A painting called "The Hunted Slaves" is another of the treasures at the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC, that speaks to North Carolina's coastal history. Done in Liverpool, England, in 1862, Richard Ansdell's oil painting depicts a pair of fugitive slaves defending themselves against a slave catcher's dogs in the Great Dismal Swamp....
Great Dismal Swamp
Working in the Logwoods: Photographs from Coastal North Carolina
I must have heard that phrase a million times when I was younger: “we were working in the logwoods.” Old men would say it again and again when they remembered their younger days on the North Carolina coast. They talked plenty about farming and fishing and raising families, but they talked just as much about “working in the logwoods.”
Admiral Ross’s Journey, part 7– The Big Ditch
This is the last of the 7-part series I’m doing this week based on an extraordinary collection of glass lantern slides that a teacher named Linda Garey shared with me. Her great-grandfather, Rear Admiral Albert Ross, took the images on a trip down the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal in 1901.
Admiral Ross’s Journey, part 5: The Land of the Blueberry Bogs
In Rear Admiral Ross’s next glass lantern slide, we see a steam tug towing a raft of logs by the village of Coinjock, N.C. This was a very common scene on the Albemarle and Chesapeake (A&C) Canal at the turn of the 20th century. Held together by spikes and chains, the logs in this raft are headed south toward the North River, a tributary of the Albemarle Sound.
Admiral Ross’s Journey, part 3: The Monster Ditcher
This is part 3 of a series I’m doing this week based on an extraordinary collection of glass lantern slides that a teacher named Linda Garey shared with me. Her great-grandfather, Rear Admiral Albert Ross, took the images on a trip down the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal in 1901.
Admiral Ross’s Journey, part 2: A Bargeman’s Life
In our first lantern slide, we see the steam tug Dauntless pulling a lumber barge through the Albemarle & Chesapeake (A&C) Canal’s “Virginia Cut.” Commander Ross—he was not yet a Rear Admiral in 1901— took the image from the bow of the lighthouse tender Violet as it steamed east toward the North Landing River.
Susan Johnson’s Diary– “On the Borders of the Great Dismal Swamp”
Last spring I visited the Connecticut Historical Society when I passed through Hartford, Conn. I was headed to my niece’s home in New Haven, but I couldn’t resist stopping for a few hours: the Society’s holdings include an extraordinary collection of early American historical manuscripts and I wanted to see if any of them might shed new light on coastal North Carolina.... I was only there for a day, but I found a real treasure that I would love to share here— a remarkable diary that was kept by a Connecticut woman when she stayed in coastal North Carolina in the very first decades after the American Revolution.
An Island Visit with Stan Riggs & Orrin Pilkey
My head spins when I am listening to Stan Riggs and Orrin Pilkey. They are legendary geologists. Both have been studying coastal N.C. for more than half a century. Last week I spent a couple days with the two of them on Ocracoke Island and Portsmouth Island. When I listen to them, my whole sense of time changes. History to them is a whole other thing. They look at the state's coastal plain and what they see is a quarry near the small town of Fountain, in Pitt County. The quarry’s rock is the same rock that you’d find in Dakar, Senegal, a relic of a time more than 200 million years ago when what’s now eastern N.C. and what’s now West Africa nuzzled together....
Remembering the Currituck Sounder
Young Barbara Doll’s portrait of Ms. Ada Waterfield and Knotts Island a century ago comes from a remarkable collection of local history and folklore that was created here at Currituck County High School in the 1970s and ‘80s. In 1976 an obviously talented English teacher named Susie G. Spruill and the 30 students in her American Literature class launched a journal called the Currituck Sounder.
Travels with Kingfish
I first met Bland Simpson at an oyster roast at the old hunting lodge at Lake Matttamuskeet. That was in the winter of 1997, and we were in the middle of a remote, swampy and unforgettably beautiful landscape. From the top of the lodge’s wildlife observation tower, the view took my breath away. In every direction, cane brakes, freshwater marshes, and juniper swamps stretched to the horizon, while thousands of Canada geese, snow geese, and tundra swans rested on the lake.
David Cecelski 