From the Archives: Peter Demens
By Jonathan Williams
In the name of an old railroad station, which today has left hardly a trace on the landscape where it once stood, there may hide an unexpected connection between two widely separated parts of the world: North Carolina’s Madison County and the pine forests of northern Russia.
After the Western North Carolina Railroad reached Madison County in 1881, four major passenger stations came into operation, at Marshall, Barnard, Stackhouse, and Hot Springs.[1] They were not the only stations, however, and one obscure stop bore an incongruous name that can only have arrived in the county by rail: Volga.
Vast and sluggish, the Volga River winds its way thousands of miles across the Russian steppe. Historically, it linked Russian trade to the Silk Road cities of Central Asia. The river does not invite comparisons with the narrow, rapid French Broad falling through its gorge on the way to Tennessee. So how did that name make its way to the mountains of North Carolina from what was, at the time, the empire of the tsars?
The answer may involve a one-time officer of the imperial guards, exiled for political reasons, who found his way to Asheville by way of the Florida backwoods. That, and the timber industry.
Reform and Terror in Russia
Pyotr Alekseyevich Dementyev was born in 1851 in an empire that was about to be turned on its head. The Anglo-French defeat of the Russian Empire in the Crimean War of 1853–6 laid bare the deplorable state of Russia’s infrastructure and the ineffectiveness of its army of underequipped peasant conscripts; humiliation in the Crimea shook the self-assurance the regime had derived from its famous defeat of Napoleon in 1812.[2] Under the liberal-minded tsar Alexander II, Russia would venture into the period of known as the Great Reforms, starting in 1861 with the abolition of serfdom, the system by which millions of peasants had been considered the property of landowning aristocrats.
Around the time of the reform, Dementyev was sent from his relatives’ rural estate to the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, where he was educated in boarding schools before becoming an officer of the Imperial Guard. However, he resigned his commission early (perhaps because it necessitated costly extravagance and restricted him from marriage), married, and took up residence on the estates he had inherited from his parents; these stood in Tver province, where the Volga River rises.[3]
Even as he worked to improve the efficiency of agriculture on his estate, Dementyev threw himself into the new avenues of participation in public life that the Great Reforms had opened up. In particular, the reforms had established a new elective assembly for local government, known as the zemstvo. Although zemstvo budgets were always stretched thin, and the peasant majority was not permitted to directly elect representatives of their own — which hardly encouraged their trust — many activist zemstvo leaders strove earnestly to improve standards of living in their provinces.[4] Dementyev stood with that category. When he took office and found that only peasants’ taxes had been kept up to date, Dementyev tracked down the local aristocrats’ arrears and used them to improve the province’s hospitals.[5]
However, the post-reform period also began to unleash political forces far beyond the control of the imperial government. A new political movement emerged, known as the Populists, or Narodniks: mostly young, well-educated intellectuals who idealized peasant traditions, and believed that the peasantry could launch an idealistic revolution — once politically awakened by the Narodniks themselves. Thousands of Narodniks migrated to the countryside to spread their message, and the secret police set out to hunt them down (often with the cooperation of the peasants themselves, as the peasants distrusted the aspiring orators wandering into their villages).[6] It was thus a dangerous decision that Pyotr Dementyev made when in 1878 he took in a Narodnik named Nikolai Ushakov. Ushakov was already under police surveillance, which immediately expanded to his host. The spies’ assessment of Dementyev was that “he has no clear-cut views neither in politics nor in public affairs: there is inconsistency in everything he does or says. Therefore, I intend to continue watching him.”[7]
Meanwhile, the optimism inspired by the reforms was beginning to curdle. Even as Dementyev was despairing of the zemstvos’ ability to improve “the hopeless chaos” of rural life, peasant distrust and government repression left many Narodniks disillusioned with the effectiveness of peaceful propagandizing, and some formed secret organizations to spark a revolution by more violent means.[8] In the winter of 1881, one cell killed the reformist tsar Alexander II by hurling two bombs at his carriage on the streets of St. Petersburg. Belatedly, the secret police scrambled to crack down on all forms of opposition. Dementyev found himself issued an international passport, and it was made known to him that he would be well advised to leave the country for good. He sold everything he owned. A month later he had joined a distant relative in Jacksonville, Florida.[9]
From Florida to North Carolina
In the course of the 1880s, the swampy wilderness of Florida was just beginning to retreat before the railroads and the tide of orange groves, tourists, and retirees they brought.[10] Dementyev — now going by an anglicized form of his name, Peter Demens — took a steamboat deep into the backcountry, where, after a stint as a day laborer, he used the $3000 he had brought with him to buy an orange grove and a share in a small nearby sawmill.[11]
It was the sawmill that kicked off Demens’s new career. After buying out his partners, he accepted a contract to produce ties for the Orange Belt Railroad, a rickety narrow-gauge logging line; when the Orange Belt defaulted on its debts, Demens took possession of it. Aiming to develop a port on Florida’s western coast, Demens joined with three investors — a Canadian, a New Yorker, and a Virginian — and extended the railway to Tampa Bay. At Demens’s initiative, the town at the railroad’s terminus was named St. Petersburg after the Russian imperial capital.[12] It remains one of Florida’s major cities today.
