Author Archive | Amanda Ross

Lost and Found

Today’s post was authored by a Guest Contributor, historian and sea grass basket scholar Dale Rosengarten.

Photo courtesy of Dale Rosengarten.

It amazes me when historic objects resurface after decades, even centuries, of lying hidden and unknown.  Occasionally, the objects are returned “home”—repatriated, as it were—and amazement turns to triumph and joy.  Such were my feelings last September when I gazed at a large bulrush wood basket, in near mint condition, on display at the Coastal Discovery Museum on Hilton Head Island.   The museum was hosting a traveling exhibition called “Grass Roots On-the-Road”—a small, low security version of a major exhibit I co-curated for the Museum for African Art in New York. Coastal Discovery’s Vice President of Programs, Natalie Hefter, had put out a call for local residents to lend Lowcountry baskets from their collections to the museum.  Beaufort resident Erik Stevens turned up with a Penn School basket, circa 1905, probably made by Penn’s first basketry instructor, Alfred Graham, and sporting its original Trademark Tag with Graham’s picture on it.

Where has the basket been all these years?  How was it rescued from obscurity?  Looking for photographs of an old house he was restoring in Beaufort, Erik Googled “Trask,” the name of the family that owned the property next door, and came up with an estate sale of the late Spencer Trask of Saratoga Springs, New York.  Among the items listed for auction was a “St. Helena basket.”  Erik bid $195—the minimum figure—and bought the orphaned object uncontested.

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Craft and Crum Family Papers Link Charleston and England

Today’s post was authored by a Guest Contributor,  independent historian Jeffrey Green of England.

When I returned to Charleston in June 2010 to attend the Charleston Jazz Initiative’s weekend, I visited the Avery Research Center to investigate a postcard of Buckingham Palace. Mailed in 1914, the postcard was addressed to the son of English-born Ellen Craft Crum of Charleston.

Edmund Jenkins to Aubine Craft

Postcard from Edmund Jenkins to Aubine Craft

Prior to my South Carolina excursion, an Avery archivist had contacted me as the card seemed to be from Edmund Jenkins, whose biography I wrote in 1982.  I drove twenty miles to Ockham Park, where Ellen Craft Crum’s fugitive slave parents had lived in the 1850s, in order to visit All Saints Church and examine its baptism register.   The link between Charleston and England continued, as I discovered images of that very church in Avery’s recent acquisition, the Craft and Crum Family Papers.

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Welcome

Welcome to the new blog of the Avery Research Center Archives.

In 2008, the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR) awarded the Avery Research Center the prestigious “Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives” grant.  This Hidden Collection grant affirms the national importance of Avery’s collections, which center on African American culture in coastal South Carolina.  Among Avery’s riches, we will be processing the Holloway family scrapbook; papers and oral histories of Civil Rights leaders; materials related to the experiences of African American women and sweetgrass basketmakers; and the notes, recordings, artifacts, and files of renowned anthropologists Joseph Towles and Colin Turnbull.

The work began in 2009, with a CLIR team of Project Manager, Project Archivist, Project Registrar, and three project assistants hired to increase intellectual and physical control of materials and to enhance access to documents, photographs, sound files, and three-dimensional objects.  Our team arranges and describes archival materials to national standards and produces finding aids that are publicly available online.  We are leveraging this  incredible opportunity to digitize oral histories and have undertaken a potentially groundbreaking initiative to provide digital access to the artifact collection.  Through this grant, Avery is able to effectively participate in the Lowcountry Digital Library and is now taking a leadership role in metadata standards.

The CLIR team and Avery staff hope to share our excitement over the treasures found within these red brick walls.  Through our actions and these posts, we aspire to innovate, liberate, and communicate.

We do hope you will join the discussion by commenting or providing additional information on the posted items or topics.

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