GATHERING NORTH CAROLINA'S THIRD RICHEST CROP Photograph from Melville Chater While the turpentine products of her pine forests are on the decline, the State is still rich in timber resources. Its three belts are: the coastal plain (upland forests chiefly of pine), the piedmont plateau (pine forests mixed with hardwoods), and the mountains (hardwoods, but no pine). North Carolina has 24 varieties of oaks, eight of the nine known varieties of hickory, all of the maple, linden, and magnolia varieties known in the Eastern States, and eight varieties of pine out of eleven. Fifty-seven of the State's trees are listed as "of great economic value." The State's lumber products are worth $168,000,000 a year, or third in value after its textiles and manufactured tobacco. Economists have sounded the warning that the annual cut is double the annual tree growth, and that $1,250,000 goes up yearly in the smoke of forest fires. HARVESTING TOBACCO NEAR NEW BERN In a favorable year North Carolina produces as much as 140,000 tons of leaf tobacco, or between one-fourth and one-fifth of the national crop, with only Kentucky exceeding her. These kicking and squealing ponies have just been herded into Diamond Pen, Beaufort Banks. They are to be disinfected and selected for auctioning, and the foals are to be branded (see text, page 476, and illustrations, pages 480, 481, and 482). With the Great Armada impending and the consequent impressing of all English vessels into war service, communication with the little overseas colony was cut off for a time, but after Spain's maritime power had been shattered, White sailed again for Virginia. Instead of colonists he found, where the memorial stands today, evidences of a "secret token" whereby, if they had moved elsewhere, the colonists were to carve the name of their destination on a tree, indicating distress by adding the sign of the cross; for, near the deserted palisade, "on one of the chiefe trees, in fayre capital letters, was graven CROATAN, without any crosse or signe of distresse" (see page 477). THE LOST COLONY IS STILL ONE OF HISTORY'S MYSTERIES Though White was "greatly joyed" at this "certaine token" that the colonists were safe among the friendly Indians at near-by Croatan, imperative conditions. caused his return to England without following up the clue. Thereafter repeated search expeditions, persevered in for 12 years, yielded no trace of the Lost Colony. Was massacre or intermarriage the fate of that intrepid handful of English men and women who vanished in the wilderness? Thirteen years later travelers heard that they were living along the banks of the Neuse; forty years still later one John Lawson was told by Croatan Indians that they were descended from white men; and in 1715 settlers gaining the mid-section of North Carolina found the ancestors of the present-day Croatans plowing, holding slaves, and speaking English. Finally, the modern Croatans themselves, using an archaic English and in many cases bearing the surnames of those who disappeared from Roanoke, claim descent from the Lost Colony. As for the ill-starred Raleigh-his fortune exhausted, himself attainted for treason, his colonial proprietorship escheated to the Crown-he valiantly declared of Virginia, "I shall yet live to see it an English nation," and died in the faith of his dream. Seventy-six years after the fade-out of the Lost Colony, Charles II elevated eight of his courtiers into Lords Proprietors over a vast, vaguely defined territory, naming it after himself, Carolina. Adventurous spirits from the already successful colony at Jamestown settled along the Chowan River; Barbadian English settled along the Cape Fear, and Germans, French, and Scotch-Irish, arriving between 1711-1725, constituted Carolina's third nucleus. After sixty-odd years of mere exploitation, and having encountered rebellions over tobacco taxes and the ousting of various unscrupulous governors, some of whom were actually leagued with such notorious pirates as Edward Teach ("Blackbeard"), the Lords Proprietors sold Carolina back to the Crown for about $112,500. The Crown had no better luck. In 1765 the people of Wilmington frustrated the Stamp Act by arresting the local stamp master. Twice prior to the Declaration of Independence the North Carolinians held their own dress rehearsals for that event the first in the Mecklenburg Resolution of 1775, the second when their delegates at the Congress of Halifax, eleven months later, declared for selfgovernment. And finally, the ladies of Edenton held a most unladylike tea party. THE TEAPOT WHICH HELPED TO BREW A REVOLUTION In that still atmospherically colonial town the aforesaid ladies gathered at Mistress Elizabeth King's mansion on October 25, 1774. There they dumped out their caddies and stamped the tea underfoot. "We do hereby solemnly engage," so ran their written declaration, "not to conform to that Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea," and not to patronize "ye wear of any manufacture from England until all Acts which tend to enslave this our Native Country shall be repealed." Thereafter dried raspberry leaves supplanted bohea, and Mrs. Winifred Hoskins initiated the dress-goods boycott by having her wedding gown spun and woven from local flax. And to-day the presence of a bronze colonial tea urn topping a Revolutionary cannon on the site of the Edenton Tea Party calls for some poet's pen to balladize the teapot which helped to brew a revolution. |