The Local Skinny! Live Nativity At North Henderson Baptist Church

/by

Pastor Eddie Nutt invites the community to a live nativity presentation at North Henderson Baptist Church on Friday, Dec. 6 and Saturday, Dec. 7.

There will be three presentations offered between 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. both nights – lasting just about a half hour each.

Most of the characters will be portrayed by children, Nutt said on Tuesday’s segment of The Local Skinny! A narrator will read from the Gospels as the children act out the story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem.

This is the first time in several generations that the church has put on a live nativity. The idea was born when several church members had a desire to do something new for the community, Nutt said, “a different type of outreach to remind people of the true meaning of what Christmas is all about.”

There will be refreshments served – including fresh popcorn from a brand-new popcorn machine – and folks can come inside to shake off any winter chill in the air.

Nutt said it’s special to see church members who are willing to give their time to create a production like a live nativity. It shows they care for their community and they want to share the love of Jesus Christ, he added.

He admitted his relief that a real live donkey has been secured to take part in the live nativity.

“Because I was the closest thing they had until they got a real one,” he joked.

North Henderson Baptist Church is located at 1211 N. Garnett St.

 

CLICK PLAY!

 

Sheriff’s Office: Two Drug Arrests Made In Separate Vehicle Stops

/by

Press releases from Vance County Sheriff’s Office

The Vance County Sheriff’s Office made two drug arrests Monday in two separate vehicle stops.

  • On Monday, November 25, 2024, members of the Vance County Sheriff’s Office Narcotics unit conducted a vehicle stop in the 900 block of Faulknertown Road.  The driver was identified as Kemarreus Frank-Quan Jones, 22, of Henderson. During the investigation, a certain amount of crack cocaine, cocaine hydrochloride and heroin was seized.  Jones was charged with two counts of trafficking cocaine; two counts of trafficking heroin; one count of possession with intent to sell and deliver cocaine; one count of possession with intent to sell and deliver heroin; maintaining a vehicle to keep and sell controlled substances; and possession of drug paraphernalia.  Jones was released on a $187,000.00 secured bond.
  • On Monday, November 25, 2024, members of the Vance County Sheriff’s Office Narcotics unit conducted a vehicle stop near the intersection of Crozier and Burr streets in Henderson.  During the investigation, a certain amount of heroin was seized from a passenger who was identified as Daquian Demard Nickolson, 34, of Louisburg.  Nickolson was charged with possession with intent to sell and deliver heroin. He is currently out on federal probation.  Nickolson, who is currently on federal probation, was released on a $20,000 secured bond, according to information from Capt. Gooch with the sheriff’s office.
Vance County Logo

Program For Low-Income Residents Offers Help With Winter Heat Bills

/by

The Low-Income Energy Assistance Program provides a one-time annual vendor payment to help eligible families pay their heating expense.  If you received a LIEAP payment in 2023-2024, someone in the household was disabled and receiving services through the Division of Aging and Adult Services OR households containing a person aged 60, an automatic payment will be generated to that same account this fiscal year. It is not necessary to re-apply. The state mailed notices in October 2024 to each family from the 2023-2024 pre-populated application information, according to Cassandra Hart with the Vance County Department of Social Services.

The notice contains instructions about how to report changes to the department. The recipient can contact or return the notice with changes to their local DSS office within 10 business days. If the recipient does not contact or report any changes to DSS, the information from the 2023-2024 LIEAP application will be used to approve the household for 2024-2025 benefits. The recipient will be informed that an automated LIEAP payment was approved.

Households not included in the target population will be able to apply following regular LIEAP application policy. Regular application policy is as follows:

  • Application period begins Dec. 1 for households with a disabled person who is receiving services through the Division of Aging and Adult Services OR households containing a person aged 60 and above are potentially eligible during the month of December or until funds are exhausted.
  • Applications for general public will be taken from Jan. 1 through Mar. 31 or until funds are exhausted.

This program is being administered by:

Vance County Department of Social Services

500 N. Beckford Dr. Ste. C

Henderson, NC 27536

office 252.492.5001 ext. 3900

fax 252.438.5997

email Vance.County.DSS@vance.nc.gov

Applications may be submitted by mail, email, fax, dropped off, in person, or online (epass.nc.gov/),

When applying, the following information may be needed to determine eligibility:

  • Information about your household’s income. If anyone works, provide wage stubs for the month prior to the month of application
  • Recent statement for savings or checking accounts
  • Name, date of birth, and social security card or numbers for each household member
  • Account number for the heating source. Households that heat with wood/kerosene, will not have a bill to submit

Heating bill-If the bill is not in applicant’s or other household member’s name, the applicant must provide a written statement from the person whose name the bill is in (must be 18 or older), stating that applicant is responsible for payment of the heating expense.

