On This Day

Lloyd Dobyns: Hi. Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg: Past & Present on history.org. This is “Behind the Scenes” where you meet the people who work here. That’s my job. I’m Lloyd Dobyns and mostly I ask questions.

The everyday details of the Revolutionary War are easy to lose in the timeline of momentous battles and landmark legislation. But as Public Services Librarian Juleigh Clark and her staff have discovered, the everyday details sometimes can tell us the most. Juliegh joins me now to talk about a new project.

Do you find that there’s plenty of stuff to do day by day when you’re going through the period of the Revolutionary War?

Juleigh Clark: Well, in the content, context of this particular project, some days yes, and some days no. Because we were trying to do 365 days, but we have a weekly newspaper. So that made it real tricky, so we made it go over 10 years, from 1770 to 1780. That way, one day we maybe could find something for January the 1st in 1772, and then we could find something for January the 2nd in 1778. To follow through one year would have been impossible.

Lloyd: But you can go through and find some fascinating details and some interesting things. For instance, the day Peyton Randolph, I had always heard, choked to death, but was the day the Virginia Gazette, well they learned of it on the day they were to publish. And rather than make the readers wait a whole week to find out that Peyton Randolph had died, they printed the news on the masthead, at the top of page one, bordered in black so you wouldn’t miss it. I never knew they printed anything there.

Juleigh: That must have been one of the few times they ever did, because I’m not sure that I ever saw it happen, or have seen it on any other papers, but yes, when they found out something at the last minute, they found a place to put it, if it was important enough. Interestingly, sometimes the date on that add-in will be the day after the date on the newspaper itself. So that got I and my volunteers fairly confused.

Lloyd: Well, it would.

Juleigh: We first, this project actually was started before I ever started working here. I’ve only been working here 12 years. And this project has been going on for many years, and I sort of came in to the point where I was editing and helping look at some of these articles. Pretty soon I realized that unless you understood the context of the little article or the advertisement, it was pretty confusing.

So who cares that a journeyman hairdresser was asked for by a particular wigmaker named Lethong? That was one of the choices that was chosen for, I think it was February 14th. So I thought, “Well, you know, why do we care about Mr. Lethong, and what was he doing?” So I started doing some research. I didn’t find out very much about the man, but I did find that among his customers was George Washington, and he’d sold him hairpieces, basically, for his daughters, his stepdaughter. So you know, you sort of find these odd little things.

Juleigh: The ads are fascinating. Sometimes, for instance, you’ve got the runaway slave ads, which tell you a lot about slavery at the time. It tells you what the people were wearing when they ran away, sometimes the ad would tell you what their skills were, like a person might be a skilled brickmaker or weaver, so that way we know certain things that the slaves had been trained to do.

Then also of interest are the ads for the soldiers that deserted. There was one ad about a soldier who deserted and it described at length what he looked like and what he was wearing, and what he was wearing was a green coat that he had bought at the recent sale of Lord Dunmore’s estate. So after the Governor Dunmore left, you know, it was probably a year before the government of Virginia, the new government, decided to have a big sale and sell off all his stuff.

Lloyd: A yard sale.

Juleigh: A yard sale for the governor, the past governor.

Lloyd: I never heard of Lord Dunmore’s yard sale.

Juleigh: Well I hadn’t, either. So when I read this thing about the coat and Dunmore’s sale, I was like, “What on earth?” And so I started doing some more research about Dunmore, and certainly using books that we have in the library and talking to a couple of the interpreters that were in the library doing research, and so putting all of these different things together, I learned something I hadn’t known before, and it was really fun.

Lloyd: Any other things like that that you’ve come across that’s just sort of wonderful to know?

Juleigh: Well, I have to say this one’s a pretty funny one. This is during the war, certainly things were hard to come by in terms of stuff in the stores, so whenever people were able to get items in, they immediately put them in the newspapers so folks would know that there were pens, or there was fabric of some sort, or something had made it through the blockade.

Here is one of a fresh parcel of Kaiser’s famous pills has just come to hand. And I’m like, “What on earth? Kaiser’s famous pills?” So I started doing a little bit of research and found that they were used to treat venereal disease as well as rheumatism, asthma, apoplexy, palsy, dizziness, dropsy, diseases of the eyes, and relief for the gout.

Lloyd: Well, that’s not a bad pill to have.

Juleigh: Can you imagine?

Lloyd: When is the project going to come to what we would call a conclusion?

Juleigh: I’m hoping next year. But I have been saying that for about the past five years. We have finally gotten all of 365 days done. We could never find leap year, we gave up on February 29th. I have written comments for all of them, I’ve done some research and tried to put some, put them in some sort of context.

Lloyd: How many articles that you’ve sort of taken as your own, said “Ok, we’ll use this and this and this,” how many of those involve people whose names we would know just instantly? Like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson.

Juleigh: Probably a minority of them. Certainly when I saw a George Washington parallel, like with the curls, or another time there was a play in town, and I found from George Washington’s diary that he had been in town at that time and had seen a play, even though he didn’t write the name of the play. Certainly whenever I could pull something in, I did.

But on the other hand, a lot of it was, you know, the idea of the common person or being of interest to just everyday life. So in some cases, it would be, you know, local doctors or wigmakers, or people selling a horse or people who might have been very prominent in their own time, but who we might not necessarily know about nowadays.

Lloyd: That period could be a very interesting period.

Juleigh: Well yes, it is, because you see so many things that are so similar to today, just like in our discussion that we’ve talked about. I’ve really learned about horse racing, which I really didn’t know much about, and the horses that were so important to the early Virginians, and I’ve learned about some scandals that I didn’t know about – just because I read a man’s obituary.

I thought, “Well let me find out about this man.” I found that he’d had a really public marriage, and everybody in town had gotten involved in his marital problems, it sounded like. So you came across really surprising things. Patrick Henry, our first governor, was immediately after he became governor, he got so ill that nobody thought he would recover. So he went home. Instead of being at the capitol governing, he was at home trying to get well.

It’s just interesting, because sometimes they are very inconsequential things. One of my volunteers loved the article about how to bring a drowned person back to life.

Lloyd: Oh I’d like that, myself.

Juleigh: Yeah, and it said that as long as they hadn’t started putrefying yet, they were still possibly, you could still use this list of how-tos to bring him back to life. Certainly some of it was getting a person warm and drying them off and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, to bleed them, for sure. And it told you what not to do. For instance, don’t roll them over barrels, that’s not good for them. And don’t try to make them drink anything. So you know, it was kind of interesting, it can work, even if the person’s been dead for weeks – or you think they’ve been dead. They might not have been.

It just says, “Persons to be recovered: stop the nostrils with one hand, and while the bystander supports himself with the other, blow with all his force in order to inflate the lungs.” Then it tells you to open a vein as soon as possible. So bleeding, of course, was another way of.

Lloyd: I think bleeding is probably the worst thing you could do. Well, who am I to give medical advice.

Juleigh: I know absolutely nothing about it either. I’m just reading the newspaper, you know.

Lloyd: Oh yeah, there’s a common comment. “I read it in the newspaper, it’s got to be true.”

Juleigh: All I know, I read in the paper.

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