Home of Robert C. Smith
The Home of Robert C. Smith. Robert, a manager in the mill, can be seen sitting on the porch. This was said to have been one of the larger homes at Avalon. I did some playing around in my photo editing software. I determined how many pixels wide a brick in the foundation was and I assumed that brick to be 8 inches wide. Then I determined the width of the house in pixels and from that I figured the house to be about 40 feet wide. Of course, I couldn't measure how deep the house was so I assumed it to be square. If so, the house would have been 1600 square feet--that can't be right. If I am anywhere close to being right it's not a mansion but it is larger than a typical mill house. The reason why I took efforts in trying to ascertain the size of the house is because a transcription of the 1910 census listed 16 people living in it.
Houses were different then. A lack of bathrooms and a laundry room combined with smaller rooms overall provided more living area; but still, 16 people? I found it impossible to believe so I began a quest for the 1910 census images. I found them... Lo and behold the transcriber correctly pulled 16 names from the dwelling and only 4 of which were under the age of 10. I still find it hard to believe.
The occupants derived from the 1910 census with some spellings corrected from other sources were: Robert C. Smith, Mintora Smith, Frank Jackson Smith, Annie Smith, Charlie Smith, Gideon Smith, Lillie Mae Smith, Robert Hunt Smith, John Willie Smith, Nora Smith, John Sherman Reynolds, Fairy Reynolds, Estelle Shropshire Smith, Clara Smith, Nannie Smith, and Sallie Fae.
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- Image Source: Unknown, Robert C. Smith (1900-1911), Location, Avalon, NC, Image [from Avalon: A North Carolina Town of Joy and Tragedy (Chapel Hill, NC: Books, 1977), 50].