100 Years Ago: May 1926

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: May 1926

 

This is number 136 in a series of digests of one-hundred-year-old National Geographic Magazines.

 

 

“And the last shall be first.”  Headlining the cover before the list of articles is the announcement of a SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT “THE BOYHOOD OF RALEIGH” as well as of color photos in one of the articles.  There is a small editorial at the bottom of the last page of the last article listed on the cover entitled “The Color Supplement with This Number” which documents the pictorial supplement which accompanied this issue.

Pictorial Supplement courtesy of Philip Riviere

“The Boyhood of Raleigh” was an accurate reproduction by means of natural-color photography of Sir John Millais’ famous geographic canvas which hung in the Tate Gallery, London.  A Genoese sailor has as his audience for his tale of adventure young Walter Raleigh and his brother, who listen with rapt attention.  A toy ship beside the boys suggested the voyages that their imagination had taken.  A starfish, a rusty anchor, and strange birds of brilliant plumage lent atmosphere to the scene.  The picture was the first in a series of paintings of great explorers to be published as supplements to the National Geographic Magazine.  An upcoming issue will include a painting of Columbus at Le Raida.  That would be followed by a painting showing Vasco da Gama at the Court of the Zamorin od Calicut.

 

 

The first article listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Motor-Coaching Through North Carolina” and was written by Melville Chater, author of “History’s Greatest Trek,” “Rediscovering the Rhine,” “Through the Back Doors of France,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article contains forty-three black-and-white photographs, of which twenty-nine are full-page in size.  Sixteen of these full-page are in a block and appear to be duotones.  I will discuss these later.  The article also contains a small sketch map of North Carolina on page 512.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

“Made to order,” in its most complimentary sense, described Raleigh, capital of North Carolina.   The capital’s location was chosen by the General Assembly in 1788, and, the Nation’s Capital excepted, it was unique in being thus planned and built.  A charmingly harmonious result was seen in the wide, oak-shaded streets converging at the statehouse, which rose in sheltering dignity above the statues of North Carolina’s presidential trio – Johnson, Polk, and Jackson – the first named was born in Raleigh.  But a visit to North Carolina should not begin in any such relatively modern environs as century-and-a-quarter-old Raleigh.  Three months was far too short a time for the author to renew his memories of boyhood while marveling at the changes which had come with the development of hydroelectric power, the extension of the public school system, and the diversification of agriculture.  The privilege of seeing every corner of North Carolina in that brief period would have been impossible except through the medium of the motor coach, by which the author traveled for more than 2,000 miles in the State.  A thirty-passenger coach sped them over 157 miles of asphalt road to Morehead City, where a motorboat took them across Bogue Sound to Beaufort.  In that quaint port, with its gigantic oaks, prim flower plots, and vistas of rigging, there breathed that ghostly old-worldliness of certain New England fishing villages.  And the broad speech, flavored with bygone idioms carried one further back, even to Deon; for Beaufort was the gateway to Hatteras Banks and the 16^th-century sea trial of Raleigh’s mariners.  Their discoveries began with wild horses and tame terrapin.  They found the former on the nearby Banks, the latter at the U. S. Biological Station at Beaufort, where terrapin were marked and released to restock local waters.

North Carolina’s shellfish beds, dotting 1,500 miles of ocean and sound shores, had at times been seriously depleted for lack of uniform laws and systematic enforcement.  The near extinction of the terrapin pointed its lesson.  No biological station was needed to conserve the wild horses.  For centuries they had been roaming on the Banks, and tradition had it that they were descended from Barbery ponies which were brought over by Sir Walter Raliegh’s colonists.  Their quest landed them on a naked, sunbaked spit where men were driving the so-called “banker ponies” along the beach and into a corral made from timers from old wrecks.  They took photos of the 200 horses jammed into the enclosure.  Some of the herders lassoed and cut out colts for branding and sale.  Others yelled out their branding marks, recognized on mares, and claiming the accompanying foals.  The sun blazed, the sand blazed.  The lighthouse was the only sign of civilization on that spit.  The U. S. seemed worlds away.  The heat drove some of the ponies to a waterhole on the beach, where they laid prone and drank the brackish fluid.  Due to a tick epidemic, the ponies were driven into a dipping sluice where they swam through a bath of arsenic and caustic soda.  A green paint stripe, slashed across the emerging beasts flank, marked him as disinfected.  The gates were then flung wide and the herd trotted forth to liberty, snorting.  Then, a chosen dozen “little Barbary ponies” were auctioned off at $6 a head.  A few years prior they fetched from $50 to $125 apiece.  Next morning they left Beaufort on a mail-launch, which for eight hours puttered lazily across the wide waters of Pamlico Sound.  Small wonder that the first English explorers mistook that 75-mile stretch of water for an inland sea.  Often, they saw no land save for an island where Presidents had shot in duck season.

A long, low land strip, dotted with tiny dwellings and sentineled by a lighthouse – such was the approach to Ocracoke.  Town, village, port – none of those appellations fit its sea-flavored individuality half so well as the natives’ phrase, “the neighborhood.”  Unforgettable was that quaint, hodgepodge layout of little low houses, embowered under spreading live oaks and gaudy crepe myrtle, the garden plots running at all possible angles to each other and often containing family graves, across which wind blew forever, with the rippling of the sound or the booming of the sea.  There were no streets, no roads; there was only “the way,” lying along some myrtle-smothered sand trail.  As to Ocracoke Inlet being the scene of the arrival of Raleigh’s first expedition, North Carolina historians nearly agreed.  Raleigh’s half-brother and co-adventurer, Humphrey Gilbert, wrote to Queen Elizabeth a few years before the expedition to allow them to annoy the King of Spain and to discover and inhabit strange places.  On May 27, 1584, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe sailed in two barks in Raleigh’s name.  Sixty-seven days later they entered an inlet which pierced what they mistook for the mainland.  They cast anchor, landed, and took possession in the queen’s name.  After exploring the inland waters as far as Roanoke Island, they returned to England and announced their discovery under the oddest name, Win-gan-da-coa – the Land of What-pretty-clothes-you-wear – misapplying the greeting the Hatteras Indians had given them.  Seven months later, Raleigh’s second and enlarged expedition embarked for the land now rechristened Virginia, after the Virgin Queen.  They explored coastal North Carolina and the “Chesapeans’” country; then they returned to Roanoke and thence sailed homeward, bearing a vegetable trio – tobacco, maize, and sweet potatoes.

The tour group planned to cross the various inlets with the coast guards’ assistance, and to traverse the successive sandpits by automobile.  In motoring across the Hatteras Banks from the sound to the ocean front, they had entered the greatest wreck area on the Atlantic coast.  For 12 hours they passed the skeletons of what had once been ships, now blanched victims of the sea and sand.  At one point they counted 14 wrecks within 100 yards.  Offshore laid here a careened schooner, there a crazily tilted steam freighter, the waves gnashing at their sides in advance of the northeaster which would fling those great hulks into their last resting place among the sand dunes.  And now, their seaward-curving beach route revealed the great apex of the Banks, off which was the Diamond Shoal.  The shoal was even more hazardous due to the enormous tonnage of steel hulls embedded in the Diamond there was a magnetic deviation of up to 8 degrees.  Man’s allies in the fight against shoals and shrieking gales were Hatteras Light, the Diamond Shoal lightship, and the radio compass.  Since 1876 [to 1926] the enemy seas had eaten inland almost two miles toward the 86-year-old lighthouse, whose 80,000 candle-power flare was known to passing vessels by its 48 consecutive flashes flowed by a 7-minute glow.  The lightship, moored by chains capable of withstanding a 40-ton drag, served passing vessels with her warning beacon and radio signals for up to one year of lonely vigilance, when she and her crew of 16 “wave-wallowers” were relieved by another lightship.  The farther northward they followed the Banks, the more remote and resourceless seemed the life of the people.  Often it was a mere existence, as of castaways who had taken root on that two-mile width of sand bar, 40 miles offshore.

