On Friday, Sept. 18, at the Preservation North Carolina annual meeting in Salisbury, Senior Planner Michelle Michael will be presented a $10,000 Stedman Incentive Grant for the stabilization and restoration of the Ailey Young House.
Restoring the town-owned house near the Wake Forest Cemetery has been the goal – and dream – of members of the Historic Preservation Commission where Michael is the staff liaison since the house was discovered in 2008.
Last fall, at Michael’s request, the HPC committed $10,000 from the biennial Christmas Historic Home Tour, and local builder and restoration specialist David St. John was the low bidder for the first step in the preservation plan Michael drafted soon after she was hired by the town in May 2014. St. John had already patched the roof, which had been covered by a blue tarp. He has just completed the initial work – marrying joists under the first-floor floor, laying down some plywood for safe walking on the floor, and cleaning out the debris from a fire, maybe fires, in the 1970s.
“We will continue to work our way up,” Michael said. There is still some money left from the HPC’s $10,000 and now they have another $10,000. “I hope we’ll be able to continue the stabilization.” That includes building supports for the walls and ceiling in the first floor, then going up to repeat the process on the second floor and attic. The final step will be repair of the roof.
However, Michael said she does not think the money will be enough to renovate the building. She is going to prepare a list of what can be repaired and what can be replaced.
Once the building is stabilized and the state Historic Preservation Office is comfortable with the stabilization, she said, “we can continue with the nomination” to the National Register of Historic Places. The house is already on the HPO’s study list.
About the grant, Michael said, “I got lucky.” Later, “We can’t ignore its (the house’s) significance in terms of the Young family, the history of the town of Wake Forest and its architectural history. For the history of the house and the Young family, particularly Allen Young, who founded and operated the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School for Negroes, the most successful and long lasting educational institution in Wake County during segregation.
As the town’s website says, “It is most certainly a rare example of Reconstruction-Era post-Civil War house for the African American working class. According to local restoration carpenter Patrick Shell, ‘There’s just nothing like this left. The fancier houses tend to survive, but something like this, the housing for regular folks, especially African Americans, is extremely rare!”
The house was rediscovered in 2008, though older people in the East End remembered the house and town water and sewer workers knew about it because of the sewer easement and driveway nearby. The town hired Ruth Little, a consultant and architectural historian with Longleaf Historic Resources in Raleigh, to search for historic buildings that had been overlooked. Little was familiar with the town because a few years before she had worked to identify and establish the Wake Forest Historical District covering much of the original town. Hearing about a house hidden near the cemetery, she and an intern plunged into the jungle-like growth between the town cemetery and Spring Street and found the house, which had been purchased by the town unknowingly when it bought land for the expansion of the cemetery.
