Snow Building

The following will be a lengthy comment providing historical background on Anna Exum Snow and Horace North Snow, who were the original developers of the Snow Building. I am their great grandson, and my father, Col. Beverly C. Snow, Jr., was their grandson. He passed in 2016, but had left these accounts of each of them with me. I'm hoping this information will be of assistance to others in their research. 

Horace North Snow. Sr. - Paternal Grandfather

He was born in Ohio in 1843. It is through him that my descendants and I can trace our lineage back to passengers on the Mayflower who landed at Plymouth in 1620, specifically to both William Brewster and Stephen Hopkins.

As a Corporal in the Union Array during the Civil War, he served in the White House as Abraham Lincoln's telegrapher, recalling that the President would come into the room, spit tobacco juice, and ask for news from the battlefront.

Our branch of the Snow family had moved from Massachusetts to Ohio as the nation expanded westward. My grandfather made a further move to North Carolina, where he met and married his second wife, Anna Exum. They had four children: Horace North Snow, Jr. born in 1885; Richard Wright Snow born in 1890; Beverly Carradine Snow born in 1893 (52 years separated my father and his father); and Mary Exum Snow born in 1896. 

The family lived first on Gattis Street, and then on Chapel Hill Street in Durham. He spent much of his working life in the tobacco industry, although he never smoked. The children were not permitted to play cards or roller skate on Sundays and were required to go to the Methodist Church (now called Duke Memorial and located downtown on Chapel Hill Street) twice on those days instead. My grandfather saw me for the first time in December 1923 when my parents brought me in a basket by rail from San Francisco to be baptized in that church at the age of three months. He died in Durham less than a year later, having been struck by an automobile after stepping off a street car. He had established a family plot in Old Maplewood Cemetery near the mausoleums of the Duke and Wright families, and is buried there with my grandmother, my parents, my father's syblings and their spouses, and two of my first cousins who died early in their lives. The white cross at the head of the plot, which is now full, has the family name on it.

My father told me everything I know about him.

Anna Exum Snow – Paternal Grandmother

Born in 1861, she came from one of North Carolina's oldest families, the Exums, whose beginnings in the state considerably pre-dated the Revolutionary War. When she married my grandfather, who was 18 years older than she, her family gave them some land as a wedding present which eventually became downtown Durham. Later, during the 1930s decade, she built an office building on part of that land. That building exists today. The family no longer owns it, but it is still called the Snow Building.

She was the first woman member of the Board of Trustees of Trinity College, which became Duke University. She told my father that when Mr. Washington Duke proposed to the Board his plan to transform Trinity College into Duke University with many new Gothic buildings of the type seen at Princeton and West Point, the Board was reluctant to accept his generous offer of millions of dollars because they believed that this money came from the sale of cigarettes, which were frowned upon by their Methodist institution. When Mr. Duke assured the Board that such would not be the case because the funds would come from his holdings in the Duke Power Company, there were sighs of relief and a grateful acceptance of the offer, be their acceptance hypocritical or not.

My earliest recollections of my grandmother go back to the early 1930s, when every summer my family visited her at her summer home in the mountain village of Ridgecrest, North Carolina, 15 miles east of Asheville, so I really knew her only during the last six years of her life. I remember her visiting us once in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and was told that she visited us about eight years earlier at Port Randolph in the Panama Canal Zone when I was about four years old.

She was a very kindly, very religious person. She went abroad to visit the Holy Land and was said to have put jewelry in the collection plate at church. She died in May of 1936, just as my family was in the process of moving from Tuscaloosa to Middletown, New York.