About & Visit
What this collection is, who made it, where it lives, and what you may do with what you find.
The Susie Carson Research Room is the Southport Historical Society's collection of documents, photographs, family files and recordings covering Southport, Smithville before it, and Brunswick County around it.
Susie Carson
The room honours Southport's most venerable historian, and one of the founders of the Southport Historical Society. It holds her vast collection of subject files, photographs and publications — the material she used to capture the town's history. Most of those files were made by Miss Susie, her students and other members of the Society: documents, newspaper clippings, family genealogy tables and handwritten notes. Her weekly Bit of History column ran in the Brunswick County edition of the StarNews from 1999 to 2007.
History is about people…. Genealogy connects people to history.
What is here
Hundreds of photographs of Southport people, landmarks, maritime scenes and businesses. The State Port Pilot's The Way It Was column, which has been reprinting and captioning old photographs since March 1967. Family files, descendant charts and family trees. Newsletters, reports, diaries, charters, correspondence and clippings, from the 1720s to the present.
Visiting
Where
East Wing, Fort Johnston–Southport Museum & Visitors' Center
203 E. Bay Street, Southport, NC 28461
Behind the N.C. Maritime Museum
Mail: P.O. Box 10014, Southport, NC 28461
When
The Research Room is open by appointment.
Write to SCRR2015@gmail.com to arrange a visit, or call the Society at 910-477-3461.
Material that is not online — and there is a great deal of it — can be consulted in the room itself.
Copyright & permissions
© Southport Historical Society, P.O. Box 10014, Southport, NC 28461, USA. All rights reserved. If you wish to reproduce anything found here — in a book, an article, an exhibit or a website — write to the Society first. Many items were donated by families on the understanding that they would be preserved and shared, not resold.
Before you search
Three things are worth knowing, because they will save you time.
- The catalog describes; Google Drive delivers. Search and browse here, then open the preserved original in Drive.
- Search follows catalog descriptions. It reaches titles, descriptions, names, places, subjects, and dates. It does not promise full-text search inside every scan.
- Cataloging is ongoing. Names, places, and subject terms improve as Society volunteers review the collection.
Credit
The collection is the work of Susie Carson and generations of Society volunteers, with photographs by Art Newton, Bill Keziah and many others. The State Port Pilot generously granted permission to include The Way It Was columns and other clippings; over 400 of those clippings were donated in 1988 by Nancy Leford, in memory of her father Karl S. Vickers. The Brunswick County Historical Society allowed the use of its newsletter archive, and the oral histories were recorded with the University of North Carolina Wilmington's Randall Library. The Society itself has been at this for over fifty years.