House and Home A legend lives on Franklin Street. by David E. Brown '75 Originally printed in the March/April 2004 Carolina Alumni Review. Once, when Chapel Hill was small and tight, young professors built roomy houses with big porches and sprawling lawns within a short walk from their work. They probably weren't thinking about a brilliant inves tment in the tony residential district that would evolve from the rutted dirt-and-mud lane that was Franklin Street; they didn't know of a university so big that faculty working in the same academic discipline would become so scattered they wouldn't see each other every day. James Love and his wife, June, settled at 410 East Franklin in 1887. Her local-celebrity mother moved in with them. Being the youngest member of the faculty, Love got caught in a layoff and had to go north looking for a teaching position. When he was hired at Harvard, his wife joined him there, and Cornelia Phillips Spencer had the house to herself. A hundred years later, the James Love House has a wider wraparound porch guarding the floor-to-ceiling windows, and one of the town's signature low rock walls rings a yard full of old hardwoods. It is an understated complement to the UNC System president's house next door, a handsome presence on the much-romanced street yet attached seamlessly to the campus a half block behind Alderman dorm. The house long ago went out of the family, and the University has it now. Recently, the family came back. Spencie Love, an author and historian in the later stages of raising her children, finally had some time on her hands, and she rented 410 East Franklin with an ear to what those walls might have to say about her grandmother and great-grandmother. Both were long gone before Love was born. One of her first contacts with her past came when she was a graduate student at Duke, living in Chapel Hill, and heard of the controversial plan to build a loop road through Battle Park, one of the campus' more serene spots on its east side. Someone told her that Cornelia Phillips Spencer, in her day, had spoken out against development of Battle Park. "Over the years they became important figures in my life because of their writings," Love said. "As a historian I've always been thrilled with the idea that you could go back." It's a five-minute walk from the Love House to the halls of the Southern Historical Collection, where many hands have pored over the voluminous collection of Cornelia Phillips Spencer's letters, poems and published stories and opinions. Love went through the papers "pretty systematically. There's a way you can get to know people even more intimately after they die, through their papers — things that would have been in private diaries while they were alive. "It was like it was meant to be." On the smaller original porch, June Spencer Love, left, and Cornelia Phillips Spencer; at left is a woman identified as Beck, the cook. Below, the house today. photo above: Southern Historical Collection. photo below: Dan Sears '74 Apparently nobody was interested in the oil paintings stuffed in there with the papers; most people went to the Spencer papers to study the feisty woman's harder edge. Love doesn't think anybody else knew about the paintings of the plants and wildflowers, 25 to 30 of them, some in Cornelia Phillips Spencer's hand and some in her daughter June's. She contacted the Chapel Hill Historical Society, which mounted an exhibit and had some of the work printed for sale. It all was a little overwhelming. Standing on the big front porch, Love would look across the street at the house where Cornelia Phillips Spencer's parents had lived, and the ones on either side of it where her brothers Charles and Samuel lived, and the tiny law office on the corner built by Samuel, who was a U.S. solicitor general. All this one block over from Spencer residence hall, the first dorm UNC built for women. Love says she was always nervous about what would become of the house. While she lived there she did some work for Carolina's Southern Oral History Program. When the program hit its 25th birthday in 1999, the staff had parties in the Love House. There was talk among the historians about what would be its natural next chapter. Caught in a crisis "Chapel Hill people are very poor. We are all so dependent on the prosperity of the Uni.