Almanac

Time Traveling

July is here and you are fishing on the bank with Papa, readjusting his faded straw hat seconds before it slips down your brow again. You don’t notice. You are busy staring at the water’s surface, thinking about the dancing cricket at the end of the line.

Summer sends us time traveling. Shucking sweet corn on the front porch with mama. Potato sack racing with your cousins. Sparklers on the lawn.

Ripe blackberries straight from the bush, but nothing tastes sweeter than summer love. You relive that first kiss, stolen beneath the Southern magnolia, and daydream at the pool with flushed cheeks and pruned fingers.

Papa reaches for the bagged lunch you packed together, unwraps a tomato sandwich, takes a pull of iced tea from the thermos. He is flashing back to his own childhood summers when you feel the tug on your line.

You wrestle a tiny sunfish, straw hat now slipping down past your eyelids. The fish is too small to take home, but papa won’t let you know it. He puts down his sandwich to help you remove the hook. You slip your first-ever catch into papa’s bucket. He lifts the straw hat from your eyes, winks, and then kisses your brow.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur
of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. — John Lubbock

Full Buck Moon Magic

Sure as our summer garden delivers fresh cabbage (read sauerkraut), July inspires cucumber salad, pickled melon, cantaloupe gazpacho, blueberries and whipped cream. Fourth of July falls on a Tuesday this month. We prepare for backyard barbecues, look for cool and simple dishes to delight friends and family.
At market, baskets of golden peaches spell homemade ice cream. The kids will love it. Hosting or traveling, stock up on pickled okra, scuppernongs, and heirloom tomatoes. This is a season that knows how to throw a delicious party. We oblige.

The Full Buck Moon falls on Sunday, July 9. If you’re gardening by the lunar cycle, pop flowering bulbs such as gladiolus and butterfly lily into the earth July 10–22 — day before the new moon. Not too late to plant squash, corn or snap beans, plus heat-loving herbs like basil, thyme and sage.

Summer doesn’t last forever. We’ve lived long enough to know that. As the cicadas serenade you into dreamland, allow visions of your autumn garden to come into focus. A gardener must always plan ahead.

Larks and Nymphs

Seeing as the spur of this month’s birth flower resembles the hind toe of a crested songbird, it’s little wonder how delphinium consolida got its common name. Larkspur (or Lark’s heel as Shakespeare called it) belongs to the buttercup family and, like the orchid, is a showy and complex flower. It’s also highly poisonous if consumed — but perhaps that’s what makes this striking beauty all the more appealing. Color variations convey different meanings. Purple says first love.

Water lilies aren’t just for frogs. Also a birth flower of July, genus Nymphaea takes its name from the Greek word meaning “water nymph” or “virgin.” A symbol of purity and majesty, the lotus flower is a spiritual icon in many cultures. Chinese Buddhists describe Heaven as a sacred lake of lotus flowers. Imagine.

Ah, summer,
what power you
have to make us
suffer and like it.

— Russell Baker

Something Different Dept.

Among the obscure holidays celebrated this month — Sidewalk Egg Frying Day (July 4), National Nude Day (July 14), and Yellow Pig Day (July 17), to name just a few — Build A Scarecrow Day is celebrated on Sunday, July 2. Egyptian farmers swaddled wooden figures with nets to create the first “scarecrows” in recorded history. Only they weren’t scarecrows, per se. They were used to keep quails from the wheat fields along the Nile River. If you’ve a corn crop to protect, consider making an art of it. But just remember, crows are smart cookies — and perhaps better friends than foe.  PS

The Wizard of Pinehurst

Sandhills’ Renaissance man Rassie Wicker

By Bill Case

It was accepted as Gospel in Pinehurst that Rassie Wicker’s ability to perceive, study and comprehend the world around him bordered on the supernatural. Hardly any subject escaped his quest for knowledge. He seemed to understand everything and could fix anything.

That was until July 22, 1944, when the War Department message dreaded by every serviceman’s family arrived. The telegram said that Lt. Jim Wicker, Rassie’s 23-year-old son, had been missing in action since July 7, barely a month after the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. A veteran of 27 bombing missions over Germany, Jim had been lost over Holland when the B-17 Flying Fortress he co-piloted collided in mid-air with another B-17. Most of the 10-man crew had perished. Jim and two enlisted men were unaccounted for.

Home on leave seven months earlier, Jim married Nancy Richardson, his high school sweetheart and the daughter of Pinehurst’s postmaster. It was the young bride who shared the news of the War Department’s wire with Rassie, his wife, Dolly, and Jim’s sister Eloise, casting the twin clouds of fear and uncertainty over the entire family.

Rassie was no stranger to the horrors of war, having soldiered on the front lines in the Meuse Argonne Offensive, the largest and bloodiest operation of World War I that cost over 26,000 American lives. When Jim revealed his intention to sign up for cadet training as an Army Air Corps pilot in 1942 — unbeknownst to his family he had already taken flying lessons — Rassie cautioned him that wartime service was “ugly, spirit-breaking labor, done under strict orders and under the most heartbreaking conditions.” If he was determined to serve, Rassie urged him to seek placement in a photographic post. After all, Jim had already been trained as a civil cartographer. Rassie admonished his son, “I thought I made it plain enough that I was not agreeable to your going into the air force as a pilot, bombardier, or navigator of combat ships.”

Rassie practically begged his son to reconsider. “The thought of your having to go through what I know would be ahead of you would be enough to unbalance what little reason of which I am possessed, and I don’t know what it would do for your mother,” he wrote. “The loss of you to us would mean the wreck of us both.” The son disregarded the father’s advice and reported to Nashville for officer’s flight training.

Now, with Jim missing, Rassie faced the potential — even probable — loss of his son. What possible comfort could there be in having been prescient? If anything, it made his grief all the more palpable. Rassie had gained a reputation in Pinehurst as a man of exceptional capability who adroitly performed any task he set out to do, regardless of its complexity. While his primary occupation was that of a surveyor and civil engineer, the 52-year-old Wicker’s versatility was such that those who knew him, if asked to name the skill at which he most excelled, could easily have given any of a dozen responses. Instead, he sat helpless.

Born in 1892 to James Wicker and Lucretia Mills, Rassie attended a one-room schoolhouse in his birthplace in nearby Cameron. It does not appear that he received any formal schooling in Pinehurst after James moved the family there in 1902. But, like Abraham Lincoln, Rassie read everything he could get his hands on, up to and including the Sears & Roebuck catalog.

Rassie’s father found that his cabinetmaking skills were in high demand in the 7-year-old community. Setting up shop near where the Manor Inn is now located, James received the bulk of his woodworking projects from Leonard Tufts, who assumed control of the family’s privately owned resort and town in the wake of James Tufts’ death, also in 1902. The young Rassie found work in the company town, too, starting as a delivery boy in the pharmacy. An enterprising teenager who nonetheless had time for a bit of fun (lanky and raw-boned, he participated in a farcical local baseball game in a red and green suit), Rassie quickly came into contact with the print shop employees who worked in the same building as the pharmacy. Soon, he had two jobs. Given the daily menu alterations at the Carolina Hotel, there was an unending flow of printing work, and it was not long before he mastered that trade.

The young man’s aptitude for catching on quickly wasn’t lost on Tufts, who used Rassie in a wide variety of roles. He assisted Pinehurst’s electrician, Owen Farrey, and lineman, Seward McCall, in cutting down the trolley line after Leonard decided to discontinue the service. When the installer of the first elevator in the Carolina Hotel walked off the job in a huff, leaving the elevator stranded at the top floor, it was Rassie who got the call. Despite knowing next to nothing about the equipment, he managed to bring the lift to the ground and, with typical dispatch, returned it to working order. Under the tutelage of civil engineer Francis Deaton, he helped survey the properties Leonard was buying, selling or developing. Rassie relished solving the kind of mathematical problems where there was only one right answer, and surveying required the same sort of exactitude. In an effort to enhance his knowledge, the largely self-educated Rassie passed the entrance exam into North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now North Carolina State University).

