Shaker Village
And then there were none. The only time we visited the Shaker village museum just outside Concord, NH, Sister Ethel had recently died. The last of the New Hampshire Shakers, until then, signed autographs, greeted children and offered tour information. Now she is gone and the campus seems just a little emptier. You can read more here
Started in 1776, this English religious sect grew to nearly 6,000 United States members by the Civil War, in rural settings around the nation. Many villages survive as museums today (see links below). Officially they were known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. The frenetic dances in their religious meetings led to the name Shaker.
The Canterbury Village with 25 original buildings has been preserved as a nonprofit agency and working farm. Today, the simple functional lines of Shaker furniture and tools and architecture are a highly popular design motif.
The Shaker story — one of deep religious conviction, hard work, striving toward quality and a strict separation of the sexes — remains fascinating today. And the best place to learn the story is on a guided tour of the Shaker Village. Elements of functional Shaker design are everywhere, and visitors can wander through the rooms and fields where the members of the community lived.
Concord, NH is just an hour from Seacoast, NH, and Canterbury Village is another 10 miles up Rte 95. There’s also a superb gift shop with a small museum display upstairs, a restaurant and frequent events on the campus of the beautiful 200-year old New England farm. In fall the sugar maples light up with color. But it’s hard to take a bad photo, in any season of this quiet, and now ghostly little village. We enjoyed the houses and the story that we told about the life of this group. Many of our hymnals contain songs, which were written by the Shakers.
Simon Guggenheim
We just drove by to take a look at this historical house. This structure was built at 1101 North Chaparral for Simon and Lila Belle (Solomon) Guggenheim. Simon Guggenheim (1861-1942) was a native Texan who came to Corpus Christi in 1882 with forty dollars in his pocket and remained to become wealthy. He and a friend formed the Guggenheim and Cohn Dry Goods Co. In 1891, the year of his marriage, he acquired a great deal of property when he helped rescue the city’s economy during a recession in 1896, and later was a successful investor in the petroleum industry.
The Guggenheim’s had this house built about 1900. They moved into a modest apartment and sold their home in 1924. Among their philanthropies was a gift of four lots on South Broadway as the site for a YMCA building, where Guggenheim’s portrait was hung. Their Victorian house of the early 1900s was moved to its present site during a period of city growth.
The turret on this house survived all others in the domestic architecture of the city. The builder adorned the house with bay windows; a lunette in the front pediment; and gables faced with shingles; ornamenting the porches with columns, brackets, and banisters, and with cornices displaying wooden beads, spindles, lattices, and other Victorian gingerbread.
Slave Plantation
We didn’t see too much of the plantation on our visit to this house in Myrtle Beach, but we were told that this is a typical plantation which is a large agricultural business which produces a cash crop for sale. It consists of all the things needed to grow, harvest, and sell that crop.
Plantation agriculture has its origins in India in the eighth century. Since that time plantation regions have developed in North Africa and various parts of the New World. In the continental United States, our plantation region comprises the old Confederacy plus some adjoining states. Plantations are an important aspect of American agricultural history, being distinct from Jeffersonian yeoman farms, manorial estates of the Hudson River and similar areas, and ranches and missions of the West.
A plantation revolves around a cash crop grown on a large scale for profit. A successful plantation region requires: 1) fertile, easily tilled land available in large units; 2) a climate characterized by a long growing season and adequate rainfall, 3) abundant landless, and cheap rural labor; 4) bulk reduction and preliminary processing techniques; 5) abundant, cheap transportation; and 6) a network of factors and factoring houses to market cash crops to other regions of the world. The invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, Bore’s process of refining sugar, and Norbert Rillieux’s (a free man of color) vacuum pan evaporator made previously unprofitable cotton and sugar cane into important cash crops. Thus, all the elements needed for a plantation system were present in Louisiana during the antebellum period.
