Jones Oakley

When I was fourteen, Jones Oakley was kind of a mystery to me. I could certainly take in that he was a farmer, tobacco and chickens. He always wore overalls and rarely had much to say. I was a “Yankee” kid, as my father frequently reminded me in his casual conversation, and I had always lived in cities or towns, but I didn’t think of myself as a city boy. At Covington though, I had to redefine myself. To everyone I came to know, I was a citified Yankee but I couldn’t feel what that was. While they contrasted me with my new surroundings, I had to absorb my new environment as I ran into it. There was no preparation and no one with whom to share the experience of the new circumstances. I had to work it out, or more frequently like stepping on a rake, my new habitat flew up and hit me in the face. More examples of that later.

Jones Oakley was a tenant farmer. I heard my parents say that but it was years before I fully understood the sociological context of that label in the South in 1948. Like so many things, I came to recognize tenant farming as rooted in the disastrous outcome of the Civil War. Like share cropping elsewhere, the term defined a degree of entitlement related to land ownership.

In Stokes County there were many poor white farmers who constantly struggled to support their families; and black families, descendants of slaves, who found Emancipation to be less like freedom and more like displacement. One group was referred to as “po’ white” and the other as “nigger.” Both terms I learned quickly were pejorative and never to be used in polite society by young boys. One thing that both groups had in common was lots of children because they were bound to the harvest and for that everyone needed “hands.”

Although Stokes County had not historically produced many large plantations, land ownership had tended to be concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The agricultural economy rested chiefly on growing tobacco and making and marketing “licker.” Both were considered money crops protected by the system.

Tobacco, like cotton in other parts of the state, were labor-intensive crops divided neatly into stages of production. There was a palpable experience like respiration, in each crop cycle, sometimes uneven but necessary to a good yield. Children were introduced into the rhythm before they could walk, tethered to a quilt in the shade of the barn, within sight of the family putting in the plant bed, plowing and planting, hoeing, succoring, priming, stringing, and putting in the barn. Once a year the cured crop was taken to the tobacco warehouses, load after load and put up at auction to the bidding of the tobacco companies. Once a year there was money and if it was a good crop, all the debts contracted in the twelve previous months could be retired. What was left over determined the caliber of life the family could expect for a year. A description of the cycle may sound plodding, pedestrian, even a little mundane, but even in depressions and bad crop years, a tight family dynamic provided a satisfying security.

Tenant farming became the final solution after the end of slavery, where the slave was free without the skills or education for independent action and the plantation owner and manager lost their means of production. Without the land, the slave could not work. Without the field hands, the landowner could not produce a crop. Without money, neither could subsist. Many convolutions were tried and failed to meet the need for farm laborers until land owners saw that without money, the freed slave and the poor white farmer were unable to rent the land. Tenant farming, as the alternative, had many of the elements of the indentured servitude of past generations. The land owner provided land and housing and advanced the cost of the crop or co-signed the tenant’s note, with a written agreement that the tenant family would “work the crop” for the year. At the end of the crop year, as portions of the crop were being sold at auction, cost would be settled and the owner and tenant would divide what was left in an agreed percentage. All obligations were presumed to be satisfied.

This is the background from which the Jones Oakley family, as a result of frugal practices, had been able to move up onto their own farm on Star Route. In their new house across the dirt drive from Covington, Jones took advantage of Federal farm programs and added chicken farming. He built several chicken houses and was thus able to secure his farm on two cash crops. Regrettably, after only about a year, one of his long chicken houses, filled with a new crop of pullets, caught fire and pullets and building went up in flames.

It was a major setback and one of Jones’ friends, learning of his calamity, pulled up in the side yard in his enclosed van. Jones ambled up and with friend and friend’s friend, they got in the back and closed the rear door of the van. Jones was known to enjoy a good drink of home-made liquor but any excesses he usually reserved for moments of high drama like when his wife had another child or like this time, when he had a serious financial loss.

Leigh and I were at home and by our Yankee naivete, we had not suspected what was going on inside the van until the door opened and Jones rolled out about an hour after he had entered. He rose spastically to his feet, as if the fall had been an intended exit and his friends staggered out behind him. In a short while the friends drove off down the gravel driveway showing clearly the degree of difficulty in keeping four tires on two gravel ruts in a straight line.

Instead of going back toward his house, Jones pondered a minute, then turned toward Covington where he could tell we were at work stripping paint. We didn’t stop right away because it was clear it was going to take Jones some time to master the stone walkway to the house and the steps to the porch. Leigh went out to greet him and he announced that he had come by because he wanted to see what we were doing to the house. Leigh invited him in and he said, “beve I will.”

There was no effort to give him a guided tour. Jones wanted to maneuver at his own unpredictable speed. In the dining room, still pretty free of furniture, we had already hung a colored print from our great grandfather’s home in Easton, Pennsylvania. It was the scene of an English Midland farm yard with a husband and wife surrounded by a myriad of animals. Jones stood weaving in front of the scene which obviously appealed to his nature as a farmer. With a single raised finger weaving as if making figure eights in the air, he pointed out each animal form. After some minutes he was ready to move on and so he climbed the steep boxed stairs to the second floor. We were happy for the diversion and Jones was on a mission. He made abbreviated findings in each room, nothing censorious, just perceptions. Then he navigated down the stairs and found himself once more in the dining room where he was again attracted to the scene over the mantle. He approached directly and once more identified the animals, whispering to himself. Then he turned with the wide look of discovery toward Leigh. “Ain’t it nice. Ya’ll got the same pitcher downstairs ya’ll got upstairs,” he stated with satisfaction and wandered home.

The Oakleys were a hard-working family. Often, I would go to see them at work in the tobacco fields and they always seemed to enjoy the opportunity to introduce me to their process. I would practice stringing, and hanging leaves in the barn. I didn’t urge them to let me sucker the plants or hoe, but I did it, and I only remember plowing with the mule to unsatisfactory results that had to be done over. Break time, with refreshing iced tea and Moon Pies, was fun.

My favorite memory of the Oakleys was centered in the kitchen with Mrs. Oakley, I always called her that. The permeated smell was of fat back and molasses, and biscuits baking. These were not fast-food biscuits. She would go to the big flour box on the kitchen floor, life the lid and portion out her flour. Then she would mix and bake the most fantastic biscuits, big as a hand. Someone called them “ho-cakes”. Smeared with molasses or a slab of country ham, they were delightful to a Yankee boy and my mouth waters today as I recall the tastes. The family would delight in my ignorance – laugh and laugh with me.

I came to understand much later that the Oakley family was part of a generation of Stokes farmers, previously tied to the farm, who were able in this generation to break the cycle of social poverty that had suppressed them. Such families moved up from the red clay tract at the end of a ragged road, to the “main surface” of “Star Route.” Government programs of the Depression Era, had provided the lift they needed, to combine with their fortitude, to make the transition. The younger Oakleys, my generation, were able to marry, get an education and built brick houses on an acre or two of the family land. Their children were raised in a middle-class society where they were free to be anything they could dream. I will forever be grateful for the people-education that Jones and Mrs. Oakley gave to this “Yankee boy.”

The INDIAN MOUND at the Sauratown

In 1803, when General Abraham Phillips was employed to map the division of the heirs of the late John Simon Farley and his brother, the late Francis Farley, into 17 individual lots, he place all of the land on the south side of Dan River into lots #8 and #9. In the subsequent assignment of the lots that followed, those two lots went to Elizabeth Morson, daughter of John Simon Farley, who was living in Middlesex north of London. In the map that General Phillips produced, he indicated where Town creek enters the Dan river on #9, marking a trail with the capital letter I. This is the location today of an impressive mound that appears to some to be man-made. The local tradition is that it is an Indian mound but the purpose has never been determined.

The question is what is this anomaly and is it human construction or natural, the product of erosion. The shape is a perfect circle at the base, 2-300 ft in circumference, with a mound about fifteen feet high with a flattened top, indicating contemporary use, and about ten feet in uneven circumference. It is on a flat bottom-land plain with the creek flowing beside it. The creek could easily have contributed to a feature of natural erosion of the plain but this is not an obviously rocky mound, so why would erosion around it have occurred?

On the hypothesis that the mound is man-made, then by whom? An Archaeology study on the north side, has established Indian occupation extensively along this section of the river and has designated this as “Lower Sauratown” for a Saura village that was the last Indian occupation before their diaspora about 1700. William Byrd II, who led the Virginia portion of the Survey Party running the state boundary in 1728, knew of the Saura settlement, gave an approximate date to the migration of its people, but did not describe a village or mention an Indian Mound.

As a result of this survey, Byrd made arrangements to purchase from the North Carolina delegates 20,000 acres on both sides of the Dan. He intended to acquire the river and the rich bottomland still clear of wood-growth from the Indian occupation. He sought to claim from where the river again on the east crossed the Virginia line and west to include what he would call the Irvine river. Although he observed the directional flow of the Dan at the eastern point, it is obvious that he did not then follow it a long distance. In 1733 when he returned, he confirmed, by a trip down the river, that its flow was further south than he anticipated and he had to acquire another 6,000 acres to take in what he had intended. Again, he made no mention of the mound.

In 1755, Francis Farley, the Antigua sugar plantation owner, purchased the 26,000 acres, which Byrd called the Land of Eden, from Byrd’s son. Farley was diversifying his investments in the Atlantic Trade Triangle. He implemented part of his longer-range plans for the plantation in 1773 when he convinced his son, James Parke Farley, and new daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Hill Byrd (daughter of William Byrd III), to take residence there intending to replicate a Virginia tobacco plantation complete with a Palladian plantation house and 100 slaves from Antigua.

To that end, the same year, Francis sent from his Antigua estates, upwards of 100 slaves who had ben trained in the production of sugar. Among these slaves were Muslims, believers in African religions, and baptized Moravians, who had been converted on Antigua. The mixture of these religious faiths begs the question, what did they make of the mysterious mound by the river? Did they assign some kind of religious significance to the anomaly?

Elizabeth Carter Farley, the eldest of the three daughters born to James Parke and Elizabeth, was married to her 3^rd husband, George Izard in 1803. She was connecting the Virginia aristocracy with another elite family, of South Carolina, an American General and a future Governor of the Arkansas Territory. In 1815 Izard made a trip to what the Farleys now called the Sauratown to inspect his wife’s inheritance which by now was being contested within the family.

In the midst of the surveying, he recorded as a casual diversion, “yesterday I set Shirley and Davy to digging the heap of Stones wh[ich] I take for an Indian grave on Mount George. Sp[ill Coleman, Robt. Brodnax and Tommy Buckingham are present – dig till Sunset – finding nothing but stones evidently not in their natural Position……..I pass the aftn with the same Diggers at my Indn Grave – Nothing yet – “ The implication seems to be that this “Indian grave” is located on Lot #17 which is all on the north side of the river and down-river just below the mound on Town Creek. If so, it seems somewhat strange that, speculating on an Indian grave site, they did not hear or appear to know of the Mound in the same area.

Another assumed reference appeared in the summer of 1873 in a Greensboro newspaper.

“Some cold-blooded wag in Wentworth, Rockingham county, has perpetrated a huge sell on the New York World, in the purported discovery of ancient Indian mounds on the Dan River. It was an extensive document, The Raleigh Sentinel bit about three columns of it. We do wonder that the Sentinel was caught in such a simple trap. It had the marks of a sell all over it.”

Over the years, other amateurs have dug at the mound but no thorough, professional Archaeological examination is recorded as having been made. Local people debated the attribution of a connection with the Indians, pro and con, and opinions became rigid. Too fine a point should not be placed on the absence, in the “Heritage of Rockingham County 1983,” a county history, of any mention of the mound even though a special section was entitled “Indian Sites and Traditions.”

