In 1980, my dad became ill with a rare disease called polymyositis. He was very weak and was in the hospital for a long time, several months actually. He was in his late 60’s at that time and had retired from his job at Ingersoll-Rand. Although he slowly improved, he…
When I was a little girl, one of the big events of the summer was my dad’s family reunion. Mother spent all day on the Saturday before cooking and baking, fixing enough food to fill up her big brown picnic basket. She always cooked roast beef along with various vegetables…
Since I love history and genealogy, I decided to try to find out how many of my eight great-great-grandfathers actually fought in the Civil War. I knew already that two of them had been soldiers because I had already written about them. During my research for this project, I found…
It all began many years ago when my grandmother, Blanche Dwiggins Smith, gave me a daguerreotype of one of her ancestors who was killed in the Civil War. I wish I had asked her more about it, but being young and busy earning a living, I did not have time…
I had heard from my grandmother Smith that her great-grandfather, Daniel Dwiggins (1779-1856), was a circuit-riding Methodist preacher, so I was especially thrilled to find the following entry in the 1850 Census: “Daniel Dwiggins, 71, clergyman, Meth E.” In the early days, the Methodist Church in our state was the…
I had heard from my grandmother, Blanche Dwiggins Smith, that her great-great-grandfather, Daniel Dwiggins, was a circuit-riding Methodist preacher in the early to mid-1800s, so you can imagine my excitement when I recently found the following entry in the 1850 census for him: “Daniel Dwiggins, 71, clergyman, Methodist E.” In…
Before the days of large numbers of churches in the Piedmont section of North Carolina, the tradition of camp meetings arose. People actually left their homes, took supplies, and went to religious services where they stayed for several days, usually about a week, and camped. That explains the name “camp…
In 1998, after having lived in Garden Valley for a long time and realizing that we wouldn’t always be able to navigate all of those steps, John and I decided to downsize. We built a house on a lot on Church Street that I inherited from my parents. Since that…
When I was growing up on Church Street several decades ago, life was very different than it is now. Everything revolved around family, friends, and church. All of the neighbors were close and helped each other out. Daddy and several of the men on the street shared the produce from…
Although I knew all the neighbors at least by sight, only a few of them were close friends of my parents. The Wall family, including Claire, James Wall, and his wife Esther, and Tommy and Lois Shore were our best friends and neighbors on the street. All of the Walls…
