Since 2015, Joni Carter has been a woman with a mission. It was in 2015 that Carter, who was born in Richmond but moved with her family to Kilmarnock, Virginia at age two, made a discovery that has been life-changing.
While helping her friend Sully Brien clean out her mother’s house after Brien’s mother died, Carter found a stash of film tins under a guest room bed. The films were left to Brien’s mother by their maker, James Wharton, a local man who died in 1992 and was, according to Carter, a lifelong “dear friend” of Brien. Carter knew Wharton and remembers him as “a creative man, a visionary, a historian, a musician and a writer. Others have described Wharton as “a Renaissance man.”
“He wrote for magazines, he wrote books, he wrote poetry,” Carter says. “He played the organ to accompany [the showing of] silent films in Kilmarnock. He also wrote plays and music—and he was a filmmaker.”
The estate find included hours of 16mm films and audiotapes dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. With her friend Brien’s permission, Carter searched for—and found—a projector capable of playing the films. Once she was able to watch the films, Carter says she knew she had found “a treasure.”
She explains, “We have a local and national treasure in these films. It’s part of our history and culture, and if we don’t preserve it, we will lose it.”
First some backstory: the late James Wharton was the son of Dr. H.M. Wharton, an evangelical Baptist minister and founder of what came to be known as the Wharton Grove Camp Meeting in 1894, a time when Christian revival meetings were commonplace in America. Organized as a Christian revival site, Wharton Grove was located near Weems on a waterfront parcel that was built on part of the land once owned by Robert “King” Carter. One newspaper reporter called it “Lancaster County’s first major tourist attraction.” James Wharton once described it as “carnival time laced with sermons, hymns and good old-time gospel fellowship.” Wharton, an accomplished musician, played hymns at the meetings, and snacks were sold.
The annual revival meetings attracted thousands annually until D.H. Wharton’s death in 1927. His widow, Lucy Pollard Wharton, (with James and his sister helping) transformed the site into a summer vacation retreat in the 1930s. Wharton Grove included cottages, a pier where steamboats once stopped, a dining hall and the tabernacle meeting area. The pier was severely damaged by the famous 1933 nor’easter/hurricane and was completely destroyed by Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
Wharton also was quoted as saying that Wharton Grove “hosted the first movie ever shown in the Northern Neck, A Life of Christ.”
“People would come by boat and stay for weeks at a time,” Carter notes. “The cottages were still there, but it was more of a vacation spot and summer resort by then. Some of the houses are still there [in the area], although the whole area [and any remaining cottages] where the camp meeting once was, are now privately owned.”
Houses called The Tents at Vineyard Grove in Irvington near the former Dog and Oyster Vineyard (now known as Camp Irvington) are now owned privately. Some are available as vacation rentals and were modeled after Wharton Grove’s cottages. The camp meeting’s early canvas tents evolved into framed cottages in a style known as “Carpenter Gothic,” with arched windows and Victorian “gingerbread” trim.
James Wharton, who graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1920, carried a 16mm movie camera all around the Northern Neck area after he returned home after college. Seeing someone with such a camera at the time, especially in an area as rural and isolated as the Northern Neck was in those days, very unusual. Carter says Wharton worked for awhile at The Baltimore Sun newspaper and speculates that perhaps Wharton got his movie camera during his time there. He also worked at The Rappahannock Record weekly newspaper, still
published in Kilmarnock, before later settling into a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Once Carter was able to view the long-forgotten films, her passion for them soared.
“I think it’s important for people to see what life was like in the 1930s [through Wharton’s films]. It was a difficult time, but people found happiness,” Carter says. “The films document life during the Great Depression days as well as rural life in the 1930s. It looked like they were having a pretty good life… they had food when a lot of the cities didn’t even have that. You feel a sense of survival even in the worst of times, and it’s very inspiring.”
Carter says Wharton focused a lot of his films on peoples’ faces. On the Wharton Films Project’s Facebook page, one commenter notes, “It’s funny how much we look like our relatives.” Some of the people included in the films have been identified, but the identity of many others featured in the films remains a mystery. The Wharton Films Project is an initiative of community volunteers who have digitized the original films after tediously going through hours of film footage.
The films include footage of May Day events with festivalgoers dancing in elaborate costumes; school events; Weems Elementary School (the building is still there but now vacant); a baby contest; seine fishing with poles/nets; working watermen in local waters; and oyster tonging. There is also a tasteful segment of film of young men “skinny dipping” in a secluded creek, along with footage of workers in various occupations. Wharton also documented some African-American life in film, a rarity during segregated times, including footage of Black citizens at a local fair and Blacks playing baseball at a Julius Rosenwald school. The films are silent, but there are also audiotapes that include recordings of Black menhaden fishermen and their shanties.
Back in the day, Wharton would screen his films locally for a small admission price and provide accompaniment to his silent films via his own piano playing. One flyer advertised “an airplane trip over Carter’s Creek” film. Local legend says he almost fell out of the plane while filming.
Carter, who describes herself as someone who likes to be in the background, is committed to making a documentary film on Wharton’s films. Her dad was a “country attorney” in Lively, and her mother’s family was from Mathews County. Her work background includes a decade-long stint at Best Products and starting a market research firm that was the research arm for a Richmond ad agency.
“When I had children I moved them back to the country so I had to commute to Richmond,” she explains. “I don’t think there is a better place for kids to grow up in a carefree, outdoor lifestyle—we have everything we want and need here. I’m still working part-time, doing consulting work and grant writing. I also volunteer about twenty hours a month for the County of Lancaster.”
After the films’ discovery in 2015, Carter started working in 2016 on a travel series called Virginia Found that was aired on PBS, including the film Journey on the Chesapeake: The Way Back Home that explored the culture, history and cuisine of people living along the Rappahannock and York Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. One reason Carter joined the production team was to try to learn as much as possible about filmmaking as she continues her quest to do a documentary film on Wharton and his movies. She has discovered it will be “a major, major undertaking.”
“I had a conversation with a filmmaker from National Geographic and asked him how much it would cost to do such a documentary—he said about a million dollars,” Carter recalls. “What I have been doing for the last five years or so is donating bits of the film to nonprofits, like The Steamboat Museum. I’ve also done a presentation for the Lancaster Historical Society. We also had an art gallery exhibit and people in their 90s came and saw their mothers in the film.”
Carter, who is now a grandparent, acknowledges the enormity of the project and admits it has been a slow process. She says Wharton Films Project may have to go after grants. She has successfully written other grants and hopes to devote herself fulltime to the documentary film project once she retires in a few years.
“I am learning to be a filmmaker… I never thought I could be a filmmaker. I also hope to find a really good cinematographer who can help. I have interviewed a few but have not found one yet who really ‘fits.’ It is a love of history that is driving me to do this,” she admits. “I want people to see what life was like in that era. It’s important to keep that alive.”
For more information: Facebook.com/Wharton Films Project