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Four people with ties to UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences are the latest recipients of the prestigious North Carolina Award, the highest civilian honor that the state can bestow. The winners were recognized by Governor Mike Easley at a ceremony on Nov. 27.
College alumni Jerry Cashion and Jan Davidson and professors William Leuchtenburg (history, emeritus) and Darrel Stafford (biology) were among six recipients with UNC connections. Two winners — Henry Frye and Burley Mitchell — have connections to the UNC School of Law. Nine total awards were given across the following categories: fine arts, literature, public service and science.
Cashion shared the award with Frye, Mitchell and Charlie Rose for public service, Davidson shared the award with Rosemary Harris Ehle won for fine arts, Leuchtenburg won for literature and Stafford shared the award with Viney P. Aneja for science.
Created by the General Assembly in 1961, the North Carolina Awards have been presented annually since 1964. More than 200 outstanding North Carolinians have been selected as recipients from citizen nominations from across the state.
Read more about the College winners below:
PUBLIC SERVICE: Jerry C. Cashion
Historian, teacher, mentor— N.C. Historical Commission Chair Jerry Cashion long has been the person to turn to with questions about North Carolina history. One colleague commends his “passion for historical accuracy, meticulous documentation, and absolute integrity.” Another points to his “immense stature as a teacher” and the “firm and fair hand” with which he presides over meetings of the state historical commission —“always the gentleman.” For a career dedicated to the truth and an unwavering sense of allegiance to the Old North State, Jerry C. Cashion received the 2007 North Carolina Award for Public Service.
Cashion credits his fascination with history and his dedication to all things Tar Heel to his upbringing in Iredell County. Of special interest from an early age was nearby Fort Dobbs, the lost fortification erected by frontier settlers as a defense from Cherokee attacks. Though raised in Statesville, he spent much time on the family farm, property he still owns, prompting coworkers to nickname him “The Squire.”
In 1958 Cashion enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he acquired bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in history. His dissertation addressed the Cherokee during the period preceding the American Revolution. His mentors were William S. Powell, the prolific author and teacher, and Hugh T. Lefler, the legendary classroom teacher. Cashion assisted Lefler with textbook revisions and classroom duties.
As a graduate student he taught popular courses on North Carolina and United States history. Among his students was future governor Michael F. Easley, whose friendship he values to this day. In 1974 Cashion received recognition for outstanding teaching. After moving to Raleigh he taught undergraduates at North Carolina State University.
A mark of Cashion’s steadfastness has been his dedication to his fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta. Cashion is an admirer of Civil War governor Zebulon B. Vance and their portraits hang together at the UNC fraternity, a chapter which Vance helped establish. Known as “Pop” Cashion to his brothers, he long served as adviser to the group and has established a scholarship for members.
From 1974 to 2000 Cashion was Research Branch Supervisor of what is now the Office of Archives and History in the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. His work for the agency began while he was at UNC and has included reports ranging from Fort Butler in the west to Polk Birthplace in the Piedmont to Halifax in the east. He supervised work on scores of reports by researchers in his office and long administered the State Highway Historical Marker Program.
Cashion has served Archives and History and broader cultural interests in North Carolina by involvement with the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, America’s 400th Anniversary Committee, Friends of the Archives, National Register Advisory Committee, Kellenberger Historical Foundation, Carolina Charter Corporation, Southern Historical Association, North Caroliniana Society, and Historical Society of North Carolina.
He received the Christopher Crittenden Award for preservation of state history in 1999. Governor Easley appointed him chairman of the North Carolina Historical Commission in 2001 and reappointed him in 2007.
Cashion, whose late wife Rita also worked for Archives and History, lives in Raleigh and dotes on his two grandchildren.
FINE ARTS: Jan Davidson
Jan Davidson has been called “North Carolina to the bone.” His contributions to understanding Tar Heel arts and culture are extraordinary and far reaching. Since 1992 he has served as director of the John C. Campbell Folk School, founded in 1925 at Brasstown in Clay County in the southwestern corner of the state. The school has been revitalized due in large measure to his vision and hard work. For his lifelong commitment to performing, collecting, and serving as a focal point for folk life interests, Jan Davidson received the 2007 North Carolina Award for Fine Arts.
For Davidson, it is the noncompetitive nature of John C. Campbell that sets his school apart: “A lot of schools are set up to sort people out. We are set up to bring them together. It is important to have some places in this world where life is not a contest.” The school has become an incubator for small businesses and has developed into a strong economic development partner in the region, providing steady, year-round jobs with good benefits.
Each year the John C. Campbell Folk School offers some 850 classes to more than 3,000 students, sixty percent of whom are return visitors. Students, who are for the most part adults, take courses in art forms such as blacksmithing, basketry, weaving, music, storytelling, and writing. Craft schools exist across the region, but the institution founded by Olive Dame Campbell and Marguerite Butler is a folk school, based on the Danish folkehojskole.
Davidson’s path to Brasstown came with detours, though his singular focus lends an air of predestination to his route. Born John Allen Davidson Jr., he is a native of Cherokee County, just a short distance from Brasstown. As a teenager he was a disc jockey at WCVP in Murphy and introduced the Beatles to the community. He followed his muse to UNC-Chapel Hill, where at night he played in a rock band called the Southern States Fidelity Choir. In his daytime hours he completed undergraduate studies in English and a master’s degree in folklore.
In 1975, the Southern States Fidelity Choir collaborated with the Red Clay Ramblers on the musical Diamond Studs. Davidson spent the better part of that year in New York City performing eight shows a week off Broadway. After Diamond Studs, he worked in Washington as an aide to Sen. Robert Morgan, followed by a five-year stint as a visiting artist in the public schools and community colleges across North Carolina.
