SUNDAY’S CHILD
By
Brendan Camp LeGrand
Copyright 2010
For my friend, Margaret Jay, who wanted to hear the stories.
To my family-I thank my God upon every remembrance of you- Philippians 1:3
PREFACE
Telling stories from one generation to another is the best way to remember ancestors and to
pass on history. As a tribute to our heritage, this book is my attempt to share the stories of the
Camp family, who came to America from England in the 1600’s, settled in Virginia and
migrated to the western region of North Carolina before the Revolutionary War.
Descendents became doctors, teachers, soldiers, tradesmen, farmers, and textile workers.
Generations of family men were drawn to the clergy. We have been called devout, God fearing,
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stubborn, prejudiced, salt of the earth, products of the slow South, rednecks, hillbillies, lint
heads, and hayseed plowboys. We were all this and more.
PROLOGUE
My brothers told me they were flying a kite that January Sunday of 1948 when I was born.
Sister Polly ran to the field to tell them I was a girl. The day they brought me home from the
Shelby Hospital, they said there was snow on the ground.
I was three weeks early and born in the Doctors’ Lounge because Mama had heart problems
and needed to be monitored. Dr. Vic Moore, who delivered me, signed fourteen-year-old Edwin,
eldest of the eight kids still at home, out of school to help out. Edwin cooked and cleaned and
helped take care of me.
I am the youngest of John Madison Camp’s eighteen children. Daddy was sixty-five when I
was born and Mama was thirty-nine. I am the ninth generation of the Camp family in America.
COMING TO AMERICA
The first inhabitants of America were the more than one million Indians belonging to over
200 tribes north of Mexico. They probably descended from the prehistoric immigrants who left
the frigid Siberian hunting ground during the ice age searching for game. They are believed to
have crossed the land bridge 25,000 to 35,000 years ago that extended across the Bering Sea and
Strait that then linked Asia to Alaska. They spread across the continent settling into the forests,
prairies, deserts, and mountains.
The first known European to set foot on the New World was Norsemen sailor, Leif Ericsson,
about A. D.1000. America was next visited in 1492, when Italian Christopher Columbus sailed
on a voyage financed by Spain, and reached the Bahamas.
John Cabot, an Italian explorer and navigator, landed on the island of Newfoundland in 1497,
and began the futile search for a navigable Northwest Passage.
Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian born explorer who moved to Spain in 1491, helped Columbus
get his ships ready for his second and third visits to the New World. Vespucci went on two, and
possibly four, voyages for Spain to Central and South America from 1497 to 1504. After his
exploration in 1501-1502, he was one of the first explorers to come up with the idea that the
places he had explored were not part of Asia, as Christopher Columbus had thought, but were
part of a New World. In 1507, a pamphlet was published called, The Four Voyages of Amerigo.
The author of the pamphlet suggested the new land Amerigo Vespucci had explored be named in
his honor. At first, the name only applied to South America, but later both continents of America
were known by his name.
Ferdinand Magellan, a native of Portugal, explored for Spain from 1519-1522, in search of a
Westward route to the “Spice Islands.” In 1521, he led the first expedition to sail from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. His expedition was the first to circumnavigate the earth,
although he was killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippians and did not complete the
voyage himself.
Explorers who were sailing to the Orient in search of spices found North America was a huge
obstacle in their path. But they were pleased to discover that the new land held untold treasures
that could be claimed for the countries of Europe.
For the next 200 years, Spanish adventurers searched the Southeast coast and the Southwest
for gold. The Spaniards established St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement north of
Mexico, and a chain of forts and missions in Florida and along the Gulf coast. In the Southwest,
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they established New Mexico, which included all of Texas, as well as a chain of missions up the
Pacific Coast of California.
French explorers hunted in the Canadian wilderness for furs, and lay claim to the land in the
Northeast around St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and Quebec. They sailed down the
Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans, and claimed all the land in the vast river system
for France.
Dutch and Swedish traders established outposts on the Northeast coast in the area that is now
New York and Delaware.
England fought Spain, France and the Netherlands for the continent. The English also came
in search of riches, but perhaps they were more adaptable that the others, for they not only
claimed the land, but settled it.
During the reign of King James I, colonization of North America began. The history of
British America started in North Carolina with Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonization attempts, which
resulted in the Lost Colony of Roanoke in the 1580s. Among those 118 men and women was
Governor John White’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English baby to be born in the
New World. The haunting mystery of their disappearance remains unsolved to this day. Paul
Green wrote a play called “The Lost Colony,” which is given each summer at Roanoke Island on
the exact spot where Governor White had his fort, and where the unlucky settlement stood.
Because North Carolina was a part of America from its beginning, it has emerged as one of the
most historic places in the United States.
After a short pause, other English settlements began. In 1607, Jamestown was founded in
Virginia, and in 1610, Cuper’s Cove was established in Newfoundland. William Bradford and
the Mayflower Pilgrims founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, at Plymouth in 1620.
The new settlers were unprepared for the rigors of colonial life and many of them succumbed
to Indian raids, starvation, and disease. In the Jamestown settlement, more than half of the
settlers who arrived in 1607 died before the end of the year. Of the 102 Pilgrims who landed at
Plymouth Rock in December 1620, 44 were dead by the following spring.
Another peril faced by the early immigrants was piracy on the seas. During the late 17th and
early 18th century, numerous rogues preyed upon the ships, seizing their contents and sometimes
killing those who resisted. Because of the shallow waters of its sounds and inlets, North
Carolina’s Outer Banks became a haven for many of the outlaws, including Blackbeard, the most
notorious pirate in the history of seafaring. His lawless career lasted only a few years, but he
captured over 50 ships. With a long flowing beard that almost covered his face, crimson coat,
two swords at his waist and bandoleers stuffed with numerous pistols and knives across his chest,
Blackbeard’s menacing appearance frightened his victims enough to make most of them give up
without a fight. He was killed in a bloody battle at Ocracoke Inlet on November 22, 1718. The
reputation of his reign of terror long outlived him.
Despite the dangers, hardships, and uncertainty of life in the New World, settlers continued to
emigrate from Western Europe and Britain in search of riches, land, and religious and political
sanctuary. By early 1700, there were thirteen English colonies from Maine to Georgia. Settlers
were adventurers, soldiers, farmers, and tradesmen. They were from every social and economic
status, except for nobility. Dukes and Earls did not emigrate. The poorest could and did.
Astonishing stories of America were told in the capitals of Europe, tales of land for the
taking, gold and pearls for the gathering,--tales enticing immigrants to come to the new land
where people could start anew, a land of opportunity and hope, limited only by the boundaries of
one’s imagination, a vision that is the appeal of America to immigrants still.
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A few settlers came to America through the port of Charleston, South Carolina, but the main
port of entry for settlers in America was Philadelphia. Migrants traveled south by the Great
Philadelphia Wagon Road, from Lancaster, through Gettysburg, and down through Staunton,
Virginia to Big Lick (now Roanoke), Virginia where the pathway split. The Wilderness Road
took settlers west into Tennessee and Kentucky and the main road continued south through
Virginia into North Carolina through Bethabara (Winston-Salem), Salisbury, and Charlotte.
Some families stayed in Virginia or Maryland and their children migrated south. The Camp
family followed this pattern.
The Camps were among the first settlers of mostly English, Scottish, Irish, French, and
German immigrants who began arriving in the foothills of the Western Piedmont along the
border of North and South Carolina in the 1750’s to what was then Anson County, the
westernmost county in North Carolina. Anson County gave birth to all the counties in the
western half of the state. Established in 1750 as the fifteenth county in the colony, Anson once
stretched westward from Bladen County all the way to the Mississippi River, including all the
land that is now the state of Tennessee. Anson County was named for Baron George Anson,
British admiral who circumnavigated the globe from 1740-1744. On one of his voyages, he went
searching for the Spanish treasure ships that were known as the Manila galleons that conducted
trade between Mexico and the Philippines. He caught the prize on the way to the Orient and
managed to get the treasure back to England. For this feat, Baron Anson became wealthy and
was named First Lord of Admiralty.
When the Camp family arrived in Anson County, Cherokee and Catawba Indians still
inhabited the land in this region of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The Indians
considered the area to be prime hunting ground. The white frontiersmen who settled here and
built homesteads found also that the land was rich for planting crops.
Some early settlers came to this area from older eastern North Carolina plantation counties.
Many, who were desperate for farms and having no money for cleared land, came past Yadkin
that had been forests thirty years earlier. They traveled west through the Catawba Path into the
Cherokee Territory. They headed for the frontier wilderness Waxhaw region on the lower
Catawba River along the North Carolina-South Carolina boundary. Just before the Seven Year
War, one thousand wagons were counted going through Hillsboro, North Carolina.
THE SEVEN YEAR WAR
During the early years, the North American settlers were caught in the middle of wars that
were not of their own accord. All international wars involving the colonies between 1689 and
1763 were related to a century-long struggle for global supremacy between England and France.
In 1756, a military conflict involving all major European powers of the period began. The
Seven Years War pitted Great Britain, Prussia, and a coalition of smaller German states against
an alliance consisting of France, Russia, Austria, Sweden, and Saxony. In later stages in the war
Russia temporarily changed sides, Portugal joined in on the side of Great Britain, and Spain on
the side of France. Neutral Dutch Republic forces were attached in India.
The war began with the French siege of British Minorca in the Mediterranean Sea and
Frederick the Great of Prussia’s invasion of Saxony. This upset the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict
issued by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI of Austria in 1713, ensuring the Austrian throne,
land, and possessions of the Hapsburgs would be inherited by his daughter, Maria Theresa.
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
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In 1754, two years before the Seven Years War began, fighting broke out between France and
Great Britain and their respective allies in North America as part of an Imperial rivalry. The
conflict in North America was a separate war and was known as the French and Indian War.
The conflicts ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. In the terms of the treaty,
Great Britain strengthened its territories in India and North America, confirming its status as the
dominant colonial power, as the treaty ratified Great Britain’s undisputed control of the seas and
shipping trade and sovereignty of North America. France yielded her claim to vast territories on
the continent, including all of its land east of the Mississippi River and Canada, as well as some
West Indian islands. This ended France’s position of more than a century and a half as a major
colonial power. After the British won the French and Indian War (1755-1763) and France ceded
its Louisiana territory to Spain, Britain had all but eliminated its chief competitor for North
America.
THE BRITISH COLONIES
The British colonies scattered up and down the Atlantic seaboard varied greatly. The New
England colonists who settled inland were mostly small farmers and artisans who lived in
villages. Other colonists who lived along the rocky coast fished, built and manned ships, and
traded with England and the West Indies. Boston and Newport were busy ports with shrewd
merchants who evaded British attempts to regulate and tax their trade with French and Dutch
colonies. New England colonists were mostly Puritans insisting on self-government.
The Middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware were settled by Dutch and
Swedish traders. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers under William Penn and by German
immigrants. They were the most cosmopolitan of the colonies and welcomed many nationalities.
Most of the residents were farmers but many merchants, mechanics, and shippers lived around
the seaports of New York and Philadelphia. The Middle colonies were more tolerant that New
England and more industrious than the South and represent the melting pot of classes and
cultures that characterizes the rich tapestry that is America.
The Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia comprised the Upper South. The
Lower South was the colonies of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. They
became large farming centers along the banks of its tidal rivers, due to climate and geography.
These self-sufficient plantations shipped their crops from their own wharfs to foreign markets.
The plantations were scattered and isolated, so development of the South lagged behind that of
the other colonies. Charleston was the only real city in the South until after the American
Revolution. Along the Appalachian Mountains and backwoods, colonists lived on small
independent farms.
Although some of the British colonies were made up of many small farms, and others had just
a few large plantations, all of them were sustained by producing agricultural raw materials for
the mother country. British laws were designed to keep the Colonies as a source of cheap raw
materials and a ready market for the mother country’s finished goods. The British did not want
competition in manufacturing goods. Any significant technology development was discouraged.
In fact, British law forbade the export of machinery, industrial drawings, and technical
specifications, and made it difficult for skilled workmen to emigrate. As a result, American
manufacturing was kept to a minimum and practically all factory-made goods came from
England. With Britain’s ban on the export of spinning machines, they held a virtual monopoly
on the sale of cloth in America. As late as 1790, not one mill in America could profitable spin
cotton into yarn or weave it into cloth.
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Money and capital were as scarce as skilled labor. Coins were rare and Britain forbade the
Colonies to mint them. Any foreign coins were rapidly paid out for imports from overseas.
At first the plantings of the New World failed. The early settlers did not know where to find
fertile land or how to prepare the soil to sow their English crops of barley, turnips, lettuce,
cabbage, and peas. The voyage across the Atlantic Ocean took six to eight weeks and often
settlers arrived in the new country after the planting season. In their struggle for existence, they
first had to tackle the hostile forest frontier. Clearing just a single acre of the land could require
several months of dawn to dusk labor. Fortunately for the newcomers, friendly Indians taught
them how to plant native crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash on hills around the tree
stumps, using fish or manure for fertilizer. This saved them from starvation. As the settlers
cleared more land, they found they could grow wheat, rye, and oats. And they could plant apple
seeds, which were among the precious supplies the colonists brought with them to the New
World.
The Indians also taught them how to make maple syrup, dyes from plants, corncribs, and
clamshell hoes. The settlers were able to grow just about everything they needed with the
exception of salt, gunpowder for their muskets, and iron for their tools. Flax and wool provided
clothing. Honey and maple syrup were used for sweetening. The trees of the great pine forests
provided lumber, resin, and tar, which were essential supplies as building materials and in the
production of new ships and boats.
Tobacco was another New World crop and became the most important export of colonial
times. Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas grew most of tobacco which was a crop that
required endless hours of labor. Rice was another successful crop and was suited to the lowlying coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. Rice was also labor intensive, and workers
had to toil twelve-hour days in the rice patties. Indigo, the blue dyestuff that was vital to the
British wool industry was grown on higher ground above the rice paddies.
Most of the labor was done by indentured whites and enslaved blacks. Thousands of English
men and women agreed to work as servants for a fixed period of time, usually three to five years,
to pay for their passage across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Thousands of others were given a
choice between serving out their terms as convicts in British prisons or being shipped to America
and indentured to masters for seven years or more. Britain shipped 50,000 convicts to its colony
in Georgia. Before the Revolution, seventy-five percent of the immigrants to America were
indentured servants from Britain.
African slave traders provided a great number of African slaves as a source of labor to work
the tobacco and cotton fields. Great profits were made from their toils. By 1790, about thirtythree percent of the South’s population and almost eighteen percent of all persons in the newly
independent colonies were slaves.
The United States was the first Western nation to be founded predominantly by Protestants
not Roman Catholics. The Church of England was the established church. The seeds of
democracy existed and many colonists believed in the separation of church and state. The
Crown was represented in the colonies by a royal governor, however, there was no such
bureaucracy as the French and Spanish had. With opportunities of almost empty land and a
weakness of any central government, democratic ideals grew. The settlers brought with them the
English law of trial by jury.
Because of their differences, the colonists bickered over religion, trade and boundaries, and
there was discord among the colonial assemblies and the English governors. Slowly the
colonists were transformed into one distinctive people, self-reliant and determined to succeed.
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Most of the colonists were Protestant and English, and they shared the English language,
British customs and traditions, and they were loyal to the King. They called England “home”
even though after the first generation, most of them had never been there. Major exceptions
were the Dutch of New Netherland, German and Scotch-Irish who settled the backwoods and the
Appalachian frontier, and the growing number of African slaves. But as long as the colonists
were allowed to make decisions on local matters, relations with the mother country were
friendly. It was only after 1763, when England sought greater control over their affairs that the
colonists rebelled.
THE CAMP FAMILY COMES TO AMERICA
Against this backdrop the Camp ancestors came to the New World. Records show that
William Campe of St. Dunstan-in-the-West married Mary Farmer of London, England in 1584 at
St. Peter, Westcheap in London, England. They had four sons, Lawrence Camp, Richard
Campe, Nicholas Campe and Thomas Camp. The marriage of son, Richard Campe, was
recorded in the Church of St. Margaret in London in 1615. In 1637, in Nasing County, Essex
County, England, Nicholas and Thomas Camp, brothers, were listed to jury duty. These two
brothers came to America. Nicholas Camp settled in New England and became the ancestor of
the Camps in that area. (His descendants founded the lumber giant, Union Camp.) Thomas
Camp came to Virginia and became the ancestor of the main part of the Camp families in the
South. Virginia was settled mostly by Anglicans, used to social distinctions and large land
holdings.
Lawrence Camp was a member of the Great Charter of the Virginia Company granted by
King James I, May 23, 1609, and was of the company of the Honorable Drapers and Weavers.
He made many donations to the infant Colony at Jamestown, Virginia, and also took four shares
in the company and later took three other shares. Each share allowed him to take lands of 100
acres per share. He took 700 acres in Gloucester County, Virginia. He also took shares in the
New England Company. In England he endowed a fund at Cambridge University for the
maintenance of indigent scholars. He also gave 7,000 pounds to establish an Alms House in the
Parish of Friam Barnet in his home county in England. He was a builder and patron of the
Church of All-Hallows-In-The-Wall, where he is buried inside a vault in that church. Lawrence
Camp was never married and upon his death, his estates came into the hands of his three
brothers. Richard Campe inherited the estate in England, Nicholas Campe got the estate in New
England, and Thomas Camp received the estate in Virginia.
This information was extracted from a Camp and Kemp Manuscript prepared in 1947 by Mr.
Leonardo Andrea, a professional genealogist of Columbia, S. C., and printed in the two volumes
of Col. Robert Neville Mann and Catherine Cleek Mann of Cedar Bluff, Alabama, in their
Camp-Kemp Family History in 1967. Mr. Andrea believed that Thomas Camp born in 1661 was
the son of Lawrence Camp’s brother Thomas, and Thomas Camp II born in 1691 was a great
nephew of Lawrence Camp.
In addition to the Camp-Kemp Family History, other genealogical information was taken from
Tyler’s Quarterly, Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. 23, pages 116, 207 and 278; also
Colonial Families of the Southern States by Stella Pickett Hardy, Second Edition, 1958, page
341 and printed in the book John Steel Camp And His Descendents compiled and edited by Paul
W. Camp and Paul K. Camp of California in 1980. Much information was gleaned from The
Camp Bulletin started in August 1923 and published until January 1935.
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Thomas Camp was born c. 1661 in Nasing Parish, Essex, England and died in 1711 in
King & Queen County, Virginia. He married Catherine Barron c. 1689 in James City
County, Virginia, daughter of Andrew Barron of James City County, Virginia who came
from London, England on the David in 1635. She was born c. 1672 in James City County,
Virginia, and died c. 1715. They had two children: Thomas Camp II and Mary Camp.
Mary Camp was born 1708 in King & Queen County, Virginia, and died in 1758 in North
Farnham Parish, Richmond County, Virginia, and is buried in the same parish, Richmond
County, Virginia. She married January 5, 1733 in King and Queen County, Virginia to James
Tarpley, son of James Tarpley and Mary Biddlecombe, born May 8, 1692, North Farnham
Parish, Richmond County, Virginia, died 1765, Charlotte County, Virginia, buried in Charlotte
County, Virginia. Their children were:
1. Thomas Tarpley was born October 28, 1734, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond
County, Virginia, died August 8, 1788 in 96 District, South Carolina, and is buried in
Charlotte County, Virginia. He married Mary Camp April 3, 1759, his first cousin once
removed, daughter of Thomas Camp III and Winnifred Starling. Thomas Tarpley served
as a private in Infantry, Virginia Continental Line in the American Revolutionary War.
They had at least seven children.
2. Lucy Tarpley was born August 17, 1736, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County,
Virginia.
3. Sarah Tarpley was born September 13, 1738, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond
County, Virginia.
4. Mary (Minnie) Tarpley was born October 30, 1740, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond
County, Virginia, died August 17, 1789, 96 District, South Carolina, and is buried in 96
District, South Carolina. She married John Camp, her first cousin once removed, son of
Thomas Camp III and Winnifred Starling, c. 1760, Lunenburg (part that later became
Charlotte) County, Virginia.
5. James Tarpley was born July 21, 1743, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County,
Virginia.
6. Elizabeth (Betty) Tarpley was born August 6, 1746, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond
County, Virginia.
7. Winnifred Tarpley was born June 9, 1748, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County,
Virginia. She married Nathaniel Camp, her first cousin once removed, son of Thomas
Camp III and Winnifred Starling.
8. Nancy (Anne) Tarpley was born October 6, 1750, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond
County, Virginia. She married Thomas Camp IV born c. 1763, her first cousin once
removed, son of Thomas Camp III and Winnifred Starling.
Thomas Camp II was born in 1691 in King & Queen County, Virginia and died in 1751
in Culpeper County, Virginia. He married Mary Ida Marshall in 1715, daughter of
Thomas Marshall and Martha Sherwood. She was born 1697 in Westmoreland County,
Virginia and died in 1757 in Culpeper County, Virginia. (Mary Marshall’s brother, John
Marshall, was the grandfather of Chief Justice John Marshall, the “greatest chief justice”
of the United States. He was an American jurist and statesman who served under George
Washington. A lieutenant and captain in the American Revolutionary War, he later served
as spokesman for the Federalist Party. In 1800 he became Secretary of State in the cabinet
of President John Adams who appointed him as 4th Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme
Court. He held this office for 34 years until his death in 1835.) Thomas Marshall was a
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planter by occupation, and he was born 1655 in Culpeper County, Virginia, and died 1704
in Washington Parish, Westmoreland County, Virginia. He married Martha Sherwood
April 30, 1690 in Richmond, Virginia. She was a daughter of Philip Sherwood, was born c.
1662 in Old Rappahannock County, Virginia, and died July 4, 1749 in Culpeper County,
Virginia at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Mary Marshall and Thomas Camp
II. The children of Thomas Camp II and Mary Marshall were:
1. Thomas Camp III was born February 8, 1717. (Additional information given
below).
2. John Camp born was born 1719. He was an officer in the Revolutionary Army in
Virginia.
3. Marshall Camp was born 1721. He was an officer in the Revolutionary Army in
Virginia.
4. Ambrose Camp was born 1723, in Spotsylvania (part that was later part of Orange, then
Culpeper) County, Virginia and died March 1769 in Culpeper County, Virginia. He
married Ann Marshall.
Thomas Camp III, son of Thomas Camp II and Mary Marshall, was born February 8,
1717, in King & Queen County (the part of the county that was later Spotsylvania, then
Orange, then Culpeper) County, Virginia and died 1798 in Rutherford County, North
Carolina and is buried in the old Camp cemetery on the Broad River one-half mile north of
the South Carolina line, and one-quarter mile east of U. S. Highway 221 between Forest
City, North Carolina and Chesnee, South Carolina.
He married Winnifred Starling c. 1737/38 in Accomac County, Virginia. She was born
in Accomac County, Virginia, in 1720, a daughter of Richard Starling of Wales and died in
1761 in Culpeper County, Virginia. Their fourteen children were:
1. Edmund (Edward) Camp was born in 1739 in Halifax District in Virginia. He enlisted as a
private in Tryon County, North Carolina, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War and
was commissioned as an Ensign in June 1776. He fought in the Battle of Kings Mountain,
North Carolina and Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina. He married (1) Mary Ragsdale in
Virginia in 1760. She was born 1742, a daughter of Benjamin and Martha Ragsdale. They
had seven children. (2) Elizabeth Carney, sister of his step-mother, who was born c. 1759
and died c. 1852. Edward died 1834 in Franklin County, Georgia at age 95. He and
Elizabeth Carney are buried in unmarked graves in the old Camp Cemetery on the L. M.
Wilbanks farm near Toccoa, (Stephens County), Georgia. They had thirteen children.
Several of their sons held places of honor and distinction in the legislative halls of Georgia.
2. Mary Camp was born Jan. 5, 1739/40, in Orange County (later Culpeper County), Virginia,
died September 11, 1786 in Charlotte County, Virginia, and is buried in Charlotte County,
Virginia. She married first cousin once removed, Thomas Tarpley April 3, 1759 in
Culpeper County, Virginia. He was born October 28, 1734, in North Farnham Parish,
Richmond County, Virginia, died August 8, 1788 in 96 District, South Carolina, and is
buried in Charlotte County, Virginia. They had at least seven children, five boys and two
girls. Thomas Tarpley served as a private in Infantry, Virginia Continental Line in the
American Revolutionary War.
3. Joseph Camp was born in 1741, in Orange County (later Culpeper County), Virginia
and died in 1813 in Pulaski County, Kentucky. He married Susannah Roundtree and
they had at least ten children. He was a physician and a noted Baptist minister who
started some of the earliest churches in Rutherford (now Cleveland) County, North
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Carolina, York County, South Carolina and Pulaski County, Kentucky. Additional
information given below.
4. Lucy (Lusey) Camp was born in 1742. She married Denis Hearn and they had at least ten
children.
5. John Camp was born in 1743, in Orange County (later Culpeper County), Virginia, died in
1818 in Jackson County, Georgia and is buried at Lebanon Methodist Church, in 96
District, South Carolina, near Greenville. He married about 1760 in Lunenburg County
(later Charlotte County), Virginia, first cousin once removed, Mary (Minnie) Tarpley. She
was born October 30, 1740, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County, Virginia, died
August 17, 1789, 96 District, South Carolina, and is buried in 96 District, South Carolina.
He was a Lieutenant in the American Revolutionary War and fought in the Battle of Kings
Mountain, North Carolina and Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina. They had nine children,
five boys and four girls. Their son, Thomas, born 1765, also fought in the Battle of Kings
Mountain, North Carolina and Battle of Cowpens. He received a wound in the Battle of
Kings Mountain by a bullet passing across his forehead, just beneath the skin, leaving a
scar for life.
6. Nathaniel Camp was born in 1745, in Orange County (later Culpeper County), Virginia.
He married first cousin once removed Winnifred Tarpley. She was born June 9, 1748, in
North Farnham Parish, Richmond County, Virginia. They had ten children, five boys and
five girls. Nathaniel Camp died after January 1832 at the home of his son, Reverend Hosea
Camp, in Gwinnett County, Georgia and is buried in Polk County, Georgia. He fought in
the American Revolutionary War Battle of Kings Mountain, North Carolina and Battle of
Cowpens, South Carolina. He brought from the Battle of Kings Mountain a silver-lined
conch shell British Commander Ferguson used as a horn.
7. Thomas Camp IV was born in 1747, Orange County (later Culpeper County), Virginia,
died after 1811 in Walton County, Georgia and is buried in Old Bethlehem Cemetery in
Walton County, Georgia. He married first cousin once removed Nancy (Anne) Tarpley c.
1763. She was born October 6, 1750, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County,
Virginia. He enlisted in the 4th Artillery Regiment of South Carolina on February 14, 1776
and fought in the American Revolutionary War Battle of Kings Mountain, North Carolina
and Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina. They had seven children, six boys and one girl.
Their son, Burwell Camp born in 1779 in South Carolina served under General Andrew
Jackson when he defeated Lord Pakenham at the Battle of New Orleans, Louisiana in the
War of 1812.
8. Starling Camp was born in 1749 in Culpeper County, Virginia.
9. Hosea Camp was born in 1751 in Culpeper County, Virginia.
10. William Camp was born in 1753, in Culpeper, Virginia, and died c. 1827 in York County,
South Carolina. He was a Baptist minister. He married Rebecca Wofford c. 1770 in South
Carolina. She was born c. 1750 near Rock Creek, Frederick County, Maryland, daughter of
Absalom Wofford and Hannah Hosea. The Wofford family was of the Spartanburg, South
Carolina area. She died in 1824 according to Buffalo Baptist Church records. She is buried
in York County, South Carolina. They had nine children, six boys and three girls.
11. Alfred Camp was born in 1755 in Culpeper County, Virginia, and died and is buried in
Campbell County, Georgia. He married a Miss Jennings of Manchester, England.
12. Benjamin Camp was in born 1757, in Culpeper County, Virginia, died 1832 in Walton
County, Georgia, and is buried in Old Bethlehem Cemetery, Walton County, Georgia. He
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married c. 1776 Elizabeth Dykes, born c. 1759 in Wales or Virginia, died after 1811. He
was a private in the North Carolina troops and fought in the American Revolutionary War
Battle of Kings Mountain, North Carolina and Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina. They
had at least five children, four sons and a daughter. Their son, Joseph Camp born
December 13, 1777 in Rutherford County, North Carolina served in the War of 1812 as a
private in Captain David Gallaspy’s Company of Infantry, 4th Regiment, Booth’s Georgia
Militia. Their son, John Camp, born about 1781, was one of General Andrew Jackson’s
trusted scouts who served with distinction in the Battle of Talladega and the Battle of
Horseshoe Bend.
13. Elizabeth Camp was born in 1759 in Culpeper County, Virginia, and died after 1850 in
South Carolina. She married c. 1777 Reubin Brock, born 1754 in Orange County, North
Carolina and died 1842. He enlisted in American Revolutionary War 1776 in Cavalry of
North Carolina troops. They had seven children, five boys and two girls.
14. Joel Camp was born in 1761.
The second wife of Thomas Camp III was Margaret Carney who was born June 20, 1744, in
Limerick County, Ireland, and died in 1824 in Rutherford County, North Carolina, buried in the
Thomas Camp cemetery near Island Ford, Rutherford County, North Carolina. She was only
eighteen years old when they married and Thomas Camp III was forty-five with children ranging
from one year to twenty-three years old. She was reputed to have been a very fine business
woman who looked after the business affairs of her husband. Their children were:
15. Crenshaw (Granger) Camp was born January 5, 1763, in Culpeper County, Virginia, died
in 1808 in Rutherford County, North Carolina, and is buried in the Thomas Camp III
cemetery. He did not marry.
16. James Camp was born in 1765, in Culpeper County, Virginia and died in 1817 in
Spartanburg County, South Carolina. He was a builder. He married Sarah Jennings,
daughter of Joseph Jennings and Anne Billups, born July 24, 1779 in Nottoway County,
Virginia and died July 1851 in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. They had eight
children, six boys and two girls. Their son, Joseph Thomas Camp born April 30, 1800 in
Nottoway County, Virginia was a lawyer in Columbus, Georgia. He killed State Senator
General Sowell Woolfolk in a duel and on August 12, 1833 was assassinated by John
Milton who later became Governor of Florida. The cause of the duel is not known, but John
Milton was acquitted. The Woolfolks were influential and the Senator was highly
esteemed, but Joseph Thomas Camp was also greatly beloved, as is proved by the laudatory
tributes inscribed on the beautiful twenty-five foot monument his friends erected in
Columbus in his memory.
17. Daniel Camp was born in 1766, died April 2, 1798 in Rutherford County, North Carolina.
He married Sarah McKinney, born 1770 in Rutherford County, North Carolina and died
October 23, 1857 in Rutherford County, North Carolina, daughter of John and Jean
McKinney. They had six children, two sons and four daughters. He was elected Sheriff of
Rutherford County, North Carolina in January 1795 and served one year. He was also
county treasurer January 1797. One parcel of land he owned was a land grant in Lincoln
County he received in 1789. Upon his death, his son, Thomas Camp, purchased this parcel
from the other heirs. He sold the parcel to James Love in 1840 and James Love gave the
land in1841 to Cleveland County, North Carolina for the town of Shelby.
18. Lewis Camp was born January 16, 1768, died in Rutherford County, North Carolina and is
buried in the Thomas Camp III cemetery. He was a builder. He married Joanna Neal,
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daughter of Thomas Neal, November 6, 1800 in Charlotte County, Virginia. They had
three daughters. Their daughter Lucy’s husband, Abel G. Beam, was killed in the Mexican
War.
19. Adam Camp was born in 1769 and died in infancy.
20. Stephen Camp was born September 17, 1771 and died in 1846 in Rutherford County, North
Carolina. He was wounded at age ten in the American Revolutionary War Battle of
Cowpens, South Carolina while holding his brothers’ horses and was lame for the
remainder of his 75 years. He married Anne Alexander, born in 1771 in Rutherford
County, North Carolina and died in 1841 in Rutherford County, North Carolina, daughter
of Colonel Elias Alexander and Nancy Agnes McCall. Colonel Elias Alexander, born 1749
in Maryland and died 1818 in Rutherford County, North Carolina was a Revolutionary
soldier. Stephen and Anne had eight children, five sons and three daughters. Their son,
William Carney Camp born in 1815 near Warm Springs, North Carolina, served as a
magistrate and a member of the Board of County Commissioners for Spartanburg County,
South Carolina. He resided for the last 33 years of his life near Campton, South Carolina,
which was named for him.
21. Larkin Camp was born in 1773 and died in infancy.
22. Eunice (Unicy) Camp was born June 21, 1775, married Samuel Broadway of North
Carolina and moved to Haywood County, North Carolina. She and their daughter both died
of smallpox.
23. Aaron Camp was born June 13, 1778, in Rutherford County, North Carolina, died 1861, in
Ringgold, Walker County, Georgia and is buried in Hillside Cemetery. He was a builder.
He married (1) Frances Willis Terrell on August 2, 1803 in Rutherford County, North
Carolina. She died September 18, 1810 in Rutherford County, North Carolina. They had
three children, two sons and one daughter. He married (2) Sarah B. Suttle, on April 3, 1817
in Rutherford County, North Carolina. She was born December 12, 1793 in Rutherford
County, North Carolina and died November 28, 1869 at Ringgold, Georgia and is buried in
Hillside Cemetery. She was a daughter of George Suttle, a Revolutionary War soldier,
born in 1766 in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia and died February 5, 1816 in Rutherford
County, North Carolina and Nancy Byars who died July 7, 1837. George and Nancy Suttle
emigrated with Thomas Camp III from Virginia to North Carolina. Aaron Camp and Sarah
Suttle had seven children, one boy and six girls. Their son, William Addison Camp born
August 12, 1818 in Rutherford County, North Carolina became a contractor and builder of
note, who by age 16 had constructed two court houses and other eminent buildings. He
was a Major of the 36th Tennessee Regiment in the Confederate Army. He was blinded in
the Battle of Fort Tyler at West Point, Georgia.
24. Ruth Camp was born September 30, 1780 in Rutherford County, North Carolina. She lived
with her mother until her death, and then she married David Patterson March 20, 1825 in
Rutherford County, North Carolina. Ruth was David Patterson’s second wife and they had
no children. Ruth died 1852 in Rutherford County, North Carolina and is buried in the
Thomas Camp III cemetery.
25. George Camp was born September 24, 1782 in Rutherford County, North Carolina and died
1835 in Tennessee. He married Mary Norman of Mecklenburg County, Virginia. They had
six children, five sons and one daughter. George Camp served two terms in the North
Carolina State Assembly, They moved from Rutherford County, North Carolina to
Spartanburg District, South Carolina where he served as a County Surveyor, Magistrate and
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member of the South Carolina State Legislature. In 1830 they moved to Tennessee, near
Nashville on the Cumberland River, where he died five years later.
26. Joshua Camp was born July 10, 1786, in Rutherford County, North Carolina, and died Jan.
9, 1849 in Rutherford County, North Carolina. He married Nancy N. Gregory, born April
24, 1794 in Virginia and died May 29, 1875 in Rutherford County, North Carolina. Joshua
and Nancy had eight children, three sons and five daughters. Joshua lived and died at the
home place and he and Nancy and their son, Joel Barlow O. Camp, who died at age twenty,
are buried in the Thomas Camp III cemetery. Their youngest son, George Camp, was a
prominent doctor in the area. He and his wife both died in 1872, leaving two daughters.
George’s two daughters inherited the home place that had been in the Camp family over
100 years.
Thomas Camp III had a total of 26 children. Twenty-one of them were boys. As far as is
known, he had the most sons on record in any Colonial family.
Thomas Camp III moved from the upper part of Virginia to Halifax County, Virginia. Then
he moved to the area where Durham, North Carolina is now located. He was residing in Orange
County, North Carolina during the term of office of Josiah Martin, November 1771-1775, the
last of the royal governors of North Carolina, when he signed a petition, along with others, for
the establishment of a new county.
He moved to western North Carolina, built a house at Horse Creek on Island Ford, on the
French Broad River at the edge of Rutherford County just before the Revolutionary War. The
first home was built about 1780. About 1795, he built a larger, more prestigious home about 500
yards from the first site, on the top of the hill, on a beautiful elevation, overlooking the Ford and
the mill and surrounding county. He was a genial host and his home was sought by all the
notables of that time and area. His hospitality was that of the Old Virginia style which he was
taught by his mother, Mary Marshall Camp.
It was handed down through the older set of Camps that he was a man of powerful physique,
amiable disposition, very religious, and a sturdy worker. He was a millwright by profession and
built and owned the first mill erected in that section.
He believed that his sons should learn a trade or have a profession, so he sent James, Lewis,
and Aaron to Halifax County, Virginia to learn carpentry. They returned to the old homestead in
Rutherford County as skilled builders. William and Joseph became ministers and Joseph also
became a physician.
The sons were conscientious and industrious. Whatever their trade, they all farmed. Old
Deed books and registers show that the Camps acquired acres upon acres of vast tracts of land, as
they spread South and West. In many of these records they are referred to as “Planters” being
their vocation. They raised large families and owned many slaves. One Deed book, dated July
1, 1809 shows Nathaniel (Nathan) bought 2,400 acres for $1,300. Aaron acquired hundreds of
acres by paying off taxes owed on the property. Records show 100 acres sold to him for 86
cents; 300 acres for $1.64; 200 acres for $1.30; 300 acres for 49 cents; 100 acres for $1.05,
Aaron Camp being the highest bidder. It is known that the Camp family migrated west into
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and California and moved over the mountains into
Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana. Their descendents eventually spread throughout the United
States.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR
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After the French and Indian War, Britain sought to appease the Indians and to secure the
valuable fur trade for their own profit, so in 1763, they proclaimed the region west of the
Appalachian Mountains closed to white settlement. This action aroused resentment among the
colonists and set the mood that ultimately led to the American Revolution, for they had heard
that west of the Appalachian Mountains the soil was rich for harvest, game was plentiful, and the
land might be had for clearing and claiming.
The settlers ignored the Proclamation Line and streamed west. By 1765, some 2,000 families
had settled along the forks of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania. In 1775, Daniel Boone
led a momentous trip over the Wilderness Road transforming the trail into a well-marked
pathway. By 1780, some 55,000 frontiersmen had poured across the mountains into what is now
Kentucky and Tennessee. One wonders how the traders, trappers, and mountaineer men who
acted as frontier guides ever found their way back. That in itself is extraordinary. Daniel Boone
was asked if he was ever lost. He said he couldn’t say he was ever lost, but one time he was
bewildered for three days.
Taxation was a major factor that led to the American Revolution. Great Britain had borrowed
heavily from British and Dutch banks to finance the Seven Years War and French and Indian
War. To generate capital to repay the loans, Parliament levied a large import tax on goods like
sugar and tobacco and a sales tax on salt, beer, and spirits. Parliament determined that the
colonists were obligated to share the cost of the empire.
Taxation became a central point of contention among the colonies because it threatened their
prosperity as well as their autonomy. The colonists considered themselves patriot Englishmen
but they had no voice in the British Parliament, and they were resentful of taxation without
representation. The colonists rebelled because they felt they were treated unfairly by the mother
country.
Their petition to King George III for relief met with Parliament reasserting its rights to make
laws binding on the colonies. At first the colonists only questioned Parliament’s right to tax, but
in 1767, the Townshend Acts imposed stiff new duties on a host of popular British products
including paper, glass, lead, lace, and tea. Colonists boycotted British imports and Parliament
repealed all of the Townshend duties except for tea.
After Patriots boarded the ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 343 chests of tea into the
harbor, Britain came down hard on the rebellious colonists, closing the port of Boston, curtailing
civil liberties, and imposing a military government.
These Intolerable Acts were looked upon by the other colonies as a threat to their liberties. In
September 1774, all of the colonies except Georgia sent delegates to the First Continental
Congress in Philadelphia. The 55 delegates supported a united stand against British demands.
They declared the Intolerable Acts unjust, illegal, and void. They urged citizens to boycott
British goods, to withhold taxes, and to arm themselves in case the British military forces
occupying Boston advanced into the other colonies.
The delegates approved a Declaration of Rights and Grievances but they still sought
reconciliation with Britain and not independence for America. They agreed to reconvene on
May 10, 1775, to consider stronger action if their grievances were not addressed.
King George III showed no interest in the grievances of the colonists, and by 1775, factions in
both countries were preparing for war. As relations between Britain and the colonies worsened,
trade deteriorated. British merchants feared that war would prevent them from collecting large
debts owed to them by the colonial planters, and they petitioned the King to appease the
colonists.
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Lord North, the British Prime Minister, asked Parliament to forego taxation on the Colonies
if the colonial assemblies themselves levied taxes to provide for their own civil administration
and defense. Parliament approved Lord North’s proposal, but the news of its passage did not
reach the colonies until April 24th which was five days after the first shot rang out at Lexington,
Massachusetts.
In April, Gov. Thomas Gage of Massachusetts received orders from England to crack down
on the rebels in the colony. The governor sent 800 men under the leadership of Lt. Col. Francis
Smith to Concord to destroy munitions that his spies told him were being assembled and to arrest
the rebellious John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were in Lexington.
Another rebel, Dr. Joseph Warren, guessing their intentions, sent tanner William Dawes, Jr.
and silversmith, Paul Revere to spread the word and to warn Hancock and Adams. Samuel
Prescott, a local young physician, joined them. Paul Revere’s midnight ride on April 18th to
alarm the colonists that the British were coming was immortalized in Longfellow’s poem “Paul
Revere’s Ride.”
When the British arrived in Lexington in the early morning of April 19th they were met by
Capt. John Parker and forty to fifty minutemen, as they were called because they were ready to
march at a minute’s notice.
Maj. John Pitcairn, the British leader, ordered the minutemen to disperse, and as he rode up
to them with his sword drawn, a pistol shot rang out. Who fired that first shot has never been
ascertained, but the British troops fired on the minutemen even after they were retreating, killing
eight of them and wounding ten more.
When the British reached Concord, they confiscated the few arms they found. Three of the
British companies were attacked by the colonists, and as they turned back toward Lexington,
they were fired upon by minutemen who lined the road, hidden behind rocks, trees, and shrubs.
More colonists joined the battle, and by the time the British reached Boston, 270 were dead,
wounded, or missing, and the colonists suffered around 95 casualties. America’s War for
Independence had begun. The opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”
refers to the beginning of the American Revolutionary War as “the shot heard ’round the world.”
The Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia to determine a course of action
toward the British. They authorized the organization of the Continental Army and appointed
George Washington as Commander in Chief. Still, they petitioned the King for reconciliation,
but the King refused their emissary and declared the colonies in open rebellion.
The Congress rejected Lord North’s proposal, as it gave them only token control over their
civic affairs. Three weeks later, the King issued a proclamation that the colonies were unlawful
and rebellious.
For fifteen months the American colonies were in revolt. Thomas Jefferson, James Otis, John
Dickerson, and others stirred the blood of the colonists and fired their imaginations to convert
them to the cause of national independence. Ben Franklin was among those who supported the
cause wholeheartedly in their writings. The colonists had related to his pithy maxims in his Poor
Richard’s Almanack and his writings had helped develop the American attitude in the decades
before the Revolution.
Pamphlets encouraging the war for independence were circulated through the colonies.
Recent immigrant from England, Thomas Paine, inflamed the colonists with the most powerful
of the pamphlets in 1776, entitled Common Sense giving voice to America’s struggle. Paine
charged that the Crown was interfering with the economic growth of the Colonies, that a
monarchy was a corrupt form of government, and that it was impossible for Britain to govern the
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Colonies from 3,000 miles away. The colonists up and down the coast discussed his call for
independence and thousands more colonists agreed that his sentiments reflected their own.
The Revolutionary War was, perhaps, the result of British weakness and inconsistency more
than British tyranny. But once battle had begun, the colonists united with a sense of purpose and
firmly resolved to be free of Britain.
On July 4, 1776, the representatives of the colonies met in the Continental Congress to adopt
a Declaration of Independence, a charter of liberty to formalize their rebellion. The Liberty Bell
at Independence Hall pealed the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For the next five
years, the colonists heard the sounds of cannons and gunfire as the Patriots marched to their
favorite marching tune, “Yankee Doodle.”
The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were taking great risks in penning their
names to such a rebellious document. They weren’t rebel-rousing renegades, they were well
educated men of means-- twenty-four of them were lawyers and jurists, eleven were merchants,
four were physicians, and nine were farmers and large plantation owners. They were willing to
sacrifice all that they had, for they valued liberty more than security. They signed and pledged
their fortunes, their sacred honor, and their lives, knowing that death would be their penalty if
they were captured. Most of them paid a heavy price for our freedom.
The colonists were willing to defy the might of the world’s greatest military power. Britain
was a powerful empire that possessed the world’s greatest navy and had a well-trained army.
King George III was unable to recruit enough Englishmen to fight in America, so he hired
30,000 German mercenaries who were professional warriors, plus the British had substantial
support from Tories (Loyalists) in the colonies that were loyal to the mother country.
America’s War for Independence divided the populace in this country was well as in Britain.
There was a difference of opinion and purpose among the people of both countries and fierce
debates ensued as the countries drifted toward war. At the commencement of the war perhaps as
many as one third of Americans preferred royal rule to rebellion.
Divisions of loyalty in the military are especially remembered by two famous incidents. Gen.
Benedict Arnold, West Point commander, was a traitor and became a brigadier general for the
British. He led two savage raids against the Patriots. On the other hand, Connecticut ranger
captain, Nathan Hale, was so loyal to the Patriots, when he was executed by the British for
spying; his famous last words were “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
British loyalty and Tory support divided families. It is said that two of the Camp brothers
were Tories and they were captured by their own brothers who took them home and locked them
in the corn crib until the war ended.
Thomas Camp III was a staunch Patriot who aided and supported the Revolutionary Army,
thus he was robbed and pillaged by the British Army. His home was burned by the Tories when
he lived at Camp Creek, an area that was named for him, ten miles down Broad River.
At a time when it seemed that victory for the British was imminent, and desertion mounted
among American forces, Thomas Paine wrote in The American Crisis: “These are the times that
try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the
service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and
woman.” George Washington was so stirred by this pamphlet that he ordered it to be read to all
his troops in December 1776.
In New England, few battles were fought after the first weeks of the war. The Middle
Colonies were where bloodshed was heaviest, but was in the South that the issue of America’s
independence was decided. The British were desperate for a way to end the rebellion before the
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French launched a defensive in the South and they also believed that Loyalist sentiment was
strong in the South and Patriot military power was weak. But the Battle of Kings Mountain,
North Carolina, about twenty-five miles from Thomas Camp III’s farm was a decisive Patriots
victory over the British forces.
On October 7, 1780, 900 wilderness-hardened frontiersmen from the backwoods and the
mountains called the “Over Mountain Men” decimated the 1,100 Tory forces. The battle only
lasted one-hour-and-five minutes. The frontiersmen, familiar with the terrain, surrounded the
mountain armed with long range hunting rifles they used for shooting wild game and the British
attempted to drive them down the mountain with muskets attached by bayonets for close up
battles.
Thomas Camp III was too old to serve in the Revolutionary War, but he had five sons and a
grandson in the Battle of Kings Mountain. His sons, Edmund, John, Thomas, Benjamin, and
Nathaniel were there as well as John’s son, Thomas. Thomas received a wound by a bullet
passing across his forehead, just beneath the skin, leaving a scar for the rest of his life. Thomas
lived close enough to the battlefield that his wife, Susannah Wagoner Camp, told about how she
could hear the firing of the guns as she fed her cows.
Col. Patrick Ferguson, the British Commander, was reported to have said, “God, Almighty
cannot remove me from this mountain.” He was shot several times, and his body was wrapped
in a beef skin and buried on the slope of the hill at the Kings Mountain battlefield.
Thomas Camp III’s son, Nathaniel, is reputed to have shot Col. Ferguson, because he came
away with the silver-lined conch shell that Ferguson used as a horn to call his troops. It
remained in the Camp family 145 years and served as a dinner bell and a bugle to call workers
from the field. In 1925, the shell was given to the Daughters of the American Revolution
National Museum in Washington, D. C.
The Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina was fought on January 17, 1871. It was a brilliant
victory and a turning point in the conquest of South Carolina from the British. The Patriots,
under the leadership of Gen. Daniel Morgan, killed, wounded, or captured almost all of Banastre
Tarleton’s 1,000-man force.
Six of Thomas Camp III’s sons and a grandson fought in the Battle of Cowpens. His sons,
Edmund, John, Thomas, Benjamin, Nathaniel, and Stephen were there as well as and John’s son,
Thomas. Thomas Camp III’s farm was located about four miles, as the crow flies, from the battle
site. He was almost 64 years old at the time. It must have been agonizing for him to listen to the
cannons firing. His 10 year old son, Stephen, who went to Cowpens with his older brothers to
hold their horses, was badly wounded and was lame for the remainder of his 75 years.
When Gen. Charles Cornwallis went to pursue Gen. Morgan, Gen. Nathanael Greene joined
Gen. Morgan and they led Gen. Cornwallis on an exhausting and frustrating chase through North
Carolina into Virginia.
America won her independence because the British had weak civilian and military leadership
and they underestimated the strength of the rebellion. Not to be forgotten in this country’s
struggle for independence, Jewish broker and financial genius, Haym Salomon, a Patriot
sympathizer, raised money and loaned money time after time to bail out the debt ridden
colonists. In 1781, he began working extensively with Robert Morris the newly appointed
Superintendent for Finance for the Thirteen Colonies. Plus, the powerful nation of France
intervened on the American side. As early as 1775, Congress had sent envoys to Paris seeking
military assistance, ammunition, and loans. The French were sympathetic to the American cause
and secretly shipped arms to the rebellious colonists through private intermediaries. The
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American mission in Paris recruited foreign volunteers for George Washington’s army. The best
known and most loved of these recruits was the gallant young nobleman, Marquis de Lafayette,
who arrived in 1777, and offered to serve at his own expense. He shared their hardships and
endured the battles, and displayed skills in the field. In 1779, he sailed to France to solicit more
military assistance for America and served as a liaison between the Continentals and the French
allies.
In August of 1781, our Southern forces had trapped Gen. Cornwallis in the little coastal town
of Yorktown, Virginia. George Washington’s army and the Count de Rochambeau and his
French army decided to march from the Hudson Highlands to Yorktown to deal the British army
a final blow. Washington needed at least $20,000 to finance the campaign, but there was no
money in the war chest and no credit available. Again Haym Salomon came through and raised
the $20,000.
A French fleet arrived off the Virginia coast which prevented the British Commander in Chief
in America, Sir Henry Clinton, from sending reinforcements to Yorktown. This sealed the fate
of Gen. Cornwallis’s army and virtually ended the war. It was the final large battle and on
October 17, 1781, Gen. Cornwallis asked for terms. Two days later, the proud and once
powerful British units filed between lines of French and American soldiers to surrender their
arms as their military band played “The World Turned Upside Down.”
But it was not until April 11, 1783 that U. S. Congress proclaimed the war over. On
September 3, 1783, in Paris, France, the British and American negotiators signed the Peace of
Paris. The British were generous toward their former colonies and kept commerce open between
the two countries. Eight years had passed since the war began when the first shot was fired at
Lexington, Massachusetts. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans had taken up arms for
their freedom.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Most of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains had been claimed by several states and
they yielded their titles to the Continental Congress, which passed the Northwest Ordinance in
1787. The ordinance outlined the procedures by which territories could advance to statehood, a
process that depended on population growth and the establishment of representative government.
In 1787, the states sent 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The
bewigged colonists were mostly lawyers, merchants, and planters, many of whom had fought in
the Revolution. Six of them had signed the Declaration of Independence. The delegates were
there to improve on the flawed Articles of Confederation, America’s first short-lived
Constitution that went into effect on March 1, 1781 after the five years it had taken for all the
states to approve.
For four hot summer months, from May 25 to September 17, they debated the nation’s future
behind closed doors. The extraordinary document that came out of this delegation, the United
States Constitution, was the blueprint for a democratic government based on the consent of the
governed with a balance between rights of individuals with state and federal power. It set up a
checks and balance system of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal
government. They made it possible to amend the document and created a Supreme Court to
dissolve disputes over interpretations of the Constitution. Thirty-nine delegates signed the
document and it had to be ratified by nine of the thirteen states. By spring it was evident that the
decisive battle for the required ratification would occur in Virginia.
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Patrick Henry, America’s most famous orator, had refused to attend the Philadelphia
convention. But he was among the delegates who gathered in Richmond in June 1788, to decide
whether Virginia would ratify the newly drafted United States Constitution. Thirteen years
earlier he had called upon his fellowmen in the Virginia assembly to muster troops for the
American Revolution when he cried, “Give me liberty or give me death.” He served as wartime
governor of Virginia, America’s richest and most populace state which provided the most aid to
Washington’s Continental Army. Now he was voicing a fear of big government and leading a
fight against it after America had gained independence. He argued that the failure of the
Constitution to limit and define powers of the federal government would inevitably lead to the
same kind of tyranny the colonists had fought against. George Washington, who had presided
over the convention in Philadelphia, pressed for the establishment of a federal government with
greater authority over international and interstate commerce, interstate disputes, national
finances, and military affairs. The subsequent history of our republic reveals that America has
yet to resolve the differences between these two political visions.
The Virginia delegates voted 89 to 79 to ratify the Constitution. The new government was
launched in 1789. In 1791, to placate Patrick Henry and unite Anti-Federalists behind the new
government, Congress passed and the states ratified ten constitutional amendments, collectively
called the Bill of Rights, to protect individual freedoms. Since many Europeans came to
America to escape religious oppression and forced beliefs by such state-affiliated Christian
churches as the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, the First Amendment settled
their unrest by establishing the separation of church and state, guaranteeing the freedom to
practice one’s faith without fear of persecution. More than two hundred years old, it is now the
world’s oldest written constitution.
Revolutionary War hero, George Washington, took the oath of office as the first President of
the United States on April 30, 1789 on the balcony of the Federal Hall in New York City. He
was honest, courageous, and decisive. His leadership got the United States off to a good start.
In the 1790’s, Rutherford County, North Carolina became the center of gold production with
the first private gold mint within the United States. This mint operated until the 1840’s and was
the first mint in the nation to coin a gold dollar. Gold mining led to a population increase in
Rutherford County.
Also in the 1790’s, the new American government assumed the debts that were amassed by
the individual states during the Revolutionary War. Congress voted to help to repay the debts by
placing a tax on whiskey and other things. Large whiskey producers were levied a tax of six
cents a gallon, and smaller producers were taxed a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. Many of
the smaller producers were of Scottish descent from the Ulster provinces of Northern Ireland
(Scotch-Irish) who lived in the remote western areas of Appalachia from Pennsylvania to
Georgia. These settlers were short of cash to begin with and they had no practical means to get
their grain to market other than fermenting and distilling it into portable whiskey. The “Whiskey
Boys” harassed the federal tax collectors and conducted violent protests in Maryland, Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Eventually the protests erupted into armed conflict
in the “Whiskey Rebellion.” President George Washington called out 15,000 soldiers to march
into Pennsylvania to suppress the insurrection.
There is speculation that Thomas Camp III and George Washington were acquainted when
they both lived in Culpeper, Virginia. In 1749, at nineteen years old, George Washington was
the official surveyor of Culpeper, and Thomas Camp III was a planter fifteen years older than the
man who would become the father of our country. In 1798, nine years after the birth of the
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nation, and the year before the death of our first president, Thomas Camp III died in Rutherford
County. He was eighty-one years old. The family cemetery between Horse Creek where the
grist mill stood and the home place site is where he is buried. His will is on file at the North
Carolina Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina in Rutherford County Wills, 1784-1833, Ace-Haw,
Vol. 1, page 29. The old Bible recording family history, using the old English spelling of words,
went to his daughter, Ruth.
His second wife, Margaret Carney Camp, outlived him by twenty-six years. She died in
1824, at age eighty-four. She is buried along side of him with other family members, a dozen
graves in a row, including son, Crenshaw, who died in 1808, daughter, Ruth, who died in 1852,
and youngest son, Joshua, who died in 1849, Joshua’s wife Nancy Gregory Camp, who died in
1875 and their son, Joel Barlow O. Camp, who died in 1839, at age twenty.
A large head stone stands at the grave site with CAMP prominently cut into the granite.
Beneath is, “Thomas Feb. 8, 1717,” and below that, “Died 1798.” To the left of Thomas it reads,
“Margaret Carney, June 20, 1744,” and below, “Died 1824.” The Old Field Stone is still there.
The entire burial ground is fenced with a gate.
Joshua Camp built a rambling, comfortable farm house near his father’s house and lived and
died at the home place. His son, George Camp, was a prominent doctor in the area. He and his
wife both died in 1872, leaving two daughters. George’s two daughters inherited the home place
that had been in the Camp family over 100 years. Joshua’s oldest child, John T. Camp, inherited
the area that is the Camp burial grounds. The cemetery was reserved separate from the division
of the 800 acres of the old homestead. John T. Camp wrote that he would will the cemetery to
his youngest descendant named Camp, to be willed by him in like manner, so that it should never
pass into strangers’ hands.
Our branch of the family is descended from Thomas Camp III’s second oldest son, Rev.
Joseph Camp, who was born in 174, in Orange County, Virginia, and came to this area
when the family moved to Rutherford County. He married Susannah Roundtree in
Virginia. They had at least ten children:
1. Claborn Camp was born before 1785. He married Mary Taylor, daughter of Joshua
Taylor of Rutherford County, North Carolina. Claborn and his family were in Cass (now
Bartow) County, Georgia in 1836.
2. Edward Camp died in 1805 leaving heirs according to records of Buffalo Baptist Church.
3. William Camp was born c. 1771 in Virginia, died c. 1855 in Rutherford County, North
Carolina. He married Elizabeth Johnston, daughter of Henry Johnston, born c. 1778 in
North Carolina and died after 1850 in Rutherford County, North Carolina.
4. Abner Camp was born in 1772 in Rutherford County, North Carolina and died c.
1858 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Abner Camp Cemetery.
He married Margaret Earl July 15, 1795. She was born in 1779 and died October
14, 1845 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Abner Camp
Cemetery. They had ten children: Abner Camp, Jr., Larkin Camp, Elizabeth
Camp, Joseph Alexander Camp, Sr., Vardrey Camp, Lawson Audie Camp, William
Camp, Margaret Camp, Thomas Pinckney Camp and Susan Camp. Additional
information given below.
5. Daughter Camp who married Fleming Goodman.
6. Daughter Camp who married James Raney.
7. Benjamin Camp who died in December 1829 in Warrick County, Indiana
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8. John Steel Camp was born in 1784 in Rutherford County, North Carolina and died May
11, 1848 in Dickeyville, Warrick County, Indiana. He married (1) Dotty Morris (2) Jane
Ann Powers, born May 16, 1797 in North Carolina, died June 21, 1876 near Lynnville,
Indiana. John Steel and Jane Ann are buried at Mt. Zion Cemetery near Lynnville,
Indiana. He was a Baptist minister.
9. Daughter Camp who married William Laswell.
10. Rebeccah Camp born in North Carolina who married George Wilson January 2, 1815 in
Pulaski, Kentucky.
Rev. Joseph Camp was a respected physician in the community. He had a good knowledge of
roots and herbs, and their applications saved the lives of many soldiers wounded in battle as well
as those ravaged by disease. Numerous women and children escaped death because of his
medical attention.
He was a noted Baptist minister as well as a physician. He was the first pastor of Sandy Run
Baptist Church that was founded in 1772 and the first preacher at Buffalo Baptist Church that
was established in 1776. He was active in Broad River Baptist Association and helped organize
at least ten to twelve churches in the area. In 1801, he accepted an appointment, along with two
other ministers, to develop a church at Cedar Springs, South Carolina. In 1802, he was
moderator of the Broad River Association. He was a writer of circulatory letters, including at
least two letters on social and theological issues. In 1802, he wrote a letter on The Duties of
Matrimony and in 1804, he wrote one on Church Discipline.
Rev. Camp did not take sides during the Revolutionary War because he believed that he
should tend his fellowman, as a minister to their souls and as a doctor to their bodies. But the
record shows that he was arrested after the British defeat at the Battle of Cowpens by the British
Gen. Cornwallis, who was in charge of the Southern Campaign. He was questioned by Gen.
Cornwallis about the direction that Gen. Morgan had taken after defeating Banastre Tarleton and
he had or gave no information and was released to return to his home.
Rev. Joseph Camp built the first brick house in Cleveland County around 1780. Located off
Highway 18 South on Brick House Road, it was told that a Mr. Kuykendall, Daddy’s Mother’s
ancestor, was the brick mason who built it. They floated the bricks up Broad River from
Charleston, S. C. He sold the house and it became known as the Surratt-Ramseur House, named
after later owners. The house still stands, but it is almost beyond repair, due to a fire in June
2006.
By 1805, it was apparent that Joseph Camp was preparing for a major move. In that year and
the next, he sold most of his land and converted as many of his assets as possible into cash. In
1808, he migrated with part of his family and a group of friends from the Buffalo Community to
Pulaski, Kentucky to start churches in that area. Camp meeting fever began in the 1790’s in
Logan County, Kentucky and spread throughout the South and West and helped double church
attendance. In Kentucky alone, 10,000 new Baptists were baptized in just three years.
Even though advanced in age, spreading the gospel and opening new churches was first and
foremost in Rev. Joseph Camp’s life. He preached the Gospel and churchly standards of conduct
and battled against alcohol, tobacco, profanity, and Sabbath breaking until he died in Pulaski,
Kentucky in late 1813 or early 1814.
Perhaps the rigors of such a hard journey took its toll on his health. Travel by wagon, during
the fall and winter months, after the harvest, fording streams through the mountains during the
rainy season, traveling on wagon trails across western North Carolina and east Tennessee into
Kentucky through Cumberland Gap was a six weeks journey. About 1819, his wife, Susannah,
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also died in Pulaski, Kentucky. Since there was a court house fire about 1875, no records are
available as to where they are buried.
After Joseph died, most of his descendants returned to the area they had left. One son of
Joseph and Susannah, John Steel Camp, who had gone with them to Kentucky, returned to the
churches in Cleveland County and preached for some time before going to Alabama, and later to
Warrick County, Indiana, where he died May 11, 1848.
Their fourth son, Abner Camp, born in 1772 in Rutherford (now Cleveland) County,
was our Great, Great Grandfather. Abner did not go to Kentucky, and he was not devoted
to church work nor followed in his Father’s footsteps as a church leader. In fact, he was
called to task by the church and was on the verge of being excommunicated a few times for
non-attendance and other acts that caused him to be labored with by the brethren. At that
time, law enforcement was lax, so the church felt they must discipline members for
misconduct. The church was the law and was very strict. Being excommunicated, or
thrown out, of the church was a social stigma no one wanted to bear.
Abner married Margaret Earl who was born in 1779. They were married July 15, 1795
in Rutherford County, North Carolina and Abner farmed for a living. In fact, in the
1790’s ninety percent of America’s workers were engaged in agriculture. The Abner Camp
farm was located where Cleveland Mall is now, which was part of Lincoln County at that
time. Abner and Margaret had nine children:
1. Abner Camp Jr. born 1800-1810 in Lincoln County (now Cleveland County), North
Carolina and died 1849 and married Margaret Unknown c. 1834. She was born c. 1816.
2. Elizabeth Camp was born about 1799 and died in Cleveland County, North Carolina and
buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery. She married David Allen, Sr. about
1817. He died about 1864 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant
Hill Baptist Church Cemetery. They had fourteen children.
3. Joseph Alexander Camp, Sr. was born 1800, and died November 17, 1876 (Joe says Jan.
13, 1875 says will probated Dec. 23, 1876) (Camp-Kemp book says January) in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery.
He married (1) Lucretia Taylor, who was born c. 1800 and died June 18, 1863 (Joe says
Jan. 1865) (Camp-Kemp book says January 1865). They had six children. He married
(2) Dulcena Conner, who was born c. 1835 and died January 5, 1921. They had three
children.
4. Vardrey Camp was born 1802, and died before 1860. He married Mary C. Bennett who
died before 1860. They had one son.
5. Lawson Audie Camp was born 1804 and died August 8, 1880 in Cleveland County,
North Carolina. He is buried in Abner Camp Cemetery. He married (1) Priscilla
Taylor in 1831. She was born in 1808 and died March 21, 1843 in Cleveland
County, North Carolina and is buried in Abner Camp Cemetery. They had five
children: Sarah Ann “Sallie Ann” Polly” Camp, Elizabeth Margaret Camp, John
Movas (Osborne) Camp, Nancy Camp and Morris Camp. He married (2) Margaret
“Peggy” Hardin in 1845. She was born 1812-1814 and died in Cleveland County,
North Carolina and buried in Abner Camp Cemetery. They had five children:
James Jefferson Camp, Elbert Abner J. Camp, Charles Manson Camp, Thomas
Pinckney Camp and Joseph A. Camp. Additional information given below.
6. William Camp was born 1814, married Frances “Fannie” Unknown. They had seven
children.
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7. Margaret Camp was born April 14, 1816, in Lincoln (now Cleveland) County, North
Carolina and died November 19, 1878 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in
Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery. She married Henderson Roberts who was born
October 19, 1815 in Rutherford County, North Carolina and died February 7, 1879 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery.
They had ten children.
8. Thomas Pinckney Camp was born September 6, 1818 and died March 3, 1887 in Wilson,
Texas and buried in Kicaster Cemetery. He married Emza Jane Hobbs who died October
27, 1907 in San Antonio, Texas. They had eight children.
9. Susan Camp was born in 1820.
When John Steel Camp and some of the other heirs and descendants of Joseph and Susannah
Camp returned from Kentucky to their former home area, they sold Abner the 200 acres that
Joseph had retained in Cleveland County. This is probably the 200 acres that Abner and Joseph
Green sold to Abner and Margaret’s son-in-law, Henderson Roberts, described in Deed Book 38,
page 46, dated February 23, 1839, as being sold for $150.00, and being located in Lincoln
County. Records also show that Abner sold 100 acres on Buffalo Creek in 1799, and 30 acres in
Lincoln County in 1816.
The First Cleaveland County Court Minutes 1841-1843 Vol. 1, by Caldwell and Thompson
page 114, May Court 1842 gives a deposition of Abner Camp, who on October 2, 1851, at age 78
was testifying on behalf of an old neighbor, William Bradley, who had been a soldier in the
Revolutionary War. William Bradley had been wounded at the Battle of Kings Mountain when
he was young. Now he had died and his widow, Aspasia Spriggs Bradley, was applying for a
Revolutionary War Pension. Abner Camp was eight years old the day of that October 7, 1780
battle. In the deposition Abner Camp told that he remembered the British Army camping near
his father’s house just a few days before the Battle of Kings Mountain. He said they just lived
seven or eight miles from the battleground and he well remembered the firing of the guns at the
Battle of Kings Mountain that day. He said that the neighbor, William Bradley, had been
wounded in the arm in the Battle of Kings Mountain, and came to their house a few days after
the battle to get Abner’s father, Rev. Joseph Camp, who was a doctor, to examine and dress the
wound. He told that he had heard William Bradley say repeatedly that he had received the
wound at the Battle of Kings Mountain, and at that time and afterwards William Bradley was
always reputed and recognized to have been a faithful soldier and a true patriot of the
Revolution. Abner Camp went on to say that his father, Rev. Joseph Camp, who was also a
minister, had married William Bradley and Aspasia Spriggs shortly after the close of the
Revolutionary War and that Abner, himself, was present that day at the wedding. The
Magistrate, James Roberts, certified that Abner Camp was of good character and highly
respected and whose veracity could not be disputed.
AMERICAN EXPANSIONISM
From the end of the American Revolution in 1783, the United States had been irritated by
Britain’s failure to withdraw from American territory along the Great Lakes and resented their
support for the Indians on American frontiers. Americans also disliked Britain’s unwillingness
to sign trade agreements favorable to the United States.
American resentment grew during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) and the
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), in which Britain and France were the main combatants. Except
for one short spell between the years 1802-1803, Great Britain had been fighting France since
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1793. Napoleon Bonaparte, head of the French government after 1799 and emperor after 1804,
had made himself the master of continental Europe. Vice President John Adam succeeded
George Washington as President in 1797 and he averted an American war with France.
America was expanding toward the west. Americans, including recent European immigrants,
poured over the Appalachian Mountains into the territory beyond. In 1800, Ohio had more than
45,000 people and nearly 6,000 pioneers had settled the Indiana wilderness.
That same year France forced Spain to cede title to the area that is loosely called Louisiana
which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico northward to approximately the 49th parallel and
westward to the Rocky Mountains.
In 1803, Napoleon, who was fearful that the British might try to take Louisiana from France,
suddenly offered the entire region to the United States for a bargain price of $15 million dollars.
President Thomas Jefferson, uneasy about France and Spain having the power to block American
access to the port of New Orleans, doubled the nation’s size by the Louisiana Purchase, which
included 530 million acres of woodlands, plains, prairies, valleys, and mountains.
The United States gained an important means of transportation, the Mississippi River, as well
as the established port of New Orleans. The land deal gave the United States the city of New
Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River. It included all or part of fourteen states and
part of the land that would become the Canadian Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. In
encompassed all the land that is now Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska,
part of Minnesota that was west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota and South
Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, and the part of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the
Continental Divide.
After the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson ordered Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark to lead a three-year expedition through the area, giving America detailed knowledge of the
acquisition.
THE WAR OF 1812
Napoleon had long hoped to invade and conquer Britain, but in 1805, his navy was destroyed
at the Battle of Trafalgar. This forced Napoleon to give up the idea of taking an army across the
English Channel. So he set out instead to ruin Great Britain by destroying British trade.
Napoleon's Berlin and Milan decrees (1806-1807) were an attempt to shut off Great Britain from
all trade with Europe. Great Britain, in turn, issued a series of Orders in Council which declared
a blockade of French ports and of ports in Europe and elsewhere that were under French control.
The British and French blockades had disastrous effects on United States shipping. Before
1806, the United States was getting rich on the European war. United States ships took goods to
both Great Britain and France, and the value of trade carried increased fourfold from 1791 to
1805. Now the picture had suddenly changed. A United States ship bound for French ports had
to stop first at a British port for inspection and payment of fees. Otherwise the British were
likely to seize the ship. But Napoleon ordered neutral ships not to stop at British ports for
inspection, and he also announced that he would order his forces to seize any United States ships
which they found had obeyed the British Orders in Council.
The British navy controlled the seas. So the easiest thing for United States vessels was to
trade only with other neutrals, with Great Britain, or under British license. A few adventurous
spirits ran the British blockade for the sake of huge profits they could make, and continued the
risky trade with continental Europe. The United States complained of both French and British
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policies as illegal "paper blockades," because neither side could really enforce such an extensive
blockade.
The British navy was always in need of seamen. One reason for this need was that hundreds
of deserters from the British navy had found work on United States ships. The British
government claimed the right to stop neutral ships on the high seas, remove sailors of British
birth, and impress, or force, them back into British naval service. The United States objected
strongly to this practice, partly because many native-born Americans were impressed by mistake
along with men who had actually been British seamen.
In June 1807, Captain James Barron of the frigate Chesapeake refused to let the British search
his ship for deserters. The British frigate Leopard fired on the Chesapeake, removed four men
whom the British called deserters, and hanged one of them. Anti-British feeling in the United
States rose sharply. President Thomas Jefferson ordered all British naval vessels out of
American harbors. Four years later, the British apologized for the incident and paid for the
damage done, but the bitterness remained.
The United States tried several times to get the British to change their policy toward neutral
shipping and toward impressments. In April 1806, the United States Congress passed a NonImportation Act, which barred British goods from American markets. The act was not put into
continuous operation until December 1807. By that time, the Chesapeake incident had taken
place and sterner measures were believed to be necessary. Also in December 1807, Congress
passed the Embargo Act. This act prohibited exports from the United States and forbade
American ships from sailing into foreign ports.
The embargo did not produce anything like the results Congress desired. Overseas trade
nearly stopped, almost ruining New England ship owners and putting many sailors out of work.
Shipyards closed, and goods piled up in warehouses. The embargo also hurt Southern planters,
who normally sold tobacco, rice, and cotton to Great Britain. Opponents of the embargo
described its effects on the United States by spelling the word backward. They called the
embargo the "O-Grab-Me" act. Even with the hardships the embargo caused for the United
States, it failed as a policy. The British and the French both were intent on winning the
European war at all costs, and so both refused to yield to American pressure.
After 14 months, Congress gave up the embargo and tried a new device for hurting British
and French commerce. It passed the Non-Intercourse Act in March 1809, permitting American
ships to trade with any countries but Great Britain and France. The act also opened American
ports to all but British and French ships. But this plan also failed.
In 1810, Congress passed Macon's Bill No. 2, which removed all restrictions on trade. The
law went on to say that if either Great Britain or France would give up its orders or decrees, the
United States would restore non-intercourse rules against the other nation, unless it also agreed
to change its policy.
Macon's Bill really helped Napoleon, who was eager to get the United States into the war
against Great Britain. He pretended to repeal his Berlin and Milan decrees so far as they applied
to United States ships. President James Madison shut off all trade with Great Britain. In the
summer of 1811, further attempts were made to reach an agreement with the British. But these
attempts failed, and in November, Madison advised Congress to get ready for war.
A group of young men known as "War Hawks" dominated Congress during this period.
Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina were the outstanding leaders of
the group. Clay was then Speaker of the House of Representatives. Like Clay and Calhoun,
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most of the War Hawks came from Western and Southern states, where many of the people were
in favor of going to war with Great Britain.
The people of New England generally opposed going to war because they feared that war
with Great Britain would wipe out entirely the New England shipping trade which had already
been heavily damaged. Another reason New England opposed war was because many New
Englanders sympathized with Great Britain in its struggle against Napoleon.
Some historians have argued that a leading motive of the War Hawks was a desire for
expansion. The people of the Northwest were meeting armed resistance in their attempt to take
more land from the Indians, and they believed that the Indians had considerable British support.
In November 1811, friction between Westerners and Indians climaxed at the Battle of
Tippecanoe near what is now Lafayette, Indiana. Indians attacked an American army, and
British guns were found on the battlefield. A desire to eliminate British aid to the Indians might
have inspired some Westerners to seek an invasion of Canada, Britain's main possession in North
America. But most Westerners favored such an invasion chiefly because of a deep resentment
over long-lasting British insults at sea.
The main concerns of Congress were maritime rights, national honor, and the country's
obligation to respond to foreign threats. The Federalists in Congress strongly opposed going to
war, but the Democratic-Republicans believed that war was the only solution to America's
dilemmas. They hoped a successful invasion of Canada would force Britain to change its
policies.
On June 1, 1812, President Madison asked Congress to declare war against Great Britain. He
gave as his reasons the impressments of United States seamen and the interference with United
States trade. He charged also that the British had stirred up Indian warfare in the Northwest.
Congress declared war on June 18, 1812. Since it was fought between the United States and
Great Britain, it has been called the “Second War for Independence.” Because President
Madison asked for the declaration of war, many Federalists blamed him for the conflict, calling it
“Mr. Madison’s War.” Regardless of the name, it was a war of poor communications, because
two days earlier, the British foreign minister had announced that the Orders in Council would be
repealed, but word of this announcement did not reach America until after the war had begun.
Congress had known for seven months that war was likely to come, but no real preparations
had been made. There was little money in the U.S. treasury. The regular Army had less than
10,000 troops, and very few trained officers. The Navy had fewer than twenty seagoing ships.
To make matters worse, a large minority, both in Congress and in the country, was opposed to
war. The declaration of war had passed by a vote of only 79 to 49 in the House, and 19 to 13 in
the Senate. New England, the richest section in the country, bitterly opposed the war, and
interfered with its progress by withholding both money and troops.
Our Great, Great Grandfather Abner Camp was one of the soldiers from our state during the
War of 1812. He was in the Second Brigade of North Carolina Militia-8th Regiment-8th
Company, a member of the 2nd Lincoln Regiment of North Carolina Militia troops.
At sea, the United States depended primarily on privateers--that is, armed ships owned by
private people and hired by the government to fight. This was because the tiny regular American
navy was dwarfed by the massive British fleet. Several single-ship U.S. victories against British
ships improved American morale but had no permanent effect on the naval struggle.
A British blockade was clamped on the United States coast, and United States trade almost
disappeared. Because duties on imports were the chief source of federal revenue, the U.S.
treasury drifted further and further into debt.
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The USS Constitution called “Old Ironsides” defeated British frigate “Guerriere” on August
19, 1812, off the coast of Nova Scotia. It marked the birth of American naval power, but the
only American naval victories that directly affected the course of the war were those won by
Oliver Hazard Perry on Lake Erie, on Sept. 10, 1813, and by Thomas Macdonough on Lake
Champlain, on Sept. 11, 1814. But United States naval vessels and privateers did considerable
damage to British commerce, taking about 1,500 prize ships in all.
A British army, under General Robert Ross, was escorted by a fleet to Chesapeake Bay,
scattered the United States troops at the Battle of Bladensburg, occupied Washington, D.C., and
set fire to the Capitol, the White House, the Treasury, the War Office and other public buildings.
Both the British army and the British fleet were driven back at Baltimore. This engagement
inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner," our national anthem.
The American plan of attack called for a three-way invasion of Canada. Invasion forces were
to start from Detroit, from the Niagara River, and from the foot of Lake Champlain. The first
attempt to invade Canada failed completely but other attempts succeeded. York (now Toronto),
the capital of Upper Canada, was captured by United States troops and held for a short time.
Some of the public buildings were burned. After holding Fort Erie in Canada for several months,
United States troops finally withdrew to the American side. This was the last attempt to invade
Canada. By 1814, Napoleon had been defeated in Europe. Great Britain was then able to send
over 15,000 troops to Canada, thus ending all American hopes of conquest.
The Battle of New Orleans fought January 8, 1815, was the final major battle of the War of
1812. The British had sent an army of more than 8,000 men intent of seizing New Orleans and
the vast territory America had acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. There were several possible
routes to the city, but the British army chose to march straight toward the entrenchments that had
been prepared by General Andrew Jackson, known as “Old Hickory”, who led the American
troops. The British forces were delayed crossing the river and did not reach their destination
until after dawn. In the daylight, without cover, they had no choice but to advance toward the
Americans across the open fields. They were perfect targets as they marched across a quarter
mile of open ground. American artillery and sharpshooting riflemen, waiting behind mud and
cotton bale barricades, killed seven hundred British soldiers and wounded fourteen hundred
more, including the commanding officer, General Sir Edward Pakenham. The Americans lost
eight men and thirteen were wounded in the battle. Thomas Camp III’s grandson, Burwell Camp,
son of Thomas Camp IV and Nancy Tarpley was one of the soldiers who fought in the Battle of
New Orleans.
In 1959, when I was a child, there was a popular song about the Battle of New Orleans
written by Jimmie Driftwood and sung by Johnny Horton. It was the first country song to appear
on the Billboard Magazine charts. The lyrics said: “In 1814, we took a little trip along with
Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.” Another verse proclaimed, “Old Hickory said we
could take ’em by surprise if we didn’t fire our muskets till we looked ’em in the eyes.” And the
chorus said, “We fired our guns and the British kept a’coming, there wasn’t nigh as many as
there was awhile ago. We fired once more and they began running down the Mississippi to the
Gulf of Mexico.”
It was a needless battle that might have been prevented by speedy communication because the
Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 had been signed in December. But news of the peace
agreement did not reach the combatants until February.
However, the Battle of New Orleans was good for American morale. The United States had
faced near disaster in 1814, and the victory at New Orleans seemed to be a successful fight
27
against Britain and confirmed America’s independence. It increased national patriotism and
helped to unite the United States into one nation.
The British public was tired of war and especially of the taxes it incurred and Americans
feared defeat if the war continued. British and American diplomats met at Ghent, Belgium, in
August 1814, to draw up a peace agreement. Both sides claimed victory. The British at first
insisted that the United States should give up certain territory on the northern frontier, and set up
a large permanent Indian reservation in the Northwest. But American victories in the summer
and fall of 1814, led the British to drop these demands.
A treaty was finally signed in Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, and ratified on Feb. 17, 1815. By the
terms of this treaty, they agreed of a status quo antebellum, all land that had been captured by
either party was to be given up and territories were to be restored to prewar status. Everything
was to be exactly as it was before the war, and a commission was established from both of the
countries to settle Northwest Territory boundary disputes. Nothing was said in the treaty about
impressments, blockades, or the British Orders in Council, although they supposedly had caused
the war, so the war settled none of the issues over which the United States had fought. However,
during the following years most of these issues faded in importance. In the long period of peace
after 1815, the British had no occasion to make use of impressments or blockades. Indian
troubles in the Northwest were practically ended by the death of the chief Tecumseh and by the
rapid settlement of the region. The United States occupied part of Florida during the war, and
was soon able to buy the rest of it from Spain.
President James Monroe followed President Madison in the White House. In 1823, in the
Monroe Doctrine, he and Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, stated that further attempts by
European governments to colonize land on the American continents or interfere with states in
America would be considered dangerous to our peace and safety and not be accepted by the
United States. Exempt from this was Spain’s colony in Cuba.
After John Quincy Adam held one term as President, Andrew Jackson succeeded him.
President Jackson’s military fame in the War of 1812 had much to do with his election. He had
many supporters among the common people, many whom recently gained the right to vote. He
curbed the powers of Congress during his two terms, but expanded the powers of the President.
THE AMERICAN WEST
From the beginning, most of the people who migrated to America had done so hoping to
improve their lot in life. Millions of them headed west to fulfill their dreams. The tragic
collateral damage of the American expansion westward is that the Indians had vast territories that
the white settlers had to have. Whenever the white settlers moved west they displaced the
Indians by force of arms. By the time of the American Revolution, the east coast Indian cultures
were destroyed and by the War of 1812, the Indians had lost all hope of maintaining a hold on
territory east of the Mississippi River.
Although the Cherokee Nation of western Georgia had a 1791 treaty between the tribe and the
Federal Government that guaranteed their land holdings, President Andrew Jackson’s
administration supported the Georgia government’s efforts to force the Indians off of their land.
In 1838, President Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor, sent 7,000 soldiers under the
command of Gen. Winfield Scott to Georgia to expel the Cherokees from the land and transport
them to a newly established Indian territory in Oklahoma. Gen. Scott called on volunteer militia
companies in North Carolina. One company was made up of men from our area that later
became Cleveland County.
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The Cherokees called the displacement to Oklahoma “The Trail of Tears” because many fell
ill and thousands died and were buried in unmarked graves along the way. An outdoor drama by
Kermit Hunter called “Unto These Hills” telling this tragic story can be seen at the Mountainside
Theatre near Cherokee, North Carolina in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park. Here in the western North Carolina mountains still dwell the Eastern Cherokee who were
saved from exile.
Horace Greeley, editor of America’s most influential newspaper from the 1840’s to the
1870’s, The New York Tribune, and the greatest editor in his day advised, “Go west, young man,
go west and grow up with the country.” Many young men heeded his call and did just that.
The miners were the first to settle the west. The 1849 gold rush to California brought tens of
thousands of people west in hunt of fortunes. Many of them made the trip from the east coast
around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast where in the 1700’s Spain had established a string of
missions. Other prospectors chose a land-sea route to the west coast through the Isthmus of
Panama.
Not long after the California gold rush, new strikes were made in Colorado, Nevada, and
British Columbia. Rumors of wealth to be had brought hoards of prospectors to the Colorado
mountains. Wagons marked “Pike’s Peak or Bust” became a familiar sight along the western
trail.
The emigrants traveled in prairie schooners, smaller, lighter more maneuverable variations of
the Conestoga wagon, in which they carried all their belongings. Each wagon was pulled by
three to six yoke of oxen or four to six mules. The safest way to travel was as part of a wagon
train because a larger company meant less danger of Indian attacks and more help in case of an
emergency.
Prospectors swarmed to Virginia City, Nevada in 1859, to stake claims to the Comstock Lode,
one of the richest finds of silver and gold in the history of mining. There were other strikes
followed by other rushes of prospectors in search of El Dorado, including Idaho’s Snake River
Valley, the 1863 great Montana gold rush, the Last Chance Gulch in the upper Missouri River
country, the Salmon River area in Idaho Territory, and against Indian resistance in the Black
Hills of the Dakotas.
Stagecoaches were the fastest means of travel to the west. Wells, Fargo was established in
1852 to provide mail and banking services to the gold camps in California. Wells, Fargo used
splendidly decorated Concord Coaches that could carry nine to fourteen people over the rough
country. These stagecoaches became a symbol of the Wild West.
The original fast mail delivery system, “Pony Express,” which remained in operation for 18
months, had horseback riders in relays to stations across the prairies, plains, deserts, and
mountains of the west.
Lewis and Clark’s sketches of the animals of the west, many that had never been seen in the
east, inspired a multitude of trappers to the west. Mormons who were hounded for their
communal lifestyle and their practice of polygamy sought isolation in the west where they might
live in peace.
The Homestead Act of 1862 inspired millions of farmers and immigrants to head west. It
provided for the transfer of 160 acres of unoccupied public land to each homesteader on payment
of a nominal fee after five years of residence. Settlers filled Kansas and Nebraska and spread
into the Dakotas and the rolling hills of Wyoming and Montana. But not more than one acre in
eight of the western land actually went to the small settler. The lion’s share was claimed by the
speculator, the jobber, the land company, and the railroads.
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Pioneer life was difficult and deprived of comforts. For the most part it was a constant
struggle against the Indians, the elements and the land itself, which had to be cleared before it
could be planted. There was constant toil, no vacations, and little entertainment or social life
beyond camp meetings and events such as wood-sawing contests, hunting, barn-raisings, quilting
bees, corn husking, parades, and political rallies. Only occasionally tinkers, peddlers, traders,
traveling medicine shows, minstrel shows, circuses, or vaudeville troops visited the towns. They
gave a reason for the widely scattered neighbors to congregate and enjoy each other’s company.
But even the pleasurable events were mostly related to the business of survival.
Leisure time is always the golden dream of the working class, and pioneers had almost no
time for pleasure. They worked the fields from sunup to sundown and at night shelled beans by
candlelight. Women cooked meals, dried fruit, and preserved food. They had to spin and dye
wool, weave fabric, and make clothing. Men were carpenters and blacksmiths, made ax handles,
plough handles, and other tools. They had to split rails for fences and firewood for heat.
The frontier offered a society where only courage and hard work counted. Lawlessness
prevailed as corrupt men and vigilantes flocked to the Western frontier and to the boon towns
with their dance hall saloons and painted ladies. Stories of lawmen like Judge Roy Bean and
Wyatt Earp, who kept the peace, and outlaws like Jesse James and the Dalton Brothers who
robbed the trains and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who robbed the banks, gunslingers
like John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid, warring Indians like Geronimo and Cochise and
Wild West Show performers Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Annie
Oakley have all been perpetuated in myth and in film.
