Here’s to 30 Years

HERE'S TO 30 YEARS

Here's to 30 Years

Celebrating the Artists League of the Sandhills

By Jenna Biter     Photographs by John Gessner

Dozens of guests swirl about a long, rectangular room. A vase of sherbet roses and powder blue hydrangeas anchors the space on a table in the center. It’s a cool dusk outside, but inside the walls, the atmosphere is warm. It’s heated by the chatter of old and new friends, or at least friendly strangers. They flit in and out of conversations, gabbing and howling like they’re enjoying one last party at the end of the world.

They aren’t, of course. The Artists League of the Sandhills begins most months like this, with a gallery opening held the first Friday evening in that slender room in the not-for-profit organization’s headquarters. The building is situated not at the end of the world but at the end of Exchange Street, with its rear wall kissing the main train tracks that slice through historic Aberdeen.

A woman leans toward a friend while pointing at a small portrait of a lady peering through a monocle on the opposite wall. “We’re getting . . . ” she begins, but her voice trails off as she gets lost in the art. She walks across the room, magnetized. A red sticker on the artwork’s label marks it sold not long into the event.

The time of the gallery openings is always the same — 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. — but the theme varies from one show to the next. In August it was small art. In September viewers with reading glasses were grateful to see the works return to regular size. In October, the gallery showcased figures and faces, and November boasts the biggest event of the year, the annual fall exhibit and sale, which opens with a public reception Friday, Nov. 8, and hangs through Dec. 20.

The sprawling gallery show features somewhere around 150 new pieces of art, with works for sale by many of the league’s dozens of members. If you wander across the one-story building, through two large classrooms, past a framing station and a library of catalogued art books and into a maze of cubicle-like studios, you’ll find an additional 300 or so pieces for sale. With a pocketful of dollars and a can-do spirit, you could easily redecorate your entire house with an evening’s offerings.

The November opening is an art lover’s delight, but this year it’s something more — the exhibit marks a milestone anniversary, too. Originally the Workshop of the Sandhills, 2024 marks 30 years since the Artists League opened shop in the same old Aberdeen Rockfish railroad warehouse that it occupies today.

As if on command, a train roars past, releasing a protracted honk into the graying night sky. The blast is a visceral reminder of the league’s modest beginnings, when a pair of retired executives scrubbed through oil and grime to transform a century-old train depot into a gathering place for artists of all calibers and kinds.

The Sandhills knew Chuck Lunney as the audacious and distinguished World War II pilot who swooped his B-29 bomber under the Golden Gate Bridge on a dare, but he’s also remembered as an advertising professional and lifelong artist with an interest in art education and community, driven to create an organization for likeminded folks. Lunney found one such mind in retired sales manager and watercolorist Mike D’Andrea at a Campbell House Galleries reception sometime in the 1980s. After a half-decade’s search for the perfect location for their artists’ haven, the men opened the Artists League of the Sandhills on Oct. 26, 1994, in one-half of a dirty train terminal. When the town of Aberdeen offered to rent them the building for a dollar per year, the word “perfect” suddenly seemed to describe the broken building tucked all the way back on a forgotten side street.

“Their goal, I think initially, was to have 20 artists just so they could pay the bills,” says Pam Griner, the league’s office manager of 14 years. Sure, rent was dirt cheap, but they still had to keep the lights on.

The initial goal was immediately surpassed. According to a Nov. 10, 1994 article in the Moore County Citizen News-Record, 28 local artists signed up the very first day.

Thirty years later, both founders have since passed — Lunney, 93, in 2012, and D’Andrea, 89, in 2018 — but their legacy lives on in the organization they scrubbed into existence. The Artists League now occupies the entire warehouse, and membership bumps its head against 200, with tens of artists able to key into studios 24/7.

There’s always a waitlist for those 34 cheap-as-bananas workspaces.

In a typical week, members teach art classes Monday through Friday on media that run the full artistic gamut from oil to watercolor. Nationally known professional artists visit to host multiday intensives several times per year. With the fees from those classes and workshops, memberships and generous donations, as well as a small percentage of sales from the monthly art shows, the league stays up and running.

As more guests shuffle in, more red stickers claim ownership. The show led off with a large work of art, a reinterpretation of Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan — a dove has been added in an upper corner. A blurb on the wall explains why. Beyond the Klimt-alike more paintings, a scratchboard engraving of a goat, and mixed media of all types ranging in size from postcard to poster, snake around the room like a boa constrictor squeezing onlookers into a tight-knit group.

Most of the league’s artists are amateurs — stay-at-home moms or refugees and retirees from their day jobs — while others have taught or made art their entire lives. It doesn’t really matter who they are, the members bond over art. Learning it, loving it, making it. They exchange Christmas cards during the holidays, often crafted in a special December class, offer bedside company when ER visits become a sad reality, and grab lunch together even when it isn’t in the Artists League’s break room.

The spirit of community bubbles over, into the corners of the gallery space and out the front doors like an uncorked bottle of champagne. Even in the dim light of evening when the last guests are walking to their cars, the atmosphere is as bright as the roses and hydrangeas still on the center table.

“The new community facility offers artists, from the beginner to the accomplished, the opportunity to share their knowledge, gather inspiration and improve their skills,” the News-Record said in 1994.

Besides the word “new,” the same sentence could be printed today.

Not the Last Waltz

NOT THE LAST WALTZ

Not the Last Waltz

After a brief and soul-crushing hiatus, the Sunrise Theater in downtown Southern Pines will once again show the ultimate tryptophan antidote, The Last Waltz, on Thanksgiving night. The award-winning rock documentary of what was billed as The Band’s farewell performance was filmed on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 25, 1976, by director
Martin Scorsese. Released in 1978, the film is so highly regarded it was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the United States National Film Registry in 2019.

The members of The Band were Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson. At 87, Hudson is the only member still living. The venue was Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, where The Band debuted as a group in 1969. Starting at 5 p.m. the audience of some 5,000 was served turkey dinners. There was an orchestra for ballroom dancing, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was among a group of poets who gave readings. The Band began performing around 9 p.m.

And what a concert it was.

When the idea of a farewell performance was hatched, mostly by Robertson, who wanted to quit the touring life, the idea was to invite Bob Dylan and Ronnie Hawkins — their original employers — to join them. The guest list exploded from there, eventually including both Dylan and Hawkins, Bobby Charles, Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Paul Butterfield, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton and more. They were backed by a large horn section. Later, sound stage work that included Emmylou Harris and the Staple Singers was added to the film.

The documentary begins with The Band performing what was, in fact, their last song of the night, “Don’t Do It.” From there the film progresses more or less in chronological order of play — songs like “Stage Fright,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — mixed in with the studio sessions and interviews with the members of The Band, conducted by Scorsese.

In one anecdote, Robertson explains that the classically trained Hudson would join the group only if every member would pay him $10 a week for music lessons so that he could tell his parents back in Canada that he was a music teacher and not just a rock and roll musician.

The Last Waltz begins on Thursday, Nov. 28, at 7 p.m., and admission is free. The leftovers will keep until morning.

Poem November 2024

POEM NOVEMBER 2024

Great Blue Heron

He looked like an old man hunkered down
in a faded blue overcoat, his collar turned up,
shoulders hunched. He didn’t seem bothered

by the shallow water his feet were covered

by, nor the chill winter air blowing around
his bare pate. But then his narrow head rose

like a periscope, higher and higher — swiveled
in the direction of a hardly perceptible splash.

Slowly, he moved toward the sound on legs
as skinny as walking sticks, to the place where
dinner was served and eaten so fast, any cook

would wonder if he tasted it. It was enough,
however, to restore his quiet contemplations.

