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From Hotel to Home: Selma sisters preserve the past
from February 2024
by Johnston Now
By Jamie Strickland
Growing up inside a hotel made for an unusual but extraordinary childhood for the children of the Ricks family of Selma, who owned and operated what was once the Merchants’ Hotel across from the Union Depot from 1944-1963.
The building, later referred to as Ricks Hotel, no longer stands, but the memories are alive and well with sisters Hilda Ricks Sullivan and Josephine Ricks Talton.
Their mother, Letha Noble Honeycutt Ricks, purchased the hotel on March 4, 1944 after learning about its availability at a church meeting and borrowing the $3,500 it cost from her parents. She ran the hotel and its dining room while her husband, Leon Thurston Ricks Sr., operated Selma’s first taxi service. The family lived in their own quarters inside the hotel.
Talton’s memory may be failing her in some areas, but she retains vivid memories of playing at the railroad station and meeting lots of interesting travelers, including Johnston County native and celebrity movie star Ava Gardner, who her father once drove in his white Plymouth taxi car.
“To this day if I hear a train blowing its whistle it brings back memories, just like that,” she said.
The two-story, 20-room hotel was built in 1904 by a group of local businessmen. Each room had its own sink but there was only one bathroom with a tub and toilet for the guests to share. Under the ownership of the Ricks, the hotel served as a regular respite for many World War II era soldiers going to and from assignments and railway workers traveling to Selma throughout the years. It had one phone located downstairs, and Talton remembered the phone number as 5-0W because it was displayed on the side of her father’s taxi.
“The men would always want to stay in their same room each time,” Sullivan said. They paid just 75 cents per night and the telephone service cost two dollars per month.
The men loved her mother’s home cooked meals, and Sullivan remembers helping out in the kitchen from as young as five years old.
“She was the best cook,” Sullivan said. “We would make wild blackberry jam and pick blueberries in jars. I remember peeling peaches and mother would make pickled peaches. I would help her set the table.”
The children got used to having railway men around as they grew up. “They were just like family almost,” Talton said. And the safety of the children was never a concern. “It was a different time, you could trust people then.”
The hotel even had a permanent resident who was living there when the Ricks’ took over the place and remained until it was torn down. The sisters remember him only as Mr. Gurley, and that he owned a local fish market and loved their mother’s sweet tea. They laughed as they shared memories of making what they called “Gurley tea.” “We ran out of tea one time, and Mr. Gurley asked for some. So Jo took the leftover tea from people’s glasses in the dining room and poured it all together and served it to him. Jo was happy because he gave her a big tip, and she used it to buy candy at the train station.”
Talton (Jo) described herself as a rambunctious child, walking along the railroad tracks, riding her bike with local children hanging on the back, and playing in and around storage buildings in the back of the hotel.
“I would get out there and swing and jump from building to building,” she said. “They’d come out there and tell me to stop and I’d just hide until they left and then I’d be right back to it. I loved it down there.”
“She was definitely the ring leader,” said Sullivan, who is five years younger than her sister. “All the kids loved to be around her.”
The family had five children in total, four sisters who grew up at the hotel and one brother who was born after the family moved into a home that still stands in Selma in the area of Ormond Plaza on Pollock Street.
The oldest sibling was Patricia Ricks Byrd, who was 15 at the time the family took over the hotel. Followed by Talton who was 10, Sullivan who was 5, and Kay Ricks Strickland who was a newborn.
When the hotel was torn down in 1963, the family salvaged building materials such as bricks from its five chimneys, and its pine floors and beams and used them for new construction. Talton’s Selma home on Old Beulah Road was built using those materials, as was a duplex building near the downtown area, which the family built and rented out for extra income. “Mother was always thinking of how to make money,” Sullivan said. “She always said all she ever wanted was to be a wife and a mother, but she did so much more.”
Sullivan has many memories of growing up in Selma and recalled a different way of life.
“The grocery stores would set up on the street to sell their produce, and Mother raised her own chickens,” she said. “I remember we entered our sister Kay in a baby contest and she won!”
She added that she’s working with the Johnston County Heritage Center to produce a book about the hotel and her memories of growing up there, and is taking pre-orders from anyone who would like a copy.
To place an order, call 984-213-1004 and leave a message.
