{"id":5382,"date":"2020-07-28T11:36:52","date_gmt":"2020-07-28T15:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/?p=5382"},"modified":"2020-07-28T12:59:14","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T16:59:14","slug":"5382","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/?p=5382","title":{"rendered":"The Gift of Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

My brother Tom and I never knew our grandfather David Neil Morrison very well. Not that he died before we were born or when we were very young. In fact he lived to the age of 85 when I was thirty-three and Tom was twenty-eight. Not that our family did not visit my grandparents at least three or four times a year although we lived four hundred miles apart. Not that Granddad did not love us or take an interest in our lives. He gave us warm and loving hugs and tickled our knees, calling them \u201cbiscuit knees\u201d! Not that we never wrote to each other, but he never wrote more than a few sentences at the bottom of our grandmother\u2019s letters probably because of a limited education. Not that he neglected or ignored us or wanted us to stay out of his way. Instead, when we were children, he often when we visited donned his favorite felt, brimmed hat and took us on walks up the nearby railroad tracks to where we could climb on the side-railed box cars or down the tracks to the Statesville Depot. We also put pennies and Grandmother\u2019s crossed straight sewing pins to be flattened on the railroad tracks. Sometimes we walked to a nearby grocery store or to a relative\u2019s gas station and small store for a special treat. Other times we filled our pockets with fiberglass marbles lying outside of the nearby fiberglass factory. In the summers we trailed around behind Granddad in his large garden helping to pick many vegetables including the multi-colored popcorn he sent us in a large box every Christmas. We played with his baby chicks, got the eggs from his exotic hens, admired the many ribbons and trophies he received from showing his exotic poultry at the Iredell County fair, and
\nsteered clear of his two nanny goats named Martha and Harriet. He never took us far from his home because he did not, once Tom and I passed our early childhoods, have an automobile. Instead, we walked to the Statesville town square to sit with him watching and greeting the passers-by. Not that he did not like taking a ride, especially to our Dad\u2019s Rumple family\u2019s farm where Dad\u2019s folks greeted him with open arms and warm hearts. And yet still we never got to know him very well at all. We did not share stories of his childhood, youth, and adulthood. We did not hear about his hopes and dreams, trials and tribulations. Something very important was always missing.<\/p>\n

When we were very young, we could communicate with him by yelling as loudly as we could. By the time we were teenagers, he was profoundly deaf, a disability he shared with about half of his eight brothers and sisters. Not that there was anything anyone could do to rid him of his disability. Not that his son Elbert didn\u2019t try. He took his Dad to hearing specialists who at that time could offer no hope through surgery. He had his Dad fitted for hearing aids, but they did not work effectively for him. After so many years of silence, we think he grew used to it and could not stand the din and static of the not yet perfected hearing aids. We know that he had worked initially in his father\u2019s flour mill, but sometime after his father\u2019s death and his brother-in-law Rob Cashion\u2019s taking over the mill, Granddad, perhaps because of his deafness, was laid off. He never had a well-paying job though he then ironically worked as a night watchman at a nearby furniture factory. In spite of his limited resources, he never missed an opportunity to fill our pockets with coins, gum, and candy. His situation was what it was, and he accepted it, but we grandchildren always yearned for ways to know him better. One summer day in the late 1960\u2019s after I had driven my mother (Virginia), her sister (Martha), and myself to Statesville from the Washington, DC, area where we lived, Granddad approached me and suggested, \u201cLet\u2019s all get in your car and go for a ride. There\u2019s something I want to show you.\u201d We did as he requested and followed his directions out through the countryside northwest of Statesville on roads I was not familiar with. Eventually, he called out, \u201cPull in the yard of that next farmhouse on the right.\u201d As soon as I stopped the car, he hopped out and headed for the front door. The first thing that occurred to me was that he would not be able to hear anything whoever might open the door might say so I scurried along behind him. To the very pleasant lady who answered the door, Granddad, having identified himself, made the request that we be allowed to climb up the hill in the adjacent field to the old, and apparently almost forgotten, Buffalo Shoals (as they were known in the old days) Morrison family cemetery. It was completely overgrown with trees, briars, brambles, and poison ivy. Yet from outside the fence, we were able to discern close to two dozen tombstones and field stones, marking the graves of the first three generations of Granddad\u2019s family, who had received by the late 1700\u2019s the surrounding nearly one thousand acres in a pre-Revolutionary War grant from the English Earl of Granville and then subsequent purchases. The field stones evidently mark the graves of the family slaves. As I stood atop that hill beside the graves of all those ancestors I knew very little about in spite of my interest in family history, I felt that I was Home again, Home upon the land members of our family had lived, worked, and played on for nearly two hundred and forty years.<\/p>\n

