100 Years Ago: September 1926

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: September 1926

 

This is the 140^th entry in my series of reviews/abridgements of National Geographic Magazines as they reach the 100^th anniversary of their publication.

 

 

The first article in this month’s issue is entitled “Marching Through Georgia Sixty Years After” and was written by Ralph A. Graves, author of “A Short Visit to Wales,” “The Millennial City,” “Ships for the Seven Seas,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article has the internal subtitle: “Multifold Industries and Diversified Agriculture Are Restoring the Prosperity of America’s Largest State East of the Mississippi.”  The article contains forty-seven black-and-white photographs, of which twenty-four are full-page in size.  Sixteen of those full-page photos are in a bloke of duotones, which I’ll discuss later.  The Photographs were taken by Clifton Adams, Staff Photographer.

Once the Empire State of the South in wealth and culture as well as in the number of her square miles, Georgia awoke a few years ago to discover her prestige departed.  Her pine forests were rapidly vanishing; failure to rotate her crops had caused much of her rich tobacco lands to “burn out”; the devastating boll-weevil army, marching eastward from Texas, threatened an even greater financial debacle than the army which marched from Lookout Mountain to the sea in 1864; a neighboring State had come suddenly to the fore in education, in improved highways, and in industrial development.  The author, a Georgian living outside the State, after an absence of over twenty years, undertook a tour of the Commonwealth to see what of good and encouragement could be found within her borders.  It was difficult to explain Georgia’s deficiencies.  In resources and location, no State in the Union occupied a more advantageous position.  The last of the thirteen original Colonies to be settled, Georgia, with an area of more than 59,000 square miles, was the largest State east of the Mississippi.  In that respect, she was truly a nation in herself, larger than Austria or Czechoslovakia, Greece ore Portugal, any one of the six Central American republics, or any of the three island republics of the Caribbean.  She was larger than England and Wales, or Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark combined.  Her situation on the Atlantic seaboard and her diversity of elevation were such that of the nine distinct climate belts to be found in the U. S. proper, eight were encountered within her bounds, with the result that she grew as great a variety of agricultural products as any State in the Union.  In this day, when “back to the farm” had become a national appeal, it was worth noting that Georgians had remained close to the soil, three-fourths being classified as rural.

The author’s sightseeing pilgrimage began at Tate, a hamlet nestling among those notorious red clay hills, some 40 miles due south of the point where Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia met.  It was difficult to find Tate on any save a detailed map, yet from it had gone forth building material for some of the noblest structures in America.  Tate was the center of the great Georgia marble industry.  The valley where the richest deposits lied was two and a half miles long and a half mile wide, and, as the seam of stone came to the very surface, Indians were digging marble there for their corn-grinding mortars long before the arrival of the white man.  The marble strata extended to a depth not yet determined, and although 800,000 cubic feet were quarried annually, the second largest output in the U. S., it was estimated that that amount could be double and their still would be enough marble to last eighteen hundred years.  A stream flowed through the valley, providing the necessary water for the marble works, and, as snow seldom fell in that section, the quarries were in operation every weekday in the year.  When the marble pits reached a depth of 200 feet, the drillers transferred their machines to another plot of ground, scraped off a few inches of soil, and began anew.  The old pits were abandoned at that point, not because the marble was bad, but because of the long climb up and down the ladders.  Aside from the lovely color tones of its three varieties – pink, white, and silver gray – the characteristics of Georgia marble which commended it so highly to architects were its nonabsorptive quality and its uniformity of texture.  It was the latter feature which caused its selection for the colossal statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.  Situated on a knoll with a view of the valley stood the magnificent mansion, nearing completion, of the quarry owner.

That mansion was made mostly of marble, not for opulence but because it was the material on hand.  In fact, in that part of Pickens County the very highways were surfaced with crushed marble and the chimneys of the one-room cabins of the hill-folk were built of marble slabs.  A two hour’s motor trip from Tate brought the tourist to Atlanta, when the well-graded but unmetalled clay roads were dry; the time might stretch into eternity in rainy weather, when it became slick.  Although the wealthiest counties of the State had their own excellent paved highways, there was no dodging Georgia’s deficiency with respect to many of her roads.  A bright day was promising, however.  Good roads were being discussed and the State’s ambitious program included a system of roads from county seat to county seat, which would give a north-to-south and east-to-west highway for every county.  The author’s trip was made in fair weather and they arrived in the city which was the State’s most effective advertisement, if one accepted the Georgia peach and the Georgia watermelon.  The largest city of the South Atlantic States, Atlanta had always prided herself upon her ultraprogressive spirit, a spirit which more leisurely communities of the State, with somewhat scornful and tenacious sectionalism, characterized as “Yankee.”  She gloried in the imputation and became more and more “yankeefied.”  When the first railway was projected through that part of the State, the wealthy citizens of Decatur refused to allow it to be located nearer than fie miles from the town’s confines.  Thus, the crossroads of Marthasville was established.  In 1926, Marthasville (Atlanta) was one of the great railway and banking centers of the U. S., and Decatur, while a separate town, was merely one of the environs of that despised village of 75 years before.

Atlanta owed any of the towns of Georgia a debt which she would never be able to pay.  For a quarter of a century, she had arrogated to herself the best youth of the Commonwealth.  In 1926, however, that situation was changing. A score of towns with progressive boards of trade were presenting opportunities that warranted the boys just out of college in staying at home and developing the regions close at hand.  One could not tour the city without acquiring the superlative habit.  The visitor was constantly bombarded with statistics about the “biggest mattress factory,” “the largest roofing plant,” “the most colossal monument,” “the largest colony of millionaires,” “the biggest mail-order concern,” and so on.  But Atlanta had something besides shear bigness of enterprises and multiplicity of millionaires’ estates in which she might properly take pride.  Her citizens had an incomparable community spirit.  Tremendously energetic and aggressive, a bit contemptuous of her more slow-moving cities, Atlanta was, withal, a credit to Georgia and the New South.  Atlanta’s week of Metropolitan Grand Opera showed how the community spirit worked.  That annual event had outgrown the expectations of its initiators, in 1926 attracting tens of thousands from across the South.  The Atlanta spirit sometimes presented an entirely different aspect.  A year prior, the major power company of the State faced a power shortage due to three successive dry summers.  The company called in conference the consumers explaining the situation, who came up with a partial solution – a staggering of working hours, some factories to work at night, others to run in the day.  In 1926, a consolidation was made, pooling the resources of northwest Alabama and north Georgia.  Using power from Alabama allowed the building of dams to assured future power security.

The development of water power had been one of the most potent factors in the tremendous industrial strides made by the State during the last ten years, for while Georgia came to full utilization of her “white coal” considerably later than North Carolins, her hydroelectric development was now on par with the Tarheel State, each using about 500,000 horsepower, with 2,000,000 as the ultimate goal.  [See: “Motor Coaching Through North Carolina,” May 1926, National Geographic Magazine.]  Atlanta was justly proud of her educational institutions, chiefly among which was the Georgia School of Technology, with an enrollment of 2,000 students.  Atlanta was also the seat of Emory University, of Oglethorpe University, and of Agnes Scott (in Decatur), a girl’s college of high scholastic reputation.  The city was a center for negro education, among the most important colleges being, Atlanta, Clark, and Morris Brown Universities, Spelman Seminary, and Morehead College.  The subject of education led to Athens, seat of the State University and a charming old place of stately colonial homes, embowered in oak groves and rose gardens.  Georgia was the first State in the Union to establish a state university, and Wesleyan, founded at Macon in 1836, was a world pioneer among women’s colleges; yet, in 1926, the Commonwealth ranked at the very bottom of the list of States in her per capita expenditures for education, and only six States had a higher percentage of illiteracy.  The higher institutions of learning were especially handicapped by lack of funds for equipment and salary.  A more hopeful situation was to be found in the rural school system.  In the summer of 1925, 170 new school buildings were completed throughout the State, at a cost of more than two million dollars.

