Topic: Early Versions - Performers
What little history of African Americans who settled in Pamlico County, North Carolina, can be gleamed from genealogies and notes on early burials suggests those who moved to the county to work after the Civil War came from nearby communities or from coastal ones a bit farther north like Hyde County.
That’s consistent with the general migration premise that people don’t marry or move far from home, unless there’s a strong reason like the push of Jim Crow or the pull of jobs in Northern cities during and after World War I.
What’s unknown is the origins of the more migratory workers who came and went with railroad construction, logging camps, and saw mills. They left no kin, and only some would have left a trace in the Census for 1910. Then, since they left no descendants, [1] no one has looked for them, and Pamlico County is hardly the candidate for a major review of the demographic data by an ambitious graduate student.
Minnie Lee’s logging songs suggest non-local sources, but not transmission links. One she "heard in a logging camp" probably originated on the popular stage. The six-line verse described a man who asked another for a loan and was told his friend had no money because he’d lent it to others. The three-line chorus began "if I had it you could get it." [2]
The verse was heard from African Americans in Lowndes County, Alabama, around 1915 by A. H. Williamson. [3] The key line in the chorus was used in work songs heard by Howard Odum around Tupelo, Mississippi, [4] in 1905 and 1906. [5] He heard the phrase "If I had it you could git it, Baby mine" in one, [6] and "if I make it/you shall have it" [7] in another "free labor gang song."
The one Lee called "A Woodman’s Song" was actually the ubiquitous "Frog Went a Courting." [8] The last verse was described as "an intruder from the body of floating bird and animal jingles." [9] Its lines
"Jay bird died with the whoopingcough.
’Long come de bird with his tail bobbed off." [10]
appeared in another of her songs as:
"Jay bird died with the whoopingcough.
Black bird died with the colic;
’Long came a toad-frog with his tail bobbed off
And that broke up the frolic." [11]
The jaybird line was introduced in 1838 in "Jim Along Josey." Black-face artist Ned Harper sang it in a New York show, [12] then published sheet music in 1840. [13] The song entered popular tradition, [14] including in children’s summer camps, [15] and became almost as well known as "Frog."
The colic/frolic end rhyme was heard by Eber Perrow from "country whites" in Mississippi in 1908 [16] and in Pickens County, Alabama, from "a white man imitating a ‘Negro song’" by Ray Browne. [17] The rhyme with the phrase "end of the frolic" was reported from African Americans living in Marion County, South Carolina, by Robert Bass. [18]
In 1931, Bass noted:
"About twenty-five years ago Negro men from this section frequently went to Georgia to work in the turpentine woods, or to Virginia to work in the coal mines, or followed railroad construction camps and lumber camps all over this state." [19]
The historian also noted that during the Depression men were going, instead, to "large industrial centers like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, returning after a few years to live with their parents and families. This contact with other laborers teaches them more songs which they introduce into their home communities, varying them as they please." [20]
This comment suggested the presence of songs in Lee’s repertoire from Mississippi and Alabama did not mean men from those states worked in North Carolina. More likely, a series of overlapping economic spheres existed so men from the Deep South might meet men from someplace like Florida, who in turn might teach songs to friends who then went to Georgia where the process was repeated until someone from Pamlico County went south or met someone coming north.
End Notes
1. None appeared in the African-American genealogies compiled by Ray Credle [21] and Bill Smith. [22] Before 1920, they only mentioned Pamlico, Craven, and Hyde counties. Whether this was a class distinction — stable families didn’t mix with transients — or if the people who remained, who often were illiterate, simply lost touch with individuals who left is unknown.
Mark Wetherington found evidence of such bias among whites in Georgia who feared "life in company camps—marked as it was by violence, gambling, and drinking—would erode traditional values." He quoted letters received by a commissary clerk from a sister and a girl friend warning him associating with the impure. [23]
2. Minnie Lee. "Logging Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:556–557.
3. A. H. Williamson manuscript. Reprinted by Newman I. White. American Negro Folk Songs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928. 309.
4. Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum’s Folklore Odyssey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. 9.
5. Rupert B. Vance. "Odum, Howard Washington." NC Pedia website. 1991.
6. "Baby Mine." 385 in Howard W. Odum. "Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes (Concluded)." The Journal of American Folklore 24:351–396:1911.
7. "O Lawd, Minnie." 91–92 in Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. Negro Workday Songs. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 91.
8. Minnie Lee. "Woodman’s Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:161.
9. Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson. Headnote to Lee, "Woodman’s Song." Brown 3:161.
10. Lee, "Woodman’s Song."
11. Minnie Lee. "Jay Bird Died with the Whoopingcough." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:201.
12. Edward Le Roy Rice. Monarchs of Minstrelsy. New York City: Kenny Publishing Company 1911. 24. The play was The Free Nigger of New York.
13. Edward Harper and John N. Smith. "Jim Along Josey." New York: Firth and Hall, 1840. Available on Connecticut College website. The original line was: "A Bullfrog died wid de hooping cough."
14. White [24] found it was reprinted in the Negro Singer’s Own Book in 1846 [25] and in a Christy Minstrels songbook the next year. [26]
15. A version with patterned gestures was discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
16. Dr. Herrington manuscript. 1909. Reprinted by as "The Jaybird Died." 133 in E. C. Perrow. "Songs and Rhymes from the South." The Journal of American Folklore 26:123–173:1915.
17. "Jaybird Died With the Whooping Cough." 45 in Ray B. Browne. The Alabama Folk Lyric. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1979.
18. Robert Duncan Bass. "Negro Songs from the Pedee Country." The Journal of American Folklore 44:418–436:1931. 425. He also noted African Americans in Marion County, where he graduated from high school, [27] did not speak Gullah.
19. Bass. 418. Labor recruiters for West Virginia coal mines were mentioned in the post for 4 August 2019.
20. Bass. 419.
21. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website.
22. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. Smith was mentioned in the posts for 8 December 2019 and 24 May 2020.
23. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 131–132.
24. White. 242–243.
25. The Negro Singer’s Own Book. Philadelphia: Turner and Fisher, 1846.
26. Christy’s Nigga Songster. New York: T. W. Strong, 1847.
27. W. Eric Emerson. "Bass, Robert Duncan." South Carolina Encyclopedia website. 2 August 2016.
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Sunday, June 7, 2020
Pamlico County Industrial Logging
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Levi Branson’s survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina, which was discussed in the post for 31 May 2020, was conducted during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893. The state agriculture department did another in 1900, a few years after the national economy revived. [1] Two changes had occurred, beyond the usual ones in small businesses.
In 1896, Arthur Midyett made barrels; in 1900 there were four barrel makers. One consequence of rail and steamer lines was the shipping time between Pamlico Sound and New York had dropped dramatically. Local farmers were able to grow produce for urban markets that required shipping containers.
The more important change was the appearance of Blades Lumber Company in Oriental. James Blades had begun, like the men in Pamlico County, with a general store. In 1877, he, his uncle, and brother bought grist and saw mills. Next, they acquired timber land. [2]
Once involved in the lumber industry, Blades made the transition to the next level of organization. In 1879 he traveled through the South looking for likely locations, and settled on Bath, North Carolina, where he bought timber land and leased a mill site. [3]
After he exhausted that timber, [4] Blades leased a mill south of New Bern at Cherry Point, and bought timber land to the east in 1886. Two years later, he moved his headquarters to Elizabeth City, [5] mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
By 1890, Blades had seven saw mills in the New Bern area, [6] and the city had become the center of North Carolina’s lumber trade. [7]
During the panic of 1893, Blades reincorporated, [8] while James Bryan evicted African Americans living on the waterfront in James City, with the aid of the state militia. [9] Bryan forced the others to sign three-year leases that impoverished the farmers. [10] He then rented waterfront lots to Blades and others. [11]
In 1903, Blades moved his headquarters to New Bern, and three years later sold the business to John L. Roper. [12] In the interim, Pamlico County’s economy expanded. In 1904, it had two barrel manufacturers, one box company, one shingles mill, eight small independent saw mills, and a cannery. [13] Blades had been joined by the Bayboro Land and Lumber Company of Wilmington, North Carolina. [14]
Bryan’s father and uncle had been lawyers who specialized in collecting debts. [15] In 1850, his father owned real estate valued at $8,000 [16] and 13 slaves, but declared no agricultural or industrial products to census takers. [17] That suggests he mainly had domestic servants, and perhaps rented slaves out to others.
Bryan spent the Civil War on the staffs of several generals and North Carolina’s Confederate governor. [18] After he returned to civilian life in 1865, he became involved with a sawmill between New Bern and Vanceboro, but during the depression following the Panic of 1873, Eileen Parris said, he decided he could earn more with less risk by leasing the mill to others. [19]
He joined the board of directors of the state-owned Atlantic and North Carolina railroad in 1881. During his tenure as president from1899 to 1904, he fired the African-American employees. [20]
The Norfolk and Southern, mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020, was the main rival for New Bern’s rail traffic through its shipping line. In 1901, Bryan began promoting an alternative line across the Pamlico peninsula to link New Bern with an Atlantic terminal, [21] and thus bypass the Norfolk.
Construction was slow, and financing problematic. When it finally reached Alliance in 1906, the Norfolk bought it and built a branch line down to Oriental. [22] It purchased Roper’s lumber company the same year. [23]
Railroad 17 is the Atlantic Coast Line to Weldon.
Railroad 135 is the Norfolk Southern north to Elizabeth City and west to Raleigh.
It didn’t take long for industrial logging to clear the timber. Roper’s Oriental mill burned in 1912. No repairs were made after a 1913 hurricane destroyed the town’s wharf and the harbor improvements [24] made by the federal government in 1879. [25]
At least some of the men who worked for Blades, and later Roper, were local. In 1890, Alonza Dixon went from Vanceboro to New Bern to work as a sawyer for Blades. Once he had the skills he worked for other mills in New Bern and Dover, North Carolina. [26]
Local African Americans must also have found jobs in the logging camps and mills. Charles Lorenzo Credle moved from Hyde County to Pamlico County where he was a day laborer in 1900. In 1910, he was "a wood cutter in the woods." In 1920, he was a farmer, and in 1930 a farm laborer. [27]
Family cemeteries began appearing the year Norfolk became active in Pamlico County. Burials were made in Oriental in 1906 [28] and 1908, [29] in Bayboro in 1910, [30] in Stonewall in 1911, [31] in Grantsboro in 1912, [32] and in Vandemere in 1914. [33]
Except for Oriental, these were all in areas with arable land. The land to the east of the pocosin, which lay north and west of Oriental, was below the escarpment mentioned in the post for 19 January 2020. The soil was too thin for farming. At best it supported potatoes, which first were introduced in 1889. [34]
The existence of surviving burials indicates some African-American men were able to amass enough hard currency to acquire clear titles. Others, Black and white, were less fortunate. They could only begin with rented land. In 1916, Anthony Avery signed a contract with Lupton Company to grow potatoes with seed and fertilizer provided by the company, in return for half the proceeds. After the potatoes were packed in barrels provided by Lupton and taken to the rail station, Samuel Ferebee seized the lot to cover the rent Avery owed him for the land. [35]
The local labor pool, even after Bryan’s evictions, probably wasn’t enough to support the demands of Blades in New Bern. Part of the labor force, including its most skilled men, may have been migratory, coming for a few years from some other lumber town, then moving on before they were captured by the census.
In 1904, two mills, Blades and Munger and Bennett, paid the bond for nine African Americans arrested in New Bern, because they "were needed as operatives at the mills." The cost was set at $2,400. [36] In September 2019, that would have been $69,184.18. [37] One has to assume the men were skilled laborers to be worth that much money.
The judge was Bryan’s first cousin, [38] Henry Ravenscroft Bryan. [39] When the case was heard, the state didn’t send a representative for the prosecution. Since representatives from the lumber companies said they would pay the charges, only skeletal information was provided, certainly not enough to explain why twenty men would have attacked a white watchman with an axe and iron pipe, and not been prosecuted.
Information on Pamlico County’s labor force is even scarcer than New Bern. The distribution of churches suggested the commercial center at Oriental attracted AME Zion Methodists, perhaps from James City, while the agricultural area to the north was settled by Missionary Baptists, probably from Hyde County.
