Durham Immigrants

Like the last post, this one is more about documents than maps. I was at the State Archives in Raleigh recently in a quest for some early legal records when I ran across a volume in their Durham County collections that caught my eye. It was conveyed to the state archives along with other older court records from the Superior Court building in Durham and contains bound copies of all petitions for naturalization and citizenship filed in Durham from 1909-22. Curious as to the immigrant makeup of Durham in the years when North Carolina actually saw a drop in total number of foreign-born residents, I decided to flip through and take some pictures.

The volume contained naturalization paperwork for around 63 individuals (there were some refillings so perhaps this number is slightly higher than actual) - this out of a Durham urban population of 18,231 in 1910, 21,719 in 1920. Of course this is only reflective of those who actually filed for naturalization while in Durham and does not include those immigrants filing elsewhere before moving to Durham. Two of those filing for naturalization were born in the United Kingdom (both Scotland I think) three were from Cyprus (then part of the British Empire), nine claimed to be Greek from Greek territories in the Aegean (many escaping from Asia Minor during the Greco-Turkish war), one was born in Belgium, and the vast majority (48) had been born in Russian territories.

Most if not all of these 48 were from the Jewish pale of settlement, including many from today's Latvia and Lithuania. The Jewish immigrants listed in this particular naturalization volume came well after the wave of Jewish tobacco workers of the late 19th century and appear from their petitions and other sources to have been store-keepers and small merchants. For those interested in these immigrants and Durham Jewish history more broadly, Leonard Rogoff's recent (2001) book covers the subject in exhaustive detail (he also cites this naturalization volume on at least two occasions).

I've reproduced a couple of the naturalization petitions to give a sense of what they entailed.



The above is Harry Cohen's 1911 petition, relating that he was born in Russia and had come to the US in 1902. It is witnessed, as was required, by two US citizens who had known him at least five years, in this case two Durham Jewish merchants, including Sam Hockfield, who was then an officer of the Durham Hebrew Congregation. Unfortunately for Harry there is a letter glued to the back of the certificate saying that it had been rendered void because one of the two witnesses seemed to have known him for fewer than the five years required.


Though Rogoff describes the generally un-hostile reception of Jewish immigrants in Durham, the racialization of Eastern European jews is hard to miss in Sam Swartz's 1909 declaration of intent to become a citizen (above). It lists his "visible distinctive marks" as a "prominent nose" and "circumcised." Accordingto Rogoff Sam Swartz and his wife Clara became quite succesful merchants and came to oen substantial real estate in the area by the 1920s.

These last two snippets from naturalization petitions are of more particular interest to me as documents in and of themselves.


This snippet is from an attached certificate to a petition. It was made in New York at the time of Sam Berman's arrival into the US. I like the use of a "Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias" stamp (I would love to get ahold of one!) and the interchangability of the "subject, citizen" line. Rogoff claims Berman was the first permanent Jewish resident of Chapel Hill (in 1914).


While almost all of the petitions and documents in the volume have rather florid and literate signatures attached, Philip Kaplan's signature (above) is decidely rough and indicative of someone less literate (at least in roman characters). Kaplan was a shoemaker from today's Lithuania who later brought the rest of his family to Durham.

And finally, because I had to include a map, below are the addresses of the four people discussed above plotted onto a contemporary satellite view of Durham (must click to enlarge). (1): Cohen (2): Swartz (3): Berman (4): Kaplan.

Agricultural and Mechanical census schedules

For a few of my previous posts I've made use of the agricultural and mechanical census schedules which accompanied the more familiar decennial population census. Unlike the population census though, these are a bit harder to find, especially online. I thought I'd link to scans (warning - somewhat large pdfs) I've made of these schedules for what is now the Durham area in 1850 and 1860.

The 1850 manufacturing census for all of then Orange county takes up only one page. You can see that grain mills (great map of many of the Eno mills) and tannery operations make up the majority of manufactures in the county, powered by water, hand, or horse. The Cheek carriage making business employed the most of any of the recorded industries, with six paid male employees.

The 1860 Orange county manufacturing census records the first tobacco factories in the area as well as the Shields+Bennett Alpha Woolen Mill (in today's Eno state park) s is enumerated as employing 3 men and 5 women to produce "Jeans etc." Also enumerated are John Leathers' (an important figure in the last post) mill as well as the mill at Orange Factory which had by far the largest industrial workforce in the county at 20 men and 30 women.

While the manufacturing censuses are relatively short and cover the entire county, the agricultural schedules run to dozens of pages and at least for 1850 it is quite difficult to separate out what we now know as the Durham area from the rest of Orange county. I erred on the side of caution and scanned all the pages with the names of early Durham landowners familiar to me.


