Note from the author: This is the first photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here.

I want to begin this series by looking at a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton in the years just before the Second World War.

The oldest of the photographs was taken in 1937. Others were taken in 1938 and in the autumn of 1941, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. One other was taken in 1942.

The first group of photographs focuses on the harvest workers, mostly the threshers, but also the diggers. A second group looks at the work of cleaning, grading and bagging the peanuts at a plant and warehouse in Edenton.

An ancient crop native to South America, peanuts spread across much of the world through the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. Farmers in West Africa were among those who came to grow them.

Most historians and ethnobotanists believe that peanuts came to North America, especially to Virginia and North Carolina, via West Africa and the slave trade in the 18th century. By most accounts, they were long considered a crop mainly for feeding hogs and for feeding the enslaved Africans that were forced to raise crops on the region’s plantations.

According to a 2019 article in the journal Peanut Science, southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina were especially important in the crop’s early development in North America in large part because of the slave trade.

In the southeastern part of the North Carolina coast, the Wilmington area was also an important center of peanut farming in the the 18th century. Again, wholly reliant on slave labor.

By 1860, the majority of the peanuts in the U.S. were grown on North Carolina’s coastal plain, though they were rarely grown as a commercial crop.

Little is known about how enslaved people utilized peanuts as a food, though it is assumed that some of the traditional peanut dishes of the Gullah Geechee peoples date to the slavery era. A good description of peanut farming’s early history in the Wilmington vicinity can be found at the website for Poplar Grove Plantation, a historic site built around what used to be a slave labor camp in Pender County.

A number of factors contributed to making peanuts into a successful commercial crop in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Those factors included the adoption of peanuts as an easy-to-carry, nonperishable, high protein food by Civil War soldiers; the groundbreaking research that George Washington Carver did on new food uses for peanuts at Tuskegee Institute; and the collapse of cotton prices and the rise of the boll weevil in the 1920s, which led many southern farmers to search for alternative crops.

Another important factor in the growth of peanuts and peanut farming was the development of popular new peanut products.

Modern peanut butter was invented sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, though there is some disagreement over where it was first made and who first invented it.

Another important development in the growing popularity of peanuts occurred in 1906, when two Italian immigrants, Amadeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi, both innovators in the roast peanut trade, established a partnership that led to the creation of the Planters Nut and Chocolate Co., which is still famous for its “Mr. Peanut” logo and mascot today.

When Obici and Peruzzi located their first plant in Suffolk, Virginia, 50 miles north of Edenton, in 1913, they guaranteed an almost endless demand for peanuts in the northeast corner of North Carolina, and other peanut processing companies followed.

Peanut candies were also growing popular in those first decades of the 20th century. The peanut-laden Baby Ruth candy bar first appeared in 1923, the no less peanutty Mr. Goodbar in 1925, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in 1928, Snickers in 1930, and Payday in 1932.

Cracker Jacks were a bit older — they were first developed in 1898 — but the popularity of Cracker Jacks and roasted peanuts soared with the popularity of baseball in the early 20th century.

All of which is to say, the demand for peanuts skyrocketed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout that time, the center of the peanut farming and peanut processing industry continued to be southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina.

When these photographs were taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the peanut belt in North Carolina ran from the counties on the north side of Albemarle Sound, including Chowan County, where Edenton is, west through Bertie, Martin, Northampton, and Halifax counties.

In those years, Enfield, a small town in Halifax County, was considered the state’s busiest peanut market.

In the photographs below, you will find something of a guide to this part of life and work in Eastern North Carolina’s history.

The photographs give us a glimpse at the people who worked in the peanut fields, and a look into a peanut mill in Edenton.

They introduce us to the kind of work that thousands upon thousands of mainly African American field workers did for much of the 20th century.

But as you will see, the stories behind the photographs also introduce us to people whom I never would have expected to meet in the peanut fields of Eastern North Carolina, including even Bahamian migrant laborers and Italian POWs from North Africa.

Note: I have arranged the photo-essays in my “Working Lives” series in chronological order to the extent possible. I’m beginning with these scenes from the peanut fields in Edenton because the earliest photograph among them is dated 1937. The last in the series will feature pickle factory workers in Faison and Mt. Olive in 1947.

So let’s get started with our first photograph, taken in the midst of threshing season on a peanut farm near Edenton.

-1-

In our first photograph, a broad view of threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton is spread out before us. We can see a field that seems to go on forever, threshers at work, several mules, piles of peanut hay, the dust rising up off a mechanical peanut picker, and a pile of burlap bags heavy with peanuts.

Threshing was hard work, but the hardest work had already been done some weeks earlier, when scores of field workers had dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground and set them out on stakes to cure.

Like beans and peas, peanuts are a legume, technically not a nut, but they are exceptional among the legumes because their pods develop beneath the ground.

To harvest the peanuts in this field, laborers, probably all of them African American, dug up the the whole plant: vine, pods and all. It was a grueling job accomplished with mules, plows, and a great deal of sweat.

After digging the vines out of the ground, the field workers shook the dirt loose from the plants before setting them out to cure. A task that, in my experience, is harder than it sounds and which nobody remembers fondly.

In a field this size, hundreds of field laborers would likely have done the digging, shaking and staking.

Firsthand accounts of peanut field workers’ labors are rare, but on July 5, 1983, the Wilmington Star-News ran an interview with an African American woman who dug peanuts on a large farm around the time that these photographs were taken.

The interview featured Ms. Carrie Simmons Ballard, who was born at Poplar Grove in Pender County in 1905.

The reporter wrote:

“As a child, she ‘put in many hours picking peanuts on The Big Lot’ where her great-grandmother was the main house servant for the Foy family. Her grandmother and mother also worked for the family. ‘They grew some cotton too, but the main farm product was peanuts,’ she said.

“‘I never did much cotton picking, but I sure did my share in the peanut fields…..’”

Ms. Ballard went on to say, “The thing that stands out most in my mind was how hard we worked for so little. It seemed like we had to work so hard for just some food and barely something to wear.”

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In this photograph, we see what is apparently the same Edenton peanut farm, but three years earlier. In the foreground, we get an especially good look at the “shocks” that were typical of peanut farming in that day.

As field workers dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground, they would place stakes in the ground and build up stacks of vines and pods around the stakes so that the pods could cure before threshing. Those mounds of peanut vines were called “shocks.”

Farmers typically left the shocks in the field and let the peanuts cure for five or six weeks before threshing began. To this day, some old-timers brook no doubt that peanuts cured in shocks are more flavorful than those cured in windrows, the more modern way.

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This is another photograph of threshing time at the farm near Edenton.

In this case, we can see workers operating a mechanical thresher, usually called a picker, in the center of the photograph. However, I was really drawn to this photograph because it highlights the peanut shocks stretched out in the field behind the threshers.

A field full of peanut shocks was a sight to see, reflecting endless hours of toil. In the largest fields, such as this one, they always remind me of the scenes in “Anna Karenina” of threshing time in the Russian countryside.

-4-

After the peanuts had cured, farm workers pulled up the stakes and raked up the hay, as it was called, being careful to stay clear of the snakes and rats that were notoriously fond of them.

Horses or mules would then cart the hay to a stationary mechanical picker that operated in the field.

The 1940s was a moment in history when tractors and mules often worked side by side in Eastern North Carolina’s fields.

Even as late as 1940, only about 4% of the state’s farmers owned tractors. Even a large, comparatively prosperous farmer, as the owner of his field must have been, was unlikely to have more than the one tractor, which, as we will see, this farmer was using to power his mechanical picker.

The end of the Age of Mules was nigh, but it had not yet arrived on the eve of the Second World War.

-5-

Here we see workers unloading hay next to the mechanical picker in our peanut field outside Edenton.

On the right, we can see a pile of stakes that have already been stripped of their vines. On the left, a man is stitching up a burlap bag of peanuts that have just come out of the picker.

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By the time this photograph was taken, at least larger peanut farmers were using pickers such as this one that were powered by long belts attached to the back axel of a farm truck or, in this case, a tractor.

Even a few years earlier, horses or mules would have done the job.

-7-

This photograph provides a closer look at the farm’s mechanical peanut picker, a machine that was designed to break up the hay, remove the peanuts from the vines, and shake out debris and dust. It was a technology that had just come into widespread use in the previous two decades.

