Wake Forest Senior Planner Michelle Michael has a daunting task ahead – stabilizing and eventually rehabilitating the Ailey Young House on North White Street just south of the Wake Forest Cemetery.
But then it was a small miracle that the house was found in a heavily wooded area or that it had not been torn down years ago. The Town of Wake Forest owns it but had forgotten about it.
The house is remarkable and worth saving because it is the only tangible link to Wake Forest’s pioneer black educator, Allen L. Young and his Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School and its buildings, all now gone. (See the Gazette for Feb. 3, 2016, for a short biography.)
Ailey Young was 23 and a housekeeper and her husband, Henry, a farmer, was 26 at the time of the 1880 Census. Their oldest son, Allen, was 4, and the family, including three younger children, lived in the saddlebag house on the east side of the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad tracks. The house was one of several of the same design built about 1875 by Wake Forest College Professor William G. Simmons, who lived a short ways away, across the tracks in the North Brick House, one of the three original college buildings that was later razed to make room for Simmons Dormitory at the corner of North Avenue and North Main Street.
The houses on Simmons Row were rental property for the black farmers – most of the former Dr. Calvin Jones plantation east of the railroad was still forested or farm lands – and the people who worked for white people or at the college. By the 1900 Census 10 of Henry and Ailey’s children still lived with their parents in the house. Mable, 10, Hubert 8, and Eva Belle, 6, were too young to work. Nora, 23, was a cook; James, 21, was a waiter at a hotel; Lizzie, 19, was a cook; Francis, 17, was a housemaid; and Peter, 16, Joseph, 14, and Fred, 11, were all farm laborers. Henry was a farmer still but Ailey was now a laundress. Their oldest son, Allen, lived around the corner on Spring Street with his wife, Louganis, 30, their two young sons, Arthur and Lewis, and a 12-year-old niece, Elkena Dunston.
Professor Simmons’ widow, Mary Elizabeth, sold the duplex house to Ailey Young in 1895, and the family lived in the house until 1967; it was purchased by the Town of Wake Forest as part of a future cemetery expansion in 1988 when the house was already swallowed up by trees and vines. Few remembered it, but one or two people mentioned it to archivist Ruth Little after the town hired her in 2008 to do a historic resources survey to see if all the historic buildings in town were documented.
Little and an associate fought through vines and underbrush to reach the house and immediately began spreading word of their find. The state Historic Preservation Office sent people to undertake an initial structural analysis in 2009, and the town mothballed the house to save it from further deterioration. A community forum was held, trees and vegetation around the house were cleared, the house was designated a Local Historic Landmark, and the town board permitted the Historic Preservation Commission to pursue rehabilitation and renovation. The HPC members began raising money to carry out their tentative plans.
Michael joined the town’s planning department and was named staff support for the HPC in 2014. That same year the HPC adopted a preservation plan for the house and hired David St. John to patch the tin roof as the first step.
and in 2014, the year Michael joined the town and began serving as adopted a preservation plan at the same time they hired David St. John to patch the tin roof.
In 2015 the HPC committed $10,000 to the Ailey Young House from the funds it raises by sponsoring the biennial Christmas Historic Home Tour at Christmas. St. John built supports for the first floor and cleaned out the fire debris from a long-ago fire.
2015 was also the year the town received a Stedman Incentive Grant of $10,000 from Preservation North Carolina. With donations from local individuals and groups, including the Wake Forest Historical Association’s $500, Michael now has $20,600 to work with and must spent the Stedman Grant by September of this year.
The plan, she told the historical association Sunday, Jan. 31, is to complete the stabilization of the first floor, work on the first floor interior and rebuild the stairs to the second floor. Future work includes stabilizing the second floor and the roof structure and replacing the roof in order to make the house eligible for a complete listing in the National Register of Historic Place. It is on the state’s study list for the listing.
In the future? Michael has a list, staring with rehabilitating the house to the same quality as in the buildings at Joyner Park, adding interpretive signage about the house, undertaking an archeological survey, restoring the porch and adding a handicap ramp and driveway. After that, the status and plan will be reevaluated.
It can serve as a heritage site to interpret how African-Americans lived during Reconstruction and onward, as part of the legacy of the Young family, the history of education in Wake Forest, and the architecture and building techniques of the late 1800s.
Michael and the HPC are still accepting donations toward the present and future work on the Ailey Young House; just note that in the memo line and make the check out to the Town of Wake Forest. Donations of material and labor are also gratefully accepted.
Ann Welton is the chairman of the HPC, and the members are Parker Schlink, Ellen Turco, Scott Leaver, William Smart, Tom Neal, Jackie Logan, Liz Johnson and Wayne Pratt.