After completing the 1911-12 academic year in Raleigh, he was back working in Pinehurst, spending an ever-increasing percentage of his time in surveying. Though he never completed his studies, Rassie was permitted to hang out a shingle as a registered civil engineer since his work in the field predated the state’s establishment of educational requirements. In 1912, someone convinced him to run for Moore County surveyor and he cruised to victory. There was only one problem: At the swearing in, Rassie learned he was one year shy of meeting the position’s minimum age requirement of 21. Accordingly, he stepped down.

Rassie’s surveying work required him to spend considerable time out of doors in the forests and fields of Moore County, and he reveled in the observation of nature. With three friends, he organized a five-day paddle down the Little River from Vass to Fayetteville, constructing two homemade boats for the voyage. Upon arriving at the party’s destination, Rassie reported to the Pinehurst Outlook that “we tied up to wharves of that old town; changed our river clothes for railroad style, bode our (homemade) boats farewell, and bought tickets to Aberdeen.”

By 1917, Rassie was already considered a person of prominence in Pinehurst. The Outlook listed him among those who “built the community.” He married his sweetheart, a 21-year-old Cameron native, Mary “Dolly” Loving and, like his son after him, left almost immediately for military service overseas. He survived the Western Front physically unscathed and returned to Pinehurst in 1919. Jim was born in 1920, and Eloise came in 1922. In 1923, the burgeoning family moved into the house that Rassie built at 275 Dundee Road in Pinehurst.

In addition to surveying, Wicker ran the movie projector at the new Carolina Theatre in Pinehurst. He supervised a five-man crew building houses for Leonard Tufts, an assignment he was unable to perform as expeditiously as Leonard would have liked. Despite Rassie’s crew completing construction of 10 homes inside of 11 months, Leonard expressed his dissatisfaction. “(Y)ou should have completed 47 houses,” complained the tough taskmaster. The beleaguered Rassie informed his boss he was incapable of meeting such an unrealistic target, and he voluntarily excused himself from further homebuilding. Leonard appears not to have taken the resignation personally, since he continued to inundate Wicker with other assignments.

One task involved preparing a detailed map of the entire Sandhills area — a job Rassie, Francis Deaton and James Swett undertook in 1921. Much of the area was still unsettled dense pine forest. Land elevations and precise paths of Moore County’s watercourses were unknown. The laborious and meticulous work took nearly a decade to complete. One result of this effort was the decision to focus on development in the triangle between Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Knollwood. The Pilot reported in November 1931: “Rassie Wicker has been in the field on the proposed extension of Pennsylvania Avenue from the top of the hill in ‘Jimtown’ (Western Southern Pines) to the boundary of Pinehurst.”

While mapping unidentified creeks, Wicker took it upon himself to name them. According to Tony McKenzie’s “Tribute to Rassie Wicker,” Rassie called one offshoot of a creek “Joe’s Fork” in honor of a Jamaican, Joe Melton, who “drove an oxcart from hotel to hotel collecting food scraps and taking them to the Pinehurst piggery.” Republican political operatives once again began floating Rassie’s name as a candidate for county surveyor. He wryly shot down that trial balloon with a Will Rogers’ style quip. The Pilot reported that Wicker “denies the allegation and spurns the allegator.” Rassie went on to say, “ I always was, is, and always will be a Democrat.”

Rassie’s work in Pinehurst brought him into contact with the landscape architect Warren Manning, a protégé of the man who designed New York City’s Central Park, Fredrick Law Olmsted. As the Tufts’ architect-in-charge, Manning had the final say regarding nearly all plantings in the village. A sponge for absorbing the insights of experts, Rassie’s acquaintance with Manning enabled the younger man to learn how the interrelation of selected plantings could enhance a home or streetscape. Rassie opened his own business, Pinehurst Landscape Service, by the mid-1920s to capitalize on the numerous opportunities for a landscaping enterprise in a village less than 20 years old built on pine barrens.

By the end of the Roaring 20s, Leonard Tufts’ son Richard began to supplant his oft-ailing father in running Pinehurst’s affairs. The father and son, however, shared their appreciation of Rassie Wicker. In a personal letter, Richard raved, “You are getting a reputation with us as an architect, landscape designer, and the sort of handyman to refer things to when we want something that looks extra nice.”

Rassie was given the responsibility for locating and laying out new streets along with the water and sewer lines. According to Tony McKenzie, Wicker “took the liberty of giving all the newest streets names. He chose to use the last names of the people who provided manual labor to build Pinehurst.” They included Graham, Short and Caddell. He supervised construction of the Given Library and the hangar for the Moore County Airport. Leonard entrusted Rassie with the preparing and placing of historic markers identifying the ancient Yadkin Trail, four of which still remain.

Everything Rassie encountered seemed to pique his curiosity. Though often racked with migraine headaches, he invariably finished three books in a three-day period — the allowable bookmobile lending policy at the time — then scoured National Geographic and the Encyclopedia Britannica, front-to-back and A-to-Z. Surveying and mapmaking led him to an interest in the historic derivations of land titles in Moore County. His research dated back to the initial grants of the king of England. The completion of that project spun off into a deeper history of the county and ultimately the state. He became an organizing member of the North Carolina Society of Historians and a valued contributor to the Moore County Historical Association. He wrote numerous columns he titled “Historical Sketches” in The Pilot. One of his writings described his successful search for the North Carolina homes of Scottish heroine and Revolutionary War figure Flora MacDonald. His research culminated in the publication of a book that continues to be a leading reference for county historians, Miscellaneous Ancient Records of Moore County, compiling a massive amount of 18th century data.

His landscaping work led to the study of the local flora and fauna. After locating a sweetgum tree in Pinehurst, he took the time to compare its characteristics with other known varieties of the species. It turned out there existed no other known sweetgum tree with similarly shaped lobes on its leaves. The uniqueness of the discovery was subsequently confirmed by a nationally known expert at Harvard University.

As if those pursuits weren’t enough, he had hobbies, too, including playing the piano, making his own dulcimer, singing in a chorus, acting in the occasional theater production, beekeeping and orchid growing. Perhaps Rassie’s most unique interest was sparked after he found a nest of orphaned quail in his yard and adopted them as pets. His care and feeding of the birds ultimately led to their taming. He cultivated wild plants he thought might improve their diet. His domesticated “Peewee” even fluttered its way into feature stories in The Pilot and Pinehurst Outlook.

His never-ending pursuit of learning took him beyond this world to a study of the heavens. He became an astronomer. Wanting a telescope to gaze more closely at the stars, Rassie fabricated one himself. In 1935, he contributed periodic columns to the paper with the purpose of educating its readers on locating the planets — “The Heavens in October,” etc.

Wicker was an inveterate writer of letters to local newspapers. Rather than pontificate he would raise issues overlooked by everyone else. And, though usually soft-spoken, he could launch into vituperative commentary when circumstances warranted. Concerned that a proposed constitutional amendment would transfer power from the “common people” to the state legislature, he colorfully opined that “(i)f it does, then it should be hung higher than Haman, drawn and quartered, boiled in oil, beheaded, disemboweled and buried in the deepest sea, and its tomb forgotten.” As part of the war effort, in 1944 Wicker was working as an engineer in Sanford for General Machinery and Foundry when he learned that his son, Jim, was missing in action.

The Wicker family tried to stay strong, but that was next to impossible. Jim’s wife, Nancy, wrote daily letters to her husband, holding them in safekeeping that he might one day have an opportunity to read them. Earl Monroe, Rassie’s best friend, noted that the interminable waiting for news about Jim drove Rassie, “a little crazy.” Finally on September 23rd, a telegram arrived confirming that Jim, after safely parachuting to the ground, had been captured by the Germans and was being held as a prisoner of war. The Wicker family was overjoyed. The only other survivor of the midair collision from his B-17 was the waist gunner, Clyde Matlock.

Jim was held in captivity at Stalag Luft I until May 1, 1945, when the camp’s guards fled as the Russian Army approached from the east. The Russians liberated the prisoners at 10 a.m. Two weeks later, Jim arrived at Camp Lucky Strike in France to await transport home. He soothed his anxious family, telling them, “All of you stop worrying now. I’m practically in the front yard.” And fittingly, it was Independence Day when he finally arrived home. Jim later received numerous commendations for his heroic service, including the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Rassie returned to his usual activities in Pinehurst, but managed to spend increasing amounts of time with Earl Monroe, his son Bud, now 80, and Tony McKenzie at the blacksmith shop at the corner of Rattlesnake and McCaskill roads. Bud recalls that Rassie loved working there as well as in his small workshop at home. Rassie welded and woodworked, like his father had. He gave away everything he made to his friends and children, including intricately crafted grandfather and grandmother clocks.

Bud Monroe proudly shows off several of Wicker’s handmade wooden pieces at his Murdocksville Road home. “How on earth are you going to go about describing what an incredible wizard Rassie Wicker was?” asks Monroe.

Wicker kept surveying until very late in life. A familiar and welcoming site in Pinehurst was Rassie driving his old Chevy down Cherokee Road with his surveyor’s rod protruding out the back window. As he aged, the white-haired Rassie began “taking on something of the majesty of an Old Testament prophet.” His community sought ways to honor him. In December 1971, he was the recipient of the Sandhills Kiwanis club’s Builders Cup for “the year’s most outstanding contribution to the county, made without thought of personal gain.” He passed away the following October at age 80. Dolly would die 16 years later.

Recognition continued to come to Rassie posthumously. On Sept. 18, 1995 Pinehurst’s Village Council held a ceremony at the World Golf Hall of Fame to celebrate the naming of its newly acquired 100-acre recreational site, Rassie Wicker Park.

Jim Wicker piloted airplanes in the military for 21 years, and continued in aeronautic related activities thereafter. He and Nancy had two children, Jim, Jr., and Jill Wicker Gooding, both of whom maintain homes in Pinehurst. Rassie and Dolly’s daughter, Eloise, emulated her father’s penchant for scientific inquiry. She graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in botany and became Chapel Hill’s curator for its herbarium, part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

In a heartfelt message to Eloise who had just graduated from college, Rassie Wicker wrote, “I (and you too) know the pleasure — the deep and soul-satisfying pleasure — of having knowledge as one of your possessions. Not a knowledge confined to one subject, but a broad intellectualism which gives you a deep appreciation, not only of the distant and unapproachable things, but also of the little, homey, everyday creatures and incidents of which everyone’s life is made up … a bug or a worm or a plant each going about [its] appointed task, not haphazardly but in conformity with some great plan. These things come to me occasionally with overpowering force, but I have learned to keep them to myself except to a certain very few people who have seen this picture.”

Rassie Wicker did his best to see the whole picture. His passion flowed from a strongly held belief that the more he studied the world, the more he would be able to discern recurring patterns, to see how everything in it — the beauties and the mysteries — fit together.  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

First in Film

The Founders highlights a new Sandhills festival

By Jim Moriarty

It may not be the seismic shift that occurred when talkies came to town in 1929, but when the curtain goes up on Tar Heel Shorties, a one-day film festival on July 8 at the Sunrise Theater, it will have the same kind of ground floor appeal. The festival is being curated by Dan Brawley, the director of the enormously successful Cucalorus Film Festival now in its 23rd year in Wilmington.

Cucalorus already has one satellite festival, Surfalorus, in its sixth season in Dare County, and Brawley, also the president of the international organization Film Festival Alliance, hopes to find the same kind of traction in the Sandhills he found in the surf. “There are so many talented young filmmakers in North Carolina,” says Brawley. “If we develop this properly over the next several years, we could be drawing students from every university. The barriers to making really high quality films have all vanished. The history of Cucalorus is all about being deeply connected to local creators and then bringing people in from the outside and making connections. That’s what we’re really trying to do, cultivate creative talent, make connections with other creative talent and then, it’s sort of off to the races.”

Tar Heel Shorties will begin at 5 p.m. with a “shorts block.” There will be a meet-and-greet party from 6 to 7:30 p.m. followed by a full-length feature, the recently released film about the 13 founding members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, titled The Founders. The producer and director of The Founders, Charlene Fisk, will be one of the artists in attendance.

Brawley’s selection of films, beginning with The Founders, is tailored to the community. He spun through 690 shorts in the Cucalorus database to winnow the selection down to between eight and 11. One of them will be What It Was, Was Football, by Duncan Brantley, a short from Cucalorus’ third season incorporating the famous Andy Griffith routine. “It’s funny, funny, funny stuff,” says Brawley. “An essential part of the film festival experience is going to see a shorts block. For one, you see the directors who will be famous in 10 years. You also see the art form developing and evolving in front of your eyes. You’ll see something clever or innovative that’s really groundbreaking in a short film, then four years later it’s in a feature film. The short films this year are either by kids or about kids, a very family-oriented block.”

Bringing the festival to the Sandhills is something of a homecoming for Brawley. He has an uncle in Southern Pines, but more than that, the ’96 Duke University graduate spent a couple of summers boarding at the Pine Crest Inn. Slight of build with flyaway red hair and a beard and mustache that could slip undetected into any artists’ co-op, he was the No. 2 player on the golf team behind longtime PGA Tour veteran Joe Ogilvie. “I’d wake up every morning and I’d walk over to the country club and practice with my golf coach, Eric Alpenfels,” says Brawley, of his pine Crest days. “I’d head back there at night. I’d have dinner in the dining room. I knew all the waitresses. I’d play solitaire in the corner of the lobby every night.” And, as a bonus, he made a small fortune hustling tourists chipping golf balls into the fireplace.

Obviously, The Founders is a film with deep roots in the Sandhills. While the LPGA doesn’t officially acknowledge Peggy Kirk Bell as being among the original 13, the founders themselves all viewed her as No. 14. Mrs. Bell appears in a lot of the movie’s archival footage. “There were two or three things that we had to lose in the film that we labored over,” says Fisk. “No. 1 was Peggy Kirk Bell. The remaining founders all have that same respect for her and include her in that group. She’s so important. After Karrie Webb saw the film, the one thing she brought up was Peggy.”

At the time of the film’s making there were four living founders and, naturally, the movie focuses on them, with Babe Zaharias and Patty Berg as stars in absentia. “The first person I called was Louise Suggs,” says Fisk of the project’s genesis. “She said, ‘Who are you and why are you making this film?’ She just read me the riot act, and when I got off the phone I kind of was in tears. I can’t do this. They obviously don’t want to do it. She was very protective of the story. I called Marilynn Smith next and she’s Miss Personality and she had the exact opposite reaction. ‘Oh, my gosh, honey, we’ve been wanting to tell the story. I can’t believe you want to talk about it.’ That was the beginning. Five years later, we’re releasing it.”

While it s form is documentary, with all the reality that implies in the interviews, the movie captures the sheer determination of a group of young women and the drama of the all-too-human jealousies. The archival footage alone is a treasure for golf fans, but the storytelling lends the narrative its universal appeal.

“To get all this archival content was the most impossible task,” says Fisk. There were five women putting the film together working out of Fisk’s Atlanta loft. They started with the USGA, went through the families of the founders, then on to the families of other players. “We were getting boxes of stuff people had never even looked at. Boxed up in garages and basements. We went and got old vintage projectors. It was like Christmas every time we’d get a box. That opening shot of that swinging golfer, that was a film reel that Betty Hicks’ family sent us. The footage of Babe sticking her face in the camera is from Bonnie Bell. It was kind of crazy that these 30-year-old women could be so elated by footage of these women from the ’50s.”

Getting things off the ground, whether it be Tar Heel Shorties or The Founders, is never easy. “We would have no money,” Fisk recalls. “I would be super frustrated. We were just hitting wall after wall after wall. One day one of the writers, Dana Lee, said, ‘You know what, we’re just like the founders. Nobody helped them. They had to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. They did it because they believed in it. Don’t forget. That’s why you’re doing it.’”

Now, it’s at a theater near you.  PS

Jim Moriarty is senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Saturday, July 8

Tar Heel Shorties
Film Festival

5 p.m. – Shorts Block:

Swimlapse / Eddie Schmit

In the shadow of a chilling accident, a young lifeguard struggles to return to work while teaching a reluctant girl to swim.

Sugar / Kristin Pearson

An animated collage of the futility of a good night’s sleep.

Courtesy Call / Jim Haverkamp

A free agent for decency tries to reach out and touch someone – usually, someone who doesn’t like to be touched.

Ignite / Christopher Zaluski

Ron Killian has big art dreams. On the brink of age 50, he’s worried that time may be running out. As a way to reinvent himself, he has created a new art medium using fire. He now spends his days inside his Asheville, N.C., bungalow burning canvas, paper and paint, creating unique pieces that the world may never see.

What it Was, Was Football / Duncan Brantley

A naïve country preacher accidentally finds himself at a football game. He has no idea what he is seeing, but describes it as best he can. A visual recreation of Andy Griffith’s classic radio comedy routine.

Bernerd / Marshall Johnson

Bernerd, the controlled burn spokesman, is here to teach us about fire safety. Unfortunately he’s lost his way and now his method mostly involves a trail of lit cigarettes and smoldering ruins. Come with Bernerd as he teaches one family the importance of random fire.

The Private Life of a Cat /Iris Monahan

In 1947, Alexander Hammid (the cinematographer husband of the famous experimental filmmaker Maya Deron) made a silent documentary chronicling his cat having kittens. Fifty years later, Iris Monahan and her dad Dave added cat voices, funky music, and a few laughs.

Acito on the Mound / Shawn Lewallen

The spirit of baseball lives on long after players leave the field. A visit to the pitching mound after saying goodbye to a friend brings back memories of a rough game.

6 p.m. – Meet & Greet with Attending Filmakers

7:30 P.M. – Feature Film

The Founders

They were not supposed to be athletes. They were not supposed to get paid to play. They were not supposed to call the shots. But in 1950, 13 amateur women golfers battled society, finances and sometimes even each other to create the Ladies Professional Golf Association.

North Carolina State Toast

Here’s to the land of the long leaf pine,

The summer land where the sun doth shine,

Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great,

Here’s to “Down Home,” the Old North State!

Here’s to the land of the cotton bloom white,

Where the scuppernong perfumes the breeze at night,

Where the soft southern moss and jessamine mate,

’Neath the murmuring pines of the Old North State!

Here’s to the land where the galax grows,

Where the rhododendron’s rosette glows,

Where soars Mount Mitchell’s summit great,

In the “Land of the Sky,” in the Old North State!

Here’s to the land where maidens are fair,

Where friends are true and cold hearts rare,

The near land, the dear land, whatever fate,

The blessed land, the best land, the Old North State!

Photograph by Tim Sayer of the oldest longleaf pine tree

Party Like It’s 1548

Weymouth Woods is home to the oldest longleaf pine in America — heck, maybe the entire world. Oh, the history that big ol’ pine tree has witnessed.

Photographs by Tim Sayer

So, what do you get someone who just turned 469? It’s not as simple as when Robert Wuhl walks to the mound in Bull Durham and advises his players that “well, uh . . . candlesticks always make a nice gift.” At 469 it’s probably time to downsize, not accumulate more stuff. Besides, when the oldest longleaf pine started growing in the back 40 of Weymouth Woods, baseball hadn’t even been invented. OK, it may not be the oldest longleaf pine anywhere but it’s the oldest one that’s been measured and it’s right here and, well, 469 is still 469 no, matter how you, excuse the expression, cut it.

When this thing started growing Shakespeare wasn’t even a twinkle in Falstaff’s eye. It started sprouting 39 years before the Lost Colony got lost and has hung around long enough to have its own GPS coordinates. It was hail and hearty 170 years before Blackbeard got blown out of the water; 225 years before the ladies of Edenton threw their own revolutionary tea party; 317 years before Sherman marched through; 355 years before the Wright brothers got airborne on the Outer Banks; 366 years before Babe Ruth got his nickname in Fayetteville; and 447 years before the Carolina Panthers got beat in their very first game by the Atlanta Falcons, in overtime, of course. In lieu of gifts, we arranged a small, intimate gathering. These are just a few of the invited guests this ancient tree could have impacted over the centuries, if only it had the chance.

17th Century

Sir Isaac Newton

Who says Newton was inspired by an apple falling in his mother’s garden in their home in Lincolnshire, England? The mathematical genius never wrote about it, though accounts of him mentioning apples and trees and whatnot to a friend do exist. As the cantankerous old boy aged, it seems the apple anecdote was polished just a bit more with each successive telling. We, however, think it’s just as likely one of the most famous eureka moments in science could have been inspired by a falling pine cone. Eddie Meacham, who has been dealing in the laws of man for 33 years rather than the laws of physics, took a lunch break from Van Camp, Meacham & Newman PLLC to get hit on the head.

18th Century

Betsy Ross

Legend has it the young, beautiful, widowed seamstress convinced General George Washington that the five-pointed star was easier to cut and stitch than the six-pointed one the powdered wig set had in mind. However, there’s nothing in the historical record to indicate that the pine cone had been definitively ruled out. Betsy was just one of several Philadelphia flag makers but, thanks to her grandson about 100 years after the Declaration of Independence, she grabbed all the old glory. Melissa Murphy, a local seamstress whose business, Banana Peels, makes hooded towels, burp rags, bibs, etc., provided a stitch in time for us. We’ll leave it to her grandson to embellish the tale in a century or so.

19th Century

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

For those who haven’t had their fill of Russian fiddling just yet, Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer, a card-carrying member of The Mighty Handful (Russian composers known as The Five) and the creator of the “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which is the fastest minute in music on the 19th century side of Prince. Mac Wood, a Scotland County native who had a distinguished seven-and-a-half year military career of his own and is a massage therapist at Sandhills Therapeutic Effects, managed to keep his bow from setting his beard on fire when we slowed the pace just a little to the Flight of Pine Beetle. Or maybe it should be Pine Beatle.

Vincent Van Gogh

Oh, sure, he’s done wheat fields and crows and starry nights and sunflowers, but we’re pretty sure, hidden away in someone’s basement, are his masterful series of pine tree paintings, every bit as hauntingly aching and tortured as a bunch of irises. This bit of pulp fiction would be grist for the mill of the anguished artistic soul. Our photographer Tim Sayer has stepped into the role for us. We could tell you how he managed to both take the picture and be in the picture but, then, we’d have to cut your ear off.

20th Century

The Embers

As a card-carrying senior member of a forest of longleaf pine that once covered 90 million acres from Sandhills to Coastal Plain, why wouldn’t there be a place for a little beach music and some shagging at a summer party? Michael Gibson, Adam Smith, Sam Schneiderman and Reed Taws stand in as The Embers to give us a controlled burn.

