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GARY GREENE
. GARY STEWART
Publisher - Managing Editor
DARRELL AUSTIN ELIZABETH STEWART
General Manager News Editor
MEMBER OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS ASSOCIATION
The Herald is published by Herald Publishing House, P.0. Box 752,
Kings Mountain, North Carolina 28086. Businesses and editorial of-
fices are located at Canterbury Road-East King Street. Phone
739-7496. Second class postage paid at Kings Mountain, N.C. Single
copy 25 cents. Subscription rates: $12.60 yearly in-county. $6.30 six
months. $13.65 yearly out-of-county. $6.85 six months. Student rates
for nine months, $9.45. USPS 931-040.
The Tomb Is Empty
The Bible warns all who will hear to avoid self-effort to
decipher the mystery of the hereafter. Those who fail to heed
the warning fail themselves.
This powerful Easter message is one that ministers will be
using from the pulpits during Holy Week services arranged
by Kings Mountain churches and congregations this week.
Good Friday services and Easter Sunrise services, as well as
regular worship services on Easter Sunday, are expected to
be well attended.
This Easter in the 88th year of the 20th century the message
is the same. Man, dealing with man, unfortunately, is not
dealing with the Prince of Peace.
The message of Christmas, the birth of Christ, and of
Easter, the resurrection of Jesus from the grave, are the hope
of the individual and of the world.
The Herald reprints today St. Mark’s account of the first
Easter from Mark 16:1-8.
“And when the sabbath was pa Mary Magdalene, and
Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome had bought sweet
spices, that they might come and annoint him.
“And very early in the morning the first day of the week
they came into the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.
“And they said among themselves, who shall roll away us
the stone from the door of the sepulchre?
“And when they looked they saw that the stone was rolled
away; for it was very great.
“And entering into the sepulchre they saw a young man sit-
ting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment, and
they were affrightened.
“And he said unto them, be not affrightened. Ye seek Jesus
of Nazareth, which was crucified. He is risen. He is not here,
behold the place where they laid him.
“But go your way. tell his disciples and Peter, that he goeth
before you into Galilee. There ye shall see him, as he said un-
to you.
“And they went out quickly and fled from the sepulchre for
they trembled and were amazed, neither said they anything
to any man; for they were afraid.‘
Turn Your Clock Ahead
If you arrive at church Sunday morning and
everyone else is leaving, you can be sure of one of two
things:
Either they’re trying to tell you something, or you’ve
forgotten that Daylight Savings Time began at 2 a.m.
So, the best thing you can do is turn your clock ahead
one hour before going to bed Saturday night.
Daylight Savings Time officially begins Sunday at 2
a.m.. You’ll lose an hour of sleep this weekend but will
gain it back when Eastern Standard Time comes back
next October. In the meantime, you’ll have an extra
hour each afternoon when you get home from work to
take care of all of those chores that have been piling up
during the winter.
(From the March 29, 1967 edition of the Kings Mountain
Herald: Looking Back in Tar Heel History, by Ed Henry
Smith).
On March 19, 1865, the largest military engagement ever to
take place on North Carolina soil, the Battle of Bentonville,
began in Johnston County. A confederate force of 30,000 men
under General Joseph E. Johnson, attacked General W.T.
Sherman’s union army of 60,000 men.
The three-day battle cost 4,200 casualties in dead, wounded
and missing and ended in a stalemate.
It was the last time in the war in which confederate troops
took the offensive. It also marked the only major effort to op-
pose Sherman’s army north from Atlanta.
On March 20, 1663 King Charles of England issued a charter
granting the territory known as Carolina (in his honor) to
eight lords proprietors in colonization and development.
Extending southward from Virginia and as far west as
“south seas’ the original grant took nearly half of the con-
tinental U.S., exclusive of Alaska.
On March 21, 1862, the town of Washington, N.C., was cap-
tured by federal troops under General Burnside.
On the same date in 1865 General Sherman’s forces took
Goldsboro, the chief military objective of his march north
from Georgia because of its importance as a rail juncture.
Letter Policy
The Herald welcomes your letters to the editor for
publication in each Wednesday’s paper. We ask that you
follow these guidelines when presenting letters:
Make the letters brief and to the point. Type and double-
space them, if possible, but sign them in ink and include
your entire name, address and telephone number for
verification purposes.
The Herald reserves the right to edit the letters for spell-
ing, good taste, libel, or any other reason, and reserves the
right to reject any letter for any reason.
Hand-delivered letters will not be published. Mail all let-
ters to Letter to the Editor, P.O. Box 769, Kings Mountain,
N.C. 28086.
GUEST COLUMNIST
ROBERT L. WILLIAMS
Sugar Hill’s Big Event Of The Year
(EDITOR’S NOTE - Between Fallston and Cherryville, a
road winds through a tiny community called Sugar Hill, and
on virtually any given day there may be three or four cars
and a stray dog or two on the road. But for only one day every
year, each Easter Sunday morning, for four hours the
highway is jammed with hundreds of local residents taking
part in a ritual that is two centuries old and stems from an-
cient Greek and German customs. The event is the annual
egg fight, in which men, women, and children from
throughout the area gather at dawn for the unique celebration
that occurs in this region only in Sugar Hill. Robert L.
Williams has contributed this tongue-in-cheek article on his
experience at the annual ritual.)
