by Bryant Simon
Because the Seaboard and other railroads operated nationally, the railway unions fought for and won national wage scales. Unlike the steel and coal industries, there was little regional competition and no agreed-upon southern wage differential. A brakeman in Hamlet got paid the same amount as a brakeman in Hannibal, Missouri, or Des Moines, Iowa. That kind of money went a long way in a small southern town. It turned these men into breadwinners and guaranteed them job stability, rising living standards, and a secure retirement. When they married, as most surely did, their wives generally stayed at home, taking care of the cooking and housekeeping, volunteering at school and church, and raising children and looking after elderly neighbors.5
“Hamlet became a thriving, bustling town,” explained local journalist Clark Cox. And that prosperity, he maintained, was broadly shared. “Hamlet,” Cox wrote, “had something that (nearby) Rockingham didn’t have—a large middle class. Railroad workers were skilled, unionized, and much better paid than textile workers.”6 The money they made as conductors, engineers, foremen, and machine shop supervisors spread across the town and lifted up whole families for generations to come. Getting a job with the railroad was usually a family affair. Brother recommended brother. Fathers got apprenticeships for sons. Church members put in a good word for fellow congregants and relatives. Once a man landed a railroad job, he usually kept it for the rest of his working life.
Burnell McGirt served in the Navy during World War II. He came home and got his first and the only job he ever had with the railroad. “I hired out in May of 1946,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “I worked in the signaling department until 1971, and from there I went to the roadway department. I had thirty-eight years of service with the railroad.”7
Nat Campbell’s stint with the railroad lasted forty-two years. Over that time, he always made decent money. “I was able to give my wife and children things that I probably couldn’t give them if I worked anywhere else,” he bragged in 2009, looking back on his years as a carman and laborer in the wheel-and-axle shop. “We always had a nice trip,” he said. They had a Sears charge account, and they ran it up each year buying Christmas presents for “our young’uns.” “By November of the next year,” he joked, “we had it all paid up, and we had to start all over again.”8
Once white workers—“railroad men,” as they called themselves—got married and saved a little money, they bought modest brick houses and wood bungalows to the east of the depot on Boyd Lake Road and Spring Street, and not far from the center of town, on Cherry Street and Rosedale Lane. Seaboard accountants and managers, conductors and crew leaders, the aristocrats of labor, settled even closer to Main Street, where they lived next to the high school principal and the football coach, lawyers, and store owners on shaded streets with names like Madison and Hamilton, Entwistle, and Pineland, in white clapboard houses with lawns as manicured as country club greens and porches wide enough for three-person bench swings. In the spring, these thoroughfares smelled like azaleas and dogwoods, and in the fall like damp pine needles and moist oak leaves. Kids tracked along the sidewalks, trick-or-treating at Halloween and singing carols at Christmas. In the years after World War II, some railway workers moved their families farther out onto curvy streets in small subdivisions named after plantations, into what passed for Hamlet’s suburbs. They parked their motorized fishing boats on trailers out front in their driveways next to their new Ford trucks, Buick sedans, and Chevy station wagons. In the backyards were brick grills and above-ground pools. In fact, one local official chuckled about Hamlet, “We had more backyard swimming pools then Beverly Hills. It was a high-income place for the South.”9
Most of Hamlet’s prosperity stayed on the white side of the town’s racial divide. Thirty-nine percent of Hamlet residents in 1980 were, according to the United States Census, African American. But not many held the kinds of high-paying jobs that pulled them out to the suburbs or paid for backyard pools. On average, African Americans made almost 40 percent less than whites, and they were less likely to work on the railroads, which classified jobs along racial lines well past World War II.10 By the time that Imperial Food Products began to relocate to Hamlet from northeast Pennsylvania, twenty-six years after the Brown decision, jobs were no longer explicitly segregated, the lights were off on the minstrel shows that used to play at the city ballpark, voting booths were open to everyone, and local children attended integrated schools. But when the bell rang after the last class period, the African American students still went home to largely segregated neighborhoods; they still knew that some sections of town were essentially off-limits to them and most still had little faith that the police would protect them or their property. Sunday remained the holiest and most segregated day of the week, as black families went to black churches and white families went to white churches.11
Yet within Hamlet’s black community there was, as one local preacher noted, an “economic divide.” Along Charlotte Street, a short walk from the depot, African Americans “who were doing well,” doctors and teachers and families with men who worked for the railroads as porters and waiters—and later on, as employment segregation broke down somewhat, as switchmen, machinists, and mechanics—lived in tidy houses with neat stone walkways and flower-filled window boxes. By 1970, a handful of black professionals had moved away from the Main Street area into one of the neat ranch houses with aluminum carports in the tiny black suburban development known as McEachern Forest on the southern edge of town, named after a successful Hamlet African American undertaker, businessman, and politician who himself lived there.12
African Americans who taught in the schools, worked as janitors in the hospital, and held decent railway jobs lived in simple brick homes just north of Hamlet Avenue along Pine, Washington, and Monroe Streets. Men who worked the dirtier, but still steady, jobs loading coal, hauling freight, hammering rails, and washing down engines lived to south near Bridges Street, and even farther south and north, in narrow trailers, on lots cut out from forests of tall, skinny pine trees.13 Their neighbors washed dishes at local hotels, stocked the shelves at hardware and auto parts stores, and cleaned up around the depot and the filling stations. They hauled wood and made a little extra money picking peaches and cotton during the harvest seasons. Black women—like Imperial worker Loretta Goodwin and John Coltrane’s mom—no matter where they lived, including along Charlotte Street, contributed to their household incomes by waiting tables, picking crops, and, mostly before 1980, cleaning toilets, folding clothes, and cooking dinner in the homes of white railroad workers, doctors, lawyers, and firefighters.
