Discovering Greenville’s Horticultural Past

It’s the season for gardening in Greenville and Pitt County and with the current proliferation of retail garden centers, you may have wondered at some point how folks living more than a hundred years ago in the area were served in obtaining shrubs and plants for home and commercial use.
As a matter of fact, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, eastern North Carolina was developing an impressive record for all sorts of truck farming and more particularly grape cultivation and vineyards.

In 1884, former Pitt County Sheriff Allen Warren opened Riverside Nursery on a ten-acre site immediately adjacent to downtown Greenville west of the present railroad tracks. Warren’s business was soon recognized as a state leader in the sale of ornamental and fruit-growing shrubs and trees. He advertised liberally and for many years offered a catalog upon request. His selection of geraniums was reputedly the largest in the state. His particular specialty, however, was the propagation of a grape variety known as the “James Grape”. Discovered about 1866 or 67 by Pitt County native, B.W.M. James, the James Grape thrived extremely well in in the sandy loam soils of eastern North Carolina and ripened late in the season when other varieties had mostly ceased. Warren also maintained greenhouses near his residence on West Third Street. Growing a variety of flowers there and making routine shipments via the railroad, he likewise became Greenville and Pitt County’s first florist.

About the same time as Warren’s business, J.B. Yellowley, a local attorney was making similar progress as a model truck farmer. Located on what is now East Third Street, Yellowley’s farm was described liberally in an October 1891 account in The Charlotte Democrat newspaper, with the correspondent reporting “he has a large vineyard in which are many of the very best varieties of grapes”. The reporter goes on to say “at this season he has the Scuppernong, James, Meisch, and Illium, the latter a variety discovered by his uncle, the late Col. E.C. Yellowley, the former owner of the place which he gave the same name. Besides growing an abundance of fruits Mr. Yellowley is a strong believer in trucking and is very successful in it. Last spring he shipped from a four-acre patch nearly 10,000 quarts of strawberries. He is making a larger patch for next year. He also has little more than an acre of asparagus, now in its second year, and next spring he expects to sell $200 worth of roots from that patch.” Warren’s business ceased about the year 1907. Of the many circulars and catalogs generated by Riverside Nursery throughout its run, only one, from 1904, currently residing at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library is known to exist.

J.B. or James Brownlow Yellowley was born in 1848 to James Burroughs Yellowley, the son of Captain Edward Yellowley, a retired mariner and tavern owner in Williamston, N.C. After the untimely death of his wife soon after James Brownlow’s birth, James Burroughs immigrated to Madison County, MS, founding there the community of Ridgeland. The younger Yellowley was left to be raised by his maternal grandparents in Greenville and later his paternal uncle Edward Clements Yellowley, whose home he inherited. As an adult, he maintained a dual residency in Greenville, NC, and his father’s plantation in Mississippi, eventually moving permanently to the latter in 1892.
Though a lawyer by trade, J.B. Yellowley continued his passion in Mississippi for things green, participating actively in statewide conferences and committees devoted to horticulture prior to his death in 1914.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Col. Edward Clements Yellowley, a Williamston native, graduated from UNC in 1844 and was involved in a famous duel at the North Carolina Virginia border in which he shot and killed his aggressor, Ferdinand Harris in 1847. Both men were lawyers in Greenville. Yellowley died in 1885. His nephew (son of J.B.) and namesake, Edward C. Yellowley (1873-1962) eventually became an enforcement agent for the Internal Revenue Service.

Edward C. Yellowley was assigned to the Chicago bureau of that agency in 1925, where he gathered information that led to the notorious gangster, Al Capone’s conviction and imprisonment for income tax evasion. It was Yellowley who put together a special group of agents known as “The Untouchables” whose activities were to give rise to a number of stories and legends forming the basis for the popular 1960s television series bearing the same name and subsequent movie production in 1987.

Sad to say, no visible reminders of the Yellowley family remain locally. The old Yellowley home in Greenville burned down in the late 1960s. Standing more than a hundred years in the town of Williamston, the old Yellowley Tavern and Hotel on “River Hill” run by family patriarch Captain Yellowley (d. 1826), and later his wife Mary, was finally demolished in 1915 for redevelopment.
Louise Booker, the late folklorist, once recalled the hotel’s ominous reputation among children in the early twentieth century as being haunted by the spirit of a young bride from many years before, who had committed suicide by jumping off the landmark’s second story verandah.

To learn more fascinating tidbits of the history and lore connected to eastern North Carolina communities, visit the Verona Joyner Langford North Carolina Collection located on the third floor of Joyner Library. Call 252-328-6601 or check the website at http://www.ecu.edu/lib/ncc/.
Fred Harrison is a staff member with the North Carolina Collection.