Tract 7: The Land at 5822 Ruralview Road and Gibsonville in 1969

Every property has two histories. There is the one you can see from the driveway, and there is the one filed away in the Guilford County Register of Deeds, a few lines of ink at a time. When I started pulling records for 5822 Ruralview Road in Gibsonville, I expected a deed and maybe a survey. What I found was a small, clear story about how a piece of Guilford County farm country became a family home, and about the town that grew up around it.

I'm Joy Watson, and my firm, Joy Watson Real Estate, is listing this home for the family. Here is what the paperwork says, and what Gibsonville looked like when the Morrisons first walked this land. Every record I mention below is linked, so you can read the originals for yourself.

Before the house: the T. J. Rumbley Estate

Long before there was a brick ranch on Ruralview Road, this ground was part of a larger holding recorded under the name of T. J. Rumbley. At some point the estate was surveyed and divided into numbered tracts, and the division was recorded as a plat in Plat Book 41, Page 15, at the Guilford County Register of Deeds. The 3.86 acres at 5822 Ruralview Road is Tract 7 of that division.

Old county records are not always consistent about spelling. Across the decades this same name shows up as Rumbley, Rumley, and Rumly, depending on which clerk was holding the pen. That is common in rural North Carolina records, and it is one reason a title search on older land takes a trained eye.

The records leave a lot out. The plat shows how the land was divided, not who the Rumbleys were, how they farmed it, or why the estate was split. If you grew up in this part of eastern Guilford County and remember the Rumbley or Rumley family, I would love to hear from you. Family memories fill in what deed books leave out.

April 3, 1969: the Morrisons buy Tract 7

On April 3, 1969, Don F. and Nancy Joyce Chamberlain Morrison bought Tract 7. The deed is recorded in Deed Book 2424, Page 353. Within weeks they were planning a house. Guilford County issued a septic permit for the property that spring, and the county's inspection certificate, approved on August 15, 1969, lists the septic system as designed for a four-bedroom home, with a 1,250-gallon tank, 600 feet of nitrification line (what we would call a drainfield today), and water from a private well.

That permit is one of my favorite documents in the whole file. It tells you the Morrisons built for a full house from the start, and more than fifty years later it still sits in the county's archive. Records like that rarely survive, and when they do, they save the next owner a lot of guesswork.

Don and Nancy, known to everyone as Meme, raised their family on these acres for the next fifty-six years. In retirement, Don spent years researching family history and the history of Greensboro and North Carolina, and he shared his collection with the Special Collections and University Archives at UNC Greensboro. It seems fitting that his own land has such a well-kept paper trail.

You can still see Don’s work online. On June 13, 2011, he contributed a 1914 photograph of his father’s family, the children of Allen James Morrison, to the Cumberland County pages of the NCGenWeb Project, with notes tracing the family back to Harnett County and the Hope Mills area. He signed it with his return address: 5822 Ruralview Rd, Gibsonville.

Gibsonville in the late 1960s

To picture what the Morrisons were buying into, it helps to know what kind of town Gibsonville was by 1969.

A railroad town that grew up around a mill

Gibsonville started as a stop on the North Carolina Railroad. According to the National Register nomination for the Minneola Manufacturing Company Cloth Warehouse, local landowner Joseph Gibson offered to grade the rail bed if the railroad would run across his property, and a depot was built in 1854. The Gibsonville Museum and Historical Society records that the first train entered Gibson Station on October 9, 1855, and that the town was incorporated on February 18, 1871. The railroad company's own records, from 1849 to 1965, are held by the State Archives of North Carolina.

For most of the twentieth century, life downtown centered on textiles, especially the Minneola mill beside the tracks. Brothers Moses and Caesar Cone, whose company later became Cone Mills, bought into Minneola in 1892. The mill's brick cloth warehouse, built in 1907 and enlarged in 1935 and 1953, still stands, and it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on September 11, 2018. The full National Register nomination, on file with the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, is the best primary source on the mill's history, and the state's 2018 announcement of the listing gives a short summary.

The town's nickname comes from that same stretch of track. As the local historical society tells it, the roses at the Minneola Mill, across from the train depot, were so plentiful that Gibsonville became known as the City of Roses.

A small town, holding steady

Gibsonville was small in the 1960s, and it was not growing fast. The official counts are in the U.S. Census Bureau's 1970 population report for North Carolina, and the Gibsonville Museum and Historical Society summarizes them: 1,866 people in 1950 and 1,784 in 1960, the only decade on record when the population dipped, as many who served in World War II found work in bigger cities. By 1970 the count was back up to 2,024.

Some of that shift started with the mill itself. The historical society notes that in 1951, during a labor dispute, Cone Mills stopped offering reduced-cost rental housing to Minneola workers, and more than sixty houses were sold and moved, with many families relocating beyond the town limits. In other words, the idea of living just outside Gibsonville was already well established by the time the Morrisons bought Tract 7.

New schools and new roads

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a building period for eastern Guilford County. According to the local historical society, Gibsonville Elementary School was built on East Joyner Street in 1965, and Eastern High School followed in 1974, with a middle school built next to it. On the roads, the North Carolina Department of Transportation notes that Interstate 85, which runs between Greensboro and Burlington, was nearly complete by the mid-1960s, changing how people traveled through this corner of the Piedmont.

Put those pieces together and you get a picture of 1969: a quiet mill town known for its roses, families settling on land just outside town, and a county getting ready for growth that was still a decade or two away.

The same land, today

Much of what drew a young family to Tract 7 in 1969 is still here. The lot at 5822 Ruralview Road runs back from the road in a long rectangle, with the brick ranch, a circular gravel drive, and open lawn up front and woods with a walking path out back. The land is zoned AG (agricultural), which gives the next owner options for a garden, a small farm, or other uses, subject to Guilford County's current rules.

The family is offering the home for sale for the first time since 1969. If you want the full picture, including photos, the recorded deed, the recorded plat, the 1969 septic permit, and the seller disclosures, visit the 5822 Ruralview Road listing page. Buyers should verify all details, including square footage, zoning, and septic, during the due diligence period.

For more on the town itself, read my posts on the history of Gibsonville, things to do in Gibsonville, and moving to Gibsonville. And if you have old stories or photographs of this area, the Gibsonville Museum and Historical Society is a wonderful place to share them.

Joy Watson Real Estate is an independent, non-corporate brokerage in Greensboro, NC. Joy Watson is a licensed North Carolina real estate broker (Broker-in-Charge). Questions about buying, selling, or renting in the Triad? Reach out through JoyWatsonRealEstate.com. Equal Housing Opportunity.