USA > North Carolina > Wake County > History of Wake County, North Carolina, with sketches of those who have most influenced its development > Part 4
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In similar fashion we may well wonder what would have been the differing traits in the like- ness of the good people of Wake County if
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busy Joel Lane and his brothers had chosen another path through the wilderness, and those dozen others whose blood lives today in many a citizen, "solid and stirring in flesh and bone," had settled beside some other river.
Joel Lane, who helped lay out the boun- daries of Wake and the streets of our city, land-owner, mine host of Bloomsbury Tav- ern, Colonel in his father-in-law's Wake County regiment, purveyor of supplies for the Revolutionary Army, Associate Justice at Wake County Court in 1771 and for many years thereafter, delegate to the Provincial Congress at New Berne, member of the Coun- cil of Safety for this district, State Senator for Wake for thirteen sessions of the Assembly, planter, speculator in real estate, did not let all these activities exhaust his abundant ener- gy. It would not take many citizens such as he to make a town progressive and lively even in these strenuous days.
He seems vividly alive to the mind as he is exhumed from old records dusty with the passing of a century. His nature must have been kindly, and his disposition sunny, to
K
CLAY-HILL-ON-THE-NEUSE, BUILT BY COLONEL JOHN HINTON BEFORE WAKE COUNTY WAS OLDEST HOUSE LEFT STANDING TODAY IN WAKE COUNTY
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have made him so universally liked. His house we have all seen, and it looks small and plain enough to us; but it represented to the people of that time what Governor Swain calls "a rare specimen of architectural elegance." Joel lived in this well-known house of his in the sense of the often quoted words, "by the side of the road, to be a friend to man;" and in turning the pages of the records, those dry bones of history, we may note and admire the human attraction of the way people grav- itated to his tavern for their various meetings. It must have been pleasant staying there, which speaks well for the character of mine host, although we must wonder where in the world he took care of so many legislators. Probably, after the good old custom, log-cabin "offices" or bachelor quarters flanked the central dwelling, and in these he put his gentlemen guests. Very few ladies went traveling in those days.
Joel Lane's two wives were both daughters of Colonel John Hinton, who lived near Neuse River, and they brought him a fine colonial family of six sons and six daughters. Joel always adhered to the Church of England.
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The Lanes are descended from the Ralph Lane who first came to North Carolina with the unlucky colony in 1585, and then sailed back to England in 1586, being succeeded as Governor by John White who left a handful of lonely white settlers to lose themselves in the western wilds, and become one of the mysteries of fate to this day. The spirit of the old seafaring Lanes still drove him "West- ward Ho" and Ralph returned after a time. Joel and his brothers were already the third generation of Lanes born in the American Colonies. Their descendants have half pop- ulated Wake County, and have sent good citizens to Alabama, to Tennessee, to Mis- souri, and to far away Oregon. Among them are numbered governors, judges, a general and a vice-presidential candidate, a cabinet officer, too,-all men in the public eye, while they have also furnished scores more of excel- lent folk of the race who, while not so con- spicuous, have built up their own communities more quietly for generations.
Joel Lane has been criticised because his sale of land for the location of Raleigh seemed a bit of sharp practice at the expense of his
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father-in-law, Colonel John Hinton, who also had a square mile of land for sale; it is even hinted that people generally resented this and that it cost him his seat in the Assembly for the next term thereafter. These hundred- year-old rumors are hard to verify. Let us use our imagination in all charity, and think that he knew what a very pleasant home for the State's central government would result from his success.
He offered a square mile of land near Cary as a free gift, should it be decided to place the University of North Carolina there, and one wonders why this offer was not accepted. He was one of the first Board of Trustees of the new institution, and had two grandsons in the first graduating class. His friendliness brought him friends and his friends showed him favor, which was surely his desert. He died in 1795, and his grave was plowed over and obliterated by Mr. Peter Brown, a Scotch- man and a lawyer, who acquired his home by purchase, a few years after Joel Lane was dead and gone. Mr Brown in his turn sold the place to the first Mr. William Boylan, early in the last century.
