by Jim Wise
A local newspaper set the tone:
This will be the most stupendous undertaking in Christmas decorating that has ever been undertaken in this section of the country, and if there is any other town in the whole country that has ever done anything of this kind the reports have not reached the local people. Just as a good housewife would decorate her home for the Christmas holiday or a merchant would decorate his store for this annual event the whole of the business section of the city will be wreathed in the green and white of the Christmas season.
Opening the proceedings, Mayor W.J. Brogden continued in the same vein: “The knowledge of our own possibilities has come to us, as it were, as an echo,” he said. “We have been slower to recognize our own advantages than the stranger who has passed through our gates, yet, in spite of herself, this, the youngest city in the state, is known wherever the human race exists.”
The weather was splendid. Santa Claus arrived on the 7:55 p.m. train and rode, blowing kisses and waving, upon a fire wagon as he led a “tacky” parade of costumed revelers who marched and countermarched along Main Street beneath Durham’s first strings of Christmas lights. The Traction Company had given out horns, and their noise, along with that of other instruments, drowned out most of the speechifying. Fortunately for posterity, some remarks were committed to paper, such as these of the Commercial Club’s W.G. Branham:
Some 2,000 years ago there appeared in the eastern canopy of heaven a brilliant light in the form of a star, which advertised and proclaimed to the wise men of the east the greatest event of all time. From that time to this splendid hour, men have vied with one another to produce some novel plan by which to proclaim to the world their achievements.
Astronomers tell us that the planet Mars is inhabited and possibly other planets. We do not know whether our fame has as yet reached their celestial shores, or not, but there has been erected on one of our large business buildings one of the largest, most brilliant and artistic signs south of Washington, the gift to the Commercial Club of Durham by one of our public spirited public service corporations, that Durham may be, as she is now, renowned the world around, the celestial planets included.
Then the time came to light up. Mayor W.J. Brogden flipped the switch and hundreds of shining, flashing, shimmering bulbs came on—all except the ones that spelled out “Durham.”
Perhaps it was a faulty circuit. Perhaps the spirit of the town was just plain embarrassed. Whatever the cause, long and pregnant minutes followed as the natives grew restless and began to chant, “Let’s have Durham!” and “Where is Durham?” But at last, the connection was made, electrons flowed, “Durham” blazed forth in all its glory and a cheer rose to the heavens.
While the Martians gave no indicationof having noticed, the sign did have some of its desired effects. Five more businesses bought electric signs by the next July, raising the town’s grand total to nine, and the Traction Company’s promotion got a few words in Electrical Merchandise magazine, along with an advertisement by the Greenwood Advertising Company. Its career, however, was brief. A windstorm a few years later wrought considerable damage, and in November 1919, a committee of the chamber of commerce—into which the Commercial Club had by then reorganized itself—estimated replacing it would cost $2,250 and recommended indefinite postponement.
THE WRITER
Over in Chapel Hill, they still make much over Thomas Wolfe, the hulking (six feet, five inches) character who passed through the University of North Carolina on his way from Asheville in the mountains to literary celebrity and an early death—the symbolism of which Wolfe, likening himself to Achilles, might have appreciated.
Wolfe left a reputation and his words—oh, lots and lots and lots of words—and while he is chiefly associated with his college and the home that he could not go back to, some sifting in the verbiage finds that Durham, too—which he called “Exeter” in Look Homeward, Angel, his thinly fictionalized version of how-I-came-of-age—made a lasting impression on the young man.
Wolfe, who called himself “Eugene Gant” in the book, would get off and catch the train in Durham/Exeter on his way to and from college at “Pulpit Hill.” Wolfe/Gant entered the University of North Carolina/Old Catawba in the fall of 1916. Durham was a booming place, and the city fathers had erected the Slogan Sign to say so, lest anyone forget or have been so out of touch not to have heard. Wolfe would have entered Durham by way of the still-new Union Station, and Durham entered literature, in Angel’s twenty-eighth chapter, as “the dreary tobacco town of Exeter.”
