Road Trip: Eden, NC

Two weeks ago, my family members and I received the call that my grandmother on my dad’s had passed away. With that news, I prepared for my fifth trip in the last ten years to Eden, NC, on the border of North Carolina and Virginia, near Danville and Martinsville. Of the five trips, four have been for funerals – one every couple of years – enough so that the funeral director at Fairs, the local funeral home, probably recognizes me for a family member of those who’ve passed.

The trip to Eden is one that brings back mixed emotions, especially recently because of the past funerals, but also because we went there frequently during the summers when I was a kid, so we got to know our cousins and learned about what they did in their more stable lifestyle while our Navy family moved around from Maryland to Memphis to Florida to Georgia – wash, rinse, repeat. Mostly I’d rate those summers as a wonderful time, especially as dusk came and we stayed out late in the warm nights, catching fireflies and telling ghost stories.

There’s a bit of family lore – first about the town itself, which is the product of a merger of three smaller towns in the late ‘60’s – Leaksville, Spray, and Draper. This is textile mill country – there was an abundance of fresh water from two rivers, the Dan (this mural in the town center is a tribute to river commerce on the Dan) and the Smith that flowed through here. There was a Karastan carpet factory, where my grandmother on my mother’s side was a designer, and then the grandmother who just passed worked in a Fieldcrest mill. But all of this industry is gone now, and even the mill stores that lingered afterwards are gone.

The little house in the photo is where my great grandmother lived when she and her family moved down from Roanoake in the ‘30’s. My mother grew up here, and my aunt was born in the house next door. We usually stayed here on vacation – the whole neighborhood looks tiny now whenever we pass through. This is where my sister drank furniture polish when she was a toddler, and we rushed her off to the hospital for treatment…

The hotels are near the hospital, which is still characterized by the main building where she was treated. It gives us great pleasure, whenever we are in town, to remind her of the significance of the place.

A last couple of family lore thoughts, for now. My grandmother was a charter member of this church in Stoneville. And my step grandfather, who passed in 2001, joined that church with her when they moved back to the area from Florida in the late ‘80’s. He oversaw the construction of this picnic area using skills he learned as a Seabee in WW2.

I have a couple of posts yet about the trip. Like I said, the recent visits to Eden have usually been because of a sad event, but when we get there, there’s an impromptu reunion with relatives. And just like the old days, they’ve always got a surprise for us in terms of what they’ve been doing with their lives in the meantime between our visits.