I just noticed this piece by Greensboro News and Record columnist Jim Schlosser describing plans to honor Judge David Schenck (1835-1902) with an historical marker.  As Schlosser’s article explains, in the late 19th century Judge Schenck was the spearhead behind development of the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in Greensboro.

But Schlosser barely mentions Schenck’s time in Lincolnton, North Carolina, where he worked as an attorney and later served as a superior court judge.  And he makes no mention at all of Schenck’s role in the Ku Klux Klan during his Lincolnton days. 

His membership in the KKK is documented in testimony Schenck himself gave in December, 1871, before a Congressional body called the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States.  See this testimony in the North Carolina volume of the committee’s work, pp. 362-415. 

If you like, you can also read a brief account of Schenck the Klansman in UNCG professor Allen Trelease’s White Terror:  The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, pp. 197-98.  Viewing him as typical of “[m]en of public standing” who supported the Klan, Trelease quotes from Schenck’s diary (readily available to researchers at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill) stating that it

shows him to be a devoted white supremacist who felt that ”the Anglo-Saxon and the African can never be equals . . . one or the other must fall.”  Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, he equated the Negro with Barbarism and the white race with Civilization.  Fundamentally he approved much of the Klan’s vigilante activity, but feared its consequences in unsettling society. 

Schenck’s descendants continue on in Greensboro and have considerable influence.  Perhaps this explains why his association with the Klan is ignored here and in the local newspaper and his positive role in the development of the Military Park — for which I have no doubt he deserves considerable credit — is played up. 

Nonetheless, given the News and Record’s reputation for liberal journalism, I can only think that Jim Schlosser must be unaware of the Klan-Schenck association. 

Would the city of the Klan-Nazi killings, Truth and Reconciliation, the David Wray mess, and so on, really give old Judge Schenck a pass and let the historical marker go forward if they knew the truth? 

The full-length photograph of Judge Schenck above is from my own collection — picked it up on ebay not too long ago. 

I just recently picked up this E. & H.T. Anthony stereograph of Chimney Rock Mountain.  The image is not that clear, but the monolith can just be glimpsed near the top of the image, at about 11:45 to noon relative to the man (accompanied by a dog) seated on a rock in the Rocky Broad.   

This was obviously taken at the same time as those Anthony stereographs depicted in my Chimney Rock Park and Hickory Nut Gap.  The yellow mount (not pictured of course) suggests a date of anywhere between 1861-70, though I will conservatively date it ca. 1870.    

I’ve been away for a while owing to a very busy last couple of months.

Though Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972) has no particular association with Rutherford County of which I’m aware, I nonetheless think the world of him & thought I would try to get the blog rolling again by dedicating a post to him.  Most people will know Frank Graham – if they know or remember him at all — as North Carolina’s very liberal (for his time, anyway) university system president & as a U.S. Senator.  But to me he was quite simply the greatest North Carolinian of the 20th Century.

I say this for two reasons:  1) as an influential liberal in State politics for his two decades as UNC’s president, he was the moderating force — with his Christian humanism — who helped to pave the way for the civil rights movement & ease North Carolina through a period which was more difficult elsewhere in the South; and 2) he was completely dedicated to service for others — moreso than any other man of whom I can think of in public life in his day or any other. 

As evidence of this latter point, I offer that after he was rejected by his own state in the racially-charged Senate campaign of 1950, Graham threw himself completely into the cause of world peace for which he worked the remainder of his life; & when he died, he did not even own a home (he died in hospital but while residing at his sister’s home in Chapel Hill & I believe his estate amounted to no more than a small insurance policy).  He loved & cared for his fellow man with a genuine, Christ-like compassion.  And when Charles Kuralt called him a saint, he wasn’t kidding.

My God!  If a man like this would just step forward to lead us through the wilderness in these troubled times.  I feel compelled to digress here & ponder the sad lot of leaders that our state finds itself saddled with today (though I do not mean to impune all of them, as I think men like Mike Easley, Richard Moore & Roy Cooper have served us well in recent years).  But “Dr. Frank” — as he was affectionately known — would not approve of such musings, & I would dishonor his memory with further talk of this sort.

