A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Posted on August 21, 2014 by

A few days before the semester begins, our reading room generally gets pretty quiet, since summer visitors have headed home and our own faculty are busily preparing for the semester. So I was delighted to find this trio poring over materials together at the front table this afternoon, looking extremely excited and even a bit giddy. Some quick investigating revealed that they are (left to right) Tommy Antorino, Rebekah Coble, and Maggie Czerwien. They are brand new Ph.D. students in the Spanish Department. They met at their department orientation on Monday and learned about Special Collections at a Graduate Student Resources panel yesterday. Finding themselves with a bit of free time on their hands this afternoon, they headed down Under Grounds, and after learning the ropes from our reading room staff, found themselves in front of a Jorge Luis Borges manuscript. Hence, the giddiness.

I didn’t want to interrupt them for too long, so I asked if I could take their picture, and if they would share with me an adjective about their experience:

“Overwhelming.”

“Incredible.”

“Ecstatic to learn of the resources here at U.Va.”

Tommy, Rebekah, and Maggie, welcome to U.Va.!! We are so excited to have you and all your fellow new graduate students here on grounds. Here’s to a fantastic new academic year.

Goodbye, Special Collections!: Two graduating student assistants reflect

Posted on April 17, 2014 by

This week, we are pleased to feature a guest post by two graduating students: Christina Balangue and Alex Valdez. Christina and Alex are long-time student assistants in Special Collections and have generously agreed to tell the blog a bit about their work down in the stacks. We will be so sad to see them go!

CHRISTINA: I’m a fourth year at U.Va.’s McIntire School of Commerce, concentrating in accounting. I started working at Special Collections the summer of my first year. After graduation, I will be joining PwC as a tax associate in the private company services group, preparing entity and partnership returns for clients in the greater Washington Metro area.

ALEX: I’ve been working at Special Collections since February 2012. I am also a fourth year but I am majoring in sociology and economics. My plans for after graduation remain fuzzy, but I’m hoping to get involved in social policy research and consulting.

CHRISTINA: The first thing that students realize about the stacks is it’s cold. Not plain cold—parka cold. So we often start our shifts with as much hustle and bustle as possible in order to warm up and acclimate. This means shelving new books, re-shelving pulled books, and pulling patron requests. Re-shelving books and pulling patron requests is one of the first things that students learn in the stacks. Every day, the ding of the dumbwaiter echoes in the stacks, signaling to students that items need to be retrieved from the shelves and sent to the reference desk. After the patrons find what they’re looking for (or not), the items get sent down to be re-shelved.

Christina gets ready to send a book up to the reading room in the dumb waiter.

Christina gets ready to put a patron request in the dumb waiter to be sent up to the reading room.

Brendan Fox, Stacks Supervisor, and Christina with a truckful of books and boxes to be reshelved.

CHRISTINA: New shelving is a task most of us learned on our first day on the job. It’s simple enough: take a cart of newly acquired materials and place them on the shelf accompanied by a colored flag. This allows our supervisor, Brendan, to check and ensure the book is shelved accurately. Most students, including myself, dread new shelving. While I can’t pinpoint an exact reason for my dislike, the fact remains that every time I see a cart of new books, I turn around and dash to find another task, leaving the new books for the next unsuspecting stacks student to discover.

Christina flagging a new book so that her supervisor can double-check the location.

ALEX: If we’re not putting something away or wandering through the aisles trying to find something, then we’re probably in the preservation area. Here, we carry out tasks meant to protect Special Collection treasures from the many destructive elements threatening an item’s long-term survival (and yes, we are as dramatic about this job as I make it sound). The first task we learn is how to mylar. We create specialized plastic wraps for books with fragile paper dust jackets or fading front covers to prevent the paper from being torn or the covers from fading further.

Christina prepares a mylar cover for a book with a paper dust jacket.

ALEX: The second preservation duty we take on is the construction of phase boxes. These are acid-free cardboard boxes custom-designed to fit each individual book. Their job is to hold together books that are falling apart. In our experience, this task appears particularly daunting to the newbie student employee because of its many steps. You get the hang of it eventually, though, and it has actually become my favorite Special Collections job!

Alex working on a phase box.

CHRISTINA: Special Collections also collects lots of serial publications from the New Yorker to the obscure Crime Times. We’re responsible for housing and shelving these materials. What’s my favorite part of shelving serials? Sneaking a peek at this week’s New Yorker Caption Contest winner.

Student assistant Ashlyn Walker with the special serials truck, preparing to put new issues of serial publications into the stacks.

