Tag Archive for: #aroundoldgranville

TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mill Strike of 1958

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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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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Annie Carter Lee

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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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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Natural Disasters

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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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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Warren and Franklin County Historical Markers

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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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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Warren County Historical Markers

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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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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Vance County Historical Markers

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Placing historical markers along prominent roadways is one way to make sure that they’ll be seen by lots of people driving by, but it also means that they run the risk of being struck by a wayward vehicle or even by the occasional grass mowing crews keeping the shoulders tidy.

Vance County has 16 historical markers located within its boundaries – seven of them honor individuals and the other nine are for particular events, towns and structures.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris continued their discussion of historical markers with a focus on Vance County on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.

There are no fewer than five markers in and around Williamsboro, and Pace said that’s a nod to when the area – now not much more than a crossroads – was a thriving community back in the pre-Revolutionary days of the 1700’s. Williamsborough, as it was known during Colonial times, has its own marker which reads: “Eighteenth century town, named for John Williams, judge, state legislator, congressman, who lived nearby. Old St. John’s Church is here.”

“You wouldn’t know it riding through there today,” Pace said. Except for the fact that the historical markers bring attention to St. John’s Episcopal Church, the oldest frame church building in the state, as well as James Turner, an early governor and senator who lived in nearby.

Another marker remembers the Bingham School, which didn’t stay very long in Williamsboro, but was the first military school, established in 1826.

The marker for Richard Henderson originally had been placed on Norlina Road, across from the former WHNC radio station, but Pace said it was relocated to Satterwhite Point Road, about a mile from where his grave is. Henderson was the founder of Transylvania County in Kentucky and Nashville, TN.

Another Henderson, Leonard Henderson, has a marker, too. He’s who the city is named for, Pace said, but he was also an educator and a member of the first state Supreme Court in the early 1800’s.

The majority of the markers remind passersby of people and places long gone: there’s the Glass House in Kittrell, for example, that had been a destination for wealthy Northerners to escape city winters and enjoy the healing powers the area’s springs. And there’s Kittrell’s Springs, the health resort-turned hospital for Confederate soldiers in the waning days of the Civil War.

And the Confederate cemetery, where 52 soldiers’ graves are located.

But the historical marker that was placed in 2007 recalls a more recent event that has claimed its own place in history: The strike at Harriet-Henderson cotton mill occurred between 1958 and 1961, and Pace said it helped to showcase the South as a place where unions didn’t have traction as in other areas of the country, particularly the Northeast.

And although it’s not the earliest marker to be erected, the marker for John Lederer along N.C. 39 north of Townsville honors a pioneering German explorer who traveled in the area in 1670, with the help of a Native American guide.

Pace said Lederer may very well be the first person of European descent to set foot in this part of the world, but he sort of “fell through the cracks, history wise,” Pace added.

Are there other potential people and places that could be honored with their own historical marker?

Surely, Pace said.

He would consider the Blacknall family’s Continental Plant Co. that shipped strawberry plants all over the world, Greystone Quarry as well as Kerr Lake, which was the largest reservoir east of the Mississippi when U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between 1947 and 1952.

Find a county-by-county listing of historical markers at https://www.dncr.nc.gov/nc-historical-markers-guide-may-2024/open

 

Listen back to the entire interview at www.wizs.com.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Historical Markers

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The state’s very first official historical marker was erected in 1936 – just a year after the Highway Historical Marker Commission was established. But where was it placed? Any ideas?

If you said Granville County, you’d be correct. The first marker honors John Penn, one of North Carolina’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence.

But Old Granville County – that four-county area that includes Vance, Warren and Franklin along with Granville – has a total of 57, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room specialist at Oxford’s Thornton Library.

The state’s 100 counties are divided into 17 regions; Vance and Granville counties each boast 15 markers and are in Region G; Franklin and Warren, both in Region E, have seven and 20, respectively.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris are tackling the topic of historic markers for the next few “Around Old Granville” segments of TownTalk. First up, Granville County.

The John Penn marker, located along Highway 15 in Stovall, was issued along with four others in the inaugural group, Pace said.

Interestingly, Granville County has the oldest marker, but also two of the newest: Camp Butner got a marker in 1989 and James E. Webb, who was instrumental in the creation of NASA and the space program, got a marker in 2018.

The commission started its work with the marker program as the country was emerging from the economic devastation of the Great Depression, which Pace said showed the state’s commitment to history. There are criteria for getting a marker approved and placed, he said, including placement in a prominent location on official state highways.

Webb’s marker, for example, is located along College Street in Oxford. He grew up a block away, Pace said.

Thomas Person has a historical marker in Granville County. He was probably the wealthiest person who ever lived in Granville County and owned 80,000 acres. But that’s not what got him a marker along Highway 158 back in 1972. His marker reads “Leader of popular movements: Regulation, Revolution and Antifederalism. His home in Goshen stood five miles north.”

Pace observes what he called “commemoration fever” when it comes to remembering historical figures or events. There seems to be renewed interest in history 50 or more years after an important event, he said.

“It’s kind of like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he said. Rockers aren’t considered until 25 years after their first record is released.

Horner Military Academy got a marker in 1939. It was known nationally because of the prominent people who attended the private school, which was established in 1851 by James JH. Horner.

There’s a marker for Henry Plummer Cheatham, who was born into slavery and served in the U.S. Congress from 1889-1893. Cheatham also was the superintendent of what is now Central Children’s Home for close to 30 years until his death in 1935. His marker can be seen on N.C. 96 at Eighth Street in Oxford.

Central Children’s Home – and the Masonic Home for Children, the other orphanage in Oxford, also have markers, placed in 1965 and 1936, respectively.

A marker for Mary Potter Academy was erected in 2005 along College Street, also known as U.S. 158 Business. Its inscription reads: “Founded by G.C. Shaw 1889 to educate African Americans. Named for a Presbyterian benefactor. Later a public school. Operated one block E.”

Bullock has one of five markers in Region G that identifies the Native American Trading Path that was subsequently used by colonists and settlers between Petersburg, VA and well into North Carolina – Hillsborough and beyond. There’s also a Trading Path marker in Vance County, but that’s a story for another day.

Check out all the historical markers in Granville County and across the state at https://www.dncr.nc.gov/about-us/history/division-historical-resources/nc-highway-historical-marker-program

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Walter Alexander Pattillo

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Walter Alexander Pattillo was a Baptist preacher, newspaper publisher and accomplished farmer who established a dozen churches in and around Old Granville County. He died young – age 57 – but his legacy has had a lasting impact throughout the area.

Local historian Mark Pace said Walter Pattillo was born in 1850, the son of plantation owner James Pattillo and Hannah Turner, an enslaved woman.

Although he was only 15 years old when the Civil War ended, Pattillo had an advantage that not many enslaved people had:

He already knew how to read and write.

Pattillo married Ida Hart of Stovall in 1870 and they raised 14 children in what is now present-day Granville County.

During the Reconstruction era – which Pace defines as that 35-year period between 1865 and 1900 – Pattillo was active in the community as a minister, an educator, a farmer and newspaper publisher.

But he was never really involved in politics, Pace said on the tri-weekly history segment of TownTalk.

“He was kinda the guy behind the scenes,” Pace said. Other local prominent African Americans such as Henry Plummer Cheatham and James Hunter Young may have garnered statewide and national attention, wielding a lot of influence and political power, “but in a lot of ways it was Pattillo who had the (real) power,” he said.

He was but 16 years old when he adopted the Baptist faith and was “openly very religious,” Pace said.

He was also a carpenter and ran a sawmill and took care of his mother and sisters during their lifetimes.

A farmer who believed in education and religion, Pattillo became part of what was called the Colored Farmers Alliance, the largest group of African Americans outside of the church. This group helped elect Cheatham and George Henry White, among others to Congress during Reconstruction.

But as an educator, Pattillo also is credited with establishing the first school for African Americans that was run by African Americans.

And although it took him awhile to do it, Pattillo graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh.

“How he did that, when it took a day to get on a horse and go to Raleigh and back,” Pace mused, must have been quite a feat. He enrolled in 1873 and was graduated in 1887.

One fellow alumnus was none other than Henry Plummer Cheatham.

The majority of churches he helped establish over the years are still active churches and include Cedar Grove Baptist, Michaels Creek, Stovall Baptist, Blue Wing Church near Virgilina, Blue Wing Grove Baptist, First Baptist Church, Oxford, Flat Creek Baptist in Williamsboro, Mt. Olive in South Boston, New Jonathan Creek, Olive Grove Baptist and Penn Avenue Baptist, where he was pastor when he died in 1908.

He started his first church in Stovall in 1873, one year before becoming ordained. That one-room log cabin became Stovall Baptist Church, which remains active today.

Right before the Civil War began, Pace said Granville County was the largest slaveholding county in the state. It also had about 900 freed Blacks residing within the county, so when the Civil War ended and enslaved people were emancipated, Granville County found itself with a majority Black population that would largely vote Republican. The 1870 Census documents that more than two-thirds of the county population was African American, Pace said.

(Remember: The Republican Party at that time was considered “the party of Lincoln,” and was more progressive than the Democratic party of the day.)

Granville County consistently elected Blacks to public office and sent numerous Black legislators to Washington, including the aforementioned Cheatham and Young.

In addition to his contributions to politics, religion and education in the area, Pattillo also was instrumental in establishing what is now known as Central Children’s Home in Oxford, founded in 1882.

“He left so many legacies,” Pace said. “He was an incredibly talented person.”

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: Agriculture’s Roots In Vance County

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Around the turn of the 20th century, the Nutbush area – known today as the Drewry community – had just shy of 400 households. And of those households, said local historian Mark Pace, there were only eight that did not derive their income from agriculture.

But in those eight households surely lived people engaged in support services for all those farmers, Pace noted on Thursday’s tri-weekly history segment of TownTalk. There were merchants, bankers, household help and physicians – all the things necessary for a community back in 1900.

Today’s landscape is quite different, to which anyone who drives along most any county road will attest: Subdivisions are popping up where row crops once stood and solar fields are replacing pastures and hayfields all across the state.

But Vance County is a little bit of an anomaly from other counties in the state, Pace said, as he and WIZS’s Bill Harris discussed a condensed history of agriculture in the county. About one-third of the roughly 178,000 acres of land that comprises the county is allotted for agriculture, which includes, pastureland, forestry and crops.

Some counties have virtually no farmland left, Pace said, thanks to urban sprawl and the proliferation of suburbs.

“That’s a trend that will probably continue,” he said.

Vance County – and Old Granville County before it – has a long history with agriculture in general, and as Pace said, “You can’t talk about Vance County and not talk about tobacco.”

From the mid-1700’s, this was always a good place to grow tobacco, he explained.

“Red” tobacco was prevalent then, and used more for plug or chewing tobacco, snuff and cigars.

Fast-forward to the 1890’s when James B. Duke was cornering the market in the cigarette-making industry in Durham, Henderson also was well-known as a tobacco market. According to Pace, Henderson once was the third-largest tobacco market in the world, behind Winston-Salem and Durham.

Henderson was perfectly placed between Richmond and Raleigh, and the railroad meant that the tobacco that was sold and bought each season could hop a freight bound for destinations across the world.

And although tobacco certainly was agriculture’s “king” crop around these parts, there were other agricultural ventures, too, Pace said.

Like silk. And sugarcane.

Huh?

In the 1830’s and ‘40’s, Pace said, parts of Vance County had a fascination with silkworms, who spin their pricey filaments in the branches of mulberry trees. At that time, cotton was selling for between 6 cents and 8 cents a pound, but silk fetched a whopping $4 a pound.

“It was worth your while to mess with silk,” Pace said.

