Last week’s action by the Wake Forest Planning Board to recommend the town commissioners approve a 290-unit apartment complex on Rogers Branch Road led me to think about the area roads which have disappeared.
Dempsey Powell was an early resident of the Forest District as this part of Wake County was then designated, serving in the county militia in 1772 and 1773. He owned several hundred acres and built a substantial house facing an east-west road somewhere south of the current-day Rogers Road. After he died intestate about 1793 – no will – his sons Jesse and Caswell inherited, and Jesse got 318 acres.
By 1950 Rogers Road was in a different alignment from today and met Forestville Road at a T intersection on top of a hill, and Dempsey Powell’s 1700s house just off Rogers Road faced an empty field; Rogers Road was behind it. That little stretch of Rogers which was lopped off to regularize the road connections during the construction of Heritage is now called Rogers Branch Road where the 290 apartments could be built. There is no historic house there to hold up any rezoning or development because Dempsey Powell’s house burned down in 2006 after an accident. I cannot even find what that old east-west road he must have used was called.
One of his sons, Jesse, built a large house on the main Raleigh to Oxford Road in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. His road ran directly in front of the house and was one of those used by Union soldiers heading north after Appomattox. You can still find bullets, coins and other relics of their passing.
Jesse Powell also built an improved road north which George Washington Paschal described in his History of Wake Forest College: Vol. 1, page 50. It says that the “Forest district extended from the Raleigh-Louisburg Road on the east (think US 401) to the Raleigh-Oxford road on the west (think Falls of the Neuse veering into Capital Boulevard). Until about 1820 there was no bridge on the Neuse River between the bridges on these roads. At that time Mr. Jesse Powell built a bridge about half a mile below the present railroad bridge and constructed through the heart of Wake Forest a road which branched just below the present town limits (think the Forestville area), one branch extending to the Oxford Road the other to the Louisburg Road. This road was called the Powell Road.”
Ed Morris, the director of the Wake Forest Museum, reminds me that the term “road” was a loose one. Most roads in 1820 and even much later were no more than tracks hacked through the trees that wandered as topography or desire dictated. He says the Raleigh-Oxford Road once ran along the west side of the college campus, and family history says that the Mrs. Crenshaw who moved from Thompson’s Mill, long gone, to what became Crenshaw Hall, now a funeral home, was happy to see the traffic on the Raleigh-Oxford Road. The traffic that also would have gone by Wakefields, the house Colonel Ransom Sutherland built that is now called The Sutherland and the nearby land he donated for a church, Wake Union Church, which originally housed four congregations in rotation.
We know Forestville Road is an old one, even as it is divided and dissected. And it always made sense that there was a road toward Falls from Forestville.
There are hints that the road once existed. A comment in a book – I can’t find it now – that a merchant lived in Forestville but had a business at Falls. A photograph taken sometime around 1880 looking north from what is now the parking lot at Hoy Auction showing a two-wheel track heading for the town of Wake Forest and similar tracks crossing both east and west. John Purefoy’s house, now called the Purefoy-Dunn House, is on the west side of Wake Forest and faces a long-gone road that must have run east and west.
Jesse Powell’s road must have helped the growth of Forestville, which became a bustling village in the late 1700s and up through the removal of the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad depot, built in 1840 but removed to the Town of Wake Forest College in 1874.
How could that road from Forestville to Falls have disappeared? It certainly would be handy now. But it is like the road Josiah Battle used to watch while sitting on the porch of his house north of Wake Forest, another east-west road blotted from memory.
One Response
Thanks for writing about the roads that are long gone but are cause for pondering where those old tracks were. I can hardly remember how Forestville Road and the dairy on land now covered by Heritage looked in 1976 when I came back to Raleigh.