Blog post by Christina White, undergraduate researcher at WVU
This is the fifth post in White’s series on race, justice, and social change through cookbooks, featuring the following books from the Ebersole collection: Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook, A Date with a Dish, A Good Heart and a Light Hand, and The Jemima Code.
“It is a fallacy, long disproved, that Negro cooks, chefs, caterers and housewives can adapt themselves only to the standard Southern dishes, such as fried chicken, greens, corn pone, hot breads, and so forth.” The preface was probably quite inflammatory to prejudiced whites that came across it. To get a sense of the author’s courage, glance over the first page here:
The author, Freda de Knight, in her book, A Date With a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes, acknowledges stereotypes. She knows that Black individuals had to improvise, cooking without measurement or modern equipment. How could they formally publish cookbooks when they couldn’t read or write?
Hannah Giorgis in Bon Appetit describes how Freda’s cookbook transformed the future of Black cooks. She recognized that “cultural archiving and culinary research are both pursuits for which few black people have received compensation.” It’s a great read for home chefs, history buffs, or anyone interested in how one woman stood for justice.
*It’s nearly impossible to find a print copy of Freda de Knight’s book, as numerous Amazon and Google searches proved. However, WVU students and staff can visit the Ebersole Collection on the 6th floor of the library to read our copy for free! Make an appointment. (They’re open during the COVID-19 pandemic by appointment.)
Stump, a faculty member and head of reference and access services with the George R. Farmer Jr. Law Library at WVU College of Law, researches environmental law, critical legal theory, law and social movements, and Appalachian and rural studies.
In “Remaking Appalachia,” his new book from WVU Press, Stump looks back more than a century to examine the creation of laws governing the rising power of coal and other industries, and chronicles their failure to protect Appalachia. In addition, Stump goes beyond law “reform” to explore true system change, a discussion undergirded by ecofeminism and ecosocialism.
Blog post by Lori Hostuttler, Assistant Director, WVRHC
Each year in April, libraries and archives take time to share information about one of our core activities: preservation. Caring for the collections materials under our stewardship is part of the mission of the West Virginia & Regional History Center, the WVU Libraries, and many other library and heritage institutions. Many of you have your own collections – records, letters, photographs, artifacts, videos, and more – that contain your personal history, the history of your family, your school, and your communities. The theme for Preservation Week 2021 is Preserving Community Archives and the goal is to provide resources and education to help you take care of your collections.
West Virginia takes pride in its sense of community and our history is often written by looking closely at groups with shared experiences. Coal camps, unions, sports teams, and homemaker’s clubs are just a scant few of the communities that have been explored to tell the story of the people of the state. Not all communities have been studied, nor their records collected. Black, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities in West Virginia are underrepresented in our histories and our archives. Community archives are a way for groups to collect and interpret their own history.
There are many things you and your community can do to preserve your historic records so they can be passed down to others in the future. The resources linked below offer guidance on many different kinds of materials. We can also offer some advice at the WVRHC. If you have a preservation question or want to start a community archive, send us an email. We’ll try to assist and provide answers or get you in touch with someone who can.
Caring for Your Treasures: Guides on architecture, books, glass & ceramics, documents & works of art on paper, furniture, home video, metal objects, paintings, photographs, textiles, and matting & framing from the American Institute for Conservation
Dear Donia: Ask preservation expert Donia Conn a question, and review the archive of her answers
Disaster Recovery: Disaster planning, salvage, and restoration resources
Preservation Leaflets: Handouts on numerous preservation issues from the Northeast Document Conservation Center
Blog post by Stewart Plein, Associate Curator for WV Books & Printed Resources & Rare Book Librarian
Shakespeare loved flowers and it is well known that he used them in his plays. Flowers conveyed meaning and symbolism in Shakespeare’s day. Each mention of a flower or tree would provide a clue to the readers of his plays. Let’s take a look at some of the flowers and plays where they are mentioned. I’m sure Shakespeare would be happy to celebrate his birthday with a bouquet of flowers!
All of the flower portraits you see here come from a set of books in the Rare Books collection, William Woodville’s Medical Botany. Published in 1832 in five volumes, each with beautiful images of flowers and other plants illustrated with hand colored plates.
‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.’
Romeo and Juliet
Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors, Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not To get slips of them.’
The Winter’s Tale
‘The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack, To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er!’
The Winter’s Tale
‘Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday.’
Othello
Happy Birthday Shakespeare!
If you’d like to see Shakespeare’s works or Woodville’s Medical Botany, contact me, Stewart Plein, to schedule a visit to the Rare Book Room.