And there was a sugar processing plant in Townsville, Pace said, that processed locally grown sugar cane.

Neither sugar cane nor silk really took hold, but there were other niche producers that had a bigger impact on the local agriculture scene.

Blacknall Strawberry Nursery in Kittrell, for example, shipped thousands upon thousands of plants each year. It was located about where the Dollar General is there along U.S. 1, Pace said. And long-time residents that remember the clothing store Davis’s on Garnett Street may not be aware that Mr. E.G. Davis earlier ventures included a food superette and more in his downtown location before settling on clothing alone.

And he also created the area’s first large-scale ag industry, Pace explained, back in the 1930’s when he established a chicken farm out in the county on what many old-timers still refer to as Chicken Farm Road.

“People are still making a living off the land,” Pace said, but farming and agriculture certainly have evolved over the years as tobacco subsidies and allotments have given way to alternate crops, niche markets and farms became destinations for recreational activities.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Camp Butner

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Soldier Memorial Sports Arena in Butner, which serves as a recreational center as well as the site of the Camp Butner Museum, was built in four days back in 1942 by a special team of builders who traveled about constructing buildings for use at military installations during World War II.

It is one of about 1,700 buildings that popped up like mushrooms across the 60 square miles or so of farmland to provide training facilities for U.S. soldiers. By the time the war ended in September 1945, things were winding down at Camp Butner, and local historian Mark Pace said it gave rise to the town of Butner, a unique town in that, until 2007, was operated completely by the state of North Carolina.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided that this part of Granville County would be the site of the camp, they offered landowners cents on the dollar for their property, which happened to be perfect for growing flue-cured tobacco.

“It was a take-it-or-leave it” proposition,” Pace told WIZS’s Bill Harris on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment. If the offer wasn’t accepted, the government just condemned the property anyway, he noted.

That didn’t sit too well with many landowners, a sentiment that lingers still today with descendants of those farmers, many of whom didn’t return, even after the war ended.

“It was a major upset to their everyday lives,” Pace said, adding that to say the government’s actions were contentious would be an understatement.

More than 425 families – 1,300 people – had to relocate, not to mention churches, school buildings and more than 1,600 graves.

Just like the recreational facility, the barracks, roads and other infrastructure was built in an incredibly short time, Pace said, and by August 1942 the camp was operational – complete with air field, a railroad spur line, churches, a hospital and even a radio station. Construction went on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in response to the national emergency – remember, the United States had just entered into the war in December 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Camp Butner took $28 million to build in the early ‘40’s, Pace said. In today’s dollars, that sum would hover around half a billion dollars. Workers got paid $1.25 an hour, which would be about $30 an hour in today’s money.

Because so many young men were fighting in Europe, local farmers faced a labor shortage. They had a hard time getting all the work done on the farm – crops still had to come in, the dairy cows needed milking and the cash crop – tobacco – had to get in the barns.

“Some of the prisoners were allowed to leave the camp and go to work,” he said. And the government said farmers had to pay them wages.

After the war ended, only about half of the land was sold back to the original landowners, their descendants or others. Pace said one man from Durham bought 3,000 acres for the grand total of $10,000. No need to break out the calculators – that’s less than $3.50 an acre.

The National Guard kept about 5,000 acres and the state of North Carolina bought what was left – for the grand sum of $1.

And that’s how all those state-run facilities came to be located in Butner – the alcohol rehab center, Murdoch center and more, Pace said.

Today, the population of Butner is about 8,600. Where soldiers once trained and POWs were housed are now subdivisions and other trappings of post-War suburbia. Many of the buildings are gone, but some – like the sports complex – remain. St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church occupies a former church building at Camp Butner, for example.

There’s probably no community like Butner in the entire country, Pace mused.

Butner has a rich past for a town that’s been incorporated less than 20 years.

The Camp Butner Museum is open the first Saturday of each month from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pace invites the public to come visit the museum, which has many artifacts and photos. The address is 416 24th St., Butner.

 

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