SESQUICENTENNIAL

Traffic had been rerouted around the four square blocks of downtown Madison, NC and the crowd had filled the traffic-vacated streets milling about like a vat of molasses. A new word had been introduced to the general use in the months leading up to the Madison Sesquicentennial Celebration in the summer of 1968. Until they could practice a little, “sesquicentennial” seemed an unnecessarily complicated way to say 150, the number of years since the town of Madison had been created at the confluence of the Dan and Mayo rivers in the northern Piedmont of North Carolina. Once mastered, however, the word did capture for citizens of all ages that special summer of fun and frolic.

Although the headquarters of the celebration was located in a vacant store building across from the Bank of Madison on Murphy Street, it had been decided to open the first big public event in front of Dick Cartwright’s store around the corner on Market Street. It had been concluded that the “Greased Pig Race ” would be an exciting beginning and would have appeal in the entire Market area which the merchant town served. Sure enough, mixed among the local merchants and mill workers and their families, seemed to be enough bibbed-overalls, straw-hatted farmers within wagon ride of town, cast in  their pejorative role as red-necks and bruising to show that they knew how to catch a greased pig better than any of these uppity city folks. A dipper of liquor had already lubricated most.  

The two o’clock hour approached. Lloyd Eastlack raised his fully-loaded double-barreled shotgun under the low-hanging telephone and power lines by the street and let loose the full load. Transformed from the molasses to a swarm of flopping alligators, the human mass sprang to action even before the four small, greased pigs could be released. With difficulty, the pigs scampered off in various directions into the crowd. Women and children squealed. Men cursed with vengeance. Bib-overalls and straw hats dashed viciously through startled family groups. A captured pig brought immediate efforts to cause a fumble and a reignited scramble to retake the squealing, squirming porker dodging between shuffling legs. The pigs were lightning fast, as slick as promised. They made it well into the mass clogging each of the four blocks of the intersection before human ingenuity in the form of burlap sacks (forbidden by the rules) and pairs of burly men working as a team, succeeded in final capture. Triumphantly, without returning to any central starting point, the victors hustled their capture back to waiting pickup trucks satisfied that they had a good day’s hunt and would bring home the bacon. 

“That was fun,” I said ironically until I saw the large footprint marks on the back of my seven-year-old son’s shirt and realized we had just missed a fast descent from celebration to near tragedy. “Do you know that fool, Lloyd Eastlack, shot that gun right into a string of lives wires?” I recognized that the best intent, even in public celebration, can run a close parallel to disaster at any moment.

We lived in Madison for nine years by then. In spite of being newcomers in a coagulated society. I saw very early that one of the attractions of the town to my family, was its age. Old houses, boxwoods Victorian store-fronts – all gave off an image of southern tranquility that made for immediate comfort in place. When I first recognized, and brought to the attention of my friends, that the town was about to be 15o years old, they were surprised but only mildly motivated. Somewhere between indifferent and apathetic, they were at a loss about what to do about it. I caught myself imagining Mickey Rooney urgently proposing to his friends, “let’s have a party!” That is the moment I had to look up the word for 150 and “sesquicentennial” mutated into the Madison vocabulary.

“The Music Man ” had been a Tony Award winner in 1957 and “76 Trombones” had become a high school band standard. Even without the internet, I looked up companies that were in the business of organizing and producing centennial celebrations. The John B. Rogers Producing Company out of Fostoria, Ohio, appeared to be the best known such company and a mailed inquiry brought a packet of instructions and brochures from towns that had put on one of Rogers’ productions in past years. Rogers offered themselves as suppliers of costumes, sets, lights and scripts for amateur productions as well as professional instructions for a full promotion of a centennial celebration. It seemed dauntingly out of our league but here were the small towns from all over America that had bought the service and succeeded wildly. I discussed the prospect with my fellow members of the newly-formed Madison Jaycees. The success of the Greensboro Jaycees at the time in running the Greater Greensboro Open (GGO), was a special inspiration to all chapters nearby to find something grand and glorious to promote in their community. We organized for success and approached the Mayor and Board of Aldermen.

The contract with the John B. Rogers Company provided us with a company employee who would spend three months on site to guarantee all the promotional services. The arrival of Cloud Morgan in Madison was our Music Man moment. Sesquicentennial was difficult enough. Who ever heard of a man whose first name was “Cloud?”

He was from Illinois, “not even one of us.” About average height, blond, very presentable, well-spoken and cosmopolitan beyond his 25 years. Cloud was programmed to assume the reins and focus the community on one purpose. Madison was going to put together an event like nothing it had ever seen before. They were going to raise money like they had never dreamed possible. They were going to participate individually like they had never been expected to before and they were going to do it willingly. All this was to be done according to a pre-planned matrix by John B. Rogers and we could sit back and enjoy the ride. Of course, this was done not as a dictum or as ballyhoo. It was to be accomplished just like all the other small towns had done since 1907  when the Rogers Company was begun. 

The Sesquicentennial office and store were opened when Mayor Jack Sealy signed the proclamation – 1818-1968 Madison Sesquicentennial. All men were directed to grow beards or they faced jail by an official Kangaroo Kourt. Nancy Carter ran the store which was already stocked with costumes: women’s bonnets and dresses and men’s hats and ties. A shipment of Sesquicentennial patriotic bunting arrived and city employees decorated light poles and festooned streets; merchants acquired material to decorate their stores. There were bumper stickers, and “Brother of the Brush” pins. 

 The official celebration was to be over the 4^th of July but the main focus was a pageant to be held nightly between July 1 and 6 at the football stadium at the Madison-Mayodan High School. The pageant was an activity that began as soon as Cloud had been installed at the Dolly Madison Motel. Cloud gave the committee a pre-script produced by the Rogers Company that could be modified to make it local. There were to be 14 episodes, each focusing on some aspect of the town’s history. Someone could write special music or Rogers would supply that from standard selections. The pageant was really how the whole celebration would be financed, so vigorous ticket sales were essential. The modus was to have young women compete for the title of Queen based on the number of tickets they sold. The winners and runners up would receive fabulous packages of rewards. The Queen’s Award alone would be: a mink stole (provided by the Sesquicentennial Committee), overnight stay at the Dolly Madison Motel, $50.00 savings account, silver tray, travel iron, Prolon dinnerware, Bobby Brooks swimsuit, beach towel, Jantzen sports outfit, towel and sheet set, charm bracelet, stockings, movie pass, and Merl Norman cosmetics and demonstration. The first, second, and third Princess Awards descended in value but were all well worth the effort. Local merchants were solicited for the gifts and responded with enthusiasm and Mickey Dean Anderson was the winner. 

The multi-stage with three projection screens was perhaps the greatest physical challenge. Guy McCall was in charge of set construction, which had to be done the week before the pageant began on July 1^st. Volunteers, mostly Jaycees, spent hours each day constructing and painting throughout the daylight, in addition to their individual work schedules. 

The pageant was titled “A Heritage to Honor” and that theme was carried out in many ways, including the publication of a history of the town which Jean Rodenbough wrote and which was printed with local advertising by the Madison Messenger. The publishers of the Messenger, Russ and Mimi Spear, were “Yankees” who had come to Madison in the midst of the Depression and bought the weekly newspaper. Madison was always their “cause” – attempting to inspire a self-deprecating, Southern town to rise to its unimagined potential. Mimi had local celebrity as the daughter of the famous author, Sherwood Anderson. She and Russ could be depended on to “call Madison out” with an authority that comes from natural respect. 

A variety of preliminaries primed citizens for the crescendo of the Pageant Week: a tennis tournament, an ‘Ole Fashioned Street Dance, several promenades and Kangaroos Kourts to display beard growth, and costumes. Judge “Pansy” Collins presided over the Kourt and men without beards were awarded various heinous penalties. The North Carolina Automobile Club made a special visit and stopped for display downtown on the 22^nd, and a traveling Carnival made a visit for a week to the Junior High athletic field on Decatur Street, beginning the 24^th.

At noon on Saturday the 29^th, Mayor Sealy opened Heritage Week by cutting the ribbon at the Sesquicentennial store, surrounded by some of the young ladies vying for Queen and dressed variously from flappers to Old South belles. Young women could display their legs and married women hid their legs discreetly under hoop skirts. Churches rang their bells and a cannon was fired by an unknown bombast. Congressman L. Richardson Preyer gave a formal speech commending the town for its years of contribution to the history of North Carolina. In the evening the Queen’s Coronation Ball was held at the High School auditorium. An “old-fashioned” square dance was held at the Fairground. 

On Sunday, each church recognized the anniversary focusing on their contribution to the history of Madison. As a preview of the newly completed stage on Falcon Field, a community worship service brought all the churches together.

Each day of the week was structured with a different theme: street games for children and tournaments for everything from softball to checkers and horseshoes. Each night there was a performance of “A Heritage to Honor” at the stadium as dusk settled in the summer sky. Nary a rainy night. The performance was dubbed, “a huge dramatic Historical Spectacular with a professionally directed cast of 312 people,” to perform the highlights of Madison’s colorful history – “a thrilling 90-minute performance before a 300-foot scenic background.” Each member of the cast could be expected to draw at least ten family members and friends who would fill the bleachers every night. 

Episode One: “Happy Birthday, Madison,” opened with a youth color guard escorting the Queen and her four princesses onto the field to rousing cheers. Subsequent episodes recognized the town founders, the Saura Indians, the first mayor, and the Madison Academy. The “ring and spear tournament” harkened to an event popular in the Victorian years when young men on horseback jousted with long sticks attempting to hook hanging spheres instead of one another. Madison’s World War I flying ace, Opie Lindsay, was honored in one episode as were the veterans of the Second World War, many in the audience, with the tableau of the flag raising at Iwo Jima. The finale brought the full cast and stage hands forward to salute our past and pledge our faith in the future. The night ended with fireworks which got more professional with each performance.

On the 4^th, the streets of Madison were cleared of automobiles, and children rode their bicycles, skated, played marbles, raced turtles, and enjoyed the frog-jumping down Murphey Street. The NC Secretary of Agriculture, Jim Graham, was the guest speaker for the dinner honoring agriculture leaders. On Industrial Day, the local mills opened to the public and families were able to see where their spouse or parents spent each working day.

Saturday, July 6^th, was “Good Neighbor Day,” the wrap-up of the Sesquicentennial. The most beautiful home was selected and a huge Anniversary Historical and Patriotic Parade wound through throngs of spectators. A Time Capsule, in the form of a baby’s casket provided by Ray Funeral Home, was buried in front of City Hall. The Mayor’s Dinner honored all the people who had organized and carried through the celebration. 

A collective sigh rose from the small North Carolina community. Fatigue was overwhelmed by satisfaction. The mysterious “Cloud” had left town and everyone used the term “Sesquicentennial” with experienced ease. Madison was comfortable in the face of all the discomfort that surrounded the world. Did that comfort come from the nostalgia for a world in which America was somehow better, or was it the satisfaction that a community working within itself, together, could accomplish the perceived impossible?

On the 4^th of July 2018, Madison celebrated its Bicentennial.

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service

In 1832, when ninety-year-old James Martin rode from his plantation on Snow Creek of the Dan River in Stokes County to the Courthouse at Germanton, he was delivering his detailed recollections of his Revolutionary War service as Colonel in the NC Militia that qualified him for a military pension. He did not anticipate that the document would be misinterpreted by later researchers as a record of his entire military service in that war. He wrote the document to prove his Militia service and had no reason to make reference further to his regular service in the American Continental Army, for which he had already received compensation in land rights in Tennessee.¹ As a result of this oversight of researchers, James Martin has sometimes received only half his due as a patriot. Considering his personal efforts in recording and thus preserving the record of his family, it is unfortunate that by this confusion he himself is under-documented. 

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¹ The author made that error in writing the biography of Colonel James Martin for the 4th volume of the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, edited by William S. Powell in 1991.

Francie Lane of Yuba City, CA is half way through publication of her five volume work, The Martin Family History. In the second volume, she concentrates on Colonel James Martin (1742-1834). It is her research, combined with that of Charles Moore Martin, a direct descendant of Colonel James Martin, that raised the question of Martin’s Militia and Continental service. As a corollary, the expanded look at the Continental service of four of the five Martin brothers makes a clearer interpretation of this entire family during the Revolutionary Period. 

Hugh Martin and Jane Hunter were born in Northern Ireland of Scots descent. They were married in Hunterdon County, NJ after their families had emigrated. They produced five sons and two daughters all born in New Jersey. Of the daughters, Martha married Samuel Rogers in New Jersey and Jane married Thomas Henderson in North Carolina.  One of the sons, Thomas, became an Anglican priest and rector of the Old Brick Church in Orange County, VA and tutor of the future President, James Madison, and his siblings. Thomas died in 1770 at the age of 27. It is his four surviving brothers upon whose military record we are concerned: Alexander, James, Samuel, and Robert Martin.

The eldest, Alexander, born circa 1739, was a graduate of Princeton College in New Jersey and had sought his fortune in North Carolina.  At Salisbury in Rowan County, he succeeded as a merchant and became a King’s Attorney and Justice of the Peace. At the coming of the Revolution he was appointed on September 1, 1775, second in command of the 2^nd NC Line Regiment, one of the two initial Revolutionary Regiments raised in North Carolina. On May 7, 1776, Martin was promoted to Colonel. After involvement in several battles of the initial Southern Campaign in North and South Carolina, Alexander moved with the 2^nd Regiment to the North in 1777 and joined General Washington at Trenton. There the 2^nd participated in the Battles at Chadds Ford and Brandywine. The loss of Philadelphia produced vicious political infighting in Congress and the army but Washington had seemed certain of his prospects at Germantown, west of Philadelphia and the defeat only added to the discontent. It also took the life of General Francis Nash, Alexander Martin’s immediate superior. As part of the recriminations following Germantown, Martin was accused of cowardice, and he demanded an immediate Courts Martial by which he was exonerated.² Martin was now senior Colonel of the 2^nd NC and should have been an obvious candidate replacement for Nash. He was, however, so exasperated with Army politics and the attempts to destroy his reputation, that he resigned his commission on November 22, 1777 and returned to North Carolina and reentered state politics.

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² Martin was not the only officer accused as character assanation was then the (common) preferred course for advancement in the American Army. See Charles Rodenbough, Governor Alexander Martin, Biography of a North Carolina Revolutionary War Statesman (Jefferson, NC, McFarland Publishing, 2005), 51-53.

