CityView Magazine

Publisher’s Note All roads lead to Fayetteville has gone over my lifetime. In these 60 years, it has grown from a small town to a big city. Sit back and imagine these things, especially if you are not from here or have not been here long: In the 1950s and 1960s, downtown Fayetteville was the commercial retail center of Cumberland County. There were no malls or shopping centers – Eutaw Shopping Center was the first one built in the late 1950s, followed by the King and Tallywood centers. Real estate developer J.P. Riddle predicted that downtown Fayetteville would dry up after he bought the Marsh property on Morganton Road and sold a chunk of it to developers from Charlotte who would later build Cross Creek Mall in 1970. His prediction came true, but Riddle, who died in 1995, would be surprised to see the comeback that downtown has made in the past 10 years. When I was a teenager, there was farmland all the way to Reilly Road on Morganton. There was no mall or All- American Freeway. Morganton was just a two-lane road. Fayetteville Technical Community T College once was a housing site used for soldiers during World War II. Fayetteville Technical Institute (FTCC’s predecessor) and Horace Sisk Junior High School were the first major construction projects there. I was in the first seventh-grade class to enter Horace Sisk, now part of the FTCC campus. Ramsey Street was a two-lane road, 12|April/May • 2009 here was a popular song when I was growing up, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” When I think of that song, I think about where Fayetteville University) was just starting to grow but seemed so far away. The only high schools in Fayetteville were Fayetteville High, Massey Hill High and E.E. Smith High, which were separated by segregation at the time. There were county schools like Stedman, Seventy-First and Hope Mills, but that was it. The high school my father attended is currently Highsmith-Rainey. The rear parking lot was the football field where Fayetteville High played its games until the early 1960s when a new stadium was built on Fort Bragg Road. Back then, Highsmith-Rainey was the only hospital in Fayetteville. The Haymont theater, where a movie was only 10 cents, is now the Cape Fear Regional Theater. Every Saturday, most neighborhood kids were there to watch movies and weekly serials like the Lone Ranger and Captain Marvel. Raeford Road was a two-lane road with a Putt-Putt miniature golf course. The course and L.B. Floyd’s (father of famous golf pro Raymond Floyd) golf driving range were located where the Harris Teeter grocery store is now. The bakery where we bought day-old doughnuts for 10 cents is where the accounting firm Tippett Padrick Bryan & Merritt is now. The Lord has blessed me to have lived long enough to see Fayetteville really grow, and I am proud of how it has grown. When you enjoy the Dogwood Festival this year, look around and think about all the changes that have occurred in this former small town and where it is now.CV and Methodist College (now Methodist Marshall Waren, Publisher

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