July 11, 2025 Coats Museum News
Time brings changes and depending upon one’s age, it seems to move at different speeds. There was a time when the farms in the Coats area has acres of tobacco, cotton, corn, soybeans, vegetable gardens, milk cows in pastures, mules in the stables and chickens in the yard. Today, we have mega chicken houses, fields growing grasses for livestock and most of all, houses gobbling up the space that was once used to get the farmer from one season to the next.
There was a time when our museum visitors could identify with many of our artifacts on display and would actually share with us information that we had not been aware of because of not having lived there in that period. With the passage of time, we find ourselves trying to explain information about many articles on display to our younger visitors who don’t even know that a train ran through our town and that many people worked at the Erwin mills after giving up farming.
Over fifty members of the Carl Whittington family visited the Coats Museum recently and there were many different generations from that family who fit into those changes of time. One could see members pointing to different items for different reasons and making comments about each. If I am not mistaken, I don’t think any of those siblings stayed on the family farm to make a living. They left the farm for higher education and better opportunities as likely many of your families did also.
Denise, Delano Whittington’s daughter, donated three Pine Burr yearbooks to our Research Library, and they show changes in time at Campbell University in the dress codes, organizations, opportunity options, and campus life of the students.
H.L, while listening to “others” speak of better times in the past, would make the statement-“We have never had it so good.” Were those “others” referring to the days when our grandparents, parents and neighbors worked from sunup to sundown many months of the year to simply survive? Each crop demanded a different time frame and a different amount of physical labor. Work is work but the kind of work is what changes. I was up at four and five o’clock in the morning during the summer months on our family farm until I left home for college and marriage.
My daughter Lenee goes with me to Duke each month for my cancer immunotherapy. Usually the regiment begins before seven in the morning and ends late in the day so we usually stay in Durham because of the unpredictable traffic from here to there. We find it less stressful than being late for the various stations of the treatment.
It is during these stays at the hotel that I see the glow from her laptop between 4:30 and 5 o’clock in the morning and sometimes late into the night. Her global office is in Australia and she is corresponding to clients worldwide covering all time zones. If it had been many years ago, the young farm boys and girls would have been up at those times to get tobacco from the barns, but today they are performing a different task because of the changes that time brings.
One event that has been around for a long time is the Farmers Day in Coats. Daily Record coverage of the Oct. 13-14th event was that lots of pigs were cooked under the leadership of C.J. Johnson and Teddy Byrd. First Place went to pig cooker Greg Stevens representing the Coats Lions Club; second place went to Jimmy Barrock representing CPL, third place went to Carlie Wise cooking for the Party Beverage and fourth place went to Mike Ennis cooking for Ron’s Barn.
The annual Farmers Day Parade had over one hundred units and was headed up by Grand Marshal Bobby Wayne Pope, the 1995 Farmer of the Year.
The year 1995 was a big one for the Coats Museum. Lots of dignitaries were there for the dedication of an old two room classroom school conversion into a heritage museum. Carsie Denning and his committee had worked tirelessly to have everything in place. Former State Sen. Elaine Marshall, State Rep. Willis Brown and Don Davis, State Sen. Dan Page, U.S. Cong. David Funderburk, Sheriff Larry Knott, Mayor Frances Avery and Town Commissioners Gale Spears, Don Ennis, Darrell Smith, Max Beasley and Bob Hedrick were in attendance. HCBOC Chairman H.L. Sorrell, Jr. was the keynote speaker at the dedication. He pointed out that it was because of groups like the Coats Museum Committee and its supporters that others will see the preservation of history when they tour the museum while also bringing dollars into the local restaurants, gas stations and other businesses that depend upon traffic flow through their doors to stay in business.
Mayor Frances Avery shared that her father had once owned the old building; Committeeman Marvin Johnson shared some humorous times he had in the old schoolhouse as a child. Who were those committee folks who worked hard to put the Coats Museum on the map? Hazel Barnes, Godfrey and Ann Beasley, Teddy Byrd, Sherrill Coats, Thessie Daniel, Carsie and Mary Denning, James Grimes, Gerry Honeycutt, Marvin and Lib Johnson, Donnie Matthews, Rupert and Christine Parrish, M.O. Phillips, Gail and Hilda Pope, Evelyn Roberts, Ophelia Roberts, Darrell Smith, John Stephenson, Eugene Stewart, Julia Stewart, Jeff Turlington, and Tommy Williford were named.
A highlight of the dedication weekend was the showing of the 1939 film entitled “The Way Coats Was in 1939” and was originally shown on the wall of the old Roycroft Drug store on Main Street because there was no theater in Coats in 1939.
Thank you goes to Sandy Kay Howard for memorializing Norfleet Gardner and to my family for remembering Tommy Ennis, a close friend of my church family.
