NC -- Raleigh -- North Carolina Museum of History -- Exhibit: Story of North Carolina:
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NCHISY_071204_03.JPG: War Comes To North Carolina:
Even before the colonies declared independence, North Carolina began preparing for the coming storm. Rumors of a loyalist army being raised by Governor Martin and the impending arrival of British ships on the North Carolina coast spread in 1775 and 1776. In response, North Carolina patriots raised regiments of soldiers and gathered supplies of weapons and ammunition in case the threats materialized. The first battle came in February 1776 when Scottish loyalists clashed with a combined force of North Carolina Continental and militia soldiers at Moore's Creek Bridge. In May, British ships reached the mouth of the Cape Fear River -- a presence that North Carolina patriots considered an invasion. But the British only sent a few raiding parties ashore before quickly moving on to attack Charleston. British troops would not reappear in North Carolina for another four years.
Much of the attention of the Provincial Congress in 1776 and 1777 focused on the intensifying conflicts with Indian nations, primarily the Cherokees. British and American agents were competing for Indian nations' allegiances or, at the very least, their neutrality. The Catawba, Tuscarora and Coharie Indians of southern North Carolina agreed to fight with the Americans, but the Cherokees remained hostile to the colonies throughout the Revolutionary War. The Cherokees battled North Carolina and other colonies primarily to rid their lands of settlers and re-establish their disrupted trading routes. But they would pay dearly for their allegiance with the British. At least two thousand Cherokee warriors lost their lives during the war, and those who survived were forced to abandon their homes -- located on land that North Carolina forced them to sell to the state -- and rebuild their nation in Georgia and Mississippi.
NCHISY_071204_04.JPG: Declaring Independence:
Once word of the battles of Lexington and Concord reached North Carolina, many of its patriots clamored for independence. On May 31, 1775, the Mecklenburg County Committee of Safety drafted a resolution known as the Mecklenburg Declaration -- somewhat shrouded in mystery because no contemporary documents survives -- calling for an end to the king's authority over North Carolina. Almost one year later, the Fourth Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax on April 12, 1776, passed a resolution empowering North Carolina's delegates to the Continental Congress "to concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency,... reserving to this Colony the Sole and Exclusively right of forming a Constitution and Laws for this Colony." The resolution, considered to be the first official action for independence by an American colony, became known as the Halifax Resolves.
On July 2, Continental Congress delegate Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a resolution that the American colonies separate from Great Britain. North Carolina's delegates -- Joseph Hewes, William Hooper, and John Penn -- wished to avoid war, but could not escape the desire and right of the citizens of North Carolina to be free. The delegates cast North Carolina's vote for independence as the Halifax Resolves had instructed and the resolution passed. News of the Declaration of Independence reached the North Carolina Council of Safety nearly three weeks later. on August 1, Cornelius Harnett, the council's president, read the Declaration to a crowd in Halifax -- the first public reading of the document in North Carolina. By the end of the year, the Old North State had approved its first constitution and Declaration of Rights and called for a general assembly to meet under the new state government.
NCHISY_071204_09.JPG: Gun powder horn from the American Revolution
NCHISY_071204_11.JPG: North Carolina in the American Revolution:
North Carolina's story during the American Revolution is often overshadowed by better known events in is sister colonies, such as the Boston Tea Party, Virginia's call for independence, and George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River. But the Tar Heel State claims one of the earliest actions by American women in support of the Revolution, the Edenton Tea Party; the first official recommendation by an American colony for independence from Great Britain, the Halifax Resolves; and one of the earliest battles of the war, the battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. As the fourth most populous American colony on the eve of the Revolution, and one of the most geographically and cultural isolated, North Carolina and its estimated 250,000 residents -- 80,000 of whom were slaves -- took a distinct path through the American Revolution.
North Carolina was originally part of a larger province granted by King Charles I to a single proprietor in 1629. The province, named Carolina after the king, included land extending from northern Florida to Albermarle Sound. Carolina remained sparsely populated until 1663, when eight English lords proprietors purchased the province and began advertising its virtues throughout Europe. The lords proprietors neglected its northern part, whose crops and other trade good remained hidden behind the shifting inlets of the Outer Banks, in favor of the large port and booming economy of Charleston to the south. In the aftermath of wars with the Tuscarora and Yamassee Indians, the lords proprietors sold North Carolina, which had recently separated from South Carolina, to the Crown in 1729.
