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Pasquotank County Yearbooks Now Available Online

Spotlight 1922Early high school yearbooks from Pasquotank County are now available on DigitalNC. The Pasquotank County Library contributed 29 yearbooks from its local history collections to be digitized. The yearbooks range in date from 1921 to 1963 and represent several different schools, including:


Nell Cropsey Case Discussed in Latest Museum of the Albemarle Materials!

Thanks to our partner, the Museum of the Albemarle, several batches of materials are now available on DigitalNC! The first batch adds several new titles and issues of older Elizabeth City, N.C. newspapers spanning from the 1800s to 1900s.

The second batch of materials contains two magazines and several newspaper clippings highlighting notable Elizabeth City news. Two of the newspaper clippings present in this batch, one from 1902 and the other 1941, directly deal with the infamous Ella Maude “Nell” Cropsey murder in Elizabeth City. The details of the case are provided below using newspaper articles from this batch along with others in our newspaper collection.

According to Ollie Cropsey, her sister Nell Cropsey and James “Jim” Wilcox met in June 1898, just two months after the family moved to Elizabeth City. In the early days, James would come over to see Nell every Sunday and eventually started to come over almost every afternoon. During their time together the two would go on walks, rides, sail, and see shows. However, in the fall of 1901 the two started getting into arguments and spats. After a period of silence and the arrival of Ollie and Nell’s cousin Carrie, the two began speaking again. The night Nell went missing from her family’s waterfront home in Elizabeth City, she was socializing with her visiting cousin Carrie, sister Ollie, LeRoy Crawford, and James Wilcox.

That evening, on November 20, 1901, around 11:10PM, Nell escorted Wilcox presumptively out of the house. About 15 minutes later, Crawford left as well. After the departure of Crawford, Ollie closed the door and windows and went to the bedroom she shared with her sister. She was surprised to find that her sister was not yet in their room, but figured she was either still talking with Wilcox outside or in the dining room and either went to sleep or stayed awake until 12:30AM depending on which newspaper issue you read. Whether she went to sleep or stayed awake, a commotion on the property had Mr. Cropsey getting his gun to defend his pigs. At that point, Ollie told her father to not shoot as James and Nell were potentially in the yard. Not finding Nell in the near vicinity, they began to search for her. Still unable to find her, the family enlisted the help of the community the following day. The search came to an end on December 27th when her body was found close to her home on the surface of the Pasquotank River. Wilcox was found guilty of second degree murder in 1902 and sentenced to 30 years.

According to the newspaper clipping from the March 13, 1941 issue of The Daily Advance, Wilcox’s father—former sheriff of Pasquotank County, Thomas Wilcox—tried several times to have him pardoned on petitions. The pardons were denied by governors two separate times supposedly as a result of Wilcox’s attitude during the search for Nell and towards the Cropsey family during the trial. In 1918, however, Wilcox was pardoned by Governor Thomas Bickett after writing the governor a “humble letter […] declaring innocence.”

To learn more about the Nell Cropsey case as it was happening, read the March 21, 1902 issue of the Tar Heel (Elizabeth City, N.C.) that provides details of the trial or by searching our newspaper collection here. For a present day look into the case, view The Daily Advance‘s article from October 9, 2021, “Author: Wilcox wrongly convicted of Cropsey murder,” covering author William Dunstan’s talk on the Cropsey case.

To view more materials from the Museum of the Albemarle, visit their contributor page here.

To browse more newspapers from across the state, visit our North Carolina Newspaper Collection linked here.

To learn more about the Museum of the Albemarle, visit their website here.


The Real-Life “Hamilton” Sequel Set in Nags Head

If you’re a big fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton (based on the life of Alexander Hamilton), you may remember the song that Aaron Burr sings about his daughter, “Dear Theodosia.” But what you may not know is that Theodosia Burr’s story comes to a head (that joke will make sense in a minute) in North Carolina.

An illustration of three horses trotting over sand dunes

Theodosia Burr was primarily raised by her father and received the kind of education that was typically reserved for the men of her time. She had a strong relationship with her father and admired him greatly, according to her letters. Among the country’s early framers, Aaron Burr was one of the few early defenders of women’s rights (7:18) (due partially to the influence of Theodosia Prevost, Theodosia Burr’s mother).

Aaron Burr’s dedication to Theodosia’s education helped her become one of the most distinguished women in early American society—and one of the most sought-after. She was apparently pursued by the artist John Vanderlyn and the writer Washington Irving. Vanderlyn allegedly painted Theodosia’s eye as a “memento of his love” (10:32) and wore it on his lapel. The most appealing suitor, though, was Joseph Alston, who would go on to become governor of South Carolina. They were married in February 1801 in Albany, New York (11:34). In 1802, Theodosia gave birth to a son, Aaron Burr Alston (15:09).

In 1807, Aaron Burr was tried and acquitted of treason, leaving his political reputation in a sorry state. To escape the negative attention, he went into self-imposed exile in England, where he stayed for four years. The separation was apparently hard on Theodosia, who didn’t see her father during that period. Then, in 1812, her son died of malaria at the age of 10 (19:50), leaving her even weaker and and more depressed.

When Aaron Burr finally returned to New York in June of 1812, Theodosia was desperate to reunite. However, her poor health made her family worry about travel on land, and the ongoing war meant that most ships had been seized by the Navy to fight the British (20:14). Finally, in the fall of 1812, Alston secured a small pilot boat, The Patriot, to take Theodosia up the East Coast from Charleston to New York. As Oscar Stradley explains (5:26), the boat was designed to sail close to the shore and arrive in New York in 5 to 6 days. Theodosia and the crew of The Patriot left Charleston on December 30, 1812.

A quick sidebar is necessary here to explain what happened next—and it involves our old friend Hamilton. As many North Carolinians know, the Outer Banks has a long history as a treacherous area for sailors, especially on dark nights, when the coastline is hard to see (not to mention the threat of pirates, which we’ll get to in a minute). Alexander Hamilton, who was personally familiar with the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” used his influence within the Washington and Adams administrations to get funding for lighthouses (1:50). He was successful in securing funding for one famous gal in 1794: Cape Hatteras.

A portion of a map of the Outer BanksAlthough Cape Hatteras provided some light for ships around Hatteras and Ocracoke by the time it was lit in 1803, by 1812, there still wasn’t good lighting around Nags Head, which is to the north (close to Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills). This set up the perfect opportunity for land pirates in the area.

On dark nights (which are especially common in the fall and winter in the Outer Banks), pirates would lure ships aground with a sneaky trick: they would tie a lantern to the neck of the ponies commonly found on the islands and lead them up and down the hills (6:48). From the perspective of boats on the water, this looked a lot like the light on another ship bobbing nearby (a “nag” is a name for an old horse). 

Although the details of what happened to Theodosia and the crew of The Patriot are still a bit of a mystery, accounts of pirates that surfaced in the 1830s led people to believe that the boat was taken in by this trick at Nags Head. Stradley notes that the crew may have been trying to determine their location when they accidentally ran ashore and fell victim to pirate murder (8:20).

The reason that we think Theodosia made it to the Outer Banks comes down to one enticingly-vague clue: a portrait that is probably of Theodosia. In Stradley’s telling, Theodosia escaped the initial pirate attack with the portrait of herself, which she intended to give to her father when she arrived in New York. The pirates may have left her on the beach, he posits, because of superstition surrounding people with mental illness, or people “whose minds had been taken by God” (10:59)

The portrait was rediscovered by Dr. William Poole, a physician from Elizabeth City who made a house call to a small fishing cabin on Nags Head in 1869 (12:06). Apparently, the owner of the cabin gave the portrait as payment for medical treatment. The portrait has a strong resemblance to Theodosia’s earlier portraits, and when it was discovered, some of her surviving family members confirmed the likeness (39:10)

Stradley tells this part of the story as if Dr. Poole was called to treat Theodosia herself (who, in 1869, would have been in her late eighties). Before Dr. Poole could take the portrait, however, Theodosia allegedly grabbed it off the wall, ran out of the cabin, and disappeared into the night (she was a sprightly eighty-six) (12:55). The portrait was later found washed up on the beach, and Theodosia was assumed to have drowned. 

