From the Joyner Library at East Carolina University comes a very useful tool for finding and using topographic maps – the TopoNC Map Database. TopoNC allows keyword searching for places (including crossroads, subdivisions, towns and cities) and features (such as rivers, swamps, mountains, bays, and forests). Click on the link for more information and to begin searching the database!
State Fair
The North Carolina State Fair opens this week. I found this postcard from the 1912 fair in the postcard collection in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives.
Thirteen Moons in Cherokee
Sunday’s Raleigh News and Observer reported the interesting news that a section of Charles Frazier’s new novel, Thirteen Moons, will be translated into Cherokee. Apparently, it will be the first novel ever to be published in that language.
The majority of publications in the Cherokee language appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, many the work of the Mission Press in Park Hill, Oklahoma. These were primarily translations of the Bible, religious tracts, and hymnbooks. After the Civil War there were some legal materials published in Cherokee, including a set of the laws of the Cherokee Nation, but publications in the native language dwindled until a resurgence of interest in Cherokee in the late twentieth century.
Many of the more recent publications in Cherokee have focused on language instruction, with some clearly aimed at younger readers: in 1975 the comic strips “Blondie” and “Beetle Bailey” appeared in booklets in the Cherokee language. The University of North Carolina library holds several recent Cherokee language instruction books, including “How to Talk Trash in Cherokee” (Downhome Publications, 1989).
Perhaps with this continued interest in the language, combined with the inspiration and example of Frazier’s novel, it won’t be long before we see a novel composed in Cherokee.
October 1896: Rural Free Delivery
This Month in North Carolina History
On the 23rd of October, 1896, J. B. Goodnight of the United States Post Office set out from China Grove, in Rowan County, North Carolina to deliver the mail. A routine task today, in 1896 Goodnight was taking part in an experiment which would launch the postal service on the biggest and most expensive endeavor in its history and help change the life of rural America.
At the turn of the twentieth century some parts of American mail service had taken on a recognizably modern form. The old system of charging postage based on the number of pages in a letter and the distance it had to travel had been replaced by a flat rate fee. Instead of the receiver of the letter paying the cost, the sender of the letter paid the postage in the form of stamps. For a few pennies one could send a letter from border to border or coast to coast, and, if you lived in a city of 10,000 or more, the mail would be delivered to your door. Postal service in rural areas in the United States, however, had changed little. Postal routes extended outward from towns and cites to small rural post offices which were often part of a store. Many farmers could not pick up their mail more than once or twice a week. and resented their urban cousins who got mail delivered daily to their home. Unhappy farmers complained to their congressmen, and Congress put pressure on the Post Office. In 1896 the Post Office agreed to try an experiment in which mail would be delivered to rural residents over a total of forty-four special routes scattered among twenty-nine states. West Virginia had the first experimental route established, and the second route was created in Rowan County, North Carolina, part of the district of Congressman John Steele Henderson, chairman of the Post Offices and Post Roads Committee of the House of Representatives. In his annual report for 1897 Postmaster General James A. Gary declared the experiment in rural postal service a success. Mail was being delivered daily to enthusiastic recipients. Over the next few years Rural Free Delivery extended to all parts of the country. In the end it was the most expensive program ever created by the United States Postal Service and one of the most popular. Ironically, considering it got the second RFD route in the country, North Carolina was initially less excited about the service than other states. Carrier Goodnight of China Grove complained that farmers on his route were suspicious and unwilling to accept the service. China Grove’s postmaster, J. C. Deaton, reported that he had to “beg the people to let us deliver their mail.” As late as 1901 there were only 11 RFD routes in North Carolina compared with 42 in South Carolina, 93 in Georgia and 142 in Tennessee. In the end, however, Rural Free Delivery was accepted with enthusiasm and, along with the improvement in rural roads that it helped foster, RFD broke down the isolation of rural North Carolina.
Sources
Fuller, Wayne E. The American Mail; Enlarger of the Common Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Scheele, Carl B. A short history of the mail service. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970.
History of the North Carolina Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. [North Carolina ?: The Association, 1965?]
