Month: February 2024

Lane Street Project: 2003 aerial.

This 2003 aerial image of the Lane Street Project cemeteries shows how much changed in the 17 years before we began our cleanups.

(1) Vick Cemetery; (2) Odd Fellows Cemetery; (3) Rountree Cemetery.

Vick Cemetery. (1) The central monument (before the pad was bricked?) and the one odd tree alongside; (2) the little white dash is the one concrete vault top remaining in the cemetery; (3) no walkway! I’d always wondered why it matched up with the monument’s pad so poorly. It was installed years later!

Odd Fellows Cemetery. (1) Maybe if someone had done a proper survey with map of the property lines, the Vick Cemetery parking lot and driveway apron wouldn’t sprawl across the line into Odd Fellows; (2) fairly heavy overgrowth in this corner; (3) the Della and Dave Barnes headstones; (4) the old entrance; (5) the interior was fairly open in 2003 and in January 2024 was cleared anew.

Rountree Cemetery: Surprisingly open twenty years ago. There is little sunlight anywhere within Rountree now.

Images courtesy of Wilson County NC GIS website. 

The old A.C.L. depot.

We’ve seen here the Atlantic Coast Line passenger depot, built in 1924, at which hundreds of African-American Wilsonians embarked for their new lives during the Great Migration. The O.V. Foust photograph above depicts the depot that preceded it. A dray sits out front awaiting luggage or freight; there was no platform.

Photo courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III’s Historic Wilson in Vintage Postcards (2003).

Historic Black Business Series, no. 10: Agnes Taylor’s eating house.

The 500 block of East Nash Street is justly remembered as the 20th century epicenter of Wilson’s African-American-owned businesses. However, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Black entrepreneurs and tradespeople also operated across the tracks. As Wilson’s downtown experiences a resurgence, let’s rediscover and celebrate these pioneering men and women.

Check in each Sunday for the latest in the Historic Black Business Series!

Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory (1912).

The entire 400 block of South Douglas (formerly Spring) Street is empty, and it’s difficult to determine the exact location of Agnes Taylor‘s eating house. (Or her house-house, which was just down the block.) It was a short-lived business, and both the 1908 and 1913 Sanborn maps show a grocery at 410 South Spring. It’s difficult to say, but per location I’d guess Taylor’s eatery catered to Black customers.

I have not otherwise found Agnes Taylor in Wilson records.

People I want to know more about.

City directories offer endless possibilities. Who were these intriguing folk?

1916

Allen C. Wooten sold (made?) patent medicines.

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What kinds of baskets did Samuel W. White make?

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We’ve met Hood Vick before. I assume he played baseball professionally, but for whom?

1920

Toilet preparations? What exactly was Oscar C. Gordon cooking up on East Nash Street?

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The Eat More? How charming! But where was Preston McCadden‘s business? Two of the four corners at this intersection were houses, the third was Calvary Presbyterian. The fourth was the site of a white-owned grocery store for nearly all of the 20th century. (Sidenote: McCadden also worked as a chauffeur and lived at 201 West Nash.) [Update: a quick look at the 1922 Sanborn map informed me. The northwest corner contained not the house facing Green with which I am familiar, but a small grocery facing Pender. This was likely McCadden’s Eat More. My grandmother was 12 years old and lived a block away and surely was a patron!]

1922

What did W. Clyde Crawford‘s Wilson Building & Construction Company build? Who transacted with its loan division? The company’s offices were at 563 East Nash,

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Evander Eddy was a confectioner. What kind of candy did he make?

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I thought at first John Robertson and John W. Best were bottlers of soft drinks, but now believe they operated soft drink shops. What, exactly, did they sell? Who were their customers?

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But here is a bottler. Did Edward Hunter work for the local Coca-Cola bottler? Or did he have his own business?

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What did William H. Brown print?

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William Picot was both a cabinet maker and repairer of furniture. Was the studio on East Vance a house or commercial business? The 1922 Sanborn shows a small wooden building at the location.

