OK, local history buffs, here’s a question for you:
What do the Declaration of Independence, inventor of a Space-Age portable stereo and the poet Langston Hughes all have in common?
Ready for the answer?
Sassafras Fork township.
Northern Granville County residents may be more familiar with Sassafras Fork than others, but back in the 1760’s, Sassafras Fork encompassed the general area now known as Bullock, Grassy Creek, Gela, Stovall and Soudan, just across the NC/VA border.
WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace talked about what that area used to look like in the recurring TownTalk segment “Around Old Granville.”
Now, here’s how those three seemingly unrelated items intersect in northern Granville County:
The town of Stovall recently held a Harvest Festival, featuring a celebration of one of its famous residents, John Penn. Penn was one of the state’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence and he moved from Virginia to North Carolina in part because there were too many lawyers where he was from in Virginia, but also because his wife’s family lived near Sassafras Fork.
Now, about that Space-Age portable radio…
Pratt Winston, who died in 2024, was an entrepreneur and inventor. He created the iconic Weltron radio product line, which sold all over the world into the late 70’s.
Winston’s home, Rose Hill, originally was part of the Speed holdings, still stands.
Pace said it’s probably the oldest brick home in the area, having been built around 1834. The two-story Greek Revival-style home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
Ready to make the connection between Sassafras Fork and Langston Hughes?
“Shaw School was so well known back in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, Pace said, that it was able to attract numerous speakers of some renown.
The poet Langston Hughes, of Harlem Renaissance fame, visited the school in 1953 for a poetry reading, Pace said.
At the time of Hughes’s visit, Stovall was enjoying a population of close to 500, but over time, that number dwindled.
The 2010 Census reported just more than 400 people living in Stovall, and that number dropped to 324 in the 2020 count.
But Stovall once boasted a booming economy for the times – with a funeral home, doctors, a bank, factories, lumber mill, hotel, numerous churches and a railway station. There were close to 800 people living in Stovall in the 1920’s, Pace said.
A man named John Stovall gave land to have the rail depot put on his land, which is what prompted the name change from Sassafras Fork to Stovall, he said.
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