Category: This Month in N.C. History

March 1840: Wilmington & Weldon Railroad

This Month in North Carolina History

Image from Wilmington Advertiser of Wilmington and Weldon Railroad train

On the seventh of March, 1840, the last spike was driven to complete the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad. As well as being the pride and joy of Wilmington, North Carolina, at 161½ miles the Wilmington & Weldon was the longest railroad in the world.

Chartered originally in January 1834 as the Wilmington & Raleigh, the line was organized in the Fall of 1835 and construction began in October 1836. The idea of the railroad grew out of the concern of Wilmington’s leaders that, while the port city had excellent communication by sea, overland connections were poor at best. In 1834 only two stage lines served the city going north, one through New Bern and the other through Fayetteville. Although still in its early years, the railroad seemed a promising alternative. The initial plan was to build the line to Raleigh, but people in the capital were slow to support the railroad while folks in Edgecombe County showed much more enthusiasm. The company decided, therefore, to turn the line north through Edgecombe to Weldon on the Roanoke River near the North Carolina/Virginia border. This would allow the Wilmington & Weldon access to the produce of the Roanoke Valley and bring it near to Virginia railroads which had reached the Roanoke River from the north.

In Wilmington the official celebration of the completion of the railroad was marked by the firing of cannon and ringing of church bells. A large group comprising the officers and employees of the Wilmington & Weldon and invited guests from Virginia and South Carolina as well as all sections of North Carolina paraded down Front Street, accompanied by a military band, to a banquet at the railroad depot. The Wilmington & Weldon operated successfully for the rest of the nineteenth century, ultimately forming part of a major north-south railroad network. In 1900 it became part of the Atlantic Coast Line railroad system which merged into the Seaboard Coast Line in 1967 and finally into CSX Transportation.

Sources
James Sprunt. Chronicles of the Cape Fear River. Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1914.

John Gilbert and Grady Jefferys. Crossties Through Carolina: The Story of North Carolina’s Early Day Railroads. Raleigh, NC: Helios Press, 1969.

Image Source:
Wilmington Advertiser, February 1, 1839

February 1927: “The Old North State”

This Month in North Carolina History

Title page of "The Old North State"
On February 18, 1927, “The Old North State” was officially adopted as the state song of North Carolina.

The lyrics to “The Old North State” were composed by Judge William Gaston in Raleigh in 1835. Judge Gaston had left his plantation in Craven County and was staying with a local family while the state Supreme Court was in session. After couple of the women in the household had attended a concert of bell-ringers visiting from Switzerland, they sang and played on the piano one of the tunes they had heard. Taken with the music, Gaston wrote out several verses of the now well-known song.

Though the words to “The Old North State” are appropriately patriotic, one line often stands out to people hearing or reading it for the first time: “Tho’ the scorner may sneer at, and witling defame her, Yet our hearts swell with gladness, Whenever we name her.” Who were these scorners and witlings? Gaston was writing at a time when North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the nation. The state was rapidly losing population as people emigrated, often to newly opened western territories, in search of more promising opportunities for themselves and their families. It was not unlikely then for local elites who were determined to stay in the state, such as Gaston, to feel a little bit defensive.

“The Old North State” received statewide attention during the 1840 Presidential campaign. At a Whig rally in Raleigh, supporters of William H. Harrison gathered from around the state for a day of speeches and entertainment, which included a choir of fifty young women singing Gaston’s song.

“The Old North State” has been published on many occasions, and while the words have remained true to Gaston’s original poem, the music has evolved over the years and probably little resembles the original air upon which it was based. The current version of the song, with which North Carolinians today are familiar, is from an arrangement prepared by Mrs. E. E. Randolph in Raleigh in 1926.

