Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  THE MYSTERIOUS BOTTOM

  There never was any monkey in Monkey Bottom. At least, that was the contention of the late Louis Cole, who ought to know since he was born in that part of our town, the West Durham village around the Erwin cotton mill, in 1919, and grew up there and delivered groceries as a boy. So he knew every bit of the place. But he didn’t know why that name was applied to and stuck to the lowest point in West Durham, right off Erwin Road by the railroad trestle.

  Sure, there are stories about where it got the name. One says the name was a racial slur for the bottom’s residents. Another says there used to be a little zoo down there in a village park. Another says some monkeys got loose from a circus once and made themselves at home in the low ground. Circus parades did process through West Durham in times gone by, marching from the railroad to the fairgrounds out on the Hillsborough road. But Cole always insisted there never were any monkeys in residence.

  Legends and names have it all over facts, though. A schoolchild from West Durham was heard to misidentify her Southside School as Monkey Bottom School, and when flower children of the ’60s occupied an old mansion up the hill, they dubbed it “Monkey Top.”

  Monkey Bottom is very close to where old Pinhook used to be, so maybe the “monkey” part is as in “monkey business.” In any case, another part of the legend has it that the president of Erwin Mills said he’d reward anyone generously who could tell him where the name came from. He never had to pay up.

  THE GOOFY STUFF

  Everybody knows about the flying saucer crashing in Roswell, New Mexico, in June 1947. E.T. didn’t make it to our town that summer, nor for several more summers, in fact, but the season was not without its strangeness.

  Otis M. Cates filed for divorce from his wife, Alveena, the two having been separated since 1932. A wandering salesman came into city hall and asked for a job as a detective after making a noise like a klaxon horn. He didn’t get the job. Maybe he could have got to the bottom of the Goofer Dust, though.

  One morning in August of that year, one George Williams of the St. Theresa neighborhood below the tracks was brought before the bar of justice for, it was held, threatening his neighbor with bodily harm for hexing his, Williams’s, property. The alleged hexer, Jesse Jones, testified that the alleged hexee, Williams, had accused the said Jones of brandishing a meat knife at him and rooting in his yard. Jones said he didn’t know anything about rooting and that Williams, the alleged hexee, had, some months previous, accused Jones of throwing an egg at his porch and threatened him with bodily harm.

  Taking the stand, Williams’s wife said that almost every morning, very early, she had seen Jones looking about as if to determine whether anyone was watching and, when he thought the coast was clear, sneaking into the Williams’s yard to spread dust that looked kind of like gunpowder. She had not been affected, but her husband said this dust had caused him pain in his feet and legs so bad he couldn’t walk anywhere close to his woodpile or garage. His agony was so great he had even paid $200 for the services of a “de-hexing doctor” from another state.

  The particular incident precipitating the case developed when Williams caught Jones dusting near his gate. When the two men ran into each other again, later, Jones reached into his pocket. Williams thought he was going for a knife and snatched up a stick for self-defense. Mrs. Williams stepped in between them and Jones went to file charges for assault with a deadly weapon. The judge ruled that Williams was innocent and went on to deal with the more routine speeders, batterers and drunks on the morning’s docket.

  It was almost five years before the aliens arrived.

  In the early evening of Monday, January 25, 1954, law student Harold Bernard was crossing a street and noticed white vapor in the sky. A moment later, he saw a huge spherical thing, green with a hint of red, moving fast. About the same time, two commercial pilots flying southeast of Durham spotted something flying off to the north, describing an arc, too slow and bright to be a meteor. F.W. Fletcher of the Bethesda community in eastern Durham turned to a man standing next to him and said he’d seen either a flying saucer or the strangest airplane ever; whatever it was, it was gone by the time the other man looked up.

  Statue of James Buchanan “Buck” Duke in front of the university chapel, dressed for Halloween 1973; almost twenty years earlier, flying saucers had called on Durham.

