From the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 1, 2004 ..... Photos offer rare and precious view - A curator finds museum pieces in an Atlantic City crawl space.By Inquirer Staff Writer Jacqueline L. Urgo (Contact at 609-823-9629 or jurgo@phillynews.com)ATLANTIC CITY - For decades, under layers of mud and flood tides that washed beneath the old house on North Michigan Avenue whenever there was a severe storm, they remained like buried treasure. Nine portraits of an African American family, long gone from this earth, seemed to be waiting for just the right person to come along and find them - a collector, a historian, or perhaps someone just curious about people's roots and their connection to the 21st century. Ralph Hunter III - the embodiment of all three traits and the founder of the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey - made the find after he arrived at the house for a yard sale. Hunter found nothing at the sale, but the family that lives in the home invited him to return the next day and search a crawl space where they believed relics could be found. Hunter found himself on his hands and knees one day last August in a crawl space beneath an old shanty kitchen brushing away the muck from the drawn-in-crayon faces of four generations of who the project's researchers believe are the Pettijohns, a middle-class family in Atlantic City at the turn of the 20th century. "When I saw her, her eyes just looked right through me," recalls Hunter about the first portrait he saw, of an attractive, high-cheekboned woman looking straight on. "It was like she spoke to me and said, 'Please tell my story.' " And so began a mission to figure who these people were and why their portraits - a collection of relatively expensive commission at the time - had been left beneath the house. Hunter called his find "priceless." He began piecing together the story of the Pettijohns and the century-old portraits with the help of Galloway Township genealogist Walter McClister and Williamstown artist and art restorer Earl K. Parker III. The portraits were done in a no-longer-used process in which subjects were photographed and the pictures transferred onto linen. The faint image reproduced on the cloth was colored using a conte crayon, which is made of clay and graphite, Parker said. "The linen helped support the pieces over the course of time and their exposure to moisture and sand," said Parker, an illustrator, who trained himself in dry-pigment-process restoration. "If they had just been done on paper, they would have been gone." The find is unusual, as well, from a historical perspective because people of color were rarely used in illustrations or photographed at the time, Parker said. "It is quite rare for a black family to have had this type of portrait work done at that period in history. As an African American, I am thrilled to have the chance to restore these," said Parker, who says he has restored works by Dali and Picasso in his studio. And although the linen portraits were soaking wet and spotted by mildew, and their wooden frames eaten away by time and insects, Hunter could clearly see the value of the portraits in telling how African Americans had played a vital role in the development of Atlantic City as a resort around 1900. "At the moment I saw these portraits, I knew I had made the greatest find I possibly could have for our museum. You can't imagine how thrilled I was," said Hunter, who has amassed about 3,000 artifacts since he began collecting African American pieces about 30 years ago. The collection began with the purchase in a North Carolina antiques shop of a first edition of the book Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman. "I bought it to take it off the market, but not to hide it away," said Hunter, a store owner and entrepreneur in Philadelphia until he retired several years ago. "My dream has always been to share what I have collected so people can better understand the struggle and cultural evolution of African Americans." Until last year, when Buena Vista Township donated the use of space in a community center in its Newtonville section, the museum operated as a kind of road show, visiting schools and other groups in the region. And although Hunter and his volunteers still take the show on the road, he and others have spent the last year or so installing permanent exhibits in the Jackson Road museum that depict African Americans from slavery to the civil-rights movement. The nine portraits, to be unveiled Dec. 5 at a reception at Wash's Inn in Pleasantville, will become the centerpiece of the museum's traveling exhibition. They will be on display in January at the museum and then in February, during Black History Month, at the Atlantic City Arts Center. The unearthed portraits appear to be of patriarch Jeremiah Pettijohn and four generations of women, which could include his mother, a wife, and a daughter or step-daughter. Census records from the period indicate that Pettijohn had been married three times before his death in the 1930s. Jeremiah Pettijohn's parents had apparently been part of a huge post-Civil War migration of African Americans who left the South and moved northward. They settled in Delaware, and Pettijohn was born in 1873. Pettijohn continued that northward migration and moved from Delaware to Atlantic City just before 1900 to take advantage of a tourism boom in the Queen of Resorts. He got a job as a "runner," delivering telegrams at the Shelburne Hotel. He later became a bellman there and married a woman named Hattie. The job was apparently a lucrative one, and, according to real estate records from the time, Pettijohn bought the North Michigan Avenue house in 1910 for $8,000, just before marrying a woman named Annie, who had a daughter named Leola. Annie worked as a seamstress at the Shelburne. Next to the portraits, Hunter found an old serving platter bearing the Shelburne's logo. The house is in a neighborhood known as Northside, populated then by what historians called a "bourgeoisie" class of African Americans. They were a growing middle class, many of whom had come to work as construction laborers for big hotels such as the Shelburne and the Traymore and stayed on as hotel staff. Just how the portraits came to be stored in the crawl space must be left to speculation. Hunter says it is possible that after Pettijohn married his third wife, Bertha, she stored them there "to get rid of stuff from the previous wife." Ellis R. Peopples Jr., who helps Hunter run the museum, said: "It is interesting to see the evolution of a family and how times occurred and then changed for them. I think it will make a fabulous exhibit and help people understand more about Atlantic City's history." If You Go:The nine portraits of the Pettijohn family from the collection of the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey will be on display from 4 to 6 p.m., Sunday at Wash's Inn, 128 New Rd., Pleasantville, N.J. For more information, call the museum at 609-704-7262.Contact staff writer Jacqueline L. Urgo at 609-823-9629 or jurgo@phillynews.com.
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