Another version, explained by Marjorie Berry, historian for Pasquotank County, says that Dr. Poole was called into the cabin of Mrs. Polly Mann, a fisherman’s widow (27:30). The portrait stood out in the otherwise plain cabin, so Dr. Poole asked where it came from. Mrs. Mann explained that her old beau, Joseph Tillet, had been one of the ship’s wreckers, and that he had gifted her two black dresses and the portrait, which he had taken as his share of the loot. (In this version, the wreckers had found the ship already empty when they arrived.)

In contrast, the report that Aaron Burr received, according to Berry, was that Theodosia was drowned by a storm. Since British ships were waiting off the coast of North Carolina (they were, after all, in a war), one admiral sent Burr a message describing a rough storm that hit the Outer Banks on January 2, 1812—around the time that The Patriot would have been there (29:44). The fact that there was a huge storm in the area is a detail missing from all the pirate confessions that came forward, leaving some doubt as to their veracity.

Horses in a fenced area surrounded by low trees

Horses on Ocracoke Island

Whatever happened to Theodosia Burr, the story of her life and disappearance has been told and retold in Northeastern North Carolina many times; a copy of her portrait is on display in the Our Story Exhibit at the Museum of the Albemarle. You can hear the Oscar Stradley’s full version of the story here (courtesy of Mitchell Community College) and Marjorie Berry’s version in the recording of “History and Highballs: Theodosia Burr” from the North Carolina Museum of History. 


The Daily Advance, Newspaper from Elizabeth City, Now Online

The headline in The Daily Advance announcing the sudden death of the 29th President of the United States.

Over 1300 issues of Elizabeth City’s daily newspaper–The Daily Advance, provided by our partner, Pasquotank County Library, are now digitized. These issues span the time period from 1923-1927, and as indicated by the paper’s name, were published every day except Sundays. The Daily Advance was founded in 1911 and continues to be published online and in print. Elizabeth City is located in Pasquotank County on the North Carolina coast. Currently the paper also covers Currituck, Camden, Perquimans, and Chowan counties.

During the 1920s The Daily Advance covered both national and local news including politics, the economy, and other stories of note. The paper provides a lens to see the nation during the roaring ’20s through the view of coastal North Carolinians. The introduction of new products and industries, dramatic political events, shifts cultural norms, and changing role of the media can be seen in this local paper.

To browse through issues of The Daily Advance, click here. To see more materials from Pasquotank County Library, take a look at their partner page or visit their website.

New women’s fashion trends discussed in the September 14, 1925 issue of The Daily Advance


Newspapers Selected for Digitization, 2016

The following microfilmed newspapers have been selected for digitization in 2016-2017. Around 70 reels were chosen from over 1,100 nominated reels, according to our Criteria for Selecting Newspapers to Digitize from Microfilm.

Title Years Nominating Institution
Carolina Indian Voice (Pembroke, N.C.) 1996-2005 UNC-Chapel Hill
The Cherokee Scout (Murphy, N.C.) 1923-1943 Murphy Public Library
The Daily Advance (Elizabeth City, N.C.) 1923-1927 Pasquotank County Public Library
Farmville Enterprise (Farmville, N.C.) 1914-1941 Farmville Public Library
The Franklin Times (Louisburg, N.C.)  1909-1924 Louisburg College
The Future Outlook (Greensboro, N.C.) 1941-1972 UNC-Greensboro
The Roxboro Courier (Roxboro, N.C.) 1922-1929 Person County Public Library
State Port Pilot (Southport, N.C.) 1935-1949 Margaret and James Harper Jr. Library
Washington Daily News (Washington, N.C.) 1909-1916 George H. and Laura E. Brown Library

Yearbooks from the Museum of the Albemarle now Online

Weeksville High School Yearbook 1958

From the 1958 Bow Wow, Weeksville High School

Twelve yearbooks for Pasquotank, Camden, Gates, and Perquimans Counties, and a class reunion book are now online, contributed by the Museum of the Albemarle.

With this addition, DigitalNC holds quite a long run for Elizabeth City High School: 1921-1958, with just 6 years missing (1932-1933, 1939-1942).

You can also view all items from the Museum of the Albemarle.


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