Red = Missionary Baptist
Black = AME Zion
Blue = Disciples of Christ
All that’s known for sure is the population increased by 23.9% between 1900 and 1910, when the logging camps and saw mills were busy, and fell by 9.1% before 1920, when they had reduced operations. The population returned to its pre-logging levels when it increased by 13% between 1880 and 1890, 12.6% between 1890 and 1900, and 12.6% between 1900 and 1920. [40]
Roper closed all its operations in 1921. [41] The Oriental mill was sold to M. J. Connolly, who had worked for Oriental Lumber [42] before it closed in 1920. [43] He said he would "continue to handle the output of several small mills." [44] Roper’s timber land eventually was acquired by Weyerhaeuser. [45]
Map
1. Selection from "North Carolina." Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas. New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948. 78.
2. Distribution of churches in Pamlico County. Base map from United States Census. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ruhrfisch on 4 July 2007.
End Notes
Cemetery information is from Find a Grave website.
1. North Carolina. Commissioner of Agriculture. Report for 1900. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1901. 430–431.
2. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Blades, James Bishop." NC Pedia website. 1979.
3. Carraway, Blades.
4. Louis G. May. "The Story of Beaufort County’s Lumber Industry." 329–352 in Washington and the Pamlico. Edited by Ursula Fogleman Loy and Pauline Marion Worthy. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1976. 332.
5. Carraway, Blades.
6. Alan D. Watson. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern: Tyron Palace Commission, 1987. 524.
7. Wikipedia. "New Bern."
8. Vina Hutchinson Farmer. New Bern. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. 110.
9. Joe A. Mobley. James City. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1981. 81. James City and the eviction were mentioned in post for 15 March 2020.
10. Mobley, James City. 84.
11. Mobley, James City. 85.
12. Carraway, Blades.
13. "Miscellaneous Mills." North Carolina State Board of Agriculture. The Bulletin 26:9–35:8 August 1905. 27.
14. Item in "Business Pointers." The New York Lumber Trade Journal 36:27:15 February 1904.
15. L. Eileen Parris. "Bryan Family Papers, 1704-1940." University of North Carolina, Wilson Library website. August 1991.
16. On 13 September 2019, that real estate was worth $263,136.41. [46]
17. United States Census. 1850. Abstracted by R. Allen Humphrey. 2001.
18. Clement Anselm Evans. Confederate Military History. Atlanta: Confederate Publishing Company, 1899. 407–409. 408. He was on the staff of Lawrence Branch from August 1861 until he was killed 17 September 1862, and then on the staff of his successor, James B. Lane. After the surrender, he joined the staff of Zebulon Vance. Vanceboro was named for him years later.
19. Parris.
20. Parris.
21. Parris.
22. Joe A. Mobley. Pamlico County. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1991. 79.
23. May. 346.
24. Mobley, Pamlico. 80.
25. Watson. 530. The government worked on the Neuse and Trent rivers.
26. "Alonza S. Dixon." The [Kinston, North Carolina] Free Press, 1906 Industrial issue. Uploaded to US Gen Web website as "Lenoir County, NC - Industrial Issue - 1906" by Allen Barwick.
27. J.D. Larimore. "Charles Lorenzo Credle." Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
28. The earliest burial in the Harper Family Cemetery was Laura C. Harper Sanders. Her husband was born in Hyde County. [47]
29. The earliest burial in the Perkins Cemetery was Edward Ocie Hudson.
30. The earliest burial in the McKinley Dudley Family Cemetery was Ellen N. Davis Dudley. She was born in Lenoir County. [48] In 1880, her husband was a farm hand. In 1900 he was a farmer and their son was working in a barrel factory. [49]
31. The earliest burial in the Stonewall Cemetery was Harriett McCallison Dunbar. Her husband was born in Tyrrell County, [50] joined the Union army in New Bern in 1863, and was granted land in Bayboro for his military service. [51]
32. The earliest burial in the Keystown Cemetery was John Keys. His father was from Edenton in Chowan County. [52] W. A. Keys was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
33. The earliest burial in the Mesic Community Memorial Cemetery was Alonzo Harrell Credle, infant son of Charles Lorenzo Credle and Pauline Kenyon. [53]
34. John T. Miller and Arthur E. Taylor. United States Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. Soil Survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, August 1937. 5. In Michigan, lumber companies also sold off cutover pine land for farms; most could only grow potatoes on the thin soil, and many failed at that. [54]
35. North Carolina. "Upton v. Ferebee" 1 October 1919. Case Text website. The name was given as L. J. Upton Co. I could find no trace of Uptons in Pamlico County, but Oriental Lumber Company acquired its land from E. W. Lupton. [55] This was the same Ferebee who was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020 as the agent for Pamlico Lumber in Stonewell. Joshua Dean’s foreclosures were mentioned in the post for 24 May 2020.
36. "Nine Negroes Appear Before Judge Bryan on Charge of Riot and Assault." New Berne Weekly Journal. 5 April 1904. 1. Uploaded to the web by bwspruill on 9 April 2015. The headline said nine; twenty names appeared in the arrest warrant. I have no idea if this event was unusual or typical. The person who posted the news story may have been more interested in the identity of one of the men than in the implications of the incident for understanding race relations in the city at the time.
37. Alioth Finance. 13 September 2019.
38. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Bryan, Henry Ravenscroft." NC Pedia website. 1979.
39. The newspaper simply said Judge Bryan. Henry Ravenscroft Bryan was the judge for New Bern in 1904. [56]
40. United States Census. Reprinted by Wikipedia. "Pamlico County, North Carolina."
41. May. 346.
42. "New Carolina Operation." The Southern Lumberman 104:45:31 December 1921. Someone named Michael J. Connelly, not Connolly, was living in New Bern in 1940. He had been born about 1886 in Massachusetts. [57]
43. Item. The Beaufort [North Carolina] News. 15 July 1920. 1.
44. Southern Lumberman.
45. Jack Temple Kirby. Poquosin. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 209.
46. "Inflation Calculator" provided online by Alioth Finance of Dehradun, Uttarakhand in India with data valid for 13 September 2019.
47. David A. French. "William M. Sanders." Find a Grave website. 8 February 2018.
48. J.D. Larimore. "Ellen N. Davis Dudley." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
49. J.D. Larimore. "Daniel Dudley, Sr." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
50. Ray Credle. "Robert Dunbar." Find a Grave website. 18 December 2013.
51. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website. "Robert Dunbar" page.
52. Sandi Danielle. "John Keys." Find a Grave website. 4 August 2017.
Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
54. "Agriculture: Early Beginnings." Michigan State University. Department of Geography website.
55. North Carolina. General Assembly. "An Act To Incorporate the Town of Oriental in Pamlico County." 1899.
56. New Bern, N. C. Directory 1904-1905. Richmond, Virginia: Hill Directory Company, 1904.
57. "Michael J Connelly in the 1940 Census." Ancestry website.
Levi Branson’s survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina, which was discussed in the post for 31 May 2020, was conducted during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893. The state agriculture department did another in 1900, a few years after the national economy revived. [1] Two changes had occurred, beyond the usual ones in small businesses.
In 1896, Arthur Midyett made barrels; in 1900 there were four barrel makers. One consequence of rail and steamer lines was the shipping time between Pamlico Sound and New York had dropped dramatically. Local farmers were able to grow produce for urban markets that required shipping containers.
The more important change was the appearance of Blades Lumber Company in Oriental. James Blades had begun, like the men in Pamlico County, with a general store. In 1877, he, his uncle, and brother bought grist and saw mills. Next, they acquired timber land. [2]
Once involved in the lumber industry, Blades made the transition to the next level of organization. In 1879 he traveled through the South looking for likely locations, and settled on Bath, North Carolina, where he bought timber land and leased a mill site. [3]
After he exhausted that timber, [4] Blades leased a mill south of New Bern at Cherry Point, and bought timber land to the east in 1886. Two years later, he moved his headquarters to Elizabeth City, [5] mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
By 1890, Blades had seven saw mills in the New Bern area, [6] and the city had become the center of North Carolina’s lumber trade. [7]
During the panic of 1893, Blades reincorporated, [8] while James Bryan evicted African Americans living on the waterfront in James City, with the aid of the state militia. [9] Bryan forced the others to sign three-year leases that impoverished the farmers. [10] He then rented waterfront lots to Blades and others. [11]
In 1903, Blades moved his headquarters to New Bern, and three years later sold the business to John L. Roper. [12] In the interim, Pamlico County’s economy expanded. In 1904, it had two barrel manufacturers, one box company, one shingles mill, eight small independent saw mills, and a cannery. [13] Blades had been joined by the Bayboro Land and Lumber Company of Wilmington, North Carolina. [14]
Bryan’s father and uncle had been lawyers who specialized in collecting debts. [15] In 1850, his father owned real estate valued at $8,000 [16] and 13 slaves, but declared no agricultural or industrial products to census takers. [17] That suggests he mainly had domestic servants, and perhaps rented slaves out to others.
Bryan spent the Civil War on the staffs of several generals and North Carolina’s Confederate governor. [18] After he returned to civilian life in 1865, he became involved with a sawmill between New Bern and Vanceboro, but during the depression following the Panic of 1873, Eileen Parris said, he decided he could earn more with less risk by leasing the mill to others. [19]
He joined the board of directors of the state-owned Atlantic and North Carolina railroad in 1881. During his tenure as president from1899 to 1904, he fired the African-American employees. [20]
The Norfolk and Southern, mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020, was the main rival for New Bern’s rail traffic through its shipping line. In 1901, Bryan began promoting an alternative line across the Pamlico peninsula to link New Bern with an Atlantic terminal, [21] and thus bypass the Norfolk.
Construction was slow, and financing problematic. When it finally reached Alliance in 1906, the Norfolk bought it and built a branch line down to Oriental. [22] It purchased Roper’s lumber company the same year. [23]
Railroad 135 is the Norfolk Southern north to Elizabeth City and west to Raleigh.
It didn’t take long for industrial logging to clear the timber. Roper’s Oriental mill burned in 1912. No repairs were made after a 1913 hurricane destroyed the town’s wharf and the harbor improvements [24] made by the federal government in 1879. [25]
At least some of the men who worked for Blades, and later Roper, were local. In 1890, Alonza Dixon went from Vanceboro to New Bern to work as a sawyer for Blades. Once he had the skills he worked for other mills in New Bern and Dover, North Carolina. [26]
Local African Americans must also have found jobs in the logging camps and mills. Charles Lorenzo Credle moved from Hyde County to Pamlico County where he was a day laborer in 1900. In 1910, he was "a wood cutter in the woods." In 1920, he was a farmer, and in 1930 a farm laborer. [27]
Family cemeteries began appearing the year Norfolk became active in Pamlico County. Burials were made in Oriental in 1906 [28] and 1908, [29] in Bayboro in 1910, [30] in Stonewall in 1911, [31] in Grantsboro in 1912, [32] and in Vandemere in 1914. [33]
Except for Oriental, these were all in areas with arable land. The land to the east of the pocosin, which lay north and west of Oriental, was below the escarpment mentioned in the post for 19 January 2020. The soil was too thin for farming. At best it supported potatoes, which first were introduced in 1889. [34]
The existence of surviving burials indicates some African-American men were able to amass enough hard currency to acquire clear titles. Others, Black and white, were less fortunate. They could only begin with rented land. In 1916, Anthony Avery signed a contract with Lupton Company to grow potatoes with seed and fertilizer provided by the company, in return for half the proceeds. After the potatoes were packed in barrels provided by Lupton and taken to the rail station, Samuel Ferebee seized the lot to cover the rent Avery owed him for the land. [35]
The local labor pool, even after Bryan’s evictions, probably wasn’t enough to support the demands of Blades in New Bern. Part of the labor force, including its most skilled men, may have been migratory, coming for a few years from some other lumber town, then moving on before they were captured by the census.
In 1904, two mills, Blades and Munger and Bennett, paid the bond for nine African Americans arrested in New Bern, because they "were needed as operatives at the mills." The cost was set at $2,400. [36] In September 2019, that would have been $69,184.18. [37] One has to assume the men were skilled laborers to be worth that much money.
