THEN & NOW

For breakfast, visitors and guests at taverns in colonial Cumberland County were typically given tea and wheat bread or hoecakes, the predecessor of cornbread. Early settlers probably ate grits, too. According to the Quaker Co., Indians shared with early settlers ‘‘rockahominie,” which was softened maize seasoned with salt and animal fat (grits).

Grits are still a favorite, but they’re instant. Wheat bread is toasted. And coffee has probably replaced tea in a majority of households.

In 1908, cooking a chicken dinner was slightly more involved than it is now. The Rumford Complete Cookbook published that year devoted two pages to describing how to prepare a chicken. It began this way: ‘‘Poultry should be cleaned and dressed as soon as possible after being killed. Pinfeathers are best removed with a small knife or by the aid of a tong-shaped strawberry huller.”

Pre-plucked, precut, precooked, prepackaged chickens and chicken dinners are available at every supermarket and can be heated in minutes in a microwave. If that still takes too long, any fast-food drive-through can provide really quick chicken.

Now thousands of recipes for low-fat and no-fat meals can be printed from the Internet with the click of a computer mouse.

Back then, the fat content of foods was not much of a concern in the early 20th century. Butter, lard, salt pork and milk were common ingredients in the 1908 cookbook. The recipe for Fricassee of liver contains only a few ingredients: 2 pounds of calf’s liver, half a pound of fat salt pork, a small onion, butter, parsley and salt and pepper.

While some recipes were similar to what may still be found in today’s cookbooks (chicken pot pie, biscuits and scrambled eggs), some dishes — potted pigeons or sweet breads à la Newburg — are just history.

Leisure

In his book, ‘‘Close to the Land: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1820-1870,” Thomas H. Clayton said the theater, gala balls, hoe-downs, afternoon teas and formal suppers entertained many townspeople and rural folks of the 19th century. That was not all, however.

‘‘Cockfights were common in the spring and fall,” Clayton wrote. ‘‘And no Tar Heel town was complete without a racetrack, for horse racing was every Carolinian’s favorite sport.”

Cumberland’s racetrack was in the original county seat of Choeffington, which was near the junction of the Lower Little River and the Cape Fear River.

Now cockfighting is illegal, and favorite sports involve some type of ball and a declaration of allegiance to either Carolina blue or Wolfpack red.

NASCAR racing has replaced horse racing as the favored sport of speed. And if fans cannot make it to the track to see a race in person, they can drop into a sports bar and watch the action on a wide-screen television.

A stereoscope viewer and cards are on display at the E.A. Poe House.

For entertainment at home, families of the early 20th century could buy stereoscopes from the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. In 1908, a standard stereoscope cost 28 cents. For less than a dollar, families could buy stereoscopic views for their stereoscopes. The views contained subjects ranging from the interior of the coliseum in Rome to the Geisha girls of Japan.

‘‘Lots of jolly fun can be had in the evening with this big set of colored stereoscopic views,” the catalog boasts.

Children of today can still play with a modern version of the stereoscope, the Viewfinder, only now they are likely to find pictures from their latest Disney movies or television cartoons.

Communication

Installation of the posts for the first telegraph line across Cumberland County was completed in 1847.

By the late 1890s, telephone switchboards were common in many towns, including Fayetteville. In 1900, the exchange in Fayetteville and four other towns in North Carolina were merged under the name Carolina Telephone and Telegraph, one of the companies that would eventually merge to form Sprint.

Switchboard operators connect calls for the telephone company, circa 1900.

In 1949, the federal Rural Electrification Program was authorized to make loans for telephone improvements in rural areas. About that time, business was booming, the county was growing and farming was good. Farmers began demanding telephone service be brought to the country.

Today, nearly all homes and businesses have at least one telephone. Corded, rotary dial phones have made way for cordless, push-button models. Consumers can also access the Internet through their telephone lines. Many people carry cellular phones, and some substitute their mobile phones for home telephones and ‘‘land lines.”

E-mail has replaced letter writing as the primary means of written communication.

The first printing press in Cumberland County was operated by the Fayetteville Gazette, which began publishing in 1789.

The Fayetteville Observer was founded as the Carolina Observer in 1816. In 1999, the Observer installed a new press and constructed a new building to house it. The total cost was about $30 million.

Farming

A German traveler to North Carolina in the late 1700s noticed an abundance of cattle and hogs in the woods and noted such in his journal.

