If you have spent
much time on battlefields, then you are aware of witness trees, trees that were
around during the battle and somehow survived not only the storm of shot and
shell of battle, but also the blows of the lumberman's ax decades later. My
personal favorite would be the Sycamore next to Burnside's Bridge on the
Antietam battlefield.
Recently, I was
standing in the heart of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, right
next
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| Gerrard Hall |
to Gerrard Hall, and the idea came to me: these are survivors, just like the Witness Trees. Surprisingly, there are not a lot of surviving homes from the area. Yes, we could probably put together a long list of several hundred, or maybe a thousand structures here in North Carolina, but really, that is a small number considering that the 1860 population of the state was just over 992,000. Say an average of six people lived in each house (a number I pulled out of thin air), that should give us around 165,000 homes.
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| Burke County Courthouse |
Some of these sites
are public buildings, like Gerrard Hall, the South Building, Old West Residence
Hall, Old East Residence Hall, and Person
Hall. (There are also the New East and New West buildings, but were they
finished before the war?)
Some of these
buildings are state historic sites, like Stagville in Durham County, the Harper
House on the Bentonville Battlefield, and the State Capital in Raleigh.
Others are local
history museums, like the McElroy house in Burnsville, the Carson House in Old
Fort, Fort Defiance near Lenoir, and Latta Plantation, near Charlotte.
And some are still
private residences, places that are still making memories for the families who
call them home and who take considerable time and expense to keep them up.
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| Slave houses, Historic Stagville |
Over the years,
I've had a chance to visit many of these places, sometimes as a simple guest,
touring the house and grounds, and at other times, as a interpreter, trying to
keep the history alive and passed on to future generations.
