Tag Archive for: #markpace

TownTalk: Around Old Granville: First Families

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Just as in today’s real estate market, the phrase “location, location, location” rang true in the days when the very first families came to the area once known as Granville County.

The English folks who’d settled Jamestown were branching out in the pre-Revolutionary era of the 1700’s and they looked south for more opportunities, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room specialist at Richard Thornton Library in Oxford.

They may have lived here, but “here” wasn’t identified as Granville County back then, and that was the topic of Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk. Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about “first families,” their interconnections and influence over close to what is now almost three centuries.

Granville County would not be carved from Edgecombe until 1746. Heck, Edgecombe was still part of Bertie until 1722, so local genealogy enthusiasts who can trace their heritage back that far would have to hit the Bertie County Courthouse for deeds and records, Pace said.

And while there may be a wealth of historical data on the first families of Granville County, or Vance, Franklin and Warren – the information stream slows to a quiet trickle before those counties were actually established.

“They have lived in the presence of five different counties – without moving,” Pace said.

“The ones that came here in 1720, 1730, 1740 were literally pioneers,” Pace said of families with last names like Hargrove, Bullock, Henderson, Penn and Taylor.

Think about it: by the early 1700’s, settlers had lived almost a century in the James River and Tidewater area of Virginia, where 95 percent of the new residents of North Carolina came from.

Farming techniques were basically non-existent – they’d “farm the land until it wore out and then clear some more,” Pace said.

So when John Carteret, also known as Lord Granville, employed a land agent to represent him and his vast land holdings, people like Edward Jones, Philemon Hawkins, Gideon Macon and others sought to purchase tracts and put down roots.

The philosophy was to get here early and get good tracts of land – not just big tracts, but good tracts.

For Jones, Hawkins and others, it meant acquiring land located along rivers or where springs were found.

“By the 1730’s, you really start to see this area grow,” Pace said, noting that several hundred large tracts of land were sold to buyers, all of whom hailed from 14 counties in Virginia.

Hawkins was clever enough to bring with him millstones that had to be specially made elsewhere for use here in the mills that he constructed in the current-day Shocco ar

The acquisition process back then required money up front or what was called “quick rent,” basically a lease-to-own deal that came with certain stipulations. The tracts came in 640-acre lots that equaled one square mile, Pace said. The landowner would pay to have a surveyor come lay out the property before the sale was made, and the buyer would be required to cultivate at least three acres a year and have a permanent dwelling constructed by a certain time. But “head rights” gave buyers the right to purchase tracts in the name of whoever they brought down with them – wives, children, mothers-in-law as well as the enslaved people who worked for them.

By the time the American Revolution began, Pace said one quarter of the population of Old Granville County was comprised of enslaved persons.

The website https://www.ncgenweb.us/ is a helpful resource for individuals looking for genealogy information of enslaved people in their ancestries.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: The Changing Role Of Sheriffs

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Sheriffs today have plenty of work to do – after all, they are the chief law enforcement officer in the county in which they serve. But when the concept of sheriff first came to the Colonies, it was a catch-all job, making it a powerful, sought-after position.

The first sheriffs were appointed by the governor, according to local historian and North Carolina Room Specialist Mark Pace, and it wasn’t until 1829 when the job became an elected position.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris reflected on the evolution of the role of sheriff in Thursday’s TownTalk segment of Around Old Granville.

William Perry was appointed the county’s first constable/sheriff back in 1746.

Pace said sheriffs in Colonial and antebellum North Carolina had a lot of power – they did everything from serve warrants and civil papers to collect taxes. There was a little added incentive for this last role, Pace said. “They got a percentage of the taxes that were paid.”

Samuel Benton, who gave the land to form the city of Oxford back in the 1760’s, held the jobs of sheriff, member of the House of Commons, justice of the county court, registrar and clerk of court, mostly simultaneously, Pace said.

These days, Benton wouldn’t have been able to hold the office – state statute says a sheriff can’t hold any two or more appointed office at the same time or a combination of elected and appointed offices.

William Henry Smith was the first sheriff of 16 sheriffs to serve Vance County. Smith and E.A. Powell rotated back and forth for a long time, Pace said, one winning one election cycle and defeated by the other in the following election.

In 1881, Powell is reported to have made a deal with challenger Isaac Jones Young, Pace said, regarding the upcoming election. “I won’t spend a dime if you won’t spend a dime,” Pace said. The two agreed, and Powell soundly defeated Young.

“And the next term, Young spent twice as much as he ever had” to regain the seat.

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: A Visit To Cokesbury And Vicksboro

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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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TownTalk Around Old Granville: Forgotten Historical Figures, Pt. 2

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Remember Soupy Sales? What about Charlie Briggs?

Both were television stars, before streaming became a preferred way of watching shows certainly before binge watching was a “thing.”

But both men share something else in common: They are both from the area known as “Old Granville County” and were the topic of Thursday’s TownTalk segment of the same name.

Sales, a comedian and variety show performer, hailed from Franklinton and Briggs was from right here in Henderson. His may not be a household name, but viewers of the old TV shows like Bonanza, Maverick and The Sons of Will Sonnet will no doubt recognize his face, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room Specialist at the Thornton Library in Oxford.

The local area has produced its share of entertainers over the years – Gerald Alston of the Manhattans, country music songwriter Danny Flowers and Ben E. King, just to name a few.

But there are plenty of noteworthy individuals who achieved stardom of a sort in other endeavors as well, leaving their marks in the area of religion, the military and other segments of society.

Take Henry Haywood Bell, for example. Bell was from Franklin County, and was an admiral in the Union Navy during the Civil War. He was from the South, but when it came time to choose sides, he said he had made an oath to serve the United States, so his allegiance was with the North.

Then there’s Charity Adams Early, who was born in Kittrell. Early was the first African American female Army officer, who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. Early died in 2002.

Kirkland H. Donald, from Norlina, still serves as a consultant to the U.S. Navy, Pace said. Donald, a Navy admiral, became commander of all the nuclear submarines in the Navy.

Col. Redding F. Perry from Henderson was career military, and served as chief of staff for Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army, Pace said. Perry, who was the uncle of longtime local attorney Bennett Perry, also established the National Guard in the state.

The Wyche family produced numerous members who made significant contributions as well.

Brigadier General Ira Wyche commanded the 79th infantry division during the Normandy invasion of World War II

Mary Lewis Wyche is credited with bringing the first nursing school to the state.  Known as the “Florence Nightingale” of North Carolina, Wyche also was the first trained nurse in North Carolina. She has a historical marker at Highway 39 and Glebe Road in Vance County, near the home where she grew up.

Alice Morgan Person, from Kittrell, contributed to people’s health in a slightly different way, Pace said.

“She was famous for her ‘remedy,’” he said. He’s not sure of all its ingredients, but he knows of one: “I know it contained alcohol.”

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: Architects

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Lovers of historical architecture could come up with the analogy that if Old Granville County – what is now the four-county area that includes Vance, Warren, Franklin and Granville counties – were an art museum, then all the lovely homes that dot the towns, cities and countryside certainly are works of art to be admired and enjoyed.

Continuing that analogy, it was architects and craftsmen like Jacob Holt and Thomas Bragg and James Burgess who are just a few of the state’s premier artists whose creations still stand -and are still admired – today.

“They were able to express their aesthetic and the community’s idea of the aesthetic,” said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room Specialist at the Richard Thornton Library in Oxford.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about a number of homes, some standing and some long gone, that can be attributed to Holt, Bragg and Burgess in Thursday’s TownTalk segment of Around Old Granville.

Holt moved to Warren County in the 1840s, having worked with William Howard, an acolyte of Thomas Jefferson, in Prince Edward County, Va. He estimates that as many as 80 Holt houses still stand, a tribute to the craftsmanship Holt and his team of artisans poured into each build.

“If you’ve got a Holt house, it’s not a ramshackle mess,” Pace said.

He set up shop in Warren County and soon laid claim to having the second-largest non-agricultural work force around, Pace said.

Among his workers were enslaved persons as well as freedmen. “He had the talent and he had the crew,” he said.

And although it wasn’t his first build, the William Eaton House is what put Holt on the map.

With motifs of Greek Revival, complete with columns, cornices, elaborate mantelpieces and sidelights, the Eaton house remains “one of the showplaces of Warrenton,” Pace said.

Montmorenci is another well-known home in Warren County, and was built by James Burgess in 1822.

Much of the interior of Montmorenci was dismantled and sent to be part of the DuPont estate called Winterthur in Delaware, Pace said, including incredibly engineered spiral staircases and intricate mantelpieces.

Thomas Bragg was also a contractor and architect who worked in the area in the 1820’s through the 1840’s, Pace said. He did significant work in Wake County and designed the William Polk House there.

The home Bragg built for his family still stands in Warrenton. Some of Bragg’s children went on to achieve fame in their own right: Thomas, Jr. became a governor of North Carolina and Braxton was a general in the Civil War – it’s for him that Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, was named.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: A Day At The Lake

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Kerr Lake will be the destination for many boaters and campers over the long holiday weekend, but the area surrounding – and under – the man-made lake has been attracting people for literally hundreds of years.