In September 1781, well after the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and two weeks before Yorktown, British Colonel David Fanning and his second-in-command “One-eyed” Hector Mclean, rode into Hillsborough and captured the Governor, Thomas Burke, his Council of State, members of the Assembly, the Governor’s military guard and 71 Continental soldiers. Alexander Martin was then President of the NC Senate, the second officer in the state but he was not present on the 12th of September at Hillsborough and therefore became acting Governor. At this point in history, North Carolina was nearly as destitute as had been South Carolina the year before after the fall of Charleston. The coffers were empty. The food supply had been ravaged by two armies. The Assembly could not meet because they had no Quorum. Martin and the wagons carrying the state documents that wandered through the state, were the residual government. .

On January 30, 1782, Governor Burke, in an embarrassing breach of protocol, broke parole and escaped Charleston to return to North Carolina. Martin immediately surrendered the government to him. When the legislature next met, Alexander Martin was then chosen Governor for the first of three terms of one year.  He served another three years and then became a US Senator for North Carolina. He was perhaps the most successful political leader in North Carolina during his lifetime.

James Martin, the chief subject of this article and Alexander’s next sibling, was born on May 21, 1742 in Hunterdon County. He too was sent to Princeton but when his father died in 1761 he left school and seems to have elected to step into management of the family estate. Family councils and the urging of Alexander, resulted in the decision to move south. In 1761, immediately after his father’s death, Alexander Martin bought 436 acres of land in Rowan County (later Guilford then Rockingham) on Jacobs Creek and Dan River.  For a few years after leaving New Jersey, part of the family including Jane Hunter Martin, remained at Montpelier with Rev. Thomas and she acted as tutor when he died. James, however, remained in New Jersey and married his neighbor, Ruth Rogers in 1763. He says clearly in his pension application that they moved to North Carolina in May 1774.³ By then they had 4 daughters and a son and their daughter, Mary was born in July after their arrival on the Dan River. 

James’ appointment to Lt Colonel as “Commandant of the Guilford Regiment of Militia was dated April 22, 1774. by Samuel Johnston, President of the Provincial Congress, then sitting, and afterwards made Governor of this State.⁴ Part of the confusion here is that James says he came to NC in May of 1774 but he was made second in Commander of the Guilford Militia in April.  It is questionable to think that James, recently arrived in North Carolina from New Jersey, could have been chosen to regimental staff in the Militia of a county, so recently created, without the influence and advocacy of his elder brother.⁵ Alexander was well known to Governor Tryon and a rising politician in Rowan County but James’ fortuitous, immediate appointment to militia command is still something of a wonder.

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³ Pension Application of James Martin, National Archives Microseries M804, Roll 1640, Application #W47.
⁴ Ibid, James Martin is in error about the exact positions of Samuel Johnston (1733-1816) in this period. He was elected to the first two NC Provincial Congresses and presided over the 4th and 5th in 1775 and 1776. On July 9, 1781 he was elected president of the Continental Congress. At the time of James’ appointment it came from Johnston as Presiding Officer of the Provincial Congress; William S. Powell, ed., DNCB, V. 3 H-K, 306-307.
⁵ Another brother named Samuel Martin was instrumental in the appointment of his brother, Josiah Martin, in March 1771 as Governor of the province of North Carolina following the departure of Governor Tryon. They were
sons of a wealthy Leeward Island sugar planter, from Antigua. In spite of some unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, no connection has ever been made between these two Martin families. .

Colonel Alexander Martin of 2nd NC Continentals

Alexander’s appointment as Lt. Colonel of the 2^nd NC Regiment was dated September 1, 1775. Alexander was ordered to Moore’s Creek to meet the Scotch Tories in February and James says “I was ordered by my brother, Alexander Martin, who was appointed Colonel of the Second regular Regiment, to raise the Guilford Militia and, as ordered by Congress then setting, march them to Fayette[ville] in order to suppress them.” The brothers Martin and their forces arrived too late to be directly involved in the short fight but they were put in charge of the many Tory prisoners. 

After Moore’s Creek Battle, Alexander spent a lot of time enlisting men and in training men for Continental service. He was included in parts of the Snow Campaign in November and December 1775. Among his recruits at this time must have been his brothers because James enlisted as a 1^st Lt. May 3, 1776 and Samuel as a 1^st Lt. June 8, 1776.  Without making any mention of this enlistment, James next says in his Pension Application, that in June 1776 he and the Guilford Militia were summoned by General Rutherford of Rowan to go against the “Overhill Cherokee” towns. James Martin with the Guilford Militia and Martin Armstrong with the Surry County Militia, rendezvoused with Rutherford at Salisbury. This was a militia campaign but James had already been signed up as a Continental in May. This further proves the point that James Martin’s service as either Militia or Continental overlapped in such a way that said more about the non-professional character of the American military at that point than about any ambivalence on the part of the Martin brothers. The Militia returned from the Cherokee Campaign at the end of October 1776. After a brief rest James received an express calling the Militia to assemble at Guilford Courthouse to put down some Tories who were threatening to join British forces at Wilmington. The militia was engaged for about six weeks against the Tories on this occasion. Between February 1775 at Moore’s Creek, through the end of 1776 against Guilford Tories, although James Martin commanded the Guilford Militia detachment, it appears that his brother Alexander as a Continental Commander had precedence over his activities and it was on that basis that when the war ended, James had no problem claiming against the land warrants provided for Continental service ⁶ and after 1830 for the pensions that were awarded for Militia service for living veterans and spouses. 

In February 1777 the NC 2^nd Regiment was ordered north to join Washington. All three brothers then were officers of the 2^nd NC Regiment. All were inoculated for smallpox as they passed through Maryland. Presumably they were all at Chadds Ford and Brandywine and ultimately at Germantown. James had been promoted to Captain April 20, 1777 and transferred to the 5^th NC Regiment.⁷ The humiliation inflicted on Alexander Martin after the defeat at Germantown must have been a severe disappointment to his brothers. They may have been inclined to themselves resign as protest but they likely would have been discouraged from such folly by Alexander.  

After Germantown, the NC Brigade was undermanned, but had a full complement of officers and reorganization was overdue. There are indications that James Martin was not with Washington at Valley Forge in the 1777-1778 winter. James was included on a list of superannuated officers in early 1778. He retired from his Continental Army commission, June 1, 1778. ⁸

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⁶ James Martin received 1,462 acres for 32 months of Continental service. (Jan 1776 – June 1778)
⁷ This promotion and transfer would have only been possible if he was with the NC Brigade in PA.
⁸ Roster of North Carolina Soldiers in the American Revolution, 42

At some point before the spring of 1780, James again took command of the Guilford Militia as a full Colonel at the point when they were called out against the Tories on Haw River.⁹  The implication is that after having not left the army after Germantown at the time of Alexander’s  court martial and departure, James found himself in a “losing position” in terms of advancement. He still had his dual position in command of the Guilford Militia and in the middle of 1778 he returned home. He was still living on Dan River in Guilford (later Rockingham). In his pension application he describes then moving against a Tory named Bryan on the Yadkin River. ¹⁰

The “Southern Strategy” began for the Americans in late 1778 with the British capture of Savannah. In 1780 a series of battles in South Carolina were British successes by Cornwallis including a significant route of Gates at Camden. Washington placed Nathanael Greene in command in the South and General Daniel Morgan gave the Americans a resounding success at Cowpens. Cornwallis pursued Greene north through North Carolina seeking a decisive battle. Greene, ever the tactician, avoided an open battle while he gathered a larger force and Cornwallis, in a rash attempt to gain speed of pursuit, jettisoned most of his non-subsistence baggage. There followed what was called the “Race to the Dan,” a delaying tactic which Greene executed, perfectly stymieing Cornwallis. Greene re-crossed the Dan in March 1781 and the two armies maneuvered to the preferred site of a major battle in the vicinity of the Courthouse in Guilford County. 

According to James Martin, he was “ordered and commanded by General Greene to raise and call upon the Guilford militia en masse and to equip themselves as the military laws directed and for me to join his camp in the regular service and not depart without leave….”  Martin then explained the difficulty in raising untrained farmers to military readiness in the face of eminent conflict. “Guns were wanting by a number of the men and I had to have recourse to impress and borrow as many as I could get and I could only raise about 200 to go with me to camp and they, hearing that the British were marching towards us in Guilford, it struck such a terror on them that some of that number deserted before the Battle at old Martinsville [sic].” 

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⁹ Guilford County NC Archives Military Records, Rev. War-Pensions William Wiley-rootswebb. He probably meant Yadkin River.
¹⁰ James Martin, Pension application.

Over the years, James Martin has been repeatedly criticized because of the less than exemplary performance of the NC militia that made up the first line of Greene’s force at Guilford. Greene’s strategy, the reverse of that preferred by Washington, was to place his less reliable units in the advance positions reserving his trained Continental force as his last line. With many of their homes nearby, after an initial volley at the Redcoats and at the sound of  incoming shots, the North Carolina boys ran. Martin was left to attempt to catch water in a sieve. The rest of the day he was assigned to rally stragglers and attempt to reform units in retreat. Then Martin was particularly useful as the American army retreated to Troublesome Iron Works near his home and his men were ordered to help refit the Iron Works for defense in case Cornwallis had strength enough to follow. 

Next the Guilford militia moved against Tories at Raft Swamp when they were on the way with General Rutherford against British Major Craig at Wilmington They learned about the Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown and subsequently found Major Craig, the British commander of Wilmington, had already abandoned the city. James Martin’s service ended when the militia arrived home November 25, 1781. 

In his pension application James says that he moved his family from Dan River in Guilford to Snow Creek of Dan River in 1781.¹¹ A year later he was able to write to his friend Charles Stewart in Hunterdon County, NJ from his new Snow Creek home:

“As to myself I now enjoy a good state of Health tho’ the first two or three years this Southern Climate racked my Constitution much that I now begin to look somewhat old. I have bettered my small fortune much since I came here have secured about 5,000 acres of good land and have Ten Negroes a good stock of cattle horses plenty and a little money to spend. I only wait for peace or our Independence to be secured to built me a better house which at present is but mean.” ¹²

Part of the attraction of James’ relocation of his family to Snow Creek was the potential of the water power of the creek.  There was already a lime kiln in operation and by 1786 he had established an ironworks and forge which he named Union Iron Works after the one near his home in Hunterdon. He became active in politics and was appointed to the commission to locate the capital of North Carolina. A strong family tradition published by his stepson says he was the commissioner who suggested the name “Raleigh” for the capital. In 1795, his wife, Ruth Rogers Martin, died. They had eleven children. On March 12, 1800, James married a widow, Martha Loftin Jones and they had five more children. 

Brother Samuel Martin (1748-1790) left Hunterdon County probably about the time of his father’s death (1761) and located in Mecklenburg, North Carolina He became County Clerk and a delegate to the First Provincial Congress. He was commissioned a 1^st Lieutenant in the 2^nd North Carolina Regiment of the line June 8, 1776 and was promoted to Captain in June 1780 ¹³ Samuel was at the victory at Cowpens with General Morgan and at Cowan’s Ford in February when General Davidson was killed. He was not at Guilford Court House but in several of Greene’s battles in South Carolina later in the year. ¹⁴

Samuel was a successful Merchant in Charlotte in partnership with Adlai Osborne after the war. He had a family but died in 1790. 

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¹¹ More accurately it might be said that immediately on his return from the Army and the end of the fighting, he moved his family to Snow Creek.
¹² Francie Lane, The Martin Family History, II, 23-24; James Martin, A.L.s, Surry Co. NC, dated March 25, 1782, Charles Stewart Family Papers MS. Am 1243, Harvard University, Houghton Library.
¹³ How did Samuel miss getting captured at Charleston when Lincoln surrendered the NC Brigade.?
¹⁴ Patrick O’Kelly, Nothing but Blood and Slaughter III,

The youngest brother, Robert Martin (1750-1822) came with his mother to North Carolina about 1774 and was located on Alexander Martin’s grant on the Dan River.  He had enlisted in the Guilford Militia at least by 1776 and was part of the Over-the-Mountain Campaign against the Cherokee as a Sergeant and as adjutant. ¹⁵

The move of the family of the late Hugh Martin from Hunterdon County, NJ to Guilford County/Mecklenburg NC was a family migration. Alexander, the eldest, went ahead and established himself first at Salisbury in Rowan County, NC. Then Rev. Thomas Martin went as far as Orange County, VA and set up a “station en route” at Montpelier with the James Madison family. As conflict bloomed near New Jersey, the rest of the family moved out. Some stopped for a time at Montpelier but when Thomas died, they moved on. The Hunter family of the widowed mother, Jane Hunter Martin, was migrating on this same course, stopping for a time in the valley of Virginia but ultimately settling on the Dan in Guilford. Jane and the younger family members arrived in 1774 and the Dan River promised to be remote enough in the face of the oncoming fratricide. 

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 ¹⁵ Guilford County NC Archives Military Records, William Bowen, Nathaniel Scales; William Wiley says he was in the South Carolina Militia in 1779 under Major Robert Martin but this cannot be confirmed as the same person. ..

In this generation, the Martin family and the Hunters had made the decision to exchange a very rich agricultural location in the most economically developed region of the middle colonies for the promise of cheaper land in North Carolina. The Hunters and Martins also elected to settle in the frontier of the new state, lightly settled and roughly organized. They represented education and a degree of wealth uncommon to most of the Piedmont. In Guilford County, they found the same German Lutheran, English Quaker, Scots Presbyterian people they were used to in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and to the west they found the Moravians fresh out of Lancaster. Clearly there was a well-thought-out plan within the family to succeed from within. But before they could move forward very far, the Revolution broke out. They could not have been surprised by its onset but a study of the service records of the sons demonstrates that the war was seen as a building block for the family and there was no ambivalence about the support they were prepared to give to the cause. 

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC

The site where the Battle of Alamance culminated in the defeat of a small farmer rebellion in North Carolina in 1771 features a visitors center and a monument of somewhat misapplied memorial. There is no structural relic of the incident that survives except in Guilford County. A Guilford committee interested in calling attention to the preservation of this relic of earliest government authority has organized under the auspices of the High Point Preservation Society to save and restore the building and its history to public attention.

William Tryon, Royal Governor of North Carolina, was concerned with protests growing along the frontier of his colony. Organized by an increasingly literate collection of small landowners and subsistence farmers it was directed against the excesses of courts and colonial government authority to fine, fee and tax.  It seemed little more than an irritant but still a threat to his authority and by extension, an insult to King George and Parliament. It represented the possibility of personal embarrassment. Unchallenged it was a seed of insurgence which he would not tolerate. His reputation as a representative of the Royal authority promised to lead him to even more important commissions of government.

