Woodrow Wilson

History

Opened May 1998

Opened as a pub

May 1998

Building

1904, for the South End Co-operative Society

Architect

T Taylor Scott

Named after

Woodrow Wilson, 28th US President

On the morning of Sunday 29 December 1918 the President of the United States stepped off a train in Carlisle, on what was billed as a Pilgrimage of the Heart to the city where his mother was born. This Wetherspoons carries his name. It is one of two on Botchergate, both named after men with a Carlisle connection, and the older of the pair: it opened in May 1998, six years before the William Rufus up the road.

The building is the old Co-op, the headquarters and main department store of the Carlisle South End Co-operative Society, running from 40 to 50 Botchergate; the pub takes up most of it. It was put up in 1904, designed by T. Taylor Scott in local quarried stone, replacing several earlier society shops on the same site, with the departments arranged around a central arcade. The society was a bigger concern than a shop. It ran its own fleet of railway wagons, lettered for the Carlisle South End Co-operative Society, and had a coal depot off London Road: a co-operative large enough to move its own coal by rail, with a department store on Botchergate to sell out of.

Wetherspoon's own history tells it differently, tracing the Carlisle Co-op to railway workers in 1861 and dating the building to an 1869 move across Botchergate, celebrated with a tea party and a ball. The 1904 architectural record looks the more reliable for the building you are standing in, and 1861 and 1869 are probably the society's earlier roots on the same street.

The name is the good bit. Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth President of the United States, had a mother born in this city: Jessie Janet Woodrow, born in Carlisle on 20 December 1826 by the President's own account, a daughter of the Reverend Thomas Woodrow, minister of the Annetwell Street chapel from February 1820 to June 1835. He was a Scottish Presbyterian, said to be the first of his family to leave Scotland in over five hundred years. The family emigrated in 1836, to New York, then Canada, then Ohio. Jessie married a Presbyterian pastor, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, and their son was christened Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

He was not the only notable child of the house. Her brother James Woodrow was born in Carlisle on 30 May 1828, became professor at Columbia Theological Seminary and president of the College of South Carolina, and was tried by the Presbyterian church in the 1880s for teaching evolution. Two children of one Carlisle manse, a president and a heretic.

Wilson had passed through Carlisle once before, in the 1890s, as an anonymous tourist. In December 1918, in Europe for the Paris Peace Conference, he crossed to Britain between the 26th and the 31st and met Lloyd George and King George V. The Cumberland News of Saturday 28 December announced the Carlisle visit for the next morning: four hours in the city, the train arriving at half past nine and leaving at half past one for Manchester. The Lowther Street church told its members to collect tickets from the schoolroom that evening.

The same paper set out how little was left to see. Annetwell Street had been almost entirely rebuilt. The chapel had stood where the Salvation Army Citadel then flanked the entrance to the Castle, with Woodrow's house and school probably beside it, and the congregation had moved to Lowther Street in 1843. The one building directly tied to him was the house in Cavendish Place he built in 1831 or early 1832 and lived in until he left in 1835. The paper called the belief that the President's mother was born there erroneous: she was born five years before he bought the site, most likely in Annetwell Street, where a directory had him living in 1829.

Wilson came anyway. He went to the Crown and Mitre, signed the freemen's roll in the Dormont Book, walked to Annetwell Street to see where his grandfather's chapel had stood, and was asked by Pastor Edward Booth to address the congregation at the Lowther Street Congregational Church, which had replaced it. A tablet there records that the President's mother was born in Carlisle and that her father, the Revd Thomas Woodrow, M.A., was minister of the church, 'then worshipping in Annetwell Street', from February 1820 to June 1835. It was placed 'to commemorate President Woodrow Wilson's Pilgrimage of the Heart to this Church, 29th December 1918'.

Some transcriptions of the tablet give the 20th; the stone reads the 29th, as do the Cumberland News's notice of the visit, the address as published in 1956 and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library. The other trace is the blue plaque the Carlisle and District Civic Trust put on Cavendish House, the Reverend Woodrow's later home, in 2000. Inside the pub, the artwork tells the family's story, and the bar runs up to fourteen handpumps, the largest real ale range in Carlisle. Solway CAMRA made it the city's Pub of the Year for 2014, under its manager Andy Hetherington.