Carolina Coal Demon

 Death in the Dark 

The Story of the Deep River Coal Demon

Deep under the North Carolina ground is a black vein of dirty decay. The Deep River coal field is an area of Triassic rocks stretching 36 miles along the river in Chatham, Lee, and Moore Counties. In the age of dinosaurs there was a vast swamp along an ancient river. As swamps tend to do, decaying plant matter formed layers of peat in the humid dense environment. Over huge amounts of time shifts in plates and other events changed the landscape and large amounts of sediment flowed down and gathered in the area. The pressure of the massive layers of sediment created the perfect situation to turn the peat into coal. For 200 years people have attempted to dig this coal out of the ground. Deep River is NC’s only commercial coal bed. 

The coal industry has always been extremely dangerous and historically, many tragedies have been associated with mines. Over time, the abundance of illness, death, and mishap creates a need for explanation in the human mind. As we often do, people created legends to place blame somewhere that would give them the opportunity to feel like they could continue working by creating superstitious ways to protect themselves. It was a way to rationalize a terrible industrial human rights travesty without placing blame on the industrialists.

 In NC's coal mines, the scapegoat came in the form of a demon. The Deep River coal field is cursed by this disturbed demon, and many have lost their lives in his clutches. 

The demon has guarded his coal through each attempt to plunder it. No one has been profitable off of the mine due to the disastrous explosions, cave ins, and flood outs. The Old Egypt mine and the Carolina mine should have been successful, they supplied coal to the railroad and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. But unfortunately the complex geology of the region made mining difficult. There was ground water and there were intrusions and veins of softer minerals that caused unexpected weakness in the tunnels. The coal itself seemed to be cursed and stories came back from the battlefields of the dreaded Deep River coal that burned yellow giving away their location to the Union soldiers. Sales to the military stopped and money owed was not paid due to the loss of life. The mines closed for almost two decades. 

A company with a new plan opened the mine to great success. The mine employed upwards of 80 miners who earned what was considered a good wage, drawing miners from the north.  A few specialized men worked as blasters, places and igniting the TNT to break loose the coal. Most of the men worked as loaders. They shoveled the freed coal into carts, which were then carried away by mule.

The first disaster struck on a winter morning. At 8:30 a.m. on  December 19, 1895 an explosion ripped through the Egypt Mine. Forty-six of the sixty-seven men in the mine at the time perished.  The cause was believed to be natural gas ignited by a flame in a miners helmet.  

The company struggled to keep going but in May of 1900 another gas explosion killed twenty-two miners. It really was too much for the already limping company.  In two years, the Egypt coal mine was closed again.

The Carolina Coal Company was formed in 1921 with the intention of developing a mine across the river from the Egypt Mine. In its first year of full-scale operation it more than doubled the best of the Old Egypt Mine's output. Again things were looking up for the Deep River Coal Bed.  But once again the profits failed to materialize.  

In the spring of 1925 at seven in the morning seventy-four miners went down into the dark of the Carolina Mine.  Fifty-three of those men did not leave the mine alive.

   

The Carolina Mine closed a few years later when the mine began to flood through an air shaft.  The water was pumped, but they made no precautions against future flooding.  So it happened again and after the mine flooded again in 1930 it was closed.

During the post WWII boom era the mines were reopened as tourist attractions but the stories of tragedy attracted night time trespassers and the mines went into disrepair with miss use and were later closed completely. The coal still sits under the earth. Tempting modern fortune seekers to risk it all and tempt their fate with the Carolina coal demon.

The Fort Fisher Hermit

Robert E. Harrill

(February 2, 1893 – June 4, 1972)

The Fort Fisher Hermit

At the age of 62 Robert Harrill hitchhiked his way to the end of the earth. If you start driving east in the foothills of North Carolina and don't stop till you run out of land you might end up there too. Fort Fisher is the tip of a peninsula called Federal Point, just before you get to the islands that make up the Cape Fear. Growing up on the coast, I heard stories about the Fort Fisher Hermit my entire life. I think the very earliest I remember learning the story was the early 1980's, I was four or five. My twin sister and I were sitting on a beach blanket in the back of our family's Carolina blue WWII Jeep.

