Category: Tar Talk

December 1865: Henry Martin Tupper and the Founding of Shaw University

This Month in North Carolina History

Postcard of Shaw administration building

Massachusetts native Henry Martin Tupper (1831-1893) attended Amherst College and Newton Theological Seminary before enlisting in the Union Army in 1862. After he was honorably discharged, Tupper requested that the American Baptist Home Mission Society of New York station him in the South so that he could work with former slaves.

The Tuppers arrived in Raleigh in October 1865. An anecdote recounted in Carter’s Shaw’s Universe reports that after travelling to Portsmouth, Virginia, Tupper and his wife stopped at a train station that had been partially destroyed during the Civil War, and purchased the first two tickets on the train to Raleigh after the tracks had been reconstructed. After establishing himself in Raleigh, Tupper began teaching Bible classes to former slaves in December. The classes were held in the Guion Hotel and aimed to teach African Americans how to read and interpret the Bible to prepare them to be Baptist ministers. In March of 1866, his wife began teaching classes to African American women in the Tupper’s home. Tupper quickly realized the need for education beyond theology courses, and set out to found what would eventually become Shaw University, the first black college in the South.

In February 1866, Tupper purchased land on the corner of Blount and Cabarrus Streets and built a two-story structure there that would serve both as a church and a school. Tupper used $500 that he had saved from serving as a Union soldier to help fund the land purchase. Significant financial assistance for construction was provided by the Freedmen’s Bureau and the New England Freedman’s Aid Society. On January 1, 1869, the Raleigh Theological Institute admitted its first class of fifteen seminary students. A year later, the school had outgrown its facilities and began making plans to expand. Through Tupper’s fundraising efforts and monetary support from Elijah Shaw (a woolen manufacturer from Massachusetts) and the Freedmen’s Bureau, funds were secured to purchase an estate in the center of Raleigh. Upon relocating, the school changed its name to the Shaw Collegiate Institute. In 1875 the school officially became incorporated as Shaw University.

Postcard of women on Shaw campus

Shaw University was co-educational from the beginning. A dormitory for men was built in 1871-1872, and, the first dormitory for African American women – Etsey Hall – was constructed on Shaw’s campus in 1874. Shaw University claims several other firsts, including Leonard Medical School, which was the first medical and pharmacy school that trained African Americans in the state of North Carolina, and, in 1888, the only law school for African Americans in the South. The 1878-1879 Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Shaw University reports that there were a total of 152 males and 115 females enrolled in various courses of study for that particular school year. During the 1878-1879 academic year, the majority of students were from North Carolina, but students from anywhere could enroll – several students were from Virginia and South Carolina, and one was from New Jersey.

Postcard of Leonard Building and medical school

At Shaw Collegiate Institute, Tupper served both as an administrator and instructor of the school and pastor of the church. He taught lessons during the day and night school classes. Managing both the school and the church gave rise to conflict for Tupper, and in 1870, people claiming to be trustees of the Second Baptist Church brought a suit accusing him of defrauding the church. The various charges suggested intrigue and internal politics relating to Tupper’s funding and administration of the church and the school and the wronging of African American church members. The law suit lasted until 1875 when a verdict was given in Tupper’s favor. Despite the lawsuit and other setbacks, Tupper oversaw the growth and expansion of the University and advocated for access to higher education for African Americans until he died in November of 1893. Tupper was buried on the campus grounds, and Dr. Nickolas Franklin Roberts, an African American and a graduate of Shaw University, was named acting president.

Shaw brochure

Sources:

Carroll, Grady Lee Ernest, Sr. They Lived in Raleigh: Some Leading Personalities from 1792 to 1892. Raleigh, NC: Southeastern Copy Center, 1977.

Carter, Wilmoth A. Shaw’s Universe: A Monument to Educational Innovation. Raleigh, NC: Shaw University, 1973.

Kearns, Kathleen, and Dayton, Michael J. Capital Lawyers: A Legacy of Leadership. Birmingham, AL: Association Publishing, 2004.

Shaw University. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Shaw University, 1878 and 1879. Raleigh, NC: Edwards, Broughton & Co., Printers and Binders, 1879.

Image Sources:

“Shaw Building, Shaw University, Raleigh, N. C.” in Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

“Shaw University for the Colored, Raleigh, N.C.” in Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

“Shaw University, Raleigh, N.C.“, Wake County, North Carolina Postcard Collection (P052), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

Shaw University brochure 1974, from [Shaw University Announcements, Bulletins, Programs, etc.] VC378.9 M67 Shaw 1874-.