Of all the stories told of the conflicts of the Old West, no other episode is so legendary as the
annihilation of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and five companies of his soldiers by a
coalition of Native American tribes in the Battle of Little Bighorn on June 26, 1876, popularly
known as “Custer’s Last Stand.”
Popular legend has it that guns won the west, but what really tamed the west was the reaper,
the steel plow, barbed wire, and the portable windmill, for these inventions enabled the pioneers
to settle the land and make a living from it.
A decade before the California gold rush, Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper. This
invention began the Industrial Revolution, one of the most important events in human history
and a turning point, for it had a profound effect on working conditions. It brought about major
changes in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture.
The reaper was the first step in the transition of farm hand labor to mechanized farming. It
gave the farmers an extra power source-- the horse. With a team of horses hitched to a reaper,
workers could cut many times more wheat than could be cut with a scythe. Horses and mules,
with their faster gait, replaced the oxen.
Before long, horses and mules were harnessed to other new machinery such as mowers,
binders, planters, cultivators, threshers, and plows. John Deere developed plows of slick, smooth
saw-blade steel, and later John Oliver created and patented chill iron plows. Barbed wire was
light, strong, and cheap and could fence in as large an area as a homesteader needed. Portable
windmills turned in the almost constant prairie wind, pumped water from deep wells into troughs
and pails, making possible the use of thousands of acres of dry, arid land.
THE MEXICAN WAR
As American settlers moved westward, they clashed with the Mexicans, another group of
inhabitants of western land, and lives and property were lost on both sides.
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Mexico had revolted against Spain and secured her independence taking Texas along. The
first group of American families arrived there in 1822. Mexico held the province of Texas on a
loose rein until 1834, when Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna established a dictatorship and
tightened his hold on Texas.
At first, the Texans supported Santa Anna, hoping to benefit from the change in government,
but they were soon in full rebellion. Led by speculator Stephen Austin and Sam Houston, former
Governor of Tennessee, they fought a war for a little more than a year. Santa Anna brought an
army of several thousand Mexicans to quell the revolt. In February 1836, they stormed the
Alamo, a Franciscan mission near San Antonio that was founded in 1722, and later used as a
fortress. There were fewer than 200 Americans inside the mission led by Col. William B. Travis,
mountainman James Bowie, and frontiersman and former Tennessee Congressman, Davy
Crockett. As they were vastly outnumbered, all the Texans in the fort were killed in the final
bombardment on March 6, 1836.
Texans rallied an army of 800 men led by Sam Houston under the Lone Star banner.
“Remember the Alamo!” was their battle cry. On April 21, 1836, they made a surprise attack on
a larger Mexican force camped along the San Jacinto River. The Texans routed the Mexicans
and captured Santa Anna. With his army in full retreat, the imprisoned dictator had no choice
but to recognize Texas’ independence.
Mexico was outraged when the United States supported the Texans in their fight for
independence and they warned that there would be war if the United States annexed the Lone
Star Republic. In 1845, Texas entered the Union as the twenty-eighth state and her admission
led to the Mexican War of 1846-1848.
President James K. Polk overrode his opponents in Congress and Americans fought and won
the Mexican War. Gen. Zachery Taylor commanded the U. S. Army. It settled the boundaries of
Texas, as America not only annexed Texas but backed Texas’ claim to land as far south and west
as the Rio Grande. Fighting began in this disputed territory. It was the first full-fledged war
fought on foreign soil by the United States.
After two years of fighting, Mexico ceded vast stretches of the Southwest to the United
States. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States paid $15 million dollars plus took
over $3.25 million dollars in debts Mexico owed to American citizens and formally added parts
of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico as well as the entire states of Utah, Nevada,
and California. The United States paid an additional $10 million dollars under the 1853 Gadsden
Purchase for the remaining parts of the states of Arizona and New Mexico. The Mexican War
enlarged the territory of the United States by one-third. Now the country stretched across the
North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean and from the Great
Lakes to the Rio Grande.
To support the expansion plans of the Polk administration and to justify the war with Mexico,
the Democrats used the term “Manifest Destiny,” a philosophical belief that first appeared in
print in 1839, that it was a divine destiny for the American people to spread their democratic
government across the continent. Though the term fell out of use after the mid-1850s, the belief
in America’s mission of promoting and defending democracy throughout the world continues to
have an influence on American political ideology. The song “America” written in 1831 reflects
this ideology in the line that says “from every mountainside let freedom ring.”
Abner and Margaret Camp’s son, Thomas Pinckney Camp, his wife, Emza Jane Hobbs and
their children were among the families who headed west to live. In 1850, they were in Grimes
County, Texas and the 1860 census records show them in Wilson County, Texas where Thomas
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Pinckney Camp died March 3, 1887. Emza Jane Hobbs Camp died October 27, 1907 in San
Antonio, Texas. They are buried in Kicaster Cemetery. They had eight children, six girls and
two boys, including twins Lawson A. Camp and Cornelia Camp. As was one of the perils of the
west at that time, their son, Frank Camp, was killed by Indians when he was seventeen years old.
Margaret Camp died October 14, 1845, the year before the Mexican War, and Abner Camp
died in March 1858. As it was the custom to set aside private cemeteries, they are buried along
with several other members of their family just south of Highway 74 by-pass, east of Shelby, N.
C. on Caleb Road, in a family cemetery at their farm on the Camp Branch of Buffalo Creek.
Also buried in that cemetery is their son, Lawson Audie Camp. He was our Great
Grandfather. Both Abner and Lawson Camp signed the petition for the formation of
Cleveland County.
Lawson Camp married Priscilla Taylor who was born in 1808, died March 20, 1843,
and is buried in the Abner Camp Cemetery. They had five children:
1. Sarah Ann (“Sallie Ann” “Polly”) Camp was born February 21, 1832 and died March 22,
1917 in Cleveland County, North Carolina. She is buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church
Cemetery. She married (1) Isaac Randall, who was born about 1831 and died March 27,
1864 in the Civil War. He is buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery. They had
three children. She married (2) John Camp, her first cousin, son of Joseph Alexander Camp,
Sr. and Lucretia Taylor. He was born December 27, 1828 and died May 20, 1911 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and is buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery.
They had one son.
2. Elizabeth Margaret Camp was born May 3, 1833 and died December 30, 1895. She married
Jeremiah King in Henderson County, North Carolina. They had five children.
3. John Movas (“Osborne”) Camp was born in 1837 and died in the Civil War in January 1863.
He married Armilda Ward and they had one daughter, Sarah Ann Camp.
4. Nancy Camp was born in 1839
5. Morris Camp was born in 1839
After Priscilla Taylor died, Lawson Camp married Margaret “Peggy” Hardin who
was born 1812-1814. In the mid-1840s, not long after Cleveland County was chartered,
Lawson moved his family to the Flat Rock section of Hendersonville, N. C. He was a
blacksmith by trade, and they lived in Flat Rock, North Carolina until after the Civil
War. They had five children:
1. James Jefferson (“Jim”) Camp was born July 30, 1845 in Cleveland County, North
Carolina. He married Mary Jane “Polly” Tarwater November 7, 1869 in Knoxville,
Tennessee. They divorced in 1871 in Knoxville, Tennessee and had no children. He served
in the Civil War and later moved to Arizona. He died in Los Angeles, California August 20,
1937, and is buried in Los Angeles National Military Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.
2. Elbert Abner J. Camp was born July 11, 1848 in Henderson County, North Carolina and
died July 20, 1920 in Henderson County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Church
Cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He married Elizabeth “Lizzie” Nelson,
September 21, 1869 in Hendersonville, N. C. She was born April 29, 1850 and died March
29, 1944 in Henderson County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Church
Cemetery, Hendersonville, North Carolina.
3. Charles Manson Camp was born September 18, 1850 in Henderson County, North
Carolina and died November 4, 1929 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried
in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery, Cleveland County, North Carolina. He
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married Sarah Jane Kuykendall October 23, 1871 in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
She was born December 9, 1852 in Henderson County, North Carolina and died May
8, 1913 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist
Church Cemetery, Cleveland County, North Carolina. They had eleven children.
Additional information given below.
4. Thomas Pinckney Camp was born February 25, 1856 in Henderson County, North Carolina
and died January 22, 1937 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Patterson
Springs Baptist Church Cemetery. He married Amanda Conner February 7, 1878 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina. She was born June 9, 1856 and died April 30, 1949 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Patterson Springs Baptist Church
Cemetery.
5. Joseph A. Camp was born December 24, 1859 in Henderson County, North Carolina and
died February 22, 1917 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Sulphur Springs
Baptist Church Cemetery. He married Ellen Conner who was born August 24, 1858 and
died November 30, 1911 in Cleveland County and buried in Sulphur Springs Baptist Church
Cemetery.
One of the interesting stories about Lawson Camp told around Hendersonville was that he
trapped a buzzard and put a bell around its neck, then released it. It was customary for country
folks to tie bells of different tones on everything from cattle to turkeys so that they could identify
their livestock by sound alone. They said Lawson’s buzzard flew around the countryside several
years, and could be heard for miles around. After that time, they called where he lived,
“Buzzard’s Hollow.” People would say, “There goes Camp’s buzzard.” Lawson didn’t see the
buzzard for a while, and one day he heard the bell. He stopped and followed the sound of the
bell to a pasture and found the bell hanging around a calf’s neck. He shot the calf and went to
the house and told the owner, “You’ve got a dead calf in the pasture that you need to go dress out
for meat, and by the way, I got my bell.”
While the Lawson Camp family lived in Hendersonville, they returned to Cleveland County
often to visit relatives and it was told that son, Elbert Abner J. moved back and forth from
Hendersonville to Cleveland County seventeen times.
Lawson and his family returned to live in Cleveland County in 1877, and the 1880 U. S.
Census states that he and Margaret were living with their son, Charles Manson Camp and his
family. Lawson Camp died August 8, 1880. Margaret died later, but we do not have her death
date. He and Margaret are both buried in the Abner Camp cemetery near Highway 74 by-pass.
Their son, Charles Manson Camp, was our Grandfather. The Henderson County 1850
census shows that the Lawson Camp family lived next to the John Kuykendall family at the
time our Grandfather, Manson Camp, was born. Manson Camp married Sarah Jane
Kuykendall on October 23, 1871, in Hendersonville, N. C. She was born in 1852, a
daughter of John Kuykendall and Mary Matilda Weaver. Matilda was a daughter of
Ezekiel Weaverville of nearby Weaverville. John and Matilda Weaver Kuykendall had
four children: Newton, Ruth Ellen, Henry Pinckney and Sarah Jane. Jane was their fourth
and last child. Daddy said Matilda Weaver Kuykendall died when Jane was eighteen
months old. Henderson County records show that John Kuykendall married Mary
Sperline Tabor, daughter of Jonathan Tabor and Lucinda McDowell on January 8, 1857.
They had seven children: Lucinda P., James Mitchell, Calvin E., Allen T., Savannah E.,
Mary Alice and Emily.
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His parents, our Great, Great Grandparents, were Rev. Joseph Kuykendall, a Baptist minister
and Ruth Guice. He was son of Jacob Kuykendall and Nancy Thomas. Ruth Guice was a
daughter of Philip Guice and Nancy Edwards. The Guice family descended from Claude de
Lorraine, (October 20, 1496-April 12, 1550) French aristocrat and general who became the first
Duke of Guise in 1528.
Claude de Lorraine married Antoinette de Bourbon (1493-1583) daughter of Francois, Count
of Vendome and their eldest daughter was Marie de Guise who married (1) Louis II d’ Orleans,
Duke of Longueville and (2) King James V of Scotland. The daughter of Marie de Guise and
King James V was Mary, Queen of Scots.
Upon the death of King James V, Marie served as regent of Scotland in their daughter’s name
from 1554-1560. Mary, Queen of Scots, married (1) Francis, Dauphin of France (Francis II) and
(2) Henry Stuart “Lord Darnley” (3) James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. She was executed in
1587. Many believe that she was the rightful heir to the throne of England.
Sixteen years later, her only child, James, ascended to throne of England and ruled as King
James VI of Scotland and King James I of England and Ireland. He was known for his great
knowledge and his impact on English literature is considerable. He was a talented scholar who
wrote many books and published many poems during his lifetime. He declared Christmas, Good
Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Whit Sunday as holy days. He ordered the translation of ancient
Greek and Hebrew into English as the King James Version of the Bible, which many people still
consider to be the best.
The Kuykendall family emigrated from Holland in the 1600’s, settled in New York and
migrated south into Hendersonville, N. C., in the 1700’s. Abraham Kuykendall, our Great,
Great, Great Grandfather was the original landowner of Flat Rock, N. C. He fought in the Battle
of Kings Mountain and was given the land as a grant for his Revolutionary War service. On
February 5, 1791 he was given 900-acres on the main fork of and both sides of Mud Creek and
hundreds more acres entered in the next few years, including land on Little Mud Creek and
Batwoods Creek. At one time he owned more than 2,000 acres in the Hendersonville area.
Outside the old courthouse museum on Main Street in Hendersonville there is a Revolutionary
War monument. Abraham Kuykendall is listed as one of their twelve Revolutionary War heroes
buried in the area. Inside the museum a large map shows the land (Flat Rock) he was granted for
his war service. There is even an Abraham Kuykendall chapter of the Daughters of the
American Revolution.
One interesting note, Nathaniel Camp, son of Thomas Camp III, was granted 200 acres in
Tryon County on Sandy Run of Main Broad River joining land of Abraham Kuykendall,
including the land where Nathaniel Camp lived, so the Camps and Kuykendalls were acquainted
many generations before the families intermarried.
Abraham Kuykendall gave property for Mud Creek Baptist Church in Flat Rock and is buried
in the church cemetery; a large monument marks his grave. His Revolutionary War grave
marker states that he was a Corp. in Corbin’s N. C. troops. In August every year they still
celebrate Abraham Kuykendall Day.
Our Grandparents, Charles Manson Camp and Sarah Jane Kuykendall had eleven
children:
1. Savannah Camp was born in Hendersonville, Henderson County, North Carolina 1870’s,
died at eight months old and buried in Henderson County, North Carolina
2. Margaret Matilda Camp was born August 2, 1872 in Henderson County, North Carolina
and died February 19, 1934 in Brooksville, Florida. She married (1) Julius England and
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
they had three children: Malvenia England, Charles England and Chivous England. She
married (2) F. L. “Pat” Patterson.
Ellen Elizabeth Camp was born in 1874 in Henderson County, North Carolina and died in
Texas. She married John Reid. They are buried in Texas. They had three children:
Grady Reid, Mack Reid, and Katon Reid.
James Chivis Camp was born August 8, 1876 in Henderson County, North Carolina, and
died November 10, 1944 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Sharon
Methodist Church Cemetery. He married Chivie Thrift who was born April 5, 1877 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and died May 19, 1957 in Cleveland and buried in
Sharon Methodist Church Cemetery. They had six children: Leira Jane Camp, Manson
Allen Camp, Sally Ann Camp, Josephine Victoria Camp, Pansy Lillie Mae Camp, and
Charles McDaniel Camp.
Anna Louisa was born February 26, 1878 in Henderson County, North Carolina and died
July 13, 1909 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist
Church Cemetery. She married Thomas H. Patterson who was born May 9, 1871 and
died April 12, 1926 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill
Baptist Church Cemetery. (His sister Jennie Patterson married Anna’s brother Thomas
Pinkney Camp). They had eight children: James Seth Patterson, Lemuel Patterson,
Minnie Patterson, Lula Patterson, Hester Patterson, Dovie Patterson, W. P. “Bill”
Patterson, and Oscar Patterson.
Thomas Pinkney Camp was born October 14, 1880 in Henderson County, North Carolina
and died in Cleveland County, North Carolina November 24, 1968. He is buried in
Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery. He married Jennie Hughes Patterson who was
born October 2, 1876 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and died June 10, 1955 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery.
(Her brother Thomas H. Patterson married Thomas Camp’s sister Anna Louise Camp).
They had eight children: Nancy Jane Camp, Joseph Pinkney Camp, Lawrence Camp,
Lemuel Manson Camp, James Albert Camp, Ben Camp, Charles Fennell “C.F” Camp,
and Matthew Evans Camp.
John Madison Camp was born in 1883 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and
died May 21, 1972 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill
Baptist Church Cemetery. He married (1) Sallie Irona Dixon September 6, 1905 at
Rev. T. H. Mullinax home, Blacksburg, South Carolina. She was born September 7,
1886 and died March 13, 1912 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in
Elizabeth Baptist Church Cemetery. They had three children: Amanda Savannah
Camp, John Nathan Camp and Ruth Aileen Camp. He married (2) Elizabeth Jane
“Lizzie” Childers March 23, 1913 in Cleveland County, North Carolina. She was
born October 9, 1894 in Union County, South Carolina and died March 6, 1918 in
Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church
Cemetery. They had three children: Mary Jane Camp, Anna Louise Camp and
Lula Belle Camp. He married (3) Edna Alberta Shields September 25, 1924 in
Gaffney, South Carolina. She was born January 20, 1909 in Spartanburg County,
South Carolina and died May 7, 1986 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and
buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery. They had twelve children:
Thelma Ione Camp, John Marion “Sam” Camp, Emmett Wyattman Camp, Billy
Dwain Camp, Edwin Carroll Camp, Jerry Douglas Camp, Nancy LaVonda “Polly”
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Camp, Thomas Joseph Camp, Robert Norman Camp, Charles Ben Camp, Martha
Jane Camp and Brendan Kaye Camp. Additional information given below.
8. Mary Alice Camp was born November 1886 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and
died in 1933 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist
Church Cemetery. She married William Mayes July 29, 1905 in Cleveland County,
North Carolina. He was born August 26, 1878 and died April 18, 1935 in Cleveland
County, North Carolina. They had six children: James Mayes, Fralo Mayes, Charles
Mayes, Beulah Mayes, Mary Mayes, and Robert Mayes.
9. Joseph William Camp was born January 19, 1889 in Cleveland County, North Carolina
and died March 5, 1968 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Cleveland
Memorial Park. Note: name on death certificate and tombstone says William Manson
Camp. He married Ora Lowery who was born October 16, 1892 in Cleveland County,
North Carolina and died January 7, 1975 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried
in Cleveland Memorial Park. They had four children: Selma Jane Elizabeth Camp,
Authurine Camp, Pearl Camp, and Rodney Camp.
10. Charles Bunyan Camp was born April 11, 1891 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and
died November 1, 1954 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Sunset
Cemetery. Note: name on death certificate and tombstone says Charles Manson Camp.
He married (1) Ethel Logan in 1909 at Rev. T. H. Mullinax home, Blacksburg, South
Carolina (2) Etta McCurry who died April 9, 1963 in Cleveland County, North Carolina
and buried in Sunset Cemetery. They had eleven children: Lonzo Manson “Bank” Camp,
Badge Camp, Jane Camp, Ralph Camp, James Yates Camp, Lawrence Walter Camp,
Everette Gamewell Camp, Clyde Camp, Helen Agnes Camp, Dwight Camp, and Lucille
Camp.
11. Mack Daniel Camp was born February 3, 1893 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and
died June 21, 1968 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Kings Mountain
Cemetery. He married Hattie Emma Moses May 10, 1911 in Gaffney, Cherokee County,
South Carolina. She was born December 31, 1893 in North Carolina and died February
15, 1977 in Cleveland County, North Carolina and buried in Kings Mountain Cemetery.
They had ten children: Mildred Camp, Fred Camp, Robert Camp, Paul Camp, Martha
Jane Camp, James. P. Camp, Mack R. Camp, Faye Camp, Ray Camp, and Trudy Camp.
Their first five children were born in Hendersonville, North Carolina in the 1870’s and
Savannah, a baby, died and was buried there. They moved from Hendersonville to Cleveland
County, and the 1880 U. S. Census shows that they had four children, Margaret Matilda age
eight, Ellen Elizabeth age six, James Chivis age four, and Anna Louisa age two. His parents,
Lawson and Margaret Camp lived in the household at the time. Lawson Camp died in August of
that year, and Manson and Jane Camp and their children moved back to Hendersonville. Their
son, Thomas Pinkney was born there in the fall of 1880. They returned to Cleveland County
before our father, John Madison Camp, was born in 1883. He was their seventh child and he and
the last four children: Mary Alice, Joseph William, Charles Bunyan, and Mack Daniel were born
in Cleveland County, North Carolina.
CLEVELAND COUNTY
The territory that is presently Cleveland County previously was designated as part of eight
different counties since 1729: (1) Clarendon, 1729; (2) New Hanover from Clarendon, 1729; (3)
Bladen from New Hanover 1734; (4) Anson from Bladen, 1749; (5) Mecklenburg from Anson,
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1752; (6) Tryon from Mecklenburg, 1768; (7) Rutherford and Lincoln from Tryon, 1779; (8)
Cleveland from Rutherford and Lincoln, 1841.
By 1836, the population of the territory had increased to the point that a new county needed to
be formed, so that the residents would have easier access to a center of government. Carved out
of Rutherford and Lincoln Counties, Cleveland County was formed by an act of the N. C. State
Legislature on June 11, 1841, and was officially incorporated by an act of the N. C. Legislature
on January 25, 1843.
It was named for Revolutionary War hero Col. Benjamin Cleaveland (1738-1806) who was
commander of the Patriots at the Battle of Kings Mountain. When Grover Cleveland became
President of the United States in 1885, the spelling of the name was confusing, so in 1887 it was
changed to Cleveland by an act that was passed by the General Assembly.
Cleveland County is made up of several small towns: Shelby, Kings Mountain, Boiling Springs,
Mooresboro, Waco, Fallston, Polkville, Belwood, Toluca, Lawndale, Lattimore, Casar, Grover,
Earl, and Patterson Springs. Every town in Cleveland County was built around creeks, rivers,
springs, or railroads.
Shelby officially became the county seat in 1843. An act creating the county provided that
the county seat be not more than four miles from Wilson’s Mineral Springs, (now Cleveland
Springs), as it was considered to be about the middle of the new county. Post Road, just east of
Wilson’s Mineral Springs had been the dividing line between Lincoln and Rutherford Counties.
There was much discussion and disagreement about where to place the town of Shelby.
Citizens living in what had been Lincoln County wanted their section to be the site of the county
seat and those living in the former Rutherford County area violently objected because they
wanted the county seat to be closer to them so that they did not have to travel so far over the
trails and muddy roads to get to town. Broad River was where most of the commerce in the area
was conducted and many people felt the town should be located nearby. The dispute was settled
when two men gave the county property for the town.
In June 1841, William Forbis/Forbes (1799-1851) and his wife, Elizabeth, gave fifty acres to
the county. This property was where Shelby City Park is now located, and where William
Forbis/Forbes and several members of his family are buried on the land that is now the seventh
tee of the Royster Golf Course. On August 11, 1841, James Love (1796-1884) and his wife,
Susan, deeded 147 acres for the town of Shelby. This land joined the property that Forbis/Forbes
donated and includes the current uptown area.
James Love had purchased this land that is the present site of the heart of Shelby the year
before, in 1840, from Thomas Camp for the price of $80.00 for 109 acres. This land, which was
then in Lincoln County, had been in the Camp family for 51 years, having been given as a land
grant in 1789 to Daniel Camp, son of Thomas Camp III. Daniel Camp died in 1801, intestate,
and since there was no will, his six children inherited his estate. His son, Thomas Camp,
purchased the interests in this tract of land from his co-heirs. This was just one of the parcels of
land that Daniel Camp had owned. In 1789, he purchased over 400 acres from his father-in-law,
John McKinney, on the east side of Broad River, property that had been a land grant to John
McKinney in 1768, and records show that Daniel Camp’s children divided 64 ½ acres of land on
Broad River.
The town of Shelby was officially incorporated by an act of the N. C. Legislature in 1843, and
was named for Col. Isaac Shelby (1750-1826) another Revolutionary War hero who fought at the
Battle of Kings Mountain and later became the first governor of Kentucky. The original town
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limits of Shelby extended one-quarter mile in each direction from the public square, the
boundaries of the town forming a circle.
In his deed to the county, James Love had designated areas for Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian, and Episcopal Churches and for male and female educational institutions.
Surveyor John R. Logan (1811-1884) laid out the streets of Shelby, and lots for businesses and
home sites. He and James Love and S. L. Gidney had been to Washington and were impressed
by the width of the streets in the nation’s capital. They made a wise decision when they decided
to follow that pattern and make the streets of Shelby wide.
The main streets uptown were named for Revolutionary War heroes Gen. George
Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Gen. Baron Johan DeKalb, Lt. Col. Francis Marion, Maj.
Gen. Joseph Warren, Gen. Daniel Morgan, Col. Joseph Graham and Gen. Thomas Sumter.
Shelby’s early growth and development was due to its designation as the county seat, and the
town grew very little during the antebellum years. In 1850, there were about 10,000 people in
the county. Poor roads and lack of bridges over creeks and rivers hindered transportation,
development, and industry. The first road of any consequence established across the county was
laid out in 1852. The road went from Froneberger’s Paper Mill, site of the later Buffalo Mill,
about four miles east of Shelby, to upper Island Ford and to the South Carolina line in the
direction of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Since travel was so limited, life was centered on work, church, and family. Often families sat
on the porch and sang or played music. Many musical instruments were homemade and some of
them such as harmonicas and Jews harps and string instruments like dulcimers, fiddles and
banjos could be carried in a knapsack and played anywhere. The banjo, of African origin,
became a popular instrument, and its African inspired rhythms were incorporated into popular
songs by Stephen Foster and other songwriters.
Stephen Foster is considered the father of American music and the pre-eminent song writer in
the United States in the 19th century. He wrote many songs that are synonymous with the era and
quite a few of them have been popular for the last 150 years. His best known songs are: “I
Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “My Old Kentucky
Home,” “Old Folks At Home” (“Suwannee River”), “Camptown Races,” “Old Black Joe,” “Hard
Times Come Again No More,” “Nelly Bly,” “Old Dog Tray,” and “Oh, Susanna” which was the
anthem of the 1849 California Gold Rush. During that era folk music was the rage including a
wide genre of sweetheart murder ballads such as “Tom Dooley,” “Rose Connelly”, “Barbara
Allen,” and “Down in the Willow Garden.” “The Yellow Rose of Texas” adopted as the anthem
of that state was written in 1858.
Religious music was the first music of early colonists. The settlers brought traditional
English hymns to America with them. Pilgrims from Plymouth and Southampton brought the
“Ainsworth Psalter” imprinted in 1612 in Amsterdam. The first book published in British
Colonial America was The Bay Psalm Book published in Cambridge in 1640. Gospel songs
“Rock of Ages,” “Amazing Grace,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “We’re Marching To
Zion,” and “Beautiful River” (“Shall We Gather At The River”) were some early Christian
hymns which are still popular today. The old psalms, hymns, and ballads became the backbone
of rural music in the South and across the Appalachian Mountains
The influence of African Americans on American music began in the 19th century with the
advent of blackface minstrel shows. They featured white performers who used burnt cork to
blacken their skin and exaggerate their lips. They often wore wooly wigs, gloves, and tailcoats or
ragged clothes to complete their transformation. They translated music such as opera into
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popular terms for a general audience. They accompanied the music by dancing jigs. By the end
of the 19th century, African American music was an integral part of mainstream American
culture.
African Americans were influenced by the Christian hymns but they created their own style
of music that was new and special to their culture, altering material they took from hymns and
using new melodies. Negro spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Steal Away To
Jesus,” “The Angels Are Coming,” “Roll Jordan Roll,” “Gospel Train,” “Michael Row The Boat
Ashore,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” “O Dem Golden Slippers,” and “Wading In The Water”
communicated their Christian ideals, their hopes and their hardships as African-American slaves.
THE CIVIL WAR
By 1860, Cleveland County’s population had increased to 12,348 and the nation was divided
by issues of states’ rights and slavery. Tensions formed early in the nation’s history. Since the
time of the Revolutionary War, Americans were divided between those who wanted greater
states’ rights and those who thought the Federal government needed to have more control.
Strong proponents of states’ rights thought the Constitution ignored the right of states to continue
acting independently and on some issues, especially the issue of slavery; the states felt that those
rights were not respected.
The slave trade was started by the Portuguese and was entered into by others for financial
gain. Slavery probably wouldn’t have existed in America had it not been that in Africa prisoners
were sold as slaves. Tribal chiefs were more than willing to turn them over to white captains.
Slave traders imported them to America, especially to the South where they were used to work
on the large plantations. Slavery was introduced to the British colonies at Jamestown, Virginia
in August 1619, and enslaved people largely replaced indentured servants as an economic labor
force.
Prices of tobacco, indigo, and rice,- the South’s most important cash crops- dropped after the
Revolutionary War and the loss of England as their main market. As the planters’ profits
declined, so did the advantage of keeping slaves. Northerners and Southerners alike thought
slavery would die out. But with Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton
became a very profitable crop because the machine was able to reduce the time it took to
separate the seeds from the cotton. The machine could do the work of five laborers. The engine
or “gin” powered by water, allowed workers to clean seeds from fifty times as much cotton as
before. Soon horse and mule powered gins were available. Many of the Southern plantation
owners greatly increased their cotton production, and by 1860 cotton made up fifty-seven per
cent of all U. S. exports. The South was dependent on sales abroad, mostly to England. The
South needed a large amount of cheap labor, thus their need for slaves. From 1750-1800 it is
estimated that 7,500 slaves were imported to America every year. Slave ownership became
recognized as the basis of wealth in the South, as great prosperity came from their labor. A slave
was as negotiable as cash, and when he had children, he created more slaves, increasing his
master’s wealth.
The South’s economy was dependent on cotton and slavery and the North’s economy was
based more on commerce and industry than agriculture. Initially Northern farms and factories
were too small to require large labor forces such as slavery. The influx of immigrants mostly
stayed in the industrial cities of the North and they provided cheap labor to their industries.
The Northern industries were purchasing raw cotton from the South and turning it into
finished products and selling the manufactured goods to the South. This disparity between the
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North and South created a major difference in their attitudes toward economy and also
influenced their social attitudes. In the North, social life was focused on the fast growing cities
and people of different cultures and classes had to work together, so social life evolved.
Southern social life revolved around the plantation and the social order remained much the same
as it had been.
Although the North welcomed the profits they made from the Southern slave economy, they
did not condone slavery. Many people felt that slavery was morally wrong. All Northern states
had barred slavery by 1804. Congress passed a law in 1808, prohibiting the importation of
slaves. Since this cut off the foreign supply, it insured that there would never be enough slaves
to satisfy the demand. The price of slaves continued to rise, and slave trading became a principal
business in the South.
Slave ownership was accepted and they were treated as property. A vast network of people
referred to as the “Underground Railroad” helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and to
Canada. It consisted of a group of individuals, many white but mostly black, who effectively
moved hundreds of slaves northward each year. According to one estimate, the South lost
100,000 slaves from 1810-1850, and sources say they lost the greatest number between 1850 and
1860. Two of the most important figures of the Underground Railroad were both former slaves.
Harriet Tubman led more than 300 people out of slavery via the Underground Railroad.
Frederick Douglas became the movement’s finest orator and after the war became a powerful
politician.
As America began to expand with the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War, the issue of
whether the new states admitted to the Union would be slave states or slave-free had to be
decided. Southern states sought to keep the western land open to slavery and Northern states
adamantly opposed it. Most Northerners did not consider blacks to be their equal and they did
not advocate immediate emancipation, but they did not want slavery to spread to the territories of
the west. Southerners were fearful that if the western territories were admitted to the Union as
slave-free states, in the end it would lead to the outlawing of slavery throughout the land.
For four decades Congress tried to reach a permanent compromise between advocates and
opponents of the extension of slavery in the new territories of the expanding country. Though
President Millard Fillmore was opposed to slavery, he enforced the Compromise of 1850 to deal
with the balance of slave and slave-free states and save the Union.
Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, requiring that all runaway slaves be
returned to their owners. In the historic Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, the Supreme Court
ruled that Negro slaves or former slaves could not become citizens of the United States or of any
state.
In 1859, John Brown led an attempt by white abolitionists to start an armed slave revolt by
seizing a United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They were defeated by a U. S.
Marine detachment ordered by President James Buchanan and led by Col. Robert E. Lee. John
Brown was tried for treason in the commonwealth of Virginia and hanged.
Along with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Dred Scott Case, and John Brown’s Raid, the
publishing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Northerners became more
polarized against slavery and their sympathies increased for abolitionists and slaves and against
slavery and slaveholders.
The Presidential election of 1860 brought the slavery issues to a head. There was much talk
in the South about leaving the Union if the outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery,
Republican Party candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected President of the United States. The
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Republican Party platform clearly stated that slavery would not be allowed to spread any further.
It also promised that tariffs protecting industry would be imposed, a Homestead Act granting
free farmland in the West to settlers would be established, and that the government would
provide funding of a transcontinental railroad. All of these provisions were highly unpopular in
the South. Of the eleven states that would declare their succession from the Union, Lincoln was
not on the ballot of ten of them. He was on the ballot in Virginia, but he got just 1.1 percent of
the popular vote there. (In the 1856 Presidential election, the Republican candidate, John C.
Fremont, had received no votes in thirteen out of the fifteen slave states.)
The national Democratic Party vote was split between Democratic Party candidate Stephen A.
Douglas, favored by the northern faction, and Southern Democratic Party candidate John C.
Breckinridge. Republican candidate Lincoln obtained a minority victory, with only 1,866,452
votes out of 4,682,069 votes cast, but he received enough votes that November 6th to win the
election. He carried all of the states of the North except New Jersey and all of the Northwest and
California and Oregon. Of the 26,000 votes he received in the Southern states, 17,000 of them
were in the state of Missouri.
South Carolina had threatened to withdraw from the Union before over economic issues, but
President Andrew Jackson informed them that if they did, he would invade the state with federal
troops. They raised the possibility of secession again in 1850, and now ten years later they made
good on the threat.
South Carolina delegates to the Secession Convention in Charleston unanimously voted
themselves out of the Union on December 20, 1860. Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Texas followed in secession. They left the Union even before President Lincoln
was inaugurated. President James Buchanan stated that secession was unconstitutional and
wrong, but that the U. S. Constitution did not give the President or U. S. Congress the power to
stop it.
On February 4th, in Montgomery, Alabama, the seven seceding states formed a new nation
called the Confederate States of America. They elected former Secretary of War, U. S. Senator
and Mexican War hero, Jefferson Davis as President and former U. S. Representative from
Georgia, Alexander Stephens as Vice-President. They adopted a Constitution that was almost
identical to the United States Constitution, except for a clause eliminating the opportunity for the
new government to ever change the law of slavery. The Constitution spelled out clearly the
supreme rights of individual states and the right of any individual state to secede from the
Confederacy should it be in its best interest to do so.
A total of eleven Southern slave states succeeded from the United States. Four states in the
upper South, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, and North Carolina also permitted slavery, but had
rejected joining the Confederacy. These states now refused to send forces against their
neighboring slave states and joined the first seven who formed the Confederate States of
America. The remaining Union consisted of the slave-free states and the five border slave states
in the North. An occupying Yankee army prevented Maryland from exercising her right to
secede from the Union, but the majority of her young men became soldiers of the Confederate
Army.
Did the states have a right to secede? This question has been debated for the last 150 years.
The best argument for their right to secede is the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution that
states that “The powers not delegated to the Unites States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by
the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Basically that says that all
rights not surrendered by the states still belong to the states. Secession is not mentioned in the
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Constitution, so the right to secede is decided by the states individually or collectively. The
South viewed the Union as a voluntary association among sovereign state powers which could be
freely terminated. They viewed the conflict as a War Between the States. For the North it was a
Civil War, a struggle with misguided countrymen of the South who were determined to sever the
bonds of the Union that had been united in the Declaration of Independence, forged in the
American Revolution and sealed by the United States Constitution.
Surprisingly it was not the South that first raised the possibility of withdrawing from the
Union. New England states threatened to secede three times. First in 1803, when President
Jefferson arranged the Louisiana Purchase, next toward the end of the War of 1812, and again
with the annexation of Texas as a slave state.
In addition to states rights and the fact that secession is not mentioned in the Constitution,
another argument for leaving the Union can be found in the Declaration of Independence. It says
that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The United States are united on the principle that
“governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and “whenever any
form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to
abolish it, and to institute new government” and “when a long train of abuses and
usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is
their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”
Tariffs and economic issues were another justification for leaving the Union. The South had
endured several decades of excessive and inequitable federal tariffs heavily prejudiced against
Southern commerce. The South being agrarian was significantly poorer than the mercantilist
North, but they were paying eighty-two per cent of federal expenses. The North had a
Congressional advantage, as they had a majority in both houses of Congress.
In his determination to save the Union, did President Lincoln act unconstitutionally to prevent
Southern secession? This is another question that is much debated. At the 1787 Constitutional
Convention, James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal government to
suppress a seceding state. He said, “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed
to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a
declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the
party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
The Confederate States withdrew from the Union peacefully. President Lincoln called the
Confederate secession a “rebellion” and a “threat” to “the government.” He did not explain how
the government was threatened and many people argue that he acted outside the lawfully limited
authority of the office of the presidency or the U. S. Congress to coerce the South back into the
Union, by invading their homeland, ruthlessly attacking and unleashing horrendous violence
against the lives, liberty, and property of those he served in the Southern states. The South’s
rejoining the Union at gun point affirmed to many people that violent coercion can be used, even
by governments if unrestrained, to rob men of their lives, liberty, and property.
Each argument was directly or indirectly tied to the issue of slavery. Could a country whose
own charter of liberty, the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men are created
equal, continue to allow human bondage of a large percentage of its population? The North and
South were divided by social, cultural, and opposite philosophical differences. The United States
had reached a perilous junction and it took bloodshed and devastation to decide our nation’s
future.
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Both the Union and the Confederacy began to raise large volunteer armies with the North’s
objective of putting down the rebellion and saving the Union and the South’s goal to gain
independence from the United States.
Neither side thought the conflict would last long. The South’s faith in their production of
cotton encouraged them to secede. Because the English and French needed Southern cotton,
many Southerners believed they would intervene and force the Union to recognize the
Confederacy and the war would be over. Northern states raised ample food to feed the Union,
and also produced a significant amount for export. Britain was faced with crop failure and
desperately needed the food they bought from the North. They were not inclined to risk a famine
in order to recognize the South as a separate nation. France followed Britain’s lead and neither
country intervened on behalf of the Confederacy. Cotton destined for export rotted on the
wharves of blockaded Southern ports.
Interestingly, the Vatican recognized the Confederacy as a free and independent nation.
After the end of the war, a sympathetic pope wove a crown of thorns with his own hands and
sent it to Confederate President Jefferson Davis while Davis was in prison.
The Confederate States of America took over property of the national government such as
post offices, arsenals, and ships. The U. S. government controlled two pieces of property in the
Confederacy: Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and Fort Pickens, Florida. The Confederacy sent
commissioners to Washington to negotiate the transfer of the forts still occupied by the Union
forces to the Confederacy. President Lincoln refused to meet with them. Instead, on April 8th he
sent reinforcements to Fort Pickens and notified the Confederate government in Montgomery,
Alabama, that he intended to send supplies to Fort Sumter. The Confederate government
demanded evacuation of the fort. On April 12, 1861 the Civil War, or War Between the States,
began when the Confederate States opened fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in Charleston
harbor. Historians still ponder the question of what would have happened to the Union if that
shot had not been fired.
Except for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War is the defining event in our nation’s history
and it was the greatest crisis in the history of our country. The long struggle disrupted every
aspect of American life. It is perhaps the saddest war in history, pitting brother against brother.
Because of divided loyalties, families were torn apart and bonds of friendships strained or
severed.
In none of the states did the people unanimously favor one side. At one time or another
300,000 men from Confederate States served in the Union Army. Four of First Lady Mary Todd
Lincoln’s brothers and two of her brothers-in-law served in the Confederate Army. Throughout
the nation, Southern officers in the small 16,000-man U. S. Army had to choose between the flag
they had sworn to protect and the South they loved. For most, ancestral ties to the South won
out, and they gave up their commissions, returned home, and served in the Confederate Army.
Of the 1,080 officers in the U. S. Army, 313 (about twenty-nine percent) of them resigned and
joined the Confederate military. Perhaps none had a tougher decision than West Point graduate
Col. Robert E. Lee of Virginia who was widely regarded as the Union’s most promising officer,
having served in the Mexican War under Gen. Winfield Scott. In the spring before Virginia
seceded, Lee was offered command of the Federal Army. He disapproved of secession and did
not care for slavery, but he said he could not raise his hand against his relatives, his children, and
his home state of Virginia. (His father, Revolutionary War Maj. Gen. Henry “Light Horse Harry”
Lee, III had served as Governor of Virginia.)
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As a Confederate Army General, Robert E. Lee was revered by his men. He served with
vigor, and became the Confederacy’s most celebrated hero. His three sons served on the side of
the Confederacy. His son, George Washington Curtis “Boo” Lee, also a West Point graduate,
served as a general in the war. Lee’s other two sons, Major Gen. W. H. F. “Rooney” Lee,
graduate of Harvard, and Capt. Robert E. “Rob” Lee, Jr., University of Virginia graduate, served
with distinction. His nephew, Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, a West Point graduate, was the South’s
youngest major general and fought valiantly throughout the war.
There were many officers whose allegiance to the South affected their relationships. West
Point graduate, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet was one of the foremost Confederate Generals and
principal subordinate to General Lee. He had served as best man when his first cousin married
his dearest friend, U. S. Army Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, who emerged as the Union’s greatest
commander. Confederate Maj. Gen. George Pickett was also an old West Point friend of Ulysses
S. Grant. When he became a father during the fighting around Petersburg, Gen. Grant had
bonfires lighted in his honor and sent a very expensive silver service to Pickett for his wife.
Confederate Maj. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, another West Point graduate, and Union Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant, had been friends. Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis Armistead and Union Gen.
Winfred Scott Hancock had served together on the western frontier and were dearest friends.
Confederate Maj. Gen. Thomas Rosser and Union Gen. George Armstrong Custer had been
roommates and best friends at West Point. Confederate Lt. Gen. Ambrose Powell “A. P.” Hill,
remembered as one of the South’s finest generals, and Union Gen. George McClellan were
roommates at West Point. Confederate Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge had served as Vice
President of the United States under President Buchanan and ran against Abraham Lincoln in the
recent Presidential election.
One of the most famous family quarrels that lasted for many years after the end of the war
involved the Virginia family of Union Cavalry Gen. Philip St. George Cooke. Gen. Cooke and
his Pennsylvania-born wife were loyal to the Union and Gen. Cooke remained in the U. S. Army
during the war. Jacob Sharpe, the husband of their youngest daughter, Julia, became a successful
Union brigadier general. However, the other family members favored the Confederacy. Their
son and other two sons-in-law resigned their Union commissions and joined the Confederate
States Army after Virginia seceded in May 1861. Their son Col. John Rogers Cooke resigned
the U. S. Army and served the Confederacy with great distinction as a brigadier general. Their
daughter, Maria’s husband, Dr. Charles Brewer of Maryland, a surgeon in the U. S. Army,
resigned his Union commission and served the Confederacy as a surgeon on Gen. Robert E.
Lee’s staff. Their daughter, Flora’s husband was U. S. Army Capt. James Ewell Brown “J.E.B.”
Stuart. He resigned to join the Confederate Army and was one of the most famous cavalry
commanders of the war. Gen. Cooke had been Jeb’s Stuart commanding officer in the Union
Army. Stuart was furious with his father-in-law, considered him a traitor to the South and never
spoke to him again. He even changed his son’s name from Philip St. George Cooke Stuart to
James Ewell Brown Stuart, Jr. Gen. Cooke and Stuart met on the battlefield during the Peninsula
Campaign in Virginia in 1862. The Union and Confederate cavalry skirmished at Williamsburg
and Yorktown, but the two did not get the opportunity to confront each other. During the Seven
Days Campaign, as Gen. Lee pushed the Union Army away from Richmond, the Confederate
capital, Stuart, as the Confederate cavalry commander, made his famous First Ride around Gen.
George B. McClellan’s entire Union Army from June 12-15, 1862, as his father-in-law pursued
him in vain.
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Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most remarkable soldiers of the Civil War
and the foremost cavalry leader of both sides. Like Jefferson Davis, Maj. George Pickett, and
Jeb Stuart, many Confederate officers were West Point graduates. A total of 385 general officers
served in the Confederacy, but there were only seven full generals. All seven of the full generals
were West Point graduates: Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Joseph
Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, and Edmund Kirby Smith. Gen. Sam Cooper was
the top ranking officer in the Confederate Army and performed brilliantly. Gen. Albert Sidney
Johnston was in full command of all Confederate forces in the Western Theater. Gen. Joseph
Eggleston Johnston resigned his post as quartermaster general of the U. S. Army to command the
Army of Northern Virginia, the highest ranking U. S. officer to do so. He was the fourth highest
ranking officer in the Confederate Army. After he was wounded, Gen. Robert E. Lee assumed
command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant “P. G. T.” Beauregard
was cited as one of West Point’s finest students and had an outstanding military career. Gen.
Braxton Bragg, the fifth ranking officer in the Confederacy, was a brilliant leader. Gen. Edmund
Kirby Smith commanded forces in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas.
Virginian Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, a West Point graduate, was one of the
greatest commanders of the Civil War and one of the most brilliant field generals to command an
army. Gen. D. H. Hill, Jackson’s brother-in-law and one of his dearest friends, also a West Point
graduate, was one of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s favorite generals. Jackson’s West Point classmate,
Maj. Gen. Dabney H. Maury was commander of the Army of East Tennessee and commander of
the District of the Gulf. Lt. Gen. Richard Stoddard Ewell, West Point graduate, after Stonewall
Jackson’s death, led the troops into Gettysburg. West Point graduate, Maj. Gen. Joe “Fighting
Joe” Wheeler, became the ranking cavalry leader in the Confederate Army following Jeb Stuart’s
death. Lt. Gen. William Hardee, West Point graduate, authored a textbook of military tactics
used by the both the Union and the Confederacy throughout the war. Maj. Gen. Gustavus W.
Smith, West Point Graduate, led the Georgia militia in the defense of Atlanta and Savannah.
West Point graduate, Maj. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder, defended the lower Virginia
peninsula during much of the war. West Point graduate, Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, served in the
Trans-Mississippi Theater. Another West Point graduate, Lt. Gen. Jubel Anderson Early,
wrecked havoc against the Union and was a delight to his troops. West Point graduate Brig. Gen.
Porter Alexander’s command was essential to Southern victories at Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville. West Point graduate, Isaac Trimble, was the most prominent Maryland soldier
to serve in the Confederacy Army. West Point graduate, Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson,
commanded the Stonewall Division of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. West Point graduate,
Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, commanded forces in South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. Lt.
Gen. Stephen Dill Lee, West Point graduate and the youngest lieutenant general in either army,
fought bravely from Sumter, South Carolina to Bentonville, North Carolina. Brig. Gen. John
Adams, West Point graduate, commanded six Mississippi infantry regiments that were assigned
to the Army of Tennessee. Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, West Point graduate, was famous as a
fighting general. West Point graduate, Brig. Gen. John Pegram, was noted for his intelligence
and daring. Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, West Point graduate, and was a classmate and dear friend of
Gen. Albert Sidney Johnson and Jefferson Davis. He commanded troops in western Tennessee
and eastern Arkansas and later resigned his commission and became a bishop in the Episcopal
Church.
Other outstanding commanders were Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan whose troops became
known throughout the North and South as Morgan’s Raiders. Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton became
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commander of Lee’s cavalry after Jeb Stuart’s death. His Hampton’s Legion participated in
some of the bloodiest battles of the war. His younger brother, Col. Frank Hampton, was killed at
Fredericksburg. Brig. Gen. Thomas Logan who served as a private in Hampton’s Legion was
promoted to general at the age of 24, the youngest general officer in the Confederate Army. Maj.
Gen. Matthew C. Butler took command of Hampton’s Legion and was considered one of the
South’s most outstanding cavalry leaders. Maj. Gen. William Mahone commanded the Sixth
Virginia Infantry and performed brilliantly at Second Manassas and Malvern Hill. Brig. Gen.
Joseph Kershaw led the Second South Carolina Infantry. This regiment was in some of the
heaviest fighting throughout the war. Maj. Gen. Robert F. Hoke gave an outstanding
performance at Fredericksburg and commanded in North Carolina. Brig. Gen. Turner Ashby’s
scouting abilities and bravery made him indispensible to Stonewall Jackson. Brig. Gen. Maxcy
Gregg was known for his courage and was one of Jackson’s most trusted officers. Maj. Gen.
Robert Emmett Rodes played a key role at Seven Pines, Sharpsburg, and Fredericksburg. He
was one of Lee’s most trusted officers. Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon commanded a brigade of
Georgia volunteers who led attacks at Seven Pines, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and
Gettysburg. Brig. Gen. Maj. Gen. Sterling Price, former Governor of Missouri, fought for the
Confederate Army and even invaded Missouri in the longest campaign of the war in terms of
miles covered-- an incredible march of over 1400 miles. Brig. Gen. Hiram Bronson Granbury
served with the Seventh Texas Infantry and the Army of Tennessee. Brig. Gen. Otho French
Strahl also served with the Army of Tennessee as well as Brig. Gen. States Rights Gists and Maj.
Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ronayne Cleburne commanded Hardee’s Third
Corps, one of the finest brigades in the entire army. Brig. Gen. James Cantey commanded the
Fifteenth Alabama Infantry and fought in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Brig.
Gen. Micah Jenkins led the Sixth South Carolina Infantry and commanded a brigade of Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia. He was called one of the South’s best and brightest generals. Brig.
Gen. Benjamin Franklin Terry organized the 8th Texas Cavalry called “Terry’s Texas Rangers”
and served fearlessly in the war. Maj. Gen. John Wharton led the Rangers after Terry’s death
and despite his lack of military training he became one of the South’s best generals. Brig. Gen.
Stand Watie, Chief of the Western Cherokees, led his regiment in eighteen engagements in the
war and was the last Confederate general to lay down his arms on June 23, 1865. Captain
William Quantrill was a notorious guerrilla whose raiders terrorized the Union Army in
Kentucky, Kansas, and Missouri throughout the war. Among the members of his troops were the
infamous James and Younger brothers. Following the war Cole, Robert, John and James
Younger joined Frank and Jesse James to rob Federal banks. Col. John Singleton Mosby called
“The Grey Ghost” led the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry. His Partisan Rangers, composed
mostly of Marylanders, were the most successful Confederate guerrilla unit of the entire war due
to their lightning ambush thrusts behind Union lines.
The Confederate Army is still remembered as the greatest infantry the world has ever seen.
After 2,500 Confederate soldiers were captured at Gettysburg, the bloodiest and most decisive
battle of the war, a Philadelphia journalist wrote about them, “They were the dirtiest men I ever
saw, a most ragged, lean and hungry set of wolves. Yet there was a certain dash about them that
the Northern men seemed to lack.”
Even though the makeshift Confederate armies were made up of poorly equipped, poorly
clothed, and poorly fed men, they fought to the bitter end against a very large and well-equipped
Union Army against overwhelming odds. They were determined and ready to die for the South.
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Perhaps the issues that motivated the Southern plantation owners were states’ rights and the
institution of slavery, they were a small minority, but they dominated the South culturally and
politically. But according to the 1860 U. S. census, ninety percent of Southerners did not own
slaves and had never owned slaves. What motivated the soldiers that actually went out and did
the fighting was a grim determination to protect their homes and families from the Northern
invaders, an army that showed little mercy to the civilian population of the South.
North Carolina declared succession on May 20, 1861, one of the last Confederate States to
secede. North Carolina left the Union reluctantly, and then only after President Abraham
Lincoln issued a call for troops to fight against the South.
Cleveland County was in support of secession though it was not a large slave-holding area
compared to other parts of the South. To show loyalty to the South and support for secession,
local men got an old cannon used in the Revolutionary War Battle of Cowpens and brought it to
Shelby and fired it all night, burning up three kegs of powder. The last round was loaded so
heavily that it burst the cannon and broke out every window light in the courthouse and nearby
buildings. The next day they held a barbecue in Shelby and gave speeches on succession.
A number of companies were organized in Cleveland County and mustered into the
Confederate Army:
1. Company E, 12th Regiment, Cleveland Guards, formed April 22, 1861
2. Company D, 14th Regiment, Cleveland Blues, formed April 26, 1861
3. Company C, 15th Regiment, Ellis Guard, formed April 27, 1861
4. Company 2nd B, 49th Regiment, Cleveland Mountain Boys
5. Company 1st D, Regiment, Cleveland Mountain Boys, formed May 14, 1861
6. Company H, 28th Regiment, Cleveland Regulators, formed August 22, 1861
7. Company F, 34th Regiment, Floyd Rifles, formed September 17, 1861
8. Company H, 34th Regiment, Rough and Readys, formed October 1, 1861
9. Company I, 38th Regiment, Cleveland Marksmen, formed November 21, 1861
10. Company G, 49th Regiment, Kings Mountain Tiger, formed March 18, 1862
11. Company C, 55th Regiment, Cleveland Grays, formed March 1862
12. Company D, 55th Regiment, Cleveland Farmers, formed March-May 1862
13. Company F, 55th Regiment, South Mountain Rangers, formed April-May 1862
14. Company F, 56th Regiment, Cleveland Riflemen, formed May-June 1862
15. Company D, 2nd Regiment N.C. Jr. Res., formed May 27, 1864
16. Company B, 34th Regiment had 144 men, but only 31 from Cleveland County, remainder
from Rutherford County
17. Company C, 71st Regiment made up of seventeen year old boys
Cleveland County furnished 2,033 soldiers, more men in proportion to the voting population
than any other county in the state.
In April 1862, as the one-year enlistments ran out, the Confederacy was forced to pass a draft
law, the first conscription law in United States history. The Confederate Congress authorized that
all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five were liable for service. Draft laws
exempted every owner or overseer of twenty or more slaves from military duty. This, plus, an
exemption could be bought for a $500.00 contribution to the Confederate war chest, causing poor
Southerners to call the conflict “a rich man’s war, a poor man’s fight.”
Confederate armies enlisted seventy-five to eighty-five percent of the white military age male
population. Forty percent of the male population were slaves and not available for military
service. But some slaves and many free black men enlisted in the Confederacy and took up arms
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to protect their homeland from the invading armies of the Union. Seventy free blacks enlisted in
the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia and sixteen hundred free black soldiers marched
through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia.
The United States Army enlisted men were more loyal that the officers. Out of the some
15,000 enlisted men at the outbreak of the war, only twenty-six switched allegiances. The Union
had three times the population as the Confederacy, so they could rely on volunteers. However,
due to difficulty in raising new regiments of volunteers, the Union instituted conscription on
March 3, 1863, requiring all men to register. If a man’s name was drawn, he could avoid that
particular draft by paying $300.00 or get a permanent exemption if he could get a substitute to
serve in his place. The poor could not pay their way out of servitude since $300.00 was about
two-thirds of the average working man’s annual pay. Draft riots broke out in New York City on
July 13, and mobs of mostly Irish immigrants roamed the streets looting and burning for four
days. Blaming the Negroes for their trouble, many black men in the city were beaten or lynched.
In the early days of the war, the Confederacy was outnumbered two to one and as months and
years went by the odds were even greater. Soldiers from both sides were dying by the thousands.
But the North had a ready supply of replacements, especially in the German and Irish
immigrants. One out of four Union soldiers was born outside the United States. German
immigrants made up the largest group, followed by Irish. After 1863, there were really no
soldiers left in the South to recruit.
To achieve their goal of conquering the South and restoring the Union, the North mounted
offensives and the South stayed on the defensive, hoping to take such a high toll of lives that the
North would lose their will to fight. Only twice did the South invade the North, at Antietam and
Gettysburg. Both were disastrous defeats to the South. By the end of 1863, the Union had
control of the Mississippi River which split the South in two, and blockaded most of the
Southern ports.
In the battle on the seas, as the North attempted to blockade Southern ports, the most famous
was the duel between the ironclad warships the Union Monitor and the Confederate Merrimack.
The ships did little damage to each other. Since neither ship destroyed the other, there was no
victor, but the battle of the ironclad ships marked a revolution in naval warfare.
The sea war was waged by the Confederacy along the North Carolina coast. Blockade
runners were used to navigate the shallow sounds and inlets. They were mainly used for
transportation of materials, but they often carried human cargo, including spies for the
Confederacy. The most renowned of all the blockade runners was the Robert E. Lee.
As commanding officers of the opposing armies, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee had many things in common. They were both graduates of
West Point, both had fought in the Mexican War, and both were sons of Revolutionary War
soldiers. But as military strategists there were major differences. Grant had overwhelming
resources of the Union at his disposal while Lee had to rely on Southern dash and the courage of
desperate men fighting to defend their own soil. He had to make up in shrewdness what he
lacked in supplies and reserves. His military tactics resulted in brilliant victories for the
Confederates and devastating defeats.
Even when the Confederate Army was victorious on the battlefield their supply situation was
dismal. Due to lack of textile factories in the South and successful Union blockades of Southern
ports, the typical Rebel soldier was rarely able to wear the standard regulation uniform,
particularly as the war progressed. After successful battles it was not unusual for victorious
Confederate soldiers to capture Union supplies and go out onto the battlefield after the fight to
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retrieve arms, ammunition, and Union army uniform parts from the dead soldiers. Shoeless
Confederate soldiers grimly searched among the dead for shoes that would fit them. (At that
time there was no difference in shoes between left and right feet.) Occasionally the Union army
uniform parts the Confederates confiscated and wore in later battles caused confusion.
Individual states were expected to supply their soldiers with uniforms and some states like North
Carolina were better able to supply them than other states such as Texas. In the more desperate
stages, toward the end of the war, lack of food became a principle reason for desertion. By 1864,
even hardtack, a hard wheat biscuit issued to the troops and deemed to be inedible, was
considered a rare delicacy.
In a strategy to end the war, Gen. Grant suspended the exchange of prisoners-of-war, in
March 1864, cutting off a badly needed source of reinforcement for the South. So by 1864, the
Confederacy was drafting boys of seventeen and men of fifty-five into its outnumbered and
manpower-starved army. By January 1865, the Confederacy was accepting boys of fourteen and
old men of sixty. There was talk of inducting slaves into the Confederate Army with a promise
of freedom to those who would enlist. March 13, 1865, Confederate President Davis signed
legislation allowing slaves in the Confederate Army. The law did not go into effect until March
20, 1865, too late for the results of this decision. The Confederate Army was in a desperate
situation but they fought on, sustained by nothing more than courage and determination to do
their duty.
The dark days of the war brought forth songs from both sides. “He Leadeth Me”, “The Battle
Hymn Of The Republic”, “The Cruel War” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” were
some of the songs sung. Though both sides were war-weary and frustrated from all the sorrow,
each side fought on, determined to force its will on the other. Gen. Daniel Butterfield composed
the bugle call “Taps” during the Civil War and the lonely, haunting sound of a trumpet blowing
across a cemetery still echoes the heartache of our nation in the loss of so many lives.
Since the North’s purpose of the war was two-fold, to save the Union and to free the slaves,
Northerners referred to the conflict as The War of the Rebellion and from the slaves’ perspective,
the war was for their emancipation, so they called it The War for Freedom.
On April 10, 1862, Congress declared that the federal government would compensate slave
owners who would free their slaves. On June 19, 1862, Congress prohibited slavery in United
States territories. On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln announced his preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the freedom of all slaves in the states of the Confederate
States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. The formal
Emancipation Proclamation was issued on New Year’s Day, 1863 naming the ten states in which
it would apply. The Emancipation Proclamation switched the moral base of the purpose of the
war from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves. This gave new luster to the Northern
abolitionists and guaranteed that wavering European nations would not dare intervene on behalf
of the slave-master.
Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address delivered in November 1863, when he dedicated a
cemetery there began: “Fore score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent, a new a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all
men are created equal.” He made indirect reference to the Emancipation Proclamation and the
ending of slavery as a war goal with the phrase “new birth of freedom.”
In January 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, ending slavery in the United States.
Nearly four million slaves were freed by July 1865. During the war, nearly 200,000 blacks, most
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of them ex-slaves, joined the Union Army. In March 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s
Bureau to aid the liberated Negroes.
The Civil War was the first modern war, as it was the first war fought with tools and weapons
of the industrial age. A variety of weapons were used by both sides, including knives and
swords, handguns, rifled-musket, and breech loaders. Some of the innovations were mass
production of war materials such as repeating firearms and metallic cartridges. Samuel Colt had
made the first revolving pistol and expounded on Eli Whitney’s system of interchangeable parts.
Some say it was Whitney Armory’s rifles that made the Civil War the bloodiest war in history.
Railroads proved invaluable to the Union. The North had more than three miles of track to
every mile in the South. This gave them a great advantage of moving supplies and soldiers to the
battle areas. The railroads were a great advantage for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in his
decisive campaign against Atlanta. He said it would have been “impossible without the
railroads.” Gen. Sherman led a force of 60,000 Union soldiers and swept up from the west and
south. His intent was to destroy the towns and farms.
Gen. Sherman made his famous “March to the Sea” through Georgia in the fall of 1864,
burning and destroying Atlanta and leaving it uninhabitable on his way to Savannah. On
December 22, he captured Savannah.
He then turned his bloody trail northward through
Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina and on into North Carolina on his way to cooperate
with Gen. Grant in a campaign to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia. As he marched
through the Carolinas, he left devastation and destruction in his wake. Sherman’s army raped,
murder, and robbed their way across the South. In her book, A Diary from Dixie, Mary Chesnut
reported that the roadways of Georgia and South Carolina were littered with the bodies of young
black girls who had been raped by Sherman’s army. Since the South lost the war, they could not
bring war crime charges against the leaders of the Union Army.
It was told that one could track the lines of Gen. Sherman’s march by the fires on the
horizon. They looted and burned churches, schools, and hospitals. In Georgia, the Carolinas,
Virginia, and Mississippi, where the armies had passed, abandoned homesteads were marked by
giant black chimneys, which became known as Sherman’s sentinels. The rich Shenandoah
Valley had been laid to waste by Gen. Philip Sheridan and his troops. All over the South,
railroads, factories, cotton gins, and farms had been destroyed. In addition to Atlanta, many
other tree lined and gracious Southern cities had been burned including Jackson, Charleston,
Mobile, Richmond, and Savannah.
Gen. Sherman’s destruction to Georgia in the fall of 1864 helped reelect President Lincoln.
Andrew Johnson replaced Vice President Hannibal Hamlin on the Republican Party ticket and
the party became known as the National Union Party in that election. Former Union Gen.
George McClellan ran against the President in the election, but carried only three states- Kansas,
Delaware, and his home state of New Jersey. Twenty-five states voted in the election. Two new
states had been added to the Union during the war-- West Virginia and Nevada. Gen.
McClellan’s troops had met little resistance when they invaded the pro-Union counties of
Virginia west of the Alleghenies in 1863, paving the way for the admission of the new state of
West Virginia. Nevada was added as the thirty-sixth state of the Union on October 31, 1864.
By January of 1865, it was obvious to all that the Confederacy could not hold out much
longer. The Federal fleet blockaded Wilmington, N. C., effectively isolating the Confederacy
from the entire world and destroying the South’s last major source of arms and food. Beginning
in Knoxville in March 1865, Maj. Gen. George Stoneman led his Union cavalry “District of East
Tennessee,” consisting of about 7,000 men, over the mountains into North Carolina and
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southwestern Virginia in one of the longest cavalry raids in history, with a mission “to destroy
and not to fight battles” in order to expedite the close of the Civil War. Stoneman’s Raid
coincided with the raids of Gen. Sherman in the eastern sections of the state, stretching local
home guard and militia units thinly across the state and forcing Confederate commanders to
make hard choices on where their men were needed most.
When they entered western North Carolina, they marched through the Shelby vicinity
ravaging property and seeking food, horses, and provisions. Fortunately little damage was
inflicted to the town or to residential property in the area. In other areas, they tore up tracks,
burned bridges, destroyed Confederate stores, and captured towns including Christiansburg and
Salisbury. They fought sharp skirmishes and terrified the population. Their mission did not end
until Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured. Stoneman’s Raid through Virginia
inspired the classic song by The Band “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
The impact of the war on families was immeasurable. In the South whole regions were
populated by poor white families. The women could not maintain their farms without the labor
of men. By 1863, with husbands and sons in the war, the food crisis in the Confederacy reached
starvation proportions. The young men of most families enlisted and the Camp family was
typical of large families of the South who had the worry and stress of many sons, grandsons,
sons-in-law, and grandsons-in-law fighting the war, getting maimed or losing their lives.
Our Great Grandfather, John Kuykendall, from Hendersonville served in the Civil War. He
and two of his brothers, Philip Allen Kuykendall, Sr. and Newton Guice Kuykendall were
members of the 56th N.C. Infantry Regiment Company G, Henderson Blues, enlisted April 1862
in Henderson County. John Kuykendall was wounded at Richmond-Petersburg Campaign and
captured at Appomattox, Point Lookout, Maryland. His brother, Jacob Kuykendall, was in the
65th Regiment NC Troops (6th Regiment N.C. Cavalry) Company D. His brother, Alfred
Kuykendall, was a member of the 35th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, Company G
Henderson Rifles, in Henderson County and died in 1862 in Kinston, North Carolina from
disease sustained in the war. Records show that John Kuykendall’s son, our grandmother’s
brother, Newton Kuykendall, entered the war toward the end, enlisting at age eighteen in April
1864 in Company F, 14th N.C., was hospitalized June 17, 1864 at Charlottesville, Virginia,
deserted at New Market, Virginia October 9, 1864 and went to New Creek, Virginia the next
week and joined the Union Army October 17, 1864. There are no records for him after that date.
Family said that he left home as a young teenager and they never heard from him again.
Abner and Margaret Camp did not live to see the Civil War and were spared the impact it had
on the lives of their children and their children’s families. Their son, our Great Grandfather,
Lawson Camp, was fifty-seven years old and living in Hendersonville when the Civil War began.
Our Grandfather, Manson Camp, was only eleven years old, but his older brothers, John Movas
(Osborne) Camp and James Jefferson “Jim” Camp served in the Civil War.
John Movas Camp enlisted in Henderson County in October 1861 as a member of the 35th
N.C. Infantry Regiment, Company G, Henderson Rifles. He was in the same company as Alfred
Kuykendall. The 35th spent the early years of the war in North Carolina and in camp at Kinston,
where Alfred died. They fought at New Bern, Seven Pines, and at Malvern Hill where they had
significant casualties with 18 killed, 91 wounded, and 18 missing. In September, they fought at
Sharpsburg/Antietam. They were not heavily engaged, but their Captain and two others were
killed. In December 1862, they fought at Fredericksburg, Virginia and were placed at the
famous Sunken Lane behind the stone wall on Marye’s Heights late in the day. John Movas was
wounded that day and had his leg amputated. That seems to suggest he was wounded on the way
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to the wall because he was unlikely to be hit in the leg while standing behind a stone wall in a
sunken road. His unit was near the top of the hill subjected to enemy fire until they were placed
behind the wall. It is likely that he was hit while they were either waiting or while they were
moving to the wall. He died from his wounds a month later.
His brother, James Jefferson “Jim” Camp, was in the 62nd N.C. Infantry Regiment, Company
E, organized 1862 in Waynesville, Transylvania County, N.C. He enlisted July 14, 1862, and he
is listed as a resident of Transylvania County. His unit worked in the west along the North
Carolina/Tennessee border. This unit was poorly equipped and was surrendered by their
commander to the U. S. Cavalry pretty much without a fight at Cumberland Gap on September 9,
1863. He was captured at Carter’s Depot, Tennessee and held as a prisoner at Camp Douglas.
He was exchanged and deserted in 1863. A month later, he joined the Union Army as a member
of the 2nd N.C. Mounted Infantry. This unit was organized in October 1863, in Knoxville,
Tennessee, and a large number of the 62nd N.C. boys joined up. Most of this unit formerly
served in Confederate regiments prior to enlisting in the Union Army. Perhaps they were pretty
upset at the Confederate Army for being surrendered, poorly equipped, etc. Some of them likely
did it to get out of prison, but either way there must have been a real salesman who talked them
into it. The 2nd N.C. USA served in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina and did a lot of
cavalry raids around Boone and Asheville. Most of the service in East Tennessee was patrol
duty and scouting and not fighting in major battles. The unit stayed together until August 1865,
when they all mustered out.
James Jefferson “Jim” Camp’s service records show that he had been attached to the 3rd N.C.
Mounted Infantry during Stoneman’s Raid. The 3rd N.C. Mounted Infantry moved March 21April 25 into Western North Carolina, arriving in Asheville April 27-30, 1865 as part of Gen.
Stoneman’s Raid, whose goal was not to fight in battles, but to rob civilians and devastate and
destroy the communities. This unit did quite a bit of damage to the western part of North
Carolina. Was Jim Camp attached to the 3rd N.C. Mounted Infantry for this campaign because
he knew this area of North Carolina so well?
Daddy did not mention that his Uncle Jim fought for the Union too. He just said that family
seemed to think Jim Camp might have stayed in Tennessee or gone to live in Texas after the war.
Our belief that Jim Camp left North Carolina because he fought for the North is correct. In
looking into his war records, we found that he said on his pension application that he “left
because of adverse southern sentiment in his family and among his neighbors. He was obliged to
leave home shortly after being discharged and has had no communications with friends and
relatives since.” On another document he says he left after “finding confederate sentiment too
strongly adverse to federal soldiers.” His pension records show that he did stay in Tennessee
until 1884. He moved to Georgia in 1885, to Louisiana in 1886, and lived in Arizona over
twenty-two years, working in mining towns wherever he went. He died in Los Angeles,
California, August 20, 1937, and is buried there in Los Angeles National Cemetery.
He lived into his nineties, and spent his last years in Veterans Homes. When he died, there
was no one to notify. The administrators of the Veterans Home thought he had a brother, Abner
Camp, in North Carolina. They tried to send a telegram to him, but it was returned due to
incomplete address. By this time, Abner had been dead for seventeen years.
His personal effects consisted of his clothing and a box of letters he had been saving. They
were disposed of by the administrators of the Veterans Home. We’ll never know who the letters
were from, but we do know that someone kept in touch with him after he left, or family wouldn’t
have known he went out west.
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So many hearts must have been broken over this family division. Jim Camp’s brother and
brother-in-law had been killed fighting for the Confederacy, as well as many of his cousins.
Many family members who survived the war were maimed for life. The Southland lay in
devastation. Emotions were raw and there must have been harsh words said when he returned to
the family after he was discharged from the Union Army. He soon left home and went back to
Tennessee to live. He got married in 1869, in Tennessee to Mary Jane “Polly” Tarwater, but
they divorced in a couple of years and had no children. He must have lived out his life as a
lonely existence. Perhaps to many soldiers, exile from family was a fate to worse than death.
Company H, 34th North Carolina Infantry Regiment was one of our main regiments and most
of our family members from Cleveland County who fought in the war joined up when the
regiment was formed in October 1861. This regiment had an impressive war service record with
the most notable service being in the Peninsula Campaign, then fighting under General Stonewall
Jackson, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. At Chancellorsville and Gettysburg they were in the
middle of some of the worst fighting.
Granddaddy Camp’s older sister, Sallie Ann, lived in Cleveland County, and she lost her
husband, Isaac Randall, in the Civil War. He was a member of Company K, 28th N.C. Infantry
and was killed at the Battle of Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864. She married her cousin, John
Camp, whose wife, Jane Spray, had died. Uncle John, member of Company D 26th N.C.
Infantry, got shot in the left foot the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 and
walked with crutches for the rest of his life. Isaac Randall was with his unit at Gettysburg that
day too, and he would have passed within 200 yards of the wounded John Camp who was
probably still lying on the field where he fell during the second attack.
Granddaddy Camp’s Uncle Joseph Alexander Camp and his wife Lucretia had four other sons
besides Uncle John in the Civil War. Their son, Tyrell Camp, sergeant of Company H, 34th
Regiment lost his right arm at Chancellorsville. Joseph Alexander Camp Jr., lieutenant of
Company H, 34th Regiment, was wounded at Gettysburg, captured at Funkstown, Maryland, and
sent to Johnson’s Island in Ohio, where they sent the majority of the captured officers. Abner
Camp, private in Company H, 34th Regiment had permanent lameness resulting from gunshot
wounds to his right leg received at Gaines Mills, Virginia. The men had left behind farms that
needed tending and families that needed support. It was said that Abram Camp, of Company D,
26th Regiment, was killed when his gun accidentally went off while he was home from the war
because of a sick child.
John Camp and Abram Camp did not join up right away and they joined Company D, 26th
N.C. Infantry as recruits during as big recruiting drive in September 1862. They were both listed
as being from Wake County in the records as that is where the regiment formed originally. The
26th N.C. is famous for being the unit with the highest casualties in the shortest period of time in
the Civil War. At Gettysburg they were practically destroyed on the first day (out of 800 men,
86 were killed and 502 were wounded). John was wounded along with 501 others! Abram
survived somehow. On the third day, the 26th N.C. was in the first line of the attack now known
as Picket-Pettigrew charge and are known for being the Confederate unit that made it the
farthest. They started this attack with 230 men, some of the wounded on day one had returned
by then, and after the charge had just 70 men left in the regiment… 734 total casualties at
Gettysburg.
Abram was lucky that he was one of the 70. On the retreat they were the last unit out and
had a bunch of their survivors captured on the same day and place Joseph Alexander Camp, Jr.
from the 34th was captured. In later battles the 26th N.C. was hit very hard (148 more casualties
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at Bristoe Station) and their morale was very nearly broken at Petersburg about the time Abram
was home on leave. There were lots of deserters, and after all that he had been through and the
loss of so many friends, one wonders if Abram deserted and went home and family members
wondered if his accident cleaning his gun was actually an accident. Through all the suffering
and anxiety over their sons, Joseph Alexander Camp Sr.’s wife, Lucretia, died during the Civil
War.
Granddaddy Camp’s Aunt Margaret Camp and her husband, Henderson Roberts, had three
sons in the Civil War. Luther Roberts, 4th Corporal in Company H, 34th Regiment was killed in
the Battle of Gaines Mills, Virginia and Sidney Roberts, private in Company H, 34th Regiment
died in a Richmond, Virginia hospital of typhoid fever. Their third son, Perry Martin Roberts,
was wounded at Chancellorsville.
Granddaddy Camp’s Aunt Elizabeth Camp and her husband David Allen, Sr. had five sons
and two grandsons in the Civil War. Their sons Elbert Allen, Larkin Allen, Abner Allen and
Lavan Allen all served in the war and their son, Clark Allen, was killed at the Battle of Second
Manassas, Virginia. Two of Elbert Allen’s sons, Marcus Allen and William Summey Allen
served and two of Larkin Allen’s sons, John Elbert Allen and David Allen, Jr. served.
Granddaddy Camp’s Uncle Abner Camp, Jr. and his wife, Margaret had three sons in the
Civil War. William Pinkney Camp a private in Company H, 34th Regiment was killed in the
Battle of Chancellorsville; Stanford Camp enlisted in York, South Carolina and was killed at
Gaines Mills, and their third son, Nathan A. Camp, private in Company H, 34th Regiment
returned home safely. Their daughter Elizabeth Camp’s husband, Champion Allen, served as a
sergeant in the Company H 34th Regiment NC troops. Their daughter Emily Jane Camp’s
husband Marcus L. Putnam served in Company B, 49th Regiment N.C. troops.
By 1860 Granddaddy Camp’s Uncle Vardrey Camp and his wife, Mary Bennett, had both
died, so Abner Camp, Jr.’s wife, Margaret, raised their only child, William Pinkney Camp. He
was named after her own son who was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville. William Pinkney
Camp married Sarah Rippy and they moved to Rio Grande, Colorado by 1885. They died in
Colorado and are buried in New Manassa Cemetery, Manassa, Conejos, Colorado.
Granddaddy Camp’s Uncle William Camp and his wife, Frances’ son Lawson H. Camp served
in the Civil War in Company C, 55th Regiment. Records show that he was in the hospital a lot.
Granddaddy Camp’s Uncle Thomas Pinckney Camp and his wife, Emza Jane Hobbs’
daughter, Corilla, married William T. Camp who was a private in Company H, 34th Regiment
N.C. troops. He was wounded in the eye at the Battle of Second Manassas, Virginia. This battle
was also called 2nd Bull Run, for the creek that flowed between the armies. Confederates tended
to name a battle after the nearest city or town and Union commanders tended to name a battle
after the nearest river, stream or creek. Hence, many Civil War battles were known by more than
one name. Both sides referred to Gettysburg, the largest battle of the war, by the same name.
The 34th N.C. was right near the 26th N.C. on both the first and third day at Gettysburg. They
fought within 400 yards of each other both days and went through some serious action. In 34th
Company H, John A. Roberts was the Captain, Joseph Alexander Camp, Jr. was a lieutenant,
Tyrell Camp was a sergeant, Champion Allen (husband of Elizabeth Sarah Camp) was a
sergeant, and Luther Roberts was 4th Corporal. Privates included Nathan Camp, Abner Camp,
William T. Camp, William P. Camp, Sidney Roberts, and Thomas Roberts. That might be why
the ones who survived the war all seemed to be so close in the pictures we have.
A photograph of a family reunion about 1900 at Uncle John and Aunt Sallie Ann’s house on
Sulphur Springs Road, the old Sale Barn Road, shows Uncle John and his Civil War veteran
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brothers- Abner, Tyrell, and Joseph Alexander, Jr.- as well as Daddy and Granddaddy Camp
among those in the picture.
Antietam/Sharpsburg, Maryland was the war’s single bloodiest day. Nearly 23,000 men were
killed, wounded, or captured in twelve hours. Despite constant pleas from the Confederacy,
after 1863, the Federal government refused to exchange prisoners, leaving their own prisoners to
suffer in Southern prisoner war camps. When the exchange system broke down, neither side was
prepared to deal with the increased number of captives. Twelve percent of Confederate soldiers
in Union prisons died and nearly that many Union soldiers died in Confederate prisons. More
soldiers died at Andersonville, Georgia that any other Civil War prison. In Salisbury, North
Carolina 11,700 unknown soldiers who were prisoners are buried. In February 1863, nearly ten
percent of Confederate prisoners at Chicago’s Camp Douglas died. Malnutrition, disease, and
cruel treatment contributed to prison deaths. The Civil War cost nearly 600,000 soldiers lives,
and crippled several thousand others. More North Carolina men died in the war than from any
other Confederate State.
At a time when almost all nursing was done by men, many women on both sides of the
Mason-Dixon Line volunteered to care for the sick and wounded and helped develop nursing to
the skilled profession that it has become. Approximately 2,000 women in the North and South
served as volunteer nurses in military hospitals.
Many of the nurses were unprepared for the carnage of the war as they experienced firsthand
the grim realities of war, the amputated limbs, mutilated bodies, disease, and death of the
soldiers. Disease killed twice as many soldiers as bullets. Civil war nurses on both sides played
a crucial role in lowering the death rate and raising the morale of soldiers in hospitals. In
addition to treating their wounds, writing and answering letters for soldiers was an important part
of nurses’ daily routine.
First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln frequented the Union hospitals and fed, cleaned, and consoled
the wounded. Union nurse, Mary Ann Ball Bickerdyke, called “Mother” by the troops, cared for
the wounded on at least nineteen battlefields. Dorothea Dix, already well known for her reform
work in insane asylums and prisons, headed the Union Army’s nurses. Louisa May Alcott
served as a nurse at Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Virginia outside Washington, D. C.,
and nearly died when she contacted typhoid fever and the drug used to treat her weakened her
heart. She wrote her first important work Hotel Sketches about her nursing days there. Her
famous book, Little Women, was partly based on her family’s experience during the war.
Hannah Ropes, influenced by Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing, worked as Louisa May
Alcott’s supervisor at Union Hotel Hospital. She kept her own diary which was recently
published. Katherine Prescott Wormeley, head nurse at Army Hospital near Newport, Rhode
Island, also recorded her experiences. Jane Stuart Woolsey, Superintendent of Nurses at Fairfax
Seminary Hospital near Alexandria, Virginia recorded her experiences for posterity in her
memoir, Hospital Days, Reminiscence of a Civil War Nurse. Clara Barton nursed wounded
soldiers on the battlefield long before she founded the American Red Cross. At Antietam, she
brought thirty lanterns and hundreds of candles so that soldiers mortally wounded from the battle
would not die in the dark. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician and her sister,
Emily, also a physician, helped train Union nurses. By the end of the war, Mary Edwards
Walker, who had graduated from medical school, became the first American woman to become
army surgeon. Susie King Taylor was a black nurse whose husband was a black Union soldier.
She wrote Reminiscences of My Life in Camp about Civil War nursing from a black standpoint.
Harriet Tubman was the best known among the black Civil War nurses who rendered service.
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In the South, women worked just as diligently collecting supplies and nursing the sick and
wounded. As the war continued, Southern nurses faced increasing hardships and shortages of
supplies. Among the outstanding nurses was Sally Tompkins, Angel of the Confederacy, the
only woman to hold a regular commission from the Confederacy, but she never allowed her
name to be on the Confederacy payroll. Her insistence on cleanliness in the Richmond hospital
where she worked gave that hospital the lowest mortality rate of any military hospital, Union or
Confederate. Phoebe Pember, an upper-class, Southern Jewish woman, headed up one of
Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital’s five divisions. She wrote her memoirs of the war years, and
it remains one of the best sources of understanding the day to day experiences as she detailed her
duties. Another nurse and Civil War diarist, Kate Cumming’s writings are an invaluable source
of Southern nursing. Laura Ratcliffe nursed the wounded soldiers of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry. These
nurses earned their place in history and in the hearts of the Civil War soldiers.
By the spring of 1865, the Confederacy was falling apart. Richmond, Virginia, the
Confederate capital fell to the Union army. Six days later, on April 9, 1865, Confederate Gen.
Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, the first army of the Confederacy, surrendered
to the Army of the Potomac Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Appomattox
Courthouse in Virginia.
Gen. Grant took no prisoners nor required trials for treason. He allowed the Confederate
soldiers to keep their sidearms and muskets and allowed both officers and men to take their
horses and mules with them and go home after they signed that they would no longer fight. He
was compassionate and ordered rations to immediately be furnished to the 30,000 starving
soldiers and offered them safe passage home, assuring that they would not be disturbed by U. S.
authorities. And he stopped the Union soldiers from firing their artillery in celebration of their
victory.
Gen. Robert E. Lee was among tens of thousands dislocated during the war. After he
surrendered, Gen. Lee accompanied by his son “Rooney” rode to 707 East Franklin Street,
Richmond, Virginia to the rented three-story brick row house which had been residence for his
wife and daughters during the war. He did not return to Arlington House, the Curtis-Lee
Mansion where he and his wife had lived for thirty years before the war. The Greek revival style
mansion sat on a hillside rising above the Potomac River overlooking Washington, D. C. It was
owned and constructed by George Washington’s adopted grandson, George Washington Parke
Curtis, son of John Parke Curtis, who was a child of Martha Washington by her first marriage.
George Washington Parke Curtis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh and they were both buried on the
property. Their daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Curtis married Robert E. Lee, her childhood
friend and distant cousin. Her father’s will stipulated that she could inhabit and control the
house for her lifetime, then full title would pass to the Lee’s eldest son, George Washington
Curtis Lee.
After Virginia seceded and Gen. Robert E. Lee was named a major general of Virginia’s
military forces, he feared for his wife’s safety and asked her to move out of the house.
Federal troops crossed the Potomac River and took up residency around Arlington House
within a month after the war began at Fort Sumter. The property was confiscated by the federal
government when Mrs. Lee did not show up in person to pay the property taxes. Timely payment
from her agent had been refused by the government. The property was offered for public sale on
January 11, 1864 and was purchased by a tax commissioner for government use. Brig. Gen.
Montgomery C. Meigs, who commanded the garrison at Arlington House, was intent on
rendering the house uninhabitable should the Lee family ever attempt to return. Brig. Gen.
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Meigs, from Georgia, had served under Robert E. Lee in the U. S. Army and he hated his fellow
Southerners for seceding from the Union. He appropriated the grounds June 15, 1864 as
Arlington National Cemetery for military veterans and ordered that graves be placed just outside
the front door of the mansion.
Neither Robert E. Lee nor his wife ever returned to live in the home again, but after Gen.
Lee’s death, their son filed a suit claiming that the land was illegally confiscated and that he was
the rightful owner. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor in a 5-4 decision in December
1882 and returned the property to him. On March 3, 1883, Congress purchased the property
from him. Some seventy years later, Congress designated the mansion as a memorial to Robert
E. Lee.
On April 26, 1865 Gen. Joseph Johnston surrendered the Confederate forces in his command
to Gen. Sherman at Greensboro, N. C and the War Between the States was over. On May 10,
1965, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was arrested near Irwinville, Georgia and
imprisoned at Fortress Monroe marking the end of the Southern Confederacy. He was released
in 1867, and though he was happy to be free, he was disappointed that he never got his day in
court, for he was certain he could prove that the Southern states had a Constitutional right to
secede from the Union.
Though the people of the South were destitute and disheartened, defeat in the war did not
crush their spirits. They loved their land and the persecution only served to strengthen their
patriotism. It was the Civil War, or as it was called in the South-- the War of Northern
Aggression and the War for Southern Independence-- that spawned the term “Southern”. Before
the Civil War, people would have said they were citizens of whatever state in which they resided.
After the war, they were proud to say they were “sons and daughters of the South.”
The proud and genteel people who inhabited the land were determined to reestablish their old
independent Southern way of life. The song, “Dixie” was written in the decade before the war, a
lament of a life missed by a freed slave. This was the first that the Southland was called “Dixie”.
It became their mantra. “I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten, look
away, look away, look away Dixie land” was on the lips of many Confederate soldiers far from
home and “way down South in Dixie” is in the hearts of their descendants still.
RECONSTRUCTION
During the final months of the war, President Lincoln was developing a plan for
reconstruction of the South and the readmission of the defeated Southern states to the Union. In
his second inaugural address a month before Appomattox, Lincoln spoke of a peaceful
reconciliation but acknowledged that to rid the sin of slavery, history might yet require that
“every drop of blood drawn from the lash, shall be paid by another drawn from the sword.”
If he knew in the final months of the war that the South was defeated and he was receptive to
a peaceful reconciliation, one wonders why he unleashed Gen. Sherman, Gen. Sheridan and Gen.
