Robert Allison Ragan is a Gastonia native who was born into textiles and its influences when cotton was king and the city was the proud Combed Yarn Center of America. Representing three generations and 120 years of noteworthy community involvement, it is but natural his historical interests should be channeled in this direction. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and several commercial banking schools, he is primarily a Charlotte businessman and private investor with an indefatigable curiosity for history, who has used his intelligence and wealth of knowledge to tell the story of a city, a county and an industry that have been vital parts in the New South vision we know today. Additionally, he has been president of Gaston County Museum of Art & History, has written and recorded through the years valuable information on the region's history, and assisted national television and broadcasting as well as state and local agencies in historical research on Gaston County, the Southern textile industry and its people.

Article One:

As viewers of Tim Ellis’ unique Vintage Gastonia web site, many of you undoubtedly have or will express an interest in knowing when and how the city of Gastonia came into being. In a series of short articles, I will attempt through this medium to anticipate some of these questions and share with you numerous defining events in the antecedent history of this All-American city many of you proudly call home. As a beginning to the story, it is important to understand that two interrelated events were to unalterably shape its destiny and define its direction – the coming of the railroad in the 1860s and 1870s and cotton textile manufacturing in the 1880s and 1890s.

Railroads Create Gastonia

Transportation in Gaston County before 1860 was confined almost exclusively to horses, mules and horse-drawn wagons that traveled along poorly maintained dirt roads. This was to change, however, in the years immediately prior to the War Between the States, opening new vistas of opportunity for the underdeveloped agricultural region.

In 1855, the Wilmington, Charlotte & Rutherford Railroad, working its way from the Atlantic port city of Wilmington to the Piedmont of North Carolina, announced its intention to extend its tracks west of the Catawba River into Gaston and Lincoln counties. Five years later, a wooden trestle was built over the river above Tuckaseegee Ford near what is today Mount Holly to facilitate its entry. From there, the iron rails extended west to Brevard Station (later to become Stanley), then to White Pine (later known as Cherryville) and finally to Lincolnton by 1861, when North Carolina seceded from the Union to join the Confederate States of America. All construction ceased until after the war, when work resumed and the line, known by then as the Carolina Central Railroad, was extended to Asheville . In more modern times it became known as the Seaboard Air Line. This was but a beginning in the opening of the “backcountry” west of the Catawba.

Following the war, a new, more important road that would create towns along the way came through in the opening years of the 1870s, as the South was gripped in a terrible period known as Radical Reconstruction. It connected Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, and Atlanta, the Georgia capital and railroad center that was rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of Sherman’s destruction. It was first known as the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line (the name was changed to Atlanta & Charlotte Air Line in February 1877) and by 1894 as the Southern Railway. Importantly, it connected many lesser market towns and hamlets in between, including a small depot, fueling and watering stop called Gastonia Station. The little station quickly emerged as a town and then into a city – today’s Gastonia .

It was only by circumstance that Gastonia became the location where a town developed. Having crossed the Catawba River from Charlotte at a point now known as Belmont, the railroad’s intention was to lay its tracks to Dallas, then the county seat and only incorporated town. However, many of Dallas ’ citizens, sensing unwanted noise and pollution that would inevitably come with the train to its peaceful community of 350 inhabitants, objected to the proposed encroachment. So, the railroad reconsidered, and the tracks were laid about four miles south to a point near the old Shiloh Methodist meetinghouse, a location that today would be on East Long Avenue near the old Modena Mills and village. It was here that the first Gastonia Station was built in 1873. Railroad carpenters built an adjoining storehouse and a one-room cabin for the stationmaster’s living quarters. In a short time a barroom was also built and a blacksmith shop opened nearby. In 1876, David A. “Honest Dave” Jenkins, former state treasurer and prominent politician during Reconstruction, built a substantial white frame home across from the little stationhouse, which stood as a landmark in the city for over a hundred years.

The first train came through Gastonia Station on March 31, 1873, when only a few families lived there, but hundreds of well-wishers were on hand to greet it. With numerous dignitaries aboard, the special train – drawn by the B. Y. Sage, a magnificent steam engine costing $12,000 – passed along the tracks through Gaston County. It left Charlotte at 8:30 a.m., arrived at Garibaldi Station (in 1895, Belmont) at 9:22, then Wright’s Station (a year later, Lowell), and by 10:08 a.m. rolled into Gastonia Station, for a water stop. Leaving the cheering crowd behind by 10:30 a.m., the train puffed west toward Wooten Station (in 1892, Bessemer City), White Plains (in 1874, Kings Mountain), and then south toward its final destination, Spartanburg, South Carolina. The following year, the tracks were completed to Atlanta .

In 1876, for reasons that are not completely known to history, Gastonia Station was relocated one mile west on farmland owned principally by Oliver W. Davis(1), the site of present uptown Gastonia as we know it today (behind the former BB&T bank building, now county offices, and the old seven-story First National Bank building). Other large property owners included the Bradley family, descendants of John McKnitt Bradley, who owned land north and west of the center city, and the Hannas, who had land south and west. After likely giving land to the railroad as an inducement for the move, Davis had much of his property laid off into town lots and sold many of them for as little as $50 or $100 apiece in the beginning. Slowly, people began to come to start a business and build a home. Fortunately for the new town, the landowners were found to be reasonable men who had vision for the future, as evidenced by their willingness to cooperate with the railroad and those interested in buying lots and building a town here.

In 1876, followng close on the heels of the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line, another smaller road, known as the Chester & Lenoir Narrow Gauge Railroad, crossed the Air Line tracks at Gastonia Station, heading north. The junction created added economic advantages for the location. In 1897 the Narrow Gauge became known as the Carolina & Northwestern or more familiarly, the C&NW(2). With the railroad came business, with business came people, with people came communication and demand for services; and this alternate location with two railroad connections quickly became a village and then a town.

