Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  Wednesday morning, all seemed back to normal. Teasley’s guards had gone home and put away their shotguns, and Mattie left the house as usual to go to work. It was not until she failed to return that afternoon that her elders realized they had been had.

  Ed’s returning the license had, just as he intended, convinced the Teasleys that he was giving up his suit. However, he and Mattie had made secret arrangements and, as soon as she was out of view of home, she changed her course for a meeting point. Together again, the lovers made for the county line. Word reached Durham that afternoon that they were indeed husband and wife. Mr. Teasley told the newspaper he knew about the trick all along but had changed his mind since the young folks were so determined to have things their way. Whether he was just trying to save face, we do not know; nor is it written what he had against young Barton in the first place.

  Nor do we know where the Teasleys spent the next day, but we may assume that Ed and Mattie, wherever they were, gave thanks.

  THE POLITICIANS

  The golden-leaf period had its episodes of sweet justice, but it could also be downright ugly, even in Durham. As we’ve noted above, party politics was stuff to stir the blood, fire the will and even get downright personal at times. For example, there was the aftermath of the 1888 general election, when Republican Benjamin Harrison unseated incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland in the Electoral College, even though Cleveland won a majority of the popular vote. So much for the nation. Down home there were charges and countercharges of local mischief, too, as the Durham Recorder of November 14—eight days after the balloting—made clear:

  Bulldozing Eaves of the Republican State Executive Committee, in one of his intimidating secret circulars said that he would see that illegal registering would be punished and made great threats…Will he do it? Will he investigate the 2d ward of Raleigh where more votes were polled than were registered? Will he prosecute the men along the railroads who were registered in different towns and attempted to vote in two towns the same day?...Will he prosecute the convicts registered and who were made to believe they were entitled to vote?

  The 1888 elections for Durham were not mere popularity contests among Democrats, Republicans and an ill-defined gang of “Rads” (as in “radicals”). They were morality plays, crusades pitting honest Democratic (a.k.a white) men against corrupt and wicked Republicans (a.k.a. blacks and carpetbaggers), and morality was running high, for evangelist Sam Jones had just finished a ten-day revival in town, so stirring the soul of Durham that he took in $165 from his last night’s collection.

  Before the election, the Democratic press asserted that Northern money had flowed into North Carolina “as a corruption fund” for buying Republican votes. Durham’s “boss Rads” had gone so far as to nominate physician Aaron Moore, “colored,” for the powerful post of county coroner. “White men of Durham,” called the Durham Recorder, “those who have any respect for the Anglo-Saxon race, will you fail to do your duty on the 6th of November? Will you allow Negro rule or a white man’s government?”

  Although Durham’s Tobacco Plant (by this time owned by Julian S. Carr) could trumpet “Durham County Redeemed; Democratic From One End to the Other” after the election, the actual vote left much unsettled. Apparently, the Plant’s editorials annoyed some of other mind, for barely had the votes been counted when the home of editor Caleb Green—who was also chairman of the county’s Democratic executive committee—went up in flames.

  The unfortunate homeowner reported:

  This morning about two o’clock the fearful sound of the fire bell aroused our citizens…The fire was clearly incendiary, for when the fire companies began throwing streams of water on the building it had no effect upon the fire and showed most plainly that the end of the house had been saturated with oil, and then set on fire by some fiend.

  This infathomable, this dastardly act, was done through revenge because he had done his duty as a white citizen of our town. We firmly believe that the torch was applied by certain negroes, instigated thereto by the incendiary teachings of certain white men of our town…It makes the blood of every white man in the town boil with rage, to think that he should suffer in this way for having so manfully done his duty.

  That was in the news story. In an editorial, the Plant explained:

  The negro, if he would, is not allowed to vote the Democratic ticket, for fear of serious bodily harm, if not actual death at the hands of the colored people. Not content with this, if a white man dare be active and works prominently in the interest of the Democratic party, he is liable to have his helpless wife and children turned homeless into the street at dead of night, by the burning torch. White men, in name of God, how can you do otherwise than stand by your white neighbor!

