The Doctor of Attaway Hill
Francis Joseph Kron was born in Prussia, married in Paris and spent half a century as a physician, vine grower and record keeper above the Yadkin River. His papers are the best window we have into early Stanly County.
At the foot of Fall Mountain in Morrow Mountain State Park stands a small house with a doctor’s office and a greenhouse beside it. The buildings date from a state project of the 1960s, but the man they commemorate was real, and unusually well documented. Dr. Francis Joseph Kron lived on this hillside from the 1830s until his death in 1883. He kept ledgers of his patients, notebooks of his plantings, a diary of his neighbors and decades of family letters, and a remarkable share of that paper survives.
North Carolina’s state parks system describes Kron as the first medical doctor to settle and practice in the southern Piedmont. He was also a teacher of French, an experimental horticulturist with thousands of grapevines, a county official, and an enslaver whose farm depended on forced labor. This article follows his life through the archival record and marks the places where the usual telling and the documents do not quite agree.
From Trier to the Yadkin
Kron was born on November 14, 1798 in Trier, an old Roman city on the Moselle that was then under French rule and passed to Prussia after Napoleon’s defeat. According to the biography published by Stanly County, he left after the French were driven out in 1813 and spent about ten years in Paris, attending university lectures and visiting the city’s gardens. In June 1823 he married Mary Catherine Delamothe, a native of Tours in the Loire Valley.
The marriage is what brought him to North Carolina. Mary Catherine’s uncle, Henry Delamothe, had settled years earlier on the east side of the Yadkin–Pee Dee River in Montgomery County, near the mouth of the Uwharrie. He was wealthy and at that time unmarried, and he invited his French relatives to join him with the suggestion that they would be his heirs. In August 1823 the newlyweds sailed with Mary Catherine’s father, Jean Baptiste Delamothe. The ship Elizabeth reached New York on September 29, 1823, and its passenger list recorded Kron as a “professor of languages.” The family reached Montgomery County that November.
Teacher, then doctor
For his first years in America Kron lived by what he had been called on the ship’s list. Stanly County’s biography says he worked as an itinerant teacher from 1824 to 1829 in Chapel Hill, New Bern and Salisbury. His own diary says he taught French at the University of North Carolina from 1824 to 1826. The archivists who care for his papers at the university note, carefully, that the university’s own records do not confirm the appointment.
In the winter of 1829–30 he attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, the oldest medical school in the country. The county biography says Henry Delamothe paid for it. Kron returned to the Yadkin with a profession that the neighborhood badly needed, and at first he practiced from the Delamothe property on the Montgomery County side of the river. His earliest surviving medical ledger, now in the Stanly County Museum, opens in 1832.
Trier and Paris
Born in Trier in 1798. About a decade in Paris, where he studied, visited the public gardens and in June 1823 married Mary Catherine Delamothe of Tours.
A teacher of languages
Reached Montgomery County in November 1823 at the invitation of his wife’s uncle. Taught French in Chapel Hill, New Bern and Salisbury. Daughter Adelaide was born in 1828.
A medical education
Attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in the winter of 1829–30. Began practice on the Delamothe lands east of the river. Daughter Elizabeth was born in 1831; a son born in 1833 did not survive.
Doctor, grower, official
Moved his family across the river to the future Stanly County. Practiced for about fifty years, planted vineyards and orchards, kept detailed records and held county offices.
Daughters, sale and reconstruction
Elizabeth died in 1896 and Adelaide in 1910. The estate was sold in 1912, the land became part of a state park in the 1930s, and the homestead was rebuilt in the 1960s.
Attaway Hill
Relations between the Krons and Henry Delamothe soured. According to a family researcher who has studied the will, the old Frenchman married a much younger local woman late in life, and when he died in 1838 his will left Mary Catherine Kron a legacy of $1,000 and a small annuity instead of the estate the family had crossed the ocean expecting. By then the Krons had already put the river between themselves and the uncle. The finding aid to Kron’s papers at the University of North Carolina says he moved his family to what became Stanly County in 1834 and remained there for the rest of his life.
