As you can imagine...I'm very interested in the history of our little cottage. The Given Memorial Library and Tuft's Archives in Pinehurst will able me to research more. Until we get back to Pinehurst again...I'll have to depend on google. I did know that our cottage was built by a man named Rassie Wicker in 1919. He named the cottage 'Merimack Cottage.' The following is about the man who built and lived in our little cottage. Taken from the Moore County, North Carolina, General Website.
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RASSIE
EVERTON
WICKER Noted Historian
Writer and Engineer
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Rassie Everton Wicker was born March 6, 1892 near Cameron and died October 16, 1972. He spent most of his life in Moore County.
He attended school at Cameron and later secured admission to the Agricultural & Mechanical College in Raleigh, now N.C. State University through comprehensive examination and graduated in 1919 with a degree in civil engineering. He later became a certified civil engineer under the "grandfather clause", and served as engineer for Pinehurst, Inc. until his retirement. Rassie Wicker was mostly self-taught, beginning with teaching himself to read from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. He was a true scholar, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He seemingly recorded to memory all that he read and learned, for he could answer most any question put to him. His interest and abilities were many and varied. He was a master craftsman who produced many beautiful pieces of furniture. He was a mechanical and architectural engineer as well as a civil one; a student of math and science, music, astronomy, horticulture and botany. His interests even extended to the art of weaving, resulting in his building a four-harness loom on which he wove a coverlet of ancient design. Bee-keeping and orchid-raising were among his many hobbies. But, he was perhaps best known as a writer and historian. He supplied much of the information used by Blackwell Robinson in his,
A History of Moore County, 1747-1847; and then, in 1969, he typed his own,
Miscellaneous Ancient Records of Moore County, NC, a 570-page (legal size) book, now in its third printing. He was also recognized as being instrumental in locating (in 1953) the American home site of the Scottish heroine, Flora MacDonald, on Cheek’s Creek in Anson (now Montgomery) County. For his contribution to the preservation of Moore County history, he was awarded the Kiwanis, "Builders Cup", in 1971, and is to be included in William Powell’s,
Dictionary of North Carolina Biography.. Rassie Wicker was an honest, gentle, soft-spoken man, who met everyone on the same level, whether rich or poor, black or white, and he had many friends of varied backgrounds and conditions. He was a great story-teller, possessed of the dry wit for which many Wickers have been known.
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