Folksmiths - The Musicians

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Four of the Folksmiths who introduced “Kumbaya” to twenty New England residential camps in the summer of 1957 primarily were interested in music when they were students at Oberlin College.

Ruth Weiss
Ruth Weiss was the granddaughter of Otto Loewi, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1936.  He fled to Brussels in 1938 when the Germans invaded Austria that year.  From there he made his way to New York City in 1940. [1]

Her father, Ulrich Weiss, was a chemist in Austria.  In 1939, she and her mother moved to Brussels, then to France after Ulrich’s company opened a branch in Paris.  They began fleeing the Germans in 1940.  After short stays in England, Martinique, and the Dominican Republic, they were able to settle in New York City with the Loewis. [2]

By the time Ruth was a French student at Oberlin, the family had moved to Maryland where Ulrich worked for the National Institutes of Health.  They had hidden their Jewish roots.  Weiss recalled that “her father was an atheist, her mother an agnostic. They celebrated Christmas and observed no Jewish holidays.” [3]

Her activism was confined to singing Christmas carols at a Cleveland hospital for the campus Christian Science Organization. [4]  She played recorder with the Folksmiths and sang the soprano parts. [5]  Her voice is the most recognizable on their recording of “Kumbaya.”

After graduation in 1959, she spent time in a work camp in Vienna, Austria, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. [6]  When she returned to this country, she became a case worker for the Cuyahoga County Welfare Agency’s Division of Child Welfare. [7]

Weiss moved to Portland, Oregon in 1975 where she is active with Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. [8]

Joe Hickerson
Joseph Charles Hickerson was born in Highland Park, Illinois, [9] where his father was a mathematics teachers. [10]  Teaching jobs were precarious in the Depression, and they moved several times before James Allen Hickerson was hired by New Haven State Teacher’s College in Connecticut. [11]

Hickerson’s older brother, Jay Allen, showed musical talents when he was young.  He earned a degree in music theory in 1956, and later became a music teacher in the schools in Bethany, Connecticut.  He also appeared as the piano soloist with orchestras, starting when he was in high school. [12]

Their mother, the former Elizabeth Hogg, often played piano and sang with the young boys.  Joe remembered she bought a plastic ukulele to peak his interest when he was about 14 years old.  This led to some lessons on guitar.  He already had sung with the church choir from “5th grade until my voice changed.” [13]

Hickerson majored in physics at Oberlin, but became more interested in folk music after Pete Seeger began appearing in concerts.  He became friends with the individual who had a program on the college radio station, and took over his place when he left. [14]  He played banjo and guitar, and led singing with the Folksmiths the summer he graduated. [15]

Joe spent the next few years studying folklore at Indiana University where he had a folk music program on the local college radio station. [16]  He spent a few summers working as a counselor at Camp Woodland, where he revised “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” [17]

Hickerson was hired by the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song in 1963, and began performing in the Washington DC area. [18]  He also made some records for Folk Legacy.  He retired to Portland, Oregon, where he still performs. [19]

Sarah Newcomb
Sarah Robinson Newcomb was born in Fairfax, Virginia, [20] where her father was a government economist.  He was chased out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when he began researching Negro businesses for his PhD from Brookings Institute.  When she was young, he was on Harry Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors. [21]  By the time that she was a psychology major at Oberlin, [22] he was working for the Urban Land Institute. [23]

Newcomb’s mother, the former Carolyn Jones, was involved with Bluebird and Camp Fire Girls’ groups when Sarah was young. [24]  She may be the only member of the Folksmiths who participated in a middle-class youth group in the 1950s.  Newcomb spent her teen years at Oakwoods Friends School, a boarding school in New York state. [25]

Hickerson remembers that, while she was in high school, she visited the Archives of American Folk Song.  She was the one who took him there for his first interview. [26]

Newcomb played banjo and guitar with the Folksmiths. [27]  In the 1960s, she was writing songs with Susie Dean, an Oakwoods classmate. [28]  Around 1972, met Shari Ajemian Craig through The Folk Song Society of Greater Boston.  They began writing parodies at Pinewoods Music Camp, and, by 1986, had expanded to musical comedies. [29]

Newcomb still lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is writing songs with Dean. [30]

Chuck Crawford
Charles Raymond Crawford played banjo and guitar with the Folksmiths. [31]  One of his classmates, Neil Rosenberg, remembered Crawford was living in Mansfield, Ohio, and had “a neat record collection that included jazz greats Django Reinhart and Fats Waller.” [32]  Rosenberg also remembered a group of guys would gather before and after meals to figured out how to play what was then the new Bluegrass genre. [33]

This group was beginning to move away from Pete Seeger.  Rosenberg recalled: “The Pete Seeger manual, in the second edition that Mayne [34] had, didn’t have anything useful for learning Scruggs picking.  There was a page devoted to it, but it wasn’t accurate.  So we learned from other musicians.” [35]

Crawford went to the University of Michigan where he earned a PhD in mathematics in 1970. [36]  From there, he was the first computer professor at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. [37]  Throughout this time he played in local Bluegrass bands. [38]  He still lives in Toronto and has joined sacred harp singing groups. [39]

End Notes
1.  “Otto Loewi.”  Nobel Prize website.

2.  Ulrich Weiss interview.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, 1993.

3.  Melissa Binder.  “Holocaust Remembrance Day: Survivor Recalls Her Own Early Escape, Honors Those Who Died.”  The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon, 16 April 2015.

4.  Hi-O-Hi.  Oberlin College yearbook, 1958.  87.

5.  Liner notes for Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah (Come by Here).”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do: The Folksmiths Travelling Folk Workshop.  Folkways Records FA 2407, released 1958.

6.  Dorothy M. Smith.  “Class of 1959 Directory.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, December 1959.  2.

7.  Item.  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, 56(7):28:November 1960.
8.  Binder.
9.  “Joe Hickerson.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 26 March 2023.

10.  The elder Hickerson wrote the article “Similarities Between Teaching Language and Arithmetic.”  The Arithmetic Teacher 6(5):241-244:November 1959.

11.  Joe Hickerson.  Liner notes.  Joe Hickerson with a Gathering of Friends.  Folk Legacy FSI-39.  Released 1970.  1.

12.  “Jay Allen Hickerson.”  Leesburg News, Leesburg, Florida, 9 August 2022.
13.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  1.
14.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  2.
15.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.
16.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  3.

17.  “Joe Hickerson (Special Event).”  Folklore Society of Greater Washington website, 13 July 2014.

18.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  4.
19.  Joe Hickerson, 2014.
20.  “Sarah Newcomb in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website.

21.  James R. Fuchs.  “Oral History Interview with Dr. Robinson Newcomb,” 6 August 1977.  Harry S. Truman Library website.

22.  Line notes, Folksmiths.
23.  Internet references to his publications.
24.  “Carolyn Jones Newcomb.”  Washington Post, 29 January 1989.

25.  “Class of 1956” reunion photograph.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Poughkeepsie, New York, Summer 2016.  8.

26.  Joe Hickerson.  “Folk Music, Archives & Performing: Experiences, Adventures & Great Stories.”  Interviewed by Jennifer Cutting for Library of Congress webcast, 15 July 2014; posted to YouTube on 26 January 2015.

27.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.

28.  Newcomb told her Oakwood classmates that a parody of a sea chantey she had written with Susan Dean Miller was being performed by groups in Britain in 2009. [40]

29.  “Ajemian & Newcomb’s Artistic Resume.”  Ajemian and Newcomb website, 2011.

30.  Item.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Summer 2020.  5.
31.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.

32.  Neil V. Rosenberg.  Bluegrass Generation.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.  No page numbers in on-line edition.

33.  Neil Rosenberg.  Interviewed by George Lyon in “Wherein George Lyon Talks to Neil Rosenberg and We Get To Listen!”  The Canadian Folk Music Bulletin 35:1-10:2001.  3.  Rosenberg earned a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, and became the academic expert on Bluegrass music, as well as an accomplished musician.

34.  Pete Seeger.  How To Play the 5-String Banjo.  Beacon, New York: Pete Seeger, 1954.  Mayne Smith was a friend of Rosenberg’s from California who also attended Oberlin.

35.  Rosenberg, 2001.  3.  Earl Scruggs began playing banjo for Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass group in 1945.  In 1948, he and Lester Flatt formed their own group. [41]

36.  “Charles Raymond Crawford.”  Mathematics Genealogy Project, North Dakota State University website.  For more information on the importance of his dissertation, see Frank Uhlig.  “On Computing the Generalized Crawford Number of a Matrix.”  Linear Algebra and Its Applications 438:1923-1935:2013.

