TownTalk: Around Old Granville: NC Author Writes About The Revolution
Author James Becker discusses his recent book “Secrets of the American Revolution”.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville with Mark Pace
Watch out, Oxford. Your tiny neighbor to the south is gaining on you. It will only take a couple of hundred more people to stake the claim of being the largest town in Granville County.
That, according to local historian Mark Pace, who talked with WIZS’s Bill Harris for the “Around Old Granville” segment of The Local Skinny! Monday.
Butner’s growth today, however, pales in comparison to the early to mid-1940’s when the U.S. government built Camp Butner as it was gearing up for World War II.
Pace said William B. Umstead and his brother John were instrumental in getting the federal government to locate Camp Butner in the southwest corner of the county, close to a big city (Durham), but not “too” close, Pace said.
Construction began in February 1942, on more than 4,000 acres of mostly farmland, much of which had been owned and worked by families for 200 years or more.
“It was amazing how quickly it was built,” Pace said. Within five months, there were numerous structures, including an armory, sports building and a water tower, all of which are standing today.
“They had 15,000 people working 24-7 to build that camp,” Pace said. And because it was a federal project, the state’s segregation laws were superseded by federal jurisdiction, which meant that for the first time, African Americans were hired the same as their White counterparts, he added.
Camp Butner was home for thousands of workers, civilian and military, but also for more than 4,000 German and Italian prisoners of war.
“So many farm people had been called up to serve, POWs would go and work farms,” Pace said. “And they’d get paid a little bit, too.”
After the war ended, much of the property reverted back to the landowners, but the footprint of Camp Butner became what is now considered the town of Butner. But until it was incorporated in 2007, the town was run by the state of North Carolina.
“Go to the town hall,” Pace said. “There’s a marvelous museum in the lobby” chronicling the creation of the town that once was known as Camp Butner.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: History Of Cedar Walk
Think about it for a minute: Is is easier to remember what you ate for breakfast this morning or to visualize in your mind the house where you grew up? Many historians rely on people’s long-term memories to piece together the past, and that is exactly what Mark Pace did to try to learn more about Cedar Walk, a home in Williamsboro that was torn down in 1967.
He and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about the origins of the home, which was called Blooming Hope when it was a school for girls during its early days. During the Depression era, it was the oldest house standing in Vance County, Pace said during the Around Old Granville segment of Thursday’s The Local Skinny!
Pace, North Carolina Room Specialist at the Richard Thornton Library in Oxford, said he was able to talk to some folks who’d lived in the house in the 1940’s and ‘50s who were able to describe the interior floor plan. The Library of Congress has photographs of the home taken in the 1930’s that show a fairly plain, two-story frame home with a covered front porch.
“It’s a shame it’s not here – it’s associated with so many important people,” Pace said. Revolutionary War leaders, a former governor and the minister who helped establish the Presbyterian Church in the state have ties to Cedar Walk, so named because of the lane of cedar trees that lined the walk up to the home.
By most accounts, the home probably was built around 1780, Pace said, based on the style and size of the structure. If the structure were still standing, the wood could be aged using tree-ring dating, he added, but most likely it would have been a contemporary of St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was built in 1773.
It was later purchased by Col. Robert Burton, who had fought in the Revolutionary War.
Burton was a businessman and UNC has a ledger in which he recorded some of his business dealings, Pace said. One notable entry is the sale of a horse to a fellow named Daniel Boone.
One of Burton’s nephews came to live at Cedar Walk. His parents died and Hutchins Burton came to live at Cedar Walk. He became North Carolina’s 22nd governor, serving from 1824-1827.
When the Bullock family bought the home in 1828, they made an addition to the home, which Pace described as “one of the great old plantation houses in Vance County.” Although the house no longer stands, the land remains in the Bullock family.
The house fell into disrepair, probably for a couple of reasons, Pace noted. One reason was the lack of electricity, which would have been a costly endeavor. But the second reason, he said, is because people said the house was haunted.
Visit the Library of Congress website and search “Cedar Walk” to see photographs.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Place Names In Warren And Franklin Counties
In a continuing discussion of local communities with odd names or curious origins, Bill Harris and Mark Pace Thursday again shone the spotlight on Franklin and Warren counties in the Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny!
Harris had been studying a 1911 map that Rand McNally had published and tested Pace’s knowledge about communities, some of which would no longer make the cut to be included in current maps of the area.