The Orange Belt’s finances remained unstable, however. At one point, one of Demens’s business partners — the sickly Canadian — discovered creditors chaining up the Orange Belt’s locomotives in order to demand payment, and suffered a fatal stroke on the spot.[13] Just before the railroad’s completion, an unexpected cold snap devastated Florida’s orange crop; at the same time, yellow fever erupted in the state, devastating the population and cutting off travel and commerce. By this time, Demens’s health was flagging, as well. Fresh air and temperate climates were thought to have great health benefits in the nineteenth century, so the Demens family moved to Asheville.[14]
Life in Asheville
The construction of the Western North Carolina Railroad at the start of the 1880s had set off a timber boom in the region, and Demens used his experience in the lumber industry and the wealth he had accumulated in Florida to build a woodworking factory, which did not merely support the family but turn the émigré into something of a one-man economic powerhouse. As he was preparing to relocate in the summer of 1889, he apparently had enough leverage over the city of Asheville to request special incentives. “Mr. D.’s proposition,” reported the Asheville Daily Citizen, “was to the effect that if a suitable lot for factory site [sic] was donated by the people of the city or any of its citizens, he would immediately leave for Philadelphia to purchase all necessary machinery for the enterprise.”[15] Later, Demens proudly claimed in his own writings that it was his habit to always seek out the latest technologies and methods for his woodworking business; he did not mention that he made them contingent on municipal largesse.[16] Whether Demens was bluffing when he described his wealth is also perhaps an open question. Selling off the Orange Belt had yielded him only $14,400, while he claimed that his house in Asheville cost $30,000 and estimated the cost of establishing his factory at $50,000.[17] It may be worth noting that the Russian relative he had stayed with in Jacksonville, Florida once claimed that Demens outdid Khlestakov, the proverbial con-man protagonist of Nikolai Gogol’s play The Government Inspector.[18]
One way or another, his financial situation stabilized following his relocation from Florida. So, in Asheville, Demens’s civic life began to revive for the first time since his zemstvo days. At a reception to mark the opening of his factory, his English proficiency surprised some of his guests; soon after, he delivered a series of lectures on Russian history at the YMCA.[19] At a debate at the county courthouse during the 1890 midterm election campaign, he represented the Republicans.[20]
Demens later wrote that he was frustrated by the hegemony in Asheville’s public life of reactionary ex-Confederates. They reminded him of the stagnant Russian aristocracy, “the ruined ‘barons’ of the south, former slaveowners, [who] could not get used to life’s new circumstances.”[21] Debates felt circular:
Persons who spoke up bluntly against the prevailing opinions could always be found. They were heard, there were mild objections to what they said, and yet one had a feeling that these were words only, that all their arguments were pearls scattered amid swine… Any matter at hand was resolved to the taste and habits of some Confederate colonel or other. To give them full justice, all of these ex-Confederates were able talkers, first-rate orators. Rising from his seat, such a man surveyed the gathering in a superior manner. Then, instead of dealing with the substance of the theme, in lieu of answering the opponent’s arguments, he harkened back to Jefferson and Jackson, mercilessly distorting the facts, drowning the substance of the topic in splendid phrases about the whilom greatness of the South.[22]
One such speaker was apparently the Madison County lawyer Hezekiah Gudger, Demens’s adversary in the debate of 1890; a newspaper correspondent present on that occasion recorded that Demens dismissed Gudger’s long-winded argument as “lengthy and flowery” before giving a much briefer response.[23] Demens apparently got a sense of déja vu, comparing Asheville to the suffocating stagnation in rural Russia as he remembered it, which drove him to leave for California after just three years. (That, and the sense that Asheville weather combined Florida summers with Tver winters.) Incidentally, he sold his house to J. H. Rumbough, owner of the Mountain Park Hotel in Hot Springs.
