The Lawson Trek
  • Home
    • About
    • Interactive Map
    • The Trek
  • Along the Path: Blog
  • John Lawson
    • "A New Voyage to Carolina"
    • The Carolina Colony
  • Talk to us!
  • Store
  • Press

Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Lawson at Nascar

7/3/2015

2 Comments

 
I'm not even kidding! Lawson's path took him right by where the Charlotte Motor Speedway sits now. He describes the rolling terrain of the day and perfectly captures the view from the speedway, at a natural crest where Route 29 and the road to Harrisburg meet. 

""Still passing along such Land as we had done for many days before, which was, Hills and Vallies, about 10 a Clock we reach'd the Top of one of these Mountains, which yielded us a fine Prospect of a very level Country, holding so , on all sides."

Which is exactly what you see from the Charlotte Motor Speedway: when you sit in the stands you get to see cloud shows and hills falling away beyond. I showed up on a Tuesday evening, which meant they had a bunch of small-scale racing going on, and I sat in the grandstand eating chips and drinking soda pop just as Lawson would have done, had he had the opportunity.
Picture
I had left Charlotte in the morning, dropped off by my friend Mike Graff of Charlotte Magazine. We talked about Charlotte's interesting history as a crossroads. As I mentioned last post, Lawson's group met an Indian trader there who was waiting for company before heading back northeast on the Trading Path, in this part of the world now more commonly known as Tryon Street, and where it crossed Trade, supposedly another trade route to the coast; their crossing is the highest point in the surrounding neighborhoods, which is why Charlotte still calls its downtown uptown, since residents had to walk uphill to get there.

Charlotte is the Carolinas' largest city and is really the only city with a big-city feel that Lawson would have passed, but even that doesn't last long. Ten minutes' walk from Trade and Tryon and you're in the North End, which welcomes you but offers mostly strip malls -- to say nothing of self-storage, vacant lots, and the homeless. 
Picture
Pretty pretty downtown!
Picture
Welcome to Not Downtown.
Picture
... which is still pretty close.
But what you get above all walking along the old Trading Path (it turns into Route 29, satisfyingly known as the Old Concord-Salisbury Road, around, natch, Concord)? You get car stuff. Cheap car lots, car repair, car parts, car tires, car rentals, car inspection, and "credit doctors" who will help you into a car you probably can't pay for. There is so much buying, selling, and maintaining of cars along these major roads that I have consistently found it hard to believe the auto industry accounts for only 3.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. By the way -- I stumbled a few trips ago into the company in South Carolina that makes an enormous percentage of the giant signs you see all over the country at auto dealerships. I'll tell you all about them soon.

But: Nascar. Nobody needs to tell you Americans love cars, and the story of the growth of stock car racing is a remarkable tale of postwar American prosperity. So I found it delightful that Charlotte, at least, offers more than just parts and signs. The speedway was started in 1959 to cash in on the growing popularity of stock car racing, and construction went along just fine until the builders reached what Lawson probably could have told them, from walking the terrain, that they'd find: granite. "A half-million yards of solid granite," according to "Charlotte Motor Speedway: From Granite to Gold." That cost five times as much to cope with, and the speedway ran into the financial troubles that all enormous undertakings tend to have.

Anyhow, the region needed a speedway for the simple reason that stock car racing lives in central Carolina. You can find a million sources explaining how farmers growing corn learned that it was a lot cheaper to distill it and distribute it as whiskey than it was to transport and sell it as food, and how during Prohibition that meant delivering an illegal product. Which meant your car had to be faster than a police car but look perfectly normal. Add in that you needed cars that could rocket along straight stretches of highway but handle in both curving mountain roads during pickup and city streets during delivery and you've about covered every element of the racecars that fill the speedway.
So, anyhow, the day I walked through the speedway wasn't running some enormous Sprint Cup race, with 150,000 or so people clogging grandstand and infield. It was an event in the Summer Shootout series with small cars running on a quarter-mile oval along the frontstretch, with maybe a thousand fans paying eight bucks for a ducat and enjoying the wreckfest. Racing is always fun, but my point here wasn't racing, it was Lawson.

