We had a great start to our Fish Dam Road experience today.  We decided that, each day, a student from our group would serve as a reporter.  I will forward you their reports as soon as I receive them.  This way, you will get a student perspective of what happens!

So as not to steal the show from the students, I will keep my comments here short.

I want to recognize my co-sponsor, Dot Doyle, math teacher at NCSSM, who is accompanying me and our 23 students as we explore Fish Dam Road.  David Southern, Don Moffitt, and Jim Wise were also present to send us off this morning.  Don and Jim continued on with us to the Indian village site in Hillsborough where John Blackfeather Jeffries welcomed us and treated us to a hot fire on this cold morning.  After giving the students a history of the Occaneechi people, John presented each of the students with a wild turkey feather, decorated with a beaded leather wrap.  John singled out the four Native American students in our group with a presentation of hawk feathers.  John presented me with a blue heron feather.  We owe a lot to this generous man.

Tom Magnuson lead us from the village site, along the river, to the horseshoe bend in the Eno where we explored the roadbed that comes up from the river.  We speculate that this is the main road coming alongside the site of the old Occaneechee village.  We looked at Sauthier's 1768 map of Hillsborough that shows this road clearly in the exact location of this roadbed remnant.  We next drove to the other side of the river and studied the more subtle signs of the road coming out of the south side of the river.  Two very old oak trees marked the way.  A pond that has been made in the road bed was too grown up to inspect.  We headed up the hill to Tuscarora Drive, and Tom led the group cross-country looking for more roadbed.  He and the students found a 100 yard section of road berm in an old field and continued on to the ford at Cates Creek.  All the while, Tom was sharing his immense knowledge of roads, plants, colonial history with the students.

On the other side of Cates Creek we crossed Elizabeth Brady Road and headed into the woods to find a section of what we think is the fork in the road that departed for more southern parts of North Carolina (Fayetteville, and after another fork, New Bern).  We continued on the easterly track of Fish Dam Road to find a 75 yard section of pronounced roadbed that eventually merged into Highway 70 Business.  On the way back to the car, Jim Wise discovered a discarded lady's pursue complete with ID and with the money gone.  We used a cell phone to call the police, and an officer arrived to inspect the scene and retrieve the purse.  Wow, that was unexpected!

We expect tomorrow to pick up Fish Dam Road on Highway 70 and follow it into the woods to Lawrence Road and into Occoneechee Golf Course (I realize that I have used three different spellings for Occaneechi, but I am trying to honor the different ways people spell this word).

After box lunches on the grass roadside, we all went to inspect the site of the old Occoneechee Speedway.  Most students walked the full mile of this dirt track where Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, and Fireball Roberts got their starts. 

The students seemed to enjoy all of our experiences today.  They are planning their own contributions to what we are doing through photography, website design, map making, Global Positioning markers, history papers, journals, and more.  We hope to have a couple of exhibitions to share this work with all of you.  Please mark Thursday, May 6 on your calendars for an exhibit opening at the Durham County Library.  It will be an evening affair.  I'll be back later with more details.

If any of you would like to add comments to anything I have reported or to what will be coming soon from my student, just "Reply to All" and share your knowledge with all of us.

Until tomorrow,

Joe