Category: Wake Forest History

Intern Reflections: The Material Culture of Textile Production

The spinning wheel that currently sits in the Calvin Jones House has long stopped producing thread, but while I studied it I was inspired me to think about conflicts around spinning and textile production and consider how this history is as political as it is material. The spinning wheel, though not original to the home, would have been the style of wheel used by enslaved women like Judy, Becky, and Comfort who lived and labored on Calvin Jones’s plantation in the 1820s. With great skill and patience, these women would have been able to produce large quantities of yarn in a relatively short time using this wheel. Several letters between Calvin and Temperance Jones suggest that Judy, Becky, and Comfort frequently refused to spin, despite being ordered to do so. This kind of resistance from enslaved workers refusing to spin is documented in other sources as well.

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DuBois Collection is Now Online

With the help of DuBois School alumni and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the museum’s archival material related to Wake Forest’s DuBois School is now available online. The DuBois School student newspaper, The Gazette, makes up most of the digitized material, but you will also find a 1964 and 1965 student yearbook, and material published by the National Alumni Association of DuBois.

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Intern Reflections: “The rich legacy of Black education across generations.”

As an intern with the Wake Forest Historical Museum, I’ve been pouring through census data, finding traces of children as young as six, adult musicians, religious leaders, and school teachers who contributed to a project of Black learning prior to and in the aftermath of emancipation in Wake Forest.

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