With the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s 75th Anniversary fast approaching, a new interactive website has been launched as a “Virtual Visitor Center to showcase all things 75th.” The site features an interactive timeline with photos, sound clips, and videos; a calendar of upcoming events; and even a Smokies Family Album, where users can share their own stories and images from the country’s most-visited park.

My favorite find on the site is the sound clip from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1940 Dedication Speech, an event we’ve got pictured on a postcard (at left) from the NC Postcards site. Can’t get enough? Check out our This Month In North Carolina History article about the speech.

Part of my job with the North Carolina Postcards project is to describe the postcards, including the messages written on them. Today I came across this Durham postcard, and you’ll notice that the message is written in German. Suffering a severe unfamiliarity with the language, I am having trouble transcribing it, and am wondering if any of you folks out there can help!

While a translation would be quite interesting, what we need most is an actual transcription of the message in German.

Any help?

Sunday’s News & Observer offered an article discussing the recent opening of the Bostic Lincoln Center Museum. What is the Bostic Lincoln Center, you ask? A Rutherford County group whose mission is “to preserve, study, prepare and make visitor-friendly the traditional birthplace of Abraham Lincoln,” which, by the way, is in Bostic, North Carolina.

Ok, most people would agree that the traditional birthplace was actually in Kentucky, but the Bostic Lincoln Center claims evidence to the contrary. For instance, records of Bostic’s Concord Baptist Church showed that Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was listed as a member at the time of his birth, suggesting that little Abe was born out of wedlock. With a little searching, I found a number of books here in the North Carolina Collection that support Lincoln’s Carolina roots, such as James H. Cathey’s 1899 work, The Genesis of Lincoln, pictured below.

Each of these sources disagrees on one detail: who’s the father? Among the seven sires of Abraham Lincoln, as listed by William Barton, are Abraham Enloe, Andrew Marshall, and John C. Calhoun. Even Napoleon Bonaparte has been accused, fictionally speaking. Perhaps playing on this Western North Carolina lore, the accusation was made by a character in Thomas Wolfe’s short story “Gentlemen of the Press.”

To settle the matter, the Bostic Lincoln Center is calling for a DNA test. Will they ever find Honest Abe’s illegitimate father? Stay tuned.

Alrighty, let’s kick it up a notch for this edition of “Where The Heel?” Who can identify the town pictured here? Do any of our loyal readers remember shopping at Patterson’s Grain and Feed? Hint: that distinctive building in the center is still there today!

Frolics, hops, germans, socials, midwinters, proms, balls…dances have a long history as a crucial part of social life at Carolina. Today’s UNC Dance Marathon shows how much this activity has evolved since the days of the dance card:

This is an 1885 dance card from our UNC ephemera collection. The name written on the front, presumably the gentlemen who originally used the card, is H.W. Jackson. The other penciled notations on the front read: “My first ball,” and “I carried out Miss Daisy Deason.” I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to interpret that latter notation for yourselves.

Mr. Jackson appears to have been a very popular guy, since he listed not one, but two ladies for many of the dances inside the card:

Curious about this suave fellow, I consulted several resources here at the North Carolina Collection, including the Biographical Index, Powell’s Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, and Ashe’s Biographical History of North Carolina, and found that our gentlemen was Herbert Worth Jackson (1865-1936). Herb was the first basemen and captain of the varsity baseball team during his time at UNC, and later went on to become a banker, civic leader, and UNC Trustee. He eventually married Annie Hyman Philips, whose name, incidentally, does not appear on his dance card.

One of the greatest mysteries I’ve encountered here in the North Carolina Collection has revolved around this postcard of “Charlotte Speedway:”

Curious about this predecessor to today’s Lowes Motor Speedway, I sleuthed around a bit to learn more about the track. What I found was perplexing: most sources described Charlotte Speedway as a dirt track built near the old airport in 1949, where stock car races were held. And yet, pictured here was an indy race on a wooden track, and the card appeared to be much older than 1949. I kept searching for traces of the speedway, to no avail. It seemed that maybe this indy track had been utterly forgotten here in stock car country.

Months have passed since my initial investigation, but today while browsing the index to “The State” magazine, I spotted this listing: “First Speedway Race Track.” Though I expected this lead would end up yet another reference the 1949 stock car track, I had to give it a shot. When I opened that November 1979 issue, I saw it: an image of a wooden track identical to the one pictured in the postcard.

Sure enough, there was another Charlotte Speedway built in Pineville in 1924, where indy races were held. According to the brief article by Bugs Barringer, the track was made of green pine two by fours, so that the wood would cure and shrink, allowing ventilation between the boards and preventing the tires from burning during races. Apparently a few stock car races were held at the track but, ironically, they attracted too few spectators to be profitable.

From training camps, to parks, to opera houses: Vanished North Carolina features images from North Carolina Postcards of selected historic places that no longer exist. Use the interactive map to zoom in to each historic site and see what’s there today. You can find Vanished North Carolina along with our other special features on the Browse by Subject page.

We’re always adding new cards to the North Carolina Postcards site, and the first cards for the following towns just went up!

Bath
China Grove
Draper (now Eden)
Falcon
LaGrange
Millbrook
Mount Sterling
Nashville
Oak Island
Oak Ridge
Ramseur
Robersonville
Saint Helena
Stanley
Tapoco
Walnut Cove

And don’t forget, there are just three more days left to catch the duck races, tractor pulls, and fried oreos at the North Carolina State Fair. Will you be traveling in style?

Having trouble remembering why you love the South so darn much? At 100+ degrees outside, we’re all desperately seeking ways to avoid those August summer blues. Well, Dr. Lionel Chalmers has some classic advice for us on keeping our health during these dog days of summer in his 1776 work, An Account of the Weather and Diseases of South Carolina, which is part of the Bruce Cotten Collection here at the NCC.

Chalmers explains why the heat affects us so: “As the air becomes more moist from heat, the watery particles that float therein, enter our bodies along with the fiery ones: and these rendering each other more active are quickly conveyed throughout the system, weakening the solids and resolving the fluids still more.”

There are apparently a whole mess of digestive issues which may arise during this kind of intense heat, most of which I am hesitant to mention. Dehydration becomes an issue, and if you don’t have that Gatorade handy then don’t fret; Dr. Chalmers has some advice on what you should be eating: “The diet in those who are strong, should be rather spare and not heating . . . On the other hand, valetudinarians [the weak], for the most part, require a more spicy spirituous and stimulating regimen.” And be warned; it takes a much greater amount of Peruvian bark to cure fevers in this weather.

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.

Image courtesy of Flickr user: Haikus, via Creative Commons license.