Bill Harris and Mark Pace dig deep into the places around Old Granville County that are a part of the National Register of Historic Places.
(Our WIZS written coverage will appear here soon.)
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OK, local history buffs, here’s a question for you:
What do the Declaration of Independence, inventor of a Space-Age portable stereo and the poet Langston Hughes all have in common?
Ready for the answer?
Sassafras Fork township.
Northern Granville County residents may be more familiar with Sassafras Fork than others, but back in the 1760’s, Sassafras Fork encompassed the general area now known as Bullock, Grassy Creek, Gela, Stovall and Soudan, just across the NC/VA border.
WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace talked about what that area used to look like in the recurring TownTalk segment “Around Old Granville.”
Now, here’s how those three seemingly unrelated items intersect in northern Granville County:
The town of Stovall recently held a Harvest Festival, featuring a celebration of one of its famous residents, John Penn. Penn was one of the state’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence and he moved from Virginia to North Carolina in part because there were too many lawyers where he was from in Virginia, but also because his wife’s family lived near Sassafras Fork.
Now, about that Space-Age portable radio…
Pratt Winston, who died in 2024, was an entrepreneur and inventor. He created the iconic Weltron radio product line, which sold all over the world into the late 70’s.
Winston’s home, Rose Hill, originally was part of the Speed holdings, still stands.
Pace said it’s probably the oldest brick home in the area, having been built around 1834. The two-story Greek Revival-style home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
Ready to make the connection between Sassafras Fork and Langston Hughes?
“Shaw School was so well known back in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, Pace said, that it was able to attract numerous speakers of some renown.
The poet Langston Hughes, of Harlem Renaissance fame, visited the school in 1953 for a poetry reading, Pace said.
At the time of Hughes’s visit, Stovall was enjoying a population of close to 500, but over time, that number dwindled.
The 2010 Census reported just more than 400 people living in Stovall, and that number dropped to 324 in the 2020 count.
But Stovall once boasted a booming economy for the times – with a funeral home, doctors, a bank, factories, lumber mill, hotel, numerous churches and a railway station. There were close to 800 people living in Stovall in the 1920’s, Pace said.
A man named John Stovall gave land to have the rail depot put on his land, which is what prompted the name change from Sassafras Fork to Stovall, he said.
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The tiny community of Afton in Warren County was at the center of a big environmental mess in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when the state bought up some land to build a landfill to store hazardous waste.
That hazardous waste was a PCB-laced oil, a product that had been used for decades to help cool electric transformers. When the chemical was declared illegal because of health implications, the companies that used it had to have somewhere for it to go, said local historian Mark Pace.
Under the cover of darkness, trucks drove along rural roads in out-of-the-way counties like Warren and dumped the oily substance along the roadsides. More than 200 miles of roads in Warren County had that familiar brown grass – dead grass – where the PCB-laced oil had been sprayed.
There were some spots in Franklin County, too, that were affected. WIZS’s Bill Harris said he remembers riding the school bus as a teenager and seeing the brown grass along the side of the road.
Harris and Pace talked about the protests that ensued, as the state went head-to-head with community activists in opposition to the dump in Thursday’s TownTalk feature, Around Old Granville.
Pace said the state got involved in the disposal of PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls –
in the summer of 1978, and it was in 1982 that civil rights leader the Rev. Ben Chavis, is credited with coining the term “environmental racism” to describe the placement of the landfill.
In 1980, Warren County was among the state’s poorest counties, majority African American and lagged behind in most areas, including income. Close to half of the workforce commuted out of Warren County to work, Pace said.
It didn’t take long for leaders to select Warren County – a county once known for producing prominent politicians – as the site of a toxic dump. And trucks beginning to haul the tainted soil to the landfill sparked protests that lasted for weeks.
The protests made national headlines, especially when notables like the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Floyd McKissick, the Rev. Leon White and Golden Frinks showed up in support of protesters.
More than 500 people were arrested over the course of six weeks or so, Pace said, as the non-violent protests continued.
“These people literally laid down in front of these dump trucks,” Pace said. More than 7,000 truckloads of tainted soil was brought to the landfill, scraped up from those rural roadsides where the PCB-laced oil had been sprayed.
A company in Raleigh, Ward Transfer Co., disposed of materials like PCBs, but there was so much of it – and it was going to cost a lot of money to send it to an incinerator for proper disposal, Pace said.
“So they just loaded up a truck in the middle of the night and rode up and down roads,” he said, choosing rural, remote places. Like Warren County.
