New Towns and State Fair on NC Postcards

We’re always adding new cards to the North Carolina Postcards site, and the first cards for the following towns just went up!

NC State Fair, 1914

Bath
China Grove
Draper (now Eden)
Falcon
LaGrange
Millbrook
Mount Sterling
Nashville
Oak Island
Oak Ridge
Ramseur
Robersonville
Saint Helena
Stanley
Tapoco
Walnut Cove

And don’t forget, there are just three more days left to catch the duck races, tractor pulls, and fried oreos at the North Carolina State Fair. Will you be traveling in style?

New Features on Postcards Site

Two new features are now available on the North Carolina Postcards website, giving users a couple of different ways to browse through the cards. A list of colleges and universities shows the many schools that appear in postcards, from well-known universities like North Carolina State to little-known and nearly-forgotten institutions like the Joseph Keasbey Brick Agricultural, Industrial, and Normal School.

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Another new feature incorporates Google Maps to show the locations of a handful of North Carolina textile mills, some of which are not even around anymore. With the Google Maps feature users can compare current maps with satellite views and zoom in to the exact location of the mills. This is pretty fun stuff.

Gate City Postcards

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We have just added a large group of postcards of Greensboro to the North Carolina Postcards project. Some of the new images include views of downtown from the early twentieth century, postcards of colleges including UNC-Greensboro and North Carolina A&T, and a variety of images of churches, businesses, and government buildings.

One of the most interesting finds was the postcard of Immanuel Lutheran College, shown here. This elaborate building housed a seminary for African American students. The school was founded in 1903 in Concord, moving to Greensboro in 1905 where it remained until closing in 1961. The building pictured on the postcard was torn down sometime after the Immanuel Lutheran buildings were acquired by North Carolina A & T in 1965.

The Carolina Fruit Hills

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Following Will Sexton’s tip I looked at the Carolina Fruit Hills pamphlet published by the Seaboard Air Line Railway in the 1920s. Sadly, I saw no mention of bananas, but it’s still a fun read, and a nice piece of marketing work. The Seaboard Railway published many pamphlets like these encouraging development in Piedmont North and South Carolina, areas conveniently served by their railroad. Most of these pieces presented in glowing terms the temperate climate of the region, not to mention the low cost of labor and the lax labor laws. In this one, however, the focus is on fruit.

Throughout the pamphlet, the region is consistently referred to as the Carolina Fruit Hills, an attractive name, but one that didn’t succeed in supplanting the term Sandhills. The virtues of Carolina grapes, strawberries, melons, and peaches are extolled, and the Fruit Hills are touted as hosting the largest dewberry shipping center in America. I’d seen dewberries mentioned on this postcard, but had to turn to the dictionary to find that a dewberry is a sweet fruit resembling a blackberry. Despite my proximity to the Carolina Fruit Hills, I’ve never seen dewberries at the grocery store. It’s too bad: a bowl of fresh dewberries and vanilla ice cream would be just the thing on a hot day like to today.

Bananas?

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This postcard from Southern Pines in 1910 shows “Mr. and Mrs. J.N. Powell among their bananas.” Bananas? I realize that there has been significant climate change over the past century, but I don’t believe that it was ever possible to cultivate tropical fruit in North Carolina. Even when I zoom in I can’t see anything that I would recognize as a banana. Perhaps this was an older nickname for some other kind of plant common to the region. I’d like for this to be possible though. Just imagine how good the banana pudding at local barbecue restaurants would be if they made it with fruit fresh from the garden.

Postcard Exhibit Opens

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A new exhibit, “Greetings from North Carolina: A Century of Postcards from the Durwood Barbour Collection,” has just opened in the North Carolina Collection Gallery. The exhibit features a couple of hundred postcards from the Durwood Barbour Collection. Barbour, a Raleigh deltiologist, amassed an impressive collection of more than 7,000 cards, which has recently been acquired by the North Carolina Collection.

Mt. Airy, Granite, & New York City!

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This morning there was a bit of excitement over a postcard from the Barbour collection, which pictured several strapping young men of the 1910’s hanging out around a very large granite column capital. The message on the back of the card was written by Ed, a worker from a Mt. Airy granite quarry, who claimed his quarry “Shipped 4,000 cars last year- enough granite in sight for 1,100 years.” The message also suggested that the capital was carved in Mt. Airy and then shipped to New York City, where it became part of the Manhattan Municipal Building, pictured below. The postcard is postmarked 1913, the same year in which the building was first occupied.

NYC Municipal Building

Image courtesy of Flickr user: Haikus, via Creative Commons license.