In Fall 2019, Archives, Special Collections, & Community (ASCC) had the privilege of working with Dr. Rose Stremlau’s “HIS 306: Women and Gender in U.S. History to 1870” course. Over the course of a semester, students researched the history of women and gender in the greater Davidson, North Carolina area using materials in the Davidson College Archives and other local organizations. The following series of blog posts highlights aspects of their research process.

Ellie Hudson is a senior from Asheville, North Carolina. She is a Communication Studies major and a Hispanic Studies minor. 

Davidson College, like many colleges in the United States, was built by enslaved people, many of whom are absent from the documentary record. Recently, there have been efforts by colleges around the country to study and acknowledge the role that slavery played in the institution’s history. In 2017, a family contacted Davidson about one of their ancestors, an enslaved woman named Betty Tate Davis, who made the bricks that were part of one of the original Davidson buildings. 

Starting in 1835, the Presbytery of Concord began meeting to discuss the founding of Davidson College. Mecklenburg locals were contracted by the Presbytery to provide services aiding in the construction of the College. In August of 1835, a committee was formed to manage the acquisition of building materials. The committee resolved to purchase bricks from the plantation of Major John Caldwell, where Betty Tate Davis may have been enslaved. The minutes read, “The committee report that they have contracted for the making of a quantity of Brick, not exceeding 250,000 to be made on the Plantation of Major John Caldwell and delivered to the kiln at four dollars per thousand.”¹ 

Unfortunately, we are unable to obtain details from the documentary record about Betty Tate Davis’s life in Mecklenburg County. We can infer that she was most likely enslaved on Major John Caldwell’s plantation by connecting her family’s oral history and the Presbytery minutes. Betty Tate Davis is one woman, but her absence in the historical narrative is important. There were many enslaved people that worked to construct and maintain Davidson College whose stories are missing just like Betty Tate Davis’s. The reality is that the uncompensated and often unrecorded labor of enslaved people made Davidson College what it is today. At any academic institution, it is critically important that we work to understand our past and how it informs our present. At Davidson, we must reckon with the legacy of slavery in order to complicate the historical narrative we are often presented by the College. When we look to stories like that of Betty Tate Davis and those like her, we can begin to gain a broader, more intersectional, and more realistic understanding of the history of Davidson College.  

Bibliography:

Presbytery of Concord. Presbytery Minutes. August 1835. Concord Presbytery Records.  Davidson College Archives and Special Collections. 

In Fall 2019, Archives, Special Collections, & Community (ASCC) had the privilege of working with Dr. Rose Stremlau’s “HIS 306: Women and Gender in U.S. History to 1870” course. Over the course of a semester, students researched the history of women and gender in the greater Davidson, North Carolina area using materials in the Davidson College Archives and other local organizations. The following series of blog posts highlights aspects of their research process.

Written by Ella Nagy-Benson, a sophomore History major from Middlebury, Vermont. Ella is involved in Warner Hall Eating House and is an editor for the Davidson History Journal.  

Feminist historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once said that “Our connection to the past… is through the stuff that is left behind… without documents, there’s no history, and women left very few documents behind.”¹ Historical materials such as letters or diaries often seem to hold only trivial information, yet they can actually provide important insight about a time period. Luckily, The Davidson College Archives houses a collection of letters written by Mary Lacy, the wife of Reverend Drury Lacy, who was president of Davidson College from 1855 to 1860. These letters help us understand her role as a slave-owning woman, specifically the race-relations in Davidson during this time. Her writings show that slave labor was a central aspect to her household and that women contributed to the management of slaves.  

One of Mary Lacy’s letters dated August 6^th, 1859, which she sent to her stepdaughter, Bess, provides a glimpse into her interactions with the household slaves, particularly one named Aunt Amy. She writes about how “for a whole month [Aunt Amy] seemed to be suffering from debility,” yet Mary was reluctant to believe her until the doctor “confined her to bed.” ² In another instance, she refers to a different slave as a “hard old case” for trying to take a break from work.³ The language Mary uses is laced with condescension and annoyance. It shows how in many ways, she was indifferent to these women—she saw them as her workers, first and foremost. Any sign of sympathy she showed regarding her slaves’ health likely had an ulterior motive of needing them to be able to work so they could provide for her again.  

Often, society romanticizes Southern Antebellum women as graceful, charming belles. However, this image is narrow and idealized because in reality, slave-owning women partook in the realities of slavery, which meant that they used their privilege and power to “manage” their slaves in ways that were coercive and sometimes even violent. The societal implications of slavery meant that many women taught their daughters how to manage slaves through tactics of punishment and control.⁴ This concept challenges the stereotype of Southern white women as pious and submissive and helps us understand why women like Mary Lacy viewed their slaves as property. As we study Davidson’s history, we must remember the institution’s ties to slavery and understand that all people who owned slaves on campus were involved in its brutal effects—even women. These letters provide powerful details which emphasize how Mary Lacy used her privilege of owning slaves to enjoy a lifestyle that she otherwise would not be able.

Works Cited:

Lacy, Mary. Mary Lacy to Bess Dewey, 6 August 1856. In The Mary Lacy Letters: https://his306sp17blog.rosestremlau.com.  

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “Mistresses in the Making,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 8^th. ed., ed. Linda K. Kerber, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 139. 

In Fall 2019, Archives, Special Collections, & Community (ASCC) had the privilege of working with Dr. Rose Stremlau’s “HIS 306: Women and Gender in U.S. History to 1870” course. Over the course of a semester, students researched the history of women and gender in the greater Davidson, North Carolina area using materials in the Davidson College Archives and other local organizations. The following series of blog posts highlights aspects of their research process.