It was a pleasant automobile journey of 100 miles from Athens, by way of Washington and Thomson, to Augusta, at the head of navigation on the Savannah and the center of the cotton manufacturing industry of Georgia.  Augusta was known in the North and East chiefly as a health resort and for its splendid golf links, but Georgians cherished its historical associations.  James Oglethorpe, the philanthropist who settled the colony of Georgia, founded the city nearly 200 years prior to 1926, naming it for the Princess of Wales.  Both Augustans and Savannahians claimed that it was on a farm near their respective cities that Eli Whitney devised and set up the first cotton gin, a machine which truly revolutionized the cotton industry of the world.  In 1792, the year of the invention, the U. S. exported only 379 bales of cotton; for the year ending June 30, 1926, the South exported more than one-half of its crop of sixteen million bales!  Fifteen miles from Augusta was Silver Bluff, where Hernando De Soto camped in 1540.  Augusta lied in the great kaolin belt, 20 to 50 miles wide, which extended across the State to Columbus.  Already the clays were being mined extensively, but unsystematically and uneconomically.  In addition to her kaolin beds and her marble and granite deposits, Georgia’s hills and mountains contained a diversity of wealth in clays and minerals.  Of the 52 known commercial minerals, more than 40 were to be found in the State.  Many interesting chapters in the mineralogical history of the U. S. had been written in Georgia.  The first bauxite mined in America came from the State, 34 years prior, and while Arkansas had since assumed leadership of that aluminum producing ore, Georgia held second place, her bauxite being used in the manufacture of abrasives, alum, chemicals for water purification, dying, and tanning.

More than half of all the ocher produced in the U. S. came from Georgia deposits.  The ore was used as a pigment in paints and as a filler in linoleum.  The State was also for years the country’s chief supplier of asbestos.  The latter ceased once the rich Canadian and South African deposits were developed.  Georgia’s gold mines had produced nearly $18,000,000 worth of the yellow metal; but their days of productivity seemed to be over.  Leaving Augusta’s broad thoroughfares, they went by motor to Macon, the former’s rival for third place among Georgia’s cities.  Situated at the geographical heart of the State, Macon was the great market center for the fruit industry.  There, the peach and watermelon growers maintained their cooperative organizations.  The author’s visit to Georgia coincided with the annual Peach Blossom Festival at Fort Valley, a colorful, historical pageant which was inaugurated five years prior and which attracted thousand to that progressive little town in the heart of the peach belt.  A few hours after the 1926 pageant there came a killing frost!  Two nights later, the author was in Bainbridge, 125 miles to the south, when the owner of one of the largest crate factories of that section was called to the telephone.  Upon returning to the group of businessmen, he announced with elation that the freeze had caused a damage of 40% to the peach crop.  That meant prosperity for middle Georgia.  A 10,000-carload crop would be profitable to the growers, but another bumper crop like that of 1924 would have meant ruin.  The time was coming when that condition would be remediated and maximum crops would be desired.  The solution lied in the development of a canning industry to utilize the un-marketed fruit.  Because of the bumper crop two years prior, the “Georgia Belles,” the last variety to ripen, were allowed to rot in the orchards.

The need to develop methods of utilizing her surplus peaches was important because Geogia was still in the troughs of “slavery” – an economic slavery through long dependence upon one crop, cotton.  For more than 100 years the Georgia farmer, the Georgia merchant, and the Georgia banker had thought and acted in terms of cotton.  The whole financial structure of the State had been built around that crop.  But when it came to other crops an entirely new machinery had to be developed, and that machinery was too new in most communities to run without “squeaking.”  Lacking familiar facilities, many farmers of limited means and narrow experience had tried other crops, but they reverted again and again to the time-tried cotton, with the result that, despite the fact that Georgia should have been a self-contained State, she annual imports around $175,000,000 worth of foodstuffs.  Though the fleecy fetters of King Cotton still galled the ankles of the Georgia farmer, there was no such one-product handicap in the industrial field.  Everywhere one turned in the State there was a new industrial plant to inspect.  At Gordon, a few miles out of Macon, one of the most modern brick plants in America was utilizing the kaolin deposits previously mentioned.  The plant, which had been operating for just a year, was designed in units, the first of which was now producing its 50,000 white bricks a day.  The kaolin, sand, and feldspar were mixed and pressed out in a rectangular ribbon, which was borne along by belt. A wheel with wire spokes sliced it into bricks.  At the same time, each brick was pierced by three holes an inch in diameter, thus reducing the weight by 15 to 20% and facilitated the drying process without decreasing its strength.  The soft bricks were sent to the drier where a pound of water per brick was dried out in 24 hours.

The bricks were next loaded on small cars, eight tons to a car, and sent on their creeping journey of 72 hours through the kilns where they were subjected to heat that began at 200 degrees, gradually rose to 2,200 degrees, then as gradually dropped back to 200.  In the same little town, there was a mill which had a daily output of 60 tons of kraft paper, a tough, tear-resisting product used largely for wrapping packages, magazine wrappers, etc.  The wood-pulp supply from second-growth pine timber was apparently inexhaustible in that section of the State, for natural forestation took place in from 10 to 15 years, permitting a cut of one to two cords to the acre perpetually.  The author’s next stop was Savannah, second city of the State.  It was there that James Edward Oglethorpe, in 1733, established the first settlement of the new colony named for his sovereign, George III.  There was a four-fold purpose for the founding of the last of the English colonies in America: as a buffer between the Carolina/Virginia settlements to the north and the hostile Spaniards in Florida; as a “shock absorber” for encroachment of the French from Louisiana; as a place of rehabilitation for thousands of impoverished countrymen; and as a refuge for unfortunates from other lands who were being persecuted for their religious convictions.  The early settlers included not only Englishmen, but Scottish Highlanders, German Lutherans, Portuguese Jews, Swiss, and Piedmontese.  How many woes might have been spared the State if the founders’ original edict against the introduction of slavery and the importation of rum had been obeyed!  Like Augusta, Savannah was steeped in tradition, and historical association was the visitor’s companion wherever he went.  There, he found two monuments, the cornerstones of which were laid by Lafayette.

The first monument commemorated the Revolutionary hero, General Nathanael Greene and the second Count Casimir Pulaski.  Hard by was a third monument, to William Jasper, who fell at Savannah with Pulaski in the siege of 1779.  Ot was from this flourishing seaport, 107 years prior, that the Savannah made the first successful transatlantic voyage by a steamship, the passage to Liverpool requiring 25 days.  Three venerable structures in the heart of the Forest City, so named because of the moss-festooned live oaks which lined its streets, attracted the attention of the historically minded – the Savannah Theater, one of the oldest playhouses in America; Christ Church, on the site where John Wesley was once rector; and the third, a mellow old house where General Sherman established his headquarters after his “march to the sea.”  While Savannah derived much of its atmosphere from such associations, there was another side to the city which was equally arresting.  It was the world’s greatest naval stores market and its miles of waterfront accommodated shipping from all parts of the globe, especially vessels which came for cargoes of cotton, turpentine, and rosin.  There was also a manufacturing side to the oldest city in the State.  One of the most interesting sites was a sugar refinery, the only plant of its kind between New Orleans and Baltimore, and therefore occupying a market area covering 13 States.  The raw sugar came in shiploads direct from the cane mills of Cuba to the docks of the refinery.  [See “Cuba, the Sugar Mill of the Antilles,” July 1920, National Geographic Magazine.]  The cargo came in325-pound sacks of burlap.  Jagged holes were snagged in almost every bag as it was lifted from the hold, but the unrefined brown sugar was damp and little spilled.  That which did seep out was swept up and shoveled into the hopper with the rest.

