Topics Related to This Day in North Carolina History
On March 13, 1953, UNC-Chapel Hill students Carl Kasell and Charles Kuralt stepped up to the microphone for WUNC’s inaugural FM broadcast.
After getting its start as a student-run AM station in the 1940s, the station made its transition to the FM band with future broadcasting greats Kasell and Kuralt. The station went on a six-year hiatus in 1970, after being taken off the air by technical difficulties and returned in 1976 as a professionally-run National Public Radio affiliate.
On March 13, 1821, North Carolina’s first attorney general, Waightstill Avery, died in Morganton.
A native of Connecticut, the Princeton-educated Avery came to North Carolina by way of Edenton in 1769 and was granted permission to practice law in the state. While living in Charlotte in 1772, Avery was elected to serve in the provincial assembly.
He was a signer of the 1775 Mecklenburg Resolves that declared all laws of the British Crown void and suspended authority of the King and Parliament.
On March 12, 1944, an all-White team from Duke University’s medical school faced off against an all-Black team from what is now North Carolina Central University, the Eagles, in a secret, interracial basketball game.
At the time, strict segregation laws criminalized racial interaction and fostered a dangerous environment for those who violated them, prompting the participants to take extreme caution in planning and attending the event. Coaches kept school administrators in the dark and barred the doors to the Eagles’ gym.
On March 12, 1952, North Carolina native Herman Baity became chief engineer and director of sanitary engineering for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
On March 12, 1865, Union troops under the command of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman set fire to the Fayetteville Arsenal complex as they marched through North Carolina. The United States Arsenal at Fayetteville was built in 1838. During the Civil War it produced rifles, ammunition and gun carriages for the Confederacy and was vital to the Confederate war effort.
On March 11, 1865, the Confederate ironclad CSS Neuse was scuttled in the Neuse River, just downstream from Kinston, to prevent its capture by advancing Union forces. Following the Battle of Wyse Fork, fought the three days earlier, Gen. Braxton Bragg ordered the gunboat’s commander, Capt. Joseph Price, to use his vessel to hold off Union Gen. Jacob D. Cox’s force while the Confederate Army evacuated the town and retreated west toward Goldsboro. The ship was then to be destroyed.
On March 11, 1879, the Western North Carolina Railroad’s Swannanoa Tunnel opened. The tunnel opened the mountain region to growth and freed it from its relative state of isolation.
Authorized by the General Assembly in 1855, construction of the tunnel was spurred by a drought in 1845. The drought resulted in a total crop failure on mountain farms. Pack trains and loaded wagons were unable to provide frontier families with enough food to carry them through to the next crop.
On March 10, 1948, the central building of Highland Hospital in Asheville was destroyed by fire, which swept from the facility’s kitchen through the dumbwaiter to all four floors.
Nine women, including Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, were killed.