The University Libraries Awards Committee announced the award winners for 2023:
University Libraries Staff Outstanding Service Award: Carolyn Shankle
University Libraries Faculty Equity-Diversity-Inclusion Award: Stacey Krim
Carolyn ShankleStacey Krim
And Service Pins for:
5 years = Patrick Dollar and Suzanne Helms
15 years = Beth Ann Koelsch
30 years = Carolyn Shankle
Preservation Services Student Worker Selected for Library Award
Congratulations to Jordan Williams for winning 2023’s Outstanding Library Student Worker Award! She was nominated this year by her supervisor, Audrey Sage, for her exceptional work for the Preservation Services department. Jordan has been working in Preservation Services since 2021, and she is responsible for binding new acquisition materials, repairing damaged circulating items, and constructing enclosures for materials for all departments.
Along with the other nominees, Jordan was nominated for her reliability, responsibility, conscientiousness, and her commitment to service and teamwork shown in the performance of library duties. Jordan has been described as having an outstanding work ethic, never missing a day of work. She has incredible organization skills and attention to detail.
Jordan is not only an exceptional employee but also a serious and dedicated student. She is studying Environment and Sustainability Studies and takes her role as a citizen of the world very seriously. Sustainability within the environment is an important focus for her, and she has taken the initiative to start a group on campus and inform others of crucial issues at stake in North Carolina and beyond.
Jordan’s commitment to her job and her studies is a true testament to her character, and we are lucky to have her. Her dedication to preserving the resources in which the state has invested is admirable, and her intelligent approaches to situations give us hope for the future. Jordan will be graduating in May, so, If you see her, please give her your felicitations! Her name has been added to the illustrious plaque of previous winners (on the wall near Access Services).
UNCG Magazine Featured Stacey Krim and her Work Preserving Campus LGBTQ+ History
Interim Head Kathelene McCarty Smith was the featured speaker for the joint meeting of theCentury Book Club, Mentor Book Club, the Belles Lettres Club, and the Heritage Book Club, in Alamance County. Her talk, “Detective Series from Your Childhood: The Enduring Mystique of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys!” focused on the history of the Girls’ and Boys’ Books in Series, including Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and other series, with a related display of SCUA material. Book Club members decorated their tables with Nancy-Drew themed decorations and a good time was had by all!
Hop into History Returns!
After a three-year hiatus, Hop into History returned in February 2023. Hop into History is a monthly event, held on the fourth Thursday of each month at Oden Brewing Company in Greensboro. SCUA staff create an exhibit on a topic of historical interest, and a speaker is invited to provide context or additional information about the topic.
The three events held during the Spring 2023 semester were:
February 23: Judge Elreta Alexander. Exhibit by Stacey Krim. Talk by Dr. Virginia Summey.
March 23: Women and Politics. Exhibit by Kathelene Smith. Talk by Dr. Mandy Cooper.
April 27: Gay Nightlife in Greensboro. Exhibit by Stacey Krim. Talk by David Gwynn.
After a summer break, Hop into History will return in Fall 2023. Please follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/UNCGArchives) to be alerted when the Fall schedule is set.
“What Would You Say You Do?”- Sharing the Knowledge of Archives with Others
By Sean Mulligan
While there as many challenges to being an archivist, one issue that frequently arises is trying to explain to others what exactly the job entails. It is not uncommon to get the question “So what do you do?” when archivist share their profession title with others. Sometimes the only connection they draw are thoughts about the National Archives in Washington D.C. or possibly that adventure movie with Nicholas Cage (National Treasure). Therefore, it was a great privilege for UNCG archivist Sean Mulligan, to have an opportunity to share his story of being an archivist this spring.
Sean Mulligan
Sean received his master’s degree in Library Science in 2008 from the University of Maryland-College Park (UMD). As an alumnus, he has maintained close ties to school and this spring, was asked to participate in an oral history project being launched by the UMD iSchool. The goals of the project were to document the history and people of the iSchool and to help students know more about the opportunities and challenges that information professionals are likely to face in their careers. Speaking for over an hour via Zoom with an iSchool graduate student, Sean touched on a variety of subjects including recounting his career path to becoming an archivist, the challenges he faces in the field, and words of advice for future archivists. His oral history interview will be available for viewing online in the future.
Additionally, Sean was randomly approached by the father of a 7th grader whose son was interested in learning more about what an archivist does and how one becomes an archivist. Never one to turn down a chance to promote the awesomeness of archives, Sean conducted a video chat with the father. During the talk, he narrated his path to becoming an archivist, provided some advice on how his son might enter the field, and spoke about the work he does at UNCG. The father was greatly appreciative of Sean’s willingness to take the time to share his archival knowledge.
If you would like to learn more about archives or what an archivist does, you can reach out to the UNCG Archives staff at SCUA [at] UNCG.edu.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Libraries maintains a vast collection of the works of George Herbert (1593-1633) in their Special Collections division. George Herbert was a Welsh born English poet and orator. His work, The Temple, is considered one of the “best-known religious poems in the English language”. It is a sequence of poems that is ordered by church rituals and liturgy, and discusses theological ideas of death, judgment, and heaven, among others.
