Tag: Raleigh

There’s a news story circulating across social media about how this week a customer of Clyde Cooper’s BBQ called the police because some of the BBQ meat she ordered was pink. This is entirely normal, but it seems that the customer is now taking legal action against the now very annoyed restaurant. On the bright side, they’re quickly getting merchandise ready and so this is some rather excellent advertising…

https://www.facebook.com/clydecoopersbbq/

And why am I mentioning this? Primarily because I think it’s an amusing news story. Although I didn’t go there, it just happens that the restaurant is located on the next road to the City of Raleigh Museum that I’m currently writing about on this blog, so it felt appropriate in terms of timing….. And not everything has to be entirely relevant on this blog ?

Not only does Raleigh have the bar with the second highest number of draft beers available in the world, it also has the second largest earth on earth (the largest is in New York) as they call it. The globe is known as the SECU Daily Planet and it’s 70 feet in width, another sign that the Americans do things bigger if nothing else.

It’s part of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and they decided to plonk it here in 2012. It’s not just decorative either, inside is a theatre which they use for educational performances. The construction wasn’t entirely easy, they needed to use vinyl roll on 217 panels with the image on the globe being 60GB in size.

Suitably impressive and apparently it’s often lit up at night, although I had a train to catch later that afternoon so had no way of proving that either way.

You have to admire a city that has sand art. Not just because they’ve found someone talented enough to create it and someone organised enough to fund it, but because no bloody local person has got drunk and stomped all over it. I’m afraid I’m not sure that this would have lasted in a lot of UK cities, so all credit to Raleigh for having some permanence to their sand art in what isn’t meant to be a particular enduring technique.

The creator of this sculpture is local man Ed Moore and his company Sandy Feat and he explains on his web-site just how much time it takes to craft these pieces of art. Where possible, he also likes to get anyone passing by involved in the creation and I can imagine that’s quite exciting and especially so for children. It’s not within my limited range of talents to create anything like this, but I can see that it’s something that an artist can really enjoy. They get the immediate response of those walking by, it’s an artwork that appeals to children and they can be endlessly creative with their project.

This all gives me an idea of how to measure the well-being of a city, put a sand sculpture in the main square of every major settlement in the world and see just how long they last before being damaged, vandalised or otherwise faffed about with. The Economist have the Big Mac Index to measure the true value of a currency, this could be the Sand Index to measure the decency of the local population.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Briggs-Hardware-Building-20080321.jpeg

I’m relying on a public domain image for this post as I didn’t realise how historic this building was when I visited the museum which is located on the ground floor of the Briggs Hardware Building. The backdrop to this is that Raleigh was a planned city, one of the few state capitals that was, and it didn’t really start getting developed until the early nineteenth century. This building is later, constructed in 1874 and it was the city’s first skyscraper and remained the tallest structure in the area for over three decades. Today it rather blends into the streetscape, although it has a sense of architectural beauty to it.

This is the ground floor of the building today, the home of the marvellous City of Raleigh Museum. The reason I mention all this is that it seems to me to be a pivotal moment of the history of the United States, when new cities were being laid out and expanding fast as migrants moved to the country from around the world. Of course, this was a difficult time because of the American Civil War, but there must have been a sense of wonder as this structure was constructed. There’s a story that the whole construction was paid for by gold and silver coins that had been buried by Briggs at the beginning of the war, although that’s now a rumour that is unlikely to be proved.

It was built for Thomas H. Briggs to house his hardware store and they used it for this purpose until 1995, when after a period of not being used it started its new life as a museum. There’s a skylight running through the centre of the building which ensures it’s well lit throughout, necessary given that there was no electricity when it was constructed. The building is the only remaining one in Raleigh from the nineteenth century that still exists in something like its original form, a survivor of the city’s early days when excitement for the future must have been running high.

This whole display was something that I hadn’t expected to see, simply because although I have known about the voyages of Blackbeard since a child, I didn’t ever realise where his escapades took place. The museum has a model of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, probably constructed in Bristol in 1710 and later used by Blackbeard, also known as Edward Teach. He pinched the ship from the French, who were using it as a slave ship, in 1717, although he managed to sink it the next year when it ran aground. That little incident happened in North Carolina, hence why it’s featured in this museum.

The ship was rediscovered by a private company in 1996 and excavated by archaeologists who dived down to it, although there have been all manner of arguments since about who owns what. The end result is that a number of items from the wreck are now on display in the museum, so I was suitably surprised and delighted to see these items that were on Blackbeard’s ship when it sank. In this photo are barrel hoop fragments.

These are fragments of animal bones.

A pewter plate and one of the interesting things for archaeologists is that they have had to try and work out where items originally came from, given that Blackbeard had stolen from so many different ships which had come from various countries. Incidentally, they have found 300,000 artefacts from the wreck, so that should amuse archaeologists for some time to come.

Dating items is made easier as it’s known the ship was wrecked in 1718, so it’s known that this bottle is from between 1698 and 1718.

As for Edward Teach, or Blackbeard, he was a much feared man from Bristol (as they often are, they’re not as refined and clean-cut as Bathonians) who became a sailor and then took a rather dubious career path. He actually tried to avoid violence and instead relied on his frightening appearance, and perhaps Bristol accent, to scare people into handing over their goods. I mention the Bristol accent as it’s the depictions of Blackbeard in films and television programmes over the years that have meant that all pirates are somehow assumed to speak with a West Country accent.

Anyway, I was impressed by this display as I hadn’t expected to see anything relating to pirates in a museum about North Carolina and I feel much better informed now about the matter. And it was quite stirring to see items that came from the ship of a pirate, moving it from a matter of fiction into much more of a reality.

I do like an old brick with some heritage to it. This one comes from the New Bern structure known as “Tryon’s Palace”, important because the building was used as the Colony of North Carolina’s first permanent Capitol, as well as being used as a home for the royal governor.

The building takes it name as the Governor of North Carolina between 1765 and 1771 was William Tryon and he then went off to become the Governor of New York between 1771 and 1777 after he managed to annoy most of the local residents. Just to show that nothing ever really changes, there was a lot of controversy about the construction of the building as it was so opulent that taxes rose sharply to fund it. It took three years to construct, between 1767 and 1770, meaning that Tryon was only able to live in it for one year before he was replaced by Governor Josiah Martin. Martin enjoyed living there until 1775 until it was taken from him during the American War of Independence and although it was used for a few meetings, it was soon replaced by a new Capitol building in Raleigh. But more on that later as I went to see that.

The building was used for a few purposes after political activity moved to Raleigh, including as a school, a Masonic lodge and a boarding house. It was damaged in a fire in 1798 which destroyed nearly all of the buildings in the complex. In the 1950s, it was decided to rebuild the Palace, which was slightly problematic as they had to move a road, knock down 50 private dwellings and reconstruct a bridge. I’m not entirely sure whether that was worth it, but anyway, it is possible to visit the Palace now, although it’s nearly all a reconstruction.

Of the original building, only the Stable Office remains. Well, and also this brick, a memory of an opulent and mostly unnecessary British structure that became very briefly a centre for political activity and then went up in flames before falling down. We’ve just had a Prime Minister like that, but I mustn’t get distracted by politics.

This is another subject that I haven’t much thought about, but I had rather assumed gold panning in the United States took place further to the west than the state of North Carolina (and that isn’t entirely stupid to be fair, the state of Nevada is the biggest gold mining area now in the US). However, gold mining was an important industry in the early United States and this pan dates to the early twentieth century and was used to, well, pan for gold.

Indeed, North Carolina was also the location where the first documented commercial gold find was made, at Reed Gold Mine in 1799. The finder of the gold, Conrad Reed, had no idea what he had found and used his lovely 17 pound yellow rock as a doorstop for a number of years, before realising it might be worth something and getting $3.50 for it. It was worth $3,600 even at the time, so someone did well out of that little exercise. The family didn’t lose out though, they made a fortune over the next few decades from the gold mine that was plonked down on their land.

That gold mine is a tourist location now, but another thing that I found interesting is that individual can still pan for gold in the National Parks of North Carolina. Might be a useful way of funding another trip to the United States…..

A coin made at the Charlotte Mint using gold that had been mined in North Carolina, alongside an old banknote from the Miners and Planters Bank.

I thought initially that this was a recreation of some hut used by gold miners, since it was located next to the display about the history of that subject. However, it’s an actual one-room building that was moved to the museum in the 1990s and it was once lived in by seven African American slaves. It once stood in Martin County, which is off towards the east of North Carolina and it was moved here as it would otherwise have been lost to yet another road widening project in the state. Although it might look cosy since it’s in the middle of a warm museum, I can imagine that this was a damp and miserable structure in which to have to reside.

One thing the museum mentions about this recreation is that there aren’t large numbers of possessions surviving which were once owned by slaves, as they were hardly from a prosperous class. Instead, their story has to be told in different ways and imagining seven people shoved into this small space with few possessions seems a powerful way of telling that story. And there’s a limit to how much can be said about the people who lived here, as even though attempts have been made to establish who the residents would have been, there isn’t enough documentary evidence to let their story be told in that way. There is far more information available about the ‘owner’ of the slaves, who was Andrew Jackson Purvis, but it seems wrong to make this post about him.

One of the shocking (to me anyway) statistic is that there were around 331,000 slaves in North Carolina in the years before the American Civil War, which was around a third of the state’s population. That’s a lot of people by any measure and 160 years ago isn’t really that long away in the country’s past. And the politicians in the state’s General Assembly weren’t going to change much, as 85% of them owned slaves in 1860, which is more than in any other state.

As another aside, I’m also going to come back in a post shortly about whether the museum is racist and pro-confederate in the way that it shows its exhibits, as I’ve noticed a few articles about this, although very few negative reviews from visitors. As a slight spoiler about this, I didn’t have the same depth of concerns about the museum, but more on this later.