Why does local history matter?
That question was the central theme at a local birthday party last month. The party, held at the Durham County Library main branch, was for historian Jean Bradley Anderson, who turned 100 this summer. With a panel of historians, a crowd of around 70 admirers, and plenty of cake, the occasion marked not only an impressive birthday but the celebration of an impressive career in studying Durham’s past.
The celebration was supposed to end with an audience Q&A. But instead of asking questions, most of the audience members who took the mic simply thanked Anderson for her work.
“Librarians are not supposed to have favorite researchers, but I think if I were pressed you might be well up there at the top,” said a librarian at UNC’s Wilson Library.
“I learned more about my own family’s history by reading your book than I ever knew before,” said another audience member, “and I just want to thank you.”
Two weeks after the party, Anderson tells INDY that there wasn’t such a friendly attitude toward local history when her magnum opus, the nearly 600-page A History of Durham County was first published in 1990.
That’s partly because local history, in its raw forms, is not always that exciting to look at. It takes a historian like Anderson to dig through the dusty archives and build a digestible narrative.
”[A narrative] sort of forms itself, in your brain…you had the chronology and that was the spine and so if you knew any anecdotes to put on that spine, or the reasons from step one to step two, you could make a story out of it,” Anderson says.
And that birthday party question—“Why does local history matter?”—is answered on every page of Anderson’s iconic tome.
To explain why European colonists found the soil good for farming, Anderson looked 200 million years back to the formation of the Durham Triassic Basin, when volcanic activity formed a narrow trough across the eastern seaboard. To explain why I-85 was built through Durham County, Anderson looked to the centuries of Native American commerce that followed a trading path from Augusta, Georgia, to Richmond, Virginia.
And to explain the beginnings of Durham, Anderson looks to the establishment of a post office and a “disorderly house” in which an 1833 court case accuses “evil disposed persons of evil name and fame and conversation” of meeting up to cause mischief.
Anderson shows that massive scale of time without making Durham’s relatively short history feel any less significant. The city has changed plenty since Anderson arrived in 1955, around the beginning of the civil rights movement, for her husband’s job in the English department at Duke.
“There were really only two kinds of people: the town and the gown,” Anderson says. “The town was largely factory workers…cotton mills had mostly white workers, tobacco had largely Black. And there was a very, very clear distinction between them. The water fountains and the restrooms and waiting rooms at the train station, everything was as it had been in the post-Civil War.”
One of her first homes in the area had a cemetery in the yard, so she started researching the family trees of the people buried there.
“I’d get down on the floor, you know, with a ruler and draw the lines. It was great fun,” she says. That hobby, she adds, sprouted into a full career as an “accidental genealogist.”
“One of the clerks [in Yanceyville] got to know me and he said ‘Do you do this professionally?’ Well, I didn’t know anybody did,” she says. “But I thought it was an attractive idea.”
In the 1970s, Anderson was commissioned for a report on Stagville Plantation, which was eventually published by the newly established Durham Preservation Society. She went on to pen Carolinian on the Hudson: The Life of Robert Donaldson, The Kirklands of Ayr Mount, Piedmont Plantation: The Bennehan-Cameron Family and Lands in North Carolina, and a chapter in 27 Views of Durham, among other volumes.
The Jean Bradley Anderson Papers, her research collection housed at the Durham County Library, is a treasure trove for today’s historians.
[History] deepens your understanding of the people there, and why things are there, and everything gels into a rational and understandable situation. And you…begin to feel that that’s your place and that you have a place, that you are not floating around.”
Decades later, the Triangle is one of the fastest-growing spots in the country. Anderson intensely dislikes the boxy apartments being dropped downtown (“In the 1900s…if someone took it upon himself to build a bank, he made it as beautiful as he could make it. Whereas today, you make it as cheaply as you can make it,”) but welcomes the new residents.
She hopes they take the time to really get to know the place, just as she did when she moved from Philadelphia.
“Talk to the locals and get a clue,” she says. “[Local history] broadens your horizon of the place where you live—you begin to see the outskirts and the various parts of the town and how it all fits. And it deepens your understanding of the people there, and why things are there, and everything gels into a rational and understandable situation. And you…begin to feel that that’s your place and that you have a place, that you are not floating around.”
Anderson says she eventually gave up researching—not because she was too old, but because parking at the universities, with their deep archives, got too expensive. But she still enjoys learning from books and the internet, and she’s optimistic about the future of Durham—and humanity.
“I have great faith in young people. They seem to be better balanced…They’re alive to what’s going on in the world, and they have enthusiasm for what they like…And they seem to have—what we used to call—have their heads screwed on right.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].