Happening at the Museum

The Calvin Jones Farm Journal

By Jennifer Smart, Assistant Director

It’s always exciting when we uncover new documents that show us what life was like for people in early Wake Forest. That’s why we were ecstatic to find out about the Calvin Jones Farm Journal. Held in the Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill, the journal is a record of the crops, farm structures, family members, and paid and enslaved workers who spent their lives on the original Calvin Jones Planation.

Jones kept detailed notes about what it took to develop and maintain the property from the time his family arrived in 1821 until their move to Tennessee in 1832. It’s a wealth of material. Over this past summer, we were lucky enough to have an intern funded by Wake Forest University. Matt Capps, a senior majoring in anthropology, worked at the museum to investigate and research the built landscape of the Original Campus. One day he drove to Chapel Hill to view this journal. It was through his careful study that we discovered the fascinating truth: Calvin Jones produced mountains of notes filled with amazingly detailed information regarding the minutia of daily life! We followed up with a digitization request, and the Wilson Special Collections Library made the journal immediately available.

What’s in this nearly 200-year-old document? We’re finding intriguing hints on every page. One of the goals we have here at the museum is to better understand the day-to-day workings of the plantation, both in its days as the Calvin Jones Plantation and in its later years as the Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute and then Wake Forest College. Jones sold his farm in 1832. The school opened in 1834. It’s reasonable to assume much of the landscape remained the same during the transition. For that reason, certain entries are more valuable than others. Although we absolutely want to know about crop rotation and drought conditions on the Calvin Jones Plantation, this line that touches on the homes of enslaved workers is the type of hidden treasure we most hope to find.

“Corn about the negro houses and margin of the low grounds is 5 feet high—poor low grounds 2 feet—over the road toward Holdens 2 feet.”

The mention of where homes for enslaved workers were located really grabbed our attention. Other sources suggest that seven cabins (later used as student dorms in the first year of the Institute) were to the east and north of campus. Putting together the clues, we now believe the phrase “low grounds” refers to the current location of downtown Wake Forest, which slopes away from the spot where the Calvin Jones House originally stood on the plantation’s highest geographic point at the center of what’s now the SEBTS campus. As the house faced east, this brief entry paints a clear visual. We can imagine visitors to the Jones Plantation would have seen cornstalks, perhaps paths, and the homes of enslaved workers when they sat on the porch or looked out a window. We got another thrill seeing the Holden name. That farm was south of the Calvin Jones Planation, on the way to Forestville along what’s currently South Main Street, and the homestead still stands.