A vivid memory from his youth inspired WFDD listener Clyde Ingle to reach out to Carolina Curious. He asked about an unusual group of farmworkers he witnessed on his family's dairy farm as a child: German Prisoners of War during World War II. He wants to know how many POWs were in the Piedmont.
Ingle's family's farmland was by Springwood Presbyterian Church, near the Guilford/Alamance county line. It's been about 80 years since the encounter, and Ingle thinks he was around 8 years old when he came across the Germans.
He didn’t live on the farm, but his father would take him there to visit.
“On this occasion, we stopped, and there was a truck there,” he says. “They were collecting bales of hay. And these were men in work clothes. And they were introduced to me, or described to me as being prisoners, German prisoners of war.”
Ingle says he recalls the encounter clearly because at the time he had an uncle in Europe fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.
In all, there were about 10,000 German soldiers detained in North Carolina. But John Guss, historic properties superintendent for Alamance County Recreation and Parks, says there’s not much documentation on how many of them were put to work locally.
Guss says there is, however, good information showing that some POWs worked on Garrett Farm at what is now Cedarock Park. Locals have passed down stories that the Germans built a stone wall there that still exists today.
There were also POWs held in Forsyth and Guilford counties.
Guss says prisoners across the region played a vital role in the workforce while many young Americans were serving overseas.
“There were a lot who were put on farms because we, of course, needed to supply food products,” he says. “But we also had a tobacco industry that was continuing on, and also we had a huge textile industry that was going on.”
For the last four years, Cedarock has hosted a living history program recalling the era. The event features reinactors playing U.S. and German soldiers, medical personnel and civilians.