Connecting old Cragmont
DNA research project rooted in Black Mountain community’s African American heritage
Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
February 24, 2021
Cragmont Community native Wallace Lynch, the oldest of five children born to Blanch and Juanita Burnette Lynch, visits the site of two iconic bookends in the Cragmont Community, Thomas Chapel AME Zion Church and the former location of Mills Chapel Baptist Church (in background), at the intersection of Fortune Street and Cragmont Road. Wallace is a participant in the new Cragmont Community DNA Project. The DNA of his deceased brother Winfred Lynch (1937-2019) has also been transferred into the project. Photo by Fred McCormick
Cragmont Road winds 1.9 miles from rural North Fork Road to West State Street, just west of downtown Black Mountain. The surrounding community, filled tightly with newly renovated homes and developments, branches out nearly a mile in either direction from the very center of the road, where the roots of the Cragmont Community were planted by formerly enslaved men and women.
The neighborhood today looks much different than it did by the early 20th century, when it was described by the U.S. Census as a “Colored Town” within the Black Mountain Township, but a new project will work to reconnect the original Cragmont Community through genetic genealogy.
Many of the oldest tombstones in the Oak Grove Cemetery mark the final resting places of African American people born into chattel slavery who settled in the Swannanoa Valley after emancipation. Names like Stepp, Lytle, Daugherty and Burnett(e) were some of the founders and initial trustees of the adjacent Thomas Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church, which was built in 1922 to replace the original house of worship erected in 1892 by those experiencing freedom for the first time.
Thomas Chapel and Mills Chapel Baptist Church, which was built in the early 1900s near present-day Carver Community Center (formerly George Washington Carver Elementary School) and later moved across the street, as their geographic locations suggest, were the center of the Cragmont Community. Both congregations — Thomas Chapel, named after Tom Pertiller and Thomas Daugherty, who were among the founders, and Mills Chapel, which took its name from first pastor Reverend John S. Mills — moved to nearby modern sanctuaries in the early 1980s.
While the Town of Black Mountain was in its infancy, a community of free Black people began to flourish throughout Cragmont, producing skilled farmers, carpenters, entrepreneurs, midwives and countless other professions immediately following emancipation. From its fertile ground, the community spawned generations of doctors, educators, athletes, laborers, artists and more.
The Cragmont Community DNA Project, facilitated by Houston-based company Family Tree DNA, the only genetic testing company that offers the ability to conduct group projects, will analyze samples of descendants of people of color who lived in the close-knit community beginning in 1930. Utilizing a combination of modern technology and traditional genealogy, the initiative will focus on the family connections of dozens of surnames with deep roots in Cragmont.
Studies will examine, but are not limited to the surnames: Brown, Burgin, Burnett(e), Cannaday, Carson, Daughtery, Dixon, Durham, Faust, Fortune, Foster, Flack, Gardner, Gragg, Gross, Greenlee, Hardy, Hamilton, Hayden, Hooper, Inabinett, Littlefield, Logan, Long, Lynch, Lytle, Kennedy, Nabors, Moore, Morehead, Rutherford, Simmons, Stepp, Twitty, Weaver, Wells, Williams, Wilson, White, Whiteside, Whittington.
Cragmont as it was
The arrival of the Lynch family home on a plot of land just south of Cragmont Road around 1944 is something Wallace Lynch will never forget, despite being only 9 years old at the time. The 86-year-old still lives yards away from his childhood home.
“In two days, me and my father removed the windows, took the tin off the top of the house and took it down to the frame,” said Wallace, who was living on the Broad River between Lake Lure and Rutherfordton at the time. “We brought it to Black Mountain on two trucks, up (N.C. 9), and my younger brother Winfred helped me and my father put it back together.”
The move to his mother’s hometown was intended to create more opportunities for the family, according to Wallace.
“My mother had been back in the woods by herself, and there weren’t a lot of jobs then,” he said of his early years in Rutherford County. “I had to walk about a mile from our house through the woods to meet a man named Mr. Bud Logan who would take us to school, right below the Lake Lure dam, in his 1939 Chevrolet. It was dark when I went to school, and dark when I went home. I had to light a pine torch to see, and when it got to where it was burning my hand, I’d light another one.”
