Temperance Hall: A Place to Debate and Proclaim Vows of Abstinence

Old historic structures always have a tale or two to tell. Temperance Hall, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, near Wagram, NC, has had an important role in its community for decades. Although it's a simple brick building, it has many stories to tell.

Formally known as the Richmond Temperance and Literary Society Hall, this historic structure in Scotland County is believed to be the only structure in North Carolina built to house a temperance society. The hall was the scene of lively debates in its early days and is still used for meetings of civic groups.

The simple structure of Temperance Hall was completed in 1860.

To elevate the moral and cultural life of its community, the Richmond Temperance and Literary Society was founded in 1855 in what was then lower Richmond County in an area settled in 1773 by Highland Scots. Built of hand-molded local bricks, the hall is still standing in tribute to its sturdy construction in 1860 by the Scottish descendants, although it was sacked five years later by U.S. soldiers advancing toward Fayetteville during Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign of the American Civil War.

Influenced by the temperance movement, the charter members vowed to “neither make, sell, buy, nor use as a beverage any intoxicating drink whatever.” The cultured and worried citizens at that time were troubled by the “deadly influence” that alcohol consumption was “exerting over the morality of our country and seeing the ravages that it is daily making in our midst.” Within a few years of organizing, the society built the small one-story, one-room hexagonal building with sixteen-foot sides near what is now the town of Wagram. Here they met and coordinated their “uncompromising hostility to intemperance and untiring zeal for the advancement of literature.” 

The finial on the roof portrays the twin aims of the Richmond Temperance and Literary Society.

The society’s twin aims are illustrated at the peak of the building’s roof by a wooden finial that represents an inverted wine goblet on top of a closed Bible. Both pieces of the finial were reportedly shot down by Sherman’s troops, and pot marks made by their bullets fired during target practice can still be detected on the hall’s exterior. The interior ceiling was once painted blue with a constellation of gold stars; each star represented a member of the society. However, if the member broke the vow of abstinence, the star was painted black. (Several stars had alternating coats of gold and black.) When a member died, the star was gilded with silver. 

The society continued to meet in the hall until the 1890s. In 1899, the area around Wagram became part of the new Scotland County, and the hall found a new role until the 1920s as a school for white students (as segregation ruled during the Jim Crow era). After many years of neglect and decay, the hall was restored as accurately as possible in 1959 by reconstructing a two-tier wooden platform that supports a lectern used by speakers, adding a cast-iron stove similar to the one that originally heated the hall, and rebuilding the pairs of recessed bookshelves on the northeast and south walls. In its role as a museum today, it serves a symbol of cultural attitudes of a bygone era. 

A two-tier platform with lectern was reconstructed in 1959.

The restored home of North Carolina poet-laureate John Charles McNeill, a Scotland County native and grandson of Scottish immigrants, was moved to the site of Temperance Hall in 1960 and serves as the visitor center for both properties. 

Although hexagonal, the hall is architecturally significant because it is a diminutive version of the octagonal mode popularized in North Carolina in the mid-1800s by the concepts of Orson Squire Fowler, who analyzed that an “octagon house” (a term that refers specifically to octagonal houses built in North America during this period) with its eight sides encloses more space than a square one with equal wall space.  

The Richmond Temperance and Literary Society still meets all these years since its founding, although now only annually. The hall is about 1½ miles west of US 401, which is Main Street in Wagram, off Old Wire Road near Spring Hill Cemetery.

Temperance Hall has survived decades as the area around it has changed, and its history is quite phenomenal. Although meetings held in the hall today no longer promote abstinence, its continued use guarantees that its history is not yet complete and it may inspire more tales for future generations to tell.

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Note: The post is influenced by two articles about Temperance Hall that I have written. One is an entry uploaded in June 2019 in NCpedia, the online encyclopedia about North Carolina. The other is an article published in the May 2019 issue of OutreachNC Magazine.