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Horace Williams The Gadfly Of Chapel Hill
by Charly Mann
Since I was six years old I have hiked up and down the unmarked trail from Greenwood Road to Gimghoul Castle thousands of times on my way to and from various locations in Chapel Hill. Long before I was born another man often walked through these woods. His name was Horace Williams, and he was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina from 1890 until the time of his death in 1940. Even though I never knew him I often felt his spirit on my path.
Horace Williams (1858 to 1940). He was the gadfly of Chapel Hill and a UNC philosophy professor from 1890 to 1940. His house is now home to the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.
Williams was an unusual man who believed a teacher's job was to help a student find himself. His favorite subject was Socrates, and he taught students about him by making his classroom a pure Platonic experience. Williams believed everything had meaning. He once said "There is no abstract knowledge." He would never allow his students to make assumptions or speak in abstractions. He was by all accounts as much a gadfly in Chapel Hill as Socrates had been in Athens. It was even said by some who knew him well that he not only practiced Socrates, he was Socrates.
This followings recounts one of my walks on this trail when I was accompanied by the spirit of this man.
Entrance of the trail from Greenwood Road up to Gimghoul Castle. Much of this land was owned by Chapel Hill novelist Betty Smith.
Horace Williams: Excuse me young man; I understand you are interested in me.
Charly Mann: What – where did you come from – do I know you?
Horace Williams: Were you not recently visiting my house?
Charly Mann: Yeah – oh I get it... you must be an actor the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill hired for their open house.
Horace Williams: No my friend, I am Socrates.
Charly Mann: Look buddy... cool... whatever you say. Now I want to get back to my walk.
Horace Williams: So you do not think I am Socrates?
Charly Mann: Look, you can be whoever you want to be, but just so you know Socrates died over 2500 years ago after drinking hemlock.
Horace Williams: Yes, my soul did leave my body, but my presence is alive as long as people like you think about my ideas.
Charly Mann on side of trail leading up to Gimghoul Castle.
Charly Mann: Okay – I'll play along for a while. You can be Socrates, and I'll ask you some questions. Why don't you walk along with me? I'll slow my pace down on account of your age.
Horace Williams: I will enjoy walking with you, but let us walk faster. Fast walking does for the body what thinking does for the mind.
Charly Mann: Hey that's a good line. So here is a question I would ask the real Socrates. Can one find happiness in life?
Horace Williams: Life is not for making you happy, but for perfecting your character. To strengthen oneself requires great challenges. Does your life give you those?
Charly Mann: Yes, I know from experience that life is a series of great challenges.
Horace Williams: That is very good. Life should be a psychological gymnasium that gives you opportunities to work on yourself.
Charly Mann: Out of curiosity Sir, I always thought Socrates spoke in Greek. You seem to have mastered English quite well since the time of your death.
Horace Williams: Ah yes, there is only one language to know if one is fortunate to spend time in the company of the Divine, and that has been English for almost 200 years.
The enchanted trail up to Gimghoul Castle has been the site of many strange occurrences.
Charly Mann: Okay so why is that?
Horace Williams: God has a small group of souls that she spends much of her time with. When we gather it always includes someone you may have heard of named Jane Austen, who sits on the Supreme's left side. Being in God's presence is the most blissful experience one can imagine, but even the Divine seems overwhelmed when Jane reads to us.
Charly Mann: I see, and would I know anyone else in this select group?
Horace Williams: Yes there are only two others, Marcus Aurelius and George Washington.
Charly Mann: A rather small group considering all the souls who must reside in heaven.
Horace Williams: Yes we are all fortunate to have escaped the cycle of birth and death and gain eternal life, but much of heaven is reflected in your own world. Each soul is an individual that has its own interests. Everyone is in a constant state of joy and peace of mind, but few even in heaven have much desire to learn more. For the most part they are all intoxicated by the serenity of their eternal existence and seek nothing more.
Charly Mann: I must say that sounds wonderful.
Horace Williams: It is not enough for me, and those who are closest to God. The real health of the soul comes from continuous growth. My gift has been to provoke and even annoy others to come to know themselves, for only in this way can we ever really be close to God. Jane Austen, for example, has written hundreds of books since she came to us, each much better than the previous. On the other hand, most of the great writers, philosophers, composers, and artists you know from your world simply ceased creating and growing when they settled in heaven, being satisfied with perpetual bliss.
Charly Mann: So let's get back to earth for a moment, I have long had an interest in how to best find contentment in this world.
Horace Williams: Almost all of one's discontentment on earth stems from an inability to sit quietly with oneself.
Charly Mann: You mean like meditation?
Gimghoul Castle has been the home of the UNC secret society, the Order of the Gimghoul, since 1926.
Horace Williams: No, meditation usually means emptying your mind. Your mind is meant for thinking and learning.
Charly Mann: And what types of things should I be doing then?
Horace Williams: The best way to use time is by improving yourself through other men's writings so that you can come easily to what others have labored hard to know.
Charly Mann: Alright, but there are many responsibilities and distractions one encounters each day which make it difficult to find much time for this kind of self-improvement.
Horace Williams: Nonsense. You should focus on excellence and learning whether you are at work or at play. There should be no distinction between the two.
Charly Mann: There are so many bad things in this world. Can I do anything to improve it, or should I leave that for God?
Horace Williams: God has sent help to this world, and it is you and every other person who inhabits this earth.
Charly Mann: But the problems seem immense. I really don't think someone like me can make much of an impact.
Horace Williams: The problem with you and almost everyone else on this planet is that they think like you. They refuse to aim too high in their ambition because they are afraid they will miss their goal, so instead, they aim too low and they reach it.
