"Dear Son:
Enclosed please find a sketch of the country wherein your Grandfather was born. It is from the memory of a child less than 10 years of age, somewhat assisted by that of an old black man and a white man, both of whom, like myself, left North Carolina (Clubfoot Creek) before or at the time I did and had to think back sixty-three years, for neither of them ever went back….I also enclose one of your Cousin’s bills, which has two of my drawings on it…If you get a trunk or drawer appropriate to your drawings and keep them carefully they will, many of them, be of use to you in after life.
Your Grandfather, Jno. S. Williams
Plan of my father’s (Robert Williams’) homestead, which he named Dinnant:
Top of map is South - [Numbered List and Text Reference to No. 63 in numerical order]: Homestead…Meat House…Little House…East Garden…West garden…Dial…Asparagus bed…Spring…Bee shed…Pear tree…Apple orchard…Entrance…Persimmon tree…Cow pen…Chinquepin tree…Pop or Passion vine…Saw mill…Waste gates…Grist mill…Plum and grape thicket…Potato house…Liquorice bed…Lumber yard…Log yard…Hog pen…Fodder house…
Miller’s house…Old piles…Tide water…Fishing bank…Sawyer’s house…Clay hole…Old stump…
Flag root…Building…Sand hole
TEXT on Map: "Looking South, as you now hold the paper, one mile is Newport River and Fisher’s landing. After my father’s death in 1790, as I have heard, Wm. Fisher bought the mill and lived at the landing, to which point vessels came up. They took on lumber after it was boated or rafted from the mill. They also took on tar, turpentine, pitch, etc., which were staples in that country. My father owned 4,000 acres, as I understood, and Fisher bought all but 1,120 with the mills on his purchase. I remember his building a fine dwelling with a cellar walled with stone brought from other countries as ballast, there being no native stone in that part of Carolina.
"My father would have every road, fence, house, etc., North and South, East and West, where it was at all convenient, and sometimes where it was not."
