Newspapers / The State’s Voice (Dunn, … / April 1, 1933, edition 1 / Page 1
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- -- “ ■ — ■ -:--—*-------—; — .■ ..—— , VOL. I. DUNN, N. C., APRIL 1, 1933. ‘ NUMBERS TWO OLD-TIME GOVERNORS Passing the homestead of Governor Holmes, two miles northwest of Clinton, a few day ago, I regret ted to note that the cabin section of the home as existing for many years has been torn away. That caHn, long used as a kitchen by the Williams fami ly, is thought by Mr. H. E. Faisfon, who Is the local antiquarian, to have been the real home of Governor Holmes. If so, it should not lightly .have been torn away, since It so eloquently spoke of the simplicity of the life of one of the great ifien of the south. More than a hundred years ago, Governor HolmeB was advocating construction of good roads and of advancement in education. One of his state papers reads very much like those of modern days. Yet his conception of what good roads and good schools meant was. doubtless, quite in contrast with the modern conceptions. There may be some questions as to the cabin’s be ing the entire residence St the distinguished Samp sonian. but the home of Governor Owen, on the sandy plain overlooking the western bottom lands of the Cape Fear in Bladen, stood thirty years ago in such a state of preservation that one could with no difficulty conceive that the household of the > North Carolina governor who declined to accept the vicepresidency. which would have in so short a while inducted him into the White House asTresi dent, could not have been conducted upon any mag nificent scale, such as the romantic notions of the old South might suggest. The’ slaves’ cabins had long agp disappeared and the""broad Acres .qf : Fear bottoms could not bo seen from the home site, Only the. sun-dial still stood in the old garden to indicate the iriodes and manners "of ye olderf days. The home occupied so graciously many years by Mr. and Mrs. puion, the latter a daughter of the governor, was occupied by the adopted) daughter of the couple, who seem to have had no children of their own. The maiden lady was one of the numerous des cent of Pocahontas. The traditions of many slaves among whom was an African prince, still pervaded the community. Contrasting conditions of craves A score of years after that visit to the Owen home I was to become familiar with Governor Owen’s grave in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard; Pittsboro, Gover nor Owen and his brother, also one or two other Bladen youths afterwards to play important parts in the annals of their times, attended the original Bingham school at Pittsboro, before the school had become permanently established at Mebane. Those boyhood days naturally led the youth when distin guished to spend his summers in the old village, which in those days was quite a summer resort for several of the southeastern families of note. On one of those summer sojourns in -Pittsboro, Governor Owen died. His Bladen home was so remote that h» was buried in St. Bartholmew’s churchyard, where a. flat stone fitlyi engraved marks his resting place today. * The good roads that Governor Holmes had advo cated have now been attained, and. the two or three day journey to Bladen is clipped to as few hours. Yet it seems fortunate that circumstances led to this Pittsboro burial, where the grave and distinguishing stone are surrounded by the loveliness' of th% well kept churchyard and by the tombs of a not-incon siderable number of other dignitaries of the State. It is also suggestive of the prominence of the Chat ham gentry of that day that a daughter of Gover nor Holmes married a citizen of Haywood. With her lived Governor Holmes’ son, an old bachelor, whom faVnily documents indicate to havg been buried at Pittsboro also, but of which no authentication could be discovered, The younger Holmes was probably bu/ied at Haywood. The sister’s family was among the host of Carolinians treking to the west. In contrast with'the lovely environs of the Owen grave is the Holmes graveyard, overgrown with trees a$d briers, without a mark of identification of the former governor’s own last resting plate, and nearly a half-mile from a road, : - / Old Haywood The village of Haywood, so prominent in antebel- * him days baa now had Its Identity largely merged with that of the larger, village of Moncure; only a mile away. The bi*oad bottom lands in the fork of the Haw and Deep, as they converge to form the Cape Fear, afforded a rich agricultural'domain to support the dignity of the Haywood gentry. The old village, according to tradition, lacked only one vote of becoming the site of the State capital, after the burning of the old c'apitol at Raleigh, I believe. One has only to imagine Raleigh at Haywood to see a transformed geography of the State. With the wat ers of two fair-sized streams, with considerable pow er available, with the coal mines just a few miles up the Deep, and looks on the river making navigation possible, as was the actual case for quite a number of years, it is conceivable that the capital at Hay wood would have been quite a city when the actual Raleigh was still 'only a straggling country town. The .North Carolina railroad would have almost as suredly been extended from Goldsboro through Hay wood, Pittsboro, Asheboro, and on westward. Pitts bcro, Siler City, Asheboro, Old Trinity, would have been the Durhams, Burlingtons, and Greens boros of today, so far as importance is con cerned. In fact, only one vote again, and that the vote of the Chatham representative himself, estopped the road’s heading through Chat ham when it wag built. That representative, who. was a great planter, didn’t want a railroad coming through Chatham and, killing or frightening ~the^ cattle. At least, tradition thus hands it down. Towering aloft, two oy, three miles’from Haywood, todays is the smoke stack of the great auxiliary plant of the Garq#i*& PoWw is the salvation of Chatham county’s finances. List ed at several millions of dollars, about a. sixth of the whole taxable assets of the county, the Carolina Power and Light Company’s check is a mainstay of Chatham’s comparatively excellent financial sta tus today, in the face of. a. series of eight -bad crop vears climaxed with- the' effects of the general panic. Chatham Misses Erwin Chatham missed the capital by one vote; it missed the railroad by the same margin; and only a few years ago it lost the opportunity of having the town of