(Ruth Little, who discovered the house in 2008, wrote this history as though it would be part of an application for National Register of Historic Places recognition.)
The Ailey Young House, located off North White Street in the East End community of Wake Forest, is the oldest African American building in town and is a rare surviving example of Reconstruction-era housing for African Americans.
Constructed as a duplex or barracks-type housing about 1875, it is the only building remaining in Simmons Row, a street of rental housing owned by Professor William G. Simmons of nearby Wake Forest College.
Long abandoned, the partly burned one-and-a-half-story house is a “saddlebag,” two dwelling units or pens flanking a central chimney. The construction technique and its context in North Carolina architecture leads to an estimated construction date of about 1875. It sits on high, finely-crafted fieldstone piers in a thickly wooded 0.78-acre parcel east of North White Street and north of Spring Street, facing Spring Street.
In 1895 Professor Simmons’ widow sold the duplex on a seven-eighths-acre lot to Ailey Young, an African American and the mother of Allen Young, who established the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, the first school for African Americans in town, which operated from 1905 to 1957. Ailey’s descendants inherited and lived in the duplex until 1967; it was purchased by the Town of Wake Forest in 1988.
The Ailey Young House meets National Register Criterion A as the oldest surviving housing associated with African Americans in Wake Forest, and in particular for its association with the Allen Young family, educators and community leaders who educated generations of African American children. It meets National Register Criterion C for its architectural significance as a rare example of African American Reconstruction-era worker housing. It is the only building associated with the Allen Young family that still stands, because Young’s own residence and all the school buildings have been demolished. (Editor’s note: Ruth Little wrote her report in the form of an application for National Register standing so that it would be easier to apply for such standing in the future.)
Historical Background: Calvin Jones Plantation becomes Wake Forest Institute: 1832
The history of the Ailey Young House must be understood by tracing its land ownership back to the early 1800s when it was a small portion of the Calvin Jones Plantation. Jones sold his 615-acre plantation to the trustees of Wake Forest Institute (later Wake Forest College) in 1832 to be used as an institution of higher education.
From 1834 to 1839 the institution operated as a manual labor institution with instruction centered on agricultural work, using seven existing slave cabins as student dormitories. Temporary frame buildings were constructed in the first few years around the Jones House in the center of the campus, including a two-story house and two one-story dormitories known as “Long Buildings.”
In the late 1830s the arrival of the railroad altered the landscape of the old plantation/campus. The college donated the right-of-way for the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad in 1837 and in 1838 the tracks were constructed through the campus, forever setting the eastern border of the campus.
Beginning in the 1840s the college trustees began selling off the outer acreage of the plantation to raise money for the development of the college. The college continued to own the lands east of the railroad, known as the “farm lands,” for a number of years.
The first sale of a portion of the farm lands was to Isham Holding in the early 1840s. In 1848 W.T. Brooks, a college professor, bought 30 acres between the railroad and a dirt path to the east called the Ridge Path (now believed to be North Taylor Street), and in 1852 he bought 94 acres to the north of this property for $10 an acre. President Samuel Wait and the trustees sold the remaining 42 acres of farm land – located between the Brooks and Holding lands – to John M. Brewer in 1852. The price was $550, about $13.75 an acre.
This Brewer property, which almost certainly includes the seven-eighths acre later purchased by Ailey Young, is bounded on the west by the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, on the north by Isham Holding’s property, and on the east by the Ridge Path.
The college’s two-acre graveyard was located on this tract; thus the trustees reserved this cemetery and a right-of-way to themselves in perpetuity.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Wake Forest was a village where white and black families lived in close proximity in the salt-and-pepper pattern typical of antebellum Southern towns. In addition to the three college buildings, there were only 15 other principal buildings, primarily dwellings. Wake Forest professor and historian George W. Paschal noted emphatically that during the Civil War there were no houses, dwellings, business houses or factories across the railroad tracks. “East of the railroad there was no building, nothing but an old field covered with pines.” (The College Building, also called Old Main, was completed in 1837 and was destroyed by an arsonist’s fire on May 5, 1933. The two houses for professors and their families, the North Brick House and the South Brick House, were completed in 1838.The South Brick House still stands and is a private residence; the North Brick House was razed to make way for Simmons Dormitory.)
Reconstruction Era: 1866-1889: Construction of Simmons Row by Professor William Gaston Simmons
In 1866 John Brewer sold the 42 acres including the college graveyard to Professor William G. Simmons for $800. Simmons (1830-1889), son of a wealthy Montgomery County family, graduated from Wake Forest College in 1852 and attended law school at the University of North Carolina. In 1853 Simmons married Mary Elizabeth Foote (1833-1917), only daughter of Henry A. Foote, a plantation owner in Warren County.