21st Century

Steve Jobs

Because he was on an all-fruit diet? That’s why a company worth something in the neighborhood of $750 billion — started in a garage by three guys, one of whom was a notoriously difficult human being who wore black mock turtlenecks, Levi 501s and New Balance jogging shoes — is named for a fruit? Surely, Pine cone would have been an equally good option. Brady Beck, North Carolina’s Southern Piedmont management biologist and a nature photographer, shows why there is absolutely no reason we’re not all talking on our iCones today.  PS

A Stitch in Time

Putting art in the palm of your hand

By Jim Moriarty   •   Photographs by Tim Sayer

With a plastic headband circling a shock of combustible red hair and a flip-down 5x magnifier in front of her eyes, Rita Ragan sits at a desk covered with what seems like a table runner of Sticky Notes and stitches art in the miniature. While it’s not exactly getting small in the way Steve Martin joked about it back in the ’70s, the road to these pieces — not much larger than your hand — stretches back at least that far. Ragan, now in her 70s herself, hasn’t exactly marched to a different drummer, she was the drummer in the band.

She was christened Nancy Marguerite Ragan but flip-flopped all of that by becoming a Buddhist after meeting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, and becoming Rita after Ronald Reagan was elected president and the inevitable first lady name game grew tiresome. A decade or so ago she decided to go small while she was living in the biggest, broadest city America has to offer, New York. “I saw an ad for a miniature show and thought I’d go. I just fell in love with all the things that can be so tiny and wonderful, how you could take a whole world and, oh, look, it’s in the palm of your hand,” she says, extending one. “At first I was just collecting things. I always thought art was something you had to have this extraordinary special ability to do — to paint or sculpt or all those things. It just never occurred to me that I could do it — but here I am.”

Though patterns are available, Ragan makes her own, reaching back to the ’20s and ’30s for inspiration. “It was such an exciting time. The whole world of art just went topsy-turvy,” she says. She has reproduced designs created by Frank Lloyd Wright, a painting by Henri Matisse and other images discovered as she roamed around the internet. After locating her subject, Ragan transfers it to a paper grid of her own creation with a 12 to 1 ratio to guide the otherwise freehand needlepoint. The thread she uses is 100 percent Chinese monofilament that comes in 700 different shades. There are 48 stitches to the inch, 2,304 in a square inch. “I can probably do one in six or eight weeks without going bananas. If I spend all day on it, I just get my mind fried,” she says. “But I recommend it as a hobby to anyone who likes to immerse themselves in something, let the worries of the world go away and make something beautiful.”

Ragan is the older daughter of Sam Ragan, who owned The Pilot from 1969 until his death in 1996, a man who casts as long a shadow over journalism and literature in North Carolina as the tallest pine at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities where his granddaughter, Robin Smith, is executive director and his younger daughter, Talmadge, serves on the board as chair of the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame.

“He was a lovely man,” Rita says of her father. “He always was wanting to go somewhere to see something and do something, meet interesting people.”

In this respect, at least, the pine cone didn’t fall far from the tree. “Sam thought of Mom as an adventurer, a lover of life who saw the world with the tenacious curiosity of a child,” says Robin. “He thought her brave to go after what she wanted and found her optimistic spirit contagious. I believe they were kindred spirits.”

And spirited ones. Rita, née Nancy, entered the University of Georgia at age 15, at the time the youngest student ever admitted. It only lasted a year or so until she decided to run off to New York — her first time to live there — to become an actress. It may not have been the shortest run ever on Broadway but it was in contention. The trail led back to Chapel Hill and marriage and children, Robin and Eric, and, eventually, single life again spent mostly in Vancouver, as ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan a city as any in North America.

“That’s probably the place I’ve lived the longest,” says Ragan, who, in addition to doing design work for local publications including the Vancouver Courier, became a drummer in a pair of punk rock bands, Nash Metropolitan and A Merry Cow. “We weren’t all that good, but I got to know all the other musicians in the punk scene.” 

Ragan became a manager, sound technician and pre-Uber driver for the hard-edged music that crisscrossed the border from Seattle to Vancouver and back. One of the bands was The Dishrags. Though these things become a bit hazy in the long pull of time, The Dishrags were, if not the very first all-female punk rock band, in contention for the title. The group is sufficiently famous that the three band members have supplied memorabilia for a 2018 punk rock exhibit at the Canadian Museum of History in Hull, Quebec. “For some reason The Dishrags just will not die,” says their drummer, Scout (Carmen Upex), who remains close to Ragan. “We made many trips with her to Seattle,” says Scout. “We were 16 when we moved to Vancouver. She was the one who was the DD. She was responsible. She didn’t drink and she had the car.”

Let’s see, there was the vanilla colored Citroën and the blue station wagon with the push-button transmission. How many punk rockers can you get in a Rambler? “They’re usually pretty skinny, so five or six,” says Ragan. Plus gear. She also managed another influential Vancouver punk rock/new wave band called The Pointed Sticks.

In the mid-’80s and still living in Canada, Ragan was dating a guy who knew a guy (Glenn Mullin), who had lived in Dharamsala from 1972-1984 and written extensively about the Dalai Lama. In a 2015 New York Times Magazine story by Pankaj Mishra, Dharamsala is described as a rhapsodic stew of, “crimson-robed monks, longhaired travelers on motorcycles, Tibetan women in brightly striped chubas, Sikh day-trippers, Kashmiri carpet sellers and English, German and Israeli backpackers.” According to Ragan, it hadn’t changed much. Mullin introduced her to the Dalai Lama and she helped his main assistant enter speeches and other communication into an early computer, stayed about a year and emerged a practicing Buddhist. “What a charming man. At the time he was fairly young. He has a translator and he asks questions: Where are you from? How did you get here? What do you do? He’s just fascinated,” she says.

“Mom was always very independent,” says son Eric. “She’d decide she wanted to do something, she’d just pick up stakes and do it.” In the early ’90s, that included a return trip to North Carolina, where she lived in a houseboat on the Cape Fear River listening to the fish jump and the alligators chomp until it was destroyed in a hurricane. The storm blew her back to Vancouver.

Then, in her early 60s, Ragan pulled up stakes again and headed back to New York. “I’d always wanted to live there. Who doesn’t? Art. Music. People. It’s possibly the greatest city in the world,” she says. She studied graphic design at NYU and lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side at 84th and Columbus. It was an easy walk to Central Park and the Natural History Museum. “My very favorite place to eat was the buffet brunch in the spectacular Peacock Alley at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel,” she says. “It was fairly expensive, but the food was excellent, and there was always a scattering of semi-celebrities having brunch along with us regular folk.” Then the rent controls came off and, as Ragan says, “Here I am.”

In his 1986 volume of poetry, A Walk into April, Sam Ragan has a poem entitled “Nancy.” It goes:

You talked about bluebirds

When you were three—

And the bright bluebird

Winging into the sunlight

Always seems a part of you.

There was that song, 

“Nancy With the Laughing Face,”

Which brightened dark days of long ago,

And other sights and sounds

Flood the memories

Of someone very special.

It has been a wonderful journey,

And it’s the journey that counts,

Not the getting there.

Here at home the dogwood is in bloom,

And across the miles I am proud

That others share my pride in you—

The very special you.

It seems the gift of producing art in the miniature may be genetic.  PS

Jim Moriarty is senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Reclamation Project

Sunken shapes of claw, paw, toe

betray those who trespass on the beach

when tide is out.

Shells, their chambered lives

destroyed by roiling waves,

spread detritus like chad.

Stones that shine with wet color,

bronze, gold, orange, onyx,

dull to grey as sea breezes

dry them out.

Evening tide awakens, reaches,

erases evidence of interlopers,

leaves the shore like a bedsheet,

taut, smooth, tucked in.

— Sarah Edwards

Almanac

By Ash Alder

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.–Aldo Leopold

 

The mockingbird sings 100 songs. Ballads of honeysuckle and wild rose. Lady’s slipper. Skipper and milkweed. Plump strawberries. Cottontail and mophead hydrangeas.

June is here, he whistles, prelude to a queue of tunes about cukes and pole beans, creaky tire swings, hives full of honey. His morning song, syrupy as the last spring breeze, is interrupted by a string of sharp rasps. The tune tells how to scold a crow.

As fox kits scuffle in a pine-fringed wood, the sweep of a tail sends a troupe of dandelion seeds swirling into the dreamy green yonder. Summer is near, the mockingbird calls. We can feel the truth of it.

