Finding Opportunities in Changing Times

"80% of the South's total spindleage" was within 150 miles of Charlotte. - Charlotte Observer, Oct. 29, 1929.

The exhibit space in the hallway outside the Carolina Room gives us a remarkable opportunity to show off our holdings to the world, or at least to the fellow staff members and hardy patrons who make it up to the third floor.

Our new exhibit concerns the history of business in Charlotte. It is entitled "Finding Opportunities in Changing Times". The theme conveys, we hope, an uplifting message to current residents. Generations before ours have also had to wonder what the new basis of Charlotte's prosperity would be. The way forward has always come from developing the assets of the old economic regime. The production of raw materials - gold and cotton - created the first concentrations of wealth here, for instance. When the markets for sellers of those commodities were no longer as strong, the key to a new economic future was the railroad. It had developed to serve the old industries, but it made Charlotte the center of the Southern textile trade. So did road improvements facilitate the growth of the trucking industry here and the steady influx of population lead to growth in real estate, finance, and government. Who knows what the new information infrastructure will lead to?

Geotagging historical images

The two ladies pictured above are stopped at the North Church Street entrance to the Selwyn Hotel, which opened at Church and Trade in 1907.

The Carolina Room's website, cmstory.org, boasts an extensive collection of historic photographs of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. With a little inspiration from other local history libraries and some guidance from the Web Services team here at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, we can now link those photos to points on a Google map, thus showing the exact modern location of a photograph taken decades ago. For the first results of our efforts in that direction click on the link below.

http://tinyurl.com/d4npry

Leave a comment! Tell us how you like it.

History Day

On April 2, Shelia Bumgarner and Thomas Cole of the Carolina Room's staff and John Camenga of the Main Library had the pleasure of serving as judges for a local round of the National History Day contest. Middle-school and high-school students from the Charlotte are had prepared free-standing displays, documentaries, web sites, even dramatic performances in response to this year's theme: "The Individual in History". They came to the University of North Carolina, where local coordinator Shep McKinley, a lecturer in the History Department, ran the show cheerfully and efficiently. This year's contest was particularly challenging because of its unprecedented size: 218 students participated.

The judges from the Carolina Room both oversaw presentations from middle school students. The students had to do research in primary and secondary sources then summarize and display their findings. The judges assessed the presentations on many points, and some succeeded on more fronts than others. Even students whose presentations had the most room for improvement showed genuine interest in their subjects and demonstrated that they had learned something. The best ones showed impressive command of historical material and diligence in research. We were particularly pleased to acknowledge the efforts of a student who had studied Dorothy Counts and the desegregation of Harding High because she had done her research in the Carolina Room. The vividness of her examples stood out in comparison to those of students who relied on publicly available internet material.