  Durham bus station, 1940. Race-baiting figured prominently in local politics even before segregation became the law in the 1890s. Courtesy Library of Congress.

  Oddly enough, just two columns over in the same edition, chairman Green’s paper cautioned that, “It will be well for both parties in the present excited state of our town to be very careful of their words, and not say anything calculated to increase the bad condition of affairs.”

  In days to come, rumor settled responsibility upon blacksmith E.G. Jordan, a former Rad candidate for constable and alderman and, moreover, a well-known member of the Knights of Labor—an organization in whose office investigators found, after the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, a written statement that the red flag would one day fly over Durham, “Vive le commune!” Thus soundly implicated, Jordan was called upon by a lynch mob and would have met an untimely end had not E.J. Parrish, the tobacco warehouseman who had married Julian S. Carr’s sister, persuaded the aroused citizens to just run Jordan out of town. The mob, so moved, bought Jordan and his family one-way train tickets, and the affair was settled without harm to life, limb or neck, but it did have an effect upon Durham’s fair image in some quarters.

  The Wilmington Messenger, a black-owned paper, tut-tutted:

  Situated as we are in localities of large colored populations at the South, where the least feeling and excitement may at any moment precipitate riot and bloodshed between the hot-headed of both races, the conservators of peace have to be constantly on the alert to prevent the worst consequences.

  In reply, the Recorder huffed: “The man or writer, white or black, or the newspapers that champion the case of the fellow Jordan and his secret modes of stirring up strife and embittering the minds of one class against another, or any other white-skinned man like him, is no true friend of peace, order, Durham or the State of North Carolina.” A decade later, the Messenger would be silenced in the Wilmington race riot of 1898, which followed an electoral sweep that ushered in North Carolina’s long Democratic hegemony and the age of Jim Crow.

  In Durham, it was probably just as well that other events quickly took precedence in the community mind. Just days after Jordan’s departure, W.T. Blackwell’s bank went broke, sending the whole town into a depression and giving tempers a chance to sober up.

  THE HOSPITAL

  Democratic rhetoric aside, the aforementioned Dr. Aaron Moore, “colored,” was one of a good number of African Americans who were doing quite well in the Durham of post-Reconstruction, pre–Jim Crow years. A map of Durham’s Station circa 1865 (though drawn from memory decades later—see page 48) indicates two black artisans’ establishments in the village—a smithy and a shoe shop—and after emancipation some of the former slaves from plantations in the county’s fertile northern section pulled stakes up and came looking for employment around the railroad and tobacco works. By 1870, several owned land on the south side of the tracks, and two black congregations were in business that would go on to become the prestigious and powerful White Rock Baptist and St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Churches.

  Later on, enterprising black citizens would even turn segregation to an advantage, building highly profitable businesses that catered to African Americans who felt uncomfortable, th
eir patronage not entirely welcome at white banks, insurers, mortuaries, contractors and the like. By the 1920s, our town would be described as “capital of the black middle class” by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. For all that, discrimination was painful and problematic—for example, when tobacco tycoon George Washington Watts paid for a hospital in Durham but restricted its admissions to white only.

  Br’er Rabbit never pulled a better one on Br’er Fox. Moore had been wanting a place where blacks could get medical services and black physicians could practice, and he, like his associates in the African American entrepreneurial class, had good connections with their white counterparts across the tracks—some by shared interests in business, some by blood, for it was (and is) commonly believed that the Duke boys, Julian Carr and other prominent white businessmen had half-black kinfolk.

  Now, it just so happened that about this time (the late 1890s), as the story goes, the Duke boys Ben and Buck got the idea that they should do something to honor those slaves who, back in the war, loyally remained on the job to help the white womenfolk keep the home fires burning. A statue, perhaps. The Dukes took this proposition to some leading citizens of color. “Well, that’s very thoughtful of you,” the response is supposed to have been, or words to that effect. “But what we could really use is a hospital of our own.”

