Greensboro 1808-1941: A brief history

              Greensboro 1808-1941: A Brief History
by Marvin Brown1
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INTRODUCTION: GREENSBORO PRIOR TO 1880
Greensboro was established in 1808, not because of any natural or commercial advantage, such as a road, a river, or a
port, but because the land it was to occupy marked the center of Guilford County. A quarter-mile square, the new town
and county seat was laid out in a grid and divided into lots. Not a single structure stood on the four original streets within
this grid. By 1829, 369 white residents lived within the town limits, another 115 just outside. The population also
included twenty-six free blacks and ninety-six slaves. Reflecting its population growth, Greensboro's boundaries were
expanded in 1837 to a mile on each side (Arnett 1955:19-23, 194; Fripp 1982:19-23). This was to remain its physical size
until 1891, although its population continued to grow; in 1850 it stood at about 1,500 and by 1880 it had grown to 2,105
(Arnett 1955:419).
As early as 1820 roads spread out from Greensboro in all directions, to Salem, Salisbury, Fayetteville, Hillsborough, and
Asheboro, and to Danville, Virginia. These roads were supplemented in the 1850s by the railroad, an all-important force
that was to turn the town into a city. In 1849 the state legislature passed a bill for the building of the North Carolina
Railroad from Goldsboro to Charlotte. Largely due to the efforts of former governor John Motley Morehead, a
Greensboro resident who was a leading figure in the railroad's construction, the line was looped north through
Greensboro. Construction began from Greensboro, going east and west, in 1851, and five years later the first trains met
just west of town (Arnett 1955:145-149; Powell 1989:288-289; Gilbert 1982:8). Prior to 1880 two other lines were
added to what was to become a network of rails spreading out in all directions like the earlier roads. In 1864 tracks were
laid by the Piedmont Railroad north to Danville and in 1873 a line was opened to Salem by the Northwestern Railroad
Company (Arnett 1955:149; Fripp 1982:33).
Some manufactories were built in Greensboro early in its history. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these was the 1833
Mount Hecla Steam Cotton Mill, which is said to have been the first steam-powered cotton mill in the state. In 1860 Col.
E. P. Jones was reported to have manufactured 250,000 pounds of plug tobacco in the town (Arnett 1955:165, 185).
However, according to historian Ethel Stephens Arnett, in spite of the 1858 advent of the railroad, "it appears that when
the [Civil] war was over, not a single manufacturing establishment was operating in Greensboro" (Arnett 1955:167).
Some industry developed during Reconstruction, including Col. Thomas McMahan's Spoke and Handle Factory in the late
1860s; the Sergeant and McCauley Manufacturing Company, which produced cooking and heating stoves, in 1869; and
the Glascock Foundry and Machine Shop, which also produced stoves, in 1873. Some tobacco enterprises were also
established between the War and 1880. These industries concentrated along the main east-west route of the North
1 This essay is excerpted from Marvin Brown’s longer National Register nomination for Greensboro. Only the main
narrative, on the history and evolution of the city, is included. His interesting discussion about the development of the
buildings and housing in Greensboro can be found in the full nomination application document. See: United States
Department of the Interior National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places. Historic and Architectural
Resources of Greensboro, North Carolina, 1880-1941 Marvin Brown (September 15, 1991)
Carolina Railroad, within a few blocks of Elm Street (Arnett 1955:167-168; Fripp 1982:40-41; Beers map 1879).
Industrial and other growth prior to 1880, however, was constrained by the stagnant economy of Guilford County, which
was the main consumer of the town's goods and services (Kipp 1974:1-83).
As county seat and a stop on the railroad, Greensboro was also home to commercial enterprises and hotels, although its
commercial trade developed slowly at first. The first property census of the city, taken in 1829, listed five stores, three
retail liquor stores, and a stud horse. Commerce grew steadily, however, and between 1830 and 1860 the town's varied
enterprises included tailor and tin shops, furniture, jewelry and book stores, hardware houses, and a variety of other
enterprises (Arnett 1955:194-195; Fripp 1982:22). After the War the city's commercial enterprises grew at a faster
pace; in 1879 numerous such enterprises stood on South Elm Street. Commercial and other activity in Greensboro in the
seventies is suggested by the construction of a $40,000 hotel, the Benbow House, on South Elm Street in 1871. It was
followed, also on Elm, by the forty-room McAdoo House (Arnett 1955:211-212).
Hand in hand with industrial and commercial growth went residential growth. Greensboro between its founding and the
Civil War has been described as having had three basic types of residential property: large estates, town lots, and
working class cottages. The multi-acre estates were located within walking distance of the central square in every
direction but the marshy northeast. The town lots stretched in all directions from the center, primarily along Market and
Elm. And white workers and free blacks lived in modest housing near the Mount Hecla cotton mill north of the center of
town and in the poorly drained area to the northeast (Baylin 1968:19-21).
Between the end of the Civil War and 1880, as discussed further below, the city's first suburbs -- Warnersville, South
Greensboro, and Shieldstown -- began to develop. They all stood to the south, not far from the commerce and business
of Market and South Elm streets, and even closer to the industries located along the east-west line of the railroad (Baylin
1968:36-41; Beers map 1879).
Greensboro's identification as a college town developed early in its history. Three of its five modern colleges have
antebellum origins, although they did not grow into major institutions until the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Guilford College, located northwest of the city, began as the New Garden Boarding School, a Quaker
institution chartered in 1837 (Edmisten 1990; Arnett 1955:103-105; Fripp 1982:27). The charter granted to Greensboro
College (then known as the Greensborough Female College) the following year was the first granted to a women's
college in the state. It opened to students in 1846. Located less than a half-mile west of the courthouse, on Market
Street, it was a major institution of the white community before the Civil War. Closed in 1863 due to the War, it
reopened ten years later (Arnett 1955:101-103; Fripp 1982:27). A central institution in the black community was
Bennett College, which had its beginnings in 1873 as a day school in the basement of a church. By 1878 its first building
was raised about three-quarters of a mile southeast of the courthouse, in the heart of the city's largest black community
(Arnett 1955:105-107; Fripp 1982:42-43; Scarlette 1989:I-1).
Educational opportunities for white and black children were quite limited in Greensboro prior to the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. Before the Civil War black children had received little if any schooling (Arnett 1955:81). In 1875 the
first free graded schools opened in Greensboro, one for whites and one for blacks. The white school stood at the corner
of Lindsay and Forbis streets; the black school was located at St. James Presbyterian Church (Greensboro Record,
November 16, 1940, and December 19, 1946; Arnett 955:87; Fripp 1982:43).
Greensboro's early churches grew from the varied ethnic and religious groups that settled Guilford County: the Lutheran
and Calvinist Germans who had settled in the northeast, the Quakers in the west, and the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish in
between. Churches were raised within the present limits of the city prior to 1880 by Presbyterians and Methodists –
black and white – and by white Baptist, Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic congregations. Although they had long been
established in the area, the Quakers did not form a Meeting in Greensboro proper until 1891, and the Lutherans until
1908 (Smith 1979:9-10; Arnett 1955:116-141; Beers map 1879).
1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GATE CITY, 1880-1899
Although it had been designated a city in 1870 by the language of a new charter, it was the 1880s and 1890s that saw
Greensboro truly transformed from town to city. Between 1850 and 1880 the population had only grown from about
1,500 to 2,100. Between 1880 and 1890 it was to jump more than fifty percent to 3,317. Even that figure was
deceptively low, for the city's population, including its suburbs, was probably closer to 8,000 in 1890 (Arnett
1955:419-420; Fripp 1982:55). In 1890, according to the Greensboro Daily Record, 239 new buildings were erected and
forty-two new businesses established, all successfully (Arnett 1955:36). The figures reported on January 18, 1891, in
the Patriot, another Greensboro newspaper, for that same year, were smaller but still bullish: ninety-seven new homes,
twenty five tenement house, ten brick stores, a brick office building and, additionally, 500 unimproved lots sold at a
value of $200,000 (Manieri 1982:51). The growth mentality of the city was reflected in the annexation of 1891, which
expanded it from one to four square miles. It grew out a half-mile, still in a square, in each direction, pulling developed
areas at its edges and, particularly, the communities to the south, into its borders. By 1900 the population had eclipsed
10,000 (Baylin 1968:55-56; Fripp 1982:55).
Five main threads were critical to the development of Greensboro in the 1880s and 1890s from a town into a city: its
transportation network; its residential growth; its industry; its commercial and institutional growth; and its schools and
colleges. Although these factors intertwine, often inseparably, they are discussed individually below.
A. Development of the Transportation Network
Greensboro's transportation network in the last two decades of the nineteenth century had three
components--railroads, roads, and a horse-drawn trolley line. The railroad and road systems were an outgrowth and
continuation of earlier transportation developments. The railroad, according to historian Samuel M. Kipp III, was ''a vital
precondition" to urbanization and industrial development in Greensboro in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and the "extension and improvement of the road system further stimulated the growth of Greensboro as a
retailing, wholesaling, marketing, and distributing center" (Kipp 1974:105-106). The trolley, a new component of the
network, did not greatly contribute to the development of the city until it was electrified and expanded at the opening
of the twentieth century.
The railroad network that had its beginnings in the 1856 North Carolina Railroad grew in lines and in numbers of trains in
the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it was the sixty trains that arrived in and departed from the city each day in 1891
that led the editor of the Daily Record to dub Greensboro the "Gate City," a name it is still known by (Fripp 1982:55) In
1888 the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad Company--joining the existing lines that had been built in 1856, 1864, and
1873--ran a line through the city that connected it with the port city of Wilmington to the southeast and Mount Airy to
the northwest. In 1890 the Northwestern Carolina Railroad connected the city with North Wilkesboro to the northwest.
With the Panic of 1893, the operators of Greensboro's rail lines fell on hard times. In 1894, however, they were all
reorganized by J. P. Morgan and Company as part of the Southern Railway Company (Arnett 1955:149-150; Fripp
1982:50, 60; Fripp 1985:49). The railroad continued to be important and to grow, and in 1899 the Southern Railway
opened a new station on South Elm Street (Fripp 1982:69).
The railroad pulled the city's residential and industrial development to the south in the late nineteenth century. Numerous
industries sprang up during the closing two decades of the century along the main east-west rail line of the North
Carolina Railroad south of the historic center of the city during this period. By 1885 a short spur line had been added
between the North Carolina Railroad and the Cape Fear and Yadkin, which already crossed each other a bit west of
downtown. This created a triangle of lines just west of South Elm Street within and around which much of the city's
industry was to locate late in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Warnersville, Shieldstown, and South
Greensboro, the city's first suburbs, were also located to the south, not far from the tracks. North of this triangle and of
downtown, the abortive North Carolina Steel and Iron Company located its early 1890s works on a rail line, the Cape Fear
and Yadkin. The Cone textile mills in the northeast were to make use of the former Piedmont Railroad tracks and the mills
of Pomona to the west were located near the main line of the North Carolina Railroad (Baylin 1968:34; Fripp 1985:49;
Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1885, 1888, 1891, 1896).
The street system also grew during the final two decades of the century, in size and quality. An 1887 bond issue
provided for extending Elm Street, the city's major business and commercial thoroughfare; an 1896 map pictures it
passing north beyond Church and Greene streets, where it had originally halted. The extension was to promote
residential growth to the north (Fripp 1985:49; Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1896). In 1899 a visitor to
Greensboro called Elm Street north of the railroad tracks, which was lined by private and public buildings, "equal in
beauty to any in the state." The street from "depot to courthouse," the visitor continued, "has been solidly and smoothly
laid with the Belgian pavement, while it is flanked with bricks brought from Fayetteville, said to be the best for such
purposes. These streets are lighted with the arc electric light and also with gas'' (Bishir and Earley 1985:250).
By 1891 Davie Street had been paved with granite blocks. Spring Garden Street was opened and macadamized west to
the community of Pomona, and connected with the roads to Winston-Salem and Salisbury (Arnett 1955:152-153; Baylin
1968:54; Fripp 1982:56). Summit Avenue, by 1898, had been opened and macadamized from downtown through the
Ceasar Cone estate to the Cone mills, and connected with the road to Raleigh. The Greensboro Patriot announced on
November 9, 1898:
The work on Summit Avenue was finally completed Friday afternoon, and it is probably the finest highway in
North Carolina. What was, a short while ago, a stubble field lying in waste has been opened by a magnificent
boulevard, with many handsome and commodious residences erected on either side (Kipp 1974:375).
Numerous other streets must have been improved as well, for the 1902 Sanborn maps reported that the city's streets
(at least some of them) were "paved and macadamized" (Sanborn Map Company maps 1902).
On October 1, 1891, a horse drawn streetcar rolled south down a track from the McAdoo Hotel at Elm and Washington
to the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad depot, beginning the era of trolleys in Greensboro. Much of Greensboro's
residential pattern had been set before the trolley – particularly the communities that already existed to its south – or
was to be set later in the decade with little regard for it, particularly in the growing mill communities of the Cones to the
northeast and Pomona to the west (Manieri 1982:44-46). According to Raymond Manieri, in his thesis on streetcar
speculators, the horse drawn street railway system of the 1890s "was not a dependable, easily accessible means of
transportation for most Greensboro citizens" (Manieri 1982:67) It did blaze the way, however, for the electric trolley
system that was to come with the new century. Institutionally, it also set a pattern for development and industrialization
in the new century, for many of the men involved in the formation of the system were involved in the land companies and
real estate speculation of the 1890s and early twentieth century (Manieri 1982:53; Baylin 1968:64-65).
The interconnection of the road, railroad, and trolley network, and of the interests that promoted them, is illustrated by
the activities of the North Carolina Steel and Iron Company. As much a real estate as an industrial venture, it planned
numerous streets on the approximately 2,000 acres of land it owned north and northeast of the city limits. A "Bird's Eye
View" map of 1891 shows the dozens of streets of the venture stretching north and northeast to the horizon. Four plat
maps picturing numerous lots, filed in 1895 by the company, confirm the grand nature of the plans (Baylin 1968:47-50;
Burleigh Lithographing Establishment map 1891; Guilford County Plat Book 2, Pages 1, 2, 3, and 4). The success of the
projected development was based upon the growth of industries along the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad tracks
at the east of the property and on the construction of a street railway system. The president of North Carolina Steel and
Iron was local hardware magnate J.A. Odell, who was also a member of the street railway company, along with Julius A.
Gray, president of the Cape Fear and Yadkin, and J.W. Fry, general manager of the railroad. The interconnection of
entrepreneurs and concerns was unhealthy rather than productive, for the collapse of the railroad in the 1890s adversely
affected the street railway and the steel enterprise, neither of which were successful (Kipp 1974:384385).
North Carolina Steel and Iron did leave a legacy of planned streets, however, few of which were actually built in the
1890s; a report that the company had graded twenty miles of streets by 1891 is difficult to believe. (Baylin
1968:47-50.) Courtesy of the textile rather than the iron and steel industry, many houses were to stand on these streets
by the end of the 1890s (Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1896; Sanborn Map Company maps 1902).
B. Early Industrialization
In 1879 the city's industries, which were varied, relatively small concerns, were primarily located near the train tracks
downtown. A foundry, a rim factory, and a spoke and handle factory were located on the tracks going east out of town,
between Davie Street and Bennett Seminary. A sash and blind factory, handle company, wagon works, spoke factory,
sawmill, and stove and agricultural works stood within a block of the tracks just west of Elm Street. A tobacco factory
was located at Elm just south of the tracks. In 1885 and 1888 industrial activity, dominated by concerns that dealt with
wood and tobacco, continued to be concentrated on the railroad tracks near South Elm. The woodworking industries
included sawmills, planing mills, a handle factory, and a sash, door and blind factory. The tobacco industries included
prizehouses, warehouses, and plug and twist factories. Not all of these were located near the tracks to the south, for a
small tobacco center had developed at the city's northwestern edge, along Bellemeade Avenue west of Greene Street
(Beers map 1879; Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1885, 1891, 1896).
By 1891 the woodworking and tobacco concerns were joined by some early textile works: the Greensboro Knitting Mill,
the Oak Hill Hosiery Co., Crown Mills, and the Cooperative Cotton Mill a mile south of the courthouse on the tracks
(Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1891 and 1896). Also by 1891 the North Carolina Steel and Iron Company had
built its works. Unlike the other enterprises, it was located to the north, at Bessemer Avenue, just beyond the city's
northern border. The steel industry was to fail quickly, because of the poor quality of the local ore, the general
depressed economic conditions of the times, and the collapse of the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad (Baylin
1968:52; Kipp 1974:384). Textiles, however, with the coming of Moses and Ceasar Cone to town in the early 1890s,
were almost as quickly to become the hallmark of Greensboro's industry.
By 1896, according to the Sanborn maps of that year, the city had fifteen tobacco enterprises, eleven wood-related
enterprises, four foundries, and four textile concerns. The steel industry had failed and the tobacco industry, although
substantial at the time, was to fade quickly; by 1902 the Sanborn’s pictured only six tobacco-related enterprises in the
city. It was the textile industry, at the cusp of tremendous growth in 1896, that was to be the city's industrial future
(Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1896; Sanborn Map Co. maps 1902).
The major industrial force in Greensboro during the late nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, was the textile
mill empire established by brothers Moses and Ceasar Cone. The brothers were familiar with the South and with textiles,
for they travelled the region for their father's wholesale grocery and dry goods business in Baltimore, buying and selling
cotton goods. In 1892 they established the Southern Finishing and Warehouse Company, the first cloth finishing plant in
the South, just northwest of city limits at the junction of present Wendover Avenue and Virginia Street, on a spur line of
the Cape Fear and Yadkin. In the 1895 the brothers broke ground on Proximity Cotton Mill northeast of city limits and in
1896 the plant loomed its first denim. At their suggestion, Emanuel and Herman Sternberger came to Greensboro and
built the Revolution Cotton Mill in the northeast, which in 1899 was producing canton flannels (Arnett 1955:170-172;
Half-Century Book 1941; Balliett 1925; Fripp 1982:57-58; Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1896; Sanborn Map
Company maps 1902). By the turn of the century the textile mills and villages of the northeast formed the dominant
industrial community in and around the city.
A second industrial community, named Pomona, sprang up about three miles west of the courthouse, near the North
Carolina Railroad tracks, during this period. The community was established by, and named for the horticultural activities
of, John Van Lindley. In the late 1870s Lindley had become the sole proprietor of the J. Van Lindley Nursery which was to
become the largest nursery concern in the state. Among its interests was 900 acres in Pomona (Ashe 1905:222-227;
Greensboro Daily News, February 18, 1960; Arnett 1973:93-100). In 1886, with William C. Boren and Dr. John E. Logan,
Lindley established the Pomona Terra Cotta Company. The latter company was established, according to Ethel Stephens
Arnett, in response to the need of Greensboro for salt-glazed sewer pipe. It was not an immediate success, for it took
about fifteen years to perfect the process. By the end of the century, however, the business must have had some
success; the Sanborn maps of 1902 show two terra cotta plants, one called the Old Works, with six kilns, the other a New
Works with eight kilns (Arnett 1955:169; Arnett 1973:95-96; Sanborn Map Co. maps 1902). The Pomona Cotton Mill,
established adjacent to Lindley's nurseries in 1897 by Speight and Thomas Allison Hunter, quickly became a major
enterprise attracting many workers to the area. Mill housing was soon built for the employees of these various
enterprises (Arnett 1973:96; Fripp 1982:58).
In summary, by 1900 Greensboro was a major manufacturing center with seventy-nine industrial establishments within its
limits or in its surrounding communities. About fifteen to twenty percent of its industrial employees worked in the
tobacco industry and twenty to twenty-five percent were employed by woodworking concerns. The textile industry was
by far the biggest employer, however, providing jobs for fifty to sixty percent of the city's industrial workers (Kipp
1974:204). Its influence was only to increase in the new century.
C. Early Commercial and Institutional Growth
Commercial activity, with the exception of a few areas near the colleges and mills, was centered around downtown
Greensboro from the city's beginnings until the end of the nineteenth century. Other institutions, again with the
exception of the colleges and mills, were also concentrated in or not far from downtown. These included banks, hotels,
churches, schools, and the government.
Prior to 1880 Greensboro's businesses were primarily retail enterprises centered on Market and South Elm streets. With
increased rail activity in the 1880s, Greensboro's businesses began serving areas outside of the city and the wholesale
trade became predominant. During the 1880s South Elm Street, which intersected the railroad tracks (Market Street was
parallel to the tracks) became the city's dominant business street, a position it was to retain into the 1960s. The business
district was to remain concentrated along South Elm and, to a lesser extent by the end of the century along South Davie a
block to its east, in large part because residential areas restricted its growth on all sides (Manieri 1980; Beers map
1879; Gray map 1882; Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. 1885, 1888, 1891).
The increase in wholesale trade in the 1880s brought increased profits to the city's businesses. This in turn led to the
construction of large, ornate buildings downtown in the 1890s. In his National Register nomination of downtown
Greensboro, Raymond Manieri uses the Odell Hardware Company as an example of this growth. The company's original
building was a small, two-story dry goods store built in the 1880s on South Elm. By 1896 the company, a profitable
hardware wholesaler, had added a third story and almost doubled the length of the building, making it reportedly the
largest commercial building in the state (Manieri 1980; Sanborn Map and Publishing Company maps 1885, 1888, 1891,
1896).
The first two blocks of South Elm were heavily developed by 1891, featuring a hotel, bank offices, and dry goods and
clothing stores. In the 1890s businesses were built farther south on South Elm, at or near the tracks, and on other streets
near the tracks as well. For the first time brick commercial structures were built on Elm south of the tracks. The railroads
not only spurred business construction, but they raised structures themselves. Still standing is the first Southern Railway
Passenger Depot, built on the 400 block of South Elm in 1899 (Manieri 1980; Sanborn Map and Publishing Company maps
1891, 1896).
Commercial and institutional activity not centered within a quarter-mile of downtown between 1880 and 1900 was
centered around the city's colleges and mills. Small commercial areas developed near the Normal Industrial School for
White Girls (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro or "UNCG") and the Agricultural and Mechanical College
for the Colored Race (now the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University or "A&T") in the 1890s to serve
the residential areas near them. Commercial areas also sprang up near the mill communities of Pomona to the west and
the Cones and Sternbergers to the northeast. The Cones, who built churches, schools, and YMCAs for their employees,
also raised stores at their mill villages. (Phillips 1983; Balliett 1925).
D. Early Suburbanization and Neighborhood Growth
Between 1880 and 1900, Greensboro made the leap from town to city. In those two decades its population jumped
almost 500 percent to more than 10,000 and its land area quadrupled from one to four square miles. The city's center,
around Market and Elm, was most densely populated. Most workers were employed in unskilled positions at downtown
establishments, at the spoke and handle factories and other industries located along the main line of the North Carolina
Railroad, or at the railroad yards. They rented or owned small houses in the vicinity of these enterprises. White
professionals and businessmen were located around three main areas: Church Street to the north, West Market Street
out to Greensborough Female College, and Asheboro Street to the south. Throughout the last two decades of the
century residential development was to occur incrementally in the established areas of the central city, as well as in new
areas to the south, north and northeast, and west. By 1900, by every measure, Greensboro was a bigger and busier
place (Baylin 1968:41-44; Beers map 1879; Kipp 1974:174-176).
Racial segregation patterns had not yet solidified in Greensboro's neighborhoods or workplaces before the close of the
century according to historian William H. Chafe. While the population of east Greensboro and of Warnersville to the
southwest of city limits was almost entirely black, white and black households stood side by side on seven of nineteen
streets within city limits in 1880. The somewhat integrated nature of racial housing patterns (at least relative to the total
segregation that was to follow) was typical of many cities in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South at this time. In
Greensboro it may have been related to black employment opportunities during this period. Between 1870 and 1900,
although overwhelmingly employed in semiskilled or unskilled positions, blacks still made up a significant proportion of
the city's skilled work force. In 1884, one out of every three skilled workers in the· city was black. At the city's two spoke
and handle factories, black and white workers held comparable positions and received comparable wages (Chafe
1980:17-18; Baylin 1968:42; Kipp 1974:228).
Neighborhoods divided solely by class did not exist prior to the early twentieth century either. According to Samuel M.
Kipp III, "The streets where the elite resided were also the ones most likely to be paved, connected to the city water
works and sewerage system, and illuminated by city street lights, but at the turn of the century their homes and those of
the middle class were still intermingled'' (Kipp 1974:272). For example, South Greensboro had large dwellings on its main
thoroughfare, Asheboro Street, with more modest houses immediately to the rear on the radiating streets.
