The Seaboard Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Portions of the content on this web page were adapted from a copy of the original nomination document. [‡]
The Seaboard Historic District is significant in the areas of Commerce, Community Planning and Development, Transportation and in the area of Literature for its association with writer Bernice Kelly Harris. Located just south of the North Carolina-Virginia state line in north-central Northampton County, the locally-significant Seaboard Historic District's period of significance begins at 1874, when the first marked burial, the district's oldest resource, occurred at the Grubb Family Cemetery and extends to 1955, the end of the historic time period. Seaboard is significant as a typical railroad town in northeast North Carolina displaying characteristic organic commercial and residential growth on an irregular grid pattern parallel to the rail line. Concord, as Seaboard was originally known, was settled in the 1750s. In 1836, the Portsmouth and Roanoke Railroad passed through the community. The line was sold in 1849 to the Seaboard and Roanoke Railroad Company and in 1911 the Seaboard Air Line Railway Company absorbed it. That company merged with Chessie System, Inc. to form CSX Corporation in 1980. Passenger trains stopped serving Seaboard in the late 1950s and the depot and a few trackside warehouses were demolished in the second half of the twentieth century, but freight trains still rumble down the tracks several times a day. The Seaboard Historic District is also significant for its association with Bernice Kelly Harris who made Seaboard home for her prolific years as an author and used the town as a setting of much of her writing. Harris was born in 1894 in Wake County, but came to Seaboard in 1917 where she lived until a few months before her death in 1973. Between 1932 and 1938, she wrote a play a year for the Northampton Players; the Carolina Playmakers in Chapel Hill produced several of them. She was a prolific interviewer for the Federal Writers' Project, and in 1939, she finished her first novel, Purslane. Purslane garnered national praise, and reviewers compared Harris to Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Hardy, and Erskine Caldwell. Purslane was the University of North Carolina Press' first fiction publication and the first fiction winner of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association's Mayflower Society Cup for best North Carolina book in 1939. Harris was the cup's first female winner. She went on to publish six other novels and received several awards and honors for her work. Her childhood home in Wake County was demolished in 2001; her home in Seaboard stands at 301 Washington Street.
The district contains a mix of nationally popular styles and vernacular forms common to railroad towns that developed in North Carolina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Seaboard Historic District contains simple I-house dwellings, complex Queen Anne designs, a few Bungalows, a large number of transitional Colonial Revival-Craftsman residences, and examples of popular mid-twentieth century styles. Three churches exhibit Colonial Revival and Gothic Revival influences. An intact downtown stands adjacent to residential areas and also displays a variety of typical, early twentieth century commercial designs. Most of the resources date from the 1920s, but a significant number are older while a few post-World War II properties illustrate that agriculture and small town commerce sustained Seaboard's prosperity into the mid-twentieth century. The Seaboard Historic District encompasses 134 buildings, structures, and sites, of which 112 (84%) are contributing resources. Twenty-two (16%) of the district's resources are noncontributing.
Commerce, Community Development, and Transportation Context and Historical Background: Seaboard, the Railroad Town
North Carolina's earliest permanent European settlement occurred in the northeastern section of the state. Settlers began acquiring land in Northampton County at least as early as 1706. By 1741, the population had increased and legislators carved Northampton County from Bertie County. Northampton Courthouse, later renamed Jackson, was designated as the county seat the following year. By 1751, a village called Concord was located at present-day Seaboard and settlers organized several Methodist churches in the area's countryside, most notably Concord Methodist Church, formed in 1793 a few miles outside of Seaboard.
The history of Seaboard's earliest years is unclear. During the 1830s, the settlement of Concord found itself in the path of a railroad when Virginia and North Carolina chartered the Portsmouth and Roanoke Railroad Company in 1832 and 1833 respectively. The Portsmouth and Roanoke planned and completed a line between Portsmouth, Virginia, and Weldon, North Carolina, by 1836, and in 1837, an amendment to North Carolina's charter of the company absolved its responsibility of picking up passengers or freight at locations without stations provided the company establish a depot at "some convenient point between Margarettsville and Garysburg." While Gumberry is situated between those two locations and a depot was constructed there, Seaboard lies almost exactly at the midway point between Margarettsville and Garysburg and therefore may have been the location of the station suggested in the 1837 amendment.