This is the largest collection of works by and about George Herbert in the United States. The Herbert collection was begun by a faculty member in UNCG’s Department of English, Dr. Amy M. Charles, in the 1970s. None of Herbert’s poetry had been published at the time of his death and no manuscripts in his hand survived. Examples of all the early editions including the first edition of Herbert’s famous collection of poems, The Temple, are in the collection. It is a major resource for Herbert students and scholars, and it also supports the mission of The George Herbert Society, based in UNCG’s Department of English.
Recently, five volumes of The Temple, ranging from 1633 to 1656, were brought to the conservation lab for treatment. In the course of teaching and research many volumes from our collections are utilized, referenced and handled as individuals access the materials during their journey in the search for knowledge and understanding.
Materials are cared for with reverence and respect, yet, inevitably, wear and strain will occur. It is my observation that particular parts of a book become more vulnerable and subject to damage, more than others. Specifically, the front hinge receives much more movement as a book opens and closes, more so than the rear cover. The corners of a book are bumped and worn down through time, the cover material wearing through and the underlying substrate exposed. During treatment, these areas can be mended, strengthening the structure of the book, allowing it to continue to be utilized, and protecting it from more drastic damage. The mends are applied archivally, giving an option for reversal if necessary.
Here are three examples of worn areas that received treatment. A torn page is seen, with a previous mend apparent, but with additional tearing away that has occurred and now requires a new mend. The cover corner in the above center photo shows extreme wear and breakdown of the leather covering and underlying board. The photo on the right shows the split in the inner hinge end paper from the repeated movement as the book is opened and closed.
A damaged interior hingeAn inner hinge repairAn exterior hinge repair in process
Each of these volumes contain unique notations and historical markings. This information provides special details about the journey of each book since its printing in the 1630’s, and gives fascinating insight into previous owners.
The printing of this work by George Herbert is fascinating and inspirational. Through each volume, unique typesetting is evident and creates interest and visual creativity that enhances the concepts of the text.
Below are images of exterior hinges of two of the volumes, showing the worn leather, and another volume, showing the japanese paper mend which will protect the worn area. The third picture shows a previous repair wherein the rear board was replaced and a new leather spine was applied. It is intriguing to find these previous treatments that have served these wonderful works through the centuries.
In the late nineteenth century, book design in America was evolving, as single-color, embossed covers gave way to more colorful designs reflecting the aesthetics of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements. One region of the country where women book designers and other female artists were particularly prolific was the Boston area. It is in this setting that Amy Maria Sacker (1872-1965) developed her considerable skills, designing book covers for several local publishers, starting in the 1890s, including Joseph Knight, Estes & Lauriat, and its successor, L. C. Page & Co. She also designed numerous covers for Little, Brown, Houghton Mifflin, and other publishers, beginning about 1900. Beyond her work as a book designer, she was also a respected illustrator, a painter, and excelled in jewelry, basketry, leatherworking, and other decorative arts.
Sacker’s work is interesting to me for a variety of reasons, some purely artistic, some more historical. I enjoy the fact that her covers display a wide range of styles, from pure Art Nouveau, as in covers for Elwyn Barron’s Manders (1899) or Mary Crowley’s A Daughter of New France (1901), to a so-called “poster style,” using clean lines to present a scene, as for Julia Dorr’s In Kings’ Houses (1898) or Willis Boyd Allen’s The Pineboro Quartette (1898). Other individual titles, such as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1901), show a definite eastern influence.
Amy Sacker created striking covers for over 345 books during her career. To learn more about her work, please visit this website : https://amysacker.net
Institutions of higher learning not only offer opportunities for academic knowledge, but also philosophical and cultural understanding. The “foreign exchange student” has long served as a pathway for experiencing the world. However, cultural exchange can be implicitly biased. Yoko Ishikawa, a Japanese exchange student at Woman’s College or “W.C.” (now UNCG) in the 1950s, shared her culture with fellow students, though she was seen through a western lens. How does true cultural exchange take place with tinted lenses? As an international traveler, Yoko studied in her birth place, Yokohama, as well as New York City, London, Tokyo, and Greensboro. Yoko received a Fulbright scholarship according to an article in the Summer 1952 issue of the Alumnae Magazine:
“In the noonday mail last June, a letter postmarked Japanese Ministry of Education came to the Ishikawa home in Tokyo, and, opening it, Yoko learned that through the U.S. Department of State, Fulbright Scholarships, and the Service League of the Woman’s College of U.N.C. Greensboro, she was going to America to study for a year.“
The magazine shares details of Ishikawa’s life. Born in 1930, Yoko mostly lived in Japan, but her late father’s job at Mitsubishi led her to New York City and then London. After four years, a year before Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Ishikawas moved to Japan where they remained throughout World War II.