ALEX: Whenever we come into contact with an item that requires unusual housing or has a call number that can’t be found in Virgo, we reach out to our fellow student employees for help. We also often work together to barcode items and make sure the records we have on file are correct.

Alex and Ashlyn work together to determine why the call number of a phaseboxed book isn’t showing up in U.Va.’s online catalog, Virgo

Alex and Christina barcode a truck of books that have just been through the preservation process

CHRISTINA: There are many reasons I love working at Special Collections. Being surrounded by rare materials published hundreds of years ago, and protecting these items, are just the tip of the iceberg. What I will miss the most when I graduate are the people working here. The smiles, care, and trust that I have received from both student and library employees are incomparable and this is why coming to work is always such a pleasure. Special Collections, thank you for a wonderful four years.

ALEX: I enjoy working here because I love U.Va.’s collections. From the miniature books that are no bigger than my thumb to the elephant folios that weigh a ton, I’m fascinated by them all and honored to be able to help with their preservation. Like Christina said, the people we get to work with here are also amazing. Their passion for the materials inspires me and they’re actually all just fun to be around. It’ll be a difficult goodbye, but I am grateful to have been surrounded by such wonderful company over these last few years.

Here’s the timesheet where we record the hours we have worked…it’s our favorite thing.

Thank you, Alex and Christina, for all your wonderful work over the years. We can’t say enough about how much we appreciate your dedication. And congratulations on your upcoming graduations! WAHOOWA!

Where’s Waldo?

Posted on February 17, 2014 by

This week, we are pleased to feature a guest post by Special Collections Public Services Assistant Ethan King, who is studying for his M.A. in the U.Va. Department of English.

A brash and turbulent man, a vigorous and luminous artist, Waldo Peirce was a striking figure, his imposing physique matching his powerful personality. Husky, bearded, a football player, an actor, a fisherman, an aspiring poet, and a prolific painter, Waldo Peirce was a jack-of-all-trades, and he was able to rival his variegated skill-set with a penchant for captivating a room with lewd stories and with the formidable ardor with which he lived his life. Yet he has not attained the notability equal to his person and his work.

Waldo Pierce, unidentified photographer. (MSS 8402, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. Image by Ethan King)

Waldo Pierce (undated, photographer not identified). (MSS 8402, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. Image by Ethan King)

Waldo Peirce with unidentified man (photographer not identified). The writing reads "How about a man who never totes a gun?" (MSS 8402, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. Image by Ethan King)

Waldo Peirce with unidentified man (undated, photographer not identified). The writing reads “How about a man who never totes a gun?” (MSS 8402, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. Image by Ethan King)

After his dazzling canvases found their way into leading museums when he was a young man, his artistic successes began to wane. After his death, he was all but forgotten in the annals of art history, and he was similarly reduced to a mere colorful figure alongside his much more accomplished friends—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Peirce’s story is one of gruff eclecticism and shining vivacity in a burgeoning world of modernist art. One need only to rifle through his letters and his one published text, Unser Kent, to get a sense of this man and his life.

The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library holds correspondence between Peirce and Harry Salpeter, an editor and writer for Esquire Magazine in the 1930s. Though the correspondence begins under the auspices of an article (“Rabelais in a Smock”) to be published in a July issue of the magazine in 1936, the letters reveal the evolution of an impersonal, working relationship into a genuine friendship in which Salpeter becomes for Peirce a family friend and a sort of artistic confidant. Stretching from the spring of 1936 to the fall of the same year, these letters highlight Peirce’s episodic life, his artistic vision, and his bawdy poetry.

Peirce begins his correspondence with Salpeter by sharing various anecdotes from his life abroad, writing in a strong but fluid style, evocative of the way he could control a room. These anecdotes range in topic from his brief acting career in a Tex Ingram film, for which he was paid in lobster; baseball and football games between his team of painters and sculptors and a team of “jockeys, international crooks, barflies etc” (TLS, 4 May 1936); his capture of a giant sea turtle with Ernest Hemingway during one of their fishing trips in Key West; his trading of girlfriends with John Reed, the American communist activist; and his inspiring a story of Hemingway’s by “grabb[ing] a town pimp by the ear,” and using the man’s body as a weapon (TLS, 25 April 1936). Reflecting upon these anecdotes, Peirce writes, “These episodes are all pretty good stories in themselves rather than just references to the eccentricity of the artist as a young man etc.. they are much more fun to live than to write hence it usually takes an outsider to do the chronicling etc” (TLS, 2 May 1936). In having Salpeter compile these stories, Peirce allows him to have control over the framing of the article, abdicating himself of biased narrativization. He writes, “I hope I dont appear as one of those .. ‘Go ahead and write yr own stuff’ etc and then begin to carp later. After all youre writing for the oaf publico and if you msut seperate the chafe from the groin etc give em the groin every time” (TLS, 29 April 1936).