  Whatever the motivation, Ben and Buck put up $8,000, and Lincoln Hospital was built. But there was compromise on both sides. The boys put up a plaque by the front door that said:

  With grateful appreciation and loving remembrance of the fidelity and faithfulness of the Negro slaves to the Mothers and Daughters of the Confederacy, during the Civil War, this institution was founded by one of the Fathers and Sons. B.N. Duke J.B. Duke W. Duke Not one act of disloyalty was recorded against them.

  THE GOOD TIMES

  Now, you may have the impression that our town was in those times a kind of a wild and woolly, rough-and-tumble, downright crude kind of place.

  And you would be correct. While there were gilded mansions on Dillard Street and greenbacks flowing into bank vaults (some of them, anyway), and while some citizens enjoyed the finer pleasures of theatre and music and found their elevation in church, not even the sublime amusement of watching trains come and go would satisfy some of ruder taste.

  Consider the spectacle greeting good people one Sunday morning in 1875: “Logan Groom and John Kelley, were not only violating the holy Sabbath but were cruelly, unmercifully and cowardly beating and mangling the person of an old, inoffensive, gray haired man, and that too, in the very centre of town, Main Street.”

  As Citizen Green’s newspaper described it, Kelley stood by with rock in hand while Groom administered a sound, but apparently unwarranted, thrashing of one B.F. Haight, “a man of no character, yet…inoffensive,” whom Groom was accustomed to entertain himself and any who cared to look on by “tantalizing, fretting and abusing.”

  To be fair, most of the country round about was recreationally challenged at the time. In Yadkin County near the mountains, revenue officials were accused of “wantonly and in violation of law destroying whiskey distilleries.” But uncivilized pastimes endured in Durham, even after the town got moving pictures and a library. As late as 1911, one October sunrise revealed that some merry pranksters had tied a cow between two railroad cars “for no other [purpose] than the brutal desire to do injury.” Fortunately for the cow, a conductor set her free before she was ground into hamburger or butchered in plain sight and open air. Three years later, some “down town sports and loafers” had their fun with “a poor demented white woman…Some smart Alec would ask her a question and the crowd would guffaw at her reply.” As if that weren’t bad enough, two officers on duty nearby did nothing “to disperse the crowd or get the woman to a place of safety.” The local press declared it all “A Shameful Sight.”

  Then there was the gallivanting truck salesman whose escapade was halted by ol’ Wash Duke himself.

  It was by now 1914, and Trinity College had taken its place on the old grounds of Blackwell Park, complete with a statue of benefactor Washington Duke, who sat regally facing the campus gate and Main Street, alert in case any coed of uncompromised virtue should pass, requiring him, as a gentleman, to rise. It was spring, when young men’s fancies turn away from whatever good sense they have, when Williamson Menefee, a demonstrator for the White Motor Car Company, took a spin through town.

  Menefee had come to Durham from his home base in Greensboro, fifty miles west, for the purpose of showing off a new truck. In the process of so doing, he picked up a load of ten or twelve young sports, including some ballplayers from Jersey City who had come down to challenge the local Bulls, and rode them out to campus for a spin around the oval drives commemorating the old racecourse.

  Caught up in the excitement he was causing, Menefee and the boys from Jersey yelled and beckoned the students to hop on; in no time at all there were about fifty revelers onboard as Menefee made one more round of the campus quadrangle and accelerated back toward town, narrowly missing the school flagpole but not managing to avoid the philanthropist’s rear end.

