David Caldwell Jr. - On Neighborhood Archives (clip)
Interviewed by Blanche Brown on April 24, 2012
David Caldwell Jr. (DC): Well it’s not just that, its in doing the history of the house, and we’ve traced it through Mr. Hogan, and it is so neat that April, no July 4th like 1845? 1855? the slaves were gathered around outside because Mr. Hogan was sick and everybody else was going uptown to Chapel Hill to celebrate the 4th of July, so of course they were walking or horse and wagon, or whatever, going through the old wagon paths. And that afternoon he- they were all afraid because they knew what would happen if he died. All of them, being property, they would be split among the family, so you know, if you had kids or whatever, chances are you might not see them again. Well, he passed that afternoon, they dug the grave right up here, as you’re going out, that's where he was buried and it did happen. They were separated. He did make some stipulations- we found his will, we were able to locate that, he has some stipulations in there. Anyways, we found out he had three house slaves that lived in the basement of that house and one of their names was Harriet. Ms. Nunn who’s one of the oldest residents of Rogers Road, just turned ninety, lives off of Eubanks and said she remembers her father talking about Harriet but nothing specific. So the people who are working with the Chapel Hill Preservation Society decided to put a thing online with the information and we had a lady, Diedre [pause] Campbell, from Atlanta, Georgia, call and say that Harriet was her great-great-great grandmother.
Blanche Brown (BB): Wow
DC: She came up here a couple of Tuesdays ago to go and toured the neighborhood and the house, we took her over to meet Ms. Nunn, she’s coming back to help us in our fight.
BB: That’s amazing
DC.: …and certain things. And that’s what we don’t want to lose. All the people. And see prior to that, one of the things that–Mr. Sam Rogers lived up there and he had like eighty acres out right here. When the depression came in, the banks around here would not let the Black farmers refinance. So they’d foreclose on them, and took the land and sold it to the white farmers. As a result of that, Mr. Sam Rogers had to lose his eighty-some acres or however many acres it was, and was able to get three acres right here. And on this three acres he built that log cabin over there, right across the parking lot. And that’s where three families were raised, three generations. That last generation, he and his wife, Mr. Rogers, I think it was Edgar Rogers and his wife built this house. Some of the floors–the planks–are like two hundred years old, yeah, taken from the old house and everything. So his son, Mr. Edgar Rogers’s son Jimmy, or James, lives right in the house back there, he’s actually our landlord.
BB: Yeah, okay.
DC: So that’s, this neighborhood, I mean, it has so much history, just going so far back with contributions and with people in the military- we go back, we found some as far back as the Civil War, no, yeah, the Civil War, not the Revolutionary War, the Civil War. People in World War I, Grenada, Vietnam, you know, still fighting today.
