The Perley A. Thomas Car Works of High Point, NC

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In 1910 Canadian-born Perley A. Thomas moved with his family from Cleveland, Ohio, to High Point to take a job as chief engineer, draftsman and designer for the Southern Car Works. When that business closed shop in 1916, Thomas organized his own company, the Perley A. Thomas Car Works, to convert open streetcars to closed streetcars for the Southern Public Utility Company in Charlotte. The ensuing years brought great success to Thomas’s company, first, in the manufacture of streetcars, and, later, with the rise in the popularity of road travel, in the manufacture of buses. In 1998 the company, which changed its name to Thomas Built Buses in 1972, was sold to Freightliner, a major American truck manufacturer. At the time of the sale, Thomas Built was the second largest manufacturer of school buses in the United States. It is now the largest.

Read about an order the Montgomery, Alabama Light and Traction company placed for streetcars in the September 29, 1919 issue of the High Point Review. For an in depth look at the company’s history, read From Rails to Roads: The History of Perley A. Thomas Car Works and Thomas Built Buses.

Corbitt Buggy Company of Henderson, N.C.

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How are you traveling home for the holidays? In 1903, your travels may have included a ride in a horse-drawn carriage or buggy such as the one pictured above from the Corbitt Buggy Company of Henderson, N.C. The company would go on to manufacture North Carolina’s first commercially produced car in 1907, “The Corbitt Motor Buggy.” Read more about the manufacture of automobiles at the Corbitt buggy factory in the July 15, 1909 issue of the Henderson Gold Leaf.

Birth Control Pioneer Makes First Visit South

 

MargaretSanger

When Margaret Sanger came to speak on family planning in Elizabeth City on November 2, 1919, contraception had been illegal in the United States since the enactment of the Comstock Act of 1873 and birth control was a yet unfamiliar term in the American language.

Sanger’s visit to North Carolina was facilitated by William Oscar Saunders, publisher of the Elizabeth City Independent. The two had met in New York City while Saunders was visiting there. The November 7, 1919 issue of the Independent reported that over 800 people attended Sanger’s talk, in the “first public meeting for the discussion of the subject of birth control ever held in the south.”

Sanger would go on to be arrested in November, 1921 in New York City for disorderly conduct as she prepared to give a speech at the First American Birth Control Conference, an event she organized. Sanger is a well-known social reformer and sex educator, and is credited with helping create the modern birth control movement.

List of Premiums, 1853 State Fair

A Morgan Stallion
A Morgan Stallion

The North Carolina State Agricultural Society organized its first State Fair in October 1853. Premiums were awarded for a host of categories, including best Durham Bull, best Morgan Stallion, best quilt, best home-made soap, best specimen of book printing, best hearth rug, best specimen of wine from Scuppernong Grapes, among many others. Find the full list of premiums from the first State Fair in the October 29, 1853 issue of the Raleigh Semi-Weekly Standard.

Forging West; The Western Turnpike and the Western North Carolina Railroad Company

TheDailyCitizen
The daily citizen. (Asheville, N.C.), 20 Feb. 1890. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

As droves of Tar Heels take to the road this summer in search of cool North Carolina mountain air, we are thinking about what this trip would have been like 150 years ago. As it turns out, it would have likely meant traveling on a plank road. Think of a plank road as a wooden highway for wagons and coaches. In the mid 1800s, North Carolina had a proliferation of plank road building.

One of these roads was the Western Turnpike, which North Carolina state legislators first discussed during their 1848 and 1849 session. In its original plan, it was to be a toll collecting plank road beginning in Salisbury moving westward to the Georgia state line. Two survey maps, drawn by state engineer S. Moylan Fox in 1850, depict the route from Salisbury to the Blue Ridge and the Blue Ridge to the Georgia state line. The state comptroller reports payment to Fox for his survey work in the December 12, 1849 issue of The North-Carolina Standard.

Construction of the Western Turnpike began in Asheville in 1850. In the same year, it connected with the Buncombe Turnpike. The Buncombe Turnpike, a dirt road completed in 1828, moved northwest from South Carolina, through Asheville, and into Tennessee. It had been key in opening up the region commercially, facilitating the arrival of tourists and allowing for agricultural trade.

Political squabbles plagued the Western Turnpike plan. Finally, during the 1854 and 1855 term, legislators abolished plans for the Salisbury to Asheville segment of the route. The Western Turnpike’s starting point would be Asheville, where it moved westward through the remote mountain towns of Waynesville, Bryson, Franklin, Jarretts, Welch’s Town and Murphy.

The Western North Carolina Railroad Company took the next big step in conquering the resource rich yet difficult terrain of the western most part of the state. The railroad completed service to Murphy in 1891 with the Murphy Branch line. The February 20, 1890 issue of Asheville’s The Daily Citizen records the railroad’s progress in blasting and grading its way west.

Western Turnpike Map
No 2 Map of the surveys for the western turnpike from the Blue Ridge to the Georgia line. From the North Carolina Collection.

 

The Nantahala River’s Enduring Allure

Sunrise_in_Nantahala_Gorge_Western_North_Carolina

In the May 31, 1893 issue of the Asheville Daily Citizen, Rowland Howard describes his ride along the Nantahala River on horseback: “Riding along the rushing river with high mountain walls one either side, one realizes the grandeur of the scenery ten fold more than one could on the railroad train.”

Nantahala, meaning “land of the noon day sun,” was so named by the Cherokee Indians for its dense, lush vegetation in which sunshine only reaches the forest floor at high noon.

Visitors today create an $85 million impact on the local economy as they raft down the river with the Nantahala Outdoor Center or another of the area’s numerous rafting outfitters, ride the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad alongside it, and frequent the area’s other attractions, restaurants and lodging establishments.

Read more about the economic impact of rafting in the area and the role of Duke Energy’s Nantahala Hydroelectric Project in its success, here.

 

 

North Carolina Newspapers Selected for Digitization

fishermanfarmer
North Carolina Historic Newspapers recently finalized its list of newspaper titles on microfilm to digitize as part of its partnership with the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). The project’s advisory board met in the fall of 2012 to make a preliminary list of titles based on research value, geographic representation, temporal coverage and other selection criteria as defined by the NDNP. Project staff then inspected the selected titles’ microfilm for conformance to the NDNP’s technical requirements. The finalized list is comprised of 21 newspaper titles totaling 100,000 pages of North Carolina newspapers dating from 1836 – 1922. The digitized newspaper pages will be added incrementally to the Library of Congress’ collection of historic American newspapers on the Chronicling America website, with all pages to be delivered to the Library of Congress by the summer of 2014.

Runs from the following titles will be digitized:

  • Watauga Democrat, Boone
  • The North-Carolina Standard, Raleigh
  • The Asheville Citizen, Asheville
  • The Independent, Elizabeth City
  • Newbern Weekly Progress, New Bern
  • The Charlotte Democrat, Charlotte
  • Tarboro Press, Tarboro
  • Rockingham Post-Dispatch, Rockingham
  • Fisherman & Farmer, Edenton and Elizabeth City
  • The Review, High Point
  • The French Broad Hustler, Hendersonville
  • The Durham Daily Globe, Durham
  • The Semi-weekly Messenger, Wilmington
  • The Sun, Fayetteville
  • Journal of Freedom, Raleigh
  • The Gold Leaf, Henderson
  • The Weekly Caucasian, Clinton, Goldsboro and Raleigh
  • The Progressive Farmer, Winston and Raleigh
  • The Western Democrat, Charlotte
  • Wilmington Journal, Wilmington
  • Cherokee Scout, Murphy

Project titles distributed across North Carolina can be found on this map:

North Carolina Historic Newspapers Available via Chronicling America
North Carolina Historic Newspapers Available via Chronicling America.

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North Carolina Historic Newspapers has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: We the People. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

National Endowment for the Humanities