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A different kind of graduation story

Senora DeCosta had worked in the University Registrar's Office long enough to have handled hundreds of questions about diplomas.

But nothing prepared her for the call she got from Frances Grey Jarratt nearly a year ago. There was nothing ordinary about this woman, she found out soon enough, or her request.

Jarratt's great grandfather, Isaac Augustus Jarratt, had been a senior at Carolina in the spring of 1861. When the Civil War broke out, Jarratt joined the slew of other seniors who took off to fight.

The story had been passed down through the generations that her great grandfather had graduated from Carolina, Jarratt told DeCosta.

No one could say for sure, though, because there had never been a diploma issued that would prove it.

"I had always been told he graduated," Jarratt told DeCosta. "I just wanted to have the diploma that showed he did."

Could she help?

'A strange, sad spring'

Isaac Augustus Jarratt had been at Carolina two years when President James Buchanan arrived for commencement exercises in 1859 to warn of "the evils of intemperance." If we should so indulge in the emotion, Buchanan said, "we bring upon ourselves a greater calamity than is brought upon us by the yellow fever."

Two years later, there would be no commencement exercises for Jarratt at the end of his senior year.

In 1861, Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote of a "strange, sad spring" that brought into bloom "a strange, enormous and terrible flower, the blood-red flower of war, which grows amid the thunders."

According to a history of North Carolina's 26th Regiment written by David McGee, North Carolina Congressman Zebulon Vance gave a speech in support of the Union days before the fuse for war was finally lit at Fort Sumter. But with the start of war, Vance would become the first colonel of the 26th and the first commander under whom Isaac Jarratt would fight.

The companies in the 26th drew most of their members from a single county. Jarratt, though from Yadkin County, would join Company C -- made up mostly of men from Wilkes -- on Oct. 1, 1861. Amid the hunger for war, 21-year-old private Jarratt still hungered for home cooking, according to McGee's history. "Jarratt had only been with the regiment a short time before he requested that his brother send a box of food with onions and cabbages included."

The passage was among several in which McGee wrote of Jarratt. In most every reference, McGee identified him not as "Isaac Augustus" but as "Gus."

The roll of honor

"It took me a moment to register when she said `1861,'" DeCosta said of that phone call.

It took her longer to figure out what to do next after telling Jarratt she would see what she could do. Her computer's database only went back to 1968.

She turned first to Jill Snider, who at the time was the acting reference archivist at Wilson Library. Snider, citing Kemp P. Battle's History of the University of North Carolina, told DeCosta that a majority of Carolina's class of 1861 had left school to join the Confederate Army before completing all graduation requirements.

In the University Archives, Jarratt's name appeared on a handwritten list of names titled "Report of Examination, June 1861" for whom no final grades were recorded. The students whose names appeared on that list were granted diplomas, anyway, Battle wrote. "In the fervor of patriotism the Faculty agreed, with the consent of the Trustees gladly given, to grant diplomas to all members of the Senior Class, although many had joined the army and did not stand their examinations."

Snider's research confirmed for DeCosta that Jarratt had earned a diploma. Her next challenge was to figure out where she would go to get one to give to his great granddaughter, Frances.

For this she turned to the University's Design Services.

Design Services, though overflowing with work, agreed to take on the project with the understanding that it could not be given a high priority. Plus, the project would take painstaking research so that the diploma they designed would come out looking as close as possible to the diplomas of that era.

That process would take time -- and patience.

From time to time, as they waited for the diploma, DeCosta called to reassure Frances that she had not been forgotten. Eventually, DeCosta started looking forward to the chance to meet Jarratt in person.

DeCosta lived in Maryland before moving to North Carolina and had always been fascinated by Southern history. In Frances, she found a representative of the Old South that was rapidly fading from view in fast-growing areas like the Triangle.

"This has turned into a wonderful history lesson for me," DeCosta said. "It isn't even about the war. It's about people, it's about North Carolina, it's about our country."

When this whole thing began, DeCosta said, she felt helping get the diploma for Frances was just part of her job. But as the weeks passed, it felt more like a commitment to a friend she was determined to see through to the end.

The war

Frances Jarratt's house sits on the rise across from the plantation house on old U.S. 421. Her grandfather had the house built in 1929 so he would have a place to stay on return visits after he moved to Florida.

She was born in that house on the sleet-filled night of Dec. 9, 1936, and has lived there all her life.

Frances, in several phone calls with a reporter, made it clear she was not interested in someone coming by the house.

No, she said over the telephone, she did not want a reporter coming out to make a big fuss and ask more questions.

Definitely not, she said to the idea of a photographer coming by the house to snap her picture. She didn't want publicity, she said. All she wanted was the diploma and -- once she had it -- to be left alone.

Besides, she said, there wasn't much she knew to tell. She knew only the rudiments of her great grandfather's war record.

He served in Company C with the 26th Carolina Infantry Regiment. He fought nearly all the way through the war and was wounded twice at Gettysburg. And in January, 1865, three months before the war was over, he left for home.

McGee, in his history of the regiment, detailed the battle of Drewry's Bluff that the 26th helped fight in May of 1862 along the James River in Virginia.

The 80-foot-high bluff stood above a bend in the James River below Richmond. It was here the Confederates built a fortress and stopped Union warships from capturing Richmond by way of the river.

In July, the 26th set off along the river toward Petersburg, reaching a point across from the Union camp of General George McClellan, McGee wrote. "Near dark, Gus Jarratt ventured down to the edge of the water to get a look at the 'celebrated Monitor.'"

The warship, encased in thick iron armor and known as "the cheese box on a raft" because of its revolving gun turret, had been among the Union fleet that the Confederates had turned back two months before.

McGee wrote again of Jarratt in regard to another Virginia battle known as "The Wilderness." Here, both sides would suffer 25,251 casualties over three days of fighting in May of 1864.

"The regiment went into position in 'splendid order' under a heavy musketry," McGee wrote. "The soldiers fell to the ground, below the dense clouds of smoke, and returned the fire. Gus Jarratt later told his father that it was the `heaviest firing' he had ever been under."

Then came Gettysburg, on the morning of July 1, 1864. The 800 men of the 26th stood facing roughly the same amount of men belonging to the 24th Michigan and 19th Indiana. By the next morning, the 26th North Carolina could muster only 216 men, including the walking wounded, R. Lee Hadden wrote in a 1991 Gettysburg Magazine story that detailed the encounter hour by hour. The 24th Michigan fared no better.

William F. Fox, in his 1889 book Regimental Losses in the Civil War, said the losses that the 26th North Carolina suffered that day at Gettysburg were "the greatest in numbers and greatest in percent of those taken into action of all the regiments on either side in the Civil War in any one battle."

McGee's final passage on Jarratt describes a time in the fall of 1864 as the 26th dug in around Richmond. "During the last months of 1864, the troops who remained with the regiment faced difficult times. They spent many of their days building and improving the defenses around Petersburg. Captain Gus Jarratt felt that if work on the breastworks continued much longer, they would be so strong that the `Yankees can't get in even if there was no men in them.'"

Of the men who served with Jarratt in Company C, 27 would be killed in action, 13 at Gettysburg. The rest died at places such as New Bern and Bristol Station and Cold Harbor and, of course, the Wilderness. Another 33 would die away from battle, many from illnesses such as chronic diarrhea, pneumonia and typhoid fever. Five would die in Union prisons. Three would be shot for desertion.

The lucky ones, like Jarratt, would leave for home to pick up what was left of their lives.

Frances Jarratt said it wasn't that she didn't want to know more about what happened to her great grandfather during the war. The problem, she said, was that by the time she got around to wanting to know there was nobody left around to ask.

Her grandfather was killed in a car accident in Florida in 1951. Her father, John Bruce Jarratt, was a rural mail carrier who never did talk much about the family, either. He died in 1981 and his sister, whom Frances called Aunt Fannie, died two years later.