The owner ultimately was caught, fined and sent to prison.
But that still left the problem of what to do with the tainted soil. It had to be removed and put somewhere.
That “somewhere” ended up being a 20-acre landfill site in Warren County.
It was fraught with problems, Pace said, including inadequate liners to keep the landfill contents from seeping out into the groundwater.
Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr. promised to “detoxify” the landfill when the money was available and the technology was developed to do it.
In 1993, with $13 million from the EPA, 60 tons of the toxic contents of the landfill were declared detoxified by conducting a complex process that separates the moisture from the soil and then chemically removes the toxins.
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Visitors to New York City back in the late 1800’s may have seen advertisements from Ridgeway
Estates Co., a group of local men who had big plans for enticing Northerners to move South, to the tiny little community that sits today between Middleburg and Norlina, just over the Warren County line.
This corporation had big plans – the Raleigh to Gaston railroad had a stop in Ridgeway, and there was even a fancy new 3-story brick hotel right across from the depot with a h 27-stall barn, carriage houses and all the finest amenities a traveler could want.
Yep, thing were looking up in Ridgeway. The group of men created a vision of a town with streets laid out and 1,800 building lots on about 350 acres of property. All they needed were the buyers.
“It didn’t take off like they anticipated,” said local historian Mark Pace on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.
Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about the community known for its German settlers and super-sweet cantaloupes. In 1869, Ridgeway became an incorporated township in anticipation of the influx of Northerners, Pace said. There’s a stone marker near what would have been the center of town, which lost its charter about 10 years later.
In 1901, a man by the name of Ed Petar happened to plant a few cantaloupe seeds in the Ridgeway area and, it turns out, the ripe melons were really sweet and delicious. From that modest beginning grew a craze for the super-sweet produce that lasts to this day. By 1932, with the help of the railroad, thousands of crates of cantaloupes were shipped from Ridgeway. The peak year was 1956, Pace said, when 30,000 crates of the smallish melon with the light orange flesh and ropy exterior found their way all across the country via refrigerated trucks and boxcars.
Pace said that 75 percent of the cantaloupes grown in Ridgeway at the time were cultivated by farmers of German descent. Families with surnames like Kilian, Holtzmann, Bender and Daeke – just to name a few – began to settle in little ol’ Ridgeway.
But how’d they know to come? It seems a traveling preacher with ties to the German community and the Lutheran Church in Germany started spreading the word about the area. He was a German-born missionary and when he came upon the advertisements in New York City, he translated them and sent them to friends in Germany.
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The Henderson cotton mill strike of 1958 began as a relatively peaceful protest when workers and company leaders couldn’t agree about how to settle disagreements – for years, both sides had agreed to use arbitration as a way to settle disputes about a variety of grievances, said local historian Mark Pace.
And, Pace said, it seemed to work out that, over those years, about half the judgments were found in favor of the workers, and half in favor of the company.
The strike made headlines across the country and beyond, Pace noted in Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk with WIZS’s Bill Harris. And in February 1959, after months of being shut down, the mill management decided to take action.
“The Coopers put out a call for strike breakers,” Pace said. “they wanted to run one shift and crank up production.” The inventory of yarns and cotton that had been stockpiled was running low, and so the mill needed to be running again.
“Until that point, the strike had been relatively peaceful,” Pace said. But when strikebreakers were brought in, that’s when things turned violent.
There were at least 16 cases of bombings between February and May 1959. Warehouses were bombed, homes were bombed, windows shot out. About 150 people were arrested, but Pace said local law enforcement was stretched beyond its limits.
The mills in North Henderson and South Henderson both were outside the city limits, so it was up to the sheriff’s office to keep things calm near the mills as best they could.
Gov. Luther Hodges, himself once a textile mill vice president, Pace explained, called the State Highway Patrol into action to help keep the peace in Henderson. Eventually, however, the National Guard got involved.
A man making a cotton delivery to one of the mills was attacked by a mob of protesters,prompting a judge to rule that a maximum of eight strikers could be at the mill gate at any one time.
“At this point the textile workers were desperate,” Pace said. “They had tried going on strike, but that had not worked.” Although the union gave them stipends, it wasn’t enough.
And the longer the strike lasted, the less money the union had available.
In May 1961, there was a call to end the strike.
By then, however, the mills were back to running three full shifts – this time with non-union workers. Pace said 90 percent of the people who went on strike never went back to work at the cotton mills.
Harriet-Henderson was Vance County’s largest employer from 1895 to 2003 and had a footprint of close to half a million square feet at the height of its success.
The strike was significant, “not just for Henderson but for the South,” Pace said. The textile workers’ strike in Henderson was the last major attempt by unions to build effective unions in the southern United States in the textile industry, which was the largest industry in the South at that time, he said.
“By and large, they failed,” he said.
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Many folks who were born and raised in Henderson or Vance County either remember the 1958 cotton mill strike or have grown up hearing stories about it. But even the youngest mill workers during that time are in their 80’s now, so there are fewer and fewer folks still alive to tell the story of how the strike affected the community then and now, more than 60 years later.
In Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk, WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace add some context to the events that led up to the strike, which lasted until 1961.
In 1895, brothers David Y. and John D. Cooper founded the Henderson Cotton Mill in North Henderson.
They’d made their money in the tobacco business after the Civil War ended and later set their sights on establishing a mill.
Textiles, tobacco and furniture, Pace said, were all North Carolina industries that began with a “relatively cheap raw material that you could manipulate into something much more profitable.”
The profit margins were much higher in textiles than for, say, tobacco, but it came with more risk, Pace explained.
The price and quality of the raw material, workers’ wages and overseas competition were just some of the factors that the Cooper family had to consider with the mills, which numbered three by 1913. Harriet Mills opened in South Henderson in 1909 and then Harriet Plant No. 2 opened in 1913.
“It took off like gangbusters,” Pace said. Indeed, the textile industry was not only big in Henderson, but also in the southern United States, possibly “the most important industrial endeavor in the South, even up until the 1980’s and 1990’s,” Pace said.
It was 1943 when the union first came to the Harriet and Henderson plants, he said. By this time the mills were under the leadership of John D. Cooper, Jr., who ran it until 1962, Pace said. By the time World War II ended, the U.S. found itself in the unique position of being pretty much the only textile producers left – between the devastation across Europe and civil wars in India and Pakistan, the domestic textile industry was looking good.
Harris said a post-war economic boom led to a 1949 downturn, and as other countries rebuilt and retooled, it was more difficult for the local mills to keep their equipment current.
“They were very forward thinking,” Pace said, and wanted badly to modernize the mills after World War II, but faced years long backorders as a result of post-War reconstruction.
Throw in the rise of synthetic textiles like rayon and nylon – no cotton needed – and the textile industry began to falter.
Harriet and Henderson produced thread and yarn from the raw cotton, and employed as many as 1,000 people during its peak, when it was the largest yarn manufacturer.
“Within the confines of the industry,” Pace said, the Coopers were “very innovative and forward-thinking.”
To keep the mills running despite high absenteeism, management had dozens of employees at the ready each day to fill jobs when employees didn’t show up for work, Pace said. Even if they weren’t needed inside the mill, the stand-by workers would get two hours’ pay for showing up.
“A lot of plant managers would not have put up with that,” Pace said of the often high absentee rate. “But the Coopers wanted the work force to be happy.”
Women made up half the work force, and sometimes had to take off with little or no prior notice but management tolerated it because they felt an obligation to the workers, he added.
Pace said he considers the mill strike of 1958 as one of the top two or three most important events in the history of Vance County, “right up there with Civil Rights or the coming of the railroad and the creation of the tobacco industry.”
Listen back to the entire show at www.wizs.com.
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At the height of the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee thought it best to send his family somewhere safe and out of harm’s way. His wife, Mary Anna, had a cousin in Warren County, so Warren County was where she and the children ended up waiting out the war.
And that is how it came to be that Lee’s favorite daughter, Annie Carter Lee, was buried in Warren County.
For a century, at least.
Annie Carter was only 23 when she died in 1862 of typhoid fever.
The grave marker remains in Warren County, but Annie Carter Lee’s remains were moved to the family crypt at Washington & Lee University in 1994, where the Confederate general taught after the war ended.
Annie Carter wasn’t the only member of the Lee family to die in Warren County – Annie Carter’s nephew, Robert E. Lee, III – the Lee’s first grandchild – died in infancy at Jones Sulfur Springs, a resort that touted the healing powers of the mineral springs there.
That’s something local historian Mark Pace learned when he was researching Annie Carter, the topic of discussion for the most recent Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.
Gen. Lee’s wife, Mary Anna, suffered from poor health much of her life and Pace said in later years she was confined to a wheelchair.
“She was a great believer in the healing powers of mineral springs,” he said,” and several months of the year, she’d take her daughters and go to her cousin’s place – in Warren County.
