This is a portrait of Ms. Neva Adams at work in the stitching room of the Morehead City Garment Company in Morehead City, N.C., in 1942. People called it the "Shirt Factory," and I still remember my elderly cousins speaking of the deep feeling of sisterhood that they felt when they worked there. (Part 10 of my "Working Lives" series.)
Morehead City N.C.
On the Old Mullet Road, 1942
In this 9th photo-essay in my "Working Lives" series, I am looking at several photographs that feature workers on a railroad that old timers, when I was a boy, still called the "Old Mullet Road."
“It Was Like a Ballet”: Menhaden Fishermen at Work, 1947
In this photograph from the State Archives, we see a crew of menhaden fishermen at work in the waters off Morehead City and Beaufort, N.C., in 1947. They have tied their purse boats up against the mother boat after making a set and are beginning to load their catch onto the mother boat.
The Menhaden Boat C. P. Dey
In this unfortunately rather blemished photograph, we see the menhaden fishing boat C. P. Dey at the docks in Morehead City, N.C., looking well-used but tidy, her purse boats in good view, November 1942.
“My Special Calling”: The Letters of a Union Army Nurse in Morehead City, N.C., 1863-65
I found the letters in an old book called Adventures of an Army Nurse in Two Wars. Published in Boston in 1902, the book chronicles the life of a Civil War nurse named Mary Phinney von Olnhausen and it caught my attention because she spent two years at Union army hospitals here on the North Carolina coast.
The Shark Factory
When I learned about Russell Coles and the shark factory in Morehead City, N.C., I thought immediately of the first pages of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, when all the fishermen have returned to shore in a Cuban port and are cleaning and packing their catches....
Cape Lookout’s War
The first mention of the First World War at Cape Lookout in Russell Coles’ diary is dated July 28, 1916. On that day, he wrote that he had risen before first light and was “looking for the German submarine” by sunrise.
The King of the Devil Fishermen
Russell Coles first learned about giant oceanic manta rays in or about 1900, when he began to spend his summers on a houseboat at Cape Lookout and started listening to the local fishermen's stories.
The Promise Landers
Every summer shark hunter Russell Coles took the train to Morehead City, and the first thing he always did when he arrived at the depot was meet Capt. Charlie W. Willis in the Promise Land.
P.S.– Shrimping comes to Davis Shore
The other day Ed Pond in Davis Shore got in touch with me. Ed grew up there in the 1940s and ‘50s and my recent series on the history of Southport’s shrimping industry had set him to remembering.
Photographs from the National Fisherman
The Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has recently made available for the first time more than 20,000 historical photographs from America's fishing communities, including those here on the North Carolina coast. It is an extraordinary collection: the photographs from every issue of the National Fisherman, the leading trade journal of the commercial fishing industry.
Shark! Shark!
A book. While my daughter Vera and I were doing research on Cape Lookout, N.C. in the 1910s and '20s, we found a little known memoir by a big game fisherman who hunted sharks on the North Carolina coast. The shark hunter was named William E. Young, and his book, published in 1934, is called Shark! Shark! Shark! The Thirty-Year Odyssey of a Pioneer Shark Hunter.
David Cecelski 