Hunger sated, he curled his long neck into its
warm collar, and stood as still as a painting

while the sun sank and the snow moon kept

rising like a white balloon over the darkening
lake, the stark tree branches, and a lone heron
blending, bit by bit, into the blue light of dusk.

                           — Terri Kirby Erickson

Preserving a Historic Graveyard

PRESERVING A HISTORIC GRAVEYARD

Preserving a Historic Graveyard

Woodlawn Cemetery is hallowed ground in West Southern Pines

By Elizabeth Norfleet Sugg     Photographs by Laura Gingerich

In a quiet acreage filled with arching, magnificent pines rest the memorials to a multitude of lives well spent. Woodlawn Cemetery, a historically African American burial ground, is on the corner of West New York Avenue and South Pine Street in West Southern Pines, surrounded by neighborhood streets carved out by families who came to this budding town to seize opportunity and put down deep roots.

A year after Southern Pines incorporated in 1887, the Seaboard Air Line Railroad began its route through the town, a desirable East Coast midpoint. With nearby Pinehurst opening its resort in 1895, the two municipalities were in the early stages of developing a tourist economy as fair-weather resorts, in the process generating a range of service jobs that lured workers to the area. Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, opened in 1918, and a continued migration to West Southern Pines came from men and women who served in the military. They met others in this close-knit community and began second careers becoming teachers, principals, nurses, opening an auto repair shop, corner stores, and ministering at a growing cluster of churches — living lives that would inspire generations to come. It’s both striking and humbling to learn that over 170 veterans from conflicts as far apart as World War I and the Persian Gulf War are buried at Woodlawn.

“Woodlawn Cemetery is a home to so many who gave to this nation, and their descendants continue to give,” says retired Col. Morris Goins, whose family has deep roots in West Southern Pines beginning  with his grandparents, Theadore Roosevelt and Marie Goins. His father, Thomas Theadore Goins, and four uncles served in the U.S. Army in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, collectively. Two of his uncles, Master Sgt. Henry Lewis Wooten Jr. (1925-1963) and Command Sgt. Maj. Fredrick Robinson (1933-2009), received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

Goins’ uncle Cecil Roosevelt Goins (1926-2000) served in World War II when the Army was still segregated and became one of the few African American officers in the 1st Infantry Division during the Korean War. Later, in the U.S. Marshals Service, Cecil Goins went to Selma, Alabama, following the violence of Bloody Sunday. Another historic assignment took him to Houston, where he protected Muhammad Ali during his trial for refusing to be drafted in 1967 during the Vietnam War. Another uncle, retired Maj. Allen Thurman Goins (1935-1997), was a Cobra helicopter pilot in Vietnam. On a flying mission making a “gun run” into a small village, his helicopter — call sign Panther 6 — was hit by ground fire. A bullet burrowed between Goins’ cheek and flight helmet, another between his temple and helmet. He woke up in a hospital. The injuries caused periodic seizures, ending his flying career. Decades later Morris Goins was walking in Washington, D.C., dressed in his uniform, when an older gentleman stopped him, read the name on his chest and asked if there were any aviators in his family. Given away by a strong family resemblance, Goins confirmed that the person the gentleman served with was his Uncle Allen.

In 1923 West Southern Pines became one of the first incorporated Black townships in North Carolina, and even after it was annexed by the municipality of Southern Pines in 1931, the community maintained its significant rooted heritage. Woodlawn Cemetery began on land that belonged to the Buchan family, about 6 -7 acres that backed up to the Rosenwald School built by the West Southern Pines township in 1925. As the neighborhood grew, the heart of the community was its school and the tree-lined burial ground that abutted it.

Retired Lt. Col. Vincent Gordan, one of four sons of a school principal and an elementary school teacher, grew up in a Sears and Roebuck house around the corner from West Southern Pines High School. Gordan was working as a senior trainer at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. After American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon’s west side, Gordan immediately began knocking on doors to help evacuate the building. The next day cots were brought in for Gordan and his colleagues to begin orchestrating the multi-level U.S. response to the attack by al-Qaida. Gordan’s final career move was as a division chief for the U.S. Census Bureau managing a $200 million budget. The experience proved invaluable when the late Rev. Fred Walden asked him to take over a nonprofit to help reinvigorate the West Southern Pines community — the Southern Pines Land & Housing Trust.

Walden was a beloved figure in Southern Pines, a veteran himself having served as an Army chaplain assistant. When he moved his young family back to Moore County in 1973 he continued a legacy begun by his great-grandparents, followed by his grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and their children. Taking over from his uncle, A.C. Walden, he ran the West Side Garage for 45 years, balancing faith ministries, serving on the Southern Pines Town Council, membership at the Rufus McLaughlin American Legion Post No. 177, and becoming a founding member of the Rotary Club of the Sandhills. Walden established the nonprofit Southern Pines Land & Housing Trust (SPLHT) to help protect property for the African American community and others in Southern Pines, and to aid people in keeping their land to foster the creation of generational wealth so vital to sustained financial well-being. In 2018, Walden called Gordan to come home and help reinvigorate the organization and its mission. His words were, “Vince, I need you.”

“My original reason (for taking the position as board chair) was because Fred saw his community going down,” says Gordan. “When I came home from the military West Southern Pines was a totally different atmosphere and environment than the one I left. There were changes that needed to be made, and I now, too, wanted to make them.”

The organization is headquartered in the former schoolhouse that in the 1940s became the segregated West Southern Pines High School and that in the 1960s evolved into the desegregated Southern Pines Elementary School. The Land & Housing Trust campus includes a playground named for an adored school principal, Blanchie Carter Discovery Park, the school gymnasium and auditorium — both of which can be rented out through the West Southern Pines Center, an entity under the umbrella of the SPLHT. In recent years Woodlawn Cemetery has also been overseen by the SPLHT with the Buchan family formally deeding the land to the Trust. The cemetery’s point person is yet another veteran, retired Staff Sgt. Bill Ross, who was a special populations coordinator with the Moore County Schools until his retirement there.

“Woodlawn was the only place to bury African Americans up to the 1970s,” says Ross, who like Gordan grew up in West Southern Pines, walking to school in the family-oriented neighborhood. Ross’ maternal grandparents were Claude and Essie Strickland, who moved from the Dunn area to West Southern Pines in the late 1800s. Claude Strickland opened a popular corner grocery and also worked for Hayes Book Shop delivering newspapers. What spurs Ross’ volunteer service is a desire to bring back “the camaraderie that I grew up with, that family connection, our community.” Once a star basketball player in the nearby gym, Ross watches over his family members buried in Woodlawn, his father Lucius Ross, a WWII veteran, mother Edith and, tragically, his daughter Barbra, who died in 1998.

Bringing much needed structure to the care and landscape of Woodlawn Cemetery has been a goal of the SPLHT board. In 2023 Gordan and Ross reached out to the Southern Pines Garden Club for its assistance updating the landscaping at both the front and side entrance gates. With funds raised from their annual Home & Garden Tour, the Southern Pines Garden Club also committed to building the recently completed brick memorial wall where brass nameplates will honor the veterans buried there. Patrick Kujawski of RK Masonry donated the labor.

Morris Goins and his wife, Yolanda, a mathematics professor pursuing a Ph.D. in higher education and the daughter of retired U.S. Army veterans Leon and Pearline Pempleston of Petersburg, Virginia, also plan to contribute to the restoration of Woodlawn. Plans in the works include irrigation installation, sodding the entire cemetery, employing ground-penetrating radar to locate old graves without markers, installing markers where there are none or where they’ve been lost, and creating a fund where the SPLHT can regularly contract with a landscaper for weekly maintenance.

