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HERITAGE, DREAMS, AND FULFILLMENT
OF
THE LIFE AND SERVICES
OF

GOVERNOR JOHN MOTLEY MOREHEAD
OF NORTH CAROLINA

An Address by
JOHN MOTLEY MOREHEAD, III

On the Occasion of the Dedication of the

Port Terminal at Morehead City, N.C.

August 14, 1952

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THE OCCASION

Se ceremonial occasions in the life of a people

bring into focus their historic traditions, present de-
velopments, and future hopes. Such an occasion is the
dedication of the Port Terminal of Morehead City. Here
today come together the name and significance of a man

and a city, the past and the present programs, and the
high hopes of a progressive people.

The man is John Motley Morehead, whose name this
city bears and one of whose dreams is being fulfilled here
today. Well it has been said that those who do not com-
memorate their fathers will not deserve to be remembered
by their sons. I recall him here today not so much with
filial pride, but more as a fitting part of this occasion and
as a symbol of all those North Carolinians who in the past
and in the present have dreamed dreams and built nobly
for a great State. Some of those dreamers and builders
still live and are represented on this platform today.

 
I

BACKGROUND AND EARLY YEARS

The name Morehead was given to the families in
Scotland who, since they lived at the head of the moors,
came to be variously known as Moorehead, Muirhead,
and Morehead. In common today with uncounted mil-
lions of Americans, the Moreheads, in their composite
inheritance, are descended from the nobility, gentry, and
commons of Britain and the old world. The Moreheads
had lived at the head of the moors of Scotland as farmers
and shepherds, served as members and chiefs of Highland
clans, as parishioners, pastors, and bishops, as crusaders to
the Holy Land, as knighted lairds, as ministers of state,
as Scottish rebels against English kings, as merchants in
Edinburgh and London, and as colonizers and colonists
in the new world. Of such are the people of America
where are melted together in freedom and democracy the
peoples of the old world as the pioneer substance of the
new world and now, thank God, the chief hope of free-
dom and peace both in the old world and the new.

From Scottish moors and London business houses,
the Moreheads came in 1630 to the lands of the Northern
Neck of Virginia between the Potomac and Rappahan-
nock and thence to the fertile valleys between the Banis-
ter and Dan rivers which join to make the Roanoke and
tie together much of North Carolina and Virginia. The
first John Motley Morehead was born on July 4th, 1796,

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in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, of John and Obedience
Motley Morehead, whose father served as a captain under
Washington in the French and Indian War and whose six
brothers served under Washington in the Revolution.
John Motley Morehead was brought by his parents as a
two-year-old child to their new home in the fertile lands
of Rockingham County, North Carolina, in 1798.

Historic traditions were in the air of the times and
place in which he lived. Not far away from his boyhood
home was the battlefield of Guilford Court House to
which his mother’s mother, Karenhappuch Norman
Turner, had ridden on horseback from her Maryland
home to nurse her son and other soldiers severely wound-
ed fighting under the able General Nathanael Greene.
That stubborn fighting checkmated the advance of the
conquering British and prepared the way for the final
American victory of George Washington over Lord Corn-
wallis at Yorktown.

The maternal and humane compassion of this typical
American mother was also in the spirit of the British
General, Lord Cornwallis, who, tradition has it, directed
his surgeon to attend alike the wounded as he found them
on the battlefield, whether friend or foe. Also not very
far from his Rockingham County home, over in Guilford
County, was the famous Log College of David Caldwell
who later prepared young Morehead for the University.
He was one of the sons of Princeton, who, in his preach-
ing and teaching, helped to light the fires of the American

 
Revolution and for whose capture Cornwallis offered
£200. Caldwell himself nevertheless nursed alike the

British and American soldiers wounded on that crucial
battlefield.

II

AT CHAPEL HILL

In such traditions of heroism and humane devotion
young Morehead grew to manhood and dreamed his
youthful dreams amid the hills, fields, and streams of
Rockingham County and on the campus and in the halls
of the young State University at Chapel Hill. At the
University he developed in association with young men
who were to become governors, judges, members of presi-
dential cabinets, senators, ambassadors, preachers, teach-

ers, agriculturists, manufacturers, builders, and leaders

of the people in many Southern states.

As a tutor at Chapel Hill, tradition has it, Morehead
associated with, as friend or tutor, among other future
leaders, William Mercer Green, one of the founders and
the chancellor of the University of the South at Sewanee;
Robert Hall Morrison, one of the founders and the first
president of Davidson College; a fellow tutor, William
Hooper, later president of Chowan College and Wake
Forest College; and James K. Polk, first honor man of the
class of 1818, who became president of the United States.
He had high respect for Polk since their Chapel Hill days,

4

 

but campaigned against him in support of Henry Clay,
his Whig party favorite, for president.

At Chapel Hill, Morehead came under the influence
of President Joseph Caldwell and a young graduate and
instructor, Archibald De Bow Murphey. Both of these
leaders, with their vision of public schools, constructive
public investments, and building programs, exerted a
profound influence on his life and his leadership of the
people of North Carolina.

Archibald De Bow Murphey’s Report to the legisla-
ture in 1817, and President Caldwell’s teachings and his
letters to the press and to the people, written under the
“nom de plume” of Carleton, in behalf of public schools,
roads, industries, railroads, and internal improvements,
are among the great documents of our State which ex-
press the vision without which the people perish.

Til

RAILROADS AND SHIPS

Near the center of Morehead’s dream was the inven-
tion by his kinsman in Scotland. The steam engine, the
motive power of the new factories in England, became
the pulsing heart of the world-wide Industrial Revolu-
tion through the invention of James Watt, who was the
son of Agnes Muirhead of Scotland. Stephenson put the
steam engine on rails in England; Robert Fulton put the
steam engine in big boats on the Hudson. John Motley

5

 
Morehead put the steam engine on rails in North Caro-
lina to meet the steamships which, in his vision, would
some day ply all the seas of the earth.

IV

DREAMS AND FULFILLMENT

To the dreams of his teachers he added larger dreams
of his own to which he gave his long and devoted life.
His dreams are yet being fulfilled in our time.

Hear this prophetic man more than a century ago
speaking out for the freedom of the mind, the freedom
of enterprise, and the unfettered equal Opportunity of
the people of our State. When fighting for the equal
Tepresentation in the legislature of the people of
the more heavily populated piedmont and western
counties, he was reminded by the opposition that in
Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson, no person was
allowed to vote or hold office who was not a freeholder
of property. Morehead replied in substance that, while
he esteemed the character and achievements of Virgin-
ians, and highly respected and even felt veneration for
their great leaders, he “shuddered to think that the poor
freemen of his State should be excluded from the legisla-
tive councils of the country. To whom did this country
belong when it burst the British fetters and became in-
dependent? It certainly belonged to the whole communi-
ty and not to the wealthy alone. Why then should the

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people be deprived of any privilege for which they
jointly fought and to which they are justly entitled?”
This challenge is being met in his prophetic spirit in our

At the request of the Quakers of Guilford County he
introduced a bill in the State legislature for the gradual
liberation of the slaves. One of North Carolina’s great
sons, Judge William Gaston of New Bern, who, by the
way, was the first student to enter Georgetown University
in 1789 and who wrote our state song “The Old North
State,” and John M. Morehead were leaders of the mi-
nority which voted in the constitutional convention of
1835 against taking away from free Negroes the right to
vote. When governor, he recommended ahead of his
time State institutions for the training of the blind, the
deaf and dumb, and for the care of the insane.

A large slaveholder, he was opposed both to slavery
and to reckless abolitionism, and favored gradual and
responsible emancipation. Opposed to secession, he
tried with other moderate leaders, North and South, to
save the Union but cast his lot with the Confederate
States against the Northern invasion of the Southern
States.

