Homer was born in a cotton mill house in Shelby, Cleveland County, North Carolina. He was the son of Reverend John Calvin Keever and Annie Blanch Keever. His parents were married in late May of 1904, less than a year before Homer was born. The Mill house served as the parsonage for the Albemarle Circuit of the Methodist Episcopal Church-South, for which Reverend J. C. Keever was minister. Homer married Alta Myrtle Allen. His mother was a school teacher. Homer's historical philosophy was heavily influenced by being raised by a minister and school teacher.
Education
He graduated at age 14 in 1919 from a ten-grade school in Troutman. After graduation, he entered Trinity College in Durham, a Methodist institution and now part of Duke University. He received an Artium Baccalaureatus degree from Trinity in 1923 with an emphasis in the religious training curricula. After graduation, he taught for a year at Piedmont high school in Cleveland County, North Carolina. Then, he took a job with the Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Church for three years. He returned to Trinity College in 1927. He earned an Artium Magister degree in 1930 and Bachelor of Divinity in 1931 in New Testament. He was unemployed for two years before obtaining a preaching job in Charolotte where he remained until 1933 when he found a job as a sixth grade teacher in Stony Point, North Carolina.
Career
He was a school teacher in Iredell County from 1934 to 1968. He was a general purpose teacher but taught mainly biology and North Carolina history in grades six, seven and eight. Homer began his research of Iredell County in 1937. In 1949, Homer began publishing articles about Iredell County history in the Statesville newspaper, the Landmark and Statesville Daily Record, which became the Statesville Record & Landmark in 1951. In 1955, he took a part time job as managing editor of the paper and began writing a bi-weekly column, Out of Our Past. He continued to write this column until he became ill in 1978 and wrote over 600 articles for the newspaper. He won second place in the Smithwick Cup for articles by local historians given by the Association for Local and County Historians.
Works by Homer
Iredell, Piedmont County was written by Homer M. Keever in preparation for the American Bicentennial in 1976. It was a result of forty years of research by Homer, who was a local North Carolina History teacher at Stony Point and Union Grove schools in Iredell County. His work was the first comprehensive history written specifically about Iredell County. Some works written about Rowan County included discussions of people that later lived in what is now Iredell County. Homer relied extensively on his interpretation of census records, military records, church records, articles he had written in the Statesville Record & Landmark, and oral histories to compile this book. For a more recent, critical analysis of this work, see Jamie Hager's Thesis. While Homer's book relies on facts in his sources, his historical perspective is heavily influenced by his religious background and optimistic interpretation of events in the history of the county. Biographies written by Keever for the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography include:
Homer wrote hundreds of articles in the Statesville Record & Landmark. The Iredell County public library in Statesville has an entire collection of Homer Keever's clippings about Iredell County and the people that lived there. The following are some interesting articles that appeared in the Statesville Record & Landmark:
Dulla Ballad Wowed Iredell Long Time Ago, May 25, 1959
Bostian Train Wreck in 1891 is Considered Controversial, August 25, 1966
Statesville Once Known for Wholesale Liquor'', April 8, 1974
Death
Homer did not live long after the Bicentennial. He was living in a nursing home in Charlotte, North Carolina when he died on September 12, 1979. He was buried in the Oakwood Cemetery in Statesville. The tremendous influence that Homer had on the Iredell County population of Iredell County was apparent from the crowd of hundreds that attended the funeral of this local high school history teacher that had written the first history of the county.
