Just a little history: Dr. Tom Jeffries, scholar, thinker, preacher and floriculturist

(This was the speech Ed Morris, the director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum, gave several years ago at Wake County’s Northeast Regional Library.)

Tom Jeffries or Dr. Tom was born on a plantation in Bluestone Township, Virginia about 1850. His entire childhood was spent as an enslaved person. By his eleventh birthday, the age when enslaved children were expected to work in the fields, the Civil War was raging in Virginia and across the South. We know little about Tom’s early life except for what we can glean from his own and short autobiography.

Toms said in a 1923 interview appearing in The Howler, the Wake Forest College yearbook, that after the surrender he moved “down to Boydton (Virginia) where he lived until he decided to come to Wake Forest during the administration of Dr. Charles Taylor.” Dr. Taylor was president of Wake Forest College from 1884 until 1905.

As the story goes, Tom Jeffries was on his way down the winding dirt road that led from the north into the college town of Wake Forest sometime in 1880. There he encountered a very distinguished gentleman working in his garden along what then was called Philadelphia Avenue, later Faculty Avenue and now North Main Street. A conversation between the two took place and Jeffries “offered” his services as a gardener. From that time forward the two men were fast friends. Eventually President Taylor offered Jeffries a job at the college as janitor and gardener.

Together Tom Jeffries and Dr. Taylor planned and worked together to transform what Jeffries referred to as a “stock pastur (sic)” into a place of beauty. By the turn of the century the Wake Forest campus was such a place of beauty that families took Sunday trips just to visit the campus’s park like setting. Over a span of 40 years Tom Jeffries planted over 3,000 flowering trees and shrubs on the campus. But in Tom’s mind something was still missing.

The old wooden fence, used to control foot traffic and to keep in the sheep that kept the grass mowed around the college buildings, was in poor condition and in constant need of repair. Jeffries wanted a stone wall to replace it. When he approached Dr. Taylor, the president was skeptical. Taylor explained that the college did not have funds for a wall.  Tom said it wouldn’t cost anything! The local farmers would supply the rocks for free and Tom was willing to build the wall on his own time. Given the nod by Dr. Taylor, Tom put out the word that he needed large rocks. As the local farmers came to town for provisions they would bring him rocks. Over the years the wall grew until it surrounded the entire 22-acre campus: a lasting monument surrounding the dogwoods, azaleas, camellias, and magnolias planted by Dr. Tom.

So how did he become known as Doctor Tom? To say his degree may have been earned is an understatement. Tom Jeffries was allowed to sit in on classes at Wake Forest College. This went on for 47 years. By the time of his death he arguably was the most educated man on campus.

However, it was the students not the trustees that bestowed the degree of doctor upon Tom Jeffries. By many accounts he was their friend, mentor, philosopher and trusted advisor. Often far from home, Tom was the one they turned to when they needed some parental advice.  In turn the students were very protective of “Doctor” Tom, although Tom proved very apt at taking care of any hecklers all by himself. One such example is the story of a freshman student who made fun of his color while Tom was burning some overgrown grass on the campus. The student remarked that the grass was a black as Tom. Jeffries retorted, “Yes, it’s black now but come spring it will be as green as you is.”   Chastised by his classmates for his disrespect, that student was never again fully accepted by fellow students on campus.

Here is how Tom is described in a 1916 issue of the school paper, The Old Gold and Black. “Dr. Tom Jeffries is a scholar, thinker, preacher, and floriculturist.” That same year Jeffries was asked to give the address at an event called “The Marshall Setup” which was one of the many events leading up to commencement. This was not the first time that Tom Jeffries had spoken at this event but according to the campus newspaper, “it was the most ‘Magnolius’ talk of the many magnolius talks he has delivered.” Tom loved to use his own variation of long words. Those words were almost always used to describe Wake Forest College, a place that he loved as much as any student, alum or faculty. Dr. Edgar E. Folk described Tom Jeffries as “…an unforgettable personality.  Once you met him, you knew him . . . he had the gift of original language, colorful, poetic in its own way, allusive, and always arrestingly expressive.”

Tom Jeffries’ private life was as colorful as his reputation on campus. He was married three times, twice while living in Wake Forest. He had eight children by his first wife while still living in Virginia. After coming to Wake Forest he married twice more. At his third marriage, which took place on the front porch of his own home, Tom and his new bride were given a grand gift by the students and faculty in attendance. The couple was given a honeymoon trip to Philadelphia. (Some sources say New York.) However, Tom, a practical, man saved a goodly portion of the cash, left his bride home to do laundry for 47 college boys and took the train to Philadelphia to visit some of his adult children who then lived in that city.

Alcohol was prohibited on the Wake Forest campus, in fact prohibited within one and one-half miles of the town limits. However, demand for the product was not diminished by the prohibition. Tom, always seeing a way to make a few extra dollars, would supply the students with wine that he made himself. Apparently, no one owned to his “little secret.”

That brings us to his funeral service. Tom Jeffries died in 1927 during summer school at Wake Forest College. His funeral was held in the College Chapel. The entire faculty sat as his pall bearers. The college president, William Louis Poteat, and the chaplain gave the eulogy. It is hard if not impossible to prove but this event in the small southern town of Wake Forest on an all-white, all-male campus may well have been the first fully integrated event in the South after the Civil War. At his funeral his widow said, “I never saw one loved more that he was,” as she stared across at the college campus. She added, “His heart was there.”

The Wake Forest College campus had no statutes or monuments to its founders like most campuses. In fact, the Reynolda Campus in Winston-Salem is also void of such monuments. However, in 1932 the senior class erected a bronze monument mounted in a granite boulder. It reads: “Doctor Tom Jeffries 1850-1927, Janitor Wake Forest College, His Memorial These Stones, These Trees.” A copy of that monument also sits in the center of the Wake Forest campus in Winston-Salem as a lone tribute to those in Wake Forest College’s past.

A final monument was placed by the college on Tom Jeffries grave. A flat white marble stone engraved: “Thomas Jeffries (Doctor Tom) 1850-1927, Campus Philosopher and Janitor for 50 years, Wake Forest College.” For more than a generation the location of his grave was lost. Recently found by a descendant it is now maintained by the Town of Wake Forest. It sits just outside the boundary of the Wake Forest Cemetery and appropriately across Taylor Street within view of the graves of the college’s first president Samuel Wait and fifth President Charles Elisha Taylor.

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