Wilmington's first (and only) woman mayor

I recently gave a tour at Wilmington's historic Oakdale Cemetery, with a focus on some of the women who were laid to rest there. 

Katherine Mayo Cowan's headstone, Oakdale Cemetery

In the course of my research, I ran across the story of Katherine Mayo Cowan, who was mayor of Wilmington in the 1920s. And I wanted to know more about her.


Katherine was born in 1883. Her father was a machinist. She worked as a stenographer as a young, single woman. Katherine married James Hill Cowan in June, 1904. The newspaper at the time said that he was a "popular and polished" young man and that she was "the charming daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Mayo." The pair were married in secret after a short engagement. 

Mr. Cowan is the reason Mrs. Cowan was mayor.  Mr. Cowan had a varied work life: he had been a newspaper editor, an actor, a show business promoter, Wilmington's Collector of Customs, and he worked at the Chamber of Commerce before he became mayor in 1921. He was inaugurated in front of an "immense throng" of people (Wilmington Dispatch, May 18, 1921). He died in office in 1924, and his widow, Katherine, was appointed to fill his term. 

Wilmington Morning Star, September 19, 1924

While Mrs. Cowan was appointed because of her husband, she gained real power and a good income by becoming mayor. The mayor was paid $5,000 a year, at a time when most women made much less than that - an experienced white teacher made $133 per month in North Carolina in the 1920s (and African American women made $100 per month). 

Wilmington Morning Star, September 22, 1924

After she was appointed mayor, Mrs. Cowan told reporters that she would "...do everything in my power to make this administration a success." (Wilmington Morning Star, September 23, 1924.). The newspaper went on to report on Mrs. Cowan's looks and demeanor: "Seated at the broad desk of her late husband, Mayor Cowan presented the appearance of being an altogether capable executive. She was becomingly clad in a black dress, her hair caught in the position one has grown to expect of the modern business woman and wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses." No known photograph exists from this era, so we don't know what the paper meant by these comments. It seems telling, however, that when the next mayor of Wilmington took the reins of office, the newspaper did not feel the need to talk about his hairstyle or clothing choices. The paper did see fit to remark that "the Mayor's gavel of authority passed back into masculine hands...." (Wilmington Morning Star, June 2, 1925)

Mrs. Cowan seemed to enjoy being mayor. She ran for her own term. She announced her candidacy in March of 1925, but, paradoxically, did not actively campaign for office.  Ideas about respectability held a powerful hold over women's lives and actions, and it may be that Mrs. Cowan thought it would not be appropriate to campaign for office.

Mayor Cowan came in dead last in the 1925 election. 

Over the course of the century, other local women followed Mayor Cowan's footsteps and held public office. In the 1960s, Hannah Block elected Wilmington City Council from 1961-1963, and held the position of mayor pro tempore.

Hannah Block materials from Cape Fear Museum collection

In 1972, Vivian S. Wright  became the first woman elected to the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners. The first black woman to run for city council, Augusta Mosely Cooper, ran in the late 1960s. Lethia Hankins served on the City Council in the 21st century. 

Campaign materials (Wright, 1972, Cooper, 1969, Hankins, 2003)

Still, Mayor Katherine Mayo Cowan remains the only woman who has served as Mayor of the city of Wilmington.

Privilege and Prejudice: An NEH Summer in Charleston

In June, 2010 I went to Savannah as a part of an National Endowment for the Humanities funded Summer Seminar program. These programs are designed for College professors, and give the attendees a chance to delve into a particular subject area in depth. In my first foray into NEH funded professional development, I spent a month at the Georgia Historical Society with a great bunch of scholars, talking about the Civil War and memory. I can, without hyperbole, say that this seminar changed the way I look at the world around me. I came to see the legacies of slavery all around me in the urbane and urban city of Savannah. I came home and looked at Wilmington, North Carolina with a deepened understanding of how the scars of the Civil War and slavery hide in plain sight.

Mural, Charleston, South Carolina, photograph by author, 2019

In June of 2019, I was fortunate enough to attend a Second NEH summer program. This one was housed at the College of Charleston, and was titled Privilege and Prejudice: Jewish History in the American South. I spent two weeks with 25 scholars, examining the history of the South by exploring the roles of Jewish people in Southern stories.

Summer Institute group photo, College of Charleston

As the summer draws to a close, I thought I'd post a few reflections on the experience.

When I read the Institute's description, I thought that there was a lot of potential to compare Charleston and Wilmington. Like Charleston, the port city of Wilmington has a longstanding Jewish population, dating back to the 18th century. I thought that attending “Privilege and Prejudice: Jewish History in the American South” would help me better understand where Wilmington’s Jewish history fits into broader historical context.

Wilmington's Temple of Israel, dedicated in 1876.

So with that in mind, let's look at the life of prominent Jewish merchant Solomon Bear as a way to reflect on what looking at the region's Jewish history might tell us about race and place. Solomon Bear, and his brothers Samuel and Marcus, came to Wilmington from Germany in the early 1850s. The brothers initially went into business together, as dry goods merchants. Like many immigrants to the U.S., the Bears engaged in what we call chain migration - where family members followed one another to a specific place, using the bonds of family to help make a new life in their new homelands. So in this sense, their story fits into a broader narrative of white people coming to the U.S. to try to make good. 



1867 City Directory listing Solomon Bear and Samuel, Marcus, Henry and Simon Bear, all of whom live with Solomon.

But Solomon and his brothers did not go to New York, a city that so many people associate with American Jewish culture and history. They came to Wilmington, a Southern port city, during a time of great sectional tensions. One of the questions we talked about a lot at the seminar was how Jews fit into the racial hierarchy in the South, and what sorts of relationships Jewish members of antebellum society had with slavery.  Overall, the seminar's answer was that many Jewish Southerners were imbricated in the slave system, benefited from claiming whiteness, and many were slaveholders. When Solomon Bear came to the Wilmington in the 1850s, New Hanover County was a slave society. While Mr. Bear was not an enslaver - according to the slave census of 1860 at least -- he did have financial success in the South. Solomon Bear lived the life of a well-to-do white southerner. He was worth $18,000 in 1860 and twice that much by 1870. He fought for the Confederacy, survived the war, and thrived.

Mr. Bear's story provides some evidence of the ways German Jews became acculturated business men, it highlights entrepreneurship, and shows how men like Solomon Bear became a part of the social life of the city of Wilmington.  Bear did not, however, shed his original faith. Solomon was one of the founding members of the oldest synagogue in North Carolina, the Temple of Israel.  He served as president of the Temple from 1872 until his death in 1904.

The Temple of Israel’s cornerstone was laid July 15, 1875, and on May 12, 1876, the temple was dedicated. Mr. Bear was president of the Temple of Israel for decades.

Looking at the city directory again shows that the city placed the Temple into equivalency with white churches (listed as "Hebrew" under the heading churches), even as Jewish organizations like B'Nai B'Brith was held separate from other organizations. Solomon Bear’s life is, potentially, a way to think about how a person's Jewish identity and faith created continuity between their lives in Europe, and their lives in the U.S. in society, and how that faith may have been a potential barrier to acculturation.

That said, I find myself dissatisfied with this as a story of Mr. Bear's life and as a way of understanding how Jewish people fit into the history of the South. 

Comparing this story to a different one helps explain why. In 2018, I set to work trying to figure out who the boy in this picture is. 

I sent the image of a boy in a tallit to a retired librarian, and asked if she knew anyone named Reitblatt, and she connected me to the Reitblatt family. Mrs. Zee Reitblatt identified the boy as her son, David, who had his bar mitzvah in 1968 at B’Nai Israel.  The photo came to us in a collection of images from a local camera store.  And as I looked through the photos, I saw more pictures of David in a different envelope.  I recognized him in the image of him in a living room in his Boy Scout uniform.

This family’s experiences of religion and leisure was literally separated in the evidence, then put together by me looking across the collection and recognizing a child. But how much richer is David’s story (and Solomon's story before him) when we acknowledge that people contain multitudes.

Our NEH institute had us reading a lot of history that seemed more a single snapshot than a contingent, varied set of entryways into the past. That reflects the state of the field of Southern Jewish History, more than the realities of said history. I like to imagine that if this Institute was held again in 20 years time, we'd have a very different reading list, filled with the work of scholars like one of our Institute leaders, Shari Rabin, whose article on ritual circumcision is a model for how the field could grow. As I am now more grounded in the field's history, and in the history of Jewish people in the South, I look forward to seeing a new scholarship develop.  I'm sure that many of the people I was at the institute with will be driving forces in that change.