The Pumpellys of Samarcand
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You seek a small camo'd thermos container, with log and swag, near the heart of what once was the community of Samarcand, founded by Raphael Pumpelly II and his wife, Amelie.
The following was adapted from the book "Up From Mt. Misery" by Chris Florance (1990, Down Home Press)
Raphael Pumpelly II was the Harvard-educated som of a famous geologist who was among the migration of northern entrepreneurs to Moore, Richmond and Montgomery counties in the early years of the 20th century to make their fortunes in peach farming.
Pumpelly was a striking figure, a tall man who always dressed for dinner. Frances Richardson of Jackson Springs wrote in a 1971 newspaper memoir that he “rode a wild mare bareback without a bridle, dressed in Russian boots, English whipcord pants, a purple smoking jacket, red bandana neckcloth and a 10-gallon hat.”
As a child Pumpelly had traveled widely in Europe and Asia with his father, and his fondest memory was of a trip on horseback from Samarkand, in the Uzbek Province of southern Russia (now Uzbekistan) through upper Bokhara, over the Pamir Mountains to Cashgar and to the railhead at Andijan. He became particularly enthralled with the city of Samarkand.
Pumpelly determined to settle down to the life of a gentleman farmer, and he realized his dream when he moved with his socialite wife, Amelie, and young children to the Sandhills. Pumpelly joined with his former Harvard roommate, Ralph Page of Moore County, to buy 500 acres of land near Eagle Springs in 1910, when Pumpelly was 30. Pumpelly soon bought Page’s share of the land.
In tribute to his horseback trip in Asia, he called his farm Samarcand Farms, and he called the showplace home he built there Samarcand House. (The spelling is a common variant.)
With supporting complex of tenant structures, Samarcand ended up self-contained and self-sufficient. The second floor of the company store was a ballroom, measuring 60 by 100 feet, in which the Pumpellys threw lavish parties. According to the book, "The ballroom was a quite suitable setting for formal dances with imported bands, masquerade balls, plays and musicals and informal hoedowns, southern style. One local old-timer who lived nearby, remembered times when a Pullman filled with weekend visitors from New York parked at the Samarcand depot across the sandy road from the ballroom, then along toward Monday morning, that same Pullman, afloat with hangovers, began the long trip back to New York, taking revelers home, some of whom may not have remembered where they spent the weekend."
Some of Pumpelly’s crop experiments were failures, but he bought more land and continued his high style of living. He farmed peaches. He hosted parties. He took an active part in the new Sandhills Board of Trade. He rode to hounds.
Also, according to sworn testimony, he engaged in torrid love affairs outside his marriage.
Amelie Pumpelly, who had an independent income, began to give much of her money to a religious sect. By 1918, the Pumpellys were in severe financial straits. Amelie sold 300 acres of land to the state that year. Samarkand Manor (now a juvenile facility for the N.C. department of corrections) was eventually built on that land.
Two straight years of failed peach crops ended Pumpelly’s venture into farming. What he hadn’t lost on the farm, he lost in a divorce trial in Carthage. Everybody who could get into the courtroom attended the trial, to hear the accounts of Pumpelly’s scandalous behavior. Amelie hired as her lawyer the same Ralph Page, Raphael's former Harvard Roomate and business partner.
"When members of Harvard's class of 1903 contributed brief items about their lives for a 25th anniversary report, both Page and Pumpelly mentioned the prolonged legal battles.
Page's brief comment was casual and non-committal. A list of Sandhills activities, he mentioned barbecues, possum hunts, vacations with his family, and added one final item: 'there is always the perpetual Pumpelly trial going on at the courthouse'.
Pumpelly categorized the litigation as one in a list of woes: 'My wife is gone, my house is empty, my property ransacked, and I have endured two years' war with my most intimate friend and former partner'."
Somehow, though, Pumpelly won custody of his children — a boy and a girl, both in their early teens. Problem was, he had not the means to support them.
As a child, Pumpelly had vacationed with his family at a lodge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He recalled playing in a cave deep in the forest near the lodge. He took his children there in 1924, after the divorce.
They lived for a year in the cave, surviving by setting traps for rabbits, gathering nuts and berries, and fishing in a nearby stream. Each weekday morning, Pumpelly would bathe in the stream, put on his one nearly threadbare suit, walk into town and catch a commuter train into New York City, where he would apply for work.
He found work at the end of a year, as a stockbroker, and he proceeded to make a second fortune.
His children, in later years, recalled that year in the New Hampshire Cave as the best year of their childhoods.
And Pumpelly often told friends that the best thing that can happen to a man is to suffer a setback in his middle years. Either it breaks you, he said, or you come out of the experience a stronger person.
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(Decrypt)
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