The city's late nineteenth century housing trends, as well as its general residential growth patterns, were displayed at its
first suburbs, the southern communities of Warnersville, Shieldstown, and South Greensboro. Greensboro's first real
estate development and suburb was Warnersville, once located along Ashe Street just south of downtown. It was
started in the late 1860s by a Philadelphia Quaker, Yardley Warner, who bought about thirty-five acres of land just south
of the city limits and divided it into half-acre tracts which he sold to freedman at reasonable prices in an attempt to assist
blacks in acquiring property for homes (Arnett 1955:221; Fripp 1982:36; Opperman 1990:130). According to an account
by an English Quaker in 1889, the community was a thriving one:
I have today been to Warnersville, visited the coloured people in their houses, examined their garden plots, seen
their schoolhouse and their church, and can bear testimony to the thriving character of the population. They
number between 500 and 600 people, all coloured. Warnersville has extended far beyond the original purchase
of Yardley Warner when he commenced the project about 1869. They have about 200 coloured children
attending their school. They have a good house as a residence for the school teacher, who has two well-qualified
assistants. (Fripp 1982:37)
Warnersville had declined by the end of the 1930s and it was destroyed as part of the city's urban renewal program in
the 1960s (Works Progress Administration 1940).
To Warnersville's east was the white community of Shieldstown, which was developed largely by Joseph Shields on
about fifty acres of property located between Ashe Street and Asheboro Street. In 1873 Shields reportedly placed
about seventy residential lots on the market. The New North State, a local newspaper, stated in January, 1874, that the
"village [of Shieldstown] is growing rapidly. The land is fast being purchased for building lots. Streets have been opened
and several houses are under construction" (Baylin 1968:38). The growth of the communities to the south of the city
limits like Shieldstown was stimulated by the city. Around 1874 it extended Elm Street south into Shieldstown, across the
tracks that had previously separated the city proper and the southern suburbs (Baylin 1968:40).
One of the city's best neighborhoods bounded Shieldstown to the east. Centered on Asheboro Street and also outside
of the city limits, it was known as South Greensboro. (South Greensboro and Shieldstown were initially treated as
separate neighborhoods. The term South Greensboro by the late nineteenth century, however, seems to refer to the
white areas of southern Greensboro, both Shieldstown and the Asheboro Street neighborhood.) An 1879 map shows
houses in South Greensboro standing on either side of Asheboro Street, but not yet off of it. The picturesque entry
drives, multiple outbuildings, and size of some of these properties, which could exceed seven acres, suggests that a
number of them were estates (Beer's map 1879). The increasing development of industry along the railroad tracks to
the north; the jobs provided by a booming downtown less than half a mile distant; and improvements in the
transportation network, all led to the suburb's rapid growth as a primarily middle-class community in the late
nineteenth-century. The New North State of February 29, 1872, stated that Asheboro Street has "fast becoming one of
the most beautiful streets of the city and a very desirable place to live. We learn there is a great demand for building
purposes in this street" (Baylin 1968:37). By 1889 the community had apparently started to fulfill its potential. According
to a report of the Chamber of Commerce cited in the Greensboro Patriot of January of that year:
"South Greensboro, a beautiful suburb, almost new one may say, and nearly as great in area as the corporate
city itself, has furnished tasteful abodes to the businessman, comfortable houses to the artisan, and a beautiful
picture to the stranger entering our gates" (Manieri 1982: 51).
The racial and physical alignment of Warnersville, Shieldstown, and South Greensboro in the late nineteenth century was
to set the pattern for development of the southern part of Greensboro up through World War II. White south
Greensboro did not expand further west than the edge of Warnersville or further east than the black communities of
east Greensboro, which were located south and east of Bennett College and the Agricultural and Mechanical College.
These black communities, in turn, were effectively barred from expanding into South Greensboro or Shieldstown. By the
close of the nineteenth century the racial patterns of all of these neighborhoods were largely set.
Suburban growth did not just occur to the south in the last two decades of the century. The textile mills and villages of
the Cones and Sternbergers led to development northeast of the city limits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Preceding them, however, and planting the seeds of development to the north of the city, was the short-lived
North Carolina Steel and Iron Company, which in the early 1890s unsuccessfully attempted to combine industrial and
residential development on about 2,000 acres of land at the city's northern edge and to its northeast. The property was
prime for development, just beyond city limits with a rail line running through it, and their efforts spurred interest in the
area. The New North State noted in March, 1890, that the "trend of the high prices for land is on the north side of
Greensboro. For years the town has been going south, but it seems now that the great improvements are to be made
[north and northeast, in the angle between the rail lines]'' (Baylin 1968:47-50).
Development activity to the north was promoted by both corporate interests and individuals. Corporate real estate
interests for the first time emerged, setting the stage for the extensive development efforts of the first three decades
of the twentieth century. They included the Worth-Wharton Real Estate and Investment Company, which was organized
in 1890, and the real estate efforts of North Carolina Steel and Iron. Individuals, rather than corporate interests, were
the most important real estate developers and promoters in the late nineteenth century, however (Arnett
1955:220-221). One of these individuals was Capt. Basil J. Fisher, who in the late 1880s purchased land between the
northern developed edge of town and the southern edge of the steel and iron property, and undertook opening Elm
Street farther north. In hopes of creating a prestigious suburb, he developed his land, grading the streets, designating
parkland, and laying out lots (Baylin 1968: 51, 57-59). The New North State trumpeted his efforts in July, 1890, stating
"Capt. B. J. Fisher is a firm believer in our city's future prosperity, and he is not backward in risking his money on his
opinion and Greensboro real estate" (Baylin 1968:51).
The activities of Capt. Fisher, the Worth-Wharton Company, North Carolina Steel and Iron, and others were ultimately
unsuccessful in developing property north of downtown in the 1890s. They did lay the groundwork, though, for the
textile enterprises of the Cones, The Cones purchased between 1,400 and 2,000 acres northeast of the city limits upon
which to establish their factories, much of it previously owned by North Carolina Steel and Iron. By 1900 they had created
a separate, self-sufficient community with housing for perhaps 5,000 northeast of town (Baylin 1968:61; Fripp
1985:49-50). On early maps the community around their Southern Finishing and Warehouse Company, at the northwest
corner of present Fisher Park, is referred to as "Coneville." Only partially pictured, it included rows of single-pile, one-or
two-story, frame houses, a Sunday School building, a grocery store, a small frame hotel, and a Presbyterian Church
(Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. maps 1896; Sanborn Map Company maps 1902 and 1913). The other more extensive
mill villages around the Proximity and Revolution mills, outside of city limits, are not pictured on early maps. Lacking any
detailed mapping or written accounts, the appearance and extent of these mill villages and surrounding communities is
not known, nor is it known if any black mill villages existed at this time. No later than the early twentieth century,
however, the villages, much like the one in Coneville, were to have their own stores, churches, YMCA's, welfare
departments, and schools (Balliett 1925) .
In summary, by 1900 what was to become modern Greensboro had three main areas of residential and industrial
concentration: the core within the city limits, the textile mill communities of the north and northeast, and the communities
established around the Pomona enterprises to the west. With the addition of property from the 1891 annexation, the
population within the city limits had grown to 10,035.
These included the many who lived in southern Greensboro and those who lived near the college campuses. College Hill,
a neighborhood near the city's western border adjacent to the state women's college, had about one hundred houses,
five stores, and three churches at the turn of the century, according to historian Gayle Hicks Fripp. About 5,000
individuals lived to the northeast near the Cone mills and about 1,000 lived to the west, near the enterprises of Pomona.
These communities were to become a more integral part of the city in the early twentieth century, connected with each
other by the electric streetcar and by residential development that extended out between them. (Arnett
1955:419-420; Baylin 1968:61-63; Fripp 1985:51).
E. Development of Public Schools and Colleges
Greensboro's three antebellum colleges -- Greensboro, Bennett -- survived into the late nineteenth century. Greensboro
remained small schools. Guilford College, Guilford, Bennett however, and saw considerable growth in the late nineteenth
century. Previously the New Garden Boarding School, Guilford was chartered under its present name in 1888. Between
1870 and 1900 its property, located outside of the city limits to the northwest, had been expanded to 300 acres and the
school was to continue its expansion in the early twentieth century (Edmisten 1990).
Additionally, two state colleges, which were to become the city's largest, were begun in the last decade of the
nineteenth century--the Agricultural and Mechanical College for the Colored Race (now the North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical State University or "A&T") and the Normal Industrial School for White Girls (now the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro or "UNCG"). In 1891 the state established the Normal Industrial School for White Girls on ten
acres of land a few blocks west of Greensboro College. Dr. Charles D. McIver, a major proponent of women's education
in the state, was named its first president. A successful institution, the school grew to 120 acres in 1897; in that year it
changed its name to the State Normal and Industrial College (Arnett 1955:107-109; Fripp 1982:61-63). Also in 1891 the
state chartered a black land grant institution in Greensboro, the Agricultural and Mechanical College for the Colored Race.
For a few years an annex to Shaw University in Raleigh, it opened at its present site just northeast of Bennett College in
1893 (Arnett 1955:111-113; Fripp 1982:64-65; Dickinson 1988).
Greensboro's first free graded schools, one for blacks and one for whites, had opened in 1875. In 1880 the black school,
which had been located in a church, was moved to its own building, the Percy Street School. In 1887 the large brick
Lindsay Street School was opened for white children to replace the building at Lindsay and Forbis streets that had been
damaged by the Charleston earthquake. A second public school for blacks, the Warnersville School, opened in 1892; it
was followed the next year by the Asheboro Street School for whites. In 1899 a public high school, for whites, was
opened. A public black high school was not built until 1929. Beyond the elementary school level, blacks had to attend the
preparatory departments of Bennett College or the Agricultural and Mechanical College (Arnett 1955:87-89; Fripp
1982:51, 65; Greensboro Record, December 19, 1946, and January 9, 1947).
Public schools were also located at the Pomona and Cone mill villages. A Proximity Manufacturing Company promotional
publication of 1925 stated that education was the first priority of Moses and Ceasar Cone. Even before the mills were
finished or houses built, according to the publication, the brothers had canvassed the local school situation. Presumably
shortly thereafter they provided educational facilities for the families of their employees. In Pomona, John Van
Lindley--who owned the Pomona Nursery and the Terra Cotta Company, and who was director of the Cotton
Mill--erected a schoolhouse for mill employees at his own expense (Balliett 1925; Arnett 1973:97; Greensboro Daily
News, February 18, 1960).
2. MODERN SUBURBANIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION, 1900-1941
Transportation, industry, commerce, and education continued to be major factors in the development of Greensboro
during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Residential growth was the dominant feature of these years,
however. Its residences overwhelmingly land consuming, single-family, detached structures, the city rapidly expanded
during the decades preceding the Depression. Largely because of established racial patterns, this expansion was much
greater to the north, west, and southwest, than to the east and southeast. All areas of the city and its environs, though,
saw significant residential growth.
A. Expansion and Consolidation of Transportation Network
As in the late nineteenth century, railroads were an important development force in Greensboro during the first four
decades of the twentieth century. Although no new lines were extended into the city during this period, tracks were
added and service on existing lines was greatly expanded. Early in the century the Southern Railway moved its division
headquarters to Greensboro and subsequently enlarged its train yard at Pomona to include a thirteen-stall roundhouse
and a twenty-one-locomotive shed (Fripp 1982:80-81). Industry continued to concentrate at or near the tracks. Zoning in
the 1920s confirmed the importance to industry of the rail lines, limiting industrial development almost entirely to the
city's rail corridors. A visual reminder of the prominence of the railroads in the city during this period is the imposing
Neoclassical Revival train station the Southern Railway built downtown in 1927 ("Zoning Map of Greensboro" 1927;
Sanborn Map Company maps 1902, 1913, 1919, 1925; Fripp 1982:101).
While the railroad continued to influence the city's development much as it had prior to 1900, a new force that was to be
particularly influential in residential development was introduced near the opening of the century. On June 11, 1902,
electric trolley service was inaugurated in Greensboro (Albright 1904:100). The charter, granted to the Greensboro
Electric Company, brought with it electric power for street lights and waterworks as well. It did not, however, bring
trolley service to all parts of the city, for early efforts by city government to mandate service equally throughout the city
failed (Manieri 1982:49, 68-69).
