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Page 2-Section II THE PILOT—Southern Pines, North Carolina Wednesday, June 27,1984 Was Prime Mover BY ROBERT MASON Allison Francis Page, who had prospered before the Civil War but had fared no better than his poor state in its aftermath, came from Cary to the Sandhills in 1880 to explore lumbering prospects. He was 55 years old. Flings at cotton and tobacco manufac turing had put him in debt $10,000-a lot of money. Moving on was in his blood. The first North Carolina Page, L^wis, wandered down from the Virginia back country to settle in Gran ville County. There Lewis’ son Anderson was born in 1790. An derson acquired a 1,200-acre farm and 30 to 50 slaves. Also, he ran a wagon train hauling market crops from Wake County, where he settled, to Petersburg, on the Appomattox River (which the Virginia political establishment favored as a port over Norfolk on the proposition that Norfolk was too close to the ocean and hence too far from commodities). An derson’s son, Allison Francis, who was called Frank, was born in Wake in 1824. When Frank Page poked into the turpentine-drained longleaf pines that shaded mile after mile after mile of this region, he knew what he was about. As a young fellow he had got into the lumber trade furnishing stringers for the pioneering Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, then rafted logs down the Cape Fear River from Fayet teville. In Fayetteville he had courted and, in 1849, married Catherine Frances Rabateau, a strong-willed girl who had atten ded Louisburg Academy. Like Frank, Miss Kate was a Methodist. Five or so years later Frank bought 400 acres of woodland eight miles west of Raleigh, near a rail line. He set up a steam- powered lumber mill and founded a village, which he named Cary in honor of a Methodist fun damentalist who preached prohibition. Frank hated rum. He didn’t think much of rebellion either; when the Civil War broke out in ’61, he formed no regiment and joined no company. He paid allegiance to the Confederate government and sawed wood when needed, but that was about ail. The South as it had been “fo’de’wa”“before The War- never misted his eyes. During Reconstruction he was too busy to look back-too busy trying to get going again and to raise a family. His family, if not his bank account, was substantial when he took the Raleigh- Augusta Air Line cars to these parts. His No. 2 son, 21-year-old Robert N., came with him. There were three younger sons and three daughters at home, and an older son, newly settled in St. Joseph, Mo., breaking in as a journalist and freelance writer. Within a month or so, Mr. Page and Robert erected a lumber mill at Blue’s Crossing in Moore County and began feeding it trees cut from a tract purchased from Archibald Ray, of the Bethesda community. The father found a boarding place, from which he commuted to Cary on weekends, and the son made do in two-room diggings. After a year, Mr. Page built a house and brought his family to Blue’s Crossing. Soon he and the four boys with him owned about 15,000 acres of timber stretching southward and westward from their lumber plant. They opened logging roads and constructed tramways. In 1888 they graduated to iron rails and full- size steam locomotives. They ex panded their mills and factories and generated satellite businesses. Blue’s Crossing became Aber- deen-officially in 1887, when the U.S. Post Office introduced an Aberdeen postmark, unofficially somewhat earlier. Major spinoffs of the Page lumber operation were the Page Trust Company, a bank that the Great Depression ruined, and the Aberdeen and West End Railroad, which became the Aberdeen and Asheboro, was ab sorbed into the Norfolk and Southern and then the Southern systems, and lately has been born again as the little Aberdeen and Briar Patch, chugging between Aberdeen and Star. In 1890 Mr. Page retired from the lumber business and concentrated on the railroad. The father was president when the railroad was chartered. Robert N. Page was secretary- treasurer, Junius R. Page was superintendent, and Henry A. Page was general freight and traffic manager. The final son, Frank C. Page, would add his name to the letterhead. The first. Walter Hines Page, having moved from a St. Joseph newspaper through a series of writing and editing positions to national prominence, in 1899 would become co-founder of a New York publishing house-but old Mr. Page worried about that one’s business acumen. There was little doubt as to who ran the fledgling railroad. President Page “employed a civil engineer,” J.N. Cole wrote in an admiring sketch of him, “but when plans of his engineer did not suit him he brushed them aside and worked out his own plans.” Yet in 1898, Cole continued in “Biographical History of North Carolina,” which Samuel A. Ashe edited, Mr. Page turned the Aberdeen and Asheboro over to his four sons