Hiding the Gold - part one of four

The following is the testimony of James H. Carson, 1829-1919, merchant and mineowner in Charlotte, NC, as recorded in the Cornelia Berry Fore papers. The Fore papers are archived in the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library.

Grasshopper Springs in 1865

It was near the close of the Civil War. Sherman had made his celebrated march from Atlanta, through Georgia to the sea, and was continuing his march across South Carolina - had reached Columbia, and that city had been burnt either by his order, or by the Confederate troops who are said to have set fire to some cotton in the streets. Be that as it may, the city was destroyed, and Sherman continued on his triumphant march towards North Carolina, coming as far as Winnsboro in the direction of Charlotte, when this little event never chronicled in print, had its inception.

The Bank of the state of North Carolina before the war was one of the largest in the South, having a capital of four million dollars - equal to any fifteen banks now in the state. It was located at Raleigh, but had branches in Charlotte, New Bern, Tarboro, and several other places in the state.

As the war progressed, the eastern portion of the state was soon invaded by federal troops, and the branches of the Bank located in that section had to pack up and remove to the interior, some of them coming to Raleigh and others to Charlotte. At last however all the specie the bank owned, amounting to about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, was sent to [the] branch Bank at Charlotte, as it was thought it would be safer here and less liable to capture than at any other point where a branch of the bank was located.

For some time no apprehension was felt in regard to its safety, but when Sherman's troops got to Winnsboro and Stoneman's raiders were getting uncomfortably close to us, some doubt was felt about the safety of the specie in the vault of the branch at Charlotte.

Gen. Joseph E. Johnston had been here and had his headquarters at the Bank, but soon left, going east to attempt to intercept Sherman's forces, and some of his troops had passed through going in the same direction.

As this move left Charlotte uncovered and without protection, some of us who were the most interested in saving that specie had a conference and after mature deliberation decided that the money would be safer in the woods somewhere than in the bank's vault.

The next thing to consider was how to do it. Teams of any sort were hard to obtain, as they had been taken for the use of the army, and the Rail Roads did not run in a direction that we thought safe. the weight of the specie was between three and four thousand pounds, which would require a good team to haul over such roads as we then had leading out from Charlotte. We were fortunate however in finding the man for the occasion.

A. A. Kennedy was his name. He lived about one mile north of Biddle Institute, had been a wagoner all his life, and always had good teams. Fortunately too, he owned ten thousand dollars worth of stock in the Bank, and this fact relieved us of any embarassment in applying to him for his aid. It was soon granted and it took us but a short time to arrange the program for our flight.

The specie was all in strongboxes and kegs, ready for shipment.

To be continued in the next blog post.

Digging for gold

"It was gold, the selection of Charlotte as a railroad junction, and the building of a network of converging highways which made Charlotte great." (Charles Brockman, Hornet's Nest, Charlotte, 1961, p.267.)

"What accounts for Charlotte?" an out-of-town visitor to the library asked me recently. Why did a city arise here at all, I supposed he meant, so I cited the Indian crossroads which presaged the later crossing of wagon roads, railroads, highways, and air routes in the same location. This transaction has stayed with me because I felt the inadequacy of my answer. Considering Charlotte as a crossroads explains why there is any kind of conglomeration here at all, but does not explain why it is such a large urban center. Any number of other Piedmont towns were the peers of Charlotte in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Sorting out the New South City (Chapel Hill, 1998), Thomas Hanchett explains the importance of the railroad, which came to Charlotte in 1852. It gave farmers a reason to take their produce to Charlotte rather than other market towns. But what made Charlotte a good spot for a railroad depot in the first place? The difference was gold.

Before the coming of the railroad, gold-mining and (after 1835) the minting of gold drew people to Charlotte and diversified the local economy, freeing it from entire dependence on cotton. (The next post to this blog will reprint a story of gold in Charlotte's past from the Civil War era.) The gold deposits discovered in the western states later in the nineteenth century would overshadow the Carolinas' gold rush but not before Charlotte had built on the initial prosperity it brought.

