If the governor signs the current budget that both the NC house and senate approved this week, it cold mean millions of dollars set aside for the restoration of the North Wilkesboro Speedway- an old NASCAR track that has been largely abandoned since 2011.
While I think the chance of ever having any actual NASCAR race at the facility again is slim, there’s so much more that could be done with the property. Wilkes, for example, is really one of the proper homeplaces of stock car racing and moonshining, stomping grounds of the late Junior Johnson. If nothing else, a racing museum would make sense, but this doesn’t preclude using the property for smaller races, concerts, events, weddings, whatever you wanted to do with it. More importantly, it would mean that a piece of local history could be saved from decay and the wrecking ball.
Here’s hoping that the money is made available and some concrete plans can be established for the old speedway.
A Somber Anniversary.
October 29th, 1982 is now 39 years removed from us. Next year it will be 4 decades since Angela Gray Hamby disappeared from Wilkesboro, NC.
I feel like Angie’s case has never gotten the attention outside of the local area that it should have or that other missing person cases have in the past and do now in the present. I think the search has been a victim of circumstance and location, and that has relegated it to only being prominent in the minds of people who knew her and locals who know of her.
Looking for information, it’s difficult to even get ahold of old articles about the case. Many are lost to time, many are not digitized, and so finding them means sifting through years worth of microfilm at local libraries hoping to chance upon the right day and page, or relying on the original authors to have kept copies. That’s one reason I have tried to gather what little bit I can.
It’s my belief that every mention, every page, every post is another point of contact, another chance for the right eyes to see this story, and to possibly contribute that one piece of information, that one loose end that could lead to a solution to this mystery, and some closure for her family and the people who loved her.
For those of you with social media or websites of your own, please take a moment today to link to Angie’s Charley Project page.
Health Sciences building opens on the site of the old Davis Hospital.
The new health sciences building Mitchell Community College has been constructing on part of the land that was once Davis Hospital has finally opened. If you look through the pictures included with the article, you might notice portraits of Miss Hill and Miss Norket adorn the walls.
Sources relating to Clio
I’ll try to include as much as I can relating to my search for Clio here. These will be in no particular order.
Also, see O.C Stonestreet’s column “The demise of a church” for information about the church’s end.
Clio Presbyterian Church
This church was founded in 1879 and closed down by it’s presbyter in 2011. If you would like to know more about it and the former community of Clio it was a part of, see my article on Clio, NC, and the sources I used for it.
This church is now private property, with the owners living directly next door, within easy view of the church. There are also several other houses nearby where neighbors can easily see you.
At the time of this post, there is a massive bee hive in one of the walls, and the bees tend to be all around the building’s exterior.
In short, enjoy the pictures, but please don’t go there yourself.
Clio, North Carolina
It’s only fitting that this story is about a place called “Clio”. If any of you reading this are students of or familiar with Greek mythology, you might know Clio as the muse of history, with the responsibility of calling to remembrance things past.
In this case, the muse strikes in a rather crafty manner, and a discovery of ephemera sent me on a journey I did not expect to take.
J.W. HAGER
It begins with a cache of papers given to me. This bundle of ephemera had items related to the work and history of a man named James Washington (or “J.W.”) Hager.
Hager was born in 1855 in Iredell county, probably not far from where he lived and died. Little is in print about his life, and none of it easily discoverable. However, through various sources I have been able to find that he was a prolific beekeeper and was by trade a merchant. His store would have been active in the general area we will from here on out call Clio sometime after the Civil War.
When the store exactly began, when it ended, and where exactly it was, I have been unable to discover. His own father, Samuel C Hager also apparently worked as a merchant and miller after being released from a Union prisoner of war camp at the end of the Civil War, and so it could have been a family business that J.W. took up.
The building was likely somewhere near Liberty Hill road, which today is just west of NC Highway 115, with Statesville to the south and the cowboy town of Love Valley to the north. This would give us some idea where Clio might have been.
