Genevieve Willcox Chandler - Come by Here, Lord

Topic: Early Versions - Waccamaw Neck
Charles Joyner published a fragment of “Come by Here” in his study of Gullah culture along the Waccamaw River of South Carolina. [1]  It had been collected by Genevieve Willcox Chandler while she was working for the 1930s’ Federal Writers Project to collect memoirs of African Americans who were born into slavery.

The first two verses follow a logical progression: a request for the Lord to “come by here,” and a rationale for the plea (“need your power”).  The meaning of the third depends on the interpretation of “sinners moanin’.”  It could be a simple presentation of Methodist conversion theology that demanded probationers abase themselves to be saved, or it could refer to older methods for addressing the spirit world.

The Carolina Coast College professor provided no more information about the song.  It is possible there were more than three verses, but he only reprinted those that showed African Americans living on the Waccamaw neck “called upon the Lord for strength to face the burdens of the present.” [2]

Performers
Not indicated

Credits
WPA Mss. [3]

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: terminal G’s dropped; no other attempt at pronunciation given
 

Verses: come by here, need your power, sinners moanin’
Pronoun: none
Term for Deity: Lordy
Basic Form: three-verse song as presented
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: use of “power” and “moan”

Notes on Performance
Chandler was hired in May of 1936, [4] and John Lomax came to her home in Murrells Inlet in August of that year to record two churches and some local singers. [5]  If Chandler’s experience was anything like that of Ruby Pickens Tartt, discussed in the post for 23 January 2019, her first assignment was collecting spirituals. [6]  Eric Crawford suggests the woman who would have received those first notes, Mabel Montgomery, was responsible for Lomax’s appearance in South Carolina. [7]

These details potentially limit the possible sources of “Come by Here” to those recorded by Lomax: individuals associated with Jerusalem Baptist Church, including Hagar Doctor Brown; members of the Heavens’ Gate Methodist Church, including Lillie Cowdell Knox and Aaron Pinnacle; Mrs Joseph A. Gaines, Frances Godson, and Janie Pyatt.

The three interviewed by Chandler represented three different cultural traditions.  Brown was born during the Civil War, and raised on a Georgetown County plantation that had grown rice with flood irrigation before the war.  Knox’s ancestors had lived on a plantation in Horry County which was beyond the area that could utilize the tides.  Pinnacle’s parents were from Charleston.

What is known about the three Black worlds comes from interviews conducted by Chandler after Lomax left.

Notes on Performers
Chandler was from the outer coastal plain that grew cotton; her family bought property on the Waccamaw neck in 1904, and moved there in 1908. [8]  There is little evidence she had any interest in music, or many contacts with African Americans before she began working for the Writers Project.  Her primary qualifications were that she needed money, was educated, had attempted writing short stories, and was from the same hometown as the woman doing the hiring. [9]

Chandler did already know the two women in 1936.  Knox worked for her, and Brown was in a material and emotionally dependent relationship.  Chandler’s husband had saved her son from drowning when his raft flipped on the Waccamaw. [10]  By 1936, Brown was in her late 70s and living alone.  She made it a habit to stop by Chandler’s house where Knox would fill her bag with produce from the garden. [11]

The number of contacts Chandler had with the local Black community increased when she was hired by the Writers Project.  Her husband had just died, and she had no resources.  Her brothers had told her to place her children in an orphanage. [12]  Knox realized her own livelihood depended upon Chandler’s success, [13] and she began contacting people she knew.  She, or members of her extended family, were present at many of the later interviews. [14]

The Writers Project published material from thirteen people in its four volumes of slave narratives related to South Carolina. [15]  It also included material Chandler collected in its South Carolina Folk Tales. [16]

During this period, Chandler published two stories based on her interviews in Scribners magazine: “De Wind an’ de Tide” [17] and “O’ Precious.” [18]  She stopped writing in the 1940s when the Saturday Evening Post rejected her work about illiterate, rural African Americans as “demeaning.” [19]

Later, Chandler’s daughter, Genevieve Chandler Peterkin, worked with two men to publish more of the folklore collected by Chandler.  They added material from thirty-six individuals, most of whom were born after the end of the Civil War.  The editors did not include the song, but promised another “volume of song and spirituals” that did not materialize. [20]

Some of this work may have been inspired by Lomax, who returned to Murrells Inlet in 1937.  In January he recorded four people interviewed by Chandler, and five others, some of whom may have been kin. [21]  In July, he met five individuals known by Chandler from 1936, and eleven others. [22]  He met Knox and members of her extended family both times.  On his final trip in 1939, Lomax recorded five white singers.  He never saved a version of “Come by Here.”

Availability
Charles Joyner.  “Come by Here, Lord.”  In Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.  165-166.

End Notes
1.  Joyner.
2.  Joyner.  165.
3.  Joyner.  308, note 46: “‘Come by Here, Lord,’ WPA Mss.

4.  Coming Through: Voices of a South Carolina Gullah Community from WPA Oral Histories Collected by Genevieve W. Chandler, edited by Kincaid Mills, Genevieve C. Peterkin, and Aaron McCollough.  Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008.  xxiv.

5.  “South Carolina 1934-1940.”  Cultural Equity website.

6.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  Letter to Janie Long Allen, undated.  Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama University.  Reprinted by Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  13.

7.  Eric Crawford.  “The Knoxes of Murrells Inlet.”  Oxford American website, 19 November 2019.

8.  Chandler’s background will be explored in a future post.

9.  Both Chandler and Montgomery were from Marion, South Carolina. [23]

10.  Genevieve C. Peterkin.  Heaven is a Beautiful Place, in conversation with William B. Baldwin.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.  18.

11.  Peterkin.  Cited by Coming Through.  14.
12.  Peterkin, Heaven.  20.
13.  Peterkin.  Cited by Coming Through.  126.
14.  Coming Through.

15.  Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves – South Carolina Narratives.  Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project.  Washington: Library of Congress, 1941.

Volume 1: Welcome Bees, Hager Brown, Louisa Brown, Margaret Bryant, and Albert Carolina.

Volume 2: Ellen Godfrey, Mariah Heywood, Ben Horry, and Georgia Horry.
Volume 3: Gabe Lance and William Oliver.
Volume 4: Sam Rutledge and Willis Williams.

16.  South Carolina Writers’ Project.  South Carolina Folk Tales.  Columbia: South Carolina Education Association, 1941.  It has more tales than are reprinted in Coming Through, and the Gullah language is stronger.

The animal tales in both volumes are from Lillie Knox’s husband, Richard Knox; Matthew Grant, Zackie Knox, George Kato Singleton, and Lewis Small.

The supernatural tales in both volumes are from Lillie Knox, her husband Richard, and her husband’s mother, Addie Knox.  One other about Cindy Lance differs between the two books, and no source is given.

17.  Genevieve Chandler.  “De Wind an’ de Tide.”  Scribners 102(6)14-17:December 1937.

18.  Genevieve W. Chandler.  “O’ Precious.”  Scribners 103(5):47-49:May 1938.  This mentions Welcome Bees.

19.  Peterkin, Heaven.  29.  There may have been other stories that I could not locate on the internet.

20.  Coming Through.  73.

21.  Cultural Equity.  In January 1939, Lomax recorded Chandler’s daughter, June Chandler; Horry’s wife, Stella Horry; Pinnacle’s children George and Myrtle Pinncale; Lillie Knox and her husband’s sister, Minnie Knox; Albertine Keith, Mrs. Alex Sing, and Martha Wright.

22.  In July 1937, Lomax recorded Lillie Knox; her husband’s sister or step-sister, Thelma Knox; Zackie Knox; Pinnacle; Tina Russell, and a group of ditch-diggers led by Mike Maybank.  The last were working on a WPA project in Murrells inlet.

23.  robin pellicci moore.  “Mabel Montgomery.”  Find a Grave website, 8 May 2011.

Iowa 4-H - Come By Here Kum Ba Yah

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Max Exner brought new skills to Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS) when he began working as a consultant in 1956.  He released a songbook in late 1957 that contained “Kum Ba Yah.”  The date is a bit confusing, because the inside cover says The Bridge of Song was copyrighted in 1957, but in contained one song with a 1958 registration date. [1]

The plate for “Kum Ba Yah” shows Rohrbough had responded to the letters from Claire Lovejoy Lennon and Larry Eisenberg.  They had told him the song was known in the American South.  The letter from Lennon, discussed in the post for 28 October 2020, was dated 19 November 1956.  Eisenberg’s letter was dated 29 January 1957, and described in the post for 23 October 2022.

The music plate was still the one created by Jane Keene for Indianola Sings in 1955.  However, the title was changed and the note about an Angolan origin was obliterated.

Exner was with the Agricultural Extension office at Iowa State College.  Although 4-H was sponsored by that group, its main concern was providing information to farmers.  This meant Exner had to work with many age groups.  Unlike editors of songbooks for youth groups, he included a large section of “Familiar” songs like “Loch Lomond” and “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”  There were so well known, many did not have music.

Many times, Exner or other extension agents, were using music to open programs.  It may be one reason he composed so many rounds that could be easily taught and worked with large audiences.  Exner also include more humorous songs that some youth groups leaders might have found offensive.  A crow in the Danish “Sim Bala Bim” is turned into soup.  “Herr Doktor Eisen Bart” ridiculed physicians and used rhyming nonsense rather than sung syllables. [2]

The Extension Office had to serve all the farmers in the state.  This may have influenced Exner’s choice of music.  The largest numbers of international songs came from three of the countries that supplied the largest numbers of foreign-born citizens living in rural areas in the 1920s: Germany, Sweden, and Denmark.  There were no songs representing the other two groups (Norway and the Netherlands), but there were songs from Czechoslovakia. [3]

Beyond hiring Exner and Augustus D. Zanzig, CRS seems to have been undergoing some organizational changes.  One of them, or perhaps one of Rohrbough’s sons-in-law, may have made him more aware of the importance of copyrights.  Not only was the songster copyrighted, but nine of the songs had been registered between 1956 and 1958.  Five carried some credit for Exner.  He provided CRS with five new pieces of music, seven arrangements, seven translations, and one text.  Many were rounds.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line

Credits
Songbook inside front cover: © 1957, Cooperative Recreation Srvice, Inc.  Delaware, Ohio, U.S.A.  All rights reserved.

