- Title
- Early twentieth century suburbs in North Carolina: essays on history, architecture and planning
-
-
- Date
- 1985
-
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
Early twentieth century suburbs in North Carolina: essays on history, architecture and planning
Hits:
(0)
Introduction
North Carolina’s urban development has been unusual
among the seaboard states. So rural, and so non- urban, has the
state remained even into this century as to be called civiras sans
urbibis, a state without a city. Even today, the state is remarkable
in having gained widespread industrialization without becoming
urbanized. As late as 1900, 90 percent of North Carolina’s
citizens lived in rural areas, and there was no city of as many as
35,000 people. What little urbanization did develop occurred
not in a metropolitan focus such as Charleston or Atlanta or
Baltimore but rather in a series of small cities — not a great
glittering solitaire diamond, but a string of middle sized pearls —
strung along the rail lines from Wilmington through Raleigh,
Greensboro, Winston, to Charlotte and Asheville.
Map shaming railroad lines in North Carolina in 1900. From John
F. Gilbert and Grady Jefferys, Crossties through Carolina,
copyright Flelios Press, 1 969. Used with permission, Gilbert Design Inc.
It was between 1900 and 1930 that urbanization first
boomed in North Carolina. Paralleling nation-wide patterns,
thousands of North Carolinians poured into towns from farms
and villages to seek work, swelling the urban population from 10
to 25 percent of the total in a growing state, from fewer than
200,000 to more than 800,000 people. One town after another
vied for the status of the largest city, pressing to reach 20, 30, or
50,000 people. “Fifty- fifteen” was Winston-Salem’s slogan —
50,000 people by 1915— as the piedmont community captured
the position of the state’s most populous community only to be
surpassed by Charlotte, which had only 34,000 people in 1910
Map showing urban population patterns, 1910 and 1940. From
North Carolina Atlas, copyright, University of North
Carolina Press, J975. Used with permission.
but reached the 100,000 mark by 1940. Meanwhile, the other
cities continued to grow as rail lines and highway networks
expanded.
Today, in the nation’s tenth most populous state, nearly half of
our6 million citizens live in urban areas; yet in contrast to all the
other most populous states, we still have no city of as many as a
million, and indeed, our largest city (Charlotte) counts only a
third of a million. There and in small cities across the state, urban
residents live not in tightly packed blocks of rowhouses or
apartment towers but, for the most part, spread out in single
family suburban neighborhoods or suburban apartments; they
space themselves across the landscape, among the trees, and
along the highways to create an urban population that is, as it has
been for nearly a century, almost entirely suburban.
North Carolina's early twentieth century urban boom coin¬
cided with a national change in city growth patterns, as the
streetcar and the automobile permitted and encouraged housing
to move away from the dense city center into the ever more
distant suburbs. A few communities such as Wilmington and new
Bern retain important collections of nineteenth century urban
fabric, but in general in North Carolina, our nineteenth century
cities were so small, and subsequent growth so overwhelming,
3
Select what you would like to download. If choosing to download an image, please select the file format you wish to download.
The Original File option allows download of the source file (including any features or enhancements included in the original file) and may take several minutes.
Certain download types may have been restricted by the site administrator.