Category: The way we were

Architectural history: Some biodegradable, some not


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My county, Stokes County (North Carolina), is a county of rolling hills and forest, with a few small and picturesque mountains, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which of course are a part of the Appalachian chain. Stokes was never a prosperous county. There were a couple of big plantations (Hairstons and Daltons), but most people lived by subsistence farming, with tobacco as the cash crop. Though Stokes County now is in the middle of nowhere, during the American colonial days, and into the 19th Century, one of the most important roads in the colonies passed right through here, just over the southeast ridge near the abbey. That was the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to Georgia, used by armies and by George Washington. When I drive down Dodgetown Road on the way to Whole Foods in Winston-Salem, I am on the Great Wagon Road. Ken’s jogging circuit includes the Great Wagon Road.

The house in the top photo mystifies me. It sits on a hill just above the Dan River, very near the place where the Great Wagon Road crossed the river, two miles from the abbey. It’s too elegant to be a farmhouse. There were few, or no, rich farmers here other than the plantations. My theory is that this house was an inn on the Great Wagon Road. I may be deceiving myself, but I suspect that the house is that old. I’ve sent an email to a friend who is president of the county historical society. I’m guessing that she will know the house’s history.

What’s remarkable is that the house is still lived in. Most of the old wood-built farmhouses were long ago abandoned to rot and have fallen down, along with their beautiful old barns and outbuildings (which I remember from my childhood). But at this old house, there was smoke coming from one of the chimneys this afternoon. There are lace curtains in the upstairs windows. There are horse tracks on the unpaved road in front of the house, and the adjoining pastures are clearly in use. There are no no-trespassing signs, but there is a makeshift drop-down gate made of a hand-hewn log over the driveway. This fascinates me. Someone is still living the old lifestyle. I am determined to find out who they are and what their story is.

On the East Coast of the United States, timber was (and still is) plentiful. There was little reason to build with stone when wood was so much cheaper. The downside of that is that we lose our architectural history so much quicker. Buildings rot away soon after the roofs fail. The old house above has an old, and possibly its original, galvanized steel roof, but the roof looks to be in good shape. I believe galvanized steel was invented in 1836, though I don’t know when it became available in this area.

The stone construction in the lower photo is an iron furnace. It’s at Danbury, about five miles from the abbey, right beside the Dan River. It was in service during the Civil War days, casting munitions. It also produced iron bars and such for the use of blacksmiths. Not a stone has fallen, as far as I can tell. Early Americans knew how to work with stone, but usually they didn’t. Even when they eschewed wood as a building material, they used brick, as at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and in colonial towns such as Williamsburg (Virginia) and Salem (North Carolina). Still, wooden buildings can last a long time if their roofs don’t fail.

People who know some local history ask me how I (my last name is Dalton) am related to the Daltons of the Dalton plantations here. The answer is that I am not descended from those Daltons but that we are all descended from the same line of Virginia Daltons. (It always amuses me to type that, because my mother’s name was Virginia Dalton.)

My eighteen years in San Francisco were great. But I love living in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, as good a place as any in the U.S. that suburbanized modernity has passed by.

Adams Motor Grader

When I see fine old machines, decaying and unlikely to ever run again, I feel something like pity. There’s something about well-made machines down on their luck that deserves our empathy.

But people do restore these things, and that’s part of why I’m posting the photo. This one is for sale, and it’s parked alongside N.C. 67 just east of Boonville, North Carolina. These were a common sight in my Yadkin Valley childhood. I still see them sometimes (newer ones, of course) on unpaved mountain roads.

More Buffalo China

This blog gets a lot of visits from people who are interested in the history of Buffalo China. I would collect Buffalo china if I had anywhere to put it, but as things are I’ve collected only enough Buffalo china for the table, and no more than will fit in the kitchen cabinets.

But recently, while searching on eBay for more green-stripe cereal bowls (of which I have only four and need more), I came across an item that I had never seen before — cups and saucers with a dogwood pattern.

The seller, who is in Lenoir, North Carolina, said that the cups and saucers were from an old hotel in Lenoir, the Carlheim Hotel, which was torn down in, I believe, 1971. I don’t know for a fact that this china came from the Carlheim Hotel, but it seems very likely. Partly this is because the china did indeed come from Lenoir, and partly because dogwood is the state flower of North Carolina (as well as Virginia). It seems unlikely that Buffalo China would sell much of the dogwood pattern outside of North Carolina and Virginia. So I’m guessing that the dogwood pattern may have been custom china made for the Carlheim Hotel.

The china appears to be brand new. This stuff and its quality always amazes me.

Rockford

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These days we take bridges for granted. We seldom think about what travel was like when getting across rivers was a big deal. The earliest solution, of course, was to ford the river where the terrain was suitable. Then came ferries, and then came bridges. In one of my visits to Paris, I wondered aloud to an English friend why the most important city in France was built seemingly in the middle of nowhere in the interior of the country. The answer was obvious to him, but he indulged the ignorant American with the answer. It’s because, he said, the site of Paris was a natural bridging place for the Seine. Oh. I get it.