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation: “Koom-bah-yah,” same as that published in Indianola Sings, which is reproduced in the post for 29 May 2022

Verses: kumbaya, crying, singing, praying; same verses and same order as those published in Indianola Sings

Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; the melody is the same as Indianola Sings
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: slowly
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: one syllable to one note except for final “Lord”
Ending: none

Notes on Performance
Cover: Arched bridge, with title above

Color Scheme: the cover uses dark teal ink on mustard stock; inside, the pages employ dark gray ink on white paper

Plate: Same music plate used in Indianola Sings, made by Jane Keen; title has been changed and reference to Angola has been removed.  The layout has returned to the standard one used by CRS with rounds scattered through the collection.

Notes on Performers
Max Vernon Exner was born in 1910 in Shanghai, China, to a YMCA medical officer. [4]  Max Joseph Exner had migrated to Iowa from the Sudetan in Austria when he was eleven years old.  While he was attending the YMCA’s college, he worked under Luther Halsey Gulick on the project to devise a new urban game that became basketball.  When he returned to this country in 1913, he worked in Newark, New Jersey. [5]

Max, the son, studied literature at Columbia College in New York City, then went to Vienna where he took courses in conducting.  He returned to New York where he worked for the state Extension Service.  Following his service in World War II, he earned a masters in music from Columbia University. [6]  At Columbia, he probably studied with, or heard about the work of, Lilla Belle Pitts and Harry Wilson.  She was promoting the use folk songs in public school music programs. [7]  He taught choral conducting [8] and published a collection of rounds in 1943. [9]

In 1947, Exner joined the Iowa Extension office, where he taught leadership workshops and directed choral activities. [10]  Sometime in the late 1940s, he published his first songbook through CRS.  Music of One World: U.N. Songs for U.N. Singing was dominated by songs from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Italy.  He wrote three rounds and two choral arrangements. [11]

Exner continued with the Extension service until he turned 70, then continued directing church choirs and leading a folk dance group in Ames, Iowa.  He died in 2004.  His memorial service was held in the local Congregational church. [12]  His photograph appears in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

Availability
Songbook: “Come By Here” “Kum Ba Yah.”  30 in The Bridge of Song, edited by Max V. Exner for the Iowa State College Extension Music Program.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1957.

End Notes
1.  “Song of the Seasons.”  94-95 in Bridge.  The English words were by GBB and Augustus D. Zanzig.  Exner did the arrangement of the Hungarian folk song.

2.  The refrain is: “Twilli willi witt, boom boom.  50 in Bridge.

3.  Germany supplied 60,548 residents, followed by Sweden (18,021), Norway (15,546), Denmark (15,035), and the Netherlands (12,0440).  Czechoslovakia had sent 5,908 rural residents and Exner’s Austria 3,268 by 1920.  Figures calculated from state totals in the Census report for 1920, [13] with numbers subtracted for Des Moines, [14] Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs, Davenport, Dubuque, Sioux City, and Waterloo. [15]

4.  Sue Haug.  “Max Vernon Exner.”  In Iowa State University Faculty Senate.  “Memorial Resolutions.”  26 April 2005.

5.  Janice A. Beran.  “Max J. Exner: Naismith’s Roommate—Later Coach, Teacher and Public Health Physician.”  13 in North American Society for Sport History.  Proceedings, 1991.  It is the same Gulick discussed in the posts for 5 September 2021 (note 35) and 27 November 2022.

6.  Haug.
7.  Pitts is discussed in the post for 30 August 2018.

8.  Wilson is discussed in the post for 15 July 2018.  He directed “vocal and choral activities” at Teachers College from 1939 to 1958. [16]

9.  Harry Robert Wilson.  Rounds and Canons.  Chicago: Hall and McCreary Company, 1943.

10.  Haug.

11.  Music of One World, compiled by the Extension Music Office, Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa; Max V. Exner, Extension Specialist in Music.  Delaware, Ohio: Coop. Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service.  Last copyrighted song was 1948.

12.  Haug.

13. Table 6.  Country of Birth of Foreign-Born Population, by Divisions and States, 1920.  697-699 in “Chapter VI.  Country of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population.”  United States Census, 1920 census.

14.  Table 12.  Country of Birth of Foreign-Born Population, for Cities Having 100,000 Inhabitants or More: 1920.  729-731 in Chapter VI.

15.  Table 17.—Country of Birth of Foreign-Born Population, for Cities Having from 25,000 to 100,000 Inhabitants: 1920.  760-767 in Chapter VI.

16.  “Harry Robert Wilson.”  World Biographical Encyclopedia Prabook website.

YWCA - Kum Ba Yah

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) was the second youth group to include “Kum Ba Yah” in 1957.  We know it came after the Girl Guides’ book, because one page of graces is described as “from CHANSONS DE NOTRE CHALET” [1].

In this case, Augustus D. Zanzig’s role is clearer: he is listed as an editor.  In addition, he translated or arranged 15 of the 63 international songs.
 
It is not known if he contacted the organization, which may not have placed an order since 1954.  On the other hand, it may decided it was time to issue a revised songster and lacked the resources after Marie Oliver left in 1952.  In the 1965 revision, Zanzig is credited with arranging the music. [2]

As mentioned in the post for 20 March 2022, the impression was Oliver was the victim of Harvey Matusow’s claim the organization was infiltrated by the Communist Party.  The 1957 songster has 13% fewer songs from countries controlled by the Soviet Union or which fought against us in World War II.  However, many of the labor songs were reprinted, including the most controversial, “Joe Hill.”

Although some of the songs the caused problems for Oliver were kept, her presence was excised.  Zanzig redid her arrangements for “The Silver Moon Is Shining” and “Golden Day Is Dying.”  This leads to questions about bureaucratic and budgetary decisions that cannot be answered.

Otherwise, the selection of songs remained the same.  It dropped 46 songs from the earlier edition and added 54.  If such changes were not made, no one would have a reason to buy it.

The major change had occurred between the 1941 and 1951 editions, when the number of religious songs increased by nearly 40%. [3]  They came at the expense of what were called “general songs.”  That class included camp songs.  This edition dropped two songs then in active camp tradition, “French Cathedrals” and “Hark to the Chimes.”  The first is a round; the second is a grace.

The songbook’s intended audience was Y-Teen clubs for high-school and college aged young women.  This is a group that would be more likely to sing religious songs at its meetings.  The songbook offered 52 hymns, of which 10 were new.  Among the 8 spirituals, “He’s Got the Whole World” and “Let Us Break Bread Together” replaced “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

The group drew its members from the same main-line denominations that ordered songbooks from Cooperative Recreation Service.  Sing Along, or the owner of CRS, Lynn Rohrbough, did not offer popular gospel songs like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” or the “Old Rugged Cross.” It certainly did not include the raucous ones like “Do Lord.  The closest the songbook came was “Green Grow the Rushes.”

Spirituals may have been used as a substitute for the popular religious songs. [16]  “Kum Ba Yah” had the good fortune to be presented in the “Folk Song” section where it replaced “As the Sun Goes Down” as the token African song.

Since the Y was a Protestant organization, it was interested in converting the heathen of Asia, rather than Spanish-speaking Roman Catholics.  Thus, the editors were still trying to find songs from China, Japan, and Korea that were singable by girls trained in western music.  There were 5 from Asia and 6 from Latin America.

The interest in Jewish settlements in the Holy land continued with “Shalom Chaverim” and “Zum Gali Gali.”  The first still only had the English words by Zanzig, and so was not the source for that song in tradition.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line

Credits
African (Angola)

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation: “Koom-bah-yah,” same as that published in Indianola Sings, which is reproduced in the post for 29 May 2022

Verses: kumbaya, crying, singing, praying; same verses and same order as those published in Indianola Sings

Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; the melody is the same as Indianola Sings
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: slowly
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: one syllable to one note except for final “Lord”
Ending: none

Notes on Performance
Cover: Five-line music at top and bottom of with YWCA logo at bottom left

Color Scheme: the cover uses dark blue ink on medium gray stock; inside the pages employ faded navy ink on white paper

Plate: The songster was reprinted several times, and each time the plate change.  The first issued had the one made by Jane Keen for Indianola Sings.

Notes on Performers
Lura Marie Barnes was born in 1897, [4] and raised in Topeka, Kansas, where she sang in the chorus of The Messiah in 1915. [5]  She married Byron Mohrbacher in 1921, when he was working for the Santa Fe Railroad.  At the time, they planned to attend Kansas State Agricultural College.  She expected she would study music and home economics. [6]

The next public notice came in 1924 when they were living in Wichita, Kansas, where he managed the United Warehouse.  They both were singing in glee clubs. [7]  By 1942, they were living in Ithaca, New York.  He ran the Cooperative Consumers Society grocery store there. [8]

Her first known contact with the YWCA came in 1943, when she wrote a letter to Oliver that said the composer of “Witchcraft” had been her accompanist in 1940. [9]  This song is mentioned in the post for 5 December 2021.