The raw sugar was dried in centrifuges, reduced to syrup, and filtered repeatedly.  Then the syrup was boiled.  When crystals began to form the thinner syrup was drawn off for further treatment.  Sometimes a syrup was sent through that process 90 times before it crystalized.  The sugar was washed, then dried in hot air blowers and was ready to be automatically weighed and poured into containers, from 2-pound cartons to 100-pound sacks and in barrels at a rate of 2,000,000 pounds a day.  From the time the raw sugar was dumped into the hopper until it was delivered to the consumer it had not come into contact with the hands of any of the plant’s 400 employees.  The sugar inside a 2-pound carton or a 5-pound bag cost less to refine than the pasteboard box or muslin bag cost to make.  Twelve miles out of Savannah, on the superb highway which would soon be completed through to Brunswick, Georgia’s second seaport, one passed a unique experiment station operated by the Department of Agriculture.  There, a bamboo propagation farm, which started from a single shoot 35 years prior, was flourishing.  Many thousands of plants had been shipped from that station since 1920, and within 2 years it was expected that 25,000 plants could be distributed annually.  The bamboo cane attained its full size and height in a single season of six or seven weeks’ growth – in May and June.  Some canes reached a height of 50 or 60 feet, with a diameter of several inches, and the station had a record growth of 17½ inches in one day.  The U. S. imported a large quantity of bamboo each year for poles, stakes, and fishing rods.  The Government believed that our domestic requirements could be supplied by bamboo groves planted in our Southern States.  Experiments indicated that it was possible to grow as fine a bamboo in the U. S. as grown in the Orient.

The whole Georgia coast from Savannah to Brunswick, and on down to St. Mary’s, including the fringe of island off the mainland, was once debatable land, lying between Spanish Florida and the English colonies to the north.  Long before the English gained a foothold in the New World, however, the Jesuits and the Franciscans had established numerous missions in the region.  A year before the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, the bishop of Cuba made a pastoral visit to four Georgia missions to confirm 1,070 neophytes.  When Oglethorpe won the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simon Island, opposite Brunswick, in the summer of 1742, it proved to be the decisive battle of the struggle that had lasted nearly a century and a half, and it determined the destiny of Georgia as an English colony.  The ruins of Frederica, Oglethorpe’s fort, still stood on St. Simon and a few yards away were the Wesley oaks, beneath which John preached and Charles sang nearly 200 years prior.  The Wesleys and their noted fellow worker, Whitefield, played a major role in the early history of Georgia, although Charles remained in the colony only six months and John only two years.  The latter’s experiences in Savannah and Frederica were to affect his whole career and life’s work.  The broad palm-bordered boulevard which ran across Bloody Marsh in 1926 and connected St, Simon with Brunswick on the mainland had given the island a wonderful impetus as a summer resort, while back from the ocean front truck gardeners were growing lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and beans, as well as poultry.  Across Brunswick’s harbor entrance from St. Simon lied Jekyl Island, forerunner to Miami and Palm Beach.  A group of multimillionaires bought the island 40 years prior and established the Jekyl Island Club, a group of luxurious rustic winter homes.

Brunswick had had more discouragements, perhaps, than any other important city in Georgia.  She had had her railroad and steamship disappointments, she had had her severe postwar deflation, and she had often received only “left-overs” from the Congressional Rivers and Harbors “pork barrel” bills.  But the tide seemed to be turning.  With an excellent system of paved roads throughout Glynn County and with a rapidly developing truck-farming industry, especially on St. Simon, her prosperity was basically sound.  Industrially the city has a variety of interests, including a $7,000,000 oil refining plant; a fishing fleet of 200 vessels, many of which supplied a big shrimp-canning factory; creosoting works and a marine railway, but her unique factory was a steam distillation turpentine plant, the largest in the world, extracting turpentine and rosin from stumps.  Stumps were hauled into Brunswick from distances from 40 to 120 miles, at a rate of 600 tons a day.  In some parts of Georgia farmers were paying from $15 to $20 an acre to have their fields cleared, but in Glynn and neighboring counties, the canny landowners exacted a price for his stumps.  The stumps were blown out of the ground with powder, which was inserted in a hole bored deep in the roots.  Only those stumps which had been dead for eight or ten years were used, but Georgia’s supply of these was said to be inexhaustible.  The stumps were crush and ground into matchstick size and the wood was dumped into tanks holding from 17 to 18 tons of splinters.  The tank was cooked with steam for 20 hours at 400 degrees.  The turpentine evaporated and was condensed in a separate container.  The chips were then washed with boiling gasoline, which absorbed the rosin.  The gasoline was next cooked out, leaving the rosin.

Less than one-quarter of 1% of the gasoline was lost in the process.  After being thoroughly dried to prevent explosion, the chips were used as the plant’s fuel.  A ton of stumps produced seven gallons of turpentine and about 4/5 of a barrel of rosin.  A third product derived from this process was pine oil, used in medicine and in the reduction of copper ore.  After visiting the plant, the author wanted to see the old-fashion way of producing turpentine and rosin from gum.  About the beginning of the century many Georgia turpentine operators abandoned their stills and moved to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, declaring that all available turpentine timber in Georgia had been worked.  But when the author revisited Decatur County, he found the men who had declined to “pull up stakes” and join the exodus were still operating, and in many cases the same timberland.  Improved methods and conservation policies had enabled those operators to continue in business in a sustainable manner.  Four the last three years, Georgia had again led the Union in the production of naval stores.  A stand of trees 20 to 30 years old was selected.  Early April a crew of “chippers” hacked Vs into the trees and placed cups under each V.  Each week, they came back and hacked another V above the existing ones.  Every fourth week, another crew, known as “dippers,” came and collected the cups full of raw gum.  Ten barrels of raw gum were emptied into a copper still and cooked for two hours, in which time two barrels of turpentine had been distilled, and four barrels of rosin remained in the copper pot.  The boiling rosin was strained using cotton batting, the used batting being sold as a by-product.  Locally, it was used for kindling as it made a highly concentrated and readily inflammable fuel.

Thirty years prior, all pines were “boxed” with deep wedge cuts into the base of the tree to catch gum.  That practice not only made the work of the dippers harder, it increased the fire hazard tremendously and it weakened smaller trees, so windstorms destroyed vast areas.  It was a professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia who invented the cup method of turpentining, thus saving millions of dollars for the industry.  Turpentining did not affect the quality of lumber which a tree produced, but in the old, haphazard days, the forests were seriously damaged by careless methods which destroyed a stand of trees too young and too small to undergo boxing.  The number of years a tree could be work depended upon its size when first chipped.  Its life after it was intelligently turpentined was not appreciably shortened.  In reforestation, it was impractical to plant “nursery” pine trees because the roots ran too deep to be transplanted economically.  The landowner therefore relied upon natural processes or else planted the pine mast (seed).  Land on which there were as few as 50 trees could be worked with profit, but one farsighted lumber company was seeding 400 to the acre as most economical for operation.  All the world was interested in the conservation of the South’s pine timber, for turpentine was an essential ingredient in paints, varnishes, and in pharmacology, while rosin was used in paints, in soap-making, in shipbuilding, in making high-grade paper, and in all soldering operations.  The turpentine operators were not only maintaining their production in southwest Georgia, but were moving back into counties worked 20 or 25 years prior and where natural reforestation had taken place.  Slash pine reproduced with extraordinary rapidity in the vicinity of the Okefenokee Swamp.

The Okefenokee Swamp, incidentally, was one of the most picturesque regions of the entire South.  Its 800 square miles in the southeastern corner of the State comprised one of Nature’s zoological and botanical gardens.  On the island which dotted its cypress-tinted waters was a wealth of flowers canopied by forests of gum, bay, pine, and cypress, while in the grassy savannas and on the banks of placid streams the amphibious alligator was sought by the sportsman, who also found bear, deer, and a vast variety of fishes in abundance.  The Okefenokee conjured to mind many incidents of romance and adventure.  There the warlike Seminole Indians made their last stand against the whites, and there, deserters from the Confederate forces during the Civil War found safe hiding in its fastnesses.  Some of the descendants of the latter still occupied primitive huts on its sequestered islands.  The St. Mary’s River took its rise in the swamp, flowing eastward into the Atlantic and forming part of the boundary between Georgia and Florida.  There, too, were the headwaters of the streams flowing into the Gulf, which furnished the inspiration for Stephen Foster’s immortal “Suwannee River.”  The author’s party returned to the southwest corner of the State for a hurried visit to the fuller’s earth mines and the tobacco lands of Decatur County.  As they motored southward from Bainbridge, the county seat, toward the Attapulgus clay beds, the well-graded highway ran between extensive groves of pecans, reminding them that Albany, in the neighboring county of Dougherty, was the center of the most prosperous nut-raising regions in America.  In fact, the pecan industry had grown so large that Albany each year had its pecan pageant comparable to Fort Valey’s peach blossom festival.  Two-thirds of America’s pecans were produced in Georgia.