The judge was Bryan’s first cousin, [38] Henry Ravenscroft Bryan. [39] When the case was heard, the state didn’t send a representative for the prosecution. Since representatives from the lumber companies said they would pay the charges, only skeletal information was provided, certainly not enough to explain why twenty men would have attacked a white watchman with an axe and iron pipe, and not been prosecuted.
Information on Pamlico County’s labor force is even scarcer than New Bern. The distribution of churches suggested the commercial center at Oriental attracted AME Zion Methodists, perhaps from James City, while the agricultural area to the north was settled by Missionary Baptists, probably from Hyde County.
Black = AME Zion
Blue = Disciples of Christ
All that’s known for sure is the population increased by 23.9% between 1900 and 1910, when the logging camps and saw mills were busy, and fell by 9.1% before 1920, when they had reduced operations. The population returned to its pre-logging levels when it increased by 13% between 1880 and 1890, 12.6% between 1890 and 1900, and 12.6% between 1900 and 1920. [40]
Roper closed all its operations in 1921. [41] The Oriental mill was sold to M. J. Connolly, who had worked for Oriental Lumber [42] before it closed in 1920. [43] He said he would "continue to handle the output of several small mills." [44] Roper’s timber land eventually was acquired by Weyerhaeuser. [45]
Map
1. Selection from "North Carolina." Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas. New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948. 78.
2. Distribution of churches in Pamlico County. Base map from United States Census. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ruhrfisch on 4 July 2007.
End Notes
Cemetery information is from Find a Grave website.
1. North Carolina. Commissioner of Agriculture. Report for 1900. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1901. 430–431.
2. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Blades, James Bishop." NC Pedia website. 1979.
3. Carraway, Blades.
4. Louis G. May. "The Story of Beaufort County’s Lumber Industry." 329–352 in Washington and the Pamlico. Edited by Ursula Fogleman Loy and Pauline Marion Worthy. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1976. 332.
5. Carraway, Blades.
6. Alan D. Watson. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern: Tyron Palace Commission, 1987. 524.
7. Wikipedia. "New Bern."
8. Vina Hutchinson Farmer. New Bern. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. 110.
9. Joe A. Mobley. James City. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1981. 81. James City and the eviction were mentioned in post for 15 March 2020.
10. Mobley, James City. 84.
11. Mobley, James City. 85.
12. Carraway, Blades.
13. "Miscellaneous Mills." North Carolina State Board of Agriculture. The Bulletin 26:9–35:8 August 1905. 27.
14. Item in "Business Pointers." The New York Lumber Trade Journal 36:27:15 February 1904.
15. L. Eileen Parris. "Bryan Family Papers, 1704-1940." University of North Carolina, Wilson Library website. August 1991.
16. On 13 September 2019, that real estate was worth $263,136.41. [46]
17. United States Census. 1850. Abstracted by R. Allen Humphrey. 2001.
18. Clement Anselm Evans. Confederate Military History. Atlanta: Confederate Publishing Company, 1899. 407–409. 408. He was on the staff of Lawrence Branch from August 1861 until he was killed 17 September 1862, and then on the staff of his successor, James B. Lane. After the surrender, he joined the staff of Zebulon Vance. Vanceboro was named for him years later.
19. Parris.
20. Parris.
21. Parris.
22. Joe A. Mobley. Pamlico County. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1991. 79.
23. May. 346.
24. Mobley, Pamlico. 80.
25. Watson. 530. The government worked on the Neuse and Trent rivers.
26. "Alonza S. Dixon." The [Kinston, North Carolina] Free Press, 1906 Industrial issue. Uploaded to US Gen Web website as "Lenoir County, NC - Industrial Issue - 1906" by Allen Barwick.
27. J.D. Larimore. "Charles Lorenzo Credle." Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
28. The earliest burial in the Harper Family Cemetery was Laura C. Harper Sanders. Her husband was born in Hyde County. [47]
29. The earliest burial in the Perkins Cemetery was Edward Ocie Hudson.
30. The earliest burial in the McKinley Dudley Family Cemetery was Ellen N. Davis Dudley. She was born in Lenoir County. [48] In 1880, her husband was a farm hand. In 1900 he was a farmer and their son was working in a barrel factory. [49]
31. The earliest burial in the Stonewall Cemetery was Harriett McCallison Dunbar. Her husband was born in Tyrrell County, [50] joined the Union army in New Bern in 1863, and was granted land in Bayboro for his military service. [51]
32. The earliest burial in the Keystown Cemetery was John Keys. His father was from Edenton in Chowan County. [52] W. A. Keys was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
33. The earliest burial in the Mesic Community Memorial Cemetery was Alonzo Harrell Credle, infant son of Charles Lorenzo Credle and Pauline Kenyon. [53]
34. John T. Miller and Arthur E. Taylor. United States Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. Soil Survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, August 1937. 5. In Michigan, lumber companies also sold off cutover pine land for farms; most could only grow potatoes on the thin soil, and many failed at that. [54]
35. North Carolina. "Upton v. Ferebee" 1 October 1919. Case Text website. The name was given as L. J. Upton Co. I could find no trace of Uptons in Pamlico County, but Oriental Lumber Company acquired its land from E. W. Lupton. [55] This was the same Ferebee who was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020 as the agent for Pamlico Lumber in Stonewell. Joshua Dean’s foreclosures were mentioned in the post for 24 May 2020.
36. "Nine Negroes Appear Before Judge Bryan on Charge of Riot and Assault." New Berne Weekly Journal. 5 April 1904. 1. Uploaded to the web by bwspruill on 9 April 2015. The headline said nine; twenty names appeared in the arrest warrant. I have no idea if this event was unusual or typical. The person who posted the news story may have been more interested in the identity of one of the men than in the implications of the incident for understanding race relations in the city at the time.
37. Alioth Finance. 13 September 2019.
38. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Bryan, Henry Ravenscroft." NC Pedia website. 1979.
39. The newspaper simply said Judge Bryan. Henry Ravenscroft Bryan was the judge for New Bern in 1904. [56]
40. United States Census. Reprinted by Wikipedia. "Pamlico County, North Carolina."
41. May. 346.
42. "New Carolina Operation." The Southern Lumberman 104:45:31 December 1921. Someone named Michael J. Connelly, not Connolly, was living in New Bern in 1940. He had been born about 1886 in Massachusetts. [57]
43. Item. The Beaufort [North Carolina] News. 15 July 1920. 1.
44. Southern Lumberman.
45. Jack Temple Kirby. Poquosin. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 209.
46. "Inflation Calculator" provided online by Alioth Finance of Dehradun, Uttarakhand in India with data valid for 13 September 2019.
47. David A. French. "William M. Sanders." Find a Grave website. 8 February 2018.
48. J.D. Larimore. "Ellen N. Davis Dudley." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
49. J.D. Larimore. "Daniel Dudley, Sr." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
50. Ray Credle. "Robert Dunbar." Find a Grave website. 18 December 2013.
51. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website. "Robert Dunbar" page.
52. Sandi Danielle. "John Keys." Find a Grave website. 4 August 2017.
Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
54. "Agriculture: Early Beginnings." Michigan State University. Department of Geography website.
55. North Carolina. General Assembly. "An Act To Incorporate the Town of Oriental in Pamlico County." 1899.
56. New Bern, N. C. Directory 1904-1905. Richmond, Virginia: Hill Directory Company, 1904.
57. "Michael J Connelly in the 1940 Census." Ancestry website.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Pamlico County 1896
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
In 1896, two years before Minnie Lee was born, Levi Branson published a business directory that included Pamlico County, North Carolina. African Americans represented one third of the population. [1] The percentage would be only fractionally higher in 1930, 33.9% versus 33.3%. [2]
The largest general population center was the county seat. Bayboro had 500 people, two saw mills, [3] Greenhill Missionary Baptist Church, and Saint Mark’s AME Zion Church. The first African-American congregation was mentioned in the post for 24 May 2020. The second began in 1892 as "a band of fifteen" who "went from home to home to conduct prayer services." [4]
The other towns with sizeable populations were Stonewall (250), Vandemere (150), Oriental (150), Grantsboro (100), and Pamlico (75). Stonewall had one lumber company [5] and one African-American Missionary Baptist church. [6] Vandemere had Delon Abbot’s sawmill [7] and two Baptist churches. [8] Joshua Dean’s Pamlico had two saw mills, [9] but no Black churches.
Oriental had two AME Zion chapels, [10] a sawmill, [11] and one lumber company. [12] There also were sawmills on two creeks that flowed down to Oriental, the Smith [13] and Kershaw. [14] In addition, W. A. Keys pastored Black Methodist congregations in Smith’s Creek and Goose Creek. He later headed a segregated high school in Beaufort County. [15]
In the northwestern part of the county, nearer New Bern, Grantsboro had an African-American Baptist church. [16] The nearest sawmills were in Alliance to the east [17] and Reelsboro to the west. [18] Each settlement had 50 people.
Arapahoe also had 50 people, two saw mills, [19] and an African-American Christian church. [20] When it organized in 1869, the North Carolina Conference of Disciples of Christ told members to establish a separate conference. [21] The congregation began with prayer meetings, then used a bush tent. [22] The earliest burials were for Warren Randall (1917), [23] and Philman Randolph Randall (1924), [24] suggesting its cemetery might have begun as a family burial plot.
The rest of the settlements in Pamlico County had 25 residents, usually with at least one general store.
Five of thirteen mill owners were born in Pamlico or Craven counties, [25] and another two were from North Carolina. [26] All but one of the local men also ran general stores. [27] One had a grist mill, [28] and one a cotton gin. [29] Four had enough land to be called farmers, [30] and four were buried in family cemeteries. [31] One was interred in a Disciples of Christ burial ground. [32]
They would have been general purpose merchants who probably took logs in payment for services or credit. Once they turned the logs into timber, they probably acted as middlemen selling the output to brokers.
Lumber brokers were in Stonewall, Pamlico, and Oriental. Pamlico Lumber of Stonewall was associated with Calvin Conard, [33] a Quaker lumber merchant in Philadelphia. [34] The company had been incorporated in Beaufort County in 1886. That business disintegrated after Conard’s Washington, North Carolina, partner died in 1891. [35] In 1896, Conard’s local agent in Stonewall was Samuel Ferebee. [36] Ferebee was running a general store there in 1888. [37]
Woodward and Sons of Pamlico were Richmond, Virginia, lumber merchants. The elder partner, John Pitt Lee Woodward, had moved from Virginia to Covington, Kentucky, were he opened a hardware business before the Civil War. [38] His lumber yards were an extension of the business: they provided all types of wood for interior finishing, lathe, bed slats, and wagon wood. [39] His son, Warner Minor Woodward, enlisted as a private in the Confederate army, was captured, and escaped to Toronto, where the family joined him. [40]
George Kugler [41] became active in Washington in 1881. He came from New Jersey through Maryland. He opened a second mill on Smith’s Creek, upstream from Oriental, before 1885 that was run by his sons. It employed 15 men to produce pine shingles. [42]
Oriental Lumber was controlled by people in Norfolk. [43] It probably bought or leased land from Lou or Robert Midyett. Lou was a seaman from the south side of Albemarle Sound who found the estuary in 1872. [44] A railroad connecting Elizabeth City, on the northern side of Albemarle Sound, with Norfolk had been chartered in 1870. [45] Midyett no doubt had heard speculation about Elizabeth City then becoming linked by steamer with New Bern. He convinced his Uncle Robert to buy land on the peninsula. [46]
A cost-effective direct land connection between Virginia and the north with timber lands in North Carolina was interrupted by the patterned areas on the above map that signified large swamps and sea-carved depressions filled with water and floating peat mats. [47] The Light Ground pocosin north of Oriental and east of Arapahoe was 5,930-acres. [48]
The economy crashed in 1873. That delayed the railroad’s completion until 1881. The next year, it signed a contract with the Old Dominion Steamship Company "to provide passenger and freight service between Elizabeth City and New Bern and Washington," North Carolina. The year after, 1883, the name was changed to Norfolk Southern. [49] Lou was granted a post office for Oriental in 1886. [50]
In 1896, Robert’s son, [51] Arthur, was in business with Paul Delamar, [52] and some Midyett was running a general store. [53] Delamars were Methodists descended from Huguenots. [54] The immigrant Midyett was from Normandy. The son who settled in the Albemarle Sound area, Lou’ ancestor, was a ship’s carpenter. [55] At some point they too became Methodists. [56]
Map
Selection from United States Department of the Interior. Geological Survey. "North Carolina." 1957; updated 1972.
