SAVING GREAT PLACES
Navassa was prosperous enough to have several “cook shops” where people could buy a meal, several social clubs, and an African American baseball team organized by the workers. A new product came to town when the Carolina Creosote Company built a plant in the 1930s. Creosote is a thick, black liquid derived from coal-tar. Lumber dried in the plant was pressure-treated with creosote so as to preserve the wood in wet conditions. The creosoted wood was used as railroad ties, utility poles, and pilings for docks. The creosote plant provided new job possibilities for African American workers, but they were not pleasant jobs. Creosote is a nasty substance. Fumes can make people sick, and constant exposure to creosote can cause skin cancer. Those who worked inside the plant endured especially hard conditions, because the creosoting process creates a lot of heat. The plant was often so hot that workers had to take salt pills to replace the sodium lost in sweat. Wages for the hard, hot work were meager, usually about a half dollar an hour. And racial inequality continued to dominate the workers’ lives, often in petty ways. Louis “Bobby” Brown, later the first mayor of Navassa, recalled that in the early 1950s “a black man couldn’t even buy a Coke. The only store in town would only sell Pepsi or Nehi to blacks. Cokes were only for whites” (Mark Hibbs, “Navassa: From Guano to Creosote,” CRO, July 13, 2016).
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