The earliest direct account I can find of the store’s existence is 1883, when the Clio post office was established in Hager’s store with Hager himself as the community’s postmaster.
The store makes it past the turn of the century, with ads appearing as late as 1908. In 1915, Hager would move to the Stony Point community , and would later die there in 1929 at the age of 74.
CLIO’S NURSERY
But where the heck is Clio? It’s not on any modern maps. But I knew from the papers I had it was local, somewhere in Iredell, and the information about Hager’s store gave me an area to pitch horseshoes in.
There was one clue I already had though. A memory of a state marker on NC Highway 115 for a place called “Clio’s Nursery”. There is unfortunately only slightly more known about it than about Hager. NCPedia has a brief account of that institution.
Clio’s Nursery, established by pioneer Presbyterian minister James Hall, was a successful eighteenth-century classical academy located in what is now east-central Iredell County, about ten miles north of Statesville. Although the exact date that the school opened is uncertain, a certificate given to a student in 1780 confirms that it was in operation by August 1778. After the first building was destroyed by a fire, the second schoolhouse was built on top of an adjacent hill.
Hall maintained an active interest in the academy while leaving the teaching to others. During the Revolution, he served both as captain of a militia company and as regimental chaplain. When Hall’s militia unit was called to active service, classes continued at Clio’s Nursery under the supervision of Hall’s brother-in-law, James McEwen. McEwen died a short time after his appointment, and he was succeeded in November 1779 by Francis Cummins. Cummins, who later became a Presbyterian minister, had been born in Pennsylvania and moved to Mecklenburg County with his family.
Because of the invasion of the British army, Clio’s Nursery was closed from May 1780 to April 1782, when it was reopened under the direction of John Newton. The last teacher at the school was Charles Caldwell, who began teaching there in 1785 or 1786. The school apparently never reopened after Caldwell left in 1787 to reestablish Crowfield Academy in the bounds of Centre Presbyterian Church in Mecklenburg County.
In the short history of Clio’s Nursery, an unusually large number of prominent individuals attended the school. A sketch of the academy published in 1858 listed as alumni George W. Campbell of Tennessee, who served as secretary of the treasury in the James Madison administration; Moses Waddell, who later became president of the University of Georgia; a U.S. congressman; three judges; and eight ministers.
-NCpedia entry
To quote an article I would find later, “It has been said that where ever the Scotch-Irish built a church to the glory of God, they built beside it a schoolhouse for the education of their children“. There would then be a high likelihood of a Presbyterian church near the site of Clio’s Nursery, and it’s existence might give some boundaries to the area that was once called Clio.
CLIO PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Despite Clio’s Nursery having such influential students, little of it’s history remains. Not so for the church built nearby, and it was easily found in the various sources. Despite the quote I mentioned above, the church was not built when the Nursery originally was, but it was chartered in 1879 by 26 members from what was the Concord district, which is just west of Statesville near what today would be called Loray. It seems they had been members of Concord Presbyterian Church, which was inconveniently far from Clio. The presbytery decided the best way to remedy this problem was to open another church closer to the congregants. And so the church at Clio was born.
It’s history is as long as the Nursery’s is short, and so I wont list every detail and name associated with it, but will include all I can on the sources page for this article.
To simplify things, a Google search lead me to an article by local historian O.C. Stonestreet. Through that article, I discovered the church remained in use until 2011, when membership had fallen into the single digits, with only a handful of elderly congregants remaining. That year, by order of the Salem Presbytery, the church was finally closed. I now knew where Clio had been.
As an aside, when looking for old churches, the easiest tool a genealogy or history enthusiast can use is most likely going to be Find A Grave. If a church exists or existed very long it most likely has a cemetery. If it has a cemetery, the volunteers who keep Find A Grave updated will have found and catalogued it.
