Echoes from the Sandhills

Series 4 - Echoes in Action

Echo 17  — When the Map Changed Around Them

When we search for our ancestors, we tend to think of place as something fixed.

A person lived in Cumberland County.

Another lived in Harnett County.

Another lived in Moore County.

But the geography recorded beside our ancestors' names was not nearly so permanent.

County boundaries changed. New counties were created. Townships were divided and renamed. A family could appear to have moved from one place to another between census years when, in fact, they may have remained on the same land while the name of the place changed around them.

That is why the old townships of the Sandhills matter.

A New Way of Dividing the Counties

Following North Carolina's 1868 Constitution, counties were divided into townships. These smaller geographic units became important ways of identifying communities and administering local government.

Their creation coincided with an especially important moment in African American history.

The 1870 census was the first federal census after emancipation to enumerate formerly enslaved people by name as members of their own households.

For many of our ancestors, therefore, those early township names are among the first geographic markers we have for them as free people.

In Cumberland County, the post-1868 townships included Babers, Black River, Carvers Creek, Cedar Creek, Cross Creek, Flea Hill, Gray's Creek, Manchester, Pearces Mill, Rockfish, and Seventy-First.

In Harnett County, they included Averasboro, Barbecue, Black River, Buckhorn, Grove, Hectors Creek, Johnsonville, Lillington, Neills Creek, Stewart's Creek, and Upper Little River.

And in Moore County, they included Ben Salem, Carthage, Crains Creek, Deep River, Greenwood, McNeill, Mineral Springs, Pocket, Ritters, and Sheffields.

But those lists are only a snapshot.

The township map continued to change.

When Barbecue Became Anderson Creek

Harnett County provides a particularly good example.

Anderson Creek Township does not appear among the county's original post-1868 townships. 

It was established later, in part from territory that had been included in Barbecue Township.

That distinction becomes very real when we look at the census.

My own ancestors appear in Barbecue Township in the 1870 census. Ten years later, in 1880, they appear in Anderson Creek Township.

At first glance, that could suggest that the family moved.

But the records raise another possibility—and an important lesson for family historians.

The people may have stayed put. The township changed.

Sometime between those two censuses, Anderson Creek Township came into existence, incorporating at least part of what had previously been Barbecue Township. So an ancestor whose residence was recorded as Barbecue in 1870 could later be recorded in Anderson Creek without packing a wagon, selling a piece of land, or moving a household.

The boundary crossed them.

That is precisely why we have to read historical records using the geography of their time, not ours.

The Map Kept Evolving

Anderson Creek was not the only later addition.

Harnett County would also gain Duke Township, which was later renamed Erwin.

Moore County's township structure changed as well, with Pinehurst and Sandhills established later.

These changes are more than interesting bits of local history. They can determine where we look for an ancestor.

If we search only for a place name we recognize today, we may miss records created when that same piece of land belonged to another township.

And sometimes the change was even larger than a township boundary.

Where Is Lee County?

There is another name noticeably missing from our original post-1868 township lists:

Lee County.

That is because Lee County did not exist.

It was created in 1907 from portions of Moore and Chatham counties.

So someone living in what is now Lee County could not have been recorded as a resident of Lee County in the 1870, 1880, or 1900 federal census.

If we are looking for that person, we have to look at the map that existed then.

A family living on land that later became part of Lee County might appear in an earlier record under Moore County or Chatham County.

Again:

The family may not have moved. The boundary did.

Townships Can Help Us Find the Community

For African American genealogy, these distinctions can be particularly valuable.

The 1870 census is often treated as a starting line because it is the first census in which formerly enslaved people generally appear by name.

But simply finding an ancestor in 1870 is not the end of the search.

Look at the township.

Then look at the people living around them.

Who were their neighbors?

Which surnames appear repeatedly?

Where were the nearby churches?

Where were the cemeteries?

Who owned land nearby?

Which white families had been enslavers in that same area before emancipation?

Where do those Black families appear in 1880?

And if the township name changes between censuses, find out whether the family moved—or whether the township boundary moved instead.

That question can completely change the direction of the research.

Names That Still Speak

Some of the old township names remain familiar across the Sandhills:

Carvers Creek.

Seventy-First.

Barbecue.

Upper Little River.

Deep River.

Greenwood.

Anderson Creek.

