~~~

Janet Travell Powell and Jack Powell,
Atlantic City, 1930

Photograph, courtesy of Virginia Powell Street,
is an enlargement of a newspaper halftone

~~~

GROWING UP IN ROXOBEL
Part One

Excerpts from an article by Jack Powell (1897-1973)
in the 1972 Bertie Ledger-Advance

Edited and submitted by his daughter, Virginia P. Street,
of Massachusetts

FROM HORSE AND BUGGY TO AUTOMOBILE

The greatest occurrence of my young life in Roxobel was the arrival of the automobile.

Mr. Stephen Norfleet, who lived in Kelford and ran a hardware store there, brought the first auto. About once a week he would crank up the small red car, which had no top, few cylinders and not much of a muffler, and chug along the sandy road in front of our home, which was located halfway between Kelford and Roxobel.

When the vehicle crossed Brown's Branch near Kelford and emerged from the woods there ~ across the open fields nearly a mile away ~ I could hear the "chug-chug" of the motor. I would run quickly to the fence along the roadway to get a good look at this strange new contraption.

Frequently, Mr. Norfleet would meet a horse and buggy. The horse would rear ~ although harnessed between the shafts ~ and often tried to run away. Finally, subduing the horse, the owner would lead him carefully around the stopped auto, and the passage was effected safely.

However, nearly always the engine of the automobile had to be turned off because of the popping noise it made. That meant Mr. Norfleet had to bend down in front and crank it up again. This might happen each time he met a horse-drawn vehicle, which was all there was.

It was some time before I had a ride in that car, but my brother, Junius Bishop Powell, was taken to visit our Uncle John Gordon and his family in Richmond, Va., about that time, and he had a ride in a similar auto. Upon his return, he graphically described to me how he had entered the three-passenger car from the rear and had a ride in it.

A horse and buggy was the method of going from here to there in our vicinity. Thomas S. Norfleet, a county commissioner of Bertie, in those days and even years later was still driving his horse and buggy the 25 miles to Windsor for the frequent meetings of the Commission. The trip took three hours or more and, after the lengthy meetings, he would spend the night in a hotel and drive home the next day.

His two sons, my first cousins, Figuers and William Norfleet, later acquired the agency for Buick automobiles. The dealer for the state was located in Charlotte. To get delivery of the cars, the brothers went to Charlotte by train along with several friends and drove the new cars back to Roxobel over dirt roads. The only hard-surface roads they encountered in the state in those days were at High Point and the stretch between Weldon and Roanoke Rapids. Sometimes, after heavy rain, the red clay roads would become impassable for automobiles. Then, the cars were left stuck in the mud wherever they were and, soon after, when the roads had been worked over, another trip was made to get them.

When I was a teenager, I was chosen by the family to attend the funeral of a relative over near Colerain. I had just learned to drive and was offered the use of one of the Buicks for the day. I made the approximately 50-mile round trip driving mostly in low and second gear because heavy rains had made the roads a quagmire. Gradually, just before World War I, we were making the transition from animal drawn vehicles to motorized ones.

TRAINS

For travel to a distance there were, of course, trains ~ trains going almost everywhere. When we visited our William J. Gordon relatives in Williamston, our family would take a mid-morning train from Kelford to Hobgood. Alighting there, my brothers, Gordon and Junius, and I would spend the next couple of hours climbing up and down the freight cars that stood on a sidetrack while we awaited the arrival of a train from Halifax which took us to Parmele. After another wait there for a train coming from the west, we proceeded on to Williamston, arriving about dusk ~ and the whole distance in a straight line was probably less than 40 miles.

Trains had been the means of travel for nearly a hundred years. Our great-aunt, Mary Frances (Fannie) Bishop Jacobs, born in 1844, lived in our Roxobel home with us, and told of driving in a carriage ~ when she was a young lady ~ to Garysburg to take the "cars" for a visit to the mountains of Western North Carolina. The tourists rode in chairs or benches set on flat train cars, with no roof over them, viewing the countryside at a leisurely speed as they went from town to town.

A train trip in the winter of 1911 was to be the cause of the death of our mother. (Isa Gordon Powell died in January 1912, at home, from pneumonia. My father's oldest brother, Gordon, had been killed by a train at the Kelford railroad crossing one night in October 1911. It was never clear if he was crawling under or making his way between the cars when the train started. My father's father, Edgar Powell, a robust gentleman farmer who played the violin, had died three years previously in Norfolk, Va., at the age of 48 after elective surgery for a sinus infection. ~ Virginia.)

Junius and I were attending Christ School in Arden, N.C., near Asheville that fall. The trip to the school involved a train ride that lasted from one morning to the next afternoon, including changing trains twice and spending a night in a hotel in Greensboro. There were no sleeping cars on that route. It was on that trip in reverse, riding in a day coach heated only by a coal stove, that our mother became fatally ill. She was bringing us home from school for the Christmas holidays. (Jack Powell and his siblings, Junius and Dorothy, were taken in and brought up by their father's older sister, Leila Powell Norfleet, and her husband Tom, at the Norfleets' nearby home, Woodbourne. ~ Virginia.)