There’s Union Hill, for one, which was in the vicinity of Rocky Ford down in Franklin County. It had a post office from around 1834-38, Pace said.
Then there’s Brookston, named for the Brooks family, which originally was in Warren County but got redrawn at some point into what is now Vance County.
Jack, in Warren County near Littleton, was named for Jack Johnson, postmaster for the short-lived post office there. It’s just one of numerous areas that sported the first names of prominent or affluent people of the day, Pace said.
He mentioned others, including Margaret, Catesville and Drewry.
Have you ever heard of Lumdsen, an area between the Tar River bridge and Kittrell in Vance County? Pace said his research has turned up no family with that surname in Census records, but he said the name could have come from someone who worked for the railroad that came through the area.
In cases where there were no stations for the trains to stop, “people would literally tie a white handkerchief to a tree” to indicate that the conductor needed to stop and pick up passengers. The area known as Lumsden could have been named to honor a rail official, he added.
Shocco Springs in Warren County had a post office from the early 1830’s to 1866. This area became known as Lickskillet, an amusing name for an area that, before the Civil War, counted among its residents some of the most prominent and affluent families around.
Communities sometimes got named by wealthy landowners that lived nearby, like Odell in Warren County – named by the Alston family as an homage to the family castle in England.
But oftentimes, it was a post office in a particular area that helped communities get their names.
One spot in Warren County was Mountain View, Pace said. Situated between Macon and Vaughan, the Riggan family provided a half dozen or so of Mountain View’s postmasters between 1879 and 1929.
At one time, there were 32 post offices sprinkled throughout Warren County. This would have been before the introduction of rural free delivery, when people had to go to a central spot to pick up their mail. Often, that local spot was inside a country store, he added.
Franklinton has one the oldest, continually used post offices in the area, Pace noted.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Place Names
What’s in a name?
So many places within the four-county area got their names as a way to honor prominent families of the day; landowners who donated land for the railroad to come through back in the late 1880s, for example, resulted in town names like Stovall, Townsville and Stem.
An area hit the “big time” when it got a post office, and local historian and Thornton Library’s North Carolina Room specialist Mark Pace said the names that postmasters chose resulted in names like Dabney, Epsom and others. Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris combed through a list of townships and communities – some still in existence and others lost to time and progress – during Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny!
Take Dabney, for instance. When a post office was established there, the postmaster renamed the community of Herndon (president of the railroad)to Dabney to honor William Dabney, a state geologist who “found some pretty neat things” in the 1880s and 1890s. Dabney later moved to Texas and became a prominent professor and university president.
And the community known as Mobile, for example, never had its own post office, but got its name because of the ties to Mobile, Alabama that the Hawkins family, a prominent African American family in Henderson, had.
More recently, the Granville County town of Butner gets its name from Camp Butner, an Army base constructed in 1942. Maj. Gen. Henry W. Butner, from Stokes County, NC, had died just a few years earlier and officials thought it fitting to name the base for someone from North Carolina, Pace said. Butner served in World War I and was noted for developing artillery for the Army, he added.
“It was run by the state of North Carolina until it was incorporated in 2007,” Pace said, making it the third newest town in the state.
The Umstead brothers – John and William B. – used their political influence to get the government to building the base in Granville County, where land was cheap and the camp could be relatively secluded but in close proximity to a large city (Durham).
The origin of Butner’s next-door neighbor, Creedmoor, isn’t quite so clear. There are several theories out there, Pace said, but he suspects that the town got its name from a famous gun range on Long Island, NY called Creedmoor Gun Range. There were a lot of gun enthusiasts in the area when Creedmoor was incorporated in 1911, he added.
The Lyons family established a post office in 1886 and there’s a Lyon Station Road located nearby.
William Thomas Stem was a big farmer in Granville County and he gave land for the railroad to come through. The name Stem replaced an earlier community called Tally Ho, which was a stagecoach stop. Tally Ho Road and Tally Ho township serve as reminders today.
There is a similar situation up in the northern part of Granville County, in the Sassafras Fork township. That name, Pace said, goes back to the late 1700s, but the town name was changed to Stovall to honor John W. Stovall who donated the land for, you guessed it, the railroad to come through to connect Clarksville and Oxford.
