July 5, 1849; two children who preceded
Walter died in infancy. The latter was born at Cary, August 15, 1855.
Cary was a small village which Frank Page had created; in honour of the
founder it was for several years known as Page's Station; the father
himself changed the name to Cary, as a tribute to a temperance orator
who caused something of a commotion in the neighbourhood in the early
seventies. Cary was not then much of a town and has not since become
one; but it was placed amid the scene of important historical events.
Page's home was almost the last stopping place of Sherman's army on its
march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and the Confederacy came to an
end, with Johnston's surrender of the last Confederate Army, at Durham,
only fifteen miles from Page's home. Walter, a boy of ten, his brother
Robert, aged six, and the negro "companion" Tance--who figures as Sam in
the extract quoted above--stood at the second-story window and watched
Sherman's soldiers pass their house, in hot pursuit of General "Joe"
Wheeler's cavalry. The thing that most astonished the children was the
vast size of the army, which took all day to file by their home. They
had never realized that either of the fighting forces could embrace such
great numbers of men. Nor did the behaviour of the invading troops
especially endear them to their unwilling hosts. Part of the cavalry
encamped in the Page yard; their horses ate the bark off the mimosa
trees; an army corps built its campfires under the great oaks, and cut
their emblems on the trunks; the officers took possession of the house,
a colonel making his headquarters in the parlour. Several looting
cavalrymen ran their swords through the beds, probably looking for
hidden silver; the hearth was torn up in the same feverish quest; angry
at their failure, they emptied sacks of flour and scattered their
contents in the bedrooms and on the stairs; for days the flour,
intermingled with feathers from the bayonetted beds, formed a carpet all
over the house. It is therefore perhaps not strange that the feelings
which Walter entertained for Sherman's "bummers," despite his father's
Whig principles, were those of most Southern communities. One day a
kindly Northern soldier, sympathizing with the boy because of the small
rations left for the local population, invited him to join the
officers' mess at dinner. Walter drew proudly back.

"I'll starve before I'll eat with the Yankees," he said.