Cemetery Street

The Vicks sell land to a hosiery company.

In 1917, Samuel and Annie Vick sold a lot on Cemetery Street to Crescent Hosiery Company of Scotland Neck, North Carolina. Crescent paid $500 for the land, which adjoined property of Smith Mercer, Columbus Goffney, and Henry Forbes.

Deed book 94, page 9, Wilson County Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

It does not appear that Crescent ever operated a factory on the site, or even built upon it, unless this unoccupied brick building depicted in the 1922 Sanborn map of the street was theirs. (Cemetery Street’s name was briefly changed to Contentnea Street.) By 1930, per the Sanborn map, the building was being used for cotton storage by an unnamed proprietor.

1922 Sanborn fire insurance map of Scotland Neck, North Carolina.

Infamously, Lewis Hine photographed children working in Crescent Hosiery Company for his expose of child labor conditions in Southern textile mills.

Nannie Coleson, age 11, working as a looper at Crescent Hosiery in 1914.

1908 Sanborn fire insurance map of Scotland Neck, North Carolina.

Photo courtesy of National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.

The town’s property on Cemetery Street?

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NOTICE: I am speculating here.

This is a plat map, labeled “The Town of Wilson Property on Cemetery Street,” showing the subdivision of a parcel of land into 79 lots and several blocks of unnamed streets. I do not have access to the deed recording the city’s purchase of this tract. Moreover, the exact location of this tract today is difficult to determine. However, the date of map — October 1942, eleven months after the exhumation of graves from Oakdale cemetery — suggests to me that this is the cemetery land that the city “condemned … to build several roads through it.”