You'll notice many names familiar from Durham history (and Durham streets!) in the 1850 census. There are plenty of Greens, Markhams, Strayhorns, Mangums, Lattas, etc. as well as Bartlett Durham himself. The illustration above shows Willis Borland's agricultural production for 1849-50: 100 bushels of wheat, 300 bushels of Indian corn, 1400 pounds of Tobacco, and on the continuation (not shown) 30 bushels of peas and beans, and 200 pounds of butter.

The 1860 agricultural census helpfully situates some enumerated farms in the Durhamville post office area but I've also included additional pages containing farms I know to have been in what is now West Durham and elsewhere. Note on page 11 the truly massive landholdings of William N. Pratt. Much of Jesse Riggsbee's 200 acres (p.5) on which he grew 450 bushels of maize and 600 bushels of sweet potatoes became Duke's west campus in the 1920s (you can find his headstone near Wallace Wade).

Producing high quality scans from microfilm is somewhat time-consuming but I hope someday to also put up the Ag and Mech schedules from 1870 and 80. In the mean time they are available at the Durham County library and at UNC (NC counties A-C available online: 1870, 1880).

Anderson Leathers - first black north Durham landowner

In February 1873, Anderson Leathers bought a modest 10 acre farm in Durham township for $62.50. His was not the largest or most important Durham purchase that year (Simeon Hester would buy much of today's Watts-Hillandale six months later) but it was nonetheless a remarkable achievement and one utterly impossible just ten years earlier.

Anderson was born around 1820, most likely on the lands of John B. Leathers in today's northern Durham county. Like so many other 19th century NC African-Americans, he lived much of his life enslaved. As such, his early life is difficult to trace. He was most likely a farm laborer working with some of Leathers' 30 other slaves on various tracts in then northeast Orange county. Anderson and other enslaved workers helped produce several thousand pounds of Tobacco every year for Leathers by 1860. While enslaved to Leathers, Anderson married and had at least seven children. In fact, his first appearance in official documents as a free man came in 1866 when he and his wife Caty (b.1825) joined other newly freed slaves at the Hillsborough courthouse to have their union (10 July 1849) recognized by the state.

Emancipation coupled with new economic opportunities in the growing tobacco and manufacturing industries brought Anderson and many other freed slaves from farms in other parts of the county to the area around the new city of Durham (for more on this generally see Leslie Brown's Upbuilding Black Durham pp.27-55). Anderson had certainly moved to the Durham area by 1868 when Washington Duke enumerated him as a voter for the federal elections that year (one imagines he voted for U.S. Grant).

In Durham township he lived near other former Leathers slaves and worked as a hired farm laborer and perhaps shoemaker along with four of his sons (ages 8-14). This hard work apparently paid off and he was able to buy his 10 acres "on the waters of Ellerbee creek" bordering Hampton Dollar, George Turner, and the Guess Mill road. Acquiring the farm was an achievement of some rarity for a man like Anderson. By the 1870s only around 5% of black men in NC owned property, many of whom were freed prior to the civil war (see Kenzer, p.12). As a slave until emancipation, Leathers had none of the advantages of antebellum free blacks and probably started the post civil war years with no capital or credit at all. By 1875 Anderson owned two cattle and five hogs and his 10 acres were evaluated at $75 by the county property tax assessor. In 1879, his 8 acres of tilled land produced 300 pounds of tobacco, 75 bushels of maize, 25 bushels of oats, and a half bale of cotton valued all told at $75 (Durham chicken enthusiasts should note that the farm only managed 20 eggs that year). Though he continued to farm without any hired labor, even expanding his holdings to 12 acres, the 1880 census lists Anderson's occupation as Shoemaker. Likewise, his sons, like many others, become tobacco factory workers.

By the 1880s, Anderson had a mix of black and white neighbors. These included white landowners J.W. Markham and J.A. Malone (produced 30 lbs. of honey in 1879!), as well as Bethel Snipes and John Trice, both black farmers (though Trice did not own land). Though Anderson's relationships with his black neighbors are unclear in extant records, Markham and Malone both played a role in Leathers' legal affairs - Markham as the executor of Anderson's will and Malone as a witness to its writing. Leathers also appears to have been active in civic life and interested in the life of the growing black population in the greater Durham area.

Perhaps because he never learned to read or write, Leathers took a particularly active role in the educational life of others. In 1882, the school board commissioners of newly formed Durham county appointed Leathers the head of Durham township colored public school committee no. 1 - his neighbor Markham was a committeeman for the parallel white school district. He remained the sole committeeman in 1883 when his district was carved up and became district no. 6 "south Piney Grove." By 1886 he was joined on the committee by N.E. Cain and famous Durhamite R.B. Fitzgerald. Whether from necessity, convenience, or a touch of self-interest the 3-man committee paid $62 in Feb. 1886 for half an acre of Leathers' land on Guess Mill road in order to erect a free school. That same year, the North Carolina supreme court declared racially based taxation (white taxes to white schools, black taxes to black schools) unconstitutional in Rigsbee v. Town of Durham (99 NC 341) and it's unclear if the school on Leathers' land was ever built (it was still called the "free school lot" in 1890).

