Just a little history: Saving money and saving souls

Last week we talked about the two banks in Wake Forest during the 1920s that had been begun by local businessmen, the Bank of Wake by T.E. Holding and Citizens Bank by W.C. Brewer.

There was a third financial institution in town – and it has endured and grown. The Wake Forest Savings and Loan Association was begun on Jan. 5, 1922, with seven charter members: S.W. Brewer, I.O. Jones, R.M. Squires, J.M. Brewer, W.J. Harper, F.W. Dickson and F.J. Duke. The directors were J.H. Gorrell, president; R.M. Squires, F.W. Dickson, George E. Gill, S.W. Brewer, W.W. Holding Jr., W.D. Holliday, J. W. Nowell and George H. Greason. T.E. Bobbitt was the secretary-treasurer and John G. Mills Sr. was the attorney.

Last week we also talked about Wake Forest Baptist Church and the predominant role it had in the town’s social and religious life.

But there were other churches, and two of them began long before the college and town. The oldest – and the second oldest in the county – is New Light Baptist Church which was founded in 1771 or 1775, depending on the historian. It was organized as New Light Meeting House. The name comes from an eighteenth-century movement of people who turned away from established churches and were called New Lights. They came to North Carolina from Pennsylvania and other northern states.

The second oldest church in the area is Wake Union, which was built in 1789 on the old Raleigh-Oxford Road. The land was given by the Sutherland and Harris families to be a church that would house all Protestant denominations with the congregations rotating their Sunday meetings. Although in 2003 the editor wrote that only the Baptists and Episcopalians used the church, there is information from later years showing the Methodists and Presbyterians had their Sundays in the rotation for some time. It was only in the 1940s or 1950s that the Episcopalians moved to a small church on South Main Street. It is not clear what happened when with the Methodists and Presbyterians. At some point only the Baptists remained and it is now called Wake Union Baptist Church with a large congregation in a totally renovated building.

The local Methodist congregation can trace its roots back to July 29, 1829. That was when the Rev. Andrew Hartsfield called a meeting where 41 men pledged $213 and selected a site near Forestville for the Hartsfield Meeting House. Sometime around 1850, this congregation and the people in Antioch Church near Mitchell’s Mill, where Hartsfield was also pastor, merged and built a new building in Rolesville. When the congregation moved to Wake Forest in 1937, it met in the Forest Theatre until the new church building on South Main Street was complete.

Olive Branch Baptist Church has somewhat hazy beginnings as an offshoot of Wake Forest Baptist, which then met in college buildings. In 1844 one of the temporary college buildings was moved off the campus and to lot 27, which would be right behind the brick store, now The Corner Ice Cream Shop, but nothing was there in 1844. That building was called the African Chapel and was used by blacks for their services. During the Civil War, when the college buildings and many temporary shelters on campus were occupied by wounded Confederate soldiers, members of both churches, white and black in about equal numbers, used the African Chapel. It became an independent church in July of 1865, but members began dropping out and some formed Olive Branch congregation and built a church that was dedicated on Oct. 16, 1881. After the church burned in 1953, it was rebuilt on the same Juniper Avenue site.

Forestville Baptist Church was built in 1859. Isham Holding gave the acre of land, and the charter members, most of whom rest in the cemetery behind the church, were Junius Fort, Job Carver, Mrs. E.P. Carver, Samuel H. Dunn, William B. Dunn, David W. Allen, John R. Dunn, W.L. Cook, Mrs. Mary A. Dunn, Miss Eliza Jones, Mrs. Matilda Dunn and Peyton A. Dunn. Peyton Dunn furnished the plan for the Greek Revival building that has been admired to this day. The total cost of the building and its furnishings, aside from gifts, was $2,081.12. The Rev. William Tell Brooks, a professor at Wake Forest College, was the first pastor. He resigned in 1874 after a controversy among church members who resented that Brooks supported moving the railroad station from Forestville (in the northeast corner of the intersection of Friendship Chapel Road, then Front Street, and the railroad tracks) to Wake Forest.

Friendship Chapel Baptist Church began with brush-arbor meetings organized by slaves between 1845 and 1865. Some slaves were allowed to attend Forestville Baptist Church from 1865 to 1867, sitting in the upper gallery, while others continued to worship under a bush arbor. During a revival meeting in 1866 at Forestville Baptist, “Uncle” Nelson Ligon was so moved by the spirit that he jumped from the gallery into the white congregants. This incident sparked the founding of Friendship Chapel Baptist Church in 1867. There have been several structures holding that congregation, but only two survive. The small brick church was dedicated in May 1929 and has been rented to several young churches through the years; the large current building was dedicated in early January 2000.

Woodland Baptist Church was founded in 1865 and Mary’s Chapel Baptist Church in 1877.

Oak Grove Baptist Church was organized in 1875 with 23 members.

Glen Royal Baptist Church was founded in 1902 in what was then the mill village for Royall Cotton Mill.

The Spring Street Presbyterian Church began in 1905.

There was no Catholic church in Wake Forest until St. Catherine of Siena was built in 1940, but Catholic services have been held since about 1910. Mr. and Mrs. George Bolus, the first Catholics in town, held services in their living room. In the 1930s, as there was a growing number of Catholics both in town and attending college, a railroad car called St. Peter was parked on a Seaboard Railway siding. The car had all the facilities of a regular church along with a bedroom and kitchen for the priest.

The Spring Street Christian Church was organized about 1910.

The Wake Forest Church of God began in 1922 and built its stone sanctuary in 1945.

(A great deal of the information about local churches – and I stopped at those founded before 1930 – came from the history of Wake Forest written by Ray Branson, Catherine Paschal, Edgar E. Folk, R. Watson Wilkinson and Shirley Wooten for Wake County 1971 bicentennial. Copies of the history are available at the Wake Forest Library.

If you have information about any of the churches listed above and/or want to correct what is written about any of the churches, please get in touch with Carol Pelosi at 919-556-3409 or cwpelosi@aol.com.)

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