Davidson accepted a position as curator of the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University in 1983. A project on blacksmithing developed into his dissertation, which he completed as part of a Ph.D. in folklore, history, and museum studies at Boston University in 1992. Davidson started work at Brasstown the same year.
Davidson’s allegiance to North Carolina has translated to service on a number of levels, from the local chamber of commerce to Western North Carolina Tomorrow to the Southern Arts Federation. Since 1996 he has been a board member of the North Carolina Arts Council.
Davidson and his wife, Nan, live in Brasstown and are the parents of two sons and a daughter.
LITERATURE: William E. Leuchtenburg
William Leuchtenburg, scholar of the presidency and history professor emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill, is the nation’s leading authority on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In addition to his skills at research and teaching, he is known for the beauty and clarity of his writing. As he says, “Writing is its own justification, the way a beautiful day is, or eating a peach. There is a feeling of joy when you have done something well.” For his lifelong dedication to the historical profession and the public realm and his manifest respect for readers and the written word, William E. Leuchtenburg received the 2007 North Carolina Award for Literature.
Born in Ridgewood, New York, in 1922, he demonstrated his flair for scholarship early in life. By the age of 12 he was tutoring other students and earned enough money for a solo bus trip to Washington, D.C. This trip to the nation’s capital set the stage for his lifelong interest in government. As a teenager he found his hometown in Queens so “stultifying” that he regularly walked across borough and bridge into “enticing” Manhattan to spend one nickel at a drugstore soda fountain and another on the return ride home on the subway. In 1939 he was “drawn, like a magnet, day after day” to the World’s Fair in neighboring Astoria.
After undergraduate studies at Cornell University and completion of a Ph.D. at Columbia University, Leuchtenburg taught briefly at Smith College, New York University, and Harvard University before settling into a 30-year career in the history department at Columbia. Like his friend, John Hope Franklin, he was lured to North Carolina by the National Humanities Center and served for 20 years as a Kenan professor at UNC-Chapel Hill before retiring in 2002.
The author of more than a dozen books on 20th-century American history, Leuchtenburg is best known for The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (1958), widely used in courses, and the prize-winning Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963). His recent works include American Places (2000) and The White House Looks South (2005). He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Mellon, and Woodrow Wilson Center fellowships.
In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1991, Leuchtenburg (who also has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians) assessed the relationship of the historian to the public realm and recounted his own lifelong involvement outside academics—from marching in Selma alongside Martin Luther King Jr. to election night commentary on network television to testimony before Congressional committees. He repudiated those who wish to politicize the profession: “Those who insist that history is worthwhile only when it offers solutions to current problems reveal a hostility to the very nature of the historical enterprise.”
At Columbia and Chapel Hill, Leuchtenburg shepherded scores of graduate students, many of whom today are leading American historians. One, William Chafe of Duke University, commends his mentor for “the model he has presented to all of us of how to research tirelessly, argue fairly and tenaciously, and write gracefully and elegantly.”
Leuchtenburg, married to wife Jean Anne since 1984, has three grown children and lives in Chapel Hill.
SCIENCE: Darrel W. Stafford
“If the genetics revolution had a front line, it would stretch through Darrel Stafford’s cramped lab at UNC-Chapel Hill,” so noted the Raleigh News & Observer in 2004 about his work. Stafford, a biology professor at UNC, has been at the forefront of research into blood coagulation for 15 years. For his world-class advances in understanding the essential details of how coagulation works and how it can be regulated, Darrel W. Stafford received the 2007 North Carolina Award for Science.
Born in 1935 in Parsons, Kansas, Stafford was raised on a farm and took up his earliest studies in oneroom schoolhouses in Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. Just out of high school he worked for the railroad; but, in 1953, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps for a three year tour of duty, the bulk of which was spent in Japan.
Stafford earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Southwest Missouri State College in 1959 and a doctorate in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Miami in 1964. After a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, he assumed a professorship in the department of biology at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he is also a joint member of the department of pathology.
Early in his scientific career Stafford concentrated on marine biology and isolated a pure gene from sea urchins. A paper he authored in 1976 on DNA purification has been cited in the scientific literature 2,637 times. He has authored 138 publications to date. A 1984–1985 sabbatical in Heidelberg, Germany, where he came to know others in the field of molecular biology, was a boost to his work.
Stafford, who became interested in blood coagulation through his interactions with Dr. Roger Lundblad and Dr. Harold Roberts, is best known for his work on two enzymes of the vitamin K cycle, gamma glutamyl carboxylase and vitamin K epoxide reductase. Warfarin, or Coumadin®, had been discovered at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Warfarin inhibits the enzyme vitamin K epoxide reductase and became widely used for anticoagulation after it was prescribed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower following his heart attack in 1955. Currently 40 million Americans are prescribed Coumadin® to reduce the risk of clotting and consequent strokes and heart attacks.
In 1991 Stafford and his team of researchers cloned the gene for gamma glutamyl carboxylase. In 2004 Stafford and his colleague, Tao Li, made international news when they identified the other enzyme of the vitamin K cycle, vitamin K epoxide reductase — the target of warfarin. The breakthrough, hailed on the cover of the scientific journal Nature, did not come easily, as the gene was one among 190 candidates and the discovery came to light only after hundreds of laboratory hours. As a consequence of Stafford’s work, doctors can better regulate patients’ treatments, since every patient on blood clotting medications responds differently.
In July 2007, Stafford received the Distinguished Career Award at the XXIst Congress of the International Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis in Geneva, Switzerland.
Stafford has five children and seven grandchildren. He is married to Dr. Sheue-Mei Wu. They live in Carrboro.
