Finding Aid to the Hugh MacRae Carolina Trucking Development Company Photograph Collection, PHC.150

[Identification of item], PhC.150, Hugh MacRae Carolina Trucking Development Company Photograph Collection, State Archives of North Carolina; Raleigh, NC.

Black and white photographs of people, buildings, homes, activities, events, and other scenes pertaining to the various farming colonies founded by Hugh MacRae and the Carolina Trucking Development Company of Wilmington, NC, c.1909. Communities depicted include St. Helena, Castle Hayne, Artesia, and New Berlin, as well as East Wilmington, Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach (Seashore Hotel). Collection also includes two letters, a crop planting chart, and one map. Photographs were originally in a looseleaf notebook and printed - sometimes two to a page - on thick 8 1/2"x1l" cardboard.

Collection is organized and described according to numbers handwritten on the backs of the original photographs by unknown persons, perhaps by the compiler of the original album. Some numbers have been skipped or omitted for unknown reasons, which is why the call numbers, which appear in numerical order in this finding aid, are not strictly consecutive; there are noticably some numbers missing. Missing numbers do not represent missing images; those numbers skipped were simply never used. We chose to maintain the original numbering in case past references to these numbers come to light in the future.

Between 1905 and 1912, six planned farm colonies were developed in southeastern North Carolina. The dream of Wilmington utilities magnate Hugh MacRae, the colonies were visualized as an experiment in "human engineering" to create a "back to the land" movement as a remedy to the economic ills of the rural South. The six communities (Castle Haynes, Marathon, St. Helena, Van Eeden, New Berlin and Artesia) were anomalies in the rural South in that they were miniature "melting pots" for the flood of European immigrants who flocked to America in the early 1900s.

Hugh MacRae (1865-1951) was a businessman and real estate developer. He helped shape Wilmington, NC, and New Hanover and surrounding counties for decades. He contributed to the growth of Wrightsville Beach and many of Wilmington's suburbs, encouraged immigration and promoted farm colonies across much of the region.

The son of Wilmington mill owner Donald MacRae and Julia Norton MacRae, he was born on March 30, 1865, at Carbonton, the family's "up-country" estate in Chatham County, N.C., where his mother had taken refuge at the end of the Civil War. He was the great-great-grandson of Scottish immigrants, and his family had been prominent in Southeastern North Carolina for generations.
Hugh MacRae was educated at the Bingham School in Asheville and, at the age of 16, entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mining engineering. After graduating in 1885, he headed for the North Carolina mountains, where for many years he was engaged in mining mica, feldspar and kaolin near Spruce Pine.
Before long, though, MacRae began to see possibilities above ground. With help from his father, he purchased some 15,570 acres of land in Avery County - including parts of Grandfather Mountain, Sugar Mountain and Flattop Mountain - between 1885 and 1889.
In 1889, he founded the Linville Improvement Co. to develop a golf course (the first in Western North Carolina) and resort community at Linville. He also built roads and developed stagecoach lines so vacationers could reach his property.
After his father's death in 1892, MacRae returned to Wilmington. In 1895, became president of his father's firm, the Wilmington Cotton Mills Co.

MacRae was highly active in the Wilmington violence of Nov. 10, 1898. He is thought to have been one of the leaders of the "Secret Nine," a group of white business leaders who plotted the overthrow of Wilmington's Republican-led city government, which had been elected in 1896. Members of the Nine met at MacRae's house and apparently coordinated local efforts in the Democratic Party's white supremacist campaign during the election of 1898. MacRae served on a committee which reviewed and produced the final draft of a "White Declaration of Independence," and he was named to a "Committe of 25" which would "direct the execution" of its provisions. The notorious and deadly 'Wilmington Race Riot' was a direct result of these actions, and on Nov. 16, 1898, MacRae was selected by the new white town board as one of the replacement aldermen from Wilmington's Third Ward.

In 1900 he became head of the Wilmington Gas Light Co., which also had an interest in an electric trolley. He gradually merged his lines with the Wilmington Street Railway Co. and the Seacoast Railway, forming the Consolidated Railway and Power Co. To ensure electric power, he bought the Rockingham Power Co., which had access to hydroelectric power on the Pee Dee River. In 1907, Consolidated Railway and Power became the Tidewater (or Tide Water) Power Co., with MacRae as president, a position he would hold until 1929. (Tidewater Power would merge in 1952 with Carolina Power & Light, a forerunner of Progress Energy.)

In 1902, he founded Hugh MacRae & Co., which at one time owned 70,000 acres in New Hanover, Pender and Columbus counties. With funding from Hugh MacRae Banking Co., he would follow the same strategy he had in the mountains: buying land, developing it, then providing customers with transportation to it.
Tidewater Power and its electric trolley line - the famed orange "beach cars" - became the engine for MacRae's development of properties at Wrightsville Beach and in the Winter Park, Audubon and Oleander communities along the way. His company built the great Wrightsville Beach pavilion, Lumina, and the smaller Harbor Island pavilion to provide recreation. He also developed the palatial Oceanic Hotel.
Further extensions of the trolley lines helped develop the neighborhoods of Carolina Place, Carolina Heights and Sunset Park.
In 1905. MacRae launched the Carolina Truck and Development Co., which fulfilled a vision MacRae spelled out in a famous 1908 speech at New York's Astor Hotel: recruiting European peasants to settle on tracts in Southeastern North Carolina, hoping their industrious backgrounds and intensive farming methods could revitalize agriculture in the state.
Between 1905 and 1909, six major farm colonies were launched:

* Marathon in northern New Hanover County, for Greeks (memorialized by Marathon Road);
* Castle Hayne, nearby, for Dutch farmers and later for Poles (a heritage carried on by St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church and its annual Polish festival);
* St. Helena, south of Burgaw in Pender County, recruiting farmers from the Lombardy region of Italy, along with a small number of Ukrainians;
* Artesia, in Columbus County, recruiting Dutch and Poles;
* New Berlin, in northeastern Columbus County, developed around 1913 for German and Hungarian settlers (after the outbreak of World War I, the community's name was changed to Delco, after the company which had just installed lighting in the nearby high school);
* Van Eeden, targeted to the Dutch. in northern Pender County.

Van Eeden, originally purchased in 1909 by MacRae and Frederik Van Eeden, was not a great success. In 1939, MacRae sold 100 acres of the remaining land to a New York corporation, headed by Dr. Alvin Johnson of the New School for Social Research in New York, as a colony for the resettlement of Jewish refugees and others fleeing Hitler's Germany. The outbreak of World War II cut off the potential flow of colonists, and many who actually reached Van Eeden had little background in farming and soon left.
Development at St. Helena was set back when nationwide Prohibition blocked settlers' plans to produce wine. Many of the settlers left, though some stayed.
Castle Hayne, however, proved a particular success. As late as 1945, New Hanover County ranked second in the state in per capita farm income, thanks largely to Castle Hayne's output.
"The South will come into its own," MacRae declared, when its fields are green in winter." At his experimental 1,400-acre farm, Invershiel, near Rocky Point in Pender County, he spent decades developing a grazing program that would support black Angus cattle year-round.
Diversifying beyond the South's traditional cash crops of cotton, corn and tobacco was one of MacRae's major goals. He promoted the growing of bulb plants (a specialty of Castle Hayne, which was a major American flower-growing center before World War II), truck farming and blueberry cultivation.
MacRae's ideas on farming were so well regarded that he was seriously considered for appointment as secretary of agriculture in both the Wilson and Hoover administrations. His farm colony scheme influenced New Dealer Rexford G. Tugwell and helped lead to the Penderlea homestead project, intended to help poor families during the Great Depression.

On Feb. 4, 1891, MacRae married Rena Nelson. The couple had three children, Nelson, Agnes and Dorothy.
Two of MacRae's grandsons would become prominent. Hugh MacRae Morton (1921-2006), the son of Agnes and her husband Julian Morton, would inherit much of his grandfather's Linville properties and would become famous as the developer and proprietor of Grandfather Mountain. He was also the founding president of Wilmington's Azalea Festival, he was a well-known photographer, and he masterminded the fundraising campaign to bring the battleship USS North Carolina to Wilmington as a floating memorial.
Hugh MacRae II (born Nov. 20, 1924), the son of Nelson MacRae and Marguerite Bellamy, served in the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II. After graduating from Princeton and earning a commerce degree from the University of North Carolina, he entered the family business, and became the head of the Oleander Co. (formerly Hugh MacRae & Co.) after his grandfather's death. He spearheaded the development of Hanover Center, Wilmington's first major shopping mall, in 1956. During the centennial of the 1898 riots, he became active in community reconciliation efforts and contributed to the 1898 Memorial.

Background from '"Own A Home in North Carolina": Image and Reality in Ethnic European Colonies' by W. Frank Ainsley, in the Journal of Cultural Geography, Volume 5, Issue 2, March 1985 , pages 61 - 69, and from an article by Ben Steelman, Wilmington StarNews http://www.myreporter.com/2009/03/hugh-macrae/

Collection Contents

MacRae, Hugh, 1865-1951

Agriculture--North Carolina

Carolina Trucking Development Company

Europe, Eastern

Farm colonies

Farm life

Immigrants

Seashore Hotel

Artesia (N.C.)

Castle Hayne (N.C.)

New Berlin (N.C.)

New Hanover County (N.C.)

St. Helena (N.C.)

Wilmington (N.C.)

Wrightsville Beach (N.C.)

Photographs

Donated by Ms. Julia Morton, widow of Hugh Morton, via Susan Taylor Block of Wilmington. Hugh MacRae was Hugh Morton's grandfather.