By FULLER ROYAL

Mabel Prevatte was a woman ahead of her time. No one is certain what her motivation was for recording so much of her family’s life as well as a good cross-section of Whiteville and Columbus County.

More than likely, it was to preserve a family history – something that she could leave her daughter and grandchildren.

It is the good fortune of this community that her daughter, Sarah P. Van Dooren and grandchildren – twins David and Elizabeth Van Dooren and the late Bill Britt – made these images available.

Little could Prevatte have known what an absolute treasure she left the citizens here – a real first-person glimpse of life in the first half of the 20th Century.

What sets Prevatte’s collection apart – 35 albums and 2,000 images – is not just the quantity or quality of the nearly century-long span of the images. It’s the fact that she documented the dates, the places, the activities and the people in the photos.

She was a historian par excellence. The real shame is that she’s not here to give us all the extras – the details behind the scenes of each photograph.

Prevatte would be 110 were she alive. The most recent anniversary of her birthday was days before her oldest grandson Bill’s funeral last month.

In spots, there are some photographs missing from the albums – like the early private Whiteville school known as the Academy.

Prevatte cut apart old albums and made new ones. Sometimes she gave photos away.

I think her collection is perhaps the most significant historical photographic discovery in the history of the county.

I had always heard of the collection. I had heard John McNeill talk about them. I had heard my grandmother Helen Fuller mention them. My mom, Louise Royal, said that as a child, whenever it snowed, my grandmother wouldn’t let them out to play until Prevatte had come by and photographed the untracked snow-covered yard.

Prevatte, a consummate host, loved to entertain and she enjoyed photographing other people’s houses, including their Christmas decorations. There’s even a glimpse of what was popular as Yuletime decor in 1960. Whatever happened to tinsel?

Bob High, who has shared with me the excitement of these albums, discovered, in her photography journal, that in approximately 1915, Prevatte used a Vineland photographer named A.W. Maxwell to process and print her photos.

We now believe that many of the early images she collected of the streets of Vineland and Whiteville are postcards that she purchased from Maxwell, including the 1916 fire that wiped out a block of wooden stores across from the depot.

Prevatte’s Maxwell-photos include never-before-seen images of the streets and business of Whiteville around the courthouse; the 1870’s First Baptist Church on a dirt-topped Madison Street with newly cut dirt sidewalks; the old wooden United Methodist Church on a dirt Pinckney Street and wooden storefront businesses in Vineland.

Whiteville First Baptist Church historian Carlton Prince had spent years looking for that photo of the old church. Needless to say, he was tickled to finally have a copy of what is now the only known photo of the white wooden structure.

In 1918, Prevatte taught school in Boardman when it was the largest town in Columbus County. She took dozens of photos there that show some of the fine houses and its old hotel.

The collection contains wonderful photos of businesses and homes, farms and tobacco barns, horses, carts, mule wagons, picnics, doctors, police officers and the Vineland Station depot.

Looking through this collection makes me wonder what else is out there. I would love to see if the descendants of A.W. Maxwell still have his negatives or copies of his photographs. I wonder who his descendants are and where they are now.

I also wonder just what treasures folks here have in their attics, closets or albums. I wonder how many folks have even looked. We would love to hear from anyone with historic photos.

We have destroyed so much of our history here. We’ve let it rot. We’ve thrown it away. We’ve torn it down. We’ve sold it off. Some of it burned. We have such a poor sense of history here. We don’t save anything for posterity and what we once had we have let go.

Twenty years ago, we let the first new fire truck the town bought, a 1930s-era American LaFrance, go. Then we got rid of the 1955 American LaFrance pumper. We’ll never get those back. Those old pumpers could have been the centerpieces of so many events and parades. We’ll never get them back and that’s sad.

We have torn down so many beautiful pieces of architecture and then replaced them with stucco and aluminum. We don’t build buildings any more that have a sense of design. We build steel skeletons and then tack vinyl, aluminum and styrofoam to the sides.

Other towns preserved the look of their downtowns and now they are reaping the benefits. Travel across North Carolina and you see what Walt Disney saw growing up in Marceline, Kansas. He knew the value of that style of 20th Century Americana. He re-created it at Disneyland and later at Disney World.

We let our train tracks get torn up and now, we can’t recreate the wonderful excursions folks took in the first half of the 20th Century, nor will we have a direct line to the planned deepwater port in Brunswick County.

Leder Park, built by the Civitan Club, had a miniature train that children could ride on weekends. It had a track that meandered through the pine trees there. It’s gone.

For that matter, Leder Park is gone, too.

BB&T disposed of the piece of sculpture it had in front of the old main building. I grew up with that piece of sculpture. It grew on people. Endless children tried to figure out just what it was. Then it was casually discarded. Again, our sense of history demolished.

The list goes on and on and on of what we have lost, what we have destroyed and what we take for granted.

Sure, some things have been lost to fire and to the natural aging process. But we have neglected so much more. We have taken no steps to preserve the integrity of so many of our historic homes and we’re witnessing first-hand how this lack of a sense of history is destroying a rich local heritage.

I hope you will look through your treasure troves of photographs and share them with us. Digital imaging has made it so easy to re-photograph images. It can be done while you watch so you know nothing will happen to your images.

If we don’t do something, we will soon have an entire generation of youngsters who have no idea of what their ancestors did or how they lived or what life looked like not 100 years ago but 50 years ago or even 25 years ago.

“What’s that, a picture of Daddy?”

“That is a mule.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s a tobacco warehouse.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the 1955 American LaFrance fire truck that the town used to have being unloaded from a box car at the Vineland Station Depot.”