Creator: Gwyn, James, 1812-1888.
Collection number: 298
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Abstract: James Gwyn I (1768-1850) married Amelia Lenoir (1765-1848). Their son James Gwyn II (1812-1888) was a planter, clerk of court, and merchant of Wilkes County, N.C. He married Mary Anne Lenoir (1819-1899) in 1839, and, in 1852, they moved to Green Hill Plantation near Ronda, in Wilkes County. Amelia Gwyn, daughter of James Gwyn I, married Major Lytle Hickerson (1793-1884), a Wilkes County merchant, and lived at Roundabout. Hickerson and his brother-in-law James Gwyn II were business partners until about 1848, when Gwyn left the business to take charge of the plantation at Green Hill and look after his aging parents. Personal correspondence, chiefly 1830s to 1880s, financial and legal items, and other papers of the family of James Gwyn and his wife, Mary Ann Lenoir Gwyn of Green Hill Plantation, Wilkes County, N.C., chiefly concerning children’s education at various schools, including the University of North Carolina; real estate; North Carolina politics; and news of the Gwyn and related Lenoir and Hickerson families, particularly of Gwyn’s brother-in-law Lytle Hickerson. Volumes include diaries, 1852-1884, of James Gwyn and, 1850-1851, of his son Hugh, kept while he was a student at Emory and Henry College, 1850-1851, and while he was teaching at Holly Springs, Miss., 1852; account books for various business activities; and remedies and recipes for home and farm preparations.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Included are slave bills of sale (1844-1846); a memorandum of agreement between James Gwyn and several young free blacks (1866); and letters describing Reconstruction politics in North Carolina and Louisiana (1868-1877), and race relations in Tennessee and North Carolina (1898).