked up and reprinted in its entirety by the Raleigh News and Observer on June 10. State supreme court justice Walter Clark saw the article and wrote to North Carolina Secretary of State Cyrus Thompson, ask-ing that he take appropriate measures to recover the docu-ment, which “on its face . . . belongs to the State of N.C. and to your office & the State can reclaim it anywhere & at any time.” At Clark’s suggestion, Thompson wrote to his counterpart in Indiana, William D. Owen. For three months, there was no response. Finally, on September 25, Thompson wrote to the Indianapolis News to see if the facts as reported in the article of May 10 were true. He also mentioned to the newspaper that he had made unanswered inquiries to the secretary of state. Within a few days, he received two letters from Owen, the first apologizing for his failure to answer the earlier letter and explaining his inability to get in contact with Shotwell. Owen’s second letter, dated September 30, detailed his interview with Shotwell, whom he had found in a bad humor as a result of the adverse publicity he was receiving from the local press. Shotwell claimed to have been personally acquainted with the soldier from whom he had purchased the manuscript, “an honorable gentleman whose integrity could not be called in question,” but who had admitted to tak-ing the Bill of Rights “and other articles from the State House at Raleigh as souvenirs.” Despite Owen’s judgment that “with genteel and courteous treatment, he will not be unreasonable in the matter,” Shotwell refused to part with the document and soon disap-peared from public view. Twenty-eight years passed with no further word of Shotwell or the purloined Bill of Rights. Then, in February 1925, Professor J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton of the University of North Carolina received a curious letter from Charles I. Reid of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Reid requested some background information concerning the theft of the North Carolina copy of the Bill of Rights. He claimed to represent an old man (presumably Shotwell) who had bought it from a Union soldier soon after the war. Interestingly, Reid and Shotwell’s son Grier had served together in the U.S. Army during World War I. Hamilton referred the letter to Robert B. House, secretary of the North Carolina Historical Com-mission. After being rebuffed in an attempt to sell the document to a private collector in Durham, Reid offered it to the commission, but House refused to buy stolen State prop-erty. In a memorable phrase, House declared: “So long as it remains away from the official custody of North Carolina, it will serve as a memorial of individual theft.” Reid, his mys-terious client, and the Bill of Rights again disappeared. In 1991, Charles A. Shotwell’s descendants contacted attorney Charles Reeder to facili-tate the sale of the Bill of Rights. Reeder approached Sotheby’s Auction House in New York, which sent representatives to Indiana to view the document and to hear the account of its removal from the Capitol in Raleigh. Sotheby’s declined to get involved because of questions about North Carolina’s claims to title to the document. Reeder then turned his attention to an auction house in Chicago, Illinois. The owner of the house also had con-cerns about the title and requested that the commission be increased from 20 to 30 V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 3 9 The Board of Trade Building in Indianapolis, Indiana, circa 1900. Charles A. Shotwell displayed the North Carolina copy of the Bill of Rights in his office in this building. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.) percent; the business relationship soon ended. (North Carolina officials did not learn of these attempted sales until after the recovery of the Bill of Rights in 2003). In 1995, North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights resurfaced and the State was again given the opportunity to purchase it. Reeder had eventually come into contact with prominent antiques dealer Wayne E. Pratt, who used his agent, attorney John L. Richard-son of Washington, D.C., to broker a sale between his unnamed clients and the State. As before, North Carolina officials refused to even consider paying the asking price of $2 mil-lion for the return of State property. Wayne Pratt, Inc., bought an option to purchase the Bill of Rights from the Shotwell heirs in September 1997. But Pratt wanted to authenticate the manuscript prior to purchase. One afternoon in early 2000, three men and a young woman with an oversized cardboard container visited the offices of the First Federal Congress Project at George Washington University in downtown Washington. They had an appointment to have a document appraised for authenticity. The foursome refused to identify themselves; two of them did not speak at all but had the appearance of bodyguards (as in fact they were). Project director Charlene Bickford and two members of her staff were first shown photographs, and then the actual document was removed from the cardboard art box. Bickford and her colleagues immediately realized they were looking at an original Bill of Rights, but were unable to determine which of the missing copies it was, as the document was mounted and framed, preventing an examination of the critical docketing information on the back. (Altogether, five of the original fourteen copies—those belonging to Georgia, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—were then missing. Two are suspected to have burned, while unidentified copies are housed in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.) Bickford advised the visitors, who refused to disclose where they had obtained the manuscript, that they would have enormous difficulty in selling an alienated document that was both priceless and worthless. She had the impression that she was merely confirming what they already knew of the provenance of the manuscript. Bickford also recommended that they have an expert conservator remove the backing from the document to permit an inspection of any endorsements on the reverse. The mysterious visitors quickly packed up and departed. In February 2000, soon after this encounter, Wayne Pratt, Inc., purchased the North Carolina Bill of Rights from two Shotwell descendants for $200,000. Manuscripts expert Seth Kaller of New York was approached in 2002 by the agent of a client (Wayne Pratt, Inc.) that wished to sell an original copy of the Bill of Rights. Kaller suggested the National Constitution Center, then under construction in Philadelphia, as a likely customer. He had no doubt been informed that the center was looking for just such an item—preferably Pennsylvania’s missing copy—to display at the opening of the center on July 4, 2003. Soon thereafter, center president Joseph Torsella and board member and attorney Stephen J. Harmelin were contacted by a broker offering to sell the center a copy of the Bill of Rights. The broker sent a notebook detailing the history of the document, with photographs of the front and back. Torsella contacted Charlene Bickford to authenti-cate the manuscript. From the photographs of the back of the document, handwriting expert Helen Veit of the First Federal Project Congress staff quickly concluded that the document belonged to North Carolina. Bickford also noticed that information she had supplied to the mysterious visitors during her previous appraisal of an original Bill of Rights was contained in the notebook. Torsella then notified Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who was also a member of the museum board, of the offer to sell the stolen doc-ument. Governor Rendell contacted his counterpart in North Carolina, Michael F. Easley, to see if he would like to share the cost of purchase. Consistent with the State’s stance since 1897, the governor refused to even consider buying what rightfully belonged to North Carolina. He sought the advice of North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper 4 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S and the Office of the U.S. Attorney in Raleigh. Soon, the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were laying plans for a sting operation to recover the stolen manuscript. On March 18, 2003, John L. Richardson arrived at the law offices of Dilworth Paxson, LLP, on Market Street in Philadelphia. In the firm’s conference room on the thirty-second floor, he met attorney Harmelin, purportedly representing the National Constitution Cen-ter, to transact the sale of the copy of the Bill of Rights belonging to Pratt. Seth Kaller was also present to certify the authenticity of the manuscript. Richardson was shown a check for $4 million; he confirmed by phone the transfer of the funds to his bank account. Assured that the money was in hand, he called a courier in the lobby of the building to bring up the document. The courier brought in the same cardboard art box that Charlene Bickford had seen three years before. The manuscript was removed from the box and placed on the conference table. After Kaller pronounced the document to be a genuine original copy of the Bill of Rights, Harmelin left the room, supposedly to bring in Torsella, as agent for the center. Instead, five FBI agents rushed in and took custody of the document, which Richardson had already tendered. The agents also served a civil seizure warrant signed by Judge Boyle (who later concluded that the Bill of Rights had already been voluntarily transferred before service of the warrant). As the State prepared its brief for the civil suit against all other claimants, prosecutors requested further evidence that would tie the recovered Bill of Rights irrefutably to North Carolina. George Stevenson Jr., private manuscripts archivist at the North Carolina State Archives and an acknowledged expert on eighteenth-century paper and handwriting, was summoned to the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Raleigh to examine the document. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of the records in the archives, Stevenson compared the handwriting of the endorsement on the back of the Bill of Rights with that on the reverse of the October 2, 1789, letter of transmittal from President George Washington to North Carolina governor Samuel Johnston. He also compared the endorsement on the back of North Carolina’s original copy of the eleventh amendment to the U.S. Constitution, received in 1795. He determined that all three notations were in the same hand. From previous research, Stevenson knew that Pleasant Henderson of Granville County had served as one of the engrossing clerks in the 1789 assembly, and as assistant clerk to the House of Commons in 1795. He compared numerous samples of Henderson’s handwrit-ing with the endorsements on the Bill of Rights, the letter of transmittal, and the 1795 amendment. He concluded that all three were by the hand of Pleasant Henderson and attested to such in an affidavit filed in federal court on August 8, 2003. On September 11, a deal was struck between Pratt, the United States, and the State of North Carolina that seemingly secured possession of the Bill of Rights to North Carolina. Pratt agreed to relinquish his claim and give the document to the State. In return, the State declined further prosecution of its civil forfeiture suit, United States of America v. North Carolina’s Original Copy of the Bill of Rights, and the United States promised to refrain from criminal proceedings against Pratt. Apparently, only one legal issue remained unresolved: Robert V. Matthews, Pratt’s erstwhile business partner and purported co-owner of the document, demanded a $15 million tax write-off for his half of the “gift,” which has an estimated value of $30 million. U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney suggested that that was a private matter to be settled between Matthews and Pratt. At a hearing on November 21, Judge Boyle issued an order that seemingly signified the court’s intention to return all matters of litigation to status quo ante, including the release of the Bill of Rights to Richardson as prior possessor. Erstwhile defendant Pratt filed a motion for clarification in federal court. Pratt’s lawyer suggested that Richardson was merely the representative of his client, who had since assigned his “title” to the document V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 1 to North Carolina. Therefore, the Bill of Rights should be returned to the State, not to Richardson. On December 12, the State initiated legal proceedings in Wake County Superior Court. Attorney General Cooper and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources Jeffrey J. Crow asked for a declaratory judgment proclaiming the dis-puted document a public record, petitioned for the return of that record to its proper cus-todians, and moved for a temporary restraining order to prevent the Bill of Rights from being damaged, hidden, or removed out of state. Matthews’s lawyers have appealed Judge Boyle’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Virginia. They have also requested that the Fourth Circuit order the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina to return the parties to the status quo ante by releasing the Bill of Rights to Matthews in Connecti-cut. There the matter rests until the State can one day reclaim its patrimony. State Archivist Cathy Morris and Editor Hank Jordan Retire The Office of Archives and History lost nearly sixty-eight years of experience with the retirement of two longtime employees this winter. After more than thirty-two years of state service and nearly four years as state archivist and records administrator of North Carolina, Catherine J. Morris retired at the end of February. Morris began her career with the Department of Archives and History as a typist in the Historic Sites and Museums Sec-tion in 1972, progressively assuming more responsible positions within the agency. With experience as supervisor of the agency’s Technical Services Branch from 1987 to 1994, she became supervisor of the Records Services Branch of the State Archives in 1994. Upon the promotion of David J. Olson to assistant director of the Division of Archives and History in 2000, Morris was named state archivist and records administrator. Morris is a graduate of Wake Forest University, a certified public manager, and a certi-fied archivist. She has been active in numerous professional and civic organizations, including the North Carolina Society of Certified Public Managers, the National Association of Gov-ernment Archives and Records Administrators, the Southeastern Archives and Records Conference, the Society of North Carolina Archivists, and the Friends of the Archives. A retirement party was held on the after-noon of February 23 at the North Carolina Museum of History where friends, family, and fellow employees gathered to wish Mor-ris farewell. David Brook, director of the Division of Historical Resources; Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History; H. G. Jones, former curator of the North Carolina Collection and former director of the Department of Archives and History; William S. Price, for-mer director of the Division of Archives and History; David J. Olson, deputy secretary for Arts and Libraries; and Jerry Cashion, chair-man of the North Carolina Historical Com-mission, were among those who took part in the ceremonies. Morris was given a formal certificate of retirement by Cashion, and 4 2 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Dr. Jerry Cashion (right) presents Cathy Morris (left) with a formal certificate of retirement at a ceremony in her honor at the Museum of History. Crow presented her with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine award on behalf of Gov. Michael F. Easley. Weymouth T. (Hank) Jordan Jr. retired from the Historical Publications Section at the end of January. Prior to entering state service, he performed intelligence duties with the U.S. Air Force in England from 1957 to 1960. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Florida State University in 1963 and 1964, respectively. He did postgraduate work there in 1965, was an instructor of history at Auburn University (1965-1966), worked towards a doctorate at the University of Virginia (1966-1967), and then served on the staff of the reference division at the University of Virginia Library from 1966 through March 1968. In April 1968, Jordan began his career with the Department of Archives and History in the Archives and Records Section. He became editor of the Civil War Roster Project in 1970, having co-edited Volume III with Louis Manarin. During the course of his long career, Jordan edited Volumes IV through XV. He was working on Volume XVI at the time of his retirement. His assistant, Matthew Brown, was promoted into the position of editor, effective March 1. Hank Jordan was one of the most meticulous people ever to work for the Historical Publications Section. One of the greatest contributions he made to the series was the expansion of the regimental histories. His twelve volumes of the roster project will remain the standard of excellence and a testament to his thorough research, and will continue to enrich the study of Civil War history for years to come. He too was honored with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. QAR Conservation Lab Dedicated at East Carolina University A facility in Pitt County that once broadcast the message of freedom behind the Iron Curtain is now home to thousands of artifacts associ-ated with the pirate Blackbeard. On January 15, the QAR Conservation Lab was dedicated on the West Research Campus of East Carolina University (ECU), at the former site of a Voice of America station. The ceremony featured exhibits of arti-facts, tours of laboratories, a buffet luncheon, and a ribbon cutting. Approximately 250 people—scien-tists, businessmen, archaeologists, and university and government officials—were in attendance, including William E. Shelton, chancellor of ECU; Lisbeth Evans, secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources (DCR); Dr. Timothy Runyon, director of the Mar-itime Studies program at ECU; Dr. David Nateman, director of the North Carolina Mari-time Museum; and James T. Cheatham III, a major benefactor of the Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) recovery effort. A Memorandum of Agreement between DCR and ECU answered the critical need for a dedicated laboratory to handle the nearly one million artifacts projected to be salvaged from the wreckage of the QAR. The space available in the Fort Fisher conservation lab was limited, and the temporary arrangement for the use of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences facility in Morehead City was about to expire. Construction at the Voice of V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 3 Artifacts from the wreckage of the Queen Anne’s Revenge on display at the new conservation lab at East Carolina University. America site began in February 2003, with funding for equipment and staff provided by a federal Save America’s Treasures grant. Project conservator Sarah Wilkins-Kenney, formerly with the British Museum, was hired last March. Wendy Walsh, manager of the laboratory, moved with the artifacts from Fort Fisher in July. The laboratory team was completed with the addition of Eric Nordgren, who formerly worked with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Egypt, as assistant conservator. Graduate assistants David Krop and Danielle LaFleur of the Maritime Studies program worked on the project during the fall semester. The conservation facility consists of two laboratories—a wet dirty lab and a clean dry lab—two small offices, and a 4,000-square-foot warehouse for the storage and treatment of large artifacts. Approximately 11,000 of the 16,000 artifacts recovered thus far from the QAR—a mere 2 percent of the estimated one million items to be gleaned from the wreckage—have been sent to the laboratory from Morehead City and Fort Fisher. Among the items salvaged to date are five cannons, navigational and medical instruments, pieces of the ship, and personal effects. Conservationists confront two major areas of concern in treating remains recovered from the ocean floor: the removal of concretions of calcium carbonate, shells, and sand; and the removal of soluble salts, particularly sodium chloride. After treatment, each item must be dried and covered with a protective coating. Finally, identifying information about each artifact, such as physical characteristics, condition, site of recovery, and conservation procedures utilized, is entered into a database maintained at the Office of State Archaeology in Raleigh. The artifacts are then sent to the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Beaufort for display, storage, and further study. Brunswick Town Opens New Exhibit Area Friday the thirteenth of February proved to be a great day for Brunswick Town State Historic Site. After years of frozen funds, budget cuts, and seemingly futile planning, new exhibits were officially opened to the public. Approximately one hundred invited guests, including past and present members of the North Carolina legislature, the North Carolina Historical Commission, the Brunswick County Board of County Commissioners, and Secretary of DCR Lisbeth Evans, attended the opening reception. The ceremony began with an introduction by site manager Jimmy Bartley and brief remarks by Kay Williams, director of the Division of State Historic Sites, and Mrs. Frances Allen, president of the Friends of Brunswick Town. Former site archaeologist Dr. Stanley A. South of the University of South Carolina gave the keynote address (left). After telling many “war stories” of the earliest days of Brunswick Town as a state site, where he led the uncovering of many of the features of the colonial town and the remnants of the earthworks of Fort Anderson, Dr. South joined other dignitaries to cut the ribbon to the exhibit area. More than five years ago, Brunswick Town received notice that funds had been secured to renovate 4 4 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Wendy Walsh, manager of the QAR laboratory, explains conservation techniques to visitors during the dedication program on January 15. “temporary” exhibits that had been in place since the visitor center opened in 1967, and to refurbish the center. Renovation began in early 1999. Site staff returned to a new visi-tor center with 1,800 square feet of exhibit space in 2000, but the exhibit project had been put on hold because of budget cuts. Summer after summer the staff urged visitors to return next year to see new exhibits. Former representative David Redwine worked hard to pro-tect the $770,000 appropriation needed to make the dream come true. Now, finally, visi-tors can walk through some of the most attractive historical exhibits in the state. The new exhibits present the pre-colonial, colonial, and Civil War eras. A furnished colonial house facade, a Civil War bomb-proof, 275 artifacts, and freestanding exhib-its, as well as kiosks, all are part of the display. To provide a “you are there” experience and to fully engage visitors’ senses, several exhibit areas are augmented by appropriate sounds. Crackling noises invite the guest to a campfire, while he reads about the Cape Fear Indians. For the first time, the Native American presence in the region is fully explored. An original piece of dugout canoe and other native artifacts are displayed. Brunswick Town was attacked in 1748 by Spanish seamen, who ransacked the town. One of their ships, the Fortuna, blew up after being fired upon by the colonists. In the 1980s a cannon from the Fortuna was recovered from the Cape Fear River. It is on display in the front of the exhibit area, under a rare mosaic by North Carolina artist Claude Howell that depicts the attack. Smithsonian Features Spencer Shops and Salisbury in Major Exhibit The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) has a massive new exhibit, America on the Move, which includes Salisbury and Spencer Shops in 1927 as a major thematic part of the display. The section on the two Rowan County towns is one of eighteen different thematic centers in the exposition, each with a represen-tative topic, date, and place in America since 1876. The exhibit, which encompasses 26,000 square feet and cost $22 million to create, replaces several outdated exhibits on railroads, roads, and civil engineering built decades ago. It is expected to be maintained in the Smithsonian for at least twenty years. The most massive artifact in the exhibit, Southern Railway steam locomotive No. 1401, was built in 1926 and for decades carried passengers through parts of North Carolina. A 4-6-2 Pacific-type locomotive, No. 1401 weighs about two hundred tons and is ninety feet long. It is so large and heavy that a portion of the NMAH was of necessity built around it in the 1960s. The locomotive rests outside a replica facade of the Salisbury depot in 1927. In the depot is a mannequin of African American educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown, which tells the story of Brown being forced out of a Pullman sleeping coach by white ruffians for violating Jim Crow laws about 1920. The thematic center also features images, stories, and artifacts (several loaned by the N.C. Transportation Museum, or NCTM) of Spencer Shops, which employed some 2,500 railroad workers in the late 1920s. “An Economy in Motion” tells how Salisbury, a representative town of the era, depended heavily on V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 5 The new exhibits at Brunswick Town include this thirty-two-inch-tall Iberian olive jar, which was unearthed at the site and reconstructed from numerous sherds by staff archaeologists. railroads, which in the late 1920s carried 70 percent of U.S. intercity passenger traffic and 75 percent of intercity commercial freight. In the depot is an area depicting the rail-cen-tered mail order catalog business of the day. A delegation from Spencer and Salisbury attended a pre-opening tour of the exhibit and reception in late November. Among the guests were several staff members from the NCTM, Sturges Bryan, president of the NCTM Foundation, and various officials from Salisbury and Spencer. The Smithsonian has agreed to have NCTM brochures available near the exhibit. The gigantic display features an accompanying book and an elaborate website, http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/. Wooden Boat Show at Maritime Museum to Celebrate Thirtieth Year Since 1975, the North Carolina Maritime Museum’s Wooden Boat Show has encour-aged owners and builders of wooden boats to come together to show and operate their boats. Professional boat builders who work with traditional designs or materials will find a receptive audience for their products. Amateur builders and traditional wooden boat enthusiasts will be at the show to share their boats and experiences. Registration is limited to boats of twenty-five feet or less in length, of home or profes-sional construction, and constructed primarily of wood. Larger vessels may be exhibited only by pre-arrangement. The registration fee is $35. The same applicant may register additional boats for $5 each. Commercial or non-commercial exhibits related to the mari-time theme of the show require submission of photographs and pre-approval by the exhibit panel. While the exhibition of wooden boats will take place on Saturday, May 1, the preced-ing week will be awash with events leading up to show day. As part of the thirtieth anni-versary of this museum-sponsored show, additional maritime-related programs, exhibits, and events will be available for visitors. Activities will begin on Sunday, April 25, with demonstrations of traditional maritime trades and skills in the museum’s Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center. Boatbuilding skills classes will be held throughout the week, beginning with a Build A Boat In A Day class on April 25, from 9:00 A.M. until 3:00 P.M. This course is designed for six teams of four persons each. At least one of the team members must be a child aged eight or older (two children are permissible). The cost for the class is $225 per team, $200 for Friends of the Museum (FOM). A two-day Woodworking Joints class will be conducted on April 27-28, from 9:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. each day. Students will be taught the proper use of a variety of tools. Step-by-step procedures for cutting accurate mortise and tenon joints, bridle joints, and lap joints are demonstrated, as well as the correct way to lay out, measure, and mark for tight-fitting joints. Registration is $75, $65 for FOM. Students in the Oar Making class on April 29-30 will complete a pair of well-balanced box loom oars. The cost for the class is $95 per person, $85 for FOM. Reservations are required for all three classes. Visitors that prefer to watch will find the observation deck in the Watercraft Center a great vantage point. On Friday evening, April 30, from 5:30 until 8:00 P.M., the museum’s nearby Gallants Channel property will be the location for fascinating tales of maritime life in Carteret County shared by renowned local storyteller, Rodney Kemp. The site, home to the repository of artifacts from Blackboard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, will provide an eclectic mix on this evening, as visitors will get to view artifacts, enjoy pizza and beer, and listen to Kemp’s stories inside a huge tent. This undeveloped thirty-six-acre site offers enormous possibilities for future development of the N.C. Maritime Museum. The prop-erty is accessible by either boat or car. Tickets for the evening are $10 per person. 