Book Review: Gleanings from Long Ago by Ellen Mordecai

Gleanings from Long Ago by Ellen Mordecai

Ellen Mordecai was part of the third generation of her family to live at Mordecai House in Raleigh, North Carolina. She lived from 1820 to 1916 and thus saw a lot of changes. The book is mostly her childhood remembrances, i.e. the antebellum plantation life of the American South. She tells charming stories of wandering the countryside, visiting relatives (sometimes traveling great distances), playing with her sister, and describing the various people who visited or lived with them. She describes the countryside and a lot of the garden and wild vegetation in detail.

Her attitude toward slavery is very child-like. She describes her relationship with their slaves as quite congenial and full of mutual admiration. She completely avoids any sense of exploitation or hardship, which at best is an incomplete view of the situation. Her remembrances are all about the fun and fascination of her childhood experiences, so the "rose-colored glasses" are in full effect.

The book is interesting as a slice of life from a bygone era but not particularly deep or greatly entertaining. I picked up my copy at the Mordecai Historic Park gift shop and it does make a nice supplement to the visit. Being able to picture the people in the rooms or on the grounds is fun.

Mordecai House, Raleigh

The oldest house on its original foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina, is the Mordecai House, the center of the Mordecai Historic Park. It was built in 1785 for Henry and Polly Lane as a wedding gift by Joel Lane, the founder of Raleigh. Their daughter Margaret married Moses Mordecai, from whom the house gets its name. The house was a plantation manor with land amounting to several thousand acres. The main crops were corn, wheat, and cotton. As North Carolina was part of the American South, they did have slaves working the plantation. The home held five generations of the family and was occupied until the 1960s.

Mordecai House, Raleigh

Our tour of the house started in the back with the original building. The front was added later, creating more bedrooms along with a front dining room and parlor.

Back of the house

 The original house had one room that served as the dining room, business office, and family room. The furnishing still reflect the multi-use of the room.

Original living area

Books!

A desk for business and letter writing

The front of the house has a new, larger formal dining room.

The front dining room

Service table with family portrait

Relaxing area with more family portraits

 The two male portraits on the wall are interesting in that there is no indication of who they are. Possibly they are the same man, though the noses are different. The two silhouettes in the top picture may indicated Moses Mordecai, who married a second time when Margaret died.

Close up of the portraits

 Across the hall is the new parlor where the family would entertain guests or themselves.

Parlor fireplace and writing table (and more books!)

Piano with family portraits

Upstairs are several bedrooms. The first is decorated as when Ellen Mordecai, Moses's daughter, lived at the home.

Dress from Ellen

Her poster bed

Hat box with some samples

Two other bedrooms have more modern decor--more modern than the mid-1800s! I was heartened to see a master bed with a crib attached like my wife and I did with our firstborn.

Master bedroom with crib attached to the bed

Toys and knick-knacks

The fireplace

The hall in between the two front bedrooms is a breezeway with a door opening onto the upstairs balcony. The family could sleep out there in the hot summer and get some benefit from cooler night air flowing through the upper part of the house.

Breezeway all the way back to Ellen's room

The other bedroom was an aunt's room with an extra bed for a niece. Often extended family members lived at the house at the same time, so few if any had their own room.

More modern bed

Dresser with marble top and extra bed

We enjoyed our tour immensely and highly recommend visiting Mordecai Historic Park if you are in (or visit) Raleigh.

Mordecai Historic Park, Raleigh

The Mordecai Historic Park is a collection of historic buildings in Raleigh, North Carolina. The main building is the Mordecai House, named after its second owner. That will get its own post. The rest of the buildings are all native to the state if not to the ground on which they currently stand. They all have interesting stories.

The entrance sign

The house that's getting a later post

We parked on Mimosa Street, which meant we had to walk through the park to get to the visitors center, where we bought tour tickets and enjoyed the display about the Mordecai family and the history surrounding the park.

Porch of the visitor center with goofy poses

More goofy poses

Inside, a display shows the family tree for the Mordecais and as much as can be pieced together for the slaves that lived on the Mordecai plantation.

Family trees

 Displays also explain pre- and post-Civil War activities there, along with an interesting description of marriages from the female perspective. All arranged marriages are not unhappy ones, apparently.

Civil War info

Mordecai women and their fortunes

The exhibit has a few interactive screens that they children loved though they wished there was more content.

Trying to share

The first building on the tour was Andrew Johnson's birthplace. Johnson was the seventeenth president (right after Abraham Lincoln). He was born on December 29, 1808, to parents who worked at a Raleigh inn. Their home was the kitchen for the inn (back in those days, kitchens were separate buildings to keep the cooking heat out of the house and prevent kitchen fires from spreading to the rest of the building, so I guess the Johnsons were stuck with the heat and the potential catastrophe). The first floor of the building was a kitchen, often full of other people. The Johnsons lived upstairs. The building was moved to the park in the 1960s.

Andrew Johnson birthplace

The kitchen fire

We did not get to go upstairs but the docent told us about Johnson's life. He was apprenticed to a tailor but had to leave Raleigh because he was picking fights with a neighbor. He moved to Tennessee where he set up his own tailor shop. He soon got involved in political discussions which lead him into political office, eventually becoming a senator from Tennessee. He went on to be Lincoln's vice president and then president after the assassination.

Our next stop on the tour was St. Mark's Chapel. The chapel was built around 1847 on the Haughton Plantation near Gulf, North Carolina. The plantation was not near town so the owners had a chapel built where they could have services. A family member would read from the Bible and possibly lead a prayer or discussion. The downstairs pews were for the family; the balcony for the plantation slaves. The building was moved in 1978 and is used now for weddings, lectures, musical performances, and group meetings.

St. Mark's Chapel

The pulpit area

Pews and balcony

Our next visit was to the Law Offices of Badger and Iredell. The building was constructed around 1810 and served as law offices in the 1830s for George Badger and in the 1840s for James Iredell, Jr. Both were active in North Carolina politics. The structure was moved to Mordecai in 1975 and restored in 1983 with furnishings from the Badger-Iredell Foundation.

Law office building

Going to see the man

Inside

Portraits of the two attorneys

The Allen Kitchen was built in 1842 for the Allen family in Anson County. It was moved to the approximate location of the Mordecai kitchen in 1968 and is similar to the Johnson kitchen--a building for cooking that won't let the heat or fire harm the main building. The main difference is the absence of an upstairs apartment.

Allen kitchen

Kitchen fireplace

Kitchen furnishings

We saw some curious metal tubes on a shelf and the kids tried to guess what they were for. The kitchen served as more than just a kitchen, they also made candles there, in addition to doing the laundry.

Jugs and candle molds

Toddler not helping with the laundry

The kitchen also features a pie safe. After pies were baked they were put in this special piece of furniture to cool off. The metal panels of the door have small holes to vent the steam and heat but they are small enough to prevent mice and bugs (and also possibly children) from eating the pies too early.

Pie safe

Just behind the kitchen is a garden with both practical items, like herbs and vegetables, and decorative items, like flowers for the table.

Garden gate with old-fashioned automatic closing door

The garden

Flowers

Even more flowers

Vegetables

In the back of the garden is a small orchard with two kinds of peach trees (Contender and Challenger) and a Royal Anne cherry tree.

Peach trees

Royal Anne cherry tree

There was another cool-looking building on the property that we never toured and forgot to ask about. I leave it to readers' speculations to fill in an interesting story.

Unidentified building

A visit to the Mordecai house will be in the next post!