Tuesday 15th September 2009 - Another Library Day Where Illumination Turns to Darkness

The regional library is in Lexington, the county seat of Rockbridge County. (It's called Rockbridge, by-the-way, because it has the extraordinary Natural Bridge where US 11 runs over Cedar Creek, a small tributary of the James River.) The librarian is keen to tell me that Glasgow has a splendid library, but I don't want to go there till I've got some grasp of the history and geography. Going to Lexington also allows me to hang out in street cafes and vegetarian restaurants, swopping photographs.
There is a history of Rockbridge County, written in 1920, and, surprisingly, a history of Glasgow, written about 1990. There appear to be two basic parts to the story: how it got its name, and how it got to be a city.
How it got its name is steeped in the Scots-Irish settlement of this area, and undoubedly goes back to a man called Arthur Glasgow, born in Scotland in 1750, a descendant, apparently, of an Earl of Glasgow. He acquired land in what is now Glasgow from the McNutt (or McNaught) family, who came from Ulster (so you can see the confusion about the spelling of their name) via Nova Scotia. The McNutts seem to have been granted huge tracts of land in Nova Scotia and Virginia.
Arthur appears never to have lived there, but he willed it to his son Joseph in 1822. Joseph, having been married in 1815 (one of the few dates in history everybody in Britain knows), built a very grand house on it in 1823. This, basically, is where the name came from.
His daughter, Elizabeth, inherited it fully when her mother died in 1868, when, in the American south, the times they were achangin'. She lived there till she died in 1902, but she sold all but a fifty-acre buffer zone to the Rockbridge Company early in 1890.
How it got to be a city is where the Rockbridge Company comes into it. We are now twenty years or so from the end of the Civil War. The Southern gentry have survived the ravages of the regulators and carpetbaggers, and have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and are preparing to start all over again. The "Southland" is to be industrialised. There are huge profits to be made from land turned into cities. The process is really very simple: you buy some well-chosen land, 'plat' it (that is to say, get it surveyed into identified lots, lodged at the local courthouse), then sell it off in small lots on the promise of a city full of workers and consumers.
The Rockbridge Company has more than its fair share of Southern gentlemen. The President is General Fitzhugh Lee, former Virginia Governor and nephew of Robert E., the Vice-President is Major M Martin, and there is a board stuffed with local worthies. And a Scottish Surveyor finds a place at the confluence of two navigable rivers, with not one, but two railroads (one, I think, going North-South, the other East-West), a canal in the offing, and large landowners willing to sell. And so they arrived at Glasgow.
The petrol poured on this flaming brew is huge amounts of European credit looking for a fire to land on. There are any number of local attorneys keen to provide the hosepipes.
Everyone is full of praise for everyone else. They spent money like it was going out-of-fashion, unaware that it actually was going out-of-fashion. The parallels with the present last few years is uncanny. The only differences are that it was European Credit, rather than American, and a Scottish surveyor, rather than a Scottish Bank.
They planned it out on a huge scale. They built a 200-room hotel (in the middle of nowhere!) with electric lighting, huge fine-wood-staircased entrance hall, furnished throughout with the best. The grand opening gala had dignitaries from all over the States and Europe. The Duke of Marlborough, no less, arrives with tens of thousands, looking for willing pockets to stuff it in. They had banks of telephones to do the dealing. The champagne flowed free and fast. Everyone was making money.
Then Baring Brothers, unkindly, tossed in the match. And in minutes, the receivers were there. In no time at all, the US Treasury had to protect the currency, ending up in the Great Panic of 1893. European credit fled, and there was nothing left but a smoking ruin.
Why did they do it on such a scale? The answer is probably like today: because they could. Where did all the money go? Well, craftsmen undoubtedly got paid well, but no doubt lawyers and landowners got paid weller.
And it left the curious feature that since it was conceived on such a huge scale, it now exists startlingly spread-out for such a small place.

Later that night I went round the pub, and it was all in darkness. Perhaps it's happening all over again.