Business on the Portsmouth and Roanoke, however, did not boom, and the company was sold under foreclosure in 1844. The new owner began dismantling the tracks, but angry citizens forced him to cease and either operate the line or sell it. In 1845 he sold the Portsmouth and Roanoke to the Seaboard and Roanoke Railroad Company, which reconstructed the damaged track. Four years later, the Seaboard and Roanoke consolidated with the Roanoke Railroad Company, but kept the name Seaboard and Roanoke until 1911 when Seaboard Air Line Railway Company absorbed it. Meanwhile, the little settlement of Concord, like other trackside towns in North Carolina, decided to take a name reflecting its association with the line and changed its name to Seaboard, sometime between 1845 and 1860, when Seaboard Township, with Seaboard listed as the local post office, first appears in the census records.
Seaboard, along with Margarettsville, Severn, Conway, Milwaukee, and several other Northampton County communities, became a small but locally-important station where farmers and merchants shipped products to and from their farms and businesses and traded their goods with one another. It is not clear when Seaboard became a formal stop on the rail line; possibly as early as the 1830s, but probably by 1860 when the township and post office were listed in the census. Passenger trains stopped in Seaboard throughout the period of significance with service ending in the late 1950s. The line moved ideas, people, fashions, and goods between Seaboard and larger cities like Raleigh and Portsmouth and Richmond, Virginia. Cotton was the chief farm product shipped from Seaboard. In 1870, the farmers with Seaboard addresses produced 647 bales which they shipped to textile factories in New England and later (starting around 1900) to nearby Roanoke Rapids and other New South mill towns. Like other railroad villages, Seaboard was not formally planned. It grew organically, along an irregular grid, away from and parallel to the railroad tracks, exemplifying railroad town development.
In 1877, the town officially incorporated. At that time, Branson's North Carolina Business Directory listed one undertaker, eight merchants, one doctor, and a post office in Seaboard. By 1880, 163 people (seventy-two African Americans and ninety-one Caucasians) populated Seaboard. White residents worked as farmers, farm laborers, merchants, and clerks. At least one physician, coach maker, mail carrier, telegraph operator, boot and shoe maker, and brick mason served Seaboard. African Americans were limited to jobs as railroad laborers, domestic servants, cooks, and farm laborers. Unlike white households, where only the male head and possibly older sons worked outside the home, nearly every member of African American families worked, including young teenagers. Between 1886 and 1889, the town had a newspaper, the Seaboard Reflector and around 1888, a small, frame, three-room Italianate train station was erected on the north side of the railroad tracks just west of Main Street.
Seaboard's population grew with its fortunes, to 289 in 1900. One bartender and one circus entertainer provided diversions, and Pruden's Hotel (later Stephenson's Hotel) engaged at least one African-American employee. In 1906, several Seaboard businessmen organized the Farmer's Bank with six thousand dollars in capital. Less than twenty years later, the bank boasted deposits exceeding half a million dollars and a "modern brick building with excellent accommodations for the convenience of Customers who are always welcome." The decade between 1900 and 1910 saw Seaboard's population hold nearly steady while residents worked in a typical assortment of capacities: African American males and females were cooks, dressmakers, domestic servants, sawmill employees, railroad laborers, laundresses, teachers, and nurses. White males were farmers, retail employees, store owners, carpenters, real estate agents, telegraph operators, bank employees, teachers, and doctors. A few white females earned a living as teachers, post mistresses, and dressmakers. By 1920, nearly three hundred people populated Seaboard.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, business expanded in Seaboard. In addition to the bank, H.C. Maddrey and Company, the oldest store in the town as of 1924, offered a wide variety of merchandise, was willing to sell to farmers on credit, and was the largest cotton buyer in the county. W. Paul Edwards opened his general store in 1921. Although advertisements for Edwards' establishment indicate that he dealt in a range of products, he specialized in perishable foods and maintained a modern icebox for that purpose. By the mid-1920s, one could patronize the Seaboard Pharmacy (100 Clay Street), general merchant D.S. Crocker, grocer F.C. Weaver Company, or R.W. Edwards who supplied furniture, floor coverings, hay, grain, groceries, and fertilizer. Jordan and Kee Mercantile Store (104 Clay Street), like Maddrey and Company, bought cotton, peanuts, poultry, and eggs from local farmers and offered them "generous credit." Dr. Carl Parker's office and drug store operated at 102 Clay Street, and Eddie Lewis Edwards ran a barber shop in the little frame commercial building at 207 Main Street. With business booming, a two-story, brick school (302 Green Street) replaced the earlier frame schoolhouse in 1927. The imposing building resulted from a statewide school construction boom that aimed to consolidate small one- and two-room schools into substantial, fire resistant, sanitary, modern brick buildings with auditoriums, libraries, drinking fountains, and electricity. A teacherage was also constructed at 122 Clay Street, probably several years after the new school was built.
