The WCPL Local History and Genealogy Room does not endorse smoking.
Unless you live in the 1950’s.
Tag Archives: books
New Books on North Carolina
Here is a list of some new materials that I have ordered and received for the Genealogy Room and the NC Collection over the last few months.
- Bridger Family Chronicles: From the old World to the New, Vol. I & II
- Henry McCulloh and Son Henry Eustace MaCulloh: 18th Century Entrepreneurs, Land Speculators of North Carolina
- 1850 Rutherford County, North Carolina Federal Census
- 1830 Rutherford County, North Carolina Federal Census: Free Schedules
- NC Petitions for Presidential Pardons 1865-1868
- Debtor’s Legacy: The Patetown Story
- Charles L. Coon: An Evaluation of His Work and Influence in North Carolina
- 1880 Rutherford County, North Carolina Federal Census
- WPA Cemetery Records for 1939, Cleveland County, NC
- Stanly County, NC Will Abstracts, 1841-1868
- Lincoln County North Carolina Inventory of Estates Records
- Index to Greene County, NC Loose Original Estates Records
- The New World Book of Mosers
- Studies in the histories of the South, 1875-1922
- Croatoan: Birthplace of America
- The Name is the Game: Onomatology and the Genealogist
- Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration
- Marriages of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, 1783-1868
- Caswell County, North Carolina Will Books, 1777-1814; 1784 Tax List; And Guardians’ Accounts, 1794-1819 (Published With) Caswell County, North Carolina
- Murder in the Courthouse: Reconstruction and Redemption in the North Carolina Piedmont
- Moon North Carolina
- Moon North Carolina Coast: Including the Outer Banks
- French and Indian War in North Carolina: The Spreading Flames of War
- Adventure Carolinas: Your Go-To Guide for Multi-Sport Outdoor Recreation
- Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina
- Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina
- Hiking North Carolina’s National Forests: 50 Can’t-Miss Trail Adventures in the Pisgah, Nantahala, Uwharrie, and Croatan National Forests
- Fishing North Carolina’s Outer Banks: The Complete Guide to Catching More Fish from Surf, Pier, Sound, and Ocean
- The Outer Banks Cookbook: Recipes & Traditions from North Carolina’s Barrier Islands
- Klansville, U.S.A. : the rise and fall of the civil rights-era KKK (2013)
- Stories of the South : race and the Reconstruction of southern identity, 1865-1915
New Materials 14 April 2014
What did Children Read in 1899? Part 2
The #1 checked out book among boys at the Wilson School Library 1899-1901
The #1 checked out book among girls at the Wilson School Library 1899-1901
My colleague and I finished tabulating the data from the circulation record of the Wilson School Library from 1899-1901. It took a lot longer than I would have thought but there were a lot of books that were checked out, 1924 books in total for 139 children. But it was fun figuring out what the books actually were from the librarians’ short hand and the fact that numerous books had been out of print for many decades. Here is a list of the top ten checked-out books for boys and girls.
67 boys and 72 girls
1054 checkouts for boys and 870 checkouts for girls
Top 10 Boy Checkouts
- Across Texas– 26
- On Trail of Moose, Out on the Pampas, Young Scout– 21
- Jack Hazard– 20
- Giraffe Hunters– 19
- The Desert Home, Three Burglars, Young Marooners– 17
- Lion of the North– 16
- Cuba in Wartime, Forest Exiles, Four American Patriots– 15
- Boy Slaves– 14
- Small Boys in Big Boots, John G. Patton, In Freedom’s Cause, Final Reckoning, Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom– 13
- Cast up by the Sea, Facing Death, From the Throttle to the President’s Chair, Kingdom of Nature, With Lee in Virginia– 12
Top 10 Girl Checkouts
- Elsie’s Girlhood– 22
- Elsie at the World’s Fair, Elsie Dinsmore, Satin Wood Box, World of Girls– 20
- Old Fashioned Girl– 19
- Our Bessie, Mistress of Bucknell– 17
- Three Bright Girls, Next Door, – 16
- Bettie a School Girl, Not Like other Girls– 15
- Barbara’s Triumph, Elsie’s Holidays at Rosewood – 14
- Dearly Bought, Emma, Palace Beautiful, The Little Lame Prince – 13
- Queechy, Edith’s Burglar– 12
- Lamplighters, Heir of Radcliffe– 11
From the data you can see that there were five more girls than boys, but boys checked out 184 more books. My colleague and I did not find that surprising due to the lesser importance education was placed on girls than it was for boys during this period. We both thought that if we looked at a modern circulation record that the girls would out-pace the boys, but that is only our non-scientific opinion.
