From the Stacks – Page 3

Thanks for the cards, Mr. Barbour

Among the jewels of the North Carolina Collection are more than 15,000 postcards. And we have one man to thank for about 8,000 of those items—Durwood Barbour. For 25 years, Barbour combed through boxes at coin and postcard shows looking for images that told stories of bygone people, places and doings in his native state. His collection, housed mostly in shoeboxes, grew so large and valuable that he worried about keeping it at his home in Raleigh. In 2006, he generously donated it to the North Carolina Collection. We learned on Sunday that Barbour died on March 2. He was 87.

Barbour was born in the Barbourtown section of Johnston County, an area near Four Oaks. His parents were farmers and he grew up helping in the fields. In 1948 Barbour enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill. He was the first in his immediate family to attend college and he told an interviewer in 2010 that he earned the money for tuition by raising sweet potatoes. Barbour graduated from UNC-CH in 1952 with a degree in geology, and, shortly thereafter, he began work as an asphalt engineer for the state highway department, where he remained for many years. Barbour made his home in Raleigh with his wife and two sons. Later in life, Barbour sold real estate. He was an active member of two Raleigh Methodist churches, including Edenton Street United Methodist, where his memorial service is scheduled for Tuesday. Barbour was also a local historian, working with Todd Johnson, executive director of the Johnston County Heritage Center, to produce a book of images of his native county in 1997.

Barbour’s interest in postcards grew from his hobby of collecting coins and paper money. His wife, Mary Anne, recalled in 2010 that there were frequently a few boxes of postcards at numismatic shows. As her husband perused tables with coins and paper money, she looked at the postcards. Eventually Barbour, too, turned his interest to postcards. And we’re thankful he did.

As a tribute to Durwood Barbour, here are a few postcards of places or activities that represent significant parts of his life. All of Barbour’s postcards—and a few thousand more—are available via North Carolina Postcards.

Barbour's Grove in Four Oaks, NC — Though his relationship to K.F. Barbour is unclear, Durwood Barbour was born near Four Oaks in 1929.

Main Street of Four Oaks — The town of Four Oaks in the early 20th century.

New East at UNC Chapel Hill — New East at UNC-Chapel Hill served as the longtime home for the university’s geology department. Durwood Barbour graduated from UNC in 1952 with a degree in geology.

Postcard of early Mule Days parade — Benson’s Mule Days, which takes place the fourth weekend in September, has celebrated Johnston County’s agricultural heritage since 1950.

Road paving — Durwood Barbour began work for North Carolina’s highway department as an asphalt engineer shortly after earning his undergraduate degree.

Postcard of Edenton Street United Methodist Church — Durwood Barbour was an active member of Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh.

The Remedy of 100 Uses

Nineteenth century newspapers advertised a host of treatments for illnesses, including one called catarrh. The term is one rarely used today, but in the 19^th century catarrh referred to an excess of phlegm or mucous. Although nasal or sinus congestion is frequently caused by fever or allergies, it also accompanies pneumonia or other afflictions of the immune system that were often deadly during that time period.

Among the products promoted for treatment of catarrh was one from North Carolina—Vicks VapoRub.

vicks_thedailytimes_19220211 — A new way to treat catarrh. The Daily Times, February 11, 1922

The Vicks brand was created by pharmacist Lunsford Richardson in Greensboro in the early 1890s.

There are several stories offered for why Richardson chose the name Vicks. Some suggest that Richardson considered putting his own name on the product, but then rejected the idea because his name didn’t fit on the label. Others say that Richardson chose Vicks to honor his brother-in-law, Dr. Joshua Vick. Vick was a respected and highly in-demand physician in Selma, N.C. He turned to Richardson, who had a love for chemistry, for help with dispensing medicine. Another account suggests that Richardson borrowed the name from a seed catalog with a listing for Vick Seed Co.