An unschooled African American farmer and inventor named Benjamin Hicks, in Southampton County, Virginia, filed what is believed to be the first patent for a mechanical peanut picker in 1901.

By all accounts, Hicks cobbled his ingenious machine together with a blacksmith’s anvil, tool box, and carpenter’s tools.

At least two makers of farm equipment modeled their peanut pickers on Hicks’ design, one of them without his consent.

To learn more about that patent dispute and about Benjamin Hicks, see Anna Zeide’s recent article in the journal Agricultural History, “The Dignity of Invention: Race, Intellectual Property, and Peanut Agriculture, 1900-1920.”

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In this photograph, we see one of the many young field workers that labored in this farm’s fields during the peanut harvest.

The mechanical thresher separated out the peanuts, emptying them into galvanized tin tubs. This worker is carrying the nuts to other field hands who will bag them, stitch the bag shut, and load the bags onto a truck.

At that time, the average wage for agricultural workers on the East Coast of the U.S. was $1.20 a day.

As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress had enacted important child labor reforms during the Great Depression. Those laws specifically exempted children who worked on farms.

By one estimate, half a million children were working in America’s fields in 1938.

-9-

In this photograph, we see another young field worker emptying a pail of peanuts into a burlap bag, while another, older man stitches a bag shut and makes it ready for shipment.

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The farm workers next loaded the bags of peanuts onto a truck that would carry them into one of the two peanut processing plants in Edenton.

Note the sea of peanut shocks in the distance. They seem to go on forever.

On the upper left, we can see the dust rising up from the mechanical picker as it separates the vines and peanuts.

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Once the peanuts had been separated, laborers carted away the peanut hay usually for use as livestock feed.

Farmers valued peanut hay as an especially good feed for hogs.

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I am not exactly sure what is happening in this scene, but I suspect that we are looking at a small hay baler or a presser that flattened and compacted the vines after they passed through the picker. Farmers sometimes used such machines to  make it easier to store the hay for use as livestock fodder.

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A large part of the peanuts harvested on that north side of the Albemarle Sound ended up here, at the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant in Edenton. Located on a bay that is on the north side of Albemarle Sound, Edenton is the county seat of Chowan County, and at that time had a population of just under 4,000 citizens.

At the time these photographs were taken, Edenton was home to two peanut processing plants, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co.

By 1935, according to the Greensboro News & Record on Aug. 16, 1935, the two companies were handling a total of some 25,000,000 pounds of peanuts a year.

The plant’s workers shelled, cleaned and bagged peanuts for farmers near Edenton and the rest of Chowan County, as well as peanuts harvested from farms in surrounding counties.

According to a number of accounts, you could tell when the plant was operating from some distance because a haze of smoke blanketed North Edenton when the plant was fueling its boilers with discarded peanut shells.

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Here we see a great pile of peanuts waiting to be cleaned and graded at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

These workers are stacking freshly arrived, 100-pound bags of peanuts, still in the shell, in the company’s warehouse.

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In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s hands lifting a bag of unshelled peanuts at the company’s warehouse.

He may be adding the bag to the stockpile or he may be taking the bag off the pile and loading it onto the handcart on the right so that he can carry it into the mill’s shelling and cleaning rooms.

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This gentleman is emptying bags of peanuts so that they can be placed on conveyor belts for cleaning and grading.

Like many of the other photographs of peanut farming and peanut processing in the state-managed collection, this photograph was taken in 1941, quite likely just a few weeks or even days before Pearl Harbor.

Long before that time though, U.S. war planners had begun planning how to adjust the nation’s crop production to compensate for expected wartime disruptions in the agricultural supply chain.

They did so with an eye both toward meeting the country’s domestic food needs and toward fulfilling the country’s Lend-Lease Act agreements with Great Britain and other allied countries.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the war cut off 68% of the nation’s supply of imported vegetable oils within a year of this photograph.

That was an issue of concern to American consumers, but in some cases it was also a concern for the U.S. military.

Just to cite one example, the bulk of the palm oil used in the United States to produce nitroglycerine for military uses had come from the Philippines prior to the beginning of World War II.

However, that supply of palm oil was completely cut off when Japan occupied the the Philippines in May 1942.

Looking for substitutes for imported oils, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Monthly Review July 31, 1942, noted, “a widespread program was launched, calling for increases in production of lard, tallow, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, soy beans, and other fats and oils.”

The article goes on to say, “Farmers in the South. . .  are taking an important part in this program by expanding the production of peanuts.”

At the time this photograph was taken, military planners had just announced a federal program to expand the country’s peanut acreage by 83 percent, roughly half of which would be set aside for use as oil.

Later in the war, the government would push to raise the country’s peanuts acreage by another 50%, all of which left peanut farmers and the workers at the Albemarle Peanut Co. with little time to rest.

As part of the wartime effort to increase peanut production, the USDA even arranged to rent mechanical pickers and threshers to farmers at a low fee in order help them increase peanut acreage.

-17-

Here we see young women removing flawed or shriveled peanuts from a conveyor belt at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-18-

This is a view of some of the chain belts that powered the conveyors at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

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During the Great Depression, times were hard in Edenton, as they were throughout most of the North Carolina coast.

Somewhere between a quarter and a half of the town’s citizens were on some kind of public relief. Unemployment rose above 25%. Few could afford doctors or medicines. In many homes, mothers and fathers struggled to keep food on the table. Many cut back, trying to get by on one meal a day.

Far too many grew far too acquainted with hunger and malnutrition.

Against that background, the success of the two local peanut plants — no matter how hard the work, no matter how poorly it paid — was one of the few bright spots in Edenton’s business scene.

In the words of the Raleigh News & Observer Jan. 19, 1933,  the two plants were “a great help to the destitute condition of many Edenton families.”

Between them, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co. employed some 150 to 200 workers in season and the peanut industry overall was one of the town’s largest employers.

In this photograph, one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers is sewing up burlap bags of peanuts to prepare them for shipment.

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In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers carting bags of peanuts out to the plant’s loading dock.

Looking back now, the transformation of Eastern North Carolina’s economy that occurred in the scant few years between the earliest photograph in this group– during the Great Depression in 1937– and the last, on the eve of World War II, was almost breathtaking.

As the nation prepared for war, massive federal investments in the construction of military installations, defense industries, and shipyards especially on the North Carolina coast– and a tremendous infusion of federal dollars into supporting agriculture– proved to be a life-changing moment for countless families and for the future of the region.

During the Great Depression, incredibly high unemployment and the collapse of crop prices had been devastating for Eastern North Carolina.

That all changed during the war. By 1943, the War Department had actually declared the whole region to be a “labor shortage zone,” a designation that meant that the federal government should not target the area for other military projects out of concern that there might not be an adequate supply of civilian labor to build or support them.

Even as early as 1941, when many of these photographs were taken, a general shortage of rural labor was being felt throughout Eastern North Carolina, and the federal government’s push for increasing peanut acreage was one of many special challenges.

To address that wartime labor shortage– and regrettably, also to resist demands from African American workers to raise wages and improve working conditions– peanut farmers in northeastern North Carolina often turned to migrant farm workers and to German and Italian POWs.

In 1943, for example, the War Manpower Commission recommended that 1,500 POWs be sent to northeastern North Carolina for the peanut harvest. Five hundred Italian POWs were assigned just to the peanut harvest in Bertie, Hertford, and Martin counties.

That same year, a temporary camp for Italian POWS was erected at a baseball field in Tarboro, in Edgecombe County, just to supply labor for the local peanut harvest.

An article in the Durham Herald-Sun indicated that the Italian POWs at the Tarboro camp were mainly from Sicily and from Italy’s colonies in North Africa – so they may have included men from what are now Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and/or Somalia.

The next year, 1944, state records indicated that POWs alone harvested a total of 9,141 acres of peanuts in Eastern North Carolina. Asheville Citizen Times, Feb. 22, 1945.

For most of the war, the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, also directed migrant laborers to the region’s peanut fields.

In the fall of 1943, the FSA even opened a special government-run migrant labor camp in Enfield, in Halifax County, to house 400-500 peanut harvest workers.