Stately homes sitting on impressive tracts of land belonging to families with names like Hargrove and Henderson, made way for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project. The lake, no doubt, has unrivaled recreational value today, the fertile lowlands created by Nut Bush creek as it makes its way to the Roanoke River provided farmers the perfect spot for tobacco and other crops.

One of those stately homes was Hibernia, built by the Hargrove family in 1798. The house was torn down in 1955, said local historian and N.C. Room Specialist Mark Pace. Few photographs exist of the plantation home, but remnants remain – if you know where to look.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris recently accepted an invitation from Parks Superintendent Bill Stanley to come explore some of the less-traveled parts of the lake, which has nine state-maintained parks along its North Carolina shoreline.

“We went looking for the remains of Hibernia,” Pace said on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk. “It was one of the more impressive old houses” in the area, he noted. And the two intrepid explorers are pretty certain they found the exact spot where it once stood.

Back then, family homes usually had a family cemetery nearby and so when the Corps was planning to build the lake, the cemeteries’ contents had to be moved. The family plots were moved to a new family cemetery and those of the enslaved people were moved to a couple of different churches nearby.

The earliest gravestone is from 1843, but the enslaved people’s graves were marked only with fieldstone.

In addition to the original house location, they also found the well, the kitchen foundation and a large, brick-lined pit that most likely was the ice house.

Moving over to Satterwhite Point, the duo explored a spring that had been discovered in the 1970’s at the J.C. Cooper campground. It likely was used for nearby Ashland, which was built by the Henderson family in 1740.

“What amazed me is how clear…and cool the water was,” Pace said. “It could have been

the reason why the Hendersons built the house where they did.” There’s a tulip poplar tree still there that possibly predates the house, Pace said.

 

Do you have memories of the area around Kerr Lake before there was a lake? Call Pace at 919.693.1121.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: Churches And Religion, Part 2

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Religious scholars and historians have labeled the general time frame between 1760 and 1800 as The Great Awakening, a time of religious revival that basically helped to shape – and reshape – how Christians viewed their relationship with their churches in the era before and after the American Revolution.

Granville County was established in 1746, and by the time the Great Awakening was taking hold in the American Colonies, three main denominations were prevalent here, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room specialist at the Richard Thornton Library in Oxford.

They were Baptist, Presbyterian and Anglican – which morphed into the Episcopal Church after the Revolution, Pace said on the tri-weekly Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.

But Methodism came on the scene in 1784, and with it, a few wrinkles.

“Methodists are interesting,” Pace said, “and it can be a little complicated.”

By the 1870’s, there were Methodist Protestants and Methodist Episcopal churches, he said. One of Henderson’s Methodist Protestant churches was located where the city’s iconic clock tower now stands; another, near McGregor Hall and the police station.

That branch of Methodism became part of the United Methodist Church when it was formed in 1939. The Methodist Protestants preferred to have individual control, much like the Baptists; they didn’t want bishops and dioceses to make decisions for them.

As for the Methodist Episcopal churches, there was a further split between the Northern and Southern churches in 1844 because of slavery, Pace said.

There was even a church of “O’Kelly-ites” in Dexter, he said, that existed until the 1870’s. James O’Kelly was an itinerant Methodist preacher who left the denomination and was an outspoken opponent of slavery as early as the 1780’s.

The Presbyterian Church took root in Old Granville in the 1760’s, again predating the American Revolution. The Mother Church is Grassy Creek Presbyterian, where the Rev. Mr. Stradley preached from 1840 until 1910 or so.

Stradley is but one example of a local pastor “that’s the heart and soul” of a community. Others include Rev. Reginald Marsh and John Chavis. Chavis, a free Black man who fought in the American Revolution and graduated from Princeton, often preached in Presbyterian churches throughout the area.

For more than 60 years – 1850 to the 1910’s – Marsh was a Baptist minister who was instrumental in the formation of Island Creek and First Baptist in Henderson, among others, Pace said.

In those days, church pews were more likely to be filled with black and white people – granted, they often sat in separate sections – but Pace said after Emancipation, there was a movement for freed Blacks to form their own churches and establish their own communities.

Shiloh Baptist Church in Henderson and Big Zion AME Zion Church between Henderson and Oxford are two of the oldest churches that fit that bill.

Many Blacks stayed with the Baptist Church and with the Presbyterian Church after the Civil War ended, but Pace said the Presbyterian Church was probably the denomination most devoted to abolitionism.

