Carolina comments

              VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6 NOVEMBER 2002
Bennett Place and UNC-TV Join Forces to Host Popular Program
Bennett Place, site of the largest troop surrender of the Civil War, became the scene of
one of the most popular special events held by the Division of State Historic Sites in recent
times as UNC-TV presented “A Civil War Experience” there on Saturday, September 28.
UNC-TV joined the state historic site as part of activities surrounding the rebroadcast
of The Civil War, the acclaimed nine-part television documentary by Ken Burns. An esti-mated
six thousand people attended the special event at Bennett Place in Durham. Can-nons
and muskets roared to life, mounted cavalry paraded the grounds, and the tunes of
the band from the 11th Regiment N.C. Troops, a Civil War reenactment group, filled the
air with an excitement rarely seen or felt at the old Bennett family farm. Bennett Place
staff and volunteers worked doggedly all day as thousands of local residents—eager to take
part in a wide assortment of sponsored activities—descended upon the historic site in
Durham.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 109
On September 28 Bennett Place State Historic Site joined with UNC-TV to host “A Civil War Experience.”
The event proved to be one of the most popular such programs in the history of the North Carolina Division
of State Historic Sites, attracting an estimated six thousand people to the site. Here visitors mill around the
kitchen at Bennett Place during the daylong event. (All photographs by the Office of Archives and History
unless otherwise indicated.)
Visitors enjoyed period music, appraisals of their antiques, lectures on historic topics,
and demonstrations of many aspects of Civil War life. From field hospitals to blacksmith-ing
and cooking demonstrations, a spectacle unfolded not only for visitors but also for
viewers throughout the state as UNC-TV employed its technology and staff to telecast live
segments via satellite. Civil War reenactments and special presentations, including a skit
and fashion show put on by Bennett Place and Duke Homestead staff and volunteers, lent
an authentic feel to the event and were well received by the crowd. Talks by noted authors
and speakers drew standing-room-only audiences. Presenters included, among others,
Cultural Resources staff member Jo Ann Williford and Dr. Jeffrey Crow, deputy secretary
for Archives and History, as well as Civil War authors Mark Bradley and Chris Fonvielle.
Anticipating the popularity of the event, organizers employed road closures and shut-tle
buses to form gateways to off-site parking, allowing greater flexibility and capacity for
the site. Bennett’s Mia Graham worked closely with UNC-TV personnel and Durham
police officers to iron out such logistical details, while Chuck Jenkins, a volunteer at
Bennett, coordinated the considerable volunteer work force needed for such a sizable
event. Piedmont Historic Sites section chief Dale Coats seemed pleased with both the
turnout and the handling of the event, calling it “one of the best I’ve seen.” James R.
McPherson, deputy director for the division, concurred, remarking that the event was “a
great example of what a well-organized event, along with television publicity, can do.”
According to McPherson, UNC-TV officials were pleased as well, apparently indicating a
desire for further collaboration with state historic sites in the future.
110 CAROLINA COMMENTS
Appearing at “A Civil War Experience” was the
band from the 11th Regiment N.C. Troops, a
reenactment group, which entertained visitors
by performing marches and other music from
the Civil War period.
Portraying a Confederate cavalry soldier at the Bennett Place
Civil War program was Bert McKenzie, who along with others
represented the 5th N.C. Cavalry, another reenactment group.
New Exhibit of Presidential Signatures Now Open
Visitors to the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh will have a unique opportu-nity
to see the original signatures of all forty-two men who have held the nation’s highest
office. From an extremely rare letter written by George Washington in 1790 to a recent
message from George W. Bush, a collection of documents signed by presidents of the
United States is currently on view at the museum. Presidential Ink: Signatures and Memora-bilia
opened at the museum on October 9 in commemoration of the centennial of the
North Carolina Historical Commission, forerunner agency of the North Carolina Office
of Archives and History (and presently the eleven-member board that oversees many
activities of that agency). The exhibit features official papers and other artifacts from the
collections of the North Carolina State Archives and the Museum of History, two agencies
under the Historical Commission’s advisory purview and cosponsors of the exhibit.
“Presidential Ink gives visitors a rare opportunity to examine documents and artifacts
not normally on exhibit,” said Michelle Carr, a member of the Museum of History’s
exhibit team. “These items offer insight into North Carolina’s connections to national and
international events.” To complement the presidential papers, the museum selected arti-facts
from its collection, as well as a few from affiliated agencies, that are associated with
the writers, recipients, or content of the documents. The items range from campaign rib-bons
for Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison to moon dust from the
Apollo 11 mission presented to Gov. Robert Scott by President Richard Nixon. Standouts
of official papers displayed as part of Presidential Ink include a letter from President George
Washington to North Carolina governor Alexander Martin penned on the occasion of
North Carolina’s becoming the twelfth state to enter the federal Union. “This document
is important to North Carolina and its citizens because Washington congratulates the state
on its ratification of the United States Constitution on December 22, 1789,” says
Catherine J. Morris, state archivist. ���Contrary to the present situation, in which few
political leaders sign the thousands of documents they send out, this letter is completely
written and signed by Washington.”
Additional documents from the nation’s chief executives include:
A 1776 essay titled “Thoughts on Government,” composed by John Adams in response to a
request from the Provincial Congress of North Carolina for suggestions on establishing a new
government and drafting a constitution. Many of Adams’s ideas were embodied in North Carolina’s
first constitution, completed in December of that year.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 111
Presidential Ink: Signatures and Memorabilia,
an exhibit of presidential signatures and
related documents and artifacts, opened at the
North Carolina Museum of History on
October 9 in commemoration of the forth-coming
centennial of the North Carolina
Historical Commission. Shown cutting a
ribbon to open the exhibit were Jerry C.
Cashion (fifth from left), chairman of the
Historical Commission, and Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow
(facing Dr. Cashion), deputy secretary of the
North Carolina Department of Cultural
Resources, each flanked by employees of the
Office of Archives and History.
An 1866 parole for North Carolina’s Civil War governor, Zebulon Baird Vance, signed by Andrew
Johnson. Vance was arrested at his Statesville home during the war and taken to Old Capitol
Prison in Washington, D.C. He was released after officials discovered that he had worked to
improve conditions for Federal prisoners at the Confederate facility in Salisbury.
An autographed speech delivered by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 at North Carolina’s State Fair in
Raleigh. Roosevelt addressed topics such as the regulation of railroads and the preservation of
forests.
A 1917 letter from Woodrow Wilson to a North Carolina congressman lending his support to a
proposed “Committee on Woman Suffrage” in the House of Representatives.
A 1947 letter from Harry Truman to Josephus Daniels, owner and publisher of the Raleigh News
and Observer. The letter discusses Charles Keck, the sculptor chosen to execute a statue of the three
presidents born in North Carolina—Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson. The
monument now stands on Capitol Square in Raleigh.
Items on display that accentuate past presidential signings include:
James Madison’s personal copy of John Lawson’s History of Carolina (1714). Madison sent the book
to North Carolina governor Montfort Stokes in 1831, after the state’s prized Lawson volume was
lost in a fire that destroyed the State House.
A desk associated with North Carolinian Nathaniel Macon, who exchanged correspondence with
several presidents, including Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren. Macon served in Congress
from 1791 to 1828.
A 1920 suffragist banner associated with Goldsboro native Gertrude Weil, who worked for
women’s rights during the administrations of William Howard Taft and other presidents. (See
news from the Research Branch, below.)
The fountain pen used by John F. Kennedy to sign the nuclear test-ban treaty on October 7, 1963.
Clothing and other personal items given to North Carolina aviator Col. Scott Morgan before his
release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war facility. The Vietnam War was an overriding
factor in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Presidential Ink also features two computer-quiz kiosks that invite visitors to learn amusing
and interesting facts about the presidents and their families. Visitors can test their knowl-edge
of the presidents and discover interesting tidbits along the way.
Immediately following the October 9 opening of Presidential Ink was the October 12
arrival at the museum of a rare original copy of the Declaration of Independence. The
document remained on view until October 20 as part of a cross-country tour dubbed the
“Declaration of Independence (DOI) Road Trip.” The nation’s birth certificate was
showcased in a free multimedia exhibit that presented the Declaration both in historical
and contemporary contexts. Visitors to the exhibition saw an extraordinary four-teen-
minute film, produced by Norman Lear and Rob Reiner at Independence Hall in
Philadelphia, in which a distinguished group of actors joined together for a powerful read-ing
of the document. Photographs, videos, and music were employed to illustrate the last-ing
values and ideals embodied by the revered document. The exhibition also highlighted
social and political movements that helped shape the United States and continue to influ-ence
nations throughout the world. Television producer Norman Lear, founder of the
DOI Road Trip, acquired a Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence in June
2000 with the goal of bringing the “People’s Document” directly to Americans—espe-cially
young people—in hopes of inspiring them to participate in civic activism, to exer-cise
their rights, and, above all, to vote. The copy of the Declaration, printed on July 4,
112 CAROLINA COMMENTS
1776, is the only one of twenty-five remaining Dunlap broadsides currently traveling the
country. The DOI Road Trip is a nonprofit, nonpartisan project sponsored by The Home
Depot. Additional funding for the appearances is provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts,
the Annenberg Foundation, and the Lear Family Foundation.
Presidential Ink will remain on view at the museum through May 25, 2003. Special pro-grams
related to the exhibition will take place at the museum in coming months. The
North Carolina Museum of History is open to the public on Tuesdays through Saturdays
from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. and on Sundays from noon to 5:00 P.M. Admission is free. For
additional information, telephone (919) 715-0200 or visit the museum’s Web site:
http://ncmuseumofhistory.org.
HPO Assists Efforts to Identify, Preserve Rosenwald Schools
In the 1910s, Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and
Company, became aware of the sad state of education among African American children
in the rural South. His response was to establish a fund that provided architectural plans
and matching grants for the construction of more than 5,300 schools from Maryland to
Texas between the late 1910s and 1932. Since 2000, the North Carolina State Historic
Preservation Office (HPO) has been assisting efforts by the North Carolina Rosenwald
Schools Community Project (RSCP) to preserve the heritage of these schools in the state.
Both groups are focusing on the preservation of extant historic places and the larger public
education aspects of those buildings, including their key role in the cultural and social his-tory
of the state and nation, by examining the historical experiences of the students, teach-ers,
administrators, and communities that supported them. Rosenwald schools are of special
interest to HPO staff because they are tremendously important yet quickly disappearing
from the landscape. The RSCP, under the leadership of Nyoni Collins, is also dedicated to
preserving the heritage of Rosenwald schools that are no longer standing.
Over the years, the HPO has guided preparation of National Register nominations for
14 Rosenwald schools throughout the state, and 22 more have been identified as poten-tially
eligible for listing in the Register. More than 800 were built in North Carolina—
more than in any other state—and it is likely that scores remain, awaiting identification,
recognition, and preservation. As the buildings are identified, it is hoped that the people
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 113
The State Historic Preservation Office (HPO) is currently assisting in efforts to identify and preserve the
heritage of Rosenwald schools throughout North Carolina. One of the institutions so identified is Panther
Branch School in Wake County, which the HPO successfully nominated to the National Register of Historic
Places in 2001.
associated with them will be identified as well and that the larger heritage that is the con-cern
of the RSCP can be preserved. Unfortunately, the HPO has not had the financial
resources to undertake a comprehensive survey of the state’s Rosenwald schools.
In April 2002 the HPO collaborated with the RSCP in a series of presentations about
Rosenwald schools to Department of Cultural Resources (DCR) staff. In one of the presen-tations,
Claudia Brown, supervisor of the HPO’s Survey and Planning Branch, discussed the
difficulties encountered in gathering information on the remaining schools and asked
employees of the DCR to let the HPO know about Rosenwald schools with which they were
familiar. When several members of the audience expressed their interest in searching for
Rosenwald schools, a meeting of potential volunteers was organized. As the RSCP spread word
of the project, even more volunteers offered to help. By mid-August, twenty-two people had
signed on to document Rosenwald schools—those that survive, as well as those that have
been lost—in thirty-two of the state’s one hundred counties. Materials prepared by the
HPO and the RSCP are guiding the volunteer surveyors in their quest.
