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A few weeks ago I received a friendly call from Mr. Bob Martin, an Avery County resident, author, admirer of Hugh Morton, and former director of the Crossnore School, a private, non-profit home and school in the NC mountains serving (primarily) abused and neglected children. Bob’s call triggered a memory of a set of Morton images that had caught my interest a while back—two circa 1940s portraits of Dr. Eustace H. Sloop, co-founder (with his wife Mary Martin Sloop) of the Crossnore School.
While perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing example of Morton’s work, I like these Sloop portraits because they show him engaged in his primary calling, medicine. Both Eustace and his wife Mary were trained as doctors, and arrived in Crossnore in 1913 planning to provide much-needed medical assistance in the Appalachian Mountains. Mary soon devoted herself to improving public education as well, founding the live-in school in 1917; it was re-incorporated in 1939 as “a child-caring institution, whose purpose shall be to provide a home and industrial and vocational training for orphan, half-orphan, and deserted children . . . preference being given to mountain children” (from p. 8 of Philis Alvic’s 1998 history, The Weaving Room of Crossnore School).
You can learn about Mary T. Martin Sloop’s remarkable life through her 1953 memoir Miracle in the Hills: The lively personal story of a woman doctor’s forty-year crusade in the mountains of North Carolina, written with LeGette Blythe. As Blythe described Sloop, “no mold shaped her, no die stamped her out. . . . She is one of our last examples of the sturdy, energetic pioneer women who played such an important role in the settling of America.”
I wish I had more illustrative material for this post, e.g. a portrait of Mary Sloop — but Morton doesn’t seem to have taken any. Bayard Wootten, however, did; she took this shot of the Sloops performing surgery in the field, circa 1917. (It was included in a 2005 exhibit put on by the North Carolina Collection Gallery entitled “Sour Stomachs, Galloping Headaches,” along with a few other early images from the Crossnore School, including Wootten’s photograph of outdoor surgery.)
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Elizabeth Hull posted this in Behind the Scenes, Nature on February 1st, 2010
Just a quick note to let you know that Series 3, and all the gorgeous, meditative splendor contained therein, is now available and included in the online finding aid for the Morton collection. (Note that the URL for the finding aid has changed, but the old link will redirect you to the new one). Note also that this is the first series to include 35mm slides in its inventory (we’re working on adding the slides for Series 1 & 2 retrospectively). Enjoy!
Note from Elizabeth: I’m pleased to present the very first essay from Worth 1,000 Words project, written by journalist Rob Christensen. Rob has been writing about N.C. politics as a reporter and a columnist for 36 years for The News and Observer and The Charlotte Observer; his book The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics won the N.C. Literary and Historical Association’s Ragan Old North State Award for the best work of nonfiction in 2008.
Update 2/9/10: This post has now been converted into its own “page” under the Essays section of A View to Hugh.
Elizabeth Hull posted this in Behind the Scenes on January 22nd, 2010
We’ve been particularly active over the past few weeks adding images to the Hugh Morton Digital Collection, which now contains more than 3,000 items. The influx is due to the fact that 1) our new digitization assistant Sam Leonard has really hit the ground running, and 2) we’ve started scanning 35mm slides in earnest. (Slides go a bit faster due to automated scanning and because we’re often able to cut-and-paste a lot of the descriptive information).
Many of the most recent additions, including the beautifully-composed image above, have been from Morton’s nature photography. (Speaking of which, processing on Series 3, Nature & Scenic, is now finished — so be on the lookout for a major addition to the Morton finding aid in the near future). We’re adding new items every day, but as of this moment the digital collection can be browsed by 419 different names, 253 different locations, and (whoa!) 951 different subjects.
Just wanted to remind you of this remarkably varied and ever-growing resource, and to encourage you, as always, to give us your feedback on the images and on the work we’re doing.
Elizabeth Hull posted this in Agriculture, Photojournalism on January 14th, 2010
Note from Elizabeth: I hope you’ll join me in welcoming the newest addition to the Morton team, Samantha Leonard! Sam is a Greensboro native in her first year of the grad program at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, and is serving as our new digitization assistant (replacing David Meincke, who had the gall to move to California). This is Sam’s first post for V2H.
