Wilson Daily Times, 26 June 1948.
Darden and Sons Funeral Homes moved into temporary space while they completed their iconic faux-Tudor building in the 600 block of East Nash Street. The location? Founder Charles H. Darden’s old “home place” on Pender Street. That house has long been demolished, but appears on a 1940 aerial photograph of the area.
(1) is First Baptist Church; (2) is Saint John A.M.E. Zion; and the old Darden house is indicated with an arrow.
Wilson Daily Times, 7 December 1944.
Lee’s Food Store occupied the westernmost storefront space in the Terminal Inn, the two-story brick building built in 1920 across from the A.C.L. passenger rail station. Lee’s was one of a series of grocery and general stores in the space, and some readers may remember it is the site of Star Credit (“Charge it, Mr. Star!”) Though Lee’s was not likely the primary grocery for many African-American shoppers, but it surely employed them and was a familiar location. This ad reveals some of the grocery staples (and boys’ toys) available during the late World War II era.
Wilson Daily Times, 20 November 1945.
Wilson Daily Times, 19 October 1945.
An ad appealed to “better class” African-Americans to sell houses on Lincoln and Viola Streets.
Wilson Daily Times, 20 October 1948.
Wilson city limits at East Nash Street at that time ran approximately with Highway 301.
Before East Wilson began to take shape as the historic heart of Wilson’s African-American community, the land just east of the railroad held small farms and, essentially, country estates like the one Rufus W. Edmundson offered for rent in November 1881. The seven-acre parcel at the east corner of Vance and Pender Streets contained a large six-room house with a well, fruit trees, and “all necessary” outbuildings. Only seven years before, the land had been “original forest.”
As we have seen, into the second half of twentieth century, Vance Street was a boundary between black and white neighborhoods. When Edmundson’s parcel was eventually sold and subdivided, the houses built on streets like Academy and Crowell were for white owners and tenants. These segregation patterns held into the 1960s.
Wilson Advance, 25 November 1881.
Pittsburgh Courier, 30 April 1949.
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The Curries, natives of Robeson County, North Carolina, were only briefly Wilson County residents. When Katie Currie, 24, daughter of Worth and Isabelle McKinnon Currie, married John Adams, 24, in Halifax County, Virginia, she reported Wilson as her birthplace. The couple lived in Durham, North Carolina.
The Mary Sutton sought appears to have been the mother of Javotte Sutton Green. The Suttons moved from Wilson to Durham between 1922 and 1930.
