The G.W. Cox House, Pitt County, North Carolina

  In 1864, Captain Guilford W. Cox walked away from his life as an officer in the Atlantic and North Carolina Bridge Guards, a unit of volunteers that guarded railroad bridges between Kinston and Goldsboro, North Carolina. Like many in North Carolina, Captain Cox had become disillusioned with the Confederacy. Men under his command had been labeled deserters. In Kinston, these men were being tried and sentenced to death. Captain Cox was Provost Marshall at Kinston for many months and managed to get himself entered as a witness to defend one of the accused, a volunteer named Clinton Cox. (It is unknown if the two were related). Clinton Cox was spared the death sentence only to be sent to Andersonville—where ironically he would die from one of the multitudes of diseases that infested the prison. Shortly after his court testimony, Captain Cox left the Confederacy and joined the Union forces. After the war, Cox testified before Congress about the war crimes he had witnessed at Kinston.

         Following the war, Captain Cox returned home to Pitt County. He built this modest, but sturdy two-story house on Emma Cannon Rd. As his home, it would see thirty-nine Christmases, at least one wedding, and serve as the post office for Coxville—with G.W. Cox serving as postmaster. Captain Cox passed away in 1910. The house he built would live on for one hundred and two more years.         

         In the nineteen-eighties, the last tenant passed away. His family packed up his belongings, but never returned for them. Over the years the house sat empty. As years passed, the windows rotted and the glass panes fell out. The family nailed corrugated steel panels to the first floor windows to stop trespassers, but vandals peeled them back to gain entry. The once elegant front door was battered from years of being kicked in. Vandals had trashed the place—ripping open the long abandoned boxes and strewing the contents around rooms. Clothes, magazines, and other odds and ends were dumped in a large pile in the center hallway. Despite the destruction, the house itself was intact and fairly original, save for the missing stairway bannister and some water damage.

         I found the G.W. Cox house not long after moving to Ayden. I spotted it while on a Sunday afternoon drive around the county. Its simple elegance appealed to me. It looked strong and solid, even in its rundown state. It became a place to visit and test a new, or new to me, camera. I was also drawn to it as a photography project—and even after dozens and dozens of frames were exposed, I couldn’t help but ride by to check on it every few weeks, and maybe even shoot a few more frames. It had become my house. I daydreamed of restoring the old place.

         I found a reference to it in a locally produced book, Historic Architecture of Pitt County. The house is described as a two story, double pile design. From this book, I began to learn of the history behind the house. I became intrigued that a Confederate soldier had come home with enough money and property intact to build such a fine home. Once I learned he had walked away from the CSA and joined the USA, it began to make sense. This also added to the mystery of the old house. Eventually I found the current owners. I also found that the Cox house was indeed haunted.

         I arranged to meet with an owner at the house one Saturday morning. It was the end of summer; it was warm, not hot, but was still shorts and tee shirt weather. A light breeze kept temperatures feeling comfortable. My host was late—very late. As the passing minutes accumulated, I realized that I had been forgotten, but with the assurance I had been invited, I decided to go inside.

         At the rear of the large center hallway, trash was piled up almost three feet deep. I carefully picked my way across the top of the pile—slippery with junk mail and magazines of a man long dead. It seemed the house was alive with the sound of thousands of flying insects, though non could be seen. The whole house almost vibrated from the sound. The walls seeme alive. I shot a few photos and then retreated back to the safety of the open front yard. I paused briefly on the porch. The buzzing from thousands of insects now behind me, I felt at ease. I looked back at the old house and imagined it as it once stood: white painted walls, curtains behind clean panes of glass, children playing outside next to a hitching post. I drove away wondering if anyone would ever wish to restore it, bring it back to life….hoping that that someone might be me.

           For the next few years, I’d ride by the house often, and sometimes I’d take photographs. I watched from a distance, a witness to its slow decay. I would not go back inside for two years, until 2009, with a student named Kate.Kate and I walked through the downstairs rooms taking photos without any hesitation or fear. Upstairs we found one room with a door that appeared to be recently painted. It was red, but not the bright cheerful red of child’s . This was a dull, aged red. It was an oxide red—the color of dried blood. Across the multi-paneled door was the expected and barely visible graffiti about God and Satan. Hanging on one wall was a pair of jeans, still a rich blue, hardly faded. The legs were adorned with rows of mud dauber nests. Years of hanging in a room with broken windows had allowed wasps to make their homes on the legs of the jeans. Kate and I each shot several frames of the jeans. I titled my version Mud Dwellings—it won best in show at a local art show,           

           One month, almost to the day, that Mud Dwellings won best in show, I cranked up the computer as I sipped my morning coffee and clicked on the local news. A headline announced that an abandoned home in southern Pitt County, on Emma Cannon Road, had burned down overnight. And I somehow knew that it was my house. I dressed quickly and headed to the Cox house. I hoped that I was wrong. There were several old and abandoned houses along Emma Cannon Road. It could just as well be one of them. As I anxiously drove to the Guilford Cox House, I hoped to pass a still smoldering ruin--someone else’s still smoldering ruin.

           The road approaching the Cox house is a long straight piece of asphalt and makes a hard right just at the path leading to the house. It always reminded  me of lane leading to Tara in Gone with the Wind. Since it was hidden by a few trees, you couldn’t see the Cox house until you were almost into the apex of the curve. As I got closer, I could see a news van and a car sitting on the dirt path. I knew then the house was gone.

             I parked away from the news people and stood next to my car looking at the smoldering pile of twisted metal, ash, and brick. Only the two chimneys remained standing. Flames popped and spit in several spots, smoke wafted skyward from the ruins—the last gasps of the dying. The newsman walked over to me. He asked if I knew the home. I told him the basic history of the house and he asked to interview me on camera, but I declined. I referred him to the local office of history for eastern North Carolina. Eventually the news people left and the folks in the car did so as well. Alone, I walked the perimeter where the walls once stood. Plaster that once covered the 140-year-old walls were now piles of powder and crumbs. The porcelain front door knob and the brass plate that surrounded it were melted over piles of plaster reminiscent of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Everything once wooden was now ash; only the largest beams retained a semblance of their former shapes. The fire had burned through them like they were matchsticks.

            I still drive by once in awhile. Only one chimney is left standing since its mate has fallen—weakened with age and without the house to support it, it collapsed. On subsequent visits, I’d find the remains of sea shells, of an old transistor radio, a television, and canned goods—all the everyday items of a life enjoyed, now ashes or melted into abstract shapes.

           I imagine the house as it was when I first spied it, and wish I had seen it in its heyday when it hosted the post office, weddings, birthday parties, and Christmases. The man suspected of setting it on fire, along with several other old abandoned homes in the immediate area, claimed he was just trying to clean up the countryside, instead, a piece of history was destroyed. Lost was one of the rare links to our past and to those who came before us.

2016:

Recently I paid another visit to the remains of the Guildford  Cox House. Both chimneys are now gone. The bricks of the chimneys and the foundation have been removed. They are probably a decoration in a new home or restaurant---their story silenced.

 (Visit the gallery to view images of the Guilford Cox House, before and after the fire).

References:

War Crimes or Justice? By Donald Collins, Rootsweb.com;

The Historic Architecture of Pitt County, Scott Power (Editor)

Murder of Union Soldiers in North Carolina, Google Books

Executive Documents, First Session 39th Congress, 1865-1866  

Also of note is Our State magazine’s series on the Civil War by Philip Gerard. The series covers the people and battles taking place in North Carolina during the Civil War. This is a great series about the people, civilians and soldiers, who lived through the Civil War in North Carolina.