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Topics Related to This Day in North Carolina History
On June 26, 1862, Col. Montfort Sidney Stokes of the First Regiment, North Carolina State Troops, was mortally wounded in an engagement at Elyson’s Mill, Va. He died 11 days later in a Richmond hospital.
On June 26, 1857, the New York Daily Tribune published an advertisement touting a new book, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. The author was Hinton Rowan Helper, born in Davie County. The book, which denounced slavery in no uncertain terms, caused a sensation.
On June 26, 1974, a scanner at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio scanned a pack of chewing gum. It was the first product to be checked out by Universal Product Code, an invention largely credited to Research Triangle Park scientist George Laurer.The first barcodes were developed by New Jersey engineer N. Joseph Woodland in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but the technology wasn’t brought into use largely because the scanners needed to put checkout systems into place were too expensive to produce.
On June 25, 1781, Thomas Burke was chosen by the General Assembly to serve as North Carolina’s third governor under the constitution of 1776. At the time of Burke’s appointment, the state was ravaged by war and on the brink of anarchy. Government on both the state and county levels had almost completely broken down.
On June 25, 1963, on the last day of the session, the General Assembly rushed through the Speaker Ban law.The bill, formally known as Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers, prohibited speeches on state campuses by members of the Communist Party, persons advocating overthrow of the state or federal constitution and individuals who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment about related topics.
On June 25, 1948, Parmele native William Claudius Chance was ejected from an Atlantic Coast Line Railroad passenger train car in Emporia, Virginia, for refusing to move to a car for black passengers.Chance was a well-respected educator in Martin County, having established and operated the Parmalee Industrial Institute. He was returning home to Parmele from the Republican National Convention, held in Philadelphia that year, when he was instructed to leave a “white car” at the stop in Emporia. When he refused, Chance was placed under arrest for disorderly conduct.
On June 24, 2004, GlaxoSmithKline became the first business to move into the newly renovated and re-purposed American Tobacco Campus, ushering in a new era for downtown Durham.
On June 24, 1749, James Davis, a printer trained in Williamsburg, Virginia, printed the first official publication for the colony of North Carolina at the colony’s official press in New Bern.