Unfortunately, there were no listings for a “Clio Presbyterian Church” when I looked. This could mean one of several things. First, it could mean that the cemetery is lost and uncatalogued, which is a particularly exciting prospect for someone interested in such things. Second, it could mean for some reason the graves were moved. Lastly, there’s the slim possibility that despite the church being active for so long it could be atypical and not have a graveyard at all.
Despite having no luck on Find A Grave, through genealogical research I was able to find a single burial at the church. In December of 1917, James Lola Hill was buried there upon his own instructions. He would be the first and the last person to laid to rest on the church’s plot. An unknown time later he was disinterred and his body reburied at Pisgah UMC in Hiddenite. So, no graveyard for the church.
After reading Mr. Stonestreet’s article, I knew a visit to the church was in order. With hours of poring over names, dates, histories, and maps behind me, it was time to see something tangible, and with my own eyes. Today, I visited what is left of Clio.
Despite now knowing roughly the area Clio occupied, I still know very little about the community. Here’s what I can find committed to print.
-A newspaper from 1883 mentions that the Nursery was built on land that was part of a plantation the people at the time called “Keaton Place”. That plantation’s beginning and ending are unknown to me.
-Likewise, Clio’s Nursery begins at an unknown date, but would have been in operation by at least 1778. I don’t think NCPedia’s listing for it is entirely accurate.
I wholeheartedly believe that the name of the school came before the community was ever called by the same name. Naming an institution of higher learning after a classical figure from mythology with ties to history seems more than apropos.
The location and building change over the course of the years, being at one time along Snow Creek, and called “Clio’s Nursery” in the early years, and in later times would also be known as “Clio Academy”. For more on this, see the sources page that will be linked at the bottom of this article.
It’s unknown how these various iterations of the school are related.
According to one article from 1875, the original academy building burned in 1787. The son of a “Col. John Walker” and a “negro belonging to John Sharp” were charged with the arson, and were eventually deemed not “innocent”, but “not proven guilty”.
-In 1879 the church is chartered, and building started. The completion date is unknown.
-In 1883 the community gets a post office, which is based out of J.W. Hager’s store.
-The church was completed at an unknown date and finally dedicated in 1892.
After this, there seems to be no great changes. Hager’s store continues, and he is installed as a deacon in the church. A position he keeps until he moves away to Stony Point. I would assume his store is sold, shuttered, or taken up by family if it was still open for business.
There are various articles in the local papers through the years about anniversary celebrations at the church, mentions of it and the academy in obituaries, but it seems to slowly disappear from the collective consciousness. In 2011, the church is closed for good.
The community that was once called Clio gets simply swallowed up by Statesville’s limits, and today even the church (if it still had an address) would be listed in Statesville. All that remains is an empty church building and a small dirt road called Clio Lane.
I hope this article isn’t the muddled mess for you, the reader that it seems to me. If it is, it’s only because the actual story I’ve tried to discover is just as hazy. With that in mind, I’m including many of my sources on a separate page, just as I did for the Trivette Clinic.
You can see many of my sources here.
In addition, the original papers that catapulted me into this search can be found on the ephemera page.
Also, if you would like to see more pictures of the church, it will have it’s own page and will be linked from the locations page.
The 130th Anniversary of the Bostian Bridge Train Wreck.
A grim anniversary today, as 130 years ago one of Statesville’s worst disasters was playing out.
Early in the morning of August 27th, 1891, just outside of Statesville proper, a train derailed and fell off a railway bridge.
To this day, no one really knows the cause, but when the dust settled and everything was accounted for, 22 people had died.
The event became fertile ground for a “ghost train” story, and tales of a phantom locomotive began to circulate locally. These of course follow a familiar pattern of urban legends all across the country, and much like the Munchkinland story, seem copied and pasted from other urban legeneds with only small details changed to make the story locally relevant.
The Statesville Record & Landmark has a fairly thorough write up on the incident published today for anyone interested in the actual details of the event.
I will say that I went out to the tracks on the anniversary once many years ago, well before the young man “ghost hunting” was killed there. I don’t believe in “ghost trains”, but I was curious to see if anyone still kept the anniversary.