The site is physical and unexplained by any academic study. It must have been just as obvious and just as unexplained, to the Indians and the Sauratown slaves whose village and cemetery respectively, were so nearby. Did either use it or build it? They certainly knew it was there. If it was natural, it was still a phenomenon that they had to explain or utilize.

Smallpox-The Epidemic in the Revolutionary War

In the age of Covid 19, it is particularly instructive to take a look at smallpox as an epidemic that consumed considerable attention in the Guilford area during the course of the American Revolution. When George Washington assumed command of the American Army in 1775, his tactical concerns were with the British Army that he faced but his attention was diverted inevitably by the endemic presence of smallpox in his ranks. In Europe as well as the colonies, it was the common experience that smallpox was the companion of any army in motion, they were the conductors of pandemics. The hundreds, sometimes thousands of camp followers in their van, were like a petri dish of infection. This was a more dominant reality in the New World since the Continental Wars had spread smallpox so broadly that many in Europe had herd immunity.

Washington himself had contracted smallpox in Barbados as a youth. He ordered that all the American troops be inoculated against the disease. Such immunizations were crude in comparison with similar procedures today but it is intuitive to observe his action in the context of Covid. Although he was not to become President for almost a decade and a half, he can be said to be the first president to order the mass vaccination of his military. Inoculation was far from an easy decision for him. It was hoped that the inoculated soldier would develop a mild case and soon recover. It was, however, still a crude and frequently dangerous process. Patients could be confined for weeks with, “high fevers and chills, severe body aches, a twisted stomach, and the telltale oozing rash.” After recovery the patient could be significantly scarred. Still, it was Washington’s view that the siege of Quebec in 1775 had been unsuccessful because so many of his soldiers had contracted smallpox. He had no other choice but to order the vaccination of all recruits who had not previously endured smallpox.

In Guilford County, smallpox was not infrequent given that constant immigration contributed to exposure. The early stages of the campaign in the South were more a gorilla war, not as conducive to the spread of pox, hoof and mouth disease or cholera. When the colony authorized the raising of two regiments of Continental soldiers, Alexander Martin became second in command of the Second Regiment and his brother, James, commander of the Guilford Militia. They marched their men North to join Washington in 1777 and at Georgetown the regiment was inoculated, before the battles at Chad’s Ford and Germantown. Alexander Martin had already been part of a mass inoculation at Princeton in his student days.

By 1778 Washington’s medical staff was mired in the primitive treatments of various camp fevers. Doctors who had been used to treating periodic epidemics in the northern cities were now handling the illnesses in the field. They had such numbers that they could not readily incubate or observe for diagnosis. They were doing what they could and moving on. They were experimenting with wide ranges of treatment under conditions that ruled out medical tenets. Men like Drs. Benjamin Rush and William Shippen advocated competing treatments defending some far beyond their demonstrated efficacy. Soldiers were unwilling guinea pigs for professional pride.

The Southern Campaign in Georgia and South Carolina soon settled into a back-country brawl. After Washington sent General Nathanael Greene to take over command from Horatio Gates, the British campaign under Cornwallis was clear in its objective. Having squandered much of his army at the loss at Camden, Gates was humiliated and Greene left with no capability for offensive strategy. Daniel Morgan gave him an unexpected victory at Cowpens which was a virtual resuscitation. Cornwallis was vincible. On the American frontier, Cornwallis was moving further from his sea-born supplies and depending on his Tory allies for adequate resources was at best uncertain. Greene retreated into North Carolina drawing the enemy further and extending his supply line. By the time the armies passed through Mecklenburg County, Greene’s strategy had a name-the Race to the Dan.

Through the Piedmont, the armies struggled in the middle of the wet winter, each giving feet to the plaque of disease. Men who signed up for tours of a few months were discharged to return as carriers to their communities. Quartermasters sent foragers into farms and communities to commandeer whatever had been stored of the winter harvest. They were propagators of disease.

Without the efforts to inoculate every recruit who had so far escaped the contagion of smallpox, the American Army could have very creditably lost the war. Inoculation was as much a combatant in this war as were the Hessians. Where ever there were recruiters, there were often Doctors to administer the immunization. Probably at Halifax young Robert Bell, serving under Quartermaster Captain John Medearis, was inoculated by Dr. Charles Pasteur. He had been called up to serve before the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Part of Medearis’ family were then resident in Guilford County.

**Receipt to Capt. John Medearis for Dr. Charles Pasteur’s inoculation of Robert Bell-1781.**

After the Battle at Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis left many of his wounded to be cared for by the non-combatant Quakers, particularly at New Garden Meeting. As medics for the unfortunates, they contracted from the soldiers the curse of smallpox and spread it within their families.

A study of the wounded and dead in the American Army during the war shows that 90 percent were the result of contagious disease, mostly of smallpox.

Mama Nellie

Nellie Moon was born in 1866 in Emporia, Kansas. At the age of twelve as a young Quakeress, she traveled alone by steamboat, train, and stage to New Garden Boarding School in Guilford County, North Carolina. She returned to finish her education in Indiana and at Earlham College. Nellie’s mother, Mary Pemberton Moon became a Quaker minister in 1872 following in an extended line of female ministers including her grandmother, Susannah Hollingsworth. In 1883 Nellie’s father, Jonathan Moon, died and her mother extended her preaching circuit travelling and preaching throughout the country.

In 1887, Nellie was her mother’s companion when she came to itinerate in North Carolina. She found herself on stage before a large gathering in Madison as her mother was speaking and caught the eye of a young man in the audience. Misinterpreting his cow-eyed expression as spiritual intensity, she sent him a note, “I’m praying for you.”

His response came back immediately, “You can get me without praying for me.”

The next year, after he had visited the family in Kansas, Nellie married the young man, James Spotswood Taylor of Danbury and he brought her to the village where she would live out her ninety-nine year life. Nellie was a new template, as foreign to Danbury as if she had come from space. She never changed though over time she altered the life of almost everyone with whom she came in contact. Like yeast in dough or sugar in water, she was a change agent, never astringent but always exuding grace. (Quote from Gene Pepper)

Spot and Nellie began their married life resident in the Taylor House Hotel, half way down the hill from the courthouse and operated by Spot’s parents, Captain Spotswood Bassett and Grace Ann McGehee Taylor. Eventually there were ten children who were products of the fusion of the diverse moral strength of this Carolina tobacco man and Kansas Quaker lady. Before the end of the century the Taylors had built their own home a block down from the Taylor Hotel.

Nellie was the replicate of the universal wife and mother who sustained the fiber of her family while her husband concerned himself with extending his farm acreage and influence in county business. Together they operated Piedmont Springs Hotel in the summer and eventually bought the property. Nellie’s children were accepted as local products but she remained an enigma, woman of unknown standards beyond local experience.

Spot Taylor died in the summer of 1928. His oldest child, Mary Morehead was 37, an unmarried school teacher, and his youngest, Edwin Madison, was an 18 year old student at Oak Ridge Military Academy. Nellie was 62, and had begun to morph into her own, independent identity. She was persuaded by the local Republican Party to run for Congress in the 5^th District, a complete divergence from the family norm; she was just as enigmatic to the voters. Of course, “Herbert Hoover was a good Quaker” and could she do less?

Even to be a Quaker in Stokes County, it was necessary to be part of the meeting over in Guilford County at New Garden. Her children would matriculate nearby at Guilford College and she was satisfied that they had been provided strong Quaker instruction. She couldn’t help knowing that instruction had been far less intense, at home and at school, as had been her own Kansas/Indiana upbringing. Liberal and socially motivated, there was not the austere association of acceptable lifestyles that had delineated Quakers of her generation. She noted the difference as a nuance and kept it to herself. Her children would make their own way but they would never wonder at the position she would defend.

To Danbury, her influence was a mold. Because it was difficult to go all the way to Guilford to attend meetings, she substituted by regularly attending the rotating Sunday services at the Presbyterian Church across the street from her home or the Methodist Church where the Taylors were members. On the Sundays that the service was at the Baptist Church on the north edge of the town, she ordinarily stayed at home considering herself as having little in common theologically with the Baptists – no criticism, just a conviction. So she was a regular at the church women’s organizations and was an organizer of the Temperance Society.

Her most difficult opposition was to tobacco. Her husband was the second largest grower of flu-cured tobacco in the world, a good friend of R. J. Reynolds since their youth. She opposed tobacco smoking even as her husband’s giant face graced billboards across the country touting the high pleasure of a Camel cigarette. She never wavered in her opposition to the bad habit when debating counter arguments from whatever source. She was often repeated as having told a friend once who smoked, “I am in the mire [about tobacco] as much as you are in the mud. I grow it and you smoke it.” She was acknowledging her own guilt as part of her married lot. It was not a pragmatic justification of cleansing sin but life as an accumulation of condemnatory choices.

I was almost fourteen when I first met “Mama Nellie.” As we drove to Danbury from Winston Salem, my father had told me for the first time that he intended to marry Grace Taylor, a woman I had met on one previous occasion. I immediately envisioned the possibility of having a little brother. I had been extremely lonely since the death of my mother in 1945. Leigh was less sanguine, having a mild resentment because Dad had said, at the time of our mother’s funeral that he would never remarry unless his boys had a part in making the decision. On the way dad seemed particularly anxious that we understood that we would be meeting a number of members of the Taylor family, particularly Grace’s mother, Nellie Moon Taylor. Why was she more of a caution than other old women I knew, like my grandmothers? I feared an ogre and met a saint, I say as an overstatement, because I had exaggerated this introduction so far before we arrived.

Mrs. Taylor’s appearance was as a little woman in a white linen, belted suit that gave her an air of official capacity. She was smiling broadly and immediately grasped my hand when offered, with both of hers. She spoke only to me and made certain that I knew that she had special pleasure in meeting me. Her action was immediate acceptance into an unfamiliar atmosphere that put me at ease. During the visit, she frequently returned to me to ask a specific question about my interests or education or about my family. Her eyes were large and bright, her nose a little over sized, but it was her mouth and chin that I thought most unusual. The lines were so distinct that in some ways she had the features of a ventriloquist’s dummy, unbecoming as I write it, but her expression was cherubic and embracing, palpable in its warmth.

Her home was defined by large two-story columns surmounted by a banister at roof level. The verticals exaggerated the dimensions forcing the observer to take in the statement of the whole. Large American boxwoods, I was learning that bush and the magnolia defined what was southern, surrounding a slate-floor porch furnished in a variety of green-painted ladder-back chairs and rockers. Inside, a central hall extended two rooms deep to a facing mantel overhung with a pretty woman with dark hair and wearing a billowing purple whoop-skirted dress. Double doors on each side led left into a room dominated by a grand piano and right into a formal sitting room with settees and gilded floor-length mirrors and a scowling portrait above the mantel of a black-headed Confederate soldier. I was impressed. The other rooms at the back entered from the hall were a dining room, left, and a library.

My impression that first day was that most of the available space in any of these rooms was filled with members of the Taylor family. Although they all seemed personable to me, it was still dumbfounding and I was conscious that I was not living up to the stimulating instructions on behavior from my father. I felt the center of a scrutiny for which I was not prepared and attempts to put me at ease did little more than stimulate my anxiety. I was under tension on that occasion for so long, that it is difficult for me to remember any single event of that first trip. It was, however, only the first occasion, known to all by the phrase, “a trip up to Mama Nellie’s,” that became a tradition to me for every Sunday and Holiday for years to come. The setting was always the same. The cast would vary, or should I say rotate, and the acts and scenes were shuffled but always seemed to have the same components.

I learned that the gentlemen always rose when a lady entered the room, even if she had just left a minute before. A gentleman always offered his seat to a lady, even if the one she had just left was still vacant. It was never polite to interrupt and children, which marginally included me, resisted speaking up unless encouraged to do so. These were all easy rules once they had been explained, on the way home.