He fought against unequal representation, against the
poverty, illiteracy, and isolation of a people devoid of
highways, railroads, waterways, and seaports. He fought
for education and transportation as necessary for the ad-
vanced agriculture and industries upon which depend

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the free enterprise and prosperity, the enlightenment and
culture, the opportunity and progress of a free people.
As agitator and builder, as leader of the Whig Party,
as trustee of the University of North Carolina for thirty-
eight years, organizer and first president of its Alumni
Association, of which, incidentally, his namesake was
president exactly one hundred years later, as one of the
reformers of the State Constitution, as chairman of the
National Whig Convention which nominated Zachary
Taylor, as president of the North Carolina Railroad As-
sociation, founder of Edgeworth, a woman’s college in
Greensboro, friend of religious dissenters, champion of
the equal representation of the people, of gradual eman-
cipation of the slaves, of the right of free Negroes to vote,
planter, builder of mills and factories, promoter of high-
ways, railroads, and seaports, founder of Morehead City,
he was both a prophetic idealist and a practical agricul-
tural, industrial, and political statesman.
More than a hundred years-ago he helped to lay the
foundations of Morehead City and across the state from
the sea to the mountains the enduring foundations of the
progressive traditions of a humane and hopeful people.
In the vision of Morehead, not only was the North
Carolina railroad to tie together in travel and trade both
the eastern and the western sections of our State and the
turnpikes and railroads to be built across eastern America
from Boston to New Orleans, but also the seaport at
Morehead City was to connect the highways, the interior

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waterways, and the railways with the seaways of the world.
After he retired from public office he invested his talents
and much of his fortune in the founding of this city, in
the further development of railroads, and in the promo-
tion of this port to be the juncture of the rails and roads
of the continent and the ship lanes between the conti-
nents.

Vv

SOME PRESENT PIONEERS AND BUILDERS AT MOREHEAD CITY

Others have told the story of those before him and
after him who worked and built on Shepard’s Point. They

_ have told of the times from the days of Bridgers Arendell,

to the times of the Morehead City Port Commission com-
posed of W. Hufham, B. F. Royal, S. Woodland, W. P.
Freeman and G. R. Wallace, to the days of the State Sur-
vey Commission, composed of the directors of the Atlantic
and North Carolina Railroad, Selby Anderson of Wil-
son, Luther Hamilton of Morehead City, J. Y. Joyner:
of LaGrange, and later M. D. Stephenson of New Bern.
They have told the story of the vision of Governor Camer-
on Morrison and his great program for building roads,

educational and humanitarian institutions, and seaports
in Norvth Carolina, all since carried on through the recent
state administration of Governor Gregg Cherry, who set
up the present State Port Authority, directed by Chair-
man A. G. Myers, Executive Director Col. G. W. Gillette,

9

 
and their associates, J. Harry White, David O. Holton,
W. J. Bason, Dr. J. M. Hedrick, E. G. Henderson, and
George R. Ross. They have all ably brought forward
this enterprise to this happy occasion and hopeful out-
look. All know of the work of Governor W. Kerr Scott,
who made North Carolina seaports a fighting part of his
go forward program through large public investments in
schools, in agriculture, in educational and humanitarian
institutions, in interurban and rural highways, and in
commercial seaports at Wilmington and Morehead City.
Colonel Gillette and others still will tell of the engineer-
ing layout of the harbor, the docks and the Terminal,
their facilities, and their limitations.

VI

HISTORICAL MOMENTUM BACK OF NORTH CAROLINA’S
FORWARD MARCH

By the cooperative leadership and work of North
Carolina people of an original rugged American pioneer
stock, and their daily work in churches, schools, libraries,
factories, and power plants, and on farms, on railroads,
highways, airlines, and seaports, North Carolina is on the
march.

A. North Carolina’s Colonial and Revolutionary Heritage

A proud history gives background and momentum to

the forward march of a great people. The first settle-

10

ment of the English-speaking people and the first English
child born in the New World was over there in Dare
County on Roanoke Island. At Alamance in 1771, in
Mecklenburg in 1775, and at Halifax in 1776, North
Carolina blazed the trails of an insurgent people on the
way to the American Revolution which started the march
of the peoples’ revolution around the earth. This revolu-
tion for the freedom of the people could not be stopped
by Adolph Hitler and cannot be halted now by the reac-

tionary and no less monstrous dictatorship of Joseph
Stalin.

B. The University with Rootage in the People’s Revolu-
tion Now Consolidated as the Threefold University
of the People

At Chapel Hill, as a child of this American people’s
revolution there was founded by the soldiers of George
Washington and Nathanael Greene the first State Uni-
versity to open its doors as a university of the people in
the New World. Today, consolidated with the distin-
guished State College in Raleigh, and the eminent Wom-
an’s College in Greensboro, and in cooperation with
Duke University, Wake Forest, Davidson, and all our
other splendid colleges for men and women, the Univer-
sity of North Carolina is with them all an advancing hope
of “light and liberty” for our people.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in

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recent decades, has led, and leads, the Southeast below the
Potomac in the number of academic departments, both
in the College of Liberal Arts and in the Graduate
School, which have been adjudged of national distinction
in a rating made by academic departments in Southern
and American Colleges and Universities. In professional
schools, in scientific, social, educational, and humanistic
research, in studies in rural economy, race relations, labor
relations, in Southern historical and other valuable col-
lections, in studies in Southern regionalism, and in free-
dom of teaching, research, and publication the Universi-
ty of North Carolina has also led the way.

The University helps develop and serves teachers,
librarians, high school and community directors of
drama, bankers, merchants, insurance executives, farm-
ers, business and labor groups, the State’s fisherfolk, min-
isters, doctors of medicine and of dentistry, nurses, phar-
macists, lawyers, journalists, and local, state, and federal
public officials in a pioneering way through academic de-
partments, the general University Extension Division,
and through the nationally unique Institute of Govern-
ment.

The University Press, with its academic freedom to
publish, and the local group of scholars, humanists,

scientists, dramatists, novelists, poets, essayists, historians,
and biographers have made Chapel Hill a national center

of both scholarly research and creative productions in
drama and literature.

 

The North Carolina State College has moved to the
forefront in teaching, research, and extension in agri-
culture, engineering, and textiles. In cooperation with
the University at Chapel Hill, the Institute of Statistics
at State College has become an acknowledged world
center of mathematical statistics, drawing upon university
centers in Europe and in Asia, and serving many depart-
ments of our national life. The Woman’s College in
Greensboro, in its faculty, standards, plant, and equip-
ment, is one of the largest and best colleges for women in
the country.

‘The increasing cooperation between the coordinated
University of North Carolina, the nationally eminent
Duke University, the other colleges, and the university
center soon to develop greatly around Wake Forest in
Winston-Salem, will, in time, make North Carolina, as
has been said, “‘one of the great intellectual and spiritual

centers of the world.”

C. Maritime Traditions

In this City of Morehead, where “men go down to
the sea in ships” and fisherfolk as “the sons of the sea
capture the wealth of the leaping tides,” we are reminded
that at Edenton, N. C., Joseph Hewes, as the first Chair-
man of the Naval Affairs Committee of the Continental
Congress, founded the American Navy and enlisted for
the American Revolution John Paul Jones of Scotland.
It was John Paul Jones, who, at the very beginning, set

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high the fighting traditions of the American Navy so that

ever since, by his example, American sea captains,

“When armored wrong makes terms to right,
Fling back his proud reply, ‘We have not yet
begun to fight.’ ”

Joseph Hewes was forerunner of four North Caro-
linians who became secretaries of the United States Navy
—John Branch, George E. Badger, William A. Graham,
and Josephus Daniels, three of them sons of the Univer-
sity. George E. Badger was a Yale graduate. Another
son of our State University, John Y. Mason, a Virginian,
was also Secretary of the Navy. One of these sons of the
University projected the expedition of Commodore Per-
ry, which opened up Japan to the world, recently fateful
with hazards and now hopeful with resurgent strength
for the free peoples of the world. The last of North
Carolina’s secretaries of the Navy directed the Navy to
victory in the First World War, my old friend, Josephus
Daniels.

As we look out upon North Carolina waters today we
are also reminded that not far from the sister port of
Wilmington, near the mouth of the Cape Fear River,
Fort Fisher held out for four years as a gallant stronghold
for the Southern Confederacy. At Wilmington the State
has now developed a promising port near where the
historic Cape Fear joins the wide sea.

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VII

THE NORTH CAROLINA RENAISSANCE

In fulfillment of these great traditions, and on the
foundation laid by Archibald De Bow Murphey, Bartlett
Yancey, Calvin H. Wiley, Alexander Graham, M. C. S.
Noble, E. P. Moses, Braxton Craven, Edwin A. Alderman,
James Y. Joyner, Charles D. McIver, E. C. Brooks,
J. I. Foust, and others, Charles B. Aycock led a great
public educational crusade in North Carolina. North
Carolina became the leader of the New South in educa-
tion, agriculture, textiles, the tobacco and furniture in-
dustries, and in public health and the general welfare.

As parts of the North Carolina Renaissance we see
advancing today the state-wide, nine-month, twelve-year
public school system, two great Universities, many noble
state, church, and private colleges, three distinguished
medical schools—Duke in Durham, Bowman Gray of
Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, and the State Medical
School in Chapel Hill—a state-wide toll-free system of
interurban and rural highways, a state-wide system of
hospitals and medical care launched by Broughton and
carried forward by Cherry and Scott. This medical edu-
cation and hospital program, by the vote of the repre-
sentation of the people, is pointing the way for freedom
and competence in the medical care of the people across
the State from the sand dunes to the mountain coves,

Nearby Morehead City, “the menhaden capital of

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the world,” not far from where the warm waters of the
Gulf Stream meet the cold waters from the north, is the
Beaufort Federal Marine Laboratory, the University of
North Carolina Institute of Fisheries, the Duke Univer-
sity Teaching Center of Marine Biology, and the North
Carolina State College Technical Institute of the Uni-
versity of North Carolina. Also nearby are Camp Le-
jeune and Cherry Point, two of the most important bases
of the United States Marines, and Fort Bragg, the nation’s
largest artillery camp.

VIII

THE COMING OF INDUSTRIES TO NORTH CAROLINA

The recent and the prospective building of large in-
dustrial and power plants in eastern, piedmont, and west-
ern North Carolina are other examples of the expanding
enterprises of the State.

The main business of this port is to serve North Caro-
lina, its farms, factories, and people. North Carolina
farmers grow 40 per cent of all the tobacco and 7o per
cent of all the leaf cigarette tobacco grown in the nation.
The tobacco factories in Durham, Winston-Salem, and
Reidsville make more than half of the nearly half billion
cigarettes annually smoked in the United States. At Can-
ton is one of the nation’s large pulp and fibre plants.
North Carolina ranks near the top among the forty-eight
states in agricultural and manufactured products. North

16

Carolina has the most textile spindles and leads all of the
states in the manufacture of tobacco, towels, denims, and
furniture. Today other important industries are coming
to North Carolina, such as General Electric, General
Motors, Western Electric, DuPont, Union Carbide, and
American Woolen. A total of 101 industries invested
over $140,000,000 in plants in North Carolina in 1951,
and estimates of the expenditures for similar purposes
for the first part of 1952 have equalled or exceeded those
of 1951 for a like period. The manufacture of their
products alone will approximate an additional $1,000,-
000,000 a year, which will serve to increase the State’s
per capita income which is much too low for the general
well-being. These companies require and demand world
markets for their goods and world sources for their raw
materials, hence the Morehead Port Terminal comes
hopefully into the picture as an outlet to the sea from
the State with east-west and north-south railways, and
with a statewide system of hard-surfaced highways with-
out one toll bridge or a toll gate in the entire State.

It is singularly appropriate that the Union Carbide
Company should establish a plant in North Carolina, as
it was in this State just sixty years ago that this giant in-
dustry had its beginning in the discovery of a method of
producing calcium carbide in the electric furnace. Dur-
ing that sixty years the Company has established busi-
nesses in every one of the forty-eight states, and in eight-
een foreign countries, and has built up a business in ex-

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cess of $2,000,000 a day. Having made a round trip in
the sixty years, it has come back home and is now build-
ing a $20,000,000 plant in Rockingham County, within
less than two miles of the spot where it first saw the light.

The Union Carbide Company was born at Spray. The
industrialists at Spray requested the chemical department
at Chapel Hill to identify the gas produced by the reac-
tion between calcium carbide and water. Dr. Francis P.
Venable, head of the department, leader in scientific re-
search, and later president of the University of North
Carolina, and future president of the American Chemical
Society, identified this gas as acetylene. Industrialists
and engineers at Spray promoted its development with
the risks of their capital investments and commercialized
the process for the use of mankind. Acetylene gas has
been used for illumination in local and in isolated in-
stallations, in mines, in early motor car lighting, in porta-
ble lighting, in cutting and welding, in the manufacture
of steel, and as an intermediate in innumerable ways in
the gigantic chemical industries. The adventurous lead-
ership of the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation
around the earth is one of the many industrial sagas of
modern times.

If these industries come to our State, spend vast
amounts of money in the location of their industries here,

if they give employment to many thousands of our people
and dispense many millions of dollars each year to the
people of our State, in taxes, payrolls, and through other

18

channels, it is only fair and right, and it is good business,
that the State provide every reasonable and fair means to
encourage them to make a just profit. Without favorable
conditions and a fair profit, industry will not be attracted
to the State to develop more income for workers and bet-
ter markets for farmers and merchants. Without a profit
they cannot produce. With a profit they contribute their
fair share to the revenues of the State, the schools, and the
health of the people, and continue, through decent wages,
to contribute to the economic welfare of the people.

Ix
SOME OTHER DEVELOPMENTS

The scenic parkway from Washington to the Great
Smokies National Park will soon connect the vast popula-
tion of eastern America with the majestic mountains of
North Carolina. The historical and symphonic folk
dramas of Paul Green’s “The Lost Colony’ on Roanoke
Island, and “The Highland Call” at Fayetteville, and
Kermit Hunter’s “Unto These Hills” at Cherokee, and
“Horn in the West” at Boone are eloquent and beautiful
with their tales of the North Carolina pioneers.

x

MOREHEAD CITY AND WILMINGTON AS TERMINALS FOR
NORTH CAROLINA AND THE WORLD

Not the least of all these enterprises, movements, and
events is the dedication of the port, the terminal and the

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docks of Morehead City as a juncture of railways, high-
ways, airways, and seaways for the exchange of goods in
the commerce of the world.

Too long has North Carolina been mainly tributary
to the, ports to the north and the south. Too long the
raw materials of the South were mainly tributary to the
great financial centers of the gigantic industrial belt
which reaches from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia
to Chicago and St. Louis. All honor to that great region
in the building of modern industrial America, whose
power helped to turn the tides of victory for freedom
against the might of the Fascist powers, a region which is
a chief bulwark of freedom and peace against the threats
of the ruthless Communist totalitarian police state in the
present world.

Rising to play its productive and powerful part in
America, and in the world, is the New South of farms,

factories, electric power, transportation, communications,
universities, and research on the farthest frontiers of
creative ideas and humane hopes. As the ship channels
are further deepened through the sandbars to the sea, the
ports of Morehead City and Wilmington will become in-
creasingly hopeful North Carolina centers of commerce,
as a vital part in a more productive South in a stronger

America, for a more prosperous and peaceful world.

PUBLISHER’S NOTES

I

Joun Motiey Moreueap, B.S., U. N. C., 1891, LL.D., 1926;
D.Eng., Wake Forest College, 1944; D.Sc., Upsala University
(Swedish) 1944; long time Chief Engineer and Executive, Union
Carbide and Carbon Corporation; Minister to Sweden, 1930-34;
donor with Rufus Lenoir Patterson of the Morehead-Patterson
University Bell Tower at Chapel Hill, N. C.; donor of the High
School and Community Stadium at Draper, N. C.; donor of The
Morehead Building and Planetarium at the University of North
Carolina; and founder of The Morehead Foundation for Scholar-

ships and Fellowships at the University of North Carolina, his
Alma Mater,

II

Mr. Morehead wishes gratefully to acknowledge that in the
preparation of this address he had much help.

Il

This address is printed in full as compared with the abbrevi-

ated copy adjusted to the time schedule of the dedication cere-
monies.

 

 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 
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