In the 1890s, twenty-one home remedies were patented and sold under the Vicks name. Each of these claimed natural ingredients, including nutmeg, thyme, camphor, and eucalyptus oils, imported from around the world. Many newspapers routinely published ads for Vicks tonics and ointments similar to the one shown below from The Watauga Democrat.

vicks_wataugademocrat_19220209 — The Watauga Democrat, February 9, 1922

The best-selling Vicks product was a salve that Richardson created for croup, a product that he marketed as Vicks Croup and Pneumonia Salve. The ointment included menthol.

vicks_goldleaf_19071024 — The Henderson Gold Leaf, December 24, 1907

The operation became Vicks Chemical Company in 1911. At that time, Lunsford Richardson’s son Henry Smith Richardson suggested renaming the product Vicks VapoRub. The company advertised the product as “the remedy of over 100 uses.”

With the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, the popularity of VapoRub skyrocketed in the U.S. Sales climbed from $900,000 to $2.9 million from 1918 to 1919. Advertisements provided detailed instructions for using Vicks to fight the flu.

vicks_spanishflu_highpointreview_19181107 — The High Point Review, November 7, 1918

Richardson’s company is today a part of Proctor and Gamble, but the Vicks brand remains. VapoRub, in its familiar blue jar, continues to be sold around the world, with users claiming the salve is a cure-all for countless maladies, including sunburn, toenail fungus, cough, warts, chapped lips, dandruff and mosquito bites. The records of Richardson-Vicks Inc. and the papers of Henry Smith Richardson are available in Wilson Library’s Southern Historical Collection.

The Gold Leaf: “Clean news and some lengthy essays”

From time to time, North Carolina Miscellany features short histories of North Carolina newspapers included on Chronicling America, a website produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). By August 2016, the North Carolina Collection and its partner, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, will have provided 200,000 pages of historic N.C. newspapers for inclusion on Chronicling America. The Henderson Gold Leaf is among the available titles. This history was written by Ansley Wegner, Research Historian and Administrator of the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program in Raleigh.

The Gold Leaf, a Democratic weekly newspaper in Henderson, North Carolina, was owned and edited by Thaddeus R. Manning (1856-1915) from 1882 until March of 1911. The paper was four pages with eight columns each. The Gold Leaf‘s masthead included the quote, “Carolina, Carolina, Heaven’s Blessings Attend Her.” Only scattered issues of the early years of the Gold Leaf have survived. The paper ran agricultural and household advice, editorials, local and social news, and many public notices and advertisements. Syndicated articles were reprinted from such newspapers as the Baltimore Sun and the Raleigh Post and Wilmington Messenger in North Carolina. Such articles contained state and national news, as well as farming and medical advice. The content of the Gold Leaf changed little throughout the 29 years of Manning’s tenure. Other papers published in Henderson at this time include the Henderson News and the Hustler.

By the 1900s, the share of local (vs. syndicated) material began to increase, and Manning occasionally wrote local historical pieces for the paper. Historian Samuel Thomas Peace described the Gold Leaf as carrying “clean news and some lengthy essays.” Its pages remained filled with a large amount of agricultural content, including advertisements for fertilizer and farm equipment.

On Thursday, March 30, 1911, the front page of the paper proclaimed, “Thad Manning has sold the Gold Leaf! Ah well! Time has a way of getting in its work, and he has held on for many years.” The article went on to say that Manning “loved his paper and sought to make it vital with his personality” and that “one could see the man in the very pages of the paper.” Upon hearing of Manning’s retirement, the editor of the Durham Daily Sun wrote, “[Manning] has elevated and brightened journalism. He has served his town, county, and State with superb devotion and zeal.”

The Gold Leaf was sold to a company called Gold Leaf Publishing. Within a few weeks, it no longer ran the catchy quote, and the name of the paper was changed to the Henderson Gold Leaf. The new editor and manager was Preston Taylor Way (1869-1920). Way had previously published and edited the Waxhaw Enterprise in Waxhaw and another newspaper in Jonesboro, North Carolina. The Gold Leaf remained largely the same under Way, although there was a stronger political edge to the editorial page.

The Henderson Gold Leaf became a semiweekly publication in 1913, and, during World War I, a daily edition was added. In 1914, the daily paper was renamed the Henderson Daily Dispatch, and the Henderson Gold Leaf returned to a weekly publication. A fire at the Henderson office in 1946 destroyed much of the newspapers’ archival material. The Henderson Daily Dispatch is still published today.

The Baird Family of Western North Carolina

In 1912, the Asheville Gazette-News reprinted a letter (A portion of which is above. Click on the image to sell the full letter), originally from 1858, from Bedent Baird of Watauga County to Zebulon Baird Vance, who at the time was a very young Congressman. Bedent Baird describes what he knows about his family lineage and wonders if his Watauga County Baird clan was in any way related to the Buncombe County one represented by Vance. The paper itself adds a little bit about the family’s history for context. Unfortunately, the matter could not have been settled with this information, because the family tree described in the article is wrong.

To make a somewhat complicated story (filled with many Zebulons and Bedents) short: the two Baird clans in Western North Carolina are indeed related. Their common ancestor was John Baird, born in 1665 in Scotland. He came over in 1683 and settled in New Jersey. He and his wife, Mary Bedent, had five sons: Andrew, John Jr., David, William, and Zebulon.

The Watauga County Bairds are descended from Andrew. Andrew’s son Ezekiel was the first of that line to end up in North Carolina. They have been quite prominent in the community, particularly for being some of the earliest settlers in Valle Crucis. Bedent Baird, author of the 1858 letter, was also a magistrate and politician, representing the part of Watauga that used to be Ashe County.

The Buncombe County Bairds are descended from John Junior. John Junior’s grandsons Bedent and Zebulon were some of the earliest settlers in Buncombe County, about 1793. The brothers had the first grist mill in the county and they played significant roles in the early days of what is now the City of Asheville. They bought a large amount of land, with Bedent settling on Beaver Dam and Zebulon near the French Broad. Zeb rose to some political prominence, serving as Senator for multiple terms. They also forged a friendship with David Lowry Swain, who helped manage Zeb’s affairs after he died in 1824. Swain also helped his deceased friend Zebulon’s grandson, Zebulon Baird Vance, attend UNC-Chapel Hill.

There are couple things that the article and letter in the Asheville Gazette-News get wrong, therefore muddying the process of answering the question about a common ancestor. The most confusing is in the listing of John Baird’s children. In doing so, they completely skip a generation. Bedent, Samuel, Obadiah, Borzilla, Jonathan, Ezekiel, etc. were the children of John Baird’s son Andrew, and therefore grandchildren of the patriarch. Bedent himself completely forgets to mention his own grandfather, Andrew, the actual son of John and Mary Baird, which is a bit of a glaring omission. The letter also claims that his uncle was the “first Bedent.” As is probably clear, the two Baird families in North Carolina did not seem to know much about each other, and therefore Bedent Baird didn’t know about his own cousin Bedent, son of William, over Asheville-way.

It is unclear if this relationship between the clans was resolved, at least not in the public’s imagination. The article is certainly curious for how much it got wrong. And for featuring a letter over 50 years old that quite possibly never made it into the hands of Zeb Vance. Most importantly, though, it shows the affection and curiosity the readership and citizens had for Vance and for the Bairds. Indeed, the significant roles that both families played in the history of Western North Carolina make them a fascinating study, and not just due to the predilection for naming children Bedent and Zebulon.

For further reading:

Arthur, J. P. (2002). A history of Watauga County, North Carolina : with sketches of prominent families. Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Pub. Co.

Arthur, J. P. (1973). Western North Carolina; a history, 1730-1913. Reprint Co.