Stranger to me were such reluctantly explained customs as the men going outside frequently, even in the winter to smoke their cigarettes. I had already become quite familiar with the connection of the Taylors to tobacco. My Dad smoked cigarettes in the house, but wait, I realized that he too did not smoke in Mama Nellie’s house. Then one day I learned the lesson that made all the other peculiarities of practice at Mama Nellie’s house clear at last. I walked innocently into the small half-bath off the library only to find Grace and her sister, Mattie Sue, perched precariously on the rim of the porcelain commode, seat up, in high heals and smoking. They were blowing their smoke out the transom window above the toilet. Those things about which Mama Nellie did not approve I realized, were never consciously done in her presence. She would not have reacted with any hostility but none of her children, grandchildren or dear friends, ever wanted to disappoint Mama Nellie. She was therefore always able to preserve her displeasure with anyone drinking alcohol, swearing, smoking, drinking Coca-cola (and presumably all soft drinks), or making light of her Lord or her church. Her progeny practiced absolute abstinence on all counts, in her presence, although they all were certain she knew in her heart that they were otherwise frequently guilty on virtually all counts.

Sunday began at Mama Nellie’s with the arrival. Those who had been to church might come in a cluster especially when it was the Presbyterian Sunday and the church was just across the street. Only my father insisted on going when it was Baptist Sunday so his arrival signaled church in Danbury was over for that week. I went with him often to the Baptist’s and remember one Sunday when he fell asleep. He really did that often. The Baptist minister called on him at the end of the service to pray and finally I had to nudge him awake. He was startled and stood clearing his throat and prayed. After the Amen, he advised the preacher that the name was “Rod-in-bow” when next he wished him to pray.

We sat in the music room, a third of which was taken up by the piano, so that we could observe the structuring of the dining room table and get a glimpse into the very active kitchen presided over by ol’ Sude, the family cook who had been in that capacity for years. That first day I had been to Mama Nellie’s I was taken on an obligatory visit into Sude’s kitchen. It seemed strange at the time. I was never sure if it was for approval of me or by me.

When Sude had completed the setting and serving of the table, we were invited in to the viewing and for the saying of ‘grace.’ Mama Nellie had a few whom she trusted with ‘grace’ including my father for whom she seemed to have a special attachment. The serving dishes were arrayed around the table with the roast or turkey on a large silver tray at one end. Deserts were on the side board as was the selection of beverages. People served their own plate and scattered throughout the downstairs to eat from the balanced knee. Little aluminum folding tables had just become popular so they were handed out to the less coordinated and to children. Food was delicious and plentiful and Sude was the best of cooks. The meal was savored at a pace set by Mama Nellie and courteously obeyed.

After lunch and the smoking ritual, we often heard Mary, the elder, unmarried sibling who had studied music at Guilford and never later left home, play the piano. She was to her mother what her mother had been to her mother, the Quaker preacher. Mary had a repertoire from her era and from these Sunday after dinner performances I learned a broader appreciation of classical and semi-classical music. I remember vividly, the rhapsody from Cavalier a Rusticanna, which I requested each time I was asked to make a suggestion. There was an occasional hymn and for that we all had to be able to sing.

Finally, if some dozing was observed out of the corner of the eye, the State Magazine was brought forward. Carl Goerch had for years edited the magazine which always included a quiz connected with North Carolina knowledge. I came to love this event and was quick to suggest it if it was passed over. It was my introduction to my appreciation of North Carolina history and general knowledge and it served me well.

If it was a beautiful fall afternoon, the teenage cousins, and I was included, were invited out to a neighborhood game of tag football in the open field in front of the Pepper’s house. Teens was a broad term in Danbury because in order to have enough to make up a game, some athletic pre-teens and some dating couples home from college, had to be included.

All the combined activities made Danbury into almost a single family community. One year, in the spring, Eddie Taylor had built a single-hole golf course in the field below the Humphrey’s house and that is where I first swung a club. It was an uphill shot to a green that had a fairly severe slope and putting was the biggest challenge.

All the white families in Danbury participated in this camaraderie but only the Taylor’s had Mama Nellie. She provided an accreditation that seemed to set the Taylors apart, or perhaps they just imagined it so. I vicariously absorbed that notion although I came to know I was by water, not by blood.

SNIPE HUNT

At the age of five, I was living with my family in Milford, New Hampshire. I remember vividly my euphoria when my older brother and his friends agreed to take me with them on a snipe hunt. As dusk settled on the New England garden, my distraught Mother discovered me still motionless, holding open a burlap sack and waiting to ketch my snipe. Over the 80 years since, I have had more than one occasion to recollect the derisive axiom-to avoid finding yourself holding the bag. Historical research, which I have found to be my late-life vocation, is a repeated case in point. It is advantageous to be perceptive to the implication insinuated by new data, but it can result in disappointment.

I was researching material for a new book on Martinville, the vanished county seat of Guilford, when I came across a manuscript map dated 1779 that clearly delineated the “Courthouse of Guilford County.” It purported to be the earliest diagram of the layout of Martinville and just two years before the battle waged around the central building. There was no way to superimpose this drawing on what we knew was the town plan. Try as we may, it just did not work out. We put the map aside reluctantly and did not include it in the finished product since we could not qualify its source.

Subsequently, I was made aware that when Governor Tryon established a new county that he named “Guilford,” between the existing counties of Orange and Rowan in 1771, he had designated the “great room in the home of Robert Lindsay,” as the temporary meeting place of the quarterly court for the new county. So between 1771 and 1774, the initial court met in what must have been considered the largest, most accommodating location within the bounds of this sparsely- settled frontier county. “It still exists. The building is still there,” said my correspondent. I convinced a few of my informed friends to join in an open-ended discussion about this relic of the earliest history of the county that miraculously had been preserved, battered though it may be, in the front yard of a fine brick home on Sandy Ridge Road on the edge of High Point. The determination we experienced, that such a find could not be ignored and particularly in a county wealthy as it was in history and preservation. The result was that we became a sub-committee of the High Point Preservation Society with the commitment to research the background and significance of this building and advise on the feasibility of preservation.

As the Chairperson of the “Buis/Lindsay Ordinary/Courthouse Preservation Committee, I found myself reading “Young Hickory,” a biography of the early life of Andrew Jackson, On page 153, I came across the same map and found it identified as a map of the courthouse of Guilford at the time when young Jackson was visiting before the battle. Of course, I knew that what I had assumed to be a map of early Martinville was instead a map of the Robert Lindsay House and its surroundings. Such a discovery, along with the Guilford Limner portraits set in the interior of the residence, were considered unprecedented relics of a place that by the standards of 21^st Century residential expansion, rarely survived.

Through Sally Gant at MESDA we became aware of a farm diary that had been preserved in the Gray family in Winston Salem. It had been kept by Elizabeth Dick Lindsay between 1837 and 1845 and covered the routine acts of the family in operating the farmstead on Deep River. Filled with minutia from the production process for making silk to hog killing, it opened the door to a clear appreciation of daily life in the early 19^th century. Sally became a valuable academic addition to our committee.

The Guilford Limner was an anonymous itinerant portrait artist who, between 1818-1833, worked in Guilford County and in the southeast states. Sally Gant was the authority on his work and was preparing a detailed study in the hopes of identifying the artist. We found that the complimentary cover portraits on the only previous study of the limner, featured Andrew and Elizabeth Dick Lindsay and two of their daughters. Incredibly, the portraits provided a virtual photograph of the interior of the main room of the Lindsay brick-filled post and beam, two story house as it looked in 1829. The Lindsay house was the only in situ site used by the limner that was known to remain.

Our enthusiasm was extended when a Ground Penetrating Radar survey by the Department of Archaeology at UNCG, confirmed the location of the basement and original site. We accommodated the labor of J. P. Kennett, whose grandparents owned the 13-acres surrounding the building and had doggedly preserved our relic, to clear and stabilize the graves in the Lindsay Cemetery as his Eagle Scout Project.

Then we had to adjust to a serious disappointment. We hired authorities on dating local preservation sites and the dating of log framing and found that our relic was actually built about 1820, well beyond the date when it would have served as the courthouse site. The committee was left to evaluate the alternatives for the project. We came to the calibrated conclusion that the project and the restoration should continue and we would continue to do research in greater depth on the site. Already with one of three planned books on the Lindsay home and family complete, we had too many exciting assets that we had come across in the process to merely turn away.

Then the Covid Pandemic hit and all meetings and physical activities related to such projects came to an immediate halt. Research alone, as a stay-at-home computer project, was the only discipline that could continue and in the process, it was possible to reposition our purpose for the Buis/Lindsay Ordinary/Courthouse Project.

And we had that elusive 1779 map. From the Jackson biography, we knew that the original of the map was located at the Alderman Research Library at the University of Virginia. It was Sally Gant who contacted UVA and began an extended dialogue, often interrupted by the vagaries of the pandemic, to obtain more of the provenance connected with the map. Just as the restrictions of movement began to be loosened in the late Spring of 2021. We learned that the map was in fact 51 pages long and we received enhanced copies of some of the sections pertinent to our research. It was clearly not a normal plat or regional cartography. It was a very long, snaking, layout that seemed to concentrate on a road running southwest to northeast across North Carolina and well into Virginia. In addition to intersecting roads and passing water courses, the map seemed to reference, in no particular pattern, natural and man-made attractions that might be used as reference points for travelers. Logic led us to contemplate who would need such a directional road map two years before the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Why, someone who was concerned with moving the pondering flow of an army through unfamiliar territory with potential natural impediments. It appeared to be a chart of strategic value to an army.

The revitalized preservation project, meanwhile, looked at all the discoveries unearthed by research and assembled an “assets list” connected to our work. We also recognized that the more inclusive vicinity on Sandy Ridge and Squire Davis Roads at the western prong of Deep River was concurrently taking on a particular quality of life that was not the conception of a city planner. When you added in the already contemplated High Point Greenway as a people conductor, the retirement community operational at River Landing, the relocated Wesleyan Christian School under construction across the road, and our preservation project, there was an identifiable community that seemed destined to have consistent social value in its combined resources. This was not the invention of electricity but the obvious interconnection of opportunities already present. There seemed to be a natural synchronicity of purpose.

Then a telephone conversation with Tom Magnuson of Hillsborough, who is a patriarch in the field of Indian Trading Paths and Buffalo Roads in the Southeast led to a casual comment about the UVA map that had surfaced and our speculation about its source. “Well,” said Tom. “You do know that as General Greene’s engineer, Thaddeus Koscuiszkov was sent South in 1780 with 27 surveyors, about 100 men in total, to reconnoiter the roads and river crossings his army might encounter in any Southern Campaign.” In an instant, we had our answer. What we had detected, as a strategic map used for military purposes, was in fact a product, or one product of, that survey. It was not 1779 but 1780 as the date of the map. UVA had associated the New Jersey families of Stockton and Eddy with the map. We suspected that the reference to Stockton might have been to Richard Stockton, a Signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey, but discovered that he had a brother, Robert, who lived in Nottingham Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania and had been one of Washington’s Quartermasters. Who would covet such a map more than a Quartermaster for an army on the move?

What had begun as the discovery of a relic on Sandy Ridge Road had mutated into important research beyond the local neighborhood and that neighborhood seemed poised to realize a new hypothetical. Sometimes you do capture the snipe no matter where you start and sometimes it takes time.

“Slavery seems Repugnant”

Manumission in One South Carolina Family

Three brothers: John, Benjamin, and Lacon Ryan appeared in the backcountry of South Carolina about 1757 and with their father, Benjamin, received grants of land on Horns Creek of the Savannah River. ¹ Coming from Virginia, they were no doubt fleeing the excesses of the French and Indian War. By 1761 the eldest son, John Ryan, was already active in the Cherokee War, the treaty for which, it was established that no Indian could travel below Ninety-Six. That was also the time when South Carolina was beginning to encourage Protestant settlement in the backcountry. The first Ryan Grant in this region was dated October 25, 1764. The Regulators, frontier vigilantes, were also active and they were responsible for the establishment of courts in the backcountry essential to the creation of order. ²

Four years later, the Separate Baptist, Daniel Marshall, organized the Horns Creek Baptist Church near Ryan land. ³ The roots of the Separate Baptist originate with Rev. George Whitfield and the Great Awakening in America. Marshall had been part of the Regular Baptists at Sandy Creek Church Association in North Carolina and he moved over to Abbotts Creek on Deep River where he came under the influence of Rev. Shubal Sterns. ⁴ There was little difference to be had between the Regular and the Separate Baptist. On such issues as the Christian Ordinances, the latter recognized nine ordinances while the Regular Baptists practiced only two: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

People who had left their traditional birthplace in Europe and the British Isles and risked the perils of a new land, had grown an intolerant personality. They had been persecuted so long with such vengeance that they had little tolerance for government and law administered from far away. In their religious faith, however, they were equally guarded about the details that made them different. They seem to have agreed on but one thing, that they wanted no part of the orthodoxy of the Catholic Faith.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, the Ryan brothers had established their repute as Indian fighters and it was John who was designated as Militia Captain under General Arthur Williamson. Ryan led his Militia unit from Edgefield to Savannah. ⁵ In 1777, he was taken prisoner by Tories on the Edgefield Road near Horns Creek Church. Without a rope to hang him, the Tories asked a man plowing nearby for his plow line and he agreed saying, “I would lose a year’s plowing to see John Ryan tied.” Ryan escaped when they reached Sarah Jane Springs. Determined to find the plowman, named Booth, he kept an eye out when he returned to service. He found Booth as he ate dinner at his sister’s house and shot him dead. ⁶ Not directly threatened by British forces in the Edgefield District in this early part of the war, Ryan, under Williamson was active in two campaigns against the Cherokee before but his Militia was also engaged at the Battle of Stono.

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¹ The Story of Edgefield, (Edgefield County Historical Society, 2005), 83.
² Rainsford, Bettis C., The Early History of Horn’s Creek Baptist Church (Edgefield: Edgefield County Historical Society, 2014) 14.
³ Ibid, 32.
⁴ Ibid, 25.
⁵ John Ryan Obituary, Columbia Telescope, September 2, 1827; Transcripted note of Rev Herbert B. Satcher from Chapman’s History of Edgefield.”
⁶ Ibid, 43

Ryan was among the militia troops captured in the Fall of Charleston in 1780. This was broadly considered as the nadir of the American cause in the South. ⁷ The British command, in an effort to neutralize Whig strength in South Carolina, offered to allow Williamson and his men to take parole and the General put it to a vote which became very contentious. Some professed such action as dishonorable. The majority voted to take parole, among them was a reluctant group who accepted parole as the only opportunity they would have to escape, among them John Ryan. When the British spoke of them as British subjects and asked them to bear arms, a number, including Ryan refused and they were sent to the provost prison in Charleston. There they rioted and they were confined to wretched conditions on a prison ship from which most escaped. Ryan had returned to Edgefield by the time Cornwallis, stymied at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, swung back to restabilize South Carolina. General Williamson returned to a plantation the British had provided and took no part in the rest of the fighting. His actions, though even now not fully understood, earned him the sobriquet, “the Benedict Arnold of the South.” ⁸

Edgefield was in deplorable condition as Tory bands, like those under “Bloody Bill” Cunningham, brought wanton destruction. Plantations were burned, slave killed, and nearly half the males of the region were killed or died of disease. ⁹ The spiraling fight to devour each other was inspired by a spirit of pure personal hatred. Finally, in the fall of 1781 in a skirmish, Ryan was wounded in the shoulder, had to withdraw and was sent home, his war finished. Years of brutal fighting with Indians on the frontier, then the organized and disciplined British including imprisonment, and finally the sheer eye-gouging bitterness of neighbors facing defeat, must have had an enervating effect on the surviving Ryan sons. They came home to claim their rewards.

Along with Arthur Simpkins and John Gray, John Ryan was a commissioner taking title to three acres near his home as Horns Creek Baptist Church. ¹⁰ Lacon Ryan, who had served as his Lieutenant, took up 140 acres of grant land to establish his homeplace and 10 months later died, leaving a widow and two small children for whom John Ryan took personal responsibility. ¹¹ When one of the children, Sarah, came of age, she married Col. George Moore, and when he died, Benjamin Gallman. Of her children by Moore, Mary Elder Moore, married Benjamin Tillman. Her younger siblings became wards of Gallman and were adopted by him with John Ryan as surety.

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⁷ John Ryan Obituary, Columbia Telescope, November 2, 1827.
⁸ Runyan, Conner, “Tha Monument that Never Was,” from Journal of the American Revolution, September 2, 2015.
⁹ Chapman, John A., History of Edgefield County From Earliest Times, abstracts in Genealogy Trails History Group.
¹⁰ Ibid, 69-70
¹¹ Biography of Benjamin Ryan, 12,

Complaints had been heard against Hezekiah Walker, the minister, by Bethel Baptist Association when the membership of Horns Creek notified them that action had already concluded to settle the problem. All was well. At this point it appears that Horns Creek entered into its association with the Separate Baptists and a second Horns Creek, under the Bethel Association, was built on land of John Ryan. These biographical incidents do not define or measure the internal congregational stress plaguing Horns Creek. The country was, however, progressing in its organization by way of such incidents as the visit at Piney Woods of George Washington, their new President, on his Southern Tour. The invention of the cotton gin anticipated the industrial revolution. Ominous was the murder of Joseph Cotton by his wife, Becky, wielding an axe, and prescient of the profusion of murder that was to characterize the Edgefield area.

John Ryan acquired two 1000-acre plantations. His wife, Margaret, was childless and in 1799 a son was born to his slave, Sophie. He was named Gilderoy [Golden Boy,] and all subsequent records indicate that John Ryan was the father. The overtones of the birth were reminiscent of the Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah and her handmaid, Hagar, who bore Ishmael. In John Ryan, they are also faithful to the actions of Abraham as Patriarch. ¹² Brother Benjamin Ryan died November 11, 1813 having written a will that in imprecise phraseology left his considerable estate (valued at $13,500) ¹³ to his widow, Milly Odom, and the two children, Sarah and Benjamin, of his late brother, Lacon. ¹⁴ At the same time, John Ryan executed a Deed of Manumission for Gilderoy who was 14. In Benjamin’s will they had been set free as long as they did not become unfaithful or sassy to his beloved wife. ¹⁵ He also attempted to comply with the South Carolina law on manumission then in force. In 1815, 1820 and 1824, John Ryan petitioned the South Carolina Legislature to free his late brother, Benjamin’s slaves. John Ryan’s actions in regard to the Horns Creek’s promotion of manumission, seem to have been in close harmony. ¹⁶

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¹² Manuscript document, Charles Rodenbough Collection, “Gilderoy, Latin: Golden King,”1-5.
¹³ “Looking for Odom and Williams of Edgefield and Aiken SC,” Abraham Odum/Odom and Samuel Marsh Blog, blogspot.com
¹⁴ Biography of Benjamin Ryan, Will of Benjamin Ryan, September 20, 1808, 19-20.
¹⁵ Edgefield County, Estate Box 25, package 905; Rainsford, Early Horns Creek, 58-59..
¹⁶ Burton, Orville Burton, In My Fathers House Are Many Mansions (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 26; Rainsford, Early Horns ,59-60.

At Horns Creek Baptist Church at this moment were Rev Samuel Marsh and Mason Locke Weems, better known in history as Parson Weems, who had already published into a fifth edition, his “Life of George Washington.” In ordinance, the Horn Creek Baptist Church was considered to be professing Separate Baptists who were using their influence to manumit slaves.

Milly Odom took Reverend Samuel Marsh as her second husband. She was considered to be “a woman of high spirit.” ¹⁷ Probably, through the cautious oversight of her brother-in-law, John Ryan, Milly insisted on a precise prenuptial agreement which, in effect, shielded all her late husband’s assets from Marsh. ¹⁸ Their marriage took place February 4, 1815. Sixteen days later, John Ryan paid for a copy of Benjamin Ryan’s will, a portentous act of caution. By August, he had hired Edmund Bacon to defend the property of the children of Benjamin Ryan. By May of the next year, he had filed a Bill for Relief, Discovery, Injunction, and Participation against Samuel Marsh and Milly.

On the 29^th of May, Milly Odom Ryan Marsh was murdered in her own house, shot through a window by a shot gun, one source says while peeling potatoes, another that she was eating supper. ¹⁹ As she lay on the floor, later testimony said that Marsh insisted that 2 keys be given to him from her pocket so he could get some medicine from her desk. He then removed papers including the prenuptial agreement, and $500 in cash, and destroyed the agreement. ²⁰ There were claims that the murderer had been dissatisfied slaves on testimony that Milly intended to send some of her slaves to Kentucky. The transcription of the ensuing trial, hint further at Marsh as the murdered but no charges were ever filed. Squabbles followed and various suits for interests in the estate. There was a charge that Marsh had cut down timber including a cherry tree on the edge of the Ryan cemetery on Benjamin’s land (shades of Parson Weem’s Cherry tree story applied to Washington). ²¹ The court awarded John Ryan all of his brother’s personal estate and the proceeds of the sale of the rest was divided between March and the two children of Lacon Ryan. ²²

Ominous was the murder, a few years later, of Joseph Cotton by his wife, Becky, wielding an axe. Prescient was the profusion of murder, that was to characterize the Edgefield area. This was a few years after the murder of Milly Odum which the Edgefield community seemed to ignore. ²³

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¹⁷ “Looking for Odom and Williams “; Rainsford, Early Horns Creek, 57.
¹⁸ Ibid; Rodenbough, Charles D., “John Ryan’s Book,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly, June 1983, Vol 51, Nr. 2, 114.
¹⁹ Descendants of Benjamin Ryan, 1718-1793, manuscript document, Family History Library, Family Search. International, 1, 4; .”The Fiery and Confusing Odum Family, Looking for Odum, blindspot.com.,0
²⁰ Rainsford, Early Horns Creek, 58.
²¹ John Ryan vs Samuel Marsh, May 18, 1816, Edgefield County; Where the Cherry Tree Grew: An Interview with Phillip Levy, Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2016.
²² Manuscript, Charles Rodenbough Collection, “Ryan-Marsh Trial.”
²³ Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane, Sex and Race in the Early South,Wallowing in a swamp of Sin, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) footnote 35, p. 35.

Parson Mason Locke Weems preached a sermon at Horns Creek titled, “The Devil in Petticoats,” using the Becky Cotton incident of the murder of her husband as a precipitous act for which her husband was acquitted. In his sermon he raged, “will the Lord have mercy upon Old Edgefield! For sure it must be pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils.” ²⁴ Parson Weems is a ubiquitous character in this story and in the characterization of Edgefield. Ultimately, it is said that “once beset by scandal and corruption, [Edgefield] transformed itself into a fortress against destructive elements, a region redeemed rather than condemned.” ²⁵ Parson’s Weems, was the preacher, book seller, and fiddler, whose pamphlet, “stirred the passion of commonfolk.” “His tracts were whips with which he lashed the brutal or self-indulgent classes of the South.” ²⁶ Why did he pass over the murder of Milly Odom and preach his searing sin and redemption through the murder of Becky Cotton? Did he shy away from a scandal directly implicating his friend Rev. Samuel Marsh? Was it, in the cutting down of the cherry tree at the cemetery, that Weems found the seed for George Washington’s confession of the similar act? Parson Weems has almost a Shakespearian presence in this story of the Ryan family.