In 1766, the first efforts to organize the scattered complaints of aggrieved farmers into a movement to affect change, was held at Sandy Creek Baptist Church. The church had been organized in 1755 near the western edge of Orange County. Two years later, almost due west but on the eastern side of Rowan County, a man named William Buis gave land to establish another Baptist Church on Abbotts Creek. Buis and his brother, Thomas, had arrived in the Deep River area with a migrant group from Augusta County, Virginia. William made an entry for a land grant in 1752 for 484 acres on the south fork of Deep River between the two Baptist churches. The astute location was a ford of the river where the ancient Indian Trading Path intersected a road south toward Cross Creek (1756) on the Cape Fear River. Buis became a Justice of the Peace, constable, tax assessor, road overseer and tax collector, an outstanding pioneer. Shrewd in his choice of location, he and his brother soon constructed an Ordinary (tavern) at his crossroad. Subject to the deprivation of highwaymen and Indians, the structure was big enough to be versatile for use on the borderline of settlement. Fort Dobbs, the only frontier fort in North Carolina between Virginia and South Carolina (1756) was about as far west of the Buis Ordinary as Hillsborough was east. In 1762, William Buis died leaving a wife and 5 children. His will left the dwelling/Ordinary to his eldest son, 22-year-old John.

Lindsay Property on Deep River

His widow, Rachel, with three of her children not yet teenagers, married William Simmons who had been part of the group from Augusta County. He had actually been one of the signatories to Buis’ will. Simmons probably lived at the Ordinary and may have even taken over joint management. Rachel and her new husband had a son they named William, Jr., but within two years, Rachel was again a widow with another mouth to feed. 

Nine miles away, in the Wachovia Settlement, the Moravians planned their new commercial town of Salem.  The first house and the chief communal structure, the Single Brothers House, were completed in 1768. Limited by location as the Moravians were on this primitive frontier, these buildings attempted to replicate by tradition, the common structural form with which the Germans had been familiar in Europe. There were no ready supplies of brick, lime for mortar, nails, glass or tin.  Still they rejected the log construction type most easily applied to a frontier, for frame post and brick noggin.  It was the same form found a few miles away on Deep River at the Buis Ordinary. 

  In the fall of 1768, Governor Tryon, mounted his first campaign against what he perceived as the challenge of the Regulators to the authority of King and Parliament although the Regulators confined their rancor to local administrators and court officials. A British officer named John Collet was serving as the Governor’s aide-de-camp in the campaign. Of Swiss extraction, Collett was also an engineer and map maker. In December he was sent by Tryon to give a first hand report to London of the expedition and the Regulator controversy that tainted Tryon’s administration. He carried with him a manuscript map of North Carolina which was basically the work of the late William Churton, surveyor of the Granville District. Churton was the man who had led the Moravians under Bishop Spangenberg, to select the nearly 100,000 acres that became the Wachovia Tract in 1753.  The map, published by Collett in 1770, was particularly reliable for northern Piedmont because both Churton and Collett had made extensive personal examinations of that area. They recorded “Bewes Ord.’ at a crossroad on Deep River east of Salem. 

 In this expedition, Tryon was prepared to take on in battle what he considered to be a poorly organized protest but he needed to determine whether he was underestimating their capabilities. He also needed to take more personal, direct command of the militia force upon which he would be depending on any hostilities.  Both sides appeared to be relieved to negotiate without conflict. Tryon, with good military efficiency, consolidated all his provincial forces. 

Men in authority in local administration and in the courts owed their position to the crown and although they may have had sympathy for the more fundamental complaints of the Regulators, the Governor’s presence stiffened their ultimate loyalty to Britain. On October 16, 1768, Tryon camped on Deep River marching up from Mecklenburg and the next night he was at Alamance. This would have been in the vicinity, if not the specific site of the Buis Ordinary.

The Regulators were not without voice, however, and two from the region around Sandy Creek were James Hunter and Herman Husband. The latter, an efficient pamphleteer who went on to later be the voice of the Whiskey Rebellion, countered Tryon’s demand for personal commitment with a pamphlet, “Show Yourselves to be Freemen.”  Husband was the more complex of the Regulators. He had significant property eventually owning over 10,000 acres in Orange and Rowan County, and he was a social radical, a seemingly contradictory combination. He had been raised in an Anglican household but had chosen early to become a New Side Presbyterian under the influence of George Whitfield.  Then he quarreled with Presbyterian elders and became a Quaker.

They were some of the peripheral characters whose action came to influence the existence of the Buis Ordinary at Deep River. Returning to the immediate occupants of the ordinary, the widow Buis-Simmons had another man in her life, Robert Lindsay, who obtained a license from the court to operate a tavern in 1769. Lindsay had been in the Deep River area for several years. His first wife was Elizabeth Mebane whose family was part of the Presbyterians living in the Nottingham District on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, which was contested by both states. .In 1753 members of the community attempted to purchase 33 non-contiguous tracts in North Carolina on Buffalo and Alamance Creek. The Presbyterians drifted down the Great Wagon Road, The Quakers meanwhile were organizing their Meeting at Deep River. All these religious affiliations were converging on what would be Guilford County.

Robert Lindsay appears to have assumed the operation of the Buis Ordinary about the time of the death of Rachel Buis’ second husband. No title changed hands. John Buis, the eldest child of William Buis was the legatee with clear title after his mother re-married. John was only five years younger than Robert Lindsay so he was not looking for maturity in order to operate the Ordinary. More likely, Robert was taking over operation in fact before he actually recorded the title in law.

Herman Husband continued to codify the complaints of the Regulators in pamphlets he was said to have had printed by his friend, Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. In the mean time more malicious Regulators sought confrontation. That came at the September Session of Hillsborough Superior Court in 1770 when the town was filled with people armed with clubs, whips, and switches. Richard Henderson, the judge, was under direct threat with competing influences first promising him protection then another threatening that he would be next punished. As officials of the court, lawyers were dragged outside and whipped including Alexander Martin soon to be located in Guilford County. In this atmosphere, the Provincial Legislature was influenced to create the new counties of Chatham, Guilford, Surry and Wake in order to attempt to defuse the concentration of the Regulator resistance.  Herman Husband had been chosen a delegate of Orange County but he was arrested for promoting riots, his voice silenced. The lines of petition were strategic. Guilford was to be made of the western third of Orange County and the eastern third of Rowan. Those lines went very near Abbotts Creek Baptist on the west and Sandy Creek Baptist on the east. Buis Ordinary was in between with the Regulator concentration to the south. 

The Provincial act creating Surry County, specified the first court there to meet at the home of Gideon Wright and the court for Guilford was designated specifically to meet “at the house of Mr. Robert Lindsay”. The implication was that both men could be counted on to securely support the Government. Clearly Lindsay now operated the Ordinary as his own. All the court minutes of Guilford were destroyed at the time of the battle in March 1781 so it is necessary to piece together bits and details from a wide range of sources which contributes to the degree of ambiguity about this period of the county history. We know that the court sessions were each quarter. We can be certain that owner-sentiment, during court and as an Ordinary, was against the Regulators.  

The Regulators threatened Salisbury in March and John Frohock, Clerk of Court, and Alexander Martin, one of the lawyers whipped at Hillsborough, rode out to negotiate on behalf of the government. When Governor Tryon heard the conditions that they had accepted on his behalf, he was livid. In fact his tone may well have been the catalyst that later turned Martin into a Revolutionary.   

The Moravians reported hearing before the April court that Regulators were threatening the meeting of the Surry Court. Governor Tryon advised the Council that the commission involved in running the actual line between Orange and Guilford would be so vulnerable to attack, that it would take a military command to protect them. He may have been preparing the Council for his plans to move again against the Regulators in force. He had already advised London of his plans to do just that and he spent the month organizing and positioning his Militia units. Advising forces to be raised in anticipation, in Rowan County they were placed under the command of Capt. Walter Lindsey, no relation to Robert but the commander at Ft. Dobbs. 

Speaking of the Buis Ordinary, Robinson and Stoessen say that “The Clapboard house, notably substantial for that date in this newly settled region, had both outside and petition walls six inches thick and filled with brick. The “great hall” measuring twenty feet by twenty feet and five inches, was no doubt the meeting room for the first court,” on Easter Monday, 1771. By the 9^th, Governor Tryon was having to recompense “young Bewes” for the destruction of his corn field by his troops. They must have been supporting the sanctity of the court session considering the threats that had been broadcast to interrupt to Surry County court. His payment to Captain John McGee for salt confirms his confiscation of supplies.

1779 Map showing the Lindsay Courthouse on Deep River

The novice court of Guilford County busily organized itself in the Lindsay “Great Room”, a euphemism for what might have been the tavern or public room of the Buis Ordinary. Continuous movement of newly called out troops of the Governor distracted conversation and any public business of the court. Without lines of troop demarcation, safety was tenuous. A stranger was a threat until verbally identified and even then the person could be a spy or a Regulator. Public words uttered in a court session would be individually analyzed in relation to one’s own political inclination. Robert Lindsay was clearly a supporter of the Governor and Council. Concurrently, his Ordinary was hostile to any Regulator. Justice, under the circumstances, was not administered exclusively under the rule of law but also through the influence of loyalty. 

Activity continued to swirl. In the beginning of May, Regulators from New Garden settlement were reported to be going to the Yadkin River to seize horses and provisions. Since the New Garden Quakers were pacifists, these must have been Scotch Irish Presbyterians On the 11^th, General Waddell signed an agreement with the Regulators to back away from confrontation. The Governor commented in his Journal, “This evening (the 13^th, received intelligence that the Regulators were sending scouts thro’ all their settlements, and assembling on Sandy Creek near Hunter’s.” 

The Battle of Alamance was fought on May 16^th.. Tryon reported it to Lord Hillsborough, “It has pleased God to bless His Majesty’s Arms in this province with a signal Victory over the Regulators.” His description continued. “The action was Two Hours but after about half an Hour the Enemy took to Tree Fighting and much annoyed the Men who stood at the Guns…” The Governor’s army, he reported, amounted to eleven hundred men and two field pieces. The Regulators he calculated as two thousand. He was disdainful of the Regulator organization and tactics. 

Herman Husband, having roused the Regulators to action, refused at the last minute to fight, calling on his Quaker non-violence, and he escaped capture. He would soon flee to Pennsylvania where two decades later he would similarly become the voice of the Whiskey Rebellion. Husband was the closest thing to a leader available to the Regulators. With no one in command, Tryon classified James Hunter in derision as “General of the Regulators.” Following the battle, the Governor went over to Sandy Creek and burned out Hunter and camped there about a week before again moving up to Deep River near Lindsay.

James Hunter was a contemporary example of the confused loyalties and religious affiliations of individuals in these circumstances. There were actually three men in the new Guilford County by that name. Over on the north side of Dan River at Beaver Island Creek, lived a first cousin of Alexander Martin. This James Hunter had come from New Jersey by way of Bedford County, Virginia. His family had taken up much of the upper Dan River valley above Eagle Falls. There is some reason to believe that these two James Hunters were distantly related. It is true that Beaver Island James Hunter was married to Mary McFarland, a cousin of Martha McFarland, wife of Captain John McGee of Deep River. Governor Tryon recognized this Hunter also as a Regulator leader. He was forced to flee into Maryland after the Alamance battle and Tryon confiscated some of his livestock and sold it to the Moravians. As active Presbyterians, these Dan River Hunters became Whigs at the time of the Revolution while those on Sandy Creek and Stinking Quarter sympathized with the Tories or remained neutral.

Tryon moved through the region systematically re-establishing order.  His troops lived off the land, requisitioning 20 steers and 20 bushels of flour from Deep River and Richland Creek and 30 steers and 20 bushels of flour from Abbotts Creek.  Colonel Hinton commanded the unit of the army at “Lindsay’s Mill.” By the end of the month Tryon could report that “most of the Inhabitants on the North side of Deep River and many on the South side, in the whole amounting to above thirteen hundred have come into Camp and Submitted themselves to the Government.”

Within a year of the Battle of Alamance, the congregation at Sandy Creek Baptist Church went from 606 to 14 members. Most refugees moved to Washington County, Tennessee and established Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church.  The Baptist congregation at Abbotts Creek seems to have remained strong indicating a heavier, more disaffected group, many of them Germans.

Robert Lindsay had two children by his first wife before she died, probably in childbirth. William Raper had already taken away Rebecca Buis Simmons as her third husband  In June of 1772, Lindsay married the daughter of Captain John McGee the nearby tavern owner. The bondsman for the wedding of Robert Lindsay and Nancy McGee was Samuel Martin, brother of Judge Richard Henderson and partner with Daniel Boone in the establishment of Boonesborough, Kentucky. Capt. McGee’s second wife was Martha McFarland. When the Captain died the next year, she married William Bell who had a grist mill further south on Deep River. He was an ardent Patriot. As Martha Bell, she was the local heroine and spy. She confronted Lord Cornwallis at the time of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and extracted his protection of her home and plantation.  These are some of the familial interconnections that interacted with the operation of the Lindsay Courthouse. This staggering list of names confirms the critical importance of the first three years of this courthouse location to the study of the Regulator Movement and to the seeds of Revolution  to come. 

Tryon received his promotion to Governor of New York and was replaced in North Carolina by a junior son of a British plantation owner from Antigua, Josiah Martin. Anxious to establish his personal contact throughout the state and to reinforce the law and order that Tryon had applied, Martin appeared at the February Term of Guilford County Court at Lindsay’s  The Governor was surprised to meet James Hunter who had returned from his Maryland exile and was there to lay before the court his petitions for pardon. It seemed to the Governor a rather brazen act of an outlaw but it is not certain which James Hunter he had confronted since he had no previous personal knowledge of either. 

In the winter and fall term, the court used the inner great room of the Lindsay house. In the warmer seasons, court was often conducted under the trees in the yard. There was only a single capital crime that came before the court in this location.  John Purcell, coming home late at night, was accused by his wife of having been with another woman. He had one of the children in his arms and told his wife to put down the gun because she did not know how to fire it. She threatened to put a bullet through him and fired, putting a mortal wound in his thigh. He lingered a few days and died. Aside from the human tragedy, the significance of this action might be in showing the political leadership that was beginning to take over in the county as revolution approached. The jurors, including Charles Baker, Richard Henderson, and John Nicks before Justice of the Peace Charles Bruce, returned a true bill which was laid over to the next Superior Court at Salisbury. 

Competing petitions appeared in Guilford asking for a new court to be built at a more central location. A tax had put aside minimal funds and varying interests sought to influence the placement. Only now, in September before the final quarterly Guilford County court to be held in Robert Lindsay’s great room, did John Buis and his wife Martha, transfer title to the building and plantation that his father, William Buis had acquired originally in 1752 by Granville Grant.