Then Granddad told me that when we returned to Statesville, I should walk over to the Victorian style home his father had built where he and his brothers and sisters had grown up and his two unmarried sisters May and Rachel still lived. He assured me that May and Rachel had the old family Bible that would tell me more about their branch of the Morrison family. I felt that Granddad had, in spite of his
\nhandicap, given me and his daughters the greatest gift that he could have given \u2013 the gift of family. In the early 1970\u2019s, Granddad clipped an article for me out of the Statesville newspaper that highlighted the over two hundred year old home on the Morrison property. The Morrison family then living there had recently remodeled and redecorated without destroying the historic nature of the originally log but by then enlarged and sided over farmhouse. They were opening it for a house and garden tour. How I wished I could go on the tour, but I was four hundred miles away and unable to travel at that time. Then as life\u2019s demands and a new baby took my attention, I stored my memories of the cemetery and old house away in my brain. More years went by until we moved to Mooresville in 2008. Every now and then I thought of that trip Granddad took us on, but by then both his generation and his children\u2019s were absent through death or dementia. I felt a tug to return to my roots but had no idea where to look. I thought I could recognize the family farm if I could only find the right road to search. My first clue was that old nickname \u201cthe Buffalo Shoals Morrisons.\u201d It seemed to me that those words directed me either to Buffalo Shoals Road or Buffalo Shoals Creek. After searching an Iredell County map, I concluded that
\nin the 1700\u2019s the creek, a good source of water, probably had more significance than a road that may not have even existed at that time. There were the additional clues that one of the ancestors was referred to in a U.S. Federal Census record as \u201cMiller Tommy,\u201d and a grist mill back in those days definitely required water to turn the mill wheel; also, when Granddad\u2019s father moved his family to Statesville, he soon opened the Star Flour Milling Company. One other bit of information that certified the one time existence of a Morrison Buffalo Shoals Creek mill was on an old 1833 North Carolina road map by Brazier and Mac Rae that my historian cousin Gary Freeze located; I then also found a copy of it online and both it and another similar old state road map in the Statesville library. Thus it seems that
\nmilling was definitely a family tradition.<\/p>\n

One sunny and warm Saturday morning in February 2013, Norb and I decided to drive out Old Mountain Road to New Sterling Church Road in Stony Point to where Buffalo Shoals Creek went under the road. To my great disappointment, nothing looked at all familiar, and I could not spot an old overgrown cemetery on top of a hill anywhere. I was standing beside the road near the creek when a woman stopped and asked if I were lost. I said that I was not lost but there was something I had lost, and I explained to her about our search for the cemetery if it still existed. She said she was sure it was located nearby and gave me the name of a man she thought might now own the property. After returning home and making five telephone calls, I finally found the owner of the farm, minus the house and four acres. I learned that the farm, including the cemetery, is owned by Beaman Nance, and the house is owned by Brenda Kaye Jolly. Mr. Nance agreed to meet us at the barn on the following Saturday morning. He took us to the cemetery and explained that the reason nothing looked familiar to me is the fact that the road some years ago was moved from the far side of the old house to run between the house and the farm (barn and cemetery). We found the cemetery still guarded by the same brambly undergrowth we had encountered the first time Granddad took us there, but Mr. Nance stated that he wants to clear out the vegetation except for the trees, enlarge the cemetery, get the few tombstones that are broken repaired, and build a fence around the cemetery to keep the cows and horses out
\nbecause he and his wife want to be buried there. We volunteered to help him when he has time for the project. He does not want to use Roundup to kill the vegetation because the earlier generations of the family have decorated the final resting place of their loved ones with a variety of perennial flowers. Meanwhile, I walked across the road and knocked on the door of the old house where I talked with Ms. Jolly. She did not invite me in, saying her house was not in good enough condition to show it off, but she encouraged me to take exterior photos and bring my husband and cousin Gary along one day to hunt along the creek down behind her house for any vestiges of the old mill. In fact, she offered to sell
\nme the property, but we could not afford to purchase it in spite of all the sentimental value it would have for us.<\/p>\n

On another warm and sunny day, this time in March, Norb, Gary, and I went on a search for the remnants of the old Morrison mill. The hike down to the stream was treacherously steep and covered with large trees, saplings, and many more of those clothes and skin tearing brambles. At the bottom of the hill, we found ourselves standing in what had obviously been the old mill pond. After walking on large rocks in the creek we came to the remnants of the dam and the mill itself, all washed downstream a bit by some years ago flood. We were very impressed by the size of the ruins. Unfortunately for the
\nby then tired hikers, we had to climb very carefully, without setting off a dangerous slide, up a huge rock pile to the new road and bridge. From there we returned up the road to the old house. The center of the old two story house, now enlarged, is built around an early 1770\u2019s log cabin constructed either by the original settlers, James and Mary Morrison Morrison (cousins?), or their son Colonel Thomas, Sr., who in addition to being a farmer and a miller was the local justice of the peace. Thomas was first married to his cousin Matilda Morrison (granddaughter of \u201cRevolutionary\u201d John Morrison). Later, after Matilda died, he may have married Mira, also buried in the family cemetery; we do not know her last name. Thomas, Sr., and Matilda\u2019s son Thomas, Jr., married Martha \u201cPatsy\u201d Smyre
\n(daughter of Elias Smyre). Their son David Augustus \u201cGus\u201d Morrison (our grandfather David Neil\u2019s father) moved his family, after about half of his children were born, to Statesville where he founded and operated the Star Flour Milling Company, built houses and also schools such as Mulberry Street School, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. His wife, our great-grandmother, is Salome G. Connor, daughter of Dr. Henry William Connor and Rebecca Bostian (buried in New Sterling ARP Cemetery).<\/p>\n

And what is the special gift our grandfather David Neil Morrison and the old family Bible left to us but a knowledge of who we are, what family we belong to, where our roots are sunk deep into the North Carolina clay. He did not hand us all the answers, but he showed us where we came from seven generations ago and passed onto us the clues we needed to trace our family on back to their origins in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Fermanagh, Ulster, Ireland. Yes, we are proud to have to a large extent (since our grandmother Macie was also a Morrison) Scots-Irish blood along with a good smattering of German, Swiss, English, and French immigrant ancestors as well. We are truly descended from pre-Revolutionary
\nWar European immigrants who gave us deep southern roots and made us into true melting pot Americans!<\/p>\n

Harriet Rumple Schroeder (Q94)<\/p>\n

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My brother Tom and I never knew our grandfather David Neil Morrison very well. Not that he died before we were born or when we were very young. In fact he lived to the age of 85 when I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":88958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/88958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5382"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5389,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382\/revisions\/5389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}