Chatham Rabbit

Fall Color, Pittsboro

2008-10-12T18:36:00.006-04:00

"The Chatham Rabbit" in Poetry. (Rabbit Lore #21, 1912)

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As mentioned in Rabbit Lore #20, the Siler City GRIT of the 19-teens, then edited by Chatham RECORD editor Henry A. London's son, Isaac, published a rich body of rabbit-related material. For one thing, the paper compiled figures for exports of rabbits by consulting the local produce merchants on a weekly basis. Week-before-last we posted several examples of the GRIT's boilerplate announcement heralding the open of rabbit season.

The younger London took many approaches to his newspaper that his father did not, and in particular, stressed reader participation in the form of letters and doggerel verse. He featured a few regular correspondents, some of whom we'll be examining soon, but essentially turned the paper's editorial and "LOCALS" pages over to the public as a kind of proto-Chatlist. Reader, belly-up and help yourself to a taste of rabbit-themed poetry in this piece from the

Siler City GRIT, 1912 JAN 10, "'The Chatham Rabbit' in Poetry":

Once again are we permitting our readers the pleasure of scanning 'real poetry.' The following is from the pen of Mr. J.E. Smith. Who will be the next contributor?

"God bless old Chatham county;
God bless her endless bounty;
May her offspring and her sages,
Through endless, countless ages,
Be ever, ever blest.
Of her lads, they know their duty;
From the earth they dig their wealth;
Of her lasses, they have their beauty;
From her springs they drink their health;
None so truthful, none so fair.
Huckleberries and harvest cherries
And a bounteous crop of wheat,
The never-failing blackberries
That makes the pie so sweet;
Though they stain the ladies hand,
Yet there's plenty in the land.
Some are cooked with new-ground wheat
For us and all our hands;
Some by rosy lasses sweet,
For winter's use are canned.
September brings the pumpkin pie,
'Tis mighty hard to beat;
And Uncle Ned's o'possum, why
Is baked so good and sweet.
Of Chatham's greatest blessings,
All these will not compare
To one baked ham of the Chatham Rabbit,
Or dumplings, stew and dressings
Cooked with the Chatham hare.
Cook him as you will
Cook him as you may,
'Tis the same toothsome dish,
It don't matter what you say;
The old-time Chatham hare.
And, when my college life is done,
I'm going to my usual habit;
There to rub my rusty gun
And shoot the Chatham rabbit;
Me and Rattler and Trail.
Prophet, poet and sages
Will sing of them through ages
yet to come.

J.E. SMITH,
Wake Forest, Jan. 2nd.

Trouble at Buckhorn (1906-1908)

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[Photographs of the Buckhorn Dam site by the Rabbit. Satellite image of Buckhorn Dam via Google.]

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Chatham RECORD, 1906 JAN 25, "Local Records":

A gasolene launch has been put on the Cape Fear river and runs between Buckhorne and Lockville, a distance of about twelve miles. Since the completion of the dam at Buckhorne the water in the river between that point and Lockville is deep enough to float almost any kind of a steam boat.

Chatham RECORD, 1906 JUN 21, "Receivers for Cape Fear Power Co.":

From the Raleigh News and Observer, 15th [inst?].

In the United States Circuit court yesterday the Schenectady Trust Company, of Schenectady, N. York, filed a bill for foreclosure of the mortgage given by the Cape Fear Power Company, organized for the purpose of developing water power at Buckhorne Shoals in Chatham county, a few miles below Moncure, for the purpose of furnishing electric power to Fayetteville and other towns. The mortgage was made in 1903 to secure an issue of $350,000 of first mortgage bonds and the foreclosure is sought to be made on account of default in the payment of the April, 1905, October, 1905, and April, 1906, coupons amounting in the aggregate to $31,000.

Judge Purnell appointed as temporary receivers under a bond of $10,000 Messrs. Charles H. Belvin and E. Maxwell, who are directed to take immediate charge of the property and the defendant is notified to show cause on the 29th instant why their appointment should not be made permanent.

The Cape Fear Power Company is owned principally by Messrs. W.T. Morgan, of Fayetteville, and R. Percy Gray, of Greensboro, and purchased the water power at Buckhorne Shoals from the Deep River Manufacturing Company, the estate of the late Col. Heck and the Lobdell Company, of Wilmington, Delaware. It acquired a right of way from Buckhorne to Fayetteville a few years ago and built and equipped the line necessary for the transmission of power to that city. For some years it has been engaged in the construction of a dam across the Cape Fear and in building a power house at the site of the plant. It purchased large amounts of electrical machinery which has been delivered, but the most of which was never installed, being stored alongside the railroad tracks at Moncure awaiting the completion of the power house.

In view of the fact that the General Electrical Company is so largely interested in the bonds, it is hoped that it will either buy the property itself or form a new corporation to do so and complete the development of the power with a view of transmitting the same to Fayetteville and Raleigh and other cities.

Chatham RECORD, 1906 AUG 16, excerpted from "Superior Court.":

On the appearance docket are twenty-two cases against the Cape Fear Power Co. brought by some of the lands owners on the river between Lockville and the Buckhorne dam, because of the new dam backing water on their land. By an order of Judge Purnell all these cases are to be transferred to the Federal court at Raleigh for trial, as the Cape Fear Power Company is now in the charge of two receivers appointed by Judge Purnell.

Chatham RECORD, 1906 AUG 30, excerpted from the notice "Sale of Valuable Water Power and Electrical Plant.":

Under and by virture of an order of the United States Circuit Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Fourth Circuit, in the cause therein pending entitled Schenectady Trust Company against Cape Fear Power Company, dated the 23rd day of August, 1906, at 12 o'clock noon, at the door of the Court House of Chatham County at Pittsboro, N.C., expose to sale to the highest bidder at public auction, upon the terms hereinafter set forth, the property of the said Cape Fear Power Company, situated in Chatham, Harnett, Moore and Cumberland Counties, and described as follows, to-wit:

[...]

CHAS. H. BELVIN,
E. MAXWELL,
Receivers

R.T. GRAY,
Attorney,
Aug. 28, 1906

Chatham RECORD, 1906 SEP 6, "Dam A Nuisance.":

There is said to be an epidemic of chills and fever in Cape Fear township among the people residing on and near the Cape Fear river, between Lockville and the Buckhorne dam. This sickness is said to be caused by the backwater from the new dam of the Cape Fear Power Company, which has overflowed many thousand acres along the river banks. Such sickness was predicted and feared by the people of that section when the dam was being constructed, and their fears are now being realized.

Mr. Merrimon Harrington has sold his farm on the river and moved to Wake county, because of the sickness caused in his family by this backwater, and we hear that other citizens of that section are trying to sell out and move away. It is probable that the grand jury, at our November court, will be asked to indict the owners of the dam and have it torn down as a public nuisance.

Chatham RECORD, 1906 OCT 6, "Important Sale.":

In pursuance of the notice heretofore published in THE RECORD the receivers of the Cape Fear Power Company sold at public auction at this place, on last Saturday, all the property and rights of that company. The first bid was made by Mr. J.B. Blades, a wealthy lumber dealer from the eastern part of this State, who started the bidding at $120,000. The next bid was $125,000 by Mr. Henry F. Schaffner, of Winston-Salem. Mr. Blades then bid $130,000, whereupon Mr. S.D. Mitchell, a prominent electrician of New York, bid $250,000 in behalf of the bondholders and there being no higher bid the property was knocked down at this bid.

The property had been bonded to the amount of $350,000, so that it did not bring the amount due the bondholders. Not only do the bondholders lose heavily, but also the stockholders of the company who were the promoters of the undertaking have lost all that they invested in it. The company was organized several years ago for the purpose of constructing a dam across the Cape Fear river near Buckhorne falls (about twelve miles below Lockville) for the purpose of transmitting electric power to the cotton mills at Fayetteville, Sanford and other places. The dam was at last completed last winter, after many delays, but the electric power has not yet been developed, and it may cost $50,000 more to develop it.

This was the second most important sale ever held in this county. The most important sale before this was the sale of the property and rights of the old Cape Fear and Deep River Navigation Company, on the 26th of August, 1859, under a mortgage or deed of trust to the State of North Carolina to secure a loan of $300,000 made by the State to the company. The State became the purchaser at that sale through Gov. Ellis.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 JAN 24, "Local Records":

After an argument before Judge Purnell at Raleigh, on last Saturday, he refused a motion by the plaintiffs to remand to our superior court the damage suits brought against the Cape Fear Power Company by more than twenty landowners in this county, whose land is damaged by back-water caused by the big dam across Cape Fear river. Several of the suits have been compromised.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 MAR 28, "Buckhorne Electric Power.":

Special to the Charlotte Observer. Fayetteville, March 24. -- Mr. E.J. Maxwell, superintendent of the Cape Fear Electric Power Company, with an immense plant at Buckhorne Falls, was in town yesterday. He confidently states that he will have 3.500 or 4,000-horse power flashed by electric transmission to the industrial plants of Fayetteville by the 1st of next June. This is a "consummantion devoutly to be wished," but, to be plain, there has been so much "hope deferred" here about the Cape Fear company that we will wait and see it.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 APR 25, "FOUR MEN DROWNED":

Swept Over Buckhorne Dam.

Four men were drowned, on last Tuesday, at the Buckhorne dam in the Cape Fear river.

They were Capt. Thorson, the foreman of the works at Buckhorne, Mr. Emory A. Brady and two colored men, one name George Champion and the other Henry Lashley.

They and a colored man, named Joe Andrews, were in a gasolene boat that was in the river above the dam, carrying some lumber across the river, when the machinery got out of fix, or for some cause the boat got beyond control and began drifting with the strong current towards the dam. All efforts to stop the boat were in vain, and with accelerated motion it swept to the dam and plunged over, dashing the five men into the seething waters below.

Only one of them, Joe Andrews, escaped a watery grave. He was able to swim ashore, but the other four were drowned, and their bodies were swept down the river and may not be found for many days, if ever.

Capt. Thorson was a stranger who had been at Buckhorne only a few months. Mr. Brady was born and reared near Haywood, in this county, and had been empoyed for two or three years by the company building the dam. He was a son of Capt. Brady, who was the captain of the old steam boat that used to belong to the Cape Fear & Deep River Navigation Company.

This dam at Buckhorne was completed last year by the Cape Fear Power Company and its construction was so costly as to bankrupt that company, which went into the hands of receivers last summer by whom its property was all sold last fall. Its present owners will soon be able to utilize and transmit the electric power generated there to Fayetteville and other places.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 MAY 9, "Local Records":

On Monday morning about 70 feet of the dam of the Cape Fear Power Company at Buckhorne Falls was washed away. It will be replaced at once by concrete work, the part washed out being made of dirt.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 MAY 9, "Local Records":

The bodies of all four of the men, who were drowned at the Buckhorne dam, have been found and decently buried. They were found in the river near the place of the accident.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 MAY 23, "Local Records":

The recent breaking of the big Buckhorne dam on the Cape Fear river has greatly reduced the quantity of water in the river between Buckhorne and Lockville, in this county. The water is now so low in that part of the river that the gasolene boat can not run, as heretofore, between Buckhorne and Lockville.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 JUN 20, "Local Records":

There will be a Fourth of July celebration at the bridge across Buckhorne creek near the big dam across the Cape Fear river, in this county. In addition to speeches there will be all sorts of games and contests of an amusing character, and at night there will be a display of fireworks.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 SEP 5, "Fatal Flash":

During the storm last Tuesday a flash of lightning struck the cementhouse of the Cape Fear Power Company at Buchhorne dam and instantly killed 7 men and stunned 25 others. This was the most fatal flash of lightning that we ever before heard of in this county. The same storm reached this place and extended over most of this county, and it was not only an unusually violent electric storm but it was an unusually heavy fall of rain. The government rain-gauge, kept here by Mr. B. Nooe, showed a rain-fall of two inches and thirty hundreths of an inch. A feed trough of Mr. T.M. Bland, near here, was filled to the depth of three and a half inches by the rain. The heavy rain was accompanied with heavy crashes of thunder and blinding flashes of lightning. A tree was struck in the yard of John L. Council, of this place, and the shock shattered 42 panes of glass in the windows of his dwelling. A rain was greatly needed, the crops were suffering very much and the streams were all very low, but this storm rather over-did the thing.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 SEP 12, "Catastrophe at Buckhorne":

Later news from the fatal flash of lightning at Buckhorne does not decrease its horrors. As was published in last week's RECORD, a flash of lightning instantly killed seven men in the cement house of the Cape Fear Power Company. The lightning struck a tall poplar tree in a few feet of the cement house, in which the men had sought refuge from the rain, and then went through the roof of the building and did its fatal work.

There were twenty-one men in the building, seven were badly shocked and seven escaped injury. A horse was also in the building and it was not hurt, but was frantic with fright. One of the injured men was thought ot be fatally hurt, but is till alive. This terrible accident so demoralized the other men at work at Buckhorne that about one-half of them quit work and left there. Of course there is no more danger from lightning there than anywhere else, and there is an old saying that "lightning never strikes twice in the same place". It is said that about twenty men have lost their lives by accidents at this place since work was begun on the big dam several years ago. It will be remembered that a few months ago four men were carried over the dam in a boat and were drowned.

About fifty feet of the dam was washed away next day after the men were killed by lightning, which will delay for some time longer the completion of this important (and we may add unlucky) enterprise.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 SEP 12, "Local Records":

On last Thursday there were two peculiarly sad funerals at Zion Christian Church in Oakland township. They were the funerals Messrs. Eugene Black and Carlton Gunter, then young men of that neighborhood who were killed by lightning at the Buckhorne dam. They were popular young men, whose sudden and untimely deaths were a shock to all their friends.

Chatham RECORD, 1907 OCT 24, "Local Records":

The break in the dam a [sic] Buckhorne, which occurred several months ago, has at last been repaired and the electrical machinery is being conveyed down the river from Moncure and installed. It required five days for the river to fill up after the dam was repaired, the water being backed some distance up Haw and Deep rivers whose confluence form the Cape Fear nearly ten miles above the dam.

Chatham RECORD, 1908 JAN 8, "Water Power":

The great work of developing the water power at Buckhorne on Cape Fear River, in this county, is about completed and last week the electric power generated there was transmitted to Fayetteville for the first time. This work has been in progress several years and nearly half a million dollars have been expended on it. It is hoped that the valuable water power at Lockville, ten miles above Buckhorne, may be developed and utilized at no distant day. This power can be developed much cheaper than than [sic] at Buckhorne and is at present running idle and of no value to anybody. This property, which includes 2500 acres of land, is now owned by the Lockville N.C. Power Corporation most of whose stockholders reside at Richmond, Virginia.

Chatham RECORD, 1908 MAR 25, "Visit to Bucknorne Falls":

On Tuesday of last week the editor of THE RECORD, being one of a small party from this place, visited for the first time the electric power plant recently erected at Buckhorne Falls on the Cape Fear river in this county by the Cape Fear Power Company, now called the Central Carolina Power Company, and which was put in operation the 3rd of this month.

We were met at Moncure by "Commodore" M.T. Sturgeon in one of the company's gasoline launches and after a delightful ride of an hour were landed safely at the big 1200-foot concrete dam, from which point a walk of a mile brought us to the power-house. Here we were taken in charge by Mr. C.P. Stewart, the efficient superintendent, who courteously showed us over the plant, explaining the details of the mechanism, etc. In the equipment, all of which is of the latest pattern, are three alternating current generators each capable of generating 2300 volts of electricity, two exciters, one of which furnishes electric lights for the plant and premises at night, a continuous motor pump making 1700 revolutions a minute, and electric transformers carrying 60,000 electric volts.

The amount of power now available is [1,600?] horse power, although only 800 horse power is at present used, this being supplied to two cotton mills at Fayetteville 34 miles distant. In a few days a line will be surveyed to Raleigh, 26 miles away, looking toward furnishing that city with electric power and arrangements have already been made by industrial plants at Sanford to take a considerable quantity of the power.

An interesting feature in connection with this plant, and in fact all like plants, is that while its erection required the labor of several hundred men for months, yes years, the work having gotten started over five years ago, yet the services of only half a dozen men are required to operate it.

This electric power plant, which represents an expenditure from first to last of nearly half a million dollars, is by far the largest industrial concern in our county and we wish for it and its energetic general manager, Mr. Eugene Maxwell, through whose courtesy we are indebted for this enjoyable trip, the largest measure of success possible. The dam is 1200 feet long, 12 feet wide at the base and 14 feet high and is made of concrete. It is a few feet below the site of the old dam built before the war by the old Cape Fear & Deep River Navigation Company, and is eight miles below the railroad bridge at Moncure.

The trip from Moncure down the river to the dam was delightful, and was a [?] experience in this county. The river varies in depth from Moncure to the dam from ten feet to thirty feet and is a beautiful sheet of water, being over twice the width of the Cape Fear at Fayetteville. Two miles below Moncure is the "point," the confluence of the Deep and Haw rivers, where the Cape Fear River begins. At this point each of the two rivers seems to be about the same width. Two miles below the confluence of the Deep and Haw rivers is McKay's Island, half a mile long and containing about 65 acres. Two miles below that is Avent's ferry which has been in use ever since the county was organized in 1771 and has always since borne the same name. The ride down the river was made in less than an hour, and a more delightful spring day could not have been selected. The air was balmy, the water as smooth and calm as a mill pond and with a whirr the gasoline launch churned through the water, leaving rolling waves in its wake. The banks of the river were low and the country on each side quite level until the dam was reached, where the high hills arose abruptly on each side of the river, and the entire landscape was changed.

Chatham RECORD, 1908 AUG 12, "Local Records":

Quite a number of young people went form here last Wednesday to Buckhorn Falls on a picnic launch party and spent a most enjoyable day, thanks to the many courtesies extended them by Superintendent C.P. Stewart and Captain Eagle. Those composing the party were the following: Misses Alice Bynum, Elsie Williams, Betsey London, Mamie Elliot, of Linden, Jessie Crosswell, of Fayetteville, Josephine Boylan, of Raleigh, Annie Plummer Nicholson, of Washington, and Katherine Hawkins, of Jacksonville, Fla., and Messrs. Paul J. Barringer, H.M. London, F.W. Bynum, Jesse Milliken, Walter Jerome, Bennett Nooe, Isaac London and B.B. Pope, of Weldon.

Pittsboro's Big Day (1907)

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Chatham RECORD, "Local Records", 1907 MAR 14:

The height of human happiness is experienced by a child (and some grown folks) at a circus, and there will be many a happy one here next Tuesday enjoying Sparks' Shows.

Chatham RECORD, "Local Records", 1907 MAR 21:

A fairly large crowd for this season of the year witnessed the afternoon and night performances of Sparks' show here on last Tuesday. A special train brought the circus here at 3 o'clock in the morning, and at 12:30 the street parade took place, the chief attractions of which were the elephants and the ponies. All who attended the show seemed well pleased.

Rabbit Lore #20 (1913)

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The avatar this backwater blogger claims for himself now once practically served as a brand for the county. People inside Chatham county built snares for the rabbits and bred dogs to chase them; people outside the county identified the place and the people with a rare quality of rabbit that tasted particularly sweet and succulent. The Chatham rabbits swam in gravy on the table and converted readily to change for a boy's pocket, yet they remained untamed and elusive, humble but a delicacy on the most discriminating palates. Maybe the rabbit served as mascot for so long because the county was like that as a place, rustic and simple, difficult to get at, yet distinguished by a certain refinement of country living.

Since we began scampering in this blog-space we've taken care to note references to the eponymous bunny as we come upon them. These quotations went into a single ongoing post, "Rabbit Lore", and included items from the Chatham RECORD, but also the Washington Post and a transcript from the Southern Oral History Project. It was a delicious stew full of tasty bits of meat, but the problem was, the tiny link from the sidebar wasn't prominent enough.

I decided for this reason to break "Rabbit Lore" into individual posts. Now "Rabbit Lore" is a blogger label that ties the series together, and new Rabbit Lore items will appear as individual posts. Several were added in the last two days; the reader may notice the use of material from the Siler City GRIT. Chatham RECORD editor Henry A. London's Son Isaac published the GRIT 1904-1920. While reading the GRIT the lore of the Chatham rabbit crops up even more frequently than in the RECORD, including, as a closer to this post, this following advertisement from W.S. Durham, a produce merchant who bought rabbits for export.

Siler City GRIT, 1913 OCT 29:

Rabbit Lore #19 (1915)

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Chatham RECORD, 1915 FEB 17, excerpted from "HELPS FOR HOMEMAKERS. Edited by the Extension Department of The State Normal Industrial College. -- Foods Prepared by Miss Minnie L. Jamison, Director Domestic Science Department. II -- CHEAP MEATS. THE CHEAPER CUTS OF MEAT.":

Rabbit Lore #18 (1913)

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Siler City GRIT, 1913 OCT 29, "CHATHAM RABBIT.":

The cycle of Time has once again revolved, bringing an expectanct section into its own. Even as the ancients regarded the Ides of a month, so the toothsome Chatham Rabbit, had it the power of human understanding, would with fear and trembling regard the first of November. On that day begins the assault on Bre'er Rabbit, and with dog, gun and gum the prized animal is relentlessly pursued. Even as Kentuckyians think corn in the liquid state is nowhere else as mellow, so Chathamites know that nowhere else are rabbits so prolific or as delicious as in her own confines.

In truth, Siler City is the emproium for the things "of the earth, earthy." The tang of the early mornings are reminders that hair-triggers are springing, and, in two more weeks the b-r-r of the partridge will half scare a fellow to death. But Nov. 1st is here and the rabbits will get it in the neck.

In 1910, 19671 were shipped from Siler City; in 1911, the number was 16,573; in 1912, 26,060; and in 1913, $13,979 were shipped. These figures may appear unreal, but are accurate nevertheless. They were compiled on Tuesday afternoon of each week during the game seasons from the books of the produce dealers by the editor; hence we know whereof we speak.

Rabbit Lore #17 (1912)

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Siler City GRIT, 1912 OCT 30, "CHATHAM RABBIT.":

The cycle of Time has once again revolved, bringing an expectanct section into its own. Even as the ancients regarded the Ides of a month, so the toothsome Chatham Rabbit, had it the power of human understanding, would with fear and trembling regard the first of November. On that day begins the assault on Bre'er Rabbit, and with dog, gun and gum the prized animal is relentlessly pursued. Even as Kentuckyians think corn in the liquid state is nowhere else as mellow, so Chathamites know that nowhere else are rabbits so prolific or as delicious as in her own confines.

In truth, Siler City is the emproium for the things "of the earth, earthy." The tang of the early mornings are reminders that hair-triggers are springing, and, in two more weeks the b-r-r of the partridge will half scare a fellow to death. But Nov. 1st is here and the rabbits will get it in the neck.

In 1910, 19671 were shipped from Siler City; in 1911, the number was 16,573; and in 1912, 26,060 were shipped. These figures may appear unreal, but are accurate nevertheless. They were compiled on Tuesday afternoon of each week during the game seasons from the books of the produce dealers by the editor; hence we know whereof we speak.

Rabbit Lore #16 (1913)

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Chatham RECORD, 1913 NOV 19, "Chatham's Rabbit Crop":

Editor of The Record:

I noticed in the News and Observer of last week that Mr. Hayes was in Raleigh and was speaking of Chatham’s unusually good crops, and being asked how the rabbit crop was this year, replied: "I think rabbits are scarce 'round Pittsboro as I haven't seen one this season there."

I wish to state that last Tuesday eve Mr. R. B. Bennett, of Baldwin township, "set" a box and upon going to it Wednesday morning found a nice, fat hare. He reset the box and Wednesday p.m., after dark, was near the box getting some wood and found the door down. On looking he found another. He reset again and found still another on Thursday morning—three rabbits in 36 hours. This is true, and we wish to state that we don’t want Chatham to get behind in the "old reliable" crop; neither do we wart to be-excelled in sweet potatoes. There are plenty of rabbits in Baldwin township.

G.G. WARD
Rt 1, Bynum. Nov. 17.

Rabbit Lore #15 (1914)

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Chatham RECORD, 1914 NOV 18, "Chatham Rabbits":

From the News and Observer.

The famous Chatham county rabbits are finding their way to Raleigh and a number of the cafes of the city are serving them on their regu!ar bill of fare. Rabbits are one of the chief products of Chatham and have a wide reputation throughout the country. Raleigh people are very fond of the Chatham rabbit and it has been said that they consume so many of them during the fall and winter season that they gradually take on the "rabbit lope" when walking around on the terrestrial sphere.

High Strangeness: Rambler's Skeleton (1913)

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[Detail from "Danjuro V as a skeleton and Iwai Hanshiro IV as Princess Sakura in the Play 'Flower of Edo: an Ichikawa Saga,'" by Katsukawa Shunsho, 1783]

Just in time for All Hallows' Eve, and thanks to Rabbit, a spooky tale from our friend the Rambler [sic throughout]:

This story is used as an illustration of one on a most respected citizen of Pittsboro. This gentleman has a summer house not far from town and occasionally stays there at night. A few nights ago he became very interested in a story he was reading. He had pulled off his shoes and was enjoying himself hugely, when, without warning, came a voice from somewhere, saying: "Sam Jones! Are you going to die here or in Pittsboro?" Sam Jones looked up expecting to see someone but he did not. Again that same voice was heard, asking the same question. This time he saw the skeleton of a man standing at the window, the mouth at work, and the arms swinging to and fro. Who would have stayed around such a place? Not I. Neither did Sam Jones. When he reached town he was nearly out of breath, and a pale, deathly look was on his face. He had run the whole distance, a mile or more, in about three minutes.

Was there a Sam Jones, or someone to whom this pseudonym was applied? Was he the victim of a practical joke? It's not beyond the realm of possibility that ol' Rambler was somehow involved, high on "Life's Elixir." Pittsboro, after all, has always been a place that requires us to make our own fun. Tweaking one of Chatham's "elites" still has its pleasures. The piece from which this passage was extracted, dated 1 October 1913, contains other, more colloquial, ghost stories. This one is so unusual that it suggests either a real paranormal occurrence or, more likely, a rascally Rambler at work.

Attention: will the owner of the skeleton or a descendant of "Sam Jones" please contact the blog. Thank you. Oh, and please give generously this Halloween. One of those little skeletons at your door might be real.

Google Rabbit

2007-10-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

Lance Mannion, a blogger the Rabbit admires, takes up a meme which came to him along a chain four links long. Here's the premise from its originator, David Ng at World's Fair:

[Y]ou will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

[...]

To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby!

A commenter to Ng's original post also suggests scoring a point for each of the total hits a phrase returns. So without prompting of any kind, I accept the challenge, and I'll include total hit counts as well as links to the individual posts that feature the phrases. Eschewing quotation marks, here are five phrases that -- on October 29, 2007 -- turn up the Chatham Rabbit blog as the first hit in a Google search:

1. chatham rabbit, 273,000 hits, links to the home page

2. chicken eats flies, 1,720,000 hits, "Chicken Eats Flies" (1913)

3. treacly ante-bellum, 195 hits, Erasing the Stone Tape

4. one of the most disgraceful acts of vandalism, 76,600 hits, The Monument 3: Symbol

5. character impersonations, humorous songs, 473,000 hits, Vaudeville comes to Pittsboro (1909-1910)

I also found it interesting that the phrase shower of blood fell around her turned up, as #2, this blog's home page and tommy yum's High Strangeness: Blood Fall (1884), behind the anomalist's article which describes the very same incident. And yet, tommy yum quotes the passage precisely from the Chatham RECORD article while the anomalist only echoes it. Hit #4 for shower of blood fell around her links in a Google books version of the poems of Ossian, containing this rather terrifying passage:

The night passed away in song; morning returned in joy. The mountains showed their gray heads; the blue face of ocean smiled. The white wave is seen tumbling round the distant rock; a mist rose slowly from the lake. It came in the figure of аn aged man along the silent plain. Its large limbs did not move in steps, for a ghost supported it in mid air. It came towards Selma's hall and dissolved in a shower of blood .

