On September 25, 1980, Ham, the “astrochimp,” arrived at the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro.
Ham, an acronym for Holloman Aero Med, was born in July 1957 in the French Cameroons in West Africa. He was taken to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico when he was about 2-years-old. Space researchers at Holloman began using animals, initially monkeys and mice, in the late 1940s to test whether they could send a living creature into space and return it to Earth alive.
Thomas Pinkney Shinn of Kannapolis, N.C., had been serving in France during World War I since August 1918. He was serving as a Sergeant in Company B, 321st Infantry, 81st Division, U.S. Army, along the front lines in France. November 1918 came up on Shinn's unit, with the unknown future Armistice to come in the middle of the month. Thomas Shinn would chronicle in his wartime diary his views, thoughts, and experiences of the war leading up to the Armistice.
On February 13, 1941, Piedmont Blues musician “Blind Boy Fuller” died in Durham. Fuller was famous for playing a steel-bodied National guitar that was a natural resonator before amplification. Along with Reverend Gary Davis, Fuller dominated the Bull City’s blues scene, attracting and influencing many musicians.
On May 31, 1775, a committee led by Thomas Polk met at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, in the heart of Charlotte at present-day Trade and Tryon Streets, to adopt the Mecklenburg Resolves.
Unlike the widely disputed “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence,” the authenticity of the resolves is not in question. This was a radical set of resolutions, denying the authority of Parliament over the colonies and investing that power in the Provincial Congress, meeting that same week in New Bern.
On May 14, 1873, a group of male journalists representing newspapers across North Carolina met in the Goldsboro courthouse and established the North Carolina Press Association “for mutual benefit and protection.”
On May 12, 1842, the first classes got underway at Saint Mary’s School in Raleigh.
Established through the vision and fundraising efforts of Episcopalian minister Aldert Smedes and his wife Sarah, the school for women was converted from a similar institution for young men, built in 1831. Smedes and his wife greeted the new students at the door, and from then on the couple acted more like family than faculty to the students.
The program or the first annual ACC Men’s Basketball Championships, held in March 1954. Image from NCSU Libraries.
On April 2, 1759, Governor Arthur Dobbs penned a letter to his naturalist friend in England, Peter Collinson. His words are the first written about the Venus Flytrap: “We have a kind of Catch Fly sensitive which closes upon anything that touches it, it grows in the Latitude 34 but not in 35°–I will try to save the seed here.”
On March 15, 1781, British and American forces skirmished near the New Garden Meeting House just hours before the larger Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
In the predawn hours, Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s British army advanced north, intent on closing in on Gen. Nathanael Greene’s position near Guilford Courthouse. Greene had placed troops out in advance positions to the south and west to give him fair warning of any potential attack.