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[[stamp of the National Archives]]

To the charitably inclined Citizens of the United States

The undersigned citizens of Hyde county, state of North Carolina, for and in behalf of the masses of their fellow citizens, humbly beg leave to call your attention to the destitute and famishing condition of our people white and black, and solicit from you, some aid in relief of that suffering and want, now so heavily pressing on them, and from which they have no personal means means of escape.

They represent that in addition to the exhausted state in which they were left by the late war, they had the misfortune in common with other sections, of loosing nearly their entire crops of last year, of all the cereals usually produced here in large quantities, leaving them but a scanty subsistence of the most common necessaries of life, with which they had hoped by a rigid economy to reach that period of the present year, when the summer crops would have relieved them from absolute want.  But in this they have been defeated by the hand of Divine Providence, (to which we humbly and uncomplainingly submit) in the visitation of unprecedented floods of rain during the present season, and especially during the month of June, submerging the larger portion of our County, and wholly destroying our wheat Oat Potatoes and vegetable crops, our sole reliance for present need, and so materially injuring our corn crops, the principle staple of the County, as to render certain a very large deficiency for another year.

They further represent, that in a population of about seven thousand white and black, not more than