Score one for the ‘demon-worshippers’

“If you read ‘Paradise Lost,’ they think you’re a demon-worshipper.”

— Bill Flowers, owner of the Milestone Club in Charlotte, describing (in 1982) his neighbors’ reaction to the New Wave scene

This week the Milestone, still gritty but and now venerated, celebrates its 40th anniversary. Saturday: Raleigh’s Birds of Avalon. Among past acts: R.E.M., Nirvana, Melissa Etheridge, the Violent Femmes, the Go-Gos and Bo Diddley.

How the need for ‘debuncombizing’ was averted

The origin of “bunkum” — N.C. Congressman Felix Walker’s explanation of his longwinded, irrelevant speech on the Missouri Compromise as “talking for Buncombe” — approaches common knowledge, but the late columnist William Safire traced some notable details in “Safire’s Political Dictionary”:

“By 1828…talking to (or for) Buncombe was well known. The Wilmington (N.C.) Commercial referred in 1849 to ‘the Buncombe politicians — those who go for re-election merely,’ and British author Thomas Carlyle showed that the expression traveled the Atlantic with its meaning intact: ‘A parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the 27 millions, mostly fools’…

“In 1923 William E. Woodward wrote a book titled Bunk and introduced the verb ‘debunk.’ A school of historians were named debunkers for the way they tore down the myths other historians had built up. Hokum, according to the OED, is a blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum.”

Bickett decries ‘wicked appeal to race prejudice’

“The scheme is so transparently impossible, so plainly a gold-brick proposition, that ordinarily the inmates of a school for the feebleminded could not be induced to part with their coin for a certificate of membership…

“But running through the whole scheme is a wicked appeal to race prejudice. There is a hark back to the lawless time that followed the Civil War…There is no need for any secret order to enforce the law of this land…Just now all of us need to be considerate and kind and trustful in our dealings with the Negro.”

— Gov. Thomas Bickett, circa 1921, responding to the revival of the KKK inspired by The Birth of a Nation. Bickett was quoted in an NAACP handbill calling on citizens not to “allow Ku Klux Klan propaganda to be displayed in the movies in New York City.”

The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography describes Bickett as “a traditionalist in his attitude toward race relations [who] nonetheless manifested a sympathy for the lot of the blacks uncommon among Southern politicians of his time.”

September 1862: The Birth of O. Henry

This Month in North Carolina History

Porter, William Sydney (O. Henry) in the Portrait Collection, #P002, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina, is the final resting place for Thomas Wolfe, Asheville native and North Carolina’s most famous author. It is perhaps less well known that Riverside also contains the grave of William Sydney Porter who, under the pen name O. Henry, had gained a national and even an international reputation as a writer at the turn of the twentieth century.

Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862. He was educated by his aunt, Evelina Porter, until he was fifteen, when he left school to go to work in the drugstore of his uncle. He became a licensed pharmacist at nineteen. In 1882 Porter left Greensboro for Texas hoping to improve his health. For almost a decade he worked at a number of jobs, including ranch hand, cook, draftsman, and, ultimately, bank teller. At the same time he began to write short pieces for local newspapers and develop his talent as a cartoonist. In 1895 Porter left his position at the First National Bank of Austin to become a columnist and reporter for the Houston Daily Post. He married Athol Estes in 1887. The couple had a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter, Margaret Worth Porter.

Porter’s life changed dramatically in 1896 when he was indicted for fraud in connection with his work with the bank in Austin. Porter protested his innocence, but, to avoid standing trial, he fled to Central America. Learning that his wife was suffering from an incurable disease, Porter returned to Austin in 1897. After his wife’s death, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in the Ohio Penitentiary. After serving a little over three years he was released for good behavior in 1901. Working as a druggist in the prison hospital gave Porter the time to continue his writing. His first short story was published in 1898 and others followed. To conceal his identity and imprisonment from his publishers, Porter wrote under several pseudonyms, but the one on which he finally settled was O. Henry. On his release from prison Porter moved with his daughter to New York City, where for the remaining eight years of his life he wrote prodigiously, producing more than 380 short stories, sometimes at the rate of one a week.

