Introduction: Birth of a Project
Mount Vernon is, in many ways, a quintessential American small town, so much so that in 1944 the U.S. State Department used it as the backdrop for educational films designed to teach people overseas how “typical Americans” lived. Recognized as an “All-American Community” in 1965 by Look magazine and as “Ohio’s most livable city” by Ohio magazine in 1994, Mount Vernon today describes itself as “One of America’s Best Home Towns!”
But it wasn’t the State Department’s “Typical American” town markers that I drove past at the city’s boundaries each day. It was instead, a historic marker that identified Mount Vernon as the birthplace of Daniel Decatur Emmett. Dan Emmett isn’t exactly a household name--I’m a professional historian who has taught American history for over twenty-five years and even I had to look him up--but chances are you know some of his music. A prolific composer, he is credited with writing "Old Dan Tucker," "Turkey in the Straw," and, most famously, "Dixie." Emmett was also one of the most successful blackface minstrel performers of his era, a local boy who made it big by performing with groups like the Virginia Minstrels and the Bryant's Minstrels in the 1840s and 1850s.
Driving past this marker everyday, I began to wonder: how it was that an Ohio town with a statue of a Union soldier standing in its town square came to embrace a blackface minstrel performer best known for writing "Dixie," a song which was an unofficial Confederate anthem during the Civil War and a rallying cry for segregationists in the 20th century? And I soon discovered that it wasn't just these town historic markers that celebrated Dan Emmett. Once I began to pay attention, I saw references to Emmett everywhere in town: in school, street, and business names, on monuments, and even on the badge of the local police.