William Gaston (1778-1844) was a native of New Bern, N.C. He was educated at Georgetown (where he was the first student to enroll) and Princeton. He worked briefly as a lawyer, but was quickly swept up into state politics. Gaston served in both houses of the state legislature, and in the U.S. House of Representatives. From 1833 until his death, he sat on the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Sources
Charles H. Bowman, Jr. “Gaston, Willliam Joseph.” In Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 2., ed. William S. Powell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

“Our State Song: Carolina.” Undated and unsigned newspaper article in the North Carolina Subject Clipping File through 1975, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Image Source:
“The Old North State: A Patriotic Song. Written by the late Wm. Gaston of North Carolina and by him adapted to a German melody and arranged for the piano forte by R. Culver.” Philadelphia: George Willig, 1844. North Carolina Collection.

January 1849: Dorothea Dix Hospital

This Month in North Carolina History

Image of Dorothea Dix
In the 1830s and 1840s the United States was swept by what one historian has described as a ferment of humanitarian reform. Temperance, penal reform, women’s rights, and the antislavery movement, among others, sought to focus public attention on social problems and agitated for improvement. Important among these reform movements was the promotion of a new way of thinking about and treating mental illness. Traditionally, the mentally ill who could not be kept with their families became the responsibility of local government, and were often kept in common jails or poorhouses where they received no special care or medical treatment. Reformers sought to create places of refuge for the insane where they could be cared for and treated. By the late 1840s, all but two of the original thirteen states had created hospitals for the mentally ill, or had made provision to care for them in existing state hospitals. Only North Carolina and Delaware had done nothing.

Interest in the treatment of mental illness had been expressed in North Carolina in 1825 and 1838 but with no results. Several governors suggested care of the mentally ill to the General Assembly as a legislative priority, but no bill was passed. Then in the autumn of 1848 the champion of the cause of treatment of the mentally ill made North Carolina the focus of her efforts. Dorothea Lynde Dix was a New Englander born in 1802. Shocked by what she saw of the treatment of mentally ill women in Boston in 1841 she became a determined campaigner for reform and was instrumental in improving care for the mentally ill in state after state.

In North Carolina Dix followed her established pattern of gathering information about local conditions which she then incorporated into a “memorial” for the General Assembly. Warned that the Assembly, almost equally divided between Democrats and Whigs, would shy from any legislation which involved spending substantial amounts of money, Dix nevertheless won the support of several important Democrats led by Representative John W. Ellis who presented her memorial to the Assembly and maneuvered it through a select committee to the floor of the House of Commons. There, however, in spite of appeals to state pride and humanitarian feeling, the bill failed. Dix had been staying in the Mansion House Hotel in Raleigh during the legislative debate. There she went to the aid of a fellow guest, Mrs. James Dobbins, and nursed her through her final illness. Mrs. Dobbins’s husband was a leading Democrat in the House of Commons, and her dying request of him was to support Dix’s bill. James Dobbins returned to the House and made an impassioned speech calling for the reconsideration of the bill. The legislation passed the reconsideration vote and on the 29th day of January, 1849, passed its third and final reading and became law.

For the next seven years construction of the new hospital advanced slowly on a hill overlooking Raleigh, and it was not until 1856 that the facility was ready to admit its first patients. Dorothea Dix refused to allow the hospital to be named after herself, although she did permit the site on which it was built to be called Dix Hill in honor of her father. One hundred years after the first patient was admitted, the General Assembly voted to change the name of Dix Hill Asylum to Dorothea Dix Hospital.

Sources:

Margaret Callendar McCulloch, “Founding the North Carolina Asylum for the Insane,” North Carolina Historical Review, vol.13:3 (July, 1936).

Dorothea Lynde Dix, Memorial soliciting a state hospital for the protection and cure of the insane: submitted to the General Assembly of North Carolina, November, 1848. Raleigh, N.C.: Seaton Gales, printer for the State, 1848.

Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Stranger and traveler: the story of Dorothea Dix, American reformer. Boston: Little Brown, 1975.

Richard A. Faust, The story of Dorothea Dix Hospital. Raleigh, N.C., 1977.

