Backcountry Notes

The following is from my friend Tom Evans, a distant kinsman through Clan Gunn, who hails from the Virginia Piedmont.

My father, sixth of the seven children of his family, was born in July, 1919, in a one-room log cabin on a rented farm near Wentworth in Rockingham County, North Carolina. A later owner of this land burned the cabin in the late 1960s to "get rid of that nuisance." It had stored farm tools for more than 30 observed years, before it was burned, and probably since the Evans family moved out of it.

This was a good bit like other original dwellings of common folks of this part of the VA/NC border area during earlier settlement times, after the local Indians moved away. This cabin was at least 50 years old and, I believe, when Dad was born within it. Grandma and Grandpa, and the kids too small to be climbing the ladder to the loft, all slept in one corner of the lower room, which never had a floor other than dirt. I have seen ladders and lofts, like this place had, in movies about colonial times. The early roof was oak shingles tacked to roughly 4 inch diameter poles, and I believe there were only two windows, one in a side wall near the beds, and one in the front on the widest side of the door, if memory does not elude me. The large stone foundation put the log walls up out of the mud and most of the rain spatter. The stones were sealed with renewable red mud "dobbing," as were the walls. I suspect the logs and other wood exposed to the weather were chestnut, because there was evidently no rot.

This was about as near to the early settlers’ cabins as I have discovered. I cannot imagine a nine-member family living in the cabin I have described, but they did. When they moved out of that place to better rented land with a real house, the 7 kids ranged from 14 or 15 down to a toddler, the only child younger than Dad.

The cabin survived throughout and after the times when most folks in that area had improved their living conditions. In 1919, when Dad was born, most people in that era lived in sawed-board sided houses, either milled to a better appearance, or at least well chosen for use as weatherboarding. My dad was still a pre-school aged child when they moved out of this place to a real house about 20 miles closer to Danville, VA, but still in Rockingham County, NC. There are not many of such structures left now, and all I have seen are total wrecks. The old Beavers' Tavern (a Virginia Historic Site) burned suspiciously at Blairs, VA, no more than seven miles north of the Danville site of the 1790s era Wynns Falls Ford. It was, when I looked it over,a storage for farm tools, too, but it was built much more like the structures that featured in your article, and it was mounted on an almost two-foot-high stone foundation. It was a combination stagecoach rest stop and local tavern,but unless there were other buildings associated with it, there was no lodging to be offered to the stagecoach passengers who stopped there and rubbed elbows with the several plantation owners and larger farmers of that neighborhood.

I believe that architectural styling was brought to the various settlements of Virginia by the people who settled each area first, and that Virginia has a broad variety of first architectural styles. All of the influences brought to the VA / NC border counties between somewhere west of the Clarkesville, VA / Oxford, NC, area, to probably the high meadows west of the Stuart / Meadows of Dan / Lovers Leap area, and to the Dan River "valley" south of these high farmlands across the VA / NC border, probably came from the Hairston/Wilson family's plantation system development. These Scotspeople arrived soon after landing on the Delaware River, probably in Wilmington, DE, or Chester, PA, and not very long after the departure of the Sara Indians from the Dan River and Smith River area. This allowed these Scotspeople to occupy and claim the vacated Indian lands and to also avoid the Indian attacks suffered in other parts of Virginia.

Some European descent people were in this area before these Scotsmen arrived, but they were soon covered up and totally changed by the plantation developments after Peter Hairston's arrival from Scotland late in the18th century. He and his family were fleeing the price on their Clan Gunn heads, put there by the Englishmen who invaded old Scotland and tried to extirpate the Scottish clansmen, and all other crofters. Hairston / Wilsons being of the North-eastern Highlands' and Orkney Islands' Clan Gunn, are believed to have made their way to the lower Delaware River from and through Ireland, just as did the members of Clan Maxwell, the roots of the family Moss, and the perhaps Welshmen who gave this clan mix the name, Evans. All four names came to America during the same era, and were adopted into the middle-western VA / NC border area for the same reasons, and via the relatively same routes. These families seem to have appeared in the VA / NC middle western border area in the general neighborhood of modern day Stuart, VA, and spread eastward into VA and NC. The Mosses were the family of my mother. The Moss and the Evans families seemed to begin their time as Americans in the area around Stuart and Meadows of Dan, Virginia. Both, from time to time lived on Wilson land, particularly after the plantation system broke up after the Late Unpleasantness. The Moss family is believed to have worked for the plantation owners, and received land from the Wilson Family as the plantations were broken up, after the same Late Unpleasantness.

