And We Was Swingin'

When the Roediger Family first lived on Spring Street, it was in the house just to the south of me, on the other side of the driveway. Today, that home is divided up into three apartments. On its porch is a swing that was recently incapacitated by a bolt that sheared in half. It turns out the old man from next door might be good for something still: I put in a pretty decent repair job on it and now it's back in service for the neighbors.

Meal No. 1792: Chicken Potpie with Cheddar Crust

Last Sunday night, it was time for a quiet meal at the Roediger House after a gorgeous day that allowed for a huge walk with Sumner. We actually walked all the way to the Salem Cemetery and found our way to the graves of the Roediger Family, who made this house their home from 1905 until 1991. Then we circled back through Salem College and Old Salem and took the downtown Strollway back up to Fourth Street for the remaining blocks back to the house.

For dinner, it was another one-bowl dish: chicken potpie with a homemade cheddar crust. I worked from a combination of ideas, as noted in the source list below.

That day was also a chance to work out in the yard a good bit, and it included the first mowing of the lawn for the 2017 summer season.

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"Chicken Potpie with Cheddar Crust," from Food Network Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 8 (October 2011), p. 132-133.

"Easy Crust Chicken Pot Pie," attributed to Norma Anderson and copied from one of Cindy Coulson's cookbooks [13 July 1997].

Shrove Tuesday, National Pancake Day, and Snow!

Meal No. 934: Pancakes

The reason I was actually home at lunchtime to make pancakes today is because winter is not yet done with us here in the northwestern Piedmont of North Carolina:

There was sleet and snow, enough to get schools called off so that I wasn't able to work next door in Guilford County today...

...and freezing rain that you can sort of see clinging to the basketball goal backboard above.

Update: The following day, I snapped the following picture of a bush at the corner of the house next door, which is (so far as I know) the house where the Roediger Family lived while they were building the house I now call home.

Winston-Salem's Finest Homes of Yesteryear

George and Laura Roediger built this house in 1905. I bought it just shy of its Centennial, in 2003. For most of this last decade, my knowledge of the Roedigers has been pretty limited and was gathered from bits and pieces and various sources, much of which is tucked away in my mix of files related to buying the Roediger House.

Near the end of last summer, I got this burst of interest in knowing more about the house and about the family. For a long time, I've operated under a hopeful assumption that this fine estate would naturally have been captured in various pictures buried in old newspapers or pictorial histories of Winston-Salem...that I had only to stroll the block and a half to the main branch of the county library and marvelous historial treats would be mine (after the anticipated digging and searching).

Another source of history is a website called DigitalForsyth.org. What has puzzled me so much is that my very beautiful old home doesn't show up in any pictures, ever. I mean: c'mon! It's a lovely and stately place and it's close to a main drag. How come it has never been caught in any street shots, parade photos, or even featured just on its own merits?

Well, the simple answer is this: my home may be a marvelous place to call home, and it may stand out beautifully against much of the rest of the neighborhood...but at the time it was built, it was modest at best. The homes that were worth a photographer's attention, whose stately presence is captured in sometimes fuzzy old black-and-white or sepia-toned prints, completely leave mine in the dust.

The following pictures should give you a clue as to what I mean.

It boggles my mind, though, that all those gorgeous old palaces of old are all gone. And my humble abode somehow endures.

How cool and simultaneously awful is that?

Geo. Roediger: Proprietor

My understanding from the bits and pieces of history of this wonderful old house was that George Roediger owned a saloon on East Third Street, called The Dreamland. That's only half-true. He did own a saloon on East Third, but it wasn't called The Dreamland. Turns out The Dreamland was a motion picture house he had for just one year; it was located on North Liberty Street.

That's what I've been able to piece together from reviewing the City Directories in the North Carolina Room of the Forsyth County Library.

Another source of historical data that I spent time studying back in August is a website called DigitalForsyth.org. I have searched it as thoroughly as I can stand, thinking that somewhere along the way, some random picture of the house would be in there. No such luck.

I did make an interesting discovery, though, and it pertains to that saloon of George Roediger's.  A picture that I'd looked at quite a few times is this one, of an unidentified man standing on a city street sometime around 1905-1908.

Not exactly sure how it finally caught my eye, but how about checking out the building over this guy's left shoulder, at the right edge of the photograph? If you see what I belatedly saw, you can tell that this is likely to be the Twin City Beer Saloon. And just below that big name is the proprietor's name: Geo. Roediger. His business was located at 15 East Third Street, at the intersection of Third and Church Streets.

I was mighty tickled to realize I actually had a picture of this. After doing some more searching and researching, and also perusing a couple of local pictorial history books, I came across another photograph of the Roediger Saloon, although this was taken from the back/rear of it since the picture is really of the P. H. Hanes factory that was across the way from it:

Geo Roediger Saloon: at bottom, center of photograph
seen from the rear

If you click on the picture to get a larger version of it, you can read that name on it pretty well.

From looking at the city directories from the 1890s through about 1930, I know that George Roediger was a bar clerk before 1904 or 1905, and that he owned a saloon for only about three or four years. Why not any longer?

Because the stupid self-righteous temperance maniacs actually got prohibition passed in North Carolina in 1908.

In case you're wondering what's located at the site of George Roediger's old saloon, it's this:

The building shown here is the Winston Tower (the lower photograph was taken from the intersection of Main and Third Streets, looking toward the intersection of Church and Third Streets). It was built in 1966 and served as the headquarters for Wachovia Bank until 1995 (when Wachovia Center was completed as the new corporate tower for Wachovia).

Lenoir Rhyne Wants Annie's Money

I believe I misspoke/miswrote in my recent blog post that described how my interest in the Roediger family history got sparked into action recently. I mentioned receiving a postcard from Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, addressed to Annie G. Roediger (daughter of the man who built my house). What I got wrong was saying she'd been dead for over 20 years. Actually, she died over 30 years ago.

But Lenoir-Rhyne must not know that, and they have embarked on an ambitious fundraising campaign and apparently they are pulling out the stops. A young man named Fletcher stopped by the house when I was away in Florida. He left a big folder of information on the front porch, describing the start of this huge campaign, along with a nice pen engraved with "Lenoir-Rhyne University," and a handwritten notecard saying he looks forward to meeting her.

I'll have to break the bad news to him if he ever catches me at home. It gets my curiosity going again, though. That postcard had her name with '71 beside it, and that suggests alumnae status. (But she would have been almost 70 years old at that time!) Her sister Ruth, the last surviving Roediger Family member, died in 1991, although it appears she passed away in Hickory...which is where LRU is located.

Did these daughters leave money to Lenoir-Rhyne? Did their parents? Did one of them actually attend LR as a much older adult? [Some of my other history digging turned up Annie Glass Roediger in the freshman and sophomore classes of Women's College in Greensboro (now known as UNC-Greensboro)...in the early 1920s!]

More questions than answers at this point.

Roediger Family Gravesites

On a subsequent trip out to Salem Cemetery, and with the assistance of the onsite manager out there, I was able to find and photograph the four gravesites of the Roediger Family members buried there. Now I have the more official birth and death dates of the whole crew...except for Ishnee, the daughter I belatedly discovered, and the only one who ever got married.

George Roediger
February 6, 1866 - September 25, 1939
"It is more blessed to give than to receive." Acts 20:35

Laura Dorothea Glass
Wife of George Roediger
February 7, 1869 - October 18, 1947
"And in her tongue is the law of kindness." Proverbs 31:26

Annie Glass Roediger
December 28, 1903 - February 27, 1981
"Deeds of Kindness"

Ruth Roediger
August 22, 1899 - May 18, 1991
"Sing Unto the Lord a New Song"

Salem Cemetery Search

With the burst of excitement I felt when I decided I was ready to learn more about the Roediger family, I quickly recognized a critical stumbling block in not knowing for certain what their birth and death dates were. I could glean a little information on this from the public/non-paid information available on ancestry.com, and that helped get me started. When I learned on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago that both George and Laura Roediger were laid to rest in the Salem Cemetery, I decided (foolishly) to head out there and just see if I could stumble upon their graves by walking around.

It's a big cemetery. It was a needle in a haystack. And no, I did not find their graves. But it was lovely out there under beautiful late afternoon skies.

Bitten by the History Bug

At the end of August, a postcard announcing the upcoming reunion of classes at Lenoir-Rhyne College arrived here, addressed to "Annie G. Roediger '71." This got me a little curious, because by my best estimation, that was quite a late graduation date for the woman I had always assumed was one of the daughters of George and Laura Roediger. 1971? Really? She'd've been, like, around 70 years old!

And this got me started on a quest to finally nail down some additional information about the Roediger Family, who built this house in 1905 and who lived here at least up to 1991. My info on them was limited...a few tidbits that were included in brief summaries about this house but which I'd never gotten around to investigating further.

In the coming weeks and months, I'll be offering blog posts to fill in these missing pieces as I find them. I can warn you that, after just a few treks to the Main Branch of the Forsyth County Library (which is a mere block-and-a-half from the house), my interest is expanding beyond the house and Roediger Family. I'm also intrigued about various former neighbors to this property...some of the things that came and went while this house remained right here where it is.

All this, just because of that silly postcard, addressed to a woman who's been dead for over 20 years.