Wendy Massagee- Broker, Covington Investment Properties, Inc., Southern Pines, NC (2026)

01/10/2026

New Year! Let this be the year you get a new home!

01/10/2026

Two new quality constructions by Pearce/ Tandem Builders. Located in Pinecroft.

01/10/2026

https://www.flexmls.com/share/DH2wC/217-Beech-Street,-Hamlet,-NC-28345

07/26/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Az1dVA17p/?mibextid=wwXIfr

The 1888 Ledbetter-Leath house is still looking for its next owners.

For Curious Rockingham, it’s another opportunity to post more of the home’s story.

In the 1870s, brothers John Steele and Thomas Benson Ledbetter cleared $20,000 in a Georgia turpentine venture. That amounted to a mountain of money in the years after the Civil War. However, both had grown tired of living on the Georgia coast. They wanted to come home.

By 1880, they had returned to North Carolina, their pockets full of cash. John also brought along a new wife, the former Sarah “Sallie” Maddox. Sadly, they left their only child in a Georgia graveyard. They had lost him in the early fall of 1878. Another son died in the summer of 1880, aged only seven months.

The Ledbetter brothers needed to get back to work. By the middle 1880s, they had given John Shortridge $2,500 for his South Union Woolen Mill. Shortridge was glad to let loose of the property. He had founded Hamlet just a few years earlier and had new ventures in which to invest.

The Ledbetter brothers quickly made improvements to the old South Union operation and, in 1887, reincorporated as Ledbetter Mill.

The next year, John and Sallie Ledbetter built a beautiful house and moved to Rockingham. At the time, John was 39 and Sallie 33. “The town would gladly welcome more such citizens,” the local paper said. It was a big home for the couple, but it suited the lifestyle.

In the years ahead, Sallie filled the house with visitors and guests. Known for her “kindly and gentle ways,” she frequently hosted relatives and visitors from Georgia. She threw parties for friends. There were card parties; parties with four-course dinners served on silver and crystal; parties on the home’s wide porches; parties for sewing; parties in the formal gardens of the large back lawn. Sallie loved to entertain.

Sallie also loved to serve others. During the Spanish Flu epidemic, she and other volunteers — with the help of their cooks — took to the home’s kitchen to pepare soups and meals for the sick. During the First World War, Sallie served as an officer in the Rockingham Red Cross and spent hours and hours sewing for soldiers.

Meanwhile, John threw himself into work with First Methodist Church. He served as Sunday School Superintendent for twenty-three years. “Uncle John,” as he was known to the congregation, sat at the church door each week, greeted each child, and offered a personal blessing for every one. He had no surviving child of his own, but he cared deeply for other children around him.

“Uncle John” died at home late one Saturday night in the spring of 1922. “The entire county and section have lost a friend,” the paper said. “His passing was peaceful, emblematic of the beautiful Christian life of the man.“

Even today, John S. Ledbetter’s legacy survives. First Methodist’s century-old Ledbetter Men’s Bible Class, was named in his honor.

Three months after “Uncle John” Ledbetter’s death, his widow shipped her furniture to Georgia and returned to her native state. There, she lived out her life close to her family, and to the graves of the two sons she lost in their infancy.