Several years ago when R.M. Newton of Belwood asked me
if I planned to go to the Sugar Hill Egg Fight, I admitted I had
never heard of the event. In truth, I suspected some sort of
bad yoke, much akin to the ghostly Indian head of Casar, a
sort of variation on the old shell game.
“Not chicken, are you?”’ Newton asked. ‘Arrive at Sugar
Hill early Easter Sunday morning--around 7 a.m.”
Years passed and I always planned to attend the annual egg
fight, but something--usually sleepiness--kept me from going.
I am not one to go to bed with the chickens and get up with the
roosters, and somehow fighting eggs didn’t seem to be much
to crow about, especialy at daybreak. :
Last year I went. I rose early and drove over to Sugar Hill,
which is a suburb of Fallston, to see what sort of activity the
locals had hatched up. If you are interested in going, read on.
The first thing I learned is that the annual Sugar Hill Egg
Fight is taken very seriously. There were people there of #ll
ages from toddlers in strollers to men and women 80 years old
and better. And all were there to fight eggs.
And there were eggs in abundance, all dyed and decorated,
some hand-painted. There were hen eggs, guinea eggs, and
talk of a goose egg or two, and one man claimed he had a
snake egg he wanted to pit against other reptilian embryonic
ova. He found no takers.
At 6:30 a.m. the lonely highway that winds past the site of
the old Sugar Hill School was totally deserted except for me
and a pair of German Shepherd dogs, both of which eyed me
as if I might be an pila omelet. I weighed the advan-
tages of getting out to scout the terrain and possibly petting
the dogs against linstening to the static on my car radio.
Static kept me clinging to the inside of the car until rein-
forcements arrived.
By 7 a.m. the highway was impassable. People came from
the nearby houses, arrived in shiny new cars, old pickup
trucks, staton wagons, and bicycles. In half an hour the place
was jammed with combatants and their weapons.
Most arrived with eggs in baskets, in styrofoam super-
market egg containers, in cardboard boxes, paper bags,
plastic shopping bags, pockets, and sacks. Some had them
packed neatly in cases in the backs of their cars, and one
enterprising man had the entire back of his pickup truck
devoted to his great eggspectations for the day. :
I asked a neatly dressed jnan-he looked like a good egg--
how long the fight had been going on. {i
“IT don’t know,” he said. ‘I’ve been coming here for 63
years, and I used to hear my grandfather talk about going.
The tradition is about 200 years old, I'm told.”
How did the Sugar Hill Egg Fight get started? No one seem-
ed to know, other than that it was originated by German set-
tlers who brought the tradition from the old country and con-
Egg Fight Draws Hundreds
tinued it here. One old idea is that the egg is symbolic of the
spring season, and it holds the promise of new life. As locals
joined the celebration the Germanic influence was lost, and
today men, women, teenagers, grandparents, visiting
relatives, and curious visitors find the egg fight to be unusual
and wholesome recreation.
And what I expected to be a wild goose chase turned out to
be more than an event with the magnitude of a hollerin’ con-
test or a chitlin’ strut. It celebrates spring, heritage and hope.
I asked several people how many eggs people typically
brought to the affair.
“I brought six dozen,” one main said. “I would have
brought more but I sold a local man 35 dozen to bring here.”
One man admitted that he had hauled 125 dozen--1500
cackleberries--to the fray, not to be confused with Flay, about
seven miles distant.
Incidentally, and this is gospel truth, there was for a time a
beauty shop at Flay which was managed by a woman named
Sue. The name of the salon? You guessed it: Sue-Flay.
: Anioshe man said he had brought five bushels of eggs to
ight.
My next question was how one goes about staging an egg
fight, other than throwing rotten eggs at one another. I quick-
ly saw that it was all good clean fun. One person holds a dyed
egg so one end is exposed in the person’s hand. Another ber
son holds his egg in his hand and taps it against the shell of the
first egg until one egg breaks. Then the damaged egg is turn-
ed so that the sound end is exposed and another attack com-
mences. If both ends break, then the victor claims that egg as
part of his day’s spoils. 3 :
All eggs, by the way, are boiled until they are hard.
Within half an hour the highway was filled with people |
holding basketfuls of broken hen fruit.
Preparation for the event starts months before the actual
fight. Some people obtain crushed oyster shells to feed their
chickens in an effort to have the biddies produce eggs with
very hard shells. Others experiment with various ways of
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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A BRICK...
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MAKING
A BRICK
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LAYING A BRICK
SHOOTING A BRICK
Our hat’s off to you
Congratulations to...
Kings Mountain High’s Anthony Hillman, who finished se-
cond in the recent state 3-A wrestling tournament at Chapel
Hill...Courtney Denise Moss, West School fifth grader, who
was first place in the DAR history essay contest...
Kenneth Wright of Grover, semi-finalist in the N.C. State
Merit Awards program...Bill Pressley, named ‘Outstanding
Young American’’ by the South Carolina Jaycees...
Kevin Mack, George Adams and John Moss who will join
the late Jake Willard Early as the first inductees into the
Kings Mountain Sports Hall of Fame at its April 11 banquet at
the community center...
Area volunteer firemen who were honored for their long
years of service to the area at an appreciation banquet last
week at the fire museum... :
Kathie Ladd, new manager of the Kings Mountain Federal
Credit Union...Jerry Bowen, who recently completed his 20th
year of service to Kings Mountain National Military Park...