June 2008

[Tom has exhausted his allotment of Humanities Council talks for the year and won't be doing any more until November when we start a new year.  If you want to have him speak at an event before then, please, make a proposal directly to the TPA. ]

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[Click any of the images for a larger picture]

They're done!  Mailing will take a few days but we expect to have the long promised donor maps in the mail by the end of this week.  These are maps, generally, showing donor home locations.  We made these for folks who contributed more than one hundred dollars during our letter campaign last winter. 

Interestingly, making them revealed some neat features about colonial town locations.  With few exceptions, colonial towns sit astride high ground.  In the interior they were on ridges.  That is fairly obvious, but what maybe isn't so obvious is that, if the ridge is the location of town center, the streams that produced the ridge are usually city limits.  Charlotte, NC, until more modern times, lay between Sugar Creek and Little Sugar Creek.  Rocky Run, a branch of Walnut Creek and Crabtree Creek were Raleigh, NC's bounds for a long time.  Greenville, SC sits on a ridge bounded by two forks of the Reedy River, and Swearing Creek and Abbots Creek define the limits of Lexington, NC.  Of course, they've all spilled over those boundaries in modern times, probably thanks to low cost culverts and more affluent or compliant taxpayers.  What is the relationship if any of bounding streams and urban development?  Some geographer may be able to answer this question.  Did they actually limit urban growth until technology allowed expansion beyond the water boundaries?

Meanwhile, the maps are done, and we hope the recipients find them as amusing to peruse as they were to make.

Davidson County Report Published

Board member and Davidson County Commissioner, Max Walser called last week to let us know that Davidson County has finished publication of the report the Trading Path Association prepared for them in 2006.  They actually produced a book from our report.  This is the second time a client has published the results of our work (the first being Pace Development's publication called "Lawson"). 

You may recall that this was the TPA's first attempt to define old trade routes by identifying stream crossings.  The effort proved quite successful.  We learned a lot about ferries and fords and bridges, and Davidson County learned a lot about its early history.  One result, we hope, will be acquisition of new park lands focusing on some of the sites we uncovered in our study.  Sometime in the latter half of July we will hold a press conference and show some slides of the mapping we accomplished during this project.

The map to the left shows fords we found and mapped in Davidson County only one of which was previously known.  The truth of the matter is that we failed to map all of Davidson County's fords because there were simply too many to do with the budget allowed.  Since performing this contract we have revised and revised again our cost estimates. One of the things learned in this contract was that it is prudent t quote artifact inventories per mile of stream studied.  We find old roads by finding where they crossed streams (roads went from stream crossing to stream crossing, not from town to town), so stream length is one easy measure of likely cost.  No county will ever again see the costing applied to Davidson.  Oh, well, tuition is never cheap.

Next First Sunday Hike: 

Unless somebody comes up with a plan for a shady, bug-free stroll, we'll suspend hikes until September.  It is just too hard to get folks to come out and stumble around in the woods in the summer.  We're ready, willing, and able to hold a hike if somebody has a suggestion for a hike that won't result in heat prostration or multiple bug bites.  Let us know and we'll advertise your hiking place for July or August.

This is just one of the views that made everybody gasp a little bit on the First of June.

This was a heck of a way to end the season, if end it we did.  I doubt we've ever had a richer venue.  Roadbeds, horse trails, footpaths, chimney falls all over the place, a very large spring box and, finally, a mill site complete with graves.  Click here to see a slide show of the frolic.  Click on the first image and the picture show will begin.

Hill Forest has never surveyed their cultural artifacts so there is no telling what is in that 4.5 square miles of woods.  Considering that we sampled two spots and found them both extraordinary, and that we've noted on our maps a half dozen other spots in the forest that should be productive, this place needs attention.  Near the site of the bridge over the Flat River in the forest there was once a ford.  It rivaled the fords at Bahama, Rougemont, Johnson's Mill and Stagville in importance, but became secondary when wagons and cargoes grew larger in the 18th century.  There is no doubt though that it was a major horse ford in the corridor connecting Moniseep Ford with the Eno River.  It would've carried traffic from Harris Burg, Oxford and Williamsboro, and may have been a high road for the routes to Halifax.

There is no way to estimate the amount of early American information stowed away in the nooks and crannies of this experimental forest.  We now know there is a bunch.  The next step will be to get our government stewards to at least locate the remaining concentrations and get them on a map before somebody accidentally destroys them.

Public Speaking Engagements

June 24th.......Warren County, NC, Ridgeway, the Opry House at 7 PM

    Tom will speak to the kick-off meeting of the Ridgeway Historical Society on June 24th.  This is pretty exciting as Ridgeway sits in a very interesting place, east of Nutbush Creek and west of Warren Plains.  Nutbush Creek, of course was the stream that moved all wagon traffic down to Harris Burg/Oxford.  It formed a deep, steep barrier canyon east of Williamsboro, NC.  Ridgeway itself has the look and feel of a railway town but some sort of hamlet probably predated the railroad on the ridge where Ridgeway sits.  Just a bit under a day away northeast of Ridgeway is Moniseep Ford, the horse ford over the Roanoke River.  A short day's travel to the west is Williamsboro, but Ridgeway doesn't sit on any useful roads to Williamsboro, so it will be fun learning from local experts why the heck Ridgeway is where Ridgeway is.  This will be the beginning of a Warren County Historical Society, and we hope to get the organization launched in a fittingly exciting fashion.  Join us, the meeting is open.  The Oprey House has to be seen to be appreciated.  If you find it for the meeting you'll be able to find it again for the regular Saturday night country entertainment there.

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trm