Class of 1926
English Course
Graduation Essay: “Progress of North Carolina During the Last Decade”

Birth: 9 Jul 1903, Concord, Cabarrus County, North Carolina
Death: 10 Jan 1975, Mount Pleasant, Cabarrus County, North Carolina

Parents:
Lindsay Luther Honeycutt (1877-1948)
Esther Corinna Cress Honeycutt (1879-1954)

Siblings:
John Dixie Honeycutt (1908-1995)
Charlotte Bathsheba Honeycutt Rulan (1910-2006)
Caroline Peck Honeycutt Hahn (1915-2004)

Spouse: Anthony Marcello (1902-1986)
Marriage: 1932, New Jersey

Burial:
Saint Stephen’s Lutheran Church Cemetery, Gold Hill Township, Cabarrus County, North Carolina
Source: www.findagrave.com, # 58291139

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Concord Daily Tribune (Concord, NC), 10 Jun 1926, p. 8.

THE PROGRESS OF NORTH CAROLINA DURING THE LAST DECADE.

The following essay was written by Miss Violet Honeycutt, who graduated at Mont Amoena Seminary last week.

North Carolina is the land of opportunity, and her dreams are coming true. Governor Aycock’s vision of what education would do for an ignorant and poverty-stricken people realized in a decade makes North Carolina one of the richest and most progressive states in the Union. North Carolina is just now realizing her greatest dream. She now pays no Federal taxes, than any other state in the union except New York and Pennsylvania.

The dream not only produces cash but can produce anything else North Carolina wants. For example, splendid system of public schools, state university, a system of highways that make motor travel a joy to even the remotest mountain hamlet, a revived and modernized agriculture, a new and flourishing crop of industries. North Carolina ranks next to Michigan in the manufacture of furniture, and is next to New England and Massachusetts in the weaving of woolen textiles. North Carolina is a people so full of hope, courage, and honest pride that they have reversed the old definition of North Carolina as “A valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” and have made it a model for the emity and emulation of their neighbors.

North Carolina was once a state humbled and impoverished by the Civil War; its little industries were dead, its prosperous agriculture demoralized, its man power killed or crippled in battle, its roads a mire of ruts that led nowhere, its people so poor that they toiled desperately to support life itself and had no money or time for schools or the commonest comforts. During all the North Carolina was full of leading lights whose passion was schools.

Progress made in education during the last decade has been remarkable. The capital invested in grounds, buildings, and equipment reaches to a total of $20,947,084. The value of school property in 1910 was $5,000,000. The value of school property in 1920 was $48,000,000, and the total value of all school property was $65,000,000. Total school expenditures in 1910 was $3,000,000. In 1920 it was $17,000,000.

Teachers employed in 1919 were 17,000. Teachers employed in 1922 were 19,000.

The census of 1920 shows that the illiteracy has decreased in the past ten years from 14 to 8.2 per cent. The number of pupils completing the elementary schools has been increasing at the rate of 50 a year.

We have a University at Chapel Hill, serving well the constituency of the State. The University is giving courses by mail to students all over the State. It is giving lectures by thousands of men to women all over this students to make a complete survey of the country’s resources and population, water, school facilities, sanitation, and every other item that is necessary to know both its present progress and its future possibilities.

A democracy cannot be built on the backs of ignorant men. Educate the people and industry will spring into being. Educate the negro, and we shall have no negro question. Educate everybody and everything; the potato on your table would not know its grandfather in Ireland, its so much better, and its better because it’s got a college education. If education is good for a potato, it’s good for the farmer’s boy who digs it. Education is getting out of folks what God Almighty put into them. Education is a means to reveal the latent powers of men, and it is a road out of backwardness and despair, into a land of hope and achievement, for ignorance is the enemy of freedom.

Today no farmer boy or factory boy in North Carolina need miss a good education in modern schools under a good teacher. In North Carolina, every day in the school year, 18,000 children are carried to school in motor vehicles. Consolidation of the one-room county schoolhouses into high grade central schools is going forward rapidly in the state. Every year the number of schools grows less, while the number of pupils grows more, and school terms longer.

Education foretells a future of clearer politics, of enriched farms, of humming factories, of a fuller life for its citizens. The contribution education has made toward making these ideals realized has been noted to the greatest extent. Let us look at some of the benefits derived from the products or creatures of education. Science has increased our understanding of nature and has given us control of powers formerly unused. Look, for example, at the blessing of the controlled water power of North Carolina.