End Notes
Unless otherwise noted, the source for information on demographics, saw mills, general stores, grist mills, cotton gins, and farmers for 1896, was Levi Branson. Branson’s North Carolina Business Directory. Raleigh: Levi Branson, 1896 edition. Craven County manufacturers, 206–207; Pamlico County, 473–476. He only listed churches with "ministers resident" and generalized denominations.
Find a Grave was the source for cemeteries and the primary source for biographical data.
1. Branson’s total population number in 1896 was the same as the 1890 census.
2. John T. Miller and Arthur E. Taylor. United States Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. Soil Survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, August 1937. 3.
3. A. B. Campen was Albin Brinson Campen. [57] W. H. Sawyer was William Hugh Sawyer. [58]
4. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website. "Churches" page.
5. Pamlico Lumber.
6. Mount Sinai with F. Long the minster. The African-American congregation was mentioned in the post for 2 February 2020.
7. Abbott & Co. He was discussed in the post for 24 May 2020.
8. Jerusalem with S. Foscue and Maja’s Chapel with A. F. Bryan. They could not be identified.
9. Dean Lumber Company and Woodward and Son. Joshua Dean was discussed in the post for 24 May 2020.
10. Pierce’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was organized in 1869. [59] Holt’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Oriental was organized in 1890. [60] They were not mentioned by Branson.
11. Midyett and Delamar.
12. Oriental Lumber Company.
13. Kughle & Bro.
14. R. D. Hodges could not be identified. Kershaw was the other settlement with 50 people.
15. J. Henry Highsmith. High Schools of North Carolina. Raleigh: State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1927. 54. Pantego High School.
16. Mt. Maria with J. C. Blackman. They could not be identified.
17. Sam Campen. Samuel Campen was Albin Brinson Campen’s brother. [61]
18. J. B. Reel was John Benton Reel. [62]
19. Vendrick and Company probably was owned by James V. Vendrick. [63] Hardison and Bowden most likely were Robert B. Hardison and Bob Bowden. They were credited with naming Araphoe, [64] and Hardison was the first post master. [65] Hardison married Susan Bowden, who had joined the Disciples of Christ before becoming a Methodist. [66] Beyond that I know nothing more about the men.
20. Diane Gardner. "Taking a Step Back in Time." [New Bern] Sun Journal website. 15 March 2019. Small’s Chapel was not mentioned by Branson. After the consolidations of the middle twentieth century, it became a United Church of Christ congregation. It began as Disciples of Christ, and probably took that denomination’s Christian Church designation early.
21. Disciples of Christ of North Carolina. Proceedings. 1969. Ridgeway, North Carolina: Thos. M. Hughes, 1869. 3. The conference "agreed, that the colored brethren be advised to form a separate Conference, and that [names of elders] be appointed to confer with and assist them in their organization."
22. Gardner.
23. J.D. Larimore. "Warren Randall." Find a Grave website. 26 November 2016.
24. Doug Williams. "Philman Randolph Randall." Find a Grave website. 27 November 2016. Updated by J.D. Larimore.
25. The Campens, Delamar, Hardsion and Bowden, Reel, Vendrick.
26. Sawyer, Midyett.
27. The Campens, Hardison and Bowden, Hodges, Midyett, Reel, and Sawyer kept general stores. Vendrick did not.
28. Samuel Campen. Abbott also had a corn mill.
29. Reel.
30. Samuel Campen, Hardison and Bowden, Midyette, Sawyer.
31. The Campens, Reel, Sawyer.
32. Vendrick.
33. Louis G. May. "The Story of Beaufort County’s Lumber Industry." 329–352 in Washington and the Pamlico. Edited by Ursula Fogleman Loy and Pauline Marion Worthy. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1976. 332.
34. Jayne Ellsworth Larion. "Walter Moss Conard." Find a Grave website. 2 August 2007.
35. May. 332.
36. Mike Weeks identified "Samuel Williams Ferebee" on Find a Grave website. 18 February 2010.
37. George I. Nowitzky. "Bayboro and Stonewall: The Twins of Pamlico." 184-185 in Norfolk; the Marine Metropolis of Virginia. Norfolk: George I. Nowitsky, 1888. 185.
38. Sue Rainey. "Drawn to Nature: John Douglas Woodward’s Career in Art." In Shaping the Landscape Image, 1865 - 1910: John Douglas Woodward. University of Virginia, Bayly Art Museum exhibition catalog. 1997.
39. Advertisement for Woodward and Son. Opposite 2:296 in New Bern, N. C. Directory 1907–8. Richmond, Virginia: Hill Directory Company, 1907. The company then consisted of Minor and his son, Steward Minor Woodward.
40. Rainey. Woodward was with John Hunt Morgan on his foray into Ohio. Morgan escaped from the Ohio Penitentiary and returned South. [67]
41. Branson spelled the name Kughle.
42. May. 334.
43. "Oriental Lumber Co vs Blades Lumber Co." The Southeastern Reporter 50:270:16 March 1905.
44. Lewis Midyett. Obituary. "Death Comes to the Founder of Oriental, NC." Republished by J.D. Larimore on "Lewis Brason "Lou" Midyette." Find a Grave website. 9 March 2014.
45. J. D. Lewis. "North Carolina Railroads - Elizabeth City & Norfolk Railroad." Carolana website. 2013.
46. Midyett obituary.
47. William S. Powell. "Carolina Bays." NC Pedia website. 2006.
48. Roy L. Ingram and Lee J. Otte. "Peat Deposits of Light Ground Pocosin, Pamlico County, North Carolina." North Carolina Energy Institute and United States Department of Energy, June 1980. The Light Ground pocosin can be seen more clearly on the map posted with the entry for 24 May 2020. It may have been larger in 1896.
49. Lewis.
50. Wikipedia. "Oriental, North Carolina."
51. J.D. Larimore. "Arthur Francis Midyette." Find a Grave website. 9 March 2014.
52. Arthur married Lula Dean Delamar, daughter of Paul Jones Delamar, in 1897. [68] The 1900 Census reported Paul was a sawmill manager. [69]
53. Midyett and Company.
54. J.D. Larimore. "Paul C. Delamar." Find a Grave website. 9 November 2015.
55. loganealogy. "Matthew Midyett- Our North Carolina Pioneer." Loganalogy website. 27 December 2017.
56. Larimore, Lewis Midyett.
57. 4losthistory. "Albin Brinson Campen." Find a Grave website. 21 June 2013.
58. J.D. Larimore. "William Hugh Sawyer." Find a Grave website. 20 August 2014.
59. Annette Hill Jones, Gladys Ford Sodoma, and Salona Jensen McCotter. The History of Vandemere United Methodist Church. Baltimore: Otter Bay Books, 2010. 9. This church was mentioned in the post for 24 May 2020.
60. Jones. 9.
61. J.D. Larimore. "Samuel Campen." Find a Grave website. 8 May 2014.
62. "John Benton Reel." Find a Grave website. 25 November 2014.
63. J.D. Larimore. "Marion Butler Vendrick." Find a Grave website. 28 November 2014.
64. Wikipedia. "Arapahoe, North Carolina."
65. J. D. Lewis. "All Known NC Post Offices - 1785 to 1971." Carolana website. 2007. He spelled the name Hardinson.
66. "Hardison." Obituary for Susan Bowden Hardison. North Carolina Christian Advocate. 8 May 1913. 12. Posted by simpsonjean. 27 October 2018.
67. Wikipedia. "John Hunt Morgan."
68. J.D. Larimore, Arthur Midyette.
69. Find a Grave website. 7 November 2014.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Pamlico County Logging
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Pamlico County was a small, perhaps minor, part of the Southern lumber trade after the Civil War. Before the American Revolution, New Bern and Craven County, which then included the Pamlico peninsula, was the largest supplier of naval stores to the United Kingdom. [1]
The North Carolina colony provided 70% of the tar exports, and 50% of the turpentine. [2] In 1894, William Ashe noted remains of kilns used to burn long-leaf pine boughs to produce tar still were "seen as one rides along the road" on the peninsula. [3]
In 1850, Craven County had 36 turpentine producers, 10 distilleries that produced spirits of turpentine, 4 shingle makers, 3 lumbermen, and 1 saw mill. [4] Cornelius Dixon owned 1,112 unimproved acres near Olympia [5] that produced turpentine, lumber, and shingles. [6]
In addition to the farms and plantations along Upper Broad and Goose creeks, which were oriented toward New Bern, a second economic center developed in the county at the mouth of the Bay River. In 1840, Stonewall, then called Jackson, had a saw mill, grist mill, boat works, and Methodist church that may have looked along the Pamlico river for supplies and markets. [7]
As soon as Union troops took control of New Bern during the Civil War, Pamlico peninsula slaves absconded. [8] Whites with connections fled; trains evacuated New Bern as Union navy ships approached the city. [9] Henrietta Sparrow, the largest peninsula landowner, [10] moved to High Point. [11] Most of the rest remained on their farms. [12]
Soldiers from both the Union and Confederate sides raided peninsular farms for food and livestock. [13] Presumably, the land lay fallow and forests recovered. Long leaf pines were dying in the 1840s, [14] and probably were replaced by loblolly. [15]
Sparrow died at the end of the war, and left the China Grove plantation to her grandson, William Snell. [16] When her husband died in 1827, he was producing naval stores with 31 slaves on 3,000 acres [17] at the mouth of Dawson Creek near Janeiro. [18] In 1850, she still had the land, but the census did not mention any industry. [19] In 1860, she had 28 slaves in five cabins. [20]
Amos Wade bought the property at auction in 1869. [21] The same year the first A.M.E Zion church was founded in Oriental, less than four miles to the east. [22] Since A.M.E Zion was the principal African-American denomination in New Bern at this time, [23] one can assume at least some members had come from there. Whether they had stayed in the area during the war, returned from New Bern, or had gone to New Bern from elsewhere during the conflict is not known.
Wade probably did not want the house, which was all that was documented. [24] He was a turpentine and lumber dealer in New Bern. [25] In 1877, he began experimenting with growing tobacco at some unmentioned locations. [26] By the time Arapahoe got a name and post office in 1886, the sandy ridge was being used for tobacco. [27]
The renewal of farming followed from lumbering. After loggers cleared land, men still needed to dig ditches to drain the wetlands that supported the forests. Everything required labor. Some was local. Bill Smith found George, [28] Bias, [29] and Simon McCotter, [30] were farm laborers in 1880, probably somewhere around Broad Creek. [31] They all were born in Pamlico County and were descendants of Tamer, mentioned in the post for 2 February 2020.
Other farm workers in 1880 had come from other areas. In the Bayboro area, Warren Kenyon had moved from Duplin County, [32] while George Midgett [33] and William Gibbs had migrated from Hyde County to the northeastern part of the county. [34] Gibbs thirteen-year-old son Willie also was listed as a farm laborer by the Census. [35.]
While local residents were recovering from the Civil War, Northerners began moving South to exploit the lumber. Many were from woodlands and had served in the military where they had seen pine lands they recognized as having commercial potential.