Downtown Seaboard remained viable despite the effects of the Depression. Mrs. Barnes ran a millinery shop in the former Seaboard Pharmacy at 100 Clay Street and Dean's Five and Ten Cent Store opened around 1930 at 106 Clay Street. As many as five grocery stores operated in Seaboard during the Depression, but federal relief was welcome, even necessary for many. One resident recalled that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) enabled survival. Federal programs distributed meal, corn, and molasses and ensured each home had a milk cow. The WPA helped Seaboard pave streets and build a water and sewer system. R.W. Edwards and Sons at 103 Clay Street survived because it sold goods to the county which it distributed, free of charge, to the destitute. Seaboard resident Bernice Kelly Harris interviewed farmers and fellow Seaboardians for the Federal Writers' Project, documenting an array of people, rich and poor, town and country, black and white, male and female, living through the economic turbulence. As recovery began in the late 1930s, 534 people called Seaboard home.
During World War II, Seaboard's residents participated in the war effort in various ways. The town's proximity to the Atlantic coast created one particular opportunity for service: plane-spotting. Volunteers learned to identify and describe suspect airplanes and manned an observation post around the clock in three-hour shifts. The post was a very small frame building on the school grounds. A direct telephone line connected the spotter to a military base in Norfolk, Virginia. Nearly everyone in town was a plane-spotter and several locals received Certificates of Honorable Service from the Army Air Forces. Residents, most of whom already cultivated small vegetable gardens, expanded them to Victory Gardens and lived with the nationwide rationing of food, gas, and building materials. Locals collected scrap metal to sell to the "iron man" who shipped it by rail to Norfolk for use in ship construction and to other locations for wartime manufacturing. At the town's Red Cross sewing room, Seaboard's ladies fashioned nightgowns, shirts, and skirts for women in Stalingrad. Many of Northampton County's soldier sons embarked for service at Seaboard's depot.
After World War II, changes came rapidly to Seaboard and Northampton County, specifically in the form of machines. Seaboard native and current mayor Melvin Broadnax felt the "automation" of the mid-1900s was the most significant change to Seaboard's economy and population since the arrival of the railroad. Farm subsidies, introduced as a New Deal economic stabilizer, paid farmers not to raise certain crops. With a little more cash on hand, farmers purchased various labor-saving implements, most notably, efficient mechanical harvesters. Competition with ever-improving machines pushed farmhands out of the fields, and those who retained jobs found it necessary but sometimes difficult to learn new mechanical skills. As a result, many sharecroppers, particularly African Americans, left Seaboard for jobs in northern cities. Even literature records the phenomenon. Although mechanization did not have a major impact until after the war, local writer Bernice Kelly Harris created a character in her 1940 novel, Sweet Beulah Land, who purchases new machinery to replace his tenants. Census figures confirm these observations: While Seaboard's population has remained steady at about 700 during the second half of the twentieth century, Northampton County's population has declined, from a peak of 28,432 in 1950 to 22,086 in 2000, and the estimated population for 2003 predicts a further drop of 1.4%.
Equipment not only changed who farmed, but it altered what was farmed. Cotton was and is tremendously important to Northampton County's economy, but peanut farming became considerably more lucrative with better machinery. During the 1950s, peanuts overtook cotton as the county's leading agricultural product and in Seaboard, entrepreneurs erected two peanut drying and storage facilities (one of which, the Bradley Howell complex (200 Clay Street), contributes to the district) during the mid-twentieth century.
By 1968, over 600 people lived in Seaboard, and many of them had constructed new homes during the post-World War II period. The old Seaboard School, which had become an elementary school in 1963 when the county's high schools consolidated, closed in 1978 when all students were assigned to an integrated elementary school in the African American neighborhood east of downtown. Several industries, specifically Seaboard Liquid Foods, Inc., Union Camp, and Seaboard Industries, began operations in the Seaboard vicinity during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but today the larger industrial employers in the area are Georgia-Pacific, Purdue Farms, and International Paper. Agriculture, however, is still the county's main economic engine, although it now operates in the form of large-scale, industrial farming. Such agri-business has forced many small farmers to find other work, resulting in continued population losses in northeastern North Carolina, but the industry accounts for over one-third of Northampton County's business and generates over one hundred million dollars in products. In 1997, Northampton County produced more peanuts than any county in North Carolina and ranked thirteenth in production nationally.