Rockford, in colonial times, was a travel hub. It sits on a hill above a ford across the Yadkin River. It used to be the county seat for Surry County, and the old courthouse still stands, though it is dilapidated. Now Rockford is in the middle of nowhere (though many Yadkin Valley vineyards have sprung up around it), and most of the old buildings are in varying states of dilapidation.

When I see an old church with carpenter gothic windows, I usually stop to take photos. It’s interesting how that one feature — gothic windows — makes a huge difference in whether a building is seen as worth preserving or whether it is allowed to fall into ruin. This old church in Rockford could use some maintenance, but it’s holding its own.

The enhanced value provided by gothic windows makes me think of my own home. I like to think that this house will still be standing two hundred years after I’m gone. The gothic windows can’t hurt.

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Buffalo china: A sad American story

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I wish I knew much, much more about a now-defunct American company named Buffalo China. Yep — they were in Buffalo, New York. The company started about 1901, making a mishmash of porcelain products. In the 1920s and 1930s, they started marking commercial porcelain dinnerware for restaurants and institutions. For decades, they made incredibly excellent commercial dinnerware. At some point, Buffalo China came to be owned by Oneida. In 2003 or thereabouts, Oneida sold the company to investors who changed the name to Niagara Ceramics, though Oneida continued to own the Buffalo China trademark. Finally, in 2013, the company closed. It was cheap imported china from China that killed the company. The last owner, Chris Collins, who was a congressman, issued a bitter statement about Buffalo China’s end:

“Niagara Ceramics consistently struggled because of unfair competition from Chinese manufacturers who benefit from China manipulating its currency at the expense of American jobs. As a member of Congress, I believe strongly that the U.S. must take a harder stand against this unfair practice by the Chinese government.”

During the last fifty years, I have been in countless antique shops and junk shops, and I’ve examined a lot of porcelain and china. In fact, the abbey owns a large set of 100-year-old fine china made in Limoges that has never been removed from the shipping boxes after I moved back to North Carolina from San Francisco. Using fine china is just too fussy to be bothered with.

Whereas heavy commercial china is a whole different story. There were other good makers of heavy American porcelain, but Buffalo China stands out.

When I first moved into the abbey seven years ago, having gotten rid of my everyday dinnerware before the move from San Francisco because it wasn’t worth shipping, I bought cheap glass dinnerware to use temporarily, planning on finding something nicer to replace it. I looked at a lot of heavy china at places like Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel. But it was expensive unless it was made in China, and I refused to buy Chinese china.

Finally I decided to go with Buffalo China. It’s easy enough to find on eBay, at wildly varying prices. I settled on the green stripe china, though Buffalo china made several other patterns for restaurant and commercial use. It’s not uncommon to come across new old stock Buffalo china on eBay, though the stuff is so durable that, if it’s used, it hardly matters. That’s the beauty of restaurant china — you can’t kill it. I don’t think I’ve ever broken a piece of restaurant china, and, if you ever did, it would be nothing to cry about (though it’s not exactly cheap anymore — more and more people know what it is).

These days, large plates are the norm. I admit that I like the current style of food presentation, in which small amounts of foods are presented on enormous plates. But, with the old restaurant china, it’s difficult to find a plate larger than nine inches. I’ll live with that, but I’ll keep watching eBay.

Meanwhile, I wish someone would write an illustrated history of Buffalo China. I’d buy it.

Update: Also see this newer post on the Buffalo China dogwood pattern.

How to find a dark sky

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The dark blue areas are reasonably dark skies. One of the darkest areas on the East Coast is in West Virginia. Note that almost the entire state of North Carolina has ruined skies, with the exception of the Dismal Swamp in the northeast corner of the state.

One of the cruelest, most magic-killing forms of our alienation from nature is our inability to see the stars. Light pollution, of course, is the cause of it. Cities, suburbs, rural areas, fracking areas — all these places are brightly lit, all night. Massive quantities of fossil fuel are expended to drive off the darkness. This is insane, but it is only one of the many forms of insanity that we’re no longer even aware of anymore, because that’s Just the Way Things Are.

Would you like to see how far you’d have to travel to see a dark sky? Here’s a link to instructions on how to get a light-pollution overlay for Google Earth. First you download a light-pollution map (it’s a TIFF image) from a site in Italy. Then follow the instructions in the link to load the overlay into Google Earth and position the overlay correctly.

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I am in northwestern North Carolina, north of Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Note that the nearest dark sky, for me, is in southern Virginia, between Hillsville and Floyd. I am quite familiar with that area. It’s isolated, is sparsely settled, and is reachable on tiny, winding roads.