By Sally Brown, WVU Libraries Exhibits Coordinator
Curating the Art in the Libraries’ large, multi-disciplinary exhibitions since 2018’s WATER, has proved an enormous and exciting part of my role as Exhibits Coordinator. Through WATER (2018-19) and Appalachian Futures (2019-20), I developed these large exhibitions with upwards of 50 diverse contributors, two committees, a designer, several sponsoring partners and of course, the signing off of Dean Karen Diaz for these displays going up in the Downtown Campus Library for the academic year.
This year’s exhibition, Undefeated: Canvas(s)ing the Politics Around Voter Suppression Since Women’s Suffrage, in conjunction with the Suffrage Centennial and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was complex in its multidisciplinary, and controversial in its political nature. The complexity was compounded by the pandemic not only logistically for exhibition display, but also as it heightened the unfolding story of contemporary voter suppression with myriad new voting considerations throughout the presidential election. Thankfully, the various contributors and partners allowed for multiple perspectives for this exhibition and its related programming and we were able to engage participation from WVU and broader communities.
Blog post by Michael Ridderbusch, Associate Curator for Archives and Manuscripts, WVRHC
A recent gift to the History Center includes negatives featuring Mountaineer Field in the 1920s, among other material. Shot by local photographer Scott Gibson, they afford a glimpse of the stadium and field in their earliest days. Before discussing them, however, a review of some of the history of WVU football and the stadium will help to contextualize and enhance our appreciation of these photographs.
Today the Mountaineers are a popular team, having achieved much success in recent times under coach Nehlen and in the years following. They were also a big deal in the 1920s. The 1922 team under coach Clarence Spears were unbeaten, the first and only WVU football team to achieve such a record. The Mountaineers then made their first appearance in a bowl game against Gonzaga in the East-West Bowl, while also stopping in Hollywood to have their picture taken with child star Jackie Coogan. A Charlie Chaplin discovery, Coogan posed front and center with the team. The resulting autographed photo is in the collection of the History Center.
Mountaineer Football Team with Coogan (front, center); 1922. (from the West Virginia History OnView collection, no. 040447, West Virginia and Regional History Center)
The success of the Mountaineer team gained the positive attention of the administration of West Virginia University, who then initiated the construction of the first iteration of Mountaineer Field, which was completed in time for the 1924 season.
Construction of the Stadium at Mountaineer Field; 31 July 1924. (from the West Virginia History OnView collection, no. 019396, West Virginia and Regional History Center)
Some of the subject matter in the negatives just recently acquired from the studio of Scott Gibson include the stadium not long after its completion. Apart from mostly Monticola yearbooks and a few scrapbooks, the 1920s at West Virginia University are not as well documented by photography as in later years, so the acquisition of these images is a welcome addition to our collections. We will feature three of them here.
One of the images shows what appears to be a football game in progress, or perhaps a practice session, we don’t know since identification is lacking. Although the number of spectators is low in this photo, we do know that the Mountaineers could draw crowds of up to 10 to 20 thousand in that era, based on newspaper reports.
Football in progress at Mountaineer Field; ca. 1926. (from the West Virginia History OnView collection, Scott Gibson collection, West Virginia and Regional History Center)
The other two photos to be featured here show what appear to be college aged students posing among the stadium benches. They could be young family members, perhaps with friends, of the photographer Scott Gibson. We don’t know. We do know, however, that the negatives for these photos date from ca. 1926, since they are clearly related to other negatives in the collection documenting a 1926 parade in Morgantown. The cloche hats, a virtual fashion necessity of the 1920s and early 30s, clinch this analysis. These images show a casual and candid side of WVU students that’s missing from photos typically seen in Monticola yearbooks.
Students posing at Mountaineer Field; ca. 1926. (Scott Gibson collection, West Virginia and Regional History Center)Students posing at Mountaineer Field; ca. 1926. (Scott Gibson collection, West Virginia and Regional History Center)
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a nearly $60,000 grant to West Virginia University Libraries to create the first-ever online portal bringing together congressional archives from repositories throughout the United States.
“Congressional archives document the democratic process and the evolution of Congress as an institution,” said Danielle Emerling, project director and curator of congressional and political collections in the West Virginia & Regional History Center. “However, the value of the archives goes beyond the study of the branch itself. They illustrate multiple narratives related to the country’s social, cultural, and political development.”
Blog post by Angela Spatafore, Program Assistant, WVRHC
I love cicadas. In fact, you can probably say it is an obsession at this point. If you visit my house or take a ride in my car, you will undoubtedly be reminded of this obsession by the cicada taxidermy on my bedroom walls to the plush cicada on my dashboard to the various art pieces I’ve collected. So naturally when I was hired at the West Virginia & Regional History Center, one of my first questions was what the Center had about cicadas in its collections. In the spirit of Brood X’s emergence later this year, let’s look at some of what I could find.
