OURHAMLET.ORG

Jody Meacham

Very interesting. I remember the accident and read the News-Messenger's coverage at the time. But this is the first time I've seen the official accident report.

Jody Meacham

I was about 12 this year and remember when the little league games were moved from Memorial Stadium, where the high school teams played, to the new ball field on Boyd Lake Road. What ties the first and last pictures together was that as a result of boys walking to the new ball field, some got burned...

Jody Meacham

I remember those phone numbers. Interesting spelling on the kind of farm that produces cow's milk.

Jody Meacham

Bruce, I’m sure there are guys here that have a lot more railroad experience than I have, but I can share what I know from working on the Seaboard while I was in college. In the early 1970s most of the freight trains I worked on had four-man crews: a conductor and flagman who rode in the caboose and...

Jody Meacham

I vaguely remember the lake cleanup project. I was not aware that the lake had caught fire, as Jerry Pait said in his post. But the source of the oil he writes about is consistent with what we know to be the case about the old roundhouse and, indeed, the old railroad yard that it was a part of. It w...

Jody Meacham

Bruce, I found your question fascinating. I looked up San Diego history and the date that San Diego Bay was discovered by Europeans was 1542. The first Spanish fort and Catholic mission wasn't built there until 1769, much later than St. Augustine and, to me, surprisingly late for a place with such a...

Jody Meacham

Bruce, The Rockingham Railroad was really a subsidiary of the ACL. A lot of big railroads back then had short branch lines that had different names but were really part of the bigger company. They often got hand-me-down equipment and rolling stock from the big railroad, and the steam engine that Roc...

Jody Meacham

Really like this collection. Some I had never seen and they show clearly that, in its earlier years, the station was not the white that I remember it being my whole life.

Jody Meacham

Amen to Freddie Hassler's memory

Jody Meacham

I remember the siren at noon on Saturdays and people taking Wednesday afternoon off. I think a lot of people worked half a day Saturday then, too.

Jody Meacham

I remember helping the Caskey family pack up their stuff at their house on Hylan Avenue when they were moving out of town, and I vaguely remember kids, but I have no idea of the answer to your question.

Jody Meacham

I believe in 1959 those rental costs were probably per month. My first apartment in Asheville when I went to work after college in 1973 was $67.50 a month furnished. It was half of a round structure on stilts on the side of a mountain with kitchenette and bathroom at one end of the semicircle. My ne...

Jody Meacham

Was this at the corner of Vance and Rice streets beside the hospital building?

Jody Meacham

It took only 12 pages to list every phone in town, a fact that reveals the relative newness and rarity of telephones, not necessarily a smaller population.

Jody Meacham

Our number was 1734 before dial phones were introduced. When the switch to dial phones was made, Southern National Bank sponsored a time of day service at 582-2601.

Jody Meacham

By the time I was going to the Hub it was not off-limits to girls -- I don't know any my age who weren't out there since that's where the hamburgers, beer and boys were -- but there was an unwritten rule that only boys could get out of the car and stand around or go inside.

Jody Meacham

Sometimes finding yourself in the middle of a railroad conversation is like waking up and discovering you're in the middle of France.

Jody Meacham

I remember that Roger Simmons, who once was the editor of the News Messenger, fell off a ladder that he had climbed to get a picture and broke his ankle or leg. I don't remember what he was trying to shoot, so I'll guess the Christmas parade. It always reminded me of the story of Zacchaeus climbing ...

Jody Meacham

When I started first grade at Fairview Heights, it had grades 1-8. But by the time I got to the sixth grade, the seventh and eighth grade classes had been moved to Hamlet Avenue/Hamlet High. So I did six years at Fairview Heights and six at Hamlet Avenue.

Jody Meacham

Kirk Kirkley

Jody Meacham

That's a sad story. I remember those pits from working on the yard. The necessity for the pits was eliminated by the change from journal bearings on freight car axles, which required replenishment of the oil and rags that lubricated the bearing, to roller bearings that are almost universal today. Mo...

Jody Meacham

I remember both Colonial Stores. What I remember about the newer one was that it had a great new invention, an exit door that opened as you approached it so that if you were carrying a bunch of groceries, you didn't have to fiddle with a door knob or pushing on the door. Loved standing on the pad th...

Jody Meacham

In answer to Bruce's question, my guess is that there was a cotton gin around there somewhere that perhaps predates his time. When I grew up, the closest cotton I remember seeing was in Scotland County. But Bruce posted a newspaper story here http://ourhamlet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=8101 ...

Jody Meacham

Ernie Morrison, who was in my class, lived on a farm between 177 and the SAL tracks and just south of that railroad crossing. On Google maps it shows up as Airport Road.

Jody Meacham

I remember the Rockingham Railroad growing up and the bridge on 177 that went over the line. It was a great treat to be going over the bridge when a train happened to be going under because the railroad was the only nontourist railroad, such as Tweetsie, that I knew of that still used a steam engine...

Jody Meacham

Owning property in the way of state-operated bulldozers is a traditional profit maker.

Jody Meacham

Got no clue. But we know from what was posted that RTI was originally planned to be built in Rockingham. It wasn't. So the story of the why and how of the change is obviously important local history.

