Our State magazine March 2004 A Sharpe Mind A thinning crop of short red hair is combed straight up from her scalp so that Eileen Lackey Sharpe seems to have a wispy flame atop her head. It is a crown befitting a fiery woman who strove to make a difference—and has. Alexander County’s most beloved benefactor is watching CNN on a 52-inch television that stands a few feet from her hospital bed. At 94, her eyes are sharp enough to spot me from across the room as I stand rapping on the outside of the French doors of her one-story house in Hiddenite. Her eyes are bright and clear as she makes a fist in the air and shakes it vigorously, gesturing for me to knock louder. Ruth Lackey, one of three women who care for her round-the-clock, appears from the kitchen and lets me in. "She says we’re related, way back down the line," Lackey says, with a gentle laugh. She is African-American. The Lackeys, black and white, and the Sharpes go back four and five generations in Hiddenite, a town of about 20,000 people located 15 miles northwest of Statesville. Regardless of a blood relationship, there is a kinship of the heart between Sharpe and those around her. "I care for her exactly like she is my own mother," Lackey says. Last week, Sharpe received a male suitor. "He’s blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other," she says. "He drove up in a 1947 tractor, now you know he can’t have a license. He’s 90 years old! He brought me a doll and some turnip greens! I gave Ruth the turnip greens and she washed ‘em and cooked ‘em and we ate ‘em. They were good!" As Sharpe speaks, she pulls her head forward off the pillow enthusiastically. "Called me Sugar Baby. He tried to kiss me but I put my hand up to my mouth. I wasn’t going to let that old man kiss me." She works her lips carefully to push words past gums that will no longer hold teeth or dentures, yet the effort does not tire her. The passage of time and the toll it takes on the body has not weakened this woman’s spirit. Somehow, she sparkles. "Get my emeralds and show her," she says, and Lackey brings out a white jewelry box that has been opened many times. Inside is a stunning necklace, ring and earrings of what appears to be transparent emerald-green spodumene, the gem discovered here in 1879. Until recent finds in Brazil and Madagascar, Hiddenite was the only place in the world the stone was found. "Designed in Europe and made in America. I owned the mine those came out of." Sharpe was born in 1909 in the house across the street, now occupied by her 90-year-old sister. Within a block or so stand her two sizable contributions to the area’s cultural and folk arts, the Hiddenite Center and Lucas Mansion Museum (a restored 1920s mansion) and a large educational complex that holds classrooms for weaving, painting, sculpting and folk arts. The first floor of the mansion is the recreated vacation home of its former owner, Diamond Jim Lucas, a gem trader in the 1920s. Lucas was a flashy dresser, often wearing striped or solid white suits and carrying a gold or ivory walking stick with a diamond head. He wined and dined the rich and famous of the day in his Hiddenite mansion, hoping to sell them gems. Eileen Lackey Sharpe was one of the town children who would gather around and hide to get glimpses of the high-stepping rich. The second floor of the mansion houses art galleries with changing displays of arts, crafts and historical artifacts from the area. On the third floor is Sharpe’s private collection of antique dolls and toys, on display for public viewing.. The Hiddenite Center is located at 316 Church Street and has hosted a Celebration of the Arts the fourth Saturday of September for the past 22 years. Executive Director Dwaine Coley says the center receives about 100,000 people annually from across the United States and 42 foreign countries. "They come from as far away as Nigeria and Russia, but the United Kingdom is a standard," he said. A series of connected buildings that formerly held a general store, barber shop and hardware store is now an education complex including a large ballroom floor that is set up for performances. Here, as many as 250 people at a time can enjoy performances from the Broyhill String Band, traveling children’s theaters and a variety of joint activities with Alexander county school system. Sharpe’s oldest daughter, Lynn Hill, is a Blowing Rock realtor and co-owner of the family-owned Hidden Chrystal Inn and Conference Center. Hill explains her mother’s