Abstract: The Atlantic Coast Line was based in Wilmington, N.C., and possessed rail that ran through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida. The Atlantic Coast Line later formed part of the CSX Transportation System. The collection contains records, 1900s-1950s, of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. Files are divided between President’s Files, which document railroad operations and relations with other companies, and Tax Files, which contain records of federal, state, and local taxes paid by the Atlantic Coast Line. There are also a set of financial journals and a series of files related to the reorganization of the Florida East Coast Railway Company. Addition of 2011 consists of records, 1918-1963, of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company Police Department. Reports document often extensive investigations into crimes such as trespassing and vandalism, especially by juveniles; petty larceny of railroad and personal property; vagrancy and train hopping; public drunkenness; and assault. Reports typically mention age, race, and sex of the suspects, many of whom were African American, and often personal or family information. There are also lost luggage claims, reports of injuries sustained in the rail yard, and personnel records that document relief checks, retirement traditions, job applications, and funerals.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The addition of October 2011 contains records of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad Company Police Department, and includes investigative reports and arrest records for juveniles as well as adults. Many of the records involve African American men and women, suspected of crimes as well as victims.

Abstract: You Got To Move is a documentary film released in 1985 about southern social justice activists and the Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, in New Market, Tenn. Lucie Massie Phenix directed and edited the film. The collection primarily contains research files compiled by Lucie Massie Phenix on people and communities featured in the documentary You Got To Move. There is a small amount of material relating to funding the film and scattered correspondence of Lucie Massie Phenix about the film. The collection also contains a DVD viewing copy of You Got To Move.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: You Got To Move features several individuals involved in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and Myles Horton.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Abstract: Letters from John Alexander Barry of Phillips’ Legion, Wofford’s Brigade, to members of his family in Dalton, Ga., written from Virginia and while serving with Longstreet’s corps in Tennessee, 1863-1864, and three later family letters. The Civil War letters concern personal news, news of relatives and friends in the army, and Barry’s participation in battles and marches.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: James Gwyn I (1768-1850) married Amelia Lenoir (1765-1848). Their son James Gwyn II (1812-1888) was a planter, clerk of court, and merchant of Wilkes County, N.C. He married Mary Anne Lenoir (1819-1899) in 1839, and, in 1852, they moved to Green Hill Plantation near Ronda, in Wilkes County. Amelia Gwyn, daughter of James Gwyn I, married Major Lytle Hickerson (1793-1884), a Wilkes County merchant, and lived at Roundabout. Hickerson and his brother-in-law James Gwyn II were business partners until about 1848, when Gwyn left the business to take charge of the plantation at Green Hill and look after his aging parents. Personal correspondence, chiefly 1830s to 1880s, financial and legal items, and other papers of the family of James Gwyn and his wife, Mary Ann Lenoir Gwyn of Green Hill Plantation, Wilkes County, N.C., chiefly concerning children’s education at various schools, including the University of North Carolina; real estate; North Carolina politics; and news of the Gwyn and related Lenoir and Hickerson families, particularly of Gwyn’s brother-in-law Lytle Hickerson. Volumes include diaries, 1852-1884, of James Gwyn and, 1850-1851, of his son Hugh, kept while he was a student at Emory and Henry College, 1850-1851, and while he was teaching at Holly Springs, Miss., 1852; account books for various business activities; and remedies and recipes for home and farm preparations.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Included are slave bills of sale (1844-1846); a memorandum of agreement between James Gwyn and several young free blacks (1866); and letters describing Reconstruction politics in North Carolina and Louisiana (1868-1877), and race relations in Tennessee and North Carolina (1898).

Abstract: Single or small groupings of items arranged in units by provenance. Included are tax forms, records of accounts, slave lists and bills of sale, land patents, schedules of debt, wills, marriage licenses, naturalization papers, invitations, proclamations, commissions, sermons, speeches, and reminiscences, predominantly from North Carolina, Virginia, and other southern states. There is little correspondence. Some units are cataloged separately.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Some of the materials in this collection have been digitized and are available online. Click here to link to the finding aid for this collection and access the digital items.

Folder 1 (Unit 1) contains a message of the General Assembly of North Carolina to Governor Arthur Dobbs (1689-1765), concerning the disposition of an African-American man in jail under sentence of death in Wilmington, N.C

Folder 9 (Unit 9) contains a letter (c. 1816 or a little later) written by Robert Ratcliffe, Clerk of Court, Fairfax County, Va., listing the value of slaves and other property from the estate of Ann Fox.