When Robert Lindsay purchased an additional 326 acres from John Miller a year later, he was listed as, “merchant of Guilford County.” Court had moved on and Lindsay never again operated the Ordinary. In years to come, the location would support a flour mill, schoolhouse, and silk mill complex Still later the Lindsay family would be active in the mining of gold, tin, and coal,  Lindsay and the Guilford Court were purchasing from the store that John Tate ran North on the Mayo River near James Hunter. Lindsay now opened a store. He was a Captain in the North Carolina Militia during the Revolution and a Justice of the Peace. He served in the State Legislature in 1777/78 while Alexander Martin was Speaker of the Senate from Guilford.

Governor Josiah Martin believed he had found a state well chastened by the actions of Governor Tryon and bound by the solemn oath of Allegiance that the people of the Western Counties had signed. In April 1775 he advised Lord Dartmouth that, “I have no doubt that I might command their best services as a word on any emergency.” This was the public conundrum faced a month later when Josiah Martin was forced to flee the palace that Tryon had built, for the security of a British ship.

The relic that is being studied and prepared for restoration today on Sandy Ridge Road and Deep River appears to be the Buis Ordinary and Lindsay Courthouse. As such, it is an important architectural example on the former North Carolina frontier, of the first attempts to transport the building style and techniques of Europe to the colony. It was, for three years, the first courthouse of Guilford County, North Carolina. It is the only remaining structural connection in the state to the historical social initiative known as the Regulation. It is the relic in Piedmont North Carolina where revolutionary debate came into vivid conflict. 

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

FORDUS ACHATES:

Riding With Miss Nancy

Miss Nancy Watkins painted by the author from a photograph in the Madison Messenger

Nancy’s knowledge of automobiles in 1923 was the cumulative information she picked up in overheard conversations.  By the end of the World War, people had lost their fear of the automobile, at least to the extent that expressions of such fear were ridiculed.  As a novelty, they were comparatively too expensive but after 1910 more automobiles were sold than buggies.

She was a teacher at the new (1918) Pomona High School in Greensboro on Spring Garden Street, where she also had an apartment. Thus her neighborhood in Greensboro was conveniently limited to Spring Garden and Woman’s College. At a time when her surroundings were being changed by the evolution of transportation, she found this circumscribed neighborhood personally limiting. Searching for the impulse that would bring her to action, she began studying car types on the street. By spring, she concluded that she was extremely nervous and suffered from indigestion because of hard work, thus she needed to get a car so she could go back and forth to her family in Madison.

She was sure it would be easy for an educated woman, but a few lessons convinced her it would be a full time undertaking. Waiting until the end of the school year, she made a contract with Dr. J. R. Roach in Madison, a dentist and owner of Rockingham Auto Company, the Ford dealership, ordering their best selling model, a Ford Tudor. In June 1923, for $700 cash, she was delivered a two-door coupe. Ford’s promotion played on the term, “two door”, (Tudor) which piqued Nancy’s creativity. She gave her car its own name, Fordus Achates, a feature that piqued what she considered the impoverishment of the general education in Madison. In Virgil’s classical Greek poetry,  Achates was a close friend of Aeneid and thus in literary circles the word came to mean a close friend or companion. Nancy’s translation was thus “Ford, my close friend.” She taunted her neighbors with her own humor which went over their head. They responded by making fun of giving a name to a car. 

Ford came out with the Tudor model coupe officially as a 1924 model of the Model T, the automobile Henry Ford produced in 1908 as the first automobile affordable to middle class America. These later models were referred to as the “high” radiator version. The coupe doors opened at the rear and the body construction was metal panel over wood frame design. There was an instrument panel with the ignition/light switch and rear sloping turtle panel. Front tires were 30’ by 3’ and rear were 30’ by 3½’. All models were painted black and upholstered in imitation leather. The front fenders had a lip on the front apron and running boards.

Part of Nancy’s arrangement with Dr. Roach was the delegation of “his boy at work,” Cecil Brown, as her most patient and sympathetic teacher.  Cecil’s patience was no match for Nancy’s operational fears. Dr Roach was shrewd enough to know that if Nancy Watkins could handle an automobile, anyone could, so the degree of difficulty was well worth the implications of success.  Nancy asked herself, “If a ten year old Negro boy can learn to drive an auto, why not I?” Day after day, the lessons were observed on Murphey Street and when she finally proclaimed success, she still was unable to turn the auto around. 

She had an added justification for her woes since Madison had just put in new water pipes and the town was now surfacing the streets. So when she came to an obstruction of highway construction, she made it a practice of abandoning Fordus on the spot rather than trying to back up or turn around. A good excuse justified what townspeople perceived as Miss Nancy’s peculiarities. She bemoaned the deleterious effect of road work on a shiny new car, once leaving it parked in the yard of the Methodist parsonage on Academy Street for a week as rain dimmed a proud shine. 

During the summer, Nancy heard that her superintendent, W. J. Sloan, intended to resign at Pomona along with much of the faculty, and she made up her mind to leave as well. For the first time, she was going to drive to Greensboro in Fordus in order to retrieve the books, pictures, and teaching material she had stored in the cloak room. She had been at Pomona for seven years and would regret the rashness of her decision to leave the steady teaching position in a good school system. 

Nancy loaded up her aunt, Miss Callie Watkins, who had as yet not made her peace with the automobile as safe transportation, and off they went. The trip to Pomona was without incident and together the ladies loaded the contents of the cloak closet into the rather cramped quarters of the two seated coupe, Fordus. 

1923 Ford Tudor coupe

They planned the return through Stokesdale, Oak Ridge, and Guilford College. Soon after their departure, they approached an intersection on Spring Garden Street at the Guilford College Railroad station which required a stop and a right turn. Momentarily discombobulated with needing to brake suddenly.  Fordus ran diagonally across the intersection and came to rest against a railroad sign.( North Carolina had that year installed ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ signs at all railroad crossings.) Fordus’ radiator stopped the automobile. Nancy stopped against the steering wheel but Aunt Callie was face down on the floor board declaring that she “was badly hurt on my knee.” 

As Aunt Callie fulminated about the extent of the damage to her knee, a nearby garage man who rushed up on hearing the impact, said he did not think Fordus to be damaged and they resumed their journey. Nancy was trembling with all the fears that she believed her driving lessons had overcome.  Miss Callie fanned the fears with a ceaseless inventory of potential afflictions that might exist under the unbroken skin on her knee. 

There was one more wrong turn before Fordus arrived in Madison late in the afternoon, loaded high over the seat with the “pedagogical stuff” of seven years. Nancy had to accomplish the unloading by herself after assisting Callie to her bed. Fordus was not moved for over a week in order to give Nancy time to recover her nerve.

If Miss Nancy knew that the presence of Fordus daily on the streets of Madison gave the community a visual comic strip of their own to enjoy as a mutual distraction, she did not let on. Without her contracted teaching position, she had to battle with her financial limitations. She and Callie each had small pensions and Fordus was paid for. Rather than allowing her an expanded degree of travel independence, the auto became her chief means of creating income over expense.

She became the deliverer of the Greensboro and Winston Salem (Sentinel) newspapers in Madison. Her routine was to meet the northbound train at the Atlantic and Yadkin Railroad station and pick up and deliver about two dozen copies of each paper to local subscribers. 

Madison had its own weekly newspaper, the Madison Messenger, but Miss Nancy had little regard for the value of the local vignettes reported. She always knew much more of the family history of the subjects who were superficially reported as having gone out of town or been visited by a cousin. 

It was her education as a teacher at North Carolina Women’s College that gave her the incentive to consider herself a writer. She was immersed from childhood in the intense Southern absorption in family and the glorious “lost cause.” Her circuitous, disjointed dissertations on family history, however, were notably praiseworthy of her prejudiced interests and what she could not footnote in truth, she was inclined to embroider with digression. This left her writing full of obscure nuggets of fact tucked under confusing divergence.  It makes all her surviving writing somewhat suspect but far too interesting to be discounted.  

Her methodology is perhaps what continues to appear as most eccentric. Aside from her early spongelike consolidation of genealogy, she periodically spent single days at research libraries. Her limited resources provided little writing material, but as she made her periodic forays into research centers, she also made the rounds of industries and merchants in Madison and scanned their garbage cans for paper unused on one side. These she would place in her pull-along orange crate on wheels, bring home and process by cleanliness, straighten, and grade to size.  Her stock was prodigious and no pencil castaway as too small was beyond Miss Nancy’s limits of reuse.

By the end of the decade, Nancy had been able to give only minimum attention to the maintenance of Fordus. On winter mornings she found him “jumpy and balky.” During paper delivery she was forced to keep the auto running in order to be certain to get home. In making a trip to the A & Y Railroad station for a bag of oyster shells and a large bag of scratch for the hens, she had to use the running board as her barrow. Until  she used Fordus again, both sacks were stored on the auto and distributed as needed, or “toted” into the house in bucketfuls. She called it her “dole system” for her yard animals.  

On occasion, she would allow a neighbor child accompany her on her paper route. Bernice came along even though she had been playing in the dirt and her face “was not too clean.” On a typical round, she and Bernice met Sarah Routh on the way, the latter having been kept in at school but determined that she had no idea why Miss Dodson had required such of her. She picked up some news from Ruth Johnson who was nursing Mrs. Sam Price and more from Esther Riggins and Virginia Price. She picked up Helen Smith Honner to give her a lift downtown and let her read the Sentinel en route.  Helen was interested in reading a review of the school play, “Magnolia’s Man,” performed the previous night and when she got to Blanche Black’s, she recommended the review to her. Jealousy raised its ugly head when Elizabeth McAnally and two little farm girls wanted to know if Bernice got money for riding the route with her. In front of J. C. Brown’s she picked up three slabs of wood, appearing to be abandoned, and took them with her to break up for stove wood. When she got home she parked Fordus in the backyard with the engine toward the street in the usual manner. 

On Saturday, February 22, 1930, Mrs. Pearl Van Noppen, one of the town women whom Nancy considered to be well educated, came by home to give her some news. By now Nancy was accumulating bits of contemporary information which she turned into snippets for the Messenger. On occasion, she similarly fed the city papers her “big news.” She also wrote articles on historical subjects but was less successful in marketing those because she could not keep focus and frequently fed in too many personal judgments. When she was accompanied by the likes of Mrs. Van Noppen, she called that “news jabbering.” 

The first week of March was clear, with gale winds and bitterly cold. On such days she had to jack up the rear of Fordus and put hot water in the radiator. Routinely people gave Nancy their old magazines as she went about. After reading them herself, she would give copies to friends, white and black, who showed specific interests she felt obligated to encourage. Jim Robertson, a “colored” man, at one point received old copies of the Progressive Farmer, Poultry Tribune, Leyburn World, and seed catalogues. Of no market value, these small gifts helped boost Nancy’s need to be philanthropic in her community.  Similarly, when she had some Burpee’s new sweet corn and scarlet runner beans, she remembered to take some to Dr. Roach, who was always glad to see the present running condition of Fordus. 

Madison gossips were treated to fresh amusement when she found a throw-away pile of cardboard behind the McGehee’s store at the corner of Market and Murphey. Recognizing immediate useful application, she loaded the pile into Fordus, except for one that was too big to get in the door. This she capped over the hood of the engine and tied it on with string. She sported a smile of satisfaction to all the “merriment among sightseers.” 

Fordus shared the yard with a varying collection of domestic fowl. Ducks were hatched and the “diddlies’ ‘ regularly required care that they would not somehow get crushed or fall into the large water bucket of the mature ducks. Her flock was also vulnerable to local boys who found Nancy Watkins a subject well worth a mischievous or cruel prank. On one occasion she was bitterly specific when she came home and found one small duck smashed and another with a broken leg and called out Charles Martin, Junior Webster, and Norman Tuttle as perpetrators  while Mrs. Martin had been at her book club. She sold her chicken eggs in Greensboro where she also bought her chicks. In an emergency, such as an inability to get one hen to set, she had to rely on Susy Lauten for some Ancona chicks.

She had been noticing for some days at a road construction site, near Dr. Charles Pratt’s house on Market, an empty cask of coal tar cast aside and leaking a little congealed tar. She carried on a guilty debate with herself about these “gleanings” and finally decided there would be enough to paint the canvas top of Fordus. Back in November she had applied a new canvas herself with tacks, and sewed two pieces of covering together, one from Sears & Roebuck and one from Montgomery Ward. She was having some leakage but she was satisfied with the quality of her work, and the tar would just finish off the job. To transport the big tub-sized can into Fordus, she wrapped the tub in some Sentinels then “scrooged” herself into the limited space and drove home. There was enough tar in the bottom of the can to paint the entire body of Fordus, all-be-it non-recommended by the manufacturer. 

The car’s age began to manifest itself more routinely in connection with various parts. The brakes were too loose to risk the engine on any incline, so she had to stop half way up and walk in a radius from the auto. She had to pay $3.50 for new brakes for which she gave Dr. Roach $2.50 and he called it even for the sweet corn and bean seeds. On a trip to Greensboro to deliver eggs, Nancy noticed rotting in the tire casing and although she feared a flat, she made it home safely. Planning to deliver the afternoon newspapers a few days later, she came out to find all her tires low and when she came out of the Post Office one was flat. The repair shop nearby took off the tire and found an old nail, nothing more. Repair of the tire cost a dollar and while she was there she had the fuel line, spark plugs and timer cleaned and declared Fordus like new.

In the waiting room Nancy was confronted by a rough looking woman who said she was Mrs. Manuel. She wanted Dr. Roach to call Factory 12 at the R. J. Reynolds tobacco factory in Winston-Salem and report that somebody had “got her husband so drunk he could not walk.” Waxing emotional, she defiantly and boastfully announced that “Henry Knight’s son married my daughter.  I am his own aunt.” Nancy agreed with Fordus that she must be one of the fighting Manuels of Stokes County. 

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF ALEXANDER MARTIN

Alexander Martin, Governor of North Carolina and United States Senator, died November 2, 1807 and his widowed mother died four days later. ¹ In anticipation of death, the Governor had prepared a stone lined vault on a bluff on the south side overlooking the Dan River. In his will Martin directed that his funeral be “liberal not ostentatious at the discretion of my Executor [James Hunter ]” ² A significant effort was made in the will to secure the remaining life of his mother, Jane Hunter Martin, that he had no reason to believe would be so short after his own death. So it is presumed that she was also buried in the vault with appropriate compliance with his wishes. 

