Some new old photos

 New to me at any rate...

Congratulations to 750 Sepia Saturdays! It's been such a fun place to read other's posts mostly on the meme suggested (except for me usually!)

Miami FL 1965

Miami Beach 1925

New York Times Square, 1936

A taste for Oriental decorations. The Casa Bruno Cuadros of Barcelona, known by locals as the Casa dels Paraigües (House of Umbrellas) since 1883

Paris 1900

Musicians touring the countryside by bike, outside Paris, France, 1920’s - Photo by Henri Roger-Viollet

Crossing Cumberland Mountain (between Virginia and Kentucky) before Highway 25E. Garnett Robinson

A family at their cabin home in West Virginia, 1900.

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Today's quote:

D.H. Lawrence said, "If there weren't so many lies in the world, I wouldn't write at all." And, "The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread."

Some stories from the past along the Blue Ridge

   First, I want to honor another ancestor in my own family. Today I give the portrait of Ada Phillips Swasey Rogers (1886-1964). Here she is candidly walking with her youngest son, James, in 1936...showing her strong determination which she lived daily. She was extremely dedicated to Christian Science and her family of four young men with an extremely smart husband.

Now let's drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway...before the leaves start to turn colors and learn about some old tales.

This is the valley today.  Pretty agrarian.  I guess losing the last buffalo isn't on anyone's mind, until they stop at this "overlook" and think about it.

But there are more stories than just a sign. From Google I discovered this interesting article, which is a bit convoluted.  I believe it's likely several pieces were cobbled together.  Remember a couger in North Carolina was the same as a panther, or mountain lion, and often called a Painter (thus the name of my own cat.)

Bull Creek Stories

by Rob Neufeld

Joseph Rice, bison killer; and children of conscience

            When Joseph Marion Rice claimed his two hundred acres of Bull Creek bottomland in 1792, he had few European American neighbors.  The Rhiems (Reems) had settled north beyond Craven’s Gap.  The Davidsons were in the Swannanoa Gap.  The Gudgers were down the wagon road near the Swannanoa River.

            Several years earlier, after The Treaty of Paris, Rice had sat down with the Cherokee around what has become the Dry Pond at the end of Parker Road.  According to a family history by Holt Felmet, Rice “was granted, by the Indians, a sun of land…what he could walk around and stake between sun-up and sundown.”

Samuel and Margaret Brank Hughey after the Civil War, Photo courtesy Frances

   Rice began building a community.  In 1799, work started on a road connecting Beaverdam and Bull Creek.  One day, a shaggy bull bison made its way up its old path toward Craven Gap and ultimately into history.

             “The last buffalo seen in this locality was killed nearby in 1799 by Joseph Rice, an early settler,” a sign reads at the Bull Creek Valley overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  

            In a version of the story fictionalized by great-great-grandson Rex Redmon in “Bits of Beaverdam,” the bison “had searched the valley of the Shawano an entire day seeking others of his kind.”  His lonely bellowing attracted the attention of Joseph Rice, who shot it for its meat and hide.

            Rices have long responded to historical forces with a sense of remorse.  Joseph’s grandson, John Longmire Rice, opposed the Civil War, but, according to history passed down to Felmet, John “agreed to serve in the army, but would not bear arms.”  In charge of the horses in Will Thomas’ Legion, he got sick, and was sent home.  He arrived just before Christmas, 1864, suffering from black tongue, malnutrition so serious that he could not be fed.

            John’s brother, James Overly Rice, whose cabin in Beaverdam is a historical landmark, had helped round up Cherokee women and children for the Trail of Tears in 1838.  Redmon recalls that his grandmother and great aunt “remembered hearing that the forceful removal of the Indians, against their will, from their ancestral homes was more than my grandfather could bear.  They said he cried when he told the story.”

            “According to oral tradition,” Redmon relates, “James Overly entered the military in lieu of a Creasman man to whom he was indebted.”   He died Mar. 8, 1863 from measles contracted in camp.  He is buried in an unmarked grave with 138 other Confederate soldiers in Ringgold, Georgia.