Since I started working for the Hugh Morton Collection in mid-December, I have been bombarded with many amazing images. When Elizabeth asked me to write my first blog post for A View to Hugh, I was somewhat overwhelmed by the choices. To narrow it down, I tried to think of current events. Recently, I scanned a group of negatives of various tobacco settings in North Carolina, and I immediately thought of the smoking ban for NC restaurants and bars that took effect on January 1st of this year.
North Carolina is the country’s leading tobacco producer and has a long history with the crop; this recent ban has been met both with praise and resistance. According to an article by Gary D. Robertson, North Carolina is the 29th state to prohibit smoking in restaurants and the 24th state to prohibit smoking in bars, making it the first of the “tobacco states” to ban smoking in public restaurants and bars.
To understand what a big deal this is for North Carolina and why it is relevant to the Morton Collection is to know that tobacco was one of the state’s main industries while Morton was taking the bulk of his photographs. But the times are changing, with North Carolina shifting to a more services-and-technology state. Robertson writes in his article:
“In 1978, tobacco accounted for 34 percent of all farm income in North Carolina, or $1.1 billion. Thirty years later tobacco production fell to $687 million, or only 7 percent of farm income, according to federal agricultural data. The amount of tobacco grown also fell during the same period from about 850 million pounds to 390 million pounds.”
So to honor this shift in North Carolina’s history and economy, I thought it would be fitting to look at a few of Morton’s striking tobacco images:
These photographs were taken in NC tobacco fields during the 1940s to early 1950s. I thought that the first picture was interesting because this man is smoking a cigarette while working in a tobacco field; I like the second one because it shows children, adults, and both whites and blacks working together in the fields. I like to think Morton is showing us how deeply ingrained tobacco is in his subjects’ lives, whether it be through farming, pleasure, or family.
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You may have heard the news this morning about Grandfather Mountain State Park being closed to visitors indefinitely due to dangers caused by recent accumulations of snow, ice, and fallen trees/limbs. I experienced some of those weather adventures first-hand over the holidays in Boone, where a Christmas Eve ice storm caused extensive treachery and knocked out power to about 21,000 (it was out at my parents’ house for five days).
We wish all the best to Grandfather staff in getting the park up and running again. It sounds like they’ve all really banded together in response to these “weather challenges.” I wonder how many times, and for how long, Grandfather has had to close due to weather in the past? Speaking for myself, I have no interest in traversing the Mile High Swinging Bridge in conditions like those shown below. Brrr.
UPDATE 1/8/09: To clarify: only Grandfather Mountain State Park is closed indefinitely; the Grandfather Mountain attraction (the Mile High Swinging Bridge, animal habitats etc.) has not made the to close indefinitely. Whether the travel attraction will be open will be a day-to-day decision. For the time being, visitors should call (828) 733-2013 before making plans to travel to Grandfather.
Stephen Fletcher posted this in Behind the Scenes on December 23rd, 2009
On November 1st, A View to Hugh quietly celebrated its 2nd birthday and during its years of life, this blog has received many visitors. So in this holiday season, we’d like to thank you for being a regular or occasional visitor. Have you ever wondered how many others of you in the blogosphere have been to this site during the first two years? Well, 323,012, if web statistics can be believed!
“How many visits has A View to Hugh received in two years?” would seemingly be an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. Let’s use an analogy to show why. You may take a trip to see family and stay with them for the holidays. If so, let’s say during your stay that you go to the grocery store, the shopping mall, church, and a friend’s house, and that each time you left each of those places you went back to your family’s house, your primary place of visitation.
When you return home and people ask you what you did for the holiday, you would likely say something like, “I visited my family”—that is, you made one trip to visit your family. But if Webalizer, a Web usage statistics program, was keeping tabs on your comings and goings, you went to your family’s house five times—your first arrival and each time you went back to your primary visitation place. Every time you entered your family’s front door would be counted as a “hit.” (In other words, if your family’s house was the home page for a View to Hugh, you made five “hits.”) So, our 323,012 total includes not only initial hits on the blog’s home page, but all hits to the home page.
Counting all those hits is useful to people managing Web servers. For those more interested in gauging readership, however, that tally is meaningless — especially since we know that it includes hits made by computers “crawling” Web sites, such as Google indexing for faster search results. To counter that hyperinflated number, Webalizer tallies “visits,” defined as “a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity.” (The are a host of other issues related to Web statistics, but for fear of putting you to sleep, if you want to read more I’ll refer you to Wikipedia and Google where you may search the terms “Web analytics” and “Web statistics” some restless night).
Going back to the example of visiting your family: once you got there and entered any door, all your subsequent departures and returns, running in and out of the front and back doors, etc., would all be counted as one “visit” after you left their home and didn’t return for a predetermined length of time.
If you recorded all of your family visits over the course of your life, you could make a chart to see how they fluctuated over time. That’s what the chart above illustrates for A View to Hugh: the trend for the number of visits during our first two years (blue line) in comparison to our sister blog, North Carolina Miscellany (red line). At the end of two years we’ve surpassed 25,000 visits per month. That number is still inflated compared to the actual number of individual people reading the blog. (Ever read an entry on your computer at work then check it out again at home? There’s two visits!) What the chart does show without a doubt is the continual growth of interest in A View to Hugh, the library’s most frequently visited blog. And for that, we again express our deep appreciation to you, our readership.
P.S. If you did venture into deeper reading about Web analytics, the chart above uses the “total entry pages” calculation.
P.P.S. Happy holidays!
Many news outlets have been reporting the death on Tuesday of pioneer televangelist Oral Roberts. You probably know some of the more interesting and controversial stories about Roberts, including his claims of being able to raise people from the dead and of receiving visions from a 900-foot Jesus; or his famous 1987 fundraising stunt where he told viewers that unless he raised $8 million, “God would ‘call him home.’” (He raised $9.1 million).
But you may not have known that Roberts made at least a few visits to Grandfather Mountain, NC, most notably as a speaker at the 1976 “Singing on the Mountain” gospel festival. Roberts shot a nationally-televised prime time special at Grandfather that year, featuring Roy Clark (among others).
Roberts apparently enjoyed the golfing opportunities afforded by the Grandfather Golf and Country Club (if you look very closely at the image above, you can see he’s wearing a “GGCC” sweater). One fall visit, Roberts got a personalized Hugh Morton tour of the natural wonders of the area. According to Julia Morton, “Mr. Roberts came to Linville to visit a friend of ours from Tulsa. Rain kept him from playing golf so Hugh entertained him by showing him the countryside.” It was during this visit that Morton took the lovely portrait of Roberts below.
Elizabeth Hull posted this in Behind the Scenes on December 1st, 2009
 We’ve just gotten some exciting news! I’m pleased to share that the North Carolina Collection has been awarded a grant by the North Carolina Humanities Council to support a web publishing project entitled Worth 1,000 Words: Essays on the Photographs of Hugh Morton. The grant funds will be used exclusively to hire a group of scholars and writers to produce thirteen essays (1,000-1,500-words long, based on 3-5 images), highlighting some of the predominant themes represented in the Hugh Morton photographic collection. The essays will be published online as part of this very blog, A View to Hugh. The plan is for a new essay to be posted approximately bi-weekly between January and July, 2010.
We think that the essays produced through the Worth 1,000 Words project will greatly enhance the discoverability of the collection, providing historical and cultural context and analysis of Hugh Morton’s fantastic images, while also demonstrating the value of visual resources for research and education. From the very beginning, we envisioned this project as interactive, hoping to take full advantage of the blog format. Our authors will not be writing into a void — you, as readers, will be able to comment, respond, object, ask questions . . . instead of just sitting there as static documents, the essays will provide jumping-off points for conversation, reflection, and exploration of our state’s culture and history.
We are thrilled that the Humanities Council has agreed to support this somewhat non-traditional publishing project, and would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to them!
View a list of essay authors and topics after the jump.
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