In this second photo-essay in my "Working Lives" series, we go inside a sawmill, a handle mill, and a veneer plant that were located on the banks of the Roanoke River in 1938 and 1939.
Plymouth N.C.
Working Lives: The Herring Fisheries at Plymouth, N.C., 1939
This is a special group of photographs that were taken on the Roanoke River, just west of Plymouth, N.C., in the spring of 1939. Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they show the last days of two of the oldest herring seine fisheries on the North Carolina coast.
Memories of Plymouth: A Justice Crusader Goes Home
Civil rights attorney and activist James Williams began our tour of Plymouth, N.C., on the banks of the Roanoke River. He had come home, and he had invited me to accompany him on a tour of the small town in Eastern North Carolina where he was born and raised.
“We Take No Negro Prisoners:” Remembering the Plymouth Massacre
Whenever I visit Plymouth, N.C., a small town near where I grew up, the first thing I think of is the massacre of African Americans that happened there on April 20, 1864.
Portraits of Roanoke River Fisheries, 1870-1910 —Bow Nets, Slat Weirs, Fish Wheels, Slides & Seines
Today I’m looking at several historical photographs of fishermen, fishing boats and fishing gear on the Roanoke River. The photographs mostly date to the period from 1870 to 1910, though one that I'm especially fond of was taken in the late 1930s. That was an exciting period in the history of the river's fisheries. If you had launched a boat in Weldon, at the falls of the river, and drifted down those swift waters all the way to the river's mouth on the Albemarle Sound, you would have seen many fishermen and many different kinds of fishing gear, including weirs, bow nets, stake nets, drift nets, wheels, seines and slides.
On Albemarle Sound– Runaway Slaves and the Sea
Welcome back to the Belle of Washington. We left Elizabeth City early this morning and came down the lovely waters of the Pasquotank River. Now we're passing the Little River and, up on its northern shore, the little hamlet of Nixonton. I’ll say more about Nixonton’s history in a second, but first I think this is a good time and place to talk about runaway slave advertisements because there are some especially interesting ones that refer to Nixonton.
The Klan Last Time- Part 6: In the Night
While the Klan’s public rallies and cross burnings brought to mind a county fair or a church revival, the soul of the Ku Klux Klan revealed itself most plainly later in the night, after the children’s games had finished and the burning cross extinguished.
David Cecelski 