In 1950, to prepare himself to teach a science unit on the Indians of North Carolina, Stan began walking plowed fields for artifacts.
Before he found his calling as a “mountain groundhog,” his life took a few zigzags: the Navy during World War II, photography school, a degree in education, and teaching. Stanley South was born Febru(Groundhog Day), in Boone, North Carolina. Then on weekends, it was family, friends, and his current hobby. He did fast leisurely, taught gracefully, filled long trips in the station wagon with intense discussion and funny stories, treated me as an equal, worked to exhaustion, but always had enough energy to enjoy a beer, dinner, and more conversation. Our weekend treat was sorting and gluing. On Friday afternoon, the clean, dry sherds rode back with us to Stan’s farmhouse near Raleigh. As soon as the sherds came out of the drain, they were washed and spread on a sheet of plywood to dry in the sun. The bottles, wasters from a 1790s firing, were glazed a beautiful robin’s eggshell blue. In one of the first test pits, Brad Rauschenberg came down on a drain stuffed with broken tin-glazed earthenware (“faience”) bottles. Then we started our summer’s project: searching for the fine pottery of Rudolph Christ in the yard behind the potter’s house in Winston-Salem. Between digs, Stan churned out reports at one hundred words per minute, inked drawings, and edited a newsletter. We located the site of an eighteenth-century tavern and tested the ditch and cellar of a French and Indian War fort. In four days he uncovered enough of an 1838 arsenal to force the redesign of I-95. $169.00 (hardcover).ĭuring the summer of 1968 I had the good fortune to work for Stanley South during his last year as archaeologist for the North Carolina Department of Archives and History. 141 bw illus., appendix, references, list of figures, index.