This excerpt of Ogilby’s 1671 map, “A new discription of Carolina by the order of the Lords Proprietors,” shows an area named Turkey Quarters, located in what is now Pender County, but at the time, Clarendon County. According to Powell’s North Carolina Gazeteer, the area was named “by Barbadian explorers in 1663 becuase of the many turkeys killed here.”
Series 2 of the Hugh Morton finding aid is now available online! Visit the finding aid here to check out the addition of People and Events, late 1920s-early 2000s (bulk 1940s-1990s).
To see photos from Series 2 online through the Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs and Films, click here.
More information on the addition is available through our sister blog, A View to Hugh.
In an undated 20th Century essay by Olive F. Gunby titled “Courtship in Carolina,” the author describes the socially appropriate way of wooing a proper North Carolina lady.
The courtship, as described by Gunby, should naturally begin when the gentleman invites the lady for a ride in his buggy after church. As the relationship progresses, the gentleman may drop by her house to visit her, and manages to speak directly to all members of the household except her. And because dancing is “an amusement indulged in only by the sinful and depraved,” the only social interactions between the pair can occur while playing games at a gathering. Actually proposing marriage requires a year or two of gathering courage.
Despite my toungue-in-cheek paraphrasing of Gunby’s treatise, what’s interesting to me is that much of the action of bringing the couple together seems to be fueled by town gossip regarding the public development of the relationship. Gunby writes that after the post-church buggy ride, news of the interaction will be discussed by neighbors and friends across town over lunch. If the man’s horse is seen tethered in front of the girl’s house, news of this will also spread, designating the lady as off-limits for other suitors. Gunby writes:
“Mike Brown’s bay was hitched in front of Aunt Mary Ann’s gate when I came by” is announced at sundry supper tables that evening, and soon it is whispered around that Mike Brown is “going after” Loretta … no one in that neighborhood will dream of interfering with Mike’s plainly evinced intentions. (174-175)
Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have any thing else in the NCC about 20th Century courtship, although there were two North Carolina Historical Review articles written about Antebellum courtship and 19th Century courtship.
Above is a postcard published by the Asheville Postcard Co., which was likely made from a photograph taken by George Masa.
The writers of NC Miscellany recently got a tip that Buncombe County Public Libraries has an online display of several of George Masa’s photographs paired with the postcards that were printed from them. You can view the collection here.
One neat thing about the way they’ve displayed the postcard with the photograph is that you can see how postcard publishers often manipulated small details in the photograph.
Masa was born in Japan, and moved to the United States sometime around 1906 after his father died suddenly. He traveled to several US cities before coming to Asheville in 1915 on a student tour group. He remained in Asheville for the next 18 years of his life, employed in various capacities. He photographed guests at the Grove Park Inn in the beginning, and later opened the Photo-Graft Shop (which would be come the Asheville Photo Service). He loved being in the Smoky Mountains, and frequently photographed scenic views of the area. He was an early advocate of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Appalachian Trail. (adapted from Powell, William S. Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1991.)
Unfortunately, we have not been able to identify any of the postcards in our collection as the work of George Masa (except for possibly the one above). You can browse for items published by the Asheville Post Card Company, which published postcards from the photos of Masa and other photographers from the 1920s and on.
Be sure to check out the new This Month in North Carolina, in which Harry McKown examines the Colored Industrial Association Fair. The Colored Industrial Fair occurred occurred on November 18, 1879, in Raleigh and displayed the achievements of the African American population in North Carolina.
… This makes an interesting follow-up to last month’s essay on the history and origins of the NC State Fair, which you can read about here.
Above is a postcard showing an Odd Fellows’ Lodge in Beaufort, NC. It turns out we’ve got a lot of materials relating to various secret societies and fraternal orders in North Carolina, including the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Interestingly, the card mentions that the lodge is over a hundred years old, which places the construction of the lodge to ca. 1805-1815.
Below is an excerpt from the inside of the front cover of the “Ritual of a Subordinate Lodge under the Jurisdiction of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows,” published by the I.O.O.F. in 1908 (VC097 O22r). While it was used in the Centennial Lodge of Elm City, it dates to roughly the same time the postcard was created.
Just in time for Halloween! Found in the stacks …
Murgatroyd, Ebenezer, with illustrations by Herb Roth. Cooking to Kill! The Poison Cookbook. Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, ca. 1951.
This book is a great source of “comic recipes for the ghoul, cannibal, witch & murderer.” It also includes inspired illustrations after each recipe.
Carole Boston Weatherford. The Library Ghost. Fort Atkinson, WI: Upstart Books, 2006.
A librarian discovers a ghost lurking around her library at night trying to solve a riddle.
And last, but not least, a general interest essay titled, “All Halloween” by E.A. Hawes, published in the 1902 University Magazine. This essay accounts several Halloween practices and superstitions, my favorite being: “A similar rite is removing the yolk of a boiled egg, filling one half with sale and eating at “bed-time,” without drinking water. If your dreams are of water, you will marry, if not, death will find you single.”
During October, we uploaded a few new towns to the North Carolina Postcard collection.
The postcard above depicts a building with a false front that housed the town’s post office and weather signal station in Pelham, Caswell County.
The winter resort village of Pinehurst, N.C. began in 1895, and the Carolina hotel opened there in 1901. It was the largest hotel in the community, and at the time of its construction, the largest hotel in the state. Pinehurst featured several other hotels, boarding houses, and cottages for rent, but none offered the same services, amenities, and recreational opportunities as The Carolina.
One recreational activity offered by the hotel was the gun club, which enabled guests to take lessons from instructors and also featured exhibition demonstrations by the instructors. The image above is an excerpt from a postcard depicting an event at the Gun Club, and shows a woman in a white dress shooting a rifle. To see the entire postcard, click on the image.
While we’re not certain, it’s possible that the woman depicted here is Annie Oakley …
After a long stint in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling show, Annie Oakley and her husband, Frank Butler, came to live at The Carolina in 1915. They had positions on the hotel’s staff, and Annie would give exhibitions and shooting lessons at the gun club, and Frank was in charge of the skeet range. Her lessons and biweekly demonstrations were extraordinarily popular. In the six years she worked at The Carolina, she gave lessons to hundreds of people each winter season.
This postcard dates to when she would have been employed by the hotel, and the large crowd gathered to watch (don’t miss the two boys on the roof of the club house!) suggests that this was not an event to miss.
This is the only postcard we have of the Gun Club, but you can view other postcards of The Carolina (and some of its other recreational activities) here.
Reference
Flory, Claude R. 1966. “Annie Oakley in the South,” in North Carolina Historical Review, 43(3), 333-343.
The 2009 N.C. State Fair opens today!
Visit http://www.ncstatefair.org/2009/ for more information.
This photographic postcard shows a winning stalk of Simpkins’ Prolific cotton seed, and the card’s caption mentions that it won the first place premium at the 1910 state fair.
The NCC has a run of NC State Fair premiums, rules, and regulations. I’m not sure if this cotton stalk won the Simpkins’ Prize or the Cotton Contest (or both), but in 1910, the prizes for each were as follows: