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Wilkes: Blackburn,
Elk Spur, homesite, Stone Mountain September 29, 2019 The Old Elk Spur Road My
great uncle told me the story about going to visit his grandparents to get a
calf. Nothing was easy back in those
days – it was probably the late 1930s.
They lived up the mountain in Roaring Gap, and his grandparents were
John F. Blackburn and Carrie Harris Blackburn who lived down the mountain in
Traphill. This is a picture of John
and Carrie, perhaps with one of their four daughters in the 1910s. The
way up and down the mountain was by using the Elk Spur Road. By our standards today, it might be a
stretch to call it a road. It was a rough,
dugout dirt path just wide enough for their old two-door Model A Ford. His mother Edith was driving, he and his
brother (my grandpa) were in the back, and their little sister was up
front. They all made it down the
mountain, picked up their calf, and then started back up. My
great uncle and grandpa were maybe 12 and 10 years old. They were in the back holding onto the calf
– not an easy thing to do when the car was making its way from one washed out
rut to the next, bouncing up the road!
At one point the car overheated, and they had to stop to put water in
the radiator, but they eventually made it back to the top. I
recently discovered where my great great grandparents lived by searching
through the deed books. John F.
Blackburn bought 33 acres from Samuel M. Johnson in 1906. This tract was originally a 30 acre grant
to Samuel’s father Leander Johnson in 1852.
It was located about a quarter mile behind the Stone Mountain Country
Store on the John P. Frank Parkway. This
is the 33 acre property, partially bounded by the old Elk Spur Road. That is, this road was being called “the
old road” in 1906. Coincidently,
I learned that there is a recently created trail that runs through their property. The Elkin
Valley Trails Association is a volunteer group that has been working to
create trails throughout the Elkin area, eventually creating a continuous
trail that leads from Elkin to Stone Mountain. When I learned that one of these trail
sections runs through the property of my ancestors, I knew I had to check it
out and see if I could find their old house even though it’s been nearly 80
years since my family lived there.
This is the Sawyers
Trail with the Blackburn property shown in blue. Below
is a section of the Sawyers Trail near where my great great grandparents
lived from 1906 until the early 1940s. I
found their home only a short distance off the trail. There are two chimneys separated by what’s
left of a foundation. There was a
cellar under the living room, but now it’s only a sunken hole in front of the
fireplace. The picture below shows one
full chimney on the left, and the bottom half of a chimney on the right. This
is a closer view of the full chimney.
This was probably the living room fireplace, with the basement or
cellar underneath the floor. The
house is close to an old road which is likely the remnants of one of the old
Elk Spur Roads. There were multiple
versions of this old road over its 200 year history, with perhaps each one
being an improvement over the previous one as transportation methods changed
from horses to wagons to cars. It
takes all kinds of information from a variety of sources to tell a more
complete story, and this one has it all.
It was a combination of oral history, trail creation from the EVTA, deed
research to find the location, and genealogy research to learn more about this
part of my family. Visit
the EVTA website to see maps and
details about all the trails they’ve created in the Elkin area. Comments? jason@webjmd.com |