Delon Abbot enlisted as a hospital steward in Maine’s Ninth Volunteer Infantry. [36] It spent the early years of the war around Hilton Head, South Carolina, then moved with the Army of the Potomac. In the final phase of the war, the unit took Wilmington, North Carolina, then marched to Raleigh. The men returned to Maine where they were paid. [37]
Abbott returned South where he bought 3,000 acres on the northern side of the Bay River. In 1874, he incorporated the town of Vandemere. By 1882, he had built wharves and a saw mill. [38] In 1896, he was running a combination saw and corn mill run by steam. [39] When he died in 1917, his body was returned to Maine. [40]
Farmers in that area may have been growing cotton. Three steam-powered gins existed in Pamlico County in 1877. [41] In 1896, there was one in Vandemere, two in Stonewall, two in Merritt, and one in Bayboro. Other parts of the county only had two. [42] By 1912, Abbott was growing cotton. [43]
I found no mention of Abbott’s labor force. [44] Vandemere itself became a center for local, white farmers. As mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019, John Robert McCotter gave Methodists and Disciples of Christ land for churches in 1885. [45] The nearest African-American church was in the county seat of Bayboro, 7.5 miles west. The first known burial in the Greenhill Missionary Baptist church was made in 1887. [46]
While Abbott was introducing the culture of New England, small, mill towns to Pamlico County, another entrepreneur relied on the older business of leases, mortgages, and rents to support his lumber business. Why he chose the Pamlico peninsula is unknown. Someone wrote to "Joshua Dean II" in Taunton, Massachusetts, from the Gaston Hotel in New Bern on June 25, 1865. [47] Since Robert E. Lee had surrendered in April of that year, the correspondent may have been a government agent or a friend looking for opportunities.
The forty-four year old man [48] arrived from Fall River, Massachusetts in 1867 to set up a saw and planing mill in Stonewall. He claimed to have had an operation in Fall River, [49] which was a textile mill town. Even before the industry expanded after the war, every usable site on the Quequechan River was utilized. [50] Increased real estate costs may have driven Dean out.
Dean opened a second facility at Broad Creek in 1872, [51] which was the next waterway south of Bay River. The Panic of 1873 apparently reminded him running a business was risky when times were bad, but rents were a constant source of income. In 1874, he transferred the mill to George Dail. [52]
The work must have been seasonal. In December of 1877, the mill was running two saws. In spring, "steamers and sailing craft come to freight away the lumber accumulated through the winter." [53] The next year, Dail Brothers was employing thirty men. [54]
George’s elder brother, Elias Exum Dail, [55] seems to have been the principal in the company. He too operated through leases rather than ownership. In 1892, he was in court over timber rights he had been told came when he took control of land on a mortgage. [56] The next year he was in court over a lease for lumber that the court ruled in fact had been a mortgage. [57]
While the Dails were not from the immediate area, they were part of the regional culture. George’s father, Elbert moved from Greenville, North Carolina, to a farm near Vanceboro [58] where he was active in the Free Will Baptist church. [59] Elias was on the board of directors of the denomination’s school near Greenville in 1896. [60]
Dean established a post office in 1878 that changed the village name to Pamlico. [61] In 1882, he had control again of the Broad Creek mill when it burned, along with a cotton gin and grist mill. [62] Two years later, Joseph McCotter’s descendants moved from the old plantation house to Pamlico. [63] The Dean Lumber Company was running a saw and planning mill there in 1896. [64]
Meantime, Dean was selling land on mortgages he controlled. He foreclosed on one in 1891, [65] and several in 1903. [66] The buyers could not be identified, although at least one may have been an African American. [67] Dean finally incorporated Pamlico in 1913. [68] He disappeared from the internet record after that.
Map
Selection from United States Department of the Interior. Geological Survey. "North Carolina." Compiled in 1957; revised in 1972.
End Notes
1. Alan D. Watson. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern, North Carolina: Tyron Palace Commission, 1987. 128.
2. Robert B. Outland III. Tapping the Pines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 32.
3. W. W. Ashe. "The Long Leaf Pine and Its Struggle for Existence." Elisha Mitchell Society Journal 11:1–16;1894. 5.
4. United States Census. Schedule 5, Products of Industry in the County of Craven State of North Carolina. 1850. Abstracted by R. Allen Humphrey. 2001.
5. C Trudel. "Cornelius Dixon." Find a Grave website. 21 April 2012. The county had 215,680 acres of land; [69] so he owned more than .5%.
6. Joe A. Mobley. Pamlico County. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1991. 31.
7. Mobley. 29.
8. This was discussed in the post for 6 February 2019.
9. Watson. 379.
10. Mobley. 41.
11. Lisa. "Pitt County Families." Roots Web website. 20 May 2009. Entry on "John Nelson."
12. Mobley. 41.
13. Mobley. 41. The raid on Hyde County, mentioned in the post for 2 February 2020, brought back corn and bacon to feed troops in New Bern. [70] While they were in the county they fed themselves on local chickens and hams cooked in commandeered iron pots. [71]
14. Watson. 268. His source was the Newbernian. 22 December 1847. There had been a drought in 1845, [72] which probably weakened trees already stressed by being milked for turpentine. [73] Then the winter of 1847-1848 was mild, so beetles did not die. They then killed the trees, leaving pine barrens. [74]
15. Ashe. 10–11.
16. Lisa.
17. Mobley. 17. 3,000 was a bit more than 1.5% of the future county’s land.
18. Lisa.
19. United States Census, 1850.
20. North Carolina. State Department of Archives and History. "China Grove." National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form. 8 June 1972.
21. North Carolina, China Grove.
22. Annette Hill Jones, Gladys Ford Sodoma, and Salona Jensen McCotter. The History of Vandemere United Methodist Church. Baltimore: Otter Bay Books, 2010. 9.
23. The AME Zion church in New Bern was discussed in the post for 15 March 2020.
24. North Carolina, China Grove. "There were no fewer than fifteen successive owners from that year until 1934." A descendant said Sparrow only gave 200 acres which was 50 acres less than the amount that was being cultivated in 1850. [75] It was not clear if the deed only mentioned the cultivated land, or if the unimproved land had been sold. Wade only would have been interested in the timber on the latter.
25. United States Census, 1850.
26. Watson. 521.
27. Charles Crossfield Ware. Pamlico Profile. New Bern: Owen G. Dunn Company, 1961. 11.
28. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. "Descendants of Tamer McCotter." Page 39. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 2.
29. Smith. "Descendants of Tamer McCotter." Page 38. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 2.
30. Smith. "Descendants of Tamer McCotter." Page 39. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 2.
31. They were in Township 2, which included what are now Arapahoe, Oriental, and Pamlico.
32. Smith. "Descendants of Maricay Midyett." Page 12. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 3.
33. Smith. "Descendants of Maricay Midyett." Page 12. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 3. Midgett’s sister married Kenyon.
34. Smith. "Descendants of Anson Gibbs." Page 29. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 4.
35. Smith. "Descendants of Anson Gibbs." Page 29. His source was the United States Census for 1880 for Township 4.
36. Dale & Patti. "Dr Delon H. Abbott." Find a Grave website. 19 November 2009.
37. Wikipedia. "9th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment."
38. Mobley. 74.
39. Levi Branson. Branson’s North Carolina Business Directory. Raleigh: Levi Branson, 1896 edition. 14.
40. Dale.
41. Mobley. 68.
42. Branson. 474.
43. D. H. Abbott. Letter. Gas Review 5:74:January 1912.
44. Smith did not name anyone who worked in the saw mill. He did say "the men would string their logs together and float them across the river from ‘The lumber landing’ to the saw mill." He also said Rodger Smith and his wife, Mahalia Green, were living on Abbott’s farm in 1896. [76]
45. In 1916 Abbott sold land to the Missionary Baptist Church. [77] This was associated with Ulysis Cicero Holton, who was mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019 and was buried there in 1929. [78] The denomination descended from the Separate Baptists discussed in the post for 19 January 2020. Missionary Baptist usually refers to later evangelizing groups who split from the Primitive Baptists.
46. "Greenhill Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery." Find a Grave website.
47. Maurice M. Bursey. "New Bern Postal Service During The Civil War." North Carolina Postal Historian 35:3–15:Summer 2016. 14–15. The envelope apparently was saved for its stamp or postmark.
48. United States Census. 1910. Entry for Jashua Dean, Pamlico, North Carolina. Posted on Ancestry website. It said he was born in 1826, but gave no location.
49. Mobley. 48.
50. Wikipedia. "Fall River, Massachusetts."
51. Mobley. 48.
52. Mobley. 62.
53. Mobley. 62. His source was a Newbernian article.
54. Mobley. 74. Dail Brothers were selling yellow pine, which most likely was loblolly.
55. Anna Taylor. "Elias Exum Dail." Find a Grave website. 14 June 2015. George was born in 1856, which would have made him only nineteen-years-old in 1874. [79]
56. North Carolina. Supreme Court. "The Beaufort County Lumber Company v. Elias Dail." 1 September 1892. Cite Case Law website.
57. North Carolina. Supreme Court. "Brown v. Dail." 1895. Court Listener website.
58. Roland Howard, Sr. "Re: Dail’s in Pitt County, NC." Genealogy website. 6 August 2002.
59. T. F. Harrison and J. M. Barfield. History of the Free Will Baptists of North Carolina. Ayden, North Carolina: Free Will Baptist Press, 1898. 274.
60. Harrison. 427.
61. William S. Powell and Michael Hill. "Pamlico." North Carolina Gazetteer. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Reprinted by NC Pedia website. Dean was identified as Joseph P. Dean when he was the Pamlico postmaster from 1868 to 1872, but was Joshua Dean when he became postmaster again in 1878. [80]
62. Mobley. 74.
63. Linda Dail. "Descendants of Hezekiah McCotter." NC Gen website. Joseph was the brother of Burney, and his were the slaves mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019 who left for New Bern early in the Civil War. The plantation house burned soon after they left.
64. Branson. 14.
65. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 10 April 1891. 1. He was foreclosing on people with the last names Coolidge, Andrews, and Toppan. Apparently he and Mrs. Emmins Chapman held the mortgage.
66. "Mortgage Sale." The Bayboro [North Carolina] Sentinel. 20 April 1905. 4. "Deed from Joshua Dean and Mrs. Chapman to Derry Mann."
67. Mann’s mortgage was made 16 April 1903. On 20 April 1903, Derry Mann and Georgiana Willis were arrested for killing a newborn infant. They were identified as "colored people of Pamlico." [81]
68. North Carolina. "An Act To Incorporate the Town of Pamlico." 789 in Session Laws and Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly. 1913.
69. Wikipedia. "Pamlico County, North Carolina." The county had 567 square miles, with 337 square miles of land and 230 of water.
70. John A. Reed. Diary entry, 10 March 1863. History of the 101st PA Veteran Volunteer Infantry. Chicago: L. S. Dickey and Company, 1910. 24. "On the morning of the 12th instant Capt. Richardson, with 300 men and all available transportation, was sent out seven miles, to the farm of Judge Donald, for the purpose of bringing in a quantity of cotton, corn, and bacon."
71. Reed. 69.
72. James Lawrence Watkins. King Cotton. New York: J. L. Watkins and Sons, 1908. 59.
73. Oatland. 101.
74. Oatland. 105.
75. Lisa.
76. Smith. Page 6.
77. Jones. 23.
78. J.D. Larimore. "Ulysis Cicero Holton." Find a Grave website. 19 February 2015.
79. Kjell-Ottar Olsen. "Elbert M Dail." Geni website. 3 December 2014.
80. J. D. Lewis. "All Known NC Post Offices - 1785 to 1971." Carolana website. 2007.
81. Item. The [Kinston, North Carolina] Daily Free Press. 20 April 1903. 1.
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Southern Logging
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
"Come by Here" had to make two journeys before Minnie Lee could sing it. One was across the color line. As the posts for 22 March 2020 and 29 March 2020 indicated, whites attended some African-American religious events after the Civil War, although opportunities for musical interchange were hindered by the formal and informal enforcement of Jim Crow laws.
The bigger puzzle was how the song moved from coastal Georgia and South Carolina to Pamlico County in North Carolina. Minnie Lee left one clue. She told Julian Boyd one of her songs was "heard in a logging camp." [1] She called another "A Woodman’s Song." [2]
The post-Civil War lumber industry was fluid and mobile. Logging, saw, and planing mills were the major industrial employers of Blacks in the Southeast from 1880. William Jones said, 83,000 were working for such mills in 1910. Indeed, he said "before World War II, no other industry employed more African Americans." [3]
Social and occupational conditions varied by task and by type of employer. The first step was cutting trees and transporting logs to sawmills. By necessity, locations changed as timber in one area was depleted and another area opened. Almost always, these were temporary, all-male work camps. Their isolation from local farms and families varied by the location of woodland. They became more remote as lumber near settled areas was removed.
