Cataloging our collection’s North Carolina phone books provided a great education for me about some of our State’s interesting and unique town names. While trying to catalog a troublesome Rockingham County telephone book, whose title and name changes were causing me a great deal of head-scratching and temple rubbing, I unearthed a fun factoid concerning one of these “interesting and unique town names”, which made it all worthwhile.
In 1968, the “Leaksville, Spray, Draper phone book” changed to the “Eden phone book.” Unfamiliar with this area of North Carolina, I went straight to the North Carolina Gazetteer, by William S. Powell, to help clear up my confusion. I found that a merger of the three towns had occurred, resulting in a new town, which was named Eden. This cleared up my telephone book title confusion, but while searching for this, I also found an entertaining piece of North Carolina trivia about Spray: according to Powell’s Gazetteer, the area in north Rockingham County was “settled about 1813 and known first as Splashy from the water thrown up by a water wheel at a local mill; name later changed to the more sophisticated Spray.” Splashy, North Carolina … sounds like a nice cool place to have been on a hot summer day!
There’s one more aside about the “Tri City” area of Leaksville, Spray and Draper, come Eden, NC It lies in the name that did not pass muster. When the vote was tallied, and I was away in Korea. clearly Eden was the winner; however, the real story is in the name that came in a close second, a combination of all three original names, or Leaksville,Spray, Draper, N.C. that would have been shortened to “LSD, N.C. Bear in mind if you will that it was during the days of the “drug culture” in the US and Timothy Leary’s call to “Tune in, turn on and drop out”
Had LSD, NC passed muster every acid head, rocker and hippie in the world would have endeavored to move there just to be able to claim the address as home. That would have been a tuned in, turned on, dropped out town the likes of which has never been known.
Be that as it may, as soon as the town preachers and leaders discovered there was such a thing as LSD and free-love loose in the world, a move to void the vote would have been rushed into effect. See the story @ http://www.leaksville.com if you haven’t already. Also I have a short story on the site in “contributions” under my name if you like.
How do I know that? I was born in Leaksville in 1944 and lived there until making my departure with my hometown bride, to whom I’ve been happily married for 48-years, in 1993.
I overlooked one point, the year consolidation passed was 1967, not 1968. I passed through Eden in August of 1967, picked up Dee, my bride since 6/3/66 and took her away to Germany for three-years. Notice the time line. We have been married only 27-days when I arrived in Seoul, Korea to return thirteen months and a day later, so we had passed our own-year anniversary and had never lived together. We returned in 1970 with our son Kevin, a little tow-headed cutie dressed in German lederhosen, suspenders and a German Alpine Mountaineer’s hat; everybody wanted to take him home with them.