October 2009 – Page 3 – NC Miscellany

1930s Meets Today

Postmarked in 1932, here’s a lovely postcard featuring the one and only Davie Hall (which apparently used to house the botany department!), the arboretum’s “pergola,” and a hysterical statement that any UNC student—of all generations—can relate to: “I don’t have any special plans for today except to try to catch up with my reading.”

With midterms just over (and coffee demand at the Daily Grind, Alpine, Student Stores, and Starbucks slowing down), I think all undergraduates know exactly what Lee C. meant.

Behold! First, it was blogging… then… it was Facebooking… NOW THIS?!?! THE NCC TWEETS!

Attention NCC, NC Miscellany, NC History, and NC Postcard lovers (and those of you stumble-upon-this-website-web-friends!): while postcard transcriptions are readily available at the wonderful NC Postcards website (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/nc_post/), we thought we’d take their quite Droll and Merry content and attempt to fit it in, you guessed it, 140 characters! As we continue to transcribe and edit past transcriptions, us folks here at the p-card factory will tweet NC past and hope to bring a few smiles to your face in the process. Additionally, we’ll be tweeting NCC updates, interesting finds, unsolved North Carolina historical mysteries, links to innovative projects, and maybe, just maybe our staff’s states of mind.

Request to follow us here: http://twitter.com/NCCollection

And tweet we go!

Seen at the Pinehurst Gun Club: Could this be Annie Oakley?

The winter resort village of Pinehurst, N.C. began in 1895, and the Carolina hotel opened there in 1901. It was the largest hotel in the community, and at the time of its construction, the largest hotel in the state. Pinehurst featured several other hotels, boarding houses, and cottages for rent, but none offered the same services, amenities, and recreational opportunities as The Carolina.

One recreational activity offered by the hotel was the gun club, which enabled guests to take lessons from instructors and also featured exhibition demonstrations by the instructors. The image above is an excerpt from a postcard depicting an event at the Gun Club, and shows a woman in a white dress shooting a rifle. To see the entire postcard, click on the image.

While we’re not certain, it’s possible that the woman depicted here is Annie Oakley …

After a long stint in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling show, Annie Oakley and her husband, Frank Butler, came to live at The Carolina in 1915. They had positions on the hotel’s staff, and Annie would give exhibitions and shooting lessons at the gun club, and Frank was in charge of the skeet range. Her lessons and biweekly demonstrations were extraordinarily popular. In the six years she worked at The Carolina, she gave lessons to hundreds of people each winter season.

This postcard dates to when she would have been employed by the hotel, and the large crowd gathered to watch (don’t miss the two boys on the roof of the club house!) suggests that this was not an event to miss.

This is the only postcard we have of the Gun Club, but you can view other postcards of The Carolina (and some of its other recreational activities) here.

Reference
Flory, Claude R. 1966. “Annie Oakley in the South,” in North Carolina Historical Review, 43(3), 333-343.

NC State Fair Opens Today!

The 2009 N.C. State Fair opens today!

Visit http://www.ncstatefair.org/2009/ for more information.

This photographic postcard shows a winning stalk of Simpkins’ Prolific cotton seed, and the card’s caption mentions that it won the first place premium at the 1910 state fair.

The NCC has a run of NC State Fair premiums, rules, and regulations. I’m not sure if this cotton stalk won the Simpkins’ Prize or the Cotton Contest (or both), but in 1910, the prizes for each were as follows:

Confederate generals found postwar work in D.C.

572 Stedman

“From the end of Reconstruction until 1890, Confederate veterans held a majority of the best offices in the Southern states…. Confederate generals held 18 of the seats in the 45th Congress, 1877-1879, with 49 other seats from the South held by lower-ranking soldiers and sailors….

“The last Confederate veteran to serve in Congress was Major Charles M. Stedman of North Carolina, who died in 1930 [at age 89].”

— From “The Last Review” by Virginius Dabney (1984)

Charles Manly Stedman was elected to the House of Representatives 10 times by his Greensboro district. This pinback must be from Stedman’s second unsuccessful run for governor (1903), rather than his first (1888), since such celluloid political buttons weren’t introduced until the McKinley-Bryan presidential campaign of 1896. And of course he looks more like 62 years old than 47.