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"SPRING HILL," LATER HOME OF COLONEL THEOPHILUS HUNTER. HE BUILT THE SMALLER HOUSE IN THE REAR. HIS SON THEOPHILUS ADDED
THE LARGER MANSION IN FRONT.
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A tablet to the memory of Joel Lane was recently placed in the Municipal Building of Raleigh by the Daughters of the Revolution. One of Joel Lane's brothers was the progeni- tor of the Lanes of Alabama and the other was the ancestor of those who sought the far west and became prominent there. Carolina Lane, his sister, was mother of David L. Swain, and lived her whole life in Buncombe County near Asheville.
Another pre-revolutionary family connec- tion was that of the Jones' of Wake County. There seem to have been two distinct families at first, no known kin, and living in different parts of the county, both well known for in- telligence and property acquired. Besides this fact, two men, one from each family, bore the unusual name of Nathaniel, and of these, one named his eldest son after himself; hence it requires more than an ordinary genealogist to reconstruct their respective family trees, and this all the more because they complicated and confounded things still worse by inter- marrying once or twice a few years later, after the second generation had grown up.
The first Jones to reach Wake County was Francis or Frank Jones, who settled on Crab-
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tree Creek near Morrisville. His deed from Lord Carteret bears the date 1749. He bought more land adjoining in 1761. His two sons, Nathaniel First of Crabtree, and Tig- nall, or Tingall, were often mentioned in County and State records. This Frank is said to have been a brother of the father of Willie Jones and General Allen Jones of Hali- fax. If this is so then these two distinguished men were own cousins to the Jones family of Crabtree. This was the General Allen Jones who gave his name to a penniless adventurer, John Paul, whom he had befriended, and who asked at parting, if the Jones surname might be added to his own, promising that if permit- ted so to add it he would also add fame to it some day. This he did most wonderfully, as all those who have thrilled at the story of John Paul Jones and the Bon Homme Richard can testify.
Perhaps this cousinship gives one of the reasons for the residence in Raleigh of Willie Jones, during the last years of his life. This great Jeffersonian bought the plantation where Saint Augustine's School for the colored race now stands, and in the spot where the garden
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of the school now is, he lies buried in an un- marked grave. Though an agnostic, Willie Jones also gave the land for a Methodist Church, where Edenton Street now stands, according to several authorities. He died about the first of the new century.
To return to the Jones family of Crabtree. Nathaniel the second of Crabtree, married a daughter of John Kimbrough. His name appears as member of Assembly from Wake in both House and Senate before 1801. His son, Kimbrough Jones, was a member of the Constitutional Assembly of 1835, and he has many descendants. John Kimbrough, the father-in-law, does not come so often into the records, being perhaps a man busy with his plantation alone, but he owned more slaves in 1800 than anyone else, except James Hinton and Tignall Jones.
To continue the Wake County Joneses: Na- thaniel Jones of White Plains near Cary, came also from Eastern North Carolina. His an- cestors are buried in old Bath Church, and he came to what is now Wake County in 1750. Nathaniel of White Plains was, as I have said, supposed to be no known kin to Nathaniel of
THE HOME OF GENERAL CALVIN JONES AT WAKE FOREST. (TAKEN FROM A PRINT)
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Crabtree. His father was of Welsh blood, and bore the Welsh-given name of Evan. Nathaniel of White Plains married into the Lane family, and his daughter Sarah married her cousin, John Lane, son of Joel. They went west, and their son, born in Tennessee was named Joel Hinton Lane. Of course there were many others of this family, but I give this instance to show the strong mixture of pioneering blood which must have been the very elixir of life in that "Winning of the West" which became the task of their genera- tion.
Finding the records of all these intermar- riages of the Jones families, and adding to them the more recent connections of these with the Cadwallader Joneses of Hillsborough and noting the constant recurrence of familiar Wake County surnames and Welsh patronym- ics among the lists of children, one realizes how hopeless and how useless it is to try and untangle the skein of these families.
There stands, however, a desolate house with vacant windows and grinning rafters, a high four-square old house, dating from the Revolutionary time, but which has been de-
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serted many years. It stands near the town of Cary to the west, and its story was told to me by an old lady who remembers traditions, and who was somewhat kin to the former owner, Fanning Jones, but who was not proud of the relationship.