But in the meantime, the Demens factory had significant economic impacts in Asheville. For instance, the Demens company used mostly Asheville workers on its most lucrative job, the $125,700 contracts it won for federal buildings built in Asheville and Statesville in 1890–1.[24] Demens was also proud to call himself “the first Southern businessman to grant my workers a shorter workday for the very same pay,” after coming to an agreement with local unions to reduce the working day from ten hours to nine (although the workers had evidently been lobbying for the reduction for several years before his arrival, Demens claimed that he had been appointed their spokesman).[25] Demens also worked to expand the market for his product on a national scale, such as by sending a display of “about 200 specimens of different Western North Carolina woods made into almost every imaginable article” to expositions in Raleigh and Boston.[26]
When writing about his business dealings, Demens emphasized his preference for vertical integration, which is to say ownership of every aspect of the extraction of raw materials as well as the manufacture of finished products: “I was able to make more money in the construction industry, even charging less than my competitors. I supplied all the building sites with wood from my own sawmills and factories.” This practice may begin to explain how the rail depot of Volga in Madison County got its name — transporting Madison County lumber had only just become profitable with the completion of the railroad, and the upper reaches of the Laurel valley were not cut over well into the 20th century, so it might have made the best available source of wood.[27]
It does not, however, suggest why the station might have gotten that name. To fully approach that last question, it is necessary to consider one last topic: the exile’s political philosophy.
So Why “Volga?”
After he left Asheville for California, Demens became a rather prolific writer, publishing a number of articles in the Los Angeles Times to describe Russia for the benefit of Americans and simultaneously describing America for the benefit of Russians in several Russian periodicals, of which the most prominent was Vestnik Evropy, a liberal monthly; its readership apparently reached from the Winter Palace all the way to Vladimir Lenin, who quoted Demens’s articles once or twice in his many writings.[28]
At one point, Demens came into direct conflict with Leo Tolstoy, who by that point had added to his literary prestige a sufficient moral and spiritual authority and general popularity that the tsarist government had come to regard him with a certain degree of alarm. So to take Tolstoy on, Demens opened an extensive correspondence with Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an infamous reactionary who had tutored and advised two tsars; Demens’s pamphlets attacking Tolstoy were printed by Pobedonostsev’s presses. The alliance rather tarnished Demens’s liberal credentials.[29]
Demens’s goal in that fight was — somehow — to persuade an anarchistic Russian religious sect that had recently emigrated to leave the remote settlements they had built with Tolstoy’s help, in Canada, and instead become workers in his enterprises in southern California. That impulse reveals a patronizing kind of faith in top-down change that characterized many of the most idealistic zemstvo and Petersburg officials in late imperial Russia, which in Demens’s case proved easily adaptable to the noblesse oblige of a successful entrepreneur in Gilded Age America.[30] As Demens himself wrote, “Human passions and human delusions and ambitions are the same everywhere — in the province of Tver and in the state of North Carolina.”[31]
While in Russia, Demens described his home district as “the very height of absurdity in all regards,” filled with “swamps and woods… [but] neither industry nor commerce.”[32] He attempted to improve the efficiency of agriculture on his estate, but was frustrated by the slowness of the ex-serf workers to adopt his techniques, and so when he described rural life in one of his first Vestnik Evropy pieces, he titled the article “The Berries Don’t Go to the Field: Two Weeks in a God-forsaken Place.”[33] Coming to America gave him a counterpoint to his worst memories of Russia while bringing them to the forefront of his mind, making the contrast appear even starker, as when he wrote that
The American worker is more intelligent and progressive than the Russian muzhik [peasant]. …He works not with his muscle alone but with his brain too, economizing in his exertion wherever possible. He does not try to move a wall by battering it with his forehead.[34]
Having witnessed the disillusionment of the Narodniks, wrestled with the frustrations of zemstvo work and agricultural improvement, and run afoul of the secret police, Demens, by the time he reached Asheville, would have had ample reason to have long since given up on saving Russia from within. When he set out to explain Russian history at the Asheville YMCA, he said that
The history of Russia began… by a very unique episode. The different tribes living in that part of the world sent an embassy to the people in the surrounding parts, and told them: ‘Our country is rich, but needs development. Come and rule us and help to develop the resources.’ A tribe was sent down who laid the foundations of the Russian despotism of to-day.[35]
If despotism had been imposed on Russia from outside, Demens may have thought, perhaps liberalization could be, as well. America could be the salvation of Russia. Who better to “help to develop the resources” of the country than businessmen like himself?