Here is a photo I took of the emerging Brood V cicadas in Fairmont, 2016. If you look closely in the bottom right and left corners, you can see two full grown cicadas sporting their signature black and orange coloring. The milky, freshly emerged cicadas will eventually dry to black. The entire process takes about ninety minutes!
With six broods of periodical cicadas covering almost the entire state, West Virginia certainly has its fair share of history with the cicadas. Every seventeen years like clockwork once the ground warms to 64° F eight inches underground, the cicadas begin to emerge, and given their predictability, newspapers publish articles warning and educating those within range of the incoming invasions.
One of my favorite newspaper articles comes from the Ceredo Advance in May 1911. In the article, the author, John E. Watkins, describes the oncoming emergence of not just one but two broods, one of the 17-year broods and one of the 13-year broods. He remarks on how he and everyone living in his time would never witness both broods emerge simultaneously again. While this emergence occurred mostly in New Jersey, it was interesting to see how the news made its way to West Virginia. After all, there’s nothing like a cicada to get you to brood about your mortality.
Growing up, no one I knew called them cicadas. Until my obsession took over and I began pouring through book after book, I, like everyone I knew, called them locusts. After paging through newspapers from as far back as 1834 to today, apparently the term “locust” never quite went out of style. Nearly every article includes some statement explaining the difference between a locust and a cicada to the reader, but why the confusion in the first place?
Apparently the massive scale of a cicada emergence was reminiscent of the biblical swarms of locust to the settlers who witnessed the event. This anecdote was included in The Periodical Cicada of West Virginia by the entomologist William E. Rumsey, a publication I found interesting not only for its scientific content but also its discussion of regional folklore related to the insect, and while I was unable to find any photographs of past invasions in my search of the Center’s OnView collection, I was able to find a photograph of Rumsey. While obviously not a cicada himself, it was nice to put a face to the man whose words I read as I put together this post.
With that said, love them or hate them, cicadas are a part of West Virginia history, and for those of you with ties to the Eastern Panhandle or any of other fourteen states covered by Brood X, be prepared. The cicadas are coming.
Blog post by Christina White, undergraduate researcher at WVU
This is the fourth post in White’s series on race, justice, and social change through cookbooks, featuring the following books from the Ebersole collection: Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook, A Date with a Dish, A Good Heart and a Light Hand, and The Jemima Code.
Freda de Knight authored the next featured cookbook, A Date with a Dish, but it would be better described as a midnight phone conversation with a friend who knows more than you.
She published this guide in 1948, but her culinary journey began at age 5 when she, like many girls at the time, helped her mother pack lunch for her siblings and prepare family meals.
Freda didn’t hide from challenges facing Black cooks. This was the first cookbook I read that outright rejected the status quo, calling for “a non-regional cook book that would contain recipes, menus, and cooking hints from and by Negros all over America.” Here, there are hundreds of those recipes with anecdotes from the cooks themselves. I have no choice other than sharing one recipe by a West Virginia resident and baker, Ruth Jackson!
I tried to find more information about Ruth, like her bakery’s name, city of residence, or even a photo. I had no success, although a more intensive search might work out. Either way, her memory lives on in A Date with a Dish.
When I think of West Virginia in the 1940’s, I never thought I’d hear about it from the perspective of a Black, female baker. It is truly awesome that Freda takes a moment to celebrate other women of color, whose recipes and ideas were generally shut off from popular cookbooks or publications. Wouldn’t it be great if they read about female entrepreneurs like Ruth Jackson in West Virginia history classes? The recipe is there, tucked away on a shelf in the West Virginia & Regional History Center. If you take away anything from this blog, don’t be afraid to fill a void in a story you care about.
Posted by Jane Metters LaBarbara.
March 29th, 2021
Blog post by Stewart Plein, Associate Curator for WV Books & Printed Resources & Rare Book Librarian
Postcards, a popular form of communication particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century, were sent to friends and family for all occasions. Mail delivery was reliable, running twice a day in most communities, and cheap, since postage stamps were only a penny. With the availability of twice daily delivery, postcards were nearly as quick as a telephone call, another late 19th century invention, and almost as fast as an email sent to your inbox today.
I’ve collected postcards for many years. I’ve purchased postcards from places I’ve lived, places I’ve visited, cards celebrating birthdays, and congratulatory cards filled with best wishes for their intended recipient, but my favorite collecting category is holiday postcards.
It’s easy to find them. I’ve collected hundreds of Christmas postcards over the years. I’m also fond of cards depicting New Year’s Day, though they’re harder to find. It’s very difficult to find Valentine’s, Memorial Day, George Washington’s birthday, or Thanksgiving postcards. My collection includes only a couple of each of these cards.
