The 2014 Wilson, Greer and Associated Families Forum 3

by Glenn N. Holliman

More Photographs and History....

One of our cousins who attended the Wilson-Greer-Osborne-Forrester Family Forum in Boone, North Carolina this past July was Kathryn Wilson, daughter of Clyde (1912-2006) and Maude (Tincy) Williams Wilson (1917 - 2010).  In the 2005 photograph below, Kathryn sits between her father and aunt, Jean Wilson, wife of Ernest Wilson, Clyde's brother.  On the far left is Tincy, her mother.  (Tincy picked up her life long nickname because of her size as a toddler.)

 

The story of Clyde and Tincy is one that was repeated millions of times in their generation.  They grew up in a rural part of America, Watauga and Ashe Counties, North Carolina.  In the 1930s occurred the Great Depression and in the 40s, World War II.  After the war, they married, eventually left the mountains and moved to a larger city, working in education and industry.  They helped create and enjoy the affluence most Americans enjoy in this generation.

Born in Watauga County, Maude took advantage of what is now Appalachian State University to become a first grade teacher, first in Kingsport, Tennessee and later in Mabel, near Zionville, and High Point, North Carolina.  

Clyde grew up Ashe County in the mountains and went to Asia during World War II.  

On the Fourth of July 2005, The Mountain Times of Boone, North Carolina ran the following front page article on Clyde's service during that World War. 

   

"On a warm, July 4^th day in the Silverstone community of western Watauga County, Clyde Wilson almost wasn’t born.  Today, the Boone resident plans to celebrate his 93^rd birthday on Monday.

“It was a special day, the day I was born because I just weighed a pound and a half,” he said, recalling that he almost didn’t make it. Nevertheless, his family celebrated his birth in 1912 along with the birth of a nation.

Upon meeting Clyde, it’s obvious he’s built to last and he still commands a razor-sharp memory. His hearing’s not so good and he has trouble with his eyesight. But, ask Clyde about his past and he can recall just about any event with details that would prove astonishing for someone half his age.  He moves about slowly, using an intricately inlaid cane, but his eyes brighten when he talks about his past.

The middle child of Arlie and Bessie Wilson, Clyde and his brothers, Boyd and Ernest, grew up in a county rife with economic downturns even before the Great Depression.  'I’ve worked for fifty cents a day,' he said. 'Lots of times, after you worked a week, they couldn’t pay you.'

While making money for his family as a gardener and doing other odd jobs, Clyde found time to attend Cove Creek School where he would later meet the girl he was to marry, Maude Williams.

“We worked young----we had to work,” he said.

Helping his father, who served as Watauga County’s treasurer, make a weekly commute ranked as one of his top household chores.  'I’d ride a horse (and bring another horse) from Silverstone to Boone to pick my Daddy up.'  Arlie would stay in town during the week and make the 15-mile journey with his son on Fridays back home.

Although Clyde had at least ten years on most World War II soldiers, he still answered the call to duty at the age of 30 while working at a naval facility in Norfolk, Va. 'I felt like I ought to go so I let the draft catch me.' he said.

As a member of the Army’s 429^th Engineers unit, he landed in North Africa in 1942.  The U.S. commissioned the unit for a few specialized tasks—most notably the construction of a road from Iran to an uneasy wartime ally, Russia.  As a motor sergeant, Clyde ensured every vehicle stayed in top shape and remained within the convoy.  That job became a life-threatening hardship when the unit crossed the Himalayan Mountains on its eastern trip.

'We had airplane wreckers (flatbed trucks with large boom-cranes for hauling aircraft) that were 60-feet long' he said. 'We took 50,000 five-gallon cans of gas.'  The trucks couldn’t navigate some of the hairpin mountain passes so Clyde and his comrades had to maneuver a bulldozer under the trucks’ rear axles to move them around.  In the Himalayas, the unit took some heavy but faraway fire from entrenched Japanese units – mostly snipers and artillery troops hidden in caves.

But the unit’s biggest threat came not from Asian gun barrels but from the mountain climate. Growing up in the High Country may have prepared Clyde for cold winters – but not the 40-below zero temperatures his outfit faced. 'The weather got bad for three days and three nights in the Himalayans. We had to wait for a thaw.'

But rather than surrender to the elements, Clyde devised a plan to survive.  'What I did – I shoveled snow up around a truck, sealed it off and left a little place to get under it.'

