My friends at New Bern Magazine are kindly allowing me to step into the first person this month to announce a new book, Whispers of the Long Departed: Untold History of Southern Craven County, N.C.
Many of the readers here are aware that I wrote New Bern History 101 for the city’s 300th anniversary. It’s only natural that the Colonial Capital, a town called the “Athens of North Carolina,” has garnered the bulk of the area’s scholarship and study since the 1700s. New Bern, however, is such a bright historical sun that it dims all the other stars in the sky around it. With Whispers, I hope to shine light upon the Neuse River’s south shore through the revelation of truly amazing new stories that till now have been unknown and unreported.
In 2018, I sat down to type up a list of old graveyards and burials I’ve been collecting since the 1970s. It should have taken about a week. I thought someone at the libraries and on my website might find it useful. I guess I got carried away.
So, three years later, the book is over 550 pages. Its story is about the people of southern Craven County – from the Trent River to Adams Creek – who have lived, loved, struggled, and triumphed there from the earliest days of America. New Bern is in it, of course, but the lower half of the county gets center-stage.
The Neuse River basin was settled from the outside in, so the history of southern Craven County begins even before New Bern was founded in 1710. And, as more than half the people were African Americans, we focus in detail for the first time upon how this thriving biracial community was radically transformed by both the Civil War and the advent of Marine Corps airbase at Cherry Point.
Our publisher says Whispers of the Long Departed is “secrets of our past … declassified.” You can discover more about this new release on Amazon.
by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
Eddie Ellis is the author of New Bern History 101 and other works about Craven County’s rich heritage. He can be reached at flexspace2@aol.com.