Kings and Currans in Church Hill
This is all going to get around to the Battle of Belleau Wood, some shenanigans in my neighborhood, and an empty grave in my nearby cemetery, I promise.
(cw: dv and suicide)
Blount King
Let’s start with a man from Goldsboro, N.C. named Blount King.
Now that name is funny for three reasons and I think only four people in the world will get all three reasons and one of those people passed away several years ago and the other two have probably forgotten.
Anyhow, Blount King was a stage driver, a huckster, and a problem in Goldsboro. He had a reputation for landing in debtor’s prison, wife beating, drinking, and getting in knife fights. So, naturally, Goldsboro made him a police officer and he spent the years before the Civil War rounding up Black people congregating together.
King married Almary (Mary) Cooper and the couple had four sons and one daughter.
Don’t think he was in the Civil War, but he was briefly associated with the 6th North Carolina, reportedly as a “camp steward” for Col. Charles F. Fisher. Fisher was killed at 1st Manassas and King (along with future Goldsboro police chief George Morrow) accompanied Fisher’s body back to NC.
For one brief moment in 1870 he was a police in Graham, Alamance County. That was the summer the Klan murdered Wyatt Outlaw. I don’t know if Blount King was involved with that, but I’d believe it if he had been.
Back in Goldsboro he spent time chasing down “highway robbers,” being drunk, and getting into fights.
In one, apparently typical, row with Mary in 1873, he threatened suicide, threatened to kill her, chased her around the neighborhood, and eventually blew his own brains out with a pistol. The local newspaper was like, “yeah, Blount King, no surprise there.” Another put it with a bit more eloquence, “Blount King having become weary of the trials, tribulations of this world, concluded to try another, and to this end placed a loaded pistol to his head, and his object was soon accomplished.”
Dallas Alexander King
Mary King gave birth to her and Blount’s third son, Dallas Alexander King in 1860, the year before Blount accompanied Charles Fisher back from Manassas. “D.A.” was thirteen when Blount killed himself.
In 1880 the younger King turned up as an apprentice printer for the Goldsboro Messenger (after working as the paper’s delivery boy) before marrying Minnie Johnson in 1883. The couple produced two daughters and two sons.
Dallas King learned the right lessons from his father and became an officer in the Goldsboro Council, Friends of Temperance and took up wholesome hobbies like playing shortstop for the touring Goldsboro Base Ball Club.
He left printing and took up painting. Painting public buildings like schools, courthouses, and churches, that is, including the First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro (where the Greensboro History Museum is today). He was more of a contractor by the turn of the 20th Century and had gained a good enough reputation that his comings and goings around the state were regularly reported on.
By 1903 D.A. and Minnie had parented eight children.
But all was not well. In 1889 the Wilson newspaper reported that D.A. had attempted suicide with laudanum and in 1890 he was reported as having been involved in a knife fight while aboard a train heading to Morehead City.
He may have had trouble staying out of debt, and in the 1890s his name shows up in a string of court cases in Goldsboro. In one, he was found guilty of stealing the wallet of a drinking buddy at a bar.
Seems like he started out well but couldn’t escape his father’s demons.
For the larceny, Dallas King was sentenced to three years in the state pen. Following his release (perhaps after one year), he returned to Goldsboro and took up painting the local militia armory. He stole some army blankets. Upon discovery of the items, he skipped town to Richmond. The local paper lamented that “if he will just stay skipped the community will be thankful.”
When the King family decamped to Richmond and settled somewhere in the Church Hill area, several of their children accompanied them, including daughter Bessie.
In 1908 at 21 years old Bessie married a 22 year old “molder,” John C. Curran from a couple blocks over. Church Hill at the time was a racially mixed working class neighborhood, and I guess the people in the building trades flocked together. John Curran’s father—also named John—was an Irish-born stonemason.
The Currans, being Irish, were Catholic and members of St. Patrick’s on Church Hill. The Kings were Baptist and members of Venable Street Baptist Church, now the Temple of Judah congregation.
But Dallas King did not keep on the straight and narrow. He got up to his old larcenous habits, picking up at least one misdemeanor, if not more, in 1906.
Then things got worse.
D.A. King & John Curran
The elder John Curran, who had raised a family in Church Hill, had moved to Baltimore after the death of his wife in 1906. After his son married Bessie, Curran, Sr. came back to Richmond to visit. John and Bessie carried the elder Curran out to Hanover County to stay a week with his in-laws.
But he did not stay a week with his in-laws. Curran immediately returned to Richmond and began drinking and someone found his broken and lifeless body at 9th and Cary Streets. Curran died from his injuries in the hospital.
A zealous local policeman, T.J. McMahon, did due diligence and visited the King house at 900 N. 28th Street (that I can almost see from my porch) and discovered a pool of blood on the sidewalk before the gate. D.A. and Minnie could not give a straight answer about that and so Detective McMahon—conscientious of King’s long criminal record in Richmond and in Goldsboro—regarded that as evidence enough and arrested D.A. for the murder of his son’s wife’s father.
That was not evidence enough for the judge, however, and the momentarily fortunate Dallas King was soon released.
John Curran’s murder remained unsolved.
Dallas and Minnie King held on a bit longer. He does not show up in the papers with any more larceny convictions, but the housepainting business he ran with one of his sons went bankrupt in 1924.
Dallas died in 1941 and is buried in Oakwood. At the time of his death he lived on N. 21st Street right smack between the first two places I lived in Richmond upon also fleeing here from North Carolina.
Arthur Curran
John Curran migrated from Ireland as a boy with his family in 1856. It is unclear what port he arrived in, where they lived during the Civil War (one lead says Brooklyn), or when they arrived in Richmond. (Finding working class immigrants with common names is kinda hard sometimes.)
He is in Richmond by 1877 where he married Katie Crouch of Hanover County. The couple lived at 520 N. 28th Street and had two daughters and two sons. One son, John C., married Bessie King.
The other son, Arthur, attended Springfield School (now the Bowler retirement home), got in the paper for being bitten by a dog (the dog was adjudicated as guilty, but released), and joined the army.
Gonna have to do something about that.