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136 Near the southern end of the Wilmington waterfront, just below the shops and restaurants of Chandler’s Wharf, visible atop a long, sloping hill, David and I in our little SeaWhip pass a stately white riverfront mansion. The great house was built on the site of the first colonial customshouse, back around 1825, by Edward B. Dudley, the first popularly elected governor of North Carolina. Dudley was a prime mover in establishing the city as a railroad hub. He invested the princely sum of $25,000—more than half a million dollars in today’s currency—in the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, which covered the incredible span of 161.5 miles and owned exactly twelve locomotives, all named after counties in eastern North Carolina. The Wilmington and Weldon would eventually play a crucial role in supplying Robert E. Lee’s troops during the Civil War. The Dudley mansion has a storied past. In 1848, Daniel Webster visited. A few years later, when Dudley’s daughter married a young lieutenant stationed downriver at Fort Caswell, two of the groomsmen standing uniformed in the dining room were fellow lieutenants Abner Doubleday and William Tecumseh Sherman. One is credited (probably a little too generously) with inventing the modern game of baseball, which became a popular way for Civil War troops to while away the days waiting for their generals to send them out to be slaughtered.The other made his final 425-mile march through the state and accepted the surrender of the Army of Tennessee at the Bennett Place. But the most famous tenant of the housewas undoubtedly James Sprunt, a legendary figure inWilmington. Born in Glasgow , Scotland, in 1846, he was brought to Wilmington by his parents, Alexander and Jane, in 1854. By the time the Civil War engulfed the South, he was just fifteen, but on his own initiative he had studied a night-school course in navigation (with a mentor identified only as Captain Levy) and signed on with a blockade-runner—one of those fast, sidewheeler steamers with shallow draughts that slipped into the river at night through channels too shoal and shifty for the deepdraught blockading U.S. Navy cruisers to follow. He shipped on the Lilian, skippered by our old friend Cap8 Chapter 8 137 tain John N. Maffitt. Like a storybook hero, he was shipwrecked, rescued, captured , imprisoned for a time at Fort Macon on the Bogue Banks, then escaped and went to sea again. After the war, his legend really began to take shape—and is all the more remarkable because it is apparently all true. During his travels, he had traded molasses for twenty-­ four bales of cotton, which he sent toWilmington for safekeeping.When theYankees arrived, they promptly torched a dozen of them. Seven more were stolen, leaving Sprunt with just five. He sold them for cash and invested first in naval stores: turpentine and pitch available from local plantations. He made his first deal with a Mr. G. C. MacDougall—seven casks of turpentine on account—and thus was born the enterprise that would become Alexander Sprunt and Son. When forests no longer yielded enough local product, Sprunt expanded into cotton. In partnership with his father, Alexander, James Sprunt, still not yet twenty years old, parlayed his first profits into a cotton-­ export business that traded with more than fifty agents throughout Europe. In short order, Sprunts was the largest exporter of cotton on the planet. In 1907–9, for example, Sprunt’s firm exported more than half a million bales of cotton valued at more than $30 million—about $740 million in today’s dollars . James Sprunt made enough to buya spacious home on the river, the Governor Dudley mansion on Front Street. In 1904, he purchased Orton Plantation downriver as a gift to his wife, Luola. The seller was her father, Kenneth M. Murchison, who had restored the main house. At the Dudley mansion, his houseguests included William Jennings Bryan (“You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold!”); William Howard Taft (who so disappointed his predecessor and champion, Theodore Roosevelt, that TR ran against him on the ballot for the Bull Moose Party); and Woodrow Wilson (“a war to end all wars”). Woodrow Wilson’s father, Rev. Joseph R. Wilson , was the pastor of Sprunt’s church, the First Presbyterian, and a family friend. James Sprunt was a handsome, well-­ built man with piercing eyes who could handle himself outdoors and was at home on the...

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