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The Dormancy of the Street Railway Eric Schichlein
A
t 11:00 am on the eighteenth day of April in the year 1939, a parade of streetcars trundled towards the car barn in downtown Wilmington.1 They were packed with local dignitaries and the lead trolley was driven by a veteran of the company, W. B. ‘Tuck’ Savage. With this short celebration, nearly half a century of history came to an end. In 1888, “a system of horse-drawn street cars” arrived in Wilmington courtesy of the Wilmington Street Railway Company (Howell 170). Later that year, Wrightsville Beach was connected to the city for the first time. The Wilmington Sea Coast Railway Company ran locomotives from “Front and Princess streets” in Wilmington via a trestle to “the Hammocks” (Howell 171). 2 At the time of their construction, Wilmington was one of the largest cities in the state, with a population of 20,056 in 1880 (US Census Bureau 467). Wrightsville Beach had yet to even be incorporated; it was merely a small collection of cottages, nowhere near the resort town it would become. Four short years after the horse-drawn streetcars were introduced, they were phased out. In a sign of modernity, the entire trolley system was electrified. Accompanying this, a generating plant was built by the company to power the system and the town. The man responsible for electrifying the system was Hugh MacRae. He purchased the company from John D. Bellamy with the help of Northern financiers. MacRae, though, was a native Wilmingtonian like Bellamy. His father, Donald MacRae, was a successful local businessman. Primarily, he owned the Wilmington Cotton Mills, but he also had interests in banks, railroads, and real estate in Florida and Western North Carolina. As his father aged, Hugh gained greater control of Donald’s businesses and began shaping them into a burgeoning empire. Upon his father’s death, he assumed total control and began expanding his portfolio through the founding of companies to dabble in his various interests. Through these companies, he exercised a paternalistic influence over entire towns and shaped their future through development projects. 1 A note on vocabulary, street car, street railway, and trolley are all used interchangeably throughout this paper. Essentially, all three terms refer to a wheeled vehicle that travels along tracks inlaid in the streets of the city. 2 The Hammocks was the name, at the time, for Harbor Island, one of the two islands that make up Wrightsville Beach. Harbor Island is located on the Intracoastal side and Wrightsville Beach proper abuts the ocean.
The Consolidated Railways, Light and Power Company, otherwise known as the Consolidated Company, is one such company; it played a significant role in the development and modernization of Wilmington. MacRae formed the company by orchestrating the North Carolina General Assembly to pass a bill ordering the Wilmington Gas Light Company to, “‘consolidate with the Wilmington Street Railway Company or with the Wilmington Seacoast Railroad Company or with both’” (Davis 5). Under his leadership, the Consolidated Company was used as an instrument to develop the Hammocks, a barrier island group owned by the company. This strategy had two prongs: extending the trolley system and encouraging the use of it. Therefore, the company built the first and only trestle across from Harbor Island to Wrightsville Beach proper before continuing southward along the island. Importantly, the only way to access the island was the streetcar system. At the end of the line, construction was begun on the Lumina, one of the defining attractions of the island for decades to come. The Lumina encompassed a “dance hall, … bowling alley, restaurants, and movie theater.” Lighting the exterior were over 1,000 incandescent light bulbs which they claimed: “sailors navigated their ships by” (Eades Our State Magazine). The luminescence of the pavilion exaggerated or not, indicates that it served as a shining advertisement for a future defined by electricity and it was a powerful incentive for the streetcar which monopolized access to the resort. At this point, Wrightsville Beach had only recently incorporated itself in 1898 and had a yearround population of only 22 people (Census Bureau, 1900 Census, 467). From these humble beginnings, the town would go on to become one of the premier resorts in the region, a heritage clear today. The golden age of the Lumina Pavilion coincided with the golden age of the streetcar system. It survived for barely a decade after the automobile replaced the trolley. In 1940 Tide Water Power, the new name of the Consolidated Railways, Light and Power Company, submitted to the North Carolina Utilities Commission, the regulatory body that oversaw the company, a request for “the abandonment of electric railroad service in and between the city of Wilmington and the town of Wrightsville Beach” (NC Utilities Commission Report 1939-1940).3 52 years after its inception as a horse drawn street car system and 48 years after 3 In 1940, the commission was renamed the North Carolina Utilities Commission from the North Carolina Corporation Commission.
Fifth World