And there are a multitude of examples that still exist in the area today – Timothy Darling Presbyterian in Oxford, founded by George Clayton Shaw, and Cotton Memorial in Henderson, founded by Adam Cotton.

Walter Pattillo, a Baptist preacher, founded a lot of churches. He was born into slavery, Pace said, but it is believed he already knew how to read and write before he went to Shaw University to study theology.

Another one of those figures that gets involved in the community, Pace said: “they don’t go anywhere – they just stay here.”

No moss gathered under Pattillo, however. He is associated with establishing a long list of churches throughout the Old Granville area, including Michael’s Creek, Blue Wing near the Virginia line, New Jonathan Creek, Olive Grove, First Baptist in Oxford, Penn Avenue, Flat Creek and Cedar Grove.

Back in those early days, when most people farmed and were, for the most part, self-sufficient, Pace said the church provided the “social fabric” of a community. The church, or meeting house, or wherever the congregations met, were so much more than a place to attend a weekly service.

“People were heavily involved in the church,” Pace said, “and the church was heavily involved in your life.”

Church members could be summoned and tried before a church council for such sinful things as cursing, drinking, gambling, adultery, consistent absence from the church, or – Pace’s personal favorite – “general meanness.”

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Drug Stores

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Today’s pharmacies just don’t have the same feel as those “drug stores” from days gone by. Nowadays, it’s all business, filling prescriptions and answering questions at a special window marked “consultation.”

That’s not all bad, by the way. We can thank a fellow originally from New Bern who moved to Oxford back in 1884 for standardizing the drug industry.

Local historian Mark Pace called Franklin Wills Hancock “the father of pharmacies in North Carolina.”

Hancock started at drug store in Oxford and enjoyed a 68-year career. When he died at age 92, he was the oldest licensed pharmacist in the country. His almost seven decades was the longest tenure as a druggist.

In fact, he was the first licensed druggist, Pace said.

Before licensing was required, there was little standardization among drug stores, apothecaries and other establishments.

Henderson is home to two independent pharmacies – Mast Drug and Medical Arts Pharmacy, and both have been around for decades. Bill Mast started Mast Drug in 1962 and Chocky White started Medical Arts in 1971. Their presence in the community has not faded, despite the existence of larger chain stores.

If you’ve lived in the area long enough, you remember Parker’s, Page’s and Woolard’s. Even the Florida-based chain store Eckerd’s had a front-row seat at the Henderson Mall, complete with a lunch counter and grill in its heyday.

In Granville County, there was Puckett’s up in Stovall that was in business from 1934-1984 and Jones Drug in downtown Oxford. Charlie Jones returned to his hometown and ran his drug store from 1955 to 2009. He continued working part-time well into his 90s at one of the chain stores in Oxford.

The best information Pace can find notes that John G. Hall opened the first drug store in Oxford in 1879. When it closed in 2000, it could claim being in operation over three centuries – the 19th, 20th and 21st, Pace said.

It opened just more than a decade after the Civil War ended, when folks used home remedies concocted from roots and bark and other materials found in nature.

“In the early days of drug stores and pharmacies, basically they were winging it,” Pace said. “They had their own cures, their own method of doing things.”

And many of those early pharmacists touted patented medicines, including Owen Davis, a Henderson pharmacist who formulated “Atlas Celery Phosphate Vitalizer” at Atlas Medicine Company in town.

At 50 cents a bottle, it claimed to cure everything from “general debility” to virility problems.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: Origins Of Religion

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Anyone traveling the area known as Old Granville – that includes present-day Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties – is bound to notice some old churches. Indeed, Vance County is home to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Williamsboro.

The existing building on Stagecoach Road is the oldest frame church in the state, but local historian Mark Pace said it wasn’t given its name until 1825. Before that, it was known as Nut Bush Chapel, and it was not affiliated with any one denomination.

On top of that, it’s not even the original building – that was located about a mile away from the present site.

Those are just a few of the details about one particular church in one particular area of the original Granville County. Pace, North Carolina Room Specialist at Thornton Library in Oxford, no doubt has collected lots of details about lots of churches with deep roots in the area.

Whether it’s Reedy Creek in the far eastern corner of present-day Warren County or Grassy Creek Presbyterian Church along Highway 15 between Oxford and Stovall, religion and the churches built to accommodate the different denominations have been instrumental throughout the history of the area.

The original three denominations, Pace noted, were the Anglicans (which became Episcopal after the Revolution), the Presbyterians and the Baptists.

