The remarkable children of George and Alice Wakefield.

George Wakefield married Alice in 1888. I've never been clear on whether George was Alice's first husband or not because I've seen her name in several combinations of Alice Letcher Hayes Reid. It wasn't unheard of in the late nineteenth century, for a person to marry and lose a spouse within the first few years. As we've seen previously with Len and Sallie Bryant, it does happen.

Greensboro Record, April 1900

At any rate, by 1890 Alice had given birth to the first of eight children she would bear between then and 1903. The oldest child was my great grandmother, Mary Pearl Wakefield (sometimes mislabelled Pearl Margaret).

Pearl grew up to be a remarkable woman in her own right, and I look forward to writing her story someday. A newspaper item from 1900 will suffice to foreshadow the strong woman grandma Pearl would become. Click on the clipping to make it bigger.

Apparently, longevity is a genetic trait among the Wakefields, because two of Alice and George's daughters, Lillian and Hallie, outlived even their nonagenarian father. Each lived about three months beyond their one-hundredth birthday. George, Jr., also lived a very long life, reaching ninety-two years old.

Not all the siblings were so lucky. Pearl died in 1953, at only sixty-three years old, and another sister, Edna, died in 1940 at forty-one. Hallie's twin sister, Beulah, died in infancy.

Perhaps the luckiest of all of George and Alice Wakefield's children was their youngest son.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, in 1914, Thomas and his older brother, George, Jr., were out hunting; Thomas was accidentally shot in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. The story, published in the Greensboro Daily News, was picked up by newspapers across the region, and perhaps was carried even further.

Miraculously, Thomas Wakefield survived and lived an otherwise long and unremarkable life. When he died in May of 1983 he was eighty years old, and I suppose, still carried that bullet in his head.

How Robert Morehead died on George Wakefield's farm.

Greensboro Telegram, 06 July 1900

On Friday, July 6, 1900, a man named Robert Morehead, an employee on George Wakefield's dairy farm south of Greensboro, was gored by a bull and died that afternoon.

Robert Morehead was a black man. He had a wife and small children. He lived in a place then outside the city limits called Warnerville.

Published Monday, 09 July 1900

In those days, there was no Occupational Safety and Health Administration coming to investigate. There were no Workmen's Compensation laws, and likely no life insurance to provide for surviving spouses and children. The social safety net was still decades away.

George Wakefield placed a statement in the newspaper a few days after the accident, essentially washing his hands of any responsibility, and it's likely that his account of the event is factual and complete, but we will never know.

A black man, born into slavery in 1849, was still valued little more than a horse, a bull, or a good dog to most white people 117 years ago, even in progressive Greensboro, North Carolina.

Had the farmhand involved in this accident been a white man, or a family member, we would probably have a much more detailed record of what happened. The investigation would have been much more thorough, and the newspaper items more detailed. Charges; criminal, or civil, or both, might even have been filed.

I wish I knew more about what happened to Robert Morehead, and his widow, and their children. I am sorry he lost his life that way.

Greensboro City Directory, 1896-97,  listing Robert Morehead and his wife, Clara.

George Wakefield, 1862-1956

My maternal grandfather was Vernon Eugene Coltrane; his maternal grandfather was George Wakefield, the fifth child of Ann Haines and Henry Wakefield. George was the middle child of nine, born September 11, 1862, near present-day Varney, Ontario, Canada.

George Wakefield, seated

When George was still a boy the family immigrated to the United States, settling in the Friendship community a few miles west of Greensboro.

The Wakefields prospered in the warmer southern climate, and their integrity earned them the respect and friendship of their new neighbors. It is known that Henry Wakefield, Sr., and at least one of his sons, William, became naturalized citizens in 1880. Whether Ann or the other children ever became citizens I have not yet been able to determine.

As a young man, George attended the New Garden Boarding School, a few miles east of the family farm. The Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, founded New Garden in 1837. It became the four-year liberal arts institution known today as Guilford College in 1888.

George has been painted, perhaps unfairly, for much of the last seventy years or more, as a wanderer, based on a passage in The Family of Henry Wakefield, North Carolina, 1805-1950.

"As a young man he had the wanderlust and his first work away from home was with Mr. Seymour Steel's Livery stable in Greensboro... where he earned $10 per week and his board."

Moving ten miles down the road, even in the days before automobiles, hardly seems like wanderlust. Ten dollars in 1880 was equivalent to about $223 in today's money. Add meals and a bed and George had a pretty sweet deal going on down at the stable.

Compared to his brothers, who managed a successful business while attending medical school or seminary at the same time, George may not have seemed headed for a life of distinction, but George Wakefield did something not many humans do: he lived to be almost a century old. In fact, George Wakefield outlived all but one of his siblings.

Let's start over. 

George Wakefield was born in Canada during the American Civil War, and moved to North Carolina with his family, during Reconstruction. George got an education and set about finding something useful to do.

As a farmer's son, George was no stranger to physical work, and like many of the Wakefields, he was very tall, so he was probably a powerful man in his prime. George was was neither lazy nor dull, he excelled at mathematics while at the New Garden school, but he was more physically suited to working with his hands and body than sitting behind a desk, so George went to work.

George Wakefield, in 1948, with his daughter Pearl,
grandson, Vernon Coltrane, and great-granddaughter, Brenda 

After earning a little nest egg at the livery in Greensboro, George is known to have traveled to Missouri to visit one of his uncles (perhaps the wanderlust remark noted above would be more applicable here), where he lived and worked in a sawmill camp. 

Upon returning to Greensboro, George joined Company Number One of the Greensboro Volunteer Fire Department and worked for a time with his brothers at their hardware store.  Later he worked for the Richmond and Danville Railroad as well as for J.I. Case, but George Wakefield is perhaps best remembered as a dairy farmer.

In 1888, at 26 years old, George married Alice Hayes Reid, three years his junior. The marriage produced eight children over the next fifteen years: Pearl, Lillian, Hallie and Beulah, Edna, Esther, George, and Thomas. Hallie and Beulah were twins, but Beulah died at a very young age. George and Alice had been married for fifty-one years when Alice died in 1939. George was 76. Their daughter Edna died the following year.

George lived another seventeen years, part of the time with his daughter, Pearl, and her husband, Lee B. Coltrane. George and Alice Wakefield's surviving children produced thirty-one grandchildren, the largest branch of the Henry Wakefield family tree. When he died, George Wakefield was over 93 years old.

Henry Wakefield's farm is now an airport.

The farm Henry Wakefield purchased in 1871 was probably located where Piedmont Triad International Airport is today.

The children of Henry and Ann Wakefield in North Carolina

Ann Haines and Henry Wakefield had eight children - five sons and three daughters - over the eighteen years between 1855 and 1873. When the Wakefields decided to relocate to North Carolina in 1871, after roughly a generation in Canada, the Civil War was still a very recent memory. Federal troops still occupied much of the former secessionist Confederacy and Reconstruction was in full swing. Outsiders, especially northerners, would have generally been looked upon with deep suspicion across much of the South.

North Carolina was no exception, and perhaps we should pause to wonder what, besides a  warmer climate, would have attracted a man like Henry Wakefield to this particular place; a section of a state that retained strong Unionist leanings throughout the Civil War.

Children of Ann Hunt Haines and Henry Wakefield, Sr.

The region around Guilford County was known as the 'Quaker Belt'. Members of the Religious Society of Friends, including some of our Coltrane ancestors, made up significant numbers of the early European settlers in the area.

Most Quakers back then were abolitionists and pacifists opposed to slavery and violence of any kind. Before the war, majorities in most of the counties of the Quaker Belt voted against secession by wide margins, and many men refused conscription and faced death rather than fight. Union sympathies ran deep across the region. Friendship, North Carolina probably looked like about the most civilized place south of the Mason-Dixon line to Henry Wakefield in 1870 and influenced his decision to bring his family to this place after military hostilities, and slavery had ceased.

All the Wakefield children, except for Ellen, were born in Canada and varied in age from toddlers to late teens when they arrived in North Carolina during the winter of 1871. Soon after arrival the younger children began attending a local school organized by the community, and most furthered themselves at New Garden Boarding School, better known since 1888 as Guilford College.

William Haines Wakefield was born in 1855. He studied at New Garden Boarding School, taught school for a couple of years, and then, with his father's backing and his brothers' help, established the W. H. Wakefield Hardware Company in Greensboro in 1879.

Between 1886 and 1890, while managing the business, William also studied medicine, first at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and later at Louisville Medical College, where he graduated with honors.

Doctor Wakefield, practiced in several cities before he settled in Charlotte in 1895, where he helped establish what is today Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center. He was also the editor of the North Carolina Medical Journal for a time. He retired from practice about six years before his death in 1929.

Will's sister, Esther Wakefield, was born in 1857, and attended New Garden school before marrying G.W. Armfield, in 1875; the couple had eight children. She died in 1942, 85 years old.

Henry Wakefield, Jr. like most of his brothers, was a tall man, standing about 6'2". He was born in 1859 and migrated south with the family at about twelve years old. As a young man, he worked as a clerk in his brother's hardware store, until it was sold in 1893. He then moved to Danville, Virginia where he worked as a bookkeeper. He died of pneumonia in 1902, at 43 years old.

Ann Haines Wakefield was born in 1861. After studying at New Garden she moved to Greensboro and kept house for her brothers, Will and John. She married L.C. Huffines in 1888 and they made a homeplace at Pleasant Ridge. She bore seven children into the world and died of pneumonia in 1919.

Wakefields, Greensboro City Directory, 1890-91

John Wakefield was born in 1864, graduated from Davidson College in 1893, and from Union Seminary before being ordained by the Presbyterian Church in 1896. He served various congregations before being appointed superintendent of the Barium Springs Orphanage, near Statesville, where he died in 1910.

Alice Haines Wakefield was born in 1866 and married a man named Charlie Stuart in 1900. The couple settled near Guilford Station and had several children. Charlie died in 1926; Alice followed fourteen years later in 1940, from pneumonia.

Another sister, Jane Wakefield, was born in 1868, and like her siblings spent time at New Garden Boarding School. She married into the Knight family and was widowed, with four small children, in 1906, prompting her to move into town and take a job, becoming the first operator of the Guilford College telephone exchange.

Thomas Wakefield was born in 1870, the last member of the family born in Canada. He married L.S. Lindsay of Davidson County in 1895 and fathered ten children. In 1897 Thomas purchased his father's farm from the estate and became the owner of the only threshing machine in the community. At various times he worked as a brakeman for Southern Railway, a district superintendent for International Harvester, owned a store near Guilford College, and became postmaster there in 1920. He died in 1931.

Ellen Carolina Wakefield was born on August 26, 1873, the first member of the family born a U.S. citizen. Nellie, as she was called, grew up and married J.E. Brown. The couple had five children and established a boarding house in Greensboro in 1915. Unfortunately, Mr. Brown died in 1917, but Nellie ran the boarding house until her children were grown, and lived well into her eighties.

That leaves George Wakefield, the fifth child of Ann Hunt Haines and Henry Wakefield, Sr, born on September 11, 1862, near Varney, Ontario, Canada. George was my great-great-grandfather. He didn't become a doctor or a preacher or an accountant, but he did a lot of interesting things and lived a long rich life, which will be the subject of the next installment.

The Wakefields of Ontario, Canada.

The story of the Wakefield side of our family picks up around 1805, in the town of Preston, Lancashire, England, with the birth of a baby boy named George.

George's parents were Joseph and Sarah Wakefield, and little more is known about his early life, except that as a young man George Wakefield somehow made his way several hundred miles south to Swindon, Wiltshire, where he courted and married Louisa Brown.

Henry & Ann Hunt Haines Wakefield

George and Louisa Wakefield's firstborn child, Henry, came into the world on February 21, 1828, followed quickly by two sisters. In 1832, when Henry was four years old the young family immigrated to Canada. Tradition holds that the middle daughter, whose name has been lost to history, died during the crossing and was buried at sea.  Young Henry's uncle, George's brother, is reported to have died when the ship he was returning to England.

Upon arrival in North America, it is believed that the Wakefields traveled overland from Boston, Massachusetts to Ontario, Canada, where they settled near a community called Arkell, roughly 100 miles west of Toronto.

Eight more children were born to George and Louisa Wakefield on the farm they carved out of the forest roughly a mile north of Arkell, five sons, and three daughters: William, John, George, Thomas, Edward, Esther, Jane, and Louisa.

In 1833 another group of immigrants sailed from England, most likely landing in New York. From there, Henry and Ann Haines traveled to Newark, New Jersey, where, two weeks later a daughter, Ann Hunt Haines was born. The Haines family also settled in the vicinity of Arkell, where Henry Haines built a large, two-story log home, part of which was reported still standing as late as 1950.

The estimated location of George and Louisa Wakefield's farm.

Ann Hunt Haines spent much of her childhood living in the home of a prosperous uncle, William Trentfield Haines, who remained in Newark. Ann lived a lavish life by all accounts, and only returned to her parents' wilderness home for brief visits.

It was on one of these visits that Ann must have been introduced to Henry Wakefield. On February 1, 1854, the pair were married by Reverend A. Palmour at Guelph. The first of  Henry and Ann's children, William Haines Wakefield, was born November 19, 1855, and over the next eighteen years, Ann would bear nine more children into this world.

One day in the Spring of 1860, George Wakefield trekked over the hill and across a swollen stream with his black dog to Arkell. The dog returned home alone that evening, and when George failed to appear in a timely manner the dog led the party to a hole in an ice dam blocking the ford. A search was made and the body of George Wakefield was found in the stream.

Upon completing his business in town, George Wakefield had turned toward home. When he reached the stream he must have tried to cross and slipped through the ice and drowned.  According to English law, this left Henry, his oldest son, in full ownership of the house and heir to the greater part of the estate. At the ripe old age of 32, Henry Wakefield found himself in charge of his father's profitable farm and other business affairs. A significant portion of the family income at the time derived from an apple orchard said to have still been producing fruit over a century later.

Henry Wakefield's home was near Varney, Ontario

Several years after George's death the house burned and Louisa moved away to Guelph, where she lived with her daughter, Esther, until the end of her life in 1882.  At that time, Henry settled the estate and divided shares equally among his siblings.

There is no record to tell us when Henry established his home some sixty miles north of Guelph, on a farm in Garafraxa Township, County of Grey, near a place today called Varney.

According to Wikipedia, "In some small townships in Ontario, the title reeve was historically used instead of mayor. In some other municipalities, "mayor" and "reeve" were two separate offices, with the mayor retaining leadership powers while the reeve was equivalent to what other municipalities called an "at-large councilor"."

According to The Family of Henry Wakefield, North Carolina, 1805 - 1950, in 1861, Henry Wakefield was elected Deputy Reeve. In 1862 he was elected Head Reeve, an office he held until 1865, and again in 1867, 69, and 1870.  The job is said to have included chairing the local school board, handling municipal business, and occasionally settling minor legal disputes.

The text further states that the "family lived in a log house for a number of years. This land was hilly and covered with stones, many of which he collected for burning to make lime, others to build a house. Sometime after 1866 Thomas Wakefield, a brother built the house for him. He too was a skilled workman, and the house is still standing in good condition. Later he built a barn, the largest in the township."

Friendship Township, Guilford County, NC, today.

Winters in Ontario were bitterly cold, and family tradition holds that Henry wanted to move the family to a warmer climate.  The Civil War in the United States ended in 1865, and federal troops were still occupying the treasonous southern states when Henry visited Friendship, North Carolina about 1870 and purchased a farm.

He returned to Canada, sold his farm, and in 1871 moved his family to their new home in the United States.  Livestock and furnishings were loaded onto a boxcar connected to a freight train leaving Guelph. Henry and his two eldest sons would travel in the boxcar, while Ann and the remaining seven children traveled by passenger train to Baltimore.

She and the children rented a hotel room and waited for Henry and the boys to arrive. When they didn't appear as scheduled Ann began to wonder what to do; she had run out of money and had no way to continue the journey. Just as she and the children were about to give up looking for Henry and the older boys, one of the younger sons, George, recognized a box through the open door of a freight car.

The children of Henry and Ann Wakefield
front row, left to right: Will, Ellen, Esther, Henry, Ann, George
back row, left to right: John, Alice, Jane, Tom

The family, reunited, embarked by boat that afternoon for Portsmouth, Virginia. From there they continued by rail to Greensboro, North Carolina. Arriving in the middle of the night, and reportedly walking the last several miles to their new home in a predominantly Quaker community still reeling from a war they never wanted.

Henry Wakefield established himself as a man of integrity in his new community. As if to cement the bond to their new home, Henry and Ann's tenth child, Ellen Carolina, was born August 26, 1873, in Friendship, North Carolina.  Henry became a naturalized citizen in 1880 and thereafter served as postmaster and express agent of the township for several years.

After many years of progressive farming and developing one of the most modern dairy operations in the county, Henry Wakefield died of a "heart ailment" on July 28, 1897. Ann spent her final years living in the home of her youngest son, Thomas, and died on January 12, 1920.