Image Source:

“Lunatic Asylum. Rear View.” Inset illustration in “Bird’s eye view of the city of Raleigh, North Carolina 1872. Drawn and published by C. Drie.” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

December 18, 1776: North Carolina Constitution

This Month in North Carolina History

Constitution News that the American colonies had declared independence from Great Britain finally reached North Carolina on July 22, 1776. One of the first orders of business in the newly independent state was the writing of a constitution. Elections for the Provincial Congress were held in October and, once elected, the representatives met in Halifax. Several states had already adopted constitutions, and North Carolina looked to these as examples. The legislators also examined the English Declaration of Rights and wrote to John Adams for advice. Rather than go through the lengthy and uncertain process of submitting the document to the voters, the representatives agreed that once they approved the final draft, it would be enacted. On December 18, 1776, North Carolina had its first constitution.

The 1776 North Carolina Constitution has many elements that will seem familiar to North Carolinians today. The Constitution opens with a Declaration of Rights, containing twenty-five guarantees of personal freedom that anticipate the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution and many of which are present in similar form in the current state constitution. The first North Carolina constitution also presents a familiar form of government, with a governor and a bicameral legislature.

However, there are several sections that differ significantly from current practice. The most notable of these were the property requirements for officeholders and voters. In order to be eligible for the Senate, members had to own at least three hundred acres of land in the county they sought to represent; candidates for the House of Commons were required to own one hundred acres; and voters were required to own at least fifty acres to be eligible to cast a ballot for a senator.

Under the 1776 constitution, most of the power was vested in the General Assembly. Governors were chosen by the legislature, served only a one-year term, and were not eligible to serve more than three terms in a six year period. Legislators were appointed by county (with a few assigned to specific towns), without regard to population. This vested a disproportionate amount of influence in the eastern part of the state, which had many small counties, even though the western counties began to increase steadily in population.

The 1776 constitution was effective in establishing an independent government in North Carolina and guaranteeing individual liberties for its citizens. Yet under this document, the state remained in the control of a small group of primarily eastern elites. North Carolina grew slowly, on its way to earning the nickname “The Rip Van Winkle State” in the early nineteenth century. By overlooking many of the demands of its less prosperous citizens, North Carolina saw a widespread emigration and was finally forced to draft a more egalitarian constitution. The state passed a series of amendments in 1835 that changed to a system of representation that was determined by population and allowed for the popular election of the governor. It was not until after the Civil War, in 1868, when North Carolina finally adopted a constitution that did not include property requirements for officeholders.

Sources:

William S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

John L. Sanders, “A Brief History of the Constitutions of North Carolina.” In North Carolina Government 1585-1979: A Narrative and Statistical History. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of the Secretary of State, 1981.

“Constitution of North Carolina: 18 December 1776.” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/states/nc07.htm

Image Source:

The Constitution, or Form of Government, Agreed to, and Resolved Upon, by the Representatives of the Freemen of the State of North Carolina. Philadelphia: Printed by F. Bailey, 1779.

November 1979: Greensboro Killings

This Month in North Carolina History

image of Southern Struggle special edition
On November 3, 1979, members of the Communist Workers Party (known then as the Worker’s Viewpoint Organization) sponsored a rally at Morningside Homes, a housing project in Greensboro. Billed Klan Kills Five Headlineas a “Death to the Klan Rally,” the demonstrators gathered to speak out against what they saw as continued racial injustice in North Carolina.
A group of self-proclaimed Klansmen and Nazis attended the rally and fired upon the crowd, killing five people and wounding nine. Much of the violence was captured on film by reporters who were covering the event.

The men accused of firing on the crowd were apprehended and charged with murder. In November 1980 a jury found them not guilty on the grounds of self-defense. After extensive FBI inquiries into the killings, the case was reopened and, in 1983, nine people were indicted for conspiracy to violate the protesters’ civil rights. Again, the defendants were acquitted.

In addition to their outrage at the violence in their community, many people in Greensboro blamed the police department for failing to act promptly enough to prevent the killings. The frustration in the community continued to grow as the courts failed to convict anyone for the shootings.cover to "They Died Fighting..."