As I mentioned the spot is high on a ridge, and though the camping outside the track was hardly a thing of backwoods beauty, I managed to make a comfortable little home for myself even on a very hot night.
Picture
Hot and flat camping outside the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I didn't sleep much.
Picture
The night was hot enough that I barely slept, and when I awoke at 5 a.m. I downed a couple Pop Tarts, policed the campsite, and headed north at 6. I'm usually on the trail around 9:15 a.m. under any circumstances: if I wake at 7, I dither, and if I wake at 8:30 I rush. Lawson's guides felt the same, "Indians never setting forward 'till the Sun is an Hour or two high, and hath exhall'd the Dew from the Earth." But this day it was scheduled to be in the high 90s, and the urban heat island effect was something Lawson and his guides never had to deal with. But according to the EPA, asphalt can be 50-90 degrees fahrenheit hotter than surrounding temperature. I was walking in terrain not just changed from Lawson's day -- I was walking in a climate that simply did not exist in his day. He complained of freezing cold, and when I awoke one day months ago and saw the thermometer at 10 degrees I felt we shared something. What an environment of asphalt, concrete, and clear-cutting would yield would have been beyond his imagination.  Having lived it, I can tell you the answer is mostly as simple as the one the delightful and excellent biologist and writer Rob Dunn suggests in this piece about heat-mapping his walk to work: plant more trees. I'm here to tell you: walking along a bare asphalt berm can be miserable, and even in the hottest weather simply ducking under a tree makes an enormous difference. The planet hates strip malls and parking lots. Plant trees.

So anyhow, along Lawson and I went, north from the speedway towards Concord. Charlotte grew from a crossroads town to a textile town to a banking town and now is a big banking city. Concord's little twin brother, Kannapolis, was home of Cannon Mills and known as Towel City. and the walk north of the speedway to Concord was a study. For a long time in the heat that even at 7 am was brutal I passed racing-related shops -- restoration parts, cams, engine shops. Then came a long stretch of what I call the Anthropocene Suburban -- long stretches of road between small fields raising cattle or pines, the roadside ditches swaying with Queen Anne's lace, daisies and black-eyed Susans, primrose, Scutellaria (any of various purple-flowered mints), and dandelions. 

PictureThanks for the sandwich, Lobo!
Nearing Concord, however, I started running into empty textile mills advertising for tenants, though downtown Concord shows the combination of Charlotte-suburban growth mixed with small-town empty office blues. I ate a delicious sandwich at Ellie's, where Lobo, my waitperson, knew that the Trading Path worked its way through Concord. I love when people know that. Lobo also sent me to the First Presbyterian Memorial Gardens in Concord, which she said would be like visiting the gardens at Biltmore in Asheville. She was right! The church has owned the property since 1810, but the main church building moved, and by the 1930s the graveyard was neglected. In the 1930s the Williams family began restoring it, and 

now the garden covers nearly a full city block, with a half-dozen fountains and grave markers including everything from boulders to obelisks to plain old lovely stone slabs. At left is a glimpse of what you'll see if you go to visit, and take it from Lobo and me, you should.

So on I went, north of Concord to, as I mentioned, the delightfully named Old Salisbury Concord Road, where I quickly encountered something my old pal Val Green had bidden me to look out for: an 
enormous granite outcropping, right along the road, described by Lawson: "We went about 25 Miles, travelling through a pleasant, dry Country, and took up our Lodgings by a Hill-side, that was one entire Rock, out of which gush'd out pleasant Fountains of well-tasted Water." No gushing fountains now, though the rock face remains, running along the left of the road, sometimes covered in hanging foliage. I did not sleep there.

Along I went, though, until the road begin to diverge away from Kannapolis. That was as far as I cared to go in that blasting sun, having covered about twelve
Picture
Picture9 feet of bronze intimidation.
miles that day before 11 a.m., but also because I wanted to go to Kannapolis as well, though Lawson did not. In Kannapolis -- another onetime textile town trying to figure out what's next -- they're building a research campus and working to build on the success of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park between Raleigh and Durham (Lawson walked by; I live there and will walk by soon enough). Most important to me, though, after starting my trip in downtown Charlotte, where lies the Nascar Hall of Fame, and sleeping at the speedway, was the Earnhardt statue. 

