John Merrick

John Merrick was born on the seventh of September 1859 at Clinton, North Carolina, the son of Martha Merrick — an enslaved field hand of the Sampson County tobacco plantation of Felix Henderson — and a white father whose name was never recorded. He was emancipated at six on the surrender of the Confederate Army of the ninth of April 1865.

He was put to work at twelve at the Chapel Hill brick-yard of the John W. Wills Brick Company — making the bricks of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill restoration of the early Reconstruction period — and worked the brick yard for the following seven years until 1879.

He was apprenticed in 1879 at the age of nineteen to the Chapel Hill barber John C. Burwell. He moved with Burwell to Raleigh in 1880 and then to Durham, North Carolina in 1880, where he opened his own barbering shop at the corner of Main and Mangum Streets in Durham.

He expanded the Merrick barbering operation across the closing decade of the nineteenth century into six Durham locations — including the principal white-clientele Washington Duke Hotel barbering shop — and accumulated through the barbering operation, the rental of the Durham black-residential properties he bought, and the small lending operations at the Durham Mutual Building and Loan Association the principal Black fortune of the Durham of the period.

He co-founded on the fifteenth of October 1898 — fifty days before the Wilmington Insurrection of the tenth of November 1898 in which the Wilmington Black-Republican municipal government was overthrown by a white-supremacist coup — the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Insurance Company at Durham, with the Black physician Aaron McDuffie Moore and the bookkeeper Charles Clinton Spaulding (placed in this archive). The company opened with a capital of one hundred dollars and twenty-six clients.

The North Carolina Mutual grew across the following twenty years under Merrick’s presidency into the principal Black-owned insurance company of the American South of the early twentieth century — surpassing one million dollars of insurance in force by 1908 and ten million dollars by 1918. It was at the time of Merrick’s death the largest Black-owned business of any kind in the United States.

He co-founded in 1907 the Mechanics and Farmers Bank at Durham — the first Black-owned bank in North Carolina — and in 1908 the Bull City Drug Company at Durham, the principal Black-owned pharmacy chain of the post-Reconstruction American South.

He died at Durham on the sixth of August 1919 of complications of cancer, at fifty-nine.

He is honored here as the co-founder of the North Carolina Mutual.