Faggart 1

Destiny Faggart
Professor Raymond
UWRT 1103
05 Aug 2020
Faggart Family Findings

Family research does not seem that exciting. That is what I initially thought when

I first heard I would be researching my family history, but I was so wrong. Over this

semester, I realized that my family is more interesting than I thought. I have come

across many documents and topics from conversations that inspired me to find out the

answers to my most pressing questions. I believe family research is valuable to me

because it allows me to connect who I am today with my ancestors of the past. It is

even more necessary to write down my findings from this research so future

generations can know the ancestors and the stories of those who proceeded them.

My family came from the United States, where

the capital city is Washington D.C. My family

lived in North Carolina since approximately the

late 1800s when my Great-great-grandparents Figure 1: Cabarrus County, NC

Source: Bangma, Peter. “Cabarrus County.” NCpedia,

William and Isbelle Faggart were born. From www.ncpedia.org/geography/cabarrus#:~:text=Cabarrus County, located in
North,North Carolina House of Commons.

my great-great-grandparents until my

grandparents, my family has lived in Concord and Kannapolis, located in Cabarrus

County. Cabarrus County is in the Piedmont of North Carolina, and it was established in

1792. Concord was the county seat and founded in 1798. Cabarrus County is known for

its rich history in the textile industry, which was booming during the late nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. During the early 1900s, Coleman Manufacturing Company in

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Concord began operation. It was America’s first textile company owned and operated by

African Americans (Bangma). Another well-known textile company, Cannon Mills,

brought attention to the textile industry in Cabarrus County. It was founded by James

William Cannon in 1887.Cannon also helped to create the town of Kannapolis in 1906

when he purchased “six-hundred acres of land located about seven miles north of his

first plant in Concord.” His plans for the new land included creating a community with

houses and a school which became Kannapolis (Cherry). My Grandpa Jacob and

Grandmother Daisy were both workers at Cannon Mills. My grandfather worked at

Cannon Mills Plant One from 1975 until 1983 as a custodian, while my grandmother

worked at Cannon Mills Plant Seven from 1969 until 1983 as a knitter. They both retired

the same year due to health reasons.

My grandparents got married on December 22, 1957, and moved to Salisbury in

Rowan County, North Carolina. They lived in a small house with a few other relatives

before a tragic event occurred. In 1969, the house my grandparents (and now their six

children) and other family members lived in caught on fire (it was later rebuilt). Due to

the damage, my grandparents decided to move out and live in a mobile home that they

found in the “country” part of town known as Woodleaf, North Carolina. Following the

move, my grandmother had two more children. She had a baby girl born in October of

the same year, and her last child was a baby boy born in April of 1972. I find it

interesting how some of my family lives in both Salisbury and Woodleaf to this day. I

have uncles who occasionally stay at the house that caught on fire in Salisbury. I have

even visited the house on numerous occasions for Christmas Eve celebrations, friendly

visits, and more. My youngest aunt, Dorothy, found a home for her family in Salisbury,
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less than ten minutes away from my grandparents’ original house. My second oldest

aunt, Vida, even lives in Woodleaf with her family not too far from where my

grandparents’ mobile home is located. Her eldest son currently attends West Rowan

High, the same high school where my dad, aunts, and uncles attended.

During the span of this project, I held an in-depth interview with my father, Joel

Faggart. Since my grandfather died before I was born (he died on March 16, 2000), I

wanted to hear a firsthand account from my dad on the type of person Jacob Faggart

was. My grandfather was born in Kannapolis, North Carolina, on April 15, 1926, and

resided in the countryside of town during his childhood. Being the son of a

sharecropper, my grandfather came from a low-income family, and he knew what it

meant to be a hard worker. He lived in a small two-room house but spent most of his

time outside tending to the vast family garden or taking care of cows, pigs, and

chickens. Like my father, he had three brothers, four sisters, and was the youngest of

eight children. Within my house, we often joke around saying the youngest children

have it the easiest, but sadly for my grandfather, that was not the case. At the young

age of eleven, my grandfather’s father (Thomas Faggart) died from having a massive

heart attack. It was one of the most traumatic hardships that my grandfather had to

endure. He came to terms with his father’s death and understood that he had to assist

more around the house. Because of this experience, my grandfather quickly developed

into a mature person at a young age. He gained up to an eighth-grade education level,

but then quit school to seek employment as a cotton field picker in Kannapolis, NC. He

sacrificed a lot to help his mother out. Another hardship that my grandfather and many

fellow African Americans at that time faced was having to live during the Jim Crow era.
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He was not allowed to eat at the same restaurants as Caucasians or even participate in

voting during that time. Throughout his circumstance, he continued to believe that race

relations would improve (J.Faggart).