One has surely heard of Dale Earnhardt, the Kannapolis native sone who became a legendary stock car racer, perhaps the best of all time. He died in a wreck at Daytona in 2001, but long before that the taciturn, stubborn competitor had become a symbol for the rural, Southern fans of Nascar's early explosive growth. When he died, though not everyone in mainstream culture understood this, in the South and across Nascar America it was like Elvis had died. Earnhardt's father, Ralph, was a racer -- racing was his way out of the Kannapolis textile mills he worked in. Earnhardt too was uneducated and headed for the mills, but his racing gave him a way out. His success on the track became a touchstone for generations of Carolinians, and his death broke hearts.

So in Kannapolis, if you go to downtown Kannapolis, you won't find a huge amount -- on the redevelopment scale it's behind Concord and nowhere near Charlotte -- but you will find a statue of Dale Earnhardt, in a little plaza built for that purpose. It's part of the Dale Trail, a collection of Earnhardt touchstones you can visit. You can visit Ralph's grave, the family's old neighborhood, roads named after Earnhardt, "Idiot Circle," the cruising area of Kannapolis, and of course the plaza, which has not just the 9-foot bronze statue but a granite monument and a circle of benches. You can also drive to race shops and stores and such, but you get the idea.  Lawson walked through here, describing the place to the world for the first time; no statue. Washington came through here on his tour of the South, solidifying the nation in the aftermath of the adoption of the Constitution. No statue.

Earnhardt drove race cars, and he gets a statue. I say this not in criticism but in description. You want to understand the South? Look at who the people raise up. In Camden, South Carolina, you see an awful lot of the Indian chief King Hagler, and you know why: he was a local.  Washington rode through; Lawson walked through. But Earnhardt was a local. Earnhardt Carolina loves. Let's hope they come to love Lawson as much.

2 Comments

Civilization, or Something

4/8/2015

0 Comments

 
PictureIndian man in match coat, drawn by John White during his 1585 visit to Carolina. The term "match-coat" appears to be a folk etymology from the Algonquian word "mantchcor" or "matchcor." Interesting world, yes? (Image from virtualjamestown.com.)
Lawson, as he goes about his business, speaks mostly of visual observations. Of the Indians he meets, he describes their clothing (they almost always wear "match coats," a sort of toga-style piece of fabric worn connected over one shoulder):

Their Feather Match-Coats are very pretty, especially some of them, which are made extraordinary charming, containing several pretty Figures wrought in Feathers, making them seem like a fine Flower Silk-Shag; and when new and fresh, they become a Bed very well, instead of a Quilt. Some of another sort are made of Hare, Raccoon, Bever, or Squirrel-Skins, which are very warm. Others again are made of the green Part of the Skin of a Mallard's Head, which they few perfectly well together, their Thread being either the Sinews of a Deer divided very small, or Silk-Grass. When these are finish'd, they look very finely, though they must needs be very troublesome to make. Some of their great Men, as Rulers and such, that have Plenty of Deer Skins by them, will often buy the English-made Coats, which they wear on Festivals and other Days of Visiting. Yet none ever buy any Breeches, saying, that they are too much confin'd in them, which prevents their Speed in running, &c.

He describes the forests and greenery he encounters, in this part of the world noticing an end to the Spanish Moss: "From the Nation of Indians until such Time as you come to the Turkeiruros in North Carolina, you will see no long Moss upon the Trees," and he's exactly right -- we saw Spanish Moss at the beginning of the trek that took us from the High Hills of Santee to the town of Camden, and I haven't seen a strand of it since. He notices that the Indians have a special mark of respect:  "At Noon, we stay'd and refresh'd ourselves at a Cabin, where we met with one of their War-Captains, a Man of great Esteem among them. At his Departure from the Cabin, the Man of the House scratch'd this War-Captain on the Shoulder, which is look'd upon as a very great Compliment among them. "

Something about that shoulder scratch appeals to me; Lawson mentions it more than once, and it seems like such a lovely predecessor of the vaguely uncomfortably two-guy sidehug or the performance level shoulders-touching-two-thump handshake that it reminds me: Lawson was a guy just like I am, and the people he met were just people. Just like the people I meet.

Picture
Like Lawson, we come across many abandoned properties.
Picture
Developed territory indeed. Lawson never saw a prison.
Speaking of people, we walked into Camden thinking about the longstanding groups of people whose territories we're walking through. Walking through the High Hills of Santee -- the hills overlooking the upper Santee River and its formation at the confluence of the Wateree and Congaree rivers -- I took what I fear may have been the last truly backpack-style trip during this undertaking. Through there I -- mostly alone -- walked along sand roads and even on actual forest trails, sleeping in state and county campgrounds. Once I made it north of Manchester State Forest, though, I was on mostly two-lane asphalt, which means different shoes (yes sneakers or trail runners; hiking boots no, no, a thousand times no) and a different experience. Now I'm always among people, in at least farmed and often developed territory. In a way this is more Lawsonian anyhow.

That is, Lawson himself when he got to this part of the world was just moving from Indian town to Indian town, and he and his friends only rarely had to sleep out of doors. Not that he always liked the Indian hospitality he received: The People of this Nation are likely tall Persons, and great Pilferers, stealing from us any Thing they could lay their Hands on, though very respectful in giving us what Victuals we wanted," he says of the Wateree-Chickanee Indians he meets not far from here. "We lay in their Cabins all Night, being dark smoaky Holes, as ever I saw any Indians dwell in."

Two friends joined me for the walk into Camden, though I entered Camden alone (described here). But our lodgings were anything but dark smoaky holes. The delightful Joanna Craig of Historic Camden offered us the basement of the historic Kershaw-Cornwallis house, which enabled us to stay bone dry on what was actually a rather rainy weekend. Some nearby Boy Scouts had a somewhat harder time of it.
Picture
Troop 5 from Rock Hill manfully braved the elements. We urban dandies from the Lawson Trek stayed warm and dry in the basement of the Kershaw-Cornwallis House.
Picture
This house was originally built in the mid-1700s. It survived the Revolution but not the Civil War and was rebuilt on its original foundations in 1977.
PictureThe map of Camden from the 1825 Mills Atlas. You can see how it's just off the Wateree, and that the old road -- surely the one Lawson would have followed up from the Santee. (Image from South Carolina Digital Library -- http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/search/collection/rma.)
Joanna Craig gave us a mile-a-minute explanation of the history of Camden, which, founded in 1732, was the first inland Carolina town settled by Europeans. King George II was looking to get the Indians off prime riverside land and spread English settlement. The town was first planned as Fredericksburg, right on the Wateree River, then called Pine Tree Hill, then finally put in its current spot (actually rather swampy; it still floods, Joanna assures me) in 1758, when Joseph Kershaw arrived from England, established a store, and got things going. The town was called Pine Tree Hill until it was renamed after Lord Camden, a supporter of colonial rights. Its downtown main street -- Broad Street; Lawson would have walked the Indian trail on which it's lain -- is filled with buildings designed by Robert Mills, the designer of the Washington Monument and many other neoclassical buildings, to say nothing of the author of the 1825 Mills Atlas of South Carolina, from which the wonderful description of the rock house near Forty-Acre Rock comes.  The revolutionaries lost the Battle of Camden, by the way, lost it big time. Cornwallis took over the Kershaw house and imprisoned its owner for the duration; "hundreds of unhappy prisoners" of the revolutionaries had the same fate penned in the yard.

So anyhow, into, and through, and past, Camden we went, and in Camden as in Charleston and in McClellanville and in Jamestown and in Horatio we found friends to help us out. I've already mentioned Joanna Craig, who helped and organized and gave us warm and dry sleeping quarters, but at Books on Broad we met owner Laurie Funderburk, who organized a meet-and-greet that was absurdly well attended, the Camdenites coming out and introducing themselves en masse and in all ways making the Lawson Trek feel welcome. 

So we wandered. A day into Camden, a day in Camden, then another day north, partway to Lancaster. We visited Boykin on our way into town, where we met Susan Simpson, the broom lady, going about the business of making brooms in a little cabin that had housed slaves in 1740, and saw the mill pond, there since 1792 and the church built six years earlier. 

We saw cemeteries and plantation houses, cotton fields and tree farms, and the usual spate of abandoned houses, including one that took our breath away, not least because as we made our way across a cottonfield to explore it a machine came out to spray the field with nitrogen. It looked like an average machine until it automatically spread its pipes to begin spraying. Michael saw praying mantis; I saw vampire; and Katie, the ecologist, saw, she said, "threat behavior." 

What we loved most, though, was the town itself. "Horses and history," Joanna said were the themes of Camden, and it's clearly finding a way to keep itself alive with its historical district, arts and antiques dealers, and the nation's second oldest polo field. Camden became a resort town for late-nineteenth-century snowbirds, which gave the horse community its beginning, and it's remained ever since. 

Walking through town was delightful; this was the first town the Lawson Trek has come through whose primary history did not involve Lawson, explorers, or Indians. Seeing the tidy streets of old houses, many from the years immediately after the revolution, was thrilling and homey and peaceful.
Picture
Streets so homey and adorable you could just wiggle.
Picture
Susan Simpson, the broom lady, working on brooms. She has a two-year order backlog, but she'll be glad to see you just the same.
Picture
You really had to kind of be there, though.
More, we noticed among the porches that most Southern of traditions -- many with ceilings painted haint blue, supposedly to keep ghosts away because the ghosts perceive the blue paint as water and won't cross it. 

Oh, yeah -- Indians. Of course Camden has an Indian history. It was probably very near the center of the town of Cofitachequi, an Indian polity visited by de Soto, Pardo, and, as late as 1670, by Henry Woodward, the first British colonist of South Carolina. It was gone by the time Lawson came through, when the territory was the southern reach of the Catawba people.
Lawson met tremendous hospitality among the Catawbas (as he did everywhere), though not long after Lawson passed through things got less cheerful. King Haigler, a revered Catawba chief, would have been an infant when Lawson passed through -- he was born in 1700, so Lawson may have chucked him under the chin or dandled him on his knee. In any case, in 1754 he became chief, and he was evidently much beloved: he's considered the "patron saint" of Camden and he's in the South Carolina Hall of Fame. His image is everywhere in Camden. 
Picture
Picture
Fat lot of good it did him. He's the chief who signed the treaty that supposedly provided a 15-square-mile reservation for the Catawbas in South Carolina. That didn't work out too well (long story, but the Catawbas finally regained federal recognition in 1993), and Haigler was killed by a band of Shawnee. 
0 Comments

    Archives

    January 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    African American
    Angie Clemmons
    Anthropocene
    Apothecary
    Appalachian
    Archaeologists
    Archaeology
    Army-navy
    Art
    Artifacts
    Atlanta
    Backpack
    Banking
    Barbecue
    Barry Beasley
    Bath
    Beaufort
    Beckee Garris
    Beetle
    Beginning
    Ben Franklin
    Berm
    Bill
    Birds
    Blister
    Book
    Bookstore
    Boston
    Botanical
    Boykin
    Breach
    Brent Burgin
    Brownlee
    Buck
    Buffer
    Cabelas
    Cambridge
    Camden
    Camera
    Canoe
    Canty
    Catawba
    Chain
    Charleston
    Charlotte
    Chelsea
    Chocolate
    Chris Judge
    Church
    Cincinnati
    City Of Raleigh Museum
    Civilization
    Coe
    Comment
    Community
    Concord
    Confederate
    Contentnea
    Cornwallis
    Country Music
    Couture
    Crawford
    Creek
    Croatoan
    Cutler
    Cypress
    Danger
    Davis
    Death
    Delightsome
    Delk's
    Denton
    Devices
    Drake
    Drawing
    Drunk
    Duck
    Durham
    Eagle
    Earnhardt
    Earth Day
    East
    Ecologist
    Effron
    Embankment
    End
    Error
    Evans
    Exhibit
    Expeditions
    Facebook
    Feather
    Fern
    Finish
    Fire
    Flag
    Flintlock
    Flood
    Francis
    French
    Gaillard
    Gander Mountain
    Garden
    Geology
    Gimpy
    GIS
    Google
    Great Wagon Road
    Green
    Greenville
    Grifton
    Guerry
    Gun
    Guns
    Haigler
    Hallenbeck
    Hampton
    Hanging
    Hannah Smith
    Harris
    Hartford
    Harvest
    Heat
    Hempton
    Highway
    Hillsborough
    Hips
    Historic Bath
    Hollow Rocks
    Home
    Homeness
    Hortus Siccus
    Hospitality
    Huguenots
    Huntley
    Indians
    Instagram
    Interstate
    Island
    Ivy
    Ivy Place
    Jamaica
    Jarvis
    Jennifer Landin
    Jered
    Jimmy White
    John Jeffries
    John White
    Journalism
    Kadaupau
    Kannapolis
    Katawba Valley Land Trust
    Katie Winsett
    Kayak
    Kershaw
    Keyauwee
    King
    Knife
    Lame
    Land
    Language
    Lawson
    Lawsonians
    Lecture
    Legacy
    Legare
    Legislators
    Leigh Swain
    Lenoir
    Lenoir Store
    Lenses
    Library
    Lichen
    Lies
    Loberger
    Locke
    London
    Longleaf
    Lost Colony
    Lynch
    Lynching
    Magnuson
    Mansplaining
    Maps
    Mass Shooting
    Match-coat
    Mathematical
    Meerkat
    Memorial
    Mental Floss
    Mill
    Millstone
    Miniature
    Monkeyshine
    Moonshine
    Museum
    Museum Day Live
    Musings
    Nancy
    Nascar
    Native American Studies Center
    Natural History Museum
    Nature
    Nesbit
    Netherton
    Neuse
    Newspaper
    Nonfiction
    Notebooks
    Occaneechi
    Orlando
    Pack's Landing
    Palmetto
    Pamlico
    Park
    Patent Leather
    Pedestrian
    Peggy Scott
    Periscope
    Petiver
    Photography
    Physic
    Pig
    Pig Man
    Pittsburgh
    Pocket
    Poinsett
    Polo
    Potsherd
    Pottery
    Preparation
    Presentation
    Press
    Process
    Proofreading
    Property
    Publishing
    Raccoon
    Racing
    Racism
    Racist
    Raleigh
    Rape
    Ray
    Readings
    Reconsideration
    Records
    Revolution
    Richard Smith
    Richardson
    Rights
    Riparian
    Rivulet
    Road
    Roadness
    Roanoke
    Robert Off
    Roland Kays
    Rolling Stone
    Roombox
    Rules
    Salisbury
    Santee
    Sapona
    Sassafras
    Scan
    Sconc
    Seneca
    Seth
    Shakespeare
    Sir Walter Raleigh
    Slavery
    Slime Mold
    Sloane
    Slope
    Small Town
    Smith
    Smithsonian
    Snow
    Sore
    Sounds
    Spanish Moss
    Specimens
    Speedway
    Spencer
    State Fair
    Steve Grant
    Stewart
    St. Mark's
    Suburban
    Sumter County
    Surveying
    Swamp
    Tar River
    Technology
    Textile
    Tide
    Tobacco
    Toms River
    Tool
    Towel
    Trade
    Trading Ford
    Trading Girls
    Trail
    Trap
    Traunter
    Tree
    Tree Farming
    Trek
    Trilobite
    Troi Perkins
    Truth
    Tryon
    Tupelo
    Turkey
    Tuscarora
    Twitter
    Ugly
    Unc
    Val
    Val Green
    Virginia
    Virginia Dare
    Virginia Historical Society
    Walking
    Washington
    Waxhaw
    Weather
    Website
    White
    Writing
    Wrong
    Yadkin
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly