To set the record straight, Wallace's Auto Electric Garage at 2820 Hillsborough Road is not built of leftover Duke stone. That notion, said owner Rick Davis, is just "some urban mystique;" and Donald Wallace, son of the business' founder, Carl Wallace, knows the facts.
When his father went to build his place of business in the early 1930s, said the younger Wallace, now a physician in Southern Pines, "He tried to get the [Duke] flagstone," but the then-budding university had dibs on all the distinctive rock coming out of its Hillsborough quarry. Instead, Wallace's Auto went up in a brownish stone that Carl Wallace thinks came from near Salisbury.
Either way, the rock garage remains a landmark of West Durham.
"It's been sort of an icon for a long time," Davis said.
According to a sign on the building, Wallace's has been in business since 1926. It began, Wallace said, "mainly rewinding armatures for starters." It continues, Davis said, as "sort of a niche operation. ... We diagnose electrical issues some mechanics would rather avoid."
The auto-repair business is a bit turbulent, he said, with intense competition and increased automotive sophistication. "We're fortunate to stay busy most of the time," he said.
Rick Davis took the business over from his father, Jim Davis, who, when he took over from the elder Wallace in the 1970s, bought what had begun as a family enterprise.
According to Carl Wallace's daughter Joann Rothery of Knoxville, Tenn., he was born on a tobacco farm in Cumberland County, one of nine children. At 17, he moved to Durham to work in a cotton mill. Wallace saved enough to put himself through the Coin Electric Trade School in Chicago. By 1923, he was back in Durham, getting married and going to work at Carolina Battery and Rewinding Co., at the intersection of Hillsborough Road and Rosehill Avenue.
Before long, he bought the company. Three of his brothers came to work with him: Clayton, Flave and John. John used half of the building for a fish market, but he and Carl dissolved their partnership in 1929. John continued to run a grocery store, Carl kept the shop and had moved to 2820 Hillsborough Road at some time prior to May 12, 1933, according to family records.
At that time, while West Durham had been incorporated into the city of Durham, it remained a community unto itself and Wallace's, on its western edge, "was kind of considered remote," said Davis. However, the shop faced N.C. 10, the first highway to cross the length of North Carolina. Most of that "Central Highway" is now designated U.S. 70.
"We lived right behind the garage," said Rothery. The neighborhood kids used the blacktop lot for a playground, and Rothery said she used go up to the garage to ask her father for pennies. "The mechanics called me a golddigger."
The auto-electric business branched into radio repair and then, around 1948, into television. "I recall the family going up to the shop to watch grainy black-and-white television for the first time," Rothery said.
Their West Durham neighbors included the Berinis, descendants of an Italian stonemason who came to Durham to work on Duke Chapel; the Loudermilks, whose son, John D., went on to become a succesfull Nashville songwriter; and Jim Davis, one of Rothery's blacktop playmates.
Carl Wallace had meant the shop to stay in the family, said his son. "He had decided I was going to take over the business," Wallace said. When Don Wallace was a high-school senior, they had a father-son talk. Carl Wallace said he wanted Don to go to college, to Duke, then come into the family business and expand it. Don wanted to be a doctor. "He said, 'OK,' " Don Wallace said.
Carl Wallace passed away at the age of 92. His grandson, Glenn Wallace, works for a venture-capital firm at the Research Triangle and owns the My Dog Tess real-estate firm. He holds a high opinion of his grandfather.
"I've always thought what he did was amazing for a man with an eighth-grade education -- especially during the Depression. At one point, he not only owned the shop, his house, and the radio building, but he owned three or four houses on his block as well.
"Time flies and folks who can remember pass on, but ... he had a lasting effect on many people's lives," Glenn Wallace said. "His charity and kindness to people made him a well-known figure in Durham."
Wallace's Auto Electric has changed hands, but it's still a family matter. Rick Davis said he came to work for his father at the shop in 1986. His grandfather had been a body-repair man, and the specialty garage business "sort of grew on me."
Now, he has a 9-year-old son of his own and, Davis said, "He's all into cars."