Grand Opening at King's Highway Park

May 9th Hillsborough, NC Town officials, park commissioners, and park supporters gathered west of Hillsborough, at the great bend of the Eno for the official opening of Kings Highway Park (KHP).  In the photo to the left, Mayor Tom Stevens and Commissioner Evelyn Lloyd invited Tom to join them in a formal ribbon cutting.  With a snip of their shears the trio open KHP to the public and put a capstone on a six year long project of the TPA.  We set out six years ago to see how inexpensively we could save a historic road.  Using Orange County high school students (Orange High and Cedar Ridge High) and a half dozen Boy Scouts striking for Eagle Scout we built several trails, two vista points, a parking area, a greeting kiosk, and a picnic spot.  There are three trails and another entrance kiosk yet to be built but the park really is ready for users besides the regular fishing folk.  Drive out Dimmock Mill Road to Ben Johnston, park and enjoy the thousands of hours donated to your enjoyment by the youth of Orange County.

May First Sunday Hike

Board member Ernie Dollar, Executive Director of the Chapel Hill Preservation Society, Civil War terrain expert, raconteur, and all 'round good fellow led the First Sunday Hike May 3rd.  He took a considerable group of hikers on to land owned by Burroughs Land Investors, LLC to look at one of the oldest recorded roads in Carolina and also to visit what may be the last Civil War rifle pits in Orange and Durham counties, NC.  As is obvious in the picture to the left, Ernie (brown shirt) had fun with history as did all around him. 

Wade Hampton's cavalry, General Johnston's rearguard, camped nearby during the negotiations which ended the War in the south.  He probably perched an observation post atop the hill where Ernie took the hikers to look at rifle pits left behind when the boys in gray went home. 

By the end of the war troops from both armies reflexively dug pits in which to shelter from incoming fire, and these were great examples of the art.  The pits were perfectly positioned, all on the same contour line, all on the military crest, all looking out toward the east, the one direction from which General Sherman, had he a mind to do so, could have stolen a march.  The photo to the right shows how little time has marred the casual labor of an anonymous Confederate soldier.

At the bottom of the hill, to the west the hikers saw a good example of remnants from Fish Dam Road, a well known 18th century roadway connecting a ford on the Neuse River to the "Indian Fields" east of Hillsborough.

Wrightsboro, GA: A Trading Path Destination

While Ernie took First Sunday Hikers through the woods, Tom was in Wrightsboro, GA talking to the Wrightsboro Church homecoming.  Refugees from the War of  the Regulation, Quakers from Orange County, NC's Eno Meeting created Wrightsboro in 1768.  Joseph Mattock, miller, led the exodus, and remnants of his work adorn the country around Wrightsboro.  Many will recall that one reason the Mattock and the Eno Quakers felt impelled to move was that the Regulators held meetings at Mattock's mill (ostensibly because he served no spirituous liquors there).  Abstention did not a bit of good though, and Mattock and the Eno River folk, including some of President Carter's direct antecedents escaped to Georgia. 

There are at Wrightsboro among numerous old buildings, a dam, a restored remnant of Mattock's Georgia mill,  and a Revolutionary War fort,  Fort Wrightsboro.  Three weeks before our talk, locals using directions provided by an elderly neighbor, uncovered the remains of the fort.  There will be a couple of archaeology careers made sifting through this largely untouched relic. 

Our host, Epp Wilson, operator of a wonderful stable, huntsman, Master of Hounds for the Belle Meade Hunt Club, and paragon of hospitality provided room and board for the duration of our stay and toured us around all the local history sites.  It was an astonishing weekend full of nice folks, great weather, gorgeous horses and remarkable historic sites.

Introducing TPA Volunteer Staff Member Evans McKinney

One of our abiding issues is how to offer landowners assistance and tax relief for protecting the little sites we find.  Most land trusts aren't the least interested in holding small parcels, so we have for some time wanted to investigate starting a land trust of our own.   Evans McKinney (pictured to the right selling Trading Path goodies at Last Friday in Hillsborough, NC) is a licensed realtor with an interest in land trust processes and law and a willingness to hustle for the TPA.  He has met with Chuck Roe, who some of you will know has nursemaided a number of land trusts over the years, thinks a small parcel specialty land trust can work.  While researching the possibility of establishing a  land trust within the Trading Path Association, Evans, ever the free marketer, is also setting up a retail "store" for us.  He ordered in shirts and water bottles, and we'll be getting some decals too.  In the next month, Evans will brief our Executive Committee on the costs and benefits, risks and likely rewards of establishing a small parcel land trust.  One way or another he seems determined to increase the TPA's value.

We'll get the "store" out on our website sometime this summer, we promise.

County Chapters and Local Historians

For the past ten years the TPA has encouraged local historians to look for, map and report old paths, trails, and road, mill sites and all other sites likely to be associated with our common, colonial past.  That effort has begun to pay off in several tangible ways which give us some hope that eventually we'll be able to create county chapters to assist with our land trust and feed information into our growing model of old foot, horse, and wagon routes.  For example, in Franklin County, NC there is now a Ben Franklin Society committed to finding colonial remnants in Franklin and Warren counties.  This Friday, prompted by a similar impulse, active geographical, genealogical, grant and history researchers working on the history of Orange County, NC will gather for a half day meeting.  The purpose of the meeting is to share, coordinate, and stimulate.  Each of the attendees will have a set of research issues which the group may be able to help resolve.

On a much larger scale, a group has formed to coordinate and share findings related to colonial sites and routes, particularly as they relate to the Revolutionary War.  The group which hasn't even been named yet, first met in March when 19 strangers spent a half day trying to determine if they had enough in common to build a standard format report and a computer data base in which to store data.  The success of that meeting has prompted a second meeting to be held on May 30th, at Central Piedmont Community College outside of Charlotte, NC.  At this second meeting we hope to finalize the initial report design, reach agreement on how data will be dumped into the system (over the Internet) and how to share maps resulting from data inputs.  It is an immensely ambitious project but if it works, it may be a prototype for a national database of pre-modern infrastructure.

We hope that all these efforts and others are but prelude to our establishing a chapter system throughout the southeast.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh?

First Sunday Hike Hiatus Until September

As has been our practice for the past couple of years, we have suspended First Sunday Hikes for the summer.  We will resume the hikes in September unless, of course, you know of some particularly sweet, shady spot that we can get to without much effort and without feeding bugs and scaring snakes.

Suggest A Hike

If you have an idea about a place to hike or an interesting spot you'd like us to visit, let us know.  We are more or less on hiatus in July and August, and we may resume First Sunday Hikes in September.  Meanwhile if you have a place we can hike without bugs and other varmints bothering us, please  let us know about it.

 
trm