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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview B-0054-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Born in 1904 in Monroe, North Carolina, John Raymond Shute found success in business and politics in his hometown. In this interview, he discusses nineteenth-century North Carolina history and his own experience contributing to the development of Monroe and Union County. Shute offers a great many details on county governance in Union County. Selected passages focus on the development of roads and farms and broader claims about the area. Researchers interested in other developments, especially the specifics of county governance, should read the interview in its entirety.
John Raymond Shute looks back on a century of growth in Union County, North Carolina. Drawing on his many years active in politics there, Shute shares his considerable knowledge about the agricultural and industrial development in the area.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is the interview with Ray Shute. Let's start with your family. You said you had one fellow who was in the wagon train in the 1870's and came into Monroe.
You're talking, I presume, about my grandfather, John Shute.
John Shure, right.
John Shute was born in Lancaster County, South Carolina, in 1824.
Together with his family, which at that time was three children, Mary,
Henry and Raymond, and his brother Sylvester and his wife, he had
started to Mississippi. The first day they traveled eighteen
miles—that's the distance from their home which was in Tabernacle
community of Lancaster County—to Monroe. Monroe was just a young town at
that time, only eleven years since it had been chartered. Like all other
towns of the period they had a camp lot, and travelers, which, of
course, was by buggy or wagon, always went to the town's camp lot to
unhitch and feed and spent the night. And everybody in town always went
to the camp lot to see new strangers. That's the way they got
information about other parts of the country. Well, they came to the
camp lot in Monroe, which was located at what is now the corner of
Church and Franklin Streets in Monroe, and unhitched and set up for the
night. It was pouring down rain, and the people in town, the leading
citizens, came to the camp lot to see who they were and to meet them and
talk with them. Among those who came was the largest merchant in Monroe
at that time, John D. Stewart, who later was to become a very dear
friend of my grandfather, John Shute. Dr. Welch was another one who
came. I mention him for this reason: his son, the late John Welch,
Let me back up and ask a few more detailed questions.
All right.
What did John Shute do in South Carolina before he made his move?
He farmed. He was just a young man. As a matter of fact, when he came to
Monroe he was only thirty-one years old. And he had farmed down there.
Where he lived, it was a rural community. Now he did have a little store
later on over at Taxahaw, which is just a few miles away from there. As
a matter of fact, my father went down there and ran it for a short
while, and he'd sleep in the back of the store. It was a one-room store.
But I remember driving down there many times and looking at it. My
father would show it to me. We went all over that country in a horse and
buggy in the old days. But the walls were just filled with gunshots.
I've seen the Funderburk name.
That's an old German family that came into this part of the country at a very, very early period.
Let me ask you another question about the wagon train. When he moved up to Monroe, did your grandfather then have people down in Cheraw and Camden that he could make contact with?
Oh, he had contact, yes, with I think they called them forwarding agents.
In other words, they would arrange—as they did not only for him but also
for others, too—shipments both ways. Like any transportation even today
by air or however, the only profitable transportation is two ways. So
those forwarding agents in Cheraw and Camden would arrange and make
contact with merchants and others to ship goods, mostly cotton, down the
river and to bring supplies back up the river. You can imagine what-all
was brought up the river, not only supplies for stores, but this was
open country and pioneer country, and they brought in all manner of
things: spinning wheels, furniture, almost everything. It was a thriving
industry. Then there were companies, primarily in Charleston, that
handled the trade from there on up, coastwise shipping. The greatest
shipping merchant in Charleston was Henry Laurens. He had a fleet of
ships. By the way, Laurens County, South Carolina, is named for him. So
these were the contacts that John Shute made, and it worked both ways.
Then he had his contacts with merchants in Charlotte and here in Monroe,
and he brought their supplies to them, too. It was necessary in those
days to have companies like his own, wholesale and retail groceries, to
in turn supply these little rural stores, say, twenty by sixty feet, out
in the rural areas that furnished the fundamental and basic supplies for
farmers. When they got ready to buy things like fertilizer or flour or
heavy groceries or farm supplies, they'd come into the store
I know there were a lot of hogs that were running the woods, especially in the northern townships and part of southern Cabarrus County and Stanly County. I know in a lot of places they'd have hog drives. I'm wondering if this wagon train had anything to do with that hog economy or whether it was completely separate and tied …
No, I don't think so. I think the development of the swine business was
more or less a natural evolution of the average farm. This county was
not a large slaveowning county. As a matter of fact, this county, from
its inception in 1842 until after World War I, was a pauper county. We
received more aid from the state and federal government than we paid
back to those two agencies in taxes.
In that connection, did you ever hear of John J. Hasty? He was sheriff at one time and had been a stock dealer.
Hasty was the leading Republican figure in this county. His son, Herndon Hasty, later worked at the Monroe Hardware and the post office. You see, back in those days most of your postal officials, your civil servants, were Republicans, for obvious reasons. The national government was Republican. Hasty was the sheriff, and a very good sheriff, I understand. That was before my day. I don't personally remember anything about him. I know who he is, of course. Herndon, his son, was a very popular man. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he was a very famous baseball player, and played semi-pro ball after he came back home. He was influential in forming a small semi-professional league in this part of the country, and he played on it, too. As a matter of fact, I was mascot of that team in 1908.
Let's go back to the railroad. You said when the railroad came through, that destroyed the wagon trade.
That's right.
What, then, did John Shute …
He concentrated then on his numerous enterprises here in Monroe and his
store. It was a tremendous store. They did a tremendous business. The
ceiling was about twenty feet high. It was an arcade
Was he involved in cotton shipping at the cotton platform?
Not at the cotton platform. The cotton platform was not a facility that
bought and sold cotton. It was the official weight station of the
county. That was owned and operated by the county. Now there was and
is—it doesn't function anymore—a Union County Cotton Warehouse, which
was a separate corporation, and they stored cotton. But we had cotton
buyers—they were called brokers—all over Monroe. You'd come up here in
the fall of the year, and you couldn't drive a buggy or later a car up
Hayne Street or Jefferson or Franklin Streets or this Windsor Street
because of the cotton wagons. I mean they just choked the thoroughfares.
Well, those buyers would give a man a bid on his cotton. If it was
accepted, he gave him a ticket. He took that ticket and his bales of
cotton to the cotton platform. There it was officially weighed, and the
cotton weigher was an official of the county. He got the correct weight
and left the cotton there in the name of this buyer who had bought it
and got a
I've got a picture I'll show you sometime that was taken in 1902.
Right.
I forget which street it was on, but it showed the cotton platform and then the line of wagons …
Oh, yes.
… going off in the distance.
I've seen lines of cotton a mile long. Yeah.
Now is that when the farmers would then buy a lot of their goods?
Oh, yes, they'd take those cotton checks as a rule and go to the
wholesaler that had been supplying them through the year and pay up his
bills. That'd be his first thing. The second thing they'd do, his family
nearly always came to town with him when he brought his cotton, and they
would do their shopping. The womenfolks would buy piece goods and
buttons and thread and needles and things that were needed around the
home. Later they'd go to the store and
So that's when J. Shute and Sons would do a lot of its business.
Oh, yes, yes. Yes, indeed. We became the largest store of its kind in Monroe.
What were some of the other businesses?
Besides the groceries and hardware?
Yes.
You had four livery stables. That was a big business back then. And
adjacent to all the livery stables, you had blacksmiths' shops. That was
an important thing, too, far more so than just shoeing horses and mules.
They also repaired wagons and buggies and things like that. All the
livery stables sold wagons and buggies. Then you had another industry
called harness making, which was quite a big thing because every horse
and mule had to have a set of harness. More than one set, because the
draft animals would use one set of harness for draft work, and then when
they were changed to a light wagon or a buggy you'd use an entirely
different set of harness for that. That was a big industry, too. And
that in turn backed up the
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
The farmers had to raise the feedstuffs for these livery stables. These were tremendous operations. It was so involved. You not only had the sale of horses and mules. You had the blacksmiths' shops, which were necessary; you had the harness makers, which were necessary; you had the financial part of it. Most of the livery stables financed their own sales. Then they sold buggies, and we got to the point in Monroe where we manufactured our own buggies and we manufactured our own wagons. We had the Cotton States Wagon Company, we had the Piedmont Buggy Company, and it was a rather involved thing, a never-ending thing, you might say. That was probably the peak of that type of economy in American life. This was with the coming of the railroad and then a quarter of a century later the introduction of the gasoline engine, the automobile, into the American economy, and you had a gradual and constantly accelerating evolution of what we called the mechanical age, as distinct from the industrial age. Monroe was here at the peak of the draft animal period and the horsepower setup. But, as I say, it was just so involved; one thing was dependent upon another, and our whole economy was based on, I reckon you'd call it, this agrarian and rural type of living.
You mentioned something that I want to find out a little more about, and that's financing, how that was done.
Nearly every stable had a bookkeeper, who was what we today probably
would call a sharpie. I mean he handled all the business transactions.
The salesman would sell the horse or the mule, usually. Say, for
example, he was sold for three hundred dollars, but maybe the farmer
didn't have but twenty-five dollars in cash. Then he would take a note
for the difference. They'd work the interest out, and the method of
payment. These payments, obviously, were not monthly payments, because
the farmer's income is not monthly income; it's annual income. So these
were usually arranged in terms of what he had planted and what today
we'd call crop loans, like the Piedmont Production Credit and other
agencies handle today. The livery stable quite often would take a
mortgage, not only on the mule that it sold, but quite often on the
crop, too. These notes sometimes would extend over a two- or three-year
period. They'd work all that out with the farmer, and then he would give
his note. And, oddly enough, in those days credit was not very risky.
The old saying that "A man's word is his bond" was more truth than
poetry. And when a man shook hands with you and promised to do
something, the chances were about ninety-nine to one that he'd do it if
it was humanly possible to do it. And if it wasn't, he'd go to you like
a man and tell you why he couldn't do it. So business was based upon
that, and there wasn't too much loss on credit. There was some, of
course, because some people just naturally couldn't operate their farms
in a businesslike way and would go broke, and there was nothing that
could be done about it. So in those cases, there would be a loss
involved, as a rule; sometimes there wouldn't be. Not only
Did financing …
There was very little of it done at banks. The banks offered credit, and the more affluent farmers, the larger farmers, a lot of them would go to the bank and borrow the money because they found it was cheaper because they could get it at a lower rate of interest. But the banks primarily financed the stores, the merchants, who in turn extended credit to the farmers. That was the cycle.
What were the interest rates?
In those days? It would run around anywhere from six to eight percent.
That was from a grocer to a farmer?
No, no, those rates would run higher than that.
I see.
They'd run higher. They'd run nearer ten percent, quite often. It would depend on the community and what the margin of profit on the commodity was at that time. But it would run a little higher.
I know that there were several men in town who were worth a great deal of money and, for example, bought the bonds on the courthouse in 1886.
Right.
How did they handle that money? What kind of things did they put it in, and what would they do with it?
You mean what would they invest their money in?
Yes.
The opportunity for investment has always been available in America. Most
of the local men of affluence in Union County would put their money into
personal loans and into real estate, the development of real estate,
rental property, and things like that. There wasn't too much investment
in stocks and bonds, unless they were local in nature. You mentioned the
courthouse. That would not be considered an unusual thing to happen at
all. Then as we later developed a few small industries, stocks were
purchased by people who were able to. But mostly it was in the form of
personal loans and development of local investment opportunities in real
estate and farming. And a lot of these fellows would finance
sharecroppers, where they would furnish the money to buy fertilizers and
the seed and stuff like that, and the farmer out there with the land and
the livestock and the labor would furnish the other. They'd usually work
this out on sharecropping, usually a fifty-fifty basis, which was a good
investment, apparently, for both parties. This was particularly true
immediately following the Civil War, when the slaves were emancipated,
in the South. This was not so much true here, where there was a minimum
number of slaves, but throughout the South, the tenant farming, the
sharecropper, was the only economic system that would work. People don't
realize that; they frown upon it today, and indeed they should, because
it's something that's outlived its time. But after the War, there was no
money in
About the time that we're talking about here in the 1870's and '80's and '90's, a lot of the counties in the Piedmont went to the legislature and got various kinds of fence laws and stock laws passed.
Right.
Do you have any sense of what the purpose behind those was?
Yes, As we developed more cattle… That would be your swine; you were
referring to that, and to the mules and horses. We didn't raise any
mules and horses to speak of in this part of the country. It was mostly
cows and swine. In the old days, we raised sheep. We don't raise any
anymore, commercially, but we used to in the old days. Not having been a
farmer, I don't have firsthand information, but the fencing laws created
a great deal of antagonism between the dirt farmers that didn't raise
cattle and those who did. The ones that raised cattle felt like the open
land—out west they
About that time, too, the county government especially began to reorganize the system of building roads …
Right, right.
… and a lot of people would come and petition to have a private road declared a public road.
Right.
And then you could call people out for a two-mile radius along the road
to work on it. Do you have any sense of how the
The merchants were in favor of roads and good roads—all-weather roads,
they were called—where the farmer could bring his cotton to town to the
market and carry his supplies back without getting hub-deep in mud in
the wintertime and covered with dust in the summertime. But the road
business reflects the history of a county and a community. Later on,
after the state highway system was developed, you can tell the counties
that had members of the State Highway Commission, because they had more
good roads emanating from their county seats out into rural areas to
bring those people into, say, Wadesboro instead of Monroe. You had that
sort of thing, which I presume was more or less natural. But the
building of roads is in itself a special field of study that would be
very good for somebody to get into. It went through an evolutionary
period. First were the landowners themselves. Said Bill, "Let's improve
the road by your farm and mine to the church." And their sons and they
would go out and work up a fairly passable road. They ran into problems
when they got to streams, because they didn't know too much about
bridge-building. They usually had fords. Then that went on, and then Tom
Jones on the other side of the church decided, "Is it all right if I
extend this road down across my property? I'll, of course, keep it up."
Yeah, it was all right, unless he was a bad character, and that wouldn't
be often. So this sort of thing. You developed a bunch of purely private
roads, you might say. Then later on, this thought was extended by these
people who were maintaining the roads going before the county
One thing I noticed in looking through some of the records was that about the same time a lot of these roads were being built, a lot of times where there was a crossroad of these public roads, two things would happen. One, the local people, especially large landowners, would get together and whatever small merchants happened to be in the area, and get the polling place moved to that crossroads.
That's correct.
Then they'd go get the common school. If they could pick it up and move it, they'd move it, and if not, they'd build another one, but they'd have to go to the commissioners to get permission to do it.
That's correct.
Do you remember these kind of trading centers, where they would be?
Oh, sure, sure. They developed far beyond that point in the early days of
the telephone. They'd put in an exchange. You'd have to holler yourself
sick to get to some of these rural exchanges. But you take communities
like, say, Olive Branch way up in the northeastern part of this county,
or the little crossroads up the Concord road called Brief. These little
places had telephone exchanges, and they were tremendously important,
especially in terms of law enforcement, reaching doctors for medical
assistance, for fires and the sheriff's office and all this, that, and
the other. Prior to the coming of the telephone, which was quite an
event, most of the counties were organized into townships. This county
had nine; it still does. They're not significant now, but in the
Let me go back to the township organization for a minute. It sounds to me like a lot of these townships were organized into neighborhoods which are centered around a particular church, and sometimes the large landowners also happened to be elders of these churches.
Right.
What can you remember about that, and how do you think that changed and when?
All communities, in my opinion, are dependent upon transportation. You
will notice, if you go back far enough in any area, that with the coming
of the railroad, for example, people tended to move from strictly rural
settlements, maybe around a church, which in turn would cause a country
store to be located. These people would build for their sons and
daughters up near the railroad. In a
The churches remind me of one other thing I wanted to ask about, and that's the movements to control liquor trade and traffic in the saloons.
I don't reckon we'll ever solve that intellectually. We go through
cycles. I remember my father saying that in his home—and the home still
stands up here, over a hundred years old—they always had a quart of fine
whiskey on the mantelpiece, and that was for the preacher. When the
preacher came around, especially in the winter in the cold, wet days
when he was making his call, you always fixed the preacher a toddy. I
often wondered, on these winter days when it was real cold and he made a
lot of calls, what shape he was in
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
… went through a period of total abstinence, where it was considered
sinful to drink whiskey at all. Then the Anti-Saloon League, with people
like Carrie Nation and the others on a national basis, eventually
exerted enough political pressure first, to abolish the saloon, to
replace it with a dispensary. As the name implied, they dispensed
alcoholic liquor on medical certificates and things like that. Then when
the First World War conscripted millions of young Americans, the people
that did most of the drinking, and they got them out of circulation,
they had an
In the mid-1880's, the county commissioners got the law changed by the General Assembly so that saloonkeepers here in Monroe had to have a recommendation through the freeholders. What that meant, as far as I can tell, is that the set of men that had been saloonkeepers before were gone, and they were replaced by a set of men connected with merchants in Monroe, one of whom was John Shute.
He became what today we would call a member of the city council. I think back then they called them commissioners. Then at one time they called them aldermen; when I was mayor, we had a board of aldermen. But yes, he took an active part in nearly everything, as far as I'm able to determine from the information within the family that I have.
Do you have any idea why they wanted to control it that way?
I don't know. There was a natural resentment. I think this was more
manifest immediately after the Civil War than any other time. In this
part of the country, there was an evident distaste for any type of
federal tax. This was true particularly in regard to whiskey and
tobacco. Tobacco stamps used to be put on the wooden boxes that held
plug tobacco, for example. That was the big tobacco item. There were no
cigarettes back then, and very little cigars. There were a few cheroots,
so-called; they were handmade, rather rough-type cigars. Mostly plug
tobacco, and nearly everybody chewed. My father chewed tobacco. You'd
never know it unless you could see him sometimes, which was very seldom,
expectorate. But those boxes that held the plug tobacco had the federal
stamps—they were narrow blue stamps—stripped down the side. Father said
that he knew practically all of the rural merchants. After they'd sell
that box of tobacco down to just a plug or two, they would then, instead
of going to the post office and buying new stamps to go on a new box of
tobacco, do one of two things. They'd either fill up that empty box with
tobacco, using the same stamp, or they'd soak that stamp off and put it
on another box. That was a common practice. I'm sure this was also true
with barrels of whiskey, where the stamps were on the exterior of the
barrel. The resentment. I presume that the federal government put so
much pressure on the states, and the states in turn on the counties,
about the liquor tax and tobacco tax. This was the main source of
income, when you stop to think that neither the federal government nor
the state had income taxes or sales
Let's move on to about 1900. I guess 1900 was the reestablishment of the Democratic Party, really the establishment of progressive government programs and reorganization of government in this state.
The Democrats took over from the Populists. In 1898, our congressman from this district was a Populist. He was a Baptist preacher from Polkton.
What was his name?
I don't recall. I ought to, but I don't. Incidentally, when the Populists
tried to come back and they saw the wave of the
What did the general political change mean for Union County?
We adjusted to it, of course. We had no choice, really. But we turned toward the Democratic Party in preference to the Republican Party, I presume because of the fact that there were still at that time thousands of Confederate veterans in this county. They influenced politics much more so than we realize and did up until World War I. The Confederate veteran's opinion was always sought, and he was a leader in his community. Most of them were rural people. If you were running for office, you always went to these leaders in the rural areas, and invariably back then they would be the Confederate veterans. I think it was perfectly natural in this particular community that we would become Democratic rather than Republican, because the Republican to us was a new thing, and it had the taint of Populism, which almost overnight had become very unpopular.
Do you remember anything about the building of the UDC
I don't remember the actual building of it. I remember more Decoration Day every year. The UDC's would decorate it with bunting and flags and flowers, and they'd always have some outstanding person—the Governor, if possible—deliver a speech there, and everybody would go. That was a big thing, and it was centered around that monument.
You were born in what year?
In January of 1904.
What was it like growing up in Monroe?
It was very pleasant. It was a good town to grow up in. Life was slow and easy, friendly. There were no social problems that were of any significance, and there was no bustle and hurry of the larger city. Everybody knew everybody, and life was good. People trusted each other, and the little spats that the womenfolk quite often would have, and some men, as a rule didn't amount to too much. They were not too serious.
What kinds of things did you do?
Almost everything.
When did you start to school?
I started to school in the fall of 1910.
Was it a common school?
No, that was Monroe Graded School. That was set up in 1900. We had a boarding academy here before that. They had a fire, and I think three of the students were burned to death. I went through graded school and two years of high school. Then I went to Georgia Military Academy, and I graduated down there.
What was the classroom day like in the graded school? What kinds of things did you do?
We'd do a lot of the things that they do today, I presume. It would depend on the period where you were, whether you were at the age when you went out in the woods and gathered colored leaves and made displays out of those, and then there was a period where the colored crayon came into prominence, and you'd draw things and have collections of drawings, and then you'd have clippings out of magazines and papers and things. The teacher was usually fairly well trained, not like they are today; some teachers probably had never been to college themselves. There was no central heating. There was a pot-bellied stove in every room, and a couple of boys would be appointed each week or month to keep it going. Sometimes they'd slip firecrackers into the stove and things like that. There was no inside water-going sewerage. You had your outhouses back a good distance behind the school, and every Halloween the boys would dynamite those. They would go around and take people's front gates down and put them in front of the steps and ring the doorbell. It's a wonder somebody hasn't broken a leg, but they never did. They got to where they'd look for it. One year they took the principal's buggy and took the wheels off and got it up on top of the school building and put the wheels back on it. I never could figure out how they did it. I wasn't in on it. Just pranks, mostly. At recess, we'd play baseball, catch, and basketball, pretty well, I reckon, like they do today.
How was the day organized? Did you have periods?
Yes, we had periods. We had a little recess and a big recess. The classes
usually ran about forty-five minutes, and we changed classes. I don't
know why the teachers didn't change, but
Did people see a big difference between this graded school and the academy that preceded it?
Yes, we thought it was quite an improvement. We had regular curricula, you see. Under the academy, I think, it was more or less left to the headmaster to work these things out. But with the graded schools, as the name implies, they were actually graded and the curricula set up for each grade on a progressive basis. We thought it was much better. We thought that was quite a step forward.
Why did you think it was a step forward?
We thought education was a progressive science or procedure and that it
wasn't just a conglomerate of information that you threw together. For
instance, in mathematics you should start off with arithmetic, and you
should gradually work into algebra,
So you felt that that kind of an education, where things would be organized …
Ultimately, all secondary school curricula are dictated by the
requirements of our colleges. It got to the point where a student could
not enter college unless he had certain courses. If the school didn't
give those courses, he either had to make those courses up at the
college, which quite often would have provisions for doing that,
especially N. C. State… It was a land grant college, and many of the
boys that went there had never had a foreign language, for instance, and
never had gotten beyond the multiplication table or the Blue Back Speller. Consequently, they had to provide
facilities for them; as they went along with some of their freshman
college studies like English and things like that, they also had to make
up these other courses that they lacked on the entrance requirements. So
ultimately I think you could truthfully say that the colleges dictate
the curricula employed by the public schools.
Would you say, then, that the graded school was sort of a
Yes, I do. I think it was part and parcel of the growing-up pains of a
rural community. And this was reflected into everything, Wayne. If you
had gone to church long enough, over a long period of time in years, you
could see the evolution of the sermon along different lines. The sermon
becoming a little more what we might call liberal, where you would
question certain things as "Maybe this is symbolic." This is not actual;
we don't think Lot's wife actually turned into a pillar of salt, but
maybe the writer meant so-and-so. That became permissible. I remember
when it was not permissible. But it was part and parcel of the whole
thing. And then the nation; we were growing up, too. We began to create
news on a national basis. We developed our wire service so that the Charlotte Observer or the Monroe
Inquirer would get news from the same source, from New York,
Washington, so forth and so on, through the telegraph, which was a new
thing. Then we began to develop national organizations, your civic
service organizations, your veterans' organizations, your professional
organizations, even things like the medical society. These things began
to appear, so that we developed not only a national consciousness, but
this was reflected into the states and into the local communities. My
boyhood and young manhood was a thrilling period to live in, to see
these things unfolding right before your eyes and quite often not even
realizing it until years later. But we were building a nation and we
were unifying a nation and establishing a set of values that should have
been maintained,
It sounds to me like the people were being taken out of these old neighborhoods and their local connections and moving into new kinds of organizations, making new connections. It sounds like a general reorganization of society.
I expect this is probably true, that we were refashioning society along somewhat different lines. Yes, I think that would be fair to say that.
What would you say would be the general characteristics or the general principles of this new society? How did it differ from the old society that had preceded it?
The old society was simplistic, overly so. It was a society in which
there were bona fides. I mean if a question arose in a
school or a social group or just an informal group of people talking,
for instance, about something that the group considered important but on
which there was no unanimity of thinking and they wanted an answer, a
positive answer was always available. We lived in a period of positivism
and not relativism, and we went to the preacher. There was never,
really, but one educated man in the average rural community, and that
was the doctor. He was the only man that had been to college. Most of
the preachers had never been to college. Most of them mistook a case of
indigestion for a call to preach and became preachers. In the case of
the Baptist Church, all it took to get ordained was to get three
preachers to ordain you. We went through a period of that changing. That
all occurred during my lifetime, when the Methodist Church, for
instance, wouldn't accept
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
We're going to talk a little bit about the twentieth century this afternoon, and I think maybe the best way would be to start off talking about Mr. Shute's career and what he did before we talk about public issues and policies. As I understand it, you started out in cars first.
That's correct.
How did you come into that, and how did that get you started?
I don't know that it did actually get me started, because I didn't get
under way too well before there was a turn in the economy. I got in the
automobile business along about 1925, I believe, and it did bring me in
touch with Henry Adams, and the two of us together built the first
airport in Monroe, on the Waxhaw Road, which operated for several years.
We built seven planes, and we were the competitors of Pan American. We
were a little bit larger than they were at that time. They were based
down in Miami, and we were the opposition bidders against them for all
foreign airmail contracts. We always underbid them, but we never did get
any. I finally went to Washington and talked to the Postmaster General
and practically accused him of shenanigans with Pan American, giving
them the contracts at the maximum rate, which was two dollars a
pound-mile. We had bid what
About when was this?
That was beginning in 1926. For about three years, I was involved. The
panic in '29 caught all of us. As a matter of fact, I sold my automobile
business about that time on credit. (I might say, parenthetically, I
never got a penny for it. The local hospital, which was municipally
owned, was leased to this doctor from South Carolina who was a very good
surgeon, and he brought two other surgeons with him, and they had gotten
in terrible financial condition. Dr. Mahoney asked me to come as
business manager to try to get them out of debt, and I did. I went over
there and stayed for nearly a year and got them in fairly good condition
and then left them. In the meantime, all the banks closed, and
everything went to pot.)
What years was that?
We opened that airport in '46 on a ten-year lease with a ten-year option,
which we exercised, and we built the buildings out there, too. That was
located where the Monroe Mall now is, that property in there around
Dickerson Boulevard. It was a very fine operation. My oldest son was
killed flying out of that airport. He was a licensed pilot, and he was
studying for his commercial pilot's license when something went wrong
with his plane. I had bought him a plane from the Royal Canadian Air
Force. As a matter of fact, we bought three of them and sent up pilots
who flew them back down here and sent them through our repair depot and
had them licensed in America. They were excellent planes, and I had one
of those for him when he came out of the Air Force, not as a pilot but
as a tail-gunner. He was in the Far East in the Air Force and didn't get
a scratch until he got back, and he was killed shortly after he got
back. But you were talking about my career. I became interested in
construction. Of course, being a member of the Shute family, I would. My
father The American
City and the Governmental News and The Southern City, and I was quite active. I was not
eligible for membership in the League then; I later became interested in
it when I was mayor, and I was elected President of the North Carolina
League of Municipalities, and I did still further work in the idea of
the independent city, the free city, and also in zoning. I got the city
to… I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Maybe I should go back and say
that after I went to the Senate, I didn't run for re-election. I got the
idea that if a person really wants to go into politics to be of service
to his fellow man, it looked to me like the place to do it was at the
local level, because that's where the people were and that's where the
problems were. I had planned to run for Congress, and I gave the idea
up. I was Chairman of our Congressional Executive Committee for this
district, so I ran for and was elected to the Union County Board of
Education and became Chairman of it. There I strove to get some measure
of help—not equality, but help—to the black citizens of the county.
There wasn't a single brick building in the county devoted to black
education. There was only one high school; that was in Monroe in a frame
building down on Maurice Street. We had abandoned a brick school at
Marvin over in the extreme western part of the county, and I finally got
the Board of Education to set up West Union High School for blacks. I
had the honor of delivering the first commencement address there when
they graduated their first class. The people there objected very
strenuously to it, although a couple of years later they thanked me for
it, said they were able to get the best tenants they had ever had on
their farms because of the good
When did Mrs. Roosevelt come down?
Come to Monroe? My guess would be along about 1939, and it is a guess.
You can document that, because it's on the record. But she was
fascinated with it. We also had a sewing project for the young girls.
We'd rented a home—I think it was on Windburn Street here in Monroe—and
they made clothing and things for the Red Cross. In the meantime, I
served as Chairman of the County Board of Health, I think for ten years.
After I served on the Board of County Commissioners, that's when I was
elected Mayor, in 1947. I immediately put in a retirement system there
and enacted zoning for the first time. We got a crew down from the
Graduate School of Government at Chapel Hill, and they stayed in the
fire station here. (Incidentally, I converted the fire department from a
volunteer to a professional department.) These students made a complete,
definitive study of the city and its needs. We got the town of West
Monroe—that's what we called Icemorlee; that's where the Johnson Mills
and Mutual Industries are—to vote to give up their charter and come into
the city, which they did. We got what had been Camp Sutton, that area,
to come into the city. Previously, Benton Heights had voted and gave
their charter up and came into the city. So that when the census of 1950
came around, Monroe went into the 10,000-population class for the first
time. But I'd like to go back just a bit, to my administration as
Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners.
Let me go back and ask you some more specific questions.
All right.
You've been on and been in on a lot of different things.
I sure have touched a lot of bases.
I think the thing I'd like to start with first is something that's been
interesting to me. I've read the county minutes and I've also read the
newspaper for the period from 1910 to 1920, and so I've got a little
more information about that period than some of the other
Right.
Several different banks opened up, and savings and loan associations opened up, and they openly advertised for working men to put their savings into these banks. At the same time, several insurance companies opened up, and for the first time the courthouse was insured. Then along about that time, around 1910 or so, the county began to borrow money from the outside for the first time …
Right.
… which I thought was interesting, because that then used the resources of the government to pull capital into the local economy and then let the people with money here go ahead and invest in other things here.
Right.
I just wonder what you remember about that period. You kind of got in on the tail end of it.
Well, yes. I started out rather young in life as a businessman. You see,
I married when I was only twenty years old, so I was up and going in my
twenties. As a matter of fact, I was elected President of the Chamber of
Commerce when I was only, I think, twenty-two years old. That was in
1926. I had the honor of being elected President a second time twenty
years later. Obviously, I remember a lot of the things that were done,
the bringing of a creamery to Monroe back in the twenties. We got the
idea early in
How did the nature and structure of finance change? Did the ways you borrowed and lent money change at that time?
You mentioned the bringing in of foreign capital. There was very little foreign financing that I was aware of in Union County back in the early years. Everything, nearly, was financed locally. You see, this was the aftermath of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. The southerners couldn't borrow money anywhere, and they were discriminated against by their own government, and you couldn't get federal money into the South hardly under any pretense whatever. We sort of inherited the idea of going it alone in this part of the country. This was carried on through, and we never really got into the public stream, so far as financing was concerned, until after World War I. And then we did the best we could. We made a play for New England mills to move down here because of our low taxes. We had the lowest utility rate in the country, and we had the cheapest labor available, non-union labor. These things attracted thousands of new industries all over the South, and some of those came to Union County. Really, though, in addition to that particular period, the next period of dynamic growth of Monroe was the period fol …
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
… the impression I've got from reading this stuff is that it all hangs together as a piece. It's not just a few men out to make bucks and a few people over here to do good in the church, but it has a pattern and a movement and it hangs together.
I think that's true. I was commenting on the next important surge in the
life of Monroe, the post-War period. As I say, Camp Sutton did for
Monroe what Camp Greene did for Charlotte. It furnished the impetus for
a forward surge that in the case of Monroe, and certainly of Charlotte,
too, has never diminished. It gave us not only that, but in the case of
Monroe, the War years, through necessity, pulling together and
cooperating with the Government, gave us a new sense of identification
with our own federal government. We had always been sort of negativists
when it came to considering the federal government. It was kind of like
the Bible saying, "Nothing good comes out of Nazareth." We didn't feel
like anything good came out of Washington. But this thing, working with
the Government the way we did, changed our attitudes toward the
Government. Instead of working so often, as we had in the past, at
cross-purposes, we learned the art of cooperation and of developing
friendships and contacts at not only the state level but the federal
level, which just brought tremendous rewards to Monroe. Not only that,
but it gave us a spirit of confidence that we could do almost anything
we set our minds to, and I think this has paid tremendous dividends to
this city and county. As I mentioned some time back, I found early in
life that the men who
I've noticed that in the records.
We never were politically oriented to the extent of…
Essentially, what we've got here is, from 1900 through 1940—I guess you really can't count the Depression—you've got an agricultural redevelopment, a transformation of the agricultural economy, and then after 1940, you've got an additional transformation …
Industrial development.
… of industrial development. Do you think that one is contingent upon the other?
To a great extent, yes, but perhaps more psychological than otherwise.
One of our slogans in putting this across—and by the way, we got the
people to vote a small tax on themselves to pay for this; it was almost
infinitesimal; it was three cents or something like that—our goal was to
have one industrial employee from every farm family in Union County. We
stressed this continuous, until I think it got to the point where people
believed it. The employment practices of the mills we brought in
confirmed it, and found that by scattering their labor, they were never
available in large enough numbers to attract the unions. You get a lot
of people living in one community, one mill village—I'm not anti-union,
please don't misunderstand me; quite the contrary—they're natural
objects of concern and of exploitation, too, sometimes, by labor unions.
But scattering these people out all
Let me back up and ask some specific questions about the earlier part of the century, because I'm really interested in how this infrastructure is built and how that in turn facilitates the development of the agricultural economy. I'm particularly interested in taxing powers and special districts for schools and roads and bond issues. Let's start with taxes. I've paid real close attention to the tax levies, as they were made by the Board. There's a problem in that I don't have the figures for the amount of assessments in the county, so I don't know exactly what the tax base is that these levies were being made on. But it appears, from 1900 through about 1931, that two things are happening. One, a tremendous number of bond issues are being passed, and then the Commission got the power to issue road bonds without having to have an election.
Right.
Which created a tremendous debt. Then at the same time, it would appear
that taxes are being made more and more regressive. That
As the title "ad valorem" implies, there's no way to
discriminate in the levying of ad valorem taxes. Well,
there is one way, and that is in the value of the property that you are
taxing. The rate has to fall uniformly on everyone alike. No, if I were
going to guess in terms of Union County, I think I would take the
opposite position. In North Carolina, the counties set the tax value.
The cities have to accept those values and make their local levy in
terms of that. I don't know if it's changed—I reckon it has—but up until
just a short time ago, a bond election in this county had never failed.
Our people had always voted for them, because usually, as you mentioned,
the early bond issues were for local roads, local schools, which they
built then on a local basis. Now they do it on a county-wide basis. We
had not yet, in the early years of this century, developed the sense of
uniform taxes—by that I mean county-wide taxes—to pay for something that
was specifically local in nature. In other words, a county levy to build
a school, we'll say, in Olive Branch. The fellow that lives twenty miles
away in Buford Township is willing to support that issue and pay the
additional debt service in the form of an increase in the ad valorem levy, when his children are not going to
participate in it at all. But they learned to consider that the time
would come when Buford would need a school and would like to have the
support of the New Salem people to build it on a county-wide levy basis.
And these special districts. Incidentally, there was a time when a
township could levy taxes. We've passed through that now. We still
Yes, that's true, after '31.
We would have paid the $42,000 off, but the people that had them had six percent bonds, and they wouldn't give them up, and they didn't have to, the way they were drawn up. Six percent on a county bond back then, that was something; that was an unreasonable rate. We don't bat an eye to think that the United States government is paying twice that much for bonds today.
Let me ask you about the Board of Equalization. The County Commissioners were set as the Board of Equalization through most of the twenties and the thirties. I wonder if you could tell me how it was conceived. What did people think the purpose of the Board …
The Board of Equalization and Review's function is to take complaints,
petitions, applications from people or groups of people who think there
are certain tax inequalities that need special consideration, that
they're out of line, that on a comparable basis x acres of land in
such-and-such a state of cultivation, as compared with y over here in a
similar situation, have a disparity in value, we'll say, that they
consider unreasonable, and they think it should be adjusted. This Board
has the authority to make this adjustment. Then, too, the man who, we'll
say, inherited a little house and is retired and trying to live on
Social Security has the opportunity, with no other source of income, to
go before this Board and ask for relief under the Homestead Exemption
Provisions of the state law. This Board can recommend to the Board of
County Commissioners that he get, we'll say, a $5,000 value
consideration in his specific case. It has no relation to anything else;
it's a personal matter. They have
About 1931 there was a considerable controversy. Everybody was more or less agreed that property values needed to be devalued at that time.
Right.
They were, in fact, declining, and so the assessments needed to be
devalued. The controversy arose over whether property values should be
reassessed on the basis of an individual tract, considering one piece at
a time, and that was the position of the merchants
I think they were probably right morally. However, under state law, the
Board of Equalization and Review, the Commissioners, could make a
uniform increase or decrease right across the board. That is legal, but
it's not recommended because, obviously, all land is not going to
increase or decrease the same. Even land that looks identical—it may be
in the same general area—would have a basis for different values. So I
think the merchants were right in insisting that it be considered parcel
by parcel. But as I say, on the other hand, it's perfectly legal to do
it the other way. That's the easy way and the less expensive way to do
it. I don't approve of it. I don't think it's right. I don't think it's
fair. In other words, you take right
Let me ask you about some of the other development things that were going
on. About the time that all the new roads and the new schools are being
built and the physical things are coming into place, at the same time
the Board of Commissioners is creating an
Do you mean the similar setup to civil service, this sort of concept of salary schedules and increments and things like that?
Yes. Some of the old employees, like the clerk and the register of deeds, had been on a fee system, and they were transferred to a salary system.
Right, yes. The transition from the fee basis to the salary basis was a
most difficult period. It's practically over now. There was a time when
the sheriff of this county, back when it was an agricultural county, was
one of the highest-paid sheriffs in North Carolina. That was due to the
fact that he didn't draw a salary. He drew a commission on taxes. The
collection of taxes was put into the hands of the high sheriff, and it
was his responsibility to collect those taxes, and he got a certain
percentage. And God, it ran to a fabulous fee. The thing that brought it
to a head was a lawsuit that we brought against a sheriff that had been
in office many, many years and was an excellent police officer. But he
was a man who was almost illiterate. I don't think he stole anything,
but his department was twenty or thirty thousand dollars short. This
brought the county up face to face with the fact that this wasn't the
place to collect money, especially when it was in the hands of a man who
couldn't hardly add a column of figures. So we created the County Tax
Collector, whose sole duty was the collection of taxes, and this turned
out to be a bonanza. It took several years to adjust these
That brings up another thing I wanted to ask about
Right.
I understand that there was quite a controversy over that, especially
involving
There's a difference of opinion on things like that. Being completely outside the judicial system, I really don't have the real knowledge of the problem from both sides, and I don't think it would be fair for me to express an off-the-cuff opinion about something that I'm so abysmally ignorant about. We reworked the entire court system, not only of Union County but of the State of North Carolina. We put in appeal courts below the Supreme Court, and we set up a completely different system. There was a great deal of complaint, and I think most of it was justified, about the j.p. system, not specifically this, that, or the other, but the system itself. Some effort has been made to clean that up. I'm sure that a lot of it has been cleaned up, and maybe there's a good bit more to be done. That's about as far as I could go on it, because I'm not familiar enough with it. I'm out of touch with that phase of the courthouse.
What about the
Right. The County Auditor came along about the time that this change in
the tax setup came along. I think those moves were excellent, every one
of them. I can't think of any man that's exerted more desirable
influence over farming in Union County than
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
Mrs. Lee was Superintendent of Public Welfare and an excellent one, and I
think I should defer to her. I think so much of her and think she did
such a wonderful job. By the way, you might be interested in knowing
that her father, the late Roland F. Beasley, who established and was
Editor of the Monroe Journal, was the first
Superintendent of Public Welfare in North Carolina, so it became a
family tradition, almost, didn't it? I don't know of anything about that
department since she left it a few years back. Who was the other officer
you asked about?
The Home Demonstration Agent.
Oh, I have the warmest spot in my heart for them. I don't even know who
the Home Demonstration Agent is today, but I do know this. My wife
drives me on weekends out in the country. I like to see things growing,
and I've gotten now to where I can't see them. But my wife and I talk so
much about the pride that's been instilled into rural homemakers. I
remember the day in Union County when you wouldn't see a grass lawn in
front of a rural home. They kept it without a blade of grass, and they
kept it swept off until it was just smooth dirt. I don't know if you
remember that period or not, but every home was that way. There was no
lawn at all, no shrubs or flowers or anything like that. The Home
Demonstration Agents—that's another one of Mrs. Roosevelt's
programs—were able to create these Home Demonstration Clubs in every
school district in the county. Back then we had thirteen high schools in
Union County—not schools but high schools—the same number that
Mecklenburg had. They had a Home Demonstration Club in each one of
You mentioned canning clubs. The counterpart of that for boys was the Boys' Corn Clubs.
Yes.
Were those around when you grew up?
I wasn't in on that. Also, later, the Agriculture Department put on a program for raising steers and swine, and I think the banks bought the steers for the youngsters. That was handled, I believe, through the 4-H Clubs. They raised them, and at the end of a certain period—I reckon it was a year—at the county fair they were judged. If I'm not mistaken, they got a dollar a pound for whatever the prize one weighed at the time of the judging. But there was a good bit of that done. These are things that were done all along. We put on poultry specialists. We put on this, that, and the other type of specialist under Tom Broom, and then, after he was gone, it was continued. We at one time were the largest poultry county in the state. I think the largest egg-producing county. We're still up near the top. We're the largest turkey-producing county. When I was in the legislature, we had passed over into the period where we were, you might say, self-supporting. We were no longer a pauper county. At that time, we had the highest percentage of home-owned farms of any county in the state, and one of the lowest acreage. Our average farm was only forty-two acres. But the people on those farms owned them, and they did the work on it; they didn't have tenants. Very few tenants in this county.
One thing I saw in the newspaper: I'm not really sure what to think about
it. There is no microfilm of the newspaper before 1910, so I had to
start there. From 1910 through about 1918 or '20, there was a
considerable amount of crime and violence reported in
Was that the Houston or Fletcher?
I think it was the Houston house. It came as, evidently, quite a shock to the community.
That's true. That sort of thing didn't occur very often. I remember
several cases of rape, but it's rather funny; the ones that I remember,
there were only whites involved. When a black raped a white woman in
those days, he usually had a very difficult time being arrested. Quite
often he'd be killed before the sheriff ever got him. I mean it just
didn't happen. But I do remember several cases, some of which, I'm sure,
were not truly rape cases. I remember one that occurred in Morrisville.
A schoolteacher and this young man went out on a date, and she came back
and couldn't get in the screen door and had to wake up the people in
whose home she lived. She was so disheveled, they commented on it, and
she said the boy had raped her. He served a prison term for that, and
I'm sure if that screen door had been unlatched, there never would have
been anything said about it at all. You had things like this that
occurred. I served as foreman of a
They commented in the article, said "This is unprecedented." This kind of thing hadn't happened.
It is. It very seldom happened. You must realize, too, that before World
War I we lived under a much stricter code of ethics than we live under
today. There was not this permissiveness that's so rampant today. I'm
not establishing any value judgments on the social behavior today, but
I'm simply pointing out that we live in an entirely different society
culturally. Back then, the least little thing that was out of the
ordinary was considered pretty bad, but a rape case was just
intolerable. That was just something that you couldn't hardly conceive
of occurring among white people. The only thing you could think about
would be a black who had gotten drunk or was out of his mind or
something like that and did a thing like that, but you just couldn't
consider things like that in that period of time. So if they said
something was unusually bad, by today's standards, with the exception of
rape and acts of violence, you might not consider them too bad. I don't
think we ever had a period as bad for rapes and deeds of violence as we
have today. I mean it's terrible, I think—I really do—and I'm fairly
liberal in my views about a lot of things, but it's pretty bad today.
It's
Let me ask you one sort of general question about the Depression. It's my impression, after reading the Commissioners' minutes, that one of the major problems that hit the government and consequently the county here after 1931 was that the county had floated so many bond issues, had begun that, really, after World War I, that they had built up a tremendous debt service that they had to pay …
Right.
… which amounted to about half of the property levy. Suddenly, in '30 and '31, the principal started coming due on a lot of these debts.
Right.
I wondered if, at that time, you had the sense that was maybe partly a self-created problem. When these bonds were floated, the rationale was if you build the infrastructure, that would expand the tax base …
Right.
… and thus the expanded tax base would pay off the principal without having to raise the taxes.
That was the problem that confronted all governments from the federal on
down, and the formula that was usually applied is almost what you've
just said;
Yes, that's what I thought. I haven't found any bonds that were ever repudiated.
No, you won't; you won't find it. And not only that, but the fine farming
facilities of Union County provided a means of sustenance to the vast
majority of people living in the county. Nearly everybody had a garden
back then, had chickens and things like that, and we were able to
weather the Depression. Nobody had any money. There was no money in this
county. But there was no indebtedness to speak of, either, from
individuals. Some of them owed, naturally. But we got out of the
Depression far better than most counties in North Carolina, and it was
because we were so well provided for from our own farms. And people
helped each other, not only within the family, in the neighborhood, but
otherwise. There was a feeling of obligation. And you were able to buy a
lot of food for one dollar.
There was a real serious problem with the tax collection, from what I can tell. In 1935, the Commissioners proposed putting the sheriff back on a fee basis, and you opposed that, right?
Right.
What was the rationale of the Commissioners for wanting to do that?
I don't actually know—I don't think I ever talked with any of them—but I presume it was because the tax collections had fallen so low that they probably thought they could save a dollar or two. Now that's rather crass, but that could be the reason. I can't think of anybody in that period of time actually wanting to go back to a fee basis for the sheriff. I don't think the people would have stood for it, to begin with.
Yes, according to the Commissioners' minutes, they proposed that, and then you came back a couple weeks later and said that you had at least fifty citizens who had complained already, and they weren't going to stand for it.
Right.
So it was dropped.
It created a good bit of heat while it lasted, I mean the comment. I remember that.
Do you feel, then, that the county government did about as well as it could do under those circumstances?
Oh, I think so. It was not the best board we ever had in that particular
period, and it wasn't the worst. These people were all people of good
will who wanted to help. They quite often did the wrong thing.
Politicians are prone to do that. They're not always right. But I don't
know, looking back on the various problems that confronted them. They
were not competent to furnish answers to problems that were plaguing the
federal and state governments at
One thing I wanted to ask you about the commissioners. I haven't been able to keep track of the occupation of every single commissioner, although I know quite a few of them, but it's my impression that very often there was an attempt to kind of balance the commissioners so that there was a mix of merchants and farmers on there.
There have been many efforts through the years, not only here but
everywhere else, to try to get a fair mix geographically, urban and
rural, in some cases nowadays a feeling that we ought to have a woman on
the board, we ought to have a black on the board, this sort of thing.
Through the years, there's been an effort to do that. There has been
through the years a certain amount of antagonism, even, between the city
and county. I mean the people themselves have not had the spirit of
cooperation between the city and county governments that should exist,
because what's good for one is good for the other. This would be my
greatest complaint of local government today, the lack of cooperation
between the city and county governments. But I do think there have been
honest efforts to mix them. I think the present Board of County
Commissioners,
Let me ask you one more thing. I really haven't gone into this in any detail in the newspapers or anything, but I do know that between 1957 and 1965 there was a considerable amount of racial controversy in the county. Without going into any great detail, do you have any sense of where that came from or how it originated?
Oh, I suppose so. We had always thought that we had done very well in
struggling to get into the new integrated society that was being built
in America. We thought we were doing fairly
Do you have any sense of why other people chose to follow them, then?
Well, I've about exhausted my questions here for the time being.
I appreciate your taking the time to do this. I'm all for it. I think it's wonderful.
END OF INTERVIEW