Easter postcards are my favorite collecting category. Besides the traditional bunnies, eggs, and chicks there are many unusual cards that we might not think of today as being associated with Easter. My collection also includes many religious Easter cards, but today, I’m going to share with you some of my favorite cards featuring all the cute things you’d expect to find in your Easter basket.
If you collect cards for a while, you’ll find that they can be organized by theme. Eggs are the central focus of these cards. These four postcards depict eggs as vehicles, such as the bunny train and the bunny drawn chick chariot. Others are used for housing, such as the egg with a balcony and the one made from flowers with a little gnome peeking out the window.
The postcards below have chickens or chicks for their central theme. Eggs are still an important focus for the chick cards. Notice these cards are all vertical in design, while the previous ones were all horizontal. The second card is interesting because it shows a chick and egg surrounded by natural greenery seen in spring. The yellow catkins dangling on each side are flowers from trees. These look like the catkins of the birch tree. The center egg is printed cloth with padding behind it. Even after 111 years, this card is dated 1910, it still creates a charming effect.
The hen house is one of my favorites. There’s the mother hen looking out her window, watching her chicks playing in the yard below. And what in the world are those chicks doing pecking at that book?
Messages on the back of the postcards are another reason to collect them. Letters home from World War I soldiers, cards posted to friends and family, love notes to a significant other, are all common. Then there’s a message like this one, written on the back of the card above, showing a flock of chickens by a gate. It’s a humorous note from a father to his daughter:
“You left the gate open and all the chickens got out. You will have no Easter eggs.”
Dad
Other animals that may not come to mind as associated with the holiday made appearances on Easter cards too. The geese, sheep, and kittens pictured here make for nontraditional Easter cards. The goose was printed later than the others in this collection. It was printed in 1931 in the Art Deco style, showing that Easter postcards remained popular.
Two of the cards combine both secular and religious aspects of the holiday. The sheep grazing in green pastures is reminiscent of the 23rd psalm, but the opposite panel shows all the traditional secular symbols of chicks, eggs and bunnies. The combination of bunnies with a cross over a spray of Easter lilies also brings together these two categories. These are unusual, as least in my collection, as cards are either specifically religious or secular in theme.
If the delivery of Easter baskets were left up to these two lazy bunnies, pictured below, no one would wake up to treats or have fun at an Easter Egg hunt. This is an undated European card according to the information on the back. There’s lots of interesting details that draw your attention in this card. Like the catkin card above, the center egg is cloth and it has been padded underneath so that it will stand out from the card. The surrounding shamrocks and pussy willow buds are edged in glitter with a dash or two of glitter on the pink clover.
But never fear, the real Easter bunny, pictured below, is here and he’s going to make sure all the little children receive their Easter baskets. This card, bordered with ribbons, eggs, chicks and flowers, copyrighted in 1905, borrows from the cookies and milk usually left out for Santa. Here, the Easter bunny asks children to make a nest for him in the kitchen so that he can fill it with eggs – chocolate ones of course! He’s pictured here with a nest and eggs in his paws to prove it!
Dear Little Friend,
I will call at your house on Easter morning with a big lot of Eggs. Make a nest for me in the kitchen and I will fill it.
Your friend,
Bunny
If you’d like to see more vintage postcards there are several available in the archives at the West Virginia and Regional History Center. If you’d like to see more of my personal postcard collection, request A&M 3989, to see an antique postcard album filled with cards spanning various holidays.
Join panelists Jeri Burton, chair of the NOW’s 28th Amendment ERA Committee; Linda Coberly, chair of the ERA Coalition’s legal task force; and Liza Mickens, Vote Equality US co-founder, for a discussion about past and present efforts, challenges, and strategies for passing the Equal Rights Amendment. Danielle Emerling, Congressional & Political Papers archivist and WVRHC assistant curator, will moderate the event.
Posted by Jane Metters LaBarbara.
March 22nd, 2021
Blog post by Christina White, undergraduate researcher at WVU
This is the third post in White’s series on race, justice, and social change through cookbooks, featuring the following books from the Ebersole collection: Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook, A Date with a Dish, A Good Heart and a Light Hand, and The Jemima Code.
It’s a tall order, de-mystifying the history of a group that was, and still is, slighted by a clear lack of representation. Delving into the Ebersole Collection of cookbooks, I unlocked a treasure chest of personal records on the issue of race. Now, I want to shine the limelight upon the recipes themselves. Let their components and technique do the speaking for women like Mary Ellen Pleasant and their prowess in the culinary arts. Despite the trope that Black women had “natural cooking talent”, Mary’s recipes show an impressive level of education and technical skill in the culinary arts.
