CityView Magazine

FEATURE A Century Ago F rom a distance the early 1900s might seem like an unhurried time in Fayetteville. It was a time when a walk down the tree-lined streets of Green and Gillespie meant a stroll, when chil- dren played with their marbles and yo-yos on front porches and tunes like "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" and "It's A Long, Long, Way to Tipperary" floated out of windows from spinets hidden by the lace curtains. But don't let relaxing images of reading a book on a wrap around porch or tending to a garden full of roses and white spirea fool you. Things were bustling in Fayetteville at the beginning of the 20th century. It was quite the vivacious place. Fayetteville was a center for trade and commerce. One of the best known businesses was Huske Hardware Store, which catered to merchants and travelers by supplying goods from stoves to sashes. Founded by Benjamin Huske in 1904, Huske Hardware became known as one of the central places to shop and gather. Another landmark was the five-story Stein Build- ing, the tallest building in the city in the early 1900s. "It was built in 1917 by brothers Jacob and Kalman Stein and was a department store which mainly sold clothing," said Bruce Daws, director of the Fayetteville Transportation Museum and Local History Museum. Transportation was changing the face of Fayetteville in these decades. It wasn't just the new fangled automobile that 54 | October • 2012 A major flood and a new Army installation radically changed the city BY DIANE SILCOX-JARRETT was making its way through town; the electric street car debut- ed at the turn of the century. It was noisy and scared what most people in town still used as transportation, horses and buggies. It was later replaced with a gas powered street car, which also chugged down Fayetteville's streets for only a short time. However, these jolly, bustling times in Fayetteville came to a stand still at the end of the summer of 1908. Rains fell hard in the region starting on August 25, 1908. That day, a Sun- day, was a typical of late summer in town — hot, humid and muggy. Most Sundays back then people enjoyed the hours aſter church by sitting in the shade and enjoying some fresh peach ice cream one last time before peach season ended. But that Sunday the rains came in the early evening, and the constant hard downpour didn't stop for two days. The Fay- etteville Observer of August 27th reported that 4.86 inches of rain fell from Sunday to early Monday morning. According to Mr. Frank Glover, the local representative of the Govern- ment Weather Bureau back then, "it was the largest rainfall recorded for any 24 hours in the last seventeen years." As the rains continued, the citizens of Fayetteville were likely pondering the possibility flooding on the Cape Fear Riv- er, something they referred to as a "freshet." Some of the older folks in Fayetteville might have had an idea of what was to come having lived through previous freshets — even naming a few of them. The Sherman's Freshet occurred in 1865 when

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