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The Wharton Films Project committee is led by Joni Carter pictured center. Joni is joined by Carolyn and Clyde Ratcliffe and advisor Bill Chapman. Other committee members include Diane Mumford, Robert Teagle, Carroll Ashburn, Agnes Carter and writer Denise DeVries.
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“You look at the school life shown in these films and you see how much more community-oriented it was.” -Joni Carter
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Viewers can thank filmmaker James “Jimmy” Wharton (above) of Weems who provided a means for 21st-century voyeurs to see what life was like on the isolated northern neck from the late 1920s through the end of the 1930s.
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“He wasn’t a professional filmmaker so the angles and approaches he used were really unique. He didn’t just point and shoot, he gives you a sense of time.” -Joni Carter
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“The discovery of these films will forever change how we see the people of this very isolated region—for many of us, our parents and grandparents—lived, worked and played before there was a bridge or television or development.” -Bill Chapman
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It’s a matter of record that an old store in Wicomico Church was manually moved from one location to another. What’s surprising is that someone took the time to document on black and white 16 mm film the men and toolboxes involved in doing it.
For that peek into the past, viewers can thank filmmaker James “Jimmy” Wharton of Weems who provided a means for 21st-century voyeurs to see what life was like on the isolated northern neck from the late 1920s through the end of the 1930s. Wharton believed everyone had a story. In a project that’s part treasure hunt, part detective game and part cultural history lesson, the Wharton Films Project is compiling a documentary from 20 hours of film and 10 audio tapes that were hidden away for almost a century. The discovery was accidental when Joni Carter helped her friend Sully Brien clean out her mother’s house after her death and looked under a guest room bed.
Entrusted to Wharton’s girlfriend for decades, the films represent a national treasure for what was captured on them. Sensing the importance of the find, Carter, a local filmmaker and researcher who was associate producer of the 2016 PBS documentary Journey on the Chesapeake, immediately went into action.
After buying a 16 mm projector on Craig’s List, she quickly realized she wasn’t terribly skilled at running it, so she hired someone to run the projector while she watched the reels frame by frame and took notes. Pages and pages of notes.
“He wasn’t a professional filmmaker so the angles and approaches he used were really unique. He didn’t just point and shoot, he gives you a sense of time,” says Carter, who will produce and direct the documentary. She sees the raw footage as telling quite a story. “It’s an Americana treasure for Virginia.”
What she saw flickering on the screen was astonishing. During a period when most Americans were feeling the pinch of the economy, James Wharton not only owned a movie camera—possibly from his stint working as a proofreader for The Baltimore Sun—but took it out and began recording the happenings of everyday people, as if he presciently grasped the importance of preserving and documenting daily life in a place as unique as the Northern Neck.
At local schools, he captured annual May Day festivities, events the communities planned and worked toward all year. Older girls from schools in White Stone, Weems, Wicomico Church and Callao are shown attired in fancy white dresses holding bouquets, with one of the girls eventually being crowned queen, while younger female students made up the queen’s “court” dressed in elaborate homemade period costumes depicting the French Revolution, middle eastern gypsies or Dutch dancers in wooden shoes.
“You look at the school life shown in these films and you see how much more community-oriented it was,” Carter says with a trace of regret about having lost some of that. “But when we look at where we come from, it helps us know where we’re going.”
Carter showed the films to Bill Chapman, executive director of the Richmond Forum, who realized at once he was seeing something extraordinary. Now he says he can’t drive by the old White Stone School anymore without seeing the children of the 1930s pouring out of the front doors, a scene Wharton also captured.
“Being a lover of history and the Northern Neck and with a background in video production, I knew immediately that I wanted to be involved,” he says. As a result, he came on board as an advisor for the film as part of the Wharton Films Project committee, along with Clyde and Carolyn Ratcliffe, Diane Mumford, Robert Teagle, Carroll Ashburn, Agnes Carter and writer Denise DeVries.
He finds the fact that these long forgotten films even exist simply extraordinary. Says Chapman, “The discovery of these films will forever change how we see the people of this very isolated region—for many of us, our parents and grandparents—lived, worked and played before there was a bridge or television or development.”
And speaking of bridges, it’s no surprise that Wharton filmed the drawbridge at Tappahannock that opened in 1926, the first to connect the Northern Neck to the Middle Peninsula, a bridge that effectively opened up a whole new means of access to the world for the Northern Neck’s secluded residents.
Little was exempt from Wharton’s keen eye and appetite for documentation, including working watermen in local waters, school events, baby contests, menhaden fishing, shipbuilding, brick-making, tomato canning, steamboats and farm life including poultry, cattle and hog farming. In one vignette, young women model the homemade dresses they’d sewn on the front porch of a house, a spontaneous fashion show of sorts.
In another, a group of boys runs toward the river, shedding their clothes and diving in, an impromptu skinny-dipping session tastefully filmed by Wharton without revealing anything. Another is even more unusual, and thus significant, because he turned his lens on a local black baseball team playing a game at a Julius Rosenwald school.
“There’s not a lot of African-American film documentation anywhere, so it’s kind of a big deal,” Carter explains, adding that given the time, the black players and spectators might well have been suspicious of Wharton being there.
Simply calling his handiwork “Northern Neck Movies,” Wharton, an accomplished pianist, would screen them at local community centers for a small admission price, playing live musical accompaniment himself.
One of his fliers from that period reads, “Attention Everybody! A Movie Trip to Weems at the Weems Community Hall! Admission 25 cents and 10 cents. EXTRA special added attraction—Airplane Trip over Carter’s Creek!” Local lore has it that Wharton almost fell out of the airplane while filming over Kilmarnock and Weems because his camera was so heavy. The footage of shoppers and pedestrians in downtown Kilmarnock is particularly notable because it was shot before a big fire in the 1930s that destroyed the opera house and other buildings.
The project got a big assist from the Library of Congress when they agreed to partner with the group by professionally cleaning, repairing and digitizing the fragile films in exchange for U.S. public ownership of the original Wharton films in two years. That gives the group time to try to put names to faces and assemble the documentary before it becomes public domain.
A Facebook page called Wharton Films Project was designed as a platform for posting still shots from the films and asking the online community at large to help in identifying faces and buildings before it’s too late. “Now that we see what he was doing, we know that he’s given us a gift,” Carter says. “The timing is perfect to talk to these folks while some of them are still around.”
Narrating parts of the documentary will be Sully Brien, the owner of the films until they go to the Library of Congress. Still in possession of Wharton’s detailed journals, Brien remembers him as having been like a father to her when she was growing up at Wharton Grove Resort.
During the summer a vacation destination with cottages, dining halls and a pier, the resort was owned by Wharton and his mother, so naturally he turned his camera on its temporary residents, too, filming tennis matches, water sports and horseshoe games.
“A lot of these people are dying off, so there’s an urgency now to document the people in the films before the people who recognize them are gone,” Carter explains. “People will contact us and say, “Oh, her name was So-and-So, but we always called her Sis. Then we try to get the name confirmed a few times more to be certain.”
A month-long art show kicking off on May 4 and running through May 27at the Rappahannock Art League in Kilmarnock invites the community’s participation with a photography show of faces and scenes from the films. Monitors throughout the gallery will show Wharton’s unedited films and attendees are invited to help identify what’s in them through one-on-one interviews, perhaps even supply snippets of narration, and video will be shot to supplement the films. Feedback on the documentary process will be welcomed as a way of determining which footage is most significant.
Carter says the goal is for this to be a community project, affording locals the chance to share their own Depression-era stories, whether depicted on film or not.
James Wharton couldn’t possibly have known how far-reaching his films might be, but Chapman doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge the good that’s come from the discovery of them. “The community is already coming together to help us identify the people and places in these films.In the process, they’re sharing memories and discussing things that just haven’t been a part of our conversation for many years.”
Carter is in complete agreement. “I believe James Wharton was a Renaissance man who was so far ahead of his time. I think he did these films for the community and I think we have to give them back to the community.”
See the Wharton Films Project art event at Rappahannock Art League, May 4-27, Tuesdays through Saturdays,10 am–4 pm. Visit facebook.com/whartonfilms.