If Demens did indeed think this way, he might have had reason to feel vindicated in 1891. That year, famine struck the Volga provinces of Russia, the breadbasket of the empire. Disease erupted in its wake. The tsarist government failed to respond effectively, continuing to export grain even as it downplayed the crisis. Zemstvo organizations, whose work had often centered on the improvement of medical facilities, led the way in providing aid; ad hoc volunteer organizations were not far behind.[36]
When word of the disaster reached the United States, meanwhile, American farmers and shipping companies worked to supply relief, which ultimately amounted to over a million pounds of grain. This unlooked-for help from abroad made a powerful impression on many Russians, such as the prominent painter Ivan Aivazovsky, who captured his sentiment in a pair of dramatic canvases that he presented to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, then the country’s closest equivalent to a national art museum.[37]
The Volga famine of 1891, then, and the sentiment expressed in Aivazovsky’s perhaps melodramatic canvas, provide the final pieces of the puzzle: the reason why someone might have wanted to commemorate the river that flows from Tver in Madison County.
Bibliography/Footnotes
Cocke, Eugene R. “Gudger, Hezekiah Alexander.” NCPedia, 1986. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/gudger-hezekiah-alexander.
Dykeman, Wilma. The French Broad. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1955.
Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. London: Jonathan Cape, 1996.
“Fine Exhibit: The P. A. Demens Woodworking Company at Raleigh.” Asheville Daily Citizen, October 3, 1891.
“Government Building: The Progress of the Work of Construction.” Asheville Daily Citizen, February 17, 1891.
“Gudger and Demens: They Speak at the Court House.” Asheville Daily Citizen, October 28, 1890.
Holmes, J. S. North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey: Forest Conditions in Western North Carolina. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1911.
“An Interesting Talk: A Lecture on Russia By One Who Knows.” Asheville Daily Citizen, May 7, 1890.
“Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Russian, Distributing Supplies.” Sotheby’s, 2008. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/russian-art-n08428/lot.36.html#.
Morris, Margaret Whistle. The Western North Carolina Railroad and the Failure of the North Carolina System. Unpublished master’s dissertation, Wake Forest University, 1969.
“Mr. Demens’ Scheme: To Build an Extensive Wood-Working Factory Here.” The Daily Citizen (Asheville, NC), July 26, 1889.
“Nihilism in Russia: Mr. Demens’ Interesting Lecture Last Night.” Asheville Daily Citizen, June 24, 1890.
“No Agreement Reached: Contractors and Laborers Met Last Night; Lots of Talk But No Action Taken; Mr. P. A. Demens Wants a Day Agreed Upon When the Nine-Hour System Shall Rule.” Asheville Daily Citizen, May 29, 1890.
Parry, Albert. Full Steam Ahead! The Story of Peter Demens: Founder of St. Petersburg, Florida. St. Petersburg, FL: Great Outdoors Publishing Co., 1987.
Parsons, William H., editor. Peter Demens: An International Symposium. St. Petersburg, FL: Heritage Press of St. Petersburg, 2000.
Povedskaia, Inna. Ves’egonskii Amerikanets [The American from Vesyegonsk]. Tver’: SFK Ofis, 2008.
Rutkow, Eric. American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Scribner, 2012.
Southern, Michael T. “Demens, Peter A. (1850–1919).” North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary. NC State University Libraries, 2009. https://ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000068.
Zakharova, Larisa. “The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?” In The Cambridge History of Russia v. 2, edited by Dominic Lieven. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
[1] Margaret Whistle Morris, The Western North Carolina Railroad and the Failure of the North Carolina System (unpublished master’s dissertation: Wake Forest University, 1969), 67. The list of stations comes from emails I exchanged with a district court judge from Madison County, Larry Leake.
[2] Larisa Zakharova, “The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?” in The Cambridge History of Russia, v. 2, ed. Dominic Lieven (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 594.
[3] Inna Povedskaia, Ves’egonskii Amerikanets (Tver’: SFK Ofis, 2008), 168; Albert Parry, Full Steam Ahead! The Story of Peter Demens: Founder of St. Petersburg, Florida (St. Petersburg, FL: Great Outdoors Publishing Co., 1987), 6.
[4] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 51–2.
[5] Povedskaia, 169–70.
[6] Figes, 134–6.
[7] Povedskaia, 172–3.
[8] Figes, 137.
[9] Ibid, 174; Povedskaia, 171; Parry, 8–9.
[10] Eric Rutkow, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Scribner, 2012), 169.
[11] Parry, 9.
[12] Povedskaia, 176–7; Parry, 11–19. Another station nearby was named Odessa after a city in modern-day Ukraine.
[13] Parry, 17.