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For which dairy did Luther Hall work?

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Though she lived over in Elm City, Sarah Lucas was Amos Batts‘ private secretary. There were several Amos Battses, but this was likely the undertaker.

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Beyond her interesting first name, Sister McMillan is one of very few, and the only woman, mill worker, I’ve spotted. What kind of mill did she work in?

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Lena Woody lived at the rear of 301 East Nash? A commercial building?

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Ice puller?

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George Martin is the earliest African-American electrician I’ve found in Wilson.

615 and 624 East Green Street.

I’ve posted several photographs from Richard L. Mattson’s article “The Cultural Landscape of a Southern Black Community: East Wilson, North Carolina, 1890-1930,” but this one threw me. The photo below is decidedly not Dr. Frank S. Hargrave’s house at 624 East Green Street.

And then I saw this and realized what happened. The photo below is Dr. Hargrave’s house. The photo above is the William Hines house at 615 East Green, which has been demolished. Their captions were accidentally swapped.

Lane Street Project: connections to Green Street Cemetery.

I’ve sung the praises of Iredell County Public Library and its commitment to Green Street Cemetery and was thrilled to be asked to speak about my family’s connections to that historic burial ground.

I was overjoyed — see how I’m grinning?– to see my 91 year-old cousin Natalie Renwick Marsh (who is always so fly!) and her eldest daughter Angela Miller. Nat’s mother and my grandmother were sisters, born and raised in Statesville.

I got to Statesville early enough to visit Green Street Cemetery for the first time in nearly a decade. Fewer than ten percent of the 1800+ graves in the cemetery are marked with headstones.

But my great-great-grandfather John Walker Colvert (1851-1921) and his wife Adeline Hampton Colvert (1864-1940) have a fine gray marble double headstone flanked by concrete planters.

A few feet away, a small monument at the grave of their daughter Selma Eugina Colvert, who died in a house fire. (Another daughter, Henrietta R. Colvert, was a longtime nurse in Wilson.)

The broken headstone of siblings Lena and Raymond Tomlin was uncovered after radar detected it just below the soil’s surface. They were my great-grandfather Lon W. Colvert’s maternal half-siblings. I knew of Lena, but this is the sole record of Raymond’s short life.

Eugene Stockton was the second husband of my great-grandfather’s paternal half-sister Ida Mae Colvert Stockton.

Dillard Stockton was her first husband (and Eugene’s half-brother.) He was killed in a sewer cave-in two years after they married.

After ground-penetrating radar pinpointed the locations of graves, volunteers turned out en masse to mark each unmarked grave with a steel disk. As explained: “The marker consists of a ten inch (10”) bolt with a three and a half inch (3.5”) disk at the top. Once installed, it will lay flush with the earth allowing maintenance to continue as usual with no disruption or damage to the markers. In time, when the ground cover grows over the markers, they will still be identifiable with a metal detector, similar to markers used by land surveyors. They are easy to install by pushing the bolt into the ground by hand or using rubber mallets.” What an idea. (Looking at you, City of Wilson.)

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2024.

Black Studies Matter, Black Stories Matter!

I unexpectedly had to hold down my panel solo, but thoroughly enjoyed repping Preservation of Wilson at my talk with UNC-Greensboro students and faculty and other conferees at Conference on African American and African Diasporic Cultures and Experiences. Thanks for the opportunity, Monica T. Davis.

Lane Street Project: an Odd Fellows funeral.

Photographs of Lane Street Project cemeteries during their period of usage are exceedingly rare. The photo, which may depict friends or relatives of Samuel H. Vick‘s family, appears to have been taken in Odd Fellows Cemetery. An older woman, a man in perhaps late middle-age, a young woman, and girl stand behind what appears to be a grave marker dedicated with a small American flag. (Was it Memorial Day?) Bearded irises grow in the foreground. Two grave markers are clearly visible at middle distance to the right, with others perhaps beyond.

I am grateful to an anonymous supporter for use of this image.