“Existing on Big Hominy in North Carolina”

"On the tenth of March [1865], less than a month after the burning of Columbia, [Northern] cavalry overran Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the surrounding country.

At Manchester, these troopers came upon the estate of the aged Mr. Duncan Murchison. Here Miss Kate P. Goodridge and her sister were “refugeeing” from Norfolk.

The Goodridge family was originally from New England; but, like practically all New England settlers in the South, they were heart and soul with the cause of the Confederacy, and the bore the privations with a heroism no less than the native Southerners. Five of the Goodridge family had enlisted in the Confederate service.

As in the case of thousands of other private houses, the Murchison mansion was thoroughly ransacked; but many of the family valuables had been hidden so successfully that some of the soldiers became enraged at not securing greater booty; in spite of protests, they burst into the room of a young girl who was in the last stages of typhoid fever.

The child was taken from the bed in which she lay and died while the bed and room were being searched for money and jewelry. An officer, whose name indicated foreign birth or extraction, was appealed to; but his answer to the Goodridge ladies was: “Go ahead boys, do all the mischief you can.”

Although over seventy years old, Mr. Murchison, a kinsman of Sir Roderick Murchison, was threatened with death; but Miss Phoebe Goodridge fell on her knees and begged for his life. Consequently, the soldiers refrained from carrying out their threat, but dragged Mr. Murchison, half-clad, into the nearby swamps, where he was compelled to stay until the raiders had gone away.

The troopers slashed the family portraits with their swords, broke up much of the furniture, and poured molasses into the piano. Everything in the nature of food was destroyed. Cattle and poultry were driven off or shot. All granaries of corn or wheat were torn open and the contents carried off or ruined.

Consequently, the members of the family were, like many of the women of Georgia and South Carolina, compelled to live on scattered grains left by the cavalry horses, which they washed and made over into what they called “big hominy.”
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“Existing on Big Hominy in North Carolina”