Lincoln Park. Offering to the Colored People for the First Time, the Finest Home Sites in North Carolina [caption title]

[Asheville, N.C., 1948. Good plus.. Large broadside, measuring 14 x 22 inches, printed on card. Upper left and lower right corners chipping. Some dampstaining, creasing, and mild wear. The years following World War II saw a significant economic expansion in the United States. Part of this expansion was a massive boom in suburban housing development, made possible by federal programs such as the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage financing and the GI Bill. However, these programs’ implementation purposefully excluded African Americans; for instance, the FHA would not insure mortgages in and around Black neighborhoods in a practice known as “redlining,” non-whites were barred from buying homes in many new developments, and attempts to create integrated housing were stymied at every turn. Nonetheless, African Americans were participants in American suburbanization, though their place in it was hard fought, often requiring the financial ability to buy up enough land to create their own neighborhoods.

Offered here is an advertisement for an exclusively African-American housing development called Lincoln Park in Shiloh, a neighborhood of Asheville, North Carolina. Shiloh, which was settled after the Civil War, was originally located in what is now Biltmore Estate, and relocated to its current location in South Asheville in 1889. The poster advertises “Terms as low as $1.00 per week” for home sites that included “Water - Lights - Telephone” in “A Seclusive Colored Development.” Shiloh started out fairly rural; from the poster’s language it seems as though the property owner, O. E. Roberts, was a farmer who decided to subdivide his land for the development. Unfortunately, it does not seem that Lincoln Park ever came to fruition; the subdivision was platted in 1948 but was only ever partially laid out -- it is not to be confused with Lincoln Park in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, an African-American postwar suburban community that was completed in 1953 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Of interest to historians of segregation and postwar suburbanization.