Lecture Series
Annual Culture & Education Series.
Lecture II
“Shoemaking in the 18th Century”, will be brought to us by Mike Fox, of Shultz’ Shoemaking Shop in Old Salem.
Tuesday, March 16, from 6:30pm-7:30pm. Please call 252.426.7567 to reserve your space.
Mike Fox was raised around Winston-Salem, NC but went to college in Alabama. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in Art from Jacksonville State University. After school, he applied and was offered a job as an interpreter at Old Salem.
Old Salem Museums & Gardens, located in historic Winston-Salem, NC has three museums - the Historic Town of Salem, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) and the Old Salem Toy Museum.
Fox has worked at Old Salem since March of 1994 in the 1827 Samuel Shultz shoemaker's shop. He is now the senior shoemaker on staff. He took over the role of "Head Shoemaker" in 2002. Since then, he has developed some more period-specific styles and has set up a shoe shop in a room of the Single Brothers House which had been a shoe shop in the 1770's through the mid eighteen teens. After only six months working in the restored buildings and giving walking tours of the town, he was given the opportunity to join the Trades Department, provided he would agree to be trained as a shoemaker.
You can also see Fox working the wheel as a potter in documentary entitled, “Founding Brothers”.
Fox hopes his talk to the PCRA audience will be entertaining, informative and will help take us back into the history of pre-industrial shoemaking. Dorothy Spruill Redford Executive Director, Somerset Place State Historic Site (retired) Dorothy Spruill Redford was born in Columbia, North Carolina. She spent her early years in Queens, New York, and received her college training at Queens College. Inspired by Alex Haley’s Roots, by 1986, Redford had researched for nearly ten years to connect her life with those of her enslaved ancestors held on Somerset Place plantation in Creswell, North Carolina. Her research culminated in the first Somerset Homecoming, a celebration of African American culture and heritage attended by 3000 descendants of the enslaved community and others connected to the former plantation. Ms. Redford lectures extensively on topics including African-American Genealogy, Antebellum History, and Slavery’s Legacy and from 1993 to 1996 was a visiting lecturer at Elizabeth City State University teaching Oral History Methods. As a panel member for the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, Redford voted to designate the historic U. S. Highway 80 from Selma to Montgomery a National Historic Byway in 1996. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Congressional Black Caucus Carter G. Woodson award, resolution from the Commonwealth of Virginia General Assembly, and has joined eminent historian, Dr. John Hope Franklin in receiving the North Carolina Humanities Council John Tyler Caldwell award. Redford has appeared in the nationally distributed programs “Roots of Resistance” and “Roots, Celebrating 25 Years” Redford currently serves on several boards including the African American Advisory Boards for Monticello and Fortress Monroe and was a “2006 Portsmouth (Virginia) Notable.” In 2005, her second book, Generations of Somerset Place: From Slavery to Freedom, was released by Arcadia Press. Redford will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from East Carolina University on May 7, 2010.
Shultz’ Shoemaking Shop
www.oldsalem.org/shultz-shoemaker-shop.html
Lecture III
Author, Genealogist and Public Historian
Tuesday, April 13, 6:30pm-7:30pm
The account of her family history, including ancestors taken to Marengo County, Alabama in 1843, and the homecoming
entitled Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage is available through the University of North Carolina Press. Since 1988, following a fifteen year career with the Portsmouth Department of Social Services, Redford has managed Somerset Place, a North Carolina State Historic Site and overseen the reconstruction of the plantation’s former slave community. Redford’s approach to the history of Somerset Place has been a familial one. Since she places the human family at the center of her historical thinking, everything at the site is designed to illuminate family relationships. According to Duke University historian, Peter H. Wood, under Dorothy Redford’s direction “one of the largest antebellum plantations in North Carolina is now a remarkable site used to educate citizens about the social history of African Americans and whites in North Carolina. Somerset Place has effectively changed the interpretive paradigm and is providing a rewarding and successful experience for its visitors.” Redford retired in August 2008.