For decades the maintenance was done by family members and volunteers like longtime friends Peggie Caple and Joyce Jackson, who joined the West Southern Pines Garden Club Cemetery Committee. Annual Memorial Day celebrations were held through 2019 to help raise money for landscaping and to pay Woodlawn’s longstanding caretaker Halbert Kearns. The group planned Woodlawn Cemetery Days with special speakers in addition to music events at area churches called “Woodlawn Day in Song.” The effort was aided by twice-a-year cleanup days conducted by the Pinecrest Air Force Junior ROTC. The cemetery committee was dedicated to the cause, even outlasting the garden club itself. Originally from Virginia, Jackson was the clerk in the Southern Pines Water Department during the week and worked evenings and weekends in the Carolina Dining Room at the Pinehurst Resort. Caple is a West Southern Pines native who has never lived more than a few blocks away from her childhood school and Woodlawn Cemetery. A longtime director of financial aid at Sandhills Community College, she finished her career there as the disabilities and placement testing coordinator.

“In our area Woodlawn is the resting place of African American descent,” says Caple.

The renewed spirit to preserve West Southern Pines is special to Matthew Walden, Fred Walden’s son, who is also a minister. Under the leadership of executive director Sandra L. Dales, he serves on the SPLHT board, which is securing funding to convert the former school and its campus into a multipurpose community and business center with an incubator kitchen and workspace for area entrepreneurs. Nora Bowman is chief operating officer of the West Southern Pines Center and handles the renting of the gymnasium and auditorium as well as the development of local events. Bob Smith is the curator of the future museum at the SPLHT dedicated to preserving the history of the area’s remarkable citizenry. Walden’s involvement with the organization his father began is born of the same desire to bring back the family-oriented community that he believes has been so vital to grounding his life. On walks through Woodlawn, he’s with family.

“When I see their names, memories come alive,” he says.

To learn more about the SPLHT or to contribute financially or as a volunteer, visit splandandhousingtrust.org.

Cabin Chic

CABIN CHIC

Cabin Chic

Destination down a dirt road

By Deborah Salomon     Photographs by John Gessner

Interesting people pull together interesting houses, sometimes for themselves, other times as business ventures.

“Interesting” barely describes Graham Settle, who grew up in a Sanford family of veterinarians; whose educational background stretches from East Carolina University to Harvard; whose careers extend from Wall Street to international diplomacy; and whose passport entries – including Afghanistan during tense times — would make Marco Polo envious.

“After 18 years living abroad with diplomatic credentials, my wife and I decided on a career as a free agent for global missions,” Settle says. “We had narrowed possible places (for home base) down to three: Singapore, Tirana (Albania) and Pinehurst.”

But when humans plan, fate may have other ideas. Shortly before making the move, Settle’s wife died of a brain aneurysm, leaving him alone with two young children.

In February 2014 he left Kazakhstan with the children, a kitten and six duffle bags to bring his wife’s remains back to the United States. Although not on the original list, they moved into a condo in Raleigh. Before long, Settle decided to home-school the children by traveling the world for a year.

Fast forward . . . they’re college age now, and Dad, shadowed by his German shepherd named Oscar, isn’t a pipe-and-slippers guy. He needed a project, somewhere to reclaim his roots. No surprise, then, that his real estate portfolio opens with the nation’s largest, if defunct, truffle farm.

In Carthage. Who knew?

Truffles, ultra-gourmet ,uber-ugly tubers (not mushrooms or rich chocolate bonbons), grow underground, requiring trained pigs or dogs to sniff them out. Prices start in the neighborhood of $200 per ounce and, depending on the variety, can run into the thousands.

But why would this adventurous world traveler want to farm truffles, no matter how exotic?

He doesn’t, really.

The wild and wooly 250 acres of Spring Hills Farms he purchased in 2020, in addition to the bankrupt truffle farm, suited another plan: a venue for weddings, business retreats, family holidays and other gatherings supervised by Mother Nature. Settle allowed air conditioning and cell access but, sorry, no Wi-Fi, no TV. Instead, on chilly nights, logs radiate heat from the east iron woodstove.

To protect the wildlife (whom he feeds) from coyotes Settle fenced the acreage, an act he compares to framing a work of art. This frame measures more than 3 miles. He paid five figures to bury wires visible from the cabin, which faces Morses Lake, and is accessed by a narrow, bumpy dirt road.

Settle describes the cabin, built in 1971, as “the middle of nowhere, the center of everything.” Quite the approbation, coming from a man who has been on the edge of everywhere and done an awful lot. But the cabin, formerly used to prep veggies to feed the truffle hogs, needed work. It had to remain “rustic,” a la Country Living, but luxurious enough to draw the Range Rover crowd.

Practical, too. Even fun.

The interior is an open two-story space with 15 windows and a sleeping loft. The kitchen corner (gas stove, dishwasher, jumbo fridge, copper-glass backsplash) has an interesting 6-foot-square table on wheels and original cabinets, all suitable for caterers. The loft accommodates two double beds arranged on a cashmere rug, from Mongolia, no less. Beneath the loft, a mattress fits a cedar swing, suspended by ropes, creating another sleeping space. Pine plank walls are painted charcoal navy, while the reddish ceiling fans evoke a tiki bar. A round leather rust-colored ottoman/storage unit houses a feather-down topper quilt brought back from Pakistan.

A Tiffany floor lamp passes for authentic, though Settle says everything is either a knock-off or secondhand, including a magnificent 9-foot tufted leather sofa where Oscar, Settle’s constant companion, is allowed to nap. The effect is masculine casual, a whiff exotic, except for the flowered curtains — chosen by Settle’s three sisters — of the Laura Ashley persuasion. For the kicker Settle opens an interior door with a flourish. “Hemingway cabin; Martha Stewart loo,” he says with a grin. The toilet-bidet combo sports a heated, lighted seat.

Spring Hills Farms has hosted one small wedding ceremony by the lake, with guests seated on benches made from split tree trunks and the reception under a tent.

There’s no denying the calm, the peace, of being surrounded by nature, its vistas, sounds and aromas. Settle has a place in Seven Lakes, also the Raleigh condo, but his heart remains in rural Moore County.

Destination weddings are all the rage. Safari, anyone? Spring Hills Farms is reaching out to city slickers weary of hotel extravaganzas, riverboat cruises and Caribbean beaches. Oscar and those thousand-dollar truffles are waiting just down Union Church Road.

Five for the Hall of Fame

FIVE FOR THE HALL OF FAME

Five for the Hall of Fame

The new inductees to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame include two bestselling novelists, a famed author-educator, a world-renowned master of haiku and a former North Carolina poet laureate. Ron Rash, Kaye Gibbons, Anna Julia Cooper, Lenard Moore and Joseph Bathanti will join the pantheon of North Carolina’s most celebrated literary voices in the biannual induction on Sunday, Oct. 6, at 2 p.m., at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. The festivities are free of charge and open to the public.

Anna Julia Cooper

It has been 60 years since Anna Julia Cooper departed the world at the age of 105.

Consider for a moment the breadth of her life: Born into slavery in Raleigh in 1858, three years before Fort Sumter was fired upon, Cooper was the youngest child of Hannah Stanley, a woman enslaved by the man who was presumably Anna’s father. On Feb. 27, 1964, Cooper died in her sleep in her Washington, D.C., home, just 17 days after the Civil Rights Act passed in the United States House of Representatives, and a few months before Lyndon B. Johnson would sign it into law.

