Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
Do you recognize the young man shown here? This is his senior photo, from the 1967 Yackety Yack, the UNC student yearbook. We’ll give you a hint. He was sworn in in Greensboro this afternoon as the new President of the University of North Carolina system. The Greensboro News-Record has the story.
If you guessed right, you’d likely do well in the “Who the Heel is That?” exhibit on display now in the North Carolina Collection reading room.
In the course of doing a little research on old North Carolina laws, we picked up a copy of The Office and Authority of a Justice of the Peace, and of Sheriffs, Coroners, &c. According to the Laws of the State of North-Carolina, a book published in New Bern in 1791. While this is a compelling read on its own, we were drawn to a handwritten note on the leaf opposite the title page. It reads
Rescued from death & destruction in a warehouse in Raleigh, Feb. 25, 1893. Will this book ever pass through such an experience again? Let him who reads these lines in 1993 if this book survives till then, ponder on human life & think if he ever heard of me.
Stephen B. Weeks
We have heard of Dr. Weeks. Fittingly, his memory endures in large part because of his collection of books just like this. The Weeks library held an impressive array of printed North Caroliniana and was one of the important early acquisitions of the North Carolina Collection. Weeks may have been modest in looking only a century into the future—his library and his legacy will almost certainly last to 2093 and beyond.
One of our favorite reference books is the North Carolina Filmography, an impressive volume compiled by Jenny Henderson and published by McFarland in 2002. The book contains entries for 2,203 movies, documentaries, and television programs shot in North Carolina between 1905 and 2000. It is indexed by location, enabling you to look up the many productions filmed in Wilmington or Asheville or Charlotte, or even the single film with scenes in Barnardsville (“Last of the Mohicans,” 1991).
We found plenty of North Carolina classics here, such as “Dawson’s Creek” and “Stroker Ace,” and of course we remembered when scenes for “Getting In” and “Patch Adams” were shot in Wilson Library, but there are lots of surprises to be found. Who knew that the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie was shot in Wilmington? Or that the train wreck scene from “The Fugitive” was filmed in Dillsboro?
It’s baseball season again, and in the North Carolina Piedmont of about a century ago, that meant that all eyes would turn to the local mill teams. We found this picture of the Hutchison Mills team from Mount Holly, N.C. in the October 14, 1920 issue of Mill News, billed as “the great southern weekly for textile workers.”
There are a handful of recent histories of professional and semi-professional baseball in the Carolinas, but we were surprised that we couldn’t find any book-length discussions of the mill teams in North Carolina. There is a history of South Carolina’s mill teams: Thomas K. Perry’s Textile League Baseball: South Carolina’s Mill Teams, 1880-1955 (McFarland, 1993).
Many of the area’s teams are pictured in Chris Holaday’s Baseball in North Carolina’s Piedmont (Arcadia, 2002), part of the popular “Images of America” series. The prominence of the sport in and around the mill towns is well documented. In his book “My World Is Gone”: Memories of Life in a Southern Cotton Mill Town (Wayne State University Press, 2002), author George G. Suggs, Jr. devotes an entire chapter to baseball, writing, “Without a doubt, baseball was the sport that gripped the interest and imagination of workers in the Bladenboro Cotton Mills from the twenties through forties.”
On the first of April 1899 the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company opened for business in Durham, North Carolina. The first month’s collections, after the payment of commissions, amounted only to $1.12, but from such beginnings North Carolina Mutual grew to be the largest African American managed financial institution in the United States.
Durham at the beginning of the twentieth century was fertile ground for the growth of such an enterprise. Forced out of politics by the successful “White Supremacy” political campaign of 1898, Durham’s African American leaders turned their talents to the business world instead. The African American community of Durham was relatively prosperous and enjoyed better relations with its white counterpart than prevailed in many other communities in the state. The idea of an insurance company, moreover, fit in naturally with a tradition among African Americans of self-help, mutual aid societies or fraternities. John Merrick, born into slavery in 1859, had become by the late 1890s a business success in Durham. Owner of half a dozen barber shops and a real estate business, Merrick was also a member of the Grand United Order of True Reformers, a mutual benefit society organized in Richmond in 1881 which had expanded into insurance and banking. In 1898 Merrick brought together six of Durham’s leading black business and professional men and organized North Carolina Mutual. Guided by the “triumvirate” of John Merrick, Dr. Aaron M. Moore, and Charles Clinton Spaulding, “The Company with a Soul and a Service” survived the hardship of its first years to achieve success and help make Durham’s reputation as a center of African American economic life.
Sources
Walter B. Weare. Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, c. 1973.