The place he chose had belonged to the Rev. William McGregor, a Scottish Baptist preacher. The Krons named it Attaway Hill, a name that survives on today’s maps as Hattaway Mountain. The dates and acreage of the purchase are reported differently by sources that all rely on the same family papers. The county biography and the university finding aid both point to 1834. North Carolina’s 1979 master plan for the state park gives a deed date of November 2, 1839 for McGregor’s home, an apple orchard and 294 acres, while the county’s page gives the tract as 234 acres. A move in 1834 followed by a recorded deed in 1839 would reconcile the dates, but that is our inference and not something the sources state.
The family did eventually come into Delamothe land. After a long lawsuit over the will, the Kron daughters took possession in December 1841 of 6,090 acres on the Montgomery side of the river. The family researcher explains that the girls could inherit as American citizens by birth when their French-born mother could not. The state’s park plan says the family’s holdings at one time exceeded 6,000 acres.
A country practice in the ledgers
Kron’s practice can be followed in his own account books. The Stanly County Museum holds medical ledgers covering 1832 to 1846, 1846 to 1853 and 1854 to 1859, all digitized. The University of North Carolina holds a record book of house calls and fees for 1860 to 1882, about 160 pages, with most entries from the 1860s. Together they cover half a century, and the state park’s history notes that he was still seeing patients past the age of eighty.
Much of the work was done on the road. He rode the countryside on a white horse named Hall and drove a buggy through the Uwharries to reach patients. At home, his office served as examining room, pharmacy and infirmary, with a few beds, a desk and shelves of drugs and books. He compounded his own medicines with mortar and pestle, set bones, delivered babies, pulled teeth and amputated limbs. A magazine account drawn from his journals lists some of his charges.
The one diary of his that survives is short and sharp. It runs from November 14 to December 7, 1835, and the university’s description says it records his patients, his neighbors and the weather, and criticizes the social, economic, intellectual and medical conditions of the frontier where he had settled. He was an educated European in a backcountry that had almost no physicians, schools or libraries, and he did not pretend to be content with that. The last pages hold copies of his letters to book dealers, to medical and horticultural suppliers and to other doctors.
Five thousand grapevines
Kron was as well known for his plants as for his medicine. He had grown up beside the Moselle vineyards and knew the Loire, and he set out to make wine country of a Carolina hillside. An account of a 2015 Stanly County Museum exhibit on the family says he grew more than 5,000 grapevines, including over a hundred varieties ordered from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. A family researcher who has worked through the papers puts the order at 107 varieties in 1859, added to 13 he was already growing. The vineyard did not succeed. His worst enemy was the grapevine borer, and he corresponded about the insect with Thaddeus William Harris, the Harvard entomologist.
The rest of the farm was just as experimental. He improved worn soil, grafted fruit trees, raised livestock and kept a greenhouse in which, the county biography says, he grew oranges, pineapples and other exotic fruits and flowers. The museum’s curator has suggested he was probably the first gardener in Stanly County to grow asparagus. He carried out experiments and kept records for the Smithsonian Institution and for federal agricultural officials. His notebooks include instructions for cider and a formula for wine, and Mary Catherine Kron won awards at the state agricultural fair in Raleigh for nectarine and prune jellies. A Japanese chestnut that he planted has been listed in the North Carolina Champion Big Tree Database.
Kron’s notebooks matter beyond the garden fence. Few rural physicians of his generation left continuous records of what they planted, what they charged and whom they treated, and fewer still wrote down what they thought of their surroundings. Because he did, a hillside in Stanly County is one of the better-documented farms of the antebellum Piedmont, and researchers in medicine, agriculture and botany still go to his papers.
Helping build a county
When Kron crossed the river, the west bank was still part of Montgomery County, and anyone with court business had to cross back. A family researcher credits him with helping to petition for a separate county, and the General Assembly formed Stanly County in 1841. The county’s biography lists the offices that followed: member of the county court, one of nine men appointed superintendents of common schools, and in 1842 a commissioner to build the first courthouse at the new county seat of Albemarle. During the Civil War he chaired the county’s Home Guard. Our account of the county’s origins covers the 1841 division in more detail.
The people enslaved at Attaway Hill
The vineyards, orchards and fields of Attaway Hill were worked by enslaved people. The exhibit account states it directly: Kron’s horticultural work depended on slave labor. The family never held a large number of people, and its income was modest beside that of the great planters, but the dependence was real. A family researcher drawing on the papers names George Kron, his wife Julia and their son Saul, and reports that in 1858 the Kron daughters bought a woman named Delia and her four children from a neighboring farm. In one letter Kron referred to “this thing called slavery,” a phrase that suggests unease and changes nothing about what he did.
The papers at Chapel Hill include a genealogy of the families once enslaved by the Krons, which makes the collection valuable to their descendants as well as to historians of medicine. After emancipation some of those families stayed close. Accounts agree that descendants of people the Krons had enslaved cared for Adelaide and Elizabeth in old age, and that Adelaide tried to leave property to them. The will was not properly executed, her debts were pressed, and the bequest failed.
Adelaide and Elizabeth
Adelaide, called Addie or Adele, was born on September 12, 1828, and Elizabeth on February 5, 1831. They were taught at home, then sent to the Greensboro Female Academy in 1846 and to Saint Mary’s School in Raleigh in 1846 and 1847. Neither married. Local tradition holds that their father thought no local suitor good enough.
Both sisters were serious students of plants. In a letter written in 1847, while still in their teens, they described their botanizing along the river. They identified their finds with an old edition of Nuttall and a school botany, raised herbs and gathered plants for their father’s medicines, and painted what they saw. An album of their botanical watercolors, made about 1870, is in the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill; one description counts 124 illustrations, most of them native species. Mary Catherine Kron died in 1873 and the doctor in 1883. Elizabeth died on February 14, 1896 and Adelaide on February 4, 1910, and both were buried in the family graveyard.
| Name | Born | Died | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Francis Joseph Kron | Nov. 14, 1798, Trier | July 20, 1883 | Physician and horticulturist. The death date is the one read from his tombstone; 1888 has also been suggested. |
| Mary Catherine Delamothe Kron | Tours, France (year not given) | 1873 | Married June 1823 in Paris. Prize-winning preserves at the state fair. |
| Adelaide (Adele, “Addie”) Kron | Sept. 12, 1828 | Feb. 4, 1910 | Botanical painter. Managed the estate after her father’s death. |
| Elizabeth Kron | Feb. 5, 1831 | Feb. 14, 1896 | Botanical painter. |
| Son (name not recorded) | 1833 | Infancy | Did not survive. |
How the house came back
The Kron line ended with Adelaide. The estate was sold in 1912, and the state’s park plan records that J. M. Morrow, the Albemarle landowner for whom Morrow Mountain is named, acquired the homesite. In the 1930s the surrounding land became Morrow Mountain State Park. The county biography says the old Kron house served as the model for the park’s lodge and bathrooms, and that the original was torn down in the 1950s. The state’s own park plan speaks of the house being restored, and the doctor’s office and flower house reconstructed, in the late 1960s.
What visitors see today is the result of deliberate research. In 1958 Robert O. Poplin Jr. prepared a report for the Division of State Parks on Kron’s life, his dwelling and his writings, based partly on interviews with people who had known the family. Further study followed in the early 1960s. A road to the site was surveyed in 1964 and paved in 1966, and by the end of the decade the house, the doctor’s office and the greenhouse stood again on their original sites, presented as the homestead looked about 1870.
The Kron House is at the foot of Fall Mountain and is signed from the main park road. The Morrow Mountain guide has current hours for the park, and the Stanly County Museum in Albemarle holds the Kron Collection. Readers who want the documents themselves can page through the ledgers, notes and letters free on DigitalNC, or consult the Francis Joseph Kron Papers in Wilson Library at Chapel Hill.
| Record | Dates | Held by |
|---|---|---|
| Medical ledgers (three volumes) | 1832–1859 | Stanly County Museum, Albemarle; digitized on DigitalNC |
| Agriculture and horticultural notes | 1843–1845 | Stanly County Museum; DigitalNC |
| “Descriptions of Stanly County Life” | 1835–1845 | Stanly County Museum; DigitalNC |
| Family letters (miscellaneous) | 1827–1901 | Stanly County Museum; DigitalNC |
| Diary | Nov. 14–Dec. 7, 1835 | Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill (collection 408) |
| Daybook, chiefly horticultural | 1848–1882 | Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill |
| Record book of house calls and fees | 1860–1882 | Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill |
| Botanical watercolors by Adelaide and Elizabeth | About 1870 | Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill |
| Portraits: watercolor (about 1825) and daguerreotype (about 1850–55) | 1825–1855 | Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill |
| Poplin report for the Division of State Parks | 1958 | Stanly County Museum; DigitalNC |
Story versus record
Quick quiz: Dr. Kron
Where was Francis Kron born?