Whether his name means a relationship of connection with the notorious Tory leader who stole the Governor, or whether it is merely a coincidence, no one can now declare, but he is said for some vague reason to have forfeited the regard of his patriotic relatives, and to have been driven from the neighborhood for that reason. The Old Tory, they called him.
Doctor Calvin Jones on whose plantation Wake Forest College was located was a later comer into the county from the North. He sold his place to the Trustees of the Baptist School for two thousand dollars, which was considered cheap even in those days, for six hundred acres, equipped with buildings. Doctor Jones sold this at sacrifice in order to move to Tennessee, and mentioning him here, too early as to time, but in order to distinguish him, we will add that he was a distinguished physician and that he had a fine war record
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for the war of 1812, having raised a Wake County troop of horse for the army.
Besides these people whom I have called out of the past, and not speaking of others perhaps as prominent and as useful, we must recall the forbears of many of our citizens of today, living in simple homes, leaving no re- cord of wealth, save the ownership of the acres which they had won from the wilderness and tilled for themselves with their own hands. A random reading over of the tax payers whose names were enrolled in Wake County in the year 1800, such a list as appears in the State records, yields many of the most re- spected and honored names of today-many names seen on church rolls, painted on sign- boards, and on office windows, names which have been marked by flags on Memorial days in the cemetery and which only yesterday have been engrossed and hung in the vesti- bules of churches, names marked on service flags with blue stars, and some after awhile with golden ones.
The father and son, and the mother and daughter also, these are those who have re- deemed the wilderness, peopled the solitude,
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fought in Revolutionary ranks in blue and buff, and many years later have worn Confed- erate grey. They have done the hardest work of the new land, and the harder of the land grown populous, they whose descendants have fought and fallen on the fields of France so lately, these plain people of whom the world is made, and for whom it was made, and who shall carry the work on by their descendants into many a tomorrow.
CHAPTER IV Raleigh the Capital Village
OLONEL CREECY in his "Grand- fathers Tales" describes the look of the City of Raleigh in the year 1800 and for some years thereafter. He says, "It was a town of magnificent distances, of unsightly bramble bush, and briers, of hills and morass- es, of grand old oaks and few inhabitants, and an onwelcome look to newcomers."
At that time the first State House stood solitary on the Capitol Square and near it was the famous sassafras tree, which had long marked a wonderful deer stand whence forty deer had been shot by one hunter's rifle, within the memory of those then alive.
Governor Ashe was the first governor to make Raleigh his permanent residence, and he came to town in 1795, while the other State officers also found it necessary to "go out there in the woods to live, and help with the govern- ment." The first Governor's mansion was a plain frame building on Fayetteville Street about where the Raleigh Banking and Trust
193]
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Company's building now stands. By 1800 there were two hotels. The first one, Casso's, still stands on the corner of Morgan and Fayetteville Streets opposite the State Lib- rary Building, is especially in excellent repair, and were the fire escapes and such modern ad- ditions taken away, would remain much as it used to be when the stages rolled to the door. The second was called the Eagle, which was demolished in April 1922, to erect a new State Department Building
One handsome residence had been built in Raleigh which is standing today, and has been kept in repair, remarkable beside for the fact that it is still inhabited by the re- presentatives of the family that built it. There is no other residence so old in town or county today, beside "the old Burke Hay- wood Mansion" on New Berne Avenue, built in the year 1794, of which we may confidently say, as it is today so it was almost identi- cally, more than a hundred years ago.
There were homes and stores along Fayette- ville Street-small frame buildings long since burned or demolished; the Joel Lane house stood near where it now stands, but facing
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South Boylan Avenue; the Mordecai place was partly built; the old Andrew Johnson birthplace, judging by the style of architecture was then in existence, but tradition says that it stood near the plot where Tucker's Store was built immediately after the war of '61. From thence it was moved at that time to Cabarrus Street, where it remained until 1900, when the local Committee of the Colonial Dames of America had it taken down board by board, and reconstructed, exactly, in Pul- len Park, where it is now preserved as a relic.
