Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  William Johnston appeared not long after the establishment of Anglican civilization, which took first form as Orange County, a section of wilderness drawn off in 1752 from three earlier-created counties; St. Matthew’s parish of the Church of England, to go with the county; and a town to go with the Orange Courthouse, called first Corbinton and later, permanently, Hillsborough. There, Johnston arrived from the shire of Annandale, in the Scottish Lowlands, in 1767—following his great-uncle Gabriel Johnston, North Carolina’s royal governor from 1734 until 1752. Having acquired a tract of land in Orange County, the younger Johnston settled in the county seat and opened a store across from the courthouse. Later that year, he opened a second store, handling general merchandise as well as a goodly stock of books, on his Snow Hill plantation on the Little River in what is now northern Durham County.

  His enterprises did well, and Johnston became prominent and well connected in the colony. He hired a young merchant, Richard Bennehan, to move down from Petersburg, Virginia, and manage the plantation store, which stood beside an ancient trade route between the James River in Virginia and the Savannah River at present Augusta, Georgia. Nearby, another old trail cut off and struck south-southwest, traversing present western Durham and Chapel Hill. A cobblestone section of the “University Road” remains in a forest owned by Duke University.

  Johnston represented Orange County in the Hillsborough provincial congress and was a Hillsborough town commissioner. He helped start several schools in the backcountry. During the Revolutionary War, he manufactured weapons for the Patriot cause. He was also a visionary. In 1774, he and several other businessmen of Orange County formed a company to procure western land from the Cherokee and open it to enterprise—having been advised by the explorer Daniel Boone that the time was ripe and the Indians in a mood to deal. Early in 1775, the partners reorganized as the Transylvania Company, bought land between the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers from the Cherokee for £10,000 and such trade goods as the Cherokee women approved—or so the story holds—and hired Boone to lead the first party of settlers. A monument in the shape of a spear point in downtown Hillsborough marks the spot from which they were supposed to have set out.

  Only one of William and Ann’s children survived to adulthood. That was Amelia, who married one of her father’s business associates, Walter Alves. In 1800, they followed her father’s pioneers, moving to land in Kentucky that Amelia had inherited. Before they left, they had the elaborate marker carved and placed on the Johnston graves at Snow Hill. In time, Johnston’s plantation was acquired by the expansive heirs of Richard Bennehan, the young man Johnston hired down from Virginia. Bennehan’s daughter married into the prominent Hillsborough Camerons, who made the Bennehan-Cameron properties into North Carolina’s largest antebellum plantation, covering thirty thousand acres and employing nine hundred slaves.

  Time and tradition left William Johnston to lie quietly and slip largely out of mind; his tombstone has held up well, though, under its repeated blankets of leaves and within its sheltering woods beside the now-bypassed Trading Path. Someday, maybe, the old plantation will grow houses, the old trail will become a greenway and the Johnstons’ resting place will become a point of historic interest—marked, tended and dutifully protected with a wall or fence. For now, a cover of leaves does the job just fine.

  THE HISTORIAN

  Our town became a name on the map as Durham’s Station when the North Carolina Railroad surveyed its route in 1850. It became a post office in 1853, a refueling stop for locomotives in 1855, the site of the Civil War’s biggest surrender in 1865 and an incorporated town in 1869. By then, it had a population of 250. Ten years later, it had a population of 2,000. By 1883, one of its leading citizens figured it was time the town had a history.

  That year, Julian Shakespeare Carr, partner in the W.T. Blackwell tobacco company, whose signature brand of smoking tobacco, Bull Durham, was internationally popular (endorsed by none less than Lord Tennyson, thanks to Carr’s advertising acumen), engaged a young fellow named Hiram V. Paul to research and write History of the Town of Durham, N.C. In later years, a scholarly paper on “Early Labor Organization in North Carolina” would describe Paul as “that versatile gentleman.”

  Born in 1848, Paul was intended for the ministry by his Baptist preacher father. Following his own bliss, however, the boy apprenticed himself to a printer while writing poetry and studying theology on the side. He published a book of poems in 1869 and, two years later, moved from New Bern, in eastern North Carolina, to New York, where he founded a temperance periodical called the Evolutionist. After six years in the North, he returned to the state of his birth to be editor of the North Carolina Prohibitionist and the Raleigh Evening Post.

