The North Carolina Mutual Provident Life Insurance Company was established in 1898 to provide benefits to the previously uninsured black community. However, construction was an integral part of the company’s success in the early years. In his book, Black Business in the New South, Walter Weare notes that, “as early as 1903 the company began an investment program in real estate, largely as an outgrowth of John Merrick’s efforts, which by this time had made him the owner of more than sixty houses in Durham. By the end of 1907 real estate holdings accounted for ¾ of the Mutual’s total assets and by 1910 the Merrick-Moore-Spaulding Real Estate Company was formed. The following year, North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company had begun transferring assets to the new company, which had begun platting land in the Hayti/Stokesdale neighborhoods. The economic environment of the 1920s extended to the black community and real estate, development, and building ventures expanded significantly, with NC Mutual and its subsidiaries taking the lead. After Merrick’s death in 1919, the firm Merrick-Moore-Spaulding lingered momentarily as the Moore-Spaulding Company, but by 1922 it became the (E.R.) Merrick-McDougald-Wilson Company, an enterprise that bought and sold real estate, managed the rental properties of the Mutual, and sold liability insurance. One of the most important tools for homeownership that came about in the 1920s was the creation of the Mutual Building and Loan Association in 1921, “for the purpose of teaching our group the importance of owning their own homes.” By the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s an 1940s lots in the Stokesdale neighborhood were sold to individual property owners for the construction of housing, presumably with financing through the Mutual Building and Loan Association, Mechanics & Farmers Bank, the Mortgage Company of Durham, or another black-owned institution.
By the 1950s, the Mutual and the Mutual Building & Loan Association responded to nationwide demand for housing, by financing apartments and housing developments. 1960s promotional material for Mutual touted their financial support of a new housing development, the Mutual Heights Apartments. By August of 1950, the building was complete, with nearly forty one-story structures, most with multiple units, organized around the curved Atlantic Street and Mutual Drive with planned greenspaces at the interior of each collection of buildings. By the 1960s, NC Mutual and its subsidiaries had been shaping Durham’s physical landscape through loans, mortgages, land development, and building projects for over half a century. Much of black Durham could not have been built without them, yet the role of each of these related companies has yet to be fully understood. While technically separate corporate identities, the Mutual and its executives gave the Mutual Building and Loan Association, the Mechanics & Farmers Bank, and a myriad of other businesses life and sustained them, serving on the Boards of Directors and holding controlling interests in the businesses. In 1966, NC Mutual would make a very visible statement of their presence in Durham.
Thus, while the most visible symbol of NC Mutual is a tower of modernism, it was the decades of policy and philanthropy and illustrate the true forward-thinking of the company and its leaders. From providing life insurance and rental housing, to mortgages and loans for securing their own homes, to leading the charge for better hospitals and schools, and even apprentice programs for construction trades, the NC Mutual Life Insurance Company, was not following tradition, but creating new standards for achieving the traditional American dream. The above text is an excerpt from the paper, "The Real Estate and Building Programs of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company" presented at the Preservation North Carolina Conference in Durham, North Carolina, September 23-25, 2010.
