Chansons de Notre Chalet - Kum Ba Yah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line

Credits
African (Angola)

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

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28.  Storrowtown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

48.  Wikipedia, Storrow.

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

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

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

Hezekiah Maham’s Rice Plantation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16.  Johnson.  286.

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

18.  Kelley.  1:313.

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

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

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

22.  Dubose, Reminiscences.  66.

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

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

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

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

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

28.  Johnson.  287–288.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

51.  Johnson.  286.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hezekiah Maham’s Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20.  Towles.  19.

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

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

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

24.  Towles.  1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

44.  Jackie.

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

The Second Introduction of Rice

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
The American Revolution disrupted South Carolina’s economy.  Because of the Navigation Acts, it only had one market for its crops, and one pool of creditors and shippers.  During hostilities, England found other sources for its indigo and rice.  The East India Company’s indigo producers monopolized the market after the war. [1]

Planters, who previously had grown rice, or had continued to do so on a small scale, returned to it.  However, freshets often destroyed the crops between 1784 and 1796. [2]  These floods inspired Nathaniel Heyward to experiment with methods to control the tides that daily flowed over coastal lands in 1788.  Once he proved the effectiveness of flood irrigation around Beaufort in southern South Carolina, planters moved from the inland swamps in the northern part of the state to the narrow band of land influenced by the tides. [3]

Inland, farmers converted their indigo lands to cotton after Wade Hampton proved it would grow around Columbia, South Carolina, in 1799. [4]  In the interim, in the period immediately after the war, farmers did what they could to survive.

One problem was finding rice seeds to plant.  The war had affected different parts of the colony at different times.  In 1778, British troops took Savannah, Georgia, and advanced north toward Charles Town.  Planters were given the choice of submitting or having their lands destroyed. [5]  After that, those who had not been plundered were able to resume some form of normal operations.

The British succeeded in taking Charles Town in May 1780.  Again, people were given the option of accepting parole as prisoners of war, or risk being looted. [6]  Francis Marion rallied dispirited rebels, who harassed the British troops as they tried to pacify the country from Charles Town to the far west. [7]  Planters still were being plundered when the war ended. [8]

Growers, like Heyward, in the southern part of the new state resumed their old ways. [9]  They still had their stores of rice with white seed-heads.  Nathaniel Greene surprised the British near Dorchester, and forced them toward Charles Town in late 1781.  David Ramsay remembered “by this means all the rice between Edisto and the Ashely rivers was saved.” [10]

Those in the north, who moved from the inland swamps to the coast, adopted new ways.  Not only did they adopt flood irrigation, but they also built rice mills powered by animals or water. [11]

Robert Allston, who became one of the most prominent planters in the Winyah Bay area, believed Hezekiah Maham was the man who introduced the particular variety of gold-hulled rice in 1785 that soon became the primary crop. [12]

No one asks where Maham obtained his rice.  Instead, the question has become what made it special.  Anna McClung and Robert Fjellstrom analyzed contemporary seeds to determine one section of one gene was unique.  This particular one affected the amount of starch in grain. [13]  In 1983, researchers for the Carnegie Institution discovered the Wx or waxy gene controlled amylose content in maize pollen and kernels. [14]  The gene since has been found in wheat, barley, millet and rice.  In rice, the Wxa allele is associated with dryland indica and Wxb is found with wetland japonica. [15]

McClung and Fjellstrom searched for the Carolina gold allele in the National Plant Germplasm System, and found it appeared in less than 1% of the samples. [16]  When they scanned the data base for the closest match, they found one grown in Ghana.  However, that did not mean the rice came from Africa.  It well could have come from South Carolina through trade. [17]

The one with a golden panicle is a subspecies of the Asian Oryza sativa not the African Oryza glaberrima.  That subspecies, Indica, developed in India, [18] and was spread west by Arab traders. [19]  Portuguese traders may then have spread Indica.  It eventually was found in Madagascar, replacing the Javonica brought there centuries before from Malaysia.  It also displaced the African Glaberrima wherever the Portuguese introduced it. [20]

The rules of genetics did not stop some from proclaiming the single DNA match as proof Carolina Gold was introduced by slaves. [21]  However, the mere fact that the variety has not been found anywhere else suggests it was the result of a rare mutation, much like the more common one that produces the weedy, red rice. [22]

McClung’s team since has attempted to recreate gold seed from the white that is known to have been common in South Carolina, and continued to be grown around Beaufort.  Glenn Roberts says it took “a 36 month subtropical and tropical year round program.  They increased this seed to breeder, then to foundation seed, then passed it to experienced [. . .] growers to move the pure [seed] into first year production only to discover a red out-cross in the subsequent pure Carolina Gold production rice harvest.” [23]

The random, but constant, appearance of the red-skinned rice may be less the result of genetics than environment.  A group of Japanese scientists found both the Wxa and Wxb existed in both Indica and Japonica, and that the distinction between the two occurs during the encoding process when a nucleotide that follows the pattern AGGT mutates to AGTT. [24]