[versity] that its decline carries the whole village down. The Faculty are greatly straightened. I could tell you some pitiful stories of some of them. And the future is both dark and uncertain..." — Cornelia Phillips Spencer to Ellen Mitchell Summerell, 1866 One could read nothing but Spencer's letters and poetry; her published commentary on education, politics, social institutions; and accounts of her naturalist wanderings and learn a great deal about North Carolina in the second half of the 19th century. She was a campaigner statewide for better schools and honest lawmaking, an early Chapel Hill tree hugger and a close witness to the sensational whirlwind of the University's growing pains and pleasures, the Civil War and all it tore apart, and the odd ways men behaved in the post-war chaos. Besides her son-in-law, her father and brother were professors, and her husband was a lawyer; she had no formal education. What endears the Carolina community to her is that she was passionately in love with the ideal of the public university, and the kinds of people and town it created. She would dress it in pretty ribbons one day and claw someone's eyes out over it the next. "Drop Mr. Pool into the boots of Dr. Caldwell, or of Gov. Swain, he may peep over the tops, but he can only stumble about in them." — Spencer to a friend at the outset of the 1869-76 UNC presidency of Soloman Pool, upon whom she regularly heaped this sort of abuse. Spencer was gracious and giving to an army of friends, acerbic and impatient with those who crossed her. She was a gifted observer and historian — a perfect fit for a day when people had the time, or took it, to write and sketch. Her Softer Side Spencer's eye for detail is evident in the hand that held her brush and her pen. "The way I go after dog-tooth violets is through a pretty grove till you come to a rock wall with a gate in it; —through the gate along a lane till you come to the brow of a hill that looks off up and down and over a valley several miles long with a streak of dark blue horizon in the north-east. Through the valley runs a fair-sized creek and swelling hills tinted now with springing wheat, and log-cabins hidden among them, , and pine groves showing where old fields have been, and interminable forests of oak and hickory and ash stretch away off to the horizon. We turn sharp to the left and aim for a solitary pine tree that towers on the steep hillside above the creek from a thicket of deciduous growth almost impassable. We slip and slide halfway down the hill and come to one of the loveliest springs you ever saw, gushing from a rock basin pure and free, and losing itself in a wet swamp of leaves and moss and decayed trunks of trees not ten feet from the spring. We are within 20 minutes walk of a village that was laid out in 1790, and the spot is still as wild and secluded as when the Indian stopped to slake his thirst here. Some vandal hath lately felled a fine red oak that stood half a yard from the spring. A most inexcusable piece of wanton barbarity, for it would be impossible to get a wagon to the spot to carry away the wood, and here the fallen monarch lies, headlong down the hill he had so long adorned and shaded, having crushed not a few of his slender neighbors in his fall. Oh! how angry I do get with the men and boys who go about with their axes, desecrating such spots, merely because they can, and there is no one to hinder them." Posters were printed of five of Spencer's and her daughter's paintings after Spencie Love discovered them in the archives. They are being sold by the Chapel Hill Historical Society. She brooded in the post-war years over the ominous signs that UNC finally would succumb to hard times, and she seemed to barely endure the period from 1870-75 when it was shut down. "I received a letter to-day from a gentleman, which spoke of the restoration of the University as something to be looked for now, not far off. I cannot write of it without tears swelling — I cannot speak of it without a sob. Since reading that letter I have been sitting with my head in my hands, picturing these Halls thrown open, these buildings tenanted, these groves once more vocal, these decaying residences repaired, this deserted village once again prosperous and populous." — writing in The Presbyterian, January 1875 Two months later, on her 50th birthday, she received a wire from Raleigh saying the University would reopen, and she climbed to the South Building belfry and performed the act for which she's best known, ringing the school's bell in celebration. In September, she de corated the chapel with evergreens, made sure the portraits of the University's distinguished were hung and wrote a hymn for the 59 students who came. The next June, she wrote: "I have lived to see another Commencement. Have seen the college chapel crowded once more, with 750 fans in motion at once. Have seen the campus thronged and the procession marching, what time we heard the sound of the harp, flute, sackbut, dulcimer, psaltery, and all kinds of musical instruments." Those words were mailed to Ellie Swain Atkins, the daughter of David Swain (class of 1825), second president of UNC. Ellie Atkins' husband was the commander of the Union force that occupied Chapel Hill near the end of the war, and Spencer had traced the roots of the malaise that fell over the University to that scandalous marriage. Spencer's brother Charles was elected chair of the new faculty, and she was promptly off on another cause — to rub the state's nose in its double standard of education for boys and for girls. Love doesn't think her great-grandmother set out to crusade. "I don't think that was her destiny at all, in her perspective," she said, adding that she seemed to get caught in a crisis — the loss of