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• 1 2020-11-10T19:00:16+00:00 Remembering a Local Boy 41 Early commemorative actions in Mount Vernon, 1904-1925 plain 33 2022-08-10T19:06:27+00:00 It was not foreordained that Mount Vernon would come to celebrate Dan Emmett and his famous composition. In fact, when Emmett first returned to Mount Vernon in 1888 after spending many years in Chicago, local residents did not accord him any kind of star status. While Emmett was a recognizable figure around town, an eccentric fondly referred to as “Uncle Dan,” few knew of his history. As Emmett’s first biographer put it, “none of his acquaintances seemed to have suspected that he ever did anything that had received recognition outside of the community."
  
  But by 1894, Emmett was performing “Dixie” in blackface minstrel shows put on by the local Elks at Mount Vernon’s Woodward Opera House. Al. G. Field’s decision to ask the elderly Emmett to tour with his minstrel group further revived his reputation in Mount Vernon. At Emmett’s last public performance at the annual Elks Minstrel in 1902, the crowd helped him sing "Dixie" after he was overcome by emotion. When Emmett died in 1904, the Elks took charge of the ceremony to ensure that old “Uncle Dan” was accorded the honor they felt he deserved. His body lay in state at the Elks lodge, an Elks honor guard accompanied the body to the cemetery, Al. G. Fields—himself a member of the Columbus Elks—served as marshal, and a band played "Dixie" as Emmett was laid to rest. Stories about his death and funeral ran in hundreds of newspapers from around the country.
  
  Preserving someone’s reputation so that they will be known beyond their death requires effort and work on the part of living people. It requires creating resources—what some historians and sociologists call “sites of memory”—that keep alive the memory of a person or event. C. B. Galbreath (1858-1934), the State Librarian of Ohio and the secretary of the Ohio State Archaeological Society, created one of these resources when he published the first biography of Dan Emmett in 1904. Galbreath made the case that Emmett deserved a place in the annals of history because of the importance of his musical legacy; much of his short biography focused on laying to rest the debate about whether Emmett had actually written Dixie. Galbreath’s work also helped pave the way for a romanticized portrait of Emmett that has shaped his public image ever since. To Galbreath, Emmett was the embodiment of America’s pioneer spirit, the descendant of migrants to Ohio who had been “led by the restless spirit that ever beckons onward the advance guard of civilization.” Emmett, Galbreath insisted, was also a “cultured gentleman” with a humble natural sense of dignity. 
  
  By 1908, the local department store in Mount Vernon had begun selling postcards featuring drawings of Dan Emmett and his retirement cabin. Yet constructing a physical memorial to Emmett—even something as simple as a tombstone to mark his grave—would prove challenging and apparently beyond the means of the local Mount Vernon community. Shortly after Emmett's death, Mount Vernon’s mayor named Al. G. Fields to head a commission to raise money for a gravesite monument, but the effort came to nothing. The Mount Vernon Dramatic Players also tried and failed to raise enough money for the project. 
  
  So the city was fortunate when James Lewis Smith, the wealthiest man in Ashtabula, Ohio—a small city about 150 miles north of Mount Vernon—took a tour of the state in 1914 and discovered that Emmett’s grave was still unmarked. Smith was at the time a 64-year old bachelor who had a penchant for building monuments, having already funded an Ashtabula Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument as well as a monument to victims of an 1876 bridge collapse. He decided to fund a granite shaft some eight feet tall to mark Emmett’s grave. He asked Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a popular poet of the day, to compose a four-line inscription. The monument was erected in late 1915, around the hundredth anniversary of Emmett’s birth.
  
  The 1915 memorial did not last long. For some reason, the memorial degraded so quickly that within ten years an effort was already underway to replace it. This time the Mount Vernon branch of the American Legion took the lead, erecting a new memorial at Emmett’s gravesite in 1925. It’s unclear why the American Legion, a veteran’s organization, took such an interest in Emmett, but it may be because of his short stint as a fife and drummer in the army when he was young. It may also relate to Emmett's lineage. Both his grandfather and father were veterans (of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, respectively), and the Legion erected a marker at his father's gravesite at the same time as they erected their memorial to Emmett.
  
  While the two memorials differ in design, they used almost the exact same, rather curious, inscription: 
  
  To the Memory of
  DANIEL DECATUR EMMETT
  1815-1904
  Whose Song
  DIXIE LAND
  Inspired the Courage and Devotion of the Southern People and now Thrills the Hearts of a Reunited Nation
  
  Why would a memorial to Emmett located in an Ohio city that sided with the Union celebrate that his song had fueled the “courage and devotion” of the Southern people? And why would it insist so firmly that "Dixie" should be considered a national, not a sectional song? This inscription—and indeed much of the memorialization of Emmett and "Dixie" in Mount Vernon and beyond—reflected the perspective of white southerners, for whom Emmett’s famous song came to play a key role in the mythology of the “Lost Cause.” In fact, it was white southerners involved in Confederate heritage organizations who would bring the most energy and zeal to the project of commemorating Dan Emmett. Their efforts shape the memorial landscape in Mount Vernon to this day.
• 1 2020-10-18T23:53:22+00:00 Who Was Dan Emmett? 31 Some Biographical Background on Mount Vernon's Favorite Son plain 80 2021-09-02T18:29:57+00:00 Daniel Decatur Emmett gained fame and a national reputation as a composer and practitioner of blackface minstrelsy. In the 19th century, blackface performance was the most popular cultural form in America. White men would darken their face using cork—the practice was sometimes called burnt cork performance—and pretend that they were black while performing comedic songs and skits. While blackface performance is today nearly uniformly considered racist and offensive, its practice was widespread as late as the 1950s.
  