“It isn’t what we say about ourselves,” she told an interviewer on her 100th birthday, “it’s what our lives stand for.”

The life of Anna Julia Cooper — educator, essayist, poet, scholar, cultural critic and theorist — was the subject of a recent play, Tempestuous Elements, written by Kia Corthron and performed at the Arena Stage in D.C. “Yet for all her accomplishments,” said a review in the Washington Post, “Anna Julia Cooper remains a relatively obscure figure. Kia Corthron’s Tempestuous Elements . . . gives Cooper the Mount Rushmore treatment she so richly deserves.”

As another reviewer remarked, “My main question is, why didn’t I know about her until this play?”

In 1867 Cooper was among the first students admitted to St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, an Episcopal school founded in Raleigh to educate those freed from slavery. Even there she bristled at excluding women from courses in theology and the classics. In 1877 she married George A.G. Cooper, a teacher at St. Augustine’s who was 14 years her senior. He would die two years later.

In 1881 Cooper enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the U.S. to admit both Blacks and women. Even there Cooper had to fight, successfully, to gain admittance to the “gentlemen’s course” of study. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1884 and followed that with a Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1887. Shortly thereafter she was invited to join the faculty of what would become known as M Street High School, later Dunbar High School, in Washington, D.C. In 1892, Cooper authored A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, a collection of essays credited as the first discourse on Black feminism.

At the beginning of one chapter, Cooper mentions a book titled Shall Women Learn the Alphabet, which proposes that such a thing should be prohibited by law. “Please remember this book was published at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Cooper continued. “At the end of its first third, (in the year 1833) one solitary college in America decided to admit women within its sacred precincts, and organized what was called a ‘Ladies’ Course’ as well as the regular B.A. or Gentlemen’s course.

“It was felt to be an experiment — a rather dangerous experiment — and was adopted with fear and trembling by the good fathers, who looked as if they had been caught secretly mixing explosive compounds and were guiltily expecting every moment to see the foundations under them shaken and rent and their fair superstructure shattered into fragments.”

So, yes, this was a woman who could write.

In the wake of the international success of A Voice from the South, Cooper addressed the World’s Congress of Representative Women held in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. In 1900 she was on the executive committee of the first Pan-African Conference in London and was the only woman ever included in the American Negro Academy.

In 1902, Cooper became the principal of the M Street High School, and it is her five-year stint there, confronting the racial and gender inequities of the Jim Crow era, that serves as the basis for Tempestuous Elements.

Cooper insisted on a college prep, classical liberal arts curriculum. M Street sent graduates to Harvard, Yale, Brown and Oberlin. She invited W.E.B. Du Bois to address her students. It was her bristling refusal to dumb down the curriculum that led to her confrontation with a white-dominated board of education that was insisting on a “colored curriculum.”

According to Shirley Moody-Turner, the editor of The Portable Anna Julia Cooper, “The tactics used to discredit Cooper followed a recognizable pattern: public shaming, presumed incompetence, questioning her professional judgment and other innuendoes used to cast doubt on her fitness to lead.” This included rumors of a liaison with John Love who, along with his sister, was taken in by Cooper after they were orphaned and continued living with her into adulthood.

Lastly, Cooper was accused of insubordination, of which she was profoundly guilty. She was dismissed from her position in 1906. “When Cooper arrived for the first day of school, the janitor barred her from entering the building,” writes Moody-Turner. “Police officers observed from across the street. They were ordered to arrest Cooper if they deemed she was creating a disturbance. With her students watching from the windows, Cooper — always a model of dignity and decorum — exited the school grounds.” Her curriculum, however, survived her.

After the M Street debacle, Cooper taught for four years in Missouri before returning to M Street to teach Latin. Following the death of the wife of a nephew (according to the Oberlin College alumni records), in 1915 Cooper adopted their five children: Anna, Regia, John, Marion and Andrew.

When the children were old enough to be enrolled in boarding schools, Cooper continued her academic pursuits, obtaining a degree from the Sorbonne in Paris at the age of 67, the fourth African American woman to receive a Ph.D. there. Following her retirement from teaching, she became the second president of Frelinghuysen University, an institution that educated Black adults while they continued to work.

Appropriately, Cooper may have written her own epitaph in that long-ago interview on the day she turned 100: “I don’t remember ever having taken anything just for myself.”

Joseph Bathanti

Believing that the study in his home was in such a state of cyclonic disarray that meeting there would be an impossibility, or at least an embarrassment, Joseph Bathanti and I sat together in the humble space — roughly the size of a mini-storage shed — reserved for a professor of English at Appalachian State University.

He was on crutches, though this sounds worse than it was. His tendons, ligaments and joints were taking a breather from long-distance running. On the desk near his phone is an autographed copy of the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It’s separated by a pile of books, a pair of scissors and whatnot from a copy of Howl. On the wall is a photograph of Roberto Clemente, a hero, beside a flier cordially inviting the public to follow the crowd to see and hear Sen. John F. Kennedy in October 1960.

The bookcases — there are exactly as many as the space will accommodate — are filled with volumes standing up, lying down, stacked and tilted, the top shelf crowned with baseballs, bobbleheads, photos of kids and more books. Joan Didion is near Gay Talese, who’s not far from Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, which is right above Becoming a Writer. The chair I occupy beside his desk is covered in garish Picasso-chic fabric. Against the wall behind it is an enormous playing card, the jack of hearts, which served as the cover of his book The High Heart.

Named North Carolina’s poet laureate in 2012, one of Bathanti’s go-to lines is, “Pittsburgh is my beloved hometown, but North Carolina is my beloved home state.” He has taught in our prisons and colleges, been to our hospitals, our shelters, our daycare centers and our soup kitchens. In actual fact, he is Pennsylvania’s gift to us.

Bathanti grew up in East Liberty, an Italian working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh. “My dad was a steelworker, my mother a seamstress. They’re union people. They just work and work and work and work, so my sister and I can have this kind of life,” he says. He came to North Carolina as a VISTA volunteer, fresh out of grad school. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I had a ponderously long list of things I couldn’t stomach the thought of doing,” he says. The first thing he did was meet the love of his life, Joan Carey, also a VISTA volunteer, in the same ballroom that was a set piece in Gone with the Wind.

“Jean Paul Sartre said somewhere that he pretended to be a writer until he became a writer,” says Bathanti. “I think that’s how we go about our lives. We pretend to be a father until we become a father. So, I just stayed with it. I continued to write badly, but I wrote less and less badly.”

He became a teacher at Central Piedmont Community College. “I made a living teaching,” he says. “I haven’t made a living on my writing at all, which most writers don’t. They have a straight job, as I like to say, so they can pay the rent, the gas.”

He fell into North Carolina’s community of writers. Kay Byer. Tony Abbott. Sam Ragan. Ron Bayes. Fred Chappell. Lee Smith. Too many to mention them all. “They invited me to their tables. They talked to me. They read my stuff. Initially you think everything you write is incredibly brilliant like, wow, I just reinvented the wheel. I got more objective about my work, kind of blue collar, shoulder to the wheel, pigheaded, hang in there with it, which is sort of my method. There aren’t a lot of long runs, let’s put it that way. Three or four yards at a crack. But that’s OK,” says the former four-sport athlete at Pittsburgh Central Catholic High.

Having authored over 20 books across various genres, Bathanti has accumulated virtually every plaudit his adopted state has to offer — poet laureate, the North Carolina Award in Literature, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine and on and on. But the Literary Hall of Fame is on another level.

