"north carolina" news and stories

Matt Edwards, executive director of the tiny Mount Airy Museum of Regional History that's just mounted an exhibit chronicling stock car racing's bootlegging roots, won't say whether there was any moonshine at an opening reception last weekend.

"I'm going to plead the fifth," Edwards says after three long, quiet seconds.

Yet the 1,200-square-foot gallery on Main Street in the town that inspired Mayberry isn't at all sly about the drinking locals used to do. While some NASCAR critics have accused the organization of sanitizing the sport's past, "White Liquor and Dirt Tracks: The Origins of NASCAR" contends millions of fans wouldn't tune their sets to coverage of Bristol and Talladega if it weren't for the thirst of yesterday's mountaineers.

"There's no denying the bootlegging background," Edwards says. "We wanted to show the shift from illicit moonshine to bragging on the tracks."

Members of an eastern North Carolina historical organization are trying to stimulate interest in Colonial-era pig preparations they claim the current crop of pork devotees has unfairly overlooked.

"Cracklings have gotten a lot of bad press," sighs Sarah Weeks, a volunteer for the Perquimans County Restoration Association. But she insists, "People can add them to any savory recipe," she insists.

While a few high-end chefs have toyed with cracklings, Weeks would like to shift the crunchy, salty byproduct of rendering lard from the amuse plate to the kitchen pantry. That's why she's enlisted an ally to show up at the association's hog-killing festival this weekend with crackling-streaked biscuits.

The Mt. Olive Pickle Company this year is slowing down its annual New Year's Eve pickle drop, milking a few more seconds of celebration from a year that's been very kind to pickle makers.

"We've seen good growth," confirms spokeswoman Lynn Williams.

Fittingly for a firm that flourished in the depths of the Great Depression, having been launched a Lebanese immigrant in 1926, the current recession has barely dented Mt. Olive's sales figures. While home pickling has caught on with the latest crop of penny-pinching backyard gardeners, Williams says store-bought pickles are equally popular with brown baggers.

"Our sense is more people are taking their lunch to work with them," Williams says.

A pair of North Carolina entrepreneurs is making sure crab pots remain a common sight along the state's coastline – at least at Christmastime.

Don Acree and Mary Smith this year took over crab-pot maker Neal "Nicky" Harvey's burgeoning crab-pot Christmas-tree business, selling more than $150,000 worth of converted crab pots strung with lights. Acree says many buyers, who just like the modernist look of the green mesh trees, are unaware of the design's waterlogged origins.

But there's no mistaking a crab pot in Down East North Carolina, where the crabbing industry was once a leading source of jobs. As recently as 1998, the state's fishermen harvested 63 million blue crabs; last year, they caught barely half as many. Unable to fend off threats posed by pollution, rising fuel costs and the global market, dozens of crab houses shut down over the past decade. "The state's blue crab industry is in serious trouble, if it isn't dead already," Harvey's hometown paper, the Carteret County News-Times, reported in 2008.

Harvey, who once sold 3000 crab pots a season from his single-wide trailer, was lucky if he could unload 300 pots a year. So the craftsman decided to reconfigure his sheets of wire into four-foot tall Christmas trees. He soon gave up on his line of pots.

For more than two decades, Allman Brothers and Gov't Mule guitarist Warren Haynes has hosted Asheville, N.C.'s Christmas Jam, a rootsy benefit concert for Habitat for Humanity. While the event is an annual present for area music lovers, the Jam has now given beer geeks a dose of holiday cheer too.

In February, Mike Rangel, owner of Asheville Brewing Company -- which concocts standouts such as the chocolaty Ninja porter and the snappy, intensely citrusy Shiva IPA -- contacted Haynes' management firm about crafting a beer in conjunction with the concert. Sold. It was a collaboration from the get-go.

"We asked Warren and his wife to choose the style of beer," Rangel says. "They like wheat beers but nothing overly spicy or heavy. Their concern was that we create a beer that was easy to drink, accessible to nontraditional craft-beer drinkers and that people could drink a few over an evening without getting out of control."