I'm currently posting from our hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Things are going good here in the US, we're just getting into the travelling life and now only have a week left which is sad. I knew that I wouldn't want to come back! We still have 8 days; today and tomorrow in Birmingham, 5 in New Orleans, and nearly three days back with our family friends in Washington D.C to finish off the trip.
I last posted after we'd been in Richmond on our first day, and a lot has happened since then, I'm not the best at posting regularly... Richmond's Civil War Museum at Historic Tredegar Iron Works was wonderful, and made me very excited for studying my civil war module in September. We also paddled in the James river where British America was first founded: we walked along a pipeline underneath a traintrack over the river to find a sandy cove and some rocks where many people were sunbathing. It was supposedly an official trail, but it makes you wonder when you looked down at the river and realised that if someone fell off, as there were no railings, there is no way they'd get back onto the pipe which is a few feet above water level! Public safety in America doesn't seem to be #1 priority; last night leaving Charleston I asked the Greyhound bus driver where the seatbelts were, who just laughed and replied ''Watchyou want seatbelt's for? You plannin' on fallin' down or somethin'?'' !
The James RiverWilliamsburg was our next point of call, me and Joseph both agree it was one of the highlights of our holiday. The whole town is set in the 1770s in the midst of the American revolution, with all the staff dressed up in colonial period costumes and the shops set in the past.
We saw a fife and drum procession, an actor as Thomas Jefferson read out part of the Declaration of Independence (he held out his arm to me in a photo, such a gentleman), saw General George Washington ride in on his horse to give us an update on the revolutionary war, and watched colonial infantry fire cannons and muskets. It was a really special experience, and very different to living history museums I've been to in the UK such as Beamish.
An unpleasant 22 1/2 hour journey with a wait from 3am-8:15am in Fayetville, NC bus station, brought us to Charleston, which is a gorgeous southern city set right on the coast and surrounded by sea islands. Every street is lined with palmetto trees, the state symbol of South Carolina, and the houses along the harbour and old cobbled streets have huge French balconies and shutters. It reminded me a lot of New Orleans' French Quarter, where we will be in a few days. Charleston was of course the main focus of my research, and it certainly delivered. We managed to get out on the harbor and visit Mount Pleasant across the bay, and go to a few museums including the Confederate Museum, where the daughters of the Confederacy have collected a staggering amount of civil war memorabilia, the old Exchange and dungeon where prisoners and traitors to the crown were kept during the revolutionary war (there we learnt of Charleston's own 'tea party', overlooked in the shadow of Boston's), and the Old Slave Mart museum, the largest indoor site in the area where slaves were bought and sold.
The College of Charleston were extremely accommodating to me and actually gave Joseph and I four nights in one of their guest houses on campus, giving me easy access to their libraries, and they covered the costs for us, which was wonderful of them. The dean of the college libraries John White was my contact there, given to me from Ben Houston, a US history lecturer at my University. I met with John whilst doing my research and he's a great guy, we're very grateful to him and the College for the beautiful accommodation. We also got a ride in a police car because it was raining, from the public safety office where we picked the keys up, to our guest house, which was an experience! That's southern hospitality for you.
Me on the water taxi.
But most of the time was spent inside the College of Charleston's Addlestone library which houses the special collections, and the collections of South Carolina's History Society. I was able to find some wonderful information on the Jenkins orphanage band, including some amazing pamphlets written about the band that I could not get access to anywhere else. I have not had time to digest all the information that I found as that will be a job for when I get back to the UK as I work on my poster for my scholarship. I also spent some time in the Avery research center for African American history and culture (http://avery.cofc.edu/).
There me and Joseph met with the amazing Dr Karen Chandler who has done so much work and research on Jazz music in the area, and on the Jenkins orphanage band. Together with Jack McCray, sadly now passed, she set up the Charleston Jazz Initiative which both aims to uncover the incredible history of Jazz music in Charleston, as well as researching into the lives on the musicians who came from there and the fantastic careers some of them went on to have. Some of you reading might know trumpet player Cladys 'Jabbo' Smith, a talent rival to Louis Armstrong, or Cat Anderson who played in Duke Ellington's orchestra, both of whom were taught music at the Jenkins orphanage. The Avery center contained all of the original documents from the orphanage, including bills, receipts transactions and financial information, administration files, donations and funding records, records of every child to ever attend the orphanage, and Reverend Daniel Jenkins' death certificate. And of course, I found many wonderful photographs which I was able to photocopy (I've only put one in here of Daniel Jenkins, not sure yet about copyright for the others.)
Something very touching I read through were folders and folders of handwritten and type-written letters from mothers, family members and friends of orphans in the care of Jenkins. Some wrote asking if their child could attend and what the procedure was for admittance, as they had heard of how good the musical education provided at the school was. Some children who went there were not orphans.
I read in the records that in 1947, the average cost of feeding a child was $1.44 a day, or $43.23 a month. Daniel Jenkins himself said ''I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for an honest living.'' A devoutly religious man, he made all children go to church on a Sunday no matter what. Sarah Finley Dowling, matron of the orphanage for over 50 years, wrote of them ''it would have done your heart good to see the children on Sunday going to church.' Sometimes the boys went to church wearing girls shoes or coats, 'they did take up a lot of room but they had a special place in that church... They went to church and they tried; they did what they were told to do.''
Reading these personal accounts, holding the documents in my hand, seeing Reverend Daniel Jenkin's personal replies to some of the mothers who inquired after places for their children, seeing photographs of the children dressed up in their uniforms and smiling for the camera because Jenkins had a vision that gave so many destitute children a home and a way of living, made the band come alive more than ever.
A few days ago I visited the original orphanage building on Franklin Street. Today the area around is quite run down. One of the first things you notice about the building is that it is situated right next door to the now derelict and quite spooky-looking town jail. I'd read the day before that the poor children could hear prisoners moaning and shouting at night.
The plaque outside the orphanage building.
These children's story is a very important one and I am so excited to further research it.
Another quote from Sarah Finley Dowling perhaps sums up best how I feel even though I wasn't even there, though I can close my eyes and hear their music.
''The music lessons, the practice sessions, the beat of the drums, the shining horns, the colorful uniforms, the flash and dash, the excitement of those marching bands exist only in the reminiscences of those in whose lives they played such a memorable part.''
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