First, compare the meals Mary provided her Black wait staff and elite guests at the ex-governor of California’s dinner parties. She catered for Mr. Latham, the ex-governor and US Senator, with an international buffet that boasted boiled pigs feet and veal knuckle. She meticulously set tables with gold dinnerware. Apparently, the punch bowl had five types of wine mixed in — not your typical frat party.
A drawing of one of the dinner parties that Mary would cater for Governor Latham.
Here’s a bit of her recipe for molded cucumbers, which Mary served to guests at New Year’s Supper:
“Slice cucumbers and put into salted water… Put into the water 1 blade of mace, 1 teaspoon of peppercorns and ½ bay leaf… Put 6 tablespoonsful of gelatin in 1 cupful of water to dissolve… Add 1 cup of tarragon vinegar and several drops of green coloring… When the gelatine has set, drain the cucumbers, arrange in a layer in mold, pour the rest of the gelatine into the mold and let jell until firm…”
Whoo! I’d botch up at slicing the cucumbers. Every item sounds like something you’d learn at a prestigious school of culinary arts in Paris. Yet Mary, enslaved since birth, had no such education. She learned these techniques as a young girl and expanded her repertoire independently. She was fortunate to have her creations documented in this cookbook, as most Black women of her time didn’t receive recognition for their tremendous and diverse culinary skills.
This is evidence that Black women trained and practiced cooking in a formal way, even if it didn’t result in a formal certificate. There was, and remains, a stereotype that Black women are born with an intrinsic, homely knowledge of cooking, and that they exclusively whip up Southern comfort foods like fried chicken and gravy.
Jumping back to the food she’d serve to her Black staff members, here is a recipe for “Cheap John Rutabaga:”
This is no walk in the park, either. The ingredients for Mr. Latham’s guests at their lavish New Year’s Supper party were expensive and imported, but the technique required to make the perfect rutabaga is formidable. When I first read the new section of recipes for Mary’s staff, I was troubled by the “lesser” quality of food. The recipes tell a different tale, one of resourcefulness and creativity. The staff section includes sour-sweet bites that require a double boiler to get just right and an ingredient I’ve never heard of: caraway seeds. The ingredients used for Mr. Latham and Mary’s staff may differ, but the thoughtfulness and technical merit are consistent across every page.
What the Thomas Jefferson Knowledge Institute has to add about Mary Ellen Pleasant can be found here.
Posted by Jane Metters LaBarbara.
March 15th, 2021
Blog post by Katie Lehosit, WVRHC Graduate Assistant.
Census records, obituaries, and old newspapers aren’t just for genealogy. In fact, with a little bit of hard work, archival research can reveal stories stranger than fiction. Such is the case with the following story, first introduced to me by Dr. Jennifer Thornton of the WVU History Department. It’s a story of immigration, a missing single mother, and ultimately, the injustice of late 19th century Wheeling.
We begin our story in Wheeling, West Virginia, in November 1879. Readers of the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer could find, buried among news stories and society updates, an advertisement for “Chinese Laundry” at 1325 Market Street. The laundromat was run by Yee Wah, Jeui Lee, Yang Fou, and Wah Sing, who lived in a boarding house at 1136 Market Street. The four men immigrated from China, and found themselves in a booming industrial era Wheeling.
1890 Sanborn map of Wheeling at 14th St. and Market St. The arrow shows where the laundromat was located. Courtesy of WVRHC.
The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer reported on the four men and their laundromat for decades. Usually, hate crimes were committed against the men and their shop. For example, in 1878, a drunk and disorderly citizen named Paul Heiler declared “war against China” and entered the laundromat and began attacking Yee Wah. While Heiler was arrested and put in jail, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer still painted Yee Wah as the villain, stating he had “vengeance in his heart” after the incident.
While articles like this were printed over the years, on March 24th, 1900, the accusations against the four men became even more serious. A woman from Bellaire, Ohio reported her daughter had gone missing. The daughter, 21 year old Rose Seamon, was a single mother who the press painted in a negative light, stating she was in a relationship with the men of the Chinese laundromat. Rose’s mother, for one reason or another, told the press she believed her daughter was being held captive at the laundromat. While others stated Rose either was there by her own will, or not even at the laundromat, law enforcement still arrested all four men, along with other Asian men in the city.
A postcard of Market St. in 1910. Courtesy of WVRHC.
Only one man was found guilty on trial, Ho Chy. Yet, all of the other men involved pleaded guilty without a trial. Ho Chy was fined $20, and Rose’s mother decided this was a sufficient penalty. Yet, this unfortunately is not the end of this story. A few weeks after the trial, a Chinese man named Sing Tong, committed suicide at a laundromat between 16th and 17th streets. It was speculated he was deeply affected by the trial and accusations against himself and the other Chinese men in Wheeling.