Communities like Gela near Stovall, Zacho near Wilton and Woodsworth near Townsville are just a few examples of communities that just sort of died off, Pace said. In the case of Woodsworth, Pace said, the family for which the community is named, moved to Arkansas but the name stuck. Zacho had a post office, and was located south of Wilton going toward the Tar River. Until just a few years ago, there had been a one-room shed that served as a post office.
There may have been only one Zacho, but several counties claim communities called Sandy Creek, Pace said.
There’s one in Vance, one in Warren and one in Franklin, he said. And they’re located near each other geographically, which could muddy the waters for genealogy researchers who are trying to find where ancestors lived or where they may be buried.
The oldest place name with European origin is Nutbush creek. William byrd doing dividing line between nc and va. Surveying in 1722.
Came to a creek in northern vance co. had a lot of hazel nut. So they just called it Nutbush creek.
“The oldest place name with a European origin,” Pace said, “is Nutbush Creek,” located in the general area of Williamsborough north of Henderson. William Byrd was surveying the area that created the North Carolina-Virginia state line in 1722.
“He came to a creek in northern Vance County that had a lot of hazel nut trees,” Pace explained. “So they just called it Nutbush Creek.”
Sometimes names come about as a matter of practicality.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Doing The Numbers For Memorial Day
There are about 110,000 veterans of World War II still alive in the United States, and at least one of them lives in Granville County, according to Mark Pace. He and Bill Harris discussed war military service veterans as part of the Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny! Thursday.
The average age of the WWII veteran is 93, Pace said. Several veterans have died in the past year, he said, along with a couple more in Vance County.
It’s sometimes difficult to determine exact numbers, Pace said, but his research has shown that there are 20 soldiers from the Old Granville area who died in the American Revolution. At least 450 (but probably more like 550) who died in the Civil War from the approximately 2,600 who fought for the Confederacy, down to 1 soldier who died in Iraq. He said 3 soldiers from Granville County and 7 from Vance County died in Korea, and 13 from Granville and 8 from Vance dying in Vietnam. One Granville County soldier died in Iraq.
By comparison, he found that 68 soldiers from Vance County died in WWII, along with 37 from Granville County.
Records are sometimes hard to come by, Pace acknowledged, and therefore having a truly accurate count is almost impossible.
Pace said a 1973 fire in St. Louis destroyed many records related to servicemen in WWI, making it far easier to locate records from the Civil War and WWII.
Even the Revolutionary War has records that remain, he said.
“There are some pretty good records from the Revolution,” he said. Many people had to sign an Oath of Allegiance against King George. Those signatures are pretty good indications of which side you were on, Pace said.
There’s still one world leader, however, who served her country in WWII and serves her country today, Pace said:
Ninety-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth II. When she was 19, she served in the transportation and ambulance service for England.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Tiny Broadwick
She was a little bit of a thing, but Georgia Ann “Tiny” Broadwick achieved some larger-than-life accomplishments in her day.
All of 4-foot-8 and 85 pounds, Broadwick had been married, given birth to a child and had jumped out of a hot-air balloon by the time she was 15, according to Mark Pace, who shared details about the Granville County native’s life and career on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny!
She was born in 1893 to tobacco farmers, but her parents moved to Henderson when she was 7 and went to work in the local cotton mill.
She went to see Charles Broadwick’s air show near Raleigh and the rest, as they say, is history.
Pace said she faced trials and tribulations in her early years. “She Literally lived life on the edge,” he said. But when she saw Broadwick’s show, she walked up to him and said “I want to jump out of a balloon.”
Broadwick took her in, became her mentor and basically adopted her. They toured the country for many years and Broadwick was known as the “world famous jumping doll,” Pace said. At age 15, she became the first female to jump from a balloon and then an airplane.
Broadwick wowed the public with his airborne acrobatics, but he also had an eye for business. He associated himself with pilot and aviation Glenn Martin – the Martin of what would become Martin Marietta – and it is during that association that Tiny Broadwick really got her name on the map.
Charles Broadwick was pitching his parachute idea to the Army and Tiny demonstrated how they could be used. During her first jump, the static line got tangled up – that’s the line that literally tethered the parachutist to the airplane – she decided to ditch it on her final jump and essentially did a free fall. But she had a cord attached to the parachute that she herself could deploy, and in so doing she invented the ripcord.
But Broadwick didn’t get a patent on the ripcord, so they missed an opportunity to make money from it.