Stoneman to leave the South in further devastation with their brutal, unnecessary pillaging of six
Confederate states when the Civil War was already decided. Gen. Stoneman’s raid across North
Carolina left such bitterness that when the first historical markers commemorating the raid were
installed over seventy years afterward, citizens tore them down and threw them in a river.
Whatever Lincoln’s hopes of restoring the South to an honored position in the Union, they
were shattered on the night of April 14- Good Friday- just five days after Gen. Lee’s surrender.
John Wilkes Booth, a well-known but deranged actor, shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in
Washington, D. C. while Lincoln was attending a stage performance of “Our American Cousin”
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with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, Major Henry R. Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris.
Lincoln died the next morning without regaining consciousness.
Booth, a Confederate spy from Maryland, thought his action would avenge the South and
rally the remaining Confederate troops to continue fighting. John Wilkes Booth was part of a
larger conspiracy that included fellow conspirators plotting to also kill Secretary of State
William H. Seward, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
In the turmoil following the assassination, many suspected accomplices were arrested and
thrown into prison. The suspects were narrowed down to seven men and one woman: Samuel
Arnold, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Samuel Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, Lewis Powell,
Edmund Spangler, and Mary Surratt. They were tired in a military tribunal and the verdict was
given on June 30. All of the defendants were found guilty. Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David
Herold, and George Atzerodt were sentenced to death and executed by hanging in the Old
Arsenal Penitentiary on July 7, 1865.
Mary Surratt was the first woman hanged by the U. S. government. After sentencing, five of
the jurors signed a letter recommending clemency for Mary Surratt, but President Johnson
refused to stop the execution. He later claimed he never saw the letter. Samuel Mudd, Samuel
Arnold, and Michael O’Laughlen were sentenced to life in prison. Edmund Spangler was
sentenced to imprisonment for six years. O’Laughlen died in prison of yellow fever in 1867.
Mudd, Arnold, and Spangler were pardoned in February 1869 by President Johnson.
Three days prior to his assassination, Abraham Lincoln related to his wife and a few friends a
dream he had a week before. He had dreamed that he heard people grieving and saw a corpse
surrounded by soldiers. When he asked one of the soldiers, who is dead in the White House, the
soldier responded that it was the President who had been killed by an assassin. He said when he
woke up, he slept no more that night and although it was only a dream, he had been strangely
annoyed by it ever since.
Abraham Lincoln was the first American President to be assassinated, though an attempt had
been made in 1835 to assassinate Andrew Jackson.
The new President, Andrew Johnson had the task of restoring the Union and reconstructing
the South. Andrew Johnson was a Southerner. He was born and grew up in Raleigh, North
Carolina, was a former U. S. Democratic Senator in Congress from Tennessee, as well as twice
Governor of the state of Tennessee. Johnson had remained loyal to the Union.
The war saved the Union and ended slavery, but peace still had to be restored between the
Northern and Southern states, between the freed slaves and former slave masters and the between
the defeated Confederate soldiers and their victorious Northern counterparts. It was estimated
that the United States spent $6,190,000,000 on the war. The first federal income tax was levied
in 1862 to help finance it.
President Johnson tried to follow President Lincoln’s program of postwar moderation toward
the defeated South. While Congress was in recess, he issued a proclamation by which all but the
former leaders of the Confederacy received amnesty and pardon, and restoration of all rights to
their property except slaves. He issued a proclamation appointing provisional governors to
construct governments in the Confederate states. The new governments were to elect governors,
state legislators, and national congressmen.
When Congress convened and the newly elected representatives from the Southern states
gathered in Washington, D. C., the restored states had named as their representatives to
Congress, four Confederate generals, and many colonels and ex-members of the Confederate
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Congress. Georgia had even elected the former Confederate Vice President, Alexander
Stephens, to the Senate.
Congress refused to seat the new representatives. They had expected an emotional
repudiation of the Confederacy and the election of former Confederate leaders to represent the
states in Congress made them feel that the South had never really surrendered.
The President was determined to have the Southern representatives admitted and Congress
was determined to bar the Southerners and eliminated their names from the House roll. Then
Congress appointed a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which consisted of six senators and
nine representatives, to deal with the admission of Southern members and decisions on
reconstruction. To avoid a presidential veto, they prepared a concurrent rather than a joint
resolution, one that did not require President Johnson’s approval. The Joint Committee on
Reconstruction adopted a resolution forbidding the admission of any senator or representative
from the eleven Southern states until Congress declared the states entitled to such representation.
So Reconstruction was in the hands of Congress. They overrode the Civil Rights Bill that
was vetoed by President Johnson. They aimed at ending the Southern political power by
disfranchising as many Confederates as possible. Those who supported the Confederacy were
denied eligibility for federal office.
Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 placing ten Southern states governments,
including North Carolina’s, under military control of the United States Army. There was little
or no fighting but there was a state of martial law and the military supervised the local
governments.
Gen. John McA. Schofield had taken command of North Carolina about the middle of May,
1865, shortly after Gen. Lee surrendered at Appomattox and Federal troops came to Shelby.
About 150 Union soldiers of the 28th Michigan took possession of the courthouse uptown. They
slept and cooked in the courthouse and burned court documents. They tried to control elections
and appoint county officers. They stayed in Shelby until the middle of August 1865. Congress
dictated the terms under which the Confederate States could rejoin the Union. North Carolina
was restored to the Union on July 4, 1868.
Congress tried to reduce President Johnson’s presidential powers. Then they sought to
remove him from office by impeachment. His real crime was that he opposed the Radical
Republicans. In 1868, he was impeached by the House, but was acquitted by the Senate by one
vote. Though their efforts failed, Congress intimidated his successors.
Union General Ulysses S. Grant, another Republican, was elected President is 1868 and
served two terms. During his administration men of wealth and power sought to control
government by influence. His years in the White House were plagued with government
corruption.
The overwhelmingly Republican Congress made decisions that further embittered the South.
They passed two more amendments to the Constitution promising equal treatment under the law
to the newly freed slaves and granting them the right to vote.
The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, guaranteed that all persons born or naturalized
in the United States were citizens of the United States and of the state in which they lived. No
state could limit the rights of these citizens.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, said that a citizen of the United States could not
be prevented from voting because of his race, color, or previous servitude.
At the beginning of the Reconstruction, military commanders in the South had divided their
territories into voter registration districts and appointed three-man voter registration boards.
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Most of the board members were Freedmen or Federal soldiers. No person was permitted to
register to vote who had participated in any rebellion or civil war against the United States.
Under this provision at least 150,000 leading whites could not vote. In South Carolina, Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana registered Negroes outnumbered registered whites. There
were two Negros elected to the Senate in Mississippi and fourteen Negroes elected to the House
of Representatives. In South Carolina, Negros made up the majority of the House of
Representatives. South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana had Negro lieutenant governors.
But Negroes did not play a dominant role in most Reconstruction governments. Despite the
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15 Amendment stating that a U.S. citizen could not be prevented from voting because of his
race, color, or previous servitude, most Southern states found a way of evading the 15th
Amendment by using literacy tests and poll tax to keep blacks from voting. And though the 14th
Amendment guaranteed Negroes full citizenship, Supreme Court decisions denied Congress the
power to pass laws protecting the civil rights of blacks, and upheld the states passing Jim Crow
laws segregating blacks. Bigotry and discriminatory laws barred blacks from Southern politics.
During Reconstruction many Northerners migrated south. Some were clergymen, others were
educators or folks just simply attracted to the warmer climate, but quite a few were shabby
adventurers who arrived in the South in search of financial gain with a desire to enrich
themselves and take over the reins of government. The Confederate supporters referred to them
as “Carpetbaggers” because of the carpetbags in which they carried their belongings.
Many Southern whites supported Unionism and considered the Confederate supporters to be
radicals. The Confederate supporters felt that the Southern white Reconstruction supporters
were Confederate deserters and they called the Union supporters “Scalawags.” The Southern
white Scalawags risked the wrath of their neighbors to profit from cooperating with Congress.
Congress supported governments run by Southern white Scalawags, Freedmen, and Northern
Carpetbag Republicans. The officers of these governments were often corrupt, unfair, and
incompetent. This made it impossible for some white people to get justice in the courts, so they
turned to a lawless force of justice, notably the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan targeted Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and Republicans as well as blacks. One major
purpose of the organization was to counteract Negro uprisings. Some emancipated slaves had
pillaged the homes of former white masters and committed crimes on women and children who
had lost their husbands and fathers in the Civil War. During the Reconstruction Period terror
reigned.
Initially the KKK was the white South’s reaction to the Loyal Leagues which were
associations formed during the Civil War to inspire loyalty to the Union and promote the
Republican cause. During Reconstruction, Loyal Leagues were formed across the South to
promote the Republican cause among free blacks. The Clubs were working auxiliaries of the
Republican Party and supported the Republican Party with funding, organizational support as
well as political activism. They mobilized freemen to vote and vote Republican. Some sources
say that virtually every black voter in the South enrolled.
As the KKK grew so did the violence of its methods. KKK members became the “Invisible
Empire of the South” wearing hoods and robes to conceal their identity. They rode through town
intimidating people with their late night visits. Cleveland County had 800 members in the KKK.
Many of the best civic leaders joined the KKK for a while, until the organization got beyond
control of its leaders as members sought revenge for personal grudges and grievances. The
Federal government sent officers in to prosecute, and many white men fled to the west. The
Klan’s efforts in Rutherford and Cleveland Counties were enough to use military force. North
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Carolina Gov. William Holden, a Republican, sent Col. George Washington Kirk, a former
Union leader who had a reputation for guerrilla tactics, to North Carolina with troops, and a
small group of them came to Shelby to keep an eye on the Klan.
Much that went on in the South during the Reconstruction was corrupt. South Carolina,
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were the most blatantly corrupt, but it was merely a matter
of degrees. Remnants of white militia in Louisiana formed the White League, a Democratic
paramilitary group. In Mississippi, the Red Shirts formed a paramilitary group. Chapters of Red
Shirts were active in North Carolina and South Carolina as well. They worked openly for
specific political ends and enforced Democratic voting by intimidation, violence, fraud, and
murder. They intimidated voters at the polls or kept them away altogether. They disrupted
Republican meetings, killed leaders, and officeholders.
The motives behind Congress’ treatment of the South during the Reconstruction were a
complex mix that included concern for the welfare of the freed slaves, distaste for the rebellious
faction, and the desire to ensure the spread of the Republican Party throughout the South.
Instead, despite the progress of the Reconstruction governments, Congress only succeeded in
adding to the bitterness of the Southern whites, resulting in almost a century of solid support for
the Democratic Party.
After the Presidential election of 1876, electoral votes from three Southern States were
disputed and the election hung in the balance. The Republican powers made a backroom deal
that gave former Union soldier Rutherford B. Hayes a narrow margin for claim to the White
House and in exchange they agreed to withdraw Federal troops.
With the disappearance of the blue uniformed troops from the South, Reconstruction came to
an end, and Carpetbaggers headed back North to find jobs there. In the South there was a
movement to return control of the South to Southerners. Many Southerners resented the
governing of Southern states by outsiders operating under the Reconstruction Acts. They wanted
to oust the Republican coalition of Freedmen, Carpetbaggers and Scalawags.
Democrats began to have more political power as former Confederates began to vote again.
Conservative whites who were landowners, merchants, and members of the old Southern
plantation owner aristocracy, and newly rising middle and upper-middle class industrial
capitalists took over the Southern governments.
Called “Bourbons” by their critics, the term was used in the 1860s to refer to conservative
Democrats both North and South, but in the 1870s to refer to the regimes set up in the South by
“Redeemers” as a conservative reaction against Reconstruction. Bourbon Democrats were the
dominant Democratic faction during the three decades following the Civil War. Their goal was
to reduce the extravagant spending and return honesty to the government. The Bourbon
governors abolished offices, reduced salaries, and cut all government services including the
education program. They were the pro-business wing of the Democratic Party.
The “Redeemers” were the southern wing of the Bourbon Democrats. The Redeemers
wanted to redeem the South and they appealed to the Scalawags who had voted Republican. The
Redeemers' program emphasized opposition to the Republican governments, which they
considered to be corrupt and a violation of true republican principles. They also worked to
reestablish white supremacy. The crippling national economic problems and reliance on cotton
meant that the South was struggling financially. Redeemers denounced taxes higher than what
they had known before the war. At that time, however, the states had few functions, and planters
maintained private institutions only. Redeemers wanted to reduce state debts. Once in power,
they typically cut government spending; shortened legislative sessions; lowered politicians'
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salaries; scaled back public aid to railroads and corporations; and reduced support for the new
systems of public education and some welfare institutions.
They found that it was easier to get a handle on the economy than to curb the dishonesty.
There were flagrant examples of powerful political figures absconding with public funds during
the post-Reconstruction period.
As Democrats took over state legislatures, they changed the voter registration rules to strip
most blacks and many poor whites of their ability to vote.
Blacks continued to vote in
significant numbers well into the 1880s, and many won local elections. Black Congressmen
continued to be elected, but in smaller numbers, until the 1890s. From 1890 to 1908, beginning
with Mississippi, legislatures of ten of the eleven states in the former Confederate South passed
constitutions which had new provisions for poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements
that disfranchised nearly all blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. Hundreds of thousands
of people were removed from voter registration rolls when the new provisions were
implemented. African Americans and poor whites were totally shut out of the political process
and left unable to vote for representation. They were shut out of all offices at the local and state
level, as well as Federal level. Those who could not vote could not run for office or serve on
juries, so they were never judged by peers.
The Bourbons accepted Negroes as part of the terrain and felt that they could manipulate the
Freedman vote. They used coercion and cash to win enough black votes to control the
Democratic Party conventions, and thus state governments.
The Redeemers were determined to uphold white supremacy. By 1900, Southern Redeemers
had all but wiped away the civil and political rights won by Negroes shortly after the war.
A group that did not accept the Negroes was the “Rednecks,” the poor whites who were called
that because of their sunburned necks from plowing the fields. The same group was also often
called the “wool hat boys”, for they opposed the rich, who wore silk hats. They eventually even
got to the point of wearing red neckerchiefs to political rallies and picnics to identify themselves
proudly and rallied at the polls during elections. Negroes were either barred from the polls or
intimidated into voting for the party of white supremacy.
The Rednecks viewed the Negroes as economic rivals and were resentful of the Bourbons,
and mistrustful of their cozy connections to the railroad oligarchy. The Bourbons failed to
perceive the needs and meet the demands of the farmers and the poor whites. The Bourbon and
Rednecks quarreled over government decisions. The Negroes, who were perceived to hold the
balance of power between the two groups, were eliminated from political life. In the North, the
fate of the Negroes was increasing a matter of indifference as the Republican Party gained
strength in the Northwest.
Neither the Democrat nor the Republican Party tried to represent the interests of the majority
of the people, who were poor farmers and laborers who owned no property. And neither party
wanted to spend government money to benefit them. Both parties bought political support by
handing out desirable government jobs to party workers and bought votes by dishing out various
favors to voters. They financed the political parties by kickbacks from government employees
who owed their jobs to the political party, by stealing government money, being a handmaid to
big business, and collecting bribes from various interest groups. They supported whoever was
able to bribe them, but ultimately they were only working for themselves.
In the years after the Reconstruction, most blacks and former abolitionists felt that
Reconstruction lost the struggle for civil rights for blacks because of violence against blacks and
against white Republicans. The freedmen had been manipulated by corrupt white Carpetbaggers
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interested only in raiding the state treasury and staying in power. By the turn of the century,
white historians saw Reconstruction as a failure because of its political and financial corruption,
its failure to heal the hatreds of the war, and its control by self-serving Northern politicians, such
as the people around President Grant. The Northern Radicals were tools of the railroads, and the
Republicans in the South were manipulated to do their bidding. The Redeemers, furthermore,
were also tools of the railroads and were themselves corrupt.
While acknowledging the corruption of the Reconstruction, the worst violation was denying
African Americans their civil rights including their right to vote. When the Federal troops were
removed from the South, blacks were treated worse between 1880 to1900 than they had been
between 1840 to1860. In a second wave of violence following the suppression of the Ku Klux
Klan, violence began to increase in the Deep South. At the end of Reconstruction, Negroes
were admitted to theaters, parks, and other public places in the South. There was no restriction
on most Southern passenger railroads. Segregation existed primarily in schools, churches, and
social life. But with the prolonged and brutal political battles between the Bourbons and
Rednecks, public barriers went up between the races. In the 1890’s, with the passing of Jim
Crow laws, a pattern of segregation in public facilities and places, down to separate drinkingfountains emerged and even rigging state constitutions to deny the Negro the right to vote, while
keeping within the Federal law. Various Supreme Court rulings especially that of “separate but
equal” facilities being admissible under the Constitution, aided in the segregation process. The
wounds of the war healed slowly. The Civil War, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction left
behind bitterness, resentment, and repercussions that lasted well into the 20th century and to
some extent even to this day.
In 1890 one piece of legislation, Lodge’s Force Bill, failed to become law. It would have
provided federal control of elections to guarantee Southern Negroes the right to vote. The bill
passed by the House but died in the Senate. It was a landmark of sorts, because Republicans
controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time in fourteen years with
the election of President Benjamin Harrison in 1888. The failure of the bill to pass demonstrated
that the Republican Party was ready to forego the 14th and 15th Amendments and abandon the
Negro to his segregated fate. (Old Bourbons allied with new industrialists.) Bourbons turned to
bribable Negro vote to save themselves from the white majority. The Republican Party seemed
to represent everything that was hateful to the whites and the Democratic Party to represent
everything hateful to the blacks.
The Civil War gave the South an economic and social backset that lasted for half a century.
The hardship and deprivation the people had to undergo following the war was devastating. The
value of wasted farms and burned-out cities was incalculable. Slave ownership was the greatest
wealth of the Southern plantation owners, and the slaves were set free. Many of the men who
went to war never came back. They were buried in unmarked graves near the sites of the battles
where they fell. Many of the soldiers who did return from the war were maimed. Confederate
currency became worthless and people had little to sell to get U. S. currency, so bartering for
goods and services became a common practice and continued until the end of the century.
After the war, the South had to commercialize and began supplying itself with many things.
The South had great deposits of coal, iron, and copper that attracted metal industry. Phosphate
dug from the ground in Charleston, South Carolina increased cotton yielding five times.
Southern mills were built to weave the cotton into cloth and yarn. Birmingham, Alabama,
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became the second biggest iron producing region in the country. Cigarette manufacturing
became a major industry and began in Durham, North Carolina, in the 1870’s.
In the years immediately following the Civil War, Cleveland County had very much the same
rural economy as in the antebellum period before the war. The industries in Cleveland County
were businesses that supported community life-- saw mills, flour and gristmills, iron works,
blacksmiths, gunsmiths, tanneries, wagon and buggy factories, grocers, butchers, druggists, and
tailors. The town had four attorneys, six doctors, a shoemaker, a planning mill, a harness maker,
and two cabinetmakers.
People became silversmiths and cotton brokers, formed iron works, and developed clay pits
for brick. The county’s economy was dependent on the farmers’ crops of cotton, wheat, oats,
rye, sorghum cane, vegetables, and tobacco. In the 1880’s there were factories in Cleveland
County that made plug and pipe tobacco, and hand-rolled cigars. In 1872, Carolina Sewing
Machine Company was established in Shelby to manufacture sewing machines. There was a 15acre vineyard on South DeKalb Street with a two-story building where wine was made and aged.
Before the turn of the century uptown bars sold liquor without restraint, and they had legalized
lotteries. But in 1908, North Carolina passed a statewide prohibition outlawing the sale of
alcohol that remained in effect until 1935.
During Reconstruction, the Camps, as well as many other Southern families, endured
dispossession and poverty. Reconstruction broke up the large farms into smaller rented farms.
In exchange for the land, seeds, tools, and supplies, the land owner got a large share, (usually
two-thirds) of the crop that was raised by the tenant farmer. This system, called share-cropping,
spread throughout the South and lasted for almost a hundred years.
Since the land owner had to advance the farmer everything he needed, including a house built
out of wood, he often had to borrow the necessary capital from the banks. Heavy mortgages
were dependent on the crops, so usually the bank insisted on a single crop that could be
liquidated as security for the loan. For a long time banks and real estate companies were the
only ones who profited from share-cropping. In 1870, the South produced only about half of its
prewar quantities of cotton, livestock, sugar, rice, and tobacco.
After the war, four million slaves were freed with nowhere to go. They wandered across the
desolate landscape, sometimes looking for relatives and more often moving around because they
were free to move. Some of the freed slaves became tenant farmers or share-croppers on the
farms, and the more venturesome families moved to the plains of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and
Oklahoma where they became farmers, prospectors, peace officers, and cavalrymen, or rode
cattle trails and pony express routes. Many of them moved up North for better job opportunities.
As they struggled to find work, it was a mixed bag of emotions for some of the Freedmen who
relocated. They missed the Southland even if they didn’t miss their circumstances. This
sentiment was voiced in the song “Carry Me Back To Old Virginny” written in 1878 by James
A. Bland, the first major black popular song composer who wrote over seven hundred folk songs.
Textile mills started as a way to supplement the income made from farming. Mills sprung up
all over the South to weave the cotton into cloth and yarn. In addition to Shelby, Kings
Mountain, Grover, and Lawndale, other towns within Cleveland County, grew up around textile
mills.
The first textile mill in the county was built in 1871 at Double Shoals. Later in the same year
Cleveland Mills was built in Lawndale. Belmont Cotton Mills was built in 1887, Mauney Mills
in 1888, Laurel Mills in 1889, Shelby Cotton Mills in 1899, Lily Mills in 1905, Ella Mill in
1907, Neisler Mills in 1910, Dover Mill in 1921, Ora Mill and Cleveland Cloth Mill in 1925.
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AMERICA BECOMES A POWER
At the end of the Civil War the nation was emotionally exhausted, but except for the ruined
South, its economic health was excellent. By the time of the Civil War, more than half of the U.
S. population was farmers and about half of all Americans lived west of the Appalachians.
Wartime prosperity continued in the North and the West. Successful cattle kingdoms sprung up
in the Southwest. Endless grain fields in Kansas and Nebraska harvested increasing crops of
grain. Before long, plant breeder Luther Burbank and scientist George Washington Carver
changed the course of American agriculture. Luther Burbank developed more than 800 new
plant varieties including new types of berries, plums, prunes, peaches, apples, citrus fruits, and
ornamental plants. While Burbank developed new plants, George Washington Carver
concentrated on finding new uses for existing plants. He produced 60 synthetic products from
pecans, 100 from sweet potatoes, and found more than 300 uses for peanuts. He propagated the
soybean which became a major crop.
Industry had flourished due to war production. While the Southern farmers’ machinery was
wearing out with no hope of replacement, Northern workers were putting new inventions to
work. As the Union reunited, America was changing. In the three and a half decades between
the war’s end and the end of the century, America was transformed from a rural agricultural
nation into an urban industrial country. New opportunities were opened and people were drawn
to the cities to achieve success in factories, money markets, and politics.
Thirty-seven other nations exhibited at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia. The attendants
marveled at the industrial progress of the United States. Packing houses were replacing
slaughter pens, furniture factories were replacing cabinet makers, and clothing manufacturers
were replacing tailors. By the 1880’s, less than half of America’s work force was engaged in
farming.
In the decades following the Civil War, there was the most massive immigration tide in
history. The allure was the expansion of the railroads, the rush of industrialization and especially
the Homestead Act of 1862 which offered for a small filing fee, any man who was willing to
become a citizen and live on the land for five years, could have 160 acres of public land. Agents
for the railroads, shipping and industry traveling abroad also contributed to the millions of
immigrants from all over the globe who spoke scores of languages who came to America.
Late 19th century was the birth of modern America. The progressive history of the United
States between 1865 and 1890 is the history of transportation. In the early years of the Nation,
rivers, inlets, and bays provided the easiest and safest means of transportation. Produce was
floated downriver to market on flatboats and rafts. Canoes, sloops, ketches, and bateaux carried
people to their destinations. But it was slow to paddle or sail upstream or against the wind. In
1807, Robert Fulton was the first to successfully produce a steamboat. Scoffers called it
“Fulton’s Folly” but it revolutionized travel on the river.
The Erie Canal opened in 1825, an astonishing achievement at the time, made possible by
Irish immigrants, engineers, and lumberjacks. Cities within the parameter of the Erie Canal
flourished. Through the canal, millions of tons of cargo and hundreds of thousands of
immigrants moved inland and grain and produce was transported back to the east coast. Success
of the Erie encouraged investors to finance new canals. From 1830-1840, 3,300 miles of new
canal were built. From 1840-1850 another 3,600 miles were added.
Even before the Civil War steamboats had navigated more than forty tributaries of the
Mississippi River and made possible the opening to vast new territories to be settled. Traffic on
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the rivers included side-wheeler passenger steamboats, stern-wheelers that were used to push
barges, and man-powered flatboats and keelboats for shallower waters. The boats carried people
and an assortment of goods. At the height of the steamboat era, America’s inland waters carried
more tonnage of goods that the entire British merchant marine. The steamboats had a reputation
of carrying gamblers who were cardsharps, some who were unscrupulous, but many who made a
good living from their skill. Riverboats, with their many decks, were a lovely sight to behold.
They flourished and they had spectacular races on the Mississippi River. The most celebrated
one was when the Robert E. Lee beat the Natchez VI, the then current speed record holder going
from St. Louis, Missouri to New Orleans.
The canals brought expansion and prosperity to the Nation but their traffic started to dwindle
with the beginning of the railroads. The process of producing steel on an enormous scale made a
network of railways possible. The First Transcontinental Railroad connecting the Atlantic to the
Pacific coasts by rail for the first time opened for traffic on May 10, 1869.
Massive numbers of Irish and Chinese immigrants lived in shacks along the lines and built the
railroads. They blasted out tunnels, shoveled, drilled, and blasted the earth across impossible
terrain to prepare for the railroads. Often it was a very dangerous job. In the Central Pacific
route there were 500 miles that had an elevation of over 5,000 feet and 200 miles over 6,500 feet.
After the roadbed for the railway had been scraped and leveled, one gang of workers distributed
the railroad ties and another distributed the rails. A team of eight men laid each rail in place.
They were followed by a gang of drivers and bolters. Ten spikes held each rail and it required
three sledgehammer strikes to drive each spike. There were four hundred rails laid to a mile.
Workers sang “She’ll Be Coming ’Round The Mountain” and “I Been Working On The
Railroad” and songs of legendary railroad heroes “Casey Jones” and “John Henry.”
The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific finally met at barren Promontory Summit, about
forty miles northwest of Ogden, Utah on May 9, 1869. They spiked the rail to the last tie on
May 10th and the last five ceremonial spikes were driven in by dignitaries from several Western
states. The last golden spike was placed in the laurel tie.
The transcontinental railroad established a transportation network that revolutionized the
population and the economy of the American West. America’s western expansion followed the
growth of the railroads. Large cities grew around them. Between 1865 and 1890, Americans
settled 430 million acres in the west.
The late 19th century was a period that started our modern industrial economy. American
industry developed in amazing fashion. In 1890, no one would have guessed that in another
thirty to forty years American industry would outdo all of the European nations combined. But
America had every advantage. She had vast coal deposits, iron and petroleum and many other
metals, and immense resources of water power. She also had talented citizens and business
leaders who were ambitious and tenacious and willing to take risks when they were playing for
huge stakes. Within a few decades, America was dotted with factories, and she offered industry
a vast market without trade barriers.
In the years between the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century the U. S. Patent
Office granted more than one-half million patents. It was a golden time for American
inventiveness. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, George Eastman developed the
first camera, Andrew Carnegie created uses for steel, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first
airplane, and the sewing machine and typewriter were invented as well as improvements in
dynamos and motors. Cyrus Field laid down the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
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Fortunes were made in each developing industrial field and vast financial baronies were
carved from steel, oil, mining, railroads, and a host of other industries. The nation grew and
prospered as never before, but the fortunes of a few were often made by exploiting the poor.
Inequality, poverty, and degradation were a high price to pay for economic growth. Many
ruthless and acquisitive men were applauded simply because they had become wealthy and
powerful. Some of the wealthy and powerful were supporters of the theory of Darwinism, the
survival of the fittest.
During President Grover Cleveland and President Benjamin Harrison’s years in office,
leaders in industry with sudden fortunes were increasingly achieving power. And by the end of
the century, two dozen men who had became millionaires in banking, railroads, silver and gold
mines, oil and utilities had seats in Congress where they represented the powerful in business.
Monopolistic trusts drove small businesses into bankruptcy. Farmers were driven to desperation
by exorbitant railroad charges, soaring tariffs, and high interest rates. Workers, including some
two-and-a-half million children, were often forbidden to organize unions and were forced to
work long hours for little pay under hazardous conditions. Unrestrained by income taxes, the
rich grew richer. Nearly 7/8ths of America’s wealth was owned by one percent of its families.
The way of life of the new rich was lavish extravagance and was viewed with indignation at a
time when factory workers earned five hundred dollars a year in primitive working conditions
where industrial accidents were common.
New York City was the commercial and financial center of the United States. Tall metalframed buildings five to twenty five stories high, called skyscrapers, sprung up and two of the
most celebrated monuments and landmarks, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, were
erected during that period. German-American John Roebling’s sixteen hundred foot long
Brooklyn Bridge suspended over the East River to Brooklyn. Finished in 1883, it took thirteen
years to build and was half again as long as any bridge that had been built.
Frederic Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty called “Liberty Enlightening the World”
dominated New York’s harbor. The Statue of Liberty was a 151 feet tall goddess and her
pedestal raised her 100 feet taller to make her 251 feet above the water. The statue was a gift
from the government of France to the United States on July 4, 1884, a decade after the
centennial, to honor the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and to represent
friendship and liberty under a free form of government. Thousands of Frenchmen had
contributed to the expense of the gift and citizens of America paid for the pedestal. It was placed
in the harbor to stand as a beacon, a gateway to the New World, and is almost as revered as the
Stars and Stripes.
New York City became a magnet to which the new rich were drawn and it became the social
center and the most opulent city. The wealthy residents built mansions on Fifth Avenue and
threw fancy balls, each trying to outdo the other. Gothic palaces were also built in Chicago, San
Francisco and Boston. Newport, Rhode Island was transformed into lavish estates called
“cottages” on the seashore. Cornelius Vanderbilt built “Biltmore”, the most palatial mansionchateau country house, the largest private residence, ever built in America near Asheville, North
Carolina. The very rich traveled the world in search of treasures to fill their grand domiciles and
wealthy American heiresses married titled Europeans. Famous portrait artist, John Singer
Sargent, captured them on canvas and Richard Morris Hunt became the most sought-after
architect designing their lavish homes. Edith Wharton, interior designer, gardener, and taste
maker of her time influenced their selections with her several books on interior design, including
The Decoration of Houses published in 1897 and Italian Villas and Their Gardens in 1904.
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Landscaping the grounds was just as important as decorating the homes. Frederick Law
Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York and over forty other public parks and a
number of college campuses, landscaped many private estates. Scores of gardeners were
employed on the estates and sometimes the residents had them work all night removing flowers
and planting a new color scheme to surprise and impress their visitors the next morning.
Mark Twain referred to the era as the “Gilded Age” for it glittered on the surface. But it was
also a period of greed and corruption with the Robber Barons, shady business practices, scandal
plagued politics, and vulgar displays of wealth. Determined reformers persuaded Congress to
pass the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 that provided for Federal regulation of
railroad rates and to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.
However, many of the very wealthy were civic-minded. Andrew Carnegie remarked that it
was the duty of rich men to get rid of their surplus revenues in such ways as to benefit the
community and encouraged other wealthy families to do the same. Other millionaires such as
John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford agreed to this and indulged in massive philanthropy. Thus,
we have the Carnegie Library, Rockefeller Center, the Ford Foundation and other endowments
that have enriched the lives of generations of people of all walks of life.
A uniquely American literature style emerged in the first decades of the century. Washington
Irving’s The Sketch Book containing his famous stories of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow appeared in the press beginning in 1819. James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales of America’s first hero, the frontiersman, included The Last of the
Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer appeared between 1823 and 1841. William
Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis appeared in The North American Review in 1817.
American literature was not prolific during the last half of the nineteenth century, but many
authors penned works on American themes that have become classics. Samuel Longhorne
Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, was the best known of the prose writers of the period. He had
helped form a Confederate Militia unit in Missouri at the beginning of the Civil War, but the
company disbanded and he headed out west to Nevada to mine silver. Soon he began to write
stories based on his early life. His most famous works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
the sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The summer voyage of the boy Huck Finn and
Negro Jim down the Mississippi River on a raft exemplified the American life in that era.
During this period, poet Walt Whitman glorified America and the ordinary man. He spent his
entire life writing and revising Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry. Poets Emily Dickinson
and Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote from the heart with intense honesty and feeling. Ralph
Waldo Emerson, philosopher and poet, lectured, wrote essays and led the Transcendentalism
movement, a view that man has to remove himself from the busy routine of life and get away in a
quiet place by himself to hear his inner spirit. He is best known for Self-Reliance and The Over
Soul. Another Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, wrote poetry, journals, books, essays,
and twenty volumes of articles. Thoreau’s most famous writings are from his self-imposed two
year period of recluse in the woods at Walden Pond and his views on Civil Disobedience,
reflecting his mistrust of government, his disapproval of slavery and American imperialism.
Herman Melville wrote his masterpiece, Moby Dick, a battle of the war between good and evil as
Captain Ahab passionately pursues the white whale who took off his leg. Nathaniel Hawthorne,
the father of the American psychological novel, wrote The Scarlet Letter, about the hypocrisy of
the Puritan society of New England and The House of the Seven Gables, about the guilt,
retaliation and atonement of the sins of Salem witchcraft. Edgar Allan Poe wrote his detective
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tales The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter and won international acclaim
with the publication of The Raven and Other Poems.
The rise of large national magazines gave authors a market to sell their work. The Atlantic
Monthly founded by brilliant authors Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
and James Russell Lowell discovered and published an extraordinary list of American writers
including Mark Twain, Brett Harte, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett,
and Stephen Crane. There were a number of large circulation magazines with popular appeal
including Ladies Home Journal, The Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, The National
Geographic Magazine, Munsey’s Magazine, Popular Science Magazine and Literary Press, and
Godey’s Lady’s Book. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Godey’s Lady’s Book was the most
successful women’s magazine in the United States with a circulation of 150,000 and a readership
of perhaps millions of people. Subscribers across the country enjoyed the monthly publication of
fashion, patterns, house plans, crafts, recipes, etiquette, helpful hints, health advice, short stories,
poetry, book notices, and musical scores. During the Civil War a blockade of the South
eliminated a large percentage of their readership but there was no mention of the war or politics
in the editions. Americans loved magazines and their arrival was eagerly anticipated.
The linotype machine and conveyer system helped to make large-scale production possible.
Their inventions also made local newspapers spring up in little towns. (The first newspaper in
Cleveland County was begun in 1854.) William Randolph Hearst publisher of The New York
Journal and Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of The New York World were captains of journalism as
owners of major newspapers. Advertising in magazines and newspapers introduced new brands
of products to residents of remote areas and advertising became a large part of the publishing
industry’s business.
American artists captured the landscapes and the people. The Hudson River school inspired
by the nature writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Cullen Bryant painted American
seascapes and landscapes of mountains, fields, and meadows. Among the famous landscape
artists were Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Inness, Martin Johnson Heade,
Frederick Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, and Thomas Moran. John
James Audubon spent years stalking all the birds of America and painting them with a beauty
that the world had never seen. George Catlin, Seth Eastman, and Alfred Jacob Miller captured
on canvas the Indian portraits and their way of live. William Sydney Mount portrayed Eastern
farmers while George Caleb Bingham’s subjects were riverboat men, fur trappers, and Missouri
politicians. Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder painted everyday life
of America in powerful realism. Still life paintings were in vogue and some of best known artists
were Charles Willson Peale, William M. Harnett, and John F. Peto. Gilbert Stuart was the most
sought-after portraitist early in the century, but after his death, wealthy patrons on two continents
came to the London studio of American artist, John Singer Sargent, famous for his portraits.
Other American artists abroad were making a name for themselves. James McNeill Whistler,
another American living in London, was famous for the detail and composition in his artwork.
Impressionist Mary Cassatt, living in Paris, was America’s first major woman artist.
The development of color lithography made inexpensive prints available and Americans
bought them to display in their homes. Currier and Ives was the most prolific of the firms and
produced prints that were among the most popular wall hangings of the day. Their prints
depicted a variety of images of American life including portraits of people, patriotic and
historical subjects, battles of the Civil War, winter scenes, horseracing images, sporting events,
pictures of ships, and buildings of cities and railroads.
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Illustrators sold their work to magazines and Norman Rockwell was the most famous of them.
Best known for the cover illustrations of American everyday life scenarios, he created artwork
for The Saturday Evening Post for four decades
Caricature and editorial cartoon artist, Thomas Nast’s work appeared in many publications.
He is best known for the creation of the modern version of Santa Claus and his political symbol
of the Democratic Party donkey, the Republican Party elephant and of Uncle Sam.
As leisure time increased with mechanization, Americans sought various types of
entertainment. P. T. Barnum was the master showman with his three-ring circus. Music and
plays were popular pastimes as well as social gatherings. Large cities had symphony orchestras
and opera.
Americans wanted to play games or watch others play. Golf became a popular sport and lawn
tennis and ice hockey were introduced. Basketball was invented and baseball and football drew
bigger crowds to events than anything except Presidential elections.
Walter Chauncey Camp is considered to be the Father of American Football. He established
the rules of football in 1880. He is credited with creating the position of quarterback,
recommending that there be eleven players to a side, and conceiving the idea of downs. He was
of the Camp line from Connecticut.
Bicycling, boxing, horse racing, croquet, gymnastics, and swimming were getting people
moving their muscles while others preferred the spectator sports. Mark Twain echoed the
sentiment of many when he said “When I get the urge to exercise, I lie down till it passes.”
Whatever our choice of pleasure endeavors, it reminds us that our forefathers recognized the
importance of including in our Constitution the right to the pursuit of happiness along with the
rights of life and liberty.
Daddy was born during the post-Reconstruction Period, just eighteen years after the Civil
War ended. Chester A. Arthur was President when Daddy was born. James A. Garfield had
been elected president three years before, in 1880, but was assassinated four months after his
inauguration while he and several members of his Cabinet waited at a Washington railroad depot
for the train for a brief holiday. Garfield was shot two times with a .44 caliber revolver by a
lawyer who had applied unsuccessfully for a government office. One bullet did no damage and
the other one struck no vital organs, but complications, including a massive blood clot, for which
doctors at the time could do nothing, caused him to gradually weaken. He lived seventy-nine
days.
As Chester A. Arthur took over the oval office, he brought order and dignity to the Presidency
and surrounded himself with able and upright men. Even Mark Twain, who was a cynical
observer of politicians, was impressed. But by 1884, the Republican Party was torn apart. Many
members, dismayed by the administration’s power politics, were disgruntled enough to desert the
Party altogether. The voting public turned to the Democrats and elected Grover Cleveland by a
landslide of almost 200,000 votes. The South was so excited about having a Democrat elected
President that fireworks and celebrations in the cities of the old Confederacy were held with an
abandon of emotion not displayed since the announcement of succession from the Union in the
winter of 1860-1861.
The Camp family lived in the Patterson Springs area where Granddaddy Camp farmed.
Farming was labor-intensive, hard work, and it was done by mule power using the crudest tools,
many of them homemade. Hoeing and picking cotton were two of the most brutal field jobs and
they were done by hand. Cash returns from farming were meager, but it paid for the basic
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necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Without electricity they used kerosene lamps and
candles for light, a wood stove for cooking and heating water and fireplaces for heat. Families
were dependent on the conscientious efforts of every member to sustain them.
In the prewar South public education had been looked upon with little favor. In 1850, one in
five Southern adults was illiterate as opposed to one in thirty-five in the Middle Atlantic States
and one in two hundred in New England. During the Civil War education suffered a terrible
setback and the illiteracy rate increased. With the men away in service, the school age children
had to protect property and work to provide the bare necessities. Most of the schools were
deserted and closed entirely. Illiteracy statistics for 1870 show the effect of the neglect on the
part of the county toward education. That year school enrollment was less than half of what it
was at the beginning of the Civil War.
In 1889, the year Daddy started to school, children didn’t have free school textbooks
furnished by the state like they do now. Noah Webster’s Blue Backed Speller and McGuffey
Readers and a simple arithmetic were the most common books used for primary education.
Daddy said that year they changed to new spellers. When the children came home at lunchtime
the first day of school they told Granddaddy Camp they needed new spellers. He said he
couldn’t afford to buy them, so he sent the children to the field to work. Daddy only attended
school for half a day, but he labored to help his younger siblings go to school.
Slowly things began to improve after the devastation and destruction caused by the Civil War
and the terrifying Reconstruction period. Since most families lived on farms away from town,
Shelby was slow to grow in its early years. During the Civil War, Shelby was just a wide place
in the road that was mostly woods and all frame buildings. The uptown did not begin to flourish
until the 1880’s. A major factor in the towns growth was the railway system began in Cleveland
County in the mid-1880’s, and both the Southern and Seaboard Railway Systems provided rail
service to Shelby.
Cleveland County had nearly twenty sulphur and lithia springs and was known as the “City of
Springs.” Lithia springs water had been piped five miles to the court square and was sold to the
public from a pavilion.
Cleveland County was one of the most popular resort areas in the South in the mid-to-late 19th
century. Hotels were built near the springs and people came from all over the South for the
medical healing powers of the mineral spring water. During the Gay Nineties many visitors
frequented the resort hotels.
Sidney Lanier, a Georgia native, who was one of the country’s most famous musicians and
poets, came to Shelby and spent a summer or two living in a cottage on West Marion Street and
visiting the mineral springs in the area. He learned about them from Cleveland County
Confederate soldiers who had been captured, as he had, and taken to Point Lookout Prison in
Maryland during the Civil War.
There were several mineral springs called “Epps Springs” in Patterson Springs where Daddy
lived. These springs contained sulfur, iron, and freestone water. In the late 1880’s, a hotel
known as Patterson Springs Resort was drawing in people from around North and South Carolina
and Georgia, some spending the entire summer in guest cottages near the main hotel. The hotel
offered recreational activities and held a dance every Saturday night. The resort was located
about one-and-a-half miles west of the present town on Sulphur Springs Road (the Sale Barn
Road).
The best known of the resorts was Cleveland Springs Hotel on East Marion Street. It had
three individual springs-- white sulfur, red sulfur, and carbonate of lime. For decades it was one
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of the leading resorts in the Carolinas. It was a year-round resort, a convention center, and a
commercial hotel. They served good food, had orchestras on special occasions, and offered
many activities including horseback riding, golf, tennis, swimming, and dancing. People also
went there for picnics and hayrides. The bands played the popular tunes of the day including
“Listen To The Mockingbird,” “Oh My Darling Clementine,” “Goodnight Irene,” and “Daisy
Bell” a song about a bicycle built for two.
The bicycling craze had its heyday then and some folks say it was what made the Gay 90’s
gay. Bicycles got women into more sensible clothes, shedding bustles and corsets for garments
that gave greater mobility. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said that “the bicycle had done more for
emancipation of women than anything else in the world.” People rode them for sport as well as a
means of transportation. Races and tournaments were held. The League of American Wheelmen
had a membership of 102,000 by 1898. Charles Murphy earned the nickname “Mile-a-Minute”
Murphy in 1899 when he peddled behind a railroad train and cycled a mile in 57.8 seconds. His
record was not even beaten by an automobile until 1909.
It is hard to track residents of the Gay 90’s because little is known about the location of
families across the United States in the last decade of the century. A Federal Census was taken
during 1890, but a large percentage of it was destroyed in 1921 by a fire that occurred in the
Commerce Building in Washington. Twenty-five percent of the Census was destroyed by fire,
and another fifty percent was destroyed by smoke and water damage. Despite public outcry, the
Census Bureau destroyed the remainder thirteen years later. A few bundles of surviving records
surfaced in the 1940’s and 1950’s but only 6,160 names were recovered out of the 63 million
Americans who were surveyed. Fortunately some of the Cleveland County Township #1,
Boiling Springs, was found, but that is all that was preserved of the records for our area.
THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
America had long been a competitor for world trade and had been involved in protecting her
interests, and from the years 1836-1861, there were twenty-five cases of American intervention.
The United States was rapidly becoming the policeman of the Americas and the price of this
position has been constant vigilance.
In the Spanish-American War conflict in 1898, President McKinley sent the battleship, USS
Maine, to Havana, Cuba to insure the safety of American citizens and interests. After suffering
a massive explosion, the battleship sank, resulting in the death of 266 soldiers and pushing the
United States into a war. Young men marched off to the Spanish-American War to the tune
“There’ll Be A Hot Time In the Old Town Tonight.” Young women, including Annie Oakley,
volunteered to be soldiers. She wrote a letter to President McKinley offering to supply fifty
sharpshooter women fighters and said they would even bring their own rifles.
America fought a series of one-sided naval and military battles for ten weeks in the Caribbean
and the Pacific, and helped Cuban revolutionists fight for their independence and win victory
over Spanish forces. They destroyed two Spanish fleets in the Bay of Santiago and the Bay of
Manila, losing just one man.
Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt was a hero of the Spanish-American War. He was a Rough
Rider, the first volunteer Calvary Regiment, made up of Roosevelt’s cowboy friends from the
Western territory and his Ivy League friends from New York. The Rough Riders were famous
for their daring charge up an obscure San Juan Hill in Cuba July 1, 1898.
Daddy was fifteen years old in 1898, too young for military service, but Cleveland County
furnished more than 100 men in the Spanish-American War. The soldiers were sent to Florida
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and Cuba for training. In 1898, that tropical area was infested with mosquitoes and malaria and
medicine to cure or prevent tropical ailments had not been discovered. There was no
refrigeration at the time and the food they ate was mostly out of tin cans. Death from disease
took a heavier toll on the soldiers than fighting.
In the Peace Treaty terms agreed to on August 12, 1898, Spain succeeded Puerto Rico and
Guam and renounced all sovereignty over Cuba. Cuba granted the United States a naval station
in the Caribbean. The purchase of the Philippines from Spain for $20 million gave the United
States formidable possessions in the Pacific. Congress voted to annex the Hawaiian Islands, and
America became a world power.
President McKinley was assassinated in 1901. He was shot by an anarchist while he was
attending a reception at the Pan American Expedition in Buffalo, New York. His death marked
the last of the six veteran Union soldiers to occupy the White House. All of the presidents since
Abraham Lincoln had worn the Union blue in the Civil War, with the exception of Grover
Cleveland, who stayed home to support his family so that his two brothers could serve.
President McKinley was succeeded by forty-two year old Theodore Roosevelt, by far the
youngest President the United States had had. He was a champion of a United States overseas
empire and he orchestrated a Panamanian revolt that gave the United States the right to build and
control the Panama Canal, a narrow land bridge between North and South America creating
water passages between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
He arranged talks that halted the Russo-Japanese War and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906
for his efforts. With the rise of Japanese power in the Pacific, many Americans saw this as a
threat to Unites States interests. President Roosevelt supplemented the Monroe Doctrine with a
pledge to police the Western Hemisphere. He is best remembered for the slogan that was his
corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the West African proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
He advocated the idea of negotiating peacefully and simultaneously threatening with a big stickthe military. As a warning to Japanese expansionists he dispatched the Great White Fleet of
sixteen U. S. navy battleships on a worldwide voyage to circle the globe from December 16,
1907 to February 22, 1909, fourteen months of pageantry as a show of America’s sea power.
The ships manned by 14,000 sailors covered 43,000 miles and made twenty ports of calls on six
continents. The fleet was greeted with great enthusiasm in Latin America, Australia, and even
Japan.
On the home front, President Roosevelt stressed equal opportunities for all citizens. He won a
reputation of a trustbuster by breaking up the Northern Securities Company. He demanded a
square deal for striking coal miners and rescued thousands of wilderness acres from greedy
lumber barons to be used as state parks. One of his most lasting legacies is his role in the
creation of 150 national forests, five national parks and eighteen national monuments. He was
instrumental in the conservation of approximately 230 million acres of American soil among
various parks and other federal projects.
President Roosevelt supported a Food and Drug Act and a Federal meat inspection that
protected consumers for the first time from careless and crooked business practices.
Teddy Roosevelt permanently changed the political system by making the presidency center
stage. He believed that character was as important as issues and he stressed this in his public
speeches. He encouraged bravery by saying “Success is never permanent, failure is never fatal;
the only thing that really counts is courage.” He said “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to
win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to take rank with those poor spirits
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who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not
victory nor defeat.” He encouraged people to “Do what you can, with what you have, where you
are.” One lasting legacy is his nickname was given to the stuffed toy animal, the Teddy bear,
after he refused to kill a bear cub.
President Roosevelt was the most popular president since Andrew Jackson. Many people
compared him to Democratic President Grover Cleveland, and at the beginning of his second
term there was even talk in the South of running him on the Democratic ticket for the next
election.
This was a period of exuberant growth in industry, world prestige, and population. Whatever
faults America might have it was a land of opportunity. The population of America was rapidly
increasing. There was a swell of immigration in the early 1900’s. In the first two decades of the
20th century, fourteen-and-a-half million immigrants arrived. There could be as many as fifteen
thousand immigrants arriving in Ellis Island in one day. They sailed past the Statue of Liberty,
standing as a beacon of hope.
America’s population went from thirteen million to sixty million in forty years. Before 1890,
the immigration flow had been from Ireland, England, Canada, Scandinavia, and Germany. In
the next thirty years the masses came from Ireland, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. They
came to this country to make a new life or to flee an old one, they brought their customs and
their cuisine with them, but they became Americans, learned the English language and felt a
loyalty and pride in their new homeland.
A speech Teddy Roosevelt made at Carnegie Hall, New York City on March 20, 1912,
entitled The Rights of the People to Rule summed up the ideal that is America. I memorized an
excerpt from it when I was a teenager. “We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the
world and the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the
light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.”
Before electricity, uptown Shelby had oil streetlamps that were lit by the chief of police.
When people were in town at night they carried lanterns. In the late 1890s electric streetlamps
were installed. Shelby’s first electricity was supplied in the 1880s by a small power dam on First
Broad River above Stice’s Shoal at Laurel Mill but this power source was not dependable. In
1902, Shelby Cotton Mill began to furnish steam from one of its boilers to power an electrical
generator. About 1912, Shelby bought the Shelby Electric Company that owned the small power
dam on First Broad River. Many people did not trust electricity and thought it dangerous to have
wires running into their homes, so they continued to use oil lamps and candles.
Water and sewer lines were put down four blocks in each direction from the courthouse. First
Broad River was the source of the water supply. By 1900, Shelby and Cleveland County were
economically booming and thrived in the early part of the 20th century. The majority of the
buildings in uptown Shelby were built at that time and affluent citizens built large homes near
the center of town. In 1901, the town of Shelby petitioned the General Assembly to create a new
charter changing its name to the “City of Shelby”, extending the city radius to three-quarters of a
mile.
In 1903, the same year that Wilbur and Orville Wright made history when they flew their
wood and canvas bi-plane powered by a 12-horsepower engine on a cold and gusty December
day over the dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, The Cleveland Star reported on the economy
of Shelby. The newspaper listed that there were “in the city seven general stores, three hardware
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stores, twelve grocery stores, three millinery stores, one wholesale grocer, one commission
merchant, three stove and tin-ware stores, two furniture dealers, a harness manufacturer, a tailor,
two jewelers, two opticians, three drug stores, one piano-organ store, a marble yard, and two
undertakers. Additionally Shelby had five hotels including the 185-person Cleveland Springs
Hotel, two cotton mills, a cotton seed oil mill, three cotton gins, a grist mill, a foundry and
machine works, two lumber plants, a brick plant, two sash and blind firms, a steam laundry, and
four blacksmiths.” The article went on to say “the county itself grew 15,000 bales of cotton,
worked 275,000 acres of crops and had thirteen cotton factories, forty-four flour mills, sixty
cotton gins, thirty-three lumber plants, and a host of small businesses.”
The 1900 U. S. Census shows that Daddy was 17 years of age and the second oldest of the
six children living in the Manson Camp household. His brother, Tommy, two years older than
he, was still living at home, as well as his younger siblings Alice, Will, Charlie and Mack. They
lived in Patterson Springs and farmed and attended Pleasant Hill Baptist Church located nearby.
On July 29, 1905, Daddy’s sister, Alice, married Bill Mayes in a wedding ceremony held at
home. We have a picture of Daddy and Bill Mayes that was probably made that day.
Six weeks later Daddy married Sallie Irona Dixon. Daddy was 22 years old and Sallie was
19. She was born in Cleveland County September 7, 1886, a daughter of L. John “Jack” Dixon
and Amanda Roberts.
Amanda Roberts’ Grandparents, Col. John Roberts (1767-1847) and Sarah Magness (17721828), are buried in the Old Roberts Family Cemetery near Moss Lake. Amanda Roberts’
parents were Morris Roberts (1808-1875) and Susannah Adams (1812-1887) who are buried at
Pleasant Hill Church Cemetery in Patterson Springs.
Both lines go back to Virginia in the 1600’s. Susannah Adam’s Great Grandfather, Abednego
Adams (1721-1809) was George Washington’s neighbor on the northern border of his home at
Mount Vernon. The Papers of George Washington mentions him seven or eight times and he is
listed in George Washington’s will.
Another family connection to George Washington was George Eskridge who was born in
1650 in England. He studied law and migrated to Virginia where he served in the House of
Burgesses and was King’s Attorney in Virginia. He and his wife, Rebecca Bonham Eskridge,
owned and operated Sandy Run Plantation on the banks of the Potomac River in Westmoreland
Co., Virginia. Mary Ball’s parents died. Her parents were friends of the Eskridge’s. They
adopted Mary and welcomed her into their family of six children. Mary loved the Eskridge
family and her love and respect for her adoptive father, George Eskridge, was displayed when
she named her first son, George. Her son was George Washington, our first president. George
Washington honored his adoptive Grandfather, George Eskridge, by displaying a portrait of him
prominently in his Mt. Vernon home.
According to the 1880 U. S. Census taken just a few years before Daddy and Sallie were
born, Jack Dixon lived next door to Manson Camp, so Daddy and Sallie probably knew each
other from the time they were little children.
They were married at Rev. T. H. Mullinax’s home between Grover, N. C., and Blacksburg, S.
C., just over the South Carolina line. For years, people went to the South Carolina side of the
community to get married because no marriage license was required to be purchased there as it
was in North Carolina. The large two story white residence of Rev. Charles A. Mullinax and
later his son, Rev. T. H. Mullinax was a wedding chapel for many residents from Cleveland
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County and surrounding North Carolina counties. About seventy-five couples a year were
married there.
Rev. Mullinax’s records show their wedding date as September 6, 1905. The wedding
announcement in The Cleveland Star says they were married Sunday, September 10, 1905. It
says “Mr. Jno. Camp, popular young son of Mr. Mintz Camp and Miss Sallie Dixon, the
attractive young daughter of Mr. Jack Dixon of Shelby were most happily married Sunday
September 10th at Grover. Rev. T. H. Mullinax officiating. THE STAR offers congratulations.”
The year Daddy and Sallie married The Cleveland Star’s Shelby Market Report said that eggs
cost twenty cents per dozen, fruit four or five cents per pound, butter ten to twelve cents per
pound, beeswax twenty cents per pound, hens twenty-five to thirty cents, sweet potatoes forty to
fifty cents per bushel, oats fifty cents per bushel, corn seventy cents per bushel, Irish potatoes
ninety cents per bushel, peas eighty cents to one dollar per bushel and beans two dollars and
twenty-five cents per bushel.
In 1905, the following sixty-two businesses were operating in Shelby: Star Publishing
Company, Newspaper and Job Printing; W. B. Palmer, General Merchandise; Lattimore &
Lattimore, Livery and Feed Stable; Shelby Hotel; Farmer’s Hardware Co.; First National Bank;
S. L. Gillespie, Pianos, Organs, Musical Instruments, Stationery; T. B. Washburn, Heavy and
Fancy Groceries; McMurry and Suttle, Dry Goods, Notions, Gent Furnishings, Groceries; Paul
Webb, Druggist; Kendall & Cabaniss, Clothiers and Furnishers; H. E. Kendall, Wholesale and
Retail Druggist; T. W. Hamrick Co., Jewelers & Opticians; Lander F. McBrayer, Real Estate and
Insurance; McMurry-Hull Company, Dry Goods, Hats, Shoes, Ladies’ Dress Goods, Groceries;
C. B. Suttle & Co., City Meat Market; D. S. Weathers, Groceries; J. T. Gardner, General
Brokerage, Fire Insurance; Millard A. Grigg, Furniture; Thompson-Branton Co., Building
Materials; James P. Austell, Barber; C. M. Webb, Clothing, Dry Goods, Notions, Shoes, Hats,
Novelties, Trunks, Valises; Carolina Monazite Company; Blanton & Wilkins Hardware; M. P.
Dellinger, Groceries; Shelby Daily News; W. H. Blanton, Livery and Feed Stables; W. B. Nix,
Dry Goods, Notions, Shoes and Clothing; Nix Brothers, Dry Goods and Groceries; Central
Hotel, T. W. Ebeltoft, Fine Stationery, Books and School and Office Supplies; Orlando Elam,
Furniture; E. M. Beam, Paint; J. S. Martin, Wholesale Groceries; W. C. Whisnant, Dry Goods;
Jno. F. Harris, Tin Shop; Miss Belle Fromm, Millinery; Miss Maggie Black, Millinery; J. C.
Beam, Real Estate; J. D. Lineberger, Buggies, Etc.; D. C. Webb’s Sons, General Merchandise; S.
A. Washburn, Harness and Stoves; L. J. Pope Groceries; L. J. Pope, Hotel; A. Blanton & Son,
General Merchandise; Shelby Marble Works; O. E. Ford, Buggies; Queen City Pressing Club;
Thompson Pressing Club; J. A. Wright’s Barber Shop; Gales’ Restaurant; Hopper Bros. Beef
Market; L. P. Connor, Groceries; Julius Elliott, Groceries; W. P. Gibbons, Groceries; Claude
Webb, Groceries; O. C. Bostic & Co., Groceries; F. A. Bridges, Bakery; W. E. McArthur,
Photography; J. A. Tillman, Jeweler; Hamrick & Hamrick, Commission Merchants; McCurry
Bros., Groceries.
In November of 1905, The Cleveland Star reported that the Van Amburg Circus came to
town. It was a small affair- they didn’t have a parade at all- but it was a very good one ring show
put on at the court square in the center of town.
The newspaper didn’t mention Shelby having a movie theater, but in the early 1900s
thousands of small theaters, called nickelodeons, because they cost a nickel, sprang up all over
the country. They were devoted solely to films and the first American movie to spin a coherent
story was The Great Train Robbery in 1903. People flocked to the theaters to see the silent
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films. Because of the broad pantomime used in the silent movies, attendees could follow the
story even if they couldn’t read the English dialogue across the screen.
E. A. Rudasill was the first business in Shelby to own movie equipment and the first movies
were shown in a tent, probably in the vicinity of the Southern Railway tracks. The March 7,
1911 issue of The Cleveland Star reported that Rudasill’s enterprise called “Screenland” was
“running again on a vacant lot adjoining the square. The show had quite a success last summer
and fall. But the tent was taken down for the winter.”
There were two vacant lots on the square at that time. One was where the old Post Office
(now the Arts Council) stands and the other was beside the present site of the Masonic building.
That lot was used by the Chatauquas, a subscription concert and lecture series that was popular
during that period. Famous novelist, Thomas Dixon, Jr., was a noted speaker on the Chatauqua
circle.
Also in 1911, the newspaper mentioned “Edisonia” theatre which had new pictures every
night. Another advertisement told of a modern picture show to be opened in the Gidney
Building by Mr. Lattimore and Mr. Brawley, where first class pictures would be shown and a
change of films daily.
Other entertainment of those days was player pianos that cranked out tunes. Sheet music was
printed for musicians and the phonograph was available. Popular tunes in the 1890’s and the
early part of the new century were “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home,” “In The Good
Old Summer Time,” “The Sidewalks Of New York,” and “The Band Played On.” People rallied
to songs of American pride like “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” “You’re A Grand Old Flag,” “On
The Road To Mandalay,” and “Meet Me In St. Louis,” written for the Louisiana Purchase
Exposition in St. Louis, and was the most popular anthem of 1904. “Wabash Cannonball” was a
popular song about a fictional train. Other ageless sing-a-long songs of the era were “Oh, You
Beautiful Doll,” “Shine On Harvest Moon,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “Take Me Out To
The Ballgame,” and “By The Light Of The Silvery Moon.” The Irish, famous for their pubs and
Irish ale, inspired “My Wild Irish Rose,” Sweet Rosie O’Grady,” “When Irish Eyes Are
Smiling,” and “Danny Boy.”
At the turn of the century ragtime music was the newest sensation. It was a distinctly
American musical style that descended from a composite of European classical music, jigs that
originated in African American music, and especially the marches made popular by John Philip
Sousa, the march King. The Ragtime King, composer and pianist Scott Joplin, became famous
through the publication of his “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899 and a string of other ragtime hits that
followed. His 1902 rag “The Entertainer” used in the Academy Award-winning score for the
motion picture, The Sting in 1973 is probably his best known piece. Scott Joplin also used the
term “swing” in describing how to play ragtime music. He said to “play slowly until you catch
the swing.” The name “swing” later came to be applied to an early genre of jazz that developed
from ragtime.
Irving Berlin was the most commercially successful composer of ragtime songs, and his
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” published in 1911 was the single most widely performed and
recorded piece of this sort, even though it contained virtually no ragtime syncopation. Another
popular tune was “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”
Daddy and Sallie lived in the country and farmed, and within six years, they had three
children: Amanda Savannah was born August 6, 1907, the year Oklahoma became the 46h state.
Two years later on April 21, 1909, John Nathan was born. Ruth Aileen was born September 7,
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1911 on their Mother’s birthday. The 1910 U. S. Census, taken the year before Ruth was born,
shows Sallie’s sister, Lizzie Dixon, who was two years younger than Sallie, was living with
them. Sallie’s Mother, Amanda Roberts died sometime after the 1900 U. S. Census, and her
Father, Jack Dixon, remarried in January 1908. He married a young widow named Ethel Collins
Pearson who had two small children. He and Ethel had three children together in the next few
years: David, Everette, and Gertrude Dixon.
Daddy and Sallie drove a horse and buggy to town to conduct their business. They shopped
the stores for shoes, hats, bolts of calico fabrics, clocks, stoves, plows, and groceries. The
uptown streets were not paved and the streets were often either dusty or muddy. The city
sidewalks in front of the stores were paved 1907-1909.
The family went to Will McArthur, the first photographer in Shelby, whose studio was
uptown where the Masonic Building is now located, to have the children’s picture made. We
still have Nathan’s baby picture made in 1909 and Ruth’s made in 1912.
Marion Street was the main part of town because that was where the fire station, city hall, and
local newspaper, The Cleveland Star, which later became The Shelby Daily Star, were located, as
well as the old Courtview Hotel. Other hotels were located near the Southern Railway Depot on
South Morgan Street. Trade Alley, the street behind the stores on Lafayette Street, was the site
of the livery stables and hitching space where farmers came to trade in the stores and trade guns,
knives, and dogs with each other. At night they built camp fires, played folk music, and danced.
Most of them slept in their covered wagons.
Some of the farmers traveled from parts of South Carolina and if their mules were too old to
make the long return trip home, they just abandoned them and the mules had to be shot, so due to
the number of carcasses, Trade Alley became known as the “bone yard”.
At the turn of the century capital punishment was carried out in public. There were seven
legal executions in Shelby. People came from all over the county to see the public hangings.
They drew a bigger crowd than a circus in Shelby. People who lived in the country left home
before daylight and came to town in wagons. They perched on top of houses or climbed trees to
watch the executions. The last one, in November 1904, was a Negro man named Ben Clark who
shot Chief of Police Edgar Hamrick. Daddy said he took a picnic lunch and went to town to see
the lynching. A memorial plaque uptown at Raper-Roark Plaza beside the City of Shelby Police
Department lists Edgar Hamrick among the officers who have been killed in the line of duty.
Another Police Chief, Shelton Jones, is also remembered on the plaque. He was shot while
arresting Jim Lowery for some offense in August 1901. The killer escaped and was never
returned to trial.
A monument of a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier on a granite base was erected on the
court square November 21, 1906. It was paid for with funds collected through the efforts of the
United Daughters of The Confederacy to honor the Cleveland County Confederate dead. It took
ten mules to haul the base from the Southern Railway Depot on South Morgan Street to the west
side of the courthouse. Daddy said he was among the crowd on the court square who attended
the dedication of the Civil War Memorial on May 10, 1907.
That was also the year that the brick courthouse that had been built in 1845 was torn down.
It was replaced by the new two-story Neo-Classical Revival style courthouse with an octagonal
domed cupola constructed of limestone.
The City of Shelby and Cleveland County revolved around the court square. It was an era of
parades, baby shows and civilians in old military uniforms marching with high school bands.
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Carnivals were held on the public square in the early years of the 20th century and people came
from all over for the parade in uptown Shelby on July 4th
Daddy said he saw Thomas Edison when the famous inventor visited Shelby. For many
years mining mica and monazite was a thriving industry and some of the largest monazite
companies had their headquarters here. Kaolin, a high grade of clay was mined. In 1906,
Thomas Edison came to Cleveland County to see what minerals were available. In late May, he
visited Kings Mountain and on June 1st he visited Shelby. The town was crowded with people
who came to see the famous inventor who received more than a thousand patents in his lifetime.
Daddy and Sallie’s happy life together was overshadowed by the fact that she suffered from
tuberculosis. At that time it was called “consumption” because of how the illness wastes away
or consumes its victim. Caused by a highly contagious bacterial infection, the disease can affect
any part of the body, but it is mainly an infection of the lungs. There was no vaccination for the
disease until 1920, and the first anti-tuberculosis drug, streptomycin, was not developed until
1944.
Few diseases have caused so much distressing illness for centuries or claimed so many lives.
At the turn of the century more than eighty percent of the population of the United States was
infected before age twenty, and tuberculosis was the single most common cause of death. On
March 13, 1912, Sallie succumbed to this affliction. She was only twenty-five years old. Her
funeral was held at Elizabeth Baptist Church, and she was buried there in the church cemetery
where several of her family members are interred. Sallie died at such a young age, and due to
lack of medical knowledge, so did many other people. At that time the average life expectancy
was only forty-seven years.
Daddy was devastated by Sallie’s death and he had to rely on relatives to help him with the
three small children while he farmed. When their Mother died, Savannah was four, Nathan was
almost three, and Ruth was only six months old.
In the two months prior to Sallie’s death New Mexico and Arizona became the 47th and 48th
state, completing the continental United States. It would be another forty-seven years before
Alaska and Hawaii would be added to the U. S. borders.
In the month following Sallie’s death one of the greatest peacetime sea tragedies in history
occurred. The Titantic, the largest passenger steamship in the world set sail on its maiden
voyage from Southampton, England to New York on April 10, 1912. Aboard the ship were
some of the richest and most powerful people. The ship was deemed unsinkable but four days
into the trip, the ship struck an iceberg on April 14th and sank resulting in the death of 1,517
people. She set sail with 2,223 people on board and the high casualty rate when the ship sank
was partly due to the fact that there were not enough life preservers on board. Complying with
the regulations at the time, there were only 1,178 life preservers on board. They were warned
twelve times of the iceberg but there were no binoculars to view it, the rope to measure seawater
was too short, and they brought only white flares and had no red flares for other ships to see that
they were in danger.
In the Presidential election in the fall of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt threw his hat in the ring.
He was dissatisfied with the performance of President Taft, whom he had supported to succeed
him to the presidency in 1908. But he delayed too long to declare himself a candidate and
President Taft had the support of most of the Republican Party leaders. So Roosevelt ran on the
Progressive Party ticket, known as the “Bull Moose Party” because he said he was as fit as a bull
moose.
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On October 14th while on the campaign trail Teddy Roosevelt was shot by an armed saloon
keeper. The bullet penetrated his overcoat, his steel eyeglass case and a fifty page single-folded
manuscript of his speech he carried in his jacket and lodged in his chest. It was too dangerous to
remove the bullet and he carried it for the rest of his life. The incident took him off of the
campaign trail. He did not win any Southern state. He received more votes than President Taft,
but they split the Republican vote resulting in the election of Democratic candidate Woodrow
Wilson as president. With the exception of Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson was the only
Democrat elected to the office of President in 56 years, since before the Civil War.
President Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission that established the Federal Reserve
System. His administration saw a change from a government that had fostered big business and
tariffs to a government that encouraged small enterprise. He introduced individual income tax
and he did not support women’s suffrage. He sanctioned segregation in Federal employment and
made no objection when Southern postmasters and Treasury officials removed Negro employees
of the Federal government.
WORLD WAR I
Daddy met his second wife, Elizabeth Jane “Lizzie” Childers, through his brother Will. She
was a niece of Uncle Will’s wife, Ora, and she and Aunt Ora were close to the same age. She
was born October 9, 1894, in Union County, S. C., a daughter of Peter C. Childers and Amanda
Lowery.
On Sunday, March 23, 1913, Daddy and Lizzie were married at the home of Uncle Will and
Ora in Township #6. Daddy was thirty years old at the time and Lizzie was nineteen. The
marriage certificate states that Lizzie’s Father was living and her Mother was dead. At the time,
Lizzie had a stepmother, Dora Wood, whom her Father had married in 1911. The marriage
certificate says that both of Daddy’s parents were living. However, Daddy’s Mother died two
months later on May 8, 1913, and was buried in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery.
In the following three years Daddy and Lizzie were blessed with three little girls. Mary Jane
was born February 10, 1914, Anna Louise was born April 14, 1915, and Lula Belle was born
July 6, 1916.
Daddy, Lizzie, Savannah, Nathan, and Ruth were living in Cleveland County when Mary was
born, but according to Anna’s birth certificate, they were living in Gastonia and Daddy was
working in a textile mill the next year when Anna was born. I’m not sure exactly where they
were living; it could have been in Kings Mountain, because parts of Kings Mountain were in
Gaston County. The whole of Kings Mountain barely missed being a part of Gaston County that
year. Kings Mountain had grown so much industrially that parts of it were in Cleveland County
and parts in Gaston County, causing confusion in legal matters and taxation. That year under an
act of the 1915 Legislature, an election was held to run a new county line and determine Kings
Mountain to be wholly in Cleveland or Gaston County. In April 1915, the month of Anna’s
birth, the election was held, with 341 voting to remain in Cleveland County and 270 to annex to
Gaston County. Cleveland County won by a margin of 71 votes. Gaston County tried
unsuccessfully to nullify the election results and Cleveland County assumed its share of Gaston
County’s bonded indebtedness of the newly claimed territory. Surveyors from both counties ran
the boundary line and commissioners of both counties adopted the report in October 1918.
Daddy, Lizzie and the children were again living in Cleveland County the year after Anna’s
birth, when Lula Belle was born in 1916. Daddy said he lived in Kings Creek, S. C., between
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Gaffney and York for a few months and worked on a short line railroad. Since Lizzie’s family
was from Union County, S. C., it was probably during this period of time.
Five years after Daddy and Lizzie were married, tragedy struck again. A terrible influenza
epidemic scourged the earth during 1918-1919 killing 50 to 100 million people. On March 6,
1918, Lizzie died from the Spanish influenza they called “La Grippe.” She was only twentythree years old. Lizzie’s death certificate states that she also had neuritis and a miscarriage.
Daddy said she was pregnant with twins. Her obituary in The Cleveland Star said that she was
“a woman of splendid traits of character. Her death is learned with the keenest sorrow by a host
of friends” and it told that a large crowd of friends attended her funeral at Pleasant Hill Baptist
Church where she was buried. Ironically, on March 2nd, four days before Lizzie died, Uncle Will
and Aunt Ora’s three week old baby, Selma Jane Elizabeth Camp, who was named for Lizzie,
died from bronchial pneumonia. Uncle Mack and Aunt Hattie also lost their baby, Martha Jane
Camp, that year to the flu epidemic.
The Cleveland Star said that “in the history of Shelby no such calamity as the present
epidemic has befallen the town.” Shelby had a private hospital that opened in 1910 in a building
that had previously been a female academy and a hotel, but the first public hospital in Shelby
was not opened until 1923. The existing hospital was not able to take care of the great number of
flu victims, and city authorities asked for assistance from Raleigh to send trained nurses to treat
the sick. Local citizens created a fund to help the stricken families. There were so many deaths
locally, that later in the year, The Cleveland Star didn’t print obituaries; they just listed the
names of the many flu victims.
The epidemic was worldwide and lasted from March 1918 to June 1920. It has been cited as
the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died in a single year from
influenza than in the four years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347-1351. In the two
years that this global disaster scourged the earth, as many as 500 million people, a third of the
world’s population, was infected and more than a fourth of Americans were struck by it. An
estimated 675,000 Americans died.
Unlike other strains of influenza which usually attack the young, the infirmed, and the elderly,
this epidemic was most deadly for healthy young adults ages twenty to forty. The death rate of
fifteen to thirty-four year olds was twenty times higher than in the previous year. People were
struck with the illness on the street and died rapid deaths, sometimes within hours. Scientists
have used tissue from frozen victims to reproduce the virus, and among the conclusions of the
research is that it kills by an overreaction of the body’s immune system, which explains its
severe nature and the concentrated age profile of its victims.
Initially the symptoms of the flu were so unusual that it was misdiagnosed as cholera, dengue,
or typhoid. There were no antibiotics at that time, and whole families died. Penicillin was not
discovered until 1928, and it was 1941 before the first human was successfully treated with the
drug and it became the miracle antibiotic of the twentieth century.
The flu epidemic hit at the same time World War I was going on in Europe. Massive transport
of troops and supplies allowed the virus to quickly spread to other countries and continents. Ten
times as many Americans died from the flu as died in World War I. Of the American soldiers
who died in Europe, half of them fell to the flu pandemic and not to the enemy. An estimated
43,000 servicemen who were mobilized for World War I died from influenza.
The spark that ignited World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to
the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. It was another famed “shot heard
’round the world.” Ferdinand was killed by the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist secret society.
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Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia, bound by a treaty to Serbia, declared war
on Austria-Hungary. Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary by treaty, declared war on Russia on
August 1, 1914. France, bound by treaty to Russia, declared war on Germany on August 3.
Germany invaded neutral Belgium to get to France quicker. Britain, allied to France and bound
by a treaty to defend Belgium, declared war on Germany.
When Britain entered the war, her colonies and dominions- Australia, Canada, India, New
Zealand, and the Union of South Africa- offered military and financial assistance. Japan,
honoring a military agreement to Britain, declared war on Germany on August 28, 1914. Italy
joined the conflict in May 1915, siding with the Allies, led by Britain and France.
Germany was desperate to gain an advantage on the Atlantic, so they decided to step up their
submarine campaign. On February 4, 1915, they declared the seas around the British Isles a war
zone. On April 17, 1915, the British ship, the Lusitania, left Liverpool, England and arrived in
New York on April 24th. The Lusitania departed New York on May 1st with 139 United States
citizens aboard although the German embassy in Washington had warned of dangers of sea
travel. On Friday, May 7, the unarmed ship was torpedoed by a German submarine U-20 boat
and sank off Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland killing 1,198 of 1,959 people, including 128 U. S.
citizens, many of them women and children.
For years Americans did not know that the Lusitania carried munitions and most Americans
did not question the discretion of their countrymen traveling on a foreign vessel through a war
zone. To them the important issue was that the Germans had intentionally destroyed a passenger
ship with women and children aboard.
Despite public outrage in the United States and Great Britain, President Wilson refused to
overreact. He called for Germany to withdraw submarine warfare against commercial ships
regardless of what flag they flew under. While America was not ready to go war, the eventual
declaration of war was set by the sinking of the Lusitania.
President Woodrow Wilson declared a policy of neutrality, but when Germany threatened
unrestricted submarine warfare against the Allies, this threatened America’s commercial
shipping. In 1917 German U-boats sank a number of unarmed American merchant ships.
America reluctantly entered World War I. Although America did not declare war on
Germany until April 6, 1917, American industry had been supplying the Allies with weapons and
supplies across the Atlantic from the beginning.
In 1917, President Wilson enacted the first military draft since the Civil War and over threeand-a -half million men were drafted from the United States into World War I. Powerful posters
soliciting young men to enlist in the Army, Navy, and Marines included the famous classic one
by artist James Montgomery Flagg with the picture of Uncle Sam that states: “I want you for the
U. S. Army.” Young men responded to the powerful posters and joined the military in great
numbers. World War I was viewed as a romantic and noble enterprise. President Wilson said it
was a war to make the world safe for democracy.
Significant numbers of American troops arrived in Europe to join the French and British in
the battlefields the summer of 1917. General John J. Pershing led the American Expeditionary
Forces. On July 4, American troops celebrated Independence Day in Paris. Part of the 16th
Infantry Regiment marched through Paris to Picpus Cemetery where several speeches were made
at Marquis de Lafayette’s tomb. During a speech honoring Lafayette’s heroic service in the
cause of the American Revolution, Col. Charles E. Stanton spoke the famous words, “Lafayette,
we are here!” remarking to return the favor of French assistance to America.
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The American infantrymen were called Doughboys. Some sources say the nickname dates
back to the Civil War while others say the nickname was given in the Mexican War of 1846-48
when the American army was in Mexico fighting Poncho Villa. Their uniforms became covered
with the local dirt, the Adobe-clay material that the Mexicans used to build their huts. An
English Calvary officer remarked that the Americans looked like Adobe boys. The American
soldiers did not like this term Adobe boys and changed it to Doughboys.
General Pershing had to follow racial policies of President Wilson, Secretary of War Newton
D. Baker, and Southern Democrats who promoted the “separate but equal” doctrines. AfricanAmerican “Buffalo Soldiers” units were not allowed to participate with the American
Expeditionary Forces during World War I.
Americans faced the threat of war and the enemies of freedom with courage and
determination. In France they lived with rat-filled trenches, poison gas, and perpetual mud but
they were high-spirited and cocky troops ready to handle whatever was thrown at them.
U. S. entry into the war set off a national outpouring of patriotism. The “Caisson Song”
became a much played John Philip Sousa march and was adopted by the U. S. Field Army as
their anthem. America’s songwriters cranked out rousing tunes like “Over There,” “It’s A Long
Long Way To Tipperary,” and “How Ya Gonna Keep Em Down On The Farm After They’ve
Seen Paree?” Movie stars Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford sold Liberty
Bonds to cheering crowds on street corners and more than half of the country’s adults bought
Liberty Bonds.
In November of 1918, Daddy had to report to Camp Greene in Charlotte about being inducted
into the Army. He had six children at home without a Mother: Savannah was eleven, Nathan
was nine, Ruth was seven, Mary was four, Anna was three, and Lula Belle was two.
Daddy rode his horse to Camp Greene and while he was there he was told that the war had
ended. The Allies declared a victory and could not have defeated the Central Powers without the
intervention of the United States in the last eighteen months of the war due to the number of
casualties. America sent two million men into the battlefields at a time when many of the
European soldiers were maimed or exhausted. Records show that more than half of the twelve
million Russian troops were killed or wounded; more than a third of the nine million British
recruits; five-and-a half of the eight million French; and one-and-a-half of Italy’s five-and-a-half
million. Of significance in winning the war was the fact that by 1918 tanks and airplanes were
available as a weapons system.
Daddy said he rode his horse back home from Camp Greene, and when he crossed the
Catawba River Bridge, he fired his pistol into the air to celebrate. He said bells were ringing,
whistles were blowing, and sirens were going off in Shelby in celebration of the war ending.
Armistice night brought an outburst of fireworks and public celebration all over the United
States.
The four years of the war left sixteen million people dead and twenty-one million wounded.
That number includes both military and civilian casualties. More than 116,000 Americans died
in World War I and another 204,000 were wounded. Many of the maimed lived in veteran
hospitals. Cleveland County had about 700 men in World War I. On the west entrance of the
courthouse, a bronze marker was placed to honor the 31 men from Cleveland County who lost
their lives in the war.
The actual fighting of World War I ended November 11, 1918, but negotiations lasted more
than six months. President Wilson took control of the negotiations with Germany and issued his
Fourteen Points, his view of how to avoid another war. President Wilson sailed to France, the
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first American President to leave the country while in office. He met with Lloyd George of
England, Orlando of Italy, and Clemenceau of France to discuss how Germany was to pay for the
damage caused by the war. The Paris Peace Conference concluded with the Treaty of Versailles
signed June 28, 1919, ending the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. Four
territorial clauses were later signed: Austria, Treaty of St. Germain, September 10, 1919;
Bulgaria, Treaty of Neuilly, November 27, 1919; Hungary, Treaty of Trianon, June 4, 1920; and
Turkey, Treaty of Serves, August 20, 1920.
The League of Nations organization was founded as a result of the Treaty of Versailles and
President Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his Fourteen Points, upon
which the League of Nations was founded. America did not join the League of Nations because
it was not supported by Congress who did not ratify the treaty. Congress feared the entangling
alliances that had been a key factor in dragging many of the European countries into the war.
President Wilson was an idealist who wanted America to enter the world arena in support for
democracy. During the bitter fight with the Republican controlled Senate over the United States
joining the League of Nations, President Wilson collapsed with a debilitating stroke and was
unable to lobby Congress for support for joining the organization. The United States returned to
its isolationist policy that was the tradition of America.
The year 1919 was bleak in American history. Prices for manufactured goods kept rising, and
workers demanded higher pay to keep up with the increased cost of living. During the war, labor
willingly gave up the right to strike. But with arbitrary layoffs and an alarming rise in the cost of
living, that year- at one time or another- four million men were out on strike. There was a
national steel strike, a railroad strike, a police strike in Boston, and race riots in twenty-three
states. Additionally the influenza epidemic was taking the lives of many people.
On November 13, 1919, Daddy was struck another devastating blow when Lula Belle died at
age three from the flu. The 1920 U. S. Census that was taken January 10-12, just eight weeks
after her death, shows that Daddy and his five children were living with Uncle Charlie and his
family in Township #6. Granddaddy Camp was living with them too. There were thirteen
people living in the house, as Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta had four children of their own, in the
household at the time, ages one to eight years old.
Daddy and his children moved to the Clifton Davis farm in the Earl/Patterson Springs area
and Granddaddy Camp moved to that farm too, but into a separate house up closer to the road.
Daddy had the task of raising his children as a single parent. He depended on Savannah to help
him with the younger ones. He said his faith in God and his love for his children kept his spirits
up. His children were his inspiration and his joy. He said there were two women in the
community who cut out the children’s clothes for him and he sewed them together on his
Mother’s treadle sewing machine.
One of our favorite stories told from that time was in an attempt to discipline the children,
Daddy told them if they didn’t behave, they would be taken away from him and put into an
orphanage. One day they had been squabbling, and a lady, who was a stranger, came to the
house. Savannah, Nathan, Ruth, Mary, and Anna all ran and hid in the bedroom. They had their
ears pressed to the door listening. It was the school census taker, and she had come to see how
many children would be enrolled in school that year. They heard Daddy tell her, “When the rest
go, Anna will have to go too. She’s only five years old, she can’t stay by herself, and I have to
farm.” They all ran out of the bedroom promising to be good if she wouldn’t take them away.
The children attended McBrayer Elementary School located just off of South Lafayette Street
on Davis Road, not far from their house. It was a two room schoolhouse with two teachers, one
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for the younger students and one for the older ones. The lunchbox they carried to school usually
held a baked sweet potato, a biscuit filled with ham or whatever else they had, and a slice of pie
or cake. They drank well water from a dipper that everyone shared. Among the students in a
1923 photograph taken at the school were Savannah, Nathan, Ruth, Mary, and Anna, as well as
Cliff Davis’s daughters, Marie, Louise, and Georgia.
Marie Davis told me Mary and Anna were her best playmates. She said Daddy bought either
a check or a stripe fabric at T. H. Lowery’s General Store in Patterson Springs, and her Mother
made Mary and Anna dresses. Lowery’s was established in 1896 and was the place they
shopped for many of their needs, including shoes. Parents measured their children’s feet with a
stick and took the stick to the store to get the right size shoes. Marie Davis told me she still has
the little pocketbook Nathan gave her for Christmas when he was about fifteen years old, and she
said Daddy used to cut her hair.
Daddy was a widower for six-and-a half years, from 1918-1924. His life revolved around his
five children. When they weren’t in school, they worked in the fields with him; even the little
ones could hoe weeds and pick berries. All of the children pitched in and helped at home. The
little ones could carry water, fill the box with firewood, empty ashes from the fireplace and
sweep.
Daddy did a fine job of raising them. They were hardworking, God-fearing, fun-loving kids,
devoted to him and to each other. Nathan was the only boy and naturally the girls doted on him.
He, in turn, teased them and made them laugh. He was Daddy’s right hand as he learned the art
of farming and he took the responsibility seriously. Savannah, as the oldest daughter, mothered
the younger girls and took on the responsibility of keeping the house. She and Ruth learned to
cook and sew and they taught Mary and Anna. The girls were proud of their domestic abilities
and Ruth won a prize for baking biscuits when she was in the sixth grade.
There was plenty to eat depending on the weather for a good crop of potatoes, corn, beans, and
other vegetables. If the weather was bad, sometimes the pickings were lean.
In general the daily lives of Americans changed more in the decade after World War I than in
the fifty years before it. America prospered and became the world’s creditor nation. It had the
highest average income of any country, and people found many new products on the market on
which to spend it.
There was a large population increase in Shelby from 1920-1930 causing a building boom.
Central Methodist Church built a new building on the square and in 1924 the tallest building in
town, the Masonic Building, was erected. Many large, modern homes were built on Washington
and Marion Street during this period replacing smaller frame structures, some of which were
moved to the back of the lots.
Spirits were up because World War I was proclaimed as “the war to end all wars.” The
Roaring 20’s was an era of lightheartedness, adventure, and fun. This decade was also known as
“The Jazz Age” as jazz music and dancing blossomed. Saxophones wailed sensual tunes. Tin
Pan Alley, on West 28th Street in New York between 5th and 6th Avenue was the music district
where publishers and songwriters made the music they danced to. African Americans were the
pioneers of jazz music and Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton,
Fletcher Henderson, and James P. Johnson were some of the masters.
Electric lighting made evening entertainment possible giving rise to an era of dance halls with
live music. Ballrooms across the United States sponsored dance contests and professional
dancers performed in Vaudeville circuits. The most popular dances were the foxtrot, waltz,
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tango, Charleston, and Lindy Hop. The song that is most associated with the Roaring Twenties
is “Charleston.”
