Commerce

Received of Daniel Vick.

From the Samuel H. Vick family’s archives, two receipts for payments made by patriarch Daniel Vick. The first reflects taxes he paid for 1883 “Graded School — Colored” in the amount of $5.52.

The second is a receipt for payment of $12.14 to Alpheus P. Branch, merchant, banker, and founder of Branch Banking & Trust (now Truist.)

Thank you for sharing, Vicki M. Cowan!

Liquor raid nets 4.

Wilson Daily Times, 17 December 1938.

——

  • Charlie Lowe
  • “Moon” Jones — Luther Jones.
  • Ed and Esther Dupree — in the 1930 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 402 South Lodge Street, Egar Dupree, 35, bottling plant laborer; wife Bettie, 31; children Wilder, 11, Esther, 9, Mary E., 7, and Edgar Jr., 5; and lodger Cornelia Hicks, 22, tobacco factory laborer.

Hardy & Suggs.

This April 1909 execution of a $40 judgment in Superior Court reveals the existence of an early twentieth-century African-American business — Hardy & Sugg. John Hardy was a livery man, and it is reasonable to conjecture that George W. Suggs opened a stable with him.

——

On 5 February 1902, John Hardy, 22, married Florence Williams, 20, in Wilson. Zion minister C.L. Alexander performed the ceremony in the presence of Mrs. Canna Alexander, L.C. Ligon, and A.L. Darden.

Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory (1908).

In the 1910 census of Wilson township, Wilson County, Wilson County: on Nash Street: barber Walter Maynor, 19, and wife Alice, 23; barber William Sutson [Sutzer], 65, barbershop proprietor; wife Mary J., 49, hotel proprietor; son Leondas Taylor, 23, pressing club laborer, and daughter-in-law Anna, 22; and boarders Lemuel Yancy, 36, drugstore clerk; Harry Carter, 35, music teacher; Ernest Allen, 30, hotel cook; and John Hardy, 30, livery stable owner; his wife Florence, 23, and daughters Lida, 7, and Estell, 5.

Wilson County, N.C., Court Dockets 1909-1910, Civil Issues Dockets, http://www.familysearch.org.

An appeal to support your own (and spy on those who don’t.)

Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Va.), 4 February 1928.

What in the East Germany is this?

In 1928, the Negro Business League suggested that “members of the race” become “a committee of one” and carry little notebooks to jot down their neighbors’ patronage habits. Beyond the bizarre and chilling embrace of citizen spies, this brief bit, which appeared as part of an otherwise breezy column of Wilson society news, raises some interesting implications.

Readers were counseled to “see whether” others “are having a white or Negro physician, a white or Negro undertaker.” An examination of death certificates discloses that up until about World War I, white undertakers like A.D. McGowan and Amerson-Boswell handled a significant amount of black custom. There’s less evidence of this practice by 1920, however.

It’s more difficult to assess the degree to which black residents patronized white doctors instead of black physicians like Drs. Frank S. Hargrave Michael E. DuBissette, Matthew S. Gilliam, or William A. Mitchner. Major surgeries, especially in emergency situations, were often performed by white doctors at one of the two white hospitals — black patients returned to Mercy to recuperate — and some white doctors, most notably A.D. Williams, routinely delivered black babies. However, death certificates of the era were signed overwhelmingly by black doctors.

Finally, there was concern about who was “patronizing the white theatre for Negroes and who is patronizing the Negro theatre.” The Negro theatre, of course, was Samuel H. Vick‘s Globe, housed in an upper floor of the Odd Fellows building he constructed on East Nash Street. The “white theatre for Negroes” was the Lincoln, opened by a Greek-American in the Nash Street block just east of the railroad. Vick was an early member of the Negro Business League and no doubt was stung by the financial hit the Lincoln created.

New remedy for straight hair.

What (or who) was the Cra-Mi Company?

The Sunday News (Charleston, S.C.), 16 March 1924.

Birmingham (Ala.) Post-Herald, 21 March 1924.

Portsmouth (Va.) Star, 29 March 1924.

Chicago Defender, 12 April 1924.

Southwest American (Fort Smith, Ark.), 27 April 1924.

… and rheumatism?

The Sunday Record (Columbia, S.C.), 29 June 1924.

Placement of ads in dozens of newspapers across the South (and in the Defender) implies the success, or perhaps ambition, of this competitor to Gordon’s Glory Hair Dressing.

The company was serious enough that it registered a patent for its product in January 1924, as this poor reproduction shows.

Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, 18 March 1924.

Cra-Mi kept up its widespread advertising blitz for the first half of 1924 … then disappeared. I have not been able to determine who owned the business or anything else about it.

A glance at Wilson.

Though this newspaper article issued a few years after Black Wide-Awake’s coverage, I could not resist its images of East Wilson.

The Afro-American (Baltimore, Md.), 21 February 1953.

Below, the 500 block of East Nash Street, Wilson’s former Black commercial center. The three-story building at right is the Odd Fellows Building, built by Samuel H. Vick in 1894. Beside it, we see the verandas of the Biltmore Hotel (earlier known as the Union and the Whitley), Wilson’s only Green Book hotel. On the left, we see the hedges that fronted several residences that once lined that side of the street.

Below, Yancey’s Drug Store, which stood at 563 East Nash.

Other buildings shown include Mercy Hospital, the then-brand-new Elvie Street School; Jackson Chapel First Baptist Church; the home of Daniel and Bertha Carroll, which still stands on Lincoln Street; and a taxi and driver of United Cab Company.