Despite changes in agriculture and business, however, if a resident of Seaboard in 1930 returned today, he or she would find the town much as it was over seventy years ago. Although the town's population has not expanded, it has not contracted, remaining stable at nearly 700 since 1987, and with tree-lined residential streets and an intact commercial district, Seaboard epitomizes the small Northampton County railroad town.
Architectural Context
The dwellings, outbuildings, commercial buildings, light industrial buildings, churches, and school in the Seaboard Historic District represent the architectural styles and forms that occurred in Seaboard and throughout northeastern North Carolina from the late nineteenth century to the post-World War II period. During this time, architecture reflected the social and economic changes occurring as Seaboard transformed from a railroad stop to a small but bustling agriculture-based commercial center and later to a small town home for local industrial employees and a few remaining farmers. Builders or architects based in Seaboard have not been identified, but since Seaboard's earliest documented years, carpenters and brick masons have been among the town's residents. In 1860, one man operated a sawmill in or near Seaboard. By 1870, one could hire an African American painter named Henry Hunt, a white carpenter, or a carpenter of mixed race in the Seaboard area. Ten years later, brick mason James Gilley, a twenty-four-year-old white male, lived in Seaboard. At the turn of the twentieth century, carpenters Willie Cuthrell, Floyd Agee, Thomas M. Stone, and William Mansfield worked in Seaboard. Oral tradition suggests that a German immigrant built several homes in Seaboard during the early 1920s. In 1931, S.V. Edwards and his wife completed their Colonial Revival house (406 South Main Street), designed by Holland, Virginia, architect R.H. Riedel. Godwin W. Draper, an architect working in Richmond, Virginia, designed a one-story addition to the house during the 1950s.
The earliest buildings in Seaboard are Queen Anne in style, or at least take cues from Queen Anne designs. Queen Anne gained popularity across the country during the 1880s. It dominated domestic architecture nationwide until around 1900, but remained prevalent in rural areas for the first two decades of the twentieth century. Examples in Seaboard illustrate both the town's fashion-ability, made possible through rail connections, and its ties to rural traditions, which generally favored plainer I-houses. Both the circa 1890 Stephenson-Barbee House (306 S. Main Street), with its curving walls and porch and the circa 1900 Richard and Agnes Edwards House (500 S. Main Street), with its asymmetrical massing and decorative shingles are exuberant examples of Queen Anne design. The circa 1910 Edwards Warehouse at 103 Clay Street illustrates the application of the style to non-residential architecture and an adherence to the style as the twentieth century began. While utilitarian in form, the building's brick corbelling and elaborate shaped and stepped parapet pay heed to the persistence of Queen Anne tastes.
Queen Anne buildings were constructed in nearly every track-side town in North Carolina. The largest town, and therefore the largest concentration of Queen Anne architecture close to Seaboard and on the rail line can be found in Weldon, which lies about ten miles southwest of Seaboard. Adjacent to Weldon is Roanoke Rapids, which boomed as a New South mill town around 1900, but contains more mill houses than Queen Anne designs.
Just as hemlines were rising in cities, but retaining their modest lengths in the country's small towns, Queen Anne designs remained popular in rural locales decades after urbanites discarded them. Seaboard's rail line afforded residents a link to cities and the ideas permeating them, but journeys consumed time and money and generally, rural architecture stayed a step or two behind urban architecture. During the first decades of the twentieth century, however, things changed. Rural mail delivery, faster trains, cars, and better roads not only moved people and goods rapidly but also theories, tastes, and opinions. Magazines and catalogues, available through the mail, disseminated the same house plans and preached the same architectural tastes to New Yorkers, Californians, and Seaboardians. Greater cosmopolitan exposure coincided with general prosperity across the country and in Seaboard so that by the 1920s, many of Seaboard's high-style dwellings were constructed using designs on par with those seen during the same period in larger cities in North Carolina.
Two-story houses exhibiting a combination of Craftsman and Colonial Revival design elements gained particular favor in Seaboard during this period. Local tradition holds that a German immigrant built several of these houses during the first years of the 1920s. Executed in either brick or frame with weatherboard siding, most examples share deep overhanging eaves, low hip roofs or high hip roofs with dormers on three or four sides, full-width front porches usually with battered porch posts on brick piers, and porte cocheres on the side elevations. Most owners also built matching or complimentary garages. Examples include the circa 1922 Seaboard Baptist Church Parsonage (310 S. Main Street), a brick dwelling with a Craftsman porch and Colonial Revival modillions in the eaves, and the 1926 home of Herbert and Bernice Kelly Harris (301 Washington Street). Like the parsonage, the Harris House mixes Craftsman six-over-one sash windows with an elegant, classically-inspired porch that features square columns and a simple cornice. Both houses have porte cocheres and garages, although the Harris porte cochere is enclosed.