Around 1945, the Mohrbachers moved to Hazardville, near Enfield, Connecticut, where they remained. [10]  She was representing the Y on colleges in 1949, when she was a member of the national music committee. [11]  In 1950, she put on a program for the Y in Hartford where she sang and played accordion. [12]  The following year the soprano gave a concert in Thompsonville, a village near Enfield. [13]

Her first known contact with CRS came after 1954, when she set down an Indonesian song she heard at the Y’s summer school.  Rohrbough’s wife, born Katharine Ferris, translated it and he copyrighted it in 1956. [14]

After that she disappears from public view.  She died in 1977. [15]

I could find nothing about Mary B. Wheeler.  It is a common name.  Posts about Zanzig are listed in the index to the right.

Availability
Songbook: “Kum Ba Yah.”  7 in Sing Along, edited by Mary Wheeler, Lura Mohrbacher, and Augustus D. Zanzig for the National Board of the YWCA in New York.  Delaware, Ohio: Coop. Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1957.

End Notes
1.  Sing Along.  61.  Chansons is discussed in the posts for 27 November 2022 and 4 December 2022.

2.  Sing Along, edited by Mary Wheeler for the National Board of the YWCA in New York.  Delaware, Ohio: Coop. Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1965.  Inside front cover.

3.  Earlier YWCA songbooks are discussed in the posts for 5 December 2021, 13 March 2022, and 20 March 2022.

4.  “Lura Mohrbacher.”  Ancient Faces website.

5.  Item.  The Topeka Daily Capital, Topeka, Kansas, 8 April 1917.  3.  Uploaded to the internet by fritzabq on 18 January 2015.

6.  Item in “Among Ourselves.”  The Santa Fe Magazine, 13:96:1921.

7.  Item.  The Marysville Advocate, Marysville, Kansas, 24 April 1924.  5.  Uploaded to the internet by araywatson on 4 August 2020.

8.  Ithaca Directory, 1942.  Bellows Falls, Vermont: H. A. Manning Company, 1942.  237.

9.  Marie Oliver.  Let’s Have Music.  1945.  47.  When I was copying pages from the book in the 1970s, I did not get the complete publication information, and it is not in WorldCat.  Presumably it was issued by the YWCA’s Woman’s Press in New York City.

10.  Lura Mohrbacher.  “Three Stories about Music and People.”  Music Journal 9(6):15:1 October 1951.

11.  “Sara Swartz Heads Membership Week Committee for S. C. M.”  The Etownian, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, 44(1):3:15 September 1947.

12.  “About Town.”  Manchester Evening Herald, Manchester, Connecticut, 13 September 1950.  14.
 
13.  “Plan Concert.”  The Thompsonville Press, Enfield, Connecticut, 72(27):5:4 October 1951.

14.  “Sarimandé.”  39 in Sing Along.

15.  Obituary for Lura Mohrbacher.  Manchester Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Connecticut, 10 June 1977.

16.  The one group who used evangelistic songs was Pioneer Girls.  As mentioned in the post for 4 December 2022, their songbook, Pioneer Girls Sing, contained no spirituals.  It had more hymns than many CRS songsters along with the words to a Fanny Crosby song.  “Good-bye, Our God Is Watching O’er You” was composed by Wendell P. Loveless.  He lived in Wheaton, Illinois, and had a radio program on the Moody Bible Institute’s station in Chicago. [17]

17.  “Wendell P.  Loveless.”  Hope Publishing company website.  

 

Initial Impact of Chansons de Notre Chalet

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
It is difficult to know how important the Girl Guides’ songbook, Chansons de Notre Chalet, was in spreading “Kumbaya” in 1957.  It is known the song entered the Girl Scout repertoire in this country.

Members of Troop 99 in Shamrock, Texas, sang it at a Girl Scout meeting in April of 1959. [1] June Rushing remembered learning it at Silver Springs in 1961. [2]  The first group may have been Brownies.  The second was a primitive camp for older Scouts sponsored by the San Jacinto Council of Houston, Texas. [3]

“Kumbaya” may have been learned from Chansons, or from some other source.  By 1959, it had appeared in a number of CRS and other songbooks.

Larry Holcomb compiled statistics on sales of CRS songbooks from the mid-1950s until 1969. [4]  Within that time period, the Methodist church still was the primary customer followed by the Presbyterian and the Evangelical and Reformed churches.  The most important youth organizations were the American Camping Association, followed by ones for young women. Among the latter, the Camp Fire Girls purchased 15% more copies of Music Makers than the Girl Guides did of Chansons.  The YWCA ordered 15% fewer booklets.

Chansons went through five editions, which means its print run in 1957 may have been 20% of the 190,000 copies reported by Holcomb.  Further, a large number probably were sent to Switzerland, so at most, 19,000 may have been circulating the first year in the United States.

Of the groups named by Holcomb, the Methodists included “Kum Ba Yah” in songbooks, but the Presbyterian and Evangelical and Reformed [5] churches did not.  The ACA, [6] Girl Scouts and YWCA [7] published it, but the Camp Fire Girls [8] and Pioneer Girls did not.  I could not find a copy of the songbook of the other group he mentioned.  However, even if the Pioneer Girls had included the text in Songfest, they would not have introduced it into camp tradition because the conservative religious program was designed as an alternative to the more secular girls’ groups. [9]

Membership in the other three girls’ groups was not exclusive.  I sent a questionnaire to camps in 1976 asking what songs they were singing.  Of the 87 who responded who had attended Girl Scout camps, 13 also had gone to CFG camps and 8 to YWCA ones.  74 reported going to a Camp Fire camp; [10] 9 also had gone to a Scout camp and 4 to a Y one.  There were fewer YWCA camps then, but of the 19 who had attended one, 5 also had spent time in a CFG one and 8 in a GS one.  24% of the Scouts had gone to church camps, 28% of the Camp Fire Girls, and 39% of the Y members.

Another way to measure the importance of the Girl Guides’ collection is not to look at sales figures or an individual song, but to ask if the anthology reflected the active repertoire in camps.  If other songs in Chansons entered tradition, then one knows, at least, that the songbook was not just purchased but used.  Of the 90 songs in the 1957 edition of Chansons, 41 were mentioned voluntarily by someone who answered my questionnaire, not necessarily a Scout.  Of those, 25 had appeared in earlier Scout or Guide songbooks, and 14 of those had been published by CRS for the Camp Fire Girls or the YWCA.

One grace, “If we have earned the right to eat this bread,” had been written for the Camp Fire Girls in 1912 by William Harold Neidlinger, but had not been included in their CRS anthologies because the organization was selling copies of it. [11]  The Girl Guides included it in the Kent County Song Book in 1934 with full credit. [12]  It may have been taken by them to the Chalet.

Thirteen more songs, including “Kum Ba Yah,” already were in the CRS stockpile.  Twelve already had appeared in Y or CFG booklets.

The remaining three of the 41 popular songs may have been introduced by Chansons.  Certainly “Tina Singu” came from the Guides.  While Chansons does not claim a role, it had been collected from Wycliffe Nkuma of Basutoland by Kathleen F. Hill.  Hill wrote a history of the organization in South Africa in 1951. [13]  In the 1970s, “Tina Singu” was mentioned by 7 people who responded to my questionnaire.

The second that had to have had an English Guide origin is “Jubilate Deo” by Michael Praetorius. [14]  The Kent County Song Book had included another round by his uncle, Christoph Praetorius.  “Rise Up, O Flame” was mentioned by 29 individuals in the 1970s.  “Jubilate” was named by 23.

“Linstead Market” could have been a Guide song or it could have just been received by Lynn Rohrbough and recommended by Augustus Zanzig.  Chansons only noted that it came from Jamaica.  In fact, it first had been collected there in 1907. [15]  It was the kind of popular folk song that caught the attention of both the people who offered songs to CRS and to the Girl Guides.  It was mentioned by 24 people who answered my questionnaire.

The creole-language song is a bit of an anomaly in Chansons: its seeming nonsense syllables have a greater appeal to younger campers than those who attend the Chalet in Switzerland.  The only other song that played with language was Sanders’ version of “A-Jogging Along.”  The ones with pure sung syllables among the top 41 were “Holla Hi,” “Vrenalie” and “Weggis Song.”

Notes on Performers
The songs contributed by U. S. Scouts to the top 41 came from two different traditions.  The official publications emphasized the organization.  George Newell introduced “O Beautiful Banner” in the Girl Scout Song Book in 1929 [16]  Sarah Birdsall Otis Edey added two Scout verses to Homer Harbour’s “The Flag Goes By.” [17]  Edey was on the national board of director in 1929. [18]

While Marion Roberts was preparing Chansons, the Scouts issued a rival songbook that adopted the size and format of CRS booklets.  The Girl Scout Pocket Songbook had sections devoted to “Songs for Girl Scout Occasions” and “Songs of the Girl Scout Regions.” [19]  It introduced two of Chalet’s most popular songs: “Ego Sum Pauper” and “Gelobet Sei.” [20]

Eleanor Thomas, editor of the Pocket Songbook, was born in South Dakota in 1917, and earned a degree in music education from the University of Nebraska.  In the 1940s she was a regional field director.  She left to earn an advanced degree from Stanford, where she sang in the university chorus.  She joined the national GS staff in 1949, and continued in staff positions with local councils until she retired in 1979.  Thomas also wrote novels featuring a Brownie Scout named Becky. [21]  She died in 1991. [22]

Mary Alison Sanders represented the other Scout tradition, that of women interested in music who privately published collections that were sold by the national organization.  She was born in eastern Tennessee in 1886, where she taught music in schools.  After studying in Europe, she worked in New York, and occasionally at the Edith Macy training center for leaders. [23]

Her first collection, Our Songs, reflected the early Scout interest in folk songs and games of England, and nothing in it stayed in tradition. [24]  Her second, Sing High, Sing Low, was responsible for the greatest number of songs in Chansons, four. [25]  One reason for its importance was that was distributed by both the Scouts and Camp Fire Girls.  I sang them all in CFG camps.  Two used rhythmic gestures [26] and two were reserved for older campers and counselors. [27]

Janet Evelyn Tobitt moved between the two traditions.  She was born in England in 1898 and earned a degree from King’s College London in 1923.  While teaching school, she spent time in Europe where she discovered folk music and became a collector.  When she first moved to New York, she taught at the Mary C. Wheeler School and the New School for Social Research before she worked as a music supervisor at Edith Macy in 1934. [28]  She edited an official songster, Sing Together, in 1936. [29]  The only song it contributed was the “Day is done” words for “Taps,” which were available from many sources.

