Porter's Quest

Eddie Porter became to Sweetwater Farm what Babe Ruth already was to rest of America during the darkest days of the Great Depression. One fall morning in 1930, a limousine, a most unusual sight to behold, arrived at the Green County Courthouse in the sleepy town of Martin, North Carolina. Eddie Porter had arrived in style at the county seat to take part in an auction of a large track of land nearby called The Sweetwater Farm. That day Eddie Porter hit a grand slam for the thirty souls who were praying for a new owner who would be receptive to their plight and  keep them from losing their homes and livelihood. Sweetwater Farm fans in the village of Fallston, a small town ringed by the sprawling plantation and the Roanoke River, were soon be cheering, too.

Once upon a time, during colonial days, Sweetwater Farm was known as “the model” of colonial plantations and the town of Fallston its crowning jewel. The huge farm produced most of the goods that were exported from the bustling river port at Fallston. The Roanoke River Rapids located just north of the town, dictated Fallston to be the most inland deep water river port in the state of North Carolina. Prior to the twentieth century, travel by road east of Fallston was slow, difficult, unpredictable, dangerous and often impossible. Swamps, marshes, lakes, snakes and North Carolina’s five ‘sounds’ make up much of the states spongy land lying East of Fallston. High and dry Fallston, boasting itself to be a lofty eleven feet above sea level: solid ground.

Fallston’s ‘glory days’ lasted nearly two hundred years. However, the dawn of the twentieth century marked the end of Fallston’s fortune and took the spotlight off its fame in the bargain. Motorized vehicles rapidly began to dictate the way goods moved to and from coastal North Carolina. Railroads also began to spread their tentacles eastward from their existing north and south lines. Almost overnight, the arduous river trip by boat to Fallston became, like Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific Ocean a century earlier, an artifact of American history.  By the 1920’s Fallston had become a ghost town with only rows of decaying mansions and the fading facade of its grand hotel to show for its splendid past. A depressing, but slightly less devastating fate descended upon the Sweetwater Farm, as its owners were forced to look elsewhere for customers and markets for its produce. Old money, however, was still around.  Some of Fallston’s rich merchants still owned sizable tracts of the area’s rich bottomland. These store owners, bankers, lawyers and doctors continued to extend credit to the hundreds of tenants farming their fertile arable land throughout the nearby Roanoke river basin.  By 1930, the Great Depression was adding misery to the list of problems already plaguing the town and its surrounding environs. Farm products were not selling. Area tenant farmers, unable to pay their debts were being driven from the land in droves. The five Sweetwater Farm families, most of whom had spent their entire lives on that large track of land, were barely hanging on. Their fate would soon be in the hands of Sweetwater Farm’s new owner.

Eddie Porter was a drifter by nature and a gambler by profession.  Every move he made, however, was dictated and subjugated to a singular pursuit he called “Porter’s Quest.” In order to stay on that quest, Eddie changed venues about as often as he did his clothing.  Eddie knew that he could ply his gambling trade most anywhere. But, Eddies drifting did not come without a price. His nomadic life style cost him his marriage and family. Gambling, however, continued to reward him with wealth. It was good for Eddie’s quest that he had a penchant for Civil War history in general, and Southern battle fields in particular. Eddie’s penchant for Southern battlefields was also a practical plank in his quest. So far, however, nothing he’d discoved to date had tied him down for any extended period of time. He would look, listen and invariably move on. When Eddie Porter learned that the Sweetwater Farm was on the auction block, he once again turned to the indexes of his sizable collection of Civil War books. He was looking for a key word. Either Sweetwater or Fallston would do. He knew that he had seen one of those names somewhere among his Civil War literature. Finally there it was: Fallston!  As usual Eddie read with interest.

“During the early months of the War Between the States, a Yankee raiding party traveling by boat up the Roanoke River set fire to the Sweetwater Farm’s Mansion House near Fallston and turned it into ashes. Had the Yankee raiders been in less of a hurry, the entire town of Fallston might have suffered a similar fate. But, the raiders had bigger plans. They were under ordered to continue on foot, past the Roanoke’s rapids and destroy the railroad bridge at Weldon, several miles further north. A successful mission would have caused a major disruption to the Confederates supply lines.