At the twentieth anniversary of the killings in 1999, it was clear that tensions in Greensboro still ran high and that there were many unresolved feelings and accusations surrounding the case. A Truth & Reconciliation Commission, modeled on similar projects in South Africa, was established in 2004. The Commission began holding public hearings on the 1979 killings, operating under the principle that the community cannot begin to heal until the events of the past are honestly and openly confronted. The final report of the Commission is due in 2006.

Sources
Elizabeth Wheaton, Codename GREENKIL: The 1979 Greensboro Killings. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

“The Third of November.” Southern Exposure, vol. 9 no. 3 (Fall 1981), pp. 55-67.

Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission
http://www.greensborotrc.org/

Greensboro Truth & Community Reconciliation Project
http://www.gtcrp.org/ (available via the Wayback Machine)

Image Source:
Southern Struggle (Special Edition), vol. 37 no. 6 (November-December 1979). Greensboro Massacre Materials, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“They Died Fighting Rather Than Live As Slaves.” Card produced by the Committee to Avenge the Greensboro-CWP 5, [1979]. Greensboro Massacre Materials, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

October 1864: Rose O’Neal Greenhow

This Month in North Carolina History

Image from Harper's Monthly titled "Mrs. Greenhow and the Two Other Passengers Demanded to be Set Ashore."

At dawn on the first of October 1864 the body of Rose O’Neal Greenhow washed ashore in the surf near Fort Fisher in North Carolina. Perhaps the most famous spy of the Confederate States of America had died as dramatically as she lived.

Rose was born in 1813 or 1814 into a planter family in Maryland. Her father, John O’Neal, was murdered by one of his slaves in 1817. His widow, Eliza O’Neal, was left with four daughters and a cash-poor farm to manage. In part to help family finances, Rose was sent, in her mid-teens, to Washington, D. C. along with her sister Ellen to live with their aunt, Maria Ann Hill. Mrs. Hill and her husband managed a highly regarded boarding house across from the U. S. Capitol. The house was often referred to as the “Old Brick Capitol” since it originally had been built as the temporary meeting place of Congress after the Capitol had been burned in the War of 1812. Pretty, lively, and intelligent, Rose was popular with the members of Congress who boarded with her aunt, and she had several suitors. In 1835 she married Robert Greenhow, a wealthy bachelor who had trained as a physician but ultimately became an official in the United States Department of State. In addition to bearing a large family, Rose became an important figure in Washington society. She was charming, witty, politically astute, and a fervent champion of the southern states in the increasingly bitter sectional struggles of the 1840s and 1850s. The death of Robert Greenhow in 1854 left Rose financially stretched, but she continued her association with important national political figures, particularly President James Buchanan. Rose considered the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to be a national disaster and whole-heartedly supported secession and the newly formed Confederacy.

Sometime in 1861 Rose Greenhow was recruited as a spy for the Confederacy. She quickly formed a network of agents from among her Washington circle of Confederate sympathizers and began enthusiastically and efficiently gathering information about the Union Army camped around the capital, which she transmitted to General P. G. T. Beauregard who commanded Confederate forces in nearby Virginia. Rose charmed information from important beaureaucrats, army officers, and politicians including, it was rumored, a Republican senator who sent her passionate love letters. She gave Beauregard the date on which the Union Army would began its advance on his position in 1861 and was credited by him with an important contribution to the subsequent victory at the battle of Manassas. Rose refused, however, to become the stereotypical spy who blends in with her background to escape detection. She continued vigorously to defend the southern cause and lambast Republicans. After Manassas she began to come under suspicion. She was arrested in August of 1861 and held for the next year and nine months without being charged or brought to trial. Rose was hardly a model prisoner, reviling her guards, complaining about her treatment and generally making herself a thorn in the side of the Lincoln government. At the end of May 1863 she was exiled to the Confederacy.

Rose Greenhow was given a heroine’s welcome in Richmond and thanked personally by President Jefferson Davis for her aid to the Confederacy. Davis also took the unprecedented step of asking Rose to promote Southern interests in England and France as his personal, if unofficial, representative. In August 1863 Rose and her youngest daughter, also named Rose, sailed on a blockade runner from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Bermuda where she booked passage to England. Rose was warmly greeted by many in the English aristocracy who sympathized with her and her cause. Over the next year she spoke with a number of leaders of British politics and society including Thomas Carlyle and Lord Palmerston. She was granted an audience by Napoleon III of France and visited with southerners who had taken up residence abroad. A British publishing house brought out her memoir, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolitionist Rule at Washington, which was a success.

