If you were in Salisbury before 1966, you remember Dixonville.

How could you forget it?

But memory isn’t always desire to go back. Nobody longs to return to those good old days.

Who would want to bring back a neighborhood with streets that didn’t know where they were going, with houses that were climate controlled? Not the kind of climate control you’re thinking, though. Not cool in summer, warm in winter. Just the opposite. Hot in summer, cold in winter.

Nobody wants to bring back a neighborhood with houses that let you look down through the floor and see years of accumulated cinders left by steam engines’ picking up speed as they headed out of town. Where you could look up and see the sky. Or feel the raindrops.

Black people in Salisbury lived in Dixonville — or the West End or Jersey City — pushed up against the railroad track, says retired school principal W.O.T. Fleming, because the South was segregated, “and they had no other place else to go.

“Every house in Dixonville wasn’t alike,” Fleming says. “There were some nicer houses in there, but most were rental shotgun shacks, one-room back of the other and all of them crowded.”

He knows. He lived there.

In 1952, when he became principal of Lincoln, one of Salisbury’s two black elementary schools and now the Rowan Vocational Workshop, he says, “I had to live in the community.” That was required.

So he moved into the 700 block of East Fisher Street, on the edge of Dixonville, which had been considered a slum as long as anyone could remember.

“I don’t know anybody who would want to go back to what it was,” he says, “but I’ll never forget where I came from. I’ll always remember. Aspirations and reminders of where you were” often help you get somewhere else. he said.

Remembering, he says, “has kept me humble.”

Jim Dunn, Salisbury native, state planner and inveterate history enthusiast, triggered the memory trip through old Dixonville when he brought a picture to the Post for Saturday’s Yesterday series — and a few days later brought more.

They begged to be seen during Black History Month.

He got the pictures when he was elected to the City Council.

“A pile of trash had these photographs and some old annual reports,” he says. “A city needs space, and the old reports had long since served their purpose.”

But they were history.

And Jim Dunn can’t destroy history. Instead he collects it.

“I asked if I could have them and the city manager — I think it was Harvey Matthias — said yes. So I saved them. And these photographs make it quite clear we did not always live in a booming economy, and things were not always equal.”

A magnifying glass and the car license in one picture dates them — 1958.

But it had been a black neighborhood for a long time before that.

“Look where our major black neighborhoods are and ask why they’re located there,” Jim says. “The blacks didn’t have a choice to live inside the city. They weren’t allowed to. They were forced to leave.”

And Dixonville, as well as the West End in the Old Wilkesboro and Old Plank roads area, and Jersey City, between Mocksville Avenue and the railroad that heads to Barber Junction and points west, were all outside town limits when Salisbury was established in 1753. And still outside in 1877, when the Civil War had been over 12 years.

“They’re inter-city neighborhoods now, but were not in 1753 or 1877. One of the boundaries was Boundary Street. That’s how it got its name.

“And that’s not unique to Salisbury. It was the way it was in most towns. Blacks had to live outside of town, almost like the old cavalry forts out West, where some of the Indians couldn’t live in the fort but would live next to the wall for protection.”

“There was no question that Dixonville was a slum,” says downtown hardware merchant Paul Bernhardt, who was mayor pro tem when urban renewal came to Salisbury.

“It was an area of extreme shanties, roads that were not straight, paths that went up through fields with houses on them,” Paul says.

Water and sewer were minimum and makeshift.

“In the winter,” he says, “they had to cut the water off and put antifreeze in the toilets to keep them from breaking. The houses weren’t heated. The pipes weren’t insulated. It was just a big cancer, right close to the downtown area of Salisbury.

“Most were unpainted. A light bulb or two hung from the ceiling. I would go down often to find people who worked for us, and there was a lot of drinking and fighting and that sort of thing. But there were also nice families, caught by the fact that there were no other places to live.

“I remember giving a program on the high cost of slums and why we had to have redevelopment. The city tax would be $10 or $15 a year, and the cost of servicing the area much higher— oil on the roads, more fire and police costs. The city was subsidizing the area.”
“It’s important for people to know what it was, so we never go back to that again,” Jim Dunn says. “I think most of the people in Dixonville today — and the baby boomers — don’t know where that story began and can’t conceive of the way it was.”
An area like that bred health problems and a higher crime rate, he said. Not that those problems hit everybody.

“There were some nicer houses,” says Tee Fleming, “and as bad as those conditions were, there were individuals who were good citizens and made positive contributions to the life of the city.”

And beyond.

“But it wasn’t easy,” says Rebecca Kelly.

Her husband, John Kelly, was owner of Kelly Construction until 1982, when he went to work for the redevelopment office. Originally he built his family a nice house where the Civic Center now stands. After urban renewal, he built another close to the railroad on East Horah Street, which he was told was the only place he could build because of the business trucks he brought home.

Rebecca stayed home with their five children.

“They weren’t allowed to run in the neighborhood,” she says. “We always had to know who they were playing with. We had a large piece of property there and put up basketball goals and had children come to them. Maybe we were too protective, but usually, if they went any place, I was with them.”

Their oldest, Linda, was among the three black students who broke the color barrier at Boyden, now Salisbury High — and tied for first in her class by the time she graduated. Today she’s a lawyer and commissioner of utilities for the state of Connecticut.

The other four also went to college. Jim, too, is in Connecticut, where he’s in management in a grocery chain. Constance, married to a minister, is a speech pathologist; Michael, an electrician; and Bridgette, the baby, is married to a United Methodist minister and a stay-at-home mother. Her children are young.

Their parents believe urban renewal was good.

“It cleaned up the neighborhood, allowed people to have nicer homes or to buy homes,” their mother says. “And it’s still a beautiful area, with residents who are proud of the neighborhood. Even the name has been changed.”

“Now,” says John Kelly, “they call it the East End.”

Dixonville was one of the earliest urban renewal projects in the nation, says Paul Bernhardt.

“This was a complete clearance. The redevelopment commission bought all the property, took it down to the bare ground, built new water lines, sewer lines, electric lines and streets and sidewalks. And the people in the area had the first priority on buying the lots back.”

A great number of them did rebuild in the area, as did Crown in Glory Lutheran and First Calvary Baptist churches.

“It probably couldn’t be done today,” he says, “because of the desire to maintain historic structures. But a complete slum was removed, and an area close to downtown, close to the National Cemetery, was made into an extremely nice area.”

“It prompted other people to fix up their own houses. I think it was a total success.”

Salisbury has no more areas like Dixonville, though it does have problem places, individual houses and pockets, says Tee Fleming, who’s on the mayor’s neighborhood commission.

“But what we’re up against is a safety housing inspector who works part time and doesn’t have staff enough to get a house improved or taken down,” he says. “So they get boarded up and become hazards, and there’s not enough money to do something about them.”

“Salisbury is to be congratulated,” Jim Dunn says. “So many cities got huge sums of redevelopment money and wiped out neighborhoods and downtowns, expecting new commerce to come in. But it never did. And they had destroyed the basic fabric of their towns.

“Salisbury didn’t destroy its downtown with urban renewal money. Its priority was to remove blighted neighborhoods and provide decent housing for its citizens,” he says, and it did that.

Of 221 structures in Dixonville, 187 were completely dilapidated. Thirty years later, they’re gone because Salisbury, he says, was blessed with early visionaries.

“I’m proud Salisbury has vision and sees problems and addresses them,” Tee Fleming says.