Nixon’s incessant work as a chronicler and preserver of local history is consistent with other antiquarians and amateur historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. These men celebrated a world that was white, male, Protestant, bourgeois, communal, and deeply rooted in and focused on a rural and agrarian collective past and memory. Their writings, speeches, and recorded histories of families and institutions spoke to an attachment in the South to climate, family, and tradition. Evidence of these attachments is prevalent in Nixon’s journals, as he regularly chronicled the weather, family “poundings”, corn shuckings, community celebrations, visitors, and births and deaths in the area. Nixon participated in the work of other local antiquarians from adjoining counties by maintaining an open network of correspondence to chronicle their respective histories. As both Gaston and Catawba counties were part of Lincoln County before they both split in the 1840s, Laban Miles Hoffman and Colonel George Yoder sent letters to Nixon during the first decade of the twentieth century to substantiate “family traditions” that they learned from local elders, and to obtain his opinion on their findings. In January of 1900, Yoder of Catawba County sent to Nixon a sketch of the Killian family that Nixon apparently requested at some point. Yoder wished Nixon “grand and noble success in all undertakings,” and provided him with a four-page sketch of the Killian family that “was gotten up very hurriedly [and] it may contain a few errors,” but thinks it is “about” correct.