As the fall semester draws to a close, so too does the fine weather and beautiful foliage associated with the season. This week, we’ll celebrate a time-honored student tradition, just in time for finals – studying outdoors.
Hopefully current Davidson College student are inspired by their studious predecessors, and will move back outdoors in the spring!
As October heads to a close, so too does Archives Month. The theme set this year by the Society of North Carolina Archivists was “Celebrating Archives: North Carolina Arts, Crafts, and Music Traditions,” and we’ve had events all month long to celebrate Davidson’s archival history in those three areas (such as a mandolin concert and an art exhibition focusing on pieces in the College’s collections from North Carolina artists). In that vein, the blog this week highlights one of the most seminal figures in the history of the Davidson College Music Department: James Christian Pfohl.
Student musical groups and organizations date back to the mid-1800s, with students forming the choir for religious services and more casual gatherings, including playing in the cupola of the Old Chambers Building. The first glee club was formally established on campus in 1890, a college orchestra appears in our archival records in 1892, and the glee club, chapel choir and a whistling club were all mentioned in the first issue of Quips & Cranks in 1895. Students (such as Alonzo Pool in 1892-93 [Class of 1893] and Daniel McGeachy in 1895-96 [Class of 1896]) or outside music instructors (Gertrude Williamson and Eulalia Cornelius, both in 1896-97, for example) were sometimes paid by the college to instruct non-credit-bearing courses.
By 1925, the demand from students for music instruction was such that the February 12th issue of The Davidsonian featured an article urging the administration to hire a music director:
“We find a student body of six hundred young men with latent musical tastes and talents that, would in time, if properly husbanded, make the musical standard of our church second to none, not even of the celebrated German communities. When the call was issued for candidates for the Glee Club this year, one-sixth of the entire student body were interested enough to appear for the trials. Every year the incoming freshman class brings in a wealth of talent along instrumental lines, but the case is usually that only the three or four best secure enough recognition to sustain them in their musical work, and by their senior year, their talent has all but atrophied with disuse.”
The cure for that atrophying of student musical talent would be to hire a musical director, who “would have charge of the musical organizations of the college, stimulate interest in things musical, and would train the students in the rudiments of music, both of singing and appreciation.” Perhaps in response, in 1927 the college hired Ernest J. Cullum as Director of Music and Associate Professor of the History and Appreciation of Fine Arts. The history of music and arts appreciation courses Cullum taught, the first offered for credit at Davidson, were listed through the history department. Cullum stayed on until 1931, when funding for the position was cut. During this time teachers from Charlotte and Mooresville were engaged to offer private lessons in piano, organ, wind, and string instruments, and students funded the hiring of Carol Baker from Charlotte to direct the Glee Club for several years in the mid-1920s.
When James Christian Pfohl (1912 – 1997) was hired by the college in 1933, he was a recent graduate of the University of Michigan (Bachelor’s of Music, organ) and would go on to earn a Master’s of Music (musicology) from that same university in 1939. Pfohl was instrumental in building the music program at Davidson – he began as the sole employee of the department, when he focused on developing student music organizations in addition to working as the college organist; as he put in a summary report in 1951, the year before he retired from Davidson, student groups were fundamental the establishment and growth of music program: “In many ways I feel that organizational work has been our most important, as it has been from these groups that the influence of music has spread on the campus and throughout the entire area.” Similarly, in his obituary (April 1, 1997), the Charlotte Observer exclaimed that “He was a musical zealot, a tireless builder of organizations such as the music departments at Davidson and Queens colleges, the Charlotte Symphony and Jacksonville Symphony orchestras and Brevard Music Center.”
Pfohl was indeed a tireless builder – by his second year on the job, he had established the Davidson Concert Series, a new symphonic band, and a new symphony orchestra. According to Mary Beaty’s A History of Davidson College, then College President Walter Lee Lingle (Class of 1892, President 1929 – 1941) convinced the college’s Board of Trustees that music was an important part of maintaining Davidson’s academic profile: “This is done in many other high grade colleges… the great Educational Associations of America are stressing the importance of Music and Fine Art in colleges.”