Simmons joined the Wake Forest faculty in 1855 and served until his death in 1889 as professor of chemistry and natural history and in other positions, including treasurer. Simmons’ long tenure at the college and his involvement in so many different aspects of the students’ welfare gave him the status in later years as a nineteenth-century patriarch of the college.
In his first few years at Wake Forest he and his wife rented the North Brick House across from the campus at the east corner of Faculty Avenue (North Main Street). In 1856 the Simmonses purchased the large, elegant dwelling and resided there the rest of their lives. The Simmonses owned eight slaves in 1860: three adult females, one adult male and four female children. The North Brick House stood about three blocks southwest of the location of the Ailey Young House. As late as 1915, two small servants’ dwellings stood behind the North Brick House, labeled as such on the Sanborn Map of that year and probably the same houses occupied by the eight slaves before emancipation.
Wake Forest College closed during the Civil War, and only two professors, Simmons and William Royall, remained in the village. In 1863 they opened a seminary for girls in the College Building, but it closed after one session. In 1866 their efforts resulted in the reopening of the college, which slowly rebuilt its faculty and student body. By 1870, enrollment had rebounded. Like many other Wake Forest households, the Simmonses used their large residence as a rooming and boarding house for college students, with 14 young college boarders in their household that year.
Mrs. Simmons worked diligently with her husband for the welfare of the college. When it reopened after the Civil War she helped to furnish blankets and other items for the students’ dormitories. At commencement, she and her husband kept an open house, often feeding over 100 guests from their own kitchen. The Simmonses’ youngest daughter, Eva Belle, born in 1869, was the first female graduate of Wake Forest College, receiving her diploma in 1889, the year her father died. She was the first and only female student until 1942. Until her early death, she taught at Eufaula College in Alabama.
The village did not develop as a commercial and trading center until 1874 when the train depot, located one mile to the south in Forestville since the railroad’s construction in 1838, was physically moved to a location along the tracks beside the college campus. (A small brick building stands on the passenger depot location. The freight station, built later, stood where the vehicles now park in the South White Street parking lot. The railroad began operations in 1840 after it was completed to Raleigh.)
At this time, 1874, the land east of the railroad was platted into lots and the present business district began to develop. In the same year Professor Simmons began to buy additional land adjacent to his 42 acres in northeast Wake Forest as well as lots in the newly developing commercial district. He may have built some commercial property on his town lots. In 1874 W.S. Holding sold him 37 ½ acres adjacent to the property Simmons already owned and in 1876 another 50 acres also adjacent to his property. By the time of his death, Simmons owned a good portion of the area that would become the East End.
Simmons apparently built some rental property on his East End property since a group of houses known as “Simmons Row” stood between Spring and White street, the area just south of the college cemetery, in 1910. Thirteen African American families, including the parents of Allen Young, lived on the row in 1910. Other evidence points to the construction of the houses on Simmons Row some time around 1875.
Simmons’ will appointed his wife, Mary Elizabeth, as executrix and gave her the power to sell all his real estate by cutting it up into “as many parcels or lots as she may think proper, and expedient” and to divide the proceeds among their seven children.
Mrs. Simmons had a reputation of helpfulness and kindness, expressed in a memorial essay by George Paschal at her death in 1917. “She had a way of doing good. The colored people were not left out of her scheme. She sold them land to build their homes. She was interested in their housekeeping, their temporal and spiritual welfare. One of her last words was that they should be asked to attend her funeral services.”
After her husband’s death, Mrs. Simmons proceeded to subdivide the property in northeast Wake Forest into small lots and sell it to African Americans, which helped to create the community known as the East End or DuBois Community. Its boundaries are the railroad tracks to the west, Roosevelt Avenue on the south, Allen Road on the east and Perry Street on the north. By the early 1900s the Sanborn Map identifies the area as “Happy Hills,” a patronizing term often applied to the black section of a Southern town.
Wake Forest College retained ownership of the cemetery until 1957 when the college moved to Winston-Salem and deeded the cemetery to the town. The cemetery has since been enlarged to its present size of about 18 acres bounded by North White Street to the east and North Taylor Street to the west. Just across North Taylor Street, at the intersection of Walnut Street, stands the African American cemetery on land once owned by Professor Simmons. (There are also African American graves on the west side of North Taylor Street and behind Olive Branch Church, all adjacent to the original college cemetery, and it was not until the 1980s that a fence separating the two burying grounds, white and black, was torn down.)
Henry and Ailey Young Family, 1880-1957
Ailey Fowler, who was born about 1857, married Henry Young, a farmer, about 1875. The Youngs had 13 children, the oldest of whom was Allen Young, born in 1875. Henry and Ailey and their children Allen, Leonora, Eddie and James first appear in census records in 1880, living in Wake Forest Township but not in the village of Wake Forest. In 1895 Mrs. Simmons sold less than an acre of land bounded by White Street on the west, Cemetery Branch on the east, Willis Johnson’s property on the north and Mrs. Simmons’ property on the south for $105 to Ailsey [sic] Young. Land in that section of town had a value of about $100 an acre, thus the duplex had little value. Since the duplex can be dated to ca. 1875 by its construction technology, it is assumed that it was on the property at this time.
According to Young family tradition, Allen Young was born in the house on this property. If so, they rented the house before purchasing it.
In 1898, Mrs. Simmons sold Allen Young, then 22, a half-acre lot nearby on the south side of Spring Street for $45. In 1899 Allen paid Mrs. Simmons $50 for the adjacent half-acre lot, and in that same year Mrs. Simmons sold Ailey Young 0.3 of an acre adjoining land owned by Mrs. Simmons, Nicholas C. Dunn and the Golden Rule Tent Society.
In 1900, the U.S. Census showed Ailey and Henry Young had 10 children living at home: Nora, 23; James, 21; Lizzie, 19; Francis, 17; Peter, 16; Joseph, 14; Fred, 11; Mable, 10, Hubert, 8; and Eva Belle, 6. Henry worked as a farmer, Ailey as a laundress. That they named their youngest child Eva Belle, the same name as the Simmonses’ youngest child, suggest that the Youngs had a close connection to the Simmons family. Although mostly in their teens, the Young children had jobs. Daughter Nora was a cook, son James a hotel waiter, daughter Lizzie a cook, daughter Francis a housemaid, and sons Peter, Joseph and Fred were farm laborers.
By 1910 Henry, then 62, was a widower and lived with his daughter Leonora, a cook with a private family; son Fred, a waiter in a boarding house; daughter Mabel; son Hubert, a servant at the college; and daughter Eva Belle. Henry farmed throughout his life with his sons, including Allen, helping as farm laborers.
The private boarding houses where Wake Forest College students lived were a ready market for farm produce as the college did not have a cafeteria until well into the twentieth century. Henry and his sons may have supplied fresh vegetables to the kitchens of houses all over Wake Forest.
Henry died during the 1910s. The 1915 and 1926 Sanborn Maps show the Ailey Young House standing alone behind a row of houses fronting on North White Street.
The enumerator of the 1920 Census also supplied handwritten street names in the margins of his census records. As in 1910, he worked his way from Spring Street to White Street, but Simmons Row is not enumerated between the two. Instead, a street called Smooth Lane containing one household where Henry and Amelia Stallings and their four children lived appears between the two streets. The parents worked as a servant and a laundress for a private family. The Stallings may have been living in the Young house. Henry and Ailey had both died, and their children may have moved into other dwellings and rented out the homeplace. The same three neighbors – Willis Johnson, Nick Dunn and Henderson Cooke, who lived near Henry and Ailey Young in 1900 and 1910 are still nearby but listed on White Street. This suggests that Simmons Row was then considered White Street with Smooth Lane referring to the driveway that led from White Street to the Young House at the rear.
In 1920 Henry and Ailey’s son James lived on nearby Juniper Street with his wife, nine children and his younger brother Fred in his household. James worked in a plow factory while Fred was a cook in a café. In 1930 Fred lived in his own household with his wife. Both were cooks: Fred in a hotel and his wife in a hospital. (There were several hotels, one the Purefoy Hotel, James S. Purefoy built on South Avenue at the request of other college trustees, and the college operated an infirmary or hospital in the southwest corner of the campus.)
The Young family lost possession of the property for two decades beginning in the Great Depression. The lot was seized by the Town of Wake Forest to pay back taxes in 1933. (The town may have allowed the family to continue to use it and pay rent.) In 1954 the town sold the same tract to the Ailey Young heirs for $165. The heirs were Ailey’s children and grandchildren: Fred Young, Allen Young, Hubert Young, Mable Young Jeffries, William Young, John Henry Gattis, Fred Young Batham, Alexander Young Carrington, James Young, Pauline Young, Hallie Young and Callie Young.
The heirs may have repurchased the homeplace to provide lodging for Hubert, Ailey and Henry’s youngest son, born in 1892. Hubert, his wife, Novella, and their six children lived at 310 N. White St. until about 1954, when their house burned. About 1955 Hubert and his family moved into the homeplace and remained there until the late 1960s. Hubert, who had worked as a custodian at Wake Forest College, was retired by this time and died in 1963. Novella remained in the house until 1967 when she moved into government-subsidized housing in the East End. No one has occupied the house since then.
The property is now owned by the town, which purchased it in 1988 in an effort to enlarge the town cemetery.
