Barbados Land Usage

Topic: Gullah History
Histories of Barbados are replete with examples of large plantations.  When James Hay [1] won his grant from Charles I in 1627, he turned 10,000 acres over to a syndicate of his creditors headed by Marmaduke Rawdon. [2]  They recruited seventy settlers with promises of a hundred acres, or 7,000 of their acres. [3]  In 1629, their agent made 140 more grants for 15,872 acres of the original 10,000. [4]

These grants could be subdivided and resold.  Alison Games says former indentured servants were not promised land at the end of their contracts, but could buy it.  They had so little money, they often pooled their resources into partnerships that purchased an average of 2.5 acres. [5]

Hilary Beckles found outside the original 10,000 acre allocation, 776 grants were made between 1628 and 1638 that were at least ten acres. [6]  Ronnie Hughs lists nine men who received a hundred or more acres with the first large grant made in 1630. [7]  These few larger grants accounted for most of the acreage, for Beckles found the average size was 95.78 acres each, and, combined with the original grant, represented 84,329 acres.

Barbados is not elastic like Virginia, where men could claim land in the wilderness beyond the original grant.  It is an island, with finite resources.  Today, its area is 167 square miles, or 106,880 acres.  However, not all that land can be farmed.  Only 16.28% is considered arable, or 11,258 acres. [8]

The island is the exposed section of an ocean ridge formed at the point where one tectonic plate is sinking under another. [9]  The limestone base is covered by a veneer of coral, which means soils are easily depleted.  Henry Colt thought planters were fooling themselves in 1631.  He noticed the soil was “loose sand” and that the ground they thought the most fertile was “but the leaves and ashes of your trees.  Dig but half a foot deep and the will be found nothing else but clay.” [10]  By the 1670s, Richard Blome noted settlers already were leaving worn out plantations for Jamaica. [11]

Perhaps the greatest limiting factor was the island has no water sources: potable water had to be collected in cisterns when it rained. [12]  This, more than anything, perpetuated medieval patterns of land usage.

The Roman concept of settlements organized in grids and joined by connecting roads was long lost in England, [13] and not reintroduced until Christopher Wren rebuilt London after the fire of 1666. [14]  In its place, families lived in settlements [15] near a church and worked land divided into narrow strips. [16]  The best fronted the only road, but many only could be reached by crossing the land of another person. [17]

Anthony Garvan believes settlers in Connecticut imported modified versions of this settlement pattern.  Before 1645, every township included a nuclear village, [18] with lands distributed along a single road whose purpose was allowing “every land owner to access his land.” [19]  As shown in the plan for Weathersfield, the land was laid out in long narrow strips that extended from the road to the township boundaries and crossed whatever terrain existed.  Some strips spanned land, water, and an island. [20]

Richard Ligon drew the map of Barbados shown above in or before 1657.  The detail below shows the twenty-one-mile strip of waterfront on the west side of the island served as a road.  No roads yet existed into the interior.  If one wanted to market one’s crop, one had to be very close to the water.  Richard Dunn has counted 285 plantations, [21] which would make their average width 452.5'.

The one difference between Connecticut and Barbados was the use of surveys.  Garvan says they were introduced in the Netherlands by the Duke of Alba as a way of asserting control on towns. [22]  The lots on the Weathersfield plot are straight lines.  It would be hard to imagine a straight line on Ligon’s map. [23]

Oliver Rackham says the narrow fields in England developed when oxen were used, and reflected the needs of those animals. [24]  The strips in Barbados may have been adjudicated like everything else relating to land of the island, by who brought a boundary area into cultivation first and was able to enforce it against his neighbors.

Graphics
Richard Ligon.  Map of Barbados in A True and Exact History of Barbadoes, 1657.  Reproduction from copy in Bryn Mawr Library posted on National Humanities Center website, 2006.

End Notes
1.  Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, is mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.

2.  Historians argue over who instigated the claim on Barbados.  Some believe it was Rawdon’s idea and that he used his Hay’s indebtedness as leverage to get him to act. [25]  Others think Hay was responsible, [26] since he also invested in the Virginia Company and the settlement of Saint Kitts. [27]

3.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  33.

4.  Gragg.  36.

5.  Alison Games.  Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.  126.

6.  Hilary MacDonald Beckles.  “White Labour in Black Slave Plantation Society and Economy: A Case Study of Indentured Labour in Seventeenth Century Barbados.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Hull, August 1980.  His source is Some Memoirs of the First Settlement of the Island of Barbados.  Barbados: Wm. Beeby, 1741.  l–25.

7.  Ronnie Hughes.  “Presugar Land Distributiion in Barbados.”  Department of History seminar paper.  University of West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, November 1980.  Table reproduced on “1630-1644: Land holdings of 100 acres or more” on Roots Web website.  Beckles thanks “Hughes, from the University of the West Indies, for his greatly valued assistance while working on the manuscripts in the Barbados Archives” in his Acknowledgments.

8.  “Geography of Barbados.”  Wikipedia website.  The exact numbers probably were slightly different in 1630.

9.  R. C. Speed.  “Geology of Barbados: Implications for an Accretionary Origin.”  International Geological Congress, 26, Paris, 7–17 July 1980.  Proceedings 259–265.

10.  Henry Colt.  “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas.”  Cambridge University Library MSS, Mm. 3, 9.  In Vincent T. Harlow.  Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.  67.  Spelling modernized; the original is “For your soyle yt is naught, nothinge ele but loose sand.  Your growned wch you esteeme ye best is but ye leaues & ashes of your trees.  Digg but half a foot deep & the wilbe found nothinge else but Clay.”  To clear the land, they cut trees and burned them in place.

11.  Richard Blome.  A Description of the Island of Jamaica.  London: T. Milbourn for Robert Clavel, 1672.  Cited by Laura Hollsten.  “Controlling Nature and Transforming Landscapes in the Early Modern Caribbean.”  Global Environment 1:80–113:2008.  It was after this period that planters began using manure to keep their land productive.

12.  Ligon. 28.  Copy on internet from Missouri Botanical Garden.

13.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  29.  There probably are more recent works on this subject, but Garvan was chairman of my graduate school department and he and this book are what influenced my thinking.

Oliver Rackham.  The History of the Countryside.  London: J. M. Dent, 1986.  164.  He thought the period of the Black Death was the “high water mark of the open field.” [28]  After that time, large landowners began converting land to sheep pasture by replacing the strips and common land into enclosed areas.  Tenants were evicted. [29]  Enclosures were more common where men had left during the plague or where warfare was a problem, like along the border with Scotland. [30]

14.  Garvan.  33.
15.  Rackham. 178.
16.  Rackham.  164.
17.  Rackham.  165.
18.  Garvan.  40.
19.  Garvan.  42.
20.  Garvan.  52.

21.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  29.

22.  Garvan.  19.

23.  Beckles says Rawdon’s syndicate hired a surveyor, John Swan, to “organise their land into large tenanted estates.” [31]  That does not mean Swan was using geometry rather than the older system of metes and bounds.

24.  Rackham.  165.

25.  Gary Puckrein.  “Did Sir William Courteen Really Own Barbados?”  Huntington Library Quarterly 44(2):135–149:1981.

N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  51.

26.  Roy E. Schreiber.  “The First Carlisle, Sir James Hay, First Earl of Carlisle as Courtier, Diplomat and Entrepreneur, 1580–1636.”  American Philosophical Society Transactions 74(7):1–155:1984.  “Though it is possible that the merchant-financiers who backed the earl forced him into these disputed projects, it is difficult to believe he was incapable of deflecting their schemes had he been so inclined” (page 139).

27.  Schreiber.  Virginia, 168; Saint Kitts, 170.
28.  Rackham.  170.

29.  Wilhelm Hasbach.  Die englischen Landarbeiter in den letzten hundert Jahren und die Einhegungen.  Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1894.  Translated as A History of the English Agricultural Labourer by Ruth Kenyon.  London: P . S . King and Son, 1908.  33–34.

30.  Hasbach.  29.

31.  Beckles.  16.  His source is: John Oldmixon.  The British Empire in America.  London: John Nicholson, Benjamin Tooke, Richard Parker and Ralph Smith, 1708.  2:1.

Barbados Views of Land

Topic: Gullah History
The Earliest settlers in South Carolina may not have brought the plantation system with them, if for no other reason than they did not yet have a crop requiring slave labor.  What they did bring, though, were views of land usage and labor practices they learned as young men in England.

Thus, if one were to begin at the beginning, as proposed in the post for 14 October 2021, one would start with the Duke of Normandy landing on the British island in 1066.  William confiscated lands of those who opposed him, and redistributed them to 180 of his supporters.  However, ownership remained in his hands, and it was granted in return for military support. [1]  Knight’s heirs had to prove their military skills before grants were renewed.  Land without title has little value, and, after William passed, nobles found ways to define ownership as something that could be inherited and disposed of by individuals. [2]

The next milestone in the history of land ownership was the Bubonic Plague, which killed 40% to 60% of the English population, after it entered the island in 1348. [3]  Arable land reverted to waste because not enough men were available to cultivate it, and no markets existed for agricultural products.  With scarce labor, wages and standards of living improved for survivors.

Harriett Bradley argues there was another reason land was abandoned: after several centuries of agriculture, it no longer was fertile.  When the land produced less for the same effort, poverty ensued. [4]  Landowners replaced the hierarchy of services with leases, and paid laborers only when they worked during plowing and harvesting times.  Landowners became “concerned with the problem of getting as much rent as possible.” [5]

Land became a burden.  Ambitious men looked to trade for wealth.  After Mary of Scotland became queen in 1553, joint-stock companies were given monopolies for foreign trade: the Muscovy Company was first in 1550. [6]

Trade patterns changed in the 1570s.  The Spanish introduced a new method for extracting silver from ore, and, within a few years, exports from South America increased ten-fold. [7]  Instead of using the new wealth to develop his country, [8] Philip II spent it trying to suppress Protestantism in what is now Belgium.  The center of European trade moved from Antwerp, Belguim, to Genoa, Italy, in 1572. [9]  Elizabeth chartered the Turkey Company in 1581 and East India Company in 1600 to pursue trade in the new commercial centers. [10]

Silver exports from South America reached their peak between 1580 and 1620. [11]  Gold was hoarded, and, with inflation, prices for wheat and fire wood rose steeply in England in the 1580s. [12]  David Fischer reports England entered a period of “deep depression,” and wealth became concentrated in the hands of the few. [13]

Many believed demographic recovery from the Black Death was the cause.  They reasoned that as the population grew, it expanded beyond the available food and firewood supply. [14]  As always, more factors were involved.  The climate veered abruptly toward the cold when crops failed between 1594 and 1597. [15]  This was followed by a return of epidemics and a major economic collapse between 1610 and 1622 [16] with an accompanying drop in the price of wool and textiles. [17]  The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, probably did not help, although fighting was confined to the European continent.

The problems were not limited to the island.  On the continent, Fernand Braudel believes the influx of silver from the Spanish Empire was a factor, [18] especially when it led to devaluations of currencies.  He notes volatile prices affected merchants and entrepreneurs more than landowners, and so those with means began acquiring land. [19]

Presumably this turn to land also occurred in England, where there was little new land to be had.  Henry VIII already had seized the estates of the monasteries and sold them to raise money in the 1540s. [20]  James I tried to dominate Ireland with new colonies in Ulster.  However, London merchants did not believe the dangers of settling a hostile countryside were worth the investment in land.  They only contributed under duress. [21]

Something more promising appeared with the Great Drainage Act of 1600, which promised companies that drained swamps would receive a share of the recovered land in compensation.  James supported proposals to drain fens in the eastern part of the island where a large number of monasteries had been established, and then deposed.  Local lease holders objected violently, and little came of the first attempts [22] beyond the idea that companies could be rewarded if they claimed new lands that were “free or virtually free of any conflicting title or encumbrance.” [23]

Overseas colonies opened another source of wealth.  James chartered the Virginia Company in 1606 to protect English land claims on the continent between the French in Canada and the Spanish in Florida.  It was rechartered in 1609, with one company open to merchants from London and a second to men in Bristol. [24]  Unlike Ulster, this was popular: about 650 individuals and 50 London companies invested. [25]

Satisfaction did not last long: until John Rolfe produced a decent variety of tobacco in 1617, [26] the colony had no commercial crop, and depended on the company for supplies.  Some investors turned that need into an opportunity by organizing a separate company to supply the colony. [27]

The original Virginia company owned the land and the settlers were contract employees, much like the rural wage earners mentioned above.  When the first contracts came due in 1613, many planned to leave.  To retain them, the governor offered those who remained three-acre tenant farms. [28]

The first period for investors ended in 1616, but the company had no money to distribute.  Instead, it gave each of them fifty acres for private development.  It expanded the new idea that land could be substituted for cash in 1617 when it promised  fifty acres per person to anyone who paid the way for a settler, even if the person was an indentured servant or slave. [29]  The original investors began pooling their grants to create bigger plantations and hired their own contract laborers. [30]

The investors still were not satisfied, and Robert Rich was especially vocal.  His complaints led James to revoke the charter on 24 May 1624 and convert it into a royal colony, [31] thus diverting any profits to himself.  A few days later, on May 29, Parliament abolished such monopolies. [32]

Courteen began his settlement of Barbados after Parliament acted, with some idea of land ownership dervied from the Drainage Act.  However, James’ son, Charles I, was not one to admit the legitimacy of Parliamentary actions.  He reintroduced grants as “patents,” exploiting as exception to the Statute of Monopolies.  In 1627, he gave James Hay the rights to develop the Caribbean islands. [33]

This set in train thirty-three years of legal conflicts that ultimately involved the heirs of Courteen and Hay, and the creditors of both.  The details, which have been chronicled by Larry Gragg, [34] are outside the scope of this essay.  What is important is the attitude toward land and deeds.  Hay’s creditors sent their own agent to Barbados who took over Courteen’s settlement.  Land ownership still belonged to the strongest.  However, to gain trust from Courteen’s colonists, who had gone as contract employees, he granted them titles to the land they had worked.  Each time, threats arose to whoever was in power on the island, land was used to reward supporters.

Chaos continued until the Restoration of 1660, when Charles’ son, Charles II, cancelled all the patents, and recognized a royalist supporter as the true leasee of the land which he, the king, ultimately owned. [35]  He only had been on the throne a short time when he acted, and needed to avoid reigniting the civil war that had raged in England for eighteen years.  To prevent rebellion, he confirmed the land titles of settlers. [36]

And so, just before settlers in Barbados begin promoting a scheme for Carolina, they had assurances that land ownership no longer was something that could be revoked by the whim of a monarch or revoked to punish unfaithful followers.  Not all the ideas introduced by William I were extinguished, but an important one had been replaced by the concept of private land.

End Notes
1.  Charles J. Reid Jr.  “The Seventeenth-Century Revolution in the English Land Law.”  Cleveland State Law Review 43:221–302:1955.  234.  The exact number, 180, is from “Enclosure.”  Wikipedia website.

2.  Reid.  235–236.

3.  For more on the effects of the Bubonic plague and the introduction of the woolen industry, see the post for 19 May 2019.

4.  Harriett Bradley.  The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1918; reprinted by Batoche Books of Kitchner, Ontario, in 2001.  30.

5.  Bradley.  38–39.

6.  Michael John Hebbert.  “London.”  Encyclopædia Britannica website, uploaded 20 July 1998; last updated 4 August 2021.

7.  Fernand Braudel.  Le Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à Epoque de Phillippe II.  Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966 revised edition.  Translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Siân Reynolds.  New York: Harper and Row, 1972.  1:476.

8.  Braudel.  1:478–479.
9.  Braudel.  1:490.
10.  Hebbert.
11.  Braudel.  1:476.

12.  David Hackett Fischer.  The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.  74.

13.  Fischer.  91.
14.  Fischer.  72–73.

15.  Fischer.  93. The effects of the mini-ice age on Jamestown are mentioned in the post for 31 October 221.

16.  Fischer.  95.
17.  Fischer.  96.
18.  Braudel.  1:490.
19.  Braudel.  1:527.
20.  Reid.  238.

21.  James Stevens Curl.  “The City of London and the Plantation of Ulster.”  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website, 2001.

22.  “The Middle Level of the Fens and Its Reclamation.”  249–290 in The Victoria History of the County of Huntingdon, volume 3 edited by William Page.  London: Saint Catherine Press, 1936.

23.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  59.

24.  “Virginia Company.”  Wikipedia website.

25.  Jeff Wallenfeld.  Answer to query “What are the names of the men who funded the Virginia Company of London?” posted to Beyond Britannica website by anneypeters on 23 November 2020.  He responded on 24 November 2020.

