Carl Sandburg 1878-1967 (P-75)
Posted by: DougK
N 35° 16.378 W 082° 26.514
17S E 368858 N 3904267
North Carolina Mark P 75 notes the location of the nearby Carl Sandburg home.
Waymark Code: WMKPGM
Location: North Carolina, United States
Date Posted: 05/11/2014
Views: 6
This North Carolina marker is located at the main intersection of Flat Rock, in front of the Flat Rock Village Hall. The text is the same on each side and reads:
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P 75
Carl Sandburg
1878-1967
"Poet of the People",
Lincoln biographer, &
Pulitzer Prize-winning
author. Lived, 1945-67,
at "Connemara", 1/3 mi. W.
Division of Archives and History 1992
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From the North Carolina Highway Marker website:
For the last twenty-three years of his life Carl Sandburg, Illinois native and one of America’s most versatile writers, lived at Flat Rock. There he wrote Always the Young Strangers, a memoir; Remembrance Rock, a novel; and several volumes of poetry. For his Complete Poems, published in 1950, Sandburg won the Pulitzer Prize, his second. He also won a Pulitzer in history in 1939 for his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. In 1955 he condensed his million-and-a-half words on Lincoln into a single volume.
Born in Galesburg, Illinois, to Swedish immigrants in 1878, Sandburg worked as an advertising writer, journalist, lecturer, and socialist organizer before publishing Chicago Poems in 1916, a volume which contained, in addition to the title verse, perhaps his best-known poem, “Fog.” Sandburg never enjoyed the success with critics that he found with the general reading public.
In 1945 Sandburg’s wife Paula, in search of a home in a more temperate clime than the Midwest and with pasture for her prize-winning goats, found such a place in North Carolina. The couple purchased a 245-acre farm called “Connemara,” which had once belonged to the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Treasury C. G. Memminger. They shipped their 21 tons of belongings to Flat Rock by freight car late in 1945. In his later years Sandburg relished his status as a literary celebrity. He and his rival Robert Frost were intimates of Pres. John F. Kennedy. In 1959 Sandburg became the first private citizen in eighty-five years to address a joint session of the United States Congress, in observance of the 150th anniversary of Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Sandburg died on July 22, 1967, at age eighty-nine. In 1968 the National Park Service made “Connemara” a National Historic Site and in 1974 the house, complete with many of the author’s personal effects, was opened to the public.
Marker Name: Carl Sandburg
Marker Type: Roadside
Related Web Link: [Web Link]
Required Waymark Photo: yes
Local North Carolina markers without State Number Designation: Not listed
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Visit Instructions:Photos of your visit to the marker are required, but PLEASE, no old vacation photos taken just because it was there!
Comments about your visit, interesting nearby areas and any significant information you may have on this waymark are encouraged.
Most of all, enjoy the History that North Carolina has to offer! From the Mountains to the Ocean .. it's all here!
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