Wilmjax News

Disagreement over whether a Civil War ancestor should lie beneath a Union or a Confederate headstone has led to the arrest of a Gaston County jailer, charged with desecrating the grave of the veteran.

A warrant was served Oct. 15 on Richard Hill, a detention officer with the Gaston County Sheriff’s Department, Gaston County Chief Deputy Tim Farris said Monday.

The warrant was issued in Madison County, where the grave lies. It was taken out by Sheila Grindstaff of Mars Hill, a great-great granddaughter of the soldier.

According to the warrant, Hill, apparently a sixth-generation descendant, “tore down and removed a tombstone on the grave” of Stephen S. Shook, who is buried in a family cemetery behind Upper Laurel Baptist Church near Mars Hill, “then replaced the stone with a Confederate stone.”

According to the warrant, Shook was “a Union soldier who died on June 10, 1902.”

But before that he was a Confederate, the family agrees.

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TARBORO – The Edgecombe County Cultural Arts Council brought the town’s history to life with a weekend of annual events.

Re-enactors came from all over the country, turning the Town Common, River Front Park and Blount-Bridgers House into Civil War camps for the weekend.

Tents housed medical centers, rope makers and generals’ offices, depicting life in the 1800s. A raid re-enactment had cannons sounding for blocks and home tours and ghost walks gave insight to Tarboro’s architecture.

“We feel like it’s our responsibility to be the keeper of our history,” Buddy Hooks, executive director of the council, said about the town’s History Days celebration.

Many of the Confederate heroes have ties to Tarboro, Hooks said, including Pvt. Henry Lawson Wyatt, the first North Carolinian known to have died in the Civil War.

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TARBORO – If all goes according to plan, residents and visitors will see a scene from the history books played out in the center of town.

Town officials are in the process of working on an agreement with the Edgecombe County Cultural Arts Council to allow Civil War re-enactors performing in this year’s History Days event to camp out for two nights on the Town Common.

The re-enactors have been a staple of History Days for the past two years but have camped out on the Blount-Bridgers House grounds because of liability concerns from the town.

This year, Edgecombe ARTS has taken out a $1 million insurance policy to free the town from any responsibility if actors are injured. In addition, the organization will sign a contract agreeing to take responsibility for any damage done to the common during the event.

“If there’s any damage to the common – be it from horses, camping or all of the above – somebody is responsible for it,” Noble said. “They’ve not had that previously.”

The actors will spend the nights of Sept. 28 and 29 on the grounds and leave Sept. 30. Edgecombe ARTS Director Buddy Hooks said it will allow the performers – roughly three times as many as last year – more room to spread out, and bring one of the organization’s biggest events to the traditional center of town.

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AVERASBORO — Three flags fly in front of the Averasboro Battlefield Museum: A North Carolina flag, a Confederate flag and a United States flag.

They dance in the breeze from poles planted on a wide lawn near the museum. Out beyond them, crops grow in late summer haze and entire hours pass in utter silence.

These farmlands are hallowed ground, said Bob Bryan, a local history buff and a founder of the Averasboro Battlefield Commission. In one of the final battles of the Civil War, nearly 1,200 men and boys died in these fields, which stand on a narrow piece of land wedged between two rivers, the Black and the Cape Fear. The injured were treated in makeshift hospitals set up in three plantation houses, all of which still stand.

Across N.C. 82 from the museum, at least 35 of the dead are buried in the Chicora Cemetery, their communal graves marked by simple headstones, replicas of the originals. No names are carved on these headstones.

There are only numbers, six here or four there, of the men who were buried there. Some were from South Carolina. Some were from Georgia. In death, they were nameless.

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