West Durham

706 Ninth Street, 12.21.69 (Courtesy The Herald-Sun Newspaper) 706 Ninth Street was built in ~1936; it initially housed the Andrews Furniture Company, followed by the West Durham Furniture Company. By the early 1960s, the building appears to have been vacant, but was soon reoccupied by Custom Interiors and the Neil Upholstery Co. In 1971, Godwin Dance School became a tenant

1916-1920 Perry were built in the late 1920s, extending the strip of older commercial buildings at the corner of 9th and Perry eastward. The 1914 Perry building initially housed the West Durham Electric Shoe shop. 1918 initially housed Hawley's barber shop. By the 1940s, 1914 housed Cole and Crumpacker General Contractors, and 1916-18 housed Check...

1920 Perry Street may have been the earliest non-mill-related masonry commercial structure built in West Durham, constructed prior to 1907. By the 1920s, the building housed the Andrews Furniture Store., and by the 1930s, the upstairs, accessed through a stair on the left side of the building, housed the United Textile Workers (AFL Local 257), and...

700-702 Ninth Street was among the earliest commercial masonry structures built in West Durham, located at the corner of Hillsboro (later Perry) and Ninth, where the streetcar turned from Ninth Street towards Broad. It was built between 1907 and 1913. In 1926, it housed Brewers Drug Store in 700 and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (the A...

Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian, 1924 The Blacknall family, both Richard, Jr., who, with his father, Dr. Richard Blacknall, had organized Blacknall's Drugstore and his brother James, who was the first sheriff of Durham County, started the Presbyterian congregation in West Durham in 1892 as a mission, based from First Presbyterian downtown. The...

St. Joseph's, 1920s. (From "From Paternalism to Protest" by Tiffany Franke.) St. Joseph's Episcopal Church was established as the outgrowth of an Episcopal mission in West Durham established in 1894 -which would become the second Episcopal parish in Durham, the first being associated with St. Philip's downtown. William Erwin taught Sunday School...

Part of Mill No. 4, and the mill village stretching westward, 1910s. The somewhat larger red-colored structure in the center of the mill houses was the West Durham Presbyterian Church, the precursor to Blacknall Presbyterian. (Courtesy John Schelp) It's hard to know what 'units' to use in describing the portions of the Erwin Mills / West Durham...