the University and the resulting exodus from the town — in which she had a personal stake. "She wanted to bring 'em back." Spencer was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from UNC. A World War II liberty ship and dorms at Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro were named for her, as is an award given by the University each spring to a woman who has made outstanding contributions to UNC. In 2002, eight years after its inception, the Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award ceremony was the target of protesters who called her a racist. Some people thought the protest was inappropriate. Others found it a delicious touch to the proceedings. A full circle Spencer was gone before Harry Chase began the University's real push into progressive research- and service-based higher education. Chase, president from 1918 to 1930, attracted the sociologist Howard W. Odum and set off a chain reaction that quickly gained Carolina a reputation as a first-rate place to study the American South. It is, said retired sociology Professor John Shelton Reed, "one thing — maybe the one thing — that we do better than anybody else in the world." Said former UNC System President William Friday '48 (LLB), "It projected the University as the center of intellectual inquiry on the South." Researchers openly and aggressively studied things many Southerners didn't like to have talked about or questioned — race, poverty and control of their own destiny. The initial faculty trained and inspired a cadre of graduate students who carried on the tradition. The Southern Historical Collection became the premier depository for the region's documentary history. Cornelia Phillips Spencer For its part, the Southern Oral History Program has upheld the kind of prestige Odum established. More recently, the University created the Center for the Study of the American South, which spun off the journal Southern Cultures. The Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life, launched in 1997 in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, hosts an annual roundtable of Southern journalists. Last year, UNC landed an Odum-like catch when William Ferris left behind 18 years at the University of Mississippi to accept a history professorship at UNC. The former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture brought a new vigor to Southern studies, and he brought a vision that these flagship programs on the campus should be housed together where they would be noticed. "We rarely see each other — certainly not daily," Ferris said. Not only are the various history programs scattered about Hamilton Hall and the journalism program across the quad, but the Center for the Study of the American South, of which Ferris is associate director, draws on resources all over the campus, such as the Center for Civil Rights in the law school, the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, the private enterprise center in the business school, and literature and music programs. "There is no center to the Center right now," he said. Ferris' office in Mississippi was in an antebellum observatory; he's been impressed by other cultural centers housed in buildings that reflect "their geographical heritage" — an adobe in the Southwest, a saltbox in New England. The big rooms at 410 E. Franklin, where Spencie Love lived when she started a methodical study of her great-grandmother's papers, will house the Center for the Study of the American South, the Southern Oral History program and related UNC programs. photo by Dan Sears '74 The James Love House, Ferris said, "essentially is like approaching the University from Franklin Street to the Old Well. It evokes the history of this University architecturally in ways that are very important. It resonates with the history of the institution." Many people assume Southern studies is a Carolina birthright. In fact, when Southern experts such as Reed, George Tindall '48 (MA) and Joel Williamson retired, there was no mandate that they be replaced with people whose focus was the South, and many humanities faculty were not sold on the idea that it should continue. Ferris is shooting toward 10 endowed professorships in Southern studies, which he says would guarantee its permanence. The plan to bring together the American South center, the oral history program, the politics and media center and Southern Cultures at 410 East Franklin is central to Ferris' mission to raise the programs' profile. "When you go to The Carolina Inn, everything about it says 'Southern,' " Ferris said. "This is a complement to everything we plan to do in the Love House." The house will need an addition, and while looking for donors, the Southern studies folks also are carefully courting Chapel Hill's historic preservationists, who will insist that the new space off the back have a low profile. Spencie Love has stopped worrying about what will become of the house that was home to the two women for whom she is named. David E. Brown '75 is senior associate editor of the Review.