We were holding on as we bounced along the east beach on Bald Head Island. We often went out to 'the point' where the east facing and south facing beaches come together and form the cape. This was the first trip I can recall when we headed north up the beach past Middle Island and into the 12,000 acre preserve. We went all the way to the New Inlet, which by then was not so much an inlet as a flat where the ocean reached across the sand at high tide and spilled into the marshy bay behind it. It was high tide by the time we had our picnic lunch and so going the rest of the way up the beach to Fort Fisher was not an option. Story telling was. Dad told the tale of an old hermit who had lived just up the beach from where we were. People from all over drove out on the beach from Fort Fisher to sit with him, hoping to gain wisdom from his lifestyle. The ride up the beach seemed endless and there was nothing out there but sand dunes, marsh, wind stunted junipers, and palm trees. I imagined the hermit, as a man on a deserted isle.

That is probably how popular culture has imagined him as well. The truth is, he was a troubled homeless man who opted out of the pressures of modern American society.  Harrill was raised in an abusive home, they were poor, with no electricity or indoor plumbing. He spent a lot of his childhood playing in the woods to escape the traumatic home life. In 1913 he got married and the couple had five children. It wasn't a happy home. The eldest son tragically took his own life and Harrill's mental health deteriorated. He was unable to hold a job and support his family. His marriage was failing. His wife knew he would no longer be a caregiver for their family. During the Great Depression the marriage ended and Harrill was institutionalized. In 1955 he took his fateful hitchhike ride.

Life in and out of mental facilities, jail, and, halfway houses was terrible and Harrill decided it was only making his condition worse. Life would be better by the beach. Several hundred miles later he saw the ocean. He walked from Carolina Beach down to the Confederate Fort where he camped for a while in a tent. He was considered a community nuisance, as he was collecting things off the beach and living on land he did not own. He was charged with vagrancy and trespassing but upon release went right back to life by the beach. He met another hermit who lived in the area. Empie Hewett, had lived most of his life in the marshland around Fort Fisher and taught Harrill many necessary life skills. Harrill adapted to his life by the beach with much more success than he had life in the 'real world'. He moved into a concrete bunker that had been built during WWII. He furnished it with driftwood and seashells and anything else that washed up on the nearby beach. He didn't suffer from lack of food. He planted veggies and gathered berries and nuts. He ate an abundance of seafood, crabs, shellfish, flounder, and all sorts of surf fish. He made a hat from palm frons and wore nothing but it and a pair of shorts most of the year. Because Fort Fisher is home to a military recreational facility, people came from all over the country.

They spread the word of the philosophical beach bum far and wide. Eventually, Harrill became one of the most popular tourist destinations on the coast. Beatniks, hippies, and square but curious suburbanites made pilgrimage to his sandy home. Locals partied with him around the bon fire each night. He was rarely alone. People left money in an old cast iron pan outside his home. They also brought him supplies, warm clothes in winter, and booze. Stray dogs had a way of finding him and settling down. Life by the beach was better.

In 1972 a group of college age boys went down to visit the hermit and found his body. The crime scene photographs tell a different story than the police official report. Hindsight is 20/20, but there was an obvious cover up. His death was ruled natural and his family was notified that he died of a heart attack, only learning the truth sometime in the next decade. His body had been found battered and covered in marsh mud and sand, dragged from the marsh up into his bunker, tossed on a pile of trash and then closed in with some boards. The truth shocked the community. Demands for an investigation led to release of the crime scene images and public interest reignited. Books have been written, movies, documentaries, and plays have all been produced. Fort Fisher State park and recreational area has added a well maintained trail out to the bunker, which now has a plaque, commemorating the famous man that lived there for 17 years.

Tourists from all over can still visit his home and his gravesite, where people continue to leave coins in a cast iron pan. He is buried in the historic Federal Point Cemetery, in the Dow Road Woods, just north of Fort Fisher. (Click HERE to read about the cemetery and what's hiding in those woods.)  Watch the movie below for a great look at the life and death of the Hermit of Fort Fisher. Warning: Movie contains crime scene photos, including his body.

The Truth about the Carolina Shag

The Carolina Shag

A story about the end of segregation.

The geographic origins of the Carolina Shag are obvious by it's name, but it's history is more of a mystery to most people.

You may not even know what the Carolina Shag is if you're not from the east coast. Perhaps you can think of pop culture references to the dance. In 1997 the country music band Alabama had a hit song called, "Dancin', Shaggin' on the Boulevard". The song, written by Randy Owen, Teddy Gentry and Greg Fowler, peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart. It was about the band's early days playing beach music in Myrtle Beach, SC at bars on Ocean Boulevard. 

