By Carol W. Pelosi
Just to clear up any possible confusion, there are two important Ailey Youngs in Wake Forest history. The first was Ailey Fowler Young, born in 1857 in slavery, who was the mother of Allen Young, the founder of the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, the first private school for Black children and teens in Wake County.
That first Ailey Young is remembered by the house she bought in 1895 for $105 from its then-owner, the widow of Wake Forest College Professor William G. Simmons. She joined the town property tax rolls that year, paying 60 cents for $100 of property. It is hard to know if she was the first Black property owner – Mrs. Simmons sold several tracts nearby – or if she was the first Black woman without a thorough investigation into the 1895 tax roll, but she was certainly among the first.
The Allen Young family retained ownership of the one-and-a-half-story saddlebag house, originally built about 1875 to hold two families, for decades, but the house became vacant sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s and then was slowly engulfed by vines, undergrowth and trees. Unseen, it was still remembered by several in the East End. Raleigh architectural historian Ruth Little heard about it and hacked through to uncover it during a survey of possible historical buildings in Wake Forest.
Since then the Town of Wake Forest has nearly completed the rehabilitation of the house and has compiled its history. It is on the North Carolina Study List which is the first step towards National Register Listing. It stands next to Wake Forest Cemetery on North White Street and was recently painted with the same pale yellow paint the first Ailey Young and her husband used.
The Ailey Mae Young we honor this week knew that history from the time she was born to Allen and Louzania Jones Young on April 11, 1909, their first daughter after seven sons, three of whom died young. Ailey Mae’s mother died a year later, and Allen Young soon after married Geneva Trice of Chapel Hill and a Shaw University graduate, who became well known for her baking; her rolls and bread were sold from an addition to the store Allen had built years earlier.
Young became the father of 11 children who grew to adulthood, including two more daughters, Maude and Kathryn. Maude went on to be a librarian in the Richard B. Harrison Public Library in Raleigh from 1941 to 1968. Kathryn married Raleigh realtor James A. Shepard and was a professor of childhood education at Shaw University.
Family life in the Young family was centered on the school and the church, the Spring Street Presbyterian Church that had two homes during its lifetime. Along with the young children, Allen Young’s large two-story house with a wraparound porch on East Spring Street usually was home to the unrelated teachers and other family members. Listed as teachers in the 1930 Census were his wife, Geneva, his sister Eva Belle Vause, his children Arthur, Ailey Mae and James, and three unrelated teachers, Lacie Smith, Gertrude E. Carter and Wilhelmina Feaster. Six of Young’s younger children were still in the household: Maude, George, Robert, Kathryn, Benjamin, and Thomas. (In the 1950s or 1960s Ailey and Maude had the big house demolished and built a small brick house on the Spring Street site. The large schoolhouse had been demolished earlier.)
Ailey Mae left the Normal and Industrial School at some point to go to Barber Scotia College in Concord and then to Shaw University where she earned her bachelor’s degree and turned to a career in teaching. She had a varied experience there, teaching (according to the information at her funeral) at the Mary Potter School in Oxford, the Boggs Academy somewhere in Georgia, back to Shaw, then to Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill and a last 15 years at the DuBois School in Wake Forest before she retired in 1969.
My husband and I came to know her shortly after we moved here in 1970, and she was a good teacher. She showed me Pine Terrace, part of the East End but outside the town limits where the only water was from a 1-inch pipe laid on the ground, which of course froze during the winter months; Barracktown, a huddle of old, old barracks discarded by the Army and used for student housing during the rush of students at the college after World War II, where again the water line was on the ground and there again there was no sewer. All over that area, all outside the town limits, there were close to 50 families with an average income of $50 a week, living in homes with privies because they could not afford septic tanks.
It was not an isolated problem. There were no paved streets in the East End, very few fire hydrants although there was water, very few street lights. The same was true of the Mill Village.
I also saw Ailey Mae in her old four-door sedan pulling up on West Owen Avenue in front of the Community House, the only polling place in Wake Forest at the time, and four or five other people getting out to go vote. She would repeat that every election day several times until everyone who had told her they needed a ride had voted.
