Am I Really Transplanted If My Roots Predate North Carolina?

Between 1640 and 1650, my earliest North Carolinian ancestors made their way down the Chowan River (pronounced cho-WONN) from Virginia to an area known as Salmon Creek, across from present day Edenton.

It is near where the Chowan empties into Albemarle Sound and approximately where my 8th great grandmother Mary Jane was given birth, almost exactly two hundred years before me.

She eventually gave her birthplace as Bath, which, further south. became the first town here by the time she was in her 50s.

Of course, these ancestors weren’t the first people here.

Having migrated from the north, Native Americans including paleo-ancestors of the Chowanaoke or Chowanac people for whom the river had been named by explorers in 1584, had already been living here more than 10,000 years by then.

Listed simply as “Bay”, the Sound was not yet named Albemarle, nor was this area called Carolina at the time my ancestors ventured down,  let alone North Carolina.

It was the northern reaches of what was simply referred to by Virginians as the southern province or plantation, which had only become a colony itself less than two decades earlier.

Officially it was known as Carolana at the time.  It included what is now North and South Carolina, as well as Georgia and was stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean a little more than a decade later.

Shown in this essay is a very Virginia-centric map created the year after my 8th great grandmother was born in Carolana.

East to west, it depicted the continent clear to the Pacific, something famously reprised by a cover to The New Yorker in 1976 parodying the view of the continent from 9th Avenue in Manhattan.

General notions of this span had been created when Spanish explorers rode across North America a hundred years earlier.  Ironically, the first was Estevanico, an enslaved African-American, who made the journey in part, as the main guide, all the way from Florida to New Mexico and Arizona.

The other was Hernando de Soto who crossed into what is now North Carolina in May of 1540 near what became Tryon, NC and explored across the Appalachians where Asheville is now and all the way to the Mississippi River near what would become Memphis.

I suspect my 8th great grandmother’s parents when she was born in North Carolina in 1650 were French Huguenots who had settled along the Virginia headwaters of the Chowan and had begun by the time she was born to venture down to trade in furs.

My hunch is because she married a Huguenot and because in the 1630s, this area had been intended for resettlement of large numbers of Huguenot refugees who had fled murderous religious persecution in France.

The grant was disputed and the idea eventually entangled in the English Civil War by 1642 just after some Hugenots had landed near Jamestown.

Huguenots are a branch of Protestant Calvinism and I have that heritage on both sides, though separated by 197 km in western France, the other settling near that time in Massachusetts.

My earliest Tar Heel roots eventually merged with the lines of an ancestor, James Shelton, who had arrived in Virginia in 1609 with a cousin and fellow London Company investor, Lord De La Warr.

This heritage was passed to me from my maternal great-grandmother Lizzie Shelton, whose grandfather Sebert had migrated first from Virginia to Illinois and then over my native Rockies coupled with a stint in the Mexican-American War before ranching in Northern California.

A life-long westerner and fifth generation Idahoan, I soon learned a part of me was coming home when twenty-six years ago I was recruited to North Carolina, a two hour drive west from where my ancestors gave birth to a baby daughter 339 years before.

In 1728, the border between Virginia and North Carolina was first jointly surveyed, with each side alternately measuring two mile segments.

But after the line had been run inland for 73 miles, the North Carolinians went home, refusing to believe that anyone would settle that far inland, let alone the more than 100 miles further where I would settle 261 years later.

It took twenty years before all 327 miles would be fully mapped.

One of my first purchases when I arrived was a newly published text to which I still refer today entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

Little did I realize how personal it would become.

Idaho’s “Red Dirt” Inspirations

I was reminded while streaming the movie Soda Springs, just how much Oklahoma meant to me growing up where the Middle and Northern Rockies of Idaho intersect.

For a few years, KOMA 1520 was the only way kids like me who were coming of age between the late 1950s and 1960s in the Mountain region of the west could hear the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Wolfman Jack.

Atmospheric conditions late at night made the Oklahoma City station seem like the center of our cultural universe.

But the movie reminded me of an even stronger connection between Idaho and the part of Oklahoma around Stillwater, which is the center of “Red Dirt,” a genre of Country rock where indie rock and alt-country intersect into Americana.