26.  Emily Salmon and John Salmon.  “Tobacco in Colonial Virginia.”  Encyclopedia Virginia website, 5 February 2021.

27.  Bernard Bailyn.  Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America.  New York: Vintage Books, 2013.  78.  The company was the Somers Isles Company; the islands now are known as Bermuda.  Rolfe was among those who first explored Bermuda. [37]

28.  Bailyn.  78.

29.  Bailyn.  79.  This use of land to attract settlers became known as the head-right system.

30.  Bailyn.  80.

31.  C. H. F.  “Rich, Robert (1587-1658).”  48:1885-1900 in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee.  London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1896.  Rich is the Earl of Warwick.  He was one of the investors in the Somers Isles Company, and eventually joined the fray in Barbados on behalf of Courteen’s heir.

32.  “Statute of Monopolies.”  Wikipedia website.

33.  Hilary Beckles.  A History of Barbados.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.  8.  Hay was the Earl of Carlisle, and had been associated with James I. [38]

34.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  Chapter 3, “Establishing a Colony, 1625–1660.”

35.  Robert M. Bliss.  Revolution and Empire.  Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.  142.

36.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  80.

37.  “Somers Isles Company.”  Wikipedia website.
38.  “James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle.”  Wikipedia website.

Barbados’ First Months

Topic: Gullah History
The Gullah linguistic area in what is now South Carolina first was colonized by English speakers in 1663. [1]  Most who came were from Barbados where they had learned to grow sugar on plantations with African slaves.  Before that, Englishmen had established colonies in Virginia in 1607 and in Massachusetts in 1630.

Barbados was claimed for the English in 1624 by John Powell, a ship’s captain working for William Courteen. [2]  The limestone island lay east of the volcanic arc of the Antilles. [3]  He returned to London, where he and Courteen, along with their relatives, recruited settlers.

By then, many knew the troubled history of Jamestown.  The men who landed in Virginia had assumed local people would gladly provide food to them in peaceful trades.  Instead, they attacked.  The colony’s dependence on supply ships was tested in 1609 when a frigid winter lead to famine. [4]

Before Powell left Barbados the first time, he spent enough time on the island to ascertain it was uninhabited, although hogs introduced by the Portuguese roamed freely. [5]  Thus, before settlers migrated from England they knew it was not Virginia: it was warm, it was free of potential enemies, and food existed.

Courteen sent two ships in 1627. [6]  The first to land was commanded by Powell’s brother Henry. [7]  He stayed a few weeks while the settlers built shelters, then sailed south to what was then called the Wild Coast, and now is known as Guyana.  He returned with seeds that would grow on the island, and a group of Arawaks to plant them. [8]

 

Right here, within the first month of life on Barbados the question of language arises.  How did Powell communicate with the natives?  The answer seems to be the bilingualism that arises with trade.  Either individuals on both sides learn enough of each others language to speak, or a member of one group learns enough of the other to act as a translator. [9]

Courteen’s father was a Protestant who fled Flanders [10] when the Duke of Alba was appointed by Philip II of Spain to extirpate Protestantism in the province. [11]  He became a textile merchant in London with contacts in Dutch cities.  Like many merchants of the time, he relied of family members to serve as his representatives.  William was sent to Haarlem as an adolescent, [12] where, if he was not already bilingual, he would have become so.

William formed a partnership with his brother Peter and his sister’s second husband, John Money.  By the 1620s, he had a fleet of ships that sailed between Europe, Guinea, and the West Indies. [13]  The term “Guinea” then referred to Portuguese lands that spread from south of the Saharan desert to the mouth of the Volta river on the Gold Coast. [14]

The Dutch trade had opened after the northern Netherlands provinces rebelled against Philip and, in response to being barred from Iberian trade.  Their primary interests were gold and ivory. [15]  By 1600, Dutch merchants were trading cloth for gold in Guinea, [16] and went to the Caribbean for salt to support their fisheries. [17]

Less is known about the Powells.  Henry’s name first appears in a manuscript written around 1667 by John Scott, after he had spent time in Barbados and Guyana. [18]  He claimed Powell received the seeds from Capt Gromwegle and that “Powell and Gromwegle had been comrades in the king of Spain’s service in the West Indies.” [19]  George Edmundson [20] believes that means Powell and Aert Adriaansz van Groenewegen bought salt from mines on Venezuela’s Punto de Arraya during a short truce in hostilities between Spain and the Dutch provinces [21] that began in 1609. [22]

The treaty’s main focus was de-escalating military activities.  It finessed conflicts in West Indian trade, but the Dutch directed its ships to Caracas and the Amazon. [23]  Punto de Arraya is south of the islands south of the “M” in “Margarita” on the map. [24]  Edmundson suspects Groenewegen explored the coast before establishing trade with the Arawaks on the Essequibo river in Guyana.  In 1616, he established a trading station there on behalf of a group of Zeeland merchants who may have included Peter Courteen. [25]

Edmundson also does not think the visit to Groenewegen was prompted by a chance recollection that someone he knew “had established a colony in the River Essequibo.” [26]  He believes the visit was part of the original plan to resupply Groenewegen in return for the seeds and services of the Arawak. [27]  He cites Powell himself who said “having left the aforesaid servants upon this Island I proceeded in my voyage to the Main to the river of Disacaba, and there I left eight men and left them a Cargo of trade for that place.” [28]

During the time Powell spent with Groenewegen they may have spoken Dutch or English, whichever they had used earlier.  Groenewegen would not have been a good trader if he had not learned enough of the local Arawak language to barter successfully.  Since the Spanish, Dutch, and English all were attempting to open trade, the Arawak also would have had individuals who had learned enough of the European languages to ensure trades were fair to them.  Only a single person in the group sent to Barbados needed to be able to communicate.

The Arawak were sent on a contract that stipulated at the end of two years they could leave and would be paid with iron tools. [29]  Unfortunately, politics intervened; a rival wrested control of Barbados from Courteen, and enslaved the Arawaks.  When news reached Guyana, they turned on Groenewegen. [30]

Groenewegen responded by marrying a Carib woman “to balance the power of the Arawaks, and afterwards was at the charge of great presents to make up the business between the Dutch and the Arawak nation.” [31]  The Arawak and Carib languages are not related, and so marriage may have been the quickest way for Groenewegen to acquire a trustworthy interpreter.

The primary interest of the Dutch was gold that washed out in rains near the headwaters of the Essequibo. [32]  Caribs were the main traders along the lower course of the river where they supplied tribes with “Dutch iron.” [33]

Groenewegen’s son later became a trader, [34] and thus similar to the Luso-African children of African woman and Portuguese men who became active in the slave trade there.  However, Ian Robertson says:

“no serious claim has yet been made for the development of a trade language between these tribes, which were essentially Arawak and Carib speaking, and the Dutch traders with whom they came in contact.  If a trade language did in fact develop it seems clear that it passed into extinction as a result of the shift in Amerindian-Dutch relationships which was occasioned by the introduction of the plantation system.” [35]

That began after the founding of Barbados.

Graphics
Kmusser.  “Map of the Caribbean Sea and Its Islands.”  Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 9 April 2011; last updated by JohnnyMrNinja on 16 February 2013.

End Notes
The primary source for information of the settlement of Barbados is a manuscript in the British Museum by John Scott.  “Descriptions of Guiana, Tobago, and Barbados.”  Sloane mss 3662.

Vincent T. Harlow reprinted it in Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.

George Edmundson established the veracity of the document by comparing it with contemporary English, Dutch, and Spanish sources in part two of “The Dutch in Western Guiana.”  English Historical Review 16:640–675:1901.  William Thayer has transcribed the article and posted it on a University of Chicago website.

The information in it is repeated in one form or another by later historians.  In my citations, I am using the earliest, accurate article or book easily available on the internet.

1.  The post for 10 January 2019 discusses the early history of South Carolina.

2.  N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  22–23.

3.  “Geology of Barbados.”  Wikipedia website.

4.  “History of Virginia.”  Wikipedia website.  This occurred during the mini-ice age that began in the 1400s and lasted until the 1900s.  A chart by RCraig09 shows severe dips in temperatures in the late 1500s and again in the early 1600s. [36]

5.  Davis.  23.

6.  “Courten.”  4:332–346 in Biographia Britannica, edited by Andrew Kippis.  London: W. and A. Strahan, volume 4, 1789.  4:323.  This William is the focus of 4:332–327.  This was brought to my attention by Edmundson, 1901.  Davis thinks three ships were sent, but only gives details for two. [37]  While his history of the politics seems to be accurate, his account of Powell has absorbed elements of legend telling; occurrences of three are common in folklore, [38] but also happen to be the number of ships used by Christopher Columbus in 1492.