Tobitt returned to England in 1936, but permanent moved to this country in 1938, just before the war became serious there. [30]  She privately published three songbooks, with one, The Ditty Bag, containing new materials and reproductions from the two earlier ones. [31]  They popularized some material from Kent County [32] and were the first publications of three songs in Chansons. [33]  While the Girl Scouts did not published Tobitt’s books, they did distribute them.

Tobitt continued to work as consultant for the Scouts while teaching, writing, and collecting in the area of New York touched by the ferment of the pre-commercial phase of the folk-music revival.  She died in 1984. [34]

End Notes
1.  Item.  The Shamrock Texan, Shamrock, Texas, 23 April 1959.  6.  The copy of the newspaper available on the internet was badly broken during the digitation process.  This is what it said: “Each troop then presented opr phase of the program as follows: Troop 99, Mrs. .) Bailey, Lead! i” ‘Kum Ba Yah’.”

2.  June Rushing.  “Kumbaya,” collected in 1961 at Camp Silver Springs.  In “Camp Songs.”  Utah State University, Department of English, Folklore Archive, 1971.  Her version included an additional verse, “laughing,” and used the verse order introduced by Tommy Leonetti in 1968. [35]  Since the words may not have been written down in 1951, her text may reflect what she was singing later.  More information about her and her photograph appear in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

3.  “Highlights through the Years.”  The Golden Link 48(2):6-8:Summer 2022.  8.

4.  Larry Nial Holcomb.  “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  129.

5.  Edward Schlingman and the importance of the Evangelical and Reformed churches are discussed in 20 February 20220 and 6 March 2022.

6.  The American Camping Association is discussed in the posts for 28 May 2023 and 4 June 2023.

7.  The YWCA is discussed in the posts for 13 March 2022, 20 March 2022, and 11 December 2022.

8.  The Camp Fire Girls will be discussed in a future post.

9.  Pioneer Girls was organized in 1939 by Betty Whitaker, a Wheaton College student, as an conservative religious alternative to the more secular girls’ groups. [42]  I have a songbook, Pioneer Girls Sing, that could be from the middle or late 1950s.[43]  It contains songs from traditional girls’ camps, like “Each Camp Fire” [44] and “Witchcraft” [45] along with ones for young campers.  The editors selected few international songs from the CRS repertoire, and used evangelistic religious songs. [46]  It did not include “Kumbaya” or any Negro spirituals.  However, in  1976, two women attending camps sponsored by the Pioneer Girls answered my questionnaire.  Both knew “Kumbaya.”  Neither mentioned going to another camp.

10.  I excluded people who went to the same CFG camp I attended from these numbers.

11.  W. H. Neidlinger.  “Blessing,” copyrighted in 1912.  Songs of the Camp Fire Girls.  This went through a number of editions, including early extracts of individual songs and later issues that removed some of the more offensive material.

12.  Girl Guides Association, County of Kent.  Kent County Song Book, edited by Gladys Crawter, Doris Escombe, Audrey Page, and Alison Tennant.  London: Novello and Company, 1934.  47.

13.  Kathleen F Hill.  “Brief History of the Guide Movement in South Africa.”  May 1951.  Copy in Girl Scout Archives in New York.  Cited by Tammy M. Proctor.  Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.  Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2009.  22.

14.  Both men were born Schultze and used the Latinized term for a local political leader, Praetorius.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs has a few more details on page 443.

15.  Walter Jekyll.  Jamaican Song and Story.  London: D. Nutt, 1907, for the Folk-Lore Society.  219-220.  Cited by “Linstead Market.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 10 November 2022.

16.  George Newell.  Girl Scout Song Book.  New York: Girl Scouts, Inc., 1929.

17.  Homer H. Harbour.  “The Flag Going By.”  2 in Archibald T. Davison, Thomas Whitney Surette, and and Augustus D. Zanzig.  A Books of Songs.  Boston: E. C. Schirmer Music Company, 1924.  The teacher’s edition is better known as Concord 14.  The student’s version is Concord 4.  2.  Harbour is discussed in the post for 5 December 2021.  He used a German folk tune.

18.  Joyce Weaver.  “Biographical Sketch of Sarah Elizabeth Birdsall Otis (Mrs. Frederick) Edey.”  Alexander Street website, accessed 14 November 2022.

19.  Eleanor L. Thomas.  Girl Scout Pocket Songbook.  New York: Girls Scouts of the U.S.A., 1956.

20.  Janet E. Tobitt had published “Gelobet Sei” earlier in A-B-C’s of Camp Music.  Pleasantville, New York: 1955.  14. [36]  This was not the sort of book most Scouts would see.  The varied spellings of the title indicate most had learned it from tradition, not Chansons.

21.  Eleanor Thomas.  Becky and Tatters: A Brownie Scout Story.  New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940.

Eleanor Thomas.  Becky’s Boarding House: A Brownie Scout Story.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.

22.  Obituary for Eleanor L. Thomas.  Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 29 July 1991.  16.

23.  Emily Holmberg.  “Mary Alison Sanders (1886 - 1949).”  Wiki Tree website, 22 May 2018; last updated 16 June 2022.  Her source was a genealogy by Sanders’ brother, William Robert Sanders.  Genealogy of the Sanders, Alison, and Collateral Families of Sullivan & Washington Counties Tennessee.  Self-Published, 1972.  32-34.  This post has family photographs of Sanders.  Holmberg is Sander’s niece.

24.  Mary A. Sanders.  Our Songs.  New York: 1942.
35.  Mary A. Sanders.  Sing High, Sing Low.  New York: 1946.

26.  At the CFG camp I attended, we used patterned gestures with “A-Jogging Along” and alternated hand claps and finger snaps with “All Night, All Day.”  Sanders claimed the second was a Negro spiritual, but the words are the familiar “Now I lay be down to sleep.”

27.  Homer H. Harbour wrote “Cloud Ships” to a Tyrolese folk tune for Concord 14.  215-216.

Eleanor Farjeon published the text for “Shepherdess Walk” in Nursery Rhymes of London Town.  London: Duckworth and Company, 1916.  48.  She published a second volume in 1917, and the two since have been combined into one book.  In 1919, she issued a four volume set that included music.  “Shepherdess Walk” is in volume 1 of Nursery Rhymes of London Town.  London: The Anglo-French Music Company, 1919, as agents for The Oxford University Press.  8-9.

28.  “Janet E. Tobitt.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 7 November 2022.  It has a photograph of her; another appears in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  The Wikipedia article is a thoroughly researched biography.

29.  Janet Tobitt.  Sing Together.  New York: Girl Scouts, Inc., 1936.  The Scouts reused the title in 1949 for an anthology that included a few songs from Newell and a few from 1936. [37]  It made no obviously contribution to the popular songs in Chansons.

30.  Wikipedia, Tobitt.

31.  Janet E. Tobitt.  The Ditty Bag.  Pleasantville, New York: 1946.  A revised 1960 edition replaced some songs for copyright reasons.

32.  “God has created a new day” appears in Yours for a Song.  Pleasantville, New York: 1939.  It is printed on page 174 of The Ditty Bag.

“Peace of the River” is in Jane E. Tobitt.  Sing Me Your Song O!  Pleasantville, New York: 1941.  It appears on page 91 in The Ditty Bag.

33.  “Railroad Corral” appears on page 62 in The Ditty Bag.  The lyrics in Chansons are different, and come from Alice Mulkey of Amarillo, Texas. [38]  She worked on the national staff of the Scouts training leaders from the 1930s through the early 1960s. [39]  Mulkey led singing at a 1940 meeting in Amarillo [40]

“Dona Nobis Pacem” appears on page 33 in The Ditty Bag with no notes.

“Vrenalie” appears on page 23 in The Ditty Bag.  The Swiss song was translated by Violet M. Synge.  She later was head of the Girl Guides in England. [41]

34.  Wikipedia, Tobitt.
35.  Leonetti is discussed in the post for 12 April 2020.
36.  Date from Wikipedia, Tobitt.

37.  Sing Together.  New York: Girl Scouts of the U. S. A, 1949.  Forward by Janet E. Tobitt, music consultant to the Girl Scouts of the U. S. A.

38.  Chansons, 61.

39.  Newspaper reports, including Amarillo Daily News, Amarillo, Texas, 25 July 1935; Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton, Texas, 21 May 1952; and The West News, West, Texas, 19 January 1962.

40.  Item.  Amarillo Globe, Amarillo, Texas, 19 April 1940.
41.  “Violet Synge.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 13 November 2022.

42.  Timothy Larsen.  “Pioneer Girls: Mid-Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism’s Girl Scouts.”  The Asbury Journal 63(2):59-79:2008.

43.  Pioneer Girls Sing.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service.

44.  “Each Camp Fire” is used as an example of a traditional girls’ camp song in the posts for 28 November 2021, 5 December 2021, 20 February 2022, and 13 March 2022.

45.  “Witchcraft” is discussed as a traditional girl’s camp song in the post for 5 December 2021.