Biddix, C. D. (1981). The Heritage of old Buncombe County. Asheville, N.C.: Hunter Pub. Co.

Blackmun, O. (1977). Western North Carolina, its mountains and its people to 1880. Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press.

Dowd, C. (1897). Life of Zebulon B. Vance. Charlotte, N.C.: Observer Print. and Pub. House.

Edwards and Broughton Company (Raleigh, N.C.). (1890). Western North Carolina : historical and biographical. Charlotte, N.C.: A.D. Smith & Co.

Gaffney, S. R. (1984). The heritage of Watauga County, North Carolina. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Heritage of Watauga County Book Committee in cooperation with the History Division of Hunter Pub. Co.

McKinney, G. B. (2004). Zeb Vance : North Carolina’s Civil War governor and Gilded Age political leader. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Sondley, F. (1977). A history of Buncombe County, North Carolina. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co.

Image:

Episode and Interlude. (February 20, 1912). Asheville Gazette-News. p. 4.

A familiar name among Lusitania survivors

On May 7, 1915 off the coast of Ireland at 2:10 in the afternoon, on the final days of its trans-Atlantic journey to Liverpool, a torpedo fired by a German submarine slammed into the side of the RMS Lusitania. A mysterious second explosion ripped the passenger ship apart. In the chaos, many jumped into the water in an attempt to save themselves and were dragged down with the ship. Within 18 minutes the giant ocean liner slipped beneath the sea. One thousand one hundred ninety-eight of the 1,962 aboard died. The dead included 114 Americans.

Stories about the catastrophe and tales of the survivors soon appeared in North Carolina newspapers, including The High Point Review on May 13, 1915.

One of the passengers aboard the Lusitania was a native North Carolinian with a well-known last name. Owen Hill Kenan was grandson of Owen Rand Kenan, Confederate congressman; great-grandson of Thomas Stephen Kenan, North Carolina senator and United States representative; and great-great-grandson of General James Kenan, a military leader during the American Revolutionary War and an early senator of the state of North Carolina. He was also cousin of William Rand Kenan Jr., a scientist, businessman and benefactor of the University of North Carolina. Owen and William were roommates at UNC in the 1890s.

Owen Kenan, a physician and seasoned traveler, was aboard the Lusitania on the first leg of his journey to Paris, where he planned to meet his niece, Louise Wise. The young woman was in boarding school and Kenan was due to escort her home to the U.S.

Kenan described the sinking in a letter to relatives, reprinted in the Wilmington Star on June 23, 1915. When the torpedoes struck the Lusitania, Kenan had just left his cabin and was heading to the Boat Deck. Once on deck, he wrote,

I saw third class passengers piling into life boats without order or command. As the boats which could not be or were not lowered filled up the bottoms pulled out and this mass of humanity was spilled 40 or 50 feet into the sea. I looked over the rail and saw nothing but hands and arms in the water below. The air was rent with their screams but there was nothing one could do. The boat was sinking and all this was transpiring most rapidly.

Kenan recounted that he returned to his cabin, put on his life jacket, and then headed outside to the deck.

After a few minutes I realized that the good ship was going and I went to the starboard and jumped into the sea, only to be carried down to a great depth by a terrible and strong suction. It was in this plight that I barely missed suffocation by drowning and being crushed to death by two life boats and debris deep under the surface. When the suction subsided I realized that I was caught under something. I had a feeling that my head was expanding and the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps I was losing consciousness.

I can’t tell why but I put my hands up over my head and, as if walking on the wall, pushed myself along until I felt the edge and pushed myself from under and began to come up. I kept my eyes open and when I began to see the light through the water I felt I should be saved though I was nearly done for and could feel myself swallowing great gulps of salt water. I came to the surface and gasped for breath. I looked up and I was directly under the forward smoke stack which was sticking out of the water at an acute angle and I said to myself that this would finish me. I went down again almost at once and my memory is blank.