  Ol’ Wash was not amused. Nor was he moved. Nor did Menefee’s truck move any more, for the collision had cost it an axle and both front wheels. The ballplayers and the students brushed themselves off and went back to mind their own business, and the deflated Menefee was left to—well, we really don’t know what he did. Maybe he went back to Greensboro and fessed up; maybe he caught the night train east. Maybe he went to the ballgame. His fate was ignored after a more pressing matter took over Durham’s attention, a fire that wiped out a million dollars’ worth of downtown.

  It broke out in a building owned by Brodie Duke, ol’ Wash’s eldest son.

  Those boys, those boys, those boys.

  Fortunately, not all street theatre was the product of plain meanness or abject stupidity. On another occasion, a column of water shot high from Main Street, making the shape of a fan with graceful descending curves and rainbows “that shimmered and danced up and down the liquescent column as gracefully as a beautiful girl’s dainty fingers toying with the strings of a tuneful guitar. Not only did the waters delight the eye, but refreshed and baptised quite a number of the onlookers who were supervising the job.” The job, that is, at which a workman was engaged when he hit a lead water main with his pick.

  THE BARN

  If anyone were to, in a fanciful moment, put our county and agriculture into the same thought, the agriculture would in all likelihood have to do with tobacco, Weedus incorrectus. Wasn’t always so, though.

  Tobacco started out a Virginia crop, spread up into Maryland and down into the region just below the Carolina line. Most farming farther south was of the subsistence variety; the few big landowners who could grow cash crops and somehow get them to a market seventy to one hundred miles away were mostly raising corn, wheat and cotton. It pretty much stayed that way until W.T. Blackwell started buying tobacco in our town on a regular basis, and then the railroads opened up the ideal brightleaf lands down east.

  Fendal Southerland was a cotton man. His people settled on the north side of the mid-county ridge, along Ellerbe Creek, some time in the 1700s. Fendal was born on Washington ’s Birthday in 1800. Growing up, he went to work managing the Stagville plantation up near the Flat River and got to be best friends with his employer, Richard Bennehan—good enough friends that Bennehan’s will included a sizable cash bequest for his manager. After about twenty-five years on the plantation payroll, Southerland started having trouble with his health and had to retire. He took several years to rest and recuperate, then took some of his bequest and bought 1,435 acres in the county’s deep south.

  Philip Southerland’s barn in southern Durham County. Surrounded by new development, the field in the foreground has grown up to block the barn from view.

  Most of that section is too swampy for growing things, but geology had provided one distinctive touch: a long peninsula of well-drained high ground that was
just the place to grow cotton. Southerland planted and prospered. He built a big home, a big barn, a gin and a big cotton press—a machine for packing ginned cotton into bales for shipment. By the time the War Between the States broke out, he was the number three cotton grower in Orange County, producing twenty bales a year when the region’s typical grower was making two or three.

  The Yankees came in 1865. From his front porch, Southerland might have seen muzzle flashes in the bottomland along the road between Raleigh and Chapel Hill (present-day Stagecoach Road) as Union troops and retreating Rebs skirmished the rainy night before their commanders called cease-fire. But if they bothered Southerland, he left no record of it, unlike his neighbor on the north, Stanford Leigh, whose farm was cleaned out but who managed to secure a little government compensation years later.

  Scathed or not, Southerland carried on. He established and ran a co-op for cotton growers, but after he had been in the cotton trade for twenty-eight years, he couldn’t summon up the stuff to face yet another downturn in the market. On January 22, 1878, he took one last walk out to his barn and hanged himself. His house and barn remain, along with a cog wheel fifteen feet across from his cotton press, but the cotton grows there no more. Condominiums are the more favored crop today.

  THE VISIONARY

  Let it not be thought, however, that Gilded Age Durham was all roaring and rowdiness. People of finer sensibilities already fretted over the image thing, and it was not too long after Trinity College came to town that its faculty and some enlightened people of the town had achieved a landmark of high culture: the state’s first public library, right in the heart of town at Five Points. It made such an impression that, just beyond the town limits in the West Durham cotton-mill village, pharmacist W.M. Yearby put a room above his store to similar use.