Also from the data you can infer that the boys and girls kept to very gender specific books. The boys read books with masculine themes and the girls read books with feminine themes. Of course if you look at individual records you will find that some boys liked to read the occasional book from the Elsie series and some girls went for the masculine adventures like Kidnapped. But the big picture presented a large dichotomy between the books read by the boys and the books read by the girls. We can only give an educated guess at what modern boys and girls reading habits are without looking at their records but I think that there are more books today with a cross gender appeal (the Harry Potter series and Lemony Snickett series for example) and gender roles aren’t as emphasized as they were during Victorian times (also called the Gilded Age) so I think that you would have several books on both top ten lists.
I found it interesting that books about the American Civil War were not very popular among boys. The only book in the top ten that covers the period is With Lee in Virginia. Books about Cuba, Cuba in Wartime and Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, were more popular. This is most likely because the Spanish American War ended the year before the circulation record starts. Perhaps the collective memory of the Civil War had waned a bit by this time, at least in the mind of boys who were now starting a half century long infatuation with everything Western. The number one book for boys was the Western themed Across Texas. The love for Cowboys and Indians among boys was fueled by wild west shows such as Buffalo Bill’s which were traveling all over the US and Europe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Buffalo Bill’s show had come to Goldsboro and Raleigh in 1895, and may have counted a few of these students among their attendees. The show would come to Wilson in 1909 and 1916.
The Elsie series dominates the girls circulation record with four books in the top ten. These novels revolve around a girl that lives on a plantation in Virginia in the Antebellum South. It turns out that just as the GA Henty novels (as I mentioned in and earlier post) are popular with Christian home-schoolers today, the Elsie novels, by Martha Finley, are also popular with the same group and have been promoted by the Christian group Value Forum.
There is an interesting critique of Finley’s novels here, which does have some unsettling passages from the books about slavery. But I think that the novels are reflective of the period in which they were written. A period in the South after the Civil War that whitewashed the era before slavery was abolished. This had to do with a lot of factors including that failure of Reconstruction and the poor economy. Although the boys had moved on to other genres the popularity of the Elsie novels gives evidence that the Antebellum period still loomed large in people’s mind.
At first I was surprised to find that the most popular books at Wilson School in 1899 were books from authors that I had never heard of, while the classics were not very popular. There is only one book in the top ten that would be considered a classic, Jane Austin’s Emma, even though the library carried books by Dickens, Stephenson, Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. But after giving it a second thought I realized that the adult books that are the most popular in our library are not from your Jonathan Franzens or Margaret Atwoods but are from your Nicholas Sparks and James Pattersons. And I think it would be a safe bet to say that Patterson and Sparks will be long forgotten (except in the Internet Archive where I found most of the books from 1899) one hundred years from now and not on the virtual shelves of libraries of the future.
Finally, one other piece of information that the record divulges is that two of the students, Luther Ruffin and Susie Williams, died during the summer of 1899. I found the Wilson Advance newspaper article that details Susie’s long battle and death from typhoid, but I could find no mention in the paper of Luther’s death. Susie’s death of a disease and Luther’s death of unknown causes highlights the fragility of children during this period when the germ theory of disease had only recently been discovered and antibiotics would not be on the market until 1932.
Even More New Materials on the Shelf
More good stuff pouring in from processing.
New Materials on the Shelf
Our Western North Carolina Holdings continue to grow as more materials from the Grace Turner Collection are being processed and moved to the shelf.
- Davie County, NC Will Abstracts, 1836-1900
- Cleveland Co, NC Will Abstracts, 1841-1910
- Cleveland Co, NC Marriages, 1851-1868
- Cleveland Co, NC Marriage Register, 1870-1886
- Cleveland Co, NC 1800 Federal Census
- Cleveland Co, NC Marriage Register, 1894-1904
- Cleveland Co, NC Death Certificates, vol 1, 1913-1919, 1,2,3
- Cleveland Co, NC Death Certificates, vol2, 1916-1922, Books 4,5,6
- Edenton District, NC Loose Estates Papers vol 1, 1756-1806
- Edenton District, NC Loose Estates Papers vol 2, 1756-1806
- Edenton District, NC Loose Estates Papers vol 3, 1756-1806
- Edgecombe Co, NC Deeds vols I-V, 1759-1798
- Edgecombe Co, NC, 1850 Federal Census
- Edgecombe Co, NC, 1860 Federal Census
- Edgecombe Co, NC, Abstracts of Wills vol 1, 1732-1792
- Edgecombe Co, NC, Records of Estates, vol 1, 1761-1825
- Craven Precinct NC, Court Minutes, Book I 1712-1715
What did children read in 1899?
