Cameron Village will drop Cameron family from its name, become the Village District
Cameron Village, a Southeastern shopping destination when it was built in the late 1940s on former Cameron family holdings, will get a new name.
It will be called Village District, dropping its connection to the Cameron family, whose wealthy patriarch was one of the largest holders of enslaved people in North Carolina before the Civil War.
“Reintroducing this destination as Village District aligns with the collective values of our neighbors, patrons, and merchants,” Chris Widmayer, vice president of investments for Regency Centers, which owns the shopping center, said in a release Thursday. “Recently, Village District has seen exciting changes including the planned addition of rooftop space at The Overlook, murals that have engaged the community, the addition of strong local merchants, and strong national brands such as Sephora. These enhancements will ensure that Village District is a destination for the area for the next 70 years.”
“The Village District will bring a renewed sense of community to a property that has been and will remain a pivotal cultural, social, and economic engine for the city and region for many years to come,” George York said in the release. York’s grandfather, Willie York, developed the property and York Properties still manages it.
Bringing a shopping center to Raleigh
News reports from the time said that James Wesley “Willie” York, who had grown up in his father’s construction business and taken it over on his father’s death in 1941, took a train to Chicago in 1946 to attend a homebuilders’ conference. On the ride, he picked up a newspaper and saw a story about a relatively new concept: the suburban shopping center.
York decided to build one in Raleigh, where downtown merchants and shoppers already were frustrated over where to park the growing number of cars.
York knew just where he wanted to build his shopping center — on a 157-acre tract northwest of downtown adjacent to the Cameron Park and Oberlin Village neighborhoods. It was owned by Annie Cameron Smallwood of New York.
The land was the last big remnant of what had been a vast antebellum network of property amassed by the Cameron family. Smallwood was the great-granddaughter of Duncan Cameron, a lawyer, Superior Court judge, three-term state senator and successful businessman.
When he died in 1853, his estate passed to his surviving children, including his son Paul and daughter Margaret. The inheritance included more than 1,000 enslaved people and more than 30,000 acres of land in Wake, Orange and modern-day Durham counties, as well as plantations in Mississippi and Alabama, according to records.
Duncan Cameron was one of the wealthiest people in North Carolina and one of the largest landowners and slaveholders in the South. His marriage to Rebecca Bennehan, whose father, Richard Bennehan, established the Stagville plantation, now a North Carolina State Historic Site in Durham, improved his fortunes even more.
History of the Cameron family
Historian Ruth Little, who has done extensive research on property ownership and development in and around Cameron Village and neighboring Oberlin Village, said records show that in the 1830s, while he was serving as president of the North Carolina State Bank in Raleigh, Duncan Cameron built a house on Hillsborough Street, where he relocated his family and nearly two dozen enslaved house workers from Fairntosh, his plantation adjacent to Stagville.
In an article recently published in the North Carolina Historical Review, Little wrote that in 1841, Duncan Cameron bought the 157-acre property of a defunct Episcopal boy’s school across Hillsborough Street from his home, and leased it to the St. Mary’s School for Girls. In 1853, the same year he married Duncan Cameron’s daughter, Margaret, George Mordecai bought the large tract of land stretching northwest from the school campus.
In 1894, the family sold the St. Mary’s campus to the Episcopal Church. In 1910, some of the remaining land was sold to develop Cameron Park neighborhood. And in 1947, by which time the westernmost tract had passed to Annie Smallwood, she sold it to Willie York for his shopping center.
Little said her research doesn’t indicate the Cameron or Mordecai families ever farmed the tract, which was locally known as “Cameron woods.” It was forested and cut by a sandy creek. Little has interviewed longtime Cameron Park residents who recall that when they were children, a group of itinerant families camped on the land once a year or so.
York and his partner, R.A. Bryan, hired architect Leif Valand to design the massive, mixed-used project with 65 stores, 112 offices, 566 apartment units and 100 single-family homes. The plan would turn the land into the first suburban shopping center between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. They broke ground in 1947 and opened in 1949 with the first three stores and a restaurant.
Sears, Roebuck and Co. was Cameron Village’s first national-chain anchor. It opened in the spot where Harris-Teeter is today, and one of the first escalators installed in North Carolina carried shoppers between its two floors.
The shopping center has undergone repeated renovations and updates, survived two fires and experimented in the 1970s and ‘80s with underground bars and restaurants. York Properties sold the shopping center in 1964.
Understanding Cameron family history
Sabrina Goode, a descendant of early settlers of Oberlin Village and a founder of the non-profit Friends of Oberlin Village, has worked for years to bring attention to and preserve the unique history of the neighborhood, which retains many of its original homes and other buildings as well as a cemetery with more than 600 graves, some of them believed to be those of former slaves.
She approached Regency with the idea of changing the shopping center’s name, in part because she thought a Florida company with no emotional ties to the Cameron or York families might be willing to consider it. The key, she said, was helping the company to understand the Cameron family history.
“I would have loved to have Oberlin in the name, but I think the name they selected is at least neutral,” she said. “Hopefully it just sends a resounding message to other developers” to carefully consider the names they give to properties.
“In order for there to be reconciliation, there has to be respect and knowledge.”
Goode said Regency has pledged $50,000 to help restore the cemetery, accessible only through a parking lot off Oberlin Road. The money will to go to filling in sunken graves, establishing a walking path between the graves and landscaping the site.
In recent years and especially in 2020 after unrest sparked by a series of killings of Black people by police in cities across the country, public and private institutions have been parting company with vestiges of a racist past.
In North Carolina, that has played out in the removal of statues honoring the Confederacy, such as Silent Sam at UNC and a monument at the Capitol in Raleigh. A statue of Josephus Daniels, an unapologetic white supremacist who owned and published the News & Observer in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was removed from a Raleigh park. A middle school named for him was rebranded.
But at the same time, Goode said, developers continue to build around Cameron Village and often default to the marketability of the Cameron name. Goode says she is aware of at least two such properties in the works now.
“There are so many beautiful words in our vocabulary. Why use one that is a tinder box?” Goode asked, noting that there are African Americans today who can find the names of their ancestors among the Cameron family slave inventories.
“The shopping center might never have been named for Duncan Cameron,” Goode said. “But his descendants are still living off the wealth that he gained off of slavery.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2021 at 11:13 AM with the headline "Cameron Village will drop Cameron family from its name, become the Village District."