The directors of the small street railway system of the 1890s had been local individuals, but the Greensboro Electric
Company appears to have been largely controlled by out-of-state interests. John Karr, its president, was from
Hackettstown, New Jersey, and M.D. Barr, its treasurer, resided in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Its secretary, attorney Zeb
V. Taylor, was from Greensboro (Kipp 1974:384-385, 390-391; Greensboro City Directories).
Initially there were two trolley routes. One ran from South Greensboro via the Southern Railway station north on Elm
Street through the center of town, then northeast up Summit Avenue to the Cone and Sternberger textile mills. The
other ran from the powerhouse at East Market Street west along Market past Greensboro College, down Tate Street
onto Spring Garden Street, and out past the women's Normal and Industrial College to Lindley Park near the community
of Pomona (Albright 1904:100; Pease Engineering Co. map 1927). To create a demand for their services, the company
constructed an amusement park two-and-a-half miles west of the city on land they purchased from J. Van Lindley. Lindley
Park--the amenities of which included a casino, pavilion, artificial lake, and bowling alleys--opened on July 4, 1902
(Manieri 1982:69-70; Fripp 1985:52).
By 1909 the system had twenty streetcars running along fifteen miles of track. The North Carolina Public Service
Company which ran it additionally provided electric and gas service to the city. A 1927 map of the city shows the trolleys
running on the two routes mentioned above. Additionally, they ran west along Lee and then south along Glenwood
Avenue (Manieri 1982:76; Pease Engineering Co. map 1927).
"Streetcar speculation during the second decade of the twentieth century," according to Raymond Manieri, "was often
characterized by a cooperation between the street railway company and the real estate interests of the city" (Manieri
1982:77). The development of Irving Park and the Greensboro Country Club was typical of this. Before opening up
development, the developers negotiated with the streetcar company to extend the line from its end on North Elm up
Sunset Avenue to the club and the planned suburb (Manieri 1982:78).
The trolleys did not just serve the wealthy, as in Irving Park. They were to reach out to communities of more modest
incomes, particularly as western Greensboro was opened up in the teens and twenties. Indeed it was noted not long
after the service became active, in a publication trumpeting the city through photographs, that
As is the usual result of the advent of electric trolley lines reaching the suburban districts, there are a number of
attractive homes owned and occupied by men of moderate income, who could only meet the expenses of very
much inferior ones in central locations" (Gravure Illustration Company 1904). Trolley service may not have been
limited to the wealthy but it was effectively limited to whites. No trolley lines ran south or east into black
Greensboro and the line northeast to the Cone mills stopped short of the black mill village of East White Oak
(Manieri 1982:76; Pease Engineering Co. map 1927).
The question of the effect the streetcars had on the residential development of the city (discussed further below) has
not fully been answered, although Jonathan Baylin, in his thesis on the city's residential development, states that "the
streetcars played a limited but significant role by following, rather than initiating, residential development" (Baylin
1968:65). He postulates that the streetcars had two basic effects on the city's residential patterns. They linked the mill
communities of Pomona and the northeast to the center of the city, effectively extending its limits out to them, and they
reinforced already existing patterns of residential development. Raymond Manieri, in his thesis on streetcars in the city,
seems basically to concur with these conclusions (Manieri 1982). Because a viable streetcar network came to
Greensboro at almost the same time as the automobile, and because from the start it connected vibrant, expanding
communities located well out from the city's existing core communities, it is difficult to judge its impact. It did, however,
in the case of such developments as Irving Park--which was built jointly with an extension of the system--at least go hand
in hand with development. It also may even have promoted development, in at least one case, where it did not go. A
1914 plat map of West Market Terrace included a dotted line for the site of a proposed trolley line that was to pass
through the middle of the development; the trolley never came, but development did (Guilford County Plat Book 3,
Page 158).
The street system, as well as the railroads and the trolleys, also grew and improved during this period. A $300,000 bond
issue in 1903 provided money for the paving of more roads and, with the coming of the automobile to town after this
date, streets were further improved (Arnett 1955:152; Fripp 1985:51). Reporting on the progress of the city in the first
decade of the century, the Greensboro Daily News reported that:
In 1900 Greensboro had one mile of cobblestone street, one half mile of macadam and two miles of cement
sidewalk.
In 1910 the city had nine and one-half miles of macadam, two and one-fourth miles of gravel, three-quarters of a
mile of vitrified brick streets and 40 miles of cement sidewalk (Kipp 1974: 408).
By 1913 the city reportedly had twenty miles of paved roads (Sanborn Map Company 1913).
The roads carried not only private automobiles. By 1927 the city's trolley network had been augmented by two bus lines.
One ran northwest up Battleground Avenue, then south and west into the Westerwood and West Market Terrace
neighborhoods. Another ran east out of the city along East Market Street. This latter bus line was the only public
transportation known to have served Greensboro's black community during the first three decades of the century. In
1934 some "trackless trolleys," which made use of the road network, were added to the electric trolley system. As
discussed further below, the improved street network allowed neighborhoods to develop away from the rail and trolley
lines, particularly in the northern and western reaches of the city's environs (Pease Engineering Co. map 1927; Fripp
1982:105).
B. The Textile Industry and Industrial Greensboro
In 1903 a booster pamphlet estimated that the city had fifty manufacturing firms producing thirty kinds of goods. (Samuel
M. Kipp III has estimated that there were seventy-nine establishments in the city and its suburbs at the turn of the
century.) The textile industry was the most important, followed by three furniture manufactories and seven lumber
companies. Textiles were to remain the dominant industrial force in the city well into the twentieth century,
overshadowing all other enterprises (Fripp 1982:77; Kipp 1974:204).
The Cone textile empire, established in the 1890s, continued its rapid expansion in the early twentieth century. By 1902
the original Proximity mill had grown from 250 to 1,000 looms. Between 1902 and 1905 the Cones added their largest
plant, the White Oak Cotton Mills, which was to become in the 1930s the largest denim mill in the world. By 1905 the
mills employed more than 4,250 operatives. In 1912 the Proximity Print Works, the first of its kind in the South, was
added.
By the 1920s the mills of the Cones, operating as the Proximity Revolution Company, along with the Sternberger &
Revolution Mill, were unquestionably an imposing force. Statistics from 1925, presented in a Proximity Manufacturing
Company publication, speak for themselves. The Proximity mill had grown from 250 looms in 1896, to 1,000 in 1902, to
1,600 by 1925. It produced 90,000 yards of denim a day. White Oak, which opened using a fraction of its 2,000 loom
capacity, was producing 160,000 yards of denim a day in 1925 on 3,000 looms. Together, the textile mills in the
northeast employed about 3,000 hands and supported a population of about 15,000 (Arnett 1955:171-172; Fripp
1982:77; Chafe 1980:19; Half-Century Book 1941; Balliett 1925; American Jewish Times, March 1937).
Other textile mills, and other industries, operated in Greensboro early in the twentieth century as well. Blue Bell, Inc.,
which began making overalls over a grocery store in 1904, opened a plant on South Elm Street in 1919. The tobacco
industry had never taken off in the late nineteenth century as hoped; from fifteen enterprises in 1896 it dropped off to
six in 1902. After 1902, however, there was resurgence in the industry, at least in the area of cigar manufacturing. The
three largest cigar factories early in the century were the American Cigar Company, which opened a factory employing
hundreds in 1903; the El-Rees-So Cigar Company, which opened a three story factory employing 300 women in 1917;
and Seidenberger & Co., which also opened a 300-worker factory in 1917, standing five stories high. In sum, by 1917
there were approximately seventy-five factories in Greensboro (Arnett 1955:174-186; Fripp 1982:78; Sanborn Map
Company maps 1902).
Most industry in the city during the late nineteenth century and through the first four decades of the Twentieth was
located close to a rail line. A 1927 zoning map of the city shows industry located along the east-west rail line all the way
through the city; down South Elm near the railroad tracks; east of downtown near Davie street; at the mills of the
northeast along spur lines; and at the railroad tracks near Battleground Avenue northwest of Daniels Lake. The original
downtown core, the textile mills and, particularly, the railroad, continued to have a tremendous effect on industrial
development ("Zoning Map of Greensboro" 1927). A report by the Works Progress Administration at the end of the
1930s depicts a city with a substantial industrial base oriented towards the railroads. "The importance of industry in the
composition of Greensboro," they reported, "is indicated by the fact that over one-seventh of all the land covered by
major structures is devoted to industrial uses, among which the manufacture of textiles predominates. Practically all
industrial establishments are situated near or alongside the Southern or the Atlantic and Yadkin Railways, for the obvious
advantages of proximity to transportation facilities" (Works Progress Administration 1940: 4)
Along with permitting the development of a variety of industries, the railroad was a major industry and employer itself.
In 1904 the Southern Railway moved its division headquarters to Greensboro from Raleigh. Subsequently it enlarged its
train yard and repair facilities in Pomona. By 1920 the Southern employed 1,100 in the Greensboro area (Fripp
1982:80-81).
Industrial development, at least in the textile industry, was not halted by the Depression. Mock, Judson, Voehringer Co.,
a hosiery company started in 1926, expanded between 1930 and 1932, as did the Cones' Proximity Manufacturing
Company and the Blue Bell Manufacturing Company. The Blue Gem Manufacturing Company, another firm which
produced overalls, was organized in 1934. In 1935 Burlington Mills, which was to become the largest textile concern in
the world, moved its headquarters to Greensboro from the city of Burlington, about twenty miles to the east (Fripp
1982:113).
At the start remained of World War II, Greensboro’s textile industry remained dominant. In 1940 the Cone mills were the
largest producers of cotton denim in the world, Burlington the world leader in rayon weaving, and Blue Bell the country's
biggest manufacturer of overalls (Fripp 1982:120).
C. Commercial and Institutional Expansion
Commercial activity in Greensboro remained centered downtown, with the exception of a few areas near the colleges
and mills, from the turn of the century until after World War II. Other enterprises, including banks, hotels, and corporate
enterprises like the insurance business and banking were also concentrated downtown, as was the government. In the
early part of the century many major churches and most schools were still located near the center of the city, reflecting
the location of its core population. As rapid growth in the teens and particularly the twenties drew population away from
the center, many institutions followed. These included, in particular, churches and schools, as well as hospitals, some
retail activity, and other institutions that were sustained by large numbers of people, rather than by industrial activity or
proximity to a rail line. The rapid suburbanization and decentralization that followed World War II has pulled most
institutional activity, with the exception of the government and corporate professional services, from the city center.
During the first decade of the century the main business and commercial thoroughfares of South Elm and South Davie
streets continued to develop, particularly on the blocks closer to the tracks than to Market Street, which were still not
completely built up. Development was such that substantial brick buildings filled almost all of the lots of the central
business district by 1910. Perhaps because of this, there was relatively little building activity in the district in the teens.
However, in the 1920s numerous commercial structures went up downtown, many of them large and imposing.
Construction activity took place on the 100 and 200 blocks of South Elm, as the pre-1880 buildings that stood there
were demolished and replaced. Building also took place on streets that had not been part of the traditional central
business district, including North Elm, Greene, and Washington streets. The 1930s saw limited growth downtown, as
elsewhere in the city, although the Belk's department store was built there in 1938 (Manieri 1980; Sanborn Map and
Publishing Co. maps 1902, 1913, 1919, 1925).
The buildings raised in downtown Greensboro between 1900 and World War II were not just retail and wholesale
business establishments. They included hotels, banks, office buildings, and government buildings. The Hotel Guilford was
built in 1900 on Elm Street to replace the Benbow House, which had burned the previous year. In 1901 the Huffine was
opened and in 1902 the five-story, 132-room Benbow Hotel was raised. Two years later the Benbow Arcade opened.
These hotels, and others, were substantial structures and, as Ethel Stephens Arnett put it, "So well supplied was
Greensboro with new hotels around the turn of the century that it was 1919 before need for more lodging space was
felt" (Arnett 1955:213). In 1919 the 300-room O'Henry Hotel was built at Bellemeade and North Elm. Charles C.
Hartmann, then a New York architect, supervised its construction. It was followed in 1927 at East Market and Davie by
the 225-room King Cotton Hotel. None of these buildings survive (Arnett 1955: 213; Fripp 1982:80, 102; Bishir, Brown,
Lounsbury, and Wood 1990:319).
The first two decades of the century also saw the opening of a number of office buildings, including the five-story Dixie
Building in 1904; the McAdoo in 1908; the Banner in 1912; and a nine-story skyscraper, the Southeastern Building, in
1917 (Fripp 1982:80; Arnett 1955:233). The largest and grandest skyscraper in the city, an opulent, terra cotta-clad,
seventeen-story tower designed by Charles C. Hartmann, was opened by the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company
on the 100 block of North Elm Street in 1923. Hartmann had caught the eye of Jefferson Standard president Julian Price
while working on the O'Henry Hotel; he came to Greensboro to design the tower and open up a practice at Price's
behest (Little-Stokes and Smith 1975).