  In those days, newspapers such as the Evening Post were unabashedly partisan. Paul’s paper was Democrat. One of its favorite Democrats was Carr, whom the paper endorsed in an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor. Carr was pleased, though. He was, no doubt, further pleased that Paul wrote an article for the Journal of United Labor in which he charged that in the factory of W. Duke, Sons & Company—Bull Durham’s main competitor—whips were “freely used on the backs of helpless little children.” The Dukes, by the way, were known Republicans. True or not, Paul’s claim embarrassed the Dukes enough that the driving Duke behind the tobacco enterprise, James Buchanan, paid a personal call on the Knights of Labor at its Philadelphia home office and promised to abandon corporal attitude adjustment as long as the Knights stayed out of his factory.

  The Dukes, however, were not ones to let grudges get in the way of business, and they took out a full-page advertisement in Paul’s book about Durham. Evidently it was Carr, though, who greased Paul’s way into our town’s inner circles of commerce, for in History of the Town of Durham, Embracing Biographical Sketches and Engravings of Leading Business Men and a Carefully Compiled Business Directory of Durham, to which is annexed a compilation of useful information in relation to The Cultivation, Curing and Manufacturing of Tobacco in North Carolina and Virginia, Paul described Carr’s partner, W.T. Blackwell, as the “Father of Durham” and wrote that to Blackwell and Carr, the town “owes much of its importance.” Paul even opened his book with the story of Bull Durham’s origin in post-bellum reconciliation at the farm of “Old Man” James Bennett.

  Title page from Hiram Paul’s 1884 book on Durham.

  Among the “Leading Business Men,” Paul did his duty by patriarch Washington Duke, but Carr got a lot more ink. Still, Carr’s favor must have had its breaking point. Paul settled down in Durham and tried to publish a labor newspaper, Durham Workman. After it failed, he tried again with Paul’s Weekly Epistle. It failed, too. He opened the Paola Café, became a store clerk, ran up debts and went broke. Things got so bad for him that, in 1899, he asked Washington Duke for a loan to put his daughter through music school. One may only imagine ol’ Wash’s response, but Paul didn’t get the money. Paul died April 24, 1903, having told Duke he would leave him with “his conscience and his God.” Even so, Wash Duke got the better of his critic—outliving him by a little more than two years.

  THE DOCTOR

  Our town just sort of happened. There was a sleepy crossroads in the early 1800s, known as North Carolina’s “Rip Van Winkle Era,” where the east–west road between Hillsborough and Raleigh crossed the north–south road between Roxboro and Fayetteville but, as we have previously indicated, crossed little else beside the grogshops (the “roaring old places”). The infertile ridge, however, was just the foundation that the railroad’s surveyors wanted when they came through scouting a route from the eastern rail junction at Goldsboro, through the state capital, then west through Hillsborough and Haw River (where a member of the railroad’s board had just opened a cotton mill), to Greensboro and then southwest to the prosperous market towns of Salisbury and Charlotte. The train would give the subsistence farmers of the state’s interior a link with the outside world and encourage them not only to grow cash crops but to ship them out through North C
arolina ports at Morehead City and Wilmington rather than bleeding the state’s capital out via the long-established trade routes through South Carolina and Virginia.

  Locomotives in those days needed frequent refueling, and the railroad needed a stop halfway between a settlement called Morrisville, west of Raleigh, and Hillsborough. The crossroads area on the roaring old ridge was just about right, and a young physician named Bartlett Leonidas Durham owned some land from which he would spare four acres for depot facilities and right of way. Hence, Durham’s Station.

  Dr. Bartlett Leonidas Durham.

  Dr. Durham came from the country, twelve miles west of Chapel Hill. Born November 3, 1824, to William L. and Mary Snipes Durham, Bartlett was a fourth generation of Orange County Durhams. Local lore says he studied medicine under Dr. James Webb of Hillsborough and then at the University of Pennsylvania, though there is no record of his enrollment in that institution. In any case, in 1847 or 1848 he bought about one hundred acres of land in the vicinity of the present Durham Bulls Athletic Park and American Tobacco complex and hung out his shingle there—figuring, perhaps, that a location along the rough and rowdy wagon road would be rewarding for a man of medicine.

