100 years of history
Although Wake Forest College began as a school and quickly became one of the most prestigious educational institutions in North Carolina, education in North Carolina and across our nation has only recently been considered a public enterprise free and open to all.
Several private academies and institutes flourished in the Forest of Wake area before the Rev. Samuel Wait began the manual institute on Dr. Calvin Jones’ former plantation in 1834.
Forest Hill Academy was the first school incorporated here in 1818. It was said to be 15 miles north of Raleigh on the old Oxford Road that crossed the Neuse on Jesse Powell’s ferry and later bridge. Although it originally taught girls and small boys, it changed in the 1830s to a college preparatory school.
Before the North Carolina Baptist Convention purchased Dr. Jones’s 600-plus acres, Powell set up Pleasant Grove Academy across the road from his house, which still stands just south of the quarry on Capital Boulevard. In the early 1850s it became the Pleasant Grove Male Academy.
Up in Forestville, J.S. Purefoy and Peyton A. Dunn began the Forestville Female Academy about that time on Liberty Street in a two-story building with an outside staircase next to the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad tracks. (A former neighbor, Vivian Branson, saw it when she was a child and described it.)
The first state-wide attempt at schools was in the late 1830s. Counties could share in a Literary Fund if they gave $20 to erect a school building for 50 students. The state would add $40, and the $60 would be used for a free school for white children under 21 for part of the year.
Wake County voters said yes and the county was divided into 37 districts with a five-man school committee in each, a number soon increased to 64 with three-man committees. Although the buildings were often log huts, the teachers received $15 a month and the school year was only four or five months, children who would have been entirely unlettered did learn basic reading and mathematics. But it was all cut short by the Civil War.
After the war, the legislature did not appropriate any money for public education until 1869, when an act was passed providing for separate schools for blacks and whites. In the 1870 Census, it was found that more than one-third of Wake County’s residents could not read. At the same time, there were almost 10,000 children 6 to 21 of both colors who needed schools.
There are few specifics. We know one new school building for black youngsters was built in Wake Forest Township about 1870 but have no indication of the exact site. There were a number of private white schools in the era, including the female academy in Forestville which was resurrected after the war.
We know that in 1907, soon after Royall Cotton Mill was built north of the town limits and when about 75 of the operatives’ houses had been built, the mill opened its own school rather than send the children, all white, to the Wake Forest school. In his history of the mill, the son of the mill president, Don P. Johnston Jr., said the reasons for establishing a separate school were to continue the pattern of paternalism by the mill’s owners and to keep the mill children from associating with the children of college professors and businessmen. It was not until the 1930s that the mill school was abandoned and mill children went to the Wake Forest school. It was also in the 1930s that there was some feeling in town that mill children should not be allowed to use the new swimming pool by the Community House.
The Bicentennial history of Wake Forest says a legislative act in 1913 allowed a bond vote for $25,000 for a graded school. We know the one-story, T-shaped building at 308 W. Pine Ave. was built about that time as an elementary school for white children, and the late Dr. I. Beverly Lake Sr. said he attended school there.
The Bicentennial history also says an act in 1919 established the Wake Forest schools with a special tax and bonds for an incorporated district which included Forestville.
It was apparently during the 1920s that the Benton Building (grades one-eleven and later one through twelve) replaced the school building on West Pine. That two-story brick building (later painted white) stood on South Main near the Elm Avenue intersection and served until the mid-1990s, when it was torn down to make way for the new addition to Wake Forest Elementary fronting on South Main.
Wake Forest Elementary was built on Sycamore Avenue in 1935 and named Wake Forest High School though it taught youngsters from grades one to 12. It burned down shortly after construction on May 31, 1934, apparently the work of a student arsonist who had destroyed Old Main and Wingate Memorial Hall on the Wake Forest College campus as well as starting fires on almost every campus building and several buildings near the campus. Because it was fully insured the builders rebuilt the building with the same plans.
Some black youngsters, including Allen Young, were privately educated with the help of college professors, but the first school for black children in town was the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School on Spring Street. It opened in 1914 as a boarding school, headed by Principal Allen Young, and was next to the home where he and his wife were raising nine children. It attracted students from other states where education for black children were between none and few. Young continued the school or some schooling for black children even years later after he lost funding by the Presbyterian Church.
In 1922, a school for black children opened at Olive Branch Baptist Church on Juniper Avenue.
DuBois School began on land donated by a local black family. The first building, the McElrath building, was built in 1926 with matching money from the Rosenwald Fund and local contributors. In the 1930s the school became the state-funded Wake Forest Colored Graded School and housed grades one through twelve.
Meanwhile, out in the country around Wake Forest, there were still separate school districts, many if not most of them desperately poor. The late Rufus Forrest, who came to Wake Forest schools after World War II, remembered that many of the school buildings still had dirt floors when he arrived.
All Wake County public schools were integrated in 1970, and in 1976 the separate Raleigh School System and Wake County School System were merged into the county-wide Wake County Public School System, the largest in the state.
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There were at least three very public arguments in 2003 — 1) How the town would provide water and sewer services by going with Raleigh or finding water and funding elsewhere; 2) How or whether the Wake Forest Birthplace Society would build a museum behind the Dr. Calvin Jones House on North Main Street; and a proposed $450 million Wake County bond issue for schools and libraries.
A group of North Main residents, who opposed the Society’s plan for the museum had just appealed to Wake County Superior Court.
The town commissioners were deciding whether to go forward with negotiations with Raleigh or spend $300,000 on engineering studies about bringing Neuse River water to town from the intake at the Burlington Mills plant.
Merrie Hedrick of Wake Forest, a former county commissioner, and Bob Luddy, the backer of Franklin Academy and other private schools, both appeared before the Wake Forest commissioners and mayor to argue for and against the county bond issue. (It passed.)
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