Martin was the most famous political figure of Piedmont, North Carolina. He had served with Washington, been elected six times Governor by the Legislature and twice served as Governor in an emergency capacity, was chosen Speaker of the North Carolina Senate for thirteen sessions of the Legislature, was selected US Senator, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. A graduate of Princeton, he was elected to the American Philosophy Society and was presented a doctorate of law by Princeton. Aside from land in excess of 10,000 acres throughout North Carolina and Tennessee, he devised to his heirs: gold sleeve buttons, a silver service, a chariot, gold stock buckles, a case of pistols, his portrait, two silver tumblers and an extensive library. A family vault was a dignity consistent with the other objects in his estate even if it was certainly ostentatious when observed by the yeoman farmers who were his neighbors. 

There was also the tradition that Martin’s casket was placed in the vault in a standing position. Memorable for the neighbors, it was explained that he requested that detail because he passionately coveted the plantation across the Dan. This tradition has always been discounted since the plantation in question could have been purchased at any time. Eight years earlier, George Washington was buried in his brick and stone vault at Mt. Vernon. Imitation of Washington would not have been lost on Martin but would have been alien to most of his neighbors who, some years later, might have to make up a reason to explain why the casket stood on end. ³

In 1822, Robert Martin, Alexander’s younger brother, died.⁴ Robert’s plantation was six miles from Danbury? ⁵ His will instructed “my body to be discreetly interred in the family vault. ⁶  “Since there was no other vault, family or otherwise, in the region, this reference is to the Governor’s vault at Danbury. There is the further possibility that Alexander’s sister, Jane, and her husband, Thomas Henderson, who died in 1821, may also have been buried in the family vault. ⁷

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¹ Raleigh Register, November 19, 1807.
² Rockingham County Will Book A, Page 44, February 20, 1807
³ “His remains were placed in a vault, which he had built for himself in imitation of President Washington’s tomb. This vault was built on a bluff, near to and overlooking Dan river. And it is said that his body was placed in this vault in a standing position in his coffin, facing the north, by his request; which was also in imitation of President Washington, whose body was placed in his vault in this position, at first,” Avery Baker, Reidsville Review, 1938.
⁴ Robert Martin died June 1, 1822, Raleigh Register, July 4, 1822.
⁵ South of Wentworth near Rock House Creek.
⁶ Rockingham County Will Book A, Page 240.

Alexander Martin’s will bequeathed Danbury to Thomas and Jane Henderson on the condition that they maintain his mother in comfort for the rest of her life. At their deaths, the plantation was to go to his nephew, James Martin, Jr., of Snow Creek.⁸ In 1808, Thomas Henderson deeded to his son 2000 acres on which the father lived. This may have included Danbury although Thomas did not have the right to deed his lifetime interest.⁹ In 1812, James Martin, Jr., deeded his residual interest in Danbury to Thomas Henderson’s son, Alexander of New Bern, calling it 933 acres.¹⁰ This same Alexander Henderson then was deeded to the 1700 acre adjoining plantation, Mt Pleasant in 1816 by his uncle, Pleasant Henderson, who had owned that plantation since 1783.¹¹ In 1835, Alexander Henderson gave a Deed of Trust to Rawley Gallaway for $4000 with Mt. Pleasant and Danbury as security.” Five years later Henderson, then living in Mobile, Alabama, gave Gallaway his Power of Attorney to sell both Mt. Pleasant, “land of Major Pleasant Henderson,” and Danbury. ¹² No sale came about and the Sheriff foreclosed for debt to the Bank of the State of North Carolina on May 24, 1841. Less than a month later, June 16, the bank sold Danbury to Robert Martin for the foreclosure value of $5,137.50. This was Robert Martin, Jr., son of Robert Martin and nephew of Governor Alexander Martin. The plantation, including the family vault, was still in the family after a little over thirty years. All the various owners were heirs of Governor Alexander Martin and had been present at his burial, and that of his mother, and siblings. 

Repeatedly the story was told that the vault decayed. There are conflicting tales of water damage. It was far too high on the bluff to flood, however, and general deterioration could be expected after about thirty years. The bodies were moved but the various accounts disagree widely on where and how. There is one explanation that they were moved to Georgia or South Carolina, unlikely in the logistics of the times. Several say vaguely that they were reburied nearby and one says a Negro was directed to dig a hole at the comer of the old vault and put them in the ground. The most prevalent assertion is that the bodies were “moved.” Only in this century a serious effort was made to document the place to which they were moved. 

In an address that Robert Martin Douglas, great grandson of Robert Martin, gave July 4, 1898 at the Battleground at Guilford Courthouse honoring the Governor, he concluded, “as the vault was injured, his remains were moved and buried elsewhere, but at what spot no one seems to know ….. ” He went on to observe the irony that Martin and General Greene “should both sleep in unknown graves.” ¹³

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⁷ Thomas Henderson died in Rockingham County, November 15, 1821, Raleigh Register, November 23, 1821. His will found in Will Book A, page 175, indicates that his wife was already dead.
⁸ Son of Col. James Martin of Snow Creek, the Governor’s brother with whom he had a very close relationship.
⁹ The deed is to the land on which Thomas Henderson lived (December 27, 1808).
¹⁰ Rockingham County Deed Book O, page 329
¹¹ Rockingham County deed, August 31, 1816, Pleasant Henderson of Orange to Alexander Henderson of New Bern. Pleasant Henderson had moved his family to Chapel Hill in 1797 when he was chosen Steward of the University of North Carolina, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, s.v. “Pleasant Henderson.”
¹² Deed of Trust, September 23, 1835.
¹³ Address of Hon. Robert Martin Douglas, Guilford Battleground, July 98.

In 1929, Mary M. Baker wrote about the re-interment of Governor Martin and his relationship to the family of Stephen A. Douglas. Her authority was two Napier sisters who had lived next to her, one actually living for seven years with her. “This one cousin was Miss Elizabeth Champion Napier, who with her brother Robert Martin Napier and John Napier, and two sisters, Martha Martin and Jane Hunter Napier, were the children of Sallie Martin Napier, wife of Moses Napier, and sister of Robert Martin, father of Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas.” She concluded concerning the burial of Governor Martin, “here [on Dan River] a vault was constructed, in which, on the death of the Governor Martin, his body was placed. It remained here until the vault began falling to ruins. Then it was removed and the remains carried to the Settle-Martin burying ground and there interred.’ ? ¹⁴

Avery Baker, son of Mary Madison Baker, worked at the Post Office and was an occasional writer for the Reidsville Review. In 1938, he wrote on the subject qualifying his comments by noting that his mother “spent the first years of her married life in the house in which Governor Alexander Martin once lived, (but which has since been destroyed by fire) …. ” He is the one who confirms the placing of the coffin in an upright position and the removal of the body. He repeats several conflicting speculations about the removal of the Governor’s body then concludes, “other accounts have it that after the removal of his body from the old vault, it was most likely removed to the old ‘Settle-Reid’ burying ground; about 18 miles to the east of old Danbury, now known as the Judge Thomas Settle Place: about three miles east of Reidsville, and laid to rest among relatives there (for many of his kindred are buried there) in an unmarked grave.” 

Maude Reynolds was a writer and music and art teacher and produced a number of articles on local history. She made a concerted effort about 1930 to confirm a location for Martin’s final resting place. She repeated the myth explaining the upright burial as necessary in order for Martin to keep an eye on his slaves and the other popular one about the river rising to flood the crypt. Then she said “I was told, by good authority, after much inquiry, that the citizens of that part of the county came by wagon and on horseback and moved the remains to the Martin and Ellington graveyard several miles north of Reidsville just off the Yanceyville road, at the old Ellington home place. It is reasonable to believe this to be true since a brother and other members of the Martin family are buried there.” Miss Reynolds is describing the previously mentioned “Settle-Reid” cemetery. 

The cemetery each of these writers is concluding to be the site of Martin’s final burial was begun by the family of David Settle. His daughter, Mary, married Robert Martin, nephew of the Governor and they lived near Danbury. This was the same Robert Martin who, in 1841, bought Danbury plantation with the site of the family vault. In 1846, his young daughter, Lucinda Martin, a young belle who had captivated chaperones in Washington, died and was buried in the cemetery of her mother’s family. ¹⁵ A year later Robert Martin concluded his own carefully worded Will tying up many details, not least of which was the ownership of his slaves that would go to his surviving daughter, Martha, the young wife of the junior Senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas. It would seem logical that at this time of melancholy and while concluding arrangements of important family responsibilities, Robert Martin might also look to the deteriorating family vault on his Danbury plantation, that at the very least contained his father, grandmother and very famous uncle, and saw to it that their bodies were properly buried with the family. His beloved daughter was buried with the Settles and he anticipated that he would soon join them, as would his wife. He could not have known that his daughter, Martha, would be buried there in 1853 at the age of twenty-five. The timeline for these events seems logical and the motivation obvious. Robert brought them all to the Settle cemetery and he joined them there on his death a few months later on May 25, 1848. It may only be the result of his imminent death that prevented Robert Martin from properly marking the burial site of Governor Martin and the rest of his family. Had he lived longer, it is obvious from the care he took in other matters, that he would have had appropriate stones to mark their graves.

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¹⁴ Reidsville Review , February 25, 1929.
¹⁵ She died September 15, 1846, according to her tombstone, which survives.

There is today a large, square depression at the Settle-Reid cemetery which suggests the location of a grave for several bodies. It is immediately beside the row of boxed graves of Robert and Mary Settle Martin and their 2 daughters. It begs investigation by professional archaeologists representing North Carolina. If confirmed as the grave of Governor Alexander Martin and members of his family, it needs better attention and proper marking. 

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

Lindsay Gold Mine

Lindsay Mine below Jamestown

The allure of “Gold” is a recurring tradition in the local memory in Guilford County. The McQuiston family conveys the saga of a barrel of gold smuggled out of Scotland by their emigrant ancestor that was distributed to heirs in North Carolina. The remainder was given to Sam Houston and used for the creation of the state of Texas.  The record that Lord Cornwallis was forced to shed commissary weight in order to hasten his “race to the Dan” to catch Greene, has spawned several traditions. The first concerns a barrel of gold buried near Abbotts Creek Church that was recovered post war and amounted to a million dollars. That story seems to partner with another about two cannons that were buried by Cornwallis near the Bodenhamer place. 

Of all Andrew Lindsay’s undertakings, none promised more to his mature ambitions than prospecting for gold. Discovered in North Carolina at the turn of the century in Cabarrus County, the fever for the dispassionate metallic element quickly infected proximate areas. The first efforts at prospecting in Guilford County began when William Hodson, near Deep River in 1819, and Edward Poor, signed an agreement allowing Poor to post a $5000 bond in order to “work & use wood & water in working a gold mine on the land of said William Hodson and pay Hodson one-fourth part of the gold or metal recovered.” ²

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¹ Piedmont Trails, “Historical Treasure of Abbott’s Creek,” November 19, 2017.
² January 25, 1819, Guilford County Register of Deeds.

Example of Gold Mining

Prospecting had no doubt preceded that agreement and introduced a new kind of settler to the area. Mary Browning suggests that Edward Poor was a “wheeler-dealer, a man with gold fever.” His gravestone proclaims him to be “Captain,” ³ a rather imprecise title to associate with a gold prospector.  

In 1829, Andrew Lindsay bought his first land including a saw mill and gold mine on Deep River from Jesse Field, Jonathan W. Fisher, and Samuel Hotton. The deed mentioned “Pore’s old line.” He had partners: his brothers, William and David, and neighbor, Jesse Shelly, all with 1/6 share and David retained ½. Then they bought 137 acres from Isaiah Ledbetter. ⁴    

This period of prospecting differed little from the approach that Andrew might make in adding any other acreage to his holdings. He was looking for land, more common around Jamestown, where gold had been found in surface and near–surface deposits. Locals became “dabblers and fair-weather farmers turned miners became entrepreneurs who sought investors,” ⁵ for the more difficult hard-rock mining that needed greater processing technology. 

In 1831, Andrew Lindsay, James Robbins, and Jesse Shelly bought out the Hobson interests when that Quaker family moved to Indiana.  They were one of the two gold mines granted a charter in Guilford-the earliest chartered mines in the county. In four years, the Hobsons had found several rich veins going not more than 15 to 18 feet deep, but had never made more than $90 in one day. They described their primitive methods: “we coursed the vein over high land to the next branch, thence up the hill some distance, where a ledge of quartz jutted out, not more than a foot thick, leading S.S.W., the general course of ledges of rock in that section of the country. The quartz in that area went in ledges south southwest and they would find small pockets of gold and when they did, men came from far and near, went to work sinking shafts at random and getting no pay.” ⁶

Edward Poor died in 1827. In a series of transactions between 1831 and 1838 and trading as Guilford Gold Mining Company, the Lindsay group attempted to obtain all the rights of Edward Poor’s assembled estate from the heirs, a total of 412 acres. ⁷ In transferring their individual interests in the Guilford Gold Mining Company, they indicate a combined value in their holdings of $25,000 ($20,833 to Andrew Lindsay and $4,166.40 to Jesse Shelly, including in total 839 acres). ⁸

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³ He died in 1827 and his estate papers dated the next year show his random efforts at prospecting. Mary Browning, “Remembering the first Jamestown gold miner,” Mendenhall Homeplace.
⁴ 3/6/1829, 4/2/1829, Guilford Deeds book 18, page 160.
⁵ . Elizabeth Hines and Michael Smith, “The Rush Started Here II: Hard Rock Gold Mining in North Carolina, 1825 to 1864.” Department of Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, NC., Earth Sciences History, v. 25, no.1, 206-37-74.
⁶ Letter 1879 Robert Hodson to Philip Horney Hodson reprinted by Jack Perdue in The Guilford Genealogist, No. 29; Mary Browning , “Remembering the first Jamestown gold miners.”-Mendenhall Place.
⁷ . Guilford County Deed Bk 18, Page 362; Bk 24, page 106; Bk 24, pages 108; Bk 24, page 103; Bk 23, page 19, Bk 34, page 619. Mention it joins Field’s Mill now Lindsay & Field’s Mill. Also for $500 they picked up the 1/6 interest still held in 133 acres joining Charles McCulloch and Stephen Harlan on Deep River, Bk 21, page 216.
⁸ Guilford County Deed Book 21, page 211; Bok 21, page 215; bk 21, page 204.

Guilford was at the northern limits of the North Carolina gold deposits. Exploitable minerals of the area included: aggregates, clay, copper, gold, granite and iron and 47 minerals, had been identified all within the context of heightened interest in North Carolina in the resources of the state. State geologists reported regularly to the legislature on the quality of mineral deposits. 

