NC Civil War Trails

North Carolina joins Virginia and Maryland in a three-state heritage tourism venture that leads travelers to more than 700 interpreted Civil War sites. The program in North Carolina was officially dedicated at Bentonville Battlefield on March 14, 2005.

Phase 1 of the North Carolina Civil War Trail, featuring more than 80 newly interpreted sites, is open. The centerpiece of the Trail is a driving tour of the 1865 Carolinas Campaign following many of the roads the soldiers used. That tour includes the battlefields at Bentonville and Averasboro and the site of the surrender of the Confederate army near Durham. Other sites included in this first phase relate to the early Federal occupation of the eastern part of the state, Confederate ironclads, coastal fortifications, the Confederate supply lifeline, hospitals and prisons. The next phase of the Trail will focus on the western part of the state.

Civil War Traveler :: North Carolina

NC: Office of Archives & History

This web site has undergone an amazing transformation in the last year. NC can be proud of the presentation of their history via this site of the NC Archives.

The mission of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History is to collect, preserve, and utilize the state's historic resources so that present and future residents may better understand their history. To this purpose the office safeguards the documentary and material evidence of past generations for the education of all citizens and the protection of their democratic rights.

NC Office of Archives & History

Gullah: Sounds from my youth

I (your bloghost) was born in Charleston, SC, in 1970. I have spent many days of my life since then in family homes on the sea islands south of Charleston. Beneath the massive oaks and swaying Spanish mosses, you can still hear the unique sounds of geechee conversations.

I can remember specifically the summer of 1985 spent on Allendale with my Aunt Augusta. She was somewhat distraught that my family had left South Carolina to live in my father's home state of North Carolina. In the weeks we spent together that summer, she regularly spoke Gullah and daily ran through vocabulary words with enunciations. I believe she likened it to a game or entertainment. I don't think she thought I would have retained it these last 20 years.

Gullah speaks to me of the lowcountry and easier times. I think of family, Charleston red rice, boiled shrimp, sweetgrass baskets and warm afternoons. Here are a few links to audio files that give you a sampling of this dialect, its lilt and its prose, as well as where to get out and experience it for yourself.

Gullah: An Introduction - by Aunt Pearlie Sue
Imitation of Gullah Preacher
Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come
Gullah Music with Aunt Pearlie Sue - a great flash site for young and old
The Original Gullah Festival Beaufort, SC
Gullah Celebration

Far Appalachia: Following the New River North

In this powerful, passionate chronicle, the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered and best selling author of Piano Lessons takes us on a river journey through the heart of Appalachia - a journey shared by pioneers and preachers, white-water daredevils, bluegrass musicians, and an unforgettable cast of vivid historical characters.

Noah Adams has Appalachia in his blood. A native of eastern Kentucky, he comes to the headwaters of the New River not just in search of adventure but to better understand this own unique heritage. Following the New River from its mile-high source on North Carolina's Snake Mountain to its West Virginia mouth, Adams travels by Jeep and by bicycle, by foot and, most thrillingly, by white-water raft to explore the history, natural beauty, and fascinating characters waiting around every bend and turn.

Distilling history from legend, Adams tells of men and women whose lives crossed the New River before him, including Daniel Boone, fleeing his farming family in search of wilderness, and Cherokee Indians, driven west on their Trail of Tears. Along the way Adams paints a luminous portrait of a land and a people as richly vital and complex as America itself. With Adams' hushed, intimate tone, Far Appalachia mesmerizes and haunts like the bluegrass music that still rings through the mountains and valleys in which it was born.

Noah Adams, a senior host of National Public Radio's. award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered, has worked in radio for more than three decades, and has written several books and an award-winning documentary. He is a native of Ashland, Kentucky.

Listen to excerpt on Audible.com

Plan Now :: Merlefest 2006

With the assistance of the late Ralph Rinzler the first MerleFest took place in late April of 1988 with a relatively small number of America’s foremost acoustic artists playing on stage in the college’s John A. Walker Center and on the deck of two flatbed trucks in front of the Cabin to a crowd of 4,000 people. MerleFest now involves more than 78,000 participants including more than 100 artists and bands that perform on one or more of the festival’s thirteen stages and annually produces a boost to the regional economy exceeding $15 million.