While volunteers were beginning to survey Rosenwald schools, the HPO had the good
fortune to gain a summer intern, Kate Phillips, a rising junior at Appalachian State Univer-sity,
who perused the HPO’s architectural survey files to identify Rosenwald schools that
had already been surveyed. In her examination of files for seventy-five central and eastern
counties, she identified thirty-eight schools either firmly documented as or believed to be
Rosenwald schools, in addition to those already listed in the National Register or deemed
potentially eligible for listing. That information, shared with the volunteer surveyors, serves
as the beginning of the HPO’s Rosenwald schools computerized database.
The need for a comprehensive survey of Rosenwald schools is underscored by their
placement on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s listing of America’s eleven
most endangered historic places. Since 1988 that enumeration, announced annually, has
raised awareness and rallied resources to save endangered sites in every region of the
nation. When the 2002 list was announced recently, the National Trust noted that the
first step in saving the remaining Rosenwald schools is a systematic survey, coupled with
the creation of local activist networks dedicated to implementing adaptive uses of the
buildings. In 2001 the National Trust Southern Office established the Rosenwald School
Initiative to develop a network of private individuals and organizations interested in pre-serving
the remaining schools. The RSCP is an active partner in the initiative, and the
HPO has enjoyed a productive collaborative relationship with the National Trust for
many years. It is expected that the results of the volunteer survey project cosponsored by
the RSCP and the HPO will help the three organizations achieve their preservation goals
through a public-private partnership.
Roanoke Island Festival Park Rejoins State Historic Sites
Roanoke Island Festival Park began on a small scale as the Elizabeth II State Historic Site in
the mid-1980s and was subsequently operated by the Roanoke Island Commission. The
park, still administered by the commission, is once again a state historic site. It offers a
wealth of heritage-related learning opportunities. Crossing a short bridge in downtown
Manteo, visitors to Roanoke Island Festival Park are first introduced to a panoramic view
of the Roanoke Sound, with the Elizabeth II moored by marshes. Whether walking or driv-ing,
guests pass shady trees and natural plantings, picnic tables, cedar shingle buildings,
and cool, covered porches with plenty of wooden rockers welcoming them to the Arrival
Center of the twenty-five-acre island park.
Aboard the Elizabeth II, a sailing ship like those used for the Roanoke voyages sent by
Sir Walter Raleigh to the New World from 1584 to 1587, reenactors portraying Elizabe-than
sailors share seafaring tales. Visitors are surrounded by sailors who give them a taste
of the early settlers’ impressions of the new land and how they adjusted to life there. When
the English arrived, they quickly established a military settlement site, re-created at the
114 CAROLINA COMMENTS
park and manned by authentically attired soldiers who are constantly on the lookout for
Spaniards and Algonquian braves. Guests learn by doing as they interact with the soldiers,
explore their encampment, and learn about their equipment.
On the grounds, visitors can dig for fossils in the Fossil Pit and enjoy picnic areas and
marsh-side boardwalks for various recreational activities. During the summer season, the
History Garden, a clearing left much as it would have appeared in the late sixteenth cen-tury,
is an intimate setting for a variety of scheduled programs, including a number of
hands-on activities that offer an in-depth look at specific aspects of history. The Legend of
Two Path, a film produced by the North Carolina School of the Arts, dramatizes the Native
American reaction to the arrival of the English on Roanoke Island—an event that changed
the lives of the natives forever. Visitors discover four hundred years of Outer Banks history
in the Roanoke Adventure Museum. Interactive exhibits range from America’s beginnings
through the succeeding four centuries—from boatbuilding to shipwrecks, from pirates to
lighthouse keepers, from the Lost Colony to the freedmen’s colony, from the Civil War to
a 1950s general store.
Likewise open to the public is the Museum Store, which delights visitors with unique
offerings, including books of local interest, educational toys and games, local artisans’
crafts, and much more. The Roanoke Island Festival Park art gallery, instrumental in
showcasing important works of art on the Outer Banks, recognizes work of talented local
and regional artists with rotating visual-arts exhibits, including opening receptions, at
which the artists are introduced to the public.
Throughout the year, the Festival Park brings an array of entertaining and educational
programs to local residents and visitors alike. The Film Theatre and Outdoor Pavilion are
sites for a variety of artistic presentations, such as public concerts by the North Carolina
Symphony, which will return in June 2003; the “Illuminations” summer program, a five-week
performing arts series produced by the School of the Arts; the children’s performance
series, a six-week summer venture for the entire family; recitations by poets; performances
by theater groups; and lectures. In addition to special programs, Festival Park is the site of
annual celebrations. In February “Roanoke Island 1862: A Civil War Living History Week-end”
is a two-day festival that explores the Civil War on the Outer Banks. May brings the
day-long Outer Banks Jaycees Beach Music Festival. The Freedmen’s Colony Remembrance
Celebration in September is organized by descendants of the African American colony that
existed on the island between 1862 and 1867. In November the Festival Park hosts “Eliza-bethan
Tymes: A Country Faire,” a Renaissance-era celebration, and the Outer Banks Film
Festival screens a variety of family-oriented and eclectic movies.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 115
Roanoke Island Festival Park
originated as the Elizabeth II State
Historic Site in the mid-1980s and
was later operated by the Roanoke
Island Commission. The park, still
administered by the commission, is
once again a state historic site.
Among a wide variety of entertaining
and educational programs connected
with it is the Elizabeth II, a replica
sixteenth-century sailing ship that
closely resembles the vessels used by
Sir Walter Raleigh and other mem-bers
of the Roanoke voyages of
1584-1587.
Roanoke Island Festival Park maintains a cooperative partnership with other attrac-tions
in the Manteo area. Adjacent to its Arrival Center is the Outer Banks History Center
(OBHC), a remarkable repository of state and regional history. The center contains hold-ings
as interesting and varied as the history of the Outer Banks themselves. The OBHC
gallery features quarterly exhibits relating to Outer Banks history and culture. Researchers
and visitors can satisfy their curiosity and find answers to questions about past times, learn
about lighthouses and pirates, examine old photographs and maps, or uncover traditional
seafood recipes. Admission to the OBHC is free and open to the public. The OBHC is
administered by the Archives and Records Section, Division of Historical Resources. The
North Carolina Maritime Museum on Roanoke Island, within the Division of State History
Museums, constructs and restores historic sailing craft and offers maritime-education
classes and an active junior sailing program. The Festival Park successfully markets an
“attractions pass” in cooperation with three of the island’s most popular enterprises—The
Lost Colony, the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, and the Elizabethan Gar-dens.
The pass offers holders an easy and economical way to visit all four destinations.
Roanoke Island Festival Park welcomes more than 100,000 visitors each year from
throughout the nation and the world; more than 10 percent of the visitors are schoolchil-dren
from more than three-quarters of North Carolina’s 100 counties.
Transportation Museum Acquires Historic Airplane
When the enormous Back Shop exhibit hall opens at the North Carolina Transportation
Museum in Spencer, a red, white, and blue antique Piedmont DC-3 aircraft will hang
from the ceiling. The North Carolina Transportation Museum (NCTM) Foundation pur-chased
the plane from Durham’s North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, which had
owned it for many years. The DC-3, which will likely be the largest artifact in the NCTM’s
enormous new exhibit hall, will enable the museum to tell the story of one of the nation’s
outstanding airlines and the largest airline ever based in North Carolina. “I think it’s great,
because the plane will be protected from the weather and more people will see it,” says
Ronnie Macklin, former head of aircraft quality control for Piedmont Airlines.
The DC-3, which is a static display and does not fly, has been mounted outside the
Durham museum since 1979. The plane was partially restored at that time and repainted
in Piedmont’s original paint scheme. In January 2004 the plane will be disassembled and
transported by truck from Durham to a building in Rowan County for restoration. The
plane is in good condition but needs landing gear (two front wheels to enable the aircraft
to land and sit on the ground) and some metal replacement. Additional restoration is
needed on some exterior surfaces and in the interior of the plane.
116 CAROLINA COMMENTS
The North Carolina Transportation
Museum Foundation recently acquired a
Douglas DC-3 for permanent display at
the museum in Spencer. The airplane,
virtually identical to the one shown in
this publicity photograph, will be dis-assembled
at its present site and trans-ported
via truck to a building in Rowan
County, where it will undergo restoration
as a static (nonworking) display and the
Transportation Museum’s largest artifact.
Photograph courtesy Piedmont Aviation
Historical Society, Winston-Salem.
Douglas Aircraft Company delivered the initial DC-3 (which first made air travel
popular—and profitable to airlines) in 1936 to American Airlines and built 455 of the
planes for various airlines. During World War II the company assembled 10,174 military
versions (the C-47) of the transport plane. The DC-3 carried a crew of three and as many
as twenty-eight passengers for up to 1,500 miles at speeds of 192 miles per hour. Remark-ably,
several hundred DC-3s are believed to remain in commercial service throughout the
world. Douglas Aircraft manufactured the Piedmont DC-3 now in Durham for the U.S.
Army Air Corps. It flew for Western Airlines before Piedmont purchased it in 1956, nam-ing
it the Potomac Pacemaker and registering it as N56V. Piedmont, with headquarters in
Winston-Salem, relied upon DC-3s during its early history and operated the Potomac Pace-maker
and other DC-3s until 1963.
NCTM director Elizabeth Smith has appointed a committee to oversee the plane’s
transfer, restoration, and historical integrity. Members include Sturges Bryan, John
Bechtel, John Mercer, and Walter Turner. Ronnie Macklin and Norman Garren, both of
whom worked in maintenance for Piedmont, have agreed to serve as consultants for the
restoration project.
Virginia Historical Society Research Fellowship Program
To promote the interpretation of Virginia history and access to its collections, the Virginia
Historical Society offers fellowships of up to four weeks a year. Awards include the
Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowships, the Betty Sams Christian Fellowships in busi-ness
history, the Frances Lewis Fellowships in women’s studies, and the Reese Fellow-ships
in American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas. Applications
are welcomed from doctoral candidates; undergraduates, master’s students, and other
graduate students not yet admitted to Ph.D. candidacy are not eligible. The awards are
made on the basis of applicants’ scholarly qualifications, the merits of their respective pro-posals,
and the appropriateness of their topics, as demonstrated by citation to specific
sources in the society’s collections. Recipients are expected to work on a regular basis in
the society’s reading room during the period of their award. A few grants are made to
commuting researchers to cover mileage.
Applicants should submit an original and three copies of the following items: a cover
letter, a curriculum vitae, two letters of recommendation (sent separately), and descrip-tions
of their research project not longer than two double-spaced pages and which also
state the desired length of the award requested. The deadline for applications is February 1,
2003; winners of the awards will be announced on March 15, 2003. An awards committee
will make partial awards and will consider resubmitted applications in future years up to
the following limits: for doctoral candidates, a maximum of three weeks in a five-year
period; for faculty or independent scholars, a maximum of six weeks in a five-year period.
Applications should be sent to: Dr. Nelson D. Lankford, Chairman, Research Fellow-ship
Committee, Virginia Historical Society, 428 N. Boulevard, Richmond, VA 23220.
For additional information, telephone (804) 342-9672; direct a fax to (804) 355-2399;
or dispatch an e-mail to nlankford@vahistorical.org. The society’s Web site is vahistorical.org.
Recent Articles on North Carolina History
Amy Cunningham. “The Road to Compliance: Asheville’s Reaction to the Brown Decision.”
Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, 8-9 (2000-2001).
Jonathan Gentry. “Molehill to Mountain: How a Physics Graduate Student Tarnished the
Reputation of the Atomic Energy Commission and Its Director.” North Carolina Historical
Review 79 (October 2002).
Thornton W. Mitchell. “North Carolina’s Thirty Years’ War: Josiah Turner Jr. vs. Governor W. W.
Holden.” Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, 8-9 (2000-2001).
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 117
Michael A. Paquette. “Thomas Day: An Inquiry into Business and Labor Practices in an Antebellum
Cabinet Shop.” Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, 6-7 (1998-1999).
S. Scott Rohrer. “Searching for Land and God: The Pietist Migration to North Carolina in the
Late Colonial Period.” North Carolina Historical Review 79 (October 2002).
Robert D. Scull. “Free Blacks in Craven County in 1850.” Journal of the North Carolina Association of
Historians, 6-7 (1998-1999).
Louis P. Towles. “Day of Jubilee: Emancipation Day in North Carolina.” Journal of the North
Carolina Association of Historians, 8-9 (2000-2001).
