Just a little history: Obie Garner’s obituary and cotton gins

(This is a combination of two weekly notes, my “Dear Friends” notice that there is a new edition of the Wake Forest Gazette that I published in 2008, the first on Aug. 7 and the second on Aug. 14.)

I was all out of ideas last evening, so I delved into the storage box of old newspapers and clippings looking for inspiration and found it about three papers down.

This was a copy of The Wake Weekly and The Youngsville-Rolesville Record from Friday, July 26, 1957. Featured prominently on the left side of the front page is a photograph of Mac Bridge, the Wake Forest High School agriculture teacher, in a full Confederate uniform with sword. He was pictured in his back yard on his white horse.

The top headline says “No Decision Reached on Forestville Vote,” and this is the complete article.

            “One extra vote has the Forestville annexation up in the air.

            In Tuesday’s election, 80 persons went to the polls and voted but when the ballots were counted it was found that 81 votes had been cast.

            Where the extra vote came from, no one is sure.

            The results were 41 against annexation and 40 favoring it. Eight-five had registered for the special election; one died, three were out of town and one sick, leaving 80 qualified voters.

            The Wake County Board of Elections failed to reach any decision at a meeting held Thursday afternoon.

            They adjourned to study the legal aspects of the case before ruling on it.

            They could call for a new election, which is what they are expected to do, or they may rule ‘no contest’ and call it a draw.

            Mayor H.L. Miller said late Thursday that the Board would probably make some ruling in the next week.”

Since there were subsequent attempts to have the area annexed, and since it only occurred in the 1980s after a bitter fight, I must conclude the election board called it a draw.

The paper’s front page also notes the death and funeral for Obie C. Garner, 55, who had just returned with his wife, Lucille, from a week’s vacation in Virginia. His pallbearers were a roll call of well-known local names. The active ones were Mayard Smith, Thomas Neville, R.D. Beck, Earl Williams, Zeb Dean Jr. and Albert Perry, while the honorary ones were W.W. Holding Sr., Jesse Hollowell, Ray Branson, Charlie Sabiston, Lee (I think they mean Leland) Jones, Worth Joyner, Bill Barbour and H.L. Miller.

One of his survivors caught my eye even though the name was misspelled as Chapel. Celera Garner Chappell was one of Obie Garner’s eight sisters and was married to Frank Chappell Sr. Since their marriage they had lived in what is now our house down in Forestville with his parents and later their son. Frank’s father, Henry Arthur Chappell, died in 1926; Frank’s mother, Miss Bettie, died in 1961, and their son, Frank Jr., was in his early thirties at that time. The couple was living alone for the first time since they were married.

Obie Garner had owned and operated Garner’s Esso Service Station for five and a half years, the obituary said. That would have been the more standard-looking Esso station next to Harvey Holding’s Esso station that had a distinctive Southwestern motif – and, yes, for years there were two Esso stations next to each other at the Roosevelt and White intersection. Holding had apparently built and operated the second one during World War II when gasoline was strictly rationed.

Directly underneath Obie Garner’s obituary was a run-over from Bob Allen’s column, and, after he informed everyone it was a good time to buy Pine State fresh peach ice cream, he announced that “Mrs. O.C. Garner has opened Garner’s Esso Station and plans to continue operating it. We’re sure their many customers will be happy to hear that she is taking up her husband’s business.” I believe she ran it for a good number of years.

A final note: Obie Garner’s obituary also said he had owned and operated the Wake Forest Cotton Gin for many years. Now I am pretty sure that C.E. “Mr. Bud” Gill owned and operated a cotton gin a bit north of the two Esso stations and I’ve got fragmentary reports of a cotton gin in Forestville. Does anyone know where the Wake Forest Cotton Gin was? Oh, another note, J.L. Shearon, who was the Wake Electric manager for years and years, helped his father operate a cotton gin somewhere in town before Wake Electric began business. Which gin was that?

See what you can find in a newspaper?

Aug. 14, 2008

Thank you to the readers who helped locate at least two local cotton gins.

J.L. Shearon’s sons, Cecil and David, said the family cotton gin was on Old Pearce Road, which runs parallel to and south of 98 between Averette Road and N.C. 96.

“The J.H. Jones Gin Lot was located at the northwest corner of Old Pearce Road and Daniel Road,” David Shearon wrote. “The lot was three-fourths of an acre and was purchased in June, 1923, by J.T. Shearon (J.L. Shearon’s father) from J.H. Jones. The property was sold to Vassar (Shearon, a Rolesville sweet potato farmer and long-time Wake County commissioner) in 1962.”

The gin has disappeared and the only structure on the property is a former country store the present property owner, Bond McCamy, moved there and renovated, making it a house.

I am pretty sure the cotton gin in town was originally owned by C.E. (Cleophas Elvius) Gill, who was known around town as Mr. Bud. In the 1910s, he lived with his sister and three brothers in the South Brick House. Until Wake County’s recent property revaluation, some of the land between Roosevelt Avenue and Spring Street where the new CVS and the old grocery store stand was referred to in the property description as the “Gill gin lot.”

Attorney John Rich, whose avocation is history, wrote: “Some of the children of T.E. Holding Sr. (who founded the Holding Drug Store, The Bank of Wake and helped found Royall Cotton Mill) owned the northeast quadrant formed by the intersection of East Wait and North White Streets. (There was no underpass or Roosevelt Avenue at the time.)”

One of the Holding sons was Robert Powell Holding, who ended up owning First Citizens Bank but for our purposes owned the cotton gin on that “Gill gin lot.”

“The scales there rested on two 60-foot by 12-inch I-beams,” Rich wrote. “The gin burned in the early fifties, maybe in 1949. The I-beams remained and Robert P. gave them to W.W. Holding Jr.”

(That W.W. Holding would be known as “Big Bill,” who ran the W.W. Holding Cotton Company, was well-known in the cotton industry, was also a long-time county commissioner and almost single-handedly made sure what is now Wake Tech was built. When it opened it bore his name although he had died shortly before.)

(W.W. Holding Jr. also began the Holding Dairy Farm, and John Rich’s father, also John, was the farm manager until his death. The family lived in the manager’s house on what is now Friendship Chapel Road.)

“Daddy moved them (the I-beams) to the farm, and we later used them to build a bridge on the farm,” Rich wrote. “I don’t know of anyone other than Obie (Garner) that operated the gin. John Lyon later purchased the land from Robert Powell Holding Sr.’s sons.”

Rich’s memories raise a possible conflict with what Grady Patterson Jr. remembers. In a memoir he wrote for his children, he talks about the horrible years in the 1930s when there was obviously an arsonist – pretty well identified as a college student – in town, setting fires at night. Old Main on the campus was the first to go followed by the new Wake Forest school building. There were over 70 fires set and 17 buildings were burned in the two years of night-time terror.

“In the business district, the W.W. Holding cotton gin made a spectacular blaze one night,” Patterson remembered.

Either there was a second cotton gin in town associated with the Holding cotton company or the old Gill and then Holding gin was the one which burned in the 1930s, not the 1950s.

Isn’t history fun?

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