The Check is Not in the Mail, Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2025

• November 12, 2025
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• Posted By: Scott Family Collection

One of the most interesting items in the Scott Family Collection is a simple silver dollar. The dollar is part of the Melville Dairy display, and it is placed right next to a photograph of Ralph H. Scott, one of the founders of Melville Dairy. In the photograph, Ralph is sitting at his desk behind a huge pile of silver dollars some of which were used to meet payroll for the month of August, 1952.

 In fact, I should say two payrolls, one for the plant employees and one for the farmers who supplied their milk to the dairy.

Why on earth would a modern, state of the art milk processing plant choose to meet a monthly payroll using coins?

Well, the explanation is simple. Despite promoting the dairy as a simple, local, home town dairy, which of course it was, Melville Dairy was, in fact, a huge contributor to the economy of Alamance County. In a single month, 60,000 dollars flowed from the two dairy payrolls into the economy of Alamance County.

But how to make this contribution visible?

Well, silver dollars were a rarity back then. According to Otis Lackey, former Assistant Manager of Melville Dairy, you did not encounter silver dollars much in your daily life. So the appearance of so many of them all at once all over Alamance County, was a way to get noticed.

The coins were ordered from a bank in Charlotte and they were delivered to the Burlington Post Office. A Melville Dairy truck picked them up from the Post Office and delivered them to the plant. The coins were sorted into bags and used to pay the plant employees and the farmers. People used the coins everywhere, and they began to pop up in cash registers all over the county.

Even today, 73 years later, many visitors to the Scott Family Collection will stop in front of the display and tells us excitedly how a relative who worked at the dairy saved out some of their silver dollars to give them to family members as mementos.

Now that is great marketing!

Pulling and Selling Tobacco in the Late 20th Century, guest blog post by Chris Ackiss. Posted on November 4, 2025.

• November 4, 2025
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• Posted By: Scott Family Collection

Although my parents both came from families living in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, they did not meet until college. Mom’s father worked for Kingsdown, the company his father had founded in 1904. Dad’s father had received a promotion which required him to move his family to the same town.  

My father was in the Air Force for the first part of my life which is why, despite my Southern roots, I was born in Japan.

When my father got out of the Air Force, we moved to Raleigh so he could further his education at NC State. He planned on going to Carolina for law school but the family kept growing and so instead, he went to work for Georgia Pacific. We lived in Raleigh until 1977 when Dad got a new job in Asheboro.

Asheboro is not Raleigh. Back then, it was a small industrial town with about 12,000 residents. There wasn’t much to do when school let out for the summer. My buddies and I couldn’t drive yet, so we spent a lot of time hiking around Back Creek Mountain. We all did odd jobs, cutting grass, cleaning yards, and collecting bottles for money.

Freedom came when one of my friend’s older brother David got a new car, a Pontiac GTO. It was green with a white vinyl roof; the seats were white as well. That car was fancy, fast, and sharp!

It was David’s idea for us to work in the tobacco fields. We had to get up early, because work on the farms in Ramseur began at 5:30 and it was a 30 minute drive.

You might be wondering why a boy who was born in Japan and raised in Raleigh would be interested in pulling tobacco. In fact, my family on both sides were farmers going back to the 1700s. I was curious to find out more about my Southern roots. And, it didn’t hurt that we would be paid every day at quitting time.

Picking tobacco is no joke. We wore long sleeves to avoid getting tar and nicotine on our arms. Also the plants were soaking wet with dew. You walked bent over up and down the rows, grabbing the lowest three or four leaves on each plant (the sand lugs, or primings as they were called) and snapping or “pulling” them off. When you got an armload, you carried them over to a sled attached a tractor. And you did this over and over again, moving from field to field, farm to farm, until it was time to go home. Before we left for the day, we had to wash with Lava soap to scrub all of the tar off.

When full, the sleds were driven to the barn where the women and girls were in charge of hanging the leaves up to dry.  If it was a stick barn, they had to wrap the leaves around a pole and then climb all of the way up to the rafters to suspend the poles from the beams.

Our breaks consisted of nabs or a moon pie and a Coke (RC cola). The day started early and ended at noon, when it was too hot to continue working. We got paid every day in cash, often spending some of it on lunch. We gave some of it to David, to pay for gas, but there was always a bit left over for us boys.

I went away to school in Virginia, and did not encounter tobacco again until years later. By the time I was in college, I was looking around for a career.

My parents introduced me to a friend who was a Vice President at Universal Leaf. My interest in my family history of farming resurfaced, and for a season I worked in a tobacco warehouse called The Liberty. When I was offered a job I bit like a catfish with a mouth full of chicken livers. Catfish really do love chicken livers, in case you were wondering.

But back to the job.

I was hired as a weighmaster, weighing all the “sheets” as they were called and prepping the bales for sale. The farmer would present me with a card that had pounds written on the card. I would deduct the pounds being weighed from the card. Each farm had its own card. When the card balance reached zero, the farmer had used up his allotment, even if he had more tobacco available. All of the “sheets” went down to the sales floor in the order that I weighed them. This way, when the auction was going on, the farmer could be present when his crop was sold.