  Flying saucers or, if you insist, UFOs, had been a part of popular culture since June 1947, when a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine “disc-like” objects flying near Mount Ranier, in Washington (state), and magazine publisher Ray Palmer got hold of the story and made strange things in the sky a national sensation, with reports coming left and right for year after year as pulp journals and Hollywood made the best of a good thing while it lasted.

  Whatever it was buzzing our town in the evening may have come back later, because Mrs. W.H. Perkins, who was sitting up late writing a letter to her husband in Korea, looked up about a quarter to 1:00 a.m. and saw an object she described as “odd shaped” and half the size of a full moon. It was shining through her window and it scared her. When she cut off her lamp, the thing started flashing red sparks and moving away, then flashed really bright and was gone. Mrs. Perkins telephoned a neighbor for comfort. The neighbor told her she was nuts. Then she got her morning paper and saw she hadn’t been the only one.

  Two nights later, another student saw a green light flying high and fast, but that was it for the saucers’ interest in our town. At least, if they stayed around, they stayed out of sight. But a few nights later, there were several strange occurrences: Dr. Waldo Boone’s hubcaps vanished while his Buick rested in his closed garage, Page-King Tire Company was relieved of electronic apparatus, a battery and some three-cent stamps, while Bailey’s Service Station was robbed of its condom dispenser. Had E.T. stopped in for biological research and gone scavenging for components to call home? If the hubcaps didn’t serve as signal dishes or the battery didn’t give enough juice, he could have planned to write—since, in 1954, a three-cent stamp would go a long way.

  THE DROWNED VILLAGE

  What remains of Orange Factory is just the name. At least, that’s all the eye can see unless you don a scuba mask and swim down through murky waters to the bottom of the Little River Reservoir.

  For many years it was a real place, high and dry. Had some importance, even—Orange Factory Road, after all, does carry on the name. There was a factory there, and a village, and the memory even spawned a preservation committee. Too little, too late.

  By the 1960s, it was clear that the city of Durham was going to need more water. Lake Michie, the reservoir that had served since the 1930s, wasn’t going to be able to handle the projected growth and, after eco-opposition foiled early plans to flood the Eno for a second lake, the engineers looked one river north. In 1983, Orange Factory’s last eight households were moved out of the way of progress.

  There had been dozens of households in years before.

  Orange Factory began as, naturally, a factory—a cotton mill, prefiguring by decades the industry that would vie with tobacco for top spot in the town a few miles south along the railroad. In 1852, John Huske Webb and John C. Douglas formed a partnership to manufacture cloth and thread. The name was a natural choice, since theirs was the first factory in Orange County aside from John McMannen’s smut-machine works a little way upriver. McMannen’s operation, though, was hardly in a class with what Webb and Douglas wrought—ninety-four feet from footing to rooftop, powered both by steam and liquid water.

  The partners also built a gristmill, houses for their mill hands, a boardinghouse, a store, a school and a church. By 1860, Orange Factory could turn out 140,000 pounds of cotton yarn, and when the state of North Carolina went Confederate, it contracted with Webb and Douglas to supply cloth for uniforms. Maybe due to the reversal of Confederate fortunes, maybe for other reasons, the founders sold out in 1864 to William Willard, a gentleman from Massachusetts, of all alien places, who had moved s
outh for his health.

  Orange Factory wove cotton cloth on the Little River and stimulated a village to grow. Its site is now at the bottom of a reservoir. Courtesy Ed Clayton.

  Willard reorganized as the Willard Manufacturing Company and diversified into making rope, hosiery cloth and bags. When the Lynchburg & Durham Railroad was built nearby, it named its station Willardville—you’ll still see the name on county maps, as well as Willard’s Station Road. There’s no trace left of any station, and the tracks are abandoned and overgrown, but humps in the pavement still mark where the grade crossings were. After Willard died in 1898, his assistant, Albert Cox, and a James Mason bought the business and reorganized it again, this time as the Little River Manufacturing Company. Cox is remembered as the main benefactor of Riverview United Methodist Church, originally Orange Factory Methodist, which perches on a hill that overlooked the village and now overlooks the reservoir. The company was sold again in 1916, becoming Laura Cotton Mill, and continued operations until, obsolete and worn out, the plant shut down for good in 1938.

