Classic North Carolina Postcards

The folks at UNC's North Carolina Collection have put thousands of interesting old NC-related postcards online. What I find fascinating about looking at these postcards is the juxtaposition of the familiar (men working in tobacco fields, the American Tobacco Company plant in Durham - which was recently converted to luxury lofts, Blowing Rock, and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse), and the unusual (If You Will Only Come to Brickton, N.C. We Will Have a Jolly Good Time) And, of course, there are plenty of scenes which might be familiar to North Carolinians, but unusual to anyone else (a bagpipe concert at the Highland Games, Gimghoul Castle in Chapel Hill, a festival celebrating the pre-American Revolution Regulators movement, and a jokingly morbid visual interpretation of the "and when I die I'm a Tar Heel dead" part of the UNC fight song, pictured above).

There are a number of postcards representing fires or natural disasters, like Asheville Flood, 1916, and Avalon Mill Fire - and you can imagine why people living in the pre-television era would want to send one of these, to capture a shocking image for friends or family. Other highlights in the collection include Teach's Oak, "It's a Bear", Captured Whiskey Stills Destroyed at the Court House, and the hilariously inaccurate "U. of N.C. Campus, Durham". Finally, a number of the cards bear interesting hand-written messages, like Colored Troops Man the 155 mm. Coast Defense Guns - Camp Davis, N.C. and The Baptist University for Women (now Meredith College).

North Carolina Postcards [UNC University Library]