J.W. Graham Recalls His Life, History of the Sandhills, 1924

From the Friday, Nov. 7, 1924 issue of The Pilot, Vass, N.C.

Last week J.W. Graham of Aberdeen told his story before the Kiwanis Club at the dinner at the Carolina Hotel, and a more illuminating bit of biographical history has not in a long time come to the notice of the folks of middle North Carolina. In an unpretentious way Mr. Graham said that he had been born in the vicinity of what is now Aberdeen, but what was then an undeveloped and unpromising bit of back country in the heart of a great pine forest, and what was more discouraging, at a time when war was holding the nation in its ruinous influences. He came about the time Sherman’s army swept through this section although he was not one of them. But Sherman and war conditions left things in such shape that the youthful Graham was not swathed in silks or reared in luxury, for until he was grown life in the Sandhills was a struggle. War put some climaxes on what nature had done through her niggardliness in this vicinity, and while J.W. Graham never knew poverty he knew the next neighbor of it, which was the absolute necessity of depending on individual effort and of living close to the hard lines of simplicity. But that did not annoy the people much in that time, for they had a faith in themselves and in life that brought a degree of contentment that was worth more than money or abundance.

But along with the struggle to subsist, and to keep in touch with development, get to school, which in Graham’s case was a long effort, reaching finally his career at the university, his story of the realization and exhaustion of the resources of the Sandhills, and the continual discovery of something else equally as valuable. Following the turpentine, which was one of the early dependencies came timber, and after timber came the realization of the climate, and of dewberries and peaches and cotton and tobacco and all the time it was discovered that the limit of resources was never reached.

A sort of climax of the interesting biography and philosophical study of the Sandhills was the discovery that in the difficult time of reconstruction the  people came through, and that the father they came the more the road was smoothed out, and now when all should according to the ancient belief be absolutely exhausted of its resources the horizon has broadened to such an extent that people, resources, prospect and everything are on a basis that in Mr. Graham’s childhood would have been looked upon as impossible to the extent of absurdity if anybody had predicted what he now sees. 

After all the resources of any place, whether the barren Sandhills, or the Gardens of Utopia, depend on the people and as the people of the Sandhills have needed the developing resources of their community those resources have developed as others will continue to develop, for under and around and above us always are things we have never dreamed of and in the course of time those things are discovered and utilized.