Edgecombe County

The household was, in short, a working plantation, not on the grand scale of the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South, but a substantial agricultural operation that required significant labor, much of it coerced, to function.

John Bell was born around seventeen fifty in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, a region of flat, sandy coastal plain far removed from the limestone hills of Middle Tennessee.

He grew up in a colony that was still, at the time of his birth, part of the British Empire, and he came of age during the American Revolution, though the specific details of his wartime experience, if any, are lost to the record.

What is known is that he married Lucy Williams, a woman who would prove to be one of the most interesting and sympathetic figures in the entire Bell Witch narrative, though her voice comes to us only through the accounts of others, and that by the early eighteen hundreds he had moved his growing family westward out of North Carolina and through the Cumberland Gap, that narrow passage through the Appalachian Mountains that served as the gateway to the western frontier for hundreds of thousands of settlers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Can you describe where we're at?

Oh, we're in Tarboro, Edgecombe County.

My sister lives here, and her husband let me grow in this horse corral, which is a perfect spot.

Now, I spoke to a lot of folks during the reporting of this story, and one thing that struck me was the diverse backgrounds of the growers.

One thing that's pretty consistent about all of these, if you just kind of think about legislative math, there needed to be a handful of Democrats, at least one Democrat or unaffiliated, who joined Republicans in each case.

So on voter ID, that was Shelly Willingham from Edgecombe County.

On the income tax cap and the property tax cap, tho- that was both Carla Cunningham and Nasif Majeed from Mecklenburg County, who at that point had lost their primaries and left the Democratic Party.

Hmm.

My family came to see me.

The officers in the picture, and the Edgecombe County Corrections told them, "We need him in there.

We need him up to CP because he's got a lot of injuries.

Somebody have to stay with him at home all day.

"That can't be," because that's just not, that's not that kind.

But it says Edgecombe County, North Carolina.

That fits.

That looks, that looks like Edgecombe County woods.

Yeah, that fits.

Um-