Articles in regional publications that pertain to a wide range of North Carolina-related topics.
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for "Greenville Times / Pitt's Past"
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23437
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William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was a lawyer, newspaper editor, and Democratic leader, came to Greenville In April of 1918. Bryan was nominated three times for president. While visiting Greenville, he roomed at the Princeton Hotel at the corner of Greene and Washington Streets. Then he spoke to up to seven hundred citizens at White’s Theatre on Fifth Street. The subject of his speech was "The Fundamentals of Man's Relations to the Government, Society, and to God."
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23438
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St. Andrews Protestant Episcopal Church is the last frame church in the central business district. It served the black Episcopal congregation until 1970. Archdeacon William George Avant organized St. Andrews in 1903. By 1951, the church was in such bad condition that the church members met in the home of Winnie Godette. In 1953, the church was re-dedicated after receiving a gradual flow of contributions and becoming a mission church of St. Paul's Episcopal Church. The churches merged in 1970.
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23439
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From 1939 to 1964, Pitt County had a prison on Belvoir Road near the airport. Before the 1930s, the chain gang system was the system of labor used. This system put serious law offenders to work. The prisoners were housed in \"Cage Camps,\" which were camps on wagons that moved to work sites. In the 1930s the county brought together all of the prisoners by housing them in a prison. The Pitt County Prison housed some of the state's toughest prisoners. By 1961, the state decided to save money by consolidating prisons. In 1964, the Pitt County Prison was decommissioned and prisoners were sent to the Vance County Prison. The old prison was eventually torn down to allow for the expansion of the airport.
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23440
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2005 marks the 73rd football season at East Carolina University. The football team was started by C. Kenneth Beatty, who received no pay for coaching. The victory bell, located on the west side of Memorial Gymnasium, was given to ECU by the Veterans Club. It was to be rung after games won by the Pirates. Plans to secure the bell began in 1951, and it was officially presented on October 10, 1953. ECU is holding a Victory Bell Commemorative Service on March 29, 2005.
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Record #:
23441
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Valentine's Day was meant something different in the year 1900 than it does today. Local boys got into mischief and would run around town tearing down signs and breaking windows. The newspaper warned people to protect their homes from the pranksters. Another local tradition was the giving of \"Penny-awfuls.\" Sold in stores, these insulting cards allowed the sender to show his or her dislike for someone.
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23442
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The old steel bridge that is soon to be reconstructed on the Town Common used to be located on Greene Street and was dedicated to World War I veterans in 1929. Work began on the bridge in 1927 and was completed two years later at a cost of $150,000. Bronze plaques were placed at each end of the bridge and they state that the bridge was dedicated on June 21, 1929 (even though the dedication date was actually April 27, 1929). Many townspeople attended the dedication ceremony.
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23443
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Charles Read was a leading politician in colonial days. In the spring of 1773 he fled his native state of New Jersey, where he faced a long jail sentence for bankruptcy. Read moved to Martinborough, North Carolina, where he died in 1774. Martinborough was renamed Greenesville in 1786. Today, it is believed that Reade Street in Greenville is named for him.
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23444
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The General Electric Company began to market Christmas tree lights in 1901 after Thomas Edison sold his factory to them. Greenville did not have electricity until 1905, and it was not until 1916 that electric Christmas tree lights were used in Greenville. By 1928, the town erected a large Christmas tree atop of the traffic island at Five Points. This practice would end by 1960, but the tradition of placing a Christmas tree in front of a business office began in 1929 by the Merchants Association and continues to this day.
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23445
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Needham Cobb was born in Jones County in 1836. After attending school in Orange County and graduating from U.N.C. Chapel Hill, he served as President of Wayne Institute and Normal College and taught Greek and Latin at Goldsboro Female College. In 1856, he turned to law and received a Master's degree from U.N.C. Chapel Hill, the first student ever to do so. Cobb practiced law in Pitt and Wayne counties for several years, while at the same time teaching himself to write in shorthand. Before the Civil War, he worked as an editor for the Biblical Recorder and attended many meetings of the State Legislature, taking shorthand notes for the press. In 1859, Cobb became a Baptist minister and began preaching and baptizing across the eastern part of the state. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Cobb first served as a chaplain in the 14th North Carolina but soon became General Superintendent of Army Colporteurs, delivering bibles to the troops and assisting in the field hospitals in Virginia and North Carolina. Following the war, Rev. Cobb worked as an editor for the North Carolina Baptist Almanac, served as the president of the Baptist State Convention, and was elected Mayor of Lilesville, N.C. A trustee of Wake Forest College, Cobb retired to Sampson County in 1895, where he would die ten years later. Needham Cobb married twice, first to Martha Cobb and later to Ann Fennell, and fathered fifteen children.
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Record #:
23446
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George Hatem, the son of poor Lebanese immigrants, moved with his family from Buffalo, NY to Greenville in the 1920s. Attending local high school and U.N.C. Chapel Hill, George studied to become a doctor. With the coming of the depression and its resulting lack of jobs for those in the medical profession, George went to Lebanon to attend medical school at the American University in Beirut. Following his graduation from both American University and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Dr. Hatem traveled to China where he helped in the eradication of venereal disease in Shanghai and Beijing. During the Communist Revolution, he examined and made acquaintance with Mao Tse - tung, who made Hatem an advisor to the Chinese Ministry of Public Health. Over the next 55 years, Dr. Hatem made China his home, returning occasionally to Greenville to visit with family and friends. Through his efforts to eradicate venereal disease and leprosy in China, he was the recipient of several awards including the Albert Lasker Public Service Award. Dr. George Hatem died in 1988 in Beijing following a ten - year battle with cancer.
