BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

DURHAM -- West Durham wasn't annexed by the city until 1925, but the neighborhoods that sprang up around Erwin Mills are a microcosm of Durham history. On those streets surrounding Ninth Street were and still are big houses and small ones, lived in by blacks and whites, rich and poor, as well as the middle class.

John Schelp, president of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, gave a talk about West Durham's history as a mill village on Sunday afternoon at the main branch of the Durham County Library downtown. Old West Durham extends from Broad Street to Hillandale Road and from Englewood Avenue to the Durham Freeway. Nearby neighborhoods include Walltown, Trinity Park and Watts-Hillandale.

Schelp laid the West Durham timeline foundation from before Durham was even Durham -- when it was 1830s Pin Hook, a "rough and roaring place of ill repute" on a river valley ridge. The area today is across from Erwin Square. The landscape shifted a little bit when the railroad came through in the 1850s, then most significantly when Erwin Mills was built in 1892, the same year as Trinity College -- now Duke University.

The mills were constructed on land that was the northern part of the Rigsbee Farm, Schelp said, in a pre-tobacco boom time when wheat was the number one crop. The cotton mills produced muslin and denim. Erwin's eight mills extended beyond Durham to other North Carolina towns as well as Jackson, Miss.

The industrial barons' homes rippled further out from the mills as technology grew. First they built right on the railroad tracks, then a little further out in present-day Trinity Park, then further out to neighborhoods served by the streetcar like Lakewood and Club Boulevard, and then Forest Hills and Hope Valley, which were reached by car.

West Durham neighborhoods today might not exist if Duke had its way buying up land north of East Campus in 1924, Schelp said. When land owners in Trinity Heights and Walltown learned that the university was quietly buying property, they raised the selling prices, so Duke stopped buying. Instead they built West Campus, where, Schelp noted, Wallace Wade Stadium was built where the Rigsbee Farm pigs once lived. The old Rigsbee family cemetery is next to an Iron Duke parking lot.

When the city annexed West Durham in 1925, many of the street names were changed except for a few that remained, like Ninth Street. Mill houses were hooked up to city plumbing, and some toilets say 1925 in houses built in 1918, Schelp noted. During the 1934 textile workers strike, Erwin Mills workers took part too, marching on Main Street.

Schelp told the library audience about tragedy in 1943, when a white bus driver shot and killed a black passenger who was also a World War II soldier, finished his route and was not convicted. The incident happened at the intersection of Club Boulevard and Knox Street, Schelp said, and he said they are working on getting a highway marker.

He shared other facts about the area, like that The Regulator Bookshop was once a laundry that was once an ice house. And that Julian S. Carr doesn't get the credit he should for what he has contributed to Duke and Durham, Schelp said. Carr donated the land for Trinity College. Schelp also said that a remnant of Erwin Mills is a terra cotta water pipe that runs underground beneath 33 houses and could bust at any time. The city is slated to take care of it next June, he said.

In the 1970s, the mill village shrank as Erwin Mills stopped replacing retiring workers and Duke tore down 400 mill houses. Erwin Mills closed in the mid-1980s. The Old West Durham Neighborhood Association was formed in 1995 and has lobbied to preserve the history and character of the neighborhood. Its Web site, www.owdna.org, includes a wealth of information about the area.

Durham Technical Community College will host a performance of "Piece Work," an adaptation of poems about life and work in cotton mills at 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Educational Resources Center auditorium.