46.  Their religious songs are discussed in the post for 11 December 2022. 

Chansons de Notre Chalet - Kum Ba Yah

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Lynn Rohrbough expanded his circle of advisors for Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS) in 1956.  He announced Max Exner’s assistance in April, [1] and Augustus D. Zanzig’s in July. [2]

Larry Holcomb does not explain why Rohrbough suddenly needed more help than that provided by Olcutt Sanders. [3]  It may well be, as Holcomb implied, CRS’s business was growing.  The Baby Boom had begun in 1946 when the number of live births increased by almost 24% over the previous year.  Those children were ten-years old in 1956, and they had more younger brothers and sisters. [4]  Their presence may have stimulated groups to order custom songbooks.

More likely, Rohrbough was aware the Methodist church central staff was going to publish its own books, rather than use him. [5]  Rohrbough did indicate Zanzig would contact “the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, 4-H groups, camps, and others.” [6]

The mention of the Girl Guides suggest this was more the result of serendipity than it was a coherent business plan.  The Guides are not an American group, but a British one.  When Robert Baden-Powell organized the Boy Scouts in England, he asked his sister Agnes to establish the Guides as its female equivalent in 1909. [7]  In this country, Luther Gulick promoted the Camp Fire Girls in that role. [8]  The Girl Scouts was introduced as a separate, independent organization in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912 by Juliette Gordon Low. [9]

Low had spent much of her time in England after her marriage and stayed after her husband died in 1905.  She met the unmarried Baden-Powell in 1911.  The two came to this country in early 1912 to introduce the Guides. [10]  He apparently introduced the English idea that an organization’s credibility depended on the social rank of its sponsors, with that of the royal family the most useful.

From the beginning, the Girl Scouts had different goals than the rival Camp Fire Girls and Young Women’s Christian Association.  Low primarily was concerned with building an organization, while Gulick, and his wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, were promoting a philosophy and program. [11]  The YWCA primarily was concerned with providing services for young women. [12]

In 1919, the Girl Scouts held its first national training school for leaders on the estate of Helen Storrow in Massachusetts. [13]  She was descended from political activists in Boston, and was part of the same progressive tradition as the Gulicks. [14]  She organized a troop for high-school-aged girls in 1915, and thereafter became vice president of the national organization. [15]

The Boy Scouts changed its organizational structure in 1915.  When Gulick had helped establish the group in 1910, he and his fellow sponsors wanted to include the Native American lore publicized by Ernest Thompson Seton [16] and the nature lore of Daniel Carter Beard. [17]  Each was made an officer, but James West was hired to manage the organization in 1911. [18]

In 1915, West started emphasizing the military values of Baden-Powell and Beard left. [19]  The next year, West asked Congress to formally recognize his group, in exchange for requiring every member be a United States citizen.  This forced out the Canadian-born Seton. [20]

Low followed suit.  In 1917, she asked the wife of the most prominent official in Woodrow Wilson’s administration to become vice-president, in place of Sturrow. [21]  She also induced the president’s wife to accept the title of honorary president. [22]  Edith Macy, the wife of a wealthy New Yorker, became the chairman of the executive board in 1919, [23] and the sixty-year-old Low herself was forced out as president in 1920. [24]

Storrow and Low did not disappear.  Storrow remained on the board, [25] while Low began working with Baden-Powell’s young wife, Olave, with the international organization. [27]  The first conference was held in 1920, and a formal organization created at the 1925 meeting in The Hague. [27]

The widowed Storrow was sent as a delegate to the 1929 international conference where she offered to pay for constructing a meeting center in Switzerland.  In return, she was elected chairman of the conference.  Our Chalet opened in 1932. [28]

Twenty years later, the Swiss center celebrated its anniversary with a Singing Camp. [29]  Marion Roberts must have attended because she recalled “our days and nights were happily spent in singing dozens and dozens of songs from all countries of the world.” [30]  In 1955, the organization decided to publish a songbook for use at the conference center [31] and a committee of 18 was formed.  Members came from thirteen countries. [32]

What happened next is conjecture.  Roberts, who lived in Boston, was appointed editor.  Either she contacted Zanzig, who was well known among musicians of a certain type in the area and had been an advisor for a 1936 Scout songbook, [33] or he heard about the project and contacted her.  Whichever happened, CRS published Chansons de Notre Chalet in 1957.  It contained the original plate for “Kum Ba Yah.”

Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line

Credits
African (Angola)

Songbook inside front cover: © 1957, C.R.S.  All rights reserved.

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation: “Koom-bah-yah,” same as that published in Indianola Sings, which is reproduced in the post for 29 May 2022

Verses: kumbaya, crying, singing, praying; same verses and same order as those published in Indianola Sings

Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; the melody is the same as Indianola Sings
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: slowly
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: one syllable to one note except for final “Lord”
Ending: none

Notes on Performance
Cover: Drawing of Chalet inside Girl Guides’ logo; design by Elizabeth Gilligan of Boston

Color Scheme: the cover uses dark blue ink on medium blue stock; inside, the pages employ gray-brown ink on white paper

Plate: Same plate used in Indianola Sings, made by Jane Keen.  The layout was not done by Sara Bisco Bailey, who had left with her husband in 1954. [34]  Whoever look over did not have her gift of organization that allowed CRS to published several songs on a page. [35]  Many of the pages have blank spaces.  Worse, some are continued on the back side, so that a singer has to flip the page back and forth to sing a second verse.  The individual may have sung in a choir that used scores, but had not sung from a hymnal or community songster where the verses are at the bottom of the page with the melody.

Notes on Performers
I have not been able to discover much about Roberts; her name is common.  She may or may not have been the Marion Alice Roberts who help produce a musical comedy in Boston in 1947. [36]  She certainly was the Marion A. Roberts who wrote the Rockport Folk Mass [37] published by CRS in 1965. [38]

In between, she was leading singing in 1947 at Camp Edith Macy, the permanent training center on land given to the Girl Scouts after Macy died in 1925. [39]  The New York Daily News photographed her playing an accordion while leading a group. [40]  She was teaching singing games to Girl Scout leaders in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1952, [41] and leading a workshop for leaders in Chelmsford, New Hampshire, in 1967. [42]  The last mentioned her accordion.

Roberts appears to have been one of the many women attracted to the Scouts who found occasional employment with the organization, and formed close friendships with other women interested in music.  In 1958, she edited a collection of songs by Marie Gaudette that was compiled by Catherine Hammett.  The musical transcriptions were done by Mary Alison Sanders and Constance Bell. [43]

Availability
Songbook: “Kum Ba Yah.”  47 in Chansons de Notre Chalet, edited by Marion A. Roberts for Our Chalet, Adelboden, Switzerland.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Inc., 1957.

End Notes
1.  Song Sampler, number 2, April 1956.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1956.  3.  Cited by Larry Nial Holcomb.  “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  136-137.

2.  Song Sampler, number 3, July 1956.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1956.  6.  Cited by Holcomb.  136.

3.  Olcutt Sanders is discussed in the post for 13 February 2022.
4.  Matt Rosenberg.  “Baby Boom.”  Thought Co website, last updated 25 May 2018.

5.  The history of Methodist church youth groups and their music is sketched in the post for 9 February 2020.

6.  Song Sampler 3.  6.  Cited by Holcomb.  136.
7.  “Agnes Baden-Powell.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 7 November 2022.
8.  The Gulicks’ role is mentioned briefly in note 35 of the post for 5 September 2021.
9.  “Juliette Gordon Low.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 7 November 2022.
10.  Wikipedia, Low.

11.  As mentioned in the post for 5 September 2021, Luther Halsey Gulick believed in the virtues of physical activity.  He asked people in Michigan, in January 1914 “what provision do you make in Battle Creek whereby groups of girls [ . . . ] can go off on a tramp of five miles and find a good place to make a fire and a place to bake some potatoes and have a good time together.” [44]  His wife, the former Charlotte Vetter, developed the camping program when she expanded work she had been doing with her daughters in Maine.  She asked Seton for ideas that led to the introduction of Native American themes in 1910. [45]

12.  The YWCA is discussed in the post for 13 March 2022.
13.  “Helen Osborne Storrow.”  Girl Scouts Archives website, accessed 7 November 2022.

14.  Both Storrow and Luther Halsey Gulick were involved with the movement to create playgrounds in Boston. [46]  After she met Cecil Sharp, [47] her interest turned to folk dancing. [48]  Gulick chaired the session on Folk Dancing at the 1909 Playground Conference. [49]  In 1911, she reviewed a book on folk dancing written by Gulick. [50]  These references do not prove they knew or liked each other, but they certainly must have been aware of each other.

15.  “Helen Storrow.”  Storrowtown Village museum website, accessed 7 November 2022.
16.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  145.
17.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  366.
18.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  367.
19.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  367.
20.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  367.

21.  Wikipedia, Low.  Herbert Hoover was directing relief efforts for war ravaged countries in Europe. [51]  His wife, Lou Henry Hoover, became president of the Girl Scouts in 1922 and remained in that position until here husband was elected president.  She was president again between 1935 and 1937. [52]

22.  Wikipedia, Low.  Edith Bolling Galt Wilson was Wilson’s second wife.
23.  “Edith Macy Conference Center.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 7 November 2022.
24.  Wikipedia, Low.
25.  Girl Scouts, Storrow.

26.  Wikipedia, Low.  Baden-Powell met Olave Soames in January 1912, and married her in October 1912. [53]

27.  Barbara Morgan.  “Baden-Powell, Olave (1889–1977).”  Encyclopedia website, accessed 7 October 2022.

28.  Storrowtown.

29.  Mrs. Arthur O. Choate.  “Greetings from the Chairman of the Juliette Low World Friendship Committee.”  20 August 1951.  In The Girl Scout Leader 28:(8):16:November 1951.  Choate was Low’s goddaughter, Anne Hyde Choate. [54]

30.  Marion A. Roberts.  “How a Songbook Is Born.”  Our Chalet.  3.
31.  Roberts, How.  3.

32.  Marion A. Roberts.  “Grateful acknowledgment...”  Our Chalet.  Representatives came from Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Sweden and Switzerland.

