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Author: David Cecelski

Bogue Banks: An Early History of Salter Path and the Western Villages

November 26, 2021November 28, 2021 / David Cecelski / 14 Comments

When Charles Farrell took these photographs, Salter Path was the only settlement of any kind on the western two-thirds of Bogue Banks. Lights were few and far between and on clear nights you felt as if you could see every star in the heavens.

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The Lighters at Clubfoot Creek

November 17, 2021 / David Cecelski / 6 Comments

My friend Betty Motes recently told me a story about a flotilla of boatmen and their families that used to come from the shipyards of Camden, New Jersey, and spend their winters on Clubfoot Creek.

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The Mullet Fishermen of Punta Gorda

November 10, 2021November 11, 2021 / David Cecelski / 4 Comments

The first fisherman from Carteret County, N.C., that I found in Punta Gorda, Florida, was a man named John C. Lewis. He was born in Beaufort in 1847 and he was the son of Anson and Irene Lewis, outfitters of sailing ships.

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“We Take No Negro Prisoners:” Remembering the Plymouth Massacre

October 31, 2021October 31, 2021 / David Cecelski / 16 Comments

Whenever I visit Plymouth, N.C., a small town near where I grew up, the first thing I think of is the massacre of African Americans that happened there on April 20, 1864.

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The Mullet Fishermen: A Journey from Carteret County, N.C. to Cortez, Florida

October 22, 2021October 22, 2021 / David Cecelski / 2 Comments

In the 1880s fishermen began to leave Carteret County, N.C., and go to the mullet fishing grounds of Southwest Florida, where they made new homes in places such as Cortez and Punta Gorda.

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Lennoxville

October 15, 2021 / David Cecelski / 1 Comment

This is a photograph of Charles P. Dey and his brother John Wesley Dey’s menhaden oil and scrap mill at Lennoxville, a mile and half east of Beaufort, in Carteret County, N.C., circa 1890.

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“All Roads Lead Back to North Carolina”

October 7, 2021October 7, 2021 / David Cecelski / 4 Comments

Whether they were in New York City, Boston or Hartford, the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina kept a close eye on what was happening back home in the Tar Heel State.

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Emancipation Day At Mother Zion

October 4, 2021October 4, 2021 / David Cecelski / 1 Comment

On January 12, 1934, the New York City chapter of the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina held an Emancipation Day celebration at Mother AME Zion Church in Harlem, one of the most historic churches in America. 

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Harlem, 1940: Dancing at the Renaissance

September 28, 2021 / David Cecelski / 1 Comment

In the spring of 1940, the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina held its annual dance at the Renaissance Casino, one of Harlem's most famous ballrooms.

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Worcester, Mass., 1888: The Sons and Daughters of North Carolina (Part 3)

September 23, 2021September 23, 2021 / David Cecelski / 7 Comments

While doing research on her family’s history, Yvette Porter Moore discovered that her ancestors had organized a chapter of the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina in Worcester, Mass., in the fall of 1888.

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The Sons and Daughters of North Carolina II

September 20, 2021September 21, 2021 / David Cecelski / 3 Comments

The second time that the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina made national headlines was the 1st of December, 1898, when they gathered at Association Hall in Brooklyn, N.Y., to protest the Wilmington, N.C., massacre and coup d’etat of 1898.

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The Sons and Daughters of North Carolina

September 19, 2021September 22, 2021 / David Cecelski / 10 Comments

The first time that the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina attracted national attention was a winter night in Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. Composed of African American migrants who had left North Carolina, the group was holding a memorial service in honor of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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The Whitehurst Fishery: A Down East Community on Lake Erie

September 8, 2021September 8, 2021 / David Cecelski / 4 Comments

A little more than a century ago, a group of seagoing people from the “Down East” part of Carteret County, N.C., settled on the shores of Lake Erie and began commercial fishing.

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Varnamtown’s Fishermen at Bald Head Island, 1938

August 20, 2021September 29, 2021 / David Cecelski / 6 Comments

In the autumn of 1938, the photographer Charles Farrell visited a gang of mullet fishermen from Varnamtown while they hauled their nets on Bald Head Island, down in the far southeast corner of the North Carolina coast.

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Remembering Sneads Ferry in the 1930s

August 13, 2021August 15, 2021 / David Cecelski / 7 Comments

Through the eyes of Sneads Ferry's oldest residents, I came to see Charles Farrell's photographs as a window into a time when most of the village's people still made their livings from the sea.

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Menhaden Fishing Days

August 5, 2021August 16, 2021 / David Cecelski / 9 Comments

When I was in Southport several years ago, I carried Charles Farrell's photographs to an old menhaden fisherman named Charles “Pete” Joyner. At the time, Mr. Joyner was 93 years old.

