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This collection contains information on people, places, and events arranged by subject. Many items are not originals.

Papers (1822 [1849]-1898) including typewritten transcript, copy, letters, sketches, grade school reports.

Papers (1941-1970) of Naval officer, USNA class of 1941, consisting of scrapbooks, containing clippings, correspondence, reports, photographs, memorabilia, orders. Also includes biographical information and 2016 obituary.

The bulk of this donation is photographs relating to the Hertford County, North Carolina, Crawford and Riddick family ancestors of William Crawford Woods. He was the son of Louise Russell Crawford and Arthur R. Woods, Jr. and the grandson of Kate Wallace Riddick and Louis Russell Crawford. The Wallace side of the family is from Norfolk County, Virginia. Additionally, there are personal items, including correspondence, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, school notes, publications, and some legal records. The items included date back to the late 1800s up through the mid-1900s.

Collection holds medical notebooks from various sources. Two notebooks found in the Laupus Library History Collection with no presently known provenance. One notebook is a dietetics notebook from E. Alexander at General Hospital, Patterson, New Jersey. The other notebook is Dr. Edward Beach Crowell's medical recipe book. An additional notebook was added to the collection in 2018. This notebook, purchased from Palinurus, was the business record for a Connecticut physician in the 1840s. Two more notebooks were added in 2022. They document medical products.

This collection includes a Wedding Anniversary Scrapbook (ca. 1940-1996) kept by Lawrence White and Florence Hines White of Hope Plantation located on Washington Post Road in New Bern, North Carolina; digital images of the images in a photograph album created by the donor which documents the lives of Lawrence and Florence White of Hope Plantation and their families; and digital images of plantation chits related to farms in the Washington Post Road area. Also included are farm record books (1944, 1948) and related documents (1943-1950).

Included are family and historical documents such as legal records, maps, family trees, correspondence, clippings, genealogical notes, and photographs, and artifacts from or pertaining to Enfield (Halifax County), North Carolina, Whitaker, Vinson, Harris, and Beavans families. Also included are drawings and articles related to The Holme (ancestral home of the Whitakers in England), information about Whitaker's Chapel, the writings of John W. McGwigan (author of weekly column "Ramblin" in the Enfield Progress), and William H. "Bill" Mann, Jr.'s work on the history of Enfield.

This collection contains documents and memorabilia (1927-1956, undated) kept by Mattie Sloan related to Winstead's Mighty Minstrels and other Black Minstrel groups such as Irvin C. Miller's "Brown Skin Models". Included are ledgers (1944, 1951, 1954, undated) recording ticket sales, salaries, and routes for the Winstead group and photographs, work licenses, advertising circulars and cards, and a poster. The strength of the collection is the historical significance that shows the involvement of African Americans as performers and managers that were not often included in standard histories of circuses and vaudeville.

Papers (1914-1972, undated) consisting of correspondence, reports, clippings, minutes, publications, speeches, affidavits, court rulings, legal briefs, trial proceedings, etc.

Collection (1838-1936) including correspondence, Genealogical information, account books, clippings of recipes, Treasurer's book, minute book, etc.

Papers (1937, undated) including a typescript volume, newspaper clippings, scripts of radio broadcast, African American spirituals.

Collection (1844-1972) of material related to Craven Co., N.C., or to maritime topics. Cemetery records for Craven Co., N.C., list 800 tombstones and include some hand-drawn maps and local historical notes. Records of the New Bern Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, New Bern, N.C., include a minute book (1954-1966), membership roll calls, correspondence, clippings, notes, reports, resolutions, and other materials. Postcards, stereographs, and sheet music concern naval and maritime themes and include World War I patriotic sheet music. Scrapbook (1919-1922) contains clippings on the construction of concrete ships at the Newport Shipbuilding Corporation of New Bern, N.C., and on the New Bern Bears baseball team. Other postcards and printed materials concern the North Carolina Outer Banks ferries; Bethlehem Steel Corporation; and the U.S. Navy, including the USS Maine, early submarines USS Porpoise and USS Shark, the USS San Francisco, and a compilation of articles written during WWI for the onboard newspaper of the USS George Washington entitled The Hatchet of the United States Ship George Washington by Captain Edwin T. Pollock and Lieutenant Paul F. Bloomhardt.