In August 1864 Rose returned to America, convinced that she could do nothing to persuade the British or French governments to recognize the Confederacy. On the last night of September her ship, the blockade runner Condor approached the mouth of the Cape Fear River on the run to Wilmington. It was spotted by a U. S. naval vessel early on the morning of October 1st and ran aground trying to escape. Rose was carrying dispatches for President Davis and her book profits in gold coins in a leather bag around her neck. She demanded that the captain set her ashore immediately, although he tried to convince her that the ship was safe under the guns of Fort Fisher until she floated off the shoal. In the end Rose had her way and with several other people was launched in a boat for the shore which was only a few hunded yards away. Within minutes the small boat capsized. Rose sank out of sight immediately while the others clung to the overturned boat and ultimately survived. Her body was buried in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Sources
Blackman, Ann. Wild Rose: Rose O’Neale Greenhow, Civil War Spy. New York: Random House, 2005.

Ross, Ishbel. Rebel Rose: Life of Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Confederate Spy. New York: Harper, 1954

Greenhow, Rose O’Neal. My Imprisonment and the first year of Abolition Rule at Washington. London: R. Bentley, 1863.

Image Source:
“Mrs. Greenhow and the Two Other Passengers Demanded to be Set Ashore.”
Half-tone plate engraved by C.E. Hart from a drawing by Stanley M. Arthurs.
In Harper’s Monthly Magazine, March 1912, p. 575.

September 1802: Spaight-Stanly Duel

This Month in North Carolina History

Portraits of Spaight and Stanly

In the early nineteenth century, North Carolina men from all walks of life often resorted to violence to settle quarrels and arguments. For those near the lower end of the social scale this usually meant fists and bad language. For those who considered themselves gentlemen, it often meant a duel. Preceded by a formal exchange of challenge and response, a duel with swords or pistols continued until the offended party declared that honor had been satisfied or until one of the combatants was wounded or killed. In September, 1802, North Carolinians were shocked by a fatal duel involving two of the state’s leading citizens.

Richard Dobbs Spaight, by the age of 44, had had a distinguished career in North Carolina politics. Spaight had fought for the patriot cause in the Revolution under General Caswell, served several terms in the North Carolina House of Commons, represented North Carolina in both the Continental Congress and the United States Congress, and been elected the first native-born governor of the state. Spaight’s opponent in the duel, John Stanly, was 28 in 1802, but had already followed a Princeton education with service in the North Carolina General Assembly. In 1802 he was the United States Congressional Representative from the district once served by Spaight. Both men lived in New Bern and were members of the Jeffersonian Republican Party.
Trouble began when friends advised Spaight that Stanly had raised questions about Spaight’s allegiance to the Republican Party. An angered Spaight demanded that Stanly “…give me that satisfaction which one gentleman has a right to demand of another.” Several more letters were exchanged between the two men which appeared to settle the matter, and Stanly gave Spaight permission to clear the air by publishing their correspondence. In forwarding their letters to the New Bern Gazette, however, Spaight added several remarks which Stanly found offensive. This led to an increasingly heated exchange in the newspaper and finished with Stanly distributing a handbill in which he accused Spaight of wishing to “strut the bravo” with remarks which showed a “malicious, low and unmanly spirit.” In reply, Spaight published a flyer accusing Stanly of being “a liar and scoundrel.” Stanly challenged Spaight and the two men and their seconds met at 5:30 on the afternoon of September 5th behind the Masonic Hall in New Bern. Standing opposite each other, armed with pistols, the two men exchanged fire three times with no damage except a tear in Stanly’s coat. On the fourth exchange Spaight was hit in the side. He died the next day.

There was general shock and outrage in the state over the loss of so distinguished a leader as Richard Dobbs Spaight. Stanly defended himself eloquently in a letter to Governor Benjamin Williams who issued a pardon absolving him from legal guilt. The General Assembly, however, passed on November 5, 1802, a bill entitled “An Act to Prevent the Vile Practice of Dueling Within This State.” The new law provided that anyone who participated in a duel would be heavily fined and barred from any office of trust or profit in state service. If an individual were the survivor of a duel to the death, he and any who assisted him would hang “without benefit of clergy.”

The act of 1802 put North Carolina on record as opposing dueling, but it did not stop the practice completely. For one thing, the act only applied to duels within the state. North Carolinians could cross the border into either South Carolina or Virginia where the practice was tolerated. The prohibition against dueling itself was often ignored by those who respected the old custom more than the new law. Gradually, however, dueling became less common until it disappeared in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Sources:
Wellman, Manly Wade, “The Vile Practice of Dueling: John Stanly and Richard Dobbs Spaight. New Bern, 1802,”  The New East, 4:5 (October, 1976): 9-11, 45-46.

Johnson, Guion Griffis. Antebellum North Carolina: a social history. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.

August 16, 1918: Rescue at Sea

This Month in North Carolina History

headline

The Atlantic waters off the Outer Banks of North Carolina are infamous for shipwrecks. More than six hundred vessels have been lost in this “Graveyard of the Atlantic” to a combination of strong currents, dangerous shoals, and sudden storms. In wartime, particularly during the twentiety century, human malice exceeded even natural catastrophe as a destroyer of ships and sailors.

In both World War I and World War II German submarines found the vicinity of the banks a rich hunting ground and almost 100 ships were lost. Through the first half of the nineteenth century aid to ships and seamen wrecked on the Outer Banks came from local people acting as the need arose. In 1789 the Federal government assumed responsibility for the construction of a string of lighthouses along the North Carolina coast from Cape Hatteras to Cape Fear.

In addition to the lighthouses, seven lifesaving stations were constructed along the coast from Currituck Beach in the north to Little Kinnakeet in the south. At each location a station keeper and at least six surfmen remained ready around the clock to go to the aid of ships in distress. The lifesaving crews operated from the beach piloting heavy lifeboats through the surf and out to stricken vessels to save passengers and crew.

Of the many daring rescues attempted by the Lifesaving Service one of the most famous involved the sinking of the British tanker Mirlo on August 16, 1918, off of the shores of Bodie Island. The Mirlo was working its way up the North Carolina coast bound for Norfolk with a load of gasoline from New Orleans. She safely passed Cape Hatteras and was near Wimble Shoals off Bodie Island when she struck a mine layed by the German submarine U-117.

The resulting explosion was seen by Captain John Allen Midgett and the crew of the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station. Midgett and his men launched their power lifeboat through the surf into a rising wind and made for the Mirlo. Two boats had been launched successfully from the ship, but a third had capsized and remained floating upside down near the Mirlo with a number of desperate sailors clinging to the keel as burning gasoline from the sinking ship spread steadily nearer.

Captain Midgett found a narrow lane in the flaming sea and guided his boat along it until it reached the overturned craft. The sailors were taken safely aboard, and the Chicamacomico lifeboat moved out of the burning gasoline, located the other two boats and brought all three to safety on the beach. For their courageous action and superb seamanship, Captain Midgett and his crew were awarded Gold Lifesaving Medals of Honor from the United States and Victory Medals from the government of Great Britain. Later the men of the Chicamacomico Station received Grand Crosses of the American Cross of honor from the United States Coast Guard.

The Lifesaving Stations were abandoned by the Coast Guard after World War II in favor of more modern and sophisticated tools and methods of aiding ships in distress. The Chicamacomico Station, however, has been carefully restored and stands as a monument to the brave surfmen of the Lifesaving Service.

Sources:

Mobley, Joe A. Ship Ashore! The U.S. Lifesavers of Coastal North Carolina. Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1994.

Stick, David. Graveyard of the Atlantic: shipwrecks or the North Carolina coast. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952.

July 1963: The North Carolina Fund

This Month in North Carolina History

lbjOn July 18, 1963, the state of North Carolina began an “all-out assault on poverty” with the incorporation of the North Carolina Fund. The North Carolina Fund was an innovative program designed, administered, and operated by local communities. It was the first project of its kind in the country.

In the early 1960s, many North Carolinians were in trouble. Historians James L. Leloudis and Robert Korstad describe the economic conditions in the state when Governor Terry Sanford took office in 1961:

North Carolina’s factory workers earned some of the lowest industrial wages in the nation; thirty-seven percent of the state’s residents had incomes below the federal poverty line; half of all students dropped out of school before obtaining a high school diploma; and one-fourth of adults twenty-five years of age and older had less than a sixth-grade education and were, for all practical purposes, illiterate.

By 1960 the state’s rate of growth had been falling for decades, in part because of heavy emigration due to the declining number of agricultural jobs. Governor Sanford promised to experiment with new programs and ideas in order to enable North Carolinians to compete in a rapidly changing society.

The North Carolina Fund was established as an independent, non-profit corporation. Incorporated on July 18, 1963, by Governor Sanford, Charles H. Babcock, C.A. McKnight and John H. Wheeler, the Fund was financed by a seven million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation and by additional funding from Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

Having secured funding and organized a Board of Directors and Executive Committee composed of many of the state’s most prominent citizens, the agency established program offices in eleven urban and rural counties across the state. This decentralized structure was designed to permit each office to coordinate locally administered public and social services and to assist the poor by developing an approach unique to each community’s needs.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson successfully pushed the U.S. Congress to pass the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act — a piece of legislation shaped both by Governor Sanford and Executive Director George Esser and the experience of the nascent North Carolina Fund — and the direction of the state’s antipoverty initiative took a new turn. On May 7, 1964, President Johnson, accompanied by Governor Sanford, visited the home of tenant farmer William D. Marlow near Rocky Mount, to promote the President’s “War on Poverty.”

This new national program, the cornerstone of which was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), would administer millions of dollars in federal funding for the creation of local anti-poverty projects across the country and offered the possibility for expanding existing anti-poverty efforts. As the OEO called for the creation of community action programs developed with the help of the people the programs would serve, the North Carolina Fund instructed its own local programs to submit proposals to the federal agency with an increased emphasis in grassroots community development. Within a year of the Fund’s incorporation a number of these applications were approved and many local offices soon became not only federally-funded Community Action Agencies but partners in the national War on Poverty.

The North Carolina Fund developed a variety of programs across the state, including: the North Carolina Volunteers, a service corps initiative that trained college students to work in rural communities; a program to train community action technicians (CAT) to work in North Carolina and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA); a summer internship and curriculum development program; academic research on poverty and economic development in North Carolina; daycare, home, and lifestyle management programs such as sewing and cooking classes, tutoring for school children, and adult literacy programs; community action and civic engagement programs; manpower and economic development initiatives such as Head Start and Neighborhood Youth Corps programs; and low-income housing development.

Over the next five years the Fund’s staff and volunteers touched the lives of countless North Carolinians and its programs and services affected communities across the state. However, many lawmakers began to question the uses of Fund resources and services, especially when some North Carolina Fund programs became involved with local black freedom movements. By 1968, according to historians Leloudis and Korstad,

“[T]he Fund’s future was in peril. “The agency “had expended its initial foundation grants, which had been awarded for a five-year period, and the national War on Poverty was under siege. When the Fund’s philanthropic backers offered to extend their support, its leaders declined. In part, they held to a vision of the Fund as a temporary and experimental agency. The founders had no desire to see their work routinized; to allow such a development, they insisted, would be to sacrifice innovation to the very forms of inertia that had for so long crippled the nation’s response to its most needy citizens.”

At the end of 1968 the North Carolina Fund disbanded, spinning off many of its successful state-wide programs into independent non-profit organizations.

Suggestions for further reading:
James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad, “Citizen Soldiers; The North Carolina Volunteers and the South’s War on Poverty,” in Elna C. Green, ed., The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South since 1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), pp. 138-162.

LeMay, Erika N. “Battlefield in the Backyard: A Local Study of the War on Poverty.” M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997

Alt, Patricia Maloney. “The Evolution of Community Action: Training Goals and Strategies of the North Carolina Fund.” M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1971.

Archival Resources:
North Carolina Fund Clippings: People, General Articles, and History of the Fund, 1963-1969. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

North Carolina Fund Records (#4710). Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Billy Ebert Barnes Collection (# 34), containing a number of photographs of North Carolina Fund people and activities. North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) (Series O. Foundation History). Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

George H. Esser Papers (#4887). Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

June 1756: Birth of William Richardson Davie

This Month in North Carolina History

Davie

William Richardson Davie, the “Father of the University of North Carolina,” was born on June 22, 1756, in the Parish of Egremont, County Cumberland, England.

His parents, Archibald and Mary Richardson Davie, were Scottish but had moved to the northwest of England prior to his birth. The future soldier and statesman immigrated with his parents and siblings to the Waxhaws region of South Carolina around the time he was eight years old.

The exact reasons for the Davie family leaving England are open to speculation. Some conjecture has centered on Davie’s uncle and namesake, William Richardson. Coming to America in the early 1750s, Richardson was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in 1758. After a brief mission trip among the Cherokee Indians, he accepted a call to serve the Waxhaw Presbyterian Church in Craven County, South Carolina.

Richardson wisely invested and nurtured an inheritance and his income as minister, so by the early 1760s he was a well-established member of the Waxhaws area. This material prosperity, however, did not diminish Richardson’s disappointment that he and his wife remained childless. In an attempt to fill the void, Richardson convinced his sister, Mary, and her family to move to the backcountry of South Carolina in 1764.

Davie enjoyed a comfortable childhood and the beginnings of a classical education while growing up near his uncle. He attended Queen’s College, later Queen’s Museum, in Charlotte before enrolling in the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University). Graduating in 1776, Davie moved to Salisbury, North Carolina, to study law in the office of Spruce Macay. The mounting conflict of the Revolutionary War forced Davie to suspend his studies and immediately involve himself as a Whig partisan fighter in the North Carolina Piedmont. Eventually, he would climb to the rank of commissary general, serving Nathaniel Greene’s Southern Army during the last years of hostilities.

As did many Revolutionary War leaders, Davie translated military success and prowess on the battlefield into achievement in the world of politics. After the conflict, he moved to Halifax, North Carolina, to practice law and was elected as a representative to the General Assembly. In 1787 he was selected by the legislature as one of North Carolina’s delegates to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia, which drafted the United States Constitution. Although Davie did not stay to sign the final document, he successfully fought for North Carolina’s eventual ratification.

It was in the General Assembly, however, that Davie would earn the title by which he is still known today. He proved to be the major force in satisfying the requirements of Section 41 of North Carolina’s constitution, which stated, “all usefull [sic] learning shall be duly encouraged and promoted in one or more universities.”

In 1789 Davie introduced a bill to establish the University of North Carolina and led the charge to secure its passage. Furthermore, his involvement with the University did not end with its creation: he served on the Board of Trustees, presided at the cornerstone laying ceremony of the first building, helped to formulate its first curriculum, consulted on selecting faculty members, procured additional financial support, donated books and other artifacts, and took part in the many other activities needed to launch the University. Even after moving back to South Carolina in late 1804, Davie continued to correspond with and give advice to the University’s trustees.

Although Davie would go on to serve as North Carolina’s governor from 1798 to 1799 and as a minister plenipotentiary to France from 1799 to 1800, his main contribution to his adopted country and state remains as “Father” of the nation’s first public university.

Suggestions for Further Reading
Blackwell P. Robinson. William R. Davie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

R. D. W. Connor, Hugh T. Lefler, and Louis R. Wilson, Eds. A Documentary History of the University of North Carolina, 1776-1799 (2 vols.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.

William D. Snider. Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Kemp Plummer Battle. History of the University of North Carolina. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1912. Available online at Documenting the American South.