Beyond Oregon Inlet they gained Nags Head, whose name celebrated the days of professional wrecking when a hobbled horse with a lantern on its head was turned loose on the beach at night to lure ships to their doom.  Farther along, towering 100 feet above the surrounding flatness, rose Kill Devil Hill, the scene of the Wright brothers’ flying experiments in 1900-1903.  In 1926, only a former lighthouse keeper, his wife, and a coast guard were the sole remaining witnesses.  They crossed to the “Raonoak” Island of Raleigh’s expeditions.  With its great oaks and friendly little cottages behind their gardenia hedges, Manteo was, after windswept Hatteras, like a lull after a storm.  It was hard for them to believe that they stood on ground which, in the annals of English colonization in America, antedated both Plymouth Rock and Jamestown.  Outlining a five-pointed star in the thick of bay-fringed woods, the Raleigh Memorial’s boundary stones marked the considerable dimensions of that “high palisade of trees” which was called by its colonist builders of 1585 “the new fort in Virginia.”  In 1587, Raleigh dispatched three vessels, 100 men, 17 women, and 9 children, under John White, Governor of the City of Raleigh, in Virginia.  After arrival on Roanoke Island, the colony was augmented by two births.  As the first English child born on American soil, Virginia Dare’s name has outlived almost three and a half centuries [by 1926].  Governor White departed for England nine days after his granddaughter’s birth; Virginia Dare and the lost colony passed from history’s realm into that of romance.  With the Great Armada impending and the impressing of all English vessels into war service, communications with the little overseas colony were cut off for a time, but after Spain’s maritime power had been shattered, White sailed again for Virginia.

Instead of colonists he found evidence of a “secret token” whereby, if they had moved elsewhere, the colonists were to carve the name of their destination on a tree, indicating distress by adding the sign of the cross; for near the deserted palisade, on a tree was carve CROATAN, without any cross or sign of distress.  Though White was greatly joyed at that certain token that the colonists were safe among the friendly Indians at nearby Croatan, he was forced to return to England without following up on the clue.  Thereafter repeated searches continued for 12 years yielding no trace of the Lost Colony.  Was massacre or intermarriage the fate of the handful of English men and women who vanished in the wilderness?  Thirteen years later, travelers heard that they were living along the banks of the Neuse; forty years still later, one John Lawson was told by Croatan Indians that they were descended from white men; and, in 1715, settlers gaining the midsection of North Carolina found the Croatans plowing, holding slaves, and speaking English.  Finally, the modern Croatans themselves, using an archaic English and in many cases bearing the surnames of those who disappeared from Roanoke, claimed descent from the Lost Colony.  As for the ill-starred Raleigh – his fortune exhausted, charged with treason, his colonial proprietorship escheated to the Crown – he valiantly declared of Virginia, “I shall yet lie to see it an English nation,” and died in faith of his dream.  Seventy-six years after the fade-out of the Lost Colony, Charles II, elevated eight of his courtiers into Lord Proprietors over a vast, vaguely defined territory, naming it after himself, Carolina.  People from the already successful colony at Jamestown settled along the Chowan River; Barbadian English settled along Cape Fear; and Germans, French, and Scotch-Irish were Carolina’s third nucleus.

After sixty-odd years of mere exploitation; and having encounters rebellions over tobacco taxes and the ousting of various unscrupulous governors, some in league with pirates, the Lord Proprietors sold Carolina back to the Crown for $112,500.  The Crown had no better luck.  In 1765, the people of Wilmington protested the Stamp Act.  In 1775, the Mecklenburg Resolution called for independence, as did the Congress of Halifax, 11 months later.  And finally, the ladies of Edenton held a most unladylike tea party.  The fine old town of Wilmington offered glimpses of its past along the Cape Fear and vivid scenes of resort life on the nearby beaches.  Its river recalled the thrill of Civil War blockade-running under Union shellfire, while the stately white columns told of colonial mansions and old plantation days.  A short drive through the pines led one to the beach resorts, where thousands of visitors flocked.  The splendid 25-mile beach terminated toward Cape Fear in a series of bleared mounds, once Confederate batteries from the closing days of the Civil War.  Wilmington was the center of the State’s railroad history.  Its earliest “fast-freight” service comprised a system of planks roads over which six-horse teams drew covered wagons to the head of navigation at Fayetteville.  About 1830, “Railway meetin’ to-night” was first announced to Wilmington stockholders, and, in 1840, the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, with 180 miles of trackage, 12 locomotives, and 58 cars, was opened with a barbecue and a salute of guns.  The public was assured that the trains would not run after dark.  The State’s future as a truck garden for the North was present in those cumbrous locomotives.  In 1926, European restaurants served North Carolina’s peaches; Canadian markets sold its watermelons; Maine resorts, its strawberries; Jacksonville, New York, and Chicago, its produce.

A stimulating factor in the State’s truck industry was seen in Wilmington’s demonstration colonies.  Begun 20 years prior, they consisted of hand-picked farming families from various parts of Europe.  Of the 12 nationalities represented on some 3,000 acres, each was selected for its Old-World specialty.  The arriving colonist-family started with 10 to 20 cleared acres and a house, with shared machinery, cooperative marketing channels at its service, and an agricultural advisor and a social worker available to assist.  It was not uncommon for those families to raise their own garden food and ship their first crops within 90 days of arrival.  The morning coach picked them up at their hotel for the 200-mile trip to Charlotte.  Back in 1912, when only one North Carolinian in 380 owned a car, the then-existing roads answered the needs of the day.  They got you somewhere, no matter how.  In 1921, State legislature authorized $50,000,000 in road bonds.  The State Highway Commission was spending annually $16 per capita, or twice the national average in road expenditure.  It was completing yearly 1,000 miles of hard-surface thoroughfares, which served the enormously increasing traffic of one car to every eight citizens.  That modern road system, exceeding 6,000 miles, costed the motorist 2½ cents per day in gasoline tax and horsepower tax.  Two lines drawn southwestward across the map of North Carolina – one from Mount Airy to Rutherfordton, the other from Roanoke Rapids to Hamlet – roughly demarked the State’s mountain area, its piedmont section, and – what they were now crossing – the coastal plain.  The plains, fringed with evergreen, reminded one that North Carolina grew up in the pine woods.  While there were still plenty cypress and gum trees, the long-leaf pine was scarce.  They could hardly find a pine-tar kiln in this, the Tarheel State.