The purity of the gold rice in the northern part of South Carolina probably occurred because planters did not save their own rice for the next year’s crop.  The red seeds still were produced as probability theories would insist. [25]  They were removed from seed intended for market by the mills that husked the grain.  However, seed corn was not husked because the rice deteriorates after the protective shell is removed. [26]

In 1911, the United States Department of Agriculture noted that farmers who could not use flood irrigation became the ones who provided the seed.  The red rice and weeds were removed when it was husked with older methods. [27]  One suspects they also trained the men who were hired as overseers. [28]

End Notes
1.  G. Terry Sharrer.  “Indigo in Carolina, 1671-1796.”  The South Carolina Historical Magazine 72(2):94-103:April 1971.  102.  He argues England’s wars produced more incentives for planters than the subsidy that existed from 1848 to 1777.

2.  David Ramsay.  The History of South-Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: David Longworth, 1809.  Reprinted as Ramsay’s History of South Carolina.  Newberry, South Carolina: W. J. Duffie, 1858.  1:293.  For more on freshets, see the post 16 January 2019.

3.  Heyward is discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
4.  The introduction of upland cotton is discussed in the post for 25 August 2019.
5.  Ramsay.  1:182.

6.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  233.

7.  Edgar.  235.  Marion now is known as the Swamp Fox.
8.  Edgar.  238, 243.
9.  Heyward’s reaction to mills is mentioned in the post for 16 January 2019.
10.  Ramsay.  1:249.
11.  See the post for 16 January 2019 for more on the introduction of mills.

12.  Robert F. W. Allston.  “The Rice Plant.”  De Bow’s Commercial Review of the South and West 1:320-357:1846.  326.

13.  Anna McClung and Bob Fjellstrom.  “America’s Golden Treasure.”  Texas Rice 5(6):5-6:August/September 2005.  Summary of a paper given at a symposium in Charleston, South Carolina, sponsored by the Carolina Gold Foundation in August 2005.

14.  M. Shure, S. R. Wessler, and N. Federoff.  “Molecular Identification and Isolation of the Waxy Locus in Maize.”  Cell 35:225-233:1983.

15.  Shinsuke Yamanaka, Ikuo Nakamura, Kazuo N. Watanabe, and Yo-Ichiro Sato.  “Identification of SNPs in the Waxy Gene among Glutinous Rice Cultivars and Their Evolutionary Significance during the Domestication Process.”  Theoretical and Applied Genetics 108:1200-124:2004.  In a simple understanding of genetics, the specific color of an eye, blue or brown, is called an allele of the gene that controls color.

16.  McClung and Fjellstrom.

17.  Erik Stokstad.  “American Rice: Out of Africa.”  Science website, 16 November 2007.  Report of paper by Anna McClung given at the American Society of Agronomy 2007 meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

18.  T. T. Chang. “Domestication and Spread of the Cultivated Rices.”  408-417 in Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation.  Edited by David R. Harris and Gordon C. Hillman.  London: Routledge, 2016.  The obvious difference between Indica and Japonica is that the grains of the latter stick together when cooked, while they remain separate in the first.

19.  Andrew M. Watson.  Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  17.  Cited by Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., and William Robert Judd.  The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice.  Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014.  10.

20.  Porcher.  11.

21.  Stokstad.  “Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.”  Carney is discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.

22.  Early attempts to explain the appearance of red rice are mentioned in the posts for 18 September 2022 and 25 September 2022.

23.  Glenn Roberts.  “Carolina Gold Rice: Pure Seed, Fame, Fourtune & Hurricane Rita.”  Carolina Gold Rice Foundation Newsletter, January 2007.  Ellipsis were CGR for Carolina Gold Rice.

24.  M. Umeda, H. Ohtsubo, and E. Ohtsubo.  “Diversification of the Rice Waxy Gene by Insertion of Mobile DNA Elements into Introns.”  The Japanese Journal of Genetics 66:569-86:1991.

25.  Allston said that sometimes rice fields became “contaminated with either grass-seed or red-rice, as not to reward sufficiently the labor bestowed on its culture.”  Instead of abandoning them, he argued planters should introduce a regime of leaving a field fallow every four years.  Then, he reported “all the rusty, red grains of rice, which have been lying dormant in the mud for years, were thrown out and exposed to the fructifying influence of the sun, vegetate, and are utterly destroyed by the frost before the time for planting the next crop.” [29]

26.  J. H. Easterby.  “Introduction.”  1-49 in  The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1945; reprinted by University of South Carolina of Columbia in 2004.  40.

27.  W. E. McLendon, G. A. Crabb, Earl Carr, and F. S. Welsh.  “Soil Survey of Georgetown County, South Carolina.”  513-562 in Field Operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1911.  Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1914.  520.

28.  The post for 16 January 2019 summarized a study on the characteristics of overseers.  The census data that was used could only identify men by state of birth.