Neither the Highland Gunns nor the Lowland Maxwells or the Welsh Evans were used to building wooden dwellings in their former homelands, or during their time in Ireland, where stone would have been their major building material, so their efforts in their new homeland were not the well laid log houses of other parts of Virginia and in other states. I think the primitive nature of the VA and NC Piedmont area buildings was born of these formerly stone-housed people who had no traditions and were unschooled in log or wooden construction, and they lacked high quality building stone in their area, also, and that this factor caused the more primitive styles of dwellings in their early American beginnings.

I think the reasons for the differing architectural styles of Virginia are born of the people who lived in the different parts of the old countries, and arrived in America beginning probably during the late colonial period, and that influences from these patterns remain yet today. I believe that the early people of northwestern VA and south central VA are parts of Virginia's population who came from very different backgrounds, and came from more than just one nation of origin. The Sara Indians, a Siouan speaking people, had recently fled the area extending from about Danville,west to about Madison, NC, and up the Smith River into the Martinsville/Bassett area. There was not much in this area between the time of the Sara Indians and the arrival of their Scots-Irish-Welsh replacements other than some traders who used Wynn's Ford at Wynn's Falls in the Dan River during the middle and late 18th century as part of their route to the western NC trading areas.

These areas included the area southwest of Greensboro, NC, where the long missing Roanoke island settlers were enslaved to work in the slate belt, at extracting copper, enhanced by smaller elements of silver and gold, from the slate belt that extends from Georgia to upper New York. The Virginia slate belt also was once a leading gold mining area, until 1849 California Gold Rush.

I think the Hairston/Wilson family never knew that this slate belt ran under their land in western Pittsylvania County a few miles from Danville. They dominated every factor of the lifestyles of this area until after the Late Unpleasantness. The Wilsons, immediately west of Danville, gave the founding fathers the land they built Danville upon, in 1793, which was not very long after the time that the above four families who constitute my origins all seemed to have arrived. My last loose end ties me to the Wilsons, who are of the same blood line as the Hairstons and who brought Clan Gunn into my family tree. Nancy Wilson of Henry county where some pre-Civil War Gunn descendants remained on remnants of the 235,000 acres of plantation lands once owned by them in that county before that late unpleasantness, married my great-grandfather, Drury Evans who operated a government-licensed distillery near Meadows of Dan, VA, until revenuers came and totally destroyed it as required by the federal act that established prohibition throughout the US. This governmental destruction took away the family fortune, and perhaps deprived my family of its financial base resources that would have made the early life of my father much better. The Federal Government seems to have always be that heartless toward its independent, self-sufficient people. Rockingham County, NC, is still loaded with the Evans name, who are seemingly all related, although many of them do not know many others, any more. The Moss name held together a little better, mostly in Virginia, because of their tradition of annual family reunions, a phenomenon that someone ought to develop into another bit of Americana, before all elements of this tradition are lost.

The Wilsons are still prominent land owners in VA and NC, but there are no remaining family communications with them, except for a few friendships in the area of Reidsville, NC, where the Wilson landholdings have endured. None of the others of the Evans family seem to have ever been reduced to living in such a hovel as my Father's family, although his siblings all did well. My father died this year as a retired minister in the Virginia Methodist Conference, at age 89, and holding two earned Doctorate Degrees, having spent his time from my High School graduation in 1959, until almost his time of retirement at age 70, as a student as well as a full time minister. One must suppose that his early life instilled in him the drive necessary for these accomplishments, beginning at the age of 40, after an early career as a salesman of wholesale paper products. Hard times often create great achievers. TWE