I’m just back in Atlanta from the Henderson Family Reunion. We are from southern Wayne County, just below Wilson County, but my line arrived in Wilson about 1905 — a story I told here.

Our reunion brings together descendants of the children of James Henderson, a free man of color born about 1815. My line is that of his first son, my great-great-great-grandfather Lewis Henderson, who was alive when my grandmother Hattie Henderson Ricks was born. Lewis’ daughter Sarah Henderson Jacobs Silver was the first in the family to settle in Wilson. She reared her sister Loudie Henderson’s children Bessie Henderson and Jack Henderson and Bessie’s children (my grandmother and great-aunt Mamie Henderson Holt), and nearly 40 of their descendants were among the almost 150 Hendersons in Goldsboro this weekend.

I gave a family history presentation Saturday morning at First Congregational United Church of Christ, the church in Dudley that Lewis Henderson helped found in 1870. My cousins still attend the church; one was guest pastor yesterday. The church cemetery — where my great-great-great-grandparents, great-great-grandmother and her siblings, great-grandmother, and innumerable cousins are buried — is right down the road.

The headstone of Cora Q. Henderson, daughter of Lucian and Susan Henderson — my great-grandmother’s 23 year-old first cousin.

Lewis Henderson died in 1912, and his wife Margaret Balkcum Henderson in 1915. By then, only James Lucian Henderson, their elder son, remained in Dudley. Twice a week, Sarah walked from Elba Street down to Wilson’s A.C.L. depot and handed up to a porter a shoebox packed with cornbread and ham and sweet potatoes. At Dudley, he threw the box off the train to a cousin waiting on the ditch bank. And thus Uncle Lucian and Aunt Susie were fed.

The Dudley depot is gone, but these tracks still run to Wilson.

Nearly 120 years after my Hendersons left Wayne County, the links remain.

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, July 2024.