4 6 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S On May 1, Exhibition Day, as many as fifty wooden boats will be on display in the water, inside the Watercraft Center, on Front Street, and on the museum grounds. There will be maritime skills demonstrations, a ship model exhibition, children’s model-building classes, radio-controlled model boats, and tours of the museum’s small-craft collection. There is no admission charge for the show or to visit the museum. On the water will be rowing and sailing races and opportunities to sail on Taylors Creek in one of the museum’s traditional watercraft. This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to sail with an expe-rienced captain on board spritsail skiffs or sharpies from the museum’s collection. A dona-tion of $5 per person is suggested, and an adult must accompany children. To register a boat or submit an exhibit, contact Jane Wolff at the N.C. Maritime Museum, 315 Front Street, Beaufort, NC 28516, call (252) 728-7317, or e-mail maritime@ncmail.net. News from Historical Resources Archives and Records Section The Government Records Branch was reorganized on November 1, 2003. The arrangement and description function for state agency records was transferred from the former Records Description Unit into a newly reorganized State Agency Services Unit. The latter’s new, combined functions are to store and protect non-current records of state agencies; to destroy non-current records without permanent or archival value, in accordance with approved records and disposition schedules; and to preserve, arrange, describe, and make available for research the permanently valuable records of North Carolina state agencies. In addition, the functions of the Local Records Unit and the county records component of the now defunct Records Description Unit were merged to form a reorganized Local Records Unit. The unit provides services to local officials, including consulting on records management issues, analyzing records and writing reten-tion schedules, providing advice on records preservation at the local level, transferring records to the State Archives for permanent preservation, and arranging and describing those records. The North Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board (SHRAB) received notifi-cation in December that it had been conditionally awarded an NHPRC grant for its pro-posed statewide archival training initiative, “Archival Education for the 21st Century.” Amounting to $50,621 in federal funds, matched by $60,753 in in-kind contributions by the Archives and Records Section, the SHRAB grant will underwrite an ongoing series of prac-tical training workshops that address both the need for instruction in basic archival principles and practices and intermediate-level education in specific areas of archives and records work. The project will fulfill a need identified at the SHRAB’s statewide conference on records, “Charting Our Future,” held in November 2001. Recommendations and evalua-tions received from the conference were analyzed and reviewed by the board in 2002 and V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 7 2003, and provided the framework for this educational initiative. The North Carolina SHRAB has worked closely with the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), and archival/historical societies in New York, Ohio, and Michigan, in develop-ing a workshop curriculum. After the two-year SHRAB project is complete, the Society of North Carolina Archivists (SNCA) has agreed to continue the training program. In March, the section’s Information and Technology Branch added several reference sources to the Archives’ website and online catalog, MARS (Manuscript and Archives Ref-erence System). Images of more than 187 early North Carolina map images were added to the descriptions available in MARS. These images represent more than 265 scans, in excess of 93 gigabytes of information. The public may view these maps by going to http://www.ncarchives.dcr.state.nc.us/, and doing a search on North Carolina Colony and State Maps. The Archives also has posted a new website containing more than 96 finding aids for private collections, photograph collections, and organizational records. These are available at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/archives under the heading, “Information for Researchers.” The Friends of the Archives (FOA) board met on February 9, and following its meeting the annual staff appreciation luncheon was held in the Archives and History/State Library Building’s conference room. This traditional event is one of the most effective ways that the FOA extends its appreciation to Archives and Records staff for their hard work and service on behalf of the people of North Carolina throughout the year. On January 20, Secretary Evans traveled to the Outer Banks History Center (OBHC) in Manteo to accept a digital collection donated to the center by the Outer Banks Sentinel newspaper. Secretary Evans personally thanked Sentinel editor Sandy Semans for the gift of the unique collection, which includes images depicting life on the Outer Banks in 1903, rare Wright brothers photographs, and First Flight Centennial stories produced for the centennial of the first flight. A new local history photographic exhibit at the OBHC gallery opened to a crowd of nearly one hundred guests on February 17. Aerial Views, Things in the News, the Beach of Yesteryear, and Past Happenings Here: Black & White Photographs by Roger P. Meekins fea-tures approximately fifty black-and-white images of Dare County and the surrounding region, dating from 1949 to 1954. Roanoke Island resident Roger P. Meekins chronicled the Outer Banks in aerial shots, landscapes, and scenes of everyday people. Photos of square dancing in Hatteras, net mending at Stumpy Point, boxing matches at the Nags Head Casino, and huge hauls of fish being unloaded at the Wanchese docks convey a sense of community life in the days before the area became a tourism Mecca. Meekins grew up on Roanoke Island, where his father was the founder and editor of the local newspaper, the Coastland Times. After obtaining a pilot’s license at the age of seventeen, Meekins took to the air with an army surplus camera, taking shots for the newspaper. He often flew to cover stories on Hatteras Island or mainland Dare in the days 4 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Lisbeth Evans (left), secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, accepts from Sandy Semans, editor of the Outer Banks Sentinel, a digital collection of photographs and stories from the First Flight Centennial celebration. before bridges connected the remote areas of the county. Combining his interest in photog-raphy with a passion for flying, Meekins began an aerial photography service. He also photo-graphed local weddings, christenings, and family reunions, eventually assembling a collection of over eight hundred negatives that are unparalleled in the way they document the area. These negatives were donated to the OBHC in 1994 and, until this exhibit, many have never been developed into prints. The OBHC staff designed and produced the exhibit. Sarah Downing selected the images, developed the interpretive themes, conducted essential research, and wrote the text. Kelly Grimm printed the neg-atives to exhibit-quality standards. Together they added colorful design elements that further highlight the visual impact of Meekins’s work. Aerial Views, Things in the News, the Beach of Yesteryear, and Past Happenings Here will be on display through August. The gallery is open seven days a week, with hours varying seasonally. The OBHC is located across from the Manteo waterfront at Roanoke Island Festival Park. For more information contact the center at (252) 473-2655. Recent Accessions by the North Carolina State Archives During the months of December 2003 and January and February 2004, the Archives and Records Section made 204 accession entries. The Archives accessioned original records from Columbus, Cumberland, Henderson, New Hanover, Pamlico, Randolph, and Rockingham Counties. The Archives received security microfilm of records for Alamance, Beaufort, Cabarrus, Catawba, Chatham, Cumberland, Davie, Durham, Frank-lin, Gaston, Gates, Greene, Guilford, Halifax, Harnett, Henderson, Hertford, Hyde, Iredell, Macon, Madison, Mecklenburg, Nash, Onslow, Person, Robeson, Rockingham, Rowan, Stokes, Transylvania, Wake, Watauga, Wayne, and Wilson Counties; and for the municipalities of Asheville, Mooresville, Northwest, Rocky Mount, Sunset Beach, Topsail Beach, and Wake Forest. The section accessioned records from the following state agencies: Department of Commerce, 2 reels; Department of Environment and Natural Resources, 31 reels; Depart-ment of Health and Human Services, 489 cubic feet and 1 fiche envelope; Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 5 reels; General Assembly, 34 reels; Gover-nor’s Office, 16.45 cubic feet, 42 Fibredex boxes, and 2 folders; Secretary of State, 3 reels; and Supreme Court, .4 cubic foot fiche box. The John W. Gould Letters, the Hannibal M. Little Papers, and the Clyde R. Hoey Papers were accessioned as new private collections. Additions were made to the Black Mountain College Miscellaneous Collection, the Ruth P. Barbour Papers, the William Joslin Papers, and the Janis R. Ramquist Papers. The Hannibal M. Little Account Book and John Calvin Rich Account Book were added to the collection of account books. Two rare volumes, the Journal of a young man of Massachusetts . . . (1816) and The Cherokee Physician . . . (1849), were added to the vault collection. Other records accessioned included school records for the Miller-Motte Business School (6 cubic feet) and the Mann Travel Academy (2.5 cubic feet) added to Academic Records; 2 Bible Records; 101 audio V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 9 A visitor examines one of the photographs from the Roger P. Meekins collection on display at the Outer Banks History Center. and 23 videotaped interviews, and 9 other items, added to the Military Collection; records of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (J. Johnston Pettigrew Chapter) and the Tuesday Afternoon Book Club (addition), accessioned as Organization Records; 7 issues added to the Newspaper Collection; and 2 original prints and 10 videotapes added to the Non-textual Materials Collection. Historical Publications Section Volume III of The Papers of James Iredell has been released nearly thirty years after the first two volumes were published. Edited by Donna Kelly and Lang Baradell, this volume provides a comprehensive view of Iredell’s life in the years immediately preceding his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. During this period (1784-1789), Iredell prac-ticed law, served on the North Carolina Council of State, prepared a revisal of the state’s laws, supported the launching of the University of North Carolina, served in the Constitution ratification convention, and had a county named for him. Copies of Volume III of The Papers of James Iredell may be pur-chased for $37.10, which includes tax and shipping. On the evening of March 2, approximately fifty members and guests of the North Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society attended a gathering at the Carolina Country Club to honor James Iredell. A collection of rare books and manuscripts used or written by Iredell was on display. Following a buffet dinner, Willis Whichard, dean and professor of law at Campbell University, presented the keynote address. Jeffrey J. Crow then introduced Kelly and Baradell, who made brief remarks about their editorial work on Volume III. The Honorable I. Beverly Lake Jr. presented each of them a plaque of appreciation for their con-tributions to the legal history of North Carolina through their editing of the third and fourth volumes of Iredell’s papers. The fourth volume is forthcoming. Volume II of the Colonial Records of North Carolina [Second Series] is back in print after seventeen years. First published in 1968, North Carolina Higher-Court Records, 1670-1696 has been out of print since 1987. Edited by Mattie Erma Edwards Parker, the volume contains records that shed light on many aspects of life in colonial North Carolina, includ-ing sources of immigration, business relations with other colonies, occupations of early settlers, and social customs. This reprint of Vol-ume II of the Colonial Records of North Carolina (533 pages, indexed, clothbound) costs $58.50, including tax and shipping. The 2004 catalog of publications is now available free of charge (left). It lists over 160 titles, including 5 new ones: The North Carolina State Fair: The First 150 Years, by Melton A. McLaurin; The Papers of James Iredell, Volume III, 1784-1789; Paving Tobacco Road: A Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, by Walter R. Turner; Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, edited by E. Thomson Shields Jr. and Charles R. Ewen; and Volume XV of North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, edited by Weymouth T. Jordan Jr. 5 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Editors Donna Kelly (left) and Lang Baradell (right) of the Historical Publications Section accept plaques from the Honorable I. Beverly Lake Jr., chief justice of the Supreme Court, (center), in recognition of their work editing the papers of James Iredell. All of these books may be ordered from the Historical Publications Section, Office of Archives and History, 4622 Mail Service Center (CC), Raleigh, NC 27699-4622. For credit card (VISA and MasterCard) orders visit the online store at http://store.yahoo.com/ nc-historical-publications/ or call (919) 733-7442. For walk-in purchases visit the office at 120 West Lane Street, Raleigh, weekdays from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. News from State Historic Sites and Properties Capitol Section The Capitol Section was affected by a reorganization of the Raleigh-based offices of the division. As of March 1, the Museum and Visitor Services Branch was elevated to section status. The State Capitol was removed from its affiliation with Tryon Palace in the Capitol Section and placed in the Museum and Visitor Services Section. C. Edward Morris will serve as chief of the new section. Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens resumes its status as an independent section. North Carolina Transportation Museum The North Carolina Transportation Museum (NCTM) is moving closer to completing a major goal of acquiring and restoring a large aircraft for display in the Back Shop. The plane is an original DC-3, named the Potomac Pacemaker, which once flew for North Carolina’s Piedmont Airlines. The twin-propeller-driven DC-3 was the last of its kind to carry Piedmont Airline passengers; it flew 48,000 hours before being taken out of service in 1963. Now, after more than twenty-five years mounted on large pylons outside the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, the plane is being moved by NCTM personnel. In January museum staff traveled to Durham to examine DC-3 N56V. The purpose of the trip was to appraise the aircraft to determine what tools, lifts, and cranes would be required to facilitate the move. Master mechanic John Bechtel devised a six-weeks disas-sembly plan (at least two days a week), which was soon set in motion. Retired Piedmont Airlines executive and NCTM supporter Ronnie Macklin coordi-nated removal of the propellers, the first step in disassembly. He arranged for assistance and the loan of special tools. Then workers removed the engine covers, engines, and wheels, using a rented lift and a forklift with a boom. The rest of the plan will carry the process through extraction of the control surfaces—ailerons, elevators, rudders, and trim tabs. After that will come disassembly of the outer wing panels, a process that will require a rental crane and the dropping of a nearby power line. The next major step is removal of parts between the fuselage and the horizontal stabilizer, and between the fuselage and the center wing section. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 1 Finally the museum team will lift the aircraft from the pylons and complete the final disassembly. A crane and riggers will raise the plane from its supports and place it on the ground. The horizontal stabilizer is then removed, and the fuselage sepa-rated from the center wing section. All components will be loaded onto trucks and moved to Spencer for reassembly. The transport of small components will be accomplished with the museum’s rollback truck. Larger items will be moved with trucks pro-vided by the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Northeastern Historic Sites Section Historic Bath has been awarded funding for a summer intern through the Alderson Internship Program, administered by the American Association of State and Local History. The intern will work with staff from Historic Bath and the division office in Raleigh to complete two small exhibits that will be mounted at the site during its 2005 tri-centennial year. These exhibits—John Lawson and the Beginning of Bath and Blackbeard: Bath’s Most Notorious Resident—will complement special programming at Bath in 2005. The intern will be responsible for researching topics to be covered in the exhibits, working with site staff to choose and research objects and illustrations for the exhibits, writing labels, and assisting exhibit design staff to create text panels and design the layout for exhibits. The intern will also work with the educational staff to create a simple activity or handout related to each exhibit appropriate for elementary school students. To apply for the internship, send a letter of interest and vitae postmarked by April 15 to Dr. Patricia Samford, Historic Bath, Box 148, Bath, NC 27808. For further information, call (252) 923-3971, or e-mail patricia.samford@ncmail.net. Camden County Middle School won first place in the regional history bowl held at Historic Edenton in February. Coach John Hill and his teams have participated in nine of the ten Edenton competitions since 1995. Students on the winning team were Jarrod Brothers, Chris Lawson, Ben Kornegay, Khristian Ortiz, and Heather Wolsiefer. Hertford Middle School, coached by Wallace Johnson, took second place. Other schools competing this year included Central Middle School, Janet McElfresh, coach; Chowan Middle School, Phyllis Copeland, coach; Currituck Middle School, Kim Jackson, coach; and First Flight Middle School, Colleen Vaughan, coach. Regional history bowls at other state historic sites will continue until the state championships in late April. Piedmont Historic Sites Section The Spitting Image: A History of Spittoons and Cuspidors, an unusual collection of recepta-cles used by tobacco chewers and snuff dippers, opened as a new temporary exhibition at Duke Homestead State Historic Site and Tobacco Museum on February 28. The unique exhibit will remain on display until December 1. 5 2 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Retired Piedmont Airlines executive Ronnie Macklin (left) assists Chic Ayers (right) in the removal of a propeller from a DC-3 at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. The plane is being disassembled and moved to the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer. Extensive research revealed that spittoons and cuspidors, common in much of nineteenth-century America, have never before been featured as a stand-alone museum exhibit, nor has there been a definitive history written on the topic. B. W. C. “Ben” Roberts, a charter member of the Duke Homestead Education and History Corporation, initiated the concept of a spittoon display. With his wife, Snow, he began collecting different models at area antique stores. His search eventually extended out-of-state and onto the Internet via eBay. As word of the project spread, numerous individuals also contributed spittoons. Apparently among the largest in the country, the collection now includes more than fifty different spittoons, ranging from an 1890s turtle-shaped version that opens when its head is pressed, to a brass cuspidor used in the N.C. Senate chamber in the State Capitol until 1961. The Spitting Image: A History of Spittoons and Cuspidors is made possible by the Duke Homestead Education and History Corporation, the Division of State Historic Sites and Properties, and Ben and Snow Roberts. Like several other state historic sites, the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum sponsored a number of special events and activities for Black History Month in February, including lectures and workshops. Activities included an exhibit and forum by the African American Quilt Circle of Durham. Dr. Freddie Parker, Department of History chair at N.C. Central University, led a special workshop that examined major themes of the black experience in America and concepts not often emphasized in the public school curricula. Topics included desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education, African Americans before 1900, reparations for slavery, and the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The museum’s own Brown Memorial Singers presented a concert of traditional spirituals and gospel music. The museum also offered special programs for Women’s History Month in March, including an exhibit, Achievements of Women, and a lecture series sponsored by the Char-lotte Hawkins Brown Historical Foundation and Louis Raiford. Roanoke Island Festival Park On February 14 and 15, a Civil War Living History Weekend commemorated the 142nd anniversary of the Battle of Roanoke Island. The fourth annual event featured re-enactors portraying Union and Confederate soldiers and sailors, artillery demonstrations, blacksmithing, quilting, rope-making, woodworking, leather-work, presentations, and lectures. Author Barbara Smith of Washington, N.C., signed copies of her book, Burning Rails As We Pleased, in the museum store during the Civil War weekend. The book is a V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 3 This turtle-shaped spittoon is one of more than fifty varieties on display at Duke Homestead. Author Barbara Smith with some of her great-grandfather’s letters that she compiled and published as Burning Rails As We Pleased. compilation of letters her great-grandfather, William Garrigues Bentley, wrote to his fam-ily during the war. Her late grandmother, who kept them in a box, passed on the letters to her. Smith recalls how her grandmother “would get out this box full of letters and she would read them to me” during the summers she spent with her. Many years later, while visiting a Civil War battlefield, she told her own daughter about the letters. This conversa-tion led to a New Year’s resolution to transcribe the material, which became an obsession to which she often devoted twelve to fourteen hours a day, scanning letters on her computer. Two old paintings, recently restored at the N.C. Museum of Art, are on loan to Roanoke Island Festival Park from Robert Midgette of Manteo. They are displayed in the administration building. Midgette inherited the art from his father in 2000. Apparently the paintings had come down through the family from Pat Ethridge, a lighthouse keeper at Rodanthe. According to Midgette’s family history, the two portraits were salvaged from shipwrecks, whose contents often washed up on shore. Portrait of a Lady is an eighteenth-century work, painted over an older portrait visible in x-rays taken during the conservation process. The older painting shows a woman more mature of face but in similar clothes. There is no history of the artist or the subject. During restoration, the painting was cleaned, surface cracks repaired, and the canvas support stabilized. Portrait of a Man, appar-ently a nineteenth-century copy of an older work, is signed “Om. Breit, après, V. Steen.” Again, the artist and subject are unknown. Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens On February 19, Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens hosted a free showing of the documentary February One, which tells the story of the 1960 Woolworth store sit-in at Greensboro, a seminal event in the history of the Civil Rights movement. Using contem-porary photos and first-hand accounts by participants, the hour-long film traces the causes and consequences of the sit-in, which inspired other non-violent protests across the nation and ultimately changed public accommodation laws. Inspired by the four Greensboro students—Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Frank-lin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—who began the sit-in, young African Americans in New Bern staged a similar protest at the local Kress store lunch counter. Charles Bell, now a Newark, New Jersey Municipal Council member, was one of the par-ticipants. After the screening, Bell and producer Rebecca Cerese led a discussion about the film and the effects of the sit-in on both the participants and the nation. February One, produced by Video Dialog, Inc., of Durham, was awarded the Human Rights Award at the River Run Film Festival in Winston-Salem and received the first annual Global Peace Film Festival Award in Orlando, Florida. The screening is part of the African American History Lecture Series, sponsored jointly by the James City Historical Society and Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens. Western Historic Sites Section The experts have finished the interior and exterior work, furniture will soon be moved back in, and a sneak peak for the press of the refurbished Asheville boardinghouse is scheduled for April. Closed for almost six years, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State His-toric Site in Asheville is set to reopen the weekend of May 28, after more than two years of complex and painstaking restoration. Reopening festivities will include a rededication ceremony, living history tours, a for-mal banquet, the performance of a Wolfe play, guided trolley tours of Asheville, and a special Authors Evening featuring several prominent southern writers. (Participants have 5 4 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S not yet been disclosed.) Site staff members anticipate that during the four-day reopening extravaganza, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial will host scores of visitors eager to see what the house looks like after restoration. Memorialized by the famed writer in his classic novel, Look Homeward, Angel, the “Old Kentucky Home” was victimized by an arsonist the night of June 24, 1998. The fire began in the dining room and raged through floors, walls, ceilings, and woodwork, severely damaging the house and furnishings. Even-tually, the roof collapsed into the 1883 boardinghouse. Water and smoke also took a terrible toll. But soon American literature lovers throughout the world will have a chance to see the famous home rise anew from the ashes. Thanks to the meticulous $2.4 mil-lion restoration, the house now much more closely resembles the way it looked during the ten years that Wolfe lived there, begin-ning in 1906, when his mother bought the building and started to rent rooms to board-ers. Historians and restorers have returned it to 1916, the year Wolfe left Asheville to study at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The exterior of the rambling boarding-house has been repainted yellow to match its color during the period of Wolfe’s residence. New interior color schemes, roofing, wall treatments, and landscaping also reflect the house Wolfe thinly fictionalized as “Dixieland” in Look Homeward, Angel. Even the loud lime green trim in one of the downstairs bedrooms is true to the period. Historians consulted on the project chose 1916 because it was the year Julia Wolfe made the last substantial changes to the boardinghouse. She added eleven rooms, bringing the total to twenty-nine, encompassing approximately 6,000 square feet. To enhance the period feel, some artifacts from later years that were previously displayed in the house—such as Wolfe’s Harvard diploma—have been reinstalled in the visitor center exhibit hall. Because of the efforts of numerous firefighters and volunteers, three-quarters of the eight hundred artifacts in the house at the time of the fire were rescued. Since the disaster, Historic Sites curatorial staff members and other experts have worked tirelessly to restore these artifacts to their former glory. In some cases, they’ll look even better than before. For example, once it was cleaned, a roll-top desk revealed that it was made from a gorgeous piece of burl wood, its brilliance previously dimmed by age. Other artifacts given new life through painstaking restoration include Julia and W. O. Wolfe’s cot-tage- style bed, in which all of their children were born, and a stunning gilt-edged pier mirror in the downstairs hall. When he began work on the project, restoration architect Joseph K. Oppermann received precise orders from longtime site manager Steve Hill: “When you get done here, I don’t even want to know you were ever here.” As a result of the commitment to histor-ical authenticity, it appears that not even Tom Wolfe himself would now know the fire had ever happened. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 5 This cottage-style bed, in which Thomas Wolfe and his siblings were born, is among the furnishings that survived the fire at the Wolfe Memorial and have been completely restored by the curatorial staff. News from State History Museums North Carolina Museum of History As part of the two-year Celebration of North Carolina Craft, the museum showcases a stunning selection of silver pieces. Highlighting the exhibit are objects by Paul Revere II and William Waldo Dodge Jr., an Asheville silversmith who gained a national reputation for his work. Crafted from Silver: Objects in the Museum’s Collection, on view through May 9, also fea-tures several recent acquisitions, including a ladle made in the early 1800s by Raleigh silver-smith Jehu Scott. Many of the exhibit items were purchased by the Museum of History Associates, the statewide support group, for the museum’s permanent collection. A new traveling exhibition, Women of Our Time: 20th-Century Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery, will be on display from May 28 to August 1. This collection of photographic portraits celebrates seventy-five women whose brilliance, courage, style, and unflagging spirit have helped shape America. The exhibition, organized by the Smithso-nian’s National Portrait Gallery, is on national tour while the gallery is closed for major renovation. On June 5, Ann Shumand, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, will present an illustrated lecture in conjunction with the exhibit. The N.C. Museum of History has been awarded a $301,000 teacher training grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant will underwrite four five-day teacher workshops in African American history and culture titled, “Crafting Freedom: Thomas Day and Elizabeth Keckly, Black Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the Making of America.” Teachers from North Carolina and elsewhere may apply to attend workshops to be offered in June and July. Sessions will be held at the museum and other sites in the Triangle area. The workshops are part of NEH’s new Landmarks of American History Teacher Workshop initiative, and are designed and conducted by the Thomas Day Education Pro-ject, an independent multicultural education initiative based in the Research Triangle Park. For more informa-tion, visit www.thomasday.net, call toll-free 1 (877) 438-1599, or e-mail tdek04@aol.com. Staff Notes 5 6 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S This photographic portrait of Helen Keller, taken in 1904 by Charles Whitman, is one of seventy-five images of prominent twentieth-century American women included in the traveling exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery to be on display at the North Carolina Museum of History. (Photo courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution). V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 7 Upcoming Events April 12 Historic Halifax. Halifax Day. Celebrate the 228th anniversary of the adoption of the Halifax Resolves, with tours and living history activities, and a patriotic observance sponsored by the North Carolina Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. April 14, 21 Aycock Birthplace. Living History. Visitors can experience old-fashioned spinning and weaving, and the making of butter, lye soap, and candles. 9:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. April 17 North Carolina Museum of History. Writer’s Block: Hugh Morton’s North Carolina. Photojournalist Hugh Morton discusses his new book, which features his own personal favorites from the thousands of photographs snapped during his sixty-year career. A book signing will follow the program. 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. Polk Memorial. Mexican War Encampment, 1847. Living history program presented by the 12th U.S. Infantry and the 1st U.S. Dragoons. Re-enactors depict camp life, period uniforms and equipment, weapons demonstrations, and a mustering-in station. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. April 18 Historic Bath. Bath Fun Day. Historic Bath will complement this annual municipal celebration with hands-on colonial activities, such as rope-making, games, and cornhusk dolls. 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. April 19 North Carolina Museum of History. This Far by Faith: Stories from the African-American Religious Experience. Journalist Juan Williams discusses the role that inspiration fueled by religious faith played in the Civil Rights movement. A reception will follow the program, which is funded by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and GlaxoSmithKline. 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. Register by April 16 at (919) 715-0200, ext. 283. April 22 North Carolina Museum of History. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Author Jean Fagan Yellin discusses her new biography of the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. A reception will follow the lecture. 7:00 P.M. Register by April 19 at (919) 715-0200, ext. 283. April 24 Bennett Place. Living History. Program includes a military encampment, drill demonstrations, music, and children’s activities. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. House in the Horseshoe. Militia Muster. Features a militia encampment and demonstrations of eighteenth-century crafts and activities. April 27-28 Reed Gold Mine. Heritage Days. Area fourth-graders and their teachers experience the life-styles and crafts of the past in this annual event. Group reservations required for panning and underground tours. 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. Fee for panning. May 1 Museum of the Albemarle. History of Lifesaving. Program explores the history of lifesaving and lighthouses along the North Carolina Outer Banks with lectures, exhibits, and demonstrations. 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Battleship Alive. Living history interpreters demonstrate daily duties, drills, and inspections aboard a World War II battleship. Special tours of the Living History areas and exhibits of home-front activities are featured. 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. May 1-2 Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex. Military Through the Ages. Learn about the evolution of weapons, tactics, and uniforms from re-enactors camped on the arsenal grounds representing a variety of mili-tary units. Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., and Sunday, 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. North Carolina Transportation Museum. Rail Days. Annual event showcases the importance of railroads in the state, and features steam and diesel train rides, caboose rides, musical entertainment, food vendors, and children’s activities. Fee. For more information, call (704) 636-2889. 5 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S May 2 Roanoke Island Festival Park. Seventh Annual Mollie Fearing Memorial Art Show. Opening reception for this annual showing of local paintings, drawings, sculptures, photography, and stained glass. Produced by the Dare County Arts Council in honor of its founder. 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. Show runs through May 26. May 8 Bentonville Battleground. Confederate Memorial Day. Memorial service near the Confederate mass grave, co-hosted by the Harper House-Bentonville Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 11:00 A.M. Fort Fisher. Confederate Memorial Day. Program recognizes and honors the builders and defenders of Fort Fisher. State Capitol. National Historic Preservation Week Celebration. Includes lectures, special tours of the Capitol and Union Square, trolley tours of Raleigh, and costumed interpreters. Cosponsored by the Raleigh Historic Districts Commission. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. May 12 North Carolina Museum of History. History à la Carte: Blackbeard: The Man Behind the Legend. Author Margaret Hoffman, who has spent years separating the myths surrounding the pirate from the reality of his life, will share some facts about Blackbeard more fantastic than fiction. 12:10 P.M. May 14 North Carolina Maritime Museum, Beaufort. Blackbeard Fest Symposium. Special event features tours of artifact exhibits, lectures about pirates and the discovery and recovery of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and a boat ride to the site of the wreck and Cape Lookout. 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. May 15 North Carolina Museum of History. The Lost Light: The Mystery of the Missing Cape Hatteras Fresnel Lens. Author Kevin P. Duffus discusses his book about the lens from the Cape Hatteras lighthouse that was hidden from the Union navy in 1861 and went missing for 140 years. A book signing will follow the program. 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. May 15-16 Alamance Battleground. 233rd Anniversary of the Battle of Alamance. Annual event features demonstrations of colonial domestic and military life, and concludes with special commemorative activities. Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., Sunday, 1:00 to 9:00 P.M. May 16 Historic Bath. Open House. Held in conjunction with National Tourism Day, open house will feature free tours of the Palmer-Marsh and Bonner Houses, an open hearth cooking demonstration, and hands-on craft activities for children and adults. 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. May 22 North Carolina Maritime Museum, Roanoke Island. Sail Training and Boat Handling. One-day course using traditional small sailing craft. $85 fee. To register or for further information, call Scott Whitesides at (252) 475-1500. May 28-31 Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Grand Reopening Gala. Festive reopening of Wolfe’s “Old Kentucky Home” includes special tours, living history programs, dramas, visiting authors, a banquet, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. May 30 Mountain Gateway Museum. Steel Rails Hummin’. Bill and Kristin Morris share songs and stories about the Western North Carolina Railroad. 3:00 P.M. May 31 State Capitol. Memorial Day Ceremony. Military encampment on the Capitol grounds represents three centuries of American military tradition, and a wreath laying ceremony at the Veteran’s Memorial honors North Carolinians who serving during times of war. 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Memorial Day Observance. Traditional Memorial Day ceremony features guest speaker, all-service color guard, a gun salute, Taps, and a memorial wreath cast upon the waters of the Cape Fear River. 5:45 P.M. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 9 June 5 Duke Homestead. Herb, Garden, and Craft Festival. Historical outdoor herb festival includes displays on traditional uses of herbs, craft demonstrations, herb and craft vendors, live music, children’s games, and refreshments. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. North Carolina Museum of History. Curator’s Talk. Women of Our Time. In conjunction with the traveling exhibit from the National Portrait Gallery, Ann Shumard, curator of photographs at the gallery, presents an illustrated lecture about path-breaking women of the twentieth century. 2:00 to 3:00 P.M. June 6 Roanoke Island Festival Park. Penland School of Crafts Show. Opening reception for showing of works by Penland artists in a variety of media, including blacksmithing, textiles, and glass art. 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. Show will run through June 30. June 7-11 Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex. Summer Kids Excellent Adventure: Carolina Crafts Fest. In conjunction with the statewide celebration of North Carolina craft, this year’s free summer camp provides children ages 9 to 12 hands-on opportunities to learn about such domestic crafts as candle making, weaving, rope-making, pottery, and storytelling. For more information, call (910) 486-1330 or e-mail mcfhc@infionline.net. June 9 North Carolina Museum of History. History à la Carte: An Astronomer Recalls Her Early Career. Jaylee Montague Mead, who joined NASA in 1959 as one of the first female astronomers, reflects on the challenges facing America’s early space program and on her own exciting career. 12:10 P.M. June 12 Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum. African American Heritage Festival. Outdoor event celebrates African American music, crafts, art, and dance, and features a Bronco League baseball tournament and live performances. 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. June 12-13 State Capitol. Civil War Encampment on Capitol Square. Weekend encampment includes lectures, period music, and demonstrations of military drills and camp life. Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., Sunday, 12:00 to 5:00 P.M. June 13 Historic Bath. Palmer-Marsh House Summer Music Series. In this first concert of the series, pianist Heidi Souza and cellist Brent Selby, both of Bath, will perform. Seating is limited to thirty persons. Advance tickets may be picked up at the Visitor Center. 2:00 p.m., free of charge but donations accepted. For more information, call (252) 923-3971 or e-mail bath@ncmail.net. June 14-July 4 State Capitol. Historic Flag Exhibit: “The American Spirit.” The rotunda will be filled with a display of historic replica flags, including the Star Spangled Banner. The exhibit is sponsored by Bayer Cropscience. June 15, 17 Historic Bath. Past Times Day Camp. Children ages 5 to 10 will learn basic life skills used by our forefathers. They will have an opportunity to cook biscuits in Dutch ovens, make herbal tea from herbs in the garden, make brooms, see how fishnets were mended, and participate in other historical activities. 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. $10 fee for the two-day session. June 21-July 17 Historic Bath. Summer Ventures in Archaeology. On weekday mornings, visitors can watch and learn how archaeologists work, as high school students enrolled in the Summer Ventures program work with East Carolina University archaeologist Dr. Charles Ewen and Historic Bath staff to uncover Bath’s buried history. June 22 USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Battleship Hootenanny. Fourth annual event on the fantail of the battleship features local musicians, including John Golden and Eric Bruton. $10 fee will benefit Friends of the Battleship. 8:00 P.M. In the Division of State Historic Sites and Properties, Justin Chambers has resigned as division exhibits designer to accept a similar position with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Jemi Johnson has separated as public affairs coordinator at the North Carolina Transportation Museum. At Tryon Palace, Brian Bowden, horticultural techni-cian and section gardener, and Priscilla Speed Hunter, information communications spe-cialist and grant writer, have both resigned. Gordon Hale has separated as site assistant at Vance Birthplace. New site assistants have been named at House in the Horseshoe, Polk Memorial, and Reed Gold Mine: Jeff Rieves, Courtney Hybarger, and Rebecca Lewis (transferred from the N. C. Museum of History), respectively. Marie Sharpe has been transferred to the division office as special projects curator. David Brook has been named director of the Division of Historical Resources, remov-ing the “acting” status from the position that he has held since November. Anne Miller, editor of the North Carolina Historical Review, has been appointed to the executive commit-tee of the Conference of Historical Journals, publishers of the newsletter, Editing History. Several staff changes have occurred within the Archives and Records Section over the last several months. Dick Lankford has been named interim state archivist and records admin-istrator, succeeding Cathy Morris, retired. Ed Southern was promoted to head of the Government Records Branch and assistant state records administrator on January 1, 2004. Lisa Maxwell resigned as records management analyst I. Chris Black started work in February as a processing assistant IV with the Correspondence Unit of the Public Services Branch, but resigned later in the month to accept the vacant records analyst position. Douglas Brown was hired as an archivist I in the Local Records Unit. Charles Michael Duncan was hired as a processing assistant IV in the State Agency Unit. In the Public Services Branch, Tom Vincent began work as an archivist I and Hilary Kanupp as a processing assistant IV. In the Collections Management Branch, Charles Murray was promoted from processing assistant IV to photo lab tech II. Lea Walker was hired as an administrative secretary III within the section’s Administrative Branch. At the North Carolina Museum of History, Michael Daul has been named multimedia producer. Colleges and Universities Campbell University Dr. James I. Martin has been appointed chairman of the Department of Government, History, and Justice. Two full-time faculty members, Dr. Stephen M. King and Professor Catherine B. Cowling, have joined the department for the 2003-2004 academic year. 6 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S June 26 Bentonville Battleground. Summer Seasonal Living History Program and Artillery Demonstrations. Costumed interpreters demonstrate routine activities of the common North Carolina soldier during the Civil War, such as small arms fire, close order drill, and the firing of a three-inch rifled cannon, and discuss the uniforms and equipment used during the war. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. July 4 State Capitol. Independence Day Celebration. Traditional, family-oriented celebration with patriotic concert and picnic on the grounds. 12:30 to 3:30 P.M. USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Battleship Blast. One of the largest choreographed fireworks displays in the state may be viewed from Wilmington’s historic downtown area. 9:05 P.M. University of North Carolina at Greensboro The Division of Continual Learning, in cooperation with Old Salem, is again offering four courses this spring and summer in the fields of historic preservation, archaeology, and museum studies. The first course, “Field Methods in Preservation Technology,” is cosponsored by the State Historic Preservation Office. It offers lectures by craftsmen and preservation specialists, and hands-on fieldwork in Old Salem using such techniques as masonry restoration, wood and stone conservation, wood shingle and slate roofing, re-glazing and repairing old windows, and paint analysis. The class runs from May 17 to June 4. A second course, “Research Methods in Historical Archaeology,” also provides participants with field experience. Students will be shown the basics of excavation, map-ping, artifact analysis, photography, measurement, and record keeping, as they participate in the exploration of the site of the 1766 “Builders House,” the first building constructed at Old Salem. The class begins on May 19 and concludes on June 16. The university cam-pus will be the site of the third course, “Identification and Evaluation of the Historic Built Environment.” The two basic methods of documentation and analysis of historic build-ings— field surveys and National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) nominations—will be introduced. Students will learn to conduct field documentation, archival research, and oral interviews as they prepare an actual NRHP nomination for a building in Greensboro. The dates for the course are June 10 to July 15. The final offering, “Southern History and Material Culture,” will focus on the collection of Old Salem’s Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) within its historical setting. This year’s course will emphasize the history and material culture of the Chesapeake region before 1820. Instructors will examine current methods of research, interpretation, preservation, and analysis of decora-tive arts and architecture from the period. The class will run from June 20 to July 16. The application deadline for these courses, each of which carries three credits, is April 20. To register or to obtain further information, call the Division of Continual Learning at (336) 334-5414, or visit their website, www.uncg.edu/hpms. State, County, and Local Groups Cape Fear Museum A new exhibit at the museum explores the use of campaign buttons and jewelry in American elections. Push Your Buttons: Politics in Action features a thousand buttons from the museum’s collection or on loan from the public. The exhibit covers the century of political campaigns from 1896 to 1996, and includes buttons of all the presidents and many of the unsuccessful candidates during the period, as well as state and local office seekers. The evolution of voting machinery, from ballot box to voting booth, is also illustrated. An Optech Magnifier and interactive display cases allow visitors to closely inspect the campaign memorabilia. The exhibit opened on January 16 and will run through November 28. Chapel Hill Historical Society Dr. Trudier Harris-Lopez, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, was the featured speaker at the monthly meeting of the society on February 1. She discussed the role of George Moses Horton, an illiterate Chatham County slave who could compose poems in his head, in the development of African American poetry. Horton’s first volume of poems, The Hope of Liberty, was pub-lished in 1829 before he was taught to write by the wife of a UNC professor. The histori-cal society has recently published a new collection of his works, titled Naked Genius. Dr. Harris-Lopez is the founder of the George Moses Horton Society for the Study of African American Poetry. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 1 Greensboro Historical Museum The museum acknowledged Black History Month with book-signings by the authors of two recent publications concerning African Americans. On February 8, Jim Carrier dis-cussed some of the historic sites in the Southeast that are noted in his A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement. The International Civil Rights Center and Museum of Greens-boro cosponsored the event. The African American community of Greensboro is the focus of a recent publication by photographer Otis L. Hairston Jr., who spoke at the museum on February 15. Greensboro North Carolina, a number in the Black America Series by Arcadia Publishing, was conceived as a tribute to his late father, Dr. Otis L. Hairston Sr., pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church from 1960 until his death in 2000. A selection of Hairston’s photo-graphs over the past forty years will be exhibited at the museum through May 10. Lincoln County Historical Association In conjunction with the Downtown Development Association of Lincolnton, the histori-cal association is hosting the fifth annual (but the first week-long) Historic Preservation Week, May 17-22. This year’s theme, “New Frontiers in Preservation,” suggests the eclectic nature of topics to be covered, with seminars on digitization, metadata, disaster planning, conserving museum collections, and collecting church and local histories. Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History, will be the keynote speaker at the kickoff dinner on May 17, discussing the various ways the office can assist local organiza-tions. The distinguished panel of speakers scheduled to participate includes Dr. Gary Freeze, Tim Pyatt, Kathy Wisser, Kevin Cherry, Pat Ryckman, David Goist, and Carol Kammen. The event is sponsored by the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners and the City of Lincolnton. The cost for the six-day conference is $150 if registered by May 3; the rate for early registrants (by April 15) is $125. To register or for further information, contact Jason Harpe at the Lincoln County Historical Association, 403 East Main St., Lincolnton, NC 28092. Montford Point Marine Museum A new museum has been established in Jacksonville to preserve the legacy of the only U.S. Marine Corps boot camp for African Americans during World War II. The mission of the Montford Point Marine Museum is to collect and preserve in a museum environ-ment photographs, documents, and artifacts that reflect the unique history of the camp and the 23,000 soldiers who passed through it from 1942 to 1949, the first of their race to earn the title “marine.” The museum acquisition committee is currently seeking such materials, either by gift or loan. The museum is located in Building M101 on the Camp Johnson Marine Corps Base, former site of the Montford Point camp, at Jacksonville. It is currently open only on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Groups are encouraged to schedule visits in advance by calling (910) 347-4930. For further information, visit the museum’s website at www.montfordpointmarines.com, or e-mail Finney Greggs, director, at montfordpointmuseum@earthlink.net. New Bern Historical Society The society sponsored three events during the winter that reflected its involvement in the New Bern Battlefield Preservation Project, the effort to expand and preserve the site of the 1862 Battle of New Bern. On January 26, a general meeting at the New Bern Craven County Library presented the community with a status report on the project. Mark Mangum, architect Paul Stephens, and historian Richard Lore were the featured speakers. Project coordinators and volunteers spruced up the battlefield during the ninth 6 2 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S annual Park Day on February 21, trimming bushes and cutting down trees. On March 27, a Civil War Adventure Day for children offered a walking tour of the grounds, demonstra-tions and drills by Civil War re-enactors, and period craft activities. The society has recently purchased an additional 2.63 acres of the original battlefield for parking facilities and a visitor center. More than twenty-six acres are now under the society’s protective care. Phoenix African American Historical Society of Edgecombe County On February 21, at its annual Black History Month program, the society presented the Helen Gordon Quigless Jr. African American History Award to St. Paul AME Zion Church for the church’s efforts to recover, record, and promote its unique history. Orga-nized in 1866, St. Paul AME Zion Church is the oldest African American church in Tarboro. The church’s edifice was damaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and demolished in 2002. Thereafter, the congregation erected monuments on the site to commemorate the church’s existence and its contributions to the community. The four granite monuments include an obelisk stating the origin of the church and highlight-ing several outstanding members; an upright ledger documenting the church’s destruction by the floodwaters on September 16, 1999; a headstone denoting the site of the Tarboro Colored Institute, established in 1869 (the first school for African Americans in Tarboro, sponsored by the church); and a slab anchoring the church’s 1883 bell. The society’s annual award has been named for Helen Gordon Quigless Jr., who died in February, to honor her exemplary service. She was the first president of the organization that was started in April 2001. Through the years, she was an avid supporter of African American history and historic preservation at the national, state, and local levels. Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities The nonprofit Friends of Weymouth recently agreed to act as fiscal agent for a fund-raising effort, the “Bring Sam Home Fund,” to purchase a portrait bust of Sam Ragan for the center. Ragan, who died in 1996, was Poet Laureate of North Carolina, the first secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, and the first chairman of the North Carolina Arts Council. He was also instrumental in the preservation of the Weymouth Center as a nonprofit arts venture, and in the establishment of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in the center. A remarkable bronze likeness of Ragan has been cast by Gretta Bader of Alexandria, Virginia, whose works are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery. Marsha Warren, executive director of the Paul Green Founda-tion, and writer Charles Blackburn are serving as co-chairpersons of the campaign. All tax-deductible contributions will be acknowledged in a celebration at the center when the goal of $25,000 has been realized. To make a contribution or for further information, contact Charles Blackburn at (919) 547-5212, or by e-mail at cblackburn@sigmaxi.org. Obituaries With the death of Thomas Custis Parramore on January 13, North Carolina history lost one of its stalwarts, a teacher and scholar with a determined commitment to ferret out little-known aspects of the state’s past. Since retiring from the history department at Meredith College in 1992, Parramore had dedicated his energy to researching the history of flight in North Carolina; he lived to see the centennial commemoration of the Wright Brothers’ exploits on the Outer Banks. In recent years, he also had taken an interest in the story of Hannah Crofts, once the property of John Hill Wheeler of Murfreesboro, and the author of a recently discovered slave narrative. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 3 It was characteristic of Tom Parramore to take an interest in Crofts and to generously volunteer to assist out-of-state scholars in fixing the historical context of the narrative. Parramore was born in Winton, Hertford County, and displayed a lifelong interest in the history of northeastern North Carolina, contributing substantially over the years to the work of the Murfreesboro Historical Commission. He joined the Meredith faculty in 1962 upon completing his graduate training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Parramore was a prolific author, publishing fifteen articles in the North Carolina Historical Review, contributing to The Way We Lived in North Carolina series, and penning major works on the history of freemasonry and of Norfolk, Virginia. The culminating work of his career was First to Fly: North Carolina and the Beginnings of Aviation, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002. Parramore did not hesitate to challenge con-ventional wisdom, reveling in taking contrary positions and staking out uncharted scholarly ground. Tom Parramore’s name, like that of his wife Barbara, is familiar to a generation of eighth-grade students, by virtue of the widespread adoption in the public school system of their two North Carolina history textbooks. But his work extended well beyond the class-room, leading him to accept speaking engagements across the state and the Southeast and to participate in a host of professional organizations. In his private life, Tom Parramore demonstrated a commitment to the ideals he held close, among those civil liberties, peace, and the values of the Baptist Church and the Democratic Party. Parramore was 71. A ser-vice was held in his honor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh on January 24. * * * Historian Jaquelin Drane Nash of Tarboro died on February 16. The highlight of her long, productive career was the publication of a history of Calvary Episcopal Church on the occasion of the bicentennial of Tarboro in 1960. She co-authored Three Centuries of Customs Houses and A Few Unsung Women: Colonial and Pioneer, both published by the National Society of Colonial Dames. Mrs. Nash also contributed fourteen articles to the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. In 1994, at the age of eighty-four, she served as project historian for the excavation of Eden House in Chowan County. She served on the Edenton Historical Commission, and was founding director of the Edgecombe County Historical Society, which named its honorary award for her. In 1976, she was named a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in recognition of her research on colonial governor Gabriel Johnston. She was elected to the North Caroliniana Society in 1987, and received the Gertrude S. Carraway Award from Preservation North Carolina in 1995. Fittingly, Mrs. Nash was buried at Calvary Church, where she had been a faithful and active member for many years. * * * G. E. “Pete” Nash of Charlotte, a loyal and generous supporter of Reed Gold Mine for decades, died on December 19, 2003. Pete and his brothers, Harold and Robie, were good friends to the mine. Harold located and/or restored many of the major machinery artifacts, as well as the ten-stamp mill, preserved at the mine today. Pete was known for his expertise in panning and for years could be found volunteering at the mine, sharing his skills and fascinating stories with schoolchildren. 