Tag: US Trip

It still seems remarkable to me that at the turns of the 1960s there was segregation at lunch counters in Raleigh and other cities across the United States. This is a leaflet encouraging people to boycott companies such as Woolworths and Walgreens where segregation was enforced, with these campaigns being mostly organised in Raleigh by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University. The latter of those establishments is important as it’s what called an historically black university, namely one which educated black students in the days before educational segregation was brought to an end with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. St. Augustine’s College also has a proud history of educating black students, being founded by the Episcopal church in 1867 to give freed slaves education.

This campaign, and others like it, were successful and lunch counters in Raleigh were made integrated on 19 August 1960. Alongside other North Carolina cities as Greensboro, the peaceful protests caused large economic losses for the companies as well as raising the rather obvious issue that it was ridiculous to have segregated counters. As an aside, it’s an interesting quirk of history just how popular lunch counters in drug stores, such as Walgreens, became and perhaps something of a shame that they mostly fell of fashion in the 1970s and 1980s.

I was clearly lax in my reading of the history of Raleigh in North Carolina as it wasn’t until I got to this museum that I realised where the city got its name from. I had stupidly assumed that it was someone called Raleigh who had funded the city or something similar, but it is all a bit more prosaic as it’s named after the great British statesman Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618). And here he is in statue form in the museum.

Raleigh had the honour of having a city named after him because when they were laying the new state capital out in 1788 they decided to commemorate him as he was the sponsor of Roanoke Island, the ‘lost colony’. As an aside, people have been arguing how to pronounce Raleigh for at least 175 years, which is something in itself. I think the explorer’s surname should be pronounced ‘ral-lee’, but Americans tend to go for ‘rah-lee’, which has also impacted on how their pronounce their city’s name. And it all goes back to the word ‘ra’ meaning deer and ‘lea’ meaning a clearing, so somewhere in England in the tenth century or whatever there were some deer in a clearing and now there’s an American city named after them….

Without context, I accept that this isn’t the most riveting display I’ve ever seen in a museum (and there’s a pun there with rivets, but readers can write their own….). However, they’re iron nails from Isaac Hunter’s tavern from when it was first constructed in 1769. And this building is important, because in 1788 the State’s General Assembly declared that the new capital of Raleigh must be built within ten miles of the tavern. Talk about how much this must have been important to the politicians of the time, it’s like the House of Commons declaring that any new city has to be constructed near to a Wetherspoons.

And here’s the tavern in the 1970s. It was a little bit rediscovered (primarily as a previous owner had moved it from its original location) and it had been used for many purposes since its early days as a tavern, including being split up for domestic purposes and also redesigned to be a stable. However, I understand that instead of saving this, it was torn down and I’m guessing that’s when they sent some of its nails to the museum. I’d bet that at some stage in the future this will be rebuilt, it’s too important for Raleigh to be ignored and all that there is at the moment is a heritage sign to mark the location.

The conclusion of all of this is that I like nails with a bit of history to them.

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.