37.  G. Scott Graham.  “Computer Science at 25.”  61 in Celebrating 40 Years of History at the University of Toronto Mississauga, edited by John Percy and Sabeen Abbas.  University of Toronto Mississauga, 2007.

38.  Rosenberg, 2001.  3.

39.  “Directory and Minutes of Sacred Harp Singings 2009 & 2010.”  Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association, Huntsville, Alabama, website.

40.  Item.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Summer 2009.  13.
41.  “Flatt and Scruggs.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 15 April 2023.

Folksmiths - The Activists

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The Folksmiths, mentioned in the post for 2 April 2023 were eight Oberlin College students who introduced “Kum Ba Yah” to twenty New England residential camps in the summer of 1957.  Four became activists in later life while three became more involved with music and one supported charitable work.

David Sweet
David Sweet, who suggested the summer tour, majored in far-eastern history at Oberlin, and played bongo drums. [1]  His father, Frederick Beaver Sweet, was from Michigan [2] and married Mary Ellen Funk in Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. [3]  In the 1930s, they published the Union Register.  During World War II, the family lived in Detroit were Fred worked for the United Auto Workers. [4]  By the 1950s, he was editing Catering Industry Employee, [5] and she was active with the Girl Scouts.  She later taught school and was active with the ACLU and Camp Joy, [5] a camp for the disadvantaged. [7]

David’s brother, John, was five years younger.  His obituary indicated that John went to “a communist summer camp” as a child and that he sang, played guitar, and collected songs, “the more radical the song the better.” [8]  In 1959, an informant told the FBI that:

“Pete Seeger had been a house guest of Frederick B.  Sweet and his wife, Mary Ellen Sweet [. . .] during the previous weekend when Seeger had given a concert in Cincinnati.  He further stated that Mary Ellen and her daughter, Marni, a student at the University of Cincinnati, reportedly sold 200  tickets at $2.00 per ticket to the concert of Seeger.” [9]

David went to Mexico in 1962 where he “learned Spanish on the street, studied Mexican history at the National University, figured a way to make a living in NGO work, married and had kids.” [10]  Twelve years later he earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin and was teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. [11]  Sweet still lives in Santa Cruz and remains active in community affairs. [12]

Joani Blank
Joan E. Blank [13] chaired the 1958 Oberlin folk festival. [14]  She graduated from high school in Belmont, Massachusetts, where she sang in the choir and played recorder. [15]  Her mother was a teacher and her father a research scientist. [16]

At Oberlin she majored in sociology.  When she was with the Folksmiths she played recorder and taught folk dancing. [17]  After she graduated in 1959, she toured Europe and Asia where she spent six months in India. [18]  During her last months, she taught folk songs for the International Recreation Association. [19]

Blank considered the Peace Corps, but then started another long trip that landed her to Hawaii.  She earned a master’s degree in Asian Studies with an emphasis on public health, and learned to play the koto and jamisen.  From there she earned another master’s in public health from the University of North Carolina and worked with family planning groups in Detroit; Concord, New Hampshire, and Morgantown, West Virginia. [20]

Blank moved to San Francisco in 1971, where her interest in family planning expanded to sexuality.  She found Down There Press in 1974, and opened a store that sold sexual toys to women.  She also sang with the Masterworks Chorale of College of San Mateo. [21]

After she retired in 1992, the Jew joined the Unitarian Church where she sang in the choir and learned to play handbells. [22]  She died in 2016. [23]

Ricky Sherover
Erica Reed Sherover [24] was the daughter of émigrés from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  Her grandfather arrived in New York City in 1903 and became an agent for a company selling insurance policies to immigrants. [25]  Before she was born, her father Miles worked in Russia on a project to build a steel mill. [26]

During the Spanish Civil War, he formed Hanover Sales Corporation to export aircraft to the Communist-backed Republican army. [27]  The war ended before the planes were delivered, and a contest developed over them in México. [28]  The family lived in Mexico from 1943 to 1946 where Ricky remembered her governess was a German communist refugee. [29]

The Sherovers returned to the United States where her father became treasurer of the American Russian Institute.  Soon after it was denounced as a Communist front in 1948, [30] Miles organized a steel corporation in Venezuela.  He later became an active supporter of Israel. [31]

At Oberlin, Sherover majored in history and literature, and played guitar. [32]  During the summer of 1958 she attended a folklore institute at Indiana University. [33]  She spent the next summers at a Kibbutz in Israel where she “played on her guitar by the fire at nights, the songs of that period, songs by Joan Baez.” [34]  In 1964, Sherover was one of the folk singers who participated in the Mississippi Caravan of Music that taught freedom songs during the efforts to educate Blacks and register them to vote. [35]

Interest in folk music faded with the rise of the Beatles, and politics became more radical.  Sherover went to study Marxism with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego.  They were married from 1976 until his death in 1979.  She carried on his work with workshops combating racism.  She died in 1988. [36]

Bo Israel
Mark Israel was born in Cincinnati.  His grandfather migrated from Russia to Birmingham, Alabama, where he had a tailor’s shop. [37]  When his father Mike graduated from high school in 1918, he said he wanted “to leave the world a little better than I found it.” [38]

Mike graduated from Purdue with a degree in agriculture in 1922.  While in Indiana, he played football and was in the glee club. [39]  He moved to Cincinnati in the early 1930s, where he worked for Fashion Frocks. [40]  His wife’s father was a partner in the Universal Skirt Company. [31]  In 1932, the elder Israel founded The Forum lecture series under the auspices of the Jewish Community Center. [42]

Bo inherited many of his father’s interests.  At the 1957 Oberlin Folk Festival, he played “Hana-ava Babanot” on a mandolin-banjo. [43]  During the summer with the Folksmiths, he played mandolin and washtub base. [44]  Israel was a member of Students for Democratic Action, [45] and, in his senior year, was active in promoting a Youth March on Integrated Schools. [46]

The summer of 1959, after his graduation, Israel trained to be an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Arkansas. [47]  He earned a law degree from Columbia Law School, and was hired by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights in 1963.  Israel eventually moved to the Washington, DC, area where he as a “public sector legislative consultant.” [48]

As a child, Israel remembered his family raised food.  To begin his return to the land, he rented some acreage from the brother of Sarah Newcomb, another member of the Folksmiths.  In 1978, he bought his own farm in Maryland and has been selling produce to farmers’ markets since he retired. [49]

End Notes
1.  Liner notes for Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah (Come by Here).”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do: The Folksmiths Travelling Folk Workshop.  Folkways Records FA 2407, released 1958.

2.  “Fred Sweet in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website.
3.  Item.  Granville Times, Granville, Ohio, 15 August 1935.  3.

4.  “Mary Ellen Sweet, Teacher, Activist.”  Ohio Obituary and Death Notice Archive on Gen Lookups website, 1 June 2012.

5.  Matthew C. Bates.  A History of the International Labor Communications Association.  PhD dissertation.  University of Maryland, 2012.  138.

6.  Gen Lookups.

7.  National Directory of Accredited Camps for Boys and Girls.  Martinsville, Indiana: American Camping Association, 1974.  202-203.

8.  Bill Banks.  “John Sweet, Activist and Lawyer, Dies at 77.”  Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta, Georgia, 22 June 2020.  Quotation about songs is from John’s wife, Midge.

9.  Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Domestic Security.  Declassified documents.  The Archive website has no more details.  The informant was M. G. Lowman.  He got his information from a girl friend who was a student at the University of Cincinnati.

10.  David Sweet.  “Learning from Mexicans.”  Uploaded to his website on 4 July 2012.

11.  University of Wisconsin - Madison History Newsletter 8(1):9:1979.

12.  Cathy Kelly.  “Santa Cruz Style: Holiday Art Fair Showcases Work of Tannery Arts Center Artists, Others.”  Santa Cruz Sentinel, Santa Cruz, California, 8 December 2012.

13.  Dorothy M. Smith.  “Class of 1959 Directory.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, December 1959.  2.

14.  Sarah Newcomb.  “Marathon Folk Festival Features Singing, Dancing.”  The Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 14 May 1957.  The festival is discussed in the post for 2 April 2023.

15.  Joani Blank.  “Personal Stuff.”  Her website.

16.  Lynn Comella.  “Remembering Good Vibrations Founder Joani Blank, 1937 - 2016.”  Bitch Media website, 12 August 2016.

