Sharing the Memories: Parmelee Special to the Daily Reflector by Fred Harrison
Recording oral history is not often an easy task. Writing it is truly nothing less than art.
In Childtimes: A Three Generation, Memoir, nationally acclaimed children's author, Elosise Greenfield draws from the written memoirs of three women: grandmother, mother and daughter to recount the significant moments of their childhoods revolving around the small Martin County community of Parmele.
Pattie Ridley Jones was born in 1884 and raised in Parmele, a time when lumbermen, particularly from northern states, began coming south and consequently to eastern North Carolina to exploit the region's vast timber resources.
From a simple crossing for two branches of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad at her birth, the spot quickly evolved into a bustling town after 1888 with the arrival of the Parmele-Eccleston Lumber Company and was eventually incorporated in 1893. Another firm, the North State Lumber Company located there in 1895. At one point as many as eleven passenger trains passed through the town daily and for a while Parmele acquired the distinction of being the busiest railroad junction in all of eastern North Carolina.
Of the town's founding member, Jones says," Mr. Parmele made a whole lot of money. Not too many people liked him, not too many white people anyway. Even though he was white, too, he was from the North, he was a Yankee, and they hadn't forgotten about the Civil War. . . He had so many people working for him that he had this special store built just for them . . . He had houses built too, two story houses. Right close to the commissary, they built houses for the white workers and their families and they painted them white. And out a ways from there, he had some more houses built, ten of them, but he didn't have those painted. They were for the black workers and twenty families had to live in those ten houses. That was the part of Parmele they called Sugar Hill."
Born in 1906, Lessie Jones Little was also raised in Parmele, but by the time of her childhood the lumber companies had begun to close down operations leaving only the railroads. As she recalls, "My Parmele was a train town. The life of my town moved around the trains that came in and out all day long. . . Trains weren't air-conditioned in those days, and when the weather was warm, the windows were always open. Black people had to sit in the front car so that whites wouldn't get dirty from the smoke and soot and cinders that blew in the windows from the engine. I remember a train trip I took when I was small. I had on my pink organdy dress that Mama had made for me and I was proud of the way I looked. But the whole time, I had to keep rubbing the cinders out of my eyes and soot kept getting on my dress and every time I tried to brush it off it made a long, dirty streak. I was a mess by the time I got off the train."
Eloise Little Greenfield was born in Parmele in 1929. She began writing articles in the 1960s and is currently author of more than thirty books related to children's literature. Her brother Wilbur Little (1928-1987) a famed jazz musician was also born in Parmele.
Today Parmele is often recalled as the location of a prominent black industrial and high school headed by the late William Claudius Chance. In the summer of 1948, long before Rosa Parks, Chance made an important although little known contribution to the nation's civil rights movement when he refused a railroad conductor's request that he give up his seat on a railway car in Virginia. He was arrested and subsequently sued for $25,000 in damages, the case going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952. While Chance only received $55, the court agreed with him on principal by extending to rail coaches in interstate traffic the non-segregation ruling directed for dining cars in 1950.
The North Carolina Collection is located on the third floor of Joyner Library. Call (252)328-6601 or visit on the web at http://www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/ncc/index.cfm for further information.
Fred Harrison is a staff member with the North Carolina Collection.
