Wake County, NC - Bicentennial File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Barbara Kawamoto Reprinted with permission of the News & Observer and cannot be reproduced without permission. An English Visitor’s View of Raleigh Angers Citizens The News and Observer December 29, 1991 Raleigh 200/The New Capital An Exchange in the North Carolina Journal, Halifax, 1798 March 12, 1798 Letter from an English Gentleman, on his travels through the United States, to his friend in London. You already are apprised that the place from which I write is the capitol of North Carolina. You have with myself I dare say, often had occasion to admire at the stupidity of princes, in founding cities in places of all others the most ineligible to ensure their future growth and importance. But when I shall have described to you this metropolis of one of the largest states in the American union, founded by the representatives of a free and (as they style themselves) and enlightened people . . . you may be induced to suspend your veneration of republicanism . . . Raleigh is situate more than a hundred miles from any seaport, and nearly thirty from any boatable waters, has no stream of water capable of making it a manufacturing town; has therefore no prospect of becoming anything more than the solitary residence of a few public officers, containing a few ordinary taverns, gaming houses and dram shops, and that is in fact what the metropolis now is. It might probably have been expected by the founders, that being in a hilly country, it would become the summer residence of many people in the eastern sickly parts of the state, but it has been found on experience not to have the degree of healthiness, which its elevated situation would seem to promise. . . . The western people (of the state) are obligated to go to another state to find markets for their produce. All of the profits of trade are therefore lost to their own state, and without their deriving the least advantages from residing in the neighborhood of the metropolis. The plan of Raleigh (which by the bye is dignified with the name of the city) would have been tolerably good, had it been situated in a place in which it could have been completed; but neither power nor superstition, as in the east, have any effect here to help its completion; for it contains neither the castle of the Lord’s anointed, nor the coffin of a departed saint. The necessities of the government, and the groveling dissipation of a few, are its whole support. The ground is divided into four quarters by as many spacious streets, which terminate in the public square, in the center of which stands the sate house, a clumsy brick building, built without any regular design of architecture, and totally devoid of taste or elegance. Disgraceful as the appearance of the state house is at best; they have contrived to place it yet in a more disadvantageous point of view, by erecting the court house, the palace of the governor, and most of the other buildings, on one of the streets which has only an end view of the statehouse, which makes but a forty appearance. At the four corners of the public square are groves which might have been made agreeable walks; I thought this was their design, and seeing a small house in two of them. I took them for summerhouses, and began in my mind, to applaud the state for constructing such charming places for the recreation of the people in a warm climate, and going to visit one of them, was arrested in my progress by a terrible stench issuing from four doors, which informed me it was a temple of Cloacina. The streets of this city are honored with the names of some of the great men who have distinguished themselves in the service of the state . . . and to do them justice the state ought, in imitation of the ancients, to place statues of them in their favorite temples. June 4, 1798 Mr. Hodge, Your No. 295 contains much entertaining matter, particularly the curious piece pretended to have been written by the English gentleman on his tour through the United States. . . . We contend he has offered a high affront and gross indignity to the state; and if he is in fact an Englishman, in return for his civility we can but advise him through you to return to the Nabobs of his own country, where the appearance of public and private buildings is more pleasing to an English eye, and the fare of their tables better suited to an English stomach. We are not disposed to enter into a reasoning detail with this man of the world on the subjects of his 73rd . . . but you will indulge us a minute while we briefly refute a few of his statements. He suggests that nothing short of monarchy and priest craft (after the manner of the Eastern countries) can ever make this a place of importance independent of commerce and navigation - We will in return ask the gentleman, what the seat of government in any country has to do with commerce and navigation? - Unless he could construct a state house that should float on the water, and send it to London and show it to his correspondent there. The people of this country in establishing a seat of government consulted their own convenience; they fought for that purpose an eligible position in or near the center of the state to make it equally convenient to the citizens thereof - and why should an Englishman or any other busy their brains about it? "Raleigh has no steam of water to make it even a manufacturing town." -- True, it has not much water about it; and the gentleman is right in his conclusion, because he had been raised with manufacturing animals of the amphibious kind that cannot do without water, of course Raleigh does not fit him. He approves the plan of our city, but it wants water, power and superstition to complete it, and of course it cannot be done without a cottage of the Lord’s anointed, and a coffin of a departed saint . . . "The Lord’s anointed, and the corpse of a departed saint, we consign to the gentleman for his ingenuity and labor in writing our history we know not his meaning by the necessities of the government, for we believe it is as well supplied here as if the metropolis had been planted on the water side, except with crabs and frogs. It is to be lamented that there are too many dissipated people among us, but they are running away fast, and our hope is, a better race will take their place." Were we to venture an opinion of this traveling gentleman, we should pronounce him a disappointed partisan, who had formerly struggled in the interest of that graveyard called Fayetteville - rankling at the heart, he has assumed the character of an Englishman to vent his spleen - That he is a natural born son, begotten by Vulcan on the body of Cloacina, at her devotion, and raised in and upon the offerings of her temples in his favorite village, where we presume the stench is not so offensive to him, as there is a material difference in the qualities of ailments that sustain human life - in one place it is mostly of the skin and bones of swine and sand hill turkeys, in another it is very different - sound and wholesome. Excuse scurrility - It is diamond cut diamond - and we must meet the gentleman on his own ground. We are, &c. 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