From Colonial days through the Civil War, a number of slaves, aided by slave watermen and sympathetic whites, escaped by the Maritime Underground Railroad, an ocean-going route to freedom along the North Carolina coastline.
Many ordinary people led civil rights protests. In 1968-69, when school desegregation in Hyde County threatened the loss of two Afro-American schools, a one-year student boycott saved the schools.
Between 1874 and 1875, Nathaniel Bishop sailed 2,500 miles in nine months, from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Locally, in his fifty-six pound paper canoe, he paddled by the Outer Banks and Onslow Bay, then down the Waccamaw River.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, demands by hat makers for plumage and restaurants for bird meat brought near extinction to coastal flocks. Efforts by T. Gilbert Pearson and others led to conservation laws that restored the birds by World War II.
Author and biologist Rachael Carson often visited such coastal areas as Beaufort's Town Marsh and Bird Shoal, and recorded her experiences in books, including UNDER THE SEA-WIND and THE EDGE OF THE SEA.
Travelers now are impatient if their destination is not reached in a good time. Cecil Buckman's journal of his meandering 1873 trip from Beaufort to Baltimore on the OGEECHEE reminds today's travelers that journeys in the era of sail required patience.
Across Jarrett Bay from Williston in Carteret County lies Davis Ridge, a fishing community founded by liberated slaves in 1865 and destroyed by a hurricane in 1933. The self-sufficient town enjoyed a unique, close relationship with its white neighbors.
In the 1890s, the state harvested over 2.5 million bushels of oysters yearly. However, a combination of ecological, economic, and management factors reduced the harvest to 42,000 bushels barely a hundred years later.
John Averitt's Onslow County plantation, \"Rich Lands,\" was a leading naval stores producer 150 years ago. Although great wealth accrued to the family, uncontrolled harvesting destroyed the pines and led to the family's downfall in 1857.
As forests were exhausted in the North, logging companies moved South. Between 1885 and 1925, Buffalo City, located in the Great Alligator Swamp in Dare and Tyrrell Counties, was one of the state's busiest sawmill towns.
\"Behind the Veil,\" an oral history project of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, is a collection of interviews of over 1,200 African-Americans who lived during the Jim Crow era in the South.
The writings of three former slaves, Allen Parker's RECOLLECTIONS OF SLAVERY TIMES, William H. Robinson's FROM LOG CABIN TO PULPIT, and William H. Singleton's RECOLLECTIONS OF MY SLAVERY DAYS, portray the late antebellum period and the Civil War.
The kitchen garden at Tryon Palace measured 16,200 square feet and was enclosed by an eight-foot-high wall. It provided the governor foods of American, European, and African origin, including squash and okra. Some, like salsify, are not common today.
From 1869 to 1870, David Coues was Army surgeon at Fort Macon. He spent endless hours studying the wildlife and writing about it. His efforts put Bogue Banks on the naturalist's map. Coues later became the foremost ornithologist of his time.
Long-buried state documents, including field notes, transcripts, surveillance reports, and registers of members, reveal Ku Klux Klan activities during the 1960s. Over one hundred groups, with about 7,000 official members, existed statewide.