USA > North Carolina > Wake County > History of Wake County, North Carolina, with sketches of those who have most influenced its development > Part 8
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mer neighbor Colonel Polk, to the effect that it was conspired to destroy the State House in that way. It seems that the Secretary of State, Glasgow, holding his office as a respect- ed leader and a Revolutionary officer of re- pute, had somehow fallen into bad ways, and was issuing fraudulent land warrants. The deception being found out, he was prosecuted, and to prevent conviction he had designed to burn the State House, and with it all evidences of his crime. This plot Jackson discovered, and the State House and its records were saved, while Glasgow fled from justice.
This time, however, the fire was well under way before anyone knew about it, and when the flames appeared they were at the top of the building, and there was not even a ladder at hand long enough to reach the trouble. And so that bright June day, the State House burned leisurely, the black smoke rolled up into the blue sky while the owls and bats and flying squirrels scurried out of the burning dome in panic, and the terrified people of Raleigh ran helplessly to and fro across the Capitol Square. Mr Hill, Secretary of State, had ample time to save the State papers. A
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few that were lost at that time were after- wards restored by bequest of Waightstill Avery, from his private collections.
Miss Betsy Geddy, that spirited and gritty maiden lady, rallied all comers to try and move the Canova statue of Washington from beneath the burning roof. The citizens took hold, under her leadership and encour- agement, and tried hard, but the marble was very heavy, and there were not hands enough to lift or to move it. There remained noth- ing to do but to watch it burn. By and by the fire had surrounded it, and it could be seen heated red-hot, glowing like a figure in a fiery furnace. So it shone for a time with unearthly beauty, and suddenly the roof fell in upon it and it broke and crumbled in utter and final ruin. A silence fell on the watching throng, and some little child's voice was heard speaking the sorrow of all: "Poor State House, poor statue, I'm so sorry!"
After the smoking ruins in the Capitol Square had been quenched in a few summer rains, the question was asked and the dis- cussion began whether the edifice should or should not be rebuilt in the same spot or an- other Capital city selected.
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At the next General Assembly the contro- versy became hot. Fayetteville, always sore because she had been passed by that first time, when the new Capital was located in a wilderness, came to the front again to put forth an earnest effort to have her way this time. She felt that the breeze that fanned the flame had been blowing good to her door.
A proposed town site of Haywood to be built at the junction of the Cape Fear and the Deep Rivers was spoken of also; and much was said in its favor because the idea was that water was needed for transportation, and such a site would be favorable for a Capital city On that account. This last is a persistent tradition, and not a matter of written record.
Haywood in the House, Judge Henry Sea- well in the Senate, made the motion to rebuild the Capitol on the former site in the City of Raleigh, and the great influence and eloquence of Judge Gaston were needed at this moment- ous session of the Assembly so to sway the wavering minds of the Legislators that they might vote for the retention of the seat of government in Wake County. The bill to rebuild the Capitol at Raleigh and on its old
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site was finally passed by a safe majority, and carried the appropriation of fifty thousand dollars. The Representatives, thinking of the twenty thousand which sufficed to build the first State House, considered this a gener- ous allowance. They ordered the new build- ing to be as nearly fire-proof as possible, to be built of granite and to have stone floors as well as walls.
The committee to have charge of the build- ing were William Boylan, Duncan Cameron, William S. M'Hoon (State Treasurer), Henry Seawell, and Romulus M. Saunders. This first committee soon resigned and was suc- ceeded by a second entire body composed of S. F. Patterson, Beverly Daniel, Charles Man- ly, Alfred Jones of White Plains, and Charles L. Hinton. Mr. Nichols was State architect and had had some experience with the stone which could be quarried here at home. A builder from the North was associated with him for a little time, but was later dismissed.
