Ransom Hunter Park Opening Honors Local Black History Icon After Years-Long Effort

For Eric Wilson, the grand opening of Ransom Hunter Park in Mount Holly will be more than a ribbon cutting; it will mark the completion of an effort that he undertook in 2008 to honor his great-grandfather, who was born into slavery only to become one of the area’s most prominent landowners following the Civil War. 

Wilson will have the chance to watch his own grandchildren play on the playground, designed as a nod to Ransom Hunter’s home, barn and blacksmith shop, all of which once stood on the West Glendale Avenue property. The moment will mark six generations of Hunters and Wilsons who have lived, worked and played on the site. 

Eric’s connection to Ransom Hunter was kept alive through Mina Hunter Wilson, Ransom’s daughter and Eric’s grandmother, who was born on the property and continued to live there during Eric’s childhood in the 1960s and ’70s, spending countless hours in the house with Eric sharing stories about Ransom. 

“Just to have [my grandchildren] there, where I grew up and five generations back they had their beginnings, and it’s now being preserved, it just means a great deal to me,” Wilson told Queen City Nerve in the lead-up to the park’s opening. “My grandchildren will now be able to play in the same spot that I played in, that my daddy played in, that my grandmother played in … It’s just crazy.” 

In 2023, Queen City Nerve covered Wilson’s efforts to convince the Town of Mount Holly to create some type of tribute to Hunter on the old property at the corner of West Glendale Avenue and South Hawthorne. At that time, 15 years after he began lobbying town leaders to fund such a project, the lot was still overgrown, hiding the foundation and deteriorating chimney of Hunter’s old home. 

Wilson credits a change of leadership in the town following the 2023 elections, including the election of former council member and longtime Ransom Hunter Park project supporter David Moore as mayor, for the recent surge in progress toward getting the park built.

In early 2024, Gov. Roy Cooper’s office announced the allocation of a $374,227 Parks and Recreation Trust Fund grant to go toward construction of the park — one of 46 such grants put toward local parks and recreation projects across the state.

Now with a grand opening celebration scheduled at the completed Ransom Hunter Park on Sept. 20, Wilson will finally get to see years of hard work come to fruition. 

How Ransom Hunter Park’s design pays homage to a historic figure

The Ransom Hunter Park playground is built in three pieces: a white structure that resembles Hunter’s home; a structure resembling a covered wagon, nodding to Hunter’s blacksmith shop where he shoed horses and fixed wagon wheels; and a red structure that resembles the old barn that Hunter built as a livery stable for his own horses and those left to him by clients. 

A large rock that was once used as a step for clients to mount their horses after the work on their wagons or horses was finished remains on the park property. To this day, the word Freedom is still clearly etched on the street-facing side of the rock. 

The playground design includes an old-style grocery where kids can find items stocked on the shelves or get behind the register, a nod to the general store that Hunter hosted on the lot. An outdoor shelter for community gatherings is located on the spot where Hunter’s blacksmith shop once stood. 

One stalwart of the property, a 200-year-old oak tree that had witnessed all the rich history of the lot since before Ransom Hunter’s arrival there in the 1870s, was knocked down in a storm that swept through the construction site in the spring. Pieces of the tree were turned into two benches that now sit at the park. 

“When they put [the benches] in place and I went and sat down on them, I’m telling you, I was really overcome with emotion,” Wilson said. “That was a tree that had been there when Ransom was freed from slavery and that tree was there when he built his blacksmith shop. Now, here it is, part of that tree is now forever going to be there in a bench that people can sit down on.” 

An original plan to rebuild a model of Hunter’s home on its original foundation was scrapped due to expense. Wilson had hoped the building could serve as an educational center in a similar way to how Siloam School is now utilized on the Charlotte Museum of History grounds. He is still in search of a private benefactor who can fund such a project. 

In the meantime, the old foundation has been cleared out and turned into a space where students from nearby Rankin Elementary School or other visitors can gather for an outdoor lesson about local history. 

Ransom Hunter’s place in Mount Holly history

At 13 years old, Ransom Hunter was torn apart from his parents on the Middleton Plantation in South Carolina, sold off to the owners of the Hoyle Plantation in Gaston County between what are now the towns of Dallas and Stanley. He was kept on the Hoyle Plantation for more than two decades until he was freed around 1860 in the lead-up to the Civil War.