in the Sandhills. Here they did well indeed, in civic and political as well as in business and agricultural affairs. Robert became the first mayor of Aberdeen, a member of the North Carolina General Assem bly, a United States Congressman, and unsuccessful •candidate for governor. Frank was appointed by Governor Thomas W. Bickett as the state’s first proper highway com missioner soon after returning from France and taking off his World War I uniform as a major of army engineers. Junius, nicknamed Cris, headed the bank and was a leader in introducing peach-growing to the Sandhills. Cole judged Henry, state war time food commissioner, legislator, and railroad executive, to be the ablest of the lot. “Had he chosen one of the professions, he would have doub tless come to an elevation few men attain,” Cole wrote for historian Ashe. “Had he chosen journalism, he would have made a great editor. Had he chosen law, he would have taken rank with the masters. Had he chosen letters, he would have had com panion with the great spirits of literature.” Over in Raleigh, Josephus Daniels, editor of the News and Observer, was inclined to agree- although he did not share Cole’s elation that the 80-mile Page railroad was “the largest built by private capital in North- Carolina.” Incident to an account Allison Francis Page of Judge Walter Clark’s cam paign to be Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Daniels wrote in “Editor in Politics” (1941): “Henry A. Page, president of the Aberdeen and Asheboro Railroad, a railroad somewhat longer than it is wide, built by his father as a lumber road, and af terwards extended into three or four counties, took up the cudgels against Clark in The News and Observer. He was a brilliant writer. I sometimes thought if he had devoted himself to it, he would have been a more brilliant writer than his brother, Walter Hines Page. He wielded a tren chant pen and wrote interestingly and vigorously...” Besides eventually selling the railroad, the Pages sold the land that had nurtured the trees the railroad hauled. The story is familiar and maybe true. James W. Tufts, of Boston, with the idea of creating a mild- weather resort for people who couldn’t afford Florida, explored stumps that Allison Francis Page had surveyed as trees. He sought out Henry A. Page and asked him how many acres were in a west tract. About 5,000, was the answer. And what would the Pages take for all that? “I reckon any land would be worth a dollar an acre,” Henry replied, ready to come down by half. The Yankee took him up. Thus was Pinehurst begun. Pages have lived to see that land increase in value many thousands fold. But they have had little reason to second-guess their forebears, who paid $3.50 an acre for the timberland when all the value was in the trees. The Tufts cash was pure bonus. Indeed, “Uncle Jesse” Page, a Methodist preacher back in Wake County, based a sermon on the transaction. Instructing a congregation that everything God created was for man’s benefit, he said that after the Sandhills pines were felled the land lay fallow until an un foreseen use was found for it-and suddenly, lo and behold, a poor region became one of the state’s most valuable. Josephus Daniels knew all the Pages. Robert was a groomsman at his wedding. As a young newsman in Wilson Daniels had gone to Raleigh at Walter’s in vitation to relieve him as editor of the State Chronicle for two weeks, and subsquently had assumed his chair. Allison Fran cis Page had helped him then by buying $100 worth of stock in the Chronicle. Mr. Page made considerably larger investments than that in Raleigh in his latter years. He built the Raleigh Hotel and Page Opera House. One day, Daniels said, Mr. Page paid him a call at The News and Observer, which Daniels had acquired and merg ed with the Chronicle. He brought advice. It was to devote less newspaper space to baseball and more to church news. Upon Mr. Page’s death in Raleigh in 1899, Daniels wrote: “Mr. A.F. Page was the best type of lumber kings in the South, but he was much more than that. He was an upstanding man of positive convictions and high character.” For all his grasp of commerce and ethics, Mr. Page could no more figure out his son Walter Hines than another North Carolina Methodist of his time, old Washington Duke, could fathom his son James Buchanan. Mr. Page recognized and ap preciated his firstborn’s brillian ce, Daniels wrote in “Editor in Politics.” Nevertheless, “he didn’t think Walter knew a thing about a dollar. Walter had come on a visit to his father, who owned a telegraph line on his railroad out from Aberdeen. Mr. Page said, ‘You know, if I had a man like Walt at both ends of my telegraph line, I would make a fortune if they could pay their bills. He will sit down and write a telegram of three or four hundred words two or three times a day. Think of the extravagance and waste of it! Why, I