Even as late as the fall of 1945, after the war was over, state and federal manpower agencies diverted hundreds of Bahamian laborers to northeastern North Carolina’s peanut fields.

That year the short-lived Naval Air Station in Edenton also temporarily housed POWs. They were only there during the peanut harvest, then returned to a POW camp in Ahoskie. Salisbury Post, Sept. 4, 1945.

-21-

These may be bags of unshelled peanuts waiting to be carried into the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant or they may be bags of processed peanuts waiting to be trucked out or shipped out by railroad.

In that day, a large percentage of the South’s peanut crop as a whole was bound for oil mills and peanut butter factories. Some of the peanuts that came through the Albemarle Peanut Co. no doubt had the same destination.

That said, compared to peanut varieties grown elsewhere, there was an especially high demand for the “Virginia style” peanut variety that was most commonly grown in Tidewater Virginia and in northeastern North Carolina for use as “cocktail peanuts” and for roasting.

In those last days before the war, there was really no telling where these peanuts were bound. Some of them may even have ended up on foreign battlefields, either in the packs of American soldiers or those of soldiers from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or one of our other allies.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend a special thanks to the USDA’s James Davis III for helping me to interpret the scenes in these photographs. A third-generation peanut farmer in Palmyra, N.C., Mr. Davis was North Carolina’s “Small Farmer of the Year” in 2002 and is now a chief program officer at the USDA’s office in Raleigh.

Mr. Davis told me that some of his knowledge of peanut farming came from his farming days, some from his studies at N.C. A&T, and some from his long years as a county farm agent and director of the USDA’s office in Halifax County, N.C.

Above all, he told me, his most important teachers were his father and grandfather, the latter of whom grew up sharecropping in Edgecombe County, N.C., and ended up buying and operating his own farm in Palmyra just after the Second World War.

I am very grateful for his assistance, and I hope very much that I did justice to his lessons.

Thank you too to Professor Katherine Charron at N.C. State University and the Grant family in Tillery for introducing me to Mr. Davis.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Today I would like to introduce a series of photo-essays that I will be publishing here over the next few weeks. Each of the photo-essays — some very brief, some longer — will focus on the working lives of people in eastern North Carolina just before, during, and after the Second World War.

The longest of the photo-essays features 22 historical photographs. In the shortest ones, though, I will try to build a story around a much smaller group of photographs, and sometimes only a single picture.

In all cases, I have based my stories on photographs that are part of the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh.

Between 1937 and 1951, the department photographers created a collective portrait of the state’s farms, industries, and working people. Some of the photographs were used in state publications or shared with magazines and newspapers. The vast majority, though, have not appeared in print.

Few of the photographs have the kind of artistic qualities that we see in the classic tradition of American documentary photography. For example, in the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, photographs of life in America during the Great Depression.

Nonetheless, I find something extremely compelling about them. Perhaps above all, I am drawn to the way that the photographs take us into fields and factories that are rarely if ever included in the stories that we historians tell about the history of North Carolina.

They are not romanticized images of working people. They are more matter of fact, more hard nosed and grittier.

These are images from down by the railroad tracks. From the warehouse district. From the engine room.

From the fields. From the lumberyards. From the textile mills. In one case, even from an actor’s makeup room.

In many of them, you can feel how hot it was, or how cold, the strain of the long days, the dangers that the people in them stood up to, all for the sake of making a living and looking after their families.

In some, you can see the pride that the people in these photographs took in their toil and craftsmanship. In others, you look at the people’s faces and wonder how they kept going.

The photographs that I am featuring are only a very small portion of the historical photographs in the Department of Conservation and Development Collection.

I have chosen to sort them into nearly 20 photo-essays featuring a total of 100 photographs in all.

The photographs that I have chosen were all taken in eastern North Carolina, basically east of I-95 today. Some were taken quite close to where I grew up on the North Carolina coast, a few even look at a sweet potato harvest on my great-uncle’s farm in Carteret County.

Others take us into different fields and factories, mills and migrant camps, remote fishing camps and distant seas.

My choice of photographs may seem eclectic at times. But I picked each photograph, or group of photographs, because I thought that they offered a special window into some important aspect of the history of eastern North Carolina, and because I thought that they led us to interesting stories.

I hope you enjoy all of the photo-essays. I will begin the series sometime in the next few days with the longest, which focuses on photographs of threshers in peanut fields near Edenton, at the end of the Great Depression and in the days just before the Second World War.

Even in that very provincial sounding subject — threshers on a peanut farm — I think you may be surprised where the story leads.

As I worked my way through the photographs from that long ago peanut farm, I was introduced to a host of unexpected stories and working people. Just in those few handfuls of photographs, you will meet Bahamian migrant laborers, POWs from North Africa, a pioneering black inventor from Southampton County, Virginia, and Mr. Peanut, among others.

You may also learn, at least I hope you will, a surprising amount about peanuts, the history of peanut farming, the evolution of farm labor and farm machinery, and the national security crisis that led to the dramatic expansion of peanut farming during the Second World War.

To say nothing of plenty of fun facts about the invention of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Baby Ruths.

Above all, and all kidding aside, I hope that these stories will help you to look at these men and women, and sometimes mere children, with a sense of kinship, a feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood.

Next in the series: “In the Peanut Fields of Edenton, 1937-41”

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

This is a special group of photographs that were taken on the Roanoke River, just west of Plymouth in the spring of 1939. Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they show the last days of two of the oldest herring seine fisheries on the North Carolina coast.

One of the herring fisheries, on the north side of the river, was called Kitty Hawk. The other, on the river’s south bank, was called Slade. They were owned by a local merchant, farmer and banker named W.R. “Roy” Hampton, whose family had operated the two fisheries since the first decade after the Civil War.

This is the first in a series of photo essays I’m writing on working lives on the North Carolina coast just before, during, and after the Second World War. The photographs all come from the N. C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh. 

In an interview with East Carolina University graduate student Charles L. Heath Jr. in 1997, Roy Hampton’s son recalled that the fishermen at his family’s fisheries had historically come from a community called Piney Woods, also known as Free Union, a historic multiracial settlement established by free African Americans and Native Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Over the years, I have written a good bit about the history of the herring fisheries on the Albemarle Sound and on two of its tributaries, the Chowan River, a blackwater stream that flows out of the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Roanoke, which flows out of the Appalachian foothills.

I imagine that the same could be said of all historians who have studied that part of the North Carolina coast in any depth.

For centuries, for millennia really, the herring fisheries were at the very heart of life on those shores.

Yearning to return to the waters where they began their lives, the herring left the Atlantic in the last days of winter and the first days of spring. Since time immemorial, great schools of the fish moved through Outer Banks inlets, passed into Albemarle Sound, and then continued upstream into the rivers and creeks that were their spawning grounds.

In a typical year, millions of fish, maybe billions, made the journey. By the 1840s and 1850s, when thousands of free and enslaved African Americans harvested herring in giant seines a mile or more in length, they sometimes caught 100,000 fish in a single haul and, on rare occasions, as many as half a million.

That was at the great seine fisheries on the Albemarle Sound, which were basically larger versions of the kind of fishery in these photographs from Plymouth. But the silvery little fish were there for one and all. On small creeks and streams, as well as in ditches, even the poorest souls could catch herring with a homemade bow net or a bushel basket.

Despite all I have written about the history of the herring fisheries, these photographs from Plymouth still stood out to me. They may not be as grand and awe-inspiring as some of the photographs, drawings, and paintings I have seen of the seine fisheries that flourished on the Albemarle Sound in earlier times, but I found them at least as compelling.

In the first place, they give us a glimpse at the seine fisheries on the Roanoke. I have previously written a little on the Roanoke’s herring fisheries, but both contemporary accounts and my and the work of other historians has focused far more on the even larger and more eye-opening fisheries that flourished on the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River in the 19th century.

But African American fishermen, both free and enslaved laborers, were hauling herring seines on the Roanoke all that time as well. Even as late as 1896, several hundred fishermen and women operated eight seine fisheries within 10 miles of Plymouth.

Those fisheries included Kitty Hawk and Slade in Plymouth, two others 10 miles upriver in Jamesville, and four more downriver, between Plymouth and the Cashie River.