By 1820, the rise of Nullification and the Denmark Vesey Revolt in Charleston had put a pause on manumission just as John Ryan was attempting to free Sophia, mother of Gilderoy. A young graduate of the University of North Carolina, Basil Manley, came to Horns Creek Baptist. He had composed a theme while at the university in which he said:

“Slavery seems to be repugnant to the spirit of our republican institutions. While the framers of our constitution recognized most distinctly the principle that all men are naturally free and equal; with the very hand that subscribed it, and fought to maintain it, they held the chain that bound a portion of their fellow men to perpetual servitude.” ²⁷

There is no proof that John Ryan ever saw these words of thesis written by Manly. He probably had occasion to hear Manly preach at Horns Creek. He certainly lived in the midst of the concern for manumission represented by the Separate Baptists. More important, his concerted efforts to free the slaves of his brother, Benjamin; his deep concern for Gilderoy; his detailed exertions to preserve the family units within his slave community; and his determination, within the scope of the shifting South Carolina laws concerning manumission, to comply with law yet accomplish the release of slaves, demonstrate a man who is not comfortable with the practice of slavery. Still, at his death he left 103 enslaved people to be sold, singly and in family units, to his neighbors. ²⁸ Today our task should be to continue to examine this conundrum of his life, without making judgements using the humanity we have come to cherish in our age. The dichotomy speaks to us, but it is not an objective basis of debate or action.

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²⁴ Burton, In My Father’s House,136-137; The Story of Edgefield,15, 85
²⁵ Clinton Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane, 33,
²⁶ Ibid, 27.
²⁷ Burton, In My Father’s House, 26.
²⁸ Biography of Benjamin Ryan, Will of John Ryan, March 13, 1827, 20-21; Transcription of Will of John Ryan sale by Rev. Herbert Boyce Satcher; Abstract of John Ryan Will, Edgefield County Will Book C, October 17, 1827..

The records of Horns Creek were taken by persons unknown and congregants attempted to re-create that history and start a new role of membership. None of the Ryan’s are found on those rolls except 22 plantation slaves. In 1824, Ryan deeded two hundred acres to Gilderoy completely surrounded by his own land, as a protection against South Carolina’s Manumission laws. ²⁹ John Ryan deeded the property of the second Horns Creek Church to the Methodist denomination. Basil Manley left Horns Creek Baptist and later was President of the University of Alabama. ³⁰ On October 1, 1827, Captain John Ryan died on his Edgefield plantation.

In a single family biography of the Ryans of Edgefield County, South Carolina, we can exhibit the deep complexities they confronted in regard to slavery. With all these details, we still cannot be certain where their commitment to humanity lay, judged in their time or in our own. If John Ryan had access to Basil Manly’s remarks, how would the arrow of truth struck him? The society around him continued to move toward a truly unforgiving character. The grandson of Mary Elder Moore, John Ryan’s niece, whose interests he protected, was Benjamin Ryan Tillman, “Pitchford Ben” Tillman, Governor of South Carolina and leader of the Red Shirts. In 1876, when Reconstruction. as Abraham Lincoln had envisioned it, ended, and segregation became entrenched in the South. ³¹ History, if it serves us, is in understanding the details and reporting reality truthfully and as completely and sensitively as possible, not in placing the imprimatur of our own judgement on the past.

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²⁹ Ibid, 61-62.
³⁰ “A Biographical Sketch of Basil Manly, Sr.,” Founders Ministries.
³¹ Benjamin Ryan Tillman Papers, 1769-1950, Clemson University

GLATTFELTER (Clodfelter)

Stonecutters & Cabinetmakers
of Davidson County, NC

Felix Glattfelder was born February 2, 1727 in Glattsfelden, Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, a name that means Happy Field or Pleasant Field. He came to America in 1743 in an extended family group. His father, Peter (Johann Peter) Glattfelder and mother, Salomea Am Berg (AMBERG); his uncle, Casper and wife, Lisabeth Lauffer; Peter’s children: Elizabeth, Barbara Felix, Hans Rudolph, Magdalena, and Casper; and Uncle Casper’s children: Anna Margareth, Anna, Soloman, Johannes, and Felix. On April 21 1742 on the Rhine River, soon after they had departed from Glattsfelden, Peter was drowned in the river. The entire family returned with his body to Switzerland. The following year, after the birth of another child to Casper and Lisabeth, the remaining adults took stock of their vulnerability and began again their immigration with Casper as the only senior male. According to the local church in Glattsfelden, their destination was Carolina. They may have been prepared for the hardship of the Rhine trip made harrowing by pirates, but tragedy struck them again when Casper’s wife and new baby died enroute on the second attempt to depart.

They arrived in Philadelphia August 30, 1743 aboard the Francis and Elizabeth from Rotterdam by Cowes. Casper and his family remained in Pennsylvania in York County as did Peter’s widow, Salomea Amberg Glattfelder and some of her children. Two of her sons, however, were eventually drawn to the Carolinas. Felix on October 25, 1750 married Maria Sarah Meier in Christ Lutheran Church in York, daughter of John George and Sybilla Meier all of whom had arrived in Philadelphia November 25, 1740 on the Loyal Judith from Rotterdam last from Deal. ¹ They settled in Springfield Township, York County, PA

Sometime after the baptism of their son, Johann Peter, in 1763, Felix and Maria Sarah Meiers Glattfelder left York and arrived in Rowan County (later Davidson County), North Carolina. They settled on Brushy Fork of Abbott’s Creek. On April 21, 1767, Felix’ younger brother, Hans Rudolph married Veronica Hitsberger in the First Reformed Church in Lancaster, PA. By 1783 Hans Rudolph and family were paying taxes in the Conieville area of the Shenandoah Valley in VA. By November 1787 they had bought their first land in Davidson County on Hanby’s Creek.

In the period of transition from PA to NC, these branches of the Glattfelder family seem to have agreed to Anglicize the name to Clodfelter, although former spellings do appear randomly in NC.

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¹ At least three Meyers/Meier families were on the same ship with the Glattfelders, The Meiers name appears profusely in Davidson County, NC

Felix Clodfelter tombstone (d. 1814) in Bethany Reformed and Lutheren churchyard in German

By the time Felix died on January 18, 1814 ², he had at least five slaves and enough acreage to leave farms to sons Jacob, Peter, John. Although it was the Quakers, in the same area including Abbott’s Creek, who rejected slavery, the Germans seem to have had no compunction about owning a few slaves as laborers but never in great quantity. Some may have been trained in the stonecutting trade.

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² Felix and Maria Sarah Meier Clodfelter are buried at Bethany Reformed Church Cemetery near Midway, Davidson County. His death is recorded in the Moravian Archives, Vol 7, excerpts from the Friedburg Diary January 10, 1814 and notes his funeral was preached in the Zion Church (NC) to a large gathering.

Soapstone is found in a variety of shades of gray or dark green in Davidson County. It is made up of chlorite, dolomite, magnesite, and talc and the presence of talc endows soapstone with its smooth feel. It is found to be used early in fireplaces, sinks and even cookware because it could be cut easily. It was a proclivity for cabinetmakers and wood cutters in Davidson to use soapstone in creating decorative tombstones. Authorities attribute to Jacob Clodfelter, son of Felix, the credit as the first to create the pierced tombstones. Jacob owned a large set of cabinet making tools. ³ The oldest such cut stones are those for Felix and Sarah Meier Clodfelter dating to 1814 and 1813 respectively and are found in Bethany UCC and attributed to Jacob. The assumption has been made that Jacob produced these stones for his parents and probably more in the same area because his son Joseph, confirmed stonecutter, would have been only a teenager at the time of their deaths.

Jacob’s son, Joseph took over his father’s profession as cabinetmaker and tombstone maker and signed at least one of his stones. ⁴ He was recognized as one of the most creative and accomplished German stonecutters in Davidson. His work is found in Bethany UCC, Pilgrim Reformed Church and Abbott’s Creek Primitive Baptist Church. ⁵

Although soapstone can be carved, it is no easy feat and researchers are still finding evidence about the origin of this particular set of craftsmen in Davidson. It would be easily assumed that the trade had come out of the Deutsch migration brought by the Lutherans who unlike the “plain” Quakers, were accustomed to more decorative art in worship and burial practices. The best assumption is that it came, at the time, out of what has been identified as the Swisegood School of Cabinetmakers ⁶ in Davidson, of which the Clodfelters were considered a part. There were perhaps three skilled stonecutters and as many as 12 less-skilled in Davidson. Joseph Clodfelter’s skill was in stonecutting not in lettering and it is thought some of his work was sold in blank and lettered by another person.

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³ His tools included a bow saw, cross-cut saw, tenon saw, hand saw and mill saw planes, augers, a turning lathe, turning chisles, drawing knives, a set of tongue and grooving planes, a “gauging” rod, iron wedges, one large “compass,” a “compass saw,” and ten thousand feet of plank and scantling for use in building construction. These were all the tools necessary to producing the soapstone tombstones.
⁴ Signed “Maid By Hand of Joseph Clodfelter” on back of headstone of Josiah Spurgin (d. 1802). Signature statement is more characteristic of cabinetmakers, scrawled on back of piece of furniture, than stonecutters.
⁵ Shannon Farlow, “Stone Foundation,” Our State Magazine, May 2006.
⁶ Named for John Swisegood the area’s foremost cabinet maker.David Sowers was also a member of the Swisegood School.

**Swisegood School corner cupboard shows similar decorations found in tombstones in Davidson County.**

Joseph, like his father, was a farmer and cabinetmaker and one of his products was coffins. When his father died in 1837 he inherited 200 acres and a slave named Joseph. In turn, when he died, he left an equally complete set of cabinetmaking tools. ⁷ Such tools, and those listed for his father, were necessary in order to produce pierced tombstones: “iron wedges to split large blocks of stone in the quarry, saws to square it into panels, augers to bore holes to start the piercing, a “compass saw” to cut the curved fylfots, and molding planes to create the relief molded decoration.” ⁸

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⁷ All putpose construction tools, wedges, joiners, dazes, augers, files, drawing knives, saws, chisels, planes, and one “lerrtting, [lettering] Box.”
⁸ M. Ruth Little, Sticks & Stones, Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers, (Chapel Hill:UNC Press, 1998), 153-156.

Following Joseph Clodfelter in Davidson was David Sowers, who did not at first pierce his stones but eventually came to it under the influence of Joseph. He too did not sign his stones but we know by a receipt that he did the stone in Pilgrim Reformed Cemetery for Peter Lopp (d. 1827). Peter (Peter Johann) Lopp married Anna Maria Frank. Their son, Jacob Lopp married Magtalina Yountz and they had Susanna and Philip Lopp. Susanna married Jesse Green. Philip married Eliza Jane Hiatt and they adopted her niece, Jenette Jane Clodfelter when Jenette’s mother, Mary Ann Elizabeth Hiatt, wife of Daniel Clodfelter died early. Eliza Jane Hiatt and Mary Ann Elizabeth Hiatt were sisters. Daniel was a grandson of Jacob Clodfelter.

In the 1960’s, Claude Green gave each of his nephews and in-law nephews (the Green penchant for males) an individual tool he said had been given to him, from his tool box, by his father, Robert Smith Green. Robert’s father was Jesse Green above. I was given a chisel missing the wooden handle. I would speculate that this might have originally come from either Jacob or Joseph Clodfelter’s tool box.

I have seen examples of the Swisegood School of Cabinetmakers at MESDA and at “Deep Springs” in Rockingham County.

Charles D. Rodenbough 5/2015

Bibliography:

Farlow, Shannon, “Stone Foundation” Our State Magazine, May 2006.

Little, M. Ruth, Sticks & Stones, Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998).

Neese, Rev. James Everette, The Dutch Settlement on Abbotts Creek, A History of Pilgrim Reformed United Church of Christ(Winston Salem, Hunter publishing Company, 1979

Rupp, I. Daniel, A Collection of Upwards of Thirty Thousand Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French and Other Immigrants in Pennsylvania From 1727 to 1776 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co, 1975 reprint).

