History Cont.
Kenneth Murchison went to New York to be a naval stores and cotton merchant after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He returned to Wilmington to be in the Confederate Army and became a Prisoner of War (POW) on Johnson Island under horrible conditions, having to eat rats for nourishment. After the war he went back to New York and revived his naval stores and cotton business. After purchasing Orton in 1884 he restored Orton House to its former state after years of neglect, repaired the rice fields, and made Orton his winter home. He was an outdoorsman who liked to fox hunt, duck hunt, and fish. He died in 1904.
James Sprunt bought Orton out of his father-in-law’s estate and presented it to his wife, Luola. During the Civil War when he was only 18 years old, James was a Purser on several Confederate blockade runners, swift little ships which dashed through the blockading fleet of Northern ships to export cotton to the British mills and import necessities for the South. After the War, with 5 bales of cotton, he joined his dad in starting Alexander Sprunt & Sons cotton exporting business. Based out of Wilmington with offices throughout Europe, it became the largest cotton exporting business in the world, known in Europe as the most prominent and reliable.
James and Luola added the wings to Orton House in 1910, designed by her brother Kenneth Murchison, Jr., an architect in New York. They began the development of a modest garden by planting live oak trees, arborvitae trees, and cedar trees. They built the Chapel in 1915 for family services, as travel to distant parishes was difficult. After Luola’s death in 1916, James named the Chapel in her memory, Luola’s Chapel.
James financed the construction of many churches; he gave a wing to the James Walker Memorial Hospital in Wilmington and named it in memory of a young daughter, Marion Sprunt; he established a fund for the aid of crippled children; and he endowed a series of lectures at the Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. James was also the author of several books on Cape Fear history, most notably Chronicles of the Cape Fear first published in 1914.
