Jacky also provides
additional background on the McGinty family and their home and store,
excerpted from an article written by one of Cocke County's most
esteemed historians, Duay O'Neill, for the
Newport Plain Talk
some years back:
"Samuel McGinty, age thirty-two in the 1850 census,
was born in North Carolina. He was a brother of Delilah McGinty, wife
of Thomas Sandusky Gorman. Living in the McGinty household were his
wife, the former Mary Larue, age twenty-seven, who was born in
Tennessee and their son, William H F, age eight months. Also living in
this household was Mary Hofland, twenty-two, born in North Carolina,
who might have been a McGinty cousin....By 1860, the McGinty family had
changed. Samuel, now forty-four, was very prosperous with real estate
valued at $4000 and personal property valued at $1971. Mary, now
thirty-seven, had given birth to twins George and Mary, age four. Mary
Hofland was gone and apparently William H F McGinty had died. Also
living in the household was Nimrod Lane, age twenty-seven,
laborer....Nimrod Lane was a son of Isaac and Julia (Sneed) Lane. He
and his father are both buried in the Newcomb Cemetery in Wilsonville.
Nimrod Lane was killed by a Free man after the two had gone hunting
and had argued over a dog. Free clubbed Lane with a dogwood limb and
left him to die....By the 1870s Samuel McGinty had died. From an
article, "Out Wilsonville Way" by Cora Massey Mims, written in the
1940s, we find the following: 'Below that (referring to the McGinty
Inn) was a more modern frame house, called the McGinty home. Mrs.
McGinty was a widow, a member of the Larue family. Her husband was a
brother of Mrs. Delilah Gorman, the only member of the McGinty family
who did not go to Missouri. Mrs. McGinty owned a mill and had a miller
by the name of Jeff Woody. Her children were twins: George, who later
lived in Jefferson County, and Vege, a beautiful girl, who married
Rowley Evans and went to North Carolina to live'".
As Jacky further explains,
"'Lavegie' told my mother that Leonidas came into her father's store
and she ran up the stairs, exposing her ankles. On seeing her ankles,
he said that he must marry her...They moved to the Evans homestead in
Canton, NC and the store ledger somehow made its way there with
Lavegie. Their daughter Georgia Maude Evans married Luther 'Jack'
Pruett from Graham Co, Canton and Waynesville, NC. They lived in
Swannanoa, NC, east of Asheville in their later years".
Below is a scanned copy of a photograph of the store at the time it was
being razed, that accompanied Duay O'Neill's article.