Duke, later Evwin, located on the Haw, just a few miles from Pittsboro. No fairer proposition was made a county. The Duke and Erwih interests owned a considerable tract of land on the Haw, in cluding a considerable water power site. Those in terests proposed establishing a factory on the pro perty on the one condition .that the county build a good road the few miles from pittsboro to he pro posed site. The chairman of the board of commis sioners was interested in the Eynum cotton mill plant. Yet it is hard to conceive of such short-sight edness. The competition of a cotton mill is not a local matter. But .for some reasoh or other, or no reason, the board of commissioners declined to ex pend the sum necessary to build the five miles of road across the hills to the power site. Later, when the world had gone crazy in (the other direction. Chatham spent hundreds of thou&i'nds of dollars, yea a million, in building dirt roads,, and the debt exists and there is no. factory plant and no considerable village to help foot the debt service charges. The power plant came, probably, without consulting Chatham representatives or commission ers.' _nViOfVnm’o lnco In tne case ui uio - Harnett’s gain. In the case of the North Carolina railroad, the state.chose a much less difficult route than that through' Chatham and Randolph. That route would have necessitated severe ‘ grading across a broad area sliced, up by the Haw, the Deep, and. Rocky Rivers. The chosen line followed the summit of the watershed for many miles, with remarkably little grading necessary'for the mileage westward to Greensboro. It would, almost undoubtedly, have cost , the statei twice ae much to build the. road through ~ Chatham anjl Randolph as it' did by way of the pre sent Durham, Burlinfeton; dnd'tSreensboro, for grad ing in those days waa hdt t^ power machine pro cess of today. It was a picked shovel process: ~ Contrasting M•**»?**• . r ' ' ‘ sometime ago I wrote of the attempt to build a i-afl^Sad from Cliiitbn to^ojnt CaSWell- on the tide 7V';. water- reaches of the Black River. That was in *1883. j For five miles from Clinton the line ran through,' „ heavily timbered flats. There was not. a tool used y^ in grading except "picks, mattocks, shovels and axes. v Yet the bed for a narrow-guaged rosed was made for $400 a mile or less. Stalwart Negro men labored , from early till late, for a dollar a day. The boss of the grading cre"w was “Dock’’ Holland of En- • field. He was a pretty tough bird, not vicious nor 'j, drunken, but far from religious. Jlie engineer was a deeply religious old gentleman from Fayetteville*. , Mr. O’Hanlon. He actually got four dollars .a day, ■ and it was a wonder with-us,boys how a man" could ' spend so much. That meant $1200 a year if he,work ed the whole year, but out of that had to come his board and his expenses for trips back and forth to Fayetteville. The engineering force and Mr. Hol land boarded at our home while the work of either [ party was within a fair walking distance. One of - . the helpers of Mr. O’Hanlon was a youth, Anderson Butler, a double-first cousin of Senator Marlon and Col. George Butler. He has been a useful Baptist. ,g| minister for forty years_oE_more. ~ ; -i'' Tempora Mutarft, Mutamur - Times have changed. The four-foot cut mad© :, through a little field of ours and through about th© ; only clay subsoil on the big old place took weeks. A .steam shovel would have , cut through within twoi or three days. And now a highway engineer, must have a regular salary of $2,000 or $3,000 and be al lowed traveling expense. Or that was the case only a short time ago. Many of them, I suspect, will her . glad to get the. O’Hanlon, wag© of four .-dollars . xggydSJK; saeir ^istBiOayaient ca®'twf©und. Th© engineering fraternity have had> their golden • days*’ i; Almost any youth who had a smattering of math ematics would blossom out into a full-fledged ep-1 ginee’r. There is scarcely a highway in the state! which has not been surveyed scores pf times, for one reason or another, and sometimes seemingly witli V no good reason.'Ayd again, negro men would be glad to have the chance to work with shovel and pick ior a aouar a aay. . The old Latins phrased it about thus: “Times change and we change with them. ” It was a .simple folk back in those days of the eighties—yes .of the nineties and also of the first decade of this century. Prosperity and progress came, or something that was mistaken for them, arid the people ‘ changed. - Staid matrons would learn to dance and formerly so ber couples gloried in liquor parties. The world went crazy with respect to money and pleasure. Just think it was only just the other day that Tyre Tay lor was going to make North Carolina rich, by turriV' . ing it into a pleasure ground! The Asheville sec-' tion, Florida, and other resort sections conceived the idea that everybody could take a holiday with plean ty of mortey to spend. Poor Asheville! It was only the other day that we noticed a . suftiming up of the financial situation of Asheville by Judge Carter. The liabilities-were listed in the millions? the assets, one row of naughts after another^ Poor Asheville! roily, rar-r\e«icmng Arfd such insanities as^ those 'that appeared in ' Asheville and Florida, to keep from trampling xtpori the toes of folk nearer home, would hot have Been so bad if they had not been so far-reaching. .An il- ; ^ lustration. Jou would scarcely be able to imagine - arty connection between the Florida boom and my failing to collect for advertising for the Acme Ferti lizer Company, of Wilmington. Here is how it went. An advertising agency in Greensboro bad charge of the Acme’s advertising business. That advertising agency got involved-in the Florida craze. 'When the boom burst, the company burst. The Acme Company* had paid the agency a lump sum for its advertising ... in all the papers. My contract was with the agency. I finally got part of the bill from the receiver. ^ You cannot hurt one man nOw economically with : out hurting somebody’else. The big business inter- ' ests of the country seemed to think for years that ;; they could continue to prosper with the agricultural third of the population barely eking out a living and even ’ pledging their capital to live ait all; They got fooled. V ; *■ ^ .. 7 (Continued on page eight) r -
The State’s Voice (Dunn, N.C.)
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April 1, 1933, edition 1
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