Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  Trinity professor Edwin Mims and Lallah Ruth Carr, daughter to Julian Shakespeare, were prime movers behind the library’s founding, but the institution’s inspiration went farther back. The earliest vision was expressed in 1881 by tobacco executive George W. Watts, imagining a Durham twenty years in the future. By 1901, wrote Watts, the “spirit of public improvement” would have “developed to a wonderful degree.” The streets would have been paved with macadam and block, and a city hall, courthouse and lyceum would stand proud in brick and sandstone, while men of worth would commute to work from homes in Chapel Hill and Hillsborough (keeping up appearances, no doubt—that image thing) via horse-drawn railways. Adjoining the lyceum, where the finest speakers and writers of North Carolina came to expand minds and elevate eyes, the library would have twenty-five thousand volumes, although receiving “a good deal of opposition at first and many predictions of its failure (and I may confess that I was among the doubting ones) but it survived all difficulties.”

  A vast transformation, Watts considered, from the Durham of the time he wrote, “its name might then very properly have been derived from the contraction of two words, Dur from dirty, and Ham from hamlet or village—a dirty village.” In some parts, Watts’s vision was not too far off. A public library, one might think, would be a point of considerable civic pride in a town once looked upon as a squalid temple of Mammon. However, when the Merchants’ Association published its City of Durham Illustrated in 1910, the booster book devoted many glowing paragraphs to the Hawkeye Café and Carolina Soda Water Company, but for the library it could spare not a single word.

  THE CHAMBER

  Another civic amenity to come along in that time was the chamber of commerce. According to records of the North Carolina secretary of state, the Durham chamber was incorporated April 27, 1906. Of course, the story isn’t quite that simple. There had been several earlier efforts to establish such an organization. In the 1880s, the Commonwealth Club promoted industries’ interests and advertised all the town had to offer. That group died out around 1890, but within four years it was followed by a chamber of commerce, in name as well as function, which managed to elect officers at its one and only meeting before vanishing from the record.

  The dapper E.J. Parrish was Durham’s first tobacco auctioneer and saved a labor leader accused of arson from a lynch mob in 1888. Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

  Organizing a second—or third—chamber of commerce began in 1902, and the 1906 articles of incorporation defined its objectives as to “promote the business interests…direct attention to [Durham’s] superior advantages… induce capital to locate therein,” encourage commerce and industry and welcome new enterprises and their representatives. The first president was tobacco man Edward J. Parrish.

  Now, between Parrish and his brother-in-law, textile and banking tycoon Julian Shakespeare Carr, there was some bad blood. In the panic of 1893, Carr had foreclosed on Parrish’s real estate investments, which ended up sold at sheriff ’s auction or in Carr’s possession. Even though Julian S. Carr Jr. was one of the signatories to the chamber’s incorporation, in 1907 the elder Carr formed a club of his own, first called “Cavaliers Club” and later reviving the “Commonwealth” name.

  While Parrish’s chamber numbered among its members an up-and-coming banker named John Sprunt Hill, school superintendent C.W. Toms and the younger Carr, the Commonwealth Club drew executives of the definitive Carr and Duke interests and spruced up its club rooms with card and billiard tables and its very own library. Overmatched, the chamber of 1906 faded from sight and was followed in 1912 by a new Commercial Club, with another Carr son, Claiborne, as its first president. It, too, was fizzling out within a year, but, despite problems keeping executive directors, Carr Sr. brought his prestige and personality to the rescue. The Commercial Club became an official chapter of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce in 1915. To demonstrate its mind for progress, it opened membership to women in 1918—a year before women’s suffrage became law of the land.

  THE MIDNIGHT RAILROAD

  When workmen were recently tearing up the downtown streets to make them all better again, they dug out some of the old streetcar tracks. That evoked a certain poignancy because enlightened citizens in Durham, as in other places, have clamored that what cities of the twenty-first century need is a dose of the nineteenth—that is, communal modes of getting around, like the streetcars used to be.