29.  R. F. W. Allston.  “On the Cultivation of Rice.”  The Southern Agriculturist 3(7):241-246:July 1843.  244-245.

The Second Introduction of Rice

 Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
The American Revolution disrupted South Carolina’s economy.  Because of the Navigation Acts, it only had one market for its crops, and one pool of creditors and shippers.  During hostilities, England found other sources for its indigo and rice.  The East India Company’s indigo producers monopolized the market after the war. [1]

Planters, who previously had grown rice, or had continued to do so on a small scale, returned to it.  However, freshets often destroyed the crops between 1784 and 1796. [2]  These floods inspired Nathaniel Heyward to experiment with methods to control the tides that daily flowed over coastal lands in 1788.  Once he proved the effectiveness of flood irrigation around Beaufort in southern South Carolina, planters moved from the inland swamps in the northern part of the state to the narrow band of land influenced by the tides. [3]

Inland, farmers converted their indigo lands to cotton after Wade Hampton proved it would grow around Columbia, South Carolina, in 1799. [4]  In the interim, in the period immediately after the war, farmers did what they could to survive.

One problem was finding rice seeds to plant.  The war had affected different parts of the colony at different times.  In 1778, British troops took Savannah, Georgia, and advanced north toward Charles Town.  Planters were given the choice of submitting or having their lands destroyed. [5]  After that, those who had not been plundered were able to resume some form of normal operations.

The British succeeded in taking Charles Town in May 1780.  Again, people were given the option of accepting parole as prisoners of war, or risk being looted. [6]  Francis Marion rallied dispirited rebels, who harassed the British troops as they tried to pacify the country from Charles Town to the far west. [7]  Planters still were being plundered when the war ended. [8]

Growers, like Heyward, in the southern part of the new state resumed their old ways. [9]  They still had their stores of rice with white seed-heads.  Nathaniel Greene surprised the British near Dorchester, and forced them toward Charles Town in late 1781.  David Ramsay remembered “by this means all the rice between Edisto and the Ashely rivers was saved.” [10]

Those in the north, who moved from the inland swamps to the coast, adopted new ways.  Not only did they adopt flood irrigation, but they also built rice mills powered by animals or water. [11]

Robert Allston, who became one of the most prominent planters in the Winyah Bay area, believed Hezekiah Maham was the man who introduced the particular variety of gold-hulled rice in 1785 that soon became the primary crop. [12]

No one asks where Maham obtained his rice.  Instead, the question has become what made it special.  Anna McClung and Robert Fjellstrom analyzed contemporary seeds to determine one section of one gene was unique.  This particular one affected the amount of starch in grain. [13]  In 1983, researchers for the Carnegie Institution discovered the Wx or waxy gene controlled amylose content in maize pollen and kernels. [14]  The gene since has been found in wheat, barley, millet and rice.  In rice, the Wxa allele is associated with dryland indica and Wxb is found with wetland japonica. [15]

McClung and Fjellstrom searched for the Carolina gold allele in the National Plant Germplasm System, and found it appeared in less than 1% of the samples. [16]  When they scanned the data base for the closest match, they found one grown in Ghana.  However, that did not mean the rice came from Africa.  It well could have come from South Carolina through trade. [17]

The one with a golden panicle is a subspecies of the Asian Oryza sativa not the African Oryza glaberrima.  That subspecies, Indica, developed in India, [18] and was spread west by Arab traders. [19]  Portuguese traders may then have spread Indica.  It eventually was found in Madagascar, replacing the Javonica brought there centuries before from Malaysia.  It also displaced the African Glaberrima wherever the Portuguese introduced it. [20]

The rules of genetics did not stop some from proclaiming the single DNA match as proof Carolina Gold was introduced by slaves. [21]  However, the mere fact that the variety has not been found anywhere else suggests it was the result of a rare mutation, much like the more common one that produces the weedy, red rice. [22]

McClung’s team since has attempted to recreate gold seed from the white that is known to have been common in South Carolina, and continued to be grown around Beaufort.  Glenn Roberts says it took “a 36 month subtropical and tropical year round program.  They increased this seed to breeder, then to foundation seed, then passed it to experienced [. . .] growers to move the pure [seed] into first year production only to discover a red out-cross in the subsequent pure Carolina Gold production rice harvest.” [23]

The random, but constant, appearance of the red-skinned rice may be less the result of genetics than environment.  A group of Japanese scientists found both the Wxa and Wxb existed in both Indica and Japonica, and that the distinction between the two occurs during the encoding process when a nucleotide that follows the pattern AGGT mutates to AGTT. [24]

The purity of the gold rice in the northern part of South Carolina probably occurred because planters did not save their own rice for the next year’s crop.  The red seeds still were produced as probability theories would insist. [25]  They were removed from seed intended for market by the mills that husked the grain.  However, seed corn was not husked because the rice deteriorates after the protective shell is removed. [26]

In 1911, the United States Department of Agriculture noted that farmers who could not use flood irrigation became the ones who provided the seed.  The red rice and weeds were removed when it was husked with older methods. [27]  One suspects they also trained the men who were hired as overseers. [28]

End Notes
1.  G. Terry Sharrer.  “Indigo in Carolina, 1671-1796.”  The South Carolina Historical Magazine 72(2):94-103:April 1971.  102.  He argues England’s wars produced more incentives for planters than the subsidy that existed from 1848 to 1777.

2.  David Ramsay.  The History of South-Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: David Longworth, 1809.  Reprinted as Ramsay’s History of South Carolina.  Newberry, South Carolina: W. J. Duffie, 1858.  1:293.  For more on freshets, see the post 16 January 2019.

3.  Heyward is discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
4.  The introduction of upland cotton is discussed in the post for 25 August 2019.
5.  Ramsay.  1:182.

6.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  233.

7.  Edgar.  235.  Marion now is known as the Swamp Fox.
8.  Edgar.  238, 243.
9.  Heyward’s reaction to mills is mentioned in the post for 16 January 2019.
10.  Ramsay.  1:249.
11.  See the post for 16 January 2019 for more on the introduction of mills.

12.  Robert F. W. Allston.  “The Rice Plant.”  De Bow’s Commercial Review of the South and West 1:320-357:1846.  326.

13.  Anna McClung and Bob Fjellstrom.  “America’s Golden Treasure.”  Texas Rice 5(6):5-6:August/September 2005.  Summary of a paper given at a symposium in Charleston, South Carolina, sponsored by the Carolina Gold Foundation in August 2005.

14.  M. Shure, S. R. Wessler, and N. Federoff.  “Molecular Identification and Isolation of the Waxy Locus in Maize.”  Cell 35:225-233:1983.

15.  Shinsuke Yamanaka, Ikuo Nakamura, Kazuo N. Watanabe, and Yo-Ichiro Sato.  “Identification of SNPs in the Waxy Gene among Glutinous Rice Cultivars and Their Evolutionary Significance during the Domestication Process.”  Theoretical and Applied Genetics 108:1200-124:2004.  In a simple understanding of genetics, the specific color of an eye, blue or brown, is called an allele of the gene that controls color.

16.  McClung and Fjellstrom.

17.  Erik Stokstad.  “American Rice: Out of Africa.”  Science website, 16 November 2007.  Report of paper by Anna McClung given at the American Society of Agronomy 2007 meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

18.  T. T. Chang. “Domestication and Spread of the Cultivated Rices.”  408-417 in Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation.  Edited by David R. Harris and Gordon C. Hillman.  London: Routledge, 2016.  The obvious difference between Indica and Japonica is that the grains of the latter stick together when cooked, while they remain separate in the first.

19.  Andrew M. Watson.  Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  17.  Cited by Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., and William Robert Judd.  The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice.  Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014.  10.

20.  Porcher.  11.

21.  Stokstad.  “Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.”  Carney is discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.

22.  Early attempts to explain the appearance of red rice are mentioned in the posts for 18 September 2022 and 25 September 2022.

23.  Glenn Roberts.  “Carolina Gold Rice: Pure Seed, Fame, Fourtune & Hurricane Rita.”  Carolina Gold Rice Foundation Newsletter, January 2007.  Ellipsis were CGR for Carolina Gold Rice.

24.  M. Umeda, H. Ohtsubo, and E. Ohtsubo.  “Diversification of the Rice Waxy Gene by Insertion of Mobile DNA Elements into Introns.”  The Japanese Journal of Genetics 66:569-86:1991.

25.  Allston said that sometimes rice fields became “contaminated with either grass-seed or red-rice, as not to reward sufficiently the labor bestowed on its culture.”  Instead of abandoning them, he argued planters should introduce a regime of leaving a field fallow every four years.  Then, he reported “all the rusty, red grains of rice, which have been lying dormant in the mud for years, were thrown out and exposed to the fructifying influence of the sun, vegetate, and are utterly destroyed by the frost before the time for planting the next crop.” [29]

26.  J. H. Easterby.  “Introduction.”  1-49 in  The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1945; reprinted by University of South Carolina of Columbia in 2004.  40.

27.  W. E. McLendon, G. A. Crabb, Earl Carr, and F. S. Welsh.  “Soil Survey of Georgetown County, South Carolina.”  513-562 in Field Operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1911.  Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1914.  520.

28.  The post for 16 January 2019 summarized a study on the characteristics of overseers.  The census data that was used could only identify men by state of birth.

29.  R. F. W. Allston.  “On the Cultivation of Rice.”  The Southern Agriculturist 3(7):241-246:July 1843.  244-245.

Thora Dudley’s Roots

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Thora Dudley knew “Come by Here” in 1956.  Where she learned it is unknown.  While her classmates who attended a meeting in Davidson, North Carolina, recognized it, the fact they directed Larry Eisenberg to her suggests they had learned it from her. [1]

As noted in the post for 23 October 22, Dudley had spent much of her life in Talladega, Alabama, where she attended the school for the blind, before enrolling in the college.  If she didn’t learn “Come by Here” there, then she may have learned it from her mother or other members of her family.