In addition to his work building new organizations and initiatives, Pfohl also maintained the work of the Glee Club, football band, and ROTC band. He also organized broadcasts of the Symphonic Band over Charlotte radio station WBT. As evidence on this growth and interest, additional music faculty were hired – by 1935, Warren Babock, Moreland Cunningham (Class of 1935), Franklin Riker, and Louise Nelson Pfohl were also working in the department.
Another one of Pfohl’s major initiatives began in the summer of 1936, when he established a summer music camp for boys at Davidson, inspired by his experience as a scholarship student at the Interlochen Arts Camp as a youth. The music camp Phofl began still continues today – it was held at Davidson until 1943, when it spend one season headquartered at Queens College in Charlotte. In 1944, Pfohl moved the camp to Brevard, NC., and in in 1955, the camp and its programs were renamed the Brevard Music Center.
By 1938, Pfohl had made another lasting contribution to Davidson: he provided lyrical arrangement for “All Hail! O Davidson!,” the college’s alma mater. The words were written by George M. Maxwell (Class of 1896) on the occasion of the college’s centennial in 1937; originally intended as a fight song, Phofl envisioned the song as more of a hymn. By 1952, “All Hail! O Davidson!” began being printed in commencement programs. The lyrics have been changed a few times since 1938, most recently by committee in 1996, to reflect coeducation.
On May 25, 1943, the faculty voted that: “Credit will be given for Applied Music within such limitations as the Curriculum Committee may prescribe, provided that, so far as concerns requirements for graduation, there be allowed a maximum of 30 hours credit in Music, of which 12 may be Applied Music.” This expansion of credit-bearing courses was a boon for the department, and Pfohl was elected a full professor of music by the Board of Trustees in 1946, replacing his previous position as “Director.”
In 1949, Pfohl began working as the conductor and music director for the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. Three years later, he resigned his position at Davidson in 1952 in order to conduct the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra (while simultaneously remaining in his position with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra until 1957, and continuing to lead summer camps at the Brevard Music Center until 1967). In 1959, he began music directing for an educational TV program in the Jacksonville area, The Magic of Music. In 1961, Pfohl left his post with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, and went on to direct the York (PA) Symphony Orchestra and Reston Little (VA) Symphony. His accomplishments included conducting four performances at the White House, establishing the Mint Museum Chamber Orchestra (1944 – 1961) and serving as inspiration and sounding board for the founders of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He retired to Jacksonville in 1983, where he remained until his death in 1997. Pfohl was survived by his second wife, Carolyn Day Pfohl (his first wife, fellow Davidson and Queens College faculty member Louise Nelson Pfohl passed away in 1968), and three children: James Christian Pfohl, Jr., David Pfohl, and Alice Pfohl Knowles.
The music department has flourished since James Christian Pfohl’s time at Davidson – currently, students can major or minor in the subject, with a vastly expanded curriculum led by faculty and artist associates. Pfohl’s legacy of establishing student organizations and gaining credit for applied music left a strong base for future generations of faculty and students to build upon, and his family recently donated several scrapbooks assembled by Pfohl during his time at Davidson and beyond. Come into the archives to see more about music history at Davidson in the 1930s through 1950s!
Today is the first day of fall, so it seemed like a particularly appropriate time for an autumnal recipe – Jennie Martin’s Brown Betty. Regular Around The D Readers might remember Jennie Martin from a previous Recipes from the Archives blog post – her Cafe Parfait was featured this summer.
Jane “Jennie” Vardell Rumple Martin (1872 – 1955) hailed from Charleston, South Carolina, and first came to North Carolina to attend the Charlotte Female Institute (now Queens University). Jennie moved to Davidson in 1897, when she married William Joseph Martin, Jr. (1868 – 1943; Class of 1888), then a professor of chemistry at Davidson College. W.J. Martin, Jr. was the son of Colonel William Joseph Martin, a Davidson College professor of chemistry and geology who served as acting College President from 1887 to 1888. W.J. Martin, Jr. became President of the College in 1912, a post he held until 1929, when he was appointed President of the Assembly’s Training School (now Union Presbyterian Seminary) in Richmond. The Martins returned to Davidson in 1939 and remained in town for the remainder of their lives. The family included five children: J. Malcomson Rumple (Jennie’s son from her first marriage to James Rumple), William Joseph Martin III, Eloise Martin Currie, Jean Martin Foil, and Mary Martin Maddox.