Mary Anna’s cousin, William Duke Jones, ran the Sulfur Springs resort. You can still see remains of some of the buildings there. The resort had accommodations for 300 guests, Pace said.
Annie Carter’s gravesite was one of the first sites identified when the state’s historical marker program started back in the 1930’s.
But over the years, Pace said the site was the object of vandalism and so the Lee descendants had the remains disinterred and reburied in Virginia.
The fourth child of Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Custis Lee, Pace said Annie Carter Lee was her father’s favorite child because of an injury she sustained when she was quite young, which left her with a disfiguring scar on her face.
She contracted typhoid fever by the end of the summer of 1862 and, despite the doctors’ best efforts, she died. Pace said the fatality rate at that time was about 40 percent for people who had typhoid fever.
Two of her brothers visited her gravesite in 1866 to have a formal funeral for their sister, but her father, as the defeated leader of the Confederate Army, was not allowed to leave Virginia.
He finally got to Warren County in 1870 and, along with his daughter Agnes – 1 and ½ years younger than Annie Carter, to visit the grave.
As Pace tells the story, Lee and his daughter asked a young man at the Warren Plains Depot if he could recommend a place for them to spend the night. The man was William J. White, who had been a captain under Lee’s command, recognized the former general and offered his parents’ home as lodging for the night.
That home, Ingleside, stands in Warrenton today.
Word spread quickly throughout the town of the visitors and the reason for the trip, and next morning, Pace said that some 800 people – dressed in their best mourning clothes – lined the streets of Warrenton to pay their respects to the father and daughter who came to visit the grave of their beloved family member.
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If you’re a Baby Boomer, chances are you grew up hearing stories from parents or grandparents about Hazel. That’d be Hurricane Hazel, the October 1954 storm that tore through this part of North Carolina on a path that went all the way to Canada.
It’s just one example of a natural disaster that people use as a yardstick of sorts by which to measure other storms. Hazel made landfall in Calabash as a Category 4 storm as it headed straight up the middle of the state on its way north.
Millenials, Gen Xers and Gen Zers will be able to tell stories about Florence, Fran and Floyd, but hurricanes are just one category of natural disaster that has struck this area. WIZS’s Bill Harris chatted with local historian Mark Pace to remember a number of historic events that affected the four-county area in Thursday’s TownTalk segment Around Old Granville.
“What made Hazel so remarkable,” Pace said, was that it was very short-lived. After making landfall on the coast, it reached this area by about 2 p.m. “By 3:45, it was gone from Vance County,” he said. “It came through like a freight train.”
Forty-two years later, Hurricane Fran took more or less the same route as it rolled through North Carolina, killing 36 people and causing extensive damage in September 1996.
Hazel’s fierce winds snapped off a lot of the trees halfway up, Pace said, and it brought great destruction in a short period of time.
This area was also subjected to what is called “the Great Storm of 1893,”
“People didn’t have to worry about the electricity going out,” Pace said, because there weren’t many places that had it. “In a lot of ways, they were able to deal with the effects of the storm a lot better” than we do today.
Over the years, information from climatologists and weather forecasters help prepare for weather events like hurricanes, but people don’t always have a lot of advance warning about tornadoes.
And this area has had its share of tornadoes. Just last year, Epsom experienced a rash of tornadoes, spawned in the remnants of Tropical Storm Debbie. They were relatively weak – F-0 and F-1 – but that’s strong enough to cause damage.
In the Oak Hill community in northern Granville County, a tornado flattened Oak Hill School in November 1952, Pace said. Luckily, it was after school had let out, so there were no injuries. But the yearbook in subsequent years was renamed ‘The Tornado.’
Other tornadoes have demolished warehouses and killed more than a dozen people in Warrenton in 1936, homes in Huntsboro in 2016 and tore roofs off the Medical Arts building on Ruin Creek Road in 1988.
And while nobody welcomes hurricanes and tornadoes, there are plenty of people who wish for a good snowfall every winter – none more than schoolchildren. And probably a teacher or two.
But even the biggest snow fans may balk at the possibility of having 2 feet of snow on the ground. That’s what Warren County got during a massive storm in 1856.
Henderson got close to that – 22.5 inches – in 1922, which collapsed a couple of tobacco warehouse roofs and part of the Corbitt Factory, Pace said.
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Two schools, both chartered in 1787, have historical markers that underscore their longevity and importance to their respective counties. The Warrenton Male Academy – more recently known as John Graham High School and then John Graham Middle School – had a local Who’s Who on its board of trustees when it was first started.
