Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  Even more famed was Pinhook, on the Raleigh–Hillsborough road near present-day Ninth Street, where hipsters, those who would like to be thought hip and surviving countercultural specimens hang out; also near, in what one might say is apt symbolism, is an apartment complex for Duke University students. Pinhook (an old Southern term meaning, in essence, buying low and selling high—applied to dealings in livestock, tobacco and other commodities) was famed “as a place of rough-and-tumble fights, drinking, gambling and other forms of amusement, where the natives and visitors met to have a rough, roaring and, to them, glorious time.”

  With a spring and campground, as well as its tavern, Pinhook was sort of a proto–truck stop, where freight haulers stopped off and locals catered to them—such as one anonymous farmer of record who began his rise to wealth by selling watermelons to the wagon drivers who, according to “Old Durham Traditions,” no doubt considered them a treat “after their long draughts of fiery corn liquor which they bought from the Pinhook grog shop.” Pinhook also attracted a more cultivated clientele from as far as ten miles off: “The students of the University of North Carolina had the habit of coming over when they wished to go off on a lark.”

  The Blue Light drive-in, near the site of the notorious nineteenth-century Pinhook, had a rowdy reputation of its own as a twentieth-century teen hangout. The sign remains, but the place is now a convenience store. Courtesy of the author.

  A fire-breathing, smoke-snorting locomotive in the North Carolina Railroad yard, Goldsboro. Courtesy NC Division of Archives and History.

  Perhaps some of those young scholars also came in hopes of catching their first sight of a fire-breathing, smoke-snorting railroad engine in the flesh (or iron, as the case may have been). Had they got the idea when the surveyors came through in 1850, they could have graduated and gone by the time a train arrived, and even then, local legend has it, it came in late.

  Anticipating the first train’s arrival, the story goes, a large crowd gathered at the station to see the show. When it didn’t show, the natives got restless. A character called Wash, “notorious rowdy, a man who drank and was known far and wide for his boisterous carousing,” decided to pass the time with a nip. He rode his mule to a nearby supplier, possibly William Pratt, and purchased a jug. While he rode back to the station, though, the train approached, the mule bucked, Wash went flying and his jug was smashed. Wash’s wife cried praise to glory: “Wash is safe and his jug is busted.”

  As we say, nothing is definite in our town. But a tradition was set. In our town, trains and timing don’t mix. When Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s funeral train pulled through in 1893, it was late, disrupting plans for an appropriate ceremony. In 1996, another crowd gathered, including the usual dignitaries, to see in the first train to a new passenger depot. By the time the train pulled in, most everyone had gone back to work.

  But it’s downright uncanny how trains have become part of the local culture.

  In the 1950s, it was common for concerts in the Nelson Music Room, just 150 yards or so from the track, to have their music drowned by diesel horns. In the 1980s, culturati staged the opera Carmen in a courtyard between two refurbished warehouses near the track. Just as the tenor opened his mouth for the “Toreador Song”—Whooooooo-whooooooooooooooo! Whooooooooooooooooooooo! The horn went on longer than the song did.

  Another time, a troupe was performing Hound of the Baskervilles. Toward the climax, Watson is frantic because it appears that the villains will make their escape. He urges Sherlock Holmes to haste, but the unflappable detective assures him, “Don’t worry, Watson. There are no trains at this hour.”

  You know what happened.

  THE GU’MMINT

  Its name established, the railroad serving as catalyst for proto-Durham to make of itself something other than—make that, as well as—a ridge of iniquity, a village accumulated in the depot district over the next few years. By the time Beauregard and the boys took their potshots at Fort Sumter, Durham’s Station—by now sometimes called simply “Durham’s”—though still close-wrapped with farmland and forest, had a couple of churches, smithies, mercantile establishments, a shoemaker and its first failed real estate developer.

