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!
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!
Goodsey H. Holden was primarily a bricklayer (and union man) and building contractor, but prudently diversified into other businesses, including an eating house that operated on South Goldsboro Street between Jones and Hines.
In the 1916 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory: Holden Goodsy H, eating house 406 1/2 S Spring h 603 S Spring
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!
By 1910, Wayne County native Columbus E. Artis operated a small grocery store in Stantonsburg. Less than two years later, he had set up an eatery in a narrow brick building on South Goldsboro Street. (Alexander D. Dawson, having closed his fish and oyster stall in the city market, ran a rival eatery across the street. The directory listed eight eating houses — all downtown, all African-American-owned.)
In the 1912 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory: Artis Columbus E eating house 214 Goldsboro h 304 Jones.
By 1915, Artis had gone into business as an undertaker and in time would establish a funeral home that rivaled Darden & Sons. He did not completely abandon the restaurant business, though, as, in 1917, Will Barnes reported on his draft registration card that he was a cook for C.E. Artis, and the 1922 city directory lists Artis as proprietor of The Delicatessen at 559 East Nash Street.
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.
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!
(I missed last Sunday — I ran out of photographed signs — so you’ll get two this week. Or maybe I’ll just double up every week for Black History Month.)
In 1908, Alexander D. Dawson, a former teacher and local Republican Party stalwart, operated a fish and oyster stall in the city hall and market building in the 100 block of North Goldsboro Street. (Also the present-day site of City Hall.) Dawson was listed as a “dealer in fish” in the 1900 census, but it’s not clear when he been hawking his wares at the city market.
Wilson city hall, market, and fire department, circa 1900.
However, it appears he shut down the stall soon after. In the 1910 census of Wilson, Wilson County: restaurant cook Alexander Dawson, 50; wife Lucy, 49; and children Sophie, 25, school teacher, Mattie, 23, stenographer, Virginia, 19, school teacher, Lucile, 17, Alexander, 15, Clarence, 13, Augusta, 11, and Arlander, 1. By 1912, Dawson operated a small eating house two blocks away from the city market at 215 South Goldsboro Street, the heart of Wilson’s tobacco warehouse district.
Though A.D. Dawson lived until 1930, it appears that he closed his restaurant before 1916.
Postcard courtesy of North Carolina Digital Heritage Center’s digitalnc.org.
“Now living in Durham, N.C., [Kate] Medley, 42, has spent more than a decade collecting images for her book of photographs, ‘Thank You Please Come Again,’ which the digital magazine The Bitter Southerner published in December. The book began with a journalist’s curiosity, but ended up as a way for a daughter of the Deep South to make sense of the beautiful, brutal, complicated place she came from.”
To my dismay, the article didn’t identify the location of that iconic green building, so:
Anyway, even though Gizzards & Livers is not Black-owned (Palestinian-American, I’m told), I feature it here because:
(2) it carries on the legacy of the little groceries and eating houses that fed working-class folk in Wilson’s tobacco warehouse district a hundred years ago; and
(3) that sign (which has since been freshened up) is classic Louis Thomas III! (Rest in peace.)
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!
More than a hundred years before Larema Coffee House set up shop on the bottom level of Gig East Exchange, Moses Brandon ran an eating house in a livery business whose building occupied roughly the same footprint. Like other downtown eateries in the early 1900s, Brandon would have catered largely to people working in nearby tobacco warehouses and factories. Most likely, his clientele were white.
Detail from Sanborn fire insurance map of Wilson, N.C., 1908.
Moses Brandon, son of Frances Terry of Virginia, married Amie Hilliard on 22 May 1895 in Wilson. A.M.E. Zion minister L.B. Williams performed the ceremony, and Charles H. Darden, Braswell R. Winstead and L.A. Moore served as witnesses.
In the 1900 census of Wilson, Wilson County: Virginia-born Moses Brandon, 50, day laborer; wife Emmie, 45, washerwoman; and son Marvin, 12.
In the 1908 Wilson city directory, Moses Brandon’s listing shows his “eating house” at 127 South Goldsboro Street and his home at 125 Ashe Street.
In 1909, Branson was also operating an “ice cream joint” on the East Side, i.e. east of the railroad tracks. In May of that year, he was brought up on charges of selling ice cream made from the milk of a tubercular cow.
News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), 16 May 1909.
It’s not clear how long Brandon operated at 127 South Goldsboro. In the 1910 census of Wilson, Wilson County, Moses Brandon, 55, is listed as the proprietor of boarding house, with wife Amy, 51, as laundress.
In 1912, the city directory shows that Brandon had moved his eating house to 411 East Nash, across the street from the Atlantic Coast Line railroad station.
The Wilson Daily Times reported Moses Brandon’s death on 4 March 1914, noting that he “had conducted a restaurant in this city for a great many years and is one of Wilson’s best known colored citizens.”
Cross-referencing the 1912 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory and the 1913 Sanborn fire insurance map of Wilson reveals the specific locations of Black-owned businesses just after the turn of the century. Here’s a closer look at the 200 block of South Goldsboro Street, which was dominated by wholesale groceries and small restaurants.
Detail, 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 the 100 block of East Barnes Street and the 200 block of South Goldsboro Street.
William Hargrove — in the 1900 census of Wilson, Wilson County: blacksmith William Hargrove, 32; wife Leuvenia, 30, washing; daughter Bessie, 6, and Lillie, 3; widowed sister Mary Boddie, 25, cooking; and cousin Julious Heat, 20, farm hand.
Isaac J. Young‘s blacksmith shop operated in the present-day location of Worrell’s Seafood. In the 1910 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 315 Spring Street, horse shoer Isaac J. Young, 46; wife Laura, 29; and sons Cornelius, 12, and Robert, 9; plus lodger Henry Moy, 5.
