By Maggie Beamguard
Insider Editor
If monuments are supposed to be fixed in one place, then Jackson Springs Presbyterian Church has an abundance of them. Names of ancestors — Blue, Currie, MacKenzie — are etched on stones filling the church yard. Stained glass windows filter warm light into the parlor. A curated history of the congregation sits behind glass display cases.
Monuments don’t usually arrive via the Post Office, and they aren’t typically made of linen.
Judy Buroughs, the church’s historian, delicately unfolds a petite blouse, yellowed with age. Names embroidered in red and blue thread drift across the chest, hide under the collar and encircle the arm cuffs. In the novice stitching, letters crowd together. Every “N” is backward.
Bending around a pocket, the name “Donald Jackson” stands out in large letters. Someone nicknamed “Teddy Bear,” earns a corner spot. The right arm sports “Rod McLeay.”
These are the names of “Uncle Sam’s Boys,” according to the words along the spine of the shirt. There is another clue about the shirt stitched across its yoke: “Maneuvers.”
Decades before this artifact made its way into Buroughs’ hands, it was handled by Margaret Blake Payne.
By the early 1940s, Payne was around 13 years old and shaped by loss. Her father died when she was eight, her mother just two years later.
“Both of them were just in their 30s,” said Buroughs. “The community decided they would look after the family.”
Older siblings, including Harris Blake, a future North Carolina state senator, stepped in to care for the younger ones and the village looked after them all.
By 1941, the wider world pressed in on the little village. In October and November of that year, the Carolina Maneuvers brought an influx of soldiers to the region. Hundreds of thousands of men moved through Moore County and its surrounding parts in what The Pilot described on Aug. 1, 1941 as the largest military training exercise ever held in the United States in peace or war.
Eight North Carolina counties and eight South Carolina counties became the battleground where two “armies” met “in the swift and complicated combat of modern war,” reported The Pilot. Between Fort Bragg and Fort Jackson, S.C., more than 5,000 square miles became the board for the war games played by 400,000 troops.
Fields and forests were transformed into temporary encampments, with soldiers living in tents, and convoys stretching for miles.
Residents were warned they might wake to “the rattle of machine guns and the rumble of tanks,” while formations of planes filled the sky and trucks moved through the countryside.
Payne found herself, with the unassuming Jackson Springs, right in the middle of the action. Twelve miles away was the newly built Camp Mackall.
Newspaper accounts described communities opening their homes and their hearts to the soldiers moving through the region with home cooked meals, hot showers and wholesome entertainment.
A letter to the editor at The Pilot, printed on Dec. 26, 1941 and originally published by The New York Times, gives a glimpse of the impact of the Carolina Maneuvers on the whole county.
“The Carolinas have truly “put out” to these officers and men in uniform. Hospitality, kindness and consideration have been the watchwords,” wrote George G. Herr. “I do not believe there has been a single home in this section that has not had one or more boys overnight for overnight Saturday and dinner Sunday each weekend…. the manliness, the decency and the general conduct of these boys have gone deeply into our hearts.”
Written on Dec. 3, 1941 the letter poignantly continued, “May I add that when they come home for Christmas, as many of them will, those who love them will find them clean and healthy boys — clean in body and soul, clean in their outlook on life and willing to give their all for God and country.” Pearl Harbor was bombed four days later.
The maneuvers may have been games, but the real thing was on the horizon. And residents gave the troops glimpses of what they were fighting for.
“They would come walking up to the house on Sundays. It gave them a little bit of a home feeling,” Buroughs said of her own memories of the fall of 1964, when maneuvers returned. For the families that lived in the area, the encounters were memorable.
“We were fascinated,” said Buroughs, whose father often gave rides to the soldiers and invited them to relax on their porch. “Some of these people were from places we’d never seen before.”
Payne must have been equally as enthralled 24 years prior. She noticed the soldiers too and wanted to remember them. Her older brothers had left for war already, and Payne was the only girl at the home place during this time. “She was quite smitten by these visitors to Jackson Springs,” said Buroughs.
It is hard to say exactly what motivated Payne to start embroidering the names of the young men she met; she died on March 24, 2011.
“She was 13 at the time, and very impressionable” said Buroughs, “and this became a project for her.”
Quilts and other textiles have long been used to preserve names and memories. In the third and fourth decades of last century, autograph shirts appear to have become a trend as a wearable yearbook for high school and college graduates, as war era souvenirs created by American GIs and mailed home and notably as an artform among Japanese Americans as a ledger of internment camps.
These shirts are rare and collectible. Many reside in museums and historical archives.
Payne may have been familiar with this culture.
“She didn’t have them sign it,” Buroughs said. “She just remembered their names and stitched them.” Having lost her father and mother, family was important to Payne. She appears to have enjoyed the esprit de corps the visitors brought and created this blouse to remember it and them.
At some point that blouse left Jackson Springs, stored away along with Payne’s other memories as she married and started her own family. Over the years, it made its way into the care of a close friend of her son, Douglass.
The blouse stayed with him in Georgia, far from the location that gave it meaning. While recently sorting through his collection, he recognized its significance. “He pulled it out and said ‘This needs to be somewhere beside Georgia,’” Buroughs said.
The family friend reached out to the Moore County Historical Society, which led to archivist Paula Caddell, who connected him with Buroughs.
The blouse traveled back to Jackson Springs in April with some other artifacts. “It’s just funny how this blouse has traveled,” Buroughs said, “and then found its way back home.”
More than 80 years after Payne picked up a needle and her red and blue threads, the shirt — a moving monument in more ways than one — returned, along with the memory of those described by George G. Herr: “willing to give their all for God and country.”
Contact Maggie Beamguard at maggie@thepilot.com.
