He said that it was an old document, badly deteriorated, dated 1882. He began reading the document to me: “Tribute of Respect…Unanimously adopted by the Board of Commissioners of Winston, N.C at their regular meeting April 4th 1882…Whereas, it has thus pleased the wise disposer of all things to summon by death one of our number…”

Without thinking I said out loud “Israel L. Clement”.

Tom said “Yes, that’s right. How did you know? I guess it means that this is a fake.”

“Just the opposite,” I said. “You’re holding a very important piece of local history.”

❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉

As reported by the weekly newspaper the Union Republican, late on Saturday afternoon, August 7, 1880, two black women got into a fight. A Winston police officer was summoned. He attempted to arrest one of the women, but she resisted, so he called for backup. The policemen eventually overwhelmed her and took her to the calaboose. But a crowd of black citizens had gathered at the scene and some of them were angry at what they perceived as excessive force applied by the policemen.

The crowd broke up into small groups and left, discussing what had just happened. One group ended up at the courthouse square, where others began to join them. Tom Pfohl, a white city tax collector, panicked and asked the captain of the Forsyth Rifles to order his men to the square.

At that point, realizing what might happen if armed militia confronted the crowd, two black men went to a nearby hotel where Major A. J. Pinkham, another white city tax collector, lived and asked him to intervene. Major Pinkham went to the square and persuaded the people to disperse. By the time that the Riflemen arrived, the event was over. There was no one there.

At that point, the mayor, A.B. Gorrell, arrived on the scene and ordered the Riflemen to leave. The Union Republican reported that that Saturday night turned out to be one of the quietest ever in Winston.

But there were those who had their own agenda. Three black men, all tobacco workers, were arrested. Two, James Henly, who worked at Leak & Wilson, and Spencer Tunstall, who worked at Brown & Brother, were charged with interfering with a police officer. Horace Jeffers, who worked at Bitting & Whitaker, was charged with inciting to riot. In a separate article, the editors of the Union Republican delivered a self-righteous lecture to the black community on the proper way for citizens to behave.

A few days later, the charges against Jeffers were dropped when the arresting officer testified that Jeffers had actually assisted him in making the arrest. And despite a passionate appeal by prosecutors for stiff sentences for the others in municipal court, they were all released under $500 peace bonds. The Union Republican’s editors were forced to eat crow with a headline that simply said “No Riot”.

Shortly afterward, several of the town’s leading white citizens, including Darius H. Starbuck, the local superior court judge; J.W. Goslin, publisher of one of the weekly newspapers; and others sent a petition to the mayor suggesting that the town hire a black police officer as a way of avoiding such incidents in the future. They even suggested a specific individual, Israel L. Clement, one of the most respected men in the community.

The mayor’s reply was that he and the town commissioners were way ahead of the petitioners. They had already offered Clement a place on the police force. Clement had asked what the pay was and pointed out that he could not afford to take the job as he made considerably more working as a roller in Hamilton Scales’ tobacco factory. So the petition was dismissed.

But behind the scenes it was decided that there were other ways to solve the problem. In 1881, Israel Clement ran for a seat on the town commission in the third ward and won, thus becoming the first black Winston town commissioner. Reconstruction was long over. This was not something enforced by outsiders. It was a simple and rational solution to a local problem.

Union Republican, April 6, 1882

Unfortunately, barely a year into his first term, Israel Clement died, thus triggering the “Tribute of Respect”. It would be almost a decade before another black man was elected to the town commission.

Rufus E. Clement, a janitor, and later a grocer on Depot Street, near Seventh Street; and J.B. Gwynn, who operated a grocery store in the 900 block of North Main Street served during the 1890-91 term.

Aaron A. Moore, a marble cutter, served during the 1892-93 term.

In 1894, Rufus Clement was reelected and was joined on the board by J.G. Lattie who is listed in the city directories as “janitor, Colored Graded School”.

Again, unfortunately, the 1890s saw a couple of brief but severe economic depressions, which triggered racial tension between the white underclass and successful middle class blacks, affecting most of the South. Winston’s run of black elected commissioners came to an end in 1896. There would not be another black man elected to the local board until 1947, when the Reverend Kenneth Williams won a seat in the third ward.

In all, a total of five black men (Israel Clement, Rufus Clement, J.B. Gwynn, Aaron Moore and J.G. Lattie) won a total of six elections in the 19th century.

❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉

On Tuesday morning, Tom Dahlen brought the “Tribute of Respect” document to the North Carolina Room at the Central Forsyth County Public Library. For me, it was a treat to see the actual document, which I had previously only read about in Robert Neilson’s history of city government, a two volume set published in 1966 to commemorate the bicentennial of the founding of Salem in 1766.

Tom filled out and signed a donor agreement, specifying that the donors of the document be identified as his parents, Al and Tallulah Dahlen. As soon as I was able to gain access to our very busy workroom computer, I used our high resolution scanner to digitize the document at 600 dots per inch, resulting in a 4645 x 7984 pixel tiff file of 111.3 megabytes saved using Adobe Photoshop’s sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color format. That will enable us to share the image with the community at a wide range of sizes and resolutions.

The document itself is being catalogued and will be stored in our locked cage in an acid free lightproof container, thus significantly retarding its deterioration. Anyone who now has or later comes into possession of such documents is invited to take advantage of our facilities for digitizing and preserving such items. You can call our information desk at 336-703-3070, or contact our NC Room Library Supervisor Billy King at kingwh@forsyth.cc or me at brownlfl@forsyth.cc.

Here is a medium resolution version of the document. If you click on it, it should expand into a quite readable image.

The document is signed by Mayor A.B. Gorrell. He was the founder of the Farmer’s Tobacco Warehouse. He built his house on Fifth Street, at the southwest corner of Poplar, which was the beginning of the later famous “Millionaire’s Row”, which extended along Fifth from Poplar to Summit Street.

A.B. Gorrell, Mayor

The other signature on the document is that of James A. Gray, Sr., a current member of the board of commissioners who was elected by them to be the board secretary. It is likely that the document itself is in his handwriting. He was one of the founders, in 1879, of the Wachovia National Bank.

James A. Gray, secretary of the 1882 Winston board of commissioners and cashier of the Wachovia National Bank

Unfortunately, we do not have a picture of Israel Clement. That is not a permanent situation. Almost certainly, someone has a picture of the man of honor. If you are that person, please contact us via the methods described above.

We hold several print copies of Robert Neilson’s history of local government. An online version, originally created by J.R. Snyder and somewhat modified at a later date, can be found at the City of Winston-Salem site http://www.cityofws.org/Home/DiscoverWinston-Salem/Articles/CityGovernmentHistory

Local author, Kevin White, will present Images of America: Clemmons at the Clemmons Branch Library on Saturday, June 22 from 1:00 – 3:00 PM.

White, who is the editor and a resident of Clemmons, partnered with the Clemmons Historical Society to make the history of the Village come alive. The book starts with the mid-18th century settlement of the Village of Clemmons and follows the town to present day, it contains images from the society’s archives as well as those collected from residents of the Clemmons’ community.

Come and find out more about the history of Clemmons during this presentation that includes displays provided by the Historical Society.

Following the presentation, Kevin White will be on hand to answer any questions you may have and to autograph your copy of the book.

Among the units that raised the most interest were two fire engines, one a 1905 La France steam pumper which had belonged to the old Salem “Rough & Ready” fire department, established in 1784; the other a La France gasoline powered pumper of the consolidated Winston-Salem fire department from the 1920s.

Salem became one of the first towns in America to have a “fire engine”. After a disastrous fire which destroyed the Salem Tavern, one of the most important parts of the local economy, in 1784 they organized a community fire brigade and purchased an European made “fire engine”, which arrived in 1785. That first engine was found wanting, so some local engineers took it apart and made improvements. Over the next 90 years, Salem would purchase several other manually pumped engines

Salem’s original 1785 fire engine. It required assistance from a bucket brigade. The buckets shown were made of leather.

The first steam powered fire engines were developed in the first third of the 19th century. Early adopters included New York, Chicago and San Francisco, all around 1850. In December, 1880, a fire destroyed most of the west side of Winston’s courthouse square. Five days later, the first moves toward creating a Winston fire company were made. In April, 1882, the town took bids from the Silby and La France companies for steam fire engines. Both bids were for $4,000. The town offered La France $3,800, which was accepted, and they took delivery on the first steam La France fire engine in May, 1882.

Winston firemen pose with the communitiy’s first modern fire engine, a La France steam pumper, in front of the Rosenbacher & Son general merchandise store on the south side of courthouse square sometime in the mid to late 1880s. The inscription reads “Winston Fire Company No. 1, Organised, Feb, 1882″. The name of the photographer, S.E. Hough is inscribed at lower left.

Winston-Salem firemen prepare Salem’s 1905 American La France steamer for its appearance in the May 11, 2013 centennial parade. The key identified parts were standard for all steam powered fire engines of the time. The frame arch was necessary to allow the front wheels to be turned at a 90º angle at the scene of the fire to help prevent the vibration of the engine from causing the engine to creep forward.

The air chamber was an important innovation, because early engines, being cyclical, caused the water to emerge in squirts. The air chamber allowed water to rise into the chamber, compressing the air, thus damping the squirting effect and giving a steadier stream.

Three years after Winston received its first modern steamer, Salem ordered their first steam engine, seen below, from Button.

By the early 1900s, Winston had two La France engines. In 1905, Salem ordered their first La France engine. Upon delivery, they transferred the 1885 Button to the newly formed West Salem fire district.

Salem’s 1905 American La France steamer, sometime around 1908-10, in front of the Salem “Rough and Ready” fire station at the corner of Liberty and Cemetery Streets. The driver is Andy Peddycord, who was the chief wagon driver for the town of Salem. His oldest son was also qualified to drive the Salem fire engine.

At the time of the consolidation of the two towns in 1913, the Sanborn Insurance maps showed the following information as to the fire fighting capabilities of the two towns:

Later that year, the city of Winston ordered its first self powered fire engine, an American La France Type 12 Triple Combination Pumping Car. The price was $9,000, to be paid $2,500 down, another $2,500 at the end of the first year and $2,000 at the end of each of the third and fourth years. The type 12 was delivered on August 5, 1912.

In March of 1913, Winston suffered one of its most infamous fires, in the O’Hanlon drugstore building at the corner of Liberty and Fourth Street. Edward O’Hanlon’s drugstore had been built following yet another disastrous 1880s fire. He had enjoyed great success in his new building and had been talking for some time about taking it down and building a much improved “skyscraper” with several floors of office space above his drugstore.

The 1913 O’Hanlon drugstore fire attracted quite a crowd of onlookers. The O’Hanlon building is at dead center. A city streetcar is halted at the right, in front of O’Hanlons fiercest competitor, V.O. Thompson’s drugstore. Smart citizens visited both each day, because if you missed the gossip, you were not clued in on what was happening in town.

A detail from the O’Hanlon fire of 1913 shows the crowd. Note that everybody in the picture is wearing a hat. Boys are wearing cloth caps. Men are wearing mostly either fedoras or homburgs. Women are sporting the latest styles from Paris. And the lone little girl, at left, is copying them. No self respecting citizen, male or female, would have dared leave home without a hat. Also note that some of the women are wearing only white blouses. These must be “office girls”, because no respectable married woman would have appeared in public without a jacket. Times do change, don’t they?

Another detail from the 1913 O’Hanlon fire shows one of the local steamers on Fourth Street between Liberty and Trade Streets. From the overall configuration and the dark band on the boiler, we can be pretty certain that the steamer is one of Winston’s American La France engines.

The outcome of the O’Hanlon fire was nebulous. The O’Hanlon building and some neighbors were gutted, but not destroyed. O’Hanlon opted to demolish them and proceed with his dream of a high rise building. The result was the tallest building in Winston and Salem at the time.

Over the next few years, the new city would acquire more gasoline powered fire trucks. By 1920, Winston-Salem, after its first annexation of the northeastern part of Ardmore, had become the most populous city in North Carolina at 47,000 plus. But population growth was so fast that by 1926, after two more Ardmore annexations, the city had over 71,000 residents. City services struggled to keep up with the demand. In 1923, the city authorized the purchase of an American La France pumper, priced at about $40,000 and paid for in three equal installments. But it immediately needed at least two more.