Many people think “Red Dirt” emerged in the 1990s but for me it is the sound heard on the bootleg Basement Tape cut in early 1967 by Bob Dylan and what became the group The Band.

Long before they were officially released, Wolfman made many of the songs hits such as I Shall Be Released and Quinn the Eskimo.  You can also hear its influence on music Dylan recorded a few years later with Leon Russell.

Red Dirt music transcends geography.

Today you can hear its influence on Garth Brooks and Miranda Lambert.  The movie Soda Springs reminded me of an Idaho connection to the stars who have remained true to the genre such as Mickey and the Motorcars and Reckless Kelly.

The ancestral ranch where I was born rests where the Bitterroots and Tetons meet along the 5,259 foot Yellowstone Highlands.

A six day ride by horseback from the back of the ranch west of Ashton takes you down across sagebrush valleys and back up to Challis at 5,253 feet in the drier mountains of central Idaho.

About the same population of around 1,000, Ashton and Challis, until recently were also rivals in sports until put in different divisions.

Challis has spawned two of the top Red Dirt bands founded by brothers in the Braun family who are now Austin-based.  They come home to Challis and Idaho each year for a Red Dirt music festival in August that I hope to catch one year on my way to an annual lakeside rendezvous.

The movie features two of my Red Dirt favorites Rock Springs to Cheyenne and Carolina Morning, both of which prominently feature mentions of Idaho, one written by an Idaho native and the other by a transplant and both performed by a band formed in Idaho.

The former was written in 1982 by Kip Attaway based on his seminal trip to Idaho in the “winter of ‘72,” at a time when a few months from graduating at BYU, I was experiencing my own bad stretch.

The latter was written in 1988 by Idaho rancher-songwriter Pinto Bennett but I enjoy the versions performed by the current day Red Dirt band Mickey and the Motorcars.

They predate the song Idaho written in 2006 by Americana artist Josh Ritter.  All three songs emote the Country Rock sound of the early 1970s pioneered by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris and made famous by the Byrds, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and the Eagles.

Soda Springs the movie, like Red Dirt country, is unpretentious like the state it depicts.  It is an hours drive north of where my fifth generation Idaho roots first took hold before it was a territory, long before it was a state.

My maternal grandparents lived in and around Soda from the time I was born until I was in high school.  The mountains are softer there than in my native nook but have their own story to tell.

It is a simple story set in Idaho, unmistakably filmed in Idaho, written and produced and sound-tracked by Idahoans who, like me see it far more for its mountains, rivers, lakes and range land than the corner where world famous potatoes grow.

For anyone unable to discern distinctions, you may find the first few lines of Red Dirt pioneer Tom Skinner’s song Nickels Worth of Difference useful solace.

For anyone needing a country genre scorecard, click here.

If you’ve Never Been Out West or to Idaho, it is true “the mountains touch the sky.” But its subtleties are best experiences on horseback.

The Prospect of Being Overrun

A few months ago a friend told our Rotary Club that 17% of all of the new apartments then under construction in North Carolina were within two miles of Duke University here in Durham.

It brought to mind a comment a professor made to that same group twenty-five years earlier.

I had just been hired during my former career to jump start Durham’s community marketing agency and after his speech, Dr. Clay Hamner, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business who also co-developed Brightleaf Square was asked what we were going to do with all of the hotels under construction.

“We should blow up half of them,” he quipped in a chacteristic growl.

Hotel developers back then, without a local destination marketing organization generating data to inform feasibility studies, were prone to use and reuse the same studies of forecasted supply and demand, even if horribly outdated.

Risky, but you would be surprised how often projects, even today, come out of the ground without factoring changes in supply, perhaps even some of these residential complexes.

Sitting in the audience that day, I knew we were already correcting that condition by providing Durham-specific market research but I also knew that we would fill many of those new guest rooms by retrieving Durham visitors who through misinformation at the time were being misdirected to stay in other communities.

The same thing will happen with all of the new apartments opening in Durham, many of which are downtown in developments inspired by Clay and his partner Terry Sanford Jr. when they set the adaptive reuse standard here more than three decades ago.

In other words, many people who will rent those apartments probably meant to be in Durham all along but were dissuaded by Realtors elsewhere or by water-cooler folk tales that it wasn’t cool enough (or safe enough.)