My other job at the warehouse was as a ticket handler on the sales floor. The ticket handler’s job was to hand the ticket on each bale to the ticket writer. The ticket writer interpreted the auctioneer’s chant and wrote the grade, the purchasing company, and the price the bale brought all on the ticket. He would flip the tickets off his clipboard as he walked along; the tickets would land perfectly on each bale.

The sale had a cast of characters, with each one having their own role. The buyers walked on one side of the row with the farmer; the auctioneer, warehouse owner, ticket handler and ticket writer walked on the other side. It seemed like a battle. You did this with several breaks, until the whole warehouse was done. At day’s end, the bales would be sorted by purchaser and moved by dolly onto the trucks that would deliver them to the buyer’s processing plant. And you did this every day until the sale was over.

I never did pursue a career in tobacco, but I did train as a cotton grader. But that, as they say, is another story.

What is a Marriage Bond? Posted on October 21, 2025

• October 21, 2025
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• Posted By: Scott Family Collection

A marriage bond is a written statement of intent to marry. Such documents were in common use in North Carolina counties before 1868 when the authority to record marriages was transferred to the Register of Deeds. After that date, the only public record of a marriage was the marriage license.

Before 1868, folks getting married would post a marriage bond. That is, the prospective groom had that responsibility.

To acquire a marriage bond, the prospective groom and one or more bondsmen agreed to forfeit a sum of money if for some reason the marriage did not take place. One reason for a marriage not being possible might be that one or both of the parties was/were already married. Another barrier might be the existence of consanguinity, which occurred when the prospective bride and groom were too closely related.

You can find the names of the prospective groom and prospective bride on the bond, but the parents were not typically included. Marriage bonds were filed in the county of the bride’s residence. Also included were the names of the bondsman or bondsmen and the witness or witnesses.

While working on the Scott Family genealogy, I came across the marriage bond for Samuel Scott and Nancy Bryan(t) Scott. The document was hand written and dated February 17, 1794. Nancy’s last name seems to have a little extra mark, possibly the letter “t.” We do think, however, from other genealogical records that her last name was in fact Bryan.

In 1794, when Samuel and Nancy decided to marry, Samuel was thirty years old and Nancy was twenty one.

At that time, Samuel was required to file a marriage bond in the amount of four hundred pounds. We don’t use pounds as currency any more, but even so, this seems like a huge amount of money. Samuel’s bondsman was James Mebane. The witness was someone named A. B. Bruce.

Here is an image of the marriage bond between Samuel and Nancy.

Busy as a Bee in a Bustle, posted on September 30, 2025

• September 30, 2025
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• Posted By: Scott Family Collection

I was browsing the website of the Alamance County Historical Museum recently and came across a photograph of a dress made around 1870. The dress was labeled as green moire silk and it sported a bustle. I have always wondered how women who wore such things sat down. Did they simply perch on the edge of their seats? Did they push the bustle to one side? Or did they only wear such dresses standing up?

I contacted the museum and asked if I could reproduce a photo of the dress. They agreed, so here it is and here is their image credit: reproduced with permission from the Alamance County Historical Museum.

As it turns out, the dress was owned by Frusannah Kime Sellars. See the black and white image of her below the image of her dress. She appears to be in costume, as the photo was taken around 1918. I think by then, bonnets such as she is wearing might not have been in style. Her grandson B. Everett Jordan was in textiles, so this might have been to do with that.

Frusannah was born in 1833 and died in 1922 at the age of 89. She and her husband, Dr. Benjamin Abel Sellars had 11 children-7 sons and 4 daughters.

Thirty six years after Frusannah died, the lives of two of her grandchildren would intersect in a very significant way on the very same day. And here is how it happened:

On Thursday, April 17, 1958, Governor Luther Hodges traveled by limousine from Raleigh to Haw River, to visit one of Frusannah’s and Benjamin’s grandchildren, Mary White Scott. The occasion was a sad one, as he was bringing his condolences to Mary, whose husband US Senator W. Kerr Scott had died the day before in Alamance General Hospital.

When the Governor’s driver, Harold Minges, pulled into Senator Scott’s driveway, they were told that Miss Mary as she was called, was not there. She was at Hawfields Presbyterian Church, selecting the plot that would be Kerr’s final resting place. Mary’s mission was urgent; the funeral would be the very next day.

After visiting with “Miss Mary” as she was called, Governor Hodges traveled to Saxapahaw to visit with B. Everett Jordan. After much deliberation, Governor Hodges had decided to appoint B. Everett Jordan to fill the last two years of Kerr Scott’s term in the Senate. Mr. Jordan was a successful mill owner; his factory made textiles. Despite his busy schedule, B. Everett Jordan was ready to accept Governor Hodges’ offer. B. Everett was  interested in a career in politics and planned to run for the Senate after his two year term expired. He went on to serve in the Senate from 1958 to 1973.

Mrs. Scott and Mr. Jordan were related; they were first cousins which meant that Frusannah Kime Sellars was the grandmother for both of them.