Kerouac’s Five Places in Rocky Mount & Kinston, North Carolina
Jack Kerouac stayed with his sister, Carolyn–known as Nin to family–and her husband, Paul Blake, in at least five different eastern North Carolina residences between 1947-1956. According to Paul Blake, Jr., they moved between Kinston and Rocky Mount because of his father’s work, with Carolina Telephone & Telegraph. By Spring 1948, the Blakes had relocated from Kinston to the Tarboro Street address in Rocky Mount memorialized in an early scene in On the Road. In 1951, they lived in Kinston again for a while, at two different addresses. Then they moved back to Rocky Mount in early 1952, to Big Easonburg / West Mount, their last North Carolina address. The 1955 Rocky Mount city directory has separate entries for Carolyn K. Blake, “with Blake TV contracting serv.”; Paul E. Blake, Sr. (both at RD 4, box 57); and Blake TV Contracting Service at 1311 Raleigh Road. [Most biographers spell Jack Kerouac’s sister’s name “Caroline”; I’m using “Carolyn” as reported in this city directory and the 1951 Kinston city directory.]
Tarboro Street home of the Blake’s, where Neal Cassady & crew came roaring up in their new Hudson, Christmas 1948
In my first attempts at connecting Carolina locales with Kerouac’s narratives, I mis-identified the house that makes a cameo appearance in On the Road as the place where Neal Cassady arrives, Christmastime 1948, in his new 1949 Hudson to begin the whirlwind series of trips to New York and back again that are the first our hero, Sal Paradise, takes with his hero, Dean Moriarity. So extreme was the boast about how quickly these trips were made that Kerouac’s editor insisted that the southern point of the trip couldn’t have been made from North Carolina–Virginia, being closer, was more believable– thus Testament, Virginia, was created, the only fictional setting in On the Road.
I stupidly used a 1950 Rocky Mount city directory to identify “the last house on the left,” as Kerouac describes it, but should’ve known better: the 1948 city directory, which I later found, shows that Tarboro Street had been extended by a couple of blocks by 1950, and that in ’48, the “last house on the left” was at 1108 Tarboro Street.
Big Easonburg, now known as West Mount. RAFoto, 1987.
This Zillow 2024 side view shows the back porch on which Jack often slept and worked, but was eventually enclosed. Not many big pines left–more houses than woods.
Big Easonburg [West Mount]
Kerouac received his mail here, at Box 31-A, Route 4, Rocky Mount. Re-numbering of residences to comply with safety regulations resulted in this house being designated as 8116 West Mount, Rocky Mount.
Kinston
After Paul and Nin were married in Kinston in the summer of 1947, Kerouac stayed in their apartment, at an unknown address which he visited twice, before they moved to Rocky Mount.
The Blakes lived in Kinston again in 1951, in a house at 286 Spence Drive and at a Terminal Street address. Re-numbering of residences in Kinston in the 1960s make it virtually impossible to know which house on this one-block street was the Blakes’ residence. The 1951 Kinston city directory lists Paul E. & Carolyn K. Blake at 505 Terminal, he’s named as a supervisor for Carolina T&T.
Allen Ginsberg Papers, Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY.
505 Terminal Street, June 2024, from Zillow
The dot in NC represents Rocky Mount, #4 on the ID chart. At lower right is a b&w side view of the Blake’s Big Easonburg house. Detail from a larger image, below, that’s on display in the Smith-Yelverton Typewriter Museum.
Note the Kerouac haiku featured in the little b&w ad for R.A. Fountain, at mid-left, and the b&w ad for Paul Blake’s TV repair shop in Rocky Mount, from the 1950 Rocky Mount city directory.
Sources
Blake, Jr., Paul. Telephone interview. XX??verify DATE
Ginsberg, Allen. Journals, Early Fifties / Early Sixties. Gordon Ball, ed. New York, Grove P, 1977.
Hill’s Kinston City Directory. n.p., Hill Directory Company, 1951, 1955.
Hill’s Rocky Mount City Directory, n.p., Hill Directory Company, 1948, 1950, 1955.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York, Signet, 1957.
–3 July 2024