July 12, 2006

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            Wake Forest College – after a less than successful five years as an agricultural institute and then a painful disagreement in the General Assembly about the rechartering – had just been approved as a liberal arts college. It had one college building plus the relocated plantation house Calvin Jones sold to the state Baptist Convention, and professors and their families lived in the nearby matching brick houses built by Captain John Berry.

            A dusty dirt road led a mile south to a small but bustling village that had a store, a private school, several businesses and a Masonic lodge. Two years before, in 1838 when it was still known as Alston’s Store, William Alston had been appointed the postmaster. (The only post office in the county had been in Raleigh from 1794 until 1823, when Calvin Jones established one at his plantation home.)

            Then in 1839 the name of the village was changed to Forestville and James S. Purefoy, who lived on Powell Road across Front Street from Alston’s Store, was named the postmaster. (Nowadays we know Front Street as Friendship Chapel Road, and Powell Road, named for the bridge Jesse Powell built across the Neuse River, is called South Main Street and U.S. 1-A.)

            Those were not the only changes coming to the village.

            The Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, the first railroad chartered and built in North Carolina, had selected Forestville as a depot. Alston and Daniel Crenshaw had sold four acres on Front Street for the station and “other houses,” as a later deed said.

            It will take even more imagination to fully understand how difficult, how limited, travel and the transportation of goods were in 1840. There were only dirt roads, dusty in summer, clayey mire in winter, and the only means of transport was on foot, on horse or mule or behind a horse or a mule. Every traveler to the state and every resident complained of the roads. And they presented more than inconvenient travel. The bad roads kept farmers from markets and stalled the growth of commerce and industry. A railroad opened opportunities unknown before.

            The R & G was built north to south. Slaves, hired from their masters for about $150 a year, laid heavy wooden rails topped with strap iron. The railroad bought freight cars and two passenger coaches along with four six-wheeled engines called Tornado, Spitfire, Whirlwind and Volcano. On March 19, 1840, the residents of Forestville celebrated the completion of the railroad to its new depot, and two days later the Tornado steamed into Raleigh.

            Suddenly you could travel from Raleigh to Petersburg, Va., in 15 hours, to Baltimore, in 32, and goods shipped from New York City could arrive in Raleigh in eight days. The merchant who received them said the change was “like annihilating both time and space.”

            Although there were schedules, they were somewhat flexible, given to late arrivals in case of rain. The unnamed agent at the Forestville depot, faced with long waits between trains, would go off to hunt squirrels, and the engineer would have to summon him back with the whistle.

            In a foretaste of the future, the first freight sent from Raleigh, on March 28, 1840, was 20 bales of cotton.

            In the next 20 years, Forestville flourished, and Wake Forest grew slowly.

            Purefoy and Peyton A. Dunn, a railroad superintendent and author of the plan of construction for Forestville Baptist Church built in 1860, opened the Forestville Female Academy on Liberty Street around the corner from the house where first Purefoy and later Dunn lived.

            Purefoy, a Baptist minister and a college trustee for 45 years, built and operated his hotel across South Avenue from the Wake Forest College campus, next door to his general store, but the only other private buildings in town were 15 homes.

            The Civil War devastated northern Wake County along with most of the South. The Confederate government requisitioned not only men, leaving the women and slaves to farm the land, but also a portion of the products of the land. The war ended with Sherman’s army in and around Raleigh. When they vacated the capital at the end of April, 1865, the entire Seventeenth Corps headed north toward Forestville with stragglers raiding as they went. William H. Wall, one of the local farmers who had increased his cotton production because of the railroad, was killed by a straggler.

            The Raleigh & Gaston was able to recover quickly afterward, and by then the strap iron rails had long been converted to iron with sturdy wooden ties.

            Soldiers, returning to find their fields choked with weeds and much of their cattle gone, turned to a cash crop – cotton. In 1870 the only agricultural products with an increase over 1860 figures were cotton, oats and mules, and the best way to get the cotton and oats to market was by railroad. Mules could walk.

            A Wake Forest planter, Peterson Dunn, was awarded a silver cup in 1869 for shipping the county’s first bale of cotton in 1869 after the war.

            The Wake Forest College trustees and faculty had tried since 1852 to have the railroad station moved a mile north so that students and visitors would not have to trek up the dusty road, and they wanted a post office, which was still in Forestville. There was probably a buggy or coach waiting for the Senator Henry Clay when he made a side trip to the college to be initiated into one of the literary societies during his celebrated visit to Raleigh in 1844, but most everyone else made the trip on foot.

            Wake Forest regained its post office in 1873. The post office Calvin Jones operated in his home had continued in the village, under different postmasters, until 1848, when it was closed.