Jody Meacham

I hope you're able to post stuff documenting how the switch was made from R.W. Goodman's property, which was the location selected for RTI in the first newspaper stories, to where the community college was actually built in Hamlet.

Jody Meacham

I just finished a book called Train by Tom Zoellner, which is about the societal impact of the development of railroads around the world, and part of it reminded me of a series of posts last year in this section by Bruce Osburn. Bruce's posts were about the frequency and severity of train wrecks inv...

Jody Meacham

As an addition to what I just posted, I googled Thomas Franklin Boyd and found the New Hanover County Library document describing his family papers, which were donated to the library by his granddaughter, Margaret Grace Boyd of Tennessee, in 2005. Quite a collection of papers, photographs and family...

Jody Meacham

This a very interesting film because of what it shows about Hamlet before probably every visitor to Our Hamlet was alive. But the film's existence has been known for at least nine years. A documentary video was made by the N.C. Department of Transportation of the Hamlet Depot restoration project, wh...

Jody Meacham

Anybody recognize the rider on the black horse in picture 10? Looks like a possible Fetner sighting although I can imagine it being several other people.

Jody Meacham

I believe every horse in Richmond County got into that year's parade.

Jody Meacham

Freddie, I did not get the scholarship. My parents and I paid my college expenses. I worked for the Seaboard two summers and one Christmas break, the state highway commission one summer planting grass and cleaning up highways and rest stops, and one summer as a surveyor's helper for some federal age...

Jody Meacham

I did the gym thing. Apparently the double doors didn't lock, so they were chained together but there was enough slack in the chain that both doors would partially swing outward. All you had to do was get to the top of those doors and there was room to drop down between them and the door frame. Also...

Jody Meacham

Freddie, I remember my freshman year when practice started in August, there was a big pile of used shoes in the middle of the dressing room underneath the gym. Everybody tried to find a pair that fit. Mine didn't, and in the first morning practice I got huge bleeding blisters on the backs of my heel...

Jody Meacham

Jim Sr lived at the corner of Boyette and Rollins

Jody Meacham

Remember some about that game, which was my last, but don't remember how we got our touchdown. The Red Ram defender in the top picture who "vainly tries to break up the play" is me. I remember the play, and I was the only player on our team with that model of Riddell shoes.

Jody Meacham

I believe David is right about the top shot being a reversed negative, and I say that because what looks like the old Cinema is at the top right of the parking lot. Really like the clarity of the second shot over the train station. The decline in passenger train travel is evident in comparison with ...

Jody Meacham

Veep's right. It was Doug. I apologize because he had a great half.

Jody Meacham

I think the Honda dealership owner is the same Steve Jones, but not sure. Jones played six seasons as a running back in the National Football League, most of them with the (then) St. Louis Cardinals. I did tackle him once way downfield and was fortunate my helmet did not split open. In the 1968 game...

Jody Meacham

This is a high quality photograph, an excellent view of what it was like in a real game locker room. Part of it is because it's from an original, not a newspaper photo, so it's in sharp focus.You can see the dust on the floor, on Coach Pruitt's shoes, the chalk on dark uniforms and the shadow behind...

Jody Meacham

I don't think they sold many British cars, either. But I know Dr. Wingate Williamson owned a Morris Minor, which is the car on the left in the photo, as did my father (it may have been the same car sold used). I learned to drive a stick shift in that car. The funny part of the ad, though, is that th...

Jody Meacham

Lots of station stops were the biggest factor in slowing the trip -- the trains to Wilmington were locals, after all, not express trains. But that trip was also over a branch line, and even though it was straight and flat, those trains just ran at a slow speed when they were moving. The line had lig...

Jody Meacham

One thing I learned from the second story is the Baltimore origins of W.R. Bonsal, who owned(s) the gravel pits served by the Seaboard (now CSX) on the Anson County side of the Pee Dee River.

Jody Meacham

One of the things that turned up in great abundance when the foundation was dug for the Seaboard depot's new location were liquor bottles -- many of them from Lackey's distillery -- that were from the lineup of bars along the railroad right of way. The bars thrived because of the large number of rai...

Jody Meacham

In railroad terms, which predate the Wright brothers, an air line was the straightest, flatest railroad route. Before air travel became possible and popular, there were other railroads in addition to the Seaboard that used "air line" in their names including the Birmingham and Atlanta Air ...

Jody Meacham

Exactly. Caldwell forced Vela to call Maceo, and that is covered in one of those links I posted. After she made the call, Caldwell ripped the phone cord out of the wall. Maceo told whoever he was working with at the funeral home that he had to go check on his mother. When he didn't return and nobody...

Jody Meacham

You're right, Linda. There are three stories in the series that Cox wrote for the Pilot , and he, too, said Sullivan's suicide couldn't be explained. Sullivan was originally a suspect in the McEachern murders because McEachern was getting ready to testify against him in a lawsuit based on distributi...

Jody Meacham

Joey Caldwell, thanks to his wife's testimony against him, was convicted of 57 federal weapons violations, mail fraud and money laundering counts on Sept. 1, 1993. He hanged himself in his jail cell in High Point the night after his conviction. Bobbie Caldwell, Joey's wife, pleaded guilty in January...

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