Deed book 290, page 587, Wilson County Register of Deeds office.

We first met Duncan J. Hargrove here, going down slow after believing himself to be hoodooed. The deed above reveals a different source of stress in Hargrove’s latter years, financial foes that led to the loss of much of his real estate.

About 1913, Hargrove bought a lot on Carolina Street from Wilson Insurance & Realty Company. Sometime later, on a basis unstated here, a man named Hugh Sheppard won a substantial judgment against Hargrove and his wife Viney Hargrove. A thirty-foot-wide strip of the lot was set off for the Hargroves as homestead property, and the rest of the lot — a twenty-foot strip — was sold at public auction to R.E. Townsend, a white real estate manager with a fat East Wilson portfolio.

Duncan Hargrove died 27 May 1935, leaving his wife and four sons, Willie, Ben, Jacob, and John Hargrove. Viney Hargrove died 9 April 1943.

Via the deed above, Willie Hargrove and wife Mary Lou Hargrove of Wilson, Ben Hargrove and wife Alice of Washington, D.C., and Jacob Hargrove and wife Curtis Hargrove of Washington, D.C., sold their interest in the Carolina Street lot to John Hargrove of Wilson.