I do not really recall how I first became aware of Dr. Frank, but it was only about five or six years ago that I really began to venerate him & feel a special bond.  That was when I found my first Frank Porter Graham letter on eBay. 

I bought the letter for just a few dollars without really knowing its contents (the photo in the dealer’s listing was too small to determine that) & gave it little thought, but oh was I surprised when I received it!  For it turned out that I had bought a letter which Graham had sent to my very own Greensboro apartment complex in 1950!  What do you think are the odds of that?                     

Since then, on my occasional research trips to Chapel Hill, I like to stop by his grave at the cemetery near campus or, if I only drive by, try and catch a glimpse of his tombstone.  I guess in some strange way that leaves me with a comforting sense that his spirit lives on.       

I’ve bought a number of Frank Graham letters and autographs since that first one & just got another the other day.  Pictured above is a letter he wrote to Mrs. James Turner Morehead as President of the University of North Carolina in 1942.  I like this one because he mentions the “open house” during which he regularly entertained students at his home on Sunday evenings.  

Others of the Graham letters I’ve bought (which range in date from about 1935-1967) also reference significant aspects of his biography, such as the movement of the engineering school from UNC-Chapel Hill to North Carolina State, the Morehead Planetarium & the death of his wife.  Sometimes he signs his name “Frank Graham,” but I think more often he uses “Frank P. Graham.”      

If you don’t know about Frank Porter Graham & would like to learn more, there are three books of which I’m aware:  Warren Ashby’s Frank Porter Graham:  A Southern Liberal (1981); Dr. Frank (1993) by John Ehle; and Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina (1990) by Julian Pleasants & Augustus Burns. 

I regret that I’ve never managed to pick up a decent photo of Dr. Frank, but I’m sure you can find one with a google image search.  I especially like the one in which the band leader, Kay Kiser, is jokingly scolding him.  I do, however, have a postcard (see below) of a performance of the famous North Carolina outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony,” in which a balding man can be noted seated in the foreground, bottom righthand corner of the picture.  John Ehle identifies this man as Frank Graham.

Chimney Rock Park was the creation of Henderson County native Jerome Benjamin Freeman (1849-1919), whose gravemarker is seen above. 

This is fairly well known, but the correct date for the Park’s beginnings & Freeman’s part in the Park’s development has been obscured by the greater emphasis placed on the later role of Lucius Morse — who agreed to buy the Park lands from Freeman in late 1902 & eventually brought improvements which established the Park as a major attraction.  However, I believe I finally worked out the correct chronology for Chimney Rock Park’s early development when I was researching my book, Chimney Rock Park and Hickory Nut Gorge.  I give here some more detail on the evidence & logic I followed in ascertaining that 1890 was the year in which the Park began.

Under the Morses, the Park has mantained that it began in 1885 & conflicting dates — variously 1870 & 1880 — have been given for Freeman’s acquistion of the land which included Chimney Rock Mountain.  I felt the date of 1885 was too early, owing to my discovery of an Asheville Citizen article of 24 July 1890 which described Freeman’s purchase of the land & construction of a stairway to the monolith as recent.  Finally, I was able to puzzle out the problem by studying the Jerome B. Freeman deeds at the Rutherford County Courthouse & looking at the “Speculation Land Company” papers at UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Asheville & Appalachian State.

There are two key land documents at the Rutherford County Courthouse which record the creation of the Park — the agreement to purchase the property & the deed conveying it.  First, in a document dated February 3rd, 1894, J.B. Freeman agreed to purchase two tracts on Chimney Rock Mountain — one of 64 acres, the other of 67 — from William Redmond & Francis M. Scott, trustees for the heirs of Isaac Bronson (Rutherford County Deeds, book 67, pp. 206-08).  These were the trustees for the “Speculation Land Company” — this company name seems to have been informal & does not actually appear on the agreement, perhaps creating confusion for anyone else who has attempted to trace the history of the Park.  The surveys for the above noted tracts were made in late August, 1890, but Freeman did not gain clear title to the land until a conveyance made on November 3rd, 1896 (the second key document, which can be found in book 75, pp. 383-85, & which provides the metes & bounds for the two tracts).  

