I have it on very good authority that the minute books and records of Forestville Baptist Church had no record that Dr. William Tell Brooks, who was the pastor from the church’s organization in 1859 until 1874, left because of a rift in the church over the removal of the Forestville depot to Wake Forest.
I found that story in the typewritten history, “The Story of Wake Forest: As Understood in This Year of the Bicentennial of Wake County.” It was prepared in 1976 by Dr. Edgar E. Folk, Ray Branson, Catherine Paschal, Watson Wilkinson and Shirley Wooten – all people who were immersed, nay soaked, in the area’s history.
The 1976 history says: “The Rev. W.T. Brooks, who had been the first and only pastor for fifteen years, resigned because some members felt aggrieved that he favored moving the station.”
The standard source for information about Wake Forest College, college people, and – to a limited extent – the people of the town of Wake Forest and the area is Dr. G.W. Paschal’s “History of Wake Forest College” in three volumes. After searching vainly through the second volume which covers the relevant years, I found a sentence about Brooks and Forestville Baptist Church in Volume I. (This is why all of us break out into hymns of praise for the people who did such a fine job of indexing the CD which has all three volumes plus Bynum Shaw’s Volume IV, 1943-1967.)
Paschal wrote that Brooks was indeed the first pastor of Forestville Baptist Church, “while he left because of the dissatisfaction of its members with him for the part he was supposed to have had in the removal of the freight depot from Forestville to Wake Forest in 1872.” The associated footnote says this information came from a “statement by W.B. Royall, who succeeded him in the pastorate.”
That would be William Bailey Royall, who walked to Wake Forest after Appomattox. He joined his father, William Royall, in rebuilding the college. After serving first as a teacher at Forestville Academy and then as a tutor at the college, he went on to become the longest-serving faculty member, finally resigning as head of the Greek and Latin Department in 1926 when he was in his 80’s and blind. But was he a disinterested observer of any problems at Forestville Baptist or did the church clerk simply refrain from setting out for history any rift or dissension in the church?
There are no answers to those questions; we will never know the answers, though perhaps it was as Royall said and Paschal wrote.
Paschal also included a paragraph I found fascinating because I had always wondered where the term “Glen Royal” came from, as in Glen Royal Baptist Church. Paschal was writing about the few men who were members of the graduating classes at the college from 1866 to 1870, and one of them was Robert Edward Royall, another son of Dr. William Royall and brother to Dr. William Bailey Royall. “After his graduation he taught for several years, first in Raleigh and then in Texas. In 1877 he entered into a partnership for the manufacture of naval stores in Georgia and was connected with this enterprise for many years. But most of his life was spent at Wake Forest; here he was a merchant from 1885 to 1893; with the organization of the Royall Cotton Mills at Glenn Royall, a suburb of Wake Forest, in 1900, he became general manager of the plant, a position which he held until 1931, when advancing age made his retirement necessary.”
Was the Town of Royall Cotton Mills (chartered in 1907) referred to as Glenn Royall and as a suburb? I never heard such. Where did that come from? It is another historical mystery.
2 Responses
WOW!! The mill issue gets more confusing. Only been here 6yrs, so I know why this is confusing to me. Have either read or heard that there were mills owned by the Royall and Holding families. Were they both within the village/town of Wake Forest? Been thru the Glen Royall Historic area many times. Also, what was the name or ownership to the Mill Condo building on Old Falls of Neuse Road? TIA
Hi Joanne,
The depot has nothing to do with the mills. It was the depot for the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad that was completed in 1840 and was on the left side as you cross the tracks on Friendship Chapel Road.
It was three brothers-in-law who began the Royall Cotton Mill — W. C. Powell of Savannah, Georgia, R. E. Royall of Wake Forest and T. E. Holding of Wake Forest. At the first stockholders’ meeting on Oct. 10, 1899 Powell was named president of the new company — Royall Cotton Mill — Royall was named vice president and treasurer and Holding was named the secretary. The land they chose for the mill was 25 acres just outside the boundaries of the Town of Wake Forest College as it was named then, land that had been owned by Powell and Royall since 1884.
As the mill itself was built and furnished with machinery, Benjamin Thomas Hicks was hired to build the four-room houses for the “operatives” and their families. At first, there were two families in each house that featured a fireplace in the corner of each room. That became, in much later years, the historic Mill Village. For years, however, the mill and the houses were a separate town, the Town of Royall Cotton Mill, and the only voter was Royall. The mill went bankrupt in the 1930s and the ownership left the original families. The final owner was the Sellers Manufacturing Company in Saxapahaw, which closed the mill in April 1976, throwing 229 employees out of work.
I’ll have to go find the history of the mill on the Neuse River. I know its somewhere but I can’t remember where right now.