Tag Archive for: #aroundoldgranville

The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Place Names

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Canadian Immigrants

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We’ve learned from history lessons in school about immigrants who traveled from faraway places, their worldy possessions often fitting in a small suitcase, passing by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to begin their new lives in America.

But did you know that there was a contingent of immigrants who came here after the end of the Civil War to what is now Vance County – all the way from…Canada?

A local man named Samuel Jones Parham got into the real estate business at a time when land prices had tanked as a result of the breakup of the huge plantations during Reconstruction.

Although Parham wasn’t single-handedly responsible for “the Canadian invasion,” Mark Pace quipped, he did go to an area in central Ontario to talk up the great land deals in the area.

“He made a connection in central Ontario,” Pace told Bill Harris on the Around Old Granville segment Thursday’s The Local Skinny! To be specific, he sold land to several families in the towns of Hamstead and St. Mary’s.

Pace said 25 families – for a total of about 400 people – relocated from Canada to Vance County between 1871 and 1873. The majority of these immigrants were first-generation Canadians whose families had come from Scotland, Pace said.

Scotland and Canada both were subjects of the British Crown back then, Pace reminded, and there was a lack of land ownership. “The motivation (to immigrate) was to own your own land,” he said.

Most of the families settled along Sandy Creek, between Vicksboro and Epsom, he said. Families with last names like Buchan, Dickie, Fox, McMillan, Pyree, Stewart and Smith were among those who came south to the United States with the dream of owning property.

“Some of their great- and great-great-grandkids are still here today,” Pace said.

Interestingly enough, there began a reverse migration of sorts back to the same area of Ontario – thanks to a crop called tobacco. Tobacco was being planted – and harvested – in that same area, and many people from here would go back to Canada to work during the growing season.

Samuel Parham died in 1880; his widow died in 1903. Although her husband was a mayor of Henderson, her name is perhaps better known because the original hospital in Henderson was named in her memory: Maria Parham.

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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: The Mystery Of Harrison Macon

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Where is Harrison Macon? Or perhaps the better question is where is this Revolutionary War veteran buried? Harrison Macon was the brother of the famous Nathaniel Macon and while Nathaniel may be more well known, Harrison also had quite a significant life. He was captured at Camden, South Carolina in 1780 during the Revolution and was a captain during the war. He was born circa 1745 and was dead by 1790. He married Hannah Glenn, daughter of Gideon Glenn who lived in present day Rocky Ford. The Glenn’s owned over a thousand acres of land and Harrison Macon lived close by, just “across the creek” from the Glenn’s. This was likely Lynch’s Creek.

The Glenn’s, as was the custom in that time, had a family burial ground on their property and legend has it that Harrison, being the husband of Hannah Glenn, was buried in the Glenn family cemetery. But just where is that?

On the Around Old Granville segment of the Local Skinny on Monday, WIZS’ Bill Harris and North Carolina Room Specialist at Thornton Library in Oxford, discussed the mystery of Macon’s place of burial. The search began four or five years ago when the Halifax Rifles chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution got curious about it. The search has continued with local historians from Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin Counties attempting to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

One of the documents unearthed is an application for a headstone made to the U.S. War Department in 1931 by Dr. Daniel T. Smithwick of Franklin Co. Dr. Smithwick was a local historian who had married Evelyn Macon, a great granddaughter of Harrison Macon. According to the application, Smithwick place the the headstone at the “Old Home Place”, near Louisburg. Was it a Macon home place, the Glenn homeplace? No one really knows for certain. Macons lived all around the area from Ingleside (which was once known as Macon) all the way to the Bobbitt area.

The Glenn Home place is still standing and occupied. It has been heavily remodeled many times and if there is a Glenn family burial ground then this is the likely site of Macon’s resting place. Just down the road from present day Rocky Ford are the remains of a once thriving community called Letha which was situated near a ford on Lynch’s Creek. The remains of an old dam can be found there along with a building or two. The land was likely part of what was once Glenn property and there is a cemetery with a number of unmarked graves inclucingh one burial situated on top of a hill overlooking the creek it is this grave that has caught the attention of local historians. This particular grave is covered in stones, somewhat reminiscent of Nathaniel Macon’s grave site in Warren Co. but nowhere near as elaborate. Could this be the site of Harrison Macon? Many historians certainly think this is a possibility. So far no headstone has been found at the site but further investigation is needed.

So the question remains “Where is Harrison Macon?”

The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: John Eaton

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John Eaton, apparently, did not shy away from challenges, political or personal. And back when he was President Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War, the political and the personal challenges overlapped – a lot.

Eaton, who was born in 1790 in Halifax County near Scotland Neck, was quite a significant character in the U.S. government in the early 19th century. Local historian Mark Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about his life and work on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny!

He was on the fast track like no other, it seemed. At age 12, he was a college student at University of North Carolina. But by 14, he dropped out and decided to study law.

