Long after the Sunday journeys had ended, Adrian Jordan could still describe the arrival at his grandparents’ house: the crowded surrey, the dogs at the gate, and Lydia Forehand in the kitchen doorway. Her greeting was always the same. In the memoir cited as Adrian’s Fact and Fables, Adrian set down the whole journey:
About six am, Pape, Leon and I hitched the horses to our pretty surrey. That was a big job. Papa, mama, and the two babies on the front seat, we five all squeezed on the back seat. What a load! Papa with his derby hat and Mama with one of those big hats of hers. Off we would go. It was about seven miles. When we arrived, grandma would be standing in the old log cabin’s kitchen door with her apron and her silver glasses and her hair parted in the middle and tied in a knot at the back of her head. A typical Quaker. She weighed about one hundred pounds and was a neat as a doll. When we drove up to the gate and stopped, Grandma would always say the same thing, “Upon my word, if it isn’t Joe.” She always sounded as though she were surprised to see us. Everybody would rush out to the barn fate, open it, and the two dogs would bounce out barking their heads off. Grandma would say to us children, “Come right in this house, I got something good for you.” We never knew what we were going to get but we knew we were going to get something good. She was an excellent cook. In the back seat of the surrey, we five kids would talk about what Grandma had for us today.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 10. Source 1
Adrian was the son of Joseph Esberry Jordan and Margaret Jane Forehand, and the grandson of Calvin and Lydia Forehand. These passages from his memoir survive in a family-history chapter. The story that follows lets Adrian speak at length, while the records help place the people he remembered. 1
Reading the recollection: The shaded passages reproduce all twenty memoir excerpts preserved in the five-page family-history chapter, printed pp. 8–12. That chapter, rather than the original memoir, is the quotation source available for this edition. Its wording and spelling are retained; line breaks and spacing have been adjusted for reading. Adrian’s childhood memories, stories told to him, and later opinions remain distinguishable from independently checked records.
The road to Grandma’s
For a reader finding the neighborhood today, Belvidere is a useful starting point. It lies about eleven miles northwest of Hertford, in Perquimans County, with Piney Woods Friends Meeting west of the village. The meeting at 118 Piney Woods Road gives a modern traveler a recognizable landmark. Calvin and Lydia’s exact homesite has not yet been established. 2
The family’s records lead across the nearby county line. In 1880, Calvin Forehand, a farmer, lived with Lydia and their daughters in Chowan County’s Upper Township. Margaret, the future mother of Adrian, was recorded as five. A published abstract of Quaker records gives her birth as December 17, 1875, correcting the 1885 date in the earlier family account. 3
Joseph and Margaret’s beginnings reached Adrian through his father’s stories. His account of their marriage turns almost at once toward a disaster in the older Jordan household:
Papa was twenty five, mamma was nineteen when they were married. Papa told us children that after paying the preacher 50 cents, which was a big fee, he only had 7 cents left. He rented a farm as a share-cropper. Papa’s father and his oldest brother were killed by lightning. Papa was three years old at the time. It was in the afternoon. His father had just opened the front door in the house after a rainstorm. The thunder and lightning were very heavy. My grandmother was ill. She was lying on the bed. Papa said he remember that he was sitting on the foot of his mother’s bed when my grandfather went to the back door, opened it, to get some breeze and draft thought the house.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 8. Source 1
Reading the recollection: The lightning story is an inherited account. Joseph’s age of three conflicts with the birth and death dates in the accompanying family summary; the event’s date has not been resolved. The quotation preserves what Adrian recalled without choosing a date from that conflict.