Attapulgus, situated almost on the Florida line, a few years prior became the center of a “rush.”  Everybody was prospecting and the woods were filled with strangers eagerly acquiring subsoil rights.  Soon land prices soared.  All because it had been discovered that a stratum of some of the finest fuller’s earth in the world underlaid that district and every oil-refining company in the country wanted a share.  Finally, one firm agreed to supply all the refineries at a reasonable price.  The bottom dropped out of the clay boom, but the fuller’s earth industry had come to stay.  The Attapulgus plant mined the fuller’s earth and prepared from 250 to 275 carloads of 25 tons each per month, to be used as a filter for lubricating oils.  Each refining company required a distinctive grade of earth, some coarse-grained, others pulverized or of shale-like qualities.  The clay was found beneath from up to 45 feet of topsoil in a stratum about 6 feet thick.  It came from the mines damp and had to be dried.  After being dried, the earth was conveyed by belts to great bins, and then ground, sifted, bolted, and sacked, much like flour in a mill.  It was shipped all over the country, and 40% of the fuller’s earth used in American refineries came from this one plant.  A few miles from Attapulgus were the Amsterdam tobacco plantations, with tr big battery of modern packing houses.  Both shade and bright-leaf tobacco were grown in that section.  Shade tobacco was grown in fields which were covered with cheesecloth stretched overhigh frames, making the acres a veritable hothouse.  Shade planting began in early April.  One man pushes a wheel with teeth spaced 10 to 12 inches apart.  A woman followed and dropped a tobacco plant at each mark.  A third person, armed with a stake, punched a hole at each mark and put the tobacco plant in it.  A fourth person followed, filling the hole with water completing the process.

Shade tobacco grew with extreme rapidity, maturing in from 50 to 60 days, by which time it had reached from 7 to 10 feet high, and was pressing against the top of the shade cloth.  Formerly, the negro men and women were permitted to sing at their tasks in the packing houses, but, in 1926, the packing houses were places of silence as busy fingers sorted, smoothed, graded, measured, and tied the dried leaves into bales of 175 pounds each, every leaf in a bale being the same size, shape, color, and texture.  This was the section of Georgia where the antique flourished.  For half a century that game had enjoyed the protection which came from indifference to its worth, but an open season had been declared of late and the woods were full of pothunters.  A very definite technique had been developed for that sport in southern Georgia, for conditions were different from those in other States, where nothing in the nature of period furniture was to be found “by chance.”  Back in the 1880s and early 1890s, the craze for “golden oak” and similar products reached that section, with the result that priceless old furniture was discarded – thrown into barns or given to negroes living on estates.  Hence the following technique: A hunter motored leisurely through the country seeking houses of ante bellum or colonial design or an avenue of trees leading to a hill where a gaunt chimney told the tale of fire or decay.  Those mansions, or remains of them, indicated that the quarry was in hiding in the vicinity.  Having located the manor house, the “snooping” proceeded in all the humble neighboring cabins.  Nine times out of ten the object of the search – spool beds, walnut and mahogany dressing tables, rare old glass, and luster ware – were to be found tucked away in a dark and dingy corner, always in sad disrepair and usually obtained for a pittance.

The author’s group rose at daybreak for the antique hunt which had been arranged for his edification.  It was a stimulating ride through bright-leaf tobacco fields, cornfields, occasional stands of pine timber, cotton fields, pecan groves, and truck gardens – a rich and fertile land stretching from Bainbridge to Cuthbert.  The letter, with the possible exception of Athens, boasted as many white-columned colonial homes as any place of its size in the South.  They found their quarry and bagged a ginger jar, a quaint old rocker, a set of old-fashion cruets, and a pair of ancient brass firedogs.  As they were leaving the tumble-down storeroom in the rear of the ancient porticoed white house, the author spied an old walnut lap desk with silver monogram plate and escutcheon.  He asked if it was for sale.  It was, so he bought it.  Motoring home that afternoon, he opened his new possession.  A great mass of papers fell to the floor of the car – letters from 1856 and 1857, and one dated “Philadelphia, October 30, 1865.  The author had completed his march through Georgia 60 years after the events which brought forth that prophecy and admonition.  It seemed to him, in the light of what he had seen, that Georgians were utilizing with both industry and vision their state’s resources of incomparable wealth and infinite diversity.  “Empire State of the South” was no longer merely a high-sounding phrase, but was becoming once more an actuality.

 

 

As mentioned above, there is a block of sixteen full-page duotones embedded within the first article on pages 275 through 290.  Duotones, formerly known as photogravures, are image transferred to paper using acid-etched metal plates and special ink.  The deeper the etch the darker the transfer.  The ink used in this set of duotones has a greenish tinge to it.

A list of caption titles for the sixteen duotones is as follows:

• “Ruins of Cooper’s Iron Works Near Cartersville”
• “In the Swimming Pool: Girls of Shorter College, Rome”
• “A Cotton Mill on the Soque River Rapids Near Cornelia”
• “Sunset Hour on Coffee Bluff, Overlooking the Estuary of the Ogeechee River”
• “Tapping a Cupola: Interior of an Iron Foundry in Macon”
• “Slave Quarters of the Hermitage Plantation Near Savannah”
• “The Governments Bamboo Farm Near Savannah”
• ““Mammy Lou”: The Type Which Has Been the Inspiration for Countless Popular Song Writers”
• “A Porticoed Ante Bellum Home in a Bower of Oaks and Apple Blossoms: Athens”
• “Apple-Blossom Time in Cornelia”
• “A Pioneer in Higher Education for Women: Wesleyan College, Macon”
• “Raising a Block of Marble from a Georgia Quarry”
• “A Honeysuckle Thicket Near Thomasville”
• “His Home Is Among the North Georgia Mountains”
• “Chapel Hour at the University of Georgia”
• “A Visit Through the Oaks on Ossabaw Island”

 

 

The second article in this month’s issue is entitled “Flying Over Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine” and was written by Brigadier General P. R. C. Groves, C. B., C. M. G., D. S. O., and Major J. R. McCrindle, O. B. E., M. C.  The article has the internal subtitle: “Looking Down Upon the Holy Land During an Air Journey of Two and a Half Hours from Cairo to Jerusalem.”  The article contains twenty-six black-and-white photograph, ten of which are full-page in size.  One of those full-page photos serves as the frontispiece for the article.  The article also contains a sketch map of the region with a large inset of Palestine.  [Note: This was one of the few sketch maps that Philip Riviere missed during his massive imaging effort.]

Egypt was destined to become one of the most important air-traffic centers in the Eastern Hemisphere, for Cairo will be the junction of two great airways – that from Europe to the East via Italy, Crete, Solum, Cairo, Bagdad, Basra, and thence along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf to Karachi, and that which will cross Africa almost in a straight line from the Cape to Cairo.  Both of those air routes had been flown over, the former on numerous occasions, the latter only twice, although it was surveyed and sites for landing grounds were selected as far back as 1919.  The first flight was made in 1920, the second early in 1926, when the return trip from Cape to Cairo was made in ten and a half days.  The Cairo-Bagdad section of the eastern route had been in regular operation by the British Royal Air Force for several years.  The service flew each fortnight and was used for government officials and important mail.  When commercial aviation establishes a base in Egypt, the prospect for the air tourist will be alluring.  In addition to flights east to Karachi, he could take a seaplane south up the Nile to Luxor, Philae, and Khartoum; or westward to the oases in the Libyan Desert, or northeast across the Desert of Sinai to Palestine.  That last trip promised to be popular, for the airplane offered very marked advantages over existing means of transport between Egypt and Palestine.  The journey by the Desert Railway was long and tedious, and the motorist was handicapped by a shortage of fuel and repair depots and by a scarcity of good roads.  But by air Jerusalem was only two and a half hours distant from Cairo by the normal route, which was via Ismailia to the north shore of Sinai and then along the coast.  Along that route were numerous excellent landing grounds.  In Palestine there were good landing fields near each of the seagirt cities.