17.  Liner notes.
18.  Blank.

19.  Smith. 2.  The International Recreation Association is mentioned in the post for 26 March 2023.

20.  Blank.
21.  Blank.
22.  Blank.
23.  Comella.

24.  Andreas Keller.  “Erica Sherover-Marcuse.”  Geni website; last updated 28 April 2022.

25.  “Edler, Fisher, Redsecker, Wald and Related Families.”  Edlers website, page 220, entries for “Erica Reed ‘Ricky’ Sherover PhD,” “Miles (Meyer) Sherover,” and “Moris Sherower.”  Her father was born in Kraków, then part of Galicia.

26.  Miles M. Sherover.  “Magnitogorsk: Epic of Soviet Labor.”  Current History 36(4):405-410:July 1932.

27.  Cordell Hull, Secretary of State.  Letter to the Chargé in France ( Wilson ), 9 March 1937.  United States Department of State website.

28.  Santiago Flores.  “Those Mexican Bellancas.”  Latin American Aviation Historical Society website, 14 September 2018.

29.  “Erica Sherover-Marcuse (1938-1988).”  Marcuse website.
30.  American Business Consultants, Inc.  Counterattack, 20 August 1948.
31.  “Miles Sherover, Industrialist, 80.”  The New York Times, 4 March 1976.
32.  Liner Notes.

33.  Richard M. Dorson.  “The 1958 Folklore Institute of America.”  Midwest Folklore 9(1):39-48:Spring 1959.

34.  Elisha Porat, 27 December 2010.  Anecdote reprinted on Marcuse website.  He was a Hebrew poet. [50]

35.  Bob Cohen.  “The Mississippi Caravan of Music.”  Broadside (51):7-9:20 October 1964.  7.

36.  Marcuse website.
37.  Debbie.  “Mayer A Israel.”  Find a Grave website, 1 May 2017.

38.  Mirror.  Birmingham, Alabama, Central High School yearbook, 1918.  93.  His father was Clarence Elbert Israel.

39.  Debris.  Purdue University yearbook, 1922.  99.

40.  “A Finding Aid to the Clarence E. Israel Papers.”  The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives website.

41.  Department Reports of the State of Ohio, 1922.  Mark’s mother was born Clare Sapadin, and her father was Philip Sapadin. [51]

42.  Marcus Center.
43.  Newcomb.
44.  Liner notes.

45.  “Oberlin Politics.”  Hi-O-Hi.  Oberlin College yearbook, 1958.  81.  SDA was the youth branch of Americans for Democratic Action.

46.  “Sixty To Join March in Capital Saturday.”  Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 87(48):1:14 April 1959.

47.  David Zeigler.  “Bo Israel Tells of Union Work In Ozark Hills.”  Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 88(20):1:4 December 1959.

48.  “Getting to Know...Mark Israel and Judith Lesser.”  The Connections Newspapers, Alexandria Virginia, website,  20 June 2007.  Sarah Newcomb’s brother was Tony Newcomb.

49.  The Connections.
50.  “Elisha Porat.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 29 March 2023.
51.  Debbie.  “Clare Sapadin Israel.”  Find a Grave website, 1 Mary 2017.

Folksmiths - KUM BA YAH (COME BY HERE)

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The Folksmiths introduced “Kum Ba Yah” to New England residential camps in the summer of 1957.  The four young women and four young men were students at Oberlin College who had been inspired, in part, by Pete Seeger.

As mentioned in the post for 26 March 2023, Seeger and his group, The Weavers, lost their recording contract and had their tour dates cancelled in 1953.   In 1954, two Oberlin students from New York City [1] asked Seeger to perform at the college.  250 went into the basement of the art museum.  Freshman Joe Hickerson wrote his family: “I have never seen anything so wonderful in my life.” [2]

Seeger returned in 1955 when 500 came to hear him in the chapel. [3]  In the summer he was at Camp Woodland and testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. [4]  By then, junior Robert Fuller remembers, Seeger had become “a heroic figure to Oberlinians.” [5]

The following fall Hickerson, then a senior, organized the Oberlin Folk Song Club. [6]  In December, David Sweet suggested they form the Folksmiths.  Over the Christmas holiday, the eight talked to their parents and began planning their summer experiment. [7]

Rickey Shoverner recalled they searched for songs and games they could teach.  Someone must have put them in contact with Lynn Rohrbough because they became agents for Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS) and the closely allied World Wide Games. [8]  Their workshop topics could have been dictated by Rohrbough: folk dancing, making instruments, indoor and outdoor games, Lemmi Sticks, and Swing Poi Balls. [9]

Over spring break, Hickerson and some others went to the Swarthmore Folk Festival where they heard Tony Saletan sing “Kumbaya.” [10]  In May, the club organized a folk festival on campus.  Saletan was one of the guests.  He lead them in singing spirituals. [11]

Performers
Vocal Soloist: man on singing, woman on sleeping, man on shouting
Vocal Group: four women and four men
Instrumental Accompaniment: banjo
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
“One version appears in print in several pocket songbooks of the Cooperative  Recreation Service of Delaware, Ohio and is Copyrighted by them.  They collected it from a professor at Baldwin College in Ohio, who heard it from a missionary in Angola, Africa.” [12]

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: KUM ba yah
Verses: kumbaya, singing, sleeping, shouting
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none

Basic Form: “verses can be made up ranging from ‘Someone’s reading’ to ‘someone’s groaning’ etc.” [13]

Verse Repetition Pattern: begin and end with “kumbaya”
Ending: repeat “kumbaya” verse

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; same melody as that published by CRS
Tempo: moderate
Length: 2:10 minutes
Basic Structure: strophic repetition

Singing Style: timbraic harmonie with occasional divergent harmony on “ya” at ends of “kumbaya”

Solo-Group Dynamics: An individual sings the first line of a new verse, and the group joins on the second; they all sing the “kumbaya” verses.  This demonstrates how campers can sing songs they have not heard before.

Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: banjo introduction, then strummed to keep rhythm
Ending: none

Notes on Performance
The group made their demo tapes in a building on the Goddard College campus during a period when they had no engagements. [14]  The recording has more than those four songs.

Notes on Audience
The Folksmiths visited 20 camps and an unspecified number of resorts in New England.  The camps varied in style from tightly structured, competitive ones, to more relaxed progressive ones.  Thirteen were co-ed; one spoke only Hebrew.  The first one they visited was in Brewster, New York. [15]  It may have been Green Chimneys, a camp dedicated to children with special needs.  If so, they probably faced their greatest challenges on their first job, before they had built any expectations for what would happen.

Audience Perceptions
Sherover mentioned two songs more than once.  She noted: “We visited camps which were slightly familiar with folk singing and we saw others whose children had never sung a folk song and who listened entranced to Deep Blue Sea.” [16]

The other was “Kum Ba Yah.”  She wrote: “We remember being greeted by Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbaya, when we returned to a girl’s camp in the Poconos.”  It’s the only song they knew entered local tradition from their singing. [17]

Notes on Performers
Profiles of the Folksmiths appear in the posts for 9 April 2023 and 16 April 2023.

Availability
Album: Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah (Come by Here).”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do: The Folksmiths Travelling Folk Workshop.  Folkways Records FA 2407, released 1958.

Reissue: Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah.”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do.  Smithsonian Folkways FA 2407, CD released 2006.  Versions of the song and the album can be downloaded from the Smithsonian’s Folkways website.

YouTube: Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah.”  Uploaded on 24 May 2015 by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

End Notes
1.  Michael Horowitz went to high school in the Bronx and earned a PhD in anthropology from the State University of New York - Binghamton. [18]  He specialized in the processes of development.  As such, he was an advisor to the World Bank [19] before he died in 2018. [20]

Kent Sidon graduated from Great Neck High School and majored in music at Oberlin.  After a short career as a performer, he founded the Guitar Workshop on Long Island in 1963 to teach classical technique and introduce traditional music to children and adults. [21]  He died in 1975. [22]

2.  Ted Gest.  “A Folk Legend’s Fertile Ground.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine 109(3):14-17:Summer 2014.  14.

3.  Pete Seeger.  Quoted by David King Dunaway.  How Can I Keep from Singing?  New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition.  232.

4.  Dunaway.  204.

5.  Gest.  14.  Robert Works Fuller left Oberlin before he graduated to earn a PhD in physics from Princeton in 1962.  He returned as college president in 1970.  He left in 1974, and became involved with The Hunger Project and informal international diplomacy.  He now lives in Berkeley, California. [23]

6.  Sue Angell.  “A Community of Folk.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine 20(4):Spring 2005.

7.  Ricky Sherover.  “The Folksmiths: Eight Students Who Had Some Singing to Do.”  Sing Out! 8(1):17-20:Spring 1958.  17.