Such was the impression it made as young Eugene came down to college for the very first time. It got worse in the next chapter, when Wolfe’s alter ego is introduced to the pleasures of the flesh. Indeed, in Look Homeward, Angel, going to Exeter is a euphemism for going out for sex. Eugene is tempted, falls and pays the price—by the time he goes home for Christmas vacation, “his loins were black” with Exeter vermin.
In real life, Wolfe would have probably paid many visits to Durham to bring the student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, for printing. Wolfe was the paper’s editor. Yet, in all Wolfe’s work, the larger town only appears in terms of “drab autumnal streets…squalor of cheap houses…the foggy air was full of chill menace…brooding quietness…a sordid little road, unpaved, littered…a world of rickets.”
Since the time of Pinhook, the boys from Chapel Hill had frequented the fleshpots along the ridge, and Wolfe was simply following a university tradition. Where Exeter was raw and dangerous and dark, Pulpit Hill possessed a “rare romantic quality of the atmosphere…thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light.”
In the book, Eugene Gant leaves Pulpit Hill with the implication that he is gone for good. In life, Wolfe went on to Harvard and, with the uproar his tell-all first novel stirred in the state he had left behind—Raleigh publisher Jonathan Daniels said Wolfe had “spat upon the South”—he, too, was reticent to come back. Could he come back today, no doubt, he would find much had changed. Or maybe not.
THE MISSIONARY
In the bully age of Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet, Julian Carr even had a hand in molding the nation’s foreign affairs. Whether he realized it or not.
Carr was a devoted Methodist. While Julian Carr Street has been absorbed into a parking garage next door to his old Bull factory, to this day an adult Sunday school at Trinity United Methodist Church (the same congregation once burned out in Dilliardsville) is called the “Julian S. Carr Bible Class.” As a Methodist on the make, in 1881 he was contacted by Braxton Craven, president of the denomination’s small and struggling Trinity College, about a young man who showed great promise in the missionary field but needed some training and polish and, more to the point, a patron to pay for it.
Carr’s spirit was moved, and so, in April of that year, he received into his home one Han Shao-chun, fifteen-year-old son of a well-to-do southern China clan who had run away from learning the family tea trade in Java to see the wider world. Shao-chun, whom the world would come to know as tycoon and power broker Charlie Soong, had landed in Boston, wearied of working in a cousin’s import-export business, stowed away on a U.S. Coast Guard ship, and became the ship’s mascot and the ward of Captain Eric Gabrielson. Under the captain’s influence, he accepted the Methodist persuasion and, upon the captain’s retirement, came into the charge of the Reverend T.P. Ricaud of Fifth Street Methodist Church in the port town of Wilmington, North Carolina.
By now going as “Charlie Soong”—the closest his shipmates could come to pronouncing his Chinese name—the young man impressed all with his industriousness, piety, smarts and personal charm. Just the kind of man, Ricaud thought, to lead half a billion Chinese heathens into Methodist sanctification. Ricaud contacted Craven at Trinity, then in a rural district about eighty miles west of Durham, and Craven agreed to Charlie’s matriculation if the money could be found. Carr obliged, and from spring until the fall term began Charlie charmed the Carrs and the rest of Durham. On s
hip, he had learned to make hammocks, and he practiced the trade in Durham to keep himself in spending money. That impressed the town’s go-getting business class, while Charlie’s manners impressed the town’s young ladies.
Charlie Soong, born Han Shao-chun, in his college days. The future Shanghai entrepreneur and revolutionary spent formative time in Julian Shakespeare Carr’s household.
At school, Charlie was exotic—the first “Celestial,” indeed the first foreign student that Trinity had ever seen. He was popular and, from his letters, had a good time all around until his way as a ladies’ man got him caught in a compromising position with a faculty member’s daughter by the faculty member’s wife. Charlie’s transfer to Vanderbilt University was quickly arranged, and in Nashville he finished his schooling and, while keeping in close touch with Durham friends, especially one Annie Southgate, set out to accomplish the Lord’s work back home.