As noted in the previous recipe entry on the Martins, Jennie was very active in town life – she founded the Woman’s Book Club of Davidson (now Booklover’s Club) and the Young Matrons Club (Twentieth Century Club from 1927 to 1964). She contributed recipes for the Davidson Civic Club’s Davidson Cook Book (circa 1928).
Jennie Martin’s cookbook was likely compiled sometime between 1897 and 1907, based on dates from a scrapbook also created by Martin during her time in Davidson. Most of the cookbooks in the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections are collections of recipes gathered from several community members and published as a fundraising activity for various civic or social organizations, but the Martin cookbook is a handwritten, personal collection of recipes.
Likely the recipes Jennie Martin recorded in her cookbook were shared from her family, friends, and neighbors – as Janet Theophano states in Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, “From at least the seventeenth century, women have exchanged and shared recipes (also called receipts until the late nineteenth century) that they recorded in their cookery manuscripts”; these recipes “may come from past generations and from individuals living side by side in small communities, connected to larger social circles, sometimes from one or more cultures, and they can also come to the cookbook from an array of print media.” (pages 8-12) Recipe books compiled for personal use also often contain notes on how the recipe turned out, whether an ingredient was substituted, or if the recipe needed to be modified in any other way.
I chose the recipe for Brown Betty from Martin’s cookbook partially because the recipe is seasonally appropriate, and partially because I had heard of but never made the classic dessert before. The Oxford Companion to Food (3 ed.) lists a “brown Betty” as a North American “baked pudding” that first appeared in print in the Yale Literary Magazine of March 1864. The origin of the name remains unknown, although given the capitalization of “Betty” since the first published reference, many have concluded that it refers to a person.
Martin’s recipe calls for: “2 cups bread crumbs, 3 cups chopped apples, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 small teaspoon cinnamon, 2 table spoons butter, cut into small bits.” I made breadcrumbs out of half a loaf of Italian bread – dried out in the oven to remove moisture, cut into small pieces, and then chopped finely in a blender. Since the type of apple isn’t specified and the modern versions of the recipe diverge greatly on apple variety, I chose Cripps Pink Lady apples (swayed by this Bon Appétit piece on the best apples for baking). I followed Martin’s instructions for layering the apples, sugar, and breadcrumbs, with dashes of the cinnamon and the “small bits” of butter thrown in.
Interestingly, the recipe apple Brown Betty has remained mostly unchanged – Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking notes that “One early-twentieth-century Brown Betty recipe called for ‘one loaf of stale bread crumbled fine, one-half cupful of milk, and twelve apples. Alternate layers of bread and sliced apples, sugared, buttered, and spiced. Moisten with milk. Bake in a tin pudding-pan for three hours.'” (page 206) Note how similar the ingredients and instructions are to both Jennie Martin’s recipe, and to present-day versions.
Stavely and Fitzgerald also note the popularity of using apples in creating various beverages and dishes in colonial America – the fruit flourished in New England beginning in 1625. Using stale bread and apples possibly gathered from a nearby tree, Brown Betty could be an easy and affordable recipe to make.
Many of the recipes I’ve encountered in our archives do not list oven temperature or baking time (and in any case, the bake time in a modern oven may vary from the historic recipe), and although Martin’s Brown Betty does not specify a temperature, she does note that to bake the dish, you should “cover closely, steam 3/4 of an hour, then uncover + brown quickly.” I took a note from modern versions of the recipe and cooked the Brown Betty with tin foil covering the pan for 45 minutes at 350°, then removed the foil and cooked for an additional 15 minutes.
As Martin notes at the close of her recipe, this Brown Betty is best to “Eat with sugar + cream or sweet sauce. Very good.” All in all, an easy and delicious historic dish!