How do I know that these are the correct agreement & deed for the Park lands?  This can be established by comparing the metes & bounds given in the indenture of 1896, noted above, with those of the later deed in which J.B. Freeman indisputably conveyed the Park lands to Lucius Morse & his brothers in 1903 (book 79, pp. 50-54; book 80, pp. 10-13).  The northern courses of the 67 acre tract, noted above, match exactly those of the 64 1/2 acre tract conveyed to the Morses — this is irrefutable evidence that we have here a record of essentially the same land, the difference in acreage being attributable to some slight changes in the southern courses in the survey for the Morses.    

I had hoped my research in the Speculation Land Company papers would lead me also to copies of the original agreements between Freeman & the Speculation Company trustees.  Though I indeed found references to the land, I could not find these agreements & presume they are lost.  But, I did find a brief letter in which Freeman paid $10 bond for the lands to Speculation Land Company agent C.B. Justice, at the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.  This letter, dated 8 March 1890, is reproduced on p. 37 of my Chimney Rock Park and Hickory Nut Gorge.  Though there is an inconsistency in that the letter states Freeman wanted the surveys done in the spring — they were not done until the summer of that year — I think this must be the first documentation of Freeman’s efforts to purchase the Park’s lands.  Though the letter does not mention Chimney Rock, I cannot think that it refers to any other lands, for I have found no evidence that Freeman was engaged with the Speculation Company to buy any other lands at this time; & the $10 bond is evidence that two tracts were involved, as my familiarity with the Speculation Company transactions for this period indicates a bond of $5 per tract was typical.          

Therefore, I would offer the following chronology for the early development of the Park:  Freeman paid his bond for the two tracts in March, 1890, and probably began building the stairway & the trail called the “Appian Way” that spring.  Work was certainly completed by July, when the above noted Asheville Citizen article appeared.  By the time the lands were actually surveyed in late August, 1890, the Park was already underway.  I would add here that further evidence for the Park beginning in 1890 is a Rutherfordton Tribune article of 5 February 1903, concerning the sale of Chimney Rock Park to Morse, in which it was stated that “Twelve years ago, Mr. J.B. Freeman bought this property from what is known as the “‘Speculation Land Company.’”   

It may strike one as strange that Freeman developed the Park before he actually owned it.  But I think we must think of the purchase of a Speculation Land Company tract as being very much analogous to the purchase of a State land grant or a Granville Grant — which will be familiar to those who have done much genealogical research on 18th century (or even 19th century) North Carolina families. 

These land grants worked like this:  first, individuals entered the land they wanted or claimed at a local land office.  Thus, when Freeman paid C.B. Justice, the Speculation Land Company agent, his $10 bond, he was effectively entering or claiming land on Chimney Rock Mountain with only vague boundaries.  It was not unusual for claimed lands to be “improved” before legal title was obtained; thus, Freeman’s stairway to the monolith & the Appian Way were completed well before he actually owned the lands.  

Next, the land office issued a “warrant” to have the land surveyed; thus, C.B. Justice must have contacted a local surveyor (in this case, a man named E.C. Merrill or Merril) to survey the lands to be sold to Freeman.

I do not know why there was so much delay in the agreement & the actual conveyance of the property to Freeman, which would be analogous to the issuing of a land grant patent (in fact, the Speculation Company referred to their lands as patents & their lands on Chimney Rock Mountain were part of patent no. 1061).  The consideration for the land was about $330; perhaps Freeman took his time paying it.  

Of course, I am not immune from mistakes & omissions.  Perhaps others will be able to dig up more information or make corrections.  But I feel confident in saying that 1890 was the year.

Michael Hoke Justice (1844-1919), above, often referred to by the initials “M.H.” & sometimes, less respectfully, as “Mikey,” was one of Rutherford County’s most prominent figures of the late 19th & early 20th centuries — and certainly the County’s most visible politician during the “White Supremacy” campaigns of 1898 & 1900.  If interested in the latter topic, please see my Forest City Lynching of 1900.

As Clarence Griffin tells us, he was a son of Thomas Butler Justice (1813-1892), a surveyor who for many years served as agent for the Speculation Land Company.  During the War, M.H. Justice served in Co. F of the 62nd NC, rising to Lieutenant; Griffin describes his services as “meritorious,” and while this may be so my impression is that this was not a particularly distinguished unit.  At any rate, following the War he read law, was admitted to the bar in 1868 & for many years practiced in Rutherfordton.  An envelope (dated 1894) bearing Justice’s signature from his lawyering days is pictured here. 

His most active years in elective office were as a Democratic State Senator representing Rutherford in the sessions of 1897, 1899 & 1901 — during those years in which the Democratic Party battled back to seize control of the State from Republicans, faltering Populists & their so-called “racial revolution,” which had seen the election & appointment of numerous black office holders. 

Justice, in contrast, was a committed White Supremacist.  In the Summer of 1900, during the campaign for the amendment which disfranchised most of the black voters in the State, Justice introduced soon-to-be Governor Charles B. Aycock before a speach in Rutherfordton & described the campaign as “a fight between the races.”  And when the leader of Wilmington’s Race Riot of 1898, Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, came to speak in Forest City shortly thereafter, Justice said “a negro . . . was never the equal of a white man, and was not as good as any white man, and was not capable of holding any office of any kind at any time. . . .  North Carolina’s whites were the people to rule and they would rule.”              

And yet a description of Justice’s funeral in 1919 affords this interesting racial contrast:  “‘Uncle Simon Wright,’ an aged colored man who has worked around the Justice home for many years was seen standing at the grave after most of the crowd had gone and remarked:  ‘The best friend that I have in this world is gone.’” 

In 1901, Justice was appointed Superior Court Judge & he served in this capacity the remainder of his life.  He was a candidate for Supreme Court Justice in 1904, but was defeated.  Below is a 1903 letter from John C. Mills (another leading man in Rutherfordton & a son of George H. Mills, prominent Confederate veteran), recommending Justice for Supreme Court Justice.     

Above is the gravemarker of William Baxter Jr. (1796-1838), who is buried in the Baxter family cemetery near Caroleen.  William Jr., his son James & niece Carolina, were brutally murdered at a remote location in northwestern South Carolina near the Tugaloo River on September 30th, 1838.  His father, William Baxter Sr. (ca. 1759-1852), a contentious old Irishman with extensive land holdings in Rutherford County, was one of my great-great-great-great grandfathers, and the story of these murders has fascinated me for many years.  An article I wrote about them (which, unfortunately, was very poorly edited & much altered from my original) appeared in Georgia Backroads in 2002.  

The basic jist of the story is this:  William Jr. was a slavetrader & sold a number of slaves for his father in Alabama during 1835-36.  Against his father’s wishes, he took promissory notes for many of the slaves he sold & when it came time to collect he accepted Alabama currency — during this period, State banks issued their own money.   But different states had different exchange rates, and Alabama currency was only worth about 80% of its face value in North Carolina.  This, naturally, had not pleased his father.

William Jr. thus planned another trip in an effort to exchange the Alabama money for specie or North Carolina currency, and in August, 1838, he & his son James left Rutherford County for Georgia.  In Murray County, he visited his brother Andrew & there Andrew’s daughter, Carolina, joined them.  They first visited another brother in Lincoln County, Tennessee, & then proceeded eastwards towards Calhoun, Tennessee, & the Cherokee Country.  The Cherokee removal was then underway, and much currency was changing hands from the sale of stores & supplies.  Here Baxter must have thought he could exchange his Alabama bills & here also he met up with a man from Dahlonega, Georgia, named Harrison W. Riley, who was then transacting business at the Cherokee Agency.