All we know about her early years are that she was born in Ainsley and her father is buried in Rutledge. [2]  Both settlements are in the wiregrass region of Alabama that stretches along the coastal plain from Macon Georgia to Montgomery, Alabama. [3]  The light, sandy soils were covered by longleaf pines with an understory of the eponymous grass when settlers first entered the area. [4]

In Pike County, where Ainsley is located, white families moved to the area in the 1830s from Georgia, the Carolinas, and northeastern Alabama. [5]  They soon discovered the soil did not support long-term production of cotton. [6]  Many moved on, while others moved in during the 1850s.  Before the Civil War, cotton was the cash crop grown by subsistence farmers who might own few slaves.  Only 32 men claimed they were overseers in the 1850 census. [7]

Fourteen of 2,520 farmers owned land worth more than $5,000 in 1859, [8] and just one could be called a large planter.  Solomon Siler held acreage in the southwestern part of the county around Henderson and Palmyra on a tributary of the Pea River that ultimately flowed into the Gulf of Mexico through Florida’s Choctawhatchee river. [9]  He built his mansion in Orion, the county’s antebellum cultural center.  When he died in 1854, he owned nearly 10% of the county’s slaves. [10]

The Civil War drew men to battle, but otherwise did not much affect Pike County. [11]  Little violence is recorded from Reconstruction, although a school was burned in neighboring Crenshaw County [12]  Hostility to education took a different form.  Baptists in Orion told a speaker in 1865 that, if he thought local women should teach freedmen, then use his own daughters. [13]  In 1874, the Democratic Party made it an official policy for citizens to shun anyone who cooperated with the Federal government or Republicans. [14]

Reconstruction eliminated farmers’ dependence on creeks as routes for marketing cotton.  The Mobile and Girard Railroad, which was built in 1870, crossed the county from northeast (Saco) to Goshen in the southwest. [15]  Planters learned they could keep the soil productive if they added fertilizer every year.  By 1914, Pike County ranked third in number of bales of cotton ginned in Alabama. [16]

Fertilizer was sold on credit by furnishing agents.  In 1877, Alabama passed a law that gave creditors more rights over crops than the growers.  Many small farmers, if they still had some resources, left the state. [17]  The remaining white farmers, along with the freedman who hadn’t left for Montgomery after emancipation, [18] were reduced to sharecropping. [19]

The county had had few places like Siler’s where a slave-controlled community could develop like those on rice plantations.  Most slaves worked for small farmers.  After the war, and especially after the consolidation of land holdings precipitated by the Crop Lien law, few would have had places they could call home.

Immediately after the war, white Baptists instructed freedmen in Troy, then told them to establish their own church in 1872. [20]  People came from as far as Crenshaw County to attend. [21]  A second Baptist church was organized in Troy in 1878. [22]  If congregations existed in outlaying areas, they were not visible to whites.  Two churches were burned in 1904 by White Cappers. [23]

Railroads introduced another change in the 1880s.  In 1886, the Montgomery and Florida Railroad built a line through Crenshaw County to reach timber [24] around places like Rutledge.  The Alabama Midland was chartered in 1887, [25] going from southeast through Bundridge and Troy to northwest Pike County.  Ainsley had a station in 1889. [26]

Ainsley seems to be on a watershed between two creeks that would have reverted to woodland, if the land had ever been cleared for farming.  The village soon had “a cotton gin, saw mill, planing mill, dry kiln, lathing mill and shingle mill.” [27]

Lumber jobs last as long as the trees, then companies move their equipment to new areas.  The boll weevil appeared in Pike County in 1918.  The decline was temporary.  By 1930, the county again was producing more cotton with more fertilizer. [28]  Then came the Depression.

What little is known about Dudley’s father comes from his gravestone in a Baptist cemetery in Rutland.  He died in 1934.  A woman, who may have been his wife, was born in 1904, and would have been thirty years old when she became a widow.  This implies he was a young man.

One interpretation is that his family was from Rutledge and he had been working in Ainsley in the middle-1920s when Thora was born.  The problem is the only tombstones with the Dudley name belong to Henry, Thora, and Willie.  If Rutledge were a family center, one would expect to see more.

A second possibility is that Henry was from Pike County and was a sharecropper who moved every few years in hopes of finding a better contract.  That might explain why Thora later claimed she was from Montgomery, rather than Ainsley.  It may have been the first place where she remained for more than a few seasons.

A third possibility is that Henry, or his father, moved to Pike County with the railroad or with a logging company.  The workers were probably a mix of skilled laborers brought by the companies and local sharecroppers who spent the winters in the woods.  Wikipedia says, in Crenshaw County, the “timber camps were rough work areas where racial tensions sometimes flared.” [29]

The movement of “Come by Here” into Pike or Crenshaw County may have been independent of the migrations of African Americans.  Lumber camps and railroads were not the only institutions that introduced new ideas into the area.  Margaret Farmer notes Troy, the administrative center of Pike County, had an opera house through at least 1912. [30]  Then tent shows brought in outside entertainers until at least 1924. [31]  The popular entertainment probably did not include religious music and Blacks would have had restricted access, but musical exchanges often occur outside scheduled events.