On January 26, 1877, with a population of about 140, Gastonia had become large enough to be incorporated as a town. The first town officials were R. E. Waddill, mayor, and T. G. Chalk, J. H. Fayssoux, F. S. Hanna, R. M. Martin and J. E. Page as commissioners. Most of these men had come with the railroad as depot agents, telegraph operators or in other positions. Landowner Oliver Davis acted as the first policeman, served as the town’s official cotton weigher, lit the oil lamps that dotted Main Street and collected the taxes.

The original pattern of streets was probably the result of natural boundaries such as the railroad tracks, wagon roads, ravines and gullies, suggestions by the railroad officials and desires of the original property owners. The first streets and avenues running east-west were Main Street (later Main Avenue) and Air Line Avenue, both paralleling the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line tracks, Long Avenue north of Air Line, Mill Street (in 1898 renamed Franklin Avenue) south of Main, and Elm Street (later named Second Avenue) running south of Mill. On the far west running north-south was Cemetery Street (later named Chester). Then to the east of Cemetery there was York Street, then South Street, then Marietta Street, then Maple Street (later renamed Oakland Street). Finally at the far east was Railroad Street (later named Broad Street), down the middle of which ran the tracks of the Chester & Lenoir Narrow Gauge. [INDEX]

Article Two:

Merchants Become Gastonia's First Families

Pioneer families began to establish homes near the depot soon after it was established. Early Gastonians seemed to agree that the best road to success was to be found in “keeping store.” Therefore the town’s first and most influential citizens were primarily merchants and tradesmen, and it was because of them that others came. Almost from the beginning, their stores were the largest and carried the widest and most up-to-date selections of merchandise in the county. Gastonia developed a reputation for being the best place to buy goods for the family or farm and quickly became a regional trading center that drew people from Gaston, Lincoln, Mecklenburg and York counties. Because of the railroads, it was also a place where traveling salesmen, known as “drummers”, stopped to service their trades throughout the region. Hotels were established to accommodate them. Before long, when people asked “What place is this?” eager citizens replied, “Gastonia. We are going to have a big town here one of these days.”

Possibly the first business in the present uptown business district was that of the Smyres in 1875. E. L. Smyre had a store in a small schoolhouse on the southwest corner of Main and Oakland streets. The following year, along with his uncle, Alfred Monroe Smyre (1), as partner, they rented a frame building at the centrally located southeast corner of Main and South streets, where a 7-story building stands today. By 1883 that partnership was dissolved and was succeeded by A. M. Smyre as sole proprietor of a men’s, boys’ and ladies’ clothing and accessories business. In 1894, he sold that business and established Gastonia Hardware Co., the town’s first hardware store. In 1905 he was also instrumental in organizing Standard Hardware. Each of them became sizable operations in the city, serving citizens for over the half-century.

In point of arrival, James E. Page was the next businessman to settle in Gastonia, arriving from Marietta, Georgia in January 1875 as agent for the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line. In 1883 he purchased the three-year-old Gastonia Gazette from George W. Chalk, who had established the publication in 1880. Not enjoying the newspaper business, Page sold the paper in 1888 and started Page Lumber Company. This successful lumber and millwork business later became Spencer Lumber Company, long a landmark in the city.

Another of the first to arrive, when there were only a few scattered houses in the vicinity, was John Henry Craig, a native of the Union section of the county. He had sold the railroad land at Shiloh, upon which the first Gastonia depot was located in 1873. In 1876 he opened a retail store at the new Gastonia depot location. By 1882 he had as his partner Captain James Daniel Moore, a newly arrived Catawba County native and Confederate war hero, and they operated as Craig & Moore. Separately Craig also owned a tannery and traded in cotton, buying the ginned and baled staple from local farmers and selling it to cotton merchants in larger cities. In 1887, he and his brother-in- law founded Gastonia and Gaston County’s first bank (subject of a subsequent article) (2)

Captain J. Q. Holland, a teenage Confederate Army officer in the War Between the States, had perhaps the next mercantile business in Gastonia, starting as early as 1877. He operated in one partnership arrangement or another for 35 years on Main Avenue and trained some the town’s earliest and most successful merchants. He was followed in 1879 by Jiles B. Beal, a Lincoln County native, who opened the town’s first lumber and building materials business in partnership with J. D. Brumfield. It became a leading plant manufacturing millwork, doors, sashes and blinds. Later Beal organized Gaston Iron Works.

Another of Gastonia’s earliest and most successful merchants and town builders was George Washington Ragan, a native of the South Point/Union section of the county and a teenage Confederate soldier. Already with seven years’ experience in merchandising, he came from businesses at Lowell and South Point in 1879 at age 33 to seek his fortune. With Thomas C. Pegram, he founded the pioneer firm of Ragan & Pegram on the northeast corner of Main and Marietta, which did a brisk business in general merchandising, as well as guano, farm equipment and trading of cotton and other commodities. Ragan left in 1881 to open a store in conjunction with the new cotton factory at McAdenville, but returned permanently in 1886 to open G. W. Ragan Mercantile Co. in a brick building on the northwest corner of Main and Marietta. Ragan’s interests expanded with the city’s growth, and soon he joined other stalwarts in building and operating Gastonia’s first cotton factories, starting the First National Bank and developing real estate in the uptown business district (3).

