Tomorrow night (Nov. 17) at the Southern Pines Public Library, the Family Fun Night program will feature a talk on Amelia Earhart.

Amelia Earhart and Lloyd Yost at Pinehurst Airport

The pioneering pilot was one of many prominent visitors to Southern Pines and Pinehurst in the early 20th century. There’s a nice photo on DigitalNC.org of Amelia Earhart in 1931, from the collections of the Tufts Archives (Pinehurst, N.C.).

That photo was probably taken when Earhart flew in to Southern Pines for a brief stop. Her visit was featured on the front page of The Pilot from November 13, 1931.

The paper included a short description of her visit:

“Amelia Earhart (Mrs. George Palmer Putnam), who flew across the Atlantic in June, 1928 and who since then has continued to be prominently identified with aviation, was greeted by a crowd which numbered well over 1,000 persons on her first visit to the Sandhills Wednesday afternoon. Miss Earhart brought her plane gracefully down on the Knollwood flying field, rose up in the cockpit and apologized for being late. She was greeted by officials of the field, the Mayor and Commissioners of Southern Pines, representatives of Pinehurst, and by Mrs. W. C. Arkell, wife of the vice-president of the Beechnut Packing Company, sponsors of her acquaintance trip around the country. The trans-Atlantic flier flew here from Fayetteville, spent about 25 minutes at the field, shook hands with scores of people, gave her autograph to numerous small boys and girls, supervised the refueling of her weird looking autogiro, took the ship almost vertically into the air and departed.”