Frances had always relied on her sister, Sara Dunreath Jarratt Edwards, to fill in the blanks on the family history. Then her sister died in 1995, leaving too many of those blanks unfilled.

The summer after her sister died, in July of 1996, Frances sold the old plantation house to a historical preservation society, which then sold it to a dentist from Winston-Salem with the stipulation that he restore it as close to its original condition as possible. The contents of the house were then sold at auction.

Frances remembers spotting Lewis Brumfield at the plantation house the day of the auction. She yelled over at him and said, "Come visit me when you get a chance, I want to learn more about my family."

And she still remembers what he yelled back: "My favorite subject."

If you really want to know about my family, she told the reporter, go and see him.

A passion for the past

Anyone trying to get in touch with Lewis Brumfield better hope for a rainy day. Otherwise, he's likely to be out pedaling his bike up and down the hills of Yadkin County.

He's not a health nut, he insists, just a little touched when it comes to history. Or at least the family history of anybody of any consequence who lived and died in Yadkin County.

On his bike, he can pass slowly enough through the countryside for the wheels in his head to start turning about the people who had once lived there.

Children who see him around know him only as "the bicycle man." Chances are, he'd know a lot more about them just by their last names.

He served as a naval officer for four years after graduating from Carolina in 1956 with a degree in English. He made a living for a time teaching piano at a nearby arts college but gave it up after he was fired from the college for a second time.

At 67, he now fills much of his time and makes most of the little money he needs through his research and writings. He has written a book on all of the old antebellum homes in Yadkin County and another on the history of the Clingmans, a family with deep roots tangled in all kinds of ways with the Jarratts'.

One afternoon this spring, Frances Jarratt stood in the old Clingman cemetery in Forsyth County where many of those connections become clear.

Gus Jarratt's father had married a Clingman woman and Gus turned out to be a first cousin one generation removed from Thomas Lanier Clingman. Clingman served in the U.S. Senate and was a Confederate general and is the man for whom Clingman's Dome in Great Smoky Mountain National Park is named.

Brumfield said he found in Battle's history of Carolina another interesting connection between Gus and Thomas Clingman. According to Battle, Clingman was supposed to have given the commencement address in spring of 1861. Like Gus, he was away getting ready for war.

The cemetery lies a few hundred yards from the Yadkin River and the county line. Along the road to the cemetery is a historical sign marking the spot near the colonial settlement of Shallow Fork where Confederate troops skirmished with U.S. cavalry during General George Stoneman's raid through North Carolina in the spring of 1865.

Here, in the shade of ancient hickories and oaks, Brumfield ran his fingers over the letters and numbers on the white soapstone marking the resting place of Gus Jarratt.

Below the Masonic symbol, the letters and numbers read:

IAJ

May 13, 1841

Feb. 12, 1890

Age: 48 years

9 months

4 days

Stuck in the front of the grave is a Confederate flag.

Beside Jarratt is the marker for his wife, Sarah Ellen, the daughter of Richard Puryear, a congressman for both the United States and the Confederacy. She died in 1912 at the age of 73.

Before Brumfield left the graveyard, a man in a pickup truck whose last name was Trexler stopped by to talk to him. The two men did not know each other, at least not until Brumfield spoke of how he had ridden his bike out here the past week. "Oh yeah," Trexler said. "I've seen you out here before."

Trexler glanced over at the direction of Jarratt's gravesite. An acquaintance of his and a local pastor and a handful of others keep it mowed and cleared. "They said the reason they do this is because of the Confederate who is buried here," Trexler said.

They were the ones who stuck the flag next to his grave.

What is now called "old U.S. 421" came through in the 1920s not more than 50 yards from the back of the old Jarratt House, turning overnight the back into the front.

Later that same day, Brumfield stood next to a giant pin oak in what was once the front yard of the Jarratt House, not far from the strip of grass that had been the road that led to Logan Creek.