The unused parts of trees and resins from long-leaf pine were processed into naval stores. These camps could be permanent, and operated by families or by groups of men. Before the Civil War, almost all the available trees in Craven County, North Carolina, had been tapped, and some had been productive for sixty years. [4] However, since a tree’s productivity declined with use, commercial producers may have exploited an area for a few years, then cut the trees and moved on.
Sawmills and factories that manufactured items like blinds, shingles, doors, and crates [5] were more likely to be located in central locations near transportation to external markets, and supplied by rivers or by railroads. As such, they were permanent, and could hire either single or married men with families.
In the early years, farmers worked in logging camps and sawmills during the off-season, often to earn cash needed for taxes and other necessities. In Craven County, North Carolina, in 1910, John Jackson Ipock was a farmer and his son, John Perry Ipock, was a "laborer, logging wood." The elder Ipock died in 1918, [6] and in 1920 his son was a farmer. [7]
After the Civil War, demand for construction and interior wood increased in the North and Europe, while the timber supply in Maine and Pennsylvania declined. Corporations entered the Southern lumber industry. In Alabama and other areas, they deliberately destroyed small producers whose lumber was of variable quality and who occasionally flooded the market. [8] As mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019, Ella May’s father was forced into the logging camps after the railroad took over the lumber market in Sevier County, Tennessee.
The first major corporate logging operation in the South was that of William Dodge, discussed in the post for 3 February 2019. Because local whites would not work for it, the company recruited African Americans. When even they refused work in turpentine camps, the managers recruited labor from elsewhere. In 1879, 80% of the turpentine workers in Georgia were Black and 70% were born in North Carolina. [9]
National corporations treated logging as an industrial enterprise. Dodge transferred forty timber cutters from Pennsylvania operations they were closing because the men had the necessary experience with the newer types of equipment. Equally important, they looked on logging as a full-time job, not as pick-up labor to be done in the off season or when some cash was needed. [10]
Similarly, when the Greene Brothers opened a sawmill in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, in 1933, [11] they hired a superintendent and foreman who had worked for them in Alabama. [12] They also brought others because "there weren’t many people in North Carolina with experience in large mills." Their most talented workers in the swampy forests were Gullah-speakers. [13]
Living conditions for workers varied. Dodge’s logging camps were moved with the work, and were all-male. By 1889, its managers had turned to convicts as a more reliable, and probably cheaper labor source. [15] However, in the sawmill on Saint Simons Island, the company was able to use local laborers who owned or rented their own homes. [16]
The two occupational situations created different African-American communities. In Pamlico County, North Carolina, Bill Smith said his ancestors "worked on the area farms, clearing farm land digging drainage canals and in the lumber camps" for one simple reason. The African Americans "worked heard from sun up to sunset and saved what they could so that they could buy land and build their homes." [17]
Howard Odum, who taught at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, [18] believed the need to move to lumber camps meant the industry attracted men whose "loose morals and weak connections to family and community stemmed from a shared background of ‘broken homes’." [19]
This generalization overlooked the many ways workers maintained ties with their culture, if not their families. [20] In 1882, someone [21] organized a camp meeting in the Dodge headquarters town of Eastman, Georiga. Some 3,000 people arrived by excursion trains. [22] This festive occasion was like the ones in Craven County mentioned in the post for 15 March 2020.
Farming represented independence to Smith’s ancestors. For many others, unable to own their own land, it represented a continuation of slavery with constant supervision and long hours in cotton fields. It was one reason African-American men, mentioned in the post for 4 August 2019, were willing to move to West Virginia’s coal fields. Then, it was a reason they stayed in the mines rather than moving farther north to take factory jobs in Pittsburgh that allowed less freedom of movement. [23]
Mark Wetherington thought young men didn’t just work in turpentine camps for the money, which generally was higher than that offered for farm work. He wrote:
"There was also much more freedom and mobility in forest-products work than on the farm, and the turpentine camp allowed many blacks, still adjusting to their role as freedmen, to escape the constant supervision that had characterized plantation agriculture." [24]
The Greene brothers established a company village near Elizabethtown which provided housing and a general store. The costs were deducted from their pay. Adelle McDowell, who lived there after World War II, told an interviewer:
"You have to understand the way of life in Elizabethtown back then. Most all of the black men worked at the lumber mill, which was Greene Brothers. That was the only thing to do other than farming, and a lot of the local men would rather work in the sawmill than farm: Living in a tenant house, working in the fields sun up to sunset, they had had enough of that." [25]
End Notes
1. Minnie Lee. "If I Had It You Could Get It." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:556. This song is discussed in the post for 14 June 2020.
2. Minnie Lee. "A Woodman’s Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown. 3:161. . This song is discussed in the post for 14 June 2020.
3. William Powell Jones. The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 1.
4. W. W. Ashe. "The Long Leaf Pine and its Struggle for Existence." Elisha Mitchell Society Journal 11:1–16;1894. 9. Calculated from his 1894 statement: "in North Carolina most of the trees which now bear seed are boxed and have been in this condition for 50-100 years." Boxing was a step in withdrawing sap from a pine tree for turpentine.
5. The construction wood in Georgia was long-leaf pine. Shutters, and other items that could use smaller diameter trees often used loblolly pine, cypress, or gum. Both long leaf and loblolly were called yellow pine.
6. J.D. Larimore. "John Jackson Ipock." Find a Grave website. 13 September 2016. His parents were not listed, so it was not possible to know how he was connected to the other Ipocks in Craven and Pamlico counties.
7. J.D. Larimore. "John Perry Ipock, Sr." Find a Grave website. 13 September 2016.
8. Jones. 38.
9. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 119.
10. Wetherington. 130.
11. Date from "Alvin McLane ‘Mack’ Greene." Obituary. [Wilmington, North Carolina] Star-News website. 18 March 2004. He was the son of one of the founders, Alvin Hobby Greene. The brother was Cecil Wayne Greene. Elizabethtown was on the Cape Fear River that flowed to the deep-water port of Wilmington, North Carolina.
12. Jones. 40.
13. Jones. 41. Their concerns were injury and wasted materials.
14. Jones. 93. Alvin McLane Greene used the term Geechie, a synonym for Gullah.
15. Wetherington. 130.
16. This was discussed in the post for 3 February 2019.
17. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. Page 6. Smith’s family was mentioned in the post for 2 February 2020.
18. Rupert B. Vance. "Odum, Howard Washington." NC Pedia website. 1991.
19. Jones. 2–6; quotation from 2.
20. Jones noted Zora Neale Hurston looked at sawmill towns in Florida and found, instead of social dysfunction, "an alternative value system that she believed persisted only where African Americans were culturally isolated from whites." [26] He was discussing her book Mules and Men. [27]
21. Most accounts were concerned with a violent incident that occurred and did not mention the details of the camp meeting itself. The only one to say anything was David Hearn, and he only said it was "sponsored by an evangelical religious sect." [28]
22. Lucian Lamar Knight. "The Eastman Riot." 705–707 in Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends. Atlanta: The Byrd Printing Company, 1914. 2:706.
23. David Alan Corbin. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 41.
24. Wetherington. 119. His footnote was not available in the online edition.
25. David Cecelski. "Listening to History." The [Raleigh, North Carolina] News & Observer. 13 August 2000. Reprinted as "Adell Mcdowell: A Frightful Time" by NC Pedia website. She said most of the men in the company’s sixty houses had families.
26. Jones. 4.
27. Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.
28. David Allen Hearn. "Robert Donaldson, Joseph King, Ella Moore, Riddick Powell and Simon Quinn." 32–33 in Legal Executions in Georgia. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2016. 32.
"Come by Here" had to make two journeys before Minnie Lee could sing it. One was across the color line. As the posts for 22 March 2020 and 29 March 2020 indicated, whites attended some African-American religious events after the Civil War, although opportunities for musical interchange were hindered by the formal and informal enforcement of Jim Crow laws.
The bigger puzzle was how the song moved from coastal Georgia and South Carolina to Pamlico County in North Carolina. Minnie Lee left one clue. She told Julian Boyd one of her songs was "heard in a logging camp." [1] She called another "A Woodman’s Song." [2]
The post-Civil War lumber industry was fluid and mobile. Logging, saw, and planing mills were the major industrial employers of Blacks in the Southeast from 1880. William Jones said, 83,000 were working for such mills in 1910. Indeed, he said "before World War II, no other industry employed more African Americans." [3]
Social and occupational conditions varied by task and by type of employer. The first step was cutting trees and transporting logs to sawmills. By necessity, locations changed as timber in one area was depleted and another area opened. Almost always, these were temporary, all-male work camps. Their isolation from local farms and families varied by the location of woodland. They became more remote as lumber near settled areas was removed.
The unused parts of trees and resins from long-leaf pine were processed into naval stores. These camps could be permanent, and operated by families or by groups of men. Before the Civil War, almost all the available trees in Craven County, North Carolina, had been tapped, and some had been productive for sixty years. [4] However, since a tree’s productivity declined with use, commercial producers may have exploited an area for a few years, then cut the trees and moved on.
Sawmills and factories that manufactured items like blinds, shingles, doors, and crates [5] were more likely to be located in central locations near transportation to external markets, and supplied by rivers or by railroads. As such, they were permanent, and could hire either single or married men with families.
In the early years, farmers worked in logging camps and sawmills during the off-season, often to earn cash needed for taxes and other necessities. In Craven County, North Carolina, in 1910, John Jackson Ipock was a farmer and his son, John Perry Ipock, was a "laborer, logging wood." The elder Ipock died in 1918, [6] and in 1920 his son was a farmer. [7]
After the Civil War, demand for construction and interior wood increased in the North and Europe, while the timber supply in Maine and Pennsylvania declined. Corporations entered the Southern lumber industry. In Alabama and other areas, they deliberately destroyed small producers whose lumber was of variable quality and who occasionally flooded the market. [8] As mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019, Ella May’s father was forced into the logging camps after the railroad took over the lumber market in Sevier County, Tennessee.
The first major corporate logging operation in the South was that of William Dodge, discussed in the post for 3 February 2019. Because local whites would not work for it, the company recruited African Americans. When even they refused work in turpentine camps, the managers recruited labor from elsewhere. In 1879, 80% of the turpentine workers in Georgia were Black and 70% were born in North Carolina. [9]
National corporations treated logging as an industrial enterprise. Dodge transferred forty timber cutters from Pennsylvania operations they were closing because the men had the necessary experience with the newer types of equipment. Equally important, they looked on logging as a full-time job, not as pick-up labor to be done in the off season or when some cash was needed. [10]
Similarly, when the Greene Brothers opened a sawmill in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, in 1933, [11] they hired a superintendent and foreman who had worked for them in Alabama. [12] They also brought others because "there weren’t many people in North Carolina with experience in large mills." Their most talented workers in the swampy forests were Gullah-speakers. [13]
Living conditions for workers varied. Dodge’s logging camps were moved with the work, and were all-male. By 1889, its managers had turned to convicts as a more reliable, and probably cheaper labor source. [15] However, in the sawmill on Saint Simons Island, the company was able to use local laborers who owned or rented their own homes. [16]
The two occupational situations created different African-American communities. In Pamlico County, North Carolina, Bill Smith said his ancestors "worked on the area farms, clearing farm land digging drainage canals and in the lumber camps" for one simple reason. The African Americans "worked heard from sun up to sunset and saved what they could so that they could buy land and build their homes." [17]
Howard Odum, who taught at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, [18] believed the need to move to lumber camps meant the industry attracted men whose "loose morals and weak connections to family and community stemmed from a shared background of ‘broken homes’." [19]
This generalization overlooked the many ways workers maintained ties with their culture, if not their families. [20] In 1882, someone [21] organized a camp meeting in the Dodge headquarters town of Eastman, Georiga. Some 3,000 people arrived by excursion trains. [22] This festive occasion was like the ones in Craven County mentioned in the post for 15 March 2020.
