
{"id":1234,"date":"2007-11-01T06:47:57","date_gmt":"2007-11-01T14:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/11\/01\/reading-signed-and-aha-moments\/"},"modified":"2007-11-05T07:05:50","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T15:05:50","slug":"reading-signed-and-aha-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/11\/01\/reading-signed-and-aha-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading signed and aha moments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>By Valarie Schwartz<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>While many of us look down at the ground to keep from tripping, some find signs when they look down.<\/p>\n<p>Ernest Dollar had a big decision to make in March. He had job offers from two places where he wanted to work.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153My dream job as site manager at Bennett Place was offered,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said from the parlor of the Horace Williams House.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The jobs were offered simultaneously soon after he received his master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s degree in public history from N.C. State University.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I came over here to walk the grounds\u00e2\u20ac\u009d while making his decision, he said. He looked down and found two arrowheads and a pristine piece of broken pottery.<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I took it as a sign.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>He chose the job as executive director of the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill where he works in the historical home of UNC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first philosophy professor, Horace Williams.<\/p>\n<p>With a mind that flashes with ideas, Dollar has initiated a number of programs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.<\/p>\n<p>Next week, Tom Magnuson, founder of the Trading Path Association (www.tradingpath.org\/) in Hillsborough will talk about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Roads and the Founding of Chapel Hill.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Magnuson finds roads when he looks at the ground while navigating his way around the southeastern United States.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Roads are landmarks on the land,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Magnuson said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153An old road bed has a lot of archaeology within 20 feet of that soil.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>It started purely by accident for Magnuson, 63, while he was a graduate student studying geopolitics at Duke. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was too poor to belong to a pool, so I went swimming at the Flat River.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Discovering a ford, he also identified a road, and the things he had learned about fords, choke points and geopolitics produced an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153aha\u00e2\u20ac\u009d moment.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00c2\u00a0 the ground set back from the road, where homes might have been sited, yielded archeological discoveries.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We find these old roads so deeply incised in the ground that even when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 200 years old we can still see them clearly,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Magnuson said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re heirlooms.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>As he talks about the roads of Chapel Hill, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll share his discoveries concerning lost history of our county.<\/p>\n<p>But while he continues the work he refers to as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153my calling,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he looks for something else.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m hunting for some young historians and anthropologists to come in and pick up the reigns,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<br \/>\nWhile Magnuson strives to find and save the roads, Dollar infuses the preservation society with new energy and ideas. See<br \/>\nwww.chapelhillpreservation.com for the schedule of future Lunchbox Lectures and other events coming next year \u00e2\u20ac\u201c including a reenactment of Pres. James K. Polk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s visit, with the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Welcome to Chapel Hill President Polk Party.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Dollar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite way to teach history.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Living history can be intoxicating. People can learn history by sight, smell, hearing and touch \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it comes alive.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Contact Valarie Schwartz at 923-3746 or valariekays@mac.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153My dream job as site manager at Bennett Place was&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}