Pin Hook Part 2: What Is Lost

A “pinhooker” is someone who buys something cheap for purposes of repackaging and reselling at a higher price. Look the word up online and most of references you’ll find relate to thoroughbred horses, but the term was also used historically for those who bought tobacco that went unsold at auction, repackaged it, and managed to turn a small profit reselling it. There’s a lot of speculation about the origin of the word, and suggestions that it might have been derived from a place name.

Pinhookers were the rag-and-bone men of the tobacco industry, so naturally it was a profession that drew the most marginal elements of society, as Pin Hook, the place in Old West Durham, reportedly exemplified, with its population of alcoholics, gamblers, and prostitutes. So, did the place take its name from the profession, or vice versa? I’m confident it was the vice versa, actually, since the first tobacco auction in Durham took place in 1873, and I’ve seen a reference to Pin Hook, by name, in print, with a date in 1871, and that was in a newspaper article looking back nostalgically on Pin Hook. Specifically, the Hillsborough Recorder was fondly recalling a race between a man and a woman, both naked, for the prize of a quart of liquor.

“Pin Hook,” the place, probably took its name from the bend in the railroad that marks the spot. The folks who inhabited this demimonde, making some money repackaging low-grade tobacco leaf, then gave their place name to the profession, which would suggest that the horse traders of today, still known as pinhookers, owe their occupational appellation to the bend in the tracks near what is now Erwin Square.

After work yesterday, I left my bike parked at Erwin Square and hiked across the street to explore the narrow greensward between the tracks and the Durham Freeway. I found little sign of past habitation, but I have posted a few pictures below:


Here’s a piece of wood from some past structure. As with every old artifact I saw here, I could imagine it dated from Pin Hook, but more likely it’s left from the later mill village that sprang up across from Erwin Mill in the early 20th century.


A length of iron pipe emerges from the ground, just outside the Durham Freeway fence.


Mysterious iron.


This was the most evocative find: an old, brick-lined well, since Pin Hook famously had a well, frequented by travelers on the old Raleigh-Hillsborough Road.


Unlike most narrow stands of woods in the midst of development, this one was dominated by mature hardwoods, not scrawny pines. There was plenty of poison ivy, however, and I had to bathe in Tecnu when I got home.


Looking across to Erwin Square, where I work. 150 years ago, this view would have been the heart of Pin Hook.


On a final note, last weekend Jen and I walked from home to The Pin Hook, the latterday downtown Durham bar, to see John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and opening act Midtown Dickens. In between was a band we’d never heard of, Mount Moriah, which is fronted by the woman who runs the bar (and also co-owns the record label whose benefit the event was). Now, I’m enough of a (nascent) Durham history geek to be bothered by the fact that The Pin Hook is located not in Old West Durham, where it should be, but downtown, and that it has a pointless “The” in its name. That said, I don’t want to romanticize what was no doubt a very unromantic past, and I’m sure I had a much finer time listening to John Darnielle pour out his heart with the articulate passion of a poet, and all the added power of his fine singing voice and acoustic guitar, then I would have had drinking grog with antebellum Old Southerners in some ramshackle roadhouse.

Still, I wish I could see that old place, and I keep trying to imagine it better than information allows.

Pin Hook Part 1: What Remains

As I’ve made clear by now, I live in Morehead Hill, in the house that was the long-time home of the “Urban Hiker” himself, Herald Sun columnist and former Esquire editor Bob Sherrill. More about that later. I’ve said less about where I work, and where I work is – or was – Pin Hook. At least, the parking lot of my building, Erwin Square, was part of it, while most was across the tracks in what is now a narrow woods between the railroad tracks and the Durham Freeway.

Pin Hook is part of Durham’s salacious reputation, perhaps the most important part for Durham history geeks (a surprisingly large group). It is like the pepper used in some Thai cooking, the one you’re not supposed to eat, but that adds so much to the spicy flavor. Before the railroad track, it was there, on maps, under that name: Pin Hook. A stop along the Raleigh-Hillsborough road where you could tie up your horse, get a slice of watermelon, some gin, and a hooker. I mean to go exploring this site soon, in those woods across the tracks from my office, but today I went to look for what remains, also across the tracks, but further west: Cedar Hill Cemetery, aka Erwin Mills Cemetery. You see, Erwin Mills, the cotton factory, was what came along to replace Pin Hook, and Cedar Hill was the cemetery the mill owners established for their workers, in the best spirit of corporate paternalism. (Those owners, by the way, were Benjamin Duke and William Erwin.)

So, today I went exploring down a largely forgotten stretch of Pettigrew St., which re-emerges in West Durham as a gravel path through the woods along the railroad track, and I found this old cemetery. Below are some pictures I took:

Back in 2000, a group of descendents and Old West Durhamites came and fixed up a part of this cemetery. You’ll find a cleared section that still reflects their work, but there’s much more to be found still hidden in the woods.

The Conways had several infant graves here.

Early death was apparently commonplace in Erwin Mills.

There were two graves like this, with rough white marble and brass plates. I want to come back and do some rubbings.

Other graves were more readable, such as this one for Ida Regan.

A number of the stones had fallen.

Pettigrew St. as old dirt road, with the tracks and lumberyard beyond. This is the view to the north of the cemetery.

I wish this sign was obeyed by all visitors. In any case, it’s a nicer message than the one in the well-tended New Bethel Memorial Gardens just across a fence to the east: “No Trespassing.”

P.S. Fellow geocachers, though I shouldn't need to say it: Dibs.

Day 25: Train of Thought

So, my daughter called me yesterday from Amtrak, to say she was crossing Ninth Street, heading east. A moment later, I heard the train, passing a few blocks north of our house, heading in to Durham Station. I hear the trains all the time, living in Morehead Hill, working at Erwin Square, biking in between. I heard them a lot in Cary, too, living near tracks, but they mean more here. Durham, after all, is a child of the railroad. Many cities resulted in railhoad stations, but here it was the railroad station that resulted in the city.

Back when there was no Durham, just Durham's Station, General William Tecumsah Sherman got off the train here, following a short ride from Raleigh. He was headed to meet General Joseph Eggleston Johnston, who had recently moved his command from Greensboro to Hillsborough to be closer to his worthy apponent. They each got on horseback - Sherman at Durham's Station, Johnston in Hillsborough, and met near a farm belonging to James and Nancy Bennitt, the so-called Bennett Place where they ultimately negotiated the surrender of Johnston's Confederate army. Meanwhile, a mix of Northern and Southern troops mingled in the neutral zone around the train station, looting J.R. Green's tobacco warehouse nearby. Green thought he was ruined, until the post-war orders started coming in. He was quick to think about branding (things really weren't so different then), borrowed his identity from a mustard jar, and the rest is history. The Bull City was born.

Investors in the state-sponsored NC Railroad contributed labor to its construction and earned shares of ownership in exchange. Of course, it wasn't generally their own labor. Paul Cameron of Stagville Plantation, for instance, put his slaves to work on the line. Here, the law was on his side. During the war, however, his slaves were conscripted for the construction of fortifications at Wilmington, and he ultimately lost them all, as Jean Anderson documents in her history of Durham County. What combination of liberation, casualty, and disease may have been involved is not stated in her book, which simply concludes the account by noting it was a loss Mr. Cameron calculated at $443,000.

It strikes me that if you want to see who benefits most from any given social order, simply check to see who has most of the benefits. One can only hope that they also pay most of the costs. The war, however, was an unsettled time, when winners and losers changed places. Washington Duke, though a veteran of the Confederate Navy who ended the Civil War as a POW, became a Republican thereafter. Maybe this was a poor choice, given the impending end of Reconstruction and the ultimate busting of his tobacco trust at Republican hands, but he did all right.

We were at a Durham Bull's game again tonight (another loss - hard to believe they're #1 in the division, based on what I've seen thus far). This time we drove the half mile or so from home, and as we walked across the American Tobacco complex to our car, after the fireworks, past the milling urban crowd, Tyler's Tap Room, Zen Sushi, Cuban Revolution, and so forth, it struck me: You're not even allowed to smoke here now. This cultural carpetbagger felt a little thrill of victory at that.

Day 16: Vickers Woods

My daily commute on South Buchanan takes me past one of the Pauli Murray murals, with quotes from Duke’s Karla Holloway, among others, paying tribute to the civil rights activist Episcopal priest who grew up in Durham. I can see another of her murals while I’m waiting to cross Chapel Hill Street, one block west, on the wall of the erstwhile Durham Co-op. You can see some of these murals and learn more about the Reverend Murray on the Pauli Murray Project website.