Jerusalem, although it stood in a limestone wilderness among the Judea hills, possessed an airdrome.  It was also possible to land near the Sea of Galilee, at one spot on the shores of the Dead Sea, and at Jerico, far down in the deep valley of the Jordan.  The principal airport in Egypt will be at Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo.  The airdrome at El Kantara, on the east banks of the Suez Canal, will probably be the point of departure for passengers and mails arriving at Port Said by sea and proceeding to India and the Far East by airplane.  Ismailia had already been selected as an airship station and a mooring mast was being constructed.  But bot El Kantara and Ismailia were far from the capital and had no hotels.  Heliopolis, which had already been selected as the northern terminus of the Cape-to-Cairo route, was also the most convenient center for the air tourist who wished to make Egypt his base.  It was within a few minutes of the capital, and it was well supplied with workshops and hangars, for it served as the headquarters for four squadrons during the World War.  As the authors rose from that field a wonderful panorama opened up – the Great white city of Cairo, with its innumerable domes and minarets; the majestic Nile, snaking away into the desert; the Delta, emerald green and intersected by a spider’s web of tiny canals.  The clear line between desert and Delta was striking and the contrast beautiful.  The view from 6,000 to 8,000 feet above Cairo was unique.  The city was set in the apex of an immense fan-shaped garden, the Delta.  That in turn was enclosed by the desert.  That dappled wilderness of sand and rock stretched into infinite distance, but never to a clearly defined skyline, which was hidden by a blue haze into which the Nile disappeared as a faintly gleaming silver thread.

A twenty-minute flight northwestward brought the Suez Canal into view.  From the air it looked like a narrow blue ribbon stretching across the desert.  The azure patches through which it flowed were the lakes – Balah, Timsah, and the Great and Small Bitter.  Ismailia, with its airdrome, was built on the northern shore of the Timsah.  It was the headquarters of the Can al administration.  Below them lied the narrow waterway connecting East and West.  Passing through it were craft of all description – passenger liners, ocean tramps, busy tugs, and tiny white launches.  The wake made by each of those craft stood out clearly.  The lakes were dotted by the sails of Arab fishing boats.  Eastward the barren Sinai stretched as far as one could see.  To the west, the Egyptian desert extended to the dark Delta.  Northward was the Bay of Tina, the nearest part of the Mediterranean; and far away to the south lied a pale-blue shadow, the Gulf of Suez.  For the next 70 miles the course was northeastward across an undulating expanse of sand.  Here and there were small oases of palms in deep hollows of the dunes.  The Bardawil Peninsula, which they skirted as they neared the sea, presented a remarkable sight from the air.  It enclosed a shallow lagoon 30 miles long by several miles wide.  The extensive flats which bordered the lagoon were covered with salt, which looked like snow.  On reaching the coast they turned eastward and flew along the surf line.  On their right stretched the Saini desert, a scared and desolate landscape.  Forty miles away to the south the Jebel Yelleg, a group of rocky peaks, rose abruptly from the plain.  Some of the rocky peaks in the escarpment towered to more than 8,000 feet.  One of those, Jebel Musa (Mountain of Moses) was the traditional site of the Hebrew law giving.  [See: “The Route Over Which Moses Led the Children of Israel Out of Egypt,” December 1909, National Geographic Magazine.]

The sands reflected a glare, and it was a relief to turn to the Mediterranean, which, viewed from their altitude, appeared to be an immense bank of blue water rising gently to the skyline.  Looking straight down, they saw a narrow strip which wound among the sand dunes.  It was a road, perhaps the oldest road on earth.  Those close-set threads which ran beside it were the rails of the Desert Railway.  Less than half an hour’s flight along the coast from the Bardswil Peninsula brought them over a flat-roofed town built near the mouth of a wide boulder-strewn watercourse.  That was El Arish, a dreary-looking little place surrounded by sand and sparce scrub.  Soon after passing El Arish, they saw a faint tinge of green on the horizon.  Those were long fingers of grassland stretching out from Palestine into Sinai.  At the small village of Rafah, where they crossed the frontier, the country was already green, and, although there were tracts of sand at intervals, the landscape grew greener as they advanced.  Gaza was a sprawling white city surrounded by orange groves and separated from the sea by a wide belt of sand dunes.  They had reached the southern end of the great maritime plain which stretched from Mount Carmel to Gaza and was bounded on the east by the Judean Hills.  Between Gaza and Jaffa this rolling, well-watered downland was known as the Plain of Philistia; north of Jaffa it was called the Plain of Sharon.  Half an hour’s flight along the sea border brought them to Jaffa, a white city bordering a sea which may be any shade of blue from cobalt to sapphire.  A few hundred yards out from the seafront there were numerous outcrops of rock. Through which the long rollers ran in sheets of foam.  Jaffa was famous for its oranges.  The orange groves bordered the city and extended for many square miles into the countryside.

As they surveyed the country from above Jaffa, they noted numerous little settlements which were clearly European.  Each had a church, the houses had red-tiled roofs and stood in gardens or compounds.  The majority of those well-laid-out settlements, which contrasted the huddled, white, native villages, were Zionist colonies, their inhabitants being mostly emigrants from Europe.  One of the largest, however, Sarona was owned by the German Temple Sect and was a flourishing little place surrounded by orange groves and vineyards.  Continuing northward, they flew over the fertile Plain of Sharon to Caesarea.  That once splendid seaport, built by Herod, was, in 1926, little more than a village.  A few half-buried ruins marked the site of its temples, amphitheater, and baths.  The great semicircular mole which formed its harbor in ancient times had disappeared.  As Caesarea fell away behind them, Athlit, built on a horn-shaped promontory, loomed up ahead.  A nearer view disclosed a huddled village dominated by the extensive ruins of what must have been a splendid castle.  That was the stronghold of the Crusaders known as the Castle of the Pilgrims.  There were many such ruins in Palestine – relics of those romantic centuries when the chivalry of Christendom came with great armies to those shores to wrest the holy places from the infidel.  While flying up the coast from Jaffa they noticed that the hills on the right were closing in toward the sea.  The plain at Jaffa was 20 miles wide, but at Athlit it had narrowed to just three miles, and a little farther on it dwindled to a few hundred yards, where it rounded Mount Carmel.  That mountain, which was a long spur reaching out from the highlands of Samaria, was covered with oak woods and orchards of almonds and pears.

They looked over the ridge into the rich Plain of Esdraelon, which, together with its extension, the Valley of Jezreel, intersected the whole of western Palestine.  The Haifa-Damascus Railway ran through that depression.  Haifa, a flourishing seaport with some 24,000 inhabitants, was delightfully situated.  It lied at the foot of Mount Carmel, on a gentle slope which overlooked the Bay of Acra and the Plain of Esdraelon – a green vista which stretched to the distant blue mountains of Galilee.  Close to the eastern outskirts of the town the river Kishon entered the sea.  Looking northward, they saw Acre, a white town which jutted into the sea like an immense breakwater.  Acre, more than any town outside Europe, figured often in the histories of both England and France.  From the Crusades to Napoleon and finally the World War, the city had seen almost continuous strife.  Acre marked the limit of their flight northward.  Thet turned southeast to glance at Lake Tiberias, the Biblical Sea of Galilee.  That sheet of water, 13 miles long by 6 broad, was some 680 feet below the Mediterranean.  Seen from the air it was blue-green in color.  The northern and eastern shores were bare and rocky, but on its western side the country sloped gently to the water’s edge and was very fertile.  The color of the Jordan when it flowed into the northern end of Galilee was brown, but when it exited from the southern end, it was clear.  Dotted round the lake, but mostly along the western shore, were numerous villages and little towns.  From the Sea of Galilee to Damascus (“The Pearl of the Orient”) was only 60 miles, a mere half hour’s flight, but they had yet to visit Jerusalem and the Dead Sea region, and probably land and inspect the former.  There were several interesting places to see on the way down to Jerusalem from Galilee.

