Restrictions to Access

No restrictions. Open for research.

Restrictions to Use

No usage restrictions.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Reed Family of Cabarrus County (N.C.) Papers #5543, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Leslie Sewell in December 2012 (Acc. 101717).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

The summary description was created in October 2017.

Encoded by: Laura Smith, October 2017

Processed by: Amy Morgan, June 2019

Since August 2017, we have added ethnic and racial identities for individuals and families represented in collections. To determine identity, we rely on self-identification; other information supplied to the repository by collection creators or sources; public records, press accounts, and secondary sources; and contextual information in the collection materials. Omissions of ethnic and racial identities in finding aids created or updated after August 2017 are an indication of insufficient information to make an educated guess or an individual's preference for identity information to be excluded from description. When we have misidentified, please let us know at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Cabarrus County (N.C.)--Economic conditions--19th century.
• Cabarrus County (N.C.)--History--19th century.
• Estates (Law)--North Carolina.
• Reed family.
• Speech therapy--History--19th century.
• Unionists (United States Civil War)--North Carolina.

The Reed (other spellings include Reid) family was established in North Carolina by John Reed (1757-1845) of Germany, who came to America in the 1770s as a Hessian soldier to fight for the British in the American Revolutionary War. In 1799, his son Conrad Reed uncovered a large gold nugget near the town of Midland, N.C., which led to the founding of the Reed Gold Mine, now a state historic site in Cabarrus County, N.C.

Legal and financial documents related to the white Reed family of Cabarrus County, N.C., comprise the majority of the collection. Documents include receipts, indentures, deeds, accounts, lists of property, and court summons and pertain chiefly to estates, land sales, and taxes. Family members represented in the collection materials include Arthur Reed, George Reed, Henry Reed, and George Allen Reed. The collection also contains scattered family and business correspondence and a small number of Civil War era documents, some pertaining to a Unionist in the Reed family. Of interest are a notebook dated 1855 with detailed instructions for a musical performance and a document dated 1850 certifying Henry Reed (born circa 1820) to treat patients with stammers and other speech disorders using the signatory Allen Reed's "rules and presentation for curing" them.