7.  Davis.  27.
8.  Davis.  29.

9.  Salikoko Mufwene mentions the importance of interpreters in “Pidgin and Creole Languages.” 133–145 in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, volume 18, edited by James D. Wright.  Oxford: Elsevier, 2015 second edition.  133–135.

10.  Kippis.  4:323.

11.  Amy Eberlin.  “Flemish Religious Emigration in the 16th/17th Centuries.”  University of Saint Andrews website, 7 February 2014.  The importance of this population movement is mentioned in the post for 19 May 2019.

12.  Kippis.  4:323.
13.  Kippis.  4:323.

14.  “Guinea (Region).”  Wikipedia website.  The word comes from the Portuguese “Guiné.”  Some think that, in turn, comes from a Berber term for people with darker skins.  Others suggest it is derived from the city of Djenné, which dominated the gold and salt trade in western Africa.

15.  Hugh Thomas.  The Slave Trade.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.  159.
 
16.  The importance of gold is mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.  When silver flooded Europe, gold became the preferred medium of exchange. [39]

17.  Thomas.  160.  He says merchants often were financed by men who had founded the Dutch East India Company in 1600.  Christian Koot describes how Dutch merchants operated in “Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, 1621–1733.”  72–99 in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, edited by Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman.  Leiden: Brill, 2014.  79.

18. “Captain John Scott.”  Wikipedia website.

19.  Edmundson, 1901.  656.  Spelling modernized; the original is “Powell & Gromwegle had been comrades in the king of Spaines servis in the West Indies.”

20.  Edmundson was a mathematician who spent years doing research for the British government’s commissions adjudicating the modern boundaries of Guyana. [40]

21.  Edmundson, 1901.  662
22.  “Twelve Years’ Truce.”  Wikipedia website.  The truce lasted from 1609 to 1621.

23.  Jonathan Israel.  The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.  409–10, 437.  Cited by Wikipedia, Truce.

24.  For a clear map of the area, see Rem Sapozhnikov.  “The Salted World of Araya.”  Tiwi website, November 2004.

25.  Edmundson, 1901.  659

26.  The idea that everything occurred by chance probably is a later interpretation.  Scott wrote Powell “bethought himself that an old comrade-in-arms of his in the King of Spain’s Service, one Captain GROMWEGLE, a Dutchman, had established a Colony in the River Essequibo.” [41]  Kippis thought the discovery of Barbados was not an accidental discovery, but rather the “result of a deliberate well-laid scheme, formed on hints from Sir William’s correspondents in Zealand, and concerted, no doubt, between him and his brother Sir Peter, probably the intelligencer, for he lived and died in Holland.”  He believed a French document introduced the idea of chance. [42]

27.  Edmundson, 1901.  659

28.  Edmundson, 659.  His source was a petition made by Powell in 1660.  Spelling modernized; the original is “having lefte the aforesaid servants upon this Iland I proceeded in my voyage to the Maine to the river of Disacaba, and there I lefte eight men and lefte them a Cargezon of trade for that place.”  “Disacaba” is a different transcription for “Essequibo.”  Edmundson adds “‘cargezon’ is a technical Dutch word for goods sent out to a trading port for bartering with Indians.”

29.  Edmundson, 1901.  656.  Scott wrote: “if they did not like the country they should be sent back at the expiration of two years with a reward of 50 pounds worth of axes, knives and other goods.”

30.  Edmundson, 1901.  656.
31.  Edmundson, 1901.  656.

32.  George Edmundson.  “Early Relations of the Manoas with the Dutch, 1606–1732.”  The English Historical Review 21:229–253:1906.  238–239.

33.  Edmundson, 1906.  232.
34.  Edmundson, 1901.  661.

35.  Ian A. Robertson.  “Dutch Creole Languages in Guayana.”  Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 23:61–67:December 1977.  61.

36.  RCraig09.  “Global Average Temperatures.”  Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 8 March 2020 and included in “Little Ice Age.”  Wikipedia website.

37.  Davis.  27, 30.

38.  Axel Orlik.  “Epische Gesetze der Volksdichtung.”  Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum 51:1–12:1909.  Translated as “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative” by Jeanne P. Steager.  131–141 in The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes.  Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965.  133–134.

39.  Fernand Braudel.  Le Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à Epoque de Phillippe II.  Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966 revised edition.  Translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Siân Reynolds.  New York: Harper and Row, 1972.  1:499.

40.  “George Edmundson.”  Wikipedia website.
41.  Davis.  29.
42.  Kippis.  4:326.

Creole Languages

Topic: Gullah History
“Come by Here” was collected in several places in 1926, sixty-one years after the end of the American Civil War.  More versions were collected in the early 1930s.  Many today, who try to imagine the inner lives of slaves, assume that all spirituals were created before 1860, and that ones like “Come by Here” somehow survived unchanged until Lynn Rohrbough published “Kum Ba Yah” in 1955.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such speculations as fanciful, for it is likely “Come by Here” retained elements of African and slave experiences, albeit not in an obvious form.  The question is how far back does one go to reconstruct the history of a song and its tradition.

Charles Joyner notes one problem with attempts to recover the slave past is that many individuals begin with assumptions about slave life, like the idea spirituals stopped with the Civil War, and look for evidence to support their hypotheses.  He wonders if it would not be better to study the facts and then draw one’s conclusions. [1]

This “look at all the facts” model risks expending effort on too many things before one determines which are the most important.  However, the validity of a reconstruction of the past is not judged by a cost-benefit analysis that values the solution that took the least effort and shortest time.

Thus, one must begin at the beginning and not stop with Emancipation. [2]  Then, and only then, can one suggest when a phenomenon, like a song, first emerged.

Of course, one’s rummaging through the past is delimited by known facts and a few assumptions.  The most important fact is that the seminal versions of “Come by Here,” which were learned from African Americans, were found along the southeastern coast of the United States.

A regional language developed along the coast that is called Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia.  The first hypothesis drawn from the locations of early versions of “Come by Here,” then it that “Come by Here” is a Gullah song, and, in fact, the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals explicitly was collecting songs to preserve examples of the Gullah language when it published a version in 1931. [3]

Gullah is a creole language that has been extensively studied.  Theories about its origins are based on the diverse vocabulary collected by Lorenzo Dow Turner in the early 1930s, [4] and on African elements in its syntax and pronunciation.  Tracing its history is often a proxy for reconstructing the history of the slave culture that developed in the lowlands and on the sea islands.  Joyner goes so far as to argue “creolization has a special importance in the effort to comprehend the transformation of African culture into Afro-American culture.” [5]

Unfortunately, I have not found a definition of creole languages that is not colored by the author’s theories about their origin. [6]  However, from the various descriptions a few traits are recognized.

First, a creole language is a new combination of elements from two or more existing languages.  Thus, it is not necessarily a branch in a linguistic family tree.  From the view of logic, it is more like the union of two discrete sets, than a subset of one or the other.

Second, it arises at a point of cultural contact where individuals from different linguistic backgrounds must communicate.

Third, it is the primary or only language of the speakers.  Thus, it is not an occupational language spoken when individuals are in particular contexts.  The most common terms for these languages are “pidgin” and “trade.”

Fourth, it is a complete language, with its own grammar and vocabulary.

Fifth, a creole language is not static; it changes in the same ways culture change and for the same reasons.

End Notes
1.  Charles Joyner.  Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.  xvi–xvii.

2.  Or, as the King told the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, “begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” [11]  But then, the author, Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician interested in linear algebra and symbolic logic. [12]

3.  For more on the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, see the post for 6 January 2019.

4.  Lorenzo Dow Turner.  Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition.  Katherine Wylie Mille and Michael B. Montgomery.  “Introduction.”

5.  Joyner.  xxii.

6.  For instance, Wikipedia begins its discussion of “Creole language” by stating it is a “stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one [word 17] within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.”  The first seventeen words are a definition, but the rest is hypothesis.  And those first words also contains an assumption about the process of creation, or worse a value judgement, in the word “simplifying.”

7.  Lewis Carroll.  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  London: Macmillan, 1866.  Chapter 12, “Alice’s Evidence.”

12.  “Lewis Carroll.”  Wikipedia website.  His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Spirit of Recreation Workshops

 Topic: CRS Versions
A history of recreation workshops misses the spirit behind the movement.  This may because of deeply entrenched views that suspect anything that is not utilitarian. [1]  Thus, when people make public statements about why they attend sessions, they tend to list the things they learn. [2]  Useful as such comments are, they do not explain why people return year after year.

