We mark the beginning of slavery in the United States as being August 20, 1619, when “20 and odd” African captives aboard a Dutch ship arrived in Jamestown and were later sold.
There seems to be a misconception by some in North Carolina that slavery, although it flourished along the coast, especially in rice plantations, was not part of the fabric of life in the Piedmont and western Carolina up until the Civil War. Maybe they were not called plantations, but local men and families owned large tracts of land, hundreds of acres sometimes, and scores of slaves.
Let us start close to home, actually our home at the corner of South Main Street and Friendship Chapel Road (once Front Street), which was begun and completed as three rooms, two down and one up, in 1838. Jesse Kemp had sold an acre to James Purefoy on Dec. 30, 1837, and a year later the property was valued at $150.
That modest house on a main road, next to the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad depot, was almost surely built by Purefoy’s father-in-law’s six carpenter slaves; Foster Fort mentioned them by name in his October 13, 1843 will – Sam, Jim, Nelson, Henderson, Joshua and Harry – along with the names of 18 other slaves who worked his fields and his mills.
He did not name the slaves he had already given to his four married daughters, but he left two slaves, a boy and a girl, Neal and Helen, to his unmarried daughter, Eliza, along with one horse, a cow and calf, a sow and pigs, a bed and stead and furniture along with, after his death, his gold watch and a sixth part of his bank stock. The four married daughters certainly were treated equally.
Mary Purefoy, therefore, entered married life in 1831 – both she and James were 18 – with property: two slaves, furniture and livestock. So did her sister, Emily, who married the Rev. William Brooks, Wake Forest College professor and first pastor at the Forestville Baptist Church whose name is also on one of Wake Forest’s major streets.
There would have been slave quarters behind the house. Surely when Mary and James moved in 1838 with their three young boys from his father’s house, now the Dunn-Purefoy House on the west side of town where they had lived since their marriage, they would have wanted a cook to work in the two-room kitchen house built at the same time. And James began buying property, land here and there, to work as a farm so he must have needed field hands. He was also an elder, a preacher for 48 years at various churches around Wake Forest and pastor of Corinth Church in Granville County for 28 years.
When he died on March 30, 1889, he owned the most property in town, including a hotel and a general store, and paid the most taxes. The slaves were freed by then, though they were not free in most senses because the freedoms of Reconstruction were being swept away by the Jim Crow laws which began to circumscribe and restrict all of black life.