Riley is considered to have been a “founding father” of sorts in Dahlonega.  He was a wealthy businessman, & for many years operated a tavern there called the Eagle Hotel.  But he was also a gambler, fathered numerous illegitimate children by whores & slaves (as many as 100, by one estimate), & had a notoriously violent temper.  Lumpkin County court records show that he was frequently involved in assualt & battery cases, especially around the time of the Baxter murders.

In Calhoun, Riley sold Baxter a slave named either Essex or Isaac.  And here also Riley must have become aware that Baxter had literally thousands of dollars on his person & likely conceived a plan to persuade the slave to murder Baxter and take his money.

When I was researching the Baxter murders some years ago & I began tracing the Riley connection, I also became interested in a state historic site on the Georgia side of the Tugaloo near where the murders took place.  Here a man named Deveroux Jarrett operated a tavern called Travelers’ Rest (which still stands) & he also built a covered bridge which spanned the river.  The bridge, known as Jarrett Bridge, was probably taken down, ca. 1920 — though I’m not really sure of the date.  At any rate, on the South Carolina side of the river you can still find a road identified as Jarrett Bridge Road, and it was along here that the Baxters camped & were murdered on the 30th night of September, 1838.

In the course of my research, a book about Travelers’ Rest led me to check another source which described the tavern, a book called The Slave States of America (pub. 1842), which describes the travels of an Englishman named James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855).  Therein, Buckingham wrote of being a guest at the inn on the night of July 12-13th, 1839.  Little did I expect it, but I was also thrilled to find that Buckingham left a fairly detailed description of the Baxter murders — though neither the names of Baxter nor Riley show up in his account.

As he tells us in Vol. II of his work on pp. 168-69, Buckingham left Travelers’ Rest on the morning of the 13th (some nine months after the murders), crossed the Jarrett Bridge into South Carolina, and then:

“At the distance of a few miles only beyond the river, we were overtaken by a man on horseback, of very common manners and appearance, riding without coat or waistcoat, a dirty trousers and shirt, both of Georgia nankeen, a beard of at least a week’s growth, and a hat in a state of great dilapidation, but who, nevertheless, was the Sheriff of the County [then Pickens County, SC, now Oconee] in which we were travelling.  This fact we learnt from himself, as he pointed out to us, while he rode along by our carriage, a rude gallows, formed by a horizontal beam, resting on the branches of two large adjoining trees, close by the road-side, on which, but a few months since, he had hung, with his own hands, a negro convicted of the murder of three white persons, at a bridge in the neighborhood of the place of execution.  The history of the case was this.  A planter from Carolina, travelling with his son and daughter [sic., actually his niece], had purchased a negro from another white man, and employed him as the driver of his carriage.  The person selling the negro, happened to know that the gentleman purchasing him had a large sum of money with him, to the amount, it is said, of 8,000 dollars, and he conceived the diabolical plan of hiring the slave to murder his new master, and seize his wealth, on condition that the negro should have a share of the plunder, and receive his freedom besides!  The slave readily assented to this, and watching his opportunity while all three of the party were asleep on a sultry afternoon [sic., probably occurred after nightfall], he took a small axe, with which he had provided himself, and beat out the brains, first of the father, and then of the son and daughter.  In these lonely roads, there being no one near, he had time to drag the bodies separately into a neighboring ditch, and there leave them, while he went off with the empty carriage in another direction.  He was soon, however, arrested; the traces of blood on the road having led to the discovery of the bodies and the detection of the murder[s].  When brought to trial, he confessed his guilt, and stated the facts already mentioned, as to the instigation to this act being given by his former master, and the conditions of reward promised him for its commission.  But, by the laws of this and other Slave States, the testimony of a negro cannot be received in any case against a white man; and therefore, though the general opinion was that the negro was speaking truth — as the bad character of his former master rendered it more probable that he should be the instigator of the murder for the sake of the plunder, than that the negro should have committed such a deed on a whole family, in whose service he had been but a few days, — yet a negro’s evidence against a white man cannot be legally taken; so that the instigator escaped all punishment, while the negro was hanged for executing his former master’s wishes.”

