On January 15, 1974, congressman and agricultural advocate Harold Cooley died from the effects of emphysema.
As the longtime chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, Cooley, a native of Nash County, was a powerful spokesman for farmers from the New Deal to the Great Society.
On January 20, 1779, the North Carolina General Assembly abolished Bute County less than 15 years after establishing it.
The legislature had established the northeastern county in June 1764 and named it in honor of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. A Scottish nobleman, Bute was the tutor of Great Britain’s Prince George. After the prince became King George III in 1760, Bute served as the king’s advisor and eventually became prime minister.
On January 3, 1837, Nimrod Jarrett Smith was born near what is now Murphy at the height of the Cherokee removal. He was raised in the Cherokee communities of Valley Town and Cheowa but was also well acquainted with William Holland Thomas and the Oconaluftee Cherokees. During the Civil War, he enlisted with Thomas’s 69th N.C.
On January 14, 1771, Joseph Montfort was appointed Grand Master of the Freemasons of America by the Duke of Beaufort, Grand Master of England.
Montfort was born in England in 1724. Little is known about his early life. After settling in Halifax sometime in the middle of the 18th century, he quickly became active in civic affairs, representing Halifax in the colonial assembly from 1766 to 1774 and eventually serving as a treasurer of the colony.
Title page of the journal of the 1868 convention.
On January 14, 1868, a North Carolina constitutional convention, now known as the “Convention of 1868,” opened in Raleigh.
On January 3, 1787, frontiersman William Sherley Williams was born in what’s now Polk County.
Williams moved to the frontier town of St. Louis with his family in the 1790s and began his career as an itinerant Baptist preacher at age 17. Several years later he radically changed the course of his life and become an explorer, trapper, scout, and guide.
St. Augustine’s College in 1900. Image from the Prezell R. Robinson Library.
On January 13, 1868, classes began at Raleigh’s Saint Augustine’s University.
Sloop and her husband operate under an Avery County apple tree.
Image from the State Archives.
Edward Jones Hale, the Fayetteville Observer‘s first publisher. Image from the N.C. Museum of History