O. Henry became one of America’s most popular writers, with an international following as well. Whether his theme was serious or comic, his writing style was casual, light, and playful. He created hundreds of characters from the people he found around him in the west or in New York. Clerks, waitresses, ranch hands, policemen, confidence men – The Four Million, as he entitled one of his collections of stories – were his inspiration. O. Henry was most famous for his surprise endings. In “The Cop and the Anthem” a New York hobo, Soapy, tries repeatedly to get himself arrested so he can spend the cold winter months in the relative warmth of the city jail on Riker’s Island. Discouraged because all of his efforts have failed spectacularly and comically, Soapy sits on a bench and listens to a beautiful anthem being sung in a nearby church. Under the influence of the music Soapy pledges to become a new person and rebuild his life. At that moment a patrolman arrests him for loitering and marches him off to The Island.

Porter’s health began to fail in 1908 under the impact of diabetes and heavy drinking. He traveled to Asheville in an attempt to recuperate and believed he had regained much of his strength while he was there. He returned to New York to resume work, but his health continued to deteriorate. He died on June 5, 1910.

Sources:

O’Connor, Richard. O. Henry: the legendary life of William S. Porter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970.

Edgar E. Macdonald, “Porter, William Sydney.” In Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 5. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Image Source:

Porter, William Sydney (O. Henry) in the Portrait Collection, #P002, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

July 1937: Krispy Kreme Opens in Winston-Salem

This Month in North Carolina History

Krispy Kreme hat

On July 13, 1937, the first Krispy Kreme store opened for business in Winston-Salem, NC. The company’s success and quick rise to popularity were due both to the personal history of Vernon Rudolph, its owner, and the larger cultural history of doughnuts in America (and more specifically, the American South).

There were very few doughnuts shops in the South prior to the 1930s, and doughnut recipes that found their way into Southern kitchens were often thought of as “Yankee treats,” coming from places like Pennsylvania. However, several Southern food traditions and preferences helped pave the way for successful doughnut ventures. Bready foods such as biscuits and deep-fried snacks like hushpuppies had long been extremely popular in the region, as were other doughnut-like products, including French beignets in New Orleans.

Vernon Rudolph opened his first doughnut shop in 1933 in the town of Paducah, Kentucky, with a recipe his uncle had purchased from a chef in New Orleans. Within a few years, he had moved his business to several other Southern cities, and was focused on selling his doughnuts wholesale to local grocery stores. He still had not found the perfect location to establish his business. It wasn’t until the summer of 1937 that Rudolph set off for Winston-Salem, NC, with little more than twenty dollars in his pocket, two friends, and the intention of opening a new doughnut shop.

Why Winston-Salem? Many sources report that Rudolph was inspired by the pack of cigarettes he was smoking. He figured that a city that already supported one large industry – tobacco – would be able to support another. He also saw Winston-Salem’s early acceptance of industrialization and technology as promising, because his methods of doughnut production were mechanized. In addition he believed that a city with a large population had the potential to translate into a sizeable customer base.

The first Krispy Kreme store was located in Old Salem, across the street from the Salem Academy. After they made their rent payment, Rudolph and his partners had no money left to buy supplies and ingredients. Rudolph didn’t let this stop him, and managed to convince a local grocer to advance him the ingredients he needed in order to make the first batch of donuts, with the promise that he would soon pay the grocer back. In mid-July of 1937, the first batch of Krispy Kreme doughnuts was made.

The Krispy Kreme business model continued as it had before in Rudolph’s earlier stores, selling wholesale to local groceries. He used the Pontiac car that brought him to Winston-Salem to make his deliveries. In order to make delivering large quantities of doughnuts possible, Rudolph had to take out the back seat of the car – perhaps he could have taken inspiration from the same delivery methods that North Carolina bootleggers used during Prohibition?

However, Rudolph’s location in a busy downtown district was pumping the smell of his deep-fried donuts into an area frequented by pedestrians. They began stopping by to ask if they could purchase doughnuts for themselves rather than waiting to buy them at a store. Rudolph eventually succumbed to their demands and cut a hole in the wall so that he could sell doughnuts directly to the public fresh from the production line. The hole in the wall, which turned a wholesale operation into a retail business, had unintended consequences for how customers interacted with the business by showing them an open view directly into the production center. In addition to purveying their glazed calorie-bombs to the general public, Krispy Kreme was now selling the experience of sneaking a peek into the behind-the-scenes activities of the shop.