‘‘Nowhere on the whole continent is the breeding of swine so considerable or so profitable as in North Carolina,” reads the excerpt from the journal. ‘‘Besides what is consumed in the country, salted, exported, and lost in the woods, there are annually 10-12000 head driven to South Carolina or to Virginia. The North Carolinians therefore should not look a-skance, if their neighbors rally them for being pork-makers, for when the talk gets on their swine-breeding they themselves use the expression, ‘We make pork.’”

North Carolina was noted for its hog production as early as the late 1700s.

That is from "Travels in the Confederation" (1783-1784), a work that is kept by the N.C. Office of Archives and History, Division of Cultural Resources.

Now North Carolina farmers raise nearly 10 million hogs a year, more than any state except Iowa. While cities and suburbs have crowded farming out of much of Cumberland County, there are still a number of hog farms. But today’s hogs are raised by the thousands in confined spaces indoors. Farmers no longer must search the woods for their animals.

Farmers in early Cumberland County used only the crudest tools, plows and hoes. They cleared the land by girdling trees and waiting for them to die. Many tended only a few acres, enough to provide for their families.

Because their simple plows did not cut deeply into the earth and commercial fertilizers were unavailable, crops quickly used up the nutrients in the topsoil. Farmers would then abandon the fields or allow them to lie fallow for a year.

Now commercial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are used regularly in the production of most crops. Farmers use computerized tractors and combines and migrant laborers in order to tend hundreds of acres.

Agriculture in Cumberland County generates between $50 million and $80 million a year.

Shopping

In Cumberland County’s early days, shopping was not an everyday event. People waited months to shop at roving ‘‘Scotch fairs,” which were held twice a year in different locales.

Now, a modern shop-’til-you-drop society can spend its money 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Many stores remain open all day and all night. Cumberland County folks can window shop alongside the world at cyberspace stores and online auctions.

The Market House was a bustling place in 1895.

The Market House was so named because vendors sold their produce, meats and other wares there. It served as the focal point of the regional shopping district that grew up around it.

After the Civil War, county residents could buy hardware, medicines, dry goods, seeds and farm equipment, books and other wares from shopkeepers around Market Square.

In 1900, Benjamin R. Huske opened Huske Hardware House on Hay Street. The store sold hardware for seven decades. In the 1970s, it closed. That was about the time that many businesses began moving away from downtown to a new mall off Skibo Road.

Now the commercial center of Fayetteville and Cumberland County is clustered around Cross Creek Mall and the other shopping centers along Skibo Road. Few traditional hardware stores remain. Instead, mom-and-pop shops have grown up into supercenters and warehouse stores.

Huske Hardware House remains in its original location downtown, but it is now a restaurant and brewery. The old hardware store is one of several businesses drawing people back to the area that was once the shopping center of the county.

Medicine

In 1929, MacKethan’s Drug Store received exclusive rights to market a medicine called ‘‘Sargon.” It was touted in newspaper advertisements of the day as a wonder drug that cured just about everything.

‘‘This Sargon beats anything I ever saw for building up a run down system,” says Andrew J. Graddick of Columbia, S.C., in an ad that ran Nov. 19, 1929, in The Fayetteville Observer.

A 1929 newspaper ad promotes Kruschen Salts.

Today, advertisements for miracle cures or medical procedures still appear in newspapers, in magazines and on television, promising pain relief or an improved appearance or longer life, desires that have not changed through the county’s history.

Malnutrition was a problem for some children in Cumberland County in the 1920s, according to a 1924 agricultural extension report. ‘‘The school children were weighed and examined by a county health nurse, and a great deal of follow up work done by her where she found bad cases of malnutrition.”

But even in 1929, women were looking for ways to drop a few pounds. An advertisement that ran in the Observer on Nov. 7 that year touted the benefits of ‘‘Kruschen Salts.”

‘‘Try a half a teaspoonful of KRUSCHEN SALTS in a glass of hot water every morning — in 3 weeks get on the scales and note how many pounds of fat have vanished.”

Now, obesity is epidemic among adults and children in the United States, and Cumberland County is no exception. Health care officials worry about the medical consequences of so many obese people.

Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, along with other hospitals, is investing in larger wheelchairs, beds and chairs to accommodate obese patients. Gastric-bypass surgeries are becoming more common.

The first private hospital in North Carolina was the Marsh-Highsmith Sanitarium that opened in 1896 on the corner of Green and Old streets in Fayetteville.

Now Cape Fear Valley Health System boasts 741 beds, open heart surgery, a cancer center and physician offices throughout Cumberland County.