The committee were men of boldness, for they calmly used the whole of the first appro- ation to build the foundation for the new Capitol and then asked for more. Of course
CANOVA'S CONCEPTION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON AS PICTURED IN A RARE SKETCH AFTER THE FAMOUS STATUE. (FROM MRS. JULIA JOHNSTON ANDREWS' SKETCH)
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this was exactly what they should have done, but when we reflect how unpopular this action would appear to the habitual parsimony of that day's public opinion, and how well the Legislature understood that unavoidable tax- ation was all that would be tolerated, we may understand that in doing this they were tempt- ing criticism and doing it consciously.
On July 4th, 1833, the corner stone of the Capitol was laid with Masonic rites, and an account of the procession and of the articles placed in the corner stone may be read in the papers of that date.
Governor Swain was in office at that time, and on that same day was held in the brick hotel, formerly the State Museum, a meeting of representative citizens of North Carolina to debate on ways and means for building a railroad; or two lines, one east and west and one north and south, connecting with the Portsmouth Railroad, and extending to some convenient point on the South Caro- lina line. Governor Swain presided over the meeting, the first of its kind ever held in North Carolina, and their decision was to petition the Legislature to assist the enter- prise by pledging the faith of the State. A
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subsequent, more widely representative con- vention suggested the proportion of three- fifths subscribed by stockholders, and two- fifths loaned or invested by the State.
To return to the new Capitol, begun as above, in 1833, and built for the sum as cal- culated after its completion, of $530,684, re- quiring seven years to finish. It is, and has been, as fine a building of its kind as is to be found in the United States, and it it has been a lovely and satisfying sight to several generations of North Carolina folk. The stone was all taken from that same quarry at the eastern side of town which had been opened for the foundation of the first State House.
It is a granite, rather brittle, and veined with lines of brown which make its coloring warm instead of too grey. It is somewhat translucent, having the quality, more than any other stone in the State, of reflecting a differ- ent color under every changing sky which looks down upon it. When snow is on the ground, in the glow of a winter sunset, it has a lovely bluish cast. In spring, when the baby leaves on the trees around it show pale green, it looks pinkish and pale grey, and
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ethereal like a fairy palace. This wonderful stone gave trouble to the builders, however, and sometimes cracked unexpectedly. One of the great pillars of the western facade, has a broken corner in its pedestal, where a piece of the slab faulted when the weight grew heavy upon it, and which was never corrected be- cause of the great expense involved of renew- ing the whole pillar.
Directing the building was Williani Nichols. The architect, Ithiel Towne of New York City, came to see the foundation laid out and begun. He left as an architect and draughtsman to to represent him, David Paton, a Scotchman, who did not remain long in North Carolina after he had completed his work. During his stay, however, he married a North Carolina lady, and his wife died and left him with one baby girl. This child was returned to the care of her Southern grandmother, and mar- ried here. Through her Mr. Paton has descen- dants in this State.
Thomas Bragg, father of Governor Bragg, was also in charge of part of the work. It was necessary also to import skilled stone- cutters from England and Scotland, for there
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were none in North Carolina, and accordingly the ancestor of the Stronach family was one of these skilled craftsmen, William Murdoch of Salisbury was another, also a Mr. Puttick, and others who cast in their lot here afterward and became permanent citizens.
On first coming to this climate these foreign folk found the heat and humidity hard to bear and several died of the fevers which were con- sidered quite inevitable in those days. They lie buried in the old City Cemetery. The most of the Scotch masons adapted themselves as that sturdy race does in every part of the world, and worked busily at the rising wall of the Capitol until it stood complete.
There is no use giving dimensions and telling of the source of the architectural details of this building, speculating as to the Greek or Roman temple suggested by this cornice, or the classical building imitated in that fa- cade, for we may see the lovely pile of stone any day, those of us who live in this city and country. It has become for us like the sunshine and the blue sky, too much a part of our daily vision for us to realize the great intrin- sic beauty it represents.
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It took several sets of commissioners to finally complete the building of the Capitol, and they frequently resigned, and were often replaced during the interval; for it is hinted that the great amount of money which had to be expended more than the first appropriation caused a good deal of criticism. Also not being skilled architects they must stand by what was told them by their contractors; and many difficulties quite unexpected had to be met one by one in the progress of the edifice. Besides this, every one who passed by felt privileged to criticise and spend an opinion, until those in charge could scarcely maintain their calmness. This sort of free advice is one of the rights of a democracy. Kings' houses are not so pitilessly criticised.