Vernon and Irene Castles brought social dancing into the Jazz Age. He was British born, and
she was a doctor’s daughter from New Rochelle, New York. They made dancing seem so
effortless and their every move was reported by the press.
Bill Robinson, “Mr. Bojangles” was a gifted dancer in vaudeville and nightclub circles for
black audiences. He finally debuted for white audiences on Broadway in Blackbirds of 1928. A
few years later he began a string of music movies with child star Shirley Temple. Ginger Rogers
was a Vaudeville dancer, and Fred Astaire performed on Broadway. They teamed up to become
the most famous dancing duo ever.
The most noticeable change of the decade was the way women looked and acted. Their
apparel was altered radically. The popularity of slinky knee-length dresses exposing the legs and
arms labeled the wearers as “flappers” and this attire was a significant style change for women.
Gone were the corsets, the high necklines adorned with cameos and lockets, and the bustles and
long skirts of the Victorian Age. Gone, too, were the Gibson Girl hairdos piled high on top of
the head with tendril curls hanging down. When Irene Castles bobbed her hair and adorned it
with a seed pearl headache band, it rated a banner headline and became all the rage. Movie star,
Clara Bow, bobbed her hair, and young girls flocked to beauty salons to get the new cut. Along
with the new chin-length bobbed hair, for the first time make-up became extremely popular.
Young ladies smoked in public and danced till dawn to the lyrical songs of Richard Rodgers and
Cole Porter, the romantic waltzes of Irving Berlin, and the bouncy tunes of George and Ira
Gershwin. During the Roaring 20’s, Daddy’s girls bobbed their hair and favored the new
fashions with drop-waist style. They listened to the new jazz tunes on the radio and learned to
dance the Charleston.
Cocktails were popular, and since the sale and manufacture of liquor was banned by the
Eighteenth Amendment that was passed in 1919, it became the forbidden fruit. The song, “Little
Brown Jug”, written in 1869, enjoyed renewed popularity during the Prohibition era.
The most important result of the Eighteenth Amendment was that it placed hundreds of
millions of dollars in the hands of gangs of criminals in the cities of the United States and caused
a decline of respect for the law. Prohibition gave rise to the national underground industry of
gangsters who supplied liquor. The most notable was Al Capone. Speakeasies were popular
watering holes for illegal drinking, and many of them were elaborate, offering food, live music,
and striptease dancing. They became more popular and more numerous as the Prohibition years
progressed and many of them were connected to organized crime. It was a lucrative business,
and corruption was rampant. Many of the owners bribed the police to leave them alone or give
them advance notice of raids.
Another brand new business that was lucrative was manufacturing, smuggling, and
transporting whiskey. Rumrunners smuggled in thousands of cases of British whiskey from the
high seas and across the Canadian border, and trucks sped over the national highways hauling
illegal whiskey. Many of the bootleggers in the Southern mountains hauled white lightning from
the mountain stills where it was manufactured to cities and saloons where it was sold. The
drivers became shade-tree mechanics and turned their cars into professional racing vehicles in
order to outrun the law. Some of these bootleggers, like the Flock family of Ft. Payne, Alabama,
became stock car drivers and that was the beginning of the multi-million dollar National
Association of Stock Car Auto Racing. Many of NASCAR’s best known drivers, including
another pioneer of stock car racing, Junior Johnson of Wilkes County, North Carolina, learned
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and honed their talents evading the law by driving fast around the mountain hills with its the
hairpin turns and speeding across the gouged roads of the North Carolina countryside hauling
illegal bootlegged liquor. Johnson delivered his father’s moonshine whiskey to Winston-Salem,
Greensboro, and other cities. Junior Johnson is credited with inventing the bootleg turn, in
which a driver escapes the pursuer by putting his speeding car into a sharp 180 degree turn and
speeding off in the opposite direction before the pursuer can turn his car around. It took speed
and daring driving skills to outrun the law. Junior Johnson is quoted as saying that was one race
you couldn’t afford to lose.
Another daredevil business of the 1920’s was barnstorming. It was the first time most
Americans experienced the miracle of flying. As there were few airports, pilots landed in cow
pastures or open fields at the edge of town. Folks could view the flying machines, usually
biplanes, up close. Many of the pilots offered townspeople a spin for $5.00 or whatever the
market would bear. The pilot flew them over the town and the folks could look down from the
open-front cockpit and see familiar buildings and landscapes from the perspective of the air. At
the appointed hour of the event, the pilots demonstrated a series of breathtaking, daredevil spins,
turns, somersaults, loops, rolls, and stalls. If the event was held at county fairs for larger crowds,
there could be an entire flying circus. There could be wing-walking, aerial dogfights, changing
planes in midair, and other hair-raising stunts. Barnstorming was a very risky business and many
of the daring, cocky pilots and stuntmen were killed. But it was also the era that transportation
took to the air and by 1920 mailbags were being carried by air from New York to San Francisco.
Another milestone of the decade was the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920,
which granted women the right to vote and the political equality they had so long fought to get.
Neither of Daddy’s wives, Sallie nor Lizzie, in their short lives, had ever been able to vote in any
election.
Prior to World War I poets Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee
Masters had won the hearts of their countrymen with publishing their work on their views of life.
Robert Frost wrote about the beauty of nature in his Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening”and Carl Sandburg wrote about the city in his “Chicago Poems.” Carl Sandburg made
a great contribution to American history with his biography of Abraham Lincoln. It took him
thirty years to complete it. But after World War I, many authors seemed to be disenchanted with
the war and wished for a simpler time and this feeling of despair was reflected in their work.
Some of them whom Gertrude Stein dubbed as the ‘‘Lost Generation’’ were Ernest Hemingway,
T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Scott Fitzgerald. A number of them resided
in Europe or at least spent time in Paris as a glittering circle of expatriate writers.
Europe at first jeered at the American fads of the 1920’s but then eagerly copied them.
America was top dog in a period of prosperity and optimism. It was an era of unprecedented
industrial growth, accelerated consumer demands, and higher personal aspirations. Art
flourished and the Art Deco style of design and architecture peaked. Telephone lines were being
strung across the country, and for the first time many people had indoor plumbing and sewer
systems. The decade was distinguished by several discoveries and inventions of far-reaching
importance.
Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris aboard
the Spirit of St. Lewis, a single engine 223-horsepower plane. Five months after his famous
flight, on October 14, 1927, at 10 a.m. he flew the Spirit of St. Lewis over Cleveland County. All
eyes were trained on the sky hoping to catch of glimpse of Col. Lindbergh as he passed over Earl
and Kings Mountain in route from Spartanburg to Greensboro. He was accompanied by a U. S.
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Army airplane. He circled the area for about ten to fifteen minutes and came in low over the
business section of Kings Mountain. Many local people, including the Camp family, had the
opportunity to see him as he flew over.
New technology brought the automobile, movies, and radio. People in different states could
hum the same song they had heard on the radio the same day. In the Southeast, WBT in
Charlotte was the first commercial radio station. They were issued a license by the Department
of Commerce April 10, 1922.
Movies went from silent and black and white to color and sound. Hollywood movies filled the
world with daydreams as eighty-five percent of film production in the U. S. came from there.
Stars like Gloria Swanson, John Barrymore, Buster Keaton, Valentino, Clara Bow, Lillian and
Dorothy Gish, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford became household
names.
Mass production of technology made it affordable to the middle class. Henry Ford made his
motorcar, the Model T, called “The Tin Lizzie” available to the masses. By 1915, he drove more
than a million cars off of the assembly line and by the mid-1920’s automobiles were the favored
means of transportation. In 1923, there were 3,000 cars and trucks in Cleveland County. Daddy
bought a T-Model Ford to drive back and forth to town. He said he ordered the car and it came
in on a train to the Seaboard Depot near O. E. Ford Company on North Washington Street.
With slow travel by horse and buggy, people could only drive about twenty-five miles a day,
but in an automobile, people could travel and take a vacation and explore the whole country.
The emergence of automobiles made roads a necessity. The automobile contributed to the
demand for better highways. A license tax on each car and a tax on gasoline were used to build
all-weather roads. Demand for automobiles grew so fast that considerable revenue was acquired
to carry on the statewide road building program.
In Shelby the uptown streets around the court square and business section were paved with tar
and gravel around 1917-1919, during the years of World War I. In the years from 1929-1935 the
city streets were paved with asphalt. In 1921, the N. C. Legislature passed a bill to build
highways to connect the 100 county seats which are approximately 25-35 miles apart. The first
concrete highway in Cleveland County was built from Shelby through Kings Mountain to the
Gaston County line. The paved road went right past Cleveland Springs Hotel as was noted in
their promotional brochure, connecting with the National Highway from New York to
Jacksonville, Florida.
Daddy’s children were quickly growing up. Savannah met Gladys Phillips, from Gaffney, S.
C. when he came to work on the Cliff Davis farm. Marie Davis remembers that he was a very
nice young man, polite and always eager to help as he worked for Daddy as well as for her
Father. Gladys and Savannah were married April 5, 1924 in Gaffney, S. C. They moved to town
to the Shelby Cotton Mill village where Gladys became a loom fixer and a foreman on the
second shift at the mill. They had eleven children: Sallie Lorene, Jack Dean, Wilma Ray, Ida
Frances, Mary Louise, Billy Joe, Martha Jean, Gladys Marie, Mary Ruth, George Henry, and
Allen Steve. Their daughter, Lorene, died May 23, 1939 from appendicitis at age fourteen. She
is buried in Patterson Springs Church Cemetery.
Just five months after Savannah and Gladys wed; Daddy married his third wife, Edna Alberta
Shields. She was born January 20, 1909, in Spartanburg, S. C., a daughter of Perry Belton
Shields and Martha Penola Philbeck.
Our history of the Shields family goes back to Ireland in the 1700’s. Earlier spelling of the
name could have been Sheals. In 1790, there were 400,000 United States residents of Irish birth
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or ancestry. Half of this group descended from the Irish province of Ulster and the other half
came from the other Irish provinces. Those from Ulster were predominantly Protestant. They
became known as “Scotch-Irish” because they were descendents of Scottish and English tenant
farmers who were settled in Ireland by the British government in the 17th century. They came to
Ireland primarily from the Lowlands of Scotland and northern England. Scotland and England
had been at war almost constantly during the Middle Ages and the territories on either side of the
Anglo-Scottish border had been in conflict for centuries. Even when the two countries were not
fighting, tensions were high and royal authority was weak. England and Scotland became
unified under the Union of the Crowns when King James VI of Scotland succeeded Queen
Elizabeth I and became King James I of England in 1603. Along with the English crown, he
inherited the conflicts in Ireland. In 1609, he embarked on a system of relocating English and
Scottish Protestant settlers to Ireland’s northern province of Ulster to bring peace to the AngloScottish border country and also to provide warriors who could suppress the native Irish in
Ireland. In addition to this plantation, tens of thousands more people fled to Ulster in the 1690’s
due to a famine in Scotland.
By 1710, most of the farm leases granted to them in the 1690’s had expired and the mostly
absentee English and Anglo-Irish landlords withheld new leases until they agreed to pay more
rent, which most of them could not afford to do. They had lived on the Irish frontier and it was
natural for them to sail to a new frontier where land was plentiful and cheap.
Approximately 250,000 of them migrated to America during the Colonial era from 17171775 and settled from Maine to Georgia. The first Scotch-Irish settlers arrived in New England
and many of the first permanent settlements in Maine and New Hampshire after 1718 were
Scotch-Irish. They brought the potato with them from Ireland and it became a staple crop in
Maine as well as an economic base.
By 1750, the Scotch-Irish immigrants were about a fourth of the population, rising to about a
third by the 1770’s. Many of the immigrants found that the land of the coastal areas of the
British colonies was either already settled or too expensive, so they left for the frontier where the
undeveloped land was cheap. Settling the frontier was difficult but they were used to poverty
and hardship. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania and some headed to western
Pennsylvania into Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest. Many of the immigrants went from
Pennsylvania south into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and
Tennessee. A large concentration of them settled in the backwoods area of the Appalachian
Mountains, becoming the predominant ethnic strain of population there. These Scotch-Irish
“backwoodsmen” influenced the American culture and identity with their loyalty to kin similar
to a clan system, their extreme mistrust of all authority and government, their propensity to bear
arms and use them. Through decades of adversity, they had become self-reliant and because of
their uncertainty of existence, they never quite lost the feeling that they were surrounded by a
hostile world. The typical migration involved small groups of families who settled together,
intermarried, and avoided outsiders. These traits left their imprint, especially on the Upper
South, which is evident in the conservative voting patterns and religious affiliations in the Bible
Belt.
The term “hillbilly” has been used to describe their descendents in the Appalachian
Mountains. The word probably has Scottish origins and likely was derived from a combination
of two Scottish expressions, “hill-folk” and “billie” which was synonymous with “fellow.” The
term has the connotation of a socially backward and ignorant people prone to violence and
poverty.
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Approximately 100,000 mostly Irish Catholics came to America in the 1600’s and 100,000
more arrived in the 1700’s. Most of them were indentured servants, the most common way to
gain passage to the New World in the 17th and 18th century.
The Scotch-Irish who settled the frontier of Pennsylvania and Virginia were involved in the
French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion. They did most of the Indian fighting from New
Hampshire to the Carolinas and became the middlemen who handled trade and negotiations
between the various Indian tribes and the Colonial governments.
The Irish settlers were generally ardent supporters of the Colonies in their fight for
independence from Britain. Many of them participated in the American Revolution, leading one
British major general to comment that half the rebel Continental Army was from Ireland. Many
had lost everything when they left Ireland and they had intense hostility toward the British.
Their battle skills were so useful George Washington even remarked that if the cause was lost
everywhere else he would take a last stand among the Scotch-Irish of his native Virginia.
Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, with such a large Scotch-Irish population, made the
first declaration of independence from Britain in the Mecklenburg Declaration of 1775. Irish
Americans signed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and Irishman, Andrew
Jackson, served as President.
Transatlantic migration was halted by the American Revolution but a total of 100,000 Irish
arrived in America between 1783 and 1812. Many were craftsmen and settled in the industrial
northern cities such as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. They became skilled workers as
the Industrial Revolution began in America. Another half million Irish came to America from
1815 to 1845.
The Irish people came to America in droves during the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852) when
there was mass starvation and disease caused by a potato disease commonly called “potato
blight.”
One third of the population was entirely dependent on potatoes for food.
Approximately one million people died and another 1.5 million fled to the United States. Hugh
waves of the 19th century Irish Catholics settled primarily in port cities such as Boston, New
York, or Chicago. Descendants of the Protestant Irish began referring to themselves as ScotchIrish to distinguish them from the predominantly Catholic and largely destitute immigrants from
Ireland. (They called themselves Scotch-Irish. The term Scots-Irish is a relatively new term not
used until the 1970’s.) The two groups had little interaction in America as the Scotch-Irish had
settled years earlier mainly in the Appalachian mountain region and the new immigrants of Irish
Americans settled mostly in the Northern and Midwestern seaport cities.
Beginning in the early 19th century, many Irish migrated individually to the interior of the
country to work on large infrastructure projects like canals and later railroads. In 1850, there
was no group in American society lower than the Irish immigrants. But they arrived in a time of
need for America. The country was growing and needed men to do heavy work. The brawny and
industrious Irish built the railroads, bridges, and canals. Desperation drove them to these jobs.
They were unskilled and had to work for low wages. Women became chambermaids, cooks, and
caretakers of children. Blacks disliked the Irish and the feeling appeared to be mutual. Though
they mostly lived in impoverished conditions, the Irish loved America and fought furiously in
her wars. In the Civil War they were fierce warriors and formed units including the “Irish
Brigade.”
Mama’s Grandfather David Andrew Shields (1828-1863) was killed in the Civil War. He
enlisted July 1, 1862 in Spartanburg, S. C. as a private in Company D 3rd SC Infantry. He was
wounded at the Battle of Maryland Heights September 13, 1862 near Harpers Ferry, Virginia and
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was sent to a hospital and died in 1863. His five brothers, Thomas Marion Shields, Moses S.
Shields, Charles A. Shields, William H. Shields, and Elisha P. Shields also served in the
Confederacy. Elisha Shields, too, did not survive the war. This family’s story has been
preserved for posterity in The Legacy of a Common Civil War Soldier Private Thomas Marion
Shields, a collection of 34 letters written during the Civil War from 1861-1865, shared by his
great-granddaughter, history preservationist, Aliene Shields and put into historical context by
noted historian and author, Mac Wyckoff.
Another 900,000 Irish immigrants came to the United States from 1851-1899. From 19001930 about 5,000 to 10,000 came every year. Relatively few came after 1930. The Irish had
good organizational skills and with their ingenuity they gained acceptance and power. History
has proven them to be some of the noblest sons of our country.
Martha Penola Philbeck’s family originally came from Germany. Their name was Felbach,
then later Filbeck before it was changed to the current spelling.
Germans had first settled in Pennsylvania and many followed the Great Philadelphia Wagon
Road south settling along the Appalachian Mountains. Thousands of Germans fled to America
in 1848, when there was a failed revolution to overthrow feudalism and unite the 38 states into a
nation. By 1900, five million more Germans had made the journey across the ocean. Large
clusters of them settled in New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. Great
numbers of them became Midwestern farmers. Many of them, along with the Scandinavians,
settled in Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas in what was America’s 19th century
breadbasket. Along with the Scotch-Irish, they were the most numerous settlers of the area of
the North Carolina-South Carolina border where we live. German immigrants were diligent,
thrifty, and hardworking and were generally accepted by the earlier settlers.
Daddy met Mama when her family moved from Chesnee, S. C. to the Cliff Davis farm where
both families were sharecroppers. Daddy was forty-one years old, about the same age as
Mama’s parents. Cliff Davis’s daughter, Marie, said Mama was pretty, and she said Mama and
Daddy got acquainted and were attracted to each other.
Mama and Ruth became best friends, and Ruth liked to tell that she stole Mama for Daddy.
She went to town with him to pick out Mama's wedding dress, and on the day they got married,
Ruth came over and asked Granddaddy Shields to let Mama go home with her to get them a mess
of corn. Instead, Mama and Daddy went to Gaffney, S.C. and got married. It was September 25,
1924.
Mama moved across the field from her family’s home into the house with Daddy and his
children. Nathan was fifteen, the same age as Mama, Ruth was thirteen, Mary was ten, and Anna
was nine. Plus, a farm hand, Lee Melton, lived with them. So Mama married into a ready-made
family. She was used to doing housework and helped her Mother cook for their family and field
hands and helped look after her younger siblings who were two, four, seven, ten, and thirteen.
She traded taking care of one household for another.
In the next 23 years, Daddy and Mama had twelve children: Thelma Ione, John Marion
(Sammy), Emmett Wyattman, Billy Dwain, Edwin Carroll, Jerry Douglas, Nancy LaVonda
(Polly), Thomas Joseph, Robert Norman, Charles Ben, Martha Jane, and me.
Daddy and Mama’s first child, Thelma, was premature and stillborn on June 1, 1925. A year
later, Sammy was born on August 25, 1926.
The next month, Ruth married Lee Melton. Lee was an orphan and he was a teenager when
he came to work for Daddy. Other farmers he had worked for had let him sleep in their barn.
Daddy welcomed him into his home and made him part of the family.
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Lee told me when Ruth was twelve years old, she fell asleep in the swing, and he carried her
into the house. He said he decided that day he wanted to marry Ruth. As he watched her
blossom into a lovely young woman, he loved her more.
One day as he and Daddy were hoeing cotton, he asked for Ruth’s hand. He said Daddy
stopped hoeing and looked at him and told him, “Lee, I don’t guess anybody would ever be any
better to Ruth than you would.”
They were married September 18, 1926, in Gaffney, S. C. and raised their eight childrenJohn William, Ellen Marcell, Emma Yvonnie, Virginia Leoma, Paul Othneal, Shirley Alberta,
Barbara Jean, and Charles Stewart- in the mill village of Brookford outside of Hickory. Lee was
a loom fixer for Athena Mills, and served as an alderman for the town and Ruth worked at the
Brookford Café and Post Office, and she sewed furniture covers. Their daughter, Ellen, died
November 4, 1934, of burns from a fire when she was five years old. They buried her in
Elizabeth Baptist Church Cemetery next to where Daddy buried Sallie, her grandmother.
On July 11, 1928, when Sammy was two years old, Mama gave birth to another little boy.
Emmett had chronic gastritis, and he only lived four months until November 7. After his death,
the family left the Cliff Davis farm and moved to town. Daddy went to work in the textile mills.
Granddaddy Camp moved to Lattimore to live with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta and their
children. He died at their house on November 4, 1929, from a cerebral hemorrhage.
In the South an abundance of cotton and labor made farming and textiles a way of life.
Cotton fields blanketed the rural countryside. The machine age of farming started in the 1930’s
and the invention of tractors, plows, cultivators, combines, harvesters, tillers, harrows, hay
bailers, and other farm equipment made farming easier. But North Carolina was one of the
slowest states to change from mules to tractors. Most North Carolina farms were small, tractors
were expensive, and farm labor was cheap in the form or share-croppers, tenant farmers, and the
farmer’s own family. During the 1930’s Cleveland County was the wealthiest agricultural
county in the state.
Mill villages dotted the towns. By 1940, there were twenty-two textile mills in Cleveland
County, paying among the highest wages in the South. Generations of families worked in them.
The mills provided jobs, housing, a company store, and they contributed generously to the civic,
religious, and educational progress of the county. Schools, churches, hard surfaced roads, and
motor vehicles also improved the social and civic lives of the people. Shelby was a comfortable
place to live. It was a thriving town with successful businesses and well-maintained homes with
the convenience of indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water.
After the family moved to town, they joined Second Baptist Church. One Sunday, Ben
Grayson asked Mary for a date after church. When he arrived at Second Baptist Church to meet
her, his older brother, Forrest, was there, and he stepped in front of Ben and said, “She’s mine.”
That same year on May 11, 1929, Mary married Forrest Grayson in Union, S. C., the county
where her Mother, Lizzie, was from. Mary and Forrest lived in the Ella Mill village where they
raised their seven children: Mary Catherine, John Jackson, Peggy Joyce, Roger Ray, Patsy
Naomi, Ronald Dean, and Linda Ann.
They had a lively household, and they loved music. Forrest sang bass and he could play a
steel guitar, and even carved and made guitars. Mary could tear up the floor dancing the
Charleston. On Saturday nights friends gathered at their house and made music until the children
nearly fell asleep.
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Mary was a hairdresser, and she operated a beauty shop beside their house on Church Street.
She had some of the same customers for decades. Forrest worked at the Ella Mill in the office,
and he was a master mechanic.
Daddy also worked at the Ella Mill, and one day he ran a splinter in his hand while he was
employed there. The lead paint from the splinter caused blood poisoning, resulting in Daddy’s
left hand being crippled. An article on the front page of The Cleveland Star on April 4, 1930,
says that in a civil session of Superior Court held that day, Daddy’s attorney, Capt. Peyton
McSwain, took a voluntary non-suit and they settled out of court. Daddy was forty-seven years
old.
At that time there were only three children living at home: Nathan was twenty-one, Anna was
fourteen, and Sammy was three. Three months later on July 11, 1930, Nathan married Mama’s
younger sister, Ollie Shields, in Gaffney, S. C.
On August 7, 1931, Daddy and Mama had another little boy, but Billy was only two years old
when he died January 15, 1934 from measles and pneumonia. His obituary was on the front
page of The Cleveland Star. Daddy and Mama lost three of their first four children, plus Daddy
had lost Lula, the last child he and Lizzie had. Edwin was born September 16, 1933, a few
months before Billy died. Eighteen years separated the births of Anna and Edwin, so of the five
children born in that eighteen year period, Sammy was the only child who survived. One can
only imagine the heartache of losing so many children. At that time, 54 out of every 1,000
infants born in the United States died within the first year of their life and the infant mortality
rate in North Carolina was higher, with 66 out of 1,000 deaths.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Edwin was born in the midst of the Great Depression. Daddy was working as a night
watchman at Lily Mill. Nathan was driving a truck for Bowman Coal Company and he and Ollie
lived on Metcalf Road. Their son, James Randolph, was born three weeks before Edwin.
Daddy’s sister, Margaret “Mag” and her husband, F. L. “Pat” Patterson moved to LaGrange,
Georgia and owned a grocery store there. Uncle Mack and Aunt Hattie moved there, too, and
Uncle Mack went to work as a meat cutter in the grocery store. Their daughter, Trudy, was born
in LaGrange in 1934. Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta also moved to LaGrange, for a while. Their
daughter, Helen, was born while they lived in Georgia. Aunt” Mag” and Uncle “Pat” moved to
Brooksville, Florida, and she died there on February 19, 1934. Uncle Mack and Aunt Hattie and
Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta moved back to Cleveland County and Uncle Mack and Uncle
Charlie both worked at the Lily Mill. Uncle Mack later went into the construction business and
moved across the county to Kings Mountain. During this period, Mama’s brother, our Uncle
Lionel Shields, was working as a barber in uptown Shelby.
The Great Depression ended the Roaring 20’s and marked the beginning of debilitating
economic hardships. Despite the prosperity of the decade, all through the 1920’s too many
Americans had insufficient income. In the years following World War I, most of the farmers,
laborers, textile workers, and miners had not felt the prosperity, optimism, and good times. Low
farm prices, a surplus of workers, and new products that were labor-saving devices only
increased the number of unemployed. The market was overflowing with things to buy like
clothes, furniture, and cars without enough buyers. Many people needed these items, but had no
money to buy them. The cotton textile market was suffering. Ladies dress styles had changed.
Patterns in 1910 had required ten to twenty years of fabric but the new styles in 1920 only
required two yards. This loss of consumption, as well as the lack of exports for the goods, led to
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a saturated textile market. This was only one of the problems that led to the economic downfall.
Other factors were the demand for American manufactured goods decreased, the American
government adjusted tariffs, European countries recovered from World War I and no longer
needed aid from the United States, and foreign countries who owed money to the United States
did not meet deadlines on repayment,
America had made Wall Street the world’s money mart. Stocks had been rising at an
unprecedented rate for four years, especially since 1928. Everybody was buying stocks, and
many people were borrowing money to purchase them. The tide turned toward the middle of
October 1929, and on October 24, twelve million shares of stock changed hands. On October
29th, “Black Tuesday,” the stock market crashed. That day, sixteen million shares sold with
everyone frightened and trying to sell at once. Prices plunged. In a few days, $15 billion dollars
in market value was lost and by the year’s end it amounted to $40 billion dollars. In the financial
panic, people committed suicide by jumping out of windows, and many investors found that they
were penniless and losing their homes.
The economic downturn quickly spread to almost every country in the world. It was the
longest, most widespread, and deepest depression of the 20th century. Personal income, tax
revenue, profits, and prices dropped and international trade dropped by one- half to two-thirds.
Unemployment in the United States rose to twenty-five percent and in some countries it was
as high as thirty-three percent. Cities around the world were hit hard, especially those cities that
were dependent on heavy industry. In most countries, construction virtually halted.
The Federal Reserve allowed some large public banks to fail, resulting in panic and
widespread runs on local banks. They began failing as debtors defaulted on loans, and
depositors withdrew their money. In all, 9,000 banks failed during the 1930’s. The money
supply dropped quickly, and businesses could not get new loans or renew their old ones.
Bankers were so unpopular from 1931-1935, that notorious bank robbers, John Dillinger and
Bonnie and Clyde, became folk heroes.
President Herbert Hoover started several programs, but all of them failed to reverse the
downturn. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found themselves homeless. Conditions were
worse in logging and mining areas, where unemployment was high and there were few other
jobs, and in farming areas where commodity prices plunged as much as sixty percent. Six
million farmers were crushed under the weight of $10 billion dollars in mortgages. These
bankrupt farmers had fed the armies of Europe in prosperous years.
President Hoover was an engineer who had run the Commerce Department efficiently and fed
the starving Belgians during World War I. He oversaw thousands of tons of food that was
shipped to Poland during the War, but his theory was that Federal relief would create deadbeats
who would prefer government hand-outs to working for a living, thus he gave food to starving
cattle in Arkansas but not to starving farm families. Congress had authorized the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation to lend up to three hundred million dollars to the states for relief purposes,
but President Hoover lent only one-tenth of this money for relief, while he unhesitatingly loaned
$90 million dollars to save a bank in Chicago. President Hoover wanted socially responsible
individuals in communities to take care of those less fortunate and urged volunteer charities,
local assistance, and states to provide relief.
To break the tension people made bitter jokes. Empty pockets turned inside out were known
as “Hoover flags,” and broken down automobiles hauled by mules were called “Hoover
wagons.” Daddy said President Hoover promised there would be a car in every garage and a
chicken in every pot. Daddy said he kept his promise. The car sat in the garage because you
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couldn’t afford gas to drive it, and the chicken was in the pot because you couldn’t afford to feed
it.
President Hoover came to Cleveland County and visited Kings Mountain on October 30,
1930. He came to the Sesqui-Centennial celebration of the Revolutionary War Battle of Kings
Mountain. He rode down on a special train from Washington to speak at the event
commemorating the importance of that great battle in the fight for our nation’s independence.
He was the first sitting president to visit our county and his presence dignified the occasion.
Many people in the county were out of work, wages and prices were low, industrial plants were
closed, and cotton was down to ten cents a pound, but the President still came.
Thousands of people turned out to see him and farmers rode to town in “Hoover Carts.” The
tented event featured refreshments, bands, soldiers, and a vast array of military equipment. In
Lee B. Weather’s book, The Living Past of Cleveland County, he remembers that as the
Presidential special train pulled in at the railroad station, President Hoover was standing on the
rear of the observation car. But the spectators were in no mood to cheer and there was no
demonstration of welcome whatsoever, for they felt that he was responsible for the plight they
were in.
By March 1931, eight million Americans were walking the streets looking for work.
Businesses cut wages of workers that still had jobs. Cotton mill workers in High Point,
Rockingham, and other towns went on strike because of lower wages. Lives were filled with
worry, hunger, sickness, and despair. Disease and malnutrition escalated.
Breadlines
sometimes stretched out for blocks. Winter was the worst time. The homeless stuffed old
newspapers under their clothes to keep warm and shivered in box cars and froze on the streets, as
they lined up for a free cup of watery soup and a slice of stale bread.
There was a growing hobo population as men who had once been successful businessmen
were riding the rails in boxcars from place to place looking for work. They slept in barns,
abandoned buildings, makeshift shelters and hobo camps close to the railroad tracks. They
worked for a few dollars at whatever job they could find and sent money back home to their
families.
In the United States the worst years of the Great Depression were 1932 and 1933. At one
time there were fifteen million men and women out of work. From the beginning, 1932 was a
difficult year for America. As the Depression deepened, frustrations mounted. In December of
1931, a small band of Communists led a hunger march in Washington, D. C. A few weeks later,
a Pittsburgh priest led 12,000 unemployed men to Washington to plead for unemployment
legislation. In March, a riot in Michigan at Ford's River Rouge plant left four people dead and
more than fifty others wounded. So two months later, when thousands of jobless veterans began
arriving in the capital in May, tensions were already high.
By June, as many as 20,000 American armed service World War I veterans besieged
Washington. They were there in support of Texas Congressman Wright Patman’s bill to advance
the bonus payment promised to World War I veterans in the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of
1924.
Under the law, a grateful Congress had authorized a plan to compensate the veterans for
wages lost while serving in the military during the war. Each Service Certificate that had been
issued to a qualified veteran soldier had a face value equal to the soldier’s promised payment,
plus compound interest. The bonus amounted to $1.25 for each day served overseas and $1.00
for each day served in the United States. The problem was that the certificates did not mature
until twenty years from the date they were originally issued, thus the Service Certificates could
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not be redeemed until 1945. This delayed compensation was acceptable to the veterans during
the prosperous 1920’s, but by 1932 in the darkest days of the Great Depression, the veterans
were unemployed and destitute and they needed the money immediately.
In 1931, the year before the veterans came to Washington, Congress overrode President
Hoover’s veto on a bill to loan the veterans half the amount of the money due them. As the
country sunk deeper into an economic downturn, the half-bonus loans were not enough, so
unemployed veterans sought the balance of their compensation in cash. They converged on
Washington hoping they could pressure Congress to pass the legislation and convince Congress
to make the payments immediately to provide relief due to their unemployment.
Many of the veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. In
desperation they hopped freight trains, drove broken down jalopies, walked, or hitchhiked to
Washington. Some of them were starving. Many were dressed in rags or battered military
uniforms and wearing shoes patched with cardboard. Others were wearing no shoes at all.
These were the same men, along with others, who had been cheered as they proudly marched
down Pennsylvania Avenue in wartime parades as American heroes of World War I.
A large number of this Bonus Expeditionary Force or Bonus Army, as they called themselves,
had brought their families with them and moved into a row of condemned buildings in
downtown Washington. Some of them set up camps on vacant lots outside of Washington, just
across the Anacostia River from Capitol Hill and built ramshackle shacks of cardboard and
sheets of tin covered in tar paper and scraps or wood, iron and any other materials scavenged
from a nearby garbage dump. The largest camp housed approximately 10,000 people. The
camps were laid out with streets and sanitation facilities were built. People referred to the
shantytown village as “Hooverville.” (This village resembled many others set up on vacant lots
across the country by countless homeless people during this dismal period.)
The veterans used the camps as a base for their peaceful, patriotic demonstrations and daily
parades before the Capitol and marches past the White House demanding their promised
payments. They were led by a 34 year old cannery worker and former sergeant from Portland,
Oregon named Walter W. Waters. Their plight was alleviated somewhat by Washington Police
Superintendent Pelham D. Glassford, himself a war veteran. He treated the veterans with
respect, agreed to serve as secretary-treasurer of the group and acquired food, supplies, clothing,
and medical assistance for them through private aid.
Working together, Waters and Glassford maintained enough discipline and order in the camps
to ward off eviction. The camps were tightly controlled, and in order to live in them, residents
were required to register and prove they had been honorably discharged. The leaders announced
that there would be no drinking, panhandling, and no radicalism and they proclaimed that the
Bonus Army was only going to stay until the veterans’ bill was passed.
The veterans waited in vain for Congress to act. The Patman bill narrowly passed the House
of Representatives on June 15th, and the veterans were encouraged, despite President Hoover’s
vow to veto it. But the bill was blocked June 17th in the Senate by a vote of 62 to 18 and tempers
began to flare. The administration opposed the bill, believing it to be inflationary and
impractical in view of the $2 billion dollar annual budget deficit.
When they were unsuccessful at getting their military bonus, many of the veterans felt
betrayed and disillusioned. Congress did offer them $100,000 to help pay for their return home.
Six thousand of them took the money and left, but the rest of the veterans refused to leave.
Many of them had nowhere else to go, so they decided to stay in Washington even though
Congress had adjourned for the summer. Their leader, Walter W. Waters said they would stay
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until the Patman bill was passed, even until 1945 if necessary. President Hoover refused to give
Waters an audience.
On July 21, Police Superintendent Glassford was ordered to begin evacuating several
buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, using force if necessary. Tensions between the tired, hungry,
and frustrated veterans and the Washington police reached a boiling point. To make matters
worse, the American Communist Party sent John Pace into the midst of the marchers to incite the
veterans to become more aggressive and to riot. The degree of his success was a small factor,
but his presence alarmed the Hoover administration.
In the stifling summer heat, frustrations led to confrontations. The police asked for federal
assistance. The law exempting the military assisting the police does not apply to Washington, D.
C. because it is governed by the Congress. On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D.
Mitchell ordered Superintendent Glassford and the Washington police to remove the veterans
from all government property. The police were met with resistance. There was gunfire and two
veterans were killed and two others were seriously injured.
President Hoover then used the military to force them out of Washington. He ordered
Secretary of War Patrick Hurley to dispense the army to clear out the veterans. An infantry and
cavalry supported by six battle tanks marched down Pennsylvania Avenue commanded by Army
Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower was his liaison with
the Washington police and Major George S. Patton, Jr. led the cavalry.
Since it about 4:30 p.m., thousands of civil service employees and hundreds of curious office
workers interrupted their daily routine and hung out of windows or left work to watch. They
lined the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol, the area
called “America’s Main Street” because it is the location of official parades as well as protest
marches.
At first, the veterans cheered the nearly 600 troops because they thought the display was in
their honor. When Major Patton ordered the cavalry to charge the veterans, they were
momentarily stunned in disbelief. No weapons were fired but some blood was shed as the
cavalry advanced with their swords drawn and began pushing the veterans out, destroying their
makeshift camps as they went. As the civil service spectators watched the U. S. Army attack its
own veterans they yelled, “Shame! Shame!” Few images from the Great Depression are more
disturbing than the sight of the federal government turning on its own citizens, especially
veterans. Many decades later, the pictures are still shocking.
Some of the veterans began running from the oncoming soldiers, but angry packs of them
yelled profanities and wielded clubs and iron bars, or hurled bottles and bricks at the troops. Of
course these weapons were ineffective against so formidable a force. The infantry donned masks
and tossed gas grenades into the crowd causing most of the remaining unarmed veterans to flee
in panic. The troops cleared downtown Washington without firing a shot. But by nightfall,
hundreds of people had been injured by bayonets, sabers, bricks, clubs, and gas.
After the cavalry charged the infantry, they attempted to evict the men from the buildings and
drive the inhabitants from their shacks. They set the abandoned camp ablaze as the veterans,
demoralized and beaten, fled across the Anacostia River to their largest camp.
The government’s next move was the most controversial moment. President Hoover worried
that the government’s actions world appear too harsh and he feared repercussions, so he did not
want the Army to pursue the veterans across the bridge to their main camp on the other side of
the Anacostia River.
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Twice Secretary of War Hurley sent orders to General MacArthur not to pursue the veterans
cross the bridge. Having driven the veterans from the downtown area, General MacArthur had
fulfilled his mission. He called a halt and allowed his troops to eat and rest. But after pausing
several hours to allow as many people as possible to evacuate, General MacArthur sent his men
across the bridge anyway.
MacArthur refused to listen to explicit instructions, saying he did not have time to be
bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.
Whether General MacArthur wanted to inflict a coup de grace against the angry veterans or
he felt that the veterans were being encouraged by a Communist attempt to overthrow the U. S.
Government, he ignored the President and ordered the infantry to advance across the 11th Street
Bridge leading to the Anacostia camp.
Someone came running out to the troops, waving a white shirt as a flag of surrender, pleading
for time to evacuate the women and children. General McArthur granted them one hour to leave
the camp.
Then the troops drove the Bonus Army and their families out by wielding bayonets affixed to
rifles and grenades of adamsite gas, an arsenical vomiting agent. A baby succumbed to tear gas
and two more veterans died. Nearby hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties. The 10,000
inhabitants of the Bonus City fled in terror and the Army torched the camp to ensure that the
veterans and their families would not return. Their shelters and belongings were burned. The
sight of the blaze became the iconic image of the greatest unrest the nation’s capital has ever
known.
The first sentence of the New York Times account of the incident said, “Flames rose high over
the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the
World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.”
Major Eisenhower later wrote, "The whole scene was pitiful. The veterans were ragged, ill-fed,
and felt themselves badly abused. To suddenly see the whole encampment going up in flames
just added to the pity."
To Major Patton’s dismay, among the men who were evicted was Joseph Angelo, a soldier
who fourteen years earlier had saved the wounded Patton’s life during World War I by pulling
him to safety from a foxhole.
In an attempt to eliminate any doubt about his motives, General MacArthur conducted an
impromptu press conference claiming that the Communists had instigated the riot to undermine
the U. S. government, saying that the president’s safety was at stake and that the movement was
more dangerous than just an effort of military veterans trying to secure funds that were owed
them from a nearly depleted federal treasury.
President Hoover had watched flames from the fire at the Anacostia camp from a window at
the White House. In his statement the next morning, he vigorously supported General
MacArthur. He said, “A challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been
met, swiftly and firmly.”
General MacArthur and President Hoover seemed to believe that Communists controlled the
Bonus Army and that veterans made up a small percent of the organization. But their estimates
were vastly inaccurate. The Veterans Administration conducted a post event study and revealed
that ninety-four percent of the marchers had U. S. Army or Navy service records.
Throughout their lives, both MacArthur and Hoover stubbornly claimed that it was a
revolutionary situation and that the Communist Party, intent on destroying the U. S.
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Government, was behind the veterans. Neither one of them ever accepted the Bonus Army as a
group of destitute men trying to get the bonus money they needed to support their families.
There was a rush to point fingers and the news media and public figures were divided in
their opinions about the episode. Some of them felt that the men in public office who
encouraged the veterans to make demands for the bonus money were to blame. Others felt that
the government overreacted. Some Americans thought the government’s actions against the
veterans was unfortunate but necessary to maintain law and order. But most Americans
protested the treatment of the veterans and were appalled that President Hoover and General
MacArthur attempted to defend their actions. Presidents had called out the military before to
suppress civil unrest, but this was the first time the federal troops had been used against veterans.
The public increasingly questioned the government's response to the plight of the Bonus Army.
Many came to see it as callous and heavy-handed. Theater audiences reacted to Bonus Army
newsreel footage with choruses of boos.
Public outcry from the episode was a factor in President Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 election.
It was unlikely that Hoover would have been reelected even without the black eye of the Bonus
Army fiasco. He was already viewed as the villain of the Great Depression who proposed too
little too late. The nation was ready for an administration change.
Hoover’s Democratic opponent in the presidential election that fall was New York Governor,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He did not support payment of the veterans’ bonus either, but he
found President Hoover’s tactics appalling. What he did support was government assisted
programs. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president by a landslide. He carried 42 states with
472 electoral votes compared to 59 for Hoover.
President Roosevelt was inaugurated March 4, 1933. He immediately began his New Deal
programs that sought to provide work and relief for the impoverished by increasing government
spending and instituting financial reforms.
An assortment of commissions was set up to regulate Wall Street, the banking industry, and
other business enterprises. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 created the Securities and
Exchange Commission and Federal insurance on bank deposits was provided by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation. He set minimum wages and maximum hours. Several
government agencies were set up to attempt economic stimulus, which added the Social Security
Act of 1935. This program ensured an income for the elderly and the Works Projects
Administration provided worker-relief job programs for the unemployed. President Roosevelt
established the Civilian Conservation Corps to put young men to work reclaiming lands and
forests, planting trees, and cleaning up State parks. It became the most popular of all the New
Deal agencies. More than 27,000 North Carolina men participated in sixty-one CCC Camps in
North Carolina. One camp was located in Shelby off of Gidney Street.
Following President Roosevelt’s election, he did not want to pay the veterans military bonus
money either. In March 1933, he issued an executive order allowing 25,000 veterans to enroll in
the Civilian Conservation Corps for work in forests. The veterans marched on Washington again
in May 1933, and the President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, chatted with them over coffee and
persuaded many of them to sign up for the Works Projects Administration jobs of making a
roadway from the southernmost portion of U. S. Route 1 to the Florida Keys.
During the Great Depression North Carolina mined its vast resources. Feldspar, talc, granite,
mica, and kaolin were important to the state and to the nation. Many people searched for gold
since this was the first state in the nation to have a gold rush during 1830-1840.
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Despite the economic downturn of the Great Depression, North Carolina was still the leading
industrial state in the southeast and the nation’s largest producer of textiles, tobacco products,
and forest products. The chief product of the Tar Heel State was cotton and the major industry
was textile manufacturing. North Carolina had more mills than any other state and employed
more workers and housed one-fourth of all the spindles in the entire textile industry. Many of
those employed in the mills were women. They worked for a lower wage than men.
Due to its textile output, North Carolina required less relief during the depression than most
states and contributed more to support the Federal government per capita than any other state
except Delaware. But due to the high number of young and older persons living in the state,
forty percent of the residents were not of an age to seek employment. The very young and the
very old were dependent on the employed population, increasing the burden of many residents of
the state.
The school dropout rate for the nation in 1940 was seventy-five percent and it was even
higher than that during the worst years of the Great Depression. Contributing factors to the dropout rate was the need to work to help support the family and by embarrassment over shabby
clothes, inadequate school supplies, and lack of lunch money. Schools across the country closed
because of lack of funding, but not a single public school in North Carolina failed to operate on
full schedule during those years.
A drought began in North Carolina and much of the nation. In the mid-1930’s an unending
drought in the Midwest withered the wheat crops and caused wells to go dry. A westward wind
of brown dust storms blew layers of topsoil away, caused erosion, left rural roads impassable,
and buried farms. Mounds of sand and clouds of dust caused hundreds of thousands of people to
be displaced from their farms in America’s agricultural heartland. Drought reduced soil in the
Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Texas to a dry powder.
In the Dust Bowl, people covered their faces with wet cloths but still many of them suffered
and died from dust pneumonia. Swarms of boll weevils and other insects invaded the land
ravishing the crops. Grasshoppers proliferated across the Great Plains and ate virtually
everything- grain, vegetables, leaves on the trees, clothes hanging out to dry and even corks out
of water jugs.
As if unemployment, drought, insects, and crop failure weren’t enough to contend with, the
1930’s was a decade of unusual weather. Two hurricanes hit the North Carolina coast in August
and September 1933. The third-strongest hurricane ever measured hit the Florida Keys on Labor
Day, September 2, 1935, killing 258 of the World War I veterans, who had been part of the
Bonus Expeditionary Army and were working with the Works Projects Administration building
the Overseas Highway to Key West. Public sentiment over the newsreels of the veterans losing
their lives moved Congress to override a Roosevelt veto in 1936 to give the Bonus Expeditionary
Army veterans their bonus ten years early. They paid nearly $2 billion dollars in veterans’
benefits.
During the winter of 1935-1936 a bone-chilling cold covered much of the nation. According
to the United States Geological Service it is the coldest weather ever in the forty-eight
contiguous states. It was so cold Niagara Falls completely froze solid. During the summer of
1936 it was just the opposite. Four states hit record high temperatures above 120 degrees and
eleven more states set all-time record high temperatures that still hold today. The year 1936 still
holds the record for the highest national average temperature since 1869.
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In addition to extreme temperatures in 1936, floods raged through the East, especially New
Jersey where highways were under water and washouts wrecked several trains. Damage of
$500,000 dollars was reported and 200 people dead.
Most of the United States was short of rain. When unusually cold winter air met unusually
warm spring air, a system of storms developed and caused two of the nation’s worst weatherrelated disasters in the United States history. Tornados occurred April 5th in Tupelo, Mississippi
and April 6th in Gainesville, Georgia leaving in its wake mind-numbing devastation and 216
people killed and over 700 injured in Tupelo and 203 people killed and over 1,600 injured in
Gainesville. The front also spawned deadly tornadoes in Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee.
My friend, Allen Martin, III, from Gainesville, Georgia, whose family witnessed the dual
tornados that collided that morning, said the winds were so severe broom straws were driven into
telephone poles, automobiles were turned around in the opposite direction, money was all over
the street, and a statue in the town square was blown into the next county. People sought refuge
in ditches and nearly drowned from torrential rains. The city was laid waste. A fire destroyed a
multi-storied building that housed the Cooper Pants Factory, killing over a hundred workers.
School children who sought shelter in a downtown department store building were killed when
the building collapsed. They had to dynamite the buildings to stop the fire. My friend, Allen’s,
Great Uncle and his two children were among those killed in the tornados.
Three days after the storm, President Roosevelt, who was on his way from Washington, D. C.
to Warm Springs, Georgia, stopped in Gainesville and witnessed the destruction.
People felt a great respect for President Roosevelt in his attempts to turn the nation’s
economy around. President Roosevelt toured the Great Smoky Mountains in September of that
year to check the progress of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. He
had passed a bill in 1933 to provide $1.5 million to develop it.
He spent the night of September 9th in Asheville at the Grove Park Inn. The next day, on
September 10th, he gave a speech in Asheville, telling the people that he was tremendously
impressed with work that was being done to open up of the Great Smoky Mountains through the
National Park. Most of the stores, businesses, and schools closed so people could see the
president.
He then traveled by car from Asheville to Charlotte to give a speech at the Green Pastures
Democratic Rally. Thousands of people lined the roadways from Asheville to Charlotte to see
the president’s motorcade. Despite a sudden downpour of rain, people kept their place along the
road or streets in Rutherfordton, Forest City, and Ellenboro.
In Shelby, thousands of people gathered early in the morning to get a place along the route. It
was the first time a president had ever visited Shelby. Welcome banners were displayed on West
Warren Street, the route he was taking through town. Thousands of people lined the streets for
miles, stood in store windows, and on top of buildings and climbed trees to see him as he passed.
They waited for hours in the summer heat and a shower of rain. His entourage got on the wrong
street and passed through town one street over, on Marion Street. Disappointed people ran over
fences and across yards to try to catch a glimpse of him as he passed. Daddy told of seeing
President Roosevelt’s motorcade and many people, including Cousin Janice Ledford, remember
where they were standing on Warren Street and how they ran to the next block to get to see him.
In October 1936, President Roosevelt made a ten day tour of the Northeast and it brought out
the largest crowd in the history of politics at that time. On city streets and country roads,
millions of people lined the streets to see this man they loved so much. In Boston 150,000
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people mobbed his entourage and in New York City millions lined the streets for the thirty miles
of his route.
In the presidential election the next month, in a loud clear voice the American people proved
they were for President Roosevelt. He was swept back into office in a landslide victory carrying
every state except Maine and Vermont. The electoral vote was 523 to 8. His New Deal
programs had captured the hearts of the American people, the economy was turning around and
in the minds of the voters they credited him with accomplishing this almost singlehandedly. The
government agencies he had created had put people back to work and industrial production,
income, and stock prices were up. Old people looked forward to their Social Security pension,
young people were assisted with furthering their education by the National Youth
Administration, and bank depositors would no longer lose their deposits.
In an attempt to balance the federal budget in 1937, the Roosevelt administration cut spending
and increased taxation. This caused a thirteen month economic downturn that lasted through
most of 1938. After a recovery from the Recession of 1937-1938, some of the worker relief
programs were abolished, but Social Security remained in place. America did not totally recover
from the Great Depression until 1941, when it entered into World War II but the unemployment
problem was solved by the massive defense spending that began in 1939.
The Great Depression turned The American Dream into a nightmare. What once was a land
of opportunity became a land of desperation. It caused emotional as well as financial trauma,
and the grim memory of breadlines remained indelible in American consciousness. Historians
continue to re-evaluate the causes and effects of those years.
Americans faced the uncertain future with bravery and hope. In destitution, there was a sense
of community that prevailed in the nation. People worked together to soften the effects of hard
times. Folks shared what they had with each other. Those who had work helped those who
didn’t. Families learned the difference between needs and wants, and hard times brought them
closer. What they lacked materially they made up for spiritually. Through hard times they
learned perseverance and faith and learned to trust and believe in themselves.
Apple peddlers were a symbol of the bleakest years of the Great Depression and men, many
who had once been business owners, engineers, stockbrokers, mechanics, and clerks stood on
street corners in the cities and sold their polished apples for a nickel.
Food was important to everybody and making dishes that were nourishing, affordable, filling,
and satisfying was a challenge to most cooks. The Depression era was known for food disguises.
Cookbooks told how to improvise, and gave tips on touches that would add flair to ordinary
meals. Marshmallows were popular during the Depression and were a hit as snacks and used in
desserts.
Food companies developed new products including Hormel’s Spam, Bird’s Eye’s frozen
foods, Pepperidge Farm Loaf, Bisquick, Ritz Crackers, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup,
Gallo’s Wines, Toll House Cookies, Girl Scout Cookies, and Nestle’s Chocolate Chips,
The economic downturn had a social impact on families. They shopped at dime stores, which
sold everything from toiletries to household goods. Many families used Depression glass, an
inexpensive machine-made dinnerware that came in oatmeal and detergent boxes and was
sometimes given at movie theatres and as premiums at gas stations or insurance companies.
Though later the dishes were highly prized collectibles, during the Great Depression they sold
for about a nickel, the same price as a loaf of bread.
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People mended and repaired what they could instead of buying new things. More families
sewed their own clothes and made garments from flour and feed sacks when cloth was too
expensive.
With the scarcity of money, and often insecure about prospects of getting more, people
hoarded what little they had. With a lack of currency in circulation, “scrip” money, a substitute
for currency and not legal tender, was used during the Great Depression at an unprecedented rate
by state governments, municipalities, school districts, manufacturers, and merchants. Mills paid
employees in scrip that could be used at the company store. Enormous mark-up on goods
enforced their loyalty to the company by making the workers dependent on the company. If
scrip was exchanged for cash, it was rarely done so at face value.
Since money was scarce, people did what they could to make their lives happy. Dance
marathons were popular and people danced to the sweet sounding big band swing music of Guy
Lombardo, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and the horn arrangements of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn
Miller, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.
People were amused by crazes like flagpole sitting. They had spelling bees, quilting bees,
and attended ballgames. They went to movies to keep their spirits high and escape the grim
world. There were more than 15,000 theatres across the nation, and admission was ten to fifteen
cents. Some of the memorable 1930’s movies were “The Wizard of Oz,” “Gone With The
Wind,” “Frankenstein,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “It Happened One Night,” “All
Quiet On The Western Front,” and “Mutiny On the Bounty.” Walt Disney’s “The Three Little
Pigs” with the hit tune “Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf” reminded people not to be afraid
and “Snow White,” his first feature-length cartoon, with uplifting tunes “Someday My Prince
Will Come,” “Whistle While You Work,” and “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go”
encouraged people to enjoy their work and to face the future with hope.
Serials were popular short subjects that were shown between the cartoons and the feature film
and were as important as the main feature. They also kept movie-goers coming back week after
week as each chapter ended with a cliffhanger. Some of the stars of the serials were Mickey
Rooney, Tom Mix, Jackie Cooper, Dick Tracy, Rin-Tin-Tin, Buster Crabbe, The Green Hornet,
Zorro, Mandrake the Magician, Red Ryder, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Terry and the
Pirates, Bela Lugosi, and Clyde Beatty.
With a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial and first feature and a second feature, the whole movie
show could last for four hours. It gave people an afternoon or evening of pleasure and relief
from day to day worries.
There were plenty of things to do that cost no money. Mostly people stayed home and
worked jigsaw puzzles, played parlor games and board games. They gathered around the radio,
danced to big band music, and listened to popular radio shows. It was the golden age of the
radio, the most popular form of American entertainment, offering adventure, comedy, drama,
horror, mystery, romance, thriller, and classical, big band, and country music, farm reports, news
and commentary, quiz shows, panel discussions, sports broadcasts, weather forecasts, and talent
shows.
The Camp family gathered around the big floor model radio in the living room and listened to
a variety of programs. They turned on Grady Cole’s show at WBT in Charlotte first thing each
day for the morning news.
Daddy and Mama tuned in to hear President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, a series of thirty
evening radio speeches, given between the years 1933 and 1944. Audiences were soothed by his
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soft spoken wonderfully appealing Harvard-accented voice over the radio. He had reminded
them in his inaugural speech that there was nothing to fear but fear itself.
On Sundays, the Camp family turned on Walter Winchell, radio’s most famous journalist, in
time to hear him begin his program with his famous opening greeting, “Mr. and Mrs. America
and all the ships at sea.” Another weekly Sunday show they enjoyed was Will Rogers’ popular
radio program, The Gulf Headlines. Will Rogers, one of the best known celebrities, was a
cowboy, an actor, a social commentator, and a comedian. He wound up his famous alarm clock
and it buzzed to alert him to wrap up his comments at the end of the program.
The family liked the comedy shows of Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, W. C. Fields,
Burns and Allen, and especially Jimmy Durante with his famous sign off line, “Good night Mrs.
Calabash, wherever you are.” Other favorites were Lum and Abner and Abbott and Costello
which was one of the most influential comedy programs in history. Amos ’n’ Andy were the
most popular characters of a comedy series. They were created by a pair of white vaudevillians
speaking in black voices. The Ripley’s Believe It or Not stories could not always be verified, but
they were worth hearing because they were incredible. Other lovable characters were Our Gal
Sunday and Charley McCarthy, a dummy.
The kids liked the shows adapted from the comic strips, Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and
Fibber McGee and Molly. Sammy especially enjoyed The Shadow, a detective story program
about an invincible crime fighter who never disclosed his identity and The Green Hornet, a
program about a masked superhero vigilante who fought crime.
The Camp family listened to country music from The Red Foley Show and The Grand Ole
Opry, the longest continuously running radio show in the nation. Perry Como was a young
vocalist who was one of the most popular singers of the era. Some of the popular, timeless, and
endearing songs of the Depression era are “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “My Blue Heaven,”
“Sleepy Time Gal,” “How I Adore The Girl Next Door,” “All The Things You Are,” and
“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” They were songs of hope and of love, two dreams anyone can
dream that cost no money.
Most of the songs of the era were about keeping your chin up, things will get better, but some
of the songs were about money. “Pennies From Heaven,” “We’re in The Money,” “With Plenty
of Money And You,” and “I Found A Million Dollar Baby” were hits, but the song that was
considered the anthem of the Great Depression was “Brother Can You Spare A Dime?” a song
about the plight of the average man on the street.
A popular radio program was a drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. One
event that stayed in the minds of the radio listeners during that era was the night they aired an
adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel, War of the Worlds. It was performed as a Halloween
episode October 30, 1938 and was directed and narrated by Orson Welles. The program ran
without commercial breaks and the first two-thirds of the episode was a series of simulated news
bulletins suggesting to the listeners that an actual alien invasion of Martians was currently in
progress. People really believed they were being invaded by Martians and were scared to death.
The extent of the public panic in the response to the episode caused a widespread outrage. In the
following days newspapers and public figures led an outcry against the perpetrators of the
broadcast.
Sports enthusiasts could participate in events across the nation through radio broadcasts.
They could listen to boxing matches of the great Joe Louis and baseball games played by
legendary Lou Gehrig.
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Among the news stories highlighted on the radio were: on December 10, 1936, King Edward
VIII abdicated the British throne to marry Baltimore divorcee, Wallis Warfield Simpson. On
July 10, 1938, Howard Hughes left New York and broke all records when he flew around the
world in three days and nineteen minutes. In July 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth
was the first reigning British monarch to visit the United States and attended the World’s Fair in
New York.
This era was also the golden age of mystery novels, and writers like Agatha Christie, Dashiell
Hammett, and Raymond Chandler were popular. Novelist, John Steinbeck, was awarded both
the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath about a poor family
of sharecroppers, who were forced from their home because of drought and economic hardship
of the Great Depression. Other important novels set in the Depression era are Steinbeck’s Of
Mice and Men and Lee Harper’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Additional bestselling authors of the era included Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck,
Margaret Mitchell, Daphne de Maurier, A. J. Cronin, Lloyd C. Douglas, James Hilton, Charles
Morgan, Hervey Allen, Walter D. Edmonds, Ellen Glasgow, Warwick Deeping, Rachel Field,
Louis Bromfield, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Mazo del la Roche, and Thomas Wolfe.
For children and adults alike the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin
introduced Little Big Books which sold for a dime. The first one was The Adventures of Dick
Tracy. Other titles followed including characters Little Orphan Annie, The Green Hornet, Tom
Mix, Buck Rogers, The Lone Ranger, and Flash Gordon. These books set the standard for other
publishers who created inexpensive books, as well as comic books, pop-up books, and paper
dolls.
The miniature golf craze helped Americans get through the Great Depression. Forty thousand
miniature golf courses sprung up on vacant lots, motel grounds, apartment building rooftops, and
at department stores all over the country.
The Great Depression brought an end to the Prohibition Period (1919-1933) that banned the
sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol for consumption nationally as mandated by the
Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Prohibition became so unpopular
during the Great Depression that the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth
Amendment.
Cleveland County was hit very hard by the Great Depression, and many families lost their
homes and farms to the banks that held their mortgages. Due to the high number of foreclosures,
these lending agencies became large landowners in the county, acquiring some of the properties
quite cheaply, as the outstanding notes on some of the foreclosures were small. For many of the
loans, the owners had to put up their farms as collateral to borrow money for their crops and lost
the farms when the crops failed. Displaced families had to find domiciles to rent or move in
with other people. Some families had to split up and live separately from each other as obliging
relatives and friends did not always have enough room to offer living space for all of them.
Throughout the decade Daddy and Mama struggled to make ends meet. Jerry was born on
November 20, 1935, when Edwin was two years old and Sammy was nine. Anna still lived at
home and worked at the Lily Mill, and she spoiled her little brothers with gifts of small toys,
candy, and special treats.
The next year Anna met Dewey Martin at a dance, and she married him on September 12,
1936, in Gaffney, S. C. Their son, Jimmy Douglas, was born the following summer, just two
weeks after Mama gave birth to Polly on July 8, 1937. Since Anna and Dewey only had one
child, this could only have happened once, but Daddy’s wife and all four of his daughters were
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pregnant at the same time. The five babies- Polly Camp, Jim Martin, Martha Phillips, Alberta
Melton, and Roger Grayson- were born within seven weeks of each other. Daddy’s children and
his grandchildren grew up together. Savannah, Ruth, and Mary had other children who were the
same ages as Daddy and Mama’s children. Sammy and Savannah’s son, Jack Phillips, were even
born in the same week.
Anna, Dewey, and Jim moved to Lincolnton and lived next door to Dewey’s parents. Anna
had a beauty shop in their house and Dewey worked as a foreman at Kings Mountain Knitting
Mills. He owned vending machines in businesses in the area, and the inventory of soft drinks
and snacks was kept in the garage behind their house.
When Polly was seventeen months old, Tom was born on December 19, 1938, and two years
later on December 12, 1940, Robert was born. Nathan and Ollie had moved to Rutherford
County and that same year, in April, they had a baby girl, Geraldine, who only lived two months
and died of yellow jaundice.
During the Depression years the Camp family lived at several different residences in south
Shelby including Broad Street, South Lafayette Street, and Shannonhouse Street. When Polly
was born, they lived on Morrison Street, and they resided at 1117 South Morgan Street when
Tom was born. They moved to 1306 South Morgan Street in 1939 and lived there for the next
thirteen years. It was the fourth house on the right from the corner of Morton Street, in a row of
mill houses known as “the front line” that was located directly across the street and the railroad
track from the Lily Mill.
WORLD WAR II
For the second time in 25 years, the world was at war. World War II was the largest war in
history and it had been in the making since the early 1930’s. While the League of Nations
debated at Geneva and the rest of the world stood by watching, a military clique in Japan, a
Fascist dictatorship in Italy, and a dangerous National Socialist (NAZI) regime were invading
country after country in an international reign of terror.
In March 1938, Nazi Germany took over Austria and annexed Czechoslovakia in October.
France and Britain warned Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler, that an invasion of Poland would result in
war. France and Britain hoped to solicit support from the Soviets against Germany, but their
hopes were dashed when Hitler and Russian leader, Joseph Stalin, signed a ten year
nonaggression pact in August 1939. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland without
warning, setting the spark to World War II. Within days Russia joined the attack and the two
countries dismembered Poland. By September 3rd, Britain and France declared war on Germany,
and within a week Britain’s colonies and dominions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South
Africa had joined the war. The United States declared neutrality on September 5, 1939.
Adolph Hitler was taking over Europe. Six million Jews, twenty million Russians, ten million
Christians, and nineteen hundred Catholic priests were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, and
humiliated with the German and Russian people looking the other way.
In the spring of 1940, the Nazi regime overran Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the
Netherlands then France. Italy, under the Fascist leadership of Benito Mussolini, allied on the
side of Germany and Russia just before France fell. They controlled most of Western Europe.
The Germans hit Britain with a massive air attack, but were met with heavy losses. Then the
Nazis forced Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria to become satellites. In early 1941, they occupied
Yugoslavia and Greece and the German Africa Korps, led by General Erwin Rommel, the
“Desert Fox”, drove British forces back across North Africa toward Egypt. Spurred by his
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success, Hitler repudiated the nonaggression pact he signed with Stalin, and on June 22, 1941,
Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By winter they were threatening Moscow.
Other countries joined the conflict as a result of the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
events such as the Marco Polo Bridge incident, fought between Nationalist China and Japan,
Fascist Italy’s declaration of war on Great Britain and France, and attacks on British and Dutch
colonies in Southeast Asia. The great powers organized into two opposing military alliances
called the Allies and the Axis.
America watched in alarm as the Nazi war machine moved through Europe. In 1940,
Congress passed a military conscription bill, the first ever enacted in time of peace, and about a
million young men were drafted for military service.
In March 1940, President Roosevelt passed the Lend-Lease act which stated that the United
States could direct aid to whomever she wanted. This meant that America was no longer neutral.
With Adolph Hitler taking over Europe, the United States sent aid to the Allies, and by 1945, the
United States ended up contributing 42 billion dollars (some sources say 50 billion dollars) to the
war effort.
Because of the Empire of Japan’s invasion of the Republic of China in the Second SinoJapanese War, the United States had stopped selling oil and scrap metal to Japan, which they
needed. Even though they were eventually forced out of China, Japan held a grudge against the
United States. The warlords of Toyko wanted to put an end to America’s influence in the
Pacific, and they decided it was time to attack.
On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the naval base
for the U. S. Pacific Fleet and killed 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians. History records that
1,178 people were wounded. More than 180 U. S. aircraft were destroyed, and eighteen U. S.
ships were hit. The USS Arizona sank with a loss of 1,177 men.
Just ten hours after Pearl Harbor, another surprise attack of almost equal magnitude occurred.
The Japanese caught General Douglas MacArthur with his planes down, and within eighty
minutes, Japanese planes destroyed half of the U. S. air armament in the Philippines. The next
day the United States and Britain declared war on Japan.
Germany, Japan, and Italy were allied via the Tripartite Pact and Axis Power articles. Four
days later, Germany upheld their end of the Tripartite Pact and declared war on the United
States. The United States, in turn, declared war on Germany and Italy.
In the months that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan overran Burma, Thailand,
Hong Kong, British Malaya (including Singapore), the Dutch West Indies, and dozens of Pacific
islands. The Japanese Rising Sun flew over most of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.
In America emotions ran high. The song “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” was
written in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and became an instant hit.
Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor the War Department launched the greatest
recruiting drive in the nation’s history. In 1942, the draft age was dropped to eighteen.
American men joined the military in great numbers. The sons and daughters of the flood of
immigrants who came to America during 1900-1914 joined the military, and labor shortage and
needs of the armed forces gave Negroes new opportunities. Buses and trains were filled with
young men in Army browns and Navy blues. More than sixteen million American soldiers
served in World War II.
In 1943, Sammy joined the Navy just out of high school. He enlisted a month before he
turned seventeen and lied about his age. He wrote to Anna about being homesick, but he
wouldn’t tell Daddy and Mama.
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He was in Great Lakes, Illinois, for six months, then Norfolk, and on to Boston where he was
assigned to serve aboard a ship as a gunner’s mate. They crossed the English Channel 104
times-52 round trips- carrying troops, equipment, trucks, and supplies from England to France
and taking prisoners of war back to England.
One day a German prisoner asked him for seconds on K-rations. Sam gave him another box,
and he handed Sam something folded up. Sam stuck it in his pocket. What the POW had given
him was a German bank note worth about $100.00 in American money.
When Sam was on liberty in London, he went to the Red Cross and learned that Jerry had had
an appendectomy, and the hospital bill was $125.00. Mama was going to sell her sewing
machine to pay the bill. Sam gave Mama the money the German had given him and she used that
money to pay Jerry’s hospital bill.
On June 6, 1944, Sam was in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the greatest seaborne
invasion in history. They landed at Juno Beach in France and were called down to Omaha Beach
for their firepower. Sam said they almost lost the beach because of the cliffs. As American
soldiers landed on the beach and waded ashore, they were open targets for German troops on the
bluffs above the beach. They advanced up the heights facing murderous fire. There were many
casualties in the first U. S. units that arrived, and for a time it looked like they might be thrown
back into the sea. It was a bitter fight to secure Omaha Beach.
Mama said she nearly had a nervous breakdown from living in fear for Sam’s safety. A Blue
Star Service Banner was placed in the window of the homes of families who had a soldier at war.
If the soldier was killed, the color of the star was changed to gold. Mama worried that they
would come and change Sam’s star. Many families’ worst fear was realized, as there were more
than 400,000 American soldiers killed.
Savannah and Gladys’s son, Jack Phillips, entered the Navy in September 1943, and received
training in Bainbridge, Maryland, and Little Creek, Virginia. He served aboard the USS Knox in
the Pacific.
Ruth and Lee’s son, John William Melton, was in the Navy on a ship taking reinforcements
from North Africa to Italy. He was in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and he went through the
Panama Canal on Christmas Day 1944. He served in the Navy for thirty years.
Mama’s brother, T.J. Shields, was in the Army in Italy, France, the Rhineland, and Central
Europe. He was a truck driver and a technician Fifth Grade, and he was in the Battle of the
Bulge, Germany’s last major offensive effort.
Mary’s husband, Forrest Grayson, joined the Air Force and was stationed at Sheppard Air
Force Base in Texas.
Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta lived next door, and they had five sons in the war. Everette was
in the Army, and Lawrence, Clyde, Ralph, and Badge all were in the Navy. Aunt Etta would
walk through the house praying, “Lord, please take care of my boys.”
Americans reacted to the challenges of World War II with a surge of patriotism. As millions
of men went to war, millions of women took their places in offices and factories. When the
United States entered the war, manufacturing increased by fifty percent. By 1944, American
factories were turning out fifty percent more armaments that the Axis nations. U. S. shipyards
produced destroyers in five months instead of twelve and aircraft carriers that usually required
three years to build were finished in fifteen months.
As America produced huge amounts of military equipment, and shipyards and aircraft plants
worked three shifts, prosperity returned. Hundreds of posters appealed to Americans to help the
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war effort by working in defense plants, buying bonds, collecting scrap metal and rubber,
keeping up morale, and avoiding rumors.
Families planted victory gardens as people were encouraged to grow as much food as they
could. By 1943, victory gardens produced half of the country’s fresh vegetables. With the
troops overseas consuming 20,000 tons of food a day, the government had little choice but to
enforce conservation at home. Some commodities were in short supply, so they were rationed.
This insured that the military had enough of the resources it needed, and rationing was the only
way to make sure everyone got his or her fair share. War ration books and tokens were issued to
each American family, dictating how much sugar, butter, meat, gasoline, tires, silk, shoes, nylon,
and other items any one person could buy. People carpooled to save gas and leisure driving was
outlawed. Folks drank chicory coffee and substituted ingredients in recipes for items that were
in short supply. Since sugar was rationed, Mama couldn’t make as many desserts. She said one
day it snowed and the kids were so excited because they thought the whole ground was covered
with sugar.
For four years, every morning Americans grabbed a newspaper to see what was happening in
the war. U. S. newspapers had at least five hundred correspondents with the armed forces. Life,
Look, and Time magazines popularized photojournalism in America as they captured scenes from
the battles on film and included the pictures in their publications.
In spite of the grim news abroad, Americans kept their spirits up. Through it all they played
favorite wartime songs “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” and “When the Lights Go on Again All
Over the World.” They were not songs of people wanting revenge or wanting to expand an
empire, but songs of a nation’s craving for peace.
Across the ocean the service men and women listened to the Armed Forces Radio in the mess
between combat. They heard “I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas, Just Like The Ones I Used
To Know” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” with its wistful line “if only in my dreams.” They
listened to “There’ll Be Blue Birds Over The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Till Then,” “I’ll Be
Seeing You,” “Sentimental Journey,” and “Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” They were songs that
reminded them that one day the war would end and they could go home and be reunited with
their loved ones.
Big Bands played a major role in lifting the morale of the soldiers during World War II.
Many band members served in the military and toured with USO troops. They played popular
tunes like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” On a sad note,
legendary bandleader, Glenn Miller, lost his life while traveling between troop shows.
One light note of the war, and an iconic image, was the drawing of a mischievous face
peering over a wall and the phrase “Kilroy was here” written on it. This graffiti became a
national joke as it appeared in many of the war torn areas.
In January 1944, The Shelby Daily Star published an oversized book titled Cleveland County
Men and Women Serving in the Armed Forces of The United States of America, picturing
Cleveland County natives in uniform. Proud families answered the newspaper’s call to send in a
picture of their loved ones serving in the war along with a short profile to be included in the
book. Mama sent them Sam’s picture in his Navy uniform along with a note about where he was
stationed, so he was among those soldiers honored in the book. Savannah and Gladys’s son,
Jack, and Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta’s boys were also shown in their military uniforms in the
publication.
World War II involved every major power and was the greatest conflict and the most
widespread war in history. It was fought in the streets, on icy mountains, in deserts, in jungles,
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and on coral reef islands. It was fought on land, on sea, and in the air. The war lasted six long
and bloody years. It was the most destructive war in human history. By the end of the war,
more than seventy million people, mostly civilians, lost their lives, and most of Europe and large
parts of Asia lay in ruins.
The Allied powers led by President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and
U. S. S. R. leader Joseph Stalin ruled out a negotiated settlement with the Axis. They declared
that they would accept nothing short of an unconditional surrender. Under the leadership of the
other Allied powers’ military commanders and American wartime leaders including Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gen. Omar Bradley, Gen. George C.
Marshall, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, and Adm. Ernest J. King, the
war ended in a victory for the Allies.
In the spring of 1945, when the end was in sight, deposed Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini
was killed by Italian partisans on April 28. Adolph Hitler and some of his supporters committed
suicide in a Berlin bunker on April 30.
Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. On July 26, the Allies broadcast the Japanese an
ultimatum. They threatened total destruction if the Japanese did not surrender unconditionally.
Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered unconditionally on September 2, 1945 after the United
States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The new
President, Harry S. Truman, made the decision. President Roosevelt did not live to see the
victory. He died in office from a brain hemorrhage April 12, 1945, the only man to break the
record of two terms in the White House.
The day the war ended, Aunt Etta ran to the clothesline to celebrate with Mama. Mama
dumped the clothes out on the ground and she and Aunt Etta beat on washtubs with horseshoes
in the backyard and danced and cried. Their boys were coming home.
Cleveland County had 6,504 men and women in World War II. A granite marker and bronze
plaque stands on the south side of the courthouse bearing the names of the 192 Cleveland County
soldiers who lost their lives in the war. I like to stop and read the names of these heroes from
time to time. I grew up with some of the children who lost their fathers.
The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as world superpowers. Fifty nations met in
San Francisco in June 1945 and formed the United Nations in the hope to prevent another world
war.
The United Nations inherited a number of the organizations and agencies founded by the
League of Nations. Although the United States had never joined the League of Nations, things
were different after World War II, as relations between countries were growing more
complicated. The United States joined the United Nations to help create a collective security
global system and help facilitate communication and cooperation between countries. Delegates
from fifty-one nations assembled in January 1946, in London for their first meeting. The leaders
consisted of several elected nations and the permanent presence of the big powers- the United
States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China.
There was a growing conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Russia reacted
defensively to America’s bombing of Japan and America’s network of bases that were
strategically placed off the Sea of Japan to Greenland. Americans were angry at Russia’s
absorption of Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Communism changed Russia from an ally to a menace, as it spread to Bulgaria, Hungary,
China, and East Germany. As the USSR established communist governments, Winston
Churchill warned that Russia’s desire for the fruits of the war and the expansion of their power
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and doctrines had created an Iron Curtain that had descended across the continent, cutting off
Eastern Europe from the West.
Mounting tensions between the two powers evolved into the formation of two military
alliances. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by America, included the United States,
Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark,
Iceland, and Portugal. The Warsaw Pact established May 14, 1955, in Warsaw, Poland consisted
of eight communist states in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, led by the Soviet Union. This was
the start of the Cold War between the two nations that lasted for the next 45 years.
Within four years after World War II ended, Russia blockaded West Berlin from June 24,
1948 to May 12, 1949. The Berlin Blockade was the first major international crisis of the Cold
War and the first incident that resulted in casualties. Russia exploded an atomic bomb in 1949
and a hydrogen bomb in August 1953, and she was working at record speed to develop an
arsenal of long-range missiles with nuclear warheads.
The exhaustion of resources of England and France thrust the main responsibility for western
civilization on America. On April 17, 1947, within two years after the war, the United States
devised The Marshall Plan, proposed by Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. An act of
Congress created the European Recovery Program to help repair the war devastation of Britain,
France, and Italy.
Representatives of sixteen nations met in Paris in September 1947, where the United States
agreed to underwrite the European Recovery Program. Never before had any nation used so
much of their resources to preserve peace. Railroads were rebuilt, factories and farms were
subsidized, and trade was restored, costing the American people between ten and fifteen billion
dollars over a four year period. The Marshall Plan restored economic and political stability and
saved half a continent from economic depression, poverty, and physical hardship. Although the
door was open, the Soviet Union and its European satellites refused to participate in the Marshall
Plan.
The Truman Doctrine gave 400 million dollars to arm Greece and Turkey against an armed
communist revolution. After the war, the number of American forces in Europe shrank, while
large Russian armies stayed in Germany, Poland, Romania, Belgium, and Hungary.
While Sam was in service, Mama had two more children. Charles was born June 2, 1944, and
a year and four days later on June 6, 1945, Jane was born. Sam had a new little brother and sister
to meet when he got home from the war.
Sam was in the Navy for thirty-two months and was discharged in March 1946. When he
came home, he continued his education at Howard’s Business School. He met Helen Putnam
from the Flint Hill community near Boiling Springs and they were married October 12, 1946, in
Gaffney, S.C.
They had a son, John Duran, the same year that I was born. He was Mama’s first grandchild,
so Mama had her last child and got her first grandchild in the same year. Sam and Helen’s
daughter, Nancy Lynn, was born four years later.
They lived in Atlanta, Georgia, when the children were growing up, and then they moved to
Houston, Texas. Sam was a sales representative for a toy distributor and for a line of
inspirational books, and Helen was a bookkeeper.
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Both of Mama’s parents died during the years of World War II. Grandma Shields died in her
sleep at Daddy and Mama’s house from hypertension on January 12, 1942, at age 58. She had
been sick for a few days, and she was staying there so that Mama could help take care of her
while Granddaddy Shields worked. Four year old Polly was sleeping with her when she died.
Polly alerted Daddy when he came home from work that morning that “Grandmama” was cold
and she “couldn’t get her warm.”
Almost two years later on October 16, 1943, Granddaddy Shields married Grace Harrison in
Gaffney, S. C., with Mama and Polly in attendance. He and Grandma Grace lived on West
Warren Street, and he owned a neighborhood grocery store there just west of where Graham
Elementary School currently sits. Granddaddy Shields died October 5, 1945, from prostate
cancer.
POST WORLD WAR II
By the end of World War II, Nathan and Mama’s sister, Ollie, divorced. When Nathan
married Ollie, Daddy became Nathan’s brother-in-law too. When their son, Randy, was born,
Daddy and Mama were Randy’s grandparents as well as his uncle and aunt. When Nathan and
Ollie divorced, Nathan brought Randy and moved back home to live with Daddy and Mama.
Randy called Daddy “Grandpa”, except when he was mad at him; he called him “Uncle Johnny.”
Nathan remarried on January 10, 1948, in Gaffney, S. C., just a week before I was born. He
married Velle Greene from Ellenboro whom he met while he was driving a truck for Blue Ridge
Ice Cream Company. He met Velle while making deliveries to her Father’s store in Ellenboro.
Nathan, Velle and Randy moved to the town of Waxhaw in the rural countryside on the other
side of Charlotte. Their son, John Michael, was born four years later. Nathan was a mechanic
for Brown Equipment Company in Charlotte and Velle was a supervisor for American Casualty
Insurance in Charlotte.
My birth on January 18th made an equal number of boys and girls in the Camp family, nine of
each. Since Thelma, Emmett, and Billy, three of Daddy and Mama’s first four children died, that
left a seven year gap between Sammy and Edwin, but the rest of us were like stair steps. There
was twenty-two years difference between Mama’s oldest and youngest child-Thelma and me,
and a span of forty years between Daddy’s oldest and youngest- Savannah and me.
Savannah was older than Mama and she and Ruth both had grandchildren older than me. So I
was a great aunt from the time I was born. Two of Savannah’s grandsons, Roger Ferree and
Carroll Maloney, were in the class ahead of me in school. Since my Daddy was their Great
Grandfather, our kinship was hard for some of our friends to grasp.
I missed Daddy’s 65th birthday party by two weeks, but four generations of family came home
January 4, 1948, for Sunday dinner to celebrate, and they took a group picture outdoors beside
the house. Daddy’s Great Grandsons, Roger Ferree and Carroll Maloney are both in that picture.
I was the only one of the eighteen children born on Sunday. I arrived at a quarter of twelve,
just in time for Sunday dinner, and Mama said I never missed a meal since. When I was born, I
only weighted 6 pounds and 7 ounces, but my early pictures show that I was a chubby little baby.
Being part of a large, loving family is truly a gift, for a large family teaches tolerance,
patience, loyalty, and unity. I still marvel at being a child of such devoted parents. How is it that
a Father can have eighteen children and give each one of them all his love? I was the last one
born, but we were all Daddy’s babies.
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Daddy’s brothers told him he wouldn’t live long enough to raise me, but I was 24 years old
when he died. Because I was small for my age, Nathan called me “Daddy’s last little squirt.”
When I grew too big for Daddy’s lap, I stood in front of his chair and his arms encircled me.
He combed my hair and curled it around his finger, and adorned it with a ribbon. He let me
choose what clothes to wear. I would ask, “Daddy, does this go together?” And he would say,
“It will go together if you put it together.” So I never learned any different. Sometimes my
brothers would laugh at what I was wearing and say I “looked like I fell off the fair train and
Daddy found me.” Daddy would smile and tell them I was just not one of those little brown
birds. If I got new shoes, he would let me go to sleep in them, removing them later in the night.
He fed me, so I ate whatever he put on my plate. He cleaned up what I left, so he put on my
plate what he liked to eat. When I asked about the bowl of turnip greens on the table, he said,
“Me and you don’t eat grass.”
I ate out of an octagonal shaped salad plate that Mary gave me. He ate with a black fork with
a broken tine. He mixed coffee and sugar in with the milk in my bottle. I sucked a bottle for so
long, the others teased me. Daddy weaned me by telling me Santa Claus needed the rubber
nipple on my bottle to make the tires for the tricycle I wanted.
He took me with him grocery shopping, and I sat up in the basket of the buggy and ate my
way through the store. When we got to the check-out counter, he would hand the banana peels
and empty wrappers to the clerk and say, “This is what Booty ate.”
Mary and Forrest’s daughter, Catherine, married Eddie Tillman, and three of Mary’s other
children Peggy, Pat, and Ronnie worked at Tillman’s Grocery Stores. We shopped there, and
sometimes when we were uptown, we shopped at the A & P, the Piggly Wiggly, and the Dixie
Home Store.
How is it that a Mother can make each child feel that she loves them best? Mama made me
Raggedy Ann dolls and special dresses. She baked me gingerbread and saved me the last piece
of cake. She dried my tears when I got hurt, and she made everything okay with just a kiss.
I lay in the porch swing with my head in her lap, and she rocked me till my feet dragged the
floor. I never grew too big for her to hold or too old for her to call me “Baby”.
She sat up with me at night when I was sick, she prayed for me, and read me the Bible. She
listened to my stories and shared her stories with me.
She slipped me her last few coins, and she filled my needs before I knew that I had them. She
told me, “I wish I could give you the world.” And she gave me all that was in it that really
mattered.
After World War II there was a demand for things made with cotton, and for many years
Cleveland County was North Carolina’s leading producer, reaching a high of 72,100 bales in
1948, the year I was born. Modern gins in this county with all the latest equipment attracted
cotton growers from other counties, and in that year they ginned 83,549 bales.
Cotton was king, and people were paid by the pound to pick it. Plowing, cultivating, and
harvesting cotton was done by hand. The first commercial cotton pickers were manufactured in
1949, but these machines did not exist in large numbers until the mid-1950’s. A decade later
most cotton was still picked by hand.
Even with Daddy’s crippled hand, the family said that he could outwork anybody. He could
pick more than 400 pounds of cotton in a day, when the average adult could pick 250 pounds.
Ruth and Lee’s son, John William, said one time he, Sam, and Daddy chopped five acres of
cotton in thirteen hours. That was really hustling, because chopping cotton was labor intensive.
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In good seasons the cotton plants came up thick, since the planter dropped seeds in a continuous
row. The plants had to be thinned out to about six inch intervals, so workers had to go along
each row with a hoe and chop out enough cotton to leave healthy plants at proper spacing. Since
there were no herbicides, grass and weeds that grew in with the cotton plants had to be carefully
removed with a hoe, and then dirt had to be pulled up around each plant to give it support to
grow.
The cotton grown locally was spun into thread and woven into fabrics in the local mills.
Almost everyone was employed by one of the mills, and people marked time by the whistle
blowing to signal the changing of shifts.
Daddy night watched at the Lily Mill for seventeen years. He said night watching was a
lonely job, but it gave him a lot of time to study about things. One morning Daddy was late
coming home and Mama was worried. She decided to send the boys over to the mill to check on
him, since we just lived across the street. But Charles told Mama, “Don’t worry. If anything has
happened to Daddy, we’ll read about it in the newspaper tomorrow.”
Daddy hung his jacket on the bedpost, and I was playing behind the bed. I reached into his
pocket and found his pistol. Mama was sitting across the room at the sewing machine making
Polly a dress. Polly came in from school, saw me behind the bed, and laid down across the bed
to say hello to me. I stuck the gun in her face and said, “I’m going to shoot Polly.” Polly said,
“No, no, let me have that. That is Daddy’s.” I handed her the pistol, and Daddy never left it
unattended again.
We lived across the street from the railroad tracks, and when hobos who rode the train came
to our back door to ask for something to eat, Mama always fed them. We were told that our
house was marked by a hobo code and they knew to come there for food.
When the fair train came to town, we sat on the front porch all Sunday afternoon waiting,
watching, and listening until it passed our house. If we were asleep by the time it came, Daddy
woke us up to see it. It was a joy to see because it was lit up with lots of lights.
If someone asked Daddy why he and Mama had so many kids, Daddy would tell them
because we lived across the street from the railroad tracks. He said the train came through and
woke them up, and he would ask Mama, “Do you want to go back to sleep or what?”, and Mama
said, “What?”
Mama and Daddy had three boys, then Polly, then three more boys, and the boys told Polly
she messed up their ball team. They liked to play in the front yard, but they had to be careful not
to hit balls into Uncle Charlie’s yard, because he kept them. They shot marbles with the
neighborhood boys, and they got the pieces of metal called “gypsy buckles” off of the bands of
cotton bales from the Lily Mill, and shot them in their slingshots. They played on the trestle near
High Hill down below Ryburn Hamrick’s Dairy Farm. Daddy worked at night, so the kids had
to be quiet during the hours that he slept during the daytime.