“All three of them were here by the late 1740’s,” Pace said on Thursday’s segment of Around Old Granville, but added that it’s hard to pin down exact dates.

Circuit riders would come down from Virginia to hold camp meetings and perform mass baptisms. “And then they’d move on,” he said.

Reedy Creek Baptist Church was established in 1743 or 1744, he said, and the Grassy Creek Presbyterian Church in the Gela community was formed by 1750 or 1752.

It wasn’t until 1772 that the current St. John’s Church in Williamsboro was constructed.

“It probably really is Vance county’s most valued relic,” Pace said of the small white church with burgundy shutters.

The Anglicans and the Presbyterians, though smaller in number, were generally more influential in pre-Revolution society, Pace said.

But the Baptists consisted of the working class and they were more of them, he noted.

Arriving a little later on the scene in this area were the Methodists, Pace said. Not only are there plenty of Methodist churches spread out across the area today, but there’s a whole community named for the two men responsible for establishing Methodism in America.

Any guesses?

Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury were sent by John Wesley to spread the word about Methodism to the colonies, North Carolina among them. That’s right – Cokesbury.

Before the Civil War, enslaved people, free Blacks and Whites all worshipped together, he said and enslaved people “could pick what church they wanted to be a member of,” Pace said.

There were numerous Black preachers in the area, among them John Chavis, who was active as a Presbyterian preacher between 1785 and 1835.

Over the years, original church buildings have been replaced for one reason or another, so their congregations are older than the buildings in which they worship, but the role of religion and the distinct denominations that meet on Sunday mornings enjoys a rich history that deserves to be remembered.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville: Gen. Thomas Person

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Thomas Person of North Carolina has several things in common with George Washington, the first president of the United States of America: Both were generals in the Revolutionary War, both were surveyors, both were involved in politics of the day and both rose from humble beginnings to become wealthy landowners.

We only need look at a $1 bill to see an image of Washington gazing back.

But we don’t have any visuals to inform us as to what Person looked like – heck, historians aren’t even sure where he’s buried.

“Person kind of falls through the cracks, historically speaking,” said Mark Pace,

local historian and NC Room Specialist at Thornton Library in Oxford. But Person, he said, is one of the most significant – if not THE most significant – figures there is in the area known as Old Granville.

By the time he was 21, Person was surveying land for Lord Granville. “He had a reputation for not being a crook,” Pace told WIZS co-host Bill Harris on the Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk Thursday.

He used his job to his advantage, Pace said. By 1792, he owned 85,000 acres in North Carolina and Tennessee – roughly half the size of present-day Vance County.

He may have been the wealthiest man in Old Granville County, and he had 100 or more enslaved persons to work on the four expansive plantations that dotted his holdings.

But he also was a proponent of just government, Pace said. And not just for Granville County, but for the whole state.

This liberal ideology, coupled with the notion that persons of power and influence had an obligation to make their communities better places to live for everyone got Person in trouble from time to time with other wealthy people in positions of power.

One of those people was Richard Henderson, a member of the Colonial Assembly alongside Person.

“Richard Henderson brought some charges up against Thomas Person,” Pace said, formed a 79-person committee of fellow assembly men, and accused Person of “extortion, usury, perjury, purloining of tax money and levying illegal fees.” Henderson had more than 20 witnesses come in from all across the colony to testify, but after several days of testimonies, the claims were deemed baseless.

And that’s when the tables turned on Henderson – the committee made him pay for all the travel costs for those witnesses he’d called to testify against Person.

In 1770, Person found himself in jail in Hillsborough, awaiting trial for making treasonous comments. Gen. Tryon was on his way from New Bern for the trial, and that’s when Person hatched a plan.

Pace said Person desperately needed to get back to Goshen, his plantation located near present-day Berea in western Granville County, apparently to destroy some papers that contained some incriminating evidence.

After promising the jailer that he’d be back just as soon as he’d “taken care of some business,” Person raced to Goshen after supper and was, indeed, back the next morning. To seal the deal, the local preacher vouched for Person’s character.

Pace said Person’s desk – complete with axe marks made by Gov. Tryon’s men looking for the letters – is on display at UNC-CH’s Wilson Library.

“They never could get him on charges,” Pace said.

Although Person married, he and wife Jenna never had children, so there are no descendants. The plantation home at Goshen burned in 1932 and the recently restored Person’s Ordinary in Littleton is one structure that remains from Person’s holdings.

As settlers went westward from Granville County to claim frontier land, Person was honored by having a county named for him. Those names usually are made posthumously, but Person County got its name while the namesake was still alive.

 

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