Each of those fisheries was the center of a little world. Each had its own history and its own folkways. No doubt each had its own celebrations, for there was no time of year when bellies were likely to be fuller or money more abundant.

No doubt each left its own scars too. The work was hard, the hours long — before sunup to past sundown — and the weather was often brutally cold. If ice had to be broken to make a set, ice was broken.

All of those fisheries were bound to the local history of slavery and plantation life, as well as, in many cases, to African American/Indian communities such as Piney Woods/Free Union.

At the very least, these photographs remind us that the Roanoke was once a place of abundance, and that the lives of its people were once bound inextricably to the natural world.

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I also found these photographs compelling because of when they were taken.

The photographer, who was employed by the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, took the last of these photographs in the first few days of May 1939.

A few days later, the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries closed for the last time. For reasons I will discuss shortly, Roy Hampton had decided that the size of the herring catches had fallen so drastically that he could no longer justify the expense of labor, fishing gear and provisions.

The next winter, for the first time since before the Civil War, no seine fishermen made the journey down to the site of the Hampton family’s fisheries. The fishery’s women workers, the African American women who headed, gutted, and often helped salt the fish, also stayed home.

At least on that part of the Roanoke, the age of fishermen hauling the great herring seines and of raucous crowds gathering to watch them and dine on fried herring dinners was over.

Seen in that light, these photographs mark an historic moment: the end of one way of life, the coming of another, yet unknown.

 -3-

A final compelling feature of these photographs concerns the reason that Roy Hampton closed the two fisheries. He and many other fishermen were convinced that the steep decline in herring catches was due to the construction of a giant pulp mill on the Roanoke in 1937.

A division of a large, national wood and paper products corporation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the North Carolina Pulp Co. located its mill just upriver of the scenes in these photographs.

Plymouth, a small town of a couple thousands residents at that time, had never seen anything like it. The company’s smokestacks came to dominate the town’s skyline, as did the sulfurous smell of its furnaces. The company quickly bought or leased timberlands in at least five coastal counties, and thousands, many of them desperate to get off tenant farms, flocked to Plymouth to get jobs either in the mill or the company’s logging crews.

The arrival of the pulp mill made Plymouth into a “company town,” with the company being the North Carolina Pulp Co.

According to Hampton, the fishermen at the Slade and Kitty Hawk fisheries began seeing dramatic declines in their catches as soon as the pulp mill began releasing wastes into the Roanoke. The river’s waters smelled of sulfur, they claimed, and some reported fish kills.

At the end of the 1939 herring season, Hampton shuttered the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries. He kept them closed in 1940. Then, instead of reopening in 1941, he went to court.

In a pair of state and federal lawsuits, Hampton accused the North Carolina Pulp Co. of dumping untreated or inadequately treated sulphates into the Roanoke, poisoning the river’s waters and destroying the herring fisheries.

In a subsequent federal lawsuit, filed in 1943, Hampton sought $30,000 in damages, an enormous sum in that day. That lawsuit referred to the pulp mill’s wastes as “a wrongful and unlawful trespass and nuisance, destroying the fish inhabiting the water” where his fisheries were located.

At that time, Hampton could do little else. Prior to the Second World War, no state agency had the authority to regulate industrial pollutants or to set standards for pollutants in our waterways.

Federal law also provided very little meaningful regulation of pollutants.

That did not begin to change until the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Act of 1948.

Even then, federal regulation of water quality had little teeth. That did not change until environmental activists succeeded in pushing the Nixon Administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and prompted Congress to pass the Clean Water Act of 1972.

If the Trump Administration lives up to its promises, the EPA will be dismantled over the next four years. The Clean Water Act of 1972 may or may not continue to exist in name, but the protections that it has provided to our rivers and streams, to our fisheries, and to public health will disappear.

-4-

During the Second World War, Roy Hampton’s attorneys had some success in court, winning on issues of standing at the North Carolina Supreme Court and at the U. S. Court of Appeals in Richmond. For a summary of those court rulings, see Hampton v. N. C. Pulpwood Co.

However, the case does not seem to have gone any further. That may have been because of legal rulings in the lower courts, but it may also have been simply that Hampton lost heart and eventually accepted that the pulp mill, not the fisheries, was Plymouth’s future.

-5-

One by one, the last of the Roanoke’s herring seine fisheries closed. Slade and Kitty Hawk were among the last. I am aware of only one other seine fishery that was still in operation at the end of the Second World War.

That seine fishery was in Jamesville, seven miles upriver of the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries.

According to an April 16, 1950, story in the Raleigh News & Observer, that fishery was owned by C.C. Fleming, a businessman and political leader in Jamesville. Gus Hooper, a veteran African American waterman, was the head fisherman and the captain of the fishery’s seine boat.

The Jamesville fishery was still in business in 1955. At that time, the News & Observer April 24, 1955, referred to the seine fishery as “the only one of its type on the entire eastern seaboard.”

That herring season may have been the last for Fleming’s seine fishery. I cannot find any historical references to it after 1955.

Seines versus Bow Nets

I should note that many of the Roanoke’s herring fishermen did not shed tears over the demise of the seine fisheries.

Historically, many of the river’s people believed, probably with good reason, that the big seine fisheries took more than their fair share of herring — and shad, rockfish, perch and other fish to boot. In those people’s eyes, the seine fisheries deprived those of lesser means of food for their dinner tables.

As UNC-Chapel Hill professor Harry Watson showed in a splendid 1996 article in the Journal of American History, the more prosperous owners of seine fisheries and those who lived more hand-to-mouth had battled over access to the migratory fish on that part of the North Carolina coast since the 18th century.

They continued to do so even in the dying days of seine fishing.

C. C. Fleming’s seine fishery in Jamesville was a case in point. In 1952-53, Fleming used his political influence to persuade state legislators to give him a virtual monopoly over herring fishing on a mile-long stretch of the Roanoke.

-6-

Though an ominous sign of things to come, the closing of the seine fisheries in Plymouth and Jamesville did not mean the end of herring fishing on the Roanoke River.

For another half century, the arrival of the herring on the Roanoke remained a festive event. Up and down the river, people continued to catch herring. They just did not use the kinds of large seines, such as the ones in our photographs, that only made financial sense if there was a greater bounty of herring to be had.

Instead, they used a wide variety of lesser gear, including dragnets, bow nets, and even a device called a “fish wheel.”

Over that time, local festivals still celebrated the arrival of the herring. Churches and other community groups marked the season with fried herring dinners. Fresh and salt herring remained staples in local homes.

The herring’s spawning runs continued to decline however. For a time, a herring fishery and cannery was still flourishing 25 miles to the north of Plymouth, on the Chowan River, but even it collapsed in the 1990s.

In response, fishery regulators eventually took the drastic step of banning all herring fishing on North Carolina’s inland waters. They hoped that the herring population would recover some of its health if there was a period of time without any commercial or recreational harvest of the fish.

For the first time in thousands of years, no herring were legally caught on the Albemarle or its tributaries, including the Roanoke, beginning with the spring spawning runs of 2007.

That ban is still in effect. We are still waiting for our waters to be restored. We are still waiting for our rivers to know again an abundance of life. And we are still waiting for the herring to come back home.

-End-

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

I would like to share a collection of historical photographs from the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

They were taken by inspectors and other personnel of the United States Lighthouse Board (1852-1910) and its successor agency, the United States Lighthouse Service (1910-1939), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Lighthouse Board, and then the Lighthouse Service, had the responsibility for building and maintaining lighthouses in the U.S., but also for placing and tending many other kinds of critically important navigational aids, including range lights, buoys, light beacons, daymarks and others.

Many of those different types of navigational aids can be seen in the selection of photographs that I am featuring here. They are all from the North Carolina coast, and they date to the years 1885-1917.

As you’ll see, they include some of the most iconic historical images of the state’s lighthouses.

However, for me the portraits of lighthouses are not the stars of the show. Even if it’s just because of their rarity and freshness, I was more drawn to many of the lesser-known photographs that I found in College Park.

In particular, I was excited to find so many photographs that highlight the historic use and importance of other, rather less majestic types of navigational aides. In some cases, I had rarely, if ever, seen them discussed in books and articles on North Carolina’s maritime history.