And Louisburg College, which got its start as separate academies for males and females, is the oldest church-related coeducational two-year school in the nation.
Local historian and Thornton Library’s North Carolina Room Specialist Mark Pace joined WIZS’s Bill Harris Thursday to wrap up an Around Old Granville series about historical markers that dot the countryside in Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties.
There are 57 across the area, which Pace said shows just how significant the people, events and places are to the state, the nation and to the world.
Take Nathaniel Macon, whose marker is in Warren County. His family came here in the mid-1700’s, and Macon became the Speaker of the U.S. House. If you remember your Civics lesson about the legislative and executive branches of government, you will know that the Speaker of the House is second in line to be president, after the vice president, Pace explained.
But Macon was an austere sort and Pace said the only thing Macon felt the government should do was “provide for the common defense and maybe the post office – anything else was intrusive government.”
He left strict instructions that his grave would have no tombstone – too flashy. Anyone with occasion to pass by his grave was asked to simply toss a rock on it, Pace said.
“There’s a big, giant pile of rocks on his grave,” Pace said.
John H. Kerr served 30 years in the U.S. Congress. He also was a long-time mayor of Warrenton, but it was his efforts in the U.S. Congress that got his name on the new lake that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed in the mid-1950’s.
John A. Hyman was the first African American to represent North Carolina in Congress. Born into slavery in Warren County, he was moved to Alabama but returned home after the Civil War ended. He served one term and when he came back to North Carolina, he was a delegate to the second state Freedman’s Convention and later served several terms in the State Senate.
Franklin County has fewer markers than the other three counties that originally were part of Old Granville, only seven to date.
One is Green Hill Place, the site of the first Methodist Episcopal church conference in the state, way back in 1785.
John Williamson, a former enslaved person, became a state legislator and then a well-known newspaper publisher. He established his newspaper, The Banner, when he was appointed to the state’s Industrial Commission as a way to promote educational and industrial topics related to his new role.
Moses Hopkins was the first African American to graduate from the Presbyterian Auburn Seminary in New York. After he graduated in 1877, he moved to Franklinton and established Albion Academy in 1879. He was appointed U.S. ambassador to Liberia in 1885 and he died there in 1886.
Then there’s Thomas Bickett, the only governor of the state to hail from Franklin County. Bickett was the state’s attorney general and served in the State House. He was governor from 1917-1921.
He died young, the same year he left the governor’s office.
Another Franklin County man with a promising future in literature was Edwin Wiley Fuller. He died of consumption – later known as tuberculosis – at age 28. He was author of Sea-Gift and Angel in the Cloud.
Pace said Fuller wrote an account of a plantation burning in one of his works. Margaret Mitchell was reportedly a fan of Fuller’s writing, and Pace speculates that the scene of Tara burning in her book, Gone With the Wind, may have been inspired by Fuller.
Fuller also wrote a fanciful tale about a fellow who went around the neighborhood telling tall tales that people fall for, Pace said, that another fan – none other than Mark Twain – may have used to base his famous story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
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The historical marker that bears his name doesn’t have room for it, but James Turner is the North Carolinian who came the closest to being President of the United States.
He only made it as far as Speaker of the House, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room specialist at Thornton Library in Oxford. But Speaker of the U.S. House is second in line – behind the vice president – to assume the role of President if circumstances call for it.
As governor, U.S. Senator and state legislator, Turner has his own historical marker, one of 20 that can be seen along major roads throughout Warren County.
Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris continued their discussion of historical markers in the four-county area in their tri-weekly history segment called Around Old Granville; Thursday’s segment focused on Warren County, which Pace described as one of the most important and influential areas in the state between the Revolution and the Civil War.
The first marker that went up in Warren County remembers Annie Carter Lee – the daughter of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. She and other family members had left their Virginia home because of the war and were staying at Jones Springs, a health resort. She died after contracting typhoid fever in 1862 and was buried in the Jones cemetery in Warrenton. Her remains were moved in the mid-1990’s and placed in the Lee family cemetery.
Her marker was placed in 1936, just one year after the state created the program.
Jacob Holt didn’t get a marker until 1976, Pace said.
“He was one of two really big architects in the boom era” between 1845 and 1861, Pace said.
He designed and built homes – many of which still stand. His interest lay in Greek Revival and Italianate styles, but his own home in Warrenton, Pace said is quite modest and doesn’t resemble the other examples of his work.
Find a complete list of historical markers located across the state at https://www.dncr.nc.gov/
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