Merlefest occurs this year April 27-30. Come out and enjoy. I'll be there!

Merlefest.org

Horry County Oral History Project

The Horry County Oral History Project began around 1989 as a college-community project to record local history in Horry County. Individuals in the county who have helped to make or who have witnessed the history of Horry County were interviewed through the project. Individuals interviewed include a broad spectrum of the community ranging from small farmers to community leaders. The Interviews were conducted under the direction of Randall Wells, Director of the Horry County Oral History Project. The project was underwritten in part by the Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies, Coastal Carolina University.

Presently, there are almost 90 interviews taped, transcribed, corrected and legally released in the Horry County Oral History Project. Though a few transcriptions are of interviews recorded prior to 1989, over 70 interviews have been recorded by this Project since 1989. The original recordings and transcripts are housed in the Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies. Additionally, copies of both the recordings and transcriptions are available in the Waccamaw Room, Kimbel Library's special collection dedicated to Horry county and the surrounding Waccamaw region.

[the above is from The Horry County Oral History Project web site]

Horry County is home to Myrtle Beach, SC.

Horry County Oral History Project
Horry County Historical Society
History of Horry County

NC ECHO: Exploring Cultural Heritage Online

North Carolina ECHO, Exploring Cultural Heritage Online, is the World Wide Web's doorway to the special collections of North Carolina's libraries, archives, museums, historic sites, and other cultural institutions. It is an evolving statewide, collaborative access to special collections and digitization project. Funded through a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant and managed by the State Library of North Carolina, this innovative project was one of the first in the nation to build a statewide framework for digitization and addresses a full-range of digitization needs of the state's cultural collecting agencies (libraries, archives, and museums).

With North Carolina ECHO, you can:

- Search an online directory of the cultural repositories of the state.
- Explore online resources created by those institutions.
- Discover the outstanding research opportunities and unique collections available in North Carolina.

The NC ECHO vision is that "All of North Carolina's cultural institutions work together to make the state's unique cultural and historical resources accessible for the education and enjoyment of people of all ages in the state, nation, and the world."

www.ncecho.org

North Carolina Folklore Society

Founded in 1913, the North Carolina Folklore Society promotes the appreciation and study of North Carolina's folklife. In its early years, members guided by Frank C. Brown of Duke University collected songs, stories, customs, and superstitions for The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, the most extensive collection of a state's folklore.

In 1948 Society Secretary-Treasurer Arthur Palmer Hudson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began a state folklore journal now in its forty-seventh volume, whose editors have included distinguished writers Richard G. Walser and Guy Owen of North Carolina State University.

Through its annual meeting, programs, awards, and publications, the North Carolina Folklore Society encourages the study and preservation of local folklife and provides a state folklife information center and resources center. The Society also publishes a resource listing and calendar, both in its newsletter and as part of this website. Membership is open to the public.

NC Folklore Society

Carolina Jamboree : Tonight at 8pm on PBS

Transport yourself back in time when friends and neighbors gathered for a festival of music, song and dance. Fiddles and banjos, pennywhistles and piano all set the mood for stories of love and marriage, passion and mystery. In a unique, three-way partnership, Tony-winning string band The Red Clay Ramblers and Tony Award-nominated resident choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett team up with Carolina Ballet to create a thrilling music and dance experience.

North Carolina's history is rich with stories of intrigue and passion, gut-wrenching struggle and the triumph of the spirit over staggering odds. The music of our region--old-time mountain music, country, bluegrass, Piedmont blues and jazz--gives a powerful aural history of generations of Carolinians, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Outer Banks.

Red Clay Ramblers

New NC Cultural Resources Podcasts

The Department of Cultural Resources is proud to introduce the State of North Carolina’s first cultural and heritage podcast, using today’s technology to bring you timely information about the exciting arts, history, and cultural life of the State.