Image Source:
Employees of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company 1906: Susan V. Gille Norfleet, C.C. Spaulding, Sr., John Merrick. From the North Carolina County Photographic Collection #P0001, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
So where do depressed Tar Heel basketball fans look to ease the pain of their team’s early exit from the NCAA tournament? In books, of course. Will Blythe’s excellently-titled book about the UNC-Duke rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to be Happy Forever has received nationwide attention, with a reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Longtime UNC Professor of English Fred Hobson also looks at the lasting influence of basketball in his life in his new book, Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood. Hobson’s book was reviewed in Sunday’s News & Observer.
And finally, of interest to Tar Heel faithful everywhere, but especially those living far from Chapel Hill, the UNC Press has just published Carolina: Photographs from the First State University, a very nice collection of images of the campus.
We were surprised, but, we admit, not shocked, to learn that Carrboro now has its very own rap song. After all, Carrboro might well be the only municipality in North Carolina with its own poet laureate, and the leap from rhyming to rapping is not a big one.
What can explain this burst of creativity from the former mill town in Orange County? Is it the proximity to UNC-Chapel Hill? The excellent schools? Something in the water? No, we think it all comes down to one thing: density. Carrboro has the greatest population density of any municipality in North Carolina at 3,161 people per square mile. More populous cities such as Charlotte and Durham have their citizens much more spread out, at 2,265 and 2,014 per square mile, respectively. All that closeness must foster a true spirit of collaboration. At least it gives Carrboroites something to rap about.
We think this is an excellent trend and hope that more North Carolina cities follow Carrboro’s example. We’re especially curious to see if an enterprising poet or rapper can come up with a rhyme for Fuquay-Varina.
We realize that it’s a little late to get your NCAA tournament picks in, but we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to point out that if, like us, you had given up on trying to pick a winner and just closed your eyes and jabbed at the bracket, then you would be more likely to hit a team from North Carolina than from any other state. With five teams in this year’s tournament (Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, UNC-Wilmington, and Davidson) North Carolina has the most teams, by state, in the field of 64. We don’t want to take anything away from the Wright Brothers, but perhaps it’s time to change the state’s slogan from “First in Flight.”
We admit it, we weren’t too impressed when we read that the tall ships were coming to North Carolina. It’s just a boat race, right? What’s the big deal about that? But then we looked into it. The America’s Sail 2006 will hit Beaufort and Morehead City this summer, June 30 – July 5. The event will include a 15-mile race off of Atlantic Beach by ships as impressive as the 54-foot Meka II, a replica of a 17th-century pirate ship and captained by Beaufort resident Capt. Horatio Sinbad. Now that’s no ordinary boat race.
On the seventh of March, 1840, the last spike was driven to complete the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad. As well as being the pride and joy of Wilmington, North Carolina, at 161½ miles the Wilmington & Weldon was the longest railroad in the world.
Chartered originally in January 1834 as the Wilmington & Raleigh, the line was organized in the Fall of 1835 and construction began in October 1836. The idea of the railroad grew out of the concern of Wilmington’s leaders that, while the port city had excellent communication by sea, overland connections were poor at best. In 1834 only two stage lines served the city going north, one through New Bern and the other through Fayetteville. Although still in its early years, the railroad seemed a promising alternative. The initial plan was to build the line to Raleigh, but people in the capital were slow to support the railroad while folks in Edgecombe County showed much more enthusiasm. The company decided, therefore, to turn the line north through Edgecombe to Weldon on the Roanoke River near the North Carolina/Virginia border. This would allow the Wilmington & Weldon access to the produce of the Roanoke Valley and bring it near to Virginia railroads which had reached the Roanoke River from the north.
In Wilmington the official celebration of the completion of the railroad was marked by the firing of cannon and ringing of church bells. A large group comprising the officers and employees of the Wilmington & Weldon and invited guests from Virginia and South Carolina as well as all sections of North Carolina paraded down Front Street, accompanied by a military band, to a banquet at the railroad depot. The Wilmington & Weldon operated successfully for the rest of the nineteenth century, ultimately forming part of a major north-south railroad network. In 1900 it became part of the Atlantic Coast Line railroad system which merged into the Seaboard Coast Line in 1967 and finally into CSX Transportation.
Sources
James Sprunt. Chronicles of the Cape Fear River. Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1914.
John Gilbert and Grady Jefferys. Crossties Through Carolina: The Story of North Carolina’s Early Day Railroads. Raleigh, NC: Helios Press, 1969.
Image Source:
Wilmington Advertiser, February 1, 1839