Rudolph used the new window into the production space to get customers’ attention. It was successful because it highlighted how clean and modern it was and introduced an element of tourism. Opening this window showed customers the machines Rudolph was using to produce doughnuts, which were definitely not old-fashioned. In fact, even the shape of a Krispy Kreme is mechanically derived: the doughnuts are formed from dough extruded by air pressure to form a perfect doughnut shape. There’s no traditional doughnut hole here! The Ring King Jr. used by Krispy Kreme stores to make doughnuts in the 1950s could make 75 dozen doughnuts in an hour.

Eventually, Krispy Kreme stores began installing their “Hot Now!” signs which lit up when fresh doughnuts were being produced in order to catch customers’ attention. At the beginning, Krispy Kreme’s business was largely focused on the wholesale market, so most doughnuts were being produced very early in the morning. As the company’s retail trade grew, it began producing doughnuts at times that were more customer friendly, with the “Hot Now!” used to draw in customers when they most wanted a doughnut.

Rudolph died in 1973 at the age of 58, but the company’s success continued to be closely tied to the spectacle of mechanical production. Even administrators of the company today refer to Krispy Kreme shops as “factory stores.” The stores were renovated again in the 1980s, creating more of a “stage” for doughnut production than a kitchen. More recently, Krispy Kreme introduced a line of coffees and espresso drinks to compete with other popular doughnut and coffee chains, which continues to encourage customers to stay and watch the doughnut production line.

Krispy Kreme has become something a cult obsession over the years, and its distinctive logo can often be found on T-shirts, thermoses, or the little paper chef’s hats you can take when you visit a store location. In 2004, NC State students developed a charity race, the Krispy Kreme Challenge, in which participants run two miles from the Bell Tower on State’s campus to the Krispy Kreme store on Peace Street, eat a dozen donuts, and run the two miles back, all within one hour.

Currently there are dozens flavors of Krispy Kreme doughnuts (not to mention their mini doughnuts and doughnut holes), but the Original Glazed has always been the most popular. The recipe that Vernon Rudolph’s uncle purchased from the French baker in New Orleans remains a secret, locked up in a safe in Winston-Salem. And while the recipe may not be available for your perusal, the corporate archives of Krispy Kreme are located at the Smithsonian Institution, as are some of the company’s doughnut-making machines from the 1950s, like the famous Ring King Jr.

Donut Queen button

Sources:

Kazanjian, Kirk and Joyner, Amy. Making Dough: The 12 Secret Ingredients of Krispy Kreme’s Sweet Success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004.

“Our Story,” Krispy Kreme website, accessed July 2014

Mullins, Paul R. Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut. Gainesville, FL: The University of Florida Press, 2008.

de la Pena, Carolyn. “Mechanized Southern Comfort: Touring the Technological South at Krispy Kreme,” in Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways and Consumer Culture in the American South, ed. by Anthony J. Stanonis. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Image Sources:

[Krispy Kreme paper hat], North Carolina Collection Gallery, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

“Krispy Kreme, Donut Queen,” Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, North Carolina Collection Gallery, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

February 1891: Founding of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This Month in North Carolina History

Postcard of UNC-Greensboro Administration Building
On February 18, 1891, the North Carolina General Assembly passed “An Act to Establish a Normal and Industrial School for White Girls,” creating the first public institution in the state to offer higher education to women. Called originally the State Normal and Industrial School, it became North Carolina College for Women in 1919, Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in 1931, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1963.

“The Normal” was one of the notable achievements of the reform movement in education which began in North Carolina in the 1880s. By almost any standard, education in North Carolina was in miserable condition at the beginning of the final decade of the nineteenth century. Nearly one third its citizens were illiterate; school attendance rates were well behind that of the nation as a whole; and, at one point during this period, North Carolina had the lowest per pupil expenditure rate in the nation. A group of young teachers, several of them trained at the University of North Carolina, accepted the challenge of revamping the state’s educational system. To do this they advocated the adoption of the graded school concept throughout the state. Graded schools — in which students pass from lower to higher levels or grades every year — demanded a substantial increase in professionally trained teachers, so the educational reformers also sought the establishment of training schools for a new generation of teachers. Beginning in 1889 Charles Duncan McIver and Edwin Alderman, two of the young leaders of the educational reform movement, crisscrossed the state holding “Teachers’ Institutes” in every county. They hammered home the advantages of the graded school system and always put in a plea for a teachers’ training school. When the legislature finally acted in 1891, McIver was the obvious choice to head the school, while Alderman was one of the first faculty members. After considering several locations, a site on the edge of Greensboro, North Carolina, was chosen for the new school, and in 1892 the Normal and Industrial School welcomed the first students to its new, two-building campus.

