A HERO OF MOUNT HOLLY

Family of formerly enslaved businessman fights to keep his legacy alive

BY RYAN PITKIN

As a boy growing up in Mount Holly in the 1960s, Eric Wilson knew firsthand that each thundercloud had a silver lining. His grandmother, Mena Hunter Wilson, wasn’t fond of storms, so she would call down to Eric’s parents whenever one began to roll in.

“She would always call my mom and dad and say, ‘Send one of the kids to come sit with me during the storm,’” recalled Eric, now 63. “I would tell my grandmother, ‘Grandma, tell us a story,’ and she would go back in her memory books and tell us how things were.”

It was there in his grandmother’s house at the corner of West Glendale Avenue and South Hawthorne Street in Mount Holly during stormy afternoons that Eric Wilson first became familiar with the legend of his great-grandfather Ransom Hunter, Mena’s father.

Hunter was born into slavery only to become one of the area’s most successful businessmen following the Civil War, lifting up other folks like him who had survived slavery in the Carolinas and playing an important but largely forgotten role in forming the community that would become Mount Holly.

In the 1870s, Hunter built the house where a century later Eric would sit on the floor and listen to stories from his grandmother.

“There were some bad times; she told us some stories of Klans coming to the house as a small girl, harassing Ransom,” Wilson told Queen City Nerve. “It was not all hunky-dory, there was some challenging times.”

Yet so much of what he learned from his grandmother was uplifting, including how Hunter had built up his own land only to then sell to other formerly enslaved people escaping postReconstruction violence and turmoil in South Carolina, forming the Freedom community.

Wilson has dedicated a large part of his life to preserving his great-grandfather’s legacy, becoming a self-taught family historian and tracing his grandmother’s stories back through time to confirm the truths behind the legends of Ransom Hunter.

“I went back from her mouth all the way back to Africa,” Wilson said.

Now, as Wilson nears retirement and plans to move back to Mount Holly from Greensboro, where he currently works as an architect, he hopes to bring his work to a close by accomplishing a goal that he and other descendants of Ransom Hunter have fought for over the past 10 years: to turn Ransom Hunter’s former homesite into a public park.

One man’s journey

It is believed that both of Ransom Hunter’s parents were brought to America on slave ships, though Eric Wilson has only found documentation of his father’s arrival, listed in the manifest as “Slave No. 13.”

Ransom’s father was sold at auction in Charleston to the owners of the Middleton Plantation, where he met his wife, who had been given the name Julia, and they took the last name Hunter after one of the overseers on the property. The two were officially married at Middleton, and it is believed that Ransom was the couple’s only son. He was born on March 14, 1825.

At 13 years old, Ransom was torn apart from his parents, sold off to the owners of the Hoyle Plantation in Gaston County between what are now the towns of Dallas and Stanley. He was kept on the Hoyle Plantation for more than two decades until he was freed around 1860 in the lead-up to the Civil War.

He bought a small parcel of land in the Woodlawn community that would later become Mount Holly, but before he could start a new life post-slavery, there was something he needed to do.

“When he was freed, the first thing he did was he went to try to find his mom and dad,” Wilson said, “and he went back to South Carolina and he was told that they had died. So he never saw his parents again. That was very traumatic for him. So he came back to his property and he started to establish his life.”

Ransom Hunter’s property was in an advantageous location in the sparsely populated Woodlawn community; it was split by a dirt road that people took from towns like Stanley to the nearby Catawba River, where there was trading to be done or crossings if needed.

Taking advantage of some of the skills he had learned in bondage, Hunter built a small blacksmith shop, offering horseshoe services and other iron work from the front while sleeping in the back. He eventually built a livery stable, then began work on the home that would become a point of pride in his family for more than a century to come.

“He had the only blacksmith shop around. He had a commodity that people needed. The next blacksmith shop was all the way in Gastonia or King’s Mountain. Let’s say a wagon wheel broke or your horse threw a shoe, then you had to stop at his shop,” Wilson explained. “So he was making money when a lot of people wasn’t making money. If your car is your only choice of transportation and it breaks down, you’re gonna get your car fixed so you can get to work. So people would pay to get their horses shoed. And he did iron work so he could repair wagons, he made nails, he made bolts, anything that was iron he did it. So that’s how he started making his money … and every bit of money that he made, he started buying land, he started adding and adding.”

The birth of Mount Holly

In the early 1870s, Hunter began hearing troubling news from South Carolina; white supremacist Southerners were becoming more aggressively opposed to Reconstruction policies that had been created ostensibly to allow formerly enslaved people to succeed. Plantation owners had begun claiming land sold to formerly enslaved people as part of the federal government’s “40 acres and a mule” policy, forcing them to work as sharecroppers on plots that the freed people had cleared and built on themselves.

Hunter became concerned that the same thing