I’ve never been to the Sundance Film Festival, but it sounds like fun. I imagine spending a strenuous day viewing independent films then dining well and relaxing by the fire in some cozy restaurant with a view of the snow-capped mountains and leisurely sipping a fine glass of . . . Cheerwine.
That’s right, the Sundance Catalog is now offering, among other luxury items, North Carolina’s very own cherry cola. The price is a little bit steeper than you’d find at, say, the Food Lion in Salisbury, but who knows, maybe the bottles sold in the catalog come from Robert Redford’s own private soda cellar.
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.
As we begin to enter the hot days of Summer, like me you may already be yearning for cooler times. Look forward all the way to next January and remind yourself to check on the date for the Annual Wild Game Cookout sponsored by the Friends of Sampson County Waterways. Always a colorful event, the Cookout has in the past featured music and dancers, but the main event, always, is the cooking and eating of some unusual wild game treats. Haven’t had your fill of musk ox? Yearning for some delicious alligator tail? Fancy a nice beaver stroganoff? Sampson County next January is the place for you. Be sure to come early, the stroganoff goes fast.
This photograph depicts the fire at the textile mill in Avalon, N.C. on June 11, 1911. I had never heard of Avalon and so turned to the handy North Carolina Gazetteer to figure out exactly where it is. Or, in this case, was. The story of Avalon gives us a sense of just how important the local mill was to early 20th-century North Carolinians. The fire was a disaster, damaging the mill well beyond any point where it could have been repaired. With the primary engine of their economy gone, the people of Avalon, located in Rockingham County, loaded around sixty houses, a Moravian church, a school, and a company store onto horse-drawn rollers and moved the whole town two miles west to Mayodan.
The front page of today’s New York Times travel section lists, at the bottom of the page, the locations covered this week: Monaco; Shanghai; Antarctica; The Silk Road; Angkor; Concord, N.C.; and Venice. Does one seem to stand out from the others? Or do they all strike you as strange and exotic destinations worth planning a vacation around? The article on Concord is a “photo essay” on the Nextel All-Star Challenge held last month at the Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
Today’s USA Today has an article about the North Carolina Barbecue Trail, a project of the North Carolina Barbecue Society listing twenty-five great barbecue restaurants across the state, from Murphy to Greenville.
We all know that North Carolina leads the nation when it comes to college basketball and pork barbecue. Now we can add another superlative: best beach. No less an authority than Dr. Beach himself has named Ocracoke Island as the best beach in the nation for 2007. The fourteen miles of beach on Ocracoke are part of the National Park Service’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore and are protected from development. With temperatures reaching into the nineties for much of the state this afternoon, this would be an awfully good day to head to the Outer Banks and see if Dr. Beach really knows his stuff.
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.
Sunday’s Charlotte Observer ran an editorial about the Lewis Hine photographs of North Carolina mills that have been digitized by the Library of Congress. Hine was the staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and traveled the country in the early twentieth century documenting children at work in mills, factories, and on farms. Some of his best-known and most striking photographs show unidentified children posed outside of North Carolina textile mills. In addition to the Library of Congress site, a sampling of Hine’s North Carolina work is available in the pamphlet “Child Labor in the Carolinas,” which has been digitized by Documenting the American South.
Broadside, “The U.S.S. North Carolina Comes Home.” Color Lithography by Colonial Press, Chapel Hill. Ektachrome by Hugh Morton. North Carolina Collection, Call Number Cb970.99 U58n8
On the 13th of June, 1940, BB 55, the first American battleship built since 1921 and the first of the Navy’s modern fast battleships, was launched from the Navy Shipyard in New York. At her launching BB 55 was sponsored by Isabel Hoey, daughter of the governor of North Carolina. Miss Hoey was present because BB 55 was to become the third vessel in the United States Navy to carry the name North Carolina.
The USS North Carolina was designed to be fast and powerful. Even with her massive armor, nine 16-inch guns, and 1,900 man crew, the North Carolina drove through the water at an impressive 28 knots. With her sleek good looks, she was also a crowd pleaser, nicknamed the “Showboat” by the men who built and tested her.
When the North Carolina was launched the United States was at peace, but war was raging in Europe and Asia. By the time she had finished her shakedown cruise, commissioning, and training exercises, the country had gone to war, and the North Carolina was hurried to the Pacific to help replace the battleships lost in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. From June 1942 until the end of the war in 1945, the North Carolina was heavily engaged in screening aircraft carrier task forces and using her big guns in support of assaults on Japanese held positions. She sailed more than 300,000 miles, engaging in every major naval operation in the Pacific theater, and earning 15 battle stars.
Broadside. North Carolina Collection, Call Number Cb970.99 U58n
The end of the Second World War was also the end of the active career of the North Carolina. The Navy designed and built the ship in the late 1930s as one of its premier offensive weapons. Battleships carried the war to the enemy. After the spectacular air assault on Pearl Harbor, however, the Navy came increasingly to depend on the aircraft carrier as its chief weapon.
Battleships like the North Carolina became escort vessels, screening carriers from surface and air attack, and gun platforms supporting troops in amphibious invasions. In 1947 the North Carolina was decommissioned and made part of the reserve fleet anchored in Bayonne, New Jersey.
For 13 years the North Carolina lay becalmed in the “mothball fleet,” but in 1960 North Carolinians led by Terry Sanford, Luther Hodges, and Hugh Morton, in cooperation with the Navy, began making plans to bring the ship to Wilmington. In that same year a statewide campaign for public support for the vessel raised $325,000, including money raised by 700,000 school children. On October 2, 1961, the NorthCarolina was carefully maneuvered through the narrow channel into the port of Wilmington to its new berth. The battleship had become a museum ship, a monument to the great warships and the people who sailed on them and a memorial to North Carolinians who served and died in World War II.
