Blue Highways: Franklinville, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Something spooky in the dark night bringing thoughts of death and demise?  In this post we take a scary walk in the woods with William Least Heat-Moon while he looks for...wait for it...a grave!  If you want to see where this creepy perambulation takes place, click on the map.  And feel free to comment, suggest or otherwise add your thoughts to this and any post you read on this site.  If you like it and want to share it, feel free to add our link to your own site or share us through your favorite social network.

Book Quote

"The smell in the pines was sweet, the spring peepers sang, and the trail over the first hill was easy.  Whippoorwills ceaselessly cut sharp calls against the early dark, and a screech owl shivered the night.  Then the trail disappeared in wiry brush.  I began imagining flared nostrils and eyed, coiled things.  Trying to step over whatever lay waiting, I took longer strides.  Suddenly the woods went silent as if something had muffled it.  I kept thinking about turning back, but the sense that the grave was just over the next hill drew me in deeper.  Springs trickled to the lake and turned bosky coves to mud and filled the air with a rank, pungent odor.  I had to walk around the water, then around the mud - three hundred yards to cross a twenty-foot inlet.  Something heavy and running from me mashed off through the brush.

"When I was a boy, my mother would try to show the reality of danger by making up newspaper headlines that described the outcome of foolhardy activity.  I could hear her:  REMAINS OF LONE HIKER FOUND.  She would give details from the story:  "...only the canteen was not eaten."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 3

Old mill in Franklinville, North Carolina

Franklinville, North Carolina

Walking through the woods as evening comes in brings up many memories for me.  If you couple it with searching for a grave, well, is it any wonder that LHM started seeing and hearing things in the dark?  While I touched on this a while back, when we were reading about LHM was driving through Tennessee, I would like to explore it some more.

The passage I quote above reminds me of walking in the woods both in my rural home in Northern California and at some property we use for a summer vacation place in a remote valley in the Coast Range about 35 miles from my house.  When I was a teenager one of the main ways I could bond with my father, who otherwise was both an alcoholic AND a workaholic, was by going hunting with him.  Our epic hunts often started about 3 or 4 a.m. and we walked sometimes 15 miles through the hills and mountains looking for a buck with 2 points or more.  Our more sedate hunts often took place in the evenings where we would leave at 3 or 4 p.m. and stay closer to our cabin, arriving back anywhere between 7 and 9 p.m.

I often noticed the difference in the types of darkness that I experienced while on these hunts.  The hunts in the early morning were much less creepy than those in the evening.  I believe it was simply perception and perspective.  In the early morning, the mind is set upon the coming of the new day.  I noticed the sky getting lighter and lighter as we traversed miles.  The darkness was more still, as if at 4 a.m. even the scary things had gone to sleep.  There was almost a magical quality to the air and the light, and as morning came and my eyes slowly adjusted to the increasing light, it seemed like the world was being born anew.  Even things that I saw at other times of the day seemed suffused with a wondrous newness.

In the evening, however, it could be downright scary.  Again, I think perspective played a part.  The light would slowly grow more dim, and as the sun set behind the mountains the shadows got thicker and the air seemed to crowd in closer.  As the light faded, things that were non-threatening during the day suddenly became things to fear.  Is that a bear standing by the side of the trail up ahead?  No, it's a burned out stump that looked like a bear from a distance.  Sounds magnified.  The noise of the evening insects picked up, and would provide some comfort, until all of a sudden they would completely stop and you wondered whether it was you or something else passing that caused them to go silent.  Distances seemed to lengthen, and a stretch of logging road or trail that seemed to pass by at an instant when we started our hunt seemed to take twice as long to traverse coming home.  Sometimes, especially as I got older and went out more often alone, I often would finish my hunts almost at a run, taking solace that there were the railroad tracks and around the next bend was our cabin and a warm fire.

I suppose there were dangers.  Mountain lions could be a menace, and an angry bear would also be a terrible thing to encounter.  But I never encountered either while hunting.  And I never worried about any dangers in the daytime when I was bird-dogging for my dad, high upon the hillside, tramping through the brush.  But at night, beyond the comforting arc of light where darkness got thick, my fears lay out there waiting.  That's all they were, - fears - but they felt real all the same.  LHM added the additional spooky element of looking for a grave, and reading further along this passage, one finds that he relates a murder story involving a young woman accidentally beating her baby to death, and the bloody sheet left hanging on a tree.  I'm sure he was thinking of ghosts and shades of ancestors past that roamed the dark woods.  In any case, his words remind me that most of us share those fears of things in the dark in unfamiliar places.