Which seems to portend the death of the people. Wow, I'll be seeing that one in my sleep tonight. But I digress! Hurrah for Old Capt. Crump's yardbird earning the #1 Google standing for the phrase chicken eats flies over more than 1,700,000 hits. She may have died suddenly, but her memory lives on for everyone who enters chicken eats flies into Google.

Rambler #5 (1914)

2007-10-28T21:25:00.000-04:00

[Image of the 1908 Rambler advertisement linked from the Wikipedia commons. See also the article on the Rambler.]

The fifth and final installment in the "Rambler's Musings" series, published in the Chatham RECORD on Feburary 18, 1914, follows:

RAMBLER'S MUSINGS. No. 5.

Is it not aggravating for a man to sit down and build air castles and then have a puff of wind blow them into a thousand pieces? That's what Rambler did, or rather let his imagination take him a hundred years ahead to see the "new" Pittsboro. What he thought he saw was enough to make most any of the people here today wish they could live that long. But it is not to be and although one hundred years from today Pittsboro may have a population of 50,000 souls, may have factories, paved streets, trolley lines and everything up to date, not a living soul here today will be here then. Every single person -- man, woman, child -- will be dead and forgotten.

Then while we are living today why not let us make the best of it? Let us get some of the pleasures and advantages that the people a hundred years hence will be enjoying.

Other towns are growing, why not this one? People here want industries to come; they want people to move here; they want paved streets and they want good roads leading into town.

But strange as it may seem and bad as they wish for these things, some of them put a check to the growth of the town when a person proposes to buy land and bulk here. If you buy my land, they say, you must pay for it. I don't blame a man for trying to get all he can for his land. It is natural that he'd want to do so, but there are times and places where a little foresight could be used in reducing their property value. It would be. more beneficial to them In the long run, help reduce their taxes, fill up the vacant places and cause Pittsboro to start to grow. Some people never stop to think of old man Malaga Grapes. He owned land, had money, horses, everything, and he probably thought he'd take it with him -- BUT HE DID NOT.

Tell me why dirt in Pittsboro should be priced so high and I'll tell you why there is no money at the end of a rainbow.

If Pittsboro was filled with manufacturing plants; if it even had a population of 10,000; if it had electric lights, paved streets, water, sewerage and no hog pens, people might have some cause for raising the price of their property, and unless property owners place a fair value on their lots people will not come here, nor will any enterprises, which so many people crave, ever be started here, and the owners of these high-priced lot will go the way of their fathers. It is true it can be left to their children. Malaga Grapes did that very thing.

Rambler knows of a case where the owner of 300 acres of land is od and feeble. He cannot work. But before he'd sell that land for $4,000, which he has been ofered, and place the noney at interest he rents it for the magnificent sum of $90 and has to pay the taxes on it.

Why not cut up his big farm into fifty acre plots, if he does not care to sell, and rent them out. He could get at least $25 a year for each farm and there would be six ears of corn grown whre only one is grown now.

"Everybody to his own notion," said the groundhog, as he went into his hole to escape the snowstorm.

RAMBLER.

Rambler #4 (1914)

2007-10-22T22:05:00.000-04:00

[The images L'avenue de l'Opéra and Chantier de construction électrique linked from Visions de l'an 2000, a 1910 series depicting life in the year 2000. From a digital exhibition of the National Library of France, hat-tip to the remarkable time-sink of a blog, Paleo-Future, "A look into the future that never was," and to tommy yum, who showed it to me.]

We continue here with #4 in the series of five numbered columns written for the Chatham RECORD by a pseudonymous "Rambler" in the opening months of 1914. In this installment [skip to it], published in the RECORD on January 28, 1914, Rambler imagines himself a Rip van Winkle falling into a hundred-years' sleep in the woods beyond Roberson Creek, then awaking to a vision of Pittsboro in the year 2014. It's an interesting bit of local speculative narrative, and probably the main reason why I chose to reprint the Rambler series.

Revisiting attempts from past eras to predict the future involves us in a kind of negotiation between things familiar and alien. There's a certain pleasure that arises when we see human needs that seem obvious and enduring get "solved" by innovations in obsolete technologies. So when the marvelous blog Paleo-Future shows us an advertisement for a wireless phone from 1910, we instinctively love it, in part because the functional need for a wireless telephone asserts itself as so obvious and eternal, and in part because the apparatus seems somehow to require an umbrella.

When Rambler talks of flying above a Pittsboro that spreads five miles south and north to the Haw River, well, he's not far off from what we're likely to see in 2014, even if he doesn't quite have the details right. His map grid of 991 numbered streets seems whimsical, but his overall vision of a boom has a ring of prescience to it. The projection of 50,000 people matches the entire county's population at the 2000 census, but seems on target for the northeastern quadrant of the county over the next decade or so. Bynum may not have a population of 3000 in the year 2014, but the Briar Chapel development resides in its township of Baldwin, and very well could. The train tracks no longer run through Pittsboro, and public transportation has no reach in town, but if we cup our ears and mute the TV we we might hear echoes in our bio-diesel boomlet of Rambler's invocation of cars (and tri- and unicycles) powered by electricity.

Part of the piece's appeal is Rambler's fixing his vision in the year 2014, which lies just ahead of us in our own future, imminent enough that our own planning cycles encompass it. This past weekend, news came via a political pamphlet left on my doorstep of "unprecedented development pressures making the Tues., Nov. 6 town election one of the most important in county history." The flier from Pittsboro Together has emblazoned in large, bold type across the front a word the Rambler could relate to: imagine. And yet, these smart-growthers do not bring visions of flying cars. They ask us to imagine, instead, "if Pittsboro became like Cary..." For readers beyond the Triangle area of North Carolina, "Cary" is a nearby Piedmont municipality said to be so overfed on sprawl that it stands as shorthand for the ultimate in suburban dystopia. On the one hand, who doesn't want a prosperous town? On the other hand, no one seems to want Cary.

I think Rambler would delight to see the Pittsboro of 2007 grown ripe with the fruits of technology and population growth: paved streets and a visible, uniformed police force to name two that he cites, and while they might seem humble in a place like Cary, I think he'd agree that our shiny new co-op, microbrewery and big box hardware store qualify as the "magnificent stores" he mentions; more of the same is surely on the way. But he would find the terms of the discussion to be very different than in 1914. It's easy to love the idea of a prosperous Pittsboro, but hard to see how prosperity lasts unless it's balanced with sustainable living and long-range planning. The industrial age is over; human- and rabbitkind produce more and we also consume more than in our youth. Somewhere we as a, um, people crossed a threshold into middle age, and the dreams of the Rambler lose some of their charm.

Still, I think it's fair for a Rabbit to ask: where's my flying car?

"Rambler's Musings No. 4" (January 28, 1914) follows; see below for more about the Rambler.

RAMBLER'S MUSINGS. No. 4.
Editor of The Record:

Rambler has talked of building dwelling houses, cotton mills and manufacturing plants. This week he is going to take you a hundred years ahead. In other words, in imgination, he is going to sleep and not wake up until the year 2014. If the reader will let his imagination run ahead for a hundred years he will be able to see Pittsboro in a new light.

* * * * * * *
Gracious! I feel tough. This has been the longest night I believe I ever saw. What am I doing over here in these woods? Have I been drunk and wandered away out here to keep anyone from seeing me? Gosh! There's a lot of fuss going on over in town. Listen at the steam whistles. Capt. Alson must be going. out. No, that’s not his train. There goes another whistle. And listen at the bells. I never heard the sound of bells like that before. Why, that sounds like a street car! What's the matter with me?

I got up on my feet and looked around. Where am I? What's the name, of this place? I never saw this town before. I am going to find, out where I am. Yonder is the railroad. Look at the tracks! I've been asleep here all night, but all those tracks were not there yesterday. I take up the railroad. Why, here's Robertson creek and this place must be Pittsboro. It is, I am told, but look at the new street, and the houses built up alongside the creek, and they extend as far as I can see. What's the matter with the place. It wasn't that way yesterday. I am drunk again, and lost. I'll nave to tell Mrs. Rambler another big ghost story.

I come to a street crossing. A sign on the corner reads "First street, East." I take up that street and go west about four blocks. Stores to the right; stores to the left. This cannot be Pittsboro. Yes, that is what it is, was the answer a blue-coated policeman gave me. Am I dreaming? No, I am wide awake. I look down at my feet; I move them; I am not asleep.

I finally reach one of the principal streets, I guess, as there were thousands of people walking the sidewalks. In the road way were all sorts of vehicles, all run by electricity. Some had two wheels, some three and some with only one wheel. Some of these vehicles were loaded with merchandise and some with people. Everything was moving. Hello! there comes a street car! Yonder is another one crossing the street. I stand bewildered -- lost. I knew I was in Pittsboro yesterday. There is the monument over there, but where is Manly Smith's wooden building? Look at the magnificent stores; and the streets are all paved. They have policemen in uniforms. Pete Gunter did not have a uniform yesterday. This can't be Pittsboro.

I wander up the street further. Hello! there's a printing office. I believe I'll go in. On a table lies a pile of papers. No one is in the room. I pick up a paper and look at it. It is the Chatham Record, dated January 25th, 2014! It was January 25th, 1914, when I wandered over to the woods beyond Robertson creek and laid down and went to sleep -- just 100 years ago today. And I thought it was yesterday.

Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years and I have slept 100!

While looking over the thirty-two pages of The Record a gentleman entered the room. He was a fat, chunky man and wore a cap -- it was Col. Bruce Poe. I recollected him in a minute. He recognized me too.

After talking over bygone days I asked the colonel how it was he had lived so long and was looking so healthy. "Why," he says, "you recollect away back yonder Capt. John Crump had a preparation -- a powder -- called "Life's Elixir?" You know it was said at the time it would prolong a man's life hundreds of years. Well, there was only three men in town outside myself that used that powder, and that was Col. Dr. Pilkington, Capt. Crump and Col. Fletcher Mann. The doctor," he continued, "is still in the drug business when he is on the ground. Col. Mann is in business at 592 West 742d street. He has been married five or six times and, you wouldn't believe it, but he is looking for another wife. Capt. Crump is working for the telephone company. He fell off a pole two or three days ago and broke a leg, but he put some of his powder on it and he is all right.now. I think he flew over to Raleigh this morning in his bird car."

Hundreds of other questions were asked the colonel about former citizens, but they were all dead.

Then he took us out to his bird house. He does not deal in Ford cars now but is a birdite. His bird, as he called it, was in the shape of an eagle; had the head, the tail, the appearance of a bird. I was asked to step inside. I was afraid, but I got in and sat down. I wish I could describe my feelings but have not got the space. He touched a spring, there was a flutter or two and the car sailed gracefully in the air. It was fine -- grand. We were about a mile in the air when we espied a car coming towards us. "Here comes Pilk now," he said. In a moment the two cars stopped alongsde [sic] of each other. We shook hands, talked a few minutes and separated.

The air was full of cars. Any way you'd look you'd see them.

Here I got good view of Pittsboro. From where the old courthouse used to stand (a magnificent one stood there now) the streets going north and south were avenues. The cross streets are numbered from First street to 991st and extend from Haw river on the east to Rocky river on the west. The avenues extend from five miles on the south to Bynum on the north. Bynum has a population of 3,000. On Haw river could be seen the big power plant.

And all this space was filled with residences, mills, factories and 50,000 busy people.

Thirty eight electric passenger trains alone stopped at the union station daily.

There are three daily papers printed in the city.

The town has grown some within the last hundred years, remarked the colonel, as we stepped upon the ground.

RAMBLER

When I opened the series, I had found no other columns by Rambler, but further research has turned up more of his writings. The numbered series of "Rambler's Musings" that began in January 1914 seems to have cut off at #5 in February, 1914; but Rambler wrote to the RECORD on numerous other occasions. The "Musings" series focuses on a vision for the development of Pittsboro, while Rambler's earlier columns tended to pass along local anecdotes, gossip, folklore and tall tales.

In "Musings" #4, Rambler goes off an extended tangent treating the "Life's Elixir" powder invented by a Capt. Crump of Pittsboro. As it happens, a piece appears in the Chatham RECORD of July 2, 1913, which relates a tall-tale or two about "Life's Elixir"; unfortunately, my current copy of the issue cuts the "Pittsboro Inventors" piece off and right now I can reprint it only in part, also below. I'll update this post with the full version at the earliest opportunity, but I'd have to say I'm about 99% certain it also came from the pen of the Rambler. It echoes his style, and also features prominently the figure of "Col. Bruce Poe".

Pittsboro Inventors.

While Pittsboro as a town cannot claim as many noted things as some other towns in this State, it has nevertheless some smart inventors. Among them is Capt. J. J. Crump, the inventor of the cross-cut saw, the hobby horse the see-saw and other useful things.

The captain once invented a horse-shoe that was put on without nails, but it did not prove much of a success, as the glue would get damp and the shoe drop off.

His latest realization of a success was a powder, which is composed of several ingredients. This powder he calls "Life’s Elixir," and is good for man or beast. To prove its efficacy as a milk producer and cow fattener, I will state the following facts:

Col. Bruce Poe, one of the finest gardeners in this State, the man who raised Irish potatoes so large and they grew so fast that they pushed his fence several inches from the line, bought a cow from Col. Bob Glenn. It was a small cow, but Col. Glenn said he'd guarantee that the cow would give a quart of milk a day. Col. Poe knowing the wonderful effects of Capt. Cramp's powder, bought five cents worth of it. Before giving the cow any powder he milked her for the first time that evening and she gave her usual amount, a pint. After milking he gave her more feed and a tablespoonful of the powder. The next morning the colonel went out to milk his cow (the colonel is a fine milker and delights in the pastime). He noticed that the cow had grown considerably larger, but he begin to milk and sing (he always would sing while at work) and the milk began to flow, slowly at first, but faster. Soon his pails were full and he called for more vessels. In a few minutes they were full and more buckets were culled for. The colonel had quit singing; consternation was depicted on his face. "Bring me some tubs," he called out in alarm, "this cow is raining milk." The tubs were soon full; in fact, everything that would hold milk was full, and still the end was not in sight. "Go and tell Capt. Minor to come here," said the colonel, excitedly. "What do you want with him," he was asked. "I want to rent the water tank over at the oil mill." Just then the sluice of milk began to cease -- the cow had been milked dry.

On feeding the cow that night (she was not milked any more that day) she was given another tablespoonful of the powder, and that was the colonel’s undoing. During the night the cow had grown so fast that she had pushed down the fence and next morning was gone. The colonel has never seen her since.

[Cont'd]

High Strangeness: Watch the Skies!

2007-10-21T12:47:00.000-04:00

[UFO image from crowdedskies.com.]

More Blood Fall goodness on the way, I assure you. But let's contemplate what else exists in Chatham's skies. I'm delighted to let reader Martha share her story with you, as it was emailed to me:

My sister and I were driving back from Chapel Hill late at night after seeing a movie I think. I want to say it was Good Morning Vietnam. It wasn't horribly late, but late enough, and in those days far fewer people lived out Jones Ferry Rd. in Chatham County so there was very little traffic. Just after we crossed over University Lake and were heading out of town, we noticed a very bright white light in the distance hovering at tree level. We talked about what it could be and speculated about it being the new WUNC TV tower that had gone up across from Story Book Farm. At the time, the large white tower was rather new and it was an eyesore because it blinked so brightly. However, the bright light on this evening was not blinking. As we drove, the light stayed stationary in the distance. We passed Story Book Farm and the blinking tower and the bright light was still ahead of us. Of course, now we were really wondering what was up. A helicopter with a search light on it. maybe? That was the best we could come up with, but given that is didn't move at all it seemed somewhat unlikely. When we came to Frosty's we pulled into the empty parking. The store was closed for the night. We stopped the car and turned the car off. The object with the bright white light shining down was right above the intersection of Crawford Dairy Rd. and Jones Fairy Rd. We rolled down the windows and it was completely silent. So silent you could hear the crickets and cicadas making their summer racket. Definitely not a helicopter. As we both sat there and looked at this thing (I recall it as being rather triangular-shaped like something from Star Wars, but my sister recalls it being saucer shaped), I'm not even sure we said anything to each other. We just stared. And then quickly, the light went off, the engines of the ship powered up (but weren't horribly loud when they did), and it took off really fast into the sky. It all lasted probably less than a minute or so.

So that's it. Never seen a UFO since. And have never figured out why one would be hanging out where this one was. Talk about boring. Maybe it was looking for the Big Hole over off of 54 and was checking the map.

She added this, in response to my queries:

The engines I guess sounded like jet engines gearing up, but not nearly as loud or deafening as that. And it took off very fast. The "ship" itself was not that large. Larger than a trash can though. Maybe the size of a reasonably sized room in a house. 50 X 50 ft? 30 X 30? Not small, but not huge by any means.

What are we to make of this? I don't know. The trash can reference is to a story I related to Martha, in which some friends of mine were chased by a trash-can shaped object as they drove their van to the beach. The object rose up from under an overpass and pursued them at speed for some miles before disengaging.

Rambler #3 (1914)

2007-10-20T09:16:00.000-04:00

[Image of auto stuck in the mud from the National Museum of American History's "America on the Move" exhibit.]

The Rambler series continues with #3, from the Chatham RECORD of January 21, 1914:

RAMBLER'S MUSINGS.
No. 3.

Editor of The Record:

Last week we talked on a cotton mill and house-building. We are going to talk about something this week that Rambler hopes will interest you.

Did you ever see a horse and wagon stalled in the mud? No matter how hard the horse pulled he could not move the wagon. All sorts of advice would be given the driver only to fail moving the load. The horse just could not budge it until a lot of husky fellows gathered around the wagon and put their shoulders to the wheel.

It moved then, didn’t it? You bet. So it is with some towns. A town will get into a rut. A few spasmodic efforts will be made to get it out by some of the more enterprising citizens, then a few more little jerks and pulls until it finally looks as if the poor old town was gone for sure.

But some day another kind of a fellow comes along and he sees the old town, and he also sees how bad she is stuck in the rut. He likes the looks of the place. it seems good to him. The people are clever, sociable and entertaining and he asks himself: "Why is this thus? Why don’t these people get on the main line?" And the more he studies over the question the more it puzzles him. He pulls off his coat and goes to work. He talks to this business man and that. He talks to the citizen. He tells them the advantages of such and such a thing; how it would benefit them, and not only them but others. The eyes of these people are opened. They, too, get to work and the result is the old town is MADE to get out of the rut. New life is taken on, new people move in, new enterprises come in, business gets on a boom, new stores and new residences begin to spring up, everything begins to flourish and everybody carries a happy face.

This is not an overdrawn picture. The town of Pittsboro has been in a rut for many years. Time and time and time again have some of its citizens tried to get it out, but the more they pulled the deeper it seemed to sink, until they gave up in disgust and despair.

Now there is yet a chance to get the old town back on its feet again, but every man must put his shoulder to the wheel and PUSH. IF YOU CANNOT PUSH, PULL. If you cannot do either don’t get in the way. LET'S ORGANIZE A CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. That will be the husky fellow to pull us out of the rut. Let the citizens get together and talk the matter over. "Argufy" the matter, as it were. There are plenty of public-spirited citizens here, and there may be some in the county who have not lost all pride for their county capital, that would join. Who knows but what such a movement, if conducted on the right line, would not be a stepping stone for the people of today to leave to future generations. Let's try it anyhow.

RAMBLER.

Rambler #2 (1914)

2007-10-16T22:02:00.000-04:00

Continuing the Rambler series, #2, from the Chatham RECORD of January 14, 1914, follows:

RAMBLER GETS TO MUSING.
No. 2

Editor of The Record:

The story printed in last week’s Record about old man Malaga Grapes is no joke and has a moral. It shows that man, no matter how rich he may be of this world's goods, when he dies he is brought down to a level with the poorest on earth.

Then why should a man toil and struggle, hoard and save for others? Would it not be better for him, for his family, for his county and for the people in general if he had taken only a part of his savings and put it into some manufacturing plant, where it would not only have helped him but also helped many others. You have got to die. There is no getting around that point, and it is a fact beyond question, that you cannot take your money with you. Then let Rambler offer some suggestions.

We are not talking particularly to the people of Pittsboro but to the whole county. It is the duty of every citizen in his county to take some pride in his capital city. Pittsboro has stood here for lo these many years. It seems to have got stuck here, and it needs the help of the business man, the farmer and all others who have any pride at all for their county seat to come to its rescue and pull it out of its present condition.

There are vacant lots galore here that need the hand of man to better improve them. Pittsboro needs houses. Here is the place where thousands of dollars could be invested that would pay the investors at least from 6 to 10 per cent and probably more. There are half a dozen families here today that would be glad of the chance to rent four or five room houses, but they are not here. People would come here to live if they could get houses, but they cannot get them and they move to other towns. Then again, how can you expect manufacutring plants to come into a town when the people do not seem to care whether there are any houses or not.

Every little business helps. Look at the hosiery mill here. Though small, yet several thousand dollars a year is spent among the merchants and others. Look how many thousands of dollars have been paid out by the Chatham oil company, by the Nooe planing mills and other works.

Pittsboro has a splendid school, excellent teachers and the healthfulness of the town cannot be surpassed. It could be made a fine winter resort if it was pushed in that direction. Don't say "Shucks! Pittsboro will never be more than it is. It's dead already." No wonder, when some of its own citizens continue to knock it in such a manner.

Pittsboro is not dead by any means, notwithstanding its hard knocks and kicks. Let the enterprising business men of the county and town put their heads together and invest their surplus in a cotton mill, or a wagon factory, or a chair factory or some other kind of a plant. LET 1914 BE AN EYE-OPENER to the Jonahs.

Have some pride in your county capital. One hundred men in Chathazn could easily raise $100,000 for a cotton mill, and Pittsboro is the logical place for it. There are the railroad facilities here, and sooner or later another railroad will be built through here, and there are two of the best sites here for a cotton factory that can be found in the state.

The monied men of this county might think seriously of this project to their own advantage as well as to the community.

Remember, six feet of earth is all you will have when you are dead, and you will be dead along time. Then leave something behind you to benefit humanity.

The clock has struck 1914, men. Let's get to work.

RAMBLER.

Rambler #1 (1914)

2007-10-16T07:21:00.001-04:00

This blog is a prequel. The idea of the Chatham Rabbit hatched as a way to connect the backstory of Chatham County, North Carolina to its doozy of an emerging narrative. In the current story, a fable for our troubled times, a sleepy little backwater county wakes up at the turn of the 20th Century to find an array of powerful and not-so-powerful interests contending for its soul. As the place's landscape, populace and social life transform under intense growth pressure, its core story follows, like it or not (and some do and some don't) the expanding course of residential development. The blog does a small mammal's mite to save some fragments of memory before that flood.

Now, when one takes on such a project, and heads to the library and into the field to do some research, all kinds of stuff can turn up worth writing about. In this space we've shared nuggets harvested from a range of sources, particularly the county's long-running newspaper, the Chatham RECORD (est. 1877). The Rabbit has relayed stories of love and marriage, community life, and the lore of the rabbit. Fellow traveler tommy yum has written of High Strangeness. We cast a wide net here, it's all wholly within scope, and we think it's all worth knowing, for while this document is about land and its use, it's also about place. Furthermore, rabbits love stories, plain and simple, and find it impossible to resist their trails arrayed like so many cabbage rows across the gardens.

But with all the dallying in the ways of lovers and horse-traders and blockaders, it's well-nigh time to take up in earnest the story we originally set out to tell, the one where the land acts as a character. Debates over land use are nothing new to this space that has been a county for 226 years, and so the Rabbit will feature some of those discussions as they appeared in the Chatham RECORD and elsewhere a century or so ago. I'll begin with the series of pseudonymous columns penned by a self-styled "Rambler" in the RECORD beginning in January of 1914.

I'm not sure who the Rambler was, and if any readers can provide information regarding the person's identity, please contact me at precept6@yahoo.com. So far in my research Rambler's trail goes cold after five columns, but those five provide a departure point for an analysis of views of land use in the early modern age. They also keenly express a vision for Pittsboro that some will find interesting to read.

I'll reprint all five of the Rambler's columns over the next week or so. In the first column, the author lays out what we might call a moral basis for development. It's something we all do, and as Exhibit A I offer the Rambler, whose own moral the reader will discern from the first of the series, from January 7, 1914.

RAMBLER GETS TO MUSING.
No. 1.

Editor of The Record

Old man Malaga Grapes is dead. Malaga is not his correct name. Neither is grapes, but it answers all purposes. But Malaga is dead and buried. Over in the cemetery where MaLaga's body is lying there are several othet bodies nearby. Over on the left is a grave that contains a pauper. The pauper is dead, too, else they would not have buried him. Over to the right is the grave of a woman. This female was a great talker. She talked about her neighbors until they shunned her; she talked about her church members until she was turned out of church. When she had nothing else to talk about she talked about the cat. This woman was a tale-bearer, the worst of all women. So one day she died because her breath gave out and she could not work up enough wind to start her to talking again. So she was buried quite near Malaga Grapes' grave.

In another grave a thief lay. Other graves around Malaga's grave contained different kinds of people -- some good, some bad, others worse. Malaga did not care because he was dead too.

Malaga had worked hard all his life; had saved his money, stinted himself, eat half enough, and the coat he wore to town was the coat he wore year-before-last and-year-before-that-year's-coat; it would do for him, he said, for next year and year after. It was too good to throw away. And he kept on wearing that coat every day and Sunday too.

Malaga had money. He was worth half a million dollars. He had land, stock -- everything to make a sensible man happy. With all his money, with all his land, with all his stock -- he was dead and buried -- surrounded by a thief, a pauper and tale-bearing woman.

Malaga had nothing now. Neither did those other three. All were equal.

Malaga's wife died years ago, probably from starvation or a broken heart, but he kept on working and hoarding and saving until he reached the half a million goal. Then he died.

What became of all of Malaga's money, cattle and land? His only son fell heir to it and today he is living a profligate's life; smoking high priced cigars, drinking $5 bottles of champagne and wearing fine clothes.

What a different tale could have been told if old Malaga Grapes had taken $100,000 of that money, come to Pitssboro and put it into a cotton mill. He would have given work to hundreds of people; he would have helped to build up the town; he would have been looked upon as a good man. The worker would have spent his money with the merchant; the merchant would have improved his store and stock; the churches, the town and the county generally would have been benefited.

But, no. Malaga Grapes, like many other men with money and lands, did not see it in that light and hoarded his money and starved himself so others might reap the benefit.

You can save and pile up your riches but old Father Time will get you in the end and, so far as your money is concerned, the old shacks you leave will remain old shacks; the idle land will continue idle, and you are dead, having passed through this world not benefitting yourself or mankind.

If you have money put it into something that will help humanity. Take lessons from the Cones; take lessons from other philanthropic men and do likewise.

Remember only six feet of earth belongs to you and you can not take your money with you.

RAMBLER.