He bought a small parcel of land in the Woodlawn community that would later become Mount Holly, but before he could start a new life post-slavery, there was something he needed to do.

“When he was freed, the first thing he did was he went to try to find his mom and dad,” Wilson told us in 2023, “and he went back to South Carolina and he was told that they had died. So he never saw his parents again. That was very traumatic for him. So he came back to his property and he started to establish his life.”

Ransom Hunter’s property was in an advantageous location in the sparsely populated Woodlawn community; it was split by a dirt road that people took from towns like Stanley to the nearby Catawba River, where there was trading to be done or crossings if needed.

Taking advantage of some of the skills he had learned in bondage, Hunter built a small blacksmith shop, offering horseshoe services and other iron work from the front while sleeping in the back. He eventually built a livery stable, then began work on the home that would become a point of pride in his family for more than a century to come.

“He had the only blacksmith shop around. He had a commodity that people needed. The next blacksmith shop was all the way in Gastonia or King’s Mountain. Let’s say a wagon wheel broke or your horse threw a shoe, then you had to stop at his shop,” Wilson explained. 

“So he was making money when a lot of people wasn’t making money. If your car is your only choice of transportation and it breaks down, you’re gonna get your car fixed so you can get to work. So people would pay to get their horses shoed. And he did iron work so he could repair wagons, he made nails, he made bolts, anything that was iron he did it. So that’s how he started making his money … and every bit of money that he made, he started buying land, he started adding and adding.”

In the early 1870s, Hunter began hearing troubling news from South Carolina; white supremacist Southerners were becoming more aggressively opposed to Reconstruction policies that had been created ostensibly to allow formerly enslaved people to succeed. 

Plantation owners had begun claiming land sold to formerly enslaved people as part of the federal government’s “40 acres and a mule” policy, forcing them to work as sharecroppers on plots that the freed people had cleared and built on themselves.

Hunter became concerned that the same thing could happen to him, so he had a deed drawn up officially marking the land that he had worked so hard to obtain.

Many years later, Wilson found the first land deed in Hunter’s name, written in 1872, showing his property stretching for 3 miles in each direction from his home — bordered by Dutchman’s Creek to the north, the Catawba River to the east, the Springs property to the west, and what is now Tuckaseegee Park to the south.

Around this time, New Jersey businessmen and brothers A.P. and D.E. Rhyne came around the Woodlawn community looking for a place to build a new cotton mill, along with A.P.’s father-in-law, Ambrose Costner. The group approached Hunter after discovering that the land they most wanted was deeded to him.

Having long been bothered by stories of freed families being forced into sharecropping in South Carolina, Hunter decided this was a time to use the leverage he now had.

“He said, ‘I will sell you the land under the stipulation that you hire former slaves that are now sharecroppers,’” Wilson said. “They agreed.”

Hunter sent word down to the communities near where his parents lived and died, and families began to seek out Hunter’s farm, which he had by then given the name Freedom Farm.

Wilson has been able to uncover records of around 35 Black families that came up from South Carolina, bought small parcels of land from Hunter and worked at the cotton mill. The community of formerly enslaved people came to be known as the Freedom community.

While the land around Hunter’s property was originally thought to be too rocky to farm — Hunter and many of the nearby residents originally called it Rocky Grove — he and his new Freedom neighbors got to work clearing all the large rocks, selling them to companies that were beginning to build roads in the area. From there on out, the land was farmable and families in Freedom were able to sustain productive gardens on their respective properties.

As the 20th century approached and the arrival of the railroad and then personal vehicles made business slow at Freedom Farm, Hunter began selling parcels of land at a profit to developers building out the burgeoning town of Mount Holly, named such by A.P. Rhyne and Co. in 1879 following completion of the Mount Holly Cotton Mill.

Many of the buildings that still stand in Mount Holly today were built on land purchased from Hunter.

The house that Hunter built was demolished around the turn of the 21st century, burned to its foundation by the city after being deemed unsafe.

Check out our story from 2023 to read more about what drove Hunter Wilson’s efforts to honor his great-grandfather.