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Amid the swamps, forests, and fields of southeastern North Carolina lies an immense, shallow, strangely egg-shaped lake, whose rich natural environment and gently sloping freshwater shores have been an asset to the region’s industrial and touristic development for over a century and a half. The long and dynamic history of Lake Waccamaw reaches back not just centuries but millennia, beginning in a time when Columbus County looked more like Alaska than anything else.
Walter Fenner “Buck” Leonard was an American first baseman in Negro league baseball and in the Mexican League. After growing up in North Carolina, he played for the Homestead Grays between 1934 and 1950, batting fourth behind Josh Gibson for many years. The Grays teams of the 1930s and 1940s were considered some of the best teams in Negro league history.
A rail pass allowing travel between Marshall, the county seat, and Volga, five miles up the French Broad. This pass was issued to the wife of Jesse James Bailey, who later served as sheriff of Madison and then Buncombe Counties during the prohibition period. See Wilma Dykeman, The French Broad (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1955), 294ff. Image from NC Museum of History, S.HS.2011.42.161.
Several views of the Mountain Park Hotel and its surroundings in the 1890s. Visitors were encouraged to visit Paint Rock. Health Resorts of the South (Boston: George H. Chapin, 1893), 110, 120, 129, 136.In 1889, a Charleston newspaper editor gushed about the facilities the syndicate had constructed on the site:
The Mountain Park Hotel: To New Heights By RailAfter the Civil War, an ever-growing network of rails and wires began stitching the country together more tightly than before. Held back for years by warfare and party politics and one outlandish incident in which fraudsters made off with four million dollars (in 1869 money) in the dead of night, the Western North Carolina Railroad was finally dragged over the Blue Ridge in 1881 by Virginian investors using black convict labor.
An advertisement for the hotel from 1883, the year before the Patton hotel burned. The thirteen columns can be seen on the right. William Gleason Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup, In the Heart of the Alleghanies (Raleigh: A. Williams & Co., 1883), 386.
The almost forgotten Anderson Elementary School in Mars Hill is being reborn. It evolved from a school for black children built in 1928 to enable African Americans still weighed down by the impact of slavery to seek a better life.The black community remained in western North Carolina as slavery ended for the small population of enslaved there. A split in pro-Confederate and pro-Union sentiment locally-led many blacks to move from Yancey to the Union-leaning Madison County at the Civil War’s end.
Photo from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Libraries.Ann Atwater was a woman to be reckoned with, a woman not to be ignored. She was a fierce fighter for rights for poor African Americans who shook up the white power establishment in Durham, N.C. in the 1960s. From then on, she demanded to be heard.
Photo by Diana Davies, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives.Ashe County, which touches the Tennessee and Virginia borders, is touted by residents — many of them part-time dwellers who are otherwise “city folk” — as the “coolest corner of North Carolina.” And indeed, the year-round temperatures are lower owing to the higher elevations and what seems, in those neighborhoods of cabins now sprouting in the mountains, like thick, tall trees that create a perpetual shade.
Christopher Bechtler’s story began in his native Germany and ended in a place far from home in every way — Rutherford County, in North Carolina’s foothills. Although he is German, Bechtler’s life is essentially one of the American Dream.