I thought I knew something about North Carolina history and geography, and felt pretty confident that I’d already spotted many of the oddities and mysteries lurking in old maps, but then somebody pointed out the Big Desert in Robeson County. It shows up on Samuel Pearce’s 1872 map of the state:

I know that sandy soil is common in eastern North Carolina, but the existence of an actual desert was news to me. I decided to look at later maps, to see if this was just a mistake or misunderstanding on the Pearce map, but sure enough, the desert showed up on one after the other. It was there on a 1884 map of the county, and then again on a 1908 soil survey, labeled simply as “The Desert”:

Soil survey maps are usually very reliable, so I decided to look at a recent satellite image to see if I could find anything roughly that shape near the town of Rennert. Here’s what I turned up using Google Maps:

The shape of that area looks exactly the same as that shown on the 1908 map. But the question remains, what in the world is it? Are there, among the many readers of this blog, any Robeson County residents who can tell us what exactly somebody would find if they went to the “Big Desert” today?

When we put up the fun and instructive “Talk Like a Tar Heel” website a few years ago, there were plenty of comments from around the state. Many of these were in the form of polite corrections to some of the pronunciations given on the site.

One of the place names that came up most often was Edgecombe County. The debate was whether the first syllable should be accented (as in “EDGE-cum”) or whether the stress was placed equally on both syllables (as in “EDGE-COMB”). I’ll leave it to current residents of the region to decide on the proper way to say it these days, but I’ve found a clue as to how the name might have been pronounced in colonial North Carolina.

On a 1781 map published in London Magazine, I spotted this:

Now surely the British publishers would have known the standard way to spell the name. The county was, after all, named after Baron Edgecombe, a member of Parliament and one time lord of the treasury. So why would they spell it differently, unless this alternate spelling was used to reflect the local pronunciation of the name?

I found this interesting detail of Piedmont North Carolina on a 1778 map of the eastern United States published in Paris:

The French phrase at the center translates to something like “New Garden where the non-conformists meet.” New Garden was a town at the time — the name was later changed to Guilford College and it is now part of greater Greensboro. But the question remains: who were the non-conformists? It’s probably not the Moravians — the area where they settled was farther to the west. So that leaves the Quakers, but, as you can see from the detail shown here, Quaker assemblies were clearly labeled as such. Did the French also refer to the Quakers as non-conformists? Or was there another group there at the time?

With the economy struggling and the price of gold on the rise, there’s no better time to go out and do a little prospecting. But why bother to trek all the way out to California or Alaska when you might strike the jackpot in your very own backyard? As a service to our readers, North Carolina Miscellany is pleased to publish online the “Preliminary Map Showing Location of Principal Gold Deposits in North Carolina.” Published in 1896, the map might be just a little outdated, but you never know what you’ll find. If you do happen to stumble across anything on par with what the Reed family of Cabarrus County dug up on their property, a modest gift to the North Carolina Collection would be an appropriate way of showing your thanks.

Madison County maps read like menus. In looking at a 1938 highway map I spotted towns named Grapevine and Walnut, mountains named Sugar Loaf, Huckleberry, and Potato Gap, and a feature with the rather abrupt name of Lick Rock. But it’s these two mountains, at opposite ends of the county and with seemingly contradictory names, that really distinguish the place:

The North Carolina Gazetteer doesn’t list an origin for either name. I think we can guess where “Big Butt” came from, but what could be the origin of “Nofat”? Was there an early movement of strict mountain dieters who have been otherwise lost to history? Or is it just a particularly skinny peak?

Arguments about the etymology of the word barbecue can be as contentious as discussions about what goes into the sauce. The word almost certainly comes from the Spanish word barbacoa, though there have been plenty of other guesses through the years. One of the most popular theories is that it comes from the French barbe à queue, meaning “beard to tail.” This origin is embraced by those who insist that real barbecue is made with the whole hog, rather than just the shoulder. However, the typically sedate Oxford English Dictionary huffs that the French origin is “an absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word.”

The first use of the word barbecue in English, at least as spotted by the OED, is from Edmund Hickeringill’s 1661 narrative, Jamaica Viewed. That’s fine, but what I want to know is, when did it first appear on a map? I submit as a contender this detail here, from Henry Mouzon’s 1775 “Accurate Map of North and South Carolina With Their Indian Frontiers”:

Look closely — the branch north of Courthouse is labeled “Barbacue Cr.” The area shown is covered by present-day Cumberland and Harnett Counties (”Crosscreek,” at the bottom of the image, was renamed Fayetteville in 1783). Barbecue Creek is located in Barbecue Township, also home to the Barbecue Church, established in 1757. I’ve never visited Barbecue Creek, but I imagine a clear stream redolent of vinegar and smoke. Located in eastern North Carolina, it would, of course, be entirely tomato free.

When I first spotted Glasgow County in eastern North Carolina on an old map, I thought it must be a mistake. I checked David Corbitt’s The Formation of the North Carolina Counties and it turns out that the map was correct — but not for very long. Glasgow County had a very short existence, lasting just eight years. It was formed in 1791 from Dobbs County and named for the current Secretary of State, James Glasgow. However, after Glasgow was implicated in a complicated land fraud inquiry in the late 1790s, the state legislature looked for a more appropriate namesake for the new county, settling finally (and permanently, this time) on Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, for whom the county was named in 1799.

The two men who were arguably the most famous residents of North Carolina in the nineteenth century are featured in a new online collection: Chang and Eng Bunker: The Siamese Twins. This website presents original materials from the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection and documents the lives and times of conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker.

Highlights from the collection include photographs of the twins and their families, letters written by Chang and Eng, and a fascinating account book documenting their travels through the United States and Europe in the 1830s.

The other day, in the North Carolina Collection stacks, I found a small packet labeled “Harriet-Henderson Mill Pay Envelopes, 1926-1927.” Inside were a bunch of small, manila envelopes that had at one time contained the weekly pay of textile mill employees. On the outside of each envelope was the employee’s name, the date, and a short account of the amount due to be paid.

These envelopes are fascinating artifacts from a time when the mill was of paramount importance in the lives of its workers, providing not just employment but housing, food and supplies, and even medical care. After all these were subtracted from the paycheck, the employees were often left with very little cash to take home, as the examples below demonstrate.

Today’s News & Observer has a nice feature on the fortieth anniversary of the Black Student Movement at UNC.

This photo, from the UNC student yearbook, depicts a member of the Black Student Movement in 1969. The image was used in “I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill,” an exhibit held at Wilson Library last year.