Picking Strawberries In Columbus County

Strawberries_Columbus_83-67

A recent post featured an image of a strawberry festival in Wallace, North Carolina (read about it here). While I was working on that post, I found the image above, which has the supplied title “Picking Strawberries in Columbus County.”

The original of the image is in the NC Collection’s Photographic Archives (P1-24-S913; 83-672).

It’s a long time until strawberries are in season in North Carolina…

Notes on the Built Environment: Cliffside, NC

In 1851, Raleigh Rutherford (R.R.) Haynes was born in Ferry, Rutherford County. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Union County, South Carolina, with his younger brother to work in the cotton fields. Two years later, around 1870, he returned to Rutherford County and invested the money he made in a general store and a sawmill. By reinvesting his money, Haynes was able to become a wealthy landowner and successful industrialist.

In 1885, Haynes opened the first successful textile industry in Rutherford County in Henrietta. Over time, he built several more very successful textile mills along the Second Broad River.

One of these was Cliffside, which Haynes began work on in 1900. It was to be a mill and company town located on the Second Broad River, like Haynes’ other mills. In North Carolina Architecture, Catherine Bishir writes that when it was built, Cliffside was one of the last (and largest) water-powered textile mills (p. 432).

Cliffside was likely named for the extremely steep and rocky hills all over the area. The company town was home to around 900 employees, who all lived white cottages. The company town featured a downtown with a main street that featured many services and entertainment opportunities.

Before he died in 1917, R. R. Haynes had planned to build a community center for the mill town of Cliffside. It was designed to have a wide variety of services and leisure activities including a library, movie theater, gymnasium, beauty shops, banquet hall, barbershops, baths, and a cafe. The community center was completed in 1922 and named the “R. R. Haynes Memorial Building,” in his honor.

Below are two postcards depicting the R.R. Haynes Memorial Building and two postcards of other aspects of town life in Cliffside.

Exterior of the R. R. Haynes Memorial Building in Cliffside. The entrance at the right is also the entrance for the movie theater. Movie posters are visible near the entrance.

Interior view of the lobby in the Haynes Memorial Building. Although it’s difficult to tell from the postcard, the table tops were inlaid with checker boards!

View of the Cliffside United Methodist Church, built in 1912. A typical Cliffside house can be seen behind and to the right of the church. Haynes built several schools and churches for the towns’ residents.

Interior view of the Lakeview Dairy farm, which provided milk for the town until the 1950s. The dairy farm was located across from the mill.

The R. R. Haynes Memorial Building and many millworkers’ houses were torn down in the 1960s and 1970s, but the building’s clock tower was turned into a monument and placed on Cliffside’s Main Street, where it still stands today.

Happy 216th Birthday UNC!

In honor of UNC’s 216th birthday, NCM shares two items from our collection. The first is from a University Day celebration ca. 1877, and the second from 1880.

Go out and have a Carolina blue cupcake to celebrate.

After Charlotte the circle wasn’t unbroken

I hadn’t known the Original Carter Family performed together for the last time during a stint on WBT in Charlotte in 1942-43.

According to Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music (2002) by Mark Zwonitzer, with Charles Hirshberg, “When the Carters moved to Charlotte…there wasn’t a house or apartment to be rented, so A.P., Sara, Ezra, Maybelle and the girls moved into the Roosevelt Hotel.

“Their radio show aired live, as the farmers got up and got going, from 5:15 to 6:15. Monday through Saturday, the Carters wakened before dawn, fixed biscuits and gravy in the little kitchenette and made their way to the station. After the morning show Helen and June would take the Piedmont & Northern railroad out to Paw Creek High School.”

In her 1979 autobiography June Carter Cash recalled that she had gone on her first date in Charlotte: “That young man just marched right into the Roosevelt Hotel, straight up to my daddy, and asked him.”

When their contract at WBT expired in March 1943, the Original Carter Family disbanded forever. June wrote that she left Charlotte “kicking and screaming and clinging to friends I’d never forget.”

Check out what’s new to the North Carolina Collection

Several new titles just added to “What’s New in the North Carolina Collection?” To see the full list simply click on the link in this entry or click on the “What’s New in the North Carolina Collection?” link under the heading “Pages” in the right column. As always, full citations for all the new titles can be found in the University Library Catalog and they are all available for use in the North Carolina Collection Reading Room.