what is called the Howard Gap, an old Indian trail. I do not know how it got the
 name Howard, because that is certainly not an Indian name, but they worked their
 way up into the mountains and found this little plateau that is most pleasant. It was
 rolling land and it had some very good farm land there in certain areas that were
 alluvial plains and very, very desirable for farming. And then the other part of the
 area was great for apple orchards and that sort of thing. [There were] not very many
 peaches, but mostly apples. It was a strictly agrarian economy and everybody was a
 farmer.

CJ: When was this [that the] family first [came to North Carolina]?

RJ: [It was] in the early 1800s. There were not too many people up there; only about a
 dozen families. And the interesting thing was, that they were all Welsh. They
 intermarried and what have you, to the point that by the time I was born in 1918 I
 was still 100 percent Welsh. It does not really matter, but it is kind of interesting.
 I do not think that I ever saw an Oriental person until I left that part of the country.
 We had an old German gentleman named Betz, [who had] a Walrus mustache and
 a big round tummy and that sort of thing. [He was] a very large man. He came in
 and opened a dairy. People who were not Welsh were so unusual that people would
 elbow each other when they saw him and say, "Hey, there goes that old German!"
 So, it was very unusual to see someone who was not of Welsh extraction or a
 Cherokee Indian. Do you want me to just roll on a little bit now?

CJ: The family came in early 1800s and they were there during the Civil War. You said
 you had some stories about that.

RJ: About the Civil War? My grandmother on my mother's side was born in 1859 and
 her name was Mamie McCall [Hood]. A very interesting thing about that is that
 when my grandmother was four years old her mother died and left my grandmother
 with two younger brothers. Her father then married a Cherokee doctor; she was the
 only medicine [person] of any kind in that part of the country. She was a wonderful
 person. They then had five more children--all of whom were highly intelligent and
 extremely handsome. Uncle Cephas McCall later became sheriff in Henderson
 County. And Uncle Sicey was a big apple orchard man.

 But on the Civil War, an interesting thing is [that] North Carolina did not really want
 to secede from the Union, but they were sandwiched in between Virginia, which did
 want to secede, and South Carolina and Georgia who [also] did. So they were pretty
 much carried along against their will. Very few people [in North Carolina] owned
 slaves, particularly up in the mountains. If you will notice still, in that part of the
 country, a very small percentage of the population is black. The slaves, when they
 were freed, chose the surnames of their owners as a general rule. [It is] interesting
 to note that you see very few black families today that are named Pace, Thompson,
 Jones, Ward, McCall, Edney, Staton, Hill, Hyder, Stepp, Lyda (my related families).


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