Johnston County Revisited
By K. Todd Johnson and Windy Thompson
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About this ebook
K. Todd Johnson
Authors K. Todd Johnson of Smithfield and Windy Thompson of Raleigh are both lovers of local history and photography. Johnson is executive director of the Johnston County Heritage Center. Thompson, retired from GlaxoSmithKline, is a volunteer in the heritage center's photograph archives. Images for this title were collected from the heritage center and the community.
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Johnston County Revisited - K. Todd Johnson
Thompson
INTRODUCTION
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this little volume of pre-1970 photographs should amount to several dissertations. The title of one tome might be, How Johnston County Has Changed in the Last Half Century.
In the State magazine on September 8, 1956, Bill Sharpe described the typical Johnstonian of the 1950s: He is mostly rural and either farming or connected with related enterprise. He is likely plebeian but does not lack for landed aristocracy; slow to embrace change, yet proud of his progress; and a habitual joiner of movements for betterment. He is inward-looking, which is to say provincial. He loves to attend meetings and travel, visit, and fish. Politics is a serious matter and often revolves around the schools. He is religious—his rural and small-town churches are numerous and flourishing.
Farming is still important, but it no longer employs the majority of the population. In the 1950s, a total of 56 percent of the people worked in farming; today, fewer than 1,000 persons (out of a population of about 178,000) are employed in agricultural pursuits, and the majority of the workforce drives to jobs outside the county. A provincial mind-set persists to some extent, but there are so many newcomers and natives who left and returned in retirement that such a mentality is becoming negligible. Sharpe’s comment about the integral ties between politics and education was close to the mark. For almost a century, tremendous sums have flowed from county coffers into public schools each year, and debate over how these funds are spent continues. In the area of religion, there is a marked decline—some 65 percent of the population claim no church affiliation.
The county’s long-standing racial divide is evident in these pages, especially in schools and churches. Until the Jim Crow caste system was challenged in the 1950s, it was understood that white and black children would attend separate schools and participate in separate public events. Much to county school superintendent H.B. Marrow’s credit, however, Johnston did not have the huge disparity between white and black school facilities found in many other Southern locales. In the 1920s, Marrow led the way in closing over 100 one- and two-room schools and oversaw construction of modern brick buildings in towns and rural communities alike. Black schools received special funding and challenge grants from Northern philanthropists, but county taxpayers covered the lion’s share of capital expenditures for both races. Under the leadership of Marrow’s successor, the venerable Evander S. Simpson, another consolidation movement in the late 1960s made it possible for schools to be fully integrated and the county to qualify for a state-supported technical college.
Smithfield Herald editor-publisher James M. Beaty opposed consolidation 100 years ago, insisting that removing a school from a rural community was tantamount to taking its soul. Every community should have a church and a school, he felt, and, as Sharpe pointed out, he preferred that the church be Baptist.
The success of this denomination is often attributed to Beaty’s tireless work. Although Johnston was one of the last North Carolina counties to have a county farm agent (1914), many local farmers already knew about crop rotation, diversification, purebred livestock, and other scientific farming practices because Beaty had been educating them on improved agricultural methods through the columns of the Smithfield Herald since the 1880s.
We hope you enjoy meeting the towering figures, the colorful individuals, and all the regular, everyday folk (many of them nameless) whose faces grace the pages of this Johnston County photo album.
—Todd Johnson
Around 1920, these farmers and merchants gathered in front of Smithfield’s Banner Tobacco Warehouse on Johnston Street (behind present Howell Theater) with a display of grain reapers from Johnston Harvester Company in Batavia, New York. (Courtesy of the Johnston County Heritage Center.)
One
RURAL LIFE
Linda Edwards (left) and Sylvia Royall (right) of the Brogden community of Boon Hill Township are captured on camera doing their part to help with the cotton harvest around 1942. (Courtesy of Sylvia Royall Pearce.)
Charles Stevens Powell, later known as Sheriff Powell, was only 18 when he enlisted in the 24th North Carolina Infantry Regiment in 1861. He served with General Lee in Virginia and West Virginia and later helped defend Wilmington, the lifeline of the Confederacy. He fought at Bentonville in 1865, and during a brief stay in