The long-leaf pine was North Carolina’s first important resource.  Instructions drafted in 1610 informed prospective colonist that pine trees were to be wounded within a yard of the ground and out would issue Turpentine.  A century later a memorial was presented a Whitehall by some would be concessionaire who propose “furnishing Her Majesty’s navy with tar from North Carolina.”  From then on North Carolinians were destined to be known as Tarheels.  Wilmington became the greatest naval stores port in the world.  From 1870 to 1880 its annual exportation of pine products not infrequently reached 300,000 barrels; but in 1885, the trek of the “turpentiners” to Georgia announced the King Pine’s 200-year reign in North Carolina had drawn to a close.  A side trip from Pinehurst, the State’s chief resort for golf enthusiasts, to the junction of Moore, Montgomery, and Randolph counties landed them in a wooded section whose homes were so remotely placed that they called its people the backroad folks.  “Jugtown” was their way of describing that pottery district.  Their potter ancestors from Staffordshire, England settled there in 1750 and refused to leave.  That refusal was in part due to local deposits of gravel-free clay, for slicing and hand-picking remained their primitive means of preparing it for the kick wheel.  Surrounded by their homemade furniture of the pioneer era and living unchanged, they passed the craft down from father to son.  They regained the main routes and were picked up by another motorcoach.  Gracious contours, rosing from the plain, resolved themselves into vistas of rolling landscape, while the pine-fringed horizon gave way to skylines broken by mauve mountains, the foothills of the Blue Ridge.  They crossed a river by cable ferry powered by the stream.  They entered the piedmont, with its hydroelectric stations.

North Carolina was passing through a renaissance.  Due to her shift from cotton fields to mill centers and from idle streams to throbbing dynamos, she had rediscovered herself on the threshold of industrial power.  Charlotte, situated between the big hydroelectric developments along the Catawba and Yadkin rivers, was a plexus of that new industrialism.  In the prior 25 years the number of textile mills operating within a 100-mile radius of that city had increased fivefold, with a spindleage (sp.) in 1926 of 10,000,000.  Charlotte was one of the first southern cities to figure at the Nation’s birth and one of the last to figure in the passing of the Confederacy.  On May 20, 1775, resolutions dissolving political bonds with Great Britain were read from the courthouse steps.  And it was in Charlotte, on April 20, 1865, that Jefferson Davis and his cabinet met for the last time.  An hour’s ride beyond Charlotte they encountered Gastonia, one of the largest textile centers in the U. S.  Of its 20,000 people, about three-fourths were workers in the 42 mills whose tall stacks cut the sky.  Yet the towns broad, tree-shaded streets, lined with neat cottages, one felt no oppressive sense of concentrated industry, but rather the restfulness of some model suburb.  With mill workers’ cottages rentable for $3 a month, with water and electric light free, and with a mild climate, needing little fuel, it was not uncommon for mountain families to work at Gastonia long enough to pay off their farm mortgages and return to the Blue Ridge.  Gaston County contained 98 textile mills, which represented one-sixth of the State’s total textile production and consumed almost one-third of her cotton crop.  Beyond Gastonia hardy crops appeared, while cotton fields and cotton gins became correspondingly less.

Night fell as they climbed by mountain roads among forest odors and with the thrill of streams in their ears.  At last, they alighted at a chalet-like inn amid the mild air of a frost-free thermal belt.  Next morning they found themselves atop the great obelisk of Chimney Rock, whose cottagers were well named the Cliff Dwellers, looking down into the magnificent Hickory Nut Gap.  A distant speck in the valley represented the slowly rising dam that would enclose an artificial lake 27 miles around.  Thus, link by link a lake system for recreation and as a reserve against drought was being constructed along the streams of western North Carolina.  A few hours drive farther into the mountains brought them to Ashville, the gateway to the Land of the Sky.  Never was an altitude of half a mile above sea level so unobvious, in all but the tonic atmosphere.  Set in a vast bowl, Ashville was encircled by mountains whose 20 highest peaks topped all altitudes in the Eastern States.  It was on the Biltmore estate, near Ashville, that, with the founding of a forestry school, the first steps in American forest conservation were taken.  In 1926, there were established in that region, for the protection of watersheds and hardwood reserves, four national forests with more than 1,700.000 acres.  By July 1925, the Government had acquired less than a fourth of that area.  In one of those forests, the Pisgah, established in 1916 as a game preserve, bears and deer roamed, trout streams were stocked, and herds of bison and elk had been implanted.  Surrounded by the modishness of Ashville, one scarcely realized that only 50 miles away mountaineers were living a ruggedly simple existence behind hand-hewn timbers and on small “switchback” farms, with Revolutionary looms and spinning wheels alongside their chimney pieces of native rock.

It was a farsighted woman from Ashville who persuaded those remote, almost forgotten, mountain folk to set their long-idle looms going again.  By 1926, there were half a dozen handicraft centers scattered through western North Carolina.  A 75-mile stretch of ideal motor-coaching up the foaming course of the Tuckasegee River took them past the big paper-pulp and acid-wood plants to the Cherokee Indian Reservation at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains.  A Cherokee legend tells of a great buzzard, scouting after the Flood, became exhausted upon reaching the Great Smoky Mountains, and whenever his wings hit the ground a valley appeared, peaks remained whenever he soared.  Nothing could better convey a picture of that wild region, with its abruptly alternating heights and depths.  For 40 miles along the Great Smokies’ crests, and from 25 to 30 miles from North Carolina into Tennessee, all was primitive, uninhabited forests.  In 1540, Ferdinand de Soto found the Cherokee living along the Appalachian range in regions in eight States.  Three centuries later, when the remnants of that once powerful tribe were transferred to the Indian Territory, some few thousands of them took refuge in the Great Smokies.  Ultimately, with Government cooperation, they settled on their present lands.  In 1926, there were some 2,600 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokees living under the Great Smokies.  A four-hour drive up the mountains from Ashville to Linville gave them another glimpse of that “back of beyond” region which fringed western North Carolina.  There were pioneer cabins miles apart, streams fordable by a plank stretched between two tree-forks, occasional covered wagons with rifles slung inside, and dryland sledges used on “switchback” farms.

From three points near Linville there might be witnessed a curious and yet unexplained phenomenon, known as the Brown Mountain Lights.  They appeared with regularity and at all seasons, especially on dark nights.  They were described as pale white lights with faint haloes.  As a rule, they appeared singly in succession, rising over Brown Mountain’s ridge, then suddenly winking out.  Often, several appeared simultaneously.  While their average duration was from 15 to 60 seconds, that had been seen stationary over the ridge for 10 and even 20 minutes before extinguishing.  While the first journalistic account of the phenomenon appeared in 1913, it was claimed that the lights puzzled observers since before the Civil War.  Mountain illiteracy in North Carolina was passing rapidly.  In the prior 15 years, the statewide ratio had dropped from 185 to 135 illiterates in every 1,000.  About 4,000 one-teacher schools had been scrapped for modern-type buildings, and North Carolina’s education budget had been raised to $11 per capita, compared to $8, as averaged throughout the Southern States, and $14 throughout the Nation.  Yet her pay standards ranked fifth from the bottom among 15 Southern States.  The statewide school bus system covered local radii of 25 miles and transported 75,000 children daily to and from their community schools.  After a long climb up the valley, they reached Linville, one of the oldest and loftiest resorts in the Land of the Sky.  Its neighbor and scenic center, Grandfather Mountain, formed a rugged apex of the Blue Ridge.  It was slightly lower than the State’s tallest mountain, Mount Mitchell, which, at 6,711 feet, overlooked everything east of the Mississippi.  Seen from near Linville, western North Carolina unfolded on a vast scale, dipping away in mountains beyond mountains.

