100 years of history – First published in 2003-2004
(This is a digression from just Wake Forest history, but there is a Wake Forest connection.)
Nutbush is not a name which has figured large in North Carolina history, but at one time it was prominent for several reasons.
Nutbush is remembered today in the Nutbush Creek Park on Kerr Lake and as the original name for Williamsboro, a community that was settled about 1740. It is the site of St. John’s Episcopal Church, the only colonial church building in the diocese of North Carolina, built in 1757.
A little farther south on N.C. 39 is Townsville, where Nutbush Presbyterian Church was organized in 1754 and the church built in 1805. It was one of the few churches for white people where the Rev. John Chavis often preached between 1809 and 1832.
In those years, Nutbush was also a community of prosperous free blacks. In 1817 John Day Sr., a talented woodworker, moved there from Virginia with his two sons, John Day Jr. and Thomas.
John Jr. was baptized into the Baptist church in 1820 and was licensed to preach in 1821. The next year, John Jr. went to Milton in Caswell County to study with the Rev. Abner Wentworth Clopton. To fund his studies, John Jr. purchased some property, set up a cabinet-making business and sent for his brother to join him.
Later, John Jr. returned to Virginia where he experienced major theological differences within his church. They were serious enough that John Jr. and his family sailed for Liberia in 1830, where he had a distinguished career as a founder of the colony, a chief justice of the highest court and a teacher and missionary for both the American and Southern Baptist conventions.
Meanwhile Thomas remained in Milton where he built one of the largest cabinet-making shops in the state with a work force of 12, five white and seven black at its peak.
He was so well-regarded in Milton that in 1829 when he selected a young Virginia woman, Aquilla Wilson, as his bride that several residents sent a memorial to the General Assembly, asking that the 1826 law prohibiting free blacks from entering the state be waived in this case. The state’s Attorney General, Romulus Saunders, who knew Thomas Day, added his personal testimony to the memorial.
Thomas and Aquilla Day and their children were members of the Presbyterian Church of Milton, and Thomas was an investor in the State Bank and a plantation owner and slave-owner.
During nearly 40 years in Milton, Day sold standard furniture from his shop and built custom furniture for merchants and planters all along the North Carolina-Virginia border. There were several orders for custom furniture from Gov. David S. Reid, who was instrumental in obtaining Day’s services for the interior of the Philanthropic and Dialectic Societies halls at the University of North Carolina.
Thomas Day was ruined in the Panic of 1857, but his son signed the note for his father’s debts and continued to run the shop through the Civil War until 1871, when he sold the property and left Milton.
Thomas Day’s tables, chairs, bureaus and desks still adorn family homes in the Piedmont and are a featured collection in the state Museum of History.
The Rev. Chavis, born about 1763, was also a Virginia native, a free black and a Revolutionary War soldier who was educated at Washington Academy (later Washington and Lee University). He was what was called a riding missionary for the Hanover Presbytery in Virginia and the Orange Presbytery in North Carolina and was probably the most educated black man in either state. Over 600 people, 50 of them black, in Wake County heard him preach in the year 1802-1803 alone.
About 1808, Chavis opened a classical school in Raleigh that was integrated at first and attended by both boys and girls. Later, after some parents insisted, he taught white children during the day and free black children at night. According to some sources, Chavis also had schools at different times in other parts of Wake County and even in Granville, Chatham and Cumberland counties.
Elizabeth Reid Murray in her history of Wake County says that Chavis lived on his property and taught school near Rogers Store in Bartons Creek District in the later years of his life.
After 1831, he could teach only white students because a law was enacted that year prohibiting the teaching of free blacks or slaves. An 1832 law forced him to stop preaching altogether. The Orange Presbytery voted him a $50 annual stipend, which he supplemented by selling copies of a sermon. Friends also helped with contributions.
Among the many students who went on to illustrious careers were Priestley Hinton Mangum and his brother, later U.S. Senator Willie Person Mangum. Willie Mangum was the father of the Priestly Hinton Mangum who returned to the family farm near Wake Forest after graduating in 1851 from Wake Forest College. In 1885, that Priestly Hinton Mangun developed a series of sloping terraces that took water from fields without taking the soil. They became known as Mangum Terraces and spread across the country and even overseas in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There are still terraced fields in rural parts of North Carolina.
There was a special bond of affection and respect between Chavis and Senator Mangum, with Chavis writing him frequently while the latter was in Washington.
When Chavis died in 1838, the Mangums buried him in the family cemetery at their home near Rougemont in what is now Orange County.
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The lead story in the Wake Forest Gazette for January 28, 2003 read: “Snow, sleet and ice imprison the area for three days.” There was ice on every twig of every tree. Governor Mike Easley declared a state pf emergency. The second serious storm of the winter it began Sunday morning with 3 inches of snow followed by an inch of sleet mixed with icy rain. There was more freezing rain and drizzle during Monday into Tuesday compounded by below-freezing temperatures.
The story in Wake Forest was brighter than in some other areas because town crews had worked to clear all the roads. “By 8 last night we had scraped every residential street and every major road at least once,” Public Works Director Mike Barton said Tuesday. The only exception was cul-de-sac streets where parked cars kept the plows out.
Town Manager Mark Williams said some town employees who live in Raleigh were pleasantly surprised by the cleared streets here. “Raleigh doesn’t scrape their residential streets.
“The guys really did a good job,” Williams said of the street crews. Also, there were no power outages in town.
Police Chief Greg Harrington reported there were 10 to 15 accidents during the three days. “Luckily, we didn’t have anything serious. I think we’re fortunate that we haven’t had any personal injuries” from people falling on the ice or from children playing in the roads, he said.
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Telephone books were going to be delivered locally in February, and people were advised to hold onto their 2003 books until then and afterward toss them into one of Wake County’s telephone book recycling centers. The editor kept a 2014 book and still uses it.
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