Consider a Clock!

"Let us begin with a clock."  Ah, one of my favorite first sentences.  As I'm looking at photographs on the Library of Congress' Historic Buildings Survey website of antebellum colleges for use in University, Court, and Slave, I recall the recent criticism of Walker Evans for (perhaps) staging photographs.  I wrote about this back in December when the Tuscaloosa News was talking about the allegations that Evans staged some photographs -- for instance, by placing a clock on the mantle in a sharecropper's house.

Now I'm even more skeptical.  I was looking at a picture of Centenary College's Dr. Jackson building; and you know what?  There's a  clock on the mantle there, too!  (See the image at  right.)  Is this, perhaps, evidence that the clocks were common on mantles?  Perhaps suggesting that even the most humble of people aspired to a clock?  This series was taken by W. N. Manning, not Evans, so if there was a conspiracy afoot, it was a big one.  

The Dr. Jackson building's a modest house, for sure.  But the "college" (so far as I can tell, it was really more of a high school), was pretty impressive.  Was pretty impressive is the right tense -- Mark Auslander has written recently about visiting Summerfield, where Centenary College (sometimes called Centenary Institute) was located and finding only steps leading to the places where buildings once were.

Comments

[Michael Hoeflich]

Al: I think that you are onto something. Don't forget that this is the period when popular magazines began to include illustrations to be removed and hung on the wall and, certainly, by the 1830s-1850s companies like N. Currier and Prang were selling engravings for the same purpose. I also seem to recall that it is during the later antebellum period when pocket watches gain popularity, something I suspect might well be connected to increasing travel by canal, and, of course, by RR. My reading of antebellum lawyer diaries makes me think that there was a growing sense of the importance of time-keeping. I feel fairly sure that someone's written a book on time-keeping during this period. I'll look in my library to see if I can find it.

By the way, did CUP send you a personal copy of my new book? I've just received copies to send out and you're at the top of the list if you haven't been sent one already.

[Alfred Brophy]

Thanks for the comments, Mike. This reminds me of one of my favorite antebellum quotes, something to the effect of people know more about the mechanisms of their watches than the workings of their minds. (Though I think that was a modification of another phrase, something like, people don't know how their minds or their watches work!)

The controversy about the mantle clocks in Evans' photos relates to stuff in the 1930s, of course. Seems to me to be reasonable to think that humble folks, like sharecroppers, might have had one prized possession -- a clock -- that they displayed on the mantle. The photo of the Centenary Institute house is not so humble as the sharecroppers' houses, of course. But it's further testimony of the centrality of clocks and of where Alabamians chose to put the clocks.

I do have a copy of Legal Publishing in Early America; it occupies a prominent place on my bookshelf at home. I blogged about it here:
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2010/04/hoeflich-on-the-history-of-the-book-in-the-antebellum-united-states.html