Tag: atlantic coast line

‘A beautiful historical tradition’ prohibiting intermarriage

“In no State is it unlawful for Mongolians [Asians] and Indians, Negroes and Mongolians, or Negroes and Indians to intermarry. The only exception to the last is that in North Carolina it is unlawful for Negroes to intermarry with Croatan [later Lumbee] Indians or to go to the same school with them. To this statute hangs a beautiful historical tradition….

“All that is left of Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony is this tradition supported by the presence of Indians with fair skin and eyes, and the statute of North Carolina that the blood of these early settlers shall not be further adulterated, by miscegenation, with the blood of the Negro.”

— From “Race Distinctions in American Law” by Gilbert Thomas Stephenson (1910) 

In this letter the Pembroke town council explains to Atlantic Coast Line why its new station needs to include three waiting rooms rather than two (1913).

 

Unwanted distinction: ‘Wreckingest road’

“In seven months there had been eight passenger train pile-ups on the three main lines running down the east coast to Florida resorts — the Seaboard, Atlantic Coast Line and Florida East Coast Railway. Three of the wrecks were in North and South Carolina, where the swift streamliners slide through the night.

“In James Boyd’s ‘Marching On,’ a novel of the South in the 1860s, Big Bill the Brakeman, who rode the historic Wilmington-Weldon (N.C.) run, bragged that he worked on ‘the wreckingest road in the Union.’ The Carolinas were beginning to wonder if they were getting to be the wreckingest states.”

— From Time magazine, Jan. 14, 1946