by Yunte Huang
Wilkes County was named, as was the town of Wilkesboro, in honor of John Wilkes, an English statesman and champion of American rights at the time of the Revolution. John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Lincoln, was related to the English political leader through his paternal grandmother.2 Equal parts piedmont and mountain, the county in the heart of the Yadkin basin had been inhabited by Siouan-speaking tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans. Then colonial settlers of primarily Scots-Irish, German, and English extraction migrated here from Virginia and Pennsylvania via the Great Wagon Road and the Carolina Road. The most famous of these migrants was Christopher Gist, believed to be the first white man to settle in the area. Friendly with the Cherokees, Gist became a legendary Indian scout and surveyor—credited, perhaps apocryphally, with twice saving the life of Colonel George Washington. One of Gist’s sons married an Indian girl, who gave birth to Sequoyah, the legendary inventor of the Cherokee alphabet.
As if Wilkes and Gist were not sufficient, Daniel Boone, the coonskin-hatted trailblazer of the American frontier, had a strong connection to Wilkes County. Brought by his parents to the Yadkin Valley as a kid from Pennsylvania, Boone had spent his formative years in the county, using it as a launch pad for his hunting expeditions to Kentucky, where he would eventually earn his reputation.
In addition to the highest-profile locals, many of the residents in this area were veterans of the American Revolution and the subsequent wars with the British and the Indians. Respectable gentlemen with names prefixed by titles of colonel, major, and captain, these decorated war heroes were joined by doctors, ministers, and planters to form the county’s upper echelon, who lived on better, more fertile lands, while the less fortunate scattered around the woodland hills of the area, subsiding in huts, log cabins, and even in mountain caves. Geographically sliced off from the outside world, these mountaineers were fiercely independent, relying on what the land produced for sustenance: corn, tobacco, wheat, rye, oats, apples, peaches, grapes, and so on. In addition, some mountaineers eked out a living by what was known as “yarbin’ it,” the local colloquialism for gathering and selling roots, barks, and herbs.3
Not even the most renowned soothsayer could have guessed that this Arcadian locale would become, as I describe in the epilogue, the setting for one of the most popular sitcoms (or, rather, rubecoms) in twentieth-century America, The Andy Griffith Show. In the nineteenth century, a landing on the moon would have been even more imaginable than the arrival of television. To this day, we do not know what exactly had brought Chang and Eng to this sleepy holler, an even more rustic version of what would become the mythical Mayberry. During their decade-long tour, the twins had traversed the Rip Van Winkle State many times, but they had always traveled along the Eastern Seaboard or through the middle Piedmont Plateau, never to the remote upper airs of the mountainous western part of the state. The only time they almost came this way was in October 1834, when traveling from Virginia into North Carolina. They had planned to go from Danville, Virginia, to Wilkesboro, and they even had the handbills printed already, advertising that, “For One Day only, the United Brothers, Chang and Eng, will receive Visitors at the TENT,” but for some unknown reason that trip never materialized. (Perhaps their horse took ill, as a bill from a veterinarian seems to suggest.)
Biographers, in fact, have speculated about the reason the Siamese Twins went to Wilkesboro. Shepherd M. Dugger, a Tar Heeler who claimed to have met the twins in person, maintained in his book, Romance of the Siamese Twins (1936), that it was a Wilkesboro doctor by the name of James Calloway who had invited the twins to come visit. Dugger believed that Dr. Calloway, a great-nephew of Daniel Boone and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, saw the twins’ show in New York in the spring of 1839 and struck up a friendly conversation with them. Learning of Chang and Eng’s fondness for outdoor sports, Calloway told the twins that Wilkes County, where he had set up a medical practice, “was replete with clear streams teeming with fine fishes; that the hills and mountains abounded in deer and wild-turkeys, with smaller game, as squirrels and pheasant galore.” Calloway warmly invited the twins to come visit. This was an explanation perpetuated by Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace in their biography. But recently, Joseph Orser, in his superb study of the twins, dismissed Dugger’s view, citing evidence that Calloway could not have met the twins in New York in the spring of 1839 because they were touring in the South during those months—as indeed they were.4
Regardless, Chang and Eng clearly had planned for this trip and paid Dr. Calloway a friendly visit after their arrival. Earlier, when they were still touring in Georgia, Charles Harris had left the caravan and gone to New York on May 8. He would stay there for two weeks, apparently to make arrangements for his and the twins’ retirement from a life on the road. On June 7, when the twins got closer to Wilkesboro, Harris returned from New York to join them. After a long stagecoach ride, Harris arrived in Wilkesboro on June 20. According to the expense ledger, Harris paid “one stage fare extra for luggage,” indicating that he had brought an unusually large amount of provisions. Ledger entries under the heading “Payments by C Harris when at New York” give us a clue: “a Box to hold clothes for CE,” “6 Cakes of Windsor Soap,” “a Nail Brush,” “getting Shirts from Jersey City,” “2 Horse Collars,” “2 Pole Straps,” “2 Breast Straps,” “a Pair of Driving Gloves for Chang,” and so on. It seemed that they were making plans for a long or even permanent stay.
This remote area had much to offer as a retirement place for Chang and Eng, who by now were road-weary and tired of the prying eyes of the public. The forests, creeks, and rivers were also ideal for hunting and fishing, a fact borne out again by their ledger. In early June, en route from Salisbury to Wilkesboro, the twins incurred costs on many items related to outdoors sportsmanship: “Copper Caps for gun $0.75,” “Shot $0.50,” “Lead for bullets $0.70,” “Two Hats $2.50,” “Copper Caps $2.00,” “Gun Smith $0.38,” and “Fishing Hooks & Lines $0.30.” Riding along the same route about a decade earlier, Elisha Mitchell, a geologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had contemplated the suitableness of this area for a reclusive life. In July 1828, Mitchell wrote in one of his diary letters to his wife: “Here, according to some men calling themselves philosophers, in retirement shut out from intercourse with the world by the sides of these streams and hemmed in by these mountains—man may, if he will, be happy.”5 In another letter a few days later, Mitchell compared the local scenery to Pennsylvania’s bucolic Wyoming Valley before the onslaught of industrialization, and he considered it to be “the place for a person to retire to, who has been ill-treated by the world and is disgusted with it.” He recommended it as a retreat to a lawyer friend, painting a scene of rustic living in the woods, “telling him how finely he could shoot bears for his wife to eat and get fine skins to warm her—the orchard would also furnish fine whisky for her as well as the field the best of wheat and he could present the whole to her as the product of his own labor and a testimonial of his love.”6 Chang and Eng’s imagination did not extend yet to domestic bliss, but they certainly yearned for seclusion.
They were now twenty-eight years old—healthy, energetic, and experienced in the ways of the world. After a decade of hard work and frugal living, they impressively had amassed more than $10,000 in savings. There was one item in their ledger that recurred almost every month: a $3 payment for “Premium on Draft to NY,” presumably for the cost of sending their hard-earned dollars to a New York savings bank. The press, prone to exaggeration, had speculated that they were worth between $40,000 and $60,000. The New Orleans Times-Picayune even claimed that by the end of 1838, the twins had “made upwards of $100,000 clear by exhibiting themselves in this country.”7 Still, the $10,000 they had stashed away was a handsome sum and could go a long way in a remote and economically moribund area like western North Carolina.
Things were clearly winding down, as revealed by their relaxing schedule en route to Wilkesboro. They did, however, hav
e one show in Salisbury on June 1 and then another in Statesville on June 3, netting $28.36 and $35.50, respectively.
For the rest of the time, almost as if returning to their country roots, they hunted, fished, or simply drove around to take in the mountains. The closer they got to their destination, the more they seemed to enjoy the area. Though it was a different kind of lushness from their native Siamese tropical green, with no palm fronds sounding off the quick beat of a monsoon rain, they felt weirdly at home immersing themselves in the running streams, soft hills, sparkling air, and blue mountains as ancient as time. They had never felt so happy since leaving Siam, free like the early days when they were kids cruising down the muddy Meklong in their dinghy, herding a team of quacking ducks.
On the night of June 10, they repaired to an old Dutchman’s hostel a few miles outside of Wilkesboro. The next morning, after fixing the halter of the buggy, they trundled into the village under the curious eyes of the townsfolk, who, having been tipped off by an advance notice, were expecting the famous twins. Stopping under the oak tree in the village square, they walked up to a boardinghouse run by Abner Carmichael, the county sheriff and father-in-law of Dr. Calloway.
After freshening up, they began to receive visitors, which took on all the hoopla of a papal visit, because the small front room of Carmichael’s boardinghouse was suddenly choked with every vestige of local humanity. Peter Marsh, the advance runner sent by the twins to Wilkesboro a few days earlier, had done a stellar job of advertising with handbills and posters, and word spread among mountain folk faster than a patch of kudzu. By the day’s end, the twins had grossed the opulent sum of $47.25. At a stiff price of twenty-five cents per head, it meant that there had been a gaggle of two hundred visitors.
Having satisfied the curiosity of the good folks of Wilkesboro, the twins spent the next two weeks exploring the area. They each got a haircut, eschewing the Chinese queues they had maintained for mercenary purposes since the days in Meklong. They bought two hats to shade them from the warm June sun and two pairs of summer trousers. Equipped with hunting rifles and fishing gear, they roamed the mountains, woods, and creeks, almost like two Siamese Daniel Boones. Cherries were in season, and they bought baskets of them from “an old negro woman,” as recorded in their ledger. The return of Charles Harris from New York on June 20 brought a temporary break from these happy outings in the woods, as they rummaged through the luggage for items they would need for setting up a homestead. All five of them—Chang and Eng, Harris, Marsh, and the driver, George Prendergast—would stay, on and off, for two months at Carmichael’s boardinghouse, using it as a base for their local adventures.
As they wound down life on the road, the twins did a few more shows in neighboring counties: Jonesville on June 24, Williamsburg on June 25, grossing meager amounts of $18.50 and $13.75, respectively. Then they traveled to Ashe County, on the border between North Carolina and Virginia, for one last hurrah. The entourage left Wilkesboro two days before the Fourth of July and rode along the foothills of the Blue Ridge. They stayed for one night at Mrs. Colvard’s, a hostel at the foot of the Blue Ridge where Elisha Mitchell had also stayed in July 1828. Mitchell wrote in his diary letter: “At Mrs. Colvards the fare was rather hard; no tea or coffee but excellent potatoes.”8
The next morning, as the twins continued to ride through the ragged ranges, more than a thousand miles to the south the American-built schooner La Amistad had quietly departed Havana, Cuba, where the twins had once toured. On this day, fifty-three Mende slaves, led by Sengbe Pieh, revolted against the Spanish crew and attempted to steer the ship back to Africa. The subsequent capture and trial of the rebel slaves would spark a firestorm in the United States. In the heat of the public debate over what to do with the captives if they were to gain freedom, the freakish figure of the conjoined twins came to the mind of some opinion makers, who suggested that “they will not be allowed by a Christian public, to be led about for show, like the Siamese Twins, where the benign rays of Christianity can never reach them.”9
Ashe County, the location of the twins’ last performance, was a mountainous plateau more than three thousand feet in mean elevation, named after the state’s governor, Samuel Ashe. “There are more cattle than people in the county, and more sheep than cattle,” was a local saying used to describe the area. Jefferson, the county seat, was surrounded by mountains: To the west, cutting off the afternoon sun, was Paddy, named for a man hanged at its base. Phoenix Mountain was to the north. To the south lay “Nigger Mountain,” named for a cave at its summit, five thousand feet above sea level, which often was used as a hideout by fugitive slaves. The other explanation for the name, however, “points to the mountain’s black granite outcrop,” a feature identified by Dr. Mitchell during his field trip in 1827 but reflecting the preponderance of racism even built into the geography.10