I am thinking, for instance, of the system of range lights that have guided vessels on the Cape Fear River since the early 19th century, or the far from glamorous lens lantern at Wreck Point, just off the point of Cape Lookout, that helped so many pilots find refuge from storms in the Cape’s lee.

Many of the photographs also give us a rare view of the behind-the-scenes work that was necessary to maintain a functional system of navigational aids on the North Carolina coast.

In this case, I am thinking, for example, of several photographs that I found in College Park of the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s buoy depot that was in the port of Washington for more than half a century.

Or, as another example, I might refer you to the handful of photographs that I have included here that feature the U.S. Lighthouse Board’s gas works at Long Point Island on Currituck Sound. At that remote outpost, the U.S. Lighthouse Board’s keepers manufactured the compressed gas that was used in gas buoys over a large swath of the North Carolina coast.

Those photographs may not come with some of the romantic connotations that we so often associate with lighthouses. Yet for me at least, each of them opens a window into an important, unsung part of the state’s maritime history — and helps us to see and understand that coastal world a little bit better.

— 2 —

By most accounts, the history of navigation aids in the U.S. began with the construction of the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island in 1716.

Records of buoys and beacons in colonial America are notoriously sparse, though. According to Amy K. Marshall’s “A History of Buoys and Tenders,” there are records of cask buoys in the Delaware River in 1767 and of spar buoys in Boston Harbor as early as 1780, but not much else.

I suspect that there were at least some local buoys and beacons, and perhaps a great many, on North Carolina waters by that time as well, but the earliest I have found were wooden slats positioned to mark a channel on the Cape Fear River, below Wilmington, in the 1790s.

The framework for a more national system of navigational aids in the U.S. began to take shape around that same time. Soon after Independence, the First Congress passed an An act for the establishment and support of light-houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers that placed the responsibility for navigational aides under the authority of the Treasury Department.

Navigational aids continued to have a largely local character, and often differed widely from place to place, however, until 1848, when the U.S. Congress adopted a system of buoyage with uniform shapes, colors, and numbering — the so-called Lateral System, that, with some minor modifications, is still in use today.

— 3 —

Croatan Lighthouse in the channel between Croatan Sound and Albemarle Sound in 1914.

At that time, the Croatan Light was one of 14 manned lighthouses built on piles on North Carolina waters. The Wade Point, North River, Laurel Point, and Roanoke River lighthouses all stood on the Albemarle Sound or at the mouth of its tributaries.

The Long Shoal, Hatteras Inlet, Bluff Shoal, Gull Shoal, Brant Island, Southwest Point Royal Shoal, and Pamlico Point lighthouses were all located on Pamlico Sound.

The Croatan Lighthouse was northwest of Roanoke Island. Another lighthouse, the Harbor Island Light, was located at the entrance to Core Sound, not far from Portsmouth Island, and the Neuse River Lighthouse stood off Piney Point at the entrance to the Neuse River. According to the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office, the Croatan Lighthouse had a 4th Order Fresnel Lens, as well as a fog bell that struck every 15 seconds when in use. 

— 4 —

This might be my favorite photograph of a U.S. Lighthouse Service navigational aid on the North Carolina coast. It’s a rather jerry-built back range light situated in a tree in downtown Edenton.

A front range light is evidently somewhere out in Edenton Harbor.

The front and back range lights worked together. When aligned visually, one directly behind the other, range lights indicated the route of safe passage on a river or other body of water. In this case, Edenton Harbor.

To be seen properly, the back range light had to be at least somewhat elevated above the front light, which in this case was achieved with nature’s help.

— 5 —

Debbie Mollycheck, who is the authority on the history of the Cape Fear river lights, recently told me that this photograph was probably taken during the Palmetto’s first inspection tour of the Lower Cape Fear.

The Palmetto had just recently been commissioned a shallow water tender. Ms. Mollycheck also informed me that the gentleman with his hands on his hips was the Palmetto’s master, Emil F. Redell. A family attorney by trade, Ms. Mollycheck is the granddaughter of Franto Mollycheck II, a later keeper of the Cape Fear river lights.

She has done extensive research on the river’s light keepers and is currently writing a history of those keepers and of the 6th Lighthouse District as a whole. You can learn more about her work online.

— 6 —

According to Debbie Mollycheck, Berry was an African American waterman who was born into slavery in Brunswick County in 1855. Her research has shown that Berry had been tending lights on the Lower Cape Fear since 1885.

At the time of this photograph, he had the day-in and day-out responsibility for maintaining the lights along a 14-mile section of the river from Upper Lilliput Channel to the Atlantic. This photograph was taken on the same inspection tour of the Lower Cape Fear that I referenced in the photograph above.

Keeper Berry was presumably guiding Capt. Redell and the Palmetto’s crew on the tour, with his boat being towed by the Palmetto and used when they needed to reach navigational aids on sections of the river too shallow for the Palmetto. You can learn more about Ms. Mollycheck’s research here, and I am hoping that I will be able to share more of her research on Henry Berry here sometime soon.

— 7 —

This is a rare portrait of the U.S. Lighthouse Service buoy depot in Washington March 1914. The depot was one of three or four in the Life-Saving Service’s 5th District, which extended from the Delaware coast to New Inlet, on the central part of the North Carolina coast.

At this site, personnel stored and maintained — painted, rebuilt, sometimes assembled — the buoys and beacons that were used throughout much of the North Carolina coast.

The depot was just below the town’s bridge across the Pamlico River, where its wharf was a popular, if apparently illicit swim spot for local kids. On the righthand side of this photograph, we can see the depot keeper’s house. In 1914, the keeper was Capt. T. F. Smith, a Life-Saving Service veteran who had previously been keeper of the Cape Hatteras Light for 19 years and the Ocracoke Light for 12 years. On the left, a side wheel steamer is docked on the Pamlico.

I can’t be sure — no Life-Saving Service tender was ever based at the depot — but the steamer looks a lot like the Sidewheel Lighthouse Tender Jessamine.

— 8 —

The U.S. Life-Saving Service used several different kinds of buoys to mark the locations of channels to warn of shoals and other dangers, and, in some cases, to indicate anchorage grounds.

Built of iron or steel plates and weighing anywhere from 700 to over 8,000 pounds, buoys such as these were moored to the bottom by a heavy chain attached to a concrete block, stone or cast-iron sinker. A cast-iron ballast ball, tethered directly below the buoy, kept them steady in rough seas and high winds.

Pilots could navigate in and out of a harbor, up or down a river or through another other kind of channel by eyeing the colors, numbers, and shapes of the buoys.

The maintenance and replacement of buoys was one of the U.S. Lifesaving Board and U.S. Lighthouse Service’s most important jobs, and a never-ending one.

As the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s annual report for 1915 said, “buoys are liable to be carried away, dragged, capsized, or sunk, as a result of ice or storm action, collision, and other accidents…, [but] great effort is made … to maintain them on station in an efficient condition, which frequently requires strenuous and hazardous exertions on the part of the vessels charged with this duty.” 

— 9 —

Another view of what I believe is the U.S. Lighthouse Service paddlewheel tender Jessamine tied up at the buoy depot in Washington, March 1914.

Built at the Malster & Reaney shipyard in Baltimore in 1881, the Jessamine was based at the 5th Lighthouse District’s headquarters in Baltimore but her crew built and maintained lighthouses and tended buoys and other navigational aides across much of the North Carolina coast.

Like all U.S. Lighthouse Service tenders, Jessamine was a tough, seaworthy vessel, constructed with a hull, deck framing, and the rest of her superstructure having “a large reserve of strength,” to quote a 1915 U.S. Lighthouse Service report.

Lighthouse tenders had to be capable of handling violent storms on the open ocean, as well as to navigate along shoals where shallow draft and a solid hull, capable of putting up with accidental groundings, was required.

Note the Jessamine’s forward mast, which doubled as a derrick for construction work and for hoisting and lowering buoys. The Jessamine was not, by the way, the only U.S. Lighthouse Service tender with a botanical name.

Since 1867, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had named its lighthouse tenders after trees, flowers, or other plants, generally ones native to the area where a tender operated.

— 10 —

In June 1900, crews from the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s predecessor agency, the U.S. Lighthouse Board, placed lens lantern at Wreck Point to help guide vessels seeking a lee inside Cape Lookout.