Folder 14 (Unit 14) contains two documents relating to slaves and slave trading. One, 2 May 1831, is between William Townes, Mecklenburg County, Va., and Alfred Townes, Hopkins County, Ky., regarding Alfred’s dealings in the slave market. The other, 20 September 1831, is among William, Alfred, and Joseph H. Townes, establishing a partnership concerning the buying and selling of slaves.

Folder 21 (Unit 21) contains a Deposition (22 May 1855), of William H. Adams and Eliza Jane Adams of Lyons, Wayne County, N.Y., that they believe Alfred Moby (or Woby), an African American, to be “feeble minded”.

Folder 61 (Unit 61) consists of three letters (6 December 1869, 25 April 1871, and undated )from Zacharias W. Haynes of Raleigh, N.C., to his parents in Yadkin County, N.C., and one letter, 19 March 1868, from Haynes’s father John to his son. Zacharias W. Haynes was a teacher at the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, apparently in charge of the Colored Department of the school for 20 years. In the 1874 letter, Haynes briefly described conditions at the school; in the 1869 letter, he mentioned that the state owed him $80.00, which he could not hope to collect before the next year since the treasury had “gone dry”. Other letters deal chiefly with family matters.

Folder 62 (Unit 62) consists of a volume of information on Greer Cemetery in Durham, N.C.  compiled by R. Kelly Bryant. The purpose of the volume was to raise support for a project aimed at ensuring maintenance of the cemetery and reseaching its history. Geer Cemetery was a principal burial ground for the city’s African-American population from the 1870s through the 1930s. It apparently had ties to the White Rock Baptist Church.

Folder 67 (Unit 67) contains a volume of Samuel J. Brim, a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives from Surry County in 1901. The volume contains notes for Brim’s political speeches, most of which concern the possibility that African-Americans might gain control of the government through their right to vote.

Folder 68 (Unit 68) Photocopy of the diary kept by Richard N.L. (Pete) Andrews in 1963 while he worked on Aaron Henry’s Mississippi gubernatorial campaign. (Aaron Henry was an African American civil rights activist, politician, and head of Mississippi’s NAACP chapters). The diary records activities of Andrews, a student at Yale at the time, and others as they staged a “mock voter registration” aimed at assessing how many people would vote in the election if they were not blocked from doing so by the state’s restrictive voter registration practices. Students from Yale were recruited and led by Allard Lowenstein.

Folder 84 (Unit 84) contains from five notes from 1851-1855 relating to James and Thomas Graham’s purchases of farm machinery, land, guano, and a slave.

Folder 92 (Unit 92) contains a slave bill of sale from Orange County, N.C. (1824).

Folders 95a and 95b (Unit 95) includes a few bills of sales for slaves in Nash County, N.C.

Folder 96 (Unit 96) contain relating to slaves in antebellum North Carolina and Tennessee. Included are the John McClatchy vs. Carter Markam judgement from Buncombe County, N.C., 22 October 1807, with an attached warrant, 4 September 1809; a deed relating to Richard Burkes, Warren County, Tenn., June 1813; bills of sale for slaves, Richard Burkes, seller, Warren County, Tenn., 19 September 1813, 23 July 1833, and 31 August 1833; and an account for smith work from R.P. Burkes, 1839

Folders 101a and 101b (Unit 101) also have documentation related to enslaved individuals in North Carolina. Includes a report of the division of slaves belonging to the estate of Thomas Mashborne, 10 December 1846; a settlement of account of James M. Mashborne with his guardian Gardner Shepard with amounts of slave hire and sales, 1847; a bill of sale for slaves of George W. Mashborne, Owen Jarratt, seller, 3 June 1850; and a bill of sale for a slave named Dave belonging to Gardner Shepard, guardian to James Mashborne, 1855. There are also other slave documents, including an inventory of the estate of William Mills with a list of slaves and other property, November 1772; a reward notice for apprehension and return of slave named Nancy Elliot, about twelve years old, 23 August 1848; an audit of the accounts of William Herring, guardian of Charity Carter, 18 January 1851; and bill of sale for slaves to F.D. Thomas, 26 April 1858.

Folder 103 (Unit 103) contains two slave bills of sale. One bill of sale, 12 February 1816, is from Bertie County, N.C., for Jeffery, a male slave about 30 years old, for the sum of $450. The other bill of sale, 26 November 1860, is from Orange County, N.C., for Caroline, a female slave about 20 years old, and Lewis, a male slave, about two years old, for the sum of $1001.

Folder 104 (Unit 104) is a 1954 undergraduate thesis by Ana Pliscz entitled “Marcus Garvey and the Negro in the United States”.