This last quotation reveals not only his unabashed deferral of authorial control to Salpeter and his ribald humor, but also his characteristic writing style—rife with ellipses, et ceteras, misspellings, and lack of punctuation. Peirce champions this style as an almost Joycean linguistic play: “God knows how many mistakes in spelling I make.. especially on the machine.. where I don’t aleays hit the right letter. Sometimes fine new words are born this way” (TLS, 29 April 1936).

This type of organic and creative spontaneity bleeds into his work. Often ending his letters, “I must quit and get to work,” a refrain that attests to his artistic diligence (TLS, 19 June 36), Peirce exemplifies the artist working in the throes of passion, constantly working himself into a frenzied rhythm more in the manner of Van Gogh than of Cézanne. His spontaneous retreats into his studio produced an incredible breadth of Impressionist paintings, whose subjects varied from sensuously colored landscapes to captivating sweeps of ordinary life. The circulation of his artwork was equally impulsive, as he would consistently shed his paintings and sketches wherever he went, giving them to friends, family, and acquaintances, and even one time burning them. Special Collections houses two stunning original watercolors of Peirce’s, which belonged to his friend John Dos Passos.

Special Collections also possesses one of only eighty-five copies printed of Peirce’s Unser Kent, a satirical and lusty poem about fellow artist Rockwell Kent (our copy once belonged to the famous book designer Merle Armitage). Intended to be recited to the music of Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig,” Peirce’s Byronic poem unfurls a euphemistic story of a man playing his flute. The frontispiece, done by Kent, shows an Olympian Peirce sitting above a group of fawning nymphs, reading his poem from a scroll that is generated from, of course, his groin. Hilariously dirty couplets abound in the poem, such as “He flutes through the fiercest wind that blows/ Arousing the unborn embryos,” “He fluted venereal legacies so/ That syphilis turned to a pleasant glow,” and “He leapt all frontiers a-waving his phallus/ Fluting Deutschland über alles.” This was not the only bawdy verse Peirce penned. Rather, it was the only one printed, for he alludes to more to Salpeter:

I got an epissel from Gingrich asking for my lyric effusions even if they werent printable for his own indulgence tho he’d like em printable mebbe. As you have been my officill hornblower as pote etc I think I’d better send [them] to you first for censorship.. I am scared of editors especially as most of my buffooneries are dam personal..the rhymes etc built around the actual names etc. these can be changed to a certain degree I suppose if by chance there were something he wanted. I dont know about sending too bawdy stuff through the mail etc. (TLS, 26 May 36)

However, the only poetry he seems to have shared with Salpeter is Peirce’s translation of Baudelaire. Yet in this moment, Peirce exhibits an intimate vulnerability and self-deprecation regarding his writing. Who knows, then, if Peirce’s inability to publish another poem or book of poems was a result of their lewd content or of his anxieties about publishing personal material.

So, what are we to make of Waldo Peirce, the enigmatic figure who maximized his artistic output all the while engaging in sport, film-acting, and rugged fishing excursions? His letters exude an infectious bravado; his vivid and daring artistic processes and productions bespeak an inexorable passion for the artistic life; and his jocular poetry radiates a captivating sense of humor and a keen eye for satire. All of these things showcase his wide skill set and seem to indicate that he was popular among an extremely popular group of artist friends. So then, when we look into the canon of established modernist artists, we must ask, “Where’s Waldo?”

Hot off the Press: Anne Spencer’s Home in the New York Times

Posted on February 6, 2014 by

Today’s New York Times Home & Garden section features a marvelous article and slide show about the historic Lynchburg home of the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, whose papers reside here in Special Collections. The slide show gives glimpses of Spencer’s distinctive modernist decorating style, her husband’s DIY projects, and their granddaughter’s recent work to restore the house. Don’t miss the image in the article showing how Spencer painted poetry on the walls of her kitchen.

The house is also featured on the cover of this year’s printed guide to Historic Garden Week, a state-wide annual event. Notably, this is the first time that an African-American garden has been featured on the cover of this guide.

We think this is a fitting event to celebrate today in particular, February 6. It was on this date in 1882 that the poet was born. Happy Birthday, Anne Spencer!

Holiday Greetings!

Posted on December 25, 2013 by

For your viewing pleasure, here are a couple of fantastic finds from the Magruder Family Papers*, which are currently being arranged and described.

