1890s

Like most negroes, she was full of superstition.

In 1891, Rev. Owen L.W. Smith‘s sister, Millie Smith Sutton, shot and killed his wife Lucy Smith at point-blank range, believing that Lucy had poisoned her son.

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Wilson Advance, 9 July 1891.

On 5 November, the Advance reported that Smith had been found “mentally deranged” at the time she killed Smith and was committed to the insane asylum in Goldsboro.

The Wilson Mirror offered more on 11 November:

This tragedy had sequels.

Six years later, Sutton’s walking companion, Nettie Vick Jones, was stabbed to death on the street by her husband, A. Wilson Jones.

Ten years later, on 22 November 1901, the Times reported that Sutton had been released from the hospital and had returned to Wilson and, with Carrie Pettiford, had threatened the life of her brother’s newest wife, Adora Oden Smith. (In the 1900 census, Carrie was a boarder in the Smiths’ home.) Both were arrested.

I hope my white friends will remember me.

I do not know the context of this puzzling letter Rev. Jeremiah Scarborough wrote to the editor of Wilson Times.

Wilson Times, 15 September 1899.

Twenty years later, Scarborough was still preaching the gospel of accommodationism.

Wilson Times, 2 June 1919.

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Scarborough is elusive in records, too. He appears in the 1877 edition of Shaw University’s catalog as a Wake Forest native and graduate of its Normal School division. He is also listed in Claude Trotter’s History of the Wake Baptist Association, Its Auxiliaries and Churches, 1866-1966 (1876) as a pastor in 1878 at Wake County’s Friendship Chapel, near Wake Forest.

Rev. Melton paints his house.

On 1 February 1898, Leavy J. Melton purchased $39.13 of paint and other materials on credit for improvement of a house at the corner of Pender and Green Streets. Melton bought the paint from George D. Green and in exchange gave him a lien on the house, which he had purchased from Green in 1893.

Deed book 46, page, Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

She is proud of her name.

Wilson Advance, 7 May 1891.

In 1891, the Advance and the Tarboro Southerner ran a contest for longest name. In this round, the Advance proffered that of an eight year-old girl living on James Woodard’s large farm — Nina Ann Elizabeth Sarah Eliza Jane Monora Carrie Mabel Virginia Bethella Woodard.

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Perhaps: on 3 June 1917, Nina Woodard, 30, of Saratoga, daughter of Louis Brooks and Sue Woodard, married Adam Carter, 21, of Saratoga, son of Stephen and Hattie Carter. H.H. Sanders, Missionary Baptist minister performed the ceremony at “the church in Saratoga” in the presence of Ernest May and Jessie Darden of Saratoga and William Pierce of Wilson.