It feels strange to look back into the past and feel heartbreak for people's suffering, and all they did without, when they are long gone and there is nothing left to be done about their want or need. But I cannot always help myself, and that is how I felt when I read these words from a tenant farmer in Martin County, N.C. in 1887.
Hyde County N.C.
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.
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 