Others, such as Flea Hill, Pocket, Hectors Creek, and Sheffields, may be less familiar today.

But on an old census page, each one is a clue.

A township takes us from a county covering hundreds of square miles and places our ancestors in a much smaller landscape—a landscape of farms, creeks, roads, churches, schools, cemeteries, and neighboring families.

And once we begin comparing those landscapes across time, something else becomes apparent.

Maps record history, too.

A line drawn across a county could give a community a new name. A new township could appear between one census and the next. In 1907, an entirely new county called Lee could emerge from land that generations had known as Moore or Chatham.

Our ancestors lived through all of those changes.

So when we find someone in Barbecue Township in 1870 and Anderson Creek Township in 1880, we should resist the temptation to immediately send them down the road.

First, we ask what every good family historian eventually learns to ask:

Did my ancestors move—or did the map?

Sometimes, the answer is the map.

And understanding that difference can help us find the people we thought we had lost.

Echoes from the Sandhills

Series 4 - Echoes in Action

Echo 16 — Dr. Conrad B. Codrington: From Barbados to the Sandhills

A blog essay tracing the life, service, and lasting community legacy of Dr. Conrad B. Codrington in Dunn, North Carolina.

Every now and then, a name that first appears almost in passing begins to show up everywhere.

That has been my experience with Dr. Conrad B. Codrington.

I first encountered him while following another story—that of Lucy S. Herring, the Jeanes supervising teacher whose work carried her throughout the Black schools and communities of Harnett County beginning in the 1920s. In her memoir, Strangers No More, Herring remembered the people who helped her build programs that extended far beyond the classroom.

Among them was Dr. Codrington.

Herring recalled that each spring, Dr. Codrington, assisted by Dr. Furlonge of Johnston County, conducted a health clinic for the families she served. They performed physical examinations as well as tonsillectomies and other procedures. Families were charged according to their ability to pay; those who could not afford the care were treated without cost.

Herring called it an “invaluable service” to rural families.

That alone would have made Dr. Codrington worth remembering.

But it was only the beginning.

A Journey from Barbados

Conrad Belfield Codrington was born in Barbados on December 10, 1883, the son of Richard and Elizabeth Codrington. A Barbados church register records his baptism on January 12, 1884.

About twenty years later, he made the journey from the British West Indies to the United States. His naturalization papers indicate that he came from Barbados and arrived in New York around 1903.

Exactly what brought the young Conrad Codrington from Barbados to North Carolina is a part of his story I have yet to uncover.

But we know where the journey eventually led him: Shaw University in Raleigh, an institution founded in the aftermath of the Civil War to provide educational opportunities for newly freed African Americans and one that would become a cornerstone of Black higher education in the South. Codrington first completed Shaw’s Normal Department, graduating in 1908, before continuing into Leonard Medical School, Shaw’s pioneering school for the training of Black physicians at a time when opportunities for African Americans to study medicine were severely limited.

Among his fellow students was Charles Furlonge, a young man from Trinidad. Their shared path is especially striking. Two young men from the Caribbean found their way to Shaw, trained for careers in medicine, and years later appeared together again—not simply as names in a college catalog, but in Lucy Herring’s memories of physicians providing much-needed health care to Black families in rural Harnett County.

It is one of those connections that makes history feel less like a collection of names and dates and more like a web of human relationships.

The Doctor in Dunn

Codrington eventually made Dunn his home.

By the time of his death in 1965, he had practiced medicine there for nearly half a century. A 1958 roster issued by the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners lists Conrad Belfield Codrington among the physicians currently registered to practice in the state and gives his address as 112 N. Clinton Avenue, Dunn. He also appears among the registered physicians of Harnett County.

But the newspaper record shows that being the doctor meant much more than seeing patients in an office.

In 1951, when an injured man arrived at Dunn Hospital with serious cuts, Dr. Codrington sutured his wounds and ordered him kept in the hospital for observation. In another case, after a young Black woman reported being raped, Codrington examined her and later appeared in court as the principal witness for the State, providing medical testimony about her injuries.

He was a physician whom the community—and its institutions—called upon.

His 1965 obituary would describe him not simply as a doctor, but as a physician, educator and church leader. It reported that he had been one of the founders of the Dunn Public Health Clinic, vice president of the North State Medical Society, president of the Eastern Medical, Pharmaceutical and Dental Society, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Shaw Alumni Association.

