There are folklore reports that have been handed down for more than a century about the glamorous life that has had its every-day setting in the doings around Old Town, some of which have been widely heralded by newspapers, that captures the imagination with fascination in the truest meanings of these terms.
Down by the river-side, and beside the highway, there is a ridge extending out to where the river once had its bed. Overflows sometimes bring high water over the lowest of it. It is being cultivated this year by Mr J.P. Carter.
Reports would have you believe that hundreds of Indian arrows heads have been picked up and carried away for relics. Walking across it recently I picked up a few. This was an Indian village when the first of the white families moved in to live and to act in the vast drama of life. They sought and found the finest of living conditions, so well-known in the Southland, and which, if properly written and heralded to the world, would place Calhoun County in a position to contest even sunny Sicily for beauty, witchery, fascination and glamour.
When Calhoun County was established in 1852, the wisdom of those in authority picked out a spot of almost level land two hundred yards south of the Indian village, and built the first courthouse of logs. A village called Hartford grew up around it, and it was a busy place.
Further to the south a jug factory sat, and many living near say that thousands of pieces of jugs were there in former years as they tilled their crops across it. The old courthouse at Pittsboro was erected and ready for use in 1856.
When the old foundation was removed following its burning in 1922, it is reported that a pigtrack was found that was made in the semi-soft mortar, and as natural as any pigtrack.
The old courthouse, and every building around it, has either rotted down or been removed. I can remember the old boarding house myself.
A pasture covers the entire plot of ground where the courthouse stood, while across the highway a barn and garden are where the old boarding house stood. Just up the ridge half a mile toward the southeast a cemetery was begun about that time and is used now my members of the older families.
Former Governor Dennis Murphree has a grandfather buried there in 1872. Still further east and on the side of the present highway a Methodist church stood for years.
In the late nineties it disbanded, and in 1900, a Baptist church was organized with a building immediately south of the new brick church building erected a few years ago.
Quite recently the Methodist people erected a new church beside the cemetery. They left nothing undone in its completion. Heated with butane gas, it is one of the most beautiful and comfortable buildings in the county. With a little more beautifying on the cemetery grounds, with its negro slave graves, it would be one of the beauty spots in Calhoun County.
Dennis Murphree believed that Desoto crossed Schoona River here in his wanderings from Mobile to Memphis where he died and was buried in the Mississippi River.
As I grew up I was often at Old Town at church services, singings, associations, and at the Murphree reunion in July, 1914.
I look with pride at the splendid reputation made and retained through the years, and, as a resident, hope to see continued throughout the future.