**L to R. Margaret Clodfelter (d. 1857) and Daniel Wagoner (d. 1827-Bethany Lutheran Reformed Cemetery**

**Joseph Clodfelter signature on reverse of David Sauers**

“COVINGTON”

The William Covington family located in Stokes County from Rockingham about 1800 after William married Jane Davis of Red Shoals in 1804. From the beginning, it was a household of three because they were accompanied by Covington’s mother, Nancy, born in 1756. It is logical to assume that William and Jane built the home, perhaps even by the time of the birth of their first child, Bethania in 1805.

Jane Davis Covington (1781-1871) was the daughter of James Davis, Sr. (1753-1844) and Margaret Dunlap, (1761-1838). Davis had acquired a land grant in Stokes County on the north side of Dan River in 1789 after he had fought in the Revolutionary War. His father is reported to have come to Stokes County from Dingwall, Scotland through Augusta County, Virginia. Since William was dead by 1792, it appears the original William Davis house was built between James’ Land Grant (1789) and William’s death in 1792. In 1804, the elder James Davis was taxed for 3,050 acres and six slaves, on the Dan. That would indicate that in the last decade of the 18^th century he had completed his house, operated a grist mill, lumber mill, and ran an ordinary or inn at his homestead and most of his twelve children had been born.

In 1817, William Davis’ grandson, James Davis, the younger, married Elizabeth McAnally the fatherless daughter of the late Jesse McAnally and Elizabeth Morgan and they are said to have built across the Dan River within sight of her parent’s home. There is a map of Rose Bank the James Davis, Sr., plantation that appears to have been made about 1870 to divide his property. It details a house on the north of the river, two stories with a double porch across the front and rear extender rooms. The building of the James Davis House, which became known as “Red Shoals,” had apparent bearing on the building of the Covington House nearer what was called the Meadows District to the west. The Red Shoals house burned about 1914 and was replaced with the present farm house, called today the Pitzer house. The drawing has a striking resemblance to the Covington House minus the front porches.

If the Covington house was built about 1805 when William married Jane Davis, it was at that time two rooms upstairs and two down without a hall and two-over smaller back rooms accessed by a narrow stair and small hall. Across the full 36-foot length of the front was an upstairs and downstairs porch to a height of 9 feet to the eve. There were chimneys on each end of the house and a boxed-in main stairwell in the west front room. A boxed stair went to the full attic over the front rooms from the west bedroom. The exterior was painted weather board with a wood shingle roof. The interior walls were covered in wide planks down to the chair rail and bottom wainscot. Originally the ceiling was exposed, trimmed beams. The floors were four-inch grooved planking. The interior was without further decoration except for very plain fireplace mantels. Doors were hung with large strap hinges and English-made box door locks. Windows were 4 over 4 at the ends including the attic. The Federal style with ample verandas had the country look of an Inn, inviting to the traveler and restful in the summer.

William Covington died in 1837 and he and his son John Davis Covington were the first to be buried on the knoll beyond the house. Within two years his eldest son, James Madison Covington, married Sally Golden Hill, daughter of Joel Hill and Mildred Golden of Germanton. The use of the title Colonel Covington has in recent years been attributed to this son but a letter in 1835 appears to speak of William as Colonel. James Madison Covington and his wife began a family and his three younger sisters were still at home as were James’ grandmother, Nancy and Mother Jane. It was time for a larger house so James added another 26 by 20 room to the east extending the front elevation to 62 feet which is as the house appears today. He also covered the chimneys with ashlar veneer which was tan stucco with scored, white lines making it look like blocks. The interior was in a later style with wide baseboards and plaster walls, double paneled doors and six over six paned windows. On the exterior, the double porch was extended across the full length of the front. The interior was in a later style with wide baseboards and plaster walls, double paneled doors and six over six paned windows. There is a clear definition of the beginning of this edition and no effort to balance the windows or doors on the older portion, even choosing a single-step chimney instead of the double step as on the west.

James Madison or “Matt” as he was better known, remained master of the house through the Civil War and the trials of Reconstruction. After his mother’s death in 1871, and the settlement of his parent’s interests, he gained full title to the house. He died in 1888 and the ownership of the house from there seems to have almost been communal as far as his children and grandchildren were concerned. In the first part of the 20^th century it was called, the Blackburn house, as his granddaughter Sarah M. Covington married Joel I. Blackburn. In 1932, widow Blackburn gave the Attorney Reeves Brown a Deed of Trust for $4500 and he took title at her death. In 1936, he sold the farm to Rufus C and Laura Mounce for $4300 and in 1946 it was purchased by Jones Oakley. In the summer of 1947, Grace Taylor, daughter of the late Spotswood B. and Nellie Moon Taylor of Danbury, married Stanley Leigh Rodenbough, a widower living in Winston Salem. They scoured Stokes and Rockingham Counties for a home to restore to accommodate Grace’s collection of antiques and settled on what they would call Covington. Overgrown and practically open to the elements, Grace and Stan began mostly cosmetic work to bring the house back to the condition it had enjoyed before the Civil War. Gene Pepper in the Danbury Reporter, editorialized that they would “improve and modernize it for their home.” But he mused, “the spirit of old times still haunts the long porches and the white columns of the restful verandas of Covington House.” Grace then was elected the first women legislator from Stokes County and the lone female member of that body. As a novelty in North Carolina politics, newspapers enjoyed writing about this woman politician who had restored an Antebellum home.

Another female trailblazer of the 50’s appeared and made the friendship of the Rodenboughs. She was Miss Caroline Covington, granddaughter of “Matt” Covington. She could remember her childhood at the old house. According to an article in the Saturday Evening Post titled, “Miss Covington Tames the Young,” she operated a classic young person’s dance and finishing studio in ritzy Westchester County, New York. She had been training about a thousand teenagers of the wealthy each year for over forty years, in ballroom dancing and etiquette. It was this new friendship that brought a considerable donation to the completion of the Stokes-Reynolds Hospital in Danbury dedicated to the Memory of Colonel James Madison Covington.”

I remember well that first year, 1947 when my brother, Leigh, and I spent the summer living in the house. We used an outhouse, and had an ice box on the back porch. At night as we lay in bed, we heard the old boards creaking making creaking sounds like other people walking around in the house. One night Leigh sat with a sword and I sat with a Japanese rifle he had brought back from Japan.

Grace and Stan added a room across the back of the old portion of the house with an upstairs porch from which they could overlook the walled garden, greenhouse and orchard that were Stan’s special interest. When Grace became ill, they added a one-story room behind the extended east end so that she could have a downstairs bedroom. When Grace died in 1967, Stan sold Covington to an executive with Piedmont Airlines and the house has been sold several times since. With each new owner, the work that the Rodenbough’s did on Covington was improved upon and augmented. The largest improvement was a stand-alone masonry garage to the west.

CIVIL WAR – ALPHA and OMEGA in APRIL 1865

Considering recent debate over Confederate statues throughout the South, it might be well for every community in the nation to at least examine some of the historical realities that were present, in their region, during that devastating conflict. What were the local, noteworthy experiences, the ways the individuals saw the conflict through their prism. Rockingham County, for example, saw relatively no actual fighting. Troops passed through. Armies advanced and retreated, but not a single symbol of an exploding bomb on a county map, can be found to indicate combat. So, if our people could not ride out in a buggy, as Washington diplomats and their wives did to observe the fighting at First Bull Run then come running pell-mell for their lives when the Confederates prevailed before their eyes, in what terms did we find our war to begin?

Rockingham County was nearly divided evenly on the prospect of Secession and the agricultural economy was dependent on the single most alienating issue ever implanted within a republic – slavery. In the Spring of 1861 the election had been won by a new party and Abraham Lincoln promised to be a different kind of president. Those were the newest predicates to be thrown on a bonfire of issues. As hard as people may have tried to ignore their circumstances by hiding or turning away from the heated moment, at some point an opinion crept out of them and then another that formed a position, and a position took a side. They suspected that neutrality was only the cover of a coward. The most indifferent white person could not avoid the inexorable suction of the fire. The most agonizing contradiction, however, was that only those who were forced by color and circumstance to be present as the cause of this conflagration, the slaves, were sentenced to a position as observers and “could not utter a mumbling word.”

Alpha

On April 9, 1861, the Fourth Circuit of the North Carolina Superior Court was in Spring Session in Danbury. ¹ Tuesday, the day before, Judge George Howard had agreed to allow a debate to take place in lieu of the court session and prominent attorneys representing the Unionist and Secessionist factions were to argue the issue of Secession. ² These Quarter Session courts were the backbone of the state’s judicial system and their structure persuaded most citizens to concentrate their public business on those designated dates of session. In the spring of 1861 the impending outbreak of conflict, north and south, so focused on the local public concerns, that a debate might help to lower pressure and allow some degree of negotiation but people instinctively knew there was a line which could not be crossed – war seemed that inevitable. The debate filled the courtroom and spilled into the yard of the Courthouse. Feelings ran high with the crowd evenly divided. The debaters were somber but the crowd was rowdy and bickering. There were no winners but the positions had been well defended.

At the end of the week, Judge Howard and the Rockingham County lawyer, Thomas Settle, road leisurely out of Danbury toward Settle’s Dan River Plantation where the judge would be his guest for the next week as the District Circuit Court would be in session in Wentworth. As the buggy rose toward some high ground northwest of Madison, they observed a Secessionist flag flying above the town which they had been led to understand was a Union town. Recognizing that something important was happening, they saw two locals approaching and they hailed them with questions about the intentions of the flag. They were advised that a telegraph had arrived, informing a crowd already gathered in the town that Fort Sumter had been fired upon and Lincoln had just announced a call up of 70,000 troops from North Carolina to defend the Union. The crowd had been unified in their demand for war.

Settle immediately understood that the die was cast. No matter what anyone thought before, Lincoln’s action had cast the “die” of inevitability and nothing, no debate would turn the resolve of the people. Settle whipped the horses toward the town where he found former Governor, David Settle Reid, haranguing the crowd of several hundred from the porch of a local hotel.

Settle rushed to the platform. “I have been all wrong,” he said several times. Each time his voice rose higher. Accompanied with cheers of enthusiasm, he was not the darling of all present but he insisted that at this moment, the Union had been sundered. The rush of history had overrun the debate. Everyone had to be Patriotic.

J. M. Leach, Randolph Co. Judge Thomas Settle and Alfred M. Scales-Rockingham

When court was held in Wentworth that next week, the groundswell of nationalism swept up the least concerned into its torrent. Any dissident opinion, closed the door or stepped into the shadows. There was no Union around which to rally and a new name subsumed the Southern Cause-Confederacy.

On the 20^th it seemed that all the people of Rockingham County and their surrounding counties needed to be in Wentworth. The courthouse was filled and people perched on every window sill and straddled the limbs of most trees on the square. No one seemed to be in charge or appeared to have any plan concerning what would transpire. A jumble of musicians played rasping military music. Ultimately, Wheeler Hancock, a veteran of the Mexican War, stepped forward and spoke for quiet. With somber authority, Wheeler called forward Thomas Settle and Alfred M. Scales, two of the Danbury debaters. Placing one to his right and one to his left, he called for all the volunteers to form up behind one of these men. The courthouse square became a milling mass for some time before settling into two squads of young men surrounded by parents and spectators. ³

Those behind Settle would be designated the Rockingham Rangers and those behind Scales would be the Rockingham Guards but that day they would march out of Wentworth as Company H and I of the newly formed 13^th North Carolina Regiment of the Army of the Confederate States of America, and so they were mustered into the army on June 1, 1861 at Garysburg in Northampton County.

The war itself touched Rockingham County mostly through the individual. The immediate news came by telegraph and people kept up with the events on about a two-day offset. It was routine to publicly read such news to crowds in the towns. Slaves were kept ignorant of the conditions for fear of uprisings or eagerness to run away to the nearest Yankee lines. The slaves typically lingered at the rear of the crowds listening to everything then, returning to their plantations, the word spread out from place to place.

