From Congregation Town to Industrial City

Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community

Michael Shirley

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780814780862
• eBook ISBN: 9780814739662
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1835, Winston and Salem was a well-ordered, bucolic, and attractive North Carolina town. A visitor could walk up Main Street from the village square and get a sense of the quiet Moravian community that had settled here. Yet, over the next half-century, this idyllic village was to experience dramatic changes.
The Industrial Revolution calls forth images of great factories, mills, and machinery; yet, the character of the Industrial Revolution went beyond mere changes in modes of production. It meant the radical transformation of economic, social, and political institutions, and the emergence of a new mindset that brought about new ways of thinking and acting.
Here is the illuminating story of Winston-Salem, a community of artisans and small farmers united, as members of a religious congregation, by a single vision of life. Transformed in just a few decades from an agricultural region into the home of the smokestacks and office towers of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, the Moravian community at Salem offers an illuminating illustration of the changes that swept Southern society in the nineteenth century and the concomitant development in these communities of a new ethos. Providing a rich wealth of information about the Winston-Salem community specifically, From Congregation Town to Industrial City also significantly broadens our understanding of how wholesale changes in the nineteenth century South redefined the meaning and experience of community. For, by the end of the century, community had gained an entirely new meaning, namely as a forum in which competing individuals pursued private opportunities and interests.

Index

Ackerman, John, 22

Africa, 5

African Americans, 4, 148, 168, 201–2, 212, 215, 236

benevolent associations, 212

and community, 164, 212–13, 221, 235

in crafts, 47–48

culture of, 212–13

and entrepreneurship, 163–64

and Knights of Labor, 213, 218, 221–23

and paternalism, 213–14

and politics, 217, 222–31

and race relations, 222–31

and religion, 212

as slaves, 47–52

and sports, 212

in textile manufacturing, 50, 52, 87–90, 153

in tobacco manufacturing, 193–98, 212–15, 227

agriculture, 4, 7–9, 18, 24–28, 31–32, 33, 35–36, 38–39, 70–71, 142, 144, 147–49, 151, 179, 186–87, 197–98, 212, 227

and artisans, 39, 179

cash value of farms, 34

and Civil War, 132–36

farm size, 34–35, 148

farmers, 102, 106–7, 109, 111–12, 115, 132, 139, 142, 146, 164–65, 186–87, 230

labor, 35

and market, 32–35, 36, 39, 147–48, 164, 254

prices of commodities, 32–33, 36, 90, 134–35, 179, 186

output, 32–33, 147–48, 254

slaves, 35

sharecropping and tenancy, 148, 165, 179, 186, 207, 212, 227. See also names of individual commodities

Alamance County, N.C., 92

Alamance Volunteers, 132

Alberson, Martha, 79

Alberson, Patience, 79

Allegheny True Blues, 132

Allen, S. E., 115, 164, 166–68

Alspaugh, John W., 125, 166, 168, 280n

Alspaugh, Samuel, 108

American Federation of Labor, 231–32

American party, 111, 123–24

Anglicans, 104

Arkansas, 128

artisans (and shopkeepers), 2–3, 7–11, 13, 18–24, 27–29, 31, 36...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ONE The Congregational Community of the Moravians
• TWO The Congregation and a Changing Economy
• THREE Manufacturing and Community in Salem
• FOUR Community Culture in Antebellum Salem
• FIVE The Community at War
• SIX Postbellum Winston and Salem: The Emergence of a Business Class
• SEVEN Workers in an Industrial Community
• EIGHT The Industrial Community: Drawing the Lines of Class and Race
• Conclusion
• APPENDIX A Rules and Regulations
• APPENDIX B Occupational Classifications for Population Sample from 1850 Census
• APPENDIX C Occupational Classifications for Population Sample from 1880 Census
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index