Farming represented independence to Smith’s ancestors. For many others, unable to own their own land, it represented a continuation of slavery with constant supervision and long hours in cotton fields. It was one reason African-American men, mentioned in the post for 4 August 2019, were willing to move to West Virginia’s coal fields. Then, it was a reason they stayed in the mines rather than moving farther north to take factory jobs in Pittsburgh that allowed less freedom of movement. [23]
Mark Wetherington thought young men didn’t just work in turpentine camps for the money, which generally was higher than that offered for farm work. He wrote:
"There was also much more freedom and mobility in forest-products work than on the farm, and the turpentine camp allowed many blacks, still adjusting to their role as freedmen, to escape the constant supervision that had characterized plantation agriculture." [24]
The Greene brothers established a company village near Elizabethtown which provided housing and a general store. The costs were deducted from their pay. Adelle McDowell, who lived there after World War II, told an interviewer:
"You have to understand the way of life in Elizabethtown back then. Most all of the black men worked at the lumber mill, which was Greene Brothers. That was the only thing to do other than farming, and a lot of the local men would rather work in the sawmill than farm: Living in a tenant house, working in the fields sun up to sunset, they had had enough of that." [25]
End Notes
1. Minnie Lee. "If I Had It You Could Get It." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:556. This song is discussed in the post for 14 June 2020.
2. Minnie Lee. "A Woodman’s Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown. 3:161. . This song is discussed in the post for 14 June 2020.
3. William Powell Jones. The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 1.
4. W. W. Ashe. "The Long Leaf Pine and its Struggle for Existence." Elisha Mitchell Society Journal 11:1–16;1894. 9. Calculated from his 1894 statement: "in North Carolina most of the trees which now bear seed are boxed and have been in this condition for 50-100 years." Boxing was a step in withdrawing sap from a pine tree for turpentine.
5. The construction wood in Georgia was long-leaf pine. Shutters, and other items that could use smaller diameter trees often used loblolly pine, cypress, or gum. Both long leaf and loblolly were called yellow pine.
6. J.D. Larimore. "John Jackson Ipock." Find a Grave website. 13 September 2016. His parents were not listed, so it was not possible to know how he was connected to the other Ipocks in Craven and Pamlico counties.
7. J.D. Larimore. "John Perry Ipock, Sr." Find a Grave website. 13 September 2016.
8. Jones. 38.
9. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 119.
10. Wetherington. 130.
11. Date from "Alvin McLane ‘Mack’ Greene." Obituary. [Wilmington, North Carolina] Star-News website. 18 March 2004. He was the son of one of the founders, Alvin Hobby Greene. The brother was Cecil Wayne Greene. Elizabethtown was on the Cape Fear River that flowed to the deep-water port of Wilmington, North Carolina.
12. Jones. 40.
13. Jones. 41. Their concerns were injury and wasted materials.
14. Jones. 93. Alvin McLane Greene used the term Geechie, a synonym for Gullah.
15. Wetherington. 130.
16. This was discussed in the post for 3 February 2019.
17. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. Page 6. Smith’s family was mentioned in the post for 2 February 2020.
18. Rupert B. Vance. "Odum, Howard Washington." NC Pedia website. 1991.
19. Jones. 2–6; quotation from 2.
20. Jones noted Zora Neale Hurston looked at sawmill towns in Florida and found, instead of social dysfunction, "an alternative value system that she believed persisted only where African Americans were culturally isolated from whites." [26] He was discussing her book Mules and Men. [27]
21. Most accounts were concerned with a violent incident that occurred and did not mention the details of the camp meeting itself. The only one to say anything was David Hearn, and he only said it was "sponsored by an evangelical religious sect." [28]
22. Lucian Lamar Knight. "The Eastman Riot." 705–707 in Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends. Atlanta: The Byrd Printing Company, 1914. 2:706.
23. David Alan Corbin. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 41.
24. Wetherington. 119. His footnote was not available in the online edition.
25. David Cecelski. "Listening to History." The [Raleigh, North Carolina] News & Observer. 13 August 2000. Reprinted as "Adell Mcdowell: A Frightful Time" by NC Pedia website. She said most of the men in the company’s sixty houses had families.
26. Jones. 4.
27. Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.
28. David Allen Hearn. "Robert Donaldson, Joseph King, Ella Moore, Riddick Powell and Simon Quinn." 32–33 in Legal Executions in Georgia. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2016. 32.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Living Voices - Kumbaya
Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The ultimate form, if not the progenitor, of Easy Listening music was Muzak. The company began transmitting music over electric lines in the 1920s when radios were complicated technology. [1]
As the mass media improved, Muzak changed its focus to piping music into offices, stores, and elevators. It sold its 15-minute segments of instrumental music in the 1950s as tools that improved productivity. [2] While its repertoire was varied, the company regulated the tempos and the bands of high and low, loud and soft tones to create a soothing sound. [3]
When Muzak stripped popular songs of their lyrics, it was dependent on the melodies. [4] To create interest the arrangers often used unusual combinations of instruments that fit within the company’s guidelines. [5]
By the early 1960s, Muzak began having problems. Popular music no longer relied on melody, but had begun emphasizing rhythm. In addition, other companies began offering competing products for individuals, radio stations, and commercial buyers who wanted something like Muzak, but wanted to choose the songs themselves.
RCA created the Living Strings in 1959. [6] It led to Living Voices, who recorded Tommy Leonetti’s version of "Kumbaya" in 1969. Muzak had eliminated voices. The arranger, Bob Armstrong, only replaced the recitation with an electric guitar solo.
Like Muzak, Armstrong used variations in harmony and instrumentation to create a subtle arrangement that would not bore the listener, while not calling attention to themselves. He began, like Leonetti, with a drum. However his had an irregular beat pattern, while Leonetti’s was even.
With the "crying" verse, Armstrong added a piano or harpsichord that sounded a bit like a xylophone, and added trumpets in a higher key for the "praying" verse. After the guitar solo, the group used the same instrumentation for "hears You." On "singing," the harmony became more complex with a female descant. The final "kumbaya" was in a still higher key, while the last iteration used the drum, "piano," and humming.
The lyrics were not intended to be religious, as they were with Leonetti, but inspirational. It was described as a "song of brotherhood" on an album that featured "The Impossible Dream" and "You Gave Me a Mountain." It claimed listeners "no longer" were "satisfied to hear pretty melodies with meaningless words." [7]
It was the very opposite of Muzak. That company did not sell its recordings, and few of its play lists have been described. [8] I don’t know if it did its own version of "Kumbaya."
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: men and women
Vocal Director: Bob Armstrong
Instrumental Accompaniment: "piano," trumpets, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum
Credits
Traditional. P. D.
Arranged and conducted by Bob Armstrong
© 1969, RCA Records, New York
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: emphasis on second syllable of "kumbaya"
Verses: kumbaya, crying, praying, hears You, singing
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: 4-verse song, framed by kumbaya
Verse Repetition Pattern: "kumbaya" the first and last verse"
Ending: repeats "Oh, Lord, kumbaya" once
Unique Features: none
Influences: Tommy Leonetti
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: harmony, instrumentation and key combinations different on each iteration
Singing Style: one syllable to one note
Harmony: primarily parallel chords
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: instruments are subservient to the melody, whether sung or the guitar
Ending: hummed last iteration
Notes on Performance
Occasion: recording session
Location: RCA’s Studio B, New York City
Notes on Performers
The Living Voices were organized by Anita Kerr. [9] Her vocal quartet sang on many country music recordings that featured the Nashville Sound. She added four people to the Anita Kerr Singers for the Living Voices. She left Nashville in 1965, [10] and Bob Armstrong took over.
Armstrong was from Buffalo, where he met Jack Paar before World War II. Paar was working for a local radio station. [11] When Paar was hired to host The Tonight Show in 1957, he tapped Armstrong as his arranger and assistant music director. [12]
Paar left NBC in 1962, [13] and Armstrong was hired as an arranger by RCA, [14] which then was owned by NBC. [15] He was living in the Buffalo area when he died in 1994. [16]
Availability
Album: Living Voices. "Kumbaya." Impossible Dream. RCA Camden CAS-2322. 1969.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Muzak."
2. Wikipedia, Muzak.
3. Joseph Lanza. Elevator Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004 edition. 240. Much of the enforcement of the sound was done by the engineers after recordings were made.
4. Lanza. 236.
5. Lanza. 230–231.
6. Wikipedia. "Living Strings." It was conceived as "an answer to Stereo Fidelity’s ‘101 Strings’." [17]
7. Liner notes.
8. Ownership of Muzak has changed several times. Lanza interviewed arrangers who had worked for the company. A list of songs recorded by Muzak was beyond his scope.
9. "Camden Is Hallmark of Growing Low-Price Strength of Majors." Billboard. 24 August 1963. 16.
10. Wikipedia. "Anita Kerr." The last recording it listed was The Living Voices Sing the Music from the Motion Picture The Singing Nun. RCA Camden CAS-974. 1966.
11. Bob Armstrong. Obituary. The [New Philadelphia, Ohio] Times-Reporter. 29 April 1994. 5. Armstrong was the WBEN music director. [18] Paar was host of the morning show. [19]
12. Bob Armstrong. Obituary. Billboard. 14 May 1994. 92. José Melis was the music director.
13. Wikipedia. "Tonight Starring Jack Paar."
14. Bob Armstrong. Obituary. The Baltimore Sun. 28 April 1994.
15. Wikipedia. "NBC."
16. "Armstrong Autopsy Results Awaited." The Buffalo [New York] News. 29 April 1994. Armstrong died from injuries sustained when he was attacked by another patient in the Buffalo Veterans Hospital.
17. Billboard, Camden.
18. Billboard, Armstrong.
19. Wikipedia. "Jack Paar"
The ultimate form, if not the progenitor, of Easy Listening music was Muzak. The company began transmitting music over electric lines in the 1920s when radios were complicated technology. [1]
As the mass media improved, Muzak changed its focus to piping music into offices, stores, and elevators. It sold its 15-minute segments of instrumental music in the 1950s as tools that improved productivity. [2] While its repertoire was varied, the company regulated the tempos and the bands of high and low, loud and soft tones to create a soothing sound. [3]
When Muzak stripped popular songs of their lyrics, it was dependent on the melodies. [4] To create interest the arrangers often used unusual combinations of instruments that fit within the company’s guidelines. [5]
By the early 1960s, Muzak began having problems. Popular music no longer relied on melody, but had begun emphasizing rhythm. In addition, other companies began offering competing products for individuals, radio stations, and commercial buyers who wanted something like Muzak, but wanted to choose the songs themselves.
RCA created the Living Strings in 1959. [6] It led to Living Voices, who recorded Tommy Leonetti’s version of "Kumbaya" in 1969. Muzak had eliminated voices. The arranger, Bob Armstrong, only replaced the recitation with an electric guitar solo.
Like Muzak, Armstrong used variations in harmony and instrumentation to create a subtle arrangement that would not bore the listener, while not calling attention to themselves. He began, like Leonetti, with a drum. However his had an irregular beat pattern, while Leonetti’s was even.
With the "crying" verse, Armstrong added a piano or harpsichord that sounded a bit like a xylophone, and added trumpets in a higher key for the "praying" verse. After the guitar solo, the group used the same instrumentation for "hears You." On "singing," the harmony became more complex with a female descant. The final "kumbaya" was in a still higher key, while the last iteration used the drum, "piano," and humming.
The lyrics were not intended to be religious, as they were with Leonetti, but inspirational. It was described as a "song of brotherhood" on an album that featured "The Impossible Dream" and "You Gave Me a Mountain." It claimed listeners "no longer" were "satisfied to hear pretty melodies with meaningless words." [7]
It was the very opposite of Muzak. That company did not sell its recordings, and few of its play lists have been described. [8] I don’t know if it did its own version of "Kumbaya."
Vocal Group: men and women
Vocal Director: Bob Armstrong
Instrumental Accompaniment: "piano," trumpets, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum
Credits
Traditional. P. D.
