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Always at home in Carrboro

Posted on April 7, 2011April 7, 2011 by Staff

Richard Ellington draws a diagram of the railroad that ran through Carrboro and Chapel Hill in the dirt near his childhood home on West Poplar Avenue. Photo By Allison Russell

By Allison Russell
Staff Writer

The house where Richard Ellington grew up used to be painted daffodil yellow. Over the years, it has been layered with different paints, today a pale minty-green color.
His father, a building contractor, built the house in 1937. Since its construction, along with the shifting colors, the house has experienced birth, death and change.
“I’ve been uncovering Richard’s life through the layers of paint,” says Alfredo Balderas, who is restoring the house for its current owners, Scott and Charlotte Smith.
Ellington was born in his parents’ bedroom in the back of the house in February 1945. He lived at 115 Weaver Road – which is now West Poplar Avenue – until he left to go to college in 1963.
The house was renovated several times while Ellington lived in it, primarily because his family needed more room after he was born.
“You can tell that there was a woman who kept saying [to Richard’s father], ‘Honey, could you add another room here and here?’” said Scott Smith.
Ellington is the youngest of three children. His sister Priscilla, 78, and brother Boyd, 76, still live in Carrboro.
“We had relatives all over here,” Ellington said as he swept his hand up and down a map of the streets surrounding his old house.
Ellington grew up surrounded by his grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins, thanks to the six acres of land purchased by his father and grandfather in the 1930s. His father took two acres to build his house and his grandfather gave the rest of the land to his sons, Ellington’s uncles.

His maternal grandmother, who lived directly behind his house, was the only grandparent he knew as a child.
“I blame my lackadaisical attitude on my grandmother because she loved to fish,” Ellington joked, looking in the direction of where his grandmother used to live.
“Whenever she’d laugh, her belly would shake up and down, and that’s my fondest memory of her,” he said.
Ellington’s grandparents moved from Durham to Carrboro to pursue millwork in 1912, a year after the town was founded. His grandfather worked as a carpenter and spooler in the Blanche Hosiery Corporation Mill No. 4, the building that is now Carr Mill Mall.
Although his parents never worked in the mill, Ellington was raised to appreciate the value of hard work. His family raised pigs and chickens in their backyard and Ellington was responsible for slopping the pigs each night after supper. He also worked with his father during the summer as a teenager.
“I worked one summer with my dad, and that’s when I decided I would go to college,” Ellington said. “Schlepping lumber as a 14-year-old – that’s hard work!”
The following summer, Ellington worked part-time at UNC in the registrar’s office. He didn’t know it at the time, but his job of assisting with summer school registration would lead him to a 43-year career of data processing at UNC.
“I became interested in data processing because of that job,” said Ellington, who retired in January. “The university was beginning to use data systems [to automate student records], and when they offered me a [full-time] job it only made sense for me to accept it and stay in Carrboro.”
Although Ellington says he has “always been a Tar Heel” and he “bleeds Carolina blue,” he never had the desire to go to college at UNC.
“I didn’t want to get lost in the number [of students],” Ellington said. “And at the time, I was intending to be a Baptist minister.”
Ellington chose to go to Campbell because it offered a pre-ministerial program. He eventually changed majors at the end of his sophomore year and decided to study history.
“My wife tells me I was born 200 years too late. I should have grown up with trains and stuff like that because I love history,” Ellington said.
Ellington has satisfied his love of history by co-authoring the book Carrboro: Images of America with David Otto. The book contains pictures of Carrboro throughout the century, many of which Ellington was given by his neighbor Mack Watts, an amateur photographer.
Bonded by community
Ellington attended school at Chapel Hill Senior High, which was located on West Franklin Street, during a time of social change in Carrboro’s history. When he was a junior, his school was integrated with Lincoln High School, Chapel Hill’s black high school.
“It was a non-event from the white community’s perspective,” Ellington said. “I was raised to respect a black man and a white man the same.”
Ellington recalls segregation in Carrboro, but said the town was progressive for its time, allowing black people to buy food from local restaurants, even though they weren’t allowed to eat in the establishment.
Ellington said he still sees room for the improvement of racial relations today.
“It’s still not what it should be for a town that’s as progressive as Carrboro,” he said.
When reflecting on the general sense of change that Carrboro has experienced, Ellington sees the town as “more transient” than it once was. However, he still believes Carrboro is bonded by its community.
“A lot of people look at little towns and [disparage the fact that] everyone knows everyone else’s business – but that’s not such a bad thing, is it? Social morals were enforced that way,” he said.
A value Ellington learned as a child is to support his community. One of the ways he does this is by participating as a member of the Carrboro Centennial Committee.
“The centennial celebration [on March 3] was pretty neat,” Ellington said. “When you live in one place all your life, everything has significance to you.”
Kim Andrews of the Carrboro Recreation & Parks Department rediscovered the old bell that tolled during the celebration. It’s a remnant of the Carrboro Baptist Church that used to occupy the Century Center.
“I hadn’t heard that bell ring in 50 years,” said Ellington, who was among the dozens of people who rang the bell during the celebration.
Ellington said he has seen a great amount of change in Carrboro during his nearly seven decades as a resident of the town. To him, the change is most obviously manifested during the celebration of Carrboro Day, which falls on May 1 this year.
“There’s always a bulletin board in the Town Commons that allows people to show where they’re from. When I was a kid, everyone was from Carrboro, but today there’s a much more global population,” Ellington said.
Despite the changes, Ellington says he will always consider Carrboro his home.
“Carrboro is my town,” he said. “It’s a town with a conscience.”

Allison Russell is co-editor of the Carrboro Commons, a bi-weekly online lab newspaper for Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism class at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and an intern with The Carrboro Citizen. This story first appeared in the Carrboro Commons.

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