Miss Ailey knew she had the responsibility to help correct at least some of those problems; she remembered all the lessons her father taught her by example and through words. And she had been active in her church and its presbytery, active in civic and community where she taught and in Wake Forest. She was a short, aging, soft-spoken woman with experiences few of her relatives or friends had had, and she ran for a seat on the Wake Forest Town Board. Her friends and relatives were not surprised when she won the most votes, becoming the first Black person and the second woman on the board. She served two terms, eight years, retiring in 1979.
I have long thought that the Wake Forest Town Board elected in 1971 was the most progressive, maybe even somewhat revolutionary, of any before or since with John D. Lyon as mayor and John Cole, Tommy Byrne and Ailey Mae Young as new commissioners joining holdovers Dessie Harper and J. Carroll Trotter.
Collectively they most likely knew every person in town by name, maybe even the names of their dogs. Lyon and Byrne were the young-ish bucks looking to make a name for themselves and I have it on good authority they both wanted to be mayor so they made a deal: Lyon would go first and Byrne would follow him four years later, which is how it worked out. Young knew everyone in the East End and many others across town; Harper knew almost everyone in the rest of town as well as some in the East End; Cole owned a store on North White Street between the all-white Mill Village and the all-Black East End and Wake County public housing; Trotter knew everyone in the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, faculty and students, when the school was much smaller than today; and Byrne and Lyon never knew a stranger.
They were diverse but mostly well educated. Lyon was a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate; Byrne a Catholic from Baltimore who came to Wake Forest College on the strength of his pitching arm which he then used after graduation for years as a New York Yankees pitcher; Young was educated by her father, Allen Young, in his Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School before becoming a teacher there, then earning her college degree from Shaw University; and Trotter of course had earned several degrees as he made his way through college, advanced study and seminary.
They looked around and decided they had much to do. First, they decided the town needed an administrator or manager. They all remembered the days in the early 1960s when then-Mayor Wait Brewer and Town Clerk Anna Holden, the first woman in that position, had to do all the voluminous paperwork up to and including federal requirements to build the Smith Creek Reservoir and water treatment plant. In November Mayor Lyon, who probably had gone to UNC to ask about likely candidates, could announce they had chosen Julian B. Prosser Jr., 26, a Davidson graduate and new master of public administration from the Institute (later School) of Government at UNC, to fill that new position.
“Miss Ailey was like a second mother to me,” Prosser said in an email for this article. “I remember visiting with her in her kitchen and planning a strategy to get the unpaved streets paved and find resources for upgrading utility services in town. We pursued paving petitions and a revolving fund to start the process. She and Carroll both lived on dirt streets at the time.
“We began a housing conditions survey which was a major asset when we applied for community development funding which we were successful in winning over several years, bringing improvements to the East side and Mill Village and enabling us to provide the utility improvements required for annexation.
“She was a strong force for community improvement. The entire board was supportive of those actions and others (such as a rework of the zoning and subdivision regulations) which we pursued.”
Also during that first year in office the commissioners and mayor were looking at the 1909 town charter with its hoary list of infractions and penalties. They wanted a charter that reflected the present and would be relevant in the future with a council- administrator form of government.
The old charter banned all alcoholic beverages inside and a mile outside the town limits, a ban that resulted in bars just beyond that mile limit on all roads leading out of town and a steady stream of illicit bottles and flasks into town. The Wake Weekly editor and co-owner was Peggy Allen, a staunch prohibitionist, who every week told the then-reporter, Jean McCamy, “Ask Julian if there is anything in the new charter about beer and wine.” McCamy asked and Julian said, “No,” which is what she reported back to Peggy. Of course, that was the point, McCamy said when asked about it recently. “There was nothing about beer and wine. She was angry but realized I had done just what she told me to.”
The town was small, 3,148 people. Seeing the growth – residential, commercial and industrial – outside the 1909 town limits, the commissioners funded a study and as a result had a list by August of 1972 of all the areas they wanted to annex: East End, Mill Village, Cardinal Hills, Pineview Estates, Forestville down to Athey (now The Factory) and Durham Road out to Schrader (now about to become housing and commercial where Wake Union Church Road meets Capital Boulevard). Almost all the homes and all the industries in these areas were served by Wake Forest water and electricity.