  An entrepreneurial circuit rider, John A. McMannen, having done well as a designer and publisher of religious illustrations, invested those earnings to do even better in smut. Smut, in this case, was a wheat disease that could be most troublesome to farmers in central North Carolina, for whom wheat was one of the few cash crops. McMannen bought a patent for a gadget that separated diseased wheat from good grain, built a factory to manufacture them and prospered. About that time, the railroad came through several miles to the south of the community McMannen’s own enterprise had catalyzed (South Lowell, so called in anticipation that its industrial stature would one day rival that of “North” Lowell, in Massachusetts). McMannen saw the future, took an option on land along the track and advertised building lots for sale.

  There were no takers. Perhaps it was because McMannen, good Methodist that he was, put a clause into his offer that forbade dealing in spirits of the liquid kind there (presumably, dealing in spirits of the ethereal kind would have been fine). He didn’t know the territory.

  But Durham’s Station did have the germ of industrial stature. In 1858, one Robert F. Morris set up there to manufacture smoking tobacco. “Manufacture” is perhaps too grandiose a word because what the job entailed was flailing cured and dried tobacco leaves with sticks until the leaves crumbled into tiny shreds suitable for packing into a pipe. But Morris, like others in the region, produced the stuff, using tobacco cured with the newly discovered “flue” process. Involving intense heat, the process turned out leaves of a pleasant golden color—hence the term “brightleaf”—that smoked mild and sweet. Thus was the foundation of Cigarette City laid.

  The village grew, the tobacco trade thrived—a tale we’ll return to in the next chapter—and, by 1867, the residents of substance decided that they constituted a town. The state legislature agreed and incorporated Durham’s Station. In Washington, though, the Reconstruction Congress thought differently, and Durham’s incorporation was undone when Congress ruled that any act by a legislature previously in a state of rebellion was null and void. Nothing is definite in Durham. The village elders had to go through the whole thing again, and Durham got its town status back in 1869.

  Red tape cut through, the town got down to business on April 10, 1869, with a charter seventeen printed lines long and a definition of one square mile with the depot in the middle. Six aldermen, among them Robert F. Morris, the founding tobacco man, and a magistrate of police (a.k.a. mayor) constituted the government. When the mood struck them, they met in one another’s offices or under a shade tree.

  The Reverend John McMannen had an entrepreneurial soul, but his Methodist convictions got in the way of his developing a town at Durham’s Station. Courtesy M.J. Hall.

  This is not to say they were not conscientious about their municipal responsibilities. Among their first actions was the establishment of ordinances against marbles and baseball on Sundays, or the selling of spirits except for medicinal uses on the day of rest. For that matter, residents couldn’t sell anything else on Sunday, either, except for funeral shrouds, and gatherings that would annoy other citizens were forbidden after eleven o’clock at night.

  Further, the elders set about to systematize the street system, which was, in the middle of town, a handful of dirt tracks going every which way according to the lay of land, convenience and habit. The northwest–southeast Raleigh–Hillsborough road intersected the road from Chapel Hill at an oblique angle; from that point, Mangum’s Lane (later Morris Street) ran north perpendicular to the Chapel Hill road, while other lanes and paths ran perpendicular to the Raleigh road, establishing a pattern of strange angles, odd blocks and deceptive directions with names that were, at best, informal.

  After defining the Raleigh–Hillsborough road’s exact right of way one Sunday afternoon
, by having a mule team plow furrows on either side, the aldermen declared that thoroughfare to be Main Street. Some locals who turned out to watch said it was all a bunch of foolishness, but the founders persevered. The lane known as Dog Trot became Pettigrew Street; Shake Rag became McMannen Street and, later, South Mangum; and Dillard Street, which the town’s first rich folks lined with their mansions, was originally called Henpeck Row.

  A simplified version of the map of the village of Durham’s Station, circa 1865, drawn from memory by Lewis Blount in 1923.

  After a few more years, the aldermen were faced with another situation: what to do with the dead bodies that accumulated around town. The churchyards were already filling up, for, though the town boasted only about three hundred inhabitants, vagrants and drifters still frequented the storied ridgeline and from time to time, perhaps after lingering a little too long at a den of iniquity, left their earthly remains for the public’s discretion. In 1872, the town bought a parcel of land southwest of its limits from a Mr. Willard, paying him $1,500, to use for a public cemetery.

