Johnnycake Town

A gray mare, a bay mare, four sheep, twenty hogs, corn standing in the fields, and two beds with their furniture: in August 1833, Anthony Forehand pledged these things as security for rent owed on a place called Johnnycake Town. The land was not his. What he could offer Demsey Grandy, the man to whom the rent was due, was the livestock, the growing crop and the household goods named in the mortgage.¹

Two years earlier the debt had belonged to two brothers. Anthony and William Forehand had agreed in February 1831 to pay fifty dollars for a year’s rent of Grandy’s place. When Anthony made the mortgage on 1 August 1833, William was dead. Anthony had also undertaken another fifty-dollar obligation for the same place that year. The document puts these obligations beside the belongings he pledged, bringing the business of renting a farm into the household itself.¹

The clerk had no need to explain where Johnnycake Town was. The name was sufficient for the people conducting this business. To recover something of their neighborhood, we can begin with a crossroads that a traveler can still recognize.

The opening beyond Ivy Neck

Local knowledge places the stop at the meeting of Belcross Road and Ivy Neck Road, matching the location described in Jesse Forbes Pugh’s 1953 driving tour of Camden County. Pugh had come through Indiantown and along the old road toward Plank Bridge. Here, in the vicinity called Ivy Neck, he stopped at the road leading right, two miles to Belcross. Looking southwestward, to the left from that point on his route, the traveler could see a distant opening. Johnnycake Town also appears as Johnnykin Town, the name Jesse Forbes Pugh used in his 1953 tour. The variation may reflect local pronunciation, though we have not established how it arose.¹⁰¹²

A grave and an old house gave Pugh more to tell. He associated Johnnykin Town with Thomas Nickols and said that his grave marker could still be seen. He also described an ancient residence about three hundred yards west, on a plantation called The Yaupons. The starting point of that measurement was not explicit. The Yaupons, the Nichols plantation of the deeds and Anthony’s rented farm therefore remain distinct leads; a familiar neighborhood name does not make them one property.¹²

Local knowledge places the Johnnycake Town locality east of Ivy Neck Road, south of Belcross Road, near McKimmey Road and Mercer Drive. The Nichols graves are reported beside the eastward spur. The markings on the aerial photograph below supply the modern reader with the crossroads, opening and burial place that make the old account easier to follow. These are approximate local identifications, not the surveyed bounds of the nineteenth-century farms.¹⁰

Where the roads met the water

Before the automobile made such a tour possible, a Camden journey often depended on a landing as much as a road. Thalia T. Jones, writing about colonial Albemarle, describes people traveling by boat to conduct business and visit friends. Cypress canoes and flat-bottomed scows served shallow creeks; sloops and shallops used the larger waters. A creek that interrupted a road could also provide another way into the country.¹¹

Keeping the roads open was a continuing obligation. Jones recounts a 1704 order requiring residents on the route from Store Landing on Arenuse Creek to Indiantown Causeway to keep it passable. A separate, undated presentment complained about neglect of the road between Pascotank and Coratuck by the Indian Town House. Such records concern the practical matter behind every line on a map: whether people could get through.¹¹

The Nichols deeds bring that country into closer view. In September 1778, Coston and Rhoda Sawyer sold Thomas Nichols about fourteen acres described by a branch of Mill Swamp, Sawyer’s house and a footbridge. Later conveyances under Nichols’s name refer to the easternmost branch of Aranuse Creek, Hickory Branch, the road to Indiantown and the road from Plank Bridge toward Indian Town. These were separate parcels. Taken as descriptions of a neighborhood, however, they show how a house, a branch and a crossing could locate a piece of land for people who knew the way.⁵

By the years before the Civil War, corn was Camden’s chief crop, according to Pugh. He describes sailboats loading it along Raymond’s, Arenuse, Sawyers and Joy’s creeks for overseas markets. Anthony’s own destination for his crop is unknown, but his mortgage gives corn a very definite place in the farm’s finances. Still standing in the fields, it was already pledged against the rent.¹⁹

Corn also belonged to the hearth, and the name Johnnycake Town naturally invites a question about the bread. The period recipes considered here describe a cornmeal cake, with variations in ingredients and preparation. In American Cookery in 1796, Amelia Simmons called hers “Johny Cake, or Hoe Cake.” She directed the cook to combine Indian meal—cornmeal—with scalded milk and a little flour, then bake it before the fire. An alternative added salt, molasses and shortening. This was a practical way to turn ground corn into bread using the heat of the household fire.¹³

A southern recipe gives us a particularly useful glimpse of the work. The 1855 edition of The Carolina Housewife, published under the name “A Lady of Charleston,” mixed cold hominy with butter or lard, an egg, milk and corn flour. The cook spread it a quarter-inch thick on a board before the fire, then passed a thread underneath to loosen it for transfer and browning on the other side. These recipes help us understand the food the place-name calls to mind. Neither establishes what the Forehands ate, or why this Camden neighborhood acquired its name. That origin remains unresolved.¹⁴

The families behind the name

The Nichols burial ground carries us back before Anthony’s tenancy. Thomas’s stone records his death in June 1799, in his seventieth year. Deborah’s identifies her as his wife; George’s identifies him as Thomas’s son, without naming his mother. An explicit record connecting the Thomas buried here to the landowner in the earlier deeds has not yet been found. Even with that question open, the inscriptions preserve relationships that the changing names in a deed book can easily obscure.⁴

The documents under the Nichols name also preserve the presence of enslaved people. A Thomas Nichols household in the 1790 census contained three free white people and nine enslaved people; its identity with the Thomas buried here remains provisional. The census named only the household head. A sale recorded three years earlier supplies one young person’s name: Easter. On 12 June 1787, Thomas Nichols, described as a planter, sold her to Denny Sawyer for ninety pounds. She was about fourteen. We cannot yet follow her family or later life, or place her among the nine people counted in 1790. Her name and age survive because the law recorded her sale.⁷

By December 1837, four years after Anthony pledged his mares and household goods, a tract of about two hundred acres in Jonicake Town passed from John D. Grandy to Tully Dozier. Dozier sold it to Abner H. Grandy in March 1839, when it was described as the Nichols plantation. Dempsey Grandy had appeared as an adjoining owner in the earlier transaction. His neighboring ownership is a reason to keep Anthony’s rented place separate from this two-hundred-acre tract unless another record connects them.²³

The next transaction brings Martha Grandy into the story. On 14 May 1839, her husband Abner conveyed fifty acres from the tract to John L. Ferrell, who conveyed them to Martha on the same day. The twelve hundred dollars used for the purchase had come from the sale of her own land to Isaac Sanderlain, with Abner’s consent. The sequence is worth following: beneath the succession of names, the deed identifies the source of Martha’s purchase money and the land acquired for her.³

In November 1858, another arrangement joined land and family. Evelina Dozier, then living in Virginia, conveyed a hundred and forty acres to her niece Evelina Palmer for ten dollars and natural love and affection, reserving an interest during her own lifetime. The tract adjoined Martha Grandy and Elizabeth Nash, though its connection to the earlier two hundred acres is still unsettled. Johnnycake Town continued to serve as a place people could name when providing for a relative or describing a boundary.⁸

The opening Pugh pointed out in 1953, the fields on the 1938 aerial and the locally identified graves allow us to return to this neighborhood with more than a name. They do not recover every farm boundary or explain every change of ownership. The documents bring us closer to particular lives: Martha’s land money, Evelina’s provision for her niece, Easter’s recorded sale, and Anthony’s obligation after his brother’s death.^13781012

For Anthony, the surviving mortgage ends before we learn how the rent was settled. It does tell us what stood behind his promise to pay. Return to the list with which we began: the gray mare and the bay, the sheep and hogs, corn not yet harvested, and two beds with their furniture. In the county books, Johnnycake Town could be measured in hundreds of acres. In Anthony Forehand’s agreement, it reached as far as the things he needed to keep a household and work a farm.¹