Charlotte's gold-mining days still attract researchers. The Depression of the 1930s sparked renewed local interest in mining, but the veins were exhausted by then. The current specter of hard times returning has brought more people into the library to ask about the location of old mines. Others study it for its historical importance rather than to strike it rich themselves. These latter researchers have a new lode of information to consider now thanks to librarian Jane Johnson of the Carolina Room. She recently travelled to the office of the National Archives in Atlanta, Georgia. There she spent the better part of a week photocopying nineteenth-century records pertaining to the Assay Office and the Mint in Charlotte. She's organizing them now, and they will soon be available to researchers.

Charlotte wet and dry

The library recently received a gift of four decades worth of letters from J. B. Ivey, the founder of the Ivey's department store chain. He wrote a newsletter almost every week from the 1920s to the 1950s to far-flung family and friends, informing them of "Home News", as he called it. He used the newsletter to report on sickness and health in his wide circle of acquaintance, to describe the state of his garden, for which he was famous, and to give news from the Methodist Church, in which he was a leader. The one bit of trivia that anyone who knows anything about Mr. Ivey seems to know concerns his adherence to church teaching. He ordered the windows of his store to be shuttered on Sundays, so that no-one would be distracted from church-going by the temptation to window shop.

The letters offer very little commentary on matters beyond his personal sphere, one exception being temperance. As the nation and the state debated Prohibition, Mr. Ivey expressed his hope that North Carolina, at least, would stay "dry" - forbidding the sale or manufacture of alcoholic beverages. To appreciate the context for his convictions, one may consult a small volume on the Carolina Room shelves: Prohibition Didn't End in '33. It is an oral history project, edited by Margaret Bigger and published in 1994. It features the words of Charlotte residents, who must have been seventy or eighty years old at the time of the interviews, recalling experiences and family lore from the period of Prohibition.

One story in the book from Charlotte's history concerns the disposal of contraband liquor seized by the local police. From the police station on East Fourth Street, they would dump it into the storm drain, which emptied into Sugar Creek. The flow of whiskey produced a noticeable smell, and some local drinkers even filled empty bottles at this source!

Welcome to Black History Month

In February students of all ages and races reflect on African American history. Many different types of resources in the Carolina Room can help them. The photograph collection called "An African American Album", for example, captures family groups, churches, social gatherings, and other moments of black life in Charlotte. Pictured above is a family portrait from 1920: the photograph complements the information on the same people from the census of the same year.

Another archive blog

The Davidson College Archives has launched a new blog – “Around the D” Whereas "The Square" has discussed library services in the Carolina Room, the Davidson Archivist, Jan Blodgett, uses the blog to pass on historical infomation about the college from sources in the Archive. Her approach makes for enjoyable reading. For example, some students at the turn of the twentieth century grew to resent the campus bell that summoned them to class and prayers, dubbing it one of the "Campus Monsters". This blog would do well to follow the Davidson example. Look for stories from Charlotte and Mecklenburg county's past in future posts.

On Monday January 19 the Charlotte Symphony culminated a week-long series of programs drawing on the African American musical tradition with a program called "Daybreak of Freedom" that honored the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Carolina Room provided scans of newspaper headlines and photographs to Wonderworld Film and Video to make the Symphony's Martin Luther King Day tribute a multi-media experience.

The Big Read

This winter the library is sponsoring The Big Read. It's a program funded by the National Endowment of the Arts to encourage reading. A community organizes to read and discuss a particular book, in Charlotte's case, To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1960 novel by Alabama native Harper Lee.

The Carolina Room supports this program with an exhibit of photographs in Gallery L, the Main Library's exhibit space. Librarian Shelia Bumgarner is the exhibit organizer. She has selected quotations from the book, which is set in the 1930s, and paired them with photographs of Charlotte from that period. To accompany the photograph at the head of this post, she chose the following passage from Chapter 1:

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family.

The exhibit also includes stills from the equally renowned 1962 movie. (Thanks to Marsha Gaspari of Charlotte for the use of the stills.)