  Enquiring minds ought to know that streetcars gave cities troubles of their own.

  To mention one contemporary concern, Durham’s first streetcars did nothing to alleviate air pollution, for they were powered not by clean (if coal-fired) electricity, but by horses and mules whose leavings provided work for not only street-sweeping crews (were the aldermen of minds to fund such), but also flies, and filtered down into the water table helping Durham win an image as a hotbed of typhoid (a.k.a. “Durham fever”). The Durham Street Railway Company began in 1887 with a line from Blackwell Park to Dillard Street. The raised tracks running down the middle of the primary avenues, however, presented a hindrance to other forms of conveyance, and their maintenance proved such a problem that by the mid-1890s the city was threatening to revoke the company’s franchise.

  Owners Richard Wright and Julian Carr Sr. responded by promising to electrify the system. In 1901, they formed the Durham Traction Company and laid new tracks, running from the mill village of West Durham to the mill village of East Durham along Main Street and, diagonally, from Trinity Avenue on the northeast to Maplewood Cemetery. The new system encouraged growth, planting streetcar suburbs in still-rural areas on the edge of town. On the east end of the line, the Traction Company built a baseball park, and on the other, just past the cemetery, the Lakewood amusement park. In hot weather, patrons would gladly pay a nickel to ride all day in the cool breeze created by the breakneck speed of six miles per hour. All that came only after the company surmounted some more difficulties.

  One of the Durham Traction Company’s streetcars at the gate to Lakewood Park. The streetcar company built the amusement park at the end of one of its lines. Courtesy Lakewood Park Community Association.

  Durham’s horseless trolley was scheduled to make its first trip on May 23, 1902. Spectators, unconvinced any such newfangled contraption could actually run, were on hand and must have felt confirmed in their skepticism when the first cars started off—and stopped dead on their tracks. Just in time, the company’s power station had broken down. A team of horses had to be summoned to tow the electric cars back to the car barn, and one unsympathetic fellow was so unkind as to stalk into the Traction Company office and say, “I hope you smarties are satisfied.”

  It wasn’t until June 2 that the company felt bold enough to try again, but then the cars worked and served well for twenty-eight years—until they, in turn, were replaced by internal-combustion efficiency. Since the tracks were built on a thick concrete base, the only thing to do with them was pave them over, though during World War II most of the rails were recovered and recycled for armament use.

  Streetcars were hardly the only form of moving freight and folk from place to place that gave our growing town difficulties. The town may have been the result of the railroad, but, business being business, train service itself had become problematic within thirty years of arriving. Durham was served by only one line, a branch line at that, and the leasing Richmond & Danville company operated the line like the monopoly it was. Even so boosterish a spokesman as Hiram Paul complained, writing in his book that rail service was far from adequate and the depot itself “a reproach, there being no reception room for either ladies or gentlemen, and the apartment used as such…being so filthy and offensive that ladies never apply for tickets, except in cases of absolute necessity.”

  Clearly, competition was called for, and Durham’s chieftains of commerce were up to the challenge. By 1886, they were promoting bonds to finance a new line:

  Let us…determine that before another summer’s sun the
shriek of the locomotive, echoing from hill to hill in the county of Durham, shall announce to your people that our work is done and it is known as the Durham & Roxboro R.R., owned and controlled by our own people and not a foreign corporation.

  It was not as easy as it looked at first. No sooner was the new Durham & Clarksville road, running northeast into Virginia, completed in late 1888 than its backers leased it to the Richmond & Danville, as well. A third line, the Durham & Northern, was completed March 26, 1889, but it had a problem of its own. Its right of way terminated at the eastern edge of town, near Dillard Street, and that was a far distance from the Blackwell and Duke tobacco factories that had been built along the original tracks now controlled by the R&D, and that firm was in no mood to share with or otherwise accommodate a rival.

