The North Carolina Room at Thornton Library in Oxford is full of all kinds of books, maps and bound volumes of all sorts and conditions.

And cookbooks.

“I must say, God bless people who do cookbooks,” said Mark Pace, North Carolina Room specialist and local historian.

Located among all those historical tomes are more than 100 local cookbooks, and Pace said they are helpful to him in his research.

These cookbooks, often published as a fundraising effort for churches, civic groups and volunteer fire departments, surely contain lots of favorite recipes but also some nuggets about the history of the organization.

And that’s exactly where Pace got some of the information about Cokesbury for Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.

As he was doing a little research, he came across a cookbook from Cokesbury Methodist Church and “sure enough, there’s a nice page in there about the founding of the church.”

And when he fielded a question about when the fire department was started there, he got his hands on a cookbook that the ladies auxiliary group had published and found out all about it.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about the communities of Vicksboro and Cokesbury, both located in the area of the county known as Sandy Creek Township.

Vicksboro was originally known as Coley’s Crossroads, Pace said, and there was a post office located there called Steedsville that operated from 1884 to 1894. Pace said it’s unclear how the name change came about, but one theory is that a Steedsville postmaster had an affinity for Vicksburg, MS and changed the name to VicksBORO to avoid confusion with the post office in the Mississippi town.

The little communities like Cokesbury and Vicksboro that dot the countryside often had their own little businesses that it was known for.

If you grew up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s in Vance County, there’s a chance your parents took you to the shoe store in Cokesbury. There was a shoe store and a small textile store in Justice, Pace said, and a dry cleaners in Manson. In the 1950’s and ‘60s, Egypt Mountain had a sewing shop where folks could buy sewing notions and cloth, Pace said.

Perhaps the heart and soul of the community out in Sandy Creek Township, however, was Aycock School, he said.

It was built as a consolidated school in 1925 and named for the former governor, Charles B. Aycock, known as “the education governor,” Pace said.

“It was really state of the art for its day,” he added. There was a gym and a teacherage located on the site of the original school on Vicksboro Road.

Listen to the show in its entirety at wizs.com.

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