The same is true of all of the new hotels opening downtown.  Hotels don’t generate demand, they harvest it.

Think about it.  People don’t wake up in the morning thinking they want to go and stay in a hotel.  They stay in a hotel because it is in the destination and near the things they want to visit.

But many of the visitors who will stay downtown have probably been coming here for related reasons, but for lack of options had been overnighting elsewhere in Durham or even further away because a certain level of lodging was full here.

But relocating these visitors and renters is only the beginning of the process of “onboarding” them.  The fact that they were susceptible to misinformation in the first place, means they will take a good while before fully embracing Durham values.

After she read a recent post of mine entitled Mitigating Halloween and Our Obsession with Risk, a neighbor asked me if Durham is in danger of being overrun.

On our listserv, a group of longer established neighbors had unsuccessfully tried to reason with some newer arrivals set on blocking off streets.

To no avail, these neighbors were trying to “onboard” the newer arrivals to intrinsic Durham values such as being open and welcoming.

Self-righteousness prevailed.

The challenge any community marketing agency has, such as the three I led during my now-concluded career, is not just to draw anyone and everyone to visit and live here (more than 80% of newcomers secretly shop a community first as a visitor) but to help prospects make the decision that is right for them, even if it isn’t the community you represent.

That’s not only good business because it leads to higher customer satisfaction, but it also protects a community’s sense of place from being overrun by people who won’t like it here or aren’t apt to appreciate and adopt the core traits and values that distinguish it.

It is also why it never makes sense to lead promotional efforts off with mainstream facilities and events which, by nature, are not distinctive or authentically representative of a particular place, even to the people drawn to them, because they are identical to those in hundreds of other places.

It is also the reason any community’s best cultural investment is in a local history museum.  Researchers have found that these places uniquely give children, students, visitors and newcomers, including relocating executives a place to get in touch with a community’s story, a sense of its soul, and its “there” there.

This is the best investment in community attachment and sense of place any community can make.  As a side benefit, history museums also draw participation from the same proportion of visitors to a community as facilities for performing arts or sports events do.

If and when Durham finally builds a museum fully capable of showcasing Durham’s history, it will uniquely interpret that one of the organic values Durhamites have is being drawn to people who are diverse rather than to tribes who are just like they are.

It is the latter that has led to bigotry in many places over the years as well as the wholesale homogenization of many communities.

Certainly not everyone drawn to Durham or even born here is in synch with Durham.  I’ve even known several elected to high office over the years as well as counterparts in other areas of economic development who weren’t.

This isn’t just because political campaigns often focus on what’s wrong with a community or because some people in these roles view themselves as the “cavalry,” but because they just don’t value or even sense Durham’s intrinsic distinctiveness.

It was easy for me.

It was part of my job to tease out and leverage what makes places distinctive so I became a quick study on which communities would be a good fit for me.

We’re living in a time of downtown revitalizations across the nation and nowhere is that more evident than in Durham.  But experts fear that in the process most are in danger of simply becoming playgrounds for the well-to-do erasing the socio-economic diversity that gave them appeal in the first place.

There may be a fine line, as I am quoted as saying, between organic and funky and merely seedy, but there is an even finer line between being authentic and merely a shell of a real place.

The former attributes in each case are hallmarks of sustainable sense of place.

As I read the new book entitled The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman, a quote by famed jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis kept crossing my mind.

In an interview here on NPR’s The State of Things, when asked why he and his family chose to move to Durham, Marsalis responded eloquently with one of the values and traits that has made Durham distinctive since its founding.

"Durham is everything I ever wanted in a City. It's fair…You can find everything… people who are wealthy, people who are not wealthy, blue collar workers, white collar workers, farmers.

They are all hanging out together. You go in the grocery store and you see people talking. It's not like the farmers on one corner and the lawyers are in one corner. In Durham, you don't have those stringent class lines."

In his book, Dunkelman identifies this trait as crucial to a sense of community and the ability to coordinate, not with cliques or inner circles, but across class and racial distinctions with those with whom we may not always agree.

In one part of his book, there is a brief history of how communities evolved in America, the anchor of what early observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville saw as key to our exceptional nature.

Dunkelman’s book weaves together numerous other studies and books over the years and he reminded me of one I read in the early 1980s by Dr. Claude S. Fischer entitled To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City.

