Though Mills Higgins Flack (1838-1900) was a politically active and religiously devout veteran, he also had a dark side: a cruel and exploitative relationship with his black sharecroppers. This bad blood eventually led to the horrific Forest City lynching.
Gilbert S. Waters built one of the first buggymobiles. Born in 1869, Waters grew up in New Bern around the buggy industry and worked in the family business, G. H. Waters Buggy and Carriage Factory.
The end of slavery in North Carolina did little to ease racial tensions. The struggle between slaves and plantation owners was replaced by the conflict between black sharecroppers and wealthy white farmers. Occasionally this struggle erupted into open violence, as in the 1900 lynching of Avery Mills in Rutherford, North Carolina.