ARCHIVEGRID

approximately 1950 items (3.0 linear ft.).

Family correspondence and business papers including Lincoln County, N.C., deeds; contracts, bills, accounts, promissory notes, and receipts; estate settlements, bankruptcy proceedings, and guardianship papers; records of two Lincoln County clerks of court; and minutes of the Lincoln County Agricultural Society. Family letters written at Greenville, S.C., 1849-1869, give information about the McBees' varied enterprises, building construction, and property there, and activities of members of the family. Other correspondence refers to efforts to establish a college at Lincolnton, college students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and East Tennessee College in Knoxville, plank road plans, slaves, the Civil War, and postwar conditions in Greenville. Papers, 1872-1900, relate chiefly to business, especially railroads and the development of industrial sites in Greenville, including Camperdown Mills. Twentieth century correspondence, largely personal, includes letters from Silas McBee (1853-1924) and other McBees, North Carolina Episcopal Bishop Joseph Blount Cheshire (1850-1932), and one from Sumner McBee, giving a first-hand account of the chase of Pancho Villa by United States cavalry. Also included are diaries, 1857-1860, 1878, of Vardry Alexander McBee, with brief entries concerning plantation and slave work, news of family and friends, court and railroad activities, and weather, and account books, 1852-1872, and papers relating to his position as the treasurer of the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherford Railroad.

The McBee family of Lincoln County, N.C., and Greenville, S.C., included Vardry McBee (1775-1864), planter, railroad official and promoter, and mill owner of Lincolnton and Greenville; his son, Vardry Alexander McBee (1818-1904), lawyer, planter, and railroad official and promoter, of Lincolnton; and his grandson, Vardry McBee (1860?-1938), Episcopal clergyman and musician in Wilkes County, N.C..

In the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (#2263).

See also Silas McBee Papers (#2455), Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

See also Vardry Alexander McBee Papers; James Thomas Williams Jr., Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

Finding aid: http://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/02263/

View this description in WorldCat: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/25031576