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/
