A few years ago, I carried a box of Charles Farrell's old photographs of the state's great herring fisheries back to one of the communities on the Chowan River where he took them. They are poignant and beautiful, and the herring workers in them are unforgettable, but I also find them a little haunting because they remind me of all that can be lost.
Month: February 2021
The Barney Slough Fish Camp, 1905
I love this photograph of fishermen at the Barney Slough Fish Camp back in the winter of 1905. They were shad fishermen and you can see them standing with their pound net stakes, just off Hatteras Island.
The Voyage to Bayou Lafourche
Now preserved at the National Archives, a slave manifest indicates that 66 of Augustin Pugh's slaves from Bertie County, N.C., sailed on the brig Calypso out of Norfolk, Va., on April 3, 1819. They were bound for New Orleans, and more than half of them were ten years old or younger.
The Spirits Damn’d
Today I want to talk about slavery, convict labor and the construction of the old Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C. I was first led to do this historical research many years ago, when I was documenting a hunger strike at the prison in its last days. It is not something one forgets easily.
David Cecelski 