donbosco
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North Carolina’s original Senator No was Nathaniel Macon of the generation of our nation’s founding. He believed ferociously in states’ rights and minuscule government. He denounced The Constitution, and certainly supported the right to secede from our constitutional democratic republic (though he died long before the Civil War). He was frugal to a pain, voting against a monument to honor his friend George Washington upon his death because he believed that such an expenditure was beyond the purview of the federal government.
His colleagues called him a ‘negative radical’ and his almost automatic response to every act of government was NO. The historian, David Hackett Fischer, author of ‘Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,‘ wrote of four waves of invaders to these shores; Puritans (To New England), Cavaliers (To Virginia and the Carolina coast), Quakers (To Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Delaware Valley), and finally, the Backcountry Borderlanders (To the Carolina Piedmont and Appalachia). While Fischer’s book has not gone without criticism I have always found his Backcountry Borderlanders to bear a goodly likeness to the “To Be Rather Than To Seem” crowd of Tar Heel fame. The old saying, “A Vale of Humility Between Two Mountains of Conceit” also strikes a chord in this pondering. While Macon seems to have been of the financial means usually associated with Virginia’s Cavalier class, most of his sentiments appear to have rested with the less-elitist, more visceral Backcountry Borderlanders.
The Backcountry Borderlanders pushed themselves into the land far removed from the coast and as the wars and depredations of that movement resulted in the death and migration westward of the Native American population they spread throughout the region and farmed. This was #DeepChatham and #DeepAlamance, Randolph, Guilford, Moore, Orange, etc. Thus many that I grew up among, including my own self, are the descendants of the Backcountry Borderlanders. Many of the men that traded at my Deddy’s hardware store in #Bonlee showed the BB’s ‘so independent I’d cut off my nose to spite my face before I’d be told what to do’ attitude pretty consistently. It was a thing that had to be ‘got around’ if you were going to attend to them in retail.
My Grandpa Willis was one of that number. My Deddy somehow learned to be more open, less stubborn - I guess that’s what made him a good merchant. Historically folks in #DeepChatham had lived in a pretty dispersed pattern with homes surrounded by fields, pasture, and woodlands. No one was too closeby. Most homesteads were found down a long dirt road, preferably with a good view so as to see a visitor coming with plenty of time to prepare. The dogs could run out and escort anyone coming up that road sounding the alarm along the way. Grandpa’s beagles always ran beside us as we made our way in.
A family home was ideally essentially a Hermitage (Significantly the name that Andrew Jackson chose for his plantation to which he retired). Nathaniel Macon, remember him, said it best: “…no man ought to live so near another as to hear his neighbor's dog bark." Grandpa lived that way, though he had neighbors with whom he was close friends to be sure. My Deddy asked Grandpa many times if he could spruce up that road, in rainy times you pretty much had to ford a creek, but he always refused. I think he thought that you ought to want to see a man badly enough to endure his driveway as is, or just leave him be. And it is with that spirit that I offer up the photo of the road to my Grandpa Dunn’s home in the woods of Sandy Branch, #DeepChatham, North Carolina.
His colleagues called him a ‘negative radical’ and his almost automatic response to every act of government was NO. The historian, David Hackett Fischer, author of ‘Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,‘ wrote of four waves of invaders to these shores; Puritans (To New England), Cavaliers (To Virginia and the Carolina coast), Quakers (To Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Delaware Valley), and finally, the Backcountry Borderlanders (To the Carolina Piedmont and Appalachia). While Fischer’s book has not gone without criticism I have always found his Backcountry Borderlanders to bear a goodly likeness to the “To Be Rather Than To Seem” crowd of Tar Heel fame. The old saying, “A Vale of Humility Between Two Mountains of Conceit” also strikes a chord in this pondering. While Macon seems to have been of the financial means usually associated with Virginia’s Cavalier class, most of his sentiments appear to have rested with the less-elitist, more visceral Backcountry Borderlanders.
The Backcountry Borderlanders pushed themselves into the land far removed from the coast and as the wars and depredations of that movement resulted in the death and migration westward of the Native American population they spread throughout the region and farmed. This was #DeepChatham and #DeepAlamance, Randolph, Guilford, Moore, Orange, etc. Thus many that I grew up among, including my own self, are the descendants of the Backcountry Borderlanders. Many of the men that traded at my Deddy’s hardware store in #Bonlee showed the BB’s ‘so independent I’d cut off my nose to spite my face before I’d be told what to do’ attitude pretty consistently. It was a thing that had to be ‘got around’ if you were going to attend to them in retail.
My Grandpa Willis was one of that number. My Deddy somehow learned to be more open, less stubborn - I guess that’s what made him a good merchant. Historically folks in #DeepChatham had lived in a pretty dispersed pattern with homes surrounded by fields, pasture, and woodlands. No one was too closeby. Most homesteads were found down a long dirt road, preferably with a good view so as to see a visitor coming with plenty of time to prepare. The dogs could run out and escort anyone coming up that road sounding the alarm along the way. Grandpa’s beagles always ran beside us as we made our way in.
A family home was ideally essentially a Hermitage (Significantly the name that Andrew Jackson chose for his plantation to which he retired). Nathaniel Macon, remember him, said it best: “…no man ought to live so near another as to hear his neighbor's dog bark." Grandpa lived that way, though he had neighbors with whom he was close friends to be sure. My Deddy asked Grandpa many times if he could spruce up that road, in rainy times you pretty much had to ford a creek, but he always refused. I think he thought that you ought to want to see a man badly enough to endure his driveway as is, or just leave him be. And it is with that spirit that I offer up the photo of the road to my Grandpa Dunn’s home in the woods of Sandy Branch, #DeepChatham, North Carolina.