His influence also reached deeply into Black education in Harnett County.

“With Our Love and Pride for Him”

In 1948, Harnett County Training School published its first annual.

The school dedicated it to Dr. C. B. Codrington.

Its tribute recognized his service not only as a physician and surgeon but for more than thirty years of leadership in education, religion and civic affairs.

The words chosen by the school are perhaps more revealing than any list of offices he held. The students and faculty dedicated that first annual to him, they said, “with our love and pride for him.”

This was not simply respect for a prominent professional.

There was affection there.

There was pride.

And there was a recognition that Dr. Codrington belonged to the community.

His relationship with Harnett County Training School would continue. His obituary later identified him as chairman of the board of Harnett High School in Dunn.

The Codrington connection to the school, however, was not his alone.

Mrs. Codrington

Lucy Herring also remembered Edna Codrington.

In describing the cultural program she developed during her early years in Harnett County, Herring called Edna “a music teacher of wide experience.” When Herring began organizing a countywide choral group, Mrs. Codrington offered her services. With the talents of Edna and other musicians and teachers, a chorus of more than fifty voices was assembled from schools across the county.

Their first major program, modeled after Wings Over Jordan, was presented at the Harnett County courthouse in Lillington. Herring remembered it as the first Black program presented there.

And Edna's community work did not stop with music.

Records from the 1920s show her contributing to the Colored Orphanage at Oxford. In 1951, she was elected president of a Community Garden Club organized at Harnett County Training School after already serving as chairman of the group developing the project. In 1953, she chaired Dunn's Black division of the March of Dimes, helping organize a large group of women to canvass the community.

The more I find about the Codringtons, the clearer it becomes that service was not the work of one member of this household.

Their son Raymond would add another chapter.

At the 1954 commencement of Harnett County Training School, Raymond Codrington delivered the salutatory address and received the National Arion Band Award for excellence in music. He later became a professional trumpeter, recording for Atlantic and RCA and performing at venues including New York's Apollo Theatre and Washington's Howard Theatre.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that the son of the woman Lucy Herring remembered as an experienced music teacher found his own life in music.

A Place for Black Children to Play

But there is one part of Dr. Codrington's story that stays with me.

In June 1953, Codrington headed a delegation of prominent Black citizens who appeared before the Dunn City Council.

They came with concerns about conditions in the Black section of town. Codrington spoke about dangerous areas around local establishments where deaths and injuries had occurred.

Then he raised another issue.

Black children needed somewhere to play.

The town, he pointed out, had provided recreation for white children. He asked whether something could be done for Black children as well.

This was 1953.

Dr. Codrington was fighting for something as basic as a safe place for Black children to play.

And he did more than ask.

By March 1955, when Dunn's Recreation Commission moved forward with plans for a Black park and playground near Hanna's Pond, Dr. C. B. Codrington was named chairman of the committee charged with helping develop it.

The physician who had cared for the community's bodies was also asking the town to care about the community in which those bodies lived.

The Echo

Dr. Conrad Belfield Codrington died in September 1965. His funeral was held at St. John's Missionary Baptist Church, and he was buried in Resthaven Cemetery in Dunn.

But his name did not disappear.

In 1981, residents, friends and city officials gathered to dedicate a municipal park in Dunn in his memory.

C.B. Codrington Park.

There is something fitting about that.

Nearly thirty years earlier, Codrington had stood before Dunn's city government asking that Black children be given recreational space. He later helped lead the effort to develop a Black park.

And eventually, a park carried his name.

There is much about Conrad Belfield Codrington that I still do not know. I don't yet know what circumstances carried a young man from Barbados to New York and eventually to Shaw University in North Carolina. I want to know more about his parents, Richard and Elizabeth. I want to understand his years at Leonard Medical School, his friendship with Dr. Furlonge, his leadership in Black medical organizations, his church work, and the nearly fifty years he spent caring for people in and around Dunn.

I want to know more about Edna, too.

Those are stories for another day.

For now, perhaps it is enough simply to put his name back into the conversation.

Dr. Conrad Belfield Codrington.

A young man who journeyed from an island in the Caribbean to North Carolina.

A physician who treated those who could pay and those who could not.

An educator and church leader.

A man his community honored with its “love and pride.”

A citizen who stood before his town and asked it to do better by Black children.

And a name that still echoes in Dunn today.

Echoes From the Sandhills

Series 4 - Echoes in Action

Echo 15 - Rev. R. F. Jamerson: Educator, Principal, and Pastor

When Jeanes Supervisor Lucy S. Herring arrived in Harnett County in 1925, she boarded in the Shawtown home of Mr. and Mrs. Ragland. In her memoir, Strangers No More, Herring recalled sharing the home with another couple whose lives reflected the close relationship between education and the church in African American communities. Clara Jamerson taught at nearby Shawtown High School, while her husband, Rev. R. F. Jamerson, served as principal of “a school near Lillington” and as pastor of “the Presbyterian church in Shawtown”—Lillington First Presbyterian Church. From that congregation, his ministry also extended to Spout Springs Memorial Presbyterian Church and Williams Chapel Presbyterian Church, three congregations that have shared a common ministry for generations. Through Rev. Jamerson's life, we catch a glimpse of a time when the same leader often stood behind the teacher's desk during the week and behind the pulpit on Sunday.

Reverend Jamerson was associated with several of the small but mighty Presbyterian churches in the Sandhills area. A June 28, 1928 article in the Africo American Presbyterian newspaper, written by Miss L. E. Brinkley of Allen’s Chapel Presbyterian in Spring Lake, NC, recounts that:

“Mr. A. J. Meriweather and Misses L. E. Brinkley and Mary Brinkley attended services at Spout Springs the second Sunday.  Rev. Jamerson and his members are cooperating nicely.  They are glad to have him back serving them again.  Mrs. Jamerson is attending Summer school in Greensboro.  The pastor and his folks are preparing for an anniversary day in July.”

By 1930, the federal census recorded the Jamerson household, consisting of Rev. R. Francis Jamerson, his wife Clara, their son R. Francis Jamerson, Jr., and daughter Asbury. The census identified Rev. Jamerson as a Presbyterian minister, while Clara was employed as a public school teacher, further reflecting the family's shared commitment to education and faith.

Rev. Jamerson remained active throughout the Cape Fear Presbytery. At the 1934 Cape Fear Presbyterial Convention, he delivered devotional messages as "Rev. Jamerson of Sanford." The following year, he was selected to lead a discussion with Rev. B. H. Brown on "Our Church at Work Among the Young People," reflecting his reputation as both a minister and mentor. His daughter, Asbury, also appears in church records, reading the Scripture lesson during a youth service at Blandonia Presbyterian Church, demonstrating that the family's commitment to church life extended across generations.

His educational achievements were equally impressive. School records show that Jamerson graduated from Mary Potter Normal School before earning a Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) from Lincoln University and a Bachelor of Sacred Theology (S.T.B.) from Lincoln University Seminary. Such academic and theological preparation equipped him to lead from both the classroom and the pulpit.

By the mid-1920s, Rev. Jamerson was already serving as principal of Ridgeway High School, a role confirmed by Lucy S. Herring in her memoir, Strangers No More. The North Carolina High School Principal's Annual Report for 1935–1936 provides a detailed glimpse into his many responsibilities. In addition to leading the school, he taught Literature, Latin, Physics, Geometry, World History, Biology, and Algebra, while also serving as advisor to the boys. The Educational Directory of North Carolina, 1936–1937 likewise lists him as principal of Ridgeway High School.

His influence extended beyond education. An account of the February 1936 funeral of Elder Anson Bailey in the Africo-American Presbyterian described Mrs. Clara Jamerson providing the music while Rev. Jamerson preached from Luke 13:24, "Strive to enter at the strait gate."  Together, they ministered to the congregation in both word and song.  The newspaper noted that his message "brought tears to almost everybody present."

Rev. R. F. Jamerson's life reminds us that the men and women who built African American education during segregation often wore many hats. He was a scholar, principal, classroom teacher, advisor, pastor, husband, and father. His leadership shaped both the intellectual and spiritual life of Harnett County. Today, the long-standing relationship among Williams Chapel Presbyterian, Lillington First Presbyterian, and Spout Springs Memorial Presbyterian continues. Long before many of us knew these churches as a yoke, Rev. Jamerson faithfully served each congregation while simultaneously leading one of Harnett County's African American high schools. His story reminds us that the history of our schools and the history of our churches are inseparable.