North Carolinians struggled with the rule of royal governors, who represented the distant authority of the Crown, almost as soon as the colony was settled. Culpeper's Rebellion, which raged in the Albermarle region in 1677 and 1678, is considered one of the earliest popular uprisings in the American colonies against government policies that residents believed to be unjust. Other protests, whether over the high cost of goods from Britain or unequal county representation in the colonial assembly, provided a glimpse of the unrest to come during the American Revolution.
NCHISY_071204_16.JPG: The Colonial Crisis Begins:
North Carolinians wholeheartedly joined the protests taking place throughout the colonies in 1765 in response to the Stamp act. The act required stamps purchase from British agents to be placed on all documents, newspapers and even playing cards distributed in the colonies. Residents of the Lower Cape Fear area, which would become a center of revolutionary activity in North Carolina, gathered in Wilmington several times that fall to protest the act.
In the midst of the Stamp act controversy, William Tryon, North Carolina's recently appointed royal governor, arrived in the colony. His tenure was consumed by increasing unrest in the assembly over British policies and by the Regulation, a movement led by farmers in the North Carolina Piedmont. The Regulation aimed to secure greater representation in government for the rural western counties and put an end to corrupt practices by local officials. Five years of escalating protests, including petitioning the governor and refusing to pay taxes, culminated in 1771 in the battle of Almanance, where Governor Tryon's colonial militia defeated the rebellion. Many of Tryon's soldiers, who were from the more prosperous eastern towns that the Regulators resented, later led North Carolina into the American Revolution. Tryon left North Carolina later that year to become royal governor of New York.
Josiah Martin, Tryon's successor, did not become the strong royal governor that the Crown needed. By August 1774, North Carolina patriots had begun to assume authority over the daily governance of the colony. Local committees of safety and an assembly dominated by patriots guided North Carolina's protests of British taxes and other perceived oppressions, controlled its judicial system, issued its currency, and prepared its military defenses. Governor Martin zealously, but ineffectively, tried to halt the growth of the American rebellion.
NCHISY_071204_17.JPG: The North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati:
In May 1783, the remnants of the Continental army were encamped along the Hudson River at Newburgh, NY, waiting to hear news of a peace treaty. At the encampment, a small group of George Washington's senior officers finalized plans for establishing a veterans' organization for the officers. The organization, named the Society of the Cincinnati, would promote the ideals of the American Revolution, preserve the union that the victory forged, and support the soldiers who had fought for eight long years. They named the Society after ancient Roman hero Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus and penned its principles in the Society's founding document, the Institution, on May 13. Over the coming months, veteran officers of the Continental army and navy established branches of the Society in the original thirteen states as well as in France.
The North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati was the eleventh branch to organize. A modest sixty former officers attended the first meeting in Hillsborough on October 23, 1783. These original members of the North Carolina Society lived in one of the most rural states in the South and the only state without an established capital city. They elected Jethro Sumner, president; Thomas Clark, vice president; Adam Boyd, secretary; and Hardy Murfree, treasurer. They also elected eight honorary members, among them past and future governors Richard Caswell, Alexander Martin, and Richard Dobbs Spaight. The North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati met regularly for several years, but quickly lost members and had disappeared from the historical record by 1800. Descendents of the original members revived the dormant society in 1896.
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Wikipedia Description: North Carolina Museum of History
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The North Carolina Museum of History is located in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Permanent exhibits focus on the state’s military history, decorative arts, the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, and more. Visitors will see a variety of short-term and traveling exhibits. (An exhibit list follows the "History" section below.) Admission is free, and special programs include craft demonstrations, music concerts and family events. The Museum Shop features North Carolina crafts.
The museum is a part of the Division of State History Museums, Office of Archives and History, an agency of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.
The museum is located at 5 East Edenton Street in Raleigh. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, noon-5 p.m. Contact: 919-807-7900 or ncmuseumofhistory.org.
History:
Frederick Augustus Olds, known as the “father” of the North Carolina Museum of History, began collecting items from across North Carolina in the late 1800s. He traversed the state, acquiring pieces of the past and the stories associated with them. Some of the objects were related to events in the state’s history, while others might have seemed rather strange. (One item was simply labeled a “box of rocks.”) Olds amassed a large private collection, and on December 5, 1902, he merged his items with the collection owned and displayed in the State Museum (the modern-day North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences). This assortment of historical artifacts became known as the "Hall of History" and was opened to the public. Thirty-seven cases contained everything from a studded shoe buckle owned by James Iredell to the death mask of Confederate General Robert Hoke.
The North Carolina Historical Commission took over the Hall of History in 1914 and moved the collection to the Ruffin Building; however, this space quickly became limited. The hall made another move in 1939 to the Education Building, where an area was specifically designed to accommodate both artifacts and exhibits. With the continued growth of the collection, the expanded exhibit space, and an increase in staff, it was decided on July 1, 1965, that the Hall of History would be renamed the North Carolina Museum of History. The museum moved to the Archives and History/State Library Building in 1968. In 1973 the museum opened to the public and soon became a landmark for visitors to Raleigh.
Finally, on June 16, 1988, the State of North Carolina broke ground at 5 East Edenton Street to begin construction of a new building. Symbolically placed between the old North Carolina State Capitol and the newer Legislative Building, the museum’s permanent home was completed in 1994. For more than $29 million, the new building featured a research library, classrooms, a 315-seat auditorium, a design shop, conservation labs, artifact storage space, offices, the Museum Shop, and 55,000 square feet (5,100 m2) of exhibit space.
Exhibits:
First Floor:
* “Barbie — Simply Fabulous at 50!” Through July 5, 2010. Beginning with a first-edition Barbie, this small exhibit offers glimpses of the history and evolution of the American icon and business phenomenon.
* “Museum Sleuths: Whatchamacallits and Thingamajigs” This exhibit features 21 objects from the museum's collection and spotlights a selection of unusual items that will befuddle or bemuse you.
Third Floor:
* “Pleasing to the Eye: The Decorative Arts of North Carolina” Objects from the museum's collection, including furniture, ceramics, metalwork, silver, portraits, pottery, and textiles ranging from the 1600s to the late 1900s.
* The 1920s Drugstore Re-created interior of a typical North Carolina drugstore from the 1920s, complete with pharmacist's workroom and authentic marble-topped soda fountain.
* “A Call to Arms: North Carolina Military History Gallery" A look at North Carolina’s military heritage from the American Revolution to the Iraq War.
* The North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame: Audio, video, and interactive biographies, plus Richard Petty's stock car, Meadowlark Lemon's uniform, and other sports artifacts.
* The Tar Heel Junior Historian Association: Award-winning history projects by North Carolina students.
* "Workboats of Core Sound" On view through May 2, 2010. This photography exhibit showcases the work of Lawrence S. Earley, an author, photographer and former editor of Wildlife in North Carolina. Earley’s black-and-white images, combined with excerpts of interviews with fishermen, boatbuilders and other Core Sound residents, tell us about the history and culture of fishing communities in “Down East” North Carolina.
* "A New Land, 'A New Voyage': John Lawson’s Exploration of Carolina" Through Feb. 15, 2010. This small exhibit commemorates the 300th anniversary of the publication of "A New Voyage to Carolina." Published in 1709 in London, this book by English explorer and naturalist John Lawson was the first major attempt to describe the natural history of the New World to Europeans. The book is based on Lawson’s 550-mile, 57-day trek with nine others through Carolina in 1700 and 1701. The exhibit showcases artifacts, natural history specimens, illustrations, maps and manuscripts related to this epic journey.
* "In Search of a New Deal: Images of North Carolina, 1935-1941" Through Jan. 31, 2011. The exhibit features Farm Security Administration photographs documenting daily life in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression. The 50 images provide a compelling and diverse portrait of a state coping with tough economic times. The exhibit, originally produced by Historic Oak View County Park in Raleigh, is supplemented with Depression-era artifacts from the N.C. Museum of History collection.
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