October 8, 2021 Coats Museum News
For twelve years, the continuous readers of the Coats Museum News have revisited the progression of events since 1740’s that led to the development of an area known today as Grove Township. The followers have been able to read about Barclaysville, Troyville, Turlington and then Coats to learn about the people, schools, businesses, and churches in those areas. The readers discovered that each of these little areas had two things in common-they were on the Raleigh- Fayetteville Stagecoach Road and each had a post office that required the folks in the surrounding areas to travel by foot, mule back, wagon or buggy to collect their mail from the post office that was located in the residence of the postmaster.
The current Coats Museum News articles are covering what happened in 1988 but for fun, let’s look in our rear view mirror fifty years before 1988 and see what was happening in 1938 in the world and in our Coats area.
The Coats locals would have read about the floods along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. They would have learned about DuPont’s patent on nylon and how dozens of products were made from it. Benny Goodman and his horn would have been the musician all generations were enjoying. A fire in New London, Texas would kill 500 children and leave the town numb with grief. The hydrogen-filled Hindenburg would blowup; George VI would be king of England; Amelia Earhart would be lost at sea, and Walt Disney would introduce the world to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
In 1938, over 8 million Americans would be jobless while Hitler had promoted himself to the military chief in Germany. Thomas Wolfe of Asheville had died and Kate Smith had blessed America in song. The L.L. Turlington Estate sold for $19,674.50- a considerable amount in 1938.
Coats School scored an A and Oakdale a B when inspected by the Chief Sanitary Officer K.W. Ballentine. A safety course was taught in the Harnett County High Schools by using the text-“Man and the Car” donated by the Chevrolet Motor, Co. to be used in all 12 of the Harnett County High Schools. One chapter contained laws regulating highway traffic in NC and in 1939, the students would get one-half unit credit if they passed the course.
Harnett County was sixth in the number of bales of cotton ginned in the state in 1937. The Coats Chapter of the FFA had built a meeting room for the boys and it took four months for the sixty boys to complete. The room was made from reworking a basement room that previously had held the vocational agricultural shop. The shop was moved to another building. Part of the money to repair the room came from the sale of the three sticks of tobacco that each student had brought to school. The students graded and sold the tobacco.
Two road petitions were heard. The one dealing with the Grove Township was the petition that the highway commissions take over and maintain a road leading from the Turlington-Sorrell Road to the Coats Benson Road at a point just west of the M.E. Ennis home place, a distance of one mile.
Approximately 75 members of the young Tar Heel Farmer’s Club and their fathers assembled for the club’s annual Father-Son Banquet. George Thomas Smith and Gerald Hayes took part in the event which shared that the boys had set shrubbery, built a tennis court and worked with practice teachers.
(I might note at this time there were likely only three buildings on the Coats Grove #3 Campus-the 1920-21 three story building with a basement and a third floor that had been converted from an auditorium to classrooms. There was the 1936 building which was two stories and had an attached auditorium that seated about 850 people. The third building likely on the campus was a wooden structure which sat on the site of what would become the first primary school classrooms in 1957 when the cafeteria was also built. Some people also referred to it as the goat house and it was later disassembled and part of it was used to construct the Agriculture Building in 1946.)
Hence, this was the type of news that was shared from 1938 as found in Volume 1 of the “Heritage of Coats, NC” (2005) on pages 116-117.
Just as businessmen W.E. Nichols, W.M. Keene, M.C. Stewart, and E.V. Barefoot made the 1938 news for being busy in their stores, the Coats IGA was in the news in 1988. The store sponsored a Beef-Shoot-Out. M.T. Strickland had set up a miniature farm to promote the event.
The CACC placed its Business Focus of the Week on the Coats Business Machines which was operated by Hugh Williams. The business sold and repaired many kinds of business equipment and office supplies. Williams was well qualified in the business area (Daily Record May 5, 1988).
The folks at the museum may not know much about Mr. Williams’ business acumen but we definitely know about his perseverance in locating and publishing the names of the cemeteries and related information in two volumes of the Harnett County Cemeteries.
