Tag Archives: Stokes County

“I Won’t Take Anything Off of Anybody”

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Clady F. Johnson was born in 1902 in Stokes County, N. C., the eighth child of Lindsay Johnson and Martha White.

The following article about Clady appeared in the Western Sentinel newspaper in April of 1921:

“Clady Johnson Sent to Roads for Month:

“Can’t you get a job?  asked Judge Hartman of a young white man in the city court this morning, who was on trial for being a vagrant.  ‘I can,’ was the reply, ‘but they won’t pay over $1.50 a day, and before I’ll work for that, I’ll go to the county roads.’

“‘Thirty days,’ said the judge.

“‘I understand you are a rather hard sort of a fellow,’ said the judge, and the young man replied:

“‘I am one of these fellows that loves a fight when I get started.  No, sirree, I won’t take anything off of anybody.’

“The young man’s replies to the court were rather abrupt.

“The defendant’s name was Clady Johnson, and he was arrested last night and held in jail until this morning.”

Clady’s Story—Low Wages

When Clady was about 17 years old, his parents moved from a farm in Stokes County, N. C.,  to Winston-Salem. There he, his brother Jim, and their father  worked at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.  Clady was able to read and write, and he had a third-grade education.

While living in Winston-Salem, Clady apparently quit his job in the cigarette factory, unhappy with the low wages.  In the 1920’s, a young man with no occupation could easily be accused of being a vagrant, by loitering in public places, possibly drinking (in the time of Prohibition) or fighting.

$1.50 for a day’s work (in 1921 usually nine hours) averages out to 16 cents per hour.  Sixteen cents back then had the buying power of $2.85 in 2025, so far from a living wage that no wonder Clady refused to accept it.

In the labor market then, race and gender affected wages, just as they do now, but with more extremes. In the tobacco industry in Virginia in 1928, the highest wage was paid to white men, at 53 cents/hour.  The wage dropped to 31 cents for white women, 29 cents for black men, and 16 cents for black women. 

Black women were the largest group employed by R. J. Reynolds, and perhaps this affected the rate of pay, even for white men, who could easily be replaced by much cheaper labor.

In the many textile factories in the area, things were no better.  The average hourly earnings for a male in the cotton textile industry in North Carolina in 1920 was about 50 cents.  In 1922, it actually fell, to 30 cents.  There was a major economic recession in 1921 and many newspaper articles report cuts in industrial wages.  Fifty cents was still more than Clady claimed to be paid at RJR.  In fact, he was earning less than half the national average for a factory worker in the U. S. in 1921.

Working on the Chain Gang

Clady’s bravado in telling the judge he’d rather work on the roads may have been reduced quite a bit by the reality of working on a chain gang.  Chain gangs were the low-cost solution to road building and maintenance until the 1950’s.  Just like in the movies, the men were dressed in black and white striped uniforms and had iron shackles on their ankles joined by a chain short enough to prevent them from running.  They were housed in temporary camps located near their work site, in all weathers, guarded by men with shotguns, and flogged for misbehavior.  They worked with picks and shovels, doing hard labor that is now done by machines.

Clady’s change in attitude was revealed when his name appeared in the newspaper again, this time in a list of thirty-three white men who had escaped the chain gang over a ten-year period.

Life Afterward

The family moved to Mt. Airy soon afterward. In 1930, Lindsay Johnson was no longer working and his three youngest sons were all working in a furniture factory, Clady, as a sprayer.  Lindsay died in 1931 at age 70 and Martha died in 1933. 

By the 1940 census, Clady was living with his youngest sister, Mary, in Washington, D. C.  He was unemployed and unable to work.  His brothers Elijah and John, also living in Mary’s household, both registered for the WWII draft.  Clady apparently never registered, perhaps because of his health, and he died in 1941 of respiratory illnesses.

Sources:  

The Western Sentinel (Winston-Salem, N.C.) Apr 23, 1921, p. 17.  “Clady Johnson Sent to Roads for Month.”

“Winston-Salem Journal,  Dec. 15, 1922, p. 4. “Reward Offered for Runaways,”

Journal Article, “Wage Rates and Hours of Labor in North Carolina Industry,” H. M. Douty; Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Oct., 1936), pp. 175-188.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: FRASER Newsletter, July 1930, Volume 31, Number 1, Date: July 1930. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/monthly-labor-review-6130/july-1930-608191?page=176

https://www.myamortizationchart.com/inflation-calculator/], accessed 10 July 2025.

 U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics/Data Tools/Charts and Applications/Inflation Calculator; https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, accessed 4 June 2025.

Handbook of labor statistics / U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics 1936,  Accessed online on 4 June 2025, at https://babel.hathitrust.org/

1910 U.S. Census, Quaker Gap, Stokes County, N. C.; NARA Microfilm # T624-1128; Enumeration District 182, p. 2B.

 1920 U.S. Census, Winston Township, Forsyth County, N. C.; E. D. 90, pp.  8A-8B.

Winston-Salem, N. C., City Directory, 1921, p. 279; Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989, database on-line.

Ernest H. Miller, Miller’s Mount Airy, N. C. City Directory, Asheville NC:  Southern Directory Co., 1928-1929, pp. 170-171.

1930 U.S. Census,  Mt. Airy township, 2nd Ward, Surry County, N. C., ED 86-12,  “Lindsay J. Johnson” family, p. 3B.

1940  U. S. Census, Washington, D. C., Block 15, E. D. 27B, p. 61B; April 9, 1940; accessed on ancestry.com.

Certificate of Death of Clady Johnson, March 7, 1941, District of Columbia, Health Dept., Bureau of Vital Statistics.

“I Won’t Take Anything Off of Anybody”

Genealogy Skills: Transcribing Old Documents

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How do you read these words: lefs, witnefs, acrofs? Is the name spelled Wright, Right, or Rite? What did they mean when they described a woman as a man’s consort?  Documents created before we had keyboards are hard enough to read.  Even hand-writing was different back then, sometimes with completely different symbols for letters of the alphabet or for key words.

I found some good clues in this webinar by Diane L. Richard on “Accurate Transcriptions for Historical Records”  https://www.ncgenealogy.org/accurate-transcriptions-historical-records/ on the North Carolina Genealogical Society website.

The author’s most important advice for me was, don’t try to clean up the document to make it easier to read—you may actually be destroying important information. She has some good methods for copying the document just as you see it, warts and all.

I decided to practice those skills by re-transcribing an old will, because I had, with good intentions, tried to make it more orderly. The original did not put spaces between the  numbered provisions for the beneficiaries. It had very few periods to separate sentences and few commas to separate the names of descendants.

However, by going back to the starting point and copying just what was there, I discovered an initial I had not noticed before in a person’s name. This is a small detail, but it might lead to finding more records about that person. Also, I was able to read some words that previously  seemed illegible, and I had skipped them instead of setting them out with brackets or notes. Every clue is important, considering how few records we have of our oldest ancestors.

The revised transcription of the Last Will and Testament of Wright Johnson of Surry County, N. C., my 5th great-grandfather, can be found here: https://8families.blog/2020/02/02/i-wright-johnson-of-the-county-of-surry/

Wright Johnson had eight children and many descendants. His land lay in three counties: Surry, Stokes, and Patrick, on the N. C./Virginia border.

Copyright 2019 by Glenda Alexander.  All Rights Reserved.

Land Records Help Fill Out a Family Tree

I recently learned that records of land sales, taxes, and legal disputes can be as valuable as to a family history as wills and deeds. I found two records that, between them, told a dramatic and sometimes tragic story.

Wright Will (1)

In his will, my 4x great-grandfather, Wright Johnson, left land to seven of his eight children. He had land in three counties: Surry and Stokes in North Carolina and Patrick in Virginia. At his death in 1866, his 460 acres were contiguous and his home was on Archie’s (also called Archer’s) Creek, straddling the state and county lines. The communities of Westfield and Quaker Gap are in that area.

Wright’s son Henderson, my 3x great-grandfather, inherited 100 acres in the northwest corner of Stokes County, containing a small mountain called Archie’s Knob. It was totally wooded with the exception of one cleared field and a road or two that Wright had cut through it.

Henderson first married in 1833, to my ancestor, Amelia Norman Jones, and raised five children, plus a step-daughter, on his father’s land. After about thirty years of marriage, Amelia died, and Henderson remarried in 1865, at about age 60, to Malinda Spangler Hall, who was 21. He soon had four more children, plus a step-son who died young.

Wright died in 1866. His wife, Nancy Wilks Johnson, followed him within about four years. At the time of their deaths, Henderson and Malinda lived with them. In 1873, Henderson, about 70 years old, also died. Malinda was left with four children from one to nine years old, and no means of support.

In the meantime, Henderson had leased his land to a man named Henry Slate, who built a cabin for himself and two other cabins, which he rented. He cleared some land and tried to raise corn and tobacco without much success. He moved out of his cabin, and Malinda moved in. She stayed a brief time, then left for Mt. Airy, where she found work in a factory. She left the cabin rented to a woman named Polly George. Polly and her children had “some trouble,” unspecified, and the family left the area. Malinda then placed an elderly woman named Celia Pringle in the cabin, to take care of “her things,” presumably furniture, and to establish her possession of the property.

Malinda (1)

In the meantime, Henry Slate tried to establish ownership of the property. He nailed the doors of the cabins shut and had a local attorney, John Clark, to take Celia Pringle to the county poor house. Years passed and the dispute went on. Malinda hired an attorney and went to court to assert her ownership, and finally sold the property in 1904.

The grantor deed for the 1904 sale provided a valuable document for my family history, as it listed all the surviving descendants of Henderson Johnson at that time, including children by both wives, grandchildren, and all their spouses.

However, the 37 pages of petition papers concerning the land dispute added even more, such as death dates for Wright, Nancy, and Henderson Johnson, the location of Henderson’s inheritance, and some circumstantial information about Malinda Johnson.

Copyright 2018 by Glenda Alexander.  All Rights Reserved.

Sources:

Will of Wright Johnson, Surry County, NC, Will Book 5: 1853-1868, pp. 25-26, Surry County Register of Deeds, Dobson N.C.

Grantor Deed for Henderson Johnson heirs, filed 22 March 1904, Grantor Book 47 pp. 4-5, Stokes County Register of Deeds, Danbury, N. C..

Account, Petition, and Sales Papers, Probate Records, Stokes County, N. C., 1753-1971; North Carolina, Wills and Probate Records, 1665-1998; database on-line at Ancestry.com; (Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.)