A 1952 W.C. Alumnae Magazine article describes a harrowing experience of Yoko’s when she was 13, a bombing of Tsuru’s Girls High School in which twenty students died.
Of the six articles that document Ishikawa’s time at W.C., only one sentence speaks of students talking to Yoko about World War II. Instead, most of the article focused upon Japanese customs such as betrothals.
The Carolinian, Sept. 26, 1952
That November, in the student newspaper The Carolinian the “Whistlestop” columnistwriter proclaimed, “I wish to extend congratulations to Yoko Ishikawa, who gave us such a wonderful talk in chapel on Tuesday. I would also like to express my sincerest wish that Yoko will enjoy this year at W. C. and learn as much from us in nine months as she taught us in that ten minutes in Aycock” (Nov. 14, 1952, p. 4). Indeed, Yoko fulfilled this instructional role. She shared Japanese customs by holding a tea ceremony in the Shaw Dormitory in December and comparing Japanese celebrations to Western ones (The Carolinian, Dec. 19, 1952).
The “foreign exchange student” tradition we see in the United States educational sphere sets the stage for learning a new culture. From another perspective, the tradition also underpins the standard for minorities having to “represent” in a burdensome way that leads to reinforcement of stereotypes. Although the articles convey Ishikawa’s experience as more of the former than the latter, they also reveal the constraints of that exchange stemming from racial bias namely the exoticization of Asians and Asian women.
In The Carolinian Ishikawa describes her cheeriness as looking at an “oriental sun” (Sept. 26, 1952, p. 3). Using terms related to the “orient” is a homogenization of the vastly diverse Asian cultures and types Asians as a racial “other.” The article also includes a description of “small” Ishikawa’s “shy” way of gathering information about United States culture from her classmates (Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1952). These kinds of descriptions, though innocuous and true to an extent, help to reinforce stereotypes of Asian women being delicate dolls and “Lotus Blossoms” (see Kuo article) and highlight one of Yoko’s characteristics at the expense of others. Moreover, the focus on the betrothal customs highlights cultural aspects sometimes misconstrued as depicting East Asian women as passive and submissive. Considering these articles were published in the 1950’s, the racial and gendered stereotypes seem normal. However, considering Ishikawa’s ability to endure a war in which the United States bombed her school and killed 20 of her classmates, Yoko shows a deep strength that counters normalized bias.
“Chance Second Meetings,” an article in the April 24,1953 issue of The Carolinian, revealed more dimensions of Ishikawa yet the author is still hedged in bias. Yoko is reacquainted with Dr. Maude Williamson, a visiting professor of home economics. Dr. Williamson recognized Yoko from her performance in As You Like It while at Tsudo in 1951. The article noted that Professor Williamson “carried with her the special memory of the young Japanese girl who portrayed the Shakespearean character in such perfect English” (p. 1). Associating Ishikawa’s success of her performance to her English speaking, rather than her acting, emphasized the Asian stereotypical descriptions of Asian accents, or “broken” English.
The November 21,1952 issue’s “Ink On My Hands” gave Ishikawa a chance to write about her experiences in her own words. As a guest columnist, Yoko wrote about what she’d be doing if she were in college in Japan: She noted the lack of roll call, because students want their money’s worth of education which instilled in them accountability and motivation to attend classes. She spoke about excursions to concerts and shows. She wrote of her love of literacy, and her enjoyment of book collecting and bargain hunting, including the challenge of obtaining the hard-to-find foreign books.
She continued to describe the multifaceted nature of her life:
“What am I doing at W.C. right now? Why, of course, trying to figure out what is so screaming funny about Pogo, and how people manage to get their work done while having so many dates.” (p. 2)
Yoko Ishikawa attended UNCG as an English major taking child psychology classes, so when she became a teacher, the knowledge would bolster her abilities. During that time, she also built ties to the people at UNCG. In fact, an article in the October 9, 1964 issue about links between Tokyo and Greensboro revealed that “Yoko and her friends rolled out the red carpet” for UNCG’s Drama department when, on a tour to different U.S. Army and Naval bases, they visited Tokyo (The Carolinian, p. 3). The effort to form such bonds cannot be accurately understood without acknowledging the cultural and gendered context. This includes the imbalance of power between Ishikawa – a person of color – and the all-white student body of UNCG, for the university was not racially integrated until 1956.
This interpretation of events applies today’s understanding of predominantly white spaces causing people of color to employ methods of protection against varying degrees of discrimination. This includes emulating whiteness in the belief that closeness to whiteness serves as protection (Kumar) along with strategically silencing oneself to avoid conflict with dominating forces of White biases (Matthews, 80). Although Ishikawa’s words and actions as revealed in the newspaper clippings do not explicitly model these forms of protections, they reflect their essence once the reality of anti-Japanese racism in post-WWII USA is acknowledged. Moreover, international relations upheld Western ideals in a way that perpetuated whiteness (Zvobgo), which granted White travelers a red carpet in non-white nations in many cases. The subtle forms of racism Ishikawa faced, like exoticism, count as situations in which Ishikawa would need to navigate a hegemonic culture as a minority, which required her to avoid conflict by not challenging the biases of her White peers.
Though warm and friendly experiences is one side to Ishikawa’s foreign exchange student story, failing to acknowledge the gender and racial inequalities forming her reality would not be telling the whole story. Likewise, failing to mention my position as a woman of color (WOC) interpreting Ishikawa’s story through the lens of my own marginalized backward would be a remission. However, the realities women of color face today, such as those outlined by Kumar and Matthews, apply to WOC’s of the past, granted to different extents according to individual circumstances. For example, Ishikawa’s status as a foreign person means Zvobgo’s point likely factored into Kumar and Matthews concepts of conforming to Whiteness as a means of social protection as she traversed predominantly white spaces, especially during post-WWII time during which a rebuilding and westernizing Japan joined the United Nations. Upholding western – as in White – standards occur at the macro level and affect relations on the micro level.
Despite the honest exchange of experiences, distortion of character due to the biases established by hegemonic forces can prevent true relating and understanding. However, the growth of awareness and active resistance against such biases in the following years enabled the ability to truly see color.
Student organizations, like YUVA and the Asian Student Association, frequently offer us such opportunities:
The Carolinian Dec 8, 2009, p. 4
Ultimately, connection is the purpose of cultural exchange. We are all part of this world, so we too understand different cultures on the micro-macro, personal and general levels. We cannot do that through tinting our lenses and distorting our vision. Though, as we have seen in recent years through mass shootings and Asian hate crimes, racism is still alive and well, but truth and justice are just as everlasting — and stem from a stronger substratum. Continuing to use voices, reach out, and connect, whether through writing an article or artistically imitating life, keeps implicit bias from completely controlling our conscious minds. No one, especially those from marginalized communities, needs to carry a cultural educator card. Assuming the purpose of minority presence is to teach, carries its own unconscious bias. The people actively choosing to share their experiences and insight certainly offer a chance to tear down such biases. Exchange is not a smooth, flawless process, instead it always demands awareness, diligence, and time.
SCUA staff taught approximately 75 classes and workshops sessions in the Spring 2023 semester, reaching over 1500 students, and incorporating primary sources from across our collections. These sessions give students the opportunity to learn from “hands-on” experience with archival materials. Some of the notable classes this quarter include:
“Something Happened Here”
On Thursday, April 20th, 2023, UNCG undergraduate students in Honors 244: “’Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story’: University History and Digital Storytelling” debuted their final class project – “Something Happened Here.” The course, taught by University Archivist & Student Engagement Coordinator Erin Lawrimore, introduced students to archives and archival research through the lens of UNC Greensboro history.
“Something Happened Here” uses a series of yard signs placed around campus to indicate sites where something important (but not widely known) happened. Each sign has a QR code to lead the viewer to a website with information about that person/place/thing. During their presentation, students provided an overview of the project and a guided tour of a few of the sites along College Avenue. You can view a map marking all the campus sites in the “Something Happened Here” project here: https://go.uncg.edu/shh_map.
The yard signs will be around campus until May 17th, but the website containing the student’s work will be available much longer. If you’re not able to visit campus while the signs are in place, you can still view the students’ research on this site: http://uncglibraries.com/shh/.
Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Instructor Tiffany Holland brought her WGS 250: Introduction to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies class to SCUA for two class sessions. The students learned about LGBTQ+ campus history and examined primary source publications with Beth Ann Koelsch and Patrick Dollar. Carolyn Shankle created a pop-up exhibit of zines, which are self-published magazines, in the collection, and Suzanne Helms led a zine making workshop.
Zine Workshop
Students learned to make three simple book structures: an eight-page zine from a single sheet of paper, a boustrophedon (based on the Greek word for how an ox plows a field) zine resulting in a 16-page mini zine from a single sheet of paper, and a simple sewn pamphlet zine. Students had the option of creating a zine for a final class project, so the workshop provided the basic skills should they choose to use the zine format.
Coming at the end of our department’s fiftieth anniversary, I had a wonderful opportunity to interview Dr. William (Bill) K. Finley for the UNCG Institutional Memory Collection this spring. Dr. Finley is the former head of Special Collections and University Archives at UNCG, where he worked from 1998-2013. He is also Emeritus Faculty at UNCG.
During Bill’s time at UNCG the department underwent a great deal of growth. In personnel, scope and depth of collections, and in outreach to the larger campus, community, and donors, Bill’s leadership and knowledge helped to shape the direction of the department through the late nineties through early twenty-tens.
Over the course of the interview, Bill covers his early years growing up in Franklin, Virginia (one of the highlights of the interview is listening for Bill’s Tidewater Virginia accent) and attending Franklin High School. Bill also recounts the course of his education after high school. He attended the College of William and Mary for his BA in English, the University of Kentucky for his MA in English, Duke University for his PhD in English, and the University of South Carolina for his MLS degree.
