By Valarie Schwartz
While many of us look down at the ground to keep from tripping, some find signs when they look down.
Ernest Dollar had a big decision to make in March. He had job offers from two places where he wanted to work.
“My dream job as site manager at Bennett Place was offered,†he said from the parlor of the Horace Williams House.
The jobs were offered simultaneously soon after he received his master’s degree in public history from N.C. State University.
“I came over here to walk the grounds†while making his decision, he said. He looked down and found two arrowheads and a pristine piece of broken pottery.
“I took it as a sign.â€
He chose the job as executive director of the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill where he works in the historical home of UNC’s first philosophy professor, Horace Williams.
With a mind that flashes with ideas, Dollar has initiated a number of programs – among them, the Lunchbox Lectures series. At noon one Wednesday each month (except December), people are invited to the Horace Williams dining room to ingest a bit of local history along with their brown bag lunch.
Next week, Tom Magnuson, founder of the Trading Path Association (www.tradingpath.org/) in Hillsborough will talk about “The Roads and the Founding of Chapel Hill.â€
Magnuson finds roads when he looks at the ground while navigating his way around the southeastern United States.
“Roads are landmarks on the land,†Magnuson said. “An old road bed has a lot of archaeology within 20 feet of that soil.â€
It started purely by accident for Magnuson, 63, while he was a graduate student studying geopolitics at Duke. “I was too poor to belong to a pool, so I went swimming at the Flat River.†Discovering a ford, he also identified a road, and the things he had learned about fords, choke points and geopolitics produced an “aha†moment.
Choke points are areas that have to be traveled to get from one place to another, as are fords in rivers with no bridges. Fords became a place to start when looking for a road and, upon finding it, looking at the ground set back from the road, where homes might have been sited, yielded archeological discoveries.
“We find these old roads so deeply incised in the ground that even when they’re 200 years old we can still see them clearly,†Magnuson said. “They’re heirlooms.â€
As he talks about the roads of Chapel Hill, he’ll share his discoveries concerning lost history of our county.
But while he continues the work he refers to as “my calling,†he looks for something else.
“I’m hunting for some young historians and anthropologists to come in and pick up the reigns,†he said, remarking that he has only a few more years of fieldwork left in him and he very much wants to pass on his knowledge and methods.
While Magnuson strives to find and save the roads, Dollar infuses the preservation society with new energy and ideas. See
www.chapelhillpreservation.com for the schedule of future Lunchbox Lectures and other events coming next year – including a reenactment of Pres. James K. Polk’s visit, with the “Welcome to Chapel Hill President Polk Party.â€
It’s Dollar’s favorite way to teach history.
“Living history can be intoxicating. People can learn history by sight, smell, hearing and touch — it comes alive.â€
Contact Valarie Schwartz at 923-3746 or valariekays@mac.com