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Bertha Landis (center) with her children in 1985. Photo provided by Tom Davenport.
North Carolina is home to a diverse set of musicians, artists, and culture-makers. One such tradition is ballad singing, largely practiced in Madison County and the surrounding area. There, the landscape is characterized by steep hills that rise above pockets, often homesteaded. These “hollers” were settled in part by the English, who brought with them a style of song which, isolated in the mountains, maintained a certain fealty to its original style.
May Day at Flora MacDonald College. From the Albert Barden Collection, North Carolina State Archives.May’s arrival has been celebrated for millennia with dancing, food, and exuberance, the earliest known celebrations dating back to Floralia, the Roman celebration of Flora, goddess of flowers. In North Carolina, an institution that carried her name had celebrated the coming of May since its inception.
The 1937 Kannapolis Towelers. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.Keith Price does not wear academic robes — a 1954 graduate of what was then called Wake Forest College, he was in a variety of business ventures through his long working life — but if Forest City in Rutherford County had a historian-in-residence, Price would be it.
Dr. Hugh Bennett Photo from the Archives of Union CountyWhy We Have Soil and Water Conservation DistrictsOf the layers of soil that we walk on every day, we are perhaps most concerned with topsoil which, oddly enough, lies just below the surface. This is where seeds germinate, and the healthier and richer it is, the more productive a crop. It was the degradation and loss of topsoil that led to the Dust Bowl, compounding the economic stress of a nation already in the throes of the Great Depression.
Musician and Storyteller Joe Penland draws on generations of his family’s traditions of passing down the history and folklore of his Appalachian Mountain home in Madison County.
Halifax, North Carolina, was an important part of the Underground Railroad in North Carolina. With the largest free Black population of any county in the state in the antebellum period, the community provided a network to help freedom seekers as well as a place to blend in.
While North Carolina certainly has some spectacular places of national and even international interest (Wright Brothers Memorial, Asheville, historic markings of the Civil War and an original colony), there are other spots around the state that are fascinating to visit.
George Santucci doesn’t worry anymore about the variety of spellings applied to his name in Ashe County, which he has called home for 25 years now after migrating from Long Island, New York.
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.”