By Mitch Virchick
One of the few certainties in the trajectory of our lives is that we eventually return to earth. The ground will rise up to claim our remains. If we are fortunate, our legacies survive, for a time, in our accomplishments, in the pages of books and journals, in our bequests and in the things we leave behind. Our built environment often outlasts us to remind succeeding generations of our industriousness; and even when that work ceases to produce something of real value, the ruins of old structures mysteriously inform us that someone was here long before we were, and took the time and effort to make their living in whatever way they believed they could.
In Carrboro, all around us, there are reminders of our past labors. Many of these ruins are on private property – old barns, a brick silo, a stone fireplace where a house once stood. But there are a number of other silent sentries which can be seen by the casual weekend stroller, especially if you walk along Carrboro’s greenways and bike paths and along our public roads.
My favorite ruin is sited along the new bike path that begins at Wesley Drive (southwest of the Libba Cotton bike path, down Brewer Lane and Hargraves Street into the Tin Top neighborhood). Take the bridge across the creek, which drains the area south of Main Street and east of the old Carrboro Cemetery, and walk a hundred yards or so along the bike path. A spring-fed stream – you can hear it gurgling in the driest of summer months – converges with the main branch, and just below this point the creek drops about eight or 10 feet.
Walk past the falls and turn. You will notice the remains of a stone dam. It is unnamed on historical maps, but clearly, the retaining wall is there for a reason. If you explore the creek below, you will find a clue – a massive remnant of concrete and brick: an archway. It may have sheltered a small water wheel, which would have turned a grinding millstone. You are looking at the ruins of a grist mill. Anywhere that water flowed and fell, one would have seen such things in the age before electric power. Grist mills were commercial centers when many local residents – even those living so close to town – grew their own corn. Fees were paid to the mill operators based on the number of bushels; or more often, the operator kept a percentage of the corn, thereby ensuring a steady supply of cornmeal to market.
I don’t know who might have operated this grist mill. They could have been white or black. I don’t know if it pre-dated the hosiery mills that dominated Carrboro in the early 20th century, but it certainly was not run by electricity.
It was built along a stream that divided historically African-American neighborhoods from land that was eventually owned by the Durham Hosiery Mills when their Mill No. 7 existed. The hosiery mill was situated where a parking lot now rambles downhill from Roberson Street and along Sweet Bay Place. If you walk along Roberson Street near the top of the parking lot, you will see the bricks that formed the foundation walls of Mill No. 7, one of the few visible remains of the old building, which was torn down in the early 1960s, and for whose employees the “workers’ cottages†along Maple Avenue, Carr Street and South Greensboro Street were built.
Some of the bricks are flush with the asphalt and form not merely a threshold to the parking lot, but another portal to Carrboro’s past, when it first became a town. The mills brought electricity to our village and, as most of Carrboroans know, were the center of activity, when men, women and children worked 12-hour days and on Saturdays, and when Weaver Street meant woolen hosiery, and not Kashi and Kombucha. If there is continuity, one can be reminded that the townspeople back then still ate organic food – they just grew most of it themselves in their gardens. It was a different Weaver Street, a harder one. But the work in the mills was, by all reports, less grueling and more remunerative than farm labor. Still, nobody seemed to mind terribly when Mill No. 7 returned to earth.
In another part of Carrboro, take a walk through the Horace Williams tract along Bolin Creek. Head upstream, and, somewhere below and between the Spring Valley and Cobblestone neighborhoods along the creek, you may see a marker on the right bank, indicating the presence of another old mill. History tells us this once belonged to Buck Taylor, a steward of the university during its infancy in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The stone foundation walls are still visible, as are the earthworks that diverted the waters of the creek to form the mill race. It’s a long enough race – it would have taken patience and persistence and long hours to dig.
It is difficult for many of us to imagine what it must have taken to build these things – a couple of small grist mills and a much larger knitting mill – in an age when men and mules, unassisted, provided the motive power. The amount of commitment and cooperation and the dedication to task are nearly beyond the comprehension of most of us, who toil in air-conditioned offices, working the margins for a return on our investment of time and effort.
Or perhaps there are some parallels to our present-day labor. Can we draw inspiration from these ruins, and remind ourselves that our commitment and dedication are as important now, in the face of grave economic uncertainty, as these qualities were a century or two ago? As Sisyphean as our endeavors may seem, we have little choice but to endure and persist. And even as these legacies are reclaimed by the earth, they serve as a quiet reminder of the industrious nature of our Carrboro forebears.
Mitch Virchik writes for northcarolinatravels.com