Mayor’s unprecedented attempt to clean up Sugar Hill “Vice District” failed
By: Ted Sampley
Olde Kinston Gazette, August 1998
Retyped by Gracie Herring, Neuse News Intern
Kinston’s population was only 10,000 in 1921 when newly elected Mayor Mills Marshall Happer declared in his inaugural speech that he intended to keep “obnoxious characters” off the streets, crack down on “certain institutions,” and see that all businesses in Kinston were closed on Sunday to officially recognize Sunday as “a day of church going and religious observance.”
By the 1920s, the good people of Kinston had learned to live with Sugar Hill and it’s unsavory inhabitants by not talking about it or them in public, at least not “in front of the ladies.” All previous attempts to close down the prostitution, gambling and liquor houses operating there had failed.
True to his word, the new mayor immediately launched one of the most ambitious efforts up until that date to close down Kinston’s politically entrenched “red light district” known as “Sugar Hill”.
According to Kinston’s oral history and local tradition, Sugar Hill first appeared in Kinston during the Civil War after Union Major General John G. Foster’s brief occupation of Kinston in 1862. He had encountered unexpected and fierce opposition from the Confederates defending Goldsboro and had abandoned his camp followers in Kinston during his hasty retreat back to New Bern.
Kinstonians were outraged and wanted nothing to do with “women of ill repute,” especially those of the enemy. The unwanted guests were quickly ostracized to an area outside the town proper near the Neuse River at the end of Herritage Street.
In those days, Kinston’s population was about 1,000 and there was no such thing as modern plumbing. The only sanitary facilities in Kinston were outhouses which were periodically cleaned by town sanitary workers known as “honey dippers.”
The honey dippers loaded the waste onto “sugar carts” and hauled the putrid cargo outside town to be buried in an area they called “Sugar Hill.” It was a place near Sugar Hill where the Yankees’ prostitutes were banned and a shanty town developed.
Throughout the years, civic groups and concerned citizens periodically complained about the “going ons” in Sugar Hill - mostly to no avail. They were never able to muster the strength to overcome the politics of Kinston’s economy which had become intimately entangled with Sugar Hill’s sinister subculture of “organized and entrenched vice.”
Respectable folks when forced to confront the subject devised special terms to deal specifically with Sugar Hill. They referred to it as “ the vice district” or sometimes “the segregated district.” The women who attended the men visiting the vice district were referred to as “inmates.”
Mayor Happer set out to make sure the Sugar Hill women stayed in the Sugar Hill district and did not live anywhere else in town. He forbade them from “joy riding with or without men” in the business or residential sections of Kinston and ordered them to stay out of public places of amusement. Violators, Mayer Happer decreed, would be given 24 hours to get out of town.
To achieve this unprecedented feat, Mayor Happer reorganized the police department by firing its Chief and several officers. He then issued a warning that any policeman failing to comply with his instructions would be “suspended” from the police force immediately.
In August of 1921, new police Chief George A. Everington, and patrolmen Henry Hart, J.B. Kennedy and Richard Stroud, members of the “provisional vice squad,” raided Sugar Hill and arrested 11 women. The following month, Happer’s vice squad arrested 117 people - about one percent of the population of Kinston.
When the court’s officials and juries failed to secure convictions (mostly because of their affiliation with bootlegging or affection for the Sugar Hill women), Mayor Happer hired well respected local lawyer N.J. Rouse as the special prosecutor.
That action caused Kinston aldermen and Police Commissioner Isaac B. Sparrow to scream “foul.” He challenged Mayor Happer’s actions, claiming that the mayor had illegally “assumed authority as police generalissimo.”
Sparrow insisted that he supported enforcement of the “moral laws” but that the mayor was supposed to make suggestions through him instead of giving orders directly to the police officers.
Mayor Happer held his ground but soon found himself under intense political fire for using city money to hire Rouse as special prosecutor.
To show support for the mayor and his anti-vice campaign, more than 200 Kinstonians gathered at the Gordon Street Christian Church and passed resolutions declaring their support for Mayor Happer.
Despite the mayor’s best efforts and the support of the morally outraged citizens of Kinston the people arrested for violating Kinston’s vice laws continued to slip through loopholes in the legal system.
If convicted in Recorder’s Court (District Court), the defendants simply appealed their cases to Superior Court where the juries would usually let them go.
In an effort to avoid Mayor Happer’s Sunday laws, some industrious merchants opened retail outlets across the Neuse River just outside the city limits in the houses perched sporadically along the road to the Caswell Street bridge.
The new businesses began to flourish.
Meanwhile, Kinston’s self-imposed invisible wall between the segregated district and the rest of the community had cracked. Madams trying to avoid Mayor Happer’s vice police moved their houses of prostitution to the new business district.
Local folklore has it that the occupants of the new business district spitefully began referring to their new home as Happersville.
By the election of 1923, the good people of Kinston were too few to gather enough votes to save Mayor Happer.
He lost his bid for another term.
The brothels of Sugar Hill were soon once again operating unhindered.
In November of 1934, former Kinston Mayor Mills Marshall Happer took his own life. (Read about this in next Saturday’s edition of Neuse News).
Before his death Mr. Happer had written letters to several persons, including his children. Spread before him when he died were the letters and instructions to the finder of his body. The cause of the act presumably was ill health. Mr. Happer had been in failing health for some years, it was stated.
By the time of the mayor’s death, Kinston’s population had grown to more than 11,000, and the town had become a bustling center of tobacco markets.
Farmers from all over eastern North Carolina were bringing their cured tobacco to sell in Kinston’s many warehouses, and Sugar Hill was the main attraction. Their pockets bulging with money after selling their golden leaf, the farmers would head their trucks or mules and wagons to Sugar Hill where they found liquor, gambling, music, and the company of young and charming women.
One old Kinstonian described the scene, “The girls would sit out on the front porch on Sunday with their evening gowns on - as beautiful as you ever saw. They never had any trouble at Sugar Hill, and the girls were clean. If you went into the house, it would cost you a nickel for the piccolo and three dollars for the loving. We’ll put it this way. The madam - the lady of the house - would give you three minutes.”
In the early 1940s, Sugar Hill found a new and lucrative clientele, becoming world famous as marines from Camp Lejeune and the servicemen from other surrounding military bases took their liberty in Kinston.
With World War II raging, Sugar Hill’s “line of 15 to 20 houses” on Shine Street between Queen and Herritage Streets became a favorite for the vicemen. Sugar Hill’s unlimited supply of liquor and women gave them a needed break in training.
Merchants all over Kinston became more dependent on the money the servicemen brought with them.
Finally, the vice merchants of Sugar Hill met their match.
What Mayor Happer tried unsuccessfully to do in the early 1920s the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune accomplished on September 4, 1944 when it issued an order declaring 17 Kinston businesses off limits to military personnel.
The Marines said the order was issued because over 500 servicemen had contacted venereal disease infections in Kinston. They said venereal disease was plaguing Kinston because law enforcement and court authorities had allowed the town “to become a virtual dumping ground for prostitutes run out of other places.”
They said the towns of Wilson, Rocky Mount and Fayetteville had been cooperating in effective cleanup efforts and that many of the prostitutes driven out of those cities had taken refuge in Sugar Hill.
Eight days later, the marines placed all of Kinston off limits, effectively disrupting the entire economy of Kinston and Lenoir County.
The red light district of Sugar Hill never recovered.
