At just 10.5 square miles, the Watkins township is the smallest of the 38 townships located in the geographical area once known as Granville County. It was established in 1881 – the same year that Vance County was formed from the larger Granville County, but local historian Mark Pace said while it may lack in size, the Watkins township is rich in history.
Pace and WIZS co-host Bill Harris talked about the origins of the Watkins township, or Watkins “community,” as it often is referred to by locals on Thursday’s segment of TownTalk called Around Old Granville.
Perhaps the most famous person to come from Watkins township was Henry Plummer Cheatham, who was a Congressman during Reconstruction. He served from 1889-1893 and ran the Central Children’s Home in Oxford for 35 years.
“He kept that institution going during some dark times,” Pace said, “through the Depression and the Jim Crow era.”
Another individual who hailed from Watkins township was John Bullock Watkins, a nephew of the two men for whom the township is named.
Born in 1881, Watkins was a lumber contractor in the 1940’s during World War II. Pace said Watkins “disappeared” for a while, and rumor had it he was conducting secret government business.
Turns out, that business was in the state to our west. “He went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and helped build the facilities where the atomic bomb was developed,” Pace said.
He died in 1949, but Pace said Watkins spent a lot of time writing down stories he’d heard from his grandmother. “A lot of what we know about history here” is because of Watkins’s writings. “He did a great service to history by writing down some of what he heard,” Pace said. Watkins died in 1949.
Today, there are about 500 folks who live in Watkins, which once had a post office, a store and a railroad depot. “The depot may still be standing as an outbuilding on a farm there, believe it or not,” Pace said.
There are two churches that have been around since the 1800’s – Hermon Methodist was built in 1853 and Rehoboth Baptist Church was built in 1883. There are homes still standing that are older than those churches – the Burroughs house, located near the fire department, was built in the 1840’s in the popular Greek Revival style of the period.
Hundreds of Union troops camped there after the Civil War ended in 1865 as they made their way back home as victors.
It was another war, however, that brought the Watkins township some notoriety, however briefly, Pace noted.
It was Dec. 1945 and World War II was raging in Europe. A U.S. plane flying out of the Washington, D.C. area, encountered trouble in the air and crashed in a tobacco field in Watkins, just across from the present-day neighborhood of Huntstone along Highway 158.
“It crashed in Huntstone and bounced over 158 and landed over in the field,” Pace said.
Everyone on board parachuted to safety, and one crew member who went knocking on a door for help “and he was met by a man with a shotgun asking whether he was a German paratrooper,” Pace said.
The incident was kept kind of hush-hush to maintain wartime security, and the military sent in a crew to clean up the debris from the crash. According to Pace, the farmer who tended the field said he “hit a scrap of metal” every once in a while.
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