Category Archives: History

The fellmonger’s office

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Wool pulling. Credit: Rudolf A. Clemen, By-Products in the Packing Industry (1927).

Wool pulling. Credit: Rudolf A. Clemen, By-Products in the Packing Industry (1927).

Fellmongers disappeared from the American industrial landscape in the last century. They were specialized meat and leather industry byproducts dealers who also prepared skins and leather from lamb pelts removed in slaughterhouses. In 2000, the last American fellmongers processed a batch of wool inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company. The exercise was captured in a documentary film produced for the Pittsburgh History Center and was documented in reports I prepared for the History Center and for the National Park Service (now in the Library of Congress: HAER No. PA-572).

Leonard1889

James Callery’s Duquesne tannery (right) shortly after it was built. It later became the Pittsburgh Wool Company. The site on the Allegheny River north shore had tanneries and wool pulleries there continuously from the 1830s through 2000.

Pittsburgh Wool Company facade, 1996. Photo by author.

Pittsburgh Wool Company facade, 1996. Photo by author.

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Georgia sunshine: the semantics of public records

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bench-docket

Georgia court records. Are they open if they are in plain view? Photo by author.

Georgia’s government regularly gets failing grades for transparency when it comes to making records available to the press, researchers, and the general public. A recent survey of states by the Center for Public Integrity flunked Georgia with a grade of 46% on two questions: 1) Do citizens have a legal right of access to information?; and, 2) Is the right of access to information effective?

Under Georgia law, the governor and legislative branches are exempt from the state’s Open Records Act (O.C.G.A. §50-18-70). The judicial branch, including county superior courts, operates under a different set of rules for making court records — case files, land records, etc. — available to the public. Continue reading →

Jesse James in Iowa

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Jesse James (1847-1882) was a nineteenth century outlaw who became a popular figure in American folk legend and folk song. By the twentieth century, film and television joined the earlier oral and print traditions with fictional and documentary renditions of James’s life.

Jesse James Historical Site, Adair, Iowa.

Jesse James Historical Site, Adair, Iowa.

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New life for old interviews: Some Atlanta music & journalism history

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Eric King and Joel (J.T. Speed) Murphy at the Blind Willie's bar, Oct. 24, 1990. Photo by author.

Eric King (front)  and Joel (J.T. Speed) Murphy at the Blind Willie’s bar, Oct. 24, 1990. My recorder is on the bar. Photo by author.

Earlier this year I began taking steps towards completing a project that had its origins back in 1990. For a few hours the evening of October 24, 1990, Eric King and I consumed a fair amount of alcohol  and talked blues music and history at the bar of his Atlanta club, Blind Willie’s. At the time, I wrote a blues column for a short-lived alt-weekly, Footnotes. I had been spending lots of time in Willie’s and I had wanted to interview King for background material for future stories. Continue reading →

Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park, Washington

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The Washington, D.C., Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) office has begun posting excerpts from the oral history interviews I did for them between 2007 and 2009. The first excerpt posted is from my summer 2007 interview with Washington Parks and People executive director Steve Coleman.

My interview with Coleman covered a lot of territory. The clip posted at the DC LISC Website focuses on the rehabilitation of Washington’s Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park). Surf on over to the page or listen to the clip here:

 

Old Julia and Elwood

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Well, the name of it is Old Julia still. I guess you hard of that. — M.R., March 1988.

Former turpentine camp site, St. Johns County, Fla.

Former turpentine camp site, St. Johns County, Fla.

“Old Julia” was the name of a turpentine still and camp that operated in rural St. Johns County, Fla., in the 1920s and 1930s. And then, like other temporary naval stores processing sites in the Coastal Plain flatwoods, its owner moved the buildings and people to another stand of longleaf pines to extract resin for distillation into turpentine.

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Some changes: fixed media, new graphics, and spring cleaning

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Over the past three years this site has changed platforms once and servers twice. It also has gone through some growing pains, false starts, and wrong turns. When I migrated the blog from WordPress.com there were some formatting errors that occurred in the earlier telecommunications history posts (embedded media not rendering correctly, etc.). Also, because of changes in Google Maps plugins over time, some of the embedded maps in older posts were broken.

After a couple of weeks of repair work, all of the graphics and other embedded media in the Western Union microwave network series appear to have been restored. The site has a new brick background —Catskill brick pavers from Savannah, Ga. — and better optimized photos. Gone are many of the posts that detoured from the site’s purpose: telling stories about the past. They diminished the site’s integrity and were a distraction from what I set out to achieve with this site.

New posts on the way cover recent past resources in the Washington suburbs and some fun ways to combine music with oral history. Future posts will be shorter and mainly will provide introductions and complementary information for blog posts and articles published elsewhere in edited sites, like the recent piece on a Southern poet’s home, and e-journals.

DSR

Historic Preservation Fund: Decatur report

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Since 1970, the State and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices have received up to $46.9 million in annual matching grants through the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF) to assist in expanding and accelerating their historic preservation activities.

Funding is used to pay part of the costs of staff salaries, surveys, comprehensive preservation studies, National Register nominations, educational materials, as well as architectural plans, historic structure reports, and engineering studies necessary to preserve historic properties.

The All HPF-assisted activities must meet standards set by the Secretary of the Interior, and at least 10 percent of the allocations to the States are subgranted to assist Certified Local Governments for locally based activities. — National Park Service

The Beacon elementary school (1955) and Trinity High School (1956) were built to replace the Herring Street School. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Wilson.In 2010 Decatur, Ga., received a $10,000 Historic Preservation Fund grant for historic preservation-related planning studies at the city’s former equalization schools, Beacon Elementary and Trinity High. The previous year, the City’s historic preservation consultants completed a citywide comprehensive historic resources survey and failed to mention the African American historic site (the survey did, however, include an inventory form for a building at 109 Waters Street with this note: “Number on building is 420 W Trinity, the police station”).

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Roadside architecture: Blue Mountain, Maryland

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There’s more to rural Frederick County, Maryland, than Camp David. Nearby, there were other twentieth century resorts that housed people of lesser means than U.S. presidents.

Blue Mountain HouseThe Blue Mountain House (F-6-095) is a 1½-story frame house located south of Blue Mountain Road in rural Frederick County, Maryland. The house is a side-gabled rectangular building constructed on a concrete block foundation. There is a front entry porch in the north façade. The porch roof is supported by four battered wood posts on brick piers. The north façade has three bays with symmetrical fenestration (central door). There is a rear one-story shed roof addition (enclosed porch) and an external gable end (west) concrete block chimney. The building has 1/1 double-hung sash windows and is clad by vinyl siding; the roof is clad by composition shingles. Continue reading →