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Black Ankle Fort Black Ankle, a community near the Randolph County line, once had quite a reputation as a rough and rowdy bootleg liquor center. In fact, that's how the community got its name. Bootleggers would build many fires to distract law officers from the fires of their stills, and it was said that they got black ankles from walking through all the ashes. The community was so rough that Lester Singleton, who admits to making a little liquor himself once upon a time, used to joke that Black Ankle ought to have a fort. So he built one. It started as a simple stone house for his family on his twelve rocky acres. It grew into a fantasy land, built mostly from junk that Lester, a trash hauler, salvaged from dumps and other places. To the front of his house, Lester added a big public room with stone furnishings, an indoor pool filled with bream and catfish. This he made into a recreation room and display area for the old things and oddities he has collected. Outside, he built covered walkways, gardens, a waterfall, a mystery house where gravity is defied, a fun house filled with gags and his extensive bottle collection, a spook house, and carnival-like game booths. All of it he enclosed in a stockade of bamboo and birch. Out by the road he put a sign that says Black Ankle Fort. "We're going to be doin' something as long as we live, you know it?" he says. "And I'd just as soon be doin' something like this as anything. I love to fool around here." Lester's fort is on State Road 1354. Turn at Asbury Church, just off US 220, about 1 mile south of the Randolph County line.
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