Time brings changes and depending upon one’s age, it seems to move at different speeds. There was a time when the farms in the Coats area has acres of tobacco, cotton, corn, soybeans, vegetable gardens, milk cows in pastures, mules in the stables and chickens in the yard. Today, we have mega chicken houses, fields growing grasses for livestock and most of all, houses gobbling up the space that was once used to get the farmer from one season to the next.
There was a time when our museum visitors could identify with many of our artifacts on display and would actually share with us information that we had not been aware of because of not having lived there in that period. With the passage of time, we find ourselves trying to explain information about many articles on display to our younger visitors who don’t even know that a train ran through our town and that many people worked at the Erwin mills after giving up farming.
Over fifty members of the Carl Whittington family visited the Coats Museum recently and there were many different generations from that family who fit into those changes of time. One could see members pointing to different items for different reasons and making comments about each. If I am not mistaken, I don’t think any of those siblings stayed on the family farm to make a living. They left the farm for higher education and better opportunities as likely many of your families did also.
Denise, Delano Whittington’s daughter, donated three Pine Burr yearbooks to our Research Library, and they show changes in time at Campbell University in the dress codes, organizations, opportunity options, and campus life of the students.
H.L, while listening to “others” speak of better times in the past, would make the statement-“We have never had it so good.” Were those “others” referring to the days when our grandparents, parents and neighbors worked from sunup to sundown many months of the year to simply survive? Each crop demanded a different time frame and a different amount of physical labor. Work is work but the kind of work is what changes. I was up at four and five o’clock in the morning during the summer months on our family farm until I left home for college and marriage.
My daughter Lenee goes with me to Duke each month for my cancer immunotherapy. Usually the regiment begins before seven in the morning and ends late in the day so we usually stay in Durham because of the unpredictable traffic from here to there. We find it less stressful than being late for the various stations of the treatment.
It is during these stays at the hotel that I see the glow from her laptop between 4:30 and 5 o’clock in the morning and sometimes late into the night. Her global office is in Australia and she is corresponding to clients worldwide covering all time zones. If it had been many years ago, the young farm boys and girls would have been up at those times to get tobacco from the barns, but today they are performing a different task because of the changes that time brings.
One event that has been around for a long time is the Farmers Day in Coats. Daily Record coverage of the Oct. 13-14th event was that lots of pigs were cooked under the leadership of C.J. Johnson and Teddy Byrd. First Place went to pig cooker Greg Stevens representing the Coats Lions Club; second place went to Jimmy Barrock representing CPL, third place went to Carlie Wise cooking for the Party Beverage and fourth place went to Mike Ennis cooking for Ron’s Barn.
The annual Farmers Day Parade had over one hundred units and was headed up by Grand Marshal Bobby Wayne Pope, the 1995 Farmer of the Year.
The year 1995 was a big one for the Coats Museum. Lots of dignitaries were there for the dedication of an old two room classroom school conversion into a heritage museum. Carsie Denning and his committee had worked tirelessly to have everything in place. Former State Sen. Elaine Marshall, State Rep. Willis Brown and Don Davis, State Sen. Dan Page, U.S. Cong. David Funderburk, Sheriff Larry Knott, Mayor Frances Avery and Town Commissioners Gale Spears, Don Ennis, Darrell Smith, Max Beasley and Bob Hedrick were in attendance. HCBOC Chairman H.L. Sorrell, Jr. was the keynote speaker at the dedication. He pointed out that it was because of groups like the Coats Museum Committee and its supporters that others will see the preservation of history when they tour the museum while also bringing dollars into the local restaurants, gas stations and other businesses that depend upon traffic flow through their doors to stay in business.
Mayor Frances Avery shared that her father had once owned the old building; Committeeman Marvin Johnson shared some humorous times he had in the old schoolhouse as a child. Who were those committee folks who worked hard to put the Coats Museum on the map? Hazel Barnes, Godfrey and Ann Beasley, Teddy Byrd, Sherrill Coats, Thessie Daniel, Carsie and Mary Denning, James Grimes, Gerry Honeycutt, Marvin and Lib Johnson, Donnie Matthews, Rupert and Christine Parrish, M.O. Phillips, Gail and Hilda Pope, Evelyn Roberts, Ophelia Roberts, Darrell Smith, John Stephenson, Eugene Stewart, Julia Stewart, Jeff Turlington, and Tommy Williford were named.
A highlight of the dedication weekend was the showing of the 1939 film entitled “The Way Coats Was in 1939” and was originally shown on the wall of the old Roycroft Drug store on Main Street because there was no theater in Coats in 1939.
Thank you goes to Sandy Kay Howard for memorializing Norfleet Gardner and to my family for remembering Tommy Ennis, a close friend of my church family.