>>> North Carolinians are called "tar heels", and the U of NC's athletic teams are known as "the Tar Heels"<<<< .
Janet--you're off to a good start--the correct term is Tar Heel, as two words, not one. UNC--Chapel Hill are known as the Tar Heels, the rest of the system have their own names etc. Appalachin State (boone) are the Mountaineers for example. I work in the system that has the state library-- as their entry stated, the term comes from the production of "naval stores"--turpentine gotten from the long leaf pine in the eastern NC--uh, North Carolina---region, down through SC, uh--South Carolina, to GA--Georgia--and then the panhandle region of FL-Florida. My family history goes back to turpentine. They started in eastern NC and migrated down to GA as the production moved further South, as the forests were depleted more or less--they wound up in FL when it was all said & done. The Long Leaf Pine is sorta scarce in terms of forests in these times..
fwiw--there are a couple of good books about NC for the armchair reader. Look at Dr. William Powell's, "NC Gazetteer":
http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/powell_gazetteer.html
As well as the revised edition of the NC Encyclopedia which he edited:
http://uncpress.unc.edu/nc_encyclopedia/index.html
The flag on the cover of that, was shot by us (film) where I work, along with many other photos within that book. I also did a lot of work for a book about NC women by Peggy Smith, and a book about the NC mountains called "The Carolina Mountains" by Margaret Morley. This is a historic reprint by Bright Mountain books in Asheville--originally published in 1914 by Houghton Mifflin--Morley was a biologist who came down to Tryon NC, and spent several years there photographing & documenting mountain life, and the changing landscape of the environment with the coming of tourism from the railroads...we have a photo exhibit of some of her work from our collection right now, and it will soon travel to our museum in Old Fort if you're interested.I recommend the Morley book though--it was for decades found in every room of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville as a primer on western NC. It had a distinctive blue cloth bound cover that was woven at Biltmore industries...it's written in a very flowery sort of prose, but it's still used a lot as a source and is sort of timeless in that aspect.
A couple of good photo books--If you can find (out of print) a copy of Jock Lauterer's "Running On Rims", and Tim Barnwell's "On Earth's Furrowed Brow" (came out last year--he's got a traveling show for this as well)--we had both of these photographers as speakers for programming for the Morley exhibit and they're both great and willing to share insights as photographers as well. Jock Lauterer is outstanding as a documentary photographer and community journalist--if you want to learn about western NC, these books are the place to start, along with Rob Amberg--Sodom Laurel & Corridor of Change--we had the last one as a photo exhibit a while back, he does some good work along the lines of Tim Barnwell showing how the region is changing.
so--welcome to the state, the mountains are very cool (literally & figuratively), rich with photo opportunities and quite different than the eastern half of the state--which is neat as well, just very different--the dialect, bbq etc. It is an old state in terms of US history...
Kent from NC