It did not take long for Charlie to get frustrated in the missionary business. For one thing, his missionary superiors were prejudiced against his race and, for another, the pay was lousy—especially after Charlie married into a wealthy family of Shanghai entrepreneurs who opened new vistas to him. Having learned the printing trade in Wilmington, Charlie opened a business to publish Chinese Bibles and missionary tracts—and, on the side, political tracts for the revolutionaries who flourished, along with the rest of Shanghai’s underworld, in the foreign-trade zone that was hands-off to the native police. Charlie did well. He kept his business to himself, for not doing so could have meant his swift and unpleasant demise, along with that of the rest of his family, at the hands of displeased associates, but it is known that he expanded the printing company and invested in cotton and tobacco factories. Charlie rode to his office each day in a private rickshaw from a suburban home he had built in Old South style to remind him of his roots in Carolina. He and his wife had three sons and three daughters; the boys he sent to Harvard, the girls to Wesleyan College in Georgia. He also became best friends with a revolutionary figure named Sun Yat-sen and treasurer of Sun’s Young China political party. He put his own money into the party’s accounts and traveled to raise more. In 1905, he paid a call in Durham.
Much had changed since 1881. The town had running water, two hospitals (one white, one black), electric streetcars and a college, Trinity having come in from the country in 1892 and settled on the former Blackwell Park (which Carr donated, having acquired the land through Blackwell’s bankruptcy proceedings). His patron had prospered even more and, having decided his original mansion on Dillard Street, Waverly Honor, was not grand enough to suit a man of his standing, Carr had it moved across the street for the use of a poor relation and built a new, bigger, fancier home that he called Somerset Villa. Each day, Carr wore a flower in his lapel fresh from his private greenhouses. No doubt impressed, Charlie regaled the pious Carr with tales of China’s plight—how the imperial Manchus oppressed the people, how good Christians were persecuted. What was said was not recorded, but it is documented that Carr and Charlie had a long, late-night conversation behind closed doors at Somerset Villa and, when Carr himself paid a visit to Charlie in 1914, after Sun’s successful revolution, the new ruling class received him, he said, “royally, like a king.” Or, one might conclude, like a Hero of the Revolution.
Charlie’s children made marks of their own. One daughter, Ai-ling, who had been Sun’s secretary, married H.H. Kung, wealthy and a direct descendant of Confucius. Younger daughter Chin-ling married Sun himself. Daughter Mei-ling married the military boss of what was now Sun’s National People’s Party, or Kuomintang—a former Shanghai thug named Chiang Kai-shek who took over most of the country after Sun’s death. Their brothers took high positions in the new order, T.V. the nation’s finance minister, Tse-liang a top tax collector and Tse-an the Shanghai harbor boss.
Family harmony fell to politics, though. In a gesture of solidarity with financial interests, Chiang executed 3,500 Chinese communists who, with Russian tutelage, had helped him seize power. Chin-ling considered that a betrayal of the revolution and left for Moscow, where she joined up with yet another Chinese revolutionary, Mao Tse-tung. In later life, she was called the mother of Mao’s revolution, which threw out Chiang, his party and his wife in 1949. Mei-ling became world famous as Madame Chiang, the dragon lady of international anti-Communism who shaped American policy toward China until 1972, when the ice was broken by then U.S. president Richard M. Nixon, who had himself come to power by way of Durham, as a law student at Charlie Soong’s first American alma mater, which by Nixon’s time had graduated into Duke University.
PART IV
BULL CITIZENS
YOU SHOULD
KNOW
Throughout these stories, I have been writing about people: William Johnston, Dr. Durham, Julian Carr. People, after all, are what make the stories of how a place came to be what it is and why it is. Some are founders, some are builders, some are rich and some are famous, and most are just plain folks. Really, it’s the just plain folks who leave their marks where they count. They don’t have to leave their names on streets or buildings. They don’t need to make money or lead great efforts toward civic betterment. They just leave the old hometown the better for their having passed through—and leave themselves in those whose lives they touch.
THE BEST DUKE
Washington Duke founded the tobacco company; his children—Brodie, Mary, Ben and Buck—built empires. There was another Duke, though, and some who knew him said he was the best of the whole bunch.