Banking and insurance were important businesses in Greensboro early in the twentieth century and have remained so.
There were three banks in the city at the opening of the century and three more had been added by 1907. Three
building and loan companies were organized between 1902 and 1914. Among these was Pioneer Building & Loan,
promoted by black community leader James Dudley (Fripp 1982:82).
In 1903 the Pilot Life Insurance Company was chartered. Nine years later the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company
was formed through the merger of a Greensboro and a Raleigh firm. By 1917 it employed seventy-five clerks and by
1923 it was located in its downtown skyscraper. Pilot Life and Jefferson Standard subsequently merged in the 1980s to
form one of the most important enterprises in the city. The prominence of the new concern, Jefferson Pilot, is indicated
by the skyscraper it raised adjacent to the original Jefferson Standard building at the end of the 1980s, the city's major
modern architectural landmark (Arnett 1955:230-235; Fripp 1982:84).
In 1900 the city hall, city market, and an auditorium were opened in one building, no longer standing, known as the Grand
Opera House. Between 1917 and 1920 an even grander building was built, the county courthouse. A Renaissance Revival
style structure of granite and terra cotta designed by local architect Harry Barton, it cost an estimated $750,000. In 1924
a new city hall, also designed by Barton, was constructed. The Central Fire Station, a Charles Hartmann design, was raised
in 1926. The Art Deco Federal Building was completed at the corner of West Market and Eugene streets in 1931. Few if
any substantial government buildings followed it until after World War II. Almost all government buildings have continued
to be located downtown (Arnett 1955:40-41; Fripp :982:99-101).
Although hotels, banks, office, government, and other major institutional buildings remained centered downtown, some
retail commercial activity was located near the residential areas centered around Bennett College, the Agricultural and
Mechanical College, the women's Normal and Industrial College, and Guilford College. It was also located in the mill
communities of northeast Greensboro and Pomona. The Cones raised some substantial brick buildings in the northeast
early in the century to house company stores, YMCAs, schools, and other services.
Greensboro's first hospitals were located in residences or structures that looked like residences, downtown or not far
from downtown. The first modern hospitals in the city were St. Leo's Hospital, a large brick structure built on Summit
Street in 1906 which is no longer extant, and the L. Richardson Memorial Hospital. The latter hospital, which opened in
1927, was built in Nacho Park on South Benbow Road to serve the city's black community. Although now used as a nursing
home, it is still intact (Arnett 1955:349-354; Fripp 1982:129; Journal of the National Medical Association, May, 1969.
Religious congregations continued to thrive between 1900 and 1940, erecting many impressive new sanctuaries. In
1904 the city directory listed twenty-nine churches in the city; by 1920, according to historian Gayle Hicks Fripp, at least
fifteen more churches and a synagogue had been established. Many of the churches were still located near the
downtown core, but they also stood within the ever expanding suburbs of the city. In 1908 the burgeoning Jewish
community chartered the Reformed Hebrew Congregation and purchased the former Friends Meeting House on Lee
Street as its synagogue. Its charter members included textile magnates Ceasar Cone and Herman and Emanuel
Sternberger. The congregation built a synagogue in Fisher Park in 1925, designed by New York architect Hobart Upjohn.
Three years later the First Presbyterian Church, designed by Upjohn and Harry Barton, was built across the street.
Preceding these structures in Fisher Park was the 1922 chapel of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, also designed by Upjohn.
The move of the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches out from the center of the city--in the late nineteenth century
they were located within a few blocks of the courthouse--reflects the movement of congregations and the construction
of new churches in general as the city grew (Fripp 1982:84-85, 118).
D. Suburban, Neighborhood, and Mill Village Development
Understanding residential development is the key to understanding all growth in Greensboro in the first four decades of
the twentieth century. Growth was rapid between 1900 and 1940, especially in the three decades preceding the
Depression. The population jumped by more than fifty percent to 15,895 between 1900 and 1910, and climbed again to
19,861 in 1920. By 1930 the population had soared to 53,569. This figure was influenced by the more than quadrupling
of the city's boundaries in 1923 to almost eighteen square miles, from four in 1891. The 1930s saw little population
growth in the city; its number of residents rose only to 59,319 in 1940 {Arnett 1955:23-24, 419-420).
Almost all of the city's residents lived in single-family, detached dwellings, so the increased population was reflected in a
proliferation of new neighborhoods and suburbs (Works Progress Administration 1940:4, 38). Many factors had an
influence on where these new residential areas were located. These included the locations of established
neighborhoods, and the racial and socioeconomic composition of these neighborhoods; the location of trolley lines and
roadways; the industries lining the different railroad lines which provided jobs for workers; the presence of cotton mills
to the northeast and industrial enterprises in Pomona; the location of the city's colleges; the presence of insurance
companies and other sources of money for big real estate developers; and the extension of city services to
neighborhoods and, in the 1920s, the establishment of city planning and zoning.
Neighborhood and suburban development
As was the case elsewhere in North Carolina, suburbanization in Greensboro occurred almost simultaneously with
urbanization. As with the other late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Piedmont powerhouses of Charlotte,
Winston-Salem, Durham, and Raleigh, Greensboro had ''a small urban core surrounded by extensive suburban
neighborhoods." In general, its twentieth-century suburbs exhibited most or all of the characteristics of North Carolina's
early suburbs: ''picturesque naturalistic settings, diverse house styles and plans, modern amenities, social and economic
homogeneity, and distance between home and work" (Smith 1985:24). Of course the wealthier the suburb, such as
Fisher Park or Irving Park, the more picturesque were the settings, diverse the houses, and modern the amenities. Also in
accord with other North Carolina cities, much of Greensboro's black suburban development was centered around black
colleges, Bennett and the Agricultural and Mechanical College on its east side.
During the first decade of the century growth continued in southern Greensboro; in western and eastern Greensboro
around the white and black colleges; to the west and northeast around the mills of Pomona and the Cones and
Sternbergers; and in the established areas near the central core of the city. With the exception of the mill communities,
all of these areas are shaded as the metropolitan area of Greensboro on a 1908 map of the county (Miller map 1908).
Warnersville and South Greensboro to the south continued to be well populated. They also retained their late
nineteenth-century racial composition: blacks in Warnersville, whites in South Greensboro. The growing neighborhoods
to the east were centered around the two black colleges there, Bennett and the Agricultural and Mechanical College,
extending a few blocks east past the latter school. The growing neighborhoods to the west extended out past the state
women's college about six blocks. Population was also starting to grow to the north, in Fisher Park and along Summit and
Fifth avenues (the present Aycock neighborhood). These neighborhoods largely owed their existence to proximity to the
city center and its jobs; the presence of the main east-west railroad line and the industries that lined it; the availability of
city services; and the presence of the colleges. These neighborhoods also reflected and perpetuated racial and
socioeconomic patterns that had largely been established by the end of the century. The black neighborhoods were to
the east and in Warnersville; poorer blacks and whites lived close to the industrial enterprises and to jobs downtown
(Baylin 1968:73).
Segregation in housing in the early twentieth century was not established solely incrementally or by following previous
patterns, however. Between 1914 and 1929, according to William H. Chafe, there was a city ordinance prohibiting blacks
from living on streets that had a majority of white households (Chafe 1980:223). The law was promulgated after a black
faculty member of one of the local colleges purchased a home in the all-white neighborhood of South Greensboro at the
corner of Gorrell and Martin streets. Although he substantially improved the property, he was pressured to resell it to a
white family at a loss (Kipp 1974:32-323). Segregation persisted even after this law was removed from the books. One
method of maintaining it was through restrictive covenants in deeds. For example, some Fisher Park deeds included the
following restriction: "No person of African descent shall occupy said property except as domestic servants in the
employ of the occupants of the dwellings upon said premises. Irving Park deeds contained a similar restriction. (For an
example of a Fisher Park deed with this restriction, see the 1919 deed between J.E. Latham and J.M. Gallaway (Guilford
County Deed Book 327, Page 603). For an example of an Irving Park deed, see the 1912 deed between A.M. Scales and
A.W. McAlister, and A.L. Brooks (Guilford County Deed Book 236, Page 312).)
The impact of the electric streetcar on the city's neighborhoods seems to have been limited. Streetcar lines extended
north up Elm Street, south down Asheboro Street, and west out towards the women's Normal and Industrial College. As
many factors led to the development of the neighborhoods near the lines, the streetcars in the first decade of the
century seemed to have followed and reinforced already established residential patterns, rather than to have created
new ones (Baylin 1968:70-71).
The finest neighborhoods in the first decade of the century were apparently still located close to downtown. A 1902
map shows the footprints of sizeable Victorian houses on North Elm and Church streets, north of downtown; on
Asheboro and Gorrell streets south of downtown in South Greensboro; and west on Market Street. A 1904
photogravure book of the city, which pictures the homes of many of its most prominent citizens, confirms the location of
the city's finest houses a short distance to the north, west, and south of downtown, on such streets as Asheboro and
South Ashe, West Market and North Elm (Sanborn Map Company maps 1902; Art Work of Greensboro 1904).
The growth of neighborhoods to the north of downtown apparently occurred at a measured pace before the teens.
Although Fisher Park was envisioned by Capt. B.J. Fisher and other developers at the beginning of the 1890s, the
neighborhood was undeveloped at the turn of the century. The future tense was used in a publication of 1904, which
said of the suburb that "when improved [it) will be a beautiful resort" (Albright 1904:105). The numerous lots east of Elm
Street and south and west of the park, pictured on a 1905 plat map of Fisher's estate, were largely paper creations
awaiting houses (Guilford County Plat Book 2, Page 60). Summit Avenue, which cut northeast to the textile mills, and
adjacent streets developed a bit more rapidly than Fisher Park. This area, now known as the Aycock neighborhood, was
located due east of Fisher Park and west of the Agricultural and Mechanical College. In 1898, even prior to grading and
macadamizing, Summit was described as a "magnificent boulevard" (Fripp 1985:50). Ceasar Cone's estate was located
on Summit before it was paved and his siblings, along with management and other white-collar employees of the mills,
were to establish households on the avenue with him (Art Work of Greensboro 1904).
The greatest influence of the Cone family on Greensboro's residential development is not found in the Summit Avenue
community. It is found rather at the mill villages they established to the northeast of the city limits in the last decade of
the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth, mill villages they continued to expand through the 1920s. The
mill villages of Proximity, Revolution, White Oak, and East White Oak probably represented the largest single
concentration of housing in the city and its environs. Possessed of a distinct character, these villages, and the ones at
Pomona, are discussed separately below.
In the teens and twenties, residential development in Greensboro boomed. Entire new neighborhoods and suburbs
were established and created. The large number of subdivision plats filed with the county during these decades, and the
numbers of dwellings raised each year, particularly in the 1920s, bluntly illustrate the growth. Between 1915 and 1919,
250 dwellings a year were raised on average in the city. (All of the figures in this paragraph are for the 1923, post
annexation city limits.) This number jumped to an average of 463 dwellings a year between 1920 and 1924, dropping off
only slightly in the next five years to 424 dwellings a year (Works Progress Administration 1940:8).
Residential development in the teens and twenties became a large scale business, with numerous realtors and
speculators appearing. Joining them was a new source of investment capital, Greensboro's growing number of
substantial insurance firms. Their numbers included the Pilot Life Insurance Company and the Guilford Insurance and Realty
Company, two important sources of money for development during the period. The developers concentrated their
efforts in the north, west, and southwest, in such communities as Irving Park, Westerwood, Sunset Hills, Hamilton Lakes,
Glenwood, and Sedgefield. Development to the northeast, other than at the mill villages, was limited by the presence of
the mills. To the east and southeast, development of white neighborhoods on the scale elsewhere around the city was
limited by the presence of blacks. However, a number of black neighborhoods grew here during the period, some of
them planned developments. (Baylin 1968:70-71, 75-78; Fripp 1985:53).
Residential construction continued to take place in the teens and twenties in southern Greensboro, at the colleges, and in
neighborhoods in and around downtown. Empty lots near the city center became fewer and farther between. The
Aycock neighborhood centered on Summit Avenue between downtown and the mills became progressively more built
up. By 1925 its lots were largely filled with houses. Growth in Fisher Park, just to the north of downtown, was even more
dramatic (Sanborn Map Company maps 1913, 1919, 1925; Fripp 1985:50; Fripp 1982:87-88).
