The finishing touches on Mike Bensen’s new Southern Rail are not that far away, now that the steel frame connecting the two railroad cars is in place. If you’ve traveled through downtown Carrboro recently, you might have seen the frame lowering trusses into place. The structure will bridge the two railroad cars.

Bensen, a Chapel Hill native who own St. Ex in Washington D.C., says he’s not that far from opening. Interior work on the cars proceeds as well.
Inside the westernmost coach, there’s a new mural of a diver and a giant squid next to the words, “Scenic University Lake sustainable food source.” At the rear of the car, there’s still an old mural from the cars’ past, a mural for the Carrboro Cosmos soccer team.

A group of local folks stopped in their tracks on the edge of one of Mason Farm’s Penstemon fields. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

Summer has not officially arrived, but the summer heat made its dramatic entry this past Memorial Day weekend. And we are well along into the predicted drought; without ample rainfall soon, that anticipated bumper crop of “4th of July blackberries” will be sparse indeed.

While we’re having to provide supplemental water to maintain the health of our cultivated gardens, the native plants along our roadsides and woodland borders are continuing to put on a show without the additional help from our watering hoses.

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 By Matthew Fiorentino
Correspondent

For six weeks now, two outreach workers have been hitting the streets of Orange County getting to know the homeless and the panhandlers. They talk to these people of the streets, earning their trust, learning about their situation and, most importantly, coming up with ideas about how to help them.

At a meeting earlier this month of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce’s Community Leadership Collaboration, this survey of people on the street was touted as an important method for developing ways to deal with panhandling downtown.

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The day started around 4:30 a.m. That’s when Miguel Torres and Rudy Rodriguez of Lantern restaurant showed up at the Chapel Hill Creamery to dig a pit and start the coals for the goat and lamb that would be cooked Monterrey style.

By 7 a.m. the goat and lamb, wrapped in cactus, banana leaves and foil were in the ground and covered. Passing by, you wouldn’t know that beneath the two stone markers over the freshly disturbed earth something culinary was happening.

Bill Dow of Ayshire Farm serving up warm radicchio
and goat cheese and visiting with Lucy Harris of SEEDS.

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Audio: Carlo Petrini remarks at the Chapel Hill Creamery, May 23, 2007

While Slow Food USA’s executive director Erika Lesser translates, the international movement’s founder, Carlo Petrini, encourages the crowd to eat well, eat less and respect the earth. Photo by Kirk Ross

By Matthew Fiorentino
Correspondent

In the pasture of the Chapel Hill Creamery, filled with the smells of the finest local foods and the audible sighs of gastronomic pleasure, and surrounded by cows, Carlo Petrini, founder of the global Slow Food movement took in the moment.

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Perry Harrison looks at Arlington through the bus window. Photo by Meghan Cooke

By Meghan Cooke
Courtesy of the Carrboro Commons

The memories are still here. Memories of battlefields scarred by the loss of friends, family and comrades years ago. Memories to honor their sacrifice. Memories of one soldier, out of many, remembered by comrades and family for his service and life.

Almost 40 members, family and friends of the American Legion Post 6 of Chapel Hill and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 9100 boarded a bus Wednesday, April 25, for a day-long journey to Washington D.C., where they honored Carl L. Fritz and visited the World War II memorial.

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Holly tree that is located at Carrboro’s future fire station site is estimated to be 200 years old. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

Please Note: In my enthusiasm last week for “hugging” that 200-year-old Persimmon tree on the university campus, I failed to credit Betsy Green Moyer, photographer and co-editor of Paul Green’s Plant Book, for the image of that grand old specimen. (Betsy Moyer’s photo of the seldom-noticed tiny Persimmon flower appears on The Citizen website.)

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Braxton Foushee is back in action. He rejoined the OWASA board as Carrboro’s representative last month. Photo by Kirk Ross

By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

Once – when there was no Caribou Café, nothing in the way of a sandwich that wraps, and certainly no luxury boutique hotel – Braxton Foushee sat down at Colonial Drug to be served.