            The depot location was an argument between neighbors, church members and family members. Forestville was, after all, the location for six or more general stores, a foundry, a liquor store and a doctor. It was also home to Forestville Baptist Church, the church for most of the college faculty, one of whom, William Tell Brooks, had been the pastor for the 15 years the congregation had been in existence.

            Feelings were so intense that, in 1874 when the trustees finally prevailed and moved the station at a cost of $3,000.02, the Rev. Brooks had to resign his pastorate because Forestville residents thought he favored the move.

            The freight station was on the site of the present gazebo parking lot, and the passenger station was across the tracks toward the college.

            Oddly enough – but probably reflecting the competition between the two – both villages were incorporated within a year of each other: Forestville with 116 residents in 1879 and the Town of Wake Forest College with 456 residents in 1880, where Purefoy was named mayor until elections could be held. From then on, Wake Forest grew while Forestville withered. The stores and businesses were gradually abandoned or moved north to the larger town, and the town charter was revoked.

            Wake Forest grew not only to serve the needs of the increasing number of college students but also to serve the farmers in the area. It was already a transportation center with roads leading in several directions. Farmers used those roads, still dirt up through the 1930s and later, to bring their cotton to a gin – one of the odd things that pop up in the county’s land descriptions is the designation as “the Gill gin lot” or “the corner gin lot” – and then to market.

            Early on, one of the official town posts was that of weigher of cotton.

            By the middle 1880s, Wake County led the state in population and agricultural production.

            What became one of the South’s largest cotton merchants, W.W. Holding and Company, was begun in Wake Forest around 1890 when Holding began buying from farmers locally and selling it to the Royall Cotton Mill (built just north of the town limits in 1900), the Sterling Cotton Mill in Franklinton and others.

            Cotton was king for a few years, but, beginning in the 1880s, Wake farmers increasingly turned to the production of bright leaf tobacco, which could pay three times as much as cotton.

            The cotton business has disappeared along with the college students, but Wake Forest retains some of the commercial vitality and many of the buildings from the age of cotton: The handsome homes on North Main and South Avenue built by the Powell, Royall and Holding families, the founders of the Royall Cotton Mill; the brick warehouse that was once headquarters for the Holding firm and is now known as The Cotton Company; and the large warehouses on South White Street the Holding firm moved to later.

            What if the station had not been moved? Would Forestville have grown and prospered as Wake Forest did? Would Front Street be lined with stores and restaurants rather than ending near the silos for the former Holding farm? Would Wake Forest be just a campus with a few faculty homes?

            That depot made a difference.

            (We live in the house where the Purefoy and Dunn families lived, a house facing what was Powell road, next to Front Street. In 1862 another owner, Street Taylor, sold the house to Dr. Leroy Chappell. He, his son, his grandson and their families lived in the house up through the 1960s, and a great-grandson grew up here.

            (I am still rambling through the deeds and wills in Archives and History in Raleigh, trying to find how James Purefoy acquired the house between his marriage in 1831 when he was 18 and the tax listing and Census of 1840 showing that he, his wife, three children and one slave lived on one acre worth $500. Mrs. Purefoy, Mary, was the daughter of Foster Fort, who acquired land, farmed and built mills as well as supporting the young college. But all his deeds from 1806 on are for larger tracts and many refer to Horse Creek or the Sutherland land. Wrong side of town. And then there are those which use a pine stump or a red oak as a starting point with no other recognizable feature today. Mary did receive property from her father at the time of the marriage. It was probably similar to what he directed his widow to give to his younger children when they married: “one bed and stead and furniture, one bureau, cow and calf, one sow and pigs” and a slave.

            (What seemed pointless searching was rewarded last week when I found some overlooked information about John Purefoy, James’ father and the man who convinced the North Carolina Baptist Convention to buy Calvin Jones’ plantation. In 1814 John Purefoy bought some 400 acres near Forestville and built a house that has become the Purefoy-Dunn House that is on the National Register of Historic Places. That nomination said he never owned more than four slaves and therefore probably did not engage in farming. I found him, listed as John Peurifoy – another instance of how the name was variously spelled by the family and others – in the county tax rolls for 1830, owning 520.75 acres and 13 slaves. It does appear he farmed. John Purefoy sold his lands around 1835 and moved to Johnston County, his second wife’s home. Did he sell or give James that acre? It is worth another Saturday of searching to try to find the answer.

            (All of the information in the article itself is from deeds and wills in my possession or in Archives and History, from Elizabeth Reid Murray’s “Wake: Capital County of North Carolina, Vol. I,” from Kelly Lally’s “The Historic Architecture of Wake County,” from the history of Wake Forest prepared in 1976 by Dr. Edgar E. Folk, Ray Branson, Catherine Paschal, R. Watson Wilkinson and Shirley Wooten, and from a series I wrote and first published in The Wake Weekly in 1982 about the history of electricity in the area and in town.)