The year 1881 saw two other men of vision and ambition make Gastonia home. From the Pisgah neighborhood came Thomas Warren Wilson to put his unique stamp on the city. By 1886 he and Thomas Lee Craig, son of Gastonia pioneer John H. Craig, established the soon-to-become large and famous Craig & Wilson Co. Purchasing the former Ragan Mercantile location on the northwest corner of Main and Marietta, they erected a four-story brick building topped by a distinctive tower that became the most recognized business landmark in early twentieth-century Gastonia. Craig & Wilson’s farm and livestock business dominated that field in Gaston County from the 1890s to the 1930s (4)

As the year 1883 rolled around, Gastonia welcomed another unusually enterprising citizen. Robert Calvin Grier Love, a native of the southern part of the county, came from successful merchandising ventures at Woodlawn and Kings Mountain. Through those ventures and independent cotton trading activities, he was successful enough by 1887 to promote and become the largest stockholder in Gastonia’s first cotton mill, known for years as the “Old Mill” (subject of a subsequent article). That same year, brothers Lawson Henderson Long and Vardry Edward Long came from northwestern Gaston County and formed Long Brothers on West Main Avenue. The new firm sold stoves, tin ware, pots, pans and sewing machines, and soon did a big business in tin roofs for homes, stores and industry.

A year after Love and the Long brothers, in 1884, two other brothers, Benjamin Theodore Morris and Samuel Malcolm Morris, both born and raised near Dallas, arrive in the fledgling town of a few hundred people to establish Morris Brothers, a retail clothing store. It was ideally situated on the southeast corner of Main and South, formerly occupied by A. M. Smyre. Following close behind them was William Lawrence Gallant, a native of the Steele Creek section of Mecklenburg County, who moved into Gastonia in 1885 to open a country store near the southeast corner of Main and Marietta. Then, too, there were John Theodore Spencer, a descendant of the Revolutionary Tory for whom Spencer Mountain is named, and Francis William Bradley, a son of one of the town’s original property owners, who became among Gastonia’s first building contractors. They built many of the first small wood-frame homes and store buildings that began appearing on newly laid off town lots as early as 1876.

With the growth of businesses like these, people came and the settlement grew. By 1880, four years after the permanent depot was established, 236 people were calling Gastonia home. By 1885 there were 485 residents, and 600 by 1887. A town had begun. Others also came, those with family names such as Anders, Boyd, Bradley, Carson, Curry, Davis, Falls, Fayssoux, Galloway, Glenn, Hanna, Hoffman, Huss, Jenkins, Lewis, Kennedy, Lineberger, Marshall, Nolen, Pearson, Reid, Robinson, Torrence, Warren. These were the pioneers. As 1890 approached, the village that had begun in Oliver Davis’ cornfield fourteen years earlier had grown to 1,033, far outstripping Dallas and all the other settlements in Gaston County (5). [INDEX]

Article 3:

Hotels Follow the Railroad

        Hotels began to appear in Gastonia as soon as visiting passengers needing a place to stay started arriving on trains, a natural occurrence at any railroad depot location that had a variety of stores and an active commercial trade. Traveling salesmen, or “drummers” as they were called in those days, came by the dozens to supply merchants throughout the countryside with all kinds of staple and novelty goods required for their trade, or to hawk them directly to neighboring farm families. Horses and buggies were secured for reasonable fees from livery stables close to the depot, which in the early days were operated by Squire A. R. Anders, J. R. “Dolph” Warren, W. H. Jenkins and Captain John Davis. Farmers coming in wagons to market their cotton or produce also found hotels convenient and hospitable places to stay while they conducted business, as did local citizens who were perhaps waiting on a house to be built or become available, or bachelors and others who did not want to bother themselves with maintaining a home or preparing meals.
      The Waddill House, owned by the town’s first mayor, R. E. Waddill, is thought to have been the first hotel in Gastonia, opening about 1875 or 1876, the year the depot was moved from Shiloh. It operated from a rather unimpressive two-story wooden building on the north side of the second block of West Main Avenue, where the Citizens National Bank was built nearly a half-century later (now occupied as a county office building). Records indicate that the old hotel was destroyed by fire on the evening of November 23, 1885.
      The affable John Laban “Labe” Falls, a native of the Pleasant Ridge/Crowders Creek section of the county, came to the struggling village in 1877, the year Gastonia was incorporated as a town. Soon he built a two-story wooden hotel on West Airline Avenue, immediately north of the depot and railroad tracks. The Falls House became the best known and most remembered of Gastonia’s early hotels. Business was so good that in 1885 the old inn of 20 rooms was replaced by an attractive three-story brick building with 25 larger rooms to accommodate its discriminating permanent and traveling clientele. It featured large public rooms and had a spacious two-story porch across the front of the building. On top of the hotel was an observation tower, which provided a pleasant vista of the little town and the surrounding countryside (1).

