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No restrictions. Open for research.

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No usage restrictions.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Wyche Family of Columbus County, N.C., Papers #05596, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Kathleen Wyche in July 2014 (Acc. 102058), February 2018 (Acc. 103321), and December 2022 (Acc. 20221215.5).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: Nancy Kaiser and Biff Hollingsworth, February 2017

Encoded by: Nancy Kaiser, February 2018

Updated by: Dawne Howard Lucas, March 2023

Since August 2017, we have added ethnic and racial identities for individuals and families represented in collections. To determine identity, we rely on self-identification; other information supplied to the repository by collection creators or sources; public records, press accounts, and secondary sources; and contextual information in the collection materials. Omissions of ethnic and racial identities in finding aids created or updated after August 2017 are an indication of insufficient information to make an educated guess or an individual's preference for identity information to be excluded from description. When we have misidentified, please let us know at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Columbus County (N.C.)--Social life and customs.
• Courtship--North Carolina--20th century.
• Families--North Carolina--Columbus County.
• Marriage--North Carolina.
• Medical education--North Carolina--History--19th century.
• Wyche family.
• Wyche, Joseph Byron, 1881-1957.

• Pierce & Company Records, 1879-2021 (#04614)

The Wyche family, a white family from Columbus County, N.C., includes four generations: Cyril Granville Wyche (1825-1910) and Mary Elizabeth Rouse Wyche (1840-1921); their sons Richard Wyche (1862-1933), Thomas Wyche (1860-1939), and Henry Wyche (1859-1904), who married Mary Matilda Maultsby Wyche (1858-1922); their son Joseph Byron Wyche (1881-1957), who married Mary Bailey Blanchard Wyche (1884-1961); and their son Ray Byron Wyche (1927-2020) and his family.

Cyril Granville Wyche was a physician in Columbus County, N.C., beginning in 1854. In the late 1890s, Henry Wyche co-founded Pierce and Company, a dry-goods mercantile business in Redbug, N.C. (later in Hallsboro, N.C.). In 1913, the family entered the lumber business. Pierce and Company had a number of locations and facilities in Columbus County, N.C. Joseph Byron Wyche attended Wake Forest College and operated the family business store in Hallsboro, N.C., after his father died. He also served on the local school board, as he met his wife Mary Bailey Blanchard Wyche when he hired her to teach at the Redbug School.

The Wyche Family of Columbus County, N.C., Papers, 1850-2020, document four generations of the family, though chiefly consist of letters to Joseph Byron Wyche from family and friends in the early part of the 20th century while he attended Wake Forest College and for the decade afterward until he married Mary Bailey Blanchard Wyche in 1912. There are also letters he received in 1918 while he was treated for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Hoke County, N.C. Topics include childhood and daily life; health; engagement and newlywed life; military service, 1903-1906, in San Francisco, the Pacific, and Wyoming, where Native Americans had resisted confinement to reservation land and were rumored to be preparing to fight U.S. Army troops; and medical education in the mid-nineteenth-century. Other materials include Wyche family genealogies, dry goods receipts, account books, and school materials.

• Digital Folder (DF-05596/1)
• Oversize Paper Folder (OPF-05596/1)