Birthplace of the state song

Our good friends at Goodnight, Raleigh! have a wonderful piece (and photo) on the place where the state song, "The Old North State Forever," was written.

There is a marker in Raleigh on the "Hargett Street side of the Edmisten Building denoting the spot where Judge William Gaston penned the official North Carolina state song 'The Old North State Forever,'" says the site. From The North Carolina History Project ...

In late 1830s, he composed the song to counter the charge that North Carolina was the “Rip Van Winkle State”—backward and unchanging. This motivation is evidenced in the following line: “Tho’ the scorner may sneer at and witlings defame her, Still our hearts swell with gladness whenever we name her.” In 1927, the state officially adopted Gaston’s song.

I was attending a state conference last year where a children's choir performed the song. The audience was asked to sing the chorus, but few people knew the words or tune, which is a shame. Hopefully this is a song that can regain prominence, perhaps in the public schools, so that it's not completely forgotten.

The original USS North Carolina?

The above is a shot of the gangway gate to the USS North Carolina (1836), 19th century warship (and on display at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh). The gangway features a black walnut engraving of the state seal "surrounded by tobacco, cotton, corn, oak leaves and pine needles with a sun rising over an American flag, eagle, and shield."

(Click to enlarge the closeup photo to really get a feel for the intricate carving work.)

Below is a artist's depiction of the "old" USS North Carolina, not the one in Wilmington.

UPDATE: Old North State motto lost in translation?

Last week or so I posted this query about an old N.C. state seal.

Came across an old book, American Symbols: The Seals and Flags of the Fifty States by M. B. Schnapper, which includes an interesting (and up until now unknown-to-me) history about North Carolina's state seal.

One of Nostre Caroline's early seals (around 1663) includes the phrase "Que Sera Tamen Respexit." This obviously predates the motto of "Esse Quam Videri" (To Be Rather Than To Seem), which was authorized in the 1890s.

The question, for you Latin experts out there, is what does that old motto actually mean?I went to an expert (an Internet translation site) which spit this out:"And sera nothwithstanding regard."

Somehow, I don't think this is what King Charles II had in mind.Obviously, "que sera" means " what will be will be." But what about the rest of it. For the record, Schnapper never divulges it either.

No one ever came forth to answer this question, so I went to an expert.

"The line comes from Virgil, Eclog 1, line 27: 'Libertas, quae sera tamen respexit inertem . . .'" replied Zola Packman, an assistant language professor at N.C. State University and a Latin expert.

Packman states that "Que Sera Tamen Respexit" "roughly" translates to "Liberty, which, (though) late (in life), looked upon (me), inactive (as I was)."

"The speaker is an ex-slave, so the liberty spoken of was meant to be that of a free, ie non-slave, man," Packman responded in an email. "I suppose that when used as a motto it must be understood to refer to a population, or an area, and that the freedom is meant to be understood as freedom from foreign occupation."

Thanks for the feedback! And how cool is it that there is a professor named "Packman" at NCSU?