Cicada skin clings to the grooved bark of an ancient willow. On the solstice, a little girl finds it. The mockingbird watches her carry it home. Summer is here, the bird sings. The girl places the empty vessel on her
windowsill, hums a tune as sunlight washes over the golden amulet.

Evening unfolds. Fireflies dance beneath the sugar maple and a resident toad joins the cricket symphony. Mockingbird sleeps, yet the music swells
into the night.

Magic of Midsummer

The days grow longer. On Friday, June 9, a full Strawberry Moon illuminates the tidy spirals of golden hay dotting a nearby pasture. For Algonquin tribes, this moon announced ripe fruit to be gathered. Because the hives now hum heavy, the June moon is also called the Mead Moon. Honey, water and yeast. Patience. Sip slowly the magic of this golden season. 

Perhaps stemming from the ancient Druid belief that summer solstice symbolizes the “wedding of Heaven and Earth,” many consider June an auspicious month for marriage. This year, Solstice falls on Tuesday, June 20. Celebrate the longest day of the year with sacred fire and dance. Now until Dec. 21, the days are getting shorter. Sip slowly the magic of these golden hours.

When the sun sets on Friday, June 23 — a new moon — bonfires will crackle in the spirit of Saint John’s Eve. On this night, ancient Celts powdered their eyelids with fern spores in hopes of seeing the wee nature spirits who dance on the threshold between worlds. 

Lady’s Fingers

Some like it hot. Some like it cold. Whichever your preference, fresh okra is one of this month’s most delicious offerings. Also called lady’s fingers, okra is a member of the mallow family (think cotton, hollyhock and hibiscus). The edible seedpods of this flowering plant are rich in vitamins and minerals that promote healthy vision, skin and immune system. Because it’s an excellent source of fiber, okra also promotes healthy digestion.

Father’s Day falls on Sunday, June 18. Say “I love you” with a jar of pickled okra — local and, perhaps, with a kick.

Everlasting Love

When you send someone roses — the birth flower of June — the color of the petals tells all. Red reads romance. Pink for gratitude. White or yellow for friendship. Orange for passion.  PS

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

–William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

The Jugtown Century

Turning fire and clay into works of art

By Ray Owen

Nestled in the northwest corner of Moore County in the early 1900s, Jacques and Juliana Busbee’s Jugtown Pottery elevated folk pottery into a broader appreciation of art and cultural heritage.  A pair of Raleigh artists initially viewed as “foreigners,” the Busbees traveled the back roads of Moore and Randolph counties like old-time politicians, introducing themselves and their goals while learning about pottery from those who made it. They collected traditional wares and studied folkways, lived among the country folks and wove themselves into the culture with dignity and personal warmth. The Busbees cared deeply about the plight of the potters, their long history and struggles.

Utilizing local materials and old-time turning and firing techniques, their own pottery provided a kind of visual nourishment that proved as timeless as its classical inspiration, and became the foundation for traditional pottery of the 20th century in North Carolina. The great gift of the Busbees’ revival was their aesthetically pleasing ware, a fusion of traditional and Oriental ceramic forms created under the watchful eye of Jacques Busbee. They found not only a new direction for the North Carolina pottery trade, propelling their community into the future, but also a means of sustaining a way of life for the Owen/Owens family of potters. And the couple grew to be the leading advocates for the trade.

The Busbees accomplished this transformation by cultivating a wider audience for folk pottery and, in turn, the Seagrove area came to embrace the Busbees as their own. This symbiosis proved not only important for marketing pots but for defining the identity of the potters themselves, helping to foster the survival of a craft that in most other areas had passed into the ages.

The arrival of the Busbees marks the turning point for a region that was looking to reinvent itself at the end of the era of the salt-glazed jug. While the locals saw pottery as another cash crop, Jacques and Juliana thought of it as something to be celebrated for its beauty. Their outsider’s perspective offered a broader view for the symbols of handmade pots and rural society, and over time the district’s residents began to see themselves through this lens. The old pug mill with the mule, and the treadle wheel and groundhog kiln, came to have new meaning and a source of community pride.

This vision of a new pottery that could breathe life into handmade craft would have been nothing without the willing hands of the potters. The craftsmen were ripe for engagement and served as the co-creators of Jacques and Juliana’s artistic undertaking. It should be noted that gifted craftsmen open to innovation were viewed as exceptional, or “different,” not unlike the early perception of the Busbees, whose pieces were at first described as “play” or “toy” ware. This view of the innovative potters’ exceptionalism likely resulted from their involvement with the newcomers in southern Moore County who where influencing their style and taste.

In the early years of the 20th century, Southern Pines and Pinehurst provided a market for pottery from the northern end of the county. The potters streamed into the settlements on schooner wagons with loads of utilitarian ware, only to find worldly resort dwellers more interested in urns, jars and teapots. The townsfolk began showing the tradesmen drawings and examples of the pieces they were willing to buy, compliant craftsmen began turning out new shapes, and sightseers began visiting their shops.

A new way for the potters was also provided by arts enthusiast Neva Burgess, who at the start of the 1900s began promoting regional arts and crafts at Lift-the-Latch Tearoom in the southern Moore County town of Pinebluff. This early sales outlet for traditional pottery offered lectures and exhibitions, set in a self-consciously rustic log cabin reminiscent of Jugtown. For several years prior to the Busbees’ arrival, potters were invited to give public demonstrations and to exhibit at the Sandhills Fair in Pinehurst, paving the way for their venture.

Jugtown represents a convergence of people who joined together with a common creative goal to make something successful happen. Beyond nourishing the pottery tradition, the key to understanding the Busbees’ vision is its connection through the generations. Sustained by teaching and sharing, such a lineage is a fragile thing, lost forever if the chain is broken. With a heritage so rich, perhaps all those who have followed in the Busbees’ footsteps have felt that nurturing the tradition was tied to a sense of being part of something greater than themselves, and that those before them kept the tradition alive under much harder circumstances.

Since 1983, Jugtown has been owned and operated by potters Vernon and Pam Owens, and their family. Vernon began turning pots at Jugtown in 1960, and his grandfather, J.H. Owen, was the first potter to successfully partner with the Busbees. Through the years, the pottery complex has remained basically unchanged, and the Owenses have carefully restored and preserved the facility.  Most remarkably, in a time when almost all traditional pottery buildings have disappeared, Vernon still turns pots in the original turning room, completely unchanged from when it was built, with a dirt floor and bare log walls.

Like the Busbees before them, the Owenses produce a hybrid of traditional and classic forms, ever careful in their transformation from old to new traditions. Older pots from the region remain an inspiration, just as Jacques and Juliana had envisioned. Decorative motifs reflect the natural world and agrarian setting, with incised sine waves, farm animals, and birds being common themes. The vessels carry evidence of the fire and earth from which they were made  — some slick like clay, others rough and volcanic, and others with slight finger grooves from the hands of their creator.

In some regards, the cares and concerns of today are not so different from the early 20th century — machines continue to replace people, as social upheaval and change persist — but Jugtown holds the same allure as when it was founded. In a 1991 interview conducted with Vernon Owens, reflecting on life at Jugtown, he said, “The more automated and the more things are done by a computer, the more important it is that this place, and any other place like this, stay the same. What you’re doing, you’re going back to a time when time didn’t matter that much, and that’s one of the things that draws people to a place like this.”

With its picturesque setting, Jugtown is the best-preserved pottery in the eastern Piedmont and one of the most significant traditional potteries in America. The complex consists of 12 rustic log cabins that blend seamlessly into the surrounding farmscape. The property embodies the Busbees’ belief in the civilizing influence of rural society, a throwback to a place closed off from the outside world where they had everything to do for themselves. The effect is one of being deep-rooted and unchanged over time, reflective of the values of thrift, modesty, plain-style tastes and homespun ways.

When you pass through the gates you encounter a cultural landscape, with a visceral, almost instinctive alignment with the past. There are those who have said it is haunted, that sometimes in the quiet of the old Busbee house you can hear the muffled sound of music drifting through the air. Stories of this apparition pre-date the current owners, with reports of the phenomena spanning decades. Whether or not one believes such accounts, the telling and retelling of these stories gives them a certain degree of life and meaning.

Jugtown is, and always has been, a shared experience. The Busbees’ vision permeates the site, and its distinctive and cherished aspects are as real to its residents and their patrons as its physical characteristics. It is a feeling that surrounds them and is held within, connecting with the invisible fabric of life.  PS

(Adapted from The Busbee Vision, with permission from the N.C. Pottery Center.)

The Arts Council of Moore County will present the exhibit, Jugtown Pottery:  A Century of Art & Craft in Clay, at Campbell House Galleries from June 2-30, 2017. The show also features jewelry by Jennie Keatts of JLK Jewelry and photographs by Angela Walker. The exhibit is free and open to the public on weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturday, June 17, 2 p.m. to 4p.m.

During the month of June, two free Jugtown events will be presented at the Southern Pines Civic Club at 105 S. Ashe St. in Southern Pines. On Sunday, June 11 at 7 p.m., the PBS film, Craft in America/Jugtown Pottery will be screened, followed by a panel discussion with Jugtown artists. And, Steve Compton, author of Jugtown Pottery 1917-2017: A Century of Art & Craft in Clay, will give a talk on Wednesday, June 14 at 7 p.m.

The Rifles of Bear Creek

How the Colonial Kennedy long rifle factory in Robbins became one of the largest in the South

By Bill Case   •   Photographs by John Gessner

More than 50 years ago, three men clambered down the steep bank of Bear Creek in Robbins hoping to discover artifacts from a frontier rifle factory that, along with its owner, David Kennedy, vanished around 1838. Arron Capel II, now the retired CEO of his family’s century-old braided rug manufacturing business in Troy, teamed with Pinehurst psychiatrist Don Schulte and candlemaker Carl McSwain to conduct what amounted to an archaeological dig. Each possessed an abiding interest in the legendary Kentucky long rifle, which became the gun of choice for America’s frontier settlers and fighting men after gunsmiths of German descent began producing them in southeastern Pennsylvania around 1719. Those artisans discovered that combining a rifled cylinder in the bore of a 4-foot-long barrel dramatically enhanced a gun’s accuracy at previously unimagined distances. British soldiers experienced the lethal power of the rifles when patriot sharpshooters, firing from 250 yards away, toppled redcoats like tenpins during the Revolutionary War. 

Because the entirety of the frontier was sometimes referred to as “Kentucky,” the rifle became associated with that area even though long rifles were never actually made there. Ambitious entrepreneurs spread production from Pennsylvania to Virginia, and finally outlying areas like the interior of North Carolina. One of those rifle makers was David Kennedy’s father, (John) Alexander Kennedy, a Philadelphia gunsmith of Scottish descent. The precise date Alexander moved his family by wagon train from Philadelphia to North Carolina is difficult to pin down. One account suggests he arrived in this area as early in 1768 — the year of David’s birth. Family lore says Alexander left Philadelphia to steer clear of the British Army, poised to seize the city in 1777. Concerned that the British would identify him as an arms supplier to the rebels, Alexander usually refrained from engraving his name on rifles he made. Only one bearing the signature “A Kennedy” is known to exist, but his rifles were employed by the Continental Army in the Revolutionary battles of Guilford Courthouse and Kings Mountain.

When he arrived in what is now Robbins, Alexander Kennedy befriended fellow riflesmith William Williamson, who helped Alexander start his own operation by loaning him assorted gunmaking tools. He then taught his trade to son David. Around 1795, David began his own business partnering with Williamson in the operation of a gunmaking facility on Bear Creek.

The partners erected a dam across the creek, diverting the water flow to millworks where the stream’s force powered a waterwheel that, in turn, operated the mill’s machinery. Iron flat bar was rolled into the form of rifle barrels by large grindstones produced by a neighboring millstone maker. The metal was hot-forged and molded into barrels by trip-hammers, likewise operated by waterpower. The barrels (referred to as the gun’s “soul” by Arron Capel) were then “cooked for days at a time and stacked like firewood.” Coal from a nearby mining works supplied the heat source. Brass fittings were cast at Bear Creek too. Once the guns were assembled, they were test fired over the millpond to a target and the rifle’s sights carefully adjusted.

As Capel points out in his book, Bear Creek Long Rifles, there existed a high demand for effective weaponry since, “(in) addition to the obvious need to put food on the table, every frontiersman had the responsibility to protect his family from hostile Indian attack.” Moreover, the Kennedys’ rifle mill and smithy were strategically situated to serve as an outpost for intrepid pioneers departing from Fayetteville (then Cross Creek) and traveling the adjacent trail on their journeys to Salisbury and destinations farther west. It was not long before David Kennedy bought out Williamson’s interest and, with his father aging, became the man fully in charge. Soon, he expanded his holding to include a sawmill, and lumberyard. Five of David’s 10 children, along with his brothers Alexander and John, busied themselves making rifles, pistols and swords. Woodworkers, carvers, engravers and silversmiths crafted the finishing touches that gave Kennedy rifles their unique look. Virtually every component, aside from flintlocks imported from England, was fabricated and assembled at Bear Creek. So many skilled artisans were employed at the bustling mill, the site became known as Mechanics Hill, and a post office by that name was opened. It was the first name given to a settlement that over the following century and a half would undergo name changes as frequently as a flimflam man, identified, in turn, as Elise, Hemp, and finally Robbins.

David Kennedy was resourceful in finding ways to trim costs. Blackwell Robinson’s The History of Moore County — 1747-1847 recounts the local legend of how Kennedy circumvented payment to a New York company of what he deemed to be outrageously high-priced gunlocks. After journeying on horseback to the factory and using his greatly admired violin music to ingratiate himself with the workmen and operators, David “soon discovered the secret involved and returned to Mechanics Hill, where he began to make his own.” And the craftsmanship didn’t come cheap. The most highly ornamented rifles, according to Robinson, “contained silver melted from 16 silver dollars and sold for proportionately higher prices.”

No definitive proof exists that Kennedy succeeded in landing a major contract to supply arms to the U.S. during the War of 1812, but Capel and his friend Bruce Turner unearthed correspondence at the Archives of the War Department in Washington sent by Kennedy in January 1812, to North Carolina Congressman Archibald McBryde. In a letter, Kennedy expressed his willingness and readiness to manufacture whatever numbers of rifles and muskets the government might require, writing, “Tho I am not ancious to under take the bisness, as I am content with my present imployment, which a fordes me a cumfortabel livin….., when I think on the blessings we injoy in our much beloeved country, it makes my hart glo with the love of the same and makes me willin to incounter almost any hardship in defence of our rights.”

Capel maintains there would never have been the “sudden and dramatic increase of employment at the rifle mill (150 workers, according to the estimate of Walter Williamson, William Williamson’s grandson)” absent the procurement of such a deal. In his dogged research, Capel also discovered ancient military records mentioning that a wagonload of Kentucky rifles “had been shipped from the north,” to General Andrew Jackson immediately prior to the Battle of New Orleans — the final engagement of the conflict — and surmises that the wagonload is as likely to have come from Mechanics Hill as any other location.

Whether Kennedy supplied armaments for the war effort or not, it is clear his factory was a booming moneymaker. Robinson’s history asserts that the factory “was the largest in this part of the south.” One contemporaneous account reported the profits of David Kennedy at about $15,000 annually and those of his brother “about 1,000 per annum.” If Google’s inflation calculator is to be believed, that $15,000 represents something in excess of $250,000 today.

