ter, along with sugar and flour and
a barrel of copperas. There were
many bolts of calicoes and ging¬
hams, and woolens for men’s suits.
The drug department included
such home remedies as asafetida
and vermifuge.
One of the pleasant excitements
of the Harper household was the
return of the wagons from Fayette¬
ville and Charleston, with stock
for the store. The goods were
purchased in New York and
Philadelphia and shipped by water
to the above ports. In an old
Harper diary, under the date of
1850, we read:
Fairfield
This beautiful old home i n
Lenoir, built in 1825, still retains
all of its original beauty and
charm. The grounds are in keep¬
ing with the building.
By HARRY Z. TUCKER
ALTHOUGH there are many
/X
handsome old homes in the
/
\town of Lenoir, none is quite
so charming and historical as
quaint “Fairfield." Built by James
Harper in 1825, at the crossing of
the Morganton-Wilkesboro and
Statesville-Watauga highroads, the
house graced almost the only
clearing in the great woods that
stretched between those communi¬
ties and over most of the western
part of the state.
A man of education and refine¬
ment, James Harper had come
from Adams County. Pennsyl¬
vania, to seek health in the warm
sun of the South. During his
horseback journey down the
Shenandoah Valley, he stopped for
a short visit in the home of Samuel
Finley and was there introduced
to a charming young maiden, Caro¬
line Ellen Finley, to whom he was
later married. When he reached
Wilkesboro, North Carolina, he be¬
came a member of the family of
Colonel William P. Waugh.
Hardly had he settled at Fair-
field when the thought occurred
to him to open a store, there being
no trading center between Wilkes¬
boro and Morganton. With Colo¬
nel William P. Waugh as his
partner, the store became one of
a chain extending from Shouns,
Tennessee, to Columbia, South
Carolina. The old sign over the
door of the mercantile establish¬
ment at Fairfield read:
"WAUGH AND HARPER, 1829."
Bernhardt-Seagle, a direct de¬
scendant of the small log store
house first erected by James
Harper, is one of the leading stores
of Lenoir. It dees one of the largest
businesses in western North Caro¬
lina in hardware, lumber, building
supplies and furniture. With its
many facilities, the company ren¬
ders a complete house planning,
house building, and house furnish¬
ing service. The store is proud of
its humble origin.
Ж:а1
of frontier stores, Waugh
rper carried everything the
community needed from black¬
strap molasses to ready-made
clothes. Nothing came in packages
in those days, and the cracker
barrel stood open under the coun¬
James Harper kept large piles
of shoe and harness leather for the
local craftsman, who made harness
on the premises. Saddle trees were
kept in stock and padded and
covered to order. Shoes were made
to order, and were delivered at
Christmas.
There was a large trade in old
rags, and the bin of this commodity
in the shed room was both smelly
and unsanitary; but, according to
the records left, it was a favorite
place for play. The Harper chil¬
dren and their friends found that
the great bins made wonderful
pirates’ dens and Indian forts.
Large amounts of goods were
exchanged each year for dried
blackberries. The berries were
packed at the store by two slaves,
one standing in a sack and holding
it up about him and tramping the
berries, as the other man shoveled
the dried fruit in with a big grain
shovel. The berries were shipped
to manufacturers dealing in wines,
cordials and medicines.
On the second floor of the store
at Fairfield were collected many
kinds of roots and herbs, with the
press for baling roots and barks.
Late on summer afternoons, the
young clerks at the frontier store
would groan to see a line of men
and women trudging down the road
with great dusty bundles of herbs
done up in billowing sheets. There
were Balm of Gilead buds, peach
stones, catnip, "pennyrile.” and
slippery "el-lum." There were
large quantities of sassafras and
cotton root bark; and there was
sweet birch, long known in the
mountains as mahogany. All these
natural medicinal agents, the
herbs with which the fields and
forests had been provided by
( Continued from page 19)
“Zadoc Smith returned with
goods, being gone 26 days, an
unusually long trip.”
8