Closer to the fields would be buildings to house the equipment needed to process the harvested crop. A cotton plantation would certainly have a cotton gin to remove the seeds from the boll and often a cotton press to compress the crop into 400-pound bales. On a sugar plantation a large and intricately designed sugar house was on site to grind and process sugar cane into raw sugar. Plantation produce was either shipped directly by steamboat from the plantation dock or carted to interior ports where it would be loaded onto steamboats. Then it would be shipped to New Orleans and sold through factoring houses. Often factors (brokers) made more money from the crop than the planter.
We had a hard time in not thinking about the abuse of the millions of slaves who had been stolen and brought to the U.S. to work and labor in the fields all day; not receiving any reward other than the ability to survive for another day.
Slave quarters
This was the kind of abuse that must have happened as the slaves were mistreated in the growing of the crops for the plantation owners. We looked at each of the houses on the plantation in Myrtle Beach which held two families in such cramped conditions and felt ashamed of own past where our own families were, indeed, slave owners. The house was divided into two parts for two families to occupy with one common fireplace between and separating the two families. This was in Myrtle Beach, SC – Not surprisingly, many Georgetown rice plantation owners supported secession.
Less than a year after the secession, Union gunboats sailed up the Santee River and Winyah Bay and disrupted the rice plantations. Gunboats were a common sight on Georgetown’s rivers. The Union Navy burned fields, looted houses, destroyed property and carried away slaves. For the remainder of the war, most Georgetown rice fields lay idle. Less than a year after the secession, Union gunboats sailed up the Santee River and Winyah Bay and disrupted the rice plantations.
Until February 1865, the Union confined their efforts to the riverbanks, but on February 17, Sherman took Columbia and General Quincy A. Gillmore accepted the surrender of Charleston and Georgetown. It was only a month and a half later that General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox and Jefferson Davis fled the Confederate Capital.
Georgetown residents began to find their way home. Georgetown’s plantations had been ravaged and the war had crippled the economy, but the culture died hard… stumbling along for another fifty-five years before it completely collapsed.
Sod houses
Some of these sod houses in South Dakota reminded me of the storm cellars we had when I was a young boy. We would use them for the storing of hundreds of jars and cans of fruit and vegetables, which my parents had put up for the winter months. This, along with the hogs and beef supplied us to live a pretty good life without having to buy from the grocery store, which really didn’t have that, much.
The sod houses we saw had walls that are about two feet thick or more. The thickness of the walls and the sod made for good insulation from both the winter and summertime elements for early settlers. In the summertime, the temperature inside the house would stay fairly cool. In the winter, you were protected from the wind and snow, and a small stove combined with the thick walls would keep you pretty cozy.
What is sod? Basically, it is just mud mixed with hay or prairie grass and lay out to dry in the shape of bricks. Sometimes settlers just carved out “bricks” from shallow cuts in the ground, so that the grass and its roots would already be mixed with the soil. You would stack them to create a wall, which might be topped off by a tar paper roof and sometimes-just sod piled on top of boards or branches. Sod houses were fairly sturdy in the short run, but would tend to dissolve or melt away after a long period of exposure to the elements unless it was constantly tended to and repaired. Most of the pioneers who constructed such buildings abandoned them as soon as they could afford more permanent dwellings constructed from wood. So, it is quite rare to find one of these sod houses still preserved.
Thomas Wolf
One of the best deals for entertainment downtown is a tour of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Even if you are not a fan of Thomas Wolfe, the sprawling 29-room house and its history is very fascinating. And tours are only $1 a person! Tickets are purchased in the visitor’s center located behind the house (Market Street in downtown Asheville). Before your guided tour of the house, see a short film and read about Wolfe’s fascinating life in the Visitors Center.
Thomas Wolfe left an indelible mark on American letters. This home was his mother’s boardinghouse and has become one of literature’s most famous landmarks. Named “Old Kentucky Home” by a previous owner, Wolfe immortalized the rambling Victorian structure as “Dixieland” in his epic autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. A classic of American literature, Look Homeward, Angel has never gone out of print since its 1929 publication, keeping interest in Wolfe alive and attracting visitors to the setting for this great novel.
Surprisingly, Julia Wolfe did not operate the boardinghouse because of financial need. But former teacher Julia was obsessed with the real estate market and used profits from the boardinghouse’s operation to buy more property.