Topics Related to This Day in North Carolina History
On August 16, 1918, a German U-boat fired a torpedo at the Mirlo, a British tanker hauling gasoline off the North Carolina coast. The torpedo hit the tanker midship, resulting in a giant explosion.
On August 16, 1950, the Cherokee Historical Association agreed to build a replica of an 18th-century Indian village to depict Cherokee daily life and culture before European contact.
On August 16, 1966, a group led by local activist Margaret Nygard and her husband, Holger, voiced opposition at a Durham City Council meeting to a plan to dam the Eno River. The city had been perusing the plan for more than year in an attempt to bolster the local drinking water supply.
On August 16, 1883, circus performers John Mertz and Mariah Elizabeth Nail were married on the stage of the Buckingham Theater in Louisville, Kentucky.
According to one story, the justice of the peace asked if they were old enough to wed because they were so small, with Mariah standing at 36 inches and John only about 10 inches taller. At the time they married, they were both around 30-years-old.
On August 15, 1754, Benjamin Hawkins, politician and agent for Indian affairs south of the Ohio River, was born in Warren County.
Proficient in French, the young Hawkins was studying at what’s now Princeton University when General George Washington recruited him to serve as an interpreter on his field staff. Hawkins served in the Continental Congress in the years between the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the federal constitution. After ratification, Hawkins became one of North Carolina’s first two U.S. Senators.
Throughout her career, Ellen Black Winston was an advocate for professional training for social workers, both black and white. She was also a founding member of the National Association of Social Workers. She remained active in the social work community until her death.
On August 15, 1866, Monroe Nathan Work, one of the most distinguished historians of the African American experience, was born in Iredell County.
Both of Work’s parents had been enslaved and, so with the promise of new horizons outside the South, the family moved to Illinois shortly after he was born. Work attended seminary in Chicago but decided that being a minister wasn’t for him and became a sociologist. While teaching in Georgia, he attracted the attention of Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute.
On August 15, 1973, Carolista Fletcher Baum placed herself in the path of a bulldozer removing sand from Jockey’s Ridge and refused to move. The driver cut off the engine and talked with Baum, who, after some time, left the dune unscathed. When the operator left, Baum took the distributor cap so the machine would not start.
Baum received word of the bulldozer from her three children who long had climbed the dune for the spectacular views it offered.
On August 14, 1880, while returning home from a political convention in Beaufort County, Bryan Grimes was murdered by a hired assassin near Bear Creek, about five miles from his family’s plantation, “Grimesland.”
Born in 1828 in Pitt County, Grimes signed North Carolina’s secession ordinance, enlisted in the Confederate army soon after, rose to the rank of Major General and served until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.