By the 1890s, Leathers had begun selling off parts of his 10 acres, in one case selling 4 acres or so for $250. When he wrote his will in 1891, Leathers estimated he had about 6 acres remaining and singled out one daughter and one son for eventual possession of his farmhouse and the acre surrounding it - the rest of his land he ordered divided up evenly among his other six children.

Anderson Leathers' six acres in 1908 and 2009 . Click for rough(!) Google earth overlay.

In 1896 Anderson Leathers died after a long life and was buried a free man on his own land. Caty (or Katy, or Catharine) continued living into the early 1900s with her son William at her side. Out of 13 live births she had eight remaining children, now spread out around Durham, her daughters with new married names like Snipes, Hicks, Sims, and Geer. After Caty died, sometime before 1905, the Leathers children behaved like many others before them (and after) by commencing suits against each other for their inheritance. Court ordered commissioners had the map above made in order to parcel out the lots for sale so as to monetarily satisfy the children's claims. By the ninteen teens all of Leathers' Guess rd. land save for one parcel had been sold off.

Lot 13 of Anderson Leathers' land on today's tax map

What first drew me to Anderson Leather's story was this one unsold parcel. After writing the piece about the trinity park cemetery (less than a mile away) I started to look around for other small cemeteries in Durham proper. In looking through tax records, the unknown cemetery lot at 1700 Guess rd. popped up and I decided to dig a little deeper. A previous cemetery canvasser for the cemetery census had failed to find anything on the site indicated by the tax map and the county records for that parcel had no deed or plat references to go on. Luckily, the city had recently drawn up a survey of the surrounding area and I was able to use other property references nearby to follow the chain back to Leathers' lot 13 which the commissioners specifically referenced as the graveyard.

2008 Plat of Walltown park area DCPB 183/292 (x added)

The plan above showing the cemetery was done by the city only last year as part of the preparations for the new recreation complex in Walltown.

Rendering of Walltown complex. Site plan by CLH Design courtesy of Cherry Huffman Architects (x added)

Anderson's land also features in this site plan for the possible Walltown aquatic center to the rec center. You'll note that like the city planning map the architects' map includes land references, except that is for the Leathers cemetery, which appears as a blank rectangle next to the proposed parking lot.

Despite his remarkable and successful life, many today, including the makers of maps and tax records, may not remember Anderson and his family, but I tend to believe the Leathers' story is worth preserving in the collective memory of Walltown and Durham generally.

Anderson Leathers graveyard 2009

This broken headstone fragment, pinned between fallen trees and a discarded couch, is all that remains of the Leathers cemetery. Though without a legible stone it's impossible to know, Anderson Leathers and his wife and perhaps a few other family members are most likely buried in the graveyard (there certainly seem to be other burial depressions on the site). Perhaps it's too much to hope that in the flurry of building construction and paving for the new rec center, some trash clearing might be done or even a small marker erected for one of the more remarkable families to live in Durham. I would hate his life to be marked as anonymously as that of many of his relatives and friends.

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Many thanks are due to Trudi Abel at Digital Durham for pointing out the 1880 agricultural census and to Erik Landfried at Bull City Rising for his reporting on the aquatic complex.

Change in direction

I'm back from 8 months in the UK and I've realized that I can't keep up any sort of regular blogging pace. From now on I'll only be posting occasional much longer pieces.

More election maps

I've just spent some time finding old precinct data and coloring in maps hoping that something significant would come up. I'm going to stop for now as I'm not sure how significant the data actually is but I give you Durham precincts by presidential winner for 2000,2004, and 2008 (click to enlarge).

Election

In honor of all the election excitement I thought I'd put up some neat Durham county elections maps. These are all available on the incredibly helpful and easy to use state board of elections website. The biggest caveat for the maps from the 2008 election below is that one-stop early voting and absentee voting are not represented. This is a big deal as 97,429 votes were cast in early voting which is about 71% of the total 135,793 ballots cast. Nonetheless, I think the election day results are somewhat representative - it's not as if Rougemont would have gone blue had everyone been forced to vote in their precinct. (click on the images for higher res map)

First up - presidential results by precinct

Pretty solid division between the north and south parts of the county with a lone red holdout at the St. Stephen's episcopal church polling place to the SW.

The map for the senate race (went 74/23 for Hagan overall) looks much the same except for those flip-floppers at Glenn Elementary School in the eastern part of the county. While voters there went 53/46 for McCain they voted for Kay Hagan 49/46.