The Southern Power Company, representing an investment of $200,000,000, which has put to the use of industry in North Carolina half a million electric horsepower developed from the waters of the dozens of streams of the Southern Appalachians, and from the coal of the nearby fields. The spring freshets of these rivers used to destroy millions of dollars worth of property. Today these freshets are restrained by the Southern Power Company’s dams, and work for mankind instead of against him, and run 5,500,000 spindles and most of the street cars in North Carolina. In Great Britain, a great industrial country which has its beds of coal to work to drive machines, every laborer in a factory, on an average, is aided by half a horsepower of artificial power. In North Carolina every laborer in a factory drives a team of eight invisible horses, brought to his service over the wires from the lasted strength of these streams.

Today North Carolina has dozens of new factories owned by New Englanders, employing North Carolina labor, and adding their pay rolls to the wealth of the state. Gaston county has 104 cotton mills, and North Carolina altogether has five and a half million spindles, which represent a capital investment of close to two billion dollars. There are 513 textile mills in the state compared with 180 in South Carolina, and 173 in Georgia.

The largest hosiery mills in the world are located at Durham, North Carolina.

The largest towel mills in the world are located at Kannapolis, North Carolina.

The largest denim mills in the United States are located at Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

Winston-Salem contains the largest underwear factory in America.

Gaston county, with around 100 mills, is the center of fine combed yarn in the South.

In the process of manufacture, our own mills consume a half million bales of cotton, more than the state produces in an average year. A few more years and the industry of North Carolina will rival Lancashire itself.

We lead the world in tobacco manufacture. The 33 tobacco factories in the State consume a fourth of all the leaf tobacco used in manufacture in the entire United States, and pays a full fourth of all the tobacco taxes to the Union. In tobacco production we are far behind Kentucky, the leading tobacco growing State in America, but North Carolina stands first in the total farm value of her tobacco crops. The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company of Winston-Salem buys more than $250,000 worth of revenue stamps from the post office every day.

Today North Carolina is the biggest manufactory of tobacco products in the United States, second in textile manufacture third in furniture manufacture, and twelfth in hydro-electric power.

We lead the South in the number of furniture factories, 5,999; in the number of operative employees, 158,659; in the volume of wages paid, $126,753,000; in the amount of capital invested, $669,144,000; in the variety of products which are worth $944,904,000; in the total value of the annual output, $416,902,000.

North Carolina is the most prosperous state in the Union, making relatively greater agricultural, industrial, and educational progress than any other state. There are higher mountains, longer rivers, wider bays, bigger tobacco fields, bigger cotton factories, bigger furniture factories, bigger peach orchards, and newer schoolhouses, more school trucks, and several other miscellaneous bigger things, all operating every day.

The Sand Hills of North Carolina a few years ago had reverted almost to a primeval wilderness. The hillsides all were clothed in blackjack oak or second growth pine. Lumbering had been the big industry, but the timber was exhausted. They tried cotton and they tried tobacco, and peaches and dewberries proved to be the answer. Beautiful and luscious, they regained this lost paradise to the service of man. Around Pinehurst and Aberdeen and Southern Pines grew up an industry famous throughout the land. Pine stumps have given way to peach trees upon thousands of hillside acres, and this acreage is rapidly increasing.

A “Yankee” (Mr. Tufts) philanthropist, looking for a site for a winter resort less expensive to reach than Florida, heard of the Sand Hills, and what Pinehurst now means to most people outside of North Carolina, is the result—a play ground of unexampled magnitude and a place to go for recuperation. Due to its ideal climate and easy accessibility, Pinehurst has become one of the world’s greatest resorts.

Pinehurst is known as our most ideal winter resort, so is Asheville our most important summer resort city. Asheville is known the world over as a great resort. It’s called Western North Carolina, Inc., and is working to bring in new industries, new capital, more and better schools, and a revival of the home crafts, which promise a rapid development of the magnificent possibilities that lie in the rich native resources and the sturdy character of the people of the “Land of the Sky.”

We have built roads over and under and around and through all of the mountains, rivers, tobacco fields, peach orchards, and, in one instance we had to float a road three miles long over one of the sounds. North Carolina’s road-building program is considered the greatest in the United States from many view points.

In 1921 the people first ventured $50,000,000, and approximately 6,200 mile of roads, connecting the 100 county seats, became the nucleus of the State. Two years later $15,000,000 more were added to it. Federal Aid funds and funds donated by the counties amounted to $11,000,000 during the three-year period. The state had invested over $75,759,228 in road building since 1921. A State of 2,500,000 people, never until a few years ago regarded by the outside world as particularly prosperous, now have 4,000 miles of the best public roads in the world, valued at $125,000,000.

Already the investment has more than justified the investors in annual cash returns with a saving of $4,500,000 a year in gasoline. Cost cannot be measured beside the opening of roads, opportunities for religious gatherings, $1,000 a day of income from outsiders in gasoline tax, and the ease and quick transportation of children between their homes and the schools. The value of this dividend cannot be computed in money terms.