Harrison Riley and/or some of his nefarious friends from Dahlonega probably followed the Baxter party as it made its way down the Unicoi Turnpike into Georgia from Calhoun before crossing Jarrett Bridge & entering South Carolina on September 30th.  But it is believed that the horrific murders — William Jr’s head was nearly split in two — were the work of the slave alone, who was later caught in Dahlonega.  In addition to Riley, another white man from Dahlonega named James Thompson was also believed involved in the conspiracy, though, like Riley, he was never brought to justice.        

There are many interesting twists & turns to the story of William Baxter Jr. & the Baxter murders that I will only mention here:  his divorce in Lincoln County, Tennessee, in 1827, from his first wife, Nancy Suttle (also of Rutherford, the daughter of George W. Suttle, who resided in the Suttle Brick House near Harris); accusations that William Baxter Jr. murdered his second wife in 1835; how William Jr’s brother, Andrew Baxter of Murray County, Georgia, was murdered in 1845 by an associate of Harrison Riley’s named Wallace H. Park; and the lawsuits over William Jr’s will which went on for years.      

But, back to the English traveller to whom I am indebted for the above account.  In his time, James Silk Buckingham was well-known in Britain as a journalist, Orientalist & advocate for social reform — thus, his attention to slavery in the United States.  And below is a brief holographic letter of his which I picked up not too long ago — talk about taking association a little too far! 

One of the things I especially like about collecting old paper is to take something with an obscure Rutherford connection and then do some detective work to find out more about it.

I’ve done this recently after purchasing some late 19th & early 20th century postal covers associated with the family of Dr. William Anderson (1847-1931), who was a Blacksburg, South Carolina, physician of some prominence.  Anderson was Rutherford-born and the son of an Irish immigrant (arrived 1841), also named William Anderson (1821-1847).  The father married a Rutherford woman named Margaret Frances Bowman (1822-1906) in 1846, but before his son had even been born he died at or near Big Hill, Kentucky (we know this from the cenotaph for him at the family plot in the Blacksburg Cemetery).

The Bowmans were connected with the prominent Twitty family by marriage & some of them are buried at the Twitty-Miller Cemetery near Mountain Creek, which has always struck me (based on descriptions) as a very interesting family cemetery, though I’ve never taken the time to try and find it.   

After the father’s death, the widow Anderson & her son lived for a while near Mountain Creek, then later in Rutherfordton.  When the War came, young William eventually joined the “Rutherford Rebels,” Co. C of the 34th NC, perhaps as early as 1863, though Weymouth Jordan found no record of him in surviving company records before 14 November 1864.  He is said to have served as a courier for Gen. Cadmus Wilcox.  Anderson’s name can be found on the final roll taken at Appomattox Court House.  Following the War, Anderson studied medicine at the City Medical College in New York before settling in Blacksburg, where he seems to have lived the remainder of his life.

The Anderson family correspondence is at the University of South Carolina.  Though I have not examined them, I imagine the letters of Dr. Anderson’s mother could be mined for information about life in Rutherfordton during the 1870s & ’80s. 

In any event, some of the postal covers associated with the Anderson correspondence recently came up on Ebay & I bought a few (see an example below).  Several included Rutherfordton postmarks & were probably sent by his mother and other family & friends.  His correspondents also included the “fighting bishop,” Ellison Capers (1837-1908), who served as a brigadier general late in the War & later wrote the South Carolina volume for Evans’ Confederate military history.  An added treat for me was that on the back of one of my Capers’ covers there was a brief postscript note initialed “E.C.”    

Among the most prominent of Rutherford County’s 18th Century families was the Hamptons.  The patriarch of the Hampton clan was Col. Andrew Hampton (d. 1805), who settled along Dutchman’s Creek in what was then Anson County about 1754; by 1770 or so we find him with land along Mountain Creek in Old Tryon County.  He later commanded the Rutherford militia at the Battle of King’s Mountain.  Lyman Draper, who wrote the very fine historical monograph, King’s Mountain and It’s Heroes (1881), managed to obtain a few of Col. Hampton’s personal papers during the course of his research.  Contemporary researchers can examine these in the Draper Manuscript Collection – which is readily available on microfilm. 

Col. Hampton’s origins are a matter of considerable debate among genealogists, and I’m not going down that road here.  Suffice to say, there seem to have been two Andrew Hamptons whom researchers have succeeded in “tangling up a bit.”  I myself claim no relationship, but there is a connection insofar as the  first recorded Rutherford County land transaction of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, John Flack (d. 1792), was witnessed by Col. Hampton.

Col. Hampton’s eldest son, Jonathan (1751-1843), was also a conspicuous Whig during the Revolution and only narrowly averted being hanged — thanks, strangly enough, to the intervention of the infamous Col. Patrick Ferguson, whom his father helped defeat shortly thereafter at King’s Mountain (see Draper, pp. 153-56).  His resting place, along with that of his father (the markers are of recent vintage) is located on the family’s old lands near Mountain Creek.   

The image below shows a small portion from a State of North Carolina land grant made to Jonathan Hampton, which I recently picked up at auction in Virginia.  Issued in 1808, it was for 60 acres along Rutherford’s Catheys Creek.  

Charles Robinson

To briefly summarize, Mills Flack was a prominent farmer & a local politician, having served in North Carolina’s so-called Fusion Legislature of 1895 as a Populist.  He lived in a modest house, near the old Cool Springs High School Building & city cemetery, which falls within the town limits of present-day Forest City, and, though I have not attempted to plat it, I know his land extended north past the railroad tracks and the old Cool Springs Baptist Church Cemetery.  Avery Mills was a sharecropper on Flack’s farm.  Flack, Mills & Mills’ wife Raney became involved in a dispute over the right to pick fruit on the farm & this led to an incident in which Mills Flack was shot & killed — apparently in self-defense — by Avery Mills.  Within a few hours, a large mob seized Avery Mills from a wagon near Prison Camp Road & he also was shot to death.  His wife Raney narrowly averted the same fate; she was later found guilty of second-degree murder by a Cleveland County jury, but Governor Charles B. Aycock pardoned her.

A couple of years ago, I was contacted by an African American genealogist with ties to black families in Rutherford County named Charles Robinson.  Charles worked for many years in Washington D.C., and he is now enjoying retirement in Florida.  About 1970 or so, he & his sister interviewed & recorded an oral account from an African American woman named Carpenter which described the lynching.  She lived just back of where Mills Flack’s farm was located. 

Though the tape is now bad & the recovery of the interview may be problematic, Charles became aware that a number of African American families in Rutherford — including families he is related to — left the County after the lynching of Avery Mills.  Some, he found, went to Oklahoma.  The effect of the lynching for Rutherford’s African American community was something which I had not really considered in my research for The Forest City Lynching.  I am glad that Charles has contacted me about this omission & wish him the best of luck in his continuing efforts researching this.  For his part, Charles has been very kind in his praise for my book and has thanked me for at least giving some attention to this incident — which he regards as one of the most important events in the history of the African American community in Rutherford County.

Back in July, I had the honor of meeting with Charles & an African American genealogist from Rutherford named Jimmy Littlejohn.  On Jimmy’s farm, called “the Littlejohn Domain,” not far from the old African American community of “Horn Bottom,” I listened & spoke with Charles & Jimmy for several hours, hearing them talk about family names like Grose, Carpenter & Baxter, which are familiar names from my own research.  Nearby, also, was the old Carpenter house — still well preserved — where Charles had recorded his interview about the lynching many years before.  And, as I noted above, a bit further back toward the town of Forest City was the location of my great-great grandfather’s farm. 

As I listened to Charles & Jimmy, I got to thinking about the name “Horn Bottom,” and I remembered something from the writings of my Grandfather (Ralph R. Flack) about Forest City.  Ralph was fifteen when his Grandfather, Mills Flack, was killed & my Mother said he never spoke about the lynching.  But it’s clear he spent a lot of time at Mills Flack’s house in Forest City while he was growng up. 

And this is what I remembered, which I quote from an unpublished manuscript composed by my Grandfather in 1964:  “The old darkey Levi Hamilton[, who] carried the mail and blew the bugle[,] lived in a small cabin North East from Cool Springs Cemetery on the North side of the Seaboard Railway on a small plot of land joining the M.J. Harrill farm and my grandfather Flack’s farm.  Levi was living in 1897-98 and in the summertime just about dark and when the whipperwills began to sing[,] Levi would give several long blasts on his bugle (we then lived in hearing distance) and to this day I can [remember] that mournful lonesome feeling.  Often on our way to school we would stop and talk to Levi Hamilton, then an old man[, and] not long after he died.”

This is one of the most vivid recollections from my Grandfather’s writings.  And though I did omit the African American response in The Forest City Lynching, I nonetheless had sometimes wondered – even before making Charles Robinson’s acquaintance — if Levi Hamilton had played his horn that sunset evening in August 1900 after two men had been senselessly killed.

Robin Lattimore discusses the start-up of the mill in his recent Old Rutherfordton:  A Hometown History (and apparently at least part of his information was provided by Dorothy Littman Zizes, a descendent of Meyer Levi).  As Lattimore states, Levi came to Rutherfordton from Manning, South Carolina; however, before this the Levis were part of a large Jewish enclave in nearby Sumter.  There you can find the final resting place of Meyer and his family, as well as of Moses Levi (1826-1899), his father, after whom the family’s business in Manning was named.  To the left is a brief note written by Moses Levi (dated 1886) concerning an order of cloth for his General Merchandise store in Manning.

Moses enlisted as a private in the 23rd SC, Co. I, in 1862, and 

saw action in many of the major battles fought by the Army of Northern Virginia — including the Battle of Five Forks on 1 April 1865, where he was captured.  He was subsequently imprisoned for three months at Point Lookout.  Levi then returned to Manning and again prospered.  After his death, his family purchased a school for the town which was named the Moses Levi Memorial Institute; later on, a local library would be named in honor of his wife.  Their tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery at Sumter is pictured to the right.

 

For some years, Levi employed a distant relative of mine, William Edgar Flack.  Flack was the son of James Mills Flack, who operated the Mountain View Inn in Chimney Rock (burned 1956), and “Mills,” as he was known, was a descendant of William Flack, one of two Flack brothers who settled in Rutherford County in the 18th century (I descend from the other one, John Flack).  At any rate, ”Edgar” Flack later on followed his father in the hotel business in the Chimney Rock section — he owned and operated the second Esmeralda Inn for many years — but before that he apprenticed under Meyer Levi.  Pictured on the left is a letter composed by Edgar on the letterhead of Meyer Levi’s store in Rutherfordton — signed with the initials “W.E.F.” below Levi’s name.  The Levi Cotton Mills invoice above identifies Flack as treasurer of that business.  (I write quite a bit about J.M. & Edgar Flack in my recent Chimney Rock Park and Hickory Nut Gorge.)

Below, left, is a Bank of Rutherfordton check (1900) made payable to Meyer Levi which came from the papers of a General Merchandise store in Union Mills called Tate & Deck — as did the Levi Store invoice above.  To the right is Meyer Levi’s endorsement on a Commercial Bank of Rutherfordton check (1903) from the same business’s papers.