clair055

Mammy's little baby loves shot'nin', short'nin', Mammy's little baby loves short'nin' bread... If those lyrics don't immediately bring the song to mind, you can here a version here . It's one of the first songs I learned to play on the piano many, many moons ago. Most people believe this to be a song sung by slaves on the plantation, but it was actually first published with the lyrics I mention above in 1915.  It is considered to be a folk song. James Whitcomb Riley  is credited with creating an even earlier version in 1900. Shortening Bread is a  wonderful mixture of cornmeal, flour, hot water, eggs, baking powder, milk and shortening and instead of baking it you serve it fried.   Shortening is used to make various types of pastry and used for frying foods.  One of my favorite uses that I try to stay away from as much as possible is frosting such as the type of frosting on wedding cakes. Oh my!   What a wicked little pleasure that stuff is.... D...

This past week I performed a little experiment. I threw the word “history” out to various people–friends, waitresses, store clerks, even a couple of surprised strangers–and asked them to tell me what immediately popped into their minds. Various words were thrown back to me– events, dates, maps, wars, battles –and the list goes on. None of the responses really surprised me, but there are other words to parallel with the word history. Words like preservation, remember, and trust come to mind and unfortunately, the words failure, greed, demolish, surrender, neglect, and ignore are on the flipside as I continue examining the winding path of history a cotton mill where I live has taken. I shared the story over at Douglasville Patch last week where I have a weekly column regarding how Douglasville ended up with the cotton mill and how important the mill was to our economic health over most of the last century. You can see my column from last week here . Now I want to share the rest of the...

Lanett and Opelika in Alabama….Amity in Arkansas…..Hogansville, Canton, and Douglasville in Georgia….Concord and Carrboro in North Carolina and Cherokee Falls, Piedmont and Whitmire in South Carolina…..All of these places including many other cities and towns across the South were all major mill towns birthed during the New South era. The New South Era has as many definitions as other historical periods such as the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era, but for my purposes here I’m going with Edward L. Ayers.    In his book The Promise of the New South:   Life after Reconstruction he states the New South era began in the 1880s after the biracial and reformist experiment of Reconstruction had ended and the conservative white Democrats had taken power throughout the southern states. A fellow Georgian, Henry W. Grady, is credited with the term “New South” which represents an ideology that emphasized a new reliance upon railroads and industrialization to modernize the South. ...