After weathering the frigid attacks and finishing the road to Russia, the engineering unit unloaded those 50,000 cans of gasoline and built an airport in China. By 1945, the war wound down and Clyde could almost taste his homecoming.

The Army offered soldiers a chance to go stateside if they agreed to sign on as a second lieutenant for two more years. Clyde remembers telling one of his friends, 'I don’t want to be a lieutenant. They get all the slack from the top up and the bottom down'”

Finally, he agreed to a 45-day leave, with the understanding that he would reenlist for another year. 

'But I remember saying, If I ever get out of here, I’m not coming back,’ he said.

And he never did.

On his return trip home, his transport plane caught fire in India. Clyde’s previous orders to return for 45 days and return for one year were on the plane with him. 'Those papers were on me when the fire started. That’s a good time to lose them', he said with an enigmatic grin.

Arriving stateside at Fort McPherson, Clyde 'told my captain what I’d done and he said, ‘Don’t you worry – you won’t have to go back.'

Clyde surprised his parents, who by then had moved to Ashe County, with an abrupt homecoming in October of 1945. 'I was at home before they knew I was around. I just walked in the door,”'he said.

Clyde married Maude and they began what will be a 60-year marriage this month. While Maude worked as a teacher in several places, including Mabel School, Clyde worked as a service technician and salesman for Ivy Wilson’s Boone dairy equipment business.

'I covered 21 counties, seven in North Carolina, several in Tennessee and seven in Virginia.' Later, he would work as a mechanic in High Point and a shop foreman in Greensboro before retiring to Boone in 1991.

He looks forward to celebrating his 93^rd birthday and has long enjoyed sharing it with Independence Day. For his 90^th birthday, more than 70 visited his Forest Hills home including well-known community leader, the late Alfred Adams.  And it’s pretty obvious he’s looking forward to his 60^th wedding anniversary.

'Those wives – they really keep you going, don’t they?' "  

Kathryn writes: "During my lifetime, my father worked in High Point, North Carolina for Olympic Chemical Company - a Division of Cone Mills. It is now called Olympic Products, and is owned privately. Daddy managed the industrial maintenance department. OCC manufactured polyurethane foam for mattresses, pillows, cushions etc. Prior to the move to High Point in 1956, he worked for Ivy Wilson's Boone dairy equipment business as a salesman and technician.

I don't know the details well enough to describe them but there was a lot of politics involved back in the day (in the mountains) in terms of who got jobs and who didn't. Just for the record and it made for interesting family dynamics - Daddy was a conservative Republican and my mother was just about as far to the left as one could get.

 My mother's father Edd S. Williams was very involved in local/state politics but never ran for public office.  I have heard plenty of "talk" about stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes - suppose that stuff happened back in the day!

Three of his 5 daughters (including my mother) married Republicans. The family joke was that someone asked him how many sons-in-law he had and he responded with: "I have 2 - the other 3 are Republicans."

 

1945 ca Clyde and Tincy (on the right) and Becky Wilson Ignelz, daughter of William and Cal Wilson, a grand daughter of Wilson family historian, The Rev. William A. Wilson (1861-1950), the Methodist missionary to Japan.  Clyde would marry Maude in 1945, and they enjoyed a 61 year union.

"And I have heard my father say many times, there were just not many ways to get ahead or make a good living in Watauga/Ashe. He always laughed about the concept of the good old days as they were not nearly as good in terms of making a living and having money to buy things with as they were once he left the area. 

With that said, he thought the mountains of North Carolina were heaven on earth. He and my mother were able to return to Boone when he was approaching 80 years of age and still in great health and live out his remaining years in the place he loved most." - Kathryn Wilson

Next posting, more lineages of cousins who attended the July 2014 Family Forum in North Carolina....

Discovered - Lost Photographs of The Rev. William A. Wilson



by Glenn N. Holliman

October 29, 2013 I visited my sister, Rebecca Louise Holliman Payne in Tennessee who was in the process of sorting her family pictures.  One box she had stored in her attic years ago was an inheritance of memorabilia from our late Aunt Louise Stansbery Sherwood (1915-2006).  Louise was the daughter of Mayme T. Osborne (1896-1953) and Charles S. Stansbery (1893-1957). Below Mayme and Louise in 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where the family had moved during World War II.

Louise's maternal grandparents were G.W. Osborne (1844-1927) and Frances Wilson Osborne (1851-1940), both originally from Ashe County, North Carolina.  They had met in 1865 when G.W. and a cousin, Richard Franklin Osborne, took refuge in the home of Caroline Greer Wilson (1828-1911), the recent widow of Isaac Wilson (1822-1864) ambushed on his farm during the Civil War.