Fisher Park finally began to develop with the opening of its handsome, welcoming park, the subdivision of Capt. Fisher's
vast holdings there, and the running of a trolley line up North Elm Street in the first decade of the century. It grew
steadily between 1910 and 1920; 115 houses still stand in the neighborhood from that decade (Sanborn Map Company
maps 1913, 1919, 1925; Fripp 1982: 87-88). In spite of the concerns of individuals like A.K. Moore, who managed the
1915 sales of fifteen homes that he worried were located "too far out" of the center of town for buyers, Fisher Park
was a great success (Fripp 1985:52). It was home to many wealthy individuals living in houses designed by such architects
as Charles C. Hartmann, Harry Barton, Raleigh James Hughes, and Charles Barton Keen. Keen designed the
13,800-square-foot, granite mansion of cotton broker, businessman, and real estate magnate James Edwin Latham in
1913 overlooking the park. Barton was the architect of a granite Tudor style house for tobacco broker John Marion
Galloway, which was raised on North Elm Street in 1919. The 1929 Tudor style brick mansion of Jefferson Standard
president Julian Price was designed by Hartmann. Many other houses, some grand, some more modest, were built in the
neighborhood through the 1920s, including some of the city's more handsome bungalows (Fripp 1985:52).
The neighborhood that was to become, and remain, Greensboro's most prestigious was begun as a suburb north of the
city limits and Fisher Park, and wes0 of the textile mills, about 1911. Named Irving Park, it was a project of the Southern
Real Estate Company, predecessor of Pilot Life. Southern Real Estate purchased fifty acres of land :'or development of
the Greensboro Country Club, the city's first, which was to be at the core of the development. The Irving Park Company
was formed to develop the area, and nationally renowned city planner John Nolen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was
employed to plan i~. New and exclusive, built apart from the city rather than just as an extension of a built-up area--like
South Greensboro and Fisher Park had largely been--it was the first fully realized suburb in Greensboro (Manieri
1982:77-78; Fripp 1982:88).
The ability to build so far beyond the city limits was due in part to the presence of the streetcar. Irving Park is an
excellent example of the convergence of streetcar and real estate interests in the city in the teens. Prior to opening up
the neighborhood and the Greensboro Country Club (1912) around which it was centered, the developers negotiated
with the North Carolina Public Service Company to extend the streetcar line from the end of the line at North Elm Street
up Sunset Avenue to the club. The negotiations must have been amicable, considering the convergence of interests
between the developers and financiers and the streetcar company (Baylin 1968:77; Manieri 1982:77-78; Kipp 1977).
According to Raymond Manieri, "Streetcar speculation during the second decade of the twentieth century was often
characterized by a cooperation between the street railway company and the real estate interests of the city" (Manieri
1982:77).
In a 1913 brochure for Irving Park, recounts historian Gayle Hicks Fripp, "the developers promised house sites of certain
sizes and city services, including streetcars, water and sewer mains, fire hydrants, telephones, 5,000 yards of cement
sidewalk, and 'no bill boards, no pigs, no nuisances, and no front fences''' (Fripp 1985:54). Attorney A.L. Brooks raised
one of the suburb's first houses there on Sunset Drive in 1913. Homes that followed included those of Irving Park
Company president A.W. McAlister, whose house at Country Club Drive was designed by Philadelphia architect Charles
Barton Keen; and Irving Park Company vice president Alfred M. Scales (nephew of his namesake, former governor A.M.
Scales), whose house went up on Alandale Road. (The company's other vice president, R. G. Vaughn, remained in the
house he built in 1910 on Church Street, suggesting that that street was still a more than respectable one at the time.) By
1924 Irving Park was the city's premier neighborhood (Fripp 1985:54; Gravure Illustration Company 1924).
Some development was planned even beyond Irving Park in the 1920s. The communities of Fairfield and Kirkwood are
pictured on a 1927 map of the city northwest of Irving Park. A plat map was filed for Fairfield in 1925 and plat maps were
filed for Kirkwood in 1928. The development of Fairfield began in 1928 and it was a less opulent neighborhood than
Irving Park ("Zoning Map of Greensboro" 1927; Guilford County Plat Book 6, Page 199, Plat Book 8, Pages 65, 95, 96;
Fripp 1982:108).
As part of the infill that was taking place between many of the suburbs, Latham Park was developed between Irving Park
and Fisher Park. Although its streets are pictured on a 1913 map of the city, it apparently was not developed until 1929,
at the close of the development boom (Brewer map 1913; Fripp 1982:112; Fripp 1985:56).
In eastern Greensboro, neighborhoods continued to grow in the twentieth century around Bennett and the Agricultural
and Mechanical College. Numerous small houses are pictured west of the Agricultural and Mechanical College and north
of Bennett on the 1913 Sanborn fire insurance maps. The expanded coverage of the 1919 Sanborn maps shows many
small houses standing east and southeast of Bennett in a neighborhood called Jonesboro. Some of the largest houses are
pictured immediately around the Agricultural and Mechanical College and the streets west of the campus--Beech,
Dudley, Cumberland were home to many prominent black citizens (Sanborn Map Company maps 1913, 1919; Fripp
1985:53).
Growth of the black neighborhoods of eastern Greensboro was not only incremental around the colleges. In spite of the
fact that most large-scale real estate activity was taking place elsewhere in the city, some black suburbs were
developed in the teens and twenties. A 1927 map which lists neighborhoods throughout the city and environs shows five
black neighborhoods in the east: Scott Park and College Heights east of the Agricultural and Mechanical College; Nocho
Park east of Bennett; and Yaquena Park and Clinton Hills southeast of Asheboro and Tuscaloosa streets. Plat maps were
filed for Scott Park by the Real Estate Trust Company in 1918; for College Heights in 1918 and 1919 by the J.E. Latham
Co.; for Nocho Park in 1924 and 1926; and for Clinton Hills in 1929 and 1936. Nocho Park was opened by 1928, an
exclusive neighborhood with a twelve-acre park and a nearby high school and hospital. All of these neighborhoods grew
in spite of the fact that there was no trolley service to them and only limited bus service (Fripp 1985:53; Pease
Engineering Co. map 1927; Guilford County Plat Book 3, Page 141 [Scott Park], Book 4, Page 142 [College Heights],
Book 5, Page 395, Book 6, Page 31, Book 8, Page 63 [Nocho Park], Book 8, Pages 136 and 137, Book 9, Page 90
[Clinton Hills]).
Western and southwestern Greensboro were the busiest areas of development activity in the teens and twenties.
Neighborhoods continued to thrive near the women's Normal and Industrial College. College Hill, east of the college, was
already a substantial neighborhood by 1900, marked by numerous houses, as well as stores and churches. By 1913 it was
largely built up, with substantial houses lining Mendenhall Street. The intensive development of this neighborhood was
probably at least partly due to the trolley line, which passed through it on Tate Street between Market and Spring
Garden (Fripp 1985:51; Pease Engineering Co. map 1927).
Communities such as West Market Terrace north of the campus and Highlands to its south continued to develop as well.
Many houses were pictured in them on the 1919 Sanborn maps, but their origins were apparently earlier. A plat map had
been filed for West Market Terrace in 1914 and for a part of Highlands in 1891, probably in anticipation of the coming
college (Sanborn Map Company maps 1919; Guilford County Plat Book 2, Page 4 [Highlands], Plat Book 3, Pages 154
[West Market Terrace]).
Development also occurred south of the women's Normal and Industrial College--south of the railroad tracks--in the
teens and twenties. A plat map was filed for Piedmont Heights in 1905 and Glenwood was promoted through
newspaper advertisements in 1909. By 1915 Glenwood was reportedly being developed. Its public school is pictured on
a 1919 map, which also pictures houses in the neighborhood and adjacent Piedmont Heights. These are large
neighborhoods and their development was likely affected by the streetcar. By 1927 a trolley line swung south from Lee
along Glenwood Avenue, servicing them (Manieri 1982:79; Fripp 1982:87; Guilford County Plat Book 2, Page 97;
Sanborn Map Company maps 1919; Pease Engineering Co. map 1927) .
A.K. Moore, manager of the real estate department of the Guilford Insurance and Realty Company, developed
Westerwood in 1919. Located along Mendenhall Street north of West Market Street, it was a community of
medium-priced dwellings. Starting around 1925, the A. K. Moore Realty Company developed Sunset Hills farther to the
west, about three miles from the center of town, on either side of West Market and Friendly streets. It was a large
undertaking, judging by the numerous streets and lots pictured in its plat maps. According to Gayle Hicks Fripp, it
"featured parkways and restrictions for houses which were to be sturdily constructed and 'architecturally good.’” In spite
of its restrictions, Sunset Hills was a less exclusive development than Irving Park. (Fripp 1982:108; Baylin 1968:79; Fripp
1985:56; Guilford County Plat Book 9, Pages 85-89).
In 1923 the city expanded its boundaries from four to almost eighteen square miles. The population, which was 19,861 in
1920, jumped to 43,525 following the annexation, making Greensboro the third biggest city in the state after Charlotte
and Winston-Salem. Major communities brought into the city limits by the annexation included the textile mill villages to
the northeast, Irving Park to the north, Glenwood to the southwest, and the communities that extended west of
downtown out to and including Sunset Hills. For the first time the bounds were not extended symmetrically. Responding
to areas of growth and growth potential, and probably racial concerns as well, they extended farther to the white
communities of the northeast, north, west, and southwest, than to the black communities of the southeast and east
(Arnett 1955:23-24; Fripp 1982:99; Baylin 1968:80).
Development continued in the 1920s in a few communities that were even beyond the greatly expanded new city
boundaries. To the east of the Proximity Manufacturing Company mill villages the community of Bessemer grew, perhaps
providing housing for Cone mill employees who could not or did not wish to live in company housing. Bessemer was
already a separate community no later than the first decade of the century; it appears as "Bessimer" on a county map of
1908. The 1919 Sanborn maps, while not picturing the community, do picture the Bessemer Public School, identified as
standing three miles east of downtown. Bessemer was not embraced by the city limits until the late 1950s (Miller map
1908; Sanborn Map Company maps 1919; Baylin 1968:81).
Also beyond the city limits, about a mile west of Sunset Hills, the community of Hamilton Lakes was begun in the late
1920s by Alfred M. Scales, who had also been active in the development of Irving Park. Scales, in 1926, had described
his vision of the project as follows:
Here I expect to see my dream of a beautiful village of homes come true. Homes will be built around clear, fresh
lakes, overlooking natural parkways or on quiet sylvan roads. Everything will be provided that will add to the joy
of living. Nothing will be done that will mar the native charm.
Lakes are there for swimming, fishing and boating. A golf course and tennis courts will be built and parks and
wading pools provided for the children. These will be open to everyone owning property in Hamilton Lakes and
will be for their exclusive use. (Fripp 1985:55)
Streets and lots were indeed laid out and the community was incorporated as a separate town, with Scales as mayor. In
the late 1920s, prior to the stock market crash, the development collapsed. It came under the control of Edward and
Blanche Sternberger Benjamin, who in 1930 renamed it Starmount. In the late 1930s construction activity resumed there
(Baylin 1968:83; Fripp 1982:112; Fripp 1985:55).
Sedgefield, an upper income community centered around a corporate headquarters in the country, was begun by Pilot
Life in the late 1920s southwest of the city. Its importance has been summarized by architectural historian Langdon
Opperman: "Sedgefield is significant as one of North Carolina's twentieth century landmarks of architecture and planned
development. Developed from the estate of wealthy tobacco magnate John Blackwell Cobb, Sedgefield and Pilot Life
both were associated with a number of the area's leading industrialists and businessmen" (Opperman 1990:107).
Established near the High Point Road, its development was directly linked to the automobile. It has always remained
outside of Greensboro's corporate limits, although the city is slowly encircling it (Baylin 1968:81-82).
While Sedgefield's growth can be linked to the automobile, it is difficult to measure the impact of the car on the
development of other neighborhoods and suburbs in and near the city. As mentioned at the outset, numerous factors
influenced the growth of neighborhoods, particularly those located near the nodes of downtown, the colleges, and the
mills. The sheer expanse of the city's neighborhoods in the 1920s, some more than a mile from any of the business,
educational, or industrial nodes, or from any trolley or bus line, clearly speaks for the influence of the car, however. In
1927 the trolleys went north to the edge of Irving Park, northeast to the Cone Mills, southeast down Asheboro Street,
southwest into Glenwood, and west into College Hill and out to Pomona. They were supplemented to a limited extent by
a bus line that served Westerwood and West Market Terrace, and one that went east out of the city along Market.
Those living away from these lines--out west in Sunset Hills or beyond at Hamilton Lakes, or northwest in Fairfield or
Kirkwood or the parts of Irving Park they adjoined--simply had to rely on the automobile to get to work or school or
church (Pease Engineering Co. map 1927).
A final factor that is difficult to assess is the influence of planning upon the overall development and growth of the city's
neighborhoods. Interest in planning, rather than just random development, was percolating in the city in the teens. John
Nolen had been engaged to plan Irving Park in the teens and the Greensboro had attempted, in 1913, to engage him to
prepare its city plan. One of America's premier designers and planners, Nolen had prepared the notable plan of
Charlotte's Myers Park suburb at the beginning of the decade and, apparently, Irving Park as well (Goldfield 1985:17;
Kipp 1974:421). In 1917 the Chamber of Commerce brought him to town to speak about the benefits of planning and
urged the city to hire a planner, offering 500 dollars to defray part of the cost. The city complied by hiring none other
than Charles Mulford Robinson, the doyen of the City Beautiful movement, to draw a plan for Greensboro. Unfortunately,
Robinson died before the year was out, without having completed the plan (Huggins 1969:390).
Greensboro, however, remained interested in planning. In 1920 it became the first city in the state (to be followed
quickly by others) to appoint a planning commission under a new state law. Among its activities was a survey of the city's
streets and topography, authorized in 1923 at the time of annexation and completed in 1926. This survey was to assist in
laying out streets in outlying districts in advance of development (Report of the Geodetic Survey 1926:35; Goldfield
1985:13; Huggins 1969:391).
The interest in planning by parties ranging from the Chamber of Commerce to the city government reflected the
concurrence of interests between the Greensboro's business classes and its governing officers who, by the 1920s, had
largely become one and the same. An example of this can be found in the establishment of the planning commission. It
was none other than state senator Alfred M. Scales, one of the city's most active developers, who introduced a bill in the
General Assembly to establish state planning commissions (Kipp 1977:392; Huggins 1969:391).
The convergence of interests of the city's economic, political, and civic elite aside, Greensboro probably had good
reason to promote planning in the early twentieth century. According to Kay Haire Huggins in an article on early city
planning in North Carolina:
By 1900 North Carolina was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, which precipitated an urban crisis. During
the first decade of the twentieth century the population in towns increased 53 percent. The result was
haphazard growth without design, congestion, unpaved, refuse-littered streets, inadequate water and sewer
lines. (Huggins 1969:377)
Frequent bond issues in Greensboro in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, directed towards paving roads
and establishing and extending sewer and water service, indicate that the city was attempting to cope with the same
problems. Huggins points out that in 1912, "Businessmen in Greensboro offered prizes for the best kept lawn, the
cleanest backyard, and the prettiest bed of flowers" (Huggins 1969:381). Perhaps more evocative of the nature of
residential life in Greensboro in the early twentieth century is the promise in a 1913 Irving Park promotional brochure of
"no pigs" in the community (Fripp 1985:54).
Zoning by the city helped preserve the character of some neighborhoods in the 1920s and 1930s. By the late 1920s,
industrial activity was largely limited to rail corridors and other already industrialized areas. Although this zoning was
apparently responsive to existing areas of industrial activity, it must also have helped limit and define it (''Zoning Map of
Greensboro'' 1927).
Mill villages
The city's mill villages were separate components of its residential picture during the first four decades of the century.
Nothing has been written of the origins of their inhabitants, but presumably they included many poor tenant farmers who
migrated to the city from the rural Piedmont in hopes of improving their lot (Kipp 1974:171, 186-187). Located in the
northeast, around the textile mills of the Cones and Sternbergers, and in the west at the textile mill and terra cotta
factory of Pomona, these villages consisted primarily of blocks and blocks of simple one-story frame houses. A 1910
description of the mill houses of Revolution described them as neat, modern houses [supplied] with schools, play
grounds, churches and every possible convenience" (Phillips 1983). The Proximity Manufacturing Company in 1925
stated that the "company encourages beautifying and improvement of premises. Village lots, they stated, were 75 by
150 feet in size, large enough for lawns, fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables. To encourage utilization of the lots, the
company stated that it plowed the ground each year, without charge (Balliett 1925).
The physical aspect of company housing remains apparent: small houses on small lots within walking distance of the mills
and the churches, stores, and YMCA's provided by, or subsidized by, the company. The quality of life in the mill villages,
and at the mill, is not as easy to determine, however. It was heavenly or hellish, depending on one's point of view.
According to a Proximity Manufacturing Company brochure of 1925:
The welfare of the operatives and their families is a consideration that is always put ahead of volume or profits.
The employees of the Cone Mills are well housed, well paid, and well provided with the comforts and pleasures of
life. The management has always realized that it is upon the physical, spiritual and mental well-being of the
operatives and their families that steady, economical production and a resultant profit depend.
The company provided houses to employees, ranging from four to six rooms each, at the "very nominal rent" of $1.00
per month. They distributed coal and wood at cost without delivery or handling charge. They sold milk, cream, butter,
beef, pork, and flour produced on company farms through company stores, at prices below costs elsewhere in
Greensboro (Balliett 1925).
The company reported that its village for black workers--East White Oak--housed about 750. One building was used as a
YMCA and a village school taught children through the seventh grade. The houses, according to the company, were of
the same general construction as those for white employees (Balliett 1925). East White Oak, a rare black mill community,
was built about 1916. Little of it other than its former schoolhouse still stands.
The Cone Mills Corporation, the successor of the Proximity Manufacturing Corporation, continued to build new mill
houses, or renovate existing ones, into the 1940s (Greensboro Record February 26, 1948). In the mid-1950s, however,
they filed numerous plat maps of subdivisions of their villages and sold off the houses, offering occupants the first
chance to purchase them (Greensboro Plat Map books; personal communication with Bill Dixon, June 12, 1991).
In contrast to the claims of the Proximity Manufacturing Company, William H. Chafe, in his history of Greensboro's civil
rights movement, characterizes the owners' social efforts as paternalistic and opportunistic and bluntly states that "pay
and working conditions remained poor" in the twentieth century for factory operatives (Chafe 1980:20). In 1898,
according to an account in the Greensboro Patriot, the day shift in the Proximity Mill worked ten hours and the night shift
twelve. For their efforts, adult male employees were paid $25.00 a month and woman and children between $12.00 and
$14.00 a month (Kipp 1974:193). Wages were to remain low through the 1930s, although rentals were accordingly
minimal (Personal communications with Bill Dixon and Carrie Owen, June 12, 1991).
Blacks, in Chafe's estimation, were particularly poorly treated (Chafe 1980:20). By the turn of the century they had been
removed from all skilled positions in the mills and at other factories throughout Greensboro, as they had been
throughout North Carolina (Kipp 1974:242). The Proximity Manufacturing Company did not deny the menial status of
blacks at the mills, nor did it stand above the pernicious racial stereotypes of the time. In its 1925 booster publication it
stated:
Cotton always calls to mind the Southern negro, and though he does only common labor in the mills, he is the
starter of the job. He breaks the cotton bale and feeds the contents into the first machine, and what he has to
do, he does with a rag-time song and a merry grin (Balliet 1925).
A company census of the black mill village of East White Oak in 1932 indicates the nature of the "common labor" of black
employees. The men were primarily employed in the opening room, the yard, the boiler room, and the dye house. They
also worked as janitors and in the Revolution barns (White Oak Villages Census).
The truth certainly falls somewhere in between the claims of the Cones and of Chafe. Although life in the village must
have been much better than life on the suffocating, noisy, dangerous mill floor.
The Depression was to cut the feet out from under the residential market, both privately owned and held by the mills.
Between 1930 and 1934 the average number of residences built a year plummeted to 135, from 424 in the previous
five years. With the worst of the Depression over and aid from public agencies, this figure climbed to 210 a year in the
last half of the decade. The stagnation in the housing market reflected flat population growth, which increased only
about ten percent in the thirties, a small increase relative to the dramatic increases of the previous five decades. In the
1940s a quicker pace of growth was to resume in the city, its population climbing 15,000 to 74,389 by 1950 (Works
Progress Administration 1940:8; Arnett 1955:419-420).
Greensboro at the end of the 1930s was captured by a Works Progress Administration survey of the city's real property.
Its census showed a city of single-family dwellings; of 12,225 residences, 83.8 percent were detached single-family
homes. About nine percent of the remaining residences were two-family, side-by-side houses or duplexes. Only
forty-eight apartment buildings stood in the city. More than seventy percent of the dwellings were from three to six
rooms in size. Home ownership, however, was correlated to the size of the dwelling an individual was likely to live in. The
median size of all dwellings was five rooms, but for owners it was six, and for tenants only four (Works Progress
Administration 1940:4, 38).
The report also pictured a city of twentieth-century residences. Only 3.3 percent of the city's residences, 407 buildings,
antedated 1895. More than a third of the residences had been built between 1895 and 1915, and an almost equal
number had been built in the 1920s (Works Progress Administration 1940:8).
The report's text, and particularly its many maps, clearly show the segregated housing patterns that were the rule of the
city. Maps show the largest concentration of blacks in the east and southeast, particularly around Bennett College and
the Agricultural and Mechanical College. There were also black neighborhoods at the city's northeastern corner, at the
mill village of East White Oak; at its northwestern corner; in the west at Pomona, south of the tracks; and southwest of
downtown in the community of Warnersville. "Negroes in Greensboro," the report summarized, "live in several
segregated areas around the city, one of which is Warnersville [which] is now less a slum district. Well-to-do Negroes,
professionals and others, live in the large and more attractive section in the eastern part of the city" (Works Progress
Administration 1940: 1).
E. Expansion and Consolidation of Colleges and Public Schools
The importance of schools, particularly colleges, to Greensboro in the twentieth century is suggested by a large format
1904 publication of photographs of the city. Directed towards promoting the dwellings of the city's most respectable
citizens, of which it pictured many dozens, it also included a number of photographs of college buildings. Its limited text
stated that "it is probably within the bounds of truth to say that of all the secular topics in which the people here are
interested--next to the necessities--that of education stands first. There is a serious and active interest in the subject,
and a pride in the growing institutions of learning" (Gravure Illustration Company 1904).
The twentieth century saw continued growth at the city's five colleges. (A sixth school-"-the small black Immanuel
Lutheran College at East Market and Luther streets--is no longer in existence. Begun in 1903 in Concord, North Carolina,
it had moved to a thirteen-acre campus in Greensboro in 1905 (Arnett 1955:114).) In 1926 Bennett College, originally a
coeducational institution, reorganized as a four-year college for women. In that year it added ten college students to its
151 high school students. By 1933 it had completely phased out its high school program. The creation of a high school
program for black students in the late 1920s by the city allowed Bennett to shift its focus to higher educational
achievement. In the 1930s the campus itself was transformed through the construction of numerous two-story, brick,
Georgian Revival style buildings (Arnett 1955:106; Fripp 1982:116; Scarlette 1989:I-1-3).
Greensborough Female College also changed significantly early in the century. It was closed in 1903 but, through the
efforts of its president and alumnae, money was raised to reopen it the following year. In 1912 its name was changed to
Greensboro College for Women and it acquired its present name, Greensboro College, in 1920 (Fripp 1982:86). Guilford
College continued its late nineteenth century growth into the twentieth century with momentum rather than problems.
The wooded quadrangle at its core was established early in the century and surrounded by two-story Neoclassical and
Colonial Revival style buildings which continue to define the campus (Edmisten 1990).
During the first four decades of the century the city's two state colleges continued to grow in size and prestige as well. A
year into the new century the Agricultural & Mechanical College became exclusively a men's school. By 1915, when its
name was changed to the Negro Agricultural & Technical College of North Carolina, it was the largest school of its kind in
the country. It continued to grow physically, particularly between 1922 and 1939, when its five oldest surviving buildings
were constructed (Dickinson 1988; Fripp 1982:86). In 1919 the name of the State Normal & Industrial College was
changed to the North Carolina College for Women and it started to offer graduate classes. Its continuing educational
achievements were reflected in its steady physical growth during the first four decades of the century. In 1963 it
became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and began to admit women (Brown 1980; Fripp 1982:86).
Greensboro entered the twentieth century with two white public elementary schools, Lindsay Street School and
Asheboro Street School; two black public elementary schools, Percy Street School and the Warnersville School; and one
public high school, which was for white students. In the teens three new white schools, the Cypress Street· School, the
Simpson Street School, and the West Lee Street School, were constructed, as were two new black ones, the Ashe Street
School and the Washington Street School. A new white high school opened on Spring Street in 1911. Until 1926 black
high school age students had to attend the college preparatory departments of the Agricultural and Mechanical College,
Bennett, Immanuel Lutheran, or Palmer Memorial Institute, which opened in 1902 out in the county east of the city (Fripp
1982:85-86).
