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Henderson: |
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Vance County, home of Kerr Lake
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Vance County’s website reads like this:
“Originally a part of the State of Virginia, King Charles II of England redrew state lines in 1665, thus putting what is now Vance County into the State of Carolina.
“As the area prospered in the mid to late 1800s, the idea of creating a separate county surfaced. After original legislative efforts to name the new county as ‘Gilliam’ and later as ‘Dortch’ failed, Vance County was established on May 5, 1881 by the North Carolina General Assembly and was named after Governor Zebulon Baird Vance, who was known as the Civil War governor.
“The majority of the land territory of the new county came from Granville County and the remainder came from Warren and Franklin Counties.
“When first established, Vance County’s population was approximately 9,000. Today it has grown to over 43,000. It had a tax basis then of about $2 million, now its base is well over $2 billion.
“Kerr Lake, the largest man-made lake east of the Mississippi River, was built in the 1950s as a means of flood control for eastern NC. Since that time it has become one of the state’s largest parks and tourist attractions.”
Supplementing the above official website is this quotation from page 68 of Brother Zeb, the Masonic biography of Zeb Vance:
“North Carolina blacks voted strongly for Republican candidates—when they could vote at all. Vance gerrymandered them out of power; it was no secret. Granville and Franklin counties had a real two-party contest going into 1881 when a new county was created ‘in honor of Zeb Vance.’ Vance and his Democrats carved Granville and Franklin in such a way as to isolate the Republican blacks in the new county and give the voting power to the whites in the two old ones. The new Vance County with 279 square miles occupied mostly by blacks was nicknamed, ‘Zeb’s Black Baby.’”
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Produced by the public relations committee of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Masons in North Carolina,
2921 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27628 MMVIII
Author/editor: Walter J. Klein wklein(at)carolina.rr.com
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