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Volume 86 • Issue 39
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Good news for great people! • Belmont • Cramerton • Lowell • McAdenville • Mount Holly • Stanley
Thursday, October 1, 2020
Hurricanes have been here before By Alan Hodge alan@cfmedia.info
W.C. Friday Middle School teacher Jennifer Bumgarner will travel abroad next summer through her participation in the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program.
W.C. Friday teacher is ready to travel and learn through Fulbright program By ALLISON DRENNAN Gaston County Schools
Jennifer Bumgarner is well on her way to experiencing a full lifetime of learning. The W.C. Friday Middle School English teacher has a passion for education that has encouraged her to pursue professional learning opportunities outside of the classroom. Her zeal for teaching and experiencing new opportunities led Bumgarner to apply for the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program. Bumgarner is one of 71 individuals chosen to participate in the program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected based on academic
and professional achievement as well as a record of service and demonstrated leadership potential. Spending 26 years as a teacher in Gaston County, the Florida native, who now lives in Lowell, was selected to attend the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s “Teaching the Holocaust: Resources and Reflections” program at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She says the immersive, life-changing experience in 2017 started her on the path to participate in more opportunities like it. Bumgarner spent the following days and weeks doing research, trying to find other programs like the one she had attended. A new quest for knowledge had been sparked in D.C., and
she was determined to find other professional development opportunities. This resulted in her being named one of 32 educators (and the only North Carolina-based teacher) to participate in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Native Knowledge 360 Teacher Institute in Washington D.C. She also was one of 36 teachers from around the country to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in the Adirondack Mountains. Bumgarner says it is because of these opportunities that she was able to learn about and apply for the Fulbright program. “These experiences have See FULBRIGHT, Page 4
As recent weather reports and events prove, including the recent drenching we got from Hurricane Sally, this time of year is hurricane and tropical storm season. Even though our coast generally bears the brunt of this foul weather, some of their power has been The backlash from 2017’s Hurricane Irma sent this huge tree crashing in felt right here in Sam Stowe’s yard in Belmont. our region. In mid-September 2018, braced for the blow and made skyward in nervous fashion. Hurricane Florence brought contingency arrangements A second wave of folks hit the stores and gas stations. Belmont and the surround- early in the week. ing towns torrents of rain and All week prior to Flor- TV broadcasters ramped up frisky winds, but thankfully ence’s arrival, weather fore- their rhetoric. no widespread destruction casters scratched their heads The Saturday morning of like the storm left elsewhere. trying to figure out where the September 15 brought showAs usual, before the storm storm was headed and what ers and blustery winds. This even got here, folks rushed would happen when it got pattern continued all day long and through the night. A to stores and stripped the there. bottled water and other drink For us, the answer came quick trip to the South Fork supplies shelves as cleanly as with winds starting to pick River in Cramerton on Sata piranha fish removes flesh up on September 14. The urday showed no flooding as from bone. Gas stations also rain held off but dark clouds of late in the afternoon. Goat reported super brisk sales. scurried by overhead as folks Island Park was closed. Local municipalities craned their necks looking See HURRICANES, Page 4
Did Lincoln’s mother live in Belmont? One of American history’s most controversial mysteries- who the biological father of Abraham Lincoln actually was- has roots in a Belmont neighborhood. In the early part of the 19th century, Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, as well as her mother Mandy and sister Lucy, are said to have not only spent time in what would eventually become Belmont, but according to some folks conceive Abe while she was in this part of Gaston County- with some-
one other than Tom Lincoln, Abe’s “legal” daddy. As a girl in the early 19th century, Nancy and the other girls supposedly visited her uncle Dicky Hanks who lived on land off what is now South Point Rd. To commemorate that time, there’s a stone and bronze marker on the site where Uncle Dicky’s log cabin is said to have stood. The monument is at the very end of Hanks Creek Lane off Dorie Drive in the Pinsto development near
South Point High School. The marker was put up in 1923 by descendants of C. T. Stowe, namely Samuel Pinckney Stowe, who at that time owned the land where the cabin was situated, and features the bas relief of a cabin and rail fence. Words inscribed on the plaque read, “This stone marks the site of the log cabin home of Dicky Hanks, an uncle of Nancy Hanks, mother of Abraham Lincoln. Nancy spent much See LINCOLN, Page 2
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