Month: May 2009

Souvenir Postcard Booklet of Lake Lure

Our postcard collections include a wide variety of styles and materials, and we try to represent the different types of postcards in our digital collection, including examples of real photograph, leather, and wood cards.

In addition to postcards of different media, we also have postcards with unique formats.  Grouped with our over-sized postcards are a lot of souvenir postcard booklets from various tourist attractions across the state, many of them dating to the 1940s.  These postcard booklets feature an accordion-style strip of different postcard views of a particular place, which could be folded up into their cover and mailed just like other postcards, but required more postage.

We’ve recently uploaded our first postcard booklet to North Carolina Postcards, showing scenes from Lake Lure and Chimney Rock.  Located in Rutherford County, Lake Lure was created for a resort development in 1928 and has been the location for scenes in many famous movies, including Dirty Dancing and Forrest Gump.  The booklet is presented online as a single object with many components so that we could display each of the twenty one cards as well as the front and back covers, while keeping all the images together as a group.  Each card’s title is listed along the left-hand side of the screen, and clicking on the title will open the accompanying image.  You can also use the “previous page” and “next page” links to scroll through the series of images.

David Stick, 1919-2009

David Stick died on May 24 (read his obituary here). A longtime historian of North Carolina’s coast, Stick wrote several books on the topic, including Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of the North Carolina Coast, The Outer Banks of North Carolina: 1584-1958 and Roanoke Island: the Beginnings of English America. In 1986, he donated his outstanding collection of primary and secondary material concerning coastal North Carolina to the state. These items are now housed at the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo.

New NC Maritime History Research Guide

People interested in North Carolina’s rich maritime history will want to check out our newest Research Guide, cleverly entitled Maritime History of North Carolina: A Research Guide. It covers a long chronological period (from pre-colonial days to the 20th century) and addresses several specific aspects of the state’s maritime history, including pirates, shipwrecks, maritime archaeology, and coastal communities. This is only one of more than 30 research guides about various topics related to N.C. Click here to see the full list of N.C.-themed guides currently available online.

Infantile Paralysis Campaign


This button comes from the Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, which is a part of the North Carolina Collection Gallery. Lew has been kind enough to send us background information on some of the pins in his collection, so North Carolina Miscellany wants to share this information with our readers.

“In 1948 North Carolina suffered the nation’s worst epidemic of infantile paralysis—better known today as polio—with a reported 2,516 cases and 143 deaths. Officials in Savannah, Georgia, fearing contagion, barred Tar Heels from visiting the beach, and citizens of Newport News petitioned Virginia’s governor to close the border.

In 1959, North Carolina became the first state to require children to be inoculated with the new Salk vaccine.”

Family Bible Records Online

For those genealogists in the readership, let me point you to a great resource that the North Carolina State Library and North Carolina State Archives just launched:

North Carolina Family Records Online

The site “contains over 200 Bible Records (lists of birth, marriage, and death information recorded in North Carolina Bibles throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries). The collection also contains a six-volume index of marriage and death notices that appeared in five North Carolina newspapers from 1799-1893.”

First African-American Woman Rabbi

A long-time reader, frequent commenter, and even more frequent “answerer” of Tar Heel trivia postings emailed the following link to me recently:

A black woman’s journey to the rabbinate in North Carolina

In June, Alysa Stanton will become the first African-American woman to be ordained as a rabbi. In August, she will assume her duties at Congregation Bayt Shalom in Greenville, North Carolina, making her the “first African-American rabbi to lead a majority white congregation.”

The Best Barbecue? Barbeque? BBQ? Bar-B-Q? Bar-B-Que?

I just read an entire article on CNN’s website called “Does your state have the best BBQ?” or the “Quest for the best barbecue” and only saw “North Carolina” mentioned once! The entire article could have been just one sentence: “Yes, my state, which is North Carolina, does have the best barbecue.”

The word “Texas” was mentioned way, way too many times.

We live in the Web 2.0 age, so CNN has provided a place for readers to comment, discuss, and argue. Plus, there’s a map showing user-submitted locations for the best barbecue. I’m equally dismayed that only one place in NC has a “red lollipop.” (Four in Tennessee? Seven in Texas? One in Minnesota? One in Massachusetts?) Take a look at the page here: “The Best Barbecue Around.”

James Augustus “Catfish” Hunter

North Carolina’s own “Catfish” Hunter has been included on Sports Illustrated’s Top 15 Major League Baseball Nicknames.

The website has this to say about Hunter’s nickname:

“Hunter was nicknamed ‘Catfish’ by Royals owner Charles Finley, who felt the youngster needed a catchy nickname. The owner then created a story that Hunter had caught a large catfish when he was a boy. Though the story was fictional, the nickname stuck.”

A native of Hertford, North Carolina, Catfish was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1987. He passed away in 1999.

Since Catfish was a product of the Tar Heel State, the North Carolina Collection has several items related to him. They are:

Catfish : my life in baseball / by Jim “Catfish” Hunter and Armen Keteyian.

Catfish, the three million dollar pitcher / by Bill Libby.

Perquimans County salutes Jimmy “Catfish” Hunter : May 9, 1987. [Image above comes from this item.]

Catfish Hunter : the three million dollar arm / by Irwin Stambler.

The picture story of Catfish Hunter / by George Sullivan.

Catfish Hunter / by Gary Libman & Paul J. Deegan. [CpB H946L]

“From Barnyard to Ball Park,” by Todd A. Brewster in The Country Gentleman, Fall, 1976, Vol. 126, No. 4. [CpB H946b]