Bill had joined the ROTC when he attended William and Mary but was fortunate to have his active duty service requirements reduced due to the winding down of the Vietnam War and an excess of officers in the military. After graduating from the University of Kentucky and serving his required active duty, Finley began his career in higher education teaching at Old Dominion University in 1970, where he taught for two years. Realizing he needed to get his PhD, Bill attended and taught at Duke University from 1973-1976. He next went on to teach at Concord College (now University) for 11 years (1976-1987), where he attained tenure, before deciding to make a shift in career.
After gaining his MLS degree from the University of South Carolina, Bill worked as an archivist at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale). Bill recalls being surprised after his initial interview at Yale, which he did not feel good about, that he was offered the job. He “had his bags packed and ready to go,” almost before he put the phone down. Bill stayed at Yale for 5 years (1988-1992), but wanted to be more involved with creating and assembling collections, so he moved on to the College of Charleston, where he served as Head of Special Collections from 1992-1998.
Bill arrived at UNCG in 1998 as Head of Special Collections and University Archives. Bill was quick to explain that he came to the department with it in a very good place due in large part to Emmy Mills, former department head, who had laid the groundwork for a successful future. The department started out very small relative to what it is today. Bill recalled the four employees in the department (Betty Carter, Carolyn Shankle, Linda Jacobson, and Janis Holder) and we discussed the changes in the department under his leadership, and in the library in general, as well as some of his favorite collections (woman’s collections – Girl’s books in series) and book (“the millionth volume” Book of Job by William Blake). There were vast changes in staffing and physical space during Bill’s time here. The department grew to 14 faculty and staff towards the end of his time at UNCG, and the department moved and shifted to eventually encompass the third floor of the Main Library.
Bill also mentions two particular areas of collection growth that expanded during his time here: Cello music manuscripts, and the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project. He cites these two collections as examples of collection cultivation that happens organically. These are also both examples of the type of growth that both demands more resources (people and space) as well as encourages more widespread interest in our collections. Bill, characteristically, is quick to add that “My focus on being a head of the department was not a very good business model I know, but I never really saw universities as business. My idea was – get good people, stand back, and let them do their job and don’t micromanage things. Many of the new directions we took here didn’t come from Bill Finley, they came from other staff members or from without…”
I hope that everyone will take a moment to watch a portion, or all, of Bill’s oral history to learn more about the department and the man who guided it for 15 years. It was an absolute pleasure to talk with him and I enjoyed getting to know him better. I hope others will as well.
John Parris was born in Sylva, North Carolina and began writing for the local weekly paper, The Jackson County Journal, at the age of thirteen. He later went on to write as a feature writer in New York, then later in London during World War II for the United Press. He continued working in London for the Associated Press as a diplomatic correspondent and was later transferred to New York to cover the United Nations. By 1947 he was ready to return home to the mountains of North Carolina where he continued writing and to later establish his column Roaming the Mountains for the Asheville-Citizen Times.
“For nearly four decades, John Parris’ illuminating non-fiction essays comprised his popular Asheville-Citizen-Times column, “Roaming the Mountains.” When Parris’ columns were first published as books in 1955, they became instant regional classics.
Parris writes with the crispness of Hemingway and the grace of Thomas Wolfe. Indeed, he was a war correspondent like Hemingway and a decorated hero for his work with the Belgian underground during World War II.
But the enduring legacy of John Parris is his work to document the culture and lives of Appalachian people. With every word, Parris links past to present in loving tribute to his Western North Carolina home, its mountains, and its people.” -Two Hoots Press
In this volume, Mountain Cooking, published by Asheville-Citizens Times Publishing in 1978, John Parris “reveals the old-time secrets of mountain cooking and makes them possible in every kitchen, but he includes much more: the smell and tase of gritted bread, the aroma of Indian cooking, the challenge of churning by hand, and the lingering whiff of the old wood-burning stove.” In his writing and sharing of tales from the mountains of Western North Carolina, John Parris is able to give to his readers an intimate view of people and ways of living from a region that is close to his heart. His essays through the decades have provided insight and tales of adventure.
We have included two of his essays from Mountain Cooking for your reading pleasure and culinary agenda:
Cat-Head Biscuits and Sawmill Gravy -Murphy, N.C.
They go together like ham and eggs, cornbread and molasses, or mush and milk.
Some folks are so foolish about cat-head biscuits and sawmill gravy that they’ll make a whole meal on them.
“It’s plain and simple fare,” said Aunt Tennie Cloer, “but mighty filling and mighty satisfying. It’ll keep a body from going hungry. A heap of mountain folks made it through the depression of the ’30s on cat-head biscuits and sawmill gravy.”
Aunt Tennie, who was born in 1886 over in the Sugar Fork hills of Macon County, is a right smart woman with a skillet. She isn’t a fancy cook. But she can take simple and inexpensive things and make them pleasure the palate.
