The Mechanics and Farmers Bank and What It Saved

The year was nineteen twenty-four, and a Black family in Durham County needed a loan. Not a large loan. Enough to hold on to their farm through a bad season, to make a payment that would keep the land in the family's name. They went to a white-owned bank and were turned away. White banks in the American South during the nineteen twenties did not routinely lend to Black borrowers, regardless of their credit history or collateral.

They went instead to the Mechanics and Farmers Bank on Parrish Street.

The Mechanics and Farmers Bank was founded in nineteen oh eight by a group of Parrish Street businessmen that included John Merrick, one of the same men who had built North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance. The bank was capitalized at ten thousand dollars and began operations in a single rented room.

It grew steadily. During the nineteen twenties, when banks across the country were failing and Black borrowers were systematically excluded from credit markets, Mechanics and Farmers loaned two hundred thousand dollars in individual loans that saved more than five hundred Black farms and homes in North Carolina. It was not charity. It was banking, the same banking that white institutions were performing for white customers and withholding from Black ones.

The bank survived the Great Depression, survived urban renewal, survived the decades of Parrish Street's physical decline. It operates today as a federally insured institution. It is the oldest Black-owned bank in North Carolina.

The families whose farms it saved in the nineteen twenties are not listed anywhere. The land they kept is the only record that most of them left.