The last committee, those who persisted, were but three-William McPheeters, John Beckwith, and Weston Gales, and it is these whose final accounting to the General Assem- bly is published in the newspapers of the time.
The stone to build the Capitol was hauled to the spot by means of a little street rail- road or tramway, called the "Experimental Railroad." This was constructed across from
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the quarry to the eastern end of New Berne Avenue, and west along that street to the Capitol Square, and the small cars drawn by mules easily handled the blocks of stone. This plan, which seems quite simple and ob- vious, was considered a wonder and a great innovation at that time. The railroad idea was quite new and as thrilling to the popular imagination as the airplane is now in 1922. The idea of building and operating this little railroad was due to Mrs. Sarah Hawkins Polk, wife of Colonel William Polk, and she put her savings into it, realizing three hundred per cent.
Among the letters of her son, Leonidas, then a cadet at West Point, to his parents, was one which contributed the idea. He went to Boston on a summer leave of absence, and saw there in operation that sort of a tramway bringing in the stone being then used to build Bunker Hill Monument. He took the trouble to write his parents the whole plan in detail, making a careful little sketch to show the proper flange the car wheels should have in order to run safely on the wooden rails. This experimental railroad was such a suc-
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cess that a passenger car was put on, drawn by a safe horse, and people came from far and near to enjoy a new sensation, so that at times the hauling of stone was somewhat impeded. Street cars were thus a very early develop- nient in Raleigh, due to the seizing of a new idea by a woman.
Indeed, the good ladies of Raleigh seem to have been more "experimental" than their lords on several occasions, although we are of- ten told that women are the conservative sex. We have told of Miss Betsy Geddy's spirited effort to save the finest thing in the State, the Canova statue of George Washington, at the time the old State House burned. This story is like that of the alabaster box of precious ointment, always to be told in her praise. One of the daughters of Mr. Casso, the inn- keeper or hotel man, had married the mer- chant, John Stewart. She was one of those strong-willed and practical sisters who make the finest ancestors in the world, because they have the common sense and decision to meet a crisis.
She saved her home, although it was given up to be destroyed in the path of that great
FIRST LOCOMOTIVE RUNNING INTO RALEIGH IN 1840. ALSO SKETCH OF PASSENGER CAR GENERALLY USED AT THAT TIME. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF MODEL AND ORIGINAL NOW IN LOCOMOTIVE MUSEUM AT PERDUE UNIVERSITY. THE LOCOMOTIVE HAD A 42-INCH DRIVING WHEEL. THE CAR SEATED TWELVE PERSONS
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fire that swept off the whole east side of Fayetteville Street. This happened shortly after the State House was burned and shows how nearly Raleigh was totally annihilated by recurring conflagrations. They brought gunpowder, and told Mrs. Stewart that her house must be blown up to arrest the fire, which was come almost to that place. She mounted her roof and defied them to blow her up with the doomed house, and when she had thus gained her point she proceeded to save her house, and keep a roof over her head, by hard work and wet bed-quilts. Another time she saved somebody's store from being a total loss by quenching the burning roof with twelve barrels of vinegar, after the wells were all drawn dry. At the festival in honor of the coming of the railroad into Raleigh, she served the banquet to seven hundred people who sat down simultaneously.
Good fire protection was scarcely to be ex- pected in Raleigh, and the business block was crowded together more than was prudent when the town was so small. A tiny fire engine was bought as early as 1802, and another in 1810, although they seem not to have done much good.
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Also there were at one time primitive water- works, water being pumped up from Walnut Creek to a tank and allowed to run down Fayetteville Street by gravity. The wooden pipes soon filled up with sediment, for the water was unfiltered and full of the red mud which is seldom absent from running streams in this section. Drought then reigned as be- fore, except as slaked by well-water.
Hunter's Pond was the cause of much of the fever and chills that made the city sickly, and only after the fever epidemics of the thirties was this pond bought by the city and drained.