            James’ cousin, Margaret Brank, (pictured above) whose mother, Elizabeth Rice, had married into a Reems Creek family, had inherited a slave, George the Tanner, from her grandmother, Margaret Young.  After the Civil War, Margaret’s husband, Samuel Hughey, told George, “You’re free to go, you can go live with your people,” according to Ray Rice, Elizabeth’s thrice-great nephew.

            George went, and came back a few weeks later.  He told Hughey, “I want to live the rest of my days right here with you.”  He is buried in Rice-Hughey Cemetery.         

A healing happened in Bull Creek,

but Rices still hear cries from the past

            When the last bison of the Blue Ridge revealed itself to Joseph Rice on Bull Creek in 1799, it seemed like an American prophecy.  In his ancestors’ homeland, hunting had been a restricted privilege, but in the New World, game offered itself up to men.  

            In a Cherokee story of origin, Kanati, the “happy hunter,” rolls back a rock to emit just one wild creature, which he shoots.  Rice shot his solo offering too, but it was a different era.  The American belief in individual rights and unlimited bounty had begun to produce some ill omens.

            Rice’s paternal grandmother, Ann Cooper, had been born in the Virginia Colony, one of the world’s first corporate ventures.  His paternal grandfather, Richard Rice, had come from Dingle, Ireland, where his family had been dispossessed of its estate.

            Retaining a landed self-assurance through moves to Virginia and North Carolina wildernesses, the Rices wedded themselves to a mountain identity.  In 1840, Joseph Rice joined fifteen Revolutionary War veterans in supporting the Whig candidate for president, William Henry Harrison, against their likely allegiance to the Democrat, Martin Van Buren.  Mountain loyalties ruled.

            Advertising in Horace Greeley’s publication, “The Log Cabin,” they rallied for Harrison, after a Baltimore journalist had sneered at Harrison’s alleged preference for a barrel of hard cider, a log cabin, and a pension instead of the White House.  

            Elected, Harrison soon died from pneumonia, caused by his tendentious inauguration speech in 16 degree weather.  John Tyler took over, fulfilling the reason he’d been selected as Vice President, to attract States Rights supporters.  The coming storm, caused by westward expansion and the formation of pro- and anti-slavery states, would put a generation of peaceful Rices in Confederate graves.

            James Overly Rice, Joseph’s grandson, enlisted at age 43, and died of measles in camp.  His son, William Philetus, died in battle at Chickamauga.  Another son, John Marion, got sick, received a furlough, and died at home.  

            The 1840s produced another legacy.  James’ cousin, Rebecca, daughter of Elizabeth Rice and Robert H. Brank of Reems Creek, conceived a child out of wedlock.  “Miss Rebecca has a baby,” Robert Brank Vance (future Brigadier General) wrote his younger brother, Zebulon (future Governor), in 1843.  “It would have been better for her if she had been in her grave but I must stop.”

            Rebecca’s baby, Eliza, grew up to marry a man twice her age, Leander Stewart, a “Northern minister,” whose Swannanoa church split over the slavery issue.  Refused a separate house away from a crowd of Stewarts, Eliza took her son, Chester, back to Reems Creek.

            Reems and Bull Creeks cradled a healing.  A Reems Creek Church commemorative program honored both General Robert Vance and 89-year-old Rebecca Brank in 1894.  In Bull Creek, Raphael and Frank Rice, James Overly’s great-nephews, bedded down in the loft of their father’s sturdy house, listening to the cries of a figure from the past: Uncle Joe Ray, a seven-foot tall Civil War veteran, suffering from gangrene in his house through the woods.

The pathway and the panther

            There’s a path that leads through deep woods over Craven Gap, connecting Bull Creek with Ox Creek.  Today, the Blue Ridge Parkway bisects this passageway, the mounded median of which betrays its use as a stagecoach road two hundred years ago.

            Joseph Marion Rice, first settler, had run a stock stand alongside it, providing a rest stop for drovers headed to South Carolina markets.  During the Civil War, two of Joseph’s great-granddaughters, Sarah Rosey and Mary Matilda Rice, set out one morning from Beaverdam and headed into the Elk Mountains to deliver canned goods to their aunts in Bull Creek.