He joined a wave of folks who journeyed to Nashville, TN for fame and fortune. At age 18, he was practicing law there and married Myra Lewis, the adopted daughter of Andrew Jackson.

He was elected to the U.S. Senate to represent Tennessee when he was 28 years old – two years shy of the minimum age to run for that office, Pace said.

His wife died shortly after they’d moved to an inn in Washington, DC, and it wasn’t long before Eaton became involved with the innkeeper’s daughter.

Her name was Peggy Timberlake and she was married to a much-older man who was in the military and died while on an overseas assignment. She and Eaton were married just months later, thus creating the “Petticoat Affair.”  By this time, President Jackson had tapped Eaton to be his Secretary of War, and this whole ordeal posed a real challenge.

“It was the scandal of the day,” Pace said. The Eatons were shunned by DC society and, in fact, President Andrew Jackson ordered his cabinet members – all men – to require their wives to accept Eaton’s new wife. They did not comply, and, the whole Cabinet resigned which required Jackson to appoint an entirely new group.

Eaton resigned as well, Pace said, and became minister to Spain and later, he was appointed Governor of Florida.

As minister to Spain, Pace said, he didn’t excel. Eaton, it seemed, had developed a drinking problem and Peggy became the de facto ambassador, he added.

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The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Weldon’s Mill

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It’s been decades since Weldon’s Mill closed, but it remains a local landmark that represents memories of times gone by, when just about every creek or stream had a mill on it.

And although Weldon’s Mill is still standing, it’s not in good condition, but Mark Pace said the foundation of the old mill is probably original. That means it’s been around since the 1700’s, when Granville County included what is now, Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties. Pace joined Bill Harris for the Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny! Tuesday and waxed poetic about the legacy of mills in and around the area.

In 1884, there were two dozen mills still in operation in the area. That number dropped to half a dozen by the mid-1950’s. But one of those was Weldon’s Mill, located on Sandy Creek in the southern part of Vance County.

The mill was originally started between 1785 and 1790, Pace estimated, and then had a series of owners before Canadian James Amos bought it in 1874. The Weldon family bought it in the 1930’s and it stayed open until 1964.

There were actually two mills located on opposite sides of the creek, Pace said. The one that still stands today wasn’t the grist mill – that one got washed out in 1917. The mill that stands today had a saw mill on the first floor and a cotton gin on the second floor.

“They took the old mill that was still standing and retrofitted that as a grist mill,” Pace said.

The mills weren’t just a place to get wood sawn, cotton ginned or corn ground, he said. When Vance County was formed in 1881, the Sandy Creek Township was divided into two voting precincts. Depending on which side of the creek you lived on, you voted at one mill or the other.

At least one congressman representing the area would have meetings there, too. “Edward W. Pugh would come there and hold his political rallies there” at the mill.

While the foundation probably dates back to the 1700’s, Pace is skeptical that the rest of the building also is original. “A curious thing about the mill,” he said, is that there is mortise and tenon and peg construction, “the actual boards have been cut with a circular saw,” indicating that the boards may have been salvaged from previous structures.

The Local Skinny! Around Old Granville: Tungsten Mine

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Timing is everything, and for a couple of local gold prospectors back in 1942, that adage certainly rang true.

The Hamme brothers, Richard and Joe, didn’t find gold in the northwest part of Vance County, but what they did find certainly proved valuable and timely.

It wasn’t gold. But they found tungsten.

Mark Pace and Bill Harris talked about the origins of The Tungsten Mine near Townsville on the Around Old Granville segment of Tuesday’s The Local Skinny!

If you remember your world history, the U.S. and its Allied forces were in the middle of World War II in 1942. The Hamme brothers’ discovery came at a very opportune time – the U.S. military needed the tungsten to put on artillery tips. Tungsten is the hardest naturally occurring metal, Pace explained. The world’s tungsten supply was in control of various countries that supported the Axis armies, and the Allied forces needed access to tungsten.

“Within six weeks, the tungsten mine was in operation,” Pace said. It started out as an open mine pit, but soon a 1,700-foot deep shaft was dug and horizontal shafts extended from the single vertical shaft.

But it wasn’t so simple to get the tungsten out of the ground. “The problem was it was very labor intensive,” Pace said. The tungsten was embedded in clear quartz rock that is ubiquitous in the area. Workers had to pulverize the rock into a fine-grained sand. “And then (they’d) run a magnet across it,” Pace said. If you were to study a Google map of the area today, he said you’d see acres and acres of those quartz “tailings” at the site of the former mine, which closed permanently in 1971.

One other problem with the tungsten mine was that folks around here didn’t have much experience with mining. Many families relocated in the area after having worked for generations up in Mitchell County, NC in iron and feldspar mines.

Although there’s probably still plenty of tungsten to be had, there’s probably not much chance of the tungsten mine being reopened, Pace said.

But, just to be on the safe side, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built two dams during construction of Kerr Lake. And it’s the Island Creek Dam that is safeguarding from possible flooding the valley where the tungsten mine is located.

Just in case.