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People complain too much about what Greensboro lacks. But three possessions are undeniable but often overlooked: history, architecture and artifacts.

This blog will devoted to the three. In the process, maybe some new nuggets will be dug up. By the way, Guilford had a rich gold mining history, with a whole mining town emerging and then disappearing near Sedgefield.

Not many cities can claim a major battle that was a turning point in the American Revolution, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Alas, many Greensboro residents think it was a Civil War battle. It is said a former mayor refused to dress as a re-enactor in a commemorative event of the 1781 battle. He said he'd look foolish in a Confederate uniform.

Greensboro missed out on a Civil War battle, but it had Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a resident during the last days of the war while he was fleeing the Yankees. Union soldiers wanted to blow up Reedy Fork trestle in 1865 as Davis' train passed over it. The train just made it across before the big boom destroyed the bridge. Some people believe Davis coined that day the adage "an inch is as good as mile."

During World War II, the U.S. government built in nine months a complete Army Corps base that eventually had 40,000 men and women and a few German POWs stationed there. And as many know, one of the 40,000 was actor Charlton Heston, who got married here.

Few cities in the South have had more civil rights activity than Greensboro, starting with Dr. George Simkins' challenge of the all-whites policy at Gillespie Park Golf Course in 1955; Josephine Boyd’s demand to enter all-white Greensboro Senior High School (now Grimsley) in 1957; four A&T students refusing to leave the Woolworth lunch counter after being denied service in 1960; A&T student Jesse Jackson leading downtown demonstrations in 1963; and violence that turned into racial riots in 1968 and 1969.

Business history alone could be a blog. The state's first steam-operated textile mill, Mt. Hecla, opened in downtown Greensboro in 1833. At one point, the city was home for four of the nation's largest and most prosperous textile companies, Cone, Burlington, Guilford Mills and Blue Bell Inc. Blue Bell invented Wrangler jeans in Greensboro, far, far from the range.

The city's education history dates back to the 18th century when David Caldwell founded North Carolina's first college, Caldwell's Log College on what's now Hobbs Road. He educated many future governors.

Today, only Raleigh can boast as many four-year universities and colleges as Greensboro: Bennett, Guilford, Greensboro, A&T and UNCG.

In architecture, how many other cities Greensboro's size can claim works by three of America's great architects? Alexander Jackson Davis of New York designed Blandwood Mansion in the early 1840s while in the state working on the State Capitol. German-born immigrant, Walter Gropius, one of several German geniuses who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s, did what's now the Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. building on East Market Street. Lorenzo Winslow was a draftsman/architect for 10 years here before leaving for Washington where he came the architect of the White House. He supervised the gutting and rebuilding of the president's house in 1948. Before departing Greensboro, he did the distinctive looking Irving Park Manor and Winburn Court apartments.

Greensboro has been blessed with local architectural talent, too. Edward Loewenstein, whose former Greensboro Public Library building on North Greene Street is being converted to the Elon University law school, helped introduce Greensboro to modernistic architecture. Charles Hartmann designed the Jefferson Building and Grimsley and Dudley highs. Harry Barton did the county courthouse and many buildings at UNCG. William Holleyman designed the Herman Cone estate in Irving Park, which recently sold for $5.9 million.

The best of America's early landscape architects did work here. Harvard trained John Nolen of Cambridge, Mass., designed Irving Park in 1911. Robert Cridland of Philadelphia expanded Irving Park, created the grounds of the Pilot Life Insurance campus headquarters at Sedgefield, the original playing field at War Memorial Stadium and the courtyard at Country Club Apartments. Warren Manning, who designed Pinehurst while working for Frederick Law Olmsted, did work at UNCG and Guilford College early in the 20th century. Earl Sumner Draper, a disciple of Nolen, designed the Lindley Park neighborhood.

There's a lot to write about, especially among those of us who enjoy knowing what used to be where in Greensboro. If you know something interesting write it and send it in. It might be a tip about a house or building that's threatened.

History, architecture and artifacts will be defined loosely. History doesn't have to be a cataclysmic event or architecture a massive building such as the barely surviving Southern Railway Roundhouse in west Greensboro.