Wallace and his four siblings would attend school at nearby Clear View, a short six-minute walk from their new home.
“It was an old rock building, and it was there where (Carver) is now,” he said. “Another big difference was that, in Rutherford County, our nearest neighbors were pretty far off.”
The Cragmont community was rural by today’s standards when the Lynch family came to town, but it was filled with family.
A photo from the 1930s shows the congregation of Mills Chapel Baptist Church in front of the building, which was later moved across the street. Mills Chapel was one of two churches that were the religious and social center of the Cragmont Community in Black Mountain. Photo courtesy of the Swannanoa Valley Museum & History Center
“Everybody was either kin or acted like kin, and I knew all of them, Black and White,” Wallace said. “I was kin to all the Stepps, and Mr. Arthur Stepp owned a small store just east of Kennedy Street, near Weaver Lane. A loaf of bread was 11 cents and a soft drink, like RC or Nehi, was 6 cents.”
When school was out and chores were completed, the neighborhood children would fish in Lake Tomahawk, which Lynch’s father Blanch helped build in the early 1930s, or explore the mountains around the Swannanoa Valley. On Sundays, virtually the entire community gathered in Mills Chapel and Thomas Chapel.
“I attended both churches,” Wallace said. “They would hold service in Mills Chapel one Sunday and then have it in Thomas Chapel the next week, and so on. I remember when they moved Mills Chapel from its old spot, where Carver is now, across the street. They moved the whole building, and I remember that like it was yesterday.”
In the blood
The bond of blood runs deep through Cragmont, and indeed extends around the world. Wallace was named after his uncle, Wallace Burnette, who was born in the community in February of 1928.
Burnette began a life of extensive travel at the young age of 13, when he left home to join Moore’s Minstrel Show. At the age of 19, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy where he became a Golden Glove Champion boxer by 1949.
A lengthy career in the Navy and U.S. Merchant Marines took the young Burnette around the globe, but the brief period that the USNS Cheyenne was docked in Subic Bay, on the west side of the island of Luzon in the Philippines, remained with him until his death in 2000.
Burnette, who was trained as a field engineer in the military and worked for Boeing and Litton Industries as a civilian, fathered three children throughout his nomadic life. His son, Cecil Davidson and daughter, Dr. Monique Ross, grew up on opposite sides of the country.
Ross, a family physician who lives in Northern California, began to develop a strong bond with her father by the age of 12, when she left the big city to spend summers visiting his native Black Mountain.
“It was magical to discover all of this family I had not really known before then,” she said. “It was also magical to discover a whole new world that also felt like it was part of who I am.”
The oldest daughter of Burnette felt an “instant connection” to her Cragmont relatives and was exposed to a culture that was simultaneously familiar and foreign.
“My mother’s family was very small, and I was a city kid, this was the country,” Ross said. “I remember on that first trip to Black Mountain my cousin Winfred told me he was going to get potatoes. I thought he was going to the store and he said he was getting them out of the garden. I didn’t know where potatoes came from, so I asked him if they came from a tree.”
The life-changing trip to the mountains began a tradition between Ross and her father that involved spending summers together, sometimes in Black Mountain and others on road trips where the daughter would be assigned the duty of navigator.
One day he told her something that she had never imagined.
“He used to tell me about his adventures, after my parents divorced in 1962,” she said. “He told me that he fathered a daughter in the Philippines. He had to leave, but he always intended to go back and find her.”
Burnette made at least one trip to the South Pacific and was unsuccessful in his quest to find the daughter he knew as Wilma Jara. When he was laid to rest at the WNC State Veterans Cemetery after passing away at the age of 72, all that he had of his lost daughter were the handwritten notes with the sparse information he had acquired over the years.
A decade later, when genealogical DNA testing became less cost-prohibitive, Ross initially submitted a sample through Ancestry DNA. Her goal was to discover more about where she came from.
“Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that I might have a sibling,” she said. “We never really had anything tangible, other than his papers, and it wasn’t really something he talked to me about a lot, so it wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind.”
Full circle in Cragmont
Scientifically speaking, there are no known magical or mystical qualities in blood, but the combined use of DNA technology and traditional genealogy can sometimes generate a similar level of amazement and wonder.
Connie Bradshaw, the professional genealogist who founded I Dig Your Roots in 2012, has witnessed or experienced most of the complicated emotions that can arise when ancestry is researched and analyzed. The retired 26-year U.S. Navy Veteran began her foray into genealogy by exploring her own family history, long before the advent of DNA testing.
She began researching her grandfather in 1980, and the work took her and her husband around the country in an RV after she retired from the service. Her search culminated with tracking down the original 1852 birth record of her great-grandfather.
“It was all about putting the pieces of the puzzle together,” she said. “So, I became very familiar with old-style research, and then later genetic research.”
Bradshaw, who is based out of Jacksonville, Florida, has done extensive research for the Historic Carson House in Marion, where she volunteers as the nonprofit organization’s genealogist.
Her work in McDowell County evolved into a reunion between Black and White descendants from the Carson and McDowell lines, which include some of the earliest residents of the Cragmont Community.
Cragmont Community native Lila Whittington Carter (1935-2019) seated front row far left, her sisters and daughter, were participants in the June 2017 Carson and McDowell Reunion held at the Historic Carson House in Marion, NC, connecting White and Black Carson descendants. Lila was the first of nine children born to Cragmont railroad man George Winslow and Minnie Rachel Jane Stepp Whittington. The Carson reunion was organized by Genetic Genealogist Connie Bradshaw, volunteer administrator for the John Carson of Western North Carolina DNA Project. Photo courtesy of Debra Yanik
“John Carson had two wives, and according to oral tradition he had children by one slave,” she said. “We established a DNA project to test Carson descendants from both wives, and test African American Carson males who would share the DNA with those descendants, or not.”
John Hazzard Carson, a member of the Burke County Militia that was part of the collective Overmountain Men who fought in the Revolutionary War, came to what is now McDowell County in 1775. He had seven children with his first wife, Rachel McDowell, who passed away shortly after moving into the home that still stands today. He later married Mary Moffitt McDowell, widow of a Pleasant Garden veteran.
“Colonel Carson,” as the five-time Burke County representative in the Constitutional Convention would be known until his death in 1841, acquired thousands of acres in present-day McDowell County. He claimed ownership of a number of enslaved people, and the resulting lineage is complex.
Bradshaw’s work on the DNA project has led to many discoveries, she said, including a Carson male who learned that his family, while having the name since they were enslaved, was a DNA match to the McDowell family.
“At the most recent reunion, we had some pretty amazing stuff come out,” she said. “There were probably as many of the descendants from slavery as there were White desendants. We had a representative of each line of descendants tell their story, and it was a very emotional experience for many of them.”
Another project Bradshaw worked on with connections to the Cragmont Community relates to the Payne family, which can be traced back to the 1830 census as “free people of color.” Bradshaw volunteered to be the project administrator for the Payne Family DNA Research Project, which includes George Washington Richard Henry Lee Payne, one of the earliest blacksmiths at the Biltmore Estate and grandfather of Burnette.
Through her DNA analysis, Bradshaw confirmed a longstanding family account that singer and actress Freda Payne was a descendant of the N.C. line of the Payne family.
In California, around 2018, Ross noticed a “close relative” linked to her DNA test results. She contacted the mysterious person.
“The email she used was actually her son’s email address,” Ross said. “I reached out and said that the results say we’re close relatives. He said, ‘it’s probably through my mom’s dad, he was a Merchant Marine in the Philippines and that’s all we really know about him.’”
Ross knew she had found her sister, the daughter her father had searched for. The burden of confirming the relationship between Ross and Mary Jara Norausky fell to Bradshaw, who analyzed the raw data from Ancestry using the tools of Family Tree DNA.
Mary Jara Norausky, daughter of Cragmont Community native Wallace Burnette (1928-2000), holds a photo of her father who searched for her until his death. Mary was conceived during the summer of 1963, while Burnette was assigned to the Cheyenne at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines, as the ship awaited orders to deliver cargo to Vietnam. Mary was discovered through DNA testing. Her test results were analyzed by Genetic Genealogist Connie Bradshaw, as part of Family Tree DNA’s Payne Family of Western North Carolina DNA Project. Courtesy photo
“When the DNA match between Monique and Mary was revealed, we transferred them into the system at Family Tree DNA which allowed me to compare each of the 23 chromosomes,” Bradshaw said. “The amount of DNA they shared was in the half-sibling range (approximately 1,700 centiMorgans) and outside of the full sibling range (approximately 2,500 centiMorgans).”
A half-sibling DNA match can often mimic that of a grandparent or aunt and uncle, she continued, and traditional genealogy confirmed that Norausky, born April 9, 1964 in Olongapo City, Philippines, was the sister of Ross and daughter of Burnette.
The sisters first met in Indianapolis for Thanksgiving in 2018, and the following summer Ross had a chance to bring Norausky to Cragmont, a place in which the older sister shared many fond memories with their father.
“It warmed my heart to be able to bring that same sense of family to my sister, who had disconnected for so many years,” Ross said. “I felt like she could finally exhale, because now she found her people.”
Where is Cragmont now?
Longtime residents like Lynch hardly recognize the Cragmont of their youth as lots fill up with new homes, old homes are remodeled or removed completely, and new faces move in.
“A lot of people left over the years for different reasons,” Lynch said. “Some because of discrimination they may have faced and many more because they couldn’t get jobs near their hometown.”
Lynch remained on his family’s land and found a way to stay close to the mountains he loves for the better part of 77 years.
“The soul of the community has changed,” he said. “All of the houses are close together; all of the driveways are paved. You can’t stop progress, and I see a lot of progress, but it often feels like it can work against you.”
But, the legacy of the community continues to thrive today, as the descendants of Cragmont families carry on the traditions and values that were instilled by their ancestors.
Wallace Lynch shares the history of the Cragmont Community with younger generations at the Oak Grove Cemetery adjacent to the current Mills Chapel Baptist Church. Photo courtesy of Courtland Bivens III
By the 1930s and 1940s the U.S. Census defined the “Cragmont Settlement” as running along both sides of the street with which it shared its name and included what Bradshaw calls “a very industrious group of people.”
“Something that stands out looking at the family component is that many people there owned their houses as early as the 1930s or 40s,” she said. “Some even owned their entire farms, and often the fathers and mothers were both working, which wasn’t always the case back then.”
Older children often worked, too.
“This was not a community where people just sat around like we do today,” she said. “If you could work, then you worked. Then everyone attended school and church together, and often worked together. Those values were a direct contradiction to many of the stereotypes that persist today, and I believe that is a credit to the entire community.”
The Cragmont Community DNA Project will allow descendants with connections to the neighborhood to learn about the ancestors who came before them and strengthen family bonds with existing relatives. Those who wish to participate can order a Family Finder autosomal DNA test, or join the group if they have already tested through Family Tree DNA. Many autosomal DNA test results from other labs can be utilized on the platform.
“This community began as a very interconnected one, so I think this project will help bring people closer to family members or discover relatives they didn’t know they had,” Bradshaw said. “And, from a personal perspective, if I can help some family member who feels distanced from their family for whatever reason, it’s very rewarding.”
Bradshaw and co-administrators of the project, Black Mountain natives Les Whittington and Regina Lynch-Hudson, are offering free tests for the three oldest Cragmont Community natives currently living furthest away from the neighborhood. Interested applicants can submit their name, age, current mailing address, phone number and date they relocated to Bradshaw at rvsailor@aol.com by Monday, March. 22.
“It is truly remarkable what DNA can do,” Ross said of the connection she still maintains with her brother and once-lost sister. “I still remember that instant connection I felt to Black Mountain when I first came there, and being able to share some of that with my sister will always be incredibly special to me.”
For more information on the Cragmont Community DNA Project, including links to join, visit https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/cragmont-community/about/background