Obituary
Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, long associated with Meredith College in Raleigh, died in South-ern
Pines on September 28, 2002, at the age of eighty-seven. She was born on October 24,
1914, in Davidsonville, Maryland, and earned a B.S. from James Madison University, an
M.A. in American history from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in American history and
social and intellectual history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Upon
her retirement, she returned to college for a B.A. in art history from Meredith College.
Dr. Lemmon served for thirty-five years in various capacities at Meredith. She was a
professor of history, chair of the Department of History and Political Science, dean of con-tinuing
education and special programs, professor emerita, and college historian. She was
active in a number of historical organizations in North Carolina and the South. Dr. Lemmon
served as chair of the North Carolina Historical Commission from 1977 to 1981 and also
was a former president of both the Historical Society of North Carolina and the North
Carolina Literary and Historical Association. She was a member of the board of directors of
the North Carolina Episcopal Church Foundation for more than twenty years and served
one term as president of that body. Dr. Lemmon was a member of the Department of His-tory
and Records of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina and was coeditor of The Episco-pal
Church in North Carolina, 1701-1959 (1987), published by the Episcopal Diocese of
North Carolina. She became an ordained Episcopal deacon in 1995.
Dr. Lemmon was the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews. She served as
editor of The Pettigrew Papers (two volumes, 1971, 1988) and was author of North Carolina’s
Role in World War II (1964), North Carolina’s Role in the First World War (1966), and North
Carolina and the War of 1812 (1971), all published by the Division (now Office) of Archives
and History.
News from Historical Resources
Archives and Records Section
Comprehensive efforts to improve the arrangement, description, and preservation of
materials in the State Archives relating to Black Mountain College have been completed.
The project, funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant in
the amount of $98,245, has generated national and international interest, largely because
of the avant-garde theories of education that were put into practice there and the well-known
artists, writers, musicians, dancers, photographers, designers, and others who
attended the college or taught there. The institution remained open from 1933 to 1956
near the town of Black Mountain. The major initiative to preserve information about the
college began in the fall of 2000 with the employment of Joshua Dillon who worked on the
project until May 2002 when grant funding for his job expired. From March 2001, Ashley
Yandle, previously employed by the South Carolina Historical Society, served as project
archivist for the grant until funding for her position ended on September 30, 2002. Archival
description supervisor Barbara Cain oversaw the entire project until her retirement on May 1,
2002, when Assistant State Archivist Jesse R. Lankford became project director.
118 CAROLINA COMMENTS
A Web site that reflects the many accomplishments of this NEH grant can be accessed at
www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/sections/archives/arch/bmc_web_page/bmc.htm. That Web site includes a
gallery of sixty photographic images of Black Mountain College, along with additional infor-mation
on the college and the Archives’ holdings pertaining thereto. Links to xml and html
versions of eighteen finding aids for those holdings are available at that Web address.
A second Web site that debuted in September 2002 is an exhibition of the “treasures of
the Archives.” The exhibit includes descriptions of twenty-two collections and/or docu-ments
that are the principal showcase items of the State Archives. Among the images
depicted are the Carolina Charter of 1663; “Thoughts on Government,” by John Adams;
Jeremiah Vail’s “Plan of Wilmington, 1743”; and the Fort Fisher Log Book, 1864, with an
accompanying transcription. Making these materials available online for use by school-children
and the general public is highly pragmatic, given the fragility of some of the items
included in the online exhibit.
On October 4, 2002, as a complement to the special commemorative and collabora-tive
exhibition Presidential Ink: Signatures and Memorabilia, an assemblage of documents
signed by all the presidents of the United States was made available on the State Archives’
Web site. The offering consists of 257 images highlighting the diversity of records and
documents in custody of the Archives, including a note from Richard Nixon discussing the
need for total honesty with the citizenry regarding his finances.
Requests for information from around the globe flow into the office of Jason Tomberlin,
the State Archives’ correspondence archivist. Beginning on January 2, 2002, the Archives
and Records Section’s Public Services Branch began tracking correspondence requests by
location. As of September 17, 2002, the branch had received requests from several hundred
North Carolina cities, towns, and communities; from all 100 counties; from every state
except North Dakota; and from the following nations, territories, or dependencies: Ameri-can
Samoa, Argentina, Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Neth-erlands,
Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In addition,
the branch has been tracking Search Room visitation for the same period. So far this year,
residents of every state except Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota have visited the
Archives Search Room. International visitors to the Search Room have arrived from Austra-lia,
Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
In September the State Historical Records Advisory Board (SHRAB), a commission
appointed by the governor and charged with monitoring and coordinating North
Carolina’s efforts to preserve its documentary heritage, held a retreat at Stagville State His-toric
Site to plan for new statewide initiatives. The board’s present grant, in effect since
February of this year, mandates that the SHRAB include in its planning the recommenda-tions
and findings formulated at “Charting Our Future,” the board’s November 2001 state-wide
conference on records. At that conclave, many participants listed continuing education
and staff training as high priorities for future board grants. As a result, at its Stagville meeting
the SHRAB tentatively decided to prepare a grant proposal for archival and records manage-ment
training and educational workshops. A new grant proposal application is expected to
be submitted to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) in
Washington, D.C., by June 2003. The SHRAB will seek to conduct three to five workshops,
offering special attention to individual institutional needs and issues, in different regions of
North Carolina. At its retreat the board also authorized revisions in its archival practices
booklet, Insuring the Future of Our Past, and the updating of its Web site. Publications of the
SHRAB appear on the Web site, and new links with national organizations will make the
site more useful to North Carolina clients. The SHRAB is composed of ten members. Dr.
Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources,
is the board’s state coordinator. State Archivist and Records Administrator Catherine J.
Morris serves as the deputy state coordinator. The NHPRC, an agency of the National
Archives, provides funding for the SHRAB.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 119
The Freedmen’s Colony Remembrance Celebration is a yearly convergence of coastal
black history, Civil War history, gospel and “Negro spiritual” music, storytelling and
reenactments, and handicraft demonstrations. After Union general Ambrose Burnside took
control of Roanoke Island in 1862, a Freedmen’s colony consisting of a school, churches, a
sawmill, more than five hundred dwellings, and nearly three thousand residents sprang up
around Fort Raleigh. On September 14 the Outer Banks History Center (OBHC) hosted
two authors—Patricia Click and Drew Pullen—who spoke at the seventh annual event.
Dr. Click, associate professor at the University of Virginia, is author of Time Full of Trial: The
Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, 1862-1867, published in 2001. Her talk was titled “The
Historian as Detective: Searching for the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony.” Pullen, a
former history teacher, is author of the recently released Portrait of the Past: The Civil War on
Roanoke Island, as well as Portrait of the Past: The Civil War on Hatteras Island, published in 2001.
He discussed both of his books, as well as research he is conducting for another book, which
will focus on New Bern and James City in Craven County. Curator KaeLi Spiers, along with
Lois Bradshaw and Mel Covey, members of the OBHC Associates who served on the event’s
planning committee, provided assistance. OBHC office assistant Kelly Grimm produced
promotional flyers for the day’s program and handled many other aspects of publicity for the
gathering. (See news from Roanoke Island Festival Park, below.)
American Airlines and the First Flight Centennial Foundation recently presented to the
OBHC a grant in the amount of thirty thousand dollars for an exhibit at the Wright Brothers
National Memorial during the 2003 centennial observance. The exhibit will focus on the
Outer Banks at the turn of the twentieth century and will help familiarize visitors with the
way the area appeared during the time the Wright brothers were in Kitty Hawk. It will depict
the natural setting that made the Outer Banks so ideal for the Wrights’ experimentation,
village life, and the history of the U.S. Lifesaving Service. The exhibit will include images
from the OBHC and other archival collections; an audio component from oral histories at
the center; and a selection of artifacts, including a period anemometer. The OBHC is also
working diligently to prepare for Pushing the Limits: Aviation Flight Research as Seen through the
NASA Art Program. The exhibit will be on loan to the OBHC from the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration from September through December 2003. It will consist of
approximately twenty-one works of art featuring aircraft and their pilots who have expanded
the boundaries of flight. The OBHC will be the only venue in eastern North Carolina to
present this exhibition of aviation artwork.
Jason Kemp, a Morehead Scholar majoring in environmental science and geography in
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Environmental Program, is serving as an intern at the OBHC
this fall. He is studying and documenting the culture and personalities of individuals asso-ciated
with the northern Outer Banks charter fishing fleet—particularly the Oregon Inlet
Fishing Center during the years 1945 through 1980—through the recording of oral histo-ries.
Interviewees include former boat captains, mates, and their families, as well as local
business owners directly related to the charter fishing industry. The project provides addi-tional
support to the OBHC’s ongoing efforts to produce and collect oral histories of area
residents, especially local watermen and their families.
Recent Accessions by the North Carolina State Archives
During the months of June, July, and August 2002 the Archives and Records Section made
193 accession entries. The section received original records from Anson, Clay, Cumber-land,
Davidson, Lenoir, and Onslow Counties and security microfilm of records for
Alamance, Beaufort, Buncombe, Cabarrus, Camden, Carteret, Cleveland, Columbus,
Craven, Currituck, Davidson, Durham, Edgecombe, Gates, Graham, Granville, Greene,
Halifax, Harnett, Haywood, Henderson, Hyde, Iredell, Johnston, Lenoir, Macon, Martin,
McDowell, Mitchell, Montgomery, Moore, Nash, New Hanover, Pamlico, Pender, Surry,
120 CAROLINA COMMENTS
Watauga, Wayne, Wilkes, and Yadkin Counties, as well as for the municipalities of
Asheville, Bald Head Island, Burgaw, Burlington, Dunn, Fayetteville, Fletcher, Hope
Mills, Kernersville, Laurinburg, Monroe, Raleigh, Rural Hall, Saluda, Shallotte, Stallings,
Statesville, Stokesdale, Sunset Beach, Valdese, Wake Forest, Waxhaw, White Lake,
Wilmington, Wrightsville Beach, Yaupon Beach, and Zebulon.
The section accessioned records from the following state agencies: Department of
Commerce, 1 reel; Department of Community Colleges, 9 reels; Department of Crime
Control and Public Safety, 43 reels; Department of Cultural Resources, 7 reels; Department
of Transportation, 15 reels; Department of Environment and Natural Resources, 2 reels;
Department of Health and Human Services, 44 reels; Department of Insurance, 2 reels;
Department of the Secretary of State, 1 folder; General Assembly, 3 reels; Governor’s
Office, .95 cubic feet and 2 reels; State Board of Elections, 1 reel; and Supreme Court,
38 reels. Additionally, 17 reels of federal census records were received.
The Larkin S. Kendrick Papers were accessioned as a new private collection, and
additions were made to the Betty Wiser and Janis L. Ramquist Papers. Among further
accessions were 22 additions to the Military Collection, 9 additions to the Map Collection,
1 addition to the Organization Records, 1 addition to the Newspaper Collection, and
7 additions to Bible records. Six films and videotape recordings were added to the
Nontextual Materials Collection.
Historical Publications Section
Effective October 1, 2002, the Historical Publications Section reorganized into four dis-tinct
branches: the Administrative Branch (overseeing office operations, marketing, digi-tizing/
typesetting, and proofreading); the General Publications and Periodicals Branch
(responsible for publication of the North Carolina Historical Review, Carolina Comments, gen-eral
publications, and documentaries); the Special Projects Branch (administering the
Colonial Records Project and publication of the governors’ papers); and the Civil War
Roster Branch (publishing the ongoing series North Carolina Troops). The organizational
chart was restructured at the advice of the Human Resources Office to streamline supervi-sory
responsibilities.
Kenrick N. Simpson, longtime archivist with the Archives and Records Section, was
promoted into the editor III position vacated by the August 1 retirement of Robert M.
Topkins. Mr. Simpson has been employed with the agency for nearly twenty-three years.
He holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from East Carolina University, and
his minor was in journalism. He officially began work October 14 with Historical Publica-tions
as the new editor of Carolina Comments, beginning with the January 2003 issue.
Because of travel restrictions, and in order to gain more visibility for the section, various
staff members sold new and discounted books at local meetings recently. This marketing
strategy will continue as staff time and opportunities allow. On August 13 Bill Brown and
Walt Evans sold approximately $400 worth of books to the Col. L. L. Polk Sons of Confed-erate
Veterans Camp in Garner. Likewise, Donna Kelly and Susan Trimble sold approxi-mately
$200 worth of books to the Wake County Genealogical Society on September 24.
