Ashmont School The Remains of Ashmont School Where My Mother Went in the 1950s

If you live in Europe, I'd like for you to read this post without laughing at me or immediately going on social media to mock me. I'm going to talk about old stuff. Yes, I know I live in the United States and that we don't really have any old man-made artifacts here. Many of you in Ireland, England and on the continent live in houses that would be museums and tourist attractions if they were transported here. I was in Leeds in the UK a few years back and my host stopped by Kirkstall Abbey on a whim and didn't make a big deal out of it. The place was built in 11152. It blew my mind, but to him, it was just a place on the edge of town.

I live in North Carolina. The First Nations people who lived here when the first English settlers landed included the Cherokee, Tuscarora, Catawba, Lumbee, and various Siouxan tribes like the Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Waccamaw Siouan, Meherrin, and Coharie. We still have a sizable Native population. One county over from where I live, there are between 40K-50K members of the Lumbee tribe. There are ancient burial mounds in my county located near the Cape Fear River.

There are no remnants of the state's most famous early settlers, known as the lost colony. A group of 117 English men and women landed on Roanoke Island, a few miles inland from site where several hundred years later the world's first airplane flight would occur. All of these settlers disappeared in a three-year period when the organizers of the colony returned to England. Included in the missing was Virginia Dare, the first child of English descent born in the new world. Today, Roanoke Island is home to the community of Manteo, a nice place to visit on the way to the Outer Banks.

We were one of the 13 colonies that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776. There are historical markers a few miles from my neighborhood where the British Army encamped on the way to get their asses handed to them at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. I could walk to the spot where the state ratified the constitution from my driveway. Because of numerous fires through the years only a couple of pre-revolutionary buildings still exist in town, fittingly, the largest of them was a once a tavern.

My paternal lineage, meaning my ancestors with the same last name that I have, came to the US around 1800. The first of us listed in a US census stated that his father's birthplace was France. I suspect he may have been the son of an English soldier, born to a camp follower. Whatever. I have no real way of knowing the exact story. What I do know that is we've been hanging around this same county now for 225 years.

I am not one of those Southerners with any sort of positive attachment to my heritage connected to the Civil War. Numerous ancestors from all branches of my family were in the Confederate Army, some drafted, some volunteered. One died of disease before ever going into battle at a giant unsanitary recruitment center located on what is now the grounds of the veterinary school for NC State University. Another was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. My favorite was an extremely reluctant soldier who served at three different times but only for very short periods. He kept trying to get out of it and come back home. Good for him.

Another branch of the family were Quakers. They didn't participate in the economy of enslaved people, nor did they serve in the Army. They farmed and worked in cotton mills and generally minded their own business.

For you Outlander fans, part of my family were Highland Scots who came here after the Battle of Culloden which ended the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and placed it firmly under English rule. The family name is McFadyen and they were good Presbyterians who farmed the land on southeastern NC into the 20th century. One of them, my grandmother's brother died in Italy fighting Nazis during World War Two.

Even though we are deep into the 21st century now, there are still signs of the past all around, if you know where to look. There are tobacco barns built from logs and chinked with mud on various farms. That type of tobacco production was last practiced in the 70s. I have hiked all the way through the NC mountains from our border with Georgia all the way to Virginia. Some of the trails today's hikers follow are the same routes Native Americans were using when we got here, I am always amazed when I am following a difficult mountain trail and I come to a stone fence or giant stone piles and I realize that at one time the thickly forested Appalachian mountainsides were clearcut and hardscrabble mountain folks planted crops there and plowed the fields with mules.

I am not a flag waving patriot in the traditional sense. I am not proud to be from where I'm from. I'm not ashamed of it either. We all have a history and I just happen to know mine because I'm curious and sought the information. That information gives me a connection to the past I would not otherwise have.

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