Abstract: Blackwell Markham (1897-1977) was a general surgeon in Durham, N.C. He received his medical training at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard University. He served in the United States Army in World War II in North Africa and Europe. The collection contains correspondence, greeting cards, diaries, personal papers, a few business papers, and photographs relating to Blackwell Markham and his family. Topics include family matters and life during World War II. Much of the correspondence is between Markham and family members and with Mary Poteat, an English teacher at Duke University with whom he corresponded for 40 years; the bulk was written from Italy and Algeria, 1942-1945. There are also detailed diaries kept by Markham during World War II that include descriptions of specific patient cases, travel, and hospital and general military life. Also included is a diary, written in Italian, that was at least partially compiled by internees at an Italian prisoner of war camp in Algeria where Markham was stationed. There are also scrapbooks and other materials primarily relating to Markham while he attended Durham High School; the University of North Carolina; and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. There are also materials, many annotated by Markham, relating to earlier generations of Markhams, including John L. Markham Sr., who owned a general store in Durham and died circa 1900. Some materials relate to Markham and Brogden relatives, including letters of John L. Markham Jr. while serving in the United States Army in Columbia, S.C., during World War I, 1917-1919; letters of Markham’s nephew, Blackwell M. Brogden, while serving in the United States Navy, 1942-1945; and papers relating to North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Willis J. Brogden Sr. Also included are materials relating to Ritta Geer, the Markhams’ longtime African American domestic servant. Photographs are of Markham and the Markham family members, 1860s-1972, and include three tintypes, circa 1860. Photographs between about 1900 and 1930 include formal portraits and candid shots of the Markham family; posed portraits of servants, including Ritta Geer; and images of various locations around Durham. There are also World War II photographs taken by Markham in North Africa and Europe; photographer Margaret Bourke-White appears in a few of the images.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: A significant amount of Markham’s correspondence discusses being stationed as a military surgeon overseas, including North Africa (see particularly Folders 5-30; 35-72). He also describes the end of a military campaign in Tunisia in 1943 (Folder 185).

There are also letters related to Ritta Geer, the Markham’s longtime domestic servant. Folder 223 contains a 13 November 1934 receipt for Geer’s funeral expenses addressed to Blackwell Markham; an 11 October 1926 letter from Ritta Geer’s niece Cleora that discusses a family rift and Cleora’s desire to bring Geer to live with her in Pittsburgh, Pa.; and a Bible belonging to Geer, with a few handwritten annotations. There are also letters from John Markham, Jr. to Ella Markham from Camp Jackson between 1917-1919  writing about missing comforts of home including Ritta Geer’s homecooking  (Folder 218-220).

Abstract: Ernest Boyce McKissick (Mack) was born in Kelton, S.C., in 1895. His family moved to Asheville, N.C., around 1900. McKissick served in France, 1918-1919, with the African American 92nd Infantry Division during World War I. Returning to Asheville after the war, McKissick married Magnolia Thompson of Asheville. They had four children, the eldest of whom was Floyd S. McKissick, prominent North Carolina attorney, businessman, and civil rights leader, who was the first African American to attend the University of North Carolina’s Law School. The collection chiefly contains letters, 1918-1919, from Ernest B. McKissick to his future wife, Magnolia Thompson, written during his World War I service. Letters were sent from Camp Jackson, S.C.; Camp Dix, N.J.; Camp Merritt, N.J.; and France. They include jokes, romantic sentiments, and mention of fellow soldiers from Asheville and nearby Hendersonville, but offer little information about life as a soldier. Also included are a postcard, possibly from McKissick to H.E. Jones, and two letters to McKissick from Floyd S. Bixler, a wholesaler from Pennsylvania whom McKissick met while working at a hotel in Asheville.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: The Atlantic Coast Line was based in Wilmington, N.C., and possessed rail that ran through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida. The Atlantic Coast Line later formed part of the CSX Transportation System. The collection contains records, 1900s-1950s, of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. Files are divided between President’s Files, which document railroad operations and relations with other companies, and Tax Files, which contain records of federal, state, and local taxes paid by the Atlantic Coast Line. There are also a set of financial journals and a series of files related to the reorganization of the Florida East Coast Railway Company. Addition of 2011 consists of records, 1918-1963, of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company Police Department. Reports document often extensive investigations into crimes such as trespassing and vandalism, especially by juveniles; petty larceny of railroad and personal property; vagrancy and train hopping; public drunkenness; and assault. Reports typically mention age, race, and sex of the suspects, many of whom were African American, and often personal or family information. There are also lost luggage claims, reports of injuries sustained in the rail yard, and personnel records that document relief checks, retirement traditions, job applications, and funerals.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The addition of October 2011 contains records of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad Company Police Department, and includes investigative reports and arrest records for juveniles as well as adults. Many of the records involve African American men and women, suspected of crimes as well as victims.