Raleigh by this time was becoming aware of her backwardness. Railroading was the topic and the sensation. Internal improvement was in the air. After so long without taking serious interest in the subject, people had sud- denly become impatient of the endless miles which separated them from their next town neighbors. Every newspaper told of the rise of real estate values, the increase in the promptness of the mails, and the other joys of those sections where railroads had already be- gun to be built and operated. "Let us cease to doubt, to hesitate and slumber, let us tear away the poppy from our brows, let us no
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longer be the Rip Van Winkle among com- monwealths," thus runs the editorial comment upon the following bit of news item, dated February 5th, 1833, Petersburg, Virginia.
"It is impossible to convey to those who have not witnessed a similar scene, an ade- quate conception of the pride and pleasure that beamed from every countenance when the Engine was first seen descending the plain, wending her way with sylph-like beauty into the bosom of the town, and, like a conqueror of old, bearing upon her bosom the evidence of the victory of art over the obstructions of nature."
Conventions were held, stock books were opened and the successive Legislatures mem- orialized, while, after a year or two of such excitement many railroads had been laid out on paper and nowhere else, and the newspapers thought things were wofully slow moving. Yet when we think of the novelty of the un- dertaking, we cannot say that there was much delay.
The beginning of railroad agitation and the laying of the corner stone of the new Capitol were accomplished the same day, and the rail-
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road, the Raleigh and Gaston, was near enough to completion to be celebrated at the same time as the finishing of the Capitol building.
The same year 1840, which saw the new Capitol complete from foundation to dome, also saw the first train roll into Raleigh from Gaston, near Weldon, and the feelings so well expressed in Petersburg, of victory over space and time, enlivened the hearts of this city, rejuvenated as it was by these two great tasks accomplished.
The Three Days of Raleigh were June tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, 1840, and the town gave itself up to jollification, speechification, il- lumination and barbecue. Guests from Rich- mond and from Petersburg, from Wilmington and from other North Carolina towns, were present. Wilmington had also seen her first train pull into the station that same spring, but the western towns were still served by stage-coaches.
The banquet was served in the new freight depot, empty and spacious, and capable of holding the seven hundred guests. A first shipment of cotton for export had been brought into it just the April previous.
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There were five tables ninety feet long, and the banqueters toasted in real, sure-enough liquor, The Railroad, The Capitol, Judge Gas- ton, "The Ladies" several times, and Mrs. Sarah Polk especially, and separately, al- though they called her a "Distinguished Fe- male." To read of the doings, one would fear that the banqueters might need help when time came to go home after all was over.
That night and the following there were strings of colored lanterns from tree to tree in the Capitol Square, and transparencies, one showing the new Capitol, one the new engine, "The Tornado," and the third, a "lovely scene of nature" entitled "Our Country." There were two balls on successive nights in the Senate Chamber, whose great chandelier held a hundred wax candles; and concerts in the Commons Hall for those who did not dance.
During the day there were trips a few miles out on the railroad, and return, although the rails, or iron strips on which the wheels should run were not yet nailed to the wooden string- ers. "The Tornado," as the first engine was named, had but a single driving wheel on each
lo
COMPLETE TRAIN OF 1838. DRAWN FROM A SKETCH IN AN ALBUM OF RAILROAD EQUIPMENT. THE DRIVING WHEEL OF ENGINE IS FORTY-TWO INCHES IN DIAMETER.
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side, and no cab. It was made in Richmond and was similar in pattern to a good many engines turned out about that time. The cars on these first roads were like a string of stages at first, but in South Carolina they had evolved a box-like passenger car, like a low-built street car. Hence we suppose the first North Caro- lina passenger cars might have been similar to those used near Charleston. All engines had proper names for the first twenty-five years of railroad experience. An item in a Raleigh paper about this time tells of a great railroad spectacle in Baltimore, when the engine came in on the Baltimore and Ohio, drawing seven coaches full of people at once, thirty persons to the coach.
