STANTONSBURG — For the last five years, Paul Sherrod has been digging through an old trunk of family papers from the 1800s and early 1900s.
When he recently found a letter from John D. Gold, founding publisher of The Wilson Times, Sherrod contacted the newspaper.
Sherrod’s great-grandfather, Jack Sherrod, was a subscriber to the paper, but on Feb. 8, 1911, Gold sent Sherrod a notice informing him his subscription was about to expire in two weeks.
The annual cost was $1 for the semi-weekly Times and $4 for the daily Times.
“Thanking you for your kindness in the past, and trusting you will appreciate our position and assist us in the past, and trusting you will appreciate our position and assist us in giving you one of the best papers in the south,” Gold writes in what may have been the equivalent of a form letter.
“He wouldn’t have just picked Jack out,” Sherrod said. “He would have sent it to anybody who hadn’t paid, I would think.”
Sherrod’s great-grandfather, Jack Sherrod, was born in 1843 and died in 1915.
As a young man, Jack Sherrod was a slave.
Near the end of the Civil War in March 1865, Jack Sherrod joined the 135th U.S. Colored Troops in Goldsboro.
Sherrod has been steadily restoring his great-grandfather’s house south of Stantonsburg for the last five years.
“He was industrious enough after 32 years of freedom to build a house for his family,” Sherrod said. “He might have been able to read, but he couldn’t write.”
Sherrod said his great-grandfather needed to stay abreast of happenings in Wilson.
“I think it was probably because others in the household could read and they could keep him up to date on what was going on because he was a businessman,” Sherrod said. “He was a farmer. There are all kinds of evidence of transactions between the Wilson tobacco houses, Centre Brick and others in Wilson, so I think he wanted to be kept up with the local news and it was probably read to him.”
The family papers come from an old trunk Sherrod is steadily sorting through.
“It had probably 1,000 documents in it. The oldest document I found was from 1891, part of Grandpa Jack’s pension request,” Sherrod said. “He was a soldier and he applied for his pension in 1891. I have documents between the lawyer in Washington who was processing a lot of claims at that time.”
That particular set of correspondence is in the Wayne County Museum in Goldsboro until May 1.
“This treasure trove of documents is amazing because we found a lot of personal letters from the sons to their parents, Grandpa Jack and Grandma Cassie, and we have been able to really identify some of the names of some of their offspring. It is a real treasure,” said Sherrod, who will be 88 on April 20.
“I cannot believe how great it makes me feel that someone in the family sought to preserve these documents. They didn’t preserve them in the normal archival manner. They just had them folded up in a trunk. But being in that trunk and out of the sunlight preserved them. We are so happy to be able to share them with the rest of the family, particularly the younger members of the family.”
Many things were vastly different in Wilson 110 years ago, as shown in the Times’ Feb. 10 edition.
A dispatch from Washington reported that the House enacted a Senate bil establishing a commission to secure plans and designs for a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. The building would cost $2 million and “be the most imposing of all monuments in Washington, save only the towering shaft erected in the memory of Washington.”
In an advertisement, the Wilson Drug Co. offered Edison phonographs or Victor talking machines for either weekly or monthly payments. The machines played cylinder records that were roughly the size of an empty toilet paper roll.
The original document shows the lines where it was folded and the paper’s variance in hue from off-white to sepia.
“I am just so happy to have found it and to connect it to the articles that you had earlier done about the 125th anniversary, so it kind of ties in,” Sherrod said.
Sherrod spoke to Times CEO Morgan Dickerman III last weekend and read him the notice written by Dickerman’s great-grandfather.