You might think of the dances in the musical "Hairspray". This campy musical is actually a good hint to the truthful history of the Shag. The musical is set in 1962, following a "pleasantly plump" teenage girl named Tracy Turnblad. She is pursuing stardom as a dancer on a local TV dance show. The tension in the plot is due to her anti segregation views. She danced at places that were for nonwhite people and rallied against racial segregation, because the dance moves that made her popular had come from people of color she'd been dancing with.

The Shag originates in the Jim Crow segregated south. Historians say the term shag was coined at Carolina Beach, NC. It wasn't always called that. The dance was popular from Wilmington, NC down to Georgetown, SC. White people doing swing dances like the jitterbug started calling a dance they were doing the Carolina Jitterbug. The name they had been using before that paid homage to its true origins; the Little Apple was the white version of a dance called the Big Apple. Called little because white dancers performed a less flamboyant version of the dance. The Big Apple got its name from a SC club for people of color in the 1930's where the dance originated. Fictional Tracy Turnblad wasn't the only white person "jumping the Jim Crow rope" and going to the segregated clubs.

Dancers on the coast popularized the Shag just as segregation was coming to an end. Beach music, which was heavily influenced by the blues, became popular on commercial radio as baby boomer teenagers wanted something they could swing dance to. Beach music bands of all races were played on the radio and allowed to perform for mixed audiences. The popularity of beach music was pivotal in a wider acceptance of music from musicians of color. The musicians who'd developed their beach music in the segregated clubs also played Rhythm and Blues. White musicians began covering the R&B songs from musicians of color. This, as we all know, led to the invention of Rock and Roll. Today 'cultural appropriation' is a hot button topic but it's nothing new. Eminem rapped about it in the 2002 song  'Without Me.'  

"Though I'm not the first king of controversy, I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley, to do black music so selfishly, and use it to get myself wealthy."

If you listen to popular music today you can't escape the influence of the Carolina Shag. From hip hop to pop country, dance music still breaks down racial barriers. That next dance craze the kids are into might even spur a revolution, you never know.

Are They Extraterrestrial Impact Zones, Ancient Ocean Currents, or Massive Prehistoric Alligator Holes?

Examining the Mysterious Carolina Bays

Fact or Fiction? Uncovering the origin stories of these geological anomalies.

Though they may go by different names up north, Carolina Bays dot the map in the east from New York to north Florida. They are shallow elliptical depressions in the earth, often wetlands, marshes, swamps, or lakes, named for the Bay trees that are found along their rims. North Carolina has many of these depressions and the largest forms the oldest, and biggest fresh water lake in the state, Lake Waccamaw. The origin of the Carolina Bays has long been a mystery.

Dinosaur Era Fish Spawning?

One hundred million years ago there was an ocean covering the coastal plain of the Carolinas. The Late Cretaceous period was a time of a tremendous amount of biodiversity. There were still dinosaurs, but the time of mammals had arrived. The ocean had abundant life too. Schools of fish on the scale of whales could move ocean currents with their passing. In the relatively shallow ocean above the coastal plain of the land mass that would become North America these massive schools of huge fish would swim together and procreate in a swirling sediment disturbing frenzy, circling around until they'd formed a large pond in the sandy ocean floor, where they could safely spawn. As sea levels changed the spawning grounds became inaccessible. The water receded leaving shallow, elliptical depressions behind. 

Safe Harbor for Ancient Ancestors of the Alligator? 

The sea level changes happened over time as plate tectonics gradually moved the land mass westward. Ocean life had time to adapt to these environmental changes, what happened next they did not have time to adapt to. Sixty-six million years ago, the end of the Late Cretaceous, was a terrifying time to be on earth. A massive disastrous event changed the oceans and atmosphere. Asteroid impact or volcano or both, the earth moved, tons of soot, ash, and sediment clouded the air and acidified the water. The temperature rose as the sun's heat could not escape through the cloud layer. Death and decay were everywhere. The low lying areas where there was still fresh water became vital to the life that was left. 75% of life on earth died and rotted. The only large four legged creatures to survive were ancient sea turtles and crocodillians, who kept their ectothermic bodies cool in the mud. The only dinosaurs to survive were the avian dinosaurs who could fly in search of food or water. 

