Month: March 2012

Cedars in the Pines: A Documentary on Lebanese in North Carolina

Screen capture of Lebanese in North Carolina website
Curious about how folks with such last names as Zaytoun, Saleeby, Baddour or Hatem ended up in such towns as New Bern, Salisbury, Goldsboro or Rocky Mount? If so, then check out a documentary screening scheduled for April 12 at the North Carolina Museum of History. A team led by N.C. State professor Akram Khater has produced Cedars in the Pines: The Lebanese in North Carolina. The film documents the settlement of Lebanese in the Old North State, from the first wave seeking economic opportunity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to a second wave fleeing civil war in the 1970s and 1980s. Cedars in the Pines is part of a larger effort to record and share the history of settlers who first made their livings as peddlers and shop owners and who now make their mark as doctors, developers, lawyers and politicians.

We at the North Carolina Collection are proud to have shared our resources and expertise with the project.

The first screening of the film is already booked up. But organizers have scheduled a second free screening. Reservations for that event are filling up quickly.

A Loyalist Describes North Carolina

“On the south you can see the Dan, the Catawba, the Yadkin, and the Haw, breaking through the mighty mountains that appear in confused heaps, and piled on each other in almost every direction.

“Throughout the whole of this amazing and most extensive perspective, there is not the least feature or trace of art or improvement to be discovered.

“All are genuine effects of nature alone, and laid down on her most extended and grandest scale.

“Contemplating thereon fills the eye, engrosses the mind, and enlarges the soul.

“It totally absorbs the senses, overwhelms all the faculties, expands even the grandest ideas beyond all conception, and occasions you almost to forget that you are a human creature.”

–Author, Loyalist, and British soldier John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth describing the view after he and others climbed Wart Mountain in the Allegheny Mountains. This description is found in Smyth’s A Tour in the United States of America… (1784), an excerpt of which appears in Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden, edited by Michael P. Branch.

For Duplin County slaves, no mercy from the court

On this day in 1787: Darby and Peter, Duplin County slaves, are convicted of murdering their master with an ax. Darby is sentenced to be “tied to a stake on the courthouse lot and there burned to death and his ashes strewd upon the ground.” Peter, less severely punished because of his youth, is sentenced to have “one half of each of his ears cut off and be branded on each cheek with the letter M” and to receive 11 lashes.

 

Artifact of the Month: 1930s UNC banner

From now through the end of May, visitors to the NCC Gallery can view the exhibit “A Dialogue Between Old and New: Notable Buildings on the UNC Campus.” A quick stroll through the exhibit reveals how much architectural styles have changed since 1793 — but also how much student life has changed in that time:

  • A 1905 photo of nude male students in the campus pool speaks of a time when women’s access to campus facilities was restricted.
  • A 1930s picture of undergrads playing billiards in Graham Memorial Student Union recalls an era when jackets and ties were typical student attire.
  • And in a photo dated 1970, students lounge barefoot in a dorm room under a poster advocating peace — an image so perfectly of its time that it almost looks staged.

One thing that hasn’t changed with the decades is a spirit of UNC pride in the student body. In that spirit, our Artifact of the Month is a Carolina banner that belonged to John DeWitt Foust, Jr. of the class of 1938.

blue Carolina banner

The banner is made of felt with an interlocking “NC” logo in the lower left. A leather seal in the upper right bears the school’s Latin motto “Lux libertas.” The banner likely hung on the wall in Vance Hall dormitory, where Foust lived for his first year or two at UNC.

yearbook page

As this page from the 1938 Yackety Yack shows, John DeWitt Foust — or J.D., as he was called — earned an Engineering degree. He graduated in the last class before the Engineering department was moved to NC State. After graduating, he worked as a mechanical engineer with Newman Machine Company in Greensboro, which later became Newman-Whitney. In 1944 he married Margaret Langston, who later graduated from UNC-Greensboro. They lived in Greensboro until J.D.’s death in 1988.

This banner was donated by J.D. Foust’s son in memory of J.D. and the NCC Gallery is pleased to preserve and share it. We invite other alumni and their relatives to contact the Gallery if they’re seeking a good home for their UNC memorabilia.

Winston-Salem’s ‘reluctant millionaires,’ Part 2

“Free from the grip of Northern interlopers [after the 1911 breakup of the tobacco trust], Mr. RJ began force-feeding Reynolds stock to employees. … Never mind that many didn’t want to go into hock….As the value of Reynolds stock ballooned in coming years, Winston-Salem came to be known as ‘the city of reluctant millionaires.’…

“[After the 1989 buyout by KKR] the world’s greatest concentration of RJR shareholders [wasn’t] thanking [departing CEO F. Ross] Johnson even as the money gushed into town.  Nearly $2 billion of checks arrived there in the late-February mail….  The river of money had washed away the last of RJR’s stock. Local brokers and bankers who managed people’s money got calls from distraught clients. ‘I won’t sell my stock,’ more than one sobbed. ‘Daddy said don’t ever sell the RJR stock.’ They were patiently told they had to. They were told the world had changed.”

— From “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco” by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar (1990)

UNC Ad from 1907

I found this ad for UNC in a 1907 issue of the Sylvan Valley News, published in Brevard, N.C. We’ve recently added over 400 issues of the paper, ranging from 1900-1911, to the North Carolina Newspapers digital collection.

The University has grown just a bit since this ad was posted. There are definitely more than six departments (over 200 degree programs now) and the library has quite a few more than 45,000 volumes (six million and counting). We do still have electric lights.

As an aside — and I’m not sure whether the University or the newspaper staff were to blame for this — it’s difficult to maintain a claim as “Head of the State’s Educational System” when you misspell the word “educational.”

Filling Our Your NCAA Bracket, North Carolina Style

There are lots of different approaches to filling out your NCAA Basketball Tournament Bracket. As for me, I’m staying loyal to the Old North State. Proud North Carolinians will have noticed already that our state has five teams in the final field, and that they’re spread throughout the bracket, leaving the possibility, however remote, for an all-North Carolina Final Four.

In three of the four regions it’s not that far fetched. You could easily see Duke advancing in the South, and there are two options in the Midwest, with the top-ranked Tar Heels and resurgent Wolfpack. Davidson would have a tough road in the West, but there are surprises every year and the Wildcats have been as far as the Elite Eight in recent memory. The most difficult region would be the South, where the only North Carolina team is the 16-seed UNC-Asheville. I have faith. I’m picking the Bulldogs to pull out a little mountain magic and make it all the way to New Orleans.

Nixon’s nuance was just the ticket in Greensboro

“In Greensboro, North Carolina, Nixon told his audience that he had a unique understanding of their difficult problem, meaning the race issue, because of the three years he had spent in their midst at Duke University Law School. He talked little about civil rights but spoke extensively about the Democrats’ threats to use federal authority to enforce civil rights. Then he connected that to state education: ‘But let us never forget that…  one of the essences of freedom in this county is local and state control of the educational system….’

“That was enough to satisfy any white Southerner in 1960 that Nixon and the Republicans would keep their hands off segregation.”

— From “The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon and the election of 1960” by Gary Donaldson (2007)