The Gilded Age comes to the Libraries

A bit of the Gilded Age now resides at the Libraries. While many North Carolinians and visitors have been to the Biltmore in Asheville, many might not know that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, wealthy industrialists also built hunting lodges in the wildlife-rich Piedmont and hosted their celebrity and dignitary friends for lavish weekends in the woods. Now, a collection of photographs, artifacts and correspondence from one of these manors—the Deep River Lodge in Jamestown, NC—has come to the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC).

“This is a significant new collection for the Libraries,” says Gwynn Thayer, Associate Head and Chief Curator of the SCRC. “The collection has great historical significance for a number of reasons, and it also intersects with human/animal studies, which is a collecting focus for us. The materials are not only about sporting culture and hunting dogs, but they are also about the East Coast elite and how they occupied their spaces of leisure. Additionally, the family felt strongly about NC State and wanted the collection here, and it was a great fit for us."

The Armstrong Family Collection on the Deep River Lodge builds upon other SCRC holdings that document the history of human-animal relationships. With materials spanning the late 1800s into the middle of the 20th century, the collection also captures the daily life of its superintendent Edward “Ned” Armstrong and his family, including his three daughters, who lived at the lodge. Through its particular lens, it even speaks to how the postbellum South developed into the mid-1900s. And the story of how the collection found its way to the Libraries is as interesting as its contents.

A hermitage far from the city
The Deep River Lodge was owned by New York-based businessman Clarence Hungerford Mackay, president of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company, chairman of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation and an heir to his family’s Nevada silver mine fortune. In 1904, Mackay bought a tract of land near High Point and began construction of the lodge, which often hosted British lords, American senators and members of prominent families such as the Morgans, Vanderbilts and Roosevelts.

The Armstrongs cared for Mackay’s lodge—and especially the hunting dogs—and Ned took parties out hunting. He came from an English family renowned for their breeding and care of hunting dogs. Ned’s father, also named Edward Armstrong, was an English dog breeder, and his three brothers also worked at American kennels. The collection documents Armstrong’s work in breeding, raising and showing the Deep River Lodge hunting dogs through pedigree records, field trial booklets, auction catalogs, news clippings and even instructions for washing dogs (titled “Dip for Dogs”).

Ned’s wife, Florence “Lollie” Amy Whittington Armstrong, and young daughters Jean Armstrong, Georgie Armstrong and Thora Armstrong Johnson all lived on the estate. The collection also contains a wealth of photographs, letters, diaries and scrapbooks that follow the girls’ lives from early childhood through their education at various schools and colleges.

If the lodge and its two families—the wealthy Mackays and the working-class Armstrongs—remind you of Downton Abbey, you’re not alone.

“This insight into the families… it’s the whole Downton Abbey thing,” says Marian Inabinett, High Point Museum Curator of Collections. “In fact, when we were going through things, and as we would talk about some people in the collection, we'd be like, ‘Oh that's like Anna, and this is so Mr. Bates.’”

Inabinett organized the museum’s 2023 exhibit “Fields & Feathers: Hunting at Deep River Lodge, 1895-1935,” which drew upon the collection to show “the hunting lodge phenomenon in the Piedmont” to people now living in neighborhoods built upon those lands and driving on roads named after the long-gone families who owned them.

“The more we went through the materials, the more we got to kind of know these people, and it really became a focus of how we developed the exhibit,” Inabinett says. “This 40-year relationship between two men, Mr. Mackay and Mr. Armstrong, and how Mr. Mackay's desire to have his English hunting lodge really shaped the life of Mr. Armstrong and the lives of his family as well. It’s an incredible story, and it has all of the trimmings of the Gilded Age.”

The High Point Museum exhibit featured objects like a quail stuffed by the “taxidermist to the stars,” a sketch of Lad of Lee (a favorite hunting dog) by Rousseau, thank-you gifts given to Mr. Armstrong by visiting hunters including a gold watch and wicker dog crates to take the dogs to Scotland for an annual hunting trip, as well as tags and menus from the transatlantic White Star and Cunard lines. There were dog collars and dog figurines and even a letter from Mackay to Armstrong letting him know that a beloved black lab named Duke had passed away.

“It just makes your heart break,” Inabinett says of the letter. “He clearly just loved this dog so much and knew that Mr. Armstrong would want to know how the poor dog ended his days and where he was buried at Harbor Hill.”

But there were many, many hundreds of letters, photographs and documents, as well as physical artifacts, spanning over a half-century of life at the lodge. There was no way that the museum could accommodate it all. 

“A Biltmore Estate-crazy amount of stuff”
After Mackay’s death in 1938, the Armstrongs purchased the land on which Deep River Lodge and the Armstrong house were located. Ned Armstrong passed away in 1948. Much of the land remained in the Armstrong-Johnson family through subsequent generations until the last remaining piece of it was sold in 2021. And that’s when the collection became a collection.

