Dan Allen Drive and Dan Allen Parking Deck

Dan Allen Drive borders important landmarks: Hillsborough Street, the Dan Allen Parking Deck, Witherspoon Student Center, Western Boulevard, and Greek Village. None of those buildings existed when Daniel Allen graduated from the college in 1896. Instead of a road name, Raleigh knew Daniel “Dan” Allen as a businessman and philanthropist as well as a proponent of white supremacy and segregationist housing policies.

The school did not purchase the land under Dan Allen Parking Deck until 1987. That land was part of “House Creek district” in 1871, where Wake County’s fourth-highest population of African Americans lived according to a map by Fendol Bevers. The statistic eventually included Dr. Thomas Love, who purchased the lot in 1888. Part of the first generation in his family who learned to read according to the 1900 Census, Love and his brother opened Love’s Drug Store by 1910. They dispensed medical advice, along with tickets to local events the city forbade African Americans from buying elsewhere, according to N&O. In 1903, Love sold the land to his sister, Maggie, and her husband, physician Dr. Lovelace Capehart. George and Susan Capehart enslaved Lovelace as an infant in Bertie County, North Carolina, according to their list of enslaved people; Arthur Caldwell’s History of the American Negro and his Institutions reported that after the Civil War, no one advised Lovelace about receiving an education. Nevertheless, he earned law and medical degrees, which helped him nourish Raleigh's African American community as a physician and Shaw University professor. The N&O reported Maggie became an activist in 1939, when she and neighbors sued to stop the city from expropriating her next home on Smith Street.

By 1934, the areas south and east of Capehart’s former property did belong to NC State, and a highway engineering professor said in a letter he sought “an underpass [under the train tracks] connecting the north and south sides of the State College campus.” A year later, the Civil Engineering Department prepared a map showing a “proposed road” to connect Hillsborough (called “Hillosboro” before 1965) and Western streets. The Buildings and Grounds Committee did not act on the proposal until after the Public Works Administration and other New Deal programs, all federal Great Depression-era stimulus efforts, funded construction of more than twelve campus buildings. Buildings like Alexander Residence Hall and the Textile Building (now Nelson Hall) spurred greater demand for roads at the campus' western edge. By 1940, the Buildings and Grounds Committee funded construction, explaining in November meeting minutes, “the Daniel Allen Road…is the road that connects the Western Boulevard with Dunn Avenue.” In 1949, the committee devoted $90,000 to an underpass, so that by 1952, Dan Allen Drive stretched from Hillsboro to Western. By 1962, Dan Allen Drive crossed Western into “Fraternity Housing,” according to campus maps.

For the next 50  years, The Technician wrote that students hosted parades, parties, and even barefoot snow runs along Dan Allen. In 1968, Student Government paid attention too, successfully lobbying administration for streetlights. But Dan Allen Drive most often made the news because of its traffic. “Anyone who has tried to cross Dan Allen at peak hours can tell you that it’s safer to face a raid of Viet Cong,” a 1969 Technician article complained, using a reference to organized Vietnamese resistance to US Forces in the Vietnam-American War. By 1987, however, reporters asserted “pedestrians have, in a sense, taken over the road,” while cars had “to muddle through a stop sign, a speed bump, numerous crosswalks and too many turnoffs.” That caused “hellacious” traffic, according to one student in 2004, although the school eased gridlock with restricted access gates in 2013.

Student publications rarely discussed the road’s namesake, Daniel Allen. The Buildings and Grounds Committee chose the name in 1940, according to a letter, after the governor ordered names for all university buildings. “The road [shall] be named Daniel Allen, Class of 1896, who died in 1929,” the committee wrote in correspondence. “He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the College.”

NC State Alumni News and N&O reported Allen, born in 1875 in northern Wake County, was one of three brothers to graduate from the college. They founded a real estate company in the early 1900s, a time of middle-class expansion in Raleigh according to historian Joe Mobley. Dan Allen grew wealthy and prominent selling suburban homes; as a lifelong bachelor, he devoted his time and wealth to the boards of the State Hospital, State Fair, and NC State’s Alumni Association. In 1927, the college selected him for its Board of Trustees. However, a heart attack on Dec. 16, 1929 cut short Allen’s career and civic leadership. He died at 54.Six days later, the trustees wrote in N&O, “a spirit of fairness ran through his life in such a way that his friends were confined to no party, creed, or race.”

Allen’s views on race were more complicated, however, as his active role in Raleigh’s White Supremacy Club demonstrates. On March 1, 1900, the Democratic Party chairman predicted in The Morganton Herald that white North Carolinians would form over 2,000 clubs that would “fully restore and make permanent in North Carolina the supremacy of the white race,” according to the state-wide organizational plan the Herald also published. Clubs from Asheville to Wilmington campaigned for a constitutional amendment, which scholar James Hunt said required a poll tax and literacy test for voters. The organizational plan said the amendment was “for the purpose of forever removing…the threat of negro ascendancy.”

On July 25, Dan Allen signed “secretary” under the N&O announcement “presidents and secretaries of all the White Supremacy Clubs in the city...will please meet.” On amendment voting day, The Morning Post reported Allen rose at 5 a.m. to “care for the interests of Anglo-Saxon North Carolina.” Mobley noted “violence by…white supremacy organizations kept blacks away from the polls” that August 2. The amendment passed and “blacks in the South no longer had the vote,” according to Mobley.

Allen’s real estate transactions showed adherence to state and local segregation policies. From 1922-1928, he sold new homes in Wilmont, Mordecai Place, and Fuller Heights to Charles Maddrey, R.B. Stephens, and J.L. Tudor, respectively. Typical of other real estate transactions at the time, all three land deeds stipulated the premises “shall not be occupied by negroes, except domestic servants and their families, employed by the occupants of a dwelling.” Historian Colin Gordon noted such restrictive covenants “grew alongside the modern real estate industry.” They had “lingering effects” on housing patterns and “debilitated the African American community's ability to propagate family wealth,” according to scholars Richard Brooks and Louis Lee Woods. The American Community Survey found Wilmont, Mordecai Place, and Fuller Heights remained predominantly white in 2020.

Dan Allen’s legacy is one of service and philanthropy, but it is also one that fits a larger pattern of segregationist policies and practices evidenced throughout the country.

Bibliography:

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