Chapel Hill was even then a bit more progressive than the majority of the South, and a young black man’s money was readily accepted in a Franklin Street business such as Colonial. But that young man’s subsequent presence certainly was not. Order to go and be gone – that was the nature of it when Foushee and others instead sat to be served. It was February 1960. For nearly a half century, Foushee has continued to live a life in service to his community.
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Giant 200-year-old Persimmon tree on UNC campus’ Polk Place

By Ken Moore

“Wow, how about that Persimmon flower!”

“I don’t see any flower!”

“There it is, right there in that little angle, where the leaf is attached to the stem.”
“All I see is a little green thing!”

“Yeah; that’s it! A tiny little green flower. How many tiny little green flowers do you ever get to see? Is that cool, or what!!!”

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Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement 

It’s being billed as a farm-to-fork event, but next week’s outing at Chapel Hill Creamery west of Carrboro is no ordinary late-spring picnic.

On Tuesday, nearly two dozen local chefs are teaming up with innovative farmers from throughout the area to provide direct, tangible and highly edible examples of the connection between agriculture and the dinner table.

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Close inspection will reveal the green ‘baby’ blackberry fruit in the center of the white petals. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

It’s early May and the blackberry “brambles” are brightening field edges and roadsides with masses of pure white flowers. When these same blackberry flower-filled days and nights are really, really chilly, the old timers refer to it as “Blackberry Winter.” That description certainly is appropriate for this early May in and around Carrboro. Blackberry flowers (Rubus argutus is the most common of about a dozen edible blackberry species in our state) are particularly beautiful this year, perhaps due to the cool temperatures prolonging their freshness. Or perhaps my pronouncement is the result of over-stimulation by the excessive masses of flowering brambles beginning to overtake more than the edges of my wild garden. Well, very few would describe my yard a “garden” since nature is far more in charge than am I.

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A fictional account of the chartering of venable

By Catherine DeVine

The published histories of Carrboro’s establishment as a town apart from Chapel Hill place all of the action at the West End train station and the prosperous textile mill adjacent to it. We know that Julian Shakespeare Carr bought the mill from Thomas Lloyd, who died the same year the town was incorporated as Venable in 1911. The fact of Thomas Lloyd’s illiteracy appears in all accounts. I invented his helper. —Catherine DeVine

They were all dressed up that day, even the clerks. The University had dispatched a young man with a camera, and a rumor started early that he was trotting up to the West End with President Venable himself. Whether or not the President wanted his picture made at the train station, there was a freshly painted sign out there waiting for him to smile beside: “Venable, North Carolina.” The young man with the camera would make the most of that.

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Flowing hummocks of clover filling the highway median south of town. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

“Grass is the most abused of all plants!” decried Steve Warner, a cherished older friend of mine, an Ohio landscape architect who many years ago retired down on a farm on the White Oak River near Swansboro. Part of his property is now a streamside nature trail of the North Carolina Coastal Federation. Steve was a lively, talkative and very opinionated individual whose life experiences gave him credibility as he worked hard to protect the wild nature of our landscapes. I remember him describing to me his response, soon after settling in coastal Carolina, to the sincere question: “Steve, when did you become an ‘environmentalist’?”

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By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

Jamie Bishop

For Jacques Morin, it was exactly that – a coin toss – that brought him to Chapel Hill, which is where he met Jamie Bishop. Bishop, 35, a former Carrboro resident and UNC IT technician, was one of the 32 people shot and killed by Cho Seung-hui at Virginia Tech last week.

Morin is associate director at the UNC Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS),
in charge of academic computing and educational technology. Some years ago, while working oversees, he was tasked to come to the States to look at classroom designs.

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Your best landscape plants may already be in place

By Ken Moore

A group of folks on the Haw River Assembly’s Earth Day walk along the new Haw River Natural area this past Saturday were happy to discover one of those pawpaw patches described in last week’s Citizen. A few of the flowers had survived the recent cold, so the walkers got a good look at the seldom-noticed burgundy flowers, and, sure enough, the main tree had suckered so that numerous stems had indeed formed a patch.

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