[14] Povedskaia, 177.
[15] “Mr. Demens’ Scheme: To Build an Extensive Wood-Working Factory Here,” The Daily Citizen (Asheville, NC), July 26, 1889.
[16] William H. Parsons, ed., Peter Demens: An International Symposium (St. Petersburg, FL: Heritage Press of St. Petersburg, 2000), 19.
[17] Parry, 22; Povedskaia, 177; “Mr. Demens’ Scheme.”
[18] Parry, 29.
[19] “An Interesting Talk: A Lecture on Russia By One Who Knows,” Asheville Daily Citizen, May 7, 1890; “Nihilism in Russia: Mr. Demens’ Interesting Lecture Last Night,” Asheville Daily Citizen, June 24, 1890.
[20] “Gudger and Demens: They Speak at the Court House,” Asheville Daily Citizen, October 28, 1890.
[21] P. A. Tverskoi [pseud.], Ocherki severo-amerikanskikh soedinyonnykh shtatov (St. Petersburg: I. N. Skorokhodov, 1895), 63–4, translated and quoted in Parry, 199. The cost of living also seems to have been comparable in Ves’egonsk and Asheville; see Parry, 205.
[22] Quoted and translated in Parry, 207–8.
[23] Eugene R. Cocke, “Gudger, Hezekiah Alexander,” NCPedia, https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/gudger-hezekiah-alexander.
[24] “Government Building: The Progress of the Work of Construction,” Asheville Daily Citizen, February 17, 1891. Only the Statesville building still stands.
[25] Tverskoi, Ocherki, translated and quoted in Parry, 57, 126; “No Agreement Reached: Contractors and Laborers Met Last Night; Lots of Talk But No Action Taken; Mr. P. A. Demens Wants a Day Agreed Upon When the Nine-Hour System Shall Rule,” Asheville Daily Citizen, May 29, 1890.
[26] “Fine Exhibit: The P. A. Demens Woodworking Company at Raleigh,” Asheville Daily Citizen, October 3, 1891.
[27] J. S. Holmes, North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey: Forest Conditions in Western North Carolina (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1911), 49–51 and map between pages 14 and 15. The description of Madison County’s forests in the early 20th century specifically notes the presence of several woods that Demens advertised his work with.
[28] Parry, 39. Parry unfortunately provides no sources for his claims that “a quotation or two [whatever that means] from Demens’s articles in Viestnik Yevropy can be seen in the collected works of Lenin.”
[29] Parry, 35–8. The conflict was a religious as well as a political one, as it concerned the emigration of a dissident Russian religious sect, the Dukhobors, to a tract of land set aside for them on the plains of central Canada. Tolstoy encouraged the Dukhobors to set up remote agrarian colonies and live according to the strictures of their religion; Demens’s hope, perhaps naive, was to persuade them to give up their anarchistic tendencies and become workers in his and his acquaintances’ California businesses. Pobedonostsev, his ally in the struggle, was Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, the government-run organization at the top of the Russian Orthodox ecumenical hierarchy. So Demens’s attacks on Tolstoy were published by official Orthodox Church organs, no pun intended. Demens later expressed his general impression of Tolstoy in a rather irritable Los Angeles Times piece in which he claimed that, although War and Peace had “at once, and very justly, put him into the first rank [of Russian novelists],” in his later work he showed himself to be a “fanatic of fixed ideas.” See P. A. Demens-Tverskoy, “Count Leo Tolstoy: His Teachings and His Position in Modern Russia,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1905, p. i7. It must be admitted that the closest Demens got to getting a rise out of Tolstoy was an annoyed reference in the novelist’s journal to “the machinations and tricks of Tverskoy to make the Doukhobors move;” Povedskaia, 183.
[30] See Figes, 51 on the “paternal populism” of zemstvo leaders.
[31] Tverskoi, 251–60, translated and quoted in Parry, 206.
[32] Quoted in Povedskaia, 21. Translation mine.
[33] Povedskaia, 169–70, 180. I’ve borrowed Povedskaia’s translation of the subtitle but not the title. Both are a bit more colorful in Russian, but I’m not sure how to translate them effectively: “Ne k pol’iu iagody: dve nedeli v medvezhem ugle,” literally “Not to the Field the Berries: Two Weeks in a Place of Bears.”
[34] Tverskoi, Ocherki, 241, quoted and translated in Parry, 71.
[35] “An Interesting Talk.”
[36] Figes, 157–9.
[37] “Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Russian, Distributing Supplies,” Sotheby’s, 2008, http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/russian-art-n08428/lot.36.html#.
