Join the museum staff for our January 2022 book club meeting. This month, we are reading The Underground Railroad (2018) by Colson Whitehead. Our book discussion will be held on Tuesday, January 17. The novel explores the horror and tragedy of slavery and a young woman’s escape from bondage. Registration is limited. See below for details and a link to sign up.
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Meet Intern John Corey
This fall, Wake Forest University junior John Corey is helping the museum build a database that pulls together the people, places, and events associated with the Wake Forest Plantation from 1820 to 1832. To learn more about John, we asked him to complete a short questionnaire.
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Meet Intern William Valtos
This fall, Wake Forest University senior William Valtos is helping the museum build a database that pulls together the people, places, and events associated with the Wake Forest Plantation from 1820 to 1832. To learn more about William, we asked him to complete a short questionnaire.
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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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Museum Book Club
Join us for the museum’s new book club. On May 10 join museum staff for a conversation about Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.
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Virtual Book Club: The Waterman’s Song
Join museum staff and fellow book lovers as we read The Waterman’s Song and learn about the lives of the black boatman, pilots, ferrymen, fishermen, sailors, and artisans in nineteenth-century North Carolina.
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