Death visited rural Coats and took a retired US Navy veteran. Haywood Elbert Creech, 84, had died at the Good Hope Hospital. He was a deacon at Red Hill PFW Church. The same edition of the Daily Record on May 6, 1988 shared happy news that Mr. and Mrs. Thurman Garriss of rural Dunn had announced the forthcoming marriage of their daughter, Connie Faye Garriss, to Ronnie Ray Beasley of Benson.
Question for those of you who live in the country-how do you determine with which town you are to be associated If you live between Dunn, Coats, Benson, or Angier? Over the years, people living on my road have had a Troyville, Benson, Coats and Angier address.
I do know that more than 200 people attended the dedication of the new Coats Senior Center. Governor Martin joined in the ribbon cutting with Florence Grimes,, Mae Coats, Carsie Denning, Ruth Parrish and Marvin Johnson. The construction took 27 months at the cost of $250,000 (Daily Record May 10, 1988).
We enjoyed a visit from Margie and A.T. Herring last week. Margie and A.T. are moving to Pinehurst so the people around Dunn and Coats will miss the couple. Margie gave the museum a dress she had made in the early 1970’s to attend a convention in New Orleans with A.T. They also gave a mirror from one of the bathrooms at the old Coats High School. They definitely put in some elbow grease because it was as shiny as a new one and by far heavier. Thanks also go to this couple for their monetary donation. Ralph and Lorena Denning dropped by to share some very old school books and a church hymnal. The books are not much bigger than a smart phone and date back to the mid 1800’s. Thanks go to these two. The volunteers will use these books and the items brought in by the Herrings in our next center exhibit when we will have a display of items from the Coats Schools of the past.
As a teacher, I sometimes become upset when people are claiming that kids don’t learn anything today like they did when they were in school. After seeing all these little books, I think to myself, I taught that much in the first week of school to my students. Today’s teachers have so much put upon them to teach and the students have so much more information to absorb with each day passing filled with new materials to learn.
Thanks goes to H.L for remembering John A. Willoughby, Sr. with a memorial. He married H.L.’s cousin Hilda Sorrell who was one of the earliest nurses with the school system. John‘s son John A., Jr. has been a strong supporter of the Coats Museum through donations in kind.
For twelve years, the continuous readers of the Coats Museum News have revisited the progression of events since 1740’s that led to the development of an area known today as Grove Township. The followers have been able to read about Barclaysville, Troyville, Turlington and then Coats to learn about the people, schools, businesses, and churches in those areas. The readers discovered that each of these little areas had two things in common-they were on the Raleigh- Fayetteville Stagecoach Road and each had a post office that required the folks in the surrounding areas to travel by foot, mule back, wagon or buggy to collect their mail from the post office that was located in the residence of the postmaster.
The current Coats Museum News articles are covering what happened in 1988 but for fun, let’s look in our rear view mirror fifty years before 1988 and see what was happening in 1938 in the world and in our Coats area.
The Coats locals would have read about the floods along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. They would have learned about DuPont’s patent on nylon and how dozens of products were made from it. Benny Goodman and his horn would have been the musician all generations were enjoying. A fire in New London, Texas would kill 500 children and leave the town numb with grief. The hydrogen-filled Hindenburg would blowup; George VI would be king of England; Amelia Earhart would be lost at sea, and Walt Disney would introduce the world to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
In 1938, over 8 million Americans would be jobless while Hitler had promoted himself to the military chief in Germany. Thomas Wolfe of Asheville had died and Kate Smith had blessed America in song. The L.L. Turlington Estate sold for $19,674.50- a considerable amount in 1938.
Coats School scored an A and Oakdale a B when inspected by the Chief Sanitary Officer K.W. Ballentine. A safety course was taught in the Harnett County High Schools by using the text-“Man and the Car” donated by the Chevrolet Motor, Co. to be used in all 12 of the Harnett County High Schools. One chapter contained laws regulating highway traffic in NC and in 1939, the students would get one-half unit credit if they passed the course.
Harnett County was sixth in the number of bales of cotton ginned in the state in 1937. The Coats Chapter of the FFA had built a meeting room for the boys and it took four months for the sixty boys to complete. The room was made from reworking a basement room that previously had held the vocational agricultural shop. The shop was moved to another building. Part of the money to repair the room came from the sale of the three sticks of tobacco that each student had brought to school. The students graded and sold the tobacco.