Life in the Paleocene, sixty-five million years ago, was tough, but there was life. Temperatures regulated and acidity levels began to clear. Plants and animals adapted and evolved in new ways. The massive crocodillian ancestors of our american alligators survived the hard times down in the mud and they developed a unique technique to increase their availability of fresh water. They wallowed. Not just any rolling around in the mud, strategic circling to push the mud out around them, creating a small pool. These massive creatures would wallow out a space in the mud until they had their own pond. During the hundreds of years of their lives they would continue to push mud around in the bottom of their hole. Massive amounts of time pass. As the Paleocene came to an end another time of upheaval as the plate moved in a much faster way than it had before and volcanic events again raised the carbon levels in the atmosphere and raised the temperatures. Animals had to adapt again and many new species developed in the warm jungles of the Paleocene-Eocene, including primates. The earth's land was covered in plant life, the ocean had vast reefs and forests of algae. 

 More huge amounts of time passed. The abundance of plant life worked to clean the atmosphere. During the Eocene the levels of carbon in the atmosphere cleared. The earth eventually began to cool again and ice formed at the poles. Sea levels dropped and land bridges allowed the new species to travel. The first ancestors of humans evolved. Things were looking up. The cold and the low sea wasn't for everyone and there were extinctions, just not on the scale of some of the previous catastrophes. During the Oligocene the tropical forests receded to the equatorial regions and grasslands spread around the globe where there was not ice. The earth went through a series of warming and cooling. As plate shifts continued, volcanic events would increase carbon levels and temperatures would increase, as temperatures increased the plant life increased, cleaning the air and allowing for cooler temperatures. In an extended absence of any carbon increasing events, the earth cooled enough to create a series of ice ages. 

Relict Thermokarst Lakes (Glacier puddles)

Two million years ago the earth had cooled to the point of freezing. The Last Ice Age propelled a mass migration. Glaciers covered most of the northern land mass. The climate changes again increased the rate of evolution in some animal classes. Many mammals adapted with thick fur and some form of hibernation during the coldest months. The massive glacial ice sheet spread further from the poles, covering a great deal of the earth in ice. Then tens of thousands of years ago, the ice spread suddenly stopped. 

The climate began to warm again. Animals that had adapted to the cold moved further and further north, some became extinct. Equatorial animals began to spread into newly warmer regions. 

The end of the last Ice Age ushered in the Holocene, which is the geological time we are still currently experiencing.

As the ice melted left over glaciers created lakes. Depositing whatever sediment had frozen in the initial ice or had been carried along with glacial movement. Shallow elliptical ponds and lakes could be glacial remnants.  

Extraterrestrial Impact Zones

The People of the Falling Star

Ten thousand years ago people settled into a routine in the lush region that is now southeastern North Carolina. The Ice Age was over and food was no longer scarce. The people didn't have to follow herds of large animals. Instead they hunted smaller animals, gathered fruits and nuts in season, and fished on the coast. The rivers were their routes from the lush interior to the coast and this is often where they settled. The ancestors of the Waccamaw people were building a settlement in the interior along a river amongst a forest as old as time. They learned how to grow their own food. The soil in the forest was rich but there was not enough sun and too many trees and the people began to cultivate the land, taking down the trees and planting crops. They believed they had created a beautiful garden. One night as they slept in their village next to their garden, the sky lit up with a crack louder than any thunder they'd ever heard. A bright streak ran across the sky and then... Boom! Everything went silent. Then muffled screams and moans, and then men shouting, and the sound of rubble moving. Flicker of flames and choking smoke. Through the night they worked to uncover those buried and trapped and heal the hurt. At first light the scope of things came into better focus. There was dirt everywhere. Their garden, meant to feed the whole village was gone. Nothing was left but a smoldering hole. It began to rain. Mud covered everything. Water began to fill the hole. The women and children huddled together under the shelter of the trees at the edge of the village as the men worked in the rain and mud. A silver haired old woman with no teeth and a face of wrinkles came out of the woods. She had animal skins to cover the children, and a snack of blackberries and walnuts. She told them she had seen the whole thing from her spot up river. "A star fell from the sky and landed right in the middle of that enormous garden." She turned to the children and shook a crooked old finger, "you know this is because, the people forgot to be thankful. They were overlooking the gifts and abundance and destroying what is free to create a life of labor for themselves. The Creator was not happy." It would not be the last time the natural resources were abused by humans.

Who cares how it got here, lets make money!

