Top row, left to right:
Ferry boat, Pee Dee
River near Mount
Gilead, 1909; Mt.
Mitchell Station
(c. 1918); horserac-ing at Pinehurst,
(c. 1905-15); and
open-wheel cars racing on a portable
plank racetrack in
Charlotte, 1927.
(Some dates are
approximate.)
card show. He joined a network of postcard collectors. Then eBay came into his
life. He’s about done now accumulating
North Carolina-related postcards. The
count is 7,894, and last spring the boxes
arrived at UNC’s North Carolina Collection.
They arrived earlier than expected,
actually. Some time ago, a collector
hooked Barbour up with Jerry Cotten,
now-retired keeper of the photography
collection in Wilson Library. Cotten mentioned the possibility of the wider audi-
ence the library would afford the cards.
The more Barbour thought about it, the
more he liked the idea of keeping the collection intact; he would put the donation
in his will.
Then one day his son, UNC English
Professor Reid Barbour ’ 82, told him a
colleague had seen a cabinet in Wilson
with a note on it that said it was “reserved
for the Durwood Barbour collection.”
Cotten had put it there.
“I said, ‘I’m not ready to go yet,’” Barbour laughed.
Second row, left to
right: Main Street,
Elizabeth City, 1912;
Fayetteville Street,
Raleigh, 1955,
the Capitol at the
end, and its reverse
side; and a night
view of downtown
Waynesville given a
painterly quality by a
special printing
method, 1941.