The strips of iron which shod the wooden rails would sometimes become loosened, catch against a car wheel, and turn upwards pierc- ing the car, so that by this means the train would be stopped. They were called snake heads. No one is mentioned as having been impaled by this strip of iron, although there must have been danger of this accident.
The fuel burned on our first railroads, and many years thereafter, was wood. The pro-
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gress of the trains was uncertain. Sometimes the engine would lurch off the track, and go plowing through the bank a few feet, but it was not a wrecking train and a great derrick that replaced the derailed cars, but simply a couple of dozen men gathered from nearby farms, and a mule or two, for the little engine was not too heavy to be coaxed back upon the track by their combined efforts.
Railroad nomenclature was not settled at this time. They called a collision (and these happened soon) a concussion. A train was called a brigade of cars.
The Raleigh and Gaston was eighty-six miles long, and this distance and return was made in twelve hours, which was considered a giddy pace. The time table given occurs several years later, and says "Leave Raleigh at ยท 7:00 a. m., Reach Weldon at 12 m."
The president of the new road was George W. Mordecai. The State aided in financing the project, although a little reluctantly, and on rather severe terms. We must notice that fares on the different stage lines were reduced immediately, and stages and harness began to be advertised for sale. That the much
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needed impulse to prosperity was given, farm property increased in value along the new line, and the North Carolina Railroad was soon built, shows that upon the coming of the much needed improvement trade was steadily pro- gressing. For a long time the population of North Carolina had been almost stationary, and from 1830 to 1840 only fourteen thousand five hundred increase was noted over the whole State. Now the "breath of progress and the breeze of prosperity was to blow away all stagnation and sloth."
CHAPTER IX The Middle Years
N the decades of the forties and the fifties progress and develop- ment of Wake County went stead- ily forward, even as the prosper- ity of North Carolina increased. The young men of the Commonwealth did not run away in such numbers to Texas and Mis- souri as they had formerly done to the near South and West.
The City of Raleigh, established beyond all peradventure as Capital of the State for the future, found herself by central position, and by heritage, confirmed in the social leadership of the State. Her individual social atmos- phere began to make itself felt. Then, as at present, there existed a certain indifference to money as an asset socially, a desire to value her new-comers for what they could prove themselves to be, provided that first of all they be agreeable people. This is the quality of a society conservative, and yet liberal; reserved, and yet tending to kindliness and toleration. Such a flavor of life, fine and subtile, does not
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develop save in a time of quiet improvement, and hopefulness.
In the county as a whole, the change to more prosperous times became evident. There was more to employ the young men of a family and to make their stay at home worth while to them.
Probably most of these plantation homes, with their wide double piazzas and clustering groves of trees, these patriarchal mansions, only a few of which survive conflagration and neglect, were built about 1840.
Some were built later, a few much earlier, but none could have been made after the war. The woodwork and the cornices of these houses were often of a high finish, and the joinery surprises those who think that slaves could attain no fine workmanship. Those were the houses of which the old folk would fondly remark, "I tell you that was a fine old house in its day." These homes seem quite simple and plain, but are well remembered for what they represented to the life of those times. They are roomy, they have a look about them of generosity on the part of their builders, of the spirit of free hospitality un-
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trammeled by the drudgery which lack of ser- vants must bring. They were largely placed in a country not too thickly settled, and pro- vided with the abundance of food and drink which was unstinted at that era of our history. They gave a cheerful welcome and were abodes of gracious leisure. These recollections com- bine to fill up the kindly memories of these old houses. Indeed the time from the first of the forties through the fifties must have been a golden age to be alive in, the joyous youth of our country.
Improvements in living conditions came in quick succession, and inade existence easier, while anticipation of the next surprise kept attention and imagination at a stretch to be- hold the next wonder that should happen. The over-mechanical development of things which has made our hurry and complication too great was unguessed at that time, and only the delight of growing ease was perceived.
The conquering of space by the railroad, and of time by the telegraph; the increase in wealth and comfort; in the desire for learning and spread of education; the feeling of enlarged op- portunity, as the great United States rounded out to its present boundaries; all these ele-
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