Some unexpected outlays, for tires and other necessities, reduced my supply of ready money; so, when I reached Washington, I called in on an old friend, whom I had not seen for many years, and asked him if he would escort me around to a bank and you can vouch for my integrity so that I might get a check cashed. He drew a roll of bills from his pocket and said: “We don’t need to go to a bank. I’m all prepared for you, right here. This is one of my regular occupations, to give relief to busted North Carolinians in Washington.” Naturally, I will not set down the benefactor’s name—it is not the sort of advertisement any man would welcome.
I have spent a good part of my life in big cities, but they have always been, for me, places primarily to work in and not to look at. On various visits to Washington, years ago, I was absorbed in this or that job, and my chief concern about buildings and parks and monuments was that they seemed constantly to be blocking the path to the place I was bound for. It was a novel and diverting experience, last week, to invade the national capital as a sight-seer.
The White House and the Capitol, the Monument, the Smithsonian, the Corcoran, the Lincoln Memorial, these all I enjoyed, but nothing else so much as the parks and driveways—the threes and the lawns and the shrubbery. Everywhere you turn you see something green and growing. Of course Washington is done on a grand scale, and has the wealth of the nation to support it; but if other cities and towns, even to the extent of their resources, would seek to cherish their trees in like fashion, this America would be a far more sightly land.
It was refreshing to find that the police, and the government watchmen, custodians, guards, and functionarires of one kind or another, were always trying to make it easier for you to do what you wanted to do instead of directing you to move hither and yon according to a lot of rules. I have been in other places where one gets the impression that the authorities are possessed of a mania for inventing and enforcing Don’ts.
While I was there the Washington Post published an editorial reviewing the city’s record of automobile accidents for the last 12 months. Most of the victims were pedestrians, and in all but a few cases the outcome of the trial in court showed that the fault lay not with the automobile driver but with the person who got in his way. I have never made any pretensions to being a traffic expert, but here I offer this suggestion: Why not make pedestrians wear tail lights?
My nearest approach to an accident in Washington came when a man afoot suddenly crossed the street in front of me, at a place where, for some reason, the pavement was in shadow. I couldn’t see him until I was almost upon him, and then I jammed on my brakes. A neat little light hanging to his coat-tail would have given him what the war experts call “high visibility” and would have materially reduced the perils of his life.
Speaking of inventions: when you go to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson three miles or so out from Charlottesville, you find yourself as much interested in the great man’s inventions as in the beauty of the house and the grounds.
In each bedroom is an alcove, and here, in the old days, used to be a bed which was hoisted up against the ceiling in the morning and let down again at bedtime. The alcove is ways from the windows and between it and the rest of the room are curtains. This idea does not commend itself in these fresh-air-worshipping days.
In the dining room is a huge mantlepiece. At one end of it is a dumbwaiter connecting with the cellar. This was for bringing the full bottles of wine up. At the other end is another dumbwaiter, the twin of the first. This was for sending the empty bottles down. These dumbwaiters, which are too small for anything but bottles standing upright, are now as out-of-date as the accommodations for sleepers. Thomas Jefferson, seer and sage though he was, could not foresee that his airless alcoves would yield to the triumph of hygiene and his bottle transporting device to the triumph of morals-according-to-Volstead.
A negro, whom one would guess to be about 70 years old, guided us through the famous home. He had all the calm and dignity and good manners which tradition associates with the perfect house-servant of the anti-bellum era. He pointed out President Madison’s room and President Monroe’s room—the chambers which these notables occupied when they came to Monticello—and then in the dining room, he called our attention to a double window. “Mr. Jefferson had it made double,” he explained, “after one of the presidents, who was dining here, fell out of it one time.” He didn’t say which president suffered this catastrophe. I am not well enough acquainted with history to know, but I intend to try to find out from Roulhac Hamilton or R.D.W. Connor.
We dropped in at the Alderman home, on the edge of the University of Virginia campus, and found that Mr. and Mrs. Alderman were still in Europe. Only Edwin Jr. was there. He told us that he was going to drive through North Carolina in the next few days, with one of his friends, and planned to come by Chapel Hill.
Has there ever been a more beautiful campus anywhere than the Lawn of the University of Virginia? I am not familiar with the appearance of so very many universities; but I have visited the greatest of the eastern part of this country, and Oxford, and two or three of the most famous in Germany and France; and I have not seen any group of buildings or any setting so thoroughly pleasing to the eye as this group and this setting at Charlottesville.
Our nine days’ trip took us north to Richmond, to Washington, thence westward to Winchester, up the Shenandoah Valley to Staunton, back eastward across the mountain to Charlottesville, through Richmond again, to Williamsburg, through Norfolk, across the Virginia-Carolina line to Elizabeth City, and home through Hertford, Edenton, Tarboro, Rocky Mount, and Raleigh. From Washington, by this roundabout mountain and valley route to Richmond, the road was as good as anybody could want; and the hills, the meadows, and the fields, the streams, were beautiful. It is difficult to realize that this land lies in the same world with the land through which we passed from Oxford on to Richmond and Washington. I have never passed through such a desolate and God-forgotten-looking country than most of this is, and I swore I would not return through it if any other way could possibly be found. To all persons who are to come from Richmond to North Carolina by car, and can spare the extra day, I give counsel that they dodge the road straight south, as they would dodge a plague, and go down by Norfolk.
Not only for what you miss, too, but for what you find. In Richmond I was the guest of Dr. J.K. Hall, University of North Carolina alumnus of the class of 1901, and he insisted that, whatever I did, I must not get out of Virginia without seeing Williamsburg. For this I call down blessings upon his more or less snowy head. Williamsburg has changed sufficiently to be comfortable by modern standards, yet it has retained its old buildings, its old greens, its old flavor. It is a charming place.
It was Washington and parts of Virginia that I went to see this trip, and as I whizzed back home on the last lap from the coast, in the well-behaving Ford, I had no time to get more than fleeting glimpses of eastern North Carolina. Some years ago I was seized by the ambition to visit this region, and the ambition grew keener when Francis D. Winston invited me to drop in on him at Windsor Castle and described in detail the feast he would have in readiness. The observations I made last Saturday have bred in me the resolve to go east again as soon as ever I can.
There is something fascinating to me about that coast and near-the-coast country. The cotton and tobacco mills of the piedmont are worthy enterprises—giving employment to thousands who need it, swelling the wealth of the state, and so on—but I like better to look at the cotton fields and the tobacco fields of the east, and the wide stretches of corn on the blacklands, and the pines rising from the sand, and cypresses by the water’s edge, and sleepy-looking old houses set back on shaded lawns.
Friday’s drive starting at Richmond at 9 o’clock in the morning, and broken by the halt in Williamsburg and the ferry ride across the bay to Norfolk, brought us into Elizabeth City at 7 in the evening. Here I had an agreeable surprise. W.O. Saunders’ paper, The Independent, printed an editorial several months back, roasting the city aldermen for cutting down trees along the streets, and I expected to see long stretches as bare as a desert. But I found that, despite the slaughter, Elizabeth City still had plenty of trees left. Victor Meekins showed me over the Independent’s plant and made me envious of the duplex press. And when I heard talk of young Miss Saunders’ writing for the paper I knew the reason—or one of the reasons—why W.O. could go off to New York to work for Collier’s and yet keep a newspaper going in North Carolina at the same time.
After a quarter of an hour of drifting about the famous old churchyard in Edenton, where Colonial governors and other notables are buried, I moved slowly along the main street and encountered one of Edenton’s less Ancient possessions, namely Dorsey Pruden, who was a student here at the University a few years ago. And near the ferry slip I found the News building and went in for a chat with Aubrey Shackell. With the newspaper and commercial printing, he is up to his ears in work.
From the front page of The Chapel Hill Weekly, Friday, Sept. 11, 1925. I don’t know who wrote this article, but I suspect it was Louis Graves, editor of The Chapel Hill Weekly.
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073229/1925-09-11/ed-1/seq-1/
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