George Hargrove Visits Home After 52 Years Seeing the World, Sept. 6, 1922

A Rolling Stone 52 Years Comes Back With Moss Gathered in 30 Countries. . . George Hargrove Left Duplin About the Time Robert E. Lee Died With Adventure Burning in His Eyes; Was Wealthy and Spent It in Rolling

Fifty-two years is a long time as life is measured and a very long time to use up in “wander-lust,” and the world is a big place to see, but George Hargrove left his home at Faison just 52 years ago, or about the time Robert E. Lee departed his life in 1870, to do both. He did both. He saw it. He came back Saturday an old man 74 years of age, wrinkled and gray. He came home unto his sister Miss Sudie Hargrove and she “received him not!” Why should she? He said he was her brother, but she had no proof. When he went away he was a young man of 22 with the light of adventure burning his eyes; he was back with all the light burned out; an old man who had seen all there was to see; and had come back to tell about it.

He did tell about it. Sunday he spoke at the church at Poplar Grove, and the people from Faison, Warsaw and miles around came to hear him talk.

And he could talk! He had combined a personality of 30 nations. There was the Bohemianism of O. Henry and Goldsmith, the peaks of the Alps and the Himalayas, the heat and scorching sunshine of India, the ice fields of barren waste in Russia and Siberia, the Victoria Falls of South Africa twice as wide and high as the cataract of the Niagara, the sleepy palms of South America waving in dreaming perpetual sunshine, Carlyle’s unspeakable Turk made more unspeakable by E.M. Hull’s unthinkable “Sheik,” and the flowers of Hiwaii [Hawaii] which Mark Twain said he could feel calling him after half a lifetime as no alien land in all the world.

And he had seen all this, and he had mixed in a revolution or two. He had passed coal, he had preached, he had prayed, he had danced by the tom toms, he had watched with eternal vigilance for the lightning thrusts of the deadly Indian cobra, the grip of the python, learned how to follow a jungle trail, and to turn to the left in England. Wonderful, fascinating, commonplaces, disgusting, everything in 52 years—and he came back. The rolling stone had gathered much moss—in experience. He was rich in experience. He was once well-to-do. He came of a well-to-do family, he got his part when it was divided and he spent it for knowledge and experience; and he claims he got more out of life than those who stayed at home and doubled their fortunes—and, “who can say who is the happiest? The rolling stone has gathered much moss.” It expects to roll on to Washington.

From the front page of The Goldsboro News, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 1922