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Hard Times: Voices from the Great Depression on the North Carolina Coast

July 23, 2021July 27, 2021 / David Cecelski / 2 Comments

At the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, I found a remarkable collection of oral history interviews from the North Carolina coast during the Great Depression in the 1930s.  

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Sharecroppers

July 9, 2021July 14, 2021 / David Cecelski / 10 Comments

The thing that moved me most about Roy G. Taylor’s book Sharecroppers: The Way We Really Were is the way that that he remembered so many of the small things about a sharecropper’s life in eastern North Carolina.

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“A Wide-Open Time To Be A Lesbian”

June 29, 2021 / David Cecelski / 1 Comment

To celebrate Pride Month, I’d like to share an excerpt from a work-in-progress, tentatively titled The Light Beneath the Waves. This scene features Betty Somers, one of the first women to serve in Marine Corps Women's Reserve.  She was a pioneer in more ways than one. 

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The Red Shirts in Lumberton, N.C., 1900

June 24, 2021July 2, 2021 / David Cecelski / 6 Comments

At the turn of the 20th century, the Red Shirts were what we today would call a white nationalist militia group. Bedecked in red trousers and shirts, they barricaded polling sites, shot into homes and generally terrorized those who supported black voting rights.

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Abraham Galloway’s Voyage to Haiti

June 12, 2021June 13, 2021 / David Cecelski / 11 Comments

At the Boston Athenaeum, I discovered that the young Abraham Galloway was bound for Haiti in 1861 and was determined to drive the United States into a civil war to free his people.

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“White Supremacy is the Motto:” Gen. W. P. Roberts and the Gatesville Rally of 1900

June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 / David Cecelski / 6 Comments

On a summer day in 1900, an old Confederate general stood before a white supremacy rally of thousands in a hamlet on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp.  

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“Laws Are Silent Amid Arms:” Remembering Elizabeth City, N.C., in 1898

May 25, 2021May 26, 2021 / David Cecelski / 10 Comments

On the 30th of Sept. 1898, North Carolina newspaper publisher Richard Benbury Creecy wrote, “We are standing on the edge of a race conflict that will shock humanity.” He was not talking about Wilmington, N.C., though, as we might expect, but about another coastal town, Elizabeth City.

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The Other Coup D’Etat: Remembering New Bern, N.C., in 1898

May 19, 2021May 20, 2021 / David Cecelski / 7 Comments

A friend in New Bern, N.C., recently sent me an issue of the Raleigh News & Observer that he found in his family's old papers. The newspaper's date was November 5, 1898. A front-page article was about a large white supremacy meeting at the Craven County Courthouse in New Bern.

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On the Great Coharie River

May 14, 2021 / David Cecelski / 1 Comment

When Dr. Linwood Watson and I visited last winter, he also told me about an extraordinary project that the Coharie Tribe in eastern North Carolina has undertaken to deepen their ancestral ties to the river and the land that has been their home for centuries.

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This is David Cecelski’s official website. Here you’ll find my books and an assortment of my essays and lectures. You’ll also find a new project that features historical photographs of maritime life on the North Carolina coast between 1870 and 1941. In “Love in the Archives,” you can also follow my expeditions to museums, libraries and archives here and abroad as I search for the lost stories from our coastal past.

If you see something in a photograph or manuscript that I didn’t see, I hope you will let me know. If I got something wrong, I hope you will also let me know. And if you have an old diary, photograph or other historical document that you think might belong here, I’d love to see it

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I enjoy writing them. I hope they will help you understand better my little corner of the Atlantic seacoast. Maybe they will even help you to grow a little closer to wherever you call home.

Series

  • Alford & Cecelski: About Boats
  • Arthur Miller's War
  • Coastal Music and Art
  • Core Sound Lectures
  • Environmental History
  • Essays, Lectures & Articles
  • Freedom Stories
  • Great Migrations
  • Harlowe Canal Diary
  • Herring and Shad
  • In Search of Abraham Galloway
  • In Their Own Words
  • Jumpin' Mullet
  • Love in the Archives
  • Maritime Photographs, 1870-1941
  • On the Belle of Washington
  • Photographs of Charles Farrell
  • Postcards
  • Shad Boats: An American Story
  • Shark Hunter: Russell Coles at Cape Lookout
  • Short and Sweet
  • Slave narratives
  • Slavery and Freedom
  • Susan Johnson's Diary
  • The Beauty of Things
  • The Color of Water
  • The Hyde County School Boycott
  • The Klan Last Time
  • The Shrimp Capital of the World
  • The Ties that Bind
  • Uncategorized
  • Wilmington & 1898

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