            “You may stay and visit for the day, but you must be home before dark,” their mother, Mary Wolfe Rice told them, according to an account passed along by Rex Redmon in “Bits of Beaverdam.”  Mary also instructed her daughters not to accept any food in return, regardless of their aunt’s wishes.

            As in fairy tales, the girls did not heed the warnings.  They left late and took cured meat.  Two miles from home, they heard “the nerve-shattering cry of the big black cat,” and managed to save themselves by stalling the panther with meat tossings.

            There is much history in this story.  The girls’ father, James Overly Rice, had migrated to Beaverdam to build a now historic home.  James’ sisters-in-law, Martha Stephenson, wife of John Longmire Rice, and Rosannah Ray, a widow, resided in Bull Creek.  Nestling in coves, pioneer communities maintained communication via woodland paths.

         

A party sets off from Riceville for an excursion in the nearby mountains, c. 1920.  The man is Arthur Lee Hughey, great-grandson of Joseph Marion Rice.  To his right is his neighbor Mary Crichton

   James and John were away with the Confederate Army, and took their horses, which is why, in the story, the girls ride a mule.  Yet, there is much myth in the story as well, and it is significant.

            It is the cougar, not the black panther, that had made the southern mountains its stalking ground; and, according to scientific accounts, it had been extirpated by 1800.  Furthermore, Redmon notes that his father’s mother had told him that it had been her father that had encountered the panther.   But family tradition favors the girls, which is a better choice.  It brings in the effects of the Civil War, and creates a sense of vulnerability.

            Another part of the family mythology—flight from Europe, where hunting grounds had been gated by aristocrats—calls for a panther tale.  William Gilmore Simms in his novel, “The Cub of the Panther,” portrays a Boone-like Western North Carolina hunter who is upbraided by a lady for trespassing on her estate.  He responds that he’s saving her from varmints, for “an old painter…wouldn’t stop to ax ef the woman was a fine rich woman.”

            The romance of wilderness is real.  Ray Rice, great-grandson of Rosannah Ray, used to go up into Riceville forest to fox hunt.  It was not unlike the hunters Fred Chappell portrays in his novel, “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” in which storytelling was the hunters’ object—until the hero’s father prods his fellows to confirm the treeing of a devil-possum, which turns out to be a bobcat.

            Ray, as a teen, had listened to his uncle, Carrol Hall, and his fellows, tell tales by a campfire while their dogs announced their exploits in woods now threatened by development and timbering.  The stories are forgotten, but they seem so consequential today.

 
(Source, Google)

Blue Ridge Parkway

Sharing with  Sepia Saturday this week.

I had already compiled this post before Hurricane Helene arrived, which meant I couldn't update my post to Sepia Saturday until now, Mon. 9.30.24 evening. I've evacuated to a cousin who lives in South Carolina and will share more on my "When I Was 69" blog soon.

The Language You Cry In

  A story of ancestors...thanks to Facebook's Suppressed Histories

The Language You Cry In

This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0OirdYGdlY...

In Harris Neck, in Georgia's coastal islands, in the 1930s, Lorenzo D. Turner recorded a 50-year-old woman singing. Her song preserved the longest known text in an African language in the North American diaspora. It was later recognized as Mende by a grad student from Sierra Leone, on the basis of a single word, kambei, which had funerary significance, and he published a translation of the song.

The singer's grandmother had been born into slavery, a descendant of many West Africans trafficked to Georgia because of their expertise in rice cultivation. Slave traders paid a higher price for people with this skill, shipping captives from the rice-growing countries from Senegambia to Sierra Leone and Liberia. More than 45% of those trafficked to Savannah were taken from Sierra Leone, out of Bunce Island which was used as a holding area prior to the Middle Passage. The channels these Mende people dug for rice plantations still remain in Georgia.

A group of Gullahs returned to Sierra Leone, and performed this melody for their African hosts. They discovered that one word, tombei, could be traced to a specific place. Anthropologists took recordings of the song around that region, and at first people recognized one or two words, but not the song. The researchers finally gave up, disappointed. Later, Cynthia Schmidt decided to try one more place, just outside the boundaries of the area they had searched in. To her amazement, people began to sing the song, which included the words “Everybody come together, the grave is restless, the grave is not yet at peace.” (starting around 15:25 in the video at link)

This was a song that Mende women sang at burials, in a funerary rites called Tenjami, Cross the Water. Bendu Jabati describes how her grandmother taught her how to perform the mourning rites, kneeling and making gestures to the ground with outstretched hands. (And it seems that the grandmother foresaw that her descendant would be the one to preserve this knowledge, and the connection that it would make to distant kin.)

The ceremony began with a call to the ancestors to accept the dead person. The women went in procession, their faces painted with white clay, dancing while bent over. They then cooked at the grave side (three days after a woman’s death, and four days after a man’s). They performed ritual crying and lamentation at the grave, and bid farewell with rice mixed with palm oil and meat. The ceremony ended when the pot was upturned over the grave, the final farewell.

The ceremony lapsed after World War II, according to the narrator, when soldiers brought back Islam and Christianity; but this one woman Bendu Jabati had been charged to remember by her grandmother, and she kept the knowledge and the song alive.

Back in the Georgia Sea Islands, Amelia Dawley taught this song to her daughter. Living in a remote area, without TV or radio, she was able to preserve it. (Hear her sing it around 26:00 in the video) The anthropologists visit and play the recording of her grandmother, telling her of the historical importance of her family legacy, in its connection to African roots.

Thanks to Hannah Ekberg for this link.

Source: Suppressed Histories Archives Facebook page

Chapter four of Ancestors of interest

 

Linnie and Lou George, 1880. Linnie was Mrs. Dirking, and Lou was Mrs. Spect

The George sisters 1901

L to R: Mary Jane George Cammack, Sarah Louise George Tompkins, Elizabeth Ann George Gaines, Susan Sophia George Thomas, and Melinda Elliot George Dirking

MEMOIRS OF LOUISE GEORGE TOMPKINS

Part 6

MOTHER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY CONTINUED AS TOLD BY HER DAUGHTER, MYRTLE T. WILKINS

 

While a student at Mt. Lebanon College in Louisiana, Louise George and Mary Tompkins, a girl from Edgefield, SC became close friends.  Mary’s brother, Tommy, was studying law and assisting some of the students in mathematics in a nearby men’s college (also Mt. Lebanon).  However, he had never met his sister’s chum.

One Friday, when the Mt. Lebanon girls were dispersing for the weekend, one of them took a beautiful rose from a vase and handed it to Mary, saying: “Give this rose to your brother with my compliments.”  Louise, standing nearby, picked up a dusty, bedraggled rose from the floor, and, in a spirit of fun, she handed it to Mary, saying: “And give this rose to your brother with my compliments, Mary.”  Mary grabbed the withered rose from her hand, and with both roses ran away.

Tommy did not respond to the gift of the lovely, fresh rose, but to “Lou” he sent a beautiful poem of thanks for the wilted rose.

Soon after, he was introduced to her, and then began their courtship.

On the fourth day of December 1860, Louise George and Thomas Brooks Tompkins were married, at the home of her father in Marion, La.

Her father, Rev. Elias George, was a well-known and popular Baptist minister.  Being proud of his daughter, he insisted on having an outstanding wedding for her, though she preferred a quiet one.  However, he had his way and invited 200 people to attend the wedding, over which he presided.  The bountiful feast was the result of three weeks of baking, barbecuing, and making dozens of pies, cakes, custards, etc.

Several months after they were married, the Civil War began, and Tommy was called into service.  Lou lived with father’s family until the war ended but saw Tommy now and then when he came home on a furlough.

Their first child, Paul Garnet, was born in Marion, LA., on the 24^th day of September 1861.

When the war ended, she and Tommy, with their little son, moved to Farmerville, La., where Tommy began his practice of law.  In later years he was elected Judge of the District.