Nazareth was only a few minutes out of their course.  It was a fair-size town, perched high up on the slopes of the Galilean hills overlooking the plain.  It contained several churches and several large buildings, including a monastery and a convent.  Turning south, they passed over Nablus.  [See: “The Last Israelitish Blood Sacrifice,” January 1920, National Geographic Magazine.]  It lied in a deep valley between two mountains, Ebal and Gerizim.  The former, one of the highest peaks in Samaria, rose over 3,000 feet.  In 1926, Nablus was a prosperous manufacturing center.  Its 30,000 inhabitants were mostly engaged in making soap.  A striking feature of the plateau system they were flying over was the regularity of its limestone strata.  Seen from the air it looked like a heavily contoured map.  The first distant glimpse of Jerusalem was disappointing.  It spread over a limestone wilderness which it matched in color, but on nearing the city they saw it possessed a certain distinctive beauty and dignity.  Even from the air, its numerous towers and domes were impressive.  At one end of the city the beautiful Dome of the Rock (the Mosque of Omar) occupied the center of an immense terrace upon which the Temple and Solomon’s palace once stood.  The effect of the city’s commanding position on the edge of the Judean Plateau was enhanced by the high crenelated walls which overlooked the deep valleys of Hinnom and Kidron.  In those valleys and on the slopes of neighboring hills were extensive olive groves.  Here and there, a stately black cypress stood out vividly against a white building.  There were few more striking panoramas than that which met their eyes.  From several thousand feet above the Holy City, one took in at a glance the main physical features of the whole of southern Palestine.

Below them, running north and south, was the plateau system of Judea and Samaria, which formed the backbone of the country.  [See: “Impressions of Palestine,” March 1915; “Village Life in the Holy Land,” March 1914; and “An Old Jewel in the Proper Setting – the Reconquest of the Holy Land,” October 1918; National Geographic Magazine.]  West of the ridge lied the maritime plain; east of it the great depression which contained the Jordan and the Dead Sea.  Beyond that depression rose the bare mountain masses of Ammon and Moab.  The contrast was arresting – on one hand a smiling plain bordering the sea; on the other, one of the most desolate and forbidding landscapes on earth.  Within easy range of vision lied the one-time territories of eight of the tribes of Israel.  In the nearer landscape it was not difficult to identify, with the aid of a map, Bethel, Jerico, Gilgal, Bethlehem, Bathany, and many more towns and villages familiar to Christendom.  They wanted to visit Jerusalem, but they were making a round tour to gain a general impression of Palestine as seen from the air.  They turned eastward, throttled down, and glided.  Jerusalem slipped away and, in a few minutes, they were over the Dead Sea.  That dark-blue sheet of water, 47 miles long by 10 miles wide at its broadest, lied 3,800 feet below the Holy City and 1,300 feet below the Mediterranean.  That great gulf had a lifeless, sinister aspect, the desolation peculiar to a volcanic region.  The most striking features about the Dead Sea were the limestone cliffs which formed its eastern and western shores.  The cliffs, which were desolate of vegetation, rose to an elevation of 1,500 feet on the west and 2,500 feet on the east.  Beyond those precipices to the east towered the Moabite escarpment, an array of rocky peaks from 3,000 to 6,000 feet high, naked, arid, and majestic.

Their glide down from Jerusalem had brought them over the northern shore, where the turbid Jordan entered the sea through an extensive muddy flat strewn with flotsam brought down by the river – mostly rotted tree trunks.  Looking northward across that flat, they saw the great canyon through which the Jordan wound among the dense reed beds and thickets of tamarisk and oleander.  The lofty escarpments on each side of the river were formed of marl, chalk, and limestone.  They descended to the river bed in a series of terraces and rugged steep-sided gorges.  Their general color, which was a creamy white, gave the wild landscape a peculiar appearance.  Turning their backs on that scene, they flew southward along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, noting, as they passed, lava beds, stretches of gray pumice stone, gleaming patches of vitreous rock, and other signs of volcanic action.  Soon they approached an extensive promontory which jutted out from the base of the Moabite escarpment.  It was flat and bare and its sides were low, perpendicular cliffs.  By studying that promontory, called El Lisan (The Tongue), geologists had determined that long ago the Dead Sea was 1,200 feet high than it was in 1926.  That ancient lake disappeared due to a volcanic upheaval followed by a subsidence.  The depression thus formed, known as El Ghor (The Trough), contained the River Jordan and the three lakes through which it passed – Huleh (The Biblical Waters of Merom), Tiberias (Galilee), and the Dead Sea.  The Ghor persisted south of the Dead Sea as a depression some ten miles in width and extended for a distance of 110 miles to the Gulf of Akaba.  The southern portion of the Ghor, including the Dead Sea basin, was a deadly region, which, except in winter, was shunned by the Arabs.

For nine months a year the Ghor’s climate was equatorial, at times reaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit.  It was frequently swept by dust storms and, except for the Jordan Valley, it was practically waterless.  From above the peninsula of El Lisan one saw the water south of it was shallow and shelved into a dreary marsh which bordered the desolate mud flats forming the southern shores of the Dead Sea.  Beyond those flats rose the remarkable ridge of rock salt called the Ridge of Sodom, seven miles long with an average height of 300 feet.  On the shore opposite El Lisan stood the ruins of the ancient Jewish fortress of Masada.  The low hill which they occupied was overshadowed by a towering, cone-shaped mountain of the same name.  The fortress was built to guard the narrow strait between El Lisan and the western shore.  Despite the absence of timber for boat-building, the crossing presented no great difficulty, as the distance was only 2½ miles, and the water was so buoyant that the human body could not sink in it.  Rafts made of brushwood or of inflated skins would serve to carry men across.  The Moabites were the enemy who threatened that back gate of Palestine.  They looked eastward and saw El Kerak (Kir of Moab), which was one of the strongholds of the Moabites.  It was less than 15 miles away and worth a visit.  They looked down on the walled town which occupied the entire summit of a steep-sided table mountain.  At one end was an immense fort, with high, massive walls.  It was heavily garrisoned by Turks when they were masters of Palestine.  It was probably built by the Romans when they established their eastern outposts in those highlands of Moab.  The Roman road from Damascus to Akaba touched El Kerak, and if one road northward, one would see the ancient milestones and pass ruins of Roman bridges.

The distance from El Kerak, near the southern end of the Dead Sea, to Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, was only 200 miles in a straight line.  But that stretch of country was waterless and uninhabited, and a forced landing could prove fatal.  It was wiser to return by the usual airway, which they reached by steering for El Arish via Beersheba.  The latter place had the appearance of a small modern town.  Its streets were straight and crossed each other at right angles, and it had several large buildings and two public gardens.  It was an important Turkish base during the World War and was built under German direction as a military settlement.  On the outskirts was a mud-built Bedouin hamlet which was the prewar Beersheba.  From El Arish they retraced the outward route.  It was easy to follow – first along the coast to the Bardawil Peninsula; then, via the oases, across the desert to Ismailia; thence along the edge of the Delta, to the airdrome at Heliopolis.  And so back in good time to partake of the fleshpots of Egypt on the terrace of a Cairo hotel!

 

At the bottom of the last page of the second article in this issue (Page 355) 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 November issue redirected, the Society needed to know by October first.

 

The third item listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Along the Banks of the Colorful Nile” and has Gervais Courtellemont in the byline.  It is not an article but a set of “23 Natural Color Photographs” on sixteen plates embedded within the second article and numbered I through XVI in Roman numerals representing pages 323 through 338 in the issue.  Mr. Courtellemont is the photographer.

A list of the caption titles for each photo together with its plate number is as follows:

• “A Donkey Boy of Upper Egypt” – Plate I
• “The Mighty Nile at Cairo” – Plate II
• “Hatshepsut’s Terraced Temple in the Valley of the Kings” – Plate II
• “Old Glories long Since Turned to Dreams” – Plate III
• “Images of Rameses II Carved in the Rocks at Abu Simbel” – Plate IV
• “A Face That Has Withstood the Ravages of Twenty Centuries” – Plate V
• “An Ancient Mummy Covering” – Plate VI
• “Trading on the Ancients” – Plate VI
• “A Young Cabaret Dancer” – Plate VII
• “A Venerable Vender of Shoes” – Plate VII
• “Reeling Off Silk Near Cairo” – Plate VIII
• “The Blue Mosque of Ibrahim Agha” – Plate IX
• “The Mosquelike Tombs of the Caliphs, Near Cairo” – Plate X
• “Conquerors of Time – The Changeless Pyramids” – Plate XI
• “A National Institution – The Tarboosh” – Plate XII
• “The Poor Man’s Meat Shop” – Plate XII
• “Dispensers of Copperware in Egypt’s Capital” – Plate XIII
• “A Pipe and a Chat on the Streets of Cairo” – Plate XIII
• “Dealers in Household Utensils” – Plate XIV
• “A Home-Grown Fruit Stand in Cairo” – Plate XIV
• “A Hard Bargainer in Soft Goods” – Plate XV
• “Where Cairo’s Aristocracy Once Dwelt” – Plate XV
• “A Masterpiece of Egyptian Arabesque” – Plate XVI

 

 

The third article in this month’s issue is entitled “The First Flight to the North Pole” and was written by Lt. Cmd. Richard Evelyn Byrd, U. S. Navy (Ret.).  It contains fourteen black-and-white photographs, of which ten are full-page in size.  One of those full-page photos serves as the frontispiece for this article.

On May 9, 1926, Floyd Bennett and the author looked down upon the North Pole from their monoplane, completely verifying Peary’s observations, and demonstrating the feasibility of using airplanes in any part of the globe.  They observed several thousand square miles of the Polar Sea never before seen by man, and returned safely to their base at Spitsbergen after an absence of nearly sixteen hours.  They discovered no land near the Pole.  They did not record altitude or duration.  They did not suffer any hardships, nor did they claim any great personal achievement.  They simply took advantage of the knowledge gained by three centuries of Arctic heroes and applied their Navy training to aviation, that great science born in this country, and so added a short paragraph to the story of man’s conquest of the globe on which we live.  Seventeen years prior, Peary’s trip to the North Pole and back kept him out of touch with civilization for more than 400 days.  The aviators left civilization early one morning, visited the northern apex of the earth, and returned on the afternoon of the same day.  Peary’s success was the climax of 400 years of Arctic struggles.  The history of polar flying had been far briefer, though equally dramatic.  There were three routes by which the Polar Sea might be readily approached:  the Bering Sea route, up past Alaska; the “American route,” northward through Baffin Bay, along the west coast of Greenland; and the European Route, via Spitsbergen.  [See: Map of the Arctic Regions (supplement), November 1925, National Geographic Magazine.]  In the summer of 1925 the MacMillan Arctic Expedition, under the auspices of the National Geographic Society, with the U. S. Navy cooperating, was assured by the approval of President Coolidge.

The mission of the expedition, however, was to explore up Peary’s way and not to fly toward the North Pole.  Six thousand miles were flown with three planes (including round trips and return flights) and two advanced bases were put down.  Aside from its scientific value, the Expedition made a valuable contribution to exploration by air, for something was learned about flying in the Arctic.  [See: “Flying Over the Arctic,” November 1925, National Geographic Magazine.]  Etah, Greenland, up Peary’s way, was not accessible until midsummer and, therefore, as at Point Barrow, Alaska, to take advantage of good spring weather for flying, it was necessary to winter there, or at least get all the supplies up a year ahead.  Spitsbergen, however, was affected by the warming influence of the Gulf Stream.  Kings Bay, only 700 miles from the Pole, could be reached in the spring.  That settlement was nearly 500 miles nearer the Pole than the northernmost point of Alaska.  That was why they selected Spitsbergen.  They could reach it in spring and take advantage of the best Arctic weather and the leveling and smoothing effects both on land and the ice.  It was their objective to explore toward the Pole via Cape Morris Jesup.  There were several Arctic expeditions announced with a goal of being the first transpolar flight.  That added the zest of competition to their plans.  After carefully weighing their own experience, as well as the opinion of aeronautical experts, they selected for their flight a Fokker three-engine monoplane.  One was available that had already flown 20,000 miles.  It had 200-horsepower Wright air-cooled motors, any two of which would keep it up.  It was 42 feet 9 inches long, with a 63 feet 3 inches wingspan.  Two 100-gallon gas tanks were set in each wing and two 110-gallon tanks were carried in the fuselage.  Extra gas was carried in 5-gallon cans.

Careful tests of the plane were made before they sailed.  Its fuel consumption at cruising speed was 28 gallons per hour, lower than anticipated, and therefore most encouraging.  It was capable of a speed as high as 117 miles per hour.  They left New York on the Shipping Board steamer, Chantier, on April 5 with fifty men, six month’s food, and 15,000 miles of coal on board, for the trip of 10,000 miles to Spitsbergen and back. They arrived at Kings Bay at 4 p. m., April 29, and found the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Expedition preparing to receive the great Italian dirigible, Norge.  The little harbor at Kings Bay was choked with ice, but the Chantier was brought to anchor 300 yards from shore.  They constructed a raft using planks across their whaleboats and ferried their plane, the Josephine Ford, ashore through the ice blocks as it snowed.  A second smaller biplane was also unloaded.  It would serve as a relief plane in case of disaster and to take motion pictures of the flight.  After assembling and readying the plane, they were ready for their first trial flight.  That first flight attempt ended in a snowdrift.  A ski was broken and the landing gear bent.  The plane was repaired and the gear reinforced.  They lengthened and smoothed the runway, and the second attempt at takeoff was successful.  After a two-hour trail flight, they landed roughly, but the landing gear held up – a good sign.  They used very little fuel on the flight so they changed their plans.  They would visit Cape Morris Jesup and the Pole in one nonstop flight.  They had planned to use Cape Morris Jesup as a halfway station, landing there and setting up supplies.  Since they had the fuel, they decided to fly straight to the pole and they explore the Cape on the return leg of the mission.  Final preparations were made and their meteorologist told them the weather was right.

The first takeoff attempt wound up in a snowbank – they were too heavy.  After lightening the load and with the weather still perfect, they decided to get off as near midnight as possible.  They took off at half past midnight.  They were off for their great adventure!  Utmost attention had been paid for months to assure their safety in case of accident, and to assure their scientific results if they succeeded.  They had a hand cranked radio, and a sled to carry their food and supplies in case they had to walk to Greenland.  They had food for 10 weeks, a rubber boat, polar bear and seal clothes, gloves, and boots, a stove, rifle, pistol, shotgun, and ammo.  All that gear was packed as compactly as possible, together with a tent, an ax, a knife, a medical kit, and smoke bombs.  They climbed to 2,000 feet, and, using dead reckoning, headed north.  Within an hour, they had passed the rugged and glacier-ladened land and crossed the edge of the polar ice pack.  It was much nearer to land than they expected.  There were no landmarks on the ice, so Polar Sea navigation was done with the sun, and stars, using a sextant to measure their altitudes.  Instead of using that date to calculate their position using math, which would have taken hours, they instead used a graph method which could be done in minutes.  They could not use their compass, since the magnetic pole was over a thousand miles south, in Canada.  They used a sun-compass, and instrument invented for their use.  It was kind of a reverse sundial.  The time of day was known, and the shadow of the sun bisecting the hands of a 24-hour clock indicated the direction north.  They also had to adjust for the wind, that so called “drift” was corrected by an instrument called the drift-indicator.  Exact time was necessary, so they carried two chronometers.

As they sped along the white field below, they felt confident in their instruments and methods.  They obtained excellent north and south bearings on the mountains of Spitsbergen which they could see a hundred miles behind them.  That was their last link with civilization.  The unknown laid ahead.  They were flying at about 2,000 feet and could see 50 miles in every direction.  If there had been any land within that radius they would have seen its mountain peaks.  The ice pack was crisscrossed with pressure ridges, some 50 to 60 feet tall, but there were stretches that appeared long and smooth enough to land.  But, at 2,000 feet, snow was very deceptive.  They passed leads of water recently opened by the movement of the ice.  There were no bumps in the air.  That was expected as the flatness of the ice and the Arctic temperatures were not conducive to air currents, such as found over land.  Another advantage of spring and summer flying in the Arctic was the 24-hour daylight.  It was time to relieve Bennett, so he could stretch his legs and pour gasoline into the tanks using the 5-gallon cans.  The empty cans were tossed overboard to save weight.  Piloting was easy for the author due to the smoothness of the air.  He was able to use the sun-compass in one hand while steering with the other.  He had time to examine the ice pack, searching for signs of life – a polar bear, a seal, a flying bird – but he saw nothing.  When Bennett was finished pouring and figuring the gas consumption, he took the wheel again and the author went back to navigating.  Twice during the next two hours the author relieved him.  They were getting into areas never before seen by human eyes.  At the end of that unknown laid their goal, beyond the shimmering horizon.  They were opening unexplored regions at a rate of 10,000 square miles an hour.  No land was seen.

When they were about an hour from the Pole, the author noticed a bad leak in the oil tank of the starboard motor.   Bennett suggested that they land and repair the leak, but they decided to go on to the Pole with two engines if necessary.  The prize was actually in sight.  They could not turn back.  At 9:02 a. m. GMT, their calculations showed them over the Pole!  The dream of a lifetime had at last been realized.  They headed to the right to take two confirming sights of the sun, then turned and took two more.  After that, they took some moving and still pictures, then went several miles in the direction they had come, and made another large circle to take in the Pole.  Time and direction became topsy-turvy at the pole.  When crossing it on a straight line, they were going north one instant and south the next!  As they flew there, they saluted the gallant, indomitable spirit of Peary and verified his report in every detail.  Below them were ice fields or cakes of various sizes and shapes, the boundaries of which were the ridges formed by the great pressures of one cake upon another.  That showed a constant ice movement and indicated the non-proximity to land.  Here and there, instead of pressing together, there was a separation., leaving a water lead which had recently frozen over and showed green or greenish-blue against the white.  On some of the cakes were ice hummocks and rough masses of jumbled snow and ice.  At 9:15 a. m., they headed for Spitsbergen, having abandoned plans to return via Cape Morris Jesup due to the oil leak.  To their astonishment, the motor never stopped.  The leak was caused by a popped rivet, high in the tank.  When the oil dropped to its level, the leak stopped.  They were getting drowsy when steering.  The author dozed off once at the wheel and had to relieve Bennett several times because of his sleepiness.

They were aiming for Grey Point Spitsbergen, and finally, when they saw it dead ahead, they knew that they had been able to keep on course!  It was a wonderful relief not to have to navigate anymore.  They came into Kings Bay at about 4,000 feet.  That tiny village was a welcome sight, but not as much as the good old Chantier that looked so small beneath.  It seemed but a few moments until they were in the arms of their comrades, who carried them with wild joy down the snow runway they had worked so hard to make.

 

 

The fourth and final article in this month’s issue is entitled “Commander Byrd Receives the Hubbard Gold Medal” and has no byline.  This editorial has the internal subtitle: “The First Explorer to Reach the North Pole by Air Receives Coveted Honor at Brilliant National Geographic Society Reception.”  The editorial contains five black-and-white photographs, one of which is full-page in size.  It also contains a full-page sketch chart on page 386 checking Byrd’s polar flight data.

Sketch Chart courtesy of Philip Riviere

In the presence of 6,000 members and friends of the National Geographic Society, including the President of the United States, members of the Cabinet, distinguished Army and Navy officers, members of Congress, ambassadors and ministers of foreign countries, and other representatives of official life in the National Capital, Richard Evelyn Byrd received The Society’s Hubbard Gold Medal in the Washington Auditorium on the evening of his return to America, June 23, after his flight to the North Pole.  On the same occasion the explorer’s associate, Aviation Pilot Floyd Bennett, also received a gold medal.  Only six other men had ever received the Hubbard Medal.  They were Admiral Robert E. Peary, Capt. Roald Amundsen, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Capt. Ernest H. Shackleton, Grove Karl Gilbert, and Capt. Robert A. Bartlett.  Dr. Gilbert Grosvenor, President of the National Geographic Society, gave opening remarks and introduced President Coolidge.  In his presentation speech, President Coolidge marveled at the speed at which science was advancing, comparing Peary’s trip to the pole in 1909, which took eight months to Byrds 1926 flight of less than two-thirds of a day.  The President presented the Hubbard Gold Medal to Byrd and then a gold medal to Floyd Bennett.  In accepting the award, Byrd thanked the President and the talked in length about the MacMillan Expedition and about his flight to the North Pole.  He thanked the Navy, The Society, and everyone who had aided in his endeavor.  He quoted and article he had written.  [See: “Flying Over the Arctic,” November 1925, National Geographic Magazine.]  Byrd then quoted Admiral Peary who said, in his last public speech before he died, that polar explorers in the future would use the airplane.  [See: “The National Geographic Society’s Notable Year,” April 1920, National Geographic Magazine.]

Commander Byrd finished his speech by predicting that within thirty years commercial aviation would be making regular flights over the Polar Region, from country to country, cutting thousands of miles off the journey, and hopefully bringing countries closer together.  Dr. Grosvenor then introduced the next speaker, the Honorable Curtis D. Wilbur.  Secretary of the Navy Wilbur said that before he had approved Byrd’s mission he had to know that Mrs. Byrd had okayed her husband’s adventure.  He then asked Mrs. Byrd to stand up, and then joked that so women stood up that he could not find her in the audience.  He then lauded Byrd’s accomplishments.  Prior to his return to Washington, Commander Byrd submitted his records, through the Secretary of the Navy, to the National Geographic Society.  The papers were referred to a special committee of The Society.  The committee examined Byrd’s original records and found them to be carefully and accurately kept.  They stated that those records substantiated the claim that Byrd reached the North Pole on May 9, 1926.  The committee estimated the time when Byrd reached the Pole at close to 9:03 GMT, less than one minute’s difference from Byrd’s estimate of 9:02 GMT.  The distance travelled between the two points was about a mile.  Upon reaching the Pole, Byrd chose the right place to maneuver. Flying to the right long enough to take two sextant observations, he turned around and took two more.  Those four observations confirmed his dead-reckoning position o the Pole.  Flying at and about the Pole at 3,000 feet, Commander Byrd’s field of view was a circle more than 120 miles in diameter.  The North Pole was close to the middle of that circle and in his foreground, and was within sight for more than two hours of his flight.

Soon after leaving the Pole, the sextant with which Byrd was using slid off the chart table, breaking the horizontal glass.  That made it necessary to navigate the whole return trip wholly by dead-reckoning.  At the moment when the sun crossed the 15^th meridian, along which he had laid his course, he had the plane steadied, pointing directly toward the sun, and observed that the shadow of the sun-compass was pointing straight down the middle of the hand, thus verifying his position as being on that meridian.  His course was verified at 14:30 GMT when he sighted land dead ahead and soon identified Grey Hook, Spitsbergen, just west of the 15^th meridian.  The successful landfall at Grey Hook demonstrated Byrd’s skill in navigating along a predetermined course, and was strong evidence that he was equally successful in his flight northward.  The feat of flying a plane 600 miles from land and returning directly to the point aimed for was a remarkable exhibition of skillful navigation and showed beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew where he was at all times during the flight.  After the Secretary of the Navy had received the Report of the Special Committee of the National Geographic Society, corroborating in every particular Commander Byrd’s data which established his right to the distinction of being the first man to reach the North Pole by aerial navigation, the explorer transmitted certified copies of his data and photographic reproductions of his charts, together with true copies of the Report of the Special Committee, to a number of the leading geographical societies of the world for their archives.

 

 

The sixth item listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Map of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Eastern Tennessee, 16 x 20 Inches” and has no byline.  It is the “Special Map Supplement in Six Colors” mentioned on the cover.  The map is referenced several times in the first article in the issue.  There is no intro article for this map, perhaps due to the fact that it was referenced in the “Georgia” article.

Supplement Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

 

 

Tom Wilson

[Scott T. Shier]

Fantastic write-up, again!

I cannot help but share this pictorial, below: