Sketches Describing The Spindle City's Beginnings
Prepared Exclusively for VintageGastonia.com
By Noted Historian Robert Allison Ragan
Robert Allison Ragan is a Gastonia native who was born into textiles and its influences when cotton was king and the city was the proud Combed Yarn Center of America. Representing three generations and 120 years of noteworthy community involvement, it is but natural his historical interests should be channeled in this direction. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and several commercial banking schools, he is primarily a Charlotte businessman and private investor with an indefatigable curiosity for history, who has used his intelligence and wealth of knowledge to tell the story of a city, a county and an industry that have been vital parts in the New South vision we know today. Additionally, he has been president of Gaston County Museum of Art & History, has written and recorded through the years valuable information on the region's history, and assisted national television and broadcasting as well as state and local agencies in historical research on Gaston County, the Southern textile industry and its people.
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As viewers of Tim Ellis’ unique Vintage Gastonia web site, many of you undoubtedly have or will express an interest in knowing when and how the city of Gastonia came into being. In a series of short articles, I will attempt through this medium to anticipate some of these questions and share with you numerous defining events in the antecedent history of this All-American city many of you proudly call home. As a beginning to the story, it is important to understand that two interrelated events were to unalterably shape its destiny and define its direction – the coming of the railroad in the 1860s and 1870s and cotton textile manufacturing in the 1880s and 1890s.
Railroads Create Gastonia
Transportation in GastonCounty before 1860 was confined almost exclusively to horses, mules and horse-drawn wagons that traveled along poorly maintained dirt roads. This was to change, however, in the years immediately prior to the War Between the States, opening new vistas of opportunity for the underdeveloped agricultural region.
In 1855, the Wilmington, Charlotte & Rutherford Railroad, working its way from the Atlantic port city of Wilmington to the Piedmont of North Carolina, announced its intention to extend its tracks west of the Catawba River into Gaston and Lincoln counties. Five years later, a wooden trestle was built over the river above Tuckaseegee Ford near what is today MountHolly to facilitate its entry. From there, the iron rails extended west to Brevard Station (later to become Stanley), then to White Pine (later known as Cherryville) and finally to Lincolnton by 1861, when North Carolina seceded from the Union to join the Confederate States of America. All construction ceased until after the war, when work resumed and the line, known by then as the Carolina Central Railroad, was extended to Asheville. In more modern times it became known as the Seaboard Air Line. This was but a beginning in the opening of the “backcountry” west of the Catawba.
Following the war, a new, more important road that would create towns along the way came through in the opening years of the 1870s, as the South was gripped in a terrible period known as Radical Reconstruction. It connected Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, and Atlanta, the Georgia capital and railroad center that was rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of Sherman’s destruction. It was first known as the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line (the name was changed to Atlanta & Charlotte Air Line in February 1877) and by 1894 as the Southern Railway. Importantly, it connected many lesser market towns and hamlets in between, including a small depot, fueling and watering stop called Gastonia Station. The little station quickly emerged as a town and then into a city – today’s Gastonia.
It was only by circumstance that Gastonia became the location where a town developed. Having crossed the Catawba River from Charlotte at a point now known as Belmont, the railroad’s intention was to lay its tracks to Dallas, then the county seat and only incorporated town. However, many of Dallas’ citizens, sensing unwanted noise and pollution that would inevitably come with the train to its peaceful community of 350 inhabitants, objected to the proposed encroachment. So, the railroad reconsidered, and the tracks were laid about four miles south to a point near the old Shiloh Methodist meetinghouse, a location that today would be on East Long Avenue near the old Modena Mills and village. It was here that the first Gastonia Station was built in 1873. Railroad carpenters built an adjoining storehouse and a one-room cabin for the stationmaster’s living quarters. In a short time a barroom was also built and a blacksmith shop opened nearby. In 1876, David A. “Honest Dave” Jenkins, former state treasurer and prominent politician during Reconstruction, built a substantial white frame home across from the little stationhouse, which stood as a landmark in the city for over a hundred years.
The first train came through Gastonia Station on March 31, 1873, when only a few families lived there, but hundreds of well-wishers were on hand to greet it. With numerous dignitaries aboard, the special train – drawn by the B. Y. Sage, a magnificent steam engine costing $12,000 – passed along the tracks through GastonCounty.It left Charlotte at 8:30 a.m., arrived at Garibaldi Station (in 1895, Belmont) at 9:22, then Wright’s Station (a year later, Lowell), and by 10:08 a.m. rolled into Gastonia Station, for a water stop.Leaving the cheering crowd behind by 10:30 a.m., the train puffed west toward Wooten Station (in 1892, BessemerCity), White Plains (in 1874, KingsMountain), and then south toward its final destination, Spartanburg, South Carolina. The following year, the tracks were completed to Atlanta.
In 1876, for reasons that are not completely known to history, Gastonia Station was relocated one mile west on farmland owned principally by Oliver W. Davis, the site of present uptown Gastonia as we know it today (behind the former BB&T bank building, now county offices, and the old seven-story First National Bank building). Other large property owners included the Bradley family, descendants of John McKnitt Bradley, who owned land north and west of the center city, and the Hannas, who had land south and west. After likely giving land to the railroad as an inducement for the move, Davis had much of his property laid off into town lots and sold many of them for as little as $50 or $100 apiece in the beginning. Slowly, people began to come to start a business and build a home. Fortunately for the new town, the landowners were found to be reasonable men who had vision for the future, as evidenced by their willingness to cooperate with the railroad and those interested in buying lots and building a town here.
In 1876, followng close on the heels of the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line, another smaller road, known as the Chester & Lenoir Narrow Gauge Railroad, crossed the Air Line tracks at Gastonia Station, heading north. The junction created added economic advantages for the location. In 1897 the Narrow Gauge became known as the Carolina & Northwestern or more familiarly, the C&NW.With the railroad came business, with business came people, with people came communication and demand for services; and this alternate location with two railroad connections quickly became a village and then a town.
On January 26, 1877, with a population of about 140, Gastonia had become large enough to be incorporated as a town. The first town officials were R. E. Waddill, mayor, and T. G. Chalk, J. H. Fayssoux, F. S. Hanna, R. M. Martin and J. E. Page as commissioners. Most of these men had come with the railroad as depot agents, telegraph operators or in other positions. Landowner Oliver Davis acted as the first policeman, served as the town’s official cotton weigher, lit the oil lamps that dotted Main Street and collected the taxes.
The original pattern of streets was probably the result of natural boundaries such as the railroad tracks, wagon roads, ravines and gullies, suggestions by the railroad officials and desires of the original property owners. The first streets and avenues running east-west were Main Street (later Main Avenue) and Air Line Avenue, both paralleling the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line tracks, Long Avenue north of Air Line, Mill Street (in 1898 renamed Franklin Avenue) south of Main, and Elm Street (later named Second Avenue) running south of Mill. On the far west running north-south was Cemetery Street (later named Chester). Then to the east of Cemetery there was York Street, then South Street, then Marietta Street, then Maple Street (later renamed Oakland Street). Finally at the far east was Railroad Street (later named Broad Street), down the middle of which ran the tracks of the Chester & Lenoir Narrow Gauge.
Article Two:
Merchants Become Gastonia's First Families
Pioneer families began to establish homes near the depot soon after it was established. Early Gastonians seemed to agree that the best road to success was to be found in “keeping store.” Therefore the town’s first and most influential citizens were primarily merchants and tradesmen, and it was because of them that others came. Almost from the beginning, their stores were the largest and carried the widest and most up-to-date selections of merchandise in the county. Gastonia developed a reputation for being the best place to buy goods for the family or farm and quickly became a regional trading center that drew people from Gaston, Lincoln, Mecklenburg and York counties. Because of the railroads, it was also a place where traveling salesmen, known as “drummers”, stopped to service their trades throughout the region. Hotels were established to accommodate them. Before long, when people asked “What place is this?” eager citizens replied, “Gastonia. We are going to have a big town here one of these days.”
Possibly the first business in the present uptown business district was that of the Smyres in 1875. E. L. Smyre had a store in a small schoolhouse on the southwest corner of Main and Oakland streets. The following year, along with his uncle, Alfred Monroe Smyre, as partner, they rented a frame building at the centrally located southeast corner of Main and South streets, where a 7-story building stands today. By 1883 that partnership was dissolved and was succeeded by A. M. Smyre as sole proprietor of a men’s, boys’ and ladies’ clothing and accessories business. In 1894, he sold that business and established Gastonia Hardware Co., the town’s first hardware store. In 1905 he was also instrumental in organizing Standard Hardware. Each of them became sizable operations in the city, serving citizens for over the half-century.
Alfred Monroe Smyre, circa 1898 at age 53
In point of arrival, James E. Page was the next businessman to settle in Gastonia, arriving from Marietta, Georgia in January 1875 as agent for the Atlanta & Richmond Air Line. In 1883 he purchased the three-year-old Gastonia Gazette from George W. Chalk, who had established the publication in 1880. Not enjoying the newspaper business, Page sold the paper in 1888 and started Page Lumber Company. This successful lumber and millwork business later became Spencer Lumber Company, long a landmark in the city.
Another of the first to arrive, when there were only a few scattered houses in the vicinity, was John Henry Craig, a native of the Union section of the county. He had sold the railroad land at Shiloh, upon which the first Gastonia depot was located in 1873. In 1876 he opened a retail store at the new Gastonia depot location. By 1882 he had as his partner Captain James Daniel Moore, a newly arrived CatawbaCounty native and Confederate war hero, and they operated as Craig & Moore. Separately Craig also owned a tannery and traded in cotton, buying the ginned and baled staple from local farmers and selling it to cotton merchants in larger cities. In 1887, he and his brother-in- law founded Gastonia and GastonCounty’s first bank (subject of a subsequent article)
J. D. Moore Mercantile Co., circa 1896 Pictured here are (l. to r.): Reverend Charles H. Durham, pastor of FirstBaptistChurch, H. Beeler Moore, Sarah Jane Moore, Captain J. D. Moore, John C. Moore, John Keener and J. Oscar White standing in front of Captain Moore’s general store on the northwest corner of Main and Marietta. From 1888 to 1893 the building was first owned and occupied by
G. W. Ragan Mercantile Company. It was said to be the first brick building in Gastonia.
Captain J. Q. Holland, a teenage Confederate Army officer in the War Between the States, had perhaps the next mercantile business in Gastonia, starting as early as 1877. He operated in one partnership arrangement or another for 35 years on Main Avenue and trained some the town’s earliest and most successful merchants. He was followed in 1879 by Jiles B. Beal, a LincolnCounty native, who opened the town’s first lumber and building materials business in partnership with J. D. Brumfield. It became a leading plant manufacturing millwork, doors, sashes and blinds. Later Beal organized Gaston Iron Works.
Another of Gastonia’s earliest and most successful merchants and town builders was George Washington Ragan, a native of the South Point/Union section of the county and a teenage Confederate soldier. Already with seven years’ experience in merchandising, he came from businesses at Lowell and South Point in 1879 at age 33 to seek his fortune. With Thomas C. Pegram, he founded the pioneer firm of Ragan & Pegram on the northeast corner of Main and Marietta, which did a brisk business in general merchandising, as well as guano, farm equipment and trading of cotton and other commodities. Ragan left in 1881 to open a store in conjunction with the new cotton factory at McAdenville, but returned permanently in 1886 to open G. W. Ragan Mercantile Co. in a brick building on the northwest corner of Main and Marietta. Ragan’s interests expanded with the city’s growth, and soon he joined other stalwarts in building and operating Gastonia’s first cotton factories, starting the First National Bank and developing real estate in the uptown business distric
George Washington Ragan circa 1898 at age 52
The year 1881 saw two other men of vision and ambition make Gastonia home. From the Pisgah neighborhood came Thomas Warren Wilson to put his unique stamp on the city. By 1886 he and Thomas Lee Craig, son of Gastonia pioneer John H. Craig, established the soon-to-become large and famous Craig & Wilson Co. Purchasing the former Ragan Mercantile location on the northwest corner of Main and Marietta, they erected a four-story brick building topped by a distinctive tower that became the most recognized business landmark in early twentieth-century Gastonia. Craig & Wilson’s farm and livestock business dominated that field in GastonCounty from the 1890s to the 1930s
.
Craig & Wilson Co., circa 1912
As the year 1883 rolled around, Gastonia welcomed another unusually enterprising citizen. Robert Calvin Grier Love, a native of the southern part of the county, came from successful merchandising ventures at Woodlawn and KingsMountain. Through those ventures and independent cotton trading activities, he was successful enough by 1887 to promote and become the largest stockholder in Gastonia’s first cotton mill, known for years as the “Old Mill” (subject of a subsequent article). That same year, brothers Lawson Henderson Long and Vardry Edward Long came from northwestern GastonCounty and formed Long Brothers on West Main Avenue. The new firm sold stoves, tin ware, pots, pans and sewing machines, and soon did a big business in tin roofs for homes, stores and industry.
A year after Love and the Long brothers, in 1884, two other brothers, Benjamin Theodore Morris and Samuel Malcolm Morris, both born and raised near Dallas, arrive in the fledgling town of a few hundred people to establish Morris Brothers, a retail clothing store. It was ideally situated on the southeast corner of Main and South, formerly occupied by A. M. Smyre. Following close behind them was William Lawrence Gallant, a native of the Steele Creek section of MecklenburgCounty, who moved into Gastonia in 1885 to open a country store near the southeast corner of Main and Marietta. Then, too, there were John Theodore Spencer, a descendant of the Revolutionary Tory for whom SpencerMountain is named, and Francis William Bradley, a son of one of the town’s original property owners, who became among Gastonia’s first building contractors. They built many of the first small wood-frame homes and store buildings that began appearing on newly laid off town lots as early as 1876.
With the growth of businesses like these, people came and the settlement grew. By 1880, four years after the permanent depot was established, 236 people were calling Gastonia home. By 1885 there were 485 residents, and 600 by 1887. A town had begun. Others also came, those with family names such as Anders, Boyd, Bradley, Carson, Curry, Davis, Falls, Fayssoux, Galloway, Glenn, Hanna, Hoffman, Huss, Jenkins, Lewis, Kennedy, Lineberger, Marshall, Nolen, Pearson, Reid, Robinson, Torrence, Warren. These were the pioneers. As 1890 approached, the village that had begun in Oliver Davis’ cornfield fourteen years earlier had grown to 1,033, far outstripping Dallas and all the other settlements in GastonCounty.
Early Gastonia street scene, circa 1899
An early scene of Main Avenue at Marietta Street, looking west. In the foreground on the right side of
the picture are (l. to r.) G. W. Ragan & Co.’s general store, a vacant lot,
the post office, J. D. Moore & Co.’s general store, First National Bank and
Central Hotel, whose balcony overlooks West Main Street.
Article 3:
Hotels Follow the Railroad
Hotels began to appear in Gastonia as soon as visiting passengers needing a place to stay started arriving on trains, a natural occurrence at any railroad depot location that had a variety of stores and an active commercial trade. Traveling salesmen, or “drummers” as they were called in those days, came by the dozens to supply merchants throughout the countryside with all kinds of staple and novelty goods required for their trade, or to hawk them directly to neighboring farm families. Horses and buggies were secured for reasonable fees from livery stables close to the depot, which in the early days were operated by Squire A. R. Anders, J. R. “Dolph” Warren, W. H. Jenkins and Captain John Davis. Farmers coming in wagons to market their cotton or produce also found hotels convenient and hospitable places to stay while they conducted business, as did local citizens who were perhaps waiting on a house to be built or become available, or bachelors and others who did not want to bother themselves with maintaining a home or preparing meals.
The Waddill House, owned by the town’s first mayor, R. E. Waddill, is thought to have been the first hotel in Gastonia, opening about 1875 or 1876, the year the depot was moved from Shiloh. It operated from a rather unimpressive two-story wooden building on the north side of the second block of West Main Avenue, where the Citizens National Bank was built nearly a half-century later (now occupied as a county office building). Records indicate that the old hotel was destroyed by fire on the evening of November 23, 1885.
The affable John Laban “Labe” Falls, a native of the Pleasant Ridge/Crowders Creek section of the county, came to the struggling village in 1877, the year Gastonia was incorporated as a town. Soon he built a two-story wooden hotel on West Airline Avenue, immediately north of the depot and railroad tracks. The Falls House became the best known and most remembered of Gastonia’s early hotels. Business was so good that in 1885 the old inn of 20 rooms was replaced by an attractive three-story brick building with 25 larger rooms to accommodate its discriminating permanent and traveling clientele. It featured large public rooms and had a spacious two-story porch across the front of the building. On top of the hotel was an observation tower, which provided a pleasant vista of the little town and the surrounding countryside.
For a generation or more, this hotel was the center of the social life of the town. In its comfortable lobby in the horse and buggy days of the Gay Nineties, groups of traveling salesmen and local businessmen gathered around a big iron stove or open fireplace in winter and sat in chairs on the spacious porches in summer, swapping stories, watching travelers arrive and depart from the depot and discussing the important news of the day. Christmas was an especially festive occasion at the Falls House. A large tree, 12 to 14 feet tall, stood in the lobby and was lighted with small candles and handmade decorations for all to see and enjoy. Sometimes the tree was a lovely American holly, I was told, but more often it was a local cedar, secured from the abundant forests in the vicinity.
Many of Gastonia’s pioneer citizens lived at the Falls House. My grandfather, G. W. Ragan, his first wife and small daughter lived there for about two years during the mother’s illness. Others such as Police Chief I. N. Alexander, Judge W. H. Lewis, banker L. L. Jenkins and family, druggists J. E. Curry and J. H. Kennedy and businessmen J. L. Robinson, J. F. Johnson, W. D. Barringer, P. T. Heath and family, A. A. McLean and family and James Gallant also resided at the hotel at one time or another.
Another of Gastonia’s earliest hotels was known as the Kee House, owned by C. J. Kee, its proprietor. Opening about the same time as the Falls House, it was a three-story brick building located on the north side of the first block of West Main Avenue, just east of the present seven-story building, formerly known as First National Bank, and later the Lawyers Building. On the second floor was a porch overlooking the hustle and bustle of Main Avenue, or what there was of it in the 1870s and 1880s. Later the Kee House became known as the Central Hotel, and Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Smyre were said to have run the popular lodging. Another lodging house at this time was the Merchants Hotel on West Main Avenue, which was established in 1886, with 16 rooms under the management of J. J. C. Anders. It was likely simply a name and ownership change of the former Merchants Hotel. Finally, in 1888 the Gastonia Hotel Co. was preparing to open for business in a nearby house under the management of D. F. Dixon, the former manager of the old Waddill House, which had been destroyed by fire several years earlier.
After serving the needs of Gastonia and its citizens for almost 40 years, the aging Falls House was demolished in 1915. On its site rose the 4-story Armington Hotel, which many of our older citizens, including myself, remember with pleasant nostalgia. Colonel C. B. Armstrong and R. B. Babington, two of Gastonia’s leading businessmen in the first quarter of the twentieth century, built the Armington. Its moniker was derived from a combination of the promoters’ family names. Like its predecessor, its location near the train station offered weary travelers a convenient place to rest and dine. Patrons said there was probably no better hotel anywhere within a hundred miles. Everything about it was first class for its day. The Armington operated for 44 years, but was finally demolished in 1959 as the needs of travelers changed. Along with its predecessor, the Falls House, it served Gastonia for a total 84 years. The exciting era that was theirs has long since passed into history, but the memory of the two special hotels and the history surrounding them still lingers on.
Armington Hotel circa 1925
Order Robert Ragan's comprehensive book, The Textile Heritage of Gaston County, North Carolina, 1848-2000 from the Gaston County Museum. Click here for more information.
ons that are not completely known to history, Gastonia Station was relocated one mile west on farmland owned principally by Oliver W. Davis, the site of present uptown Gastonia as we know it today (behind the former BB&T bank building, now county offices, and the old seven-story First National Bank building). Other large property owners included the Bradley family, descendants of John McKnitt Bradley, who owned land north and west of the center city, and the Hannas, who had land south and west. After likely giving land to the railroad as an inducement for the move, Davis had much of his property laid off into town lots and sold many of them for as little as $50 or $100 apiece in the beginning. Slowly, people began to come to start a business and build a home. Fortunately for the new town, the landowners were found to be reasonable men who had vision for the future, as evidenced by their willingness to cooperate with the railroad and those interested in buying lots and building a town here. 
Northwestern or more familiarly, the C&NW. With the railroad came business, with business came people, with people came communication and demand for services; and this alternate location with two railroad connections quickly became a village and then a town. 
