Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  Green, facing competition in “Durham” tobacco, picked the bull emblem to set his brand apart and took in partners, including W.T. “Buck” Blackwell and J.R. Day, who bought the firm outright after Green’s death in 1869. They, in turn, brought in a third partner, Julian Shakespeare Carr from Chapel Hill by way of Arkansas. That triumvirate, blessed with business savvy and Carr’s flamboyant knack for marketing, turned a humble hometown enterprise into a nationwide, and even international, phenomenon as teams of sign painters painted “Blackwell,” “Durham” and the bull on any vertical surface that would stand still long enough.

  Soldiers “requisition” hay at the Bennett farm near Durham’s Station, April 1865. Others similarly “requisitioned” John Green’s stock of tobacco. Courtesy Bennett Place State Historic Site.

  Hiram Paul, their hired historian, called “Col. Buck” (who actually paid a surrogate to do military duty for him) the “Father of Durham.” It was mostly Blackwell’s idea to open an auction house next to their tobacco works in 1871, giving nearby farmers a place to sell their crop without having to haul it to markets in Virginia and getting them higher prices by letting manufacturers bid on what they wanted. With a market handy, Blackwell and company also assured themselves of a steady supply of raw material and in the process set up the town’s first industrial spinoff as one auction floor after another opened in the next few years and directed money into the stream of our town’s commerce. That money supply brought in the town’s first bank, opened by Julian Carr’s college pal Eugene Morehead, son of the governor who got the North Carolina Railroad underway; and the town’s first cotton mill, which Carr himself opened in 1884.

  It was Colonel Buck who kept the first public school in town going, putting up his own money when political opposition cut off the school’s tax appropriation. He cashed out of his namesake tobacco company in 1883, and went into banking and real estate. Blackwell came to own a horse-racing track just outside town, Blackwell Park, site of a future Duke University campus, and estimated that he had three hundred houses to his name, as well as a personal wealth of more than $1 million, by the time his soul was saved by a brimstone-breathing evangelist named Sam Jones during an 1888 revival. Blackwell would need all the spiritual sustenance he could get—just a few weeks later, Blackwell’s Bank of Durham failed and took sixteen Durham businesses down with it. The Father of Durham spent the rest of his life paying debts and feeling sorry for himself, living largely on charity from his former competitors in tobacco, the Duke family, until he died of a stroke in 1903. In death, his stature was redeemed. The town’s aldermen, Masons, Odd Fellows and Knights Templar marched in his procession. along with two companies of militia. A eulogy affirmed what Hiram Paul had written: “To say that Col. Blackwell was the father of Durham, would be putting it mildly.”

  Blackwell’s partner, Carr, was another case entirely. If Blackwell was an honorary colonel, Carr was a self-made general—so says the inscription on his tombstone in Maplewood Cemetery. In his portrait at the public library, he is depicted in the uniform of a three-star Confederate general, when in fact he mustered out at Appomattox as a one-stripe Confederate private. Wealth and fame account for much, though, and by the time the history of Carr’s old regiment was published in 1899, he had enough of both that his service photo (as a lad whose chubby face might have yet needed a razor) appears on the frontispiece, along with the weathered and bewhiskered visages of five genuine officers.

  W.T. Blackwell took over the tobacco company after John Green’s death and became recognized as the “Father of Durham.” Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

  Carr’s father, John, had been a partner with Bartlett Durham in a store at Durham’s Station and did well for himself as a merchant in his own town of Chapel Hill. His boy Julian grew up there, spent a couple of terms at the university and then dropped out for the adventure and glory of wearing a uniform while he rode his horse fast. Displeased by what he found at home after the war, Carr went west and took a job in a relative’s store in Arkansas. Perhaps his father felt that proximity to the frontier, with its buffalo skinners, gunslingers and wanton women, was no place for a hot-blooded youngster. Maybe he just saw a good investment. In any case, when Blackwell and Day were shopping for capital, the elder Carr bought a third interest in the Bull firm and lured Julian home with it.

  Flamboyance aside, Carr had a fine head for business and ambition to match. Making a fortune in tobacco, he branched into textiles, banking, streetcars, railroads, electrical power and farming, as well as the affairs of Confederate veterans—another route to that honorary generalship. He set his hands to politics, religion, higher education and even international affairs—the latter, perhaps, in a way he didn’t realize.

  “Let buffalo gore buffalo,” went Julian Shakespeare Carr’s pet motto, “and the pasture to the strongest.” Yet he had his weaknesses, vanity being one. As a banker, Carr took particular notice of loans coming due, personally deciding which might be renewed and which he wanted paid, in full, right now. According to one of Carr’s clerks, Southgate Jones Sr., a traveling ammunition salesman named George Lyon was directed to pay up, and he showed up, as directed, on the appointed day at the bank. Putting on his best salesman’s smile and straightening his coat, Lyon charged into Carr’s office with his hand thrust out and a “General, I certainly am glad to see you! I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of shaking your hand in six months… That necktie! It’s the most gorgeous tie I’ve ever seen…I’ve been over the greater part of the United States in the past two months and haven’t seen a tie that could compare with it.”