Revivals are a more likely possibility.  Pentecostalism arrived by 1921 when evangelists from the Alabama-Florida border held tent meetings.  No formal Assembly of God congregation developed until after Dudley died. [32]

Possibly more important were tent meetings held in 1923 and 1924 by William Tipton Grider. [33]  He was part of the Church of Christ, and from Covington County, south of Pike. [34]  The Church of Christ was descended from the Disciples of Christ, mentioned in the post for 8 November 2020, and still did not accept musical instruments in services. [35]

Neither denomination was particularly open to African Americans.  The Assembly was founded as a white alternative to the mixed-race meetings associated with early Pentecostalism. [36]  The Disciples kept Blacks in separate congregations, but did not expel them during Reconstruction as the Baptists had done. [37]  What is important is the two revivals indicate a steady movement of religious ideas, and possibly with it songs, along the old lines of river communication from Florida into Pike County.

A less likely source for “Come by Here” are the all-day sings held in the county before World War I.  The area around Good Hope, southeast of Ainsley, was one center.  William Marion Cooper, editor of The Sacred Harp, [38] often went there to lead sings.  William Brantley remembers “singing schools teachers, who traveled around the country like revival preachers, would come and give courses to all ages and classes from beginners to finished singers.” [39]  The result was a high level of musicianship in the county.  Brantley noted many did not have melodious voices, but had perfect pitch. [40]

Cooper was from Dothan, in Dale County, to the east.  A Black sacred harp tradition developed there and in the contiguous counties. [41]  African Americans probably were not allowed to join the singing in Pike County, but since some of the attendees were middle class, [42] they may have been present as cooks, servants, or men handling the horses.  All Dudley told her sorority sisters was she “had an ear for music and was able to hum tunes that she heard throughout the house.” [43]

Graphics
Base map:  DemocraticLuntz. “Location of Troy in Pike County, Alabama.”  Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 27 October 2017.

End Notes
1.  The meeting at Davidson College and Larry Eisenberg’s role in contacting Dudley are discussed in the post for 23 October 2022.

2.  Dudley’s life is described in the post for 23 October 2022.
3.  “Wiregrass (Region).”  Wikipedia website.

4.  Mark V. Wetherington.  “Wiregrass Georgia.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website, last updated 28 September 2020.  Wiregrass is Aristida stricta.

5.  Margaret Pace Farmer.  One Hundred Fifty Years in Pike County Alabama 1821 – 1971.  Anniston, Alabama: Higginbotham, Inc., 1973.  76-77.

6.  Donna J. Siebenthaler.  “Pike County.”  The Encyclopedia of Alabama website, 18 September 2007; last updated 7 December 2020.

7.  Farmer.  77.
8.  Farmer.  77.

9.  Silers Mill Creek flows into Whitewater Creek, which joins the Middle Pea in Coffee County. [44]  The Pea becomes part of the Choctawhatchee at Geneva, Alabama. [45]  That continues to Choctawhatchee Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. [46]

10.  Siler’s estate sold 97 slaves in 1854; the final settlement in 1862 listed 259. [47]  That implies he owned more than 300 when he died.  In 1850, the county had 3,818 slaves. [48]

11.  Farmer.  53.

12.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  629.

13.  Jefferson Falkner.  Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama, 20 October 1871.  United States Congress.  Joint Select Committee.  The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States.  Alabama.  Volume II.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872.  1123.  Fleming reports Jefferson Falkner heard the challenge at a Baptist Association meeting. [49]

14.  Fleming.  781.
15.  Farmer.  67.

16.  Farmer.  81.  Dallas County, with Selma, was first, and Montgomery County directly north of Pike was second.

17.  Farmer.  79.

18.  One assumes the more enterprising, ambitious, or discontented African Americans left the area as soon as they  could.  This exodus is not mentioned by historians.  Farmer notes the percentage of Blacks to whites in Pike County increased from 24% in 1850 to 27% in 1870, with 807 more freedmen, and 5,321 more whites.  The increase may only mean more whites left than Blacks.  Numbers are hard to compare because parts of Pike County were removed to create new, predominantly white counties, like Crenshaw, during Reconstruction. [50]  The subsequent reductions in the tax base to support the government was another reason whites moved elsewhere. [51]

19.  Farmer.  79.

20.  Farmer.  298.  The Black church was the First Missionary Baptist Church in Troy.  The parent white church was the First Baptist Church in Troy.

21.  Farmer.  299.
22.  Farmer.  301.  The church was Bethel Baptist Church in Troy.
23.  Farmer.  235.
24.  “Crenshaw County, Alabama.”  Wikipedia website.
25.  Farmer.  70.
26.  Farmer.  402.
27.  Farmer.  402.
28.  Farmer.  83.
29.  Wikipedia, Crenshaw.
30.  Farmer.  188-189.
31.  Farmer.  189-190.

32.  Farmer.  296-297.  S. W. Notes was from Solcomb in Geneva, County, Alabama, and C. L. Duck was from DeFuniack Springs in neighboring Walton County, Florida.