That Linville was a hardwood and acid-wood center was charmingly revealed by its bark-sheathed inn and cottages.  The products of its tree nurseries went far afield to beautify landscape gardens and its forests’ wealth of galax decorated many a northern ballroom in midwinter.  Thirty miles farther along the skyscraping Yonnalasee Road lied the town of Boone, once the home of the famous pioneer and Indian fighter, Daniel Boone, who blaze the transmontane trail into Kentucky in 1775.  A final link of road took them through Winston-Salem, Chapel Hill, and Durham, completing the circle of their 2,000-mile motor-coaching trip around the State.  Though Winston-Salem had been designated as “the twin city” since its component towns were merged in 1913, certainly no twin showed greater dissimilarity than old Salem and youthful Winston.  There, one had the stately 18^th century and the industrial 20^th century side by side, with a mere street or so acting as the hyphen.  Salem signified that “peace” which was sought by the persecuted Moravians.  One could still see in the archives at Herrnhut, Germany, the plans for the proposed town, which was realized in the Carolinian wilderness in 1753.  And that “peace” had never forsaken old Salem.  A colonial dignity, a sweet primness, breathed from its columned porches, its tree-shaded promenades, its ivied walls.  Cross a few streets and one was amid Winston’s humming beehive of industrialism, where 15,000 wage-earners were turning their daily trainloads of manufactured tobacco, furniture, and textiles on a scale that led Uncle Sam to rate Winston-Salem as the South’s second industrial city.  A circle enclosing Winston-Salem with the denims center of Greensboro and the furniture center of High Point delimited an industrial patch 30 miles across, representing an annual products value of more than $300,000,000.

Winston-Salem’s method of cigarette manufacture was fully automated. One machine shredded and fed out the “makings.”  Another rolled them into a never-ending length of cigarette, which, as it oozed forth, was snipped into multiples as rapidly as a machine gun sprayed bullet.  Other machines made containers, affixed revenue stamps, imprinted and recorded serialized numbers.  The revenue stamps total $100,000,000 for Uncle Sam, on half the taxes paid by North Carolina.  From the tobacco standpoint, North Carolina’s civic twins were really Winston and Durham.  At Durham, the first perfected cigarette-rolling machine was used, and her fame for the “makings” dated back to the Civil War.  Durham finely symbolized education springing out of industrialism, for it was the seat of Duke University, which was destined by recent bequests to become one of the country’s greatest centers of learning.  Social welfare springing out of education was as finely symbolized by the nearby State university at Chapel Hill.  The author’s last impression of North Caroline was an industrial nocturne, glimpsed from their sleeper as they shot by some humming mill town – a blaze of tiered lights, a roar of sleepless machines, the picture framed in night as black as once it was among the pine forests of the State’s origin.  With those shorn forests, there had passed away forever her Golden Age, and instead she stood upon the threshold of industrial power.

 

 

As mentioned above, there is a block of sixteen full-page duotones embedded in the first article.  Duotones, formerly known as photogravures, are transfers which use acid-etched metal plates to put ink to paper.  The deeper the etch, the darker the transfer.

• “Chimney Rock, Overlooking Hickory Nut Gap: North Carolina”
• “Upper Creek Falls, Near Cold Spring”
• “Working at a Kick Wheel”
• “View from Mount Mitchell, 6,711 Feet, the Loftiest Peak East of the Mississippi”
• “In the “Land of Doing Without””
• “A Victim of the Hatteras Banks”
• “Living Oaks Festooned with Moss: Masonboro Sound”
• “Lake Fairfield, Near Sapphire, Surrounded by Summer Homes and Camps”
• ““Nursery” Terrapins”
• “Linville Falls, in the Blue Ridge Mountains”
• “Demonstrators of Old-World Farming Skill”
• “Where the Confederacy’s Fate Was Sealed”
• “Gathering North Carolina’s Third Richest Crop”
• “Harvesting Tobacco Near New Bern”
• “Wild Horses of the Carolina Dunes”
• “Forefather of North Carolina’s Present-Day Hydroelectric System”

 

 

The second article in this month’s issue is entitled “The Ashley River and Its Gardens” and was written by E. T. H. Shaffer.  It contains six black-and-white photographs taken by Jacob Gayer, Staff Photographer.  Four of these photos are full-page in size, and one of those full-page photos serves as the frontispiece to the article.

Among the streams of America the Ashley, a short tidal river of South Carolina, was unique, both for its wistful beauty – bluffs crowned with semitropical foliage overlooking wide marshlands – and for its haunting, tragic story.  In 1926, its upper reaches were silent, the wide marshes the lonely haunt of waterfowl, the bluffs crowned with dark lines of forest trees; but once those shores were vibrant with the life of the 18^th century England that reached over the sea and flourished there throughout many generations.  It centered about the river region, whose natural beauty became changed and softened by the arts of a long-established culture.  Then the tide ebbed, leaving only a quaint old seaport with walled gardens and narrow, cobbled streets, forgotten parish churches entwined in creeping forest, here and there a manor house, or again only a silent avenue of oaks to remind a new world of its yesterdays.  Charleston, far-famed for a lingering delight of other years, in her day of glory projected her life along the banks of the Ashley Eriver in an unbroken line of great countryseats.  As early as 1675, grants of land were made to Englishmen of wealth and station, and before the close of the 18^th century, 35 mansions looked down from the riverbanks; avenues and gardens were planted beside them, while the marshes along the upper reaches were transformed into emerald squares of rice.  At private wharves the crops were loaded into ships that sailed up and down the river, bringing in exchange the luxuries and conveniences of the Motherland.  After the English custom, each of the river estates bore some distinctive name that clung from generation to generation; even in 1926, deserted groves and avenues retained such proud names as Windsor Hill, Courtlands, White Hall, and Runnymede.

An English church, St. Andrews, where the landed gentry worshiped, was built in 1706 and still looked down on the river from a dark grove of live oaks.  During the Revolution, English troops held this Ashley River country, Lord Cornwallis established his headquarters at Drayton Hall.  Little damage was done by his soldiers, and with peace began long years of prosperity for the region, lasting until 1861, when a crueler war came upon the land.  When peace returned, only three of the great houses remained, among them being Drayton Hall, which was still occupied by a descendant of the builder.  The natural appearance of this region, especially in the spring, was still that of a God-made garden, a paradise where man walked reverently.  Those forests were set with live oaks, huge arched limbs sweeping the earth with long festoons of moss, and in every direction the straight trunks of pines ranged themselves into natural aisles, down which one glimpsed carpets of wild azalea, purple Judas trees, and white dogwood, while ghostly Old-Man’s-Beard peered from the swamp shadows.  Overhead, everywhere, against gray moss and dark pine, swung bridal wreaths of white Cherokee rose.  Into such a land came Englishmen in the dawn of the 18^th century when landscape gardening in England had attained greatest vogue and perfection.  Small wonder that they soon occupied themselves with training the natural beauty of the new world along the more formal lines of the old.  And it was because the Ashley River estates had remained through the centuries in the hands of men who had been faithful to the vision of their fathers, and had preserved and not sought to replace Nature, that the ancient charm had not fled.  Here, one did not meet Nature entirely tamed or put through parlor tricks of the topiary art, as at Hampton Court or the Boboli.