(Originally published on WIZS.com on November 18, 2024.)

Longtime VGCC President, Dr. Ben F. Currin, Dies

/by

Dr. Benjamin Fleming Currin, long-time president of Vance-Granville Community College,  died on Nov. 23, 2024. Under his leadership, VGCC grew from a single campus to four campuses, doubled its enrollment and saw its Endowment Fund swell to $5 million. He was 88.

Ben was born on November 13, 1936 in Granville County to Sophia Hunt Currin and Elam Ray Currin. He attended the public schools of then Oxford City Schools. He graduated from Oxford High School in 1955 and earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is survived by his wife, Betsy, a son, George and a granddaughter, Catherine.

According to his obituary, “Ben was a man of the people and had the rare ability to relate to and care about people from all walks of life. He and Betsy devoted their lives to education—he was a teacher, school principal, school superintendent, and community college president.”

Current VGCC President Dr. Rachel Desmarais sent a message to staff and board members on Sunday afternoon to share the news of Currin’s passing. “It is with sadness that I communicate with you this weekend,” the statement read. “I know that some of you worked with him or went to college when he was president,” Desmarais stated. He held a variety of positions in public schools systems across the state, beginning in 1959 in Durham as a teacher and coach. He rose through the ranks and became the youngest principal in the state just a couple of years later when he was named principal at Eureka Elementary in Wayne County. By 1970, he was named superintendent of Rocky Mount City Schools and led the school system for more than a decade.

Currin was named VGCC president in 1981 and retired in 1998. During that time, VGCC experienced exponential growth.

In 2016, Ben received the I.E. Ready Award, the highest honor given by the North Carolina Community College System, which recognizes individuals who have made significant, statewide contributions to the establishment, development or enhancement of the community college system. Currin also was a Mason and a Shriner.

A graveside service will be held at Elmwood Cemetery in Oxford, North Carolina, 530 Hillsboro St., at a date and time to be announced.

Brown-Wynne Funeral Home is handling arrangements. View the full obituary at dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/raleigh-nc/benjamin-currin-12104838. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the Dr. Ben F. Currin scholarship at Vance-Granville Community College, or to Transitions LifeCare.

In an article about the I.E. Ready award written in 2016, WIZS News spoke with L. Opie Frazier Jr. about Currin’s accomplishments. Frazier was chair of the VGCC board of trustees for many of the years during Currin’s tenure as president, and Frazier called Currin “a godsend” as part of the written nomination for the award. “His greatest asset was his emphasis on students. The second was his enthusiasm. His successes are many – for example, the satellite campuses started under his leadership and the scholarship program that grew dramatically – because he wanted the best for students, and his enthusiasm helped him win friends at various levels to help him grow the college and serve more students,” Frazier wrote.

In remarks at the 2009 ceremony at which Currin received The Order of the Long Leaf Pine, Dr. J. Reid Parrott Jr., retired president of Nash Community College, cited the positive impact Currin had on VGCC. “I want to tell you, I’ve been doing this community college stuff a long time, and there is no president of all 58 of our schools that has transformed an institution as quickly and as magnificently as Ben Currin did at Vance-Granville,” Parrott said.

The Local Skinny! 3rd Annual Vance County Camp Meeting

/by

It’s called a camp meeting, but it’s not the type of camp meeting that Scott Matthews’s granddaddy Jesse held, always the week of the Fourth of July under a tent on the grounds of Forest Hill Baptist Church.

Back then, it could be 100 degrees, with 1,000 percent humidity, Matthews said, half joking half serious. “I can remember some hot days,” Matthews said on Monday’s segment of The Local Skinny!

The third annual Vance County Camp Meeting will be held all next week in the comfortable surroundings of McGregor Hall, and Matthews said he couldn’t be happier to head back home to lead the gathering. Things kick off at 7 p.m. nightly on Monday, Dec. 2 and continue through Friday, Dec. 6.

A few years ago, several pastors encouraged Matthews to bring the camp meeting concept back to life. The first year, there were nine churches involved, he said, but last year’s camp meeting had close to two dozen pastors who attended on multiple nights.