  Etc., etc., etc. Lyon got his loan renewed.

  Blackwell’s partner, Julian Shakespeare Carr, in costume as a Confederate general. Courtesy George Pyne.

  Julian Carr, at bottom, was a mere private in the Confederate army, but his wealth and fame earned his youthful likeness a place in the military record. From Walter Clark’s Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861–1865.

  THE COUNTY

  With our town turning into the little economic engine that could, the chains that connected it to colonial Hillsborough started to chafe through the generally desolate 1870s.

  Durham was the place in old Orange County where business was done, products produced and money made, but Hillsborough remained the seat of government. That meant that to register a deed, file a lawsuit or petition the commissioners required a trip of fourteen miles each way—that is, a full day shot to get there, do business and get home for supper, having to travel either by the windy, bumpy road or by the train that ran once each way each day.

  From 1870 to 1880, the population in our town’s one square mile had shot from 250 to more than 2,000. Eight out of every ten legal instruments processed through the Orange County courthouse pertained to transactions in Durham. Equally galling, from the point of view of Durham’s bulls, ever since their town’s incorporation its aldermen had been in dispute with the county powers over who had the authority to issue and collect from liquor licenses. Clearly, for the booming little municipality, this state of affairs was not acceptable, and citizens such as Blackwell, Carr and E.J. Parrish—auctioneer at the town’s first tobacco sale and by now owner of a block-long warehouse of his own—began plotting to carve off a county of their own.

  Caleb Green, the Tobacco Plant editor, was a delegate to the North Carolina General Assembly and, in early 1881, sponsored a bill to take the eastern half of Orange and odd bits of three other counties to make of them a new jurisdiction. The bill had general support from plain folk in the affected areas, all of whom would benefit from having a county seat closer to hand; it had general opposition from the established interests in the affected counties, as well as from North Carolina’s historic antipathy to change. Compromises at the capitol removed two counties’ territory from the proposition and aligned Durham interests with those of another proposed new county, Vance, up on the Virginia line. After s
everal weeks’ backroom dealing, the legislature authorized a public referendum, and in April the public voted (roughly six to one) to create Durham County. There was some sentiment to name the county “Mangum,” after antebellum U.S. senator Willie P. Mangum, but when it was pointed out that “Durham” was a well-established brand, the wisdom of commerce prevailed, moving one traditionalist to lament the bulls’ triumph:

  ’Tis at Durham’s Bovine Nod

  Our “Solons” bend the knee

  In coming years when we shall see

  A cow with wrinkled face,

  We’ll think of that unhallowed spree

  That did our state disgrace.

  THE BRAND

  As we have described, the bull symbol became associated with “Durham”—as in “Durham tobacco”—through John R. Green’s inspiration in 1865 or 1866. The wide success of Blackwell’s brand turned association into practical synonymity, to the extent that the 1889 city directory declared that “the ‘Durham Bull’ is the genius of our young city.” It’s not so clear, though, just when and how the venerable nickname “Bull City” came into the popular lexicon.

  The earliest example we have so far identified is from 1902, the same year a Durham baseball team first took the field as the Bulls. A listing appeared in the city directory that year for the Bull City Tailors and, a few years later, Bull City Drug was in business. Interestingly enough, both businesses had African American owners. In 1908, a Bull City Transit Company began automobile service between Durham and Chapel Hill, as long as the road was dry enough that the cars didn’t get stuck in mud. That was followed, in 1912, by the Bull City Cigar Manufacturing Company. In the meantime, two Durham druggists concocted a headache remedy and put it on the market in 1910 as BC Powder—though the initials actually referred not to “Bull City” but to inventors Germaine Bernard and C.T. Council.

  Carr’s flamboyant advertising made Bull Durham a hit with smokers and the bull synonymous with Durham. Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

  As time has gone by, local boosters have coined other nicknames for the town: “City of Medicine,” for example, and “City of Exciting Stores.” Outsiders have contributed “Cigarette City,” “Fat City” (Esquire magazine, April 1972, for a cover story on Durham’s weight-loss industry) or “Chicago of the South”—the latter a term equally applicable to the town’s industrial shoulders and political character. Hardly a wonder that the name that has stuck, has stuck: “Bull City” just seems to say it all.

  PART III

  A GOLDEN ( -LEAF )

  AGE

  For our town, the term “Gilded Age”—referring to the American period roughly from the centennial of 1876 until the entry into World War I in 1917—has a double meaning. With the town’s industrial explosion and population boom from perhaps one thousand to about twenty thousand residents, accompanied by the advent of such amenities as automation, running water, electricity, automobiles and lavish places of residence, the one-time whistle stop indeed was in tune with its times as it reached the fiftieth anniversary of Durham’s Station’s establishment. In our town’s case, too, the gild referred to the gold-colored brightleaf tobacco upon which its success was founded. It was a time of optimism, energy, expansion and very important people with very important money, but it was also a time when the engines of progress could come up against more down-to-earth concerns.

  THE ICE CASE

  There are recurrent themes in our town’s story—motifs, if you will. We have already talked about the trains’ ill sense of timing. Overtime parking is another: whether to meter or not, how zealously to ticket and how to strike a balance between enriching the city coffers and not driving business away. And then there is the administration of justice, sometimes seemingly capricious and more often like a revolving door. One time, they all came together.

  It was in June 1892. It was, no doubt, warm in town when the Durham Weekly Globe reported that “a case full of interest was tried before Squire Angier…It seems that Jake Price, who has charge of the switch engine on the R&D, left a string of freight cars near the Market House.”

  “Squire” was Malbourne Angier, merchant and alderman; the “R&D” was the Richmond & Danville Railroad, which by this time had leased the original North Carolina Railroad line through Durham. It happened that citizen J.W. Hutchins, butcher, was heading home with a cake of ice when the idling train blocked his way. By the time he could proceed, he claimed, his ice had all melted away.

  Now, as the Globe pointed out, the law in town was that, “if trains are left for a period of time longer than five full fleeting minutes, the engineer who leaves the cars there shall be yanked up and be made [to] cough into the general fund of the municipality the sum of ten dollars and trimmings.”

  Having lost his ice to the trainman’s delay, an indignant “Col. Hutchins” alerted the constabulary and had engineer Price arrested. When the matter came to trial, a “Major” Guthrie represented the railroad and “Colonel” Junius Parker represented the affronted city, while “Squire” Angier toyed with the goddess Justice, who is barefooted, and the case commenced. Hutchins was positive that the train was on the crossing fifteen or twenty minutes, while Price swore that it was not there over five. Speeches were made, and then the court, to get down to the details of the case, asked Mr. Hutchins how large a cake of ice he had.

  “I paid for ten pounds,” said the Colonel.

  “Do you reckon that there were ten pounds of it?” asked the court.

  “I refuse to criminate myself or an ice man,” responded Hutchins.

  The newspaper continued:

  At this juncture, the court sent Officer Woods out with a requisition for 10 pounds of ice and a string. As we go to press, the court is holding the ice in his hand in the sunshine, trying himself to see how long it takes to melt, while Maj. Guthrie is contending that this is a cooler day, that the ice man for once in his life and never before had given too full weight, that the string is of a different variety, and that the whole rip-roaring, ram-jamming business is irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial.

  You may have always wondered where television’s Hamilton Burger got his immortal objection to his eternal courtroom nemesis, Perry Mason. Now you may have an idea. Sorry to say, the case’s final outcome went unrecorded by the Globe or any other local agency of the fourth estate. Perhaps the railroad just paid up and shut up. Perhaps it held its ground, as it was wont to do; perhaps, in some great Durham in the sky, some unfortunate bailiff is still standing in the sun, by the track, waiting to see how long it takes ten pounds of ice to melt. Such is the majesty of the law.

  THE ROMANCE

  Edgemont was a tough neighborhood, but it was there one Thanksgiving that true love did prevail.

  It happened in 1902, and it happened to Ed Barton and Mattie Teasley, who, as the local press put it, “ran against a rock they did not look for.”

  How Ed and Mattie came to know each other and discover they were kindred spirits, we do not know. Edgemont was a cotton mill village just outside the Durham town limits, beneath the Millionaire’s Row along Dillard Street in a lowland formerly called “Smoky Hollow” and known as a red-light district. Upstanding citizens were glad when tobacco, textile and banking tycoon Julian Shakespeare Carr, that upstanding citizen, decided to put up a factory and housing for his hands down there, figuring that honest industry would remove the smirch upon Durham’s good image. It was Carr, who could overlook the hollow from the backyard of his mansion, who bestowed the name “Edgemont,” which sounded highfalutin, and gave flower names to soften the image of the neighborhood’s streets.

  So Edgemont was not a large place, with the mill its single focal point, and it would have been only natural for Ed and Mattie to encounter one another in the course of regular affairs. And so, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, November 24, they secured a license to wed and engaged J.E. Owens, justice of the peace, to do their honors that evening at the bride’s home at Main and Elm Streets, next to the new
Baptist church.

  When Owens arrived, however, he found the home prepared not for celebration but as if to withstand a siege. Mattie, in her bridal best, was confined in her room, while half a dozen of her father’s acquaintances were patrolling the yard with firearms. The good justice figured his services would not be required that night, the prospective bridegroom having been sent packing and his chances of securing his intended for an elopement not looking very good. Indeed, Ed had got the message, for the next morning, bright and early, he returned the license to the register of deeds, admitting it had been issued under false pretenses.

  What had happened was, when Ed and Mattie came in the day before, they had no proof they were of age. Told to go home and come back with notes from their parents, they left, forged the notes and returned to get the license. So, Ed said, there wasn’t going to be any wedding at all, a sentiment that Papa Teasley separately affirmed later in the day. However, that very night, Ed Barton’s brother Will appeared before Justice Owens with his fiancée, Addie Lloyd, who had slipped out a window without her parents’ knowledge so as to be present.