Postcard of Student's Building, State Normal and Industrial CollegeOver the years under several names, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro supplied teachers to the public school systems of the state. McIver and Alderman, however, had also believed in the value of higher education for women as a good in itself, and from the beginning the school served this cause as well. The curriculum in the arts and sciences broadened and deepened as the Normal became first a college and then a university. As Chancellor William Moran observed in 1992, the founders and faculty at Greensboro understood “that talented women were one of the new forces that would shape the nation and the twentieth century.”

Sources
Trelease, Allen W. Making North Carolina Literate: the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Normal School to Metropolitan University. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2004.

Moran, William E. Between History and Hope: Some Centennial Reflections. New York: Newcomen Society of the United States, 1992.

Bowles, Elisabeth Ann. A Good Beginning: the First Four Decades of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.

January 1890: Creation of the American Tobacco Company

This Month in North Carolina History

Late in January 1890 the five largest tobacco companies in the United States completed a series of meetings stretching back for almost a year and agreed to combine their operations into the largest tobacco manufacturing corporation in the world. The American Tobacco Company, chartered under the laws of New Jersey, dominated the market for tobacco products in the United States and was a major supplier of tobacco to Europe and Asia for nearly twenty years. A prime example of what historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., called “managerial capitalism,” American Tobacco monopolized the production of all tobacco products except cigars, and replaced market forces with management decision making to both stimulate and supply the demand for its product.
Scotland Coins of All Nations card from American Tobacco packet

The driving force behind the creation of American Tobacco was W. Duke Sons and Company of Durham, North Carolina, led by James Buchanan Duke. The family business had prospered under James B. Duke’s combination of aggressive marketing and strict cost accounting but lagged behind older and larger firms. Duke believed that the future of tobacco manufacturing was in cigarettes and that the key to success in making cigarettes lay in the cigarette rolling machine. In 1885 Duke reached an agreement with the Bonsack Company of Virginia to lease their cigarette manufacturing machines for his factories. Other cigarette manufacturers had rejected the Bonsack machine, fearing that it was unreliable and believing that customers had a strong preference for hand-made cigarettes and would not buy the machine-made variety. Duke’s gamble paid off in a big way. The machines worked effectively and greatly increased W. Duke Sons production. Lower cigarette prices, brought on by increased manufacturing efficiency and secret leasing terms Duke had negotiated with the Bonsack Company, overcame any customer resistance. W. Duke Sons became one of the largest tobacco companies in the United States. In the late 1880s James B. Duke slowly moved toward creating a monopolistic combination of the five dominant tobacco firms. This led ultimately to the series of meetings in 1889 from which American Tobacco was born.

Siam Coins of All Nations card from American Tobacco packet

After 1890 Duke methodically combined the manufacturing functions of the firms comprising American Tobacco. He introduced the accounting system which had been so successful at W. Duke Sons and continued a strong marketing and sales program. Under his leadership American Tobacco flourished, gaining control of the market for plug tobacco and pipe tobacco as well as cigarettes. American Tobacco’s success, however, brought it to the attention of Federal regulators, and in 1907 the national government began an anti-trust suit against the company. In 1911 the United States Supreme Court held that American Tobacco violated the Sherman Anti-trust Act and ordered it dissolved. James B. Duke participated in the process of reorganizing the tobacco giant into three companies: a much smaller American Tobacco, Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company, and P. Lorillard Company, but, after that, increasingly distanced himself from the tobacco business and went on to other interests. For a short while, a North Carolina company was at the center of the biggest tobacco manufacturing concern in the world and one of the giants in the era of great American business combinations.

Sources:

Tilley, Nannie May. “Agitation against the American Tobacco Company in North Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review, 24:2 (April, 1947), pages 207-223.

Durden, Robert F. Bold entrepreneur: a life of James B. Duke. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003.

American Tobacco story. [New York]: American Tobacco Co., 1962.

Image Source:

Coins of all nations. New York: Knapp & Co., [188?]. [Distributed in packages of Duke’s cigarettes.]