  So, the town’s good aldermen, acting with the general welfare at heart, gave the Durham & Northern the go-ahead to lay its own track to the factories, running it right up Peabody Street, which paralleled the existing rail line on the north side. The trouble was that Peabody Street lay inside the old North Carolina Railroad right of way that the state had leased to the Richmond & Danville. Anticipating opposition, on April 9 a crew made up of townsmen went out in the dead of night and began making tracks. By the dawn’s early light, the R&D had them arrested for trespassing.

  The town authorities, however, promptly dismissed the trespass charges and the Durham crew was back at work as soon as darkness fell. By the time the sun came up again, the “Moonlight Railroad” was complete all the way to the W. Duke Sons & Company factory on the western side of town. The workmen went home for a well-earned rest, and the Richmond & Danville’s hands began tearing the new tracks apart. Town police stepped in. Both sides summoned legal counsel, and while the matter awaited the pleasure of the courts, townsmen stood armed guard over the line they had drawn, so to speak, and the Durham & Northern parked freight cars all the way through town to dissuade anyone from messing with its track. The Richmond & Danville tried to lay connecting switches to move the cars out of the way, but in May a federal judge told it to leave the D&N alone. The R&D complied, but its attorneys labored on.

  It had not yet been determined to legal satisfaction just who had the right to do what with Peabody Street. In 1890, a court ruled that, when the Richmond & Danville had leased the North Carolina Railroad, authority over Peabody Street reverted to the city. In 1895, the Southern Railroad bought the R&D and dissolved the company, thereby, the Southern claimed, voiding the reversion. In 1903, a federal judge agreed and so obliged the Seaboard Air Line, which had bought the Durham & Northern in 1901, to pay the Southern rent for use of the Moonlight track.

  That decision only set up another contest of wills. While the city, the D&N and the R&D faced off, a third line, the Durham & Roxboro, had been completed to Ramseur Street on the east side. Rather than deal with the R&D and its attitude, or the D&N and its legal problems, the Duke principals, who had put up $100,000 of their own money for the Durham & Roxboro’s construction, skirted the situation by laying a beltline from their factory, around the northern edge of Durham, to the Durham & Roxboro track just outside town. (In 1899, the Durham & Roxboro was bought by the Norfolk & Western.)

  Union Station opened in 1905 after an act of the state legislature forced the five railroads serving Durham to share depot space. From City of Durham Illustrated.

  The Norfolk & Southern soon joined the mix with a freight route going south. Each railroad maintained its own station facilities. The inefficiency grated on the customers of all four lines, who, by the new century’s beginning, were clamoring for the companies to share one “union” station. The railroads, especially the aggressive Southern basking in the light of its legal triumph, were cool to the idea, but Durham legislator Jones Fuller contrived to maneuver the state legislature to decree that, where two or more railroads served the same town, they could be compelled to share a depot.

  So blessed, in 1904 a Union Station Company began constructing a new depot in Durham, to serve the N&W, N&S, Seaboard and Southern. That very year, the Southern applied to build a side track along Pettigrew Street, which paralleled Peabody on the south side of the tracks. The town said no. The railroad not only went to court, but this time also set nocturnal crews of its own to work, laying track along Pettigrew and, just to rub the court’s earlier ruling in the city’s face, along Peabody as well. The city got an injunction, the railroad sued and eventually, this time, the nonsense was thrown out of court.

  Through this episode in March 1905, the new station, complete with Italianate tower and intricate decorative brickwork, stood waiting for business—while the Norfolk & Western worked out its own right of way dispute with the town of Durham, which had blocked that company’s track at Chapel Hill Street. Cool heads prevailed, deals were struck and Union Station opened to general fanfare and festivity on May 1, 1905. A mixed train—passenger and freight—of the Southern was the first through; later in the day, baseball fans streamed through on their way to the hometown team’s game in Raleigh.

  In time, pigeons took over the tower. Coal grime and grease settled over the building. Wear, tear and passing passengers took tolls of their own, and traveling tastes changed with the times. Rail passenger service to Durham ceased in 1965, and three years later the iconic Union Station fell to another era’s best and brightest ideas of highest and best use. Durham tore down the station and put up a parking lot.

