January 2011

To the Editor of American Heritage:

A propos of nothing at all except that I just thought of it, I wonder if this little bit of Civil War-iana would interest you.

It started back in 1903 when I was a chemist in the laboratory of the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company in Richmond, and on Saturdays played on the Boston Heights team of the Tri-City semi-pro league. In our first game the opposing team’s first baseman was Jim Darby. I remembered him vividly on account of his spiking me—unintentionally. I still have the cleat scars. Next day I looked at the box score in the paper and said to a teammate: “They’ve got this guy’s name wrong. Enroughty. It was Darby.”

“Yes. That’s the way the nut spells ‘Darby.’ ”

“What?”

“That’s right.”

“I never heard of such damn foolishness.”

“Well, you’ve heard now.”

When Hurricane Connie whirled towards the U.S. coast in August, 1955, an odd-looking old cral’t wallowed up Chesapeake Bay just ahead of the oncoming gales. The United States frigate Constellation , oldest American fighting ship, her masts and spars gone and her hull gripped tight in a floating dry dock pulled by a panting tug, was racing for her life.

She made it, warping into a berth in Baltimore Harbor just before the hurricane hit. The gala reception that had been planned for her arrival had to be postponed.

Artist Eric Sloane lives in Connecticut and roams about America seeking to recapture the look and the feel of a countryside which is inexorably changing. On these two pages are presented some of his sketches, which depict things that seem to be symbols of a bygone age. “Such symbols,” he writes, “preserved by a longing tethered to the past, whether it be a distant church spire, a gracious bend in an old road, or just a reverence for trees and the old ways of farm life, become more important as they vanish. But if some good things are destined to be only memories, we can still be thankful that though they have disappeared the memory remains.”

These sketches are reproduced from Mr. Sloane’s latest book, Our Vanishing Landscape , recently published by Wilfred Funk, Inc. Some of the material in this book appeared in the October, 1955, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE , under the title, “The Mills of Early America.” Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Wilfred Funk, Inc., from Eric Sloane’s Our Vanishing Landscape. Copyright, 1955, by Wilfred Funk, Inc.

Out of the National Attic The New Picture Books The Triumph of Right Leader of Lincoln?

One day in the mid-1840’s, old John Quincy Adams, then congressman from Massachusetts, sat motionless, bolt upright, for a full sixty seconds while a young man named Mathew Brady took his daguerreotype. We can see the bald, bullet head sunk into the upright collar of the time, the eyes staring clearly out of the deep-lined face, the actual look of a tired old man whose work was done. Although Brady photographed Andrew Jackson and John Tyler about the same time, Adams was the earliest President who ever faced a camera. With him, the scales fall off the eyes of our history.

The Frontier Years , by Mark H. Brown and W. R. FeIton (Holt: $10), perhaps the best of this year’s picture histories, is also the most limited in time and space. It is built around the life of one man, L. A. Huffman, a photographer who came to Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone, in Montana, in 1878 and remained in that area until his death in 1931, taking pictures of just about everything that happened or appealed to him there. In his photographs—and in the letters and notes he left behind, which the authors quote extensively—he left a record of a raw, rough portion of the West as civilization moved in and made over the land. Some of the pioneers themselves deplored the change and agreed with Badger Clark:

”… I loved my fellow man the best When he was scattered some.”

Not long ago two teen-age boys in New York City got into trouble with the law. The police laid hands on them as juvenile delinquents, and in due course the boys appeared in court. Judge J. Randall Creel, of Magistrates’ Court, faced the tough problem that confronts jurists in such cases: should he send the boys off to jail forthwith, or should he see whether they might not be able to straighten themselves out? He decided on the latter course, and in looking for a means of rehabilitation he selected an unusual instrument: American history.

He gave these high school youngsters a historical research job to do.

A few fighting words were issued in the general direction of American antiquarians the other day, from a fairly expert transatlantic source. The speaker was John F. W. Rathbone, who as an official of Britain’s National Trust knows a good deal about preserving and restoring historic sites. After visiting a number of restorations in this country, and after complimenting us on our growing enthusiasm for history, he leveled at his target.

“If you would forgive me for presuming to advise,” he said, “I would say don’t over-restore, don’t be corny about it—bogus, as we say in England. For example, at Cooperstown, New York, I visited a beautifully preserved doctor’s house of the Eighteenth Century. But inside the house, I found a caretaker dressed in Eighteenth-Century costume pretending to dispense Eighteenth-Century medicine.