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The Garden
PLPL A Look Back
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Map of Vineland, the initial town name of Southern Pines. Inset, early photo of Southern Pines.
The Streets of Patrick’s Folly
By Ray Owen Images courtesy of Moore County Historical Association
It was a wild world John T. Patrick entered at Manly Station in 1881: a dusty timber, tar and turpentine industry outpost just north of what would become Southern Pines. If you were looking for trouble, this is where you went to find it at more than a dozen bars lining the tracks—feuds and fights were common, with a shooting almost every Saturday night.
In isolation they forged a unique brand, these original Tar Heels, their forest ageless and endless, pillared with longleaf, cut off from the outside world until the railroad came through in 1876, confronting them with a new way of being.
Patrick was one of them but different, a young man in his late 20s, newly appointed as Commissioner of Immigration for cash-poor North Carolina and paid next to nothing to visit every county to foster economic opportunity.
Born in Wadesboro in 1852, as a teenager he traveled the country presenting magic lantern shows, a combination of projected images, narration and music. By 1878, he owned a general store, was proprietor and editor of the Pee Dee Herald, and served as a captain in the State Guard. He also was selling property in Wadesboro and arranged the first annual fair in the town.
Recognizing his community would appeal to outsiders, he began distributing press releases in national newspapers pointing out the availability of inexpensive land. This effort resulted in around 200 families purchasing 20,000 acres.
News spread fast that a dollar invested with Patrick always turned a profit. This earned him the respect of powerful allies, and in July 1883, he was appointed head of state immigration. His task was to generate wealth, so he devised a plan that was known for a time as “Patrick’s Folly.”
His study of census records showed a steady flow away from crowded northern urban centers headed west. North Carolina suffered from a population and monetary deficit, and the number of people with cash leaving the North could more than address the state’s shortfall.
Patrick’s concept was to divert the westward flow of immigration into the heart of North Carolina to fuel the growth of the rail system. We had no real roads so this was economically critical. Railroads required travel and commerce to sustain their existence and so did the state.
He was applauded for his grasp of the issues, but condemned for his remedy, locating the first Yankee settlement in southern Moore County, which was considered “a place where the pea vine will not grow and a grape vine will not sprout.” This was a realistic assessment, there being few trees, most having been cut for lumber or scarred by the turpentine industry.
Not to be deterred, in 1884 Patrick used his own resources to purchase 675 acres on Shaw’s Ridge at the crossroads of two aboriginal trails, the Pee Dee and Yadkin. Here, he laid
Left, the Southern Pines Singing Society. Top, John T. Patrick, founder of Southern Pines. Top right, early Southern Pines. Bottom right, the Patrick Hotel.
out a town intended as a health resort, first called Vineland but soon renamed Southern Pines, a place with no real existence beyond his fertile imagination.
The proposed resort crystallized into map form with a gridiron pattern of 35 blocks east of the track and 100 west, totaling 3,240 lots. Each block was traversed by two public alleys crossing at the center with a small park in the middle.
A hastily built structure was erected to serve as a hotel, the only existing buildings being the workers temporary log camp, a shed train depot and a few scattered farmsteads. The streets were deep with dust and you might trip over a sleeping hog when you went for your mail or be chased by an angry bull if you had on the wrong color shirt.
Patrick began circulating advertisements in northern publications to promote the Sandhills, followed by tours of Pennsylvania, New York and Boston, where he gave talks on the virtues of Southern Pines against the backdrop of a live minstrel show.
A critical hurdle for establishing a northern village in the South was overcoming concerns about “rebel retribution” and the stability of Southern society. The nation had just survived a terrible war and many were fearful. Patrick understood that, for his plan to work, he would need to demonstrate to outsiders that they would be well received.
“Let harmony and good feelings prevail,” said Patrick. “We have had enough dissension. The differences engendered on account of the late war must be forgotten. No more malice or hatred, but love one another. We could cut for ourselves a garment of splendor which would be made up by people of worth, culture and thrift.”
Such inducements sparked interest and he was soon arranging train fares for parties of prospective settlers. Patrick enlisted a gospel choir called the “Singing Society” to serenade the incoming trains and he rallied scores of representatives from local immigrant Scottish Highland clans to provide a warm welcome.
Visitors were invited to tour the countryside. Offering included a ride to Carthage to witness court in session, religious services at white and Black churches, banjo picking, dancing, barbecues, hunting excursions, woodland rambles and sightseeing at a turpentine still.