On the 5^th of January 1864, their second son, Samuel George, was born in Farmerville, La.

Annie Brooks, their third child, was born on the 21^st of March 1870, and on the 3^rd of February, 1872, Myrtle Louise arrived on the scene.

Though urged to run for State Senator, Judge Tompkins declined, on account of failing health.  He and his wife planned to move to California where his two sisters and their families resided.

Unfortunately, Judge Tompkins did not live to start on their westward journey, though they had shipped their household effects ahead.  He died without knowing that the boat carrying their belongings had burned on the Mississippi River, and nothing was saved.  Among valuable books that were burned was a volume of his own poems.  His wife seemed to deplore that loss more than she did the loss of many other treasures.

Now that everything had been swept away except her four children, she determined to move with them to California as she and Tommy had planned.  In the spring of 1873, she boarded the train with her little flock, and after a long, wearisome journey, they arrived in Yuba City, where they were welcomed by Dr. John Key (her brother-in-law) and Tommy’s sisters, Mrs. Savannah Key and Mrs. Mary Murphy, and their mother, Mrs. Eliza Thurman Tompkins.

After a good rest and visit, Dr. Key, being a Mason (as Tommy had been), took Tommy’s widow to Colusa and introduced her to his many masonic friends, and, together, they organized a “girl’s school” for her to conduct.  They arranged for her to reside and teach in a large building called “Spect’s Academy,” and soon the “Young Ladies’ Seminary” opened with 13 or more pupils.  The school grew and prospered, and the girls did not mind if the two little girls, Annie and Myrtle, played with their dolls under the teacher’s desk, not daring to talk aloud.  Paul and Sam attended the public school.

Mrs. Tompkins eventually sent for her sister, Linnie, to assist in teaching.  Oil painting and piano were added to their curriculum.

After two years of teaching, Mrs. Tompkins was married to Mr. Jonas Spect, a wealthy attorney, owner of Spect’s Academy and other properties.

A widower for over fifteen years, he built a nice four-bedroom home for her family, and provided a Chinese cook who was with them until Mr. Spect’s death in 1883.

Now that her time was practically her own, Mrs. Spect became active in church and charity work.  She produced many entertainments which were staged in the “Colusa Theatre” which was owned by her husband.

Among the entertainments she presented and directed were, “Madam Jarley’s Waxworks,” “King Oberon and Queen Titania” (a spectacular fairy play), “the Old Folks’ Concert” (humorous), and others.  These entertainments were well attended, and the proceeds given to charity.

Being ardently religious, Mrs. Spect organized a weekly prayer meeting which was held in private homes.  She usually conducted the meetings.  In her own home she held family worship each night with prayer and a chapter from the Bible.

Sunday school and church attendance for herself and children was a “must.”

After nine years of marriage to Mr. Spect, she again was left a widow.  Mr. Spect died with a heart attack at the age of 63.  At his funeral many of his tenants were weeping.  Sixty-two conveyances followed his body to the cemetery.

In 1887, Mrs. Spect, with her two daughters, moved to San Jose where her son, Sam, was attending College of the Pacific. At that time San Jose was a village.  Its small, horse-drawn streetcars carried passengers between Seventh (then Fourteenth) Street at the bridge and the town of Santa Clara.  The fare was 10 cents; that being the smallest coin.

A few years after she moved to San Jose, her son, Paul, who was a telegraph operator in the Western Union, was given a position in the San Jose office and arrived with his wife, Allie.  Their arrival united the entire family, and Mrs. Spect could not be censured for resuming her former name of “Tompkins.”  Her many talents and accomplishments enabled her to do much good during her long life.  A fractured leg confined her to a nursing home for two years, where she passed away on the 23^rd day of July 1936, at the age of 94 ½ years.

Her descendants to this date number 45.

-Myrtle T. Wilkins - 1960

Lou Tompkins 1930s

I am so appreciative of Lou Tompkins and her daughter's records of her life. There are many gaps, but the details which are included are so rich. I've learned much about the way families in Perry AL moved to Louisiana, which many of my own ancestors also did.  She does talk about some of them as they were also part of her life.