It could be about an item about forgotten Millicent Fisher, the daughter of Basil Fisher, founder and namesake of Fisher Park. She went off to Hollywood to make flickers, as movies were called early in the 20th century. She also may have been the city’s first woman driver.

Artifacts could be something as small as a Tarpley Rifle, a miniature and failed firearm made here during the Civil War, and a rare fine today. It could be the dynamite safe behind the former South Side Hardware Co. on South Elm Street or the apothecary cup atop former Fordham's Drug Store across from the South Side Building.

Let's start looking and researching.

Another potential fuss looms between preservationists and First Presbyterian Church, although the parties hope an amicable settlement can be reached.

The dispute again regards the fate of an old house near the church. In the past, preservationists and the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association have clashed with the church over houses on the North Greene Street side. The church saw the old dwellings as potential parking lots.

This time, the space-hungry First Presbyterian wants to demolish a two-story house built about 1930 at 620 N. Elm St. on the opposite side of the church.

The house has no significant historical value, but it's an elderly member of the Fisher Park Historical District. The neighborhood association hates seeing houses in the district disappear.
Preservationists also blanch at the reason the church gives for wanting to remove the house: for yet more parking. Parking lots, preservationists say, have harmed cities by creating large gaps between buildings. They say parking lots are rarely attractive. It's time, they argue, to end sacrificing so much space for the sake of cars.

The church has offered to give the house to anyone who will move it. Some years ago, when the church wanted to remove the historic McAlister House on Greene Street for a church addition, antique dealer Margaret Carlson moved it a tenth of a mile up Fisher Avenue and put it beside another old house she had saved for displaying antiques. She connected both houses and today they compliment each other.

But Preservation Greensboro Inc. says moving the North Elm house, which lacks the grandeur of the McAlister, isn't feasible. The move would be too costly. Besides, Fisher Park lacks space on which to put it.

PGI and the neighborhood assocation hope to work with the church in considering "creative" ideas that might save the house and provide the church more parking.

One idea, says PGI Director Benjamin Briggs, would be to jack up the house - like a beach cottage - and park cars under it. Then the house could continue as it has for the past 25 years as offices, mainly for psychologists and counselors.

Briggs says another possibility is for the church to establish a shuttle service between the city's Bellemeade Street parking deck several blocks away. Parking is free in the 1,200-space deck on weekends and nights.

The North Elm house may not be unusual architecturally, but it's ownership pattern sure makes it different. According to Greensboro city directories dating to 1930, Margaret Gay, a widow, lived there from that year until the late 1970s. After that came a series of owners and residents, all women. A man didn't own a piece of the house until about 1981, when Jerry and Janet Merritt lived there briefly while operating an ad agency in another house nearby.

After the Merritts left, the house was subdivided into offices.
The Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission will consider the church's demolition request at a meeting next Wednesday at 4 p.m. in the City Council Chambers of Melvin Municipal Building.

The last sighting of Piedmont Airlines' "Potomac Pacemaker" was April 2004. It was in three parts flying down Interstate 85/40 on the back of three trucks bound for Spencer.

The 61-foot, 24-seat DC-3 aircraft was one of the earliest to fly Piedmont's blue colors. The airline was founded in Winston-Salem in 1948, and until it merged with United Airlines in the 1980s, enjoyed a reputation for reliability and had a loyal following of travelers.
Parts of the Potomic Pacemaker are now in Greensboro, at Guilford Technical Community College's Aviation Center at Piedmont Triad International Airport.

GTCC's aviation students, under instructor Larry Belton, have been assigned to reupholster with fabric the planes "control services" - the ailerons, the elevators and the rudder. The ailerons made it possible for the plane to roll left or right; the elevators made it go up and down and the rudder stirred it.

The students are part of a project at the N.C. Transportation Museum in Spencer to restore the old piston-drive plane to pristine condition.

But don't plan to book passage.

The plane will never fly again. Instead it will either hang from the rafters or be placed on the floor of the museum's Back Shop. The Back Shop was built in 1905 to repair Southern Railway steam engines. The museum occupies the railroad's old repair shops, which were located midway on Southern's main line between Washington and Atlanta.

