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.
Hyde County N.C.
Wharf Pilings and Sawdust: Visiting the Lost Villages of Hyde County, N.C.
More than 50 years ago, a high school history teacher named Morgan Harris and his students at Mattamuskeet High School created what I believe are the only surviving maps of four lumber mill villages in Hyde County, N.C.
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.
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....
David Cecelski 