One such happening is the unresolved story of Sheriff J.W. McArtan, who also served as the county tax collector in the early 1920s. McArtan ran several ads in the Harnett County News reminding people to pay their taxes on time. One short article in the March 3, 1921 edition warned that those who failed to pay would be put on the county’s “delinquent list.”
But what happened to that tax money? Apparently, it didn’t all make it to schools and roads. An article in the December 18. 1924 edition reads: “Former Sheriff and His Bondsmen to Contest Claim: J.W. McArtan and Bonding Company to Make Denial of Statement that He Is $54,000 Short.” It goes on to explain, “The News is informed that J.W. McArtan, former sheriff and tax collector of Harnett county, has employed counsel to defend him in the matter of settlement with the county for moneys alleged to be due to the county by the sheriff.” According to the rest of the article, McArtan’s attorney argued that several of the books keeping the tax records had been taken out of McArtan’s office, so it was impossible to tell “how much money has been collected on the tax books since they were taken away… that is, [the auditor] does not know to which account moneys turned over to him may be credited, nor does he know for what year they were due.”
$54,000 is certainly a lot of money to be missing, even by today’s standards. But to put things into perspective, converted to the value of today’s dollars, McArtan was on the hook for about $937,250.
What happened to former sheriff McArtan? His name brings up a lot of results in the Harnett County News and other nearby papers, so it’s up to you to look and find out.
This week we have another 34 newspaper titles up on DigitalNC, including four from Carthage, North Carolina: Former home to the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company.
The “Jones” of the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company was William T. Jones, who was born into slavery and became one of the most well-respected and wealthiest businessmen in Carthage. Born near Elizabethtown in 1833, his father was a plantation owner and his mother was an enslaved person. Prior to the Civil War, he was given his freedom and moved to Fayetteville to work as a painter for a carriage company. It was there that his work was noticed by Thomas Tyson, who convinced him to come to Carthage to work for his fledgling operation in 1857, and by 1859 Jones was made a partner in that company. In 1861, Jones joined the Confederate Army and was subsequently captured by Union forces. While imprisoned at Fort Delaware, Jones began making moonshine from potato peelings and bread crusts and selling it to the Union guards. After Sherman’s March left much of the area devastated, it was the Jones’ moonshine money that allowed the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company to restart production, employing many struggling locals and helping to restart the local economy.
Even though Jones was a captain of industry, North Carolina House of Representatives candidate, and Sunday School teacher with a legacy that lives on in Carthage, it was not widely acknowledged that he wasn’t White. It wasn’t until recently that him being a Black man was recognized as fact and his full story was told.
Over the next year, we’ll be adding millions of newspaper images to DigitalNC. These images were originally digitized a number of years ago in a partnership with Newspapers.com. That project focused on scanning microfilmed papers published before 1923 held by the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library. While you can currently search all of those pre-1923 issues on Newspapers.com, over the next year we will also make them available in our newspaper database as well. This will allow you to search that content alongside the 2 million pages already on our site – all completely open access and free to use.
If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.
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This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