At Magnolia there was always the background of virgin forest, the canopy of native trees, the winding lake of black water, not unlike other black pools in the nearby forest, but here a pool magically glorified.  Middleton Place, which achieved in more formal manner, was stepped back gradually into an untouched forest.  One seeking this romantic region could motor through Summerville, a village that had transformed itself into a spring flower garden, crossing the Ashley on old Bacon’s Bridge, near the picturesque ruins of Dorchester Town.  That town was built by a band of Puritans who came there from Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1696.  The author came by way of Charleston, leaving the main road five miles south of the city.  Thence, he followed a well-kept road through the pines, from which at intervals ancient avenues of live oaks lead down to the river.  The first and most magnificent of those avenues was once the approach to Ashley Hall; but the mansion of Governor Bull was gone and there remained there only the noble trees and a memory.  The last of a long line of proprietors, William Izard Bull, torched the mansion during the Civil War to keep it from falling to the enemy.  Scattered along the road were the primitive houses and villages of Negroes, descendants of slaves who once toiled the humid rice fields along the Ashley River.  The masters, lords of the land, had vanished before great cataclysms that shook human society, but the lowly blacks, rooted to the soil, had lived on in undisturbed tranquility.  As a rule, each family owned its rude hut and a few surrounding acres, the fragments of vast tracts which were broken when the old order ended.  At other points, for miles the earth was raised into huge furrows.  These were old phosphate diggings, where, just after the Civil War, rich beds were found.

The next evidence of former civilization was the little parish church of St. Andrews, intact among the trees, waiting for its worshippers that would never return.  A few miles beyond the church, the author was attracted by the impressive gates of Drayton Hall, but discouraged by the legend above them, “Closed to visitors.”  The famous house could only be viewed by the public from the river, as it was set some distance back from the road.  Next in order came Magnolia, another ancestral estate of the Drayton family.  It was opened during the spring to the public and lured visitors in increasing throngs each season.  The original grant of that tract was made in 1676, and about 20 years later it was willed to Thomas Drayton, in whose line it still remained [in 1926].  An attractive cottage now stood upon the foundations of the original dwelling.  The famous collection of imported flowers, which had long made that estate the spring fairyland of the South, were planted by the Rev. John Grimke Drayton, rector of the Parish of St. Andrews.  Artists and poets had labored in vain to convey their impressions of the loveliness of dazzling masses of exotic bloom in somber setting of magnolia and cypress and gray moss, the whole mirrored in the surface of a still, black pool.  After leaving Magnolia, one passed two long avenues that led to Runnymede, for many years the home of the Pringle family.  One of the avenues was of living oaks, the other of solid green wall of interlocking magnolias, sidereal with white, fragrant blossoms.  Another avenue was called the Alphabet Walk because the name of each tree was supposed to begin with a different letter of the alphabet.  The road dipped to cross a quiet stream, then at the brow of a small hill stood the entrance gate and curved walls of cypress and weathered masonry that guarded Middleton Place.

Middleton Place was the ancient seat of the Middleton family.  In entering the gates, one was swept back into the past by the courtly bow of the ancient Negro gatekeeper, who had in like manner welcomed generations of guests that once came dashing in coach and four to visit at the “great house.”  The first grant for that tract was made in 1675 to Jacob Wayte.  It soon passed into the hands of the Middletons, and in 1740 Henry Middleton sent to England for skilled landscape gardener, under whose direction 100 slaves toiled for 10 years to achieve the miracle of terraces, ornamental waters, walks, groves, and fields of flowers that had endured through the vicissitudes of years, the cruelty of wars, and the rise and fall of nations.  In 1785, French botanist, Andre Michaux brought many new plants and trees from Europe.  The estate was further embellished by Arthur Middleton, signer of the Declaration of Independence.  The manor house, built in 1740, that once crowned the highest terrace, was a spacious, three-story structure, with detached wings on either side, all with massive walls of English brick and built in the Tudor style.  When British troops held the river, they spared mansions that reminded them of home, but not Middleton Place, the home of “the damned rebel.”  John Izard Middleton returned to live in Middleton Place in 1825 from Europe, where he amassed a large collection of paintings.  In 1846, the estate passed to William Middleton, who greatly heightened the charm of the gardens.  But soon came the thunder of guns rolling up the river from Ft. Sumter and war had come again.  The men marched away and the quiet mansions were left in the keeping of faithful slaves.  In February 1865, raiding bands swept down and the river was lurid with the flames of the homes along the shore.

Of Middleton House, only the steps and the walls of the east wing remained.  Happily, the gardens escaped unharmed and, in 1926, they were maintained and graciously opened to the public.  At Middleton Place there was one outstanding live oak.  When approaching the garden, its lofty crown was seen, lending a sense of majesty from afar.  Its age was estimated to be between five and seven centuries old.  The branches formed an almost perfect circle, giving a shade-span at noon of 180 feet.  Its trunk measured 35 feet in circumference.  The old rice mill at the river landing was unique in that it was operated by an artificial waterfall from one of the ornamental lakes.  In those Ashley River gardens Nature was softened with the patina of long and intimate human association.  Nature and life seemed almost blended into one harmony.  Festoons and flames of color that were blossom of azalea, camellia, and wisteria proclaimed the joy of life, the glory of love; but on every hand cypress and oak, ancient and gray with moss, were symbolic of age and the inevitable end, while the wide, unchanging marsh beyond the river whispered of eternity.  Even the wild creatures that found sanctuary there new that in such a glorified forest man must live in gentler mood.  Cranes, blue herons, ducks in the summer, early morning squirrels rustling in the trees, and mockingbirds which transposed the glory of color into song.  There was a year-round procession of flowers.  The camellias began in late November and lingered until the end of April.  March and April formed the spring festival of azaleas, and as they passed the gardens were filled with the delicate pinks of mountain laurel.  Through the summer there was a succession of roses, while the air was filled with the perfume from the giant magnolia.  And blending those notes were those of thousands of minor flowers.

The formal terraces and lakes at various levels recalled better-known European gardens, but the live oak held a tone that was of the New World and of the South.  Standing on the broken steps of Middleton House and looking out over the terraces, there marched before one’s eyes much of American history.  To that spot came England’s best and bravest to build her empire upon an unknown shore, and there, in the appointed time, her sons planned and struck for freedom.  Far down that river sounded the opening guns of a greater conflict, and there the closing scene, when the river mansions were given to the flames.  Through the dark marsh that was once an emerald rice field the river throbbed with the measured beat of the ocean’s tide; to the west it was lost in a somber swamp, beyond which lied the hills, the plains, the far mountains of a new world.

 

At the bottom of the last page of the second article in this issue (Page 550) there is a notice regarding change of address.  If a member wanted the magazine to be mailed somewhere else, the Society needed a month’s notice in advance, starting on the first of the month.  If a member wanted the June issue redirected, the Society needed to know by May first.

 

The third item listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Exploring the Atlantic Seaboard with a Color Camera” and has Charles Martin and Jacob Gayer in the byline.  It is not an article, but a set of sixteen plates embedded within the second article containing eighteen color photographs and numbered I through XVI in Roman numerals representing pages 533 through 548 of the issue.  Mr. Martin and Mr. Gayer are not authors, but the photographers of these colorful images.  Fourteen of the photos are full-page in size, while two plates (III and IV) contain two half-page photos each.  The photos on plate III share one caption while the Photos on plate IV each have their own caption

A list of the seventeen caption titles for the eighteen photos on the sixteen plates is as follows:

• “Corn Harvest Time in Virginia”
• “Autumn Foliage in Rock Creek Park”
• “In the House and Garden of Washington’s Mother”
• “On the Quadrangle of the University of Virginia”
• “Monticello, the Home of Thomas Jefferson”
• “Apple-Picking Time: Winchester, Virginia”
• “Celebrating the Dedication of Kenmore: Fredericksburg, Virginia”
• “A Virginia Mammy, Ancient of Days”
• “A Glimpse of a Restored Wing of Middleton Mansion: South Carolina”
• “Where Many Exotic Flowering Shrubs First Found a Home in the New World”
• “Flower Beds Projected in Scattered Groups Among the Pines”
• “A Bank of Azaleas: Middleton Place”
• “A Canopy of Native Trees with a Background of Virgin Forest: Magnolia Gardens, South Carolina”
• “A Winding Black Pool Porticoed with Gray Columns of Cypress”
• “Azalea Blossomtime in South Carolina”
• “The Cherry-Blossom Season in Washington, D. C.”
• “At the Amaryllis Show: Department of Agriculture Greenhouse, Washington, D. C.

 

 

The third article (fourth item) listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “London from a Bus Top” and was written by Herbert Corey, author of “Adventured Down the West Coast of Mexico,” “Andorra, a Unique Republic,” “Across the Equator with the American Navy,” “On the Monastir Road,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article contains forty-four black-and-white photographs, of which twenty are full-page in size.  Sixteen of these full-page photos are in a block and appear to be a set of duotones and will be treated as such.

One saw London best from a bus top, or so it seemed to the author.  On board a bus, one tuned into London’s life, felt oneself a part of it.  In a private car the least snobbish felt himself aloof and superior.  On a personally conducted tour one was at the mercy of a stranger’s rhetoric.  In a taxicab even the reckless could not help watching the meter.  But from a bus top one looked down, part and parcel of a he saw, understanding and being thrilled by a thousand activities.  It was true that one saw the centuries without order or sequence; but that was as it should be in London, where in 1926, tomorrow, and 1,800 years elbowed each other companionably.  Perhaps one saw a lordling sprawled at the wheel of a great car on Watling Street, one of the four thoroughfare the Romans used to hold Britain; or to watch those who were to fly to Paris stepping into the car to carry them to the flying field at Croydon.  [See: “Looking Down on Europe,” March 1925, National Geographic Magazine.]  Next the bus passed a porter’s lodge in which a duchess lived at the gates of the great house she could no longer afford to occupy.  Or the brass triangle near the Marble Arch, which marked the site of Tyburn Tree, a common gallows back in 1196.  Or that street of pallid houses built by a French architect for Napoleon’s offices when he conquered England.  Or the House Guards, where massive sentinels in scarlet, buckskin, and silver bestrode horses of black silk.  One saw an episodic and disconnected London in that way, it was true, but Londo was casual in her greatness.  Londoners mourned the “improvements” which were doing away with so many fine old houses.  The stranger saw the steel skeletons rising overhead, to be clothed with the flesh of the new London.  Yonder was Landsdowne Passage, leading from Piccadilly into Curzon Street.

The street was the citadel of the highest fashion, lined with gloomy houses.  A steel bar was still set across the passage, that no highwayman might gallop his horse through it to safety in the fields.  Nearby was the Shepherd’s Market, which as in its essentials what a shopping district was in London in Dick Turpin’s time.  Off Whitehall one might see the window through which a king walked on his way to the block.  Over the rail of Hyde Park, one might glimpse the little gravestones of the dog’s cemetery; then hurriedly glance at the new Devonshire House, wherein apartments may be leased for 999 years at an incredible number of pounds per year.  To get the full value from a bus-top tour, one must have a certain leisure.  Two weeks was not too much.  Even then he could but skim the surface and gain a faint idea of how amazing this largest city of the world was.  He should be historically minded.  Above all, he should be a true lover of romance.  He should be able to see through the curtain of today into a more colorful – and unpleasant – past.  He should cultivate the doormen, the old soldiers, and the vergers, who watched the churches.  Let him avoid the gabbler, who pattered through a memorized speech, and sought out tourists, especially Americans because they were always in a hurry.  In Westminster Abbey, a licensed guide eyed them coldly, stated his terms and said: “Your countrymen often ask me how much I can show them in ten minutes.”  When he discovered that they were really interested he revealed himself as a cultured gentleman.  He had come down in the world, it was true.  England was full of the “new poor.”  Better still, he was a lover and a student of the Abbey.  Trafalgar Square was the natural center of London for the adventurer.

It was true that Charing Cross, a long stone’s throw down the Strand, was accepted as the geographical center.  The 699 square miles of the Greater City included all parishes any part of which was within 12 miles of the Cross, or of which the whole was within 15 miles.  But Nelson’s Column, in Trafalgar Square was the North Pole to the visitor’s compass.  If one could stand atop the Column, he would discover that each quarter turn revealed a new aspect.  Down Whitehall was the ancient City of Westminster, with the House of Parliament and the Abbey.  The Strand opened to Fleet Street and the offices of the great newspapers.  Over Convent Garden, a bit more to the left, one saw the Bank of London and the heart of the old Roman city.  Another turn left and the markets, the Charterhouse, and the British Museum.  Just once more and the theater district; Soho, where were the foreign restaurants and the fashionable shopping district.  Just a bit more and clubland and Mayfair, and a glance at Buckingham Palace.  Then Hyde Park and the Admiralty, and the circle was complete.  All reached best by busses.  Trafalgar Square was a place of perilous delights.  Eight streets debouched upon it, each filled with roaring traffic, made more perilous for Americans by the English insistence on making lefthand turns.  One leapt from safety island to safety island across those streets, as if they were steppingstones in a torrent.  Once, Trafalgar Square was the King’s Mews, where various monarchs stabled their horses.  Artisans shaped weapons for English gamecocks in Cockspur Street.  Fronting the Square was the National Gallery, crammed with treasures of art.  Of all the 1,500-odd churches in London, the most memorable was St. Martins’s-in-the-Fields.  The gray, white, and black pillars of its majestic portico gained added value when seen across the open Square.

One keyed into London’s past and present at Trafalgar.  Where Northumberland Avenue entered the Square stood the Northumberland House, and next to it was the Constitution Club.  In a little house which once stood there, Ben Jonson wrote “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”  From Trafalgar, too, one could peer through the fine Admiralty Arch down the Mall, at the farther end of which stood Buckingham Palace.  It was down the Mall that Charles I walked to the headsman’s block.  Almost in front of St. Martin’s stood the statue of Nurse Edith Cavell.  Across the Square was that of Charles I, perhaps the finest equestrian statue in London.  Queen Eleanor’s Cross stood there in the thirteenth century.  The Puritans tore the statue down during the Commonwealth.  After the execution of Charles I, his statue was sold by Parliament to a brazier to be melted down or broken up.  He hid it in his back garden and made a fortune selling bits of metal thought to be from the statue.  Then royalty came again and it was placed upon its present site.  In the courtyard of Charing Cross Station stood a doubtful replica of Queen Eleanor’s Cross.  Much was to be seen thereabouts in the compass of a short walk before embarking on a cruise through London’s streets.  A turn to the left led to Maiden Lane, where Voltaire and Turner once lived.  One might pause at Rule’s oyster house for a snack, not because of hunger, but because it had been the resort of English actors since 1750.  Just around the corner was Covent Garden, once the convent garden of the Abbey of Westminster.  It had been the great market for fruits and vegetable since 1634.  It was a lively, sad, industrious place.  Under the great Piazza, which was, a century prior to 1926, London’s most fashionable walk, old woman sat all summer long shelling peas.

