Friday from the Archives: “Day at a Historic Park” a poem by Craig Thompson Friend in NCLR Online 2019
We are always chuffed when we get to watch a writer publish an initial piece in NCLR and then go onto an award-winning publishing career.
Last week, Craig Thompson Friend was awarded the North Caroliniana Book Award for his Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas, published by UNC Press in May 2025. This award “recognizes annually “the book that captures the essence of North Carolina by contributing powerfully to an understanding of the state.””
Friend appeared in our pages not as a researcher, but as a poet. His bio read, “Craig Thompson Friend is CHASS Distinguished Graduate Professor of History and Director Emeritus of Public History at NC State University. He was the 2017–2018 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Raised in Dallas, NC, he has a BA from Wake Forest University, an MA from Clemson University, and a PhD from the University of Kentucky. His published historical works include Kentucke’s Frontiers (Indiana University Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 Kentucky Governor’s Award. He is currently working on a biography of Lunsford Lane of Raleigh. This poem is his first submission to NCLR.”
His piece “Day at a Historic Park” was a finalist for the 2018 Applewhite Poetry Prize. It was published in our 2019 online issue, along with photographs Friend took at Mordecai House in Raleigh. Here is the beginning:
Day at a Historic Park
I sorrow
walking a gently hilly countryside
once traversed by Shakori and Eno,
Sissipahaw and Occaneechi,
Tutelo and Saponi.
A gently hilly countryside,
taken by Others who,
pretending the Indigenous disappeared,
ignored those who continued to traverse
the ancient homelands
that had been fertilized
with Tuscarora
blood.
I sorrow,
touring mansion and fields
saturated with the sweat of the enslaved:
blacksmith Dick and cobbler Davey;
cooks Milly and Charlotte;
Chaney and Sabina, nurse maids;
Jim Gundy, aged about 30 years,
about 5 feet 10 inches high, well made,
who once belonged to Edward Tansit
of Franklin County
who owned his wife,
ran away in February 1820;
and Weston, dark mulatto,
about 24 or 25 years of age,
5 feet 4 or 5 inches high, stout, and well made,
who ran away in April 1827
and went constantly
armed with
a gun.
Read the rest in the NCLR Online 2019 issue and pick up his book at your local independent bookstore!
