Have you ever heard of “Jonkonnu”? No? Well, you can check out Harry McKown’s most recent edition of “This Month in North Carolina History” for the details.

The Bush White House has chosen (again) a North Carolina-grown tree for its final Christmas celebration in office. The tree, which comes from River Ridge Tree Farms in Ashe County, will be cut today and transported to Washington. Read more about the story here.

This time of year just begs for a Thanksgiving-oriented post. As I was racking my brain trying to come up with a suitable one, I remembered something that had caught my eye several years ago. It is a “Proclamation by Richard Caswell concerning a day of thanksgiving.” Caswell was the first governor of the newly independent state of North Carolina, and in his proclamation he declared that November 28, 1777, would be a day of “General and Solemn Thanksgiving.” For what were we giving thanks? It was for General Horatio Gates and his army’s surprising victory over British forces at Saratoga, New York.

You can read the entire proclamation here: Proclamation by Richard Caswell concerning a day of thanksgiving [as printed in the North-Carolina Gazette].

It’s been on our blogroll for a few months, but our friends on the 4th floor of Wilson Library are officially launching “Southern Sources.”

The staff at the Southern Historical Collection hope to use “Southern Sources” as a way to highlight some of the deeply hidden gems in the SHC and as a way to encourage a greater level of public engagement with archival materials in general. Through regular posts, Southern Sources will show off interesting staff finds, curiosities, old favorites, and other samples from our collection.

So, after you’ve finished reading about Blenheim Ginger Ale and the verities of golf, take a look at Southern Sources.

While spending another enjoyable visit to the those two fine reference works, the South Carolina Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, it struck me that my adopted state of North Carolina appears to have pulled substantially ahead of my native state of South Carolina in the important field of soft drinks. Cheerwine, a cherry flavored drink of regional fame, was developed in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1917, and Pepsi, one of the national giants of cola drinks, was first brewed in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1893.

However, appearances, as the old adage says, can be deceptive. South Carolina may not be the home of a giant like Pepsi, but it can boast that it gave the world Blenheim Ginger Ale, particularly the variety known and loved as “Old Number Three.” First concocted in Blenheim, South Carolina, in the 1890s, by Dr. C. R. May as an aid to digestion, the drink was a mixture of local mineral water and Jamaican ginger. I don’t know what kind of punch it packed at the turn of the twentieth century, but I vividly remember my first taste some sixty years later. My tongue burned; my throat constricted; my eyes watered; and I sneezed my head off. What a pop! Restricted for years to the area in which it was produced, Blenheim has been distributed a bit more widely of late. I can usually find it somewhere in Durham or Chapel Hill and have delighted in introducing it to my friends — at least they were my friends.

In October, I shared with you a menu from the Chuck Wagon Restaurant in Boone, NC. In honor of the upcoming Turkey Day, I’ll share with you another menu collected by one of our former curators, William S. Powell. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to dig in.

If you haven’t done so already, check out WRAL’s “Tar Heel Treasures.” From Scaly Mountain General Store to the Bogue Inlet Pier, it’s a great way to view North Carolina.

Among the recent additions to the North Carolina Maps project are several excellent detailed maps of North Carolina towns published by O.W. Gray & Son in Philadelphia in the late 19th century. These maps show an impressive amount of detail of downtown areas, including the names of businesses, schools, churches, and property owners. The O.W. Gray & Son town maps now online include Wilmington, Louisburg, Monroe, Oxford, and Wadesboro.

We got a request recently for a copy of a dissertation done at the University of North Carolina in 1928. Because of its age and condition we decided to digitize it rather than try to photocopy it. Therefore you will be able to find a digital copy of “A study of mob action in the south” by John Roy Steelman on Internet Archive. For me, however, a bonus of the process was learning more about Steelman himself. Steelman’s obituary in the New York Times of July 22, 1999, is titled “From riding the rails to top Truman aid.” During the Great Depression Steelman earned money for college by working at a number of jobs, including being a “blanket stiff,” a roving agricultural laborer who carried his blanket with him as he hoboed from job to job. Steelman got his undergraduate degree from Henderson-Brown College in Arkadephia, Arkansas. He received his doctorate in 1928 from the University of North Carolina in economics and sociology. After serving in a number of government positions, Steelman became an advisor to President Harry Truman with the title, Assistant to the President. Steelman’s dissertation is an exhaustive study of violence, particularly racial violence, in the south. Our copy has a number of fascinating hand-drawn charts and graphs.

Throughout this election season, I’ve been sharing some of the North Carolina Collection’s wonderful collection of political ephemera (I hope you’ve enjoyed). I’m sharing another piece today; the image to the right is a list of Republican Party candidates for state office in 1884.

However, I’d also like to turn this posting into a solicitation for more ephemera. Yesterday, our collection development librarian (the person in charge of getting “stuff” for the NCC), sent out an email to North Carolina librarians. In this email, she asked them to save all of the various politically related mailings that they have been getting, pack them up, and mail them to us. Well, I want to do the same thing with our loyal NCM readers. Since all of the NC Collection’s staff members live near Chapel Hill, most of the political ephemera we collect is “Triangle-centric.” Our collection, however, seeks to document the history and culture of the entire state. So, for those of you in the western or eastern (or other parts of the Piedmont) parts of the state, please do the following: 1) save the mailings you get 2)pack them up 3)send them to the NC Collection. Who knows…a hundred years from now my replacement may be blogging about the ephemera you sent to us in 2008.