A Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear: Written in Collaboration by Citizens of Wilmington in North Carolina, With the Supervision of Frederick Henry Koch (1921)
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The New Day, A Masque Of The Future: In Verse And Music
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Frederick Henry Koch was an American professor of dramatics and proponent of American folk plays. He is known as the "Father of American Folk Drama. "
Background
Frederick Henry Koch was born on September 12, 1877 in Covington, Kentucky, United States, but grew up chiefly in Peoria, Illinois, where his paternal grandfather, Heinrich Friedrich Koch, a landscape gardener, had settled after emigrating from Germany in 1858. Frederick's father, August William Koch, was an accountant and cashier for the Aetna Life Insurance Company, but in his spare time sketched and painted. Frederick's mother, Rebecca Cornelia (Julian) Koch, was the daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter of French Huguenot descent. From his mother Koch apparently derived his gregariousness and quick wit. He grow in a family of ten children (nine of them boys).
Education
Koch graduated from the Peoria high school, attended Caterals Methodist College in Cincinnati for a time, and then entered Ohio Wesleyan University, receiving the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1900. In March 1901 he enrolled at the Emerson School of Oratory in Boston, where he studied theater arts and graduated in 1903.
Feeling the need for more training, he took a leave of absence to study at Harvard, where he earned an Master of Arts in 1909; he was greatly influenced by Prof. George Pierce Baker, who stirred his interest in developing an original American drama. At the University of North Dakota, Koch organized the Sock and Buskin Society (later called the Dakota Playmakers), a small group of faculty and students who wrote and produced one-act plays based on their own knowledge of life in the frontier state. The Playmakers traveled all through North Dakota, often carrying their dramas to communities that had never before seen a play.
Career
Perhaps because of his father's strong opposition to a theatrical career, Koch turned to teaching, becoming an instructor in English at the University of North Dakota in 1905. There he found partial satisfaction for his theatrical urge by directing his students in dramatic productions.
Koch moved in 1918 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at the urging of Prof. Edwin A. Greenlaw, the head of the English department. There for twenty-six years he taught dramatic literature and play writing. From the start he stressed folk plays, which he described as being "concerned with folk subject matter: with the legends, superstitions, customs, environmental differences, and the vernacular of the common people. " Organizing the Carolina Playmakers, modeled on his earlier group at North Dakota, he staged "Carolina Folk Plays, " first in a high school auditorium and then in a small remodeled building on the university campus, and took them on tour to neighboring communities and to cities as far afield as Washington, New York, Boston, Dallas, and St. Louis. One of the students in his first class in play writing was the fledgling author Thomas Wolfe; Koch's encouragement was instrumental in Wolfe's decision to become a playwright and later to enter George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard. Other writers who began as Koch's students were Paul Green, Betty Smith (author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), and the newspaperman Jonathan Daniels.
As Koch's fame spread, young men and women came not only from North Carolina but from other states and even from abroad to study under him. A "Johnny Appleseed of the drama, " Koch established, with the aid of the university's extension service, a Bureau of Community Drama to help school and civic groups in North Carolina develop their own dramatic programs. A traveling field secretary gave the necessary training and assistance in production. Local drama groups performed for each other at regional festivals, and once a year they gathered in Chapel Hill at a statewide dramatic festival sponsored by the Carolina Playmakers. Koch also strongly influenced the development of outdoor pageants and pageant plays based on historical themes, notable examples of which are Paul Green's The Lost Colony, given annually on Roanoke Island beginning in 1937, and Kermit Hunter's Unto These Hills, given high in the mountains at Cherokee. Three decades later, these two dramas between them were attracting more than 200, 000 spectators each summer. Koch had begun in 1918 with students as his only assistants, but he gradually added trained members to his staff, and by 1936, when the University of North Carolina established a separate department of dramatic art, he had a fairly large group of associates. To them he increasingly turned over the direction of the work, although he continued to take a lively interest in all details.
Achievements
Koch gave a lasting stimulus to the theater in North Carolina. The Bureau of Community Drama he had founded in North Carolina was still flourishing a quarter-century after his death.
Koch was not himself an outstanding artist or scholar, but his radiant and vibrant personality evoked the highest talents of students and others who worked with him.
Connections
Koch was survived by his wife, Loretta Jean Hanigan, an Irish-American whom he had met in Athens while on a European tour in 1909 and had married at Denver, Colorado, on March 24, 1910, and by their four children: Frederick Henry, George Julian, Robert Allan, and William Julian.
