“Papa sent me to Uncle Will and told me not to come back home and Uncle Will put me on the train this morning and told me that it was papa’s place to support me,” 11-year-old Hazel Mintcalf of King’s Mountain, bobbed out Sunday afternoon at the police headquarters where she was taken by Detective Alex West after she had left the Southern station.
Papa, it seemed is Ed. Mintcalf, a mill worker at Kings Mountain, and Willis Will Moss an operative at the Cannon Mill at Kannapolis. The little girl was appeased by Clerk J.C. Mayson with the assurance that the tangle would be straightened out and she was turned to Commandant Crook of the Salvation Army, who said Sunday night that Hazel was having a great time at the hall.
Hazel, it appears, became motherless at the age of four years and her father has married twice since that time. Her uncle, she says, adopted her at it was with the intention of returning to Concord and having the clerk of court dig up the papers and force her uncle to maintain her that the young girl left the train here instead of continuing to her father at King’s Mountain. Since the adoption, she has been known as Hazel Moss, she said.
“He adopted me and I have seen the papers,” Hazel declared, and her face brightened, only to darken again as she answered questions about her life. “I remember that mother told me when she was dying that I should go to Uncle Will and I have been with him off and on since that time. I was with papa all of last year and went back to Kannapolis the first of this year. Papa sent men, telling me that I must not come back home. But Uncle Will told me that it was papa’s duty to support me and sent me back.”
Hazel was determined not to return to her father. He was good to her, she admitted, but her stepmother was not, and she did not want to live there. Uncle Will, husband of her mother’s sister, treated her well and she was happy with him. Her uncle and aunt have one child, 10-year-old Beatrice Moss, almost the age of Hazel, who will be 12 next month.
But for some reason, the uncle tired of the child and packed her off Sunday to her father. Leaving the train here, she went to a home nearby and stated her plight.
Hazel is a bright child and answered questions put to her in a straightforward manner. Tears constantly filled her deep blue eyes and sobs choked her voice, but she looked her questioner straight in the eye and replied instantly. She is in the seventh grade at the Kannapolis school and makes a grade a year, but “I don’t suppose I shall be promoted this year because I have changed so much,” she said ruefully. She is smart enough to know that it is the duty of her uncle to keep her if he has legally adopted her, and she says she has seen the adoption papers.
From the Charlotte Observer as reprinted on the front page of The Lincoln County News, Lincolnton, N.C., April 5, 1923
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