WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

North Carolina, the preface declares, extends “from the sand bars along the Atlantic to the crest of the Great Smokies,” and in that single span it offers the geologist, the botanist, the biologist, and the folklorist an unusual field for study. The guide takes the measure of all of it: in plain, foothill, and forested mountain, it promises, the hunter or fisherman, the hiker or the leisurely traveler “may find his heart’s desire,” with a good highway system making the way easy to any nook or corner.

Governor Clyde R. Hoey, in his foreword, frames the volume as a civic inventory. He is pleased to present the North Carolina guide, he writes, a book offering “a complete view of the State, her people, the historical background, and a complete inventory of the resources of North Carolina, all compiled in one volume” — and he notes that many of the facts gathered here are not obtainable elsewhere in book form. The result, he adds, is a comprehensive portrait of one of the greatest of the American states, a commonwealth as outstanding as it is American in its ideals.

That portrait was assembled, as the preface explains, by the Federal Writers’ Project of North Carolina, which began work in October 1935 with headquarters at Asheville and district offices in seven other cities. North Carolina had already taken an advanced position in preserving and publishing its historical records, the preface observes; its political, military, and social history had been treated in works of undisputed value, and the University of North Carolina Press had issued excellent studies of its natural resources and economic development. What was missing was a single convenient volume giving a coordinated picture of the state in all its aspects, past and present — and that is exactly the picture this guidebook sets out to draw, down to the personal anecdotes and sidelights of history the governor credits to the project’s research workers.

The architecture is broad. Part I, “General Background,” opens with Jonathan Daniels’s essay “Tar Heels All” and moves through the natural setting, the Indians, four centuries of history, agriculture, industry and labor, religion, folkways and folklore, eating and drinking, the arts, and architecture. Part II profiles thirteen cities and towns, from Asheville and Chapel Hill to New Bern, Raleigh, Wilmington, and Winston-Salem. Part III is an immense touring section — thirty-three numbered automobile tours and their lettered branches — reaching from the Outer Banks lighthouses to the Blue Ridge and the Great Smokies. Part IV turns to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the national forests; Part V closes with a chronology, suggested readings, and an index.