The boys belonged to a scout troop, and as they were getting ready to go to church to scout
meeting to get their Christmas goody bags, they informed Polly that they were not going to share
their candy with her. Jerry got the bright idea to dress Polly like a boy and take her with them.
They put a pair of Tommy’s jeans on her and pinned her hair up under a baseball cap. All the
way to the church Jerry instructed her to not look up as they were handing out the treat bags and
not to speak to anyone. Polly lined up with the boys and looked down as the Scout Master
passed out the treats. When he got beside her, as he handed her a bag of treats, he whispered in
her ear, “Hello, Polly.” She and Jack the Dog ate candy all the way home.
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One day Polly boasted to Mama that she had eaten all those old boys’ candy. When Mama
asked her where she had found candy, Polly showed her the empty Exlax laxative box. Mama
was really worried about her, but Daddy teased Mama and told her to just pin Polly’s dress tail
up and put her outside. He gave Polly a Coca-Cola to drink and she was okay.
Mama lost her coat button, and Polly found it and put it in her mouth. She saw Daddy
coming and hid behind the door to scare him. He saw her too, and when he came in, he hit the
door and said, “Boo!” Polly swallowed the coat button. Mama said, “Lord, Johnny, she
swallowed a coat button as big as a quarter.” But she was okay and that was the last they saw of
the coat button.
The kids went to the Lily Mill Store to buy treats. The colas were in a drink box, and they
had to ask the manager to get the drink they wanted. When Polly said she wanted an orange
drink, the manager asked her if she wanted a Nehi. She didn’t know that Nehi was a brand of
soft drink, so she told him she didn’t care if it was a head high. The manager of the store teased
her about it after that.
Mrs. Davis who lived on the back line of mill houses sold candy at her house, two bars for
fifteen cents. Jerry told her to let him have the candy bar that was a nickel.
Jerry was in the class ahead of Polly at Morgan School, and sometimes two grades shared the
same classroom. They were having a spelling lesson, and Jerry had to make a sentence with the
word ‘gladiator’. He said, “If a bear got Polly, I’d be gladiator.”
At the beginning of their school play, they spelled out HELLO, and each kid carried a letter.
Polly had the O and she went to the wrong end of the line. When everybody laughed, she stepped
forward to look at the letters to see what was so funny and fell off the stage behind the piano.
Polly was exasperated by all those brothers, and she cried for a little sister. One day she was
playing outside next door at Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta’s house and she saw the doctor go up
the walk. A girl who was older than Polly told her that the doctor had a baby in his satchel. Polly
ran home and asked Daddy.
He gave Polly some money and told her to go to the Lily Mill Store and get him some
cigarettes. She ran all the way there and back. When she got home she went into the bedroom
where Mama and Dr. Vic Moore were. She told Dr. Moore if he brought a baby in that satchel,
and it was a boy, she would flush it. She was so upset. Dr. Moore and Mama were laughing,
and Dr. Moore showed her a baby sister.
Her prayer was answered when Jane was born, but she got not only a sister, but a shadow.
She found that slipping off from Jane was like trying to slip daylight past the rooster. Polly
would sneak out the back door to go to the neighbor’s house to play, and find that Jane had gone
out the front door and had beaten her there.
When Mama put Jane to bed, she would plead, “Make Polly go to bed with me.” Mama
would tell Polly, “Just lie down on the bed with Jane until she goes to sleep, and then you can get
back up.” But Polly always fell asleep before Jane did.
Polly and Jerry went to the Lily Mill Store to buy Jane some baby shoes. Logan Newton,
who ran the store, asked them, “What did ya’ll do, shake the sheet and find another one?”
Jane was two-and-a-half years old when I was born. Daddy was still night watching at the
Lily Mill at that time, but he retired when I was two years old. His next full-time job was
looking after me. He scolded me for eating dirt, so the next time I decided to eat it, I borrowed
his handkerchief to take to the yard with me to wipe my mouth, thinking it was okay to eat the
dirt if I didn’t get my face dirty doing it.
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I had a duck named, “Waddles”, and I worried about him when it rained. I would tell Mama,
“My poor little ducky is out there in all that rain barefooted.” My brothers teased me about
kissing my kitten. They would say, “Snuffy Buttons give me a little bit of that there smooch.”
Edwin raised chickens, and one day after I helped them eat their corn, I had to go to the hospital
and have my stomach pumped.
Raising chickens meant that we had an abundance of eggs. Charles grumbled about always
having to eat them. He said, “Old eggs, old eggs, old eggs.” Edwin told him, “If you say that
again, I’ll knock you down.” Charles said, “Old eggs, old eggs, old eggs.” Edwin pushed him
down, and Charles looked up from the floor and said, “Old eggs, old eggs, old eggs.”
Edwin was helping the younger kids get ready for school, and Polly couldn’t find one of her
red rubber boots. He discovered that she had one boot on her foot and the other one in her hand.
She was saying, “I got to have notebook paper, and I got to have a pencil.” Edwin stamped his
foot and said, “I gotta have, I gotta have, I can’t go to school ’till I getta have!”
When I was born Polly got her second little sister. She was pleased that the tide had finally
turned, and Daddy and Mama were having girls. I have a snapshot of me, sitting in the backyard
of our house on South Morgan Street. It was made when I was about three-and-a-half years old,
and Polly had written on the back of it "My little Darling.”
She swung me to sleep in the front porch swing, and when I was afraid of the moon, she told
me it was a big yellow ball. I would climb onto her lap and say “Let's talk about dresses,” and
we would take turns describing imaginary clothes. She took me to the county fair to see the
Dancing Waters. She took me with her on the last day of school to get her report card. She took
me to Shelby Beauty School, where she was a student, and cut my hair.
We walked from South Morgan Street to Second Baptist Church and all the way home I sang
hymns, so Polly decided to take me with her to the Intermediate Department at Sunday school to
sing a song to the whole department.
All week long I practiced "Bringing In The Sheaves,” but that Sunday morning I got up there
and sang, "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It, I Can't Buy Me No Beer.”
When the teacher finally found her voice she said, "I'll bet you learned that one from the
radio.” I said, "No, my Daddy taught me that one.” Then she said, "That sure is a mighty pretty
little dress you have on.” And I told her, "Mama said it was a bitch to iron.” I guess Polly was
glad when we moved across town and joined another church.
It was a crisp day October 13, 1952, when we moved to 609 South DeKalb Street. I was four
years old and the only child not in school. They had planned to take me to the house last, after
the furniture was arranged, so that I wouldn’t get in the way. But Mama told me to pack up all
my shoes and put them in the basket. She noticed, just as the truck left, that I was barefoot, so
they had to take me with the next load to find my shoes.
Robert likes to joke that we moved off and left him. He went to Morgan School that Monday
morning, and when he got out of school that afternoon, he had to find our house on South
DeKalb Street. He got a bicycle to ride the mile back and forth each day to Morgan School for
the remainder of that school year. He was in the sixth grade.
Uncle Charlie bought the house where they lived next door to us on South Morgan Street
January 12, 1951 from Lily Mill. The property included the house in the back yard where his
son, Yates and his family lived. Yates bought the house that we lived in from Lily Mill on
September 24, 1952, the month before we moved to South DeKalb Street. An interesting but
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unenforceable clause in the deeds states that the property could not be sold to a Negro nor
inhabited by a Negro except as domestic help. (At that time Negroes could not work in the mills
as weavers, spinners, or loom fixers. They could only work outside the mill or as custodians in
the building. Negro women could only work as domestics.)
The house we moved into on South DeKalb Street was just six blocks from the center of town
and closer to Shelby High School, Shelby Junior High School, and the Shelby City Park. This
made it easier for the kids to walk to the places we needed to go. Shelby High School and
Shelby Junior High were located on West Marion Street. The junior high building was built in
1907 as a graded school, which meant that it was not a one room schoolhouse where all students
met together. It was used as the high school building until 1937, when a Federal grant allowed a
new Shelby High School to be built. Then the graded school became Shelby Junior High School
for seventh and eighth graders and was used for another thirty years before it was torn down.
Another federal grant of the same era allowed for the construction of the baseball field behind
that school building.
We liked our new residence, and Jane and I hoped that when we grew up, all of our brothers
and sisters would live in the houses up and down South DeKalb Street so that we could always
be together.
Americans had never seen anything like the Presidential nominating conventions for the 1952
election year. In July, three major television networks shipped their equipment and more than a
thousand workers to Chicago to the Republican National Convention. Seventy million
Americans watched as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower got the nomination. His slogan “I Like Ike”
appeared on campaign memorabilia everywhere. Later in the summer, the show was every bit as
good at the Democratic Convention when eloquent, witty Adlai Stevenson received the
Democratic nomination. Daddy, a diehard Democrat, didn’t like the Democratic Party’s choice
of their presidential candidate. We had new linoleum rugs, and we played outside with the large
round cardboard tubes they came in while Daddy and Mama went to vote. The Republican
candidate, Dwight Eisenhower won the election. I don’t believe Daddy voted for a Republican,
but he named the cat that showed up to live with us “Ike.”
We already had a cat named Sally who was twelve years old when we moved from the Lily
Mill. Then Charles and Polly got rabbits and kept them in cages in the backyard. Mama had
parakeets and sometimes they would get out of their cage and fly around the room and light on
Daddy’s hat. We didn’t have a dog, and I hoped we would get one. I saw the one I wanted when
Tom got hit in the eye with a ball and had to spend a couple of weeks in Charlotte Memorial
Hospital. Since I was too young to go to school or into the hospital, somebody had to stay in the
car with me while everyone else went to visit Tom. In the hospital parking lot, I saw a dog
wearing a sweater. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell the others I saw a dog with clothes on. I
wanted a dog like that to dress.
From our house on South DeKalb Street we could hear the Shelby Cotton Mill whistle blow
at 6:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. to signal the shift change. South DeKalb Street was not
part of a mill village, but many of the people who lived on the street worked in the mills. In fact,
most of the people in town were associated with the textile industry regardless of where they
lived. In the 1950’s, Cleveland County led the nation in the number of textile mills.
Shelby had neighborhoods that bordered uptown and new neighborhoods were being built
extending residential areas to the fringes of the city. After World War II there was a housing
shortage as millions of American soldiers returned home eager to go to work, marry, and start a
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family. The marriage rate was at an all-time high, and the average ages of brides and grooms
were at a record low.
Between 1940 and 1950, nearly half of American women had their first child before they
were twenty years old. The United States Census Bureau defines the demographic birth boom as
between 1946 and 1964. That wave of childbearing produced a generation so large that it was
called the Postwar Baby Boom. There were approximately 76 million births in the United States
between those years.
Slowly and inexorably this generation of babies rearranged the country, and set new standards
with sheer numbers, as society had to reconcile itself to feed, clothe, and educate the population
boom. First, the maternity wards weren’t big enough, and then new elementary schools had to
be built, and later new high schools and colleges. Still later, a vast expansion of the job market
was necessary.
The G. I. Bill of Rights or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 helped veterans from
World War II, or “GI’s” as they were commonly referred to, secure needed assistance from the
federal government to help them fit back into civilian life. This was a service the veterans from
World War I had not received. The G. I. Bill of Rights provided for one year unemployment
compensation, and college or vocational education. The bill also provided many different types
of loans to buy houses and start businesses.
National euphoria was released by the end of the Great Depression and World War II. As the
country moved from the sacrificing of the war years toward the prosperity of the 1950’s, its
culture changed, rapidly. America’s standard of living reached a new high and marked the
beginning of postwar commercialism and materialism. Government assistance, union benefits,
student loans, and housing subsidies greatly eased the economic inequality of the 1930’s and
1940’s. For the first time white-collar workers began to outnumber manual laborers. By the
1950’s, the average worker could buy a median priced home for less than twenty percent of his
income. The installment plan allowed him to buy it and furnish it with a washing machine,
clothes dryer, automatic dishwasher, and many other new modern conveniences now on the
market.
The new families needed someplace to live, and the answer was suburbia. It filled a need and
fulfilled the American dream of a family having a home to call their own and raise their children
away from the center city. Servicemen remembered the 1944 Cole Porter song, “Don’t Fence
Me In” and millions of them who returned the next year took it as a theme. They moved to what
had been farm fields and built homes.
The availability of Federal Housing Administration loans stimulated a housing boom in
American suburbs where residences had larger lots of land than in the city. Subdivisions were
carved out of rural land and made into multiple home developments by a single real estate
company. The subdivisions had appealing names and were filled with American ranch-style
houses, a type of architecture that is uniquely American. First built in the 1920’s, the style is
single story, long, and close to the ground with a minimum of exterior and interior decoration to
create an informal and casual living style. Split-level ranch style homes became popular with
living space on different levels with carports or garages attached to the house.
Residential neighborhoods in Shelby began developing to the east and west, and the new
neighborhoods with young families needed new grammar schools. The Shelby School System
had built six grammar schools, Washington, Jefferson, Morgan, Lafayette, Marion, and Graham
as the early years of the century passed. Three of the schools were two-story buildings. Graham
School built on West Oak Street in 1927 is the only one of the six buildings that is still standing.
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Marion School was located on East Marion Street just two blocks from the center of town and
was the first of the six buildings to be torn down. In 1951, Shelby built a new larger Marion
School, with multiple classrooms for each grade level, on Forest Hill Drive toward the eastern
end of town near the new neighborhoods that were developing in that direction.
Five years later, in 1956, a new, larger Graham School was built on West Warren Street to
accommodate the new neighborhoods being built in the area of the city to the west.
From 1955-1959 twenty to twenty-five new housing areas sprung up. In 1962, contractor
Lennie Brittain built the first subdivision in Shelby, a new development he called Brittain
Village, on rural farmland in south Shelby that he bought from the R. T. LeGrand family. Soon
after, contractor Tom Weathers built Eastway Heights off of Highway 74 East at Main Street.
Housing in Cleveland County increased more than twenty times in the thirty-five years between
1935 and 1970.
Whether one lived in the mill villages or the other residential neighborhoods around town,
growing up here was a simple life in this small Southern town, where everyone knew each other,
and we were connected by work, interests, blood, and marriage. It was an era when deals were
sealed with a handshake. People visited each other, sat on porches and talked, helped each other
out, and cared about each other.
Cleveland County produced many people of notoriety including Wilbur J. Cash (1900-1941),
journalist, who as Associate Editor of The Charlotte News, was nominated in 1941 for a Pulitzer
Prize for editorial writing he did in 1940 for the newspaper for his work on World War II. He is
best known as author of the book The Mind of the South, which he wrote while he lived in
Shelby. The book has been a continuing source of debate among scholars and has never been out
of print since it was first published.
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. (1864-1946), born in Shelby, was the author of 28 novels depicting the
horrors of the Reconstruction Period and the Invisible Empire. He is best known for writing The
Clansman and producing the first million dollar movie, The Birth of a Nation, which was based
on that book. It is ranked 44th in the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies. Thomas Dixon’s
brother, Rev. A. C. Dixon was a noted minister on three continents and wrote fifteen religious
books and numerous pamphlets.
Hatcher Hughes (1881-1945), born in Cleveland County was a professor at Columbia
University and was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for his 1922 Broadway play Hell-Bent for
Heaven.
Shelby native O. Max Gardner (1882-1947) was Governor of North Carolina from 19291933. The Governor built his own dynasty. His political organization controlled state politics in
the 1920’s to 1940’s and the Democratic Party when it dominated the state and the South.
Governor Gardner was Undersecretary of the U. S. Treasury, and he was appointed Ambassador
to Great Britain, but he died February 6, 1947, in New York on the eve of his departure for
London.
His sister Bess’s husband, Clyde R. Hoey (1877-1954), also from Shelby, was Governor of
North Carolina from 1937-1941. He served in the U. S. Senate from 1945 until his death in
1954. His funeral was held at Central Methodist Church in uptown Shelby, and sixteen senators
attended it. The crowds filled the court square and Washington Street.
Governor Gardner and his local political allies were known statewide as the “Shelby
Dynasty.” It consisted of Governor Gardner; his father-in-law, Superior Court Judge James L.
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Webb (1853-1930), who served two years in the North Carolina Senate; Judge Webb’s brother,
Federal Judge Edwin Yates Webb (1875-1955), who was also Congressman of North Carolina’s
Ninth District; Judge Odus M. Mull (1880-1962), who served six terms in the North Carolina
House of Representatives; Governor Hoey; and Shelby Daily Star newspaper owner and
publisher, Lee B. Weathers (1886-1958), who served four terms in the North Carolina Senate.
Webbley, on South Washington Street, had been the home of both Governor Gardner and
Judge James L. Webb. Judge E. Y. Webb had lived in the house next door. Governor Gardner,
Judge James L. Webb, Judge E. Y. Webb, and Judge Mull all had their offices on West Warren
Street in the same building. Many decisions that affected Cleveland County, North Carolina, and
the entire South were made in Shelby at those two houses and that office building.
I heard Shelby native, Charlotte Observer writer, Kays Gary, speak at The Fiftieth Annual
Banquet of the Greater Shelby Chamber of Commerce in 1987, and he said there was a time
when you couldn’t get into politics in North Carolina unless you were from Cleveland County.
It was unusual that so many men from the same county would reach such heights of fame
during the same generation. The “Shelby Dynasty” aimed to improve government on all levels
for all people. North Carolina made great advancement in good government for the people under
their leadership. Cleveland County is proud of the distinguished public service they performed.
O. Max Gardner was governor during the Great Depression, and North Carolina’s economy
was too low to allow for large expenditures, but he saw that the state did not default of its debts.
He reorganized the State Highway Department and the State Department of Labor and enacted
the Workman’s Compensation Act. One of Governor Gardner’s greatest achievements was the
consolidation of the North Carolina university system. He initiated and engineered the merger of
the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State College, and Woman’s College into the
Greater University, and he donated time, energy and money to Boiling Springs College which is
now Gardner-Webb University, renamed to honor Governor Gardner and his wife, Faye Webb
Gardner.
During Gov. Hoey’s administration more than 25,000 miles of hard surfaced roads were built.
His implemented the largest program of departmental and institutional buildings the state had
ever undertaken, and he started state-Federal assistance to dependent children, to the aged, and to
the blind. He launched the state’s first advertising program to attract new residents, tourists, and
industry, with 234 new industries locating in the state during his administration.
When Judge E. Y. Webb was in Congress, he introduced the bill chartering the Boy Scouts of
America, was co-author of the Webb-Kenyon Bill, and the Anti-trust Bill. He helped draft the
Eighteenth Amendment to our Constitution prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcoholic
beverages, and all of his ideas for purer food and drugs were eventually incorporated into the
Pure Food and Drug Act.
During Judge Odus Mull’s six terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives he
established vocational education in North Carolina’s public schools and appropriated money to
establish the North Carolina Vocational Textile School at Belmont. He provided for a bond issue
for Shelby’s first waterworks system and permitted the purchase of the electric light system from
private ownership.
After his two-year term in the North Carolina State Senate, Judge James L. Webb served
thirty-two years in the court system, the first twelve as a district solicitor and the remainder as a
Superior Court Judge. He was fearless but merciful and just.
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Lee B. Weathers served four terms from 1943-1951 in the North Carolina State Senate and
was publisher of the Shelby Daily Star from January 1, 1911, until his death January 11, 1958.
He headed campaigns for better health facilities, roads, schools, and churches.
The members of the “Shelby Dynasty” were interested in people from all walks of life,
charitable with their resources, and generous with their time. In Lee B. Weather’s book The
Living Past of Cleveland County he said, “Governor Gardner often joined the gang gathered on
the uptown street at night to listen to and take part in an exchange of views and enjoy a few
hearty laughs.” More than one time Daddy told me the story about meeting Governor Gardner
and some of his out-of-town friends on the street uptown and Governor Gardner stopped and
introduced Daddy to them and told the gentlemen, “This is one of my boys.”
Local residents had hometown pride and we sang the song, “She’ll Be Coming Around The
Mountain” as “Shelby Coming Around the Mountain”. Knox Hardin had been the Police Chief
of the City of Shelby since 1939, and he served for twenty-eight years, and Haywood Allen was
Sheriff of Cleveland County for thirty-two years. We found comfort and reassurance in the
familiar and the kind of trust that only comes with time.
We never locked our doors, and in the summertime we left the windows up. At our house we
slept at the foot of the bed if it was closer to a window. Houses were not air conditioned then.
The Sears, Roebuck and Co. air conditioned their uptown store in the early 1950’s and was the
first place in Shelby that had air conditioning.
Cleveland County’s economy was dependent on the cotton crop, and the cotton crop was
dependent on the weather and pests, and the boll weevil arrived in the county soon after I was
born. Boll weevils chewed up the cotton crop of 1949. The weevil, plus a string of bad weather
years in the 1950’s, made many local growers turn to raising beef cattle, dairy farming, growing
soy beans, or leaving the farm to work in town. In 1950, only eleven percent of the American
work force was employed in agriculture.
The court square in Shelby was the center of the county, and the uptown bustled with many
people on the street. Groups of men stood on the corner and talked while street preachers
witnessed to passersby and people sitting on park benches. Teenagers in cars circled the square
and called out to one another. Sometimes vendor, Charlie Crow, had his peanut cart on the
street, and Mr. Willis had his snowball wagon there too. When Daddy and Mama took us
uptown, they stopped and talked to so many people. Daddy always said “Hey, here” as he
greeted them.
Banks, grocery stores, service stations, department stores, taxi yards, and car dealers were all
located uptown, as well as hardware stores, restaurants, furniture stores, barber shops, and
florists. The police and fire stations, public library, and City Hall were all uptown. Lawyers’,
doctors’ and dentists’ offices were located upstairs over the stores, and court was held at the
Cleveland County Courthouse in the center of town. It was a Federal courthouse.
The Post Office was located uptown across from the courthouse and we went there to mail
packages and buy stamps, which at that time were three cents. Personal letters were handwritten
and were an important means of communication. Letter writing was an art form. Hallmark
Cards and other greeting card companies had made sending all occasion cards popular.
Business letters were typed on portable typewriters using carbon paper for copies, and offices
had mimeograph machines that made copies in purple ink. The United States Post Office
handled a huge volume of mail and the Postal Service made home deliveries- come rain or shineevery day but Sunday and holidays. In the city, postmen walked their routes and carried large
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leather satchels filled with mail over their shoulders, placing the mail into a mailbox on each
front porch.
With all the different stores uptown, I wondered how Daddy and Mama knew their way
around. Daddy pointed out where the livery stables had been on Trade Alley, and he told us
about the fire at Central Hotel on Lafayette Street in 1928, when four people were killed. First
National Bank, which occupied most of the first floor of the hotel, had to move because they had
water damage from the fire. Six months later the temporary housing for the bank on West
Warren Street collapsed due to excavation work being made while digging a cellar for a pool hall
on an adjacent building which housed Goode’s Grocery. The grocery store fell, damaging the
bank building and the building where William Hagley’s Tailor Shop was located, and six people
were killed.
The Central Hotel building was renovated and rebuilt as Hotel Charles. First National Bank
moved to the corner of the block and is still open in the same location and is still Shelby’s
predominant financial institution.
Daddy told us that when he lived in the country, if there was something going on in town, his
friends would send a horse and wagon to the country to get him so he didn’t miss out on it.
We did most of our shopping in the stores uptown. Almost all of the merchandise in the
stores was American made. Goods were transported across country to the stores by United
Parcel Service and trucking companies, and one of the major freight transport companies,
Carolina Freight Carriers, was located in nearby Cherryville.
The stores uptown were closed on Wednesday afternoons and almost all businesses were
closed on Sundays. North Carolina had Blue Laws that designated what businesses could be
open on Sunday. Blue Laws required strict observance of the Sabbath.
When I was six years old in the summer of 1954, Daddy, Mama, Jane, and I went to Olan
Mills Studio upstairs in the Shelby Hotel on Graham Street to have our picture taken. My smile
revealed that my two front teeth were missing. The portraits of Daddy and Mama are our most
familiar photographs of them.
The drugstores uptown were hubs where people met and discussed everything from weather
to sports. Politics was always a hot topic at the drugstores. During the 1950’s there were five
uptown drugstores, all locally owned, and three of them were on the square across from the
courthouse- Cleveland, Suttle’s, and Smith’s. They served sandwiches, ice cream, and soda
fountain drinks. People who hung out at the drugstores were called “Drugstore Cowboys” after
the Hollywood actors in cowboy movies who hung out at the drugstores waiting for their movie
parts. Teenagers stopped by the drugstores after school and during the 1940’s Messick’s Soda
Shop at the corner of Lafayette and Warren Streets, where the Cleveland County Chamber of
Commerce now sit, had been the hangout for the local crowd.
When Daddy had business in town, he usually took me with him. Sometimes he and I would
stop at Smith’s Drug Store on South Washington Street and drink a cup of coffee. We would sit
with Dr. Vic Moore and other doctors and lawyers including Charles Coleman “Cobby” Horn
and Judge Audie Aycock Powell, who had their offices over the drugstore. The gentlemen
conversed with me and made me feel part of their group. “Audie” Powell’s daughter, Mary Ann
Powell Goins, still calls me her Daddy’s other daughter.
Daddy loved people, and he kept up with what was going on. He was a good listener, and
people enjoyed being around him for his quick wit and his keen insight. He told us the best
compliment you can pay somebody is to listen to them. He said everyone has a story to tell, and
you can learn something from everybody
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We shopped at Washburn’s Cleveland Hardware Co., and I was fascinated by the variety of
merchandise they had to sell. We bought tools, nails, screen wire, and many other things we
needed around the house.
Daddy and I had to take the radio uptown to Wylie Sander’s Radio Repair Shop on West
Graham Street. I broke the radio by turning the knob too far. The first Shelby radio station was
WOHS and went on the air in 1946. They played all the hit songs. I climbed on a chair to reach
the radio, and I was turning the dial trying to find WOHS, hoping I could hear Hank Williams
singing “Cold, Cold Heart.” I liked that song because I thought it had something to do with
Coca-Cola, which I loved and didn’t get too often.
We often stopped at Ideal Ice and Coal Company next door to Wylie Sanders to visit with the
men who sat on the platform out front. Since we had a refrigerator, we didn’t need the blocks of
ice they sold for an icebox, but we got ice from there for the ice cream freezer, and we burned
coal in the winter. We bought it by the ton and had it delivered and stored in our basement.
Daddy and the boys brought it into the house in a bucket to burn in a coal heater and in the
fireplaces. Later we bought an oil heater for the front room and had a large metal oil barrel
installed next to the house. Lutz-Yelton Oil Company provided a “watch dog” service that
checked the contents of the barrel periodically during the winter and kept us from running out of
fuel.
There was also another ice company, Blue Ridge Ice Company, located on Morgan Street
between Warren and Marion Streets.
There were three dime stores uptown, Eagles, Woolworths, and Crests. The dime stores had
candy counters at the front of the store, and we could get a little bag of candy for a nickel.
Daddy let me select the candy I wanted, and I always chose orange slices, gum drops, or other
kinds of candy that I knew he liked too. We shared the candy as we walked home.
Sometimes on our way home from town, Daddy and I stopped in Mrs. Royster’s yard on
South Washington Street and watched the goldfish is the little pond out front. If Mrs. Royster
saw us, she would come out to say hello.
Telephones were first installed in 1890 in the rural part of the Cleveland County in Lawndale
to connect Cleveland Mills to five businesses in Shelby. The first telephone exchange in Shelby
was about 1895, and that system was replaced in 1917-1919. Our telephone number only had
four digits. The telephone was black with the rotary dial system that began here March 11, 1950.
For a while we shared a telephone party line with our neighbors- the Galloways and the Howells.
Kids liked to make prank calls. They would call strangers and ask, “Is your refrigerator
running? Well, you’d better run catch it.” And call neighborhood grocery stores and ask, “Do
you have Prince Albert in a can? Well, you’d better let him out.” Teenagers tied up the
telephone lines talking to their friends, but at that time girls usually weren’t allowed to call boys.
There were many churches in Shelby; in fact, Cleveland County had the highest rate of
churches per population of any county in North Carolina. We were smack in the middle of the
Bible Belt. We joined Bethel Baptist Church just down the street from where we lived. After
Sunday school we met in the vestibule to go into the sanctuary for the worship service together.
Mama would go into the pew pushing Jane in front of her and holding me back. She sat between
us to keep us from talking.
Daddy sat in the back of the church in the “Amen Corner” with some of the men who stood
on the church steps smoking and filed into the church at the last minute before the service began.
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Daddy said he sat back there in case he started coughing and needed to get up and leave. He had
a smokers cough from years of too many cigarettes.
The eleven o’clock worship service lasted until the preacher was done preaching. You
couldn’t count on being out at exactly twelve o’clock noon. If the service was long, growling
tummies were often heard and always ignored.
Hellfire and brimstone and tithes were popular and recurring themes of sermons from the
pulpit. I liked when we had communion and they passed around the little glasses of Welch’s
grape juice and pieces of soda crackers. The congregation partook of the communion in unison
as the preacher instructed. Once a neighbor kid went to church with us, and we had to stifle a
laugh when he devoured his as soon as the usher passed the tray.
To me the highlight of the service was singing the hymns. I love the old hymns and
“Amazing Grace,” “Rock of Ages,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Precious Memories,” “Precious
Lord,” “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms,” and “Marching To
Zion” are some of the ones I learned in that church that are special to me. In my memory I can
still hear choir soloist, Clifford Gold, singing “A Child of The King.”
The service never ended without an alter call to anyone who wanted to come down to the
front to join the church or be saved. The congregation usually sang “Just As I Am” as people
filed to the alter where the preacher was waiting to receive them.
Sometimes couples went down the aisle to the alter after the Sunday service to be united in
marriage by the preacher. It was a planned event, as proper license had to be obtained
beforehand. This was a special occasion to share in their joy.
I went down to the alter myself when I was six years old and gave my life to the Lord. I was
baptized in that church by Rev. Dwight Digh one Sunday morning soon after that, wearing a
pretty white dress Daddy took me to town and bought for the special occasion.
Jane and I joined the Girls Auxiliary and the Children’s Choir. Polly likes to tell about the
Sunday Jane and I were singing in the choir and the sash of my dress came untied. I pleaded
with Jane during the prayer to tie it. I said, “Jane, tie my sash… Jane, tie my sash… Jane, tie
my sash. Don’t you have any sense?” The congregation heard me and Jane was looking at Polly
to see what to do. Polly mouthed, “Tie it!”
Our family attended Sunday night service, Wednesday night prayer meeting, Bible school and
revivals. Sometimes we attended Bible school at other churches too. One time the kids were
going to Bible school at Lafayette Street Methodist Church and the teacher was quizzing the
attendants about their knowledge of the Bible. Tom kept raising his hand to answer the
questions. Finally the teacher asked, “Who is the little boy in the back of the room that keeps
answering all the questions?” Tom proudly replied, “I’m a Baptist!”
The churches were not air conditioned and we cooled off in the summer by waving paper fans
provided by the funeral homes. In the summer we attended tent revivals that were held outdoors
in west Shelby.
Daddy said Nathan was ticklish and Mary tickled him in church one Sunday just as the usher
passed the offering plate. Nathan said out loud, “I’ve got a nickel if you’ll come get it.”
On Mother’s Day we wore a rose to church. The kids wore a red rose in honor of Mama
because she was living, and Mama wore a white rose in memory of her departed Mother. One
Mother’s Day Mama wasn’t feeling well, so she sent us out to cut the roses. Robert asked her if
we should wear pink roses because she was sick.
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Since we moved from the Lily Mill village, I didn’t get to go to Mrs. Stockton’s kindergarten
as my siblings did. Daddy taught me my ABC’s and how to count. He was good with numbers,
and he could spell simple words, but he never learned to read and write.
Daddy was 71 years old when he took me to preschool at Marion School in the spring of
1954. The other parents there were so much younger than Daddy; I thought they were my
classmates’ brothers and sisters. Most of my classmates Fathers had served during World War II
and were about the same age as my brother, Sam, who had fought in the war. Since Daddy was
so much older than their parents, most of my classmates thought Daddy was my Grandfather.
Before we started school, we were required to have a smallpox vaccination. Ours was another
class of a generation of school children branded by a left-shoulder smallpox scar.
The city schools started classes each September after Labor Day. The county schools started
in July and had a split term of six weeks to pick cotton. I started first grade in September 1954,
at Lafayette School, located on South Lafayette Street, two streets over from us. Charles and
Jane were in fourth grade and we walked to school together. Miss Adele Justus was my first
grade teacher. Mrs. Juanita Burns was Principal at Lafayette School. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs.
Carl Putnam, were our neighbors on South DeKalb Street.
Lafayette was a small school with only one classroom for each of the six grades. South
DeKalb Street was in the Marion School district but Lafayette School was closer, so Mama got
us transferred. The next year, in the fall of 1955, Mama could not get us transferred because the
classrooms at Lafayette School were too full. There were 4,000 children in the Shelby School
System that year including both black and white schools. We went to Marion School after that
one year. The following year they closed Lafayette School.
We learned to read by chanting repetitive lines from a series of books about the adventures
of Dick and Jane. We learned to write by copying the alphabet and words onto tablets of lined
paper using a number two pencil. We learned arithmetic from flash cards that taught us addition
and subtraction. Flash cards also taught us spelling and colors.
Our school teachers filled our minds with wonder and excitement and instilled in us a thirst
for knowledge. We pledged allegiance to the flag and started the school day with a prayer. We
had fun and didn’t realize that we were learning. We had Halloween carnivals, Christmas
pageants, school plays, and we took field trips and played ball and learned the polka. We
swapped valentines, made potholders, memories and friends.
In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, we were schooled in the arts. A roving art
teacher came to our classrooms to teach us to draw and paint, and a roving music teacher came to
teach us to sing and dance.
The North Carolina Little Symphony Orchestra performed a concert at the Shelby Armory
each spring for school children, and we joined them playing our black plastic flutes.
School Safety Patrol taught us safety and responsibility, and team sports gave us a drive and
perseverance that make for success. School united us and gave us a loyalty and pride that would
remain with us for a lifetime.
The main disciplinary problems in the classrooms were chewing gum, getting out of line,
running in the halls, and talking. Sometimes the kids threw spitballs made out of notebook paper
or folded notebook paper into airplanes and sent them sailing through the air across the room.
The teachers had the authority to paddle us if necessary, and if we misbehaved they made us
stay in after school. Sometimes for punishment they made us clean chalk erasers or write
repeatedly on the blackboard a sentence about proper conduct. In our family we got a whipping
when we got home if we were disciplined at school.
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Mama spent a lot of time in the kitchen. The walls were painted a sunny yellow and she
made the ruffled café curtains on the windows. Her crocheted potholders with roses on them
hung on the wall near the stove.
The kitchen table stood in the middle of the floor surrounded by cupboards and appliances.
On one wall was a large cabinet that had a bin to hold and sift flour and had shelves behind
closed doors to store dishes and cakes and pies. There were drawers on the bottom for pots and
pans, and it had a counter surface to mix ingredients and to roll out dough.
We grew up on the American foods and drink that are known all over the world- apple pie,
hamburgers, hot dogs, peanut butter, popcorn, potato chips, doughnuts, graham crackers, jell-o,
ice cream cones, ice cream sodas, and carbonated soft drinks like Coca-Cola. And we consumed
the high carbohydrate diet that is known in the South as “comfort food” or “soul food.”
Mama cooked the Southern country style she learned from her Mother. It was difficult to get
her to write down a recipe because she didn’t measure ingredients. She used a pinch of this and
a little bit of that. She prepared the same dishes, mixed in the same bowls, and cooked in the
same pots and pans, so she just knew how much of each ingredient to use. She knew the desired
consistency and how long to cook it. The best way to learn to duplicate the dishes she made was
to watch her.
She made light fluffy, flaky hot biscuits from scratch and we filled them with butter and jelly,
honey, molasses, country ham, sausage, liver mush, and fried eggs, or we covered them with
milk gravy. Mama baked biscuits every meal, and Daddy made bread pudding with the ones
leftover. He made the coffee and cooked the meat, and often he and Mama were in the kitchen
cooking together.
She made gravy from the drippings of whatever meat he was cooking, and we smothered rice,
dressing, and mashed potatoes with it. Daddy loved country ham. He said if you had country
ham you didn’t need anything else. Sometimes Mama would joke and say, “If we had some
ham, we’d have ham and eggs, if we had the eggs.” We usually had fish on Friday nights, King
Mackerel was Daddy’s favorite, and on Saturday nights we fixed hamburgers.
We had milk to drink with our meals, but Daddy always had a pot of coffee on the stove, and
Mama kept a pitcher of sweet iced tea in the refrigerator.
Mama made colorful potato salad using her nine day pickles, and she pan fried sliced
potatoes, salmon patties, okra, and squash. She cooked turnip greens and boiled cabbage and
made coleslaw with grated cabbage, mayonnaise, vinegar, salt and pepper, and a pinch of sugar.
Sometimes she added diced tomatoes, pickles, or grated carrots.
She cooked chicken dumplings, creamed style corn, and corn on the cob and pots of beans
and peas. She used left over vegetables for homemade soup. She baked cornbread in a cast iron
skillet, and we ate it with soup, vegetables, or crumbled up in milk. She made macaroni and
cheese, deviled eggs, jell-o with fruit cocktail in it, meat loaf, and banana pudding.
One time Polly was trying to make banana pudding, and Mama told her to separate three
eggs. Polly put one on the cabinet and one on the table and was looking for a place to put the
other one when Mama came in and showed her how to separate eggs.
English peas and Crowder peas were Mama’s favorite, and she made the best pinto beans.
She soaked the dried beans overnight and seasoned them with fatback meat. She cooked the pot
of beans slowly, adding a heaping tablespoon of Crisco the last thirty minutes of cooking time to
thicken the soup.
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To feed our crowd, we bought dried pinto beans in a fifty pound burlap sack, purchased the
biggest bucket of lard, bought the heaviest sack of flour and corn meal, and the largest bag of
sugar. Mama had particular brands she used, and she didn’t want any substitutes. She used Red
Band flour that was made in Johnson City, Tennessee, from soft Southern wheat. She thought
she got the best biscuits, cakes and pie crusts from that brand. She bought Duke’s mayonnaise
made in Greenville, South Carolina, and spread it on sandwiches, mixed it in coleslaw and
deviled eggs. She used Carnation Evaporated Milk in her cooking. She used “Crisco” which
was the first shortening to be made entirely of vegetable oil. If she sent us to the store with a
grocery list, it didn’t say, “lard,” it said, “Crisco”. If we bought her another brand, we took it
back.
Mama made pies and egg custards, and when she baked cookies and cakes, she called us to
come lick the bowl. We got to choose the kind of cake we wanted for our birthday, and Daddy
and I always picked Banana Nut Cake. Mama liked to make pound cakes and pineapple cakes
for Sunday dinner.
A black man named Roosevelt brought his mule each spring and plowed our backyard. Then
we planted a garden. Daddy got a Cardui Calendar at Smith’s Drug Store uptown that included
phases of the moon, and he planted by the signs.
The calendar was printed by the Chattanooga Medicine Company, which later became
Chattam Drug and Chemical Company. Cardui was a uterine sedative and the company also
made Black-Draught, a senna-based laxative and Soltice, an analgesic balm. During World War
II the company was the largest producer of K-rations and a major supplier of ammonia. They
were a pioneer in direct marketing with the printing and distribution of millions of wall
calendars.
Daddy hung the calendar beside the bed and used it along with The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a
publication that has been around since 1792, which gives a wealth of information including
helpful gardening, weather and astronomical information, along with stories, anecdotes, puzzles,
and contests. He picked the most favorable days to plant and to harvest the crops. He believed
that the best time to plant crops with yields above ground was when the moon was waxing and to
plant those crops with the yield below ground, like potatoes, when the moon was waning.
Mostly we grew vegetables in our garden, but Mama claimed the space closest to the house
and down the right side of the yard for her sultanas and pretty boys. She would have liked the left
side too, but there was the clothesline. I can still hear Daddy saying, “Edna, you can’t eat them
dadburn flowers!” I was with Mama- the vegetables fed us, but the flowers were a feast for the
eyes.
We grew a variety of vegetables, but the kids liked to grow watermelons, cantaloupes,
strawberries, and peanuts. We ate out of the garden all summer and preserved the rest for winter.
We stored Irish and sweet potatoes in the basement along with shelves of canned goods.
I didn’t like to get up early, so I promised if they would let me sleep, I wouldn't eat any of the
food they canned. But they got me up anyway to wash the dusty, empty fruit jars brought up
from the basement, some with dead creepy crawlers in them.
Until I was tall enough to reach the sink, they turned a kitchen chair around backward and
stood me on it. My little hand fit easily into the jars, and I meticulously washed them as Jane
stood beside me and rinsed, dried, and placed them on the table for Mama to fill with whatever
we were canning and preserving.
The rest of the troops were on the front porch peeling fruit, shelling peas, or breaking beans.
We had a co-op going, and this went on all summer.
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Mama's uncles were truck farmers who delivered produce to the grocery stores. They stopped
by our house first for Mama to select whatever she wanted. Sometimes before we got through
putting that up, they came back on their way home to give her what they had left. Plus she
stopped other produce trucks that passed and bought from them, so this canning job could last
most of the day.
Neighbors and friends picked up a paring knife or a bucket of beans and pitched in and
helped. Our front porch was a neighborhood gathering place, and since we lived on one of the
main streets, people passing often stopped to visit. At times, Sheriff Allen, policemen, and
businessmen were among those who joined in or sat on the porch and swapped stories while we
worked. The camaraderie and laughter made the time pass faster, and the jobs seem to be less of
a chore. By autumn the freezer, cupboards and shelves were full, and we were ready to feed the
multitudes for the winter.
Mama cooked three meals a day, and whoever was there at mealtime was invited to join us.
Her fresh vegetables and fruit cobblers were hard to resist. I remember the day the preacher and
the revival minister and their families were our dinner guests, and I had polished the backs of the
dining room chairs. To Mama's dismay, when the preachers got up from the table, they had
furniture polish stains on the back of their white shirts.
Americans gobbled up more than 700 million gallons of ice cream a year and at our house
homemade ice cream was a family treat. I sat on the freezer while Daddy turned the crank.
Bought ice cream came from Tony’s Ice Cream Company on South Lafayette Street. We usually
got vanilla because Daddy once ate so much chocolate candy he got sick, so he wouldn’t eat
anything chocolate. Sometimes the kids got Dixie Cups, but Daddy said a Dixie Cup was just
enough to make you want ice cream.
I was too short to reach many of the kitchen cabinets. I inherited my short stature from
Mama. She used to say she should sue the city for building the sidewalks so close to her butt.
Charles would tease me and ask me how it feels to be the last one to know when it is raining.
One night I climbed the jelly cupboard to get a jar of jelly off of one of the higher shelves,
and the cupboard toppled over. Luckily for me Daddy was there to catch the cupboard before it
fell on me. But I fell backward onto the floor and was surrounded by broken glass, jelly, jam,
preserves, pickles, and relish. It was a mess to clean up, and we lost some of the precious
harvest we had worked so hard to can. Probably the greatest loss was the jars of Mama’s nine
day pickles. The recipe has passed down through the family, and some of us as well as friends
and acquaintances still make them. We laughed when Mama told one of the grandsons she was
making nine day pickles and he said, “I’ll help you, Grandma, and it won’t take you that long.”
If we were sick, Daddy had a remedy for whatever ailed us. If we had a stomach ache, he
picked leaves from the backyard and made a tea that tasted so bad we were never sure if it cured
us, or if we got better so we didn’t have to drink any more of it. He had a red solution for a sore
throat that we called “The Atomic Bomb.” It tasted like iodine and set us on fire. Charles said it
was an instant tonsillectomy.
Daddy treated our ailments with castoria and paregoric, and he made a cough syrup with rock
candy, rye whiskey, and lemons with brown sugar or honey to kill the taste. It sounds like a
recipe for Whiskey Sour but at our house alcohol was used only for medicinal purposes.
Cleveland County was dry. There were no legal sales of alcoholic beverages, but there were
bootleggers who sold them illegally, and there were liquor stills around the county. Alcohol was
served in private clubs. The Sheriff’s Department raided the clubs periodically and confiscated
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the liquor. They also located, dismantled, and busted up the liquor stills. The local newspapers
reported the raids, telling how much liquor was confiscated and who was arrested.
Alcohol was legal just over the state line in Cherokee County, South Carolina, and many
local people made trips down Highway 18 South to purchase and drink alcoholic beverages.
Daddy learned how to make his medical remedies from his Father. Granddaddy Camp had
practiced folk medicine with recipes handed down from generations long past. Nature provides
healing roots, barks, and herbs, the native plants that were the basic ingredients for the medicine
Granddaddy made. He dug roots, cut bark, picked berries and herbs, and people came to him for
jars of medicine and poultices he made. Uncle Charlie’s son, Everette, said Granddaddy would
take him and his brothers, Clyde and Lawrence to the woods and fields with him to dig roots.
Everette said Granddaddy had good eyesight and he could spot the plants he needed a quarter of
a mile away. Doctors today use some of the same basic remedies Granddaddy used, but now
they are compounded by pharmaceutical companies.
Granddaddy had a mad stone that was reputed to draw the poison out of snake bites and rabid
animal bites. It was a small, porous chalk-like white stone. The stone was put on the bite and
then placed into a glass of sweet milk. The poison made the milk bubble up and turn green.
Rabies was called hydrophobia because of the victim’s inability to swallow water due to the
throat and jaw becoming paralyzed, and it is fatal if left untreated. Daddy said that after
Granddaddy died in November 1929, the mad stone was sold to E. V. Crane who owned a store
across from Zoar Baptist Church down Highway 18 South, where we bought our coffee.
Mama dipped snuff. She grew up in an era when it was fashionable. Snuff came in a little tin
can, and there were several brands on the grocery store shelf, including Tuberose, which Ruth
dipped. Mama’s choice was Navy Sweet Scotch Snuff.
We knew she kept her can of snuff in the top dresser drawer in the bedroom and I don’t know
if any of the other kids slipped and tried it, but just lifting the lid and sniffing it made me sneeze.
But snuff did have one medicinal purpose. Mama made a poultice from a pinch of snuff to put
on bee stings.
Sometimes there would be an orange sign with black letters that said “Quarantine” on the
door of a residence. State law mandated that every health official had the power to quarantine
any person with any dangerous, contagious, or infectious disease until that person had recovered.
Vaccination and disinfection was required of any person who was exposed to any dangerous,
contagious, or infectious disease.
Polio was everyone’s fear, and there was no cure for it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was
stricken with polio at the age of 39. It nearly killed him and left his legs paralyzed. Although he
was confined to a wheel chair, his affliction did not seem obvious to the general public, because
photographers never photographed him in motion. He started the March of Dimes program in
1938, as The Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to raise money for polio research and to provide
care for those suffering from the disease. A total of 675 million dollars was collected for the
March of Dimes. When President Roosevelt died in office in 1945, he was commemorated by
placing his portrait on the dime.
The name “March of Dimes” was originally the name of the annual fundraiser of the
Foundation. The effort began with a radio appeal for everyone in the country to contribute a
dime to fight polio.
In the post-World War II years, the number of cases of polio sharply increased, making the
cause more urgent. The Foundation provided money for polio researchers and virologists. In
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April 1955 Dr. Jonas Salk developed a polio vaccine. His research was largely supported by the
March of Dimes.
We went door to door in our neighborhood collecting for the March of Dimes. We had been
provided with cards about the size of an envelope that had slots to insert the dimes.
In the summer of 1955, there was a polio scare. By September, there were eighteen cases of
polio in Cleveland County that year. Thomas Rabon, who was 17, died from polio in August,
and his 20 year-old sister, Sarah, died in September. Their Grandfather was A. V. Wray, who
owned one of Shelby’s leading department stores uptown, and they lived on South Washington
Street, the next street over from us.
Mama was worried about us, and she checked us every time we came in the door. No one
was allowed to go swimming, because they didn’t know what caused polio or how it was spread.
Mama wouldn’t let us run or get too tired. She encouraged us to play quietly in the house.
The age most likely affected was birth to nineteen years old, and particularly susceptible was
the five to nine year old age group. I was seven years old and in second grade, and Charles and
Jane were in fifth grade at Marion School.
The largest clinical trial of the Salk polio vaccine in U.S. history involved 1.8 million
schoolchildren and proved the vaccine to be 80-90% effective in preventing paralytic polio.
As part of the federal distribution program, Cleveland County purchased Salk polio vaccine
from the National Polio Foundation to be administered in the schools. The teachers sent a letter
home from school with a form for parents to sign to request the vaccination. Our letters never
made it home. Charles and Jane and I checked the block that said “no” to the shot and signed
Mama’s name, and we gave it back to our teachers at school. Our neighbors Peggy and Ronnie
Church and Ralph McKee did the same thing.
When the teachers lined the students up in the hall for the vaccinations, their cries gave a
whole new meaning to the term “shot heard ’round the world”. We didn’t get our shots at
school, but one of the teachers called and when we got home that afternoon, Mary Church put us
in her car and took us to the Cleveland County Health Department to get our shots.
I was petrified of a needle, so I broke away from the nurse and ran to the hall. Sheriff Allen
was coming down the hall and he picked me up and carried me back in there for the nurse to give
me my shot. I broke away again and went the other way and ran into Carver Blanton, the Dog
Catcher.
When we got home, Daddy found out that the Sheriff and the Dog Catcher had to hold me
while I got my shot. When he finished spanking me, my bottom hurt more than my arm did.
Because so many parents did not request their children have the vaccination, there were 1000
shots left over and the county health department divided the shots among 28 doctors’ offices and
specified the shots be given to the five to nine year age group.
In addition to the polio vaccine, other advances in medicine in that era included vaccinations
for mumps, measles, and also the manufacture of sulfadiazine, cortisone, quinine, and oral
contraceptives. Another medical breakthrough came when the transatlantic team of Watson and
Crick discovered the structure of DNA, the genetic code.
CHRISTMAS
Christmas was the most special time of year. We knew the true meaning of Christmas for we
attended church, and Mama read us the story of the first Christmas, when Baby Jesus was born in
a manger in Bethlehem.
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In the Bible in John 3:16 it says, “For God so loved the world that He sent his only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” God had
already given us the most perfect gift at Christmas, He sent his Son. The best gift we can offer
back to God at Christmas is to help those less fortunate and to spend time with family and friends
remembering our Heavenly Father who gave us the greatest gift of all.
At the Camp house, in the spirit of giving, we wrapped small gifts to each other that we had
made at school or saved a few coins to buy and placed them under the tree. The younger ones of
us counted the days until Christmas and were filled with anticipation as we dreamed of the toys
we wanted Santa Claus to bring us. We talked endlessly about what we wanted to get. Daddy
and Mama told us that there were multitudes of boys and girls all over the world for Santa to
remember, and many of them were less fortunate that we were. We were reminded that Santa
had to share his bounty with all of the world’s children. Sharing was something that we
understood, and we knew that Santa would do his best for us.
There was a knock on the door one Christmas Eve night, and Daddy told me to answer it. It
was Santa Claus. I was afraid, so I promptly closed the door. Daddy asked me who was there,
and I said "Nobody.” Santa opened the door and came on in, but by this time I was safe on
Daddy's lap. We were all excited about Santa's visit and the presents he brought, but we were
sorry Nathan had stepped out for awhile and missed him. Nathan never seemed to be there when
Santa came.
Some Christmas Eve nights we went looking for Santa. We rode in the car with some of the
older siblings through the neighborhoods, admiring the decorations. We liked to go past the
grandest houses in town that had lighted outdoor displays and drive by the Catholic Church on
East Graham Street to see their life-sized crèche. But when we got back to our house, we always
learned that Santa had come while we were gone, and we just missed him. He had left our
presents under the tree, and we opened them Christmas Eve night, because the next morning,
there was more excitement as the whole crowd came home for Christmas dinner.
One year Daddy and Mama attended a funeral on Christmas Eve Day. While they were
gone, Jane and I slipped and opened a couple of our packages under the tree. They were
beautiful Oriental music boxes with drawers to hold jewelry, gifts from Bill McKee. When we
couldn't find Scotch tape to rewrap them, we had to borrow some next door. Of course the
neighbor told Mama, but she didn't tell us she knew until after we reopened the presents that
night and tried to act surprised. We learned our lesson, for it not only spoiled the surprise for us,
it also denied them the pleasure of seeing genuine delight on our faces.
The boys went to the woods to cut our Christmas tree. The scent of cedar permeated the room
as soon as the tree was brought into the house and placed in the living room in front of the
double windows. We decorated it with the bubble lights Mama bought in the 1940’s. We all had
a hand in placing Mama’s crocheted snowflakes and the other ornaments that we had made or
accumulated over the years, and we argued over whether it looked better to throw the tinsel
on the tree or place it. We ran outside to look at the tree through the windows and thought the
sight was magical. There was nothing more pleasing than sitting in that room watching the
bubble lights, listening to Christmas carols on the radio, reading a good book, and eating an
orange.
Daddy bought crates of oranges, tangerines, and apples in shredded purple paper, bags of
unshelled, mixed nuts, and a huge peppermint candy cane about two feet long, wrapped in
cellophane that he hit with a hammer to break into pieces. He bought a tin of assorted hard
candies that were different colors and shapes, whose flavors included peppermint, butterscotch,
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fruit flavors with soft centers, and some pretty ones with a little flower on the end of them. He
was generous with the Christmas treats, and he would take out his pocket knife and cut a hole in
the top of an orange for me to squeeze and suck the juice before I tore it apart to eat.
Mama baked pumpkin, sweet potato, and pecan pies, as well as fruit cakes. We all helped
shell the pecans she needed to use. From the kitchen the scent of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and
ginger filled the house with the smell of Christmas.
The local radio stations played Christmas music exclusively, and we sang along with the
carols. “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” and “Jingle Bell Rock” were new popular holiday
tunes. Mama liked “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus.” Robert’s favorite was “Oh Christmas
Tree,” which he sang “Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree, your lovely branches peed on me.”
We were in Christmas plays at school and church and we helped each other learn our parts.
Sometimes Mama had to make a costume for us to wear. After our Christmas play at church, we
were given paper bags filled with oranges, apples, little candy canes and small boxes of raisins.
Often we got a box of Chocolate Covered Cherries or a Whitman’s Sampler of chocolates. We
only got the milk chocolates filled with a sweet creamy filling and a maraschino cherry at
Christmas time, and it didn’t take me long to recognize the square shape of my favorite piece of
chocolate, filled with caramel in the Whitman’s Sampler box.
Uptown Shelby was decorated for the holidays and a highlight of the Christmas season was
the Shelby Christmas Parade. The streets were lined with people who arrived early to get a front
spot along the parade route in anticipation of the large crowd who attended the event. We
dressed warmly as the air cooled considerably in the late afternoon before the sun went down.
Our family walked uptown and found a place on the sidewalk at the edge of Lafayette Street.
The little ones stood in front so that we all got a clear shot of the parade as it passed. As the
crowd started to spill over into the street, a city motorcycle policeman drove slowly down the
edge of the street requiring the crowd to stay in bounds of the sidewalk. Daddy and Mama
talked to people around us, as we impatiently waited for the parade to start. Finally in the
distance, we could hear the parade announced by the siren of the police car that led the way.
Right behind were the grand marshal and local government officials, waving to the crowd from
automobiles with their names displayed on side banners. They were followed by beautifully
decorated floats sponsored by local businesses, churches, and civic groups that held choirs,
scouts, and members depicting Christmas scenes. Many of the floats were filled with lovely
young ladies in evening gowns, often with their shoulders draped with a fur stole as warmth
against the winter cold. When Jane became of age, she was a favorite to be asked to ride on a
float. Christmas music filled the air from the floats and from the school bands that participated
in the parade. Our bodies vibrated with the sound of the drumbeats- so loud and so close- as the
bands marched past us in a high stepping rhythm. Cleveland High, the local black high school,
always put on quite a show as they strutted and danced down the street playing upbeat Christmas
tunes.
Beauty queens participated in the parade riding on the backs of convertibles, and school clubs
and cheerleaders rode on flat bed trailers or walked along. Private clubs joined in, with some
showing off vintage automobiles or riding on horseback, often throwing individually wrapped
hard candies to the crowd. Last, was the most anticipated and favorite attraction of the parade,
Santa Claus, with his flowing white beard, dressed in his red furry suit, riding in his sleigh,
waving to the crowd and exclaiming, “Ho, Ho, Ho, Merry Christmas!”
All through the parade we waved and hollered to people we knew and exclaimed over the
beautifully decorated floats, each one prettier than the last.
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After the parade, Daddy and Mama took the younger ones of us to the Sears, Roebuck Store
to see Santa Claus. We waited in line to sit on his lap and tell him our Christmas wishes. Then
we went into the stores or window shopped as we headed for home. The uptown stores glistened
with colorful lights and decorations, and the windows were displayed with lovely winter
merchandise. Seasonal music filled our ears as the clerks smiled and wished us “Merry
Christmas” as soon as we opened the door and came into the store out of the cold. The stores
stayed open each night until 8:30 p.m. the last couple of weeks before Christmas, so that
customers could shop after work. Each store set up a gift wrapping station with beautiful
Christmas paper, so the packages left the store ready to be placed under the tree.
Gilliatt’s Florist, the city’s oldest retail florist business, was a sight to behold with poinsettias,
mistletoe, amaryllis in pots, and Christmas cactus like the one Mama had at home that she tended
with pride. They had silver aluminum Christmas trees with blue balls and blue lights, and white
Christmas trees whose branches looked like they were covered with snow. Twinkle lights
blinked at us, and candle lights flickered magical patterns across the store.
Miss Beth Casstevens, who became Mrs. Gene Clark, was my second grade teacher at
Marion School. She introduced us to scores of classical music and as Christmas approached, she
played Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite”. She made every holiday special by decorating
the classroom. We drew Christmas pictures to hang on the wall, and Danny Limerick drew a fat
man. When Miss Casstevens asked him who it was, he told her it was Round John the Virgin.
Mama bought white linen handkerchiefs from Mrs. Spake, an elderly neighbor who lived up
the street from us, and embroidered delicate pastel flowers on the bottom right corner of them
with Lily embroidery floss. We gave the lovely handkerchiefs to our teachers for Christmas. I
was always proud to give my teacher something so special. As I wrapped Miss Casstevens’s
gift, I found some nice orange tape to use. When she opened it, she said, “I’ll bet you wrapped
this yourself, and I wondered how she knew.”
That same year was our saddest Christmas. We had a little white dog named Tinker I called
my “talking” dog. He met Charles, Jane, and me every afternoon at the corner of South DeKalb
and Graham Street as we came home from Marion School. Daddy said he could tell time,
because he took off up the street about ten minutes till three. He was hit by a car and killed on
Christmas Eve. We buried him in the backyard. Mama sung a sad song, “Little buddy, rest in
peace, God will watch you through the years; for I told him in my prayers that you were mine.”
The whole family cried.
TALK AND TALES
Among the stories Daddy and Mama told were ghost tales, strange occurrences, and legends.
Daddy told a story of the death of a woman in the community before embalming was practiced.
He said the lady was buried with her wedding rings on. That night, as soon as it got dark, two
men dug her up to steal her rings. When they cut her finger, she screamed. The men fled and the
woman got up and went home to her family. My 84 year old friend, Wilda Haskell, says her
Daddy told her that same story.
********
One ghost story they told was about a girl named Lydia who was killed in an automobile
accident one night on her way home from a dance in Raleigh in 1923. The accident happened on
U. S. Highway 70 near Greensboro at an underpass. For years strangers saw her standing on the
side of the road, near where the accident occurred wearing her long, white evening gown. She
stopped many motorists throughout the years and they gave her a ride home. When they arrived
at her house in High Point, she disappeared. Many of the motorists just drove on, but those who
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knocked on the door of the residence were shocked when they were told the story of Lydia’s
tragic death years before, and learned that many others had tried to bring her home. Sister Polly
and our cousin, Janice Ledford, remember hearing this story and it is written up in several books
of ghost stories of North Carolina.
Daddy said he thought the Lily Mill was haunted. He said sometimes he heard unexplained
footsteps and at other times he heard voices when he made his rounds during the seventeen years
he worked there as a night watchman.
********
They talked of Robert Harrill, a former resident of the Lily Mill area who became known far
and wide as the Fort Fisher Hermit. He lived in one of the houses down the street from us and
walked past our house going back and forth to town. He worked at the Lily Mill and had also
worked as a farm laborer and sold jewelry and trinkets in uptown Shelby. He was very
intelligent and dissatisfied with his jobs.
He and his wife divorced and in 1955, at age 62, his in-laws had him committed to the state
mental institution, Broughton Hospital, in Morganton, in nearby Burke County. He was
determined that he was not going to be confined, so he ran away from the facility and moved to
Fort Fisher on the North Carolina coast, where the last battle of the Civil War was fought.
For three years his family did not know of his whereabouts and when they found him, they
were not able to convince him to give up his new life. He liked the Fort Fisher area, and he had
always gone there fishing and camping. He told his family he enjoyed living with nature and
that he was living a nice free life. He said that he had moved there to escape people and to write
a book.
For the rest of his life, if his family saw him, they had to go to the coast to visit him. For
sixteen years he lived in an old World War II bunker, near the Cape Fear River along a salt
marsh. He survived on berries and vegetables that he grew and seafood from the ocean, the salt
marsh and the nearby oyster beds. In lean times and in the winter, generous people gave him
food.
He went into town for provisions he needed and many folks befriended him. He became a
local celebrity and a tourist attraction. Many people came to see him because they were curious
and others came to hear his words of wisdom. He was second only to the USS North Carolina as
the greatest tourist attraction in the state of North Carolina in number of visitors.
He was not a true hermit in the real sense of the word, because he welcomed visitors who
stopped to see him. He saw the visitors as an opportunity to spread his common sense beliefs.
Many people dropped some money into his pan or paid him a small fee to have their picture
made with him. By his own estimates, he had about 17,000 visitors a year. He kept a guest
registry, a notebook held down by seashells, and in it was recorded a total of more than 100,000
visitors from all fifty states and at least twenty foreign countries. Reporters wrote articles about
him and he gave an interview to the Center for Southern Folklore which was made into a
documentary that gave insights into his life.
There were rumors that he had thousands of dollars hidden in his bunker and buried on the
beach, so he was harassed by local ruffians, attacked, beaten, and robbed by drunks and thieves.
His sons feared for his life and pleaded with him to come live with them. But he wouldn’t do it
and he stayed on the land despite the harassment of ruffians and eviction attempts by the
government. He never thought the harassment would get out of hand.
Robert Harrill died mysteriously about 11 o’clock on Saturday night June 3, 1972, at 79
years old. His body was found early the next morning by a group of teenage boys. He was laid
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spread eagle on a pile of rubbish and covered in sand and blood from his wounds. Though there
was much speculation of foul-play, the cause of his death as murder was not determined. The
New Hanover County coroner ruled that the cause of death was a heart attack. An official
investigation into a possible cause of murder was never conducted.
His body was brought back to Shelby and his funeral services were held Tuesday, June 6, at
Palmer Mortuary. He was buried in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby. But in 1989, his remains were
moved to the Fort Fisher area and reburied in the Federal Point Methodist Church Cemetery. A
Fort Fisher Hermit Marker was placed in his memory. The hermit bunker is still standing and
The Hermit Society and “Friends of the Fort Fisher Hermit” continue to tell his story. His life
has been commemorated in film and books, so his story and legacy live on.
********
A startling and almost unbelievable story happened here on June 13, 1956 that got us all
talking. A man fell out of a passenger airplane as it flew over Shelby and he landed in the Zion
Baptist Church graveyard. Oren Ase Pruitt, age 38, a Charlotte resident and his new bride,
Blandene Tidd Pruitt, had been married only twenty-two hours. The ceremony was held in York,
S. C., and they were on their way to Asheville for their honeymoon and to visit her family.
They boarded the Piedmont Airlines DC-3 flight from Charlotte to Asheville at 5:43 p.m.
There were twenty-four passengers on board the flight that was scheduled to last forty-two
minutes. At 6:07 p.m., as they flew over Cleveland County, the plane lurched and a warning
light came on in the cockpit showing that a passenger door was open. A flight attendant noticed
a change in air pressure, and he and the co-pilot went toward the door at the back of the plane
and noticed an empty seat. Oren Pruitt was missing and his wife, Blandene said he had gone to
get her a drink of water. Airline officials said no water was accessible to the passengers who
were onboard planes, so Pruitt was apparently going to the bathroom to get his wife a drink of
water, and opened the door opposite it by mistake.
One passenger said he saw Pruitt’s heels as he disappeared out the door. Heel marks were
discovered alongside the plane’s fuselage.
The plane continued to the Asheville-Hendersonville Airport with the open door dangling on
the side. When the plane landed, the door handle was found in the “open” position. Airline
officials said it would have taken considerable pressure to open the door in-flight.
Zion Baptist Church caretaker, L. G. Hayes, saw Oren Pruitt land in the church graveyard and
skid twenty-seven feet from the point of impact.
Hayes said it sounded like an explosion.
Witnesses that came to the scene said the impact left a four-inch dent in the ground. They said
his brown shoes were knocked off and the shoe laces were broken.
Sheriff Haywood Allen and local law enforcement officials arrived at Zion Church around
6:15 p.m. Near Pruitt’s body, they found his wallet that contained his identification and $114.00.
The SBI assisted in the investigation and ruled out foul play. Coroner Ollie Harris wrote on his
death certificate, “Complete destruction of body in fall from airplane from 6,500 feet.” Family
came to North Carolina from Georgia to identify his body. He was buried at Evergreen
Cemetery in Charlotte. Zion Baptist Church placed a marker on the ground near a bench in his
memory.
Oren Pruitt had two children from a previous marriage. He met Blandene while he was
working as a chef at the Selwyn Hotel in Charlotte. At the time of his death he worked for a civil
engineer in Charlotte.
It seems Blandene was on a streak of bad luck. She was previously engaged and her fiancé
died in a car wreck shortly before their marriage.
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********
A story of much speculation was the theory that President Abraham Lincoln was born in
Western North Carolina, and that Abraham Enloe of Bostic, near Forest City in Rutherford
County, was the father of Nancy Hanks’ illegitimate son whom she named Abraham. Many
people believed that Abraham Lincoln was born in Rutherford County about 1804 and not in
Hardin County, Kentucky in 1809.
Nancy Hanks’ mother, Lucy Hanks, was a poor woman who took in spinning and weaving for
other people. Because of her inability to support her children, Nancy Hanks was “bound out” as
a servant to the well-to-do Abraham Enloe and his family of Puzzle Creek, about two miles
northeast of Bostic. Nancy Hanks lived with the Enloe family to womanhood.
Nancy Hanks was well-known, beautiful and popular. Finally it appeared that she was also
expecting a child. Mrs. Enloe blamed her husband for this, but he would neither confirm nor
deny it. The Enloes took Nancy and moved to the Oconaluftee River area, in the present Swain
County, near the entrance to the Great Smoky National Park. Nancy became missing and
Abraham Enloe was blamed. People believed he had killed Nancy Hanks. They were getting
ready to lynch him, when Nancy turned up back in Rutherford County with a baby boy. Nancy
Hanks also brought the infant to her Uncle Richard Hanks in what is now Gaston County, North
Carolina.
When Abraham Enloe’s wife demanded that Nancy be turned out of the house, he arranged
with his good friend, Representative Felix Walker, to bring Nancy to Puzzle Creek near Bostic
where she could raise the baby among friends. Then Mr. Enloe arranged to pay a sum of money
to an itinerant worker named Tom Lincoln to marry Nancy Hanks and give the boy a name and a
home. Tom Lincoln and his new family moved to Kentucky in 1806.
Tom Lincoln was a stocky built man of medium height with a low brow and not intellectually
gifted. The future President of the United States in no way resembled him, for Abraham Lincoln
was tall, with a long lean body, high forehead, large ears, and great intelligence. His
resemblance to Abraham Enloe’s sons and other descendants was remarkable.
Publicly Abraham Lincoln did not say much about his father. Once when someone
mentioned his grandfather to him, Lincoln said, “I don’t know who my grandfather was; I’m
more interested in what his grandson will become.” Lincoln often spoke of Nancy Hanks. He
said, “All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.” During the Lincoln-Douglas
Presidential campaign, newspapers referred to him as the son of Nancy Hanks and did not
mention his father.
A friend of Lincoln’s told of a time when Lincoln did mention his father. When this friend
visited Dr. Edgerton in Hendersonville, N. C., in 1860, he said that Lincoln had told him that his
right name was Enloe, but that he had always gone by the name of his step-father.
There were many affidavits given concerning his parentage. People in the community
testified that they had held the child, Abe, before the family moved off to Kentucky. Others said
he was older than was claimed. One friend told that he had saved young Abe from drowning in
1812, when they were in school together. If he was indeed born in 1809, he could not have been
in school by then. Residents in Elizabethtown, Ky. remember seeing Abe as a toddler two years
before he is supposed to have been born. In North Carolina prominent residents of Cleveland
and Rutherford Counties including government officials, doctors, bankers, merchants and older
citizens all testified to Abraham Lincoln’s North Carolina origin.
********
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Another speculation that was talked about was the unexplained mystery of Sasquatch or
Bigfoot, an ape-like creature that inhabits forests. In 1958, a footprint was discovered at Del
Norte County, California and the Associated Press picked up the story, stirring up international
attraction. Sightings of Bigfoot spread throughout North America. People said they had spotted
him in the woods and he was a huge fur covered man-beast that walked upright. Sometimes
footprints had been found to validate the story of his existence. In our area he is called Knobby,
because he is reputed to have been seen on Knob Hill by residents near Casar. Folks wondered if
some sightings were fabricated in hopes of scaring revenuers away from the moonshine stills that
were located in the mountains.
********
Another story told of Casar had to do with Kadesh Methodist Church and how their organ
mysteriously played by itself. The beautiful sad haunting melodies had been heard by people
passing the church when it was closed. The church minister and others told about approached the
organ to see who could play such unearthly music, only to find that the chair was empty and no
one was there playing the organ. Word of the mysterious music at Kadesh Church spread, and to
this day no one can explain why the organ played. This story too has been told in the books
written about North Carolina ghosts and legends.
********
Another strange story told was about the Brown Mountain Lights, the state’s best known
legend. There have been hundreds of sightings over the years and official and unofficial
investigations, but the mysterious lights over the top of Brown Mountain, a long, low mountain
in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, have not been satisfactorily explained scientifically.
Newspapers have reported stories about the lights a dozen times and they have been investigated
at least twice by the U. S. Geological Survey. They ruled out foxfire and a Smithsonian scientist
ruled out St. Elmo’s fire, the electrical phenomenon familiar to sea voyagers.
Many legends abound as to when and why they first appeared. German engineer, Gerard
William de Brahm, recorded the mysterious lights in 1771. Residents of the small Burke County
mountain community of Linville say the lights have been seen since the 1800’s. Many legends
about why they appear include the mysterious death of a young woman, Indian folklore, and
candle-bearing ghosts marching across the mountains.
Some witnesses say the light is white, while others say it has a red or blue or yellow cast.
Some say the light is stationary while others say it is in motion and dwindles and fades away, but
the origin of the light no one has determined. They appear in mid-air and not during a storm.
They appear at irregular intervals at various heights and move erratically up and down, visible at
a distance, but vanishing as one climbs the mountain. Most folks say the best chance of seeing
the lights is in the fall of the year on a cool, clear night from eight to ten o’clock. Grandfather
Mountain and Blowing Rock and Wiseman’s View on Linville Mountain are good places to see
them. There are signs posted at viewing areas throughout the region of the mountains where the
lights can be seen. This story also appears in many of the North Carolina ghost books.
********
Another unexplained mystery they recounted was the story of a man named Daniel Keith who
was hanged in Rutherford County on December 11, 1880. They said everyone agreed that Keith
was a low-down scoundrel, guilty of theft, con-games, and swindling people out of money. He
was a very large man and few people would risk a confrontation with him. But he had never
been suspected of a violent crime until the body of a young girl named Alice Ellis was found in a
wooded area. She had been raped and brutally murdered. Folks said they had seen Daniel Keith
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near the area about that time and he was arrested. Blood was found on one of his shirts but he
said it was from skinning rabbits. Even though carcasses of rabbits were found, no one believed
him.
He was taken to Rutherford County jail, but transferred to Cleveland County jail in Shelby
because the Sheriff feared a lynch mob would take justice into their own hands. He was tried in
the Rutherford County court and found guilty, even though evidence was produced that there
was an escaped convict from nearby McDowell County seen in the area by several people at the
same time of the murder. The fugitive was also awaiting trial of this same crime.
Keith appealed his case to the North Carolina Supreme Court, but they upheld the conviction.
He was returned to the Rutherford County jail a few days before his execution. He professed his
innocence until he was hanged. He said, “The soul of an innocent man will not rest until he can
prove himself innocent.”
Not long after he was executed a shadow appeared on the South wall of the Rutherford
County jail, the shadow of a hanged man. The shadow was of a very large man like Daniel
Keith. They scrubbed the building until the wood showed and whitewashed it again and again.
They finally painted the building, but each time the shadow returned. For eighty years and after
multiple attempts to remove the shadow, it reappeared. They grew ivy on that side of the
building and it was told that the shadow was still visible if one peered closely into the thick
foliage of the ivy.
The old Rutherford County jail sat at the intersection of North Carolina Highway 108 and U.
S. Highway 221, a prime business location in the city of Rutherfordton. It was torn down in
1960, in the name of progress. But it has been told that subsequent businesses that occupied that
space failed. This story has been told in the 1984 book titled The Heritage of Rutherford County,
North Carolina, Volume I.
********
Another intriguing story Daddy and Mama told was the Bible story in Genesis where Lot’s
wife looked back when they were fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, and she turned into a pillar of
salt. Having no concept of how long ago and far away this happened, I thought they could take
me to see it.
********
A family story that started much speculation began with a telephone call from one of the
Shields relatives. They told that one ancestor in Ireland who never married had sent a deed to
property he owned in Ireland to his brother in South Carolina. He shipped the deed to the
property in the back of a clock. Our relative said if the Shields family could find the deed, the
property could be claimed. Mama remembered that the last time she saw the deed it was in a
family Bible. I overheard conversations Mama had with other Shields family members, as they
speculated as to the whereabouts of the deed, but to my knowledge no one was ever able to
produce the document. Mama’s Uncle Melton’s grandson, Monroe Hutchins from Spartanburg,
also knew of this story and he said Uncle Ellis wanted the document and Uncle Melton’s wife
had thrown the deed in the fire.
********
Daddy liked to make rhymes and quote poetry. When Polly and Wilburn were dating, they
liked to sit in the swing on the front porch. Jane and I would be hanging over the back of the
living room sofa, peeping through the blinds. More than one time Wilburn gave us money to go
to the store to get candy. When Daddy caught us spying on them, he would say, “You want to
see my sister, Sue? Pay a nickel or see me too.”
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He told Jane her toes were the biggest things he had ever seen that didn’t have guts in them.
He said, “You’re a poet and don’t know it, but your toes show it because they are Longfellows.”
And he told Jane “I should have named you Jimmy I’ll Take All You Gimme.”
If we idly wished aloud for something, Daddy would say, “If wishes were horses, beggars
would ride, if wishes were fishes, we’d have some fried.”
Daddy went to bed at nine o’clock, even if it was in the middle of a television program he
was watching. One night he got up and said, “Good Great, I’ve got to go to bed”, and set the
cuckoo clock to nine o’clock. Mama said, “Johnny, what did you do that for; it’s just eightthirty.” And he told her, “That dadburned old man on television just now said Channel 9.”
About the time Daddy started to go to bed, I’d get hungry, and I wanted him to fix me eggs
and fritters. Mama wanted to stay up late and crochet or read her Bible. Daddy would say:
“Let’s go to bed,” said Sleepy Head,
“Let’s wait a little while,” said Slow,
“Put on the pot,” said Greedy Gut,
“Let’s eat a little bite before we go.”
He taught us this anonymous poem:
Judged By The Company One Keeps
“One night in late October,
When I was far from sober,
Returning with my load with manly pride,
My feet began to stutter,
So I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came near and lay down by my side.
A lady passing by was heard to say:
‘You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses,’
And the pig got up, and slowly walked away.”
I made a bad grade in English class because of all the poems in The Best Loved Poems of the
American People, I chose this one to recite to the class. At a family gathering a few years ago,
Charles started quoting the first line and we joined in and recited it in unison.
Daddy liked to tell the story about Granddaddy Shields sending the Irishman, who worked
for him, to the barn to get a burlap sack. He told him to get one with no holes in it. Granddaddy
finally went to the barn to see if there was a problem. The Irishman said, “By Faith and By
Christ, Mr. Shields, I can’t find one without a hole in it. They all have a big hole at the top.”
Daddy’s favorite joke was about two drunks staggering through a cemetery and stumbling
onto a tombstone that said, “Here Lies A Lawyer And An Honest Man,” and one of the drunks
said, “I wish you’d look, they’re burying them two to a grave.”
If someone asked Daddy how he was doing, he would say, “Tolerable, just tolerable.” So
Tom’s friends called him “Tolerable John”. He named two of his sons John (John Nathan and
John Marion), and two of his daughters Jane (Mary Jane and Martha Jane), so we could have
said, “This is my brother John and my other brother John” and “This is my sister Jane and my
other sister Jane.” But most of us were called nicknames. John Marion was “Sam”, Edwin
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Carroll was “Dock”, Nancy LaVonda was “Polly”, Robert Norman was “Pinky”, and I was
“Booty, Boots, or Boot”. Boots suits me because I usually wear them, and my favorite t-shirt
bears my nickname, “Boot Camp”.
In typical Southern fashion, many of our relatives called us double names, for example,
Tommy Joe, Martha Jane, and Brendan Kaye. At home we called each other nicknames. I
called Mama “Liz” and I called Nathan “Peanut”, Nathan called Anna, “Anna Louiser Wagon
Wheel Greaser,” and we called Robert “Rainbow.” Charles had the most nicknames: Edwin
called him “Chigger,” Uncle Charlie called him “Reuben,” and we called him “Ya-Ya”, “JudahBen” and “The Punjab of Javen Poe.” Sometimes he would tell me his name was “Robert the
Rabbit,” “Harry the Horse,” “Claude the Crab,” or “Abdullie the Coolie the Soul Sender and
Heart Bender.” We called Tom “Sparkie” for awhile after the boys were changing the spark
plugs in Edwin’s car and Tom dropped a screwdriver down the spark plug hole.
Daddy and Mama’s conversation was spiced with humor, adages, maxims, folklore, old wives
tales, and superstitions.
Daddy said, “A whistling woman and a crowing hen will always come to no good end.”
Mama said, “If the sky is red at night it is a sailor’s delight, if it is red in the morning, a sailor’s
warning.”
Mama would say, “Tell me no and make me believe it” and “that beats a hog a-flying.” And
she would tell us, “Give me that money, and don’t let me catch you with any more.”
Daddy called an umbrella an “umbresol.” When I explained that it was either an umbrella or
a parasol, he told me, “It takes two to make a pair.” If we said, “Well,” Daddy would say, “A
well is a hole in the ground, mine is shallow how deep is yours?” And if we said, “Mister”,
Daddy would say, “Missed a pot of slop for not being a pig.” Daddy wouldn’t say “Goody,
Goody” to us; he would wiggle his pinky finger and say, “Crookie, Crookie.”
Daddy and Mama teased us and told us jokes, and we told them “knock, knock” jokes we
heard at school. They told us riddles, and I remember one that said, “Brothers and sisters, I have
none. But this young man’s Father is my Father’s son. Who am I?” The answer is “yourself.”
One time Mama told Jane and me to look down our blouse and spell attic. We laughed as we
spelled it aloud, “a-t-t-i-c.”
They told us if your nose itches company is coming. They taught us a rhyme: “My nose
itches, I smell peaches, and somebody is coming with a hole in their britches.”
They told us if your left palm itches you’ll get money; if your right palm itches, you’ll shake
hands with a stranger; if your ear itches someone is talking about you; and if the bottom of your
foot itches, you’ll walk on strange ground.
And they told us:
“If you have a sore on your tongue, you’ve been telling lies.”
“If you dream of the dead, you’ll hear from the living.”
“If you tell your dream before breakfast, it won’t come true”
“If you sneeze three times before breakfast on Sunday morning, you’ll hear of a death of
someone you know by Wednesday.”
“If you get bread, and you already have bread on your plate, someone is coming who is hungry.”
“If two people say the same thing at the same time, link pinky fingers and make a wish.”
“If you call someone by someone else’s name, then the person whose name you called is
thinking about you.”
“If it thunders in the winter, it will snow within 10 days.”
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“If the snow stays on the ground for several days, it’s laying around waiting for some more.”
“If it is raining and the sun is shining at the same time, the Devil is beating his wife.”
“If someone sweeps under your feet, you’ll never get married.”
“If you can put salt on a bird’s tail, you can catch it.”
“If you break a mirror, you’ll have seven years of bad luck.”
“If you open an umbrella inside the house, it is bad luck.”
“If a black cat crosses the road in front of you, it is bad luck.”
“If you walk under a ladder, it is bad luck.”
“If you step on a crack in the sidewalk, it is bad luck: Step on a crack; break your Mother’s
back.”
“If a flag touches the ground, it is bad luck.”
“The number thirteen is an unlucky number.”
“If you don’t go out the same door you came in, it is bad luck.”
“If you spill salt, it is bad luck. To change the bad luck, throw loose salt over your right shoulder
and don’t look back.”
“Knock on wood three times after mentioning good fortune, so bad fortune won’t ruin it.”
“A cricket in the house brings good luck.”
“An elephant with its tusk up is good luck.”
“Carrying a rabbit’s foot in your pocket is good luck.”
“Hanging a horseshoe over the door of a home brings good luck.”
“If you find a four-leaf clover, it is good luck.”
“If you find a coin with heads up, it is good luck.”
“If you make a wish while you toss a coin into a well or a fountain, the wish will come true.”
“If you make a wish upon the first star you see at night, the wish will come true. Say, “Star
light, star bright, I wish I may, I wish I might, make my wish come true tonight.”
“If you blow out your birthday candles on the first puff, you’ll get your wish.”
“If the hem of your garment is turned up, kiss it and make a wish.”
“If an eyelash falls out, make a wish on it for good luck.”
“At the end of a rainbow there is a pot of gold.”
They said, “If you pull a gray hair out of your head, ten more will grow in its place.” And
they told us, “To get rid of a wart, rub a pork skin on the wart, and feed the pork skin to a black
dog.”
They said, “Ten sips from a teacup will cure hiccups.” If we got hiccups, Mama would give
us a quarter and say, “I bought those hiccups,” and we couldn’t hiccup again if we tried.
They said to “Feed a cold and starve a fever,” and they said, “Lightning never strikes in the
same place twice.” They told us, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” and “Carrots would
improve our eyesight.” They teased us and said, “If you swallow watermelon seeds, a
watermelon will grow in your stomach.”
They said, “If you sew on Sunday, you’ll have to pick the stitches out with your nose,” and
they believed that, “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.” And they said they loved us, “A
bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck.”
Daddy and Mama didn’t allow us to go barefoot before the first day of May. Daddy placed a
#2 tin tub in the yard and told us to pick up all the stones, sticks and glass and get the tub full
before we could take our shoes off. Polly and Jerry put sand and dirt in the bottom of the tub to
help fill it up. Mama sang, “Put your shoes on Lucy; don’t you know you’re in the city. Put
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your shoes on Lucy; you’re a big girl now.” And they said not to wear white shoes or straw hats
before Easter of after Labor Day.
Daddy pronounced some words with a dialect of a by-gone era. He pronounced join “jine”,
joints “jints”, cover “civer” and creek “crick”. He said we got “shed” of our car, the dog
“follered” us home, and we “drapped” seeds at planting time. We were bitten by “skeeters”, we
watched smoke disappear up the “chimbley,” and we dropped “bums” in World War II.
Kids liked to talk Pig Latin. The lingo is a strange and foreign sounding jargon that really
has nothing to do with Latin. The words are formed by transposing the first letter to the end of
the word and affixing the first letter to ‘ay’. Example is: the word candy would be andy-cay, trip
would be rip-tay, and money would be oney-may, and so forth.
There was a slang language of the 1950’s, especially among teenagers and a new group of
American-bred bohemians, that emerged calling themselves the Beat Generation or “Beatniks”.
They had their own jargon picked up from juvenile street gangs and jazz musicians, which
included: “a chick” was a girl, “a cat” was a man, “wheels” was a car, “yo-yo” was a dull person,
“bread” was money, “drag” was something dreary, “dig” was appreciate, “dog” was a dud,
“passion pit” was a drive-in movie, “square” was a nerd, “cool” meant worthy of approval,
“hairy” was formidable, “gone” meant the greatest, “hardee-har-har “was a sarcastic response to
a bad joke, and “grounded” meant unable to have the privilege to leave the house. Beatniks
smoked marijuana they called “pot” and lived in apartments they called “pads.”
If that disorientation of the English language wasn’t confusing enough, conversation of local
people was filled with colloquialism. We heard people say they felt “fair to middling,” and some
people called hanging out “lollygagging.” Folks called a hard rain a “gully washer.” If they ate
too much, they would say they were “full as a tick.”
People would say, “If you had the brains of a jaybird, you’d fly backwards.” And when they
were asked the time they would say, “It is time all old dogs are dead. Aren’t you glad you’re a
pup?” They called snooty people “biggety,” and if a male hung around a female, they said, “He
hung around her like Grant around Richmond.” If they thought someone was spoiled, they said
they were “rotten.” They said someone who was lazy was “sorry,” and someone who was
industrious was “smart.” And they said, “Pretty is as pretty does.” If someone was skinny,
people said they were “poor,” and Daddy said they were “poor as a snake.”
Other comments we often heard people say were:
“I ain’t seen you since Hector was a pup.”
“The cat is out of the bag.”
“Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me.”
“I’ll give you the long and the short of it.”
“It’s between me, you, and the fence post.”
“He ran that one in the ground (talked too much).”
“The jig is up.”
“He’s into it head over heels.”
“He toots his own horn.”
“I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”
“He’s sly as a fox.”
“He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“He talks out of both sides of his mouth.”
“I wouldn’t believe him if he swore on a stack of Bibles.”
“Don’t let him get your goat (embarrass or make you mad).”
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“He took off like a bat out of hell.”
“He struts like a rooster.”
“He’s old as Methuselah.”
“You’ve said a mouthful.”
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“That’s enough to strangle a horse.”
“That’s a bigger cud than I can chew.”
“Don’t buy a pig in a poke.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“The fat is in the fire.”
