Flower Hike February 27th

This will be our first ever "recommended donation" hike.  We'll try to one of these every month.  They will be both purposeful and amusing.  During this hike we will revisit some of the terrain we touched on during our St. Mary's study.  We'll be looking for house sites by looking for bulb patches and other exotic plantings.  We'll also be looking for a reported old school site.  All this will be on Eno River Park land west of Buckquarter Creek (I wonder if that should be Buck Water Ck?).  We found a considerable amount of retaining wall at the west edge of the creek bottom and neighbors assert that once there was a one room school somewhere above the floods in that area.  We will walk the old roadway, on skirmish line, looking for the shoots of daffodils or jonquils, periwinkle, boxwood and other exotica.  These events will have a larger window than our First Sunday Hikes.  On the map to the left, the green dots mark items we found at the tail end of our research.  We'll come to the site from the Holden Mill trail bridge over Buckquarter.

Eno River State Park where we'll meet is in Eastern Orange County, NC, click here for a map.  We'll meet at 1 PM and may stay out until 4 PM. 

The keepers of the Piper House, a restored house on the park property have asked to stop there on our way out for a tour and maybe something to drink.  So, to make that happen we'll come off the trail around 3:30.  The tour of the house is optional but it is a beautiful old house and I'm sure we'll learn a great deal with a brief visit. 

Participants in this hike are asked to consider making a $10 dollar donation to reduce production costs.  Of course all kids participate for free.

March First Sunday Hike to be on Mary's Creek

We'll meet at 5767 Jewell Road in lower Alamance County on March 7th, as usual at 2 PM to visit mill sites and see what may be a portion of the "Lower Trading Path."  Click here to get a map.

There is an outstanding up-thrust of rock in southern Alamance County called the Cane Creek Mountains and Bass Mountain.  The Lower Trading Path passed the south end of Bass Mountain, a major obstacle to east-west travel.  It may w ell be that John Lawson (traveling from southwest to northeast, headed for Petersburg, VA) spotted the Haw River from a rise on one end or the other of this mountain.  We're not sure where he was but he said that toward the end of the day he saw from an eminence, in the distance, the Haw River and continued to that river.  When he got there he nearly drowned as the river was in spate; it w as winter, the water was high, and he had just finished about a ten mile walk.  The next day he gave up on reaching Virginia, but that's another story.  It is possible, though, that t he was on the Lower Trading Path as he moved across what would become Alamance County. 

In the map to the far left we see a late 19th century representation of the area shown to the right in a crop from the 1770 Collet map.  Between the two we have an image of a modern map showin g the are of the up-thrust mountains and the fords.  Note that Marys Creek is one of the more substan ti al creeks tributary to the Haw. (Click on any of these maps to see an enlarged version.)

Between Great Alamance Creek and the Deep River there are a handful of creeks that effectively channel east-west travel.  From north to south they are: Varnels, Marys, and Cane Creeks, and Rocky River.  Each was large enough to present crossing problems.  Coupled with the Cane Creek Mountains Marys Creek, in particular, forced traffic to go either to Saxapahaw or to Cedar Cliffs.  Movement using fords farther upstream on the Haw probably called for passage around the north end of the mountains.

Lawson could have taken either route, north of the mountains or south, but his description of the Haw River where he crossed indicates a crossing at Cedar Cliffs or Saxapahaw.  Farther north.  But smart money would bet on our never really being able to sort out where that young man crossed the Haw.  But he saw it from a hilltop, and the only hills in the neighborhood were the Cane Creek Mountains and Bass Mountain.  Was he to the north or to the south of these obstacles.


The mills we'll visit are on parallel roads trending toward on an axis from northeast to southwest and connect the Marys Creek crossings with the crossings of the Haw at Saxapahaw and at Cedar Cliffs, and facilitating the roads' passage around the south end of Bass Mountain.

It was a brisk, sunny day we spent out at Stagville.  Coming on the heels of a week of storms, though, the bottoms would have daunted any traveler, so we walked around the top of the ridge which is home to Stagville Plantation, a state historic site.  The object was from the hikers' standpoint was to have a good time and the object from the TPA standpoint was to see how much remnant there was of early infrastructurel.  We both exceeded our expectations.  The old site has a lot to offer, and we trust the interpretation of Stagville will benefit from this visit.

To the left is a picture of the beautiful stone work around the family graveyard at Stagville.  You can see some pictures of the hike here.  The were taken by Victor Gordon, a Stagville board member who attend the hike.

Here is a link to some photos we posted at our facebook site.  We found road remnants, daffodils pushig up through the year's accumulation of leaf mold, numerous signs of the complexity of the plantation's  transportation origins, and we ran out of time before we could stumble into the oldest road in the park.

What was High Point called before it was called High Point?

This was a question raised at a presentation to the High Point Museum Guild last week.  It is an interesting and worthy question.  High point received its name from North Carolina railway engineers who found it to be the high point of the new railroad in the 1850s.  Clearly, though, there was a place there before High Point was there.  The ridge on which the town sits is a gathering-point for several transportation ridges, and the peak of the ridge where the city came to be is one day (15 miles) from four or five major colonial eral towns or very early overnighting places including:  New Garden and Climax, Lexington, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro.  What is the earliest name that can be found for that high point that became High Point?

Trading Path Calendar

We've activated a Google Calendar for the TPA.  We will endeavor to keep it up to date and not be too different from the event calendar on our web page.  Our first goal will be to keep you informed of upcoming events.  If you have other information you'd like to see on the calendar, let us know and we'll try to comply.


To initiate or renew your membership in the TPA, we now offer the following three options:

Option 1: You can renew using your credit card via the Triangle Communities Foundation at: www.trianglecf.org

Option 2: You can click the "Donate Now" button on the right side of the screen, and that will take you to PayPal, a secure transaction site.  You'll be asked a few questions to create an account so as to protect your sensitive information, and then you'll be able to donate using a credit card or other vehicle.

Option 3: The membership form can be downloaded from the website and sent in to the address below with your payment.
 
Thanks for your continued support!

So, you want to suggest a First Sunday Hike.....

Please, if you want to suggest a First Sunday Hike, there are a few points to bear in mind that will make preparing the hike a lot easier.  For example:

1. We need to know the names and contact information for all property owners that will be affected,
2. The site needs sufficient parking for a dozen or more cars,
3. The hike needs artifact content, historic merit, something to trigger the hikers' imaginations; we need a description of the site,
4. There needs to be a passable route suitable for hikers of all ages,
5. The route should be less than two miles long, depending on artifact content.  That is, the more there is to see, the shorter should be the hike.
6. The trail head needs to be accessible without heroic driving.

trm