        For a generation or more, this hotel was the center of the social life of the town. In its comfortable lobby in the horse and buggy days of the Gay Nineties, groups of traveling salesmen and local businessmen gathered around a big iron stove or open fireplace in winter and sat in chairs on the spacious porches in summer, swapping stories, watching travelers arrive and depart from the depot and discussing the important news of the day. Christmas was an especially festive occasion at the Falls House. A large tree, 12 to 14 feet tall, stood in the lobby and was lighted with small candles and handmade decorations for all to see and enjoy. Sometimes the tree was a lovely American holly, I was told, but more often it was a local cedar, secured from the abundant forests in the vicinity.
      Many of Gastonia’s pioneer citizens lived at the Falls House. My grandfather, G. W. Ragan, his first wife and small daughter lived there for about two years during the mother’s illness. Others such as Police Chief I. N. Alexander, Judge W. H. Lewis, banker L. L. Jenkins and family, druggists J. E. Curry and J. H. Kennedy and businessmen J. L. Robinson, J. F. Johnson, W. D. Barringer, P. T. Heath and family, A. A. McLean and family and James Gallant also resided at the hotel at one time or another.
         Another of Gastonia’s earliest hotels was known as the Kee House, owned by C. J. Kee, its proprietor. Opening about the same time as the Falls House, it was a three-story brick building located on the north side of the first block of West Main Avenue, just east of the present seven-story building, formerly known as First National Bank, and later the Lawyers Building. On the second floor was a porch overlooking the hustle and bustle of Main Avenue, or what there was of it in the 1870s and 1880s. Later the Kee House became known as the Central Hotel, and Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Smyre were said to have run the popular lodging. Another lodging house at this time was the Merchants Hotel on West Main Avenue, which was established in 1886, with 16 rooms under the management of J. J. C. Anders. It was likely simply a name and ownership change of the former Merchants Hotel. Finally, in 1888 the Gastonia Hotel Co. was preparing to open for business in a nearby house under the management of D. F. Dixon, the former manager of the old Waddill House, which had been destroyed by fire several years earlier.
        After serving the needs of Gastonia and its citizens for almost 40 years, the aging Falls House was demolished in 1915. On its site rose the 4-story Armington Hotel, which many of our older citizens, including myself, remember with pleasant nostalgia. Colonel C. B. Armstrong and R. B. Babington, two of Gastonia’s leading businessmen in the first quarter of the twentieth century, built the Armington. Its moniker was derived from a combination of the promoters’ family names. Like its predecessor, its location near the train station offered weary travelers a convenient place to rest and dine (2).
      Patrons said there was probably no better hotel anywhere within a hundred miles. Everything about it was first class for its day. The Armington operated for 44 years, but was finally demolished in 1959 as the needs of travelers changed. Along with its predecessor, the Falls House, it served Gastonia for a total 84 years. The exciting era that was theirs has long since passed into history, but the memory of the two special hotels and the history surrounding them still lingers on. [INDEX]

Article 4: Gastonia's Medical Community

Gaston County’s distinguished medical profession had its beginning in the South Point community following the American Revolution, when Dr. WilliamMcLean returned from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1787 to set up a practice near his home on the lower South Fork River in the “Point” section. In 1820 his son, Dr. John Davidson McLean, joined him. Together, these two country doctors served the citizens of the county, near and far, for a period covering 93 years, until the son’s death in 1880. Gaston’s next professionally trained physician was Dr. Ephraim B. Holland, who set up a practice at the new county seat in Dallas about 1858. Then came Dr. William Junius Torrence, who opened a practice in the Crowders Creek section immediately after the War Between the States.

But it was to be in Gastonia, the fast-growing railroad and soon-to-become cotton manufacturing town, that most physicians would find the best opportunity and medicine made its greatest contributions. Dr. Robert Harris Adams, having completed the prescribed regimen of professional study at Louisville Medical College in Kentucky in 1875, became the town’s first doctor as well as its first druggist (1). A native of the Bethel section of adjacent York County, he came in the fall of 1876 and served the town and surrounding community until his death twelve years later. His office was said to be in a little brick building on West Airline Avenue that was also thought to serve as the town’s first post office, its first newspaper office and its first lawyers’ office.

The next physician to arrive in Gastonia was 1878 University of Maryland graduate Dr. Charles Edward Adams. Also a York County native, he came in 1883 to assist his cousin. When Dr. Robert Adams died unexpectedly in 1888, Dr. Charles Adams succeeded to his practice and dutifully served the community for a total of fifty years, becoming one of the town’s most outstanding citizens. The third man of medicine was Dr. William H. Wilson, a Gaston County native, who came in 1887 to join in associated with Dr. Charles Adams and share with the town his talents and high professional standards as both a physician and druggist. He remained until 1900, when he left for a practice of his own in Lenoir. Another early physician who was reported to be practicing in Gastonia in late 1886 and in 1887 was Dr. J. L. McKay, of whom little is known, except that he was a partner in the pioneer Gastonia drugstore of Torrence & McKay.
By 1890, Gastonia’s two resident physicians had become greatly overworked and needed assistance in caring for the townspeople and others who lived in rural areas. This need was filled in 1890 when Dr. James Marshall Sloan, a Mecklenburg County native recently graduated from Louisville Medical College, arrived in Gastonia at the age of twenty (2). He soon developed a sizable practice and began administering his skills to patients all over the county, traveling, as one did in those days, on horseback or doctor’s buggy. His work in surgery, some of it pioneering, continued until his death 36 years later. Six years after Sloan’s arrival, in 1896, Gastonia’s medical community was given another boost, when the much-respected Dr. Robert McDowell Reid, also from Mecklenburg County, began his practice. He continued until his death, 21 years later.

That same year, 1896, also saw another skilled physician, Dr. Frank G. Wilson, arrive from the medical school of the University of Maryland to set up his practice. He served faithfully until his death in 1920 at age 48. Outspoken and independent-minded Dr. Lucius Newton Glenn of the Crowders Creek section, who had begun his outstanding career at McAdenville in 1897, arrived in Gastonia in 1903. “Luch” Glenn became one of the region’s most outstanding surgeons, and, along with Drs. J. M. Sloan and H. M. Eddleman, would found Gastonia’s first hospital in 1908, known as City Hospital in the early days and later as Gaston Memorial. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, five pioneering physicians – Drs. Adams, Sloan, Reid, Wilson and Glenn, were serving Gastonia.

Gastonia’s explosive growth in the first decades of the twentieth century, brought about primarily by the expansion of the cotton textile industry and a general advancement of the “American Age”, resulted in the need for yet more trained doctors and a far greater sophistication of talent in all areas of medical service. Some of the city’s most prominent physicians and surgeons began their practices during that period.