In other outreach efforts, several of Archives and History’s books and posters are cur-rently
featured in an exhibit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill titled North
Carolina Mysteries, Myths, and Legends. This display is housed in the North Carolina Collec-tion
Gallery through January 19, 2003. Frances Kunstling, marketing specialist, has sent
numerous materials (catalogs, order forms, and display books) to various in- and out-of-state
conferences. Furthermore, Susan Trimble, digital editor, has linked the section’s
home page to two genealogical Web sites. All of those efforts have resulted in increased
sales over the past few months.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 121
Effective January 1, 2003, subscriptions to the North Carolina Historical Review will be
raised by $5 to $30 per year to meet increasing production costs. Individual back issues
will now cost $8 each. Individual subscriptions to Carolina Comments will increase to $10
per year, with back issues available at $3 each. Subscribers to the Review automatically
receive Carolina Comments with each subscription, and both periodicals will be sent out
quarterly in 2003, following a January, April, July, and October schedule.
Office of State Archaeology
On September 19, Mark Wilde-Ramsing, director of the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck
Project, made a presentation to members of the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society at
their annual Membership Dinner at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He
presented an overview of the significant archaeological discoveries that have resulted from
recent investigations of the wreck site in Beaufort Inlet.
Research Branch
On October 1, 2002, officials of the Office of Archives and History took part in the unveil-ing
of the state’s newest highway historical marker, one dedicated to Gertrude Weil. The
sign stands in front of her home at the intersection of Chestnut and James Streets in
Goldsboro. The Goldsboro Woman’s Club and the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs of North Carolina cosponsored the program. Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary
of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (DCR), represented Secretary of
Cultural Resources Lisbeth C. Evans, whose health prevented her from traveling to the
event. Former DCR secretary Betty Ray McCain paid tribute to Miss Weil in her remarks.
Research Branch supervisor Michael Hill acquainted the eighty people in attendance with
the operation of the state marker program. Weil family members formally accepted the
marker and recalled the life of their distinguished kinswoman.
122 CAROLINA COMMENTS
On October 1 officials of the Office of Archives and History and others assembled in Goldsboro to
participate in the unveiling of the state’s newest highway historical marker, which honors Gertrude Weil,
one of North Carolina’s best-known leaders in the realm of woman suffrage, social welfare, and civic
causes. The marker stands at the intersection of Chestnut and James Streets in Goldsboro.
Gertrude Weil (1879-1971), daughter of Henry Weil, was North Carolina’s best-known
woman suffrage leader. After graduating from Smith College, she returned to
Goldsboro and involved herself in club work. She was a founder and first president of the
North Carolina Suffrage League (now the League of Women Voters). Despite her speak-ing
and prodding, the North Carolina legislature in 1920 rejected the Nineteenth Amend-ment
(within days Tennessee approved the measure extending the voting franchise to
women). Miss Weil was a mainstay of practically every private effort connected with social
welfare. Like her mother, Mina, she advocated legislation restricting child labor and
spearheaded Jewish projects (the Weils were active in raising funds for European Jewish
relief). In the 1960s Gertrude Weil, in her eighties, took an active role in race issues. In an
ironic twist, the state legislature approved the Nineteenth Amendment in May 1971, the
same month in which Miss Weil died.
State Historic Preservation Office
At the State Capitol on June 20, 2002, David Brook, administrator of the State Historic
Preservation Office (HPO), represented the North Carolina Department of Cultural
Resources (DCR) in accepting the 2002 Anthemion Award, presented each year by Capi-tal
Area Preservation, Inc., for excellence in historic preservation in Wake County. Brook
joined officials from the L. L. Polk Foundation, the Wake County Historical Society, and
the North Carolina Departments of Administration and Agriculture and Consumer Ser-vices
at the awards ceremony. All of those groups cooperated with the DCR in a joint
effort to preserve the nineteenth-century home of Leonidas Lafayette Polk (1837- 1892).
Polk was North Carolina’s first commissioner of agriculture and was poised to be the presi-dential
candidate of the National People’s Party when he died in 1892. The DCR provided a
grant in the amount of $25,000 for the Polk House project in 1995, and Restoration Branch
staff of the HPO provided expert technical services. The frame Victorian house, owned by
the state, is located in the 500 block of North Blount Street in Raleigh.
Under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, staff of the HPO reviews and
comments on more than four thousand federal development projects each year. Among
the most important resources protected are historic buildings and structures on military
bases in North Carolina. Renee Gledhill-Earley, environmental review coordinator, and
HPO staff have worked with military personnel to identify and preserve historic proper-ties
that embody America’s proud military heritage and which are still serviceable for the
nation’s defense. Brig. Gen. Winfield W. Scott III, 43d Airlift Wing commander, recog-nized
the positive working relationship between the U.S. Air Force and the state during a
September 13 dedication ceremony for Pope Air Force Base’s newly rehabilitated Field
Officers Quarters, striking Spanish Colonial Revival buildings dating from 1933 and
1934. Among HPO staff recognized during the ceremony were David Brook, deputy state
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 123
Officials of Pope Air Force Base and the
HPO stand in front of the wing com-mander’s
quarters at the base at the
conclusion of a dedication ceremony for
the newly rehabilitated Field Officers
Headquarters. Shown left to right are Lt. Col.
James E. Welter, base civil engineer;
Gen. Winfield W. Scott III, commander,
43d Airlift Wing; David Brook, deputy state
historic preservation officer; and Jeffrey
Adolphsen, HPO restoration specialist.
historic preservation officer; Jeffrey Adolphsen, HPO restoration specialist for southeast-ern
North Carolina; and Renee Gledhill-Earley (who was unable to attend the dedication
because of a scheduling conflict.) The Air Force planned the ceremony to coincide with
the 2002 annual conference of Preservation North Carolina, held in Fayetteville. Those
who attended that conference toured Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg.
News from State Historic Sites
Capitol Section
On September 11 a “Ceremony of Remembrance” was held on the west Capitol grounds
in memory of the victims of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Gov. and Mrs.
Michael F. Easley led the hour-long official state service. Mrs. Easley read passages from
the Declaration of Independence. State Adjutant General William Ingram Jr. read the
Preamble to the United States Constitution. The governor’s cabinet secretaries followed
with readings of the ten Articles contained in the Bill of Rights. Special music was pro-vided
by the Raleigh Concert Band, singers LaChauna Sumpter and SFC Thomas G. Pope
of the North Carolina National Guard 440th Band, and the Carolina Harmony Chorus.
Pastor Dumas A. Harshaw Jr., Raleigh’s mayor Charles Meeker, and Linda Coleman, chair
of the Wake County Commissioners, participated in the ceremony. Gwynn Swinson, sec-retary
of the North Carolina Department of Administration, acted as emcee and also
delivered remarks for the occasion.
On September 21 and 22, special Civil War tours were held in the Capitol to provide
insights to visitors on the pivotal role played by the State Capitol before, during, and after
the war. Special emphasis was placed on the Secession Convention of May 1861 and the
Union occupation of the Capitol in April and May 1865.
The Capitol staff is working with the Raleigh Garden Club to decorate the Capitol for
Christmas again this year. Members of the garden club have volunteered their time and
talents since 1976 to provide beautiful decorations in the executive offices and through-out
the building. This year club members will focus on North Carolina floriculture and
will decorate the Capitol with many different varieties of poinsettias. They plan to pay
tribute to Dr. Roy Larson of North Carolina State University, who has been instrumental
in the research and development of poinsettia cultivation in the state. A new variety of
poinsettia, “Eckespoint’s Pink Ribbon,” will be used to decorate the Governor’s Office.
The stunning soft-pink peppermint-like variety was introduced in 2002 as part of the
Plant for the Cure initiative, which is a unified effort by independent retail garden centers
and growers to raise awareness of and generate funding for breast-cancer research. These
plants, which are available at select retail garden centers, were chosen to provide garden-ers
an opportunity to plant their gardens with flowers that will make a difference in the
lives of the approximately 178,000 women and 1,400 men who are diagnosed annually
with breast cancer. Ten percent of the purchase price of these plants goes directly to the
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens and the New Bern-Craven County Public
Library recently obtained from the ECHO (Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) project
of the State Library of North Carolina a grant to create digitized images of some of their
collections and make them available to the public via the World Wide Web. Tryon Pal-ace’s
currency and map collections and the library’s collection of early-twentieth-century
pamphlets and printed materials were selected for the initial project. The three collec-tions
were chosen for the ease with which they could be digitized and their significance to
the study of North Carolina history.
The small but important map collection held by Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens
encompasses the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries—from John Speed’s
“Map of the coast of Carolina . . .” (London, 1676) to maps of New Bern drawn just after
124 CAROLINA COMMENTS
the Civil War. It includes the highly prized 1775 “An Accurate Map of North and South
Carolina, with their Indian Frontiers,” by Henry Mouzon Jr., the first map of the Caro-linas
issued during the Revolutionary War period and one used by British, French, and
American forces. Tryon Palace’s paper currency collection encompasses North Carolina’s
colonial period, notes issued during the Revolutionary War, and bills printed by both the
state of North Carolina and the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. The
New Bern-Craven County Public Library’s collection includes commemorative printed
material celebrating New Bern’s two hundredth anniversary in 1910. The digitized photo-graphs
can be viewed at Tryon Palace’s Web site, www.tryonpalace.org, or at the library’s
Web site, http://newbern.cpclib.org/digital/index.html.
Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens played a small but visible part in National Estu-aries
Day in early October. A special program called “Estuary Live!” was broadcast by way
of the Internet to schoolchildren throughout the United States. “Estuary Live!” is
described as a live, interactive field trip through some of the nation’s most important estu-aries.
Naturalists led online tours, via the Internet, of eight of the country’s major estuar-ies,
including North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound. Schoolchildren in classrooms throughout
the United States (and anyone else with access to the Internet) could view the online tours
on their computers, submit questions by e-mail to the tour guides, and have them
answered during the Webcast. A video crew from the North Carolina Department of
Environment and Natural Resources was in New Bern in September to film Tryon Palace
Historic Sites & Gardens as part of a tour it produced, which included highlights of the
Pamlico Sound. It shot footage of staff at work in the kitchen garden and palace kitchen.
To learn more about the field trip, log onto this Web site: www.estuaries.gov/estuarylive/estlive.html.
North Carolina Transportation Museum
On September 28 the North Carolina Transportation Museum (NCTM) held a special
celebration during Steamfest weekend to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the facility. The occasion marked the anniversary of transfer, by deed of gift, of the prop-erty
from Southern Railway to the state. Following a morning parade for Steamfest, visi-tors
enjoyed both a “Silver Spike” ceremony and a cake-cutting. Among other special
attractions for the public were demonstrations of blacksmithing and Indian dugout
canoe-making and an exhibition of antique automobiles. At a private luncheon, museum
leaders honored all past board members with certificates recognizing their contributions
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 125
The North Carolina Transportation Museum recently observed its twenty-fifth
anniversary as a state historic site. This logo, specially designed for the
commemoration, graced the museum’s invitations to its September 28
anniversary celebration and will be used for public-relations purposes through-out
the remainder of this year. The anniversary received considerable coverage
by local media.
to the museum. The museum’s productive and invaluable nonprofit support group has
had only four presidents during its quarter-century tenure—Fred Corriher, Charles Pea-cock,
Elmer Lam, and, recently elected, Sturges Bryan. An exhibit on the role of boxcars
and rail transportation in the operations of textile manufacturer Cone Mills Corporation
officially opened (in an actual Cone Mills boxcar) that afternoon. On days leading up to
the celebration, various issues of the Salisbury Post featured archival photographs of
Spencer Shops and the town of Spencer; the newspaper ran a special article on the anni-versary
as well. The activities also received local television coverage.
The museum has launched a newly improved Web site, which retains the same
address, www.nctrans.org, but has an updated look and is more user friendly for potential
visitors. Users of the new site will notice a helpful navigation bar to guide them. Categories
labeled “Visitor Information,” “History,” “Events and Exhibits,” “Group Tours,” and
“Thomas” offer general information about the museum. Additional links, such as “Kids’
Stuff,” provide students and younger children with fun facts. In addition, there is also a link
titled “Restoration,” through which rail fans can get the latest updates on current projects,
such as the ongoing renovation of the enormous Back Shop. Browsers can buy gift shop
items and tickets to some special events (such as Thomas the Tank Engine) online. On the
“Want to Help” page is information on how to become a mechanical or interpretive vol-unteer,
how to become a member of the Friends of the NCTM, or how to donate some-thing
on the museum’s wish list. The Web site also contains a page through which viewers
can contact the staff with questions. Museum public information officer Jemi Johnson
collaborated with NCTM staff and key volunteers, among them Christian and Rivka
Skidmore and Eric Shock, to create the new Web site. Volunteers David Seniw and Kip
Hale deserve thanks for initiating the original site and maintaining it for many years.
Piedmont Historic Sites Section
Three years ago, Duke Homestead started its junior interpreter program with two boys
and two girls, aged nine to sixteen, who entered the program in order to learn historic
skills and crafts, to interpret the history of Duke Homestead, and to dress in 1870 cos-tumes.
Presently there are sixteen children in the popular program, and the waiting list is
just as long. Among many enthusiastic responses by the homestead’s junior interpreters to
the question of what they would most like to learn about life in the past were knitting,
clogging, ballroom dancing, sewing, advanced cornhusk-doll-making, pottery-making,
gardening, and cooking.
126 CAROLINA COMMENTS
The junior interpreter program inau-gurated
at Duke Homestead State
Historic Site in Durham three years
ago has proven quite popular, and
the site now has a waiting list of
young people eager to participate in
the offering. Those who enter the
program learn historic skills and
crafts, to interpret the history of Duke
Homestead, and to dress in authentic
1870s costumes. Shown here are
junior interpreters engaged in gar-dening
at the site.
The junior interpreter program is a structured activity, with children attaining
different levels as they attend workshops, take part in special events, and accumulate volun-teer
hours. Charts allow young people to mark their progress with stickers and reveal skills
learned. To date, the students have attended workshops on milking cows, knitting, crocheting,
quilting, outdoor cooking, blacksmithing, playing games, making jelly, churning butter, mak-ing
candles, and stringing tobacco. As the children advance, they assume additional responsi-bilities
in helping the staff, planning special events, and training new junior interpreters.
Each October Duke Homestead hosts “An Evening at the Homestead,” a special event
inaugurated three years ago as a junior interpreter program. Last month the young people
held a “scary evening,” inasmuch as the activity took place on the final Saturday before Hal-loween.
Keeping with authenticity, the children planned a magic lantern show. They created
their own magic lantern (the popular Victorian predecessor to the slide projector), dipped
candles for the lantern’s light source, and painted their own slides. The show actually was a
phantasmagoria—a spooky magic lantern show that was all the rage after the Civil War.
Junior interpreters seemed to have an enjoyable time, and the Homestead staff probably
learned as much from the young people as the interpreters learned from the staff. Duke
Homestead has planned more events and workshops for the young volunteers in the future,
although requests for learning opportunities have surpassed the skills of the site staff.
Visitors to the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum enjoy walking about the former
Palmer Memorial Institute campus and looking at the wayside exhibits. They particularly
like the photographs on the panels and comment on the beauty of the campus seen in the
views. Planning for restoration of that historic landscape is now under way. The museum
staff has begun research and development of a site landscape plan, continuing work begun
in 1998 by deceased facilities coordinator Gary Gage. Nita and Jack Almon of Greens-boro,
as well as Palmer alumni, have contributed old photos for the project. Through a
stroke of luck, the Almons acquired a notebook that had belonged to a supervisor at
Greensboro’s venerable J. Van Lindley Nurseries in the 1920s; three pages of the book refer
to Palmer Memorial. A 1930 prospectus issued by Palmer Memorial revealed that the nur-series
“cooperated . . . throughout the years in helping to make the school campus . . . [very]
attractive . . . [and] contributed hundreds of dollars worth of plants and shrubs.” According
to the notebook, on Friday, April 1, nine men worked all day with one truck delivering three
loads of material to the school. Because the book includes drawings of Stone Hall and
Kimball Hall, the year was probably 1927, when those buildings were being completed.
The Almons likewise donated copies of the 1919 and 1922 catalogs for Lindley Nurseries.
Lindley, a local Quaker who fought for the Union in the Civil War, owned and oper-ated
one of the largest plant nurseries in the South. His Lindley Park was an amusement
park in Greensboro. When it closed in 1917, he donated it and thirty-seven additional
acres for a public park and neighborhood, suggesting that southern landscape architect
Earl Sumner Draper design it. Association with the Lindleys was crucial for Charlotte
Hawkins Brown in terms of support for her school.
The park-like atmosphere of Palmer Memorial is important from a cultural history
perspective. By 1880 new public parks were popular, particularly in urban areas and the
Northeast. Frederick Law Olmsted, perhaps America’s first and greatest landscape archi-tect,
developed New York’s Central Park in the 1850s and later worked on Boston’s
“Emerald Necklace” public parks during the years Dr. Brown grew up there. One of
Olmsted’s partners in Boston was Charles Eliot, son of Palmer supporter Charles W.
Eliot. The creation of urban natural areas, an important social movement around 1900,
was heartily endorsed by the elite with whom Dr. Brown associated. She loved nature,
realized that a landscaped campus would mark Palmer Memorial as progressive, and
referred to the institution as “a bit of New England.”
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 127
The current landscape project began with a close examination of old images and sur-veys
of the campus. Plans call for the staff to study extant 1920s plantings in Greensboro
associated with Lindley Nurseries and consult the Lindley Papers, nursery catalogs, and
Boston’s Arnold Arboretum collection. A certified arborist will examine existing trees and
assist with establishing new specimens. Money has been donated to the Charlotte
Hawkins Brown Historical Foundation to begin restoration, and a local Delta Sigma Theta
sorority alumni chapter has assisted since the mid-1990s with landscaping.
Roanoke Island Festival Park
On September 13-14 songs, folk tales, lectures, and historic reenactors filled the bill dur-ing
the Freedmen’s Colony Remembrance Celebration on Roanoke Island. The Outer
Banks History Center (OBHC) and the Roanoke Island Festival Park pavilion served as
venues for some of the events. Descendants of runaway slaves and freedmen who flocked
to the Union army’s Fort Raleigh during the Civil War organized the event, with assistance
from the OBHC and others. The free program began Friday night with a storyteller’s per-formance.
On Saturday, gospel choirs, including the Sensational Nightingales and the
Mighty Clouds of Faith, performed. Special guests included African American Civil War
reenactors representing Battery B, 2nd U.S. Colored Troops, who presented a living his-tory
program. Dr. David E. Cecelski, author of Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot
and its Legacy and The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina, dis-cussed
African American history and the Civil War era in North Carolina. (See news from
the Archives and Records Section, above.)
The Division of State Historic Sites cordially invites readers and friends to the follow-ing
special events scheduled for December:
November 27-
December 29
TRYON PALACE HISTORIC SITES & GARDENS. Holiday Celebration 2002:
Daytime Holiday Tours. Tryon Palace and its historic homes, specially
decorated in holiday finery, welcome visitors to two centuries of American
Christmas traditions. Telephone (252) 514-4900 or (800) 767-1560 for a
copy of the palace’s Holiday Celebration 2002 brochure.
128 CAROLINA COMMENTS
This elevated view (ca. 1950) of the former campus of Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia (now the
Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum) reveals the obvious interest Dr. Brown took in the landscape of the
institution’s campus. Planning for restoration of the historic campus landscape in now under way at the site.
December 1 REED GOLD MINE. Christmas Celebration. A holiday open house with
decorated visitor center, site, and mine tunnels. Eighteenth- to twentieth-century
historical demonstrations. Handbell and vocal choirs. Guided
underground and stamp mill tours, free refreshments. 1:00-5:00 P.M.
SOMERSET PLACE. Christmas Open House. 1:00-4:00 P.M.
December 3, 4 HORNE CREEK LIVING HISTORICAL FARM. Christmas by Lamplight.
Experience the warmth of a rural Christmas about 1900. Music and food of
the era will be featured. Nominal fee for refreshments. Reservations required.
3:30-7:30 P.M.
December 3, 5 AYCOCK BIRTHPLACE. Christmas Candlelight Tours.
December 6 DUKE HOMESTEAD. Christmas by Candlelight. The 1852 homestead is
decorated as the Washington Duke family would have celebrated Christmas.
Evening tours of the house, led by costumed interpreters. Special music and
refreshments. Groups of more than twenty should call for reservations.
Donations accepted. 7:00-9:00 P.M.
STATE CAPITOL. Discussion and demonstration of decorating with live
poinsettias. House chamber. 11:00 A.M.
December 7 JAMES K. POLK MEMORIAL. Candlelight Tours. Living history program with
holiday celebrations from the late eighteenth century, cooking demon-strations,
dancing, musket-firings, and decorations. Tour the historic area
and see living history vignettes by candlelight. Fee of two dollars for adults; no
charge for children twelve and under. 6:30-9:00 P.M.
BENTONVILLE BATTLEGROUND. Christmas Open House. Reenactors
decorate the kitchen in festive themes and show how Christmas was
celebrated during the Civil War. 1:00-4:00 P.M.
FORT FISHER. Christmas Open House. Decorations and refreshments in
the visitor center. 1:00-4:00 P.M.
December 7, 8,
14, 15
NORTH CAROLINA TRANSPORTATION MUSEUM. Santa Train. Fee.
December 8 HOUSE IN THE HORSESHOE. Christmas Open House. Noon-5:30 P.M.
CHARLOTTE HAWKINS BROWN MUSEUM. Christmas Open House.
ALAMANCE BATTLEGROUND. A Star-studded Christmas. A focus on the
significance of the star at Christmastime. 1:00-5:00 P.M.
BENNETT PLACE. Christmas Open House. 1:00-4:00 P.M.
THOMAS WOLFE MEMORIAL. Christmas Celebration. Children’s activities,
Appalachian music. 2:00-4:00 P.M.
HISTORIC BATH. Christmas Open House. Historic buildings decorated for
Christmas and open free of charge. Period music and refreshments.
VANCE BIRTHPLACE. Christmas Open House and Candlelight Tours. Tours
of the reconstructed Vance house decorated in the style of the 1830s.
1:00-6:00 P.M. Candlelight tours start at 4:00 P.M.
December 9 STATE CAPITOL. Lecture on the history and development of poinsettias.
House chamber. 11:00 A.M.
December 9-20 STATE CAPITOL. The “Twelve Days of Christmas.” Musical program during
lunchtime.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 129
December 12 STATE CAPITOL. State Tree-lighting Ceremony, Capitol Open House, and
Holiday Festival. Music on the west grounds beginning at 5:00 P.M.
Ceremony by Governor and Mrs. Easley at 6:00 P.M.
December 13 DUKE HOMESTEAD. Christmas by Candlelight. The 1852 homestead is
decorated as the Washington Duke family would have celebrated
Christmas. Evening tours of the house, led by costumed interpreters.
Special music and refreshments. Groups of more than twenty should call
(919) 477-5498 for reservations. Donations accepted. 7:00-9:00 P.M.
HISTORIC EDENTON. Caroling on the Courthouse Green. Community
Christmas caroling in front of the 1767 Chowan County Courthouse. If your
group wishes to lead a portion of the Christmas carols, or if you need more
information, please telephone (252) 482-2637. 6:00 P.M.
December 13-14 HISTORIC EDENTON. Iredell House Groaning Board. Eighteenth-century
Christmas decorations, harpsichord music, and a holiday groaning board.
Tables are so heavily laden with foods you can almost hear the boards
“groan.” 1:00-5:00 P.M.
December 13, 14,
20, 21
TRYON PALACEHISTORIC SITES&GARDENS. Christmas Candlelight Tour.
The decorated first-floor rooms of Tryon Palace, the kitchen office, and
nearby historic residences are open for holiday tours. Visitors will experience
the spirit of a wartime Christmas at the Civil War camp and enjoy holiday
music, cider, and cookies at the Palace stables. 5:00-9:00 P.M. (ticket sales
end at 8:00 P.M.). Admission charged.
Jonkonnu Celebration. Costumed singers, dancers, and musicians re-create
an African American Yuletide tradition unique to eastern North Carolina. As
the festive procession winds from house to house, it brings to life a nine-teenth-
century blend of African, Caribbean, and English customs. 6:00 and
8:00 P.M. Free.
December 14 HISTORIC HALIFAX. Christmas at Halifax in conjunction with the town of
Halifax. Natural wreaths, swag decorations on the outside of buildings. Infor-mation
about colonial Christmas celebrations given on tours. 10:00 A.M.-
4:00 P.M.
TRYON PALACE HISTORIC SITES&GARDENS. Garden Lecture: “Christmas
Wreaths and Garlands.” Linda Stancill, Tryon Palace’s floral designer,
demonstrates techniques for creating stunning garlands and shares secrets
to making designer-quality holiday wreaths. Visitor Center Auditorium,
10:00 A.M. Admission fee of four dollars (Tryon Palace ticket holders and
members of the Tryon Palace Council of Friends admitted free).
December 16 HISTORIC EDENTON. Historic Christmas Decorations Workshop. Learn to
use materials from nature to decorate for the holidays. Make your own to
take home. Reservations required. $5.00 supply fee. 1:00-4:00 P.M.
News from State History Museums
North Carolina Museum of History
The North Carolina Museum of History offers the following programs to complement the
exhibit Presidential Ink: Signatures and Memorabilia, which will remain on view at the
museum through May 25, 2003 (see second story in this issue of Carolina Comments). All
programs are free and open to the public.
130 CAROLINA COMMENTS
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8: History à la Carte: “Presidents North Carolina Gave the Nation.”
Raymond Beck, historian, North Carolina State Capitol, will discuss the creation of the Capitol
Square monument honoring the three presidents born in North Carolina—Andrew Jackson,
James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson. 12:10 to 1:00 P.M. Bring your lunch; beverages are provided.
SATURDAY, MARCH 8: “Celebrate North Carolina’s History.” Craft demonstrators, historical
reenactors, special exhibits, and hands-on activities will be available in Bicentennial Plaza and the
Museum of History from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. This event is sponsored by the Office of Archives
and History and the Division of State History Museums.
SATURDAY, MARCH 29: “Preserving Your Family Papers.” For participants aged sixteen and older.
10:00-11:30 A.M. An introduction to the basics of preserving valuable papers and books, featuring
advice on types of enclosures, containers, and proper methods of storage. The workshop is
cosponsored by the North Carolina State Archives. Registration required by March 24. Telephone
Sarah Koonts at (919) 733-3952 to register or obtain additional information.
Staff Notes
The two most recent graduates of the Public Manager Program in the Division of State
Historic Sites are Peggy Ann Dallmer, controller at the battleship USS North Carolina, and
Barbara G. Hoppe, site manager at Fort Fisher. Each became a certified public manager
on September 16, 2002, at the North Carolina Museum of History. The distinction repre-sents
two years of leadership training. The two women devoted approximately forty-five
days to assessments and classes on such topics as problem solving, conflict resolution, and
group processes. Each manager also completed a work-related project that reflected les-sons
learned throughout her course of study.
Channie Newberry has begun work as a security guard at Tryon Palace Historic Sites &
Gardens. At Roanoke Island Festival Park, resignations include Laura Perkins Catoe, com-munications
specialist; Lori Beyer, maintenance mechanic I; Michael Murphy, mainte-nance
mechanic II; Carole Whittington, general utility worker; and Laura Wolke,
processing assistant III.
Colleges and Universities
University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Stephanie De Backer was named an instructor in the history department, effective August 15,
2002.
State, County, and Local Groups
Chapel Hill Historical Society
On October 13 Rollie Tillman, professor of marketing at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business, conducted members of the society on
an “entrepreneurial walk” through the UNC-CH campus. The program focused on the
people behind the names on the buildings throughout the campus and ended with a tour
of the campus’s new Institute for Arts and Humanities Building led by UNC-CH chancel-lor
James Moeser. On November 14 Fred Kiger, well-known local expert on the Civil
War, offered insights and perspectives on how the University of North Carolina, the town
of Chapel Hill, and Orange County were affected by the conflict.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 131
Lower Cape Fear Historical Society (Wilmington)
At its annual meeting in May, the society presented its Clarendon Award for 2002 to
David E. Cecelski for his book The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North
Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Cecelski is Whichard
Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at East Carolina University. The society pre-sents
the Clarendon Award annually for the most outstanding work in interpreting and
preserving the history of the Lower Cape Fear region, preferably in the form of a book
published during the preceding calendar year. The society likewise presented its Society
Cup to author Susan Taylor Block for the numerous books on the region she has written
or edited. The award recognizes meritorious and outstanding contributions to the aims
and work of the society and/or the appreciation of the history of Wilmington and the
Lower Cape Fear.
The society has honored the work of longtime volunteer archivist and author of local
history Diane Cobb Cashman by creating the “Cashman Award,” which will be presented
annually to a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington
who has written the best history thesis or graduate paper during the preceding twelve
months. The winner of the first such award was Werner D. Lippert for his graduate paper
“Hometown and German Nationalism: A Case Study of Mark Treckvitz.”
The society’s twenty-ninth annual Christmas Candlelight Tour will be held in
Wilmington’s Forest Hills to highlight that neighborhood’s beauty and historical signifi-cance.
Development of the subdivision, which became the city’s third upper-class neigh-borhood,
began in 1915 adjacent to Market Street and just outside Wilmington’s city
limits of that period. Included in the tour will be Colonial Revival- and Tudor-style houses
of the era and two churches in the neighborhood. Tours will be available from 4:00 to
8:00 P.M. on Saturday, December 7, and from 2:00 to 6:00 P.M. on Sunday, December 8.
Tour tickets can be obtained at a number of Wilmington-area retailers or by telephoning
Cathy Boettcher, executive director of the society, at (910) 762-0492. Tickets to the can-dlelight
tour can be used to tour Wilmington’s Latimer House, headquarters of the Lower
Cape Fear Historical Society, until December 21, when it closes for the holidays.
New Bern Historical Society
The society held its annual Ghost Walk, October 24-26. The event featured guided tours
of historic houses, churches, public buildings, and cemeteries in New Bern, as well as an
encampment by the Seventh and Twenty-sixth Regiments North Carolina Troops and the
Fourth New Hampshire Volunteers, Civil War reenactment groups.
Wake County Historical Society
At its thirtieth annual meeting, held in Raleigh in June, Capital Area Preservation, Inc. pre-sented
its 2002 Anthemion Award to the Wake County Historical Society for the organiza-tion’s
efforts on behalf of preserving the L. L. Polk House of Raleigh. The society formed the
L. L. Polk House Foundation to acquire the historic dwelling, relocate it to a protected loca-tion
when it faced the threat of demolition, and preserve it.
The Wake County Historical Society (WCHS) recently presented its President’s Cup
to Ray Hinnant of Wendell, former two-term president of the society and currently presi-dent
of the Wendell Historical Society. The award honored Hinnant for meritorious ser-vice
to the WCHS, as well as for his efforts on behalf of historic preservation in the county.
The society hosted its traditional Labor Day tour of Raleigh City Cemetery on Septem-ber
2. Local historian Betsy Shaw led the annual event.
132 CAROLINA COMMENTS
New Leaves
Editor’s Note: Michael Hill is supervisor of the Research Branch, North Carolina Office of Archives and His-tory,
and awards coordinator for the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. He is the editor of the
ninth edition of the Guide to North Carolina Highway Historical Markers (2001).
Mayflower Cup, R.I.P.
Michael Hill
On November 15, 2002, a long-standing Tar Heel tradition ended. On that evening, at
the meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association in the North
Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, the Mayflower Cup, awarded annually for sev-enty-
two years, was presented for the last time. The award, created in 1931 by the Society
of Mayflower Descendants in the State of North Carolina and made a permanent posses-sion
of the association, originally was awarded annually to the best published work, fiction
or nonfiction, by a North Carolinian. Since the creation of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award
for Fiction in 1952, the Mayflower Cup competition has been limited to works of nonfic-tion.
The history of the venerable old cup provides a prism into North Carolina arts and
letters over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century.
The North Carolina Literary and Historical Association traces its beginnings to 1900.
Most noteworthy among its early achievements was the central role it played in the cre-ation
in 1903 of the North Carolina Historical Commission, now known as the Office of
Archives and History. From 1905 to 1922 “Lit and Hist” at each fall meeting presented
the Patterson Cup to the most deserving book—prose or poetry—by a North Carolinian.
Lucy Bramlette Patterson of Winston-Salem, who in 1902 had served as the first president
of the North Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs, established the prize—a gold, jew-eled
loving cup—in memory of her father, William Houston Patterson. President Theo-dore
Roosevelt, speaker at the “Lit and Hist” dinner in 1905, made the inaugural
presentation to John Charles McNeill for his volume of poems, Songs, Merry and Sad.*
Judges for the competition were professors of history and English at North Carolina col-leges
and universities. No awards were presented in 1918, 1919, or 1921. Each year the
winner kept possession of the cup until the following year’s dinner. The original plan had
been for a three-time winner to take permanent possession. Clarence Poe won the cup
twice but, absent anyone with a better record and with the space for engraving gone, the
cup was retired in 1922.
A proposal to recognize once again the year’s best book by a North Carolinian arose in
1930. The president of the Literary and Historical Association that year was Horace
Kephart of Bryson City, the recipient in 1913 of the Patterson Cup for his book Our South-ern
Highlanders, the now-classic interpretation of the culture of the North Carolina moun-tain
region. Working jointly with Albert Ray Newsome, the association’s secretary-treasurer
and secretary of the Historical Commission, and Josephus Daniels, publisher of
the Raleigh News and Observer, Kephart advised Burnham S. Colburn of the Mayflower
Society on the creation of such a prize. The North Carolina chapter of the society, a
hereditary group with membership limited to those who could trace their ancestry to a
passenger aboard the Mayflower, had been organized in 1924. The society’s objectives were
*In thirteen subsequent presentations only one other Patterson Cup award was for poetry (and
none for fiction), that being the prize given to Olive Tilford Dargan for The Cycle’s Rim in 1917. The
other Patterson Cup winners were Edwin Mims, Kemp Plummer Battle, Samuel Ashe, Clarence
Poe, R. D. W. Connor, Archibald Henderson, Horace Kephart, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, W. L.
Poteat, Winifred Kirkland, and Josephus Daniels.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 133
to promote the memory of the Pilgrim Fathers, maintain and defend principles of reli-gious
and civil liberty as set forth in the Mayflower Compact, cherish ideals and institu-tions
of freedom, and transmit the “purity of purpose and steadfastness of will of the
Pilgrim Fathers.”
Colburn commissioned a Biltmore Forest neighbor, William Waldo Dodge Jr., to
design the cup. A work of detailed craftsmanship, the twenty-inch-tall cup was placed on
display in the Hall of History (it presently remains on display in the third-floor case in the
Archives and History/State Library Building). Atop the cup is a faithful model of the May-flower.
Around its original black Belgian marble base is a band of sterling silver. As addi-tional
winners’ names have been added over the years, it has been necessary to add new
bases to provide space for engraving.
In 1931, as in succeeding years, a replica cup was presented to the winning author. The
original guidelines, little changed over the years, called for the cup to be presented “to the
resident of the State of North Carolina who during the preceding twelve months ending
November 1st shall have published an original work of outstanding excellence, which in the
opinion of the Board of Award, hereafter specified, shall appear to have been the most
deserving of recognition.” The agreement called for the chairmen of the departments of his-tory
and English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Duke University to serve as
members of the Board of Award along with the association president. Whenever a member
of the board had a book in the competition, a substitute judge would be engaged.
The first recipient of the Mayflower Cup, selected from a field of twelve entrants, was
Marcus Cicero Stephens Noble, dean of education at UNC and member of the Historical
Commission, for his book History of the Public Schools in North Carolina. Gov. O. Max
Gardner was asked to make the presentation, but he elected to keep a football-game
appointment. Instead, a Raleigh member of the Mayflower Society, Kingsdale Van Winkle,
presented the cup to the seventy-six-year-old Noble. Noble’s 476-page tome, published by
the University of North Carolina Press, was a workmanlike study, but Colburn, in private
correspondence, suggested that there was “little of real literary worth” in the volume.
Newsome was defensive about the selection and noted that literary luminaries such as play-wright
Paul Green had produced no work eligible for the competition that year.
134 CAROLINA COMMENTS
The Mayflower Cup stands in a display case in
the Archives and History/State Library Building
in downtown Raleigh. The historic cup, which
has recognized literary achievement in North
Carolina since 1931, was presented for the last
time on November 15, 2002.
Green was in the running the following year but with a shorter work not judged to
carry the heft to make it worthy of the distinction. Archibald Henderson, the Chapel Hill
polymath, was the winner for the first volume of his biography of George Bernard Shaw (a
second volume on Shaw won in 1957), a work labeled “Boswellian” by one of the judges.
The fact that another resident of Chapel Hill, a young sociologist named Rupert Vance,
won in 1933 made it three years with the winner from the same town. The winner in 1934
was Erich Zimmermann, a Duke professor, but it was evident nonetheless that scholars
tended to vote for colleagues or acquaintances.
The judging procedures in the early years led to other unforeseen consequences. The
simple matter of getting the books to the judges was among these. Newsome asked judges
at the same institution to share books and, to facilitate that request, placed copies in the
respective libraries. The success of the competition led judges to complain about the
onerous nature of the task. From twelve nominated books in 1931 the number swelled to
more than forty. R. D. W. Connor, one of the Chapel Hill judges, declined to participate
any longer, pointing out that the task came around at the busiest time of the school year.
William K. Boyd of Duke joined him in withdrawing. As a consequence Newsome, in con-sultation
with Colburn, devised a rotation sequence for judges, calling upon professors of
history and English at Davidson College, Wake Forest College, North Carolina State Col-lege,
and the Woman’s College as well as UNC and Duke. “The men would know when to
expect their tour of duty,” Colburn surmised.
The popularity of the Mayflower contest increased considerably under Christopher
Crittenden, who succeeded Newsome as association secretary-treasurer in 1935. News of
the competition reached the western provinces. Arthur T. Abernethy of Rutherford Col-lege,
the state’s first poet laureate, wrote: “Living, as I do, in the famous South Mountain
terrain, capital of Moonshine, and in a town about equally divided as to population
between Bishops and Bootleggers, I could find a very handy service in the cup.” Olive
Tilford Dargan wrote from rural Swain County in 1936, expressing her intention to sub-mit
her next work but noting, “I have been wrestling over here all summer with my
unprofitable acres, which must be made to provide for seven adults and fifteen children
before I can enjoy the sleep of the just.” Another western North Carolinian, Thomas
Wolfe, was ineligible for consideration, given the residency requirement and the fact that
he lived in New York. Years later, Wilma Dykeman Stokely, when her own eligibility was
questioned, pointed out the arbitrariness whereby Wolfe was ineligible but Carl
Sandburg, the Illinois native living in Flat Rock, was welcomed.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 135
The first winner of the Mayflower Cup was Marcus Cicero
Stephens Noble, dean of education at the University of
North Carolina and a member of the North Carolina
Historical Commission, for his book History of the Public
Schools in North Carolina.
The success in 1937 of a book on medicine led Crittenden to write Colburn of a “gen-eral
feeling that the competition has become too academic.” In tandem they ruled that
technical and scientific works should be ineligible. Religious titles remained perennial
entries. Books written to promote a particular belief received little notice from judges, but
in 1942 a history of Quakerism won, and in 1952 a book on the Papacy received the
honor. Crittenden further devised a new judges panel, substituting two literary critics for
one pair of professors, keeping the total number of judges at five, including the association
president. The new scheme produced a more varied set of winners, beginning with Jona-than
Daniels in 1938 for his book A Southerner Discovers the South, the winner over a field
that included Guion Griffis Johnson’s acclaimed Ante-Bellum North Carolina. The following
year produced the first female winner, with Bernice Kelly Harris taking the award for her
novel Purslane. Harris was the second winner for a work of fiction, after James Boyd for
Roll River in 1935.
The success of a fiction entry likely inspired Houghton Mifflin in 1940 to nominate
Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, written while she resided in Fayetteville.
That work received votes but was bested by The Good Old Days by David L. Cohn. Nell Bat-tle
Lewis, the acerbic critic for the News and Observer, took the opportunity to assail the
Mayflower Cup process. She noted that Yanceyville resident Cohn had been born in Mis-sissippi
and educated in Virginia. Lewis especially regretted that Paul Green had never
been a recipient. Crittenden, who had tried to enlist Lewis on the board of judges, wrote
his friend George McCoy, an Asheville newspaper editor, that “on several occasions she
had shown personal animosity toward me.” Green never received the Mayflower Cup but,
with the institution of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction in 1952, he was the inau-gural
recipient for “outstanding literary achievement.”
The reconceived judges panel, by including literary critics as well as academics, pro-duced
during the World War II years two especially noteworthy winners. In 1941 the
leading contenders were a multivolume history of North Carolina by Archibald
Henderson; a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Duke professor Newman White; and
The Mind of the South, by Shelby native and Charlotte journalist W. J. Cash. Results were
inconclusive after three ballots. W. T. Couch, the president of the Literary and Historical
136 CAROLINA COMMENTS
The popularity of the Mayflower competition increased consider-ably
under Christopher Crittenden, who succeeded Albert Ray
Newsome as secretary-treasurer of the North Carolina Literary
and Historical Association in 1935 and continued to serve in that
capacity until his death in 1969.
Association that year, had delegated Chapel Hill journalism teacher and writer Phillips
Russell as his substitute. Crittenden summoned the five judges to convene at the home of
William T. Polk, an attorney and an associate editor of the Greensboro Daily News. Russell
took the bus to Raleigh on November 30, rode with Crittenden to Polk’s home in
Warrenton, and there influenced the others to support his choice of Cash. The award was
the first one presented posthumously. W. J. Cash had committed suicide in his hotel room
in Mexico City the previous June. His widow attended the presentation ceremony.
In 1943 the balloting, in a surprise, resulted in the first African American winner of
the Mayflower Cup, J. Saunders Redding, a Delaware native, who had taught English for
five years at Elizabeth City State Teachers College. Redding, a critic and social commentator,
traveled across the South to research No Day of Triumph, an unvarnished documentary look at
contemporary black life. Published by Harper and Brothers, the book was well received,
coming to the attention of national critics such as Malcolm Cowley and Wallace Stegner.
The ex officio judge for the Mayflower Cup in 1943 was Paul Green, that year’s president
of the Literary and Historical Association. From the Woman’s College, A. M. Arnett and
Winfield Rogers were appointed, while from Washington, North Carolina, came Pauline
Worthy, a librarian (in time co-author of the standard history of Beaufort County) and
insurance man John Bragaw. (Shortly after devising the scheme to include literary critics,
Crittenden had broadened the definition to include librarians, booksellers, and others
with a serious interest in books.) Also nominated that year was historian John Hope
Franklin for his pathbreaking study The Free Negro in Antebellum North Carolina, 1790-1860.
Redding’s book caught the eye of Worthy, who wrote Crittenden: “I don’t know how
interested you are in the race problem. I am keenly. And I found No Day of Triumph very
disturbing.” The initial balloting was inconclusive, and Green called the judges together in
Raleigh on Sunday, December 1. Green took a particular interest in African American life
and delight in literary work that documented everyday life and speech. He had collabo-rated
with Richard Wright, author of the introduction to Redding’s book, on the stage
adaptation of Wright’s Native Son. On receipt of notice that he had won the prize, Redding
traveled to Raleigh on two days’ notice. In accepting, he declared: “I am happy about the
award not only for my own sake, but for the sake of the new hope and new faith which it
kindled in the hearts of many Negroes who did not believe it could happen.”
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 137
The first African American to win the Mayflower Cup
(1943) was J. Saunders Redding (right), a native of
Delaware who had taught English at Elizabeth City
State Teachers College for five years. Redding, a critic
and social commentator, won the award for his book
No Day of Triumph, a documentary examination of
contemporary black life. Making the presentation to
Redding was M. R. Dunnagan of Raleigh, representing
the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.
The news sparked considerable public interest. The day after the program, the News
and Observer heralded the evening’s program on the front page, with an accompanying pho-tograph.
The story named the judges and noted that the presentation was especially
timely, given that the evening’s principal speaker, Richmond editor Virginius Dabney, had
delivered an address titled “Race: The South’s Problem Number One.” On the editorial
page of the same paper, the writer concluded that the award “demonstrates that in North
Carolina a man who does a good job is recognized without regard to race or creed.” The
following week Nell Battle Lewis recommended the book with reservations. In concep-tion,
she noted, the volume recalled Jonathan Daniels��s A Southerner Discovers the South.
Calling attention to the rough language (mild by present standards), she suggested that
“the book needs some lye soap and sand.” Nevertheless, she applauded the choice and
concluded: “I am—and always have been—in favor of inter-racial amity, in the direction
of which this award was a sensational gesture.”
Progressive the choice might have been, but there were dissenters. One was Willis
Smith, a Raleigh attorney, now best remembered for the heated 1950 race against UNC
president Frank Porter Graham for a seat in the United States Senate. In November 1944
Smith wrote to Crittenden to renew his membership in the Literary and Historical Associ-ation
but took strong exception to the previous year’s award for what he termed “a filthy
piece of literature” and “an obscene portrayal of sordid incidents.” He concluded: “prob-ably
some of the committee was trying to prove that they were liberal” for awarding the
prize “for such a piece of trash as the Negro wrote.” In his reply, Crittenden wrote that
“there is much to be said for your position in the matter” but pointed out that his involve-ment
in the process was limited to the selection of judges.
A challenge of a different sort arose during the war years. Because of restrictions on the
use of metal, the Mayflower Society was unable to procure replica cups for the recipients.
Colburn proposed that each winner receive instead a fifty-dollar check and a certificate
but, for the short term, agreed to an arrangement whereby the winner would take tempo-rary
possession of Jonathan Daniels’s 1938 cup on loan for the purpose. Daniels’s father,
Josephus, solved the conundrum by virtue of his connections within Mexico, where he
served as U.S. ambassador from 1933 to 1941. Six silver cups were obtained, and the tra-dition
was renewed. Appropriately, the winner of the prize in 1946 was the third female
recipient, Josephina Niggli, for her book Mexican Village. In 1971 a similar need arose, and
the former president of Mexico was prevailed upon personally by Bernard Flatow, a Cha-pel
Hill alumnus; and once again six cups were supplied “as a gesture of inter-American
friendship and understanding.”
The most consequential change in the history of the Mayflower Cup took place in
1952 when a separate competition for fiction, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, was estab-lished
(at the same time, awards were introduced for the year’s best volumes of poetry and
juvenile literature by North Carolina writers). Sam Ragan of the News and Observer and
Richard Walser, professor of English at North Carolina State College, led the effort to cre-ate
the new categories, each of which operated under similar criteria. On behalf of the
Mayflower Society, Burnham Colburn expressed initial reluctance to change the criteria.
The shift to the nonfiction emphasis was adopted in stages. During the 1950-1951 bien-nium
the judges agreed to consider fiction only for the first calendar year and nonfiction
for the second. As a consequence, Chapel Hill writer Max Steele received the final May-flower
fiction award in 1950 for his novel Debby. Jonathan Daniels received his second of
three cups for nonfiction the following year for a biography of Harry S. Truman. Daniels
was one of two three-time winners of the Mayflower Cup, the other being historian Glenn
Tucker. No writers won more than three times. Seven have been two-time recipients:
Archibald Henderson, LeGette Blythe, Paul D. Escott, David R. Goldfield, Joel William-son,
Catherine W. Bishir, and William A. Link.
138 CAROLINA COMMENTS
The list of names reinforces the public impression that in the postwar period the May-flower
became a “history cup” or “historian’s cup.” A closer examination of the list of
winners proves that, while the trend since 1950 has been in that direction, the specialties
of recipients have been more varied. Blythe, collaborator on two winning titles, was a news-paperman,
as were Ben Dixon MacNeill, the choice in 1958 for The Hatterasman, and
Vermont Royster, winner for his 1984 memoir My Own, My Country’s Time. Bill Sharpe, the
editor of The State magazine, received the Mayflower Cup in 1962 for “outstanding literary
achievement over a period of years”—the only award not tied to a single work. Harry
Golden, outspoken editor of the Charlotte-based Carolina Israelite, was a perennial also-ran.
Upon winning his third cup in 1971, Jonathan Daniels acknowledged the news: “I am
afraid I’m getting greedy. But if the Mayflower Society will hand out cups, I’ll take ’em.”
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 139
Except for journalist Jonathan Daniels, historian Glenn Tucker is the only
three-time winner of the Mayflower Cup. Tucker won the prize in 1956
for his biography of the Native American chief Tecumseh, in 1964 for his
history of the Barbary Wars, and in 1966 for a biography of Zebulon B.
Vance, North Carolina’s beloved governor and senator.
From the late 1940s until the late 1960s, the dining room of the Sir Walter Hotel in downtown Raleigh
served as the official meeting place for annual meetings of cultural organizations that convened on
successive days to hear speeches and present awards (among them the Mayflower Cup). The series of
meetings culminated in the annual dinner meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical
Association.
Literary scholars and biographers rounded out the list of winners. Jay B. Hubbell of Duke
University won in 1955 for The South in American Literature, 1607-1900, and C. Hugh Holman
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) triumphed in 1975 for his
study of Thomas Wolfe titled The Loneliness at the Core. Two other Chapel Hill professors,
Townsend Ludington and Joseph Flora, won in back-to-back years for books on John Dos
Passos and Ernest Hemingway respectively. A third UNC-CH professor, Charles G. Zug III, a
folklore specialist, won in 1987 for his book on pottery traditions in North Carolina.
But professional historians have dominated the balloting over the years, taking thirty of
the seventy-one cups awarded through 2001. The year 1970 saw a close competition
among an especially varied field of titles. After three ballots the finalists were books on
Russian history, Shakespeare, seafood cookery, and black laborers in the Civil War. The
judges that year included two Greensboro journalists and two professors, in addition to
historian Joseph Steelman of East Carolina University, that year’s association president.
The Greensboro newspapermen strongly endorsed the cookbook. Steelman refused to go
along, expressing some surprise that the book had even been nominated. In the end the
group chose The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865, by
James H. Brewer, making the North Carolina Central University professor only the sec-ond
African American recipient of the honor.
In 1967 Christopher Crittenden, the longtime secretary-treasurer of the Literary and
Historical Association, suggested that the future of the group, then 2,100 members
strong, needed study. For two decades cultural organizations had convened in Raleigh on
successive days for speeches and awards presentations, culminating in the “Lit and Hist”
dinner on the final evening. The term “Culture Week,” originally applied to the Raleigh
tradition in derision by Jonathan Daniels, was picked up and used to advantage.
140 CAROLINA COMMENTS
Upon winning his third Mayflower Cup
(joining historian Glenn Tucker as the only
three-time recipients of the honor), Raleigh
journalist Jonathan Daniels happily
proclaimed that “if the Mayflower Society
will hand out cups, I’ll take ’em.” Daniels
won the award for a book on the South
(1938); a biography of Harry Truman (1951);
and a study of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander
Hamilton, and Aaron Burr (1971).
In 1975 C. Hugh Holman, professor of English at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, joined a distinguished group of
literary scholars and biographers in winning the Mayflower Award
for his study of novelist Thomas Wolfe titled The Loneliness at the
Core. Two other professors at Chapel Hill won back-to-back
Mayflower Awards in 1981 and 1982 for volumes on literary
figures.
Crittenden suggested that the association either be recast, forsaking the traditional literary
role, or that Culture Week be scaled back. The latter recommendation was adopted, and
the annual meeting eventually was reduced to a single day. In 1969 Crittenden died, and
H. G. Jones assumed his duties as chief organizer for the “Lit and Hist” meetings.
From time to time questions have arisen as to why a North Carolina award should bear
the name of Mayflower, most closely associated with Massachusetts. In 1971 James G. W.
MacLamroc, a local historian in Greensboro, wrote Jones, voicing his complaint that the
award was given “by a private hereditary organization composed of descendants of Massa-chusetts
settlers.” He stated that he carried membership in the Jamestowne Society and
suggested that he personally might endow a Jamestowne award. Jones responded that the
awards slate was fairly full at present, and no further action ensued.
In 1983, in order to assist the judges, award administrators refined a points system, sug-gesting
that a maximum of twenty-five points be assigned based on the extent to which the
author covered the subject and achieved the expressed purpose. A like maximum number of
points were to be attributed on the basis of excellence of style, universality of appeal, and
relevance to North Carolina and its people. The last guideline resulted in an increase of win-ning
entries with North Carolina content. Of the 70 single winning titles since 1931, 24
have been related to the state; 12 of 18 since 1983 have fallen into that category.
Customarily, judges act altogether independently, without conferring, and unanimity
is rare but not unheard of. For example, in 1998, from a field of twenty-two nominated
books, all the judges gave their first-place vote to Closing: The Life and Death of an American
Factory, a collaborative effort by photographer Bill Bamberger and Duke English professor
Cathy Davidson. The number of judges was dropped from five to three in 1993, leaving
one from a history department and one from an English department at the same institu-tion,
in addition to the association president. The consequence was to eliminate the need
for judges to share books. The exclusion of literary critics (or non-academics) also made
more likely the success of books by professors—the very problem that the revision to the
judging system in 1938 was designed to preclude.
An analysis of the list of winners with respect to publishing houses is revealing. It is not
surprising that UNC Press, given its mission and track record since its founding eighty
years ago, should have produced the highest number of winning books, with 22. Ten other
publishers have had multiple winners, led by Louisiana State University Press with 8 and
Oxford University Press and Harper with 4 each. Duke University Press, Knopf, Bobbs-
Merrill, Rinehart, and Appleton each produced 3 winning titles. Macmillan and
Doubleday each had a pair. Three established North Carolina presses had a single May-flower
winner. John F. Blair of Winston-Salem published Ben Dixon MacNeill’s The
Hatterasman in 1958. Vermont Royster’s My Own, My Country’s Time was part of the
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 141
In 1970 James H. Brewer, professor of history at North Carolina
Central University, became the second African American to win
the Mayflower Award. Brewer was honored for his study The
Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers,
1861-1865.
inaugural list issued by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 1984. Tim McLaurin’s Keeper of
the Moon: A Southern Boyhood was a production of Down Home Press of Asheboro in 1992.
Over the course of the award’s long history, the relationship between the Mayflower
Society and the Literary and Historical Association has undergone strains. In 1954 Chris-topher
Crittenden suggested that the Mayflower group contribute toward the costs
involved in conducting the competition, which he estimated at $230 per year. The May-flower
governor declined and suggested that the two groups share the costs of the replica
cups. In 1989 another Mayflower officer complained about the lack of press coverage given
the presentation and suggested that the society might withdraw from the “Lit and Hist” din-ner
and present the award at its own function. No action was taken. In recent years Rudy
Topping of Charlotte, a past governor, has capably handled the presentation program at the
dinners. The 2001 winner was timely, given national events. Announced within weeks of the
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the choice was Michael Kent Curtis, a Wake
Forest University law professor, for a book about freedom of speech.
In February 2002 Eleanor Blackwell of Washington, North Carolina, a past governor
of the Mayflower Society, corresponded with Jeffrey J. Crow, secretary-treasurer of the
Literary and Historical Association. She cited several factors in the pending decision as to
whether to continue sponsorship of the cup beyond 2002. Among these were the costs
involved for replica cups and for dinner tickets for recipient and presenter. She complained
that members were not pleased with their lack of influence in the annual selection of the
winner, noting, “In recent years, the award was given twice to the same author who wrote
the same type of book!” Most importantly, she cited the fact that the award sponsorship did
not “gain any publicity or new member interest in our society or any other benefit,” adding,
“this is a big issue.” In closing, Blackwell wrote that “times do change and other ways of
honoring our Mayflower Ancestors may be more appropriate today.” Several weeks later she
telephoned the decision of her committee to forgo future sponsorship.
The executive board of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association has sig-naled
its intention to seek a sponsor for or independently establish a new award for non-fiction
beginning in 2003. Details and criteria remain to be determined, but the plan is to
create a worthy successor to the Patterson Cup (1905-1922) and the Mayflower Cup
(1931-2002).
Mayflower Cup Winners, 1931-2002
1931 M. C. S. Noble. History of the Public Schools in North Carolina
1932 Archibald Henderson. Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet
1933 Rupert B. Vance. Human Geography of the South
1934 Erich W. Zimmermann. World Resources and Industries
1935 James Boyd. Roll River
1936 Mitchell B. Garrett. The Estates General of 1789
1937 Richard H. Shryock. The Development of Modern Medicine
1938 Jonathan Daniels. A Southerner Discovers the South
1939 Bernice Kelly Harris. Purslane
1940 David L. Cohn. The Good Old Days
1941 Wilbur J. Cash. The Mind of the South
1942 Elbert Russell. The History of Quakerism
1943 J. Saunders Redding. No Day of Triumph
1944 Adelaide L. Fries. The Road to Salem
1945 Josephus Daniels. The Wilson Era: Years of Peace, 1910-1917
1946 Josephina Niggli. Mexican Village
1947 Robert E. Coker. This Great and Wide Sea
1948 Charles S. Sydnor. The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819-1848
1949 Phillips Russell. The Woman Who Rang the Bell: The Story of Cornelia Phillips Spencer
1950 Max Steele. Debby
142 CAROLINA COMMENTS
1951 Jonathan Daniels. The Man of Independence
1952 John McKnight. The Papacy: A New Appraisal
1953 Mary T. Martin Sloop and LeGette Blythe. Miracle in the Hills
1954 Hugh T. Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome. North Carolina: The History of a Southern State
1955 Jay B. Hubbell. The South in American Literature, 1607-1900
1956 Glenn Tucker. Tecumseh: Vision of Glory
1957 Archibald Henderson. George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century
1958 Ben Dixon MacNeill. The Hatterasman
1959 Burke Davis. To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865
1960 Richard Bardolph. The Negro Vanguard
1961 Mabel Wolfe Wheaton and LeGette Blythe. Thomas Wolfe and His Family
1962 Bill Sharpe (for Outstanding Literary Achievement over a Period of Years)
1963 Ethel Stephens Arnett. William Swaim: Fighting Editor
1964 Glenn Tucker. Dawn Like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy
1965 John Ehle. The Free Men
1966 Glenn Tucker. Zeb Vance: Champion of Personal Freedom
1967 Joel Colton. Leon Blum: Humanist in Politics
1968 George B. Tindall. The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945
1969 John R. Alden. A History of the American Revolution
1970 James H. Brewer. The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers,
1861-1865
1971 Jonathan Daniels. Ordeal of Ambition: Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr
1972 John Bivins Jr. The Moravian Potters of North Carolina
1973 Lionel Stevenson. The Pre-Raphaelite Poets
1974 Helen Bevington. Beautiful Lofty People
1975 C. Hugh Holman. The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe
1976 Eleanor Smith Godfrey. The Development of English Glassmaking, 1560-1640
1977 Lawrence Goodwyn. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America
1978 Louis D. Rubin Jr. The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South
1979 Paul D. Escott. Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives
1980 William H. Chafe. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle
for Freedom
1981 Townsend Ludington. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey
1982 Joseph M. Flora. Hemingway’s Nick Adams
1983 David R. Goldfield. Cottonfields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980
1984 Vermont Royster. My Own, My Country’s Time
1985 Joel Williamson. The Crucible of Race
1986 Paul D. Escott. Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900
1987 Charles G. Zug III. Turners & Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina
1988 William C. Harris. William Woods Holden: Firebrand of North Carolina Politics
1989 William S. Powell. North Carolina through Four Centuries
1990 David R. Goldfield. Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to
the Present
1991 Catherine W. Bishir. North Carolina Architecture
1992 Tim McLaurin. Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood
1993 William A. Link. The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930
1994 Joel Williamson. William Faulkner and Southern History
1995 William A. Link. William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education
1996 James L. Leloudis. Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina,
1880-1920
1997 Catherine W. Bishir and Michael Southern. A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern
North Carolina
1998 Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory
1999 Margaret Supplee Smith and Emily Herring Wilson. North Carolina Women: Making History
2000 John David Smith. Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro
2001 Michael Kent Curtis. Free Speech, “The People’s Darling Privilege”
2002 David S. Cecelski. The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER 2002 143
CAROLINA COMMENTS
(ISSN 0576-808X)
Published in January, March, May, July, September, and November by the Office of Archives and History,
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4622 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-4622
Telephone (919) 733-7442
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