Being a fan of local history, things that take place after nightfall, and good mysteries, I was incredibly intrigued by a story I read last year in the N&O. In it, Josh Shaffer (my favorite local journalist), tells the tale of a person or persons who for the last 20 years have decorated the tombstone of a rebel soldier buried in the Confederate Cemetery of Oakwood:

Each April, a stranger creeps into Oakwood Cemetery and drapes a single gravestone with a black sash. He lights a candle in tribute to a doomed Confederate hanged for firing a last-ditch shot at Raleigh’s Yankee occupiers. … After 20 years, the soldier’s secret admirer remains a small-time legend among history buffs who like to guess at his identity. The guessing begins anew each April 13, the death date of the hotheaded Texan with no known first name.

— Josh Shaffer

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Nestled between a stretch of convenience stores and empty lots on South Street lies an architectural gem built a half century ago that served as one of the first in the area to offer drive-through banking. Originally home of First National Bank, the structure now serves as a house of worship for The Prayer of Deliverance COGIC (Church of God in Christ).

Much of the fenestration and landscaping elements have long since been removed or altered, but the building still stands proudly today in a long neglected corridor just slightly removed from the downtown revival taking place to the East. As the now absent sign in the first photograph shows, it was a “Drive-In” bank – a concept that was just beginning to emerge in the mid 1950s and early 1960s.

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Cars race down Dawson Street near its intersection with Lenoir Street in front of the Convention Center.