33.  Janet Tobitt.  Sing Together.  New York: Girl Scouts, Inc., 1936.  4.
34.  Oscar Bailey is discussed in the post for 1 May 2022.
35.  Sara Bailey’s talents are discussed in the post for 15 May 2022.

36.  Marion Alice Roberts and Bob Gest.  Sunday Afternoon in Boston.  Copyrighted 11 April 1947.  United States Copyright Office.  Catalog of Copyright Entries.  Third Series.  January–June 1947.  1931.  Volume for dramas.

37.  Marion A. Roberts.  Rockport Folk Mass.  Copyrighted 27 August 1965.  United States Copyright Office.  Catalog of Copyright Entries.  Third Series.  July–December 1965.  1931.  Rockport, on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, was a summer place for the wealthy in the nineteenth century.  It since has become a vacation place for artists and writers. [55]

38.  Marion A. Roberts.  Four American Folk Hymns for Rockport Folk Mass: August 20, 1965.  Delaware, Ohio: Informal Music Service, 1965.

39.  Wikipedia, Macy.
 
40.  “Marion Roberts with accordion.”  The New York Daily News photograph, 1947.  Reproduced on Girls Scouts Archives website, accessed 7 November 2022.

41.  Item.  Fitchburg Sentinel, Fitchburg, Massachusetts , 10 April 1952.  28.

42.  “Workshop for Leaders of Girl Scouts.”  The Telegraph, Nashua, New Hampshire, 23 January 1967.  20.

43.  Marie Gaudette.  Marie Gaudette’s Songs, compiled by Catherine T. Hammett, edited by Marion Roberts, music transcriptions by Mary Sanders and Constance Bell.  Bedford, New York: The Marie Gaudette Memorial Fund, 1968.  Sanders is discussed in the post for 4 December 2022.  Bell will be discussed in a future post.

44.  Luther Halsey Gulick.  “The Girl Who Goes Right.”  In National Conference on Race Betterment.  Official Proceedings.  Battle Creek, Michigan: The Race Betterment Foundation, 1914.  Quoted by Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  12-13.

45.  Edward Gulick.  “The First Camps for Camp Fire Girls.”  Camp Fire Girls Camp Histories website.

46.  Her interest in playgrounds, without dates, is described in “Helen Storrow.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 7 November 2022.  Gulick’s role in Playground and Recreation Association of America is mentioned in the post for 5 September 2022.

47.  Cecil Sharp is mentioned in the posts for 6 February 2019, 7 April 2019, and 12 May 2019.  Before he began promoting folk music in England, he was interested in rituals like Morris dancing.

48.  Wikipedia, Storrow.

49.  Proceedings of the Third annual Playground Congress.  New York City: Playground Association of America, 1910.  197.

50.  Helen Storrow.  Review of Luther Halsey Gulick’s The Healthful Art of Dancing in The Playground 4(10):353-354:January 1911.  Cited by Linda J. Tomko.  Dancing Class.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.  261, note 4.

51.  “Herbert Hoover.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 8 November 2022.
52.  “Lou Henry Hoover.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 9 November 2022.
53.  “Olave Baden-Powell.”  Wikipedia website, 7 November 2022.
54.  “Anne Hyde Choate.”  Girl Scout Archives website, accessed 7 November 2022.
55.  “Rockport, Massachusetts.”  Wikipedia website, assessed 5 November 2022.

Hezekiah Maham’s Rice Plantation

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
Joseph Johnson, mentioned in the post for 13 November 2022, said all that was known about Hezekiah Maham before the American Revolution was that he was the son of Nicholas and had worked as a “respectable overseer to Mrs. Sinkler, of St. John’s Parish.” [1]

Mrs. Sinkler most likely was Jane Guérard, the widow of the immigrant James Sinkler.  Sinkler, born Sinclair in Caithness, Scotland, died in 1752. [2]  Her grandson, Samuel DuBose, remembers she purchased Lifeland from the widow Mary Jameson.  Her husband died in 1766. [3]  Lifeland was located two plantations east of John Palmer’s Richmond. [4]

Maham was well enough established to be granted land in 1771. [5]  By then, he was 32 years old with two daughters, Nancy [6] and Mary. [7]  DuBose, mentioned in the post for 13 November 2022, remembered Maham’s land was south of Richmond. [8]

We have more precise information about Maham’s land because his sister’s grandson erected a nearly indestructible monument to him. [9]  The cemetery is a landmark on the U. S. Geological Survey map for Pineville. [10]  It may not have been considered prime land at the time, because it was too far removed from the river.  A 1793 advertisement claimed it had had “about 500 acres of high land, with about 40 acres of very rich rice swamp.” [11]  The height saved it from inundation when the river was dammed to produce electricity for the area north of Charleston in 1942. [12]  The monument now is 50' above sea level.

Richard Porcher was able to examine a 1929 plat of the land [13] and also was able to visit.  He saw a swamp that had been enclosed by banks to serve as a reservoir for a rice field. [14]  While Porcher could not swear Maham grew rice, Maham’s ledgers indicate he did grow “rice and indigo as well as corn, peas and oats.” [15]

When war was in the air, Maham was elected to the first Provincial Congress in 1875, where he was elected a captain in Isaac Huger’s first regiment of riflemen in 1776. [16]  While Huger was active in repelling the first British attack on Charleston that year, Maham’s name does not appear as an active combatant. [17]

The next major battle occurred in the fall of 1779 when the British took Savannah.  Maham was there under Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. [18]  Walter Edgar indicates that little more occurred after planters accepted parole as the price of maintaining their lands. [19]  The number of men active in military units fell from 2,400 in 1777 to less than 800 in 1780. [20]

Maham was next away from his farm in the winter of 1780 when he was providing information on British movements. [21]  Charles Town surrendered in August of 1780, and many in Saint Stephen’s Parish accepted parole to save their estates. [22]

The area became treacherous as men responded to fears of British reprisal.  Peter Sinkler saw his property destroyed because a brother-in-law betrayed him.  He was taken to Charleston where he died in prison from typhoid fever. [23]  John Palmer was taken prisoner, [24] while Thomas Cordes only survived being hung when his brother-in-law intervened.  The British general was using his in-law’s plantation as headquarters. [25]

Maham became active with Francis Marion in the spring of 1781. [26]  Then, he was constantly in battles.  His wife may have been able to keep the fields productive with the aid of their slaves. [27]  He remained unmolested until March 1782 when a runaway slave betrayed his presence. [28]

While Maham ended the war in better condition that his neighbors, he still was deeply in debt. [29]  Crops had been bad in 1783. [30]  His wife died in January of 1784, [31] and his daughter Nancy married in February. [32]  Floods inundated the area, destroying crops in summer. [33]  In September, 1784, a deputy sheriff in South Carolina attempted to serve him with a writ.  He not only refused the papers, but forced the man to eat the document. [34]

His indebtedness did not concern his fellow citizens.  Saint Stephen’s sent him to the state convention that ratified the constitution in 1785.  He voted for it, along with Samuel DuBose, John Palmer, and John Peyre.  Thomas Cooper and Thomas Palmer voted no. [35]

His stand against debt collectors was treated with ridicule by William Gilmore Simms in an 1854 novel.  In Woodcraft, Maham is changed into Porgy, an insouciant scion who has mortgaged his property “which had been transmitted to him through three or more careful generations” to support a life of alcoholic leisure.  He is saved from the consequences of his rash actions by  Charles Cotesworth Pickney. [36]

Simms’ background was not that much different from that of Maham.  His father had migrated from County Antrim in Ireland, [37] and settled in Charleston.  After his wife died, he went west.  The infant Simms was raised by his maternal grandmother, who told him stories about the Revolution. [38]  Jane Singleton’s grandfather had been among those leaders who were sent to Saint Augustine by the British in 1780, [39] but her father’s exploits may have been exaggerated.

Patrick O’Kelley, a participant in war re-enactments, [40] only mentions Captain John Singleton once.  In July 1781, Thomas Sumter [41] left him behind with the artillery when he advanced on the British at Quinby Bridge.  Maham’s dragoons “charged through the fatigue party and into the howitzer, driving [the British] artillery men from the gun.” [42]

Simms makes Porgy so fat he can’t dismount his horse, and worries his trousers will split in company.  The horse Maham was riding at Quinby Bridge was shot from under him. [43]  Soon after, Singleton and his men killed ten marauders in an ambush. [44]

Simms made his first attempt at fame in 1825 when he wrote a poem commemorating the death of Pinckney, which drew little attention. [45]  During the crisis of 1832, he did not support succession, [46] but by the eve of the Civil War he had change his views.  Woodsmoke was seen by some as an answer to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. [47]

Legends had outpaced history by then.  Pinckney’s grandfather Thomas [48] had been on that same pirate ship, mentioned in the post for 13 November 2022, that brought the ancestor of Maham’s wife to South Carolina.  Later, Edward McCrady, whose father was raised by Johnson’s father, [49] went to great lengths to prove the ship could not have been illegal. [50]  The legendary origins of South Carolina lay in the aristocracy of Barbados and England, not with men like Maham who, to quote Johnson, rose through their own “good conduct from this station to distinction and honor in the history of his native State.” [51]

End Notes
1.  Joseph Johnson. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South.  Charleston, South Carolina: Walker and James, 1851.  286.

2.  “James Sinkler.”  Ancestry website.  She probably was descended from one of the first Huguenot settlers, Jacques Guérard.  However, her names does not appear in Guérard genealogies. [52]

3.  Mary Cantrey married William Jameson.  After he died in 1766, she married Thomas Sumter. [53]

4.  Samuel DuBose.  “Reminiscences of St. Stephen's Parish, Craven County and Notices of Her Old Homesteads.”  35–85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina.  Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas.  New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887.  45.  DuBose and Palmer/Pamor are introduced in the post for 13 November 2022.  Palmer was married to the daughter of Maham’s great-aunt Ann Maham Cahusac.

5.  “Maham Plantation – – Berkeley County.”  South Carolina Plantations website.

6.  I found little information about her other than the notice of her marriage mentioned in note 32 below.

7.  John J. Simons III.  “The Early Families of the South Carolina Low County.”  Roots Web website; may no longer be available.  He indicates Mary was born in 1768.

8.  Dubose, Reminiscences.  44–45.
9.  Johnson.  292–293.

10.  United States Geological Survey.  “Pineville Quadrangle South Carolina.  7.5 Minute Series.”  2014.

11.  Advertisement in Charleston City Gazette, 21 February 1793.  Cited by Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., and William Robert Judd.  The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice.  Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014.  21.

12.  Sharron Haley.  “Legacy of the lake.”  Central SC website, 11 July 2004.

13.  J. P. Gailland.  “Map of Richmond, the Farm, Hampstead, Johns Run, Tower Hill and part of Bluford Plantation, owned by the Est. of Robert Marion.”  Reproduced by Porcher.  22.

14.  Porcher.  21–22.  What cannot be known is if the banks and canals were used by Maham or were created by a later owner.

15.  H. Maham, Ledger, 1765-1794.  Cited by Thomas R. Wheaton, Amy Friedlander, and Patrick H. Garrow.  “Yaughan and Curriboo Plantations: Studies in Afro-American Archaeology.”  Report for National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office, April 1983.  302.

16.  Johnson.  286.

17.  Patrick O’Kelley.  Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas.  Volume 1, 1771-1779.  Blue House Tavern Press, 2004.

18.  Kelley.  1:313.

19.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  231–232.  This is discussed in the post for post for 6 November 2022.

20.  David Ramsay.  The History of South-Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: David Longworth, 1809.  Reprinted as Ramsay’s History of South Carolina.  Newberry, South Carolina: W. J. Duffie, 1858.  2:182.

21.  Patrick O’Kelley.  Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas.  Volume 2, 1780.  Blue House Tavern Press, 2004.  2:29, 35.

22.  Dubose, Reminiscences.  66.

23.  DuBose, Reminiscences.  7–8, 46–47.  Peter was the grandson of the immigrant Sinker, and the uncle of DuBose.

24.  DuBose, Reminiscences.  59.
25.  DuBose, Reminiscences.  51.  Cordes is mentioned in the post for 13 November 2022.

26.  Patrick O’Kelley.  Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas.  Volume 3, 1781.  Blue House Tavern Press, 2005.

Patrick O’Kelley.  Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas.  Volume 4, 1780.  Blue House Tavern Press, 2005.

27.  George Haig.  Will, 4 January 1790.  Charleston County Public Library.  Vivian Kessler placed a copy on SC Gen Web website on 26 March 2006.  He left his wife, the former Mary Maham, the “use during her natural Life of all the Negroes I got from Col. Hezekiah Maham.”  They married sometime between the death of his first wife 1778 and the birth of Mary’s son, Maham Haig, in 1786. [54]

28.  Johnson.  287–288.

29.  A great deal has been written by historians about the credit crises that followed the end of the American Revolution when British merchants wanted immediate payment on notes issued during the war.  DuBose says: “when peace was restored every planter was in debt; no market crops had been made for years; and where the river swamp was their sole dependence, even provisions had not been made.  It was not a season therefore merely of embarrassment; ruin stared many in the face.” [55]

30.  Edgar said there were three bad harvests in a row from 1783 to 1785. [56]

31.  Mabel L. Webber.  “Marriage and Death Notices from the South Carolina Weekly Gazette (Continued from April).”  The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 8(3):143–148:July 1917.  146.  She spelled the name Mayham.

32.  Nancy married John Waties of Georgetown in 1784. [57]  He was with the Williamsburg Township Militia in 1780, [58] and Marion’s Brigade of Partisans in 1781. [59]

33.  John Palmer said the freshets began in 1784 and lasted until 1796. [60]  DuBose said they began after the war and lasted ten years. [61]

34.  Chuck Leddy.  “Will America Please Come to Order?”  Christian Science Monitor website, 23 October 2007.  Maham may still have been in debt when he died in 1789.  As mentioned above, his land was offered for sale in 1891, and his one son-in-law bought slaves from the estate. [62]

35.  Debates which Arose in the House of Representatives of South-Carolina on the Constitutions Farmed for the United States.  Charleston, South Carolina: A. E. Miller, 1831.  83.  This Samuel DuBose was the father of the chronicler.  John Palmer, mentioned above, died in January of 1785, so this may have been his son, John Gendron Palmer Jr. [63]

36.  William Gilmore Simms.  Woodcraft, 1854, republished by Norton in  1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.

37.  kwmtex.  “William Gilmore Simms.”  Find a Grave website, 7 January 2021.  This is the entry for Simms’s father of the same name.

38.  “William Gilmore Simms.”  Wikipedia website.
39.  Ramsay 1:212.
40.  The cover biography says hs retired from the U. S. Army Special Forces.
41.  This is the same Sumter who married Mary Cantrey Jameson.
42.  O’Kelley.  3:291–296.  Quotation from 3:296.
43.  O’Kelley.  3:296.

44.  O’Kelley.  3:299.  His source was Lyman Draper.  Thomas Sumter Papers, Draper Manuscript Colletion, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Draper lists Singleton as a Major.  O’Kelley says Singleton killed 10 men alone, but that seems unlikely, given the weapons of the time.  He does mention the group.

45.  William Peterfield Trent.  William Gilmore Simms.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896.  Reprinted by BiblioLife of Charleston, South Carolina in 2009.  144.

46.  Mary Ann Wimsatt.  “William Gilmore Simms, 1806-1870.”  Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris.  Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

47.  Wikipedia.  Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 by John P. Jewell in Boston.

48.  Names in the Pinckney family are confusing because they were reused.  Thomas, the immigrant, married Mary Cotesworth.  One of their sons, Charles, married Elizabeth Lucas.  They had two sons, Charles Cotesworth, who died in 1825, and Thomas, who married Rebecca Mott.  Josephine Pinckney was the great-granddaughter of this Thomas.  Lucas is mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019  as the person who introduced indigo.  Mott is mentioned in the post for 16 January 2019 as an individual who sold her indigo lands and bought new land for flood irrigation of rice.  Josephine is mentioned in the post 204 as a member of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals.  Samuel DuBose, Jr., is mentioned in the post for 16 January 2019, as the great-grandfather of DuBose Heyward, who also was a member of the society.

49.  “Major Edward McCrady, Jr.”  Antietam AOTW website.

50.  Edward McCrady.  The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government, 1670-1719.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897.  260–261.

51.  Johnson.  286.

52.  William Francis Guerard.  “A History and Genealogy of the  Guerard Family and Related Pope and Woodward Families of South Carolina from 1679-1980.”  Square Space website, 1873.

53.  “Mary Jameson or Gemstone / Sumter.”  Geni website, 28 April 2022.

54.  Peter Beauclerk Dewar.  Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain.  Volume 1.  The Kingdom in Scotland.  Stokesley, UK: Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, 2001.  582.

55.  DuBose, Reminiscences.  66–67.
56.  Edgar.  246.
57.  Webber.  147.
58.  O’Kelley.  2:350, 2:384.
59.  O’Kelley.  3:58, 3:115, 3:177.

60.  John Palmer.  “A Statistical Account of St. Stephens’ District.”  2:291–295 in Ramsay.  2:293.

61.  Samuel DuBose.  Address to Black Oak Agricultural Society, 27 April 1858. 3–33 in Thomas.  10.  “For the period of ten years no income was realized on account of freshets” after the war.

62.  George Haig, Will.  He left his wife the use of the slaves he received from Maham’s “Estate since his Death.”  When he died, Haig owned land in Saint Paul Parish, Lexington County, Spartanburg County, and in Georgia.

63.  John Britton Boney.  “John (Pamor) Palmer Sr. (1715 - 1785).”  Wiki Tree website, 20 July 2018; last updated 27 July 2022.

Hezekiah Maham’s Background

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
Robert F. W. Allston told readers in 1846 that Hezekiah Maham grew rice with a golden panicle on the Santee river in 1785. [1]  He did not give any evidence, and may have gotten his information from Joshua John Ward.  Ward was both Allston’s friend and the grandson of Maham’s sister. [2]

Earlier, in 1823, the South Carolina Agricultural Society appointed a committee to study the value of importing seeds.  It cited the Carolina Gold brought by Henry Laurens as a positive example. [3]  Laurens was a slave trader who purchased the Colleton family plantation in 1772. [4]  He spent the American Revolution as a diplomat in Europe, sometimes as a prisoner of war.  Richard Porcher notes he certainly would have been able to acquire a new strain of rice while he was abroad, but his ledgers provide no evidence that he did so. [5]

On the other hand, Maham’s plantation records do show he sold a barrel of rice to his neighbor, Thomas Cordes, in 1785. [6]  He probably did not specify the type because, then, rice was either good or bad (red).