In the attic box were photos from the Stansberys and three intriguing ones of Louise's great uncle and a brother of Frances Wilson Osborne, The Rev. William A. Wilson (1861-1950).  The pictures are in excellent condition and may have been professionally made.  They were taken in Japan where Will served as a Southern Methodist missionary from 1890 to 1930.

I emailed these photos to Michael Ignelzi, a direct descendant of William Wilson, but he had not seem them in the family.  So I am sharing them now with the larger family, asking if others have copies of these picture or know when they were taken of our fascinating  ancestor who moved in his life from the lush, but isolated mountains of western North Carolina, to a Japan awakening from centuries of  self-imposed isolation from the West. 

 

Educated at the University of North Carolina, Class of 1889 at Chapel Hill, Will was ordained a Southern Methodist Church pastor at his own Sutherland Methodist Church in Ashe County.  (My own great grandfather, G. W. Washington, was ordained a lay pastor in the same denomination in the 1870s in the same church.)  It is from Will's memoirs that we know so much of Isaac and Caroline Greer Wilson and the travail of the Civil War in the family.

I would like to think in the picture below, evidently taken in Will's home, that one can see the likeness of his mother, Caroline Greer Wilson, in the middle photograph on the shelf above Will's head.  Unfortunately who the women are with Will are not identified, but one assumes they are connected to his church or school work in Japan.

 

The above picture is labeled in English as having been processed by K. Mimura in Okayama, Japan.  These pictures may have been taken as publicity for the Southern Methodist Church and its missionary work in Asia.  My belief is my great grandmother, Frankie Wilson Osborne, obtained them from her brother to share with her Anderson Street Methodist Church missionary society in Bristol, Tennessee in the 1920s.

 

When World War II began, Okayama housed a Japanese Army camp. On June 29, 1945, the city was attacked with fire bombs. Almost all the city was burned, and more than 1700 people were killed. Okayama suffered terrible damage in the war, losing more than 12,000 households.  In near by Hiroshima, another site of Will's work, the U.S. Army Air Corp also dropped the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 killing over 80,000 immediately.   Below the ruins of Okayama and Will's work after the incendiary raid. (Wikipedia)

 

 

At that time in 1945, Will Wilson had been in retirement in his Durham, North Carolina home for almost 15 years.  Whatever must have been his emotions that horrid summer during the War when his life's work and many of his Japanese friends were destroyed?  One can scarce imagine his conflicted feelings.

 

  

For more information or to ask for an invitation, please contact Glenn N. Holliman at glennhistory@gmail.com.  Likewise at the Holliman-Long Ancestry.com site.  Or visit www.bholliman.com, a virtual archive.

 

From the Archives of Annie Greer Heaton, Part 3

by Glenn N. Holliman

More Treasures from Annie Greer Heaton's Family History Materials....



The above is a family photograph of the Rev. William Albert Wilson family taken in 1896 in Hiroshima, Japan.  William Wilson (1861-1950) was the last born son of Isaac and Caroline Wilson Greer of Sutherland, Ashe County, North Carolina.  Ordained in the Southern Methodist Church, Will and his wife, Mary McClellan Wilson, served decades as Christian missionaries to Japan.  A graduate of Trinity College (Duke), Will wrote the memoirs that became the book Neighbor to Neighbor, the story of the Civil War in Ashe County and his father's murder in 1864.

According to Annie Heaton's marginalia in red, William sent this picture to his first cousin, William Isaac Greer who lived in Banner Elk, North Carolina.  Mary Wilson died in 1949 and William the next year, 1950 in retirement in Durham, North Carolina.

In 1947, William wrote the below comments concerning his family lineage and relatives.  His descendants have written their own comments in the margins. Click on the document twice and it should enlarge.

 

 

The above document of my great, great Uncle W. A. Wilson is key element in the tracing and understanding the Greer lineage. 

 

More information on the relationships of Greers, Wilsons, Osbornes, Stansberys and others can be found at this writer's Ancestry.com site. Please write glennhistory@gmail.com for access or to add information.



Wilson-Greer 2012 Family Tour, Part XV

by Glenn N. Holliman

The Wilson-Greer Tour goes to Banner Elk....

