PRINCEVILLE history Kelsi Dew poses for a portrait outside the old history museum and the new mobile history museum.
What Kelsi Dew said stunned her mother into silence.
So why was she coming back?
There, in a course on African American
Kelsi couldn’t help herself. Like kinetic
history,
Kelsi’s
lifelong
disdain
for
her
“I’m moving back.”
attraction between two magnets, everything
hometown began to melt away. The passion
While those three words seem so simple,
in her life was pulling her back. But it wasn’t
for history started when Kelsi really learned
nostalgia.
about her hometown for the first time. When
Kelsi said them with such conviction that Karen Dew was floored.
It was history. She moved to Greenville
she really learned about the twin towns that
Kelsi grew up in the small town of Tarboro,
to earn her master’s degree in history and
represented each of her parents: her father in
in the heart of Edgecombe County, and she
then accepted a job as a historical outreach
Princeville and her mother in Tarboro.
swore she would never return when she left in
coordinator in Princeville, the town that
2017 to attend Appalachian State University.
straddles the Tar River with her birthplace.
“That’s why she chose App, because it was
Her
interest
started
in
a
“There was just all of these connections of ‘Holy crap, I live in a place that is so interesting,
cultural
and now I want to learn about it,’” Kelsi said. “I
the furthest she could go without going out of
anthropology course at Appalachian State
lived there for 18 years and had no idea about
state,” Karen said.
despite Kelsi not knowing what anthropology
all of these things that absolutely makes this
her
meant before enrolling in school. One course
place wonderful.”
hometown could not — space, time to grow, a
led to another until Kelsi was so deeply invested
Princeville is the oldest town incorporated
freshness that comes from a place where no
in the history and anthropology departments,
by African Americans in the United States.
one knows who she is or what her parents do
that she knew she had found her life’s calling.
After being established by formerly enslaved
or which house in the neighborhood is hers.
History consumed her.
peoples after the Civil War, the majority-
Boone
36
offered
Kelsi
everything