The Covent Garden Opera had declined.  At all events the author visited at the fine old house, two jazz bands played for hordes of dancers.  There was Bow Street and its police station.  On Russell Street corner was Will’s Coffee House, where Dryden sat in judgement on plays.  Charles Lamb lodged at No. 20 Russell Street; the National Sporting Club, most aristocratic of boxing clubs, was at 43 King Street; and at No. 4 York Street, De Quincey wrote his “Confessions.”  Half the charm of London was in its history.  They passed the Savoy and the Cecil hotels and dove down Carter’s Lane to Victoria Embankment.  All historic ground there.  There was the York Water Gate, far in on dry land, through which boats once landed with freight for York House.  The Adelphi Terrace was built by the four brothers Adam on the Adelphi Arches, whose gloomy recesses were here and there sighted.  Once they were the haunts of London’s most desperate characters.  Samuel Pepys once lived at the foot of Buckingham Street, and just across the way, Tsar Peter had his lodgings as a ships carpenter.  On the way to the next bus, they stopped at the Savoy Chapel, rebuilt in 1505, sunk in a valley between great buildings and shaded by old trees.  On the Strand they took Bus 15A for The City, that square mile of money contained in the still traceable remnant of the Roman walls.  But, before boarding they walked a few steps down a twisting, narrow lane, at No. 163a Strand, to a Roman bath.  Few knew of that bath, and fewer visited it.  As the bus rumbled and swayed eastward, they saw two churches isolated in the center of the Strand – St. Clement Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand.  And there was Somerset House; this huge gray-black 18^th-century quadrangle was one of the most majestic structures in Britain. 

On past the Law Courts, which suggested a deluxe version of Coney Island.  There, Temple Bar once stood, decked at intervals for centuries with the heads of patriots and traitors.  In the rear of the Law Courts once stood Clement’s Inn, where Falstaff and Shallow “heard the chimes by midnight.”  Lincoln’s Inn Fields was reached through a maze of little streets.  In the 12 acres of the Fields duelists used to meet, but, in 1926, peaceful old-timers dreamt away the days on benches beneath the great plane trees.  Across the Fields lied the 13^th-century Lincoln’s Inn, where each night curfew was rung upon a bell brought from Cadiz in 1596 by the Earl of Essex.  They walked down Chancery Lane to the Tudor Building, where the Public Records Office was located.  It used to be the House of Converts, intended as a place of worship for apostates from the Jewish faith.  When the Church stopped paying bounties for captured souls, the pool of converts dried up, and the chapel was put to other uses.  Here was the Doomsday Book, with the contrasting signatures of Guy Fawkes on his confession, one after torture and the other a few days later after rest.  The old inn at the Chancery was going.  Some had already been built over, and there was a “For Sale” sign on the rest.  A row of quaint houses remained, perhaps as they were when the inn was built, in 1345. Only one of them burned in the Great Fire in 1666.  Another equally aged row was to be found in Neville’s Court nearby, in tiny gardens behind brick walls.  Right alongside Clifford’s Inn was Fetter Lane, where Praisegod Barebones lived.  They walked back to Fleet Street by way of Gough Square, in which was the house where Dr. Samuel Johnson worked out his dictionary.  Before climbing back on the bus, they ate lark pie at the Cheshire Cheese.

Through a tunnel-like passage they returned to Fleet Street, on the other side of which lied Prince Henry’s Room.  The house was built in 1610 and by a miracle escaped the Great Fire.  Through a gateway, one entered the Temple, with its memories of Goldsmith and Lamb.  They stood puzzled before the locked doors of the Temple Church, “the most beautiful small church in Christendom,” wondering how they could get in, when their problem was solved for them.  A small messenger boy came and whanged upon a great wrought-iron knocker, and they entered upon his scornful heels.  They changed omnibuses at Ludgate, once an entry through the Roman wall and, in 1926, a whirlpool of traffic.  To the right New Bridge Street led across Blackfriars Bridge, from which one could explore Bankside.  First, it was worthwhile looking about at Ludgate.  Nearby was the Congregational Memorial Hall, on the site of Fleet Prison.  William Penn was confined there.  Over the river was The Ring, an octagonal building intended for a chapel and, in 1926, the center of London’s more popular boxing activities.  It was in Bankside that William Shakespeare acted in Richard Burbage’s Globe Theater.  Sir William Walworth, once mayor of London, owned “stew-houses” in Bankside, that being a euphonious early English name for bathhouses.  Not far away was Battle Bridge Lane, where the Romans defeated Queen Boadicea in a pitched battle, and the remnants of the old George Inn in a railroad yard.  They returned by bus to Ludgate and carried on through Cannon Street.  St. Paul’s Cathedral was the third, perhaps the fifth, great structure to stand on that site.  Perhaps a Temple of Diana preceded them.  The Cathedral was granted the estate in the seventh century.  Nearby were Paternoster Row, Carter’s Lane, and the Old Bailey, where stood the prison of that name.

Knightrider and Giltspur streets got their names because knights rode through their narrow lengths on their way to the tournaments at Smithfield.  The author was less interested in the Cathedral than in the fat pigeons around the statue of Queen Anne, nearby, or in London Stone in Cannon Street, embedded in the walls of the church of St. Swithin, clerk of the weather.  It was thought that the Romans measured the distances on their highroads from that old stone.  The bus carried them through Cannon and Fenchurch streets to Aldgate, once a portal in the city walls.  Whether to visit St. Botolph’s Institute or turn down the Minories to the Tower of London?  On that route was the Coal Exchange, in which one might see the fire-blackened bricks of a Roman bath.  Likewise, Billingsgate Market was there, where the city bought its fish.  They remained on the bus but could smell the fish.  To the left, they glanced down Houndsditch, once a fetid moat outside the city walls.  There abouts lived the Dutch Tenters, Holland Jews, who had been for 200 years among the most valued citizens of the city.  In the signs over the bars in Aldgate High Street, one saw the sole remainder of the coaching inns from which the lumbering wagons set out each weekday for all parts of England.  They rode on down Whitechapel and the Mile End Road, where the Hebrew population mostly centered.  St. George Street was once Ratcliff Highway, in which not a night passed without a coldblooded murder.  A bit of asking and one found Middlesex Street, which was once called Petticoat Lane.  On Sunday morning Petticoat Lane was still the most interesting spot in London.  Anything and everything were bought and sold on its exchange.  One could buy back his stolen dog, or lay in a supply of chickens, cats, white mice, jellied eels, Eastern silks, or camels.

It was with some trepidation that they bussed it down the Commercial highroad from Aldgate in search of Limehouse Causeway and Penny Field.  This was London’s Chinatown.  The streets were dirty, sordid, and uninteresting.  Here and there a bland Chinese smoked a cigarette, and they sometimes glanced into close-packed rooms where Orientals sat reading, sewing on buttons, and playing odd games.  Back to the bus for the long, jolting return to Aldgate and a pedestrian excursion to St. Olave’s Church in Hart Street, one of the few churches that lived through the Fire.  Here worshiped Samuel Pepys, the diarist.  In a corner they found the monument erected by the Davison and Newman families.  They were the tea merchants whose cargo was dumped in Boston Harbor.  The firm still sold tea in 1926.  They got back on the bus to go through Leadenhall and Cornhill toward the Bank.  Nothing but history there – history and a myriad narrow, twisting streets, through which passed a multitude of busy men. Sites there included Lloyd’s new building, where agents issued insurance policies against any conceivable disaster (fire insurance was invented after the Great Fire), the Mansion House, official home of the Lord Mayor, the Guildhall, and the Royal Exchange. When one tired, there was Simpson’s restaurant in Bird-in-Hand Court.  They made a rapid way through Cheapside.  Cheapside was once the market for all little things in medieval London.  The names of the streets around told their own story to them rumbling past – Milk Street, Wood Street, Goldsmith Street, Honey Lane.  As early as 1277, Friday Street was the place of the fishmongers.  It was from No. 37 Cheapside that Gilpin set out on his ride.  John Milton was born nearby, Chaucer lived here; Shakespeare, Kit Marlow, Beaumont and Fletcher met for wine and witticisms in the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street.

It was the bells of Bow Church that called to Dick Whittington to turn again.  Now they were fairly on their way to the London of fashion and sophistication.  Yet in London one was never out of touch with the past.  In Newgate Street they thumped past the site of Newgate Prison, where malefactors condemned to death were confined.  When the bells of St. Sepulchre nearby sounded, the hangman placed the condemned wretch, heavily ironed, in the open cart to take him to Tyburn Gallows through the eager streets.  They took another bus at Farringdon Road for a visit to the Charterhouse.  Half a dozen centuries of history in that lovely old structure, which was the finest example in England of what a nobleman’s home of the first order used to be.  Not five minutes’ walk away was the gatehouse of the Priory of the Order of St. John.  Even the hurried passerby must pause to admire the solid grandeur of Prior Docwra’s building.  They continued on the bus to Hampstead Heath, the best London open space.  There, the Spaniard’s Inn was found, and Jack Straw’s Castle.  If they took the bus along Oxford Road, they might pause again where Charterhouse Street opened into Holborn Circus.  Every vestige of the palace of the Bishop of Ely had been swept away, but each night the iron gates of Ely Place were locked, as they had been for 600 years.  At Tottenham Court Road one journeyed to the Caledonia Market, Hogartian in atmosphere, where two day a week, things of no value at all were sold at commensurate prices.  In evening, it was worthwhile wandering down Soho Street to see the foreign restaurants.  The author remembered the Stolen Snail.  They had wandered in one night to a little French restaurant and found the host in despair.  For weeks, he had kept a giant snail on lettuce in his display window.  Someone had abducted it.

Oxford Circus was taken as the very center of the fashionable shopping district.  A turn to the left and the bus charged down Regent Street, along the greatest shopping street in London, and cherished in memory for the fine old buildings which lined the Quadrant at the Piccadilly end.  Reconstruction was occurring in 1926.  Londoners mourned but the stranger saw a change for the better.  Through Piccadilly Circus, the center of the theatrical district.  A proprietor there boasted the largest restaurant in the world.  Through Haymarket, which not few years prior was in fact a hay market.  A snuff house was established there in 1720.  To the left was Panton Street, bought by Colonel Panton after winning a fortune in one night of card playing.  They returned to Trafalgar Square, then down Charing Cross and Whitehall to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.  They passed several ranges of severe government offices.  There was Downing Street, in which, at No. 10, the Prime Minister lived during his term of office.  Old Scotland Yard, where Scottish kings were quartered once upon a time.  It was later the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Division (CID).  And there was New Scottland Yard, in 1926, the CID’s home.  The old Banqueting Hall harbored a small but interesting museum.  And there was the Cenotaph, a memorial to the British dead of the World War.  The Houses of Parliament were at the foot of Whitehall.  And there was Westminster Abbey.  Back to the bus again at Victoria Station, and on through Buckingham Palace Road.  If they were to veer to the left, they would find their way to Chelsea, with its memories of Carlyle, Whistler, and Sir Thomas More.  The loveliest place in Chelsea was the Physic Garden, given in 1722 to the Society of Apothecaries by Sir Hans Slone.

The Chelsea Royal Hospital for old soldiers was established by Charles II at the request of little Nelly Gwyn.  By this street and that the busses made their way from Chelsea to Kensington Gardens, on the Kensington Road, wherein was set the Kensington Palace, where Queen Victoria was born.  Down Kensington and Knightsbridge roads, past Hyde Park, where on Sunday mornings every man in London who wished to orate could do so.  One strolled with the crowds to hear feuds centuries old, perhaps.  That was one of the four Sunday-morning sights that must not be missed.  The others were the Petticoat Lane market, the gallopers in the bridal paths in the park, and Tattersall’s.  There, men and women for the country, in London to shop or other reasons could enjoy a whiff of the horsy air.  A bus to the left at Apsley House, if you will.  Apsley House, which was given to the Great Duke by the nation for his services.  Then up Park Lane to the Marble Arch.  Hereabouts every house had its history.  Straight on through Piccadilly.  They dismounted at St. James’s Street to walk down the gentle incline to the gatehouse of St. James Palace.  The western part, in 1926 known as York House, was the official residence of the Prince of Wales.  By a turn to the left one might find Pall Mall, the heart of clubland; or to the right to find the London Museum.  There one could trace England right from the beginnings.  In the basement were the remains of a Roman galley found in the Thames and a dugout canoe, perhaps used by Saxons to ferry across the stream before the Romans arrived.  There, too, were the leg irons of Newgate Prison, the handbills of execution, and the black room of debtors’ prison.  They crossed Piccadilly to find Bond Street, the world's most famous shopping district – a narrow thoroughfare, down which busses rumbled with bare passing room.

The narrow pavements thronged with happy people; the windows filled with jewelry, goldsmith’s work, the best of the past and the most expensive of the present.  Turn through a byway to find St. George’s, Hanover Square – another oasis of quiet in the heart of London.  The fine old church was familiar to the eye, because its picture appeared often in the accounts of fashionable weddings.  And so back to Trafalgar Square.  The itinerary was incomplete, of course.  How could it have been otherwise.  There were 7,000 miles of streets in London, which sheltered 7,500,000 people in nearly 1,000,000 houses.  A person willing to explore further would find 231 district bus routes at his disposal, on which almost 5,000 busses were operated.  Yet the author believed that would enjoy London best if he knew the history of the places he visited.    He recommended that they dismount on Oxford Street at Selfridge’s and make his way to Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, where he would find a tobacco pipe labeled as Sir Walter Raleigh’s.  First, he should know history; then know London history; then be humble and tireless; and, lastly, take a bus.

 

 

As stated above, there is a block of sixteen full-page duotones embedded within the last article.  Duotones, formerly known as photogravures, are images transferred to paper using ink on acid-etched metal plates, the deeper the etch, the darker the transfer.  These duotones are on pages 565 through page 580 in the issue and are referenced throughout the third article and its photo captions.

• “The Huge Tower Bridge, “Gateway of the City”
• “Greenwich Observatory: Chief Time-setter for the World”
• “The Treasure Mart of the Empire”
• “Saint-Gaudens’ Lincoln in Broad Sanctuary, Westminster”
• “The Cenotaph: Whitehall”
• “Fountain Court, in the Temple, Immortalized by Dickens”
• “Looking Up Fleet Street from St. Clement Danes”
• “Trafalgar Square and the Monument to England’s Greatest Sailor”
• “Cleopatra’s Needle, on the Thames Embankment”
• “Britain’s Valhalla”
• “The Victoria Memorial in the Queen’s Garden”
• “A Royal Residence”
• “Time’s Treasury – The British Museum”
• “Living Statues”
• “A Corner of Official England”
• “Statue of “The Boy That Never Grew Up”: Kensington Gardens”

 

 

Tom Wilson

[Scott T. Shier]

Great selection of imagery to accompany this write-up.