By By GREG KATSKI
Community Editor
John Gray Blount was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame on Oct. 13, some 176 years after his death. Not bad for a man who helped found Beaufort County and Washington and revolutionized transportation and the economy in North Carolina.
Blount’s fifth great-grandson, John Gray Blount VI, accepted the award for his accomplished ancestor at the Transportation Hall of Fame’s 2009 Induction and Award Ceremony at the Ballantyne Hotel &Lodge in Charlotte.
“I am honored and pleased to accept this award on behalf of John Gray Blount, my fifth great-grandfather. He was a great man, and I hope when I grow up I can do good things for North Carolina, also,” the younger Blount, 8, said in his acceptance speech.
John Gray Blount V also spoke on behalf of his forefather.
“I basically told (those in attendance) that his contribution was as the father of the economy and transportation in North Carolina,” he said.
The eldest Blount was born in 1955 to Jacob Blount. His father helped found Washington, then known as the Forks of the Tar River, in 1761, according to John Gray Blount V.
John Gray Blount followed in his father’s footsteps as a successful land owner and merchant. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was devising a way to transport goods, mainly lumber, from towns along the Inner Banks to destinations up and down the East Coast, including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
“John Gray Blount did something brilliant,” John Gray Blount V said.
Ocean-going ships could not navigate the shallow Pamlico Sound and reach the Inner Banks. So, John Gray Blount purchased Shell Castle Island, a small sandbar inland from Ocracoke Inlet, and built up 100 yards of wharves and warehouses with the help of Capt. John Wallace, according to John Gray Blount V. He would direct his larger brigantine ships to come to the inlet, and there their cargo would be offloaded onto small boats and barges. The goods would then be placed in warehouses on Shell Castle Island and transported by sloops to towns along the Inner Banks.
His innovation in the transportation of goods essentially helped transform the state’s economy from a subsistence economy to a thriving economy, according to John Gray Blount V.
“The people of eastern North Carolina started making money,” he said.
The most prized cargo being shipped from the Inner Banks was lumber, most notably wood taken from cypress and juniper trees.
“Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were built out of North Carolina timber,” John Gray Blount V said.
He said his forefather also was involved in land speculation and at one point owned 90 percent of eastern North Carolina, 90 percent of western North Carolina and 33 percent of what is now Tennessee.
“He was the largest landowner in the United States (at the time),” John Gray Blount V said.
The first John Gray Blount mostly left politics to his brother, William Blount, but he represented Beaufort County in the state’s House of Commons from 1782 to 1793 and served in the senate for three terms. He was appointed to the convention in Annapolis, Md., in 1786, but was too ill with a fever to attend, according to the North Carolina Department of Archives and History. He also was a member of the North Carolina conventions at Hillsboro in 1788 and at Fayetteville in 1789, and he had an important part in the decision of the convention of 1789 to ratify the federal Constitution to include the Bill of Rights, according to “State Records of North Carolina.”