Tobacco farmer Thomas Easley built Oak Grove in 1820 in Cluster Springs, a stop on the stagecoach line before South Boston became a town. Easley, who served a term in the Virginia legislature, built a home that was two rooms wide and one deep, with woodwork and mantels in the federalist style. The house was built with heart of pine wood cut from the farm and bricks made on the farm. Easley and his wife, Harriet, had 10 children.
Education was important to the family, and the oldest son, Thomas, went to West Point but was killed in the Mexican-American War. Son William, who went to Virginia Military Institute, was Captain of the Black Walnut Calvary Dragoons in the Civil War’s Peninsula Campaign but got typhoid fever and came home to die in 1861.
When it become apparent that he was about to die, he told a member of his company: “Tell all the boys farewell.” Though he felt he had not been too strict, he said, “Tell them if I have hurt their feelings, forgive me. Remember me. I remembered them to the last.” The family farm is still intact, now operating as Oak Grove Bed & Breakfast by Pickett Craddock, a direct descendant of William Easley.
Source; Col. George B. Davis, Librarian, Virginia Military Institute.
When Thomas and Harriett’s youngest child, Mary Bailey Easley, married Dr. John Craddock in 1853, they moved to Oak Grove with her mother and expanded it. They widened the front hall, put a second story over the dining room and added a one-story, two-room rear addition with Greek revival mantelpieces and no wainscoting. They also added a Greek Revival front porch with latticework columns, sidelight surrounds, double doors and a hipped roof. Thomas Day, a free black cabinet maker from nearby Milton, N.C., designed the staircase and door trim of the front hall. The entrepreneur designed and built the baseboard, mantle pieces and window surrounds in three bedrooms.
The Craddocks’ 10th child, Edward Branch Craddock, married Mary Douglas Easley in 1897, and moved to Oak Grove in 1897. He was a stock farmer, worked for the family’s Craddock-Terry shoe company and was appointed Halifax County sheriff in the late 1920s. Oak Grove was also a dairy operation and shipped milk to Lynchburg by train daily. When Edward’s wife, Mary Douglas Craddock, died in the 1918 flu epidemic, he married Fannie Barksdale Vaughn, who contracted tuberculosis. The cure for the era was fresh air, and after two sun porches were built around 1920, she was in good health again.