Erected at the barb at the point of Cape Lookout Bight, the light was a welcome sight for many a mariner caught offshore in heavy weather. The Wreck Point Light gives some sense of the diversity of navigational aides built and maintained by the U.S. Lighthouse Board and the U.S. Lighthouse Service.

According to The United States Lighthouse Survey for the year 1915, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had 14,554 navigational aides in commission in U.S. waters as of that year. They included lighthouses, so-called “minor lights” that are not tended by resident keepers, light vessels, gas buoys, float lights, and a wide variety of unlighted aids such as bell and whistle buoys, fog signals, and day beacons.

— 11 —

The beacon in this photograph was a temporary replacement for a slatted, 3-pile structure that was crushed by ice in the great freeze of December 1917 to January 1918.

That cold spell devastated both U.S. Lighthouse Service navigational aids and a great deal of maritime infrastructure. The ice cut away wharves and piers, took out beacons, and severely damaged at least two lighthouses. The North River Lighthouse was washed off its foundation after ice shattered its pilings. A buildup of ice also knocked askew the Norfolk & Southern’s railroad bridge across the Albemarle Sound.

According to the Jan. 25, 1918, Daily Advance in Elizabeth City, the weight of the ice made the bridge “as crooked as a snake” and a 1,000-plus foot section of the track fell into the Albemarle. Boats of all kinds were frozen in the ice; some, like the U.S. Coast Survey’s Matchless, were sunk. With no freight boats running, mail and other supplies did not reach Roanoke Island and a large section of the Outer Banks for three to four weeks.

When the ice finally broke up, U.S. Lighthouse Service crews had their hands full replacing and repairing buoys, beacons, and other navigational aids. A freeze that bad was unusual, but losing navigational aids to storms was not and kept the U.S. Lighthouse Service busy. Only a few years earlier, for instance, a 1913 hurricane destroyed 20 post lights on Pamlico and Albemarle Sound, washed out many government wharves and outbuildings, and did serious damage both to the buoy station in Washington, and to nine light stations from Ocracoke Island to Pamlico Point, according to the Washington Progress, Oct. 13, 1913.

— 12 —

The Wade Point Light Station at the mouth of the Pasquotank River was another lighthouse damaged in the great freeze of 1917-18. A screw-pile structure, the light was originally built in 1855 but was rebuilt at least once and maybe twice after Confederate guerrillas burned the superstructure during the Civil War.

It was rebuilt again in the 1890s. The station’s light and 26 x 26 cottage rested on five metal pilings roughly 12 feet above the water. During the freeze, a buildup of ice pushed the pilings to one side and left the superstructure in danger until repairs could be made to stabilize the foundation.

— 13 —

— 14 —

–15–

This is a view looking down from the U.S. Lighthouse Service tender Jessamine at the gas plant that was located at the Long Point Light Station, March 1893. Established in 1879, the station ran the gas plant in order to make the compressed gas that was used to light buoys throughout that part of the North Carolina coast.

At that time, the technology was still quite new. The country’s first gas buoy had only been deployed 12 years earlier, in 1881 at the entrance to New York Bay. Gaslit buoys were the wave of the future however. By 1915, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had more than 500 gas buoys in operation.

By then, all of the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s lighted buoys utilized compressed gas, either oil gas or acetylene. U.S. Lighthouse Service personnel deployed the gas buoys widely to mark the the entrances of rivers, inlets, and canals, as well as to signal shoals, jetties, and other dangers, as well as the paths of channels.

— 16 —

The brick building on the right is the Long Point Light Station’s retort house, where special equipment distilled and compressed the oil gas that was used in the region’s U.S. Lighthouse Board light buoys. On the left, we can see one of the two brick cisterns that were used for storing the gas. The rest of the gas works is in the background. According to research by Currituck Sound teacher and historian (and my friend) Barbara Snowden, the resulting gas was what was typically called at the time “Pintsch gas.”

Named after its inventor, a German tinsmith and manufacturer named Carl Friedrich Julius Pintsch, it was a compressed fuel gas created from distilled naphtha. Pintsch’s firm pioneered its use in buoys in the 1870s, and the U.S. Lighthouse Service used the gas extensively in buoys and other lighted navigational aides through the First World War, when it was largely replaced by acetylene.

Widely used in railroad cars as well, “Pintsch gas” could often light a buoy for a couple months or longer without refilling.

— 17 —

Originally built in 1817, the lighthouse was long a welcome sight to mariners at the entrance to the Cape Fear River. In July 1834, Capt. Henry D. Hunter of the revenue cutter Tanker described the Light as having 15 lamps, being 109 feet above the level of the sea, and showing a fixed light.

On an inspection tour two years later, he reported, “The keeper is an old Revolutionary [War] soldier and is unable from sickness to give the lighthouse his constant personal attention. The light, however, shows well from a distance,” according to the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.

— 18 —

The Keeper’s House at the Ocracoke Light Station, May 1893. You can’t see it in this photograph, but the Ocracoke Lighthouse, built in 1823, is just a few feet to the north.

I would expect that the three individuals in the photo are the light station’s keeper at that time, Enoch Ellis Howard, his wife Cordelia, and one of their daughters or granddaughters. According to Ellen Cloud’s book, “Ocracoke Lighthouse,” Enoch Ellis Howard was born on Ocracoke in 1833, became keeper of the light during the Civil War, and died while still serving as the Light Station’s keeper in 1897.

He was one of many Ocracoke Howards who made their livings following the sea one way or the other as ship’s pilots, mariners, coast guardsmen, and in other maritime trades, including, some say, one who was a member of Blackbeard’s crew in the early 1700s. 

Phillip Howard’s Village Craftsmen Journal is a wonderful place to learn more about the history of the Howard family on Ocracoke, as well as much else about the island’s history.

— 19 —

As I mentioned earlier, range lights are a pair of lit beacons placed some distance from one another, with the back light elevated higher than the front light. By lining up the two beacons, ship pilots could identify the channel that would afford safe passage through shallow or dangerous waters. They are sometimes used to fix position as well.

— 21 —

In addition to lighted navigational aids, the U.S. Lighthouse Service also built and maintained thousands of navigational aids that were not lighted– so-called “daymarks” that were only meant to be visible from sunrise to sunset. This 32-foot high structure, for instance, helped pilots get their bearings at the Little River Inlet, roughly 50 miles south of Wilmington.

— 22 —

Cape Lookout Light Station, 1889. I don’t know if I’ve seen a photograph that better captures the austere beauty of the Cape in that day and time. The building on the far right is the original Keeper’s Quarters, built in 1812 and apparently abandoned by this point in time. On both sides of the lighthouse’s base, we can just glimpse the two chimneys of the second Keeper’s Quarters, built in 1873. The two outbuildings to the right of the lighthouse are an oil house and perhaps a coal shed or other storage building.

— 23 —

These are the ruins of the keeper’s dwelling at the Price’s Creek Light Station on the Cape Fear River, just upriver of Southport, June 1917. Built in 1849, the brick dwelling had a wooden lantern that served as one of the range lights that guided vessels through the river’s ship channel.

This structure has since been destroyed by storms, but the ruins of the second range light at Price Creek, a squat 20-foot high brick tower, have survived and can be easily seen from the Southport-Fort Fisher Ferry.

— 24 —

–end–

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who shares on his website essays and lectures about the state’s coast. He brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives where he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Over the last several years, I have written a series of photo essays focusing on Charles A. Farrell’s photographs of fishing communities on the North Carolina coast in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

This is the 10th and last essay that I am devoting to Farrell’s remarkable collection of photographs.

In this essay, I will showcase photographs that he took on Cedar Island, Wanchese, Manns Harbor and one or two other fishing villages that I have not previously featured in this series, as well as a few old favorites.

But I mainly want to do something else, and it is something that maybe I should have done when I began this series. At that time, I suppose that I was afraid that it would distract from the people and places in his photographs.

But now I think it is time to explain why Charles Farrell never published his extraordinary photographs and why he and his photographs were forgotten for so many years.

* * *

That story goes back to the 1930s when Farrell, and often his wife Anne, began traveling the backroads of the North Carolina coast.

At that time, they lived in Greensboro, where they ran an art supply business, camera store and photography studio called The Art Shop. But whenever they could spare the time, they headed east to the coast.

