Legacy finding aids update

A new batch of updated finding aids has just been posted.  Collections comprising this group include a number of family papers:

Hatch Family Papers, #2508-z

Thomas Hatch (1761-1868?) resided in Orange County, N.C. The collection includes a transcription of an autobiographical letter, 1813, by Thomas Hatch; other family data; and information about and photographs of old houses in Orange and Chatham counties, N.C., owned by Hatch and his connections.

Click Family Papers, #2537

The collection includes the papers of the Click family, early residents of Rowan County, N.C., consisting chiefly of deeds and wills; a letter, 1835, from relatives who had moved to Indiana reporting conditions there; family letters and papers related to the sale of tobacco, 1880-1895; and scattered items pertaining to the Lutheran church in North Carolina. The family name was also spelled Glucke and Gluicke.

Price Family Papers, #2850

Members of the Price family resided in Mecklenburg County, N.C., and Fayette County and Giles County, Tenn., where several members of the family moved to settle and where many of them owned land. The collection is primarily business and financial papers, with some family letters, of several generations of the Price family. Papers are mainly those of Isaac Price, Isaac Price Junior, and Isaac Jasper Price, and deal with farming, estate settlement, lands and property, medical services, settlement in Tennessee, the Steele Creek Church in Mecklenburg County, and family matters.

Harper Family Account Books, #2908

The Harper Family of Caldwell County, N.C., owned a general merchandise business in Lenoir, N.C., operating at times under the name Waugh and Harper. The collection includes extensive daybook and ledger accounts of Waugh and Harper and other records of scattered dates relating to this business, including invoices, inventories, shipping and hauling accounts, produce orders, barter accounts for such items as wild herbs, roots, bark, and sheepskins, and letterpress copies of business letters; and a cash book of the Chester & Lenoir Railroad, 1874-1882.

A full list of all legacy finding aids published can be found here.

Dr. Reginald A. Hawkins: North Carolina’s first African American gubernatorial candidatecan

“The establishment has discounted the poor, the black, the low-income and liberal whites. It had been divide and conquer. This is the dream I have for North Carolina: to bring us together, black and white…Too long have black people sought a place at the bargaining table, only to receive the crumbs after dinner is over.”

These were the words of Dr. Reginald Armistice Hawkins, given in a speech in 1968 as part of his campaign to become North Carolina’s governor.  Dr. Hawkins, a dentist and ordained Presbyterian minister from Charlotte, made history with his 1968 gubernatorial bid as he was the first African American in the history of the state to make a run for the office.

Today we feature this photograph, from the SHC’s Allard Lowenstein Papers (#4340), of Dr. Reginald Hawkins (at right) with Dr. Ralph David Abernethy, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  This photograph is included in our current exhibit, “We Shall Not Be Moved: African Americans in the South, 18th Century to the Present,” on view until February 5, 2010.

Dr. Ralph David Abernethy (left) and Dr. Reginald Hawkins, from Allard Lowenstein Papers, #4340
Dr. Ralph David Abernethy (left) and Dr. Reginald A. Hawkins at a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C., 27 April 1968. Photograph from Allard Lowenstein Papers, SHC #4340.