The News Reporter

Treasure trove of historic photographs released

By BOB HIGH

A treasure trove of historic photographs of people and places in and around Whiteville dating back to 1914 - thanks to the amateur photo efforts of the late Mabel Maultsby Prevatte - has been unlocked for The News Reporter.

There are a minimum of 1,500 photos showing homes, businesses, people at meetings, parties, and posing at work and play, and these are just an estimated half of Mabel Prevatte’s collection.

The value of the photographs is greatly multiplied because Mabel Prevatte usually identified the year and the subject of her snapshots, ranging from family, friends, business people, homes, churches and scenes of Lake Waccamaw.

“Wow, I was in her home several times but she’d never show me the photographs and I began to wonder if she really had any old photos,” John McNeill said with a laugh when he was asked to view the collection.

“This is undoubtedly one of the finest treasures in our county,” McNeill, a local historian, pointed out.

Morris Pridgen Jr., the county’s librarian, was equally impressed and amazed. “It’s amazing how many different scenes are shown in these photographs. We get a look at the clothing of the period and it’s a wonderful candid history of Whiteville and its people.”

Both McNeill and Pridgen noted the priceless value of the photos. “Nearly everyone has hand-me-down stories from the older generation, and now there are literally hundreds of hand-me-down photographs to prove and embellish the stories,” Pridgen added.

Everyday life pictured

Many of the pictures show everyday life at Whiteville High School, plus picnics at Lake Waccamaw, teachers, students, her neighbors, her business friends and operators of local firms.

There are numerous photos of Prevatte’s kin -- the Maultsby and Rouse families of Columbus County -- plus her husband Gordon Prevatte’s Robeson County kinfolk.

The Prevattes lived at the corner of Madison and Clay streets here and Mabel was an everyday fixiture in the downtown business area, visiting and taking photographs with a variety of Kodak cameras.

“I remember her very well. I knew her for 60 years. She was a people person if ever I saw one. She wanted to be where the action was, particularly the social scene,” Mabel Johnson Wingfield said this week.

Wingfield, the 88-year-old daughter of the late Dr. Floyd and Ursula Singleton Johnson of Whiteville, recalled her friend Mabel Prevatte as “impeccably dressed, beautifully groomed, every hair in place.”

Sarah Prevatte van Dooren of Chapel Hill, Gordon and Mabel Prevatte’s only child, made the photos available a few weeks ago and Fuller Royal of The News Reporter staff has copied each of them.

The collection will be made available within a few months to the public through the Columbus County Library or the newspaper, probably in DVD sets, Royal said. He asked that readers do not contact the newspaper to view the photos because it is impossible to handle individual requests.

Wingfield, who moved here from Cerro Gordo with her parents in 1921 at the age of three when Dr. Johnson became the head of the county’s health department, is a former News Reporter social editor. She began her newspaper career in 1939 and introduced the society scene and news gathering business to Mabel Prevatte’s daughter Sarah in 1939.

“When I needed to take some time off Sarah Prevatte came in and worked for me, and she told me this week it was because of this exposure to the newspaper business that she began her career in writing for newspapers,” Wingfield noted. “I didn’t know that until she told me when we talked (via telephone) Monday.”

“My father and Gordon Prevatte bought a half a cow together and divided the meat. My father saw him a few weeks later and told Gordon how much he was enjoying the beef and asked how his tasted.

“Gordon told him he didn’t know because he hadn’t tasted his. Mabel didn’t stay home long enough to cook,” Wingfield remembered with delight. “She was everywhere something important socially was going on.”

Wingfield recalled that when Beulah McNeill married Marion Martin in 1942 Mabel was there with her camera. “She took pictures of each attendant in the wedding. I was the maid of honor and Richard Whittaker was the best man.”

Virginia Coburn Powell, who knew Mabel Prevatte as a youngster living across Madison Street from the photographer’s home, declared, “She always had her camera, and she was always so nicely dressed.”

Mabel Prevatte’s daughter Sarah remembers she was the subject of many of her mother’s photographs. “She loved her pictures. She never got tired of them.”

Mabel, the only child of Edward A. and Flora Rouse Maultsby of Whiteville, got her first camera when she was in her teens. “My grandfather (E.A. Maultsby who became a judge of the old Recorder’s Court) gave her whatever she needed because she was his only child,” Sarah said with a smile.

Sarah left Whiteville in 1950 and worked for The Greensboro Record for two years before moving to The Charlotte News (the afternoon paper). “It was the happiest time of my life during my newspaper career.”

She continued to write until 2005 when she ended her columns for the Chapel Hill newspaper. She said she owed her success to encouragement to Mabel Wingfield, News Reporter Editor Gordon Lewis in 1939, publisher Leslie Thompson, and Editor Willard Cole, who came here after Lewis moved to the Chadbourn newspaper.

A 1939 graduate of Whiteville High School, Sarah said newspapers gave her to chance to meet and interview people such as Billy Graham and Frank McGuire, the legendary basketball coach for the University of North Carolina’s 1954 national champions.

Some of Mabel Prevatte’s photos show Whiteville High’s football players in the late 1930s, plus the first baseball game played at the school’s new field - located behind the old gym and where the walking track is now along U.S. Highway 701 Bypass.

Mabel Prevatte’s lasting gift to Whiteville and Columbus County is her photos, taken with pleasure and recording the scenes and history of everyday people.