Among the stock companies in Guilford were: Gardner Hill Mining Company, Conrad Hill Gold & Copper Company, The Fisher & Millis Hills Mining and Smelting Company, Deep River Copper Mining & Smelting Co., North State Copper and Gold Mining Co., and North Carolina Gold Company.  

The corresponding need for internal improvements had begun earlier with efforts to expand navigation on the state water courses as avenues of transport for agricultural production. Grains and livestock could be accommodated easily on the flat-bottomed bateaux. The growing attraction for minerals and manufactured goods, however, represented weight which became a concern that encouraged the interest in the short-lived plank roads and the more durable railroads. 

Governor John Motley Morehead and wife, Ann Eliza Lindsay

By 1828, John Motley Morehead was already advocating a central North Carolina Railroad. Andrew Lindsay was close to such conversations and that appealed to his imagination and entrepreneurship. Morehead had married Andrew’s cousin, Ann Eliza Lindsay, in 1821. A year later, Andrew’s mother, Letitia Harper Lindsay, widow of Col. Robert Lindsay, had married the wealthiest man in Greensboro, Henry Humphreys. Such men as Morehead and Humphreys would be instrumental in locating the North Carolina Railroad through High Point, Jamestown and Greensboro by 1850.

Henry Humphreys had built the first steam-operated cotton mill in North Carolina in 1828.  Charles McCulloch, an innovator from South Carolina, and Elizer Kersey had used a stationary steam engine and a Chilean mill to provide new life for gold mining in North Carolina. Readily accessible gold from known mines had been exploited fully and the remaining embedded hard quartz veins required a more efficient milling process. The combination of the new steam power source using the stationary engine and the less expensive Chilean mill for processing the ore, was successful for the Cornish-style gold mill that McCulloch built adjacent to the Lindsay Mine. The keystone of the engine house declared it was constructed in 1832 on a site bought by McCulloch on a tract bought from the earlier miner, William Hobson, from whom Lindsay had also purchased land. In addition to the Lindsay Mine, the McCulloch Mine served the Deep River Mine, Gardner Hill and possibly North State Mine. ¹⁰

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⁹ Elizabeth Hines, “McCulloch’s Rock Engine House: An Antebellum Cornish-Style Gold Ore Mill Near Jamestown, North Carolina,” Material Culture, Vol. 27, no. 3 (Fall1995)
¹⁰ Nomination Form for National Register of Historic Places Inventory-McCullock Mill, Guilford County.

J. B. Gardner, one of the gold ore owners, drawing by Strother

The emphasis was on gold but this cadre of enthusiasts recognized they were concentrating on the most glittering mineral in this natural treasure chest. They were finding substantial quantities of copper and traces of other minerals to excite the appetite of the most acquisitive man. 

Elizabeth Dick Lindsay in her diary never made a direct mention of Andrew Lindsay’s activities relating to gold. That can be justified by the fact that her concerns focused more on the family, their religious life, education, and maintenance of the household. It still indicates that gold did not become a consuming focus for this generation of the family. Still, the very hypothetical word “gold” carried a natural excitement that infected all ages to a varying degree. 

Andrew’s death in 1844, came at the point when the projection of wealth from gold in North Carolina seemed closest to fruition. Mines were sunk. Milling was in place and operational. Railroads were being chartered. Andrew owned 400 shares in the Guilford Gold Mining Company valued in excess of $25,000. Regrettably, his death left his estate and all his burgeoning prospects to a widow, who may have already been dying, five daughters, three of whom were already married, and a pre-teen son. The estate was abundant but the structure of age and experience of the primary legatee who would benefit, was insufficiently prepared for such operational real estate and unqualified for any manufacturing operation. 

Stock shares in Lindsay Mining Company

Andrew’s interest in gold made manifest the operational destabilizing effect of his death. Each of his five daughters received in his will 66 shares of the Guilford Gold Mining Company and his son, Andrew, received 70 shares. None was prepared to be active in the industry and they had to sell out as quickly as possible. Local interest seemed to center on Shubal Coffin and John Shelly. By 1853, the local investors had sold out to Samuel Smith and J. L. Colby of New York City. ¹¹ Two years later, the Lindsay Mining Company, made up of the remainder of the late Andrew Lindsay’s heirs, lost the rest of the Hodson/Poor land to Thomas C. Durrant of New York. The demise of the Lindsay Gold Mining Company came in 1855 when the Bank of Cape Fear, along with 39 other creditors, forced a sale. ¹²

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¹¹ Guilford County Deed book 34, p. 147-49, January 22, 1853.
¹² Guilford County Deed Bok 36, page 460, October 27, 1855.

The discovery of gold in California transferred the rush for riches to the West and the industry in North Carolina struggled on without impetus. Andrew Lindsay in his last decade had been attracted to the right commodity at the wrong time. In the end that became a metaphor to explain why some of his branch of the family may have had less than intended security in the next generation. 

Back in 1829, Andrew’s brothers William and David Lindsay had been among his first partners in the purchase of land on which they expected to prospect for gold. Andrew and William had operated jointly the grist mill/saw mill on the property line they shared, on the west side of Deep River, with frontage on both the Salem Road and the Salisbury Road. It was the same mill that Judge Robert and his bachelor brother, John, had operated in tandem. The other children, even the spouses of the daughters, were inclined to be more entrepreneurial seeking more urban growth potential.  

Elizabeth Lindsay’s diary has little to comment about the operations of the mill except as it applied to the ice harvested from the mill race during the winter as necessary to the preservation of her foodstuffs. We can still extrapolate the importance, to two large families of Lindsay’s, that was this mill-seat with such good access to the primary roads.

In 1841, William Lindsay died and was buried near his parents in the Lindsay cemetery on the hillside beyond the homeplace. The sorrow that Andrew Lindsay experienced in the loss of this older brother, was inflated by the burden that he had to assume in the senior management of the partnership activities.  These were not capitalized entities with negotiable stock or personal property like the slaves, so the title passed through the ownership of the parcels on which they were located. Mill customers, even though they may have been family, paid for services.  Still death, even when it was anticipated, interrupted the order of life. 

McCulloch Mill indicating proximity of Lindsay Mine which contributed a supply of ore

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

Iron Mining and Mineral sources in Stokes County

A very large limestone belt and an even larger slate belt lie in parallel lines in North Carolina in a northeast-southeast direction. In these two belts is found much of the mineral deposits of commercial value in the state – gold, silver, mica, slate, semi-precious stones and Iron. Stokes County lies in the limestone belt, not far west of the boundary with the slate belt. The county varies from rolling hills in the southeast to hilly and rough land in the north, with the Sauratown Mountains in the west central part. Altitude varies from 900 feet to 3,000 in peaks. Many ridges follow belt directions, eroded by many streams. The Little Yadkin rises in the west on the flanks of the Sauratown Mountains, draining southerly. The Dan River bisects the county, northwest to southeast.

Ferrous deposits, exposed by erosion, were found here very early by the settlers in the area. In a few years they were producing ingots and bars, using local ore, local limestone, and charcoal for fuel. In these years Catalan Forges, or furnaces, were used, a process using charcoal for heat and bellows, or blowers for air. Some used water power for pumping air. Stoke iron was used during the Revolutionary War, and was in continual production until the end of the Civil War. Stoneman’s Raiders in 1865 drove through Stokes, destroying forges.

Ferrous deposits of magnetite and brown hematite are found in deposits running generally northeast-southwest, of these principal types:

1. “Hard ore,” a hard, compact, massive, crypt-crystalline magnetite.
2. “Soapstone ore,” a soft, greasy mass, composed of crystalline grains of magnetite in a matrix of talcose and micaceous schists.
3. “Sand ore,” composed of magnetite grains in a sandy matrix, soft and pliable.

Occupations:

• Iron Master – James Martin, Peter Hairston, Peter Perkins, Alex Hampton, Philip Keyser.
• Forge Hand – William J. Heath.
• Hammerman – Joseph Reed, Joshua Freeman.

1780 – Union Bloomery Forge built by Peter Perkins and James Martin, with eventual production of 7 tons of bar annually. Matthew Brooks was appointed commissioner to procure supplies and to purchase for the army and Navy of the United States, in the Southern District. The State of North Carolina passed special laws to deal with iron mines – tax advantages, considering uses f slaves, confiscated from Tories, etc.

1790 – Clement’s Forge in operation. Matthew Moore Forge in operation.

1795 – Peter Perkins – James Taylor Forge and furnace. Old Forge on Seven Island Creek. Gottlieb Shober  obtained 14800 acres in state grants for purposes of a “county iron works.”

1796 – Keyser’s Bloomery Forge built by George and Phillip Keyser.

1800 – Three forges before 1800,m along Snow Creek, operators unknown.

1860 – Stokes County very nearly denuded of trees by the years of charcoal manufacture for use in iron production. 

1865 – Stoneman’s Raiders destroy bloomeries and forges.

Ore Bank:

William Nelson Hard Ore Bank on Buck Island Creek. 

Schoolhouse Ridge Ore Bank.

Nelson Grandfather Bank.

Becky Nelson Ore Bank.

Banner, Langford, and Schropshire Banks.

Rogers Mine 2½miles north of Danbury.

Old Cherrytree Bank on Sandy Ridge.

Carlin Ore Bank on Seven Island Creek.

Pepper Mine east of Rogers Mine.

Isaac Fagg Ore Bank on Buck Island Creek.

Thomas Simmons Ore Bank above Double Creek.

Mabe Ore Bank north of Danbury.

Ore Banks in the Sauratown area.

John C. Troutwise of Philadelphia (Civil Engineer)

Geology of North Carolina by F. A. Genth & W. C. Kerr.

Dr. Genth (1871) went through the entire collection of the state museum, specimen by specimen.

Coper, p. 9 –one lump of copper about two inches in size, much resembling that from the Cliff Mine, Lake Superior, said to have been found in Stokes county, is in the Museum at Raleigh.

p. 10 – Highly interesting meteoric masses. Iron

2 – The Guilford County iron was found in 1820; weighed twenty-eight pounds, and  was described by C. U. Sheppard in 1841.

10 – The Rockingham County iron from Smith’s Mountain, two miles north of Madison, found in 1866 in an old field, grown up with pines, but cultivated ten to fifteen years previously. It probably fell in that interval. The original weight was 11 pounds, the greater portion of which is preserved in the museum in Raleigh. It is highly crystalline and on etching gives fine Widmannstaedtean figures, showing that it consists of probably three different kinds of iron. Also contains Schreibersite in short, very minute quadratic crystals, and, according to J. L. Smith, solid chloride of iron. Spec. grav. 7.78. It has been analyzed by me and J. L. Smith as follows: (missing)

p. 16 – Sulphur in Stokes

  Graphite in Stokes

p. 27/28- Hematite. A band of granular magnetite, free from titanic acid, mixed with actinolite, tremolite  and a little epidote, passes from near Danbury in Stokes County and also from Surry County, through Yadkin, Forsyth, Davie, Lincoln, and Gaston Counties. It contains some of the most valuable ore beds.

p. 32 – Pyrolusite – also near Danbury , Stokes Couhnty.

p. 35 – Quartz – (rock crystals). Stokesburg in Stokes County.

p. 36 –  Opalescent Quartz at Dan River, Stokes County.

p. 37 – Chalcedony – At Martin’s limestone quarries in Stokes County.

Itacolumite – Sauratown Mountains in Stokes County

Fossil Wood – and near Germanton I Stokes County.

p. 39 – Amphibole/actinolite – at Bolejack’s limestone quarry in Stokes County, at Roger’s ore bank near Danbury, in Stokes County.

p. 43 – Garnet/magnetic – near Moore’s mills, stokes County.

p. 47 – Phlogopite – small brownish scales of it have been found in the granular limestone of Bolejack’s quarry, near Germanton, and at Martin’s quarry on Snow Creek, Stokes County. Muscovite/mica – and with pyrite in Stokes County. 

Stoke County: 

p. 117 – Coffee Gap – Lazulite (!) with damourite in quartz.

  Danbury – Magnetite (!) pyrolusite; actinolite; cyanite (!) 6 miles East of  Danbury; titanite (Roger’s Ore Bank).                         

  Dan River – Opalescent quartz; anthracite and bituminous coal.

  Germanton – Fossilwood!; bat Bole=jack’s quarry, actinolite (!); phlogopite; granular calcite;b2 miles east of Germanton serpentine; calcite.

  Moore’s Mill – Manganese garnet.

  Peter’s Creek – Sulphur.

  Sauratown Mountain – Itacolumite (!) asbestos

  Snow Creek – Hematite, at Martin’s Quarry; chalcedony; hornstone; phlogopite; granular calcite; agate; amethyst; hyalite; jasper.

  Stokesburg – Rock crystal; anthracite and bituminous coal.

  Elsewhere – copper; graphite; chalcopyrite; muscovite in pyrite; siderite; tourmaline talc; muscovite (large plate); epidote; limonite; calcite, granular, on Little Yadkin and Dan Rivers.

Pyronite – also near Danbury, Stokes County.

History of the Manufacturing of Iron in All Ages by James Moore Swank, 1892.

p. 273.

Of other Iron enterprises established in North Carolina in the last century we gather from Leslie Bishop, and from Dr. William Sharswood, a local historian, of Danbury,  NC, the following information: Union bloomery and forge, on Snow Creek, in Stokes county, six miles northeast of Danbury, was built in 1780 by Peter Perkins and James Martin. Other iron works were built on Snow Creek, in the same county and conducted with spirit before 1800. Dr, Sharswood mentions a furnace and forge on this creek which was built by Peter Perkins and James Taylor about 1795;  they were located about half a mile from the mouth of the creek. Davis’ mill now stands on the site of the furnace. He also says that Matthew Moore built a forge on Big Creek, where George’s mill now stands, before 1800. Keyser’s bloomery forge, on the headwaters of Town Fork, in the same county, ten miles southwest of Danbury, was built in 1796, by George Hauser and Phillip Kiser. Hill’s bloomery forge, on Tom’s creek, in Surry county, nineteen miles west of Danbury, was built in 1791.

Iron Works in Stokes County 

1850:

1860:

1870:

None.

Thomas Ruffin:

Previous post:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

Pocahontas of Moscow

This BLOG should be read in the context of the current relationship between Russia and the United States which has none of the quality of hope and opportunity that I observed in Russia just two decades ago.

Imagine a snowy day when Pocahontas rowed down the Moscow River to debark in the shadow of the Kremlin near the outdoor swimming pool. Only during the insurgency of the tectonic plates of history, could such paradoxes come into alignment as in 1995. 