  The village carried on, though. It lost population as the years went by, people drifting off to bigger places with more opportunity. In its late years, residents looked back on times when menfolk made whiskey against the law, women went swimming in old dresses because they didn’t have money for bathing suits and people walked up the hill to Sunday school and got baptized in the river. Facing the prospect of being flooded out in 1980, Effie Castle told a reporter, “We’re the happiest po’ folks in the world, if they’d just leave us alone.”

  But they didn’t, and now waters bound for mixing the drinks and washing the cars of Durham lie over the foundations of an old hometown. Looking down from the hilltop churchyard feels fitting, for up there elegy is what it’s all about.

  THE LAST AND FIRST DAY

  Spring mornings, in the rolling-hill and farm-pond country north of town, start out dew-damp and sparkly. Light haze dawdles in the woods like the children of collective imagination, if not really memory, stalling all the way to school. The way time itself drags at that age as it gets close to the last day. The way it would have dragged once, for all the children like you used to be, who were educated at South Lowell School.

  Woods surround long-abandoned South Lowell School in the hilly region of northern Durham County.

  The children are long gone, the school closed these seventy years or more, but the schoolhouse is still there, even though you may have to look hard for it in the springtime when the leaves have budded out and the vines resumed their growing. It’s up in the woods, off South Lowell Road—another commemorative name, recalling the ambition the Reverend John McMannen had for the community growing around his smut-machine manufactory—in the prettiest part of Durham County.

  A window made of ornate teardrop-shaped panes gapes blankly from a second-story gable that is centered over where twin doors once hung. The open entrance gives view clear through the building to a big oak tree, under which the kids once played games like “Andy Over” and “Goose and the Gall” under the steady gaze of Miss Beulah Wilson Breedlove. At the end of term, she would lead the children in a show for their families. They would decorate the school with greenery from the woods, and decorate a wagon and all go to ride.

  Graffiti at the back door of South Lowell School, with a view to the woods on the building’s far side.

  The school years’ ends still bring their ceremonies, but they also still bring beginnings, and the last days of school can get lost, unnoticed, in the giddiness of summer’s edge—“the first real time of freedom and living,” as Ray Bradbury wrote at the beginning of his Dandelion Wine. Old school years get left behind in the rush to the imagined times ahead, fantasies, and may only be appreciated in bits and pieces reordered and refined for the use of futures unthinkable at the time they were fresh and sparkly as those dawdling dewy mornings, last and first at the same time.

  THE PARADE

  In town, in December, they have a “holiday” to-do. In Bahama, they have a Christmas parade. (Not to be outdone, its rival village of Rougemont has a parade for Easter.) The way it came about is that one Christmas back in the 1970s, Howard Trickey got together with a mule, a wagon and a jar of white whiskey.

  That’s his story, anyway. The local Ruritans sponsor it now, and white whiskey is not encouraged, but a mule and wagon would be OK.

  What happened was that Christmas Howard and the wife of his buddy, Mike Terry, went in cahoots to get Mike a wagon for his present, along with a mule to provide its motor power. Mike had wanted one for the longest time. Christmas morning, Mike was duly appreciative, but some assembly was required. He called Howard to come show him how to put mule and wagon together. Once that was accomplished, the two men and a jar of Christmas spirits took the mule and wagon out for a spin.

  They stopped by the village store to show off, and someone said they ought to have a parade.

  Seemed like a good idea at the time. When next Christmas rolled around and it still seemed like a good idea, they did it. Santa Claus rode in a borrowed sleigh behind a white horse.

  Now the community’s been doing it ever since. It got bigger and bigger, and folks from all around started putting it on the calendar. Homefolks that have moved away come back. There are school bands, scouts, sheriff’s cars, fire trucks, a few floats and a local celebrity or two. Just a good ol’ country kind of parade. Just about everybody takes part, and everybody else comes to watch.