Murray wrote about growing up in Durham in the early 20th century in her book Proud Shoes. She spent at least some of her childhood on the edge of Morehead Hill, in an area then called “the Bottoms,” where the land bottomed out along what is now known as Carroll Street (then Cameron and Shaw Streets). I live more-or-less in the Bottoms, myself, on the last block before Carroll, though Cobb Street didn’t extend that far yet (the earliest map I’ve seen with my block of Cobb dates from 1925).

Nonetheless, she writes about this part of the neighborhood in her book. She called it “Vickers Woods,” a name broadly applied to the undeveloped parts of Morehead Hill owned by William Gaston Vickers. By her time, this would have been a pretty small area, since Morehead Hill was mostly developed and Forest Hills had also come along, just a few blocks below. In any event, she describes an incident that occurred in Vickers Woods in 1917. She and some other children entered the woods below her friend’s house on Morehead Avenue, at the point “where Arnette Avenue ended abruptly in a dump heap.” Pursuing the sound of a child crying, they found where another boy had been shot and killed, apparently by a white man who thought the two boys were stealing watermelons from his patch (the boys, like Pauli Murray herself, were black). I say “apparently” because the crime was never investigated, such being the times.

She called the area from Arnette east “Swelltown Heights,” another common moniker of the time. This was the wealthy, white area. She mentions a color line that appears to have run just west of Arnette, and still does, to some extent. Twenty years later (in 1937), the North Carolina Department of Public Works published a map delineating the “White” and “Negro” sections of Durham, and it holds up surprisingly well to this day, even the bit about how Carroll south of Cobb is white, while north is black. In fairness, these lines are no longer near so firm as they must have been back then. There has been progress, after all.

Day 12: Bull Durham

So we walked to a Bulls game tonight, my family and I. The fireworks are loud enough at home to scare the cats; we might as well see them up close. Jen got our tickets from a season ticket holder on the Old West Durham listserv, which thus far has proven way cooler than the Morehead Hill listserv, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. Anyway, we wound up down in front in right field, able to put our beers right atop the Bulls' dugout.

Our bullpen was off to the right, while the visiting bullpen was way off in left field, below the "Hit Bull, Win Steak Bull." I've always heard, during my twenty-something years in the Triangle, that our bullpens were the origin of the word. Makes sense, though it's not quite the case. Assuming you buy the theory that the old Bull Durham ads were responsible for the term, which seems probable, they weren't just used here in Durham; they were found along the outfield walls in ballparks all across the USA in the early 20th century. But, yes, they did originate in Durham, it being Bull Durham Tobacco. But where exactly did that come from?

The American Tobacco Company had something close to a monopoly on tobacco by the first decade of the last century, a monopoly eventually broken up under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Company head James Duke was hell bent on acquiring his competitors, and one of them was Liggett & Myers. Now, Liggett & Myers got Bull Durham Tobacco when they bought out W.T. Blackwell & Company, which acquired the brand from J.R. Green, who got the idea for the brand from his friend James Whitted, who was inspired by a jar of Colman's Mustard, which has a bull's head for a logo (still does, to this day). It's called English mustard now, but it was sometimes known as Durham mustard, since the style of mustard was invented by a woman in Durham, England. The bull logo was presumably a reference to John Bull, a symbol of Britain at the height of its popularity in the mid-19th century, when Colman's adopted it. John Bull's surname, in turn, is probably a reference to the derogatory use of the phrase "les rosbifs" by the French to refer to the British. So, that is the chain of associations that led to me and 10,000 other people screaming, "Let's go Bulls!" time and again tonight (to no effect, alas), while a man in a Bull costume danced in front of me on the dugout.

Day 10: Durham Palimpsest

On the ride in today, I just beat the morning Amtrak. I wasn't playing chicken with the train, exactly, but I could hear it coming, pulling out of Durham's lovely new station at West Village, so I pushed harder on the pedals. The crossing lights came on just as I was riding over the rails, and this gave me an inordinate sense of accomplishment.

Most of my short commute is on South Buchanan Blvd. This little stretch between Chapel Hill Street and Main is a cross section of the ridge line that runs between Raleigh and Hillsborough, a geologic formation that attracted the North Carolina Railroad back in the 1840s, when the necessities of wood-burning steam engines forced them to consider a midway stop in this vicinity. There was no Durham then. Durham, they say, is the young city of the Triangle: younger than Chapel Hill or even Raleigh, and nothing compared to Hillsborough. So the city's story begins with the tale of two men, one good, one bad, like the story of The Island on "Lost." In this case, we have William Pratt, the tavern keeper whose "grog shop" acquired a reputation as a place where "evil-disposed persons of evil name and fame and conversation... come together," and Bartlett Durham, the country doctor who donated the land for the railroad depot, which was then given his name, an appellation later applied to the new town that sprang up around it (and I always figured we were named for Durham, England).

As the tale is usually told, Pratt held out too long for too much money, and so lost the deal, though G K of the "Endangered Durham" blog (recommended) suggests naming rights mattered little to him, compared to what he was eventually able to sell his land for, as property values rose after Durham Station opened in the early 1850s. The City of Durham wasn't actually established as such until 1869, with the County to follow in 1881 (torn from the right shoulder of Orange).

But of course our history does not begin with incorporation, or the railroad. Pratt and Durham were already there, after all, and the ill-famed region was known as Prattsburg before it became Durham. Before that it was Dilliardsville, for William Dilliard, from whom Pratt bought his land. Dilliard ran a post office along the Raleigh-to-Hillsborough Road, which he started after buying the land from one Absalom Alston. And who before Absalom? Eventually the Indians, like Eno Will, whom we encounter twice in history: first as a vigorous native guide in John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina (1701), then as an aging alcoholic in William Byrd's Journey to the Land of Eden (1733). So it goes.

It seems Durham has always had a taint to it, from Eno Will, to William Pratt, to, well, today: always the poor corner of the Triangle. Way back when Julian Carr started his cotton mill here (1884), the Durham Morning Sun rejoiced, "In place of this dark hole of iniquity and infamy, there will be a busy, bustling manufacturing community." But then, of course, manufacturing declined, both textiles and tobacco, and today all the mills and cigarette factories are gone from Durham. I'm often reminded of my native Cleveland here, as I am in no other part of the Triangle.

On the way home tonight, near the corner of CHS and S. Buchanan, I saw an historical marker for Julian S. Carr (the "S" stands for Shakespeare, by the way). According to this marker, which is located on the berm by the accounting firm in the converted church, Julian's grave lies "1/4 mi. S." This places it right in my neighborhood. But where? I paid close attention as I biked, especially when I figured I was "1/4 mi. S." of the marker, but I saw only the houses lining Yancey Street. So, there's a mystery to be solved, another day.

Day 8: Attention

Trumpet flowers are in bloom - blood orange flutes jutting out up and down the many trees they've entwined. Silk trees are blooming, too, and crepe myrtles. Non-natives call attention to themselves: invasives and, in the case of the myrtles, ornamentals. Back when I first bike commuted, along the greenways of North Raleigh, I focused on the native species, and took notes: when the bluets bloomed (it's now too late for them), and when the tickseed sunflower (too soon). Here, in this urban setting, while the big trees are native, the understory and and herbaceous flora are dominated by alien species. I hope to plant a native garden behind my house, and I encourage my neighbors to do likewise.

Certain native fauna, on the other hand, have drawn our attention. We spied a second fox this weekend, smaller than the first fox we saw. This was in the adjacent neighborhood of Lakewood, but still less than half a mile from home. Jen, my fiancee, pointed out that the vacant Army Reserve base that sits along the Morehead Hill - Lakewood border provides potential den sites, as does the wooded border of the creek below Carroll Street. So, even if the abandoned house across the street is re-occupied (and Durham Water & Sewer was up to something there yesterday), our local vulpine population may stand a chance, as might our tomatoes, threatened as they are by rabbits.

Attention must be paid to see the Wheel of the Year enacted in an urban setting, to discover the geography and culture of place, to know one's home. I bike in the morning half asleep; I come home in the evening anxious to get out of the heat. I need to remember to look. I need to read the history of Durham. I need to remove the English ivy from a hackberry tree, and the elm branch that threatens my roof. I should have noticed the bag of water bottles I left on our kitchen floor from when we were still painting, which now, having leaked, created a mold spot on our hardwoods that we must clean, and sand, and refinish.

Biking does help one pay attention. Of course there's the whole being-out-in-the-elements aspect, but even more important, perhaps, is the rise in energy, the waking up that comes along the way. I may start out half asleep, but by the time I reach the gym that's down to about a quarter, and if I have the time to work out before going to work, then I arrive, as I did today, fully awake.

And that seems to last all day.