Foremost among them was Dr. Henry Franklin Glenn, another highly regarded York County native and a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta. He arrived in 1900 and immediately commanded a large Gastonia patronage. Then, from nearby Bessemer City in 1908, came Dr. David Allen Garrison who, like Dr. Glenn, specialized in surgery. Along with Drs. H. F. Glenn and L. N. Patrick, they founded Gastonia’s second hospital, Gaston Sanitarium, later known as Garrison General, in 1917. Drs. Hall M. Eddleman and McTyeire G. Anders, familiar names in the early days, came to join the Gastonia medical profession around 1903 from earlier practices elsewhere. In 1909, hard-working York County native Dr. Lyle Neale Patrick followed them.

After World War I, another group of pioneering physicians found their way to booming Gastonia. The admired Dr. Roland Smith Clinton, born in the Bethel community of York County but reared in Gastonia, returned from the war in 1919 as a highly decorated major to set up his well-known practice. Coming at the same time to assist Dr. Henry Glenn was the inimitable Dr. James Luther Blair, another York County native. He succeeded to Dr. Glenn’s practice, became a partner and chief of staff at Garrison General Hospital and served faithfully from the 1920s until his death in 1951.

To provide a diversity of quality medical care, Gastonia’s first eye, ear, nose and throat specialist arrived in 1910. Dr. Thomas Crouse Quickle, born on a farm in Lincoln County, operated his clinic until his death in 1936, at which time his son, John Cephus Quickle, who had interned in New York, succeeded him. Henry M. Van Sleen, a native of Holland who came to Gastonia in 1910 to open a jewelry store, became the first optometrist in the city, opening another new area of specialization.

Others doctors came as the city grew during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s: Drs. James Meek Caldwell, William Henry Patrick, William Augustus Anthony, Charles E. Lyday, William E. Jones, W. Wallace McChesney, H. Russell McConnell, Robert C. Miller, William M. Roberts, Charles H. Pugh, J. S. Norman, Henry F. Glenn, Jr., G. W. Belk, O. Douglas Boyce, J. Lee Robinson, Jr., W. M. Patrick, H. M. Van Sleen, Jr., E. C. Pierce, A. V. Suggs, Charles A Glenn, Dorothy Norman Glenn, H. Keith Herrin, L. L. Anthony, Leslie M. Morris, Simeon Adams, and many more since.

Through the years, these men and women have made penetrating contributions to their professions. Gaston County has benefited as the profession advanced from country doctors to dedicated specialists in today’s highly technical and demanding health care industry. [INDEX]

Article 5:

Dentists Arrive as Gastonia Grows

       In Gastonia’s founding days, one who had a hurting molar or bicuspid would very likely have to wait several days or even weeks to see a qualified dentist. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, pioneer Gaston County citizens had to depend for their dental care upon the few dentists of Charlotte, Lincolnton and Yorkville who made periodic visits to Gastonia or other communities in the county to serve its people.
         Gaston County native Dr. William Henry Hoffman of Charlotte, who had opened a practice there soon after his service in the War Between the States, was one of the weekly visitors. He found his trips to Gastonia so profitable and his patients so friendly and appreciative that he moved to Gastonia and established a practice in 1882, becoming the town’s and the county’s first permanent dentist. He attended to the dental needs of the county, first from offices on East Airline Avenue and then on West Main Avenue, for the next thirty years. In 1886, four years after Dr. Hoffman’s arrival, University of Maryland graduate Dr. Enos Franklin Glenn, a native of the South Point/Union section of the county, also moved to Gastonia to hang out his shingle. He opened an office in the centrally-located town hall building on South Street for the practice of dentistry and dental surgery – Gastonia’s second – and played a leading role in Gastonia’s development until his death in 1913.
        Gastonia’s dental profession was given a much-needed boost in 1898 when its third dental practitioner, the friendly and talented Dr. Daniel Edward McConnell of McConnells in York County, arrived and opened a practice in the same worthy profession as Drs. Hoffman and Glenn (1). To his offices on the second floor of the Robinson Brothers shoe store building on West Main Avenue went several generations of Gaston families (2). The McConnells were to become highly regarded leaders in the professional and social life of the city for the next four decades.

The turn of the century ushered in an era when another of Gastonia’s best-known dentists, Dr. Pleasant Ralph Falls of the Pleasant Ridge community south of Gastonia, opened his highly patronized and long-remembered dental practice in 1899. At first he had as his partner Dr. Thomas A. Wilkins until 1907 and they, like Dr. McConnell, also operated on the second floor of the Robinson Brothers building. He and his family played important roles in the city’s history for the next three generations.

       During most of his career, Dr. Falls operated alone. However, in 1924, as business increased, young Dr. Alfred Cornelius Current, an Iredell County native, arrived to join him. By 1944, Falls retired and Current took over the practice, becoming one of the city’s most prominent and respected dentists. It was at that time that his office was moved to the seventh floor of the Commercial Building on West Main Avenue. In the late 1950s, his two sons, Dr. A. C. “Ace” Current and Dr. William A. Current, joined him. For 85 years, Gaston families have patronized the Current firm. Today, it is the oldest surviving dental practice in Gaston County, and is carried forward by the founder’s grandsons, Dr. Darrell C. Current and Dr. William A. “Will” Current, Jr. from modern offices on South New Hope Road.
        Gastonia saw an influx of new dentists and other medical specialists in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s to support its surging medical needs. Dr. S. Everett Moser, an expert in dental surgery, came in the mid-1920s to set up a practice. So respected was his surgical ability that he was selected chief of staff at Gaston Memorial Hospital near the end of his remarkable 50-year career. Also coming to Gastonia during this era were Drs. Cullen Hoffman and Ralph Ray, warmly remembered for their caring service and personal attention.
       In the years that followed, these pioneering Gastonia dentists were joined by Drs. J. E. Moser, H. D. Froneberger, M.E. Woody and others who established outstanding reputations in their field and established professionalism in the county’s largest city. Today, one only has to open the telephone book to the yellow pages to discover that there are simply dozens of family dentists and dental specialists practicing in every area of the city and county. Their work has been made complete and meaningful because of the pioneering work of those dedicated pioneer practitioners who came before and laid the foundation of professionalism – Hoffman, Glenn, McConnell, Falls, Current and Moser. [INDEX]

Article 6:

Drugstores Arrive With the First Doctors

In the early days, what we now call drugstores or pharmacies served three primary purposes. Firstly, they prepared and dispensed drugs, and were often owned and operated by doctors as a necessary and logical part of their practices.