The last day of our Wilson-Greer tour in June 2012 took us to Banner Elk, North Carolina.  There cousin Annie Heaton and her husband, Jim, joined us.  Jim is descended from a pioneer family that gave it's name to Heaton, North Carolina, a near-by town.  Banner Elk now is in ski country with numerous gated second-home communities located in the western highlands.

On the grounds of Lees-McRae College is a Presbyterian church and grave yard.  In the cemetery are the graves of Jesse (1806-1892) and Frances Brown Greer, Jr. (1810-1905).  When Isaac Wilson (1822-1864) was bushwhacked in June 1864 during the Civil War, Jesse and Frankie raced to Caroline Greer Wilson's side and stayed with her during the trauma of the event and through succeeding months. 

Below, left to right, Gay and Bob Adema, Connie Burns, Betty Ankers,  Charles, Chase and Jennifer Bundy, Bryan Payne, Jackie Burleson, Alice Holliman Murphy, Annie Heaton and Jim Gray at the monuments to Jesse and Frances Brown Greer, Jr.


Caroline's son, The Rev. William A. Wilson, wrote that his grandfather, Jesse, was at the farm when the murder occurred and rushed to his son-in-law's side.  He carried his mortally wounded son to Caroline's home and after Isaac died within the hour, took over arrangements for the funeral.  The father of Isaac, Hiram Wilson, constructed the coffin at Jesse's behest.   Frankie Greer helped protect Caroline and her small children during the deprecations of Union sympathizers home invasions as law and order broke down in the mountain communities near the end of the War.

Above descendant Connie Burns, far right,  remarked over the courage of Frances Brown Greer.   W. A. Wilson described, in the book Neighbor to Neighbor, how his grandmother  confronted Union soldiers who stole food from her daughter's home in the Wilson Cove in Sutherland, North Carolina.  When one young soldier seized the butter pot, the brave Frankie chased him and while scuffling, suffered a deforming permanent injury to a finger from a bayonet thrust!  Left to right: Jackie  Burleson, Jim and Annie Heaton, and Connie Burns.

Above, the monument in Banner Elk to Frances Brown Greer who stood solidly with her family during the darkest days of the American Civil War.  Below the Greer monuments in the foreground, and the Presbyterian Church in the backgound.

A Book About Our Family

by Glenn N. Holliman

In 2007, The Center for Appalachian studies at Appalachian State University in Boonesboro, North Carolina (a town named after one of our ancestors) published an 180 page book entitled Neighbor to Neighbor. The volume is about the family of Frances Wilson Osborne, my generation's great grandmother. Edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Leila E. Weinstein, most of the paper back is a memoir by my generation's great, great uncle The Rev. William A. Wilson (1861 - 1951). His photo (right) and family are on the cover.

Born in Wilson Cove, near Sutherland, Ashe County, North Carolina, William was the last of eight children born to Isaac Wilson and Caroline Greer Wilson. He was the best educated of the children, having graduated from Trinity College (now known as Duke). Raised a Southern Methodist, he was ordained a pastor in that denomination.

In 1890, he accepted a call as a missionary to Japan, and spent the next forty one years mainly in the Hiroshima district. Every ten years he was granted a paid furlough. In his first decade in Japan, he met and married Mary Amelia McClellan, another Southern Methodist missionary. They were to have four children.

In the work Neighbor to Neighbor, Will shares his memories of growing up in the Western North Carolina mountains near Boone, NC to the south east, and Mountain City, Tennessee to the west. He collected stories and tales from his mother and siblings, and in his old age gathered them up in a memoir that remained unpublished in book format until recently.

Of particular interest is the story of the 'bush whacking' and murder of my generation's great, great grand father, Confederate Lt. Isaac Wilson in June 1864 while he was plowing his corn. My generation's great grandmother, Frankie Wilson Osborne, was with him when bullets fired from ambush took his life. Great great grandfather Isaac is buried in the Wilson Cemetery in Oscar Wilson Cove. His son, the Rev. William A. Wilson, the author of the poignant memoir, lies near him.

Neighbor to Neighbor can be ordered from the Appalachian State University bookshop. If they are out of the work, please contact Sandra Ballard, editor of the Appalachian Journal. The volume contains several photographs of Frankie Wilson Osborne and information on both her and G.W. Osborne, Jr., her husband and my great grandfather.

Will tells a story of an America that my grandchildren would not recognize. If you want your children to understand the violence and tragedy of the Civil War, have them read this book. Our immediate ancestors lived and suffered in a manner we can scarce imagine in the 21st century.

Next post, more on our Appalachian Mountain roots....