Statement of Significance

The Elizabeth City Historic District is the grid-patterned, densely developed heart of Elizabeth City, located on the Pasquotank River, the boundary between Pasquotank and Camden counties, near the mouth of the Albemarle Sound. The district contains most of the nineteenth century buildings remaining in Elizabeth City, the major port city of northeastern North Carolina since its establishment in 1793. As the terminus of the Dismal Swamp Canal, the oldest surviving artificial waterway in the United States, the town's history is a fascinating chapter in North Carolina's struggle to overcome its treacherous outer banks, the coastal island barricade, and lack of deep-water ports. The district is architecturally distinguished not only by a substantial group of Greek Revival, Queen Anne-and Colonial Revival houses and one of the most handsome Victorian courthouses in the state, but has perhaps the largest number of antebellum commercial buildings of any business district in the state.

Although located in the heart of the Albemarle region, one of the oldest settled areas of North Carolina, Elizabeth City was not founded until 1793. In that year, a group of men petitioned the General Assembly to charter the town of “Redding” at the “Narrows” of the Pasquotank River,¹ a ferry crossing since the 1770s.² Redding would link the great port of Norfolk, on the Chesapeake Bay, with the Albemarle Sound, one of North Carolina's major inlets.

Fifty acres of “the land commonly called the Narrows Plantation” were purchased from Adam and Elizabeth Tooley and seventy-seven numbered lots were laid off within a rectangular grid street pattern.³ In 1794 the town was renamed Elizabeth, and in 1801 Elizabeth City.⁴ The settlement grew slowly, with the last of the original lots not selling until after 1800.⁵ Apparently these were purchased as investments by nearby residents, for there are few records of activity on the site until 1800, when the town was designated the county seat of Pasquotank County. By summer of this year the new courthouse and prison were finished.⁶ Dual concentrations of activity evolved: the river front, already an important ferry crossing to Camden County; and Road Street, seven blocks west, the major north-south highway from Norfolk to Edenton. The widest street between these two areas was designated Main Street on the earliest extant map of the town, drawn by Exum Newby in 1832.⁷ In the approximate center of Main Street was Courthouse Square.⁸ Also vital to the town's development was the Dismal Swamp Canal. Upon its completion in 1805, the canal made Elizabeth City a depot of imports and exports from the Albemarle area, and was the major influence on the town's development until topped by the railroad in 1881.⁹

Elizabeth City grew steadily during the early nineteenth century. In 1807 the town boundaries were extended to include the property of the Baptist Church, just outside the original west boundary of Dyer Street, where the first church building in town would soon be erected, and a few blocks north and south.¹⁰ In the same year, publication of the first newspaper, the Elizabeth City Gazette and Public Advertiser, began.¹¹ In 1816 the north and south boundaries were further extended.¹² By 1819, steamboat lines operating between New Bern and Elizabeth City met with limited success.¹³ Episcopal and Methodist church congregations were established during the mid-1820s.¹⁴ In 1836 Elizabeth City's first bank, a branch of the Bank of North Carolina, opened.¹⁵ The energetic young town attracted immigrants from far and wide.

Isaiah Fearing, a merchant from Massachusetts, was one of the most prominent of the New England immigrants drawn to Elizabeth City in the early nineteenth century. Educated at Harvard, he fought in the War of 1812 and was captured by the British. Following his 1814 release, he settled in Elizabeth City and operated a general store until his death in 1858. He served as postmaster from 1823 to 1829, when he was removed from office by political enemies because of an anti-Jackson political cartoon which he mailed to his family during a trip north.¹⁶ His home, the Grice-Fearing House, is believed to be the oldest in the district.

A history of Elizabeth City, written in the late nineteenth century, called the canal during this early phase of operation “a big ditch through which flats were sometime slowly pushed.”¹⁷ Because of its shallow depth, it was passable only to flat-bottomed boats, and its traffic consisted primarily of barges bringing shingles and other lumber products out of the Dismal Swamp. From 1826 to 1828 the canal was deepened, enabling sailing vessels to use it.¹⁸ Elizabeth City's trade, particularly with the West Indies, was greatly stimulated, and a boat loaded with staves owned by Matthew Cluff, an Elizabeth City merchant, was the first vessel cited as clearing the improved canal.¹⁹ The ElizabethCity Star (later lengthened to the Elizabeth-City Star and North Carolina Eastern Intelligencer) had a regular “Marine News” column which chronicled the arrivals and departures of schooners and brigs which carried the area's primary products: staves, shingles, and tar, to the West Indies; and corn and wood products to New England and the major adjacent ports of Norfolk and Charleston. West Indian molasses, sugar, and coffee were the major imports.

The town's growing importance as a port is seen in the moving of the customs house of the Port of Camden to Elizabeth City in 1827 with the appointment of Asa Rogerson as customs collector.²⁰ The town became a shipbuilding center: during one three-month period in 1849 three ships were built in Elizabeth City shipyards, two large vessels for the West Indies trade and one for the canal.²¹ The industrial of the 1850 census listed three firms valued at almost $27,000.²² The 1850 population schedule illustrates the town's economic dependence upon the water: among the marine-related occupations listed are seaman, mariner, ship carpenter, ship builder, caulker, sailmaker, . and captain. The places of birth of the heads of families also illustrates the cosmoolitan character of the town during.this period, for many were born in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York. Rhode Island and Virginia.²³ In 1860 over 85% of the adult population of Elizabeth City was literate,²⁴ an unusually high rate perhaps explained by this influx. The town's closest ties were with Norfolk, of course, and the local newspapers were filled with advertisements of Norfolk business firms. By 1860, with a population of slightly over 1000, Elizabeth City was one of the thirteen largest towns in North Carolina.²⁵ When Edward C. Brice of Harper's New Monthly Magazine visited the North Carolina coast on the eve of the Civil War, he sojourned briefly in Elizabeth City:

Elizabeth City is not contemporary with the maiden queen. When it was set on foot we have forgotten, but take it to have been near a century after her time. It is a beautiful village-the rus in urbe rather overdone if any thing. You stroll through a grove from one house to another; and the view up the principal street from the wharf might almost be taken for a vista in a park. This peculiarity arises mainly from fear of fire, the insatiate foe of the well-(no pun designed) watered towns of the South. Most of a square in the business centre of the place we found covered with fresh ashes. We were away forty hours; and in the interim the two most prominent buildings in the town, on the next square and opposite the hotel, shared the same fate.²⁶

Two blows ended this antebellum boom, stifling growth for twenty years: the construction of a major rival canal and the Civil War. The Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, completed in 1859, was located east of and parallel to the Dismal Swamp Canal, and connected Chesapeake Sound with the Currituck and Albemarle Sounds. Through traffic switched to this shorter, larger, and more easily navigable canal, and the Dismal Swamp Canal was beset by financial problems which permanently crippled its operation.²⁷ Then, on February 10, 1862, the Union fleet of Commander S. C. Rowan, and the overwhelmingly outnumbered Confederate “mosquito fleet” of six small steamers and a flagship, met in battle a few miles downriver from Elizabeth City. With the exception of two steamers, the entire fleet was destroyed or captured. Historian Samuel Ashe claimed that this was the end of the North Carolina Navy.²⁸ An eyewitness account of the aftermath of the battle, written by a Cincinnati Gazette correspondent, is reprinted in Moore's Rebellion Record:

When it became evident that nothing but disaster awaited them, the rebels, after firing their gunboats, fled to the village and commenced firing the principal buildings...Capt. Rowan (of the Union Navy) besought them to cease inflicting injury on themselves by setting fire to their beautiful village...but several of the best buildings were already in flames, among them the court-house.²⁹

The Dismal Swamp Canal escaped blockage during the war, but went through a period of neglect during Reconstruction, with traffic limited primarily to timber lighters. A limited steamboat passenger service between Elizabeth City and Norfolk operated during these years, with three separate lines plying the canal in 1880. Boats, many of them “double-decked”, left Norfolk in the morning, arrived at Elizabeth City the same afternoon, and returned early the next morning. The mail was also carried by this service.³⁰

The arrival in 1881 of the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Railroad, 57 miles in length (renamed the Norfolk and Southern Railway Company in 1906), ended the lethargy.³¹ The railroad and its connecting steamer lines to smaller towns on the Albemarle Sound quickly superseded the canal service.³² The local newspaper The Economist proclaimed proudly in 1883 that “There are more buildings in construction in old Betsy than was ever known at one time. We rejoice to see it.”³³ The population increased from 2,315 in 1880³⁴ to nearly 4,000 in 1885, and in that year the editors of the Historical and Descriptive Review of North Carolina described Elizabeth City as:

...probably the most energetic, enterprising, and progressive town in Northeastern North Carolina .....with over a hundred stores, five hotels, one of them as large and handsome as any in the State, two saw and grist mills, two planing mills, a carriage manufactory, a net and twine factory, a cotton seed oil mill, two brick yards, one to press brick, a steam cotton gin, an oyster packing establishment, five blacksmith shops, a ship yard, three newspapers, three job printing offices, a bank, three livery stables, a theatre, a beer-bottling and soda establishment, a handsome and commodious academy, a number of private and public schools, a normal school for the colored race, a State normal school for the white race, four churches for whites and two for colored.³⁵

The railroad linkage increased Elizabeth City's economic dependence on northern cities. This is graphically illustrated in local newspapers, in which local and regional advertisements dominated until the late nineteenth century, when those from Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other northern cities gradually became preponderant. Talent and capital were also imported. In the last quarter of the century, energetic businessmen like the Blades, Kramers, and Robinsons emigrated to Elizabeth City from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, and other northern states. Many of these were attracted by Dr. Palemon John's newspaper North Carolinian, published in Elizabeth City from 1869 to 1894 and distributed in the North for this purpose.³⁶ In 1872 the Kramer brothers, natives of Pennsylvania, established a saw and planing mill which became one of the area's largest wood-processing plants.^37> Charles Hall Robinson, from New York, was instrumental in the establishment of the Elizabeth City Cotton Mill,³⁸ and the Elizabeth City Hosiery Hill in 1902.³⁹ The population increased fourfold between 1890 and 1915, when 12,000 people, many of them attracted by the new factories, inhabited the town.^40> Cotton yarns, hosiery, lumber, shingles and other wood products were the major manufactured products during this period.⁴¹