Last week I made an exciting find. No it wasn’t the Lost Colony, but it was a great artifact. While rummaging through the storage area I found the 1899 circulation records for the Wilson School Library. The over-sized ledger book lists 288 students and their check-out history for 1899 and part of 1900. This ledger is of course a great genealogical record but also an invaluable window into the reading habits of small town, white children of the American South at the end of the Victorian era. Of course the children could only choose books from the school’s collection, of which I have no idea how large it was, but each title that is checked out is listed next to the child’s name.
Gender roles during this period were much more defined and reinforced than today (Women’s gender roles may have become more fluid during the Civil War, but they gradually went back to the Victorian default afterwards. ). Given this you would assume that boys check out books about history (war), the outdoors and adventure and the girls check out books about homemaking, family and girl’s adventures. Let’s analyze two of the scamps: May Lovelace and Jack Ellis and figure out what books they were reading.
May Lovelace
Small Boys and Co. -not sure what this is.
Elsie Dinsmore-a Christian themed book series set on plantations in Virginia.
Elsie’s Girlhood (ditto)
Little Men -Sequel to Little Women, checked out twice.
Childhood Favorite Library (?)
Winter Amid the Ice -Adventure novel written by Jules Verne in 1855.
In Ole Virginia -Thomas Nelson Page’s book of idealized stories of antebellum life, checked out twice.
Queechy -a novel of orphans, servitude, Paris and unrequited love-sounds like a blast!)
Free Joe -The opposite of In Ole Virginia. This book was written by the compiler of the Uncle Remus tales, Joel Chandler Harris and is a surprisingly modernistic story of a free Black man that can’t find a place for himself in the small town in Georgia that he lives. The enslaved Africans Americans reject him out of jealousy of his freedom and the poor whites are intolerant of a potential competitor. For a book written by a Southerner of this period, it is quite a honest look into Antebellum society.
Our Bessie -a book about a sweet girl in England, you can read it on project Gutenburg.
Indian Larry Tate -not sure what this is or what the handwriting says.
Kidnapped (The classic adventure by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Elsie’s Holidays (another mirthful Elsie adventure.
Three Bright Girls (family stories set in England.
Satin Wood Box -Not sure what this is about but I believe that it is a mystery.
Red Rock (I’m at a loss on this one
Jack Ellis
Flag of Distress –A tale of the South Sea, adventure.
True to the Old Flag -One of the 99 historical novels that GA Henty wrote during his lifetime. This book was unique in that it was about the American Revolution from a Loyalist’s perspective.
Mamyat’s Tales -Not sure what this is, there is a Mamyat trail in Andorra.
Stone Creek Wreck –Subtitled a Modern Will o’ the Wisp. I believe that it is about a train wreck.
Red Rock -I wish that I knew what this was because May checked it out also.
The Young Marooners (on the Florida Coast)-Also called Robert and Harold. This book is about a family who sails out of Charleston, SC only to become stranded on the wild Florida Coast. A land of savage Timeshares!
Mosby’s War Reminiscences– This book about John Singleton Moseby, the Confederate cavalry leader, would have been eaten up by young Southern boys in this era of the Lost Cause. Confederate war leaders were looked upon as near demi-gods except for maybe Gens. Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet.
Doing His Best-Can’t find any information on this book. Self help?
John G. Paton– An autobiography of a Scottish missionary in the New Hebrides Islands, now called Vanuatu.
Young Scout- It may be a book about Young’s Scouts, an elite army group during the Philippine-American War. But the war started in 1899 so I am not sure if it would be to soon to have a book out.
Final Reckoning- A book about an young boy on the frontier of Australia, Christian themed.
From the Throttle to the President’s Chair- The life of a railway worker.