By asking family members about people in my family tree, I was able to uncover

some information that I never knew of before. I learned that my Great-Grandfather

Thomas Faggart was a sharecropper. Like most people, I have heard of the term

sharecropper before, but I never knew what it meant. I decided to research

sharecropping. What is sharecropping? What was life like for a sharecropper? How

does slavery compare to sharecropping? These were all questions that I posed to

myself to find the correct answers. Sharecropping was a system between

sharecroppers and landowners in the southern part of the United States from the 1860s

until the 1940s. This system began to decline due to the modernization of farming

techniques and because African Americans began moving to the North during the Great

Migration for better paying industrial jobs. Sharecropping began because slavery was

abolished following the end of the Civil War, and many African Americans in the rural

South were looking for a sense of independence by possessing a plot of land. Large

landowners (usually white) would give African Americans small plots of land, seeds,

tools, and clothing in exchange for the African Americans working in the field harvesting

crops. The problem with sharecropping was that the things “given” to the African

Americans came with a price. All the materials that I previously mentioned were loaned

to African Americans. They had to pay back to the landowner by giving him a share or

percentage of the harvest. Landowners were infamous for saying that the crops the

African Americans harvested were not enough to pay off their debt, causing them to
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spiral into a continuous cycle of trying to harvest enough crops to pay off a debt that

would never go away. In this way, sharecroppers were forced to form a dependency on

their landowners, much like slaves did to their masters because they were rarely able to

pay off their debts by other means, and they were tied down to that land without the

ability to leave for better opportunities because by law sharecroppers could not leave

until their debt was wiped clean. Slavery and sharecropping were different in the sense

that sharecropping allowed for families to stay together as opposed to facing the

possibility that a parent or child could be sold and forced to work at different plantations

(Jaynes). Life for a sharecropper could have involved working in the fields until

nighttime when the moon became the source of light. It could have involved working

when feeling too sick but sacrificing your health for the hope that one day your hard

work would result in hearing that your debt is finally paid off (“Sharecropping”). Since my

Great-Grandfather Thomas Faggart was a sharecropper in North Carolina, I found that

North Carolina’s treatment of African Americans was among the worst in the nation

along with other states, including Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana,

Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. The annual income for an African American

sharecropper in Chatham County (near Chapel Hill, NC) in 1921, was only two hundred

and nine dollars per family. When I put that into perspective, it was less than one dollar

each day, which is mind-blowing to me (“We Do”).

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Some family hobbies or interests are

passed down or continued into the present day.

My family’s hobby happens to be gardening.

Due to talks from my family, it is believed that

my Great-Great-Grandpa William grew up on a

plantation in Cabarrus County. He was used to

planting and picking crops just like his son

Thomas, a sharecropper. My grandfather Figure 2: Joel Faggart’s Garden and Fresh Produce

Source: Destiny Faggart Phone Photo Album, 31 July 2020

continued the hobby of gardening by creating

a backyard garden of fruits and vegetables at his house in Woodleaf. Whenever the

school year ended, my father and his siblings knew that during the summertime, they

would have to tend to the garden. My second eldest uncle, Solomon, always jokes

around saying that even on his birthday as a child, his father would say, “Happy

Birthday! Now go in that field and pick some vegetables.” My father continues the same

love for gardening as the generations proceeding him did. My father even continues

some of the same traditions of my grandfather by giving away extra produce to

neighbors so they can enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables.

Besides gardening, my family also shares a history of military service. My

Grandfather Jacob was eighteen when he registered for the World War II Draft on April

15, 1944. He served in the United States Army Air Forces from 1945 until 1946 as a tail

gunner (a person who stands at the back of an aircraft protecting it with guns) for the B-

29 aircraft. After completing his service, he received an honorable discharge from the

Army. Following in their father’s footsteps, five of his eight children served in the
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military. The eldest, Timothy Faggart, served in both the United States Army and Air

Force. He served in the United States Army from July 1976 until July 1980 as a Basic

Infantryman and Personnel Management Specialist. He obtained a ranking of Specialist

Fifth Class. He served in the United States Air Force as an Information Management

Officer and Personnel Squadron Commander from September 1985 until September

1997, when he retired with the rank of Captain. He was able to spend three years in

Germany with the Army and three years overseas in England with the Air Force (T.

