Creator: Daniel, Bessie Heath, 1886-1976.
Collection number: 4187
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Abstract: Bessie Heath Daniel, farmer, teacher, and amateur historian, of Person County, N.C., was born to Lewis Heath Daniel, a tobacco farmer and distillery warehouse employee, and Sallie Barnett Daniel at the family home in Flat River, N.C. She had one sister, Bertha Daniel Cloyd, who married Edward Lamar Cloyd, dean of students at North Carolina State University for nearly 40 years, with whom she had two children, Edward Lamar Cloyd Jr., and Ann Daniel Cloyd. Bessie Heath Daniel attended the State Normal and Industrial College (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) in Greensboro, N.C., and worked there in the office of the president. She also held positions as the treasurer of the Kanuga Club near Hendersonville, N.C., and as an administrative assistant in the Agricultural Extension Service of Roxboro, N.C., and Person County. Daniel held numerous clerical positions, taught at Roxboro High School and the Hillcrest School in Flat River, and from 1923 to her retirement managed the family tobacco farm. From 1957 to 1975, she hosted a weekly radio program on WRXO in Roxboro, N.C., devoted to Person County history. Correspondence, financial and legal materials, and other items relating to Bessie Heath Daniel and others. Personal and business correspondence is mostly among Bessie Heath Daniel, Sallie Barnett Daniel, Lewis Heath Daniel, Bertha Daniel Cloyd, and their friends and family. Topics include tobacco farm management, rural household affairs, and the daily life of young female college students in the early 1900s. Financial materials including financial and legal documents from the 19th and 20th centuries; documents relating to Lewis Heath Daniel’s employment at the distillery warehouse in Roxboro, N.C.; bank books; account books (one of which includes a muster roll for Company A, 35th Battalion of Home Guards and a list of names and birth dates of slaves born 1813-1864); documents relating to the Daniel homestead and tobacco farm in Flat River, N.C.; and receipts. There are also materials relating to Bessie Heath Daniel’s weekly radio program; school materials including a cipher book, possibly of J. A. Lunsford; an “Album of Remembrance” of Carrie Scott while attending the Warrenton Female Collegiate Institute; materials relating to Bessie Heath Daniel and Bertha Daniel Cloyd’s education, such as notebooks, essays, tests, and grade reports; historical and genealogical materials including pages of a family record including birth, death, and marriage dates for the Ward, Bacon, Lamkin, Gregory, Edwards, and Scott family members, 1753-1886; printed materials; photographs, including a daguerreotype of Ann Lunsford Daniel; and other items.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: In Folder 86, one account book contains a list of names and dates of slaves born (1813-1864).