During this period of rapid growth, the focus of commercial activity shifted from Water and Road streets to Main Street. The original Water and Road streets areas continued as the retail centers until the late nineteenth century. As late as 1891, commercial development on Main Street was limited to the two blocks west of the wharves, with the remaining blocks residential. Water Street, closed off by a brick city market at the north end (just north of the present Colonial Avenue intersection) and by two brick row stores at the south end (just south of the Fearing Street intersection), formed an interesting commercial space which has now disappeared.⁴² Fires and continual rebuilding have erased most of the late nineteenth century commercial fabric from this area. The Road Street commercial district, however, is remarkably intact, primarily because it was largely abandoned in the early twentieth century. During the second half of the nineteenth century, South Road Street was the major banking and residential street in town.⁴³ The earliest known reference to road surfacing in town is an 1857 record of the purchase of bricks to pave the sidewalks along Road Street.⁴⁴

The intensive usage of this area throughout most of the nineteenth century is well represented by the succession of activities in the Cluff-Pool Store at 100 Road Street, at the Main Street intersection. The construction date of the two-story brick store is unknown. Matthew Cluff, one of the town's earliest storekeepers, bought the lot in 1819, had a store on the site by 1827, and the present store had been constructed by his death in 1845.⁴⁵ Like many early residents, Cluff's residency alternated between Norfolk and Elizabeth City. In 1826, while living in Norfolk, he invented a new type of steam engine which was acclaimed in the Norfolk newspaper.⁴⁶ His ownership of the first boat to clear the enlarged Dismal Swamp Canal in 1828 has already been noted. The first floor of the building remained in general store or drugstore use throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the 1850s the second floor contained the office of the local newspaper The Democratic Pioneer.⁴⁷ From 1862 to 1882 the upstairs held the records recovered from the burning courthouse following the Union capture of the town, and the building was known as the “Court House.” The law office of federal judge George W. Brooks, one of the judicial heroes of Reconstruction in North Carolina, was upstairs during the mid-nineteenth century.⁴⁹ Brooks gained fame in 1870 when he issued a writ of habeas corpus which freed a number of North Carolinians imprisoned illegally by “Kirk''s Army.”⁵⁰ In the late nineteenth century, the Masonic Lodge room was located upstairs.

During the early twentieth century, with the construction of the United States Post Office and Courthouse in 1906, the Kramer Building of 1909, and the Hinton (Carolina) Building of 1912, now demolished,⁵² Main Street assumed its present dominant role. This development of the central business district required efficient handling of traffic, and the extant information concerning street paving materials illustrates this effort. Perhaps the earliest material used was oyster shells. The Economist of October 20, 1899, mentions that “Martin Street has become very popular with the teamsters since the shelling of same”. The December 6, 1901, issue notes that Water and Poindexter streets would soon be treated to an additional coat of oyster shells. The main streets were given more durable surfacing: The Economist of September 15, 1899, announced that John H. Armbrecht of Berkeley [sic], Virginia had been awarded the contract for paving and curbing the section of Poindexter Street within the central business district with “Belgian block” (granite block). Most of the residential streets in the historic district are paved with large bricks imprinted “Baltimore Block, W. P. B. Co.”, laid between 1910 and 1920. Like the Belgian block, the brick was unfortunately covered with asphalt in the later twentieth century.

Although the canal has been outmoded since the advent of the railroad, it continues to exercise some influence on Elizabeth City. In 1899, the Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company opened the reconstructed Dismal Swamp Canal, and by 1906 it had recaptured much of its former trade from the Albemarle-Chesapeake Canal. During the early twentieth century logs and lumber made up the majority of the northbound cargo; and coal, cement, and general merchandise the majority of the southbound. In 1929 the United States government purchased the canal, and its operation became the duty of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. It became part of the intra-coastal waterway system and has flourished since then, a large proportion of the vessels being pleasure craft.⁵⁴ The early twentieth century era of growth and progress was outstanding as well for the work of editor W. O. Saunders. Saunders, one of the most influential southern editors of his day, published The Independent in Elizabeth City from 1908 to his death in 1939. An iconoclastic crusader for such liberal principles as Negro rights, birth control and animal conservation, he became one of the best-known weekly newspaper editors in the United States during the 1920s, when he published a series of articles in American Magazine and Colliers.⁵⁵

The early twentieth century character of the central business district of Elizabeth City changed 1ittle until recently. The 1950 population was identical to the 1915 population.⁵⁶ By 1960, however, population had risen to 14,000,⁵⁷ and this gradual increase is continuing. Commercial development of incompatible character and scale now threatens the integrity of the historic district.