           Secondly, they were places to receive advice and treatment for minor ills and purchase an array of patent medicines and elixirs for promoting good health, which would today be considered over-the-counter medicines. Both services are not unlike the services performed in the places we frequent today. Along these lines, druggists in the late 1890s and early 1900s, concocted their own tonics with claims for promoting health and energy. This is how Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola and a hundred imitations came about.
          Thirdly, drugstores became the social center of small towns, where men, women, children and young courting couples congregated to see their friends and have long, pleasant conversations. Importantly, it was a place to share the news of the day, discuss family and personal goings-on in the community over a sandwich, Coca-Cola, root beer, homemade milkshake, soda or banana split, served to them at booths and tables by friendly attendants in white aprons. This third purpose defines the differences between that generation and this one.
          Dr. Robert H. Adams, who came to Gastonia in 1876 as its first physician, also served as the town’s first druggist, concocting his own medicines for patients. Then came Dr. W. J. Torrence, a physician in the Crowders Creek community, who opened a Gastonia drugstore in the early-1880s. It was located on West Airline east of the Falls House under the name of Torrence & McKay, with Dr. J. L. McKay managing the day-to-day operations. Things really began to change, however, in 1886, when young Frost Torrence, the senior partner’s son, came from Crowders Creek to work in his father’s pharmacy. As Frost took over management and ownership, he implemented new ideas that created the “modern” drugstore as envisioned in the 1890s. Torrence was followed in 1887 by Dr. William H. Wilson, who conducted the town’s third drug business. They were each small establishments operated as a natural adjunct of the physicians’ primary practices.
          Curry & Adams Drug Store began in 1888, when it took over the business founded 12 years earlier by Dr. Robert Adams, who had died. Located on the north side of West Main Avenue, it was operated by James Edward Curry, a native of Canada who had found his way to Gastonia two years earlier as a clerk in the Adams store. Then, in 1890, friendly James Holland Kennedy bought Dr. Charles Adams’ interest in the business and changed the name to Curry & Kennedy. Son of a local Presbyterian minister, young Kennedy had come to Gastonia in 1886 at the age of 20 as a clerk for Torrence & McKay (1).

Kennedy and Adams Drug Stores (right) on the southeast corner of West Main Avenue and South Street around 1917. Notice that the First National Bank Building had not yet been built across the street. The Commercial Building now stands on the site of the Kennedy building. Postcard published by the Gazette Publishing Company.

Curry died in 1901, and the business was purchased and carried forward by J. Lean Adams, son of Gastonia’s first doctor and druggist. When it moved in 1904 to the new Adams building on the south side of West Main Avenue, its motto became “Across From the Post Office and Just as Reliable.” J. L. Adams Drug Store was operated until 1931 by the popular Lean Adams and his associates Ross Clinton and Norman Morrow, long fixtures behind the counter and throughout the community.
Meanwhile, Jim Kennedy opened his own firm on the southeast corner of Main Avenue and South Street in 1897 under the soon-to-become familiar name of J. H. Kennedy & Co. It remained on that popular corner until 1922, when Third National Bank of Gastonia built its 7-story headquarters on the site and Kennedy changed locations (2).

When Frost Torrence relocated his drugstore to the southwest corner of Main and South in the early 1890s, it became the most popular place in the city. In 1911, he took over the Abernethy-Shields drugstore business, a nearby competitor. Not only was his drug emporium “the” smart place to be seen, on the second floor there was the Opera House, run by Charlie Cavis, to provide artistic diversions for the delighted citizens of Gastonia and the surrounding countryside. The productions were not grand opera in the classical sense, but popular stage performances by stock companies, musical programs, specialty acts, minstrel shows and lyceum courses.

Jim Kennedy’s business continued to prosper. Soon, the unforgettable Edward Clarence Adams, a York County native, joined the firm in 1906 as the head pharmacist, and by 1913 had been admitted to the firm as a junior partner. Six years later, he and Meek Barnett each became one-third owners. With William Foil Michael as the pharmacist, the firm moved to the immediate east of competitor Frost Torrence & Co., in the Love building, in 1922. Ed Adams purchased the business in 1928 and changed the name to Kennedy’s, the most remembered name in Gastonia’s drugstore trade. It remained at its West Main location in the uptown business district for the next 60 years, until the landmark finally closed its doors in the 1980s, an end to a colorful era.
Frost Torrence & Co. operated until 1930, when its business was purchased by and combined with Kennedy’s. It did a thriving ice cream business in connection with its pharmacy and delivered to the city’s families, as did most drugstores of that day. Sweetland, originally a confectionary shop owned and operated by the Trakas family, soon became a full-fledged drugstore. It was later taken over by Smith Cut Rate Pharmacy in the late 1950s, and continues in business today at its original location, 121 West Main Avenue, the sole surviving legacy of a by-gone era.

There were other family-owned drugstores that were part of this scene. Norman Morrow, for instance, had Morrow’s Drug Store. Paul G. Caldwell purchased the Loray Drug Store on West Franklin Avenue in 1919 and in the early 1920s formed the popular Caldwell’s Drug Store. This business was subsequently purchased by the Brown family, and it operated until recently at its familiar location at 207 S. Chestnut Street. Fred Moss, of course, had Moss Drugs, which continued until the 1990s under the management of his family; and there was Akers Pharmacy, started in the late 1950s in Akers Shopping Center. That business later moved to East Garrison Boulevard.

Drugstores today are mostly large national chains – Walgreen, Revco, Rite-Aid, Wall-Mart, Bi-Lo – extremely efficient, but without the ambience and personalized service of the old-time drugstores we nostalgically remember from the days of our youth, friendly, warm places like Kennedy’s, Torrence’s, Adams’ and Sweetland. [INDEX]

Article 7:

Cotton Mills and the New South Vision

Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Company

The preeminent event in the transformation of Gastonia into a city of consequence was the arrival and grass-roots development of the cotton textile industry in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Henry Grady’s famous proclamation of a “New South” in 1886 and Daniel Tompkins’ promotion of the “Cotton Mill Campaign” in the Carolinas heralded a new era of hope in the war-torn and impoverished agricultural states of the former Confederacy.

Newspaper editors, political leaders and enlightened citizens heeded the call of industry. Nowhere was that vision to become more evident than in Gaston County, and nowhere in Gaston County was it more evident than in the little town of Gastonia, with two major rail connections and a small but ambitious citizenry. A city was being built in a former cornfield and pine thicket on the strength of the industrial revolution, as men who nearly died defending the Old South committed the remainder of their lives to building a New South.

One of the truly significant events in Gastonia’s history occurred in the closing days of 1887, when nine of its enterprising citizens – four merchants, a banker, two farmers, a physician and a cotton-mill superintendent – put up $75,000 and chartered a corporation for the building of the town’s first cotton factory. On more than one occasion, this group of visionary men had discussed the future of the struggling town of nearly 600 people and what action they might take to lift the region from the economic plight of a terrible war and debilitating reconstruction.

Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Co., the name chosen by its founders, was incorporated December 12, 1887. Its prime movers were R. C. G. Love, L. L. Jenkins, J. D. Moore, J. H. Craig, G. A. Gray, G. W. Ragan, Dr. R. H. Adams, W. L. Robinson and Thomas Wilson. Mr. Love, the largest shareholder and principal promoter, became president; Captain Moore, who drew up the charter, secretary and treasurer; and George. Gray, the only one of the group with technical experience in manufacturing, supervising engineer and plant superintendent.

Seven mills already operated in Gaston County, and they were all located on traditional riverbanks to take advantage of the cheap but unreliable water flow. After a study of site options, it became the unanimous opinion of the directors that the proposed mill should be located in Gastonia, which had no rivers. Therefore, it was to be a steam-powered plant, the first in the county. This technological advancement assured that in the future most new mills in Gaston County would no longer be built along rivers or streams, but at inland locations with rail connections like Gastonia, Belmont, Lowell, Stanley, Dallas, Bessemer City and Kings Mountain. Little did the “Gastonia Nine” know what far-reaching effects their action would have on the future of their city and the entire region.

Work started right away, and a one-story brick factory incorporating a coal and cordwood fired steam-powered system for operating its 3,044 spindles and auxiliary equipment was built on a 40-acre tract of land immediately north of the intersection of the two rail lines. The next challenge was to find and train workers to operate the mill. Village houses were built near the mill to accommodate the workers, called “hands” in the early days, recruited from surrounding farms, and a company store was built to supply the families’ basic needs. Workers came, and here they began learning a new means of making a living and a new way of life.

On October 10, 1888, the first cotton yarn ever produced in Gastonia was sent to the Atlanta & Charlotte Air Line depot for shipment north to textile factors and the great weave mills located there. Never before had a product made in Gastonia been sent so far to untested markets. The company became a success, and this led to expansion, increased capital and another adjacent one-story mill by 1892. By 1895 there were 12,000 spindles and 140 looms in operation, tended by 250 workers who lived in 75 comfortable and affordable village homes. Success was contagious, and enterprising leaders began to devise plans for new and expanded opportunities that would economically benefit the town

Three particularly noteworthy partners of Gastonia’s first mill – George Alexander Gray, James Daniel Moore and George Washington Ragan – saw these opportunities and acted upon them. They were responsible, both individually and jointly, for promoting and operating the next dozen mills in Gastonia and providing employment to thousands. They were Gastonia’s first textile manufacturers, the 19th century pioneers. To them and their associates are due much of the credit for bringing the textile industry to the city and making it the “Combed Yarn Center of America” by 1923.

From the Old Mill, as it became affectionaty known by employees and townspeople alike, went supervisors and trained workers who had learned their first lessons under the watchful eye of Superintendent Gray. They included such talented men as John R. Withers, J. Oscar White and Charles M. Dunn, who became the most influential superintendents and operating men in the early industry. Some say the workers held them in almost god-like awe; and they certainly obeyed their strict rules of conduct. This method of staffing the newer mills from the trained workforce of the older ones was a major reason the mills at Gastonia prospered and why there were so many of them. [INDEX]

Article 8:

