Sagefield Cotton (ii)

Connor and Louise’s only child was a son, Frank, born the year before the War. He grew up to work by his father’s side and he did well, continuing to develop Sagefield Cotton through the years following the War and into the 1880’s and 1890’s, maintaining contact with his father’s New England friends and backers, but always looking to serve the local market. When the Haw Creek Railroad spur was opened in 1880 it brought freight service twice a week with connections to larger lines through Company Shops. Frank bought stock in the line to reduce his own shipping costs and eventually owned a third of the line’s business.

During the good years of the late 1870’s and on through the 1880s, Conner and Frank worked together to enlarge Bellemont to accommodate the extended family as it grew. As the house grew it also evolved, until by 1886 when Frank and Marie Abbott exchanged vows in its huge front lawn, Bellemont had become a model Victorian home. Louise, gradually growing more incapacited each day, watched the ceremony from her bed through a second floor window. She died the following day.

In 1897, Frank took his wife and their three children, Emily, Robert and John, on a grand trip to Nashville for the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition. They traveled for two days in a rail-apartment where each private car is divided into two large suites with sleeping and sitting areas. The children were small and remember only bits of the two week stay in Nashville and the train ride across the Appalachians through Ashville, but the trip opened the world to Frank and Marie. The following winter the family traveled to Florida stopping in St. Augustine and Palm Beach before spending the most of January in Miami. They returned each winter for a minimum often for a month at the time. Frank staying in touch with Sagefield Cotton via brief telegrams and large packets of papers delivered by train-mail.

The family grew to love train travel because it always held adventure and the promise of new experiences, because it could take you somewhere new and you traveled with people you have never met.

(The mill pictured is similar to Sagefield Cotton's second mill built in the early years of Reconstruction.)