Before the pandemic and a spine operation I had been working on deciphering the handwritten minutes for the Town of Wake Forest College. It was chartered by the state in 1880 and superseded by the Town of Wake Forest in 1909 to allow the town to sell bonds and begin the electric system.
I have always the thought the Wake Forest town fathers – no women could vote then – only asked the General Assembly in 1880 for the charter because the Town of Forestville was chartered in 1879. There was a bit of competition between the towns because Wake Forest was only beginning to have a commercial center and Forestville had been the vibrant commercial center of the Forest District for years.
But Forestville was beginning to fade in 1879 because the depot for the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad was moved from its original 1840 site on what is now Friendship Chapel Road (originally Front Street) to a location next to the Wake Forest College campus, which would later be the north side of Wait Avenue or the Rolesville Road. The college trustees had been pestering the railroad owners to let the move the depot and finally succeeded in 1874. Before that, college students were accustomed to walking about a mile down to the depot on a dusty or muddy road, depending on the season, to get their mail and watch passengers alight or board the cars.
The moving was very real. Workmen loaded the small frame building – its piers were either bricks or stones – onto several supporting beams and put it on a flatcar to carry it the mile north. Later – and the date is not known – a freight depot was built on the south side of Wait Avenue. When it became dilapidated and then abandoned in the 1940s-1950s, it was torn down and the site is now the town South White Street parking lot.
The original depot was replaced, date obscure, by an almost exact replica and became the passenger depot once the freight depot was built.
For college students in those days, the trains and the depots were one of their focal points, almost constant entertainment just feet away from the campus. For the town fathers, some of their antics became the subjects of a constant stream of town ordinances about jumping on or jumping off the trains, ogling the girls who arrived from Meredith, and generally foolishness and misbehavior.
About 12 years ago two men appeared in our side yard, looking at and taking pictures of the Historic Forestville sign that is there. When asked, the brothers Jack H. King and Thomas King, are descendants of a family who with two other families left from Forestville in 1845 for a three-month journey to new lands in western Tennessee. The three families – King, Thomas and Garrott – all lived in North Carolina. The question the two brothers asked, why did they all come to Forestville? And they were sure of it because a young girl kept a diary of the trek.
The reason is simple. Beginning in the late 1700s there were tracks and trails that crossed here and later became roads. As that happened, stores and blacksmiths grew up to serve the large plantations around what became Forestville. Before 1837, when John S. Purefoy bought an acre near the future depot site all the land in the Forest of Wake was held in large parcels. Our house is on the acre, built in 1838.
By 1845 Forestville was a thriving community. Of course there was the church, Forestville Baptist, but that was later, 1860. There was a hotel called Fort’s House and later a hotel or boarding house operated by J.A. Jones and his wife. John M. Brewer owned a general store here, and there is a long list of other men, including college professor W.G. Simmons, who owned stores.
From the early 1800s there had been a two-story school on Liberty Street, the Forestville Academy, that at one time was for young men and at a different time for young women.
Liquor was available in several stores, Arch Moore was a shoemaker and Mrs. C.C. Rogers was a milliner. There were restaurants and blacksmith shops. Until 1879, when he moved the business to Brooks and Jones streets in Wake Forest, W.B. Dunn had operated the Dunn Plow Company in what was called “an old government shed in Forestville.”
James L. Phillips owned a large two-story general store that supplied other stores farther from the railroad, and he was also the postmaster for several years. In the 1870s there were four physicians in the immediate Forestville area: Dr. Leroy Chappell (who was still practicing up through 1901), Dr. H.H. Harrison in the house next to Dr. Chappell, Dr. A.R. Vann and Dr. B.F. Harrison.
Even in the 1960s and 1970s, Forestville still had two or three stores and gas stations, but the doctors and the restaurants, hotels and boarding houses along with the shoemaker and milliner were long gone. And it all began when the depot was moved.
(We know Tennessee had a strong attraction for North Carolina people. Dr. Calvin Jones moved there in the early 1830s, acquired more land and became wealthy.
For a different history about Tennessee, consider Mike Williams, a descendant of the Fuller family – think of the Powell-Fuller House on Capital Boulevard south of Wake Forest – who wrote: ‘My great-great-grandfather, Jonathan M. Fuller, was part of that Tennessee migration, although he left from the Bobbitt community in what was then Franklin County (now Vance) instead of Forestville.’ He settled in Lincoln County, Tennessee, and Williams has a letter he wrote to his cousin John Young back in Bobbitt.
‘Jonathan died in Tennessee in 1848, and his widow, three sons and a slave set out for North Carolina in a covered wagon. The widow died enroute, but the slave delivered the three boys safely to their maternal grandparents in Franklin County, where they were raised.’
The Census of 1850 showed those three boys living with their maternal grandfather, Harbird H. Hight. ‘My late aunts, Myrtle and Pearle Fuller, knew one of the sons, Richard Monroe Fuller,’ Williams wrote. He was grandfather to Williams’ aunts and his great-grandfather. ‘He was born in 1839 in North Carolina and died in 1911 in Wake County. His two brothers, Milton and Silas, were born in Tennessee in 1844 and 1846 respectively.'”)
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4 Responses
I’d love to see a map of where Forestville was. The only thing I know about it is that there’s a road named after it.
When it was first incorporated — chartered by the General Assembly — in 1879 the dimensions were a mile in every direction from the center of town, sort of a square, I think. The center of town would be where the Powell Road, now South Main Street and U.S. 1-A South, crossed Forestville Road, which at that time stretched both east and west toward or ending at Falls. You can think of the center as the Hoy Auction building.
Cool – thanks.
I love your articles on Wake Forest history. I learn something new every time. The original owners of my house on N. College were Alice and Molly Fort. I’m curious now if they were connected to the Fort Hotel. Thank you Carol.