That was Uncle Billie. He was Washington’s older brother, a farmer, a preacher and a character who rests by the church he founded: Duke’s Chapel. Now, that is not to be confused with Duke Chapel, the towering neo-Gothic edifice on the university’s West Campus; while built of the same gray stone and in a similar style, Duke’s Chapel is a humbler house of worship out on the Old Oxford Highway near the land that Uncle Billie cultivated and his old homestead. The homestead is gone, removed to make way for a subdivision. The road it stood on once was called “Duke Lane,” but now the name is “Danube” just to avoid confusion with the Duke Street thoroughfare or Duke University Road. But Uncle Billie is still remembered.
William James “Uncle Billie” Duke helped raise his younger brother Washington and passed on his brand of circuit-riding Methodism. Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.
Uncle Billie came into the world as William James Duke on July 18, 1803, first of the ten children born to Taylor and Dicey Jones Duke, who owned a small farm on the Little River in northeastern Orange County. Taylor Duke was prominent in his own right, a captain of militia and a member of the Democratic Party’s local “committee of vigilance,” well-to-do enough that his five-room home had glass in its windows. His own father, similarly, may have been a man of standing, for the Methodist evangelist Francis Asbury, in the journal of his first foray through backcountry North Carolina, recorded that on June 21, 1780:
I had to ride alone better than 12 miles to Mr. Duke’s; when I came there, found about 30 people, and they quite ignorant. After preaching I took dinner, and in talking found three or four of them tenderly serious; gave them advice; the man and his wife have had conviction, and have sinned it away. They say it was the disputes of the Baptists that turned them aside.
Methodism took hold in the Duke household. Young William met the Lord at a church picnic and then, as a grown man, heard the call himself, joining the company of circuit-riding preachers who spread hellfire, brimstone, hymn-singing and salvation to isolated pagans, lonely brush arbors and camp meetings in the seasons when crops could be left to grow on their own. Setting out on his own around 1825, he married Sarah Roberts and began buying land, but every Sunday he and Sarah would travel, their babes in arms, five miles to their home church, Mount Bethel. The hike must have begun to wear on them, though, for around 1836 he built a brush arbor of his own on the Roxboro road at present-day Denfield Street. Some folk still know the intersection as “Old Hebron.”
By the time Billie left home, his parents were in financial straits. Billie took in his little brother Washington and taught him farming, religion and abstention. When Billie founded the Mount Hebron Temperance Society in 1842, the twenty-one-year-old Washington was one of its committeemen. That was also the year Washington married Mary Caroline Clinton and received some acreage of his own from his father-in-law. They had two sons, Sidney in 1844 and Brodie in 1846, but in 1847 she died, leaving Washington to raise the boys and run the farm alone. He managed for five years. In 1852, he went along with Billie to a revival one county over. At Mount Pisgah Church in Alamance County, he met a beauty named Artelia Roney—descendant of an eighteenth-century evangelist known as the White Pilgrim. They married in December. Artelia bore three children: Mary in 1853, Benjamin Newton in 1855 and James Buchanan, “Buck,” in 1856. The children learned to work under their uncle’s tutelage. It was Ben and Buck who started calling William “Uncle Billie.”
Uncle Billie was also known as “Squire,” for his landholdings grew to 640 acres, and as “Uncle Billie of the Old Ship,” for his favorite hymn, “The Old Ship of Zion.” People said he could take off the roof when he sang it and out-preach anybody in the county. “He never made the money Wash and his boys had,” one said, “but Billie was the best of the Taylor Duke lot.” He inveighed against the devil, including liquor, though he did like a little nip of apple brandy, and he chewed tobacco but never failed to expectorate it before going in to preach. Once upon a time, a slicker tried to sell him some insurance. “I’m not interested,” Uncle Billie said, “but if you’ve got some insurance for my soul, I’ll talk to you.”
The Hebron congregation grew, and talk began about moving and building a bigger church. Billie Duke donated some money, but before the move could be made he went to his reward. It was 1883, and he was buried in a family plot near the Eno River. And there he remained until 1990, when what had become Duke’s Chapel United Methodist Church approached its 150th anniversary and members figured a fitting way to mark the occasion was to bring Uncle Billie to his namesake graveyard. His body was exhumed and reinterred—or so everybody thought.