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In my novel, Fugue in Ursa Major, the young protagonist is a stargazer. The novel begins with Jake driving southwest from Charlottesville to go stargazing, to the blue area west of Grayson, Virginia.

The new publication date for the novel, by the way, is May 30. I’m still waiting for one of the first readers to finish. He’s an academic and won’t have time to read the draft until the end of the academic year, which is — tomorrow! His feedback on the novel is very important to me, so I’m holding up the release of the book for a few more weeks.

What young'uns used to eat


The school cafeteria staff, circa 1960. Mrs. Martin is on the left.

When I was in elementary school, we called the school cafeteria “Miss Martin’s Slop Shop.” Mrs. Martin has gone on to her reward, but we all owe her such an apology.

I have often thought about Mrs. Martin’s made-from-scratch cooking and how lucky we were to have it. I remember many times walking in line with the other kids, outdoors to avoid making noise inside the school building, to the side door of the cafeteria. The wonderful smells wafting out the open windows of the cafeteria would hit. I particularly remember Mrs. Martin’s scratch-made rolls (I always had seconds and thirds), her amazing vegetable soup, and her apple crisp.

An alumnus of the school recently put out a book of old photographs made between 1927 and 1967. I cannot find a single overweight child in this book, and certainly not an obese child. We did have snack foods in those days — chips, Moon Pies, and all that. And all kids got snack food and candy, though never at school. We had ice cream in the afternoons. And desserts. But everyone was lean.

I’m not going to get into a rant about our industrialized, de-localized, factory-driven food system. But here’s a plug for cooking from scratch…

By the way, the scraps that the kids didn’t eat were collected into a large container, and a farmer in the area fed the scraps to his hogs. Nothing went to waste, either.


The serving line at Courtney School, circa 1960. Courtney school is in the heart of the Yadkin Valley.

High school's permanent marks and scars


Reynolds High School, N.C. Department of Archives and History

A story in the Winston-Salem Journal this morning refers to “historic” R.J. Reynolds High School and mentions that the school is 90 years old this year. Not many high schools make it to that age, at least as still-operating schools, or make it to the National Register of Historic Places. No doubt most of us remain haunted by high school, for better or for worse, but there’s something about Reynolds High School that gets — and stays — under your skin.

Even in this era, 46 years after I graduated, I find myself driving by the school when I’m in the area, to see if it has changed (not much) and if the cherry trees are still there. It always feels a little crazy to be so drawn to a place, given how miserable I was there. But anyone who went to Reynolds will understand. We were constantly reminded how privileged we were to go to Reynolds (even though it is a public high school) and the word “tradition” was heard almost daily. My readers in Britain, where schools are hundreds and hundreds of years old, will think this funny. But we Americans, of course, measure our history on a shorter scale.

In these parts, if you went to Reynolds High School, you leave it on your resume no matter your age or other achievements. One of North Carolina’s senators, Richard Burr, graduated from Reynolds in 1974, and this fact is mentioned on his Wikipedia page.

The school does have an interesting history. It was partly tobacco money that paid for the school and its rather grand auditorium. Katherine Smith Reynolds, widow of R.J. Reynolds, donated land for the auditorium in 1918. The school opened in 1923, the auditorium in 1924. One of the traditions of the school is that the ghost of Katherine Smith Reynolds still haunts the auditorium. And in fact it is the auditorium which haunts me to this day, more than the school. The auditorium seemed as grand to me then as Carnegie Hall does today, and it was similarly a temple of music. Winston-Salem, partly because of cultural advantages handed down by its Moravian settlers, and partly because of the patronage of old money (Hanes, Reynolds, and Gray), punched above its weight musically. I even had the stage to myself once in 1966, when I gave an organ performance during the annual Key Club Follies. The orchestral and choral music I heard in that auditorium were critical to my early music education. My high school music theory class sometimes met on the stage, when we needed access to the big Steinway.

But of all the music that haunts me from that era, it’s one thing in particular that stands out — the school hymn, “Her Portals Tall and Wide.” It was written in 1933 by a student whom the older teachers remembered, B.C. Dunford Jr. It was generally sung a capella in clear four-part harmony by the school chorus, with the chorus located in the upper balcony for the best acoustical effect, and always with the lights dimmed. Sometimes the members of the chorus held candles. It was more than a tradition; it was a sacred ritutal. This hymn is always mentioned in histories and reminiscences, but I am unable to find a single recording of it. I must put that to rights and record it at the organ. No doubt the current chorus teacher (I hope they still have chorus teachers) could provide me with the score.

P.S. to the current principal: The fourth floor was still used in the 1960s. I had Spanish classes up there.


Reynolds Auditorium, N.C. Department of Archives and History


That’s me in the center, a photo of the yearbook staff in the 1967 yearbook. Did I ever do anything other than publishing? I guess not…