How Charles Farrell came to feel so akin to the state’s fishing communities has never been clear to me. His father was an itinerant tintype photographer who, after the Civil War, traveled from hamlet to hamlet, making portraits for people who had often never seen a camera before.

I have wondered if Charles’ father used to visit the fishing villages that his son later grew so entranced by, and if his father’s stories later led Charles to visit those communities and fall under their spell. But of course, I don’t really know.

What I do know though is that Charles kept returning to those fishing communities again and again, as if he was searching for some lost part of himself by the sea.

Beginning in 1936 or 1937, he began documenting life and work in dozens of the state’s fishing communities.

Those of you who live on or often visit the North Carolina coast will recognize the names of some of the places that he visited — Beaufort, Southport, Nags Head, Manteo, Edenton and others.

You may or may not recognize the names of some of the other places he visited: Terrapin Point, Colerain, Brown’s Island, Marines, Stumpy Point and others that barely exist anymore, though some of them were among the state’s most important centers of commercial fishing in the 1930s.

The most compelling thing about Farrell’s work to me has always been that he had a special eye for those who usually go unseen in historical photographs of North Carolina’s fishing communities: women, people of color, children and the aged.

In addition, Farrell carried his camera places that other photographers did not go: the insides of canneries and fish houses, the mess halls and engine rooms of fishing boats, salting sheds, net lofts, bunk houses and wherever else he found those who made their living from the sea.

Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, his photographs make up the fullest visual portrait of North Carolina’s fishing communities in the first half of the 20^th century in existence.

* * *

In the late 1930s, Farrell signed a contract with William Couch, the editor-in-chief at the University of North Carolina Press, to publish a book that would feature his photographs of North Carolina’s fishing communities.

Farrell never finished that book, however. The photographs were never published in a book or anywhere else. For decades, the prints and negatives remained in boxes, all but forgotten, presumably either at the Farrells’ home or shop in Greensboro.

As gifted as he was as a photographer, Farrell soon realized that he had not developed his talents as a writer and the book that he and Couch envisioned was to have been a combination of photographs and writing.

But something else was going on, too, which I realized while I was doing background research on Farrell’s life in preparation for writing the first photo essay in this series.

That photo essay was called “An Eye for Mullet: The Photographs of Charles A. Farrell.” In that first part of the series, I focused on just one group of photographs, which Farrell took at a mullet fishermen’s camp on Browns Island, in Onslow County, in 1938.

That photo-essay originally appeared in Southern Cultures, a scholarly journal published by the Center for the Study of the American South at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

What I discovered was that Farrell was struggling with what would eventually become an incapacitating mental illness while he was working on his book of coastal photographs.

I learned something of his illness from his family. I spoke with his younger sister, one of his sons and one of his nephews. All generously shared their recollections of Charles Farrell with me. I appreciated this especially because, at least for his son, it was painful to do so.

I also learned a good deal about Farrell’s mental illness from a collection of the family’s letters, diaries and other records that has been preserved at the Greensboro Historical Museum.

I still do not fully understand the nature of his ailment, however. All I know for sure is that he struggled to write the book in the early 1940s, when he first tried to put pen to paper. That is evident in a series of correspondence between Farrell and his editors that is preserved at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

But the fate of Farrell’s coastal photographs was really sealed a few years later, in 1948, when he was hospitalized in Greensboro.

While in the hospital, Charles Farrell underwent a neurosurgical treatment called a transorbital lobotomy.

They were better known as “icepick lobotomies.” The first one in the U.S., which was performed at George Washington University in 1936, was actually done with an icepick.

In performing the procedures, surgeons severed the connections to the brain’s prefrontal cortex by driving a surgical tool through the patient’s eye socket with a small mallet.

Most Americans know of lobotomies, if they know of them at all, one of two ways. Some recall that Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, had a prefrontal lobotomy in 1941. She was incapacitated the rest of her life, and the Kennedy family largely kept her out of the public eye.

Others remember the 1975 movie “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which was based on Ken Kesey’s wonderful book of the same name.

At the movie’s end, Randall McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, is forced against his will to have a lobotomy to repress his rebellion against the asylum in which he was being held.

The peak year for the procedure’s use in the U.S. was 1949, just after Charles Farrell’s surgery. In that year, surgeons performed more than 5,000 transorbital lobotomies in the U.S.

Particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, psychiatrists looked to the procedure for treating a host of mental illnesses for which they had no effective treatments at the time. Those mental illnesses ranged from schizophrenia to alcoholism.

The neurosurgeon most responsible for the procedure’s popularity in the U.S., Dr. Walter Freeman, referred to the desired effect as “surgically induced childhood.” Most patients, including Farrell, became passive, emotionally blunted and limited in their intellectual range.

The efficacy of transorbital lobotomies was widely debated. So was their morality. As early as 1950, some countries had banned them, considering them both ineffective and inhumane.

Reports of abuses of the procedure were also widespread.

In a sign of the mental health profession’s own maladies at that time, a strikingly disproportionate percentage of the procedures in the U.S. and other Western nations was done on women, often with an eye toward making them more docile and compliant.

There is also some evidence that Dr. Freeman, at least, was more inclined to perform transorbital lobotomies on African American patients than on white patients.

I have also read accounts of surgeons using icepick lobotomies as a “treatment” for same-sex attraction. In a case I recently discovered near my home, a psychiatrist apparently also used the procedure in an unsuccessful attempt to “cure” a decorated World War II veteran of his affection for cross dressing.

What led Farrell’s family and physicians to resort to a transorbital lobotomy is not clear to me. His surviving family, who were too young at the time to know for sure, suspect alcohol was involved.

But if the nature of his struggles is still mysterious, I do know this: Charles Farrell’s life as a photographer and artist ended on the day of his surgery.

When I spoke with his family, they told me that he lived a quiet, rather passive and apparently untroubled existence for the rest of his life. Unlike Rosemary Kennedy, he was never institutionalized, however. He could still speak intelligibly, and he still got around on his own a little.

When I talked with his younger sister, she recalled that he even sometimes caught a city bus and went downtown to visit with old friends.

After her husband’s surgery, Anne Farrell ran The Art Shop until it went out of business in the early 1960s. She and Charles both lived until 1977. He died at the age of 84, and she was a year younger.

After their deaths, their son Roger Farrell, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Cornell, donated more than a thousand of Charles’ photographs to the State Archives of North Carolina. Roger and I talked about his father not long before he passed away in 2017 at the age of 88.

 * * *

When he took these photographs, we now know, Farrell was a broken man or, at the very least, a man on the edge of breaking.

I wish he could have known how much his photographs would come to mean to those of us seeking to understand North Carolina’s coastal past.

I also wish that he could have seen what happened when I carried his photographs back to the fishing communities where he took them and visited with the descendants of the people in those photographs.

Or what happened when I carried them to local fishing docks, spread them out at fish houses, took them to family reunions and church homecomings and shared them on social media.

In several places, local people kindly hosted gatherings at community centers, local museums, and churches so that we could get together and look at the photographs and talk about them. At those events, we usually shared a supper and then I projected Farrell’s photographs on a screen.

How I wish he could have heard the memories that his photographs awakened, and the stories that spilled forth. How I wish he could have known the joy of it all, as we came face to face with his one true work of art, these portraits of a time and place bound deeply to the sea.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

A few years ago, I carried a box of Charles Farrell’s old photographs of the state’s great herring fisheries back to one of the communities on the Chowan River where he took them. The photographs are poignant and beautiful, and the herring workers in them are unforgettable, but I also find them a little haunting because they remind me of all that can be lost.

Farrell took the photographs between 1937 and 1941. At the time, he was documenting fishing communities up and down the North Carolina coast. Today they are preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh.

When I carried the photographs to the Chowan River, I was trying to find anyone at all that might be able to identify some of the people in them or tell me what it had been like to work in those legendary herring fisheries.

Herring had been important on the Chowan River for thousands of years. The Chowanoke, an Algonquin-speaking tribe, had fished for herring on the river for ages, and before them other indigenous people.

When the British took the land, they fished for herring, too. They had started commercial fishing on the river in the mid-1700s. Enslaved laborers from Africa and their descendants did most of the fishing and the shore work.

