Impact of the banking holiday and helping smaller banks
Hill discusses his and his father's roles in the national banking holidays during the early years of the Great Depression. At the time, Hill's father was president of the Durham Loan and Trust Company, which later became Central Carolina Bank. Hill and his father had been carving out a name for themselves in banking and he describes how the success they had achieved thus far allowed them to give loans to smaller banks struggling to survive.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with George Watts Hill, January 30, 1986. Interview C-0047. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
The crash comes in the fall of 1929 and then
intensifies in '30 and '31.
- GEORGE WATTS HILL:
-
'31. We had our bank holiday in North Carolina because it was
coming up from Florida and in South Carolina and Hoover called my father
and asked him if he could slow it down or stop it, which we were able to
do. As I remember, no bank in Virginia . . .
- JAMES LEUTZE:
-
That was to slow down the runs on the bank. There were people taking
their money out.
- GEORGE WATTS HILL:
-
Well, just busting because of that. And we had a little bank, it was a
million and a half, as I remember, I was a vice-president at the time.
My uncle Isham was running the savings and loan and his son was working
in the bank, in the cage. Dad was president, and as I told you about the
money going - it's in an article
here - feeding it out the back window and people flatten their
noses on the window of the corridor and then coming in and making their
deposit. We saved the Negro bank, Mechanics and Farmers, we saved the
Citizens' Bank.
- JAMES LEUTZE:
-
Now, by saving them you made loans to them?
- GEORGE WATTS HILL:
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Yeah, we put up some cash and made a loan. The Merchants'
Bank, Mr. Clements, busted, had closed its doors. The First National
Bank, as I remember, the First National Bank busted. That was the Carr
bank. General Julian Carr was the president, and Claiborne Carr, a
director, in what's now the North Carolina National Bank
building on the southeast corner of Main and Corcoran street.
- JAMES LEUTZE:
-
Why did your bank survive when these other banks . . .
- GEORGE WATTS HILL:
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Well, as I said before, I went to Charlotte and brought back some money,
$500,000, and to Richmond and brought back some more money,
$750,000 - cash that my father put up in the Federal
Reserve Bank, bonds and what have you, to get the cash, and Dad kept
buying notes, taking notes out of the First National Bank, buying them.
Just couldn't take them out fast enough. The bank had over
loaned, and so forth, and the Merchants' Bank the
same way. They were just unable, when business
stopped, to meet the demands of the public when they withdrew their
money. And cash just wasn't there. Well, we took out seven or
eight hundred thousand dollars cash, notes, out of the First National
Bank and I don't remember doing anything for the
Merchants' Bank. But the Citizens' Bank was the
same way. That was the time that Trust Company bank expanded.
- JAMES LEUTZE:
-
Now, what was the bank called at this point?
- GEORGE WATTS HILL:
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The Durham Loan and Trust Company. Eventually it was changed to Durham
Bank and Trust. And when we, as I said, when we merged the University
National Bank in Chapel Hill into the Trust Company, as we called it,
spoke of it, we changed the name to Central Carolina Bank because
Durham, as one of these articles says, Chapel Hill just
wouldn't use the word Durham, period. They
wouldn't agree to it. So we used Central Carolina, which was
by then the area in which we were in business.