David Cecelski

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Environmental History

“All this Land is Called Pantego and Neus”

March 6, 2023March 7, 2023 / David Cecelski / 4 Comments

A 1730 map of the NC coast that I found in London reminded me that we can learn a lot from what is on maps but sometimes even more from what is not on them.

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“One Book of Plants Very Lovingly Packt Up”: Searching for John Lawson in London’s Natural History Museum (Part 3)

February 24, 2023 / David Cecelski / 3 Comments

At London's Natural History Museum, Dr. Mark Carine led my wife and me to the plant specimens that John Lawson collected on the North Carolina coast in 1710 and 1711.

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“One Book of Plants Very Lovingly Packt Up”: Searching for John Lawson in London’s Natural History Museum (Part 2)

February 23, 2023February 24, 2023 / David Cecelski / 3 Comments

In the weeks after John Lawson's death, his “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up” found a new home in James Petiver’s herbarium in London.

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“One Book of Plants Very Lovingly Packt Up”: Searching for John Lawson in London’s Natural History Museum (Part 1)

February 20, 2023February 23, 2023 / David Cecelski / 5 Comments

When my wife and I were in London last summer, we visited the Natural History Museum to see the collection of plants that the naturalist, explorer, surveyor and sometimes fur trader John Lawson sent to the English naturalist James Petiver in 1710 and 1711.

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The Linnean Society’s Venus Flytrap

September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 / David Cecelski / 8 Comments

Here at the Linnean Society in London, I have found an extraordinary treasure from the North Carolina coast: the first written record of the Venus flytrap in history.

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13 Views of the Sea

February 8, 2022February 8, 2022 / David Cecelski / 4 Comments

When I was visiting my son in Washington, DC recently, I went to a breathtakingly beautiful exhibit of Katsushika Hokusai's paintings that is currently at the  National Museum of Asian Art's Freer Gallery.

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From Aguascogoc’s Ashes

January 31, 2022January 31, 2022 / David Cecelski / 13 Comments

 An anthropologist named Frank Speck took this photograph of an American Indian woman and child on Roanoke Island, N.C., in 1915. He referred to them as  "Machapunga Indians" (though I will not), a tribe whose homeland had historically been the area around the Pungo River and Lake Mattamuskeet.

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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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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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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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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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The NC Native Ethnobotany Project

May 5, 2021May 5, 2021 / David Cecelski / 1 Comment

One of the great pleasures I had last winter was a visit from Dr. Linwood Watson, a Haliwa-Saponi family physician who has a passion both for growing native plants and for understanding more deeply how they were traditionally used for sustenance and healing in eastern North Carolina’s Indian communities.

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Search

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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