Battle Seat is at the top of the trail to Gimghoul Castle. For most of the 19th century this was a favorite spot for UNC students to relax and enjoy an incredible view of Durham an Raleigh. Today trees block most of that view. The seat was built at the same time as the castle in 1926. Many of the rocks used in it were placed near this spot many decades earlier by former UNC President Kemp Plummer Battle (1831 - 1919) who was a friend of Horace Williams.
At this point we reached Battle Seat at the top of the trail. Horace Williams sat down and I continued on my walk.
Comments:
Billie Denton
11:01 AM Thu 2/11/2010
Are there any teachers at UNC like this today? If so I am going to urge my daughter to apply to Carolina next year.
Ernest Dollar
10:01 PM Wed 2/10/2010
I live with Horace's ghost every day! Come by the Horace Williams House at the end of Rosemary Street and I'll give you a tour. We're open to the public Tuesday through Friday and Sundays. Every August we celebrate the Gadfly's birthday. Last year we started the Horace Williams Memorial Cupcale Festival. It's a hoot! Check us out on the web www.chapelhillpreservation.com.
Great piece Charly
Please come by the house when you are back in the Southern Part of Heaven.
Anne King
11:06 AM Wed 2/10/2010
I love your conversation with Mr. Williams. You mentioned the Preservation Society is now located in his former house. Where is it located and is it open to the public?
Tony Miller
2:04 PM Tue 2/9/2010
Sure sounds like Socrates to me, and I can see why he was a favorite of God's. The primary reason he was condemned to death was because he did not accept the belief of the Athenian state that there were a multitude of Gods. Socrates thought there was only one God. Socrates also believed the greatest sin was ignorance or what we call stupidity. It sounds like Williams (Socrates) in this conversation is urging us be more focused on learning throughout our lives.
William Graves
10:06 AM Tue 2/9/2010
Great piece. I had always thought that Horace Williams was a major real estate developer from the distant past in Chapel Hill until I read your piece. I guess he also owned a lot of land in Chapel Hill too. Pretty amazing for someone who was just a philosophy professor.
I am borrowing a couple of the quotes from your piece and putting them up on the wall above my desk.
Patricia Barber
8:25 AM Tue 2/9/2010
What an amazing man and walk. I would love to hike up Gimghoul trail with you someday.
Check out our other website:
Investment strategies and advice about Apple Inc. and related technology companies by Charly Mann. www.appleinvesting.com
Investment strategies and advice about Apple Inc. and related technology companies by Charly Mann. www.appleinvesting.com
Chapel Hill is located on a hill whose only distinguishing feature in the 18th century was a small chapel on top called New Hope Chapel. This church was built in 1752 and is currently the location of The Carolina Inn. The town was founded in 1819, and chartered in 1851.
What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. or the crisp October nights. No, our love for this place is based upon the fact that it is as it was meant to be, The University of the People.
-- Charles Kuralt
Dark Side of the Hill -- Pink Floyd, the creators of the most popular album in history, Dark Side of the Moon, took the second half of their name from Floyd Council, a Chapel Hill native, and great blues singer and guitarist. He once belonged to a group called "The Chapel Hillbillies".
Check out Charly Mann's other website:
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
There would probably be no Chapel Hill if the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees in 1793 had not chosen land across from New Hope Chapel for the location of the university. By 1800 there were about 100 people living in thirty houses surrounding the campus.
The University North Carolina's first student was Hinton James, who enrolled in February, 1795. There is now a dormitory on the campus named in his honor.
The University of North Carolina was closed from 1870 to 1875 because of lack of state funding.
William Ackland left his art collection and $1.25 million to Duke University in 1940 on the condition that he would be buried in the art museum that the University was to build with his bequest. Duke rejected this condition even though members of the Duke Family are buried in Duke Chapel. What followed was a long and acrimonious legal battle between Ackland relatives who now wanted the inheritance, Rollins College, and the University of North Carolina, each attempting to receive the funds. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in 1949 UNC was awarded the money for the museum. Ackland is buried near the museum's entrance. When the museum first opened, in the early sixties, there were rumors that his remains were leaking out of the mausoleum.
The official name of the Arboretum on the University of North Carolina campus is the Coker Arboretum. It is named after Dr. William Cocker, the University's first botany professor. It occupies a little more than five acres. It was founded in 1903.
Chapel Hill's main street has always been called Franklin Street. It was named after Benjamin Franklin in the early 1790s.
Chapel Hill High School and Chapel Hill Junior High were on Franklin Street in the same location as University Square until the mid 1960s.
The Colonial Drug Store at 450 West Franklin Street was owned and operated by John Carswell. It was famous for a fresh-squeezed carbonated orange beverage called a "Big O". In the early 1970s, I managed the Record and Tape Center next door, and must have had over 100 of those drinks. The Colonial Drug Store closed in 1996.
Sutton's Drugstore, which opened in 1923, has one of the last soda fountains in the South. It is one of the few businesses remaining on Franklin Street that was in operation when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Future President Gerald Ford lived in Chapel Hill twice. First when he was 24, in 1938, he took a law couse in summer school at UNC. He lived in the Carr Building, which was a law school dormitory. At the same time, Richard Nixon, the man he served under as Vice President, was attending law school at Duke. In 1942, Ford returned to Chapel Hill to attend the U.S. Navy's Pre-Flight School training program. He lived in a rental house on Hidden Hills Drive.
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My dad, Henry Satterfield, was a member of this society. My sister. Said he joined in 1929. Great article. It brought back so many memories.