There was no church edifice in Raleigh in 1800, although services were frequently held by the several denominations in the State House.
There were no common schools in all North Carolina, and but few pay schools. In the year 1801, Raleigh asks for state aid in estab- lishing an academy, and also petitions for the use of Burke Square (where the Governor's mansion now stands) for its site.
In 1802 the plans for the building were made, fifty feet long and twenty-four feet wide, with fireplaces at each end both above and below stairs. My authority says brick, but
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the expression is so vague, perhaps it merely means that the great chimneys were brick, and not the whole building. In 1807 a build- ing for a "Female Department" was added. This was one-story and smaller. The school was supported partly by tuition fees and part- ly by private subscriptions to bonds or shares. All the State officers' names of that day and those of nearly all the townsfolk besides were to be found on its lists.
In 1813 another building was built, the two larger buildings were insured for two thousand dollars each, while the Female Department carried two hundred and fifty dollars. Tui- tion was nine dollars a year and the rolls of honor and other school notices published in the newspapers of the time show that many of the pupils were from other places and boarded in town. By the year 1817 one hundred eighty pupils were in attendance. The first teacher engaged was named German Guthrie, the second Maurin Delaigny, a French refugee, a Huguenot minister, who afterwards went to Charleston and became pastor of the old Huguenot Church there.
In 1810 came Doctor William Mc. Pheeters who was principal of the Academy for many
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years, and also "Town Pastor," preaching on Sundays in the State House and holding Sun- day School there. His salary was eight hun- dred dollars a year. His school throve, and soon he required assistants in his work. The course included Latin, Greek, Mathematics, English, Geography, and Bible, and his scholars ranged from beginners in reading to those who would go next year to the Univer- sity. No Latin or Greek was taught to the girls, but a course in "alphabetical samplers" and wool work took the place of the classics for them.
There were other schools in the county, and some were very efficient, especially the one at Wake Forest which afterwards was enlarged into Wake Forest College. Besides this one the schools were more or less intermittent, be- ing private enterprises.
One of the Raleigh schools deserves mention for the oddity of its human interest.
John Chavis was a negro slave, who was sent by his master to Princeton College, and educated as a Presbyterian minister. This was done as an experiment on the part of his owner, to see what could be done with a
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negro's mind, as I have been told by the older people. John had a good understand- ing and a docile disposition. When, after his years of training, he was returned home an educated man of some refinement, it became a problem to know what should be done with him. He was an ordained Presbyterian min- ister; he could not be sent back to the negro quarters; nor could he be recognized as a social equal. He was set free, and he was per- mitted to use his learning in instruction of youth. He taught in Raleigh in 1808, in- structing poor white children in the day, and colored youth at night. He afterwards kept school in other parts of the State, and prepared many prominent young men for college with great success. I have heard stories told of how on occasion, he might be at some white planter's house at meal time, and how the plantation darkies would come to peer into the windows of the dining room at the Great House, to see "dat nigger John Chavis" sit- ting over at his side table by himself, but nevertheless, actually eating his dinner in the same room with Old Massa and Old Miss. That was the way the problem was finally
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solved as to the exact social position of John Chavis.
Before leaving the subject of educational uplift in Raleigh, let me chronicle the doings of the leading matrons of the town in the year 1802. They then presented a pair of globes to the scientific equipment of the infant University at Chapel Hill. The names of of the donors were as follows: S. W. Potter, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Polk, Anna White, Martha McKethan, Margaret Casso, Eliza Williams, Nancy Bond, Hannah Paddison, Susannah Parish, Ann O'Brien, E. H. P. Smith, Nancy Haywood, Priscilla Shaw, Rebecca Williams, Winifred Mears. This is probably a list of all the ladies who made up Raleigh society at that date, and shows these good women ready and efficient in helping worthy causes as their descendants and suc- cessors have ever since striven to do.
