Yanceyville National Farm Loan Association: 1917

 Yanceyville National Farm Loan Association

A Voice From Caswell County

Mr. Editor: What is known as the Yanceyville National Farm Loan Association, of Caswell County, has been organized. it comprises the following teritory: Yanceyville Township, Locust Hill Township, Pelham Township and Stony [sic] Creek Township.

President, R. A. King

Vice-President, J. H. King

Directors -- W. T. Williamson, Walter King, and Thos. Graves

Loan Committee -- J. W. Williamson, Rufus Graves and Washington Graves

All persons wishing to join the Association in the above territory must apply to S. P. Grogan, Sec. and Treas., Yanceyville, N.C., R.F.D. 1. The Association consists of a $20,000 loan. S. P. G. R. 1, Yanceyville, N.C.

The Union Republican (Winston-Salem, NC), 11 January 1917.

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This was a co-operative organization established by federal statute to provide loans to individual farmers and their families. Under the act, farmers could borrow up to 50% of the value of their land and 20% of the value of their improvements. The minimum loan was $100 and the maximum was $10,000. Loans were paid off through amortization over 5 to 40 years.

Borrowers also purchased shares of the National Farm Loan Association. This meant it served as a cooperative agency that lent money from farmer to farmer.

Womack Home: Christmas In The Old South by Martha Eliza (Marnie) Hatchett Bason

 Christmas In The Old South: Yuletide Season Brings Nostalgic Thoughts Of Joyous Event At Famous Womack Home

By Mrs. Sam Bason [Martha Eliza Hatchett (1896-1993)]

Yanceyville, Dec 14 -- The old farm house sets empty and forlorn by the side of the road as those of us who knew and loved it for so many years pass up and down the highway. The very sight of it brings to us a feeling of nostalgia for the old days, especially at Christmas time!

This old house was the home of one of Caswell County's most illustrious sons. The marker in front of the house reads, "Bartlett Yancey, congressman, state legislator, political leader, died in 1828 at the age of 42. His home and grave are here."

Wonderful Days

Bartlett Yancey's grandson, Thomas Pancoast Womack and wife, Mattie Hatchett Womack, later owned it and lived there. It was during this period that we shall do a bit of reminiscing.

Days of preparation for Christmas Day itself and the holidays themselves were wonderful days at "Summer Hill." "Aunt Mat" and "Uncle Tom" had no children of their own, but there were always some of the many nieces and nephews around. Christmas was the time, and "Summer Hill" the place for gathering of the clan.

For days before Christmas the kitchen with its big wood range was a busy, good smelling place. Aunt Mat and Cousin Jence (our old maid cousin whom we adored) were cooking cakes, pies, cheese straws, beaten biscuits, etc. Often this cooking went on until far into the night. The children shelled walnuts and hickory nuts, grated cheese and coconuts, of course tasting as we went along besides scraping bowls from cake batter and icings -- humming Christmas songs as we worked.

Yanceyville Baptist Church Building Final Services 1950

Final Services Will Be Held Today In Yanceyville's Old Baptist Church; To Give Way To Modern New Building

By Tom Henderson

Yanceyville, Jan. 28 -- The walls of Yanceyville's historic Baptist Church will echo some weepings and wailings, along with paeans of thanksgiving, Sunday morning when the pulpit is preached from for the last time and the doors officially locked, preparatory to tearing down the old building and breaking ground for the new, whose architectural magnificence and magnitude will more fittingly eulogize the living God and more lovingly express the denominational loyalties of a growing membership.

Perhaps those who are yet unrelentingly loyal to the ancient landmark, satisfied with its size and imposingness and loath to see it razed will find some consolation in the knowledge that the costlier edifice will arise in the same setting of the grove of oak and hickory donated by Thomas Graves in the long ago.

Many Noted Sons

Through the years this church has been the home-base shrine of the Kerrs, Poteats, the Graves and the Yanceys. From the portals have gone out into state and national life many who have become eminent in the professions of life. Senator Bartlett Yancey, Dr. Edwin McNeill Poteat, Dr. William Louis Poteat, Miss Ida Poteat, Judge John Kerr and Representative John Hosea Kerr, to particularize, learned much of their Bible beliefs from the teachings here.

It is no reflection on either the Primitive or the Missionary Baptists to tell that the founding fathers of the Yanceyville church were mostly Primitive Baptists who had pulled out of the Country Line Church, whose foundation rocks are yet to be found on this side of the creek near the nascent mill site of the late William Graves, now in the possession of the heirs of the late Billie Martin, an ardent and orthodox Primitive Baptist.

The late Dr. Billie Poteat once "commissioned" this humble scribbler to "search the records and find out the historical facts incident to the splitting-off of the Missionary church from the Primitive." Unfortunately, these irreplaceable records have either gone up in smoke or "gone with the wind."

Caswell County Visual Artists

Caswell County Visual Artists*

Cadmus, Shirley

Compton, Nancy Jean Poteat (1934-2023)

Ellison, Mary Elizabeth Moorefield

Gatewood, Maud Florance (1934-2004)

"Blue Lady" by Maud Florance Gatewood (1986)

Guthrie, Charles Edward, Jr. (1942-2018)

Rawi, Sayed Hussein (1954-2008)

Roberts, William Anderson (1837-1900)

Shell, James Allison, Jr. (1944-2019)

Smith, Yancey Gwendolyn Moorefield

Thomas, Willie Carolyn Ellerbe (1925-2004)

Watlington, Russell Carter

Williams, Benjamin Forrest, Jr. (1925-2017)

Williams, Margaret Ann Click (1930-2017)

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*Caswell County natives and those associated with Caswell County.

Caswell County Historical Association and M. Q. Plumblee Recognized 1980

 "The Caswell County Historical Association will receive an Award of Merit for a record of outstanding accomplishment in the areas of local historical publication, documentation and preservation.

"The award carries a special commendation for M. Q. Plumblee, its president during the six years in which the association has sponsored two acclaimed publications -- William S. Powell's When the Past Refused to Die and Ruth Little-Stoke's An Inventory of Historic Architecture of Caswell County.

Both books were done by scholars with funding from the association. The Powell book is now in its second printing.

The association helped sponsor the first county-wide historical survey in the state, and a considerable number of county properties have been placed on the National Register of Historical Places.

Plumblee, a retired school principal, is cited for his "quiet but determined leadership" which prodded the association into a series of successful ventures, the most recent being the establishment of a museum in the historic courthouse.

By Dr. H. G. Jones (For The Associated Press). Published in the Durham Sun (Durham, NC), 20 November 1980.

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Millard Quentin Plumblee (1906-1987)

Click image to see a larger version.

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Dr. H. G. Jones

Stories from the Smith-McDowell House (Asheville, NC)

 Stories from the Smith-McDowell House

In 2021, this immersive exhibit was on display in recreated rooms throughout the 1840s Smith-McDowell House and on its grounds.

In this virtual version, you can view the halls, stairwells, rooms, and grounds, and meet many of the people who walked these same pathways over a century ago and whose stories represent a microcosm of the history of Western North Carolina.

Stories from the Smith-McDowell House

Welcome 

Just a few miles north of George Vanderbilt's grand Biltmore Estate is a different kind of mansion–one that was nearly 50 years old when Vanderbilt's crew began construction in 1895. This house is now home to the Western North Carolina Historical Association.

In the 1840s, James McConnell Smith, who was rumored to be the first white child born west of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, broke ground on a large brick country house on his property overlooking the confluence of the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers–just one tract of the more than 30,000 acres in the county he would eventually own.

Smith paid few people to build his house or run his many businesses. Rather he purchased people, whom he would enslave, to perform the work. By the 1840s, when this house was being constructed, Smith held at least 70 people captive.

Once the house was complete, the Smiths used the property as a vacation destination from their main residence in Asheville, about two miles away. The house only became a full-time residence for a family when James's daughter, Sarah, and her husband, William McDowell, purchased the house at auction in 1857 from her brother's estate. The McDowells continued to hold people captive on the property, which contained numerous outbuildings, including at least six "slave houses," until April 1865 when freedom finally came to people enslaved in Asheville.

The McDowells lived in the house until 1881, when, in debt after the Civil War, they sold the property. From that date on, the house saw a rotating series of occupants resulting in periods of grand renovations and serious neglect, that have added new chapters to the history that it holds.

Photograph: The McDowell Family outside their family home, 1875.

Yanceyville Telephone System: 1936

 Did Yanceyville have "dial system" telephone service before Danville?

Rise in Number of Telephones Business Index

Next to Postoffice receipts as an index to community business conditions the telephone company's volume of business is regarded as important. J. M. H. Morgan, local manager for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone company reports that 60 new telephones have been put in since the first of the year bringing the total number in Danville up to 5,196.

Of interest here is the fact that telephones in Yanceyville, NC, are being run directly from the Danville exchange through the dial system and without the necessity of going through an exchange at Yanceyville.

But officials of the company have stated that this does not mean the adoption of the dial system in Danville at any time in the immediate future. The Yanceyville situation was found to be more economically administered by installing the dialing system insofar as it relates to the telephones in the Caswell County seat.

The Bee (Danville, VA), 18 June 1936.