Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

CHAPTER III

THE DOOR TO THE COMPOSING-ROOM
I
IN the years immediately following the Civil War the
great plantations of the South, thereafter so generally
subdivided into small holdings, were in many cases leased
at heavy rentals to Northerners afflicted with the delusion
that they could grow cotton to profit. So it came about
that in 1866 and 1867 the Bryan Grimes plantation on
the Tar River in North Carolina, half a dozen miles above
Pamlico water, was the scene of novel and intensely interesting experiences for a Yankee boy, and of equally novel
but not so entertaining financial disaster for his parent.
General Grimes, whom I remember seeing but once, had
come out of the Confederate service as the senior majorgeneral in "Stonewall" Jackson's corps; he led the division, I believe, that made the last charge at Appomattox.
Fifteen years or so later General Grimes was shot by an
unknown assassin while riding through the woods near
this plantation; Grovedale it was called.
The peculiarity of the experience in question was that
it made me familiar with the aspects of plantation lifo
under conditions almost precisely the same as had obtained in the days of slavery. There were about twentyfive hundred acres bordering on the cypress jungle through
"which the Tar River flowed. Stern-wheel steamboats
made their sluggish way up and down this stream. There
were eleven or twelve hundred acres under cultivation
for cotton; pitch-pine woods all around, scarred for turpentine as sugar-maples are for syrup; three to four hundred negroes, all formerly the slaves of the Grimeses,
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