The second week of classes is well underway here at Davidson College, and the hubbub of Freshmen orientation and upperclassmen moving back to campus is beginning to settle down. One topic on the minds of many students both new and returning, is dorm decorating – what are the perfect wall hangings and tchotchkes?
With that in mind, this week we’ll take a look at how Davidson College students have decorated their dormitories throughout the years – click on any of the images in the following picture post to get a closer view:
While many things have changed at Davidson throughout the years, students’ desire to decorate their living space has remained constant – and the some of the modes of decorating have also remained popular, such as the gallery wall hanging style.
If you’re a Davidson alumni or current student who wants to document your college decorating style, please send any photographs to the College Archives & Special Collections!
A few weeks ago, Davidson College’s new International Student Advisor, Bea Cornett, got in touch with the Archives & Special Collections – her recent new employee orientation campus history tour had sparked an idea: what about spicing up new international student pre-orientation week with a night-time glow-in-the-dark history tour?
We had a quick turnaround – roughly two weeks from the conception of the idea until it was carried out. Jan Blodgett (College Archivist & Records Management Coordinator) and I got to work, brainstorming stories from the archives that could be spooky, creepy, or weird enough for a glow-in-the-dark tour. We compiled a list of fifteen tales, pulled archival material related to each, and scanned the material to make a study guide.
Some of stories we selected: Davidson’s first virtual student, Bill Edwards; the Ghost of Old Chambers; finding skulls and skeletons in the columns of Old Chambers and early x-rays on campus; several tales of freshmen hazing of days gone by; the Freshmen Riot of 1903; the December 21, 1854 student rebellion; and the history of some of the oldest buildings on campus – Eumenean and Philanthropic Halls, the Carolina Inn, and Oak and Elm Rows.
Last Friday afternoon I met with the International Orientation Leaders, the group of students who would help acclimate our new freshmen to campus. Bea assigned each student a stop along the tour, and I told short versions of each story we’d selected. We all discussed the archival material and how each Orientation Leader would make their story their own. That following Sunday evening, fellow library staff Cara Evanson, Sarah Crissinger, and I led small groups of new international students around campus, stopping at each glow-stick-lit Orientation Leader to hear tales of Davidson’s past.
The first Glow-in-the-Dark Tour was a success – new freshmen were spooked and entertained, and tour-givers and tour-takers were united in wanting to hear even more tales from the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections. We can’t wait for next year’s iteration of the international student Glow-in-the-Dark tour!
For this edition of Recipes from the Archives, I made a seasonally- and regionally-appropriate treat – Janet Harris Goldiere’s Corn Pudding, from the Davidson Senior Center’s 1985 printing of The Davidson Cookbook.
Davidson Senior Services (later the Davidson Senior Center), open to all town residents over the age of sixty, began operating in September 1977 in the railroad depot building on Jackson Street. The Center sponsored programs (including an income tax assistance service and a Senior/Student Friendship program), day trips, connected volunteers with seniors, put out a yearly newsletter (Tracks), and published three printings of a cookbook (The Davidson Cookbook). The Center closed in spring 2004, but a variation of the Senior/Student program continues to be operated through the Davidson College Presbyterian Church and the College Civic Engagement Council, now known as the Adopt-a-Grandparent program.
As the Cookbook explains, the community-sourced recipes reflect “the unique quality of life in our town, a hospitable place where the old landmark ‘Depot’ houses a lively program of activities and services of older townspeople through DAVIDSON SENIOR SERVICES, the official sponsor and beneficiary of this cookbook project.”
Janet Harris Goldiere (1898 – 1991) was a North Carolina native – born in Macon, in Warren County, she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1919, just as the school changed its name from North Carolina State Normal and Industrial College to Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina. As a student, Janet Harris was a member of the Cornelian Literary Society, Classical Club, was a substitute on the sophomore field hockey team.