Christmas postcard (Image by Petrina Jackson)

Christmas postcard, 1925. (Image by Petrina Jackson)

New Years postcard (Image by Petrina Jackson)

New Years postcard, 1914. (Image by Petrina Jackson)

See you in the New Year!

*Edward May Magruder was a Charlottesville doctor who established a private sanitarium in 1899 at his house on W. Jefferson St. Along with 6 other local doctors, he was one of the founders of Martha Jefferson Hospital in 1902. Magruder’s daughter, Evalina, was the first woman to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The Magruder family papers were donated to the University of Virginia by Eleanor Magruder Harris in 2001 when the Magruder house was purchased by Christ Church for use as offices.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted on November 28, 2013 by

This Thanksgiving Day blog post is written by our very own Heather Riser, Head of Reference and Research Services.

We recently discovered this Thanksgiving gem among the Magruder Family Papers*, a large collection that is currently being sorted, arranged, and described in our processing area in Special Collections.

“Place Cards for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Turkey Dinners/Conundrums” was published by P.F. Volland & Co. of Chicago, a publisher of children’s books and novelty items from 1908 to 1933. (Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

“Place Cards for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Turkey Dinners/Conundrums” contains twelve turkey-related riddles and an answer key. Can you guess any of the turkey riddles?

Featured are questions number . The envelope contains 12 cards in total. (Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

Featured are questions number four, six, ten, and eleven. (Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

Answer key (Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

Whether or not your Thanksgiving dinner requires fancy place cards, we hope you have a happy Thanksgiving!
*Edward May Magruder was a Charlottesville doctor who established a private sanitarium in 1899 at his house on W. Jefferson St. Along with 6 other local doctors, he was one of the founders of Martha Jefferson Hospital in 1902. Magruder’s daughter, Evalina, was the first woman to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The Magruder family papers were donated to the University of Virginia by Eleanor Magruder Harris in 2001 when the Magruder house was purchased by Christ Church for use as offices.

Preserving Fraternity and Sorority Records: The Legacy of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Posted on October 21, 2013 by

Recently, I had the pleasure of facilitating a workshop on preserving historical records at the 2013 Fall State Meeting of Virginia – Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc (DST). The sorority, which was founded at Howard University, celebrates its centenary this year.

Each chapter is charged with collecting and maintaining its historical records: its charter, photographs, programs, news clippings, etc. The purpose of my presentation was to give them direction in doing just that, but moreover to share with them the importance of working with local libraries or archives who specialize in keeping such rich historical materials secure, safe, and accessible for the long run.

Preserving the Legacy workshop attendees, October 2013. The workshop was held at the Jefferson School City Center in Charlottesville. (Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

Some of the attendees at the Preserving the Legacy workshop, October 2013. The workshop was held at the Jefferson School City Center in Charlottesville. (Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

At the University of Virginia, we are committed to collecting personal and organizational records of African Americans. We do not have a DST collection, but we do have materials in other collections that feature the sorority. For instance, the Records of the Office of the Dean of Students document the relationship among fraternities, sororities, and the University. It is in these records that you find correspondence from sorority presidents, event documentation, disciplinary records and more. Sometimes, you find real treasures.

Letter from Linwood Jacobs to Sheila Hardy, congratulating her on the founding of Kappa Rho Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta at the University of Virginia, 19 October 1973. (RG-18/2. Image by Petrina Jackson)

The U.Va. yearbook, Corks and Curls, which ran from 1888 to 2008, also provides a window into fraternity and sorority life.

Photograph of U.Va.'s Deltas from the 1975 Corks and Curls (LD. Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

U.Va.’s Deltas from the 1975 Corks and Curls (LD5687 .C7. Photograph by Petrina Jackson)

Another place to look for sorority information is in the personal papers of its members, such as Alice Jackson Stuart. Jackson Stuart was a Delta from Richmond who was initiated in 1934 at Virginia State College (now University), the oldest Delta chapter in the state. She was a student at Virginia Union University, which did not yet have a Delta chapter.

Alice Jackson Stuart has the distinction of being the first known African American to apply to the University of Virginia or any white Virginia college for a professional or graduate degree, which she did in 1935. U.Va. denied her entry, and she questioned this judgement. The University’s response was that they denied her because of her race and “other good and sufficient reasons.” After her rejection, the state of Virginia passed laws that funded the tuition for African American students to study outside of the state instead of having them desegregate colleges and universities within Virginia. Jackson Stuart graduated from Columbia University with a Master of Arts degree in 1939. Almost seventy years after her rejection by the University of Virginia, her son, Judge Julian Towns Houston of Brookline, Massachusetts, gave her papers to the Special Collections Library in 2003. She finally “entered” the University.

