I was up in Richmond visiting a family friend in a rehab facility recently and took the trip as an opportunity to stop off to visit "Soul City," North Carolina. It was a housing project borne of the very 1970s idea to have a largely (though not exclusively) African American community. There was some HUD funding for the housing, health care, and manufacturing project, which was located on the site of a former plantation. A late eighteenth century house is at the center of the development -- it's now on the National Register of Historic Places and I guess is a community center. The planners -- including North Carolina politician Floyd McKissick -- hoped that the project would offer housing and jobs to thousands. Here's a pamphlet that explains a lot of the hopes for Soul City. There are, I guess, dozens of homes and some apartments, too, there now. The roads have names like "Liberation," "Freedom," and "Soul City." One street is called White and another Brown, too. There's also some nice park space, with tennis courts and a pool. It's not nearly as desolate as I'd been led to believe it would be.
Maybe to me the saddest part of this is that there was one manufacuring building put up there -- along "Soul City Boulevard," also known as NC State Road 1151. (That's useful to know the "official" name of the road, because if you're looking for "Soul City Boulevard" as I was this weekend your GPS probably will only recognize State Road 1151. Or maybe it's just that my GPS is behind the times.) The building is now part of the Warren County Correctional Facility. Yup, what was built to provide jobs is now part of the correctional facility. Anyway, I think it's highly worth a trip. And sometime soon I'm going to talk about the part of my trip that invovled a visit to nearby Warrenton, the county seat of Warren County. There's a whole different set of things to talk about with Warrenton, which was founded in the late eighteenth century.
I went there knowing that I wanted a couple of pictures, particularly one of the concrete "Soul City" sign, which is in the upper right of this post. Don't get much more 1970s than that, now, do you? The other picture I wanted was the "Soul City Blvd" roadsign that graces the cover of Devon Fergus' Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980. So far as I can tell, the latter was on the corner of NC Highway 1151 and Manson-Axtell Road. It isn't there any more. And in fact it wasn't easy to find "Soul City Boulevard." My gps didn't recognize that -- it thinks of the road as NC Highway 1151.
One thing I was thinking about is how close this road is to another one that I write about on occassion -- Blackhead Signpost Road. There's quite a bit of history from 1831 to 1972, that's reflected in those very different road names, isn't there? One hundred forty-one years apart (and about an hour-and-a-half if you're driving it today) -- but very, very different ideas.
If you want to see the one remaining roadsign that says "Soul City Blvd," it's on the corner of US Route 1 and NC Highway 1151, not far from I-85. I hope to spend some time up there sometime soon. I'd be particularly interested in knowing how the people who live there think about this place and the dreams of its founders.
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