The family-history chapter continues that the house burned and neighbors helped build another. Adrian preserved a small detail of how his paternal grandmother furnished a home in difficult circumstances:
Grandma said she made bed mattresses with cornhusk and grass stuffed in burlap bags sewn together.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 8. Source 1
A house full on Sundays
At Calvin and Lydia’s, the children entered a household whose buildings, furniture and cloth Adrian remembered as the work of his grandparents’ hands. His description moves from the log buildings to the animals and shade trees, then back to the Sunday journey:
My grandma had about the most wonderful place in the world. Not because it was grandma, but because it was real old and antique. Grandfather built it. House, barns and all the other buildings were log cabins. Grandma made all the things for living and grandpa made all the furniture and plenty of it. They had six daughters. One boy died with typhoid fever. Grandpa built all those buildings, also a corn crib, a smoke house and a house for his weaving and spinning machines for wool and cotton. Also made the family clothes of cotton and wool. Dyed all the cotton and wool. All around that house were nice shade trees, fruit trees, and grape vines. There was an old split rail fence all around the place. All kinds of herbs and shrubs. The house and barn were on about a two acre lots that was mostly sand. They always had two nice dogs, geese, chickens, ducks, hogs, two cows, sheep, and two large Belgium draft horses. There were nice swings under the trees. It was like heaven on earth there. Papa would hitch our two pretty black horses to the surrey every Sunday morning and we would go the church, then to Grandma’s. Sometimes we didn’t get to church if there was a special occasion at Grandma’s.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 10. Source 1
Reading the recollection: The household description and the son’s death from typhoid are memoir statements. The census confirms a substantial household but does not establish a complete lifetime child count or the reported cause of death.
The welcome belonged especially to Lydia. Adrian remembered the children competing to reach her, and a grandmother who made room for every one of them:
Our wonderful little Grandma Forehand, with her loving arms, was never too busy to give us a great big hug, including my Father (Joseph Jordan). I remember as we jumped out of the surrey at her house, we would see who could get to her first for a hug and a kiss, and many more before the Sunday was over. Grandma would sit down on a bench or swing in the yard to be sure none of us missed that hug and kiss. With seven children rushing at her, I bet she thought it was better sitting. Besides, they had other Grandchildren there every Sunday. When we left for home, she would stand at the road gate and wave to us until our Surry went around the bend of the road out of sight.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 9. Source 1
She also kept the children guessing. A discussion about a wedding dress became a joke they were too young to understand; a question about a horse gave Leon a chance to surprise her in return:
Some things are so vivid in my mind. One day, all we children were sitting around Grandma Forehand (Lydia Copeland) just before her youngest daughter, Aunt Georgia, was married. She and Mama (Margaret Forehand) were talking about wedding dresses. One of us children asked Grandma why didn’t Aunt Georgia get married in your wedding dress. After a while, Grandma said, “Well, I don’t see any reason why two girls should be punished in the same dress.” We were too young to know what she meant. She just smiled with her dry sense of humor she always had. She liked dry jokes. One day at the table at her house she asked my brother Leon, “Do you know how many legs a horse has?” Leon said “four”. She asked, “If you turn him on his back, how many legs would have have?” Leon said, “Not any.” She asked, “Why not?” “Because the horse cant walk like that”, Leon said. Then Grandma just smiled and said, “I like your joke better than mine Leon!”. Grandma liked nothing better than sitting in a group of little children and carrying on. Grandpa (Calvin Forehand), her husband, was just the opposite. He was congenial with some people, hide off with others.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 9. Source 1
The meal brought the separate families together. Adrian’s recollection gives the adults their seats and the children their rules:
My grandpa would take Papa out and they would have a nice glass of cold cider that was put down the well to get it cold. All the children would pile around Grandma and Aunt Nan, Aunt Priscilla, Aunt Mattie, and Aunt Georgie. They would all be there on Sunday too with all their children. What a dinner table there was! About thirty feet long and built to the floor with long benches on each side. There were no chairs except one at each end. They were for Grandma and Grandpa. When we all got seated at the table, Grandpa would stand and ask a blessing. Poor Grandma had a large fan. It was large and it hung down a long was from the ceiling. It would fan that table from one end to the other. Heavy, hot food in August. We children didn’t reach, we asked. If one did reach, he or she was sent from the table and had no dinner.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 10. Source 1
In cooler weather there was candy to make, and something to carry home:
In cool weather, Grandma would go out and get the black walnuts and crack them with us to make candy. We would have candy pulling and then she would give some of it to us to take home. What a beautiful Grandma! She died at the age of 80. I was living in Connecticut then.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 10. Source 1
Reading the recollection: Lydia’s reported age at death is retained as Adrian’s statement; her ages differ among the records examined.
The visit ended, but the farm work did not:
We would leave there about 5:00pm, go home, change clothes and start feeding for the night. Fill up the wood boxes, milk the cows, and by nightfall the whole family would be in bed. But what a day had been had!
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 10. Source 1
The years before Adrian
The grandparents who presided over those Sunday dinners had married in January 1861. Their grandson knew the Civil War through stories passed down to him. In those stories, Calvin hid from soldiers while the women carried food and helped keep the farms working. 4
Reading the recollection: Adrian’s age of twenty-one for Calvin in 1861 conflicts with the earlier census ages. The trapdoor, night farming, estrangement from brothers, unnamed pensioner and military descriptions below are inherited recollections, not independently verified service history.
Beginning of the Civil War, 1861, Grandpa Forehand was twenty one years old and just married. He was a Quaker and didn’t believe in fighting or any other hostility. He was a farmer. He and grandma were building their log cabin and all the other things necessary for living. Nothing was ready made. There were no businesses of that kind around then. When he built there log cabin, in one bedroom he built a trap door. It led out under the house and then into the back yard. If any army, North or South, Confederate or Federal, came along in the night looking for men, Grandpa would roll out of the bed and out that trap door and go out the back way to the woods to keep from being captured. It got to the point that all the able bodied men had to hide in the woods by day and come out at night to do their farming by lantern light. Their wives would hold a light with one hand and lead the horse with the other. The husband was doing the plowing with another lantern hanging around the plow. Before daylight, they would go back to the woods to hide. There were sentries posted and if anyone approached, the women would blow their fox hunt horn to warn the men and the women in the fields. All the lights in the field were extinguished until the dangers were over. All the women would run into the house and get in bed. If the army knocked on the door, the would answer. They would be asked where their husbands were. “Gone to the army”, would be their answer. To get their meals, the women would cook the food early in the morning and put it in a feed basket and put corn over it. Then she would go out to the hog lot and the hogs would follow the woman to be fed. After the woman reached the woods, she would feed the hogs, and then go on to the camp and take the day’s food to their husbands. They would go a different route so not to make a path. Some of the women had a long way to go to reach the camp. There were many camps. That was the way of life for four very long years. Some wanted to secede from the Union. He didn’t believe in Slavery. The rest of his life he was treated as a nobody. He had two brothers but after the war, they never spoke again. Uncle got a pension for the rest of his life. Those soldiers were known as buffaloes. I don’t have any idea why. It must have been a great and hard struggle to live that life.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 11–12. Source 1
One story Lydia told repeatedly had her meeting soldiers at the cabin door. Adrian remembered both the pies and her pleasure in the outcome:
One day, my grandmother baked some pies to take to the camp. It was a Saturday morning. She put them out on the window sill to cool. Along came the Yankee soldiers. They stopped as always to see what they could take. Grandma said one started rubbing his hands together and said, “Look boys, what I have found.” Grandma walked out of the log cabin door and said, “I thought you Yankees might be along, so I cooked them especially for you.” The soldiers looked at each other and said, “I be she is trying to poison us.” They went away and never touched the pies. Sunday morning she took the pies to the camp with a pot of hot chicken and sweet potatoes. I heard her tell that story many times. She was real proud that she out-foxed those Yankess that day.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 12. Source 1
He also repeated an account of preachers visiting the men in hiding. His closing wish to have lived in those times belongs to the later storyteller:
On Sundays, the Quakers preacher would go from camp to camp to hold services for those men. I think they were the only preachers that tramped the woods preaching all day every Sunday. Preside at the funeral and Baptisms on horseback, but no horseback to the men’s camps. They had to walk in case they would have to hide from the Yankee soldiers. I think it was exciting. I wish I could have been living then and to be living with Daniel Boone. Many wonderful stories have come from it.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 12. Source 1
The grandfather he lost