“In my time,” she said, “I’ve made many a pan of cat-head biscuits and many a gallon of sawmill gravy. Why, way back yonder, I made ’em for breakfast every morning for six years. That was when I was cooking in the lumber camps.”When you’re cooking for loggers and sawmill workers, it takes a lot to keep’em fed. I cooked regularly for eight men. Part of the time for ten.
No matter what I fed ’em for breakfast – and it was usually fried meat and eggs and biscuits – they had to have sawmill gravy.”That’s what they wanted. And that’s what I give ’em. After they put away their meat and eggs, they’d take a biscuit and break it open and spread it on their plate and spoon sawmill gravy over it. “Sometimes I had to serve it at supper. They’d ask for it.
It didn’t take long to make, you know. I’d make it in the iron skillet after frying the meat and taking it out. “It takes bacon drippings or fried ham grease to make it. What you do is take flour and put it right in the hot grease and let it barely brown, then put in some water to thin it, and add milk and salt and pepper. “It took a half a gallon at a meal to feed them men. That meant using two heaping tablespoons of flour, about a half a pint of water, a pint and a half of milk, and half a teaspoon of salt and the same amount of pepper. “When that cooks, you know, it’ll puff up and make a half a gallon bowl full.”
She paused and shook her head.
“Law, me,” she said, “How them men did like their gravy! They cleaned out the bowl every time. And the biscuits they put away was a sight.
“I baked six pans of biscuits every morning. Had two pans that would hold twelve biscuits each. That meant filling ’em three times and baking ’em in the stove. They weren’t your ordinary biscuits. They were big and thick. And them men never left any. “Made ’em about as thick again as these you buy. They called ’em cat-head biscuits. The only difference between them and regular buttermilk biscuits is in handling the dough.
“For cat-heads, you make up your dough in a big loaf. You don’t roll it out. You grab a hunk of it and squeeze off a piece and pat it out with your hands instead of rolling it out on a board and cutting it with a biscuit-cutter.
“Big biscuits they are. Big as a cat’s head. That’s the way folks liked ’em back then. It’s the way my mother always made them, and I learned from her when I was just a little thing big enough to stand up to the kitchen table and mix the dough. “My mother usually rolled out her dough and cut out her biscuits. She used the top of a baking powder can for a biscuit-cutter. But when she was in a hurry, she’d just knead her dough into a loaf and choke off her biscuits and pat ’em up and put ’em in the pan and bake ’em.
“That’s what I done when I was cooking in the lumber camps. When you’ve got a big bunch of men waiting for breakfast and having to be at work on time and it takes a lot of biscuits, you’ve got to be quick. So you squeeze ’em or choke ’em off instead of rolling out the dough and cutting ’em out. “Them men had to have biscuits twice a day. Breakfast and supper. I fixed cornbread for dinner, and had both cornbread and biscuits for supper. It didn’t take as many biscuits at supper unless I fixed sawmill gravy when they asked me to. “Another thing I’d fix for ’em was cornmeal mush. Now and then they’d tell me that’s what they wanted for supper. Just mush and milk, and nothing more.
“Now, to make mush for eight men come in from working all day took something, I’m telling you. It had to be made in a gallon pot. “I’d get my water boiling in that pot, put in some salt, sift my cornmeal, and then stir in the meal a little at a time and stir it while it was boiling. Let it cook until it was done. Stirring to keep it from sticking. It got so thick that you could might near cut it with a knife. Didn’t take but about fifteen minutes.
“I’d take it to the table in two big bowls and the men would take it and dip out a big spoon full and put it in their glass of sweet milk. They ate it out of the glass with a spoon. They kept right at it until they needed another glass of milk and then they went through more mush and more milk.
“That’s all they wanted for supper. All they wanted – just mush and milk. Folks back then used to eat a lot of mush and milk. You hardly ever hear of it anymore. But sometimes I fix it for myself. Just as I still make a meal every now and then on cat-head biscuits and saw mill gravy.”
Aunt Tennie isn’t the only one who still fixes biscuits and sawmill gravy. And it isn’t only out in the country that sawmill gravy is served up. As a matter of fact, it is often to be had in some of the public eating places in the mountains that specialize in mountain dishes. It’s a fixture on the breakfast menu at Phillips Restaurant over in Robbinsville. And it always turns up on the luncheon menu when there’s creamed potatoes. “We’ve been serving it regularly for breakfast since we opened our restaurant 20 years ago,” Mrs. Patton Phillips, another smart lady with a skillet, told me one day last week while Smith Howell, the banker, and I stirred up old memories with a lavish of her sawmill gravy. “Folks around here in the old days,” she said, “used to call it ‘Life Everlasting’, because, they said, it had saved so many people’s lives. It was just about all they had to eat. They made a meal on it and biscuits.”
She paused a moment, looked at our plates of gravy, then laughed. “You know.” she said, “I’d eat it every day if it didn’t make me so fat.”
Poke Sallet – Dodgin Creek
Poke Sallet is a favorite dish of mountain folks whose tastes run to natural foods.
whose tastes run to natural foods. Of all the wild greens, it’s the best known and the most sought after.
