Notes on the Cultural History of the Rocky River

 

-Written and arranged for the 1992 Rocky River Festival by Lisa Howell, festival originator, and derived from notes and information given to her by Cathy Sutton, a local historian.  This information is being updated and posted along with the Rocky River 2001 program information.

 

Human beings have been living around the Rocky River for about 12,000 years.  Spearpoints have been found nearby on the Deep River dated at 4,000 B.C.  The Indians here were a "Siouxan-type" Indian (there were the Plains Sioux and the Eastern Woodland Sioux).  They were migratory, following the big game herds as the herds moved from feeding station to feeding station back and forth in the coastal plain and piedmont.  These herds of deer, elk and woods bison were massive, and the migrations were big events.

 

The Indians also used these big game trails for their transportation corridors.  Where the herds forded streams, so did the Indians often cross there, too.  Later on, when the European settlers arrived, they widened these same woodland paths for their wagon trails.  When they came to a river, they moved the rocks around the river to support wagon crossings.  Still later on, some of these trails became paved roads with bridges.  So many of today's modern highways follow the same migratory paths of the bison and the elk.

 

The Indians of this area did not live in teepees. (Teepees were used by Plains Indians during the brief and glorious period when the Indians used European horses and could carry their nomadic teepee structures by horse.)  Indians in our region made shelters out of tree saplings and bark.

 

The Indians here, lived as hunter-gatherers; later, they learned agricultural techniques and grew corn, beans, peas, and squash.  They ate Jerusalem artichokes, cattails, fruits (mulberries, plums, dewberries, persimmons, etc.), groundnuts, potatoes, nuts, tubers, corms, and shoots. Deer made up around 90% of their source of meat, provided clothing, tools and implements, and played a large part in their spiritual experience of their world. They gathered acorns, hickories, berries (such as blackberry, elderberry, and gooseberry), and wild greens. [from the Haw River Festival 1992 Handy Guide]  And don't forget muscadines!

 

The Indians fashioned their tools and clothing and shelter out of what was available around them.  Rock, animal bones, hides, water, earth, fire, air, clay, and plants gave them the raw materials to make the objects they needed.  How their jaws must have dropped when the Europeans introduced them to metal!  We can imagine how much the Indians treasured the metal knife.  And yet Indians thrived for thousands of years here without the use of metal.

 

The virgin forests of yesteryear were something else!  Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could see what the early peoples saw here on the Rocky, to be dwarfed by the continuous and towering oak-hickory forests and pine forests?  And not only were there bison and elk, but also timber wolf, cougar, black and spotted jaguar and bear.

 

Occasionally bears still migrate undetected between the swamps of Eastern North Carolina and the mountains by following the lush, green, narrow, ribbony corridors provided by woodsy streams and rivers, just out of sight of the farmers' adjacent fields.  Bears have been spotted infrequently on the Rocky and in the Piedmont area in recent  years.

 

The first European settlers to this area were Highland Scots who came up the Cape Fear River and settled near what is now Fayetteville in 1729.  Surveyors came through in 1747.  The Quakers came here around 1750.  The oldest established church in the Rocky River basin was located near the headwaters, near what is now Liberty, but just over the county line in Chatham County.  It was the Rocky River Friends Church, established in 1754.  Earliest Lord Granville Proprietary land grants of deeds around the Rocky are dated 1755.

Napton Quaker Church established 1751 on the headwaters of Tick Creek. Oakley Quaker Church established three miles east of Ore Hill in 1751. Rocky River Friends established on the headwaters of the Rocky River in 1754. Tick Creek Baptist Church established a few miles east of Ore Hill before 1769. Rocky River Methodist Church established on the south part of the Rocky River on July 22, 1780 and Bear Creek Baptist established on Bear Creek in 1787. 

 

There is so far no evidence of any wars (or trading, for that matter) between Indians and settlers in the Rocky River basin.  Apparently when the first settlers arrived at Rocky River, the Indians had migrated somewhere else, perhaps to join up with a bigger Sioux tribe to the north.

 

Today, the Rocky River is sparcely settled, except for concentrations of people in Liberty and Siler City.  But 100 to 200 years ago, it was an entirely different story.  There were many less people back then than there are today, but the settlers who were here concentrated themselves along the river.  Water power was the big attraction.

 

Starting in the late 1700s and continuing to about 1915, water power was running the mills up and down the Rocky and its tributaries.  So far we know of the existence of 34 mills located on the Rocky and another 12 on its tributaries, for a total of 46.  Can you imagine 31 or more mill sites in the little Rocky River basin?  These were mainly grist mills (often with a stone wheel for grinding wheat and another for grinding corn), but also water-powered cotton mills and saw mills.  The mills changed hands over the decades and had different names during different periods.

 

Thriving communities grew up around these water-powered mills.  For example, where Highway 902 crosses the Rocky River, there used to be a community called Beaumont, which even had a post office in 1851.  The mill handled wheat, corn, sorghum, lumber and cotton.  Beaumont also had two community stores, a blacksmith shop, a cabinet maker, a cotton gin, a Masonic lodge and an academy that met in the Masonic lodge.  After 1914 there was no more post office and the community faded out.  Today at the Highway 902 bridge over the Rocky River, you can see an old historic farmhouse, the rock foundation of the old bridge, and a lot of woods where Beaumont once was.

 

Nowadays, wherever we see an old homesite ruin, we can know that there was a spring nearby, for the inhabitants drank not usually from the river where the surface water could be contaminated by something as small as a dead box turtle, but rather from where subterranean waters bubbled up clean and filtered straight out of the earth.

 

As for the many communities which grew up around water-powered mills on the Rocky, the advent of electrification and commercial power companies around 1910-1915 made people less dependent on being located next to the river.  Populations shifted to larger towns and many river communities disappeared.  But still today our society is no less dependent on the river.  It's just that many of us are unaware of our rivers.  Many people don't know that they get their drinking water from the Rocky or discharge their treated (and untreated!) sewage into the Rocky.  As a society our use of the river has become impersonal.  We hope that the Rocky River Festival will make this relationship more personal.  The first step is just finding out what's here.

 

Today on the Rocky we find old roadbeds in the woods, old home ford sites, old bridge sites, old mill sites, old cemeteries, old arrowheads and pottery and tools.  One of these days our homes and factories and tools will be archeological relics.  And the river will still flow on.