  THE HOLIDAY

  It was a simpler time back then. Durham had its Union Station and the railroads were at peace, so come November it was time for giving thanks. Thanksgiving Day 1905, in fact, was a quiet one in town. Nettie Watts and William Carden, an East Durham couple, ran off to get married in South Carolina, and businessman James Southgate received due honor for founding the local Masonic Lodge. A crowd did gather at the drugstores, where play-by-play reports from the University of North Carolina’s football game against Virginia in Norfolk came in as quick as eight minutes after the action via long-distance telephone. North Carolina won, 17 to 0. Elsewhere, a man was caught stealing eggs, two women were arrested for selling whiskey and, out in the county, a Bible and a flag were presented with appropriate fanfare to the Redwood School.

  The quiet was, no doubt, welcome. In the week leading up to the holiday, when an African American passenger on the streetcar was ordered to give up his seat to a white woman and child, another black passenger exclaimed, “I’d die right here before I’d get up and give my seat to any poor white trash!” A white commentator used the incident to make a case for Jim Crow laws. Reverend W.S. Elam of Orange Grove Baptist Church pulled a pistol and fired on Dave Lyon, who had threatened Elam with bodily harm for kicking him out of the congregation. But Ernest Womack would have cause to give thanks, for the charges against him, for accidentally killing Cornie Marks with an antique rifle two weeks earlier, were dropped because the arrest warrant had been filled out incorrectly.

  Then, once Thanksgiving Day was done, the Christmas buying season sprang into full gear. The Ellis, Stone & Company department store promised “one of the greatest fur openings…ever attempted in Durham” while the W.H. Proctor dry goods emporium advertised “Christmas Goods and Fireworks.” Speaking of fireworks, on Saturday Jack Shambly and Dick Sykes went to court for an “affray” with deadly weapons but were discharged for insufficient evidence. That same day, one Jackson Emory, who had disappeared without a trace seventeen years before, was spotted in East Durham. He was reported to be visiting friends but made no effort to call on his “widow.”

  THE SIGN

  In the 1980s, the city council dithered for months over what welcoming slogan to paint on a water tower overlooking the freeway that leads into town from the airport. It ended up painting nothing. That’s a story we will return to later. That was not the first time Durham felt moved to proclaim itself to passing traffic. First, there was the Slogan Sign, and its introduction was occasion for soaring oratory and special sales at the downtown stores. It was Christmast
ime, December 15, 1913, and Durham greeted the season with bright color in the form of 1,230 electric bulbs casting a five thousand-candlepower glow, declaring “Durham Renowned the World Around.” This was mounted on a skeletal framework forty-one and a half by thirty-one and a half feet in size, perched atop the telephone exchange building in ready view of all trains passing a block away.

  The wording was a combination of suggestions from J.E. Banning and Mrs. W.W. Weaver, who shared fifty dollars for their inspiration. Constructed by the Greenwood Advertising Company of Knoxville, Tennessee, the sign flashed “Durham,” in electric letters four feet tall, followed by “Renowned the World Around” in two-and-a-half-foot letters and then “Progress,” “Success,” “Health” and “Wealth” around the sign’s perimeter. A red globe appeared to rotate, and a double border of red and white lights stayed lit as long as the power was on.

  The monstrosity was a project of the aforementioned Commercial Club and the Durham Traction Company, which had diversified from streetcars to powering the whole town. In 1913, the company was promoting electric signs for businesses and, to show what it had to offer, donated one to benefit the city’s image. Illumination was scheduled for a Sunday night in shopping season. The railroads ran special excursions into town. As darkness fell, an estimated ten thousand people had jammed the streets in anticipation.

  The Slogan Sign by night. Using 1,230 colored bulbs and five thousand candlepower, the sign first blazed forth for the Christmas shopping season in 1913.