Collection (1852-2014) includes correspondence, newspaper clippings, printed materials, and other items compiled by retired East Carolina University English professor emeritus Dr. Ralph Hardee Rives (1930-2016) relating primarily to the Hardee - Rives and related families of North Carolina and the United Kingdom, the history of Eastern North Carolina (especially Halifax County and the town of Enfield), the United Methodist Church in Eastern North Carolina, state and local and national politics, and his charitable and philanthropic interests. The earliest original documents cover the period from 1852 through the Civil War and World War I.
Papers (1819-1872) of Thomas Sparrow (1819-1884), a Washington, N.C., lawyer until the outbreak of the Civil War. He was commissioned a captain in the Confederate Army in 1861 and served at Fort Hatteras until he was taken prisoner by Union forces in August of that year. After the war he returned to Washington and represented Beaufort County in the North Carolina General Assembly in 1870 and 1881. Papers include correspondence, military papers, prisoner of war diary kept at Fort Warren, Massachusetts, articles, essays, speeches, accounts, clippings, genealogical notes, and Sparrow family Bible records. Also included are letters (1858-1881) written by Thomas Sparrow's son George Attmore Sparrow (1845-1922) to him describing life in Okaw/Arcola, Illinois, at Hillsborough Military Academy, in military service as a Confederate soldier, and in his post-war life as a farmer and lawyer and later as a Presbyterian minister.