Surry County

By Carolyn Boyles, Wilma Hiatt and Surry County Genealogical Association

Founded in 1771 from parts of Rowan County, Surry County possesses a special charm and an engaging history in the northwest corner of the Tar Heel State--a heritage famous for rolling hills, autumn festivals, and the birthplace of "Mayberry," which attracts countless tourists and visitors each season to the county's 15 townships. This volume, containing over 200 black-and-white images, transports readers into the Surry County of yesteryear, a time when the county's unpaved roads echoed with a cadence of noisy wagons matched with the sounds of early automobiles. Through these historic photographs, readers will explore the landscape of a bygone era, from the 1880s through the 1930s, and travel through each of the county's townships: Franklin, Bryan, Elkin, Marsh, Dobson, Stewarts Creek, Mount Airy, Eldora, Rockford, Siloam, Shoals, Pilot, Long Hill, Westfield, and South Westfield. Surry County uncovers the personal side of the county's history by touching upon many elements of everyday life, from family gatherings, church services, various occupations, daily work on the farm, early rural schoolhouses, and people at play. These scenes serve as fitting testimony to Surry Countians' sheer will and determination to carve successful and lasting communities into this beautiful setting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439627747

Carolyn Boyles

Authors and local historians Carolyn Boyles and Wilma Hiatt, on behalf of the Surry County Genealogical Association, have compiled a wonderful collection of photographs that captures, in word and image, the true essence of the Surry County experience. Appealing to both longtime residents and newcomers to the area, Surry County celebrates a pioneering people and their unique story, one full of challenges and triumphs.

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INTRODUCTION

On the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at the meeting of the North Carolina and Virginia borders, is a bountiful place. With the beautiful tree-covered blue ridge as its backdrop, there lies below it valleys, hills, woodlands, and pleasant fields. Riverlets of pure water spring forth from mountain headwaters and meander through the hills and valleys forming creeks by the score and flowing into rivers by the names of Mitchell, Fisher, and Ararat. These languid rivers flow across the land until each, in its time and place, enters the ambling Yadkin River, marking this good land’s southern boundary. The eastern boundary is marked by that magnificent sentinel known as Pilot Mountain, whose wooded slopes rise upward until its nearly bald pinnacle touches God’s beautiful sky. Then traveling along the northern boundary, the Virginia line, one traverses ridges and mountains back to Fishers Peak in the blue ridge. Here is a place of singular beauty.

For over two and a quarter centuries, this lovely place has been known as Surry County, a good place to live, work, worship, and play. This pictorial history reminds us of those who lived here in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Nearly everyone pictured in this book is gone now, but they and their contemporaries helped make Surry the wonderful place it is today. They created farms and towns, and established homes, churches, and the communities we value today. We are indebted to those who have lived before us, and this book will help to remind us of those who passed this way.

The mode and manner of living today is far removed from the scenes preserved on these pages. Older folks may remember those simpler times, but the younger generation can’t imagine how different things are today. For instance, a hundred years ago there were no paved roads. The roads that did exist were poor, and fording creeks and rivers was normal. Railroads to Mount Airy and Elkin were built in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but, for the most part, people traveled over rough roads on mule or horseback or by wagons pulled by mules or oxen. In the pictures that follow, you will see some of the early motorized vehicles.

In nearly every home could be found two books: Blum’s Almanac and the Holy Bible. Both were used. The first was helpful in planting gardens and crops and a host of other things; people believed in doing things by the signs of the moon and the planets. The second book was to live by—it was God’s instruction book for us. Table grace and reading the Bible as a family were daily practices.

Nearly every family had at least one milk cow, a hog pen, and chicken coop. The milk cow provided milk, buttermilk, and butter. In the late fall of the year, the hogs were killed for sausage, bacon, pork chops, tenderloin, livermush, and other things that the family would have eaten through the year, as well as the lard used for cooking. Nearly all this meat had to be salt- or smoke-cured or canned since there was no means of refrigeration. Chickens laid eggs and were also served fried on the table. Almost all of the food a family would eat was raised on the farm. To supplement the meat for the table, wild game was hunted and used for cooking in different ways.

Today a number of people raise gardens, but they aren’t as large or as necessary as they were in earlier days. From the garden one obtained vegetables; however, when they weren’t in season, they weren’t available. Thus canning and preserving vegetables was a necessary task in supplying the table for the rest of the year. Canned beans, peas, corn, hominy, sauerkraut, tomatoes, pickled beets, and cucumbers were all important to the family. Potatoes, turnips, apples, and pears were kept in cellars or in pits covered with dirt to keep them from going bad. Berries, grapes, and other fruits were canned or made into preserves. Crops raised at the turn of the century included corn, wheat, and other grains, as well as cane, cotton, and tobacco.

On average, families were larger than they are today, and three generations might live together. The preparation of meals, which were eaten around the kitchen table, was slow, hot, and hard work. There was no running water—springs and wells provided water. Most of the family’s clothing was made by the women in the family. Houses were lit by candles or oil lamps, and heat was generated by a fireplace or a wood stove in the kitchen. An outhouse was used by those who had them and the woods by those who didn’t. Baths in a tub happened just once a week; the rest of the week you just wiped off what was dirty.

By the 1920s, houses in town had indoor toilets, some kind of electric lighting, and, in some cases, telephones, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that electricity was available in rural communities. And it wasn’t until the 1920s that many cars were seen in the county.

Things have changed a lot over the years, and some things are decidedly better. Educational opportunities are much better in our modern schools than the one-room schools of a century ago. Medicine and health care are much better today than they once were—cemeteries reveal the high number of deaths that occurred among children and young mothers in the days of long ago. Two things that have remained fundamental in the lives of Surry County residents are a strong sense of family and the role of the church and spiritual life. Today the family unit might look different from the family of 100 years ago, but a sense of the importance of family and