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In Raleigh, the streetcar charter was held by a private company, and the owners were constantly changing, announcing ambitious new plans, then running into financial problems. More than once, workers started to rip up tracks they had already laid down after a dispute.

"Gentlemen, settle your troubles," one newspaper article chided. "We are tired [of] walking. Put in a first class system and the entire community will bless you."

On Sept. 1, 1891, electric streetcars began regular service in Raleigh on the same routes the mules had followed. There were financial problems and other disputes, but the system became reliable by the turn of the century, and modern Raleigh soon followed.

Suburbs and segregation

Life was different in a city with streetcars.

Residents no longer had to live near their jobs or shops. They could move to one of the new suburbs -- Glenwood, Cameron Park and Boylan Heights -- to enjoy what was then considered living in the countryside.

"All of a sudden you could get on a trolley car for a nickel and ride to work in the morning and then back home at the end of the day," said Tom Hanchett, a Charlotte historian. "That opened up all sorts of areas to development."

It also proved a crucial tool for newly empowered segregationists.

Before the turn of the century, Raleigh and other Southern cities had a "salt and pepper" pattern of development, Hanchett says, with blacks and whites living next door to each other in the dense downtown neighborhoods.

The new suburbs, however, were almost exclusively white. In Cameron Park, residents had to sign a covenant restricting them from renting or selling to anyone "of negro blood," with an exception for household servants. Glenwood had similar restrictions.

The streetcar was not alone in causing segregation. Prejudicial banking practices, federal housing laws and local zoning regulations, along with other discriminatory Jim Crow practices, played a role as well.

"The increasing focus on Jim Crow around the turn of the century called for separation of the races in every setting, including residential," said Catherine Bishir, a historian who lives in Cameron Park. "But if there was no way to get out of the city, the middle class wouldn't have done it as readily."

The streetcar system also began a push to the north and to the west.

To serve the new suburbs, the Raleigh Electric Co., which had taken over the streetcar charter, extended the tracks farther west on Hillsborough Street and north on Glenwood Avenue. The new lines just drove growth farther in those directions.

Many in the city became concerned that growth was uneven.

In 1907, 4,000 people signed a petition demanding service be extended north to the Oakwood Cemetery and east along New Bern Avenue. City leaders and the editor of The News & Observer argued that more lines to the south and the east would keep growth balanced.

The Raleigh Electric Co. balked at placing new lines in the poorest parts of town, but it extended a short loop to South Park. At the same time, the company began planning a 100-acre amusement park, open only to whites, near the site of the Carolina Country Club, to promote growth along the Glenwood route.

The phrases didn't exist back then, but the streetcar had just helped invent white flight and urban sprawl.

The end of the era

During the 1910s, '20s and '30s, the streetcar was a crucial part of the urban fabric.

Wright Dixon, 84, grew up in the Hayes Barton neighborhood near the Glenwood route. Although his father had a car, he remembers riding the streetcar with his mother all the time.

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