But, like collard greens and hominy grits, a taste for poke sallet must be cultivated by outsiders.
Mountain women begin picking poke as soon as the young sprouts shoot out of the ground in the spring, and they keep right on picking it and serving it until the sprouts grow old and tough.
Some of them, like Mrs. Elvie Corn who lives here on Dodgin Creek in the hills above Cullowhee, have been picking poke since they were kneehigh to a duck. Mrs. Corn has been searching it out and picking it for more than 50 years.
“Poke is best,” she said a couple of days ago,”when the sprouts are white and tender with just a little tuft of green leaves at the top. But you’ve got to pick it with a sparing hand. The root is a deadly poison. And if you get too much of the lower part of the shoot it’ll give a body a fit when they eat it.”
She had just come in from picking a mess of poke sallet from the field back of her house.
“There’s different ways of fixing poke,” she said. “I’ve never seen any written recipes for it. I learned how to fix it from my mother and my grandmother. But all of it has got to be cooked.
“First, you’ve got to parboil it. I boil mine three times. That get’s out any poison there might be. With the first boiling, the water turns red. You pour that off, put in fresh water and boil it again. And then you pour that off, put in water again and boil it a third time. “You can serve the sallet as it comes out of the pot. Eat it with vinegar poured over it. But the way I like it best is to take it when it comes out of the pot, cut it up, put it in a greased frying pan with eggs and stir it all together.
“Another way to fix poke is to take it after you’ve parboiled it and cut it up and roll it in corn meal and fry it like you would okra. It’s mighty tasty, too, if you’ll chop it up with onions and fry it with bacon or fat-back drippings.”
I told her that my wife cooks poke like asparagus and serves it with hot Hollandaise sauce.
Mrs. Corn recalled that as a child all the old folks warned her to be mighty particular about picking poke too close to the root. “They said if you ate the root it would kill you. But my grandmother used to get the roots and boil them until they were tender and then sprinkle cornmeal on them and put them out for the chickens to peck on. She claimed it was good for them.”
While poke sallet is her favorite greens, Mrs. Corn also has a taste for crow’s-foot, speckled dock, lamb’s-quarters, and branch lettuce – all of which were in the diet of settlers during the early days of this country.
“Some folks,” she said, “call crow’s-foot Indian mustard. But all the old folks referred to it as crow’s-foot. If you’ll examine the leaves, you’ll see they look like crow’s feet. Now, the way to prepare crow’s-foot is to take the tender leaves and scald them with hot grease, like you would with lettuce that comes out of the garden, and then pour vinegar over them.”
“But you’ve got to cook lamb’s-quarters and speckled dock, just like you fix poke sallet. I’ve heard some folks call lamb’s-quarters wild spinach. Grandma parboiled her speckled dock and then fried it in grease.
“Now, as for branch lettuce, it’s mighty good but it’s hard to come by. Not like poke. Grows only in the winding hollows where the water comes warm from the earth, or in and near the edge of a branch where the soil is dark and damp. You won’t find it on just any stream. The way I fix mine is to chop it up coarsely or take only the smallest leaves and spread it on a serving dish. I make a sauce of hot vinegar with a touch of sugar and bacon or ham drippings and pour over it. Then I cover it with sliced boiled eggs.”
At our house, I told Mrs. Corn, we never chop up the leaves, no matter the size, and then told her about the dressing my wife concocted for branch lettuce. Dorothy takes a couple of rashers of bacon and fries them crisp. She takes the bacon out of the pan, leaving the drippings, and cuts up the bacon. Then she puts into the frying pan about one-third cup of vinegar, a quarter cup of water, two teaspoons of sugar, a half teaspoon of salt, then brings the mixture to a boil. A moment later, Dorothy takes thinly sliced onions and the diced bacon and puts them in with the lettuce. And over the lettuce she pours the mixture, then tosses the branch lettuce until it is all mixed up.
“That sounds real good,” Mrs. Corn said. “I’ll have to find me some branch lettuce and try it. Let me get a pencil and some paper and put down that recipe.”
When she finished, she sat a moment longer without saying anything.
“You know.” she said finally, “I spent a lot of time with my grandmother when I was growing up. She taught me a heap of things. She taught me to tell all the wild greens and wild fruits.
Back then folks depended on them more than they do now.
“I’d go out with her into the fields and the woods and she’d show me the things a body could eat and things a body couldn’t.”
She paused and a smile crept across her face.
“My grandmother was a good teacher,” she said. “I’ve never forgot what she taught me about poke and the other wild greens. And I’ve been picking them spring in and spring out since she first showed them to me.”
Special Collections and University Archives received a wonderful gift from Judith Fetterley, a first edition copy of Silver Pitchers: and Independence, a Centennial Love Story by Louisa May Alcott published by Roberts Brothers in Boston, 1876.
