Evil Fanning and The House in the Horseshoe: This Date in History

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#OTD in 1953 Cuban Anti-Batista Rebels attacked the Moncada Barracks but were repelled and defeated by the army stationed there.

This loss would result in a recouping of forces and a rethinking of strategy. In honor of those lost in that day the surviving rebels would name their project “The 26th of July Movement.”

Led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, that group eventually overthrew Batista and took over Cuba.
 
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‪#OTD (July 27) in 1946 Gertrude Stein died (b. 1874) in France. She was a US-born writer/art dealer and influencer. In the 1920s her Home Salon in Paris was a center of avant-garde Art. Her writing style tended toward Cubism. Her partnership w/Alice B. Toklas was Legendary and Crucial in difficult times for art and artists. ‬(Toklas on Left, Stein Right)
 
In July 1948, construction of the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital began.
That summer, a devastating polio outbreak swept through North Carolina, with Guilford County experiencing the highest per capita rate in the entire nation. As hospitals struggled to keep up, Greensboro mobilized. Civic groups, neighbors, and volunteers from across the state came together—raising over half a million dollars in donations, materials, and labor in just weeks.
Only 95 days after fundraising began, the hospital opened its doors on October 11, offering cutting-edge treatments and hope to patients from all corners of the state. It was one of the few racially integrated medical facilities in the region, standing as a symbol of both innovation and inclusion.
After its time as a polio hospital, the building’s legacy continued. In 1963, it was transformed into a temporary jail during the Civil Rights Movement, holding arrested student protestors fighting for desegregation in Greensboro.


Marker located in Greensboro, NC:

https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2024/01/10/polio-hospital-j-122
 
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Cigarettes. Man they were EVERYWHERE. I remember from my early years there were but maybe three places where a man didn’t light up: Inside the Church Sanctuary, the Funeral Home, and a Hospital Room IF there was a sign prohibiting it. My high school had a smoking area. I had teachers in college that smoked in class. The true test of whether a film set in a time before the 1980s is whether or not the rooms are filled with smoke. Matchbooks were the most ubiquitous advertising prop of them all. Once upon a time our ashtray collections were much prized. Sometimes we smoked the ‘healthy’ brands…first with filters and then the “American Spirits.” The bar sold packs and ‘bumming’ a cig was a way to start a conversation. The first draw in the morning was a jumpstart. The history is interesting.

In 1900 only 2% of tobacco went toward cigarettes. Chew, snuff, cigars, and pipes were how people smoked. “Buck” Duke (of THAT family and place) was the innovator, working hard via image marketing to extract the effeminate cachet of the cigarette (its a French word after all) while also searching for a machine that could replace his troublesome, prone to labor-organizing, Eastern European cigarette rollers. He managed the latter (Look up Bonsack Cigarette Machine) and the US Government did the rest by pushing cigarettes into the WW1 doughboy’s allotted provisions. Morale raising, nerve calming, and increasing camaraderie were cited as rationales. At any rate cigarettes emerged from WW1 far, far more normalized than before. The addiction level skyrocketed.

In North Carolina tobacco love apparently predates the European invasion and the lay of the land, the nature of the soil, and subsequently the way we have worked, lived, and owned (or not owned) property has been profoundly entangled with the plant. Today those straight-rowed green fields of tobacco are nowhere close to as ever-present as they were when I was a boy nor is the aroma of the burning of that toasted weed everywhere. So few of the old barns remain that if you see one standing these days you ought to stop and take a photo because it is American History. My Grandpa Dunn chewed Tube Rose and he could lay flat on his couch with his head only slightly propped and propel a gob into the air and into his coffee can spittoon without fail. He could nail bugs and anything else he wanted to point out as we walked the field. This talent intrigued young me to no end. Deddy didn’t chew. He told me that he had once smoked — hadn’t everyone? — but had quit (a decision prompted by thrift rather than health consciousness he claimed). He didn’t want me to indulge either so one day when I inquired as to Grandpa’s habit, he handed me a plug and said just take this and try it. Off I went, walking the half mile from the hardware store to the house, my cheek bulging with the chaw. It was a clever plan. He didn’t tell me anything about not swallowing the juice so I did. Within minutes I was retching in the ditch by the side of the road — never again to have the slightest desire to chew.

The economic role played by the weed in the story of North Carolina cannot be overplayed. Like chicken-raising, tobacco permitted a family, when coupled with factory-work from at least one adult, to prosper and dream of, and pay for, the kind of educations that sent a generation into professions across the region. There was also seasonal labor that made great contributions to fending off poverty. I only primed tobacco one day, so sick I became from the tobacco goo so it was back to garden work, store tending, and hay baling for me to earn summer money but many that I knew garnered what at the time seemed like good pocket cash and more from that particular chore.

Ironically I smoked for a while and I enjoyed it. In graduate school and while tending bar a cigarette provided a signpost saying ‘Leave me be for these few seconds’ and, so I believed, also could facilitate thoughtfulness. Sometimes though, lighting up was more self-defense than anything else so filled were the spaces that I loved to inhabit with the gray haze. Thinking back it is difficult to even believe just how huge a part of our daily lives was tobacco. Think back a little more and the smoke starts rolling in.

#OTD (July 28) in 1918 Richard Joshua Reynolds died. He was born in 1850 in VA into a very wealthy family. In 1874 RJR came to Winston, NC to expand the family’s industry-He added sweetener to chewing tobacco, created Prince Albert smoking tobacco, and marketed Camel brand cigarettes. With Wealth came philanthropy to the present.

https://www.ncdcr.gov/.../07/28/tobacco-magnate-r-j-reynolds
 
dukeman92 said:
I’ve had plenty of bad habits. I’m thankful that smoking was never one of them.
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I actually started because I worked at the Blimpie's up on Franklin Street and smokers got more breaks than non-smokers. I started carrying a pack of cigarettes to work and would duck out back to take that extra time off. Then I stated dating a woman that smoked. That ball just started rolling from there...Between grad school, living in Central America, and working in restaurants it all seemed to fit.
 
donbosco said:
I actually started because I worked at the Blimpie's up on Franklin Street and smokers got more breaks than non-smokers. I started carrying a pack of cigarettes to work and would duck out back to take that extra time off. Then I stated dating a woman that smoked. That ball just started rolling from there...Between grad school, living in Central America, and working in restaurants it all seemed to fit.
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Thats funny... when I was 19 I started working in a factory and quickly realized that smokers got more breaks, so I purchased a pack of cigs and sat outside pretending to smoke when they did.
 
dukeman92 said:
Thats funny... when I was 19 I started working in a factory and quickly realized that smokers got more breaks, so I purchased a pack of cigs and sat outside pretending to smoke when they did.
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It was probably the woman that doomed me.

A phrase I said or thought far, far too many times.
 
My first real job (where they withheld taxes and shit) was working in the kitchen in the hospital after school and weekends when I was 16-17. There were multiple cigarette machines in the hospital (at 25 cents per pack) and signs on various wards or on the doors of private rooms warning "No Smoking-Oxygen in Use"

On breaks, everybody would just go sit and smoke in the hospital cafeteria. Although some people would go out on the loading docks behind the kitchen and smoke weed on their breaks.
 
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1945 Empire State Building B-25 crash​


"On July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber of the United States Army Air Forces accidentally crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building in New York City while flying in thick fog. The crash killed fourteen people (three crewmen and eleven people in the building), and an estimated twenty-four others were injured. Damage caused by the crash was estimated at US$1 million (equivalent to about $17 million in 2024), but the building's structural integrity was not compromised."

More on the wikipedia page: 1945 Empire State Building B-25 crash - Wikipedia
 
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I did a lot of riding around in Chatham, Moore, Randolph, Orange, Guilford, Alamance, Durham, and Wake Counties during my growing up years - The very Heart of North Carolina. I can attribute this to four factors: #1, my parents were big hospital visitors, maybe that was a function of their own life cycles or advances in medicine. #2, my Deddy ran a hardware store and we were constantly going here and there to pick up water pumps or put them in the ground or deliver this or fix that. He knew ALL the back roads too. #3, we attended a lot of small political rallies — never-never GOP by the way — in school auditoriums and gyms in little towns throughout the Piedmont. And #4, they were big followers of high school basketball and we regularly drove to games, often in those same towns and venues, across the winter months.

In doing that I came to despise David Fanning. There was a NC Historical Marker proclaiming his meanness in Pittsboro (Chatham County — see images for each marker below) but I also saw evidence of his evil in Eli Whitney (Alamance), near Ramseur/Asheboro/Cox’s Mill (Randolph), Hillsborough (Orange), and Carthage (Moore). These markers, “History On A Stick” — sparked me to read and to try and understand our Tar Heel history. They are pretty likely the biggest reason I’m a teacher today.

Back to Fanning. His story attests to the nastiness that was our War for Independence and the degree to which it was also a civil war. In 1781 Fanning managed to gather together a troop of some 700 North Carolinians dedicated to preserving monarchy and the rule of King George III. Countering that commitment were multiple pockets of Resistance and pro-Democracy sentiment throughout the colony.

Fanning has been described as vicious and truth be told, it appears he was - and so were many of the engagements of that conflict. I think we are often given to believe that war in those times was somehow different, less brutal, from later ones. A simple following of Fanning’s July through September 1781 terror campaign through the Piedmont should extinguish those imaginings.

Fanning was appointed Colonel of the “Loyal Militia of Randolph and Chatham” on July 5, 1781.

On July 18 Fanning attacked the courthouse in Pittsboro and took captive numerous pro-Independence activists. On July 29 he led an attack on the Alston home near Carthage. Throughout August Fanning spent his time in the Cape Fear region claiming supplies. Back in the Piedmont, on September 12 Fanning attacked Hillsborough and nigh destroyed the Government of Resistance, kidnapping Rebel Governor Thomas Burke. Burke later chronicled his poor treatment at Fanning’s hands. On September 13 Fanning fought off an attempt to free the governor and other captives at Lindley’s Mill.

Note that ALL these actions occurred AFTER the Battle of Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781, and the swift movement (flight?) out of the colony of General Cornwallis and the British regular Army. Fanning fought until forced to flee to Canada where he led an auspicious life not uncontroversial and flecked with notable acts that hardly absolve him. Was I correct in my child’s vision of Fanning as Evil? He was certainly daring and ruthless and ultimately on the wrong side of MY history. He did himself no favors in his comportment and mentions of kindness and/or compassion are absent from his story. He was convicted of rape in his later life but received a Crown pardon, a fact that certainly indicates a rotten, soulless cretin.

Now on to our #OnThisDay:

#OTD (July 29) 1781 British Loyalists led by David Fanning attacked Rebelling Colonists bivouacked at the home of their commander Philip Alston. Temperance Alston hid her children in the chimney and when the Loyalist Tories threatened to burn them out, she negotiated peace, saving the property and lives — This place is known as The House in the Horseshoe (Moore County) because of its location in a bend of the Deep River. https://www.ncdcr.gov/.../attack-at-house-in-the-horseshoe

Check out (And Search) the NC Historic Marker Website HERE: http://www.ncmarkers.com/search.aspx.
 
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