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Commercial Expansion (1.5.3)

The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of numerous mercantile, commercial, and financial enterprises in Elizabeth City and the subsequent erection of modem brick buildings in the downtown area. These new, supposedly fire-proof structures, were particularly numerous along Water, Poindexter, Main, and Fearing streets and are exemplified by repetitive two-story buildings displaying modest Victorian elements in the 200 block of North Poindexter Street. By 1896, the town's merchants were providing services for most of the county and much of adjacent Camden and Perquimans counties. In fact, of the 117 merchants and tradesmen listed in the county in the 1896 Branson's North Carolina Business Directory, 98 were located in Elizabeth City, even though, according to the 1900 census, the city contained less than half of the county's total population (6,348 city, 7,312 rural). Furthermore, the various steamship companies enabled city wholesalers to supply retail general stores throughout the eastern Albemarle Sound (Branson 1896, 479-480). Two banks--the First National Bank (1891, 501 East Main Street, demolished) and the Citizen's Bank (1899, 200 South Poindexter Street)--were organized in the 1890s to provide the financial resources required by this growth. These banks expanded the private banking services of Guirkin and Company, which operated from ca. 1872 until ca. 1897 in the antebellum Farmer's Bank Building (108 East Main Street), and the Albemarle Bank, which operated only briefly during the late 1870s (Branson 1872: 152, 177, 239; 1890: 509; 1896: 481; 1897: 481).