While this story doesn’t have a happy ending, it does show the racism showed against Asian individuals in Wheeling at the turn of the 20th century. Painted as villainous from the start, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer aided in the accusations against these Chinese men.
So, take some time to make a full story out of bits and pieces of research you’ve done. Regardless of the ending, remembering the injustices done against people only helps prevent them in the future. Plus, you’ll open the door for research on the story you put together!
*Note: I want to thank Dr. Jennifer Thornton for sharing her research with me, as well as the graduate students in Dr. Thornton’s Local History Methodology class.
Art in the Libraries’ Virtual Program Series will present “Don’t Throw it Out!” a conversation about documenting women and the new West Virginia Feminist Activist Collection of the West Virginia and Regional History Center on March 19 at noon.
Panelists Judith Stitzel, Professor Emerita of English and Co-Founder of Women’s Studies, and Carroll Wilkinson, University Librarian Emerita, come together with Lori Hostuttler, Assistant Director of the WVRHC, to discuss collecting and documenting women’s lives, share some of their own photos, ephemera or objects, to encourage a broader and more accessible approach to archives and all it can encompass.
Blog post by Christina White, undergraduate researcher at WVU
This is the second post in White’s series on race, justice, and social change through cookbooks, featuring the following books from the Ebersole collection: Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook, A Date with a Dish, A Good Heart and a Light Hand, and The Jemima Code.
W.E.B. Du Bois compared Mary Ellen Pleasant to Harriet Tubman. He said, “Here was a colored woman who became one of the shrewdest business minds of the State.”
From “plantation lamb” to “smoked picnic tongue,” Mary Ellen Pleasant cooked it all and saw it all on her careful rise to culinary stardom in Victorian America. She was born into slavery on a Georgia plantation. Her training in the culinary arts began early in childhood, and once she was freed, she combined cooking and business skills to climb the ranks in gold-rush San Francisco and on a river boat owned by wealthy financiers. She used her connections with powerful figures to find jobs for colored people and led an effort to desegregate San Francisco’s streetcars, which established a legal precedent in the California Supreme Court for future civil rights suits (Thomas Jefferson Knowledge Institute). I’m left thinking, Where was this series of events in my American History class?
Taking her story closer to home, Mary Ellen was a leading figure in John Brown’s uprising at Harper’s Ferry. She financed his mission by donating $30,000, nearly $1 million in current money. When John Brown was hung in 1859 for treason, officials found a note in his pocket from an unknown, assumed-to-be-male source. It expressed complete support for the raid. That note was written by Mary Ellen Pleasant, self-made millionaire and West Virginia hero.
Mary Ellen’s arduous journey is written between the lines of kitchen guidance, local recipes, and lists of common ingredients like nutmeg and bread crumbs. You get a sense of life’s everyday essence in the words of a chef to a novice reader. It’s conversational, light, yet studded with evidence of Mary Ellen’s home and career at the time. This timeline of food showcases her major steps, characteristic recipes, and social position throughout her life.
She’s a feminist leader whose name belongs beside modern icons like Simone de Beauvoir, Coretta Scott King, or Malala Yousafzai. I read about her campaign for justice in the pages surrounding quaint recipes for stews and cakes. No other book I’ve read detailed the process of stewing turtle meat with sherry wine or whipping cream with a rotary beater.
Like many women of color in the United States, Mary Ellen was artistically and academically restricted. She was blocked from etching her success, struggle, and feelings in popular documents. We must widen the reading lens of history, piecing together hidden accounts from secondary sources like cookbooks. Stories like Mary’s, a brilliant entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, and important abolitionist, cannot remain shrouded by discrimination.
When you step back and absorb Mary’s well-rounded recipes, you can almost taste her march toward self-empowerment and social change. As we move through this blog, let’s celebrate the women who built modern food systems and simultaneously campaigned for freedom.
“I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.” -Mary Ellen Pleasant
The State Journal published this article on March 3.
By Karen Diaz, Dean of WVU Libraries
Women – of all backgrounds – have made important contributions to society. Only recently are we learning more about these individuals and learning to give credit to women where that credit is due. The way we have learned more is through evidence. Often that evidence sits in archives used by historians and others to document how women have shaped society. Due to a long tradition of underrepresenting women and women’s contributions, there are archival silences or gaps in what has been preserved. This undervaluing perhaps also causes those making contributors to undervalue documenting what they have done.
Blog post by Rachael Barbara Nicholas, WV National Digital Newspaper Project grant assistant, WVRHC
The Republicans of Berkeley County once bemoaned how difficult it was to edit a political paper when “the Republican backbone” in Berkeley “was weakened by Democratic domination.” This perceived difficulty did not prevent editors A. S. Goulden and John T. Reily from establishing the Martinsburg Herald in 1881. A thoroughly Republican paper, the Martinsburg Herald retained its original management until 1885, when Reily purchased Goulden’s interest in the paper and associated himself with George F. Evans, a manufacturer of cigars and wholesale dealer in tobacco. In addition to being a Republican paper, the Martinsburg Herald was “A Weekly Family Journal—Devoted to Home Interests, Local News, &c.” It followed a fairly consistent format: the first page contained literature, the second political reports, the third local news, and the fourth advertisements.