6 4 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S “The Birth of a North Carolina Symposium” By Claudia S. Slate EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Claudia S. Slate (right) is professor of English at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. Her teaching and research focus on American and African American literature. She recently participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Harvard University entitled, “African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1866-1965.” During the summer of 2000, on our way back to Florida from the Outer Banks, my husband and I visited Edenton, North Carolina, population 5,300, a charming town filled with stunningly preserved antebellum homes and a real commitment to history. I sought out Edenton because it was the hometown of Harriet Jacobs, the author of an 1861 slave narrative that I include in my American and African American lit-erature classes. Little did I know that this visit at the beginning of a new century would be the catalyst for a three-year project, culminating on April 4-5, 2003. What I envisioned walking the streets of Edenton and discovering the buildings, such as St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and the Old Jail, that were instrumental in Jacobs’s life was a symposium dedicated to Jacobs, held right there in her hometown. Thanks to Jacobs, I knew the stories that those walls could tell, and I ached for everyone passing by to hear them as well. In pursu-ing this vision, I discovered the essential elements for the planning of a successful humani-ties project, which I would like to pass along: a unique mission; objectives that include all segments of the community; and cooperative, enthusiastic individuals. Harriet Jacobs was a unique individual who told an exceptional and distinctive story. She was born a slave in 1813, escaped from Edenton in 1842, and eventually became a writer, abolitionist, and reformer. The story of her life, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, helped build Northern sentiment for emancipation during the Civil War and was the only slave narra-tive to deal frankly with sexual as well as racial oppression. Jacobs told about the seven years spent hiding in the crawl space of her grandmother’s storeroom in Edenton, watch-ing through a peephole as her children grew up. Literary critic Henry Louis Gates says, “Jacobs’s autobiography is one of the major works of Afro-American literature.”1 The Harriet Jacobs symposium would be a milestone, the first time that scholars of his-tory and literature knowledgeable about Jacobs and her work, in particular, and slavery in North Carolina, in general, gathered for such a focused endeavor. For two days, humani-ties scholars, college students, middle and high school teachers and students, the people of Edenton, Chowan County, other parts of North Carolina, and from around the nation would engage in and discuss the historical and literary aspects of Jacobs. This would be accomplished through lectures, panel discussions, and question-and-answer sessions for open discussion and debate. Other events would include music (such as the singing of tra-ditional Negro spirituals), a walking tour, and an essay contest for Edenton eighth-grade schoolchildren. The symposium sought to accomplish several objectives. One was to work as a catalyst for an ever-increasing presence of Harriet Jacobs in Edenton, both for its present and V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 5 New Leaves future residents as well as for its many visitors. The symposium was organized at an oppor-tune time for the Edenton community. Not until 1987, when Jean Fagan Yellin authenti-cated details and authorship of Incidents, was Jacobs clearly identified as the slave narrative’s author, and it has taken time for the details of her remarkable life to work their way into the public consciousness. Several years ago a state highway historical marker commemorat-ing Jacobs was placed in front of the Historic Edenton Visitor Center. Jacobs also features prominently in a recently published walking tour provided by the visitor center staff, and an exclusive Harriet Jacobs tour is provided upon request. Recently, a local committee has published an African American guide map to Edenton, including mention of Jacobs. However, the Edenton community desired to do more. According to the visitor center staff, an increasing number of visitors were asking for information about Jacobs, and local high school students were beginning to learn about her in their classes. Joe Sliva, a local historian and member of the planning committee, spoke for the citizens of Edenton: “A symposium dedicated to a better understanding of Jacobs’s life and times would not only inform and enlighten the public but would help us become better stewards of her legacy.” Another objective of the symposium was to promote cooperation and collaboration among the black and white communities of Edenton and Chowan County. Many in the community recognize what Martha Norkunas notes, “What is needed is an acknowledgment that power must be shared with minority populations and that the prevailing perspective on the past must be radically altered. . . . The communitymust then have the courage to enact these new insights on the public landscapes of history and tourism.”2 By making the sympo-sium free to the public, with the citizens of Edenton and the surrounding communities of Hertford, Elizabeth City, and Murfreesboro as the primary target audience, the hope was for a racially, educationally, and economically diverse audience that would include leaders of the religious community, teachers, and local middle and high school students. Public school chil-dren were encouraged to enter an essay contest that focused on Jacobs and the period in which she lived. Organizers also strove to draw students from Chowan College, College of the Albemarle, Edgecombe Community College, Elizabeth City State University, and East Carolina University, as well as from colleges and universities in the Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill area. Having leaders on the planning committee who represented different seg-ments of the target audience was beneficial for both their input and outreach. In addition, diversity was evident in the choice of symposium speakers: they included black and white, male and female professors from five universities. The third objective of the symposium was to educate the people of North Carolina about the importance of Harriet Jacobs and her work. As convinced as many are now about the authenticity of Jacobs’s account, questions still remain concerning the accuracy of many of the narrative’s details and about how much abolitionists, especially Lydia Child, contributed to or altered Jacobs’s writing. Giving voice to questions of historical validity by probing the existing evidence and encouraging lively debate was an important aspect of the symposium. Scholars of history and literature were to be the catalysts and moderators for discussion of Incidents as history, autobiography, and/or slave narrative. The most vital element for the success of the Harriet Jacobs Symposium was the coopera-tion of individuals who were passionate about the project. My dedication to the symposium was engendered by my background, which made me acutely aware of the African American struggle for their rights. My father, John Herbers, was a New York Times correspondent dur-ing the civil rights era, and on several occasions my three sisters and I were exposed to the injustices predominant, especially in the South, at that time. For example, Dad drove the whole family to St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 to visit the beach while he reported on local 6 6 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S events. By the time we arrived, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy had been jailed for attempting to eat in a local restaurant, and King had informed the White House that “all semblance of law and order has broken down.” Not only did my family see the results of that breakdown on the city square, but we also experienced it firsthand when we were awakened by vehicles circling the motel and by shots being fired each time the cars passed our room. The local KKK-type group wanted to frighten my father out of town. I will never forget the terror I felt nor the empathy it engendered. I now realize that I was expe-riencing only a small portion of what African American citizens felt routinely. In relating my experiences to my students, I inform them not only about the fifties and sixties in the South, but I also pay tribute to the efforts of brave freedom-fighting individuals, both black and white, of the Civil Rights movement. As an English professor, I have an obliga-tion and privilege to ensure that students are exposed to a portion of literature that was neglected in my college education: the rich African American literary tradition as a critical and dynamic part of our country’s literary heritage. That is how I came upon Harriet Jacobs and, subsequently, developed such a curiosity about her hometown. Fortunately, I discovered many other individuals who shared my enthusiasm and zeal. Since I live and work in Florida, a network of people in North Carolina was essential, though I also received help from others throughout the country. In general, these amazing persons fell into five categories: academic, governmental, ecclesiastic, business, and media. My background and current job lie in academia, so that seemed a logical place for me to begin. After all, it was preparation for teaching the course, “Survey of African American Literature,” including Jacobs’s narrative, that drew me to Edenton in the first place. His-tory and literature are the two humanities disciplines most appropriate to the study of Jacobs. These disciplines often intersect, and that is certainly the case with Harriet Jacobs, whose book is considered by most scholars to be not only a true depiction of slavery in the South in the mid-nineteenth century, and of life as an escaped slave in the North, but also a work of literature that combines the attributes of the slave narrative with characteristics of the sentimental novel so popular at the time. Consequently, most of the scholars helpful to the project specialize in the areas of history or literature. Two scholars in particular served as models and inspiration for me: Dorothy Redford, site director at Somerset Place in Creswell and author of Somerset Homecoming, and Jean Fagan Yellin, the English professor emeritus who authenticated Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and has studied and written on Jacobs for twenty years. Considering the connec-tions during the years of slavery between Creswell and Edenton and intrigued by the tenacity of Redford in tracing her ancestry to the large plantation at Somerset, I met and interviewed her. I also arranged with my college’s Multicultural Affairs Office for her to give a public lecture at Florida Southern College for Black History Month in February 2002. Knowing that Jean Fagan Yellin is a friend of Redford, I invited Yellin to come up from Sarasota for the lecture. To my delight, Yellin and her husband stayed in our home, and I was able to share with her my hopes for a Harriet Jacobs Symposium in Edenton. She applauded the project and showed interest in participating. In addition to my contact with Redford and Yellin, I spent several weeks in North Carolina gleaning ideas from meetings with nine scholars in history and literature at Chowan College, Elizabeth City State University, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the N.C. Office of Archives and History. Several of the scholars agreed to speak or moderate a session if a symposium was held. I was granted a sabbatical from Florida Southern College for 2002-2003 (meaning that I taught part-time) to be the project director and to apply for a North Carolina Humanities Council (NCHC) grant. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 7 Billy C. Hines, professor of music and director of the Elizabeth City State University Concert Choir, agreed to the choir performing traditional Negro spirituals during the symposium. These songs echo the religious beliefs expressed by Jacobs in her book’s spiri-tual references and also represent both the anguish and hope of enslaved people who, unlike Jacobs, were not able to achieve literacy. As such, this music added an element to the symposium that mere words could not. Another scholar—Jennifer Edwards of the NCHC—gave me invaluable advice as I pur-sued the grant to finance the project. This was my first experience at grant writing, and it was a daunting one; Edwards and Harlan Gradin made sure that I was up to the task. I found budget formulation particularly challenging, given that words, not numbers, are my specialty. Edwards and I spent hours on the phone fleshing out details of the symposium. Ultimately, the hard work paid off as NCHC approved the grant that provided the sym-posium’s major funding. Local support for the symposium was absolutely essential. Joe Sliva was extremely important to the project. Long before I had ever set foot in Edenton, Sliva conducted his own unofficial walking tour about Jacobs for the visitor center, bolstered by his extensive study of her time in Edenton. He also fought hard against some local opposition and suc-ceeded in having a state highway marker for Jacobs placed on Broad Street in front of the visitor center. Willing to help in any way he could, Sliva used his impressive technological skills to establish an official Harriet Jacobs Symposium website, write and design a bro-chure, and send out dozens of e-mails to publicize the event. Edenton eighth-grade schoolteachers not only taught from Letters from a Slave Girl, the juvenile version of Incidents, but also supervised an essay contest about Jacobs, narrowing winning finalists down to ten. The members of Sigma Tau Delta, an international English honor society at Elizabeth City State University, judged the final ten essays. The first, sec-ond, and third place winners were announced and awarded prizes during the symposium. The teachers also planned a collage project on slavery, and the creative, colorful results were displayed in the visitor center over the weekend. Another group of individuals important to the project were those affiliated with gov-ernmental agencies, both local and state. For example, one of the symposium sponsors was the Office of Archives and History, an agency of the Department of Cultural Resources, which promotes North Carolina’s artistic and cultural treasures. The office encourages the sharing of North Carolina history through educational and research programs such as North Carolina History Day, which spurs students on to develop historical research skills. The agency was one of the sponsors for The 1898 Wilmington Racial Violence and Its Legacy, a symposium held in 1998, which brought together for the first time scholars most knowledgeable about the violence in Wilmington to share that knowledge with the pub-lic. The Office of Archives and History agreed to videotape the Jacobs symposium sessions for use by teachers and students in the local public schools, and for possible broadcasting on UNC-TV. Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History, was instrumental in obtaining additional funding for the symposium and helping with publicity efforts. He also chaired a session of the symposium. Crow was also responsible for convincing Ginny Culpepper, the local heritage tourism development officer with the Department of Commerce, to form an ad hoc committee of Edenton community leaders to develop the symposium. Culpepper was born and raised in Edenton and commands a great deal of respect there. She is also an extremely hard worker with lots of energy and creative ideas. In May 2002, I met with the Edenton committee that she had called together to begin serious planning. Nancy Nicholls, tourism director of the Edenton-Chowan Chamber of Commerce, also came on board. Once the project had 6 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S local sponsors and the NCHC grant was obtained, I was able to procure speakers and work with the local committee on final details and on publicity. Another governmental agency that sponsored the symposium was the Edenton Histori-cal Commission, created by the General Assembly in 1961 to “effect and encourage pres-ervation, restoration, and appropriate presentation of the Town of Edenton and Chowan County, as an historic, educational and aesthetic place.” The members of the commission include the chairman of the board of county commissioners, the mayor of Edenton, the secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, and citizens appointed by the gover-nor. The commission has sponsored the Elizabeth Vann Moore Biennial Series for Preser-vation Studies and has funded Dabney Narvaez’s grant writing for funds to restore the 108-year-old Kadesh AME Zion Church. Without a doubt, the commission is interested in the rich history of Edenton, including that involving Harriet Jacobs. Beverley Kirchmier, the commission’s executive director, was a member of the committee formed to plan and promote the symposium. Judy Chilcoat, operations manager, and the staff and volunteers at the Historic Edenton Visitor Center, part of the Division of State Historic Sites, were indispensable to the sym-posium. They developed a Harriet Jacobs walking-tour brochure that they included in packets for symposium participants, and also worked very hard on a self-guided walking tour for the first morning of the symposium that featured interpreters at several Jacobs sites. In addition, site personnel, with assistance from the home office in Raleigh, devel-oped and installed a permanent exhibit in the visitor center showcasing Harriet Jacobs’s life. The display contains a first edition of Jacobs’s book, a Japanese edition of the book, a trophy awarded posthumously to Jacobs as a North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee, and replicas of dolls that Jacobs made after escaping to the North. Individuals connected to a historic Edenton church were the first indicators of support from some of the town’s involved and prominent African American citizens. Kadesh AME Zion Church became a sponsor in the early stages of the symposium by graciously offering its historic sanctuary as a venue. The congregation of the church founded the Edenton Normal and Industrial College, a beacon of educational opportunity for African Americans from 1895 to 1928. The present church building, the third in which the congregation has worshiped, was constructed in 1895 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its sanctuary has descending curved pews, original choir and bishop chairs, chandeliers, and lovely stained glass windows. Pastor Edna Lawrence, also on the planning committee, is a native of Edenton. She contributed her artistic talents in the creation of the symposium logo, an interpre-tation of how a young Jacobs might have appeared. The congregation of Kadesh enthusi-astically embraced the symposium not only by proudly sharing their sanctuary but also by par-ticipating as ushers. About a month before the symposium, I addressed the congregation and was encouraged by the members’ warm response. Several Edenton ministers also V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 9 Kadesh AME Zion Church in Edenton, site of the Harriet Jacobs Symposium in April 2003. The sanctuary was severely damaged by Hurricane Isabel in September and subsequently condemned. announced the symposium from their pulpits and included notices in their bulletins and newsletters. The Edenton business community also cooperated fully. Downtown shopkeepers agreed to display posters publicizing the symposium, and bed-and-breakfast owners offered discounted rates for attendees. All Edenton residents, associated with a business or not, welcomed the weekend visitors with their extraordinary southern hospitality, helpfulness, and kindness. As remote as Edenton is, media attention was imperative. Newspapers, newsletters, and television spread the word about the upcoming event. Gregory Kane of the Baltimore Sun, who has a syndicated column that runs nationally, wrote a piece about the symposium during Black History Month. Dee Langston of the Virginia Pilot did a feature story both in WaterColors magazine and in the daily newspaper edition. A local Greensboro television station ran a community news segment. The Chowan Herald, Edenton’s news source, included a notice about the symposium. The Office of Archives and History mentioned the symposium in their quarterly newsletter Carolina Comments, and had the departmental Public Affairs Office disseminate news releases. Heritage NewsWatch, a publication of North Carolina’s Northeast Partnership of the Department of Commerce, and the North Carolina State Historic Sites newsletter gave extensive coverage to the event. The results of the hard work and dedication of all the aforementioned individuals were evident in the spring of 2003, three years after my first visit to Edenton. A huge banner across Edenton’s main street read, “Harriet Jacobs Symposium, April 4-5.” On Friday, April 4, 329 symposium participants attended book signings by some of the speakers and took the new walking tour, with interpreters posted at each Jacobs historical site. Partici-pants showed particular interest in the home site of Jacobs’s grandmother, where Jacobs hid from her owner for seven years and watched through a peephole as her grandmother raised her young children. Another popular site was the Old Jail, where Jacobs’s children were imprisoned for two months in an effort to coerce her out of hiding. The program for the rest of the weekend consisted of speakers on Jacobs, slavery in gen-eral, and runaway slaves in particular. The keynote address was delivered by Jean Fagan Yellin, author of a new biography of Jacobs. [Professor Yellin will discuss her book, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, at the North Carolina Museum of History on April 22.] Yellin was warmly introduced by Dorothy Redford. Other participants who delivered papers or moderated ses-sions were Trudier Harris-Lopez of UNC-Chapel Hill, Lucinda H. MacKethan of N.C. State University, Freddie Parker of N.C. Central University, Anne B. Warner of Spelman College, and Jeffrey J. Crow. At Kadesh AME Zion Church, the Elizabeth City State Uni-versity Concert Choir sang traditional Negro spirituals, including “Has Anybody There Seen My Jesus?” It was such a powerful culmination to the symposium that tears flowed among the attendees, including one who remarked, “Harriet Jacobs was right there.” The number of registrants for this event, free to the public, was impressive considering the remoteness of Edenton. The audience consisted of townspeople, other North Carolinians, and visitors from as far away as Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, and New York. North Carolina counties represented were Brunswick, Camden, Carteret, Chowan, Colum-bus, Craven, Dare, Iredell, Lenoir, New Hanover, Pasquotank, Scotland, Wake, Washing-ton, Watauga, and Wilson. Mixed by race, age, and education, attendees included high school students, educators, and retirees. The question-and-answer sessions following scholars’ presentations proved lively, with discussions of Jacobs’s Edenton family, her religious beliefs, the plight of runaway slaves, and the power of literacy, not only for nineteenth-century slaves but for the present generation. Two members of the audience who shared a passion for Jacobs’s story were a woman who has just completed a musical, Hatty, based on Jacobs’s 7 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S life, and an author who has written a young adult historical novel about Jacobs. A film pro-ducer from WNET, a Public Broadcasting System station in New York, who is interested in including Jacobs’s story in a documentary on slavery, was also in attendance. The positive comments from participants on evaluation forms indicated that we met our objectives of increasing Jacobs’s presence in Edenton, of achieving diverse participa-tion, and of educating the public about Jacobs and slavery. In terms of the selection of Edenton for the event, a local resident wrote, “As an Edentonian, I am so proud and pleased that this symposium took place.” Another said that he/she had been previously “unaware of Edenton’s place in slave history.” Someone from Iredell County remarked, “Having it in Edenton was wonderful! The location gave it a relevance and immediacy available nowhere else,” while a New York City attendee wrote, “Celebrating ‘native daughter’ in her own hometown was inspiring.” Two persons from Watauga County commented on local community involvement: “Wonderful integration of community and academic interests. The level of energy and enthusiasm at the community level was inspir-ing— a refreshing change from the usual academic conference”; “Great community involvement, pride and enthusiasm; appeal to a broad range of people.” One Chowan County resident alluded to a changing Edenton: “[The symposium] reinforced that racism, though still with us, is being dealt with and that communities can be transformed.” Lots of people seemed pleased with the diverse audience. They said that the strength of the symposium was “the integration of the races,” “the variety of people, teachers, schol-ars, historical, locals, students,” “an audience that contained both scholars and novices,” “attendance by students at the symposium,” and “the diversity of participants—in terms of disciplines, race, locale and academics.” Many attendees commented on what they had learned at the symposium: “My sense of Jacobs’s life was enlarged and deepened”; “Each of the writers shed light not just on Har-riet Jacobs, but on how we today are affected by her story. This symposium was extremely well organized, the staff were helpful and friendly, and the presentations were wonderful”; “As an African American I realize I need to learn more about this part of history and today gave me a good understanding of what I do not know.” Several persons commented that the information given about female runaway slaves was new to them. One person wrote: “I gained an understanding and respect for the empowering role of black enslaved women.” Another commented: “The sessions enlightened further understanding of not only negative behaviors but also faith, endurance, perseverance, struggles of life.” Some persons remarked on the importance of audience discussion by saying that the strength of the symposium was “the question-and-answer sessions [because] they gave everyone an opportunity to take part. They also motivated my quest to read and study more African American history,” and “The questions were fabulous, and meeting so many different people from different vocations and avenues was very enriching to my under-standing of Incidents and the period of Harriet Jacobs.” The attendance and the apparent success of the symposium can be attributed in large part to the overwhelming “can do” attitude of all North Carolinians involved in this project and of the network of accomplished Edenton citizens, who share a commitment to preserving and understanding their rich and complex past. The ripple effect of their many hours of work will endure in the hearts and minds of all those informed and enlightened by the Harriet Jacobs Symposium 2003. 1. Scott Veale, “New and Noteworthy Paperbacks,” New York Times Book Review, September 10, 2000, at 7:44. 2. Martha Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History and Ethnicity in Monterey, California (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 99. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 7 1 Carolina Comments Published quarterly by the Office of Archives and History North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources Raleigh, North Carolina Jeffrey J. Crow, Editor in Chief Kenrick N. Simpson, Editor Historical Publications Section Office of Archives and History 4622 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4622 Telephone (919) 733-7442 Fax (919) 733-1439 www.ncpublications.com Presorted Standard U.S. Postage Paid Raleigh, NC Permit No. 187
Object Description
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Title | Carolina comments |
Date | 2004-04 |
Description | Volume 52, Number 2, (April 2004) |
Digital Characteristics-A | 22378 KB: 36 p. |
Digital Format |
application/pdf |
Pres Local File Path-M | \Preservation_content\StatePubs\pubs_borndigital\images_master\ |
