Location: US 401 (South Main Street) in Warrenton
County: Warren
Original Date Cast: 1956
Born in Scotland on August 31, 1814, John White arrived in Warrenton, North Carolina in December of 1828. He became partners with his brother Thomas in a Warrenton mercantile. White used his experience as a merchant when Governor Zebulon Vance appointed him as North Carolina’s agent and commissioner to England in 1862. Vance instructed White to travel to England to borrow money and secure credit on state warrants payable in cotton and rosin. At that time, the demand for cotton was very high overseas, and it was a valuable commodity for those who could not only produce the products but also get them past the federal blockade of southern ports. Once he secured the capital in England, White purchased provisions for the war eventually amounting to twelve million dollars. A London outfit, Alexander Collie and Company, acted as agents for the state and chartered the purchases as far as Bermuda.
North Carolina needed a way to retrieve purchases from Bermuda and export cotton and resin beyond the Federal blockade. Captain Thomas Crosson, who accompanied John White to England, oversaw the purchase of the Lord Clyde for $170,972.30. Renamed the Advance, the iron steamer became North Carolina’s first and most famous blockade-runner. Loaded with cargo that White had purchased in England, it ran the blockade in the Cape Fear River. The Advance made eleven successful trips between Wilmington and Nassau before it was captured a few miles from Wilmington. Thanks to White’s work as commissioner and the success of the blockade-runners that the state continued to acquire, North Carolina regiments were the best supplied in the Confederacy.
John White married Priscilla Bella Jones on November 28, 1838; they had ten children. After the war, the family moved to Liverpool, England where White ran a cotton brokerage office for about nine months before returning to Warrenton. In April of 1870, he hosted General Robert E. Lee and his daughter Agnes in his home. They were in Warren County to visit the grave of Lee’s daughter Annie Carter Lee who had died there from typhoid fever in 1862. A grandfather to thirty-six grandchildren, White remained in Warrenton until he died from a stroke on December 17, 1894. He was buried next to his wife in the family cemetery behind his house.
References:
Daniel Harvey Hill, Bethel to Sharpsburg, I (1926)
Hamilton Cochran, Blockade Runners of the Confederacy (1958)
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, VI, 180-181—sketch by James P. Beckwith Jr.
Lizzie Wilson Montgomery, Sketches of Old Warrenton, North Carolina (1924)