Bev Purdue won Durham handily (70/25) and even got the voters of Glenn Elementary on her side but for some reason folks voting at Forest View elementary (center-west) which went 57/41 for Obama decided for McCrory 50/43 with 6% going for Dukie Michael Munger.

Yet lo and behold when it came to the Lt. Governor's race voters at both Glenn and Forest View elementaries just couldn't bear to be consistent. Forest View went 49/45 for Dalton (D) while Glenn, which liked Purdue 48/46 seemed to prefer a Republican Lt. Gov also 48/46. Any voters there care to explain themselves?
Finally, I give you the big winner of the night, attorney general Roy Cooper (won 82/17). He garnered the most votes of any candidate or item on the ballot (107,786 or 5,500 more than Obama) and will I'm sure be handed the keys to the county at some point. Not even unopposed candidates managed as many votes. There are probably 240k or so men, women, and children living in Durham county so he did quite well though he obviously couldn't persuade the curmudgeons in the Neal middle school district to complete his all Durham sweep.

If the NCBOE site is right it looks like voter turnout ~70% was slightly lower than the ~73% in 2004 but this obscures the fact that there were 40,000 more registered voters this time around (~193,000) meaning that nearly as many people voted this year -135,000 (if +/-20,000 is nearly) as there were registered voters in total in 2004 (~154,000).

There has been a sharp jump in both registrations and the number voting for president as well. Below are the numbers of people who voted for president in Durham (not total number who voted) since 1996:

1996: 80,910 (60/38 Clinton)
2000: 84,604 (63/36 Gore)
2004: 109,651 (67/33 Kerry)
2008: 135,342 (75.5/23.5 Obama)

Big numbers and an exciting big win locally for Obama. This weekend I bring you a historical election map or two.

Ground Zero at Five Points

1950 Durham A-Bomb blast map (Duke University Libraries)

This is one of my favorite Durham maps and I'm quite upset that I couldn't get my hands on a large format scanner to display it online in all its glory. My bad photography does not do it justice. The map was created in 1950 by the Durham public works department only a year after the first Soviet nuclear test. I've transcribed the on-map text describing damage in each of the concentric rings as the images are less than clear:

1950 Durham A-Bomb blast map detail - not as blurry as above

" This map is marked in zones of 3000, 6000, and 12000 feet from Ground Zero at Five Points. Sources, William L. Laurence's digest of "The Effects of Atomic Weaponds" published this month by the AEC (The New York Times, August 17 and 18, 1950)
3000 feet - edge of the East Campus to the bus station. Virtual complete destruction of all buildings. Initial nuclear radiation fatal to those not protected by 12 inches of concrete. Blast and heat are so serious that "radiological injury does not need consideration." In other words, almost everyone will be a casualty.
Fire stations, marked in red, are all in, or very close to this area."

" 6000 feet - rest of the East Campus to Lincoln Hospital. Most buildings damaged beyond repair. Serious flame and flash burns, especially from the fire storm resulting from the high winds which will blow into this area. Most fire equipment will already be destroyed. There will be no water pressure. In most American cities there will be 80,000 surviving injured, half of them stretcher cases.
A third of these stretcher cases (12,000) will die within twelve hours from shock unless treated treated immediately with blood plasma or substitutes. "They are the largest group of preventable fatalities." The next most urgent problem is getting all the stretcher cases into hospitals within 72 hours. Those who will get radiation sickness are likely to remain well from seven to ten days. Then those exposed can be treated "in orderly fashion."
Total hospital beds in North and South Carolina (1948- The World Almanac, 1950) are 38,924. Total in this county at that time were 1142. Duke Hospital then had 558 beds."

" 12000 feet - Blast damage to most homes. Very severe fire, window and plaster damage. None of these homes will be fit for occupation. In a typical British city, there will be 100,000 refugees to be provided for. Thermal radiation burns for all those who were outside in this area; most people also subject to radiation, though not in lethal quantities. All overhead power and telephone wires will be down in this area. Hospitals marked in purple."

" Limit of light damage - windows and plaster damage and some fires - will be eight miles or more, depending on the
This eight mile radius includes a little more than half of the county. It would take in Hope Valley, Lowes Grove, Braggtown, Gorman... It would extend to the flat land right below Chapel Hill and about two miles...road to Raleigh."

I would love a clear scan of the map and am curious if anyone out there has one.

Quiz

*Updated - sorry that was really hard, this should make it easier*
*Solved! - contemporary view now below*
I'm swamped with work this week so I had the inspiration for a cop-out map quiz. I'm delighted that folks are taking what they learn from the site and doing their own research and making their own maps (see Hickstown post comments). I just came across a really surprising image on the sanborn maps site and figured I'd throw it out there as a challenge. Where is this Durham
intersection today?:

1937 Sanborn map image (Copyright SBC)

Site today - soon to be site of new 9th street north development (Google maps)

The image is oriented like the original with north to the top and the street layout is exactly the same today minus the stream and wooden bridges for traffic. Many readers have probably passed through the intersection at some point but I'm sure it will get more notice now that it's been in the news and in neighborhood debates the several weeks. Good luck!

Hickstown part II

Hickstown looking west from near NCRR (from DOT report)

While the picture above was most likely taken in the late 1970s or early 1980s it probably doesn't differ too much from what the area looked like in the 1950s (except for the VA hospital in the background). Most roads in the community were unpaved like the one above (Barnum?) and many of the lots from the plat on the previous post remained vacant throughout the period.

1953 Sanborn Map (click to enlarge)

This Sanborn map from 1953 only shows the section of Hickstown to the west of the tracks but the section to the east has kept its general street pattern and some original dwellings. Notice the number of streets listed as unpaved as well as the Hickstown School to the extreme left on Crest st. From what I gather there had been a school for the black children of Hickstown on that site for several decades before it was rebuilt as part of the Rosenwald school plan (note the description "heat-stoves"). It was later rebuilt after integration as Crest st. Elementary and is still there today in the form of a senior center. Just off the map to the west next to the school was the Hickstown cemetery where over 1000 mostly black members of Hickstown and Durham were buried.

Hickstown Cemetery plan (illegible in original- list of graves)

However the cemetery is now no longer there and the majority of the houses and streets in the 1953 plan have been completely destroyed. Most people are probably familar with the story of the destruction of Hayti in the 1960s and 70s but the saga of the Durham freeway didn't end once it got to Chapel Hill st. Highway plans called for a linkup between the freeway and I-85 and the chosen route went directly through Hickstown. However, those who do know the history of Hayti will be suprised by the outcome of the confrontation between Hickstown and the transportation department. The best description of how the residents of Hickstown managed to reach an accomodation with the state and federal governments and shape their own relocation is in this official summary. While it is a bit of a triumphalist account I think it gives a good sense of the enormous amounts of time and energy that went into the accomodation. It also serves as an important reminder of the power of tightly knit neighborhoods in the face of seemingly inevitable state plans. I'd also add that if you're ever in need of a good trivia question - I believe that disputes over attorney's fees in the moving of the neighborhood led to the most recent appearance of a Durham issue in the US Supreme Court.

Hickstown top and Crest St. Community Bottom (from DOT report)

As you can read in the report various government agencies paid to rebuild Hickstown as the new Crest st. neighborhood. All but two original Hickstown structures (see map) were destroyed and entirely new culs-de-sac, houses, and facilities were built to the west of Fulton st. The massive Hickstown cemetery was completely disinterred (google earth overlay of the cemetery on today's map) and some graves were moved to a cemetery further out in Durham county while the bulk were reinterred just across the highway at New Bethel memorial gardens. I've been to through Crest st. a number of times and talked to a couple of folks there including the very hospitable pastor of New Bethel church and it seems like the intense neighborhood pride and tight network of social connections remains to this day. My one complaint with the layout of the neighborhood neccesitated by the highway is how the neighborhood has been sequestered in a corner of development with pretty much only two ways in or out. All in all, Hickstown's story is definitley worth sharing and I'd like to see its narrative more part of discussions on Durham's history. I know there are hundreds of stories about Hickstown floating around and I'd love to hear what people know.

Hickstown part I

As I mentioned before I'm going to post on Hickstown over the next several days. Most people who have lived in Durham for more than a decade or two will probably know of Hickstown but being relatively new to the area I had no idea there was such a place until I saw it on this map below some months ago (now helpfully available online at UNC)

1895 George F. Cram Atlas (from UNC-CH maps)

Some of the historical basics about the begginings are in Jean Anderson's book but I'll summarize a few. According to Anderson, Hickstown was incorporated as its own town in 1887 in the wake of the city of Durham going dry. There were protests against its incorporation and while I don't know when it un-incorporated, its post office closed in October 1890 (anyone have any old Hickstown, NC postmarks floating around?). The settlement was named after Hawkins Hicks who lived near the NCRR tracks in a residence awarded her in court as the common law wife of Jefferson Browning who was one of the many Browning land owners in what is now western Durham.

Section from 1920 soil map (using 1914 data)

From looking at the 1910 census it looks like the above map underestimates the number of dwellings in Hickstown (two clusters of Hickstown houses highlighted above) but I would point out that on a clearer version of this map you can see a + in that northern cluster which I believe indicates the original New Bethel Baptist Church which is today on Crest st. It was built in 1879 and moved to Crest st. around 1930 with several local black landowners as its first members (and has been at the heart of the community ever since.