In the mid 1600's the English King gave the Waccamaw land to a Lord as part of a large land grant, he then divided it among his heirs and others who wanted to colonize their piece of the ‘new world’. As the European invaders began settlement, the Waccamaw people retreated further into the swamps. The story historians tell involves the son of a cattle farmer from the Virginia colony who settled his grant in the 1700's and began buying up the area after the revolution. His family continued to be large landholders in the area for several generations. They were uninterested in how the lake had formed, only motivated by it's usefulness to their mercantile aspirations. For two hundred years the land was used for lumber and turpentine production. The lumber yards produced shingles from the giant cypress trees of the swamp surrounding the lake. The industry brought the railroad to the area. A depot was built in 1900. In 1926 a dam was built to prevent the lake water levels from dropping during dry weather. It was ceremoniously declared a State lake in 1929, as government interest in preserving natural resources began to increase. A YMCA boys camp was created on the banks of the lake.

A bird's eye view

With airplanes came areal photography and a renewed interest in the origin of the Carolina Bays. The extraterrestrial impact hypothesis came back with a vengeance. Truthfully the appearance from above does lend itself to this explanation. Scientists even had areal surveys commissioned, taking measurements of the angles of each ellipse. 

The Younger Dryas period is sometimes explained by the impact of material from outer space. The Carolina Bays were used as evidence of this most recent massive climate altering impact.  

The Carolina Bays and other NC wetland areas began receiving State and federal protection in the 1970's. Lake Waccamaw became a State Park. For several decades the catastrophic comet creation story was considered scientific fact.

Technology and testing today

As technology advanced, satellite imaging, core sampling, particle analysis, and radiocarbon dating disproved the theory of extraterrestrial impact. The Bays are shallow and the depression is in the superficial sandy surface, the bedrock underlying the Bays remains undisturbed.  Lake Waccamaw is located in the larger geological region known as the Pee Dee Formation, named after the river which exposed the ground underlying the area. The Pee Dee Formation is a marine deposit from the Late Cretaceous, (when the ocean covered the area). Glauconitic sand and fossiliferous limestone make up the bedrock. That means there is a dark greenish sand and  limestone rocks that contain fossils from a hundred million years ago covered in a layer of newer sediment.  Lake Waccamaw is underlain by layers containing fossils of the lower Pliocene Goose Creek Limestone and the lower Pleistocene Waccamaw Formation. The sediment layer and the underlying layer have been radiocarbon dated.  The lake is estimated to be 15,000 to 30,000 years old. In 2008 a whale fossil was found in the lake believed to be one to three million years old. All this data collection has reignited a debate about the origin of these geological anomalies. Geologists today believe terrestrial processes and repeated modification by eolian and lacustrine processes of relict thermokarst lakes created the depressions. That's geo-jargon for earth bound processes of erosion and glacier lake sediment deposits. 

The State Park

Today they offer a handful of primitive hike-in camping sites right beside the lake in the shade of the cypress trees. No frills, clean well maintained campsites for tents. There are restrooms at the visitor center.

Did the Nazi's bomb North Carolina?

 Dow Chemical Plant Ruins

Click HERE to GO INSIDE the RUINS

Click Here to learn more about THE CAPE FEAR REGION

Warning: Government property, no trespassing, area patrolled by military police!

Location: Dow Roads Woods along the Cape Fear River on 'Pleasure Island' 

 
Original Purpose: In 1934 Dow Chemical began extracting bromine from salt water.

There's tales of spirits and spooks and creepy creatures all through the Cape Fear region, but the woods on the west side of Pleasure Island seem to have something extra that makes them magic.

The Cemetery

On Dow Road somewhere between Carolina Beach and Kure Beach 'Alice' and her friend parked in a sandy parking area with a wooden sign for Federal Point Methodist Church Cemetery. No cemetery was visible from the road, all they could see was a mossy, sandy path into the dark woods. There was a large yellow barrier blocking any vehicle traffic, which anyone wanting to mourn at the cemetery would need to go over, under, or around. The temperature seemed cooler as soon as they began walking the path. The air smelled of earth. Something ran off through the woods as they approached. It was big. They decided it was a dear.  The first signs of the cemetery became visible, the girls see a cracked concrete table sitting crooked in the sand and a rusted and damaged chain link fence. They slowed and became skeptical. They were looking for a historic site. They saw newer tombstones adorned with shabby fake flowers and tattered miniature flags. It was not well taken care of but it didn't seem historic. Disappointment was adding to the gloom of the day. It began to sprinkle and the girls were just about to go back to there car when they saw it. Just to the back of the modern cemetery was a historic plaque, they ran towards it. Alice tripped over an exposed root but landed in the sand with some amount of laughter. They joked about horror movie cliches. 

