Truckin' on the Western Branch

There was lots of love and lots of hate in the community. At one time in the late 1800s, a big warehouse in the community stocked food for those who needed it. Love and compassion was part of the Twin Pines family too. Job’s Lodge on Branch Street collected dues that went to anyone sick or out of work. Members were also assigned to sit with, feed, and care for sick people and go bathe and prep the dead. Sort of like hospice now. And if you missed your turn, you were fined. The lodge was torn down when the BUD (Black Urban Development) was formed to work with the city to allow people to sell dilapidated property to the city and buy new homes built by developers including the black developer Robert Turner from Mt. Hermon.

We are still considered a family community, and it seems even though people don’t have a blood relationship, they are still our brothers and sisters. We always made a point of getting to know what newcomers were like.

Our mother had an ideal path for her children to follow. There were a lot of illegitimate births in Twin Pines, and if someone we knew was pregnant but not married, we were not allowed to socialize with them. They were out of the club, and we never thought anything of it. There were plenty of babies on Baby Row and plenty of moonshining in the woods.

We attended church with people in Crozierville (Ebony Heights), and there were lots of marriages between the two communities too. Funerals were held on Sunday during church services. Everyone wore black and sometimes you had to borrow something to wear from the neighbors. Everyone had to be buried in three days. Children didn’t go to school while burial preparations were going on.

Olanda and Shirley Gibson Olanda Gibson was born in Twin Pines in 1929 at home, he said, because hospitals were off limits for blacks then, so black children were delivered at home by a midwife. He grew up in Twin Pines and still lives there in a house he built next to where he grew up.

Twin Pines was like a village—you know, as in it takes a village to raise a child. We had no telephone or electric lights, but I could go down the street and my mother would know before I got home if I had done something wrong. And I couldn’t deny it because then I’d be calling the person who told her a liar.

There were other black neighborhoods too—Pughsville, Huntersville, Mt. St. Clare, West Norfolk, and Crozierville, now called Ebony Heights.

Everyone in Twin Pines is related. Gibson Street is named for my father’s family, Branch Street for my mother’s family. Prominent people in the village had two-story houses—but back then they could be built for $100.

Olanda and Shirley Gibson. Images by Sheally

I was the baby of the family. My father died when I was two, and my mother raised us on her own. My stepfather came into my life when I was 13. Mother did field work, and I went with her because I was the youngest. I started working for pay, 75 cents a day, when I was 11. We worked for the Porter Hardy, Watts, Trotman, and Ballard farms—picking greens and

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