Last week, I took an impromptu field trip to Reidsville. My son had taken a fourth-grade field trip to the Betsy-Jeff Penn 4H Center, and the tiny Fitbit device we’d given him for his birthday had come out of its band (this happens a lot!) and was lost in a field. That night, he described where it was, and the next day I got in the car, drove 30 minutes up to Rockingham County, and spent another 45 minutes walking with my head down, trying to devise a good method to find a tiny 2-inch-long black device that couldn’t make any sound in a grassy area the size of two or three basketball courts.

Folks, I did it.

Short version: Once I got there, I got my phone out and opened the Fitbit app to see if it would sync. It did. From there, I walked in different directions until I lost the Bluetooth connection. Then I used an app that measured the Bluetooth signal strength coming from the Fitbit, and after moving very slowly and deliberately (and occasionally explaining to friendly 4H staffers why I was wandering around on their property), I found a spot where the signal was strongest, then ran my fingers through the grass until I found it. I am now Dog The Fitbit Hunter, available for your fitness tracker tracking needs.

To celebrate (and to get some work done), I drove into Reidsville. Somehow, I’d never been there before. First thing you see is a giant Lucky Strike smokestack towering over Scales Street.

For years, the American Tobacco Company had a big factory underneath that smokestack. That’s the company, by the way, that was once run by James B. Duke, who went on to be in charge of Duke Power and donated the money that made Duke University into what it is today. The plant closed in 1994 but it’s still there, and there’s still quite a bit of tobacco out in the fields around town.

I posted up at Sip Coffee House. The only customers were three state troopers who were hanging out. Later two Greensboro (?) Police officers came in. Downtown looks nice thanks to grants and programs that fixed up the streets, sidewalks, and building facades. It’s a lovely backdrop but several storefronts were empty, and others were full of an eclectic assortment of businesses. One cafe very prominently displayed statues of Jake and Elwood Blues. Another bookstore offered bibles with “Giant Text.” Short Sugar’s Barbecue is on the outskirts of town (their stuff is good; I had it at a church dinner they catered a while back), and there’s a hot dog joint across from Sip. It is not, however, a Wiener King.

I wanted to get a run in before I got back, so I pulled off at a roadside trail that I’d driven past on the way in. The Chinqua Penn Walking Trail had sort of interesting name and was a 1.5 mile loop, and it started off fairly lovely enough. First it passed some ruins of old stone buildings and then cut through a cattle pasture on the way around a pond.

Then it followed some wooden raised boardwalks and bridges back into the woods, and that’s where stuff got weird.

Again, remember: I just pulled off of the road because I was looking for a place to run. I had no idea that there were a series of dams back there.

The big one holds back what’s known as Betsy Pond, named for Betsy Penn, the wife of Jeff Penn, who once owned all of this land. Before this, I’d passed a much smaller, more fragile dam with water flowing over the top. This one was called “Little Niagara” as a joke by Jeff, because Betsy’s family had made its money from its Niagara Falls Power Company.

There’s also a pump house back there, along with a gazebo.

The trail itself opened in 1997, and its website is a trip, man. First off, the Friends of the Chinqua Penn Walking Trail are very much in the “This Meeting Could Have Been An Email” camp:

Out near the trailhead are the ruins of the “Stew Site where the Penns entertained large parties with his famous Brunswick stew.” Imagine loving stew so much that you create an entire site dedicated to it. All of the rock used to build everything was quarried nearby.

It’s quite a run (and steep, since the climb up from the dam is 158 feet in elevation). The whole property, which also includes the 4H camp, is now owned by North Carolina State University and used as an agricultural research station, but long before that it was the Penn’s plantation. Jeff Penn himself had this to say about his property:

I now plan to end all of my invitations with “Anyhow, come!!”

I’d noticed a big stone house poking up over the trees as I drove in. Turns out, that’s the Chinqua Penn Mansion, which is absolutely huge and looks like it has no business being out there. It was built by the Penns in the 1920s. Jeff Penn’s family had made its money in the tobacco business, and Jeff got rich by selling stocks and bonds during the Depression. He’d later sell his local tobacco company to James Duke. During the time, though, the house was this huge gorgeous thing that the Penns used to entertain. Jeff Penn died in 1946 and Betsy lived for 20 more years, becoming a philanthropist and eventually donating the property to NC State. The house itself was insanely furnished, and operated as a history museum for a long time. It was never particularly successful, and in 2006, it was sold to Calvin Phelps. Here he is in 2008, showing off his digs on the Our State TV show:

Phelps ran the Renegade Tobacco Company, and that company’s unfair advantage was that it wasn’t covered under the 1998 Master Settlement that required major tobacco companies to make huge payments to states (The actual advantage is complicated, but spelled out in this Business North Carolina story). Phelps bought Chinqua Penn and planned to make it into an events space, but apparently he’d used company fund to secure the loan for it, and in 2012 the feds seized it. It went into foreclosure and was auctioned off for $1.4 million. Phelps himself was sentenced to 40 months in prison in 2012 for not paying taxes; In short, his company sold cigarettes in the United States that were supposed to be sold overseas. Today, the Chinqua Penn house and grounds have gone back to being a private home, and none of the stuff in old pictures and YouTube videos is there anymore, so please, please, don’t trespass there. Stick to the footpath.

In any event, the public walking trail alone packed quite a bit of variety and charm into a mile-and-a-half. So let this be a lesson to you: The next time you have to make a spur-of-the-moment road trip to find your child’s lost fitness tracker, make sure you bring your running shoes just in case you stumble upon a fantastic historic site on a quiet back road.