Return of Love Rabbit (1892, 1909, 1890-1914)

2007-10-09T22:35:00.000-04:00

1) A few weeks ago we noted the sweet story of James W. Pearce and Maggie Pearce, who found one another via an advertisement in the Raleigh NEWS AND OBSERVER, courted by mail, met up and got hitched in Greenville, NC. Sadly, the Rabbit did not have the whole story when the item went to press. A follow-up item appeared in the "Local Records" soon after, on November 10, 1909:

A few weeks ago The Record published the romantic marriage of Mr. J.W. Pearce, of Albright township, to a widow in Pitt county, the result of an advertisement in the News and Observer. We regret to learn that the romance is shattered and so are the hopes of wedded bliss, for the bride has left her groom and returned to her former home.

2) The following surely invites further exploration, but it's worth teasing now. "Love Rabbit" goes major-daily in the New York TIMES of December 4, 1892:

TRICKED HER AGED LOVER.

THE SHREWD GAME OF A NORTH CAROLINA GIRL SPOILED

RALEIGH, N.C Dec. 3. -- In Chatham County live Samson Edwards and Jennie Culberson. Samson is hale, hearty, and sixty-two years old, and handsome for a man of that many years. Jennie is twenty-five years old and is a remarably pretty girl.

As the world goes, the old man wanted a "darling," and the girl wanted a slave. They courted. Jennie, being without worldly goods, told Samson that if he would give her $275 she would marry him, and with the money she would buy a tract of land and take the deed in her name, and that this would suffice in place of dower in case she survived her aged lover. Samson gave her the money. She bought the land, and the deed was made to Jennie Culberson.

Old Madam Eve then appeared. It seems that a younger man had been going to see Jennie on the sly. The day for the wedding with Edwards was set. The preacher was engaged and the license procured. On the day before that set for the wedding Jennie end her younger lover journeyed to Pittsborough, the county seat, and there they were married. They returned and took up their abode on the land paid for with the money of Edwards.

The frame of mind of Samson when he heard of the marriage is better imagined than described in cold type. He sought his lawyer and brought suit to recover the land. The case was a noted one and the whole county was present In Pittsborough when It was tried. The Superior Court gave judgment against Jennie for the money, but refused to order the sale of the land to pay the debt and Jennle had no other property.

Edwards then appealed to the Supreme Court, and this tribunal has just decided tbat Jennie perpetrated a fraud on Samnson and violated her contract of marriage; that the transfer of the land to her was without consideration, and that the land must be sold to pay the debt of Edwards.

3) Finally, the Rabbit can but blush at the goings-on! Chatham RECORD, 1910 MAR 2:

A Real Romance

At February term, 1890, of the superior court of this county Dr. John Sanford Stone and Vallie Weathers, both of Cape Fear township, were convicted of fornication and adultery and he was sentenced to imprisonment in our county jail, but after serving a few months he was pardoned because of his bad health. Judgment was suspended on the woman. Sometime after this they both left this county, he deserting his wife and family, who heard nothing more of him until last month, when they heard that he had died recently in Georgia.

One of his sons went last month to Georgia, in consequence of information received, and there found that he and Vallie Weathers had been living for several years as Dr. and Mrs. John Sanford. At the death of Dr. Stone (or Sanford as he was there called) the woman, who was thought to be his wife, was allotted the usual year's allowance as his widow. His property in Georgia was estimated to be worth $1500, and now his family, whom he deserted, will take the proper legal steps to secure possession of it. His deserted wife is still iving, a most estimable lady, and her friends are glad to know that she will at last get something from his estate.

Our society has been going downhill, ever since 1800.

High Strangeness: Blood Fall (1884)

2007-10-02T11:14:00.001-04:00

[Photograph of Francis P. Venable from the UNC Virtual Museum of University History.]

On a clear day in 1884, it rained blood on a farm in Chatham County.

"Pooh!" scoffs the Gentle Reader. "Nothing weird ever happens around here, except the '70s." Ah, but I can prove it.

The event had an eyewitness. There were other, more gentrified witnesses of the immediate aftermath. And none other than UNC chemist Francis Preston Venable (pictured) published an article, "'Fall of Blood' in Chatham County" in the Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society.

The March 6, 1884 issue of The Chatham Record took a dubious tone in its article "A Shower of Blood:"

We do not ask our readers to believe the following wonderful statement, but merely publish it as it is told us. The wife of Kit Lasater, a negro who lives on the farm of Mr. Silas Beckwith in New Hope township, states that, about 2 o'clock on Monday the 25th of February, while she was at the bars near her cabin a shower of blood fell around her from a sun-bright sky!

We are pleased to note that The Record elected not to include any gratuitous details of "negro" eye-rolling and hair-straightening. They couldn't resist, however, this zinger at the end:

We are informed that a reputable physician of the neighborhood visited the spot and said it was blood.

It's not inconceivable that a tenant farmer, no doubt proficient at slaughtering hogs and chickens, would easily be able to recognize blood. Nevertheless, every neighborhood should have a "reputable physician."

More white men came to behold the wonder. SA Holleman visited the next morning, later describing the scene to Venable:

The space covered was about fifty by seventy feet, and nearly in a rectangular form. The drops were of sizes varying from that of a small pea to that of a man's finger and averaged about one to the square foot...Some fell in the bushes and coagulated upon the limbs.

The "reputable physician" must have been a certain Dr Robinson, who, according to Venable, "made certain simple tests which satisfied him that it was blood." Venable's next sentence is more explicit: the sample passed the Robinson Sniff Test.

Samples of bloody sand got into the hands of Holleman and another doctor, Sidney Atwater. Atwater brought the samples to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for analysis.

"It was looked upon rather as a joke and no analysis was made for some time," Venable noted.

But when preliminary tests were conducted, something happened that must have made Venable's prodigious mustache curl up with a hilarious "tweeter" sound:

The blood was real.

To be continued.

Do you have stories of UFOs, ghosts or other weirdness that you'd like to see covered in the High Strangeness corner of the Chatham Rabbit? Email me: pborowest@yahoo.com

Vaudeville comes to Pittsboro (1909-1910)

2007-10-01T21:43:00.000-04:00

[Images cropped from the digitized materials in the University of Iowa's digital collection, "Traveling Culture: Circuit Chautauqua in the Twentieth Century".]

In October of 1909 the Chatham RECORD publicized the first of three entertainment events intended to raise money for Pittsboro High School. A few weeks later, a review of this initial performance referred to these events part of the "Lyceum course". The Lyceum Movement, a concept of adult education that began before the Civil War, emphasized community culture in the setting of town hall gatherings. It was on the Lyceum circuit that luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan spoke before eager crowds whose attention spans would surely astonish us in our own time. Many lesser lights worked the circuit as well, and "permanent lyceums" established themselves around the country.

Following the war, the Lyceum retained some of its high-minded characteristics while edging more into an entertainment circuit and a venue for vaudeville acts. Eventually the Chautauqua movement took the original Lyceum concept of adult education and community culture and ran with it, while vaudeville became the source from which an emerging entertainment industry drew such acts as the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. The performers that visited Pittsboro in November of 1909 and then January of 1910 certainly shaded into the territory of vaudeville. Thanks to a library digitization project at the University of Iowa, we can take a look at the printed programs that likely accompanied these performers and provided advance publicity. In this post I'll link the three acts to Iowa's "Traveling Culture." More broadly I'll embark on an ongoing effort to describe the intellectual and cultural lives of the people living in the county and its surrounds about a hundred years ago.

The Pittsboro High School benefit series began with a magician named Hal Merton. The October 27, 1909 issue of the RECORD advertised his performance in terms so glowing and detailed that the author (surely the paper's editor, Henry A. London) seems to have experienced the maestro's act in person:

The Magician Merton.

On Thursday night of next week, November 4th., this community will have the opportunity of enjoying the most unique entertainment ever had here, when Hal Merton, the wonderful magician, will give one of his mysterious performances, the same that he has given in the large cities of this county.

Disdaining the aid of apparatus of any sort, Merton appears on the stage with his arms bared, and, depending entirely upon personal dexterity, accomplishes a series of remarkable feats, baffling the eye and the understanding alike. Eggs, billiard balls and flowers appear suddenly at his finger tips, vanish as mysteriously as they come, and then reappear at command. He will cause objects to spring from nowhere back to nowhere and will make hats and other objects perform remarkable antics. For comedy and mystery this entertainment will surpass anything ever seen here, and every body ought to attend it.

But London almost certainly had never seen Merton perform before. T he circular for Merton at the "Traveling Culture" series must have preceded the magician Merton to the office of the RECORD. Compare the wording of London's description to the text in the program's inner pages [emphasis mine]:

Upon a brilliantly lighted platform, with arms bared to the elbows, Mr. Merton will demonstrate to the satisfaction of all that it is not only possible for an article to be in two places at the same time, but that it is equally possible that it may be nowhere at all. Solid articles, eggs, billiard balls, flowers and handkerchiefs appear at his finger tips and having served to amuse, vanish as mysteriously as they came, reappearing at command in the most unexpected places; a borrowed hat plays a most important part in the evolutions of a tumbler, ladies' rings develop most astonishing powers, a gentleman's watch figures in a series of startling surprises, silver bands become endowed with more than life and many of the most puzzling demonstrations of the Hindoo necromancers are duplicated for the first time upon the Lyceum platform. The Bouquet of Mystical Novelties concludes with a series of laughable feats in the pleasing and ever popular art of ventriloquism in which the famous blockhead "Joe" takes a most important part.

The RECORD hawked the event again in the November 3 issue, then provided a review of sorts on November 10:

No audience at this place ever before enjoyed more greatly any entertainment than did the audience at the school auditorium last Thursday night when Hal Merton, the magician, performed his wonderful feats of sleight-of-hand. They were truly wonderful and unaccountable and kept the spectators most delightfully entertained. The next entertainment of the Lyceum course will be on the night of the 29th of this month, when the celebrated Litchfield Trio will be here.

The RECORD then publicized the next act, the Litchfield Trio, in the November 24 issue:

Litchfield Trio.

On next Monday night at the school auditorium the citizens of this community will have the opportunity of enjoying one of the most delightful entertainments ever held here. The celebrated Litchfield Trio will then give one of their attractive entertainments, and it is of a different kind from any ever before seen here. It consists of humorous recitations, character impersonations in costumes, music of various sorts and a comedy entitled "Down at Brook Farm", which of itself is well worth the admission price.

The Litchfields are a man, his wife and daughter, all first-class performers, who will keep their audience highly amused and entertained with their character impersonations, humorous songs and splendid music. Wherever they have appeared they have given entire satisfaction, and a rare treat is in store for all who will be present next Monday night. No one who attends will regret it, and those who do not attend will regret missing so rich a treat.

The image shown here, a detail from the circular for the Neil Litchfield Trio, shows an apparent array of the "character impersonations in costumes" that Mr. Litchfield would perform. By the time the Litchfields visited Pittsboro, they had spent some two decades on the road to refine their act and test new portrayals. A search in a couple of historical newspaper databases provides a sense of their career arc and the itinerant lives they led.

The first mention makes no allusion to entertainment, only a notice under HOTEL ARRIVALS of a "Neil Litchfield and wife" in the Idaho Daily Statesman, April 1890. An August 1895 theater listing in the Duluth News-Tribune mentions Neil Litchfield as a member of a vaudeville company called "Heywood's Celebrities," then a notice in August 1897 places "Neil Litchfield, Yankee comedian" in a troupe performing the "WORLD FAMOUS CHARACTERS." At last Mr. and Mrs. Litchfield are listed together in the Washington Post theater notices of February 11, 1900 as part of a vaudeville review where they will "show a 'truly rural comedy' called 'Down on the Farm,'" which "has much snap and wit." From this point over the next several years the Litchfields appear regularly in the advertisements and notices of the Washington Post, New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, performing their signature "Brook Farm" skit. February 1904 they pop up in Kansas City, listed last in a long vaudeville bill at the Orpheum, where they are to perform "Halloween at Brook Farm." Just a few months before they came to Pittsboro, in August 1909, an advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News shows them performing "Down at Brook Farm" as part of a bill at Theater Jose, under the headline act, Doblano's Trained Sheep. The Lexington (KY) Herald has the Litchfield Trio playing there in February 1910, just a few months after their appearance here, then again in November of 1911. Finally, the Idaho Daily Statesman lists them in the "Immanuel Brotherhood Lyceum Course" in October of 1912.

Where the Litchfields appear in the larger city listings -- and at least some of the listings in the Post and Inquirer may be for venues in New York City -- they lie at or near the bottom of a larger vaudeville bill. The farther they roam from the major urban centers, the more prominent the mention they rate. In some cases, they even get reviewed, as in the 1910 appearance in Lexington, Kentucky, when the Herald wrote:

Enjoyable Entertainment

Despite the inclement weather, a large audience was present at the opera house to enjoy the splendid entertainment given by the "Litchfield Trio," who appeared under the auspices of the Midway Lecture Course. Refined and entertaining, the program rendered by this unusually talented family was thoroughly enjoyed by all present. No entertainment held here in years has given more universal satisfaction.

The RECORD's summation of the Litchfields' performance in Pittsboro practically echoes the sentiment they inspired in Lexington; from "Local Records", December 1:

No entertainment ever held at this place created more laughter and fun than that given by the Litchfield Trio on last Monday night. The impersonations and facial expressions of Mr. Litchfield could not be excelled and convulsed his audience with continual laughter. The music by Mrs. Litchfield and daughter was very fine and much enjoyed.

Finally, on January 26 the RECORD publicized the third of the three acts in the Lyceum course to visit:

The Italian Boys.

On next Saturday night will be the last and best of the three entertainments contracted to the be given here by the Radcliffe Entertainment Bureau. It will be given by Elbert Foland and five Italian boys, and wherever they have appeared they have been most highly complimented. No such entertainment as this has ever before been given in this town, and it is an opportunity that nobody should allow to pass by without attending it.

Mr. Foland is one of the most brilliant and versatile entertainers in the United States. He will both amuse with his humorous recitations and facial impersonations, and also entertains with his wonderful elocutionary talents. The music by the Italian boys charms and delights every audience that hears them, and no such music as their has ever been heard here. Their musical nad literary fantasy "A night in Venice" is of itself well worth the price of admission to the whole entertainment, even if there was nothing else.

Each of the two preceding entertainments given by the Radcliffe Bureau gave perfect satisfaction and this one is the best of all, as will be admitted by everybody who attends it. If you fail to attend this you will certainly regret it.

Again, the circular from the University of Iowa, and the mini-review by the RECORD on February 2:

The entertainment given here last Saturday night by the Italian Boys was greatly enjoyed by a large and appreciate audience. Their music, especially that on the harp, was the best ever heard here, and the singing by the boy of thirteen was flue-like and was twice encored. Mr. Foland's recitations and impersonations were much enjoyed.

Both the Italian Boys and Merton the Magician appear in similar patterns of listings as the Litchfields. All three of these acts were road-tested and probably quite compelling as performers, but they were all marginal vaudeville attractions, never top-of-the-bill in the big city. Of the three acts, the Italian Boys probably garnered the most swooning praise as they traveled, which suggests a certain timelessness to the formula of a boy-band with a soprano lead singer.

So far in my research, the RECORD does not follow up on these items with any mention of how the program fared in terms of raising money for the high school. As always, the Rabbit remains vigilant for more information, but unless the RECORD says anything else, it's hard to imagine where it might turn up. Still, at some point, someone must have calculated that the acts would draw large enough crowds to pay the performers and provide a surplus for the benefit of the high school.

By the same token, some incentive must have drawn the performers to the road and away from the creature comforts of the big cities. Perhaps they earned more while traveling, maybe they enjoyed it, found creative stimulation, or used it as an opportunity to build an audience and a following. Maybe they just took pleasure in making the world smaller for rural audiences. Merton the Magician, the Litchfields, and the Italian Boys all brought to the high school in Pittsboro a cultural experience that Chatham's farmers and merchants and their families shared with audiences in Lexington, and Duluth, and even San Jose. In a place that could seem as remote and occasionally forbidding as Chatham County, a polished boy-band with a soprano lead singer was just the thing to deliver the world.

Rabbit Lore #14 (1909)

2007-09-29T09:35:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1909 SEP 15, "Rabbits at the North Pole":

From the Asheville Gazette-News.

Tar Heels will recognize a lamentable weakness in Dr. Cook's story. He says the last signs of life he saw was a bunch of rabbits, as they disported themselves about a glacier. As all North Carolinians in general, and the good people of Chatham county in particular, will at once realize, this is a most extraordinary rabbit tale. Your well regulated rabbit is a vegetarian, and as there are no turnips and parsnips in the region of the pole, no rabbit would think for a moment of abiding there. This is a part of Dr. Cook's story that may only be explained upon the theory that they have a carniverous [sic] breed of rabbits up that way, such as the Washington Post is most familiar with.

Rabbit Lore #13 (1910)

2007-09-29T09:27:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1910 FEB 23, "Chatham Rabbits":

From the News and Observer.

Rabbit is the principal diet of Chatham's connoissuers and epicures. No rabbits are shipped from Pittsboro because the fastidious people of that county seat get their beauty and many other good qualities from a diet of rabbits. The best cooks have ninety-seven different ways of cooking the rabbit, and the animal is so good in each way that when Pittsboro folks go away from home they carry enough rabbits to give them at least one a day while they are gone. They have been known also to carry a broiler and to be found by their hosts broiling a rabbit in their room after they thought everybody else had retired. They do not understand how anybody can prefer canvas-back ducks or Lynnhaven bays to the succulent Chatham rabbit.

Rabbit Lore #12 (1882)

2007-09-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

Washington POST, 1882 OCT 18, "Protection in North Carolina" (from ProQuest Historical Newspapers):

John Gubbins in the Raleigh News.

The season is approaching when hares and 'possums will be plentiful, and when large quantities of this species of game will come pouring into Raleigh by the Chatham wagons. Now, I have a splendid 'possum dog, and brother Jim, he has a good dog for rabbits, and his boys are cute, too, in setting rabbit gums. But it is a well-known fact that Wake county rabbits and 'possums are much shyer and harder to catch than Chatham rabbits and 'possums, and besides, they are scarcer here than they are in Chatham.

Now, Mr. Editor, I think these facts will justify me and brother Jim in asking the county commissioners to levy a tariff on Chatham rabbits and 'possums to enable our dogs and Jim's boys' rabbit gums to complete with these foreign rabbits and 'possums, which I think would produce some revenue to the county, if it did not amount to prohibition. At any rate, it would enable us to declare a larger dividend on the products of our dog and rabbit gums. It is true it would raise the price of rabbits and 'possums to the consumers of those delicacies to, perhaps, double what they now have to pay, but it is necessary that individuals must suffer for the general good. Indeed, brother Jim thinks the higher the tariff the commissioners should lay on Chatham 'possums and rabbits the cheaper they would be in the Raleigh market. I don't know how that is but if the argument will hold water, pleaes use it in inducing the county commissioners to grant us the relief asked for.

The Irrepressible Levi Poe (1906 - 1910)

2007-09-25T16:04:00.000-04:00

As told by the Chatham RECORD...

1906, OCT 25, "Notice":

Notice

I will be in Pittsboro on Thursday, November 1, 1906. All that I hold papers against will be there to settle with me, as I shall be there only one day. After that day the papers will in 'Squire Burns' hands for collection. Please don't ask for any more time.

I have 80 young mules that I want to put out on twelve months' time, good papers, better than I have brought to the county.

B.B. Wagner.

1906 NOV 22, "$25 Reward":

$25 Reward

I will pay $25 for the arrest and delivery to the sheriff of Chatham county of Levi Poe.

He is a tall white man, about 26 or 27 years old, spare built, no beard, light colored hair.

B.B. Wagner,
Pittsboro, N.C.
November 22nd, 1906

1907 MAY 2, "Local Records":

Sheriff J.R. Milliken received a telegram from Norfolk Tuesday stating that Levi Poe, a young white man of this county who is wanted here for disposing of mortgaged property, had been arrested and would be held until sent for.

1907 MAY 9, "Superior Court":

The May term of Chatham superior court began on last Monday. The judge is Hon. Robert B. Peebles, who arrived on the train after 1 o'clock on Monday and opened court as soon as he had dinner.

[...]

State against Levi Poe was a novel case, the first of its kind we have ever known in this county. He had been indicted for disposing of mortgaged property, and when the case was called for trial his attorneys insisted that he was insane and could not plead to the indictment. The following issue was then submitted to the jury: "Has the defendant sufficient mental capacity to understand his defense?" After hearing the evidence the Solicitor said he would not resist a verdict for the defendant, and the issue was answered "no," and the defendant was ordered to be sent ot the hospital for the dangerous Insane for treatment.

1907 MAY 16, "Commissioners' Meeting":

The county commissioners held their regular monthly meeting last week and audited the following accounts:

[...]

Chas. B. Wright, for conveying Levi Poe from Norfolk to Pittsboro .... 40 45 [$40.45]

1907 MAY 23, "Local Records":

Mr. Levi Poe has escaped from the hospital for the dangerous insane at Raleigh, whither he was carried at the last term of our court.

1907 SEP 26, "Local Records":

At last May term of our superior court Levi Poe, of Hickory Mountain township, was sent to the department for the criminal insane at Raleigh, from which he escaped shortly thereafter and returned home. He had been having all right until a few days ago when he again became violent and dangerous, and made desperate resistance when deputy sheriff James T. [illegible] and a posse went to arrest him. He not only tried to kill them but also tried to kill himself before they could secure him.

1907 NOV 7, "Local Records":

Levi Poe, a young white man who was put in jail here about six weeks ago to await trial on the charge of disposing of mortgaged property, escaped from jail here last Tuesday night by breaking the lock to his cell with a cold chisel which he had secured in some way and forcing an entrance throught the ceiling of the building.

1907 NOV 21, "Local Records":

Levi Poe, who escaped from our county jail two weeks ago, was captured last Saturday at Raleigh and was returned to the insane department at the penitentiary, from which he escaped several months ago.

1907 DEC 19, "Local Records":

The irrepressible Levi Poe has again escaped from custody, being the third time in less than six months. Last May he was sent to the criminal insane department of the penitentiary, from which he soon escaped. In October he was arrested in this county, after a desperate struggle, and confined in our county jail, from which he soon escaped. He was again arrested at Raleigh last month and returned to the penitentiary, from which he escaped last week and with him three others.

1908 AUG 19, "Superior Court":

The August term of Chatham Superior Court was held last week for the trial of civil actions only ....

[...]

The next case tried was that of H.G. Kime against L.N. Womble, which was a suit for the value of a horse alleged to have been bought of plaintiff by Levi Poe, who gave a mortgage on it and then sold it to the defendant. There was a good deal of evidence as to the identity of the horse, as to whether the horse bought by the defendant from Poe was the same on that had been mortgaged to the plaintiff. The jury decided that it was the same horse and rendered their verdict in favor of the plaintiff for the amount of $100. The moral, or lesson, to be learned from this suit is to be careful with whom you trade horses and to be sure that there is no mortgage on the horse you get.

At this point, Levi Poe seems to disappear for some time from the pages of the Chatham RECORD. Chatham County marriage records show Levi Poe, age 24, marrying Eula Jones, age 20, at Hickory Mountain Baptist Church on August 15, 1909, John R. Blair, J.P., officiating. His parents are listed as James W. and Anna Poe, while Eula's are deceased. Then Levi and Eula make one final appearance in the newspaper:

1910 FEB 16, "Levi Poe's Suicide":

From a Jacksonville, Florida, paper of February 2nd, we copy the following account of Levi Poe killing himself:

"Taking deliberate aim with a 44-calibre Colt's revolver held tightly clutched in right hand, Levi W. Poe, a young white man 25 years of age, sent a bullet crashing through his heart yesterday afternoon at 3:30 o'clock.

The tragedy took place on a vacant lot on Myrtle avenue, only a short distance from Kings road and there were no witnesses to the suicide.

Having grown despondent over a nervous affliction, and having battled with odds against him with fickle fortune, Poe calmly and deliberately planned his self-destruction without giving the slightest intimation to the few friends he had here, or to his wife, that he contemplated putting an end to his life.

Poe came to Jacksonville in August, accompanied by his wife, from Goldston, N.C.

The couple had just married and with light hearts and a future that seemingly had much happiness in store for them they came to Florida to live. But all did not go well with Poe and his young bride. He soon lost his health and day by day he saw what money he had gradually dwindling away.

Recently Poe was driven to the last extremity, and through the kindly offices of a friend he secured the position as an attendant of an old invalid gentleman that resided on Kings road. His wife secured the position of assistant house-keeper at the Duval county experiment station. With the small stipend that each received they managed to keep the wolf from the door. But as the days wore on Poe's heart grew heavier, and yesterday, having reached the breaking point, the young man put an end to it all by snapping out his life.

How long Poe had planned to end his existence is not known as he appeared, or tried to appear, to the friends he had made since coming to this city, and to his wife, as being in a hopeful and happy mood. It is said that Poe could have obtained financial aid from his parents who are reputed to be well off, but this he persistently refused to do.

Yesterday afternoon at three o'clock, Poe walked into the grocery store of R.D. McCormick, at the corner of Myrtle avenue and Kings Road, and after chatting a few moments, walked from the store. That was the last seen of him alive. Five minutes later a pistol shot was heard, and on an investigation being made the lifeless body of Poe was found lying in the center ofa vacant lot adjoining the store he had just left. In his right hand was clutched a brand new 44-calibre Colt's revolver. The bullet had done its deadly work, for Poe did not move, nor did he utter a word after the shot was fired.

There was no farewell message, no note, nothing left by the suicide to his wife or relatives telling them why he had committed his rash act. But it was known to all who knew him -- he died because he could no longer withstand the disappointments that seemed to completely engulf him."

Love Rabbit (1906, 1907, 1909, 1913)

2007-09-23T10:35:00.000-04:00

If there's one thing that rabbits know about, it's love. Thus the old saying, "[love] like rabbits." So what better place to start digging an archaeology of the heart than the county where bunnies once ruled? Back in those days, folks did some things differently, especially in the area of getting started on marriage earlier in life. But other things never change, and there's plenty of that old familiar heartache to go around. I selected the following RECORD excerpts mainly because the couples (for better or worse) somehow selected each other.

The Daughter of John W. Griffin and Charles Young ("Local Records", 1906 Dec 27)

On Christmas eve the fourteen-year old daughter of Mr. John W. Griffin, of this township, eloped with Mr. Charles Young, formerly of Durham but who has been running a saw-mill near here for several months. They drove to Sanford and thence went by train to Durham to be married.

Man Marries Son's Widow ("Local Records", 1907 July 11)

Did you ever hear of a man marrying the widow of his son? There is a man in this county who married his deceased son's widow, and is the stepfather of his own grandchildren. Such a marriage brings about a medley of mixed kinship. For instance, the children of such a marriage are the uncles and aunts of their half-brothers and sisters!

A Night in the Forest ("Local Records", 1909 July 21)

Mr. and Mrs. J.W. White, an aged couple who live near Rocky river, about 7 miles from here, were taking a ride in a buggy one evening last week when some part of the harness broke, and both got out of the buggy to fix it. While they were at work on the harness, the mule in some way got entirely loose from the buggy and dashed off into the woods. Mr. and Mrs. White followed, and after vainly trying for some little time to catch the mule they attempted to return out to the road to their buggy, but soon found they were lost, in the woods. It being then dark, they concluded it better to stop where they were and spend the night than to ramble about in the woods. Mrs. White when asked how she fared through the night, said being very tired she pillowed her head on her husband's bosom and had a very good night's rest, though the night was cool and Mr. White had no coat and she no shawl or wrap.