Once fully restored in 2006, the Back Shop will be the museum's biggest display building. The Potomic Pacemaker will be the biggest item on display.

Until it was brought to Spencer, the plane was parked for years at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham.

Most of the plane's restoration is being done in the Back Shop, under the supervision of a committee, which includes a mechanic who worked on the plane and a Piedmont pilot who flew DC-3s.

DC-3s hauled troops and supplies and dropped paratroopers during World War II. After the war, DC-3s crissrossed America as commercial airliners.

The Potomac Pacemaker and Piedmont's other DC-3s were retired in 1963, but a few other airliners flew them awhile longer. Wright Airlines, a regional carrier in the Midwest, still had DC-3s flying between Detroit and Cleveland as late as 1980.

Only a few survive but "we still see some float in and out of the airport as cargo haulers," Belton says. "A DC-3 can carry a tremendous amount of cargo."

He says the control systems of the plane were covered with fabric to protect the metal and reduce maintenance. Aircraft Spruce & Specialty Co. in Georgia still supplies fabric and parts to the airline industry.The company donated nearly $3,000 worth of fabric for the GTCC students to use on the Potomic Pacemaker.

Belton says students from various classes in the aviation program will be working on the project throughout the new school year.

My thanks to David Hoggard for his welcome aboard the blogging boat. I've known David several years, and I've never encountered anyone who who can soak up the who, what, when, why and where of a city better than him. And he's not even a Greensboro native. He's from Kentucky.

I once walked the Charles B. Aycock Historic District neighborhood with him. Residents were standing on porches, getting into cars and walking along the sidewalks. David knew them all by name, and they know him. Aycock is a big neighborhood, too, but David seems to always be out and about in it.

Yeah, I know, politicians learn to know names. But this was long before David decided to run, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for City Council two years ago. Knowing people just comes naturally to him, and there's hardly a community meeting in the city he doesn't attend. He was at the Truth and Reconcilation Commission hearings this past weekend.

When not making the rounds of the neighborhood or city, he renovates old houses in Aycock and in other older neighborhoods.

And he's a musician. One day when I was waiting in the living room of his Cypress Street home for him to come home to be interviewed, someone starting playing the piano. It turned out to be the family cat walking across the keyboard. I figured the piano was an antique decoration in a house full of them.

But later when I attended a Preservation Greensboro Inc. reception at Blandwood Carriage House, snappy piano music could be heard coming from across the crowded room.

It was David, sitting there stroking the keys. For the most part, he played with both hands, but ever so often he'd free one to reach for a beer atop the upright piano.

He said he paid his way through college playing piano in bars.
Many years ago, I remember asking the late Greensboro civil rights leader Dr. George Simkins who he calls when he wants to find out what's going on in Greensboro. Without a pause, he declared, "Jim Melvin, and he always returns my calls."

David might not like this comparison - he and Melvin clashed over whether to renovate War Memorial Stadium in the Aycock neighborhood or build a new stadium downtown - but Hoggard reminds me of a poor man's Jim Melvin. He doesn't have the capital to build stadiums or downtown parks, but he's someone you can call when you want to know what's going on in Greensboro.

And he'll return your calls.

Everyone knows the whereabouts of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. They go there not so much to learn history but to walk dogs, jog, stroll and picnic. The park's 220-plus acres get crowded on weekends.

Then there's tiny Tannenbaum Historical Park a block away at the corner of New Garden Road and Battleground Avenue. Visitors come, but not as many as park director Adrienne Byrd would like. She has long called the city-operated park "Greensboro's best kept secret." She and her staff watch cars pass the entrance to the six-acre park and continue on to the federal park.

"We kept telling people we were tired of being the best-kept secret," she says. "We figured it was time to raise awareness."

The result: a seven-minute video, called, not surprisingly, "Best Kept Secret," that will officially air on Greensboro Cable Channel 13 Thursday at 11 p.m. and be repeated almost every day through Sept. 8.

The video stars local actor Mack McClain as farmer Joseph Hoskins, whose farm house is believed to have stood at the park site in 1781 when the British and Americans fought the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. In and around the Hoskins house, the British took up positions and prepared to advance against the American front line.