“The proof is in the pudding.”
“The two of them can’t gee haw (get along).”
“She’s no spring chicken.”
“She was wearing her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.”
“She’s so bow-legged; she couldn’t hem a hog in a ditch.”
“She’s crazy as a bed bug.”
“She wouldn’t say, “boo” to a goose.”
“Don’t beat a dead horse.”
“She’s got a long row to hoe.”
“Get off your high horse.”
“Let bygones be bygones.”
“I don’t give a doodley squat.”
“I’ve got other fish to fry.”
“The grass is greener on the other side of the fence.”
“Don’t give me that hound dog look.”
“You can’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Still waters run deep.”
“Don’t make me eat my words.”
“I’ll do it, come hell or high water.”
“You’d forget your head, if it wasn’t fastened on.”
“Don’t bust a gut (get too excited).”
“I’ll be there, if the Good Lord is willing, and the creek don’t rise.”
“You have the patience of Job.”
“There’s not enough room in here to cuss a cat.”
“She’s playing possum (pretending to be asleep).”
Daddy didn’t swear, in fact he wouldn’t even say, “I swear,” he would say, “I swigger.” His
by-word was, “Dadburn it,” and if he was really upset, he would say, “Dadburn it to the dadburn
Devil.” He said Uncle Tommy threw a pitch fork and it stuck up in Daddy’s foot. I asked him
what he said when that happened and he told me he said, “Good Great, I can’t stand that.”
Daddy was a strict disciplinarian. If he told us to do something, and we asked why, he said,
“Because I said so.” He didn’t believe in sparing the rod. If we argued with each other, he
spanked us. If we sassed him or Mama, he spanked us. If he had to spank one of us, he usually
spanked all of us, including the neighbor kids if they were in on the ruckus. He kept the razor
strop visible, and that was usually enough to make us behave.
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One day when we lived next door to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta on South Morgan Street,
Robert stole butter out of the icebox on their back porch. Daddy wanted to know where the
butter came from, and he whipped Robert all the way back to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta’s
house to return the butter and apologize.
Tom was riding Robert’s bicycle, and Robert wanted him to stop. So he lay down in Tom’s
path, and Tom ran right over him. Charles shot Tom in the leg with his BB gun and Tom held
the gun all afternoon and dared Charles to get up out of his chair. We usually settled this kind of
thing among ourselves.
We were high-spirited and rambunctious, and we messed with Daddy’s rain gauge, adding
water or pouring some out from time to time, confusing him about how much it rained. We shot
firecrackers and cherry bombs in the backyard, and one of the boys shot out a streetlight with
Charles’s BB gun. Robert got a memorable spanking for shooting Edwin with it.
Jerry had a toy rubber knife with a blade that bent down and he and Polly put it in the
waistband of Tom’s pants so it looked like he had been stabbed, poured ketchup on him and
dragged him into the house. Mama fainted and Daddy whipped them all.
Daddy couldn’t outrun the boys, but they didn’t try to run from him again after the time he
knocked Jerry down with a rock. One time Daddy told me, “The Lord must have known you
were going to need a lot of whippings, because He sure did give you a good spanking ground.”
There was an old black couple who lived near the railroad trestle, and as they walked past our
house on South Morgan Street the man carried a sack. They usually went up the road in the
mornings and came back down in the afternoon. On their return trip the sack, which was slung
over his back, appeared to be full. Daddy called them “Sackie” and “Soap Sally,” and told us
“Sackie” had mean children in that sack, and “Soap Sally” made soap out of them. He said if we
didn’t behave, they would put us in that sack and take us off. We ran and hid under the porch
and watched them until they passed. We never knew what they had in that sack, but we surely
didn’t want to be in it.
Like most houses at the time, our house had only one bathroom, and we had to do all of our
grooming in front of the bathroom mirror.
We had a medicine cabinet where we kept band aids, razors, toothpaste, Bayer Aspirin, other
over the counter medicine, and Goody Powder and BC, which Daddy preferred to take.
We had shelves where we kept toiletries and hygiene products. We used Dial, the leading
deodorant soap. The first commercial underarm deodorant was called Mum, and was marketed
under the name Ban Roll-on deodorant. This is what we used at our house. There were no
aerosol deodorants at that time.
One day I had been in the bathroom for a while, and Daddy had knocked on the door twice.
On his third trip to the door, he said, “Booty, what are you doing in there? Trying to shit a roll of
barbed wire?”
Sometimes the hot water ran out before we all finished taking our baths, and Mama would
have to heat bath water on the stove. Jerry liked to joke about taking baths in a washtub in the
living room by the fire. He said he would wash down as low as possible, then wash up as high as
possible, and then step behind the door and wash possible.
Mama bathed Jane and me together to save both time and hot water. This arrangement
worked fine until the time I stood up, peed in the water, and got out of the bathtub, leaving Jane
in it.
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The 1950’s was a glamorous decade, and women wanted to look pretty. Toni made the first
home permanent and it was introduced to millions of women in 1947. We used Drene Shampoo,
and I was disappointed when I washed my hair in Breck Shampoo, and it didn’t turn out looking
like the Breck Girls in the advertisement. We rolled our hair on bobby pins and used wave clips.
We had cans of hair spray, but there were no hand held hair dryers.
Mama had a few beauty products she kept in the bathroom. She used Oil of Olay skin care
products, and she had foundation make-up, face powder, and rouge. Mascara, eye shadow, and
eyeliner were popular in the 1950’s, and Maybelline was the best known name in eye make-up.
Revlon and Max Factor were the most popular lipstick companies, and they offered a variety of
bright shades of pink and red. Mama’s favorite color was called “Paint the Town Pink.”
Although Mama didn’t wear much make-up, she always said, “A little paint helps any old barn.”
She used Jergens Lotion and she liked Evening in Paris Perfume and Estee Lauder Youth
Dew, but the scent that we associate with Mama was the lilac fragrance bath powders she
preferred.
Daddy shaved with a straight razor. He used Old Spice shaving soap and aftershave lotion.
Aqua Velva was another popular aftershave. The boys liked English Leather fragrance that is an
American classic. Some of the guys used Brylcreme hair gel and Vitalis hair tonic to slick back
their hair into a ducktail they wore along with sideburns. Butch Hair Wax became popular with
flat top haircuts. Charles put some of it on my hair one morning, and I had to shampoo my hair
several times to get it out.
I liked to put Mama’s cold cream and Noxzema skin cleanser on my face, and one night there
was a loud noise in the house, and Tom remarked that I must have been so greasy I slid out of
bed.
The dining room was the center of the house, and the place we gathered for meals. Double
windows hung with lace curtains overlooked the driveway and the neighbors’ yard.
The buffet was down the opposite wall, and its drawers held kitchen and table linens. In the
summertime, watermelons were placed underneath it on the floor. Milk glass candlesticks and
fruit compote shared the space on top with desserts and side dishes during Sunday dinners.
A china cabinet was on the left side of the doorway that went into the kitchen. Floral dishes
and tall green iced tea glasses filled its shelves and could be seen through glass doors.
On the right side of the kitchen doorway, Mama’s begonias wintered over on top of a dresser
that held bed and bath linens.
Old floral prints were framed and hung over the buffet and dresser. Floral plates secured by
brass holders hung on the wall in the recessed panel on each side of the French doors that went
into the living room.
The walls were painted a soft rose pink and a floral linoleum rug covered most of the
hardwood floor. I thought it was the prettiest room in the house, and I enjoyed spending time
there.
Sometimes out of boredom or curiosity I plundered through the drawers. If we didn’t put our
things up, and Mama had to do it for us, she forgot where she put them. I suspect this was a
memory lapse of convenience to teach us the responsibility of taking care of our things. If we
had to search for them, we’d put them away where we could easily find them again. Often she
stored errant stuff in the dining room, so I never knew what I might find at any given time in
those drawers.
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The dining room table with all its leaves filled most of the room. If we had company, the
younger kids ate in the kitchen. If there was a crowd, we ate all over the house.
At mealtime the blessing could be an eloquent spontaneous prayer of gratitude rendered by an
adult, or a simple memorized prayer recited by a child, but it was always reverent and sincere.
The “Good bread, good meat, Good Lord, let’s eat”- that one of us was prone to chant as we
bounded for the table- did not qualify as a prayer.
Conversation around the dining room table was lively. Daddy could tell us to let our food fill
our mouths. Sunday dinners we had fried chicken. Tom and Charles grabbed for the gizzards,
and the person who got the pulley bone got to make a wish. Tom likes to joke about a
thunderstorm knocking the power out during dinner. He says he reached across the table in the
dark to get the last piece of meat, and he got eight forks in his hand.
We used the dining room table for everything. During the school year we gathered there to
do homework, and in the summer a jigsaw puzzle graced its top. It was Robert’s place to build
his model ships and airplanes, and the place Tom taught himself to type. We played checkers on
the dining room table using a home-drawn board and drink bottle caps. Daddy taught us how to
jump them all off the board. We played ping pong, electric football, and monopoly on the dining
room table. But one thing we didn’t play was cards. Daddy didn’t believe in gambling, so card
playing wasn’t allowed at our house. One time a neighbor boy taught me some card tricks, and I
brought the deck home to show the others. Daddy took the cards away from me and burned
them in a five gallon bucket.
We had marbles, peashooters, yo-yos, sling shots, horseshoes, and roller skates to entertain
us, but we didn’t need toys to have a good time. We made music with combs wrapped in
cellophane and used spoons to tap out a tune. Charles rolled discarded tires up and down the
street and Jane and I played hop-scotch in the front yard and on the sidewalk. We could make a
game out of anything. Robert tied knots in Daddy’s handkerchief to make a ball, and then we
stood in the dining room doorway taking turns trying to ring the empty popcorn bowl he had
placed on the arm of a living room chair.
The boys made guns out of a block of wood and a clothespin. The guns shot rubber bands and
strips of inner tubes. We would each pick a color and sit on the porch counting how many of the
cars passing were our color. We turned soft drink bottles upside down to see where they were
made, and to see who had the bottle from the farthest distance.
Robert and I would toss all of our coins up in the air and play heads or tails until one of us
had all the coins. Of course, we weren’t allowed to play for “keepsies,” because that was
gambling.
Mama hosted baby showers and bridal showers at our house, and we had birthday parties and
attended other kids’ birthday parties. We played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, a game where a
donkey picture was taped to the wall and kids tried to see who could come closest to pinning the
donkey’s tail in place while they were blindfolded. And we played Clothes Pins in a Bottle,
where they put a milk bottle or other jar with a small opening on the floor and let each kid try
dropping ten wooden clothespins into the bottle to see who got the best score. The winners of
the games were given a prize.
The older kids, the teenagers, played spin the bottle, a game where everyone sits in a circle.
One person spins the bottle and they must kiss the person who the bottle points toward when it
stops spinning. Then that person takes a turn at spinning the bottle.
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Charles and Jane always had their birthday party together since their birthdays were only four
days apart. I always envied them having a summer birthday.
When Tom and Robert were in high school, Mama gave them a surprise birthday party near
Christmas, since there is only two weeks between their December birthdays.
I tagged along with my brothers and sisters and followed them around. They took time for
me and I hung onto their every word. I listened as Charles told me stories about an imaginary
Uncle Appalachian. Robert changed the words to songs, and I joined him singing the new ones.
I still remember the parts Tom taught me of Vachel Lindsay’s poem, The Congo.
Charles pitched his tent in the backyard underneath the pear tree, and that is where he held his
circus. He drew posters and nailed them to the oak trees that lined the sidewalk next to the
street. He hoped to entice the neighborhood kids who passed our house going to the store to stop
and spend their nickels at his circus instead. The posters proclaimed, “See The Hairless Dog" and
"Take A Trip Around The World.” Once they paid the admission and got inside the tent, they
saw that the hairless dog was a wiener in a cage, and the trip around the world was a walk around
a world globe. He got lots of laughs, and nobody asked for their money back.
The City of Shelby picked up the garbage once a week. There were two men on the garbage
truck. One man emptied the garbage can into the back of the truck, and then whistled for the
driver to move forward. One day we were sitting on the front porch, and just as the man lifted
the can into the air, Charles whistled, and the truck moved forward, spilling garbage all over
South DeKalb Street.
Iva Jane Denton next door took piano lessons, and we all gathered on the front porch when it
was time for her lesson to watch her teacher try to park her car. She parked on the street, and she
would get out, walk around the car, get back into it, and move it about a foot. She repeated this
until eventually it was parked to her satisfaction, and she finally went into the house. Parking
her car took about as long as the music lesson.
When a boy in our neighborhood started to grow whiskers, as a rite of passage the other boys
held him down and gave him his first shave. I spoiled it for them without meaning to when Don
Galloway was leery of coming closer and I said, “It is okay, Don, they’re not going to shave
you.”
On summer nights the neighborhood kids played Ring-a-levio, Red rover, Kick-the-can, and
Hide-and-seek. One night I was standing on the Mill’s front porch next door, and I jumped off
the porch in the dark to scare Connie Dixon as she came around the hedge. I landed face down,
spread eagle, in the middle of a rose bush.
Everyone came running when they heard my screaming. Daddy and two of the boys lifted me
out of the rose bush. It hurt just as much coming out of it as it did going in, with the thorns
scraping and tearing my skin.
Daddy took me home, and he and Mama cleaned my scratched up and bleeding arms, legs,
and face, and got the Merthiolate out and started to put it on my wounds. I knew it was going to
burn like fire. I remembered seeing Tom leave the house earlier in the evening, so in trying to
avoid the Merthiolate, I said I didn’t want anybody to put it on me but Tom. What I didn’t know
was that Tom had come back home, and suddenly he appeared. He said he would put the
Merthiolate on me. It did burn like fire, and he and Daddy painted me up like a red striped tiger.
Out of necessity we were an industrious bunch. The boys worked on Ryburn Hamrick’s
Dairy Farm. Jerry rode on the milk truck and set bottles on front porches in the mornings before
school, and Tom and Robert washed milk bottles. Robert mowed Ryburn Hamrick’s grass in
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exchange for milk. The boys looked through the furnace at the Lily Mill for dimes. We
collected soft drink bottles and sold them to the grocery stores for candy money. We picked
cotton for money to go to the county fair, had paper routes, sold Cloverine Salve, packs of seeds,
Mama’s crochet potholders, greeting cards, and Grit newspapers. Jerry and Tom bought a little
bicycle fixed it up, and painted it red for Polly to ride to collect for their paper routes. For extra
money Mama babysat, and sometimes she sewed for the public. One time she made curtains for
Hager Motel’s dining room.
Daddy and Mama were frugal. They shopped wisely and took advantage of specials and
promotions. The grocery stores offered dishes that could be purchased at discount prices. Some
detergent companies offered glasses, dishes, and towels as premiums with their products. We
got Libby drinking glasses that came in Silverdust Washing Powder. Mama clipped coupons
from magazines and newspapers, and Daddy ordered Polly a doll with the coupons he saved
from Kool cigarettes.
Mama bought Stanley Home Products, which were high quality household cleaners, brushes,
and mops from representatives that were sold at home parties. Ladies invited small groups of
friends to their home for product demonstrations, and Mama hosted a party at our house several
times.
Polyethylene was a new plastic that was formulated in 1942 during World War II. Earl
Tupper, a Du Pont chemist, created Tupperware, lidded bowls made from this plastic, and they
were sold exclusively at home parties. Mama had Tupperware parties at our house to buy the
storage bowls.
She bought brushes made by the Fuller Brush Company from a salesman who came door-todoor. They were famous for their hairbrushes that came with a lifetime guarantee.
Mama collected and saved S&H Green Stamps and Gold Stamps. They were a form of
trading stamps that were given free as a rewards program based on the dollar amount of the
purchases from supermarkets, department stores, gas stations, and other retailers. The stamps
were pasted into a savings book, and the filled books could be exchanged for premiums,
including house wares and other items from their catalog. S&H Green Stamps could also be
redeemed at the local S&H Green Stamp Store.
There were premium incentives offered for kids in products too. We liked the plastic prize
toys that came in the Cracker Jack’s box along with the caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts, and
we collected the baseball cards that came in the Topps Company’s Bazooka Bubble Gum.
We saved coupons that came in Blue Horse school notebook paper and sent cereal box tops to
redeem for merchandise. Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger offered many premiums that could be
purchased with just a few box tops and a little cash.
It was an era of door-to-door salesmen. They sold Bibles, encyclopedias, coffee, insurance,
vacuum cleaners, and a multitude of other things. It seemed as if someone was always knocking
on our door selling something. Mama was polite to the salesmen, invited them in to demonstrate
their wares, and offered them a glass of iced tea.
Daddy was a pack rat. Everything Mama threw away, he retrieved and put in the basement.
Some things Mrs. Mills next door threw away, he retrieved and put in the basement. In defense
of the things he salvaged, he would say, “You never know when you might need it.”
Daddy’s motto was “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” He could find a use
for anything. We had a corner what-not that the shelves were made of triangles of plywood and
the legs were stacks of empty wooden Lily thread spools. These homemade units made to
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display figurines were popular among mill families and could be found in a number of mill
homes in the community.
Clothing fashions in the 1950’s included bobby socks, saddle oxfords, PF Flyer and Keds
sneakers, poodle skirts, neckerchiefs, pedal pushers, straight skirts, pleated skirts, full skirts with
crinoline petticoats, wide belts and tabs with buckles on the back of pants and shirts. One fun
fashion item was plastic pop beads that came apart and were interchangeable to make bracelets
and necklaces of any length and combination of colors.
When our clothes were beyond repair, they became cleaning rags or cut into remnants and
sewn into Mama’s quilts. But first, the buttons were retrieved and recycled. The button jar held
a delightful collection, and it was fun to spill them out and sort through them.
My first sewing lesson involved the button jar. I selected the ones I wanted to use and sewed
them onto a wash cloth. Then I cut them off again. Daddy wore suspenders that he called
“gallowses.” They were buttoned to the inside of the waistband of his pants. So once I learned
to sew on buttons, I had a little job to do when he got new pants.
I loved to rummage through Mama’s quilt scraps and select a few to make my dolls some
clothes. Mama would cut patterns for me out of newspaper, just as she created patterns for the
clothes she made for us. Then she would help me hand sew the clothes together with a needle
and thread. Daddy had his Mother’s treadle sewing machine, and he helped me use it to make
my dolls a quilt.
In the wintertime Mama kept her quilt frame up in the living room and quilted while we were
at school. Daddy helped her raise the quilt frame toward the ceiling and out of the way late in
the afternoon. Sometimes she would let me help her, if she was still quilting when we got home.
She used colored chalk to draw a fan design onto the quilt, and she taught me to make the tiny
even stitches she liked to use.
Our bedrooms were cold in the winter, though there was a fireplace in each room. We piled
so many quilts on the beds I could hardly turn over, and I spent the time when I wasn’t asleep
admiring the quilts and remembering garments the fabrics used to be. Mama sewed some of our
clothes out of feed sacks, and those scraps made their way into the quilts too. Everybody
recognized the feed sack fabrics, and a little girl at Sunday school told Polly, “Oh, we have
curtains just like your dress.”
I always liked to play with Mama’s pinking shears, cutting scraps of cloth to see the scalloped
edge they made. Mama said that helped to keep the fabric from fraying, and she told me about
the time Tom used them to cut Polly’s hair.
Daddy washed our clothes first thing on Monday morning, just as soon as our breakfast was
cooked. The washing machine was on the back porch, and he ran the garden hose from the
kitchen faucet to fill the big tin tubs with water. So the back door stood open part of the time. In
the winter on Monday mornings, the kitchen was cold. Mama asked him to wait until we left for
school to do the wash, but if he had a chore to do, he wanted to do it and be done with it.
Several times he made lye soap in a big black kettle in the backyard, but he learned firsthand
that lye soap would destroy our clothes. He soon switched back to Rinso Laundry Detergent.
Sometimes a garment got caught in the washing machine’s ringer. One Monday morning, to
my horror, my white cheerleading blouse got stuck, and Daddy had to cut it out of the ringer with
his pocket knife.
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The washing machine had been given to Daddy. When the old one broke, Mama saw this one
advertised for sale in the newspaper. Daddy got Uncle Charlie, who lived next door on South
Morgan Street, to take him in his truck to the address listed in the paper. It was a beautiful
residence in the finest neighborhood. Daddy told the man that his kids’ shoes were worn out,
and they needed new ones, but he had to have a washing machine, because they needed clean
clothes more than they needed new shoes.
The man said, “I have a child upstairs who has never walked a step. I would give everything I
own for a pair of worn out shoes.”
He gave Daddy the washing machine along with his blessings for the children. And when
Daddy got home, he picked up Polly’s little worn out sandal, kissed it, and told Mama the story.
Daddy used Clorox to bleach the white clothes, and one time I borrowed the Clorox and
poured it full strength on my dingy white tennis shoes. My toes were sticking out of the tops of
my shoes by the time I got across the street to the ball field.
Daddy hung the clothes on the clotheslines in the backyard to dry. They smelled fresh from
drying in the open air. He brought them in and placed them in the bedroom to be ironed.
Mama ironed everything, including the sheets and pillowcases. She starched our clothes with
Argo Laundry Starch. It was white and chalky looking, and some folks liked to eat it. She used a
soft drink bottle with a sprinkler cap on it to dampen the clothes as she ironed them. She made a
sugar starch and used it to stiffen the doilies and centerpieces that she crocheted.
Daddy’s trunk held all of his treasures. In the bottom were his clothes, while the top shelf
held cartons of Kool cigarettes, his shaving gear and hair cutting paraphernalia, our school
supplies, his Mother’s pocketbook, jewelry box, family pictures, and newspaper clippings. The
trunk had belonged to his Father. It held all that he had left of his parents. It was sacred grounds
and off limits to us. He kept a salvaged antique brass lamp on top of it and used the trunk as a
bedside table.
When we gave him new clothes, they went into the trunk and remained unworn until he
needed them. About the only time he dressed up was Sunday morning, but he always wore a suit
and necktie to church. Other than his Sunday clothes, he had specific things that he would wear- black narrow striped pants that he wore in winter, seersucker striped ones that he wore in
summer. His shirts always had two pockets. One of the pockets was for the silver cigarette case
that held his cigarettes and a couple of toothpicks, bobby pins, safety pins, band aids, and rubber
bands. The other pocket held his eyeglasses case, cigarette lighter, clip-on screwdriver, stub
pencil, ink pen, and comb. His trousers pockets held a handkerchief, wallet, coins, a redhandled, folded nail file, a whet rock, and a key ring full of keys to unknown locks, perhaps
some to doors at the Lily Mill. He also carried a white-handled pocket knife, a military metal for
good luck, and a metal tape measure. When he favored wearing bib overalls, he carried a
wooden fold-up ruler in his side pocket, and a flashlight. He was prepared for anything. He
stood 5’ 11” and he said the most he ever weighed was 170 lbs. But I’ll bet that wasn’t with his
clothes on and his pockets full.
In winter he wore a cardigan sweater and a jacket, and all year long he usually wore high top
black laced up boots. He said he needed the support for his ankles. He wore suspenders because
he said a belt hurt his side. He thought something inside of him was “torn loose”. Nathan had
his doctor in Charlotte perform a complete physical check up on him, but they didn’t find the
problem. He wore his pants higher than his waist so Jerry called him “High Pockets”. He called
Jerry “Low Pockets,” and he called Doug “No Pockets”.
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He wore a grey beaver felt fedora in the winter and a straw panama hat in the summer. He
had specific “John Camp Issue” even to his socks and underwear. He was easy to buy for and
most of his attire could be purchased in the basement of A. V. Wray’s. We replenished his stock
three times a year-- at Christmas, on his birthday, and on Father’s Day.
THE KOREAN WAR
Edwin married Ruby Deaton from Patterson Springs on September 30, 1950, in Gaffney, S.
C., when I was two years old. We still have a bridal shower invitation, now sixty years old, that
Mama and Velle sent to Aunt Adeline Shields inviting her to a miscellaneous shower for Ruby
held at the Lily Mill Clubhouse.
Ruby was always the life of the party. She and Edwin lived with us until I was five years old.
Ruby loved shoes and Polly loved Ruby’s shoes. One time Polly slipped a pair of Ruby’s pretty
shoes, a strappy number with a little heel, and wore them to junior high school. Polly tore the
heel off one of the shoes rounding third base.
Edwin and Ruby moved across town to a little house on Poverty Street. Carl Thompson
named the street, “Poverty Street” because of a dispute he had with the city about running water
lines to the houses he built there. Later the street was renamed Mimosa Drive. Edwin and Ruby
worked right up the road at Bost Bakery.
I spent so much time with them many people thought they were my parents. One day Ruby
took me with her to Bost Bakery. It was her day off, and she stopped by to get her paycheck.
She left me alone in the car while she went inside. Her cigarette lighter was on the front seat
beside me, and I started to play with it. When I saw the flame, it scared me, so I threw the lighter
down, catching the front seat of the car on fire. I stood up and edged toward the passenger door,
but I couldn’t get the door open. Ned Bost happened to be in the parking lot, saw me, and
rescued me from the burning car.
Edwin was drafted into the Army. The Korean War, a military conflict between the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea supported by the People’s Republic of China and the
Soviet Union and the Republic of Korea supported by the United Nations and the United States.
On October 14, 1953, Edwin was sent to Fort Jackson in Columbia, S. C. for his basic training.
The morning Edwin left Shelby, the family was in tears. Daddy, Jerry, and Polly walked from
our house on South DeKalb Street to the bus uptown, waiting in front of the Post Office for the
inductees. They joined Edwin and Ruby and more tears ensued as Edwin boarded the bus and
they told him good-bye. Polly and one of her friends went with Ruby twice to Fort Jackson to
see him during his basic training, and when he came home, he brought a few of the soldiers with
him.
About the same time Edwin was inducted, Nathan and Ollie’s son, Randy Camp, was drafted
into the Army and sent to Fort Benning, Georgia. When they finished boot camp most of his unit
shipped out to Korea, but Randy finished cook school and remained in Fort Benning as a cook.
Mary and Forrest’s son, Jack Grayson, joined the Army and was sent to Fort Hood, Texas,
and later shipped out to Okinawa for a tour of duty.
Ruth and Lee’s son, Paul Othneal “Buck”, was in the Navy from 1953-1974 on a submarine
on the West Coast and on the East Coast in Key West, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina.
At the end of World War II, Korea had been taken from Japan and divided at the 38th parallel
of latitude and occupied by the Soviet Union north of that line and by the United States south of
the line. It had been intended as a temporary line between the American and Soviet zones of
occupation, but what had been planned as a temporary line became a border between unfriendly
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regimes. Russia had established a puppet communist government in North Korea intent on
reuniting the country by force. In the south, the Americans tried to maintain democratic order.
In 1949, after four years of occupation, America withdrew its troops. This gave the North
Koreans the chance they had been waiting for.
The Korean War began in June 1950, when North Korean troops invaded South Korea. The
United Nations voted unanimously to conduct a war against the northern invaders and rallied to
defend South Korea. The vote was unanimous because the Soviet Union happened at the
moment to be boycotting the Council. They had begun the boycott in January in protest over the
United Nations refusal to seat Red China instead of Nationalist China on the Council.
In Korea, it was the first time in history that nations fought for international justice. United
Nations troops from British Commonwealth, France, Holland, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand,
Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg, Ethiopia, and Columbia, and medical attachments from
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, and India gathered there, but the United States had to bear the
main burden.
The decision to defend South Korea was popular with both the Congress and the American
public. Americans had seen Eastern Europe and China fall to Communism in the postwar years
and they were ready to draw the line. So the Cold War ended in combat. America was at war
again and it was never even called a war. In the United States it was officially described as a
“police action.” It was called the Korean Conflict not the Korean War due to the lack of a
legitimate declaration of war by the U. S. Congress. Colloquially, it was referred to as “The
Forgotten War” and “The Unknown War” because it ended in a stalemate.
General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the Pacific in World War II and later Supreme
Commander of the occupation troops in Japan, was appointed commander of the United Nation
forces. Ten months later on April 5, 1951, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his
command when MacArthur violated United States policy by publicly advocated the bombing and
blockading of Communist China. President Truman and United Nation allies feared a full-scale
war with China and maybe also the Soviet Union. General MacArthur returned to America to a
hero’s welcome, but he was told there would be no change to the President’s decision. President
Truman was determined to assert civilian control over the military and replaced General
MacArthur with General Matthew B. Ridgeway.
By July 1951, both sides were prepared to discuss a truce, and negotiations began. Still
months later the talking dragged on and men continued to die in combat. The Korean War
became an issue in the 1952 Presidential campaign. Republican candidate, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower promised if he was elected he would go to Korea and end the war. He won the
election and on November 29, even before he was inaugurated, he went to Korea to see what
could be done to stop the war. President Eisenhower ended the war by moving atomic weapons
to Okinawa and threatening to bomb Chinese bases. The war ended in a border stalemate and on
July 27, 1953, a Peace Treaty was signed at Panmunjom, establishing a demilitarized zone at
approximately the 38th parallel of latitude, creating a boundary between Communist North Korea
and anti-Communist South Korea. The Republic of Korea never participated in the armistice,
and the Cold War tension was unabated. Congress extended the war period to January 31, 1955,
for eligibility of military benefits, and many U. S. troops were sent to Korea for occupation duty
from 1954-1956, because of the uneasy peace negotiations. Sixty-eight million Americans
served from 1950-1955. Since then there have been frequent skirmishes in the area and charges
of violations by both sides.
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One of Cleveland County’s major contributions to the Korean War was the 311th Station
Hospital, a 300-bed, self-sufficient unit of skilled personnel that had its own cooks, drivers,
doctors, dentists, nurses and assorted technicians. The 311th unit was sent to Ft. Bragg, N. C. to
help train and assist in the Army hospital there, and remained at Ft. Bragg, N. C. for two years.
About half of the unit went to Korea.
The Korean War left 36,516 U. S. soldiers dead, and 23,615 of them were killed in action. A
bronze plaque on the north side of the courthouse bears the names of the 20 Cleveland County
soldiers who died in that war.
After his basic training, Edwin was stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. He worked in
artillery as a gunner on a Sherman tank. He and Ruby lived in military housing on the Army
base. Edwin served the remainder of his two years at Fort Hood. One time he came home for a
visit, and Ruby wasn’t with him. Daddy and I rode with him to Atlanta to the bus station to get
her. We spent the night with some of her relatives on the way there.
When Edwin was discharged from the Army, he came home alone. One day he got a phone
call, and he only talked for a minute. He left the house without saying a word and walked down
the street. Shortly, he came back up the street, and Ruby was with him. She had called him from
a nearby neighbor’s house. She was wearing a white, beaded and fringed jacket she had bought
in Mexico. When they walked into the house, you could have heard a pin drop. Then Mama
broke the silence with, “Look what the cat drug in.” And we all laughed and lined up to hug
Ruby and welcome her home.
Edwin and Ruby stayed around Shelby for awhile. He and Robert squirrel hunted on High
Hill down below the Lily Mill, and he drove us to school in his new 1955 Mercury. He looked
for a job in the area between Shelby and Charlotte. When he couldn’t find a good job, he and
Ruby moved back to Texas to live. He had developed a taste for Texas and embraced all things
Western down to his cowboy boots and the “Do You Know How Big Texas Is” jokes. He
opened a successful air and power tool company in Fort Worth and stayed there for the next forty
years.
Jerry was deferred from the military because he had a heart murmur. He married Ann
Ledford May 30, 1953, in Gaffney, S. C., when I was five years old. She was a student at the
Nursing School beside the Shelby Hospital. One time I spent a week with her family in Casar,
about thirty minutes away from Shelby, closer to the mountains. Her parents and her four
brothers doted attention on me, and her Mother made me dresses and tea cakes. Ann and I rode
the bus back to Shelby on Saturday morning with a bag full of tea cakes to share with my family.
We stopped in town and bought the new shoes that Jerry had promised to buy me.
Jane and I liked to spend time with our siblings at their in-laws. We went with Nathan and
Velle to Ellenboro to visit Velle’s family, and when Edwin and Ruby came home from Texas,
we went with them when they stayed overnight at her family’s house near Patterson Springs.
Polly married Wilburn Evans August 6, 1954, in Gaffney, S. C., when I was six years old.
Wilburn worked for Baxter Corporation as a jacquard harness builder setting up looms to make
labels. For a while they lived with Wilburn’s family on South DeKalb Street, just up the street
from us. Then the Evans moved to Patterson Springs. I enjoyed visiting Wilburn’s family and
his sister, Mary, and I are the same age. Jane and I liked to spend nights at Polly and Wilburn’s
house.
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Their son, Scotty, and Jerry and Ann’s son, Douglas, were born when I was seven. They took
a trip to Texas together to see Edwin and Ruby when the boys were about a year and a half.
They took pictures of the boys standing on the “Welcome” signs that denote entering another
state.
Robert and Tom and his friend, Jack Dockery, went to Texas to spend the summer with
Edwin and Ruby. Daddy’s nephew, Mack Reid, owned a commercial construction company
there, and the boys worked for him building barracks at Carswell Air Force Base.
Jane and I went to Texas with Anna and Dewey. Anna had cut my hair very short and gave
me a scull hugging poodle cut permanent that was all the rage. We had a wreck one afternoon,
when Dewey and I went to pick up the boys from work. It didn’t do much damage to either
vehicle and no one was hurt. The police officer asked, “Who is the little boy in the back seat?”
Tom took a look at my haircut and said, “That’s Henry.”
Edwin and Ruby had a son, Robby, in the fall of 1958, and they divorced soon after the twins,
Keith and Karen, were born in the summer of 1963. Ruby became the Chief of Police of
Crowley, Texas. She was the second female in Texas to become a chief of police.
Bill McKee started coming to our house with Edwin when I was about two years old. His
family lived in the Belmont Mill village. After we moved to South DeKalb Street, the McKee
family moved there too, and became our neighbors across the street.
Bill never married, and he became friends with all of us. At one time or another he served as
Sunday school teacher, scout master, mentor, preacher, boss, and baseball coach to the boys.
He was like a member of our family, and he ate many of his meals at our house. He drove us
everywhere, and the boys borrowed his car to go on dates.
Bill liked to play practical jokes. He wrapped up Tom’s old football jersey and gave it to him
for Christmas, and he hid calendars all over Jerry and Ann’s house.
When Ronnie Austell and our neighbor, Nita Horton, got married, Tom was in their wedding
party. Tom got the “Just Married” sign and put it on the back of Bill’s car. Bill didn’t know it,
and he drove around town for days by himself or with a bunch of boys with the sign on his car.
Charles rode with Bill on Clyde A. Short Co.’s delivery truck for several summers. Some
days they delivered to South Carolina, and they would stop at Uncle Adam and Aunt Lizzie’s
house and get watermelons that they grew. When they got home, Charles would come running
into the house yelling, “Adam had ’em, and we got ’em!”
Bill managed the concession stand at the ballpark, and Charles worked for him there too.
Charles would bring home the hot dogs and doughnuts left over from the ballgame and wake us
up for a midnight snack.
Sometimes in the summer they had melted candy at Clyde Short’s, and Bill would bring it to
us. One time Bill brought home some display samples from work. He gave us wooden packs of
Lifesavers to play with. We placed them on the sidewalk in front of the house and watched as
people passing stooped to pick them up, thinking they had found some candy.
Bill remembered our birthdays, and he really made our Christmases. One year, he bought
Charles, Jane, and me each a bicycle. We rode them around the neighborhood and we rode them
to Marion School. I took my roller skates to school with me, and in the afternoons, I put them on
my shoes and tightened them with my skate key. I rode my bicycle and skated at the same time
all the way home. I placed my baseball cards between the bicycle spokes, and I thought it
sounded like a motorcycle. I put my feet on the ground and flew down the East Graham Street
hill. I was almost to the Snowflake Laundry before I stopped rolling.
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Bill taught me the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, which was his favorite, and I still have the
white zippered Bible he gave me when I was baptized at Bethel Baptist Church.
Everette Dixon lived the third house up from us on South DeKalb Street. His older sister,
Sallie Dixon, was Daddy’s first wife, so he was Daddy’s brother-in-law and Savannah’s,
Nathan’s and Ruth’s uncle. Eb never knew his sister, Sallie, because she died four years before
he was born.
Eb and Marie had three children, Everette Jr. “Poochie”, Janet, and Connie, who was a year
older than me. Eb worked at the Snowflake Laundry on East Graham Street established in 1925
as Shelby’s oldest laundry. He walked down to our house and visited most days after supper for
an hour or two. He and Daddy talked about people they used to know. He watched television
with us, and many times he fell asleep in his chair with his arms up and his hands locked behind
his head. One time when he was sound asleep with his mouth wide open, we poured our
popcorn all over him, got the camera, and took his picture. He laughed when we showed it to
him.
Lem Patterson owned the neighborhood store on South DeKalb Street with Patterson Dry
Cleaners located behind the store that was operated by his son Willard “Pat”. The store was
eight doors down the street from our house and across the street from Bethel Baptist Church.
Lem and Mattie had their residence in the back of the building. Lem was Daddy’s sister, Anna’s
son, so he was Daddy’s nephew and our cousin.
The store was closed on Sundays, but Lem sat in there behind the counter reading his Bible.
He would let us in between Sunday school and preaching to get a snack. He sang “Dance with a
Dolly with a Hole in Her Stocking” and a song about “Old Tom Hawkins” sometimes while
people shopped in the store.
The store had several shelves of candy, and many selections were just a penny. There were
candy bars; kits, which were bite size pieces of old fashion taffy; B B Bats, which were flavored
taffy suckers on a stick; Sugar Daddy and Sugar Babies; jawbreakers; fireballs; Mary Janes,
which were peanut butter and molasses flavored taffy candy with peanut butter in the center;
black cows; Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops; candy cigarettes; Necco wafers; coconut flavored
suckers: wax bottles filled with fruit flavored liquid, and wax lips.
Lem had a penny gumball machine directly across from the check-out counter. If we were
lucky enough to get a speckled ball, it was redeemable for a nickel, which meant we could get a
candy bar. Sometimes Lem kept giving us pennies to put in the machine until we got a speckled
ball.
On the other side of the counter was the drink cooler. It was horizontal shaped with a bottle
opener on the outside. The soft drinks were on ice and cost a nickel. He had crates of soft drinks
sitting on the floor. We drank the popular southern Sun Drop Golden Cola and Cheerwine that
was made in Salisbury, N. C. Lotta Cola, the first sixteen ounce soft drink, was popular because
it was larger than the others. We bought Nehi Orange and Nehi Grape flavored sodas and we
liked to put a pack of peanuts in our bottles of R. C. Colas.
The ice cream cooler, located nearby, was filled with chocolate-covered, fudge, and fruit
flavored popsicles, nutty buddies, and ice cream sandwiches all priced at a nickel.
The bread shelves were located at the front of the store. A loaf of bread cost nineteen cents,
but what we were studying were the other goodies on the bread shelves like Moon Pies, fried
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pies, honey buns, and chocolate snowballs with coconut topping, that could be had for a nickel or
a dime. Sometimes we made our selection by saying, “Enny-meeny-miney-moe.”
In the back of the store, Lem had a machine that he used to slice bologna, luncheon meat, and
hoop cheese. After he sliced it, he weighed it and wrapped it in white butcher’s paper.
Lem stocked a variety of small toy items including Mexican Jumping Beans. He had Tricky
Dogs, which were a pair of plastic Scotty Dogs, one white and one black, and each dog was
glued to a heavy magnet that kept them in a kissing position.
He had jackstones, which were several six pointed metal pieces that were picked up while
bouncing a ball in the game of jacks. There were rickrack paddles with a ball attached by a long
piece of elastic, and pick-up sticks used in a game of physical and mental skill where each stick
has to be removed from a pile without disturbing the remaining ones.
I gauged my height by how tall I came to the counter of Lem’s store. I had to go around the
open side of the counter to pay Lem for my purchases for years, until I grew tall enough to see
over the top of it and place my items and money there.
Lem kept the tobacco products on the shelves underneath the cash register. Cigarettes were
twenty cents a pack. He gave me empty cigar boxes to use to store my paper dolls and baseball
cards. One day he gave me a turtle pull toy and told me not to tell anybody he gave it to me. He
meant not to tell the other kids in the neighborhood, because he couldn’t give everybody one. I
pulled the turtle behind me up the street toward home. I’d been eyeing those pull toys, and now I
had one for my own. When I got home, Mama and Daddy asked me where I got it. I
remembered what Lem said, and I wouldn’t tell them. Mama called Lem, and he told her he
gave it to me, and she thanked him for his generosity to us kids.
If Mrs. Spake, our neighbor up the street who was elderly and lived alone, needed something
from the store, she would call me. If Mama was cooking and she needed something from the
store, she would send me. I would run down there and back as fast as I could. Sometimes when I
got back, she had thought of something else she needed, so I would sprint to Lem’s and back
again.
At our last high school class reunion, Nancy Eaker asked me if I could still run fast. She said
that when we were kids, my little legs would fly. Eddie Sain said that I was the only one at
Marion School who could outrun him. I told them that I had plenty of practice because Mama
kept me running to the store.
Mama and Daddy kept Scotty and Doug while Polly and Ann worked, and they were like my
little brothers. They played together well. They walked to Lem’s store and shared their candy.
Scotty dropped his candy then picked it up and put it in his mouth. When he was reminded about
germs, he said, “Germs, germs, germs, the Booger Man, and Santa Claus, that’s all I’ve ever
heard, and I’ve never seen any of them.”
Scotty liked to use big words. He asked Doug, “Do you like girls?’ Doug said, “No, do
you?” Scotty said, “Confidentially, I push them down.”
A pair of spinster sisters lived across the street from us. Everyone referred to them as the Old
Maids. One day Daddy came in and told Mama there was an old mole in the garden. Doug said,
“Old Maids and old moles, that’s all there is around here.”
One day Scotty found Polly’s little pair of red rubber boots, and Daddy let him wear them
home to show her.
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I started third grade the fall of 1956 and Miss Marie Davis was my teacher at Marion School.
Her father was Cliff Davis who owned the farm where Daddy and the family used to live. He
and Daddy were friends, and sometimes I would go with Daddy to their house to visit.
Miss Davis gave our class patterns and fabric scraps to hand sew stuffed animals. I made
myself a menagerie of them. Classmate Bill Browning still remembers the ones I helped him
make.
For our class play, we had a circus. I cut cartwheels across the stage on roller skates. I
wanted a red tutu to wear for my performance, and Miss Davis went to Charlotte to Lebo’s Inc.
to find me one. I stood on our front porch on South De Kalb Street with it on, while she and
Mama sewed on rows of red net ruffles.
Miss Davis wrote on my report card that I needed to be more expressive in my reading. She
suggested that I go to the Shelby Public Library and check out some books to practice reading
aloud at home. The Library was on South Washington Street, just a few blocks away and on the
next street from where we lived, so I could walk there by myself.
I enjoyed going to the Public Library. I discovered the Jane’s Books and liked looking
through the pictures of airplanes and ships. Miss Maude Kelsey, the Head Librarian, took me
under her wing and recommended books she thought I would enjoy reading. I checked out
books, took them home and practiced reading them aloud to Mama.
One day on my way home I noticed the pretty flowers growing in the late Governor Gardner’s
yard. So I stopped to pick some of them to take home to Mama. Mama thanked me for the
flowers and asked me where I got them. Then she called Mrs. Gardner and apologized for my
behavior. Mrs. Gardner told Mama to enjoy the flowers, that she looked out the window and
watched me pick them.
We had a bookcase at home that held an old set of encyclopedia with lithograph drawings and
a collection of books that ranged from Voltaire to William Faulkner and Hemingway. I think
every family member had deposited books there along the way. I looked through the book
shelves and discovered a Nancy Drew mystery book, and I was hooked. I went on to read all of
them as well as the Hardy Boys mystery books too.
Mama liked to read McCall’s Magazine and she cut the Betsy McCall paper dolls out of it for
me. She enjoyed Good Housekeeping Magazine, Reader’s Digest, and The Saturday Evening
Post. Daddy was interested in Field and Stream and Progressive Farmer Magazine. We liked
Sports Illustrated, Mad Magazine, and comic books. One time I found a Playboy Magazine in
the bathroom behind the claw foot bathtub. I didn’t want anybody to know I found it, but it
slipped out of my hands and I dropped it in the water.
It was an era when there was very little seen or heard that was risqué. People were still
talking about Jane Russell exposing cleavage in the movie, The Outlaw. In 1957 Grace
Metalious wrote Peyton Place, a work of fiction about a sordid little town that caused quite a stir.
In 1961, The Coasters’ song about belly dancer, “Little Egypt,” was banned from most radio
stations because the song says, “Little Egypt came out strutting wearing nothing but a button and
a bow.” In Anna’s beauty shop there were popular magazines called True Story and Modern
Screen, a magazine about movie stars that I thumbed through when I visited her.
One publication that we all loved was the Sears, Roebuck and Co. mail-order catalog. The
first catalog was published in 1888, as a way for people who lived a long way from town to send
off for merchandise they needed. By 1927, the book was 1,100 pages and offered 35,000 items.
We all poured through the new Sears, Roebuck catalog when it arrived. Mama ordered some of
our clothes from the catalog, and I wore the toy section out of the Christmas Wish Book, just
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thumbing through it. Families found many uses for the thick Sears, Roebuck Big Book through
the years, including serving as a booster seat at the dinner table for young children, papering the
walls for insulation, interesting reading in a privy, and even toilet paper in an outhouse.
We loved listening to music on the radio. Sometimes they had contests, and we participated
in them. One time Jane won ice cream from Carolina Dairy because they picked her birth date,
and I won Diane 29 Drive-in movie tickets for guessing the correct weight of the radio
announcer. Mama bought Double Colas and wouldn’t let us drink them. They were having a
promotion that stated if they came to your house they would give you cash for each Double Cola
you had on hand.
We had a record player and we bought albums and 45’s uptown at Bobby’s Music Shop and
J&K Record Shop. We listened to Doo Wop, Rock and Roll, Country and Western, Classical,
Gospel, Bluegrass, movie soundtracks, and albums by comedian, Brother Dave Gardner. We
liked Big Band swing music, and we were proud that Shelby native, Johnny Best, American jazz
trumpeter had played with the bands of Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman.
Since World War II the music market had been booming. By 1946 record companies were
selling ten times as many songs as they had a decade earlier. In 1948 the jukebox industry
blossomed. The industry got another boost when 45-rpm and long playing 33-rpm records made
the old brittle 78-rpm records take a back seat. In the early 1950’s top male vocalists were
crooners Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, and Harry Belafonte, who sang ballads.
Female stars were polished singers like Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, and Rosemary Clooney,
performing highly orchestrated songs about romance. Ever since the 1940’s the age of the
typical record store customer was dropping, and by 1958, teenagers were buying seventy percent
of all record albums being produced.
The teenage market surfaced during World War II when the absence of manpower had a
definite effect on the American way of life. Men in civilian attire became scarce on U. S. streets
and college campuses. The younger boys picked up jobs available in the scarce labor market,
and girls earned money babysitting for parents who worked night shifts at war plants. For the
first time since The Great Depression days, teens had money in their pockets. Teenagers exerted
a growing influence on the media of the day, and the teenage phenomenon was capitalized on by
a variety of shrewd merchandisers including songwriters and manufacturers of phonograph
equipment. The junior fashion market boomed, and teenage girls began wearing make-up. In
1944, a magazine called Seventeen was created that was solely devoted to fashion and interests
of young girls. Teenage canteens became popular weekend spots for dancing the jitterbug and
drinking milkshakes.
By mid-1957, television’s pop showcase Your Hit Parade went off the air, drowned out by a
wild new sound called “rock and roll” that inundated the world. The roots of rock and roll was
country and western music with jazz and rhythm and blues and almost all the singers were young
men belting out their hit tunes to mostly white mainstream teenagers who were their most avid
rock fan base. Teenagers cranked up the volume of the jukebox to hear Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, James Brown, and The Shirelles, but the most notorious of
all was a truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, named Elvis Presley. By 1960, Elvis had sold
one-hundred-twenty-million dollars worth of records, sheet music, movie tickets, and
merchandise.
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Many hit tunes came from movies and from Broadway plays. In the 1950’s, Broadway
blossomed with musicals and drama. Oklahoma and South Pacific were two musicals that had
quite a run on Broadway and Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams and Arthur Mailer were two
of the most famous American playwrights of drama.
The most popular form of entertainment was television. The late 1940’s brought television
into the homes for the first time, bringing Vaudeville and radio comedians like Milton Berle into
the living room. Television dominated the communications industry. By 1949, Americans were
buying 100,000 television sets a week. In 1950, television sets were in only 3.1 million U. S.
homes, but by the middle of the decade the figure had jumped to 32 million. In 1959, the
average U. S. family was sitting in front of the television six hours a day, seven days a week.
At our house television was our main form of entertainment. We gathered in front of the
blue tube when the sun went down to watch the six o’clock nightly news for an hour. There was
thirty minutes of local news, weather, and sports from the Charlotte station with Doug Mayes,
news commentator, and Clyde “Cloudy” McClain, weatherman, and thirty minutes of national
news with Douglas Edwards, who was later replaced by Walter Cronkite. We watched other
national news broadcasted by commentators such as Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and Edward
R. Murrow. We particularly enjoyed the editorials of Eric Sevaried, television’s most eloquent
essayist. His career on the CBS Evening News lasted for 39 years.
After the news broadcast, we enjoyed a few programs before going to bed. We knew the
schedule of what was on every night of the week. We liked to watch our favorites cowboys beat
the outlaws to the draw. Television’s top guns were Cheyenne, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon
Train, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, Maverick, Death Valley Days, Zorro, The Lone
Ranger, Restless Gun, The Cisco Kid, Sugarfoot, and Bonanza. Hopalong Cassidy was so
popular with those under the age of thirteen that “Hoppy” clothing sales were forty million
dollars by 1950. We cheered Rin-Tin-Tin, Lassie, and Superman as they helped those in perils.
From 1952-1957, millions of Americans tuned in to Dragnet, whose police stories were
essentially true, each crime busting episode based on actual cases from the files of the Los
Angeles Police Department. We liked to watch Alfred Hitchcock Present,s dramas and spine
tingling thrillers, and Perry Mason, criminal lawyer who never lost a case. Game shows were
popular such as Beat the Clock and The Price is Right. Quiz shows had high ratings, and What’s
My Line outlasted all other quiz shows at a time when they were one of TV’s staples. The show
had a seventeen-and-a-half year run in which the panel hardly changed at all. By the end of the
decade the world of quiz shows took a hard hit when witnesses from the quiz show, Twenty-One,
were hauled down to Washington for a congressional hearing in 1959 to testify that contestants
were primed with the right answers. Late night television changed the habits of millions with
The Tonight Show. Steve Allen was host 1954-1957, followed by Jack Parr 1957-1962, who was
later replaced by Johnny Carson (1962-1992). We didn’t stay up late enough to watch it.
Television programs for children were popular with the thirty million babies who were born
between 1942 and 1950. The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, and cartoons were some of the
favorites. We journeyed among the stars in the gadget-filled spaceships of Space Patrol and
Captain Midnight. On December 15, 1954, television created the fad of Davy Crockett. An
audience of forty million fans, mostly between the ages of five and fifteen, watched Fess Parker
portray Davy Crockett on Walt Disney’s weekly show Disneyland, creating a one hundred
million dollar market for coonskin caps, Davy Crockett school lunch boxes, guitars, and
swimsuits. A record entitled “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” sold four million copies.
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Disneyland’s Mickey Mouse Club was watched by millions of children who joined Karen and
Doreen in singing the theme song. We liked to watch Captain Kangaroo, Huckleberry Hound
and Buffalo Bob with Howdy Doody and Clarabelle the Clown. The Puppet Show starring Kubla,
Fran and Ollie was seen by ten million viewers in 57 states until they were cut from the 7:00
p.m. prime time slot.
Perhaps the most popular show of the decade was I Love Lucy which lured fifty million
viewers. We were entertained by Lucille Ball’s spoofs on married life, and we laughed at Red
Skelton, and situation comedies like Mama, The Real McCoys, Burns and Allen Show, Leave It
To Beaver, The Phil Silvers Show, December Bride, The Honeymooners, Make Room for Daddy,
Mr. Peepers, Our Miss Brooks, Dobie Gillis, Amos ‘n’ Andy Show, The Donna Reed Show,
Father Knows Best, and The Beverly Hillbillies.
The theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett”, was performed by
legendary Bluegrass musicians Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. It was one of the most memorable
banjo songs of the 1960’s and sometimes Flatt and Scruggs appeared on the show.
Earl Scruggs was from Cleveland County, and Daddy knew him when he worked at Lily Mill.
His house was close to ours in the Lily Mill village. He lived in Cleveland County until 1945,
remaining close to home during the war years to take care of his widowed Mother.
He perfected and popularized a 3-finger style of picking a banjo that is a defining
characteristic of Bluegrass music. He wrote “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” which has been
described as the best instrumental bluegrass song ever done. It is one of the banjo’s fastest and
rhythmically challenging pieces and it was used as background music for the motion picture,
“Bonnie and Clyde”. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs sometimes appeared on The Grand Ole Opry
on Saturday nights.
Another Cleveland County native was Country Music Hall of Fame singer and songwriter,
Don Gibson. He grew up in the Lily Mill village. In 1957 he went to Nashville and recorded
“Oh Lonesome Me” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. He had written both songs in the same
afternoon. It was a double-sided hit on both the country and pop charts. Along with his hit song
“Sweet Dreams,” these are three of the most famous songs in country music history. We got to
see him on The Grand Ole Opry too.
We liked to watch other programs that featured music too such as The Dinah Shore Chevy
Show. She was the first woman to have her own television show. We watched The Tennessee
Ernie Ford Show, a variety show that featured music, humor and talk. Gayle Storm always sang
on the comedy show “Oh, Susanna,” which she starred in and Ricky Nelson sang on the sitcom
that featured his family, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett.
We watched The Lawrence
Welk Show that provided a wealth of musical entertainment and The Liberace Show, featuring
the famous pianist who, from the 1950s-1970s, even when Elvis Presley and The Beatles were at
their height of popularity, was the highest paid entertainer in the world. Two of our favorite
shows were Ozark Jubilee from Springfield, Missouri and Louisiana Hayride broadcast from the
Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana. Both of these programs helped popularize
country music in the United States and helped launch and advance the careers of many
significant recording artists.
On Sunday nights at 8 p.m., we watched The Ed Sullivan Show. It ran on the same network
weekly in the same timeslot for two decades. Every type of entertainment appeared on the show
from singers and songwriters, to ballet dancers, comedians, and circus acts. Elvis Presley had
made his first television appearance on The Dorsey Brothers TV Show, but with his bumps and
grinds and shaking and shimmying, many people thought he was unfit for a family audience. In
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late 1956, Ed Sullivan hired Elvis for three appearances at an unprecedented fifty thousand
dollars, insisting that Elvis only be seen on camera from the waist up.
Weekdays Mama watched the noonday soap operas- Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light, As
the World Turns, and Love of Life. The fifteen minute segments were romantic serials with many
storylines that went on for years. They were called soap operas because soap companies
sponsored them, and during the breaks, there were commercials for soap.
Sometimes in the morning during the week, she and Daddy watched The Arthur Godfrey
Show, a variety show with musicians. In the afternoons, they watched Art Linkletter, who
interviewed kids and wrote a book called Kids Say The Darndest Things about episodes from the
television show.
TV created a new generation of sports lovers including Daddy. He liked watching wrestling
on television. He became animated, sat on the edge of his seat, and threw punches at the air. He
would get mad if someone told him the matches were rigged. Jerry took him to Shelby City Park
to see Bolo wrestle.
The one thing Daddy would stay up late for was The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports’ Friday
Night Fights which was broadcast on NBC from 1944 to 1960 from Madison Square Garden.
This fourteen year period was the longest run of any boxing program in television history. I fell
asleep on Daddy’s lap on Friday nights, while he and the boys watched the boxing matches.
Two-time Heavyweight World Champion Floyd Patterson was from Cleveland County. In
April 1956, World Heavyweight Champion Rocky Marciano announced his retirement. Floyd
Patterson was among the light heavyweight contenders for the title. He fought and beat Archie
Moore, another light heavyweight, on November 30, 1956 by knocking his out in the fifth round.
At age 21, he was the youngest boxer to win the world heavyweight championship title and he
was the first Olympic gold medalist to win a heavyweight title. He was beat June 26, 1959, by
Ingemar Johansson of Sweden. June 20, 1960, Patterson beat Johansson in five rounds to
become the first world heavyweight champion to reclaim the title. He lost the title for the last
time September 25, 1962, when he was knocked out by Sonny Liston in the first round. He
almost regained the title again in 1969, losing a 15-round decision to Jimmy Ellis.
Floyd Patterson returned to Shelby in November 1959, to speak at the dedication of Holly
Oak Park Community Center. A parade was given in his honor and crowds of local fans
gathered in uptown Shelby to cheer him as he passed through the city streets riding on the back
of a convertible adorned with a banner that said, “WELCOME HOME CHAMP.”
American Bandstand was a show that was filmed on Saturday but broadcast “live” weekday
afternoons that featured teenagers dancing to top 40’s music. Disc jockey, Dick Clark, was
master of ceremonies of the show that was televised from Philadelphia and played to an audience
of twenty million regular weekday viewers. A stream of top rock and roll stars paraded before
the cameras, performing their hit songs. Some of the teenagers, who were regulars that danced
on the program, became celebrities in their own rights with a fan base of the television audience.
Jane and I knew the names of all the couples who danced together. Daddy wouldn’t let us watch
American Bandstand. He said he didn’t want any dadburn dancing on his television. One day
when we tried to watch it anyway, he pulled the switch. Mama got upset because the electricity
was off and she was trying to cook supper. We would go to Peggy Church’s house, two doors
down, to watch American Bandstand with her, as her parents didn’t mind.
We looked forward to watching the World Series on television in the fall. It was broadcast
for the first time in 1947. Sports fans marveled at the domination of the New York Yankees.
We kept up with the teams, and Shelby was proud of local Major Leaguers Tom Wright who had
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played with the Boston Red Sox, and was a teammate of Ted Williams, and Roger McKee, who
had pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies. Baseball was a favorite pastime in Cleveland County,
and people still talked about the American Legion Post 82 winning the American Legion World
Series in 1945. The schools and most of the mills had teams, and sometimes Shelby had a
professional team. Shelby supported the teams, and crowds turned out to see the “boys of
summer” hit homerun balls over the fence into Sunset Cemetery.
The neighborhood boys played baseball in the fields and parking lots. Jerry was a promising
pitcher with a good arm and could throw a ball as straight as Daddy could throw a rock. He
pitched no hitters. But Daddy didn’t encourage the boys to play baseball as a team sport.
Tom and Daddy were at odds because Tom wanted to play American Legion baseball in the
summer, and Daddy wanted him in the cotton and corn fields. Coaches Casey Morris and Pop
Simmons along with businessman, D. W. Royster came to pay Daddy a visit. After they left,
Daddy told Tom to go play baseball and to do his very best.
Tom got a summer job at Spangler’s Wheel Service, and they planned his work hours around
his baseball schedule. He played American Legion baseball for four summers, and we never
missed a game at home and tried to attend all the ones away as well. Daddy became an avid
baseball fan. He grumbled at the umpire and applauded for the home team. Mama didn’t
understand the game, so she couldn’t keep up with what was going on. Daddy told her she
should still join in and cheer. So the next time something exciting happened, Mama stood up
and started cheering. Daddy got hold of her dress tail and said, “Sit down, Edna, you’re rooting
for Salisbury.”
One night we didn’t make it to the American Legion Western NC playoffs game, and we
were gathered around listening to the ballgame on the radio. Tommy Eaton was a left-handed
pitcher who played for Salisbury. One of the announcers said, “Tommy Eaton on the mound.”
Daddy jumped up and yelled, “What is he doing? He’d better get his mind on the ballgame,
dadburn it!” Mama asked him what he was talking about, and he replied, “They just said that
dadburn Tommy is out there eating on the mound and they’re about to lose that ballgame!” The
American Legion team won the state championship in 1957, the year Tom graduated high
school.
What the coaches and Mr. Royster told Daddy was that if Tom had some experience he would
most surely get a college scholarship to play baseball. When Coach Morris, himself, came to tell
us Tom had a baseball scholarship to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill if he
wanted it, the only dry eyes in the house were Tom’s. He was the first one of us to get to go to
college.
In 1960, he traveled with the UNC team to Omaha, Nebraska to play in the College World
Series, and his senior year at UNC he was captain of the team and was awarded the Most
Valuable Player trophy. He had offers to play professional baseball, and baseball scouts came to
our house to talk to Daddy. Daddy told them that he had lived his own life, and he would let his
son make his own decisions about his life.
We continued going to the American Legion baseball games even after Tom was no longer
playing. Each year they gave us two season passes. Either Charles of I went with Daddy to the
games. We sat in the box seats behind home plate as we always did. Daddy still grumbled at the
umpire. After the games, we declined offers for rides home, preferring to stroll through town on
the warm summer nights. However, we did accept the offers for rides to the out of town games.
Daddy was proud that Robert and Charles played baseball. In 1959, Robert’s senior year at
Shelby High School, he pitched and won the WNCHSAA State Championship game against
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Kannapolis 3-1. The Shelby Daily Star said that Robert “pitched brilliantly for the home cause”
and Coach Casey Morris said, “Robert Camp did an excellent job. I’m proud of him.”
Charles won the Most Valuable Senior Player trophy for baseball at Shelby High School in
1963. Thirty years later Charles and Tom served as co-chairmen for raising the money for a new
field house at Shelby High School and it was named Camp Field House for them and their
families to honor their financial support and efforts in fundraising. The field house also honors
the football coaches. There have only been four head football coaches at Shelby High School in
eighty-five years- Casey Morris, Gerald Allen, Jim Taylor, and Chris Norman.
If I call Charles during baseball season, I ask him “Who’s on First?” a famous question from
an old Abbott and Costello skit. And often he tells me, because he is watching a baseball game
on television.
Mama was Mrs. John M. Camp. We grew up in an era when women were publicly identified
by their husband’s name and were usually only referred to by their given name by family and
friends. She wanted us to call her “Mother,” but we never did. She was always “Mama” to us.
She was 5’3” with brown eyes and the kind of natural curly hair that people pay money to
emulate. Daddy said none of us had hair as black as she had. When it turned gray, she started
using a rinse that came in a little capsule, and we thought it turned her hair a tint of purple. The
boys would get out of her earshot and sing, “Have you ever seen a purple headed cow? Well,
you’re seeing one now. It is better to see one than to be one.”
Mama wore shirtwaist house dresses made of cotton prints with short sleeves and buttoned
down the front. She chose loafers or house shoes, and in the summer, she wore open-toed wedge
shoes with sling backs or a buckled strap. Mama always liked to have a pair of red shoes since
that was her favorite color.
When Aunt Becky and Uncle Roy came to visit from Southern Pines, Aunt Becky brought
Mama some of her beautiful clothes that she had bought at Montaldo’s in Charlotte, so Mama
had nice suits, blouses, and lovely dresses to wear. Aunt Becky even gave Mama a fur coat.
Ladies dressed for church in their Sunday best and always wore high heels, hats, gloves, and
carried a handbag. Stockings were in two pieces and were held up by garter belts or girdles.
Ladies wore them when they dressed up, even in summer.
Cousin Janice Ledford said when Tom was born she went over to see him. She said Mama
and Tommy were lying in the bed. Janice said she told Mama, “Aunt Edna, he is so pretty.” And
she said Mama told her, “I’ve never seen a pretty baby. He is as ugly as homemade sin, but he’s
as sweet as honey.”
We would say, “Mama always did like Tommy best.” And Mama would explain that she had
more pictures of Tommy around the house, because he gave her more pictures. But when she
took the picture of Jesus out of the big brass light up frame that someone gave her and replaced it
with a picture of Tommy, we really teased her and told her that was proof.
When we went out, Mama told us to stick together and take care of each other, and we did.
When Robert first got his driver’s license he made a traffic mistake. He didn’t cause an accident,
but a big burly taxi driver got upset and threatened to beat up Robert. Tom was with him, and he
was older and bigger than Robert. Tom told the taxi driver, “If you whip him, you’ll have to
whip me too. He’s not always right, but he’s always my brother.”
Mama’s favorite joke was about a drunk and a fat man carrying a duck. The drunk asked,
“Where did you get that pig?” The fat man said, “That’s not a pig, that’s a duck.” The drunk
said, “Yeah, I know. I was talking to the duck.”
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Mama also liked to tell about a hostess who asked her dinner guest, “Would you like to have
some molasses?” And the guest said, “How can you say molasses when I ain’t had no ‘lasses?”
Mama taught me a little cheer she said they did when she was in school, “Watermelon,
muskmelon, cucumber, squash, Piney Grove, Piney Grove, yes by gosh!”
She would tell us that she had the best kids in the world and then she would say, “Every old
crow thinks her own feathers are the blackest.”
It must have been hard on Mama to always be a Mother, but she usually seemed to take the
job in stride. But one time when Charles, Jane, and I were especially rowdy, she put us out on
the front porch and made faces at us through the living room window.
The only other time I remember her losing her patience with me, was after the third,
unacceptable egg she fried. Egg, plate, and all splattered down the kitchen wall after it sailed
through the air just past my head.
If we asked Daddy his age, he would turn it backwards if it made him younger. If we asked
Mama her age she would say, “You’ve done quit talking and gone to meddling.” It seemed the
whole time I was growing up she said she was 43. Decades later when I teased her about it, she
said I had just asked her age real often that year. Charles said 43 was the best ten years of her
life.
Mama was an eternal optimist, and Daddy was an idealist, and they both had a sense of
humor. But sometimes they bickered. I don’t think they were aware that it had any effect on us
kids. They must have felt a lot of frustration and stress, because maintaining that household was
financially and emotionally challenging.
Twice Daddy took a sabbatical from us. He slept a couple of nights at the Lily Mill packing
house, and for a few days he visited Savannah and Gladys and their family in the Shelby Mill
village where they lived. This was a particularly unnerving time for us when uncertainty
loomed, because Daddy was the compass that set the direction of our family, and the guide who
kept us on course.
Daddy tried to talk to me about his advancing age. He would tell me he wouldn’t always be
there with me. I’d remember what the few times without him had been like, and I’d start crying.
Sometimes when I was away from home, I’d worry and wonder if he was okay. An acute
awareness of mortality is the downside of the relationship for both the aging parent and the child.
I was nine years old when Savannah died of cancer. It was August 16, 1957. As was the
custom then, they brought her body home. I can still see Gladys and Daddy standing in their
front yard the day of the funeral, holding each other and openly sobbing. I felt so helpless. I had
never seen Daddy so broken. Savannah had just turned fifty years old and their three youngest
children, Mary Ruth, George, and Steve were still at home. Steve was only twelve years old. I
remember thinking, “I’ll never, ever, ever see her again.” The length of a lifetime is infinity to a
child.
Daddy talked to me about how a person feels to lose a loved one. He said it was like waiting
for someone to come back, but they never do. In his life he had known his share of sorrow. He
buried his parents, two wives, ten siblings, five children, and three grandchildren.
Mama and Daddy were almost always home. They had little time away from us for their own
pleasure. And they never left us and took a vacation together. One time Mama went to the
beach with Robert, Edwin, and Ruby. It was a trip planned especially for her, because she had
never seen the ocean. Daddy went deep sea fishing with Sammy and his Father-in-law and
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Brother-in-law, Duran and Deb Putnam. And Daddy and Jerry took a bus to Texas to visit
Daddy’s sister Ellen’s sons, Grady and Mack Reid. I have a picture of Daddy and Grady at Red
River, Texas, and I still have the little blue crocheted dress worn by the doll he brought me from
that trip. He brought Mama a chalk ware statue of a Texas cowboy that said, “Tough Guy.” That
statue graced their bedroom mantle for several years.
The older siblings saw that the younger ones had a vacation. Edwin and Ruby took Jerry,
Polly, Tom, Robert, and Charles to the beach. Jane and I didn’t get to go along on that trip, but
Daddy let us stop the ice cream truck every day while they were gone.
Every summer Jane and I went to visit Anna, Dewey, and Jim in Lincolnton. Anna styled our
hair, bought us new clothes, and took us to movies. They let us eat snacks from their vending
machine business.
Ruth and Lee moved to Rockmart, Georgia, for a year while Lee worked on the looms in one
of the mills. Alberta and Charles were their only kids still at home. Jane and I went to visit them
that summer. We bought Mama a little pair of earrings as a gift, and the store clerk asked if we
wanted her to put them in a sack. The only sack we knew about was a burlap sack, so we told
her, “No, just put them in a paper poke. A sack would be too big.”
We went to Waxhaw to visit Nathan, Velle, Randy, and Mike, and to Atlanta to visit Sam,
Helen, Johnny, and Nancy for three weeks. We got homesick, and Daddy had Sam put us on the
bus to send us home.
When we took a trip, we had to travel on state highways and city and county roads that were
two lanes. Some of the county roads were not even paved. The Federal Interstate Highway
System, named for President Eisenhower who championed its creation, was started in 1956. So
on road trips people had to go through all the little towns along the way to their destination. The
roads usually went right through the middle of each town.
The restaurants along the way were usually located in town and were family owned. There
were no chain restaurants to stop and grab fast food, so we usually packed a picnic lunch and
snacks for the trip.
Though we didn’t go on family vacations together, we did take day trips, especially to visit
family. Daddy liked to walk down to south Shelby to visit Mary at her beauty shop, and he liked
to ride through the countryside past the fields he used to farm. He’d point out houses and barns
that he had helped people build. He enjoyed going to go to Pleasant Hill and the Earl/ Patterson
Springs area where they used to live. He also liked to go down Sulphur Springs Road past the
Sale Barn where Uncle John and Aunt Sallie Ann Camp, his favorite uncle and aunt, had lived.
We visited Uncle Mack and Aunt Hattie Camp in Kings Mountain. Daddy told about Aunt
Hattie’s hearing an owl outside and thinking it was a person. The owl was saying, “Who?
Who?” Aunt Hattie hollered, “Mack, Hattie, and Fred.”
We spent the day with Uncle Will and Aunt Ora Camp at their farm on Camp’s Creek Church
Road, off Highway 150 South, where they raised Black Angus cattle. I remember hearing Aunt
Ora say, “It’s a good thing everybody doesn’t like the same thing, or everybody would want my
Will.”
Sometimes when we visited Uncle Tommy and Aunt Jennie Camp, we would go to the
Jumping Off Place on Buffalo Creek, have a picnic and, play in the water. Their farm is now
part of Woodbridge and Moss Lake. The little white church that Uncle Tommy built, Camp
Creek Baptist, still stands next to the road. Uncle Tommy had a path from his house to Buffalo
Baptist Church on Highway 150 and to Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Patterson Springs. He
regularly walked the many miles from his house to both destinations. He told us that when he
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got to heaven he was going to just sit in a rocking chair for a thousand years, then slowly start
rocking.
If somebody came to their house that Aunt Jennie didn’t know, she would hide. One day
there was a knock at the door, and she hid in the closet. It was the preacher. He came in,
propped his chair against the closet door, and sat there talking to Uncle Tommy all afternoon.
Aunt Jennie told about going into J. C. Penney’s to try on a hat. She said she looked in the
mirror and saw her daughter, Nancy Jane, across the store, trying on the same hat. She said, “I
smiled at Nancy Jane and she smiled at me. I started walking across the store toward Nancy
Jane, and Nancy Jane started walking across the store toward me. But when I got there, it wasn’t
Nancy Jane. It was me.”
Uncle T. J. and Aunt Adeline Shields lived on South Washington Street, just one street over
from our house on South DeKalb Street. Aunt Adeline said she went into Belk’s department
store uptown and tried on a hat. The clerk told her, “You can’t afford that hat.” Aunt Adeline
said, “I would have bought that hat if it had bankrupted T. J. Shields.”
The siblings told of visiting Grandpa Shields, and five year old Robert got into Uncle T. J.
Shields’ car, knocked it out of gear, and backed it out of the driveway and right across Highway
18 South. The other kids said. “Look, Robert is driving!” Fortunately, no traffic was coming.
Uncle Charlie and Aunt Etta Camp had three sons who were preachers, Yates, Dwight, and
Clyde. Clyde told a story about a time that his car quit, and a young man gave him a ride. They
were going along and the young man lit up a cigarette. Reverend Clyde told him, “If the Lord
had intended for you to smoke, he would have put a smokestack in your head.” The young man
pulled over to the side of the road and told Clyde to get out. He said, “If the Lord had intended
for you to ride, he would have put wheels on your ass.”
It was common in rural areas to see dirt roads, outhouses, and wells. We went to South
Carolina to buy peaches and on one visit to Uncle Adam and Aunt Lizzie Mitchem in Chesnee,
S.C. Charles wanted to see the water in the well. When they held him up to the well, he said,
“Golly, what are they going to do when that little bit runs out?”
The siblings told a story about visiting Uncle Adam and Aunt Lizzie. A massive thunderstorm
came up while Uncle Adam was gone to town “to get a nip.” During the thunderstorm, a tree fell
right in front of the house and blocked the road. When Uncle Adam came barreling down the
road in his A-Model, he hit the tree, knocking car parts off. Everybody ran to the car to see if
Uncle Adam was okay. He got out of the vehicle unharmed and told Aunt Lizzie he had seen the
fallen tree, but thought it was a shadow.
We went to visit Daddy’s cousin and his wife, Lawson and Juanita Camp, for hog killing time
and to pick cotton in the fall. When I was too small to pick cotton, Mama placed me on a bed
sheet on the ground to play while they worked. She came, took my hand, led me over to the
cotton patch, and gave me an empty sack. She stooped down and showed me how to reach into
the boll and retrieve the cotton to put it into the sack. She watched, encouraged, and approved
my progress as I went down the row. Then she retrieved my sack and carried me back to the bed
sheet to play. At the end of the day when she paid the other siblings for their efforts, she gave
me fifty cents. Of course, I didn’t earn that much money, but I was so proud that I got to
participate, and that I had earned money too.
Also in the fall Daddy and Mama took us to the Cleveland County Fair which is the largest
county fair in the state. The lovely stone entrance and grandstand that looked like a fort around a
castle had burned on Christmas Eve 1951. Daddy said he took Mama and his kids to the first
Cleveland County Fair, which was held in the fall of 1924, right after he and Mama got married.
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We toured the exhibit halls and admired the flowers, artwork, handcrafts and needlework. We
inspected the cakes, pickles, and canned vegetables, and finally checked out the large pumpkins
and other produce people had entered. The first bale of cotton that was ginned in the county that
year was on display. They annually auctioned it off uptown on the courthouse steps.
We visited the barns and saw the cows, horses, pigs, chickens, rabbits and other farm animals.
The smell of vinegar French fries, cotton candy, and candy apples lured us to the concession
stands. The sideshows intrigued us, and we craned our necks to take it all in. We tried to find
our way out of the house of mirrors, laughed as we walked through the fun house, and screamed
our way through the haunted house. We tried our hand at winning prizes, and Daddy told us
when he was younger, they wouldn’t let him throw the ball to try to win prizes because he won
too often.
While we rode the rides, Daddy and Mama sat and visited with people at the waterwheel near
the entrance. We stayed until after the fireworks at night and went home exhausted and content.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s stock car races, “The Lucky Teter Daredevils” featuring Joe
Weatherly, Curtis Turner, “Fireball” Roberts, and “Kochman Hell Drivers” were on the
grandstands at the fair. NASCAR eventually abandoned convertibles as race cars for safety
reasons.
One year during the fair, the Fat Lady died. On October 7, 1954, Betty Singleton Holdridge
died and was buried at Sunset Cemetery. Her tombstone reads: “She came to Shelby as a simple
fat lady in the fair. She left this earth as our friend.”
When we went to the fair we always went to the County Home across the street to visit
Mama’s brother, Uncle Gene Shields. He had polio when he was a baby. He was an invalid, and
he had never walked. He could use his arms and upper body, but he was paralyzed from his
waist down. He was 23 years old when Granddaddy Shields died, and since there was no one to
provide the special care he needed, he had to go there to live.
We enjoyed visiting him. He was intelligent and witty, and he loved to laugh. He liked to
trade things. One time he traded his portable television for a banjo. He said he couldn’t play the
banjo, but he just liked having it. Uncle T. J. got him into Tryon Nursing Home, and they
brought him in an ambulance to our house to spend Christmas with us.
We went bowling and swimming at Shelby City Park. There we also rode the HerschellSpillman Carrousel and the Rotary Train. We went there to see Borden Company’s mascot,
Elsie the Cow, when she came to town.
We rode to Lithia Springs and filled containers with water to take home for Mama to drink.
She had been told that the spring water was good for her kidney problems.
We went to Pleasant Hill Baptist Church for Memorial Day the first Sunday in May for
dinner on the grounds, and we placed flowers on the family graves. We attended the Manson
Camp Reunion in July for Sunday dinner and to visit with all of the relatives who came from
everywhere. Although there was a groaning board of food, the kids always wanted the
sandwiches. One time Jane ate so many tomato sandwiches that she got sick.
We traveled to Hendersonville a few times to see Daddy’s cousin, Pink Camp. This trip was
usually in the fall when we went to get apples to can.
One Sunday, we went to visit Sammy and Helen when they lived in Columbia, South
Carolina. Mama and I spent a week with them, and Mama kept their son Johnny when their
daughter Nancy Lynn was born.
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Wherever we went to visit, Mama seemed to get a cutting of a plant to bring home. There
were no nurseries to purchase plants, so people shared cuttings. There was always something
growing roots in a glass on our kitchen windowsill.
We enjoyed going to movies. The 1940’s and 1950’s were Hollywood’s glory days. There
were four theatres in uptown Shelby-- Rogers, State, Webb and Carolina, which formerly was
called the Princess. In addition to the featured film, they showed newsreels, cartoons, and
previews of coming attractions.
War movies were popular, and I went with Daddy and Jerry to see World War II’s most
decorated soldier, Audie Murphy, in To Hell and Back. I went with Daddy and Mama to see
From Here to Eternity. We saw Mr. Roberts, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Caine
Mutiny.
We saw Robert Mitchem in Thunder Road, a movie about running moonshine in the
mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee in the early 1950’s.
When we went to see Gone with the Wind at the Rogers Theatre, the line stretched all the way
around the block. The movie was so long, there was an intermission. The movie, based on the
book by the same name and written by Margaret Mitchell, is set in Atlanta and Clayton Co.,
Georgia, and depicts the genteel plantation society of the antebellum South and their struggles
during the Civil War and Reconstruction Period.
Although I had seen Elvis Presley twice in Love Me Tender, Ruth gave me money to go back
to see it again. I was frightened by the Wicked Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz and
upset when Heidi was taken from her Grandfather. I was thrilled with the musicals Oklahoma
and South Pacific, and I loved the Edna Ferber saga Giant.
The whole family enjoyed the religious movies The Robe, The Silver Chalice, Ben-Hur and
The Ten Commandments with its special effects of parting the Red Sea.
We liked the novelty of movies that were three dimensional as the audience viewed them
while wearing 3-D Polaroid glasses. Objects in the film seemed to jump right out of the screen.
Some of our favorites were western movies. John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were
our heroes. We went to see Rio Bravo, The Searchers, The Big Country, Shane and Old Yeller.
Robert and I saw “High Noon” so many times that we practically knew the script.
Occasionally Bill McKee and Daddy and Mama took Charles, Jane, and me to a movie at the
Skyvue and Sunset Drive-Ins. Drive-ins were popular outdoor entertainment and offered special
“dollar-a-carload” nights. Charles sat in the front seat between Bill and Daddy and Mama sat in
the back seat between Jane and me. I usually fell asleep with my head in Mama’s lap long
before the movie ended.
The Rogers Theatre hosted a Kiddie Show on Saturday mornings. Admission was free with
R.C. Cola bottle caps or Carolina Dairy milk bottle caps. Kids from all over Shelby came to the
Kiddie Show, and many kids rode the bus to town from other areas of the county to attend it.
All week long I looked forward to the Kiddie Show. We watched cartoons, The Three Stooges
and Western movies.
The show was broadcast on WOHS Radio Station. Kids could take the stage and perform
songs or tell jokes for free movie passes. I sang there every Saturday morning. Jane and I used
the free movie passes, and one time when we stayed to watch a movie over again, Daddy came
into the theatre looking for us. He came down the aisle calling our names, “Jane, Booty, it’s time
to go home.”
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We liked to go places, but usually relatives came to our house to visit us. If they spent the
night, the kids slept on pallets on the floor.
Uncle Lionel and Aunt Brooksie Shields lived in Alabama, and came to visit. They brought
their talking parrot. Uncle Lionel was always a jokester. He told us stories about pranks he and
his favorite neighbor played on each other. One time Uncle Lionel put an ad in the local
newspaper giving the neighbor’s address, saying he would take in stray dogs. He said one day
when they were living in Tryon, N. C., he was outside mowing their grass and a lady stopped by,
thinking he was a gardener. She asked him how much he charged to do yard work. Uncle
Lionel told her, “The lady who lives here lets me sleep with her.” He said she couldn’t get out of
there fast enough.
Mama told this story on Uncle Lionel. She said that after their Grandfather Philbeck died
their Grandmother divided her time among her children. She said there seemed to be one
grandchild in every household that their Grandmother picked on. At their house it was Uncle
Lionel. Mama told about the day that Uncle Lionel snitched their Grandmother’s snuffbox while
she was asleep, took it to the chicken house, and added some manure. She said when their
Grandmother took her next dip, she told their Mother, “Mattie, my snuff doesn’t taste right.”
When Uncle Hilbert and Aunt Carrie Shields came to visit, he would bring a pocket full of
change. He’d throw it up in the air and let us kids scramble for it.
Ruth and Lee’s son, John William, who was career Navy, and his family moved from
Maryland to California, and they brought their mobile home and parked it across our front yard,
staying for a week. They had four kids, two parakeets and a cat. When they left, Daddy wanted
to give them some sweet potatoes to take with them. They told Daddy they couldn’t take
produce across the Arizona or California state line. When they got to California, they found the
sweet potatoes Daddy had placed in their water tank.
Aunt Ellen and Uncle John’s sons, Katon and Mack Reid, lived in Raleigh and they had a
band called “The Blue Sky Boys.” They played on the radio there. They came to visit us and
played their guitars, singing gospel, bluegrass and folk songs.
Mama’s Aunts and Uncles came up from Chesnee, South Carolina, and our married siblings
and their families often came home to visit. Some of the grandchildren came to spend weeks at
a time with us during the summer.
But when Uncle Tommy, who was a preacher, came to visit, if we had the television on, he
wouldn’t come into the house. Like many other evangelists he thought television would corrupt
the morals of the young. He said, “Johnny, when you brought that thing in the house, you
brought the Devil in your house.” And he would sit down on the front porch until the television
was turned off.
When our house was full of people, it was filled with laughter. There was joking, teasing, and
everybody talking at once. There was a lot of hugging and kissing and sharing stories and
reminiscing, and nobody said goodbye without saying “I love you.”
In the fall of 1957, I began fourth grade at Marion School, when Charles and Jane started to
Shelby Junior High School. Marion School was located exactly one mile from our house. Since
I had no one with me to walk or ride my bicycle to school, I rode to Marion School in Bill
Thompson’s taxi. Bill Thompson was one of several people who operated a taxi service to
schools including Mrs. Lorraine Helms, Coyt “Black Cat” Self, and his brother “Burr Rabbit”. If
I had a dentist appointment with Dr. John Yelton, Bill Thompson picked me up at school and
took me to the dentist office. Daddy walked uptown and met me there.
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Mrs. Athleen Farris was my fourth grade teacher. Her husband, Floyd Farris was manager of
the Bell Telephone office up the street from us on South DeKalb Street. There was an epidemic
of Asian flu all over the United States in October of 1957. I got the flu on Halloween night and
was sick with a high fever. Mama called Dr. Moore to make a house call, and he gave me a shot
in my behind, then he paddled me for kicking my heels up and hitting his goatee.
The 1958 school year Miss Lucy Hamrick was my fifth grade teacher. Sometimes she had
little patience with us, and she would say, “Now, children, I’m on the warpath.” Every Monday
she took up our lunch money, and when she called Sonny Davis’s name, she would make a
rhyme, “Sonny, Honey, did you bring your money?” To this day this is still how we greet him.
One of my first rhymes I remember writing was, “To my fingers and my toes, I am grateful
plenty. For without a set of those, I couldn’t count to twenty.” In the second grade, Miss
Casstevens had us write a poem about the rain. She had mine and two others published in The
Shelby Daily Star.
In the fifth grade I wrote a poem about North Carolina. Miss Hamrick didn’t think I could
have written it. Tom was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying
journalism at the time, and she thought he must have written it. As long as Miss Hamrick lived,
every time I saw her, she would say, “I always did say Tom wrote that poem.” Sometimes when
I say my prayers, I ask God to please tell Miss Hamrick I wrote that poem.
I worked in the school store that year in the mornings before class, and I received an award of
merit for the School Safety Patrol.
That was the year I started puberty. Nobody had warned me about this biological change.
Late in the school day, and almost time for the bell, I had a terrible pain in the pit of my stomach.
I asked Miss Hamrick’s permission to go to the restroom. There was blood all over the back of
the green taffeta skirt that I probably shouldn’t have worn to school.
I rode home in Bill Thompson’s taxi quieter than usual. I really hated to tell Mama that I was
dying. She had lost three children already, and she would be sad. As soon as I got home, I took
her aside to break the news. I told her I was bleeding, and I would be dead by dark. She asked
where I was bleeding, and then she told me the facts of life. She sent Jane to the store for
provisions, and the three of us had a good laugh.
After Nathan’s son, Randy’s, stint with the Army, he went to work at Carolina Uniform
Rentals in Charlotte. He met Pauline Kinsey who worked there the day he applied for the job.
Randy was engaged, and Pauline was married with a small son, William. A couple of years later
after Randy’s engagement was called off and Pauline’s marriage ended in divorce, someone at
the company suggested that they date. Pauline said Randy was the last person she would ever
consider dating, because he didn’t have a serious thought in his head. Randy took this as a
challenge and asked her out. Pauline came to Cleveland County to her Mother’s house to spend
the weekends. Randy began coming from Waxhaw to spend the weekends with us or usually
with Polly, Wilburn, and Scotty until he and Pauline got married. He was always like having
another brother, and he was generous to me. He bought me a baton, a pogo stick, flip flop, and a
hula hoop. Thirty million hula hoops were put out that summer, and every American kid seemed
to be spinning one.