Biltmore in 1905
George Washington Vanderbilt was the youngest of his parents’ eight children. Because of the age difference between George and his siblings, some of his closest family ties were with his nieces and nephews. One niece, Edith Shepard Fabbri, visited Biltmore in late 1905 with her husband, Ernesto G. Fabbri, and their two children. Ernesto Fabbri, described in his New York Times obituary as a “world traveler, linguist, and former president of the Society of Italian Immigrants in New York,” was the heir of Egisto Fabbri, a J.P. Morgan partner. He and Edith Vanderbilt Shepard were married in 1897 and divorced in 1923.
Apparently, Fabbri was an amateur photographer. The North Carolina Collection recently purchased an album of photographs that Fabbri made during that 1905 visit to Biltmore. The seventeen large (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inch) photographs include images of the exterior of the mansion, the model village, farm buildings and animals, and the ferry across the French Broad. The final image in the album shows George Vanderbilt’s wife, Edith Dresser Vanderbilt, setting up her camera on a hillside on the estate. Several of the images appeared in Ellen Erwin Rickman’s Biltmore Estate (Arcadia Publishing, 2005), but most have not been published. The first image in the album is shown here.
N.C. Novels for the Fall
This is a great season for reading North Carolina literature, with new novels by some of the state’s most respected writers coming out within a few weeks of each other. Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill, set in Civil War era Hillsborough, has just been released and Doug Marlette’s Magic Time comes out this week. Follow the links from each title for recent reviews in the Charlotte Observer.
These two books should keep anxious readers busy until October 3, when Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier’s long-awaited second novel is released. Raleigh News & Observer columnist J. Peder Zane has already declared it a “worthy successor” to Cold Mountain.
Of Radio and Rain
As an undergraduate I took a “Weather and Climate” class, which I have to admit was one of my favorites. I don’t remember everything we discussed, but I definitely do remember that precipitation has nothing to do with radio waves in the air. This fact was called to doubt, however, as I was reviewing the Biblical Recorder (which was and is published in Raleigh) for another subject. In its “Current Topics” section for 2 June 1926 I found a piece titled “Is the Radio to Blame?” In the late spring of 1926, sections of the United States were experiencing a severe drought–the worst in forty years, and the Recorder reports that Thomas Edison blamed radio waves for the lack of rain. He believed that “moisture [was] being absorbed from the air by the radio, thus preventing the formation of rain clouds.” The Recorder went on to say that coming from Edison this theory was worthy of consideration and “it would be better to abolish [the radio] than have the earth parched as it has been for the past two months.”
Nursery Rhymes for the C & O
This great advertisement is from a promotional brochure published by the Chesapeake and Ohio lines — the “C and O.” I ran across the brochure in a volume labeled simply “Miscellaneous Pamphlets.” The volume bears the signature and date “R.G. Cherry October 10 1931.” At the time, Cherry was in his first term in the North Carolina House of Representatives. Fourteen years later he was elected Governor of North Carolina.
Bigfoot in N.C.
Today’s Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the recent Bigfoot sightings in Madison County. Apparently, Sasquatch himself has appeared around the mountain town of Hot Springs. This is exciting news indeed, but I was most impressed to learn that this is not Bigfoot’s first visit to our state. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has an excellent website documenting all known sightings, which are arranged by state. The North Carolina page lists 42 Bigfoot sightings in the Tar Heel state. Predictably, he has shown up most often in the mountain regions of North Carolina, but has popped up a few times in other parts of the state, including Mocksville in Davie County and at Camp Lejeune in Onslow County.
Historical Markers Online
Our friends at the North Carolina Office of Archives & History have just released an impressive new website at http://ncmarkers.com. The site taps into a database of information about the North Carolina Historical Marker Program — those black and silver signs scattered along highways around the state denoting historic people and events. Users of the new site can search by keyword, browse by county or subject, and, in many cases, see a picture of the actual sign and read a short essay giving more information on the topic.
You’ll find this site especially handy if, like me, you’ve found yourself so caught up in reading one of the historic markers that you nearly drifted into oncoming traffic. Now that I know I can find the text online later, I’ll keep both eyes on the road.