North Carolina is providing a link of tremendous value in the transportation chain which is to bring the North and South into closer union, geographically and commercially, thus increasing an international spirit of union.

The investment broadens the life of the community, increases its religious and educational opportunities, develops companionship and the community spirit and stimulates industrial and other material activities.

It begets faith. (Faith inspires work). “An army travels on its stomach,” said Napoleon: Civilization and culture and prosperity by transportation. The people of North Carolina were clogged and restrained by the mire of their highways. In time, through Providence, they awoke to this realization and once awakened, proceeded to cast aside the detaining handicaps.

North Carolina has learned the difference between investment and expenditure, and, having learned the lesson, has proceeded to apply it in practical development of the State.

Measured by its taxpaying power, North Carolina is the richest State in the South. In 1922-23 it paid $140,000,000 of tax money into the Federal treasury. This was twice as much as paid by Virginia and Texas, its two nearest competitors. It was nearly $10,000,000 more than the rest of the twelve Southern States paid, all put together. Its domestic corporations and the foreign corporations doing business in North Carolina paid another $5,000,000 into the state treasury.

North Carolina has multiplied its total wealth by ten in the last decade. The estimated true worth of all properties in North Carolina, on January 1st, 1923, was $4,500,000,000. Virginia ranks slightly ahead of us, while Texas with twice our population, and five times our territory had only twice the true wealth of North Carolina. It is an increase of $3,000,000,000 during the last ten years.

North Carolina is not only a billionaire State in the possession of wealth, but it is a billionaire State in the annual creation of wealth. We are still far from being the richest State in the Union in true and actual wealth, but in the increase of such wealth, man for man in the last ten years, North Carolina led the whole United States. No other State came anywhere near its two and a third-fold ratio of gain during the last decade.

Three hundred thousand dollars worth of household goods are exempted from taxes, in favor of the poor man struggling to raise a family and establish a home. No State in the Union is kinder to the poor than North Carolina. This exemption wiped off the tax books, of the State more than $200,000,000 worth of taxable property.

The State is able and willing to pay for public education, public highways, public health, and public welfare, and North Carolina has learned that money paid to a trustworthy government, to support productive enterprises for the common good is invested money, and not taxes at all in the ancient and hated sense of the word, for 92 cents of every taxpayers’ dollar in North Carolina goes directly back to him.

The State is spending $4,000,000 a year to support common schools, public high schools, technical training, liberal earning and agriculture promotion. It is spending $3,000,000 more to care for her old confederate soldiers, the insane, the deaf, the blind, the crippled, the feeble-minded, and the orphans, the wayward boys and girls of both races, and the public welfare agencies of direction and supervision. North Carolina would not spend less on her afflicted and distressed, for the purposes are tenderly humane and finely Christian.

The people of the State are definitely determined upon the most liberal policies of health promotion and disease prevention. The State is spending $860,000 a year in public health work. They want not less, but more, public health work. They want the days of weakness, illness and loss of income definitely decreased. At last our people have come to realize that health is wealth as well as happiness. The death rate of North Carolina has been lowered from 18.2 per cent to 11.5 per cent per thousand of population during the last ten years.

We spend more and more on cradles and baby carriages and we spend less and less on funerals and coffins. Our high birth rate and low death rate have given North Carolina a fame that reaches around the world. The vitality and virility of our unmixed stock is the wonder of the world. Her people are the sort that build enduring civilizations. They have just begun to erect such a common-wealth, but all the future is theirs.

North Carolina is one of the oldest States in the Union. Twenty years ago it was one of the poorest. Today with practically no immigration from the other States, with only the increase in population that comes from its excess of births over deaths, it finds itself one of the richest States, progressing rapidly in every desirable instrument of civilized life—a community of contented, industrious citizens, with beautiful and modern homes, thriving farms and factories, hotels in every small city that cannot be excelled anywhere, highways that make travel and commerce comfortable and expeditious, schools that are good and daily growing better, a public health department that has brought its death rate to the lowest in the country, and, best of all a people of one mind upon the great issues of life, inspired by a common ideal, informed with a common purpose, heartened by their success in the pursuit of a great vision, and confidently pressing forward to further achievements.

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High Point Enterprise (High Point, NC), 12 Jan 1975, p. 24

MRS. VIOLET MARCELLO

MT.PLEASANT – Mrs. Violet Honeycutt Marcello, 71, died Friday night.

Survivors are her husband, Anthony Marcello; two sisters, Mrs. Harry Hahn of Concord and Mrs. Charlotte Ruland of Williamstown, Mass; and one brother, John Dixie Honeycutt of High Point.

Funeral services will be conducted at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Stephens Lutheran Church in Gold Hill. Burial will follow in the church cemetery.