This marker on N.C. Highway 42 has long mystified me.
PINE TREE. Original center of Gardners township. Established by John Gardner. December 22, 1848.
Hugh B. Johnston Jr. described Pine Tree as the “community around John Gardner’s store about 20 years before and after the Civil War. On the Tarboro Highway about 6 1/2 miles E. of Wilson and 1 1/2 miles W. of Wilbanks.”
The records of Gardner’s 1857 estate, which was beset with claims and bad accounts receivable, do not note any enslaved property, but in the 1840 census of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, Gardner claimed one male aged 10-24, a female aged 10-24, and a female under age ten. In the 1850 slave schedule of Edgecombe County, John A. Gardner claimed ten enslaved people: women aged 50, 40, and 39; men aged 41, 23, 18, and 18; a boy aged 4; and girls aged 2 and 12.
Beyond these men and women, Gardner and Pine Tree would have been well known to enslaved people throughout what is now northeastern Wilson County.
Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, September 2024.
My Uncles and neighbors in Wilson always referred to the area as “Pinetops”..they used to frequent there…for those who had a car.
If you keep going east on 42, you’ll hit the town of Pinetops in Edgecombe County!