Institutional buildings reflected prevailing architectural tastes during the 1920s, and like their residential counterparts, also often blended revival styles, classically-inspired styles, and Craftsman designs. The Seaboard School (302 Green Street) was built in 1927 and exhibits a combination of Beaux Arts, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman references, including a now-destroyed full-height portico on the front elevation. The 1922 Seaboard Methodist Church (314 S. Main Street) employs Gothic Revival styling, and commercial buildings from the early twentieth century on Clay and Main Streets display typical corbelling, display windows, and parapets.
As the twentieth century progressed, Seaboardians accepted other styles. During the late 1930s and immediately after World War ll, Period Cottages, also known as English Cottages, used some Tudor Revival elements, such as steep roofs, asymmetrical chimneys placed on the front of the house, and arched windows and doors, to create diminutive masonry or frame houses. Peanut production and other light industries generated new profits in Northampton County, which meant Seaboardians could build new dwellings. Minimal Traditional houses, one-story side-gabled dwellings so-named for their stripped-down or minimal Colonial Revival decorative elements, gained popularity immediately after World War II and continued to be built into the 1950s. The house at 211 West Central Street (N.C. Highway 186) is a good example, with a side-gable roof, gabled stoop, and six-over-six sash windows. Ranch houses, such as the 1958 Dick and Elsie Edwards House (503 S. Main Street), incorporated the mid-century ideals of open interior spaces, horizontal massing, and relaxed, casual living.
Bernice Kelly Harris and Seaboard
The Seaboard Historic District is significant for its association with the productive life of Bernice Kelly Harris, who resided in Seaboard from 1917, first as a boarder and after 1927, at 301 Washington Street, until her death in 1973. Meredith College graduate Bernice Kelly was born to a farm family in eastern Wake County in 1894 and arrived in Seaboard in 1917 to teach a variety of high school subjects. English and drama interested her most and she directed school plays for which she designed sets and occasionally stepped in for stage-frightened actors. Kelly also wrote plays, poems, and short stories. In 1926, after a six-year engagement, she married Seaboard businessman Herbert K. Harris, and shortly thereafter resigned her teaching position.
Although no longer teaching, Harris continued writing, generating feature articles for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the Raleigh News and Observer, and other local newspapers. Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post published her short stories. Harris taught a play-writing class for her friends in Seaboard and between 1932 and 1938, she wrote a play a year for the Northampton Players. Carolina Playmakers in Chapel Hill produced several. Harris' Wake County childhood inspired her, but her adopted home of Seaboard influenced her significantly and local people and places are often recognizable in her works. Two plays, His Jewels and Open House, sprung directly from her Federal Writers' Project in-home interviews with tenant farmers and their families through which she documented the injustices of the sharecropping system in and around Seaboard. She also used these interviews to pen five of the twenty fictionalized essays from North Carolina in the Writers' Project book, These Are Our Lives, published in 1939.
In an effort to distract herself from Harris family conflicts, and with encouragement from several newspaper editors familiar with her writing, Harris produced her first novel, titled Purslane, which was the first novel published by the University of North Carolina Press. Reviewers at the New Yorker, the New York Herald Tribune, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times raved and compared her to Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Hardy, and Erskine Caldwell. The publishing houses of Putnam in London and McClelland and Stewart in Toronto printed the book abroad under the title Pate's Siding. For Purslane, Harris won the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association's Mayflower Society Cup for best North Carolina book of the year in 1939. She was the first woman to receive the prize, and Purslane was the first novel to win it.
Harris set most of her plays, short stories, and seven novels in or around Seaboard. Although Purslane bore the traditional disclaimer that no resemblance to real persons was intended, she admitted in her autobiography that characters "are sometimes illumined by an identification less 'purely coincidental' than is indicated in prefaces to novels." Doubleday published Portulaca, Harris' second novel, in 1941. It dealt with many of the issues Harris faced as a female in a small southern town as she sought to be her own artistic person while feeling both her own desire for and society's pressure to be a part of her community through the accepted channels of domesticity, women's clubs, and church participation. She set Portulaca in fictional Bonwell, but, despite her claims to the contrary, Seaboard seems to be the model. Though it offered up some unflattering descriptions of small town life, sparking predictions that Seaboard would "give her hell" or "finish her off," most Seaboardians embraced Harris' work. Those who read it and recognized locals rarely saw themselves, instead laughing at those they thought she had "hit hard." Sweet Beulah Land, published in 1943 and based largely on her work for the Federal Writers' Project in and around Seaboard, bore a more honest disclaimer that "Some of the people and incidents in this book are fictional."