She died in 1978 at the age of 85 and is buried in Sunset Gardens in Henderson. Her great-granddaughter, Bonnie Young Ayscue, wrote the foreward for a recently published book that includes stories of Tiny Broadwick. The book, published in March 2022, is titled “Ladies of Skydiving A Comprehensive History: Volume One The Early Years” by Robert V. Lewis.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Louise Sneed Hill
Louise Sneed Hill was the daughter of a very prominent family that came to the Townsville/Williamsboro area in the late 1700’s. She was educated at an elite boarding school in New York City. She was accustomed to the finer things in life, and she spent her adult married life establishing that culture and high society in her new home of Denver, Colorado.
For all her accolades and accomplishments, there’s something else that Hill did: She snubbed the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, of Titanic fame. Mark Pace recounted the story on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment during The Local Skinny!, and he and Bill Harris discussed her family’s importance in the area.
Louise’s mother died just 11 days after Louise was born, Pace said, apparently of complications from the birth. Louise was baptized on the same day that her mother’s funeral was held; both ceremonies took place at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Williamsboro.
Although Sneed’s Mansion still stands today beside the church in Williamsboro, it is in a general state of disrepair, Pace said. Louise Sneed is a good example of someone from a locally prominent family who moved away from North Carolina and made a big difference somewhere else.
For Louise, that “somewhere else” was Denver, in a state that had just joined the United States a few decades earlier.
“She kind of set the standard for high society in Colorado at the time,” Pace said. “She brought a lot of culture to Denver,” Pace said. Hill created the first published record of members of society and provided instructions on how to get one’s name on the list – chief among them were having lots of money, knowing how to entertain properly and knowing when to pay a visit to someone.
As for her limited interaction with Margaret “Molly” Brown, the story goes like this: Molly and her husband had struck gold – literally – and were fabulously wealthy, but Molly was not accepted into Hill’s circle of society. Only when she became famous for her role in helping fellow Titanic passengers to safety did Hill change her mind about Molly.
Historical documents, including court records, chronicle the goings-on around Sneed’s Mansion, Pace said, which include entertaining and lavish parties to horse racing and general carousing.
“When the court adjourned to Sneed’s Mansion,” Pace said, it meant that partygoers would arrive at 6 p.m., have supper at 10, then dance from 1 a.m. to dawn. Then, if anyone remained standing in the morning, they’d have brunch and head home sometime around noon.
Hill never returned to North Carolina and she spent her last years occupying an entire floor of a nursing home that serves as a hotel today.
And sometimes, Pace said, come reports that the phone from Room 904 mysteriously rings, although no one has inhabited that space since Hill’s death in 1955.
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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Cemeteries
Whether they are small family plots or large city-owned and maintained properties, cemeteries can reveal a lot about an area’s history and its beginnings. In the Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny! Tuesday, Bill Harris and Mark Pace discussed a few prominent cemeteries in the Vance County area, some of which have graves that date back to before the late 1800’s.
But Pace said the oldest known graves are probably in a private cemetery on an estate near Williamsboro called Montpelier. There are graves there from the late 1700’s, he said, as well as at Ashland, the site of the original Henderson family cemetery.
Two of the larger and older cemeteries in Henderson are Blacknall and Elmwood.
A group of prominent Blacks formed the Union Cemetery Company in 1887 and purchased land from the Blackwell family to create a cemetery for African Americans. But how did Blackwell become Blacknall? Pace supposes that somehow the names became confused – if you’ve ever tried to read old handwritten documents, it stands to reason that someone somewhere simply spelled the name incorrectly, thus creating Blacknall Cemetery.
There are still Reavis family graves located in the middle of Blacknall Cemetery, Pace said, because originally it belong to that family. Those graves date back to the 1860’s and ‘70’s.
“It had gotten in bad shape in the 1970’s and ‘80’s,” Pace said. A consortium of civic groups and the city got together and raised awareness about the cemetery and cleaned it up, and it is still in use today, he added.
Elmwood Cemetery, established in 1879, is located at the end of Breckenridge Street. At that time, the dead were buried either in smaller family cemeteries or in church cemeteries. As the city of Henderson grew, the need for more and bigger cemeteries grew as well. The city bought Elmwood in 1935, and there are a number of graves that were relocated there from other cemeteries. Since then, two other sections have been added to expand the cemetery, Pace said.
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