This town was founded for one reason only: To shoot dogs
Dellview, North Carolina was formed 100 years ago for a very specific reason. It survived for years as one of the smallest towns in the United States. Why did it hang on for so long?
Earlier this summer, Rabbit Hole reader Hunter Rogers asked if I had ever heard of Dellview, North Carolina, a town that was created for one reason and one reason only: To allow its residents to shoot dogs. This seemed too good (and, uh, morbid) to be true. After all, small towns are formed for all sorts of reasons! It used to be that people would band together to form a government to provide services to the folks who live there. More recently, people have formed small towns not to provide a multitude of services, per se, but to keep themselves from being potentially annexed into a bigger city. (This is basically why Summerfield was created, although they are now firmly in their FAFO phase and are gonna have about 1,000 acres annexed into Greensboro anyway.)
But I had never heard any town’s organizing principle being dog-shooting. So in honor of Dellview’s 100th birthday, here’s a deeper look at some of the myths of a place that likes to tell some weird-ass stories about itself.
First off, I am far from the only person who has ever written about Dellview. Every couple of years, from the 1930s until the early 2000s, a newspaper, magazine, or television reporter would come to town. Nearly all of them have relayed the same origin story. In the 1920s, members of the Dellinger family, who lived on farmland just west of Cherryville, were tired of stray dogs attacking their chickens. (Yes, packs of stray dogs used to be a menace in North Carolina! We’ve been over this!) The problem was that their land sat in unincorporated Gaston County, which didn’t allow farmers to fend off the dogs in the manner they preferred at the time: With a rifle or a shotgun. So the Dellingers called up a relative who was both a lawyer and a state lawmaker, and told them they wanted to get a state charter to make a new town that encompassed one square mile on the south side of Delview Road. (Nobody knows why it’s misspelled, but it still is!) David P. Dellinger introduced a bill, it passed in March 1925, and the town was born. A population of 17 people, all members of the Dellinger family, made up the entire population. They picked a mayor and town commissioners (David P., who lived outside of town, could only serve as town attorney). Those commissioners supposedly met in the newly designated town hall (the chicken coop) and passed one ordinance and ONLY one ordinance: To allow for the shooting of stray dogs. Thus, having fulfilled their civic duty, everyone just went back to whatever they were doing before. Farming, probably.
The town had the power to do all sorts of things that it never did. It could have its police chief arrest people! That never happened. It could build its own power plant, schools, water lines, and sewer systems! Also never happened. It could collect taxes! Nope! The town mostly ignored most of the powers it was given in its charter, except for the whole regulation of dogs thing.
This, however, may have been a smokescreen for the real reason why the Dellingers wanted to form a town. “I think what it came down to was rural electrification,” Dr. Van Dellinger, the town’s mayor, told the Shelby Star in 2000. “It was easier to get electricity if you were a town and they pretty much used the dogs as a reason to become a town.” They eventually got a power line run to town from Cherryville.
Over the years, the details seem to get fuzzy. In 2000, Van Dellinger said there was only one law that was ever passed in the town’s 75 year history: The dog shooting thing. But in the 1960s, some Dellingers recalled there was some sort of hog pen regulation that went into place. Someone else thought there were maybe four laws that were on the books, but they didn’t know where the “books” were and forgot what they all were. Another time, someone said they never actually passed the dog shooting ordinance. In another instance, a Dellinger family member told a reporter that he remembered holding elections in someone’s living room every couple of years. Others said that they just never held elections: For the first few decades Onie Dellinger served as mayor. (Her husband Henry couldn’t hold office, since he was a rural mail carrier). Onie’s brother-in-law Tom was police chief. His wife was clerk. They didn’t hold elections. There was a town council. It never met. Over its first 35 years, the town had no births and no deaths.
People did move away, though. By 1960, the population was down to four: Onie and her husband, and Tom and his wife, all of whom had retired. Every ten years, when the U.S. Census came to town and did an official count, newspapers began to guess that that Dellview was have been the smallest incorporated town in America. That could have changed when a housing development, Dellview Acres, popped up just oustide of the town limits. In late 1963 the people living there, fearful of being swallowed up by Cherryville, asked if they could be annexed by Dellview. Onie and Henry were in Florida for the winter. Only Tom’s wife Ola was around, and she said no.
By that time Tom, the police chief, had passed away. Months later, Onie’s husband Henry died. Then Onie left. That left Ola as the only resident of town, but then she died in 1966. Onie would stay in town sometimes, but when she left for Florida, or Alabama, or Charlotte, the population would fall to zero.
In the early 1970s, the General Assembly decided that there were too many small towns that weren’t really doing anything, and started an effort to remove them. Dellview was on the list. But once again, Onie and the remaining Dellingers, now scattered around Gaston County, flexed their political muscle and asked their local legislators to keep Dellview alive. It worked, and the town survived for another day.
(A quick aside here to tell you that David P. Dellinger, the longtime lawmaker who technically created Dellview died in 1957. But! He wanted to make sure he’d be remembered, so in 1949 he commissioned and built his own gravestone: An 18-foot-tall obelisk that towered over the rest of the Mount Zion Baptist Church Cemetery just outside of Cherryville. Okay then!)
Over time, some Dellingers came and went, but the town remained. Maybe that’s because, as the state and (maybe) the country’s smallest incorporated town, it was the answer to a trivia question, and nobody wanted to pull the plug and get rid of a tiny bit of quirky notoriety. It also survived because running a town that doesn’t do anything isn’t that hard. Once, someone called the mayor to do a bridge survey. Van Dellinger replied that the town had no bridges. He’d get forms every once in a while. “It’s not too hard to write N/A (not applicable) on them and send them back,” he told the Shelby Star in 2000.
CBS Sunday Morning came to do a feature story. David Letterman asked Van to come on his show. Van said no, because he didn’t want to be the butt of a joke.
Van, a grandson of a town founder, ended up being the last mayor of Dellview. When the Census came in 2000, they didn’t end up listing a population for Dellview. Turns out that Gaston County had told the census that the town was “inactive,” so the Census didn’t give Dellview an official population (the people were were just considered to be residents of Gaston County). That meant the town was no longer the smallest in the state (Love Valley, population 30, picked up the honor).
That doesn’t mean the town is gone gone, necessarily. The charter is still on the books, and it’s conceivable that the town could make a move to come back. And, at last check, the tiny “Dellview” road sign is still up on the side of Delview Road. But it now joins a long list of North Carolina towns that have faded away. That includes Spencer Mountain, another Gaston County town which had a population of two a few years ago: A pastor and his wife. But the pastor died in 2019, the wife moved, and now with a population of zero, that town is also inactive.
Hence, Dellview, which came into this world for one specific reason and survived longer than it really needed to, may never have needed to exist in the first place. It turns out that nobody shot a stray dog there. They didn’t need to. The chicken farm burned down in 1928, just three years after Dellview’s founding.
I meant to tell you this when I originally asked you about Delview, but one of my best friends is a Dellinger, and lives on Delview Road in Gaston County very close to where the town was! I had asked him about the town one day and he confirmed that members of his family started the town!
Three years later there were no chickens.
L'homme propose, le dieu dispose.