Located in the mainland of Eastern North Carolina, Hyde County is a fascinating blend of beautiful wetlands--with an incredible assortment of wildlife--and rich, sweeping farmlands, which have played the principal role in yielding the economic prosperity for the county. Lake Mattamuskeet, the center and heart of Hyde County, has enjoyed a long and interesting history, one that has included early American Indian tribes, national business interests, New Deal government projects, and many generations of hunters and fishermen. Through an impressive collection of photographs, this volume will take you on a visual tour through the history of Lake Mattamuskeet, New Holland, and Hyde County over the past 100 years. Because the farmland around the lake was so rich, early businessmen, even back into the colonial days, had the ambition of draining the lake to provide more rich-soil acreage and thus, create a profitable real estate venture. In this book, you will see first-hand all the intensive labor, both mental and physical, that went into the lake: from the first plans for drainage, the huge floating dipper dredges excavating the canals, the creation of the world's largest pumping plant (now Mattamuskeet Lodge), a company's city planning of New Holland, the introduction of the railroad, the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in making the lake a waterfowl refuge, and throughout, the farming that has sustained Hyde County over the years.

In 1912, a Congressional committee met to investigate allegations that the Secretary of Agriculture had suppressed a report by J. O. Wright on drainage in the Florida Everglades. The following seven months of committee hearings uncovered a veritable horror-show of corruption, self-dealing, misuse of government personnel and property for private gain, the tarring of reputations in order to protect high-level officials, and outright blackmail within the Department of Agriculture and the state governments of Florida and North Carolina. The "Wright Report Incident" is most commonly understood in its connection to the Everglades, and few histories have included its effects on the North Carolina Pocosin wetland and other coastal plain swamps. This book seeks fills that gap. It details the timeline, intricate politics, and webs of corruption that make up the story of the Wright Incident and, specifically, its connection to land management practices in coastal North Carolina that continue to impact the industries of the state almost 100 years later.

The North Carolina Gazetteer first appeared to wide acclaim in 1968 and has remained an essential reference for anyone with a serious interest in the Tar Heel State, from historians to journalists, from creative writers to urban planners, from backpackers to armchair travelers. This revised and expanded edition adds approximately 1,200 new entries, bringing to nearly 21,000 the number of North Carolina cities, towns, crossroads, waterways, mountains, and other places identified here. The stories attached to place names are at the core of the book and the reason why it has stood the test of time. Some recall faraway places: Bombay, Shanghai, Moscow, Berlin. Others paint the locality as a little piece of heaven on earth: Bliss, Splendor, Sweet Home. In many cases the name derivations are unusual, sometimes wildly so: Cat Square, Huggins Hell, Tater Hill, Whynot. Telling us much about our own history in these snapshot histories of particular locales, The North Carolina Gazetteer provides an engaging, authoritative, and fully updated reference to place names from all corners of the Tar Heel State.