The river itself is narrow, black and forbidding, often without definable banks, wandering aimlessly through cypress-studded swamps. Even in the lushness of summer, with crops at their peaks and marshlands and woods in rampant tangle, an impression of emptiness prevails. Bullards have lived on this land for generations. John Bullard raised cotton and tobacco on the Sampson County side of the river until he swapped farms early in this century with Frank Autry, who lived on the Cumberland side. In the deal Bullard ended up with more than two hundred acres and a small house into which he moved his wife Isabelle and their burgeoning family. Here they would finish rearing their nine children, losing a daughter, Sophia Velma, to fever at the age of three, and a son, Joe Tyson, to blood poisoning at fourteen. A daughter, Annie Belle, also would precede her parents in death, a victim of the flu epidemic that swept through the country in the winter of 1918-19, dead at twenty-six. In 1926, ten years before his own death, John Bullard began dividing his land to parcel it out to his surviving children.