primary interest in establishing the Hiddenite Center. "Weaving, painting, sculpting, cooking, quilting and pottery, these are things that were taught at your mother’s feet that go away in the industrial age. How to churn butter and make soap, these are basic skills that were necessary for survival but are also creative skills, and the fact that these were being lost and concerned her greatly." The Sharpe family has long been at the forefront of the town named after the unusual gem-like stones found here: Sharpe’s father owned the furniture factory and her grandfather owned the country store in town at a time when people traded chickens for store-bought supplies. As a young woman, Sharpe wanted to be a missionary. For a year, she attended Asbury College, a Methodist-founded Christian college in Wilmore, Kentucky. "That’s where I fell in love with my sweetheart. He was already in business and he was ready to get married and I wasn’t, but I married him anyway. He was so good looking." Sharpe’s husband of 74 years, the late R.Y. Sharpe, founded Pilot Freight Carriers, Inc. in Winston-Salem in 1941. Initially, Mr. Sharpe drove trucks himself, running cigarette shipments out of the South, and eventually became a multi-millionaire. Forty years later, he sold the company after several diabetic strokes and bought a historic property in Hiddenite. The Sharpes painstakingly restored the house of James Paul Lucas, a.k.a. "Diamond Jim," and turned it into educational center and historic museum. "He was a genius! And he was so good to me. He flew me to New York in his own jet. I’ve been all over Europe. I’ve been in Paul’s churches and museums in Greece and I’ve seen a lot of stuff that’s in the Bible!" While her husband built a small trucking empire, Sharpe looked for ways to contribute to the community. In the 1930s and ‘40s, she taught adult Sunday School at the Maple Springs Methodist Church on Reynolda Road. She was an avid book reader and made sure that others had access to books, too. Shirley Sharpe Duncan of High Point remembers when her mother hosted the neighborhood bookmobile in their home next to the field that is now the campus of Wake Forest University. "When I was in grammar school, we had a cabinet in our dining room that most people would have kept china in, and Mother kept books in it," recalls Duncan. "Carnegie Public Library had a bookmobile that would leave books at our house, and people would come and borrow those books. To this day, my brother and I are great readers." Sharpe was politically active in a manner befitting a fine Southern lady, recalls Keith Sharpe, a retired Winston-Salem attorney-turned-novelist. "She was a wonderful liberal yellow-dog Democrat. Mother wouldn’t hesitate to buttonhole people on behalf of Democratic candidates, at any kind of social event or gathering. My earliest memory is holding on to the hem of my mother’s dress in the voting booth in 1932 election day. My grandmother was selling hot dogs across the street." Sharpe is personally generous. "Lord have mercy, you ought to be see the gifts she had us buy for everyone who ever did anything for her, across the country," says Duncan. In 1984, Sharpe self-published a memoir in booklet form, "Come A Fur Piece," in which she explains her personal philosophy towards history and the future. "I have been concerned that the rural South is becoming more urbanized, and the folk arts and crafts…are becoming extinct. The people seem to look and listen without inspiration. One possible reason for the decline of folklore may be the loss of the extended family way of life…. Technical changes in the entertainment industry have…moved us away from the storytelling, music and life of the bygone days. Why not join hands with technology to preserve man and his personhood?" Although she’s been bedridden for nearly five years, Sharpe still gets dressed in her finery and attends family birthday parties and holiday meals. "Mother dresses in the latest New York fashion and the finest clothes and furs that can be bought," Duncan said. "She had my sister buy her a new outfit for Thanksgiving and Christmas." Mr. Sharpe, who suffered from diabetes and Parkinson’s’ disease, died in 1988 at the age of 83. His wife speaks ever fondly of him and the times gone by. "He’s dead, but I talk to him every night. I turn the pages of my memories one after the other and I don’t get bored. I have a good memory." Eileen Lackey Sharpe, matriarch of Hiddenite, by Sheridan Hill 828 669 1303.