“It means everything,” he says. “I’m terribly grateful that a Yankee interloper, a son of Italian immigrants, has entered the pantheon. To me, it’s about my mom and dad. I’m taking Joe and Rose into the Hall of Fame with me, in a lot of ways. My whole family of immigrants, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, all those people who work so hard, so selflessly. I show up here at age 23, a volunteer to work in the prison system who wants to be a writer but has never written a bloody thing except English papers. I would have never thought that something like that was possible. It was the very beginning of everything happening. It was kind of a magic portal I feel like I stepped through.”

Into our land. Into our literature.

Lenard Moore

It would be ironic if it weren’t so profoundly true that Lenard Moore has used the smallest of nets to capture, in stark and stunning detail, the chaos of our lives and his. A master of haiku and its many associated forms — tanka, senryu, renku and on and on — Moore was the first Southerner and first Black president of the Haiku Society of America, and the author of too many poems to count. He has been published in over 30 genres and translated into more than 20 languages.

With the pockets of his dapper sport coats stuffed with tiny notebooks, Moore doesn’t just write every day; he writes everywhere.

“I write all times of the day,” he says. “I write in the morning. I write at night. Walk through the woods, I write. Go to the beach, I write. In the mountains. It doesn’t matter. I go to basketball games, I always have a journal on me. I might have three.” In 1982, sitting in a Western Sizzlin’ all day, drinking a pitcher of sweet tea, he wrote 1,447 poems, and has stopped counting ever since.

Twenty years ago Moore lost his only child, his daughter Maiisha, a student at East Carolina University, in a car accident two weeks after her 22nd birthday. Her self-portrait is on the wall of his bedroom. There are Chinese fortune cookies wrapped in cellophane on the coffee table in his living room next to his daughter’s dictionary, its well-worn pages marked with as many yellow sticky notes as there are bees in a hive. On the shelf of an end table nearby is Maiisha’s Bible.

“That’s the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s kind of devastating. I went to the library about every evening for a year,” he says. “I wrote about her. I challenged myself. Writing is healing. If you go through tragedy, trauma or whatever, writing is there to help you.”

hot afternoon
the squeak of my hands
on my daughter’s coffin

It became one of Moore’s best-known haiku. “That poem kind of haunted me. At the burial I was the first one they called up to put a rose on the casket,” he says. “I put my hand on the coffin, maybe my hands were sweaty, I don’t know. I remember my hands slipped down the side and there was a loud squeak. It probably was about three days before I wrote it down. The poem just haunted me so I had to write it.”

Born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in 1958, Moore grew up in rural Onslow County, the eldest child in a large family. He was priming tobacco by age 13, “climbing the tier poles; hanging the tobacco; in the field, on your feet; walking those long, long rows; sunup to past sundown.” He and his brothers chopped wood for his grandfather after school. “I think I got a knack for writing from listening to my grandfather tell stories. I’m sure that had something to do with it. I think if you write your truth and you document it and you try to have structure to it, you will be able to get an audience — if you tell the truth in that work. Emily Dickinson said, ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant.’”

In athletics he excelled on the track team, when he was known not as Lenard (pronounced Len-ARD) but as Dwane. He ran the mile relay for White Oak High School, and he and his sister, Angela, cleaned up at local dance competitions in the ’70s. “Sports helped me,” he says. “I don’t give up.”

He won his first poetry prize in 1981 as a member of the 139th AG Postal Company stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. Back in the States, looking for that “audience,” he made sure he had “52 envelopes out at all times” to publications large and small.

Much of Moore’s work shares a kinship with the blues and jazz, his tight language giving form to genres that can expand and contract with the very lack of it. “I’ve performed a lot with jazz musicians all over the country, Canada, too. Hopefully, that’s a trademark of my work. Music,” he says. He writes about Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Nneena Freelon, John Coltrane and Nina Simone, but also of the clubs, as in the last two stanzas of “Girl Tap Dancing.”

She clicks, pats, taps

Shoes shocking the floor,

Arms swirl, whirl,

Legs stamp, swing,

Feet notes smoke, beat

The floor, the floor.

She taps, clicks, pats,

This sister firing the floor,

Arms encompass endless circles,

Legs slide, glide,

Displace air, filling space,

Black feather bobbing as she taps.

“This great community of writers, I’m humbled and honored to be a part of them,” says Moore of his induction into the Literary Hall of Fame. “It means a lot when home celebrates you. Home appreciates your work. Home gives you a nod to what you’re trying to do. Trying to document, write about the natural world, write about family, write about relationships, write about music. It makes me feel good that North Carolina appreciates that.”

Kaye Gibbons

Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina, in 1960, to Alice Dorothea Gardner and Charles Batts, a tobacco farmer. After their deaths, she lived with different relatives before settling in with her brother and his wife in Rocky Mount, where she graduated from high school in 1978. She attended North Carolina State University before transferring to UNC-Chapel Hill to study Southern Literature with Louis Rubin. In 1984, she married Michael Gibbons, a landscape architect.

That same year, at the age of 24, Gibbons wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster, published by Algonquin Books, the company Rubin founded in 1982. Praised as an extraordinary debut, Eudora Welty described the work as possessing “the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word.” Walker Percy said, “Ellen Foster is a Southern Holden Caulfield, tougher perhaps, as funny . . . a breathtaking first novel.” In 1987, the novel won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, the Louis D. Rubin Writing Award, and other major awards. Now considered a classic, it is taught in high schools and universities, alongside works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. The book has been widely translated and was produced for CBS television’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, starring Emily Harris and Jenna Malone.

Gibbons’ second novel, A Virtuous Woman, also received wide praise in the United States and abroad. The story, told in the voices of a dying wife and her widowed husband, was dubbed “a small masterpiece” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Both Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman were chosen as Oprah Book Club selections in 1998 and led the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks.

In 1989 Gibbons received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel, A Cure for Dreams, published by Algonquin in 1991. Writing about three generations of women, she used transcripts from the Federal Writers’ Project of the Great Depression, housed at Wilson Library in Chapel Hill. Gibbons said she discovered for the first time “the voice of ordinary men and women as a pure form of art and force of nature.” The Los Angeles Times Book Review described the novel as “full of unforgettable scenes and observations, characters drawn surely and sharply, and writing that is both lyrical and lightning keen.” It won the PEN Revson Award for the best work of fiction published by an American writer under 35 years of age, the Oklahoma Homecoming Award, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, and the Nelson Algren Heartland Award from the Chicago Tribune.

When Charms for the Easy Life was published in 1993, it became an instant bestseller. The novel takes place between 1910 and 1945 in the home of three generations of highly intelligent and forthright eastern North Carolina women. It was followed by Sights Unseen, published in 1995, and a winner of the Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Chronicle.

The following year, her sixth novel, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, was a story set during the Civil War. The Orlando Sentinel found it to be “a muscular narrative that humanizes all sides of that bloody conflict — North and South, Black and white, male and female.” Gibbons was described as “one of the most lyrical writers working today” by Entertainment Weekly.

In 1996 she became the youngest writer to receive the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recognizing her contribution to French literature. She spoke at the Pompidou Center in Paris and at the University of Rennes. In 1998, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature and, in 1999, North Carolina State University awarded her the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. She also received the Carolina Alumni’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award and was invited to become a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She served as a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards and wrote the introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Other Stories.

Divining Women, published in 2004, is set during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Gibbons also wrote The Other Side of Air that year, which was left unfinished after the death of her close friend, the writer Jeanne Braselton. The sequel to Ellen FosterThe Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster — was published in 2005.

Gibbons is currently working on a memoir about the intersection of mental illness and creativity in her work, and has spoken and written about the need to remove the stigma from illnesses, like bipolar disorder, which she was diagnosed with in 1981.

