Midweek link dump: Sniff sniff bang bang

— New owner of abandoned Frying Pan Shoals Light Tower brings back first impression: “It smelled like 1964.”

— No casualties when antique cannonball dug from beach near Fort Caswell belatedly goes boom! (Unlike 1941, when two members of the Coast Artillery Corps at the antebellum Fort Macon suffered shrapnel wounds after rolling what they mistook for solid iron shot into a fireplace to use as andirons.)

— Collection of almost 700 ambrotypes and tintypes of Civil War-era soldiers donated to  Library of Congress. Most are unnamed, few are Confederates and perhaps only one is a North Carolinian. All are painfully evocative.

Today’s link dump has had no contact with agents

— Click away a leisurely afternoon with these 206 images of Asheville from the Library of Congress.

— “The Nylon Capital of the World… need not embellish its past with a bogus story about Leonidas Polk.”

— The distinctive architecture of Gaston County’s oldest building “came down the Great Wagon Road.”

Hugh McColl Jr. recalls “the most boring city I’d ever seen in my life.” (Relax, Raleigh, he’s not talking about you.)