From the late 1700s until nearly the end of the 20th century, the river was home to one of the largest commercial fisheries for river herring in the U.S. Some say it was the largest in the world for a great part of that time. Local fishermen once caught millions of tons of herring a year on the river.

In a five-year period, between 1878 and 1883, a single fishery on the Chowan River harvested 15 million herring.

Even a century later, the herring were still coming. I’ll never forget visiting one of my favorite historians, Alice Eley Jones, on the Chowan River back in the 1990s. After living in the Raleigh-Durham area for many years, she had returned to her hometown of Murfreesboro, on the upper part of the river. Alice and I drove all around the river and its creeks that day while she talked about the importance of herring in the area’s history.

“Fish literally clogged these streams,” Alice told me. She was talking about when she was a girl. “You could wade into Vaughan Creek and pick them up with your hand or a bucket. It’s not like it was one or two fish. It was millions of fish!”

She went on:

“Everybody went herring fishing. Some would have dip nets. Some would have bow nets. People would go down here, catch the fish, clean the fish and fry the fish right on the shore. Churches would go. It was a community event, a time of fellowship and community.”

That has changed. The herring fishery suffered a slow decline during much of the 20th century and it collapsed completely in the 1980s and ’90s — a victim of increasingly poor water quality, grave habitat loss and probably at least a measure of overfishing both on inland waters and out in the Atlantic.

In a desperate gambit, state regulators closed the herring fishery altogether in 2007.  For the first time in history, nobody could legally catch a herring on the Chowan River. The regulators hoped that the herring might come back on their own if they were not being harvested at all. The fishery is still closed on the Chowan River and throughout the state’s waters.

Charles Farrell’s photographs remind us of a different time though, and perhaps they also give us a vision of what could be again if the river is restored to health. When Farrell visited the Chowan, great shoals of herring still migrated out of the Atlantic at the end of every winter and swam up into the Albemarle Sound and its tributaries to spawn.

The fish companies sent fresh herring, salted herring and canned herring roe far and wide, but herring were also a staff of life for people who lived on the river.

In hard times I don’t know how they would have survived without them. Few winter pantries did not have a keg or two of salt herring in them, and some families ate herring and sometimes not much else for breakfast, lunch and supper.

Many of the oldest people I know in that part of the state recall making long trips to the Chowan River to purchase herring when they were young. Many families made the journey on Easter Monday, which was always a festive time at the herring beaches. Farmers brought carts, too. They often purchased “trash fish” and offal and carried them back home to use as fertilizer on their fields.

Some paid in cash. Others traded corn from their fields, a country ham or a mess of collard greens.

For fishermen and shore laborers alike, their work in the herring fishery was only seasonal. The fish’s spawning runs usually lasted about three months, roughly from mid-February into May. Most of the men returned to farms or timber mills or something like that for the rest of the year. Many of the women shore workers that we see in Farrell’s photographs probably returned to domestic work and/or worked in other people’s fields.

These photographs came from at least two sites on the Chowan River. One was the Perry-Belch herring company in Colerain, a small town on the west side of the river in Bertie County. Most local people today remember it as the Perry-Wynn Fish Co. The ownership and name changed in 1952.

The other site is a herring fishing beach called Cannons Ferry. That beach is located on the edge of a hamlet called Tyner, which is on the other side of the river in Chowan County.

In addition to the photographs from the Chowan River, I’m also including here photographs from three other herring fisheries that Farrell visited on that part of the North Carolina coast.  They include the Brickell fishery near Edenton, the Terrapin Point fishery at the mouth of the Cashie River and the Kitty Hawk and/or Slades fishery in Plymouth, on the Roanoke River. All five fisheries are located within 25 miles of one another.

* * *

One of the things I like most about Charles Farrell’s photographs is that he never forgot how important women and children were to the fishing industry. In all his travels, he paid attention to both the men and women in fishing communities, and also to the children.

For that reason, we often see sides of the commercial fishing industry in Farrell’s photographs that we rarely see in the work of other photographers at that time — or now. He didn’t just visit fishermen, and he didn’t just photograph fishermen with their boats and nets.

Instead, Farrell also directed his camera’s lens toward the women and children heading and gutting fish, canning roe, peeling shrimp, mending nets and shucking oysters. It’s very unusual for that time and for today, too.

I don’t know, but I have wondered how much this focus on women’s work reflected his wife Anne’s influence. They were very much partners in his efforts to document the state’s fishing communities, as in the rest of their lives.

Anne Farrell was very knowledgeable about photography. She was the co-proprietor of their photo supply shop in Greensboro, and she ran the shop on her own for many years after he grew ill in the 1940s. She didn’t always accompany him on his trips to the coast, but she often did.

As I looked through the Charles A. Farrell Collection at the State Archives, I could even tell that she was sometimes the photographer, not him, because he appears in some of the photographs. I couldn’t begin to guess how often she was behind the camera. However, I do assume that she at least occasionally took coastal photographs that are attributed to him. She may also have occasionally influenced her husband’s choice of subjects, though again I don’t really know.

As I look at Farrell’s photographs, I am also struck by the central role that African Americans played in the herring fishery. I won’t say any more about that here, but I think the photographs speak for themselves.

I am a little disappointed that I wasn’t more successful at finding people that could fill in more of the details about the scenes in these photographs. Over the last few years, I’ve been carrying Farrell’s photographs back to the fishing communities where he took them and sharing them with the families of the men and women in the photographs.

I’ve also shared them with many local commercial fishermen and other coastal people that have a knowledge of the kinds of fishing that we see in the photographs. Their insights have been especially helpful in interpreting what is happening in the photographs in a deeper way.

Overall I feel as if I have been fairly successful. I have learned a tremendous amount from many different people who were kind enough to share their time and knowledge with me.

You can see the results in my photo essays featuring Farrell’s work in those other fishing communities. So far I’ve published pieces on the photographs that he took in Colington, Southport and at two sites in Onslow County, a mullet fishing camp at Brown’s Island and a village on the New River that was later destroyed to make way for the construction of Camp Lejeune.

Time has been passing though, and as we all know, time can be very unforgiving when we’re trying to hold onto the voices of the past. So far I have utterly failed at finding the people that might tell me more about these photographs of herring fisheries on the Chowan and elsewhere in northeastern North Carolina. I haven’t given up hope though. Perhaps someone will read this and say something like,” Well gracious, he should talk to my great-aunt Daphne!”

I will be waiting for that call.

* * *

Cannons Ferry seems a bit like a ghost town now. A few years ago, I drove down to that side of the Chowan River to see if I could find anybody that might be able to identify some of the people in Farrell’s photographs. I found a nice little boardwalk with signs that discuss the herring fishery’s history, and there’s a beautiful view of the river. But mostly I remember empty homes, old wharf pilings and a few abandoned cinderblock buildings.

I was hoping that I might even find some of the people that used to work at Cannons Ferry in the 1930s still alive or at least find their children or grandchildren that could tell me about them.

If I did, I hoped that they might be willing to sit a spell and tell me what it was like.

While I was down there, I did meet a group of local fishermen that had just come off the river. (They weren’t herring fishing.) We spread out copies of Farrell’s Chowan River photographs on one of their pickup trucks and looked at them together, which I think we all enjoyed.

They had things to tell me about herring fishing for sure, but every time they thought they might recognize one of the people in a photograph, they’d hesitate and say something like, “Well, they’ve been dead a long time now,” or “Their family moved away a long time ago.”

Cannons Ferry is a beautiful place, though so many of its old homes seem to have been abandoned and all that’s left of the fishery are those old pilings and the remains of old fish sheds. The river’s dark waters are broad there, the shores lined as far as you can see by cypress trees, and you can’t help but feel that you’re on the edge of something great and mysterious and wild.

I was there at dusk and when I looked out on the river, I saw hardly a light. I saw only mile after mile of the cypress glades that mark the edge of the great swamplands that reach north up into the Great Dismal.

Before getting in my car and heading home, I walked up the road a little toward those swamps, passing maybe a half-dozen old fish camps. I could hear a whippoorwill singing not too far off, and I thought about the people in these photographs, and how interesting and how beautiful they all look. As I walked along the shore, I thought I could almost hear their heartbeats.