33.  Farmer.  293-294.

34.  Hugh Fulford.  “William T. ‘Tip’ Grider.”  The Restoration Movement website.  Covington County abuts Geneva County on the east and Walton County on the south.

35.  Sydney E. Ahlstrom.  A Religious History of the American People.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  822-823.

36.  Vinson Synan.  The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 edition.  154-155.  This is mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.

37.  Bobby Ross Jr. and Hamil R. Harris.  “Fifty Years after Historic Meeting, Race Still Divides Churches of Christ.”  The Christian Chronicle website.  2018.

38.  W. M. Cooper.  The B. F. White Sacred Harp: Revised and Improved.  Dothan, Alabama: 1902.

39.  William H. Brantley, Jr.  Letter to Margaret Pace Farmer, 13 August 1962.  Quoted by Farmer.  194.

40.  Brantley.  Quoted by Farmer.  195.

41.  H. J. Jackson.  “History of the Colored Sacred Harp.”  In  J. Jackson.  The Colored Sacred Harp.  Ozark, Alabama: 1934; reprinted by Paragon Press of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1973.  Judge Jackson, the founder of the Black sacred harp tradition in Alabama, was born eight miles west of Orion, and went to school in Ainsley.  When he was an adolescent, he left for Ozark, near Dothan, where he discovered the fasola singing tradition.  Men who helped put together his first edition were from Dothan’s Dale County, and the neighboring Houston, Henry, and Coffee Counties.

42.  Ora Lee Park, a descendant of Siler’s wife family, played piano for the sings. [52] The first Baptist church established in Troy, the Beulah Primitive Baptist, held all day sings with dinners on the grounds.  Brantley remembered the church overflowed, and people took turns going inside.  Theologically, he described it as the “Hard-Shell Baptist Church.” [53]

43.  “Our Charter Members.”  Alpha Kappa Alpha, Eta Omega Omega chapter website.

44.  “Choctawhatchee, Pea, and Yellow Rivers Watershed Management Plan.”  Alabama Department of Environmental Management website.  65, 71-72.

45.  “Pea River.”  Wikipedia website.
46.  “Choctawhatchee River.”  Wikipedia website.
47.  Farmer.  358.
48.  Farmer.  78.
49.  Fleming.  625.
50.  Farmer.  78.
51.  Farmer.  56, 58.
52.  Farmer.  433.
53.  Brantley.  Quoted by Farmer.  195.

Thora Dudley - Come By Here

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Students at a Davidson College meeting in 1956 [1] claimed the song that was introduced as “Kumbaya” was really “Come by Here.”  As detailed in the post for 16 October 2022, Pete Seeger was there and incorporated their response into his introduction when he began singing a variant of the version published by Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS).

Another man who was present, Larry Eisenberg, talked to the students.  By January of 1957, he had “found the name of this blind Negro gal who knew other verses for Come By Here (Kum Ba Yah).”  He must have contacted Thora Dudley, because he enclosed the lyrics in his letter to Lynn Rohrbough, owner of CRS.

The verses, which Dudley provided, deal with the consequences of death.  The order of the stanzas is not chronological – logically sorrow would come after dying – and may not matter.  Eisenberg indicated “she had these extra verses, and apparently knew others.”

She shifts pronouns from “somebody” who is dying to “we” who are in sorrow.  The words “down here” may represent a traditional Christian view that the dead rise to heaven, or may be an idiomatic term for they way individuals addressed the Holy Spirit.

It would be interesting to know why Eisenberg bothered to contact Dudley, but a seance is not possible.  He had edited books for The Methodist Church and written some himself.  In the process, he would have become aware of the legal responsibilities placed on writers by the copyright law. [2]

When he heard that “Kumbaya” was not a traditional African song as he supposed, he may have contacted Dudley to get information to pass on to Rohrbough.  The latter heard from Eisenberg ten weeks after he received a letter from Claire Lovejoy Lennon that told him she had known the song in Georgia before World War I. [3]  Sometime in 1957, Rohrbough removed the reference to Angola from his next songsters.

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: no comment
Verses: needs you, down in sorrow, dying, mourning
Pronouns: somebody, we
Term for Deity: not known
Special Terms: down
Basic Form: open-ended
Verse Repetition Pattern: not known
Ending: not known
Unique Features: shift in pronoun

Notes on Audience
Eisenberg wrote Rohrbough that “the other Talladega kids at Davidson, N. C. were familiar with the song.”

Notes on Performers
Thora Louise Dudley was born in Ansley, Alabama, in 1927 [4] and is buried in Rutledge, Alabama. [5]  Her life in between is recorded in events, divorced from dates, that may be connected by two different narrative lines.

In her public biography, Dudley told her class mates at Talladega College she was a “native of Montgomery.” [6]  Her sorority sisters in the Bronx believed she was born in Montgomery to “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dudley” in 1937.  She became blind as a child, and her “parents enrolled her in The Alabama School for the Blind and Westside Senior High.”  She pledge Alpha Kappa Alpha in her sophomore year, [7] and graduated from Talladega College in 1958 [8] with a degree in Early Childhood Education. [9]

After graduation, she moved to New York where she earned a masters in rehabilitation counseling from Hunter College, and began teaching for the New York Association for the Blind. [10]

While she was at Talladega, Dudley was active in the YWCA and sang in the college choir. [11]  In New York, she played Pamina in some production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. [12]  In 1970, she won a contest at the Apollo Theater. [13]  She also had played organ as a child. [14]

This is the life of a woman who became part of the Black middle class.  Indeed, her photograph appeared in issues of Jet [15] and the NAACP’s Crisis [16] in connection with her fund-raising activities.  The second biographical line shows just how remarkable was her rise.

Ainsley was a small settlement in Pike County in southeastern Alabama about 40 miles southeast of Montgomery. [17]  Claiming she was from Montgomery may not have been an attempt to hide her rural roots from her more sophisticated colleagues.  Anyone who has lived in a small town quickly learns to tell others the name of the nearest place that is familiar to the person asking where one is from.  Otherwise, one has to answer the next question, “where is that?”

Rutledge, Alabama, is about twenty miles southwest of Ainsley in the next county.  The Roxanna Baptist Church Cemetery has a gravestone for Henry Dudley that says he died in 1934 during the depression. [18]  If Thora was born in 1927, she was about seven-years-old.  If she was born in 1937, then this is not her father.  The only other Dudley buried in that cemetery is Willie C. Dodley. [19]  Find a Grave has no information on any of them; Thora’s tombstone has no birth date.

If this Henry was her father, Thora’s mother may have moved to Montgomery where it would have been easier for her to find work.  Dudley, then, would have been justified in telling people she was from the city.

Alabama created a registry of blind students in 1927, and, in 1937, passed laws requiring every one between the ages of seven and sixteen to be in school.  Alabama School for Negro Deaf and Blind was in Talladega, and concentrated on vocational education.  It was partly funded by sales of goods produced by students. [20]  While it was a boarding school, her mother may have moved there when Thora enrolled.

The 1927 birth date seems the most likely.  She told Talladega she retired in 1992, [21] and would have been 65 years old.  The question is what she did after she left the school for the blind until she entered Talladega at age 27.  One thing we know she did was attend Westside High School in Talladega, where she would have received a traditional academic education.  From there she earned a state scholarship to Talladega, and received a little money from the Westside teachers. [22]

Her photo appears on the Pic_K tab.

Graphics
Larry Eisenberg, Brentwood, Tennessee.  Letter to Lynn, 29 January 1957.  Copy courtesy of Bruce Greene and World Around Songs.  Lynn is Lynn Rohrbough, owner of Cooperative Recreation Service.  CRS published “Kum Ba Yah” in 1955.

End Notes
1.  Larry Eisenberg described the meeting in a letter he wrote on 29 January 1957.  One assumes it may have taken Eisenberg a little time to locate Dudley.  He also may have delayed his search because he assumed a new church pulpit in September of 1956, and probably was occupied with moving his family and meeting his new parishioners. [23]  The logic of human activity suggests the event at Davidson College probably took place before the Christmas holidays in 1956.

2. Biographical details on Eisenberg appear in the posts for 9 February 2020 and 16 October 2022.  He is mentioned in the ones for 1 November 2020, 4 November 2020, 3 October 2021, and 13 March 2022.

3.  Lennon’s letter is quoted in the post for 18 October 2020.

4.  Cassandra Burford, Talladega College, Special Collections Librarian.  Email, 4 December 2018.

5.  “Thora L. Dudley.”  Find A Grave website, 22 April 2014.  She is buried in the Roxanna Baptist Church Cemetery.

6.  “Miss Thora Dudley, Rare Beauty, Courageous Spirit.”  Talladega Student, Talladega College, February 1955.  Copy courtesy of Perry H. Trice, Talladega College Savery Library.

7.  “Our Charter Members.”  Alpha Kappa Alpha, Eta Omega Omega chapter website.
8.  Burford.
9.  AKA.
10.  AKA.
11.  Talladega Student.
12.  AKA.
13.  “Thora Louise Dudley.”  Prabook website.
14.  AKA.
15.  “Final Meeting.”  Jet, 23 March 1961.  44.
16.  “Life Membership.”  The Crisis, February 1970.  69.
17.  Ainsley is discussed in the post 30 October 2022.
18.  “Henry Dudley.”  Find a Grave website, 22 April 2014.
19.  “Willie C Dudley.”  Find a Grave website, 22 April 2014.

20.  “Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind.”  Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) website.  The segregated school was merged into the white one in 1968, [24] and its history nearly obliterated online.

21.  Burford.
22.  AKA.
23.  Larry Eisenberg.  “It’s Me, O Lord.”  Tulsa, Oklahoma: Fun Books, 1992.   63.

24.  “Alabama School for Negro Deaf-Mutes and Blind.”  American Printing House website.