Page 4, Sanborn fire insurance map, Wilson, N.C. (1908).

Cross-referencing the 1908 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory and the 1908 Sanborn fire insurance map of Wilson reveals the specific locations of Black-owned businesses just after the turn of the century. Above, the intersection of South Goldsboro and East Nash Streets.

Moses Brandon operated an eating house at 127 South Goldsboro Street. (Within a few years, he moved to 411 East Nash Street.)

John H. Aiken and Braswell R. Winstead ran livery stables at 125 and 129 South Goldsboro. The map does not make clear how the space was divided between the two. Aiken was a long-time stablekeeper, but Winstead is a surprise. He was a teacher, then an assistant postmaster to Samuel H. Vick, then a barber.

Short W. Barnes was a carpenter by trade, and his ownership of a South Goldsboro Street barbershop is a surprise.

Annie Best‘s eating house at 121 South Goldsboro was just a few blocks from her home at 313 South Spring. 

Physician Frank S. Hargrave bought Ideal Pharmacy from a white pharmacist and brought in D’Arcey C. Yancey to staff it. Yancey took over as sole proprietor around 1910. 

Wilson Times, 11 November 1910.

Tate & Hines Barbershop, a partnership of Noah J. Tate and Walter S. Hines, operated in a storefront underneath the New Briggs Hotel at 213 East Nash Street. (The hotel’s footprint is now the site of the new Wilson Arts Center.) The business began as Paragon Shaving Parlor in 1903 with a third partner, Joshua Tabron. See here a note for Tate & Hines’ purchase of a new cash register in 1910.

A barber pole is visible curbside in this postcard depicting New Briggs Hotel circa 1900. Tate & Hines occupied the first storefront on the left.

In the interior of the block, circled in red, a narrow freestanding rectangle of a building labeled “servants.” There were few white servants in Wilson in this era, so the reference is surely to African-American workers, but whose servants? What kind of servants? And what did they do in this space?

Postcard image courtesy of Penny Postcard Archives, a USGenWeb Archives site.