By Mark Stinson
Siler City, NC – Very few things make me cry and break my heart. My mama lives in the Paul Braxton apartments. She called me to let me know they were demolishing the gym next to the apartments. To help you understand why this upset me so bad I need to explain a few things.
Many of you may remember my great uncle Eugene Jones. He was the game warden known as Kucklebury Jones. My great uncle Norris Jones was the one of the earlier driving instructors for the NC Highway patrol. My grandmother Letis married Clarence Jones. During World War II he was at a factory installing Stewart Warner gauges in P51 Mustangs. He passed when mama was four years old from pneumonia he got on a fishing trip to Fontana Dam. What these people all had in common was my great granddaddy Autsie Jones, also known as Casey Jones. He was their daddy.
Casey Jones ran a large lumber operation in Chatham and Wake County. Grandaddy Jones loved children. I remember him before he passed in the mid 1970s . He had short bristly white hair, a beard to match and a smile a mile wide and big feet. He built his own house and it was amazing. I learned later in life it was what you call a craftsman style home. Its amazing what you remember about people. Long story short, he helped a lot of folks black and white especially children. When he heard they wanted to build a gym for the kids in Siler City he donated every stick of lumber that went into that building. The oak and hickory beams to the heart pine siding, rafters and the best pine you could cut for the floors just so those children had a place out of the rain to play and enjoy. He had his men load the trucks and deliver it onsite.
Its upsetting they are demolishing it, but what made it heart breaking is simple. Granddaddy had donated some of the lumber to help build Paul Braxton School too. When they demolished the cafeteria the person over the demolition crew let me salvage some lumber and the massive steel beam that once held up the roof and spanned across the stage in the auditorium. That beam is holding up my tractor shed to this day. I went up to ask if I could get a couple boards or a window off the gym and got a flat “NO”. They were nice but “NO”. I was informed the town was going to auction off the oak beams afterwards. I thought to myself that they let them demolish a building someone would have gladly paid over $25,000 for the reclaimed old growth heart pine and kept the least valuable parts to auction off. It made no sense.
My mama will turn 80 tomorrow, February 18th. I would have loved to got at least a half dozen heart pine boards from the floor or siding even a window frame of door would have been nice. I got a flat “no”. I watched as it was being smashed to shreds by an excavator and loaded up to go to the dump. Think about it, I couldn’t get a single board but its all going to the dump. I could have made mama something really meaningful from a few pieces of that old building.
When they demolished the parts of Paul Braxton school they also sent 120 years of county ledgers and records to the dump. I saved a few of those and I donated the Sheriff’s ledger to the Chatham County Sheriff’s Department. I tried to get someone to preserve part of those but the answer was the same, no where to store them. They were nice enough to let some of us go in and salvage pieces of the building and those records before the remodel went underway. I was teared up and really upset I couldn’t get something of Granddaddy Jones Gym to make mama something special for mama and possible something to pass down to the kids.
I know a lot of you won’t understand but every-time mama looked at that building and I looked at that building it reminded us of granddaddy. And he was awesome .