As the last of the Armstrong family to live on the land, the Johnsons needed to clear everything out of the house before the closing of the sale. This turned out to be a daunting task. “That house was stuffed from basement to attic with stuff,” says Ned’s grandson Bill Johnson. “It was overwhelming. You know, you tend to remember one or two things that come out that are the most surprising. There was a picture of them loading the Armstrong Cadillac onto the boat to go to Europe for the summer. And I thought, I'll never see something like that again. I started cleaning the house out myself and, being an old guy, quickly ran out of steam.”

The Johnsons asked Shanna Moore, a family friend, to help them clear out the house. This was during the pandemic, and Moore took on the “stuff” as a COVID project, sorting, cataloging and preparing all of it into a collection. It was an indispensable labor of love without which there would have been neither museum exhibit nor Libraries collection. 

“Some of the letters were handwritten over at a ninety-degree angle. I mean, what a wonderful, unique kind of situation. And Shanna, I think, read every letter. I'm not sure how many there were, but it felt like a thousand,” Johnson says.

Eventually, Moore approached Inabinett to see if the museum could accept the collection, but it was much too large. As they worked together to develop the museum’s exhibit, they discussed where the materials might go to fulfill the family’s wishes that the collection stay complete and be accessible to the public. Inabinett had worked with Thayer to bring the papers of Reginald D. Tillson, a landscape architect based in High Point, to the Libraries in 2016. She reached out, and the connection was made.

“I told them we were going to help them find a good repository for this,” Inabinett says. “We already had a bit of a relationship with Gwynn, so I called just to see if she was interested, but also to find out maybe if they had any other ideas about what was an appropriate repository.”

“Bless Gwynn's heart, she came out and looked at the exhibit. And she was very much like—this fits, we can take it. This is about land management in North Carolina; it's about hunting and animal studies there. She said this fits so many different parts of what our collection is about. And then it came out that Mr. Johnson was an NC State graduate, too.”

“When I first started working on the Armstrong collection, Bill expressed that our goal was to keep it intact and share it with the public,” Moore says. “When the Libraries accepted the collection, we were all thrilled because we knew it would be processed professionally and made accessible to everyone, both presently and in the future.”

“We are absolutely overjoyed and tremendously happy with the way it worked out,” Johnson says. “We knew that NC State would provide excellent care for the documents and access and easy information. So it was kind of a no-brainer that they would make it available—it certainly wouldn't sit in a cardboard box in the garage.”

“The other thing is that the Libraries and the university are highly respected. And that people interested in this subject are more likely to go there and look. When we first started talking to the folks at the Libraries, they quickly listed off several departments within the school where the information would be used or could be used. It was a perfect partnership.”

The future of the past
From the Libraries’ perspective, bringing the Deep River Lodge materials to the SCRC is just the start of that partnership. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work to process such a large and varied collection in order to make it publicly available. Katie Bushman, who recently completed an MA in Public History, was the graduate processing assistant who processed the collection as part of her graduate assistantship. Bushman is currently studying at the School of Library and Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Bushman accompanied Thayer to pick up the collection and gathered information from Johnson and Moore. Right away, she could see how resonant the collection was with her studies.

“As a historian, a lot of my work focuses on the early 20th century and late 19th century, which is when this collection is from,” Bushman says. “We don't get a ton of collections from that time period at NC State. A lot of the other processing work I did was with more modern collections. I asked if I could take the lead on processing it, and that was a really gratifying experience, just being able to take a collection from the very beginning to the end by myself—the collection pickup, accessioning, processing, all the way to writing the finding aid and creating the catalog record.” 

She saw how well the materials fit with other SCRC collections, like the Derby Lane Greyhound Track Records, in helping show the full range of how people interact with animals. But she discovered a deeper story in the materials, too.

“What surprised me more about this collection was getting glimpses into the lives of the two families—the Mackays, this very influential socialite family, and then more pertinently the Armstrongs,” Bushman says. “Having all the records of his daughters there as they were children, that's something that's kind of rare to find in archives. Having those materials from young children—and young girls, especially—I found really interesting to work on.”

Items that Bushman found particularly interesting included a set of enamel toy figurines of a hunting party with people on horseback and little hunting dogs, a picnic set that they would bring on a hunt with wicker-wrapped glass bottles, a letter from the youngest daughter to Santa Claus when she was four or five years old, as well as letters from the teenage daughters to their father during the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

“Coming so close after we all experienced the COVID lockdowns, I saw a lot of these same things mirrored in these children's experiences of not knowing when school's going to reopen or really getting into raising chickens. I wasn't necessarily expecting that kind of material to be in there.”

It’s exactly the kind of discovery that Johnson and Moore were hoping for. Historians interested in dog breeding and hunting lodges will find plenty in the collection. But scholars interested in looking at everyday life in that period and place, and the lives of these girls who were raised there through childhood on to college, will find a rich resource as well.

“I honestly might even come back and look at this collection as a researcher,” Bushman says. “I'm currently writing my master's paper on how children appear in family paper collections, so I think I might come back and look at some of those for my own research. There's just a lot I think that can be done with this collection.”

A link to Bushman’s recent blog post on the Armstrong Family Collection on the Deep River Lodge can be found here.