Some snippets on early Hickstown seem to suggest that people regarded it as a new pinhook filled with debauchery and drink as well as both black and white residents. While I don't have a good picture of early Hickstown based on the sources I have available, I think it may have been less integrated than suggested. Certainly by 1910, the federal census shows that people who lived on the primary streets of Hickstown were mostly enumerated by the white census taker as black or mixed race. This is not to say that many white families including that of Hawkins Hicks (living on today's Main street near the Food Lion) didn't have houses within close proximity to black families, it just seems to me that Hickstown as a separate entity grew up particularly as a settlement of post-civil war migrants, largely ex-slaves and their families, from elsewhere in North Carolina. This is confirmed both by the report on Hickstown's relocation (which I'll get to in the next post) and in an interesting (though dated) article on the geography of post civil war population movement. The author calls Hickstown "a former Negro agricultural village" and while I'm not sure where he got the "agricultural village" idea,I think he was probably on to something. There was a surge of small farm buying by newly arrived black families in the 1870s and 80s in various areas on the outskirts of what was then Durham and which is now well within the city limits.

1910 plat of the eastern part of Hickstown (click for GEarth overlay). Today largely a parking structure.

However, in a transition that I'll write something about someday many of these black farm owners sold their land around the turn of the century to white landowners and speculators. Some white landowners like W.T. Neal and J.W. Markham had evidently acquired property in the Hickstown area and in 1910 they parceled up some of this land to the west of the NCRR and to the south of the old New Bethel church. Some of the Hickstown street names you see above (and below) have always seemed a bit odd to me (e.g. Cycle, Barnum, Baily) and I can only think that the nearby circus grounds (near where the Kroger on Hillsborough is now) inspired the naming. I don't know the racial politics surrounding the above lot division but I would be more than a little surprised if the Clements land company was interested in selling lots to non-whites.

From 1937 public works map of Durham

While the parceling up of land for houses in 1910 suggests the beggining of the shift, by the time the map above was made agriculture had been replaced in Hickstown as a primary occupation (though farming undoubtedly continued part time on small plots) by industrial and service occupations in rapidly expanding Durham proper. I'm not sure what the state of land tenure was in Hickstown at this point but I imagine it to be concentrated in the hands of landlords as in 1980 only 22% of dwellings were owner occupied. I'll continue soon with some more maps and overlays bringing the story up to the present as well as some discussion of the well covered relocation and transformation of Hickstown in the early 1980s.

University Heights

Moving eastward from Funston back towards Durham and before I launch a longer series on Hickstown I thought I'd pause briefly at University Heights with some cautionary notes about maps. I recently came across plats of the great neighborhood of "University Heights" and was quite excited because it appeared to be located in a part of western Durham that I'm quite curious about. Here are the plats of the north and south portions with Google earth overlays linked below.

North section (GEarth overlay)

South section (GEarth overlay)

Like most people in Durham I know this area as home to two contrasting but neighboring large apartment complexes: the Belmont, and Duke Manor. I was immediately curious about this large (hundreds of lots) subdvision created in 1925 with a whole network of streets I was unfamiliar with. Maps are dangerous in that they create geographies of their own whether or not they exist on the ground. The maps above not only map out planned space but also dictate how spaces are referred to in the future. Vizt. several deeds to property in the area today including a couple of Duke deeds have references to particular lots and streets in University Heights. I looked next to my trusty 1946 Durham street map made by the city of Durham for municipal and planning purposes.

1946 road map of Durham (from the NCSA)

Look the roads are there in a kind of funny and unnatural waffle pattern disappating into nothing but there nonetheless. Excited about this lost neighborhood and wondering about its connections with Hickstown I checked the USGS topographic map from 5 years later.

1951 USGS map of the Hickstown area

MMM...well you can clearly see what became Lasalle st. including the straight section as it crosses south of the tracks labeled as Sprunt st. in the University Heights map. The rest of the neighborhood is gone though, no streets, and just three scattered buildings in the far northwest part of the planning maps. Did the neighborhood go under in just a few years - what happened? I'm fairly confident there never was a University Heights on the ground beyond the surveyors marks. The plats above were made in June 1925 at a fortuitous point in the history of that part of Durham. In Spring 1925 newly named Duke University had just finished most of the purchasing of land for what would become west campus. With the cat out of the bag for the new university location it looks like land speculators jumped on this tract just to the north of the (yet unbuilt) university and attempted to turn it into the next Hester Heights or Club acres. They failed. The land remained largely overgrown though there are clearly buildings and houses in the SE segment of the plats but those are probably part of greater Hickstown.