It was about the time I first read Wallace Stegner’s essay coining the term The Sense of Place and among the earliest influences I had in getting my head around how communities evolve organically and how even landscape and other traits help shape them and make them distinct from those even close by.

One was scientific, the other lyrical and combined they led me to my first grasp of community attachment and what made some communities worth loving and visiting and others not so much.

Today, sociological researchers such as Dr. Jeni Cross at Colorado State University focus on unwrapping sense of place and its relationship to attachment.

Cross breaks our relationship to a particular place down into biographical (historical and familial,) spiritual (emotional and intangible,) ideological (moral and ethical,) narrative (mythical,) commoditized (image of desirable physical traits) and dependent (when someone has no choice.)

She finds a cohesive sense of rootedness and attachment with ideological, spiritual and biographical.  The tragedy of becoming cool is that many drawn last in by that attribute alone will also be first out, leaving sense of place diminished. 

In the words of Wendell Berry, another of my influences, most will be boomers vs. stickers.

If Durham’s sense of place is sooner or later overrun, it won’t be solely the fault of poor public policy or gentrification gone amuck or blocking off streets by helicopter parents but because, as Dunkelman explains, the social architecture of communities is in transformation.

Preserving what makes Durham Durham is not just the job of politicians or agencies, even ones such as DCVB which is charged as a guardian.

It certainly won’t be about “thinking big” or “monumental” or “institutional,” all of which in the words of Jane Jacobs “have the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery” and deaden places.

It will also not be just about preservation or change but rather how a community blends both.

It will all come down to how badly grass roots individuals and groups want to keep coordinating across differences to find Durham solutions to Durham problems, just as those founders did and generations have done for decades.

Rootedness

It took me a while to remember why his name was familiar when a new friend my daughter’s age reached out recently to have coffee.

It wasn’t because he is the accomplished lead singer for the highly regarded group The Old Ceremony, although that should have been enough.  I often start writing each morning to the group’s song Wither on the Vine, Pt. 2.

I remember now when I first saw his name, not on a CD cover, but tucked into a remarkable photo essay about Durham that he authored for Design Sponge which I quickly forwarded to my community marketing team a few months before I retired from that field five years ago.

It makes sense that Django Haskins and I share a sense of rootedness and a passion for sense of place,  particularly in Durham.

As activities go, researchers cite music as a form of fantasy but for me at least it is at its most appealing when it reflects authenticity.

This explains my preference for the “roots” genre as we call it today and why even what researches find is the least authentic of the performing arts, touring Broadway musicals, that Once resonated so much more than others when I saw it on tour.

Authenticity is not only a spectrum, but there is even a spectrum  within activities that fall on the least authentic end.

But during incessant performance touring, a form of “extreme” tourism, Haskins began to pick up on what gave those rare places a “there” there, a “realness,” unlike the majority of others places where it was impossible to tell where you are.

A few years ago, my daughter and only offspring surprised me when she suggested we travel up through Stanley, Idaho, a remote area high in the mountains of my native state, on our annual pilgrimage to a family lake-side rendezvous in the Northern Rockies.

As she and my grandsons lay sleeping a few doors down, I arose early and was driving west looking for coffee.  Stanley is more than 6200’ above sea level and even in August the early morning temperature was barely 40 degrees.

The town’s population of around 60 had swelled just before our arrival with nearly 500 Forest Service firefighters working in shifts to battle the Halstead blaze lighting the pre-dawn sky over the ridge behind Stanley.

I had to settle for service station coffee when the song So Far Away came on the satellite radio station I was listening to.

Released as a b-side single just before my daughter was born, it became a favorite anthem for us during long stretches between visits as she was growing up.

Carole King, the anthem’s singer-songwriter had retreated to the Robinson Bar Ranch, the cut-off to which we would pass that morning on our way to Challis, a couple of years after I took the place-marketing post in Anchorage, my second of three.

After thirty years there and just before I retired, she moved just a hundred miles south into the town of Ketchum near Sun Valley which has an airport for private and charter jets.

On drives to and from her ranch, King would climb up out of the thirty-mile long valley of ranchland lying between the Sawtooth and White Cloud ranges.

Just before crossing over the 9,000’ Galena Pass she would have passed by an overlook dedicated to Senator Frank Church and his wife Bethine.

Bethine was the daughter of the former Governor of Idaho who also became a federal judge, named Chase Clark, who in 1917 with his wife had homesteaded the Robinson Bar Ranch.

It was across the broad Snake River plain from where my grandparents and great-grandparents had earlier homesteaded ranches along the Tetons and where both my father and I and my two sisters were born.

Judge Clark, who had spent much of his life in Idaho Falls, 50 miles below our ranch, died just a few months after I graduated from high school there in 1966.

But he, Senator Church and my great-grandfather Messersmith were an inspiration for me growing up, confirming that there was more to being Idahoan than being Republican like most of family were.

Carol King started writing hits such as Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow in 1960, when I was a rising 7th Grader, preparing to transcend the rivalry between my native Ashton Huskies and the Challis Vikings by starring on the junior varsity football team for the Greenacres Cubs.

Ok, subbing, on the practice squad but I lettered.

As an aside, the lead singer for the Shirelles thought the song was too country but the group’s 1961 version (with strings added) became the first #1 hit by an all-girl group, followed the next year by Soldier Boy and Baby It’s You.

It is a wonder I ever made it out of puberty, which didn’t start for most boys until the age I was back then.

At the time of her first hit as a songwriter, King was still a New York City teenager.  By my early 20s she released Tapestry, singing her own songs, one of the biggest selling albums of all time.

Just after I turned 30, she sought refuge and found her rootedness in my native Idaho, where its “there” there is most prominent.

In all, she has written far more than 400 songs which have been recorded by an astounding 1,000 artists.

“So far away

Doesn’t anyone stay in one place anymore”

A subsequent sequence also had special meaning for me because my chosen career was spent encouraging people to travel to particular places.

“One more song about moving along the highway

Can’t say anything of much that’s new”

As noted in his incredible essay, “The Geography of Somewhere,” Dr. Scott Russell Sanders explains that for many who travel, it is just a “far flung form of shopping,” merely another form of attention deficit consumption where any “there” there is immaterial.

But for the overwhelming proportion of travelers, researchers have learned that even those drawn to this and other forms of fantasy, places with a realness, an authenticity are preferable.

Community destination marketing organizations are supposed to be the guardian of sense of place but the great majority of places and their DMO executives have misplaced their bets instead on fantasy.

What these places and executives now have in common is a sense of rootlessness.

Worthy community marketing instead appeals to rootedness in travelers including those in search of places worthy of love as new residents or for relocating businesses. 

In his essay, Sanders uses the term “civic” to describe this place-based approach to tourism because the vast majority of travelers are in pursuit not for escape but paradoxically, to reinforce their rootedness and bring back a sense of home.

It is why a propensity for “rootedness” and not just a lust for travel should be a core competency sought for communities looking for someone to forge visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

Tony Knowles, a local restaurateur and friend in Anchorage who served on the Assembly and became Mayor and then Governor, would often kid me that he “trusted me to be that community’s tourism guy because I didn’t like to travel.”

Coincidentally, Tony had served in Vietnam with the 82nd Airborne which is based in North Carolina, where I would go next and where I remain.

What he also sensed while kidding me is that I was rooted, a job characteristic that helped me help the three communities I served during my career leapfrog those places that surrendered to fantasy instead.

It was in the early 1980s that I first read Dr. Wallace Stegner’s incredible essay coining the term sense of place.  It made me value my rootedness in a field where that was rare at the time and even more rare now.

He also turned my attention to Wendell Berry, one of his former institute fellows before retiring from Stanford, whom he mentions in the essay.

Berry is often compared to Thoreau in his uncanny grasp of and ability to eloquently capture the essence of place.

Stegner, Berry and Sanders should be required study for aspiring DMO execs as a means to get their heads around the more noble aspects of tourism.

Writing recently about rootedness, author, entrepreneur and road warrior Courtney Martin wrote in an essay on On Being that “Ultimately, life is made up of great conversations.  Whom do you want to have them with?  Some strangers, to be sure, but mostly with old friends, neighbors and family.”

Her essay reminded me of some wisdom on rootedness and perspective on travel written by Wendell Berry:

“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

As long as my adopted home is worthy of love from people such as Django Haskins, there is hope for its sense of place.