Abstract: Stan Woodward is a southern auteur and documentary filmmaker. The Woodward Studio Limited produces documentaries on southern folk culture through the themes of American foodway and related traditions. In the 1980s, Woodward served as director of the Media Arts Center and the Communication Wing at the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C., where he got to know animator Chuck Jones. Woodward also worked as filmmaker-in-residence in Georgia, South Carolina, and other locations where he was involved in mentoring independent filmmakers and advising classroom teachers on how to teach students to create Super 8mm films. In the 1990s, Woodward worked on productions of Satellite Distance Learning Broadcasts for various television networks. The R. Stanley Woodward Collection consists of about 1400 items created or collected by Woodward, 1932-2004, including films, moving image materials, production notes, distribution and licensing contracts, and promotional and educational materials related to his films and other work promoting independent filmmaking. Films cover a wide range of topics, including southern food traditions; southern families, storytelling, folklore, and customs; African American dance and folk art; NASA, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, the Skylab Program, and astronauts; media programs on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird ; educational films; teaching filmmaking to students; the Capital Children’s Museum; the University of South Carolina; serpents; and sharecroppers. Locations include South Carolina; Virginia; Georgia; North Carolina; Kentucky; Washington, D.C.; New York City; and Alabama. Some of the people associated with the films are food critic Craig Claiborne, John A. Burrison, filmmaker Frank Eastes, John Egerton, Harold Hausenfluck, Fred Wolfe, animator Chuck Jones, Richard Pillsbury, and folklorist Saddler Taylor. The moving image materials are in various media formats, including 16mm print film, DVCAM video, U-Matic video, Betacam SP video, Digital Betacam video, MiniDV video, VHS video, and DVDs. Descriptions have been derived from the original container, film, video, or notes.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: This collection contains materials related to African American dance and folk art. In Series 1, about the tradition of Brunswick Stew in Georgia, Videotape VT-20446/262-267 contains an author’s note about meeting with an African American stewmaster.

Series 2 focuses on Southern Stews and Videotape VT-20446/35-37 depicts the cooking of Frogmore Stew by the African American Faulkenberry family and a neighboring chef in Saint Helena, S.C.

There is also a 1971 film in Subseries 6.1 (Video and Film) entitled Afro-American Dance: Establishing A Cultural Heritage (Film F-20446/17)

Abstract: The Grigsby family of North Carolina and South Carolina; New Haven, Conn.; Detroit, Mich.; and Phoenix, Ariz., descend from Fred Grigsby (b. 1867), the son of a former slave. The Grigsby family papers consist of correspondence and invitations, funeral and school materials, newspaper clippings and other printed biographical material, photographs, and other materials documenting the Grigsby family, especially publicist, civil rights activist, and editor Snow F. Grigsby, artist and art educator J. Eugene Grigsby (Gene), school principal J. E. Grigsby and school teacher Purry Leone Dixon Grigsby, and the family of teacher Miriam Grigsby Bates. Educational achievement is the central theme of the collection, in evidence in transcripts, diplomas, and photographs of family members receiving degrees. Other education-related materials include a letter from one Grigsby generation to the next providing personal insights on Langston Hughes for a research paper; a 1938 photograph of Purry Leone Dixon Grigsby teaching in a Biddleville (Charlotte, N.C.) elementary school classroom; and a small amount of material relating to the School Workers Federal Credit Union, which was founded in 1941 in Charlotte, N.C., by J. E. Grigsby, for African American teachers and employees of the public school system. Also of note are a 1942 living letter recorded at a USO Club; a 1980 letter that included a then-confidential list of the Detroit chapter of Tuskegee Airmen; a copy of a 1980 letter from Snow F. Grigsby to fellow Republican Strom Thurmond on racism, politics, and the economy; a CORE sit-in songs (Congress of Racial Equality) booklet; and the 1942 program for the women’s West End Book Club of Charlotte, N.C.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: William Alexander Graham of Hillsborough, N.C., was a lawyer, legislator, United States senator, Secretary of the Navy, Whig vice-presidential candidate in 1852, Confederate senator, trustee of the Peabody Fund, and member of the board of arbitration for the Maryland and Virginia boundary dispute. William Alexander Graham’s correspondence with prominent persons about state and national politics. Correspondents include George E. Badger, Thomas Bragg, T. W. Brevard, James Buchanan, Duncan Cameron, Paul C. Cameron, Henry Clay, Dorothea L. Dix, Stephen A. Douglas, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gaston, James Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, W. W. Holden, Sam Houston, William Preston Mangum, Charles Manly, Matthias E. Manly, Elisha Mitchell, B. F. Moore, James T. Morehead, J. Johnston Pettigrew, J. L. Pettigru, Leonidas Polk, Thomas Ruffin, James A. Seddon, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, David L. Swain, William Tryon, Martin Van Buren, Zebulon B. Vance, Hugh Waddell, Daniel Webster, and Jonathan Worth. Also included is material relating to legal business; the Graham family;iron foundry; plantations, slavery, and overseers in North Carolina and South Carolina; affairs at the University of North Carolina, the Revolutionary War history of North Carolina, and letters from sons serving as soldiers in the Confederate army. Later papers are of other Graham family members, especially Augustus Washington Graham, lawyer of Hillsborough, N.C., and Oxford, N.C. Volumes are personal accounts, school notebooks, and legal notes. Also included are typed carbon copies of letters, 1823-1877, to and from William A. Graham in this collection and in collections at other repositories that were compiled for an editing project in the 1960s.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The collection contains slave lists; slave bills of sale (1825, 1838- 1840); notice of a sale of runaway slaves (1829); and discussion of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), Ku Klux Klan arrests in South Carolina (1871, 1873), and race relations (1871). Volume 5 in Folder 365 also contains account information and slave lists.

Abstract: The collection includes miscellaneous items of Laura Margaret Cole (Mrs. James R.) Smith (b. 1806) of South Carolina; her daughter, Laura Smith Brumby (fl. 1866- 1885); and her son-in-law, James R. Brumby (b. 1846). Included are a diary, 1833-1834, of Laura Margaret Cole Smith, with entries discussing courting, death and dying, and the nullification crisis of 1832, and her reminiscences, written as epsitolary fiction, recounting her childhood and daily life. Also included is a diary, 1884-1885, of Laura Brumby, describing a wagon trip from Thomasville, Ga., to Clearwater and Tampa, Fla.; and reminiscences, written in 1929, of James R. Brumby, a native of Holmes and Yazoo counties, Miss., Confederate soldier who served with the 7th Georgia Cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia, and chair manufacturer of Marietta, Ga., in which he detailed family history, including his experiences during the Civil War and Brumby family activities in the furniture business.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Series 2 includes an autobiographical sketch written in 1929 of James R. Brumby, a Confederate soldier and businessman, in which Brumby refers to going into business with an African American man (See Folder 8).

Abstract: John Durant Ashmore (1819-1871) was a planter of Sumter and Anderson districts, S.C.; member of S.C. House of Representatives, 1848-1852; comptroller-general, 1853-1857; and Democratic congressman, 1859-1860. Plantation journal, 1853-1859, of John Durant Ashmore, relating to plantations in the Sumter and Anderson districts, S.C. Entries, made on a daily basis, consist of short remarks on the planting of cotton, corn, potatoes, peaches, and other crops. At times, individual laborers, presumably slaves, are named, but most entries describe groups of workers in terms of “hands.”Interspersed among the Sumter entries are remedies, recipes, and reports of agricultural experiments that were carried out at the plantation. Also included are tallies of “pork killed and baconed” and household property sold in 1854 and 1858, lists of letters mailed, and inventories of books (1475 volumes) and household property.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The plantation journal of Ashmore, planter of Sumter and Anderson districts, South Carolina, member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, and Democratic congressman. Some entries mention individual laborers, presumably slaves, by name, although most describe groups of workers as “hands.” Microfilm available.

Abstract: Chiefly Civil War letters from Federal soldiers throughout the South, in camps, hospitals, and prisons, to family and friends in the North. This collection is made up of unrelated single items or small groups of items, some of which are cataloged separately.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: One letter (Unit 48, 25 March 1870) written by Edward Pennington Pearson, Jr. to his mother in Pennsylvania. Pearson provides a brief description of Raleigh, North Carolina, during Reconstruction from the point of view of a Union soldier and comments on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.

A letter from 16 April 1865 (Unit 49) from I. (Shoger?) in Raleigh, N.C., to his wife reporting his experiences in North Carolina around the time of Lee’s surrender. He wrote that the announcement of the surrender was “redd by Genl Sherman in front of the Court House” in Smithfield, and that the soldiers then “threw up thair hats and chreed [sic] with all thair might. they got a negro on a blanket and threw him ten feet.” Johnston’s departure from Raleigh and the surrender of that city by “the mayor and counsil” are also mentioned.

Also includes a letter (Unit 55, 16 February 1862) from Whittier, a U.S. Army soldier at Hilton Head, South Carolina, to his mother, Mrs. Polly Whittier, describing the Union camp at Hilton Head. The writer discusses local blacks and states his belief that the Union should employ them in some productive way (it is unclear whether the writer means as soldiers or as laborers). He also comments that local blacks would starve to death without aid from the soldiers and states that he had been informed by several former slaves that their masters had not beaten them as he had been told at home.

Materials from this collection have been digitized and are available online. Click here to link to the finding aid for this collection and to access the digital items.

Abstract: Principal member of the Hughes family of Edgefield, S.C., are Dr. John Hughes (d. 1835) and his son, John H. Hughes (d. 1871), who were both cotton planters; John Hughes’s sister, Sophia Hughes Hunt (fl. 1825- 1864); his daughter, Jennie H. Hughes (fl. 1858-1879); his father-in-law, James Bones (fl. 1819-1836); his cousin, Lucy T. Butler Moore (d. 1857); his son-in-law, Cicero Adams (d. 1868); and wagon maker John Christie (fl. 1851). The collection includes family correspondence, legal, and financial papers, and miscellaneous items, dated chiefly between 1820 and 1898, and relating to Hughes family members and their Bones, Hunt, Christie, and Nicholson relatives. Papers relate primarily to plantation life, especially the daily routines and social and religious lives of plantation women. Other topics include army life during the Civil War and postwar antagonisms. South Carolina politics are also discussed in the early papers. Locations besides Edgefield for which considerable information appears are Augusta, Ga.; Grande Cane, La.; Woodville, Miss.; and various locations in Ireland. Financial and legal items of interest include wills, deeds, personal accounts, estate papers, and slave bills of sale. A few miscellaneous items include sermons, clippings, advertisements, and recipes.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 1 contains a letter,  dated 6 January 1818, is from James Blocker to Col. Sampson Butler, and contains Butler’s reply of 17 January on the back page of the original. The letter concerns the legal status of a free black man named Joe, who had once belonged to Samuel Butler’s brother.

A receipt signed 22 September 1828 by Joel Spencer acknowledged his purchasing  of an enslaved individual named Nace, whom he promised to sell in Louisiana for John Hughes. A bill appears from Hughes to Spencer for Nace on 23 May 1831 (See Folders 3 and 6).

Folder 10 contains a a copy of a slave bill of sale (originally dated 18 December 1827; copy dated 21 January 1847) for a young girl named Pricilla.

Folder 14a contains undated letters discussing a cholera epidemic among slaves in South Carolina and Louisiana.

Folder 16 contains a letter from Emma Lenice, dated 3 May 1860, which discusses the travel of her brother and sister to Africa as missionaries with 80 freed slaves, who had been educated and manumitted by a Mr. Cuthbert of Savannah.

Folder 17 contains a letter from Sophia Hughes Hunt on 15 October 1861, discussing the 27 enslaved individuals near Natchez for suspected involvement in inciting an insurrection.

Folder 22 contains a letter dated 26 November 1867 from Robert Hughes discussed being “forced” by the Freedman’s Bureau to pay higher wages to African American laborers. There is also a letter from 14 October 1867 from Cicero Adams concerning a black woman named Edith, who had died in childbirth. Adams had arranged for her burial and described the kind treatment she received in her last hours from friends.