Burlington Black Bottom walking tour traces Black history downtown

Worth Street in downtown Burlington is the spine of the Black Bottom tour, a district that ran from 1875 to 1979 and traces where Black business, art and civic life took root in the city’s core. Built from work by the African-American Cultural Arts & History Center and Elon University’s Department of History & Geography, the self-guided map identifies 55 Black-owned or Black-frequented businesses, from movie theaters and cafes to pool halls and drug stores.

How to read downtown through Black Bottom

The most useful way to start is with the district itself. Black Bottom sat on Worth Street, one block north of Main Street, inside the part of Burlington that now overlaps with the city’s active downtown footprint, including a 16-block Municipal Services District and a seven-block social district. The walk moves through the same streets where residents once shopped, worked, gathered and built institutions of their own.

Using Sanborn fire-insurance maps, city records, newspapers and library archives, Lucy Garcia traced Black Bottom’s rise and fall and showed that the area was largely shuttered or displaced by the 1970s. The land that now reads as parking lots and ordinary downtown edges once held a dense Black business ecosystem.

Start where Burlington began

To understand Black Bottom, begin before Burlington was Burlington. The town was originally known as Company Shops, the community built around the North Carolina Railroad’s repair facilities between 1855 and 1859. The railroad bought almost 632 acres for repair shops, offices and railroad employee homes, and Preservation Alamance places the population at about 300 people by 1864.

Twelve enslaved African Americans and one Black freedman worked at the shops, and by 1867 all non-white workers there had been fired.

When the railroad shifted operations to Spencer in 1886, Company Shops took on a new name: Burlington. The change marked a municipal reset, but it did not erase the people already building Black economic life here. Black commerce followed immediately behind the railroad era and helped define the downtown that emerged after it.

The businesses that made Black Bottom matter

Thomas Duck, sometimes identified as John Duck, was an early Black grocer downtown. Black residents created businesses that served daily life as well as social life.

The first known site of a Black-owned business after 1886 was where Spencer Thomas opened a tinsmith shop in 1888. Thomas was a freed former slave who had worked at the Company Shops before opening that business. A tinsmith shop, a grocery, a theater, a cafe, a pool hall and a drug store all belonged to the same downtown ecosystem.

By identifying 55 businesses over a century’s span, the ArcGIS StoryMap reveals a durable commercial district rather than a handful of isolated sites.

What the cultural center preserves

The African-American Cultural Arts & History Center extends the tour’s meaning beyond storefronts and street corners. Its mission is to document and celebrate the contributions of African Americans in Alamance County, and its collection spans personal, familial, generational, industrial and commercial history. The center’s exhibits are housed at 2381 Corporation Parkway in Burlington.

Its virtual tour connects local school history to broader systems of Black education. One exhibit focuses on McCray School and the Rosenwald Fund, which helped educate approximately one-third of African Americans in the southern states. That same material links segregated school life, community education and desegregation in North Carolina.

The center’s programming grew out of a preservation vision that Jane Sellars recognized in 2018. After her death in 2019, Shineece Sellars carried the work forward. In 2021, tours at the center focused on the struggles, successes and impact of Black residents in Alamance County after emancipation.

Why the memory work reaches beyond one street

Burlington’s Black history is tied to wider county struggles over race, power and civic life. Wyatt Outlaw, a Black councilman in Graham and founder and president of the local Union League, was hanged by Klansmen on February 26, 1870. He was a business owner and the first Black town constable and commissioner in Graham.

That larger context continues in the work of the Alamance County Community Remembrance Coalition, which has partnered with Elon University and the Equal Justice Initiative to honor victims of racial terror. In 2025, the coalition displayed soil collected from Outlaw’s lynching site at the African-American Cultural Arts & History Center.

How to use the tour today

The best way to approach Black Bottom is to move slowly enough to notice what changed and what remains. The downtown map, the StoryMap and the center’s exhibits work together as a practical route through Burlington’s layered history, from the railroad repair shops to the business district on Worth Street and the institutions that followed.

A few stops carry the strongest lessons:

• Company Shops and the railroad repair grounds, where Burlington’s earliest labor system was built and where Black workers were present but excluded.

• The Worth Street Black Bottom district, a dense Black commercial corridor.

• The first known Black-owned business site after 1886, linked to Spencer Thomas and the shift from labor to ownership.

• The African-American Cultural Arts & History Center, where school history, family history and business history sit together at 2381 Corporation Parkway.

• The broader downtown blocks now shaped by the Municipal Services District and the social district, which show how much of the old landscape still sits inside the city’s daily life.

Preservation Alamance began creating walking tours in 2021 to update the photographic and descriptive record of historic districts.