Janet Harris taught French in public high schools for twelve years, and married Augustin Victor Goldiere (1895 – 1965), a professor of Spanish and French at Davidson College, in 1930. A.V. Goldiere received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He served in the U.S. Ambulance Service in France during WWI, and first arrived in Davidson in 1922, while working on his graduate degrees. A.V. Goldiere taught at the College for nearly 40 years, until retiring in 1963.
Both Goldieres were very active in the Presbyterian Church; Janet served as the President of the Women of the Church and A.V. was President of the Men of the Church of the Concord Presbytery, and he also served as a deacon and elder of the Davidson College Presbyterian Church. Janet participated in several Davidson community organization – she was a member of the Quadwranglers Wives Club, as well as serving as the vice-president and then president of the Davidson Civic Club in 1930s, when the club motto was “Do Something For Davidson.”
After A.V. Goldiere’s death in 1965, Janet Goldiere remained in Davidson. In 1974, she won the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award for Service to the Community, which each year recognizes a member of the senior class and a member of the community “who have given unselfish service without due recognition” (according to award text from the Davidson College Catalog, 2009 – 2010). At the close of the personal information sheet she submitted to the Davidson Senior Center, Goldiere noted: “Nothing unusual except, perhaps Christmas in Russia with UNC-G and UNC-CH college groups in 1974.”
As further proof of her community spirit, Janet Goldiere served on the Board of Directors for the Davidson Senior Center, and contributed several recipes to The Davidson Cookbook. I chose to make her Corn Pudding – a classic Southern side dish.
I purchased eight ears of sweet corn at the Davidson Farmers Market, and doubled the ingredients in Goldiere’s recipe in order to make more pudding. The recipe is simple – the only area that requires interpretation was the note to “start it at 350° and cut back to 325°” as this doesn’t specify when to lower the heat. I chose to bake the pudding at 350° for the first fifteen minutes, and then reduce the temperature for the remaining 45 minutes. I ended up leaving the pudding in the oven for a few additional minutes, in order to brown the top lightly.
The resulting corn pudding is delicious! The final product is less cake-y or bread-like than some corn puddings, due to the ratio of corn to flour and eggs. This corn pudding really calls for fresh, in-season corn, which is the highlight of the dish. I highly recommend making traditional corn pudding recipes like this one in the summer!
Like many college students in the early to mid 1980s, Davidsonians were fairly obsessed with R.E.M. The weekly campus newspaper, The Davidsonian, featured reviews of every R.E.M. album and local show (see the April 22, 1983, September 21, 1984, and September 21, 1987 issues for examples), and during the Spring 1983 semester, R.E.M. played at Davidson twice.
R.E.M. played in the College’s 900 Room on February 5, 1983, and by all accounts the show was a major campus success – the room was packed to capacity and students had to be turned away. The band was had been in the area for a few weeks, recording their debut studio album Murmur at Charlotte’s Reflection Sound Studios (R.E.M. would return to Reflection the next year, to record their second album, Reckoning).
After the show, Director of the College Union, C. Shaw Smith (Class of 1939, College Union Director 1953 – 1983, and namesake of the C. Shaw Smith 900 Room) received a postcard from the physical embodiment of Davidson’s connection to R.E.M. – Bertis Downs IV, then a recent Davidson College alumnus (Class of 1978) who began giving legal advice and assisting R.E.M. with contracts as a law student at the University of Georgia, after seeing the band’s second-ever show at Athens’ Kaffee Klub in April 1980. Downs’ father, Bertis Downs III, was also a Davidson alumnus (Class of 1953).
In addition to numerous student newspaper references to R.E.M.’s perfomances and albums, the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections hold a copy of the band’s contract for the May 1983 performance. There are several interesting nuggets to pull out of the contract:
Unfortunately, R.E.M. didn’t play at Davidson again after the Spring 1983 semester, but we here at Around the D can still be proud of the success alumnus Bertis Downs has found with the band. According to an interview with the Gwinett Daily Post in 2012, Downs’ love of music also fueled his Davidson activities:
At Davidson I had been on the concert committee and had a radio show. I was always interested in music but I was interested more in the business side of music: how does it work? You know, the inner-workings of the business, concerts etc.