Talk about uproar! People and businesses who had benefitted from the town’s water and electricity did not want to pay town taxes. The town board had to withdraw its ambitious annexation plan, but later was able to annex the west side of town out to Schrader (strongly contested but final in 1982) as well as the East End, Mill Village, Pineview and Cardinal Hills without opposition in 1977. It was 1988 before the annexation of Forestville and South Main down to Capital Boulevard was confirmed by a judge. Former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice I. Beverly Lake Sr. and local attorney Jane Harris spearheaded the legal opposition to that annexation.
Also, there was change afoot. The state finally began to four-lane U.S. 1 (now Capital Boulevard from the South Main (U.S. 1-A intersection) south to the U.S. 401 intersection in Raleigh, and it also was building the new section of N.C. 98 from the west side of Wake Forest almost to Durham.
The town began to build a new sewer treatment plant on Smith Creek near the Neuse River using federal and state funds except for an eighth of the cost the town covered with a bond issue.
And the seminary announced plans for new student housing and renovations of campus buildings, an announcement that helped convince the commissioners – former Utilities Supervisor Guy Hill had joined the town board in place of Trotter in 1975 and was opposed – to upgrade the electrical system from 4KV to 23KV.
Some federal money began to trickle into Wake Forest. First was a grant to help ease the bite of high local unemployment, $820,000, to demolish the 1940s swimming pool, build a new pool, renovate the Community House in front of the pool and build a new town hall if the town would donate the land. (That new town hall was built about where the current town hall stands, but it was a temporary, hastily-built one-story building that at least accommodated a growing town staff.)
That grant was in 1977. All the eight years Miss Ailey served as a commissioner, the 1909 town hall on Brooks Street housed the Recorder’s Court upstairs, town offices, the fire department and fire truck and the police department with jail downstairs. The courtroom where the town board met was all wood with connected wooden chairs with fold-down sets. The whole place creaked at the slightest movement. The judge and also the town board sat behind a high wooden desk, and most in attendance could only see the upper half of the faces of Young, Harper and Cole. Miss Ailey always wore a hat to the meetings and Mrs. Harper did sometimes.
Ellis Nassif was the town attorney with a practice in Raleigh, and I remember him coming in at 7 p.m. as the monthly meeting began in his slippers and cardigan, having left his suit coat and daytime shoes at home after supper. He also dozed, but as soon as something came up, someone said something that he thought needed his attention he opened his eyes, raised his head and listened – or commented if necessary – before dropping again into a doze.
After the 1979 election, with an entirely new board and mayor (Mayor Jim Perry, commissioners Guy Hill, Terry Carter and Lyman Franklin), Nassif came to each town board meeting in his full suit and shoes and never closed his eyes.
The big Community Block Grants that brought the Mill Village and the East End into the 20th Century with paved streets, street lights, adequate water and sewer, fire hydrants and houses with bathrooms, kitchens with appliances and sturdy roofs all came after Miss Ailey’s two terms, but she did a lot of the groundwork to be able to get them.
In a Wake Weekly article about Young in 2002 or 2003, reporter David Leone quoted Byrne: “Former town commissioner and later mayor Tommy Byrne said the town board credited Young for making the connections with the legislature and tracking down many of those grants and funding sources.” Also, he said Young ought to be remembered in the birthplace museum (now the Wake Forest Historical Museum). “She’d be one we certainly wouldn’t want to forget.”
Well, she is sort of forgotten today – except:
*She was honored with the title of Wake Forest Citizen of the Year while a commissioner;
*The town’s second park was named for her; and this year, a historical marker is planned for her home.
*While she lived and afterward she had the respect of everyone, Black or white, who worked with her.
Ailey Mae continued to work for her community and her town after she left the town board, but in the late 1980s, after Maude died, her health began failing, she went to live with her sister, Kathryn, in Raleigh and she died on April 6, 1992.
(There is much more I could add about how she loved teaching and the children and adults she taught loved her back, how Maude was fun – imagine her in a Volkswagen going to McGregor Downs Country Club and to a union meeting during the same evening – how Ailey had worked tirelessly for the Democratic Party at the local level, how she worked at all lay levels of the Presbyterian Church in North Carolina. She was truly her father’s daughter.)
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One Response
Fascinating history. Thank you!