Where did he study medicine?
What did his daughters leave to history?
Questions and answers
Who was Dr. Francis Kron?
Francis Joseph Kron (1798–1883) was a Prussian-born physician and horticulturist who lived from the 1830s at Attaway Hill, now part of Morrow Mountain State Park in Stanly County, North Carolina. State Parks describes him as the first medical doctor to settle and practice in the southern Piedmont.
Is the Kron House original?
The buildings seen today date from a state project of the 1960s that presents the homestead as it looked about 1870. Stanly County’s history says the original house was taken down in the 1950s.
Where is the Kron House?
At the foot of Fall Mountain in Morrow Mountain State Park, east of Albemarle. It is signed from the main park road.
Where are Dr. Kron's papers?
The Francis Joseph Kron Papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Stanly County Museum in Albemarle holds his medical ledgers, farm notes and family letters, which are digitized on DigitalNC.
Did the Krons own slaves?
Yes. The farm at Attaway Hill depended on enslaved labor. The Kron papers at Chapel Hill include a genealogy of the families the Krons enslaved.
Sources
- University of North Carolina Libraries, Southern Historical Collection, Francis Joseph Kron Papers, 1823–1882 (collection 408), finding aid: biographical note and descriptions of the diary, daybook, record book, drawings and photographs.
- Stanly County, North Carolina, “Dr. Francis Kron” (county history page).
- North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation, Morrow Mountain State Park Plan (February 1979), excerpted on NCpedia; Morrow Mountain State Park General Management Plan.
- Stanly County Museum, Francis J. Kron Collection (medical ledgers 1832–1859; agriculture and horticultural notes 1843–1845; family letters 1827–1901; Poplin report, 1958), digitized by DigitalNC and the Digital Public Library of America.
- UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, “From Paris to backcountry Stanly County: the Kron family tale”; Richard Rankin, “Kron sisters’ botanical explorations left an important legacy,” first published in The LandMark, spring 2000.
- Kay Fetner, “Stanly County’s First Doctor,” Carolina Country, October 2013.
- UNC Libraries exhibit, “Sour Stomachs and Galloping Headaches,” section on the Kron family; Three Rivers Land Trust, “Fall Mountain Trail.”
- “The Kron and Delamothe Families,” Job’s Children (family history blog), August 2012, for the terms of Henry Delamothe’s will and the names of people enslaved by the Krons. We treat this as a secondary source.
- “Morrow Mountain State Park,” Wikipedia, for the champion Japanese chestnut and the date of Mary Catherine Kron’s death.
Descendants of the families connected with Attaway Hill, and anyone who has worked with the Kron papers, are warmly invited to send corrections or additions through the About page.
Local businesses, churches and nonprofits can sponsor history features like this one.
Photo and image credits (12)
The reconstructed Kron House at Morrow Mountain State Park — James Willamor / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Kron House, Morrow Mountain State Park — James Willamor / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Pages from F. J. Kron medical ledger, 1832 to 1846 — F. J. Kron / Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Page from F. J. Kron agriculture and horticultural notes, 1843 to 1845 — F. J. Kron / Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Manuscript page, Descriptions of Stanly County Life by Francis J. Kron — F. J. Kron / Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Page from F. J. Kron medical ledger, 1854 to 1859 — F. J. Kron / Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Address panel of a Kron family letter — Kron family / Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Document from the Francis J. Kron Collection, 1855 to 1889 — Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Cover of the 1958 Poplin report on Dr. Francis J. Kron — Robert O. Poplin Jr., 1958 / Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Ninth Street campus of the University of Pennsylvania, 1802 to 1829 — Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Saint Mary's School, Raleigh — Abbylabar / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Plaque honoring James McKnight Morrow at Morrow Mountain State Park — Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Charts, tables, timelines and map overlays: original work by The Stanly County Guide. Basemap tiles © Esri and data partners.