Daddy and the boys liked to hunt and fish, and they got together in the kitchen and made
dough-based fishing bait to use. Robert had six Beagle hunting dogs in a lot in our back yardSally, Molly, Rowdy, Jack, King, and Trail. When they howled, he called them “Bugle
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Mouths.” Nathan had hunting dogs at his house in Waxhaw too. The whole gang of guys went
hunting on Saturdays in the fall and on Thanksgiving morning.
Once they told a story about Tom running from a cow, thinking it was a bull. They sang, “I
want to be a cowboy, but I’m afraid of cows. Moo, Moo, Moo how they scare me. Over the
fences and o’re the fields they prowl. Moo, Moo, Moo how they scare me.”
There was a scout hut behind out house on the old Civilian Conservation Corps Road off of
Gidney Street. In the field near the scout hut we picked blackberries and cotton, and played
baseball. We climbed on the rocks at the Rock Quarry at the end of Grice Street. We caught
fireflies and we stood under the street light across the road from our house with the other
neighborhood kids, watching the cars go by, swapping stories, and sharing our dreams.
The automobile dealers displayed the new cars in their showrooms the first of September and
we went by to look at the new models. We recognized everything on the road and could identify
a car by its taillights. Some of them even had a decal that identified what kind of motor they
had. The cars produced in that era are still some of the most prized. With the fins and all the
chrome on them they are beautiful. It was the glory days of automobile design. Polly and
Wilburn favored convertibles, and we enjoyed riding around with them with the top down. They
often took us to The Silver Villa on Highway 74, to get a Coke, the hangout for the teenage
crowd.
From our back porch we could watch the fireworks in the sky every night the week of the
Cleveland County Fair, and we could see Tom in the distance as he walked up the hill on Kings
Road to visit his girlfriend.
We could watch crop-duster airplanes spray the fields. Farmers were dependent upon aircraft
to efficiently fertilize the crops and dispense chemical pesticides on destructive pests. The
planes flew low with their wheels almost touching the crops to eliminate fertilizer or pesticides
from spraying in the wrong direction. Most of the airplanes were converted post-war surplus
biplanes. Many of the crop-dusters planes were flown by men who had been World War II pilots
and still wanted to fly.
January 3, 1959, Alaska became the 49th state to join the Union and on August 21, Hawaii
became the 50th and final state. For the first time since 1912, a new flag was made to include
fifty stars.
On Monday night August 24, 1959, we watched from our back porch as the flames
skyrocketed as Arey Oil Company, the Amoco distributor, burned.
Hoyt Keeter Motors, the Ford dealer, located uptown on Marion Street at the corner of South
DeKalb Street burned the same night.
The Arey Oil Company fire broke out about 7:15 p.m. and quickly engulfed the service
station and warehouse. Oil drums, some loaded with high octane gasoline, exploded. Shelby
Fire Department rushed every piece of equipment to the scene and volunteer units backed them
up and managed the fire station.
Bob Arey said he was bringing things out of the office, and the Shelby Fire Chief, Jim Reid,
told a fireman to start putting the hose back on the truck and send the truck uptown, because
Hoyt Keeter Motors was burning.
The fire at Hoyt Keeter Motors began about 9:00 p.m. Two trucks from the Cleveland
County Volunteer Fire Department arrived first. Workers managed to get several customers’
cars and some of the new automobiles out of the building before the flames spread.
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The fire quickly engulfed the ground floor of the building and burst through the roof. The
Keeter fire was a threat to the other buildings in the uptown area.
Chief Reid called Kings Mountain and Gastonia and the entire county volunteer units for
assistance. They had twenty-two pieces of equipment and more than a hundred firemen at the
Keeter fire. Four firemen were injured in the blazes, and at that time, it was the city’s most
dangerous night of fire in history.
The fall of 1959, Maxine Jolley was my sixth grade teacher at Marion School. I was selected
by the football team to be a cheerleader. I was honored, but I would rather have played football
with them. I got to work in the school library, checking in new books, and I received the School
Safety Patrol award for captain and most outstanding patrol.
On a cotton field in 1959, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, the world’s largest producer of fiberglass
yarn, built a vast manufacturing plant out in the country near Lattimore. They invited school
children to their open house and provided a real train, a Southern Railway “Special”, dubbed the
“Fiber Glass Flyer” as transportation for us to and from the plant.
The next year Fiber Industries built on a cotton field near Earl. This plant also turned out
synthetic materials, and the county’s economy was no longer dependent on the weather and the
cotton crop. The new plants offered benefits and higher wages, and more people left the farms
for manufacturing jobs. The economy thrived, and more businesses came as well as more stores,
restaurants, and doctors. From 1955-1965 seventeen new industries came to Cleveland County.
The 1960’s brought new and unparalleled prosperity to the United States. Nationwide the
farm population was rapidly decreasing. In fact, seventy percent of Americans lived in cities or
suburbs. Manufacturing was booming and many Southern blacks had moved to Northern cities
to work in factories and in the service industries that supported the businesses.
In March 1960, we got the largest snowstorm to hit the Cleveland County in twenty-five
years, and it snowed every Wednesday for three weeks. At our house we were excited when it
snowed, especially Charles, who would go from window to window to watch it fall. We made
snowmen and snow cream, walked around town and neighborhoods, and sledded down the golf
course hills at Shelby City Park and Cleveland Country Club with our friends. If it snowed very
much, the schools closed. The county did not have the equipment to handle the snow cleanup.
The city scraped the main roads but neighborhoods and many rural roads could be dangerous or
impassible until the snow melted. We made up missed school days on Saturdays that spring,
dining on boxed lunches alfresco in the schoolyard.
In the fall of 1960, I joined Teen-Dems, the Young Democrats Club, and hit the streets after
school and on Saturdays giving out political memorabilia for the John Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson
Presidential campaign. Tom gave me a little donkey pin to wear, and he told about a time Daddy
pointed out a Republican to the kids. He took them uptown to buy new overalls for school, and
as they walked up Lafayette Street, he pointed out a man across the street. He told them, “Kids, I
want to show you something you’ve never seen before. You see that man over there in a fancy
suit and a white wide-brim hat? Well, he’s a Republican.”
They didn’t know what a
Republican was, but they thought there must be something awesomely weird about him for
Daddy to make such a to-do. Tom said he thought, “My God, a Republican is walking down the
streets of Shelby as pretty as you please, right in amongst the women and children. Why doesn’t
somebody call the High Sheriff?”
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In those days crowds gathered in front of The Shelby Daily Star building on East Warren
Street for election results that were posted by hand on a board. Since ballots were counted by
hand, the results of an election could take until the next morning.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the election, and at age 43, he was the youngest man to be
elected President of the United States. He also was the first President who was not of the
Protestant faith. At age 31, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy was one of the youngest First Ladies and
one of the most beloved.
The Kennedys were the closest that America ever came to royalty. They brought about
change in American culture, President Kennedy in his support of civil rights and the First Lady
in her support of the arts.
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy is remembered for her contributions to the arts and historic
preservation and for her style and classic elegance. With her cultured voice and lovely figure, she
was a style setter wearing her pillbox hats, three-strand pearl necklaces, A-line dresses and
lovely gowns. Her bouffant coiffure became known as the “bubble cut” and was copied by
ladies all over the country. When the Kennedys visited France, the First Lady was so popular
with her stylish wardrobe and her affluent French, President Kennedy joked, “I’m the man who
accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris-- and I have enjoyed it.”
President Kennedy, with his charming Boston accent, his wit, grace, intelligence, and good
looks, captivated the public. His handpicked band of “New Frontiersmen” and his idyllic views
for America inspired enthusiasm and a sense of renewal. He is remembered for his inauguration
address in which he encouraged Americans to seek the greater good for their homeland. He
paraphrased a Kahlil Gibran quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country.” He appointed his brother, Robert Kennedy as Attorney General. Robert
Kennedy shared his brother’s ideals. He is remembered for paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw,
“Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask why
not.”
Later in an interview with a journalist, Jacqueline Kennedy described the years of the
presidency of John F. Kennedy as an American Camelot, a period of hope and optimism in U. S.
history. Camelot refers to the seat of the court of the legendary British King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table. It has come to mean a place or time of idyllic happiness. And so
were, too, were those years for our family.
The year of President Kennedy’s election, I was in seventh grade at Oak School, the old
Graham Elementary School. Mrs. Lib Claytor and Mrs. Margaret Baldree were my teachers.
Our class was so large that we had the whole building to ourselves. The baby boomers were
becoming teenagers, and the classrooms were overcrowded.
Shelby implemented the 6-3-3 Plan, six years of grammar school, three of junior high and
three of senior high, and Cleveland County built four new high schools in a five year span.
Shelby High, the first to be built, opened in the fall of 1961 and was state of the art. Charles and
Jane went to the new high school that year.
I joined Teen Center, which was held on Saturday nights at Shelby City Park in the 1950’s
and 1960’s. Bill Baley was our chaperone. We played 45’s of the current popular hit songs, and
occasionally we had a live local band. The majority of the kids in Shelby went there during their
teenage years and most of us learned to dance there. In the summer months Teen Center was
held outside by the swimming pool.
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Kathryn Allen and I took the Sheriff’s car out for a spin a few times after her Father, Sheriff
Allen, went to bed. We took in a drive-in movie, cruised through the local lovers’ lanes at the
end of Wesson Road and Peach Street, and scared the couples who were parking half to death.
Classmate, Roby Combs’ Daddy was the flagman for NASCAR, and I accompanied his
Mother, Irma Combs, to the racetrack to sign in the drivers.
Tom graduated from college the spring of 1961. He got a job as a sports writer for The
Charlotte Observer and moved to Charlotte. We looked forward to seeing his byline in the
newspaper and enjoyed reading the articles he wrote.
That fall I started eighth grade. Jane married Tommy Truelove on December 9, 1961, in
Gaffney, S. C., and they moved in with us for a while. Tommy played baseball at Shelby High
School, and he worked after school at Thomas and Howard Wholesale. Sometimes I would go
with them over to the Cleveland Hotel on East Marion Street to eat at the restaurant there.
That same month, Robert married his high school sweetheart, Sandra Henderson on December
23, 1961, at Christmastime. Tom was best man, Jerry and Bill McKee were ushers, and Jane was
a bridesmaid in their wedding party. We laughed as Daddy went down the aisle of the First
Baptist Church, waving and speaking to all the people. Robert worked at The Shelby Daily Star
and Sandra worked in the office at Dover Mill. She often took me with her when she went to
visit her girlfriends. Robert and Sandra bought a house in Brittain Village, in south Shelby in
1963. Theirs was the third house built in the first subdivision in Shelby.
Tom joined the Army National Guard and went into active duty for six months. He did his
basic training in Columbia, S. C., at Fort Jackson and spent the remainder of his active duty at
Fort McPherson, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Fort McPherson was headquarters for the
Third Army, which was Patton’s Army in Europe in World War II. The Third Army
encompassed nine states. Tom served as an Aerial Photographer and spent most of his time in
the Third Army Photo Facility. In addition he was assigned as Cannoneer on a 105-Howitzer,
which fired salutes to retiring officers and visiting dignitaries. He was also appointed to a 7-man
rifle squad burial detail. They fired salutes at soldiers’ burials from privates to generals all over
the nine states. In addition to firing at the graves, they stood two at a time at both ends of a
coffin inside the church during the funeral.
September 16, 1962, Tom married his college sweetheart, Mariel O’Dell, from Birmingham,
Alabama. The ceremony was held at Canterbury Methodist Church in Birmingham. Robert was
an usher in their wedding party. Mariel was a staff writer in the women’s department of The
Birmingham News. When she moved to Charlotte she worked for The Charlotte News and The
Charlotte Observer. Tom went to work for WBTV as public relations and sales promotional
manager and later for Duke Power Company as a public relations official. He was also editor of
the Duke Power Magazine.
Charles and I were the only kids still at home. I was in ninth grade at Shelby Junior High,
and he was a senior at Shelby High School. He worked after school at Clyde A. Short Co., and
he bought a 1957 Ford. He drove us to school, and he took me to Mary Jo’s Cloth Shop in
Dallas to buy fabric to make clothes.
Clothing fashions in the 1960’s included Bass Weejun penny loafers, crew socks, Ivy League
button-down-collar oxford cloth shirts, blouses with roll up sleeves and Peter Pan collars, wrap
around skirts, A-line and pleated skirts, alpaca sweaters, cardigan sweaters with grosgrain ribbon
down the front, circle pins and madras fabrics.
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Going to movies was still the favorite pastime. The James Bond spy movies began in 1962,
and six of them were released that decade. The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and West Side
Story were memorable musicals. Other popular movies of those years were To Kill A
Mockingbird, Dr. Zhivago, Pink Panther, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and
Clyde, and the “spaghetti westerns” produced and directed by Italians: A Fistful of Dollars, For
A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Television had more stations and we had T V Guide Magazine to help us keep up with the
schedule. By the 1960’s, it became the most read and circulated magazine in the country.
Twilight Zone and Way Out were a couple of our favorite TV programs. There was talk of
someday having pay television, but we didn’t believe it could ever happen.
Charles listened to “The Dick Biondi Radio Show” at WLS 890 radio station in Chicago from
nine p.m. until midnight. Biondi, the “Wild I-talian”, was one of America’s top disc jockeys, and
he played the top hits and great tunes of the era. The radio was loud enough for me to hear it. I
missed the times when more of us kids were at home. We used to talk from room to room and
bed to bed late at night, and Daddy would tell us, “Let the hushings get you and go to sleep.”
We grew up against the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race with the Soviet Union.
Americans feared a nuclear attack, and some people built fallout shelters and stored provisions.
The entire field of military weapons was undergoing a major change with long-range missiles
taking the place of airplanes carrying bombs.
The Soviet Union and the United States vied to launch satellites into space. The Soviet
Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik 1, the first Earth orbiting satellite, on October 4, 1957,
ignited a space race within the Cold War. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit and
was the first human-made object to orbit the Earth, demonstrating the viability of using artificial
satellites to explore the upper atmosphere. It was the first in a series of satellites that were
known as the Sputnik Program that led to the U. S. creation of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency and National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) and an increase in U.
S. government spending on scientific research and education. An American satellite, Explorer I,
was fired at the end of January 1958.
A Cuban revolution in 1959 put a Communist regime headed by Fidel Castro just ninety miles
from Florida. In 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to devise a plan to overthrow the
new Cuban government. The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after
President Kennedy assumed office. The Bay of Pigs, as it was called, was an unsuccessful
attempt of a US-trained force of Cuban exiles with the support from US government armed
forces, to invade southern Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime. The Cuban forces defeated
the exile combatants in three days.
The bad Cuban-American relations were exacerbated the next year by the Cuban Missile
Crisis. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and Cuba occurred
October 18-29, 1962. Russia was putting nuclear warheads in Cuba. President Kennedy told
Russia that no nuclear warheads in the Western Hemisphere would be tolerated. United States
armed forces were at their highest state of readiness ever. It was the first and only confrontation
between the United States and the Soviet Union, and was the closest the world came to nuclear
war. During the year after the Cuban Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States signed a
treaty banning nuclear tests everywhere except underground, and agreed not to put weapons into
space.
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In the spring of 1963, Charles graduated Shelby High School and became a student at
Gardner-Webb College in the fall. That summer Shelby got the first chain fast food restaurant
when Hardee’s opened on Highway 74 West. Hamburgers were 15 cents, French fries were 12
cents, and soft drinks were 10 cents. Locals flocked to Hardee’s for burgers and teens cruised
through in cars to see who was there.
President Kennedy urged Congress to pass further civil rights legislation, as blacks were
becoming angrier over the slow rate of their progress for equality. The year 1963 marked a
century since the Emancipation Proclamation. That summer, 250,000 supporters of the bill
before Congress, marched on Washington singing their song of hope, “We Shall Overcome.”
I entered tenth grade at Shelby High School in the fall of 1963. That was the same year
Cleveland County integrated its school systems peacefully and with dignity and respect. We
only had a few black students that year, and they excelled in their classes and were well behaved.
Desegregation was slow in Southern high schools, as school districts were not forced to fully
comply with Federal court desegregation orders. In 1954, Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, and
his eight-year-old daughter had sued the city school board for refusing to let her go to a white
school a few blocks away, instead forcing her to cross railroad yards to take a bus twenty-one
blocks away. In the most famous civil rights case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court Justice, had taken on
segregated education in the Supreme Court and in a landmark decision, segregation was ruled
unconstitutional, as it denied blacks the equal protection of laws guaranteed by the 14th
Amendment. The Supreme Court unanimous decision overruled the 58-year-old “separate but
equal” doctrine of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, as they held that “separate educational facilities
are inherently unequal.” In our own city this inequality of education was apparent in school
facilities and programs available to black and white students.
Two months after our term began as an integrated school, on November 22, 1963, the Friday
before Thanksgiving, President Kennedy was shot. Americans will always remember where we
were when we got the news.
Those of us at Shelby High School learned of the tragedy as the broadcast on the radio blared
to us over the school intercom. Our President had been shot and was dead. He had been killed
in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired at the President’s motorcade from an upstairs
window of a book depository. We were stunned by the news, then moved to tears. President
Kennedy was so young and so full of life. We were horrified. How could this happen in
America and in broad open daylight? We lost an innocence we would never regain.
America watched as Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President aboard Air
Force One at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson and First Lady,
Jacqueline Kennedy, at his side. Jacqueline Kennedy in the pink suit stained with her husband’s
blood.
The nation, and indeed the world, was in mourning. The next three days Americans were
glued to the television as networks cancelled their regular programming to cover the aftermath of
the tragedy.
On Sunday, November 24, we were further shocked as millions of people saw Dallas
nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald on live television as they moved
Oswald from the jail.
In the following days, we watched as crowds of people filed past President Kennedy’s coffin
in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building to pay their respects. We witnessed the dignity of a blackshrouded First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as she held in her grief. We watched the funeral
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procession as the horse drawn caisson carried President Kennedy’s flag-draped coffin, and his
three-year-old son John, Jr. saluted his casket outside St. Matthews Cathedral following the
funeral mass. We saw Jacqueline Kennedy lead the procession on foot to Arlington National
Cemetery. We watched as the First Lady lit the eternal flame at the gravesite, a flame that had
been created at her request. These images are forever burned into our minds. It seemed we
buried American Camelot along with him. The rest of the decade was filled with social turmoil.
President Johnson continued President Kennedy’s goals for civil rights legislation. Baptist
minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. had emerged as the spokesman for the civil rights movement
after he organized a bus boycott in 1955-1956, in Montgomery, Alabama. He is best
remembered for his “I have a dream” speeches for his goal of racial equality and for his
nonviolent resistance to discrimination.
Black athletes led by Jackie Robinson had broken through the sports barrier and entered
major league baseball in the 1940’s. African Americans had once again proven their patriotism
and courage in World War II, but they were still experiencing discrimination, and they were
running out of patience. Stores had separate bathrooms and separate drinking fountains for black
people, and doctors’ offices had separate waiting areas. Negroes could not sit down at lunch
counters and restaurants. Perhaps most disturbing to the Negroes was the lack of compassion
many white people had for them.
President Lyndon Johnson finished legislating two major parts of President Kennedy’s Civil
Rights Program. He signed the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, that opened all public
accommodations-hotels, restaurants, and swimming pools- to all people regardless of race, color,
religion, or national origin. The bill also strengthened voter’s rights, ended legal discrimination
in employment on the basis of race, or sex, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission to enforce the law.
There were protests and riots as blacks searched for equality. Many whites resisted and
social unrest sometimes turned to violence. The Ku Klux Klan held many rallies to solicit new
membership and support against the Civil Rights Act. I attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in a field
on North Lafayette Street and I watched in fear as the hooded members burned a cross. I
witnessed the prejudice and hatred.
Some angry blacks turned away from nonviolent methods and joined black militant separatist
groups. Black Nationalism was encouraged by the Black Muslims, and the most aggressive of
the militant groups was the Black Panthers, who practiced violence in some places. In the
summer of 1965, rioting broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Buildings were burned,
stores were looted and blacks and whites were killed. Two years later violence erupted in
Newark, New Jersey and Detroit, Michigan as well as many other communities.
The 1960’s were marked with several notable assassinations. In Jackson, Mississippi, a Ku
Klux Klan member assassinated Medgar Evers, a NAACP field secretary on June 12, 1963.
Members of The Nation of Islam assassinated Malcolm X, a Black Muslim leader, on February
21, 1965, in New York City. James Earl Ray assassinated civil rights leader, Martin Luther
King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, and Sirhan Sirhan assassinated President
Kennedy’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles.
So much blood was shed in a tragedy-filled decade, one hundred years from the time of the
Civil War. The assassinations of civil rights supporters Abraham Lincoln, John and Robert
Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. are immortalized in the classic song “Abraham, Martin
and John.” It was written in 1968, by Dick Holler, and first recorded by Dion in response to the
assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy that year.
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Perhaps as proof that civil rights was making headway, in the Presidential election in the fall
of 1968, Barry Goldwater only carried six states, his home state of Arizona and the five states
that were most opposed to racial equality.
THE VIETNAM WAR
The Cold War, the poor outcome of the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba, the Vietnam
War, and the unsatisfactory explanation of President Kennedy’s death had made many people
mistrust American government. Disillusioned with America and seeking a better world, some
people’s values and views were at odds and ran counter with those of the social mainstream.
They used music, politics, and alternative lifestyles in what came to be known as American
counterculture.
This movement was against the conservative social norms of the 1950’s, the political
conservatism or perceived social repression of the Cold War Period, and the US government’s
extensive military intervention in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War lasted from September 26, 1956 to April 30, 1975. It was the longest and
most unpopular war in America’s history. The United States entered the war to prevent a
Communist takeover of South Vietnam. The war in Indochina was yet another example of
Communist expansion, and President Eisenhower believed in the domino theory, that if one
country fell to Communism, the surrounding countries would follow. The policy of containment
was to be applied to prevent the fall of Southeast Asia to Communism. President Kennedy felt
that if Communism flowed to Vietnam, the security of other nations including Burma, Thailand,
Laos, Cambodia, India, Japan, and the Philippians would be threatened.
United States involvement escalated in the early 1960’s as the number of U. S. troops tripled
in 1961 and tripled again in 1962. On December 22, 1961, the first American fell in Vietnam in
defense of our freedom. On May 15, 1962, President Kennedy ordered 5,000 more troops. After
President Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson ordered in more U. S. forces to support the
Saigon government, beginning an extended presence in Southeast Asia.
On August 7, 1964, in response to a sea battle between North Vietnam’s Torpedo Squadron
135 and the destroyer USS Maddox that happened on August 2nd and an alleged second naval
engagement between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy on
August 4th in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was signed by President
Johnson. It is of historical significance because it gave President Johnson blanket authorization,
without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in
Southeast Asia. The Johnson administration relied upon the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to begin
its rapid escalation of U. S. military involvement in South Vietnam and to open warfare between
the U. S. and North Vietnam.
U. S. combat units were deployed in 1965, and U. S. involvement peaked in 1968. The
American military was not defeated and did not lose a battle of any consequence. It was a new
and unconventional kind of war. Mostly it was fought in jungles and rice paddies and often it
was impossible to tell the friendly villagers from the Vietcong guerrilla.
We fought to an agreed stalemate. The Paris Peace Accord, signed by all parties on January
27, 1973, called for the release of all American prisoners, the withdrawal of U. S. military troops,
limit of forces of both sides in South Vietnam, and a commitment to a peaceful reunification.
Despite the signing of the Paris Peace Accord, fighting continued. The Case-Church
Amendment passed by Congress in response to the anti-war movement prohibited direct U. S.
involvement after August 15, 1973, but U. S. military and economic aid continued until 1975.
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The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese army in April 1975, marked the end of the
Vietnam War. North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The fall of Saigon
occurred two years after the American military left Vietnam. The last American troops left
March 29, 1973.
Because of television, it was the first time the horrors of war were shown and accessed
through the media to the public in the United States. As the statistics of American soldiers dead
and wounded rose, antiwar sentiment spread. Peace groups held antiwar demonstrations around
the country. Public support for the war decreased further as the war waged on throughout the
sixties and the beginning part of the 1970’s. Opposition of the war was exacerbated by the U.S.
compulsory military draft, although two-thirds of the men who served in Vietnam were
volunteers. Opposition to the draft drove much of the protest after 1965. It threatened lower as
well as middle class residents, and the baby boomers were at risk. College students were granted
deferment, which meant that poor boys were more likely to be drafted than those of the middle
class. And everyone over 26 years old was exempt from the draft. The draft was unfair in many
of its provisions, and those were interpreted in different fashions by 4,000 local draft boards.
Robert and Charles did not serve in the Armed Forces. Charles was in college, married and
had a child. Robert was called up twice by the Selective Service Board. The first time he was
deferred because he was married and had a child to support, and the second time he failed the
vision test of the physical examination.
Savannah and Glady’s son, Steve Phillips served in the Army in Germany during those years,
and Ruth and Lee’s son, Charles Melton served in the Navy. As his two brothers had done,
Charles made a career of the Navy. He served our country from 1960 to 1985. He was a
quartermaster in navigation on a destroyer off the east coast of the United States. In 1968, he
served an eight-and-a-half month tour off the coast of Vietnam, from Saigon to DaNang, in the
areas where the fighting occurred. From his ship they fired 56,000 five inch diameter bullets.
The U. S. became polarized by the Vietnam War. On May 5, 1965, University of California
Berkley staged the first burning of draft cards, protesting the seemingly unfair draft system.
Charges of draft unfairness led to a draft lottery. Some young men became conscientious
objectors, and more than 100,000 “draft dodgers” averted the military conscription policy by
leaving the country and fleeing into exile rather than serving in Vietnam. The U. S. discontinued
the draft in 1973, and moved to an all-volunteer military force. President Jimmy Carter
pardoned nearly 10,000 men who evaded the Vietnam War.
As the decade progressed, widespread tension in American society seemed to flow across
generational lines, with white, middle-class youth making up the bulk of the counterculture. Due
to the baby boom, over half of the population was under thirty years old. Many college-age men
and women became political activists, and they were the driving force behind the civil rights
movement and the antiwar movement. Staging sit-ins at schools, lunch counters, and other
public facilities, and taking over college buildings became common forms of antiwar protests.
The most famous demonstration was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Upstate, New York in
1969, which lasted three days. The young people felt empowered by their numbers.
The number of women attending college greatly increased during the 1960’s, and many of
them became involved in the civil rights movement. Attitudes toward sexuality loosened, as oral
contraceptives became available, and women began to actively protest the role of housewife and
mother.
Counterculture dominated the second half of the 1960’s and reached its peak between 1966
and the early 1970’s. It was a decade that changed the world. A willingness to challenge
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authority, environmental awareness, social suppression, and attitudes about gender roles are
legacies of the era.
The “hippies,” as they were called, were often known as “the lost generation.” They
advocated peace, love, and harmony. They wore their hair long and adorned with flowers.
Many of them dropped out of society, left the cities to live in the countryside, and experimented
with utopian lifestyles.
Meditation, yoga, and psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, were widely used to expand one’s
consciousness. Psychedelic drugs influenced fashion, artwork and music. New cultural forms
emerged as American listeners expanded from the folksingers, doo wop, and saxophone sound of
the 1950’s and the beach, soul, rock and roll, and British invasion music of the 1960’s. Music
evolved to include psychedelic music or acid rock, and a number of prominent musicians died of
drug overdoses, including Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
In the mid-1960’s, Shelby was far removed from the psychedelic influence and Cleveland
County had no problem with illegal drugs. Marijuana and LDS were not part of the local party
scene. However, the Vietnam War hung over us like an ugly cloud. It was the worst nightmare
of three presidents, as they dispatched three-million-men to make the world safe for democracy.
The price of world power is continued diligence. America seemed to have given an unwritten
pledge to the leaders of the nations of the world with all sorts of ideologies, that America would
be obliged to join in and help fight their wars. We disagreed about how we felt about America’s
involvement in the Vietnam War, but our boys who were called to serve there stood together and
fought proudly, duty bound. Some of them never returned, and some who did, never recovered.
We owe a salute of gratitude to those who fought there, for a long overdue hero’s welcome
home.
The Vietnam War cost more than 58,000 American soldiers their lives and $150 billion dollars
in war debt. There were 1,573 North Carolina casualties and 23 from Cleveland County. A
bronze plaque on the north side of the courthouse bears the names of the local men who died in
that war, including one from our neighborhood, Ronald Earnest Mullinax, and one from our
school class, Wayne Roger Hoyle. Sometimes I stop by the memorial and run my fingers across
their names on the plaque, as I remember them as the boys they were and revere them as the men
they became. They made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.
Although the war was unpopular on the home front, and many returning American soldiers
were spat upon by citizens of our own country, the Vietnam War was a turning point for
communism. Because the United States was committed to Vietnam, the governments of
Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippians stayed Communist free.
On January 29, 1965, Edwin married Margaret Couch in Fort Worth, Texas. He brought her
to Shelby that summer to meet our family. She was very stylish, and I was fascinated by her
pierced ears. She gave me a pair of gold hoop earrings, and I was determined to pierce my ears
and wear them.
My friend, Helen Austin, and I asked Bill Blanton Jewelers on South Lafayette Street to order
a pair of gold studs for each of us, and I pierced our ears using a darning needle and a bathtub
stopper. Helen got sick to her stomach after I pierced one ear, and it was about a week before
she let me pierce the other one. I read in an article in The Old Farmer’s Almanac that said red
heads feel more pain.
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We were in high school where everybody strives to look alike, and nobody around here had
pierced ears. It was popular with the kids at school to use peroxide to lighten their hair, and
beauty salons put streaks in customer’s hair by pulling strands of hair through holes in a fitted
skull cap and bleaching them in a process they called “frosting.” I remembered that Daddy had
been none too happy the year before when I got Kathryn Allen to give me a blond streak when
she bleached her hair. Daddy took the scissors and snipped the blond streak out. I didn’t know
what he would say about my pierced ears, so I hid them with my long hair.
One morning at breakfast, I noticed Daddy looking at me, and he said, “Booty, did you pierce
your ears?” I said, “Yes, Sir,” and I waited for his reprimand. Then he told me that his Mother
had had pierced ears, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The ear piercing fad caught on, and my
darning needle, bathtub stopper, and I were in high demand.
We only got to see Margaret that one summer. She suffered from severe bouts of depression,
and she took her own life. Edwin was devastated, and several members of the family went to
Texas to be with him. After the funeral, Margaret’s sisters-in-law came back to the house and
went through Margaret’s clothes. Polly was wearing a new pair of high heels, and she had
kicked them off. When Polly got ready to go to the airport to catch her plane, she couldn’t find
her shoes. The ladies had taken Polly’s new shoes, thinking that they belonged to Margaret.
Polly had to fly home in a pair of ballerina scuffs that Anna and Jane went to a store to buy her.
After Margaret’s death, Edwin came home more often. Being around the family seemed to
help him heal. Dewey and Anna would pick him up at the airport in Charlotte, and one trip
Dewey invited a girl who worked in the office at the mill where he worked, Myrna Cloniger, to
ride along. She and Edwin began dating and were amused when they learned that her Mother’s
maiden name was Edna Shields, the same as Mama’s.
Edwin and Myrna got married in Gastonia on September 2, 1967, and Jerry was best man in
their wedding party. Myrna liked living in Fort Worth, Texas, and their daughter, Melisa, was
born four-and-a half years later.
Charles married Sue Champion June 27, 1965, the summer after I was in eleventh grade. I
was a bridesmaid in their wedding, Polly was matron of honor, Jane kept the guest register,
Robert was best man, and Tom, Jerry, and Bill McKee were ushers.
Charles and Sue had spent their first night together in the Shelby Hospital when they were
born. She is one day older than Charles. They attended school and church together growing up,
but they didn’t date until they were in college. She is the only girl Charles ever dated. He said,
“When you find what you’re looking for, why shop.”
Tom wrote a little poem about them: “Brother Charles Ben, one of those people who never
do things right, he gave his girl friend a diamond and a case of flu, all on the same night.”
Charles had graduated from Gardner-Webb College and he was working part time at Clyde A.
Short Co. He entered the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the fall. Sue was working
in the office at the Shelby Cotton Mill for Bill and Dick LeGrand.
Sue’s Daddy, W. H. “Dub” Champion, owned a grocery store in south Shelby for many years.
When they widened South DeKalb Street, we moved to 416 Charles Road into a brick house
on the corner of Elm Street, across from Aldersgate United Methodist Church. It was right down
the street from where Charles and Sue lived. The kids bought the house for Daddy and Mama. I
was the only child still at home.
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Daddy sat on the front porch and smoked his cigarettes and listened to his transistor radio. He
said he had been smoking Kool cigarettes since they started making them. He smoked them
down close to the filter, his fingernails stained because of it. Every time the price of cigarettes
increased, he would protest and quit smoking. Before long he would buy a sack of loose tobacco
and papers and roll his own. Finally he would give in, pay the new price, and go back to
smoking Kools. One time Mama told Charles, “Your Daddy is so ornery I don’t know what to
do.” Charles figured out what was wrong, and he bought Daddy some cigarettes.
Our parents always welcomed our friends and enjoyed them. Many of our friends came to
visit Daddy and Mama as long as they lived. My friends and I liked to sit on the porch and talk
to Daddy. We sat on the steps in front of Daddy’s chair, while he told us stories about old
Shelby and times when he was growing up. He saw the first cars, first airplanes, and some of the
first railroads. In his lifetime travel went from horseback to spaceship.
Daddy talked about building some of the roads in Shelby. The N.C. Legislature of 1909
passed a law that provided for townships in the county to vote bonds to improve roads in the
township. By 1919, every township in Cleveland County had sold road bonds and were building
and maintaining their own road systems of sand-clay roads, covered with a top of natural soil and
given good drainage. Since they did not have road building equipment at that time, roads were
built largely by manual labor. Daddy told us about how he, Nathan and Lee Melton had laid off
the streets in the Cleveland Springs area with mules and drag pans, and he told us that he had
helped lay the curbing at the courthouse.
He said in August 1886, when he was three-and-a-half years old, there was an earthquake in
Charleston, S. C., that was by far the largest earthquake in the southeastern United States. It was
estimated to be between 6.6 and 7.3 on the Richter scale. It was felt in New York, Boston,
Chicago, New Orleans and even Bermuda and Cuba. Major damage occurred over sixty miles
away and structural damage was reported several hundred miles from Charleston, all the way
from Alabama to West Virginia. Daddy said that tremors from the earthquake could be felt in
Shelby. It broke window panes, cracked masonry walls, knocked down chimneys, and
frightened the people of Cleveland County.
Daddy liked to tell about the bulldog they named Jack that showed up to live with the family
and became a legend. Daddy said Jack slept in the house and protected the family while Daddy
night watched the Lily Mill. He said if there was a knock at the door, Jack would jump over the
heater to be the first one to the door. Jack followed the kids everywhere they went. One summer
Sunday morning on the way home from church, he was bitten by a snake and died.
Daddy talked about how the railway system had united the country, and how people and
products were transported by rail. He told us that hotels uptown were located near the train
depot. He said that our Hendersonville relatives and Granddaddy worked on a crew that ran the
railroad line to bring in supplies to build the Biltmore House in Asheville. Their family had
moved to Cleveland County from Hendersonville, just before he was born, but they moved back
there two or three times when he was growing up. He said some of the Kuykendall relatives had
worked as stonemasons building the Biltmore House.
Daddy talked about the mineral springs in Cleveland County and the hotels that were built
around them. The best known was Cleveland Springs Hotel on East Marion Street near
Cleveland Country Club. It had burned down three times. The first hotel was built in 1851, and
burned in 1854. The second hotel was built in 1866, and burned September 9, 1907, as a result
of lightning striking it. Three people perished. The third hotel was built in 1920, and burned the
night of October 15, 1929. The fire started in the flue from a furnace that had been lit for the
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first time that year. Daddy said that people still gathered at the springs to camp out and socialize,
even after the hotel burned.
Our neighbor, Gary Shuford, and I went over there to see the area for ourselves. We climbed
through the weeds and kudzu, finding shards of tiles and the hotel columns still standing. Two
decades later Charles built lovely condominiums called “The Columns” on that hillside.
One day when we had unexpected company, Daddy asked Mama what she was going to feed
them. She said she thought she would just send out to that new Kentucky Fried Chicken place
instead of cooking. Daddy took her aside and said, “Edna, you know that chicken fried in
Kentucky and shipped in here won’t be fit to eat.”
We were watching a program on television, and a beer commercial came on. Daddy lowered
the volume, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and said, “I won’t watch their old beer
commercial.” They spread a tablecloth for a picnic, and cut a watermelon open. Daddy said,
“Look, Edna, their dadburned old watermelon is green.”
Daddy woke me up in the morning and got me off to school. He let Mama sleep. He cooked
my breakfast of fried eggs, sausage and biscuits. He kept his index fingernail filed to a point to
pop open canned biscuits. He and I ate breakfast together and drank our coffee.
When Daddy woke me up to go to school, he always said the same thing, “Booty, this is a
school morning. If you’re going to school, you’d better get up.” One night it was really snowing,
and I said, “Daddy, listen to the radio in the morning, and if we’re not having school, please let
me sleep.” The next morning when he woke me up, I looked out the window at all the snow on
the ground. I asked if he had been listening to the radio and he said, “Yes, they’re not having
school in Atlanta today.” I asked why he wasn’t listening to the Shelby station, and he said, “All
that yah- yah they had on there, I got tired of listening to it and changed stations.”
I resented homework because it took away time from the family I loved. Somewhere in the
back of my mind, a clock was always ticking away at the hours, the days, and the years that we
had together. Often Daddy sat with me while I did my homework. I liked to draw cartoon
Snoopy dogs on the inside of my notebook. Daddy said, “That don’t look like no dadburn dog.”
I said, “What does a dadburn dog look like?” And he took a sheet of paper out of my notebook,
got my pencil and drew a dog with a floppy ear, stick legs and tail and a dot for an eye. I
laughed at his “Dadburn Dawg” but I cut it out and carried it with me in my wallet. It was my
treasure.
I especially enjoyed the English Department at Shelby High School. Mrs. Mamie Lou
Bridges, Mrs. Margaret Cummings, and Mrs. Becky Hamrick were my teachers. I shared with
Daddy some of what I learned from them of American and English literature. He would listen
and nod and often he would finish the quotation right along with me as I read it aloud from the
printed page. Emerson, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Carl Sandburg meant more to me as I read
them aloud to him.
Mr. Eugene Allen taught Western Civilizations to a small group our senior year and prepared
us for the course we would take the next year in college. He entertained us occasionally by
sharing stories about his special interest in unidentified flying objects.
Miss Stella Randall, who taught geometry, had a dry wit and was famous for her one-liners.
If she saw someone watching the clock she would remind them that “time will pass, will you?”
One day Bryan LeGrand got up and started to the front of the classroom to sharpen his pencil.
She quipped, “Sit down, LeGrand, it is already sharper than you are.”
I studied journalism for two years in Mrs. Vanda Nesbitt’s class and wrote a column called
“And Another Thing” for the school newspaper, The Outlook.
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Mr. Wayne Caudill was Shelby High School principal from 1955-1971. My senior year as he
installed the new Student Council officers in the gymnasium in the presence of the teachers and
1,000 students, he began to tell who had been student body president each of the years he had
been principal at the high school. He told where they were living and their current occupation.
When he came to the class of 1957, he told about Tom’s year as president and about his career
since. Then the whole student body laughed when he said, “If I can get Brendan out of here this
year, I will be through with that family.”
It was in the fall of my senior year in high school when deer season opened that I decided I
wanted to go hunting. My friend, Hayden Sikes, wanted to go too. Growing up with all of those
brothers, I couldn’t have helped but be a bit of a tomboy, even the boys at school said, “Brenner
is just one of the guys”, but Hayden? She was Homecoming Queen.
I asked my brothers to take us hunting. Charles said I wasn’t getting in the woods with him
with a gun. Tom reminded me of my gender. Robert agreed to take us, and asked what time we
got out of school.
Then Hayden’s Daddy, Frank Sikes, said we could go with him on Thanksgiving morning.
Hayden and I purchased a hunting license, and the night before Thanksgiving, Hayden picked me
up in her Volkswagen to cruise the hang outs and neighborhoods. We rolled the Volkswagen in
a curve in Country Club Acres. The car landed on its top, her Daddy’s tool box lodged in the
window and one door wouldn’t open.
We got out of the overturned car, shook up but walking on our own to the nearest house to
use the telephone. We had tousled hair, dirt on our faces and grit in our teeth, and Hayden had
her Daddy’s 30-30 rifle that had been in the car tucked under her arm.
The nearest house was the Athos Rostan residence, owners of the Waldensian Bakery uptown
that made Sunbeam bread. Sue Rostan was lying on the sofa in their den, reading an article in
that day’s newspaper about a cat burglar in Charlotte, when their doorbell rang. When she
opened the door and was confronted by two ragamuffins with a 30-30 rifle asking to use their
phone, she put her hands up and backed out of our way. Hayden apologized for the gun, stood it
in the corner, and used their telephone to call her Daddy.
Frank Sikes and his friend, Dr. Dick Bowling, came to get us. We got checked out and xrayed at Cleveland Memorial Hospital and I learned that I had a whip lash.
I spent a quiet Thanksgiving lounging around the house wearing a neck brace, and Hayden
and I never did go deer hunting.
Daddy was eighty years old when I started high school and Mama was fifty-four. In his older
years Mama called him “Poppy.” I can’t imagine what it would be like at that age to have a
teenager in the house. I was usually at home on school nights, and I had an eleven o’clock
curfew on weekends, but I had a lot of company. And when I went to bed at night, I put on a
stack of record albums. I’d be asleep before the first album finished playing. I’ve often thought
about Daddy and Mama being just across the hall, having to listen to the Motown and Beach
Music I liked such as The Temptations, The Four Tops, and the Tams. I hope they fell asleep
fast too.
Daddy advised us not to date anyone we wouldn’t marry. And he said that love is like
lightning, it can strike an outhouse as easily as a church.
Charlie Magness was my high school sweetheart. The Magness family was one of the earliest
settlers in Cleveland County. Daddy had known Charlie’s grandparents, George and Lillie
Poston Magness, even before they were married.
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Charlie was a year ahead of me in school, and he was captain of the Shelby High football
team. His parents, Charles “Coon” and Ernestine Magness, took Roxana Hamrick and me to the
out of town football games. Coon entertained Roxie and me by throwing his voice and making
his car talk.
I rode to school with Charlie, and sometimes he brought ham biscuits for Roxie and me to sit
in the car and eat at lunch. He had a 1957 Ford as well as an old A-Model that he drove to
school a few times. His Grandmother Magness and his Grandfather Watts lived with them. His
Grandfather Watts had problems with his vision. He saw Charlie’s barbells and told him,
“Charlie, you’d better put that axle back on that car.”
Coon owned Magness Gulf Service Station on the corner of South DeKalb Street and East
Warren Street. Ernestine and their older son, George, ran the station with him. Charlie worked
there after school and on Saturdays. His Mother would pay him extra and tell him to buy me
something pretty.
A man named Jim Palmer worked at the service station. Coon told a story about a lady
pulling up in her car and asking if they had a restroom. Jim thought she said a whisk broom, and
he told her, “No, but if you’ll pull on over here to the air hose we’ll blow it out.” Coon said he
was laughing so hard he couldn’t explain it to the lady, and she took off out of there.
After Charlie graduated Shelby High School, he played football at Gardner-Webb College,
and he joined the Navy Seabees.
During the summers of my teenage years Anna and Dewey included me on their annual
vacation to the beach and allowed me invite a friend to join us. Anna had a dark green 1949
Pontiac she had bought brand new not long after I was born, and she drove it the whole time I
was growing up. She took care of it, kept it in the garage, and gave it to her grandson the year I
graduated high school. Then she bought a new 1966 Pontiac.
Polly, Wilburn, and Scotty took me to the beach with them and to Florida for a week. The
summer before my senior year in high school I attended the North Carolina Scholastic Press
Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study journalism. But because of
Daddy’s age, I didn’t want to be away from him for too long at a time, especially since he’d had
a stroke the winter of my sophomore year.
I babysat, ironed clothes, and did odd jobs for spending money. When I asked Daddy for
money, he liked to tease me by saying, “What did you do with the fifty cents I gave you last
week?”
When I graduated high school, Daddy was 83. Velle offered me a summer job at American
Casualty Insurance Company in Charlotte, where she was a supervisor. She said I could spend
the summer with her and Nathan and their son, Mike, in Waxhaw and ride back and forth to
work with her each day. I needed the money for college in the fall.
As I packed my bags to go, Daddy sat on my bed and watched. The misery on his face was
reflected in mine. He said, “Booty, as long as I have a place to live, you will. This might be
your last summer not to have to work, and you don’t have to go.”
I picked up the blouse I’d just placed into the suitcase and put it back on the hanger, and we
both cried.
I went to school at Gardner-Webb College that fall on a student loan. My siblings also helped
pay my college tuition. I placed out of any Spanish classes they taught at the College, and I got a
job working for the Spanish professors.
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The summer of 1967, I got a job in the Admitting Office of Cleveland Memorial Hospital. I
was nineteen years old. I grew up in a hurry there. A man I was admitting had a heart attack and
died at my desk. A woman had a baby right there in the office. I had to admit patients in the
emergency room with gunshot wounds, and on the psychiatric ward in lock-up rooms. I donned
surgery scrubs to go into the delivery room if patients had no one to come to the office to admit
them.
Those of us who worked there shared funny stories to give us comic relief. Sarah Wylie
worked with me in the Admitting Office, and she told me a story about being at the bus station in
Rock Hill. A lady and a little girl came in and walked up to the counter. The lady told the ticket
agent, “I want to buy a ticket for Magnolia.” She said the man looked and looked at the map.
He finally asked, “Where is Magnolia?” And the lady pointed to the little girl and said, “She’s
right here.”
Helen Allen, a nurse in the emergency room, said she was filling out a patient’s paperwork.
She asked the lady if she’d had a B.M. that morning. The lady replied, “No, but I had a R.C.
before I came over here.”
The Doctors gave their patients who were going to have surgery pre-admission forms to send
to the admitting office at the hospital. On the form where it said “sex” they were suppose to
denote male or female. Instead some of them got more personal. They would say things like
“good,” “occasionally,” “twice a week”, and one said “Once in Concord.”
The doctors had to keep their hospital patients’ charts up to date, or their admission privileges
were suspended. It was my job to call the doctors and tell them when their charts were
delinquent. If I had to call Dr. Vic Moore who delivered me, he would yell, “I should have
pinched your head off when you were born.”
When Dr. Moore made his rounds to see his patients, he would come by the Admitting
Office. If I was working on Sunday, we would go together to the cafeteria downstairs to eat.
Regardless of the current fashion, Dr. Moore always wore wide colorfully printed neckties, and
he smoked Camel cigarettes. One day at lunch I asked him why he smoked those old Camel
cigarettes without a filter. He said, “I’ll tell you like it is. Trying to smoke a cigarette with a
filter in it is like trying to suck a tit through a sheet.” I said, “I’m sorry I asked.”
Some patients entered the hospital repeatedly, because they were terminally ill. One of them
was D. B. Tolleson. Every time he was admitted, he gave us a good laugh with his selfdiagnosis. One time he told us he had the foreign flu, that he caught it from a broad. Another
time he said he had Irish fever, and that his private parts had gone to Dublin.
I didn’t have a vehicle to drive to work. Mama always said when I started wanting
something to drive, she was going to give me a hammer and a nail. Jerry and Ann divorced my
senior year in high school, and he married Shirley Greene August 2, 1967, in Gaffney, S. C.
They lived on W. Elm Street, diagonally across from us. Jerry worked for Nehi Bottling
Company and Shirley worked in the lab at the hospital. I rode to work with her until I got a car.
Wilburn took me car shopping, and we bought me a new 1968 Chevrolet Camaro. I wish I still
had it.
In those two years, 1966 to 1968, Daddy lost the last of his siblings, Uncle Tommy, Uncle
Will, and Uncle Mack. Daddy was saddened by their deaths and he missed them. He told me,
“Now, there’s no one left who remembers me when I was a boy.”
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Charlie Magness and I became engaged, and he spent two tours of duty in Vietnam. When I
got his letters, as I read them, I would wonder if he was still alive. It took about two weeks for
the letters to arrive from Vietnam. I watched television and read the papers for news from Da
Nang. I knew it was one of the most dangerous areas of the war. His sister, Margaret, worked at
the hospital in the business office, and she boosted my morale.
I sewed a lot. I made dresses for Mama and for myself, and I taught some to the younger
neighborhood girls to sew. Mama taught me a lesson about procrastinating. I bought red fabric
for her Christmas dress, but I didn’t make it. Christmas Eve night she reminded me that she was
planning to wear it Christmas Day. I thought about all the times I had brought in fabric on
Saturdays, wanting her to help me make something to wear for Saturday night, and she stopped
whatever she was doing and helped me. I woke her up at 3:30 a.m. to try on the dress, so I could
pin up the hem. It was a simple jewel necked, short sleeved, back zippered A-line shift. On
Christmas Day she got compliments on the dress, and whenever I yawned, she smiled like the
Cheshire cat.
When Charlie Magness came home from Vietnam, he was out of the Navy. He was
especially quiet, and he never said too much about the war. We broke up not too long after that.
His brother, George, was one of the volunteer firemen killed in the fire and explosion in uptown
Shelby on May 25, 1979, the worst fire to date in Cleveland County history. It was the same
spot where the temporary housing for First National Bank collapsed on West Warren Street in
1928, killing six people. Cleveland County Chamber of Commerce is now located there.
I met Jerry Gardner who worked as Warehouse Operations Manager at Clyde A. Short Co.
with brother, Charles, who was Vice President there. Jerry and I began dating and we were
married August 31, 1968, at Central United Methodist Church. Polly, Jane, Peggy Church, and
Jerry’s sister, Karen, were bridesmaids. I made the dresses Polly and Jane wore. Tom walked
me down the aisle, and Charles was an usher, along with Jerry’s brothers, Jim and Steven.
After the ceremony, Daddy told the family, “Some of you had better go home with us. The
nest is empty now, and we just might try to start another family.”
The problem with being the baby of the family is that in the pecking order, you never have
any rank. You learn to follow orders, and you aim to please. I succeeded in pleasing my family
in marrying Jerry. Daddy told me that he loved Jerry just like he did his own sons. Daddy and
Jerry’s Grandfather, Monroe Hendrick, had been friends when they were boys. Daddy gave
Jerry a picture of his Grandfather Hendrick made when he was twenty-one years old. Daddy had
it among his treasures in his trunk.
We moved next door to Jerry’s parents, William Hoyle and Lucille Gardner, on the Gardner
farm, out in the country near Lattimore, across the street from Double Springs Baptist Church.
The Gardners’ welcomed me into their family. Jerry is the oldest of four children and Jim,
Steven, and Karen were still at home. W. H. taught at the vocational high school in Gaffney,
S.C. and wrote a textbook on building construction. Lucille substitute taught at schools around
the county. Jim was a teacher at Crest High School, and Steven and Karen were students at
Crest. They were involved in school activities, and they hosted the first exchange student at
Crest that next year.
Lucille showed me how to grow plants, and we shared our love of needlework. She made and
sold pulled candy mints, volunteered at the hospital as a Pink Lady and was involved with Broad
River Genealogical Society, researching family histories and transcribing Voter Registration
Records and Court Pleas and Quarters Sessions.
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Granny Cordie Gardner lived across the street. Since all of my grandparents were dead by the
time I was born, she was the first grandparent I ever had. Her husband, Hoyle Gardner, had died
in 1941, and she lived alone in the two story stone and weathered shingle one-hundred-year-old
farmhouse that was the Gardner home place.
The house was surrounded by apple trees and purple leafed flowering plum trees with old
rambler roses scrambling through their branches. A tall pink camellia next to the house bloomed
during the winter months. Azaleas, lilacs, and nandinas served as foundation plants. Flowering
shrubs and bulbs provided an ever-changing palette.
In the summer she worked in her flowers and in the vegetable garden that was located
between her house and the barn. She canned the vegetables and stored them upstairs to be
brought down for meals or bestowed as gifts to family and friends.
On winter days she quilted upstairs or sat by the fire in the den reading, writing letters,
looking at seed catalogs, and doing handwork. She knitted and crocheted, did tatting, made hair
pin lace, and she made aprons and pillows out of gingham checked fabric she embroidered with
chicken scratch.
She loved to cook, and often invited us over to eat. I was embarrassed to go back for seconds,
so she started serving me on a turkey platter. One time she made a pound cake for my birthday
and put a pillar candle in the hole in the center of the cake.
Jerry made repairs for her and did chores she couldn’t do herself, and I took her to town to do
her errands. She liked to go to Shelby Feed and Seed Store on South Morgan Street by the
railroad depot to buy the things she needed for her garden. She called the store “Billy
Bankhead’s” after the owner.
Like most farmers she charged what she bought and settled the bill in the fall when the
harvest came in, or in her case when the neighbor farmer, Wilbur Cabiness, who leased the
farmland, paid the rent at the end of the harvest season.
She walked down the dirt road each Sunday morning to attend Double Springs Baptist Church
which the Gardner ancestors had given the land to build in 1844. She visited us on Sunday
afternoons and often stayed for supper.
There was a creek on the Gardner farm, wildlife to observe, and woods to explore. John Bell’s
Antiques was close by and was known throughout the South for an inventory of lovely furniture.
Just browsing through the old books upstairs was a great way to spend an afternoon.
I learned to cook the casseroles that had become so much a part of new cuisine in America in
the 1960s. With so many women now in the workforce, it was important to have meals that
could be prepared quickly at the end of the day, or prepared ahead of time and frozen for later
use. TV dinners filled the grocery stores and American freezers. New cookbooks of recipes for
soups and chowders, as well as casseroles and pasta, appeared on bookstore shelves. Fondue
pots and slow cookers called crock-pots, griddles and grills, pyrex dishes, and Corning ware
appeared in the houseware sections of department stores.
I joined the local home demonstration club in the Double Springs community, one of many
that were sponsored by the Cleveland County Home Extension Agency. At the meetings we had
programs about food preservation and household arts.
I made jellies, jams, and preserves and dried fruits and flowers. I learned crafts and needle
arts to make affordable household and decorative items. I filled my leisure time with hours of
fun as I tole-painted boxes, stitched and embroidered pillows, and made Christmas ornaments.
These handcrafts filled our home with unique touches that were admired by family and friends
who came to visit.
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I loved living out in the country, and I enjoyed being home. Jerry had lived on that farm all
of his life, and he had a Corvette, a motorcycle, and a parachute. He loved to “go and do.” He
and Wilburn built dune buggies, and we rode the roads. He fished with Charles, Jerry, and
Robert at the Outer Banks, and he hunted in Maine with Tom and his friends from WBTV. He
rode motorcycles out west with his brother, Jim. He skydived and worked on his pilot’s license.
He snow skied with his brother, Steven and his friends, and water skied and went tubing down
the Green River with the guys from his construction work. He took photographs, had a dark
room, and joined the Shelby Camera Club. He bought a kilt and participated in the Highland
Games. He played tennis and handball, and he played basketball on the team at Central United
Methodist Church. He played cards with his buddies and with Polly, Wilburn, and Scotty.
On weekends we went on trips and brought Daddy and Mama back little treats. They loved
the pecan divinity and log rolls from Stuckey’s Convenience Stores located on the interstate
highway, and the jars of honey, molasses, and apple cider from roadside stands in the mountains.
We often went to Atlanta, and we spent an enjoyable weekend in Anniston, Alabama, visiting
Uncle Lionel and Aunt Brooksie.
Jerry was in the Army National Guard and he spent one weekend a month at the National
Guard Armory and two weeks in the summer at one of the Army bases in Georgia in training at
summer camp.
We rode to Houston, Texas, with Polly, Wilburn, and Scott the summer of 1970, and drove a
U-Haul truck back to Shelby. Sam and Helen had divorced, and he married Barbara McSwain
Gregory March 15, 1969, in Houston, Texas. Sam and Barbara, their son, Mark, and her two
sons from her previous marriage, Weldon and Al Gregory, moved to Shelby to live for a year.
Polly, Wilburn, Scott, Jerry, and I went to Houston to help them pack and move them out here.
Sam worked for Clyde A. Short Co., and Barbara worked for a savings and loan in Charlotte.
Daddy and Mama kept Mark while they worked.
Daddy and Mama loved having a baby in the house again. Mama said the sweetest sound is
the patter of little feet across the floor. Daddy said grandchildren are God’s compensation for
growing old. Mark was one of several new babies in the family. Jerry and Ann had Tammy,
Tom and Mariel had Mary Jean and Sissy, Robert and Sandra had Rob, Charles and Sue had
Chip, and Edwin and Myrna had Melisa all within a few years. And while these siblings were
becoming parents, the older siblings were becoming grandparents and great-grandparents.
Mama and Daddy were thrilled with each new birth.
I left the job at the hospital to go to work in the dental office of Dr. David E. Trawick. I
worked there for a little more than a year. I scheduled appointments, took x-rays, and did lab
work. His office was located beside the Post Office in Boiling Springs, and across the street
from Gardner-Webb College.
I started taking classes in interior design at Isothermal Community College in the evenings. I
taught myself to do needlepoint, and I entered my first piece of needlepoint in the Cleveland
County Fair that year. I won a ribbon, and later the piece was shown in McCall’s Needlework
Magazine.
At the first of the month when Daddy got his Social Security check, he went to pay his bills.
He called it “making my rounds.” He didn’t want to send checks; he wanted to go in person.
This was one of his outings, a ritual that he did. When he went to the Lily Mill to pay his
insurance, he had to go through the office and the mill and say “howdy” to everybody who
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worked there. Plus he often wanted to ride around in the country in the Earl/Patterson Springs
area to see the places he used to live. This took more than a little bit of time.
Polly always drove him to make his rounds. But one month when it was time to take Daddy
to pay his bills, Polly, who was a Deputy Sheriff, was staying with the jury for a murder trial.
She was sequestered with them at a local motel. Sue promised to fill in for Polly to take him on
his rounds.
The next morning when Mama got up, Daddy was nowhere to be found. She called Charles
at work at Clyde A. Short Co., and she was crying. Charles promised to leave work and go look
for him. He went uptown and found Daddy sitting on the steps of the City Hall, waiting for them
to open so he could pay his water and lights bill.
When Charles brought him home, Mama begged Daddy to promise her he would never do
that again. He said, “Now, dadburn it Edna, I’m 87 years old. I’m old enough to walk to town if
I want to.”
Tom and Mariel moved from Charlotte to Shelby, and Tom became a licensed real estate
salesman specializing in industrial properties and timberland. He and Charles went into the real
estate and developing business with their offices in town. Charles was given the Distinguished
Service Award by the Jaycees. Those years saw some changes in Shelby’s hotel business. Hotel
Charles in downtown closed in 1967 and Shelby Hotel, also in downtown, was torn down in
1968. Cleveland Hotel on East Marion Street burned in 1970.
I worked at the Cleveland County Department of Mental Health, transcribing patients’
records, and I also filled in at psychiatrist, Dr. Henry S. Ritchie’s, office.
At Daddy’s 88th birthday party, Tom asked him how old you are when you quit thinking
about sex. Daddy said, “Son, you’ll have to ask somebody older than I am.” Mama laughed and
said, “Men are all alike; their faces are different, so you can tell them apart.”
Charles and Tom had a large garden down Highway 18 South. They brought the vegetables
for Mama to cook, and we all went to Mama and Daddy’s for lunch every day that summer.
Daddy had cataracts and needed surgery to remove them. When he went to get his eyes
examined, Dr. Emile Gebel asked him how far he could see. Daddy said, “I can see the moon.
How far is that?” He had stayed up to watch Apollo 11, the third lunar mission of NASA’s
Apollo Program on television as Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the moon
on July 20, 1969. Armstrong descended the ladder, turned and set his left foot on the moon’s
surface and said these famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for
mankind.” On this mission Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent two-and-a-half hours
exploring the lunar surface as Michael Collins remained in orbit in the Command Module,
fulfilling President John Kennedy’s goal of having a man on the moon by the end of the 1960’s.
Walter Cronkite of CBS provided some of the most compelling news coverage. Daddy said he
wouldn’t have missed watching the moonwalk for the world.
Daddy said the time you spend with loved ones is important, because when you come to the
end of your life, you have those cherished memories to sweeten your days.
It was those memories of loved ones that he shared with us over and over that sustained him.
He was frustrated by the limitations of old age, and sometimes he felt that he had outlived his
usefulness. He would say, “I can’t do much. I just feel like I’m no account.”
I would tease him by telling him they’d had to quit planting so much cotton in Cleveland
County, because they didn’t have him to pick it. I’d tell him his retirement from the cotton patch
had made them bring diversified industry into the county, so his retirement did the county a
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favor. He would laugh when I sung him a couple of lines of his favorite song- “John Henry was
a steel driving man, Lord, Lord. John Henry was a steel driving man.”
He still got up at the crack of dawn and cooked his breakfast, but by nine o’clock he was on
the porch stretched out on the chaise he called his “lazy bed” with his hat over his eyes napping.
In the winter he napped on the sofa in the den. He watched the noonday soap operas on
television with Mama, but he wouldn’t have wanted anybody to know it.
In the afternoon he waited for some of us to come to visit. He used a push mower and still
mowed their grass, while Mama did the housework, her handwork, and read the paper.
They ate supper and watched the six o’clock news. He still got riled up and said a few
“dadburn it’s” over the news. He sat at the end of the sofa next to the television so he could turn
the volume to silence the commercials at his whim.
They watched a couple of programs or visited with the kids who stopped by. And at nine
o’clock, he picked up his alarm clock, although he never set the alarm, and carried it with him to
bed.
He was a creature of habit and he didn’t welcome change. Mama bought new porch furniture
on South DeKalb Street, and he took his old porch chair and sat in the yard under the maple tree
for a while. When we moved to Charles Road they bought new furniture, but he brought his old
rawhide woven bottomed straight back chairs with him to sit in.
In the summer of 1971, Tom and Charles opened a men’s clothing store uptown called The
Gentlemen’s Corner on Lafayette Street, where Cohen’s Department Store used to be. Aug W.
Smith Co. from Spartanburg, S.C., opened a lady’s apparel store next to it. I went to work there
keeping the inventory and buying clothes and accessories for the store. I traveled to Charlotte,
Atlanta, and New York to the clothing shows.
Clothing fashions in the1970’s included hip hugger and bell bottom pants, hot pants,
miniskirts, maxi skirts and coats, wide neck ties, wide and pointy lapels, polyester knit dresses
and leisure suits, mod prints, swirling psychedelic prints and geometric shapes, and platform
shoes. Men wore sideburns and long hair.
Disco dance music was popular in the 1970’s, and mini dresses, hot pants, and platform
shoes were the attire for disco nightclubs. Among the best known of the disco performers were
the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, The Jacksons, and my former classmate, Alicia Bridges, with the
song she wrote and sang “I Love the Nightlife.” It was recorded in 1978, and went to number
five on the Billboard charts. It is perhaps the song that is most remembered from the disco era.
Mariel worked for Aug W. Smith Co., writing their advertisements for the newspaper, and she
was in charge of the kitchen at Central United Methodist Church. Jerry Gardner and I became
leaders of the Junior High Methodist Youth Fellowship at that Church. We met with the
teenagers on Sunday nights and planned church related activities. We took them on trips, and to
Loy White Camp for weekend retreats. We enjoyed working with that age group.
Jane was working for the Shelby Police Department as the first Meter Maid, and she and I
often ate lunch together at uptown restaurants, especially at Shirley’s Restaurant on South
Lafayette Street, which was a familiar gathering spot for the City of Shelby police.
The uptown Shelby stores had an annual sidewalk sale the Saturday before Labor Day to clear
summer merchandise. It was also the first day of dove hunting season, and Jerry and my
brothers went to the field to hunt. They hunted in the late afternoons during the following weeks
too, and I pleaded with them to let me join them.
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They said I could go, so a few days I left work early and joined Jerry Gardner, Tom, Robert,
and Charles in a recently plowed cornfield in Lattimore at 4:00 p.m. We sat spread out in the
field, and when the doves flew over, we stood up and fired. I had an Ithaca .410 over-and-under
shotgun that also shot .22 short rifle cartridges. The boys used 12 or 16-gauge double barrel
shotguns.
Sometimes we sat close together, talked, and told jokes. The worst part was sometimes I got
peppered with shotgun pellets. The best part was the camaraderie and time with my brothers.
I’m sure they’d rather their little sister didn’t tag along with them to the dove field, but they were
good sports about it.
In 1971, at the Cleveland County Fair, I won Best of Show in both needlepoint and crewel
embroidery, and Best of Fair for the needlepoint piece. Jeanette Story of Arden, N. C., who
designed needlecraft for Belding Lily, encouraged me to start teaching needlework. Cleveland
Technical School which had begun in July 1965 was granted institutional charter status as
Cleveland County Technical Institute on July 1, 1971. I began teaching needlepoint and crewel
embroidery at Cleveland Tech in Continuing Education that fall, and I taught there for nine
years.
Saturday, May 20, 1972, as I locked the doors at Aug W. Smith, Co. at 5:30, the telephone
rang. I ran back into the store to answer it. It was Polly telling me to come to Daddy and
Mama’s house. She said that Daddy wasn’t well, and the boys were taking him to the hospital.
When I got there, he was in the bathroom. A couple of the boys were in there with him. As
he came out, I heard him ask, “Where is Booty?” I said, “Daddy, I’m right here.” He told me he
had to go to the hospital.
We stayed at the house and waited, while the boys took him. Daddy had been saying for two
weeks that he just didn’t feel good. Edwin, Myrna, and Melisa had been here from Texas for a
visit. Melisa was only four months old, and it was our first time to see her. They had just left
that morning to drive back to Texas.
Robert came back from the hospital to tell us that Daddy had a blood clot in his intestines and
needed surgery to correct it, but at his age his heart wouldn’t stand the surgery. The doctors said
they would lose him on the operating table. There was nothing they could do but give him
medication to ease his pain.
We all went to the hospital and took turns going into Intensive Care to see him. He told me
he wanted to get up, that his back was hurting. They were giving him morphine. The last thing
he told me was, “If I don’t see you in the morning, I’ll see you up yonder.”
He had said that same thing to me back in February, when he had his eye surgery to remove
his cataracts. I was hoping for a miracle. All my life I had asked God to just let me keep him a
while longer, but this time I knew my time with him was up.
We all went home but Jerry. He stayed at Daddy’s bedside with him until the end. Jerry
didn’t cry when he died. He had been a witness to Daddy’s pain. Jerry said, “I don’t feel sorry
for Dad; he’s out of his pain. I feel sorry for us having to go on without him.”
Jerry Gardner answered the telephone when we got the dreaded call in the middle of the night.
He told me, “Pop didn’t make it.”
I sat up in the bed in the dark the rest of the night thinking that he always tried to tell me this
would happen. But there was no way he could have prepared me for this sense of loss. He
chewed my food for me when I was a baby, picked the seeds out of my watermelons, and peeled
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my oranges when I was grown. I thanked God for the time that I had with him and for the kind
of Daddy that he had been.
Three weeks before, he and Mama had come to see our new house. He saw that I was settled
in and happy. He smiled at me, and I knew he was happy too, for God had let him live to raise
his kids.
The next morning after Daddy died, Mama told me to look in the closet in Daddy’s jacket
pocket to get the old military metal Daddy always carried and called his “good luck piece.” He
had promised it to me. He would pull it out of his pocket from time to time and tell me, “Booty,
you can have this when I don’t need it any longer.”
Tom handed me this poem that he had written about Daddy. I treasure the poem, keep it in
my memory box, and reread it through the years.
BENT HORIZONS
I
He was an old man and that had always been a part of the problem. Or at least a part of the
unintended wall that served to barricade them. Always one fought time with the mind; the other
fought for it with the heart. An old man, his face showing tired, telling the years. Why had he
missed all the answers? Had he not shared and enjoyed the privilege of the Gods? If he had not
missed them, why did he not share what he had learned? Was the question wrong?
II
Life promises no praise or eulogy
For patient, unquestioned dignity.
Compiled, it’s history, recorded and blest,
Written in red on the enemy’s breast.
It’s a code just two words perpetuate;
You either love, or somehow hate
What it was or could have been,
Or might be if only chanced again.
Exist is not the same as live,
For all mortality can find to give
Will not make life entirely painless,
Nor how he failed make the man less stainless.
Take it seriously and what is it worth?
What’s the reward at death, or birth
If you mold your face to fit the part
But fail to knead and bake the heart?
From compromise and things half done,
Two failing to make a more hallowed one,
Piling their trifles in little heaps,
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Regretting sewing where no one reaps.
Much better the lives of Gladiators
Than sulking, twilight mediators,
Hovering between matter and dreams
And differing from each, or so it seems.
III
I might as well try to build a cathedral alone
As carve life like a cutter his stone.
Or like Paul imprisoned by Nero,
Or Dante, exiled, before Inferno,
Accept secular substitute for reason.
Scorned like fruit bloomed out of season
For a life of dreaming too intense
To bring the dreamer recompense.
Even love is not without its horrors
If lived today in fear of tomorrows.
No weekends, no Sabbaths, no vacations,
Only sunset’s stark insinuations.
To face the quest means chance at loss,
There is no Easter without the cross.
Willing to remain alone to please,
“Does a snuffbox have the right to sneeze?”
The spur of challenge makes its mark,
Threatens, reverberates, forecloses dark
Shadows and doubts; and only resolute defense
Can overcome determined pestilence,
And dominance of love turn the defeat
Into objective…a life complete;
Complete with trifles, things so small
But without which there is nothing at all.
IV
Is it more difficult to rise than dictate
You were not borne at the hands of fate?
Is it more worthy, can it not better be
If you claim captaincy of destiny?
Is life to go on staged and plotted,
With impressions wished undone or blotted?
Must it come to the final drum roll and call
With just a cry of “Was that all?” Was it all?
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How vain it is, how very vain,
To have given it all again;
Hearing it discussed more in jest
And seeking reward without the quest.
And how wrong it is to settle for just
Marking time, a speck of dust;
Pretending to be alone, and ought
To be, for first ignoring that thought.
Shadows lengthen, twilight is lent
To desolation, tone and tint.
Glimmering with dreams and watered by tears
I caress the flowers of yesteryears.
Different drummers playing the tune,
And memory’s ear failing me soon
I mark the cadence of a distant drum
Dreading the life that’s not yet come.
V
When you’ve reached those years you should know
Wherever the heart leads the rest must go,
So go, if you must, without the drummer,
Go and forget the drummer.
The question again, and this time the eyes dropped downward, as if to see them would betray the
truth, leaving an impression he would later wish had not passed the mute, wintered face. But the
only answer was a tear that crawled down the leathered wrinkles of his cheeks and disappeared
into the dust.
Tom Camp
The night the family received friends at Lutz-Austell Funeral Home, cars were lined up on
both sides of the street all the way to uptown. We had such a large family, and we had so many
friends.
A black man named Clyde Degree, who had worked at Lily Mill with Daddy, was one of the
many people who came to the funeral home to pay his respects. Some years before when we
lived on South DeKalb Street he had visited Daddy and sat on the porch, laughed, and told us
this story. He said Daddy was hauling a load of manure from the cattle barn at the fairgrounds to
landscape the courthouse yard, and Clyde was riding on the back of the truck. Twice as they
drove through town, someone hollered to ask Daddy what he was hauling, and Daddy said, “A
load of shit and an old Negro.” Clyde said he hollered to Daddy, “Uncle Johnny, can I ask you
to do me a favor?” Daddy said, “What’s that, Clyde?” And Clyde said, “The next time
somebody asks you what you’re hauling, how about mentioning me first.”
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That night we received friends at the funeral home, Clyde Degree told us, “Uncle Johnny was
the best man I ever knowed.”
Bill McKee was always there for us whatever we needed. He preached Daddy’s funeral at
Bethel Baptist Church.
Robert was a driver’s license examiner at the N. C. Highway Patrol Station in
Hendersonville. They closed every driver’s license office in his district so that the employees
could attend Daddy’s funeral.
Jane was on the Shelby Police force and a policeman was standing, hat in hand, on every
street corner as the funeral procession passed from Lutz-Austell Funeral Home on West Marion
Street to Bethel Baptist Church on South DeKalb Street. We were honored by the overwhelming
respect and love.
We laid him to rest in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery beside his Daddy, Lizzie, Lula
Belle, Thelma, Emmett, and Billy. He was 89 and Mama was 63. They had been married 47
years.
Mama was lonely after Daddy died. On the day after Father’s Day, she wrote a letter to
Nathan and Velle telling them how lonely she was. Ruth and Lee’s granddaughter, Cherie
Melton, came to spend a couple of weeks with her.
Mama flew to Texas to visit Edwin and Sam and their families. Jane, Jerry and Shirley went
with her. Mama had never been on an airplane before. Though she was nervous, she enjoyed
the flight.
Edwin always had plenty of family in Texas. Mama’s brother and sister-in-law, Uncle
Hilbert and Aunt Carrie lived there. Daddy’s nephews Grady and Ann Reid and Mack and Lois
Reid lived close by, and so did Ruby’s brother, Robert Deaton. And Edwin and Myrna spent
weekends and vacations with Sam and Barbara.
Mama became more independent and opened her own checking account. She would laugh
and say, “I know I still have money left, because I’ve still got checks.” She joined Aldersgate
United Methodist Church across the street. Sometimes she visited Aunt Ollie and Uncle Carl in
Forest City for a few days, and Aunt Leona and Mama’s Aunt Grace came and visited her for
several days at a time.
She visited me and helped me plant my flowers. She enjoyed Lucille and Granny Gardner.
She and Lucille both crocheted and grew African violets. Sometimes when she and I were
together, she would smile and say, “This is me and you going along here.”
Her backyard neighbor, Madeline Shuford, came over to keep her company, and they
crocheted together. Tom and Mariel’s daughters, Mary Jean and Sissy, liked to spend Friday
nights at her house.
Robert lived with Mama. He and Sandra had separated a few months before Daddy died, and
Robert had come to live with Daddy and Mama. If he was away for a night or a weekend, one of
us stayed with Mama, because she had never spent a night in a house alone before.
I enjoyed spending the night with Mama. I slept in Robert’s room, which was my old room,
and in the morning, I made cup of coffee and got in the bed with Mama for a girl chat. She was
witty, and she always had so many stories to tell. She told me that when the kids were little she
and Daddy had a milk cow named Buttercup. She talked a lot about when she was a girl living
in Chesnee, S. C., about going to Piney Grove School, and about the school teachers who
boarded with the families in the community.
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She talked about the hardships of the years when they were farming, and she told me about
the good times they had then too. She told me about cooking for the threshing crew, a group of
men who were hired to come help pick the crops and bring in the harvest. She said everybody
tried to outdo each other to fix a smorgasbord of food for them when they came to work the
fields. She said they had corn shuckings and barn raisings, and everybody gathered to help their
friends and neighbors. It was fun.
I was pleased that Mama shopped more, and she bought a few things for herself. She had
done without so many things through the years so that she could buy for us, and she loved pretty
things.
When she was 70 years old, she bought a piano and hired Ann Shuford, a music instructor, to
come to her house to teach her to play. Her Grandfather had been a Methodist minister, and her
sisters had learned to play the piano and they played at church service. Then Mama had
preferred to crochet, and she had never learned to play. She said, “I want to learn to play a hymn
before I die.”
When I went to visit her, she would run over to the piano and say, “Listen to this. Do you
know what hymn this is?” I would strain my eyes to read the title in the hymnal, so she wouldn’t
be disappointed that I didn’t recognize the tune she was playing. She kept practicing until she
could do a fine job of playing a hymn.
Mama liked to tease. One day she called Maxwell Furniture Store during the President Nixon
political scandal, and she told them she needed a new television. She said all she could get on
hers was Watergate. She told the clerks at the grocery store that their prices were too high, and
she asked them if she could lay-away a roast. One day I stopped by to see her and told her I had
been to the beauty parlor. She looked at my hair and said, “What was the matter, Honey,
couldn’t they take you?”
The family rallied around Mama and we kept close. Tom ran for Mayor of Shelby in
October 1975, and he was barely defeated by only a margin of seven percent (183 votes) to an
incumbent who had been in eleven years and had never been opposed. Polly opened an exercise
salon called “Figurama,” and we went there to exercise sometimes on Sunday afternoons. She
closed the salon when they needed the space for a medical office and started working for Dr. Roy
Burrus, a dentist in the building. She worked there for more than thirty years. Jerry co-owned
“Carolina Carpet Company,” a floor covering company on North Lafayette Street. Robert was
transferred from Hendersonville to the driver’s license examiner office at the Highway Patrol
Station in Shelby, and he referred midget, junior high, and high school football games,
sometimes as many as seven a week with both an afternoon and evening game.
Nathan and Velle had moved to Orlando, Florida, before Daddy died. Velle was transferred
there by CNA Insurance Company, and Nathan retired. Anna and Dewey retired and moved to
Orlando to be close to them and then they moved to Shelby to be near the rest of the family.
Anna and Dewey liked to travel and took several trips abroad. They went to France,
Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, and Israel. They showed us slide shows from their trips, and
sometimes they brought us little gifts. On their trip to Hawaii, two of Savannah and Gladys’s
daughters, Louise and Frances and Frances’s husband, Plato, went with them. While they were
there, they stayed in a condominium and went to a luau. Dewey told us they stayed in a condom
and went to a hoot owl.
The resignation of President Richard Nixon rocked the national news in the summer of 1974.
The scandal that led to his resignation began with the arrest of five men for breaking and
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entering into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex
in Washington, D. C., on June 17, 1972. The men were connected to the 1972 Committee to Reelect the President by a slush fund and investigations by the Senate Watergate Committee, House
Judiciary Committee, and the news media.
Nixon’s staff conspired to cover up the break-in. The break-in and cover up also resulted in
indictment and conviction of several Nixon administrative officials. As evidence mounted
against the President’s staff, which included former staff members testifying against them in a
Senate investigation, it was revealed President Nixon had a tape recording system in his office
and that he had recorded many conversations. Recordings of those tapes implicated the
President, revealing that he had attempted to cover up the break-in. In late July 1974 the House
Judiciary Committee recommended three articles of impeachment. After a series of court battles,
the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the President had to hand over the tapes, and on August 5, he
ultimately complied by publicly releasing the transcript of three tapes he was sending to Federal
Judge John Sirica in response to a Supreme Court order. These tapes, implemented him in a
conspiracy to obstruct justice, cost him most of his dwindling support in Congress. Facing near
certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and a strong possibility of a conviction in
the Senate, President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. A month later his successor, President
Gerald Ford granted President Nixon a full pardon, protecting him from prosecution of any
Federal crimes he possibly committed.
I opened The Yarn Loft on the second floor of Aug W. Smith’s where I worked. I carried
instruction books, yarns and supplies for needlepoint, crewel embroidery and cross-stitch. I
taught classes through Cleveland Tech in my shop Tuesday mornings and Wednesday
afternoons. I taught wherever the College could find me a classroom Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday and Thursday nights.
A needlepoint picture I entered in the 1974 American Needlepoint Guild show in New York
was among approximately 100 pieces selected to go to the International Royal Needlepoint
Festival in Monaco, and I won a first place ribbon. My winning exhibit was a pair of doves done
in petit point with embroidery floss. This piece of needlework has had a place of honor in
Charles and Sue’s living room for many years. There were many pieces from various European
countries, as well as needlework done by celebrities, including a pair of slippers made by Mrs.
Lyndon B. Johnson for the former President.
Princess Grace, an honorary member of the Board of Directors of the Needlepoint Guild,
along with other royalty, including a Russian Princess, attended the Festival.
Pat Trexler, writer for Good Housekeeping’s Needlecraft Magazine and syndicated columnist
whose articles “Pat’s Pointers” on needlecraft appeared in newspapers all over the country,
honored me and seven other North Carolinians whose needlepoint had won awards at the New
York exhibit at a luncheon at Ivey’s in downtown Charlotte.
I was selected to stitch one of the squares in the needlepoint Peace Rug that hangs in the
United Nations Building in New York. The rug is a visible symbol of the hopes of all people for
peace and was placed in the United Nations Building as a reminder that though it was of many
pieces, it was joined into unity, as a symbol of the unity of nations of men who dwell on the
earth. The rug, with the crest of the 137 member countries was needlepointed by governors’
wives, business women, and homemakers throughout the United States. I stitched the seal of
Mexico, and I donated it in memory of Jeanette Story, Belding Lily needlecraft designer, who
had died of cancer.
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Six of the squares were worked by North Carolinians, and I showed them on television on
The Betty Feezor Show. One of the six was worked by Shelby native Pat Spangler’s sister, Mrs.
John C. Foy, who lived in High Point.
The rug was finished in time for America’s Bi-Centennial in 1976. I went to New York for
the presentation and met Dr. Kurt Waldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, and Mary
Martin, America’s First Lady of Theatre, who shared her love for needlepoint with millions in
her delightful book.
A group of needlepoint enthusiasts organized a local chapter of the American Needlepoint
Guild in Shelby. Rosalyn Gilliatt, Pratt Westmoreland, and Lucille Suttle were members of the
guild who won national awards for their needlepoint.
Patsy Hendricks, manager and buyer of Aug W. Smith Co., retired and I became the store
manager. In this capacity, I served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Shelby
Merchants Association.
When I worked in the apparel industry, many people thought I was Jewish. Sometimes
people still ask about my ethnic background. With my black hair and green eyes, I could pass
for Armenian, and some people have said I look Italian or Greek.
One day I was going through a cafeteria line, and I noticed a lady behind the food counter
staring at me. She said, “I want to know something. Are you a Gypsy or what?” Everybody
close by got quiet and listened for my answer. Facetiously, I told her, “I’m Norwegian.” Several
people laughed, but she seemed satisfied with that answer. She smiled and said, “Well, I knew
you were something.”
While I was working uptown, Cleveland County built a new courthouse and law enforcement
center as the official center of government a couple of blocks east of the center of town and
moved into it in 1974. The old courthouse on the court square became the Cleveland County
Historical Museum and housed a lovely assortment of artifacts and treasures, donated to the
museum by the families of our county, depicting our history as a people.
In 1976, there were over one hundred manufacturing firms in Cleveland County. They
included plants that made corrugated cardboard, ready-mix concrete, fabricated steel, and motion
pictures.
Cleveland County native, independent film-maker, Earl Owensby, created a motion picture
studio that brought recognition to Shelby. E. O. Productions made dozens of low budget action
movies in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and many of them starred Earl Owensby, himself. Many of the
movies originally played on outdoor theatres throughout the South.
Since the movies were mostly filmed locally, we got to see the filming, and many local
people got bit parts in them. Often we saw movie stars we recognized on the streets of Shelby.
Roy Orbison came to Shelby to make a film as well as George Kennedy and musician David
Alan Coe.
Also bringing recognition to our community, several Shelby natives became known in sports.
Many of the football, baseball, basketball, golf, swimming, tennis, and soccer teams made sports
history in North Carolina. Many individuals from Shelby played college and professional sports,
and a few became coaches.
Bobby Bell was an All-American tackle and Outland trophy winner at the University of
Minnesota. He played linebacker in the National Football League for the Kansas City Chiefs
when they won the Super Bowl in 1969 and was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1983.
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Shelby High School athlete, Billy Champion made his major league debut June 4, 1969, and
played eight seasons of professional baseball with the Philadelphia Phillies and the Milwaukee
Brewers.
David Thompson played basketball at North Carolina State University and was one of the
most exciting players of the Atlantic Coast Conference. He became a member of National
Basketball Association Hall of Fame and made the NBA All-Star Game four seasons.
Shelby native, golfer Pete Webb, played in two United States Open Tournaments.
Buck Archer won numerous tennis titles and played on the Golden Cup team that represented
the United States against Canada.
James Washburn was a college football star and became a successful coach in the National
Football League.
Millie Keeter Holbrook was a member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association as a
touring professional, and she taught golf in Japan.
Melvin Phillips, Jr. played twelve years in the National Football League for the San Francisco
49ers. He became an assistant coach with the Miami Dolphins.
The summer of 1975, Peggy Beatty and I traveled to Asheville for the celebration of the 75th
anniversary of the birth of Thomas Wolfe, one of the most important writers in modern
American literature. We toured his home place- the boarding house his Mother ran called “Old
Kentucky Home”, where he lived until he started college at the University of North Carolina.
We attended lectures at UNC-Asheville, and watched a film of Look Homeward, Angel, his
autobiographical novel that fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville.
The concrete angel stands overlooking Riverside Cemetery where he is buried beside his
parents. Also buried in that cemetery is William Sydney Porter, “O. Henry”, another famous
author.
The year 1976 marked the Bi-Centennial of our country. National, state, and local
governments and businesses hosted events, and citizens celebrated the milestone. In June of
1976, brother, Jerry was awarded the Shelby Lions’s Club “District Lion of the Year” award for
his exceptional work in helping the blind. It is the highest award the district gives to an
individual.
In the fall of 1976, I sold The Yarn Loft inventory and left Aug W. Smith’s to start Bee Gee
Designs, a publisher of needlework books. My first cross-stitch book was printed in April 1977.
The humorous and heartfelt designs could easily be stitched as gifts to share with others. A sales
representative I had at The Yarn Loft placed the book in shops in seven states within two weeks.
I joined the National Needlecraft Association and the National Hobby Association and began
working trade shows. I was honored that designers and authors whose needlework books I had
in my own collection, came by to meet me and brought other people by.
February 20, 1977, Jane married Don Bridges at Charles and Sue’s house. Bill McKee
performed the wedding ceremony. Don had two children, Kelli and Kyle, from a previous
marriage. Don had played American Legion baseball with Tom, and he had played professional
baseball for the Detroit Tigers. He owned a janitorial chemical supply company uptown, and
Jane worked for him.
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In April 1978, I got an opportunity to create a line of ladies handbags in Italy with stylist,
Jeffrey Lefcourt. Aug W. Smith Co. carried Lefcourt Imports handbags, and I had selected the
styles the store carried for several years.
Jeff and I shopped the stores in London, Paris, Milan, and Switzerland to see the styles being
shown in Europe, and then traveled to Florence, Italy, to put together the line.
We met with handbag manufacturers in the hills overlooking Florence and gave them our
sketches, while we discussed fabrics and hardware. We dined in the homes of some of the
award- winning handbag manufacturers. It took about two weeks to get the samples made.
We also put together a line of knit hats and scarves at a manufacturer, whose largest
American account was Bloomingdale’s in New York. I have never seen women hand knit so
fast.
The art in Florence is overwhelming. Even the ceilings of the banks are painted with frescos.
I toured Uffizi Gallery, Pitti Palace, and the Bargello and saw my favorite statue, Michelangelo’s
“David,” and my favorite painting, Raphael’s “Madonna of the Chair.”
As I walked along the Arno River and crossed the Ponte Vecchio Bridge to buy Polly a
handcrafted doll from one of the artists there, I remembered watching the news on television
November 4, 1966, when the river had flooded. That flood sent 600,000 tons of mud, rubble,
and sewage into Florence, damaging or destroying between three and four million
books/manuscripts as well as 14,000 movable works of art. Many people were killed, 5,000
families were homeless, and 6,000 stores were forced out of business. It was the worst flood in
the city’s history since 1557. Volunteers came from foreign countries to help salvage the muddy
paintings and manuscripts when the floodwaters receded.
During the trip to Italy, there was political unrest. The Red Brigade, a leftist Bologna
Marxist-Leninist Communist inspired group that sought to create a revolutionary state through
armed struggle and to separate Italy from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, mainly via
political assassinations and bank robberies, were shooting people in the knees in Milan. In the
1970’s and early 1980’s, they were responsible for 14,000 acts of violence.
On March 16, Red Brigade members killed five bodyguards and kidnapped five-time Italian
Prime Minister Aldo Moro. His captivity was used by the Brigades in order to obtain some kind
of recognition by the Italian Government. The Government refused to negotiate with Moro’s
captors. It was a time of darkness and confusion for the country.
From his captivity Moro sent desperate letters to his family, to his political friends, and to the
Pope pleading for their involvement in a negotiated outcome.
After holding him captive for fifty-six days the Red Brigade realized the Government would
not negotiate with them. They became fearful of being discovered, so they decided to kill the
prisoner. Four Red Brigade members led him into a garage, placed him in a car, and told him to
cover himself with a blanket. He was slain in the back of the car. It was the ultimate expression
of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary action and is the action for which the Red Brigade is best
known.
In the middle of the afternoon on May 9, when the news that Moro’s body was found riddled
with bullets near Rome, most businesses in Italy closed.
There was a large gathering that evening for a candlelight vigil at the Basilica de Santa Maria
del Fiore Cathedral. The Duomo is the cathedral church of Florence; one of Italy’s largest
churches, it is located in the historic center of Florence and is a distinctive feature of the Florence
skyline. It remains the largest brick dome ever constructed.
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Many people were afraid to be on the streets, and most restaurants closed. We shared a table
at one of the restaurants that night with some other Americans on business in Florence. We had
to stay in Italy several days longer to get the samples from the manufacturers.
I continued teaching at Cleveland Tech, because I wanted to share my love of needlework
with others. My greatest joy as a teacher was to hear a student who had mastered a stitch say,
“I’ve got it.” If you get an opportunity to learn something, pass it on. Daddy said, “If you give a
man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” I
wanted to teach people a craft they could enjoy doing for the rest of their lives. Through the
years, people have told me they didn’t know what they would have done after a death, during an
illness, or other crisis in their lives, if they had not had their needlework to do.
Many students told me it was worth coming to the classes just to learn the method I taught
them about how to thread a needle. Some people aim the thread at the needle, and lick and
discolor the end of the thread. The thread is pliable, and it will bend. Attempts at success in
threading the needle are hit or miss. The easy way to do it is to hold the end of the thread tightly
between the thumb and index finger so that you can barely see the thread. Aim the eye of the
needle at the thread, slowly releasing the thumb and index finger. The thread will go right into
the needle.
Mama came to my needlepoint classes several times, but after a while she brought her crochet
to class. I think it was because she could crochet and talk and visit. She could crochet almost
without looking at it. Polly said one time when Mama took her to a movie, she brought her
crochet with her, and sat there crocheting during the movie in the dark.
In 1979, Newlin Schenck gave me an opportunity to design needlecraft kits for Belding Lily.
He was president of the company, and Lily Mill was named for his Mother, Lily Schenck.
Belding Lily made sewing thread, cotton yarns, and the embroidery floss that I used in my crossstitch designs.
The Lily Mill crowd was pleased that I was designing for them, because I was one of their
own. Some of the employees had worked there for many years and knew our family when we
lived across the street. I enjoyed working with them and hearing stories about the mill. One I
remember is about how the boys in the neighborhood would get chickens out of the coops on the
back porch of the Lily Mill Store, carry them around the building, and take them in the front door
to sell them to the store again. One day Logan Newton, the store manager, asked them, “Boys,
just how many times am I going to have to buy these same chickens?”
Oliver Emmert, National Sales Manager of Belding Lily, arranged for me to travel to national
and regional hobby, needlework, and chain store stores across the country to show and sell the
cross-stitch kits and booklets. If my company, Bee Gee Designs, and Belding Lily were both
showing, we would get adjoining booths or share a space.
On June 14, 1980, Jerry married Nellie White Shuford at Palm Tree Methodist Church in
Lawndale. Nellie was a widow with two grown children, Debbie and Tony. The two of them
and Jerry’s grown children, Tammy and Doug, were in the wedding. Wilburn was an usher.
Jerry was selling insurance and Nellie worked at Superior Dental Lab.
Their wedding pictures show that Jane was pregnant. The baby was not due until October,
but Jason was born July 19. He was premature and only weighed 2 lbs. 9 ozs. The blood
capillaries in the back of his head had not matured and they started bleeding into his brain,
leaving him severely mentally and physically handicapped.
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Jason was in the hospital fifty-eight days, and Jane and Don drove back and forth to Charlotte
to see him, only missing one day. Jane promised God if He would let them keep Jason, she
would never complain about his condition. They were advised by the doctors to place him into a
home for handicapped children, but this was not something that they even considered.
Jane owned a hair salon, and Don worked for Doran Mills in time study. They began a cakes
and catering business from home and devoted their lives to taking care of Jason.
In the fall of 1981, the boys took me with them on their annual fishing trip to the Outer
Banks. I went along as the cook, until Charles could get there on Tuesday.
I took Charles’s luggage, and since Robert was coming from Raleigh, Mama packed his bags,
so I went by to pick them up too. Although his luggage was sitting there in his room, Mama put
his clothes in brown paper bags. Robert called it “Pollock suitcases.” She packed him several
pairs of blue jeans, but she forgot to pack his toothbrush or his coat. I had an extra toothbrush,
and I gave him Charles’s coat. Robert had to wear it even though the sleeves were much too
short. I called Charles and asked him to bring Robert a coat when he came.
I did the grocery shopping and I bought a deep fry cooker called a “Fry Daddy” and some
flowers to put in it for a centerpiece for the table. I told them I would cook fish in it when they
caught some.
I cooked their meals and had hot beverages and hors d’oeuvres in the evenings when they
came in. I cleaned up the kitchen while they played a card game they called “Two Card Molly”.
We had the fish fry on Monday night and on Tuesday morning Robert drove to Norfolk to the
airport and picked up Charles, so I went home.
I resigned my teaching position at Cleveland Tech because I was away from Shelby so much.
For six years I worked twenty-two trade shows annually. That is an average of one every two
weeks. Sometimes I would be gone as long as five weeks at a time. Jerry Gardner went with me
whenever he could. We were like a Vaudeville act - another day, another city. Sometimes I
would stand a sheet of hotel stationary up next to the telephone, so that the next morning when I
got my wake-up call, I would know where I was without having to think about it. I taught
“make-it-and-take-it” cross stitch projects at my booth, and sometimes, I taught workshops with
fifty or more people. By the end of the day, I was cross-eyed, blind and crazy.
I traveled to needlework shops across the country to autograph my booklets and I judged a
statewide needlecraft exhibit in Denver, Colorado. While we were there, Jerry and I attended
Buffalo Bill Days in Golden, Colorado, and Frontier Days, the Granddaddy of Rodeos, in
Cheyenne, Wyoming. We visited nephew, Scotty Evans, in Cheyenne. He was in the Air Force
and stationed there.
When Jerry and I were traveling to shows, we took time when we could to see other parts of
the country. When we were out west, we went to the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. We went
to Utah, drove up the coast of Oregon, and over to Crater Lake. We traveled the coast of
California to Napa Valley and Sonoma wine country and took a train trip from Los Angeles to
San Jose and toured the Winchester House there. When we were in southern California,
sometimes we would go across the border into Mexico.
When we were in Texas, we visited Edwin and Myrna and Sam and Barbara and their
families. It is amazing how much kids can grow from one visit to the next.
We went to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and as we rode through the Zuni Indian
Reservation, we saw costumed figures walking one or two at a time. We stopped at the co-op
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and inquired about them. The manager said that there had been no rain for seventy days, and the
figures were Mudheads and Kachinas on their way to dance for rain. We asked if we could
watch them, and he told us we could if we would be respectful and take no cameras.
We parked the car and followed the dancers down the road through the village behind a row
of adobe houses to a pit. We sat on the edge of the pit with tribal members of all ages. It was
late afternoon, and the older women were wrapped in a blanket or had a blanket spread across
their laps.
Two rows of dancers facing each other formed an “L” around two sides of the pits. In their
right hand the dancers had a rattle to use to keep time, and in their left hand they held a sprig of
juniper. They chanted as they danced.
Occasionally someone stole a look at us, but no one spoke. We felt transported in time, and
we were spellbound. Silently we prayed to God for rain for the people and for their other needs.
After a while, we quietly took our leave. We were silent for a long time even after we got
back into the car. We felt that we had shared something sacred with them.
Kachina Dancers emphasize rain, the life giver in the semi-arid country. Life for these
agricultural people revolves around their religious beliefs which are centered on three most
powerful of the deities- Earth Mother, Sun Father and Moonlight Giving Mother. Their religious
ceremonies take precedence over all else. They believe that as long as the dancers dance, the
rains will come.
Their location is relatively isolated but they welcome respectful tourists to their reservation to
see their way of life and to their trading posts to purchase their beautiful handcrafted art.
It was during those years of travel, when I was exposed to other cultures, that I developed a
keen interest in architecture and art. As I visited castles, cathedrals, private homes, museums, art
galleries, antique shops, and markets, I marveled at the talent and love that had gone into such
beautiful creations. I wanted to know the souls of the artists; I wanted to touch the labors of their
hands.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the early settlers, with their Yankee
ingenuity, had crafted what they needed. With their skill and talent they had created machines
that saved labor. With their leisure time, they created masterpieces that filled our museums.
Master craftsmen have left us lovely works of silver, pewter, pottery, porcelains, furniture, and
textiles to attest to the tastes and fashions of the times. Henry Belter, Duncan Phyfe, Louis
Comfort Tiffany, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many other famous craftsmen have left their mark on
the world.
When I traveled, I purchased artifacts and art to fill our home. My tastes were diverse, from
Oriental and Turkish rugs, to Chinese porcelains, English and French pottery, Irish crystal,
Scottish tartans, and African tribal art. I bought like a drunken sailor, and some would say my
cull factor was zero, but every piece I purchased “spoke to me.” I covered walls with paintings,
tapestries, and masks. I filled cabinets with dolls, teddy bears, and hand-carved Santa Clauses. I
displayed scrimshaw, cloisonné, and old ivory in curios. I loaded shelves with art books to
further my studies, and filled racks with old copper, and baskets with handcrafted eggs. Our
house began to look like a decorative arts gift shop. When sisters, Polly and Jane, came to visit
they inquired if I was “Open.” My friend Hunter Owen lovingly said of me “Less is more is just
an excuse for making do with not enough. More is more and too much is just fine!”
As I traveled the United States I became aware of the diversity of our nation in geography,
politics, and English dialect. Regional flare is evident and displayed across the land as cities
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bustle with activity and country sides exude a peaceful tranquility. From coast to coast,
mountains and beaches lure us, sports captivate us, and music and food defines us.
At the core, one can still detect the heritage of the settlers of the different areas of the country
from its inception, much as an adult often physically still resembles the child he was. To my
observation, as a whole, New Englanders still appear formal and straight-laced, Northerners still
outspoken and industrious, Southerners still hospitable and laid-back, Midwesterners still hearty
and wholesome, and Westerners still adventurous and independent.
I began to find myself dressing similar to the attire of the area I traveled. For example if I
was visiting, exhibiting, or speaking in New England, I tended to wear tailored skirts and
sweaters and loafers; in New York, I chose sophisticated suits or dresses in grey or black with
high heels; in the Midwest I wore muted colors and earth tones with sensible medium heeled
shoes; in the West I wore blouses with scarves, long full skirts, and donned my cowboy boots; in
Florida or California, I chose colorful avante guard clothes and completed my attire with sandals.
But no matter how I dressed to fit in, the minute I opened my mouth, the first question out of
theirs was, “Where are you from?” My Southern drawl was a dead giveaway. In Boston, I got a
laugh when I told them, “I’m from South Boston—way south of Boston!” I became more aware
of my dialect when I called the American Embassy in Italy to check on the duty of the knit hats
we were having made for export to America, and they couldn’t understand my enunciation of the
word “hats.” Only after I supplied the Italian word for hat “cappello” did they say, “Oh, hats!”
Despite my Southern drawl (which some guessed as Texas), as I traveled, my own personal style
of dress evolved, as I mixed components from my wardrobe.
As I became more aware of my own dialect, I started to notice the accents of other areas of
America. I came to recognize the sounding of the vowels that define the region’s speech. As I
struggled to enunciate the King’s English, so that they could understand me, I thought of our
famous line from the South to foreigners, “You ain’t from around here, are you!”
The United States is a country that thrives on diversity and freedom of expression. Despite
our regional dress, customs and dialect, as a nation, our similarities outweigh our differences.
Our cultures have blended, and “American” is stamped all over us. This is most evident in
traveling abroad. They can spot us a mile away, even before we speak. There is a swagger about
us, a sense of knowing who we are, and being proud of it. This confidence and self-esteem was
born in the halls of our founding fathers, won on the battlefields by our soldiers, earned by the
toil and sweat of the brow of our ancestors, their ideals and work ethics passed down so that each
generation would have more advantages that the last.
When I was home, I wrote articles for needlework trade publications and did needlecraft
projects for magazines. I wrote and designed needlecraft booklets for my labels “Bee Gee
Designs” and “Sunnybrook Syndicate.” I created booklets for needlepoint, cross-stitch,
candlewicking, chicken scratch, lace net darning, and tin punch.
I published about sixty different booklets, and for a time, I shipped more than 10,000 booklets
a week. I turned out as many as fourteen booklets a year. In addition, I designed for Singer,
Dritz, Down On The Farm, House of Genoa, Yarn Kits, Inc., and other companies.
We moved the business out of the house and into Whistle Stop Mall uptown and shared space
with Oliver and Ann Emmert with Alpha Mailing Service. Jerry Gardner quit the construction
business and ran the needlework operation. Oliver bought the old Lily Mill Store and we moved
there. Being back at Lily Mill was being back on home turf.
Eventually each of us needed more space, and we moved Bee Gee Designs to Highway 180
South and shared an office duplex with Robert E. Lee Builders. That winter an ice storm caused
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the roof to cave in, so we moved to North Washington Street. I opened a retail store called
“Gardner’s Eden” in the front part of the building, and Henry Weathers and his Charles Chip’s
potato chip operation was in the back.
It was a time when everyone from children to men and grandmothers was cross-stitching. I
would get on an airplane and people would be stitching my designs. I still see them hanging in
restaurants and doctors offices.
My nephew, Scott Evans, Becky Macomson White and Kim Weatherly helped with artwork.
Barbara Morgan, Sybil Jolley, Pat Brown, Karen Waldrop, Brenda Bridges, and a few others
stitched the models. Sometimes chain stores ordered as many as 200 models of a design for their
stores.
Winston Shull washed and pressed the samples and got them ready to frame. She and I
worked together as Directors of Needlecrafts at the Cleveland County Fair for fifteen years.
During those years, I enjoyed seeing Mama, Anna, Polly, and Jane all win ribbons at the
Cleveland County Fair with their handwork, foods and crafts.
There was no computer program for the graphing, so I had to hand draw all of the “x’s” and
“o’s” and all of the other symbols. I typed the instructions and product design artist, Mike Doty,
got it typeset and ready to be printed. I staged the set with the needlework and props, and Hubert
Carlisle photographed the booklet covers. I worked with Scott Todd from Belding Lily, artist
Bob Shepherd, and photographer Hubert Carlisle on the covers of the Belding Lily kits.
My friends would joke by asking me what I did in my spare time. Mama would say, “Honey,
I wish you would slow down.” Then she would tell me about a dress she saw that she liked on
the television show ‘Dallas’. She had put many years into raising us kids when she couldn’t
slow down, and she knew my job required a lot of time.
Jerry and I seemed to be going in opposite directions, and somewhere along the road, we lost
our way. We divorced, but we continued to work together for two more years. He managed the
office and warehouse in town, and I ran the design and production from the studio at home. We
still traveled and worked the needlework trade shows together.
Mama always had a word of encouragement for us kids. If we were worried about something,
she would remind us that, “This too shall pass.” If we thought we couldn’t do something, she
would say, “Can’t got killed going after I couldn’t.” And she didn’t ask too many personal
questions. She would say, “If my children want me to know something, they will tell me.”
The Saturday after Jerry moved out, I went to visit Mama. Aunt Leona was spending the
weekend with her. As I left, Mama handed me a brown paper bag which held a slice of cake and
a baked sweet potato. Food is a Mother’s gift of comfort, and Mama’s love gave me a kind of
peace that only a Mother can give a hurting child.
Daddy and Mama always welcomed the in-laws. Mama always said of the ones whom the
children married, “If they can live with them, I can live by them.” Marrying into the Camp
family is like the line from the Eagle’s song, “Welcome to Hotel California”. It says, “You can
check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Once a member of the Camp family,
you’re always family.
I stayed on in the house on the Gardner farm. I lived alone for four years. Lightning struck
the house in the summer of 1985, and Jerry Gardner repaired it and made an addition. I moved
the needlework business back into the house.
Granny Gardner had died from a stroke in 1980. W. H. and Lucille Gardner divorced about
the time Daddy died, and he moved to Orlando, Florida, and remarried. So Lucille and I were the
only ones living on the Gardner Farm.
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In 1985, I took a vacation to Jamaica. I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the
island and the poverty of its people. The island had high unemployment, lawlessness, political
turmoil, and poor social services. Tourism is the major industry of Jamaica and it is famous for
its rum and sugar cane.
I stayed in a hotel in Montego Bay and took daytrips to other parts of the island. I rode a train
to Kingston, the capital and largest city, located on the Southeastern coast of the island. It is the
principal port of Jamaica. The trip was made on a coal burning train, and at the end of the day,
my pink jumpsuit was covered with soot. It was my birthday and a Reggae band sat with me on
the train and we sang “When the Saints Go Marching In” and Bob Marley reggae songs. We had
lunch at the head of Alcoa Aluminum’s house in Kingston and visited a home with a lovely
garden of orchids.
I went down the Martha Brae River, the most recognizable waterway, on a thirty foot bamboo
raft while the river guide carved a gourd with floral designs and my name on it, as a souvenir
from the trip.
I enjoyed a day in Negril on its famous seven mile beach, and one day I went to Ocho Rios,
located on the Northern coast, whose most celebrated beauty spot is Dunn River Falls. It is the
most popular destination in Jamaica, where waterfalls cascade down smooth rocks and tumble
directly onto the beach. It has beautiful ferns only found in a tropical rain forest.
At that time Ocho Rios was a sleepy banana and fishing port. There was political unrest, and
we were stopped at a roadblock caused by a group of people creating social turmoil. My taxi had
to take off across a field as chickens and goats scattered.
In early 1986, my friend, Hunter Owen, and I designed a line of hand-painted tee-shirts
embellished with rhinestones that we called “Bodacious”. The two of us spent a weekend in
Charlotte at the Apparel Mart to find a sales representative to carry the line. After we returned to
Shelby, we witnessed the worst tragedy in space travel. We watched on television the launch of
the Space Shuttle Challenger operated by NASA. Along with millions of Americans we saw the
Challenger break apart seventy-three seconds into its flight. There was no escape for the crew
and all seven of them were killed.
On weekends I spent time with Robert and Mama. Sometimes on Saturday nights Robert,
Mama, and I would share a pizza. A few times we got Mama a takeout order of her favorite
seafood from Shelby Fish Camp, and Robert and I went out to a restaurant for dinner. Mama
didn’t feel up to joining us. Mama’s kidney problems were getting worse. Cornell Stringer was
staying with her during the weekdays.
Mama had a history of kidney trouble. When she was five months pregnant with Robert, she
had to have a kidney removed. It was the first surgery of this type performed at the Shelby
Hospital. Dr. J. W. Harbison, resident surgeon, thought they should abort Robert, but Mama
begged him not to.
Dr. Harbison advised her not to have any more children since she only had one kidney. She
didn’t have another child for three-and-a-half years, but within the next three-and-a-half years,
she had three- Charles, Jane and me.
Through the years she had kidney infections, plus she had high blood pressure and heart
problems. The medications had an effect on her kidney.
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She went to the hospital in October 1985, and they transferred her to Charlotte Memorial
Hospital. She knew she would not live long after the beginning of her repeated visits to the
hospital. She told me she was going to die. I said, “You can’t die. You don’t have a thing to
wear.” She said, “Yes, I do. I have that blue dress I wore to Jerry and Nellie’s wedding.”
Polly took her and Cornell to Mama’s doctors’ appointments, and Polly heard firsthand from
the doctors that Mama’s health was failing. Polly shared with us a little poem she wrote during
Mama’s illness:
My Mother
She held me in her arms to rest
As on my cheek her kisses pressed.
It was she who sang the lullaby
And rocked me, so I wouldn’t cry.
She sat with me both night and day
When pain and sickness came my way.
She ran to catch me when I fell
To kiss the hurt and make it well.
She made our home a pleasant place
And raised nine children by God’s grace.
She stayed awake till we were in
Praying and wondering where we’d been.
We sat with her both night and day
When pain and sickness came her way.
When her life could not be spared
It was our turn to show we cared.
I held her in my arms to rest
As on her cheek my kisses pressed.
It was I who sang the lullaby
And rocked her so she wouldn’t cry.
Polly Camp Evans
In April 1986, I got reacquainted with my former classmate, Bryan LeGrand, who was in
Shelby to visit his parents and his brother, Homer Eugene LeGrand, Jr., who was home from
Australia. Bryan was still single and he was living in Kentucky and mining coal.
Although I had known Bryan since we were twelve years old, I had not seen him since our
tenth Shelby High School class reunion. The day Bryan returned to Kentucky Mama went back
to the hospital.
She was in the final stages of renal failure, and she should have been nearly unconscious
from so much poison in her system. But instead, she was sitting up telling jokes. She didn’t
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want anybody to feel sorry for her. She was still thinking of other people. Mama taught us how
to live, and she taught us how to die. She did both with dignity and finesse.
Tom said that on Tuesday about noon before Mama died that night, he talked to her for a long
time about life and the peaks and valleys, the ups and downs, and what we are about in general.
He said she told him, “Nothing in life is better or more important than children to love and be
loved by. When all is considered, mine have been a joy to me, and I wouldn’t have traded all of
King Solomon’s gold for a minute I spent with any one of them. I’ve been rich in all that
mattered.”
She went on to say she wanted to know that the family would remain intact and in touch, and
she wanted to be remembered for all the good times and to always be a part of all that was a part
of her.
Tom finished by saying that he only wanted a token of hers to hand down to his children. He
said, “I am content with the memory of her smile and the gentle voice saying a thousand times, ‘I
love you’. Because of her and Dad and you [siblings], it means a lot to me to be a Camp. And
that is something of real value.”
We received friends at Lutz-Austell Funeral Home Chapel. We were comforted by all of the
people who came, old friends and neighbors we hadn’t seen in years, including Myrtle Felker
and her two grown daughters, Pam and Sandy. Myrtle was a single parent with two little girls
who had lived in the apartments across the street from us on South DeKalb Street. Mama kept
Pam and Sandy after school and in the summertime while Myrtle worked. Mama’s kind heart
and gentle spirit had touched so many lives.
Her funeral was at Aldersgate United Methodist Church, across the street from her house.
We buried her in Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery beside Daddy and her babies. It was the
Friday before Mother’s Day.
After the funeral, Sue sat down at Mama’s piano and lifted our spirits with a medley of
hymns. She plays beautifully, and she plays by rote. Then Sammy’s sons, Johnny and Mark
took turns playing classical music. Then Bryan played movie themes. The three of them can
tickle the keys, for they all had taken piano lessons for years. But Jane made us laugh when she
took a turn at the piano and played her rendition of Chopsticks.
I called photographer Lem Lynch and asked him to come take a picture of all of our family
while we were together. He took a group picture, and then he took a picture of Daddy’s children.
With the exception of the four of us who died as babies, and Savannah, who had died in 1957,
we were all present. There were thirteen of us in the photograph.
Tom was standing on the end beside me, and he leaned over and said in my ear loud enough
for the others to hear, “Mama and Daddy are dead now and I don’t have to be nice to you
anymore.” Jerry was toward the other end of the group, and he leaned forward and said, “Hey,
Boot, Mama and Daddy are dead now and I don’t have to be nice to you anymore.” I said, “You
never were.” Lem didn’t have to tell us to smile for the camera.
Three months after Mama, died Bryan LeGrand and I got married. His parents hosted the
rehearsal dinner at North Lake Country Club. Tom was to give a toast. This is what he said, “I
could tell you that advancing age has caused me to hear a request to “roast” Brendan instead of
“toast” Brendan. But that isn’t true. In our family we have a long-standing tradition that when
as many as three of us are together, we talk about Brendan in ways that burn her crispy on all
sides. So please, permit me to reluctantly perform my duty. Anyway, Bryan can hear it all now,
for it’s too late to back out.
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You probably know that Mom and Dad did more than their share to populate Shelby. They
loved children—and would have given anything if Brendan had been one. They were both
unschooled and poorly educated, and didn’t understand complicated things like heredity, but
after Brendan’s birth, they were a lot more suspicious of each other.
I was quite young when Brendan was born, but already I had a couple of theories about how
to raise children. After Brendan, I had a couple of children and no theories.
I don’t have to tell you that Brendan is a talker, although she does have occasional flashes of
silence that make conversation almost possible. She learned to talk when she was two—hours
old. By her first birthday she was answering back before anybody said anything.
By the time she started kindergarten we had all learned not to argue with her. She would stick
to her guns, whether they were loaded or not. She wouldn’t change her mind and she wouldn’t
change the subject. By first grade she was doing everything exactly as she thought the Good
Lord would do if He knew all the facts of the situation.
When she was ten years old, Mom allowed that she ‘just didn’t know what Brendan would be
in another ten years.’ After much consideration, we decided she would be twenty.
But don’t get me wrong. What I’m really trying to say is that Brendan was a sensitive, highstrung, little stinker. The rest of the family learned a lot from her, for instance, patience.
And she helped bring our family closer together. We had lots of family meetings to discuss
what to do with her. Usually, we concluded that we would sell her.
Honesty demands that I admit living with her wasn’t fun all the time. The rest of the time it
was no fun at all.
Brendan was perhaps the first real feminist. She wouldn’t let any man be a fool and not know
it, and she never accepted the advice to leave three or four things unsaid every day. By the time
she was twenty years old, the only way she could have had equal rights was to surrender a few.
By that time, we male members of the family had determined that God could surely have done
something better with a perfectly good rib.
But don’t be disheartened, Bryan. She is not completely overbearing. On occasions she will
let you be right. Sometimes dinner will be every bit as good as the grace. Sometimes when you
call home to tell her you’ll be late for dinner, you’ll catch her before she leaves a note on the
stove saying it’s in the refrigerator. And you will find that two can live as cheaply as a large
family used to.
And it might be some consolation to know that behind a lot of great men have been women—
with nothing to wear.
Seriously, Brendan is the greatest in my book. My life has been enriched by her, and because
of her, Planet Earth is a lot more beautiful.
I toast Brendan and Bryan. The family they leave behind is less important than the family
they make. May the happiest days of their past be like the saddest days of their future.”
The wedding was August 16, 1986, at Central United Methodist Church, and it was a family
affair. Tom walked me down the aisle, Polly and Jane kept the guest register, Jerry, Robert and
Charles were ushers, and Nellie directed the wedding. Bryan’s sister Anne was maid of honor,
his sister Beth was vocalist, and her husband, Read, was an usher. Sisters-in-law Mariel, Sue,
and Myrna, brother-in-law Don, niece Tammy, and Bryan’s cousin, Gay Suttle, and Mama’s
housekeeper, Cornell, served at the reception.
We visited Scotty in Honolulu, Hawaii, for our honeymoon. He was in the Air Force and
stationed there. He shared his condo and automobile with us, showed us the island, and took us
to the Pearl Harbor War Memorial.
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The LeGrand’s welcomed me into their family. Bryan’s Mother, Jo LeGrand, had been my
Home Economics teacher for two years at Shelby Junior High School, and she drove the junior
high school cheerleaders to the out of town football games.
She made beautiful quilts and painted with water colors. She was a daughter of John Beam
and granddaughter of D. A. Beam of the trucking industry and a descendant of John Teeter
Beam, one of the oldest families in Cleveland County.
Bryan’s Grandfather, R. T. LeGrand was one of the textile pioneers of Cleveland County. He
and Bryan’s Daddy, Gene LeGrand, and his Uncle Bill LeGrand and Uncle Dick LeGrand had
run the Shelby Cotton Mill.
Gene LeGrand was a Cleveland County Commissioner when Bryan and I got married, and he
was chairman of United Way’s campaign fund. He has served on many boards, including the
board of trustees for Cleveland County Technical Institute, and he was the recipient of Shelby
Lion’s Club Shelby’s Citizen of the Year award in 1971, for his leadership and contributions to
community welfare.
For many years Gene LeGrand was plant manager of Fiber Industries, Cleveland County’s
largest employer. He knew all of the employees as individual people and took a personal interest
in the workers. Former employees still tell me about how he came to Fiber on Christmas Day,
all three shifts to visit with them and thank them for working that day. They said he knew
everybody who worked in the plant by name
R. T. LeGrand had started Planters & Merchants Warehouse, a bonded cotton storage
company, in 1922. Gene LeGrand was managing that family business. Bryan went to work at P
& M Warehouse with his Daddy that fall, and he continued to go back and forth to Kentucky for
his coal interests. I worked there for a year, helping out in the office and keeping cotton records
up to date, but I also continued designing needlework.
I created a line of eighteen different old world style Santa Claus dolls made of muslin with
molded, hand-painted, linen faces with Angora fur beards and dressed in long coats that I hand
painted or embellished with embroidery. The sacks were filled with handcrafted toys, including
tiny rag dolls that I stitched. Robert made the wooden bases for them, and Bryan attached the
brass plaques that said “LeGrand Dame’s Olde St. Nick.” I showed them in Charlotte and
Atlanta in showrooms at the Merchandise Marts, and sold them to gift shops and Christmas
stores all over the country.
I also began reproducing antique cross-stitch samplers. As part of their curriculum in 18th and
19th century England and America, school girls made a sampler as a way of learning to sew. In
addition to cross-stitch, many of them incorporated other stitches such as satin and outline.
Many of the samplers had an alphabet, animals, flowers and other motifs, the child’s name and
date, and an inspirational or pious verse. My favorite verse and a favorite of many of the young
girls, was:
“Jesus, permit Thy gracious name to stand as the first efforts of an infant’s hand. And while
her fingers ore the canvas moves; engage her tender heart to seek thy love. With thy dear
children let her be a part. And write Thy name, Thyself, upon her heart.”
For each sampler I copied, I used a high thread count linen fabric as close to the original as
was available. I duplicated the design, including any errors made by the child. In addition, I
created a special original sampler each year for Bryan. Elva Gheen at Gheen Lumber Company
framed them and I displayed them on the walls at home.
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The family kept in close touch as Mama hoped, and we got together as often as we could.
Anna took over Mama’s job of passing on the family news. Sue got her doctorate and became a
professor at the Broyhill School of Management of Gardner-Webb University. She began
writing articles, textbooks, and computer software for McGraw Hill Publishers. She served as
president of the Rotary Club in Boiling Springs.
Mariel worked at the Gardner-Webb University Library, and she also worked at Emily’s on
the Square, a delightful gift shop uptown.
Charles helped look after Bill McKee in his battle with cancer in the last two years of his life.
He died in 1987 at 57 years old. An article in The Shelby Star, where he worked as circulation
manager, talked about Bill’s gentleness, loyalty, faith and courage, and said that he touched so
many lives.
Our spirits were lifted by Bill’s generosity and laughter, and our lives were blessed by his
friendship and his love. The hardest part of loving somebody is losing them. Most of us were
just kids when Bill came into our lives, and he did so much for us. In many ways he was like a
surrogate parent.
When your parents die, you feel like an orphan. One day I went to the cemetery and sat on
Daddy and Mama’s graves and cried. An older black gentleman who was mowing the grass got
off of the lawn mower. He came over to see if I was okay. I told him I was just missing my
Daddy and Mama. He looked at the headstone and said, “Oh, you’re Sam’s sister.” I said, “Yes,
do you know him?” He said, “No, I mean Jane. When we worked together at Fiber Industries,
we called her Sam.” Then he laughed and told me about how Jane left a pack of chewing gum
on her work station, and he was always taking it. He said one day Jane put Feenament, a laxative
gum, into a Chiclets gum box. He got it, chewed it, and was out of work the next day.
Robert stayed on in Mama’s house for a while. We could still go home, but even after he
moved, our old telephone number was not given to anyone for a very long time. I know this
because when I got the urge to call home, I dialed it several times. I thought of so many things I
wanted to tell Mama. You never stop missing the one who gave you life.
Robert kept Benji, Mama’s beloved black poodle. We had teased her about him by calling
him our little brother. When Benji died, we cried. It was like losing a part of Mama.
Robert married Judy Pendleton September 3, 1988, at Lutz-Austell Chapel. Robert’s son,
Rob, was best man. Judy had two grown daughters, Julie and Tiffany, from her previous
marriage. She was a real estate agent and owned rental houses. She was Jane and Don’s
neighbor and their friend. She and I share a love of interior design.
Our family missed sending flowers to Mama on Mother’s Day, so we sent her friend, Jewel
Mitchell flowers “from Edna Camp’s children.” On Saturday before Mother’s Day, Bryan and I
visited Lily Weathers, Mother of our deceased classmate, Jim Weathers. We took her flowers
and a note signed “from Jimmy’s friends.” We visited Katherine Harry, classmate Billie Ann
Harry’s Mother, with flowers for Mother’s Day. She has treated me like her own child since I
was a teenager. You never forget the people who took time for you and paid attention to you
when you were a child. Many of my friends’ parents gave me advice, fed me, gave me rides to
and from events, and even paid my way in.
In the summer of 1985, Jerry and Ann’s daughter, Tammy had married Joseph Henry Carroll
IV. His Great Grandfather, Joseph Henry Carroll, was the second sheriff of Cleveland County
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from 1848-1852, and the first sheriff appointed by the people. He became postmaster March 24,
1856.
In August 1988, Joey was killed in a boating accident. He and a friend were in separate boats
going down Broad River. Joey did not see a cable stretched across the river, and he was killed
when he hit it. Tammy and Joey’s son, Joseph Henry Carroll V “Jody,” was fifteen months old
at the time.
September 11, 1989, Velle died. She and Nathan had been married 41 years. Polly, Jane,
Charles, Robert, Judy, Jerry, Tammy and her son Jody, and Bryan and I rode the train to
Orlando, Florida, to her funeral. We had a whole train car all to ourselves so we got to visit on
the way down there. On the way back the next night we were tired, and we mostly slept. Anna
and Savannah’s daughter, Ray, drove down. Jody was two-and-a-half years old, and he called
Anna, “Aunt Maw Maw.” After Velle’s death Nathan moved to Mt. Pleasant, N. C., where
Randy and Pauline lived. Later Nathan and Velle’s son, Mike, moved from Florida to Mt.
Pleasant.
That same year, I was invited to join the Junior Charity League. It was an opportunity for me
to give back to the community by helping to raise money to clothe needy children. Nice clothes
are an important asset and have a direct impact on one’s self esteem. I had some nice clothes to
wear as a child, but I also often had hand me downs and I remember Mama remaking garments
to fit me.
I also remember Claire Leonhardt taking me to a Woman’s Club Christmas party. She came
to visit and asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I liked the way the British school boys
dressed, so I said I wanted Bermuda shorts and knee socks. I didn’t realize what a challenge it
would be to find Bermuda shorts in winter in America in the mid-1950’s. She ended up getting
me a pair of black corduroy pants and a pair of grey flannel slacks and Mama cut them off to
make Bermuda shorts. I got a pink cardigan and a yellow pullover sweater, each with matching
knee socks. I thought I looked like Merry Olde England. I remembered her generosity, and I
wanted to help make other children feel good about their attire.
I loved working in the Junior Charity League’s clothing room and assisting the kids in
selecting their new clothes. I got down on the floor at eye level with the little ones, and I wanted
to hug them all. It was an emotionally rewarding experience.
I enjoyed the projects that the League did. I liked cooking for the tea room and compiling
recipes for the new cookbook. In December 1990 we had a Christmas holiday tour of six lovely,
historic homes on West Marion Street. Gardner-Webb University President Chris and Linda
White requested that I decorate The Blanton House where they lived. I had been assigned to be
in charge of crafts, and I agreed to do both. I made a cross-stitch Santa afghan for a raffle, floral
arrangements and rose water, and I had a committee, headed by Brenda Lowery, who helped me
make the rest of the crafts.
My friend, Hunter, came to help our group decorate The Blanton House. We handmade the
garland and we made fourteen, double-sided, boxwood wreaths. The Shelby Star showed
colored pictures of the decorated ten foot blue spruce tree. We also helped with the decorations
at The Hudson House and The Suttle House.
Tom wrote a book With Both Eyes Shut Everything Looks The Same that was a compilation of
articles that he had written in his column for The Shelby Star. He and The Shelby Star gave the
proceeds to the Junior Charity League. Mariel was a past president of the League, as was
Bryan’s Mother, Jo LeGrand.
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The biggest international news that year was the fall of the Berlin Wall. The unification of
Germany is historically the most significant event of the last half of the 20th century. People
were glued to the television watching the Berlin Wall being torn down. After World War II
Germany was divided into three parts with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union each
were controlling a part. Berlin was divided into an east and a west section with Russia
controlling East Berlin and the Western Allies controlling West Berlin.
As the Cold War started to increase, relationships between Russia and the Western Allies
became strained. When conditions in the Soviet-controlled East Germany became unbearable,
Germans began to sneak into the free West Germany. To protect their interests and prevent the
East Germans from migrating to West Germany, the Soviet Union built a huge wall with guard
towers placed along it. The concrete barrier completely enclosed the city of West Berlin and
existed for a quarter of a century. During the years the wall served as a barricade it stopped
almost all emigration. About 5,000 people attempted to escape, resulting in a death toll of 100 to
200 people.
A revolutionary wave swept across the Eastern Bloc for several weeks, and on November 9,
1989, the East German government announced that all citizens could visit West Germany and
West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans climbed onto the wall, and over the next few weeks, parts
of the wall were chipped away by the public. As the Soviet Union started to break down, it
became evident to them that Germany would be reunited, so they formally followed U. S.
President Ronald Reagan’s advice when he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Later
heavy equipment was used to remove all the rest. The wall finally came down October 3, 1990.
Cable television became available at the Gardner Farm where we lived the day of the
beginning of the first gulf war. Operation Desert Storm (1990-1991), as it was called, was a
successful U. S.-Allied response to Iraq’s attempt to overwhelm neighboring Kuwait. We
watched the bombing on television late into the night. Satellite television is such a marvel that
events can be seen around the world as they happen.
In April 1990, Mary and Forrest’s house burned in the middle of the night. Mary literally had
to drag Forrest out of the fire. He died two weeks later on Sunday, April 15, in Baptist Hospital
in Winston-Salem. They had been married 62 years.
Six months later on October 28, Dewey died, so Anna became a widow too. They were
married 53 years.
Nathan died in Mt. Pleasant, N.C., November 12 just two weeks after Dewey died. He was
buried in Florida with Velle. He only lived a year after Velle died.
The next year, on November 16, 1991, the year after she lost Forrest, Mary died. She never
really recovered from losing Forrest. Our family lost Mary and Forrest, Dewey, and Nathan all
within nineteen months.
Our spirits were lifted when Sam and Barbara retired and moved to Shelby from Arkansas in
1991. They moved into the two-story Norman house on Elizabeth Avenue. Sam decorated the
interior beautifully. He made the draperies, hung wallpaper, stenciled borders, and tiled the
kitchen counters. He and Robert built a gazebo adjacent to the house, which Anna called a
“gizmo”
We celebrated July 4th holidays there as family reunions. We shot firecrackers and marched
across the yard with an American flag. We all brought food, and Tom and Jerry cooked
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hamburgers and chicken on the grill. We sat on the big front porch and told family stories. We
had some good times together at that house.
We held a Christmas party there and exchanged gifts. Polly brought a loaf cake, and we had
so much food, it didn’t get cut. Polly said that was okay, that she had five more Christmas
parties to take it to. The cake got put into the freezer and brought out again on every occasion.
The last time I saw that cake, it was sporting a band aid.
Each year, we had a Christmas party at Jerry and Nellie’s house the Saturday night before
Christmas. We brought presents to play the Chinese gift game.
For many years we ate Christmas Day dinner at Tom and Mariel’s house, and now we get
together for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day at Charles and Sue’s.
The locations have changed through the years, and some of the faces have changed. We have
lost family members and gained new ones. But what hasn’t changed is the love, fellowship, and
our desire to spend the holidays together.
Ruth and Lee always drove down from Hickory to spend Christmas Day, and sat close
together and held hands. At their 50th Anniversary party, they renewed their wedding vows.
Polly was Matron of Honor, and Jerry gave away the bride in memory of Daddy.
In 1993, we lost Ruth and Lee within a few months of each other. Lee died June 26, and Ruth
died October 12. They had been married 67 years. Except for Anna, all of Daddy’s first two sets
of children and their spouses were gone. We called Anna “The Oldest Rat in the Barn”. We gave
her a stuffed toy rat as a symbol of her status as leader of our clan.
She kept a little black address book with all of our telephone numbers in it. She passed on the
family news and kept us in touch with each other. She visited all of us at home and at work. If
anybody ever loved us, she did. We weren’t all born of the same Mother, but in our family there
were no half brothers and sisters.
Don and Jane opened a restaurant at the Farmers Market. They served breakfast and lunch.
Don cooked Southern country style like Mama did. At lunch they offered a choice of several
meats, vegetables, and desserts. It was a popular spot in uptown Shelby. Several members of
the family worked there- Sam, Polly, Myrna, Tammy, and Mariel. Later Sam managed the
restaurant, and he continued cooking the Southern country style fare.
In December 1993, Sam and Bryan drove to Houston, Texas, to take Sam’s son, Johnny’s
family, a woodstove that Bryan had picked up for them from a manufacturer in Asheville.
They visited Sam’s daughter, Nancy, and her husband, Randy Scroggins, in Kerrville, Edwin
and Myrna and their family in Fort Worth, and Sam’s stepson, Al Gregory and his wife, Kay, in
Dallas. While they were there, Al taught Sam and Bryan to make antler chandeliers.
In February Sam and Barbara moved to Dallas for Sam to work with Al, but they returned to
Shelby and moved back into the Norman house in April. Sam and Bryan decided to make some
chandeliers to sell. They took a trip to Colorado where Bryan bought antlers, and I ordered wire
and lighting parts.
They constructed the chandeliers at our house, and I finished the details. I made pheasant
feather lamp shades. We took several trips that summer to the North Carolina mountain resort
areas to sell them to shops. Sam was retired, and he did not want to work at it as a business, but
he continued making chandeliers on his own as a hobby.
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Bryan contacted a home furnishings sales representative that we knew and leased space in a
showroom for the International Furniture Market in High Point in October. We had two weeks
to get the samples ready, photographed and a sales brochure printed.
The International Furniture Market, which is held in High Point in April and October, is the
largest furniture show in the world. Two hundred fifty buildings in the area show furniture and
accessories, and one hundred fifty thousand people attend the market from eighty-five different
countries.
We were in the Commerce and Design Building in one of the best known showrooms in High
Point. We shared the showroom with about forty other lines of furniture, antiques, accessories,
and decorative arts. We came home with a stack of orders and a sales force of representatives in
other showrooms across the country.
Through the years we have sold to several catalogs including Gorsuch, Cabelas, Horchow,
and Neiman-Marcus. We have sold to furniture stores, specialty shops, restaurants, and interior
designers all over the world.
We did the lighting for an Inn in Scotland, a Ski Resort in Kitz Buhl, Austria, and a five-star
Marina in China. We made a large elk chandelier that hangs in the center of the entrance of the
Broyhill Furniture Showroom on Highway 321 in Boone/Blowing Rock. We placed antlers to
look like they were holding up the mantles on the three rock fireplaces.
We have made chandeliers and shades for the homes of many celebrities, athletes,
entertainers, and politicians. We met a few of them in our High Point showroom. Our work has
been shown in interior and architectural design magazines and furniture trade publications.
When Sam and Bryan were in a restaurant in Amarillo, Texas, they saw tables and chairs
made of steer horns and covered with steer hide. We arranged for the manufacturer to make a
line of steer hide furniture for us-- chairs, tables, ottomans, loveseats and a chaise, and we called
it “Cattle Baron Furniture.”
Bryan and Sam met a man at the Canton Flea Market who made barn wood furniture, and
Bryan asked him about making furniture items using antler hardware. We added barn wood
desks, gun cabinets and wall cabinets to our line.
Several years we were invited to the Dallas Cattle Barons Ball in Texas. Each year we
donated an antler chandelier for auction to contribute to the fundraiser. The ball is held at one of
the large Texas ranches and is the world’s largest single-night event that benefits the American
Cancer Society. They have raised over forty million dollars in an ongoing pursuit of a cure for
cancer.
We met people from all over the world through the home furnishings business and made
many friends. We were invited to many places, and several people came to Shelby to visit us.
Our friend who shared showroom space with us, Ken Burrows, was President of the Rose
Bowl in 2000, and he invited us to Pasadena, California, for the parade.
Another friend who showed with us, Toni Timken, invited us to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania,
singer Perry Como’s hometown, for a festival and unveiling of a life-size statue in the middle of
town of her famous Grammy Award winning Uncle, who had sold millions of records, and
whose career spanned half a century. He had forty-two top ten hits.
We donned our tweeds and rode in the Tally Ho of the opening of the Belle Meade Fox Hunt
in Augusta, Georgia, with our friends who shared showroom space with us, Allen Martin, III and
Jim Dabbs. Allen had ridden in the hunt for several years.
We went to West Palm Beach, Florida, to visit showroom friends, Guistino “Joe” Brusca and
Patti West, and they came to Shelby and spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, and July 4th with us.
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We attended the shows in High Point and Atlanta, Georgia, and we made our own deliveries
to Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. We
made one delivery to the Rocky Mountains Aspen and got caught in a blizzard. I drove a Ford F350 crew cab pulling a twenty foot trailer all night through the blizzard, down the mountain from
Aspen to Denver, and across Colorado into Kansas.
In 1997, Sam and Barbara moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas, to be with Mark. A year
later in 1998, they moved back to Shelby and moved into our old house on Charles Road. That
house had been home for us from the time I was a teenager until I was thirty-eight years old. It
still felt like home. Sam had Mama’s china cabinet and other things, including some candlewick
pillows I had made for her.
Edwin had bone cancer, and he and Myrna moved from Texas to Shelby. Robby continued to
work in Edwin’s business in Fort Worth during his absence.
Edwin had surgery in Winston-Salem at Bowman-Grey Hospital. He reached a point that he
couldn’t walk. Being an invalid was difficult for him, for he had always been so robust. He had
spent a lifetime being in charge and taking care of others.
During his illness, we all spent time with him, wanting to make up for the years we had
missed with him when he had lived in Texas.
His road to death was long, slow and painful, but all of us were devoted to his needs. When
he became bed ridden, Tom and Charles went to his house every few hours to physically turn
him over. We lost him February 18, 1999. He was 65 years old.
We buried him in Sunset Cemetery on a cold winter day. As the male members of the family
who were pallbearers carried his casket across the cemetery, Melisa told them, “Make room for
me, Guys, I want to help carry my Daddy.”
A year later on March 7, 2000, Nathan’s son, Randy, died unexpectedly from complications
of stomach ulcers at 66 years old. At his funeral, a friend of his talked about how Randy was not
ashamed to kiss his grown sons. I thought about how Nathan had kissed Randy and Mike, and
how Daddy had kissed Nathan and his other grown sons and grandsons. Demonstrative shows of
affection come easily in the Camp family.
Two months before Randy died, we learned that Anna had terminal cancer. I had the
opportunity of repaying her for her generosity to me and honoring our parents by caring for her.
I went with her to her doctor’s appointments, and Bryan and I took her to Charlotte for her
chemotherapy treatments. I sat with her in the hospital, and I remained in close touch with her to
attend to her needs. She and I became very close that spring- Daddy’s oldest and youngestbound by loyalty and love.
I wheeled her down the church aisle to see Tom and Mariel’s grandson, Tommy, christened. I
took her to Don and Jane’s restaurant at the Farmers Market in April, where we gathered to
celebrate her birthday.
At the hospital they sent a counselor to talk to her about dying. She told him she was ready to
go, that she had a lot of people over there, and she then began to name them. But she said if she
had a choice, she would rather stay with us for as long as she could.
One night as I visited her in the hospital, I noticed she had something in her hands. I asked
her what she was holding. She held up the little black address book and said, “My family.”
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She held on to us for as long as she could. When she could hold on no longer, the Lord
called her home. When she died May 14 at Hospice on Mother’s Day, I was holding her in my
arms.
She instructed the boys to plan her funeral but they allowed me to do it. I picked out the
flowers at the florist to match the dress she was buried in, and I gave a eulogy at her funeral.
There was a song I had heard on the radio the year before, right after Edwin died. I called the
Billy Graham Radio Station, 106.9, in Black Mountain, and told them the song I needed. They
were on cue, and when I was ready to record it, they played it for me. I took the recording to
Marla Alsobrook Patterson, and she sang it at Anna’s funeral. The song, titled, ‘We Are Still A
Family’ says, “Even though it breaks our hearts to think about the missing part, it will never be
the same, but with the pieces that remain, we are still a family, we will always be a family.
Though one of us is gone, we still can carry on, because we are still a family.”
We left Anna with an Irish blessing that we prayed aloud together, “May the road rise to meet
you; May the wind be always at your back; May the sun shine warm upon your face; The rains
fall soft upon your fields; And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of His
hand.”
A few weeks after Anna died we had a party at Sam and Barbara’s house on Charles Road to
initiate Sam as the “Oldest Rat in the Barn”. We gave him Anna’s rat and a new book with all of
the family’s addresses and telephone numbers in it to keep us in touch. Everybody brought
party pickups made of cheese.
In the fall on September 22, 2000, Polly married Dixon Bridges in a quaint little chapel in
Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Charles and Sue hosted a reception in Shelby at their house. Dixon’s
brother, Tom Bridges, was a Cleveland County Commissioner and their father, Paul Bridges, had
owned the Bridges Airport and Bridges Auto Parts stores in cities around the Piedmont. Their
other brother, Harry, lived at the Outer Banks and ran the family enterprises there. I thought
their parents must have had a sense of humor, because they named those three boys Tom, Dick,
and Harry.
Polly and Dixon made an addition to Dixon’s house in Casar and created a picturesque setting
by building a covered bridge and cabins at the creek where they sell the birdhouses that they
make from gourds, which she hand-paints. They sell them to shops in resort towns in the
mountains, at festivals, and arts-and-crafts shows.
Jerry and Ann’s son, Doug, who was plant manager of Copeland Corporation in Shelby,
along his wife, Debbie, and daughter, Lauren, moved to Hong Kong for several years to manage
the Asian interests of Emerson Electric.
Soon after they moved, Jerry died on October 28, 2000, of congestive heart failure. He was 64
years old. We lost Edwin, Randy, Anna, and Jerry all within a year-and-a-half. At Jerry’s
funeral the preacher recalled some of the funny things Jerry said. Jerry was always telling jokes.
When he called me on the telephone, he ended the conversation with, “Come to see me, Boot.
I’ll treat you so many ways you’re bound to like some of them.”
One of his favorite stories he liked to tell was about the time he and Robert were going to the
county fair, and Daddy told them not to go into the girlie show, because they would see
something they weren’t supposed to see. Jerry said they went into the girlie show anyway, and
sure enough they saw something they weren’t supposed to see--- Daddy sitting down on the front
row.
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The 2000 George W. Bush-Al Gore Presidential election was held on Tuesday, November 7th.
It was the closest election since 1876. The outcome of the election was not known for 35 days
after the balloting ended, because of the process of counting and recounting Florida’s
presidential ballots. On December 12th the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 vote that the recounts
should cease, and the previously certified total should hold. The court also ruled 7-2 that the
Florida State Supreme Court’s ruling, requiring a statewide recount of ballots, was
unconstitutional.
Some members of our family were not in agreement with the direction the Democratic Party
had taken in political doctrines in recent years and we were upset by the turmoil following the
presidential election. On Friday, January 19, 2001, the day before the presidential inauguration,
a group of our family members met at 10 o’clock at the Cleveland County Board of Elections to
change our voter’s registration from Democrat to Republican.
After the paperwork was completed and we were ready to leave, sister-in-law, Nellie,
commented, “I know what that noise was that we heard. It was your Daddy turning over in his
grave!”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North
Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. At first Americans thought it was an
accident.
I had been up in the Twin Towers not long after they were opened, when I was on an apparel
buying trip for Aug W. Smith Co. The 110 story Twin Towers were at that time the tallest
buildings in the world. Looking up at them they seemed to reach to the sky. They each had their
own zip code.
Americans were shocked to see United Airlines 175 fly into the South Tower. We knew this
was no accident. Millions of Americans saw the second plane hit the South tower.
In a series of coordinated suicide attacks, Islamist terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda flew two
hijacked commercial passenger jet airlines into the Twin Towers, killing everyone on board and
many others working in the buildings. We watched in horror as the buildings collapsed within
two hours.
The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon. My classmate, Billy Davis, a Colonel
in the Air Force, was working in the Pentagon at the time. He said they were watching the news
from New York about the World Trade Center on television, when they heard the airliner crash
into the Pentagon. He said they knew immediately what had happened, and they ran for their
lives to evacuate the building.
The fourth hijacked airliner crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after some of the
passengers and flight crew tried to retake control of the plane, which also was directed toward
Washington.
There were no survivors from any of the flights. Excluding the 19 terrorist hijackers, there
were 2,974 people killed in the attacks. America was at war with an enemy without a country.
As a direct result of the World Trade Center bombing, the second Iraq War began in 2002,
and continues to the present. It is the first time America is not fighting an enemy country, but an
ideology. Islamic terrorists have been credited with 13,000 attacks on 25 nations.
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A missionary in Tanzania, Africa, ordered needlecraft booklets from me while she and her
husband were home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She told me she had been using the patterns in
my booklets to teach the African women to make items for their homes. She sent me pictures of
the women and some of the things they had made. I sent her a box of needlecraft booklets, Lily
embroidery floss, scissors, fabrics and other supplies I thought the ladies would enjoy.
When the missionaries were home again in Chattanooga in 2003, they came to Shelby,
brought some of their family members, and spent July 4th with us. We took them uptown to the
Alive After Five concert on the court square and introduced them to Shelby barbecue.
Family members shared memories of trips they made. Robert and Judy went on a tour of
Switzerland and hiked the Alps. Charles and Sue took a trip to the West Indies, and Sue went to
the Holy Land and to Africa. Tom and Mariel built a lovely home at the beach and shared it with
the family.
In the summer of 2006, Polly, Jane and I took a road trip to Florida, to Scotty’s retirement
festivities from the Air Force as a Lt. Colonel. It was the first trip just the three of us had ever
made together. We took turns driving and laughed all the way down there and back. Wilburn
was there for the celebration too. We all stayed at Scotty and Kay’s house and visited with them.
The ceremony was lovely, and we were all very proud of Scotty. As he hung up his dress
uniform for the very last time, he wiped away tears and turned and presented me with his
military ribbons.
In the fall of 2006, the Shelby High School class of 1966 had a 40th reunion. It was the first
reunion we’d had in fifteen years. I was part of a zealous committee group, headed by Judith
Parker-Proctor and Betty Poston Peeler, who located all 367 of our classmates, either a current
address for the ones who are living, or a documented death date for the ones we have lost. We
had lost 42 classmates already.
Our class had many outstanding students, and more than fifty percent of them had stayed in
Cleveland County. Classmates have excelled in industry, music, arts, and education. They are
ministers, doctors, judges, lawyers, and teachers.
Several classmates have become writers. In 1973 Jane Logan wrote The Very Nearest Room
which was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Her widely acclaimed novel, about a girl
coming of age, was influenced by her years living in Shelby.
In 2006, Rebekah Ellis Adams wrote Called To China Attie Bostick’s Life and Missionary
Letters From China, a book about her famous missionary Aunt from Cleveland County. Attie
Bostick and her brothers, G. P. and Wade, had a total service of 170 years in the mission fields of
China.
Kenneth Walker wrote a book called The Banyan Tree about his platoon in Vietnam.
Kenneth was in the Navy, and he served with the Marines as a medic during the war.
I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WHAT PATRICIA DAVIDSON WEEKS WROTE!
We had a wonderful reunion with the largest attendance of any reunion of a Shelby High
School class ever. George “Butch” Hatcher sung his hit song, “Coming Home” from his album
of the same title, and Fate “Junior” Warren entertained us with his Elvis Presley impersonation
of “Blue Suede Shoes.”
I wrote, designed, and narrated a documentary of our class called “Reminiscing,” using
snapshots of us as children, pictures from our yearbooks, and current photos. I told our story as
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baby boomers growing up in this small Southern town in the 50’s and 60’s and our journey
through adulthood to almost retirement age. We watched the documentary together at the
reunion.
Six months later in the summer of 2007, we held another reunion. We invited the teachers to
lunch at Alston Bridges Barbecue. They came from as far away as High Point and Tennessee.
They enjoyed seeing each other as much as seeing us. It was a reunion for them too.
I wrote, designed, and narrated another documentary called “Migrations of the Heart” about
Shelby when we were growing up, and what Shelby is like now. Cleveland Community
College’s television station, Channel 19, shows the documentaries a few times a day for a week
from time to time.
I also designed a Shelby High School alumni reunion t-shirt using the Shelby High School
Lion and the school’s motto “Depart to Serve”. The t-shirt says “Depart to Serve-Return to
Party.” I see these t-shirts all over town on proud Shelby High School alumni of all ages.
In reminiscing about the years we have lived, my classmates and I have seen so much
progress in our country. Medical science has permitted more Americans to live to a ripe old age.
The life expectancy in America has increased to 78 years, to a great extent due to public health
measures. During the 20th century, the average lifespan in the United States increased by more
than thirty years. The number of centenarians grew from 15,000 in 1980 to 77,000 in the year
2000.
Under the Health Insurance Act for the Aged created in 1965, an amendment to the Social
Security Act, federally funded hospital insurance became available for the first time for
Americans 65 years and older. Medicare for the older citizens and another amendment that
provided Medicaid for those too poor to pay, put health care within the reach of many more
Americans than ever before.
To meet the needs of a growing elderly population, retirement homes and retirement villages
and communities, assisted living facilities, senior housing, and nursing homes have opened all
over the country. Nursing care facilities have become necessary to house and care for the aging
population. The number of patients discharged from hospitals but still needing home health care
increased from two million to four million, or fifty-three percent, between 1997 and 2000. In
1997, data shows that there were more than 17,000 nursing homes in the United States.
Women have achieved more equality in the workplace. As of 2008, 72 million or fifty-nineand-a-half percent of women were employed. As more women entered the job market, daycare
facilities became a part of communities to provide for the care of the children of working
mothers. The census bureau estimated that ten million children return home from school to
empty houses and are unsupervised until a parent gets home from work. Single parent families
are the largest factor in the increase of latchkey kids.
Our classmates still have the same devotion to our hometown. Loyalty and pride in Cleveland
County and in its leadership have made Cleveland County the outstanding place it is today. The
population of Cleveland County now is nearly 100,000 people.
The city streets of Shelby are lined with beautiful, stately homes. Many of the homes and the
uptown district are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The uptown is named a
“Main Street” by the National Trust For Historic Preservation. First Baptist Church is adorned
with an original stained glass window. Restaurants and art galleries surround the court square
that in summer is the scene of Alive After Five concerts and street dances, and at Christmas and
Valentines features horse-drawn carriage rides.
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The Cleveland County Arts Council is located in the old post office building. They have art
exhibits open year round and host many events including the “Art of Sound” music festival in the
fall and the “Reel to Reel” film festival in the summer.
The Hershell-Spillman carrousel and the Rotary Train at Shelby City Park have both been
restored and are again being enjoyed by all ages. The “Merry-Go-Round Festival” is held at the
City Park each spring.
Cleveland County still has the largest county fair and crowds turn out to see the exhibits,
sample the fare and enjoy the shows. The fairgrounds host many other events throughout the
year, including the annual Hog Happenin.
Shelby has been an All-America City, hosted the Tour DuPont Bicycle Race, and the
American Legion World Series. National Ham Radio Festival and National Barbecue Cook-Offs
are held here. Shelby is herald as the “Livermush Capital of The World” with a festival held to
sample and to celebrate this fare.
The Shelby Star wins journalism awards for their reporting and a variety of free newspapers
including “The Shelby Shopper”, “The Spot” and “Foothills News” keep the people connected
and informed.
Cleveland Tech became Cleveland Community College and Gardner-Webb College became
Gardner-Webb University. Both institutions are growing and expanding their curriculum. The
LeGrand Center will open at Cleveland Community College in early 2012 to provide a
Conference Center and Exhibit Hall and space for Continuing Education and Early College High
School. This facility was named to honor Bryan’s family for their many contributions to
Cleveland County and for providing the lead gift on this project.
Cleveland Memorial Hospital became Cleveland Regional Medical Center. Its emergency
department is designated as North Carolina’s first Level III state-of-the-art trauma center. A
wide variety of patient-centered care services are provided through Hospice of Cleveland
County, the Senior Centers and Life Enrichment Center.
The public schools have merged into one school system and have strong academic and
athletic records. The home teams have won state championships, and proud local citizens still sit
in the stands cheering them on to victory, as seasons have turned into decades.
Many civic organizations contribute to the needy, help the handicapped, support students, and
offer other community services. Their members work diligently for the betterment of Cleveland
County. The Salvation Army, Red Cross, and United Way attest to the compassion and
generosity of the community.
The YMCAs offer activities for the entire family; Moss Lake provides recreation for boaters,
fishermen, and jet skiers; and Broad River Greenway has nature and hiking trails.
The Don Gibson Theatre opened in the fall of 2009, and provides a variety of entertainment
including well known musicians and movies. The Earl Scruggs Center-Stories and Songs of the
Foothills- will open in 2012. The Rogers Theater is now being renovated for a restaurant, a
dinner theater, and performing arts center.
Diversified industry has boosted the economy, elevated the standard of living, and enhanced
the quality of life. Unfortunately, the mills, are boarded up now, cordoned with chain-link
fences and topped off with rolled barbed wire. They have become proud fortresses of derelict,
broken windows and overgrown yards, crumbling testaments to another era, ghost towns of the
villages of our past lives, before manufacturing moved away and left the USA. Many of the
storefronts now stand empty. The shops downtown have moved to the mall. But Highway 74
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has become a thoroughfare with new businesses opening all the time. Automobiles numbering
40,000 a day pass through there.
As I look around the at the faces of the crowd gathered at the Volunteer Fire Station on
Graham Street for the election returns, see the audience that turned out for a Greater Shelby
Community Theatre play, and marvel at the number of people waiting in the church fellowship
hall to donate blood, I feel such a sense of community. I love this place.
Bryan and I still live in the house on the Gardner farm. It is my Walden Pond. In its peaceful
tranquility, I sort my thoughts. In the rural countryside I flourish. I bask in the beauty of nature
that abounds here. I have a deep affection for the land and for the animals that inhabit it. I roam
the fields; I pick the figs, the apples, and the blueberries. I know every tree, and my memories
hang on their branches. I anticipate the cycle and the progression of the year as the seasons
unfold and winter’s hushed silence speaks to me through snowflakes tapping on the
windowpanes. I have been here forty-two years, and God willing, I will spend the rest of my
days here. It is the only home I have ever known outside of my Father’s house.
We had to replace the roof when a tree fell on it, so we decided to convert the American
ranch style brick house into an English Tudor style stone cottage with a turret. The
transformation has been long and laborious, but we’ve had a lot of laughs and made some
friends.
An English cottage garden surrounds the house where flowers spill onto the pathways. Roses,
flowering shrubs, and perennials shared from other gardens, including Mama’s daffodils and
irises, happily coexist. Benches, statuary and urns are scattered throughout the garden, and fat,
lazy cats nap under the shrubbery. Each morning I rise early and go to the garden, eager to see
the new blooms that have opened. My spirit is lifted by the beauty of the landscape and the
fragrance that permeates the air. The perennials are like old friends that come back true to form.
The day lilies remind me that life is worth living even if all you have is one day. I “can’t eat
them dadburn flowers”, but, oh, how they feed my soul!
I remember Mama said, “You’re never too old to learn something new.” I had always wanted
to play a mandolin, so I bought a pretty ruby red one with a mother of pearl dragonfly inlay and
the sweetest sound, and took lessons from Darin Aldridge for three years. He is a master of
many instruments, but the mandolin is his favorite. He has been nominated four times by the
Society for Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America (SPBGMA) as mandolin player of the
year.
Mostly I play for my own enjoyment, but during the Christmas season, Bryan and I volunteer
for the Salvation Army kettle fund, and I play my mandolin instead of ringing the bell. Bryan
wears his Santa outfit, and sometimes he sings Christmas carols as I play them. Children tell
their parents, “Look, Santa is singing”.
Bryan’s Uncle, R. T. “Dick” LeGrand, Jr. was instrumental in getting The Salvation Army
started in Shelby, and he always enjoyed ringing the bell during the holiday season. Bryan and I
began ringing the bell in honor of him. Last year The Salvation Army gave us an award of
recognition. They said we had raised the most money at the kettle that season with the exception
of The Rotary Club, which was fifty people ringing the bells.
The Camp family kept in touch under Sam’s reign as the “Oldest Rat in the Barn”, but Sam
and Barbara’s health began to fail. Barbara had diabetes, and she was beginning to have
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dementia. Sam had bladder cancer, and he was trying to take care of her. Charles added a ramp
to Mama’s house to accommodate Barbara’s wheelchair, but she had to go to a nursing home
because Sam could no longer lift her after he had surgery to remove his bladder.
Sam shared with us this poem he wrote during his illness:
MEMORIES
I didn’t make it home
Before my Mother passed away
Just couldn’t take the time
I thought I’ll go another day.
Her health was failing fast
Later I was told.
She always had a laugh, so
You would never guess she was getting old.
Though time may last forever
There will never be
A more loving Mother
Than God has given me.
She bought an old piano
And loved to show me how
She had learned the old hymns
That she plays for Jesus now.
I’m sure He sits down to listen
For He knows every word.
I’ll bet it’s the sweetest music
He has ever heard.
“I want to see you, Son”, she said,
“I feel it’s getting late.”
I’ll be there soon I promised.
I’ll set an early date.
Now many years have passed,
But those words I still can hear.
“Don’t wait too long, Son.”
That voice I hold so dear.
I moved into the house she had
When all the rooms were bare
And through the tears I searched for her,
But Mother wasn’t there.
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Now each night I wonder
Will I hear my Savior say,
“Let’s make her wait no longer,
I’ll take you home today.”
John Marion “Sam” Camp
In October 2006, Mark moved Sam and Barbara to Little Rock, Arkansas to be near him and
his wife Patti, and daughter Lauren. Barbara went into a nursing home there and died March 1,
2007, from diabetes. Sam died five months later on August 30, 2007. They had been married 38
years.
May 2, 2007, Don died from a massive heart attack. Jane gave up the catering business, but
she continued to make her cakes and take care of Jason’s needs. Jane and Don were married
thirty years.
Myrna died unexpectedly in May 18, 2008, from a blood clot. Melisa moved to Cleveland
County from Texas, after her husband, Jeff Bush, died. She and her children, Randy and Conner,
live on a farm in Casar.
Chip married his high school sweetheart, Amber Blevins, on Charles and Sue’s twentyseventh wedding anniversary. The same preacher, Jim Brackett, performed the ceremony. Chip
has worked with Charles in real estate developing and securities since he finished college, and
Amber teaches third grade at Jefferson Elementary School.
They have two sons, Charles III and John Mattison II, who is named after Daddy. I gave
John Matt Daddy’s memory box I made that contains his picture, cigarette lighter, pliers, whet
rock, awl, shaving brush, skeleton key, and the military good luck metal Daddy left me. I also
gave him the “Dadburn Dawg” that Daddy drew. Years ago I had put it in a little brass picture
frame and kept it on my desk.
Chip and Amber and the boys live next door to Charles and Sue in Shelby, and they have a
farm in Casar called Quail Hollow Farms with two cabins connected by a porch. They all spend
time together there, and in the summer they truck farm, selling their produce at Farmers Markets.
We have Thanksgiving dinner there if it is not too cold, and sometimes a pig-picking the night
before Easter.
I gave Charles some pictures of our family. He was especially pleased to have the picture of
me. He laughed and said he would hang it in his garden, and the birds would bring back what
they took last year.
Robert’s son, Rob and his wife Lori, and their two children, Liam and Caitriona, moved from
Shelby to Black Mountain, North Carolina, near Asheville. They are still close enough to visit
often.
Tom and Mariel moved to Spartanburg to live with Mary Jean and Andy, and their children,
Tommy and Roby. Sissy lives across the street. When the girls were growing up, if Tom and
Mariel were aggravated with Sissy, they would tell her she was just like her Aunt Brendan.
Roby looks like Mary Jean, but Mary Jean says she is just like Sissy. Sissy says Tom and Mariel
tell Roby she is just like her Great Aunt Brendan.
We were together at Charles and Sue’s house on Thanksgiving Day, and as I watched Roby
run out the door to play, I told Sissy, “If she is like me, she’ll be right in the middle of that
football game.” We went to the window and looked out in the backyard at the pile of kids on the
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ground. All we could see of her was one white sock. I said a prayer of thanks to God for family
genes.
I can see my brothers and sisters in their children and grandchildren, not only in how they
look but also in how they behave. It brings back a flood of happy memories from our childhood.
People always tell each of us that we bear a family resemblance. They say, “I can tell you’re
a Camp.” Just to hear that makes us proud.
In the fall of 2008, Bryan and I joined Ann and Tammy and her husband Scott Trammel, and
their son Kalan at the Courthouse for a celebration of the adoption of children through Social
Services. We were there to celebrate the adoption of their daughter, Emily Grace.
Judge Ali Paksoy and Judge Larry Wilson said it was a good day for them too, since
everybody in the Courtroom that day was there because they wanted to be.
Social services praised the families for opening their hearts and homes to the children. Each
family was called to the front of the Courtroom for a round of applause and to have their picture
taken with the Judges.
We celebrated downstairs with cake and ice cream and stuffed animals as gifts for the
children. It was a good day for all of us. Our family is blessed with another child to love, and
our clan continues to grow.
In January 2009, Ruby died from COPD. She was in a nursing home in Fort Worth, Texas.
She had burned her house down last April while smoking in bed.
Robby called me from the nursing home before daylight as he sat there with her just after she
died. We talked, cried, laughed and shared stories about Ruby. He said he had pictures of her
wearing the white, beaded and fringed jacket she bought in Mexico years ago. And he told me
about a covered dish luncheon at the Police Department when she was Chief. He said Ruby
brought a fancy covered casserole dish with nothing in it. After she got a lot of laughs, she went
to the car and brought in the covered dish with the food she brought to share.
Ruby was a wild, beautiful bird. She came here flying solo. She spent her life resisting
being captured or tamed. She would let you grab hold of her wing and fly along, as long as you
didn’t burden her or slow her down. If you didn’t choose to fly along, it was all the same to her-just stand out of her wind, let her soar and eat her dust.
Flying with Ruby was not an adventure for the faint of heart, and some grew weary from the
flight. But it was a trip worth taking, despite the risks, and you wouldn’t have missed it for the
world, for Ruby made you feel alive. Telling stories of her are what rocking chairs are made for.
Her illness had held her captive for too long. She spread her wings and flew away.
We made it without having a family death in the month of May that year, but just barely. On
June 2, Jason died from pneumonia and asthma. He was 28 years old.
The doctors and nurses marveled at how well he had been cared for. They asked Jane how
she had kept him for 28 years without a bed sore. They said they couldn’t have done it. They
realized the full measure of how he was loved.
Don and Jane had devoted their lives to him, and Jane and his special CNA’s, Sherry and
Robin, massaged him, lathered him with lotions, played him music, and lavished him with
attention. God knows to whom to give special children. Jane carried Motherhood to Sainthood,
for Jason was her life.
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He was a blessing to us all and showed us that you don’t have to speak to communicate love.
He shared his joy with us by laughing with the angels we couldn’t see. We think he’s running
with them across heaven now. His short life taught us that Robert Frost was right when he said,
“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”
Edwin and Ruby’s son, Robby is “Poppy” now and Jacque is “Nani.” Their granddaughter,
Olivia Kate, was born to daughter, Lauren, the same week Jason died. The cycle of life remains
a mystery and on the heels of sorrow there is joy.
Also that same week we had our first John Madison Camp reunion. It was held in Casar at
Polly and Dixon’s house on Jane’s birthday. We had a good turnout and we held each other
close. Ruth and Lee’s daughter, Yvonnie, died in 1998, but all six of their other children, their
spouses, and some of their family members were present at the reunion. Nathan and Velle’s son,
Mike and his wife Judy, were there too. Mary and Forrest’s daughter, Peggy and her husband,
Bill Gantt, came to the reunion. All of Mary and Forrest’s children are still living except Jack.
Savannah and Gladys’s daughter, Marie, joined us for the reunion. She, Martha, and Mary Ruth
are the only ones of their eleven children left. We were delighted that a few cousins could join
us, and we plan to make the reunion an annual event.
Only the last six of Daddy’s eighteen children are still living- Polly, Tom, Robert, Charles,
Jane and me, and there is just ten years difference between the youngest and the oldest. Polly is
the “Oldest Rat in the Barn”. We are great, great, great, great aunts and uncles now.
We are devoted to each other, we get together, and we keep in touch. Love for our family and
memories of home unite us. The heart is never far from home because we take the memories
with us. A familiar sight, a forgotten sound, and the memories come flooding back.
Home was iron beds and center tables, Mama’s crocheted doilies and lace tablecloths,
Grandma’s crystal candy dish, the little hand-carved Dutch wooden shoes Sammy brought home
to Polly from the war, bicycles, dolls, balls and bats and marbles, the smell of cinnamon and
pickling spices, Mama’s cake on the kitchen table, and Daddy’s pot of strong coffee on the stove.
Home was a well-worn family Bible and a plaque Daddy placed by the front door that read,
“As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.-Joshua 24:15.”
Though many of our family members are no longer with us, they live on in our hearts. Those
who are bound by the ties of love are never really separated.
One night I dreamed of Mama, and in my dream I told her I wish we could all be together.
She said, “Honey, we’ve never all been together, but someday we will be.”
Life moves in a forward motion, and hope is the fuel that propels it: hope that we will be
reunited with the ones who are gone, hope that the next generations will do us proud, hope that
they in turn will be proud of us, hope that the legacy we leave them is as great a gift as the legacy
we were given, and hope that the torch we pass on will burn as brightly as when it was handed to
us.
There is a Christian Bovee quotation that reminds us of Daddy. Tom and Charles published a
picture of him with the quotation in The Shelby Star on Father’s Day. Sam used it on a
calligraphy plaque in his artwork line, and I used it in a Belding Lily cross-stitch kit:
“A Father’s love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to age; and he is still but a child,
however time has furrowed his cheeks, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall with a softened
heart, the fond devotion, the gentle chidings of the best friend that God ever gives us.”
Sam wrote this poem about Daddy:
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A FATHER’S LOVE
A Father’s love is like a
Link of purest gold,
Binding youth to age through
Out our life, so we’ve been told.
The fond devotion, true love
Indeed, that we can forever trust,
Of the very best friend
That the Lord has given us.
God took our Dad to be with
Him many years ago,
But the memory lingers on
Because we loved him so.
His left arm was scarred, his
Hand was stiff, from a surgeon’s knife.
He had a severe infection
And almost lost his life.
He was kind at heart, a loving Dad,
Who lived an humble sort of way.
Always trusting in the Lord,
There would be a better day.
I never heard him curse or swear,
To get angry he was slow,
And if he was ever aggravated,
“Dadburn it” was as far as he would go.
He had his own kind of “Proverbs”:
You’ll be known by the company you keep,
Lay down with dogs-get up with fleas,
Simply meant, be careful where you sleep.
You can’t prop up a lie, but the
Truth will stand alone, he would say,
And you can’t hoot with the owls at
Night and soar with the eagles in the day.
He worked as a watchman for the mill
In rain or snow, at night,
He made the rounds, for six ‘till six
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When everything was quiet.
I’d go with him, when I was a child,
To keep him company, I would say.
He would lay me in a cotton pile
And I’d sleep ’till break of day.
It must have been a lonesome job
When there was little light.
Just he and God together,
Two watchmen through the night.
Color made no difference,
White, black or brown were all the same,
And to everyone who knew him,
“Uncle Johnnie” was his name.
John Marion “Sam” Camp
In our lives Daddy was a commanding presence and a lasting influence. In his firm yet gentle
way we knew his generosity, his compassion, his kindness, and his love. It has been said that
what a Father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.
Daddy said to us, “I am who I am; I make no brags about it nor apologies for it. I put
nobody’s head above or beneath my own. We’re all the same in the eyes of the Lord, and the
Good Maker made us all.
Right is right and wrong is wrong no matter who is doing it. You get back what you send out,
because chickens come home to roost. Wrong desire is the greatest cause of unhappiness.
Contentment comes from knowing when enough is enough. Don’t confuse making a living
with making a life. Making a living is the means to making a life, and don’t let making a living
become your life.
Being broke is not the same as being poor. Being broke is a financial situation, being poor is
a state of mind.
Stand up for what you believe in. If you follow the crowd, you’ll become an echo instead of a
voice. Know where you’re headed or you’ll end up some place else. Use your head and follow
your heart.”
Daddy said he was proudest that all of his children were in good standing with both the
Creator and the law.
Our family tree is a mighty oak with deep roots and many branches whose limbs you can’t
climb out on so far that you can’t climb back. Blood is thick and loyalty is strong. Forgiveness
and acceptance are a part of unconditional love. It is a family that embraces you and celebrates
who you are.
Last summer our family was contacted by a black man from Florida named Charles Robinson
who is researching his genealogy. His ancestors were slaves on the Thomas Camp III plantation,
migrating with him to this area of North Carolina from Virginia. In the spring, Charles Robinson
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will return to Cleveland County, and we will go to the old family homeplace to visit the
gravesites. Together we are tracing our roots.
The comedian, Jeff Foxworthy’s ancestry also goes back to Thomas Camp III. His Mother is
Carol Camp. I’ve always thought he must be joking about the Camps when he says, “You might
be a redneck if….” One night on television, he said, “When you go to the Camp reunion, if you
want a clean spoon, you have to lick you one clean.”
Families bearing the name Camp were found as early as 1273 in the English counties of
Cambridge, Suffolk, York, Oxford, Lancaster, Essex, Howden, and London. The name Camp is
found in ancient records in various spellings: Campo, Campa, Campe, Kamp, Kemp, and Camp.
The last form is the one most generally used in America today. The English spelling with the
“e” on the end was dropped from our name about the 17th century.
If we asked Daddy whether we were kin to somebody with the last name Camp, he would say,
“All the Camps are kin. The Lord didn’t think enough of us to make two sets.”
If we could trace our ancestry back far enough, we would find that we are all kin. We are all
children of God. If we would join together to sing His praise, it would be in blood harmony.
THE END
*************************************
Brendan Camp LeGrand
1205 Bob Falls Drive
Shelby, North Carolina 28150
704/434-5966
June 24, 2011
Mr. Johnny Hutchins, Chairman
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Cleveland County Commissioners
311 East Marion Street
Shelby, North Carolina 28150
Dear Chairman Hutchins,
The history of the courtroom of the old Cleveland County Courthouse revolves around the
many citizens whose careers were in our judicial system. Certainly some of the most outstanding
members to serve our county faithfully for so many years in that courtroom are listed below.
The voices of these remarkable men still echo through those hallowed halls.
The families still reside in Cleveland County. As a token of our appreciation, these families
would be honored to be recipients of a bench from the old courtroom as a treasure to cherish and
preserve for posterity.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Brendan Camp LeGrand
Governor O. Max Gardner family- O. Max. Gardner, III, contact: 704/487-7554
Gov. Gardner; Gov. Clyde R. Hoey; Judge and N.C. State Senator James Webb; Judge and
Congressman E. Y. Webb; Judge and N.C. House of Representative Odus Mull; Judge John
Mull Gardner; Attorney O. Max Gardner, III; Attorney Bill Gardner
Judge George Hamrick family- Judge George Hamrick contact: 704/487-7377
Judge Hamrick; son-in-law City Attorney Mike Kennedy, son of Attorney Horace Kennedy
Attorney C. C. “Cobby” Horn family- Judge Charlie Horn contact: 704/487-5500
Attorney Cobby Horn; Judge Charlie Horn; N.C. House of Representative Jim Horn
Judge A. A. “Audie” Powell family- Mary Ann Powell Goins contact: 704/482-1517
Judge Powell, Judge and City Attorney
Sheriff Haywood Allen family- Kathryn Allen Monroe contact: 704/482-2491
Sheriff Haywood Allen, sheriff for 32 years; father Sheriff Irvin M. Allen; brother Chief
Deputy George Allen; son Deputy Woody Allen
LESTER D. ROARK
Lester Davis Roark was born October 31, 1924, the youngest of eight sons of James
Alexander Roark and Margaret Avalona Earle Roark. He grew up in rural Cleveland County,
North Carolina near the town of Grover. His father died during the Great Depression, when Les
was only eight years old. Les helped the family face the challenges, as farming took the
conscientious efforts of every family member. He graduated from Grover High School in 1942,
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where he was an outstanding student and athlete. He served our nation in the U. S. Air Force in
World War II. Three of his other brothers served in the military during the war and his brother,
George, was killed in combat.
Les has been married to Dorothy Jane Mulder Roark of Holland, Michigan for 55 years and
they reside in Shelby. They are the parents of Jeffrey Scott Roark of Shelby and Pamela Sue
Roark Washer of Blowing Rock.
In the 1960’s, as co-owner of Cleveland Sports, Les was instrumental in bringing the first
professional baseball team, “The Colonels,” to Shelby. In 1965, he became involved in fast-food
restaurant and franchising and was co-founder and co-owner of Burger Barns, Little Moo Diary
Barns and Cleveland Foods.
As Representative for two U. S. Senators in Washington, D. C. in all 100 counties of North
Carolina, Les traveled from Murphy to Manteo doing constituent service work for the State of
North Carolina. Also, he served as Administrative Deputy to North Carolina Attorney General
Lacy Thornburg.
During his career, Les served the area as a real estate and insurance agent. He created real
estate parcels, including River Bend Acres, which increased the tax base for the City of Shelby.
He was elected to the Shelby City Council as Alderman of Ward One on July 1, 1957 and
continued to serve in local government for the next 22½ years until December 3, 1979. He
served as Mayor of Shelby from 1976-1979.
During his years of public service, Les started the Human Relations Commission, Shelby
Economic Development Commission, and the Appearance Commission in Shelby, which
instigated Thompson Gardens, the former East Graham Street Park and Playground and
supported numerous other landscaping projects. He initiated the Downtown Farmer’s Market
and helped organize the Cleveland Association of Governmental Officials. He supported city
funds for a new library, Malcolm Brown Auditorium, Shelby High School’s indoor swimming
pool, tennis court and other improvements. He organized and carried out fundraising efforts to
build Veterans Field baseball stadium at Shelby High School.
While he was Mayor, the City of Shelby completed the Charles Road Fire Station, the Public
Works Building and a new City of Shelby Police Station. He urged a tight fiscal policy and low
tax rates, and the buildings were all built with pay-as-you-go financing.
When Les became Mayor, he recommended Sam Raper to fill his vacated seat on the City
Council. Sam Raper became the first black man to serve on the City Council. Sam and Les
became the first black and white men to be co-founders of a public trust for their city. Earnings
from the Raper-Roark Trust Fund can be spent for appearance and beautification projects. In
2004, Sam and Les were honored at a Unity Rally at Gardner-Webb University as recipients of
the Order of the Long Leaf Pine Award, the highest civilian award bestowed by the Governor of
North Carolina.
In December 2009, the late Sam Raper’s daughter, Carolyn Raper-Petty and Les Roark were
chosen by Uptown Shelby, Inc. to be Grand Marshals for the City of Shelby Christmas Parade.
On January 27, 2011, the Board of Governors of the Raper-Roark Trust Fund was recognized
by the Main Street Center as a Main Street Champion for dedicated support of the downtown
revitalization effort of Uptown Shelby, Inc.
At the end of his retirement from public office in 1979, the City of Shelby honored Les by
naming a parcel of land connecting city government buildings in uptown Shelby adjacent to the
City Hall “Roark Plaza.” This beautifully landscaped site on a prominent corner consists of a
park with benches, planters, and a lovely fountain. In June 2010, at Les’ request, the City of
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Shelby rededicated the Roark Plaza as the Raper-Roark Plaza, adding his beloved friend, the late
Sam Raper’s name to the plaza.
Les is a prolific writer. For several years, he served as editor for our local newspaper, The
Cleveland Times. He has authored four books: “It’s A Matter of Time” (1993); “A Man Goes
Back To Where The Boy Has Been” (1996); “Something To Think About” (1998); and “Getting
America Back On Track” (2004.) He established the Lester D. Roark Scholarship Fund and
proceeds from the sales of each book go to the Shelby High School Scholarship Fund.
Also a playwright, his play “Go West Old Man” will be presented next season by the Greater
Shelby Community Theatre with proceeds going to charity.
Les is an active member of Shelby Presbyterian Church and has served as a Sunday school
teacher and deacon. He is a member of the American Veterans Association, Disabled American
Veterans, and a life member of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. He has
been involved in various civic organizations in Shelby throughout the years including the
Jaycees, and Toastmasters. Les was a charter member of the Civitan Club that began June 6,
1961, fifty years ago.
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