  Details of Dr. Durham’s life are sketchy. Perhaps the best account comes from a patient, T.J. Redmond, who as a small boy came down with a case of typhoid fever. The good doctor made a house call, left instructions and some medicine, then went away and was not seen for some time, having told young Redmond he did not expect the two would meet again. Dr. Durham cared deeply for his patients, to the point that when he thought he’d lost one, he would drown his sorrows in a week-long bender. Yet, Redmond did recover and went on to serve the Confederacy in the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. (“They like to killed me,” he would recall.) Back home, he became an early recruit to the Ku Klux Klan and, toward the end of his life in the 1930s, shared memories of that career, as well as what he knew of Dr. Durham:

  Dr. Bartlett Durham was a fine, portly looking man. He was a jovial fellow. On moonshiny nights, he would get a group of boys together and serenade the town…I remember on one occasion Ed Lyon, L. Turner, Jim Redmond and Dr. Durham went out to serenade. I don’t remember where we went. We had some horns, a fiddle and a banjo. We went by a barroom and got some liquor. Dr. Durham would go on a spree and when he did, he would want to get in a fight. He would fight only when necessary, as he proved on one occasion. Dr. Durham weighed about 200 pounds. He came in late one night. He knew [his landlord] Andrew Turner had a dog. On that occasion, he was in the yard and the dog came toward him, the dog not having a block on him. Dr. Durham got the dog in the collar and mastered him and sat down on him…

  Dr. Durham never got married. He knocked around with the women a great deal, and he died at a woman’s house by the name of Dollarhite… Dr. Durham was a fine man and when he was sober, he was strong and courageous.

  Other accounts describe Bartlett Durham as the town’s first railroad agent and an early storekeeper, the medical trade probably not lucrative enough to keep a young man’s body and soul together. By 1852, he was authorized to sell spirits, yet as a representative to the state legislature he helped establish a Sons of Temperance chapter. Legend has it that Durham lived in a two-story home called Pandora’s Box, across the track from the depot he provided for; in later years, it would be the site of the swanky Carolina Hotel, then of the Durham Hosiery Mill. Today, it’s a parking lot.

  Durham passed away in 1859, and his body was taken home for interment in a plot belonging to his mother’s people, the Snipes. En route, he lay in state for a night at Chapel Hill, so highly was he regarded in that section. Mebane Edwards, then an eighteen-year-old slave, attended the interment but, as he recalled decades later, was most impressed by the sight of Dr. Durham’s cook: “She was dressed in green silk from her head to her feet and she sure was pretty.”

  And so he lay to rest for seventy-five years, while the town he left his name upon grew in fortune and in stature such that its prominent citizens decided the namesake should have an appropriate place of honor. A movement commenced to have Durham’s body dug up and relocated to Maplewood Cemetery in Durham. The grave had not been marked, but old-timers remembered the location well enough; on June 27, 1933, a crowd assembled and a fitting ceremony began. Mebane Edwards was called upon to speak. S.B. Turrentine, president of Greensboro College and a native of the area, presided. Sure enough, the excavators quickly struck the iron coffin and hoisted it into view.

  Dr. Durham was remarkably well preserved, if a little grayish in color. His hair was still dark, and he wore a black string tie and a shirt with two small ruffles down the front, but there was a small crack in the glass plate above his face and water had apparently seeped inside for he was immersed in fluid. Those supervising the operation drilled a hole in the casket to drain the liquid off, at the same time releasing a nauseating odor. By some accounts, the smell never got out of spectators’ clothing, and when a memorial service was held at nearby Antioch Church, the coffin had to stay outside. From there, the body proceeded to Durham and lay on view for some time at the Hall-Wynne funeral home. The state of Dr. Durham’s preservation was so remarkable that it was reported in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Sunday comic strip.

  Dr. Durham’s gravestone, Maplewood Cemetery. The doctor’s year of birth, year of death and middle name are incorrect. Courtesy of the author.

  Reinterment did not occur until the next winter. Dr. Durham was given a spacious plot all to himself, upon a low grassy knoll, marked with an upstanding stone that records his birth in 1822, his death in 1858 and his middle name as Snipes. All three details are incorrect, but isn’t it the thought that counts?

  THE POSTMASTERS

  A departing school superintendent said it well, on his way to the county line: “Nothing is definite in Durham.”

  I mentioned the matter of Dr. Durham’s own name in the story above; the spot on the map had several metamorphoses before “Durham’s Station” stuck, at least in part.

  So far as the good people of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum can tell (and if you can’t believe the Smithsonian, whom can you believe?), it is correct that the Durham’s Station branch of the United States Post Office went into service April 26, 1853. Before that, however, there was in that same country Dilliardsville, which was replaced by Herndon’s, which was, in turn, supplanted by Prattsburg.

  Dilliardsville may have been in the vicinity of the present-day public library, leaving its name (at least in part) on Dillard Street, later Durham’s first millionaire’s row, after that post office was closed in 1827 and its mail forwarded to Herndon’s, which has a little more space in the historical record. William R. Herndon served as the area’s postmaster from 1827 until 1836 and, in that period, dedicated an acre of his land to the east of the future town limits “for the purpose of promoting religion and education.”

  A two-year-old homeless congregation moved into a building there and went on to become the first organized church in Durham: Trinity Methodist. That name came only later, after the congregation was rendered once more homeless by a certain Jefferson Dillard (of unknown relation to the aforementioned “Dilliard”) who, in 1835, set the church house on fire for reasons all his own but left the area for reasons that should be obvious. His destination remains unknown.

  For whatever reason, Herndon gave up or was relieved of the postmaster’s duties in 1836. They were passed on to one William N. Pratt, a man whose character served as counterpoint to that of his apparently pious predecessor. Pratt was an accumulator of land, and by 1836 he owned a considerable piece of property also to the east of the future town, near present Angier Avenue and Lyon Street. Then, as now, the area was of shady reputation, thanks in no small part to Pratt, who, three years before becoming postmaster, had been indicted for maintaining “a disorderly house [for] evil disposed persons of evil name and fame and conversation to come together…drinking, tippling, playing at cards and other un
lawful games, cursing, screaming, quarreling and otherwise misbehaving themselves.”

  At the same location, Pratt had a general store, blacksmith shop and cotton gin. The place became known as “Prattsburg,” and in it the North Carolina Railroad surveyors saw the ideal spot for the refueling stop they needed. They made Pratt an offer. He countered, but set his price well over what the railroad was willing to pay. The reason, according to tradition, was that he thought locomotives going by with their chuffing, puffing, whistling and blowing sparks would spook his customers’ horses and drive his trade away. Whether Pratt actually thought that, and whether he had ever seen a locomotive or, indeed, ever heard of one, the bearer of tradition may form his own opinion.

  The North Carolina Railroad survey map gave the location for the future Durham’s Station, as well as the notorious Pinhook and Pratt’s Store.

  In any case, the railroad said “see ya,” or words to that effect, and went one landowner west, where Dr. Durham would be of different mind. Thus, the post office once again relocated and underwent a shift of identities, but not, this time, of masters. Pratt kept the job, though he had to walk a mile each way to and from his own establishments when it came time to meet the trains and sort the mail. What all went through his mind on those reflective hikes, whether he ever supposed he could have had a real town to bear his name (and, quite likely, the nickname “Prattfall”), we’ll never know, but we can be sure he spotted opportunity. Even before the first train arrived, in the spring of 1855, Pratt was buying land around the depot.

  As we mentioned, Pratt was an investor in land, and he owned a spread farther west along the route that would be the railroad. One holding was known as the Redmond Place, possibly in honor of Pratt’s long-term paramour, Polly Redmond. The Redmond Place had a spring, and close to it a family named Peeler maintained an inn where “uproarious times were often witnessed”—as it was expressed in the Trinity Historical Society’s 1906 collection of “Old Durham Traditions.” Innkeeper Ben Peeler, legend holds, sometimes murdered his guests, stuffed their bodies down a well and took their horses for sale at the state capital.