It all started with a couple of hours to kill. We had just left the attorney’s office after signing all of the paperwork to purchase our little seven acres in Alleghany County, NC. We wanted to go and start really exploring the plot we had bought, but being the rule follower that I am, I wanted to wait until the attorney could confirm that the seller has signed everything, and that we were the official owners of the property. I suggested that we go over to the Alleghany County Register of Deeds Office and just browse around a little bit and see what we could find about the previous owners of the property. Having worked in county government for over 30 years, I knew a little about how to approach this.
The ladies in the office were super helpful, and in no time I had the index books out and was looking for the grantor who had sold the land to the grantee that we had purchased from. As it turns out that “grantor” was quite the land trader! He and his various partners has bought and sold a ton of property in Alleghany County. Raymond Andrews and his partner, Green and Crouse, had purchased several parcels of land in Glade Valley, so I wasn’t sure how I would find the right one. Once I did, I could trace further back from there.
I located the plat map that Mr. Andrews had recorded for our little subdivision called Brushy Ridge. Not knowing where to go from there, I just scanned the different deeds in the area. I came across one that referenced some land that had been purchased by Mr. Andrews and his partners from a gentleman named David Jarrell, and from there, land purchased by Mr. Jarrell from a Henry Johnson that referenced the “Mary Jane Evans land” and half of the old Abram Evans homeplace. It was there that my obsession began! Who was this Mary Jane Evans and who was Abram?
Luckily the Register of Deeds is also the place that preserves birth and death records, so I searched for Mary Jane. I found her death certificate. She had died in January of 1921 from pneumonia and tuberculosis. Her parents were listed as Abrham and Mahala Evans.
We finally got the call that everything was done, and we officially the owners of the property! For that day, the exploring was over, but little did I know at the time that I would start unraveling the history of the land that we bought and the parcels around us. The Abrham and Mahala Evans family became very familiar to me along with their previous neighbors – the Carpenters, the Joines, the Caudills, and many others. These were the people who owned this land in the 1800’s. They farmed, raised families, went to church, lived, and died here. All of them were interesting to me. I wanted to know more, but with Mary Jane Evans, I was obsessed!