Outside of the city, in the Cone mill villages and at Pomona, there also were schools. The Cones had built schools early in
the history of their mills, probably in the late nineteenth century. By 1925 the Proximity School had 582 pupils and
seventeen teachers; the Proximity Kindergarten had seventy-two students and two teachers; the White Oak School had
834 pupils and twenty teachers; and the East White Oak School had three teachers and 123 students (Balliett 1925).
Reflecting the city and county school system, the schools were segregated, the East White Oak School, which still stands
as a community center, serving the black mill children. Not until 1946, well after the mill communities of the northeast had
been incorporated into the city, did the Cones turn over control of their schools to Greensboro (Greensboro Record,
February 21, 1946). Largely through the efforts of John Van Lindley, schools had been built in Pomona in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve the children of the families working at the J. Van Lindley Nursery and
the Pomona Cotton and Terra Cotta mills (Arnett 1973:97; Guilford County Board of School Improvement 1905).
In 1922 Greensboro's schools began a decade-long period of growth with the construction of Aycock, McIver, and
Caldwell elementary schools for whites and Price School for blacks. In 1926 the Greensboro School District was formed
and numerous schools were drawn into the new system, from the center of the city out· to Pomona. A more than two
million dollar building program in the late 1920s led to the renovation of a number of schools and the construction of
many new ones, including Greensboro High School for whites and Dudley for blacks (Fripp 1982:117; Greensboro
Record, November 16, 1940). Dudley, opened in 1929, was the first black high school built by the city, which had
established its first accredited high school program for blacks only three years earlier at the Washington Street School
(Greensboro Record, January 10, 1947.)
Schools were particularly important to Greensboro's black community. Although they were not equivalent in facilities or
resources to the white schools, they provided a high standard of education relative to other similar schools in the state.
In 1920 Greensboro's black illiteracy rate of 13.5 percent was second only to that of High Point; its 1930 rate of 11.1
percent trailed only that of Asheville (Kipp 1974:315). According to William H. Chafe in his history of the civil rights
movement in Greensboro, the black community's schools and colleges Here a "primary source of strength" in the face of
white oppression. Bennett and A&T continued in the Twentieth century at the center of the black community's
neighborhoods and intellectual life. Dudley High School in east Greensboro quickly gained a reputation "as a model of
educational excellence." Even the elementary schools were important. "Of the ten Negro elementary schools accredited
in North Carolina in 1950, " Chafe writes, "six Here in Greensboro. The statistics suggest how unusual was black
Greensboro's educational record, and how potentially a powerful source for change" (Chafe 1980:23). 2
* * * *
2 Brown’s historical narrative presentation ends here in Section E, page 44 in the original pdf version.
Books, articles, nominations, and pamphlets 3
Albright, James W. 1904. Greensboro, 1808-1904, Facts, Figures, Traditions and Reminiscences. Greensboro: Jos. J. Stone
& Company.
Arnett, Ethel Stephens. 1955. Greensboro, North Carolina, the County Seat . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press.
________, For Whom Our Public Schools Were Named, Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro: Piedmont Press.
Art Work of Greensboro, N.C. Published in Nine Parts. 1904. Chicago: Gravure Illustration Company. Located at the
Greensboro Public Library, Caldwell-Jones Room.
Art Work of Piedmont Section of North Carolina. Published in Nine Parts. 1924. Chicago: Gravure Illustration Company.
Ashe, Samuel A., ed. 1905. Biographical History of North Carolina. Greensboro: Charles L. Van Noppen.
Balliett, Carl. 1925. World Leadership in Denims, Through Thirty Years of Progress. Baltimore: Privately printed by the
Thomsen-Ellis Co. for the Proximity Manufacturing Company.
Baylin, Jonathan F. 1968. "An Historical Study of Residential Development in Greensboro, 1808-1965." Master's thesis,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Bishir, Catherine W., Charlotte V. Brown, Carl R. Lounsbury, and Ernest H. Wood, III. 1990. Architects and Builders in North
Carolina: A History of the Practice of Building. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. L
Bishir, Catherine W., and Lawrence S. Earley, editors. 1985. Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs in North Carolina. Raleigh:
North Carolina Division of Archives and History.
Brown, Charlotte V. 1980. "Julius I. Foust Building [University of North Carolina at Greensboro] -National Register of
Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form."
Chafe, William H. 1980. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro. North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom. New
York: Oxford University Press. Located at the Greensboro Public Library, Caldwell-Jones Room.
Cowhig, Michael. 1985. "Preservation Planning in Greensboro's Fisher Park Neighborhood." In Bishir and Earley, Early
Twentieth Century Suburbs in North Carolina, pp. 95-98.
Dickinson, Patricia S. 1988. "Agricultural & Technical College of North Carolina Historic District -National Register of
Historic Places Registration Form."
Edmisten, Linda Harris. 1990. "Guilford College -National Register of Historic Places Registration Form." Located at North
Carolina Division of Archives and History, Survey and Planning Branch, Raleigh.
Fripp, Gayle Hicks. 1982. Greensboro, A Chosen Center. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications. Located at the
Greensboro Public Librar7, Caldwell-Jones Room.
1985. "Greensboro's Early Suburbs." In Bishir and Earley, Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs in North Carolina, pp. 49-57.
Goldfield, David R. 1985. "North Carolina's Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs and the Urbanizing South." In Bishir and
Earley, Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs in North Carolina, pp. 9-19.
Greensboro City Directories, 1886-1940.
3 Brown’s list of sources appears in section H, pages 1-7 in the original pdf version.
Greensboro Daily News. February 18, 1960. Clipping of article entitled "School Names: John Van Lindley Gave Both Land
and Honey" located in the vertical files of the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Greensboro Record, November 16, 1940. Clipping of article entitled "Greensboro City Schools Always Leader" located in
the vertical files of the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
______, February 21, 1946. Clipping of article entitled "Three Schools to be Put in City District" located in the vertical files
of the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. ·
______, December 19, 1946. Clipping of article entitled -”Graded Schools Here Inaugurated by Action of Citizens in
1870" Located in the vertical files of the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
______, January 9, 1947. Clipping of article entitled "First Negro Schools in City" located in the vertical files of the Jackson
Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro . .
______, January 10, 1947. Clipping of article entitled “Dudley High Has Outstanding Rating Among Negro Schools"
Located in the vertical files of the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
______, February 26, 1948. Clipping of article entitled "Many Southern Mills Selling their Villages" located in the vertical
files of the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Guilford County Board of School Improvement. [1905] "Progress of Public Education in Guilford County, North Carolina,
1902-1905." Greensboro: Chas. G. Harrison Printing Company. Pamphlet located in the vertical files of the Jackson
Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Guilford County Deed Books. Located at Guilford County Courthouse, Greensboro, North Carolina.
Guilford County Plat Books. Located at Guilford County Courthouse, Greensboro, North Carolina.
Half Century Book, 1891-1941. 1941. Greensboro: Cone Export & Commission Co.
Huggins, Kay Haire. 1969. "City Planning in North Carolina, 1900 1929." The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. XLVI,
no. 4 (October 1969), pp. 377-397. Located at the Library of Congress.
Journal of the National Medical Association. May, 1969. Article by Wilson Elkins entitled "The History of L. Richardson
Memorial Hospital, Greensboro, North Carolina."
Kipp, Samuel M., III. 1973. "Urban Growth and Social Change in the South, 1970-1920: Greensboro, North Carolina, as a
Case Study." Ph.D. disssertation, Princeton University. Located at the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at
Greensboro .
______, 1977. "Old Notables and Newcomers: The Economic and Political Elite of Greensboro, North Carolina,
1880-1920. " Journal of Southern History, vol. XLIII (August 1977), pp. 373 394.
Little Stokes, Ruth and McKeldon Smith. :975. "Jefferson Standard Building -National Register of Historic Places Inventory
Nomination Form." Located at North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Survey and Planning Branch, Raleigh.
Manieri, Raymond E. 1980. "Downtown Greensboro Historic District National Register of Historic Places
Inventory-Nomination Form." Located at North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Su~1ey and Planning Branch,
Raleigh .
______, 1982. "Streetcar Speculators: The Role of Street Railway Promoters in the Development of Suburban
Neighborhoods in Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina, 1886-1923. '' Master's thesis. North Carolina State University.
Located at the Greensboro Public Library, Caldwell-Jones Room.
Opperman, Langdon Edmunds. 1990. "Draft Report: Historic and Architectural Resources in the Area of Potential Impact
of the Proposed Construction of the Greensboro Western Urban Loop, Guilford County." Draft architectural component
of Greensboro Western Urban Loop cultural resource report. Located at North Carolina Division of Archives and History,
Survey and Planning Branch, Raleigh.
Personal communication. June 12, 1991. Bill Dixon, longtime resident of White Oak New Town.
______, June 12, 1991. Carrie Owen, longtime resident of White Oak New Town.
Phillips, Laura A.W. 1983. "Revolution Cotton Mills -National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form."
Located at North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Survey and Planning Branch, Raleigh.
Powell, William S. 1989. North Carolina Through Four Centuries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. L
Report of the Geodetic, Tonographic and Block Survey of Greensboro, North Carolina. 1926. Toledo: R.H. Randall & Co.
Scarlette, Mary R. 1989. Bennett College, Institutional Self-Study Report. Greensboro. Located at the Thomas F. Holgate
Library, Bennett College, Greensboro.
Smith, H. McKeldon. 1979. Architectural Resources: An Inventory of Historic Architecture: High Point, Jamestown,
Gibsonville, Guilford County. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History.
Smith, Margaret Supplee. 1985. ''The American Idyll in North Carolina's First Suburbs: Landscape and Architecture." In
Bishir and Earley, Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs in North Carolina, pp. ~1-28.
Souvenir of Greensboro, N.C. 1910. Brooklyn: Albertype C0. Souvenir photo album located at the Library of Congress.
Weaver, C.E. 1917. City of Greensboro, North Carolina, Pen and Picture Sketches. Richmond: Central Publishing Company
. Located at the Greensboro Public Library, Caldwell-Jones Room.
White Oak Village Census. 1932. Photocopy of typewritten census in files of Cone Mills Corporation, Greensboro.
Works Progress Administration. 1940. Report of the Real Property Survey, Greensboro, North Carolina. Located at the
Greensboro Public Library, Caldwell-Jones Room.
MAPS
Beers, F.W. 1879. "Map of the City of Greensboro, Guilford Co., North Carolina." New York. Located at Greensboro
Planning Department, Greensboro Municipal Building.
Brewer, R.W. 1913. ''Map of the City of Greensboro, North Carolina." Greensboro: M.M. Pruden. Located at Guilford
County Register of Deeds, Greensboro.
Burleigh Lithographing Establishment. 1891. 'Bird's Eye View of the City of Greensboro, North Carolina." Madison, WI:
Ruger & Stoner. Located at Greensboro Planning Department, Greensboro Municipal Building. "City
Limits Map of the City of Greensboro, North Carolina, Including Town of Hamilton Lakes and Pomona." 1938. Located at
Greensboro Planning Department, Greensboro Municipal Building. Gray. 1882. "Gray's New Map of Greensboro, Guilford
County, North Carolina." Located at Greensboro Planning Department, Greensboro Municipal Building.
Miller, C.M. 1908. "Map of Guilford County, N.C." Salisbury, N.C. Located at Guilford County Register of Deeds,
Greensboro. Pease Engineering Co. 1927. "Map of the City ::>f Greensboro, North Carolina, Towns of Hamilton Lakes and
?omona 'the pivot of the piedmont.'" Greensboro: Pease Engineer~ng Co. Located at Guilford County Register of Deeds,
Greensboro. Note -this map pictures the city's trolley and bus lines.
Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. 1885, 1888, 1891, 1896. "Greensboro, North Carolina." Located at Greensboro Planning
Department, Greensboro Municipal Building and on microfilm at the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at
Greensboro.
Sanborn Map Company. 1902, 1907, 1913, 1919, 1925. "Greensboro, North Carolina." Located at Greensboro Planning
Department, Greensboro Municipal Building and on microfilm at the Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at
Greensboro.
"Zoning Map of the City of Greensboro, North Carolina, Showing Town of Hamilton Lakes and Pomona." 1927. Located at
Greensboro Planning Department, Greensboro Municipal Building.