Perhaps the best illustration of the workshop spirit is the life of Bruce Good, son of Kathryn Thompson Good who named him for her mentor, Bruce Tom. [3]  He was born in 1943 when his parents were living on a farm.  Even though he lived in Columbus from the time he was five, he remembered he “grew up in the woods and the water.” [4]

After graduating from high school in Columbus, Ohio, in 1961, Good took classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design.  The end of his freshman year coincided with the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1962. [5]

He stayed in San Francisco and worked as a musician. [6]  In 1968, he was playing lead guitar with Black Swan when it recorded some songs for Matthew Katz.  He wrote one of the band’s songs, “Lady Blonde,” while the piano player, Jeffrey Cohen, wrote the other. [7]

Katz has an unsavory reputation.  After Jefferson Airplane fired him in 1966, [8] he formed Moby Grape with the Airplane’s former drummer, Skip Spence.  David Rubinson signed them for Columbia records in 1967, [9] and later that year Moby Grape fired Katz. [10]  Rubinson remained their producer through their last recording, which was released in May of 1969. [11]

Rubinson left Columbia for Bill Graham’s Fillmore Records in October. [12]  The relationship is not clear, but Good and Cohen also joined Fillmore Records. [13]  In 1970, they produced their first record for Rubinson, an album by David Lannan. [14]

Fillmore Records folded in 1972, [15] and Rubinson organized a multi-purpose management company the same year. [16]  His first major artist was the Pointer Sisters in 1973.  Good wrote the lyrics to one of the songs on their debut album with John Shine. [17]

Good and Cohen wrote one song, “Bangin’ on the Pipes,” [18] for their second album, and collaborated on “Salt Peanuts.” [19]  Herbie Hancock played piano on the latter. [20]  By 1977, Cohen was the A & R man for Rubinson, while Good was managing tours. [21]

When Good was 38-years-old, he left the music business to write.  Since that does not provide a steady paycheck, he also taught scuba driving.  From there he worked for Lindborg Explorer as a dive master. [22]  Anne Kalosh said “he fell in love with this and became expedition leader/cruise director on Polaris for several years.” [23]

While his early career may have been inspired by his mother’s interest in music, his second career drew on his family’s interest in ecology and the skills he absorbed in Buckeye Recreation Workshops he attended with her when he was young.  Susan Pierres recalls:

“Good led a nightly passenger briefing on the next day’s anticipated discoveries, emphasizing respect for nature and any human encounters, then entertained visiting dignitaries of the host African nations for cocktails and dinner.

“‘By day Bruce was the epitome of an adventure traveler, bandanna around his brow, steering the Zodiacs into shallow inlets and creeks seeking out rare saltwater hippos and the extraordinary bird life of the region, graciously meeting tribal chiefs, including those of Alex Haley’s ancestral village of Juffereh on the Gambia River’.” [24]

The life on cruise ships necessarily is peripatetic.  When he reached 43 years of age, Good went to work in the offices for Royal Cruise Lines in 1985.  By then, nothing was absolute in the corporate world.  He survived reorganizations that forced him to leave San Francisco for Miami, Florida, and then Seattle, Washington.  When he retired in 2014, one of his colleagues said:

“Not only did he have the history, but he had a passion for the guest experience.  He understood the fabric of the interrelationship between the people who deliver the service (the crew) and those who receive it (the guest).” [25]

This may sound like an odd way to transform the ice breakers promoted by Lynn Rohrbough in early recreation programs as a way to break down barriers between individuals and ensure everyone participates, but it is the spirit that is the same.

When Bob Nolte tried to identify the essence of the Northland Recreation Laboratory, he finally said:

“Northland is much more than a time and place and program and much more that a recreation laboratory.  Somehow, over the years, Northlanders have become each others’ best friends, - supporters when one stumbles, consolers when one weeps, celebrators when one succeeds, but mostly ever present as one lives.” [26]

He concluded his history of the movement by saying: “Northland is not so much a week long retreat from life as it is a one week encounter with it.”  He does not mention they came together to have a good time. [27]

End Notes
1.  The post for 3 October 2010 describes ways the National Recreation Association and the Buckeye Recreation Workshop have used to promote their activities among conservative supporters who were raised in churches that do not approve of frivolity.

2.  One example is quoted in the post for 9 February 2020.

3.  John Blocher, Jr.  Email, 2 July 2016.  Good’s parents are discussed in the post for 10 October 2021.  Tom is mentioned in the posts for 12 September 2021, 19 September 2021, 3 October 2021, and 10 October 2021.

4.  Diane Moore.  “Royal Cruise Line’s Spirit Is Still Alive.”  Facebook website, reprint of an obituary for Good who died 26 January 2021.

5.  Moore.  The Summer of Love is discussed in the post for 27 September 2020.

6.  Anne Kalosh.  “Seabourn’s Good Is Retiring after Lively, Adventure-Laced Career.”  Seatrade Cruise website, 20 August 2014.

7.  Black Swan.  “Lady Blonde” and “She Encircles Me.”  Fifth Pipe Dream – Volume I .  San Francisco Sound S7-11680.  Released 15 November 1968.  The other musicians were Mark Hanesworth on guitar and Tom Bright on drums.  [Discogs entry.]

8.  Wikipedia.  “Jefferson Airplane.”

9.  Simon Glickman.  “Moby Grape Biography.”  Musician Guide website.  Skip’s first name was Alexander.

10.  Wikipedia.  “Matthew Katz.”

11.  Andrew Lau.  “Alexander Spence – ‘Oar’ (1969).”  Beat Patrol website, 1 January 2010.

12.  Ben Fong-Torres.  “Fillmore’s Latest: A Record Label.”  Rolling Stone, 4 October 1969.

13.  Joel Selvin.  San Francisco: The Musical History Tour.  San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996.  71.

14.  David Lannan.  Street Singer.  San Francisco Records SD 202.  Released 1970.  [Discogs entry.]

15.  “Label Guide: Fillmore.”  C Vinyl website.

16.  Jim McCullaugh.  “Self---Sufficiency Keys City’s Prime Producer.”  Billboard 89:SF-4, SF-6:19 March 1977.   The company was David Rubinson and Friends.

17.  The Pointer Sisters.  “Old Songs.”  The Pointer Sisters.  Blue Thumb Records BTS 48.  Released 1973.  “Old Songs” written by B. Good and J. Shine; [28] arranged by B. Good and N. Landsberg. [29]  Good’s name appears on songs on other albums, along with the Pointer Sisters.  Since it still was common for record producers to add their names to receive some of the royalties, [30] I am not mentioning those songs here.

18.  “Bangin’ On The Pipes” written by B. Good and J. Cohen.  [Discogs entry.]

19.  “Salt Peanuts” lyrics by B. Good and J. Cohen; music by D. Gillespie and K. Clarke; arranged by B. Good, J. Cohen, and N. Landsberg.  [Discogs entry.]

20.  The Pointer Sisters.  That’s A Plenty.  Blue Thumb Records BTS 6009.  Released 1974. [Discogs entry.]

21.  McCullagh.  SF-4, SF-6.

22.  Lars-Eric Lindblad began his company in 1966.  He has been described as “the father of ecotourism.” [31]

23.  Kalosh.  Polaris has been used in the names of several companies.  I could not identify which employed Good.

24.  Susan Pierres.  Quoted by Kalosh.   Alex Haley’s book Roots [32] was the basis for the twelve-part television miniseries, Roots, broadcast in 1977. [33]

25.  Pamela Conover, past Seabourn president and CEO.  Quoted by Kalosh.

26.  Bob Nolte.  Northland Recreation Lab: A History.  1984.  30.  Copy provided by Heidi Ryan, 21 June 2016.

27.  Nolte.  30.

28.  John Shine is described as a “country-jazz-folk, blues rocker with a sharp wit and a flair for writing melodies” by Robert Ford Jr.  “Marilyn Sokol, John Shine: Reno Sweeney’s, New York.”  Billboard 87:20:6 September 1975.

29.  Discogs website.

30.  This practice is mentioned in the entry on “B.B. King - Come by Here” posted on 13 April 2018.

31.  “About Lindblad Expeditions.”  Expeditions website.

32.  Alex Haley.  Roots: The Saga of an American Family.  Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1974.

33.  Roots.  ABC Television, 1977; produced by David L. Wolper; directed by David Greene.

Kathryn Thompson Good

Topic: CRS Version
Kathryn Thompson Good was the immediate source for Lynn Rohrbough’s version of “Kum Ba Yah.”  She most likely learned it at a Buckeye Recreation Workshop in 1954, and taught it to John Blocher, Jr.  He transcribed it for a 1955 an Indianola Methodist Church camp songbook published by Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service. [1]

As mentioned in the post for 3 October 2021, Bruce Tom was one of the founders of the Buckeye Workshop.  She first met him when she was an undergraduate at Ohio State University in the late 1930s.

