J Hampton Rich.pdfDavie County Public Library
Mocksville, North Carolina
J. Hampton Rich
July 14, 1874 - December 1, 1949
J. Hampton Rich was born July 14, 1874, the son of Samuel Chase and Betty Caroline
McMahan Rich of the Cana section of Davie County. Graduating from the Wake Forest College
in 1898, he attended the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. He then spent several years
preaching and teaching before buying a printing press and operating the Piedmont Printing
Company in Winston Salem, publishing a newspaper called “The Labor Leader”.
In 1913 Hamp Rich founded the Boone Trail
Highway and Memorial Association. He engaged a
sculptor named Henley to design the Daniel Boone
tablet which shows a likeness of Daniel Boone
sitting on a boulder looking westward, with his dog,
rifle and powder horn.
From the Navy he obtained 400 pounds of
metal from the USS Maine, which had been
scuttled in 1912. A little bit of this metal was mixed
into each tablet. However, the connection
between Boone and the battleship was never
explained.
Rich dressed in a coonskin cap and carrying
a long rifle, made personal appearances through-
out North Carolina and all over the nation. He
would deliver a spellbinding speech about Daniel
Boone to any assembled audience, urging them to
build a monument to the great pioneer.
School children brought in money, civic
clubs and patriotic societies donated funds, and hats were passed around. When enough
money was raised, Rich would pull from the back of his old car shovels, bags of cement, and a
large metal tablet. He would supervise local labor in construction of a large 8 foot arrowhead
from rocks and concrete. The metal tablet designed by Henley, was riveted onto the side of the
arrowhead, along with another tablet carrying the message.
Hamp Rich marked Boone’s trail from North Carolina to Kentucky and back. Then he
began working on a transcontinental Boone Trail from Virginia Beach to San Francisco. In 1925,
he made a cross-county trip and claimed to have spoken to 50,000 school children. When
asked about the Boone marker constructed at the Golden Gate, Rich reportedly explained:
“Although Boone never actually got that far west, he dreamed a lot about the Pacific”.
Davie County Public Library
Mocksville, North Carolina
About 1934 Rich headed the American Institute of Heraldry in North Carolina, offering
to research and register arms as a "token of the achievement of blood." In the following decade
in Chapel Hill he built inexpensive log cabins for students at the university, and in 1945 he
served on the staff of the General Assembly.
Rich married Ina Bagby and they had four children,
Katherine Elizabeth, Edith Hulda, Charles Hampton, and
Samuel Frederick Chase. He died on December 1, 1949 in
Duke Hospital of a liver ailment and was buried at Eaton's
Church in Davie County.
J. Hampton Rich, who claimed to have placed more
than 350 metal tablets throughout the country and to have
addressed more than 50,000 schoolchildren on just one
cross-country tour, was an enigma. Given to exaggerations,
less than scholarly in his research, and not above a little
chicanery, Rich was nevertheless a gentle and generous man
who enjoyed the luxury of making his hobby his career. For
more than two decades he stirred the interest of countless
schoolchildren in what he called "pioneer lore," which
formed the "mud-sill of our republic." Many of his markers
may still be seen from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Florida to Michigan and
Massachusetts. In memorializing Daniel Boone, Hamp Rich probably exceeded the old pioneer
in both travel and exploration.
Sources:
https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/mediaui-
viewer/tree/31218530/person/12390284367/media/2ef63344
-94b9-4d3b-b13c-da39ddfd703c
http://www.ncpedia.org/biography/rich-joseph-hampton
Gordon Tomlinson, Salisbury Post