Some Rockingham County soldiers maintained thorough records of their experiences as they exchanged their letters with family. The last two issues of the Rockingham County Journal of History and Genealogy contained two groups of such letters written by Lt. W. M. Nunnally from the Lawsonville Community. ⁴ Lt. Nunnally was killed instantly by a mini ball on July 1, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

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¹. The state was divided into Judicial Districts and Superior Court Judges were assigned in a similar way. On a quarterly basis, weekly sessions were held in each county court in the district. Judges, lawyers and court staff were permitted in this way to “ride a circuit”, from one county to the next in their district.
². Thomas Settle of Rockingham and J.M. Leach of Randolph County were selected to represent the Unionists. Alfred Moore Scales of Rockingham and Robert McLean of Guilford spoke for the Secessionists.
³. There are competing local traditions about this event. Some believe that this happened at a local muster ground which has some validity when the logistics of getting a large crowd around the courthouse at Wentworth is considered.
⁴. He joined the “Dixie Boys,” a company founded May 22, 1861 from eastern Rockingham and Caswell Counties. Nunnaly was appointed 3rd Lt. of Company K of the 13th North Carolina Regiment. In the letters he appears as a typical son of Rockingham, very sincere, a man of strong faith, loyal to his commanders and durable in the face of debilitating conditions.

Omega

One of the last battles of the war in Virginia occurred on April 8, 1865 at Henry County Courthouse. ⁵ Colonel William J. Palmer, a 29 year old brigade commander under Union General William Stoneman, swept into Henry County. He detached his 10^th Michigan Cavalry to attack about 250 Confederates under Colonel James T. Wheeler, encamped north of the county seat.

Both sides claimed victory but Palmer retained the field as Wheeler moved southeast toward the Dan River. The two brigades were virtual shadows of each with the open question of who was shadowing whom. On the 9^th Stoneman reassembled his mostly Tennessee army, including Palmer’s brigade, at Danbury in Stokes County. They would not know for many hours that General Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox that same day.

Stoneman knew that Sherman was driving Johnston’s main force from Raleigh toward the railroad junction at Greensboro. He also had some news that President Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, government, and treasury were about to leave Danville for Greensboro on the recently completed final link of the Piedmont Railroad. ⁶ Having abandoned the Capital of the Confederacy, the government was in flight. Greensboro, which in 1861 was a small railroad town of 2,000 people, had now swelled to over 200,000, retreating troops, refugees, deserters, military baggage, ordinance, and everything that was left of the regional quartermaster. With the largest Confederate field army congregating in Greensboro, the war was on the edge of deteriorating into a familiar exercise in “fox and hounds.”

It was the intent of General Stoneman to continue to clear from the west, relentlessly deterring any possibility of linking Lee and General Johnston. Defeat existed in everything but name. By continuing to destroy anything that could possibly contribute to the continuation of the war, Stoneman sustained that pressure but he was aware that to continue to bear down harshly on the local populace would be counter-productive in the end.

As Stoneman’s raid had progressed, plantation slaves, rejoicing in this tangible confirmation of their new liberation, attached themselves to the Union columns by the thousands. By the time Stoneman rendezvoused his Brigades at Danbury, the fields around the tiny town were filled with more slaves than blue coats. As a raiding force, his army had become bogged down and that day he made immediate plans to send several thousand of these slaves to relocation in east Tennessee to get them out of the way. In the meantime, General Palmer would be his most flexible cavalry force available as the fast-moving events in North Carolina were spinning out of order. ⁷

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⁵. Martinsville, VA.
⁶. In May 1864, the 48-mile link between Richmond and Greensboro, known as the Danville connection, was completed. It joined the Richmond and Danville Railroad with the North Carolina Railroad at Greensboro. Bradley R. Foley and Adrian L. Whicker, The Civil War Ends Greensboro, , April, 1865, 7-8.
⁷. Robert W. Back, Cavalry Raids of the Civil War, 187-88.

Among his Brigade commanders, William J. Palmer was a man of exceptional character. Between April 9 and 12, it was his influence that had the greatest bearing on the experiences of the people in Rockingham County as this last exercise of “chase” played out. While many portions of Stoneman’s Army had been known as destroyers in the same terms as applied to General Sherman, Palmer was an exception. He was a Quaker and by his upbringing had come to abhor violence and his passion was said to be “to see the slave set free.”

As Stoneman left Danbury on the 10^th moving South to destroy Confederate supplies at Salem and the Confederate Prison at Salisbury, Palmer and his 15^th Pennsylvania Cavalry would be his multiple flying force. On that day we have a rare glimpse into the mindset of this soldier as seen through the eyes of a young woman, Luretta C. Davis, at her family’s home at Red Bank on the Dan River just southeast of Danbury. “I reckond Sam told you all about Stoneman’s raid through Stokes. If you could have seen the place the day after the Yankees left you hardly would have known it. General Palmer and his staff stayed in the house they acted very gentlemanly treated us with respect they did not plunder the house, I believe we are getting along now as well as we were before the negro’es [sic] were free.” ⁸

Palmer continued to Germanton then Salem with Stoneman to burn clothing factories and railroad bridges. From there his command was divided and directed in different ways as the more mobile force. Some of Palmer’s command crossed on a higher route along the Dan River aware of the “fox” fleeing Danville. Had Stoneman better information concerning the exact timing of the departure of Davis’ Cabinet from Danville, he could have easily expressed Palmer’s cavalry across Rockingham County in a direct line to intercept the train in the vicinity of Reidsville. As it was, Palmer and Stoneman did not know until they were at Salem, that the Confederates had departed Danville.

Palmer’s force was divided four ways at Salem and given specific targets. One group under Major A. B. Garner was dispatched to burn the Reedy Fork Bridge to prevent Davis’ escape to Greensboro. At approximately noon on the 11^th they arrived only to find that Davis’ train had crossed safely within the hour. Garner’s man began the destruction of the bridge expecting an attack at any moment. They found the bridge to be newly constructed and it took two hours with axes and saws to sever the main beam and get the bridge prepared for burning.. ⁹

Another part of Palmer’s command, this one under Lt. Col. Charles M. Betts was similarly dispatched toward Greensboro. At sunup on the 12^th, they surprised a portion of the 3^rd SC Cavalry at breakfast by the North Carolina Railroad bridge over Buffalo Creek. After a brief skirmish they captured about 50 men under the command of Lt. Col. Johnson and proceeded to eat their breakfast. ¹⁰ Then they burned the bridge. This was part of isolating Greensboro although access to the town was still porous. By the next day, Davis was meeting with his cabinet in a boxcar at the Greensboro Junction.

Other parts of Palmer’s Brigade advanced toward Salisbury where they destroyed the prison and to High Point, where they found more military stores and railroad stock. They were spread out across Rockingham neutralizing any military capability for the Confederates.

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⁸. Letter sent from Red Shoals, North Carolina, April 20, 1866 to Polly Fulton, original owned by Elizabeth Drouel of CO.
⁹. Ina Woestmeyer Van Noppen, “Stoneman’s Last Raid, 1964, 44-45.
¹⁰. Ibid, 45; Bradley R. Foley and Adrian L. Whicker, “The Civil War Ends – Greensboro, April 1865, 2008, 14-15.

There are many references in the postwar period of the coming of the Yankees to Rockingham County Plantations. A good example was in the book published by Letty Carter (Mrs. William Nelson Mebane) in Child Life on the Old Plantation.

“Whilst in this state of mortal terror and expectancy, our cousin who was watching in another room, came across the hall screaming and exclaiming: “Yankees have come! The Yankees have come!” Of course, this struck instant terror to every heart, and in the intense excitement of that moment, we were at a loss as to what was best to do, but our mother, with as much calmness as she could possibly command under the circumstances, went to the front door, followed by the other members of the family, there as we thought, to meet Stoneman with his host of soldiers, but, fortunately for us, it was only some of our gentlemen friends from the neighborhood who had ridden by the house to enquire after our safety in the trying night and to tell us the latest news, which was that the raiders were coming straight on and would probably be at our house before midnight, so we continued that awful watch during the entire night and far into the day following, with no rest from this intense anxiety and dread until the news came from some friends in passing that the army had turned off from the road leading to our house and had gone directly to Greensboro, so we escaped one of the worst horrors of the war, a visit from the raiders. We did not see Federal soldiers until just after the surrender at Appomattox. A few days after this sad event, a troop of horsemen wearing the blue uniform rode up, taking possession of the plantation for a short time, walking around, ordering the servants to have dinner for them, going around gathering eggs from the hens’ nests, strawberries from the garden, and such things as that, but really doing no great harm except trying to make the negroes dissatisfied by talking to them, telling them they were no longer obliged to work, they were as free as anybody, etc.” ¹¹

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¹¹. The sequence of Stoneman’s appearance and the surrender at Appomattox of General Lee shows how in recollection exact events seem to mingle in our minds. Still there is in this story a general confirmation that Stoneman was first thought to be coming right across Rockingham County but had veered to Greensboro. Also, the treatment of the plantation at Eagle Falls and the encouragement for the slaves corresponds with the attitude attributed to General Palmer and the men of the 15^th Pennsylvania Cavalry.

Terrell Garren, a Civil War historian from Ashville, has recently studied the record of General William J. Palmer and come to have a high regard for “Palmer’s steadfast Quaker decency which held even in the darkest days of the war.” The influence that had on the treatment of the civilian population in areas that came within Palmer’s command is shown in the story of the end of the war in Rockingham County. After the war Palmer received the Medal of Honor for bravery in the face of the enemy. He later became a leader in the development of the American Railroad system in the West beginning with the Kansas Pacific Railroad, an outgrowth of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He introduced the narrow-gauge railroad in America and encouraged the shift from wood-burning to coal-burning locomotives. He founded the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado where his equestrian statue is located. He became one of the richest men in America.

General Brian Grimes, acknowledging to his men at Appomattox that General Lee had indeed surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, spoke of one soldier who “cast away his musket and holding his hands aloft, cried in an agonized voice, ‘Blow, Gabriel, blow! My God, let him blow; I am ready to die!’” ¹² As each Confederate Army surrendered the same weary relief was subsumed by the depth of personal loss. In some cases there might be a new uniform distributed or stolen from the disappearance of a Quarter mastery, a weary horse for spring planting, even a dollar or two from a treasury of mostly worthless money but there was no place to go but home.

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¹². Walter Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-’65 (Goldsboro:Nash Brothers, 1901) V, 256.

From Appomattox there were alternate routes south. Defeated men may have preferred the back roads to avoid contact with Federal cavalry units. Colonel Samuel Walkup of the Forty-eighth Regiment passed through Rockingham County on his way to his home in Monroe.

“April 16, 1865 – Sunday. We continue route towards Leaksville which is not on direct way. But food leads and we must follow. Pass over a poor country. Davies of Co. C and Briney and Marsh are with same route. We reach old North Carolina this evening at Cascade, [state] line and Smith river, passing William Aikens. Passing large tobacconist, halting at Leaksville, North Carolina. We here got rations to eat but nothing else but beans. Stayed all night with William Wade who treated us well. Col. Hill and I slept in a house. We were not charged anything.

April 17, 1865 – Monday. We pass Mayo River and Dan at Davistown or Saura Town [upper Sauratown]. Saura Town Mountains and Saura Town have a beautiful, well-watered and fruitful grazing country. Press some oats. Mathews gives me some corn.

At David Leaks who is amiable and generously attentive and hospitable. Got some of the best of apple brandy and supper and camp in sight of Germanton. We pass by Germanton and get rations and sorghum, have bread and corn and buttermilk.”