Alice Jackson Stuart’s Delta Sigma Theta Sorority certificate, 1934. (MSS 12512. Gift of Julian T. Houston. Image by Petrina Jackson)

Alice Jackson Stuart’s sorority memory book, ca. 1934. (MSS12512. Gift of Julian T. Houston. Image by Petrina Jackson).

Although there is a lot to learn from items across our collections related to Delta Sigma Theta and other African American fraternal organizations, we hope to acquire records of local chapters and individual alumni, ensuring the preservation of their legacy for generations to come.

I would like to give a special thanks to Schwanzetta Aikens, Heritage & Archives Committee Chair of the South Atlantic Region of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and Charnette Singleton, South Carolina Chair of the South Atlantic Region of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., who were such warm and outstanding hostesses. I had a wonderful time!

Curating Yoko Ono

Posted on September 9, 2013 by

Anyone who has ever curated or installed an exhibition of books and manuscripts knows that these materials are inherently impossible to exhibit effectively. While paintings and sculpture are created with the intention of exhibition, most of the artifacts we hold are not. Visitors can only see one page of any multipage document, and artifacts that were made to be held in one’s hands and experienced intimately are relatively far away, usually behind glass. Curators are always looking for ways to transcend these difficulties. We hem and haw over writing lengthy descriptions in labels. If we have funds, we create high-quality facsimiles of hidden pages or even a “page-turner” digital facsimile of the complete artifact.

Who knew effective display could involve smashing china cups to smithereens?

Here is the curator, hard at work. (Photo by Alicia Dietrich)

I have just finished installing our latest exhibition, “Magazines Unbound: Periodicals as Art 1942-1983.” This project reveals an unexpected strength in our collections: magazines conceived of as formal artistic experiments in and of themselves. Most of the magazines displayed are gatherings of paper or even objects into folders, envelopes, and boxes, rather than bound as books. This makes them, in some ways, ideal for exhibition.

The 1950s west-coast Beat magazine Semina displays beautifully, since most of its contents are loose sheets. Shown are most of the contents of Semina 8 being prepared for exhibition (PS 580 .S45, Marvin Tatum Collection of Contemporary Literature. Photo by Molly Schwartzburg)

But two of the magazines–Aspen and S.M.S.–were venues for conceptual artists in the 1960s, who had a penchant for works of art that remain incomplete without the participation of the reader or viewer. Among the objects included are records and audio and video tapes that need to be played, instructions for writing a poem, templates for boxes that need to be glued together, and a paper doll and candy-wrapper that need to be cut out. What’s a curator to do?

I chose to let all the works stand incomplete with one exception: Yoko Ono’s “Mend Piece for John,” shown below.

Yoko Ono's *****. From S.M.S. 5 (October 1968).

Yoko Ono’s “Mend Piece for John,”. From S.M.S. 5 (October 1968). (N1 .S15, University of Virginia Library Associates Fund. Image by Molly Schwartzburg)

A tube of glue is wrapped with a poem, and attached to a plastic bag with a satin ribbon. Inside the bag is a set of typed instructions:

Take your favorite cup.

Break it in many pieces with a hammer.

Repair it with this glue and this poem.

The poem wrapped around the tube of glue in Ono's piece.

This poem comes wrapped around the tube of glue in Ono’s piece with a rubber band. After unwrapping it to be sure I knew what it included, I took a quick snapshot for reference purposes before carefully rewrapping it. (Photo by Molly Schwartzburg)

How could I resist? A friend was visiting from out of town, so we went out to The Factory, my favorite antique mall out in the Shenandoah Valley, where we selected two cheap but visually appealing teacups. “But wait,” you say. “Didn’t the instructions specify that it be ‘your favorite cup’?” Well…let’s just say I wasn’t ready to make that kind of sacrifice for work. It was still a pretty profound experience.

We prepared to destroy the teacups in my front yard. (Photo by Molly Schwartzburg)

No tortillas were harmed in the making of this artwork. But it only took one try to shatter each cup. This was the fun part.

No tortillas were harmed in the making of this artwork. It only took one blow to shatter each cup. This was the easy part. (Photo by Alicia Dietrich)

The glueing was fun at first, and then we realized how long it was going to take. We had to sit very still holding each piece for at least 15 or 20 minutes before we could safely let it go. So we sat, talked, glued, talked, and mended. It was wonderful. (Photo by Molly Schwartzburg)

Here’s the final view of the item in the exhibition, with all the other materials in S.M.S. 5. (Photo by Molly Schwartzburg)

I can’t say that visitors to the exhibit will understand the piece fully just because they can view its final result in the cases. But my friend and I discovered that the process itself, even modified, was wonderfully meditative. There is something about mending a cup, slowly and deliberately, that is itself healing, we discovered. Even if the cup is no longer usable. I’ll look forward to taking these results back home after the exhibition comes down.

You can view Ono’s piece in the exhibition “Magazines Unbound: Periodicals as Art 1942-1983” in the First Floor Gallery until January 5, 2014.

Revealing the Mountain Communities of the Blue Ridge: Emmanuel Episcopal Church provides significant Digitization Grant

Posted on July 25, 2013 by

This week we feature a guest post from Special Collections staff member in Public Services, Margaret Hrabe:

The Small Special Collections Library is proud to announce our successful application for a seed grant to begin to scan our holdings of the periodical Our Mountain Work in the Diocese of Virginia. Published from 1909 to 1954 by the Board of Missions of the Diocese of Virginia, this periodical documents the founding of Episcopal mission churches and schools in the Ragged and Blue Ridge Mountains of Central Virginia by Frederick Neve, Archdeacon of the Blue Ridge. Our Mountain Work is a uniquely rich resource for the study of communities that were little documented at the time. The periodical’s writers had intimate contact with individuals and families who were otherwise extremely isolated. Many of the magazine’s issues predate the establishment of the Shenandoah National Park in 1933, an act that displaced hundreds of families and eradicated many small mountain communities.

Our Mountain Work, v. 1, no. 1 (BV2575 .O813. Image by Petrina)

Our Mountain Work, v. 1, no. 1 (March 1901). (BV2575 .O813. Image by Petrina Jackson)

The grant of $3000 comes from the Endowment Fund of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Greenwood, Virginia. The Emmanuel Endowment Fund Board annually administers grants in “furtherance of exclusively religious, charitable or educational purposes.” We are grateful to the Board for its support and look forward to having this unique resource made available beyond the underground walls of Special Collections.

Emmanuel Church today. Photograph by Margaret Hrabe)

Emmanuel Church, 2013. (Photograph by Margaret Hrabe)

U.Va.’s holdings of Our Mountain Work in Special Collections total 370 issues of the over 400 that were published and comprise the largest single collection available to researchers. Smaller collections reside at the Virginia Theological Seminary’s Bishop Payne Library and the Virginia Historical Society. Special Collections will begin the scanning project in early Fall of 2013. The images will be placed in the University of Virginia Library’s digital repository accessible through the online catalog VIRGO.

Frederick William Neve

Frederick William Neve, born in the county of Kent, England, was educated at Merton College, Oxford, and ordained a deacon in 1880 at the abbey church of St. Albans. In 1888, the vestries of St. Paul’s (Ivy, Va.) and Emmanuel (Greenwood, Va.) Churches asked Neve to come to Virginia to serve the needs of their congregations, and he accepted. Neve served as the rector of Emmanuel Church from 1888 to 1905 In 1890, Neve built his first mission church in the Ragged Mountains, St. John the Baptist. Ten years later, he began supporting a teacher at Simmon’s Gap, an isolated community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. This was the beginning of his work with the mountain inhabitants that eventually embraced seven Virginia counties and became the Archdeaconry of the Blue Ridge. As editor of Our Mountain Work, Neve made possible this window in time to the history of Central Virginia during the first half of the twentieth century.

Frederick William Neve, undated (MSS 791. Image by PetrinaJackson)

Digitization as Preservation

Over the years, U.Va.’s holdings of Our Mountain Work have been accessed by researchers both local and distant for their religious, social, educational, and genealogical significance. Recently a researcher from Northern Virginia requested photocopies of over 800 pages from the periodical—a request which Special Collections had to decline due to preservation concerns. Many of the original issues have small tears and nearly all were initially folded; consequently, there are crease marks and separations at the folds on a large number of issues. These preservation issues prompted Special Collections to apply to the Emmanuel Endowment Board for funds to scan the paper issues, so that all interested researchers will have access to these documents without producing further damage to the delicate originals.

This image reveals some of the conservation problems inherent in these ephemeral issues of the magazine. _Our Mountain Work_ 1.3 (November 1911) (BV2575 . 082. Photograph by Petrina Jackson).

This image reveals some of the conservation problems inherent in these ephemeral artifacts. _Our Mountain Work_ 1.3 (November 1911). (BV2575 . 082. Photograph by Petrina Jackson).

Beyond Our Mountain Work

Emmanuel Church and Frederick Neve are well-represented in the holdings of Special Collections beyond Our Mountain Work. The Papers of Emmanuel Church (MSS 10731, etc.) were initially deposited in Special Collections in 1987 and contain parish registers, 1885-1983; vestry books, 1909-1977; Woman’s Auxiliary minutes, 1871-1972; and financial statements, 1976-1977; written and oral histories. With these are also parish and church service registers of Holy Cross Mission, 1912-1942, a mission church established by Neve near Batesville, Va. Three collections of Neve’s personal papers (MSS 9115, MSS 9970,-a-b, and MSS 10505) give an even more in-depth view of the outreach mission work done by this extraordinary individual.

Observations on the Seventeen-Year Cicada: A Citizen Scientist Reports from 1824

Posted on May 23, 2013 by

For the last two weeks, I have been, well, geeking out as cicadas have begun appearing in my heavily wooded neighborhood in Charlottesville. I’ve seen two waves of the little beasties emerge from beneath the shrubs outside my cottage, and each time, have immediately documented my sightings online. Social-networking and online-news sources this spring alerted me to two websites that are calling on “Citizen Scientists” to document the emergence, one hosted by Radio Lab and the other by National Geographic.

One of the first cicadas to emerge in my neighborhood in Charlottesville, May 15, 2013. It rests on the branch of an Abelia shrub, under which may be seen numerous circular holes from which this and other cicadas emerged. (Photo by Molly Schwartzburg)

Why the big deal? Brood II cicadas (Magicicada septendecim) spend seventeen years living underground before emerging to sing loudly, lay eggs, and then die within about a month. Because of this unusually lengthy life cycle, Brood II cicadas are relatively mysterious to scientists, and a lot of basic questions about their activities remain unanswered. So scientists have been taking advantage of crowdsourcing opportunities to gather information; emergences are spotty (some people will see no cicadas in their yards) and range across hundreds of miles. Projects like the ones I’m participating in will perhaps provide enough data to keep the lab rats busy for, oh, maybe another seventeen years.

I wondered how earlier Virginians experienced cicada emergences, and was thrilled to discover that Special Collections holds a remarkable 200-year-old personal account of a fellow magicicada enthusiast, who wrote his own history of “locusts,” as they were commonly termed in that period. “J. S.” (who felt uncomfortable giving his/her full name to “such a rough draft”) tracked what are now known as Brood II and Brood X, which also emerges every 17 years, and will emerge next in 2021. J. S. explains how careful observation led him to determine that the cicadas feed off the roots of trees while underground (correct!). He also describes with great detail the workings of the female’s “perforator” (now called the “ovipositor”), the mechanism with which she lays her eggs.

J. S.’s 4-page long description of emergences in 1766, 1783, 1800, and 1809 is reproduced here in full, each page first in transcription (with paragraph breaks added and some spelling and punctuation modified for ease of reading), followed by an image of the page. Enjoy!

A short history of the locusts of North America

Several years past some conversation took place between an intimate acquaintance and my self, respecting the locusts. For his information I will throw my Ideas on paper. In the spring of 1766 they made their appearance in Frederick County Virginia and in 1783 the appeared again. Previous to their coming up at this time, I observed the Hoggs were very busy rooting under the Apple trees in the orchard. In a few days the locusts were seen in abundance crawling from the avenues of their subterenious dwellings. A short time after they appeared they were observed to be busily employed in geting released from a covering they had no use for in their present abode. As they appeared to come onely a small distance from the apple trees or the trees of the forrest, I was at a loss for a reason why it was so, and was induced to think that when the eggs they deposited in the small branches of of the trees, were hatched, that the young ones droped down and made their way into the earth, that they remained there a certain number of years. I had heared of several spaces of time mentioned, but there appeared no standard to calculation as to the length of time they remained in the earth, or the depth they decended. All appeared uncertain.

So it passed on untill they came in 1800. The first discovery I then made of their coming was the earth rooted up by the hoggs as heretofore. At this time finding it to be 17 years since their last appearance, it claimed my further attention, and I undertook a more minute investigation of the case. I had an orchard near the house where the trees were planted too close together and some of them had been cut down two or three years before. In conversation with a friend of mine on the subject of the locusts, which appeared in great abundance, we walked into the orchard, and made a prety full examination of their coming out of the earth, and discovered that there was no holes in the ground near the stumps of the trees that had been removed some years previous to that time. This led me to investigate the case further in respect to the means of sustenance & I was now led to believe that they drew their support from the live roots of the trees So I left it until they came the next time.
I was now living In the State of Ohio in the year 1809. In the spring of this year I

First page of A Short History of the Locusts of North America (MSS 9727). (Digitized by Molly Schwartzburg)

I was fencing a garden. I observed in diging the post holes at one corner of the garden, we found many locusts near the Surface, but in the other part we did not discover any. Here the former observation took place. There was the green roots of a shade tree that we had removed, and the locusts were not found further than the roots had spread. This was several years before the time that I expected they would again shew themselves, according to my former calculations, yet I judged we should have another locust year before the time in course. I now made enquiry of some of the former setler that had lived near me, when the locusts had made their appearance last, but none of them appared clear as to the time. And recuring back to the time that I discovered that they did not come up round the dead appletree Stumps, it struck me that it was similar to our not finding any locusts in the holes we dug for the post holes of our garden fence.

This spring the locust came in great abundance. A further examination took place. I took a walk in order to satisfy my curiosity, and after advancing some distance and passing several stumps of trees that had been cut not more than two or three years, and could not find one hole where the locusts had come up, and proceeding on a little further, I discovered one hole, and then another, and casting my eye a little further on, I observed several holes the locusts had made nearly in a straight line. In order to gratify my curiosity a little more, I got a spade and dug till I found the root of an elm tree that was now exactly under the row of holes, the locusts had made, and searching further about the roots of the elm, I discovered there was small open spaces round the roots, where I thought it was at least probable, the locusts had lain and sucked the sap out of the roots. Here they could not have decended more than four or five feet , as the leavel of the creek was not more than that distance.

The knowledge I thought I had gained of their history led me to pry minutely into the manner of their increas. I found that they hatched in a short time after the eggs were deposited in the small branches of the trees, and that they were

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to be found in little clusters on the small lims. In a short time they shed a little coat or shell something similar to that they shed soon after they came out of their [subterenious caverns?.] They shed several of these coverings when they are small of a colour between white and brown. To take hold of them is difficult. They will slip off more like what is calld a flee than any other insect that I know of. They continue on the tender branches of the tree, untill they are something more than half an inch long, and have the resemblance of the locust.

The perforator (as I do not know any name more proper to call it) appears to be perfectly formed at this time for driling the holes in the small branches of the trees where She deposits their eggs. This instrument is about half an inch long and about the thickness of a smallish needle. It is hollow and a seam along the lower part, a little resembling a steel pen, the outer end is shaped a little like the bowl of a spoon with the concave side down, the curved part is brought to a sharp point and both edges are set with sharp teeth so fine that the naked eye can hardly discern them, but when magnifyed appear something like [sickle?] teeth. The motion made with this almost curious instrument in driling the holes is nearly a semicircle and with the little teeth cuting both ways they soon make the hole as deep as the want it.

The egg now appears opening and swelling the tube untill it gets in the concave part, then the egg is deposited and another hole is commenced. So they go on untill they have a douzen or more of eggs in regular order. One end of the first one is [elevated?] about forty degrees, and the next egg is laid part on the first so that they lay in a regular streight line. So beautifully are they aranged that the nicest [illegible?] cant exceed it, and the perforator cant be exceeded by human art. The locust when prepared to decend into the earth as above described, is near three fourths of an inch long, is covered along its back from the hindermost part of the wings to the front of the head, with a hard horny substance perhaps as hard as a cows horn,

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and on the foremost part it appears to be formed for diging or penetrating into the earth, (all the work of the great architect) . I think it is likely they ware this armour untill they are nearly ready to leave their house of clay, and about to ascend into the pure and sublime regions of the air. Here their existence is not long in duration. Soon after they arise they shed a coat or covering. It appears to burst on the back and they crawl out, and soon begin their ravages on the tender branches of the fruit and other trees, by piercing them with their small bits and sucking the sap, which appears to be their onely sustenance. I have seen them when about to leave the branch where they have been feeding on, the flow of sap hath been so strong that after the locust leaves the place where he has been feeding the tender juice will run and stand on the branch quite transparent.

There is one more remark that I want to make respecting the locusts. I have found the young locusts more numerous on the branches of the locust trees than any other tree. Whether the locusts took their name from this tree, or the tree from the locusts, I must leave.

It is left now to inform that what is wrote is the result of my own observation which begun with the year 1766—1783—1800—1817 were locust years in Frederick and Loudon, Counties, in Virginia. I once related this circumstance to a friend of mine in whom I could place the greatest confidence and he then informed me, that in the year 1749 his Father removed with his famely from Pensylvania to Loudon County Virginia, and it was a locust year. In the year 1817 the locusts onely reached to the crossings in the Aleghany mountain and in 1809 when we had them in Jefferson Ohio they did not reach Pittsburgh until several years after that time, so it is I believe they have 17 years as a stated period of appearance. What changes may take place hereafter we do not know. I onely state what has been the result of my my enquiry

Thy friend
J. S

My name in full is too much to put to such a rough draft as this 3rd mo 16th 1824

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Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

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