— Adapted from the N.C. Writers’ Network

Ron Rash

Finding Ron Rash’s home is easy enough: Bear left at the tethered goat and keep climbing. Both a resident and chronicler of the high country, Rash is praised for his portrayals of the struggles and grit of the common and uncommon folk — from whom he is descended — of the Appalachians. A teacher, first in high school and then in a community college, Rash achieved his first critical success as a poet. His debut collection, Eureka Mill, draws on the experience of his grandparents’ generation, migrating from the mountains to find work in the cotton mills and the cultural upheaval attending it.

Though Rash has become internationally known as a novelist, his work stayed home in the mountains. His bestselling 2008 novel Serena is the story of a newlywed Northern couple, George and Serena Pemberton, and the full-blooded ruthlessness of the title character as the couple cause multiple tragedies in their pursuit of riches. The book was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, Rash’s most recent novel, The Caretaker, was selected by The New York Times as one of its best books of 2024. “I set this novel on my grandparents’ farm between Blowing Rock and Boone because the happiest time of my life was spent on that farm,” says Rash. “The cemetery (appearing in the novel) is up there. Everything is the way it is in the book. I’ve always wanted to write about that place and finally did.”

Rash’s writing life, in a sense, began with a pulled hamstring — a poet in disguise with a soft tissue problem. Tall and fit, he was a more than serviceable track star running the 800 meters in high school and college. “I’m a terribly obsessive person,” he says. “I’ve never been interested in being well-rounded. I was training one day in the winter and it gave. Sometimes those things can heal but this one wouldn’t. I’d been dabbling with writing but then it was, what now?”

What now became poems and short stories. “I tried to write a couple of novels when I was in my 20s and another one when I was about 30,” he says. “They were terrible. I burned them. Did a service to the world. They were really bad but that was OK, I was learning. I didn’t try to write another novel until I was in my mid-40s. That was One Foot in Eden. I read it and thought, this is something I can have my name on and not be ashamed of.”

By his own admission, Rash’s nature tends to be solitary, and it shows in his workday. “I’m repetitive, structured, ritualistic. I eat breakfast, exercise for an hour, get a big thing of unsweetened tea. Get my pencils laid out. Everything kind of has to be in the right place. I like to write in my office (at Western Carolina University) because it’s so monastic.”

The session may last an hour or six. “When I was working on Serena I’d go 10 hours a day at times,” he says. “The part I love is editing. I hate first drafts. What I love is getting to the last stages. That’s when I’m just listening to sounds. The writers I love, when you read them you’re gliding. You don’t have those stumbles where the sentence is awkward or the word just seems to be wrong.”

In The Caretaker, Rash writes:

As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.

If Rash showed early symptoms of a man who would lead an author’s life, those signs didn’t come solely in the form of an 800-meter race. “As a child my father had severe mental problems. He had to be institutionalized at times. I would go to my grandparents’ farm,” he says of the land occupied by The Caretaker. “It was peaceful. I could go out in the woods. In a way, I found solace in nature — no TV, no vehicle — and just wander. The land borders the Blue Ridge Parkway. I was like Huck Finn. I was just kind of daydreaming.”

Selection as a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame is particularly poignant for a writer whose work lives so organically within the state. “So many of the writers who have inspired me are in there,” he says. “Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, they’re the generation that showed me the possibilities, and how to do it right. Each of them taught me something different. I think Fred gave me a sense of the possibilities of humor. Robert Morgan really showed me the possibilities of the details, the significant details of a place, knowing the landscape. Lee opened up the possibilities of writing stories. A wonderful sense of storytelling.”

His list of mentors, real and spiritual, unwinds as he talks: Thomas Wolfe; Robert Penn Warren; a bushel of European writers introduced to his universe by Chappell.

To the extent to which such honorifics are capable, there is one thing the Hall of Fame can do. “I am drawn to things that can be forgotten,” says Rash. These five inductees will not be among them.

Poem

POEM

October 2024

The Doorman at the
Washington Hilton

Regal in his red cap and Nehru tunic,

he summons with a silver whistle,

depended from a silver tassel

around his neck,

a taxi for Jacob,

our first-born –

mere minutes to make his train

to Philadelphia, then another

to New York, and the plane

to Dubai, then Zambia.

How can it be that you raise children

for the world and they rush off to it,

places and people you’ll never see.

Is that your son, the doorman asks.

When I am unable to answer,

he tells me of his son, in Iraq,

his fear of the telephone

he can’t bear to answer.

All week, this man has held doors for me,

hailed cabs,

smiled as if he did not have such a son.

    — Joseph Bathanti

Sunblock

SUNBLOCK

Sunblock

Scientists flocked to Pinehurst for the eclipse of 1900

By Bill Case

Situated on Ritter Road in the Old Town section of Pinehurst is a decidedly quirky monument that could conceivably double as an immovable outdoor coffee table. A rectangular brick base, 18 by 21 inches wide and 18 inches in height, supports a circular sandstone slab 4 inches thick and 30 inches in diameter. Punched in the middle of the slab is a tiny hole.

Curiously, there are no inscriptions on the monument to indicate its significance. In 2001, the Pinehurst Civic Group placed a small engraved marker near the monument, a foot above ground level, for the purpose of enlightening puzzled passersby. The marker, titled SOLAR ECLIPSE MONUMENT MAY 28, 1900, reads:

On this spot astronomers and scientists from around the country came to observe and photograph the eclipse. The punchmark in center is basis for all computations of location and distance measurements in this section of the country. It is also part of a gigantic scheme of world mapping that covers the entire Earth. Additional information at Tufts Archives in village.

To increase awareness of the mostly overlooked site, a tall historic landmark sign with identical verbiage was recently erected along Ritter Road by the village of Pinehurst. 

So, what circumstances caused eminent men of science to select Pinehurst, then solely a winter resort town, as the ideal spot to observe and study the solar eclipse? It would have been an inconvenient time for them to work here. By May 28, 1900, the fledgling resort and town would have already ceased operations for the summer. Who were these scientists, and what did they accomplish? Where did they eat and sleep?

While the Tufts Archives has in its collection numerous photographs pertaining to the Pinehurst eclipse expedition of 1900, it has little documentation concerning it. Like the resort, the Pinehurst Outlook, first printed in 1897, was in mothballs for that summer and would not resume operations until early November. The January 5, 1900, edition of the paper did, however, herald the fact that “an excellent view of the total eclipse of the sun (on) May 28 . . . one of the great events of 1900, may be had at Pinehurst.”

Fortunately, other newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun, Charlotte Daily Observer, Charlotte News and the Henderson Gold Leaf, did report on the Pinehurst eclipse expedition. A digital search of these ancient publications helped piece together the story.

The Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., was the prime mover in organizing the Pinehurst expedition. Stimson J. Brown, the director of the observatory, petitioned Congress to authorize $5,000 to fund three eclipse stations. Two were in Georgia — one in Barnesville and the other in Griffin. The third was to be located in the vicinity of Southern Pines. The three expeditions were charged with performing identical missions, the thought being that if cloud cover hampered observations at one of the sites, hopefully the sky would be clear at the others. The May 28 total solar eclipse was the first in America since 1878, and with scientific techniques having improved markedly, there was much to be learned.

Brown tabbed the observatory’s professor of mathematics, Aaron N. Skinner, to find a suitable location to observe the eclipse in or near Southern Pines. Following Skinner’s two-day visit to the area in April 1900, he chose Pinehurst as the site. Though the town would be closing down on May 1, four weeks before the eclipse, resort owner, James W. Tufts (according to a report authored by Skinner) “courteously extended an invitation to the N.O. to locate an eclipse observatory on the property.” Tufts assigned resort general manager C.D. Benbow the task of arranging necessary housing. Skinner reported that J.M. Robinson, owner of The Lenox rooming house (which later burned down and is now the site of a residence at 175 Cherokee Road), was induced to keep his operation open “for our entertainment.”

In fact, the emptiness of the town was viewed as a plus, according to the May 20 edition of the Charlotte Daily Observer (in an article reprinted from the Baltimore Sun), which said, “There are no curious persons to hinder the work . . . on the eventful morning.” Furthermore, the Pinehurst location seemed “to be all that is desired. There are no trees, woods, or buildings to obscure the view of the sun.” A marked contrast to the Ritter Road of today.

Professor Skinner and the observatory’s assistant astronomer, Theo King, arrived in Pinehurst on May 3 to begin preparations for the expedition on the “plot of ground about 800 feet southeast of the Carolina Hotel,” which was then in the final phase of construction. Because the station’s precise longitudinal and latitudinal position was critical, the first order of business was to lay out a “meridian line” toward true north.

Naval Observatory records indicate that Skinner, in locating that line, placed a landmark exactly 1,100 feet north from the tiny hole in the monument slab. Does this landmark still exist? Using the compass on an iPhone and proceeding due north from the monument approximately 1,100 feet, I saw a circular metal object in the ground off Caddell Road. It was covered with design features that looked like astrological symbols. Could this be the long lost marker?

Uh, no. What I had discovered was a manhole cover — albeit an intricately designed one — made in India. The marker does, however, still exist. As luck would have it, Jill Gooding, the granddaughter of Pinehurst’s jack-of-all-trades (including surveyor) Rassie Wicker, was able to show me the location of the true north marker stone I had failed to find.

On May 8,, 1900, team members began trickling into Pinehurst to join Skinner and King. This was more than just a Naval Observatory operation. A contingent of six from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, led by 35-year-old physicist and professor Joseph S. Ames, would play a key role in the expedition. Ames would later ascend to the presidency of Johns Hopkins. He would also serve as a founding member and longtime chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA. Professor R. W. Wood from the University of Wisconsin, Dr. F.L. Chase from Yale, and the Cincinnati Observatory’s E.I. Yowell rounded out the expedition. Ultimately 16 team members would have roles to play during the actual eclipse.

Other expeditions were arriving at various destinations along the eclipse’s 50-mile-wide path. The Smithsonian Astrological Observatory shipped several railroad cars of equipment from Washington, D.C., to Wadesboro, N.C. They were joined by teams from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the British Astronomical Association. Wadesboro was chosen because of the belief that the town’s high elevation made it less likely that clouds would impede visibility. Unlike Pinehurst, spectators flocked to Wadesboro in massive numbers (including those who arrived on a special excursion train from Charlotte) to view the eclipse and the feverish efforts of the Smithsonian expedition. The wave of people and publicity would cause Wadesboro to be generally remembered as the best place to have witnessed the 1900 eclipse.

The Naval Observatory’s longtime historian, Geoffrey Chester, explained to me why eclipse expeditions proliferated at the turn of the century. Scientists were eager “to help refine the theory of the moon’s orbit in order to provide more precise data for navigational almanacs,” he says. “By observing the actual times of the ‘contacts’ of the moon’s climb with that of the sun, and comparing those with predicted values, those corrections could be incorporated into a refined theory.”

Moreover, the Naval Observatory’s historian says that “there were many measurements that could only be made during a total solar eclipse — in particular, high-resolution spectrograms of the sun’s chromosphere . . . and the solar corona,” which enabled scientists to measure the elements present in these areas.

A May 26, 1900, article in the Charlotte Observer confirmed that the Naval Observatory’s expedition would indeed be studying the “the nature and constitution of the corona and chromosphere of the sun,” and elaborated on the reasons in layman’s terms: “(The atmosphere) of the sun consists of vapors or metals such as iron, calcium, and silver, together with many ordinary gases, such as hydrogen and oxygen. This atmosphere is called the chromosphere. Outside it, and seen on the Earth only at times of total eclipses, is a sort of irregular halo, with streamers going off in different directions, all of a brilliant white color against the blue of the sky. The cause of this corona is unknown . . . an attempt will be made to see how many different agencies are taking part in it, and to learn if its existence depends solely on the sun itself.”

On May 8, the various instruments required by the expedition were shipped from Washington to Pinehurst by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad via freight car, and the team members diligently worked to assemble them. With the exception of last-minute adjustments, the staging of the Pinehurst site was completed several days later. A number of brick and cement piers, as well as wooden structures and tarps, were constructed to support and house the equipment. Among the instruments was a telescope mounted on two axes of motion parallel to the Earth’s axis, transits, and several types of spectrographs designed to assist the scientists in their quest to analyze the corona and chromosphere by splitting their emitted light into its component parts. A darkroom and 40-foot tower housed the camera equipment that would photograph the various phases of the eclipse. From a distance, the site would have given the impression of an outdoor produce market next to an oil well.

While attendance for the eclipse at Pinehurst was paltry compared to Wadesboro, there was an influx of camp followers in town as the event approached. Ames reported that in the final two days, “all the meals at the astronomers’ boarding house (the Lenox) were served in two or three relays.” The actual working team of the expedition was “given the right of way, and had the privilege, if it may be called that, of having breakfast at 5 a.m.”

After that, according to Ames, “came the preparations of the buildings for action. The curtains were raised from the sides of the observatory, rafters were taken out, and hastily constructed roofs were taken down. In a short time, all the instruments were exposed to the sky, where the sun was slowly rising.”

Final rehearsals followed as the team members synchronized their watches. “We all knew that the instant of second contact had been calculated at 46 minutes, 16 3/10 seconds past 8 o’clock.” Ames confided, “There is enough uncertainty as to the moon’s true position at any time to make it possible there might be an error of a second or two in this predicted time.” The excitement within the team “was more intense than one would have expected. No one was willing to acknowledge this until afterwards.”

When the moment of first contact was announced, tensions were forgotten as the team sprang into action. They knew that the big moment of the “second contact” would be occurring in an hour and 10 minutes. “Everyone had his piece of smoked metal or colored glass,” said Ames, “and was intently watching the wasting away of the sun.”

Ames was fascinated by the spectacle unfolding before him. In conveying its grandeur, he wrote, “No wonder the poets of ancient civilization could picture the conflicts of huge beasts, one consuming the other in this great spectacle of nature.”

One researcher who was especially interested in examining shadow bands readied his stroboscope and spread a large linen sheet perpendicular to the sun’s rays, but the results of that particular experiment proved disappointing. Ames reported that “the shadow bands were conspicuous by their feebleness.”

At 8:46 and 6 3/10 seconds the team “heard the cry ‘Attention!’” meaning there was less than 10 seconds to go before the second contact. “All the photographic slides were withdrawn. Not a sound was heard even from the surrounding crowd,” wrote Ames.

Announcement of the command to “Go!” was assigned to Johns Hopkins team member Dr. W.B. Huff. He was to shout it immediately upon observing the flash signaling the start of the second contact. To perceive it, Huff employed a binocular, one barrel of which was fitted with a small diffraction grating.

Ames vividly describes the flurry of activity when Huff gave the command. “The lenses were uncapped, shutters were opened, and as the monotonous calling of the seconds proceeded one could dimly hear the sounds of changing plates and sliding camera boxes.” The predominant thing in the observers’ consciousness “was the rapidity of the flight of seconds and the absolute need of never allowing one’s mind to leave the work in hand even for an instant.”