Our office was on the corner of the second floor, room 32, at 10 Prochinstenka one block off the intersection at Kropatkin Square. It was referred to locally as the Lvov House and pre-1917 it had been the city home of the Orlov Family. Now we were renting the office as the US-Russian Mayor to Mayor Program from ФОНД МИРА (formerly the Russian Peace Fund), a USSR organization through which welfare services were directed. The West had considered it as a front internationally for social subversion. We had a working agreement with Thomas Gregoriev at the Peace Fund to cooperate in the development of peaceful initiatives, possible since Perestroika,  that might encourage charity in Russia outside of Communism.  The Peace Fund maintained a food, medicine, and clothing closet in the Lvov House. Remember that Communism had just collapsed like a punctured Macy’s helium balloon. Russia had no United Way, no domestic civic clubs, no public philanthropy. Before the Revolution, that had been the venue of the Orthodox Church and limited royal charities. Communism appropriated charity as the purview of the state through which it was able to control poverty by distribution of the wealth through a Communist bureaucracy. By becoming the distributor of the limited resources of a failed economy, leadership could appear to be the only source of benevolence. When that state process was overthrown, and the existing former traditional church was found to be equally impoverished, where could the system be found that was equal to the immense charitable task? 

Orlov House-Prochinstanka Street-2nd floor, right

There was no Marshall Plan like I had observed as a youth that rebuilt a defeated and physically destroyed Germany. Russia had lost a war of political philosophy and the resulting economic implosion was visceral, if less visible. So one of the partners with whom we worked was the Peace Fund, severed now from its connection with Communist form but still staffed with benevolent former Communists in a surging Capitalist world. The Peace Fund was desperate for any potential lifeline. 

The Orthodox Church had survived a persecution of literally biblical proportions, a survival of accommodation that had left it a fragile shell. So desperate for an iconic image of hope for forlorn believers, one of the first acts of the Patriarch was to use any funds available to gild the domes of as many churches as possible: image over substance. Weak as it was, the Orthodox Church recognized that at an age when the Christian Church in the West was potentially an evangelical juggernaut threatening the newly liberated theological fields, Orthodoxy could easily be smothered in the cradle. Many church leaders feared they stood between the Armageddon of economic capitalism/materialism and a proselytizing phoenix. Could they even survive in order to develop the moral basis on which to build a humanity of community?

Our partnership in polity was the United Methodist Church and the Ministry of Education and Catechism of the Patriarchate of Moscow. At that moment, the Methodists had around twenty congregations in the area of post-Soviet Russia. Their tremendous advantage in the circumstances was that along with the Baptist and Reform denominations, they had been allowed for years by Communist authority to operate under restriction. Under the new federal law they were technically grandfathered. In the spirit of Perestroika, how could they now be restricted by the interests of the Orthodox Church. As the one without resources, how could the Orthodox Church deny the potential that there was in the rich resources of the western churches. Quid pro quo! in spirit. The Patriarchate agreed to a gradual expansion of Methodist congregations. Through Stafford and Associates, under the US/Russia Mayor to Mayor Program, we were hired to assist the Russian Orthodox Church through Father Ioan Econometzev, Head of the Ministry of Education and Catechism, in the development of charitable programs to assist particular areas of social need by the liberated Orthodox Church in the new Russia. 

We had success in convening the first Orthodox Women’s Conference in Uglich, bringing church leaders together from as far away as Siberia, along with women leaders from the United States in such varied fields as journalism and banking. These were not high-level bureaucrats or corporate leaders but individuals experienced in their fields who could potentially communicate on an operational level. The Mayor of Uglich, Eleanora Shervamechiva, for example, was the first female mayor in Russia and a member of the Dumas. 

Now, through the Association of Small and Historic Cities, organized under Father Ioan, and with Dumas participation, we were being directed to the second tier of historic Russian cities, smaller and less known in the West than the cities of the Golden Ring, to suggest steps to develop tourism potential. These cities typically were heavy with history and historic built environment, particularly churches. Uglich, for example was the city where Dmetry, the last surviving son of Ivan the Terrible, a teenager protected by his mother from palace intrigue, had been murdered, supposedly by Boris Gudenov in order to gain the throne. It was already an established stop on boat excursions on the Volga River. 

In 1997, we were being approached as one of the cooperating associations on the ground that could objectively consider the creative initiative in the new Russia. At an operational level, we had been able to connect government and state resources in the US and Russia, outside the structure of politics and commerce, making use of the fundamental potential of the church and the state. We had learned to keep our heads down and be satisfied to work in the trenches which was the favored position in times of turmoil.

As an American Thanksgiving holiday approached, Suzanne Stafford began to conceive the need to introduce Moscow to the spirit of appreciation that was the basis of Thanksgiving. Russians were natural sharers. The “widow’s mite,” must originally have been a Russian folk tale. Also, Russia, not historically considered a “melting pot,” encouraged its indigenous people by allowing them to establish indigenous republics. American Thanksgiving seemed a particularly appropriate public holiday to introduce onto such an historic stage. 

She began by requesting that one of the particularly supportive North Carolina churches  send some honey-baked hams. She requested another friend to mail her the Pocahontas costume she had worn on another occasion. Suzanne’s daughter, Degan, along with us for this trip,  requested that her class back in Colfax gather Thanksgiving stories and poems that would illustrate the spirit of the season. Then Suzanne organized all the American and Russian friends in Moscow who associated with the humanitarian efforts we were making, to plan a menu and assign production. 

The day before the banquet, we were finally notified that our hams had arrived at Demedova Airport. We had nearly given up on their arrival on time so Suzanne and I went to the airport to retrieve them. The arrival area was gated and we were allowed in only when we proved we had a specific package to retrieve. This was at 10 o’clock in the morning. We entered a modern airport building already awash with people of every description and nationality. Unable to get directions to navigate the system, we each entered a line hoping one would lead to our target. Neither did, but did provide us more specific directions to a line for receipts from America. We nearly reached the front when the alarm went off and all staff went on a two hour lunch break closing everything, even the gate so no one in parking could get out. 

We waited in the car, nothing to eat. When business opened again everyone started over. On reaching the front of the line we were advised that we had to go to the back corner of a large storage building to see Evanka who would give us the package after stamping the form we were provided in multiple. After what seemed like a mile walk through rooms of dust covered, impounded Mercedes and Audi automobiles, we brightened at finding Evanka who took us to the shelves and pointed to our package. We could not take it because the officer at the front should have stamped the sheet first. We had to walk back. The officer at the front, threw up his hands and said something unpleasant in Russian. He grabbed the paper and led us back to Evanka in a half-trot. Their contest of shouts above continued for several minutes before Evanka went to her boss. A second round, this time three contestants and two observers, ended with an exchange of notes on the receipt justifying each position. We were handed our package off-handedly, the receipt being the document in triplicate that was the bureaucratic prize. 

The setting for the Thanksgiving banquet was spectacular: the grandeur of Russia from a former age with the simplicity of a feast in the American forest. The XVI century mansion took its name from Russian General Mikhail Orlov, a leader of the Decembrist and at another time  the author, Boris Pasternak lived here as a tutor. The entrance to the Orlov House was directly from the street. There was a guard at the desk to check each entrant. The foyer was dominated by a wide, direct, marble staircase covered with a maroon runner with iconic borders leading to a landing that reversed to the second-floor balcony. On the left was a parquet floor ballroom with columns and two-story high windows. To the right rear was the office of the US/Russian Mayor to Mayor   Program, and the Peace Fund office was on the other side of the balcony landing. The large office beside ours belonged to the Russian Chess Federation, headed then by Anatoly Karpov, World Chess Champion (1975-1985). A massive chess board decorated the room. Karpov was also President of the Peace Fund.  

A long table was set for 25 people with a red vinyl cloth and floral arrangements and the finest plastic that Indians would have used in America. This room had been selected because it was adjacent to a large kitchen and on entry, the guests were encapsulated in the aromas of Thanksgiving and greeted by Suzanne as Pocahontas. There was a slight delay. The cooks had decided on fresh Russian turkeys instead of having them sent from America, but apparently Russian birds take a little longer to cook. 

The mixture of Russian and English-speaking guests took pre planning but most, uncertain of their ability to speak the other language, could understand it fairly well. The bounty of the food bridged all conversation, and strange foods were explained and receipts exchanged. Vodka was available in abundance, the wine of enthusiastic conversation. Not traditional at American Thanksgivings, it was a bridge we shared. Corn was explained as the most symbolic of the traditional Indian foods, along with turkey, of which the Russians were of course familiar.

Suzanne’s explanation of the seasonal tradition was followed by Dagan, symbolic of “the future leadership of youth.” She read a few of the Thanksgiving poems and pronouncements and showed off a wall of posted illustrations by children in America. This seemed a little staged but appropriate. Then a table of toasts carried us all off into the afternoon on special wings of nostalgia.  

Father Ioan had brought his English-speaking secretary, Katerina, but she proved redundant as he lifted his glass as honored guest, and expounded in clear English, his thoughts about the significance of his grandson, Peter. He lived in America with his mother and was being educated as an American. It was a declarative statement. He and Dagan represented the world we all sought to make better. He spoke of his years as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Greece. He was still Head of the Orthodox Brotherhood. He pointed out that the Orthodox Church needed to expand their structure of religious education. It would be difficult because of tradition. He would soon open the Russian Orthodox University in Moscow as Rector. This would be a University, not a Seminary, but they would encourage clergy to study economics, law, architecture, publishing and media subjects. He hoped to achieve a partnership with an American university medical school. The people at the table recognized that such ideas were anathema within portions of Orthodox hierarchy. But Ioan spoke of the encouragement he was receiving from Patriarch Alexi II, his friend since college. “Zdorov’ja!,” to health.”

Ludmilla Kornureva was a Professor of Philosophy. She was a close friend of Suzanne’s and had been particularly involved in the Women’s Conference. She spoke of growing up and educated in Russia under Communism. She had nothing but praise for the content of her education but as a teacher she considered herself liberated not revolutionized.  She spoke of her previous trip to the US without funds, when she had been befriended by Suzanne and how much their friendship had meant to both of them through the years. She was particularly thankful for the opportunity to have her parents with her to see this mix of international cooperation. She wanted to dance. “Zdorov’ja!”

General Kornureva rose frail but imposing and spoke for himself and wife. “Fifty years ago my residence was in Washington, DC where I was a military attaché for the USSR during wartime, when the US and Russia fought a common enemy. The international military community in Washington was very close. Men who had fought the war knew the price of war but they were all patriotic disciples of their country’s politics. I have many dear American friends and we all grow old. Back then all Russians believed that our sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War had saved the world from Hitler. Americans believed that they had supplied the men and machines that had saved the world from Nazism. It was a natural competition that developed into the Cold War of separation. I am thankful that we come to this table under more promising prospects. “Zdorov’ja!”

Marjory Loory had worked with Suzanne on several projects over the years and with Father Ioan. Her husband, Stuart Loory, was with CNN and had just published Seven Days That Shook the World: The Collapse of Soviet Communism, that was a pictorial narrative and television report on the fall of Communism. “Russia has again passed through a baptism of fire,” said Marjory. “It is in this period of testing and recommitment that the spirit of the Russian people will be drawn out and tested. It is my hope that the Western democracies will see this opportunity for a new order, to see also the opportunity to assist, openly and as future partners. This is a time to promote strong communities of faith. We can be thankful but we must reach out to each other. “Zdorov’ja!”

Bill and Ginger Wallace were from Dallas, Texas. Bill had spent his career with the Federal Reserve System and was now the CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. He was the closest, within the American delegation, to a high level Government official and he had been meeting for a week with banking managers throughout Moscow. “I am inspired by the people assembled here,” he began. “Images and symbolisms are racing through my head of the potential for this kind of compassionate concern. Leadership is often restricted, by real and imagined political concerns, from being  able to organize potential. The task is going to be to translate the symbolism present at this Thanksgiving in Moscow into a tangible impetus. Zdorov’ja!”

Thomas Gregoriev spoke for the Peace Fund. “This is a deceptively grand place from which to operate a very struggling charity organization but we are thankful for it. The Peace Fund is in transformation while we are called on daily to meet a wide variety of human needs, helpless people who have lost all support. Downstairs we have an office full of food and clothing and blankets to serve people living on the street. We also have a pharmacy to provide medicine. From all over Russia we are called on by groups like the Chernobyl Victim’s Families and the Children’s Fund in the Russian cities where we formerly functioned. Russia has got to find a way to transition from administered charity to public charity. Our Orthodox church is already focused on the need but is limited in its resources. We hope that such organization as the US/Russian Mayor to Mayor Program can connect us to the model of American charity. Russians are by nature charitable. They need to organize the new vehicles for delivering that charity to the real need. Thanksgiving is a start. Zdorov’ja!”     

As winter set into the bones of Russia in 1995, we could look down along Prechistenskya Street from our second floor balcony to the intersection at Kropotkin Square and see steam rising above the wooden palisade around the public swimming pool. It was the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior which had been detonated by order of Joseph Stalin in 1932. The monumental statue of Lenin, planned to be the largest in the world, had failed when begun on the site because it kept sinking. The public pool was the alternative of the Communist system to the church and the statue. In the next few years we would watch as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior would rise again on its original location, a monumental metaphor. 

In 1995, Perestroika was another of Winston Churchill’s Russian “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,”     that the US and the West were never able to fathom. It was a time when a small group, even a single, well-intentioned American, could travel there and attract an impressive community of like-minded altruists. Such people then could struggle together to be attuned to compassion. Unfortunately, there was not the sufficient public will, or will within the faith community, to fashion a template that could complete the endeavor. 

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

BOXWOODS (RURAL RETREAT)

Since its construction in about 1820 by Randal Duke Scales, this house and the surrounding acreage has functioned as a plantation. The Federal plan of the house adapts the style popular then on the Dan River in southside Virginia (see Dan’s Hill, Oak Hill, Green Hill, and particularly Thornfield). The land came into the Scales family when Joseph Scales (1750-1796) of Henry County, Virginia bought the core 324 acres from Edmond Brewer in 1786. Tradition says that there already was a house on the site although there is no surviving evidence. It is a plausible assumption since the bluff overlooks almost a hundred acres cleared by Indians for cultivation before 1700. On the immediate west side of the house the original road to a ford in the river was the connection to transportation. On the south side of the river that road connected to one constructed originally by General Nathanael Green’s engineers for General Daniel Morgan to move much of the American military baggage from harm’s way in the vicinity of Guilford Courthouse, hence termed the Baggage Road. 

