A Man With a Vision

by Claudia Houston, Historian, New Bern Historical Society

New Bern’s history is replete with tales of ordinary men and women who do fascinating and extraordinary things. Our story this month is about a man whose visionary invention could have changed the course of history. Who was this man? Keep reading!

Gilbert and Margaret Waters and their young family in the Fall of 1906. Photo contributed by Jack Waters, Gilbert’s grandson.

Gilbert Stanley Waters was born on October 6, 1868, in Beaufort County, NC to Guilford and Julia Gaylord Waters. He worked on the family farm until age nineteen when he moved to New Bern to work in his brother-in-law’s buggy and carriage business on Broad Street. Gilbert’s parents and family soon followed. In April 1890 Gilbert convinced his father to purchase the business, and in March 1891 it became the “G.H. Waters & Son Buggy and Carriage Factory.” The same year Gilbert married Margaret Mae Scales of Raleigh, NC.

The G.H. Waters & Son factory was a busy and prosperous one. Four buggies or carriages were built and delivered each day. They had customers all over the country and as far away as the West Indies. In January 1892, they began building a new and larger factory at 78 Broad Street (site of the current New Bern Firemen’s Museum) and the family also moved to a new two-story residence next door at 80 Broad Street.

Photo courtesy New Bern Fireman’s Museum

In 1899, Gilbert traveled to Baltimore, MD where he observed a steam powered buggy. He decided to develop a gasoline powered buggy, and when he returned to New Bern, he mounted a 5 horsepower, single cylinder gasoline engine on one of his buggies. He installed a tiller for steering and a chain drive to the rear axle, with bicycle type wheels. He called his vehicle a “Buggymobile.” It was the first gasoline powered vehicle built in the south. In 1900 he demonstrated his vehicle to crowds on Broad Street, scaring horses and people with its noise.

Gilbert had a vision for the sales of his gasoline powered buggy but the banks were unconvinced, deeming it impractical, too dangerous, and too expensive. His father told Gilbert that no one would be giving up their horse drawn buggies for his “contraption.” It is unknown whether any of them knew that across the country Henry Ford had just launched the Detroit Automobile Company after securing $150,000 in funding.  

Guilford retired from the business in April 1903 and the name of the business changed to G S Waters and Sons. During this year, Gilbert built a more advanced model of his Buggymobile by adding a radiator and wooden spoke wheels. He continued to operate the family business until September 1917, when he sold and razed the homeplace and factory to make room for the new fire station. He moved his residence to 131 Broad Street, built a small factory next door and continued to sell buggy and carriage parts and later Corduroy Tires.

Photo circa 1939 of Mr. and Mrs. Waters in Buggymobile. Courtesy of New Bern-Craven County Library

On March 9, 1939, Gilbert was invited to appear on the nationally syndicated radio show “We the People” in New York, NY. Gilbert drove the Buggymobile around Times Square and Central Park carrying local celebrities, and then appeared on the show and started his Buggymobile to the pleasure and applause of the audience. Despite its popular appeal, he remained unable to find financial support to mass produce his invention. Sadly, the Buggymobile remained only an expensive toy.

Gilbert safely drove the 1903 model Buggymobile daily on the streets of New Bern into the late 1940’s. He later donated it to the North Carolina History Museum in Raleigh, where it remains on permanent exhibit. The Waters family had a plaque installed at the New Bern Firemen’s Museum in 2010 to commemorate the Buggymobile’s fascinating history.

On August 12, 2012, Gilbert Stanley Waters was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame. He died on 15 Feb 1950 and is buried with his family in Cedar Grove Cemetery. His family continues to preserve his wonderful legacy.

This plaque installed by the Waters' family outside the New Bern Firemen's Museum, former site of Waters' factory

Thank you to Jack Waters, grandson of Gilbert Waters, for giving us permission to share this information that he wrote in a biography of his grandfather. He has also shared many family photos for which we are most grateful.

At the Forefront of History

by Claudia Houston, Historian, New Bern Historical Society

Abraham Galloway was a slave, abolitionist, spy, recruiter, and political leader who had tremendous influence in New Bern and coastal North Carolina during the Civil War. When he died unexpectedly, he was only 33 years of age. On September 1, 1870, over 6,000 people of both races attended the funeral of this impressive leader. This is his story.

Galloway was born to a white father, John Wesley Galloway, captain of a government vessel, and a black mother, Hester Hankins, who was a slave in Smithville, North Carolina. Galloway was a skilled brick mason and while his owner allowed him to seek masonry jobs, he could not earn the $15 per month his master demanded. Galloway decided to escape. At the age of twenty, he made a daring escape by hiding on a ship loaded with turpentine, fleeing from Wilmington, NC to Philadelphia. There he became an abolitionist and began working with the Underground Railroad helping people escape to Canada. In 1860 Galloway traveled to Haiti to help recruit to prepare for a military invasion of the American south.

Engraved portrait of Abraham Galloway. From William Still's Underground Railroad, p. 150-151, published 1872, by Porter & Coates, Philadelphia

In 1861, Galloway returned to the US and began work as a spy for the Union under Major General Benjamin Butler. He was captured at Vicksburg; it is unclear whether he was released or escaped. He made his way to New Bern and in 1863 he married Martha Ann Dixon in Beaufort. That same year he was able to free his mother from enslavement in Wilmington and brought her to Union-held New Bern.

The Union Army needed troops and General Order No 143 of the US War Department, May 22, 1863, established the Bureau of Colored Troops to recruit and train formerly enslaved people and freedmen to fight. Galloway began recruiting African Americans to enlist in the Union Army, but he proposed four conditions to be met before the men in New Bern would enlist. They were to receive the same pay as whites in the Massachusetts Regiments, the Army had to provide for their refugee families, the Freedmen’s Bureau had to set up schools to teach their children to read and write, and the US government had to agree that if they were captured, they would have rights as legitimate military prisoners of war. These conditions were agreed to, and within days hundreds of recruits arrived. The new regiment was designated the First North Carolina Volunteers (later becoming the 35th US Colored Troops).

Recruiting poster for US Colored Troops

Galloway soon became an important and influential political leader. In May of 1864, he was part of a delegation of five black leaders who met with Abraham Lincoln advocating for suffrage for African Americans. He was one of 144 black leaders who attended the National Convention of Colored Citizens of the US, the most important gathering of African American leaders during the Civil War. By 1865 Galloway had organized a state chapter and five local chapters of the National Equal Rights League. He also helped to lead a freed people’s convention.

In 1868, despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan, Galloway ran for the state senate in the first election in which Blacks were eligible to hold state office. He was one of three Black senators and seventeen Black representatives in the NC General Assembly. Galloway was able to vote for the 14th and 15th Amendments during his tenure and was a powerful advocate for African Americans not only in New Bern, but throughout the north and south.

NC hIghway marker in Wilmington, NC

You can read more about Abraham Galloway’s inspiring life in David Cecelski’s excellent book The Fire of Freedom; and on interpretive panels at New Bern Battlefield Park, 300 Battlefield Trail. Galloway’s daring escape story will also be featured in the Historical Society’s 2021 Ghostwalk.

A New Bern Trailblazer

by Claudia Houston, Historian, New Bern Historical Society

Photo courtesy of https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/battle-samuel-james-1883-1966/

Samuel J. Battle was born in New Bern on January 16, 1883. Weighing in at 16 pounds, he was recorded as the largest baby born in North Carolina. Samuel would eventually grow to be 6”3” tall and over 280 pounds. By the time of his death in New York City in August 1966, the reputation of this legendary New Bern son was even greater than his towering stature.

Battle’s parents were born into slavery, and he was one of nine siblings. As a teenager, he was caught stealing money from the safe of his boss, I.H. Smith. His boss did not press charges because of his friendship with Battle’s father Thomas, a Methodist minister. Smith predicted Battle would be in prison within a year, but Samuel was determined to do everything in his power to prove him wrong.

Battle went north and had several jobs, including as a $32/month red cap at Grand Central Terminal. Influenced by his brother-in-law, Moses Cobb, a police officer for the City of Brooklyn, Samuel decided that he too wanted to become a police officer. Though he was initially turned down for the job, in 1911 Samuel J. Battle became the first Black to be appointed to the 10,000-member force of the newly-merged New York City police force.

Battle faced enormous discrimination in the department – years of silence, ostracism, even death threats. Initially assigned to the West 68th Street station, he was not allowed to bunk with the other officers at the station house, so a mattress was moved to the second floor, where, though isolated, he studied for the Sergeant’s exam. Although he was passed over three times, he would later become the first Black Police Sergeant (1926), Lieutenant (1936) and Parole Commissioner (1941). Battle served on that commission for ten years, finally retiring in 1951.

Fiorello LaGuardia, 99th Mayor of NYC and Samuel J. Battle in 1941. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube

While on his first beat in the San Juan Hill section (where Lincoln Center is today), tourists on sightseeing buses would stop and gawk at NYC’s first Black policeman. Undaunted by racial barriers, Sam served heroically and with distinction. In 1919, he rescued a white police officer during a battle with rioters at 135th and Lenox Avenue. In 1935 Battle helped to quell a riot in Harlem which was started by the arrest of a 16-year-old shoplifter. As a Parole Commissioner, Battle initiated rehabilitation programs for the delinquent youth of Harlem.

When Battle retired from the New York City Police Force in 1951, he was the highest-ranking Black on the force at that time. In 2009, the corner of West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York was renamed Samuel J. Battle Plaza in honor of his achievements. That street corner marked the location where Battle saved the white officer’s life during a racial skirmish in 1919.

But there’s more to this story. As part of my research with the New Bern Historical Society, I recently created the Battle family tree in Ancestry, an online genealogical site. I was contacted by a woman named Tina Lechner-Gibbons, who shared this wonderful account:

Photo courtesy AP, NYDailyNews.com

"On Friday, June 19, 1925, my mother was 5 years old and living in Brooklyn. She, her brothers, and her mother were walking home from the store when a tragedy happened. Her mother was killed by a trolley car. A kind policeman helped the children - he stayed with them and took care of them while everything was going on around them. In 2006, when my mother (that 5-year-old girl) was lying in a hospital bed dying, she started to tell me about that day and the policeman. She remembered, he was a big black man and his name was Officer Battle. She kept talking of his gentle way - his kindness and how she wouldn't forget him. Mom died a few days after that, I never forgot what she told me, and today while I was writing some of our family histories, I researched that officer and found his story - then searched on Ancestry - and found this tree. I just want to say what I'm sure my mom would want to say - Thank You."

If you want more information about this amazing man's four-decade odyssey, read his biography by Arthur Browne, One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York.

Independence Day in History

by Claudia Houston, Historian, New Bern Historical Society

Courtesy vintageholidaycrafts.com

We always enjoy reading about how the New Bern of yesteryear loved celebrations and parties. What better time for festivities than the Fourth of July? We all have recollections of the Fourth of July - parades, baseball, barbecue, and fireworks. Was it always so? Here’s a look at how – and when – the Fourth of July was commemorated in days past.

Congress declared independence from England on July 2, 1776. John Adams thought that would be the date that the country would celebrate. On July 3, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:

“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.—I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

John & Abigail Adams, courtesy New England Historical Society

Two days later, delegates from the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence which explained their reasons for declaring independence. It would not be ratified until later, but July 4th would evermore be the date upon which the country would celebrate.

In 1777, after the news of the ratification, impromptu celebrations took place in various villages and towns though this was not widespread. Although Congress was still occupied with the ongoing war, Philadelphia held the first annual commemoration of independence on July 4, 1777. None of these celebrations were official.

John Lewis Krimmel: Independence Day Celebration in Centre Square, Philadelphia, courtesy Wikimedia

On June 24, 1778, Congress gave official recognition to the day and appointed a committee which arranged for a celebration. In 1778, New Bern was the site of the first celebration in North Carolina under federal authorization. On July 4, 1778, Richard Cogdell wrote to NC Governor, Richard Caswell:

“In celebration of this day, great numbers of guns have been fired at Stanley’s wharf and Mr. Ellis’ ship, three different firings from each, early morning, midday and evening and Liquor given to the populace. Stanley and Ellis seemed to vie with each other in a contest as to who would do the most to honor the day, but Mr. Ellis had the most artillery.”

This is believed to be the first observance of the fourth of July as Independence Day in North Carolina, and the third celebration in the nation, following those in Boston and Philadelphia.

How did New Bernians celebrate the 4th of July in other years? In 1826 Independence Day opened with a 50-gun salute. At midmorning, soldiers and townspeople assembled at the Academy Green and then proceeded through the town to the Baptist Church where they heard a patriotic oration followed by a reading of the Declaration of Independence. That afternoon at the Masonic Lodge on Hancock Street, a gala dinner was served which included thirteen regular toasts and twenty additional toasts to the President, our nation, and various organizations and leaders, among others. The day ended with fireworks display in the evening while bells were rung, and guns fired to end the day.

What are you be doing this Fourth of July? Whatever it is we hope it is with … pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illumination as John Adams foretold. And take just a minute to reflect upon the fact that our little town was only the third in the nation to celebrate the official Independence Day – amazing, don’t you think?

Happy Independence Day everyone!