Mildred Bright Payton was a founding member of Chatham County Colored Agricultural Fair and is credited with promoting the idea of the fair and working to get the Farm and Home Association to give it a try.
The name was changed and the Chatham County Fair is still running every year.

In her job as home demonstration agent, Mrs. Payton provided support for rural housewives, many of whom worked outside their homes. She educated families about gardening and nutrition, and taught sewing and other skills.

Mildred Bright Payton enjoyed many careers. She was a public-school teacher, county agricultural agent for Chatham for 15 years, a lawyer, and college professor. During her middle age, Mildred joined the newly formed Peace Corps, working in Turkey.

Mildred also researched George Moses Horton, who was not known by many at the time. Horton was a poet who spent most of his life enslaved in Chatham County.

Mrs. Payton recognized his genius and worked to see it recognized by others. She wrote and outdoor drama, "A Man Named Moses", that was performed in Chatham, and later at the Greensboro Coliseum.

She published her first book of poems which she calls "Lay O' The Land." The book was dedicated to the author's "fellow farmers of Chatham."
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Woman Leaves A Lasting Legacy For Greensboro\ Mildred Payton Leaves Behind A Long Resume Of Careers And Accomplishments, Including An Outdoor Drama About A Slave Who Loved Poetry.

By Jim Schlosser Staff Writer Jan 14, 2000 Updated Jan 25, 2015

Mildred Bright Payton devoted plenty of energy during her life to making sure that George Moses Horton, a slave who wrote poetry, wasn't forgotten as a North Carolina literary figure.

She wrote an outdoor drama about Horton that was produced for two summers in Chatham County and indoors for several nights at the Greensboro Coliseum complex. Now with Payton's death at age 81 last Sunday in Greensboro, where she had lived in retirement, the question is not whether she herself will be remembered, but how.

She started out as a public school teacher, became a county agricultural agent, then a lawyer and finally a college professor. Along the way, she helped start a county fair and the N.C. A&T State University Alumni Association. In middle age, she joined the Peace Corps and served in Turkey.

Like Horton, Payton found time to write poetry. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt praised her verse once in Roosevelt's newspaper column, ``My Turn.'

But Payton considered herself a failed poet - a fact that has left her sister, Jean Bright of Greensboro, feeling guilty as she and other family members prepared for Payton's funeral at 11 a.m. today in Grace Lutheran Church.

Bright was in a bad mood, she recalls, 50 years or so ago, on the day when her sister gave her a little book of poems she had penned and paid to have published. Bright made an offhand remark, she says, about some of the poems reading like the silly rhymes and sayings she and her sister had to memorize and recite as children growing up in Rutherford County.

``I was teaching Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and others at the time,' says Bright, who was an English professor at A&T. ``I guess I was too highfalutin. '

She says the comment discouraged her sister, ``and those books were left to mildew in the basement.' Bright says the remark was unfair, ``and I have been bothered by it all my life.'

Mildred Payton wanted to be the best at what she did, yet criticism stung her deeply, Bright says. Bright realizes now that perhaps her sister's way of coping with unpleasantness, including racial segregation, was to walk away from it and change jobs or careers.

``She had more interesting things to do,' Bright says.
In high school, for example, Payton refused to attend her graduation at a private school in Asheville because she felt the school had wrongly denied her the honor of being valedictorian, even though she had the highest average. The administrators said she had attended the school only two years, not long enough to receive the honor.

After graduating with honors from N.C. A&T, Payton was a home economics teacher in a Franklin County public schools. She left teaching and became a county agricultural extension agent in Chatham County.
She quit 15 years later, and entered law school at N.C. Central University, graduating with honors. She then practiced law in Greensboro, but only briefly. She joined the Peace Corps, not long after President John F. Kennedy began the program.

After Peace Corps service in Turkey, she joined the law faculty at N.C. Central. She later taught business law at Appalachian State University. Sometime after her return from the Peace Corps, while in Washington, Payton began doing research at the Library of Congress on George Moses Horton.

Horton had grown up in Chatham County and made money writing love poems for white students at UNC-Chapel Hill to send to their sweethearts. Payton interviewed Horton's descendants and read everything she could find about the poet, who died around 1883.

As a result, she wrote ``A Man Named Moses,' an outdoor drama about Horton's literary efforts and his hard life as a slave. The play included a chorus of 60 singers. It was performed at the fairgrounds in Chatham County in the summer of 1978 and 1979.

The setting was appropriate because, as a Chatham County agricultural extension agent years before, Payton had joined others in buying land for the fairgrounds and started the Chatham County Colored Fair. Today, it's the official Chatham County Fair.

In 1988, ``A Man Named Moses' was produced at the Town Hall Auditorium at the Greensboro Coliseum. It got a respectful review in the News & Record. By then, Payton had retired from teaching and was living with Bright and another sister, Sarah Bright Smyre, on South Benbow Road.

Many years before, while a student at A&T, Mildred Payton had married. The marriage didn't last long, but it produced a daughter, Marjorie, who became an English professor at Howard University and at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Marjorie died in the early 1980s, leaving two children. Payton's granddaughter is now a certified public accountant, her grandson a medical doctor.

Looking back, Jean Bright now realizes that some of the poems and quotations Mildred Payton memorized and recited as a child weren't so silly after all. She remembers the first verse her sister repeated when she was 7 years old.

It went:

``If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley, but be the best little shrub you can be.'

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In her job as home demonstration agent, Mrs. Payton provided support for rural housewives, many of whom worked outside their homes. She educated families about gardening and nutrition, and taught sewing and other skills.

After Mrs. Payton's resignation in October 1959, Mrs. Hassie Torain came to Chatham County as Home Agent on January 1, 1960 and thereafter directed the home economics fair exhibits until her resignation in 1962.

Ms. Edith Williams served as Home Agent from 1963 to 1969 followed by Ms. Marietta Smallwood from November 1969 to June 1974, and Miss Glennie Beasley serving from July 1974 to the present.

During all these years the Fair continued to progress. Running water was installed, an office building was built, and new program features included a Senior Citizen's Day, and an invited Square Dance performing troupe.

Mildred Bright Payton enjoyed many careers. She was a public-school teacher, county agricultural agent for Chatham for 15 years, a lawyer, and college professor.

During her middle age, Mildred joined the newly formed Peace Corps, working in Turkey.

Mrs. Payton passed Jan. 2000
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Sources: News and Record article By Jim Schlosser-Staff Writer Jan 14, 2000 Updated Jan 25, 2015;
The History of Chatham County; The Chatham Arts Council Horton Project; The Register, March 1954, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University - NCAT Student Newspapers. 133.