Joseph Scales was born and living in that part of Rowan County that would eventually become Rockingham when he bought the plantation from Brewer. In 1771, he married Anne Perkins of Henry County, Virginia. Why he then purchased the plantation from Brewer is not clear, however, his children in 1811 sold it to their cousin, Peter Scales, who was born in North Carolina.  Then in 1818, Peter sold the plantation to his son, Randall Duke Scales. In addition to the mansion houses referenced in Virginia, another branch of the Scales family would build High Rock, Mulberry Island, Deep Springs and Ingleside, as well as Rural Retreat in Rockingham County. All the homes were in the same Federal style and most were two-bays brick. This linking of Patrick and Henry County in Virginia and Rockingham County in North Carolina was relational in the Scales family. Branches of the family moved back and forth to residences in both states and selected wives in both. It was as if the Dan River knit the extended family. That simile can be applied to their homes in location and architecture.  

Randal Duke Scales was born in Patrick County, VA. By the time he married Mary McFarland Dearing in 1810, the wedding was in Rockingham County. The couple were already living there by the time his father purchased the Edmund Brewer land.  Since Peter died in 1821, it is assumed that it was Randal Duke Scales, who had bought the land from his father three years earlier, who was the builder of Rural Retreat. Then the likely date of construction would have been between 1818 when Randal Duke bought the land, and 1821 when he would have received the inheritance of his father. 

The two-bay residence had a wide central hall. The ceilings were high and the decorations unadorned. The entrance on the north looked out on farm buildings, and the river entrance, to the vast bottomland with the road to the ford. Exterior brickwork was American bond set off with pairs of chimneys on the east and west sides. The symmetry of the Federal style dictated five windows upstairs and four down, with the door in the middle, set off by a small porch. 

Rural Retreat was a house of style and ornamentation that fit the panorama of this plantation site. The master would always be able to look out on his abundant fields. Scales surrounded the house with appropriate outbuildings and a family cemetery.¹ There were 42 slaves to work the plantation and their cabins were positioned along the road descending west of the house to the ford. 

Simultaneous to his purchase of the plantation, Randal Duke Scales laid off the town of Madison, north of the residence. ² Among the town commissioners were his relatives: Nicholas Dalton, Joel Cardwell, Joshua Smith and Richard Wall. The town was made up of 96 lots originally offered by auction. The design was then to capture the trade of the upper reaches of the Dan River. The land route between Salem and Petersburg, Virginia passed immediately west of Madison. 

There is a tradition that Scales had some kind of financial conflict and another that he was discouraged by the frequent spring freshets that brought typhoid fever.  More likely it was the prospect of the rich cotton land that drew Randal Duke Scales to give up this tobacco plantation for a more profitable opportunity in Mississippi. 

In 1844, the Scales family with their 42 slaves departed in a single wagon train. Scales sold Rural Retreat, which was now 892 acres on both sides of the river, to a young doctor in Madison, James L. Oliver. Oliver had only a short time to appreciate his plantation before he died, February 11, 1847, perhaps of the same typhoid fever that had concerned the Scales family. In the dispersal of his estate, the plantation was sold to John Dupuy Watkins (1810-1896) of Cascade, Virginia. Watkins and his family had been members attending the Spring Garden Presbyterian Church near Wentworth when the church in Madison was begun in 1844. 

John D. Watkins’s wife, Jane Martin, had died in 1840 and he was a widower with a little daughter when he made a second marriage to Phoebe Ann Stone in 1844. Perhaps it was to make a new family start that they decided to purchase Rural Retreat. Their first daughter had been born a month before Dr. Oliver had died. One of their first acts at the time of their occupancy of the Rural Retreat plantation was, to bring boxwoods from their earlier home in Cascade to construct an extensive garden. As it matured, the gardens and six acres surrounding, began to define the home. Plantings of English dwarf boxwoods became neat patterned squares and faster growing American boxwoods lined the pathways. The Watkins added a silver door bell, brick walks, and two large iron urns at the entrance as if to define an estate. A white picket fence separated the house from the farm buildings. 

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¹ Today only one fenced grave remains of this cemetery on Penn Street, the others were destroyed with the construction of that sub-division.
² Tradition says it was Archibald D. Murphey who had the land surveyed for the town, hence his name was given to the main east-west street.

It was probably during the occupation of the Watkins family that the face of the house was altered, front and back, by an extension of the porch across the face on the ground floor surmounted by a small central stoop on the second floor. In the process, the central window upstairs was replaced with a fanlight door and downstairs with a larger door with glass surrounds in an early Victorian form.

For a dozen years, the family prospered before the Civil War brought excitement and then despair to their lives.  In 1861, the Watkins’ eldest daughter married Major William Harrison Worth of the 45^th Virginia Regiment. Untouched by physical contact with troops of either army, in the latter days of the conflict they were threatened by elements of General Stoneman’s Western Army as it passed on their way from Danbury to Greensboro. The end of conflict meant total economic chaos. The slaves, who had been the engine of the plantation operation, were free and only a few remained as hired labor. Even the prospect of a healthy plantation economy was gone. 

In 1875, Watkins sold Rural Retreat to Joseph M. Vaughn for $12,000. ³ Vaughn had been raised on the south side of the Dan River near Rocky Springs. He married Cassandra Black, daughter of Pleasant “Trader” Black of Madison. They had three sons and a daughter by the time they purchased Rural Retreat. In the shadow of Reconstruction, Joe Vaughn knew a good thing when he saw it. This was a step up from the place of his birth and in the era of recapturing the aura of the old South, his family delighted in the tradition of this house.

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³ Pheobe Watkins, having departed the house, realized the she treasured the silver doorbell and sent her husband back to beg for its return saying his wife had not intended that it go with the house. Joe Vaughn is said to have shrewdly responded that he would not have bought the property if it had not been for the doorbell.

Boxwoods from the garden side.

Old “Uncle Pete” was the carriage driver sent to greet visitors who might arrive by railroad in Madison. Joe Vaughn had been active in the effort to bring railroads through Madison and sold the railroad right-of-way that curved along his bottomland beneath the house on the bluff. Although it was mostly grains that were cultivated in the river bottoms, it was tobacco that was now the money crop and people like Vaughn and Pleasant Black fostered the tobacco warehouses that made Madison a tobacco market town. The name Rural Retreat was taken over by the magnificence of the boxwood gardens and consequently the Vaughns began calling the place Boxwoods. In 1932, “Country Life” magazine called the house “one of the most beautiful places in the piedmont section of North Carolina” and the boxwood gardens were declared unique examples of the style.

The Vaughns’ only daughter, Luola, married Harry Jefferson Penn in 1898. He had come to Madison in 1892 to operate as a tobacco manufacturer under the name of Pegram and Penn.

Some of his relatives had located in Reidsville and started the American Tobacco Company and in 1903 he became a buyer for that company. The young couple came to live at Boxwoods and a one-room, frame addition was added to the west side of the house. 

Luola and Jeff Penn had two daughters and four sons. In 1922 he started a small manufacturing company producing garters of his own design. When his son commented that it was a “gen dandy,” they had the name for their business. They took over two vacant tobacco warehouses in Madison. Jeff Penn was a manufacturing executive but he relished his role in running Boxwood in the plantation style. The smoke house was a finished frame building in front of the house on the river side. Jeff filled it each year with aging smoked hams that he insisted on glazing himself. They were doled out as “acceptable” gifts to friends and largess from the master. 

Their youngest son, Edgar Vaughn, married Josephine Webster and they inherited the house and their daughter, Nancy Lee Byerly, is mistress of Boxwoods today. The boxwoods have overgrown walkways and winter freezes through the years have caused gaps in the forms but the garden still bears an atmosphere of elegance that once characterized many of these similar fine homes along the Dan.      

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES:

Albion W. Tourgée

I am a strong believer that history should examine facts in their own time and that is where research should concentrate. Judging such research through the prism of another age, even our own, begs conflict. Like the medical examiner, the historian should only seek the facts. Sociology is not their game. Having said that, might I add that there are times when historians should assess history, as published in another age, as a reflection of the contemporary. That is an insightful tool of history-the thesis laid down speaks again in a different context. 

A case in point that I have run across is Albion Tourgée, a well-intentioned Yankee who, seeing the confusion that emancipation would initiate in a defeated Confederacy, decided to insert himself as a palliative. Noble as it was in intent, it was equally a “Fool’s Errand,” and the fool was inevitably chastised.

Tourgée and his family left their Ohio home and chose Greensboro, North Carolina as their venue of good works. The ingredient of their purpose that was astringent, was that they intended to focus their effort on behalf of people who had been enslaved for an estimated 12 generations, their labor usurped and their humanity severely proscribed. As a do-gooder, not sought by the structured white society, he was operating under a newly promulgated Federal Plan of Reconstruction. He was no revolutionary, but he saw himself as an honest practitioner. In his sojourn of more than a decade, he would reap a leadership role but in the process become the personification of the “carpetbagger” of Southern romance-driven out in his own ignominy. In Greensboro, he became the image of unsolicited intrusion to whites and disillusionment to the liberated slave. After a century and a half of segregation and desegregation, have we reasonably come to a time where we might gain value from a re-examination of Tourgée’s effort? 

His roots were out of the area of Ohio known as the Western Reserve. Attributed to be the “last footprint of Puritanism,” it was an area on Lake Erie that had been part of Connecticut by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. In 1800, it was finally incorporated into the Ohio Territory. It can be likened to the western limits of New England migration, imbued with the cause of abolition. In 1849, Ohio repealed all the black laws thus encouraging racially integrated schools. ¹

With that sociological background, Tourgée entered the Union Army as a Lieutenant and fashioned his future in terms of service. He called it, “his Southern scheme,” and he wished, “to do right, I know I wish to do good.” ²

Coming first to Raleigh in July, 1865, he was influenced there by Governor William Holden, appointed to his post by President Andrew Johnson. Holden was a Quaker from Guilford County, where the roots of Abolition had contributed so directly to the operation of the “Underground Railroad” in antebellum days. Greensboro, only a few months earlier had experienced total social upheaval as the ending acts and military forces of the Civil War converged on a town of 2500. ³ Social order was in such flux that the most vulnerable suffered. Freed slaves were confined by the circumstances without any apparatus to shield them. It was Tourgée’s perfect vocation. ⁴ It appears almost naivete that “he favored instead the cause of free speech, equal citizenship, the politicization of the masses through voluntary associations, a government-supported public education system, and the value of an active, informed citizenry.” ⁵

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¹ Elliott, Mark, Color-Blind Justice, Albion Tourgée and the Quest For Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 59, 69; The Free School Movement came out of the Western Reserve and spread educational opportunities throughout the mid-west. That it was concurrent with the Freedman’s Bureau’s efforts to improve black education in the South, they are interesting reflections.
² Elliott, Color Blind Justice, 105.
³ As the defeated armies of Lee and Joe Johnston converged on the rail hub with the fleeing Confederate Cabinet and extant commissary and merged with the victorious Union Army of George Stoneman, the population of Greensboro is estimated to have risen to perhaps 250,000, mostly displaced persons; Bradley R. Foley and Adrian L. Whicker, The Civil War Ends, Greensboro, April 1865 (Greensboro: Guilford County Genealogical Society, 2008), 14-15.
⁴ Tourgée located on the southern edge of Greensboro that in time would become the Warnersville neighborhood.
⁵ Elliott, Color-Blind Justice, 102.

Tourgee and wife in 1865 at time they came to NC

Soon after arrival, he delivered a rousing speech at the Quaker Deep River Meeting House assembled to determine delegates to the upcoming Southern Loyalist Convention. Called by Radical Republicans, it was an attempt to rally the support of Southern Republicans against Johnson’s Southern policies of rehabilitation of secessionist and former Confederates back into leadership. Tourgée took a leadership roll as the Republican Party refashioned itself in North Carolina.  He was elected as a Guilford County representative to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention, ⁶ to the Legislature and Superior Court Judge. ⁷ His speaking and composition capabilities thrust him into policymaking as former Whigs fused with national Republicans. Later in life he was a Republican spokesperson and confidant of President Grant.

Governor Jonathan Worth, a Randolph County Quaker, who had been elected Governor replacing the appointed Holden, labeled Worth a “vile wretch” and “lying villain.” ⁸ He was branded. Albion Tourgée’s “A Fool’s Errand” was published in 1879. Along with “Bricks Without Straw,” he wove his “Southern Scheme” in Greensboro in novel form. Among the evidence rejected through omission by the local historical record, Tourgée was considered as one of America’s pre-eminent authors of the late 19^th century. Clothing his familiarity in novel form took the political edge off and caused the reader to experience, in terms of sympathy, the human tragedy of white Confederates and liberated but helpless Negroes.  

The protagonist admits that he does believe the bulk of the Southern people, “regard the abolition of slavery only as a temporary triumph of fanaticism over divine truth. They do not believe the negro intended or designed for any other sphere in life. They may think the relation was abused by bad masters and speculators and all that, and consequently God permitted its overthrow; they have no idea that he will permit the permanent establishment of any system that does not retain the African in a subordinate and servile relation.” Again he comments, “no community has any right to have, cherish, or protect any institution which cannot bear the light of reason and free discussion.” Then he finds that, “the institution of slavery is abolished; but the prejudice, intolerance, and bitterness which it fostered and nourished, are still alive.” Therefore,   “a servile race, isolated from the dominant one by the fact of color and the universally accepted dogma of inherent inferiority, to say nothing of a very general belief or its utter incapacity for the civilization to which the Caucasian has attained, should be looked on with distrust and aversion, if not with positive hatred, as a co-ordinate political power, by their former masters, would seem so natural, that he could hardly expect men of ordinary intelligence to overlook it,”  ⁹

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⁶ Stefanie Alyson King, “Consent and Coercion in the Central Piedmont of North Carolina during the Civil War Era,” Masters Thesis, UNCG, 2015, 76.
⁷ He also is listed as a founder of Bennett College.
⁸ Ibid, 110.
⁹ Tourgée, Albion, A Fool’s Errand (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1879) reprint 2016, 73.79, 91.113

Tourgée’s works reflect a singular clarity to our time of racial imbalance: hostility to immigration, politicization of education, economic inequity, and social hostility. On occasion, it is easier. even in our own blindness, to see the beam in the other man’s eye.  

I am not going to provide a bibliography to show the sources that I have found appropriate. Instead, let me highly recommend that you read either “The Fool”s Errand or “Bricks Without Straw.” And balance your reading with the recent and pertinent “Color-Blind Justice” by Mark Elliott, Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  

Tourgee in 1882

Photographs from “Color-Blind Justice.”

Previous posts:

• Christmas 1958
• SESQUICENTENNIAL
• James Martin of Snow Creek, Stokes County, NC – his Militia and Continental Service
• Buis Ordinary/Lindsay Courthouse – Significance to Regulator Movement in NC
• FORDUS ACHATES: