Exceeding Expectations

MountainCHAPTER ONELong before European settlers built homes in the lovely, rolling lands at the foot of NorthCarolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the river they called Yadkin had passed through the hilllands for untold centuries. It created a valley lined with hardwood forests, with chestnut andbirch and sycamore.The river begins modestly enough in a cold spring high on a Watauga Countymountainside, near the Village of Blowing Rock. From that simple beginning, it drops 3,000feet while gathering water from small streams and the runoff from rain, then flows to thenortheast through Wilkes and Surry Counties, before turning south to form the westernborder of Forsyth County. As it continues south, the Yadkin powers the cities and industriesof the North Carolina Piedmont, then changes its name to Pee Dee before continuing itsjourney through South Carolina to Winyah Bay and the sea.CHAPTERThe great river provided transportation for those first settlers and powered their mills;towns grew up along its banks and farmers shipped their crops to market. The forests ofthe river valley provided shelter, fuel and fence rails, and wild game in the forests fed theimmigrants until their first crops could be harvested.It could be a hard land. Winters were severe and farming required unceasing labor. Therewere few good roads into the area and work was performed by the power of men and farmanimals. Great floods sometimes roared through the valleys, destroying mills and bridges androads. Yet it was a land where enduring memories were born, and roots were put down deepin the land. Even those who left the valleys for a season carried with them the memories of acrisp autumn day, the reds and oranges of the trees, and a morning mist lying softly upon themountains.In the 1870s, that troubled time after the Civil War, a Pennsylvania farmer named WilliamM. Wayne moved to a portion of that lovely, hard land named Wilkes County. Althoughthe early records are not complete, it seems that William Wayne had farmed lands in theWayne Family Homesteadpainting by Audrey Rogers, Keith Wayne’s cousin