Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” He introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series in early August, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken between 1937 and 1951 of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.
One of the more unusual scenes of working life that I found in the NCDC&D Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh was a series of photographs taken aboard the James Adams Floating Theatre while docked on the Pamlico River in Washington in 1940.
The James Adams Floating Theatre’s troupe of actors and actresses toured coastal waterways from Florida to New Jersey from 1914 to 1941. Tugboats towed the theater from town to town, and the boat’s troupe usually did a weeklong run before heading to their next stop.
Over the years, I have seen many photographs of the James Adams Floating Theatre. However, nearly all of them have been looking at the Floating Theatre and its traveling troupe of performers from a distance, usually when it was tied up at a wharf or being towed down a local waterway…