  There was, of course, objection. Louis Austin, the story goes, was a Yankee who wandered south after the war and stopped in then-growing Durham to work as a roofer. Having learned the game elsewhere, perhaps in soldiers’ camps during the recent unpleasantness, Austin thought that the cemetery was a waste of money and what the town really needed was a field for baseball, and he made his feelings known to Mayor W.J.H. Durham. The mayor and aldermen heard him out and did what they wanted anyway.

  Although Austin was from the North, by this time he was sufficiently acclimated to local sentiments to be a Democrat. In those times, still close upon the war and Reconstruction, party politics was a matter of strong emotions, and so, when Democrat W.N. Patterson beat Republican Washington Duke for a seat in the state legislature, it was cause for raucous celebration. Austin, along with some other young bloods, did their bit by securing an antique cannon. While more sober citizens filled the air with mere confetti, those boys fired up and fired off the cannon. It was so much fun that they did it again. And again. And again.

  The cannon was old. The barrel got hot. The cannon blew up, much to the amusement of some onlooking Republicans but not to that of Louis Austin, who was left with no clothes to hide his black-powdered and armless body. Any embarrassment he might have felt was soon relieved by his death. He was suitably laid to rest, becoming the town cemetery’s first resident. His gravestone came to mark one corner of a potter’s field—the section reserved for paupers and the unclaimed—and, in time, Austin’s identity was worn away by the elements.

  More than a century later, the local Preservation Society redeemed Austin’s place in Durham’s history and etched it in stone—a three-hundred-pound hunk of rock, to be precise, donated by society members John and Kathleen Bost. Cut, shined and set in place in 1989, the stone declares: “This is the grave of Louis Austin, who was the first person buried in this cemetery after it was opened in July 1872.”

  Louis Austin, who wanted a ballpark, instead became Maplewood Cemetery’s first resident thanks to an exploding cannon in 1872.

  Fate would deal kindly one other way with Austin. Just a few years later, townsfolk laid out a baseball diamond on a lot right across the road. Louis’s ghost would have had a fine view.

  THE FACTORY

  It wasn’t very long after Durham got up and running that it got a regular landmark. What buildings there were around town were wood, and those that served the growing tobacco trade were for the most part little more than shanties tossed up in haste by owners anxious to start cashing in on the golden leaf. By 1874, though, the little enterprise begun by Robert Morris had grown through several owners and trademark lawsuits and adopted as its emblem a bull—which came in time to represent the town itself. Business was so good that the W.T. Blackwell Company—as the firm was by then named—felt worthy to build in solid brick. Its new factory went up, four stories high, on the south side of the railroad and beside the station. At the time, it was the biggest tobacco facility in the world, and the factory’s lower floors still stand, lately remodeled into high-priced apartments.

  It must have been quite a sight. Like Egypt’s pyramids rising from the vast and vacant desert, so rose the Bull building from a nondescript hamlet where menfolk spat tobacco juice in church and the main form of entertainment was pickup fistfights. Indeed, a correspondent only identified as “Citizen” wrote to the local press—the Tobacco Plant—and railed about the image problem.

  With “daring effrontery,” wrote Citizen, some persons of no doubt evil intent had cast “false charges and foul aspersions…a stain upon the fair escutcheon of our bright and prosperous little village.” It was true, Citizen admitted, that once Durham was “the territory where the Devil and Billy Pratt…reigned supreme,” and upstanding citizens were yet “surrounded with many evil ‘influences,’ such as ‘Bar Rooms,’ ‘Smoking Tobacco’ &c.”

  What Durham had and its critics needed, Citizen held, was positive thinking:

  If your correspondents will quit their misrepresentations…we will soon have good churches, good schools and good streets—when, save under the pernicious influence of “King Alcohol” or bewildering mazes of “Railroad Mills” [a brand of snuff], one might travel without the assistance of Mayor or Town Constable.

  It was in just that spirit that the Blackwell Company raised its plant, topping off with what the newspaper described as “an instrument after the style of the Calliope, which imitates the bellowing of the bull.” It was fitting, for business was bullish. In November 1866, the village of Durham’s Station shipped out just over 4,000 pounds of processed tobacco. By November 1871, the month’s total was 65,000. In one month in 1876, the Blackwell factory alone sold 183,680 pounds and figured its total for the year would be more than 2.5 million pounds.

  Durham still had a ways to go. At that same time, a citizen was threatening to sue over the sorry state of streets, the air was thick with the stink of fertilizer dumped in the middle of town and the five-point intersection of Main, Chapel Hill and Morris Streets was still a mudhole where cows came to drink after a rain. Noisy spectators and mischievous boys disrupted attempts at serious theatre and, in just two days, a caretaker at the Blackwell stables had killed 321 rats.

  With industry, too, came labor. With Southern agriculture in a prolonged state of postwar depression, former farm folk streamed into the growing railroad towns in search of what they called “public work.” Taking a job was disgraceful for a man who had stood on his own feet (even if they were standing on land leased from somebody else), but there was much to be said for regular pay. The Bull factory paid $1.50 a day.

  Yet, the 1800s were revolutionary times, and alien notions about how business owners and their hired help ought to get along crept into even so conventional and off the beaten track a place as Durham. In the summer of 1875, the town had its first strike when Blackwell hands walked out one morning after demanding higher pay. Management simply sent a delegate out of town, and he shortly returned with forty Virginians ready and willing to take the neglected positions. Fresh off the farm, Durham’s proletariat had a lot to learn about supply and demand.

  THE BULLS

  How did the sleepy whistle stop join the Industrial Revolution? In 1862, Robert F. Morris sold his tobacco business to John Ruffin Green, who had been making a blend of his own out on the family farm until his “manufactory” burned down. Taking over in town, the astute Green developed a formula for mixing and blending his smoking tobacco so as to appeal to cultivated, sophisticated tastes—in particular, those of the college boys over at the state university (for it is well known there are no tastes more self-consciously cultivated and sophisticated than those of college boys), who passed through Durham’s Station on their ways between home and campus and between campus and the Confederate army. The boys took along Green’s tobacco, shared it around their campfires and built a following for it.

  The other side was heard from in
April 1865. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on the ninth, but there remained many thousands of Confederate troops in a state of hostilities (at least on paper, since deserters had been streaming out of Southern camps to get home for plowing season), and Confederate president Jefferson Davis and some of his generals had every intention of fighting on, however they could, indefinitely.

  While Lee and Grant were facing each other in Virginia, Union general W.T. Sherman, of incendiary fame, had been marching through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina with Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston making a futile attempt to slow his progress. The week after Lee surrendered, Sherman occupied Raleigh and set an advance line running through Durham’s Station. Johnston’s advance line was at Hillsborough. On Easter Sunday, April 15, Sherman and Johnston agreed to call a cease-fire and meet the next day, somewhere between their respective lines, to talk about putting an end to the war.

  John Ruffin Green adopted a bull emblem to set his Durham tobacco apart from the competition. Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

  The generals met on the Hillsborough–Raleigh road near a small farm belonging to James and Nancy Bennitt (the spelling later changed to “Bennett”) and spent eleven days negotiating and dealing with their respective superiors. In the meantime, their idled soldiers foraged about and amused themselves as best they could—by liberating John Green’s stock of ready-for-market tobacco, for example. Green figured he was ruined, but after Johnston surrendered the eighty thousand men under his command (Lee’s command was only twenty-eight thousand) and everybody went home, inquiries began coming in about getting more of that good Durham tobacco from former soldiers who were now willing to pay for it. There was a sudden boom, at which point the economy of Durham and that of the South in general parted ways and the town that grew acquired a character more like those in other bullish sections of the reunited Republic.