Author: O.Henry Magazine

On a warmly flaring afternoon in late August, Smith High School AP History teacher Nick Jordan, wife Macy and their young son, Rowan, are settling into their spacious new house on Northridge Street in the Lindley Park neighborhood. This is their second home in the neighborhood, having moved just two weeks ago from a much smaller two-bedroom bungalow just down the block. Renovation of their handsome Dutch Colonial with its sweeping front porch is well underway, but neighborhood history is on Jordan’s inquiring mind this day.

“Our house was known as the Dailey Retreat,” he explains during a break from clearing his overgrown yard for new shrubs and native plants. “Its previous owner operated it as a traditional bed and breakfast and cooking school for more than two decades. As we all know, houses don’t stay on the market for very long in Lindley Park. “That’s why we grabbed it. We wanted more room for my work and maybe a second child down the road.”

Two years ago, Jordan became the neighborhood’s official historian, researching and writing colorful vignettes about Lindley Park’s storied past for the seasonal newsletter. Though the historic neighborhood is relatively compact in size (it occupies roughly a mile between West Market Street and Spring Garden Street one way and Elam Avenue and Holden Road the other), its 1,200 homes present a remarkable array of 20th-century housing styles that range from quaint bungalows to Colonial revivals, stone mansions to mid-century ranches, charming cottages to Craftsman classics. 

Jordan’s own house was built in 1914 by a shoe salesman named A.E. Fordham, who reportedly had a shop on a corner near the site where the future 18-story Jefferson Standard Building (today Lincoln Financial Group) would rise in 1923. His brother, C.C. Fordham, was a prominent pharmacist on South Eugene whose son later became the dean of UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine. Fordham died after three years in the house but passed its ownership on to his wife, an unusual circumstance for that era of home ownership, Jordan notes.

The Jordans’ next-door neighbor’s house holds even greater interest to the historian. The Boren House was built by a man who worked as vice president of Pomona Terra Cotta Company, which was owned by John Van Lindley, a visionary Quaker who left the area to fight for the Union Army during the Civil War and returned to dramatically expand his father’s commercial nursery and florist business. By the late 19th century, J. Van Lindley Nurseries reportedly occupied 900 acres between Oakland Avenue and West Market Street. As biographer Joseph C. Carlin notes in J. Van Lindley: His Ancestors, Life, and Legacy, the Lindley operation was at one point, on its 1,130 acres in nearby Pomona, “likely the largest nursery operation in the then-known world with 1.5 million plants under cultivation.” In addition to founding Pomona Terra Cotta Company, Lindley also helped start Jefferson Pilot Insurance Company and built peach orchards in Southern Pines.

A young girl named Mary K. who grew up in the Boren house during the late 1920s, Jordan learned, was part of something called the “Northridge Gang,” a troupe of neighborhood kids that attended the new Lindley Elementary School. “These kids wrote and performed plays around the Lindley Park neighborhood to raise money for helping to feed the city’s hungry children,” he explains. “I also found a remarkable wedding notice from 18 years later that this same young woman grew up to become a Guilford County social worker working with the poor in the city.”

He sees a timeless message in her story. “I think this is why Lindley Park folks today are so keen to preserve the spirit of a neighborhood that echoes J. Van Lindley’s own love of nature, love of a community and our fellow human beings. We treat our neighbors accordingly. I believe almost everyone here carries that legacy with them.”

•

First, a brief history lesson. At the turn of the century, with an eye to Greensboro’s future, Lindley donated 60 acres of land along Spring Garden Street for the establishment of an amusement park with a manmade lake designed to showcase the beautiful forest and landscape of the city’s western boundary.

The park’s grand opening in June 1902 coincided with the inauguration of the Greensboro Electric Company’s new streetcar service from downtown to the park entrance and serves as the birthdate of the neighborhood that would carry its benefactor’s name. 

The amusement park featured a Vaudeville show, dining casino, bowling alley, dancing pavilion, miniature railroad, movie theater and recreational lake for boating. Lindley’s gift also included 17 undisturbed acres for an arboretum. As Greensboro writer Tim Cole notes in a 2015 remembrance of the park, “The Greensboro Patriot recorded that the new park was visited by thousands on a single Sunday in June 1902.”

When the amusement park closed in 1917, a year before Lindley’s passing, the lake was filled in and the city hired a Charlotte city planner and landscaper named Earle Sumner Draper to design a planned neighborhood development that would be named in Lindley’s honor. In time, Draper’s name would become associated with some of the finest subdivisions in the South including Charlotte’s Myers Park, High Point’s Emerywood and Druid Hills Historic District in Hendersonville.

Distinctive stone entrances were created to establish Lindley Park’s neighborhood presence on an expanding Spring Garden Street in hopes of attracting the growing city’s middleclass families. It was also Draper who reportedly coined the term “urban sprawl” to describe how the quality of otherwise attractive neighborhoods could be threatened by encroaching commercial development — a cause still close to the hearts of many Lindley Park residents today.

Following Lindley’s death, son Paul C. Lindley, also a prominent nurseryman, was elected to the city council and became a passionate advocate for an expanding Greensboro’s parks system. His vision included a large meandering public park that would link Lindley and Lake Daniel parks via North Buffalo Creek. But the plan never became a reality. Upon becoming Greensboro’s mayor in 1931, however, Paul was instrumental in the creation of Country Park during the early days of the Great Depression, probably using Federal WPA money to hire unemployed workers to do the job. Sadly, Lindley drowned in a tragic boat accident on the property in 1933.

It wasn’t until the city adopted a formal Master Plan for Recreation by Charles M. Graves in 1951 that playgrounds, ball fields and a recreation center with an Olympic-sized swimming pool were created for the Lindley Park neighborhood. In 1957, about the same time legal efforts by six African American golfers to desegregate Gillespie Golf Course were working their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Lindley Park’s swimming pool became the focus of a historic effort to desegregate the all-whites facility by a pair of African American women. To avoid opening to all races, the city chose to sell the pool to a private operator but repurchased the facility in 1967, opening it to everyone. Both events have been cited as moments that jump-started America’s Civil Rights movement, prelude to the historic sit-in protest at Greensboro’s Woolworth’s Department Store in February 1960. The popular pool is scheduled to open in 2027 after much needed repairs are completed.

•

The year 1968 was one that Lindley Park residents would never forget, especially Marygrace Llewellyn.

She and her parents, Don and Rose, had just moved from suburban Boston to Greensboro and purchased a pretty, yellow bungalow with green shutters on Masonic Drive, overlooking Lindley Park. They moved in on a Saturday morning in May.

“My father thought he’d moved to Paradise,” Marygrace remembers with a laugh. “And I did, too. When you stood in our yard and look out at the park all you saw were the beautiful trees and meadows of Lindley Park.”

She woke the next morning to start school, however, to the sound of heavy machinery.

“I looked out my bedroom window and saw bulldozers knocking down the park’s trees. My mother was horrified. Our beautiful park was being destroyed to build a road through the middle of the park!” 

That road was Wendover Avenue, bisecting the heart of the Gate City from east to west, isolating Lindley Park’s playgrounds and ballfields in the process. That same year, however, Greensboro Beautiful was created as a partnership between the City of Greensboro, civic organizations, local gardeners, private citizens and businesses to develop and fund beautification projects throughout the city. 

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, however, that Greensboro Beautiful broke ground on a 17-acre tract of land off Ashland Street then called the Anniversary Garden. The Greensboro Arboretum — long a vision of one J. Van Lindley — was finally completed and dedicated to the city in 1991.

•

Ron and Theresa Miller moved into a small house on Sherwood Avenue in 1987. Ron worked for the editorial board of the News & Record and Theresa taught composition at UNCG. Five years later, with three small children and a house that no longer fit their needs, they purchased a larger Dutch Colonial on Willowbrook Drive, which sits where the amusement park’s lake was drained to become a park with attractive stone bridges. “The house was kind of a disaster because it hadn’t been fixed up in years,” Ron remembers. “There was plaster falling off the walls, ugly, blue shag carpeting on the floor and only one bathroom upstairs with no shower and only a toilet and small bathtub.”      

“I cried when we moved there,” Theresa chips in with a laugh. “There was no air conditioning and the kitchen was tiny and dated.” Moreover, they add, the neighborhood around them had visibly declined, due in part to a 1971 redistricting plan that bussed children from their part of Lindley Park to other schools in the county, fueling an exodus of young families from the neighborhood. In 1993, however, a retired officer named Jack Almon and his wife, Nita, started the Lindley Park Association to lobby for change and improvement. Within a decade, thanks to the association’s persistent work, a revised and more sensible redistricting plan sent all of Lindley Park’s school kids to nearby Lindley Elementary, Kiser Middle and Grimsley High School. “That had a positive impact on the neighborhood,” says Ron. “Young families began to moving back to the neighborhood, sending it in a very good direction.”