In this fourth photo-essay in my "Working Lives" series, we can see a quartet of Hatteras fishermen getting their gill net ready for fall fishing: patching holes, mending tears. The date is August 1939.
Great Depression
The CCC Workers of Bell Island
These photographs were taken at a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp on Bell Island, in Hyde County, N.C., circa 1935. Taken by a young man named Troy Elliott and now preserved at the State Archives, they give us a rare glimpse at a little-known part of the Great Depression on the North Carolina coast.
The Migrants in the Potato Fields (New Version)
I discovered another forgotten chapter in eastern North Carolina's history while I was exploring the Farm Security Administration (FSA)'s photographs at the Library of Congress-- it is a story about the migrant farm laborers that worked in Camden, Currituck and Pasquotank counties in the last years of the Great Depression.
The Lost Photographs: Remembering North Carolina’s Fishing Communities in the 1930s and ’40s
This is my tenth and last photo essay dedicated to Charles Farrell's photographs of fishing communities on the North Carolina coast in the 1930s and '40s. I think it's time to talk about what happened to him, and why he and his photographs were forgotten for so long.
Menhaden Fishing Days
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.
Hard Times: Voices from the Great Depression on the North Carolina Coast
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.
The Migrants in the Potato Fields
I discovered another forgotten chapter in eastern North Carolina's history while I was exploring the Farm Security Administration (FSA)'s photographs at the Library of Congress-- it is a story about the migrant farm workers that harvested the region's crops in the 1930s and '40s.
Soup Houses & Charity
ENFIELD, N.C., 1930. Another letter in the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst also got my attention for its look at eastern North Carolina life in the throes of the Great Depression.
Colington Island: An Outer Banks Fishing Village in the 1930s
In the late winter or early spring of 1938, a photographer named Charles Farrell visited Colington, an old fishing village on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Today Colington is surrounded by condominiums and resorts, but at that time Farrell discovered only a quiet, out-of-the-way settlement with perhaps 200 or 300 residents divided between two small islands, Little Colington and Big Colington.
David Cecelski 