  Emmett came to minstrelsy after a childhood spent in Ohio, which was then on America’s far west frontier. Emmett’s grandfather moved his family to Ohio from Virginia in 1807. Emmett’s father, blacksmith Abraham Emmett, married Sarah Zerrick in 1812 and their firstborn, Daniel, arrived soon after Abraham returned from fighting in the War of 1812. Dan Emmett’s middle name—Decatur—honors Stephen Decatur, a naval hero from that war. 
  
  Like many children at the time, Emmett’s formal education only lasted until age twelve. At thirteen, he began training as a printer’s apprentice. But music was Emmett’s real love. Brought up in a musical household, he learned to play the flute and fiddle. By the time he was fifteen, he had written his first song, “Old Dan Tucker,” and begun performing for his neighbors. After a brief stint in the army, where Emmett became an expert in fife and drum, he joined a travelling circus. It was as a circus performer in 1835 that Emmett began performing in blackface and composing "Ethiopian" songs in exaggerated Negro dialect.
  
  The young performer soon moved on to New York to seek his fortunes there. By 1842, Emmett was living in New York and performing in a “fiddle and bones” duo with blackface singer and dancer Frank Bower. His career really took off a year later when he and Bower began performing with two other musicians as the Virginia Minstrels. This four-man minstrel show was a departure from the typical one or two-man minstrel performances. The Virginia Minstrels also pioneered a new kind of entertainment. They advertised an entire evening of blackface minstrelsy with songs, skits, dancing, and comedic sermons, all of which, they promised, would be “entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas.” Emmett wrote much of the music and many of the sermons and skits for the shows. The Virginia Minstrels proved such a huge success in New York that they left for a tour of England. By the time they returned in 1844, many other four-man minstrel troupes had begun performing and Emmett would spend the next fourteen years forming new minstrel groups, founding the first minstrel theater in Chicago (“Emmett’s Burlesque Ethiopian Varieties”), and continuing to write music. 
  
  Emmett wrote his most famous song, "Dixie", in 1859, a year after being recruited to join the successful New York troupe, the Byrant’s Minstrels, as a performer and principal songwriter. Bryant’s Minstrels were well-known for their finales which typically depicted the life of slaves on a southern plantation and featured singing and dancing by all members of the troupe in what became known as a “walkaround.” Emmett wrote "Dixie"—supposedly in a single sitting,—as a walkaround and it became instantly popular, first in the show, and then nationally. By 1861, a version of "Dixie" had become popular throughout the South as a kind of anthem for the Confederacy. Emmett spent the Civil War working with the Bryant Minstrel’s. A supporter of the Union, Emmett did not appreciate the South’s use of the song to support their cause, but like most other blackface performers, Emmett was a Democrat who believed that ending slavery was not necessary to preserve the union. 
  
  Emmett’s career reached its apex in the heady days of the Civil War. In 1866, he moved back to Chicago where he performed with a minstrel troupe, played fiddle at saloons, and gradually fell into such poverty that younger minstrels staged benefits to raise money for him in the early 1880s. In 1888, at the age of 73, Emmett returned to his hometown of Mount Vernon. Back home after more than fifty years, Emmett built a one-room cabin, lived off a small pension from the Actor’s Fund of New York City, and performed with local musicians. 
  
  Emmett’s star would rise one more time: in 1895, Al. G. Field asked him to join the tour of his Columbus-based minstrel company, the Field’s Minstrels, as they toured Ohio and the South. Emmett, now an elderly man, would come out on stage and sing his signature tune, "Dixie." Performances in Ohio earned polite applause, but Emmett became the showstopper once the troupe reached the South. In Richmond, where "Dixie" had been played at the 1861 inauguration of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, women threw flowers at him and the Virginia elite came to pay him their respects. Fields marveled that even though old Dan Emmett’s voice was largely gone, every time he stood to sing "Dixie" in the South, “the audience went as nearly wild as any I have ever seen. It seemed to me a if they would actually raise the roof from the theater.” Emmett proved so popular that Fields named one of his circus cars, “The Dan Emmett.” 
  
  Emmett returned to Mount Vernon in 1896 to live out his final years, where he made money by selling autographed copies of "Dixie" and by taking donations from southern fans, some of whom came to visit him in Ohio. He would perform one last time, at a show sponsored by the Mount Vernon Elks in 1902. When he died in 1904 at the age of 89, Al. G. Fields led the procession to the cemetery as a band played Emmett's most celebrated song. 

This page references:

• 1 2020-11-12T19:49:28+00:00 Charles B. Galbreath 1 Photo of C.B. Galbreath, first biographer of Dan Emmett plain 2020-11-12T19:49:28+00:00 Mercer, James K. (1913) Ohio Legislative History: 1909-1913, Columbus: Edward T Miller, p. 444 Photo 1913 Baker Art Gallery Public Domain Image/jpg
• 1 2020-11-12T20:07:32+00:00 Charles Burleigh Galbreath, DANIEL DECATUR EMMETT: AUTHOR OF 'DIXIE' 1 Digitized version of C.B. Galbreath, Daniel Decatur Emmett: Author of Dixie (Columbus, OH: 1904) media/Galbreath, Daniel Decatur Emmett.pdf plain 2020-11-12T20:07:32+00:00 danieldecaturem00galbgoog Text 1904 Google Books Public Domain Text/pdf