After the battle, the British treated their wounded at the house and, according to legend, buried their dead in a mass grave that archaeologists are still searching for.

This important tract was left out between the 1880s and 1917 when battlefield land was acquired and eventually made a national park. The park covers only about one-fifth of the 1,000 acres over which the battle was fought. The rest is now covered over with apartments, houses and shopping centers.

In the 1980s, the Hoskins property, then the site of a private home, was threatened with a shopping center development. This resulted in the re-activation of The Guilford Battleground Co., which Judge David Schenck had formed in the 1880s to save as much battlefield land as possible. The new generation of company members worked to preserve the property and did so with help of donations from the Sternberger-Tannenbaum Foundation and from the city and county.

The park is devoted to interpreting domestic life before and at the time of the battle. The setting includes the Colonial Heritage Center, featuring exhibits, a gift shop and meeting space.

The video was shot by Channel 13 photographer Ahmed Sabir-Calloway. Adrienne Byrd says over a period of months, Sabir-Calloway video taped special events in the park. He also would show up on pretty days to do landscape scenes.

Here's Channel 13's schedule of "Best Kept Secret":

Thursday, 11 p.m.
Friday, noon and 11:30 p.m.
Saturday: 9:30 p.m.
Monday: 8 p.m.
Wednesday: 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.
Thursday, 11 p.m.

Despite urban sprawl, mysteries remain to be found in patches of woods that survive in Greensboro. The News & Record recently reported on Sunday walkers who found in woods in the New Irving Park area a grave stone with the name Amos Jones, 1931-37. Checks of register of deeds birth and death records and old newspaper birth notices and obituaries from those years yielded no clues. Amos Jones remains unknown.

Here's a new mystery. Jim Farley, a retired businessman turned urban explorer in southwest Greensboro, recently found the ruins of a concrete wall in a thickly wooded, hard-to-reach area off the west side of South Holden Road, below Smith High School.

He took a photo and showed it to Julie Curry, who directs the county's historic preservation program. Stumped, she forwarded the photo to the newspaper to see what we knew.

We knew nothing.

A call went out to Eddie Styers, who has lived in the Pinecroft Road area since he was nine years and long before there was ever a South Holden Road.

"If there's anything around here I haven't seen, I'd be surprised," he said.

Shown the photo, he was suprised. He had no clue as to what it was.

His curiousity churning, he rode to South Holden. The decent down to the wooded area was too steep for him to try, but he knew a crek that he knew as Rocky Branch as a boy ran through the woods at that location and under South Holden.

He recalled a bridge standing at the spot that had taken old Osborne Road over Rocky Branch. He is convinced the wall held up one side of the now vanished bridge.

South Holden, built in late 1950s to early 1960s, follows the path of old Osborne Road. Pastures of Lindley W. Osborne's farm occupied both sides of the road. The late philanthropist Joseph Bryan had a farm he used for weekend get aways close by. Bryan also had a skeet club range where Smith High stands.

The old Osborne and Bryan farms are now covered with houses, apartments and commercial developments, with more to come.

Styers said confirmation that the ruins are a bridge wall might be possible though the Osborne family. Two of Lindley Osborne's great grandsons, twins Dwight and David Osborne, remain in Greensboro. In fact, Styers said, "I think David works up at the newspaper."

He sure does. David Osborne has been at the paper more than 40 years and is phone systems administator. He grew up on a section of his great-grandfather's farm.

When he looked at the photo, he immediately agreed with Styers. Although years have passed since he walked the creek, he's positive the brick wall held up the old Osborne Road bridge.

So, what does a decript wall lost in the wood amount to in the scheme of things. You have to be someone like Jim Farley and Eddie Styers to understand the significance. They've witnessed humongous changes to Greensboro's landscapes. Spotting a scarce reminder of a bygone time thrills them.

But Farley is a skeptic. He's not convinced it's a bridge wall. He can find no signs of an old road bed. He thinks it might be a dam that held up a farm pond.

He didn't know Joe Bryan had a skeet club in the area, but he says that fact explains all the clay pigeons he has found in the woods south of the high school.

"It's fun to find old things and to get the feel of what the community was like once," he says "We need to safeguard what we can."