When I opened my eyes again the entire boat had disappeared and the scene surrounding me of dead, drowning and struggling humanity mixed with a great quantity of broken debris I cannot describe. After four hours in the water I was taken aboard a torpedo boat destroyer almost frozen and much maimed.

Kenan was aboard the Lusitania with Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, a member of the wealthy American family, and Ronald Denyer, Vanderbilt’s valet. Kenan reported that after the torpedo strike he saw Vanderbilt leaning against a door and calling out, “They’ve got us now.” Several accounts suggest that Vanderbilt, who could not swim, handed off his life jacket to a young mother and helped numerous women and children into lifeboats. Neither he nor Denyer survived the sinking.

The torpedo boat destroyer that picked up Kenan and other survivors left them ashore at Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Ireland. Kenan remained in the town for several weeks as he recuperated from a severe case of tonsillitis. Reports suggest that Kenan had been suffering from the ailment prior to the sinking of the Lusitania and that his time in the water exacerbated his symptoms. Eventually, Kenan headed for Paris, met his niece, and the two returned to the U.S.

As the fighting in Europe continued, Kenan headed back to France and volunteered for the French army’s ambulance corps. For his service at Verdun, he received France’s Croix de Guerre. Kenan later joined the American Expeditionary Force’s medical corps and eventually was awarded the rank of colonel. Kenan’s time in Europe included medical relief in Turkey and Russia during the Revolution. Upon returning to the U.S. in the early 1920s, Kenan devoted his time to providing medical care for Kenan family members and wealthy friends and collecting art. In 1931, he donated one of his art purchases, a wooden statue of Sir Walter Raleigh, to the UNC Library. The statue is on view in the North Carolina Collection Gallery.

During his life, Kenan maintained homes in Palm Beach, New York, Wilmington and Paris. He died at age 91 in 1963.

Among the items to survive Kenan’s near-drowning on the Lusitania was his pocket watch. Its hands are frozen at 2:33, a short time after the initial torpedo strike. The watch is now in the collection at Liberty Hall, a Kenan family home in Duplin County.

Owen Kenan’s life and art collection was celebrated in “A Wilmingtonian Abroad, The Remarkable Life of Colonel Owen Hill Kenan,”, an exhibition mounted at the St. John’s Museum of Art (now the Cameron Art Museum) in Wilmington in 1998-1999.

North Carolina’s First State Park – Mount Mitchell

French Broad hustler and Western Carolina Democrat. volume (Hendersonville, N.C.), 10 Feb. 1916. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. — French Broad hustler and Western Carolina Democrat. (Hendersonville, N.C.), 10 Feb. 1916. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

In March 1915, a bill was passed in both houses of the State Legislature naming Mount Mitchell as the first state park in North Carolina. The bill was largely encouraged by Governor Locke Craig, the 53rd Governor of North Carolina. He acted in response to concerns from the citizens of North Carolina regarding deforestation.

The namesake of Mount Mitchell was Dr. Elisha Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell, a science professor at UNC, measured elevations of the Black Mountain region until he met an untimely and unfortunate death after falling off a cliff over a large waterfall. Mitchell is buried on the summit of the mountain. Mount Mitchell is the highest point east of the Mississippi River. The second highest point, Mount Craig, was named in honor of Governor Craig. Read more about North Carolina’s first state park in Chronicling America and on the website of the N.C. Department of Parks and Recreation. Additional information about North Carolina woodlands is available from The Forest History Society.

Durham’s “Secret Game” against segregation

Sunday, March 12, dawned blustery. McLendon had scheduled the game when most of Durham, including its police force, would be in church. He hadn’t told the school administration about the game; when a reporter for The Carolina Times, Durham’s black weekly, found out, he agreed not to write anything. No spectators would be allowed.

Just before 11 A.M., the Duke team piled into a couple of borrowed cars. ‘To keep from being followed, we took this winding route through town,’ Hubbell recalls. They pulled their jackets over their heads as they walked into the small brick gym.