Courtney Clawson is a junior history major at Davidson College. She is from Winston-Salem, NC and is a proud alumna of Salem Academy (the revised name of Salem Female Academy) where she first discovered her love of history. Courtney is grateful to the archivists at Davidson College and at Salem Academy and College for their assistance during her research process. 

Founded in 1772, Salem Female Academy — now called Salem Academy and College — is the oldest all-girls school in the United States.¹ Mary Graham Morrison, wife of Davidson College’s first president Rev. Robert Hall Morrison, attended Salem Academy, as well as four of the Morrison’s six daughters. Salem’s remarkable history is well preserved within the Salem Academy and College archives, where they keep records of each student who has attended the school dating back to the early 19th-century — including information about the Morrison women. 

Mrs. Mary Graham Morrison enrolled at Salem Female Academy in May of 1815, a month before her fourteenth birthday, and concluded a year later in 1816. Her daughters Isabella Sophia, Harriet Abigail, Mary Anna, and Eugenia Erixene each attended Salem Female Academy in the 1830s and 1840s.² Salem has a rich history of its own. Founded by a group of Moravian women from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Salem is proud to have existed since “four years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.”³ Salem Female Academy became Salem Academy and College in 1907 and remains to this day the oldest, continually-operating all-girls school in the country.⁴ 

The Morrison family clearly valued education for their daughters, although this education prepared them for their lives as wives and mothers. Mrs. Mary Graham Morrison’s alumna card lists her occupation as “12 children.” Additionally, her card reads: “wife of first president of Davidson College – and mother of Marry Anna Morrison, Salem 1847-1849, wife of [General] “Stonewall Jackson – Mary Graham’s four illustrious daughters attended Salem, and all married distinguished men.”⁵ The use of “distinguished” to describe Mrs. Morrison’s sons-in-law is intriguing, as three of the four men were generals in the Confederate army.⁶ Salem claims that “students of diverse backgrounds were accepted as members of the school community” beginning in the 1780s with two slave girls.⁷ When I attended Salem Academy, the administration made an important decision regarding the institution’s history of slavery. The most outstanding senior received the Elisabeth Oesterlein award, named for the first teacher at Salem; however, in 2017, the school’s leadership decided to rename the award “The Oak Award” due to Ms. Oesterlein’s ownership of slaves. This served as a monumental moment for the academy. It is fascinating to examine Salem’s history — particularly their wording in describing the men who married Salem alumnae  — in this contemporary context. 

Bibliography:

Salem Academy and College. “History.” Accessed November 7, 2019. https://www.salemacademyandcollege.org/history 

In Fall 2019, Archives, Special Collections, & Community (ASCC) had the privilege of working with Dr. Rose Stremlau’s “HIS 306: Women and Gender in U.S. History to 1870” course. Over the course of a semester, students researched the history of women and gender in the greater Davidson, North Carolina area using materials in the Davidson College Archives and other local organizations. The following series of blog posts highlights aspects of their research process.

I am Cecelia Miller, a sophomore History major with a pre-medical studies focus from Orlando, Florida.

While researching women in the town of Davidson during the 1800s, I stumbled across the legacy of the Helper family, a name not generally known by our student body. Many of us walk by the Carolina Inn daily, not knowing the family behind it. Hanson Pickney Helper (1825-1902) served as the postmaster, innkeeper, and shopkeeper in Davidson. While he played integral roles in the college and the town, it’s his relationship to one of the most loathed men of the South that demands more investigation.  

Chalmers G. Davidson, a history professor and author at Davidson, detailed this relationship in his short piece written about the history of the hotel.¹ Apparently, Hanson’s brother was the (in)famous Hinton Rowan Helper, author of The Impending Crisis of the South. Hinton Helper’s book is still largely considered to be the most effective attack of the South to come from the South itself. Davidson explained that Hinton made an economic argument against slavery, declaring slavery was holding the South back from economic progress. His appeal to poor white farmers angered many Southern leaders, while Northern abolitionists used the piece as propaganda.  

Through Davidson’s writing, as well as Hanson’s obituary, it’s clear Hanson was a respected member of the community. Davidson explains that Helper was known as “Mr. Pink” by students, known to engage in games with students, and considered very pleasant and intelligent. His obituary described him as “one of the oldest and most highly thought of citizens of Mecklenburg county” as well as an “important factor in the business and social life in Davidson College.”² The obituary also details his surviving relatives in excruciating detail—with one notable exception—Hinton Rowan Helper.  

Taken together, these sources reveal the status Hanson Helper had in the community. Students appreciated his spirit and engagement, the town relied on his businesses, and the county commission board welcomed his business expertise. Davidson College appreciated him as well, accepting a loan from him in the 1870s.³ It is interesting to consider this respect and dignity in contrast with the feelings of hatred and furor the community must have felt for his abolitionist brother—especially because it appears that Helper’s community standing was not tarnished by his brother’s condemnation of slavery.  

I speculate that Helper specifically tried to avoid public association with his brother. First, Chalmers Davidson notes that it is not quite known what Helper thought of his brother as Helper “kept to his own counsel.” Second, upon Helper’s death in 1902, brother Hinton was still alive, and would be for another five years, yet Hanson’s obituary, which includes a rather extensive list of surviving and deceased family, fails to count Hinton as a surviving relative. This omission seems intentional—and begs the question: did Hanson Helper avoid association with his brother to maintain his esteemed image in his conservative southern community?  

Works Cited:

[1] Chalmers G. Davidson, “Lives of the Wayside Inn,” The State, November 15, 1971. Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC.  

[2] “An Aged Citizen of Mecklenburg Is No More,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), October 2, 1902, North Carolina Collection Archives.

[3] Jan Blodgett and Ralph B. Levering, One Town, Many Voices: A History of Davidson, North Carolina (Davidson, NC: Davidson Historical Society, 2012), 44.