Full Text | Judge Rules Bill of Rights Belongs to North Carolina On January 23, 2004, the State of North Carolina moved another legal step closer to recovery of its long-missing original copy of the Bill of Rights. Chief Judge Terrence W. Boyle of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina ruled that the disputed document belonged to the State as a public record. However, he ordered the U.S. marshal in Raleigh to retain possession pending final resolution of any appeals. Even-tually, State officials hope to transfer the Bill of Rights to the State Archives, to resume the rightful place of honor from which it was removed 139 years ago. The priceless document has a mysterious and peripatetic history, much of it spent out of the public eye. It is one of fourteen original copies of the proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution—collectively known as the Bill of Rights—prepared by three federal clerks in 1789. A copy was scrivened for the governor of each state to peruse as the adoption of the twelve amendments (only ten of which were then approved) to the Constitution was debated; the other copy was for the federal government. After the ratification of the first ten amendments in 1791, North Carolina retained custody of its copy of the document for the next eight decades. The secretary of state kept the Bill of Rights with other valu-able state documents in the State Capitol. In April 1865, as Gen. William T. Sherman’s victorious army passed through Raleigh in relentless pursuit of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s retreating Confederates, a soldier from Ohio along with his comrades removed numerous official documents from the State Capitol. The unidentified thief later returned with his unusual spoil of war to his home in Tippecanoe (present Tipp City), in Miami County, Ohio. Approximately one year later, the veteran sold his trophy to Charles A. Shotwell, who then lived at the county seat, Troy. Carolina Comments VOLUME 52, NUMBER 2 APRIL 2004 Published Quarterly by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, missing since 1865, was recovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last March. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Attorney General’s Office and Karen Blum, N.C. Department of Justice.) 3 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S A Message from the Deputy Secretary Culminating nearly a year of intense legal maneuvering, federal judge Terrence Boyle ruled on January 23, 2004, that North Carolina should get back its original copy of the Bill of Rights. Out of an abundance of caution, how-ever, Judge Boyle ordered federal authorities to retain cus-tody of the document until the case is finally adjudicated. While Boyle’s decision is not the final chapter in the document’s 139-year saga, it underscores two important principles. The first affirms that North Carolina will not pay to have its public records returned. The second principle rein-forces the first: public records created by the state belong to the people of North Carolina. Ownership of those documents cannot be alienated with-out legislative approval. Over the years leaders of the Office of Archives and History have maintained those principles, often in the face of criticism, or when expediency might have dictated a different course. This agency’s responsibility for managing the state’s public records is mandated by G.S. 121 and G.S. 132. Before 2003 North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, which was stolen from the State Capitol by a Union soldier in 1865, had come to light three times. In 1897, Dr. Cyrus Thompson, the North Carolina secretary of state, learned that the state’s copy of the Bill of Rights was on display in Indianapolis, Indiana. Working with the Indiana secretary of state and a newspaper publisher, Thompson tried without success to secure the document. In 1925 the Bill of Rights appeared again. When an agent tried to sell the docu-ment to the State of North Carolina, Robert B. House, secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission, refused. He argued that “title to it has never passed from . . . North Carolina to any individual.” The Bill of Rights next surfaced in 1995 when a lawyer tried to open negotiations for its purchase. Officials of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources again declined to buy back a public record that belonged to the people of North Carolina. Judge Boyle reaffirmed those principles in his decision. He specifically cited North Carolina v. B.C. West Jr. (1977) to make his ruling. In that case the North Carolina Supreme Court had decided by a vote of five to two that public ownership of records could never be broken. The case centered on two colonial legal documents signed by William Hooper when he was a Crown attorney. Hooper later signed the Declaration of Independence. The West case established a precedent for the return of public records to the custody of the state. As an immediate consequence of that decision, a letter dated August 26, 1790, from President George Washington to the governor and Council of State also was returned to the state. In that letter, Washington welcomed North Carolina into the Union upon its ratification of the federal Constitution. The driving force behind the West case was Dr. Thornton W. Mitchell, then state archivist. His courage, foresight, and resolve ensured that the state’s public records would always belong to the people of North Carolina. At this writing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has not ruled. The case could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Office of Archives and History looks forward to the day when it can receive the Bill of Rights and celebrate its return with the citizens of North Carolina. Jeffrey J. Crow Some thirty years later, Shotwell was working in the Board of Trade Building in Indianapolis, Indiana, proudly dis-playing the unique relic on the wall of his office. On May 10, 1897, the Indianapolis News ran an article about Shotwell and his souvenir that, in the journalistic fashion of the day, was picked up and reprinted in its entirety by the Raleigh News and Observer on June 10. State supreme court justice Walter Clark saw the article and wrote to North Carolina Secretary of State Cyrus Thompson, ask-ing that he take appropriate measures to recover the docu-ment, which “on its face . . . belongs to the State of N.C. and to your office & the State can reclaim it anywhere & at any time.” At Clark’s suggestion, Thompson wrote to his counterpart in Indiana, William D. Owen. For three months, there was no response. Finally, on September 25, Thompson wrote to the Indianapolis News to see if the facts as reported in the article of May 10 were true. He also mentioned to the newspaper that he had made unanswered inquiries to the secretary of state. Within a few days, he received two letters from Owen, the first apologizing for his failure to answer the earlier letter and explaining his inability to get in contact with Shotwell. Owen’s second letter, dated September 30, detailed his interview with Shotwell, whom he had found in a bad humor as a result of the adverse publicity he was receiving from the local press. Shotwell claimed to have been personally acquainted with the soldier from whom he had purchased the manuscript, “an honorable gentleman whose integrity could not be called in question,” but who had admitted to tak-ing the Bill of Rights “and other articles from the State House at Raleigh as souvenirs.” Despite Owen’s judgment that “with genteel and courteous treatment, he will not be unreasonable in the matter,” Shotwell refused to part with the document and soon disap-peared from public view. Twenty-eight years passed with no further word of Shotwell or the purloined Bill of Rights. Then, in February 1925, Professor J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton of the University of North Carolina received a curious letter from Charles I. Reid of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Reid requested some background information concerning the theft of the North Carolina copy of the Bill of Rights. He claimed to represent an old man (presumably Shotwell) who had bought it from a Union soldier soon after the war. Interestingly, Reid and Shotwell’s son Grier had served together in the U.S. Army during World War I. Hamilton referred the letter to Robert B. House, secretary of the North Carolina Historical Com-mission. After being rebuffed in an attempt to sell the document to a private collector in Durham, Reid offered it to the commission, but House refused to buy stolen State prop-erty. In a memorable phrase, House declared: “So long as it remains away from the official custody of North Carolina, it will serve as a memorial of individual theft.” Reid, his mys-terious client, and the Bill of Rights again disappeared. In 1991, Charles A. Shotwell’s descendants contacted attorney Charles Reeder to facili-tate the sale of the Bill of Rights. Reeder approached Sotheby’s Auction House in New York, which sent representatives to Indiana to view the document and to hear the account of its removal from the Capitol in Raleigh. Sotheby’s declined to get involved because of questions about North Carolina’s claims to title to the document. Reeder then turned his attention to an auction house in Chicago, Illinois. The owner of the house also had con-cerns about the title and requested that the commission be increased from 20 to 30 V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 3 9 The Board of Trade Building in Indianapolis, Indiana, circa 1900. Charles A. Shotwell displayed the North Carolina copy of the Bill of Rights in his office in this building. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.) percent; the business relationship soon ended. (North Carolina officials did not learn of these attempted sales until after the recovery of the Bill of Rights in 2003). In 1995, North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights resurfaced and the State was again given the opportunity to purchase it. Reeder had eventually come into contact with prominent antiques dealer Wayne E. Pratt, who used his agent, attorney John L. Richard-son of Washington, D.C., to broker a sale between his unnamed clients and the State. As before, North Carolina officials refused to even consider paying the asking price of $2 mil-lion for the return of State property. Wayne Pratt, Inc., bought an option to purchase the Bill of Rights from the Shotwell heirs in September 1997. But Pratt wanted to authenticate the manuscript prior to purchase. One afternoon in early 2000, three men and a young woman with an oversized cardboard container visited the offices of the First Federal Congress Project at George Washington University in downtown Washington. They had an appointment to have a document appraised for authenticity. The foursome refused to identify themselves; two of them did not speak at all but had the appearance of bodyguards (as in fact they were). Project director Charlene Bickford and two members of her staff were first shown photographs, and then the actual document was removed from the cardboard art box. Bickford and her colleagues immediately realized they were looking at an original Bill of Rights, but were unable to determine which of the missing copies it was, as the document was mounted and framed, preventing an examination of the critical docketing information on the back. (Altogether, five of the original fourteen copies—those belonging to Georgia, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—were then missing. Two are suspected to have burned, while unidentified copies are housed in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.) Bickford advised the visitors, who refused to disclose where they had obtained the manuscript, that they would have enormous difficulty in selling an alienated document that was both priceless and worthless. She had the impression that she was merely confirming what they already knew of the provenance of the manuscript. Bickford also recommended that they have an expert conservator remove the backing from the document to permit an inspection of any endorsements on the reverse. The mysterious visitors quickly packed up and departed. In February 2000, soon after this encounter, Wayne Pratt, Inc., purchased the North Carolina Bill of Rights from two Shotwell descendants for $200,000. Manuscripts expert Seth Kaller of New York was approached in 2002 by the agent of a client (Wayne Pratt, Inc.) that wished to sell an original copy of the Bill of Rights. Kaller suggested the National Constitution Center, then under construction in Philadelphia, as a likely customer. He had no doubt been informed that the center was looking for just such an item—preferably Pennsylvania’s missing copy—to display at the opening of the center on July 4, 2003. Soon thereafter, center president Joseph Torsella and board member and attorney Stephen J. Harmelin were contacted by a broker offering to sell the center a copy of the Bill of Rights. The broker sent a notebook detailing the history of the document, with photographs of the front and back. Torsella contacted Charlene Bickford to authenti-cate the manuscript. From the photographs of the back of the document, handwriting expert Helen Veit of the First Federal Project Congress staff quickly concluded that the document belonged to North Carolina. Bickford also noticed that information she had supplied to the mysterious visitors during her previous appraisal of an original Bill of Rights was contained in the notebook. Torsella then notified Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who was also a member of the museum board, of the offer to sell the stolen doc-ument. Governor Rendell contacted his counterpart in North Carolina, Michael F. Easley, to see if he would like to share the cost of purchase. Consistent with the State’s stance since 1897, the governor refused to even consider buying what rightfully belonged to North Carolina. He sought the advice of North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper 4 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S and the Office of the U.S. Attorney in Raleigh. Soon, the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were laying plans for a sting operation to recover the stolen manuscript. On March 18, 2003, John L. Richardson arrived at the law offices of Dilworth Paxson, LLP, on Market Street in Philadelphia. In the firm’s conference room on the thirty-second floor, he met attorney Harmelin, purportedly representing the National Constitution Cen-ter, to transact the sale of the copy of the Bill of Rights belonging to Pratt. Seth Kaller was also present to certify the authenticity of the manuscript. Richardson was shown a check for $4 million; he confirmed by phone the transfer of the funds to his bank account. Assured that the money was in hand, he called a courier in the lobby of the building to bring up the document. The courier brought in the same cardboard art box that Charlene Bickford had seen three years before. The manuscript was removed from the box and placed on the conference table. After Kaller pronounced the document to be a genuine original copy of the Bill of Rights, Harmelin left the room, supposedly to bring in Torsella, as agent for the center. Instead, five FBI agents rushed in and took custody of the document, which Richardson had already tendered. The agents also served a civil seizure warrant signed by Judge Boyle (who later concluded that the Bill of Rights had already been voluntarily transferred before service of the warrant). As the State prepared its brief for the civil suit against all other claimants, prosecutors requested further evidence that would tie the recovered Bill of Rights irrefutably to North Carolina. George Stevenson Jr., private manuscripts archivist at the North Carolina State Archives and an acknowledged expert on eighteenth-century paper and handwriting, was summoned to the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Raleigh to examine the document. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of the records in the archives, Stevenson compared the handwriting of the endorsement on the back of the Bill of Rights with that on the reverse of the October 2, 1789, letter of transmittal from President George Washington to North Carolina governor Samuel Johnston. He also compared the endorsement on the back of North Carolina’s original copy of the eleventh amendment to the U.S. Constitution, received in 1795. He determined that all three notations were in the same hand. From previous research, Stevenson knew that Pleasant Henderson of Granville County had served as one of the engrossing clerks in the 1789 assembly, and as assistant clerk to the House of Commons in 1795. He compared numerous samples of Henderson’s handwrit-ing with the endorsements on the Bill of Rights, the letter of transmittal, and the 1795 amendment. He concluded that all three were by the hand of Pleasant Henderson and attested to such in an affidavit filed in federal court on August 8, 2003. On September 11, a deal was struck between Pratt, the United States, and the State of North Carolina that seemingly secured possession of the Bill of Rights to North Carolina. Pratt agreed to relinquish his claim and give the document to the State. In return, the State declined further prosecution of its civil forfeiture suit, United States of America v. North Carolina’s Original Copy of the Bill of Rights, and the United States promised to refrain from criminal proceedings against Pratt. Apparently, only one legal issue remained unresolved: Robert V. Matthews, Pratt’s erstwhile business partner and purported co-owner of the document, demanded a $15 million tax write-off for his half of the “gift,” which has an estimated value of $30 million. U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney suggested that that was a private matter to be settled between Matthews and Pratt. At a hearing on November 21, Judge Boyle issued an order that seemingly signified the court’s intention to return all matters of litigation to status quo ante, including the release of the Bill of Rights to Richardson as prior possessor. Erstwhile defendant Pratt filed a motion for clarification in federal court. Pratt’s lawyer suggested that Richardson was merely the representative of his client, who had since assigned his “title” to the document V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 1 to North Carolina. Therefore, the Bill of Rights should be returned to the State, not to Richardson. On December 12, the State initiated legal proceedings in Wake County Superior Court. Attorney General Cooper and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources Jeffrey J. Crow asked for a declaratory judgment proclaiming the dis-puted document a public record, petitioned for the return of that record to its proper cus-todians, and moved for a temporary restraining order to prevent the Bill of Rights from being damaged, hidden, or removed out of state. Matthews’s lawyers have appealed Judge Boyle’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Virginia. They have also requested that the Fourth Circuit order the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina to return the parties to the status quo ante by releasing the Bill of Rights to Matthews in Connecti-cut. There the matter rests until the State can one day reclaim its patrimony. State Archivist Cathy Morris and Editor Hank Jordan Retire The Office of Archives and History lost nearly sixty-eight years of experience with the retirement of two longtime employees this winter. After more than thirty-two years of state service and nearly four years as state archivist and records administrator of North Carolina, Catherine J. Morris retired at the end of February. Morris began her career with the Department of Archives and History as a typist in the Historic Sites and Museums Sec-tion in 1972, progressively assuming more responsible positions within the agency. With experience as supervisor of the agency’s Technical Services Branch from 1987 to 1994, she became supervisor of the Records Services Branch of the State Archives in 1994. Upon the promotion of David J. Olson to assistant director of the Division of Archives and History in 2000, Morris was named state archivist and records administrator. Morris is a graduate of Wake Forest University, a certified public manager, and a certi-fied archivist. She has been active in numerous professional and civic organizations, including the North Carolina Society of Certified Public Managers, the National Association of Gov-ernment Archives and Records Administrators, the Southeastern Archives and Records Conference, the Society of North Carolina Archivists, and the Friends of the Archives. A retirement party was held on the after-noon of February 23 at the North Carolina Museum of History where friends, family, and fellow employees gathered to wish Mor-ris farewell. David Brook, director of the Division of Historical Resources; Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History; H. G. Jones, former curator of the North Carolina Collection and former director of the Department of Archives and History; William S. Price, for-mer director of the Division of Archives and History; David J. Olson, deputy secretary for Arts and Libraries; and Jerry Cashion, chair-man of the North Carolina Historical Com-mission, were among those who took part in the ceremonies. Morris was given a formal certificate of retirement by Cashion, and 4 2 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Dr. Jerry Cashion (right) presents Cathy Morris (left) with a formal certificate of retirement at a ceremony in her honor at the Museum of History. Crow presented her with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine award on behalf of Gov. Michael F. Easley. Weymouth T. (Hank) Jordan Jr. retired from the Historical Publications Section at the end of January. Prior to entering state service, he performed intelligence duties with the U.S. Air Force in England from 1957 to 1960. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Florida State University in 1963 and 1964, respectively. He did postgraduate work there in 1965, was an instructor of history at Auburn University (1965-1966), worked towards a doctorate at the University of Virginia (1966-1967), and then served on the staff of the reference division at the University of Virginia Library from 1966 through March 1968. In April 1968, Jordan began his career with the Department of Archives and History in the Archives and Records Section. He became editor of the Civil War Roster Project in 1970, having co-edited Volume III with Louis Manarin. During the course of his long career, Jordan edited Volumes IV through XV. He was working on Volume XVI at the time of his retirement. His assistant, Matthew Brown, was promoted into the position of editor, effective March 1. Hank Jordan was one of the most meticulous people ever to work for the Historical Publications Section. One of the greatest contributions he made to the series was the expansion of the regimental histories. His twelve volumes of the roster project will remain the standard of excellence and a testament to his thorough research, and will continue to enrich the study of Civil War history for years to come. He too was honored with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. QAR Conservation Lab Dedicated at East Carolina University A facility in Pitt County that once broadcast the message of freedom behind the Iron Curtain is now home to thousands of artifacts associ-ated with the pirate Blackbeard. On January 15, the QAR Conservation Lab was dedicated on the West Research Campus of East Carolina University (ECU), at the former site of a Voice of America station. The ceremony featured exhibits of arti-facts, tours of laboratories, a buffet luncheon, and a ribbon cutting. Approximately 250 people—scien-tists, businessmen, archaeologists, and university and government officials—were in attendance, including William E. Shelton, chancellor of ECU; Lisbeth Evans, secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources (DCR); Dr. Timothy Runyon, director of the Mar-itime Studies program at ECU; Dr. David Nateman, director of the North Carolina Mari-time Museum; and James T. Cheatham III, a major benefactor of the Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) recovery effort. A Memorandum of Agreement between DCR and ECU answered the critical need for a dedicated laboratory to handle the nearly one million artifacts projected to be salvaged from the wreckage of the QAR. The space available in the Fort Fisher conservation lab was limited, and the temporary arrangement for the use of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences facility in Morehead City was about to expire. Construction at the Voice of V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 3 Artifacts from the wreckage of the Queen Anne’s Revenge on display at the new conservation lab at East Carolina University. America site began in February 2003, with funding for equipment and staff provided by a federal Save America’s Treasures grant. Project conservator Sarah Wilkins-Kenney, formerly with the British Museum, was hired last March. Wendy Walsh, manager of the laboratory, moved with the artifacts from Fort Fisher in July. The laboratory team was completed with the addition of Eric Nordgren, who formerly worked with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Egypt, as assistant conservator. Graduate assistants David Krop and Danielle LaFleur of the Maritime Studies program worked on the project during the fall semester. The conservation facility consists of two laboratories—a wet dirty lab and a clean dry lab—two small offices, and a 4,000-square-foot warehouse for the storage and treatment of large artifacts. Approximately 11,000 of the 16,000 artifacts recovered thus far from the QAR—a mere 2 percent of the estimated one million items to be gleaned from the wreckage—have been sent to the laboratory from Morehead City and Fort Fisher. Among the items salvaged to date are five cannons, navigational and medical instruments, pieces of the ship, and personal effects. Conservationists confront two major areas of concern in treating remains recovered from the ocean floor: the removal of concretions of calcium carbonate, shells, and sand; and the removal of soluble salts, particularly sodium chloride. After treatment, each item must be dried and covered with a protective coating. Finally, identifying information about each artifact, such as physical characteristics, condition, site of recovery, and conservation procedures utilized, is entered into a database maintained at the Office of State Archaeology in Raleigh. The artifacts are then sent to the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Beaufort for display, storage, and further study. Brunswick Town Opens New Exhibit Area Friday the thirteenth of February proved to be a great day for Brunswick Town State Historic Site. After years of frozen funds, budget cuts, and seemingly futile planning, new exhibits were officially opened to the public. Approximately one hundred invited guests, including past and present members of the North Carolina legislature, the North Carolina Historical Commission, the Brunswick County Board of County Commissioners, and Secretary of DCR Lisbeth Evans, attended the opening reception. The ceremony began with an introduction by site manager Jimmy Bartley and brief remarks by Kay Williams, director of the Division of State Historic Sites, and Mrs. Frances Allen, president of the Friends of Brunswick Town. Former site archaeologist Dr. Stanley A. South of the University of South Carolina gave the keynote address (left). After telling many “war stories” of the earliest days of Brunswick Town as a state site, where he led the uncovering of many of the features of the colonial town and the remnants of the earthworks of Fort Anderson, Dr. South joined other dignitaries to cut the ribbon to the exhibit area. More than five years ago, Brunswick Town received notice that funds had been secured to renovate 4 4 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Wendy Walsh, manager of the QAR laboratory, explains conservation techniques to visitors during the dedication program on January 15. “temporary” exhibits that had been in place since the visitor center opened in 1967, and to refurbish the center. Renovation began in early 1999. Site staff returned to a new visi-tor center with 1,800 square feet of exhibit space in 2000, but the exhibit project had been put on hold because of budget cuts. Summer after summer the staff urged visitors to return next year to see new exhibits. Former representative David Redwine worked hard to pro-tect the $770,000 appropriation needed to make the dream come true. Now, finally, visi-tors can walk through some of the most attractive historical exhibits in the state. The new exhibits present the pre-colonial, colonial, and Civil War eras. A furnished colonial house facade, a Civil War bomb-proof, 275 artifacts, and freestanding exhib-its, as well as kiosks, all are part of the display. To provide a “you are there” experience and to fully engage visitors’ senses, several exhibit areas are augmented by appropriate sounds. Crackling noises invite the guest to a campfire, while he reads about the Cape Fear Indians. For the first time, the Native American presence in the region is fully explored. An original piece of dugout canoe and other native artifacts are displayed. Brunswick Town was attacked in 1748 by Spanish seamen, who ransacked the town. One of their ships, the Fortuna, blew up after being fired upon by the colonists. In the 1980s a cannon from the Fortuna was recovered from the Cape Fear River. It is on display in the front of the exhibit area, under a rare mosaic by North Carolina artist Claude Howell that depicts the attack. Smithsonian Features Spencer Shops and Salisbury in Major Exhibit The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) has a massive new exhibit, America on the Move, which includes Salisbury and Spencer Shops in 1927 as a major thematic part of the display. The section on the two Rowan County towns is one of eighteen different thematic centers in the exposition, each with a represen-tative topic, date, and place in America since 1876. The exhibit, which encompasses 26,000 square feet and cost $22 million to create, replaces several outdated exhibits on railroads, roads, and civil engineering built decades ago. It is expected to be maintained in the Smithsonian for at least twenty years. The most massive artifact in the exhibit, Southern Railway steam locomotive No. 1401, was built in 1926 and for decades carried passengers through parts of North Carolina. A 4-6-2 Pacific-type locomotive, No. 1401 weighs about two hundred tons and is ninety feet long. It is so large and heavy that a portion of the NMAH was of necessity built around it in the 1960s. The locomotive rests outside a replica facade of the Salisbury depot in 1927. In the depot is a mannequin of African American educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown, which tells the story of Brown being forced out of a Pullman sleeping coach by white ruffians for violating Jim Crow laws about 1920. The thematic center also features images, stories, and artifacts (several loaned by the N.C. Transportation Museum, or NCTM) of Spencer Shops, which employed some 2,500 railroad workers in the late 1920s. “An Economy in Motion” tells how Salisbury, a representative town of the era, depended heavily on V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 5 The new exhibits at Brunswick Town include this thirty-two-inch-tall Iberian olive jar, which was unearthed at the site and reconstructed from numerous sherds by staff archaeologists. railroads, which in the late 1920s carried 70 percent of U.S. intercity passenger traffic and 75 percent of intercity commercial freight. In the depot is an area depicting the rail-cen-tered mail order catalog business of the day. A delegation from Spencer and Salisbury attended a pre-opening tour of the exhibit and reception in late November. Among the guests were several staff members from the NCTM, Sturges Bryan, president of the NCTM Foundation, and various officials from Salisbury and Spencer. The Smithsonian has agreed to have NCTM brochures available near the exhibit. The gigantic display features an accompanying book and an elaborate website, http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/. Wooden Boat Show at Maritime Museum to Celebrate Thirtieth Year Since 1975, the North Carolina Maritime Museum’s Wooden Boat Show has encour-aged owners and builders of wooden boats to come together to show and operate their boats. Professional boat builders who work with traditional designs or materials will find a receptive audience for their products. Amateur builders and traditional wooden boat enthusiasts will be at the show to share their boats and experiences. Registration is limited to boats of twenty-five feet or less in length, of home or profes-sional construction, and constructed primarily of wood. Larger vessels may be exhibited only by pre-arrangement. The registration fee is $35. The same applicant may register additional boats for $5 each. Commercial or non-commercial exhibits related to the mari-time theme of the show require submission of photographs and pre-approval by the exhibit panel. While the exhibition of wooden boats will take place on Saturday, May 1, the preced-ing week will be awash with events leading up to show day. As part of the thirtieth anni-versary of this museum-sponsored show, additional maritime-related programs, exhibits, and events will be available for visitors. Activities will begin on Sunday, April 25, with demonstrations of traditional maritime trades and skills in the museum’s Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center. Boatbuilding skills classes will be held throughout the week, beginning with a Build A Boat In A Day class on April 25, from 9:00 A.M. until 3:00 P.M. This course is designed for six teams of four persons each. At least one of the team members must be a child aged eight or older (two children are permissible). The cost for the class is $225 per team, $200 for Friends of the Museum (FOM). A two-day Woodworking Joints class will be conducted on April 27-28, from 9:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. each day. Students will be taught the proper use of a variety of tools. Step-by-step procedures for cutting accurate mortise and tenon joints, bridle joints, and lap joints are demonstrated, as well as the correct way to lay out, measure, and mark for tight-fitting joints. Registration is $75, $65 for FOM. Students in the Oar Making class on April 29-30 will complete a pair of well-balanced box loom oars. The cost for the class is $95 per person, $85 for FOM. Reservations are required for all three classes. Visitors that prefer to watch will find the observation deck in the Watercraft Center a great vantage point. On Friday evening, April 30, from 5:30 until 8:00 P.M., the museum’s nearby Gallants Channel property will be the location for fascinating tales of maritime life in Carteret County shared by renowned local storyteller, Rodney Kemp. The site, home to the repository of artifacts from Blackboard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, will provide an eclectic mix on this evening, as visitors will get to view artifacts, enjoy pizza and beer, and listen to Kemp’s stories inside a huge tent. This undeveloped thirty-six-acre site offers enormous possibilities for future development of the N.C. Maritime Museum. The prop-erty is accessible by either boat or car. Tickets for the evening are $10 per person. 4 6 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S On May 1, Exhibition Day, as many as fifty wooden boats will be on display in the water, inside the Watercraft Center, on Front Street, and on the museum grounds. There will be maritime skills demonstrations, a ship model exhibition, children’s model-building classes, radio-controlled model boats, and tours of the museum’s small-craft collection. There is no admission charge for the show or to visit the museum. On the water will be rowing and sailing races and opportunities to sail on Taylors Creek in one of the museum’s traditional watercraft. This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to sail with an expe-rienced captain on board spritsail skiffs or sharpies from the museum’s collection. A dona-tion of $5 per person is suggested, and an adult must accompany children. To register a boat or submit an exhibit, contact Jane Wolff at the N.C. Maritime Museum, 315 Front Street, Beaufort, NC 28516, call (252) 728-7317, or e-mail maritime@ncmail.net. News from Historical Resources Archives and Records Section The Government Records Branch was reorganized on November 1, 2003. The arrangement and description function for state agency records was transferred from the former Records Description Unit into a newly reorganized State Agency Services Unit. The latter’s new, combined functions are to store and protect non-current records of state agencies; to destroy non-current records without permanent or archival value, in accordance with approved records and disposition schedules; and to preserve, arrange, describe, and make available for research the permanently valuable records of North Carolina state agencies. In addition, the functions of the Local Records Unit and the county records component of the now defunct Records Description Unit were merged to form a reorganized Local Records Unit. The unit provides services to local officials, including consulting on records management issues, analyzing records and writing reten-tion schedules, providing advice on records preservation at the local level, transferring records to the State Archives for permanent preservation, and arranging and describing those records. The North Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board (SHRAB) received notifi-cation in December that it had been conditionally awarded an NHPRC grant for its pro-posed statewide archival training initiative, “Archival Education for the 21st Century.” Amounting to $50,621 in federal funds, matched by $60,753 in in-kind contributions by the Archives and Records Section, the SHRAB grant will underwrite an ongoing series of prac-tical training workshops that address both the need for instruction in basic archival principles and practices and intermediate-level education in specific areas of archives and records work. The project will fulfill a need identified at the SHRAB’s statewide conference on records, “Charting Our Future,” held in November 2001. Recommendations and evalua-tions received from the conference were analyzed and reviewed by the board in 2002 and V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 7 2003, and provided the framework for this educational initiative. The North Carolina SHRAB has worked closely with the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), and archival/historical societies in New York, Ohio, and Michigan, in develop-ing a workshop curriculum. After the two-year SHRAB project is complete, the Society of North Carolina Archivists (SNCA) has agreed to continue the training program. In March, the section’s Information and Technology Branch added several reference sources to the Archives’ website and online catalog, MARS (Manuscript and Archives Ref-erence System). Images of more than 187 early North Carolina map images were added to the descriptions available in MARS. These images represent more than 265 scans, in excess of 93 gigabytes of information. The public may view these maps by going to http://www.ncarchives.dcr.state.nc.us/, and doing a search on North Carolina Colony and State Maps. The Archives also has posted a new website containing more than 96 finding aids for private collections, photograph collections, and organizational records. These are available at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/archives under the heading, “Information for Researchers.” The Friends of the Archives (FOA) board met on February 9, and following its meeting the annual staff appreciation luncheon was held in the Archives and History/State Library Building’s conference room. This traditional event is one of the most effective ways that the FOA extends its appreciation to Archives and Records staff for their hard work and service on behalf of the people of North Carolina throughout the year. On January 20, Secretary Evans traveled to the Outer Banks History Center (OBHC) in Manteo to accept a digital collection donated to the center by the Outer Banks Sentinel newspaper. Secretary Evans personally thanked Sentinel editor Sandy Semans for the gift of the unique collection, which includes images depicting life on the Outer Banks in 1903, rare Wright brothers photographs, and First Flight Centennial stories produced for the centennial of the first flight. A new local history photographic exhibit at the OBHC gallery opened to a crowd of nearly one hundred guests on February 17. Aerial Views, Things in the News, the Beach of Yesteryear, and Past Happenings Here: Black & White Photographs by Roger P. Meekins fea-tures approximately fifty black-and-white images of Dare County and the surrounding region, dating from 1949 to 1954. Roanoke Island resident Roger P. Meekins chronicled the Outer Banks in aerial shots, landscapes, and scenes of everyday people. Photos of square dancing in Hatteras, net mending at Stumpy Point, boxing matches at the Nags Head Casino, and huge hauls of fish being unloaded at the Wanchese docks convey a sense of community life in the days before the area became a tourism Mecca. Meekins grew up on Roanoke Island, where his father was the founder and editor of the local newspaper, the Coastland Times. After obtaining a pilot’s license at the age of seventeen, Meekins took to the air with an army surplus camera, taking shots for the newspaper. He often flew to cover stories on Hatteras Island or mainland Dare in the days 4 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Lisbeth Evans (left), secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, accepts from Sandy Semans, editor of the Outer Banks Sentinel, a digital collection of photographs and stories from the First Flight Centennial celebration. before bridges connected the remote areas of the county. Combining his interest in photog-raphy with a passion for flying, Meekins began an aerial photography service. He also photo-graphed local weddings, christenings, and family reunions, eventually assembling a collection of over eight hundred negatives that are unparalleled in the way they document the area. These negatives were donated to the OBHC in 1994 and, until this exhibit, many have never been developed into prints. The OBHC staff designed and produced the exhibit. Sarah Downing selected the images, developed the interpretive themes, conducted essential research, and wrote the text. Kelly Grimm printed the neg-atives to exhibit-quality standards. Together they added colorful design elements that further highlight the visual impact of Meekins’s work. Aerial Views, Things in the News, the Beach of Yesteryear, and Past Happenings Here will be on display through August. The gallery is open seven days a week, with hours varying seasonally. The OBHC is located across from the Manteo waterfront at Roanoke Island Festival Park. For more information contact the center at (252) 473-2655. Recent Accessions by the North Carolina State Archives During the months of December 2003 and January and February 2004, the Archives and Records Section made 204 accession entries. The Archives accessioned original records from Columbus, Cumberland, Henderson, New Hanover, Pamlico, Randolph, and Rockingham Counties. The Archives received security microfilm of records for Alamance, Beaufort, Cabarrus, Catawba, Chatham, Cumberland, Davie, Durham, Frank-lin, Gaston, Gates, Greene, Guilford, Halifax, Harnett, Henderson, Hertford, Hyde, Iredell, Macon, Madison, Mecklenburg, Nash, Onslow, Person, Robeson, Rockingham, Rowan, Stokes, Transylvania, Wake, Watauga, Wayne, and Wilson Counties; and for the municipalities of Asheville, Mooresville, Northwest, Rocky Mount, Sunset Beach, Topsail Beach, and Wake Forest. The section accessioned records from the following state agencies: Department of Commerce, 2 reels; Department of Environment and Natural Resources, 31 reels; Depart-ment of Health and Human Services, 489 cubic feet and 1 fiche envelope; Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 5 reels; General Assembly, 34 reels; Gover-nor’s Office, 16.45 cubic feet, 42 Fibredex boxes, and 2 folders; Secretary of State, 3 reels; and Supreme Court, .4 cubic foot fiche box. The John W. Gould Letters, the Hannibal M. Little Papers, and the Clyde R. Hoey Papers were accessioned as new private collections. Additions were made to the Black Mountain College Miscellaneous Collection, the Ruth P. Barbour Papers, the William Joslin Papers, and the Janis R. Ramquist Papers. The Hannibal M. Little Account Book and John Calvin Rich Account Book were added to the collection of account books. Two rare volumes, the Journal of a young man of Massachusetts . . . (1816) and The Cherokee Physician . . . (1849), were added to the vault collection. Other records accessioned included school records for the Miller-Motte Business School (6 cubic feet) and the Mann Travel Academy (2.5 cubic feet) added to Academic Records; 2 Bible Records; 101 audio V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 4 9 A visitor examines one of the photographs from the Roger P. Meekins collection on display at the Outer Banks History Center. and 23 videotaped interviews, and 9 other items, added to the Military Collection; records of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (J. Johnston Pettigrew Chapter) and the Tuesday Afternoon Book Club (addition), accessioned as Organization Records; 7 issues added to the Newspaper Collection; and 2 original prints and 10 videotapes added to the Non-textual Materials Collection. Historical Publications Section Volume III of The Papers of James Iredell has been released nearly thirty years after the first two volumes were published. Edited by Donna Kelly and Lang Baradell, this volume provides a comprehensive view of Iredell’s life in the years immediately preceding his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. During this period (1784-1789), Iredell prac-ticed law, served on the North Carolina Council of State, prepared a revisal of the state’s laws, supported the launching of the University of North Carolina, served in the Constitution ratification convention, and had a county named for him. Copies of Volume III of The Papers of James Iredell may be pur-chased for $37.10, which includes tax and shipping. On the evening of March 2, approximately fifty members and guests of the North Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society attended a gathering at the Carolina Country Club to honor James Iredell. A collection of rare books and manuscripts used or written by Iredell was on display. Following a buffet dinner, Willis Whichard, dean and professor of law at Campbell University, presented the keynote address. Jeffrey J. Crow then introduced Kelly and Baradell, who made brief remarks about their editorial work on Volume III. The Honorable I. Beverly Lake Jr. presented each of them a plaque of appreciation for their con-tributions to the legal history of North Carolina through their editing of the third and fourth volumes of Iredell’s papers. The fourth volume is forthcoming. Volume II of the Colonial Records of North Carolina [Second Series] is back in print after seventeen years. First published in 1968, North Carolina Higher-Court Records, 1670-1696 has been out of print since 1987. Edited by Mattie Erma Edwards Parker, the volume contains records that shed light on many aspects of life in colonial North Carolina, includ-ing sources of immigration, business relations with other colonies, occupations of early settlers, and social customs. This reprint of Vol-ume II of the Colonial Records of North Carolina (533 pages, indexed, clothbound) costs $58.50, including tax and shipping. The 2004 catalog of publications is now available free of charge (left). It lists over 160 titles, including 5 new ones: The North Carolina State Fair: The First 150 Years, by Melton A. McLaurin; The Papers of James Iredell, Volume III, 1784-1789; Paving Tobacco Road: A Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, by Walter R. Turner; Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, edited by E. Thomson Shields Jr. and Charles R. Ewen; and Volume XV of North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, edited by Weymouth T. Jordan Jr. 5 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Editors Donna Kelly (left) and Lang Baradell (right) of the Historical Publications Section accept plaques from the Honorable I. Beverly Lake Jr., chief justice of the Supreme Court, (center), in recognition of their work editing the papers of James Iredell. All of these books may be ordered from the Historical Publications Section, Office of Archives and History, 4622 Mail Service Center (CC), Raleigh, NC 27699-4622. For credit card (VISA and MasterCard) orders visit the online store at http://store.yahoo.com/ nc-historical-publications/ or call (919) 733-7442. For walk-in purchases visit the office at 120 West Lane Street, Raleigh, weekdays from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. News from State Historic Sites and Properties Capitol Section The Capitol Section was affected by a reorganization of the Raleigh-based offices of the division. As of March 1, the Museum and Visitor Services Branch was elevated to section status. The State Capitol was removed from its affiliation with Tryon Palace in the Capitol Section and placed in the Museum and Visitor Services Section. C. Edward Morris will serve as chief of the new section. Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens resumes its status as an independent section. North Carolina Transportation Museum The North Carolina Transportation Museum (NCTM) is moving closer to completing a major goal of acquiring and restoring a large aircraft for display in the Back Shop. The plane is an original DC-3, named the Potomac Pacemaker, which once flew for North Carolina’s Piedmont Airlines. The twin-propeller-driven DC-3 was the last of its kind to carry Piedmont Airline passengers; it flew 48,000 hours before being taken out of service in 1963. Now, after more than twenty-five years mounted on large pylons outside the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, the plane is being moved by NCTM personnel. In January museum staff traveled to Durham to examine DC-3 N56V. The purpose of the trip was to appraise the aircraft to determine what tools, lifts, and cranes would be required to facilitate the move. Master mechanic John Bechtel devised a six-weeks disas-sembly plan (at least two days a week), which was soon set in motion. Retired Piedmont Airlines executive and NCTM supporter Ronnie Macklin coordi-nated removal of the propellers, the first step in disassembly. He arranged for assistance and the loan of special tools. Then workers removed the engine covers, engines, and wheels, using a rented lift and a forklift with a boom. The rest of the plan will carry the process through extraction of the control surfaces—ailerons, elevators, rudders, and trim tabs. After that will come disassembly of the outer wing panels, a process that will require a rental crane and the dropping of a nearby power line. The next major step is removal of parts between the fuselage and the horizontal stabilizer, and between the fuselage and the center wing section. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 1 Finally the museum team will lift the aircraft from the pylons and complete the final disassembly. A crane and riggers will raise the plane from its supports and place it on the ground. The horizontal stabilizer is then removed, and the fuselage sepa-rated from the center wing section. All components will be loaded onto trucks and moved to Spencer for reassembly. The transport of small components will be accomplished with the museum’s rollback truck. Larger items will be moved with trucks pro-vided by the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Northeastern Historic Sites Section Historic Bath has been awarded funding for a summer intern through the Alderson Internship Program, administered by the American Association of State and Local History. The intern will work with staff from Historic Bath and the division office in Raleigh to complete two small exhibits that will be mounted at the site during its 2005 tri-centennial year. These exhibits—John Lawson and the Beginning of Bath and Blackbeard: Bath’s Most Notorious Resident—will complement special programming at Bath in 2005. The intern will be responsible for researching topics to be covered in the exhibits, working with site staff to choose and research objects and illustrations for the exhibits, writing labels, and assisting exhibit design staff to create text panels and design the layout for exhibits. The intern will also work with the educational staff to create a simple activity or handout related to each exhibit appropriate for elementary school students. To apply for the internship, send a letter of interest and vitae postmarked by April 15 to Dr. Patricia Samford, Historic Bath, Box 148, Bath, NC 27808. For further information, call (252) 923-3971, or e-mail patricia.samford@ncmail.net. Camden County Middle School won first place in the regional history bowl held at Historic Edenton in February. Coach John Hill and his teams have participated in nine of the ten Edenton competitions since 1995. Students on the winning team were Jarrod Brothers, Chris Lawson, Ben Kornegay, Khristian Ortiz, and Heather Wolsiefer. Hertford Middle School, coached by Wallace Johnson, took second place. Other schools competing this year included Central Middle School, Janet McElfresh, coach; Chowan Middle School, Phyllis Copeland, coach; Currituck Middle School, Kim Jackson, coach; and First Flight Middle School, Colleen Vaughan, coach. Regional history bowls at other state historic sites will continue until the state championships in late April. Piedmont Historic Sites Section The Spitting Image: A History of Spittoons and Cuspidors, an unusual collection of recepta-cles used by tobacco chewers and snuff dippers, opened as a new temporary exhibition at Duke Homestead State Historic Site and Tobacco Museum on February 28. The unique exhibit will remain on display until December 1. 5 2 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S Retired Piedmont Airlines executive Ronnie Macklin (left) assists Chic Ayers (right) in the removal of a propeller from a DC-3 at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. The plane is being disassembled and moved to the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer. Extensive research revealed that spittoons and cuspidors, common in much of nineteenth-century America, have never before been featured as a stand-alone museum exhibit, nor has there been a definitive history written on the topic. B. W. C. “Ben” Roberts, a charter member of the Duke Homestead Education and History Corporation, initiated the concept of a spittoon display. With his wife, Snow, he began collecting different models at area antique stores. His search eventually extended out-of-state and onto the Internet via eBay. As word of the project spread, numerous individuals also contributed spittoons. Apparently among the largest in the country, the collection now includes more than fifty different spittoons, ranging from an 1890s turtle-shaped version that opens when its head is pressed, to a brass cuspidor used in the N.C. Senate chamber in the State Capitol until 1961. The Spitting Image: A History of Spittoons and Cuspidors is made possible by the Duke Homestead Education and History Corporation, the Division of State Historic Sites and Properties, and Ben and Snow Roberts. Like several other state historic sites, the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum sponsored a number of special events and activities for Black History Month in February, including lectures and workshops. Activities included an exhibit and forum by the African American Quilt Circle of Durham. Dr. Freddie Parker, Department of History chair at N.C. Central University, led a special workshop that examined major themes of the black experience in America and concepts not often emphasized in the public school curricula. Topics included desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education, African Americans before 1900, reparations for slavery, and the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The museum’s own Brown Memorial Singers presented a concert of traditional spirituals and gospel music. The museum also offered special programs for Women’s History Month in March, including an exhibit, Achievements of Women, and a lecture series sponsored by the Char-lotte Hawkins Brown Historical Foundation and Louis Raiford. Roanoke Island Festival Park On February 14 and 15, a Civil War Living History Weekend commemorated the 142nd anniversary of the Battle of Roanoke Island. The fourth annual event featured re-enactors portraying Union and Confederate soldiers and sailors, artillery demonstrations, blacksmithing, quilting, rope-making, woodworking, leather-work, presentations, and lectures. Author Barbara Smith of Washington, N.C., signed copies of her book, Burning Rails As We Pleased, in the museum store during the Civil War weekend. The book is a V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 3 This turtle-shaped spittoon is one of more than fifty varieties on display at Duke Homestead. Author Barbara Smith with some of her great-grandfather’s letters that she compiled and published as Burning Rails As We Pleased. compilation of letters her great-grandfather, William Garrigues Bentley, wrote to his fam-ily during the war. Her late grandmother, who kept them in a box, passed on the letters to her. Smith recalls how her grandmother “would get out this box full of letters and she would read them to me” during the summers she spent with her. Many years later, while visiting a Civil War battlefield, she told her own daughter about the letters. This conversa-tion led to a New Year’s resolution to transcribe the material, which became an obsession to which she often devoted twelve to fourteen hours a day, scanning letters on her computer. Two old paintings, recently restored at the N.C. Museum of Art, are on loan to Roanoke Island Festival Park from Robert Midgette of Manteo. They are displayed in the administration building. Midgette inherited the art from his father in 2000. Apparently the paintings had come down through the family from Pat Ethridge, a lighthouse keeper at Rodanthe. According to Midgette’s family history, the two portraits were salvaged from shipwrecks, whose contents often washed up on shore. Portrait of a Lady is an eighteenth-century work, painted over an older portrait visible in x-rays taken during the conservation process. The older painting shows a woman more mature of face but in similar clothes. There is no history of the artist or the subject. During restoration, the painting was cleaned, surface cracks repaired, and the canvas support stabilized. Portrait of a Man, appar-ently a nineteenth-century copy of an older work, is signed “Om. Breit, après, V. Steen.” Again, the artist and subject are unknown. Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens On February 19, Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens hosted a free showing of the documentary February One, which tells the story of the 1960 Woolworth store sit-in at Greensboro, a seminal event in the history of the Civil Rights movement. Using contem-porary photos and first-hand accounts by participants, the hour-long film traces the causes and consequences of the sit-in, which inspired other non-violent protests across the nation and ultimately changed public accommodation laws. Inspired by the four Greensboro students—Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Frank-lin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—who began the sit-in, young African Americans in New Bern staged a similar protest at the local Kress store lunch counter. Charles Bell, now a Newark, New Jersey Municipal Council member, was one of the par-ticipants. After the screening, Bell and producer Rebecca Cerese led a discussion about the film and the effects of the sit-in on both the participants and the nation. February One, produced by Video Dialog, Inc., of Durham, was awarded the Human Rights Award at the River Run Film Festival in Winston-Salem and received the first annual Global Peace Film Festival Award in Orlando, Florida. The screening is part of the African American History Lecture Series, sponsored jointly by the James City Historical Society and Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens. Western Historic Sites Section The experts have finished the interior and exterior work, furniture will soon be moved back in, and a sneak peak for the press of the refurbished Asheville boardinghouse is scheduled for April. Closed for almost six years, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State His-toric Site in Asheville is set to reopen the weekend of May 28, after more than two years of complex and painstaking restoration. Reopening festivities will include a rededication ceremony, living history tours, a for-mal banquet, the performance of a Wolfe play, guided trolley tours of Asheville, and a special Authors Evening featuring several prominent southern writers. (Participants have 5 4 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S not yet been disclosed.) Site staff members anticipate that during the four-day reopening extravaganza, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial will host scores of visitors eager to see what the house looks like after restoration. Memorialized by the famed writer in his classic novel, Look Homeward, Angel, the “Old Kentucky Home” was victimized by an arsonist the night of June 24, 1998. The fire began in the dining room and raged through floors, walls, ceilings, and woodwork, severely damaging the house and furnishings. Even-tually, the roof collapsed into the 1883 boardinghouse. Water and smoke also took a terrible toll. But soon American literature lovers throughout the world will have a chance to see the famous home rise anew from the ashes. Thanks to the meticulous $2.4 mil-lion restoration, the house now much more closely resembles the way it looked during the ten years that Wolfe lived there, begin-ning in 1906, when his mother bought the building and started to rent rooms to board-ers. Historians and restorers have returned it to 1916, the year Wolfe left Asheville to study at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The exterior of the rambling boarding-house has been repainted yellow to match its color during the period of Wolfe’s residence. New interior color schemes, roofing, wall treatments, and landscaping also reflect the house Wolfe thinly fictionalized as “Dixieland” in Look Homeward, Angel. Even the loud lime green trim in one of the downstairs bedrooms is true to the period. Historians consulted on the project chose 1916 because it was the year Julia Wolfe made the last substantial changes to the boardinghouse. She added eleven rooms, bringing the total to twenty-nine, encompassing approximately 6,000 square feet. To enhance the period feel, some artifacts from later years that were previously displayed in the house—such as Wolfe’s Harvard diploma—have been reinstalled in the visitor center exhibit hall. Because of the efforts of numerous firefighters and volunteers, three-quarters of the eight hundred artifacts in the house at the time of the fire were rescued. Since the disaster, Historic Sites curatorial staff members and other experts have worked tirelessly to restore these artifacts to their former glory. In some cases, they’ll look even better than before. For example, once it was cleaned, a roll-top desk revealed that it was made from a gorgeous piece of burl wood, its brilliance previously dimmed by age. Other artifacts given new life through painstaking restoration include Julia and W. O. Wolfe’s cot-tage- style bed, in which all of their children were born, and a stunning gilt-edged pier mirror in the downstairs hall. When he began work on the project, restoration architect Joseph K. Oppermann received precise orders from longtime site manager Steve Hill: “When you get done here, I don’t even want to know you were ever here.” As a result of the commitment to histor-ical authenticity, it appears that not even Tom Wolfe himself would now know the fire had ever happened. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 5 This cottage-style bed, in which Thomas Wolfe and his siblings were born, is among the furnishings that survived the fire at the Wolfe Memorial and have been completely restored by the curatorial staff. News from State History Museums North Carolina Museum of History As part of the two-year Celebration of North Carolina Craft, the museum showcases a stunning selection of silver pieces. Highlighting the exhibit are objects by Paul Revere II and William Waldo Dodge Jr., an Asheville silversmith who gained a national reputation for his work. Crafted from Silver: Objects in the Museum’s Collection, on view through May 9, also fea-tures several recent acquisitions, including a ladle made in the early 1800s by Raleigh silver-smith Jehu Scott. Many of the exhibit items were purchased by the Museum of History Associates, the statewide support group, for the museum’s permanent collection. A new traveling exhibition, Women of Our Time: 20th-Century Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery, will be on display from May 28 to August 1. This collection of photographic portraits celebrates seventy-five women whose brilliance, courage, style, and unflagging spirit have helped shape America. The exhibition, organized by the Smithso-nian’s National Portrait Gallery, is on national tour while the gallery is closed for major renovation. On June 5, Ann Shumand, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, will present an illustrated lecture in conjunction with the exhibit. The N.C. Museum of History has been awarded a $301,000 teacher training grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant will underwrite four five-day teacher workshops in African American history and culture titled, “Crafting Freedom: Thomas Day and Elizabeth Keckly, Black Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the Making of America.” Teachers from North Carolina and elsewhere may apply to attend workshops to be offered in June and July. Sessions will be held at the museum and other sites in the Triangle area. The workshops are part of NEH’s new Landmarks of American History Teacher Workshop initiative, and are designed and conducted by the Thomas Day Education Pro-ject, an independent multicultural education initiative based in the Research Triangle Park. For more informa-tion, visit www.thomasday.net, call toll-free 1 (877) 438-1599, or e-mail tdek04@aol.com. Staff Notes 5 6 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S This photographic portrait of Helen Keller, taken in 1904 by Charles Whitman, is one of seventy-five images of prominent twentieth-century American women included in the traveling exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery to be on display at the North Carolina Museum of History. (Photo courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution). V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 7 Upcoming Events April 12 Historic Halifax. Halifax Day. Celebrate the 228th anniversary of the adoption of the Halifax Resolves, with tours and living history activities, and a patriotic observance sponsored by the North Carolina Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. April 14, 21 Aycock Birthplace. Living History. Visitors can experience old-fashioned spinning and weaving, and the making of butter, lye soap, and candles. 9:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. April 17 North Carolina Museum of History. Writer’s Block: Hugh Morton’s North Carolina. Photojournalist Hugh Morton discusses his new book, which features his own personal favorites from the thousands of photographs snapped during his sixty-year career. A book signing will follow the program. 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. Polk Memorial. Mexican War Encampment, 1847. Living history program presented by the 12th U.S. Infantry and the 1st U.S. Dragoons. Re-enactors depict camp life, period uniforms and equipment, weapons demonstrations, and a mustering-in station. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. April 18 Historic Bath. Bath Fun Day. Historic Bath will complement this annual municipal celebration with hands-on colonial activities, such as rope-making, games, and cornhusk dolls. 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. April 19 North Carolina Museum of History. This Far by Faith: Stories from the African-American Religious Experience. Journalist Juan Williams discusses the role that inspiration fueled by religious faith played in the Civil Rights movement. A reception will follow the program, which is funded by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and GlaxoSmithKline. 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. Register by April 16 at (919) 715-0200, ext. 283. April 22 North Carolina Museum of History. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Author Jean Fagan Yellin discusses her new biography of the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. A reception will follow the lecture. 7:00 P.M. Register by April 19 at (919) 715-0200, ext. 283. April 24 Bennett Place. Living History. Program includes a military encampment, drill demonstrations, music, and children’s activities. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. House in the Horseshoe. Militia Muster. Features a militia encampment and demonstrations of eighteenth-century crafts and activities. April 27-28 Reed Gold Mine. Heritage Days. Area fourth-graders and their teachers experience the life-styles and crafts of the past in this annual event. Group reservations required for panning and underground tours. 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. Fee for panning. May 1 Museum of the Albemarle. History of Lifesaving. Program explores the history of lifesaving and lighthouses along the North Carolina Outer Banks with lectures, exhibits, and demonstrations. 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Battleship Alive. Living history interpreters demonstrate daily duties, drills, and inspections aboard a World War II battleship. Special tours of the Living History areas and exhibits of home-front activities are featured. 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. May 1-2 Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex. Military Through the Ages. Learn about the evolution of weapons, tactics, and uniforms from re-enactors camped on the arsenal grounds representing a variety of mili-tary units. Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., and Sunday, 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. North Carolina Transportation Museum. Rail Days. Annual event showcases the importance of railroads in the state, and features steam and diesel train rides, caboose rides, musical entertainment, food vendors, and children’s activities. Fee. For more information, call (704) 636-2889. 5 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S May 2 Roanoke Island Festival Park. Seventh Annual Mollie Fearing Memorial Art Show. Opening reception for this annual showing of local paintings, drawings, sculptures, photography, and stained glass. Produced by the Dare County Arts Council in honor of its founder. 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. Show runs through May 26. May 8 Bentonville Battleground. Confederate Memorial Day. Memorial service near the Confederate mass grave, co-hosted by the Harper House-Bentonville Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 11:00 A.M. Fort Fisher. Confederate Memorial Day. Program recognizes and honors the builders and defenders of Fort Fisher. State Capitol. National Historic Preservation Week Celebration. Includes lectures, special tours of the Capitol and Union Square, trolley tours of Raleigh, and costumed interpreters. Cosponsored by the Raleigh Historic Districts Commission. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. May 12 North Carolina Museum of History. History à la Carte: Blackbeard: The Man Behind the Legend. Author Margaret Hoffman, who has spent years separating the myths surrounding the pirate from the reality of his life, will share some facts about Blackbeard more fantastic than fiction. 12:10 P.M. May 14 North Carolina Maritime Museum, Beaufort. Blackbeard Fest Symposium. Special event features tours of artifact exhibits, lectures about pirates and the discovery and recovery of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and a boat ride to the site of the wreck and Cape Lookout. 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. May 15 North Carolina Museum of History. The Lost Light: The Mystery of the Missing Cape Hatteras Fresnel Lens. Author Kevin P. Duffus discusses his book about the lens from the Cape Hatteras lighthouse that was hidden from the Union navy in 1861 and went missing for 140 years. A book signing will follow the program. 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. May 15-16 Alamance Battleground. 233rd Anniversary of the Battle of Alamance. Annual event features demonstrations of colonial domestic and military life, and concludes with special commemorative activities. Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., Sunday, 1:00 to 9:00 P.M. May 16 Historic Bath. Open House. Held in conjunction with National Tourism Day, open house will feature free tours of the Palmer-Marsh and Bonner Houses, an open hearth cooking demonstration, and hands-on craft activities for children and adults. 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. May 22 North Carolina Maritime Museum, Roanoke Island. Sail Training and Boat Handling. One-day course using traditional small sailing craft. $85 fee. To register or for further information, call Scott Whitesides at (252) 475-1500. May 28-31 Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Grand Reopening Gala. Festive reopening of Wolfe’s “Old Kentucky Home” includes special tours, living history programs, dramas, visiting authors, a banquet, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. May 30 Mountain Gateway Museum. Steel Rails Hummin’. Bill and Kristin Morris share songs and stories about the Western North Carolina Railroad. 3:00 P.M. May 31 State Capitol. Memorial Day Ceremony. Military encampment on the Capitol grounds represents three centuries of American military tradition, and a wreath laying ceremony at the Veteran’s Memorial honors North Carolinians who serving during times of war. 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Memorial Day Observance. Traditional Memorial Day ceremony features guest speaker, all-service color guard, a gun salute, Taps, and a memorial wreath cast upon the waters of the Cape Fear River. 5:45 P.M. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 5 9 June 5 Duke Homestead. Herb, Garden, and Craft Festival. Historical outdoor herb festival includes displays on traditional uses of herbs, craft demonstrations, herb and craft vendors, live music, children’s games, and refreshments. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. North Carolina Museum of History. Curator’s Talk. Women of Our Time. In conjunction with the traveling exhibit from the National Portrait Gallery, Ann Shumard, curator of photographs at the gallery, presents an illustrated lecture about path-breaking women of the twentieth century. 2:00 to 3:00 P.M. June 6 Roanoke Island Festival Park. Penland School of Crafts Show. Opening reception for showing of works by Penland artists in a variety of media, including blacksmithing, textiles, and glass art. 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. Show will run through June 30. June 7-11 Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex. Summer Kids Excellent Adventure: Carolina Crafts Fest. In conjunction with the statewide celebration of North Carolina craft, this year’s free summer camp provides children ages 9 to 12 hands-on opportunities to learn about such domestic crafts as candle making, weaving, rope-making, pottery, and storytelling. For more information, call (910) 486-1330 or e-mail mcfhc@infionline.net. June 9 North Carolina Museum of History. History à la Carte: An Astronomer Recalls Her Early Career. Jaylee Montague Mead, who joined NASA in 1959 as one of the first female astronomers, reflects on the challenges facing America’s early space program and on her own exciting career. 12:10 P.M. June 12 Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum. African American Heritage Festival. Outdoor event celebrates African American music, crafts, art, and dance, and features a Bronco League baseball tournament and live performances. 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. June 12-13 State Capitol. Civil War Encampment on Capitol Square. Weekend encampment includes lectures, period music, and demonstrations of military drills and camp life. Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., Sunday, 12:00 to 5:00 P.M. June 13 Historic Bath. Palmer-Marsh House Summer Music Series. In this first concert of the series, pianist Heidi Souza and cellist Brent Selby, both of Bath, will perform. Seating is limited to thirty persons. Advance tickets may be picked up at the Visitor Center. 2:00 p.m., free of charge but donations accepted. For more information, call (252) 923-3971 or e-mail bath@ncmail.net. June 14-July 4 State Capitol. Historic Flag Exhibit: “The American Spirit.” The rotunda will be filled with a display of historic replica flags, including the Star Spangled Banner. The exhibit is sponsored by Bayer Cropscience. June 15, 17 Historic Bath. Past Times Day Camp. Children ages 5 to 10 will learn basic life skills used by our forefathers. They will have an opportunity to cook biscuits in Dutch ovens, make herbal tea from herbs in the garden, make brooms, see how fishnets were mended, and participate in other historical activities. 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. $10 fee for the two-day session. June 21-July 17 Historic Bath. Summer Ventures in Archaeology. On weekday mornings, visitors can watch and learn how archaeologists work, as high school students enrolled in the Summer Ventures program work with East Carolina University archaeologist Dr. Charles Ewen and Historic Bath staff to uncover Bath’s buried history. June 22 USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Battleship Hootenanny. Fourth annual event on the fantail of the battleship features local musicians, including John Golden and Eric Bruton. $10 fee will benefit Friends of the Battleship. 8:00 P.M. In the Division of State Historic Sites and Properties, Justin Chambers has resigned as division exhibits designer to accept a similar position with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Jemi Johnson has separated as public affairs coordinator at the North Carolina Transportation Museum. At Tryon Palace, Brian Bowden, horticultural techni-cian and section gardener, and Priscilla Speed Hunter, information communications spe-cialist and grant writer, have both resigned. Gordon Hale has separated as site assistant at Vance Birthplace. New site assistants have been named at House in the Horseshoe, Polk Memorial, and Reed Gold Mine: Jeff Rieves, Courtney Hybarger, and Rebecca Lewis (transferred from the N. C. Museum of History), respectively. Marie Sharpe has been transferred to the division office as special projects curator. David Brook has been named director of the Division of Historical Resources, remov-ing the “acting” status from the position that he has held since November. Anne Miller, editor of the North Carolina Historical Review, has been appointed to the executive commit-tee of the Conference of Historical Journals, publishers of the newsletter, Editing History. Several staff changes have occurred within the Archives and Records Section over the last several months. Dick Lankford has been named interim state archivist and records admin-istrator, succeeding Cathy Morris, retired. Ed Southern was promoted to head of the Government Records Branch and assistant state records administrator on January 1, 2004. Lisa Maxwell resigned as records management analyst I. Chris Black started work in February as a processing assistant IV with the Correspondence Unit of the Public Services Branch, but resigned later in the month to accept the vacant records analyst position. Douglas Brown was hired as an archivist I in the Local Records Unit. Charles Michael Duncan was hired as a processing assistant IV in the State Agency Unit. In the Public Services Branch, Tom Vincent began work as an archivist I and Hilary Kanupp as a processing assistant IV. In the Collections Management Branch, Charles Murray was promoted from processing assistant IV to photo lab tech II. Lea Walker was hired as an administrative secretary III within the section’s Administrative Branch. At the North Carolina Museum of History, Michael Daul has been named multimedia producer. Colleges and Universities Campbell University Dr. James I. Martin has been appointed chairman of the Department of Government, History, and Justice. Two full-time faculty members, Dr. Stephen M. King and Professor Catherine B. Cowling, have joined the department for the 2003-2004 academic year. 6 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S June 26 Bentonville Battleground. Summer Seasonal Living History Program and Artillery Demonstrations. Costumed interpreters demonstrate routine activities of the common North Carolina soldier during the Civil War, such as small arms fire, close order drill, and the firing of a three-inch rifled cannon, and discuss the uniforms and equipment used during the war. 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. July 4 State Capitol. Independence Day Celebration. Traditional, family-oriented celebration with patriotic concert and picnic on the grounds. 12:30 to 3:30 P.M. USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Battleship Blast. One of the largest choreographed fireworks displays in the state may be viewed from Wilmington’s historic downtown area. 9:05 P.M. University of North Carolina at Greensboro The Division of Continual Learning, in cooperation with Old Salem, is again offering four courses this spring and summer in the fields of historic preservation, archaeology, and museum studies. The first course, “Field Methods in Preservation Technology,” is cosponsored by the State Historic Preservation Office. It offers lectures by craftsmen and preservation specialists, and hands-on fieldwork in Old Salem using such techniques as masonry restoration, wood and stone conservation, wood shingle and slate roofing, re-glazing and repairing old windows, and paint analysis. The class runs from May 17 to June 4. A second course, “Research Methods in Historical Archaeology,” also provides participants with field experience. Students will be shown the basics of excavation, map-ping, artifact analysis, photography, measurement, and record keeping, as they participate in the exploration of the site of the 1766 “Builders House,” the first building constructed at Old Salem. The class begins on May 19 and concludes on June 16. The university cam-pus will be the site of the third course, “Identification and Evaluation of the Historic Built Environment.” The two basic methods of documentation and analysis of historic build-ings— field surveys and National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) nominations—will be introduced. Students will learn to conduct field documentation, archival research, and oral interviews as they prepare an actual NRHP nomination for a building in Greensboro. The dates for the course are June 10 to July 15. The final offering, “Southern History and Material Culture,” will focus on the collection of Old Salem’s Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) within its historical setting. This year’s course will emphasize the history and material culture of the Chesapeake region before 1820. Instructors will examine current methods of research, interpretation, preservation, and analysis of decora-tive arts and architecture from the period. The class will run from June 20 to July 16. The application deadline for these courses, each of which carries three credits, is April 20. To register or to obtain further information, call the Division of Continual Learning at (336) 334-5414, or visit their website, www.uncg.edu/hpms. State, County, and Local Groups Cape Fear Museum A new exhibit at the museum explores the use of campaign buttons and jewelry in American elections. Push Your Buttons: Politics in Action features a thousand buttons from the museum’s collection or on loan from the public. The exhibit covers the century of political campaigns from 1896 to 1996, and includes buttons of all the presidents and many of the unsuccessful candidates during the period, as well as state and local office seekers. The evolution of voting machinery, from ballot box to voting booth, is also illustrated. An Optech Magnifier and interactive display cases allow visitors to closely inspect the campaign memorabilia. The exhibit opened on January 16 and will run through November 28. Chapel Hill Historical Society Dr. Trudier Harris-Lopez, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, was the featured speaker at the monthly meeting of the society on February 1. She discussed the role of George Moses Horton, an illiterate Chatham County slave who could compose poems in his head, in the development of African American poetry. Horton’s first volume of poems, The Hope of Liberty, was pub-lished in 1829 before he was taught to write by the wife of a UNC professor. The histori-cal society has recently published a new collection of his works, titled Naked Genius. Dr. Harris-Lopez is the founder of the George Moses Horton Society for the Study of African American Poetry. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 1 Greensboro Historical Museum The museum acknowledged Black History Month with book-signings by the authors of two recent publications concerning African Americans. On February 8, Jim Carrier dis-cussed some of the historic sites in the Southeast that are noted in his A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement. The International Civil Rights Center and Museum of Greens-boro cosponsored the event. The African American community of Greensboro is the focus of a recent publication by photographer Otis L. Hairston Jr., who spoke at the museum on February 15. Greensboro North Carolina, a number in the Black America Series by Arcadia Publishing, was conceived as a tribute to his late father, Dr. Otis L. Hairston Sr., pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church from 1960 until his death in 2000. A selection of Hairston’s photo-graphs over the past forty years will be exhibited at the museum through May 10. Lincoln County Historical Association In conjunction with the Downtown Development Association of Lincolnton, the histori-cal association is hosting the fifth annual (but the first week-long) Historic Preservation Week, May 17-22. This year’s theme, “New Frontiers in Preservation,” suggests the eclectic nature of topics to be covered, with seminars on digitization, metadata, disaster planning, conserving museum collections, and collecting church and local histories. Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History, will be the keynote speaker at the kickoff dinner on May 17, discussing the various ways the office can assist local organiza-tions. The distinguished panel of speakers scheduled to participate includes Dr. Gary Freeze, Tim Pyatt, Kathy Wisser, Kevin Cherry, Pat Ryckman, David Goist, and Carol Kammen. The event is sponsored by the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners and the City of Lincolnton. The cost for the six-day conference is $150 if registered by May 3; the rate for early registrants (by April 15) is $125. To register or for further information, contact Jason Harpe at the Lincoln County Historical Association, 403 East Main St., Lincolnton, NC 28092. Montford Point Marine Museum A new museum has been established in Jacksonville to preserve the legacy of the only U.S. Marine Corps boot camp for African Americans during World War II. The mission of the Montford Point Marine Museum is to collect and preserve in a museum environ-ment photographs, documents, and artifacts that reflect the unique history of the camp and the 23,000 soldiers who passed through it from 1942 to 1949, the first of their race to earn the title “marine.” The museum acquisition committee is currently seeking such materials, either by gift or loan. The museum is located in Building M101 on the Camp Johnson Marine Corps Base, former site of the Montford Point camp, at Jacksonville. It is currently open only on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Groups are encouraged to schedule visits in advance by calling (910) 347-4930. For further information, visit the museum’s website at www.montfordpointmarines.com, or e-mail Finney Greggs, director, at montfordpointmuseum@earthlink.net. New Bern Historical Society The society sponsored three events during the winter that reflected its involvement in the New Bern Battlefield Preservation Project, the effort to expand and preserve the site of the 1862 Battle of New Bern. On January 26, a general meeting at the New Bern Craven County Library presented the community with a status report on the project. Mark Mangum, architect Paul Stephens, and historian Richard Lore were the featured speakers. Project coordinators and volunteers spruced up the battlefield during the ninth 6 2 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S annual Park Day on February 21, trimming bushes and cutting down trees. On March 27, a Civil War Adventure Day for children offered a walking tour of the grounds, demonstra-tions and drills by Civil War re-enactors, and period craft activities. The society has recently purchased an additional 2.63 acres of the original battlefield for parking facilities and a visitor center. More than twenty-six acres are now under the society’s protective care. Phoenix African American Historical Society of Edgecombe County On February 21, at its annual Black History Month program, the society presented the Helen Gordon Quigless Jr. African American History Award to St. Paul AME Zion Church for the church’s efforts to recover, record, and promote its unique history. Orga-nized in 1866, St. Paul AME Zion Church is the oldest African American church in Tarboro. The church’s edifice was damaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and demolished in 2002. Thereafter, the congregation erected monuments on the site to commemorate the church’s existence and its contributions to the community. The four granite monuments include an obelisk stating the origin of the church and highlight-ing several outstanding members; an upright ledger documenting the church’s destruction by the floodwaters on September 16, 1999; a headstone denoting the site of the Tarboro Colored Institute, established in 1869 (the first school for African Americans in Tarboro, sponsored by the church); and a slab anchoring the church’s 1883 bell. The society’s annual award has been named for Helen Gordon Quigless Jr., who died in February, to honor her exemplary service. She was the first president of the organization that was started in April 2001. Through the years, she was an avid supporter of African American history and historic preservation at the national, state, and local levels. Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities The nonprofit Friends of Weymouth recently agreed to act as fiscal agent for a fund-raising effort, the “Bring Sam Home Fund,” to purchase a portrait bust of Sam Ragan for the center. Ragan, who died in 1996, was Poet Laureate of North Carolina, the first secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, and the first chairman of the North Carolina Arts Council. He was also instrumental in the preservation of the Weymouth Center as a nonprofit arts venture, and in the establishment of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in the center. A remarkable bronze likeness of Ragan has been cast by Gretta Bader of Alexandria, Virginia, whose works are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery. Marsha Warren, executive director of the Paul Green Founda-tion, and writer Charles Blackburn are serving as co-chairpersons of the campaign. All tax-deductible contributions will be acknowledged in a celebration at the center when the goal of $25,000 has been realized. To make a contribution or for further information, contact Charles Blackburn at (919) 547-5212, or by e-mail at cblackburn@sigmaxi.org. Obituaries With the death of Thomas Custis Parramore on January 13, North Carolina history lost one of its stalwarts, a teacher and scholar with a determined commitment to ferret out little-known aspects of the state’s past. Since retiring from the history department at Meredith College in 1992, Parramore had dedicated his energy to researching the history of flight in North Carolina; he lived to see the centennial commemoration of the Wright Brothers’ exploits on the Outer Banks. In recent years, he also had taken an interest in the story of Hannah Crofts, once the property of John Hill Wheeler of Murfreesboro, and the author of a recently discovered slave narrative. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 3 It was characteristic of Tom Parramore to take an interest in Crofts and to generously volunteer to assist out-of-state scholars in fixing the historical context of the narrative. Parramore was born in Winton, Hertford County, and displayed a lifelong interest in the history of northeastern North Carolina, contributing substantially over the years to the work of the Murfreesboro Historical Commission. He joined the Meredith faculty in 1962 upon completing his graduate training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Parramore was a prolific author, publishing fifteen articles in the North Carolina Historical Review, contributing to The Way We Lived in North Carolina series, and penning major works on the history of freemasonry and of Norfolk, Virginia. The culminating work of his career was First to Fly: North Carolina and the Beginnings of Aviation, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002. Parramore did not hesitate to challenge con-ventional wisdom, reveling in taking contrary positions and staking out uncharted scholarly ground. Tom Parramore’s name, like that of his wife Barbara, is familiar to a generation of eighth-grade students, by virtue of the widespread adoption in the public school system of their two North Carolina history textbooks. But his work extended well beyond the class-room, leading him to accept speaking engagements across the state and the Southeast and to participate in a host of professional organizations. In his private life, Tom Parramore demonstrated a commitment to the ideals he held close, among those civil liberties, peace, and the values of the Baptist Church and the Democratic Party. Parramore was 71. A ser-vice was held in his honor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh on January 24. * * * Historian Jaquelin Drane Nash of Tarboro died on February 16. The highlight of her long, productive career was the publication of a history of Calvary Episcopal Church on the occasion of the bicentennial of Tarboro in 1960. She co-authored Three Centuries of Customs Houses and A Few Unsung Women: Colonial and Pioneer, both published by the National Society of Colonial Dames. Mrs. Nash also contributed fourteen articles to the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. In 1994, at the age of eighty-four, she served as project historian for the excavation of Eden House in Chowan County. She served on the Edenton Historical Commission, and was founding director of the Edgecombe County Historical Society, which named its honorary award for her. In 1976, she was named a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in recognition of her research on colonial governor Gabriel Johnston. She was elected to the North Caroliniana Society in 1987, and received the Gertrude S. Carraway Award from Preservation North Carolina in 1995. Fittingly, Mrs. Nash was buried at Calvary Church, where she had been a faithful and active member for many years. * * * G. E. “Pete” Nash of Charlotte, a loyal and generous supporter of Reed Gold Mine for decades, died on December 19, 2003. Pete and his brothers, Harold and Robie, were good friends to the mine. Harold located and/or restored many of the major machinery artifacts, as well as the ten-stamp mill, preserved at the mine today. Pete was known for his expertise in panning and for years could be found volunteering at the mine, sharing his skills and fascinating stories with schoolchildren. 6 4 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S “The Birth of a North Carolina Symposium” By Claudia S. Slate EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Claudia S. Slate (right) is professor of English at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. Her teaching and research focus on American and African American literature. She recently participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Harvard University entitled, “African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1866-1965.” During the summer of 2000, on our way back to Florida from the Outer Banks, my husband and I visited Edenton, North Carolina, population 5,300, a charming town filled with stunningly preserved antebellum homes and a real commitment to history. I sought out Edenton because it was the hometown of Harriet Jacobs, the author of an 1861 slave narrative that I include in my American and African American lit-erature classes. Little did I know that this visit at the beginning of a new century would be the catalyst for a three-year project, culminating on April 4-5, 2003. What I envisioned walking the streets of Edenton and discovering the buildings, such as St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and the Old Jail, that were instrumental in Jacobs’s life was a symposium dedicated to Jacobs, held right there in her hometown. Thanks to Jacobs, I knew the stories that those walls could tell, and I ached for everyone passing by to hear them as well. In pursu-ing this vision, I discovered the essential elements for the planning of a successful humani-ties project, which I would like to pass along: a unique mission; objectives that include all segments of the community; and cooperative, enthusiastic individuals. Harriet Jacobs was a unique individual who told an exceptional and distinctive story. She was born a slave in 1813, escaped from Edenton in 1842, and eventually became a writer, abolitionist, and reformer. The story of her life, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, helped build Northern sentiment for emancipation during the Civil War and was the only slave narra-tive to deal frankly with sexual as well as racial oppression. Jacobs told about the seven years spent hiding in the crawl space of her grandmother’s storeroom in Edenton, watch-ing through a peephole as her children grew up. Literary critic Henry Louis Gates says, “Jacobs’s autobiography is one of the major works of Afro-American literature.”1 The Harriet Jacobs symposium would be a milestone, the first time that scholars of his-tory and literature knowledgeable about Jacobs and her work, in particular, and slavery in North Carolina, in general, gathered for such a focused endeavor. For two days, humani-ties scholars, college students, middle and high school teachers and students, the people of Edenton, Chowan County, other parts of North Carolina, and from around the nation would engage in and discuss the historical and literary aspects of Jacobs. This would be accomplished through lectures, panel discussions, and question-and-answer sessions for open discussion and debate. Other events would include music (such as the singing of tra-ditional Negro spirituals), a walking tour, and an essay contest for Edenton eighth-grade schoolchildren. The symposium sought to accomplish several objectives. One was to work as a catalyst for an ever-increasing presence of Harriet Jacobs in Edenton, both for its present and V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 5 New Leaves future residents as well as for its many visitors. The symposium was organized at an oppor-tune time for the Edenton community. Not until 1987, when Jean Fagan Yellin authenti-cated details and authorship of Incidents, was Jacobs clearly identified as the slave narrative’s author, and it has taken time for the details of her remarkable life to work their way into the public consciousness. Several years ago a state highway historical marker commemorat-ing Jacobs was placed in front of the Historic Edenton Visitor Center. Jacobs also features prominently in a recently published walking tour provided by the visitor center staff, and an exclusive Harriet Jacobs tour is provided upon request. Recently, a local committee has published an African American guide map to Edenton, including mention of Jacobs. However, the Edenton community desired to do more. According to the visitor center staff, an increasing number of visitors were asking for information about Jacobs, and local high school students were beginning to learn about her in their classes. Joe Sliva, a local historian and member of the planning committee, spoke for the citizens of Edenton: “A symposium dedicated to a better understanding of Jacobs’s life and times would not only inform and enlighten the public but would help us become better stewards of her legacy.” Another objective of the symposium was to promote cooperation and collaboration among the black and white communities of Edenton and Chowan County. Many in the community recognize what Martha Norkunas notes, “What is needed is an acknowledgment that power must be shared with minority populations and that the prevailing perspective on the past must be radically altered. . . . The communitymust then have the courage to enact these new insights on the public landscapes of history and tourism.”2 By making the sympo-sium free to the public, with the citizens of Edenton and the surrounding communities of Hertford, Elizabeth City, and Murfreesboro as the primary target audience, the hope was for a racially, educationally, and economically diverse audience that would include leaders of the religious community, teachers, and local middle and high school students. Public school chil-dren were encouraged to enter an essay contest that focused on Jacobs and the period in which she lived. Organizers also strove to draw students from Chowan College, College of the Albemarle, Edgecombe Community College, Elizabeth City State University, and East Carolina University, as well as from colleges and universities in the Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill area. Having leaders on the planning committee who represented different seg-ments of the target audience was beneficial for both their input and outreach. In addition, diversity was evident in the choice of symposium speakers: they included black and white, male and female professors from five universities. The third objective of the symposium was to educate the people of North Carolina about the importance of Harriet Jacobs and her work. As convinced as many are now about the authenticity of Jacobs’s account, questions still remain concerning the accuracy of many of the narrative’s details and about how much abolitionists, especially Lydia Child, contributed to or altered Jacobs’s writing. Giving voice to questions of historical validity by probing the existing evidence and encouraging lively debate was an important aspect of the symposium. Scholars of history and literature were to be the catalysts and moderators for discussion of Incidents as history, autobiography, and/or slave narrative. The most vital element for the success of the Harriet Jacobs Symposium was the coopera-tion of individuals who were passionate about the project. My dedication to the symposium was engendered by my background, which made me acutely aware of the African American struggle for their rights. My father, John Herbers, was a New York Times correspondent dur-ing the civil rights era, and on several occasions my three sisters and I were exposed to the injustices predominant, especially in the South, at that time. For example, Dad drove the whole family to St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 to visit the beach while he reported on local 6 6 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S events. By the time we arrived, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy had been jailed for attempting to eat in a local restaurant, and King had informed the White House that “all semblance of law and order has broken down.” Not only did my family see the results of that breakdown on the city square, but we also experienced it firsthand when we were awakened by vehicles circling the motel and by shots being fired each time the cars passed our room. The local KKK-type group wanted to frighten my father out of town. I will never forget the terror I felt nor the empathy it engendered. I now realize that I was expe-riencing only a small portion of what African American citizens felt routinely. In relating my experiences to my students, I inform them not only about the fifties and sixties in the South, but I also pay tribute to the efforts of brave freedom-fighting individuals, both black and white, of the Civil Rights movement. As an English professor, I have an obliga-tion and privilege to ensure that students are exposed to a portion of literature that was neglected in my college education: the rich African American literary tradition as a critical and dynamic part of our country’s literary heritage. That is how I came upon Harriet Jacobs and, subsequently, developed such a curiosity about her hometown. Fortunately, I discovered many other individuals who shared my enthusiasm and zeal. Since I live and work in Florida, a network of people in North Carolina was essential, though I also received help from others throughout the country. In general, these amazing persons fell into five categories: academic, governmental, ecclesiastic, business, and media. My background and current job lie in academia, so that seemed a logical place for me to begin. After all, it was preparation for teaching the course, “Survey of African American Literature,” including Jacobs’s narrative, that drew me to Edenton in the first place. His-tory and literature are the two humanities disciplines most appropriate to the study of Jacobs. These disciplines often intersect, and that is certainly the case with Harriet Jacobs, whose book is considered by most scholars to be not only a true depiction of slavery in the South in the mid-nineteenth century, and of life as an escaped slave in the North, but also a work of literature that combines the attributes of the slave narrative with characteristics of the sentimental novel so popular at the time. Consequently, most of the scholars helpful to the project specialize in the areas of history or literature. Two scholars in particular served as models and inspiration for me: Dorothy Redford, site director at Somerset Place in Creswell and author of Somerset Homecoming, and Jean Fagan Yellin, the English professor emeritus who authenticated Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and has studied and written on Jacobs for twenty years. Considering the connec-tions during the years of slavery between Creswell and Edenton and intrigued by the tenacity of Redford in tracing her ancestry to the large plantation at Somerset, I met and interviewed her. I also arranged with my college’s Multicultural Affairs Office for her to give a public lecture at Florida Southern College for Black History Month in February 2002. Knowing that Jean Fagan Yellin is a friend of Redford, I invited Yellin to come up from Sarasota for the lecture. To my delight, Yellin and her husband stayed in our home, and I was able to share with her my hopes for a Harriet Jacobs Symposium in Edenton. She applauded the project and showed interest in participating. In addition to my contact with Redford and Yellin, I spent several weeks in North Carolina gleaning ideas from meetings with nine scholars in history and literature at Chowan College, Elizabeth City State University, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the N.C. Office of Archives and History. Several of the scholars agreed to speak or moderate a session if a symposium was held. I was granted a sabbatical from Florida Southern College for 2002-2003 (meaning that I taught part-time) to be the project director and to apply for a North Carolina Humanities Council (NCHC) grant. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 7 Billy C. Hines, professor of music and director of the Elizabeth City State University Concert Choir, agreed to the choir performing traditional Negro spirituals during the symposium. These songs echo the religious beliefs expressed by Jacobs in her book’s spiri-tual references and also represent both the anguish and hope of enslaved people who, unlike Jacobs, were not able to achieve literacy. As such, this music added an element to the symposium that mere words could not. Another scholar—Jennifer Edwards of the NCHC—gave me invaluable advice as I pur-sued the grant to finance the project. This was my first experience at grant writing, and it was a daunting one; Edwards and Harlan Gradin made sure that I was up to the task. I found budget formulation particularly challenging, given that words, not numbers, are my specialty. Edwards and I spent hours on the phone fleshing out details of the symposium. Ultimately, the hard work paid off as NCHC approved the grant that provided the sym-posium’s major funding. Local support for the symposium was absolutely essential. Joe Sliva was extremely important to the project. Long before I had ever set foot in Edenton, Sliva conducted his own unofficial walking tour about Jacobs for the visitor center, bolstered by his extensive study of her time in Edenton. He also fought hard against some local opposition and suc-ceeded in having a state highway marker for Jacobs placed on Broad Street in front of the visitor center. Willing to help in any way he could, Sliva used his impressive technological skills to establish an official Harriet Jacobs Symposium website, write and design a bro-chure, and send out dozens of e-mails to publicize the event. Edenton eighth-grade schoolteachers not only taught from Letters from a Slave Girl, the juvenile version of Incidents, but also supervised an essay contest about Jacobs, narrowing winning finalists down to ten. The members of Sigma Tau Delta, an international English honor society at Elizabeth City State University, judged the final ten essays. The first, sec-ond, and third place winners were announced and awarded prizes during the symposium. The teachers also planned a collage project on slavery, and the creative, colorful results were displayed in the visitor center over the weekend. Another group of individuals important to the project were those affiliated with gov-ernmental agencies, both local and state. For example, one of the symposium sponsors was the Office of Archives and History, an agency of the Department of Cultural Resources, which promotes North Carolina’s artistic and cultural treasures. The office encourages the sharing of North Carolina history through educational and research programs such as North Carolina History Day, which spurs students on to develop historical research skills. The agency was one of the sponsors for The 1898 Wilmington Racial Violence and Its Legacy, a symposium held in 1998, which brought together for the first time scholars most knowledgeable about the violence in Wilmington to share that knowledge with the pub-lic. The Office of Archives and History agreed to videotape the Jacobs symposium sessions for use by teachers and students in the local public schools, and for possible broadcasting on UNC-TV. Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History, was instrumental in obtaining additional funding for the symposium and helping with publicity efforts. He also chaired a session of the symposium. Crow was also responsible for convincing Ginny Culpepper, the local heritage tourism development officer with the Department of Commerce, to form an ad hoc committee of Edenton community leaders to develop the symposium. Culpepper was born and raised in Edenton and commands a great deal of respect there. She is also an extremely hard worker with lots of energy and creative ideas. In May 2002, I met with the Edenton committee that she had called together to begin serious planning. Nancy Nicholls, tourism director of the Edenton-Chowan Chamber of Commerce, also came on board. Once the project had 6 8 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S local sponsors and the NCHC grant was obtained, I was able to procure speakers and work with the local committee on final details and on publicity. Another governmental agency that sponsored the symposium was the Edenton Histori-cal Commission, created by the General Assembly in 1961 to “effect and encourage pres-ervation, restoration, and appropriate presentation of the Town of Edenton and Chowan County, as an historic, educational and aesthetic place.” The members of the commission include the chairman of the board of county commissioners, the mayor of Edenton, the secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, and citizens appointed by the gover-nor. The commission has sponsored the Elizabeth Vann Moore Biennial Series for Preser-vation Studies and has funded Dabney Narvaez’s grant writing for funds to restore the 108-year-old Kadesh AME Zion Church. Without a doubt, the commission is interested in the rich history of Edenton, including that involving Harriet Jacobs. Beverley Kirchmier, the commission’s executive director, was a member of the committee formed to plan and promote the symposium. Judy Chilcoat, operations manager, and the staff and volunteers at the Historic Edenton Visitor Center, part of the Division of State Historic Sites, were indispensable to the sym-posium. They developed a Harriet Jacobs walking-tour brochure that they included in packets for symposium participants, and also worked very hard on a self-guided walking tour for the first morning of the symposium that featured interpreters at several Jacobs sites. In addition, site personnel, with assistance from the home office in Raleigh, devel-oped and installed a permanent exhibit in the visitor center showcasing Harriet Jacobs’s life. The display contains a first edition of Jacobs’s book, a Japanese edition of the book, a trophy awarded posthumously to Jacobs as a North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee, and replicas of dolls that Jacobs made after escaping to the North. Individuals connected to a historic Edenton church were the first indicators of support from some of the town’s involved and prominent African American citizens. Kadesh AME Zion Church became a sponsor in the early stages of the symposium by graciously offering its historic sanctuary as a venue. The congregation of the church founded the Edenton Normal and Industrial College, a beacon of educational opportunity for African Americans from 1895 to 1928. The present church building, the third in which the congregation has worshiped, was constructed in 1895 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its sanctuary has descending curved pews, original choir and bishop chairs, chandeliers, and lovely stained glass windows. Pastor Edna Lawrence, also on the planning committee, is a native of Edenton. She contributed her artistic talents in the creation of the symposium logo, an interpre-tation of how a young Jacobs might have appeared. The congregation of Kadesh enthusi-astically embraced the symposium not only by proudly sharing their sanctuary but also by par-ticipating as ushers. About a month before the symposium, I addressed the congregation and was encouraged by the members’ warm response. Several Edenton ministers also V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 6 9 Kadesh AME Zion Church in Edenton, site of the Harriet Jacobs Symposium in April 2003. The sanctuary was severely damaged by Hurricane Isabel in September and subsequently condemned. announced the symposium from their pulpits and included notices in their bulletins and newsletters. The Edenton business community also cooperated fully. Downtown shopkeepers agreed to display posters publicizing the symposium, and bed-and-breakfast owners offered discounted rates for attendees. All Edenton residents, associated with a business or not, welcomed the weekend visitors with their extraordinary southern hospitality, helpfulness, and kindness. As remote as Edenton is, media attention was imperative. Newspapers, newsletters, and television spread the word about the upcoming event. Gregory Kane of the Baltimore Sun, who has a syndicated column that runs nationally, wrote a piece about the symposium during Black History Month. Dee Langston of the Virginia Pilot did a feature story both in WaterColors magazine and in the daily newspaper edition. A local Greensboro television station ran a community news segment. The Chowan Herald, Edenton’s news source, included a notice about the symposium. The Office of Archives and History mentioned the symposium in their quarterly newsletter Carolina Comments, and had the departmental Public Affairs Office disseminate news releases. Heritage NewsWatch, a publication of North Carolina’s Northeast Partnership of the Department of Commerce, and the North Carolina State Historic Sites newsletter gave extensive coverage to the event. The results of the hard work and dedication of all the aforementioned individuals were evident in the spring of 2003, three years after my first visit to Edenton. A huge banner across Edenton’s main street read, “Harriet Jacobs Symposium, April 4-5.” On Friday, April 4, 329 symposium participants attended book signings by some of the speakers and took the new walking tour, with interpreters posted at each Jacobs historical site. Partici-pants showed particular interest in the home site of Jacobs’s grandmother, where Jacobs hid from her owner for seven years and watched through a peephole as her grandmother raised her young children. Another popular site was the Old Jail, where Jacobs’s children were imprisoned for two months in an effort to coerce her out of hiding. The program for the rest of the weekend consisted of speakers on Jacobs, slavery in gen-eral, and runaway slaves in particular. The keynote address was delivered by Jean Fagan Yellin, author of a new biography of Jacobs. [Professor Yellin will discuss her book, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, at the North Carolina Museum of History on April 22.] Yellin was warmly introduced by Dorothy Redford. Other participants who delivered papers or moderated ses-sions were Trudier Harris-Lopez of UNC-Chapel Hill, Lucinda H. MacKethan of N.C. State University, Freddie Parker of N.C. Central University, Anne B. Warner of Spelman College, and Jeffrey J. Crow. At Kadesh AME Zion Church, the Elizabeth City State Uni-versity Concert Choir sang traditional Negro spirituals, including “Has Anybody There Seen My Jesus?” It was such a powerful culmination to the symposium that tears flowed among the attendees, including one who remarked, “Harriet Jacobs was right there.” The number of registrants for this event, free to the public, was impressive considering the remoteness of Edenton. The audience consisted of townspeople, other North Carolinians, and visitors from as far away as Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, and New York. North Carolina counties represented were Brunswick, Camden, Carteret, Chowan, Colum-bus, Craven, Dare, Iredell, Lenoir, New Hanover, Pasquotank, Scotland, Wake, Washing-ton, Watauga, and Wilson. Mixed by race, age, and education, attendees included high school students, educators, and retirees. The question-and-answer sessions following scholars’ presentations proved lively, with discussions of Jacobs’s Edenton family, her religious beliefs, the plight of runaway slaves, and the power of literacy, not only for nineteenth-century slaves but for the present generation. Two members of the audience who shared a passion for Jacobs’s story were a woman who has just completed a musical, Hatty, based on Jacobs’s 7 0 C A R O L I N A C O M M E N T S life, and an author who has written a young adult historical novel about Jacobs. A film pro-ducer from WNET, a Public Broadcasting System station in New York, who is interested in including Jacobs’s story in a documentary on slavery, was also in attendance. The positive comments from participants on evaluation forms indicated that we met our objectives of increasing Jacobs’s presence in Edenton, of achieving diverse participa-tion, and of educating the public about Jacobs and slavery. In terms of the selection of Edenton for the event, a local resident wrote, “As an Edentonian, I am so proud and pleased that this symposium took place.” Another said that he/she had been previously “unaware of Edenton’s place in slave history.” Someone from Iredell County remarked, “Having it in Edenton was wonderful! The location gave it a relevance and immediacy available nowhere else,” while a New York City attendee wrote, “Celebrating ‘native daughter’ in her own hometown was inspiring.” Two persons from Watauga County commented on local community involvement: “Wonderful integration of community and academic interests. The level of energy and enthusiasm at the community level was inspir-ing— a refreshing change from the usual academic conference”; “Great community involvement, pride and enthusiasm; appeal to a broad range of people.” One Chowan County resident alluded to a changing Edenton: “[The symposium] reinforced that racism, though still with us, is being dealt with and that communities can be transformed.” Lots of people seemed pleased with the diverse audience. They said that the strength of the symposium was “the integration of the races,” “the variety of people, teachers, schol-ars, historical, locals, students,” “an audience that contained both scholars and novices,” “attendance by students at the symposium,” and “the diversity of participants—in terms of disciplines, race, locale and academics.” Many attendees commented on what they had learned at the symposium: “My sense of Jacobs’s life was enlarged and deepened”; “Each of the writers shed light not just on Har-riet Jacobs, but on how we today are affected by her story. This symposium was extremely well organized, the staff were helpful and friendly, and the presentations were wonderful”; “As an African American I realize I need to learn more about this part of history and today gave me a good understanding of what I do not know.” Several persons commented that the information given about female runaway slaves was new to them. One person wrote: “I gained an understanding and respect for the empowering role of black enslaved women.” Another commented: “The sessions enlightened further understanding of not only negative behaviors but also faith, endurance, perseverance, struggles of life.” Some persons remarked on the importance of audience discussion by saying that the strength of the symposium was “the question-and-answer sessions [because] they gave everyone an opportunity to take part. They also motivated my quest to read and study more African American history,” and “The questions were fabulous, and meeting so many different people from different vocations and avenues was very enriching to my under-standing of Incidents and the period of Harriet Jacobs.” The attendance and the apparent success of the symposium can be attributed in large part to the overwhelming “can do” attitude of all North Carolinians involved in this project and of the network of accomplished Edenton citizens, who share a commitment to preserving and understanding their rich and complex past. The ripple effect of their many hours of work will endure in the hearts and minds of all those informed and enlightened by the Harriet Jacobs Symposium 2003. 1. Scott Veale, “New and Noteworthy Paperbacks,” New York Times Book Review, September 10, 2000, at 7:44. 2. Martha Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History and Ethnicity in Monterey, California (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 99. V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 , A P R I L 2 0 0 4 7 1 Carolina Comments Published quarterly by the Office of Archives and History North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources Raleigh, North Carolina Jeffrey J. Crow, Editor in Chief Kenrick N. Simpson, Editor Historical Publications Section Office of Archives and History 4622 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4622 Telephone (919) 733-7442 Fax (919) 733-1439 www.ncpublications.com Presorted Standard U.S. Postage Paid Raleigh, NC Permit No. 187 |
OCLC number | 02047645 |