Of course, the Huguenot aristocrat was the preferable progenitor of the post-war economy in South Carolina than was Maham.  His great-grandfather, Nicholas Mahum, registered with the colony in 1682, [7] and died in 1709.  The state appointed a guardian for his orphaned children, [8] which probably means they were indentured as soon as they were of age. [9]

One of Mahum’s sons, possibly Nicholas, had a daughter Ann in 1719.  She married John Cahusac in 1740. [10].  He was a Huguenot, but not part of the original migration. [11]  His father, Bertrand Cahvac, [12] of Lévignac, France, was naturalized as a British citizen in 1707. [13]  This would have made it easier for him to migrate to South Carolina where John was born in 1712. [14]

Both Ann and John died in 1761.  One source says she was living in Charles Town; [15] another says he was in Craven District. [16]  Craven then was Huguenot area north of the capital. [17]  I found no mention of who raised their minor children.

One of their daughters was Sarah, who married Edward Jerman. [18]  Another, Mary Ann, wed John Palmer. [19]  Sarah’s granddaughters were the second and third wives of Palmer’s son, Thomas. [20]

Jerman and the Palmers were born in Saint James, Santee Parish, which was established in 1706. [21]  The first settlers were Huguenots who settled along lower part of the river.  Later immigrants settled the upriver frontier, which was separated as Saint Stephens Parish in 1754. [22]  Jerman may have been the grandson of George Jerman, who arrived as an indentured servant with John Godfrey in 1670. [23]

A little more is known about the Palmers.  Their immigrant ancestor was Joseph Pamor. [24] Like Maham, the Pamor name is not traditional.  Both may have been French names that were changed when Huguenots fled to England and Ireland so long before that their immigrant ancestors were anglicized by the time they moved. [25]  Nothing more can be traced.  Louise Palmer Towles has tried to make some sense of the fragments of Pamor information that have survived, but admits John, the one who changed the spelling, but not the pronunciation, is the first to leave a solid documentary trail. [26]

Ann Maham Cahusac’s brother Nicholas may have had the son named Nicholas who was the father of Hezekiah.  He married Anne Guerín when he was 19. [27]  Marie and Mathurin Guerin arrived before 1700. [28]

Hezekiah married again in 1766 when he was 26 years old.  Mary Palmer was the daughter of Thomas Palmer. [29]  His father was Jonathan Palmer who married in 1692 on Saint Helena Island at the southern end of the state. [30]  Agnes Leland Baldwin could not decide if the John Palmer who was a gentleman and woolen draper was the same man as the Palmer who arrived on the Loyal Jamaica in 1692.  The first came with a well-to-do family unit. [31]  The second was a seaman on a ship that had been a privateer before being purchased in Jamaica and sent to Charles Town where it was grounded and treated like a pirate vessel. [32]

John was allowed to settle in South Carolina after Joseph Palmer and John Guppel vouched for him. [33]  Guppel was a Huguenot cabinet maker [34] who came from Languedoc.  Palmer probably was the immigrant Pamor.

The reason for dwelling on the diverse heritage of Maham family in-laws is that standard histories of South Carolina mention the early immigrants.  However, once the colony becomes establish, they tend to focus on the cultural and political activities in Charles Town.  Areas like Saint Stephen’s parish are eclipsed by settlements on the Piedmont.  All that remains are memoirs of early settlers.

Samuel DuBose was six years old [35] when Maham died, but his family had been in Saint Stephen’s Parish since his great-grandfather moved there. [36]  In his memoir of the area, he recalled events that occurred in the area during the Revolution were:

“too unimportant to have found a place in history; but we are near Eutaw and Quinby; we are on the highway that led from Charleston to nearly all the scenes where great deeds were performed; the armies of both friend and foe camped near us, and marched near us, and the people who lived in those days had countless incidents to relate, all of which possessed a local or an individual interest, and I cannot but regret that their memory has perished.  We are in the midst of sacred territory; about us armies were encamped, houses were burned, men imprisoned and brutally murdered; but as these were merely incidents to more stirring and important events, they have escaped the notice of the historian, and we now tread the ground without a thought of the scenes that were enacted upon it.” [37]

Joseph Johnson’s father was a blacksmith who pushed for separation from the United Kingdom in Charles Town. [38]  During the siege of 1780, William served in the artillery under Thomas Heyward, Jr. [39]  When the city fell, he was taken captive and sent to Saint Augustine. [40]  Joseph was a toddler during the war, but heard details “from the lips of our parents and friends.” [41]  He too regretted that “historians of the American Revolution all lived on or near the sea coast—many of the sturdy sons of the forest were therefore unknown to them.” [42]

What little we know about Maham comes from the writings of DuBose and Johnson.

End Notes
1.  Carolina Gold rice is discussed in the post for 6 November 2022.
2.  Ward is discussed in the post for 6 August 2023.

3.  Thomas Pickney, John D. Legare, Elias Horry, Nathaniel Heyward, and Charles E. Rowland.  “Report of the Committee [. . .] Importing Foreign Seeds, Plants and Implements of Husbandry,” 25 July 1823.  The American Farmer 5(24)187–188:5 September 1823.

4.  “Mepkin Plantation – Moncks Corner – Berkeley County.”  South Carolina Plantations website.  Its source is John Beaufain Irving.  A Day on Cooper River.  Charleston, South Carolina: A. E. Miller, 1842.  83 in 2010 reprint by Kessinger Publishing of Whitefish, Montana.  Laurens career as a slave trader is discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.  John Colleton was an original proprietor of the colony.  His youngest son, James Colleton, owned Mepkin.  John is discussed in the posts for 17 April 2022, 26 June 2022, and 3 July 2022.  James is discussed in the posts for 11 September 2022.

5.  Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., and William Robert Judd.  The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice.  Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014.  23-24.

6.  H. Maham.  Ledger, 1765–1794.  44.  Cited by Thomas R. Wheaton, Amy Friedlander, and Patrick H. Garrow.  “Yaughan and Curriboo Plantations: Studies in Afro-American Archaeology.”  Report for National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office, April 1983.  301.

7.  Agnes Leland Baldwin.  First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670–1700.  Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1985.  152.

8.  A. S. Salley.  “Abstracts from the Records of the Court of Ordinary of the Province of South Carolina, 1700–1710.”  The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 13(1):56-63:January 1912.  62.

9.  George Rogers noted church wardens apprenticed orphans in the parish of Prince Frederick Williams in the 1750s and 1760s. [43]

10.  John Britton Boney.  “Ann Stall (Maham) Cahusac (1719 - 1761).”  Wiki Tree website, 21 July 2008; last updated 4 January 2022.

11.  The surname is not reported by Baldwin as existing before 1700 in South Carolina.
12.  “John Cahusac (1712 - 1761).  Ancestry website.

13.  William A. Shaw.  Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland 1701 — 1800.  Manchester, UK: Sherratt and Hughes, 1923, for Huguenot Society of London.  60.

14.  There’s another entry on Ancestry for “John Cahusac (1720-1760) which seems to make some assumptions that he was son of Bertrand Cahusac of Tarn, France.

15.  Boney, Ann Maham Cahusac.
16.  Both Cahusac entries mention Craven District.
17.  “Craven County, South Carolina.”  Wikipedia website.
18.  Jackie.  “Edward Jerman / Sarah Cahusac (F3615).”  Singleton Family website.

19.  Louise Palmer Towles.  A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.  1-2.

20.  Towles.  19.

21.  Matthew A. Lockhart.  “St. James Santee Parish.”  South Carolina Encyclopedia website, 1 August 2016; last updated 25 August 2022.

22.  Matthew A. Lockhart.  “St. Stephen’s Parish.”  South Carolina Encyclopedia website, 1 August 2016; last updated 25 August 2022.  The changing names of districts makes it difficult to know if people moved or just their political residences changed.

23.  A. S. Salley, Jr.  Warrants for Land in South Carolina.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, volume 1, 1910.  Reprinted as A. S. Salley, Jr., and R. Nicholas Olsberg.  Warrants for Land in South Carolina, 1672-1711.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.  97.  Edward’s father was Ralph. [44]  I found nothing about Ralph’s parentage or George’s family on the web.

24.  Towles.  1.

25.  Typical of the confusion is the House of Names website, which thinks Maham is MacMahon, and that the name appeared in County Clare.

26.  Towles.  1.  The comment on pronunciation was made by  John Britton Boney.  “John (Pamor) Palmer Sr. (1715 - 1785).”  Wiki Tree website, 20 July 2018; last updated 27 July 2022.

27.  “Hezekiah Maham.”  Ancestry website.
28.  Baldwin.  109.  There also were Guerris and Guerrians.
29.  “Catherine Farwell.”  Ancestry website.
30.  “Jonathan Palmer.”  Roots Web website.
31.  Baldwin.  177.
32.  “British Ketch ‘Portsmouth’ (1665).”  Three Decks website.

33.  Edward McCrady.  The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government, 1670-1719.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897.  261.
 
34.  Luke Beckerdite.  “Religion, Artistry, and Cultural Identity: The Huguenot Experience in South Carolina, 1680–1725.”  Chipstone website.  His original name was Jean Guibal.

35.  Darlene.  “Samuel DuBose Jr.”  Find a Grave website, 21 April 2007.

36.  “Isaac DuBose, II.”  Geni website, 6 August 2022.  Isaac settled at Milford, which was one property over from that of Maham.

37.  Samuel Dubose.  “Reminiscences of St. Stephen's Parish, Craven County and Notices of Her Old Homesteads.”  35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina.  Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas.  New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887.  62-63.

38.  Joseph Johnson.  Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South.  Charleston, South Carolina: Walker and James, 1851.  30.

39.  Johnson.  64.  Patrick O’Kelley identifies Heyward’s company. [45]
40.  Johnson.  32.
41.  Johnson.  vi.
42.  Johnson. v.

43.  George C. Rogers.  The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1970; reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society.  71.

44.  Jackie.

45.  Patrick O’Kelley.  Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas.  Volume 2, 1780.  Blue House Tavern Press, 2004.  2:41.