Going Down Home Timeline

May 2018 Third trip Down Home

July 2015 Second trip Down Home

October 2014 First trip Down Home

July 2013 to October 2014 Online research and interviews

July 2013 23andme results received



Monday, May 28, 2018

May 21, 2018: Inner Banks, the South Shore and a Farm in a Forest


On Monday morning, our last day of this trip, we headed west from Manteo toward Creswell. I’d eaten at the Creswell Café in 2015 and had been thinking about their biscuits. But the parking lot of the popular eatery was empty, the one-story pink building abandoned. The café had closed.
 We turned down St. David’s Road and stopped at the historic Saint David’s Episcopal Church and cemetery, once known as Pettigrew’s Chapel. Constructed in 1803 by the Rev. Charles Pettigrew, across the road from his Belgrade Plantation, the chapel is the oldest remaining Episcopal church in the area.

More than two centuries of heat and humidity have been kept at bay, making it possible to maintain the structure and small cemetery, where the surnames of the departed are woven into my family tree: Ainsley, Alexander, Armstrong, Barnes, Bateman, Cahoon, Davenport, Dillon, Furlough, Patrick, Phelps, Sawyer, Spruill, Swain, Tarkenton, Woodley.
We headed east under gloomy skies, hoping to stop at the Spruill Farm Home Place in Washington County before the rain would arrive.  Jack Spruill has an enviable relationship to the land. My parents both grew up on farms but left, relinquishing family land to their siblings.

Jack has managed to protect and share this special land on the south shore of the Albemarle Sound. As a conservation project, the 110-acre farm honors our dependence on land and water. It is a place where people gather, but we found the farm to be a quiet place on a cloudy Monday morning. We parked, walked past the 100-year-old Scuppernong grape vine and the fig trees and waived to Joey Eason, who was kind enough to take some time out of farming to talk with us. Before leaving, we walked on the beach and admired the public access Jack has provided to the Sound.
It was noon when we reached Columbia, and we were hungry.  The trendy restaurant where I’d eaten in 2014 had also closed. We found another lunch spot and moved on to the Tyrrell County Courthouse, where I would finally see a graphic depiction of land my ancestors once owned.

In the 1921 map of the Richmond Cedar Works holdings in Tyrrell and Hyde counties, which hangs in the Deeds Office of the courthouse, the land that was once a homeplace is depicted as “Exception 2: “The Old W.G. Armstrong Plantation”. It is a green shape, landlocked by corporate holdings. It is the place that Roy T. Saywer, in “The extinct community of Up Road, Gum Neck,” describes as having once been a pivotal stopping place for anyone traveling between Columbia and Gum Neck.
Maybe it was the gray skies, but too much of what I’d longed to see on this third trip down home was extinct or closed or now unrecognizable. The branding of the Inner Banks – a marketing effort meant to attract tourists and retirees to the rural areas to the west of the Outer Banks - seems without efficacy. The Inner Banks do not seem to be a pivotal stopping place.

The population of Tyrrell County remains at slightly more than 4,000, with a population density of 11 people per square mile.  Adjacent Dare County has about 35,000 permanent residents, a population density of 78 people per square mile and absorbs another 225,000 additional residents during peak summer months. Inner land and outer land are radically different and support dissimilar economies, dissimilar lifestyles. The natural environment has elected the built: the imbalance is disorienting.

 

Sunday, May 27, 2018

May 20, 2018: Part 2 - Nature vs Man

 
Driving east From Columbia, NC along US 64, fields give way to wetland forests. To the north of the highway, the 10,000-acre Palmetto-Peartree Preserve maintains habitat for native species and migratory birds. To the south, the 150,000-acre Alligator River Wildlife Refuge also shelters species you don’t want to encounter on the trail: black bears, red wolves, American alligators, bobcats. Snakes. Lots of snakes.
 
Whether the wetlands habitat has been preserved by government action or has existed, undrained, for centuries, there is something so formidable about its density that even from the paved highway, we can imagine the challenges this terrain presented to our ancestors.  We pass a small house that has become an armature for vines and sense how quickly nature can claim the built environment in this heat and humidity.

In Dare County, the highway sign for Buffalo City references a former logging and moonshine town that has been swallowed up by nature. South of US 64, the location of the community that once had 3,000 residents appears in Google’s satellite view as a solid green canopy of forest.

Nature can win quickly here. Even when our ancestors cleared fields, the margins could push back. A hurricane could change the boundaries of land and water. Nature had and still has an advantage in this biodiverse coastal terrain. Black bears may paw through the trash while people sleep in their air-conditioned homes, and snakes may be lurking in the garden.  
That our ancestors came here in the 17th century and lived in that challenging environment and procreated and passed their genes into a modern world seems in many ways amazing. Even though my maternal line is filled with women who died before fifty, who were replaced by second and third wives who bore their husbands more children, we descended, and from US 64 and my home in Philadelphia, that is no small thing.






May 20, 2018: Part 1 - Man vs Nature



We decided to let the weather organize our day, and because it began with blue skies, we headed for the beach. Our first stop was Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head. The pier I had known was a wooden pier, suspended over the surf on wooden pilings. After Hurricane Isabel destroyed that historic structure in 2003, the state approved funding for the reconstruction of a 1,000-ft pier with classrooms, concrete pilings, three wind turbines, and all the amenities of a modern welcome center. It is a beautiful facility and sits lightly on the landscape and water.
But the rest of modern development of the Outer Banks communities does not sit so lightly on the sand. Built out, landscaped, bike-pathed, with upscale shops and restaurants woven between closely-spaced, expensive beach houses, OBX seems a city dropped upon the shore. In the absence of damaging storms, Man has won. The wild, vegetated places seem neutered.

The Cavalier Motel in Kitty Hawk, where we stayed in the Fifties and beyond, still stands, dwarfed by new construction. Once I was a child in that very same spot, my mother pushing my hair away from my face, but the place as it was in that time, and the people who inhabited it, have been lost.
The randomly-built past has been replaced by a kind of homogenized affluence.
I  am still trying to process why I was so saddened by the present, with its overwhelmingly density of development. I’ve considered that so much change triggered some big mortality blues, but I didn’t feel that way about Manteo, where the transience of tourism blends with the permanence of a small town, and where I could imagine myself living in a vintage home on a quiet street.
Ultimately, I think I was saddened by the level of development, the triumph of the built environment over a place that once seemed wild and unwilling to give up its scrubby vegetation and mosquitos for high-end rentals.
I would have plenty of opportunity to see untamed land on this trip.

 

May 19, 2018: Landed


 It has been a long three years since my last trip to North Carolina, and while my July 2015 trip was about family, this trip was largely about the land: who owned it, how it was used, how it has changed, how it has nourished or limited the experiences of the people who lived there.
The East Coast storms that threatened the entire weekend held me back in Philly. I landed in Norfolk almost an hour later than expected, then headed south through patches of hard-driving rain toward my Google-mapped, homeplace destination.

Colors pop on dark days, and as I drove, I passed field after field of glowing flowers. Lavender and light green frothy blooms shaped like snap dragons reminded me of how much I don’t know about what is being grown in that sandy coastal plain. (Later I’d learn that those were fields of clary sage.)
When I finally arrived at the genealogical society’s cookout,  the eating had ended, and the group had moved on to grave dowsing. I don’t understand the science behind this work, although one of the participants is a nuclear engineer, and must understand its inexplicable powers.

I tried holding the metal rods softly in my grip as I walked over a family plot and was amazed when they took on a life of their own, crossing and uncrossing over the remains beneath my feet. The dowsers mark the heads and foots of the graves with cornstarch. They are mapping the long-dead that lie in orderly and disorderly formations on this land. They hold theories about what has happened on this farm and when.
My research partner and I are exploring different branches of a family of Ulster Scots who came to the Colonies and first farmed in Maryland. After a couple of generations, we assume that they wore out the land before moving south, where their holdings were once significant.

She has done extensive work in wills and deeds and understands how strategic marriages were used to increase real estate assets and build wealth. She has been following our extended family’s land ownership for decades. During less than four days, we’d visit four counties and look for secrets in the landscape, places that could be marked with cornstarch, places that could not.