November 18, 2007

Collectors piece together American history

Paul Brendle discusses the collection of Native American artifacts he recently sold to Jim Sutton. Photo by O.C. Stonestreet

By O.C. Stonestreet

Paul Brendle was not born in Iredell County, but he and his family moved here more than 70 years ago, so we can claim him as one of our own.

He will be remembered by many as an athlete, a teacher and a coach, but this is about his avocation, rather than his vocation: collecting Native American artifacts.

“I got started in collecting,” he said, “when I’d go bird hunting. You have to watch the ground, watch your step, and I usually would find a few of what most people would call ‘arrowheads,’ put them in my coat pocket, take them home and clean them up.

“I’d fish in Lake Norman, too, and walk around the shoreline. This was before it got so built-up, and you could about always find a few points, pieces of pottery or other artifacts.”

Brendle was a teacher at Cool Spring School under Principal R.B. Madison. There he taught a variety of subjects and coached baseball, boys and girls basketball and eight-man football. After North Iredell High School opened, Brendle taught math and history there. He took his history students on field trips where they could find artifacts of their own in the fields of northern Iredell.

In those pre-Baldrige and state EOG test days, Brendle had more freedom to teach what he felt was more important.

“Instead of spending one or two weeks on the American Indian, I’d spend about a month,” he confides.

The last seven years of his teaching career were spent at South Iredell High School, where he taught history and math and coached baseball and helped in the physical education department.

Brendle looks at his prime artifact collecting days as a thing of the past. The farmers generally don’t plow their fields in the fall anymore, and Iredell’s population explosion has resulted in housing developments on top of sites where he used to hunt.

He notes that he surface-collected only and always got permission of the landowners to go on their property.

Brendle’s collection grew and grew, due both to collecting excursions in the Yadkin and Catawba basins and purchases. He bought reference books and educated himself in the history and culture of the Native Americans, a people who were not officially recognized as American citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act on June 2, 1924.

He eventually had to erect a separate building to store his growing collection and get it out of his basement. His wife, Shirley, encouraged him in this endeavor, saying that she would like to see the floor of the basement once again.

Statesville’s Jim Sutton, owner of the Fairintosh Building and owner of Pro-Tech, Inc., which produces electronic monitoring systems for temperature, light, humidity and so forth for poultry houses, became interested in Brendle’s collection after reading about it in a newspaper.

Sutton was already a collector of Americana himself. He and his wife started collecting furniture and their interests diversified.

Brendle and Sutton got together in February 2006 and Sutton left Brendle’s home with about 50 percent of his collection. Brendle estimates that included about 5,000 “good” points and tools.
With Brendle’s help, Sutton installed the collection in a fashion where it could be displayed.

And so it is.

Sutton welcomes visitors to see the collection he bought from Brendle along with Native American artifacts he found, plus other bits of Americana. He just asks that you give him a call beforehand at (704) 872-6227. The address of Pro-Tech Inc. is 541 Gaither Road, Statesville, and his e-mail address is .

Both Brendle and Sutton stress that the Native Americans were true artists, working in stone, a medium that requires a great deal of skill to shape.

Besides “arrowheads,” most of which are were never used on arrows but instead were attached to spears or darts, the Native Americans produced a great variety of tools, including drills, scrapers, knives, mortars and pestles, nutting stones, axes, pipes, pots and so forth, all of which are represented in the collection.

What is often called an arrowhead is too large to have been attached to an arrow. True arrowheads, which are relatively scarce as compared to other tools, are small, triangular and usually no bigger than one’s thumbnail.

The most common type of projectile point found in Iredell is the so-called Savannah River point, large points with a square base, which were crafted some 2,000 years ago.

N.C. is rich with historical artifacts

Gov. Mike Easley recently proclaimed November as American Indian Heritage Month in North Carolina. While the average person might associate Indians, or Native Americans, with Western movies and television shows, what we now know as North Carolina has been home to various Native American groups for at least 10,000 years and today has the largest Indian population of any state east of the Mississippi with more than 100,000 people.

While the Eastern Band of Cherokee might be the best known, the largest tribe in the Tar Heel State is the Lumbee. A large number of Lumbees live in Robeson County in the eastern part of the state. Besides the Lumbee and the Cherokee, other tribes are the Meherrin, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Coharie, Sappony and Waccamaw-Siouan and Haliwa-Saponi.

There are several museums with displays of Native American artifacts within relatively easy driving distance of Iredell County.

The Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia — (704) 866-6900 — besides having a fine artifact collection, also has a great collection — 650 pieces — of Catawba Indian pottery and life-sized Indian dwellings. There is an admission charge.

Town Creek Indian Mound State Historic Site in Mount Gilead in Montgomery County — (910) 439-6802 — is worth the drive, with an excellent museum and reconstructed mound and ceremonial center surrounded by a palisade. Admission is free, donations are accepted. The site is closed on Mondays.

The Indian Museum of the Carolinas in Laurinburg in Scotland County — (910) 276-5880 — has 200,000 artifacts. Admission is free.

The granddaddy of all museums displaying the artifacts of Native Americans is the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh — (919) 715-0200 — which currently has an exhibit on “Mys-teries of the Lost Colony.”

By the way, there are those who believe that at least some of the Lost Colony moved inland from the coast and that their descendants live today as members of the Lumbee tribe.