The Tar Heels charmed their guests and by 1886, more than 2,000 people had entered the Sandhills, bringing with them an aggregated wealth of around $2,000,000. For whatever purpose they came—in search of health and fortune—creating a foundation for what was perhaps the first Mid-South resort established after the American Civil War.
Patrick consciously branded the concept of Northern and Southern reconciliation onto Southern Pines by naming the avenues after the Northern states that had supplied so many of its settlers and the streets for friends and local heroes.
Before his death in 1918, Patrick acquired 800 acres west of Southern Pines for a group of Japanese merchants from San Francisco and Belgian painter Valentin Henneman, who was invited to establish an “artist colony.” The plan was to sell artwork in a shop at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Bennett Street—the project cut short by Patrick’s passing.
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Life and Loss
By Robert Gable
Part of living your life means dealing with loss along the way. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one or the loss of a dream, life goes on. Oftentimes we’re left to deal with loss on our own, though some ways of dealing are not as effective as others. Richard Ford deftly explores these themes in his latest collection of nine short stories, Sorry for Your Trouble.
In Ford’s stories, we’re parachuted down into the middle of a situation in some part of the world. The characters unveil what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling and their backgrounds. Then you piece together what is happening, and you learn from the story. Part of the challenge is he keeps you guessing. What exactly is going on? What are these people doing, and why are they acting this way? He also has an ear for dialogue that rings true. You listen in on the people as they’re talking, trying to come to grips with an issue.
Ford’s prize-winning writing style is lean and his sentences are crisp. He reveals the story’s situation in concise terms, letting your imagination fill in the rest. He paints the picture with a few deft strokes and doesn’t leave you awash in words. He explores the complex interactions between the characters with well-placed words that get to the crux of the story.
For instance, in “Jimmy Green—1992,” a man in Paris wants to do something different on election night. On a lark, he asks the French woman at a nearby art gallery to join him at an election party. She says yes, but strange happenings make Jimmy’s high hopes for the evening go completely awry. At the end he wonders what happened and thinks, “Though being here, in the freezing night, this bit of misery—he could never have imagined. Here, of course, was never precisely the point you’d attained (a view he’d often reminded himself). Here was a point you’d passed already but didn’t realize.”
In “The Run of Yourself,” a husband is trying to make sense of his wife’s suicide. Sick with recurring cancer, she wanted to end her misery. He didn’t see the signs that she was preparing to go. Two years later, he is still trying to figure out how he missed the signs, wondering if he could have changed the events if he had been aware of her intent.
In “Nothing to Declare,” two people meet again, 20 years after their brief college affair. He has gone on to a marriage and a law practice in New Orleans. She has drifted through a few marriages and wants to catch up with him. When she drops in unexpectedly, he finds old feelings, buried and almost forgotten, come rushing back as she says hello. The encounter leaves them both wondering, what might have been?
Some common themes run throughout Ford’s latest collection. Just like reality, events don’t always go as planned. As with, “Man proposes, God disposes,” unforeseen twists come out of nowhere. This happens to all of us; in many cases it’s only in retrospect that we recognize the hints, the initial signs of the train that was barreling down on us. At the time, though, the train’s lights were shaded, indistinct and blurred behind a mist we couldn’t quite see through.
Usually a loss of some kind has the characters trying to make sense of where they currently find themselves. Widowed or divorced, that sense of loss finds many of the characters close to being broken—but they’re learning how to bend to keep from breaking. Their children aren’t exactly friendly or happy—nor are they easy to get along with. For these characters, change is the price of survival. Through no one’s fault, their lives get complicated, confusing, and off the rails in a hurry. Knowing and world-weary, humbled yet hopeful, the characters aren’t giving up, though they may be despairing, and somewhat bewildered. All is not lost. Not yet.
These are enlightening stories, worthy of re-reading and further refection. Ford doesn’t sugar-coat loneliness or the disoriented feeling that can come from a sudden change to an ordered world. He has a masterful way of showing, when it comes to the interactions between people, no one really knows how things are going to end. In a nod to everyday life, the ending might not be neat and tidy. The ending may be one we didn’t see coming—nor one we would have preferred—yet we keep on trying, just like the familiar adage, “While I breathe, I hope.”
Sorry For Your Trouble
By Richard Ford 258 pages, HarperCollins Publishers / $27.99
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Robert Gable worked in book publishing for 18 years before going into the golf industry. He lived and worked in Pinehurst for five years and still misses it. He currently lives in Queens and works as an assistant golf pro at Metropolis Country Club in White Plains, New York.
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