The girls started googling on their phones. The Newton Home site and Graveyard at Federal Point is the oldest archaeological home site of Europeans on North Carolina's islands. Artifacts dating from the 1700's and 1800's have been found there. The graveyard contains markers with well known local names of early settling families. Many tombstones are missing or destroyed. The graveyard is surrounded by woods. The oral history of the area says there was a grave site for people of color as well, today it remains unmarked. 

There is a doghouse sized replica of one of the structures that burned in a fire that destroyed buildings and took lives in the early settlement.

Beside the chain link fence between the modern cemetery an the historic one are two graves decorated in seashells and coins and other strange collected things. They are paupers' graves. Donated to those who had no means for a burial. One was a vagabond who ended up in the area and was well loved by the community and the other was a legend, The Fort Fisher Hermit, a man who'd lived on the island in the middle of the 1900's alone as a hermit. People would pilgrimage to meet with him and hear his philosophical take on the perils of the modern world. (Click HERE for a post on the Hermit) From the back of the old grave yard there is a sandy path going off into the woods. Knowing the river was nearby, the girls decided to follow the path hoping it would lead to the water. It was still sprinkling every now and then but it was warm and not to much of a bother. The moisture increased the smell of earth in the air.

 

The River

The girls saw the sunlight before they saw the water. It was shining still to the west. They came to a clearing and saw that they were on a bluff above the river bank. It was about four or five feet and sandy so they jumped down the embankment. The sun was shining off the river. There was a little beach there and they walked along it taking in the sun and beautiful scenery. No other humans anywhere to be seen. 

It was so beautiful they got a little carried away and walked a long ways down the beach. Taking pictures of the river and the trees along its shore. They walked along for sometime until they came to a place where they could not go any further. There was an old structure, rusted metal and wooded pilings. It was a retaining wall of some kind. Alice climbed atop and announced that there was water, black and deep on the other side. It was not cross able. There was smoke on the horizon across the water. The girls used Google maps to see what was there. Sunny Point Military Terminal. They joked about the men in black. They Googled some more. Dow Chemical. They had heard of the ruins in the woods and the legend of how they came to be. They scurried up the ridge to see if they could see anything else. Nothing but dark woods, the smell of earth, and rustling of some small animal in the underbrush. 

More Google.

 

Into the Woods

They found a picture of the old site. Dow had chosen it because a nearby Carolina Bay made a perfect natural holding reservoir and there was already a trench that had been dug during the Civil War as part of the defenses along the Cape Fear. Using the picture of the old site they decided they'd need to venture into the woods a bit and try to find a way around or over the trench. The woods were dark and dense. The smell again was strong. Earth. Enough smell of earth in the air to almost choke a person. Alice swore she saw a dog. Her friend wondered if it was a coyote. They went into the woods anyway. They were on an adventure and they were determined.

They peered out into the forest, looking for any signs of structures or creatures like the big cats they'd heard prowled these woods. Reassuring each other that it was just legend. Something caught Alice's eye. She tried to use her phone's camera to see what it was without going closer. The picture didn't really help. They decided to cautiously approach. As they got closer they could smell the odor of death. It was a bird. A large bird. To their surprise it was a hawk. It was hanging from an odd low limb of a tree. It had the claws of one foot deep into the wood. Nothing about its position in the woods looked natural. This beautiful bird hanging there to decay and be eaten. Needless to say the creep factor was rising. The rain started back. 

                

The girls were not going to give up. They went deeper into the woods following along the trench. 

That's when Alice screamed. A pile of bones were in the path and off to the side was a skull!

            

The bones were real but the skull, thankfully was a cheap plastic Halloween decoration. It wasn't even close to Halloween. The girls had theories about what they had come across. Maybe it was a ritual of some kind. Witchcraft. Maybe it was just the killing field of a predator animal and the skull was dragged there by mistake. Whatever it was they had finally found the way across the trench just past the bones. It was like a land bridge across the trench. Once across the girls saw thick woods and something colorful. It was their first glance at the graffiti that adorns the ruins. 

The Dow Chemical Plant Ruins

The ruins have long been a popular spot for mountain bikers and graffiti artists and any other youngster looking for a slightly illegal way to pass the time. The remnants of the buildings are brick and concrete. There are concrete footings and tunnels and a towering pile of brick rubble. 

The girls walked through the tunnels. It was surprisingly colorful. Graffiti covers everything and some mischievous people have created a fairy land with pink and green fiberglass and plastic wands over a bed of bricks, broken and splattered with red paint. The wall above scrawled with a plea to jump in, lay down and get comfy. It started raining harder and the girls sat in one of the tunnels listening to the silence and the rain. 

