Mozelle Payne was born in Georgia to James Franklin and Martha Louise (Fowler) Payne in 1898. Beyond that, I can’t tell you much about her early life in Georgia. She had 8 brothers and sisters, but only 2 of her brothers would survive into adulthood. Somewhere between the end of her schooling and 23 years old, Mozelle would find her way to Iredell county, and to Statesville. It was in Statesville she would meet a paraplegic man named Clarence Earl Beam. Clarence had been in a wheelchair since 1913 after a fall from a wagon had damaged his spine and left him paralyzed from the chest down.
I wish I had some idea how this all transpired, how Mozelle ended up in Statesville, how she met Clarence, but I simply don’t, and can’t find any information about it in print. What I do know for sure is that the two were married in 1921, and in 1923 Clarence, with help from his family would open his own print shop called Beam Printing Company out of the family home. The Beams would work together at the printing business until 1962, when Clarence retired and sold the business to a partner, Carl White, who had worked for Beam since 1955. This then became what many of you locals may remember as Bec-Car Printing until 2019 when it was sadly sold off.
But getting back to Mozelle. I don’t know a lot about her so I don’t have a long narrative about her life to give you, but what has survived is her writing. And that’s going to be the majority of what I want to show you here.
In addition to her work at the print shop I do know Mozelle discovered a love of language, of story telling. This would manifest in a number of ways, beginning in 1933 when the Beams launched their own newspaper, called “The New Deal.” Clarence worked on the publishing and business end with Mozelle as the paper’s editor. It unfortunately didn’t last terribly long, but it was probably the proper beginning of Mozelle’s interest in story writing.
After the paper shuttered, she began looking for other ways to express herself and it seems she didn’t have a difficult time finding them.
Beam’s writing would also appear several times in “The State” magazine, what we today know as “Our State.”
In the 1940’s, Mozelle also began writing for what would have been her competition when The New Deal was being published: The Statesville Daily Record. Her column, “It Happened In Iredell” would become a notable addition to the paper and would generally chronicle local human interest stories, or else talk about the “old days” in Iredell, with stories and accounts from old-timers. It’s from these columns I learned her name, and saw it keep coming up over and over as I searched for various things. It’s how I found a second, written account that could confirm the tale of the blacksmith of Ringfire Mountain.
These are a small sample of her overall output in the local papers and publications, but I think they represent fairly well what she was interested in. Writing, but writing about people.
As I mentioned earlier, Clarence decided to retire in 1962, probably due to declining health. He sold off the business and had died by March of the next year.
Mozelle continue writing for the newspaper into the 1970’s, and became an advocate for various charities and endeavors.
Later in life, probably with health issues of her own and no children as heirs, Mozelle sold off her possessions and home, donated some of her land, and moved to the rest home called the Brian Center in Statesville.
Mozelle Beam finally passed away in 1983 at the age of 85 after a lifetime of activity. For someone who had such an impact on the local community, it’s a shame we simply don’t know more about her.