The new bi-weekly ncculture.com podcast offers interesting interviews, music, features about performing arts, literature, and history across North Carolina, up to date events information, plus traveler guides to historic sites and museums.

Definitely worth getting on your favorite podcast client. Very good quality and excellent production.

Site: http://www.ncculture.com/
Feed: http://www.ncculture.com/podcast/feed.xml

Talk Like A Tarheel

For all of you non- or neo-Carolinians, I have found an audio resource almost as reliable as the local barbecue house, but not quite as aromatic.

Listen to North Carolina place names pronounced by local authors Bland Simpson and Michael McFee.

Talk like a Tarheel

Historically Important Information Organization

I have spent the weekend interacting with two of the hottest info sites on the web today. Google Earth and Wikipedia.

Google Earth has so much potential that it is just amazing. Beyond the just put a point on a map and name it, there is an API available that will allow you to do just about anything you want. One significantly lacking Carolina item I saw was a plotted map of the Mountains to Sea Trail. I may tackle this one. Another thought I had was the Greene/Cornwallis march through the Carolinas in the later part of the Revolution. I think that would present well on this system. Ultimately, as I play around with the system and learn it, I would like to start connecting multimedia links to points on the map. For example, a show about Lexington Barbecue would be linked to Lexington, NC. My user name is "historytalks"

Wikipedia is an interesting project. There is a similarity between this and the Oxford English Dictionary build in the early 1900s. Many volunteers helping build the store of human knowledge. I know I have found many of the places I know well not detailed on the site. I have created some "stubs" and contributed to several local articles. I agree with many about the accuracy, but this is a great opportunity to provide accurate information and to report on the history that you know (and can verify). Thanks to my friend Dave for turning me on to this little gem. My user name here is "dnparker" but I am going to try to change it to "historytalks".

Barbecue is a Noun

[from www.barbecueisanoun.com] In the Spring of 2002, Hawes Bostic and Austin McKenna set out to make a film that would set the record straight: Barbecue is a Noun. As one film subject put it, "If you use it as a verb, you can barbecue anything, but barbecue is roast pork."

Barbecue is a Noun is the story of some very peculiar men who make a particular kind of barbecue. Their stories unfold in the small towns, strip malls, farms and backyards of North and South Carolina, conjuring insights into fading traditions andrising ambitions. Eccentric, dedicated, and patient to a fault, these men struggle against modernity and uncertain futures as the film unfolds.

Through the long hours of cooking, the camera captures extraordinary images of carcasses, smoke-filled rooms, glowing coals, swinging cleavers, and slowly roasting meat. Reputations are made, dreams are dashed and new legends are created from the fat-drenched embers of blackened pits.

The film is currently making the rounds at festivals and limited theatrical engagements in the Southeast. Check out the web site for sneak peeks.

I have sent an email to Hawes and Austin to see if we could get a showing here in the Charlotte area.

www.barbecueisanoun.com

Southern Oral History Project

"You don't have to be famous for your life to be history."

[FROM SOHP.ORG] - These words, spoken by Nell Sigmon when she was interviewed by the Southern Oral History Program in 1979, now emblazon a statue of a textile worker in Charlotte's Spirit Square. The comment serves as our unofficial motto, reminding us of the extraordinary significance of ordinary lives and guiding our efforts to seek out and record memories of the southern past.

Human beings make sense of their lives in story. Oral history allows us to use those stories to explore the private dimension of public careers, add new voices to the historical record, track the creation and re-creation of historical memory, and present history to the public in creative new forms. The South is especially rich in storytellers, yet many great storytellers leave no written record, and modern forms of communication have rendered personal letters and diaries virtually obsolete. A sense of urgency therefore informs our work, for the memories we preserve in tape and transcript might otherwise be lost.

Founded in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program seeks to foster a critical yet democratic understanding of the South - its history, culture, problems, and prospects. We have recorded more than 2,900 interviews with men and women from all walks of life, and currently maintain an active research and teaching program. Our tapes, videos, and transcripts are preserved in the University's Southern Historical Collection, the country's foremost repository for research materials on the American South. Each year hundreds of researchers - scholars, students, family historians, and local history enthusiasts - make use of our collections.