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Record #:
23447
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Lewis Bond was born in 1795 in Pitt County. Sometime around 1815, after apprenticing to a cabinetmaker, Bond started his own furniture shop in Greenville. By 1820, Bond moved to Tarboro and opened a furniture making business there. During this period he married Sydney Nelson and had a number of children. Following Sydney's death in 1832, Lewis married to Mary E. Norman. Keeping up with the latest styles of furniture, Bond ran his business successfully until 1846, when his son, Francis Lewis Bond, took over the operation. Lewis Bond died in 1858. F.L. Bond was very successful in Tarboro and contributed a great deal of money to help build a new Methodist church in town in 1856. He married Martha Dancy, a dressmaker, in 1849 and the newlyweds moved to Goldsboro shortly after the wedding. Returning to Tarboro by 1860, F.L. Bond gave up the furniture business and switched to making surgical instruments. Following a brief experience in Wilmington as a cabinetmaker after the Civil War, he returned to Tarboro and worked as a sewing machine operator in his wife's dressmaking shop. F.L. Bond met a sad end when, in 1890, during a bout of depression, he jumped off a bridge into the Tar River and drowned.
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Record #:
23448
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Susan Virginia Streeter was born in 1825 in Greene County, the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. In 1843, she married Peyton Ashley Atkinson of Pitt County and thereafter resided at his plantation \"Bensboro,\" north of the Tar River. Mr. Atkinson, active in local politics, was a very wealthy man who purchased several tracts of land in the area and acquired nearly 117 slaves. The couple had six children but four died before reaching their first birthday. With the death of Peyton Atkinson in 1863, Susan received nearly $250,000 from his will. For several years, she managed her holdings and her late husband's business ventures while raising their two still living children, Benjamin Streeter and Francis Marion. Susan remarried to William Whitehead in the late 1860s though this marriage was short lived as she quickly divorced him for whipping her. After suing Whitehead for her property, Susan struggled to run her plantations with the help of her two sons. Tragically, both Benjamin and Francis died in the early 1880s, leaving her virtually alone in the world. Susan Virginia Streeter Atkinson sold off almost all of her family's land and died in 1895, having outlived her entire family.
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Record #:
23449
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Blount Coleman Pearce, born in New Bern in 1829, lived most of his life in Greenville. Pearce, in a partnership with Robert Kinsaul, was in the mercantile business. He sold cotton and transported goods up and down the Tar River. In 1855, Pearce married Ann Kinsaul. The couple had two children, Ada and Joseph D., a noted singer and a dentist respectively. During the Civil War, Pearce served in the Confederate army while his wife worked in the military hospital in Greenville. Following the war, he was a staunch Democrat and a member of the Greenville Masonic Lodge. He was the first man in North Carolina arrested for being a KKK member. In 1872, Pearce was elected Pitt County Register of Deeds but left Greenville in 1880 following the death of his wife. He worked for several years as a traveling salesman but returned to Pitt County in the 1890s. He served as a Deputy US Marshall and married Maggie Hunt of Sanford. He moved to Sanford shortly after and was elected Treasurer of newly formed Lee County. Blount Coleman Pearce died in Sanford in 1911.
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Record #:
23450
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James Berry and John Henry Whitehurst were born near Bethel in Pitt County on October 16, 1838. Their claim to fame revolves around their service in the Civil War. James Berry was in Missouri when the war broke out and quickly enlisted in the Confederate Army. Wounded and captured at Shiloh, James escaped captivity and re - enlisted in an Arkansas regiment. James was again captured at Tullahoma, TN in 1863 and held prisoner in Ohio until the end of the war. Returning to Pitt County after the war, he became a farmer and married Mary Elizabeth Manning in 1866. During the 1880s, James traveled across much of the United States. Mary died in 1894 and he married in Mary E. Whitehurst in 1897. At his death in 1928, James could count 12 children from both marriages.\r\nJohn Henry Whitehurst led a much simpler life than his twin brother. When the Civil War erupted, John was working for his future mother - in - law, Martha Carson, as a farm laborer. Enlisting in the 8th North Carolina, John was captured at Cold Harbor in 1864 and remained a prisoner until the end of the war. After the war, John returned home to farm in Carolina Township where he served as a Justice of the Peace. He married Zilphia Ann Carson and the couple had 10 children. John Henry died in 1919. The Whitehurst twins, who attended numerous Confederate reunions in Greenville, are believed to be the oldest surviving set of twins, Union or Confederate, who fought in the Civil War.\r\n
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Record #:
23451
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Born in Kentucky, Jonathon Bowling lived in Belgium for much of his childhood before discovering his love of art while attending college at the University of Kentucky. Bowling followed his girlfriend to North Carolina in 1996 and ended up furthering his two art degrees with a Masters in Sculpture from East Carolina University. In 2002, he opened an art gallery in Greenville named \"The Hobbyhorse,\" where he displays and sells not only his own work, but that of other local artists as well. Bowling specializes in 3 - D sculptures made of steel, glass, wood and even bone. Many of his pieces are representative of animals, mostly birds and fish. He says that he never goes looking for ideas or materials, he simply lets them come to him; many of his materials are things he finds on the side of the road or in dumpsters. Bowling sells many of his pieces to art galleries all over eastern North Carolina and his sculptures have become quite popular among art lovers.
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