As the city grew, more and more was spent on improved fire engines. But financial reality kept the old engines on the force. At some point not too long ago, the local fire chief proposed surplussing of the last of the 1920s engines. Fortunately, some of the local firefighters rose up in defense of the 1923 La France engine. It was quietly moved to an exhibition space at the fairgrounds, but was never actually removed from the official roster, being retained as a “reserve” engine. But it has not been capable of actually running for many years.

Last year, in anticipation of the 2013 Centennial parade, the 1923 engine was moved from the fairgrounds to Fire Station #1, downtown on North Marshall Street, where local firemen began trying to get the engine into shape for the 2013 parade. In January, WXII TV did a marvelous report on the progress.

Last year, a minimum security prisoner in San Diego stole the unit’s fire truck and escaped. He was caught two days later at the trolley station in Lemon Grove. After the parade on Saturday, our 1923 La France fire engine also went to jail. It will be strip searched and then meticulously restored by a North Carolina prison unit’s auto repair class. Maybe soon it will be able to leave its trailer and drive on its own in a future parade.

❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉

Sources:

Neilson, R. W., History of Government; City of Winston-Salem, NC: All American City, 1766 – Bicentennial – 1966. Winston-Salem, 1966.

Salem People’s Press, weekly newspaper, 1851—1892.

The Union Republican, weekly newspaper, 1873(?) — 1952.

Winston-Salem Journal, daily newspaper, 1897 —.

Twin City Sentinel, daily newspaper, 1906 — 1985.

Images

Old Salem Museums & Gardens

Forsyth County Public Library Picture Collection

WXII TV news broadcast, January, 2013

American Cyclopaedia @ chestofbooks.com

Grening, John A; Yorks, S.H.; and Beach, C.H. The Automobile Handbook. The International Textbook Company, 1913.

 Please join us at 6:30 PM for refreshments. The program starts at 7:00 PM. The meeting is free and open to the public.

 FCGS Member Paul Marshall will speak on “Trade Street’s Masonic Building.”  The Masonic Building is one of several historic structures on the Old Town Road. 

Tuesday, June 11th @ 6 PM

Michele Gillespie is currently the Kahle Family Professor of History at Wake Forest University. Her areas of interest include class, gender, and race in the American South.

Please call 703-2960 or register online to reserve your seat today.

The Winston-Salem Centennial celebration begins Thursday. Don’t miss it.

Centennial Website

100 years ago, on May 30, 1913, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West finally came to Winston-Salem. The video above is a compilation filmed by Thomas Edison in 1902 of the pre-show parade, Annie Oakley in action, a couple of American Indian dances and and a “Bucking Broncho”, all available at the Library of Congress website. Click on the start arrow to watch.

The show was heavily advertised in the local newspapers, the kickoff being the parade from downtown to “Wheeler’s show ground”, in east Winston at the site of the then under construction City Memorial Hospital.

Admission was 50¢, $1 for grandstand seats, children under 9 for half price, rain or shine. The ads stated that all seats were protected by an “Immense Waterproof Canvas Canopy”. The Winston-Salem Journal reported that there was an immense crowd, but others complained that there were many empty seats, probably because of a conflict with commencement exercises in the local schools and colleges, which will be reported in a coming post.

Another reason for attendance problems might have been that Annie Oakley was no longer with the show. She was severely injured in a train wreck in 1901 and after along recuperation, never returned.

Just moving the show from town to town was an immense undertaking. There were hundreds of people and animals; cowboys, American Indians, other performers and crew, horses, bison and others. The operation required two railway trains, each with its own kitchen car to feed the workers.

Just after midnight on October 29, 1901, the two trains carrying Buffalo Bill’s Wild West pulled out of the Charlotte station, cleared for Danville, Virginia. Southern Railways freight train #75 had been ordered to remain on the siding at Lexington until the two trains passed. Sometime around 3:00 AM, the first unit went through Lexington. But the Southern train order had only included one train number, so  #75′s engineer, Frank Lynch, eased his freight out onto the mainline, headed south to Charlotte.

The two trains collided near Linwood, NC. Dozens of animals were killed and many more had to be shot. No crew or show workers died, but Annie Oakley was temporarily pinned in the wreckage and suffered severe spinal injuries. Some newspapers reported that she had been killed.

She was taken to the Twin City Hospital on Brookstown Avenue in Winston-Salem, then transferred by train to New York. In later years, she and her husband lived for a time in Pinehurst and conducted a shooting school out of the Carolina Hotel there.

Top picture, Annie Oakley bird hunting with a pointer. The location of the picture is unknown, but the terrain looks suspiciously like the NC Sandhills.

Bottom picture, Annie Oakley, in white, center, shooting at the Pinehurst Gun Club, ca 1911.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was out of business for some time. Despite a $65,000 settlement from the Southern Railroad, it never recovered. Buffalo Bill remained in debt for the rest of his life. By the time the show arrived in Winston-Salem in 1913, he had handed over control to creditors and the show was a mere shadow of its former self, joined with Pawnee Bill’s lesser show and incorporating such acts as “Auto Polo” (the forerunner of “Demolition Derby”?), horseback football and a live fox hunt, things which bore no resemblance to Buffalo Bill’s beloved Wild West.

Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull

100 years ago, the young women of Salem Academy & College helped celebrate the joining of the cities of Salem and Winston.

Seven young Winston women, left, seven young Salem women, right, and Mary Pell, not from Salem or Winston, as the hyphen. Clever girls!

They also apparently had some backward seniors.

Images from digitalnc.org UNC Libraries, College Yearbooks

“Sights & Insights”, Salem Academy & College, 1913

Winston-Salem’s Centennial Celebration begins next week. Visit these two links for more information:

Official Centennial Website

Winston-Salem Journal article, May 2, 2013

As anyone who does a lot of historical research knows, some of the best stuff comes through serendipity.

Recently, while looking for something else, I came upon a reference to a book that intrigued me. We didn’t have it in our collection, but I found a copy available at Abe Books, so ordered it. Here is the title page.

What a neat fit for next week’s centennial celebration, a book published locally in 1913 by a local man. Colonel H. Montague was one of the more interesting citizens as Winston and Salem became joined by a hyphen. A native of Wake County, the son of a Wake Forest College professor, he moved to Winston in the 1880s to practice law and became a major player in the local real estate world.

Every year, around high school graduation time, his name is widely published, so many have heard of him, yet have no idea why.

But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his life was his name, always rendered as “H. Montague”. Soon I will do another post about him and the epic search for his real first name, which he took great pains to conceal. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, you might ask “Who was Josh Billings?” Colonel Montague’s book gives us an image.

Suffice to say that “Josh Billings” was actually Henry Wheeler Shaw, probably the second most popular humor writer of the 19th century. Unfortunately for him, there was this other guy, Sam Clemens, who wrote under the pseudonym “Mark Twain”. “Billings” was eclipsed by the might of “Twain”, but he is not quite forgotten. He appears in many anthologies of American literature, so is at least known to college English professors.

Winston-Salem’s Centennial Celebration begins next week. Visit these two links for more information:

Official Centennial Website

Winston-Salem Journal article, May 2, 2013

Which of these Depression Era desperadoes, born and raised in Abbotts Creek Township in  Forsyth County, NC, terrorized the citizens of North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia for sixteen years, committing a series of bank and highway robberies, kidnappings, hundreds of auto thefts and, finally, the murder of a North Carolina State trooper?

Which was arrested in North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana a total of five times, and sent to prison, yet escaped six times?

Which, during their last escape, kidnapped the warden and another official of the state prison, commandeered a laundry truck, carjacked another vehicle, then spent the next twelve hours racing about for three hundred miles on eastern North Carolina back roads eluding over two hundred law enforcement officers, only to vanish into the night?

Which made J. Edgar Hoover’s personal most wanted list, more than a decade before the FBI “Ten Most Wanted” list was created?

And which is buried in the Abbotts Creek Missionary Baptist Church cemetery near Wallburg, just across the line in Davidson County?

There is only one way to find out. Click here.

I have linked this post to an external site because WordPress is unfriendly to audio links. Keep an eye on the external site for updates to this post which fall outside the NC Room’s area of interest.

Our patron, Ms. Small White Duck

A small white duck waddled into the NC Room on Thursday and asked if we could help her trace her family lineage. Just a few years ago, that would have involved a complicated confluence of ancient books, microfilm, rare documents and incredibly expensive worldwide correspondence and travel requiring years, if not decades, of dedicated study.

But since the NC Room is now the most high tech outfit in the genealogy world, we are able, within minutes, to trace the ancestry of almost anyone without ducking the question. Our new secret weapon is Google.

So Melodie typed our new patron’s name, “Ms. Small White Duck” into the Google search box, and up popped this:

Not bad. But Melodie immediately realized that this particular item had some problems. It was a bit nebulous, with a number of unclear connections. This is commonplace nowadays, as people strain to qualify for DAR membership or to cash in on the billions of casino dollars available if they can prove that they have Cherokee ancestors.

So Melodie consulted our erstwhile genealogical genius Janice, who, as always, had all the answers. Within moments, utilizing her vast knowledge of genealogical databases and sheer magic, she brought up the following points.

One of the first things that she found was this rare document, apparently the notes of a duck historian called Carl Barks, who in ancient times worked as a genealogist for a guy named Walt Disney and created illustrated documents anent the duck family history.

Well, that clears up a lot of questions, doesn’t it.

But perhaps Janice’s greatest contribution is the connections back beyond duckness in the US to Europa and beyond. Here is what she came up with.

The first known duck was Scrooge-Shah I of Fatcatstan, who ruled, with his queen Nefer Duck, in the ancient Middle East around 2050 BC. As soon as she gave me the name, I queried Molly, who came up with this photograph taken by F. Jones Duck in April, 2048 BC.

Scrooge-Shah I

There were a total of 97 Scrooge-Shahs. Scrooge-Shah XCVII was killed by Genghis Duck in around 1217 AD. But by then, the Scrooge-Shah empire was a mere shadow of its former self. The Scrooge-Shah clan had scattered to the four winds. For instance, both Rome and Egypt were heavily influenced by cousins of the original Scrooge-Shah. Who can forget the monumental struggle for control of the Roman Empire between J.C. Duck and Mark A. Duck? Or the brilliant femme fatal who manipulated them both, Queen Cleoduckra?

But our concern is with the ancestry of our patron, Ms. Small White Duck, so we will focus on that line. One of Scrooge-Shah’s grandsons migrated to what is now Lebanon, built a small empire and called himself Pasha Duck the First. That empire lasted only a couple of centuries before crumbling in the face of the mighty Assyrians.

By then though, Itchy Foot Duck had already left the area. He spent his junior year abroad in Europe and wound up settling in what is now the Basque country in Spain and France. Eventually, his descendants made their way to Ireland. One of them, Dagda Duck, became the first ruler of Ireland. His daughter, Brigid Duck, married Bodb Derg Duck, known simply as B2D. After their honeymoon at Myrtle Beach, B2D became king, while Brigid occupied herself by becoming the patron of healing, fertility, craft and poetry. Many years later, one of her cousins, Bobby Burns, would rework one of her poems into the legendary “Auld Lang Syne”.

The arrival of the Celts meant yet another exodus for the Duck family. This time they crossed the Irish Sea to Scotland. Since the area that they settled in was very rocky, they went into the stone business, achieving monumental success in 122 AD by selling stone to the builders of Hadrian’s Wall.

Hadrian’s Wall was built with stone from the Scottish Duck family.

This led to the founding of Clan McDuich by Sir Eider McDuich the same year. By 400 AD, the clan had constructed McDuich Castle near the village of McDuich on the Dismal Downs. In 1071, they abandoned the Gaelic spelling and became the Clan McDuck. And in 1675, they abandoned McDuck Castle, moving first to the village of McDuich, thence to Glasgow. The reason for leaving is explained in the epic tale about their predatory neighbors, “The Hound of the Whiskervilles”.

Sir Eider McDuich and McDuich (later McDuck) Castle.

Early ducks of note in Scotland include Sir Quackly, Sir Roast and Sir Stuft McDuck, who was at one time the leader of the clan. His great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson was Sir Donald Duck, nicknamed, for his bad temper, “Black Donald”, born in the 15th century. He is said to have invented golf, the hammer throw and the caber toss, the three most popular pastimes of the day. Apparently he was not a very good golfer, because every time he hit a duck hook into the woods, he erupted into an unprintable tantrum. King James II got so sick of hearing such fowl language that he outlawed golf.

Sir Stuft McDuck

One of “Black Donald’s” descendants had a son named Daffy McDuck. He had an illegitimate son named Ishmael McDuck, but his wife was so outraged at his infidelity that she began referring to Ishmael as “the ugly duckling” and eventually succeeded in having him banned from Scotland. Ishmael ended up in America and took a new name, Washington von Steuben Lafayette McDuck, a name that may sound familiar to American history buffs.

Daffy Duck. Washington von Steuben Lafayette Duck adresses the troops at Valley Forge.

Meanwhile, back in Scotland, another of “Black Donald’s” descendants, Dingus McDuck married Molly Mallard, from England. They had three sons: Angus (known as “Pothole”), Jake and Fergus, who was born in 1830. He and his second wife, Downy O’Drake, from Ireland, had two daughters, Matilda and Hortense, and one son, Scrooge McDuck, named for his ancient ancestor Scrooge-Shah I, born in 1867.

Fergus McDuck, Scrooge McDuck’s father and Donald’s grandfather.

By this time the McDuck fortunes were at a low ebb, so Scrooge left Scotland for America, where he began building his fortune working as a cabin boy, then a cowboy. He soon established Duckburg, in the state of Calisota and brought his sister Hortense to the US, where she met and married Quackmore Duck in 1920.

That same year they had twins, a daughter, Thelma, aka Della, and a son Donald. Donald has never had children with his consort Daisy, possibly due to the awful temper he inherited from his ancestor “Black Donald”. Their relationship may well be merely platonic.

Hortense, Scrooge’s sister, and her husband Quackmore, parents of twins Donald and Thelma (Della) Duck

Della had three children by an unknown father: Hubert, Deuteronomy and Louis, better known as Huey, Dewey and Louie, born around 1938. Apparently, while their father was in the hospital, they were sent to live temporarily with their uncle Donald. For reasons unknown, that arrangement became permanent. The whereabouts of Della is unknown; it is possible that she is no longer living.

The 1940 US census, just released last year, reveals the duck details.

Deuteronomy “Dewey” Duck inherited his uncle’s bad temper and has been married several times. His last wife was the illegitimate daughter of a famous movie star, Marilyn Duck. They had a son, Little Yellow Duck, and a daughter, our patron, Ms. Small White Duck.

Deuteronomy Duck, left, and Marilyn Duck in a famous pose, circa 1954.

Needless to say, Ms. Small White Duck left the NC Room quite pleased, her head swimming with new knowledge.

CODA

I mentioned this story to someone at Camino Bakery on Friday morning. They asked if there was any possibility that their favorite historical character, Foghorn Leghorn, was related to the Ducks. Since Foghorn is of a different species, the easy answer would be no. But I happened to know that he was originally born Foghorn Duck, to members of the Louisiana branch of the Duck family, the Longs, from which Huey Duck got his namesake.

Unfortunately for him, he happened to defeat his cousin, Magica de Spell, in the class spelling bee in fifth grade. She was so angry that she turned him into a chicken.

Magica de Spell turned poor Foghorn Duck into a chicken

I might add that there is, as always, a local connection. At the turn of the 20th century, R.J. Reynolds found himself locked in a life or death struggle with the American Tobacco Company, which was trying to corner the world tobacco market.

Fortunately, R.J, with the help of his friend Theodore R. “Teddy” Duck, was able to bust the trust and defeat his bitter enemy, James Buchanan “Buck” Duck of Durham. But James B’s legacy lives on in the name of the former Trinity College as Duck University.

—————————–

All photographs in this post were taken by the legendary photographer F. Jones Duck, whose career spanned over 4,500 years, and whose age made Methuselah look like a spring chicken.

Dr. Nelson A. L. Weller, past president of the Society, will make a presentation entitled ”To Publish or Not to Publish – What to do When You Finish Your Genealogy.”  Dr. Weller will discuss what you might do with your finished resear

What most have forgotten is that a few weeks before, the undefeated Tar Heels had invaded New York with high hopes of defeating the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium and eventually becoming the 1948 national champions. The railroads put on special excursion trains from the Tar Heel State to New York, transportation and game ticket for one price.

On Friday night, thousands of partying Tar Heel fans showed up in Times Square and formed a seemingly endless conga line, chanting “All the way, Choo Choo, all the way!” Jaded New Yorkers, who thought they had seen it all, were flabbergasted. Unfortunately, the next day, the Tar Heels lost to Notre Dame,

Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice (22) and Art Weiner (50)

But a few months earlier, another significant Tar Heel sporting event had occurred out of view of the rest of the world, on a farm on the banks of the Yadkin River in southwestern Forsyth County. It was on April 25, 1948, that a farm hand raced up to Delvin Miller and said “You’d better get over there and help ‘em out with that mare. She foaled out in the field and now they can’t catch her.”

When Miller got to the field, the mare had been running for 45 minutes, with her newborn colt trying to follow. “The colt was just blowing like mad…exhausted but still on his feet,” Miller recalled. He helped catch the mare, let the colt nurse for the first time, then confined mother and son to a shed. He was worried that all the running might have ruined the colt for good.

But later that afternoon, he checked the shed and was delighted to find “…a big, tall colt…”, healthy and solid black. For some time he had been saying to his boss “You live here in the Tar Heel state, which you love…you’ve named your horses for darn near everything, the mares for nearly every woman in town, yet you’ve never named one for your own home state.” And finally he said “Well, if you don’t mind, the next colt that I really like real well, I’m going to name him Tar Heel.” And his boss had agreed.

So that night when he and his wife Mary Lib sat down to dinner with the boss at Tanglewood Farm, he said “We’ve got a fine new colt on the farm, and his name’s gonna be Tar Heel.”

Tar Heel (left) and his stablemate and great rival, Solicitor

The boss, of course, was William Neal Reynolds, the youngest brother of tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds. “Mr. Will”, as he was known to three generations of local folks, had been a major force in harness racing in the USA for three decades. His horses, both trotters and pacers, had won hundreds of races across the nation. The Forsyth County Fair, second only in the state to the North Carolina State Fair, every year featured major harness races. But Mr. Will had never had a real championship horse.

The W.N. Reynolds #1 Pace Stake at the Forsyth County fairgrounds, 1951. #5 is Theme Song, driven by Benny Schue. #6 is Gemette Bunter, driven by L.E. Payne

Tar Heel would change all that. His mother, the errant mare, Leta Long, was the daughter of Volumite, both known for their “attitude” problems. Maybe Eleanor Roosevelt was right when she said that “Well behaved women rarely make history.”

Mister Will, stopwatch in hand, at the Tanglewood Farm track, 1946

Miller had had many problems with Leta Long. Even though she was fast in practice, she had never won a single race with him driving. So one day at Roosevelt Raceway in New York he handed her over to a young man named Johnny Simpson. Later, after workouts, he asked Simpson how Leta Long was doing. Simpson said that she might be worth a bet. Miller pulled out an old watch fob and said that he wouldn’t even bet that on Leta Long. Minutes later, Leta Long pulled Simpson across the line in first place, lighting up the board with boxcar-sized payoff figures. So Johnny Simpson became a part of the Tanglewood racing team.

Johnny Simpson driving Tar heel at Lexington, Kentucky, 1952. Time was 1:56 2/5

And Tar Heel’s father was Billy Direct, a former world champion. The right combination?

Yes. Tar Heel was intended to be a pacer, not a trotter. But after his first workouts, he couldn’t seem to do the pacer stride. Miller came up with some ideas and was astonished to find that Tar Heel quickly adapted to become “…as slick as you’d ever want to see in a pacer.”

In his first year as a pacer, Tar Heel won 18 of 29 starts, and over $52,000. His second year, 1951, began even better. But his owner, Mr. Will fell ill. Out of respect for his illness, Miller withdrew Tar Heel from several races. Mr. Will died on September 10, 1951. Miller went to Winston-Salem for the funeral, then entered Tar Heel in the most important pacing race, the Little Brown Jug, the pacing equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, the following week in Delaware, Ohio.

The Little Brown Jug was decided by heats. The first heat winner was matched against the best finishers of the first heat. If another horse won, the race went to a third heat, and so on, until one horse had won two heats. Tar Heel won the first heat in a close race over his chief rival and stablemate Solicitor. In the second race, Solicitor led most of the way, but Tar Heel made a surge at the end to win and become the top horse in US pacing.

Johnny Simpson holds Tar Heel in the winner’s circle after the 1951 Little Brown Jug. The driver is Del Cameron

Shortly afterward, in the settlement of Mr. Will’s estate, Tar Heel was sold to Hanover Shoe Farms for the then record price of $125,000. Due to injuries to his front legs, he was retired from racing and placed at stud. If he had been successful at racing, he proved even more successful at stud. “He was an extremely fertile horse,” owner Lawrence Shepperd said. “If you didn’t want your mare to foal, you’d better not put any of his semen into her.”

$125,000 horse! L-R: Lawrence Shepperd, Tar Heel, Johnny Simpson and Delvin Miller

From 1954 through 1981 Tar Heel sired the winners of over $39 million in racing purses. He produced 99 $100,000+ winners.

Hanover Shoe Farms ad in Harness Horse Magazine, Sep 8, 1954. Del Cameron driving

Tar Heel’s richest performer was Lavern Hanover, a winner of $868,557 who also won the Little Brown Jug. His most well-known performer is perhaps Nansemond (named for the son of Chief Powathan, of Jamestown fame), a winner of $448,436 and also a Little Brown Jug winner, and a major entry in the harness racing Hall of Fame.

Tar Heel died in June of 1982 at the ripe old age of 34, a few weeks after some guy named Michael Jordan made a shot with 17 seconds remaining against Georgetown to win the NCAA basketball championship. Oh, and some other guy named James Worthy was named that tournament’s Most Outstanding Player.

Tar Heel spanned a long era, from Choo Choo to Michael and James. As always, you can choose your own greatest Tar Heel athlete. We’ve got a lot of them.

——————————

Sources:

Quotes and pictures:

Dean A. Hoffman, Hoof Beats, 1982

Genealogy:

The Black Book

All Breed Pedigrees

Famous Horse Roster

Additional Pictures:

Forsyth County Public Library picture collection

Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs & Films

Forsyth County Public Library relies on donations from library users to build its yearbook collection. When we acquire enough yearbooks from a school we loan them to UNC Chapel Hill to be digitized. In the last few years we have been trying to expand our collection of yearbooks from historically black high schools such as Atkins and Carver but few people are donating them. If you or someone you know is looking for a good home for a yearbook from one of these schools we would love to have it.

Encyclopedia of North Carolina Now Available Online

The University of North Carolina Press’s comprehensiveEncyclopedia of North Carolina is now available online through NCpedia. The history of telephone service in North Carolina, the mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights, the range of growth of the Venus flytrap and thousands of other facts are now at your fingertips for free.

Bob Lockett, past president and current board member of Wythe County, Virginia, Genealogical and Historical Association, will make a presentation entitled “DNA and Genealogy: A basic Course.”  The presentation will explore the basics of biology and cell structure and explain what DNA is and what characteristics of it are useful in Genealogy. An example of a DNA study on a family with German roots will be shown and discussed.

Analysis of DNA is fast becoming a standard tool for tracing your ancestry.  Every serious genealogist should be knowledgeable about the pros and cons of using DNA in their research.  Hope you can all attend.

Inclement weather note:  If the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County schools are closed owing to weather, the Society will not meet.

 February 14th, 11:45am: Wake Forest University history professor, Dr. Michele Gillespie on the courtship and marriage of Katharine and R.J. Reynolds.

 February 28th, 5:30pm: Architect David Gall and Community Activist Maurice Pitts Johnson on the restoration of the historic Happy Hill Cemetery and discovery of a terra cotta section of the 1892 Old Town Hall.

 March 14th, 11:45am: Writer Joe Mills on NC’s historic transition from agricultural tobacco crops to viticulture and wine vineyards.

 March 28th, 5:30 pm: Historical architect Marc Bryson on the restoration of eight stained glass windows in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

 April 11th, 11:45am: David Bare, Horticulturist with Reynolda Gardens; Eric Jackson, Horticulturalist with Old Salem Gardens; Margaret Norfleet Neff and Salem Norfleet Neff of Beta Verde on heirloom gardening and seed preservation.

 April 25th, 5:30pm: Artist Jan Detter of Third Eye Studio on the evolution of textiles as art and the life of a professional working artist.

 May 9th, 11:45am: Historian Fam Brownlee  May 9th, 11:45am: Entertaining writer and historian, Fam Brownlee of the Forsyth County Public Library NC Room on “The Golden Hyphen” and life in Winston-Salem in 1913.

 May 23rd, 5:30pm: Twin City Story Time. Four Winston-Salem writers will share their tales of the city with musical interludes.

 June 13th, 12:30pm: Winston-Salem Foundation Executive Director, Scott Wierman and former Executive Director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, Tom Lambeth, on the City’s long legacy of philanthropy.

 June 27, 5:30pm: Ellen Kutcher, Director of Historic Bethabara Park, on our community’s unique shared history.

The Salon Series at the New Winston Museum Discussions will feature the people that make life in Winston-Salem unique and interesting
The mission of the New Winston Museum is to preserve the cultural history of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, and to inspire our citizens to incorporate our past in creating a great future for our community. The New Winston Museum is located at 713 S. Marshall St. Directions: From I-40 E or W, take Exit 5B to Broad Street, take Broad Street South and turn left on Academy St. Turn right on Marshall St. The Museum will be on the left. Additional Parking in Old Salem Visitors Center parking lot next to the Museum.

From the city of Winston-Salem’s Centennial website, http://ws100years.com

Watch for a face familiar to NC Room visitors

May 9 MERGER VIDEO PREMIERE
Come to the free premiere of the documentary, “Merger: Making the Twin City” at Aperture Cinemas – 311 W. 4th St. Winston-Salem.

Show times: 8:15 p.m. SOLD OUT; tickets still available for the 8:45 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. showings.

Advance tickets required. Contact Michelle McCullough by e-mail or call 747-7063.

On March 18, 1913 Salem and Winston, residents were going to the polls to vote on a proposal to consolidate their towns under one city government. Just 34 years earlier, in 1879, they had soundly rejected the idea. That failed effort reflected a lingering political acrimony between the towns that dated back to the founding of Winston in 1849. A second consolidation proposal in the 1890s never got far enough to be put to a vote. But this time, boosters were confident that the citizens of the twin city would embrace this merger of identities.

NC ECHO enables users to search across thousands of digitized and born-digital historic materials including a wide variety of books, photographs, maps, family histories, state documents, newspapers, and much more from cultural heritage institutions around North Carolina. The collections available through NC ECHO include a diverse array of materials by and about the people, places, and history of North Carolina. All of the collections available through the NC ECHO Search are freely available online to all users, regardless of their location or affiliation.

The NC ECHO Search was developed by staff members at NC LIVE, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, and the State Library of North Carolina. It is hosted and maintained by NC LIVE.

The NC ECHO Search currently includes records from selected collections at the following institutions:

• East Carolina University
• Johnson C. Smith University
• New Hanover County Public Library
• North Carolina Digital Collections, Department of Cultural Resources
• North Carolina Digital Heritage Center
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Western Carolina University

Please note that not all of the descriptive information for the materials represented in NC ECHO can be searched through this site. Full text of digitized newspapers and other publications is not searchable in NC ECHO, but can be searched through each digital collection’s home page.

Afro-American HIstorical and Genealogical Society Workshop

Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013

9am  -  3pm

Topics:

Designing Your Family Tree

&

Gullah/Geechee Culture in North Carolina

Guest Speaker:

Michelle Lanier, Curator of Multicultural Initiatives/NC Div. of Historic Sites

Greensboro Central Library

219 N. Church St., Greensboro, NC

No Admission Charged

For more info call 336-547-0718

The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library 

​​​​​​​Cordially Invites You ​To A Seminar​​​​

World War I:

The Most Significant Event

of the Twentieth Century​

 and

​The War’s Impact on the World Today

​​​​​Saturday, January 26, 2013​

 8:30 am – 5:00 pm 

Graylyn International Conference Center​

​Winston-Salem, North Carolina​

For all the details go the website: 

http://nps1025.wix.com/worldwar1seminar

Tuesday, January 8, 2013 – The Forsyth County Genealogical Society will hold its regular monthly meeting at the Reynolda Manor Branch of the Forsyth County Public Library, 2839 Fairlawn Drive, Winston-Salem, NC 27106.  Please note this change of date and venue; it is due to our regular 1^st Tuesday being a library holiday.  Please join us at 6:30 PM for refreshments. The program starts at 7:00 PM. The meeting is free and open to the public.

Long-time FCGS Member Phyllis Hoots will discuss “Completing Your Pedigree Charts.”  Following her presentation, Ms. Rose Ann Wade, founder of Pass the Memories, will make a brief presentation and will discuss the process and formats in which your family story can be saved.

 Note – If Forsyth County Schools have been closed on the day of a meeting owing to weather, the Society doesn’t meet.

 Happy New Year To All

Wow! A bit less than a year ago, I posted a story called “The Battle of Henry Johnson”, about a man who spent part of his childhood growing up in the town of Winston who went on to an extraordinary moment of achievement in World War I. He became the first American soldier in that war to be awarded the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honor. But due to racism at home, he did not even receive a Purple Heart from the US government. It ended up being a tragic tale.

You can read that here: The Battle of Henry Johnson

That post has become the most popular entry on our blog, drawing an international audience. In that post, I mentioned that New York Senator Charles Schumer had taken up the campaign to get Henry Johnson our nation’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his actions.

Little did I know how that would develop. This summer, Senator Schumer presented a 1300 page document to the Department of Defense on behalf of Henry Johnson. In October, the Senator posted a petition on his website asking people to sign on to persuade the DOD to give Henry what he obviously had coming.

You can view and sign that petition here.

A post office and a charter school in Albany have been named for Henry Johnson. An article in Stars and Stripes, dated May 24, 1918, sketches the story and includes a quote from the French General commanding the sector saying “The American report is too modest. As a result of oral information furnished me, it appears that the blacks were extremely brave.” The same article quotes the white commander of Henry Johnson’s 369th Regiment as referring to his soldiers as “chilluns”.

But even more was to come. Earlier this year, the PBS hit program “History Detectives” did a show on the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Winston-Salem. Tukufu Zuberi, one of the stars of the show and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, filmed a segment in the North Carolina Room.

Tukufu Zuberi

I was not involved in that, so had no idea that at the same time Zuberi was working on a show involving Henry Johnson. Zuberi did not know then that Henry Johnson had a Winston-Salem connection.

You can watch that show online here.

Among other things, Zuberi is a collector of posters depicting moments of heroism in black American history. He had become curious about this poster:

He did not know it at the time, but the poster was issued in 1918 by the graphic firm E.G. Rensch in Chicago. Rensch was a German-American who cashed in on black American pride in this instance. The highly romanticized print sold for 25¢.

The shield at the left says “Colored man is eager to show his mettle and do his bit”. It names Henry Johnson, at right, and Needham Roberts, background left, and quotes a fuzzy communique from General “Black Jack” Pershing, which turned out not to be enough to award any medals.

The actual site of the “Battle of Henry Johnson” had no trees or grass because it was a battlefield devastated by years of trench warfare. In addition, Roberts had been disabled by a grenade at the outset of the battle, so could not have been standing as depicted here. And the truth is that the battle occurred in pitch darkness and was a very nasty and desperate struggle, involving a lot of blood, much of it Henry Johnson’s. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

During World War II, despite the fact that the US military was still not integrated, the government realized that they needed the help of their black citizens. Many had already come forward, but an attempt was made to recruit more. So the government created this poster, which was also used as a newspaper ad:

Henry Johnson had been dead for over a decade when this item was produced. And he had never been awarded even a Purple Heart for his heroism. But he was certainly seen as a prime candidate for recruiting black Americans to the cause.

Because there have been a few fraudulent Medals of Honor awarded, especially during the Civil War and in Iraq, the requirements for posthumous awards have been severely tightened, requiring very specific documentation. As you might imagine in the case of a black American soldier in World war I, a soldier who received the French Croix de Guerre but was refused even a Purple Heart, despite having received 21 wounds in a single night, by the US military, acquiring that documentation has been extremely difficult.

If you want to help, besides signing the online petition, you might want to contact your Congress folk and urge them to get involved in helping one of our own:

Senator Richard Burr

Senator Kay Hagan

Virginia Foxx     (Foxx makes it difficult to contact her via e-mail. You will need your normal Zip Code, plus your 4 digit extension in order to e-mail her)

Mel Watt

Here is a neat coda. There is already a black American soldier named Henry Johnson (no relation) who owns a Medal of Honor. Weird? Yes. His MOH was awarded during the Indian Wars of the late 19th century. Read about it here.

Meanwhile, I will try to keep you updated on this bizarre and frustrating story.

Filed under: Events, Local History ]]> http://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/the-battle-of-henry-johnson-part-2-tbc/feed/ 0 Fam HenryJohnson003.JPG 00Stars&Stripes001.jpg 00Tafuku001.jpg 00HnyJohnsonPoster.jpg 00HnyJohnsonRecruting.jpg http://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/tarheels-in-your-family-tree/ http://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/tarheels-in-your-family-tree/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 22:04:19 +0000 Billy http://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/?p=1866 ]]>     The North Carolina Genealogical Society will have a FREE TO ALL webinar online January 18-20, 2013: Tarheels in the Family Tree by Helen F. M. Leary, CG Emeritus, FASG, FNGS.  

Find out more about this free webinar at  http://www.ncgenealogy.org/

Katharine and R.J. Reynolds : Partners of Fortune in the Making of the New South

Richard Joshua Reynolds (1850-1918) and Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880-1924); separately they were formidable, together they were unstoppable. Wake Forest University Professor and author, Michele Gillespie, provides a sweeping account of how R. J. and Katharine succeed in realizing their American dreams.

Meet the Author Michele Gillespie

Tuesday, January 15th, 6:30 pm in the

Walkertown Branch Library Auditorium.

If you have any questions please contact Melodie at 336-703-3070.

Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Winston-Salem, there was a politician who believed in keeping his campaign promises. Yeah, I know, all fairy tales begin with “once upon a time”. Read on.

Marshall Kurfees, front center, and the newly elected Board of Aldermen, 1949.

In 1949, Marshall Kurfees decided to run for mayor of Winston-Salem. Over the previous twenty years, he had run for local offices eight times, and lost all eight. So this time out, he decided to make some big campaign promises.

If elected, he promised to build two new highways through the city, plus a couple of new fangled freeways.

If elected, he promised to build a much needed new hospital for the city.

If elected, he promised to make the state legislature return more local tax money to the city.

If elected, he promised to bring ABC stores, with their high tax revenue flow, to the city.

And if elected, he promised a winning minor league baseball team for the city.

All this was good for a laugh. Marshall was running against the very popular incumbent, George Lentz, so he didn’t really need to worry about keeping any of those promises. But, as often happens in life, the unexpected occurred.

When the votes were counted the day after election day, Marshall Kurfees was the new mayor of Winston-Salem. So how does he go about fulfilling all those improbable promises?

Ingenuity, hard work, sweat of the brow.

ABC Store #1 was on North Cherry Street in downtown Winston-Salem.

One of the first to come was the ABC stores. Against all odds, battling a coterie of powerful preachers, he pushed through a referendum in July, 1951, and won. Four of the first five stores opened on August 14, 1951, with the fifth opening a few days later. The new ABC stores were immediately dubbed “Kurfees drugstores”.

Interstate 40 under construction in 1957. Stratford Road runs diagonally across the picture at lower left. The highway inspired Winston-Salem’s first shopping center, Thruway, at center. The world’s second Putt-Putt golf course can be seen just beyond Thruway. Beyond it is the Knollwood Street bridge.

Next came Interstate 40. It had this strange curve near Hawthorne Road, which critics claimed Marshall had created for real estate investment purposes. Actually, Marshall had no control over the route of the highway, but it was immediately dubbed the “Kurfees curve”.

Next came the local tax money. Marshall went to war with the state legislature, ended up in a court case and won. The city got to keep a significant amount more of local sales taxes.

Construction at the intersection of Peter’s Creek and Silas Creek Parkways.

Next came the Twin City’s first two “freeways”, Peter’s Creek Parkway and Silas Creek Parkway.

Interstate 40 runs left-right, US 52 bottom to top.

Next came another highway, US 52, the “John M. Gold Freeway”, and a new hospital, Forsyth Memorial, now Novant Health’s Forsyth Medical Center.

Forsyth Memorial Hospital was designed by noted local architect Luther Lashmit.

But how about that baseball team. Even George Steinbrenner’s vast wealth could not make the New York Yankees a winner every year. What chance did a mere mayor have?

In the spring of 1950, the St. Louis Cardinals, the parent of our local minor league team, selected a group of their young players and assigned them to play at Southside Park in Winston-Salem. They were not a particularly remarkable group. Only a few of them would ever play a single game in the major leagues.

But under the guidance of veteran minor league manager George Kissell, who also played third base or any other position as needed, a miracle occurred. The hitters were OK. Five of them reached double figures in home runs, a difficult task at the old Southside Park, which had 330 foot foul lines and a 400 foot center field fence. Outfielder Russel Rac led the team with 16 homers, and first baseman Neal Hertwick hit 14.

The defense, especially in the infield, was much better than average and very smart, anchored by Kissell and Earl Weaver, whose playing career was nothing to write home about, but who, as manager of the Baltimore Orioles in later years, would be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

L-R: Weaver, Rac, Tiefenauer

But the pitching staff may have been one of the best ever in the low minors. Future major leaguers Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell and Bobby Tiefenauer were awesome. Mizell went 17-7 and led the Carolina League in ERA at 2.48. Tiefenauer was 16-8 and finished just .03 behind Mizell in ERA. But the stalwart of the team was legendary minor league pitcher Lee Peterson, for many years afterward my insurance agent, who went 21-10.

Left, Lee Peterson in the W-S dugout with long time fan J.A. Brewer. Right: “Vinegar Bend” Mizell.

The team started out winning and just kept on. At the end of the season, their record was 106-47, at that time the record for any team at any level in the modern era of professional baseball. That record would stand until the 1954 Cleveland Indians, with four future Hall of Fame pitchers on their roster, beat out the New York Yankees by eight games in the American League race, going 111-43.

The 1950 Winston-Salem Cardinals, who practically guaranteed Marshall Kurfees’ reelection in 1951. Manager George Kissell is front row, 4th from left, sitting between Earl Weaver and Lee Peterson.

So Marshall delivered on all counts. Name me another politician who has done that.

 Michael C. Hardy, the 2010 North Carolina Historian of the year, will speak on

“Bringing the War Home: The Civil War in Forsyth County.”

 Mr. Hardy is the author of sixteen books.  His latest release is “Civil War Charlotte: Last Capital of the Confederacy”. He is one of North Carolina’s best-known Civil War historians.  Not only does he have numerous books and articles to his credit, but he also writes and edits a blog on North Carolina during the war years.  His latest book, “Civil War Charlotte: Last Capital of the Confederacy” was released by The History Press in June 2012.  He is an eight-time winner of the Willie Parker Peace History Book Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians, and was recently presented the Jefferson Davis Gold Medal by the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  In 2010, the North Carolina Society of Historians honored him as the North Carolina Historian of the Year.  He lives in western North Carolina with his wife Elizabeth and their children, Nathaniel and Isabella.  You can learn more by visiting his web site at http://www.michaelchardy.com/

See us on the web at www.forsythgen.org.   Facebook too!

The State Library and the State Archives of North Carolina have been working together to digitize family history materials from their holdings. Currently available are almost 1500 Bible records from the 18^th through the 20^th centuries, indexed marriage and death announcements from five NC newspapers from 1799-1893, and photographs of the Raleigh Hebrew Cemetery and the Hebrew section of the Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh. To access these great resources and for more information about this project visit their website.

Donate a copy of your family Bible records

The State Archives is looking for family Bible records that include the name of at least one person who was born or lived in North Carolina AND at least one birth or death dating to 1913 or before. If the information in your family Bible meets these criteria simply scan or photocopy the title and copyright pages and the pages containing the family records and send them to the address below. Typing any handwritten information and including it with the scans or photocopies will help to ensure that names are spelled correctly. If you have any questions call 919-807-7310 or email them at digital.info@ncdcr.gov.

REGISTRAR

North Carolina State Archives

MSC 4614

Raleigh, NC 276994614

33rd AAHGS Conference
Hosted by AAHGS – North Carolina Chapter

“Our African & Southern Heritage”

4 -7 October 2012
Embassy Suites Airport Hotel
Greensboro, North Carolina

The Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) will hold its 33rd National Genealogy Conference October 4-7, 2012, at the Embassy Suites Airport Hotel, 204 Centerport Drive, Greensboro, North Carolina.  Participants will have an opportunity to attend a series of workshops and programs in celebration of more than a quarter century of service to the community. Each year family historians and genealogists from California to Florida gather to seek answers to discovering their family roots. The theme, “Our African & Southern Heritage”, endeavors to bring together persons from diverse backgrounds, distant geographic areas, and similar interests to continue this tradition.

Conferees will have the opportunity to meet authors and guests, exchange information and ideas, and network with attendees from around the country. The conference will consist of broad choices of workshops and facilitators with over 30 sessions, focusing on resources, research methods, historic events, and our ancestors who have paved the way. Experienced historians and genealogists will lecture on subjects targeted to the beginner, the advanced, the hobbyist, or the professional researcher. Attendees may shop with vendors and exhibitors, showcasing an assortment of genealogical software, resource books, apparel, and ethnic collectibles.

AAHGS is a non-profit, 501(C)(3) membership organization committed to the preservation of history, genealogy, and the culture of diverse groups of people from local, national, and international communities. The Society stresses the importance of history and genealogy by encouraging active participation in recording research and documenting personal family

http://aahgs.org/conference.htm

Mark your calendars for these interesting documentary films in the Central Library Auditorium, showing soon on Monday nights. This series is possible through the partnership of the Forsyth County Public Library, the State Library of North Carolina, and the Southern Documentary Fund, as a part of the first gentleman Bob Eaves’ focus on North Carolina resources.

February One
September 24 @ 7 pm
The story of the Greensboro Four and the sit-ins at the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, NC. Based largely on first hand accounts and rare archival footage, February One documents one volatile winter in Greensboro that not only challenged public accommodation laws in North Carolina, but served as a blueprint for the wave of non-violent civil rights protest that swept the South and the nation throughout the 1960’s.

Moving Midway
October 1 @ 7 pm
A New York filmmaker returns to North Carolina to participate in the relocation of his family’s ancestral plantation home. As memories are stirred at the loss of this place and way of life, distant relatives are discovered who are descended from the slaves of the plantation, and they have their own memories to share. The mythology of the Southern Plantation as depicted in films – from Gone with the Wind to Roots – is explored and combined with the actual moving of the home to a new location.

Doubletime
October 8 @ 7 pm
Jumping rope has moved off the sidewalks and onto the stage. Doubletime follows two disparate teams of competitive high school jump ropers –one suburban white from North Carolina and the other inner-city black from South Carolina. Both teams are national champions but from different leagues, and they train to compete against each other for the first time. Doubletime culminates with an exciting international competition at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, which features “fusion” routines where Double Dutch is blended with hip-hop dance and music.

She knew who she had bought it from and had been told that it was built in 1926. She wanted to know who the original owner was and who the architect was. I explained that the original owner would probably be easy, but that who the architect was might be impossible.

A quick check of our old city directories gave us the name of the original owner, Dr. John B. Bynum and confirmed the date as 1926. The same directory told us that Dr. Bynum’s offices were at 207-208 Woolworth Building, which wrapped around the O’Hanlon Building on the corner of Fourth and Liberty Streets, and that Dr. Bynum was a member of the county Board of Health.

I knew that the Bynum’s had been a prominent family in the Germanton area in Stokes County, and we were quickly able, through census records, to confirm that Dr. Bynum’s father had been a physician in the Germanton area in the 19th century, but had later moved to Winston. The same census records revealed that young John had worked at a local pharmacy. My immediate guess was that John’s father and his experience at the pharmacy had led him to medical school.

This 1880 census listing is a bit confusing. The number 23 in the third column designates the household, while the numbers 34 and 35 are supposed to designate different family groups. Since I live less than half a block from this location, prior research told me that all of the people listed lived in the home of Dr. V. O. Thompson at the northeast corner of Fifth and Liberty Streets.

Dr. Thompson, his wife Lina, their children Peter, Minnie and Ella, all school children, and Dr. Thompson’s younger sister Anna were the primary residents. But the other residents were not really a family group. Betty Young and Joseph Tyson worked as servants in the Thompson family home. Mary Champion, a 36 year old widow, and her 18 year old daughter Lula are listed as boarders, but quite likely had some family connection with the Thompsons. And, of course, John Bynum was employed by Dr. Thompson at his pharmacy a block away at the northeast corner of Fourth and Liberty Streets.

The 1885 Sanborn Insurance Map above shows us the Thompson house at the corner of Fifth and Liberty Streets. It was a large brick structure, varying between two and three stories depending on the terrain, which has changed little over the years. Later the building became a boarding house and later yet was replaced by the Charles Store, which has since been converted to condos.

On a guess, I checked the 1894-95 Winston city directory, where we found John Bynum already established with a local medical practice at 13 1/2 West Fourth Street, across from the courthouse, and living at 838 Liberty Street with his widowed mother and sister.

The same directory showed that he had already become the official city physician.

The next step was finding Dr. Bynum’s obituary. We have a massive collection of local newspapers on microfilm, spanning the period from 1851 to the present. But they are not indexed, so finding an obituary depends upon knowing the date of death.

We have several resources for doing that, but for those who probably died in the 20th century, the best bet is the vital data records from the county Register of Deeds. Unfortunately, we could not find Dr. Bynum in those records. I explained that the problem is that the vital data only records those who actually died in Forsyth County. If they died while on vacation or visiting friends or on a business trip outside the county, their death will not be in our records.

That happens more often than you might think. R.J. Reynolds’ widow, Katharine Smith Reynolds Johnston, died in New York during child birth. P.H. Hanes brother John Wesley Hanes died in Atlantic City, NJ because he had Bright’s Disease and his local physician had recommended a sojourn on the seashore to possibly relieve the symptoms. Local lawyer H. Montague, who conceived and funded the Montague Medal, awarded to the student who has the highest average during senior year in our public high schools, died on vacation in Florida.

When that happens, our next resort is Ancestry.com. Ancestry is a pay website, around $15/month if you want to access it from home. But the library pays an annual fee of about $3,500 which allows all library card holders in Forsyth County to access Ancestry for free from any library public access computer.

There we found Dr. Bynum’s death certificate, which told us that he had died in Durham, at Duke Hospital on November 2, 1933. Note that the cause of death is listed as a “blow on spine” which caused a thrombosis of the the spinal cord, the initial cause of which, as listed below, was a “fall in bathtub”. Early on, Duke became known as the center of study for neurological problems. As late as the 1980s, most neurosurgeons and neurologists in North Carolina had studied there.

Using that date, we easily found Dr. Bynum’s obituary in the local newspapers, a brief front page story on November 3, followed by a more detailed story on page 2 on November 4, which, among other things, listed the pall bearers and “honorary” pall bearers, a who’s who of local folks that indicated the esteem with which Dr. Bynum was held in the community.

I also checked out our patron’s house using Bing maps birdseye view and recommended some ways in which she might find out who the architect of her house was. Needless to say, she left happy and hopeful for more, promising to return soon.

We had discovered a lot of facts in less than an hour, but I am never satisfied with just facts. History is a story, and I am never happy without one.

Our patron was hardly out of the building before my mind was working on a vague Bynum stirring around in my brain. Where did that come from? What did I know that I could not quite recall having to do with a Dr. Bynum and some ancient story?

It took until the next day, and some tossing and turning overnight, but, as it always does, it eventually popped up.

If you remember the raunchy old song “Salty Dog”, it always ends with the words

“I think we better call this the end of this song ’cause it’s a-getting’ too d–n long. Honey, let me be your salty dog.”

Well, this song has gone on long enough. See the following post for what happens next. It won’t have much to do with our patron’s house, but it will be one of the great joys of living in a historic house, because it will be a story that the owners can tell their dinner guests for years to come.

Before we start, I should point out that there were three main weekly newspapers in the city of Winston in the mid-1890s, all three of which we have on microfilm. The Progressive Farmer took a typical late 19th century populist stance and showed little interest in local affairs that did not have an impact on agriculture. The Western Sentinel, established in the 1850s, had been a supporter of secession and remained a hard core Democratic, therefore conservative, mainstay. All of the issues for the key dates in 1894-95 are missing, so we are left with just one newspaper source, The Union Republican, founded after the Civil War, which had merged in 1892 with the Salem People’s Press, a formerly Whig voice.

The only other sources that we have are a single census entry, scattered minutes of the Winston city commissioners meetings and Bob Neilson’s excellent History of the City of Winston-Salem, based on the commissioners’ minutes and published in 1966 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of Salem. All of these sources show a strong establishment bias. And in those days, little effort was made to separate facts from editorial opinion. That out of the way, let us proceed.

On Thursday, May 23, 1895, the local weekly newspaper the Union Republican published a spectacular piece that included the following phrase “Drs. Gray, Bahnson, Bynum and possibly other physicians were summoned , the wounds were examined and probed, and all that medical skill could do was exerted…”

The date is Saturday, May 18, 1895. The scene is a couch in a boarding house at the corner of East Fourth and Church Streets. The best doctors in the towns of Winston and Salem, Henry T. Bahnson, Robah Gray and John B. Bynum, who is the official city physician, are involved in some sort of intensive activity.

What is going on? To answer that, we must travel back a bit in time.

In the 1880 U.S. census, we find an entry for a black couple, Charles Tuttle, 53, and his wife, Margaret, 39, living in the Middle Fork township of Forsyth County, just northeast of Winston. Charles is listed as a farmer and Margaret as “keeping house”. They had, at the time, seven children living at home, ranging in age from 17 to 3. One of the children, Walter, aged twelve, was already working in a Winston tobacco factory. He had a younger brother, Arthur, aged five. Within a few years, Arthur would join his older brother as a laborer in Winston.

In July, 1894, there was some sort of disturbance in downtown Winston. Walter Tuttle, 26, got into a shoving match with a white man named John Bradford. Bradford had served two terms as Winston chief of police, from 1886-1887 and 1889-1894. During his second term, he had been disciplined twice, once for failing to control a drunken officer and once for failing to pay debts in a timely manner. In the first instance, Chief Bradford was also accused by witnesses of being drunk himself, but the commissioners decided that that charge was unfounded.

Winston police department, 1893. Chief Bradford is seated to the right. Next to him is Jesse C. Bessent, the tax policeman and the commander of the local militia, the Forsyth Rifles. Standing, 2nd from the left, is police officer Michael Mordecai Vickers. At the moment, we do not know who the others are, but one of them is certainly J.R. Hasten.

••••••

During this period, chiefs of police and the policemen themselves were elected twice a year by the city commissioners. It is not clear what prompted the change, but in March, 1894, the commissioners elected J.M. Willson to be chief, and did not include Bradford among the regular policemen, so he was essentially dismissed from the force.

Winston police force, 1894, on the steps of the Winston Town Hall. In the back row are the policemen, in no particular order, M.M. Vickers, J.J. Adams, J.J. Cofer, J.T. Thompson, J.R. Hasten and A.A. Dean. In the front row is Chief Willson, flanked by three men in straw hats who some have speculated might be the police commission, but the man on the chief’s right is clearly Jesse Bessent, who was not a member of the police commission. The others may be S.J. Lamb, the sanitary policeman and R.H. Hensley, whose main job was guarding any prisoners in the calaboose. At the left, brandishing a billy stick, is the photographer, Tom Hege, who may have used a remote device or timer to take the picture. The policemen were required to furnish their own uniforms from their $45/month salaries, but in early 1894 the city commissioners agreed to buy the policemen “nice new hats”, which apparently resembled London “bobby” hats.

••••••

A few days after the July incident, Tuttle was hailed into municipal court, found guilty of assault and fined by the mayor, Eugene E. Gray, the son of one of Winston’s founders and a well known local lawyer. Tuttle told the mayor that he did not have the amount of the fine at the moment, but he could produce the money if he was allowed to go and ask his employer, two blocks away, for an advance on his wages.

The mayor agreed and appointed a local police officer, J.R. Hasten, to accompany him. The two walked to Tuttle’s employer’s, tobacco manufacturer T.L. Vaughn, at the corner of Fifth and Trade Streets. For reasons unbeknownst, Tuttle’s employer refused to advance him the money, which meant that he would go to the chain gang.

As Tuttle and Hasten were leaving to return to the Town Hall, Tuttle made a break for freedom. According to Hasten, when he tried to grab Tuttle, Tuttle reached for Hasten’s gun and then his billy stick. Hasten drew his gun and fired, hitting Tuttle just above the right hip. Tuttle died the next day.

The probable route followed by Walter Tuttle and policeman J.R. Hasten from the Town Hall to T.L. Vaughn’s tobacco factory.

••••••

In the aftermath, the mayor declared Hasten’s action justified. But witnesses at the scene, both white and black, disagreed. They said that Tuttle made no attempt to grab Hasten’s gun, that he simply ran and that Hasten drew and fired, hitting Tuttle in the side, just above the right buttock. They said that Tuttle staggered on for several more steps before falling to the ground. And they said that Hasten followed, continuing to fire, even after Tuttle was on the ground.

Of course, that came to nothing. The coroner quickly found the cause of death to be justifiable homicide. And despite the fact that Tuttle’s parents were still living just a few miles from the Town Hall, Tuttlle’s body was turned over to the only black undertaker in town and quickly buried at the county’s potters field near what is now Smith Reynolds Airport.

But there was apparently grumbling in the black community that yet another white man had gotten away with murdering yet another black man. Not that Tuttle, nor his younger brother Arthur, were well beloved in either the white or black community. According to the newspaper account, they were known as gun toting drinkers and scrappers, constantly at odds with the law. So that was the end of that, or so it seemed.

In those days, the county superior court met once a month. On the first day, a grand jury was empaneled to consider possible indictments to be heard later in the week. Most months, those indictments plus any other cases already scheduled were disposed of by the end of the week, although some of the more complicated cases were held over to the next session.

In March, 1895, the grand jury summoned some of the witnesses who had watched the Walter Tuttle incident nine months before. Their testimony must have been pretty powerful, because, for the first time in the history of the town of Winston, a white police officer was indicted by an all white grand jury for murdering a black man.

The case was held over to the May session. Hasten was arrested, posted bail and went back to work as a policeman.

His trial began on Friday, May 17. On Saturday, May 18, an all white jury found Hasten “not guilty” of murder.

Shortly after six o’clock that afternoon, Winston policeman Michael M. Vickers was returning to the Town Hall after escorting a prisoner to the jail less than a block away. As always on a Saturday afternoon, there was a considerable crowd of people on the sidewalk and the street in front of the Town Hall. Vickers ordered the people gathered there to disperse.

According to the newspaper accounts, all moved away except for one man, Arthur Tuttle, 19, the younger brother of Walter Tuttle. The newspaper reported that Tuttle said “I will move when I feel like it.” The newspaper reporter tells us that Vickers then pushed Tuttle, whereupon Tuttle took a swing at Vickers. Another policeman, A. A. Dean, happened to be nearby and came to the aid of his fellow officer and a scuffle ensued.

Tuttle is described as “small, but athletic, and very strong.” Tuttle tripped Vickers, who arose and went after Tuttle again. Tuttle struck Vickers in the face and Vickers fell for a second time. Officer Dean then moved in, wielding his billy stick against Tuttle, but as Vickers rose again, Tuttle drew an American Bulldog .38 pistol and shot Vickers twice, once in the neck and once in the side.

American Bulldog pistol manufactured in the mid 1890s by Iver Johnson. It was made in several models, from a small frame .22 caliber to a large frame .44 caliber. The newspaper report says that it was a .38 caliber, which is unlikely, because that would have been a large frame model. It is more likely that it was a .32 caliber medium frame model with a short 2.5″ barrel, which was considered a “pocket pistol”. All Iver Johnson pistols were cheaply made, the “Saturday night specials” of their time, often called “suicide specials” because they sometimes exploded in their owner’s hands.

••••••

Vickers went down and stayed down. Two other men, Deputy Sheriff Frank Martin and Jerry Respass, a superintendent at the city water works, then overpowered Tuttle before he could fire again.

Tuttle was hustled into the Town Hall and locked in the small calaboose. Vickers was carried into the police offices of the Town Hall. Once the seriousness of his wounds was realized, he was carried to the back of the building and across Church Street to a boarding house operated by Mrs. Nannie Rierson and placed on a couch there.

Doctors Henry T. Bahnson, Robah Gray and John B. Bynum, who was the city physician, arrived shortly. After examining the patient and probing the wounds, they realized that there was nothing that they could do. Policeman Vickers wife soon arrived and succumbed to hysteria. She was described by the reporter as “frail and delicate” and for some time it was feared that she might die from stress.

Vickers died on Sunday morning. He was a Mason, so the members of the Masonic Lodge turned out for his funeral in full regalia. A fund was begun to support Vickers’ wife and the city aldermen agreed to continue his salary for several months on her accord. They also agreed to employ her eldest son in a city job. Eventually they put Vickers’ widow on the payroll at half wages for over a year. And they voted to compensate the doctors for their work, $50 to be split among them. That might not sound like much, but in 1895 you could get a steak and oyster dinner at one of the best restaurants for $1.50.

Meanwhile, fearing that Tuttle might become the object of mob violence, Sheriff R.M. McArthur had Tuttle transferred by train to the Guilford County jail on Monday. But Guilford County sheriff Joseph Hoskins was not comfortable with that arrangement. The 1890s were known as the time of a lynching a week in the South. And there had been cases in which lynch mobs had ridden the train to nearby towns, taken the prisoner back on the train and lynched them. So Sheriff Hoskins petitioned the local Judge Bryan to have him transferred again to the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, which was done. And there he remained until his trial date came up in early August.

Before 1894, North Carolina law regarding murder was pretty straightforward. If you killed somebody, unless you were a female, you were almost certain to be hanged. But in 1894 the state legislature added gradations. First degree murder still brought an automatic death sentence. But Arthur Tuttle was to be tried for second degree murder, which carried a maximum sentence of thirty years. That increased the chances of a lynching.

On the Sunday before his trial, with Arthur Tuttle back in the Forsyth County jail, rumors began circulating at the black churches that a lynching was being planned. So around 9:30 that night, about twenty young black men grabbed their shotguns, most loaded with bird shot for hunting, and went down and surrounded the jail. Mayor Gray appealed to them to disperse, to no avail.

Sheriff McArthur soon arrived from his livery stable a couple of blocks away on Church Street. He asked the young men to disperse and promised that Tuttle was safe in his jail. But the young men had heard that one before, so weren’t buying it. Other dignitaries, including Cyrus Watson and John Cameron Buxton, Winston’s preeminent lawyers, and Judge Brown, who would be hearing Tuttle’s case, were summoned to address the crowd.

All the time, more and more black citizens were joining the original group of young men. The Union Republican later claimed that the “mob” eventually grew to “several hundred”, which is unlikely. Sketchy articles appearing in newspapers across the country to as far away as the Deseret News in Salt Lake City indicate that the Union Republican was exaggerating.

At any rate, the mayor eventually summoned the local militia, the Forsyth Rifles, a well trained paramilitary unit. He gave the “mob” a few minutes to disperse. When they showed no inclination to do so, the Rifles were ordered to take aim. At this point, according to the newspaper, some of the young black men began firing their shotguns at the militia. At that, the militia were ordered to “fire to hit”, which they did. The “mob” ran for their lives.

Forsyth Riflemen march in a funeral cortege on Main Street near Fourth. The picture was taken prior to 1895, because the street had not yet been paved, which was done in 1895 to accommodate the extension of the streetcar system north on Liberty Street. Brown’s Tobacco Warehouse is at the right. In the center background is the Forsyth County Jail, site of the 1895 “riot”.

••••••

The Union Republican reported that a few militiamen received superficial wounds in the skirmish. As to the “mob”, it was “impossible to learn of the fact”. They did report that the “skirmish” continued until about four in the morning. But no further casualties were reported.

That night, city officials asked the Mecklenburg County militia to lend them their Gatling gun, which was sent to Winston by train the next morning. But by then the incident was over and the Gatling gun was not needed.

For some time, this picture was identified as “possible Charlotte Gatling gun, 1895.” But if you look at the police officer in the background wearing one of the new 1894 Winston police helmets, it becomes much more than possible.

••••••

A few days later, Arthur Tuttle got his day in court. His lawyers argued that he had shot Vickers in self defense, that he was standing on the sidewalk minding his own business when assaulted by Vickers, then attacked by two policemen at once, one wielding a billy club. Some details that had not previously appeared in the newspaper were revealed. Witnesses said that the reason that Vickers had asked the crowd to clear the sidewalk was that a white woman had been struggling to get through the crowd.

It did not take the jury long to find Tuttle guilty as charged.

At his sentencing the next day, the judge took pains to remind him that had he committed his crime a year earlier that he would have encountered the hangman’s noose. He was sentenced to 25 years in the state penitentiary.

Tuttle appealed, but at that point, we lose track of him. I found an Arthur Tuttle in the 1910 census serving time at the Caledonia Farm #2 in Halifax County, but he was far too old to be the Arthur Tuttle of this story.

When you buy a historic house, you are buying a right to an interesting dinner party story or two. But this one kind of got out of hand, didn’t it?

All photos are from the Digital Forsyth Collection.

Maps are based on the 1895 Sanborn Insurance Map, http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/ncmaps/

The Union Republican was scanned from our microfilm

The 1880 Census record was copied from Ancestry.com

The American Bull Dog pistol image was created from two different pictures from the website detailing the history of Iver Johnson pistols

RALEIGH — As part of the popular 2^nd Saturdays program, the State Library’s Government and Heritage Library will host its very first Family History Fair featuring speakers, exhibitors, and genealogy experts, on Saturday, Aug. 11.  The free event, which is also part of the State Library’s ongoing 200th birthday celebration, will be held in the Department of Cultural Resources Building at 109 E. Jones Street, in downtown Raleigh, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Family History Fair will provide information and guidance for experienced family history researchers and beginners alike.  Children can learn what life was life in the 18^th century, and enjoy a special children’s family history activity book.

Nearly 20 exhibitors and activities for all ages will fill the lobby of the building. Speakers and exhibitors include Library staff, genealogy professionals, State Archives staff and local family history organizations. Click here to see a list of exhibitors. For more information call (919) 807-7450.

Featured presentations and activities include:

• “We Have Stories to Tell: Family and Personal Stories” by Sylvia Payne, B.A. Sponsored by the N.C. Humanities Council Road Scholars Program.  11 a.m.

• “Exploring the North Carolina Digital Collections: Tips and Tricks for Genealogists and Historians,” by Lisa Gregory, Digital Collections Manager, Digital Information Management Program, Government and Heritage Library. 1 p.m.

• “Ask the Genealogist!” The N.C. Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists will be available for free 15 minute research consultations. This service is on a first-come first-served basis. There will also be a German translator on hand to help decipher old German handwriting.

• North Carolina Family Records Scanning Station. Visitors can bring North Carolina family Bibles and brief genealogies and letters to be scanned to be part of the N.C. Family Records Online Collection.  For questions, contact Druscie Simpson with the State Archives at (919) 807-7319.

About the State Library of North Carolina

The State Library of North Carolina builds the capacity of all libraries across the state, develops and supports access to genealogy and other specialized collections, and provides resources for the blind and physically handicapped.

About the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources annually serves more than 19 million people through its 27 historic sites, seven history museums, two art museums, the nation’s first state-supported Symphony Orchestra, the State Library, the N.C. Arts Council, and the State Archives. Cultural Resources champions North Carolina’s creative industry, which employs nearly 300,000 North Carolinians and contributes more than $41 billion to the state’s economy. To learn more, visit www.ncdcr.gov.   For more about 2nd Saturdays, and other events, visit www.ncculture.com

By coincidence, I happened to be working on a new blog post about a series of spectacular incidents centering on the Town Hall in 1894-1895, when it was still a brand new building. Since the Journal has limited space to devote to such matters, I thought that I would add some interesting information about the Town Hall. The story of the spectacular incidents will follow in a day or two.

When Forsyth County was created by the state legislature in 1849, the Moravians in Salem sold some acreage north of Salem to the new county commissioners to serve as the county seat. For a while, the new town had no official name. Most people called it either Salem, or the “county town”. But it was soon named for Colonel Joseph Winston, a local hero of the American Revolution.

In 1859, Winston was incorporated as a town, but for its first couple of decades, Winston was not much of anything except a place that served as the site of the county courthouse.

Then, in the early 1870s, a series of events began to transform the town. First, Edward Belo and Henry R. Fries, both Salem men, and others from Winston, worked to establish a spur line of the North Carolina Railroad from Greensboro to Winston and Salem. Then Thomas Jethro Brown, a native of Davie County, established a tobacco sales warehouse at the end of that spur. Then Pleasant Henderson Hanes, another Davie County man, and Richard Joshua Reynolds, from Patrick County, Virginia, opened tobacco factories near Brown’s warehouse.

When Reynolds left Patrick County, he told his father that he was going to open a tobacco factory in Winston, make $80,000 dollars and retire. That later became a family joke.

By the 1880s, Winston had nearly forty tobacco factories and was undergoing a population explosion. The city fathers realized that if Winston was to continue to prosper, certain changes needed to be made. In 1884, they created one of the first free public graded school systems in the South. In 1890, they followed Asheville’s lead and built the second electric street car system in North Carolina. That same year they authorized the construction of a grand new town hall and moved toward a new charter to convert the town into a city.

The new Town Hall, designed by architects Glenn Brown and Willis Hall, and built by the local firm Miller Brothers at the then dizzying cost of $45,000, opened in 1892. It was by far the most spectacular public building ever erected in the area.

The new building was designed as a multi-purpose civic center, housing all of the city government functions in one place, including the mayors office, meeting spaces for the city commissioners, police and fire services, plus the local telephone exchange, a city market and the headquarters of the local militia, the Forsyth Riflemen.

The clocks on the tower marked the time for two generations of city dwellers. If you were out of sight of the tower, the bell rang the time, and was also used to signal community emergencies. The fire department had several horses, two of which were kept at the station at all times. The others were used to do maintenance on the streets and other government infrastructure, but when the bell began pealing, they would race back to the fire department to pull the steam pumper and the ladder wagon to the site of the fire.

The 1895 Sanborn insurance map shows the functions of the various areas of the building. Red indicates brick, yellow wood frame. The two yellow areas running along the left rear of the building were a part of the market, coops for chickens and other fowl and stalls for fresh vegetables.

And this early 1900s photograph shows the building in its context as the center of city life. At the left is the second Forsyth County courthouse, designed by famous southern architect Franklin Pierce Milburn and built in 1897. At the center on the far side of Fourth Street is the Brown, Rogers Hardware Store, later Brown, Rogers, Dixson. The entire top floor was occupied by Brown’s Opera House, which hosted traveling dramatic productions, many famous singers and vaudeville acts, plus local events. The large, low building beyond the Town Hall was Brown’s Tobacco Warehouse, which was also used for events requiring more space than the opera house could provide. Around the time of this picture, the famous evangelist Billy Sunday held a week’s worth of revival meetings in the warehouse, drawing huge crowds. The Winston-Salem Journal printed each of his sermons in full in its pages. In the distance on the left can be seen the steeples of the Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church on Liberty at Sixth Street and the Methodist Protestant Church on the corner of Seventh Street. Those two would later join forces to become Centenary United Methodist Church.

But the 1892 Town Hall had a relatively brief life, because by the time it was finished, economic forces had already made it virtually obsolete. The Hanes and Reynolds tobacco companies were expanding so fast that they could not find enough workers. Reynolds began sending recruiters to the South Carolina cotton fields to bring new workers to the city.

Then, in 1900, the Hanes brothers sold their operation to Reynolds and started over in the textile business, which also began a major expansion. By 1920, Winston-Salem had grown from a sleepy backwater of 1,000 or so residents in 1870 to North Carolina’s largest city, with a population of about 47,000.

It was the “Roaring Twenties”, and lest you misunderstand what that meant, by 1926 Winston’s population had increased another 66% to 71,000, yet had already been surpassed by the roaring growth of Charlotte.

So in the early 1920s, the city fathers began to plan for a new city hall. That was completed in 1926, and a year or so later, demolition of the 1892 City Hall began to make way for a new office building for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, to this day the grandest building constructed in the city.

As reported by the Journal, a Reynolds executive, who was a member of the brand new Calvary Moravian Church on Holly Avenue, purchased the clocks and the bell from the old Town Hall and had them installed in the belfry of the new church. If you are walking downtown near Calvary today, you will hear their bell strike the hour, with a single strike on the half hour. There are actually two bells in the tower. The old Winston Town Hall bell rings the hours every day of the week, and a larger bell is used to summon the congregation on Sunday morning. I thank my much-missed late friend Ham Horton for that information.

There are other downtown churches whose bells strike the hour and the half hour, among them First Baptist on Fifth Street and St. Paul’s Episcopal on Summit Street, but none can match the 120 year old historical sound of Calvary’s ancient town bell. The shape of the bell (yellow arrow) in its original home can be dimly seen in this blowup of the above picture.

There are still about 75,000 US GIs unaccounted for from World War II, about 8,000 from the Korean campaign and around 1,700 from Viet Nam. But human remains from those conflicts and many others are still being found. JPAC, a multi-service US military operation based in Hawaii, is responsible for identifying those remains, and finding and notifying the “primary next of kin” (PNOK).

It’s a complicated business, combining the skills of archaeologists, anthropologists, crime scene technicians, and pathologists with the latest technology in forensics, especially the rapidly developing capabilities of DNA matching. But all of that is useless without the final component, the humble genealogist.

Thus begins the book Hey, America, You’re Roots Are Showing by super genealogist Megan Smolenyak.

Megan Smolenyak, author of Hey America, Your Roots Are Showing

In the first chapter she explains her role at JPAC. The forensics team assembles as much information as they can from the recovery scene, using dog tags (if available…they didn’t even exist before World War I), other artifacts, dental records and military history records. If they can provide some sort of preliminary identification, it becomes Smolenyak’s job to to track down the PNOK or other suitable DNA donor so that DNA matching can be used to make a positive confirmation of the identity of the remains, then notify the PNOK.

She tells fascinating stories, ranging from cases in which a mother was married half a dozen times and moved thrice that many times to an identical twin who served in the same combat zone as his twin, yet never knew that he even had an identical twin until just a few years ago.

But that is only the first 22 pages. There is more, much more.

Such as the story about how she tracked Barak Obama’s mother’s family back to Ireland, making him the 22nd U.S. President with Irish ancestry, the first being Andy Jackson. Or how she tracked Michelle Obama’s roots to the Jumpers, an early 19th century free black family.

Then there are stories about who would be king or queen today if George Washington had decided that he wanted to be royalty (King Spotswood, King Bushrod, Queen Brynda?), the extremely complex and frustrating battles fought by adopted children, the vagaries of Eliis Island and who really changed your ancestors’ names, prostitutes and philandering grandfathers, the FBI and Annie Moore, one of the first known cases of identity theft.

I have two favorites. The first is that of the slave Phillip Reed and how he was bought in Charleston, moved to the District of Columbia and came to cast the statue of Freedom that stands atop the U.S. Capitol.

Freedom, US Capitol, Washington, DC

The other is the almost unbelievable story of serial centenarians, one Hiram Cronk, born in the final years of the 18th century, and his great-granddaughter, Jane, who lived into the 21st century, thus spanning four centuries between them.

The extraordinary part of the story is that Jane was born in 1902 and lived in the same house in as her great-grandfather until his death in 1905, so they actually knew each other. The only U.S. Presidents that their two lifespans did not cover were the first, George Washington, and the current President, Barak Obama.

And if that is not enough for you, Hiram fought in the War of 1812 as a teenager and at his death in 1905 was the last survivor of that war. His body was displayed at the New York City city hall, viewed by an estimated 25,000 people, followed by an enormous parade to his final resting place at Cypress Hills cemetery in Brooklyn.

The event was so big that the Library of Congress dispatched a movie team to record the parade. The unedited film is available online. In it you will see cavalry and infantry troops from the Spanish-American War. And the hearse is escorted by Union veterans of the Civil War.

I occasionally hear people say that they think genealogy is boring. They don’t know what they are talking about.

Coming soon to a library near you.

http://www.wxii12.com/news/local-news/piedmont/Tracing-your-family-tree-free/-/10703612/15504408/-/7dpqvcz/-/index.html

You are invited to participate in our 2012

Yadkin Valley History and Genealogy Fair and Conference

Theme: The Civil War in the Yadkin Valley

Counties of Alexander, Alleghany, Ashe, Caldwell, Davidson, Davie, Forsyth, Iredell, Rockingham, Rowan, Stokes, Surry, Watauga, Wilkes, and Yadkin

Iredell County Agricultural Center

444 Bristol Drive, Statesville, NC 28677

Saturday, August 04, 2011

8:00 am – 5:00 pm

Exhibit and share NEW, UNPUBLISHED information

about your Civil War ancestors.

What did they do during the Civil War (1861-1865)?

Did they fight for the North, South, or not at all (Quakers, pacifists, and others)?

Were they enlisted in the Army or Navy? In which battles did they fight?

Did they die during the War? Did they receive a pension? Where are they buried?

Can you document these things?

Whom did they marry? How did your female ancestors keep the home fires burning?

What did their children do?

Were your ancestors enslaved or free Persons of Color?

Do you have photographs of your Civil War ancestors?

Do you have other information (diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, obituaries)?

Where did they live? Is their home place standing? How did they live and make a living?

How did they react to Stoneman’s Raid (March – April 1865)?

What other stories can you reveal for the first time?

Pre-Registration (includes exhibit table*, lunch, and tour) is

$15; and $20 at the door on August 4.

For a registration form, log onto

rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncyadvha/ or“Yadkin Valley Historical Association” and mail to Cathy Boyer, PO Box 12636, Winston-Salem, NC 27117-2636. Make check payable to YVHA.

*Exhibit tables are limited, so first come, first served.

“Can you help me figure out what this is?” she asked.

It was obviously a photograph of a church building and its congregation, taken sometime in the early to mid 1920s, so I asked her what she knew about the picture.

“Not much,” she replied. “But it is from my father’s things, so it might have something to do with the early history of Calvary Baptist Church.”

Nowadays, many churches have fairly extensive histories on their websites, so I thought we might find a shortcut, maybe even the same picture, at the Calvary website. So we went there and looked, but drew a blank.

Next, we focused on the sign next to the church entrance.

The first word is partially blocked by a gentleman’s head, but there is only one four letter word in modern English that begins with a “W” and ends with “st” and that is “West”. Part of the second word is blocked by another gentleman’s hat, but it appears to begin with an “E”, so we might jump to the conclusion that the second word is “End”, since there were several churches in Winston-Salem in the 1920s with “West End” as part of their names. But the last letter is obviously a “t”, so that cannot be the case. And the spacing clearly indicates that two letters are blocked.

“The only thing that I could think of was ‘West East’ ,” the patron said. “But that doesn’t make sense.”

Indeed! The second row of words is mostly blocked as well. The second word is obviously “Church” and the first word ends in “t”. The spacing there is too short for “Methodist”, so we combed through the city directories from about 1916 through 1926 looking for Baptist church names that might match our picture. No luck.

I knew from previous research that Chatham Mills of Elkin had established a Winston branch around 1900 in the area near the current Hanes Dye & Finishing plant, and that a sort of mill village had grown up there and that sometime around 1915 the Chatham Heights Baptist Church had been founded there. I even knew the name of the minister, L.B. Murray, originally from Elkin, who later moved to Buxton Street.

When I mentioned that, one of our brilliant genealogy volunteers, Reba Jones, said “Why don’t you look at the street directories in that area to see what might be there.”

So we looked at Chatham Road and Buxton Street. Nothing. Then I decided to try Eighth Street, since the later Calvary Church, one of my all-time favorite local church buildings, unfortunately now demolished, stood at the corner of Buxton and Eighth.

And there it was, in the 1922 city directory, “West Eight Street Baptist Church”. Not “Eighth Street”, but “Eight Street”. But still a problem, because the spacing of the second word on the sign allows for only two letters, so if it is meant to be “Eight ” there is not enough room for the three missing letters.

Then I remembered a dramatic episode in my own life. Fifth grade, Ardmore School annual spelling bee. It comes down to an on stage duel between me and a brilliant seventh grade girl. At some point, the principal, Myrtle Butler, decides that everybody needs to get back to class, so we retire to her office where she dictates 100 words which we write down. The first hundred, we both get all correct. A second hundred is dictated. And I lose, because the seventh grader is again perfect and I misspell one word. What is the word? “Eighth”. I spell it “Eigth”. The sign painter at West Eighth Street church made a similar mistake.

So the picture is of the “West Eighth Street Church”, taken at about the time that it was renamed “Calvary Baptist Church”, around 1925.

Clearly, the building was originally a private residence. The original front porch has been enclosed and a bell tower placed on top of the porch.

Once we have established this, it is easy to trace the history of the building located at 521 West Eighth Street. It was constructed around 1911 and originally occupied by John E. Thompson and his wife, Louise. Thompson worked as a night watchman for an unspecified employer.

By 1915, the occupants were Walter and Della Tesh. Walter Tesh worked as a clerk at J.J. Adams & Son, a grocer located at 411 Trade Street, just a few blocks away, which was the original location of H.D. Poindexter’s general merchandise business, built in 1880 and still standing today.

By 1920, the house was occupied by another grocer, G.M. Childress. That same year, it was converted to become the West Eighth Street Baptist Church, Frank L. Fiddler, pastor.

Our patron was delighted at the outcome of this on the spot research. She knows about a centenarian woman who was probably in this picture and may be able to identify some of the other people therein. Stay tuned for more.

The image below is from the 1917 Sanborn Insurance Maps of Winston-Salem and shows the private residence that became Calvary Baptist Church.

Ms. Rachel Hiatt, staff member at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ Family History Center, will present a program on using the improved Family Search Website.

Please join them  on Tuesday, June 5^th at 6:30 PM for refreshments.  The program starts at 7:00 PM.  The meeting is free and open to the public.

FORSYTH COUNTY GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY

For more information about the Society, please see our website at www.forsythgen.org. – Facebook too!

Direct Inquiries to FCGS-Editor@triad.rr.com.

The Society’s regular monthly meeting

 will be held on Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 at 7:00 PM

in the Auditorium of the Main Public Library,

660 W. 5^th St., in Winston-Salem, NC

Please join us on Tuesday, May 1st at 6:30 PM for refreshments.  The program starts at 7:00 PM.  The meeting is free and open to the public.

Our program will be presented by Molly Grogan Rawls, local author, historian and, since 1990, photo archivist for the Forsyth County Public Library, Winston-Salem, NC.  Her topic “Preserving Family Photographs” will include tips on proper handling of photographic prints, slides, and negatives, identification of older types of photographs, and how to secure our photos against deterioration and damage; there will be handouts.

As genealogists, photos are our most cherished links to the past – come learn how to preserve them.

Each day, some new delight emerged from the darkness. A baseball autographed by people that none of us had ever heard of, and a baseball bat to go with it, inexplicably sawed off to billy club length. Copies of pamphlets whose titles did not appear anywhere on WorldCat. A plank with a brass label stating that it was a part of the original deck of the battleship USS North Carolina.

Then one day, our newest colleague, Audra Eagle, said “Come look at this. What do you think it is?”

A good-sized parcel, swathed in brown wrapping paper, lay astride a couple of cardboard boxes. We carefully peeled back the paper to reveal a large brown ledger book.

“What is it?” was the immediate question. Only one way to find out. We opened the book.

Streaming across the top of the double page spread was the legend:

TAX LIST in_____Township, _____ County, for the YEAR 1890.

As you can see, the blanks were not filled in. But a quick scan of the alphabetically listed names in the leftmost column was all that was needed. We were looking at the 1890 Forsyth County, NC tax book.

I checked a few more pages, just to make sure. All of the key names were there: Alspaugh, Atkins, Bahnson, Bitting, Blair, Blum, Brown, Buxton, Carter, Clement, Conrad, Davis, Fogle, Fries, Glenn, Gorrell, Goslen, Gray, Hairston, Hanes, Hege, Hill, Hinshaw, Leinbach, Lemly, Liipfert, Manly, Miller, Montague, Morgan, Nissen, Norfleet, Ogburn, Patterson, Pitts, Reynolds, Shaffner, Spach, Starbuck, Vogler, Watson, Williamson, Wilson.

Each listing showed the address and value of real property; a categorized listing of personal property, including buildings, furniture, clothing, cows, horses, mules, hogs, right down to the last billy goat gruff. For those engaged in agriculture, business or industry, the values were given for the tools of the trade and any inventory on hand. Other special township taxes – school, road, railroad were added. And the poll tax, $2 per person. And a final accounting. The largest tax payer was not Reynolds, Gray or Hanes, as you might expect – it was F&H Fries of Salem.

But the pages were old and fragile. You could see that if you touched them in the wrong place, an invaluable piece of information could crumble forever. So we reluctantly closed the book, rewrapped it and gingerly transported it to a shelf in our newly built locked cage.

For those not actively involved in genealogy and local history, the import of this discovery might be a bit fuzzy. One of the most important historical resources in the United States is the decennial US census, beginning in 1790 and continuing every ten years thereafter. Through some unbelievably careless mistake, the 1890 US census records were consumed by fire, leaving us with an unbearable 20 year gap in the record.

Many communities across the nation have used a variety of local records, including tax books, to partially reconstruct that lost census. Tax books are not a perfect solution, because they do not include the names of children or spouses. In fact, our tax book contains very few listings of women at all. But they are better than nothing. By adding other records such as estates and wills and obituaries we can at least partially make up for the missing census.

We knew the potential of this old tax book, but we also knew that we could not allow anyone, even ourselves, to turn those pages for fear of the damage that would inevitably occur. We also knew what the solution was…digitization. But we had neither the equipment nor the money to make that happen. So the 1890 tax book slumbered peacefully in its new home in the locked cage for a few more months. But it was not forgotten. We talked about it regularly, floating ideas on how we might accomplish its digitization.

A couple of weeks ago, our fearless leader, Billy King, and our newly minted archivist, Melodie Farnham, transported the 1890 tax book to the Wilson Library in Chapel Hill, where Nicholas Graham and his fabulous staff at the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center took over.

On Tuesday, April 3, Nicholas sent us a link to a sample page of the newly digitized tax book. It was, simply, perfect, and we let him know. Two days later, April 5, Nicholas sent us the link to the entire book at its new permanent home on digitalnc.org

So now you can go to the 1890 Forsyth County Tax Book and find out how much F&H Fries paid in taxes that year. And you can check out 46 year old Harvey Alexander, a landowner in Happy Hill, the county’s oldest black neighborhood, and see how many cows and horses and hogs that he owned (no billy goats, gruff or otherwise) and what they were worth tax wise.

For this and much more, give thanks to Jerry Carroll, Audra Eagle Yun, Melodie Farnham, Billy King, Nicholas Graham and his outstanding crew, the unknown donor of the tax book and the taxpayers, then and now, of Forsyth County and the state of North Carolina. Our heritage is alive and well.

Check it out here:

1890 Forsyth County, NC Tax Book

Filed under: Events, Genealogy, Government Information, Great Links & Resources, Local History, New Acquisitions, Our Treasures ]]> http://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/bigger-than-the-1940-census/feed/ 3 Fam 1890TaxBook001.jpg 1890TaxBook002.jpg HarveyEntry001.jpg