In 1938, Thompson directed a “Get Acquainted” party for a short course offered to Grange lecturers that was sponsored by Tom and the university’s Agricultural Extension office. [2]

That was spring of her senior year.  Thompson was an education major, and on the department’s student council.  Its responsibilities included “training in recreation activities for future teachers.” [3]  Although it is not stated, one assumes Tom was involved, either directly or indirectly.

Her primary interest was music.  Before Thompson could be initiated into the Delta Omicron music honorary, she had to present a recital. [4]  Her other college activity was the YWCA.  She co-chaired its peace committee. [5]

The summer after Thompson graduated, she worked at Camp Ohio, the 4-H camp mentioned in the post for 3 October 2021.  She assisted in evening programs. [6]  The next year she had “charge of group singing and vesper services,” while Tom supervised group games. [7]  In 1940, she was on staff for a six-week conservation short course at the camp, and probably the one responsible for teaching folk dancing. [8]

She was teaching in the Columbus public schools in 1940, when she served on a National Recreation Association panel at its fall meeting in Cleveland, Ohio.  Carl Hutchinson chaired the group discussing “Recreation in Cooperatives.”  Tom was in the audience. [9]

Despite her activities with Tom, Thompson was not a farm girl.  She was born in 1914, and her family says “she lived in Columbus most of her life.” [10]  However, she became one when she married Gene Good.  He was raised on a farm in northwestern Ohio, and worked for the Soil Conservation Service after he graduated from high school.  During this time, he also had to have been working on his undergraduate degree in botany.  They must have married soon after he earned it in 1940. [11]

Good worked for the Indiana Department of Conservation in 1941, then they moved to a farm in his native Van Wert County where he grew purebred seeds.  He also was working on his master’s thesis on the local Great Black Swamp. [12]  During this time, they had three children.  She, now known as Mrs. Eugene Good, was involved with a Farm Bureau Youth Group recreation program in 1945. [13]

After Good earned his master’s in 1948 and joined the OSU staff, [14] they returned to Columbus.  One would guess they conformed to faculty expectations for its members.  It may be then that they joined the Indianola Methodist Episcopal Church. [15]  It often shared its pastor with the university’s Wesley Foundation. [16]

As was the way with women in the years after World War II, Tommy, as she was called, became nearly invisible.  Mrs. E. E. Good attended the wedding of a cousin in 1949, [17] and led the singing at a revival in Worthington in 1952. [18]  She used her nickname when she registered for the Buckeye Workshop that year in Urbana. [19]

Gene earned his zoology PhD in 1952, [20] which may have given them more freedom, and possibly more income.  The children would all have been in elementary school.  It is not known when they began going to the Indianola camp. [21]  Oscar Barnebey [22] built facilities for the church in 1927, [23] and transferred ownership to the Barnebey Foundation in 1954. [24]

Camp Indianola offered three week-long sessions for boys in 1941, and three for girls. [25]  Blocher described it as a family camp. [26]  A photograph he sent of Tommy shows her serving food at a picnic table.  It looks like that, by 1958, the camp had abandoned the old buildings, and abbreviated its program.

The family remembers: “Tommy always led the group sings, whether around a campfire, after meals, or vespers.  She particularly loved negro spirituals and folk songs.  Kumbaya was a favorite of all.”  One child especially recalls “she had an amazing range of musical interests and enthusiasms.  She was a gifted square dance caller.” [27]

Tom retired from OSU in 1954, but continued to work as a lecturer for the Grange. [28]  He attended the 1954 Buckeye Workshop, [29] where it is believed Tommy heard “Kumbaya.”  She was on the Workshop planning committee in 1963, [30] and served on the permanent committee from 1967 through 1969. [31]

By then, the Good children were entering college.  One graduated from high school in 1961, a second in 1962, and the youngest in 1968. [32]  Tommy was able to return to teaching by 1969. [33]  She died in 1985. [34]

Graphics
1.  Kathryn Thompson Good at Indianola, August 1958.  Photograph by John Blocher, Jr.
2.  Her photograph also appears on the Photos K tab.

End Notes
Biographical information on Good is scarce.  Her married name is a common adjective, and difficult to use in a Google search.  Some historic Ohio State University publications only are available to members.  The Columbus newspaper does not seem to have been digitized.  The large local cemeteries have not been inventoried by the Find a Grave website.

1.  Patricia Averill with John Blocher, Jr.  “‘Kumbaya’ and Dramatizations of an Etiological Legend.”  Voices 46:26–32:Spring–Summer 2020.  Copy available from Academia.edu.

2.  “Grange Speakers To Meet March 21.”  The Lantern, Ohio State University, 25 February 1938.

3.  “Education Council.”  59 in Makio, Ohio State University yearbook, 1938.
4.  “Delta Omicron.”  Makio.  376.

5.  “YWCA.”  Makio.  182.  Thompson also was tapped for Mortar Board [35] and Pi Lamda Theta, the education honorary for women. [36]

6.  Item.  The Marysville Tribune, Marysville, Ohio, 5 July 1938.
7.  Item.  The Marysville Tribune, Marysville, Ohio, 10 July 1939.  3.
8.  Item.  The Evening Independent, Massillon, Ohio, 19 August 1940.  6.

9.  National Recreation Association Congress, 30 September–4 October 1940.  Proceedings.  136–137.  Hutchinson is discussed in the posts for 19 September 2021, 26 September 2021, and 3 October 2021.

10.  Kathryn Thompson Good’s family.  Email, 10 November 2020.

11.  Thomas M. Stockdale and John F. Disinger.  “Ernest Eugene Good 1913–1994.”  Ohio Journal of Science 94:164–165:December 1994.  When she died in 1985, they had been married for 45 years.

12.  Stockdale.
13.  Item.  The Times Bulletin, Van Wert, Ohio, 2 February 1945.  3.
14.  Stockdale.

15.  The only reference to her prior religious beliefs is her membership in the YWCA.  Her cousin was married in an Evangelical and Reformed church. [37]  Two of Good’s brothers were Baptists. [38]

16.  Joan Giangrasse Kates.  “Rev. Lee Charles Moorehead, 84.”  Chicago Tribune, 23 March 2003.  In 1944, Moorehead was appointed “as the minister to students at the Wesley Foundation at Ohio State University and as associate pastor of Indianola Methodist Church.”  The church and the foundation merged with the University United Methodist Church to form the Summit United Methodist Church in 1977. [39]

17.  “Grierson-Osborn Wedding Is Solemnized on Sunday In Church in Columbus.”  Newark Advocate, Newark, Ohio, 4 April 1949.  6.  Tommy was a hostess.  Jane Grierson also was in the YWCA at Ohio State in 1938.

18.  “M. E. Church Plans Religious Emphasis Week.”  The Worthington News, Worthington, Ohio, 13 November 1952.

19.  John Fark.  Email, 1 November 2020.
20.  Stockdale.

21.  The family remembers their “summers were spent out of the city often in youth camps. Tommy and her husband Gene served in staff positions for youth camps as well as family camps. Camp Indianola, a Methodist church camp, was the primary camp.” [40]

22.  Oscar Leonard Barnebey was from Missouri, [41] and earned a chemistry PhD in 1912 from the University of Wisconsin. [42]  He met Merritt Brooke Cheney when both were serving in World War I.  After their discharges, they formed a company [43] that exploited Barnebey’s research on manufacturing carbon filters. [44]

23.  Gregg Griffith.  “Former Recreation Site Donated as Research Lab.”  The Lantern, Ohio State University, 5 June 1970.

24.  “The Barnebey Foundation.”  US Corporates website.

25.  Camp Indianola.  Brochure for 14th season.  Ohio State University archives website.

26.  John Blocher, Jr.  Email, 28 April 2016.
27.  Good family.

28.  “R. Bruce Tom.”  Ohio 1954–1955 Community Service Guide.  Columbus: Ohio State University, September 1954.  23.  He died in 1969. [45]

29.  Larry Nial Holcomb.  “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  87.

30.  “David Jenkins, County 4-H Extension Agent.”  Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, Lancaster, Ohio, 15 February 1963.  13.  Also involved were Tom, and Rohrbough’s son-in-law, John Rowlands.

31.  Fark.
32.  One son is discussed in the post for 17 October 2021.

33. Item.  Ohio State University Monthly, February 1969.  The family said “she taught elementary vocal music in Columbus, Ohio area schools.” [46]

34.  Stockdale.
35.  Makio.  72–73.
36.  Makio.  378.
37.  Grierson-Osborn Wedding.

38.  “Merrill M. Good.”  The Times Bulletin, Van Wert, Ohio, 9 March 2017.

“Mood H. Max Good.”  The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio, 25 July 2006.

39.  “Our History.”  Summit United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio, website.
40.  Good family.

41.  Laura Anne Knight.  “Oscar Leonard Barnebey.”  Geni website, last updated 10 June 2017.

42.  Oscar Leonard Barnebey.  “Rare Earth Reactions in Non-Aqueous Solvents.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Wisconsin, 1912.

43.  “Merritt Brooke Cheney.”  American Ceramic Society Bulletin 1:26:May 1922.  The company was Barnebey-Cheney Engineering of Columbus.

44.  Oscar L. Barnebey.  “Process for the Manufacture of Decolorizing Carbons.”  Patent 1537286A, granted 12 May 1925.

45.  Item.  The Circleville Herald, Circleville, Ohio, 4 September 1969.  5.  The Grange charter was draped in his memory.

46.  Good family.

Buckeye Recreation Workshop

Topic: CRS Versions
The Progressive Movement’s interest in the constructive use of leisure time developed in response to the masses from Europe who moved into urban areas where no open spaces existed.  It began in Boston with the Playground Association of America, which provided sandboxes for children.  The year was 1885 [1] and, as the chart shows, the urban population was increasing rapidly from 28% to 35% of the United States total.

The concern spread from children to adults, and, among Populists, culminated in Prohibition in 1920, which closed the gathering places of the poor.  In their stead, settlement houses and other organizations offered alternatives to the amusement parks that sprang up along tram and interurban lines.  Neva Boyd was active with Jane Addams in Chicago’s Hull House. [2]

Meanwhile, as the percentage of urban dwellers rose from 40% to 51% between 1900 and 1920, people in towns and small cities began to worry about their own children.  The Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls were organized in 1910 to send kids back to the country for a few weeks each summer. [3]  As more communities introduced high schools, churches organized activities to promote endogamy among their youth.  Lynn Rohrbough provided an alternative to phonographs and dancing with his social recreation. [4]

Agricultural colleges became concerned that farm life was suffering from the concentration of wealth in urban areas.  The Smith-Lever Act introduced county extension agents and home demonstration agents to spread new ideas about farming and food preservation in 1914. [5]

The youth program, which became 4-H, had its roots in Clark County, Ohio, where A.B. Graham [6] started a Boys’ and Girls’ Agricultural Club in 1902.  In 1916, four Ohio counties hired 4-H agents as part of their extension programs. [7]

One early agent was Bruce Tom in Summit County.  He had been raised on a farm near Zanesville, and taught school [8] after graduating from the Presbyterian’s [9] Muskingum College in 1911. [10]  In 1919, he ran the first 4-H camp in Ohio. [11]

This was the time when many youth organizations, including the Epworth League, were promoting summer institutes in resort settings. [12]  The rationale for 4-H camping differed from that of the Boy Scouts; farm kids did not need to be reconnected with country.  Instead, the camps aimed to supplement rural education with programs that country schools could not provide in areas like biology, music, and athletics. [13]

Tom’s specialty became recreation.  In 1920, he set up a Rural Community Playhouse at the state fair to sponsor daily competitions for fiddlers and dancers. [14]  Later, he was hired by Ohio State University as a rural sociologist.  Stewart Case, a retired extension agent in Colorado, believed that was because “he couldn’t be known as a recreational specialist.  People would not have been willing to pay his salary.” [15]

In 1927, Tom attended Rohrbough’s second Recreation Institute, where he would have met Boyd, along with those mentioned in the post for 12 September 2021. [16]  The next year, he helped open a permanent 4-H camp in Ohio. [17]   He was on the committee that organized the Waldenwoods meetings mentioned in the post for 19 September 2021, [18] then, during World War II, wrote a column on recreation ideas for the National 4-H News magazine. [19]

The Playgrounds and Recreation Association did not get involved because the declining rural population, down to 44% in 1930, was too small and too widely dispersed to support such work.  It was only after the Rockefellers became involved in 1929 that it held 78 recreation institutes in 34 states. [20]  The group, renamed the National Recreation Association in 1930, eventually hired five men to work with rural groups in cooperation with “federal and state extension agencies.”  Its program continued until 1940 when its field director died and World War II became more important. [21]

The U. S. military opted to handle its own recreation needs during the war, rather than relying on outside volunteers as it had during World War I. [22]  Augustus Zanzig was sent to the Treasury Department to help organize events to sell war bonds.  When that concluded in 1943, he went to work for the  Griffith Musical Foundation in Newark, New Jersey as its education director. [23]

The resulting vacuum in national leadership led a group in Westerville to organize its own Northeast Ohio Recreation Institute in 1944.  The workshop at Hiram College attracted Boyd, Rohrbough, and Rohrbough’s former partner, Carl Hutchinson, [24] along with Tom. [25]

The name changed to Buckeye Recreation Workshop in 1948 when it moved to Cuyahoga Falls.  Each day of the week-long institute began with breakfast and devotions, then alternated gym and craft activities.  A tea was held in the afternoon with a short lecture, followed by dinner, and an evening party. [26]

Most of the people who registered were home demonstration agents, but “ministers’ wives, farm women club leaders, and recreation personnel for Campfire Girls, YWCA, churches [and the] Grange” also attended.  E. O Harbin came, [27] but Merrill Davis led the music.  He taught singing in the Jackson, Ohio, public schools.

“Songs went with pretty nearly everything except the craft work and puzzles.  Fine old hymns were a part of each morning’s devotions, or what the church folks might have called a consecration service.

“Songs were sung with folk games, square dances, and at meals and assemblies.  And after a day or two the strains of the more melodious ones came floating through your mind and heart, and seems to help set the tempo and line of your thoughts and feelings.

“One that all of us quickly caught on was the spiritual, ‘When the Spirit Say Sing, I Want to Sing.’  Another was ‘I’ve Got a Home in Beulah Land,’ and a sample of a very neat ditty was ‘Ten Pretty Girls at a Village School’ which was sung to a folkgame.” [28]

The reporter for the National 4-H News did not mention any of the international songs that had been introduced by Zanzig. [29]  While the participants were shown the Varsovienne form of the waltz, the theme was still “Play with a Purpose,” and “not just for fun.” [30]

The workshops spread.  Mary Lea Bailey believed [31] “at least twenty-three labs affected by the Waldenwoods fellowship are still in operation” in the early 1970s. [32]  Allen Smith [33] identified thirteen spawned by the Northland Recreation Laboratory mentioned in the post for 26 September 2021. [34]

So many workshops sprang up that Larry Eisenberg remembered Howie Turner was his “constant companion, in dozens of labs” as they worked the modern equivalent of the chautauqua circuit.  He recalled most were “started and maintained by 4-H leaders. [35]

While some, like Eisenberg, began as invited speakers, [36] they returned as vendors with products to sell.  Bob Nolte recalled Eisenberg arrived at the Northland Recreation Laboratory “with a phonograph, loud speakers and records made for dancing.  Thus was born an era that never ended.” [37]  He was promoting the records and songbooks produced by the Methodist church that are discussed in the post for 9 February 2020.

The 1954 Buckeye Workshop, where “Kumbaya” might have been introduced, did not differ from the ones before.  About 150 registered for the week-long session in an Urbana, Ohio, Methodist church where Rohrbough talked about play-parties.  Other speakers covered “handicrafts, folk dancing, games, party planning, community song leading, camping techniques, and nature experiences.” [38]

The Buckeye workshop continues under the name Buckeye Leadership Workshop as a nonprofit corporation, and is still deeply rooted in the extension service. [39]  This many years after the word “recreation” was created to distinguish it from mere play, [40] the suspicion of things frivolous persists.  A current board member said they had to change the workshop name “for marketability reasons (easier for professionals to get leave to ‘lead’ rather than ‘recreate’).” [41]

Graphics
1.  United States Census Bureau data gathered by Jeff Hoyt.  “1800-1990: Changes In Urban/Rural U.S. Population.”  Senior Living website, 29 June 2021.

2.  “Recreation Labs/Workshops.”  41 in Folklore Village Christmas Festival, Program, 27–31 December 1987, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.

End Notes
1.  Richard F. Knapp and Charles E. Hartsoe.  Play for America: The National Recreation Association 1906–1965.  Arlington, Virginia: National Recreation and Park Association, 1979.  19–20.

2.  W. Paul Simon.  “Neva Leona Boyd, a Biographical Sketch.”  Virginia Commonwealth University website.  Among those who taught music in settlement houses are Augustus Zanzig in Boston [42] and Martha Ramsey in Cleveland. [43]  George Fenstermacher, who was Dean of Students at Taylor University when Melvin Blake was a student, received his first music training in the Cleveland Music School Settlement.  Once he was on the college faculty, he upgraded his education in Chicago.  For more, see the post for 30 May 2021.

3.  The Boy Scouts of America and Camp Fire Girls are mentioned briefly in note 30 of the post for 5 September 2021.

4.  Social recreation is discussed in the post for 12 September 2021.
5.  Amy Manor.  “Smith-Lever Act.”  North Carolina State University website.

6.  Suzanne Steel.  “A.B. Graham’s Legacy.”  Ohio State University website.  “A.B. stood for Albert Belmont, but ‘he ignored anyone who called him anything but A.B.’.” [44]

7.  “A Look at the History of 4-H in Ohio.”  Farm and Dairy website, 7 February 2002.

8.  Dorothy Montgomery.  “A Look at the History of Camp Ohio.”  Zanesville Times Recorder, Zanesville, Ohio, 15 June 2018.  Tom also is discussed in the posts for 12 September 2021, 19 September 2021, 3 October 2021, and 17 October 2021.

9.  The area was settled by Scots Irish moving west from western Pennsylvania. [45]  Tom’s great-grandfather migrated from Greensburg in Westmoreland County. [46]  While family genealogists have tried to find a Scots ancestor, [47] local historians believe the Thomm family had Lutheran roots. [48]  By the time Robert Bruce Tom was born, his parents had absorbed Scots history.

10.  Nainsí J. Houston, director Muskingum University Roberta A. Smith University Library.  Email, 12 August 2021.

11.  Montgomery.
12.  See the post for 12 September 2021.

13.  Ella Gardner.  Short-Time Camps: A Manual for 4-H Leaders.  Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture Extension Service, 1939.  1.  “Many of our rural schools present no music, nature study, recess games, or sheer fun activities.  In many places, isolated homes and a heavy schedule of home and school work make informal social gatherings rare.”  Robert Meadows believes Liberty Hyde Bailey was one of the more vocal critics of rural schools. [49]

14.  Premium List and Rules Governing Awards, Annual Ohio State Fair, Columbus, Ohio.  Columbus: Ohio Department of Agriculture, 1920.

15.  Stewart G. Case.  Interviewed by Dennis McGuire, 15 September 1983.  Mountain Scholar website.  24.

16.  Larry Nial Holcomb.  “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  37.

17.  Montgomery.  The camp is Camp Ohio.
18.  Holcomb.  40.

19.  “Let’s Play.”  National 4-H News 20:14:June 1942.  The column was “Sociability Lane” and he signed himself “Uncle Tom” Bruce.

20.  Knapp.  99.  He was not more specific than “the Rockefellers.”
21.  Knapp.  95.

22.  Knapp.  129.  See the post for 5 September 2021 for the World War I activities of the Playground and Recreation Association of America.  John Bradford headed the rural workshop program.

23.  “Book Week Program Sunday at Library Augustus D. Zanzig Will Be the Speaker.”  The Montclair Times, Montclair, New Jersey, 9 November 1944.  He is discussed in the posts for 5 September 2021, 19 September 2021, 26 September 2021, and 3 October 2021.

24.  Hutchinson is discussed in the posts for 19 September 2021, 26 September 2021, and 3 October 2021.

25.  Mrs. Oliver Bailey.  Letter to Larry Nial Holcomb, 6 February 1972.  Cited by Holcomb.  87.  Oliver Bracken Bailey was the father-in-law of Mary Lea Bailey. [50]  Presumably, this Mrs. Bailey is Mary Lea’s mother-in-law.  Mary Lea is mentioned below in note 31.

26.  “Play with a Purpose.”  National 4-H News 26:19–21, 24, 26:May 1948.

27.  Harbin’s health failed in 1945, [51] but he continued to attend recreation meetings. [52]  He is discussed in the posts for 9 February 2020, 12 September 2021, 26 September 2021, and 3 October 2021.

28.  Play with a Purpose.  20–21.

29.  Zanzig’s Singing America is mentioned in the post for 26 September 2021.  International songs simply may not have been mentioned, or were not in the repertoire of Merrill Davis.  It is difficult to draw any conclusions from the absence of information, but some already were included in a 1944 Rohrbough songbook described in the post for 9 February 2020.

30.  Play with a Purpose.

31.  Bailey had worked closely with Rohrbough since 1948, [53] and was on the board of the Buckeye Workshop when Holcomb was writing. [54]

32.  Holcomb.  45.  Waldenwoods is discussed in the post for 19 September 2021.

33.  Smith was the “youth manager of Farmland Industries, Inc. of Kansas City, Missouri.” [55]  Despite the shared surname, he does not appear to be related to the Fred Smith who helped found the Northland Rec Lab.

34.  Allan T. Smith.  “Genealogical Chart of Non-profit Recreation Laboratories,” 16 June 1972.  Reprinted by Holcomb.  46.

35.  Larry Eisenberg.  “It’s Me, O Lord.”  Tulsa: Fun Books, 1992.  60.  Turner represented The Handcrafters of Waupun, Wisconsin, who sold craft materials like the flat, plastic-coated lacing used in lanyards.

36.  Eisenberg.  59.  He thought he was invited to Northland Rec Lab in 1940 or 1941.

37.  Bob Nolte.  Northland Recreation Lab: A History.  1984.  21.  Copy provided by Heidi Ryan, 21 June 2016.  The Rec Lab is discussed in the post for 26 September 2021.

38.  Holcomb.  87.  His source was Grace Goulder.  “Ohio Scenes and Citizens.”  Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, 23 May 1954 Sunday supplement.  4.

39.  One of the current board members is a former extension agent and another has a master’s degree in agricultural education. [56]

40.  Knapp.  3.  “At the turn of the century, in contrast, people used the term ‘play’ with much the same connotation that ‘recreation’ would come to hold by the 1930s by which time ‘play’ came to have a popular usage equating it with playgrounds and activities for children.  The switch from ‘play’ to ‘recreation’ for all ages is indicating of the broadening of the concept which took place over the first three decades of this century.”  And hence, the name change for the National Recreation Association as it sought more respect from potential patrons and the government.

41.  John Fark.  Email, 1 November 2020.
42.  See the post for 5 September 2021.
43.  See the post for 9 February 2020.
44.  Her source was his grandson, James Graham.
45.  “A Brief History.”  New Concord, Ohio, website.
46.  “Henry Tom.”  Geni website, 21 November 2014.

47.  Jay Webb Thom and Nelle Bigham Robinson.  The THOM Family: The Descendants of Joseph Thom and Elizabeth Craig Thom of Westmoreland County Pennsylvania.  Franklin, Indiana: 1932.  Copy posted to Wiki Tree website.

48.  Lorle Porter.  A People Set Apart: Scotch-Irish in Eastern Ohio.  Zanesville, Ohio: New Concord Press, 1998.  58.

49.  Robert Ray Meadows.  “History of Virginia’s 4-H Camping Program: A Case Study on Events Leading to the Development of the 4-H Educational Centers.”  PhD dissertation.  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 21 March 1995.  20.

50.  “Warren O. Bailey.”  Cook and Son–Pallay Funeral Home website, 2016.

51.  Eisenberg.  54.  “When in 1945 he was heading the Youth Department staff of the General Board of Education, Nashville, E.O. Harbin’s health had failed.”

52.  Nolte.  11.  “As the years passed, E.O. became very frail, but came to Rec Lab wheel chair and all, with wife Mabel to care for him.”  Harbin died in 1955.

53.  Mary Lea Bailey.  Email, 25 June 2016.

54.  John Blocher, Jr.  Email, 23 June 2016.  He notes she was president in 1960.

Barry Jolliff.  Email, 30 October 2020.  “There is only one (retired) Committee member with more tenure than me that is still living. [ . . . ]  Her name is Mary Lea Bailey.  She lives in Delaware, Ohio.”

55.  Holcomb.  45.
56.  “BLW Permanent Committee.”  Buckeye Leadership website.