Harris delved into the lives of rural African Americans in Janey Jeems, published in 1946, but she did not specifically mention race in the book. The only hints were a reference to slave ancestry at the beginning and a conversation between Janey and a white doctor in which the doctor condescendingly used "uncle" and "auntie" in reference to his patient and Janey respectively. Critics and readers often failed to realize the story was about African Americans, and many felt deceived when (if) they grasped the characters' race. Her agent commented, "Here is a book about Negroes as people, just as if they were Laplanders or Southern Baptists. See what happens. Even the supposedly enlightened members simply don't recognize it." Others, including North Carolina author Inglis Fletcher, clearly recognized Harris' treatment of African Americans and deemed it radically, unacceptably liberal.
Harris published two short Christmas stories in the 1960s, but finished her last novel, Wild Cherry Tree Road in 1951. In 1963, she began teaching a non-credit creative writing class at Chowan College in Murfreesboro. She encouraged her students to publish their writing and edited her students' works into two collections, Southern Home Remedies in 1969 and Strange Things Happen in 1971.
In the last years of her life, Harris garnered several awards. In 1966, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature and honorary degrees from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Wake Forest University. Two years later, Meredith College named her a distinguished alumna. Posthumously, she received a Brown-Hudson Folklore Award for editing her Chowan College students' anthologies.
Harris lived and wrote in Seaboard until a stroke sent her to a nursing home in Durham. She resided there for five months until she passed away on September 13, 1973, midway through writing a letter to friends in Seaboard. Her novels and plays, like her WPA work, explored the lives of a wide range of people. Seaboard was small, but, as in other villages, remarkable variety flourished on its streets and in its buildings. Seaboard was home to those of wealth and those living in poverty. Farmers lived in town or near town, as did sharecroppers. Shopkeepers, domestics, landlords, cotton gin owners, preachers, bankers, and carpenters lived together in Seaboard and on Harris' pages. Bernice Kelly Harris' childhood home in eastern Wake County was demolished in 2001. The home she and Herbert Harris built in 1926 and 1927 still stands at 301 Washington Street in Seaboard.
References
Broadnax, Melvin. Interview by the author, April 2, 2004.
Cleaton, C. L. Interview by the author, April 28, 2004.
Edwards, Dick. Interview by the author, December 16, 2003.
Edwards, Dick and Elsie. Joint interview by the author, April 9, 2004.
Edwards, Kelly Lynn. Interview by the author, May 6, 2004.
Federal Writers' Project. These Are Our Lives, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939.
Harris, Bernice Kelly. Southern Savory, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.
Harris, Bernice Kelly. Sweet Beulah Land, Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1943.
Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session, 1876-1877, Raleigh: The News Publishing Company, State Printer and Binder.
Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1838-'37, Raleigh: Thomas J. Lemay, Printer, 1837.
Lee, W. D. Soil Survey of Northampton County, North Carolina, Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, 1925.
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Northampton County Chamber of Commerce website, www.northamptonchamber.org/profile.asp.
Northampton Progress (Jackson), June 26, 1924.
Powell, William S. The North Carolina Gazetteer, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
Powell, William S. North Carolina Through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 52.
Ray, Lilly D. Interview by the author, April 28, 2004.
Seaboard Air Line Railway Company, Valuation Department. The Corporate History of the Seaboard Air Line Railway Company, Norfolk: Burke and Gregory, Inc., 1922.
Smith, John W. Building a Railroad: the Seaboard Air Line: Its Beginnings and its Contributions, New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1952.
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Varnadoe, Hubert E. Interview by the author, May 6, 2004.
Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Bernice Kelly Harris: A Good Life was Writing, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1999.
Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Telephone conversation with the author, April 5, 2004.
‡ Sarah A. Woodward, with Cynthia de Miranda, Edwards-Pitman Environmental, Inc., Seaboard Historic District, Northampton County, North carolina, nomination document, 2004, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C.
Street Names
Central Street West • Church Street • Clay Street • Green Street • Main Street South • Railroad Street • Route 186 • Washington Street