With fine weather favoring the Albemarle Fair, and the roads improving, the crowds are growing larger each day. Thousands flocked to the fair on Thursday, making it the greatest attendance of the week. Carload after carload of visitors were pouring in the gates as this newspaper went to press on Thursday afternoon.
Camden County took first prize of $50 at the District Fair with the best county exhibit. Weeksville High School took the first prize for the best community exhibit, and C.W. Ives of Wildwood farm, this county, got the $15 for best farm exhibit.
Newland got the second prize for community exhibits, and Dudley Bagley came all the way from Moyock in Currituck County and won the ribbon for the second best farm exhibit.
Hundreds of visitors came especially to see the big Coast Guard demonstration and the presentation of medals held after dinner yesterday. Rear Admiral F.C. Billard, Commandant of the Coast Guard service himself was present to give the medals, and O.M. Maxim, Chief of the Division of Operation of the Coast Guard was there to tell the stoiry of the rescue for which the Coast Guards were decorated.
The men who received decorations were Capt. John Allen Midgett and surfmen LeRoy S. Midgett, Prochorns L. O’Neal, Arthur V. Midgett, Clarence E. Midgett, and Zion S. Midgett, men of Chicmacomico Coast Guard who on August 18, 1918, rescued 42 British seaman from the sea off Rodanthe. The men were members of the crew of the British S.S. Mirlo, which was torpedoed by a submarine, loaded with oil, after the tanks of the ship blew up, covering the sea with burning oil and wreckage, over which floated a heavy pall of black smoke. Into this blazing, smoking inferno, the men of the Chicamacomico station made their way in a small motor surfboat and rescued the seamen.
The boat used by the rescuers was brought to Elizabeth City and exhibited at the fair. Demonstrations of life saving methods employed by the Coast Guard were features of yesterday’s program.
Capt. Midgett and his crew were decorated three years ago by the British government, and the medals of the two nations were pinned side?? On the coasts of the men yesterday. A hundred or more Coast Guards of the Seventh District came to see the event.
The medals presented here this week are medals authorized by act of Congress, June 20, 1874, and bearing on the reverse side this inscription: “In testimony of Heroic Deeds in Saving Life from the Furies of the Sea.”
The first of these medals to have been presented to surfmen in the Seventh district were given to the late Capt. B.B. Daily of Hatteras, father of N.W. Daily, secretary of the Surfmen’s Mutal Benefit Association of this city, and to Capt. Daily’s crew of six men who assisted him in the rescue of the crew of the bark Ephraim Williams, waterlogged off Cape Hatteras, December 22, 1884. Captain Daily and his six men rowed 14 miles in a raging wintry sea to rescue the men. The heroes are dead and gone. The medal won by Captain daily is now in the possession of his son, N.W. Daily.
From the front page of the Elizabeth City Independent, Friday, October 10, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83025812/1924-10-10/ed-1/seq-1/#words=OCTOBER+10%2C+1924
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