Arranged and conducted by Bob Armstrong
© 1969, RCA Records, New York
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: emphasis on second syllable of "kumbaya"
Verses: kumbaya, crying, praying, hears You, singing
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: 4-verse song, framed by kumbaya
Verse Repetition Pattern: "kumbaya" the first and last verse"
Ending: repeats "Oh, Lord, kumbaya" once
Unique Features: none
Influences: Tommy Leonetti
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: harmony, instrumentation and key combinations different on each iteration
Singing Style: one syllable to one note
Harmony: primarily parallel chords
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: instruments are subservient to the melody, whether sung or the guitar
Ending: hummed last iteration
Notes on Performance
Occasion: recording session
Location: RCA’s Studio B, New York City
Notes on Performers
The Living Voices were organized by Anita Kerr. [9] Her vocal quartet sang on many country music recordings that featured the Nashville Sound. She added four people to the Anita Kerr Singers for the Living Voices. She left Nashville in 1965, [10] and Bob Armstrong took over.
Armstrong was from Buffalo, where he met Jack Paar before World War II. Paar was working for a local radio station. [11] When Paar was hired to host The Tonight Show in 1957, he tapped Armstrong as his arranger and assistant music director. [12]
Paar left NBC in 1962, [13] and Armstrong was hired as an arranger by RCA, [14] which then was owned by NBC. [15] He was living in the Buffalo area when he died in 1994. [16]
Availability
Album: Living Voices. "Kumbaya." Impossible Dream. RCA Camden CAS-2322. 1969.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Muzak."
2. Wikipedia, Muzak.
3. Joseph Lanza. Elevator Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004 edition. 240. Much of the enforcement of the sound was done by the engineers after recordings were made.
4. Lanza. 236.
5. Lanza. 230–231.
6. Wikipedia. "Living Strings." It was conceived as "an answer to Stereo Fidelity’s ‘101 Strings’." [17]
7. Liner notes.
8. Ownership of Muzak has changed several times. Lanza interviewed arrangers who had worked for the company. A list of songs recorded by Muzak was beyond his scope.
9. "Camden Is Hallmark of Growing Low-Price Strength of Majors." Billboard. 24 August 1963. 16.
10. Wikipedia. "Anita Kerr." The last recording it listed was The Living Voices Sing the Music from the Motion Picture The Singing Nun. RCA Camden CAS-974. 1966.
11. Bob Armstrong. Obituary. The [New Philadelphia, Ohio] Times-Reporter. 29 April 1994. 5. Armstrong was the WBEN music director. [18] Paar was host of the morning show. [19]
12. Bob Armstrong. Obituary. Billboard. 14 May 1994. 92. José Melis was the music director.
13. Wikipedia. "Tonight Starring Jack Paar."
14. Bob Armstrong. Obituary. The Baltimore Sun. 28 April 1994.
15. Wikipedia. "NBC."
16. "Armstrong Autopsy Results Awaited." The Buffalo [New York] News. 29 April 1994. Armstrong died from injuries sustained when he was attacked by another patient in the Buffalo Veterans Hospital.
17. Billboard, Camden.
18. Billboard, Armstrong.
19. Wikipedia. "Jack Paar"
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Roger Neumann - Kum Ba Yah
Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The cover of John Haag’s Super Pop Rock ’69 reflected the state of popular music that year. It had photographs of two Black men, one white woman, one Puerto Rican man, and four all-white, all-male groups. [1] None were folk-music revival singers, but it did contain two songs from that repertoire: "Greensleeves" and "Kum Ba Yah."
Haag established his publishing business in 1967. He had agreements with the owners of copyrights to reproduce their music, and worked with 15 rack jobbers to distribute his folios. [2] In addition, he produced his own anthologies that brought together the most current songs with full-page photographs of artists.
It is unknown if he commissioned the arrangement of "Kumbaya," or if the arranger sought him out. The company that copyrighted it was a division of Haag’s West Coast Publications. [3]
The immediate stimulant was Tommy Leonetti’s recording, discussed in the post for 12 April 2020. Neumann placed the verses in Leonetti’s ballad order: "crying," "praying," and "singing." However, he did not include the recitation. Instead, he used Leonetti’s "hears you" verse between "praying" and "singing."
Neumann wrote his arrangement in two keys, with no transition between the two. A singer or piano player could perform it as written, or use just one part for all the verses.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano, guitar chords
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Arranged and Adapted by Roger Neumann
© Copyright 1969 by Westport Music Corp., Los Angeles, Calif.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: dropped the final "g"
Verses: kumbaya, cryin’, prayin’, hears you, singin’
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: 4-verse song framed by "kumbaya"
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: Slow
Part 1
Key Signature: two flats
Guitar/Autoharp Chords: Bb Eb F F7
Part 2
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Guitar/Autoharp Chords: C F G7
Basic Structure: two parts, with strophic repetition within each
Singing Style: one syllable to one note, except for final "Lord"
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: piano plays the melody in the right hand with chords struck on the first beat of each measure and on the first syllable of "kumbaya."
Ending: Last note held
Audience Perceptions
The Boy Scouts’ Philmont Ranch song book for 1979 included a version of "Kum By Yah" that was attributed to Neuman. It only published words, and did not drop the final "g." Its numbered verses were Neuman’s "crying," "praying," and "singing," plus "laughing" and "come by here." The "Kum Ba Yah" words were printed at the top, implying they were a burden. [4]
Notes on Performers
Neumann was a jazz musician stranded by the changes in musical taste in the middle-1950s. He was the son of a professional musician who settled in Spencer, Iowa, after World War II. Neumann studied music at the local college, then became a music teacher in Guthrie Center, Iowa. [5]
In 1965, when he was 24 years old, he moved to New York to study at the Berklee School of Music. After graduation, the saxophone player moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a session musician and pick-up sideman. To supplement his income, he provided arrangements for other performers. [6]
He told an interviewer the arrangements he created for his own ensemble, the Rather Large Band, began when he "hears music in his head."
"‘A tune, either an original or a standard, will stick, going around and around,’ says Neumann, who estimates that he’s concocted close to 400 charts. ‘I keep hearing it in different ways, and I’ve found I can’t get rid of it unless I write an arrangement. It kind of releases it’." [7]
He died in 2018. While he still was living in Los Angeles, his second home was Eagle County, Colorado, where he taught at the Vail Jazz Goes to School in the summers. A colleague there remembered:
"The kids looked at Roger like a big teddy bear who played the hell out of the saxophone. He was incredible as a musician and an educator. Just the love of this guy … it can’t be measured." [8]
Availability
Book: Roger Neumann. "Kum Ba Yah." In Super Pop Rock ’69. Produced by John L. Haag. Hollywood: West Coast Publications. 36–37.
Book: Roger Neumann. "Kum Ba Yah." In In the Groove. Los Angeles: West Coast Publications. 32–33.
Book: "Kum Ba Yah." In Some Folk. By John L. Haag. West Coast Publications, 1969. [9]
End Notes
1. The photographed artists were: Otis Redding and O. C. Smith; Janis Joplin; José Feliciano; and The Beach Boys, The Grassroots, The Turtles, and Sparky and Our Gang.
2. "W. Coast Publications Gives Graphics a Creative Spirit." Billboard. 2 January 1971. 26. It said the firm was four years old.
3. Entry for Roger Neumann. "American Folk Trilogy." United States Copyright Office. Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series. January–June 1972.
4. Boy Scouts of America. The Philmont Rangers 1979 Fieldbook. No publication information.
5. Wikipedia. "Roger Neumann."
6. Wikipedia, Neumann.
7. Zan Stewart. "Music That Swings: Writer-saxophonist Roger Neumann’s acoustic, mainstream jazz-rooted Rather Large Band will appear Tuesday." Los Angeles Times website. 26 March 1993.
8. Tony Gulizia. Quoted by "Remembering Roger Neumann." Vail Jazz website.
9. Amazon entry, which included copies of the cover and table of contents.
The cover of John Haag’s Super Pop Rock ’69 reflected the state of popular music that year. It had photographs of two Black men, one white woman, one Puerto Rican man, and four all-white, all-male groups. [1] None were folk-music revival singers, but it did contain two songs from that repertoire: "Greensleeves" and "Kum Ba Yah."
Haag established his publishing business in 1967. He had agreements with the owners of copyrights to reproduce their music, and worked with 15 rack jobbers to distribute his folios. [2] In addition, he produced his own anthologies that brought together the most current songs with full-page photographs of artists.
It is unknown if he commissioned the arrangement of "Kumbaya," or if the arranger sought him out. The company that copyrighted it was a division of Haag’s West Coast Publications. [3]
The immediate stimulant was Tommy Leonetti’s recording, discussed in the post for 12 April 2020. Neumann placed the verses in Leonetti’s ballad order: "crying," "praying," and "singing." However, he did not include the recitation. Instead, he used Leonetti’s "hears you" verse between "praying" and "singing."
Neumann wrote his arrangement in two keys, with no transition between the two. A singer or piano player could perform it as written, or use just one part for all the verses.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano, guitar chords
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Arranged and Adapted by Roger Neumann
© Copyright 1969 by Westport Music Corp., Los Angeles, Calif.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: dropped the final "g"
Verses: kumbaya, cryin’, prayin’, hears you, singin’
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: 4-verse song framed by "kumbaya"
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: Slow
Part 1
Key Signature: two flats
Guitar/Autoharp Chords: Bb Eb F F7
Part 2
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Guitar/Autoharp Chords: C F G7
Basic Structure: two parts, with strophic repetition within each
Singing Style: one syllable to one note, except for final "Lord"
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: piano plays the melody in the right hand with chords struck on the first beat of each measure and on the first syllable of "kumbaya."
Ending: Last note held
Audience Perceptions
The Boy Scouts’ Philmont Ranch song book for 1979 included a version of "Kum By Yah" that was attributed to Neuman. It only published words, and did not drop the final "g." Its numbered verses were Neuman’s "crying," "praying," and "singing," plus "laughing" and "come by here." The "Kum Ba Yah" words were printed at the top, implying they were a burden. [4]
Notes on Performers
Neumann was a jazz musician stranded by the changes in musical taste in the middle-1950s. He was the son of a professional musician who settled in Spencer, Iowa, after World War II. Neumann studied music at the local college, then became a music teacher in Guthrie Center, Iowa. [5]
In 1965, when he was 24 years old, he moved to New York to study at the Berklee School of Music. After graduation, the saxophone player moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a session musician and pick-up sideman. To supplement his income, he provided arrangements for other performers. [6]
He told an interviewer the arrangements he created for his own ensemble, the Rather Large Band, began when he "hears music in his head."
"‘A tune, either an original or a standard, will stick, going around and around,’ says Neumann, who estimates that he’s concocted close to 400 charts. ‘I keep hearing it in different ways, and I’ve found I can’t get rid of it unless I write an arrangement. It kind of releases it’." [7]
He died in 2018. While he still was living in Los Angeles, his second home was Eagle County, Colorado, where he taught at the Vail Jazz Goes to School in the summers. A colleague there remembered:
"The kids looked at Roger like a big teddy bear who played the hell out of the saxophone. He was incredible as a musician and an educator. Just the love of this guy … it can’t be measured." [8]
Availability
Book: Roger Neumann. "Kum Ba Yah." In Super Pop Rock ’69. Produced by John L. Haag. Hollywood: West Coast Publications. 36–37.
Book: Roger Neumann. "Kum Ba Yah." In In the Groove. Los Angeles: West Coast Publications. 32–33.
Book: "Kum Ba Yah." In Some Folk. By John L. Haag. West Coast Publications, 1969. [9]
End Notes
1. The photographed artists were: Otis Redding and O. C. Smith; Janis Joplin; José Feliciano; and The Beach Boys, The Grassroots, The Turtles, and Sparky and Our Gang.
2. "W. Coast Publications Gives Graphics a Creative Spirit." Billboard. 2 January 1971. 26. It said the firm was four years old.
3. Entry for Roger Neumann. "American Folk Trilogy." United States Copyright Office. Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series. January–June 1972.
4. Boy Scouts of America. The Philmont Rangers 1979 Fieldbook. No publication information.
5. Wikipedia. "Roger Neumann."
6. Wikipedia, Neumann.
7. Zan Stewart. "Music That Swings: Writer-saxophonist Roger Neumann’s acoustic, mainstream jazz-rooted Rather Large Band will appear Tuesday." Los Angeles Times website. 26 March 1993.
8. Tony Gulizia. Quoted by "Remembering Roger Neumann." Vail Jazz website.
9. Amazon entry, which included copies of the cover and table of contents.
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