Daughter of long-ago mayor returns
When it came time for lunch, Elizabeth Leftwich Murphy Christopher wanted to dine at the Jefferson Roof Restaurant on the top floor of the 17-story Jefferson Standard Building.
It had been a favorite when she grew up in Greensboro.
One obstacle: The Jefferson Roof closed more than 60 years ago.
Well, at least her house and church were still there.
Christopher is the daughter of Thomas J. Murphy, mayor from 1905-07 and again from 1911-17. He served a term in the state legislature, and commuted to High Point from 1917-19 as town manager. He also had a law practice and business interests.
Greensboro has had three forms of government: before 1911, an alderman system with a mayor; until 1921, a three-member commission with a mayor; and since then the present council-manager form.
Murphy is the only person to have served under all three. He got a taste of the council-manager system as a council member from 1931-33.
Christopher, 93, and her daughter, Sue Irish, spent two recent days Greensboro, while traveling from Florida to upstate New York. With her advancing age, Christopher wanted a last look at the place of her youth.
She’s hard of hearing and lets Irish do the talking.
"They were members of the (Greensboro) Country Club," Irish says of the Murphy family. "She had her coming-out party there. The family dressed for dinner. They had a housekeeper who would pop her on the back if she wasn’t sitting straight. She had a nanny."
They visited her former house on North Church Street at the corner of Leftwich Street. A soaring Gothic Revival house, it was built in the 1870s by man named Dixon, who sold it to entrepreneur A.H. Leftwich. Murphy married Leftwich’s daughter, Annie, and came to own the house.
A design firm is now there. The staff told Christopher to wander around. She found the library where her father’s casket had been placed after his death in 1939. The library is now an office.
She examined the double front doors and found them to be the same ones she had opened and closed long ago.
She looked across the street at the double railroad tracks. She told of the night the family went to Aycock School for a gathering. Afterward, Mayor Murphy’s car stalled on the old Leftwich Street crossing.
With the house nearby, Murphy told his wife and daughter to go on while he fixed the car. Later, the two heard a train whistle and a crash. A train had left the Murphy car a heap of metal. Mother and daughter were horrified. They thought Murphy was in the car.
When the smoke cleared, Murphy came walking across the tracks. Better to lose a car than his life, he said.
Christopher assured a worried woman with the design firm that the house was not haunted, as rumored.
She and her daughter rode through Fisher Park as Christopher ticked off who had lived in what house.
They also stopped at the News & Record. Her father had once owned the Greensboro Patriot. The Patriot was published under different owners from the 1820s until the early 1940s when what’s now the News & Record bought it and later ceased publishing it.
Christopher and Irish went to First Presbyterian Church in Fisher Park, where Christopher posed for a photo next to the portrait of Charles Myers, pastor when she attended.
Their last stop was Green Hill Cemetery, burial place for Thomas and Annie Murphy and one of Christopher’s sisters.
The trip was to have been Christopher’s farewell to her native city.
"Now, I’m hoping we can make one more trip," Irish says.
That possibility arose when they visited the Greensboro Historical Museum, whose buildings Christopher remembered as First Presbyterian.
The staff was excited at meeting a daughter of the amazing Mayor Murphy. They asked her to attend the city’s bicentennial in 2008.
"I told mother," Irish says, "that she has something to live for and look forward to."