Scott and wife Becky spend most of the year traveling the country preaching and singing as Matthews Family Ministries, which includes the couple’s two daughters. They recently returned from Phoenix, AZ and then turned around and headed to Jacksonville, FL.

“I’m just excited for everybody to come together, Becky said. “It’s always good to see everybody there in Henderson and just have a great week of worshipping the Lord.”

A 1000-seat climate-controlled auditorium in early December is the perfect venue to bring people from different churches and denominations to hear the nightly preaching and musical performances that will be offered.

The speakers “have no axes to grind, no agendas to push,” Scott said. They are interested in delivering “messages that encourage the people of God to do more for the cause of Christ right now is what these guys will bring. We’ll try to make it (McGregor Hall) a church every night,” Scott said. “Come on out and join us.”

CLICK PLAY!

 

TownTalk: Around Old Granville – First Families Part Two

/by

Ready to hear how the area now known as Kittrell is connected to the first Thanksgiving?

THE first Thanksgiving.

The one that happened in 1618, a full four years before the Pilgrims and Native Americans celebrated the first successful harvest in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621.

Leave it to WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace to make the local connection in their tri-weekly TownTalk segment called Around Old Granville. Monday’s discussion was a continuation of “First Families” of the area that now includes the four counties of Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin.

According to Pace, a man by the name of John Woodlief gets the credit for the very first Thanksgiving that took place at Berkeley Plantation on the banks of the James River southeast of Richmond. It is Woodlief’s grandson, Thomas Woodlief, who leaves Charles City, VA and settles in the vicinity of what is now Kittrell way back in 1754, when the Colonies were still under British rule.

Woodlief is just one of numerous notable surnames that pop up in research of local history, but sometimes genealogists and historians have to do a bit of detective work to find useful tidbits about people who lived and worked in the area almost three centuries ago.

Kittrell is another family name that predates the birth of the United States. The earliest Kittrells came pretty early, Pace said, back in 1727. Then Jonathan Kittrell purchased 300 acres or so in the area along Tabbs Creek around 1760.

Another well-known family was the Eaton family. “The Eatons would definitely qualify as one of the first founding families of this area,” Pace said.

William Eaton first settled up in the northeast corner of the old Granville County along the Roanoke River – a ferry bearing the family name operated from the 1800’s to the early 1960’s near Littleton in Warren County.

Eaton also built the first courthouse and the first jail – with his own money – in Granville County

and he built Locust Hill on Old County Home Road in Vance County.

“It was actually THE county home” at one time, Pace noted. Eaton died in 1759 and his children were influential in the area for the next hundred years or more, up until the Civil War.

Locust Hill burned in 1976. Pace remembers the year vividly because it was the year he got his driver license. He and his younger brother tootled out to Locust Hill and the brother snapped a pic of the old home with his Polaroid.

“About two weeks later, it burned down…my brother took the last picture of it,” Pace said. He said the back portion of the home could easily date back to the 1740’s – “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Pace said.

One son, Thomas Eaton, was a general in the American Revolution. He was captured during the Battle of Brier Creek in Georgia, and legend has it that when he was captured, the British sympathizers confiscated his prized boots, made specially to fit his quite narrow foot. Fast forward to a post-war “sit down” Eaton was summoned, along with one of his captors, who returned the long-lost boots to Eaton.

And although Pace said he can’t confirm what happened, the story goes that Eaton proceeded to whack the captor over the head with said boots. So much for letting bygones be bygones.

There’s a stately home in Warrenton – the William Eaton home – that still stands today that belonged to a son of Thomas Eaton.

William Eaton, an attorney and prominent politician, wrote a book called “How to be a Good Lawyer” which Pace said was a bestseller in the 1830’s and 1840’s.

The Eatons have a connection with Osborne Jeffreys, who was born in Williamsburg, VA in 1716.

Jeffreys was a captain in the North Carolina Colonial militia for Granville County, said Harris, and owned several plantations in the area, which included grist mills, a tannery, a shoe-making business and taverns. Jeffreys also was active in the politics of the area. Like many early settlers, Pace said Jeffreys “owns land all over the place…he comes here (early) and gets the best land” for himself. He built Portridge on some of his land holdings, which was located between what is now Louisburg and Franklinton. It was at Portridge that the first church of England was built in the area. The building is long gone, but the cemetery remains. It contains many unmarked graves, but the names on some stones are legible.