Inside, stomachs had been churning all morning. ‘I had never played basketball against a white person before and I was a little shaky,’ Stanley says. ‘You did not know what might happen if there was a hard foul, or if a fight broke out. I kept looking over at Big Dog and Boogie to see what to do. They were both from up North.’

The game began with a sputter. Both teams botched routine plays, and shots caromed off the rims. One of the Duke players made a gorgeous pass—right into the hands of a North Carolina College player. ‘On that particular morning, you didn’t exactly need to play skins and shirts,’ Hubbell says with a laugh….

The Duke players had never seen anything like it. By the end of the game, the scoreboard told the story: Eagles 88, Visitors 44.

Then came the day’s second unlikely event. After a short break, the two teams mixed their squads and played another game, an even more egregious violation of Jim Crow. This time it was skins and shirts. ‘Just God’s children, horsing around with a basketball,’ says George Parks….

The Durham police never found out what happened. Nor did the city’s two daily newspapers, and the black reporter kept his word. No scorecard exists, and as far as official basketball recordkeeping is concerned, the game never took place.

From “The Secret Game” by Scott Ellsworth. The article appeared in the New York Times Magazine on March 31, 1996. A fuller account of the March 12, 1944 basketball game between students from North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) and medical students from Duke University—an illegal game in the Jim Crow South—is now available as The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph.

Weather by Telegraph

How Weather Predictions are Made - An Explanation of the Principles on Which Forecasts are Based. — The progressive farmer and the cotton plant. (Raleigh, N.C.), 18 April 1905. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

Spring is just around the corner! In the last couple of weeks, Chapel Hill and the East Coast have been abuzz about the weather. With all of our modern day radar and forecasting technology, the elements are still unpredictable. What resources were available 100 years ago to predict the weather? The above article from the April 18, 1905 issue of The Progressive Farmer and the Cotton Plant discusses some of the tools and techniques U.S. government forecasters used to predict the weather in 1905. It touts forecasters’ 80 percent accuracy rate in calling the weather.

Since its inception in 1886, The Progressive Farmer has transformed from a local newspaper to a country life oriented magazine with a strong web presence. The online weather briefing delivered by today’s Progressive Farmer includes numerous forecasts as well as indices for drought and crop moisture.

Cherokee Scout: Published Every Tuesday at Murphy

Regular readers of North Carolina Miscellany are likely aware that the North Carolina Collection in partnership with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History has received two rounds of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to scan and make available online through the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website, historic North Carolina newspapers published from 1836 through 1922. Thus far Chronicling America includes runs of various length of twenty-one North Carolina newspaper titles (and their successor titles). And, over the next two years, we’re scheduled to provide an additional 23 titles. We’ll share the list in a future post.

With each batch of scanned newspapers, we also submit a history of that paper. We drafted them with help from our colleagues in the Office of Archives and History’s research branch. Some of those histories are already posted to Chronicling America. But, as a special service to North Carolina Miscellany readers, we also plan to post them here periodically.

Our first is below.

The casual observer might conclude that the Cherokee Scout is affiliated with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This is not the case. Rather, the newspaper serves readers in Cherokee County, from its seat at Murphy, described in its pages as “this pretty town of ours—a city in miniature—situated most delightfully amid the mountains of North Carolina.”

Eugene F. Case (1844-1915), editor and co-owner of the Pierce County Herald in Ellsworth, Wisconsin, bought the Murphy Advance in 1890 and changed its name to the Cherokee Scout. Case sold the paper six months later to Dr. John William Patton (1828-1902) and John Stanley Meroney (1832-1909), Patton’s brother-in-law, and returned to the Midwest, where he eventually became the longtime editor and publisher of the Watervliet Record in Michigan. Early issues of the Cherokee Scout are few and scattered, and the only one marking Case’s ownership of the paper lists his name as F.E. Case.