If you want to know more about Franklinville

There isn't really much to give you.  It's a small place.

Town of Franklinville
Wikipedia: Franklinville

Next up: Siler City, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Ramseur, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapSorry about the long time between posts.  I have been out at a hospital in Sebastopol, California tending to my mother who just had two major back surgeries.  I'm supposed to go back home and get back into my routine on Sunday.  But we can't leave William Least Heat-Moon hanging, so here's a post for you before the weekend.  Comments and suggestions welcome!

Book Quote

"The next morning I headed back toward Asheboro, past the roads to Snow Camp and Silk Hope, over the Haw River, into pine and deciduous hills of red soil, into Randolph County, past crumbling stone milldams, through fields of winter wheat.  Ramseur, a nineteenth-century cotton-mill village secluded in the valley of the Deep River, was the first town in the county I came to."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 1

Ramseur, North Carolina

Ramseur, North Carolina

Reading this passage, and going a little farther into William Least Heat-Moon's account of finding information about his namesake William Trogdon, a miller and patriot killed by Tories on the shores of Sandy Creek in North Carolina.  He discovers that there is a grave of his ancestor that was flooded when the county built a dam.  However, he learns that there is a monument on the shore of the reservoir.  In Ramseur, a local tells him about a guy who knows the area like the back of his hand, and who can help guide him to the spot.

Finding relatives in the mists of history often depends, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, on "the kindness of strangers."  You can't be too proud, and you take up anyone who can help you find a lead.

In 2007, such a lead embarked me on a journey to find more about my birth parents.  I was trying to learn more about my adoptive father's father, and stumbled across an amateur genealogist named Ruth.  Ruth had a similar interest in my family because she was related to a half-sibling of my father's mother.  She had collected some information relating to my father's ancestry, and I discovered it online.  I contacted her, and soon she and I began collaborating in a search.  The search yielded much information about my adoptive grandfather and the family he left behind in Ohio.

However, Ruth, whom I have never met in person, also learned that I was adopted and offered me a deal.  She said she could help me find my birth family if I was willing.  I hadn't really considered it seriously before.  California law does not make it easy for adoptees to find their birth parents.  My wife had her doubts.  "What does Ruth want out of this?" she asked.  It turned out Ruth didn't want anything but the thrill of the search and the possibility of helping me find my own ancestry.

In a long story short, Ruth did what she said she would.  Today, I now know who my birth parents were and some of their story.  I have a newly discovered half-brother and half-sister on my birth mother's side. (I also have some half-siblings on my birth father's side, but their story is painful enough that they don't want to know about me.)  I also have cousins on both sides that want to know more about me.  I have been to the family reunion of my birth mother's kin, and I plan to go up to meet my birth father's only surviving brother, perhaps this year.

All of this wouldn't have happened without the assistance of Ruth.  Our online meeting was the equivalence of William Least Heat-Moon stopping in Ramseur and asking for help from a librarian, who directed him to Madge in the dry goods store, who was out of town but whose employee sent Heat-Moon to the Water Commissioner, who told him to go see Noel Jones in Franklinville (our next stop with Heat-Moon).

The kindness of strangers, whether it is in electronic cyberspace or in Ramseur in rural North Carolina, can lead us back to new understandings of ourselves and the history that made us what we are.

If you want to know more about Ramseur

Millstone Creek Orchards
Town of Ramseur
Wikipedia: Ramseur

Next up: Franklinville, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

As we continue into North Carolina, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) begins a quest to find information on family history, specifically his namesake William Trogdon, a patriot during the Revolutionary War.  We'll go along with him, and I'll look at more of my own search for my family history.  We'll also touch on Chapel Hill and its attractions.  Click on the map to see how far we've come!  Comments from readers are always welcome!

Book Quote

"As soon as I could, I took state 54 to Chapel Hill, a town of trees..."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 1

Downtown Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

The name of Chapel Hill draws up memories for me of watching March Madness college basketball when I was younger.  Every year, it seemed, the University of North Carolina was the team to beat and was in the Final Four.  I would agonize in the days before the shot clock when they got ahead and then put into practice their Four Corners offense, in which they would simply pass the ball around the corners and not take a shot for minutes at a time until the clock ran down.  They were the team I hated to see win.  Nowadays, they still field good teams, but my sports hatred in college basketball has switched to Duke, just down the road.

LHM simply stops in Chapel Hill to find a library to find information on his ancestor.  He describes it as a city of trees, but otherwise does not spend much time there to find out what the city is like or about.  In my search for information on my grandfather, which I started writing about in my last post, I did something similar.  While driving on a business trip from Milwaukee to the East Coast, I made a detour down to Akron, Ohio to see if I could find any information.  I remember it was a dark, rainy day as I found the main public library.  I went to Akron because my grandfather's death certificate said that he was born in Akron, so I tried to look up a birth record.  Unfortunately, I coudn't find one, and later learned that birth records were somewhat sketchy in the era in which my grandfather was born.  If a birth was in a hospital, there was a better chance of finding a birth record.  But if it was at home, there was practically no chance of tracking one down.  I also learned during this time how difficult it was (this was just before the Internet became really popular), to use census records.  They weren't indexed, just "soundex"ed.  In other words, you could find people whose last names began with "h" but they weren't alphabetized.

LHM was looking for information even earlier than I.  The internet was really a future dream at the time.  At least he was looking for someone who was considered a patriot.  If you try to find ordinary people, the run of the mill person who didn't really make a name for him or herself, the opportunities to find information about them were very limited.

Now, genealogical databases are everywhere on the internet, and some are enormous.  The biggest one on the internet is Ancestry.com, which has ties with the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints.  For a subscription, or even for free, you can find information on individuals past and present that past genealogists could only dream about.

I often wonder, now that everything is being digitized, stored on drives and discs, and fully accessible through databases, if anonymity is a thing of the past.  I can look up information about pretty much anyone I want.  Unless they are completely "off the grid," something will turn up.  Sometimes it is helpful information, sometimes embarrassing.  Totally by accident, for instance, as I was doing some research on Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) for my job on the internet, I happened across an arrest report of a person I know.  Should I have known about it?  The fact is that I might have never have learned about it if the internet didn't exist.  In some ways, knowing about the arrest puts the person in a different light for me and brought out an internal response of concern, but my awareness of the situation may be embarrassing to that person.

I'm not sure if access to so much information is a good thing.  I know that when I need such information, it is helpful to have it.  When I don't want the information, or I don't want people knowing mine, it is frightening to know that someone could get information that is embarrassing or inimical to my interests.  But I bet if William Least Heat-Moon had access to such information when he made his Blue Highways trip and stopped at a library in North Carolina town he called a city of trees, he would have probably had an easier time finding information on William Trogdon.

If you want to know more about Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill and Orange County Visitors Bureau
Chapel Hill Magazine Blog
Chapel Hill News and Advocate (newspaper)
Chapel Hill Watch (blog)
Independent Weekly (alternative weekly of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill)
Town of Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Wikipedia: Chapel Hill

Next up:  Ramseur, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAfter a long trip, we leave Tennessee and enter the state that was first in flight.  We are also just over 1000 miles from the start in Columbia, Missouri, and we move from Part 1, in which we were traveling east, to Part 2, in which the road in Blue Highways takes a southeasterly swing.  In this post we'll whip around Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) doesn't have much to say about these two places as he doesn't pass through them on blue highways, but on the hated interstate.  However, he does start thinking about family history.  I will too.  Click on the map to see where these cities are situated.

Book Quote

"Blood.  It came to me that I had been generally retracing the migration of my white-blooded clan from North Carolina to Missouri, the clan of a Lancashireman who settled in the Piedmont in the eighteenth century...

"Highway 421 became I-85 and whipped me around Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  For a few miles I suffered the tyranny of the freeway and watched rear bumpers and truck mudflaps."

Blue Highways:  Part 2, Chapter 1

Downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

This post is ostensibly about Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  Yet, as you may have learned, often my posts are not exactly about the places named.  When I read a book, places and images correspond to images and memories in my own life.  So in a sense, you are reading in this blog what I am thinking as I process those thoughts upon my own reading of Blue Highways.  LHM doesn't really say much about these places, and North Carolina is one of the ten or so states that I have never set foot in, so I don't have any experiences that I can add that would be of any value to you if you want to know more about these places.  I have assembled a few sites below so that you can explore for yourself.

The images that come to mind for me are located in the first part of the quote I cite above.  LHM realizes that he is tracing in reverse the route of his ancestors.  The search for one's roots has become very popular over the past few years, especially with the growth of the internet, which has allowed people to access each other's data and fill in gaps in history that may have existed for years.  Many people have become so good at finding bits of history and genealogical facts that they are almost like amateur family history detectives.

I became an unwitting beneficiary of this phenomena.  I'm going to touch on this story briefly and fill in gaps over the course of the next couple of posts.  The backstory is that I'm adopted, but I was always interested in solving a mystery about my adoptive father's own father.  We never knew much about him, and any records he might have had were lost in a fire.  His sons, my father and his brothers, never really knew much about his life prior to their births.  Their mother died when they were young, so they couldn't learn anything from her.  So, nobody knew where Marion came from, other than back east.

Occasionally, I would put his name into Google to see if anything would pop up.  There were mostly false leads, other people with his name that had no relation to the family.  But one day, about two years ago, I put his name in and got a hit.  Someone, in a genealogical database, had filled in his and his wife's name.  I contacted the person, and because she had an interest she embarked with me on a fact finding mission.  I filled in some gaps for her, and because she was passionate about geneaology, she was able to use those facts to find out more about my grandfather.  We learned that he apparently left a family behind in Ohio, came out to California, and married my grandmother and fathered my father and his brothers.  It was a sad story, because he left a fatherless child, Julian, behind.  I have recently made contact with a set of cousins in Ohio, descendents of Julian, a half-brother that my father and his brothers never knew they had.  Unfortunately, all of the brothers are now dead and never met each other.  But I was able to let my last surviving uncle know about all of this before he died, and my cousin let me know how much he appreciated my efforts to discover family history.

I still don't know what led my grandfather to leave a family, nor why he never told his sons about his past.  It all seems shrouded in mystery and pain and he apparently was not a happy person.  But a recent letter from one of my newly discovered cousins said that she hoped that old family wounds could be healed by this new contact.  I hope so too.

LHM, in his next couple of stops, will discover more about his own family history.  As an adoptee, I never really gave the importance of family history much consideration until recently, because my adopted family's history was never really my own.  I didn't know mine, that is, until I met my genealogical detective friend online.  I'll tell more about that as we move through the next posts.

For more about Winston-Salem and Greensboro, see below.  We're in tobacco country now, so you'll recognize some names.  Winston-Salem is the home of RJ Reynolds Tobacco, creator of some of the most recognizable brands of cigarettes.  Enjoy checking these places out!

Greensboro, North Carolina

If you want to know more about Winston-Salem and Greensboro

Dishing it Out (Winston-Salem food blog)
Downtown Winston-Salem (blog)
Eating Up Greensboro (Greensboro food blog)
Greensboring (blog)
Greensboro Convention and Visitors Bureau
Greensboro News-Record (newspaper)
Life in Forsyth (blog)
Salem College
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Visit Winston-Salem
Wake Forest University
Wikipedia: Greensboro
Wikipedia: Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem (blog)
Winston-Salem Journal (newspaper)
Winston-Salem State University
Yes! Weekly (Greensboro alternative newspaper)

Next up: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Jonesboro (Jonesborough), Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIt's amazing the little facts of history learned when reading this book.  First we learn of a secret Tennessee city.  Now we learn of the lost state of Franklin.  Click on the map thumbnail to see the location of this important town in the establishment of a forgotten American state.

Book Quote

"The 14th state in the Union, the first formed after the original thirteen, was Franklin and its capital Jonesboro....But history is a fickle thing, and now Jonesboro, two centures old, is only the seat of Washington County, which also was once something else - the entire state of Tennessee....

"Main Street in Jonesboro, solid with step-gabled antebellum buildings, ran into a dell to parallel a stream; houses and steeples rose from encircling hills.  After breakfast, I walked snowy Main to the Chester Inn, a wooden building with an arched double gallery, where Andrew Jackson almost got tarred and feathered, for what I don't know.  Charles Dickens spent the night here as did Andrew Johnson, James Polk, and Martin Van Buren (whose autobiography never mentions his wife)."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 19

Jonesborough as William Least-Heat Moon might have walked it

Jonesboro (Jonesborough), Tennessee

Tennessee is full of secrets.  That's the conclusion I'm coming to as we make this last stop in the state with William Least-Heat Moon (LHM).  I know that in the heady days after the Revolutionary War, nothing was completely settled and the United States had some precarious moments.  Lest we think that the new American country was in a love fest with each other and completely united, remember that the new country was rife with divisions.  Slavery was an issue that was beginning to be recognized as a major divide between states.  The new U.S. government, now faced with responsibilities of running a country, had to now impose its own taxes, and taxes were just as popular then as they are now, which is to say not very popular.

The State of Franklin was born out of confusion and frustration with the new federal government of the Thirteen States and anger at the government of North Carolina.  The federal government was deeply in debt, so North Carolina ceded 29 million acres of its territory in what is now Tennessee to the federal government to help out.  The people living in this area were deeply fearful that Congress would become desperate and sell the land to France or Spain.  When Congress didn't act on the North Carolina gift, North Carolina took back its territory a few weeks later.  However, the damage was done, and a group of counties got together and declared self-government.

They named their state Frankland, and petitioned the Congress to grant them statehood.  Seven of the thirteen colonies supported their petition.  However, they needed the support of nine.  The Frankland legislature then changed the name to Franklin, in order to hopefully draw the support of Benjamin Franklin, but this did not work.  North Carolina sent in troops and established a territorial government, and for a time two governments worked independently of each other.  Finally, the arrest of the leader of Franklin, John Sevier, and increasing attacks by Indians on area settlements led to a reunification with North Carolina, who could send troops to aid in defense, and the pardon of Sevier.  North Carolina later ceded the territory again to the U.S. government, and it eventually became the eastern part of Tennessee, of which Sevier was the first governor.

One person of later historical importance born in Franklin while it was a state was pioneer and participant at the Alamo, Davy Crockett.

I find it very interesting that a group of people, right after our country became independent, decided to secede from North Carolina and join the United States in the name of protecting their interests and freedoms.  Lest we think that the fledging U.S. was living high on the euphoria of defeating the British and becoming its own country, it is good to remember that we had our own problems and divisions.  The debt from the war was very high, leaving the new U.S. government in a position of having to impose its own taxes on the citizenry, who just finished fighting a war in part because of taxes.  Taxes were just as popular then as they are today, which is to say not very popular.

Freedom is an ideal with many consequences.  As a professor teaching American government, I constantly lectured on the balancing act between freedom and other ideals, such as order and equality.  The more freedom one wants, the less order can be maintained.  The more freedom one wants, the less equality can be achieved.  The more order one wants, the more freedoms will be taken away.  The more equality one wants, the more freedom is impinged upon.  This is the crux of our political battles today.  American conservatives cry out for more order.  They fund the military to protect the U.S.'s place in the world order.  They decry social freedoms as undermining the moral order.  Liberals demand more equality as the basis of freedoms.  They argue for raising the welfare of the poor and disadvantaged.  They push for equal opportunities for disadvantaged minority populations.  Demands for order and demands for equality both entail government interference in ordinary lives, and curtail freedoms.  Libertarians want to scale government back to its bare essentials, so that freedoms are maximized.  However, a country with many freedoms and little order or equality may lead to class warfare and/or a more dangerous, defend yourself world.  Government does many good things, and provides us with many services and protections that we take for granted.  Thus, maintaining the dream that is the United States of America involves a delicate balancing act.  The State of Franklin could not maintain that balance.  Seceding from North Carolina may have bought them freedom for a time, but they could not maintain order when the US Congress rejected their petition and then Indians began to attack their settlements.  Ultimately, they saw a better mix of freedom and order back under the jurisdiction of North Carolina, and eventually, the State of Tennessee.

The history of Franklin also reminds me of the impermanence of human institutions.  Sometimes this notion can be frightening or depressing.  Franklin didn't last very long, but it is part of a United States that has lasted for about 235 years.  Americans tend to see the United States as a permanent fixture, that we will always be a great nation, but this is not guaranteed.  The entirety of world history indicates that we will wax and wane, and one day disappear.  The Romans had a great empire for nearly 1000 years, yet today their cities are either crumbling away into oblivion or are living museums of impermanence.  In a 1000 years, the United States may not exist anymore, done in by war, pestilence, dwindling natural resources, climate change, or the breakdown of our political system.  Who knows what country or countries, if any, will occupy the geography we now claim as ours?  Perhaps the United States, like Franklin, will be forgotten except by a few - our passage marked by a faded plaque outside a crumbling capitol building in an ancient and deserted city once called Washington.

Yet I also find hope in our impermanence.  The idea that we can leave something that aids or advances humanity, and the potential that our screw-ups will be heeded or perhaps even be fixed after we are gone, makes me believe that there is some sense of cosmic justice.  It's not that what we do now doesn't matter.  It does to us, and perhaps it will to the next generations.  But in the end and on a universal scale, it probably doesn't matter that much, and in the end, as Julian of Norwich once said, all will be well.

If you want to know more about Jonesborough or Franklin

Franklin: The Lost State of America
Historic Jonesborough
History of Western North Carolina: The State of Franklin
Jonesborough Herald and Tribune (newspaper)
Jonesborough Online
State of Franklin History
Town of Jonesborough
Wikipedia: State of Franklin
Wikipedia: Jonesborough

Next up: Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina