TPA UPDATE

April 2008

Contents

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On Lynch's Creek in Franklin County, NC

Reading

"Beaten Paths" Blog

Donor Maps

Last and Next First Sunday Hikes

May First Sunday Hike, King's Highway Park, Hillsborough, Orange County, NC

April First Sunday Hike on Mount Tirzah, Person County

Other Upcoming Events

Irongate Vineyard's Old Fashioned Farm Day

Great Wagon Road Meeting

Roads Scholar Talks

DOGS Meeting

The afternoon of April 3rd, a blustery, rainy day about twenty brave souls met on the banks of a creek in Franklin County to visit a couple of mill sites.  Board member C.L. Gobble arranged the introduction that resulted in this outing. Our hosts were Bob Radcliff, John Rogers, and Bill Spencer.   They all own or control lands blessed with absolutely wonderful artifacts of premodern industry.  Specifically, the Gill Mill and the Whitaker Mill.  Both mill sites had amazing head race remnants and stonework at the Whitaker site is amazing.  At Whitaker Mill the race remains left the impression that there had been a much older facility upgraded in the late 19th century.  The upgrade stonework was something to see.  At Whitaker Mill there was also one of the prettiest waterfalls around.  The darnedest thing was a basin on the creek bank that either pre-dated or post-dated the mill site as it was set on a rock that would have been under the mill pond.  It is a great mystery and if anybody can suggest and explanation of why somebody would mold a two foot wide, four inch deep basin and cut a channel in native rock from the basin to the river we'll all appreciate hearing the theory. 

At t he end of the day we all climbed back up to the ridge top and saw a demonstration of Revolutionary era military hardware and clothing.  Billy Jarrell, renowned musician, raconteur and all round good guy.  If you're ever looking for a down home Saturday evening, spend a little gas driving to Ridgway, NC, in Warren County, just a bit west of Norlina.  There Billy is host at the Ridgway Opry House every Saturday evening from 7-11 when local musicians gather for toe tapping and old harmonies.  Billy makes dulcimers and has apparently devised the event to create more dulcimer players.

After stumbling around along the creek all afternoon many of us went over to Oxford for an evening of yakking about old roads and trails, about the wonderful landmarks of our common past all around us, and how we might protect some of this for our posterity.  Step one, we agreed, was to try to keep the sites we'd visited off the beaten path until some way can be arranged to prevent their being vandalized.  The old mill didn't have a speck of spray paint and nary a drink can anywhere near it.  This is a testimonial to the land owners upstream.  The banks and stream bed were clear of trash; a rare vista in these times.

Lately, in an attempt to reduce the danger of burying the dog under a pile of unread books, we've been processing books at a pretty good clip, some old, some new.  I always try to find the racey bits when reading history as it makes the telling so much more titillating.  The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie filled that role neatly.  This book is a good example of the new social history.  The authors are all of an age to view and review southern history with somewhat modified race, class, and gender lenses, hence the main value of the book.  Their subject is risque but their methods old school; tedious reading of court records.  The essays and papers challenge the reader to reconsider their prejudices.  For some this will be liberating and for others too painful to consider.  Such are the successors and victims of change.  Looking back to some older, less controversial works, Passage to America (1983), by Helen Hill Miller was a pleasant reminder of how good writing style can bring the past to life.  The subtitle, Raleigh's Colonists Take Ship for Roanoke, is a bit indigenously but that story does get told.  Supplement it with William P. Cumming's Mapping the North Carolina Coast: Sixteenth-Century Cartography and the Roanoke Voyages (1988), published by the same authority as Ms Miller's, and  a book equally well written and you will have a pretty fair idea of how folks found Roanoke and the James River.  These are 400th Anniversary books published by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and they may well be available at that department's on-line book store.  Between them they provide a clear sense of the technologies of the day, the ships, navigation, and geographic knowledge available to England's first North American colonial endeavor.  If there are any left in the state store, they are certain to be a good deal and a fun book to have on the shelf.  Finally, not too long ago an old friend, Frederick Merk's History of the Westward Movement (1978)came to hand anew.  It was a pleasure to reread the first hundred pages wherein he tells the story of colonial land use, collisions between peoples on the frontiers and the evolution of an American mentality toward space and place.  Some of it now has an antique ring, and unless you're prepared to indulge some old fashioned attitudes about rights to the land and Native American values don't bother picking it up.  But if you can handle a few insensitive remarks, Merk still has a lot to say.

While visiting with a friend recently he said he intended to write an autobiography but just couldn't find the time.  The recommendation given to him then was to write a series of stories about the length of a good campfire or barroom story and not worry about continuity.  Individual stories are plenty entertaining and generally quite informative, and the big story is just too big to contemplate most the time.  Even as the words went out to the friend it became clear that they were doubly applicable in the case of the TPA. A number of members have asked (not necessarily nagged) about when we'll publish what we're learning.  It is a touchy subject as what we know from what we are learning changes all the time.  The worst part of this business is continuous learning that regularly undermines or negates what we were sure of previously.  Every new awareness cries out for return to all the sites visited previously so we can view them with new eyes.  (This is one of the motives for creating county chapters, to allow for cost effective review of previous work in the light of new information)  Maybe by publishing even tentative knowledge we can get others to revisit the old places and see them anew.  Anyway that's one reason to write a few things down.  Another is that, owing to the uncertainties afflicting us all, it is probably a good idea to publish something about a work-in-progress.  So, "Beaten Paths" the TPA blog has recently seen activity, and we have every intention of adding a blog a week or so.  So, either attach a "feed" to the blog or pop in from time to time to see if there are any of the short bits interesting to you.  Feel free to suggest corrections or enhancements in the comment area as it is a fact that all of us together know a heck of a lot more about this business than the TPA alone can ever know.

