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.

CLICK PLAY!

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.

CLICK PLAY!

If everyone who was born and raised in the Henderson area took a deep dive into their ancestry, how far back would they have to go to find out that they were related to the Hawkins family?

Even if your last name isn’t Hawkins, local historian Mark Pace said he predicts that up to 20 percent of folks whose families are from Vance County can trace their roots to  Philemon Hawkins.

Pace and WIZS co-host Bill Harris discussed some of the notable figures who descended from Hawkins, who was born in England in 1690.

Between 1778 and 1848 there was a member of the Hawkins family in state government, Pace said.

“They were the family that developed the railroad that fundamentally changed the area,” he said on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.

What the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds were to Boston and DuPont to Delaware, the Hawkins family was to this area, Pace said.

Hawkins and his wife first settled in Gloucester County, VA, then in 1735 he moved his family and second wife (his first wife died) to what is now Warren County, NC. With him he brought two millstones and not much else and set up a grist mill in what had to be considered the frontier.

Anyone looking into the history of the area should really take a close look at this family, Pace said. “You’ll go far…by studying the Hawkins family,” whose wealth and influence was unsurpassed at the time.

By the time Bute County was founded in 1763, Hawkins had amassed more than 7,000 acres of land and had more than 100 slaves. Bute County was formed from old Granville County, and in 1779 split again into what are now Warren and Franklin counties.

Hawkins had four sons, who were influential in their own right. One was Benjamin Hawkins, who was the first senator from North Carolina. He went to Princeton and later worked on the staff of Gen. George Washington. He spoke French, and was an interpreter when Washington sought the help of Lafayette and Rochambeau in the Revolutionary War.

One of Hawkins’s grandsons, Philemon Hawkins III was born in 1752. He married Lucy Davis and they lived at Pleasant Hill in Middleburg. Today it’s called Rivenoak and it still stands as one of the best examples of antebellum architecture in the area.

In 1829, Hawkins and wife held a big family reunion, to which more than 131 direct descendants attended.

Hawkins died in 1833 and is buried at Rivenoak.

But this Hawkins also had several children who were successful in life. His three sons – John Davis Hawkins, future NC governor William and Dr. Joseph Warren Hawkins – married sisters, daughters of Alexander Boyd, who founded Boydton, VA.

“It was a real power marriage,” Pace said.

Besides the future governor, Joseph reportedly established the first medical school in North Carolina and John Davis (1781 – 1853) “was a mover and shaker of the second railroad in North Carolina,” Pace said.

But it was their sister who got the train out of the station, as it were. She had married into the Polk family of Raleigh and had the idea to build a wooden track from a stone quarry in this area all the way to Raleigh, where workers were busy rebuilding the State Capitol, which had burned in June 1831.

Her brother John Davis took that idea and, with $750,000 of his own money, set about bringing the railroad to the area.

The towns of Littleton, Henderson, Kittrell, Youngsville and Franklinton have this member of the Hawkins family to thank, Pace said, because “none existed before the railroad.”

CLICK PLAY!