This Must Be The Place

There's a town in Johnston County most people know from an exit sign and a story about a possum. Four Oaks. Population around two thousand. Nice little place.But here's what the founding mythology leaves out: the man who owned the ground.His name was Isaac Evans. He was Black. His family had been free since the 1700s. And in 1886, when a railroad colonel came looking for land to build a town on, it was Isaac Evans's forty acres that became the footprint of Four Oaks.Every block. Every deed. Every brick building along that old railroad strip — it all starts with him.So who was Isaac Evans? Where did his family come from? And why does that phrase — free since the 1700s — point toward one of the most overlooked stories in this county's history?