Abstract: John Bayles was a resident of Washington County, Tenn., when he decided in 1820 to grant a slave woman named Jenny (also spelled Jeanny or Ginny) her freedom upon his and his wife’s deaths. The collection contains three documents that relate to a female slave owned by the Bayles family of Washington County, Tenn.: a petition application, circa 1820, signed by John Bayles requesting and receiving the right to free 25-year-old slave Jenny (Jeanny) upon his and his wife’s deaths; a Washington County court document, 21 April 1821, detailing the $600 fee that the Bayles family paid to the court for Jenny’s freedom; a bill of sale, 18 November 1830, for Jenny (Ginny) and her two children to Isaac Murry.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: Letters and a few other items, 1839-1867, chiefly relating to the members of the Scott family of New Hampshire and Vermont. The earliest papers are deeds, 1839 an 1849 copies of 1830 deeds, dealing with property of the Scotts’ Warren family relatives in Fairfax and Chittenden counties, Vt. Letters begin in 1857, with those of Rogene A. Scott Bailey (b. 1840), daughter of Hanah Scott Warren, attending a private music school in Burlington, Vt. 1858 letters also relate to Rogene, who was then employed as a teacher in Grayson, Ky. Letters 1859-June 1860 find Rogene teaching on a plantation near Cheneyville, La., and those of August 1960-June 1862 document her teaching in Nashville. During her stay in the South, Rogene wrote frequently about race relations, especially attitudes of slaves and slaveholders towards each other and towards northerners like herself. In 1862, she wrote graphically about her work with wounded soldiers. Letters show that, in 1863, Rogene moved to Hyde Park, Vt., where, with her new husband John Bailey, apparently a Presbyterian minister, and her sister-in- law, Rogene operated a fairly successful school. There are also letters relating to Rogene’s brother Don E. Scott, who served with the 11th New Hampshire Volunteers. In letters, 1862-1865, to his mother, sister, and future wife Nancy Smith, Scott described military life and his unit’s involvement at the battles of Fredricksburg, Vicksburg, and Petersburg. From March 1863 to January 1867, there are also other letters to Nancy, including one from a friend who assisted freedmen in Wilmington, N.C.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Rogene A. Scott Bailey, an avid abolitionist, discusses slavery in many letters sent home during her extensive stay in various southern states.

She expresses her sympathy for enslaved house servants in Carter County, Kentucky (13 January 1858). See Folder 3.

She also writes correspondence Southern opposition to Northern abolitionists and the imagined consequences of a hypothetical slave insurrection (3 April 1859); her own ostracism due to her antislavery sentiments (1860-1861); and rumors of slave insurrections in the Tennessee countryside (28 May 1861). See Folders 5-6.

The collection also contains one letter to Nancy (Smith) Scott from a family friend who worked with freedmen in Wilmington, North Carolina (1864). See Folder 9.

Abstract: The 14th Infantry Regiment of United States Colored Troops was organized at Gallatin, Tenn., in 1863. The regiment marched to the relief of Dalton, Ga.; was at the siege of Decatur, Ala.; fought in the battle of Nashville; and served at Chattanooga and in the District of Eastern Tennessee before being mustered out at Greenville in March 1866. Its commanding officers were Brevet Brigadier Generals Thomas J. Morgan (1839-1902) and Henry Clarke Corbin (1842-1909). Account book was kept by Cornelius Ferris, sutler of the 14th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops Infantry between September 1864 and April 1866, ending shortly after the regiment was mustered out. The 369-page ledger begins with an alphabetical list of people who had accounts with him and their military ranks. The rest of the book is organized into lists under each person’s name of items purchased, cost, and date purchased. Also shown is the date and amount the customer paid to balance the account. Several people listed at the end of the book worked for Ferris as cooks; the amount they earned appears along with the record of their purchases. There is also a “mess account.” The ledger lists such purchases as cans of peaches and other fruit, items of clothing, writing paper, spelling books, guns, and circus tickets. On the last page is a three-item list of “books borrowed.” Also included is an enclosed sheet with calculations.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: The Southeastern Cooperative League, an interracial organization established as the Southeastern Cooperative Education Association in 1940, became a federation of cooperatives in 1941. It worked to promote agricultural, consumer, manufacturing, and housing cooperatives throughout the Southeast from 1940 until its demise in the early 1950s. Correspondence of Southeastern Cooperative League officers Lee M. Brooks, Edward Yeomans, Elizabeth Lynch, Charles MacGill Smith, and Morris Mitchell; organizational records; educational materials; and materials relating to the cooperatives that were members of the Southeastern Cooperative League.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Of particular interest is correspondence of members the African American Executive Committee, as well as the League overall and its members in Series 1. (Of particular note, see folder40 with correspondence of Gillis Cheek from Shaw University about North Carolina Cooperatives).

In Series 4, there are pamphlets and other information related to nine local cooperatives, including African American cooperatives in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.