More time to Google. What exactly did they make here? Bromine, used for photography and chemical warfare!? What happened to this place? Officially: It was decommissioned in 1946 when a plant opened in Texas. But ask a local and you might hear the legend about what happened there during WWII. There is very little information about the chemical plant during the war years and the decommissioning and destruction of the structure isn't well documented. A media black out surrounding certain events led to the wide spread belief that there had been a cover up. Locals say that at the end of the war the Nazi's desperate to stop production of chemical agents drove a submarine up the Cape Fear to the site of the chemical plant and fired on the structure, damaging it beyond repair. The area became a part of the Sunny Point Military Terminal's buffer zone after the war. An area protected and patrolled by the military to insure security and safety surrounding the nations largest marine terminal for munitions. Any person wanting to see the ruins for themselves does so at some risk. There are wild animals of course, and there could be some sketchy people, as well as the military police on atv's and carrying guns. There are also bugs. Lots of bugs. Mosquitoes are everywhere because the ruins have a lot of standing water in low spots. People have come out of these woods covered in hundreds of baby ticks, like specks of dirt crawling up their legs. In the summer there are spiders that build giant webs across the trail at face height, they can be as large as a human hand. This is not a place for the weak or easily frightened. 

Go with the Flow

Following North Carolina's Groundwater 

From the Mountains to the Coast

(Stopping in my back yard to check out my town and the local campground.)

Boone, NC

    In North Carolina the flow of groundwater is kind of complicated. Water moves from areas in the mountains, like the Appalachian temperate rain forest, through a layer of weathered rock and soil, called the regolith, into cracks in the crystalline bedrock to the aquifer underneath. The water flows through the fractures and emerges as springs and streams in the lower elevations.

NC rivers 1830

 The creeks and rivers flow through the Piedmont Plateau picking up sediment, eventually crossing into the Coastal Plane at what is called the fall line, where the hard bedrock of the Piedmont shifts to the softer coastal formation and the rivers have rapids and waterfalls.The rivers pick up more sediment as they travel through the permeable sand hills and swamps, eventually depositing this sediment to help form NC’s distinct coast line. Groundwater in the Coastal region is absorbed from creeks, rivers, and swamps. The interaction with the ocean has created a complex freshwater-saltwater transition within the coastal aquifers.

    I’ve written about the Cape Fear region a couple of times. And I have mentioned how the Cape Fear River has its beginnings far from the coast. In fact, the Cape Fear is a great example of how NC’s watersheds work. The Cape Fear river begins in Haywood, close to the Chatham and Lee county line where the Deep River meets the Haw just south of its exit from Jordan Lake. These are rivers that begin with springs in the Piedmont. The area where these rivers begin has head springs which feed many rivers. There are megacrystic features and intrusions of granite from the Paleozoic Era, what that means in plain English is that the terrain in this area has cracks or veins in the rock bed where past geological events like earthquakes, volcanoes, or other plate movement pushed large crystalline rocks and older granite up into the younger bedrock. These intrusions give groundwater a flow path both to and from the aquifer and thus many springs can be found in areas with this type of unique geology. 

    The Deep River actually has multiple head springs, the East Fork of the Deep River begins in the Sandy Ridge area near the runway of the Piedmont Triad International Airport. The West Fork begins in Kernersville near the intersection of two major highways. (Runoff mitigation has been a continuing issue at these headwaters.) The West Fork flows south to High Point where it feeds the man made Oak Hollow Lake (where I live). It exists Oak Hollow at a controlled dam and flows across the northeast side of High Point into City Lake. The East Fork flows from Sandy Ridge through northeastern High Point and then into City Lake. The two become one as they exit this lake headed southeast. The river leaves Guilford County near Jamestown where it heads through Kersey Valley into Randleman Lake Reservoir. From there the river flows south through Randolph county from Randleman northeast of Asheboro. It winds eastward to Franklinville, then at Ramseur it heads south until High Falls where the river moves west and northwest along the fall line. 