Downs also recently wrote a reflection on Davidson College Basketball for the Davidson Journal. Downs remains an employee of R.E.M., and is a retired adjunct professor of entertainment law at the University of Georgia.
Next up in our Recipes from the Archives series – Jennie Martin’s “Cafe Parfait.” Jennie’s Martin’s recipe comes from the Davidson Civic Club’s Davidson Cook Book (circa 1928), the same volume that contained the Misses Scofield’s Ice Box Pudding #1. The Davidson Civic Club (1911 – 1959; Davidson Civic League from 1952) aimed to promote “a well-kept household and a place for good and pleasant living” in Davidson. The club’s first president was Cornelia Shaw, Davidson College’s first full-time librarian and registrar; the members raised money to establish the first town library, beautify the town, and name town streets.
Jane “Jennie” Vardell Rumple Martin (1872 – 1955) was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She attended the Charlotte Female Institute (now Queens University) and afterwards married James Rumple of Salisbury, North Carolina. Rumple died in 1892, and in 1897 Jennie married William Joseph Martin, Jr. (1868 – 1943; Class of 1888).
W.J. Martin, Jr. moved to Davidson in 1870, when his father (William Joseph Martin, Sr., known as “The Colonel”) took up a post as a professor of chemistry (and served as acting College President in 1887 – 1888). After graduating with B.A. (1888) and M.A. (1894) from Davidson, Martin went on to the University of Virginia, where he received M.D. (1890) and Ph.D (1894) degrees. W.J. Martin was a professor of chemistry at Davidson College from 1896 until 1912, when he became College President. After retiring from that post in 1929, Dr. Martin served as President of the Assembly’s Training School (now Union Presbyterian Seminary) in Richmond until 1933. W.J. and Jennie Martin moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, for five years before returning to Davidson in 1939. Jennie Martin had a son from her first marriage, J. Malcomson Rumple, and four children with W.J.: William Joseph Martin III, Eloise Martin Currie, Jean Martin Foil, and Mary Martin Maddox.
Jennie Martin was extremely active in Davidson town life – she was fundamental in founding the Woman’s Book Club of Davidson (Booklover’s Club since 1911) in 1899, and the Young Matrons Club (Twentieth Century Club from 1927 to 1964) in 1922. According to the January 1899 Davidson College Magazine, the Woman’s Book Club was established to be a place for women to discuss the latest books – in fact, “The Magazine warns the learned Ph.D’s. to be on their guard and look to their colors, since the women in their midst intend to be intellectual! As to the Boys!-they simply are not in it.” The Booklover’s Club still exists as a space for women in Davidson to gather and learn together.
Now to Jennie Martin’s Cafe Parfait – this recipe for a cold treat seemed just the thing for summer.
I tripled all the ingredients and added a bit extra coffee, since I was concerned that the flavor wouldn’t come through all the cream. I began by making a sugar or simple syrup, and the coffee I used was Reanimator Coffee’s Guatemala Finca La Pastoria (since I already had a bag on hand). Pro tip: if you don’t constantly stir the egg yolk-sugar syrup-coffee mixture, the eggs will start to separate from the liquids. I borrowed an electric ice cream maker from Jean Coates, our Assistant Director for Access and Acquisitions, for the freezing process – undoubtedly a bit different than what Jennie Martin would have used!
After the ice cream maker had completed its process, I put the resulting ice cream in my freezer overnight. The completed Cafe Parfait is delicious – it tastes a like a sweet cream frozen custard with a hint of coffee. The recipe was very simple to follow, and with the modern addition of an electric ice cream maker, it was also a speedy treat to make.
For our third installment of Recipes from the Archives, I chose Helen Abernethy’s “Oatmeal Crispies (Children love these)” from the 1965 “The Village Cook Book: Recipes from the P.T.A. Pantry, Davidson, North Carolina.”
According to the February 15, 1965 Mecklenburg Gazette, “A group of young Davidson housewives, who are also busily engaged in Parent-Teacher Association work, have begun a determined campaign to raise funds to buy a new 50-star American flag for the Davidson Elementary School auditorium… The proceeds of the cookbook will be used also for a recorder and filmstrips for the school library.” The cookbook cost $1.50, and could be purchased at the Davidson College Store, as well as local shops Cashion’s and P. Nicholls.