Jeffreys and his wife, Patience, had a daughter named Elizabeth. She married Charles Rust Eaton, another descendant of the original William Eaton.

A dozen or so families in Colonial North Carolina, he said, intermarry and create what Pace calls an oligarchy – “they’re the ones who run things,” he explained.

Listen to the entire discussion at wizs.com.

 

CLICK PLAY! 

Local Nonprofit Sponsoring Christmas Toy Drive

/by

Those donation boxes at Vance Family Medicine and the fire station in downtown Henderson are part of the inaugural toy drive sponsored by Blk Sista Productions, a local nonprofit organization with a mission to support local families facing financial challenges.

“Let’s come together to make this Christmas unforgettable,” is the message from Blk Sista Productions Founder and CEO Bessie Williams, who uses the moniker Diamond Unique.

“Drop off a new toy and help us bring joy to a child’s life this holiday. Spread the word, share the love, and let’s make this first year one to remember,” she said in information provided to WIZS about the toy drive.

In an effort to reach as many community members as possible, Williams said she hopes donations will fill up those boxes with toys for children to make a positive impact locally during the upcoming holiday season.

Toy pickup is scheduled for Dec. 20 between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. The location will be announced the week prior to pick up, Williams said.

To learn more, contact Williams at blksistaproductions@icloud.com or by phone at 252-432-9683.

YMCA

Remember Henderson Family YMCA On ‘Giving Tuesday’ Dec.3

/by

The days following Thanksgiving are a retailer’s dream – slash – nightmare – Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday.

But then comes Giving Tuesday, where the emphasis is not on retail so much as on ways to support local organizations. It’s a global day of giving that has come into its own as a way to provide support to causes that matter to you, the giver.

This year, the leadership at the Henderson Family YMCA invite its neighbors and community partners to donate on Giving Tuesday – Dec. 3, 2024 – to support the Y’s mission to provide programs and services that help individuals and families across Vance County and the surrounding area.

Director of Marketing and Operations Christina Miceli said, “Many people feel compelled to support an organization that provides vital services to all, especially in their local communities. The YMCA’s ability to create a sense of belonging and a healthy connected community – through afterschool care, summer camps, swimming lessons, fitness classes, or senior wellness – appeals to donors who want to make a tangible difference.”

A $100 donation, for example, equates to three swim lessons for a young person. A donation of $230 provides a family one month of after-school care for a child. And a $582 gift provides one adult a year-long membership with full access to all facility amenities, including the fitness center and the pool.

So whether it’s swim lessons, a workout in the weight room or water aerobics for senior adults, Miceli said the Y provides a wide assortment of programs and activities.

“When people see how their contributions can directly enhance lives and strengthen the community, the YMCA stands out as a truly worthy cause,” Miceli said.
“The YMCA means something different to everyone; it is truly what you make of it.”

For many, the Y is a place where young people learn how to swim, but also a place where they gain confidence, Miceli said. “For others, it’s a place where children can experience summer camp and embrace the gift of adventure. The Y is also a welcoming space for widows and widowers, providing the gift of connection and community during challenging times,” she said.

Teens can play basketball after school, strengthening their passion for sports and the value of teamwork.

“For our members, it’s a space to exercise and receive the gift of activity and health. And for those looking to make a difference, it’s a place to volunteer and participate, giving the gift of purpose and fulfillment,” Miceli added.

Through a variety of programs and partnerships, the local YMCA strives to create an inclusive environment that supports the health and well-being of all community members, Miceli said. That makes the Y a welcoming place for everyone.

With a focus on affordability, inclusivity and community outreach, the Y can be a place for the whole community to use and enjoy.

  • Financial Assistance: The Y offers financial assistance and discounted rates for youth programs, ensuring that low-income individuals and families can participate in memberships without financial barriers. This commitment allows more people to access the amenities and benefits of the Y.
  • Diverse Programming: The Y offers swim lessons for all ages and skill levels, ensuring everyone can learn to swim safely. But there’s also a wide range of  fitness classes for people of all abilities, from beginners to advanced. The Y tailors programming for older adults, too, which includes social activities and educational workshops to promote healthy aging.
  • Community Collaboration: The Y collaborates with schools, nonprofits and community groups to expand its outreach. Free programs like the Diabetes Prevention Program, for example, helps participants lower their risk of type 2 diabetes, and the Y’s Safety Around Water initiative targets second graders in Vance County how to be safe around water.

Visit https://www.hendersonymca.org/ and click on the link to donate.