Sure enough, before dark, people began gathering along the roadway in front of the bridge, (many even from out of state) all hoping to catch a glimpse or hear a sound related to the spectral engine and it’s fall from the bridge.
That night people clambered up the embankment to walk along the track in the dark with various paraphernalia related to ghost hunting. Their endeavors were ultimately cut short by repeated blasts from a train horn.
While many cheered, many others realized what this meant, and those on the bridge quickly made their way back to solid ground, some just in time to see an actual train lumber across the span. As it turns out, Norfolk Southern still uses the line, and no doubt knows about the anniversary.
One has to wonder if that night in 2010 when the 29 year old man was killed if it’s possible a new crew was conducting the engine across the bridge and didn’t know about the likelihood of people being on the tracks, or else, simply forgot.
Whatever the case, it wasn’t many years later that his death was added to the list of those killed on the bridge, and that second tragedy became part of the oral ghost story that passes from person to person in the area.
Though I haven’t been there myself since the anniversary night I went, I would assume the Iredell County Sheriffs Department probably keeps people away from the bridge these days. Surely I would not suggest going at night and risking life and limb in the dark climbing the track.
But if you would like to visit the bridge, it’s best seen in the daytime and can just be spotted from Buffalo Shoals road where it passes over Third Creek, near the landscape supply business.
Rosy Retrospection
When looking at the past, it’s easy to see things through the filter of nostalgia- sometimes even if we’re looking at a time period when we weren’t alive. Surely I’ve been guilty of this myself.
Whether you explain this by “rose-colored glasses”, “grass is always greener” or some other idiom, saying, or metaphor, it’s rarely a true view of the past.
Take the newspaper at the top of this post. The Statesville Landmark of Thursday, May 29th, 1947.
We’re talking post war America in the rural south. The days when doors were left unlocked and there was new industry and promise, when people were returning home from war and starting families, buying cars and building houses. Truly golden years if you can believe the people who lived through them, and even some history text books.
But as we take a look at just the front page of this issue, things don’t seem so rosy. You have an article about an adult from the Scotts community going to prison for 30 years for shooting and killing a 15 year old.
An account of a still and 7500 gallons of illegal alcohol being discovered and destroyed.
A young war vet is sentenced for assault with a deadly weapon.
A 17 year old boy charged with the attempted rape of his 9 year old cousin.
Another adult man being sentenced to 30 years in prison for the shooting death of a woman.
20 married couples being divorced in the local court before 11am.
Keep in mind, these are just the front page stories.
It can be very easy to glorify and to idolize times we never knew or only remember as past. For whatever reason, humans seem hardwired to do it, even in cases where things weren’t really that good. You hear it from elderly family members all the time. People who lived hand to mouth and picked cotton in the hot sun until their hands were raw and bleeding will think upon those days and proclaim how wonderful they were.
However, it’s important to remember that history is nuanced, and the study of it should be as well. One man’s simple country childhood is another man’s Jim Crow south. The story of our families, our towns, and our nation is one of good and ill, warts and roses, victory and defeat, successes and mistakes.
It’s important we remember both the good and the bad, and especially the worst of it, so we learn from our failures and hopefully don’t continually repeat the same errors.
The Boneyard – The Movie Filmed At Davis Hospital
During the winter of 1989, one of the hospitals most notable post-mortem identities was taking shape, and it became the set for a small horror movie. While at least one other location in Statesville would be used, the bulk of the movie would be filmed inside the empty hospital.
The story starts with James Thomas Cummins, who graduated from the California Institute of Arts in 1979 after receiving a scholarship from the Walt Disney Company.
Cummins almost immediately was able to get into “the business”, working as an illustrator, special effects artist, and sculptor for various tv shows and movies such as 1982’s “The Thing“, the 1985 reboot of TV’s the “Twilight Zone” and the 1986 Elvira movie. During those years he also did some sculpting for Hasbro toys, but I have been unable to find exactly which toy line he worked on.
