1970-1971: For this
school year, two new
service projects are
offered to junior historians
for competition:
Community Service and
Visual History. Clubs who
participate in either of the
service projects will
receive Certificates of
Appreciation, and rosters
of clubs that receive
these certificates will be
displayed in the Tar Heel
Junior Historian Gallery.
The Visual History cate¬
gory offers clubs an
opportunity to document
(through sketches or
photographs) places,
buildings, or persons who
are significant to area
communities. The
Community Service cate¬
gory encourages clubs
to contribute hours of
service to a history-
connected project within
the club’s community. The
awards were presented
byTHJHAon December 3,
1971, during Culture
Week activities in Raleigh.
1970-1971: At the close
of this academic year.
North Carolina history
will no longer be taught
as an individual unit at
the seventh-grade
level.
1971-1972: With the
start of this year, North
Carolina history will be
incorporated into a
new two-year course in
United States history to
be taught in the eighth
and ninth grades.
December 3, 1971:
Two clubs from LeRoy
Martin Junior High
School in Raleigh, the
Trail Blazers of Carolina
and the Pioneers of
Carolina (with adviser
Anne Kennedy), receive a
Certificate of
Commendation from
AASLH. The award was
North Carolina Society in 1953 and in 2003
by Dr. Gary Freeze*
North Carolina has always been a
place where the old and the new
live side by side. The
time period from 1953 to 2003
is no different. Although pat¬
terns from the past, such as
eating barbecue or listening to
country music, are still part of
the state scene, many aspects of
life today differ from those in
the year THJHA was founded.
Most young people in the state,
for example, assume that the
Atlantic Coast Conference has
been here forever, but it, too,
was new in 1953. And back
then Davidson College was
part of the Big Five, with the University
of North Carolina, North Carolina State,
Wake Forest, and Duke.
Today, just about every North
Carolinian has access to the new types of
communication and technology. Cell
phones and cable television lines seem to
be everywhere. Most residents of the state
are no more than thirty minutes from a
multilane highway, and those roads take
them to big cities that have all the ameni¬
ties they are used to: fast-food outlets,
"big box" stores that sell just
about every thing, and lots of
traffic.
In 1953 most residents of
the state still lived in the
country or in towns with
fewer than one thousand
people. Most North Caro¬
linians were just getting
"modern" conveniences. For
example, there were 288,000
farm families in the state.
Only 44,000 of them had
telephones in 1953. More
than 62,000 of those farms
lacked electricity. More than half the
roads in the state were unpaved, and only
a few were more than two lanes in width.
Interstate highways were a decade away.
Even the cities were small, given the
size of urban places elsewhere in the
nation. In 1953 Charlotte was nearly
twice as big as any
other North Carolina
city, just as it is today.
Charlotte then had
134,000 people. Today,
there are more than
570,000. In 1953 the
next largest city was
Winston-Salem, with
87,000 people. Today,
the second-largest city
is Raleigh, which has
more than 280,000
residents. Some cities
have literally been
created in the last fifty
years. The biggest
example is Cary. In 1953
it was a small town of
just over one thousand people in the mid¬
dle of rural Wake County. Today, more
than 100,000 people live in Cary in a
4
THjl I, Spring 2003
’Cary Freese is an associate professor of history on, I the Jiimes F. Hurley Scholar in
Resilience at Catawba College in Salisbury. He also serves on the TH/HA Advisory
Board.