The Southern Oral History Program attracts exceptional students to the University and helps them become engaged citizens as well as outstanding teachers and scholars. Through interdisciplinary courses, faculty and students work together on a variety of fieldwork projects. The experience introduces undergraduate and graduate students alike to the use of individual stories in understanding the past. Our students go on to develop and direct oral history programs, preside over museums and archives, lead community oral history projects, and teach in schools, colleges, and universities around the nation.

The Southern Oral History Program conducts an ambitious outreach program, sharing our research and our expertise with a wide audience. Through a variety of intitiatives, we engage local citizens in interpreting the past. Students and staff teach oral history workshops and consult with local historical societies and preservation groups across the state. Photographic exhibits, films, videos, public performances, books, and articles allow us to carry history back to the communities that have been our teachers.

The Southern Oral History Program, a component program of UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South, welcomes your interest and invites you to contact us.

James Eddie McCoy - Oxford, NC

"I'm curious. I'm nosy." - James Eddie McCoy

Eddie McCoy owns a janitorial service in Oxford, North Carolina, a tobacco town of some 10,000 people. A decade ago, badly injured in a car wreck, Eddie's business nearly came to a close. A man who had always been on the move was now unable to work. Frustrated, Eddie went to a doctor who told him, "Try using your head instead of your hands."

Eddie took his passion for local history and a scavenged cassette recorder, and began taping his town, starting with some of Oxford's oldest citizens.

A self-made historian, Eddie has done some 140 interviews since 1979, and knows just about every detail of the life and lore of Oxford: his neighbors, his friends, and total strangers. Eddie records the who, what, when, where, and why of slavery times, of sharecropping, of the civil rights era, of who poured the first concrete in Oxford.

Audio interview with Eddie McCoy

Kickin Grass : A Carolina Bluegrass Band

[FROM KICKINGRASS.COM] Up-and-coming bluegrass band, Kickin Grass, have set themselves a cut above the rest with their tight vocal harmony, driving instrumentation and effusive energy on and off the stage.

The band prides itself on reaching all types of bluegrass and non-bluegrass audiences, incorporating standard bluegrass tunes, rock & country classics and a number of "can't get 'em out of yer head" originals into their entertaining sets.

Forming in 2000 to provide accompaniment for the Chapel-Hill based Apple Chill Cloggers, the current lineup started performing locally, regionally and internationally in 2002. Kickin Grass took the category of Best Band Name in the Independent Weekly's 2003 "Best Of" Issue, and in the same year they beat the odds and won the title of Best Band In Raleigh in a multi-genre competition hosted by the Guitar Center and the Hibernian Pub. They promptly took their $2000 prize money and recorded their first album, Backroads, recorded by Tom Landgon at West Station Records and produced by Steve Dilling of IIIrd Tyme Out.

After working with Kickin Grass in the studio, Steve Dilling summed up the band quite nicely: "This group is a force to be reckoned with. They have great original songs with powerful arrangements, and their execution is awesome! And to top it all off, they are all wonderful people. Wow!!! What a pleasure to work with this band."

Important Links - please visit and buy a CD!
Kickin Grass Web Site

A half-hour MP3 with the band including some performances. Interviewer Candace Corrigan lets the band talk about their pursuits and interests. Informative and entertaining.
Interview at The Nashville Nobody Knows

Previews from their new album:
Ain't Got Nothin
Cloverleaf
Change Your Mind

A concept is born

With competitive research and other due diligence to come, I am bringing together the spectrum of my interests and publishing abilities to produce Carolina History Talks.

The concept is to get one-on-one with Carolina history. Touring historical places, capturing expert opinion, sharing facts about our shared Carolinian history, and giving you lots of my own opinions. I anticipate delivering the majority of the content via Podcast (and hopefully transcriptions will be available here).

More to come on my background. For now, know that I am an amateur in all regards. I truly enjoy Carolina history and have studied it in college as well as in my travels and my genealogical research. We have so much history here, I know an entire series can be dedicated to just the Carolinas.

More to come.