Boat Club-Also called The Boat Club or the Bunkers of Rippleton: A Tale for Boys
Jack Hazzard no 2: A series of Adventure novels
With Wolfe in Canada- An account of the English General James Wolfe’s victory over the French at the Battle of Quebec. According to Wikipedia the books by this author, GA Henty, are still very popular among Christian home schoolers, although every book is about war.
Facing Death- Not sure what this is, but it sounds like war.
In Freedom’s Cause- Robert Bruce and William Wallace fight the English. What could be better than that? A GA Henty novel.
Lion of the North (A Tale of the Times of Gustavus Adolphus)- This is another GA Henty novel and it chronicles the life of the Protestant champion of the Thirty Years War, King Gustav II. He did make Sweden a world power but I imagine that some would read it for the accounts of his victories over Catholic forces (the end of the 19th century very anti-Catholic due to the influx of Catholics to the US from Ireland), at least until he died in battle.
The Young Carthaginian- The fourth GA Henty novel. This one is about Hannibal, and of course, war.
Looking closely at the circulation records of these two students reveals the gender differences in book selections that I mentioned at the beginning. Jack does not stray from books that I have labeled as “boy” books. Six of them are about war and the rest are mainly adventures involving men. May’s selections are a little more diverse. Most of her books were family stories or girl’s adventures and unfortunately I could not discern a few of May’s books, but she does have some of what I would consider “boy” books, with those being Kidnapped and Winter Amid the Ice. Free Joe is also an interesting selection in that is more of a morality tale with a definite point of view on what the author thinks are societal failings in the Antebellum South. Also, many of the books that most of the children chose have Christian underpinnings. This is to be expected in a time that was still very affected by the several “Great Awakenings” of the nineteenth century. But these are just two students, so one of my colleagues (one who loves Excel much more than I do) is typing up all the students and their circulation records into a spreadsheet so that we can see what we can infer from the data. It would also be interesting to compare it to modern children’s circulation records (but I might would need a grant for that lol) I will post the data from 1899 soon.
Sources:
Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Whites, LeeAnn, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (University of Georgia Press, 2000)
Fogel, Robert William, The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism (University Of Chicago Press, 2000)
New Materials
The Wilson County Genealogical Society and the Wilson County historical Association has generously donated some great new materials
From the Wilson County Genealogical Society
- Abstracts of the Pasquotank County, NC Guardian Bond Books, 1798-1831
- Abstracts of the Pasquotank County, NC Guardian Bond Books, 1832-1867
- Pasquotank County, NC Will Abstracts, 1720-1880
- Abstracts of Wills and other Records, Currituck and Dare County, NC, 1663-1850
From the Wilson County Historical Association
- The Heritage of Nash County
New materials I ordered that are now on the shelf
- Anson County, NC Deed Abstracts, 1749-1766 and Abstracts of Wills and Estates, 1749-1795
- Searching for Scotch-Irish Roots in Scottish Records 1600-1750
- Surry County, North Carolina Wills, 1771-1827
- Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800
New Materials
A Very Mutinous People: The struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713
In Noeleen McIlvenna’s book, A Very Mutinous People (2009), she examines the often overlooked beginnings of North Carolina in region of the coast called the Albemarle. Albemarle was the neglected child of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. The southern part of Carolina, Charleston, was their darling. The subtropical holy city with its large harbor and seasoned plantation veterans from Barbados was a perfect place for them to export Virginia’s slave society, leaving Albemarle mostly to its own devices and out of their direct control. Formed from runaway indentured servants, Quakers and other Renagadoes that fled from the aftermath of Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia still full of the “Leveler” egalitarian ideas that resulted from the British Cromwellian Revolution , the Albemarle region of late 17th century North Carolina was a meritocratic society with democratic leanings protected by the Great Dismal Swamp and the treacherous shores of the North Carolina outer banks. The area was not conducive to plantation agriculture or merchant shipping and the inhabitants engaged in small scale farming and trade with the smaller, more agile ships from New England. The settlers of Albemarle also established trade and peaceful relations with the native Algonquin speaking tribes and the powerful Tuscaroras. From their haven the settlers were out of the reach and out of the mind of the Lords proprietors and their attempts to establish a top down society of Landgraves and Cassiques (their titles for the new peerage) in America.
