The Rabbit's Miscellany (2007 SEP 9)

1) This blog changes. Today Chatham Rabbit proudly becomes a group blog. tommy yum's first post, written in ink derived from the fluid that collects beneath the rotting floor of the Patrick St. Lawrence House -- Pittsboro's glory, Pittsboro's shame -- immediately precedes this one. Some of you may know tommy yum as Tom Maxwell, whom I'm proud to call my friend and neighbor. With his post, Chatham Rabbit officially becomes a group blog, and I hope that the "group" part of that designation will grow over time.

2) Rabbit's not-so-secret identity. Tom points out that I have never revealed my true identity on the blog, though the information was available in my blogger profile. Thus I will confess to being Will Sexton, of Pittsboro. Twice a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, I do information technology stuff for Duke University Libraries, and in case my rooting allegiances aren't clear, let's just say I like this picture. I started this blog in July for reasons which I managed to articulate for the most part in the first post. Other reasons? I like telling stories, and I discovered a wealth of them in the research material for a documentary project that I started on the development boom happening in these parts. The theme of this blog is "change in Chatham County".

3) Reads the RECORD v. 2.0. Since I have anecdotal evidence that a few people may now on occasion read this blog, I should account for the fact that my previous explanation of the Reads the RECORD (version 2.0) feature was bloggered a month or so ago. So here's how it works. For a separate research project, I read and take notes on whole sections of the Chatham RECORD's run at a time. As I go, certain stories strike me as worthy of sharing on the Rabbit blog, and this I do in the recurring "Chatham Rabbit Reads the RECORD" feature, or "Reads the RECORD" for short. That's about it. Now that I've finished writing the lengthy series on the Chatham Confederate memorial, I'll probably return more often to the "Reads the RECORD" style of posting for a while.

4) More RECORD. Today I visited the North Carolina Collection and scanned a new range of issues of the Chatham RECORD. To be specific, I scanned the years 1912-1914. While scanning issues from this period, when the RECORD ran as four pages, I scan the leftmost four or five columns of the inner two pages, where the editorial and the "Local Records" sections lay. Here is where most of the topical information on the county appears in the RECORD of this period. The rightmost three columns usually contain advertisements and a few public notices.

I'll likely return to the NCC and scan the years 1915-1918 in the near future. My reasoning for selecting this range relates to my own larger research objectives; these years represent the height of the Good Roads movement in Chatham County and elsewhere in the south. The upshot for Chatham Rabbit is that items will appear from this period in the "Reads the RECORD" feature and elsewhere.