Two road petitions were heard. The one dealing with the Grove Township was the petition that the highway commissions take over and maintain a road leading from the Turlington-Sorrell Road to the Coats Benson Road at a point just west of the M.E. Ennis home place, a distance of one mile.
Approximately 75 members of the young Tar Heel Farmer’s Club and their fathers assembled for the club’s annual Father-Son Banquet. George Thomas Smith and Gerald Hayes took part in the event which shared that the boys had set shrubbery, built a tennis court and worked with practice teachers.
(I might note at this time there were likely only three buildings on the Coats Grove #3 Campus-the 1920-21 three story building with a basement and a third floor that had been converted from an auditorium to classrooms. There was the 1936 building which was two stories and had an attached auditorium that seated about 850 people. The third building likely on the campus was a wooden structure which sat on the site of what would become the first primary school classrooms in 1957 when the cafeteria was also built. Some people also referred to it as the goat house and it was later disassembled and part of it was used to construct the Agriculture Building in 1946.)
Hence, this was the type of news that was shared from 1938 as found in Volume 1 of the “Heritage of Coats, NC” (2005) on pages 116-117.
Just as businessmen W.E. Nichols, W.M. Keene, M.C. Stewart, and E.V. Barefoot made the 1938 news for being busy in their stores, the Coats IGA was in the news in 1988. The store sponsored a Beef-Shoot-Out. M.T. Strickland had set up a miniature farm to promote the event.
The CACC placed its Business Focus of the Week on the Coats Business Machines which was operated by Hugh Williams. The business sold and repaired many kinds of business equipment and office supplies. Williams was well qualified in the business area (Daily Record May 5, 1988).
The folks at the museum may not know much about Mr. Williams’ business acumen but we definitely know about his perseverance in locating and publishing the names of the cemeteries and related information in two volumes of the Harnett County Cemeteries.
Death visited rural Coats and took a retired US Navy veteran. Haywood Elbert Creech, 84, had died at the Good Hope Hospital. He was a deacon at Red Hill PFW Church. The same edition of the Daily Record on May 6, 1988 shared happy news that Mr. and Mrs. Thurman Garriss of rural Dunn had announced the forthcoming marriage of their daughter, Connie Faye Garriss, to Ronnie Ray Beasley of Benson.
Question for those of you who live in the country-how do you determine with which town you are to be associated If you live between Dunn, Coats, Benson, or Angier? Over the years, people living on my road have had a Troyville, Benson, Coats and Angier address.
I do know that more than 200 people attended the dedication of the new Coats Senior Center. Governor Martin joined in the ribbon cutting with Florence Grimes,, Mae Coats, Carsie Denning, Ruth Parrish and Marvin Johnson. The construction took 27 months at the cost of $250,000 (Daily Record May 10, 1988).
We enjoyed a visit from Margie and A.T. Herring last week. Margie and A.T. are moving to Pinehurst so the people around Dunn and Coats will miss the couple. Margie gave the museum a dress she had made in the early 1970’s to attend a convention in New Orleans with A.T. They also gave a mirror from one of the bathrooms at the old Coats High School. They definitely put in some elbow grease because it was as shiny as a new one and by far heavier. Thanks also go to this couple for their monetary donation. Ralph and Lorena Denning dropped by to share some very old school books and a church hymnal. The books are not much bigger than a smart phone and date back to the mid 1800’s. Thanks go to these two. The volunteers will use these books and the items brought in by the Herrings in our next center exhibit when we will have a display of items from the Coats Schools of the past.
As a teacher, I sometimes become upset when people are claiming that kids don’t learn anything today like they did when they were in school. After seeing all these little books, I think to myself, I taught that much in the first week of school to my students. Today’s teachers have so much put upon them to teach and the students have so much more information to absorb with each day passing filled with new materials to learn.
Thanks goes to H.L for remembering John A. Willoughby, Sr. with a memorial. He married H.L.’s cousin Hilda Sorrell who was one of the earliest nurses with the school system. John‘s son John A., Jr. has been a strong supporter of the Coats Museum through donations in kind.