“Plantation tours offer an abundance of learning opportunities, but they can also offer a stereotypical, even anachronistic, portrayal of slavery and life in the Old South. …
“At Latta Plantation, near Charlotte, North Carolina, during our 2016 tour, students inquired toward the end of the tour about the slaves who had worked on the plantations, since the tour guide had not mentioned anything on the subject. The tour guide asked the students to wait until the African-American family, who had been on the tour, left, at which point, he answered in vague and circumscribed terms….”
“The historic pumping station next to Lake Mattamuskeet could become a privately run lodge, tourist attraction and economic engine for one of the state’s poorest counties.
“Set next to North Carolina’s largest natural lake, the state would spend $7.4 million for renovations and lease the property to a private operator to run a lodge with about 14 rooms and a conference center and host educational programs, Hyde County Manager Bill Rich said.
“ ‘This finishes a story that needed to be finished many years ago,’ Rich said. ‘It’s going to happen.’
The renovated lodge built 100 years ago could open in 2018, he said….
“Volunteers and officials have attempted to renovate the lodge at least since 1990. Originally built to drain Lake Mattamuskeet for farmland, the 15,000-square-foot facility was called the largest pumping station in the world at the time, drawing 1.2 million gallons of water per minute.
“ ‘The private owners of the lake planned to sell farms, residential lots and commercial real estate in the reclaimed lake bed and create a utopian community unlike any agricultural community in the world,’ said Lewis Forrest, founder and director of The Mattamuskeet Foundation.
“For a few years, it worked, until the Great Depression ended the enterprise….”
“The word ‘bucolic‘ has a powerful connotation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. When RJ Reynolds Tobacco, a company that began and grew in Winston-Salem, bought Nabisco in the ’80s, its new head, F. Ross Johnson, moved the company headquarters to Atlanta, because it was ‘nouveau riche’ and Winston-Salem was too ‘bucolic.’
“ ‘Proud to be bucolic’ became a bumper sticker in Winston-Salem, which isn’t actually that bucolic, but the whole nasty business, chronicled in the book Barbarians at the Gate, became emblematic of the ’80s corporate frenzy to merge, fire people, extract capital and move to cities where CEOs could show off their multi-million-dollar salaries to each other.”
Newbern progress. (Newbern, N.C.), 31 Jan. 1863. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
Just how does one spell this city’s name? This was once a question of considerable debate.
Founded in 1710 by Christoph von Graffenried of Bern, Switzerland, New Bern was so named by the Swiss baron for the city of his birth. Graffenried, seeking to enrich himself through mining, led a group of German Palatine and Swiss colonists to the Province of North Carolina. Like its namesake, New Bern sits on a peninsula. The town was settled where the Trent and Neuse rivers converge. The settlement was laid over the Tuscaroran village of Chattoka.
Over time the town came to be known by various spellings. Some of the variants included New Bern, Newbern, New Berne, and Newberne. Printed in newspapers, referenced in official documents, and used in every day correspondence, the true spelling of this colonial port town’s name became ever more obscure.
From Petersburg to New Berne, Published in the State Records of North Carolina, volume 15, North Carolina Maps, North Carolina Collection
In 1891 Henry Gannett, a renowned geographer and father of government map making, sparked an orthographical debate when he wrote the city clerk with an inquiry as to the true spelling of the “Eastern metropolis on the Neuse.” Gannett was writing on behalf of the United States Board on Geographic Names, which he had pushed to establish a year earlier. The clerk, William Oliver, responded that Newbern was the proper spelling, and sent Gannett “a bound copy of the Acts of the General Assembly published in 1793” as proof. Consequently, Gannett settled on Newbern as the official spelling. The State Chronicle published the full exchange between Gannett and Oliver in its July 23, 1891 issue.
Six years later, in 1897, the General Assembly established “that the coroporation [sic] heretofore existing as the city of Newbern shall hereafter be known and designated as the city of New Bern, and all laws in conflict with the above are hereby repealed.”
The spelling of the city’s name was still a matter of interest in 1902 when Graham Daves, a New Bern businessman and an avid amateur historian, penned a letter to the editor of the Semi Weekly Messenger on the “Proper Way of Spelling the Name.”
On this day in 1928: Buncombe County dedicates its new 17-story courthouse on Asheville’s Pack Square. “The motley crowd that sauntered back and forth through the ornate $1,750,000 structure were awed by the lavishness,” reports the Asheville Times.
Several new titles just added to “New in the North Carolina Collection.” To see the full list simply click on the link in the entry or click on the “New in the North Carolina Collection” tab at the top of the page. 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 Wilson Special Collections Library.
