Appalachian History

The North Carolina historical marker skirts the issue diplomatically: there’s much more to the story of how Felix Walker ‘gave new meaning to the word’ than the sign is letting on.

The verb debunk means to expose or ridicule the falseness or hollowness of a myth, idea or belief. It is made up of the prefix 'de-', meaning to remove, and the word 'bunk'.

On February 25, 1820, the Missouri Question, whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a slave or free state, was being hotly debated in Congress. Near the end of the debate and amidst calls from the floor to have a vote, Felix Walker, representative from Buncombe County, NC, rose to speak. And speak. Did I mention that Felix Walker spoke?

When asked by other members to desist, he replied that he was bound ‘to make a speech for Buncombe,’ and continued to hold forth.

Walker was elected as a Republican to the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Congresses, serving from 1817 to 1823. One can only wonder if his long-windedness got him hounded out of North Carolina, for he moved to Mississippi in 1824.

But he left in his wake a masterful symbol for empty talk that could not be ignored by the speakers of the language, and buncombe, actually spelled bunkum in its first recorded appearance in 1828 in "Niles' Weekly Register," must have been widely used. Bunkum, noted that journal, was said to be a 'very useful and expressive word, which is now as well understood as any in our language.' And "The Wilimington Commercial" referred in 1849 to 'the Buncombe politicians --- those who go for re-election merely.'

In George Ade's 1900 book "More Fables in Slang" the –um ending has been dropped: "he surmised that the Bunk was about to be handed to him.'

The term debunk originated in a 1923 novel "Bunk," by American novelist William Woodward (1874–1950), who used it to mean to take the bunk out of things. And H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore and a connoisseur of the American language, entitled one of his books "A Carnival of Buncombe."


sources: www.ncmarkers.com/Results.aspx?k=Search&ct=btn
www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/feb2004/feb.html
Safire's Political Dictionary, by William Safire, Random House, 1978
Word Myths, by David Wilton, Ivan Brunetti, Oxford University Press US, 2004



Felix+Walker Bunscombe+County+NC appalachia history+of+appalachia appalachian+history

It was the centerpiece of the Montreal Expo of 1967: Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome, a vaulted structure made of lightweight materials that form interlocking polygons.

Nineteen years before that majestic statement, Fuller, an architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, and visionary, had gathered a group of students together at Black Mountain College in Bunscombe County, NC to make the leap from theory to reality and construct the first full-scale geodesic dome.

Black Mountain College, established in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier and other former faculty members of Rollins College, was the first American experimental college boasting complete democratic self-rule, extensive work in the creative arts, and interdisciplinary academic study.

The faculty and students worked on a farm, did maintenance, served meals, and constructed buildings – no extracurricular activities or sports were organized as it was felt that there should be no distinction between work and play.

This independent, coeducational, four-year college was originally located in buildings leased from the Blue Ridge Assembly, near Black Mountain, N.C. In 1941 the college was moved nearby to property purchased by the college, and it remained at this location until it closed in 1956.

Josef and Annie Albers held central positions at Black Mountain from 1933-49. They arrived shortly after their previous home, the Bauhaus, had been closed by Hitler, and brought with them that institution's emphasis on working from first principles, or starting at zero.

It was Josef Albers who invited Buckminster Fuller, as well as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall to teach at the 1948 summer session. At the time they were all struggling and unknown artists.

Buckminster Fuller's project aimed to produce a dome with a forty-eight foot diameter, a height of twenty-three feet, and an area of fifteen hundred square feet. It was to weigh less than 270 pounds. The students measured long strips of venetian blinds and computed the tensile strength of each unit. Each strip was coded and the points marked where they would meet.

The class began to connect the points on the strips, but the dome collapsed to the ground when tension was applied during its attempted erection. Fuller had said in advance that it probably wouldn’t hold (the materials weren't right), but decided nevertheless to go ahead and complete the class project, blithely referring to the experiment's result as the supine dome.

As Fuller put it, "You succeed when you stop failing," a valuable lesson for the young students. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and aluminum aircraft tubing, Fuller and his class succeeded.

The structures slowly filtered into public consciousness and commercial use: Ford commissioned the first commercial one for Dearborn. The military used them widely as radomes for early warning radar.

One of the Black Mountain students, Kenneth Snelson, claims that Buckminster Fuller took credit for Snelson's discovery of the concept of tensegrity. Fuller gave the idea its name, combining tension and structural integrity. Geodesic domes are the most commonly known structures whose composition depends on tensegrity.

Fuller's dome idea was just the tip of his "comprehensivist" thinking. His worldview included everything from his three-wheeled Dymaxion car to a plan to stack hundreds of houses in airplanes and drop them on underprivileged areas. In other words, a cornucopia of global, revolutionary, and completely unrealized plans.


sources: www.bmcproject.org/ARCHITECTURE/CAMPUSES/LAKE%20EDEN/FULLER%201948.htm
www.ibiblio.org/bmc/bmcaboutbmc.html
www.villagevoice.com/news/9912,215261,4551,4.html
www.studio-international.co.uk/reports/black_mountain.asp
Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, by Calvin Tomkins, MacMillan Publ, 2005


Buckminster+Fuller geodesic+dome supine+dome Black+Mountain+College Bunscombe+County+NC appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history