COTTON MILLS AND THE NEW SOUTH VISION

Trenton Cotton Mills

          Destiny intervened to place Gastonia on a path that only a few years earlier had been but the hopeful dream of its earliest advocates. Five years after Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Co., in the closing days of 1892, Gastonia’s spirits soared, its pride swelled and land values rose accordingly when it learned that another cotton mill was in the process of organizing. George Washington Ragan (1), one of the founding partners of the Old Mill, proposed to a group of public-spirited entrepreneurs a yarn spinning enterprise he planned to build on a 23-acre tract of land on Main Avenue, several blocks west of uptown (3).
       As had the promoters of the Gastonia’s first mill, Ragan sought the technical assistance of George Gray (2), a man he had first known in McAdenville in the early 1880s when Ragan ran the company store and Gray superintended the factory, and most recently through their association at the Old Mill. Ragan provided the management skills gained from nineteen years’ solid experience in merchandising and operating country stores. Gray brought 30 years of training in cotton manufacturing, which began from necessity as a sweeper boy at age ten and advanced subsequently to the superintendency of several important mills.
     The partnership between a businessman with organizational, buying and selling experience and a production man with manufacturing experience became the general rule. This pattern created a successful combination that was to repeat itself over and over in the founding of the early mills in Gastonia and Gaston County as evidenced by the following examples: Ragan and Gray at the Trenton; Love and Gray at the Gastonia; Moore and White at the Modena; Hutchison and Dewstoe at the Nims; Stowe and Lineberger at the Chronicle; Armstrong and Dunn at the Clara; Groves and Withers at the Flint, to mention the most notable examples. A spirit of cooperation was set early by these pioneers and was directly responsible for Gaston County’s rapid rise as the manufacturing center of North Carolina.
          Gastonia’s second mill proceeded to organize as Trenton Cotton Mills (a tribute to General George Washington’s first major victory in the Revolution at Trenton, New Jersey in 1776) on February 21, 1893 with a capital stock of $62,400. With money so difficult to raise in the South during that economically deprived era, the promoters eagerly talked with anyone who had a thousand or two dollars to invest in this new type of venture. Industry was foreign to people who had spend their entire lives in agriculture, and traditions had to be overcome. In many respects, the Trenton became a community effort, and the whole town was soon abuzz with excitement and curiosity over its prospects.

Ragan as treasurer and general manager and Gray as superintendent commenced to build the factory, contract for the machinery, construct village housing and secure the necessary workers. The company, it was decided, would specialize in yarns of a higher quality than any that were currently being made in the South. It was going to compete head on with the best mills in New England and carve out a niche for Southern-made manufactured goods. Experienced Northern machinery men and New England manufacturers expressed doubts for its success because of the South’s generally unsuitable climate, scarcity of trained labor, lack of qualified supervisors and other less obvious reasons. The newer equipment and stubborn determination of Trenton’s management, however, overcame this skepticism, and the result was a quality yarn that was well received in nationally competitive markets. Not only was the Trenton a pioneer in fine cotton spinning in the South, but also the enterprise was a financial success and the forerunner of many similar mills in the region. The plant soon doubled its size from a capacity of 3,072 spindles to 6,500 by 1899 and then to 12,500; and it was soon supplying trained supervisors and workers to other mills. The historic buildings survive today at 612 West Main Avenue (4) (5), as witness to a grand and colorful era of industrial expansion and the beginning of a North Carolina city that became an admired symbol of New South progress.

No sooner had news of the Trenton penetrated through the community than Gastonians learned there was to be yet another fine new factory that would provide a hundred more jobs, payrolls and demand for services of all types. It would be called Modena Cotton Mills and would be located one mile east of town along the Southern Railway in the area known as Shiloh, near where the first Gastonia railroad station had been established twenty years earlier. Captain James Daniel Moore (6), like Gray and Ragan one of the founding partners of the Old Mill, was its principal promoter. He was to have as his superintendent J. Oscar White, a valued supervisor trained at the Old Mill.

Incorporated May 1, 1893, Gastonia’s third mill started business with $75,000 in hard-to-obtain capital and a two-story plant containing 3,100 spindles and 135 looms (7). Business was so good and management so experienced that it was not long until Modena was able to build another mill (8), thereby doubling and then tripling its capacity for the purpose of manufacturing the South’s staple into textiles.

Gastonia’s passage forward was only a beginning. The Cotton Mill Movement was catching on like a prairie wildfire and providing ordinary people a means of making a respectable and honest living, and becoming a decided preference to life on the farm. As new mills were built, it became more difficult to recruit qualified workers to tend the machinery. Whereas workers could be found locally in the beginning years, it soon became necessary for mill companies to recruit in other counties surrounding Gaston, and then into other states. Thus, mill villages became a necessary part of attracting a stable and contented workforce.

Several of Modena’s factory buildings can be seen today on East Long Avenue. If one can visualize the era with the hustle and bustle of hundreds of workers coming and going day and night, lights glowing in the windows, the constant sound of whirring spindles, smoke billowing from huge smokestacks and whistles and bells sounding time and shift changes at regular intervals, we can then, perhaps, begin to understand the excitement and magnitude of the cotton mill experience.

In 1896, with a spirit of progress and expectation continuing in the air, George Gray in partnership with a wealthy young Gastonia merchant, John F. Love, son of the Old Mill’s founder, led a group of investors in building the Avon Mills, Gastonia’s fourth (9). The up-and-coming city of 2,260 people was talking of little else but cotton manufacturing and the economic benefits that would come with it. This historic building now houses the old Avon Bonded Warehouse on East Franklin Boulevard, and has been a landmark in that section of the city for the past 112 years.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, still another new cotton yarn spinning mill of 10,000 spindles began to rise east of town. Ozark Mills (10), Gastonia’s fifth, was the work of Rufus Pinkney Rankin, a successful country merchant who had come from nearby Lowell in 1899. These five pioneer mills had broken the ice and charted the way, and the shape of Gastonia’s future began to emerge more clearly. What was to come afterward, however, would far exceed the expectations of this hopeful beginning. [INDEX]

TO ARTICLE 9

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GASTONIA HISTORY

Dentists Arrive as Gastonia Grows

Cotton Mills and the New South Vision