1955 USDA aerial photo (from Duke University libraries)

I believe those white lines running vertically down the center of the photograph to Erwin road are Third (today's Douglas st/Research dr.) and Fourth streets from the plats. I will use this picture when I talk about Hickstown but for now I've highlighted the two large cemeteries in the area (there's a 3rd smaller one I haven't highlighted) which are noted on the plats above. Being somewhat of a Durham cemetery buff I'll post more on the New Bethel Cemetery (Hickstown cemetery- towards the middle) and let John Schelp's OWDNA website tell the story of the West Durham cemetery (top).

Funston

I thought I'd continue for one more week on the railroad theme. First, in response to the question of how the segment of the NCRR through Durham was actually built, I don't have that much information and it all comes from Allen Trelease's book. Once the survey of the whole line was done in May 1851, small sections of the future line from .5 miles to 2-3 miles in length were awarded to contractors for the hard manual work of grading and preparing a bed on which the track would be built. I would love to know more about this process in what's now Durham County but all I have is that Paul Cameron of plantation (and Stagville) fame and several other local elites were awarded contracts for Orange county (unclear who got what section). They then in turn had enslaved laborers (their own or those rented from others) do the work of building the trackbed (free laborers were also occasionally employed on parts of the RR but it's not clear if there were any in this area) . Much to the chagrin of UNC and Chapel Hill boosters the NCRR survey precluded going through Chapel Hill and instead the University had to settle for a station about 10 miles or so north of the town on the main line when it was finished in 1855.

1865 Army map (From UNC-CH Maps Site)

The 1865 US Army map above shows the course of the RR as well as important local roads. Note university station at Strayhorn's store above - since the NCRR bypassed Chapel Hill a depot was set up about 10 miles or so north of campus to serve the university. This commute wasn't much better than the one from Durham where there was an arguably better road. According to Trelease, when president Buchanan came to UNC's graduation in 1859 he got out of the train in Durham and took a coach the rest of the way. If you can find a copy you can read Tony Reevy's article about the eventual Iron mining/university branch line (to the left below) that was built in the early 1880s between University station and western Chapel Hill (today's Carrboro) and its fate today.

1900-06 Scarborough Atlas (from UNC-CH maps site)

The map above shows the railroad and a few other roads around 1900. This is the first map I know of which shows the mysterious "Funston" on the RR on the very western edge of Durham county. Though I originally hoped for some long lost town, it seems after further investigation that Funston is merely the more recent name of an older rail siding. Jean Anderson points to there being a "woolen siding" at this location after the short lived textile factory which used to be located nearby. Apparently NC-DOT doesn't know the origin of the name but my guess (with no evidence) is that the siding was renamed in 1900 after Frederick Funston a Spanish-American war hero.


The Funston siding still exists and was just widened by NC-DOT a few years ago. There is also a nice sign saying "Funston" along the railway which can be viewed from 751. Above is a photo of its current extent which is much longer than it was 100 years ago. If you live in the western part of American Village or in the new development near the tracks there you might want to try and introduce the name into common usage. As far as I know this was never a stop proper on the NCRR but I would love to be proved wrong on that point.

NC RR Survey Maps 1850

It's hard to live in Durham and not notice the train tracks and the trains, at-grade crossings, and occasional deafening horn blasts that come with them. Most people probably also know the basic facts about Durham being founded as a depot on the new North Carolina Railroad in the early 1850s - the railroad needing a water and fuel depot somewhere between Raleigh and Hillsborough and Dr. B.L. Durham willing to give up some land to the company. The story has been told a number of times but it's worth reading Jean Anderson's account or Gary's at Endangered Durham. What seems to circulate less widely are the railroad survey maps made when the course of the track from Goldsboro to Charlotte was being planned. By far the definitive account of all things NC RR related is Allen Trelease's The North Carolina Railroad, 1849-1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina which has good chapters on both its founding and the process of surveying and building it's length. Engineer John McRae was in charge of the part of the survey that went through today's Durham and his surveyor's and draftsmen as well as those of the other sections of the RR produced a set or really extraordinary small scale maps of every foot of planned track with local watercourses, buildings, and property lines. The original maps are held at the state archives in Raleigh and are fairly easy to request if you take a trip down there. The best high resolution image of any part of the Durham segment that I know of is in Jean Anderson's book and shows the planned Durham's station depot as well as a few scattered buildings in the immediate area.