We promised personal maps to donors who contributed in excess of $100 in our last fundraising campaign.  The maps are coming but must take a backseat to finishing some contract work.  Please, be patient (we've actually ordered the mailing tubes...progress).  We are reasonably certain you'll see the maps before you see another fundraising plea.

We will meet at Kings Highway Park (KHP) in the Great Bend of the Eno, west of Hillsborough on May 4th from 2PM until 4PM to admire the handiwork of the numerous young people who have worked on this park for five years or more.  KHP is a TPA experiment.  We set out those many years ago to see how inexpensively we could build a public park to protect an historic intersection.  We also want to see how well a historic intersection will stand up to being a public site.  Orange High School students initially mapped the park and inventoried the flora.  Then Cedar Ridge High School students cleared the generations of trash accumulated in the old roadbeds leading to the intersection.  Over the past three years, Boy Scouts striking to become Eagle Scouts have been adding trails, vista points, a picnic area and an entrance kiosk.  This Spring a troop of Adventure Scouts cleaned the trails.  This is truly a product of our children.  Like so much of what we're doing, this park is a work in progress and it may be another year before we can call it finished, but we will hold a grand opening sometime in the next year.  Meanwhile, you can come out and enjoy what has been done and envisage with us what will be done.  You will most likely be impressed with what our much maligned youth have done for the common wealth.

As usual, click on the map to the right for a larger image.  It shows Kings Highway Park.  Future projects are shown in fuchsia. 

April First Sunday Hike on Mount Tirzah in Person County, NC

April 6th turned out to be a perfect day for a walk in the woods and we will hike along the remnants of a packhorse road atop Mount Tirzah in Person County, NC.  This is, we believe, the course of the upper trading path, the high road, so to speak, of the original Petersburg trail. Packhorsemen crossed the Roanoke River north at Moniseep ford, in Brunswick County, VA and proceeded on virtually a straight line to Mount Tirzah, crossing

the Tar River in its higher reaches, a nd crossing the east fork of the Neuse, the Flat River just above its forks.  Judging by the flagging and recent construction we saw, this may be the last time we'll visit this absolutely invaluable relic.For the record, this is the longest stretch of packhorse trail we've found to date and its lose is utterly tragic.  We have offered to pay market value to the owners to no avail.

To the right is a GPS track of the course we took down off of Mount Tirzah to the North Fork of the Flat River, which is the East Fork of the Neuse River.  Much as we wanted to cruise back on a different course, we ran out of time and had retrace our steps to end the hike on time.  The tree shown to the left stands alongside the old roadbed just about eighty yards from the road we cross half way between the summit and the river.  The trunk is probably between five and six feet in diameter.

This just in:

  Steve Rankin, a regular TPA volunteer and an excellent researcher today sent us the following quote on Carolina roads found in Kemp Battle's History of UNC: 

Most of the travel and trade of this section went to Raleigh and during the winter the roads, cut up by the heavily loaded four-horse stages and wagons, became almost impassable.
The notice posted at a Virginia cross-road was not a great exaggeration, if applied as well to some of the pipe-clay stretches between Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

                         The road is not passable,
                         Not even crossable.
                         Who wants to travel,
                         Must bring his own gravel. 

 When the maximum softness and stickiness was reached, in order to get the mail through, the stage would be taken apart, a light box fastened on the front wheels, two seats in front,
one for the driver and the other for a passenger. Four strong horses were attached. These would pull through at the rate of two and a half or three miles an hour. I have seen Governor
Morehead coming from Greensboro by the side of the driver in such weather. A hack driver, bringing four passengers from Raleigh, charged six dollars each, and probably lost money
at that. A student told with Munchausen gravity that in the widow Atkins' lane, about seven miles from Chapel Hill, the mud was so soft that a blanket spread on it sunk at once out of
sight, and so tenacious that a knitting needle could not be pulled out except by an ox team. Seven vehicles are said to have been stuck in that lane at the same time. The difficulty of travel
very seriously interfered with the opening of the winter term. As similarly it prevented the students from visiting other places, it made Chapel Hill all the more a microcosm.

 I met a German pedestrian, who had walked in from the West and was splashed with mud, on his way to Raleigh. I said, "You find the roads muddy." "Ya," said he, "foots is more petter as a poggy on this road,"
i. e., "feet are better than a buggy."

As  a "Road Scholar" for the NC Humanities Council, Tom will go anywhere in the state of North Carolina
to speak on transportation and migration in the colonial backcountry of the southeast.  Paid for with grants from the
Humanities Council (www.nchumanities.org), these talks must be open to the public, so we'll announce here and on
our website (under "Events") whenever we have a talk scheduled.  Kindly notify the hosting organization of your intent
to attend.