Many of Hamlet’s African American families didn’t actually live in Hamlet. They lived in the North Yard, an unincorporated section of Richmond County with a population of between eight hundred and one thousand people that sat about halfway between the Hamlet train depot and Seaboard’s vast maintenance facilities north of town. Some houses in this area were neat and tidy and clustered together in family plots. Most, however, were shotgun shacks and trailers owned by politically connected white landlords, men like D.L. McDonald.
Born in 1911, Daniel Leonard McDonald graduated from high school and went right to work as a carpenter. It didn’t take long before he moved up a few rungs and became a general contractor. Over the next several decades, he built hundreds of houses, from simple lakeside cabins to sprawling ranch homes across Richmond County. Between 1961 and 1978, he served on the Richmond County Board of Commissioners.14 Throughout his years of real estate and political success, McDonald held on to a North Yard general store where he extended credit to his tenants and their neighbors. Locals called him “Jot It Down” because every time someone picked up a can of beans or a loaf of bread, he wrote it down in his book. He would add it to the rent. Then, it seems, he would factor in interest and other fees. When it came time to settle up, no one in the North Yard ever seemed to be able to get all of their debts erased from D.L. McDonald’s book.
McDonald charged $50 to $100 a month for one of his th
ree- or four-room houses in the North Yard. Most of these tin-roofed places sat a foot or two off the ground on short stacks of cement blocks. Well into the 1960s, some still had hand-dug wells and outhouses in the back. “There were so many holes in the floor,” remembered Martin Quick of his North Yard rental house, “that if you dropped a penny you had to go outside to pick it up.” During the winter, his family shoved crumpled pieces of newspaper into the holes in the walls to keep out the cold.
Locals knew that they could find a drink and a dice game in the North Yard just about any time of day. “If my mom got word I was there,” Joseph Arnold, who lived in one of Hamlet’s black neighborhoods, chuckled, “I’d be in trouble.” Even if she didn’t know he was there, he made sure he left by nightfall.15
“I wouldn’t have gone over to that part of town,” Josh Newton recalled. There just wasn’t anything there for him, the white son of a white railroad worker who didn’t drink or smoke and was getting ready to go to college. At least, that’s how he looked at it at the time.16
When Mike Quick’s family moved from the North Yard to the Leroy Hubbard Homes, the South Hamlet public housing project down the hill from the Mello-Buttercup factory on Bridges Street, he felt like a real-life version of the television Jeffersons, moving on up the social ladder. For the first time in his life, the future NFL All-Pro wide receiver lived in a place where he couldn’t see the ground through the floors and his neighbors didn’t walk out the back door to go to the bathroom. But he remained in a segregated neighborhood, one where most people were just getting by, though things got better for his family when he entered the fifth grade around 1971 and his mom, the family’s breadwinner, landed a job as a nurse’s assistant at Hamlet Hospital not far from the depot and downtown.17
From the time that Seaboard set up shop in town, even the people who didn’t work for the railroad in Hamlet, black and white, still depended on the railroad. For years, Walter Bell shined shoes at the station. J.C. Niemeyer started in the Seaboard maintenance shops around the turn of the century. A few years later, in 1902, he left the railroad and opened the town’s first laundry. J.L. Dooley, a carpenter, made his living building and repairing homes for Seaboard engineers and conductors. W.R. Bosnal and Company manufactured crossties and switches. Before refrigerated cars came into use, the Hamlet Ice Company employed fifty men, making huge blocks of ice and delivering them to the yards to keep the fruit from Florida and vegetables from New Jersey cool and fresh in transit. During World War I, runners carried platters of fried chicken, potato salad, greens, and cornbread from McEachern’s Hotel, an African American–owned rooming house on Bridges Street, not far from where the Imperial plant would be, over to the depot and sold them for a quarter each to hungry black soldiers passing through town, men trusted to fight for the United States Army but not permitted to get food at the whites-only lunch counters and eateries on Hamlet’s Main Street.18
Before the wide adoption of Pullman cars in the years after World War I, passengers didn’t sleep overnight on trains. They got off at midway points between New York and Miami in places like Hamlet. Local businesses grew to meet the travel needs of these short-term visitors. Passengers in blue blazers and silk skirts stayed at Hamlet’s Terminal Hotel or at the fancier Seaboard Hotel. After they checked in and freshened up, they went for a stroll along Main Street, where as one local remembers, “every store was filled and business was doing pretty well down here.” They passed the banks, the Beaux Arts opera house, and the hardware store, shoe store, and jewelry shop. Next to Birmingham Drug there was a bowling alley where, as a local dentist recalled, “They had black boys in there that’d set the pins.” On Saturday nights, the overnight guests mixed with local bankers and their wives, and on Sunday mornings, railroad workers and their families walked through town on the way back home from church. White men would stop by the newsstand in the depot to pick up the papers, including the New York Times if they wanted it, and get the latest local gossip.19 Every once in a while, they would catch a glimpse of one of the famous figures seen on the front or back pages of papers in their hometown. When the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus hit the road in the South, it would stop and exercise its lions and elephants on Hamlet’s streets. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Jenny Lind stopped in Hamlet. And for one glorious night in 1917, Hamlet was the center of the musical world as Italian tenor Enrico Caruso performed before a packed crowd at the town’s opera house.20
