Memory Activist Extraordinaire: H. Ogden Wintermute's Dixie Obsession
Wintermute had a nostalgic personal connection to Emmett. As a boy growing up in Mount Vernon, he recalled seeing a strangely dressed man who wore a turban cap and a coat tied around his waist with a rope. “That’s Uncle Dan Emmett,” his father told him. When young Wintermute’s father took him to a minstrel show at the Elks Theater in Mount Vernon in which Emmett performed, Ogden was enchanted by the music, the dancing, and especially the “purple satin suits worn by the Negro men.” When “Uncle Dan” walked on stage to perform Dixie in the show’s finale, the audience cheered and broke down in tears. Wintermute was hooked. He began collecting things that belonged to Dan Emmett, and eventually amassed a collection that included Emmett’s original violin, two of his piccolos, a chair Emmett made himself, copies of programs from Emmett’s minstrel shows, and an original copy of the sheet music for Dixie. This collection would, after Wintermute's death, be gifted to the Knox County Historical Society, which today gives Emmett’s violin and Wintermute's other Emmett memorabilia a central spot in their floor displays.
Like other fans of Emmett, Wintermute was not concerned about Emmett’s history with blackface performance nor with the use of Dixie as a battle song by the Confederacy. He insisted in his 1955 biography of Emmett that Dixie was a national song that reflected America’s “pioneer spirit.” And he praised the song as “strictly an American composition filled with the youthful spirit of a new way of life” when so many other American songs were set to foreign tunes. Wintermute also praised Emmett’s blackface performances; indeed, he argued that Emmett’s had done such deep study of the mannerisms of southern blacks that “his sympathetic portrayals of Negro characters made many believe he was a colored man.” Those portrayals, Wintermute implied, might have been especially good because Emmett, he argued, had inherited “Indian blood” from his mother.
The high school English teacher and superintendent of music for Mount Vernon schools found a variety of ways to honor Emmett and his most famous musical composition. He published a short biography of Dan Emmett with a local Ohio press. He named his downtown antiques store “Dixie antiques.” In the early 1950s, when the house thought to be Dan Emmett’s birth home was threatened with destruction, Wintermute partnered with local doctor Robert Eastman to have the house moved to a lot behind Eastman’s doctor’s office. Wintermute and his wife restored the home to its original condition and in 1955 opened it as the Dan Emmett Birthplace Museum. Wintermute also dreamed of staging a musical historical drama to honor Dan Emmett, and took a small step towards that goal in 1955 when he produced a pageant about Emmett as part of Mount Vernon's sesquicentennial celebrations in 1955. Four years later, Wintermute helped start the tradition of a town festival celebrating Emmett and his music as co-chair of the 1959 Dixie Days Festival, a three-day celebration of the 100th anniversary of the writing of Dixie.
Wintermute would not live to see it, but his memory work laid the foundation for the efforts to sell Emmett and Dixie as part of a coordinated tourism campaign that were soon to come.