    The region where the river runs in a counter intuitive direction is significant geologically, not just because of the fall line. The Deep River coal field is an area of Triassic rocks stretching 36 miles along the river in Chatham, Lee, and Moore Counties. In the age of dinosaurs there was a vast swamp along an ancient river. As swamps tend to do, decaying plant matter formed layers of peat in the humid dense environment. Over huge amounts of time shifts in plates and other events changed the landscape and large amounts of sediment flowed down and gathered in the area where the river turns. The pressure of the massive layers of sediment created the perfect situation to turn the peat into coal. For 200 years people have attempted to dig this coal out of the ground. Deep River is NC’s only commercial coal bed. The coal industry is extremely dangerous and many tragedies are associated with mines. Over time the abundance of illness, death, and mishap creates a need for explanation in the human mind. As we often do, people created legends to place blame somewhere that would give them the opportunity to feel like they could continue working and create superstitious ways to protect themselves. It was a way to rationalize a terrible industrial human rights travesty without placing blame on the industrialists. In NC's coal mines, it came in the form of a demon. The Deep River coal field is cursed by this disturbed demon, and many have lost their lives in his clutches.

    As the river leaves the coal fields and drops onto the flatter plain to the east of the fall line, just north of Sanford. Southeast of Pittsboro, it joins the Haw River, just below the Haw's emergence from Jordan Lake.

Mermaid Point

     The area where the two rivers converge to form the Cape Fear River is called Mermaid Point. Legend says that mermaids would swim up the Cape Fear River from its mouth seeking the fresh water source. (Click HERE for more on Mermaids of the Cape Fear)

    

    Of course, Native Americans lived along the river for thousands of years. Europeans were settling in the Deep River basin from the Virginia or Pennsylvania colonies during the 1700's. The town I live in developed later with industrialization and improvements in transportation. First in the area was James Mendenhall, a Quaker like many who were moving to the area, received a land grant in 1762 in the place that is still called Jamestown. He built a gristmill and a sawmill on the river.

Mendenhall Home

His heirs built a home and by the 1800's the Jamestown Quaker’s had a thriving community. However, in 1851 the North Carolina Railroad built its tracks to the south of Jamestown instead of through it. The placement of the railroad was hotly debated at the time. It’s location would be a boom for whatever community was closest. At the railroad’s highest point it intersected NC’s Great Plank Road. This intersection was incorporated in 1859, becoming High Point. The area's location was ideal for trade because of the transportation hub. People in the area grew tobacco, cotton, and produced furniture from the vast hard wood forests of the western Piedmont and foothills.

High Point, 1913

By 1889 High Point had its first furniture factory. In the next ten years thirteen more furniture factories and a handful of textile mills turned High Point into a bustling industrial town. In 1905 NC held its first furniture exposition, the Southern Furniture Exposition Building was built in 1921. It was ten floors and 249,000 square feet. Throughout the 1920’s the furniture industry continued to grow, as did High Point. The city purchased the land that had been the original Mendenhall site along the river, and tore down all the structures.

They built a dam to create City Lake, a reservoir for drinking water as well as recreation. City Lake Park has a number of amenities; a large swimming pool with a water slide, grills, picnic tables, shelters, a merry-go-round, miniature golf, and the 340-acre lake. Of course my memories from childhood are of the miniature train that goes around for taking in scenic views of the lake. Also back then there was an old fire truck that kids could play on.

I love kitchy roadside stops and furniture city has a few. High Point chamber of commerce built the world's largest chest of drawers in 1926 to showcase the towns industries, furniture and textiles. Neighboring Thomasville, not to be out done, created the world's largest chair.  The chair has been re-titled, the largest Duncan Phyfe Chair, after the famous man who designed the chair and many others. 

    The Piedmont is home to the original Krispi Kreme Doughnut shops and though the store on main street has been rebuilt to modern standards, they have kept the vintage neon sign. 
    

    Oak Hollow Lake, High Point, NC is a relatively new man-made lake. The dam on the West Fork or West Prong of the Deep River was completed in 1971. A larger water source and recreation facility for a booming international city. High Point was becoming a global center for furniture sales and manufacturing. Of course the 1980's and 90's deregulation of global trade led to deals with countries where labor and natural resources were cheaper. Many manufacturers moved plants to other countries. This changed the economic outlook for towns like High Point. No longer booming much of High Point's growth today is centered around the University, though furniture market is still the main economic driver. 

Oak Hollow Lake happens to be my back yard. Well almost. There is a campground, a marina, a playground, and picnic areas just a short drive down the street. I had never really utilized this beautiful place until recently. Last spring I started taking the kids I babysit to the lake side playground. It is beautiful. I hope to plan a camping trip to one of their lakeside spots as our first attempt at camping with the baby. (Safely less than a mile from home.)  I will post about it for sure!