However, there was a glitch in the timing of the command. “Unfortunately the small diffraction grating attached to the binocular failed to render viable the flash at the second contact and delayed the starting signal by 25 or 30 seconds,” said Skinner’s report. “Consequently valuable time was lost.”

Once the action started time passed rapidly until Huff shouted, “Done!” The eclipse was over as the crescent of the sun gradually peeked out from behind the moon. After the taking of a few final spectrum photos, the dismounting and packing of the equipment commenced. “As fast as the covers were screwed on the boxes were carried to a freight car standing nearby,” wrote the professor, “and in an almost incredibly short period the appearance of the whole place had changed entirely.” By 10 o’clock, all evidence of the expedition was gone, except, of course, for the monument.

Notwithstanding the delay in calling out the flash, the expedition provided substantial data and excellent photographs of the corona and total eclipse. Ames declared it a success and credited “the energy and industry of Professor Skinner, who has done everything in his power to carry out the plans formed early in the year by Professor Brown.”

The expedition was largely forgotten in Moore County until an article in the Nov. 28, 1931, edition of the Pinehurst Outlook when the paper’s editor, Bion Butler, described efforts to determine the precise longitude and latitude of what is now the Moore County Airport. It was the legendary Rassie Wicker who arrived at a simple solution: Use as a starting point the solar eclipse monument, known to have a north longitude of 35 degrees, 11 minutes, and 38.23 seconds and a west latitude of 79 degrees, 28 minutes, and 12 seconds, then work from there. And that’s what happened.

Thus, the humble “coffee table,” left behind by the Naval Observatory nearly 125 years ago, rather uniquely, served a practical purpose — as well as commemorating a historic astronomical event. Doesn’t that make it the best type of monument? 

Art of the Manor

ART OF THE MANOR

Art of the Manor

Grand spaces and small treasures

By Deborah Salomon     Photographs by John Gessner

Imagine a residence resembling an Impressionist watercolor of all things spring. Imagine that it never fades or droops or goes to seed from summer’s heat. Turquoise predominates, cool as a rushing stream, channeling Monet. Birds flutter, some painted, some carved, some blown glass perched on a delicate glass birdbath. Yellow walls warm as May sun illuminates a living room housing two grandfather clocks, skirted end tables, leafy wallpaper, a thickly upholstered extra-long, 60-year-old sofa and, for contrast, a porcelain urn tall enough to house the ashes of a dynasty of pharaohs.

Mallory Hickey, dressed in lime linen, calls the result “my happy house.” Her friends call it “Mallory’s Gallery.”

The house, an elegant yet informal English country manor clad in white stucco with narrow shutters, was built in 1923 by the Tufts organization for a Mrs. Butterfield who, according to correspondence on file in the Tufts Archives at the Given Memorial Library, expressed multiple petty grievances. Subsequently, Richard Tufts is said to have lived there. Without complaint.

In an era when country homes needed names, this mild-mannered specimen was called Blackjack Cottage, not for connections to gambling or even rakish Black Jack Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy’s hard-drinking, high-rolling father. Rather, the lot was overgrown with blackjack oak trees named for its bark divided into ebony plaques.

Could this be why Hickey painted the foyer opening onto an otherwise pastel interior . . . black? No. “Black is neutral,” the chatelaine says. It’s also a contrast. The antique Irish rocking horse leaning against the staircase suggests that surprises await.

For 30 years Hickey has been leaving her imprint on this manor on the edge of Pinehurst village, where construction dug up a crumbling tombstone engraved “John O. Fisher 1889,” its provenance a mystery.

In the early 1990s Hickey and her late husband, John, Michigan residents, contemplated early retirement, she from an upper-echelon job with American Airlines, he from marketing. They took two weeks off to scope out Hilton Head, Savannah, et al. Friends had moved to Pinehurst. It made sense to stop on the way home one lovely October.

“We checked into the inn. I thought, what a cosmopolitan place,” Hickey recalls. Just for fun, they looked at houses. In Blackjack Cottage she saw beyond the shag carpet and flocked wallpaper. They rented, then purchased, the property, which she would spend decades transforming.

“I’ve done the kitchen twice,” she says.

First, they needed to replace the upstairs master suite with something more substantial and comfortable, preferably on the ground floor. The new wing of mammoth proportions has a vaulted, timbered ceiling rising 20 feet, dwarfing two queen-sized beds. Its seating area with sofa, tables, fireplace and bay window overlooks a terrace. Here, summery pastels give way to richer hues, forest green and deep coral, a contrast continued in the TV/library/den, just off the living room, where dog art rules.

On the bay windowsill, Gracie, a 14-year-old retriever mix, stretches out in her bed. “We found her in a dumpster in the Dominican Republic, when she was a puppy,’’ Hickey says. Also in residence, three cats, the eldest pushing 20.

Each room contains something notable. In the dining room one of three corner cupboards displays Hickey’s collection of vibrant Majolica pottery. The dining table (with no extensions) seats six — eight in a pinch — since this hostess prefers intimate, informal dinners seasoned with lively conversation. Its skirted chairs are upholstered in white. Not to worry, she explains, ketchup wipes off.

About that twice redone kitchen: If most Pinehurst manor house kitchens are sequined ball gowns, this one is a finely tailored suit in sand, beige and off-white with a beadboard ceiling and furniture-finish island, softened by an eyebrow window over the farm sink. In here, the cry of the Wolf range goes unheeded. Hickey did not submit to Sub-Zero, either. In a home a shade under 5,000 square feet, the proportions of the modest but elegant kitchen meet her needs. “When guests congregate here I chase them out,” she says pleasantly.

Upstairs belongs to family mementos, beginning with photos of Hickey’s mother and grandmother in the stairwell, continuing with a framed christening dress, a bedroom set, quilts, art and snapshot collages. “My grandfather came over from Russia,” she says, drawing attention to a photo. “He jumped ship in New York.” She saved his bed, along with a figurine of a lady that was broken in a fall and mended by a child with chewing gum. A narrow indoor balcony overlooks the sunroom, a veritable bower adjoining the living room. Sitting there is like being outdoors minus inclement weather.

The gardens are lush and densely shrubbed, a goldfish pond is covered with wire to thwart fishing birds.

Mallory’s Gallery, indeed, enhanced by grand spaces and small treasures — stained glass window panels, a framed Hermes scarf and, on the swinging doors, raised metal finger plates from New Zealand.

“I live in a bubble — secure, far from the madding crowd,” Hickey says. Then admits the obvious: “I love Monet water lilies.”

Dressed to Thrill

DRESSED TO THRILL

Dressed to Thrill

Audrey Moriarty

In the early 1930s, in a village not so very far away, masquerade balls were all the rage. Over time, the Carolina Hotel celebrated New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day and Valentine’s Day with dress-up galas. Guests and cottagers were “invited” to attend by Leonard Tufts himself, and admission was by card only. Invitations for guests were procured at the Carolina office. Other balls, sponsored by the Sandhill Shrine Club, were held at the Pinehurst Country Club. Donald Ross was the chairman of the Ball Committee and invited attendees by letter describing the club’s purpose, and enclosing a ticket and a stamped envelope. Tickets were $5, and proceeds supported the community’s “little sufferers.”

These events, however, were no match for the revelry of the employees’ masquerade balls. The annual “Frolic in the Spring” was attended not only by employees, but cottagers and guests as well. Held at the Carolina Hotel, the annual ball started with a parade from the dining room, down the great hall, and into the ballroom. According to the April 3, 1931, Pinehurst Outlook, “The annual employees’ masquerade brings out the best array of costumes seen during the entire season.”