The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources announced today that 24,000 articles from William S. Powell’s Dictionary of North Carolina Biography and Encyclopedia of North Carolina will be added to NCPedia, the free, online encyclopedia of North Carolina history, biography, and culture maintained by the State Library of North Carolina.
This is big news for anyone interested in the history and culture of our state. Powell’s trilogy of reference books — the aforementioned encyclopedia and biographical dictionary, together with the North Carolina Gazetteer — are unparalleled sources of education and enlightenment for students, librarians, and curious readers of all ages. I don’t think that any state has a comparable collection of major reference books of this caliber. Adding these new sources to NCPedia will only increase their usefulness and reach.
A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina drawn from the Original of Colo. Mosely's, 1737
One of the most famous maps of early North Carolina is the one created in 1733 by Edward Moseley, the Surveyor General of the province (Note: It’s NOT the one above. Keep reading to learn more). Moseley’s A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina is generally cited as the first map of North Carolina to provide a detailed–and accurate–survey of the North Carolina coast. The Moseley map includes the names of European settlers and plantations on the Albemarle Sound and along the Pamlico, Neuse and Cape Fear rivers. The survey also includes some details on the North Carolina interior, noting rivers and creeks as well as the Indian people settled in the areas and their trails.
At 57 1/8 x 45 1/4 inches, Moseley’s map was large, with one inch representing five miles. The survey was engraved by John Cowley. Only 3 copies of the map are known to survive today. East Carolina University holds one copy as do Eton College in England and the National Archives of the United Kingdom in London.
Moseley’s map proved a source on which future surveys of North Carolina built. One such survey is a 1737 manuscript map (the one above) placed up for auction by Swann Galleries in New York in 2007. A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina drawn from the Original of Col. Mosely’s Survey by J: Cowley appears to be a smaller version of Moseley’s 1733 map, with identical place names and locations of rivers and inlets. But, unlike its 1733 predecessor, the 1737 map shows a proposed settlement at the head of the Pee Dee River, where the Yadkin and Uwharrie rivers merge. An inscription near the settlement reads “This is a Representation of an Improvement (sic) made at the conflux of the two Rivers, which Demonstrates the advantages of such a situation, both for Profit, Pleasure & Security.” Settlement along the lower Pee Dee River did begin in the 1730s, but no community appears to have been established upriver. It’s unclear who created the 1737 map. Perhaps it was John Cowley, the engraver credited on the 1733 map. But who was John Cowley and, if he’s the creator, why did he copy Moseley’s map? And why did he include the information on the upper Pee Dee River settlement?
Have we piqued your interest? If so, then join the North Carolina Collection, the Rare Book Collection at UNC and the William P. Cumming Map Society on March 10 for a talk on the 1733 Moseley Map and its 1737 copy. Mike McNamara, a Williamsburg collector of Colonial maps and furniture, will speak at 10 a.m. in the Pleasants Family Room at Wilson Library.
“The House Ways and Means Committee was skeptical of [FDR’s] revenue proposals.
“Its legendary chairman, Robert Lee ‘Muley’ Doughton [of] North Carolina had been a central figure in passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal tax legislation. But Doughton foremost was a Southerner. He had been born during the Civil War, and his father, a captain under Robert E. Lee, named his son after the general.
“He also was a fiscal conservative who had earned his nickname for ‘a backwoods stubbornness that cloaked a shrewd ability to compromise’….
“He often reminded colleagues that ‘the science of levying and collecting taxes is the science of getting the most feathers with the least squawking of the geese.’ ”
–– From “The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars from the Revolution to the War on Terror” by Robert D. Hormats (2007)
Don’t worry about not having time to make a home cooked meal before the big UNC vs. Duke game tonight. These recipes will have you well fed and on time to cheer on the Tar Heels!
The photo above is one of 66 images of historic schools in North Carolina that the State Library of North Carolina added to its Flickr site. Our colleagues are trying to determine where each of these schools stood. The photos were included in the Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina for various years in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The photo of the Chapel Hill school is from the 1896-1898 report.
As a Chapel Hill native and a proud graduate of its school system, I thought I’d take a stab at finding the location of this school. It took an hour or so. But I can now state with reasonable certainty (always a dangerous position to stake) that the building stood at (or very near) the southwest corner of Columbia and Franklin streets. It’s the current site of University Baptist Church.
The school opened in September 1896 under the supervision of John W. Canada, a Summerfield native who had graduated from UNC the previous spring. Although a young school master, Canada was not new to teaching. A farm boy, he arrived at UNC as a sophomore in fall 1893, having earned money to attend the university by teaching school in Guilford County and in South Carolina. While a student at UNC, Canada earned extra money by tutoring the older children of faculty. As Canada later wrote in his autobiography, Life at Eighty, Chapel Hill lacked schools, especially those for older students.
Funds for a very few months of public schools were available. There was no building adequate for such as might come to one. There was no special tax and no law whereby one might be levied. Through county funds, only a very limited amount was available. A lady, Miss Herndon, had a limited number of primary and kindergarten grades come to her home for a small but very good school. Mrs. Sallie Wilson, a most capable and experienced teacher, had come to town and expected to start a school. The would also be a one-room school and could not possibly cover a wide range of teaching. This would leave such work as I had done in preparing boys and girls in higher classes to such an extent that they might be ready for college not provided for.
As Canada prepared to graduate, several UNC faculty members urged him to start a school. And that he did. The Canada School, as it would become known, opened in an old hotel. Canada brought in others to help with teaching, including his younger brother, Charles, a student at UNC. Canada wrote in his autobiography:
The people of the town took the school to their hearts and soon the enrollment was almost two hundred boys and girls of various ages. Also there were many pupils from places outside Chapel Hill. With the second year the school began to make a showing, through its pupils going on to the University. The Alumni Record of the University, 1895-1924, shows some fifty boys and girls who went from Chapel Hill school to the University.
First graduating class of Canada school, 1898. Canada school students in early 1900s
The Canada school’s first graduating class included Louis Graves (second row, second from right),who would become the first professor of journalism at UNC in 1921 and then start the Chapel Hill Weekly two years later. Charles Maddry (second row, third from right) became a Baptist minister and played a part in the construction of the Baptist church that would later occupy the site of the Canada school. Later graduates of the school included the children of such UNC notables as Presidents George T. Winston and Francis P. Venable and Professor Eben Alexander.
Within several years of opening, the Canada school was seeking a new home. Industrialist Julian Carr helped finance the building of a new 10-room schoolhouse on Pittsboro Street across from the Carolina Inn. But in May 1901, with construction of the new school still underway, Canada left Chapel Hill for Denver, Colorado, where he and a friend tried their hands at writing and publishing textbooks. Two years later, having met little success in Colorado, Canada headed to Texas, where in short order he established a weekly newspaper in Kingsville, a cattle ranching town between Corpus Christi, Laredo and Brownsville. Canada spent the remainder of his life in south Texas, eventually moving from publishing to banking and the development of agricultural cooperatives. Canada was 86 when he died on February 1, 1958.
The Canada school lasted for a few years at its Pittsboro Street location, but eventually folded for lack of financial support. In 1906 the first school in Chapel Hill financed with public money opened in the Pittsboro Street schoolhouse. The first teachers included Blanche Pickard (1898 photo, first row, second from left) and Canada school graduate Nellie Roberson.
“Some beach debris is gruesome….In the 1970s a local physician found a piece of shipwreck timber on a North Carolina Outer Banks beach. The piece of cypress wood had two clumps of rust on it separated by a few inches. Close examination of the rust revealed fragments of a fibula and tibia in each. The explanation: The wood fragment was part of a slave ship that sank with its human cargo shackled to ship timbers, unable to escape.”
— From “The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline” by Orrin H. Pilkey, William J. Neal, James Andrew Graham Cooper and Joseph T. Kelley (2011)
“In the South, intestine [internal] war continually raged inside the conventional war of strategy and maneuver being fought by the British and Continental armies. Intestine warfare was more than pitched; it fondly embraced cruelty, nighttime murders and hangings without trial….
“Or, as North Carolina Governor Abner Nash more vividly described the land that suffered it, ‘a Country exposed to the misfortune of having a War within its Bowels.’ ”
— From “With Little Less Than Savage Fury” by Thomas B. Allen in American Heritage magazine (Fall 2010)
Did you know the North Carolina Collection has a vast collection of cookbooks? Here are a few recipes from some early 1900s cookbooks that may help with your party planning.
On this day in 1865: Capt. G.W. Booth responds to Gov. Zeb Vance’s request for a report on conditions at the Confederate prison at Salisbury: “About the 5th of November, 1864, a large number of prisoners of war, some 8,000, were suddenly sent here, the Government having no other place to send them. The grounds were enlarged and such preparation as could be made were arranged for their reception. A short time after their arrival tents were issued, and now they are all under shelter of some sort. The number of prisoners confined here has reached as high a figure as 10,000.
“The matter of food receives the earnest attention of the commanding officers. They [prisoners] regularly receive one pound of good bread, one pint of soup, besides small issues of meat or sorghum. Sometimes small quantities of both. As to clothing, their condition is truly deplorable, most of them having been prisoners some six or nine months. The Confederate Government cannot issue clothing to them, and none has been received at this post from the North.”
Our friends at the State Library of North Carolina have just added a bunch of new materials to their excellent historical state publications online collection.
Among the titles recently added is the North Carolina Collection’s copy of the Public Papers and Letters of O. Max Gardner, from his term as Governor, 1929-1933. The volume includes Gardner’s excellent speech at the dedication of the new library building at UNC in 1929 (pp. 199-200), which featured this great quote:
We may, therefore, say that while its soul is the spirit of the men who teach and are taught–the heart of a true university is its library. It is the safety-deposit vault in which is kept the past’s legacy for the present and the future. It is the quiet sector in the life of the busy university where imperialists in the realm of truth may happily dream of new frontiers. And it is, finally, an index of our progress as a people.