Donations from the railroads and contributions from the paychecks of railroad workers helped to create Hamlet’s layered town life. The city put on a Christmas parade in December and fireworks on the Fourth of July. Downtown there were Belk’s and W.R. Land’s department stores and Stewart Gordon Furniture with its rocking-chair sign over the front door. There was Cromartie’s and Fox’s Barber Shop, three pool rooms, and two or three movie theaters showing weekly serials and Westerns to packed—and of course segregated—houses on Saturday afternoons. The money from Seaboard helped to build churches with stained glass windows and pipe organs. It paid for meeting halls and Sunday school classrooms, folding tables and stacks of collapsible chairs brought out for banquets and weddings. It funded improvements that made Hamlet schools, especially the white ones, better than most in the area. Those wages helped to lay out Little League fields with smooth infields, lush grass outfields, and electric scoreboards. It built a hospital other towns envied. Opened in 1915, Hamlet Hospital, where Mike Quick’s mom worked, grew by 1940 into a four-story, one-hundred-bed facility, twice the size of the one in more populous Rockingham, the county seat of Richmond County and Hamlet’s bitter rival in sports and business. According to a local historian, Hamlet Hospital was the largest medical facility in the state at the time. Patients traveled from the much larger cities of Charlotte and Greensboro, two and three hours away, to get their care there.21
Beginning in the 1960s, however, the economic world of Hamlet’s well-dressed Main Street and landscaped residential areas began to fray. State highways and county roads began to cut across North Carolina and the rest of the South. The post office started to use planes to move letters and postcards. Snowbirds on their way to Florida started to drive on the wide interstates paid for with Cold War dollars. Salesmen from Charlotte loaded their samples in their trunks and steered their new Oldsmobiles with electric windows and frosty air-conditioning out of their driveways to call on customers in Wilmington and Fayetteville. Truckers carried trailers full of live chickens, loaves of Wonder Bread, crates of sweet potatoes, and boxes of rolled bologna from the farms and factories to supermarkets in cities, suburbs, and small towns.
The Seaboard tried to shore up its financial health and meet the new challenges posed by jetliners, road building, and a growing trucking industry. Beginning in 1967, it began buying up smaller lines and merging with other rail companies. The early consolidations cost Hamlet some jobs as they got shifted to other hubs in the system. To stay competitive, the company cut crews, eliminated the caboose on some lines, froze wages, and introduced other labor-saving technologies. Faced with fewer riders, it reduced its passenger services, eliminating more jobs and taking visitors off the streets of Hamlet who in the past had looked round town for lunch, a souvenir, and even a taste of whiskey. Seaboard would stay in business, eventually reorganizing after another round of mergers and job transfers that moved even more positions out of Hamlet to Jacksonville, Florida, and Corbin, Kentucky. In 1986, the company would officially be renamed CSX, but by then, the best days were clearly behind the onetime “Hub City of the Carolinas.” The one or two short lines that still cut through Hamlet scaled back as well during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, just months before the fire at Imperial, as the nation’s economy sagged under the weight of a sharp downturn, there was another round of layoffs in town as dozens of longtime local workers were furloughed.22
As jobs, industry, and talent g
ravitated toward urban centers and interstate highways, Hamlet, forty-eight miles from I-95 and eighty-one miles from I-85, started to die a slow death. The signs of the area’s decline could be seen from a number of different vantage points. In 1974, as double-digit inflation struck the entire country and the nation’s economy began to tank, the unemployment rate for Richmond County—where Hamlet was located—rose to a staggering 24.4 percent. The local paper, the Richmond County Daily News, reported the next year that 20 percent of area families lived below the poverty line and that the local annual wage had fallen below the state average and wasn’t keeping up with incomes in urban areas.23 By the 1980s, despite the presence of Hamlet Hospital, the county had less than half as many physicians per capita as the rest of the state averaged. Teenage pregnancies were on the rise and so was infant mortality. In 1980, the county nearly topped the state in premature deaths of children.24