The Jarratt plantation was mostly fertile bottomland along the creek, good for growing grains and corn, but not so good for what would become the state's best cash crop: tobacco.

After the war, Brumfield said, the Jarratts continued to live off the land, but by selling it as much as by farming it.

They held on until old Isaac, Gus's father, died in 1880. Brumfield's great uncle David Shore bought a good chunk of it from Gus a few years later. "He was of a whiskey-making family and he bought over 400 acres of the Jarratt property, partly to grow corn and have a whiskey still back down there on the branch," Brumfield said.

Here, Brumfield said, is one of the ironies he has mused about over the years.

His uncle was one of the early German settlers who never became part of what he calls "the old plantocracy."

After the war, the German families prospered because they did not let pride, or the law, stand in the way of a living. "They didn't have this past, this glorious past, to protect."

The Jarratts, for instance, made whiskey by the barrel for parties and their own private use, but never sold it. "It was funny the juxtaposition," Brumfield said. "They went downhill because they were too proud to sell whiskey while the whiskey makers buying their land kept doing better and better."

Four creeks drain two thirds of Yadkin County and all four run into Yadkin Creek right around here, Brumfield said. "That's what makes this stable bottomland, which was so important in agrarian times. Now, for real estate, it's not worth anything. It's in the flood plains. And these uplands that nobody wanted back then are the most valuable building lots. That's another irony from the switch of the plantation economy to the modern day."

In 1987, Brumfield wrote a book for the Yadkin County Historical Society that documented and described not only the county's historic homes but the lives of the families to whom they belonged. In it, he described the "The Jarratt House" as a "large and imposing two-story four-bay Federal style house," built in the 1820s by Davis Durrett, who sold the house to Isaac Jarratt in 1835.

In 1850, Yadkin County was formed and Isaac Jarratt became the first chair of its county court, the equivalent of the board of county commissioners today, Brumfield said.

Isaac, in his 60s by the time the war started, ended up a captain in the Home Guard and a member of the Confederate North Carolina Senate.

Brumfield said he has been out to the house with the dentist from Winston-Salem who bought it and has tried to help him assemble the varied pieces of its history.

"He's not trying to fancy up the house," Brumfield said. "He's trying to restructure it so it will stand."

"That's another irony I've thought a lot about," Brumfield said. The dentist restoring this crumbling remnant of the Old South was a transplanted Yankee from Ohio.

Much of the information he has supplied the dentist comes from the history Brumfield wrote on the Thomas Lanier Clingman and other Shallow Ford families.

The book's passages about the Jarratt family history came from conversations he had more than 20 years ago with Frances Jarratt's father, Bruce.

It was through Bruce Jarratt, for instance, that Brumfield learned about the visit that Zebulon Vance, while still governor, paid to Gus at the plantation house in the years following the war.

When Gus arrived back home in January of 1865, Brumfield said, the same English boxwoods would have been there. "The house would have been whitewashed, and it would have just been gleaming white with the shutters all painted up nice. The yard would have been immaculate. It's very beautifully sited. They could have sat on the front porch and watched the field hands tending the corn."

The front porch is gone now, and the field sits empty.

One passage from the book details what happened on that porch in the final days of the war. Brumfield read it aloud:

"A small detachment of the Michigan troops quartered at the Puryear plantation in early April of 1865 made a foray to the Jarratt House. Gus Jarratt was at home. His sister, Mary Jane Pickett, who had come up from her South Carolina plantation, held off the Yankees with a shotgun while he escaped."

In anticipation of a Yankee visit, Gus's father had two barrels of whiskey bricked up behind the storage space in the basement, Brumfield said. After the Yankees left, Isaac had the whiskey broken out and provided drinks for the countryside.

But Gus Jarratt was not around to help drink it, Brumfield said. "He got to Salisbury in time to fight in the skirmish there against Stoneman's troops."

The battle at Salisbury took place April 12, 1865, one day after the skirmish with Stoneman's calvary at Shallow Ford, and three days after Lee and Grant had already settled the final score at Appomattox.

A quiet moment beside Silent Sam

It was March 30, 2001, and the moment that Frances Jarratt and Senora DeCosta had been waiting for was about to arrive.

Days before, one of Frances' nephews, Brian Edwards, had arranged to get off of work so he could drive his aunt the two hours to Chapel Hill.

She arrived on campus shortly before noon, her gray hair done up in a permanent she had styled especially for the occasion. She wore black slacks and a black-and-white plaid blouse with a splash of red roses. If she was going to have to get her picture taken, she told DeCosta, she was going to make sure she looked her best.

It had rained hard all week, and during the drive to Chapel Hill she noticed a sky still filled with clouds and worried if the weather would be good enough to get her picture taken outdoors in front of Silent Sam, the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier that the United Daughters of the Confederacy had raised money to erect in 1913 to honor Carolina's Civil War veterans. The statue stands at the northern end of McCorkle Place, in line with the Caldwell monument and Davie Poplar and the Old Well.

If the weather held, Frances and DeCosta decided, there would be no better place for her to get the diploma.

At the age of 64, Frances bears some resemblance to Mayberry's Aunt Bea. She is just as full-bodied and full of hustle-bustle as Aunt Bea appeared on the television screen, but her voice is not shrill like Bea's but stretches out into a true Southern drawl. And like Aunt Bea, she never got around to marrying. She worked as a dispatcher for Duke Power Company until ill health forced her to quit some 12 years ago.

They walked together, DeCosta, Frances and her nephew, to the statue at McCorkle Place. The rain that had threatened earlier had given way to clear skies.

"Isn't that nice," Frances said when she first glimpsed the diploma in DeCosta's hands.

In their first phone call, Frances told DeCosta that part of the story that had been passed down through the years was that Isaac Jarratt never got his diploma because he never had the $5 it would take to pay for it.

There would not be any repeat complication this time around. Design Services performed the work at a cut-rate price that the Registrar's Office agreed to pay in full.

Gus Jarratt may have been the family's first Carolina graduate, but he had not been the last, Frances said. Her grandfather had graduated from Carolina in 1900, her uncle in about 1931 or 1932, she said. Her father attended Carolina, too, but never graduated.

This was not the first time Frances had been to campus -- she and her big sister had been here for a picnic with their parents in the stands of Fetzer Field ages ago.

A distance away from her, a family walked across McCorkle Place, and Frances noticed the little girl in pink riding on her father's shoulders. "They need to go and get her a little blue outfit," she said. "She's wearing the wrong color."

When she was growing up, she would hear her father and uncle listening to Carolina games on the radio, and as she got older, listen in with them. She can still remember some of the cheers she heard for Choo Choo Justice, the Tar Heel football star from the 1940s.

With all that, she could not help but grow into a big Carolina fan herself.

"It was bred into us," Frances said. "I didn't know there was another school until I was grown."

Of course, it would have been easy enough for the University to have mailed the diploma to Frances, but too easy, too much like getting a bill rather than unraveling a mystery.

Besides, Frances said, she wanted to see the campus again -- and meet DeCosta.

"I'm so lucky to have this lady right here," she said of DeCosta. "She's been so sweet to me. I told her the other day I understood why her husband married her."

There are so many of her people and so much of their land that are gone now, so much of the family's legacy beyond her grasp. Maybe that is why this diploma meant so much. It was more than a piece of paper. It was reaching back for a missing part of her past.

"I just wanted to have it," she told friend Senora DeCosta nearly a year ago.

And as Frances walked away with her nephew, the parchment clutched in her hands, she said, "It's wonderful. I think my great grandfather would be proud of me."

MORE THAN A PIECE OF PAPER This is the diploma that University Design Services created for Isaac Augustus "Gus" Jarratt, which he earned in 1861 but never received after he left Carolina to fight in the Civil War.

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