The Dart: What would the walls say if they could talk?

HOME OF FORMER SLAVE STILL STANDS

Friday, October 20, 2006

By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer

STARTOWN -- The skeleton of a rusted mattress leans in the corner of the antiquated wood cabin. Upstairs, two dressers haphazardly stand in the middle of the master bedroom, the drawers strewn across the floor.

The tin roof, built with the house in the late 1800s and preserved to near perfection, has kept out the rain, the snow and summer's harsh sunlight for more than 100 years.

Now, it catches golden and orange leaves falling from the trees in this thickly wooded plot of land less than a mile off Joe Johnson Road in Catawba County, where The Dart hit last week.

But for more than 100 years, the roof - and the house it covers - have stood, witnessing the changes that have marked those years.

Jim Saine, a banker from Startown, started buying land in the neighborhood, including the cabin, because it was easily accessible to his wife's job in Newton and his job in Charlotte. He moved to a house across the street from the cabin 14 years ago.

"I've often wondered about the stories this house could tell," he said. He already knows many of the stories:

Former slave Octavia Shuford, who was born Octavia Powell in Catawba County 19 months after the Civil War erupted, bought the 18-acre property from J.E. Johnson in two separate purchases in 1905 and 1914, according the original deeds.

One portion of the property, about 10 acres, was sold to Octavia for $150, Saine said. The property markers, the deeds show, began "at a dead and down locust on the east bank of a branch" on one tract and at "a dead black oak" on the other.

Octavia's parents plucked cotton on nearby land, and even after the war had ended, she continued to pick the crops with her husband and their children for decades, said granddaughter-in-law Sarah Shuford of Hickory.

Octavia and her husband, Albert Shuford, were in their 20s when they began building their wooden home not long after they got married, Sarah Shuford said. They chopped trees from the woods and carried water from the nearby spring.

"How in the heck did they have the knowledge to build a house like that at their age?" she said.

As the Shuford family grew, they expanded the original two-room structure into a four-room cabin, which included the kitchen. Electricity came after the end of World War II, Saine said.

Sarah Shuford, 84, remembers "Mother Octave" cooking grand meals in the kitchen, many of which she would share with neighbors and friends.

After dinner, she said, the family would gather in the parlor and would dance as Gracie, one of Octavia's seven children, would play the pump organ.

"Some of them would be barefooted and would have to wash their feet before they'd go to bed because their feet got so dirty from dancing," she recalled.

As the children got older, they began to leave Catawba County for jobs elsewhere in the county, Shuford said. Some stayed nearby, but opted for more modern homes than the cabin.

So, when Octavia died on Nov. 20, 1946, she left behind a cabin full of her things and a lot of memories. Shuford and Saine said no one has lived in the house since then, but thick and tattered canvas curtains still hang from the kitchen windows. The carcasses of an old refrigerator, rusted tin cans and a metal stove stand nearby.

"I don't know what a Victor Junior is," Saine said of the pastel white and blue stove standing in the middle of the room, "but it looks like it's in pretty good shape."

Saine said he thinks it's incredible that the cabin is so well-preserved after more than 100 years of wear-and-tear and six decades of abandonment.

He walks around the cabin, pointing out the stone chimney climbing the side of the building. Saine found some extra pieces of rock, he said, and is saving the slabs in case he chooses to restore the cabin after he retires.

Shuford said she hopes he does. "I'd love to see it like it was one more time."


The Point of the Dart

The idea behind the Dart is simple: We're looking for the kind of news the media don't usually report. We throw a dart at a map of one of the counties in the Catawba Valley, and we'll write about what's happening at that spot. We hope this feature will bring out stories that too often are ignored and will help you meet some of your neighbors in the region.



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