The author acknowledges with thanks a 1987 Henry Francis du Pont fellowship at the Winterthur Museum for initial research on this topic. The author also thanks, for critical readings and suggestions, John Bishir, Jerry Cashion, Jeffrey Crow, Catherine Hutchins, James Leloudis, Carl Lounsbury, William Price, Janet Seapker, Dell Upton, Harry Watson, Camille Wells, and Chris Wilson; and for encouragement and assistance in obtaining illustrations and information, Claudia Brown, Ned Cooke, Michael Hill, Elizabeth Reid Murray, Beverly Tetterton, Edward Turberg, Abigail Van Slyck, Harry Warren, and R. Beverly R. Webb.
1.Rev. M. M. Marshall, “Address,” in Exercises at the Opening of the Olivia Raney Library, Held in the Library Hall on the Evening of Thursday, January Twenty-Fourth, 1901 (Capital Printing Co., 1901), 14-15.
2.Wilmington, the Cape Fear River port settled in the early eighteenth century, was from 1850 through 1900 North Carolina’s largest city, with about 20,000 people (56 percent of whom were black) in 1890. Raleigh, the inland capital established in 1792, had in 1890 nearly 13,000 people (50 percent black and 50 percent white). In subsequent decades the Piedmont industrial cities of Charlotte and Winston-Salem drew ahead in population.
3.This summary derives primarily from the following works: Kenneth Ames, “Introduction,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (W. W. Norton and Co., 1985); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 1992); John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 1992); Michèle H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1989); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael Kämmen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (University of Chicago Press, 1984); Christopher Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming); Richard Guy Wilson et al., The American Renaissance, 1876-1917 (Pantheon, 1979); and Richard Guy Wilson, “Architecture and the Reinterpretation of the Past in the American Renaissance,” Winterthur Portfolio 18 (Spring 1983): 69-87.
4.Quotes from Charles B. Aycock, “The South Regaining Its Prestige,” in Literary and Historical Activities in North Carolina, 1900-1905 (Raleigh Publications of the Historical Commission, 1907), 1:120; and The Biographical History of North Carolina from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Samuel A. Ashe (Charles L. Van Noppen, 1905), 1:36.
5.Harry S. Warren, “Colonel Frederick Augustus Olds and the Founding of the North Carolina Museum of History” (M.A. thesis, East Carolina University, 1988), 20-21. Samuel A’Court Ashe (1840-1938), a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and an Episcopalian, engaged in several occupations, founded the News and Observer in 1881, and produced The Biographical History of North Carolina. See The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell (University of North Carolina Press, 1979-).
6.The Raleigh Ladies Memorial Association was organized in 1866 with Mrs. General L. O’B. Branch (née Nancy Haywood Blount) as president (“Ladies Memorial Association,” the Bishir: Landmarks of Power, News and Observer, 10 May 1903). North and South Carolina and some of Virginia used 10 May as Memorial Day, the anniversary of Stonewall Jackson’s death (Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 42). Alfred Moore Waddell (1834-1912), a descendant of colonial general Hugh Waddell and Revolutionary general Francis Nash, practiced law, edited newspapers in Charlotte and Wilmington, and though opposing secession, served as an officer in the war. As a “Redeemer” Conservative and Democrat, he was elected to Congress (1870-79); he wrote Some Memories of My Life and works of Cape Fear history (Powell, ed., Dictionary of North
Carolina Biography).
7. Ladies Memorial Association Records, North Carolina State Archives, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh. As Waddell noted, the state had previously (1857) erected a bronze cast of Houdon’s statue of George Washington on the Capitol grounds. Still earlier (1816), the state had commissioned a marble figure of Washington from the celebrated Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, which stood in the rotunda of the State House until a fire in 1831 destroyed both the building and the statue.
8.See Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, on the shift from funereal to civic memorials. Similar trends took place in the North. According to Ralph W. Widener, Jr.’s, Confederate Monuments (privately published, 1982), in North Carolina only the Concord monument (1892) predates the Raleigh monument on a civic site. On the North Carolina Monumental Association, see Branch Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Officers included Mrs. Armistead Jones (president), Mrs. Garland Jones, and Mrs. John W. Hinsdale. Mrs. Armistead Jones (née Nancy Haywood Branch) was the daughter of Gen. Lawrence O’Bryan Branch (railroad president and Confederate officer) and Nancy Haywood Blount Branch, founding president of the Ladies Memorial Association. Her husband, Armistead Jones, was a Confederate officer, Raleigh attorney, and Democratic party leader; the couple belonged to Christ Episcopal Church (see “Armistead Jones” in Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography). Among the couple’s best-known descendants is novelist Armistead Maupin. First quote, undated (February 1895) clipping, Scrapbook, Branch Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History.
9. News and Observer, 20, 21 May 1895. The granite came from Mount Airy, N.C., quarries. In contrast to the popular mass-produced soldier figures, the figures were modeled on North Carolina regiments and fashioned by Bavarian sculptor Ferdinand Von Miller. Prominent on the dais were Mrs. Armistead Jones, Mrs. Gen. Branch, Mrs. Gen. Stonewall Jackson, and Mrs. Gen. D. H. Hill. Rev. Aldert Smedes, principal of St. Mary’s School, offered the prayer. Julia Jackson Christian unveiled the monument.
10. See Fred Arthur Bailey, “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 75 (Fall 1991): 507-33, for a similar 1895 speech by Stephen D. Lee to the United Confederate Veterans in Houston, part of the effort of the “South’s aristocrats” to defend “not merely the South, but, more importantly, the embattled status of southern patricians” (508).
11.Richard N. Current, “That Other Declaration, May 20, 1775-May 20, 1975,” North Carolina Historical Review 54 (April 1977): 169-91. North Carolina Confederate leaders’ usage of the symbolic date paralleled the Confederate government’s choice of 22 February as its founding date and the use of Washington’s image on its official seal.
12. James Sprunt to Alfred Moore Waddell, 21 May 1895, and H. G. Connor to Alfred Moore Waddell, 23 May 1895, Alfred Moore Waddell Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (See political leader Henry Groves Connor and his son, historian and archivist Robert D. W. Connor, in Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography.)
***
24.The qualification for membership read “any white resident of the State, or North Carolinian residing out of the State, who subscribes to the purposes of the Association” (Literary and Historical Activities in North Carolina, 1-3, 6).
25. From these roots also emerged the state’s tradition of distinguished historians as well as the fruitful relationship between historical pursuits and civic and political leaders. See William S. Price, Jr., “Plowing Virgin Fields: State Support for Southern Archives, Particularly North Carolina,” Carolina Comments 19 (March 1991): 41-47.
***
55. Mary Hilliard Hinton, The North Carolina Historical Exhibit at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition (Edwards and Broughton, 1916), 7, 9.
56. The Official Blue Book of the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition, ed. Charles Russell Kelley (Colonial Publishing Co., Inc., 1909), 367-68. Lumber merchant Kenneth Howard in Dunn, North Carolina, was one who copied the North Carolina building in his residence (Davyd Foard Hood, “Kenneth L. Howard House National Register Nomination,” Survey and Planning Branch, North Carolina Division of Archives and History). On the NCAA meeting see Southern Architect and Building News, 28 December 1907. Predecessor and later contemporary of the North Carolina chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the group included as founding leaders Charles Barrett (vice president), Charles McMillan, C. E. Hartge, and C. C. Hook. On the NCAA and the North Carolina American Institute of Architects, see Brown, “The Day of the Great Cities” in Bishir et al., Architects and Builders in North Carolina, 337-40.
57. Hinton, North Carolina Historical Exhibit, 7.