This week @UNC sent out a fundraiser asking folks to donate money for bottles of “Old Well water"... that don't actually have water from the Old Well in them.
So, it's time to talk about how the Old Well’s history, symbolism & traditions are rooted in white supremacy.
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So, it's time to talk about how the Old Well’s history, symbolism & traditions are rooted in white supremacy.
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Most campus histories like to start with this 1792 founding myth. As the story goes, a major reason Davie chose the site was due to an abundance of natural springs in the area.
What these retellings of the Davie myth whitewash is that he wasn’t the 1st person to recognize the value in this land & water…for thousands of years native communities thrived here before being dispossessed of the land in the early 1700s.
Prior to 1795 the most important water source on campus was a spring in what's now Coker Arboretum. It still exists, on the north end by the back wall of the Chapel of the Cross.
Before any wells were dug on campus, people who were enslaved by UNC were forced to retrieve buckets of water from this spring 4x per day & walk it up the hill for students, faculty, & to other enslaved workers who were building the 1st campus buildings.
On Jan. 21, 1795 the UNC Board of Trustees passed a resolution to “cause a well to be sunk.” So, who dug the Old Well? We are not aware of any records that prove it, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that supports the idea that enslaved people dug it.
UNC in these first few years was a giant construction site. Dozens of enslaved people were trafficked in from as far away as Texas for difficult & dangerous labor: from felling trees & cutting wood, to digging clay & firing 150,000+ handmade bricks for the 1st buildings.
Fast forward. In 2001, plumbers were repairing the Old Well, the fountain was removed, exposing the original well shaft. They noted that the stones lining the well were identical to stones used in walls that we know were built on campus by enslaved people around the same time.
The original stone-lined shaft of UNC's Old Well is 42 ft. deep. There is about 12 ft. of water at the bottom. The shaft is only 30 inches wide. It’s not hard to imagine who would have been forced down into this narrow pit to do the dangerous task of digging it out by hand.
Archaeological digs have found other similar stone structures used for water, like this drain built by enslaved people in the 1840s. Elisha Mitchell, namesake of Mitchell Hall, was overseer for this project. He was also the largest slaveholder in Chapel Hill at his death in 1857.
Between 1795 & 1900 at least 4 other wells were dug at the center of campus, each covered by simple wooden well houses like this. So why was this one chosen to become a symbol? Basically because a UNC president got tired of looking at it outside his office window.
In 1897 Pres. Edwin Alderman spent some $ to put a new housing over the well (no doubt he, too, would have sold bottles of water to fund it). He had it designed to look like Greco-Roman (Ionic/Tuscan) garden fountains he liked, specifically the Temple of Love at Versailles.
Here's the thing... Edwin Alderman was a straight up white supremacist. In his letters, about the time the (new) Old Well was built, he waxed poetic about the atrocities of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre & praised the violent racist Red Shirts for the “ingenuity” of their tactics.
Also, after he was at UNC, Alderman became Pres. of UVA. While there, he actively recruited eugenicists to join UVA’s faculty - established a sort of Center for Eugenics. UVA activists have been fighting for renaming Alderman Library there. UNC has an Alderman Residence Hall.
Alderman was also a believer in the white supremacist idea of “Western beauty” as a “civilizing influence” (not uncommon among neoclassicists of the time) and saw his Old Well project as an opportunity to center that idea in the minds of everyone who passed through campus.
The most exhaustive history of the Old Well was done in the early 2000s by Sarah Madry in her book, “Well Worth a Shindy.” Bill Friday wrote the foreword. It’s sold in Student Stores. The problem: no mention of enslaved workers, Native history on campus, or Alderman’s racism.
Current lore is that if you drink from the Old Well on the first day of class you’ll have good luck and get A's. It’s yet another revered Carolina tradition that's built on privilege and on a facade that hides a history of violence and white supremacy.
So it tracks that UNC would try to grift its students and alums with bottles of Old Well water (but not really) as a gimmicky fundraiser (in the middle of a pandemic!).
White supremacy is in the groundwater. And UNC is trying to bottle it up and sell it, like it always has.
White supremacy is in the groundwater. And UNC is trying to bottle it up and sell it, like it always has.
