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Whoever happens upon this website will also be visiting second hand one of the great scenic areas in eastern America, part of which is a horse farm that has been in our family for more than 100 years. Award-winning movies have been shot here, and there are ancient Indian sites that have yet to yield their treasures to the archaeologist’s shovel. Our farm lies just two miles north of Bethabara, the first of our German-Moravian settlements, and looks north toward Pilot Mountain, an early Indian guidepost near where-so we are told by the Winston-Salem Journal--there is a wormhole through which UFOs from alien universes make nightly visits. (I haven't yet been sequestered from my bed by any of these "Grays," but I have a whole list of requests for my betterment--among them, the gift of immortality--if that day or night
ever comes.)
Farther on are the Sauratown Mountains, the Southern tip of the great Appalachian
range. On a clear day they seem hardly more than a rock's throw from our farm,
inviting a visit to all passersby, whether alien or domestic. Drive north a ways on the
new Interstate 74, on up past the Pilot Mountain (Mt. Pilot in the old Mayberry
television series)and one will also be traveling along portions of the Great
Philadelphia Wagon Road, a rough mountain trail that brought almost all of our early settlers, mostly Scots and Scots-Irish, into the interior South.
Speaking of our “Anglo-Saxon heritage,” the truth is that in the interior South we have very little of it. What we have mostly is an Anglo-Celtic influence, growing greater as
one moves toward the Mississippi. We should be proud of it. Some of the best, if not
the best, poetry music, novels and other artistic forms are Gaelic in origin. We hear it
said that the South has produced such an inordinate amount of great literature in the
last one-hundred years because, as William Faulkner and many others have said,
“We lost the War.” But I wonder if our Gaelic heritage—the love of words, the old
Bardic tradition—is not also largely responsible.
Before the city of Winston-Salem foolishly placed a landfill, now a grassy mountain in
itself, on property lying just to the north of our farm, we enjoyed immediate access to
the Great Road. Not that we knew anything about. To us it was just another working
farm road. Yet now we know that not only does it lie beneath the mountainous
landfill, but it also crosses our property in three ways. There is the main road that
cuts almost due west toward the Moravian town of Bethania and on beyond to the old
Shallowford, the Yadkin River crossing that British general Lord Cornwallis, crossed
to bring his war—and not too successfully—to the patriot forces lying all across North
Carolina.
That is not all. The first Moravians settlers who, years earlier had come south from
Pennsylvania, realized as evening approached that they were actually on the wrong
road to their destination. They then cut another road due south to the present village
of Bethabara, and later a second to the Bethabara mill. As a child I often walked
those old roads, still not understanding their historic significance. We know the path
of these old roads because of work done by some of the finest historians in an area
that boasts a great many of them. There is also a great amount of oral history to
support these findings. A neighbor of mine, now in his nineties, can remember when
the road leading from Bethabara north across our land and so on to Stanleyville
Drive and Town Fork (now Germanton) was still called by its original name, The Great
Philadelphia Wagon Road.
The former director of Historic Bethabara, a noted authority in the tracing out of old
roads, once designated our farm as the most important undeveloped historic site in
Forsyth County—not only our farm, but also much of the land lying to our north, now
to the landfill that has become a mountain. It is not yet a pleasant mountain inviting
golfers and picnickers. Much of it still gets its daily serving of garbage, driving more
and more wild game onto our farm, rabies-laden raccoons, poisonous vipers, packs
of wild dogs, foxes, and rodents as well as great herds of deer that we are happy to
have come and graze each morning in our lower pasture, even as the dogwoods are
bursting into bloom along our creek bed. This is the stream I have called the Big
Grassy Fork, polluted now, though in my childhood the home of many happy catfish
and perch waiting to be eaten.
I am told reliably that the southern tip of the garbage mountain will be taller than the
Winston-Salem landmark that was once the tallest building in the state and first office
of the tobacco company now known as Reynolds-American. And here on the lush
creek bottoms beyond the Big Grassy strange sounds still fill the night. Who knows
but what we may yet bring back the panther and cougar.
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