NoAth CtvwLinu State.
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Raleigh, UoAth Ccvwlina
1822.1
Collection: David ,Braina,rd WHITING Reminiscences
c. 1861-1916
Raleigh, N.C.; Hamlet, N.C.
Physical Description: 1 manuscript volume of 61 leaves in a black binding;
1 typescript of the manuscript volume in 97 pages; and a typescript supple¬
ment in 13 pages.
Acquisition: Gift of Mrs. Mary W. Dorman, Pembroke, N.C., 1994
Description: David Brainard Whiting (Jan. 8, 1852 - Oct. 31, 1922) was the
third son and sixth child of Seymour Webster and Hannah M. (Stuart) Whiting
of Raleigh.- His father, a descendant of the Whiting and Bradford families
of Massachusetts, was born at Stratford, Connecticut in 1816. He moved to
Raleigh in 1835, and was brought into the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad as
treasurer under George Washington Mordecai, president of the company from
1824 to 1839.. Whiting purchased a residence at the southwest comer of
Jones and McDowell streets, • within a block of the offices and train yards
of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, and moved his family there. Young
Brainard was. only three when his father died and left his widow to raise a
family of seven children.' He enjoyed a brief childhood marked by the priva¬
tions of the Civil War and the years following the war, finding as much
boyish entertainment among the locomotives and railroad men as in the fields
and woods adjacent to the town. After as much formal education in the
schools of Mrs. Judge Taylor and Dr. Drury Lacy as the boy could be held to,
he began clerking in Raleigh stores to augment the family income. In 1870
he learned telegraphy in the local Western Union offices and took brief
fill-in jobs as telegrapher at various depots 'of both the North Carolina
and the Raleigh and Gaston railroads. In 1871 he moved to Wilmington to
accept employment as a telegrapher for the Wilmington, Charlotte, and
Rutherford Railroad (the Carolina Central Railroad after 1873) . He was
briefly employed by the Atlantic Coastline Railroad in 1876 when he was
sent as agent and telegrapher to the company's depot in Mount Olive. The
following year, however, when the Carolina Central Railroad line was extended
to Hamlet,. he was offered the agency there and accepted it. Here Whiting
served as agent for three of the companies that eventually became constituent
elements -of the Seaboard Air Line Railway: Carolina Central, Raleigh and
Augusta, and Palmetto railroads. Although forced out as agent in 1899,
Whiting remained in railroad employ at Hamlet until 1911 when he ended his
thirty-year career as a railroad man and moved to McColl, South Carolina.
