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Vonnie Brown, left.
Orphans must find family wherever they can. That is a lesson Bowersville resident Vonnie Bentley Brown was forced to learn early in life.
The family she knew until she was 10 years old was torn apart by tragedy on a chilly and rainy October day in 1962 in Morganton, N.C. She, her mother and father and her eight brothers and sisters were riding in an old panel truck from their home in Lenoir, N.C. to pick up a load of apples and cabbage when their lives changed forever.
“It was kind of a misty, rainy day, and the brakes gave way in our old panel truck,” Brown said, still tearing up at the thought 57 years later. “We went town a 150-foot ravine. I lost my mom and dad.”
She nearly lost a little brother as well, but miraculously, all the children survived the crash.
But without parents, immediate family they knew about and little to no resources to get by, Brown, now 67 years old, and her siblings were sent to the North Carolina Home for Children in Concord, N.C.