Research Rabbit Hole: Bernard Cone Photograph Albums Edition
Dear Hugo,
in my Blue Stoop class this week we were tasked with bringing a photograph related to our writing project. I could have brought an old family photo, or one that I snapped on my phone while talking with Uncle Mike, maybe the persimmon tree where their dachshund once treed a possum.
Instead, though, I found this digital collection through the Greensboro History Museum website. Bernard Cone, one of the Cone Mills men, was also a hobbyist photographer. I’m a little astonished that this is so buried in the history museum’s website. Documentary interest aside, a lot of the images are just really beautiful.
It’s strange when you find source material so perfect for your research but also so overwhelming – nearly 1,500 images! I had a tiny moment of, like, oh noooo. Like I am about to lose an entire day to looking at these pictures and there is nothing I can do about it. The purest research rabbit hole of all.
Frustratingly, most are dated with only a broad decade range, 1890s-1920s, rather than an exact year. My theory is that most are from around 1908. There are a bunch of the Greensboro Centennial festivities that occured that year. There was a blimp and that seems to have been really big deal. Who doesn’t love a dirigible?
The exact year matters to me because Daisy Foust was born in 1899. (That’s Meemaw’s mother, or my great-grandmother, for those keeping track at home.) She could easily be in one of these pictures, one of the many mill children featured throughout.
Is this her?
Could she be one of these girls?
It’s probably stupid to think I could recognize her. I never met the woman and have only seen a few photographs of her, all when she was older. I don’t know what Meemaw looked like as a child, either. This is what she looked like as a young woman:
Is it possible to project backwards like this? To see the adult and imagine, accurately, the child? Probably not. But on the other hand, I do know what my mother looked like as a child, because photography wasn’t just a wealthy man’s hobby by the 1950s, and she looked exactly like my sister, and they both look exactly like my sister’s daughter, Cousin Nora, born in 2016. So maybe I would recognize some glint of eye that’s been passed down through a century and change. Daisy had five brothers, too, so maybe I should even be looking for that glint in a boys’s eye. I like this kid with the rabbits. Maybe he’s James or Joseph or June Wesley or John or Jabus.
Of course, the anonymity is the point. The unknowableness is the point. The mill children are just mill children. They aren’t named. The Cones are named. Here’s Herman, Ceasar II, and Benjamin Cone as boys:
How do you write the story of the unnamed and unidentifiable? For class we also read this excerpt of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Her book is the blueprint on this topic, as far as I’m concerned. I’m almost embarassed to say what an inspiration it is to me, because I know I could never write anything half as good. But maybe I can write something like 49% as good! If someone officially declared me 49% as brilliant as Saidiya Hartman I would die a happy and fulfilled person.
One more photo for the road. I like this one because the men look so contemporary to me, face-wise. I am going to keep looking through the photos for other calendars and potential date-revealing details, but I am exiting the rabbit hole for the time being.
Love,
M.