A brick mansion was built about 1813, just opposite the foot of Fayetteville Street, and outside the then city limits. It stood where the Centennial School stands now. It was a large simple building, with no architectural pretensions, and was paid for out of the pro- ceeds of lots in the City of Raleigh sold for the
THIS IS PART OF THE OLD RALEIGH ACADEMY, WHERE DR. WM. MCPHEETERS ONCE TAUGHT. LATTERLY CALLED LOVEJOY'S SCHOOL. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN JUST BEFORE
IT WAS TORN DOWN TO MAKE WAY FOR THE GOVERNOR'S MANSION)
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purpose, being those which remained in the possession of the State up to that time. These lots did not bring as great a sum as was hoped, by reason of the hard times prevailing after the War of 1812. This mansion, al- ways known as the Governor's Palace, is the one occupied by all Governors in succession from 1813 up to the War of '61, and Gover- nor Swain adds in dignified phrase, "The Executive office was then, as now, contiguous to the Palatial Residence."
The little town of those early days was in feeling and deportment always the capital. We read of plays staged, of processions and festivities, of speakings patriotic, and speak- ings commemorative, and of regular religious services all held in the State House, which was then even more than since, the center, and one might say, almost the circumference as well of all Raleigh's social life.
Banquets in celebration of the national an- niversaries, not on a strictly temperance plan, were held at the hotels and occasionally out of doors at the mineral spring near the Palace. These inns were good ones, because of the many gentlemen who had to be entertained
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at certain seasons of the year, whose number would have strained the small private accom- modations of the place.
On great occasions tables were even set in the rotunda of the State House and toasts were drunk on patriotic excuse to "every State in the Union," and the fact that there were not nearly so many states then as there are now is the reason the devoted banqueters lived through the test.
The census of Raleigh on March 23, 1807, as published in the Raleigh Minerva, gives white males 255, white females 178, freedmen 33, slaves 270, total 786, families 85. Governor Swain also gives these figures. The apparent overplus of bachelors in Raleigh at that time is noticeable, there being seventy-five or more unattached men. This must mean that the State officials were written down as residents whether they had brought their families to live in the town or not.
Raleigh had a commission form of govern- ment in those early days, similiar to that of the City of Washington now, being governed by the direct authority of the Assembly. It also had a town watch which patroled the un-
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lighted streets at night, and kept the slaves from wandering abroad. There were twenty classes who took turns. This same plan was universally followed in the larger towns throughout the South.
The names of the Captains of the Watch for the year 1811 were Henry Potter, Isaac Lane, William Scott, William Boylan, Joseph Gales, Thomas Emond, Southey Bond, John Wyatt, Joseph Peace, Samuel Goodwin, Bev- erly Daniel, William Peck, Willis Rogers, Sherwood Haywood, William Jones, John Raboteau, James Coman, Benjamin King, Robert Cannon, and Jacob Johnson. This last name was that of the father of the Presi- dent Andrew Johnson.
We may gather a good many good home- sounding names from this collection, although they made their rounds more than a century ago, and all sleep dreamless sleep tonight while others are watching.
The war of 1812 having been fought to a glorious finish, and the Algerian pirates having been smoked out by Admiral Decatur, the America name became more respected and the flag more distinguished abroad, while
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England was no longer a present fear to our nation as it had been since the Revolution. Our nation began to feel its full destiny as favored of heaven. We might say of ourselves in our growing vigor and importance as a nation,
"No-pent up Utica contracts our powers."
This happy time when there was little politi- cal or sectional bitterness or other jealousy was called the "era of good feeling." The Revolution was receding into the historic past, and its heroes loomed grander, and less dis- tinct, as their doings passed out of ordinary day-light into the shadowed aisles of history. The great consequences of these deeds were more and more realized, as time unfolded its changes.
There was in this village capital of North Carolina ninety years ago one treasure which we would give a great deal to possess, and to be able to point to, in our Capitol of today. I refer to the famous statue of General George Washington, first President of the United States, which was made by Canova.
In November, 1815, the Assembly of North Carolina passed a bill authorizing the purchase
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of a statue of the great and good George Washington, to be placed in the State House, and setting no limit to the cost of such a work of art.
The people of North Carolina had a right to be proud of their appreciative admiration for Washington, and the delight they took to honor his memory honored themselves also.
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