Patton, the first doctor in Cherokee County, appears to have served as co-publisher only briefly. His name had disappeared from the masthead by November 10, 1891. By contrast with Patton, Meroney had little formal education. His family was among the first non-Indian settlers in the town. They had arrived in 1839, shortly after the federal government’s forced removal of the Cherokee Indians from the area. Meroney shared the masthead with Alonzo Don Towns (1866-1913), a native of Albany, Georgia, who had worked at the Daily News and Advertiser in his hometown and the Murphy Bulletin prior to joining the Cherokee Scout under Case’s ownership.

The early days of the partnership between Meroney and Towns may have proved tumultuous. Towns’s wife died in November 1891 and left him with a baby. Six months later Towns married Meroney’s daughter, Alice. As reported in several newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution and the Asheville Daily Citizen, Meroney had refused to consent to his daughter’s marriage and ordered Towns to keep away from her. Towns, in turn, returned to Albany, Georgia, where he resumed his duties with the News and Advertiser. But, in April 1892, he headed back to Murphy, visited Alice Meroney, and the two eloped. Towns’s death proved equally noteworthy. He was found dead in his office on December 13, 1913, having killed himself by drinking carbolic acid.

On January 16, 1914, the Jackson County Journal, in Sylva, North Carolina, announced that Tate Powell had assumed editorship of the Cherokee Scout. Powell served as editor and publisher of the paper until November 1917, when he sold the Scout to George Otto Mercer, a resident of Asheville, who had previously edited the Mebane Leader in North Carolina and the Camas Post in Washington.

Crop reports, sermons, humor, and poetry could be found regularly in the Scout. Unusual among North Carolina newspapers, but reflecting the paper’s proximity to the “Peach State,” was the presence of news from Georgia, including market prices in Atlanta. The social notes common in newspapers of the era, indicating who was visiting or sick or out of town, appeared under the heading “Some Scoutlets.” In a typical issue of the Scout, business cards occupied the left column on the front page; advertisements for patent medicines such as “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” and railroad excursions via Southern Railway to exotic points in the western United States filled the remainder of the pages. In 1917, schools, including Brevard Institute, the North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering, and the University of North Carolina Law School, took out ads in the Scout.

Today the Cherokee Scout is owned by Community Newspapers, Inc., and remains a weekly, published on Wednesdays. Its readership is 9,600.

Early photos of Chapel Hill and UNC

Old Well in Battle Album — The Old Well as it appears in the Battle photo album

Image of gym from the Battle album. Phillips Hall currently sits at the site. — Image of gym from the Battle photo album. Phillips Hall currently sits at the site.

There is only one known existing image of the iconic Old Well that dates back past the pillars and marble to when a wooden structure was simply known as ‘the well.’

Taken for former University of North Carolina President Kemp Plummer Battle, and wedged between the pages of a 120-year-old photo album, the faded photo is among a collection of images showcasing 19th century life in Chapel Hill.

‘This is the most comprehensive set of images from a set period of time,’ said Stephen Fletcher, photo archivist for the North Carolina Collection.’This would be the earliest set of town scenes.’

Photograph archivists at the Wilson Library’s North Carolina Collection recently reorganized and relaunched the photo album online to give viewers a full experience of the 19th century artifact. All 74 images of the book have been scanned and formatted into a virtual album, which allows researchers the ability to flip through the book like intended when it was created in 1894.

‘We made a conscious effort to be able to show the album as an album,’ Fletcher said. ‘We didn’t just photograph the individual images. We wanted people to see what the album looks like and be able to recreate the experience of turning the pages and seeing the images.’

-From
“Century-old photo album shows Chapel Hill’s history” by Brandon Bieltz for “Spotlight” section of UNC-Chapel Hill website. Library staff have experimented with restoring details and color to some of the images in the Battle album. One example is below:

Restored image of Old Well. Image is from the Battle photo album.