Conservator Audrey Sage was able to put a plan into action to provide some repair and restoration to this wonderful book. Part of the original spine was missing and the original text block spine adhesive was failing leaving the text block at risk for damage and deterioration.
The first step was to carefully remove the remaining spine adhesive. This was able to be accessed due to the absence of part of the cover cloth. Once the old adhesive was removed, she was able to apply a layer of new starch paste and a protective piece of 18 gram Kozo Japanese paper. This creates a strong and supportive layer for the textlbock signatures. The next action was to create a paper hollow along the spine.
Sage was then able to carefully lift the original cloth from the cover boards in order to insert a new spine substrate to recreate and reform the cloth covering.
This piece is constructed through the lamination of a layer of linen cloth and a toned piece of Moriki Japanese paper.
This new spine piece was inserted and formed around the book and then what remained of the original spine was adhered to this piece.
Damaged corners were repaired, pages were surface cleaned, interior hinges were mended, and finally the book is ready to be returned to the Special Collections. It is now more secure and easier to use and view with these archival mends in place.
SCUA staff have found that our classes have almost returned to its pre-COVID numbers. Although we are still conducting some online sessions, many professors are choosing to bring their classes to the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University (SCUA). The following are a few examples of the classes that have visited SCUA during the first few months of 2023.
ART 285-01: Photography I, Jill Beaton, Instructor
Professor Jill Beaton brought her Art 285-01 class to SCUA to view the extensive historical camera, photographic image, and stereoscope collection. The class was walked through the display by Interim Head, Kathelene Smith, who also gave a presentation regarding the history of photography. The students then adjourned into the Research Room where they did a document analysis of photographs taken by early faculty member, Dr. Anna Gove, who was also an amateur photographer. The photographs ranged from
ART 344: DIGITAL DARKROOM, KELLEY O’BRIEN, INSTRUCTOR
SCUA hosted Kelly O’Brien’s Digital Darkroom class, once again focusing on “What is truth.” One of the most collaborative classes that SCUA teaches, Digital Darkroom combines the efforts of ROI Librarian Maggie Murphy and archivists Carolyn Shankle and Kathelene Smith. While Maggie worked with her group in the library, the remaining students were divided into two groups in the Hodges Reading Room and the Research Room. Hodges was divided into multiple stations which featured rare books related to photography and photographers.
The Research Room displays focused on the question “What is truth?” or how multiple perspectives give a more comprehensive understanding of the truth. Each station highlighted artifacts that encouraged students to find a “truth” – and since they were art students, they were asked to either describe or draw what they found. In some cases, this might be illustrated by the difference between a photograph of a student and a painting of her, what first president and college founder Charles Duncan McIver really look like, what Desegregation really look like on our 1950s campus, or perhaps the student perspectives seen in campus scrapbooks as opposed to the administrative perspectives seen in a university publication. The students left the session with a greater understanding of what can be discovered in Special Collections and University Archives!
HIS 430: Historical Methods for Social Studies Teachers, Lisa Tolbert, Instructor
Dr. Lisa Tolbert brought her HIS 430 class to SCUA for several sessions focusing on the history of UNCG as seen through campus scrapbooks. After a review of campus history given by archivist Kathelene McCarty Smith, students took several days to research primary sources relating to the school during the 1920s and 1930s! A special class research guide was created by special collections specialist, Carolyn Shankle.
WGS 250: An Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, Faye Stewart, Instructor
For this class session, Special Collections Specialist Carolyn Shankle and Accessioning Archivist Suzanne Helms created an overview of zines. The students in Stewart’s class have an upcoming project to create a zine of their own. Helms led a zine-making workshop where she demonstrated two structures for the students to create and explore. She provided materials and hands-on instruction as well as supplies that the student could take with them. Shankle curated a display of zines held in the Rare Books collections, which covered the early years of sci-fi fanzines in the 1940s to zines focused on activism and marginalized groups in the 1950s and 1960s, to music fanzines in the 1970s celebrating the underground punk movement, to those created in the 1980s through 2022.
The five dresses in the Fast Fashion of the 1960s, Paper Dresses exhibit were all designed by faculty in the UNC Greensboro Department of Art for the 1967 Art on Paper gala held at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and are held in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections & University Archives. The exhibit was designed by SCUA archivist Stacey Krim and UNCG Libraries Diversity Resident Shelbi Webb and is available for viewing on the first floor of the W.C. Jackson library from January 4th until June 1st, 2023.
Hop into History returns!
On February 23, 2023 SCUA archivist Stacey Krim exhibited materials at the Oden Brewing Company from the Elreta Alexander Papers, housed in UNC Greensboro’s Special Collections and University Archives. At the event, Dr. Virginia L. Summey, author of The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts, spoke about Alexander’s life and legacy. Elreta Alexander (1919-1998) was the first African-American woman to: 1) graduate from Columbia University Law School when she received her degree in 1945, 2) practice law in North Carolina (in Greensboro from 1947-1968), and 3) be elected to the bench when she was elected District Court judge for Guilford County in 1968.