Calvin’s death in 1906 appears in the published family record. Adrian remembered it as a child of six: first the house funeral, then the burial in the woods. The small boy trying to see beneath a door is part of that memory, as much as the gathering of adults around him. 3
I can remember my Grandpa when I could barely walk. He would take my on his arm and go out in the grapevine and pop grapes in my mouth. I remember the day he died from a stroke. We went to the funeral, I was only six years old. I was put in a room to sleep. They had the funeral at the house. I was trying to peek under the door and fell asleep right there on the floor.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 11. Source 1
At the grave in the woods, I was sitting in the buggy and it was raining very gently and everybody was crying. There was an old woman there, about seven feet tall, standing in her door with a snuff brush in her mouth and wearing a black bonnet. Her house was about fifty feet from the family grave yard.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 11. Source 1
The account continues from the graveside to the things Calvin had shown him. It also preserves a difficult memory of Lydia and Mary Stafford on the day of the burial:
I sure missed Grandpa. I will always remember him with his corncob pipe, carrying me from place to place, showing me things. He showed me the cotton and wool weaving and carding, dying, stitching and so on. He was great and I was just a little boy of six. That day grandpa was buried, I remember seeing Grandma slap Mary Stafford because Mary wanted to wear her other dress. Girls had only three dresses and one was for Sunday. Mary was about fifteen then. She was an adopted girl. There were two adopted boys also, Jim and Albert Dale. That made ten children. Children were a good investment then. All the farm work was done by hand.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 11. Source 1
Reading the recollection: The stroke, graveside details, treatment of Mary, and descriptions of Mary Stafford, Jim and Albert Dale as adopted children are Adrian’s recollections. Legal adoption records and a full household chronology have not been established. The woman’s height is his remembered description, not a measured fact.
Affection did not make every family story a gentle one. Elsewhere Adrian connected his grandfather’s blueberry journeys to Norfolk with a report about money after his death. To preserve his account in full, that passage is included here with its uncertainties intact.
Reading the recollection: The passage below combines family-origin tradition, an explanation of the neighborhood’s name, remembered market journeys and an allegation about two unnamed daughters. The claimed sixteenth-century arrival and blueberry origin of “Piney Woods” are not established by the sources examined. No estate or bank evidence has corroborated the money story; “alleged” and “some said” are essential to reading it.
We children always looked forward to the Sunday that we were going to visit grandma and grandpa Forehand. They were Quakers. They came to this country from England in the 16th century and many of them settled in a part of North Carolina called the Piney Woods. The name came from that part because there were so many blueberries, it was named Piney Woods. My mother and her six sisters picked blueberries while my grandfather hauled them to Norfolk, Virginia. IT was forty or fifty miles on a dirt road. It took four days for the round trip. They had another laod ready when he got back. He never gave anyone a dime. He died with his trunk keys in his hand in 1906. No one knew how much money was in the that trunk. Two of his daughters were sitting by his bedside when he died. They took most of the money. It was alleged that they put it in the bank in Edenton, North Carolina, about fifteen miles away. The bank failed though and they lost all the money. Some said it was about eight thousand. There was only three hundred in grandpas trunk.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 9–10. Source 1
What he carried home
In writing about Lydia, Adrian returned to the gate where she had stood waving. The adult wished he could have told her what those childhood visits had meant:
I so wish I could had an adult mind and heart so that we could have let her know how much we loved her. Guess love is generated through childhood. Now, I feel so bad that we couldn’t show it in a different way towards wonderful people. Grandma standing by the gate in the yard with her little silver glasses, hair parted in the middle, fixed with a knot back of her head and with that little bit of skin under her chin. There was never a more typical Grandmother type than we had, no more than a hundred pounds. I wish there was a statue of her on a thousand foot tall gold flag pole right in the middle of America. That would be just a small honor for all the wonderful Grandmas and Grandpas in the world.
There is so much I could say about her. The last thing I will say is she has given me so many beautiful thoughts all through my life. There is only one material thing left of her, the grapevine she gave me when I was six years old. It stands in the field where I grew up.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 9. Source 1
The later return to his own childhood landscape brought losses that he described without softening. He began with the sounds of the country night, then came to the burial ground he remembered:
It’s damp and cold out there, but you feel real good after having fried ham, country sausage, corn pone, hot country biscuits, coffee with cream and a good quiet country sleeping with no noise except the old hoot owls. Once in a while a horse in the stable still chewing some hay or an old milk cow mooing for the calf that had been weened. Where we lived, the wild cats would come up around the fence down by the swamp and let our a screech or two. There was a beautiful old burying ground out in the field behind our farmhouse. Later, while visiting, it was gone, plowed under. It was down by the swamp on a hill that overlooked the peaceful river. The river was so calm in the morning, it just rolls along so quiet. As the wind started to blow, the ripples would being moving so slowly and gently.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 12. Source 1
Trees had disappeared and fields had changed. Yet the grapevine Lydia gave him was still there when he made that visit:
My mother died in Boston at age 86. The tall black walnut trees were gone, wild red and yellow plums were gone. All of the gooseberry was gone, wild apples were gone. All of our trapping woods were in cultivation. The cemetery plowed over. That made me good and mad. The grapevine that I sat in when I was six years old, my grandmother gave it to me, was still there. She gave me a black puppy on the same day. I am happy to say the grapevine is still living and the grapes are delicious. Sorry to say, I didn’t see my black puppy. He would have been 76 now. I went for a walk down by the river where I buried him when I was a boy. His name was Rover… one of the best rabbit dogs I ever had.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 12. Source 1
Reading the recollection: The vine’s survival belongs to Adrian’s later visit, not to a verified report of its condition today. The burial-ground account refers to the landscape behind his childhood farmhouse; it should not be silently equated with the woods graveyard in his funeral recollection.
The family-history chapter identifies January 1979 as the completion date of this section of Adrian’s memoir. Adrian explained why he had written it: he wanted the children coming after him to have something of the people he had known. His own farewell gives the recollections their close:
I am glad my memory is still quite good and clear. In my poor way of presenting some of these things, I only hope my children and their grandchildren will carry some of this along in their lives and preserve of this for those who might be along later. Yes, I am just one hard working American in a small way. I believe that I produced as much or more than I consumed during my lifetime and I am glad that I did. I think we should strive to do so. No matter how little or how much we have, we have to trade it for six foot of this beautiful world. Some do and some don’t earn that. Now I will say goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa Forehand. They were two of the greatest fighters with thousands like them making America what it is today.
Adrian Alfonso Jordan, Adrian’s Fact and Fables, as quoted in the family-history chapter, printed p. 12. Source 1
Sources and editorial notes
1. Adrian Alfonso Jordan’s recollections, quoted in “From Piney Woods, North Carolina,” March 24, 2013, and the related manuscript chapter The Forehands of Piney Woods—Perquimans County North Carolina, printed pp. 8–12, held in the family collection. These are two presentations of the same remembered account, not independent corroboration. The original memoir has not been inspected for this revision. Sunday visits, household work, greetings, jokes, wartime incidents and the later return are attributed recollections. The grapevine’s survival today and the exact farm location have not been established.
2. Drucilla H. York, Belvidere Historic District, National Register nomination, December 1, 1998, section 8, p. 47 (PDF page 52); Perquimans County Tourism, “Must-See Historic Churches in Perquimans County”, March 20, 2023, Piney Woods Friends Meeting. These locate the community and meeting, not the Forehand homesite.
3. 1880 U.S. census, Chowan County, North Carolina, Upper Township, ED 34, p. 26, household 230, lines 12–19, original-record image held in the family collection; William Wade Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, Perquimans Monthly Meeting, printed p.9, right column, entries headed “Page 15-2” and “Page 2-4.” The latter is a published abstract, not the original register. It gives Margaret J.’s birth as December 17, 1875 and Calvin’s death in 1906. The census calls Margaret five, slightly inconsistent with that December birthday but incompatible with 1885. Other family ages and child lists differ across sources; exact Calvin/Lydia birth dates and a complete child count are therefore omitted. Earlier proposed descent from Jarvis Forehand remains unproved and is not adopted here.
4. Chowan County marriage transcription, Calvin Forehand and Lydia Copeland: bond January 23, 1861; marriage January 24, 1861 by Drew Welch, justice of the peace. The original bond and return have not been inspected; the narrative uses the month and year. This transcription explains the apparent 23/24 January difference in older compilations.