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Catching up on North Carolina history... - 14 March 2003 . 01:23 On this day in North Carolina: (March 11th) 1879: Workers approaching from both sides complete the 1,832-foot Swannanoa Gap tunnel, the longest in western North Carolina. James Wilson, chief engineer of the Western North Carolina Railroad, wires Governor Zebulon Vance that "daylight entered Buncombe County today through the Swannanoa Tunnel. Grade and centers met exactly." Later the same day, however, a slide at the tunnel kills 21 laborers. In all, some 400 workers, most of them convicts serving sentences for misdemeanors, will die in bringing the railroad through the mountains to Asheville. 1910: In Elizabethtown (Bladen County), Henry Spivey is executed for the murder of his father-in-law. His is the last public hanging in North Carolina. 1956: Congressman Charles Bennett Deane of Rockingham effectively ends his political career by refusing to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto--a document pledging its signers to use "every lawful means" to resist the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision. Deane, a five-term incumbent, will be turned out in the next election. "I do not have to remain in Washington, but I do have to live with myself," he says. "I will not sign my name to any document which will make any man anywhere a second class citizen." (March 12th) 1956: A subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee convenes in Charlotte. Two days of hearins will single out Bill McGirt, a poet working at a Winston-Salem fish market, as state's top Communist, but he and 10 other subpoenaed witnesses refuse to testify, and little new information surfaces. 1972: H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, White House chief of staff, notes in his diary President Richard Nixon's desire to distract Senator Sam Ervin back home in North Carolina. "He raised the point that he wanted...a candidate fielded and going against Sam Ervin, to give him some trouble in his district, to slow him down a little on his Watergate activities." The ploy fails to materialize, however, and hearings held by Ervin's committee later expose Republican sabotage during the 1972 Presidential campaign and the subsquent White House cover-up, paving the way for Nixon's resignation in 1974. 1991: The National Examiner, a supermarket tabloid, claims country music star Randy Travis is secretly homosexual. Travis, a Marshville native, responds with angry denial but adds, "I guess it could have been worse. They could've said I wasn't country." 1994: Police arrest Henry Louis Wallace, suspected of being the state's most prolific serial killer. Wallace, a 28-year-old fast-food worker, will be charged with murdring 10 Charlotte women over the previous 22 months. (March 13th) 1868: The impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson begin. The Senate is organized as a court; Chief Justice Salmon Chase presides. Johnson's lawyers request 40 days to prepare an answer to charges but are only allowed 10. 1966: University of North Carolina alumnus Robert Welch, president of the John Birch Society, tells a Chapel Hill audience that communists plan to reform the South into a "Negro Soviet Republic." Since founding the John Birch Society in 1958, Welch has made headlines by calling Dwight D. Eisenhower a "concious agent of the Communist conspiracy" and seeking to impeach Earl Warren, chief justice of the Supreme Court. A native of Chowan County, Welch was a 12-year-old math whiz when he entered the university. Later, he attened the US Naval Academy and Harvard Law School before becoming an executive for his brother's candy company in Boston. 1993: The "Blizzard of the Century" slashes its way up the eastern seaboard, spawning winds of 101 miles per hour on Flat Top Mountain in Buncombe County and immersing downtown Manteo in two feet of water, but sparing much of the state's midsection with only a few inches of snow and subfreezing temperatures.
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