I was in the Raleigh archives a few months ago and figured I should take some photos of all the maps which cover today's Durham. I was lazy however and after I stopped after a lot of odd looks from other archivists and other researchers for standing on a chair trying to get all of each map in one photo (the maps are really quite large). As a result the maps aren't as high resolution as they might be (though every word should be readable) and more importantly some of the edges are cut off - I haven't cropped them or prettied them up so you can see the full layout and where the edges should be. Nonetheless I've put together a tentative google earth overlay of the survey maps from downtown Durham to the west past Pinhook. I've done my best but since I missed small bits of the maps in photographing and because I took the pictures from an odd chair-standing sideways angle they aren't quite at perfect scale. Mostly I'm just making excuses for why I just couldn't get them to fit on today's map as seamlessly as I wanted. I've posted the three maps below with the four overlays linked underneath and you probably get the best effect if you have them all open at the same time (the Durham's station bit gets chopped in two for the overlay - don't ask).

Planned Durham's Station depot (overlay1, overlay2)

Pinhook area west of the station (overlay)

Hickstown - West Durham (overlay)

Besides establishing me as one of the worst archival photographers in the state, these maps help to show how much Durham grew within just a few decades (compare 1881 map here). Families like the Turners and the Hicks remained in Durham for the duration but property lines shifted with the growth of the town (Pratt's illegitmate children also remained important in Durham politics into the 20th century - more on that in future postings). J.R. Green, one of the creators and first marketers of Bull Durham tobacco bought (at least part of) Andrew Turner's farm before the civil war and William Pratt's land was split up after his death in 1867 (see post below). Pinhook ceased being the raucous site of naked whiskey racing by the late 19th century(I hear there is a new bar called Pinhook in the works for Durham that seems like it may live up to that legacy), more and more people and businesses business built on this ribbon of land around the NCRR, and by the creation of Durham county in 1881 the surveys above would have been unfamiliar to most newcomers.

First Durham Map

Before I can come up with another longish post I thought I'd go back to putting a few more general maps up. I've displayed two maps below. One of these two maps was the first general state map to include Durham. The North Carolina Railroad put Durham's station on the map remarkably soon after the first train service in the early summer of 1855:

From the NC Maps Collection at UNC (see links to the right)

This map (above) was published as part of an atlas between 1855 and 1860. It's fairly simple and doesn't depict many of the smaller towns and crossroads in the area - perhaps unfairly catapulting Durham into the minds of readers as it still had only a couple hundred people living in is vicinity. Also it seems that the Eno got lost in the shuffle of this map though it does include New Hope creek flowing south from the Durham area.

From the NC Maps collection at UNC

The map above has the potential to be the earliest of the two and was published in either 1858 or 1859 also as part of an atlas. I especially appreciate the added detail though I have to say that the measuring is a bit off as Durham has been shunted almost all the way to the Orange county line and quite far south of the Eno. I'd love to know if anyone else can find an earlier atlas or large scale map that depicts Durham

Trinity Park/ Markham property

I'm still recovering from doing that Nancy Warren post so this one will be pretty brief. I wanted first to say thanks to everyone who emailed and commented about the Watts st. cemetery. I've heard from a few family historians who really have a vast knowledge of the Warren and Shambley families which is exciting to see. They've pretty much convinced me that there were two cousins both with the middle name of Kinchen and last name Shambley and both born within a year of each other and that Jesse was the other Kinchen from the one most proximate to Nancy on that 1860 census. I also wanted to mention one other detail that I've heard from a few sources over the last week - according to a cemetery survey done in the early 1980's and the original archaeological survey done last year there used to be a pair of very large trees straddling the entrance to the cemetery. One reason Nancy's body was missed is that it was partially buried under a part of one of the trees. Obviously those trees were torn down in the building over the past year and with them the last markers of its original use.

I promised to post the 1911 property map of the Markham estate which became much of the northern half of today's Trinity Park. I have it as a google earth overlay so you can see it fit pretty nicely on the grid of today's streets as well as below.


Notice the earlier proposed street name for Gregson - "Hated" st. The story goes that this naming choice came about because of the mutual dislike evident between Watts and Brodie Duke. Hence reading the street names Watts hated Duke and vice versa. Though in this map today's Watts st. is rendered as Hospital st. after the original Watts hospital due south near Main st. This planned subdivision map is also a reminder of how misleading property maps can be. If you look at the Sanborn fire insurance maps from the post below you can see that many of these lots were not built on or even subdivided for decades thus rendering this map totally unfamiliar to anyone standing on the corner of Urban and Watts in 1915.

(From Digital Durham- 2008 street name additions my own)

It is interesting to note the area right near the cemetery and the boundary between Durham and the former city of West Durham. You can plainly see on the 1911 property map where the property line veers east away from Guess rd./First st./Buchanan on a diagonal which was the city boundary as it was the former property line dividing Markham's land from the Durham land trust and improvement company. Over at Digital Durham there is an 1890 map of the area just to the west of the Markham land (mapped above) where you can see the planned course of two separate streets running north away from Trinity College's campus - First st. to the west and Guess to the east along the property line. That diagonal split never happened in practice and we are left with a only slightly crooked Buchanan today.