never sent a telegraph in my life longer than ten words. If I had two men like that I would get rich on my telegraph line.” Walter Hines Page was Am bassador to the Court of St. James during the First World War. His career is spelled out in a four-volume biography published internationally. He too wrote of his father’s death. It left him “lonelier than I ever felt before; for it has somehow pushed me forward from the almost youthful attitude that I had continued to assume that I held in the family,” he confided to a friend. “It is a severe shock to find that of a large group I am suddenly be come the senior.” John T. Patrick (Continued From Page 1) Washington Barracks. “They sent for Carl, who was able to get an emergency furlough,” Mrs. Patrick said. “He came to Southern Pines and was with his father when he died. I think he (the elder Patrick) was pleased with the development of Southern Pines. It had running water, some paved streets, a lot of hotels and big houses.” The elder Patrick had been to visit his son and new daughter-in-law at Washington earlier that year. “He was a very strict dietician,” she recalled. “There was no alcohol, no coffee, very little meat and you didn’t fry anything, either. When he came to our house in Washington we just put the coffee pot away.” Later in the summer of 1918, Mrs. Patrick said she went to Chimney Rock to visit her father-in-law at the Esmeralda Inn, in which she said he had a financial interest and which was run by Tom and Tillie Turner. He also was engaged in another real estate venture in Chimney Rock. ‘ ‘Daddy Patrick told me he had planned to live to be 100 years old,” Mrs. Sadie Patrick recalled. “He liked me very much.” However, after his death she said a depression came along and it was necessary to dispose of his land holdings. He is buried in Wadesboro. Mrs. Patrick’s father, Henry Bilyeu, was one of the early noted horticulturists in North Carolina. He has been recognized as a pioneer in establishing the dewberry as a profitable crop. Bilyeu’s father was a New Jersey fruit grower and the son grew up on a fruit farm, coming to Warren County, N.C., in 1874. Bilyeu was a fruit grower there for 15 years but in 1890 came to Moore County as one of the pioneer settlers. He bought 20 acres east of the then town boundaries where he had an extensive vineyard. This now is part of the Elks Club golf course. Then in 1903 Bilyeu bought 300 acres four miles west of Southern Pines which he developed as the then widely acclaimed Pine Knot Farm. The crops there included dewberries and Delaware grapes which he introduced into Moore County. This property, now known as the C. Louis Meyer farm, was Mrs. Patrick’s home until about the time of her marriage to Carl, who she said, remained in the Army until he retired as a first lieutenant. He died in 1956 and is buried in Pinebluff. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Patrick worked as a licensed practical nurse for some 20 years. She and her husb^d had four children, including twin sons, Walter and John, another son, James, and a daughter, Ethel. All three sons served in the Air Force. John is dead. She has seven grandchildren. “Daddy Patrick was quite a character,” Mrs. Patrick said. “He was a big man at the time but he did spread himself very thin.” COUNTY SEAT MOVED In 1796, the county seat was permanently located on 60 acres given by Richardson Fagin, a beautiful tract on the Salem Road. In leisurely fashion, 64 lots were sold around the square where at last the courthouse was built. Carthage was the classical name given the town. MOORE COUNTY ACADEMY The Moore County Academy was established by legislative act in 1799. No records of the school’s operation survive, and its life must have been short. Happy Birthday, 0ftE_CO^^ Moore County! f ^ ^pvV' Tommy Phillips General Manager “Thank You, Moore County, For Supporting Phillips Motor Company Since 1946. We Pledge To Work Even Harder To Serve Your Automotive Needs In The Years Ahead. Tommy Phillips Our Progressive Salesmen Con Help You Select The New Ford Or Used Vehicle To Meet Your Needs. Our Service, Parts And Body Shop Personnel Are Eager To Help You Keep Your Vehicle In Top Condition. PHILLIPS Motor Carthage, Company phone 947-2244 N.C. 196a 17R4 X-L 200 We Are Proud To Have Been A Part Of Moore County For 24 Of The Last 200 Years The Large, Modern John Deere Facility In Carthage * We Serve Moore County And Surrounding Counties With The Most Modern And Efficient Farming Equipment * We Specialize In Tobacco Equiprnent And Carry A Complete Line Of Irrigation Equipment * We Carry A Full Line Of John Deere Farm, Lawn & Garden Equipment RIDDLE EQUIPMENT CO., INC. Hwy. 27 East, Carthage, N.C. - 947-2943 JOHN OEEP^
The Pilot (Southern Pines, N.C.)
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June 27, 1984, edition 1
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