NC Miscellany – Page 336 – Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State

January 1870: North Carolina State Penitentiary Opens

This Month in North Carolina History

On January 6, 1870, North Carolina’s State Penitentiary accepted its first prisoners, housing them in a temporary log structure that was surrounded by a wooden stockade. Charles Lewis, a twenty-two-year-old African American convicted of robbery in Johnston County, was the first person to be admitted, and his accomplices, Eliza and Nancy Richardson, were the second and third individuals received by the prison and the first women.

Prior to 1870, North Carolina, unlike the majority of other states, did not have a central, state-operated prison. Responsibility for housing convicts and administering punishment rested with the counties. As local jails became overcrowded and expenses mounted, public officials began to examine the possibility of opening a state-funded institution to house long-term inmates. In 1846, there was a statewide vote on the desirability of a state penitentiary, but North Carolina’s voters, many of whom still believed in the efficacy of corporal punishment, such as whippings, croppings, and brandings, overwhelmingly disapproved of the plan. Not until mandated by the Reconstruction-era Constitution of 1868 did North Carolina fund and build a state penitentiary.

Operating under this more progressive plan of government, the General Assembly created a penitentiary committee in August 1868 and charged it with selecting a location for the new structure and contracting to have it built. This committee chose and purchased land near Lockville, a community in the Deep River Valley of Chatham County, but the legislature nullified the purchase and began anew after an investigation discovered that the entire process had been fraudulent. The assembly disbanded the original committee and selected a new commission, ordering them to locate the prison near the state capital and giving explicit limitations on acreage and price. The new committee, of which Alfred Dockery was president, purchased about twenty-two acres in southwestern Raleigh. This site had easy access to a railroad line and was adjacent to a stone quarry from which material to build the structure could be removed. With the location chosen, construction of a temporary facility began in late 1869.

The prison into which Charles Lewis and the other inmates were admitted on January 6, 1870, differed greatly from Central Prison, the modern structure that now occupies the same location. A report submitted by the penitentiary’s assistant architect on November 1, 1870, describes the original wooden edifice as such:

“The Work has been as follows: 2965 ft. Prison Stockade made of long leaf pine poles, hewed on two sides placed close together and set four (4) in the ground, standing fifteen (15) ft. above ground. In which are two (2) large Wagon gates, one (1) Railroad gate, and one small gate for entrance of Persons on foot.

There are twenty (20) Prison Cells, two (2) Hospital Rooms and (2) Rooms for Lockups, all of which are 19×19 ft. square, 8 ft. pitch, built of logs, and sealed with heavy boards on the inside, and all covered with one continuous roof…

There is 850 ft. Railroad Track running in the grounds, and connecting with The N. C. Railroad, also 870 ft. heavy plank stockade enclosing the quarry.”

Believing that the state penitentiary should be self-supporting and that manual labor was beneficial for the prisoners, state officials utilized the readily available and inexpensive inmate work force to construct the permanent buildings, walls, and fences. The process took almost fifteen years and over one million dollars, but in December 1884 the permanent buildings were completed and occupied. The old log cells, which were eventually used as storage bins for animal feed, survived for several more years, with some burning in 1887 and others removed over time.

Sources
Brown, Roy Melton. “The Growth of a State Program of Public Welfare.” Typescript in North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ca. 1950.

Murray, Elizabeth Reid. Wake, Capital County of North Carolina. Raleigh, N. C.: Capital County Publishing Company, 1983.

North Carolina. Board of Public Charities. First Annual Report of the Board of Public Charities of North Carolina. February, 1870. Raleigh, N.C.: Printed by Order of the Board, 1870.

North Carolina. Penitentiary Commission. Report of the Penitentiary Commission, to the General Assembly of North Carolina, Made December 8th, 1870.Raleigh, N.C.: The Commission, 1870.

North Carolina. Penitentiary Commission. Rules and By-Laws for the Government & Discipline of the North Carolina Penitentiary During its Management by the Commission. Raleigh, N.C.: M. S. Littlefield, State Printer & Binder, 1869.

Olds, Fred A. “History of the State’s Prison.” The Prison News, vol. I, no. II (November 1926): 4-7.

Image Source:
Ralph, Julian. “Charleston and the Carolinas.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, No. 536, January 1895.

Gerald Ford in Chapel Hill

President Gerald Ford spent time in Chapel Hill on a couple of occasions as a young man. He was enrolled at the UNC Law School in the summer of 1938, and then returned to campus in 1942 to attend the U.S. Navy’s Pre-Flight School training program. Ford reflected on his time here in 1979 in response to questions sent by Mary Layne Baker, a UNC graduate student who was working on a thesis about the Pre-Flight School.

When he came for the Pre-Flight training, Ford and two other officers rented a “small cottage off the Durham Rd. about 3 miles out of Chapel Hill.” The future president remembered the university as “a beautiful, quiet but potentially a well-organized campus.” In regard to the general community, Ford said of Chapel Hill that “There was a good but not too demonstrative feeling of patriotism. It was wholesome & constructive.” And finally, it appears that he kept out of trouble when in town. In response to a question about the social life in Chapel Hill, Ford wrote that it was “Not too bad considering my heavy Navy schedule.”

Life’s Luxuries

I like the detailed engravings that you find in so many 19th-century books and periodicals. The complicated machine shown here is from the Historical and Descriptive Review of the State of North Carolina, a business directory published in Charleston in 1885. The engraving appeared in an ad for James Redmond of New Bern, a “wholesale liquor dealer, and manufacturer of ginger ale, sarsaparilla, lemon soda, buffalo mead, California pear cider, &c.” Apparently this is some sort of bottling contraption. The entry for Redmond in the book describes his business as furnishing “one of the staple luxuries of life, lager beer.”

Bottler Engraving

Old Christmas

Not had your fill of Christmas? January 5th marks the celebration of “Old Christmas” in Rodanthe on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Folks will be celebrating the day Christmas used to fall on before the British Empire adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. Find out more about the celebration and about “Old Buck,” who puts in an appearance every year, on the feature in This Month in North Carolina History.

We’re Number Ten!

The Census Bureau’s 2006 State Population Estimate, released yesterday, has North Carolina passing New Jersey to become the tenth most populous state in the country. But this is no long rise to glory, rather, it’s a return to a spot we know well. North Carolina has hovered around the tenth spot in the population numbers for the past 70 years, but if you look back further, we’ve been even higher in the rankings.

North Carolina was once the third most populous state in the nation. This may not seem quite as impressive, however, when you take into account that there were only thirteen states in the country at the time. The first federal census, taken in 1790, showed North Carolina trailing only Virginia and Pennsylvania in total population. There was a steady decline from there as, apparently, North Carolina in the 1800s was not the idyllic place it is today and many citizens left for greener pastures, often to the new territories in the west. North Carolina fell as low as 16th in population, hitting that number in 1880 and 1910 before the population began to climb again. Here are the rankings by Census year:

1790 – 3rd
1800 – 4th
1810 – 4th
1820 – 4th
1830 – 5th
1840 – 7th
1850 – 9th
1860 – 12th
1870 – 14th
1880 – 16th
1890 – 12th
1900 – 11th
1910 – 16th
1920 – 14th
1930 – 12th
1940 – 11th
1950 – 10th
1960 – 12th
1970 – 11th
1980 – 10th
1990 – 10th
2000 – 11th

Tidbits from the CSR

For those of you who haven’t heard, the North Carolina Collection and Documenting the American South are digitizing the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, a thirty-volume set of transcribed documents covering the history of North Carolina from the 1600s to 1790. Now, before you start searching Google for the electronic versions of this wonderful resource, let me warn you…we’re still at least two years from being finished with the project! However, I occasionally run into interesting tidbits that simply have to be “published,” and I think the North Carolina Collection’s blog is the perfect outlet. I can’t promise weekly postings, but I’ve already seen index entries for “Beer, lack of” and “Girls and Soldiers,” so I can’t imagine they’ll be far between.

The first tidbit involves Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, an influential pamphlet published in Philadelphia in January 1776. On February 14 of that year, John Penn, one of North Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress, wrote from Philadelphia to Thomas Person in North Carolina concerning military matters and troop requisitions. With the letter, Penn enclosed a copy of Common Sense and in the postscript stated, “I send you a pamphlet called ‘Common Sense,’ published here abt. a month ago.” Is this the first copy of Paine’s pamphlet to find its way into North Carolina? I can’t say, but it is most definitely one of the earliest.

Committee of Secrecy

Insurgents, secret subpoenas and hearings? When you hear these topics, you probably think of current events, right? Well, that may be the case, but North Carolina’s Fourth Provincial Congress, called and led by patriot leaders from April to May 1776, dealt with these issues as well. The congress created a “Committee of Secrecy, Intelligence, and Observation” and gave it the power to compel the attendance of suspected loyalist insurgents and witnesses at hearings. In an effort to quell dissent, the committee could also remove insurgents from their homes and force them to reside in remote locations where they could not “influence” their friends and neighbors. The Committee of Secrecy could even withhold information from the Provincial Congress if they felt it would “tend to defeat the purpose of [the committee’s] appointment.”

Poetry from the Big Rigs

Drivin 'N Dreaming

If you’re looking to start a book collection, but are having trouble finding the right niche to specialize in, I’ve got just the thing: trucker poetry. I stumbled across what appears to be the North Carolina Collection’s sole title in this genre, Rotha Dawkins’s Driving ‘N Dreaming (Your Treasure Publications, 2001). Dawkins is the author of the popular trucker romances Red High Heels and Red High Heels II.

I checked WorldCat to see if anything else would show up under the subject heading “Truckers — Poetry,” and sure enough, there were four more titles: Trucker’s Life, by Daren Flynn (Vantage Press, 1997); Driver: Sixteen Gears and Lonely, by Joe Walsh (Violin Roads Press, 1987); Soft Slow Motion by Dixie Schnell (Turnaround, 2001; and The Road Leads North: A Collection of Poems of the North Country Through an Alaskan Trucker’s Eyes, by Robert D. Birt (R.D. Birt, 1989). With all that time on the open road to contemplate and compose, it’s no wonder that some of these folks are starting to commit their thoughts to verse.

Limbs and Needles

I’ve been catching up on my holiday reading, browsing through back issues of Limbs & Needles, the journal of the North Carolina Christmas Tree Association. So far I’ve learned about Sudden Oak Death, the proper time of year to graft a Fraser Fir, and the possibility of importing Turkish Fir seedlings from Turkey.

Limbs & Needles has been around for a while, publishing since the 1970s. The North Carolina Collection holds issues from 1989 to the present. The North Carolina Christmas Tree Association has been in business even longer, and is now approaching its fiftieth anniversary. I’ve learned from the association’s website that there are currently five times as many live Christmas trees in North Carolina as there are people. Fortunately, North Carolina trees are popular around the country, else our living rooms would get pretty crowded.

Claymania in the NCC

Just in case you had the impression that the North Carolina Collection was nothing more than a collection of dry, historical tomes, I want to point out that with the recent acquisition of Out of the Blue: “Clay” it Forward: How One Man & His Fans are Changing the World, we now hold seven titles on Clay Aiken.

I did a quick survey of other popular culture figures in the collection and found 23 titles on Dale Earnhardt, 30 on the Andy Griffith Show, and an impressive 82 titles about Michael Jordan. But it’s not all fun and games: we do have dry, historical tomes, too.