A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



Dogwood Neck. The company still owned 

 much of the local housing, a company store 

 and its own police force, but the black 

 workers also gained a fierce independence 

 by owning land and having regular wages. 

 By the 1920s Navassa was, in Willis' 

 words, "a booming, wide-open town." It 

 had six social clubs, numerous cook shops 

 where the guano workers could buy a meal 

 and trains that stopped four times a day on 

 their way in and out of Wilmington. Other 

 fertilizer companies also located in Navassa, 

 employing as many as 2,000 workers in 

 their heyday. 



I haven't found a good description of 

 the inner workings of the guano factories in 

 Navassa, but in 1897 a reporter from the 

 Wilmington Messenger toured the nearby 

 Almont Fertilizer Co. and described the 

 factory in some detail. Founded in 1 882 by 

 Powers, Gibbs and Co., a British firm that 

 had a monopoly over the sale of Peruvian 

 guano in Europe and North America, 

 Almont occupied a bluff on the Northeast 

 Cape Fear River a couple of miles above 

 Wilmington. 



As described by the Messengers 

 reporter, the factory workers first used mills 

 to grind into powder phosphate rock mined 

 in Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee. 

 Then they separated the phosphate from the 

 silica in great vats of sulfuric acid. The 

 dissolved rock phosphate could be mixed 

 with different combinations of potash, salts, 

 blood, dissolved bone and other ingredients 

 to make a variety of fertilizer brands. 

 Finally, the mixture was dried, lumps were 

 broken up and it was put into bags. 



The Almont Fertilizer Co., like most of 

 the local companies, also produced its own 

 sulfuric acid. Working in the "acid factory" 

 was always fraught with danger due to the 

 lethal acid and its fumes, and it must have 

 resembled a scene out of Dante's Inferno. 

 The black laborers burned pyrite ores mined 

 in Spain and Newfoundland in two dozen 

 furnaces. "The heat from the fires drives the 

 sulphur from the ore in fumes," the reporter 

 wrote. The fumes condensed into sulfuric 

 acid, which flowed through lead pipes into 

 the fertilizer factory next door. 



A railroad trestle crosses the Cape Fear River 

 near the remains of the Navassa Guano Co. 



The Navassa Guano Co. and the 

 Almont Fertilizer Co. were among more 

 than a dozen fertilizer factories operating in 

 the Wilmington area by 1912. The 

 Pocomoke Guano Co., started around 

 1910, located its factory in the remote 

 community of Pocomoke, which had first 

 been settled by ex-slaves from a local rice 

 plantation just after the Civil War. Located 

 off U.S. 421 by Carolina Power & Light 

 Co.'s Sutton Steam Plant, the deserted 

 remains of the Pocomoke community have 

 recently been the subject of research by 



Mariel Rose, an anthropology student at the 

 University of North Carolina at Wilmington. 



One of the local people Rose inter- 

 viewed about Pocomoke was Hortense 

 Moss, whose mother and grandmother fed 

 guano workers out of their kitchens. "They 

 had all the black people that would come 

 over there to work in fertilizer for five 

 dollars a week," Moss recalls her mother 

 telling her. "My grandmother was a cook, 

 and she'd sell a cup of coffee for five cents 

 and a meal for 15 cents." 



A bustling village rose by the guano 



22 EARLY SUMMER 1998 



