Brunswick Town Daughter Honors Her Own Her Daughter

Brunswick Town DAR Public Relations chair and her husband attended the opening of the Brandy Myers Memorial Playground in Carolina Beach, NC on April 10, 2024. Brandy is their daughter who died at age 10 of leukemia. 

The park is located at the Carolina Beach Lake Park, located at 400 Lake Park Blvd. S.

“It means everything. This whole thing means everything to us because, first of all, it allows our daughter’s memory to always live on, but look at the kids. They’re having such a great time. That’s what it’s all about,” Brandy's mother said.

Google - Go to WECT Brandy Myers Memorial Playground to view the video? You can see the children having a great time.

Information from the 

CAROLINA BEACH, N.C. (WECT)

     Here are some photos of the new playground. If you Google  WECT and look at the video you will see children actually playing at each station. There is even a place where blind children can read in braille if the station is appropriate for them to use. 

Brunswick Town DAR Daughters Had a Tea Party at their April 2024 meeting

 

Today at our Brunswick Town DAR meeting our membership committee chairs organized a special tea. They brought a big urn of hot water, a variety of special teas, and some tasty treats for us to eat. The members brought beautiful teacups with saucers and wore spring hats. This gave new members a chance to visit other members before the meeting. Hope we do this again.

Brigadier General Dan Hickman - Guest Speaker at the April Brunswick Town DAR Meeting

Dan Hickman, was our guest speaker at our April meeting. He is a retired Brigadier General living in Wilmington, North Carolina. His Army career began with service as an infantry private. He subsequently served as an Army warrant officer pilot and section leader during the Vietnam War and received a direct commission based on combat experience afterward. As a citizen soldier, he successively commanded an infantry company, an infantry battalion, and a mechanized infantry brigade in the Army Guard.

He is a graduate of the Army War College, the Army Command and General Staff College, numerous Infantry schools, and Army Flight School. His civilian education includes a BS from Embry Riddle University and an MS from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He served in combat with Bravo Troop, 3rd/17th Air Cavalry, during the height of the Vietnam War. He later served in combat with the 1st Infantry Division during the Iraq war, where he commanded the 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team near the Sunni Triangle. He published newspaper and magazine articles before writing A Thousand Chances.

https://www.nationalguard.mil/portals/31/Features/ngbgomo/bio/7/726.html For additional information about Brigadier General Dan Hickman go to the website. 

Dan Hickman grew up on a farm at Hickman Crossroads, Brunswick County, NC. He is a proud member of Sons of the American Revolution through his sixth great grandfather Samuel Hickman and cousin to two of our chapter members.

                                            Brigadier General Dan Hickman

Dan grew up on a farm at Hickman Crossroads, Brunswick County, NC. He is a proud member of Sons of the American Revolution through his sixth great grandfather Samuel Hickman and cousin to two of our chapter members.

The Edenton Tea Party

Brunswick Town DAR public relations chair presented information about the Edenton Tea Party at our April DAR meeting. On May 10, 1773, Tea Act 1773 which was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses. It was also to help the struggling company survive. A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea that was being smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

Now, up in Boston, the colonists were not happy about this. But they had not been happy for at least the past 8 years, because you see in 1765, that’s when the Stamp Act was imposed as a direct tax on the colonies The Stamp Act required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper from London which included an embossed revenue stamp on it. These printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not colonial paper money and it was out of the Stamp Act that the Sons of Liberty were born on the 4th of August of 1765. That was the day a group of notable men from Boston protested in the streets and hung in effigy Andrew Oliver, a distributor of stamps for Massachusetts.

The drumbeat of dissent was underway, and by December 16, 1773 - just seven months after the Tea Act went into effect – the Sons of Liberty, disguised themselves as Native Americans and destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent into Boston Harbor by the East India Company. Their war cry was “taxation without representation”.

Now, back here in North Carolina, in the town of Edenton, located on the coastal Albemarle Sound near the mouth of the Chowan River, a socialite named Penelope Padgett Hodgson Craven Barker - we’ll just call her Penelope Barker for short – was busy leading her own political protest in response to the Tea Act. On October 25, 1774, Penelope led 51 women to sign a statement of protest vowing to give up tea and boycott all other British products "until such time that all acts which tend to enslave our Native country shall be repealed."

That petition was published in colonial newspapers and in London. Barker herself sent a "fiery letter" to London. In London, the women of Edenton were mocked in the London papers with a political cartoon entitled "Edenton Tea Party" portraying the women as bad mothers with loose morals.

However, in the Colonial American press, the women were praised as patriots. Soon, other women followed suit by swearing off tea. Southern women danced in ballgowns made from homespun fabric which started a homespun movement. Northern women had spinning bees for the production of homemade material. And in Charles Town, now Charleston, SC, a shipload of imported East India Company tea was locked away in a port for months because it could not be sold with the tax. At the start of the Revolution, a group of patriots gathered that tea and sold it to other patriots to fund the rebellion against the British. They had also ousted royal officials and agents at the time. These Daughters of Liberty, like the Sons of Liberty, had direct consequences on what was to come in the war between Great Britain and the American Colonies.

In 1908, a plaque was dedicated by the DAR placed in the North Carolina state Capitol Building a plaque honoring the Edenton Tea Party. And in 1940, a marker was placed at West Queen Street, which is also US Business 17 in Edenton by the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program that states, "Women in this town led by Penelope Barker in 1774 resolved to boycott British imports. Early and influential activism by women. It was the "first recorded women's political demonstration in America".