Caswell County Quiz Answer (April 11, 2022)
Question: Here we have discussed the erratic history of Yanceyville incorporation -- becoming an organized town rather than just a village.
In 1905 Yanceyville was again incorporated. But the reason was liquor. Do you know why liquor was behind this incorporation?
Answer: An issue in North Carolina in the early 1900s was to chose, at the local level, between dispensaries and saloons. Yanceyville apparently had to be incorporated for its residents to be able to vote on the dispensary issue.
Many churches and prohibition groups favored the dispensary system over licensed saloons. They believed this was a first step toward full prohibition. The modern North Carolina ABC store can trace its ancestry to the early dispensaries.
Of course, North Carolina adopted absolute statewide prohibition that became effective January 1909. Thus the Caswell County dispensary system experiment was short-lived, and little is known about it.
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Some NC towns/counties had dispensaries bottles/flasks manufactured with identifying information on it. They are very collectible. None is known for Yanceyville. Below is a bottle from the Raleigh dispensary. Click image to see a larger version.
Source: NC Dispensary Flasks
Notes
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It appears the issue in North Carolina in the early 1900s was to chose, at the local level, between dispensaries and saloons. Yanceyville apparently had to be incorporated for its residents to be able to vote on the dispensary issue.
Many churches and prohibition groups favored the dispensary system over licensed saloons.
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Were NC dispensaries an attempt to restrict liquor purchases by blacks?
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As of 24 January 1905 Yanceyville, North Carolina, apparently was a "prohibition town, and with a population of probably less than 200."
Source: "The Yanceyville Whiskey Fight, The Reidsville Review (Reidsville, North Carolina), 24 January 1905.
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"The town [village] of Yanceyville, which has been trying prohibition for quite a while, has concluded, so the Democrat informs us, that the thing to do is to incorporate the town and establish a dispensary. We are informed further that no opposition resulted in the mass-meeting against the incorporation of the town and but little against the dispensary. All of which goes to show that the people of Yanceyville have not profited by the lesson learned at Fayetteville, Greensboro, Tarboro, Madison and many other towns in this State, where the dispensary has been tried and pronounced much worse than saloons or prohibition."
The Reidsville Review (Reidsville, North Carolina), 17 January 1905.
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"Our neighboring town, Yanceyville, has wisely determined to ask the legislature to incorporate it and give it a dispensary. As the Weekly sees it, this is the best way of handling the liquor question."
Webster's Weekly (Reidsville, North Carolina), 19 January 1905.
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The Yanceyville Whiskey Fight: 1905
"The Democrat [newspaper] says that petitions are being circulated in Yanceyville against the establishment of the [liquor] dispensary, and that the ladies generally are signing it.
"The report of [Anti-Saloon League] Chairman Bailey, which was adopted by the temperance convention last week, only favors dispensaries in towns of 4,000 or more, and then as a step to prohibition. . . . When the Yanceyville dispensary fight is carried down to Raleigh it may be that the Anti-Saloon League will take a hand against its establishment. Certainly it will if it is consistent with the report and views of Chairman Bailey, for Yanceyville is already a prohibition town, and with a population of probably less than 200."
Source: "Temperance Meeting: Shall the People Stand Dispensary? That is in Substance, the Question Which Caused a Long and Heated Argument in Anti-saloon Convention," The Reidsville Review (Reidsville, North Carolina), 24 Jan 1905.
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NC History and the Law: Prohibition in North Carolina
After becoming interested in the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, a show about Prohibition in the late 1920s and 30s, I was inspired to research Prohibition in North Carolina. As of today, North Carolina is one of eighteen (18) US states in which the government controls the sale and purchase of alcohol.
North Carolina was the first state in the South to enact Prohibition of alcohol or “intoxicating spirits.” The North Carolina General Assembly enacted state-wide Prohibition in 1908 which was twelve (12) years before the nationwide Prohibition law by the Volstead Act in 1919/1920 and the addition of the Eighteenth (18th) Amendment of US Constitution. North Carolina was able to enact Prohibition so much earlier than much of the nation because it was supported by many religious organizations and churches. The NC General Assembly voted in favor of Prohibition in 1908 with 62% of the referendum vote. Before state-wide North Carolina Prohibition was enacted, many counties were no longer able to sell alcohol in establishments such has saloons, bars and restaurants (also known as “dry” counties). Some of these counties included Burke and Graham counties.
Here are images from George Pierce Pell’s Revisal of 1908 of North Carolina which contains public and general statutes. The call number is RBR KFN7430 1908 .A22 v. 1 c. 1. These pages define and detail North Carolina’s Prohibition laws:
Source: http://blogs.law.unc.edu/library/2013/11/21/nc-history-and-the-law-prohibition-in-north-carolina/#:~:text=North%20Carolina%20was%20the%20first,the%20addition%20of%20the%20Eighteenth%20(
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Prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in North Carolina was in effect statewide between 1909 and 1935. As early as 1852 a petition seeking prohibition was presented to the General Assembly, but no legislative action was taken. Antiliquor forces did gain enough influence in the Democratic Party in 1881 to win the legislature's approval of a popular referendum on the measure, but it was overwhelmingly defeated by a vote of 166,325 to 48,370.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many municipalities were allowed to regulate the sale of alcohol through dispensaries controlled by town commissioners. In 1903, at the urging of a newly organized Anti-Saloon League, the Democratic-controlled legislature passed the Watts Act, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of spirituous liquors except in incorporated towns. According to historians Hugh T. Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, the law was designed "to get rid of the county distilleries," which Democratic Party leader Furnifold M. Simmons called "Republican recruiting stations." In 1905 the Ward Law extended Prohibition to incorporated towns of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, meaning that 68 of the 98 counties in the state had Prohibition.
The Anti-Saloon League and Governor Robert B. Glenn finally convinced the General Assembly to authorize a statewide referendum on Prohibition, which was scheduled for 26 May 1908. The measure passed by a vote of 113,612 to 69,416, with 21 counties voting against it. Statewide Prohibition became effective in January 1909. In 1913 Congress passed a law making it illegal to transport liquor from wet states into North Carolina and other dry states; six years later, the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution established Prohibition as federal law.
Prohibition was slowly phased out in North Carolina after national Prohibition was repealed in 1933. "Light" wine and beer sales were allowed soon afterward, and a county-option liquor law in 1937 established the Alcoholic Beverage Control system.
Source: https://www.ncpedia.org/prohibition
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The modern [North Carolina] ABC store can trace its ancestry to the network of “dispensaries” that many North Carolina counties set up in 1895 to distribute liquor. The theory was that liquor would be prescribed for “medicinal” purposes, and patients would fill their prescriptions at the dispensaries. (Today, North Carolina dispensary bottles are hot collectibles.)
Source: https://www.thetimesnews.com/story/news/2015/09/14/north-carolina-s-abc-system/33543170007/
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The Dispensary System in the South
Another alternative to prohibition which enjoyed popular favor in the '90s, particularly in the South, was the dispensary system whereby the state or a local community opened public retail establishments for the sale of liquor and assumed a monopoly of the business-. The first American experiment with the plan - which was in some respects similar to the Gothenberg system used for many years in Scandinavia and shows no important difference from the government control schemes at present in use in most of the Canadian provinces.
The dispensary plan was tried out on a local basis in four other southern states, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. As many as 142 counties in the South adopted this system during the two decades 1890–1910,1 but in many of them it did not long survive. The coming of prohibition to Alabama in 1909, to North Carolina in the same year, to Georgia in 1908 and to Virginia, in 1916 put an end to the county and town schemes that remained in operation.
Source: https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1928080700
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