Despite these initial successes, Cummins would later in life say he was frustrated by the way his work was being presented on film. In one interview with Suspense magazine, he would say he “grew tired of asking the powers that be for permission to play and create“, and this is what would eventually lead to his venturing out into the world of filmmaking on his own, culminating with “The Boneyard“.
Armed with a small budget, one of his own drawings of a prehistoric poodle as inspiration, a former hospital, and special effects help from Bill Corso, Cummins got to work.
The cast would include such veteran actors as Norman Fell, Phyllis Diller, and Ed Nelson. The casting of Diller, in particular seems to have been an adventure.
As anyone could guess, putting together a movie for the first time was likely a challenge. One that wasn’t helped by the freezing temperatures inside the unheated hospital, problems between actors, and an accidental fire in a portion of the building.
Despite these problems, Cummins managed to get the movie on film, and it was eventually released direct to video in 1991.
Reactions to the movie from critics were not positive. One called it “claustrophobic” and the makeup effects “crude and unconvincing”. But, as can be the case with low-budget horror movies, over the years it has developed a cult following among fans for it’s mix of comedy and horror, and of course for that giant poodle.
Once out of print, today there are several re-releases available, including a Blu-Ray edition with a director’s commentary.
Cummins would never take on creating another movie during his life, but would have several small roles in other films, including in the directors chair.
He would unfortunately contract rheumatic fever shortly after working on a movie called Dark:30, which would lead to several open heart surgeries. This would cause him to slip out of the Hollywood life and he would begin self-publishing books and taking on other creative pursuits.
Cummins died in December, 2000.
The Boneyard leaves behind a mixed legacy for those who worked on it and for the hospital. For most of the actors it was a paycheck at the end of notable careers. For Cummins, it was an attempt to find artistic freedom. For the hospital, maybe just a footnote. But one thing it does provide us with is something exceedingly rare; footage from the inside of Davis shortly after it ceased to be a hospital.
In 2003, on a trip inside the hospital with several other explorers, we came across a left behind script for the movie in the old Women’s Division building near the pediatric entrance. At the time we probably didn’t think very much of it, but one of the other explorers took it to preserve.
Through the years, we lost contact and I had given up on ever seeing or being able to share the script. Until this year when I was able to get in contact with two of the explorers who had been on that trip. As a result, I can now offer up the script in PDF form for anyone interested in this piece of eccentric ephemera. This script will also be available for download from the Internet Archive, and the physical copy will be placed under the care of the Statesville Historical Collection.
I’m also going to include some other material I’ve found while researching the movie.
There’s also still a lot out there online about Cummins and the movie, and I’ll include some links I’ve found to pertinent information as well.
A recollection about James Cummins and his work on The Thing from someone who knew him.
Cummin’s website, which is only available now on the Wayback Machine.
An interview with Cummins from the defunct MyPDFScripts, also from the Wayback Machine.
A story about Cummins and his projects after his cardiac surgeries.
The website for his Little Doodle project mentioned in the article above, available on the Wayback Machine.
The Statesville Historical Collection has a complete press kit for the movie in their collection, but one would have to see this in person.
For the moment, the film can also be found on Youtube.
“We Well Remember” and the Trivette Clinic
Although out of print now, the book “We Well Remember“, which was published in 1997 by Sarah Brawley Cheek is available online in several places and is a gold mine of stories relating to the local communities.
Tucked away in a section about health care are several useful passages about Dr. Trivette, including a story or two about house calls he made.
One of these accounts is from Willie Mae Tulbert, his niece. She was apparently employed as what we today think of as a CNA in the clinic for four years while a teenager. I have included a clipping of her account on the sources page and updated the main article with her name listed among the employees.
The book also revealed a new portrait of Dr. Trivette, which I have also included in the original article.
“We Well Remember” is available from The Internet Archive and Digital NC if you would like to read it for yourself.