John T. Reily, a Catholic historian, published frequently throughout his life. During his tenure as editor, he published Conewago, A Collection of Local Catholic History, Gathered from the Fields of Catholic Missionary Labors within Our Reach (1885).
The Republican element of the Martinsburg Herald was secondary under Reily and Evans, but it was not absent. Reily and Evans championed protection and denounced free trade during the presidential election of 1888. It was their belief, and that of the Republican Party, that restricting imports from other countries would promote American producers, businesses, and workers. They utilized the rhetoric of labor to equate protectionism with agricultural and working-class interests. “Protection always won when the issue was openly against Free Trade,” the editors said of the 1888 Republican victory. “Labor of all kinds fears free trade, and well it may. Labor was aroused, and Labor is the Lion of America.” The lion Reily and Evans envisioned represented unity, something they wanted for the Republican Party.
A healthy repugnance of party factionalism followed the Martinsburg Herald into the Progressive Era, even as it became increasingly political. It no longer bore the title “Family Journal” after A. B. Smith and J. H. Mowbry replaced Reily as editor on July 22, 1893. As a Republican newspaper, the Martinsburg Herald published extensively on free silver—a monetary policy that favored unlimited coinage of silver into money on demand—and territorial expansion. Both Smith and Mowbry and the editors who succeeded them (U.S.G. Pitzer in 1899, George F. Evans in 1900, Wilbur Thomas in 1904, and W.E. Hoffheins & Co intermittently) criticized free silver and its populist Democrat defender, William Jennings Bryan. They predicted an economic collapse under Bryan’s silver standard and urged farmers, the potential beneficiaries of free silver, to “not pursue a phantom and bring down on his own head worse ills than he now suffers.” They also chastised Bryan’s opposition to the imperialist war being fought in the Philippines. Invoking the memory of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Smith informed his readers “[that] Mr. Jefferson was nothing if not an expansionist… and if alive today both would be found supporting the foreign policy of William McKinley.” The editors of the Martinsburg Herald equated progress as a nation with rampant imperialism.
In defense of free silver, Bryan famously proclaimed in 1896 that he would not allow mankind to be crucified “upon a cross of gold.”
The reformist spirit of the Progressive Era did not penetrate the pages of the Martinsburg Herald. A few reports addressing prohibition and women’s suffrage graced its columns, but they never received lengthy coverage. The editors had other concerns, particularly in 1912, when ex-president Theodore Roosevelt ran against incumbent William H. Taft, creating a schism in the Republican Party. They accused the newly formed Progressive Party of putting “local candidates into the field against the Republican candidates in every State and congressional district” in “a war of extermination” against Republicans. There was no subtlety in their assertion that the “motto of the new party seems to be ‘Kill the Republican party; elect Roosevelt at the same time if possible, but in any event kill the Republican party.” Republicans and Progressives alike felt the sting of defeat when Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the presidency in 1912 and 1916.
A political cartoon from February 5, 1916, depicting a “third party” sickness. The markings on the GOP elephant are caricatures of Roosevelt’s face.
The Republican Party survived its splintering and the victory of Wilson; the Martinsburg Herald did not. The final issue appeared on December 27, 1919, under the World Publishing Company. The editorial body gave no indication that this issue would be the Herald’s last. It published a variety of articles, as it always had, including a speech from its former political rival, William Jennings Bryan. It was strangely ironic—maybe even appropriate—that Bryan had the final say in a paper that had spent twenty years opposing and denigrating his policies.
Editor’s note: The Martinsburg Herald is one of the newspapers that will be digitized during the current WV NDNP grant cycle, so it will eventually be available on https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.
The Art in the Libraries Committee and Dean of Libraries Karen Diaz selected Anna Allen, a BFA candidate in painting, and Raymond Thompson, Jr., an MFA student in photography, to receive the 2020 Dean of the Libraries’ Student Art Award.
Posted by Jane Metters LaBarbara.
February 22nd, 2021
Blog post by Christina White, undergraduate researcher at WVU
This series of blog posts will feature the following books: Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook, A Date with a Dish, A Good Heart and a Light Hand, and The Jemima Code
Emphasis on race, gender, socioeconomic status, and themes of social justice
Note: The cookbooks in this series feature revolutionary and talented women of their times. Reading their stories in the West Virginia & Regional History Center, I chose to refer to the authors by their first names. Their casual tones conveyed a desire to connect with the reader, and being one of those readers, I wanted to uphold that connection while maintaining the highest respect for the work they created.
I found a place on campus I never knew existed. The West Virginia & Regional History Center houses doorways into the past, into the day-to-day struggles, relationships, and moments of sweet relief. I’m sifting through the realities of women, Black Americans, and other marginalized groups to elucidate forces that affected their lives. These forces, far from obsolete, persist into today’s social landscape, whether it is in private conversations at the Mountainlair or national media coverage.
Donated by the late Lucinda Ebersole, an acclaimed writer and cookbook collector, hundreds of cookbooks await analysis on the sixth floor of the Downtown Library. I started with Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook, which captures the travels and fierce entrepreneurship of Mary Ellen Pleasant.
The Rare Book Room at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.
I realized that recipes cast a new light on history with an intimate truthfulness. Standard high-school history books don’t reveal the ins and outs of stewing a turtle, running a renowned kitchen on a senator’s riverboat, or feeding enslaved people at secret boarding houses of the Underground Railroad. The language around recipes, be it an author’s note or long introduction, tells a story about a time period. How are specific groups of people described? Mammy Pleasant’s Cookbook uses “Negro,” while later books opt for “African American” or “Black.” Who knew a timeline of societal awakenings and changes in norms is etched between the dinner and dessert section of a cookbook?
As I flipped the page of a hundred-year-old cookbook, a plume of dust shot into the air. I caught a whiff of an unfamiliar scent that reminded me of my grandmother’s stack of outdated newspapers, musty yet potent. I felt like a foreigner in an unexplored country, getting to know the smells and rituals of a group whose history was scrubbed and sanitized by dominant groups.
For example, the “mammy” stereotype — a jolly, rotund Black woman who cares for everyone and whips up a southern feast — seemed awful but extinct in today’s world. However, it was only three months ago that the international brand Quaker Oats removed a notorious mammy stereotype from their most famous product line, Aunt Jemima syrup and pancake mix.
The content of these frayed cookbooks is so pertinent to the current moment. Their lessons on racial identity and inclusion matter in policy decisions, university trainings, and dorm-room discussions among friends.
My goal in these blogs is to share stories from sources as raw, as delicious, and as unfiltered as personal recipes. I don’t mind if opinions are unsettled or comfortability is shaken. I’ll also let you in on experiences that I’ll likely never witness, like skinning an opossum or preparing fruit punch for a hundred people at a church social.
At some points, I found myself agitated over a cookbook. I texted friends and annoyed my family about what I read, mostly injustices against the authors and their communities. Civil rights, intercultural blending, mental health, women’s suffrage, gender issues, slavery, single parenthood, poverty, environmentalism, and more fills the pages of the Ebersole Collection. This blog would be lucky to dust off just one of those topics!
I invite you to accompany me into the daily lives of skilled chefs who objected in the most cunning, illusive way. Their judgements and hopes are woven into the blank spaces between recipes for roast duck and spice cake.
I’m excited to show you what I uncovered after hours in the West Virginia & Regional History Center, carefully leafing through these antique cookbooks on a special book pillow.
I’m a senior pursuing a double major in Biology and International Studies and intern at the WVU Center for Resilient Communities. Welcome to my excursion into the Ebersole Collection!
An exhibit of cookbooks written by Black women, an underrepresented group in culinary publications. This case and others can be viewed at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.
*I will capitalize the term “Black” in agreement with the New York Times’ 2020 decision to respect a shared cultural identity. Read more about their decision here.
A warm thank you to our dedicated Rare Book Librarian, Stewart Plein, and our Reference Supervisor, Jessica Eichlin, for empowering me during this process. Without their work, organizing the hundreds of books and spreading the word about their content would not happen.
By Beth Royall, chair, WVU Libraries Collections Advisory Committee
Dean of Libraries Karen Diaz and Beth Royall, chair of the Libraries’ Collections Advisory Committee, presented the Licensing Principles for Vendors document to the WVU Faculty Senate at the February 8, 2021 Senate meeting. Anyone who has been following the development of this document may note the title change. Dean Diaz explained that discussions with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee made it clear the previous title, “Vendor Policy,” was misleadingly stringent, and the new title better represents how we will use this document. The new Licensing Principles for Vendors have now been approved by the Dean of Libraries, the Library Faculty Assembly, and the WVU Faculty Senate.
Faculty are encouraged to share these principles with their vendor contacts and engage in candid dialogue about the serious need for—among other things—fair, transparent, and sustainable pricing models; compliance with usability and accessibility standards; and interlibrary loan privileges for e-books. Change isn’t easy, but when the WVU community speaks with one voice the impact is powerful.