  They don’t make many of ’em any more.

  THE FESTIVAL

  Our town has a festival around the Fourth of July now. It’s not an “ole-fashion Fourth,” though there is ice cream and watermelon, and the fireworks are still lit off downtown at the ballpark. But halfway out toward the country, at West Point on the Eno city park, the Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley holds a shindig over several days to extol the virtues of going green, with musical accompaniment and cold drinks (non-alcoholic only, we’re on city property here) to help beat what invariably feels like the hottest weather all year.

  It’s a pretty correct affair, with compost demonstrations and a minimal carbon footprint. There are canoes to take for a drift on the stream, an old mill gristing its grist, booths for worthy causes and music from the old times played by real folks in Birkenstocks—even if some of the music is electrified now, a concession to the times that bothered some purists for a while. All in all, as paeans to the simple life of yore go, it’s pretty city-slick and hip, but that befits the festival’s own roots and raisin’.

  Festival for the Eno started out as a fill-in for Joe College Weekend. It came about like this:

  Joe College was for years Duke University’s annual “spring fling” debauchery, held a few weeks after undergraduates got back from spring breaks at Myrtle Beach and Fort Lauderdale. During the late ’60s, though, when everything in college went relevant, the accustomed celebration fell somewhat out of favor and by 1974 had pretty well fizzled out.

  Now, an undergraduate from Texas named George Holt had spent a summer in Washington, D.C., and became enthralled by the Smithsonian’s annual Festival of American Folklife. A neighbor in the dormitory back at school—Nick Tennyson, later our town’s mayor and head of the home-builders’ association—engaged Holt in helping come up with a model for doing something special in the spring. Holt contrived a folk festival of Duke’s own, showcasing North Carolina folklife like snake-oil pitchmen, moonshine making and cows and sheep out on the quad around James B. Duke’s statue and in front of the chapel where, as it turned out, there was a wedding going on at the same time as the folklife. The pigpen went right under the office window of the university president.

  It actually worked well enough that Holt staged it again the next year. The year after that, by which time he was an old grad, happened to be the bicentennial of U.S. independence, and all over the country every patriotic city, town and country crossroads was doing something for the occasion. An older fellow alumnus, Bob Cha
pman, had been engaged to do the same for Durham. Having seen what Holt had done, and finding Holt still hanging around, Chapman invited him to do what he had done on campus, only in a much bigger way.

  Sophie Galifianakis kicks up her heels at West Point Park during the North Carolina Folklife Festival, July 1978.

  Holt set to it, shooting for “Smithsonian-level integrity.” Really folky. No Peter, Paul and Mary sounds, no plastic crafts from China. Only practitioners of tradition handed down through Ma and Pa and Great-uncle Hezekiah. In the meantime, the city was rushing to get a park in shape on the riverside land it had originally bought in expectation of flooding it for a reservoir. The Liggett Group (previously Liggett & Myers Tobacco) folks, good corporate citizens, signed a blank purchase order for whatever anybody needed. Holt’s uncle happened to be chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, so the army donated a walkie-talkie system. Everything went off fine: seventy-five thousand people showed up over the three-day weekend, receipts were so heavy that the bank’s night-deposit drawer would hardly shut, and it was all so much fun that, two years later, Holt did it all over again with the backing of the State of North Carolina.

  This caught the notice of the Eno River Association, a group formed in 1966 by the indefatigable Margaret Nygard to protect the thirty-mile stream from damming and development. In 1980, the association took up the festival idea and has staged one every Independence Day since, raising money to buy land for the Eno River State Park. It’s been thoroughly successful, a signature event among the claims to fame our town’s convention and visitors bureau boasts of. Honestly, it’s one of the elements that goes into making our town our town. “See you at the Eno” is our own shorthand conveying time as well as place—Fourth of July and a particular spot out by the riverside.