The Rev. Daniel Field recalled an even more generous Leaksville:

“On April 9^th news reached us that General Lee’s surrender was inevitable. Numbers of soldiers left their commands and hastened across the country by way of Leaksville to Johnston’s army, then near Greensboro. Large bodies of soldiers, hungry and tired, were constantly passing day and night, for ten days or more, until it was estimated eight or ten thousand had passed. At their sad plight __ hungry, poorly clad, tired ___ every heart was moved and the liberal spirit seemed to catch from soul until every family in the community was giving food or clothing to these needy. Tables were spread in the old Dillard porch and adjacent building and supplies of vegetables, meat and nick-nacks, with great quantities of buttermilk, were placed upon these tables; while our noble women, old and young, gave them a hearty welcome from six in the morning until nine at night. Good order prevailed all the while and at least eight thousand hungry soldiers went away with their hunger satisfied and with expressions of gratitude to ‘Old Leaksville.’” ¹³

General James Longstreet who had surrendered with Lee, led part of his men south toward his home in Georgia. They too camped at Leaksville to receive the generosity of the town. ¹⁴

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¹³. David Fields, edited by Bob Carter, “Leaksville of “Ye Olden Times,” The Journal of Rockingham County History and Genealogy, V, No 1, June 1980, 34. At Appomattox word was spread that soldiers could break the surrender under a white flag and attempt to reach General Johnston whose army was in central North Carolina. Those who chose to thus break surrender headed south toward Greensboro, NC.
¹⁴. Thomas Cutrer, Longstreat’s Aide: The Civil War Letters of Major Thomas J. Gorce.

A Banditti of Villains

THE CRIME: Some time late in the year 1781¹ Alexander Shannon, son of William Shannon, who had become a Tory under David Fanning, was captured by a party made up of William Quiet Hall, Henry Reed, James McAdoo, Jr.,(from Alamance Presbyterian Church?), and a stranger from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. John McAdoo saw that Alexander Shannon had his hands tied behind his back. He had probably already been wounded. Before daylight and after “many violent expressions of vengeance,” that William Quiet Hall had a “first flash of pistol against Shannon and then in his presence Hall reprimed and fired and shot Shannon in the head at or near Guilford Courthouse.”

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¹ Some documents indicate October/November 1782

The locale for this very brutal action was “near Guilford Courthouse” in the year 1781 but there is no mention of the battle at the courthouse on March 15th. This incident is part of the very bitter fratricide between Whigs and Tories that followed the military maneuvering of General Nathanael Greene and Lord Cornwallis that culminated in the battle at the courthouse. In the wake of the battle, Guilford County had been stripped of food, effective law enforcement, operating courts, and moral integrity. As the British Regulars moved toward Wilmington, the Guilford/Randolph Tories saw their chance of victory evaporating. They were at the point of desperation and Whigs were conversely emboldened. Any Tory act was to be met with a greater and more frightening reprisal from the Whigs. Under threat of bodily harm to self or family, it was common for men to abandon one side and cleave to the other only to reverse themselves at the next opportunity. Loyalty was first to the family and next to the local community. It rarely extended further since all higher levels of government had failed repeatedly to keep the citizens secure. There was no army to enforce any higher level of authority. That does not mean that county or state governments did not have form but when they were challenged by circumstances, they could not be depended upon. This condition did not descend to anarchy but it could be considered for a time in 1781, as mobocracy.

The official report of this incident described the action of one Alexander Shannon in the context of these conditions. He had, “fled from the defense of this country and Joined the Enemies thereof and had Committed Sundry Atrocious Robberies and other enormities on the good Citizens of this State, at a Time when a Banditti of Villains headed by one Fanning…”actively attempted to destabilize the state. The record recognizes no legitimate organizational title for what it adjudges as “enemies.” They are not British Irregulars although their leader, David Fanning, was in July 1781 appointed Colonel of the Militia of Randolph and Chatham County Tories by Lord Cornwallis and was given an appropriate uniform for the rank ². They are not even referred to as Tories, the Colonial term applied to any who supported the King.

The most egregious of the many acts committed, alternately by Whigs and Tories at this moment, was the accusation of a neighbor, to one of the belligerent companies, that his neighbor sympathized or even rode with the other party. By such an action, the one justified the taking of his neighbors land. Power went to the victor, not clemency or mercy. This story alone demonstrates that bloodletting dissolved all civil order and all humanity. But even an orgy becomes satiated and eventually there are no neighbors left to accuse.

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² Manuscript Narrative of Col. David Fanning found in the Archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA,

It is pathetic to read, six years after this act of murder, the extent to which the official government, Council and Governor of North Carolina, would go to excuse these acts as unfortunate excesses of Patriots at a moment of immoderation when “Courts of Law through the confusion of the Times were dormant.”

We know little about the accused, Alexander Shannon, except that he was recognized as the son of William Shannon. Having been identified as belonging to this band who “had Massacred a Number of Worthy Citizens with Impunity….,” Shannon was implied to have guilt by association. Without trial, witness, or corroborated charge of a specific act, the parties to the action ventured to justify feebly that “the public Jails of the State were in such Condition, that no Prisoners could be detained without large Guards to attend and when Courts of Law through the confusion of the Times were dormant.” This description surely applied to the local jail and court in Guilford County in the fall of 1781. Guilford County Court was held for the first time in the location near Hunting Creek in February 1781. The battle occurred a month later. The May Court was not held. When court was resumed for the August Term, the courthouse was noted as needing considerable repair to make it a reasonable facility for the purpose. Both armies had used the courthouse on the day of the battle with little concern for the sanctity of the civil court. As a result, the building needed repair as did the goal and the stocks were insufficient for the confinement of any prisoner. The claim of the captors that there was no secure way to imprison Alexander Shannon was not specious but even in the time of war, it did not justify murder.

Therefore, “James McAdoo (whose Brother had been then lately Murdered by said Fanning and his party), Henry Reed, and William Hall” were identified as part of the group “by whom the said Shannon was put to death,” and were found liable “to a Capital prosecution in the Courts of Justice.” At this sentence in the official report, a crease and the action of time upon paper, has obliterated the justification in law that was entered on behalf of the accused. It was sufficient enough in detail, however, that the court pardoned McAdoo, Reed, and Hall “and every other person or persons then present, of the Company, who were in any wise concerned in the killing of the said Alexander Shannon, to be fully pardoned for any Murder, Manslaughter or other species of Homicide done comitted by them or any of them on the person of the said Shannon…” Thus did Governor Richard Caswell and the General Assembly of North Carolina at Fayetteville on January 4, 1787 declare a full pardon to all and sundry.

Following a revolution, this was “public housekeeping.” There could be no doubt that a murder had been committed and admitted to by the accused. Courts of law in 1787, acting in a similar case, would find at least William Quiet Hall guilty and might have pardoned James McAdoo because of his grief over the murder of his brother. As for the others, in 1787 a good lawyer might have gained a verdict of not guilty or minor sentences.

Eight years later, December 15, 1795, a warrant had been issued in Guilford County by Justice of the Peace, Ralph Gorrell, based on information provided by William Shannon against William Quiet Hall for “killing dead” sometime in 1781 his son Alexander Shannon. Law and order had returned and William Shannon, the Tory who in 1782 had to demonstrate to the court why his lands should not be confiscated, was now a fully redeemed citizen of Guilford County and he sought justice for his murdered son, Alexander ³. The surviving public record only hints at the evolution of local justice, in uncontrollable chaos at the end of the Revolution (1781), through the confirmation of a new form of constitutional government that was willing and secure enough to correct an injustice in law.

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³ Stokes County. North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, State Archives, December 16, 1795, Traugott Bagge, J.P.

Where William Shannon succeeded in making peace with the victorious Whigs, the murderer, William Quiet Hall, appears to have been marginalized by life, either because of the curse of his admitted guilt or because he was never able to succeed in life itself. William Shannon had been unwilling to forgive or forget the act of the murder of his son nor the unlawful pardon given to the murderer by the state.

Finally, on December 15^,1795, Shannon got word that William Quiet Hall was at Salem and would spend the night at the Tavern of Jacob Blum. Gorrell issued the warrant and that evening, Hall was apprehended at the Tavern by William Armfield. The next day he was brought before Traugott Bagge, a Moravian and a Justice of the Peace in Stokes County to answer the charge against him. He pled “not guilty.” The court had also summoned Captain James McAdoo and the widow, Kathrin McKnight, as witnesses. ⁴

Before Justice Bagge, the widow McKnight not appearing, Captain (sic) Meadow testified that at a distance of about fifty yards he had seen William Hall shoot Alexander Shannon through the head. He had seen Hall “first flash a Pistol against said Shannon, and that in as short time as could be primed saw Hall fire and shoot Shannon dead.” McAdoo declared it to have been in the early morning before daylight in October or November 1782 at or near Guilford Courthouse. ⁵ James McAdoo was noted in 1787 as from (sic) Allemance but Kathrin McKnight was not mentioned. Henry Reed, who had been noted as present in 1787, died in mid-summer 1789. ⁶ Evidence was noted that William Hall had tied Alexander Shannon’s hands behind his back before he was shot. Shannon had also been wounded earlier by William Hall, James McAdoo, and Henry Reed and William Hall had been heard to say that he would kill Shannon before daylight and had threatened him “with many violent expressions of vengeance,” even though he was given evidence that all the charges against Shannon were not true. It was testified that Shannon had been enlisted in “Evidences Company,” meaning probably Hall’s company, and had served part of a tour with him. Then he had deserted to the Tory company under Kimbrough. ⁷ Shannon had been arrested by Henry Reed, Sheriff of Guilford at the time he was shot by Hall. ⁸

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⁴ This is James McAdoo although the two surviving documents produced by Traugott Bagge say the name is John Meadow, and John McAdow.
⁵ Likely Captain Meadow is off a year but his testimony is not challenged on the point.
⁶ Guilford County Will abstracts, A/304, probate August 1789.
⁷ John Kimbrough was one of the first Assemblymen elected from Guilford County in 1771 along with William Field. Both represented families who later sympathized with the Tories. This reference may be to John Kimbrough.
⁸ There was another Alexander Shannon in this area in 1781 – Captain Alexander Shannon, an officer in General Nathanael Greene’s army. Shannon was from Guilford County and he was slain in Salisbury in a skirmish with the British before the Battle at Guilford Courthouse. Jethro Rumple, A History of Rowan County(Heritage Books, reprint of 1916 copyright) 165.

Evidence was sufficient for Bagge to bind William Hall over to trial in the Salisbury District Court scheduled for March 19, 1796 and he was sent to the goal in Salisbury. James McAdoo, with Jonathan Armfield of Guilford pledged as his security, was to be called as a witness.

The whole of this story of murder in time of revolution and unresolved punishment, also provides a glimpse of the vagaries of remaking society after it has been torn apart by the excesses of fratricide, to which revolution always descends. Thomas Bagge, the Justice of the Peace of Stokes County in 1795, was a Moravian. Their congregations refused to take part in the belligerency, so they were suspected and sometimes abused by both sides to the conflict. By 1795, Bagge represented a civil authority outside the Moravian community. That was a departure from earlier practices of the faith and part of their transition from a religious brotherhood to “becoming American.” Bagge was accepted in Stokes County as a respected preceptor of justice.

We have already noted that Henry Reed, who was listed by name as party to the murder in 1781, was Sheriff of Guilford County by 1785. Reed had died in 1789 so he is not considered in the charges in 1795. ⁹ James McAdoo, whose name was so confused in the 1795 decision of Traugott Bagge, was an active member of Alamance Presbyterian Church. Although he admitted his presence when Alexander Shannon was killed, the fact that he was called “John” McAdoo several times in 1795 may reflect the fact that his brother, John, known locally as “Devil John” was particularly bitter about the murder of their sixteen year old brother by Tories under Fanning in 1781. The McAdoos were respected in the Whig community, another brother, Samuel, having become a Presbyterian minister. Bitterness over murder does not ease evenly among those directly affected, nor is forgiveness equally dispensed.

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⁹ Guilford County Wills A/304, probated August 1789.

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Jones Oakley

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