8.  World Wide Games is discussed in the post for 22 May 2022.

9.  Sherover.  17-18.  She identifies “Lummi Sticks” as “An American Indian stick game.”  On pages 424-425, Folk Songs, Camp Songs traces it back to a Maori tradition introduced into this country by a Mormon, Leona Holbrook.  Holbrook’s photograph appears on page 78.

10.  Saletan and the Swarthmore festival are discussed in the post for 26 March 2023.

11.  Sarah Newcomb.  “Marathon Folk Festival Features Singing, Dancing.”  The Oberlin Review, 14 May 1957.

12.  Liner notes for We’ve Got Some Singing To Do.
13.  Liner notes.
14.  Sherover.  20.
15.  Sherover.  18-19.
16.  Sherover.  19.
17.  Sherover.  21.

18.  “Michael M Horowitz.”  Ernest H. Parsons Funeral Home, Binghamton, New York, website, 20 November 2018.

19.  “Michael M. Horowitz.”  Prabook website.
20.  Parsons Funeral Home.

21.  George Vecsey.  “Guitar Workshop Stresses Tradition.”  The New York Times, 16 December 1973.

22.  Mattan Segev-Frank.  “Kent Sidon.”  Geni website; last updated 12 January 2021.
23.  “Robert W. Fuller.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 25 March 2023.

Tony Saletan - Kumbaya

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Tony Saletan introduced “Kumbaya” to the nascent folk revival movement in the spring of 1957 when he sang it at the Swarthmore College Folk Festival. [1]

As mentioned in the post for 11 August 2019, the movement had begun to emerge in the 1930s and become more recognizable with benefit concerts in 1940 for refugees from the Spanish Civil War and drought in Oklahoma that brought together artists like Burl Ives, Josh White, and Woody Guthrie.

Anthony David Saletan was born to Russian immigrants in New York City in 1931. [2]  He grew up surrounded by the kind of people who contributed to those causes. [3]  Barbara Witemeyer remembers her father was friends with Saletan’s dad and that “as children we would go into New York City to have our teeth cared for.  Lenonard Bernstein (‘Lenny’) was a good friend as he also went to Dr. Saletan who often charged his artist patients very little for his work.  Lenny taught David’s son Tony to play jazz on the piano; and we three girls, a few years younger than Tony, always made him play for us.” [4]

Saletan was a freshman at Harvard in 1950 when the recording of  “Goodnight Irene” by the Weavers [5] became the most popular song in the country. [6]  By his junior year, he was the music director for Dunster House and arranging music for the dormitory. [7]  His senior yearbooks listed his interests as: “Vocal, Jazz, Classical” and “Folk Dancing.” [8]

The summer he graduated, 1953, Saletan worked as a counselor at Buck’s Rock Work Camp outside New Milford, Connecticut. [9]  It had been founded in 1942 by Ernst and Ilse Bulova, who had been trained by Maria Montresori in London.  After they arrived in this country, Bulova worked at the Walden School in New York [10] where both Tony and his sister became students. [11]

The next summer Saletan worked at the Shaker Village Work Camp, [12] where Margot Mayo was responsible for folk music. [13]  This may have fit his interests better than Buck’s Rock since she was a founding member of the American Square Dance Group, and taught in New York City. [14]

During this period, Harvey Matusow denounced Peter Seeger as a communist, and the Weavers lost their recording contract in 1953.  The group stopped touring in the spring, [15] and Seeger began performing in New England summer camps.  It’s not known when he first appeared at Buck’s Rock, [16] but he definitely appeared at Shaker Village when Saletan was there. [17]

Seeger became a role model for many aspiring folk singers, especially after he refused to cooperate with House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.  Apart from politics, he pioneered supporting a professional career by performing for children. [18]

Saletan began working on a Masters in Education from Harvard after he graduated. [19]  In 1955, he appeared on a children’s show produced by the Tufts University Nursery Training School.  Come and See was the very first program broadcast by Boston’s public television station, WGBH. [20]  Saletan accompanied himself with a small guitar. [21]

From there, he became the music consultant for the Newton, Massachusetts, public schools. [22]  This was less a full-time job than it was an opportunity to perform in schools when invited.  For instance, he appeared for second graders in Plainville, Massachusetts, in 1958 [23]  Three years later he gave a concert in Newton. [24]

The programs and the television show not only gave him opportunities to perfect his performing techniques, but probably brought him into contact with Augustus D. Zanzig.  Zanzig retired from the Brookline, Massachusetts, schools in 1956, and began working for Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service. [25]  Saletan had to have learned “Kum Ba Yah” from him, either directly or through someone like Marion Roberts who was working with Zanzig in Boston on the songbook for the Girl Guides mentioned in the post for 27 November 2022.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: Tony Saletan
Instrumental Accompaniment: he probably used a guitar

Notes on Lyrics
I have no idea how Saletan sang “Kumbaya”; he may have added his own verses or instrumental flourishes.

This surmise is based on the changes he made to “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”  In the winter before he worked at Shaker Village, he was looking through folksong collections in the Harvard library and found Slave Songs of the United States. [26]  Number 31 is the version of “Michael” collected by Charles Pickard Ware from boatmen working in the Port Royal Islands near Beaufort, South Carolina. [27]

Saletan recalls: “I judged that the tune was very singable, added some harmony (a guitar accompaniment) and thought the one-word chorus would be an easy hit with the teens (it was).  But a typical original verse consisted of one line repeated once, and I thought a rhyme would be more interesting to the teenagers at Shaker Village Work Camp, where I introduced it.  So I adapted traditional African-American couplets in place of the original verses.” [28]

The changes were slight.  “Michael” is one of the few songs in the original collection to have two part harmony on the second line.  The original had 16 verses.  Many dealt with dying in Biblical imagery which would not have interested adolescents.  Verses 10 through 12 became popular: “Brudder, lend a helpin’ hand,” “Sister, help to trim dat boat,” and “Jordan stream is wide and deep.”

Notes on Performance
Occasion: Swarthmore Folk Festival, Sunday, 14 April 1957

Location: Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles from Philadelphia and reachable by rail

The Swarthmore Folk Festival began in 1945 with a strong emphasis on folk ballads of Appalachia.  Richard Dyer-Bennett was the first guest artist.  Pete Seeger appeared in 1953.  The festival became so popular by 1955, that the administration cancelled the festival because it attracted too many outsiders.  Students claimed the president was offended by the fact many wore jeans. [29]

The administration allowed the festival to resume in 1957 on two conditions: fewer artists and no outside visitors. [30]  John Jacob Niles [31] appeared all three days, with Mike and Peggy Seeger joining him on Saturday and Sunday. [32]  The Sunday concert added Tom Paley [33] and Saletan. [34]

Notes on Performers
In 1958, Saletan worked on a record of Japanese folk songs for Rohrbough. [35]  It supported a collection by Albert Ichiro Suzuki that was edited by Zanzig. [36]  Suzuki earned a masters from Boston University in 1952, [37] and the other singers were BU students. [38]  Zanzig played piano.  Saletan spent the next year on an Asian tour sponsored by the International Recreation Association, and later worked on other CRS records. [39]

Throughout the florescence of the commercial folk-music revival, Saletan remained an active performer.  He also continued to work on projects for second graders.  At the time, the performances were probably the most satisfying.  In retrospect, his work with elementary school music had the more lasting impact.  Kathryn Bornhauser recalled:

“You taught me that I can make up new verses and new songs myself, and that my made-up songs count as REAL songs, too!  I passed that awareness on to my children.  We loved our time with you.  One son took up guitar and still plays for personal enjoyment.  You, your voice and your songs are still in our hearts and on our lips.  Thank you, for your gift to the world.  You did and are making a huge difference.” [40]

Saletan now lives in University Place, Washington, and still performs.

End Notes
1.  Joseph C. Hickerson.  Letter, 8 November 1977.

2.  “Rose Saletan in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website; his mother.

“David Saletan.”  Geni website; last updated 2 November 2014.  His father.

“Saul Saletan.”  Geni website; last updated 2 November 2014.  His grandfather, who was born in what is now Latvia.

3.  In 2004, Saletan provided the music for George and Ruth, a play about the Spanish Civil War based on letters written by the parents of one of the authors, Dan Lynn Watt. [41]  A blurb for the book version began: “Recently, Tony Saletan learned that his father, David Saletan, who had a dental practice in New York, provided pro bono dental work for ...” [42]

4.  Barbara Witemeyer.  “Dentist to the Stars.”  Leonard Bernstein website, page 5 of “Memories.

5.  Gordon Jenkins And His Orchestra And The Weavers.  “Goodnight Irene.”  Decca 27077.  Released 1950.  [Discogs entry.]

6.  “Goodnight, Irene.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 19 March 2023.

7.  Milton S. Gwirtzman.  “Dunster Dunces---Charms to Soothe the Savage.”  The Crimson, Harvard University, 9 May 1952.

8.  Red Book, Harvard University yearbook, 1953.  79.
9.  “Tony Saletan.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 17 March 2023.

10.  Douglas Martin.  “Ernst Bulova, 98, Founder Of Camp With a Free Spirit.”  The New York Times, 28 January 2001.

11.  Wikipedia, Saletan.

“Rhoda (Saletan) Goldberger.”  2022 obituary on North Jersey website.

12.  Wikipedia, Saletan.

13.  “Shaker Village Work Camp Is Novel Camping Experience.”  The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 13 August 1947.

14.  “Margot Mayo.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 19 March 2023.
15.  Pete Seeger and The Weavers are discussed in the post for 6 October 2019.

16.  In 1957, campers attended a Weaver’s concert at the Berkshire Music Barn. [43]

17.  Saletan recalled he taught “Michael Row the Boat Shore” to Pete Seeger during the summer of 1954. [44]

18.  The influence of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Children is discussed in the post for 18 August 2019.  She was Pete’s stepmother.  The book was published in 1948 by Doubleday.

19.  “Dirty Old Boston.”  Facebook website, 2 May 2021.
20.  “WGBH-TV.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 18 March 2023.

21.  The photograph for the “Dirty Old Boston” entry shows Saletan and his co-host, Mary Lou Adams.  He is sitting behind her with his guitar.  Later photographs show him with a banjo.

22.  Telecourse Catalog 1967.  Bloomington, Indiana: National Center for School and College Television, 1967.

23.  Harriet F. Washburn.  “Music.”  Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Town Officers of Plainville, Mass Year Ending 31 Dec 1958.  131.

24.  Item.  The Newton Graphic, Newton, Massachusetts, 9 November 1961.

25.  L. R.  “Dedication.”  65 Friendly Songs.  Delaware, Ohio: CRS, Inc, 1963.  Edition for Ohio Music Education Convention, 12 January 1963.  L. R. is Lynn Rohrbough.  For more on Zanzig, see the column at the right of the screen.

26.  Wikipedia, Saletan.

27.  “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”  31 in The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.

28.  Wikipedia, Saletan.  It gives no source; by now Saletan probably has told the story so often he has an internal script he uses.

29.  Will Treece.  “The Swarthmore Folk Festival.”  The Phoenix, Swarthmore College, 31 March 2011.

30.  Treece.
31.  Niles is mentioned in note 24 of the post for 28 April 2019.
32.  Mike and Peggy are children of Pete’s father by his second wife, Ruth Crawford.

33.  Paley was interested in the string-band music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s by Southern white artists.  He, Mike Seeger, and John Cohen formed the New Lost City Ramblers in 1958 to perform that music. [45]

34.  “Swarthmore College Folk Festival 1957 Setlists.”  Setlist website.

35.  A Sampler of Japanese Folk Songs.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, 1959.  10" LP.

36.  Albert Ichiro Suzuki.  A Sampler of Japanese Songs for Group Singing, edited by Augustus D. Zanzig.  Delaware, Ohio: Informal Music Service, 1958.

37.  Boston University website.

38.  Taeko and Masako Fijii were Fulbright Scholars at BU;  San'ichi Kesen was a graduate student in psychology. [46]

39.  Larry Nial Holcomb.  A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  145-146.

40.  Kathryn Bornhauser.  “38 thoughts on ‘Tony Saletan’.”  WGBH Alumni website.  Comment added 20 January 2019.

41.  Molly Lynn Watt and Dan Lynn Watt.  George and Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Educational Alternatives, 2004.  CD.

42.  “George & Ruth-Songs & Letters of the Spanish Civil.”  Deep Discount website, 27 April 2004.  The website no longer is available.

43.  Buck’s Rock Work Camp Yearbook.  New Milford, Connecticut: Buck’s Rock Work Camp, 1957.  44, 61, 65.

44.  Wikipedia, Saletan.
45.  “Tom Paley.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 20 March 2023.
46.  Holcomb.  145.

LaVilla Landowners - Francis L’Engle

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
In 1865, Francis L’Engle purchased the land west of Jacksonville, Florida, that had been owned by Baptist preachers. [1]  After the Civil War, he platted the LaVilla subdivision [2] where James Weldon Johnson was raised.

L’Engle was the son of Susan Philipa Fatio and John Nicole Claudius L’Engle.  Her family was from Switzerland and had owned land in Florida under the Spanish.  His was from France and had lived in Haiti.

Francis Philip Fatio was a Protestant [3] who had fought with the Swiss Guard against France in the War of Austrian Succession.  After he married Marie Madeleine Crispell, he developed land near Nice, France. [4]  In 1761, he moved to London [5] where his brothers were merchants. [6]  His son, Francis Phillipe, Jr., was born that year. [7]

Britain took control of Florida in 1763 as part of the settlement of the Seven Year’s War. [8]  Fatio and two partners invested in an indigo plantation in 1769.  Two years later he moved to the Saint John’s river to manage New Castle plantation. [9]

Fatio and his partners were granted 10,000 acres for a new plantation in 1774 called New Switzerland. [10]  He remained when the Spanish regained control of Florida in 1783. [11]  The next year he bought out his partners. [12]  By 1800, Fatio was growing cotton. [13]

His son, Francis, Jr., married in Greensboro, Georgia, in 1802, [14] and Susan was born in 1806 in Saint Augustine. [15]

The elder Fatio died in 1811.  During the War of 1812, Americans attempted to take Florida.  While there, they burned the Fatio plantation. [16]  The family fled over the international boundary to Saint Mary’s, Georgia.  By 1816, they had returned to Fernandina.  They moved back to the Saint Johns in 1822, and had returned to New Switzerland by 1824. [17]

L’Engle’s grandmother, Suzanne Guilman, was born in Haiti in 1775. [18]  She had married Jean L’Engle by 1796, when their daughter Marie Madeline was born. [19]  Neither were part of the planter class.  Suzanne’s father may have been an officer in the Free Masons, and Jean may have been a ship’s captain and Mason. [20]

The Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791 and the United Kingdom invaded in 1796.  After losing to yellow fever, the British troops retreated in 1798. [21]  L’Engle’s father, John, was born in South Carolina in 1801. [22]

John graduated from West Point in 1819, and immediately was sent to Fernandina’s Amelia Island. [23]  He married Susan Fatio in Saint Johns County, Florida, in 1830. [24]  Francis was born later that year. [25]  John remained in the army until 1838, when he resigned and settled in Florida. [26]

Their son Francis married Charlotte Johnston Porcher in 1853. [27]  A letter at the time said she was the daughter of Dr. Peter Porcher and that Francis worked on the Broad River and “mostly lives in Goldsboro, North Carolina.” [28]  While the immigrant Porcher is well known, her tie to the family has not been documented further. [29]

Francis was twenty-three years old when he married.  He entered business with his father, who traded in real estate, bonds, and notes.  He also rented slaves.  On the eve of the Civil War, he owned fifteen or sixteen. [30]

In 1855, Seymour Baldwin became president of a railroad, which had been chartered in 1851.  He convinced Jacksonville it should issue bonds to pay for construction. [31]  One can only guess John L’Engle subscribed.  The next year, Francis had the contract to survey the route from Jacksonville to Alligator Town, as Lake City then was called. [32]  That was the same year he bought land in LaVilla, which would have benefited from his proposed route.

John Pease Sanderson took over management of the railroad in 1857, [33] and the road commenced operations in March 1860.  Florida seceded from the Union in January 1861. [34]  Francis’ younger brothers joined the army, [35] while John oversaw the construction of fortifications. [36]  John died in 1864. [37]

At the end of the war, Francis faced reduced wealth.  His wife complained she had problems managing with just one servant. [38]  He and his brother Edward became involved with a society promoting immigration to Brazil.  He hoped “to buy just “two or three slaves in Brazil and hold them as long as the damnable abolition spirit of the age will permit me.” [39]

The L’Engles had not been planters before the war; much of their real estate was in or near Jacksonville.  Laura Jarnagin thought the brothers were less interested in leaving the country, than in establishing a business to handle the trade of those who did emigrate. [40]

Railroads were the only assets remaining in the state, and they were in poor condition.  Before the first Union invasion of Jacksonville in 1861, [41] Confederate leaders ordered men to remove iron spikes, bolts, and rails, and then burn the crossties. [42]  When Lake City became the transshipment point for food going north, parts of the original road were rebuilt. [43]  They were the object of the fourth invasion of Jacksonville in 1864. [44]

Getting railroads operational after the war was a high priority for everyone.  During the period when the Union was running the Pensacola and Georgia railroad that ran west from Lake City, Francis had a contract to produce crossties. [45]  One suspects the family may have done similar business before the war.  Later, his brother, Edward, and Sanderson tried to subvert attempts by outsiders to strip the railroad of its assets. [46]

Francis’ land in LaVilla was in equally poor condition.  In 1862, Confederate troops used the Baptist church as a training camp, that led to a skirmish with Union troops in March. [47]

The next year Thomas Wentworth Higginson arrived with Black troops to build defenses for Jacksonville.  To get materials and clear an area from invasion, they cut down “a large forest of pine and oak trees” and “destroyed about fifty dwellings, mostly of an inferior class.” [48]

In 1866, before the Freedmen’s Bureau was operational, Francis platted the land and gave 99-year leases to forty-one Freedmen.  The next year, his wife signed similar leases. [49]  Patricia Drozd Kenney says his motives are hard to discern.  She thought perhaps he was trying to make money on land whose value “was not expected to increase over time.” [50]

Francis remained a businessman.  When sixteen Blacks didn’t pay, he voided their contracts in 1869. [51]  That was the year Johnson’s father contracted for a lot with a “four- or five-room dwelling, old, rough, and unpainted, a typical ‘poor white’ house.” [52]  It may have been one of the repossessed lots.

Johnson was born in 1871 and believed his father bought his land for cash in 1869. [53]  In 1871, he built a new house in the center of the lot. [54]

The next year, 1872, Kenney says “L’Engle entered into a new leasing agreement with twenty-one blacks, five of whom were among the original lessees, stipulating an option to purchase the property in fee simple.” [55]

Francis, no doubt, sold land to Johnson’s father when he saw the money.  However, it would be interesting to know when, or if, he ever learned Johnson’s grandmother had left Haiti in 1802, [56] one year after Francis’ was born to Haitian refugees.

End Notes
1.  Patricia Drozd Kenney.  “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.”  Masters thesis.  The University of Florida, 1990.  13.  This land is mentioned in the post for 12 March 2023.

2.  Kenney.  12.

3.  William Scott Willis.  “A Swiss Settler in East Florida: A Letter of Francis Philip Fatio.”  Florida Historical Quarterly 64(2):174-188:1985.  187.

4.  Willis.  174.
5.  Willis.  175.
6.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.

7.  Tommaso Valarani.  “Francis Phillipe Fatio, Jr.”  Geni website; last updated 20 September 2022.

8.  “East Florida.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 10 March 2023.
9.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”
10.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”
11.  “East Florida.”
12.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”
13.  Willis.  183, 184.

14.  Louise Ingersoll Lanier.  A Genealogy of the Family Who Came to Virginia and Their French Ancestors in London.  Washington, DC: Goetz Printing Company, 1965; reprinted 1970.  262.

15.  “Susan Philippa L'Engle (Fatio).”  Geni website; last updated 20 September 2022.
16.  Willis.  187.

17.  Samantha Williams.  “Spotlight on Louisa Fatio.”  St Augustine website, 8 January 2012.

18.  “Marie Madeleine L'Engle.”  Ancestry website.

19.  Johnny.  “Marie Madeleine “Aunt Leonis” L'Engle.”  Find a Grave website, 13 January 2017.

20.  Oliver Gliech.  “Settlers from St.-Domingue without Landed Property.  Domingino website, 2021.

21.  “Haitian Revolution.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 10 March 2023.
22.  “John Claudius L’Engle.”  Ancestry website.
23.  Bill Thayer.  “Class of 1819.”  University of Chicago website.

24.  “John Claudius L’Engle (1800 - 1864).”  Wiki Tree website; last updated 24 July 2014.

25.  “Francis Fatio “Frank” L’Engle.”  Geni website; last updated 12 June 2018.
26.  Thayer.
27.  Lanier.  262.

28.  Quoted by Towles, p183 - Louise Palmer Towles.  A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

29.  Isaac Porcher immigrated to the French Santee in 1695. [57]

30.  “John Claudius L'Engle account book (1858-1864).”  University of Michigan, Clement Library website.

31.  Edward A. Mueller.  “The Florida Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad.”  Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Southeast Chapter, Newsletter, February 2012.  Additional material from Don Hensley. 1.

32.  Mueller.  2
33.  Mueller.  2.
34.  Mueller.  3.

35.  William Johnson L’Engle was born in 1833. [58]  He died “suddenly” in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1861 while awaiting his commission as a surgeon. [59]  Edward McCrady L’Engle was born in 1834, [60] and served was a quartermaster.  He was wounded in 1862. [61]  John Claudius L’Engle was born in 1840, [62] and rose to be a surgeon. [63]

36.  Thomas Frederick Davis.  History of Early Jacksonville.  Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911.  156.

37.  “John Claudius L’Engle (1800 - 1864).”

38.  Jerrell H. Shofner.  Nor Is It Over Yet.  Gainesville: The University Presses of Florida, 1974.  21-22.

39.  Laura Jarnagin.  “The Edgefield Southern Immigration Society.”  37-45 in A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008.

40.  Jarnagin.
41.  The post for 19 February 2023 discusses Jacksonville in the Civil War.

42.  Samuel Proctor.  “Jacksonville During the Civil War.”  The Florida Historical Quarterly 41(4):343–355:1962.  459.  Proctor thought: “it is questionable that this order was fully carried out.”

43.  Mueller.  4.

44.  “Florida Central and Western Railroad.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 11 March 2023.

45.  Shofner.  30.

46.  Paul E. Fenlon.  “The Notorious Swepson-Littlefield Fraud: Railroad Financing in Florida (1868-1871).”  The Florida Historical Quarterly 32(4):231-261:April 1954.

47.  “Skirmish of the Brick Church.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.

48.  Davis.  180.
49.  Kenney.  12.
50.  Kenney.  49.
51.  Kenney.  49.

52.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.  139.

53.  Johnson.  139.
54.  Johnson.  140-141.
55.  Kenney.  50.
56.  Johnson. 135.

57.  “Porcher Family Papers, 1740–1967.”  South Carolina Historical Society website.

58.  Cousins by the Dozens.  “William Johnson L'Engle.”  Find a Grave website, 14 August 2010.
 
59.  “William Johnson L’Engle Book, 1843-1863.”  University of North Carolina, Wilson Special Collections Library website.

60.  Kristy Thomas.  “Edward McCrady L’Engle.”  Find a Grave website.  23 July 2002.

61.  Genealogy Trails Team.  “Civil War Infantry Rosters.”  Genealogy Trails website.  Its source is: Fred L. Robertson.  Soldiers of Florida in the Seminole Indian--Civil and Spanish-American Wars.  Tallahassee, Florida: Board of State Institutions, 1903.

62.  “John Claudius L’Engle.”  Ancestry website.
63.  Genealogy Trails.

LaVilla Landowners - Joseph Stevens Baker

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
James McDonald’s contract with the Georgia Baptist Association in 1832 required him to keep a daily journal and report quarterly. [1]  He often sent reports to The Christian Index, [2] which was published by the association.  By the time McDonald was in Jacksonville, the editor was Joseph Stevens Baker. [3]

Baker’s family had moved to Dorchester, South Carolina, from Massachusetts in 1695. [4]  The Congregational church removed to Liberty County, Georgia, in 1752. [5]  His grandfather was the first deacon. [6]  After the American Revolution, it affiliated with the Presbyterians. [7]

Joseph was raised to be a Presbyterian minster like his four step-brothers.  For that purpose he was sent to Hampden-Sidney College. [8]  While the school supported religious freedom, [9] it also housed the Presbyterian’s Union Theological Seminary. [10]

When he returned to Liberty County, the local church asked him to prepare an answer to the question: was John’s baptism a Christian baptism?  Two years later, Baker sold his property in Georgia and entered Columbian College to study medicine. [11]  It had been founded in 1821 by Baptists. [12]

Baker practiced medicine for a few years, then became a Baptist missionary.  It was after he moved to Georgia around 1840 that he took over the editorship of The Christian Index.  It suffered the same financial problems that McDonald did when the Southern Baptist Convention replaced the Northern Baptist sponsors. [13]  He resigned in 1848, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida. [14]

By then, Baker was fifty years old.  His son, McRobert Baker, was a lawyer who also moved to Jacksonville.  In 1850, he was the town’s mayor. [15]  Joseph must have acted as a preacher at McDonald’s church when the evangelist was out proselytizing. [16]  In 1851, McDonald sold his land to the Bakers [17] and moved to Atlanta.  McRobert turned part of the acreage into a plantation, which he called LaVilla. [18]

The same year, 1850, McDonald’s deacon, Elias Jaudon bought a 550 acre plantation on the Saint John’s River.  The previous owner, William McKay, had used 50 slaves to grow sea island cotton.  By 1855, Jaudon had expanded Magnolia Plantation to 1,000 acres and added livestock and over crops. [19]

In 1853, McRobert Baker was a circuit court judge for Sumter County in the central part of the state, but still lived in Jacksonville. [20]  The next year, Joseph returned to Georgia. [21]  McRobert’s interests in central Florida increased, and, in 1856, he sold LaVilla to Francis L’Engle. [22]

Jaudon remained the deacon for Bethel Baptist church, and supported the minister who arrived in 1859, E. M. Dennison. [23]  The church had grown to 290 members, of whom 250 were Black. [24]  By 1861, Jaudon provided land for a new building closer to town. [25]  The cemetery remained where it was.

In the meantime, in 1860, Jaudon, McRobert, and others incorporated La Villa Institute as a school to train teachers. [26]

During the Civil War, the new church building was used as a hospital for Union troops. [27]  After the war, the white and Black members fought over its ownership.  In 1868, a court gave whites the property, and ordered them to pay compensation to the newly freed Blacks.  They used the funds to erect a wooden building at a new location, which they called Bethel Baptist.  In response, the whites changed their name to Tabernacle Baptist. [28]

Jaudon’s role in this fight is unknown.  By 1868, he was 62 years old. [29]  His oldest son had died in Richmond in 1862, [30] and he apparently had left the area during the war. [31]  Jaudon returned a less wealthy man; he had lost capital when slaves were emancipated.  His land had not been tended during the war and probably had been used by Union troops in 1865.

During Reconstruction, Jacksonville attracted northerners, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, [32] who came for the winters or to make investments. [33]  Capital moved more freely after Federal troops were withdraw in April of 1869. [34]  In 1869, Jaudon sold 100 acres to Elwell Jamison, who in turn sold 35 acres to William James.  They hoped to build a residential suburb. [35]

Jaudon died in 1872. [36].  McRobert had died in Richmond in 1864. [37]  His father, Joseph, moved to Quitman, Georgia, after the war where he died in 1877. [38]

End Notes
1.  James C. Bryant.  “James McDonald: Missionary to East Florida.”  Florida Baptist Historical Society meeting, Deland, Florida, 5 May 1984.  Republished on the society’s website.  17, footnote 27.  James McDonald is introduced in the post for 5 March 2023.

2.  Bryant.  3.
3.  “The Christian Index.”  Georgia Historic Newspapers website.

4.  Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society.  History of the Town of Dorchester, Massachusetts.  Boston, Massachusetts: Ebenezer Clapp, Jr., 1859.  261-262.

5.  James Stacy.  History of the Midway Congregational Church, Liberty County, Georgia.  Newman, Georgia: S. W. Murray, 1899.  16-18.

6.  Stacy.  33.
7.  Stacy. 12.

8.  William Cathcart.  Baptist Encyclopedia.  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Louis H. Everts, 1881.  Biography of Joseph S. Baker reprinted by Greg Willis.  “Joseph S. Baker, Queries Considered
Church Discipline, 1847.”  247-249 in Polity, edited by Mark Dever.  Center for Church Reform, 2001.  248.

9.  “Hampden–Sydney College.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 4 March 2023.
10.  “Union Presbyterian Seminary.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 4 March 2023.
11.  Cathcart.  248.
12.  “Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 4 March 2023.

13.  The post for 5 March 2023 discusses the impact of the division of the Baptist church over slavery on the income of McDonald.

14.  Cathcart.  248.

15.  Richard Lee Cronin.  “Cowboys & Lawyers: Part 2 - Joseph McRobert Baker.”  Citrus Land Fl website, 9 January 2020.

16.  Thomas Frederick Davis.  History of Early Jacksonville.  Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911.  88.

17.  T. Frederick Davis.  History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924.  Saint Augustine, Florida: The Record Company for The Florida Historical Society, 1925.  43-44.

18.  Davis, 1925.  44.

19.  Wayne W. Wood.  The Living Heritage of Riverside & Avondale.  Jacksonville, Florida: Riverside Avondale Preservation, Inc., 1994.  9.

20.  Cronin.
21.  Davis, 1911.  88.

22.  Patricia Drozd Kenney.  “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.”  Masters thesis.  The University of Florida, 1990.  13.

23.  Item on E. M. Dennison in “Biographies D.”  Florida Baptist Historical Society website, 23 November 2020.

24.  Davis, 1911.  88.
25.  Davis, 1911.  87.

26.  Chapter 1,166—[No. 73].  An act to incorporate La Villa Institute, near Jacksonville, Florida, 1860.  157-1958 in The Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the General Assembly of Florida at Its Tenth Session.  Tallahassee, Florida: Dyke and Carlisle for Office of the Floridian and Journal, 1861.

27.  Davis, 1911.  87.
28.  “Our History.”  The Bethel Experience website.
29.  “Elias Gabriel Jaudon, Jr.”  Geni website, last updated 8 February 2023.

30.  Isaiah W.  “Elias Gabriel Jaudon III (1836 - 1862).”  Wiki Tree website, 10 November 2013; last updated 20 April 2018.

31.  Steve W. has been researching the history of the 169th Civil War regiment from Troy, New York.  The men were camped north of Jaudon’s plantation in 1865.  On 9 February 2014, he reprinted reports by men in the regiment on the Metro Jacksonville website who described vacant houses in the area.  In another post on 9 February 2014, Steve concluded: “I think a possible reason why the mansion, plantation, and nearby village were not identified by the men is because the place was deserted, per orders of the Confederate authorities.  Nobody was left behind to say who owned the property.” [39]

32.  Stowe paid her first visit to Jacksonville in 1867.  For the next 17 years she and her husband spent their winters on 90 acres of land they purchased.  She became a bit of a tourist attraction herself when steamboats went buy their property. [40]  Her observations on a ring shout are quoted in the post for September 2018.

33.  Davis, 1925.  149, 152.
34.  Davis, 1911.  197.
35.  Wood.  10.
36.  “Elias Gabriel Jaudon, Jr.”
37.  Cronin.

38.  Stacy.  138.  Quitman is located near the Florida boundary; the rivers flow into the Suwannee in central Florida.  The surrounding Brooks County was a center of vigilante activity during reconstruction. [41]

39.  Steve W.  “Topic: Jacksonville Plantation Mystery (Civil War) -- SOLVED.”  Metro Jacksonville website, 9 February 2014.

40.  Jeff Klinkenberg.  “Mrs. Stowe’s Florida.”  Tampa Bay website, 19 November 2006; last updated 20 November 2006.

41.  “Brooks County, Georgia.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 8 March 2023.

LaVilla Landowners - James McDonald

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
James Weldon Johnson grew up in LaVilla, a small community west of Jacksonville after the Civil War. [1]  The area originally was an island, but the surrounding creeks later were filled. [2]

Like most land in the area, it began as a Spanish grant, and changed hands several times.  In 1836, Adin Waterman acquired 250 acres on behalf of Lydia Pinkston, apparently as an investment. [3]  It was described as pine and oak woods in 1863. [4]  Waterman had a large timber grant from the Spanish with a sawmill near modern Chester. [5]  He had been named as her trustee when she married Milo K. Pinkston. [6]

In that year, 1836, James McDonald was a Baptist evangelist in Darien, Georgia. [7]  He had been born in Limerick, Ireland, where his father was hung as a rebel in 1805.  The seventeen-year-old fled the country after “exacting revenge upon a fellow countryman for his false testimony against his relatives.”  He had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and so headed for Cuba, where he was arrested by the Spanish as a spy for England.  A friend from Norfolk saved him from execution. [8]

That was around 1815.  Sometime after he moved to Georgia, where he became a Baptist.  During his voyage to Cuba, the ship’s captain had tried to convince him “it was not a mortal sin to read the Scriptures.” [9]

McDonald was living near Macon in central Georgia when he was licensed to preach in 1830.  Two years later, the Georgia Baptist Association made him a missionary to Burke County near Augusta on the South Carolina border. [10]  By 1837, he was working for the Sunbury Baptist Association and living in Darien. [11]  Most of his converts there were Black. [12]

He made an exploratory trip down the coast into north Florida in the spring of 1837 where he held a three-day protracted meeting.  In the summer, he returned to the area where he held a five-day meeting in Jacksonville.  After people asked him to return, [13] he moved to Fernandina’s Nassau County in 1838.  At the time the county seat was at the Court House Ditch on Waterman’s Grant. [14]

McDonald’s primary purpose was holding meetings where he converted attendees.  If enough affiliated, he found some local person to run the congregation, while he went elsewhere.  He did return on a circuit a preach at each group. [15]  By 1839, he had organized 17 congregations, and was ministering to seven. [16]

In 1840, Jacksonville built a small church, [17] and, in June, McDonald moved from Nassau County to the town.  The building was dedicated in September, with a gallery for slaves. [18]

His life became for secure in 1941, when he was hired by the American Baptist Home Missionary Society. [19]  That year, he notified The Christian Index:

“In this beautiful river [St. Johns] opposite our town, I have never baptized but one white person, whilst thirty blacks have gone down into the water, and been buried with Christ by baptism into death.” [20]

In January 1842, Waterman transferred 250 acres to McDonald.  In March, a neighbor deeded the adjoining 250 acres to him. [21]  In May, the 44-year-old man married. [22]  In August, the Seminole War, which had been raging since 1835, formally ended. [23]

McDonald’s wife, Theresa Amanda Pendarvis, was the descendant of the Joseph Pendarvis, who had gone to South Carolina from Barbados in 1672. [24]  His son, John, recognized and freed the children of his slave mistress, Parthena. [25]  Theresa’s father George was born in Dorchester, South Carolina, and was in Jacksonville by 1830. [26]  One of her sisters was named Lavilla. [27]

Nothing is known about the wives of George’s father, William, or his grandfather, also William, the son of John. [28]  PBS thought some of John’s descendants could have married white women, and within a few generations been considered white. [29]  One assumes Theresa was deemed white.

McDonald’s security ended in 1845, when the Baptists split over slavery.  He lost his position with the northern society, and returned to itinerant evangelism for the Southern Baptist Convention. [30]

Meantime, the congregation in Jacksonville sold its church building and erected a brick building on McDonald’s land in 1846.  His deacon, Elias Gabriel Jaudon, purchased some adjacent land for a cemetery. [31]

The Southern Baptist Convention finances deteriorated and, in 1849, the 51-year-old began planning a move to Atlanta. [32]  After weathering the war there, McDonald moved to Rome, Georgia, in 1869, where he died in April. [33]

Jaudon must have maintained the church during the periods McDonald was working as an evangelist.  His immigrant ancestor, Daniel Jaudon, moved from the Bay of Biscay to the French Santee. [34]  Sometime his grandson, Samuel Elias Jaudon, moved to the Black Swamp area near Beaufort. [35]  There the family affiliated with the local Baptist church. [36]

Our Jaudon managed a plantation on Hilton Head for Mary Sarah Stoney Barksdale.  This was probably after her husband died in 1832 and before she remarried in 1836. [37]  Her grandfather, John Stoney, had migrated from Tipperary, Ireland, in 1774. [38]  His son, her father James, married the daughter of a Baptist convert who lived in the Black Swamp area. [39]

Jaudon was able to marry in 1835, and, by 1840, was a planter in Beaufort. [40]  He was in Jacksonville by the time McDonald held his first meeting.  He and his wife were charter members, and must have been two of the few whites in the congregation.  When he died in 1872, [41] he owned the Magnolia Plantation. [42]

End Notes
1.  Johnson is discussed in the post for 12 February 2023.

2.  T. Frederick Davis.  History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924.  Saint Augustine, Florida: The Record Company for The Florida Historical Society, 1925.  151.

3.  Davis, 1925.  43.

4.  Thomas Frederick Davis.  History of Early Jacksonville.  Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911.  180.

5.  John Hendricks.  “Pioneers Who Lived in the Yulee Area Two Hundred Years Ago.”  The Yulee News, 16 June 2022.  2.  Not much more is known about them except Waterman named one of his sons Lewis Pinkston. [43]

6.  Davis, 1925.  43.

7.  Darien, Georgia, is mentioned in the posts for 2 October 2018 on Lydia Parrish and for 3 February 2019 on Robert Winslow Gordon.  Gordon collected four versions of “Come by Here” near Darien in 1926.

8.  “James McDonald.”  Florida Baptist History website.

9.  James C. Bryant.  “James McDonald: Missionary to East Florida.”  Florida Baptist Historical Society meeting, Deland, Florida, 5 May 1984.  Republished on the society’s website.  9.

10.  Bryant.  9.
11.  “James McDonald.”
12.  Bryant.  3.
13.  Bryant.  4.

14.  Bryant.  5.  “So stagnant did business become between 1835 and 1840 that the county seat was removed from Fernandina to a community known as Court House Ditch at Waterman’s Grant, between King’s Ferry and Fernandina.” [44]

15.  Bryant.  6.
16.  “James McDonald.”
17.  Davis, 1911.  86.
18.  Bryant.  11.
19.  “James McDonald.”
20.  The Christian Index, 24 September 1841.  618.  Quoted by Bryant.  12.

21.  Davis, 1925.  43.  Davis used the word “deeded.”  This suggests McDonald may not have bought the land, as it seems hard to believe he would have accumulated any capital.

22.  Bryant 17, note 18.
23.  “Seminole Wars.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 26 February 2023.

24.  Agnes Leland Baldwin.  First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670–1700.  Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1985.  182.

25.  Jim Latrip.  “Pendarvis.”  Gen website.  The connection was made by Theresa’s daughter who knew the names of George, William, and William.  Randy Floyd found the reference in a letter of James Barnwell Hayward.  Hayward then tied the elder William to Joseph. [45]  Hayward elided John’s children in his published genealogy of the family. [46]

26.  Fred.  “wilfredleblanc -- Cavaliers and Pioneers.”  Roots Web website, last updated 9 May 2019.  Page for “George Pendarvis.”  Dorchester is discussed in the post for 12 March 2023.

27.  George Pendarvis.  Will, 28 October 1870.  Transcribed by Jane Gibbs and posted on US Gen Web website.  He called Theresa Tracy.

28.  Latrip.
29.  “Pendarvis.”  Public Broadcasting System website.
30.  Bryant.  13.
31.  Davis, 1911.  87.
32.  Bryant.  14-15.
33.  Bryant.  15.

34.  Robert E. H. Peeples and Sarah Nichols Pickney.  “Jaudon of Carolina.”  Huguenot Society of South Carolina, Transactions (89):123-139:1984.  123.  Daniel probably immigrated after 1700, because he is not in Agnes Leland Baldwin’s list of seventeenth century settlers. [47]  His son was born in 1715 in the French Santee. [48]  The French Santee is mentioned in the post for 20 November 2022 on Hezekiah Maham.

35.  “Samuel Elias Jaudon.”  Gini website, 5 September 2017.
36.  Peeples and Pickney.

37.  “Calibogia (Lawton) Plantation.”  The Heritage Library Foundation, Hilton Head, South Carolina, website.

38.  Mags Gaulden.  “John Stoney (abt. 1748 - 1821.”  Wiki Tree website, 18 March 2014; last updated 20 February 2023.

39.  Robert E. H. Peeples.  Tales of Ante Bellum Island Families.  Hilton Head, South Carolina: 1970.  Part reprinted in “Gaillard Genealogy,” Square Space website.

40.  Peeples and Pickney.
41.  “Elias Gabriel Jaudon, Jr.”  Gini website, 8 February 2023.
42.  Peeples and Pickney.

43.  Sally Spencer (Watkins) Lanoza.  “Adin Eleazer Waterman.”  Geni website, 8 November 2022.  She does not have surnames for Waterman’s wife or mother.

44.  “American Proprietors, 1818-1860.”  Amelia Island Genealogical Society website.
45.  Cited by Fred.  Page for “Sarah Rebecca McDonald.”

46.  James Barnwell Hayward.  Pendarvis-Bedon Family.  Atlanta, Georgia: Foote and Davies, 1905.  45.

47.  Baldwin.
48.  Edward Leo Neary.  “Elias Timothy Jaudon.”  Geni website, 14 July 2021.