The ghosts of long-gone buildings linger in Wake Forest – destroyed by fire, torn down to make way for the new – but one which could have been just a whisper in the wind has survived and thrived.
Last month the Calvin Jones House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in the last few years has been redecorated with historically accurate furniture and furniture for the various uses and periods it has survived. In 2016 its second owner, Dr. Calvin Jones, was named to the Raleigh Hall of Fame.
The Federal-style house was built facing east on a small rise which is now the site for Southeastern Theological Seminary’s Stealey Hall by Davis Battle, very likely a relative of Josiah Battle, the planter who built the nearby Battle-Purnell House in Georgian style in 1802-1803. In 1821 the house and the 615 acres surrounding it were purchased by Dr. Jones, who practiced medicine there, served as the postmaster (giving the later college and town their names), and ran a corn plantation, about the only use for agricultural land at the time before the railroad and decent roads to get goods to market.
By 1832 Jones had decided to remove his family to western Tennessee where he owned about 3,000 acres because of his service as an adjutant general in the North Carolina militia during the War of 1812. Before his death in 1846 he would expand those acres to 30,000. He was persuaded by his neighbor, John Purefoy, another planter and an early North Carolina Baptist, to sell his farm to the new North Carolina Baptist Convention for $2,500 for its Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute to educate Baptist ministers.
The new president, Samuel Wait, and a very few students began the academic year in 1834, but within a few weeks the number of students grew to so many that a tent made of sheeting had to be erected as a dining hall with Wait and his wife, Sarah, spending hours each night making up shuck mattresses for the new arrivals. The Waits lived in the house and some classes were held there. The manual labor institute model did not meet the needs of new students, who wanted a broader education, and in 1838 the General Assembly approved a new charter for Wake Forest College.
By then plans were already underway for a large building to house classrooms and dormitories, so in 1835 the house was moved to a site about where Wingate Street meets Durham Road now. Cheap wooden buildings housed students until architect John Berry, who was hired in late 1834, could design and build the large central building called Old Main.
According to the exhaustive history researched and written by Jennifer Smart, the assistant director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum, and Town of Wake Forest Senior Planner Michelle Michael, the college trustees sold the house and 94 acres to John B. White, a professor and later president of the college, for $400. White moved the house again, this time to a site almost across Wingate (then Back Street) from the current seminary campus entrance. White sold the house to Professor William Walters in 1853 for $2,000 and it remained in the Walters family until 1916.
Museum Director Ed Morris says the house was used by the college’s two-year medical school as a dormitory for medical students from 1902 to 1941 when the medical school moved to Winston-Salem and also as a regular dormitory and boarding house. At some point a shed-style addition was added. There are a lot of memories in the college history about the students who roomed there with their small stoves on old winter nights.
But then came 1956 and the uprooting of the college and its transfer – students, professors, books and all – to Winston-Salem. The seminary, which had shared the campus with the college for four years, planned to tear down the old house in order to build what became known and well used as the seminary cafeteria, the Forks Cafeteria of its day.
That was when the Wake Forest Garden Club and particularly Annie Gill Harris, Ruth Snyder, Kathleen Lake and Kathleen Mackie stepped in. They, helped by John Wooten and John Mills, persuaded the college to provide some funds to move the house to the block on North Main Street which was still owned by the college. (Morris said Christopher Crittenden, the state’s first historian and a Wake Forest native, helped also and was planning to have it declared a state historic site at the time of his early death.) Plaster was removed from the walls, windows and doors and the porch were removed, and the house rolled through town to settle where it currently stands. Although a contractor built a foundation, rebuilt the chimneys, fashioned the new two-story porch and replaced the doors and windows as well as other necessary external features, for several years the interior of the house remained untouched, with sunlight filtering through lathe and dust.
It was used a bit. A local artist rented an upper room for the summer months for a few years. What might have been the first town-wide art exhibit was held there. Neighbor Bob Ford cut the grass on the large lawn. And at least once or twice garden club members and other women gathered up their children, grandchildren and neighborhood children for a rock party – the children picked up all the rocks they could find while the women sat and chatted on the steps.
That block has its own history. It was first used as the football field. Wake Forest College played what is now N.C. State in the first intercollegiate football game in North Carolina in Raleigh on Oct. 18, 1888. After the college built its first football stadium with concrete bleachers about where Patterson Hall now stands, the block became the baseball diamond with bleachers in the back southeast corner and the score board near North Main, then Faculty Avenue. The baseball field moved out to Stadium Drive in the late 1930s after Groves Stadium (now Trentini Stadium for Wake Forest High School) and Stadium Drive were built. After World War II the college moved surplus Army barracks from Camp Butner and trailers onto the lot to serve the new G.I. Bill students and their families. Student housing was so scarce, Morris said, that one student ordered a chicken coop from Sears, Roebuck and lived in it.
Meanwhile the Calvin Jones Memorial Association, which had plans to turn the house into a museum, became the Wake Forest College Birthplace Society and in 1976 proposed and was granted a Bicentennial grant to put plaster and paint on the walls, refinish the floors and begin to acquire some furnishings, most of which had no connection to the college.
But that has changed in the last few years as members of the Wait family have donated pieces they inherited although nothing is from Calvin Jones. His family took all their possessions when they moved to Tennessee except for Mrs. Jones’ piano, which is now in Haywood Hall in Raleigh. The museum has a large portrait of Jones and some memorabilia.
The land itself, which was owned by the university until 2009, was deeded to the birthplace society then to allow the construction of the Wake Forest Historical Museum behind the house. There is a reversion clause; if the land ceases to be used for historical purposes it will revert to the university. And the university maintains close ties with the museum, providing salaries and maintenance. Next Saturday that tie will be strengthened when current university students and alumni will return to the old campus for the Old Campus Trek.
Morris said the National Register designation was both for the house’s use in the college’s early days and for Calvin Jones’ achievements. A Massachusetts native born in 1775, Jones was licensed to practice medicine when he was 17. He moved to Smithfield, N.C., in 1795 and eight years later moved to Raleigh. He and a few other doctors organized the first North Carolina Medical Society; he was one of the first physicians in the state or country to adopt smallpox vaccinations; and he was elected to the state legislature, the House of Commons, from Johnston County two times and once from Wake County. He edited a newspaper, served as mayor and was active as a Mason. He was an adjutant general in the state militia, leading troops to defend New Bern during the War of 1812. He was a trustee of the University of North Carolina and went to Paris to study surgery for cataracts. While living in Wake Forest, he continued to practice medicine and perform cataract surgeries sans anethesia in his small office at the back of the house. As Morris says, “If these walls could talk, they would scream.”
Jones married late at 44, choosing a widow, Temperance Boddie William Jones, the younger sister of his fiancé, Ruina Williams who died of tuberculosis in 1809. She brought a son, at least one slave and a substantial dowry to the wedding. Together they had three children: Montezuma (1822-1914), Octavia (1826-1917, and Paul Tudor (1828-1904). Calvin and Temperance died and were buried in Tennessee.
One Response
This is such an interesting and informative article–both for people who have lived here all of their lives and for people just moving into the community. Thank you.