Faggart). The next eldest child, Solomon Faggart, served in the United States Air Force

as an Inventory Management Specialist from October 1982 until September 1992. My

Uncle Sol, as I call him, was involved with the movement, storage, and distribution of

government property (S. J. Faggart). Shawn Faggart, the third eldest child, served in the

United States Air Force from November 3, 1985, until November 3, 1989. He worked in

base operations, working closely with the flight service station, weather department, and

air traffic control. He also worked in the control tower giving aircraft permission to take

off or land, and he gave briefings about international air spaces. From November 1989

until March 1997, my Uncle Shawn worked in the medical squadron for the North

Carolina Air National Guard. He was a clinician doing flight examinations for vision and

hearing testing. My Uncle Shawn also worked as a field medic in the remote jungles of

Honduras, Central America, where he immunized humans and livestock. He obtained a

rank of E-5 Staff Sergeant (S. G. Faggart). Wanda Faggart, the fourth child, served in

the United States Army. Sheila Faggart Plumber was the last child that decided to serve

in the military. My Aunt Sheila served in the United States Navy from April 1987 until

March 1996. She was trained as a Cryptologic Intelligence Operator. She dealt with
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incoming and outgoing messages that pertained to all branches of the military

movements and locations until April 1992. She had additional training in Pensacola,

Florida, on the technical side and learned to maintain all the cryptologic electronic

equipment. My Aunt Sheila spent two years at the Naval Security Group in Rota, Spain,

working as a Technical Control Operator. This means that she gave nightly

communication briefings of all ships, their locations, and their communication status.

She was also in charge of keeping the communication equipment and lines up and

running for all US Navy ships that were based in or visiting the European area. She left

the Navy as a CTO3 which stands for Cryptologic Petty Officer Third Class (Plumber).

Through hours of research and reaching out to different family members, I have

learned more than I ever thought I knew about the Faggart family. I now know that my

family came from Cabarrus County, North Carolina, more than one hundred and sixty

years ago. I know that I am a descendant of a slave and sharecropper. I finally know the

reason why my father is so passionate about gardening. Most importantly, I know how

valuable family research is. I hope that future generations will be able to look back at my

findings and realize the rich history that is the Faggart family.
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Works Cited

Bangma, Peter. “Cabarrus County.” NCpedia, www.ncpedia.org/geography/cabarrus#:~:text=Cabarrus

County, located in North,North Carolina House of Commons.

Cherry, Kevin. “Cannon Mills.” NCpedia, www.ncpedia.org/cannon-mills.

Faggart, Joel T. Personal Interview 2 July 2020.

Faggart, Timothy E. Text Exchange 1 Aug 2020.

Faggart, Solomon J. Text Exchange 1 Aug 2020.

Faggart, Shawn G. Text Exchange 1 Aug 2020.

Jaynes, Gerald D. “Debt Slavery.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 28 Aug. 2019,

www.britannica.com/topic/debt-slavery.

Plumber, Sheila F. Text Exchange 1 Aug 2020.

“Sharecropping and Changes in the Southern Economy.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service,

www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reconstruction-sharecropping-and-changes-southern-

economy/.

"We Do Not Want to Hear the Truth Pertaining to Our System of Political Economy Index to This

Issue." Wyandotte Echo, vol. V, no. 31, 10 Feb. 1933, p. PAGE [ONE]. Readex: African American

Newspapers, infoweb-newsbank-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/apps/readex/doc?

p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12ACD97C8656DCF8%40EANAAA-

12C8BA43CB2B6BB8%402427114-12C8BA43D211B3B0%400-12C8BA43E9B62D48%40We%2BDo

%2BNot%2BWant%2Bto%2BHear%2Bthe%2BTruth%2BPertaining%2Bto%2BOur%2BSystem%2Bof

%2BPolitical%2BEconomy%2BIndex%2Bto%2BThis%2BIssue. Accessed 1 Aug. 2020.