Kennedy became an influential personage and benefactor in Mechanics Hill. According to the 1830 census he owned a large plantation consisting of 23 people, including 15 slaves. He and brother Alexander were trustees of the Mount Parnassus Academy in Carthage. David donated land and financed the building of the Mechanics Hill Baptist Church, located on Salisbury Street in Robbins, where the Woodmen of the World Hall now stands. He served as a deacon in the church. A Bible donated by Kennedy in 1823 contained the following tongue-in-cheek inscription: “David Kennedy — his book he may read good but God knows when.”

Kennedy’s religious inclinations may have been galvanized by a harrowing close call. Nearly crushed by a rolling log at the sawmill, David “declared that ‘if the Lord let him live he would use his logs for better purposes,’” according to Robinson’s Moore County history.

Business slowed at the Kennedy rifle factory after 1825, a period of a generally declining economy culminating in the depression known as the Panic of 1837. Making matters worse was the ongoing presence of competitive rifle mills near Salem and Jamestown, North Carolina. The real coup de grace for Kennedy occurred around 1835, when he faced a demand to make good a surety for payment of a large debt owed by brother Alexander, whose general store had failed. David and wife Joanna were ruined and their holdings liquidated. According to Capel’s book, “one 300 acre tract of Kennedy’s land sold for four dollars.” Ironically, gold was later discovered on it. The rifle mill was closed and auctioned off. The buyer converted the facility to a grain mill.

Creditors never ceased hounding David Kennedy even after he’d lost everything. He and his wife fled to Green Hill, Alabama, where they resided on son Hiram’s cotton plantation. He died there in 1837. His total estate reported in Alabama tallied $170.30.

David’s second son, John, stayed on in Mechanics Hill making rifles in his own business. John achieved lasting local fame in a three-way “shoot-off”  before a large crowd in Carthage against fellow Moore County gunsmiths Phil Cameron and John B. McFarland. Each of the competitors claimed to make Moore County’s most accurate rifles. When the smoke cleared, all three were found to have met the bull’s-eye. The men called it a draw and each went home “feeling proud of his marksmanship, and certain that no gunsmith in the state made a more accurate shooting rifle than he did.” John continued in the business until shortly before he died in 1855, the same year a spring storm washed the Kennedy rifle mill down history’s drain. An amble today along Bear Creek’s rugged trail provides scant evidence that the area was once a beehive of activity. Aside from easily overlooked foundation stones, there is no vestige of the old factory. Capel, McSwain and Schulte knew it would take real digging to find any remnants of manufacture, but they were prepared to do just that in their visit to Bear Creek half a century ago. Over time, local residents had unearthed various metallic objects thought to have been left behind, but few of those relics had been preserved.

Working together, the three men located a small vine-tangled mound. It proved to be the mill’s discard pile. For the excited long rifle enthusiasts, the shards of buried rifle barrels, drill bits, flint hammer castings and raw silver they unearthed constituted a treasure trove as valuable as gold. These artifacts provided the insights into the Bear Creek operation.

Aficionados of David Kennedy’s rifles have launched their own Facebook site — Kennedy Rifle/Mechanics Hill. Followers post comments that run the gamut from Second Amendment discussions to providing advance notice of the Kennedy gun show and food drive recently held in Robbins in April. Historian-collectors like Capel and Asheboro’s Bill Ivey, author of North Carolina Schools of Longrifles 1765-1865, cite the historic importance of the Bear Creek gun factory as one of nine documented facilities (referred to as “schools” ) that produced the vaunted Kentucky long rifles in North Carolina.

What really excites historians and collectors are the beautiful carvings and engravings on the long rifles. Like the Kennedys, many founders of the North Carolina long rifle schools hailed from either Pennsylvania or Virginia, and their craftsmanship reflects those roots. Ornamental engraving contained on the butts of many Kennedy rifles exhibit a six-pointed star nearly indistinguishable from those found on guns made in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Alexander Kennedy began his career. Similarly, engravings emblazoned on the side “patchbox” (used to store cloth patches and grease) of Kennedy rifles typically reveal “flower petals” that mimic a recognized mark of Lancaster County rifles.

Long rifles displaying David Kennedy’s engraved initials or signature (he spelled it “Kannedy) are particularly prized. Another of the under 100 known Kennedy guns depicts a serpentine-like comet on the butt. Capel says the design was inspired by the “Great Comet of 1811,” which electrified the country for the better part of a year. In a remarkable coincidence, a Kennedy rifle owned by Capel displays the name of an English lock maker named “Robbins” on the flintlock. It was crafted more than a century before Karl Robbins’ beneficence in the community caused the town to be renamed in his honor. When asked about the market value of Kennedy rifles, savvy collectors Ivey and Capel tend to hold their cards close to their respective chests, but neither blinked at five figures as a fair starting point.

The Moore County Telephone Directory contains nearly as many entries for “Kennedy” as there are for “Jones” and more than a few are descendants of David Kennedy, including Southern Pines’ Assistant Town Manager Chris Kennedy. A gun lover and hunter, Chris had frequented Robbins many times and was generally familiar with David Kennedy’s story, but his 2015 visit to the town as a member of the Moore County Leadership Institute heightened his awareness of his ancestor’s critical role in the founding and development of the town. “It’s pretty humbling, especially in my role, to think that the Kennedys had a lot to do with development not just of Robbins, but of the whole county,” says Chris.

The rapid decline in recent decades of Robbins’ textile industry caused town leaders to grapple with how best to attract new business. One tactic has been to go “back to the future” by stressing the community’s rifle-making origins. Prominently positioned in the center of town is a historical landmark plaque recognizing the Kennedys’ “extensive gunsmithing operation” at Mechanics Hill. In 2013, the Town Council members adopted resolutions establishing the second Thursday in each April as “Mechanics Hill/Kennedy Rifle Day,” and affirming their personal sworn duty to uphold the Second Amendment.

Like the Phoenix of ancient lore, gunmaking in Robbins astonishingly rose from the ashes. Soft-spoken gun devotee and lifetime Robbins resident Joey Boswell is something of a latter day David Kennedy. After a wide-ranging career performing computer automation, engineering new product developments, and generally solving all sorts of industrial problems for various manufacturers, Boswell tired of travel to faraway destinations and being away from his family. Familiar with the design, operation and limitations of weaponry, both civilian and military, he and his wife, Martha, started their own business, War Sport Industries, LLC, in the “barn” alongside their home atop a hill in Robbins.

His first major solo project in 2008 involved finding a method to camouflage the infrared heat visible to the enemy at nighttime on the hot barrels of American soldiers’ guns after repeated firing. Boswell invented a heat-resistant device he labeled a “suppressor sock,” which did the trick. The sock became standard issue for certain Army weapons. They began producing their own armaments — the first manufactured in Robbins since the day the Kennedy factory was shuttered. After extensive research, Boswell designed what he called a low visibility operations application rifle (LVOA), which proved to be a major advancement in military weaponry.

Soon, customer demand for the LVOA increased to the point that the Boswells could no longer handle operations out of their barn and they moved War Sport to an old factory off Route 24. With operations running full tilt, two shifts, with 25 employees, War Sport had suddenly become a major Robbins employer. In 2016, the Boswells separated from War Sport and began another weapons-related enterprise in their barn. The new company is called Mechanics Hill Marketing, LLC, in homage to Boswell’s gunmaking predecessor. The Boswells and Mechanics Hill now work in partnership with Osprey Armaments in researching, developing and marketing its weapons and other related products.

“I have never had to move from Robbins to do anything I wanted to do, and I have worked overseas and everywhere,” says Boswell, who has served as a member of Robbins’ Town Council since ’09. As the catalyst to the rebirth of gunmaking in Robbins, Boswell feels a kinship with David Kennedy since — modern assembly line processes aside — the art of making guns has not changed much since Kennedy’s day. “Here we were bringing jobs to this town in the same business that started it.”  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.