The sparsely populated area around Jefferson had a long history of conflict and strife. Settled by veterans of the Revolutionary War, the town was one of the first in America to be named after the nation’s founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Many of the county’s residents were living embodiments of frontier trials and patriotic sacrifice, real-life stories that would make James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales or Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative sound like preposterous Yankee concoctions. One woman by the name of Lydia Waters, though not as literary as Mary Rowlandson, had an experience just as horrific as what was depicted in that classic captivity narrative: “In 1800 unidentified Indians captured eleven-year-old Lydia and her younger brother as the family approached their new home on the South Fork,” as Martin Crawford tells us in his in-depth historical study of Ashe County. “Spared her brother’s scalping and death on account of her ‘beautiful golden hair,’ Lydia was enslaved and for two years suffered brutal hardships at the hands of her captors. These included having her hair torn out and being branded on the neck with hot spears and irons. After an exchange of prisoners, Lydia was released and returned to her family, but they did not initially recognize her because she was so disfigured by the branding and her hair had turned pure white.” And now Lydia Waters Brown, a widow in her fifties, was presiding over a large family household on the North Fork.11
The story of Captain Martin Gambill was also a local yarn that had regional and national resonance: In 1780, Captain Gambill, a thirty-year-old Virginia-born pioneer, rode a hundred miles to warn the American commander of the impending British approach, thus playing a pivotal role in a battle that proved a turning point in the war. Disabled in the left arm at the Battle of Kings Mountain, this southern Paul Revere settled with his family in the area, serving as the county’s first tax collector and first sheriff.12 When the Siamese Twins arrived in 1839, Captain Gambill had passed away, but his widow, Nancy, and their sons Martin and Jesse, still resided in the area. In the coming years, the twins would frequently carry on commercial transactions with the Gambills, buying fodder, brandy, and livestock from them.
Now, however, after half a day of hard riding on mountain roads, the twins and their party finally arrived in Jefferson, locale of their last performance. On Main Street, lined by rows of blackheart cherry, the twins pulled up at the boardinghouse run by Colonel George Bower, Ashe County’s wealthiest man and leading politician. Settlers in the central part of the county in the wake of the Revolutionary War, the Bowers were true founders—in 1800, the family had provided, at the nominal price of $100, the fifty-acre land upon which Jefferson, as the county seat, was to be located. In his prime, Bower could boast of more than a thousand acres of improved land, thirty-four slaves, and a fortune estimated to be over $122,000.13 In 1861, while pursuing a fugitive slave, Bower drowned in the Yadkin near Wilkesboro. The North Carolina Standard eulogized him as “a striking example of the honest, straightforward old time public men of the state who are rapidly passing away.”14 The twins would stay at this old-timer’s boardinghouse for two nights and incur $10 in expenses, in addition to thirteen cents paid to the hostel’s black se
rvant for shining their boots, a behavior anticipating their complicity with a binary white–black hierarchy in which they clearly identified with the white.
Befittingly, given the area’s illustrious patriotic past, it was in Jefferson on July Fourth that Chang and Eng gave their career-ending performance—while fireworks and guns popped off everywhere in this young nation. Far away in New York, where President Martin Van Buren was visiting, the whole city, as someone told Edgar Allan Poe in a letter, was “in perfect confusion.” Poe’s confidant continued to inform him: “The President’s visit and the celebration of the Fourth of July have turned people’s brains. I have never heard such an incessant popping and squibbing in my life before. The whole place appears under arms.”15 Western North Carolina was not noted for raucous celebrations of the Fourth of July, with the possible exception of Salem, where the Moravians would pray for peace and sing “The Psalm of Joy,” accompanied by a trombone. That annual performance had first started in 1783 and was in fact the nation’s earliest official Independence Day celebration.16
In Jefferson, the twins discovered that a horse show was the local custom on the Fourth. The program included a horse race down the Main Street, a display of jumping horses, and pony rides for kids. On this day in 1839, the appearance of the twins in Ashe County seemed to instantiate a new national existence for the town. After the horse show was over, trophies awarded and ribbons taped, the locals packed the courthouse for a peek at the famous Siamese Twins. Sensing that this might be the grand finale of their decade-long road show, Chang and Eng put in extra effort entertaining and indulging these mountain folks, who had no idea that the twins were planning to settle down among them. For too long, the twins had been carnival clowns. On this carnivalesque holiday, no one really understood what Chang and Eng were secretly celebrating, perhaps with a stifled chuckle, while grossing $38.60 in receipts.