In 1675 Thomas Eastchurch, a disgruntled local man and aspiring Cassique, was looking to ingratiate himself with uncollected taxes. He managed to get elected to the General Assembly and became de facto governor of Albemarle. After seizing power he jailed the former popular governor named Jenkins and appointed another disgruntled local with dreams of peerages and fat purses named Thomas Miller to be his overly zealous tax collector. Miller’s crusade to enforce the tobacco tax, the hated Navigation Acts, which heavily taxed any exports, and the more hated Plantation Duty Act, which impeded their New England trade, forced the Alamance population into insurrection. An armed force forcibly removed the governor and his deputies declaring “Wee will have noe Lords noe Landgraves noe Cassiques we renounce them all” in what is now known as Culpepper’s Rebellion. The rebellion, as described by McIlvenna, was a “… grass roots democratic movement against imperial authority in all its forms. They fought to preserve their right to representation and against both imperial taxation and the corruption of imperial officials on the ground, like the American Revolution of a century later.” But unlike the American Revolution the rebels were a heterogeneous band made up of white men and women, free blacks and Native Americans. This was unique anywhere in the colonies at the time, which also made them a guiding light for the disenfranchised across the colonies and bugbear for those in power.
The Alamance settlers’ problems weren’t over after the rebellion. They soon attracted the attention of a
Proclamation regarding Cary. Image from the State Archives of North Carolina.
progression of ruthless men looking to make Alamance their bonanza and the people their supplicants. The Alamance settlers were met with a stark choice- to be a hierarchical slave society with the Anglican Virginians as their masters -or be a free society with no one their masters. They chose the latter and rebelled again. Cary’s Rebellion in 1708-1711 showed that they would not readily internalize the hierarchical values of the Virginians and would fight to keep their independence. A new governor named Edward Hyde was, in the end, successful in putting down Cary’s Rebellion and establishing Anglican control, but only by calling in British Marines. It would be that last time that Quakers or anyone not willing to take an oath of allegiance were allowed to hold office. But Hyde would not find his position lucrative, for he would discover, just as his predecessors had, that collecting taxes from these people was next to impossible.
Fort Neoheroka. Image from the State Archives of North Carolina.
The final stage of the fight for North Carolina involved a player that had, until now, kept to the sidelines. This player was the Tuscarora Indians and their allies. Because of their good relations with the settlers there was none of the animosity and violence that was sown between the Europeans and Native Americans in other areas of Colonial America. The Albemarle settlers did not encroach onto Native American lands out of a mutual respect for their trading partners. The Cassique speculators had no such qualms about violating this trust that had kept the peace for fifty years. In September, 1711 the famous surveyor, ethnographer, and neutral player in the politics of Albemarle, John Lawson, along with the leader of New Bern was sent by the Alamance governor to reconnoiter the Neuse River, looking for new lands to settle. En-route they were taken captive by the Tuscarora. The presence of a land surveyor on their lands, who was known to have staked out land from smaller tribes, set the Tuscarora on a warpath that would leave hundreds dead, including John Lawson (The unfortunate irony is that Lawson is about the only ethnographer that gave an account of the proto-historic Native Americans of Carolina, without which we would know next to nothing. The English were horrible ethnographers, the French and the Spanish were much better). Bath County was ravaged, but the non-Anglican portions of Albemarle were untouched and the settlers would not meet the governor’s call to arms, so the governor had to look elsewhere. The South Carolinians came to their aid and after a protracted and difficult war and siege of Fort Neoheroka (a nearly impenetrable fort designed by a brilliant escaped African slave named Harry) the Tuscarora were defeated and the survivors moved up to New York to live with their Iroquois allies or scattered to live with other tribes in NC.
Asking the martial slave lords of South Carolina to come to one’s aid was a bit like Roman Britain enlisting the Saxons to help defeat the Picts. They may defeat the enemy, but they also may never leave. And the South Carolinians did not want to leave. They married into the Albemarle Anglican planter clique and soon dotted the Cape Fear river with their plantations. The leveling ideals of the Albemarle were not to be the dominant school of thought for the rest of North Carolina’s history but would live on with the new egalitarian Scots Irish and German farmers of the Piedmont who stood up to the Planters (and lost) in the 1760’s during the Regulator Movement. North Carolina, in the end, would be a hierarchical slave society with power in the hands of a few, but at least some fought valiantly against its implementation and McIlvenna does a service by documenting the defiant ones who wanted a different future for their people.
Wilson County Public Library Local History and Genealogy Blog 