Helen McLandress Abernethy (1901 – 1992) was a longtime Davidson resident and prominent community member. Raised in Indianapolis, Helen earned an art degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1923 and an M.A. in arts education from the University of Chicago in 1932. In her obituary, the Mecklenburg Gazette (November 18, 1992) noted that she “worked in ink and oils, she had her own kiln and did beautiful, original work in ceramics and mosaics.” Helen worked as a commercial artist in Chicago and taught art in public schools in Birmingham, Alabama, Champaign, Illinois, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She founded the art department of Barber-Scotia College in Concord, North Carolina, in 1957 and worked as an associate professor of art at the college until 1964. Her work was exhibited at the Mint Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Barber-Scotia College, and Davidson College.
In 1936, Helen married George Lawrence Abernethy (1910 – 1996), well-known to many Davidsonians as the founder of the College’s Department of Philosophy and as a co-founder of the Humanities program. George Abernethy taught at Davidson from 1946 through 1976, after earning a B.A. at Bucknell University in 1932, an M.A. from Oberlin College in 1933, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1936. In 1962, George was the first recipient of Davidson’s Thomas Jefferson Award , given to a faculty member who demonstrates “the highest example of personal and scholarly integrity” (Charlotte News, May 15, 1962). Helen and George had two children – Robert John Abernethy and Jean Helen Abernethy Poston. Both Abernethys requested that their memorials be made to Davidson College at the time of their deaths; George to the George Lawrence Abernethy Endowment, and Helen to the Helen Abernethy Art Book Fund.
The recipe Helen Abernethy submitted to the Davidson PTA Cookbook in 1965 is a fairly simple one. I selected it for this blog series because I was intrigued by the title addendum (“Children love these”), and because the crispies sounded delicious.
As an amateur baker, I had to look up what creaming shortening and sugars meant – essentially, using a hand mixer to fluff up the shortening and then slowly adding the sugars in while continuously mixing. I took some liberties with the recipe: I used tin foil instead of wax paper to wrap the cookie dough rolls in (because I don’t have any wax paper at home), and I put the dough rolls in the freezer for roughly 2 hours, instead of into the icebox (read: refrigerator) for an unspecified amount of time. I baked the crispies for roughly 12 minutes per sheet, checking the color every few minutes or so. My batch made about two dozen cookies instead of five – I must have sliced mine considerably thicker than Helen Abernethy would have done.
Inspired by the newly-established campus Digital Mapping Learning Community, we’ve been creating more digital map-related resources this semester. Regular Around the D readers have likely heard of Under Lake Norman, our mapping project that includes crowdsourced stories and images related to what lies beneath Lake Norman.
One of our faculty members, Dr. Anelise Hanson Shrout (who wrote a guest post for Around The D last year), has been creating mapping projects centered around Davidson, and taught DIG 360: Digital Maps, Space and Place last semester, which resulted in two student digital mapping of Davidson projects as well. Check out Dr. Shrout’s Mapping Davidson’s Past project on her website.
Last week, in preparation for the Archives & Special Collections participation in Digital Charlotte, I created a map of the Charlotte locations featured in our collections postcards. The Charlotte Postcards maps is actually my first Neatline (an Omeka plug-in) project, and was a fun way to learn more about early 20th century Charlotte history.
As we all learn new methods for digital mapping, we’ll be creating even more maps of Davidson (and the surrounding area)! Currently, College Archivist and Records Management Coordinator Jan Blodgett and Kyle Goodfellow from the Center for Civic Engagement are working on translating the freshman orientation community walk to an interactive map, making the stops along the walk and information about getting involved in the Davidson community available year-round. Current student Sarah Roberts (Class of 2015) is working on physically mapping the environment of Davidson, and I am partway through mapping Davidson’s National Register of Historic Places sites – look out for all of these projects to be linked on the Archives & Special Collections website when they’re completed!