Maggie Waters and James W. Pearce ("Chathamite's Romantic Marriage", 1909 September 29)

Special to News and Observer.

Greenville, N.C., Sept. 21. -- A romance that started from an advertisement in the News and Observer last March, concluded in a marriage here this afternoon. The parties to this romance were Mr. James W. Pearce, of Chatham county, and Mrs. Maggie Waters of Pinetown, Beaufort county. Mrs. Waters advertised in the News and Observer for a position as governess and Mr. Pearce answered the advertisement. From this a correspondence arose between, followed later by an exchange of photographs, a courtship by mail and finally a proposition to meet at a given point. The place of meeting agreed upon was Greenville, and both Mr. Pearce and Mrs. Waters reached here yesterday. They then met each other for the first time, and found no occasion for disappointment on the part of either. They decided to get married here and the ceremony was performed at Hotel Mason this afternoon by Rev. J.H. Shore, pastor of the Methodist church. Mr. and Mrs. Pearce, with the latter's little daughter, left on the 6:20 train for Raleigh, and from there will go on to the home of the bridgegroom near Siler City.

[Our congratulations are extended to the happy couple and we wish them much happiness. ED. RECORD.]

Josie Hammock and Benny Pegram ("Local Records", 1913)

June 11: On last Monday, about 7 o'clock p.m., Mr. Benny Pegram and Miss Josie Hammock left here in a carriage for Durham, where they were to be married, so it is said. Both are employed in the hosiery mill here, which seems to be a favorite place to promote marriages.

June 18: The couple that ran away from here on Monday of last week returned on last Saturday with a marriage certificate showing that they had been married at Richmond, Virginia. They first tried to get a marriage license at Durham, but could not succeed because of the youth of the bride, she being only fifteen years old. They went then to Raleigh, but could not get a license there, and therefore to Richmond. They are residing at the residence of Mr. S.G. Gunter.

Mamie Bounds and Henderson Cole, Jr. ("Secret Marriage Announced", 1913 June 25)

On the night of the first of last November there was a marriage at this place that was kept a secret until last week, when it was made public by the parties thereto. The couple were Mr. Henderson Cole, Jr., and Miss Mamie Bounds, both of Wilmington, and the announcement of their marriage was made last week in the Wilmington papers.

On the night of November 1st they arrived here on the train from Moncure and applied to Mr. John W. Johnson, our register of deeds, for a marriage license. He was at first doubtful about issuing the license, fearing that the lady was not eighteen years old, but she and the expectant groom insisted so earnestly that she was nineteen years old that he decided to take the risk and issue the license. They went to the residence of Squire Robert M. Burns, who with impressive manner soon married them, the witnesses being Sheriff Lane, Mrs. R.M. Burns and Miss Myrtle Siler.

The happy couple requested that their marriage be kept a secret until they were ready to announce it, and so well kept was their secret that nobody here knew anything about it. The groom was a student at Elon College and the bridge a stenographer in the office of the Southern Express Company at Wilmington, and they did not wish their marriage made until he graduated and she was afraid of losing her position if her marriage was known. They met by appointment here because, as they said, this place was so retired and quiet they thought that their marriage could better be kept a secret here than elsewhere.

The Gilbert-Gill Affair ("Local Records", 1913)

July 9: A few days ago a warrant was issued by N.J. Wilson, a justice of the peace of New Hope township, for the arrest of J.E. Gill, a Wake County man, for eloping with the wife of W.W. Gilbert, formerly of Wake county but recently employed by Kelly Bros., saw-mill operators in New Hope township. Gill is a married man and is said to be well connected and possession some property.

July 16: Mention was made in these columns last week of a warrant having been issued in New Hope township recently for a man named J.E. Gill for abducting the wife of one W.W. Gilbert. After Gill's arrest in Wake county the woman came back to her husband who thereupon refused to prosecute Gill and asked that the warrant be dismissed, which was done for lack of evidence.

Betty Henderson and Ernest Petty ("Local Records", 1913 August 6)

- On last Sunday morning Ernest Petty, the 16-year-old son of Stephen Petty, of Hadley township, and Miss Betty Henderson, the 15-year-old daughter of Mr. Hiram Henderson, were married, both parties having the written consent of their parents when they obtained license from Register of Deeds Johnson on Saturday. The same day the couple were married the father of the young woman was drowned, as mentioned elsewhere in this issue.

- On last Sunday afternoon, Mr. Hiram Henderson, of Hadley township, started from his house on foot to a neighbor's and nothing later being heard of him, a searching party was organized to look for him. His tracks were seen as far as Dark's ford on Dry Creek which was greatly swollen all day by the heavy rains on Sunday morning. Monday morning his dead body was found on a fish-trap about half a mile below the ford which he is supposed to have entered not known how deep it was.

Ernest and Betty enjoyed 45 years together. Hiram and his wife, Bettie, lie not too far away.

"Chatham Citizen Shot." (1908)

2007-09-18T21:54:00.000-04:00

[Image of St. Leo's Hospital, Greensboro from the North Carolina Collection's North Carolina Postcards digital collection.]

What is the line that takes a man from "Citizen" to "Blockader"? Last week's post "Chatham Blockader Shot" told the violent story of the "noted blockader of Bear Creek township named John Cheek," who ran afoul of the sheriff of Moore County over 1500 gallons of illegal beer. Armed with a Winchester rifle, Cheek fired on the sheriff and his deputies; himself shot, he lay wounded under guard while the sheriff went for help.

A scamper six months ahead in the Chatham RECORD reveals no follow-up on the fate of John Cheek. But something does turn up from five years before. It raises some interesting questions about the blockader John Cheek (1908 July 29):

Chatham Citizen Shot.

From the Greensboro Record.

John Cheek, of the Bear Creek neighborhood, Chatham county, is a patient at St. Leo's Hospital suffering from a gunshot wound received at his home one night a week ago, his brother having mistaken him for a burglar and fired upon him, the load of buckshot taking effect in his thighs.

Mr. Cheek's residence had been robbed the night before and he and his half-grown brother were out in their yard watching to see if the burglar would return. After being on watch for several hours, Mr. Cheek handed a double-barrelled shotgun to his brother telling him he was going into another part of the yard and would return the same way. Instead of doing so he went around to the kitchen door and just as he reached it his brother blazed away, thinking he was a burglar.

His injuries are quite serious, but he is reported to be getting along very well and will probably be able to leave the hospital within in the next few weeks.

The account of the 1908 incident tells a lot about its own John Cheek in a few sentences. In a tense situation, he puts the weapon in his younger brother's hands, relays the plan, then botches it. For this mistake he gets the long bloody journey to Greensboro, and then a recovery. What does he think about as he lies in St. Leo's? Does he laugh for what a fool he was? Does the trauma harden his character?

Then, in 1913, a notorious criminal by the same name opens up on the sheriff and deputies at the site of his distillery. For this work he abandoned a wife and family back on the farm in Chatham. Did he die from his wounds in 1913? If he had, the RECORD would have mentioned it, and editor London taken the occasion to lecture on temperance and stronger laws against beer. But while his crimes in Moore County generate newspaper copy, they could also put a man on ice somewhere far away.

Knowing what we know, no one can blame the Rabbit for asking. Did the guy who was hit by buckshot as a young man, turn to the life of an outlaw? When cornered by the police, did the friendly-fire victim of five years before flash PTSD and open up with his Winchester?

The Rabbit confesses to blogging today with only fragments of evidence that neither indict nor clear 1908's John Cheek of brewing contraband beer and assaulting the police in 1913. I'll tell you a secret, rabbits occasionally take time to pursue other pleasures besides blogging, considerable though the latter be. See the postscript to this post for my research if you're interested in that kind of thing. But for now, certainty requires more -- a middle initial, a name for the brother, another exploit of the "noted blockader" in the RECORD.

And that's really the point of today's post. We can't know the answer to the questions that we have without digging deeper. But if you've read this far you must want to know. I do. These discoveries plot two points for a story to connect, and seeking and liking connections helps make me human, er rabbit. Our kind are weak for sweet story, the gooey nougat of narrative that makes for rich mind candy. I openly, actively, unabashedly root for the two John Cheeks to be the same guy. But I'll enjoy it best if I do everything in my power to prove they aren't.

History happens both inside and outside. At some levels it sweeps but at others it shuffles, and the little inducements lead to the critical moment that changes everything. We know that John Cheek the blockader lived outside the law. In one view he's a two-bit thug, dangerous when cornered, a hard man and a bad man. In another he's a soldier and a casualty in the War on Booze that culminates in Prohibition and the rise of gangster life in America. Which in turn feeds into the present-day global boondoggle called the War on Drugs, seems to the Rabbit.

In my original post I recommended the story to "action fans" and thereby reduced its violence to a cartoonish interpretation. A rabbit should respect more ... these are life and death affairs, not zany madcap adventures, no matter how arch the RECORD's coverage, or febrile the rabbit mind. Descendants of either John Cheek may live in these parts, and descendants of that notable family indeed do [see item B below for more on the Cheek family]. Stories don't have to be respectful but they can be. Despite last week's take on "Chicken Eats Flies" this is not some southern grotesque thing we're doing here. It's the story of the place where we live and it's complicated.

POSTSCRIPT

Just for fun, let's list the pertinent facts in these two pieces, and consider how to follow up in the documentary sources. First of all, there's one main fact driving this post -- each incident involves a John Cheek of Bear Creek township. So beginning with a name a place and the dates around 1900 and 1910, census records might help to identify possible John Cheeks.

Next, the main points from the 1908 piece. 1) The incident occurred at "Mr. Cheek's residence." The phrasing strongly implies that Mr. Cheek lives as head of a household, but does it also suggest that he owns the land? Here consult land records as well as census. 2) His "half-grown brother" shot him. Seek any evidence showing a John Cheek with a brother "half-grown" in 1908. 3) Cheek received treatment in St. Leo's Hospital, which is in Greensboro. These days hospitals notify police when treating gunshot wounds. Was the same true in 1908? Did the police take a report?

Finally, from the 1913 piece. 1) He was a "noted blockader" and "a fugitive from justice." So the RECORD may yield more about his exploits 1909-1911, and a rap sheet might turn up in the criminal records. 2) He operated in Moore County, so look for connections there. 3) He "abandoned his wife and family", so consult marriage records and keep an eye out for wives and children in the record. 4) He "owned a very good farm," which takes us back to the deed books.

Having no ready access to census records right now, I've pursued fewer of these avenues than I'd like. And as a rule, the directive "Ask Some People" always holds; of course oral history could probably do as much for this inquiry as anything. But there follow a few follow-ups.

A) I consulted Cemetery Census, which is a remarkable resource if you don't know about it. Great care goes into the extensive listing of names, dates and inscriptions from cemeteries around Chatham County. It goes without saying that I can't vouch 100% for the accuracy of data from an online source, but it must be very close to exhaustive, and it's highly usable. Listings there show that there could have been multiple men named John Cheek active in Bear Creek for several generations, including the period in question. Somehow, the inscription "noted blockader" doesn't appear on any headstones. In short, the cemetery listings do support the possibility that the 1908 and 1913 John Cheeks are entirely different John Cheeks.

B) As to the connections to Moore County, they exist in number. The name of Cheek is a very old and distinguished one in both Bear Creek and Moore County. Cheeks took land grants along the Deep River in Moore and Chatham; they stood and fought as Regulators; and they propagated and prospered throughout the counties of Moore, Chatham, Orange, and elsewhere. See this extremely well-researched genealogy web site for some of the big picture, and this page of it for an example of a John G. Cheek (1801-1892) who migrated to Chatham County and lies with his wife Jane in an eponymous cemetery in Bear Creek. Chatham Deed Book AD 276-277 [pdf's] also designates a "John Cheek of the County of Moore" who acquires land on Tyson's Creek that had been granted to Robert Cheek. This John Cheek may be a grandson of Robert Cheek of Moore County; see here under "2. Richard CHEEK". A John Cheek with the dates 1811-1897 lies at Bear Creek Baptist Church.

To stress again the prominence of the Cheek family in the county, I'll add that Chatham County 1771-1971 lists "J.D. Cheek" among the founding members of Siler City Mason's lodge No. 403 [p. 314]; a J.D. Cheek (1826-1912) is buried at Brush Creek Baptist Church in Bear Creek township, and a Mason's insignia adorns his headstone. A Mason insignia likewise marks the grave of Joe J. Cheek (1870-1928), who lies at Bear Creek Baptist Church.

C) A deeds search turns up of a handful of John Cheeks buying land in Bear Creek at varying rates and amounts in the relevant time frame. Again, nowhere does the text solve our problems by referring to any of them as a "notable blockader".

D) Legal actions would have fallen under the jurisdiction of Moore County, though records may exist.

E) I don't have the Chatham RECORD from 1909-1911 but this story has convinced me to fill the gaps on my next visit the NCC Microfilm Collection. More stories could turn up on the "noted blockader" and other intriguing topics. Let's just say John Cheek has become a person of interest in the Rabbit's pantheon.

Justice, Chatham Style

2007-09-13T13:49:00.000-04:00

Rabbit's post "Chicken Eats Flies" was so good I had to respond, in a way.

In reading that old standby "Chatham County 1771-1971" I came across this tidbit. There were four courthouses built in Pittsboro. The first was moved from its original location south of town to downtown proper, where it remained as a store until burning down in the 20s. The next two were so shoddily built they didn't last. Here is the story of one of them, from the book:

The second courthouse, also constructed of wood, was so flimsy that during a dramatic moment in a trial being held there, a strong wind blew off the roof. All the jurors, spectators, witnesses and court personnel were so frightened they fled, leaving the judge and defendant. The judge is reported to have found the defendant "not guilty," saying, "He stayed with me when all others fled and I will stand by him."

About this time the jail burned and the county commissioners decided to build a new courthouse and jail, this time of brick.

This story is so good it deserves a follow-up. I'll report more when I can track down contemporary court records and get a comment from Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour.

Update: From Judge Baddour, in the comments:

As to the defendant in that particular case, I can find no reference to it in the Court of Appeals. I suppose the State did not appeal, jeopardy had attached and the matter was not continued due to the sudden emergency; a not guilty, or more properly, dismissal by the court for failure to prosecute, is the remedy.

Fiddlin' (1908, 1914)

2007-09-13T06:53:00.000-04:00

With a modern-day "old-time" fiddlers' convention taking place at Shakori Hills in a week, the Rabbit takes notice of similar events in 1908 and 1914. Nothing has turned up so far on fiddlin' in 1906-7 or 1912-13, other years for which I have copies of the RECORD. Gotta love the use of archaic spellings in the first two items. If anyone knows anything about the musicians named below, drop me a line at the email address in the sidebar.

1908

July 8, "Local Records". We are requested to announce that "Ye olden tyme fiddlers' convention" will be held here next Tuesday night (the 14th) for the benefit of the Methodist parsonage. Many old time fiddlers are expected to be present and play the old familiar tunes. Admission 25 cents reserved seats 10 cents extra.

July 15, "Local Records". Ye old tyme fiddlers' convention, held in the school auditorium last night, proved to be quite enjoyable to the audience in attendance despite the threatening weather. Nearly a dozen musicians participated in the contest, one of the instruments used being a banjo and another an autoharp the rest being the genuine old-fashioned 'fiddle and the bow.' The first prize was awarded to Mr. O.T. Williams, of Rock Rest township, the second to Mr. J.P. Taylor, of Columbia, Texas, the specialty prize to Mr. L.H. Sanders, of this township, while to our musical townsman, Mr. W.B. Hartson, fell the booby prize. The success of the entertainment (the proceeds of which went to the Methodist parsonage) is largely due to the efforts of Mr. Walter G. Jerome.

1914

May 13, "Local Records". At the fiddlers' contest held here last night Bosier Williams won the first prize of $5, and Has Hackney won the prize of $2 as the best banjo picker.

Deep River is Deep and Wide (1908)

2007-09-13T06:50:00.000-04:00

Follows up on "Lee Takes Egypt", (April 8, 1908):

A magistrate in this county was requested, a few days ago, to marry a couple in Lee county. Deep river is the dividing line between the two counties, and they proposed to stand on the Lee county bank and let the magistrate stand on the Chatham side and perform the ceremony, but he correctly decided that they must also be in Chatham.

Erasing the Stone Tape

2007-09-12T11:17:00.000-04:00

"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time."

--Willem de Kooning

Once upon a time, a sturdy house sat overlooking a creek in Pittsboro. Sandwiched between the public buildings on West Street and Pittsboro Elementary School road, it was roughly a three acre slice of 19th Century Chatham county. Built around 1838, it was originally known as the William Hardin Home. When I first saw it, it was called the old Rectory, and its date with oblivion had been set.

In 1946, however, it was the setting for a treacly ante-bellum tale of ghostly lost love. The 26 April issue of The Chatham Record recounted the story told to them by W.B. Morgan:

"The daughter of William Hardin dashed joyously down the steps of the new mansion high on the hill. Down the steep, winding path she ran, pausing for a moment to wave to someone below. The moonlight splashed on her golden curls and her full white dress, fashioned in the ante-bellum style, appeared to float about her as she ran to the boy who stood beside the big stone at the door of the spring-house. The boy, Phillip Jones, a successful young Chatham County planter, seemed in the grip of some mysterious, unreal force as he watched the lovely girl. 'Why you're just like an angel,' he said. 'Promise that you will always stay the way you are tonight!'

'I promise,' she answered shyly.

Suddenly her hand fled to her left side and she swayed for a moment, and Phillip in alarm moved to steady her.

'It is nothing,' she said quickly, 'Perhaps I ran too fast to meet you, and then, too, I'm so happy to think that I, Helen Randolph Hardin will next month, June 1839, become the wife of Mr. Phillip Jones.'"

I would transcribe more, but already have tunnel vision from this syrupy mess. It's just not worth full-blown diabetes. For your sake as well as mine, I'll hurry through to the end: the girl dies in her sleep that night from a heart attack, presumably brought on by having to deliver such lengthy exposition. The lad, grief stricken, sees her luminescent apparition coming to meet him as he waits to keep their appointment by the creek the following night.

The article goes on to cite Scotland Scurlock as a later witness of Ms Hardin's phantom. Scurlock told William E Brooks, a later owner of the house, who was also able to find collaborative accounts of this haunting, though he himself had no direct experience.

You and I, dear reader, can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this reputed local haunting. Even if unimpeachable witnesses testified to seeing something float down to the creek and vanish on those moonlit nights in June, it is beyond reason to call that strange vision the persistence of Ms Hardin's earthly personality.

But let us, for the sake of argument, or for the sake of blogs needing posts, stipulate both: a young girl died, and her ghost was seen.

A generally accepted theory (reserving all rights, of course--there are many who consider any such theories to be idiotic) of explaining such repetitive, non-interactive "hauntings" is called the "Stone Tape." Essentially, it allows that, for whatever reason, our environment is capable of "recording" highly emotional events, and "replaying" those events under similar atmospheric conditions. Was there something about the Hardin House, or the creek, still extant, or the rocks and water that define that creek, that could have somehow captured the movements of this girl? Could her unfulfilled desire have made such an impression?

(We would do well, at this point, to remember Charles Fort's take on such explanations: "I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.")

In the 1990s, the Hardin House, by then known as the Rectory, was bought by RAFI. Their worthy goal was initially to restore it to use as their offices. Too late they realized the impossibility of ever making the structure compliant with ADA requirements. They graciously offered the house free to anyone willing to move it. My wife and I toured the house, admiring the broad wall planks and floorboards. We went underneath and marveled at the enormous white-pine sills, just as we had the wood pegs that held the ancient roof together. We couldn't move the house, despite our efforts, and it was dismantled. Months later I saw pieces of it for sale in an Asheville architectural antiques store.

In a way, it was just as well. The house was so clearly part and parcel of the land on which it was situated. To move it, though the more desirable option, would have obliterated that context. It's gone forever, not to be retrieved.

And I don't doubt that, because the environment was so profoundly altered, Ms Hardin's apparition ceased to manifest itself. Even ghosts must sense when they're not wanted.

We imply permanence by saying that something is "written in stone." But headstones, and stone tapes, can be erased. Because this town, this area, and its inhabitants have traditionally only been "land rich," we are forever trading our magic beans for cows. What little historical and natural assets we have continue to be devalued and sold off, because we have neither the will nor the resources to preserve them. I wonder, as the bulldozers and backhoes ply their trade along the 15-501 corridor, what other tapes are being erased as I write, and as you read. Many of us know the price of what we've sold, but few know the value.

"Chatham Blockader Shot." (1913)

2007-09-11T22:05:00.000-04:00

[The Rabbit samples stories from past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. See description of Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, version 2.0.]

Here's one for the action fans. Also, fans of moralizing, finger-wagging condemnations (an H.A. London specialty. June 4, 1913):

Chatham Blockader Shot.

On Monday morning of last week a noted blockader of Bear Creek township named John Cheek was shot and captured in a raid by Sheriff Blue and deputies, of Moore county, about 10 miles northeast of Carthage.

The officers had known of the existence of this still for a long time, Cheek having negroes to run it for him and seldom going near it. The still was of eighty gallons capacity. Fifteen hundred gallons of beer were at the still when it was captured.

When the officers came upon the still Cheek and a negro were found there. They immediately retreated and began a running fire with the raiders. Cheek was armed with a Winchester and the two officers were equipped with pistols. After the running fire had continued for some time Deputy Sheriff Phillips brought Cheek down with a bullet wound through the right leg just above the knee. After overpowering the distiller Sheriff Blue went back to Carthage for a doctor, leaving Phillips with the wounded man for an hour and a half.

Until a few years ago Cheek was considered a hard-working, law-abiding man, owning a very good farm, but for some time he had been mixed up in the blockading business, had abandoned his wife and family and was a fugitive from justice. His present trouble is but the logical outcome of his career and is but another illustration of the truth that when one becomes involved in the illicit manufacture of whisky sooner or later he will have to suffer for it.

Wonder what they did with the 1500 gallons of beer? Anyway, times sure have changed -- these days the Sheriff hangs out where they make the beer, without shooting anyone. I note for the record that it looks like a sweet tea he has there. On the other hand I can say unequivocally that this blog owes its existence to legal beer.

"Chicken Eats Flies." (1913)

2007-09-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

[The Rabbit samples stories from past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. See description of Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, version 2.0.]

The Rabbit has long harbored a diabolical scheme by which I capture the world's imagination by passing off a sample of my own prose as the first two paragraphs of a long-lost Flannery O'Connor story. But I must abandon my dreams today, for I realize that I could never do any better than the following, from the RECORD of June 11, 1913:

Chicken Eats Flies.

Our venerable townsman, Capt J.J. Crump, has a pet chicken that he is raising on flies, and the chicken seems to enjoy its diet. The captain is so disabled by the wound in his leg received at the battle of Reams' Station that he walks with much difficulty and spends much of his time seated in a large armchair on the sidewalk in front of his room. One of his amusements is killing flies with a fly-swatter, at which he has become an expert, and the chicken stays near his feet and watches the movements of the fly-swatter with much interest and quickly seizes and swallows every fly that is hit.

It is quite amusing to see that chicken watch the fly-swatter and pounce upon the smitten fly. It is very tame and does not become frightened at the approach of strangers.

As in an O'Connor story, the thing one loves must be lost forever within two weeks, no more (June 25):

Pet Chicken Dead.

We regret to announce the death of the pet chicken of Capt. J.J. Crump, of this place, mention of which was recently made in these columns. It is not known whether too large a consumption of flies was the cause of death. To console him for the loss of his pet the captain has adopted another pet chicken which he is also feeding flies, and it is hoped that this diet will not have the same fatal results as on the former chicken.

(Honest, I wrote all of this post up to here before I read on Wikipedia that when she was five, Flannery O'Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards. Or that her chicken appeared in newsreels around the country and she said, "That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. It's all been downhill from there." You have no reason to believe this, I know. But it's wondrous true.)

High Strangeness: The Four-Footed Tribe

2007-09-11T06:42:00.000-04:00

I was gratified to receive an email from a reader yesterday which sent me scampering through a thicket of North Carolina folklore.

Down near Robeson creek, so the story goes, a witch once lived back in the woods, on the creek that runs by Johnny Burke road. Two hunters were out in this area long ago, and one shot a deer. The blood trail led them back into the woods to a tiny house. There they saw a little old lady, sitting on the porch in her rocker. To their horror, she had a gunshot wound in her upper right chest area--exactly where the deer was hit. My correspondent heard this story as a child, some 40 years ago, and it was already old news then.

It was instantly familiar to me, however, and after some searching I found my friend Roger Manley's "Weird Carolinas," which put me on the right path.

It's worth noting that deer were a rarity at this time, before some well-meaning people (no doubt related to those who thought planting kudzu would be a good idea) re-introduced them after Jordan Lake's completion. (We can thus conclude that deer should be considered fair game either because of paucity or abundance.)

The story of the unfortunate witch is reminiscent of a romantic explanation of how Daniel Boone found his future bride by wisely refusing to shoot a blue-eyed "deer" during a nighttime fire hunting excursion.

There are also echoes in the legend concerning the fate of Virginia Dare. Spurning an Indian suitor, she was turned into a white doe, and later killed. (It's impossible not to recognize an unsubtle example of white female exceptionalism here; an inverted riff on Public Enemy's "too black, too strong"--"too white, too frail." What's the first white girl to do when surrounded by amorous savages? Change species!)

The albino deer, a convenient metaphor for Ms Dare's uniqueness, has much deeper roots in North Carolina Indian folklore about the "four-footed tribes." It was, if we are to believe what we're told, the chief of the deer tribe, and responsible for ensuring that hunters made proper atonement for their kill. As soon as a deer was hit by an arrow, he was there, and "asked the blood" on the ground if the hunter had made the proper apology to the victim. If not, the blood trail would lead to the murderer, who would then be cursed with rheumatism. To atone is to make ourselves "at one" with those we have injured, as witch woman suffers the wounds of her surrogate, or as hunter "covers up" the bones of the dead with offerings to appease the bereaved.

It pains me to conclude that, in all probability, the story of the Deer Witch Woman was calculated only to spook the crap out of an impressionable lad. "It scared me that day in the woods," my correspondent confided, "especially when [my friends who told me] took off running like they just seen the little old lady." But that story, told by children, is a variant on stories told about the first colonists, even older stories told by the aboriginals who co-existed with them, and ancient stories told before humans ever set foot in this wondrous land of Caroline, as our collective ancestors scratched curious images on sacred rock walls and explained the world, one to another.

[I'm always on the lookout for Chatham strangeness--folktales, ghost stories and the like. Email me with yours: pborowest@yahoo.com]

Who Defaced the Chatham Confederate Monument?

2007-09-10T19:23:00.000-04:00

[This post follows up on a 3-part series about the Chatham Confederate monument. The image of the "Negro Domination" headline is taken from a special "Supplement to the Chatham RECORD", published November 3, 1898.]

Late summer 1907, Pittsboro, North Carolina. The week after the Winnie Davis Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a reunion of Confederate veterans some 300-men-strong unveiled the Chatham Confederate monument before a crowd of six thousand, someone defaced it with shoe polish and grease. I wrote a three-part series on the monument project, the unveiling and the defacement, and posted it late in August and last week. Since then I've had the opportunity to discuss the incident with some highly informed readers.

In part 3, I had placed an emphasis on the possibility of the defacement as an act of protest, performed by an African-American who saw the statue as an overt symbol of racial inequality. I also suggested in passing that the defacement might have been a result of disgruntlement with Henry London, or resentment toward the unveiling event. My correspondents suggested taking the idea of disgruntlement further to encompass something that everyone who participates in elections in Chatham comes to know at some level -- animosities related to local politics. That's right, it's like the guy who held up the "Buck Funkey" sign at the January, 2004 court house protest. Except different, because not just goofy and personalized, but racial and broad.

As I wrote in part 1 of the series, the monument was a very public project of Henry A. London's. London was a staunch Democrat who relentlessly used the pages of his newspaper to taunt the Republicans, Populists and those who fashioned the Fusion coalitions of the previous decade. One way to get back at London would be to desecrate the statue that he had placed so much fund-raising and editorial effort upon.

Furthermore, London used race as a political wedge wherever it would be effective. He had learned the lessons of 1898 well. He learned them as a participant; in the "Local Records" section of the RECORD of September 24, 1898, he wrote:

A friend at Wilmington has sent us a copy of the negro paper at Wilmington, dated August 18th, in which is published that vile and infamous libel on the poor white women of this State. We would be pleased to show this paper to any and all persons who will call at the RECORD office, and they can see for themselves that it is not "a democratic lie."

Here he references the infamous editorial, purportedly by Alexander Manly, which appeared in the Wilmington DAILY RECORD. Manly's assertion that some relations involving white women and black men were consensual (see the excerpt here) lit the fire under the powder keg of the "white supremacist summer" of 1898. After the Red Shirts staged their racial insurrection in Wilmington, London wrote (November 17): "WILMINGTON is once more ruled by respectable white men and all her citizens are now safe and secure in their lives, liberty and property. Peace prevails ...."

The drumbeat of race and the hammering of the Fusionists continued through London's career. Perhaps because he didn't want to offend the Populists directly, or possibly to marginalize them, London focused his haranguing fire on the Republicans. Still, in October of 1906, leading up to the election before the unveiling of the memorial, London looked into his heart and wrote:

When the Fusion gang had charge of our county they appointed negro school committeemen in charge of schools for white children, and this was endorsed by the present Republican candidates. What do the white men of Chatham think of this?

One of my correspondents assured me that Populist sentiment ran high in the county. Democratic sympathies would have been concentrated in Pittsboro, where Mr. Pittsboro himself, London, developed a personal and professional relationship with Democratic kingpin Josephus Daniels, publisher of the Raleigh NEWS & OBSERVER. Populists thrived in the other parts of the county (according to my correspondent). There the smaller farmers developed their political consciousness via the Farmer's Alliance. They briefly forged their coalition with the Republicans and took power before the race scares of 1898 broke it up. The RECORD's relentless taunting must have galled them considerably.

With this background, perhaps it makes more sense to suggest that a Populist aimed the racially-charged vandalism of the memorial directly at London and the RECORD. Or perhaps the target was more broadly the Democratic elite, whom the shoe-polish phantom saw embodied in that figure posed in the center of Pittsboro. Along similar lines, it could have been a scalawag. Or as one of my correspondents suggested, it could have been some teenagers who got into their father's corn liquor.

But the simple fact is, I was probably wrong in my original estimation. The act was too swashbuckling to be a statement about racial (in)equality. As I said in part 3, lynching was not a common practice in Chatham at the time, but the fear of lynching or other horrific punishment would have persisted. An African-American caught on the plinth with a bottle of shoe polish in the dead of night could have paid for the transgression with his or her hide. A white Republican or Populist would escape with a night in jail, a fine and a stern finger-wagging from Henry A. London. It would have been unpleasant for a while, but a scant day or two later, the perp would have been on his way, enjoined to return for court week in a month or so. The incident might even have given the a certain lightness to his step on the way home.

High Strangeness: Against Tramping

2007-09-10T09:24:00.001-04:00

I admire my friend Rabbit.

He was kind enough to invite me to post on this blog. My desire is to inhabit a separate territory; my own section of pasture. In order to be a good, complimentary neighbor, I need only to stay away from Rabbit's strengths--"research" and "good writing" come to mind. It's a relief, really, to not take on such responsibilities.

My own niche will be a parochial overview of what the English charmingly call "high strangeness." Essentially, various anomalies have been visited upon the region and its inhabitants: ghosts, mysterious lights, a shower of blood. I will try as best I can to draft a psychogeographic map of Chatham's paranormal terrain, avoiding only the canonical and clichéd.

I need your help. Folklore, superstition, and rumor will be gratefully received and included in the topography. Email me: pborowest@yahoo.com

In honoring Rabbit's role as iconoclast, my first goal is to expose that appalling fraud known as the Devil's Tramping Ground. Noteworthy only in its lameness, let us agree to never mention it again.

If we allow the conceit that Old Nick has appeared in Chatham, he certainly doesn't waste his time kicking empty FunYun bags out of a crappy little circle of land outside Siler City. No; if anything, he would come visit us only to lay down, rubbing his temples, temporarily overwhelmed by the manifest ascendancy of his agenda worldwide. After recovering, he might indulge himself to polish, with long, deliberate strokes, the ready rifle of our Civil War Memorial. The "Our Confederate Heroes" epitaph must surely be the kind of subterfuge that would make his eyelids flutter, if only for a moment.

It cannot be doubted, if we stipulate his existence, that he merrily led the blasphemous parade on several occasions to the various lynching trees in town, up to the corner of Midway and Hillsboro, or down old Lockville Road, hooting on his pipe triumphantly.

But the Devil's Tramping Ground is dull, varnished with stupid. Away with it. We can do better. We have done better. Allow me, in the posts that follow, to demonstrate.

Maps and Plats of Chatham

2007-09-10T08:44:00.000-04:00

[This page collects references to maps and plat drawings of interest in this blog's studies. Plat drawings are PDF's borrowed from the Chatham County Register of Deeds database.]

[Plat_1_40], or Plat Book 1, Page 40: "Map Showing Boundary Lines of the Town of Pittsboro, N.C." A survey done by George Love, 1937.

[Plat_1_56], or Plat Book 1, Page 56: "Map of Pittsboro." A map drawn by surveyor R.B. Clegg [1890?].

[Plat_1_79], or Plat Book 1, Page 79: "Map of G.W. Blair's Farm, Pittsboro, NC, Surveyed Dec. 1943." Shows area now occupied by Central Carolina Community College and the soon-to-be Moore's Ridge development. Otherwise known among rabbits as "The West Pittsboro Delta" for the way US highways 87, 64 Bypass and 64 Business enclose it.

The Rabbit's Miscellany (2007 SEP 9)

2007-09-09T20:45:00.001-04:00

1) This blog changes. Today Chatham Rabbit proudly becomes a group blog. tommy yum's first post, written in ink derived from the fluid that collects beneath the rotting floor of the Patrick St. Lawrence House -- Pittsboro's glory, Pittsboro's shame -- immediately precedes this one. Some of you may know tommy yum as Tom Maxwell, whom I'm proud to call my friend and neighbor. With his post, Chatham Rabbit officially becomes a group blog, and I hope that the "group" part of that designation will grow over time.

2) Rabbit's not-so-secret identity. Tom points out that I have never revealed my true identity on the blog, though the information was available in my blogger profile. Thus I will confess to being Will Sexton, of Pittsboro. Twice a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, I do information technology stuff for Duke University Libraries, and in case my rooting allegiances aren't clear, let's just say I like this picture. I started this blog in July for reasons which I managed to articulate for the most part in the first post. Other reasons? I like telling stories, and I discovered a wealth of them in the research material for a documentary project that I started on the development boom happening in these parts. The theme of this blog is "change in Chatham County".

3) Reads the RECORD v. 2.0. Since I have anecdotal evidence that a few people may now on occasion read this blog, I should account for the fact that my previous explanation of the Reads the RECORD (version 2.0) feature was bloggered a month or so ago. So here's how it works. For a separate research project, I read and take notes on whole sections of the Chatham RECORD's run at a time. As I go, certain stories strike me as worthy of sharing on the Rabbit blog, and this I do in the recurring "Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD" feature, or "Reads the RECORD" for short. That's about it. Now that I've finished writing the lengthy series on the Chatham Confederate memorial, I'll probably return more often to the "Reads the RECORD" style of posting for a while.

4) More RECORD. Today I visited the North Carolina Collection and scanned a new range of issues of the Chatham RECORD. To be specific, I scanned the years 1912-1914. While scanning issues from this period, when the RECORD ran as four pages, I scan the leftmost four or five columns of the inner two pages, where the editorial and the "Local Records" sections lay. Here is where most of the topical information on the county appears in the RECORD of this period. The rightmost three columns usually contain advertisements and a few public notices.

I'll likely return to the NCC and scan the years 1915-1918 in the near future. My reasoning for selecting this range relates to my own larger research objectives; these years represent the height of the Good Roads movement in Chatham County and elsewhere in the south. The upshot for Chatham Rabbit is that items will appear from this period in the "Reads the RECORD" feature and elsewhere.

The Yellow House, and What You Can Do With It

2007-09-09T11:08:00.001-04:00

There is a movable wall in the Patrick St Lawrence House, which, when lifted and hooked into place horizontally near the ceiling, opens two normally separate parlors into a main room large enough for an 18^th Century dance. This, along with exotic wood balusters, newel posts and enormous window sills, is one of the many features of the “Yellow House” that nobody gives a shit about.

If, for some reason, you’ve read about the house on a local historical site, you’ll know to hang a left onto Chatham from South Street, then a quick right between two other historic houses nobody gives a shit about, into a new-ish parking lot. If you know where you’re looking, or if it’s Fall and the trees are bare, you can see the Yellow House on the left, dolefully rotting away in its third and possibly final location.

Keen students of history—hand wringers all—know that the Yellow House was built in 1787, the year that Pittsboro was chartered. It was constructed by the obscure and suspiciously flamboyant Patrick St Lawrence, who distinguished himself by marrying a wealthy widow. Building the house bankrupted both himself and his contractor. He fled somewhere and died somewhere else. We can’t be concerned with him. He was a Mason.

The house wandered around Pittsboro for a couple centuries, starting in the northwest corner of the Courthouse lot, then spending some time south of where the jail used to be, and finally ending up at the end of South Street. It’s been private residence, an inn and a tavern, a boarding house, and, in its latest incarnation, a white elephant. In 1984 its epitaph was written by the National Register of Historic Places. It’s now the oldest house in the county, if you care about that kind of thing. It sure is taking a long time to go away.

Frankly, the Yellow House is kind of an embarrassment.Because it’s falling apart on government property, it can’t be quickly mowed down like Betty Bell’s old mansion on West Salisbury. No, there it sits, free to whoever can afford the $100 grand to move it.(Somebody better show up quick, because there are plans for that space.) The County is so aware of the house’s value that they let the Historical Association, after much mewling, barely raise enough money to fix the leaky roof. Town employees refrained, by all accounts, from throwing black walnuts at the men who made the repairs.

It’s well established that the house is old and in the way. But the main problem with the Yellow House is that it’s, well…you know, not like other Chatham county houses. It’s not a plain, sturdy farmhouse. It’s ostentatious and big, and was designed for having dances and socials. It has “architectural details:” elaborate chair rails and the aforementioned hinged wall and exotic woods. It was originally painted bright yellow.

Do I have to come right out and say it? It’s the gayest historical landmark we’ve got.

So, what’s to be done with this leaky, gay behemoth? The County could take a page from it's own book with respect to history management: let developers bulldoze it and name the fake-ass little village that sprouts there “St Lawrence Place.” If the house still had its chimneys (which it doesn’t—do you know what a pain in the ass those things are to move?), then those could be kept, restored and left standing as a monument to the developer’s reverence for history.

But that will never happen.Local government can’t participate so obviously in the free market. If the Yellow House is going to fall down, it had better be quick about it, and reduce the surplus population of local historical money pits. Haven't there been enough pictures taken of it? We all know what it looks like.

Until such time as the house is dismantled or mysteriously implodes, and if you love the smell of mildew or have a fondness for water stains, you can get the key from the town manager and see the Yellow House for yourself. If you fall through the rotting porch floor the Town cannot be held responsible. You might, once you see the enormous green double doors on the second floor that used to open onto the veranda, fall in love with the place. If so, congratulations. Pittsboro needs another foot soldier in the Pyrrhic Wars.

Rabbit Lore #11 (1913)

2007-09-09T09:19:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1913 JAN 15, "Chatham Rabbits Electrocuted":

From Raleigh News & Observer,

The electrocution of one hundred rabbits Tuesday morning on the lot of the Buckhorn Power company's property is a Chatham rabbit story that former Representative R.H. Hayes, tells with full comprehension of its astoundingness.

The superintendent of this transmission company has been greatly worried by the Chatham rabbits, which have made depredations upon his cabbage patch and utterly annihlated his prospects for food. Last week set "hollows" for them, but the rabbits demurely dodged the dead fall. It made him mad, and built an expensive barbed wire fence about the patch. The wires pulled together so ingeniously that when Brer Rabbit bounded up he got stuck and when he started to crawl through the barbs harpooned him. The Buckhorn superintendent then threw the electric current into the wires. Tuesday morning the rabbits, making an effort to escape, jumped against the fence and were shocked to death. One hundred were found by the fence that morning.

How Chatham County Got Its Name

2007-09-07T00:24:00.001-04:00

The story goes that the slave found the huge diamond while working the mines, then cut a wound in his calf to make a place to hide it. From the mines of Parteal in south central India he escaped to the seacoast, where he offered the stone to an English sea captain in return for passage to a free country. The captain agreed, then set sail, took the diamond, and flung the slave into the ocean.

The captain sold the 410-carat piece to a prominent diamond merchant named Jamchund. But how could fate permit the murderous captain to live well? He took to drink and dissipation, lost his mind and hung himself. A rabbit who studies the affairs of humans gets used to tales of pointless cruelty, but with this one, perhaps one of you can explain to me ... why not just give the slave his freedom?

In December 1701, the gems dealer Jamchund approached the "President of Fort St. George", or the British colonial governor in the Indian city of Madras, and offered to sell him the large diamond. He asked for a sum approaching £85,000, but the governor knew his way around a deal. He had made his fortune on the Indian seas as an interloper, or a rogue trader, operating in contravention of the East India Company's legal monopoly. Then he parlayed that wealth into property that granted him a seat in the House of Commons. The influence that he gathered to himself and his reputation as a savvy trader compelled his old nemesis, the East India Company, to charge him in his present position. The governor passed on purchasing the diamond and the dealer departed.

Jamchund returned in February to offer the stone again. The governor and the dealer haggled until the price came down to £20,000. The governor's son returned with the stone to England, where a two-year project of expert cutting produced a flawless 136-carat brilliant. Relieved of his post in Fort St. George, the father returned to England and became so paranoid about possessing the diamond that he never showed it to anyone or slept under the same roof two nights in a row.

In 1717 the financier John Law brokered a deal to relieve the former governor of the burden of owning the finest diamond in Europe. The sale to the French regency netted £135,000 whereupon the stone became known as the "Regent". Louis XV wore it on his crown for his coronation, then took to wearing it on his hat. Marie Antoinette wore it and Napolean Bonaparte, after taking the title of First Consul by coup d'etat, hocked it to the Dutch for funds to consolidate his power and finance an adventure or two. He later redeemed it and set it in the hilt of his sword. It resides now in the Louvre.

It's a good story, but what's it doing here? What's its relationship to the clay backroads and rustic farms of Chatham County, North Carolina? Shouldn't rabbits concern themselves with the most delicious lettuce in the fields, rather than the finest crown jewels of Europe?

After its cutting the diamond was known as the "Pitt", for Thomas Pitt, the colonial governor who acquired the stone and made a fortune from it. With that profit, he established his family's enduring fortune. Thomas Pitt's eldest son, Robert -- the one who shepherded the stone back to England -- sired William Pitt, a prominent Whig politician and British statesman. William distinguished himself in two ways: first, as a savvy architect of British empire, and second as a staunch supporter of leniency, though not independence, for the colonies in America. In 1766, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, he took the title Earl of Chatham, created especially for him.

Thomas Pitt was as self-made a man as any in Great Britain at the turn of the 18th Century. The wealth he gained early in life earned his family a seat in the House of Commons. Still, it's doubtful that his grandson would have reached the levels of power and influence that he did without the fortune brought to the family by the sale of the Regent diamond.

In December 1700, not long after the diamond turned up in the mines of Golkonda, Englishman John Lawson set out to explore the Carolina backcountry. His journey carried him up the trading paths that connected the Yadkin River Valley to the Eno. He praised the region highly, and the map that appeared in his 1709 account labeled the area between the Deep and Haw Rivers as "no poor Land here." Of his visit to a Native American village in the area now Hillsborough, Lawson famously declared, "The Savages do, indeed, still possess the Flower of Carolina, the English enjoying only the Fag-end of that fine Country."

Over the following decades, drawn by the perfume from that flower, European settlers nibbled at the edges of the area of what's now Chatham County. They came along the trading paths to the northwest or up the Cape Fear and then past its confluence with the Haw. By mid-17th-Century a handful of households stood within the area that was then southern Orange County. The place always presented challenges to travelers. Crossed by several prominent rivers prone to flooding, rocky and bypassed by the trading paths, it attracted a rough-and-tumble sort. No surprise, then, that these industrious and hardy farmers joined the Regulator movement that protested the corruption and unfair land management practices of the colonial government.

In November of 1768, the month after William Pitt resigned as Prime Minister, a group of men from around the border between sprawling Orange County and Cumberland County to the south got together and wrote a petition. To the governor of North Carolina, William Tryon, they argued:

[T]he petitioners live at to [sic] great a Distance from the Several Court houses Occasioned by the great Extent of Orange and Cumberland Counties Several Rivers frequently unpassable by Reason of freshes &c. To the great hinderance of Juries Election and general Musters for which we are liable, to fines if we do not appear, &c. We therefore pray that as Several Counties of less Extent have been divided for like Reasons that a New County may be laid out which we pray may Begin where Johnston and Orange meet Cumberland and with a North Course 12 Miles thence West 42 miles thence South 34 miles thence Est [sic] 42 miles thence North to the Beginning ...

Two years later, in December 1770, the Assembly introduced "An Act for establishing a New County between Campbleton and Hillsborough, by taking the Southern Part of the Inhabitants of Orange County, and by erecting the same into a distinct county, by the Name of Chatham County, and St. Barholomew Parish." A few months later, the bill passed, and within weeks, the Regulator movement ended in the bloody Battle of Alamance Creek.

But the new county had come to be. No doubt the Assembly were trying to tell the Regulators something by naming it after that advocate of indulgence, leniency and forebearance -- but not independence -- for the colonies, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. In 1781, the county seat of Pittsborough was established and named after William's son, William Pitt the Younger, who had just himself entered the House of Commons. William, however, did not inherit the earldom of Chatham, which went to his eldest brother, John Pitt. On the latter's death in 1835, the title became extinct.

One more thing to know about William Pitt the Elder. He was enormously popular as a politician, but when he gained the seat of Prime Minister he accepted his earldom and held a gala event in London. At that instant his popularity dissipated. It doesn't do for a Whig to act a Tory, as William's grandfather Thomas would have told him, and probably did. William earned a new name for his family, but a generation later, and Chatham was gone from the peerage. What can we say? Thanks for the name, William!

Sources

Dalton, Cornelius Neale. The Life of Thomas Pitt. Cambridge: The University Press, 1915.

Lawson, John. A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof. And a Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel'd Thro' Several Nations of Indians. Giving a Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, &c. London: [s.n.], 1709.

Streeter, Edwin W. "The Pitt or Regent," in The Great Diamonds of the World: Their History and Romance. London: George Bell & Sons, [1898?].

Wheatley, Henry B. "Precious Stones: A Chapter in the History of Personal Ornaments." The Antiquary XIII (1886), 152-157.

The Correspondence of William Tryon and Other Selected Papers. Edited by William S. Powell. Raleigh: Division of Archives and History and Division of Cultural Resources, 1981.

Chatham County, 1771-1971.

Davis, et al. "Map of the study area locating Occaneechi Island, Occaneechi Town (Fredricks site), and Upper Saratown." Excavating Occaneechi Town. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998.

Wikipedia articles accessed September 5-7, 2007:

Image of the Regent diamond hotlinked from "Diamond, known as the 'Regent'", Louvre web site.

Image of William Pitt borrowed from "Secretary Pitt", the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The Monument: Chatham's Confederate Soldier

2007-08-26T13:35:00.002-04:00

[Update September 5 -- the third part of the monument series is finally completed. Other topics coming soon.]

Last week, a notable Chatham centennial came and went, as far as I know, with little or no fanfare. Thursday, August 23, marked the hundred-year anniversary of the unveiling of the Confederate memorial that stands in front of the Chatham Courthouse. The dedication ceremony represented probably the last sizable reunion of the county's Confederate veterans. The Rabbit has for some time planned a series of posts to mark the event, explain the origins of the monument, and discuss it as a symbol. But personal matters made posting difficult last week.

Here, then, is the Rabbit's Confederate memorial series, which consists of three parts and relies mostly on accounts from the Chatham RECORD.

The Monument 1: Project. Discusses the efforts primarily of the Londons, Henry and Bettie, to raise funds for the monument (posted August 26).

The Monument 2: Event. Chronicles the event of the monument's unveiling (posted August 29).

The Monument 3: Symbol. Discusses the defacement of the monument just after its unveiling, and the symbolism of Chatham's and other Confederate monuments over the years (posted September 3).

Who Defaced the Chatham Confederate Monument?. Follows up on "Monument 3: Symbol" with comments based on correspondence with readers (posted September 10).

The Monument 3: Symbol

2007-08-26T13:35:00.001-04:00

[Part 3 of a 3-part series that includes The Monument 1: Project and The Monument 2: Event. See also the follow-up to this post, Who Defaced the Chatham Confederate Monument?]

As far as I know, the person who put blackface on Chatham's Confederate monument a week after its unveiling never was caught. To be honest, I can't say that it was blackface. It's just a hunch; for one thing, Henry A. London rarely if ever shrank from itemizing the heinous and lurid deeds of humankind for the Chatham RECORD, but his report of September 5, 1907 pulls up curiously terse:

Monument Defaced.

On last Monday night was perpetrated one of the most disgraceful acts of vandalism ever known in a civilized community. On that night some person or persons defaced the monument recently erected in front of our courthouse in memory of Chatham's Confederate soldiers. The defacement was made with black shoe polish (a bottle of which was found near the monument next morning) and with grease. After several hours of hard scrubbing most of the shoe polish was removed, but still a few streaks remain on the monument.

Of course such an outrage aroused great indignation when discovered next day, and the county commissioners as soon as they met promptly offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of the guilty person or persons. Such an outrage is a misdemeanor and is punishable by fine and imprisonment, and every effort will be made to detect and punish the guilty party as he deserves. We regret to know that our county is disgraced with the presence of any human being mean enough to commit such a despicable act.

There follows the commissioners' reward notice:

REWARD!

The board of county commissioners of Chatham county hereby offer a reward of $25 for the arrest and conviction of each of the persons who, on last Monday night, defaced the Confederate monument erected in front of the court-house of said county. S.W. HARRINGTON, Chairman, September 3rd, 1907

A search of the RECORD for the fifteen months following turns up no report on the capture of the perpetrator. The likelihood of a corroborating account with more detail seems remote, but the Rabbit promises to keep the eye on one side of his head open for one. Still I can't help but think that the event that left H.A. London, for once in his life, bereft of descriptive powers must have breached some taboo. And in 1907 North Carolina, an act with the transgressive power to turn Henry London mealy-mouthed may well have touched on the matter of race.

To be sure, lacking details, it lies beyond the Rabbit's ken to say exactly what symbolic statement the vandal intended. With no spraypaint in 1907, the perpetrator may have merely used the shoe polish to scrawl "Matthews Township RULEZ!" on the granite. Was it simply a person, white or black, who hated the pretensions of the statue, the overbearing pitch of the London fund-raising drive, or the pomposity of the previous weekend's unveiling ceremonies? Could the gesture have come from someone whose ax was stolen or porch peed on during the weekend of celebration?

Or was it truly a racially-charged act, done by an anonymous dissident making a point about apartheid in the era of Jim Crow? Given the risks to a person of color, who in that community would have done the deed? If the perpetrators never did get caught, they either kept mum about it -- which, given the public nature of the gesture, seems unlikely -- or they confessed only in circles tight enough that no one betrayed them for $25. There hadn't been a lynching in Chatham for some time, and London, who vehemently opposed the lawlessness of lynching, would not have countenanced it. But African-Americans would have known that the person, if caught, would be in for a heap of trouble.

Furthermore, can we even say that the blacks of 1907 Chatham saw a potent racial symbol in the Confederate monument? Was there clandestine organizing; what affairs of race did the members of the African-American community discuss when they met privately? What were their private thoughts about the memorial, the cult of the Lost Cause, and its connections to the Jim Crow regime? Unfortunately, the marginalization of African-American voices of the county limits us to nibbling at the edges of these questions.

Whatever the particulars of the defacement, it must have stung Henry London deeply, given his and Bettie's personal investment in the statue as a project. For London and his contemporaries, the movement to memorialize the Confederacy represented a sweeping, nationwide project to sanctify the remembrance of the American Civil War. A carefully-shined sheen of racial harmony illuminated their world view. Recall the words of Chief Justice Walter Clark, speaker at the memorial dedication, when he addressed the graduating class at St. Augustine in 1920: "The colored people do not wish social equality, and the white people would not tolerate it, and there the matter ends.".

But let's not kid ourselves regarding the integrity of that veneer; the cracks were there. One of the more chilling comments that the Rabbit has read in the RECORD comes from the "Local Records" section of May 31, 1906:

The colored pastor (C. Campbell) of the A.M.E. Zion Church, near here, has requested THE RECORD to deny a report that he has advised his congregation not work for the white people. On the contrary he says that he has always tried "to promote peace, Christian fellowship and happiness" between the two races, and has always met the approval of the best white people.

Whatever underlying fissures may have prompted the item, we may never know, but it hints at something larger going on under the surface. An imbalance in documentary evidence tips any question of race in Chatham County 100 years ago decisively to one side of the color line, where Henry A. London's voice dominates. So it may help to explore the question along a line from London himself to a place where a statue like Chatham's had clear racial resonance.

London had become a mainstay at veterans' reunions around the state and national reunions in places like New Orleans and Richmond. In October of 1906, during the height of the fund-raising drive for the Chatham memorial, London traveled to Oxford, the seat of Granville County, and gave an address at a Confederate veterans' reunion there. He called it "one of the pleasantest that it has ever been our good fortune to attend." The Governor of N.C., Robert Glenn, also spoke at the event. Less than three years later, in June of 1909, Granville County would erect its own Confederate monument. It stood then in the center of the main intersection of Oxford and was built to resemble Chatham's in several of its particulars.

As it happens, the Confederate monument at Oxford figures in the story that Tim Tyson tells of the racial murder in Oxford, North Carolina in his book, Blood Done Sign My Name [see Chapter 7, "Drinkin' That Freedom Wine"]. The story centers on the death of African-American Henry Marrow, killed by whites in 1970. Tyson writes of where, in his view, the monument stood both literally, and in the figurative realm of the town's racial politics:

The old Rebel soldier in the town's main intersection was more a monument to white supremacy than to the Confederacy and in 1970 most whites either liked it or simply did not think about it. But neither white supremacy nor the Confederacy had always unified the white population. The monument's appearance in 1909 had marked the consolidation of the new social order of segregation and the establishment of a new degree of racial solidarity among whites, who had been deeply divided by the Populist upheavals of the late nineteenth century and the changing politics of race in the decades after the Civil War.

Tyson tells of the 19th-Century Fusionist alliance of poor white farmers and blacks that put African-Americans in office in county and municipal governments, and white Populists and Republicans in control of most of the state government. He relates how the elections of 1898 returned power to Democrats following an intense summer-long campaign of white supremacy. Unsatisfied with their electoral gains in November, the white supremacists then marched their Redshirts or stormtroopers into Wilmington and seized control of the city's government by force.

The Rabbit may in time relate the events of the white supremacist summer of 1898 as they unfolded in Chatham County, but in the end Chatham and the rest of the state saw the apartheid era of Jim Crow take its hold. North Carolina all but led the way for much of the rest of the South to mimic the disfranchisement of African-Americans and segregation of schools in the coming years. Tyson sees the movement to memorialize the Confederacy as part-and-parcel; he writes of the monument in Oxford that the "tall bronze figure testified to the entrenched power of the new social order, standing guard in front of the courthouse for the next sixty-five years -- until the next revolution in racial politics came to town."

The killing of Henry Marrow set off that revolution in Granville County, and on the day of Marrow's funeral, Golden Frinks, a civil rights firebrand from eastern North Carolina, led a march from the cemetery to the Confederate monument at Oxford. Frinks told Tyson, "I saw that Confederate monument and I thought it was a good time for this. There was something in the core of these black people's psyche that carried a little racism that is still there, but they can't see it." Addressing the crowd that gathered around the Confederate monument, Frinks used it as a symbol of the repression that they had so long known.

Frinks, the veteran SCLC warrior, spoke about the meaning of the old Confederate's vigil in the center of town. The monument needed to be moved, he said, "because it's a stigma, because it stands for hundreds of years of a repressive period -- slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, bigotry, and all of that complicity of keeping a people down. But we ain't staying down no more," he declared. Years later, Frinks told me how he had waved his broad hands to the assemblage and leavened the fiery rhetoric with humor: "I talked about that man, this old Confederate soldier, how he hadn't been the bathroom since 1865, and it was time for him to come on down now and get some relief."

With Golden Frinks we see at least one proponent of racial equality in 1970 who looked at the memorial of a Confederate soldier and saw a racial "stigma," and a symbol for Jim Crow. Frinks used ridicule and mockery -- bathroom humor, even -- to bring that figure low. Was there something in the core of the black people of Chatham in 1907 that "carried a little racism?" Did one among them try to dispel it with ridicule and mockery for the Chatham statue?

A movement to erect Confederate memorials swept North Carolina and other parts of the country in the decades around the turn of the century. Attitudes have changed since then, not least those regarding race. The monuments now lie at the center of debates about the role of race in American society, and stand implicated by one side in undeniable crimes of racial injustice. The debate that swept over Oxford on a wind of deadly violence moved the monument itself; it now stands off the center of the town, in a small park near the library.

An opposing view sees the monuments as well-intended war memorials. In this view, the linkages to race are overblown, products of Civil-Rights-era revisionism, and political attacks upon well-intentioned caretakers of Southern heritage. Mainstream supporters of public display of such symbols of Southern heritage unflaggingly maintain the rhetoric of honor that resonates in London's ideal of "perpetuating the memory of the heroism and self-sacrifices of the Confederate soldier." For them, if race ever was a part of it, it shouldn't be now.

This point of view may be heard across a whole spectrum of voices, including one as rarefied as that of Louis Rubin, Jr., former professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill and founder of Algonquin Books. In the Chapel Hill News of June 16, 2000, Rubin penned a column titled "Of Statuary, Symbolism, and Sam" and lamented that "our community may soon be embroiled in a dispute over whether Silent Sam, the Confederate memorial statue on the UNC campus, should or should not be hauled down." Rubin, arguing that the community should leave the statue be, emphasizes its symbolic value as a war memorial:

The statue of Silent Sam, however, is another matter, as are the multi-hundreds of similar statues of Confederate soldiers on courthouse lawns and other public places throughout the Southern states. Sam is the product of another and different time, when thousands of white-bearded old men wearing grey uniforms were looking forward to their approaching oblivion. They wanted their place in time to be marked.

Rubin does not acknowledge the coincidence of Jim Crow with the widespread movement to erect the statues. His point of view, in fact, resembles London's. However, Rubin identifies the statues with race when he proposes a solution to the controversy-to-come over Silent Sam.

To return to the matter of Silent Sam, I would leave him exactly where he now stands. But I would also commission and erect another statue. It would be of that most remarkable of all 19th-century North Carolinians, the slave poet George Moses Horton, who was in and about our town at the same time that the young white college students of Sam's generation were.

I would place George Moses Horton's statue on the front campus, not far away from Sam's, both in clear view for all to see. I daresay that present and future passersby would get the point.

The Rabbit certainly cannot let the quote pass without remarking that the distinguished man of letters in Orange County would solve his place's problems by building a second statue of a Chatham man!

But when Rubin says that people "would get the point" of the two statues, what is the point? Simple; it's race. Rubin's approach divides the baby, in a sense. For those who argue that the Confederate monuments merely honor the southern dead in a manner , Rubin's proposition must represent one of the worst compromises. After all, to ameliorate the linkages of racial injustice by juxtaposing a second memorial selected along racial lines serves to confirm those linkages rather explicitly. The only act that could create a more racially-charged ground around the statues would be to ... well, let's just say a modern vandal could use spraypaint.

So we inevitably come to the question of what, if anything, we in Chatham should do with our Confederate monument. After all, I brought it up, and so I should either address the question, or scamper around it.

Let me caution the reader that rabbits are iconoclasts. For pete's sake, we leave pagan fertility symbols in the hedgerows for Christian children to find on Easter morning! Just ask Elmer Fudd about us (though I daresay Elmer has had our number in Chatham). If I thought it would release the hold that race still has on our politics and society to put the plinths through a rock crusher and melt the figures down into (non-commemorative) door knockers, I'd take that bargain in a heartbeat. But it won't, and I do sympathize with the unattributed quotation employed by London: "A people who forget their dead deserve themselves to be forgotten." And I will admit, Chatham, iconoclasm aside, I have been touched by the monuments that you put up for my brethren and sistren slaughtered over the years (see the rabbit icons in the sidebar to the right).

Now, rabbits don't solve problems, at least none that extend beyond "too many vegetables in the garden." But I think that "Rubin's juxtaposition" doesn't take the solution far enough. In the Rabbit's estimation, plain and simple, the monument no longer belongs at the center of civic affairs in the county. I think it should be moved, to a dignified memorial park where it can reside with memorials of a wide variety of origins. I also support making explicit the linkage to race by balancing the Confederate soldier with a memorial to those who fell victim to the scourge of slavery and the divisions of racial apartheid.

We could, of course, select Rubin's choice, "that most remarkable of all 19th-century North Carolinians, the slave poet George Moses Horton." But while Horton lived a slave, he died a freedman. And besides, we have a school named for him already. Further, we can choose to honor someone who died in the long and continuing conflict for racial equality. Four names stand out: Jerry and Harriet Finch, John D. Pattishall and Lee Tyson. They were victims of a lynching in Chatham County in 1885, stripped of freedom and denied justice, taken from the jail in the Chatham Courthouse to a spot a mile south, and hanged. Their story will have to wait for another day on the Rabbit blog. But in our new and dignified memorial park in downtown Pittsboro, let's raise a monument to them, and to all the victims of slavery and racial apartheid when it reigned in Chatham.

So where is this dignified memorial park of which I speak? Where are the funds for this memorial? They don't exist. The Londons and the Daughters of the Confederacy raised money for the statue and succeeded because they managed to convince enough people that it was important. Would enough people feel the same way about our memorial park, set within a few blocks of the courthouse? As I said, a rabbit doesn't solve problems. Community, I leave the matter to you.

Meanwhile, as we think it through, it's safe to say that the monument that Henry and Bettie raised in the center of things ain't going anywhere. May I suggest that in the time being, we let it do double duty? Let the soldier continue to stand for the souls of Chatham who fought and suffered in the American Civil War. Think of it also as a memorial to those subjugated by the Jim Crow era in which it was born. Take it from a furry mammal who lays colored eggs in the spring -- symbols can mean whatever we say they mean.

The Monument 2: Event

2007-08-26T13:34:00.004-04:00

[[Part 2 of a 3-part series that includes The Monument 1: Project and The Monument 3: Symbol. The following account is based except where noted on the August 15, 22, and 29 issues of the Chatham RECORD, 1907.]

Clouds covered the sun all day on August 23, but it didn't rain like the day before. By ten o'clock that cool morning, thousands had arrived in Pittsboro by rail and wagon to view the unveiling of the Confederate monument. They streamed past houses decorated with Confederate flags and red-and-white bunting, and filled the town square on the north side of the courthouse, where chairs sat waiting for the ceremonies. In the hour leading up to the event, a brass band played from the portico of the courthouse.

The home of Henry A. London, a block-and-a-half from the courthouse, would have stood out among the houses trimmed for the occasion. London, Chatham RECORD editor and former courier with the Confederate army, would serve as master of ceremonies, and his wife, Bettie, dedicate the monument as president of the Winnie Davis Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In the window of the store owned by London's brother William a dummy stood garbed in the shopkeeper's old Confederate uniform; a hole in the front showed where a bullet passed through William's body at Winchester, September 1864. Some 300 veterans milled among the crowd of 6000, and doubtless many of them could give evidence of the wounds that war left them.

The veterans gathered on the south side of the courthouse at 10:30 and began marching behind John R. Lane, "the last colonel of the famous 26th North Carolina regiment," who rode on horseback. The six-year-old grandson of William London followed Lane on a "Shetland pony not much larger than a Newfoundland dog." The procession headed northward up Hillsboro Street to the London home and there emitted a "rebel yell" for the day's guest orator, the Daughters themselves, and the children who would disrobe the statue. Then they marched back toward the courthouse and mounted a four-foot high stand to await the speakers.

Rev. A.H. Perry, himself a veteran, said a prayer, and then Henry London introduced the orator. North Carolina Chief Justice William Clark had what the Rabbit would call a "small-p populist" approach to the issues of the day. Clark ran as a Democrat but won support from Populists and Republicans. He attacked the tobacco and railroad trusts and supported reforms such as popular election of U.S. senators, income tax and women's suffrage. The "Fighting Judge" [article available to JSTOR subscribers] stirred up controversy as he labored for "socialized democracy" with a fervor that presaged the New Deal. Yet for his audience of Lost-Cause warriors on the day of Chatham's unveiling ceremony, he tucked into a states'-rights stemwinder to warm whatever cockles pulsate in the heart of a modern-day Southern Strategy Republican.

The hopes of our perpetuity as a government and the maintenance of our liberties as a free people depend upon upholding this guarantee of the rights of each state, in its integrity. There are a few good men who panic stricken at the result of the war of 1861-5 have declared that "state's rights died at Appomattox." Nothing is farther from the truth. [...]

It is true that there is the fourteenth amendment which was passed solely (if indeed legally adopted at all) to secure the rights of the newly emancipated colored people. The monopolies and plutocracy of this country quickly seized upon it as a device to draw all jurisdiction of all questions concerning them from the state courts, whose judges are mostly elected by the people, and responsible to them, into the subordinate federal courts whose judges are in most instances selected by the great capitalistic combinations and hold for life. "Like sappers and miners," to quote the words of Mr. Jefferson, they have been at work night and day to wrest the fourteenth amendment into something very different from its true meaning, and to make it repeal both the tenth and eleventh amendments and, indeed, nullify the whole spirit of the constitution.

Should this succeed, there would be no longer use for state judges or state legislatures, and even the acts of Congress would be set aside at will by judges appointed for life at the selection of Wall Street.

Clark's reputation as a liberal and forward thinker on social and economic issues resonate still in the literature that recalls him. But he conformed to the damning social conventions of the time in his recognition of the color line. In 1920, Clark would deliver the commencement address at historically-black St. Augustine's School of Raleigh, and utter the following:

It is true that our colored people wear "the shadowed livery of the burnished sun" and there is no social equality between the races, but the latter condition exists in every country where there are two or more distinct races of people. The colored people do not wish social equality, and the white people would not tolerate it, and there the matter ends. It is not a matter of debate, but is settled and not a cause of strife like the divergence in language, in religion, in national aspirations which exists in nearly every other country.

The Chief Justice of North Carolina came to Chatham county for the unveiling of the Confederate monument and held forth with a populist-tinged but recognizable "states' rights" argument against the U.S. constitutional amendment that enfranchised African-American voters and guarantees due process and equal protection under the law. In the next post in this series, the Rabbit will draw a connection between the Chatham memorial and race, and some may protest. But let's make it clear -- the featured orator on the day of the monument's dedication put forward the very arguments that held fast against racial equality until the civil rights movement cut them down to size.

A good orator finds ways to connect whatever cause he or she is addressing to past causes that resonate with the audience, and Clark went all the way back the Regulators and the Battle of Alamance Creek:

In short, I hold with that grand old patriot, James Hunter, who declared after the battle of Alamance was lost, "I believe that the people are as much master now as ever." That was in 1771. At Mecklenburg in May, 1775, at Halifax in April, 1776, at Philadelphia in July, 1776, his declaration was taken up and repeated and its echoes have been rolling down the years ever since and will never cease.

Clark went on to speak in some detail discussing the history of the various companies in which Chatham's men served. The RECORD reports that he spoke for fifty minutes.

Following Clark's speech, Bettie London "delivered a few appropriate remarks" in her capacity as president of the Winnie Davis Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Oran A. Hanner, a veteran of the 26th Regiment, made "an appropriate response" on behalf of the veterans. The RECORD did not reproduce their remarks. Then it was time for the unveiling.

Twenty children dressed in white, each bearing a red shield with the regiment and letter of a company in which Chatham men served, tugged red streamers attached to the top of the statue. The white covering "began to fall gracefully, first exposing to view the bronze soldier and then gradually the entire monument." London goes floral describing the audience reaction:

A cheer from the upturned faces and the "rebel yell" from the veterans greeted that bronze figure as it was first seen, standing there as a silent sentinel with his empty musket at parade rest. And then tears filled the eyes of many veterans and others as that life-like figure recalled to their minds the "long ago" with all its sad associations. The unveiling of that bronze soldier was like the raising of one dead, and like uplifting the shroud that covered the corpse of some loved one long since passed away!

A dinner followed for veterans in the corridors of the courthouse, then a meeting of the Leonidas J. Merritt Camp of United Confederate Veterans. The agenda included elections and the presentation by the Daughters of "crosses of honor" to selected veterans. Reading of verses, short speeches and then singing wrapped it all up, with the final number, "When the roll is called up yonder" echoing in the afternoon as the meeting adjourned.

London estimated the crowd at 6,000 strong and "only three men at all under the influence of liquor." He called it "the grandest occasion ever known in Chatham" and suggested that the crowd would have been larger if not for the threat of rain earlier in the day. In any event, some of the young people of the town took advantage of the gathering to socialize. The RECORD reported the following:

The dance which was given in the old Academy building Friday evening by the young men of the town complimentary to the visiting young ladies was largely attended and was one of the most successful affairs of the kind that has taken place here in several years. The music was furnished by the Chapel Hill string band.

No doubt some of the visitors left Pittsboro immediately following the ceremonies, but it's no stretch to imagine many of them remaining in town at least an evening, visiting with old friends, spending time together perhaps one last time. The Rabbit's imagination may be overstimulated in seeing a couple or two wriggling free from the chaperones at the Academy building where it stood on the corner of Chatham and Fayetteville Streets, and setting out for a stroll in the meadows beyond the Rectory two blocks southwest, or over to the groves of Kelvin off of West Street.

The RECORD had reported the day before on a comet "visible an hour so before daydawn in the sky a little north of east." In fact, Daniel's comet appeared for two months in the skies that summer. Maybe a handful of old friends stayed together reminiscing through the night, so they were awake in the early morning hours to lay eyes on the comet for the few minutes that it rode low on the horizon.

For those who attended the festivities, the occasion must have seemed a wholly right and appropriate way to honor the lives of the veterans and place a final, monumental blessing on their service and sacrifice. But there are two points worth considering before we leave the story on this idyllic, fraternal scene. First, one fact stands clear from the RECORD's account -- the events occurred on one side of the color line. The newspaper never failed to designate the African-Americans who figured in the life of Chatham with the "colored" or some other epithet, but not one reference to a "colored" person appears in the account of the unveiling. And second, the RECORD of September 5 makes it clear that not everyone in the county regarded the monument with the same reverence as London and the veterans. In the third and final post of the series, the Rabbit speculates wildly about lines that connect these two points.

[Detail of photograph of Daniel's comet taken from the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, Wisconsin, August 21, 1907. From Barnard, E.E. "Photographic Observations of Daniel's Comet." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 49, No. 194. (Jan. - Jun., 1910), pp. 3-16. Article available to JSTOR subscribers]

The Monument 1: Project

2007-08-26T13:34:00.003-04:00

[Part 1 of a 3-part series that includes The Monument 2: Event and The Monument 3: Symbol.]

The rain that drenched Chatham County on the afternoon of August 22, 1907 must have made for anxious times in the London house. The next day would mark the unveiling of the Confederate monument that stood now covered in white cloth, in front of the county courthouse in Pittsboro a block-and-a-half away. Henry A. London wrote in that day's Chatham RECORD that the "largest crowd ever assembled in Chatham was here at the veterans' reunion in August, 1888 ... [and i]f tomorrow (Friday) is a good day almost as large a crowd will be here ...." Visitors had already begun arriving in the town, and no doubt many called at the Londons' to pay respects. Talk probably edged into nervous concerns for the next day's weather.

Yet it almost surely mixed with congratulations and gratitude for the Londons as prime movers of the monument project. For years London, a Confederate veteran and editor of the weekly RECORD, had used the pages of his newspaper to advocate for the monument and solicit donations to the fund. No -- the words "advocate" and "solicit" do not do justice -- more like, harass, cajole, harangue and shame. London knew when folks were flush: "With cotton now selling at a good price contributions ought to be made promptly" (October 18, 1906). London appealed to guilty feelings: "Are not Chatham's soldiers as worthy of being honored as those of any other county? Why wait until all of them are dead?" (December 6, 1906). London called out the slackers: "The last contribution to Chatham's Confederate monument is one dollar by Mr. A.T. Womble, of Matthews township, a one-arm man. This ought to put to shame those two-arm men who are much more able to give and yet have not given one cent." (April 4, 1907). And London walked the color line; after a contribution of one dollar from a G.G. Smith of Fayetteville, London noted it as "the first that has been received from a colored person," and wrote (June 7, 1906):

He was born and reared in this county, near Haywood, and is now a teacher in the graded school for the colored race at Fayetteville, and is highly thought of by all who know him. In his letter sending his contribution (which was unsolicited) he wrote these words: "Gratitude demands that I give my mite to any cause that will perpetuate the glory of the old soldiers." This surely should stimulate our white countymen to contribute!

The real organizers and heavy lifters on the monument project, however, were the women of the Winnie Davis chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The former Bettie Louise Jackson, or "Mrs. H.A. London" as she was known in the pages of the RECORD, served as chapter president, and the London home served as a frequent meeting place. Bettie also joined her husband in hectoring the county from the editorial pages of the RECORD. On February 15, 1906, she expressed hope of unveiling the statue that coming August, and entreated her fellow countypersons in plaintive all-caps:

[N]ow we appeal to ALL to come forward and make up the balance right away. We know that all will give; but we want it NOW. WE ARE READY FOR IT. Or a written PROMISE for the amount to be paid in June.

Dedication to memorializing the Lost Cause brought Bettie renown and admiration; the RECORD on May 16, 1907 conveyed the following Fayetteville OBSERVER report on the recent Memorial Day parade there:

[W]hen the Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry reached the Highsmith hospital, on the decorated balcony of which sat Mrs. H.A. London, they halted and presented arms, then came the veterans, seventy-five strong, who raised their hats and gave the "rebel yell." Mrs. London acknowledged the compliment by waving a Confederate flag.

The fund-raising did not come easily in hard-scrabble Chatham, and the memorial project took longer than the Londons had expected. Target dates came and went, and the fund grew in dribs and drabs. By early summer 2006, it had languished for months, but a pair of fifty-dollar pops in April-May 1906 got it going again. One came from Dr. Isaac Emerson of Baltimore, inventor of Bromo-Seltzer and "a native of this county," and the other from American Tobacco Company attorney W.W. Fuller, a Durham transplant to New York, and "one of the most successful lawyers in the United States" [see this Endangered Durham post with photos of Fuller's since-demolished, gorgeous Durham manse]. With the balance at $1343.84 in October of 2006, London still complained that "in several other counties twice that amount has been raised in half that time for their soldiers." Even as the fund approached the target amount of $1600, London's edge of disappointment never dulled. In February of 2007, he wrote:

When the effort was started three years ago to raise money enough for the proposed monument many persons laughed at the prospect and predicted that even $500 would never be raised. Of course more should have been contributed [than] has been, but enough is now on hand to make certain that the required amount ($1600) will soon be raised.

Finally on July 19, 1906 the RECORD announced that the Daughters had signed a contract with Durham Marble Works, and threatened that the monument "will not be unveiled, but will remain covered, until every dollar due for it is paid." Nearly a year later, on July 4, 1907, the newspaper announced the date of August 23rd for the unveiling. The full moon would provide light for those traveling to Pittsboro, but also, it was one of four days of the year on which the Daughters could present "crosses of honor" to the veterans. By August 8 the monument at last stood in place, veiled in white cloth and awaiting the grand occasion of its unveiling.

As the day of the unveiling drew close, the London home became de facto headquarters of the Winnie Davis chapter of the U.D.C., who met frequently as the final plans for the unveiling ceremony took shape. The Raleigh drum corps, "composed of Confederate veterans, who were musicians during the war, ... said to be the only Confederate drum corps now in existence," committed to the program. A repair and paint job improved the looks of the courthouse. A dinner in the corridors of the courthouse was planned for the veterans.

Henry London devoted the editorial page of the August 22 edition of the weekly RECORD to framing the next day's events. Just a week earlier, he had announced the start of the paper's thirtieth volume, three decades over which "no other paper has been exclusively and continuously owned and edited ... by the same person." This former Confederate courier and longtime voice of the county took the moment to wax editorial:

The bronze figure, standing on this monument, will forever typify and call to mind the most magnificent soldiers who ever marched to battle in any age or country. In the ages to come that silent sentinel, standing with his empty musket at parade rest, will speak more eloquently than the glowing words of the impassioned orator, in perpetuating the memory of the heroism and self-sacrifices of the Confederate soldier. In a few more years the last of those whom he represents will like him, be at rest. Let posterity revere their memory so long as that bronze figure stands its silent watch!

It has been well said that "A people who forget their dead deserve themselves to be forgotten." It is eminently right and proper, therefore, for the people of Chatham county thus to honor the memory of their Confederate heroes.

So it rained buckets that day, and the paper ran an item announcing the deaths of the snare and kettle drummer from the Raleigh drum corps. The Londons probably worried, as any organizer does the night before the grand event. But these setbacks would not have blunted the underlying sense of satisfaction with which both Henry and Bettie lay their heads down that night.

Their efforts of three-and-a-half years had placed a seven-foot "bronze statue or figure of a fully equipped Confederate soldier with his gun at parade rest" atop a twenty-foot granite base practically within sight of their own front porch. It stood facing north in the town center, in the shadow of the stately courthouse they had seen built there a quarter-century earlier. It stood, in fact, in the very center of civic life in the county that London had chronicled in his newspaper for three decades, and would for another. Over the years, London had made himself a fixture at veterans' reunions all over the south. For him and Bettie, remembrance of the war provoked a passion and a deep commitment to public service. Now as they entered into old age, they could point to an embodiment of that passion, in the form of a durable stone-and-bronze figure that would watch over the affairs of Chatham County for years to come.

The Rabbit's Bookshelf

2007-08-21T15:08:00.000-04:00

[This page collects bibliographic entries of books that the Rabbit uses and references, which deal directly with the history of Chatham County. The two-letter abbreviation that precedes each entry may appear in the text of posts as a shorthand reference linked to the entry on this page. This post will be updated on an ongoing basis, taking the form of a running bibliography.]

[CC] Hadley, Wade Hampton, Doris Goerch Horton and Neil Craig Strowd. Chatham County, 1771-1971. Lillington, North Carolina: Edwards Brothers, Inc., 1976.

[AH] Osborn, Rachel and Ruth Selden-Sturgill. The Architectural Heritage of Chatham County, North Carolina. Edited by Marjorie Ruth Hudson and Rachel Osborn. Pittsboro, North Carolina: The Chatham County Historic Architecture Committee, 1991.

Rabbit Lore #10 (1914)

2007-08-20T09:17:00.000-04:00

From Chatham County, 1771-1971, Chapter IX, "Towns, Communities, Townships and Early Post Offices," section titled "Siler City", pp. 214-5:

1895: W.S. Durham opens business. Mr. Durham was the town's leading dealer in poultry, eggs, and rabbits for many years. His place of business was located on the west side of South Chatham Avenue near the center of the 100 block. Volume of business is reported to have reached a maximum in 1920 when country produce bought totaled $65,000. During the fall of 1914 the following appeared in the Siler City Grit:

"Durham's Rabbitt Letter to the Boys

Dear Boys:--

The rabbit season is here again and I am ready to buy. I want your rabbits and will pay you every cent for them I can afford to pay.

I have a nice present for every boy who sells me his rabbits. Bring them along and I will treat you right.

Yours truly,
W.S. Durham"

Rabbit Lore #9 (1907)

2007-08-19T09:16:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1907 DEC 19, "Local Records":

Did you ever hear of catching rabbits in a well? Mr. T.M. Bland is having a well dug at his farm, near here, and since it was begun about twenty-five rabbits have been caught in it. They would fall or jump into it at night. Pretty good rabbit trap, isn't it?

Rabbit Lore #8 (1907)

2007-08-19T09:14:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1907 DEC 5, "Local Records":

Sheriff J.R. Milliken headed a rabbit hunting party on the morning of Thanksgiving Day and bagged 13 of Chatham's celebrated game in a few hours.

Rabbit Lore #7 (1907)

2007-08-19T09:13:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1907 NOV 21, "Local Records":

Did you ever hear of a cat catching rabbits? Mrs. M.A.Y. Wheeler, who lives near here, has a large Maltese cat which came to the house some days ago dragging a rabbit which it had caught.

Rabbit Lore #6 (1907)

2007-08-19T09:10:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1907 OCT 31, "Milliken on Rabbits":

The Raleigh Evening Times of last Friday contained an interesting interview with Sheriff Milliken on the quality and quantity of Chatham's crop of rabbits, a large part of which is engaged from year to year by our Raleigh neighbors. The interview, which is really the opinion of an expert on this important topic, is as follows:

"Sheriff J.R. Milliken, of Pittsboro, is in the city today, being on his way home from Goldsboro, where he took a negro to the insane asylum. Sheriff Milliken reports an unprecedented crop of Chatham's chief staple, the rabbit. 'People treat our rabbits as a joke,' laughed the sheriff, 'but really the cotton tail forms a big item in the commerce of the county. Thousands of the things are marketed each year, and they bring from eight to ten cents apiece. One man at Siler City last year sold wagon loads of them.

"'Do you know,' continued Sheriff Milliken, 'on what the rabbit fattens? It's frost. 'Possums eat persimmons, but rabbits love frost, and they are already getting fat. There won't be many 'possums this fall, but we have thousands of big rabbits, and there are plenty of birds, too.'"

Lee Takes Egypt (1906-1908)

2007-08-17T07:07:00.000-04:00

[The Rabbit samples stories from past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. See Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, version 2.0.]

When the General Assembly first created Chatham out of Orange in 1770, the county was larger and more square. When a border dispute between Chatham and Alamance was settled in the nineteenth century, a little bit of Chatham went to Alamance, but the county was still pretty square. All that changed in 1907 when the General Assembly voted to create Lee County from Chatham and Moore (technically, they voted to give the people in the area of the proposed county a vote on the matter). Chatham lost the part that lay below the Deep River, including the coal-mining area once known as Egypt, later Cumnock. The county's border along the south now runs with the course of the Deep River, making it much more of a challenge to draw freehand. Chatham's representative in the state House at that time was Henry Mauger London, son of RECORD editor Henry A. London. Here's how the RECORD reported on it ...

1906 OCT 11, "Local Records":

Do the people of Chatham wish any more of their county cut off for another county like the Fusionists did in 1895? A mighty effort will be made in the next Legislature to take part of Chatham for the proposed new county of Lee. It is important then that our county should have a solid representation in the Senate and House for a Republican senator or representative would have no influence in preventing it.

1907 JAN 24, "Local Records":

The bill to create the new county of Lee was introduced into the Senate last week by Senator Seawell, and its promoters are making desperate efforts to pass the bill. They have raised a large sum of money to pay lawyers to lobby for it, among them being Mr. Walter D. Siler, of this county, Hon. Locke Craig, of Asheville, Messrs. Jas. H. Pou and J.N. Holding of Raleigh. If the people of Chatham are opposed to losing any of their county they ought to be stirring in opposition to this new county. Large delegations of the best citizens of the proposed county are in Raleigh nearly every day working actively for their county.

1907 JAN 31, "Local Records":

On next Wednesday afternoon the Senate committee will consider, and hear discussion on, the bill to create Lee county out of parts of Chatham and Moore. The advocates of the new county are making every effort to get it, and citizens of Moore are actively opposing it. But few citizens of Chatham are making any effort about it, though opposed to losing any part of our county. They had better be stirring themselves and help Senator Rives to defeat the bill.

1907 FEB 14, "Lee County":

The advocates of the proposed new county, to be called Lee, are making desperate efforts to get it.

The proposed lines are to run so as to take from Chatham all south of Deep river and west of Cape Fear river. It is estimated that this slice from Chatham contains nearly fifty thousand acres with property assessed for taxation at over half a million dollars and with a popullation of nearly 2,000.

On Wednesday afternoon of last week the Senate committee heard the bill discussed by its advocates and opponents. A large crowd from the proposed county was present, every one wearing a white ribbon on which were printed the words Lee County. The bill was discussed for three hours in the Hall of the House of Representatives, which was crowded with a deeply interested audience. Next day the committee by a vote of seven to two voted in favor of the bill, which then passed the Senate by a large majority.

But on last Tuesday "Linden saw another sight" and the advocates of the proposed county met a disastrous defeat in the House committee, which after a long discussion voted against the bill by a vote of twelve to seven. This discussion before the House committee was even more animated and interesting than that before the Senate committee. A large crowd from the proposed county attended this committee meeting and also quite a number from Chatham and Moore counties in opposition. Those from Chatham were W.L. London, R.H. Hayes, H.A. London, James B. Atwater, F.C. Poe, Joe W. Mann, A.H. London, E.J. Riggsbee, H.T. Chapin, Jacob Thompson, Fred. W. Bynum, J.L. Griffin, W.E. Brooks, J.R. Milliken, Jesse Milliken, R.S. Thompson, C.W. Hanks, Spence Taylor and W.H. Ward.

Of course the delegations from Chatham and Moore rejoiced greatly at their victory before the House committee, which was the more notable because of the almost unanimous vote for the new county in the Senate. Everybody admitted that this great victory in the House committee was due chiefly to the influence and efforts of Chatham's young Representative, who received many congratulations upon thus "snatching victory from the jaws of defeat."

The bill will considered in the House today (Thursday) and it is confidently predicted that the House will by a large majority sustain the action of its committee and defeat the bill. It is hoped that a large delegation of our countymen will go to Raleigh today (or whenever the bill is considered in the House) and help its defeat by such a majority that his vexatious question will not disturb our people again.

1907 FEB 21, "Lee County Defeated":

By the close vote of 48 to 49 the bill creating Lee county failed to pass its second reading in the House of Representatives on last Friday.

1907 FEB 28, "Local Records":

Carthage News: The people of Moore county hold the Hon. H.M. London of Pittsboro in the highest esteem for his noble work in leading the fight against the division of our county. In a great measure the defeat of the bill was brought about by his untiring zeal and persistent work in our behalf. Any time he needs our support, it is his without the asking.

1907 FEB 28, "Local Records":

The fate of Lee county will be decided today, as the bill for its creation is made the special order for 12 o'clock today. The vote will be close and both sides are claiming a victory. Some of the members who voted against the proposed county before will now vote for it, and some who voted for it will today against it. So, the result is in doubt.

1907 MAR 7, "Chatham's Representative Complimented":

From the News and Observer, 2nd. During the entire session of the Legislature no member has waged a more magnificent fight against greater odds than the capable and resourceful young member from Chatham. His earnest and powerful opposition to the creation of the Lee county has won him the gratitude of the people of Chatham and the admiration of the people of Lee county.

1907 MAR 7, "Lee County Wins":

After a long and desparate contest the Lee county bill has at last passed and our neighbors in Sanford have come out victorious in their efforts to have a new county.

The bill, as heretofore stated, was defeated in the House three weeks ago by one majority. Another bill was introduced and this was passed by the House on last Thursday by a vote of 60 to 44, and no fight over it was made in the Senate. The difference between the first and second bills was very slight. The last bill leaves the question to a vote of the people of the proposed county, which election will of course be a farce and useless, because there is no doubt a majority of the voters in the new county are in favor of it. An amendment to the bill was offered by Representative London to allow Moore as well as Lee county to vote on the question, because the people of Moore are greatly interested, as much so as the people of the proposed county -- in the creation of the county. This amendment was voted down by a large majority.

The election will be held on the first day of July on the question of having the new county, and of course a large majority will be given for it. The first officers of Lee county will be appointed by the governor and will begin their terms on the first Monday in April of next year. The people of the new county will pay their taxes this year in Chatham and Moore. The line between Chatham and Lee will be the middle of Cape Fear and Deep rivers, so that both counties will have to keep up the bridges on Deep river. The new county will have to assume its proportionate part of indebtedness of Chatham and Moore.

The court-house is to be built about half way between the depots in Jonesboro and Sanford, which will be rather a long walk from either town, but the two towns may grow so much that a street railway may be built before long running by the court-house and connecting Jonesboro and Sanford.

We will greatly regret to lose so goodly a part of our county, but hope that our countymen living in the strip taken from Chatham will continue to prosper and always remember kindly their old county.

1907 APR 4, "TO ORGANIZE NEW COUNTY":

Raleigh, Special. -- The first step in carrying out the legislative enactmetn [sic] for forming the new county of Lee out of parts of Moore and Chatham, was taken here Monday." [...] "The new county is to take on official life on the first day of April, 1908.

1907 JUL 11, "Lee County":

In accordance with the act of the last Legislature establishing Lee county an election was held in the proposed county on Tuesday of last week, at which 875 votes were cast for the county and only 40 against it. The Governor will appoint the county officers, who term will begin next April and continue until the election in November, 1908.

While of course we regret to lose any part of Chatham, yet we extend our best wishes for the prosperity of the new county and hope that the most sanguine expectations of its promoters may be fully realized.

1908 FEB 12, "Local Records":

Lee county will be organized and enter on its career next Monday. On that day her new officers will be sworn in and enter upon the discharge of their duties.

"Deer Killed In Chatham." (1906)

2007-08-15T10:24:00.000-04:00

[The Rabbit samples stories from past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. See Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, version 2.0.]

Anyone who has driven the roads of Chatham County the last, oh, several decades is bound to be startled by the letter that follows, from the February 22, 1907 edition of the Chatham RECORD. WARNING: Animal lovers, you might want to turn away. We have here a genuine example of "History, red in tooth and claw." It's not as if the evident thrill that the hunters took in their chase is remarkable of itself; but the author of the letter does have a certain flair for detail, and his sense of revelry in the kill comes through. But for the strong-of-stomach, the real kicker lies in the editor's note at the end. Let's just say that where the rabbit once held dominion over the lands of Chatham, the deer now rules ...

Deer Killed In Chatham.
Williams Township, N.C.
Feb. 12, 1906.

Mr. Editor:

Yesterday afternoon as Mr. N.W. Beckwith was feeding his sheep, he discovered a fine female deer a short distance from the flock of sheep. He knowing that I had a Winchester rifle came in a hurry for me to go and shoot the deer. It so happened that Mr. W.H. Goodwin, a well known turkey hunter and trapper, was visiting me. So Messrs, Beckwith, Goodwin and I got on Goodwin's buggy and drove to the sheep pasture in great haste. It was only a very few minutes before we came in sight of the deer. All hearts thumped very hard at the sight of the deer. At this point we separated for the deer was disappearing down in a certain bottom. I went around and headed the deer off and got the first shot, about 100 yards distant. I being excited and so nervous, missed my mark, but not the deer. That shot took effect in the upper part of the shoulder and went through and through. The deer fell on its fore-legs, but arose and took to flight. I shot three other shots at it on the run, one shot taking effect in its fore-legs, almost severing it. At this point I gave Mr. Goodwin the rifle and he again headed the deer (it could not travel fast with two severe wounds) and got four shots. The third shot made a mortal wound, piercing the body through and through behind the shoulders.

Mr. Goodwin, not being satisfied with that last shot, fired the 4th shot and sent a steel-cased ball through the head. That one killed the deer. In all, the deer had six severe sounds, but did not give up until shot through the head.

The shooting on Sunday attracted much attention, and before the deer had been dead five minutes it was surrounded by many excited neighbors. We tied its legs together and bore it to Mr. Beckwith's home where we dressed it, (but before dressing it we weighed it, 101 pounds being the weight.) Before we finished dressing the deer many others came to see the sight.

Since writing the above, I have enjoyed two fine meals off of the deer. I can not describe the flesh more than it is very firm, sweet and wholesome. I dare say that more than a hundred people have tasted some of the venison.

D.J Williams.

[The above letter ought to have been received in time for last week's RECORD. This deer must have escaped from some park, as no wild deer have been roaming in this county for many years. -- ED. RECORD.]

Auspicious Debut? (1907)

2007-08-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

[The Rabbit samples stories from past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. See Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, version 2.0.]

From the Chatham RECORD, 1907 MAR 28, "Local Records":

The first automobile ever seen in Pittsboro passed through here on last Tuesday afternoon, having come from Danville, Va., via Durham and being en route to Horry county, S.C., via Sanford. It was an unusual sight for our ancient 'Boro' and attracted quite a crowd of our citizens as it stopped on Main street for a short while.

Rabbit Lore #5 (1907)

2007-08-14T09:07:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1907 SEP 26, "Local Records":

What do you think of a rabbit being paid as a marriage fee? Well, that what was paid one of our popular Chatham preachers some time ago by a happy groom as the fee for marrying him.

Rabbit Lore #4 (1906)

2007-08-14T09:03:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1906 NOV 22, "Chatham Rabbits" (added 2007 AUG 14):

The Industrial News, the Republican daily at Greensboro, humorously accounts for the big Democratic victory in Chatham at the recent election, as follows:

"In the first place Chatham county has a statewide reputation for the number, size and juiciness of its rabbiits [sic]. Nothing that falls a victim to the hunter's gun throughout the entire confines of North Carolina can compare with the Chatham rabbit.

"In the second place, election day was an ideal rabbit-hunting day, and being a general holiday the temptation to go rabbit hunting for a few hours before voting must have been too strong for a number of the Chatham voters. We further conclude that the plentifulness of rabbits and the ideal character of the day must have proved too much for the men who had intended to bring home their bag in time to vote, with the result that the would-be voters upon returning found the polls closed."

Rabbit Lore #3 (1906)

2007-08-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

Postcard from "Wm. R." to "Miss Marie Elliot", 1906 NOV 28:

[From the North Carolina Postcard Collection at the North Carolina Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill. Photo postcard shows a young boy holding a rabbit.]

"I am sending for today's express a sample of our favorite game which, I trust will reach you o.k."

Rabbit Lore #2 (1906)

2007-08-14T08:59:00.000-04:00

Chatham RECORD, 1906 NOV 29, "Local Records":

One of our townsmen, when at a hotel in another town some days ago, got into conversation with a travelling man from Connecticut, who, when he learned that our townsman was from Chatham county, exclaimed, "Oh yes, that is the county where the Populists wanted to make rabbit skins a legal tender."

Rabbit Lore #1 (1976)

2007-08-14T08:54:00.000-04:00

John Wesley Snipes Interview, 1976 SEP 20 and NOV 20 (added 2007 AUG 14):
[Excerpts from an oral history with Bynum resident John Wesley Snipes, born 1901 in Bynum. Brent Glass of the Southern Oral History Program conducted the interview, the full transcript of which is available on the Documenting the American South web site.]

Snipes: And it's the only county in the world that I've ever heard tell of (and the records bear this out) that ever shipped a solid carload of rabbits to New York. Chatham rabbits; we were known for Chatham rabbits. They caught them in hollows and boxes. And you could go in New York seventy-five years ago and call for Chatham rabbit on the menu in New York City [laughter].

BG: Wow. I tell you, I didn't know that.

Snipes: Rabbits run just like ants or grasshoppers. They shipped them by the carload to New York.

[...]

BG: How about hunting or fishing? Did you do much of that when you were a boy?

Snipes: Well, we didn't have nothing to fish. I mean, there's nothing but little old branches and creeks, and not much water up in that area. And we didn't get to go nowhere. I'd never seen the river 'til I was a great big boy. We rabbit hunted. Now, that was a big occasion: go out and kill thirty or forty rabbits a day.

BG: What would you kill them with, guns?

Snipes: Sticks and guns, and the dogs'd run them down and catch them. We'd just take the entrails out in real cold weather and hang them up in the smokehouse with the hide on them, and dry them out. Then we made rabbit hash, and cooked them. And they replaced a whole lot of meat, hog meat. There was a lot of quail way back there, a lot of turkeys. Chatham County has been blessed with rabbits: just thousands and hundreds of thousands of them way back seventy-five years ago.

BG: And you were telling me that Chatham County supplied. . .?

Snipes: It's the only county in the United States that ever shipped 'em by the carload, a carload of nothing but rabbits with the entrails taken out with the fur on them: just pack 'em down and fill the whole car full. Like this place over here Rabbit's Crossings, they've shipped them from there here in Chatham County, and Devil's Tramping Grounds and over there at Hogs Crossing and all that. They shipped them by the carload. But the foxes got so they destroyed them, and we don't have that many rabbits now, very few.

Rabbit Lore

2007-08-14T08:01:00.000-04:00

[This post collects quotations and references regarding the onetime flourishing rabbits of Chatham, whom this blog honors with its persona. To be updated on an ongoing basis. Items are numbered in the order that they're added and listed in the reverse, so that more recently-added items appear toward the top.]

14) Chatham RECORD, 1909 SEP 15, "Rabbits at the North Pole" (added 2007 SEP 29):

From the Asheville Gazette-News.

Tar Heels will recognize a lamentable weakness in Dr. Cook's story. He says the last signs of life he saw was a bunch of rabbits, as they disported themselves about a glacier. As all North Carolinians in general, and the good people of Chatham county in particular, will at once realize, this is a most extraordinary rabbit tale. Your well regulated rabbit is a vegetarian, and as there are no turnips and parsnips in the region of the pole, no rabbit would think for a moment of abiding there. This is a part of Dr. Cook's story that may only be explained upon the theory that they have a carniverous [sic] breed of rabbits up that way, such as the Washington Post is most familiar with.

13) Chatham RECORD, 1910 FEB 23, "Chatham Rabbits" (added 2007 SEP 29):

From the News and Observer.

Rabbit is the principal diet of Chatham's connoissuers and epicures. No rabbits are shipped from Pittsboro because the fastidious people of that county seat get their beauty and many other good qualities from a diet of rabbits. The best cooks have ninety-seven different ways of cooking the rabbit, and the animal is so good in each way that when Pittsboro folks go away from home they carry enough rabbits to give them at least one a day while they are gone. They have been known also to carry a broiler and to be found by their hosts broiling a rabbit in their room after they thought everybody else had retired. They do not understand how anybody can prefer canvas-back ducks or Lynnhaven bays to the succulent Chatham rabbit.

12) Washington POST, 1882 OCT 18, "Protection in North Carolina" (from ProQuest Historical Newspapers; added 2007 SEP 29):

John Gubbins in the Raleigh News.

The season is approaching when hares and 'possums will be plentiful, and when large quantities of this species of game will come pouring into Raleigh by the Chatham wagons. Now, I have a splendid 'possum dog, and brother Jim, he has a good dog for rabbits, and his boys are cute, too, in setting rabbit gums. But it is a well-known fact that Wake county rabbits and 'possums are much shyer and harder to catch than Chatham rabbits and 'possums, and besides, they are scarcer here than they are in Chatham.

Now, Mr. Editor, I think these facts will justify me and brother Jim in asking the county commissioners to levy a tariff on Chatham rabbits and 'possums to enable our dogs and Jim's boys' rabbit gums to complete with these foreign rabbits and 'possums, which I think would produce some revenue to the county, if it did not amount to prohibition. At any rate, it would enable us to declare a larger dividend on the products of our dog and rabbit gums. It is true it would raise the price of rabbits and 'possums to the consumers of those delicacies to, perhaps, double what they now have to pay, but it is necessary that individuals must suffer for the general good. Indeed, brother Jim thinks the higher the tariff the commissioners should lay on Chatham 'possums and rabbits the cheaper they would be in the Raleigh market. I don't know how that is but if the argument will hold water, pleaes use it in inducing the county commissioners to grant us the relief asked for.

11) Chatham RECORD, 1913 JAN 15, "Chatham Rabbits Electrocuted" (added 2007 SEP 9):

From Raleigh News & Observer,

The electrocution of one hundred rabbits Tuesday morning on the lot of the Buckhorn Power company's property is a Chatham rabbit story that former Representative R.H. Hayes, tells with full comprehension of its astoundingness.

The superintendent of this transmission company has been greatly worred by the Chatham rabbits, which have made depredations upon his cabbage patch and utterly annihlated his prospects for food. Last week set "hollows" for them, but the rabbits demurely dodged the dead fall. It made him mad, and built an expensive barbed wire fence about the patch. The wires pulled together so ingeniously that when Brer Rabbit bounded up he got stuck and when he started to crawl through the barbs harpooned him. The Buckhorn superintendent then threw the electric current into the wires. Tuesday morning the rabbits, making an effort to escape, jumped against the fence and were shocked to death. One hundred were found by the fence that morning.

10) From Chatham County, 1771-1971, Chapter IX, "Towns, Communities, Townships and Early Post Offices," section titled "Siler City", pp. 214-5 (added 2007 AUG 20):

1895: W.S. Durham opens business. Mr. Durham was the town's leading dealer in poultry, eggs, and rabbits for many years. His place of business was located on the west side of South Chatham Avenue near the center of the 100 block. Volume of business is reported to have reached a maximum in 1920 when country produce bought totaled $65,000. During the fall of 1914 the following appeared in the Siler City Grit:

"Durham's Rabbitt Letter to the Boys

Dear Boys:--

The rabbit season is here again and I am ready to buy. I want your rabbits and will pay you every cent for them I can afford to pay.

I have a nice present for every boy who sells me his rabbits. Bring them along and I will treat you right.

Yours truly,
W.S. Durham"

9) Chatham RECORD, 1907 DEC 19, "Local Records" (added 2007 AUG 19):

Did you ever hear of catching rabbits in a well? Mr. T.M. Bland is having a well dug at his farm, near here, and since it was begun about twenty-five rabbits have been caught in it. They would fall or jump into it at night. Pretty good rabbit trap, isn't it?

8) Chatham RECORD, 1907 DEC 5, "Local Records" (added 2007 AUG 19):

Sheriff J.R. Milliken headed a rabbit hunting party on the morning of Thanksgiving Day and bagged 13 of Chatham's celebrated game in a few hours.

7) Chatham RECORD, 1907 NOV 21, "Local Records" (added 2007 AUG 19):

Did you ever hear of a cat catching rabbits? Mrs. M.A.Y. Wheeler, who lives near here, has a large Maltese cat which came to the house some days ago dragging a rabbit which it had caught.

6) Chatham RECORD, 1907 OCT 31, "Milliken on Rabbits" (added 2007 AUG 19):

The Raleigh Evening Times of last Friday contained an interesting interview with Sheriff Milliken on the quality and quantity of Chatham's crop of rabbits, a large part of which is engaged from year to year by our Raleigh neighbors. The interview, which is really the opinion of an expert on this important topic, is as follows:

"Sheriff J.R. Milliken, of Pittsboro, is in the city today, being on his way home from Goldsboro, where he took a negro to the insane asylum. Sheriff Milliken reports an unprecedented crop of Chatham's chief staple, the rabbit. 'People treat our rabbits as a joke,' laughed the sheriff, 'but really the cotton tail forms a big item in the commerce of the county. Thousands of the things are marketed each year, and they bring from eight to ten cents apiece. One man at Siler City last year sold wagon loads of them.

"'Do you know,' continued Sheriff Milliken, 'on what the rabbit fattens? It's frost. 'Possums eat persimmons, but rabbits love frost, and they are already getting fat. There won't be many 'possums this fall, but we have thousands of big rabbits, and there are plenty of birds, too.'"

5) Chatham RECORD, 1907 SEP 26, "Local Records" (added 2007 AUG 14):

What do you think of a rabbit being paid as a marriage fee? Well, that what was paid one of our popular Chatham preachers some time ago by a happy groom as the fee for marrying him.

4) Chatham RECORD, 1906 NOV 22, "Chatham Rabbits" (added 2007 AUG 14):

The Industrial News, the Republican daily at Greensboro, humorously accounts for the big Democratic victory in Chatham at the recent election, as follows:

"In the first place Chatham county has a statewide reputation for the number, size and juiciness of its rabbiits [sic]. Nothing that falls a victim to the hunter's gun throughout the entire confines of North Carolina can compare with the Chatham rabbit.

"In the second place, election day was an ideal rabbit-hunting day, and being a general holiday the temptation to go rabbit hunting for a few hours before voting must have been too strong for a number of the Chatham voters. We further conclude that the plentifulness of rabbits and the ideal character of the day must have proved too much for the men who had intended to bring home their bag in time to vote, with the result that the would-be voters upon returning found the polls closed."

3) Postcard from "Wm. R." to "Miss Marie Elliot", 1906 NOV 28 (added 2007 AUG 14):

[From the North Carolina Postcard Collection at the North Carolina Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill. Photo postcard shows a young boy holding a rabbit.]

"I am sending for today's express a sample of our favorite game which, I trust will reach you o.k."

2) Chatham RECORD, 1906 NOV 29, "Local Records" (added 2007 AUG 14):

One of our townsmen, when at a hotel in another town some days ago, got into conversation with a travelling man from Connecticut, who, when he learned that our townsman was from Chatham county, exclaimed, "Oh yes, that is the county where the Populists wanted to make rabbit skins a legal tender."

1) John Wesley Snipes Interview, 1976 SEP 20 and NOV 20 (added 2007 AUG 14):
[Excerpts from an oral history with Bynum resident John Wesley Snipes, born 1901 in Bynum. Brent Glass of the Southern Oral History Program conducted the interview, the full transcript of which is available on the Documenting the American South web site.]

Snipes: And it's the only county in the world that I've ever heard tell of (and the records bear this out) that ever shipped a solid carload of rabbits to New York. Chatham rabbits; we were known for Chatham rabbits. They caught them in hollows and boxes. And you could go in New York seventy-five years ago and call for Chatham rabbit on the menu in New York City [laughter].

BG: Wow. I tell you, I didn't know that.

Snipes: Rabbits run just like ants or grasshoppers. They shipped them by the carload to New York.

[...]

BG: How about hunting or fishing? Did you do much of that when you were a boy?

Snipes: Well, we didn't have nothing to fish. I mean, there's nothing but little old branches and creeks, and not much water up in that area. And we didn't get to go nowhere. I'd never seen the river 'til I was a great big boy. We rabbit hunted. Now, that was a big occasion: go out and kill thirty or forty rabbits a day.

BG: What would you kill them with, guns?

Snipes: Sticks and guns, and the dogs'd run them down and catch them. We'd just take the entrails out in real cold weather and hang them up in the smokehouse with the hide on them, and dry them out. Then we made rabbit hash, and cooked them. And they replaced a whole lot of meat, hog meat. There was a lot of quail way back there, a lot of turkeys. Chatham County has been blessed with rabbits: just thousands and hundreds of thousands of them way back seventy-five years ago.

BG: And you were telling me that Chatham County supplied. . .?

Snipes: It's the only county in the United States that ever shipped 'em by the carload, a carload of nothing but rabbits with the entrails taken out with the fur on them: just pack 'em down and fill the whole car full. Like this place over here Rabbit's Crossings, they've shipped them from there here in Chatham County, and Devil's Tramping Grounds and over there at Hogs Crossing and all that. They shipped them by the carload. But the foxes got so they destroyed them, and we don't have that many rabbits now, very few.

Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, v. 2.0

2007-08-08T20:26:00.000-04:00

[hmmm ... this one got "bloggered" ... see updated explanation in item #3 of the September 9, 2007 Miscellany.]

Reads the RECORD: [JUL-SEP 1906] Excerpts from the "Local Records"

2007-08-08T20:02:00.000-04:00

[The Rabbit samples stories from past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. See Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD, version 2.0.]

A Remarkable Fish Story; Death of a Carpet-Bagger; First Cotton ...

[Note: The "Excerpts" series features selected items from the "Local Records" section of the Chatham RECORD, the following for the period of July to September of 1906. Henry A. London edited the Chatham RECORD during this time, and the reader should presume his voice as the first-person below.]

JUL 12:

Quite a remarkable fish story was told the THE RECORD by Mr. W.O. Farrell. He says that on the 4th a party of neighbors went on a fishing frolic near the mouth of Robeson creek, and a large eel was caught. When they started to prepare the eel for smoking two snakes were found in it and one of them was alive. We understand that the party did not 'see snakes' on that occassion.

JUL 19:

The wife of a colored man in New Hope township, named Dud Farrar, has turned almost white. Her face has become white except a few dark spots under her eyes, and she is quite a curiosity. While the leopard may not change its spots, yet it seems that an Ethiopian may sometimes change its color.

JUL 26:

The notorious John T. Deweese died a few days ago at Washington City. He will be remembered by our older citizens as the carpet-bag Congressman from this district, who resigned in 1870 in order to escape expulsion for having sold a cadetship at West Point. Probably some of our old Bear Creek friends will remember the discussion between him and this writer at the old 'locust tree' election ground in October 1868.

JUL 26

A colored man, named John Alston, was carried on last Monday to the hospital for the insane at Goldsboro. Until quite recently he was the mail rider on the star route from here to Siler City.

AUG 9

A large assemblage of the good people of western Chatham attended on last Saturday the unveiling of a monument to Mr. Abel Edwards and wife erected by their descendants. The exercises were impressive and were held at Providence church, in Bear Creek township. An appropriate memorial address was delivered by Rev. J.B. Craven, and short addresses were made by several others. We regret that we have not been favored with a full report of the interesting exercises.

AUG 16:

The first new cotton that we have seen this season is an open boll brought to the THE RECORD by one of our colored subscribers, Charles Thompson, who lives near here.

SEP 6:

We much regret to hear of the death of Rev. O.T. Edwards, which occurred at his home near Mr. Vernon Springs, on last Thursday. He was one of the ablest and most prominent preachers in the Sandy Creek Baptist Association, and for several years taught school.

SEP 27:

The editor of THE RECORD will speak today at a reunion of the Confederate veterans of Granville county at Oxford.

Reads the Record # 1.2: 1906 APR-JUN

2007-07-18T22:52:00.000-04:00

[In this recurring feature, the Rabbit reads and writes about past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. For further explanation, see Chatham Rabbit Reads the Record.]

SAN FRANCISCO DEVASTATED BY EARTHQUAKE

Local Doctor, Awaiting Trial, Cured of Morphine Habit

Four-legged Chicken Born in Chatham

Issues Surveyed
1906 APR 5, 12, 19, 26; MAY 3, 10, 17, 24; JUN 7, 14, 21, 28.

National and Foreign Affairs
Immigration. APR 5, editorial. "It is said that Italian anarchists are arriving in the United States in great numbers, and that Baltimore is rapidly becoming an anarchist center. It is a pity that they could not all be detected on their arrival and sent right back."

The San Francisco Earthquake. APR 26, editorial: "San Francisco was visited last week with the most destructive earthquake and conflagrations ever known in the United States." ... "The sufferings of the homeless people can scarcely be imagined. Think for a moment of over 300,000 people (men, women and children) suddenly driven from home with no provisions and many in their night clothing. Decrepit old men and women, delicate and refined ladies, invalids and sick persons, helpless children, all driven from their homes with scarcely a moment's warning, an affrighted crowd rushing for safety they knew not where. Families and loved ones separated in the struggling mass of humanity, and all panic-stricken. Wealthy persons suffered with poorer people with hunger and thirst, and knew not how or where to satisfy the pangs of either. Refined ladies slept on the bare ground with no shelter or even covering."

Oklahoma admitted. JUN 21, editorial: "Another star in the galaxy of States was added to the Union Saturday when President Roosevelt signed the bill admitting Oklahoma and Indian Territy under the name of the former as one State."

Local Stories Reported
Confederate memorial fund. APR 5: $1089.79. "Make it $1100 by next week!" APR 12: $1145.79 following "one contribution of $50 from Dr. Isaac Emerson, of Baltimore, who is a native of this county ...." APR 26: $1149.79. MAY 3: 1214.29, with $50 from W.W. Fuller, New York, who "moved from Durham to New York several years ago", and is "one of the most successful lawyers in the United States." MAY 10: $1219.29. MAY 17: $1221.29. MAY 24: $1232.29. "Do not wait until all the old soldiers are dead!" MAY 31: $1244.29. JUN 7, "Confederate Monument Fund": $1251.29. Follows a $1 contribution from J.G. Smith of Fayetteville, "the first that has been received from a colored person. He was born and reared in this county, near Haywood, and is now a teacher in the graded school for the colored race at Fayetteville, and is highly thought of by all who know him. In his letter sending his contribution (which was unsolicited) he wrote these words: 'Gratitude demands that I give my mite to any cause that will perpetuate the glory of the old soldiers.' This surely should stimulate our white countymen to contribute!". JUN 14: $1263.39.

The J.B. Matthews Affair. APR 12, "Local Records": "Dr. J.B. Matthews has been entirely cured of the morphine habit since his confinement in the jail at Greensboro. His physician says that he is now perfectly rational and his mind clear as anybody's. He has steadily gained in flesh. He is in jail awaiting the result of his appeal to the Supreme Court." APR 19, "Local Records": "Dr. J.B. Matthews has been released on a five thousand dollar bail bond, while awaiting the result of his appeal, which will not be heard until next fall. He has been taken to a Baltimore sanitarium for treatment for the morphine habit." MAY 24, "Local Records": "Dr. J.B. Matthews, who is now recuperating at the Mount Hope Santiarium, near Baltimore, Md., will in all probability remain at that institution until the motion for a new trial is arranged in his behalf before the Supreme Court in Raleigh next October." JUN 21, "Local Records": "Dr. J.B. Matthews returned to Greensboro on last Monday and renewed his bail bond, in the sum of $5,000, for his appearance pending his appeal to the Supreme Court. He is said to be much better mentally."

The press. MAY 3, "New Press": "We hope to print next week's issue on a cylinder press bought over a month ago, but could not be used because a part of it had been lost by the negligence of some railroad employee. This lost part has at last been found at Portsmouth and ought to be here in time for next week's issue. // "Ever since THE RECORD was established in 1878 it has been printed on an old Washington hand-press. In its place we have bought a cylinder press, which will of course print the paper much better and greatly improve its appearance." JUN 14, "Local Records": "On account of a breakage in our cylinder press we have to print this issue on the old Washington hand press. So if the print of your RECORD is not good you know the reason why. We expect to have the press in shape to print the next issue."

Samples from "Local Records". APR 12: "Chatham comes to the front once more with another curiosity. It is a chicken with four legs and all the same length, and belongs to Mr. Jasper Foushee, who lives five miles west of here." MAY 3: "Pittsboro's tonsorial artist, John Council, is no longer a gay widower, having marries last Sunday a daughter of Weldon Perry, a very respectable colored man who lives near here." MAY 17: "There will be a grand celebration at Durham some time in July in honor of the completion of the Durham & Southern and the Durham & South Carolina railroads. The first is from Apex and the latter is from Bonsal. Many citizens of Chatham will attend." JUN 7: "Mr. A.R. Norwood, of Baldwin township, had a rat-killing at his barn a few days ago. In less than an hour and a half he and his sons killed 98 of the pesky rodents, making a total of 197 rats that were killed by them by one device and another within the last month." JUN 21: "A number of our townsmen had an enjoyable fish-fry and picnic on the banks of Roberson creek, near the Haw river, yesterday." JUN 28: "The first cotton bloom sent to THE RECORD this season was plucked on last Sunday (the 24th) by Mr. James A. Parham, of Lockville."

Roads -- Policy, Reports, Opinion
APR 5, "Commissioners' Meeting": "ORDERED, that the sheriff be authorized to repair bridge in Matthews township on branch near Willis Brooks at cost not over $20."

Landmarks Referenced
Depot at Bonsal. APR 5: "The new railroad station at Bonsal is a busy place now. A large number of laborers is now at work there laying side-tracks and erecting a depot."

Bridge at Haywood. MAY 17: "The iron bridge over the Haw river at Haywood is having a fresh coat of paint put on. Messrs. L.R. Exline and F.S. Hill have the contract to paint it."

Bridge at Harland's Creek. MAY 24, "Local Records": "The county commissioners on last Tuesday let to Mr. Will E. Hearne the contract for building an open wooden bridge over Harlan's creek near the DeGraffenreidt place, four miles west of Pittsboro. The contract price was $248."

Bridge at Johnson' ford. JUN 7, "Local Records": "At a joint meeting of the boards of road and county commissioners Tuesday R.W. Bland was authorized to make an examination of the bridge site at Johnson's ford on Rocky river and make an estimate of the cost of building a bridge there and report to the boards the first Monday in July, when the propriety of building the bridge will be considered."

Bridge Repairs. JUN 7, "Commissioners' Meeting": $20.40, "Bynum & Burns, lumber for Green's bridge". $35.96, "R.E. Harris, balance on lumber for Fearrington's bridge". $3.10, "R.E. Harris, lumber for Bear Creek bridge".

Old stage road. MAY 17, "Local Records": "Mr. J.W. Moore has been appointed carrier on the new rural free delivery route from this place westward. Service on this route goes beyond Emmaus church, thence southwest to the old stage road and thence back to this place." JUN 21, "Visit to Siler": "For the first time in a year we made a hurried visit, on last Monday, to Siler City and were agreeably surprised to find so many improvements had been made and others in progress. No one could now recognize it as the same place that it was twenty-five years ago, when it was known as Mattews' [sic] Cross Roads and the only dwelling there was the residence of old Capt. Matthews, which is still standing. // "Nearly all the stores there now are handsome brick buildings, blocks of brick buildings and handsome residences now standing where, only a few years ago, were cornfields. Two large blocks of brick buildings are now being erected, having pressed brick fronts, the lower floors of which will be used as stores and the upper floors as offices and a town hall. The bricks are now made in the suburbs of the town, and from this brickyard quantities of brick are shipped to other towns. The population of the town has almost doubled since the last census and is increasing more rapidly now than ever before. // "We are pleased also to note the many evidences of prosperity along the road -- the 'old stage road' -- between here and Siler. The farms seem to be better cultivated than ever before, there being many labor saving machines now used, such as wheat binders and reapers, cutaway harrows, etc. Along the road were many nice new residences and some of the old ones repaired and painted."

JUN 14, "Local Records": "The railroad authorities have ordered a crossing to be made just south of the depot, where there used to be the old road leading to the present residence of Mr. J.A. Perley."

Metereological Exceptionalism
APR 19: "A more delightful day for Easter is rarely seen than was last Sunday."

Reads the Record # 1.1: 1906 JAN-MAR

2007-07-10T22:48:00.000-04:00

[In this recurring feature, the Rabbit reads and writes about past issues of Chatham County's longest-running newspaper. For further explanation, see Chatham Rabbit Reads the Record.]

Issues Surveyed
1906 JAN 18, 25; FEB 1, 8, 15, 22; MAR 1, 8, 15, 22, 29.

Summary
In early 1906, we find activities related to one of the most recognizable landmarks in Chatham County, as editor H.A. London and his wife use the pages of the paper to solicit donations for the Confederate memorial that now stands before the Chatham Courthouse. For residents of the county now, or anyone who drives the roads, the editor's note to the "Deer Killed in Chatham" letter will be of special interest. Other local affairs include a near-drowning in Roberson Creek and some stern editorial words regarding the assembly of disreputable characters at the previous year's state fair.

If It Bleeds, and Other Mayhem
Page-two headlines and datelines from JAN 25: "Bloody Revolution In Ecuador. Guayaquil, Ecuador, Jan. 16." "Fatal Mine Explosion. Charleston, W. Va., Jan. 18." "Boy Boiled in Vat. Greenville, S.C., Jan. 20." "Fatal Panic In Church. Philadelphia, Jan. 21." "Preacher Arrested For Poisoning. Gainesville, Ga., Jan. 21." "Hung to City Scales. Hopkinsville, Ky., Jan. 22." "Burned In Calaboose. Salisbury, January 22."

Bad things happening to editors. FEB 1, "Editor Wilkie Commits Suicide": "Special to the Charlotte Observer." Clarence D. Wilkie, editor and founder of The Rutherfordton Sun, committed suicide "by shooting himself through the right temple with a 32-calibre Smith & Wesson pistol."

State of NC
Gambling and immorality at the State Fair. JAN 18, editorial: "Such a horde of gamblers and dissolute characters of both sexes as attended our last State Fair had never before assembled in our good State, and we hope never will again. They can be excluded and ought to be." JAN 25, editorial: "We are pleased to learn from the News and Observer that the secretary of the State Agricultural Society says that no gambling or immoral exhibitions will be permitted at the next State Fair. It would be well for the president and secretary of the Society to publish an offical card making a pledge to that effect."

Top Local Stories Reported
Lee's birthday. JAN 18, "Lee's Birthday": "Tomorrow (Friday) afternoon beginning at 2:30 ... the Winnie Davis Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy will commemorate with appropriate exercises at the academy the birthday of General Robert E. Lee." JAN 25: "Last Friday being the 99th anniversary of the birth of General Robert E. Lee appropriate exercises were held at the academy under the auspices of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The academy had been artistically decorated with Confederate and North Carolina flags and with pictures of Gen. Lee and other distinguished Confederates. Quite a number of persons attended the exercises, among them being several veterans from a distance in the country. The exercises were conducted by Mrs. H.A. London, the President of the Daughters ...."

Confederate memorial. FEB 15, "Appeal For Monument", signed "Winnie Davis Chapter, Daughters of the Confederacy. By its President, Mrs. Henry A. London.": "To the Men and Women of Chatham County: We are anxious to erect our Confederate Monument, and unveil it at the Soldiers' Reunion in August." The editorial outlines an offer received from Carolina Marble Works of Statesville, for a 24-foot monument costing $2000. It describes monuments and their dimensions and cites their costs in cities such as Asheville, Winston-Salem and Lexington. "Colonel Lane most generously started the monument fund with $100, now we appeal to ALL to come forward and make up the balance right away. We know that all will give; but we want it NOW. WE ARE READY FOR IT. Or a written PROMISE for the amount to be paid in June." MAR 29, a letter titled "'Buck' Appeals For The Monument", signed, "Yours truly, Buck.": "I am apprised of the fact that some think that a monument is unnecessary and is of no good to those who shall live in the future. But let us think of the thousands of boys who had so much to look forward to in the future and for a cause that was as dear to them as life and for forty odd years they have been sleeping in the valleys of Virginia where the snow-clad mountains are looking down upon their unmarked graves as a token of love for their noble sacrifice."

Confederate memorial fund. All entries found under "Local Records" unless otherwise indicated. JAN 25: $1,025.89. "It ought to be twice that sum." FEB 22: $1029.14. MAR 1: $1,042.09. "Who will give the next $5?". MAR 8: $1,054.79. "Rally up, men of Chatham, and send your contributions without further delay. Let us raise the monument next summer." MAR 15: $1072.29. MAR 22: $1072.99. MAR 29: $1087.29.

The Alick Allen Affair. JAN 18, "Local Records": "We are pleased to learn that Mr. Alick Allen, who was so seriously shot by revenue officers is much better and will, it is now thought, get well." FEB 1, "Local Records": "The revenue officers who shot Mr. Alick Allen, in Baldwin township a few weeks ago, have been arrested at Durham and will have a premilinary trial before G.W. Riggsbee, J.P., in Riggsbee township, next Saturday. Mr. Allen is recovering from his wound, and will not lose his leg."

FEB 22, "Deer Killed In Chatham. Williams Township, N.C., Feb. 12, 1906", letter from D.J. Williams: Describes in vivid detail the shooting of a deer by the author and "Mr. W.H. Goodwin, a well known turkey hunter and trapper." Concludes, "Since writing the above, I have enjoyed two fine meals off of the deer. I can not describe the flesh more than it is very firm, sweet and wholesome. I dare say that more than hundred people have tasted some of the venison. // "[The above letter ought to have been received in time for last week's RECORD. This deer must escaped from some park, as no wild deer have been roaming in this county for many years. -- ED. RECORD.]"

MAR 22, "Local Records": "Dr. J.N. Taylor narrowly escaped drowning, on last Monday afternoon, while driving in his buggy through Roberson's creek, near Mr A.P. Terry's which had become very high by the heavy rains that fell that day. The water came into his buggy as high as his waist, but the horse by swimming pulled the buggy through the rushing torrent. The doctor's case of medicines and surgical instruments was washed out of the buggy and lodged on the bank a short distance below the ford, where it was found the next day."

Roads -- Policy, Reports, Opinion
JAN 18, "Good Roads", page-one editorial reprinted from the New York Tribune: "The wealth of the nation depends largely upon the farmers. They are the wealth-creators, and if we would increase our farm products and improve land we must keep our young men at home instead of sending them to the cities. The way to destroy the isolation of farm life now so discouraging to young men is to build good roads." ... "Good roads are needed to make life desirable upon the farm, to increase the average of intelligance by putting people in close touch with the world and ech other, and for the advancement of education and for Christianity." ... "We can have good roads only when the expense of building and maintaining them is somewhat equally distributed." ... "Every country on earth that has good roads secured them by recognizing road building as a legitimate function of government, and it is safe to say we shall never have them in the United States without the Federal Government leads in the movement."

JAN 25, "Good Roads", page-one article reprinted from the New York Tribune: Describes techniques for the building and care of roads.

MAR 15, "Good Roads", page-one editorial reprinted from Good Roads Magazine: "The wise arrangement of tree growth along the lines of streets, roads and avenues is more nearly fruitful at producing financial benefit, pleasing and attractive surroundings than any other investment that can be made in the way of public improvements." ... "There is no one improvement that municipal engineering can arrange for that can help a suburban locality so much as tree planting."

MAR 22, "Good Roads", page-one editorial reprinted from Uptown Weekly: "The time has come when Congress should do something directly beneficial to the farming classes, and that thing can best be done by extending the aid of the general government to the States in road construction and improvement. The proposition to do so, in the form of what is now commonly known as the Brownlow-Latimer bill, has been generally discussed by the press, and has been endorsed by the National Grange, the National Good Roads Association, by farmer's societies, county organizations, State legislatures, State school officers and college presidents of eminent character, by leading ministers of the many churches, by State Governors, county officials, legal bodies, medical societies, trade and labor organizations, and by the President of the United States, who declared in a speech two years that the people had a right to demand it."

Landmarks Referenced
Depot at Bonsal. JAN 25, "Local Records": "The depot at Bonsal will completed in a month. The framing is nearly all done at Hamlet and will be put up in a short time after being hauled to Bonsal. A telephone line, instead of a telegraph line, is being erected between Bonsal and Durham, and will be completed in two weeks' time. No regular schedule has been put in operation, but freight trains are run occasionally from Durham to Bonsal."

Bridge Repairs. FEB 8, "Commissioners' Meeting": Account of $137.51 paid to "John L. Council for repairing bridge at Sears' mill". W.A. Copeland was paid $4.50 "for repairs on bridge on Roberson creek".

Culinary Notes
Page-one recipes. JAN 18, "Household Recipes": Graham Gems, Cornmeal Bread (Creole Recipe), Swan Pudding, Toasted Graham Gems, Monkey Pudding, Mutton Cutlets. MAR 1, "Household Affairs": Corn Pudding, Baker's Custard Pie, Stewed Sirloin of Beef, Apple Pie. MAR 29, "Household Affairs": Cheese Cakes, Dream Sandwiches, Steamed Brown Bread, Macaroni with Oysters, Apricot Tapioca.

Metereological Exceptionalism
FEB 1, editorial: "The sleet on last Thursday night was the heaviest that we remember ever having seen. The branches of the trees and every twig and bush were more heavily coated with ice than we have ever before seen ...." "Many of our public roads were obstructed with fallen limbs and uprooted trees, and there was less travelling done last Friday on any one day in a long time."

FEB 15, "Local Records": "Yesterday was as a delightful day as anyone could wish for."

MAR 1, "Local Records": "The past month has been the mildest and pleasantest February that has been known in this section for several years."

Comments
The Chatham Record was founded in 1878 and owed both its existence and its character to Henry Armand London (1846-1918). London was a Confederate veteran, having joined the army in 1864, his senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill. From William S. Powell's entry in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography: "Serving as a courier in Company I of the Thirty-second North Carolina Regiment, he participated in one of the last actions of the Civil War in carrying the message to General William R. Cox to cease firing because General Robert E. Lee had just surrendered." On returning to Pittsboro, London took active roles as banker, lawyer, and railroad developer, in addition to founding the Record.

During the present survey period, London's editorial voice bespeaks an intense, patriarchal focus on social control and a consensus among elites in the community. His affinity for the Confederacy, unreconstructed attitudes toward race, and high-handed scolding dominate the editorial and "Local Records" sections of the paper. One of the challenges of this exercise lies in selecting and presenting items from the paper without getting caught up in the editor's point of view. "Reads the Record" is on the beat of Chatham County and its story, not that of H.A. London. However, in these first few installments, before the Good Roads movement really picked up political steam following 1910, London's editorial voice takes prominence.

As we pick it up, the paper follows a strict and predictable format based around four broadsheet pages with seven columns per page. Each of the two interior pages supports a particular, recurring function. Page two runs editorials on the left, usually across two columns sometimes spilling into three. Extending across the seven-column structure to the right run brief opinion pieces and news dispatches, ranging in scope from local to regional to national and occasionally foreign. Letters to the editor occassionally appear on page two. Page three repeats the formula but calls itself "LOCAL RECORDS". It provides single-paragraph and often single-sentence notices, and mostly succinct commentary up to four or five paragraphs, regarding local and regional affairs. It runs into printed official notices and advertisements as it moves to the right. Page four is generally devoted to advertisements and syndicated columns.

The front page of the JAN 18 leads on the three leftmost columns with chapter 7 of a serial, "Little Make-Believe, or a Child of the Slums", by B.L. Farjeon. A recurring feature, "Woman's Realm", occupies two columns. Another recurring feature, "Household Affairs", runs in the sixth column, and the seventh and right-most column of JAN 18 is given to the "Good Roads" editorial described below.

"Little Make-Believe" ran on the front page of the Record through March 15, when a new serial would commence, "The Great Hesper, or the Search for the Biggest Diamond in the World," by Frank Barrett. Through the middle of the year, besides the serial, the front page rotated the recurring features. Other titles that lead the paper include "Popular Science", "With the Funny Fellows", "Farm and Stock Yard", "For the Younger Children....". Hard news would not lead until MAY 17, with the headline "Czar Opens Parliament".

Selected titles and quotations from "Woman's Realm". JAN 18, "Women With Federal Jobs": "Less than ten per cent of the Federal employees are women, and a great majority of them hold minor positions at small pay." FEB 1, "Feminine Press Agent": "The only woman in the world who travels as press agent for a circus, it is said, is Lillian Calvert Van Osten, who left the stage to exploit the merits of a Wild West show." MAR 8, "Shoes That Creak" and "Self-Government at Vassar".

The main editorial themes on page two through this period are Confederate memorials and commemorations, along with London's relentless broadsides against the state's Republicans. National and foreign affairs make limited appearances in the news or the editorials.

Chatham Rabbit Reads the Record

2007-07-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

The Rabbit begins here a recurring feature called in full, "Chatham Rabbit Reads the Record", or "Reads the Record" for short. The ground rules are subject to complete revision and even abandonment according to the flimsiest of whims, but for the moment they stand as:

1) Examine a year's worth of issues of the county's longest running newspaper, The Chatham Record, at a time, and write in installments, starting with quarters but switching to half or full years as convenient. Most of the paper's run is available on microfilm at the North Carolina Collection.

2) Start with 1906 for a few reasons; first, because that's the origin of this guy. Second, because working through about a year and a half would bring it up to a century before our moment. Finally and most importantly, because in accord with one of the themes of this blog, it starts at the point in history where the automobile begins to overtake rail as the primary transportation technology in the county and in the country.

3) Work with selected sequences, to help keep the project manageable. The first series will end probably around 1908. Another series might survey the few years leading up to 1915 and the passage of road bonds around the county. Also, the 1920s hold a lot of interest, as does the period leading up to 1939-1940 and the visits of the Farm Securities Administration photographers [to be blogged upon soon].

4) Summarize and feature selected quotations, notices and storylines from the paper, with two objectives:

A) First, to trace the roads debates, and the transformations brought by the automobile; to gather data on notable landmarks; and to note the development of the county's infrastructure.

B) Second, to highlight stories from community life. Here, particularly during the period when the paper was edited by its founder, Henry Armand London, we are led by a relentlessly parochial and politically partisan editorial voice. But this project isn't about the editor or the editor's persona. Most of the interest lies in voices that make it through the editorial filter into the paper.

5) Important Disclaimer: This is not a systematic study. I expect it to be comprehensive but not exhaustive with respect to information on the theme of roads and roads policy. It will be highly selective on the cultural, social, political themes.

6) Organize items under headings to improve readability. Some of the headings should remain consistent, but others could change as the paper itself changes. The Rabbit reserves the right to change headings without notice or explanation. To start, we'll see:

Roads -- Policy, Reports, Opinion

Landmarks Referenced

National and Foreign Affairs: These should be very brief and selected references, only when notable for the slant of coverage or the historic background they provide for local events.

State of NC: State affairs, especially as they relate to the roads movement and the county.

Top Local Stories Reported: In particular, follow narrative themes that develop over time.

Culinary Notes: Titles of recipes provided, particularly those printed on page one or submitted by local cooks. If I have time, I'll type out selected recipes in separate blog posts.

Chatham Rabbit: Wherever the paper mentions anything having to do with this blog's mascot.

Headings that we'll start with in 1906, but may not apply in different periods of the paper's life:

If It Bleeds, and Other Mayhem: The paper at times seems to portray a world where the entire human race is under constant siege from violent and disruptive forces. Natural disasters, transportation disasters, mob violence, random criminal behavior, bloody coups, and grisly workplace accidents -- hardly a week of the Record goes by without a heaping helping of mayhem.

Metereological Exceptionalism: Features statements about the weather that describe in terms exceeding the current year or season. For example, "the coldest day I can ever remember" would make it, but "the coldest day of the winter would not."

Setting Out

2007-07-06T17:55:00.000-04:00

[The Chatham rabbit postcard immediately below is hot-linked from the North Carolina Collection's "North Carolina Postcards" digital collection. Other photos courtesy the author.]

Now comes the moment that changes the place forever. It has happened before, of course, and we're only kidding ourselves if we think the dirt here hasn't seen change. It happened when the settlers of European lines began to identify themselves as the people of New Hope or Sandy Creek. It happened when some of them registered among their property the laborers of African descent, and set them to digging the rows where the new land prospered.

It happened when the rail chugged through, then again when the paved roads were laid down on a bed of federal money. It happened again when a generation of micro-farmers began refitting the old tobacco fields and plantation sites to an alternative, regional economy.

It happened when a building concern from Chapel Hill laid the first of the mixed-use communities and set off the wave of suburban development that washes over the place now. And speaking of washing and waves, it happened when the US Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Haw and flooded New Hope Valley, and for the sake of flood control and bathwater in Raleigh, filled Jordan Lake.

But in terms of force, sweep and pace, it's hard to top what's happening now. For those of us who live in the place, and those in the region who see it as an outskirt, the trend is well-known. Dozens of residential developments are underway. The population will grow from just under 50,000 at the 2000 census estimate to perhaps over 100,000 by 2020, with the bulk of growth concentrated in the northeast corner.

At this moment, as the gears of the growth machine mesh, Chatham County, North Carolina finds itself in an advancing state of disassembly. The developers' machines peel back layers of use and disuse to show new and transitory contexts for old things. Places and objects appear from where they lay in the shade, or under brush, or buried under topsoil. Heavy machinery roots up the place's stones, turns its insides out to the sky in a riot of clay and cut green timber, and piles it all along with the detritus of the old infrastructure off to the sides of job sites.

Now the eye is engaged by old forms in new placements,

new, transitory vistas,

invading grasses,

receding foliage,

heaps of both solid and brittle pieces.

Over time, the agent of this transformation, the growth machine, will tamp it all down again, landscape it with stones shipped in from elsewhere, and label it with new, focus-grouped names like Briar Chapel, the Parks at Meadowview, Legend Oaks.

Some people mourn this change as a travesty, and an affront to nature. Others celebrate it as progress. While the Rabbit certainly has opinions on the state of a meadow (as well as a forest, glade, ridge, hollow, field ...), he has only two sharp eyes and a hankering for scampering to affect the course of the growth machine. This document is a change log. The philosophy: observe, research, and connect. Critique where there's leisure to do it, and on rare occassions, advocate. But neither endorse nor spin an ideology besides one: Now we owe it to the place to keep an accounting of names as they change, to see the land where it's turned, and to make its olds stories alive in the ongoing.