Just a little history: The Purefoy-Chappell House is 185 years old

The history of the Purefoy-Chappell house in Wake Forest is closely associated with the history of Wake Forest College and the village of Forestville, which is now part of Wake Forest. The house still sits at the corner of South Main Street and Friendship Chapel Road, a stone’s toss from the oldest railroad in North Carolina.
In 1837 Forestville was the area’s business-economic center, with several stores and the crossing of two major roads, Forestville Road, which then extended to Falls, and what was later called the Powell Road from the Neuse River northward along the ridge that previously was an Indian trail. The Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, the first chartered in North Carolina, had announced it would locate a depot at Forestville. The depot stood in the southwest quadrant where the dirt road crossed the tracks.
Also, John Purefoy, who owned the plantation later called the Purefoy-Dunn House (which still stands next to the Wake Forest ABC Store), was marrying his second wife and planning to move close to her family in Johnston County. Earlier, John Purefoy had been the voice that helped persuade the North Carolina Baptist Association to purchase the 648-acre plantation owned by Dr. Calvin Jones and turn it first into an institute to educate Baptist ministers and later into Wake Forest College. That move meant that his youngest son, John Simpson Purefoy, and his wife, Mary, and their three young sons had to find a new home.
On Dec. 30, 1837 James Purefoy (spelled Purifoy in the deed) purchased one acre from Jesse Kemp for $50. The deed was proved in open court on the oath of Foster Fort, Purefoy’s father-in-law, on Feb. 6, 1838, and was subsequently registered in Book 13, Page 63 on April 25, 1838 in the Wake County Register of Deeds office.
Jesse Kemp had been a captain in the Revolutionary War and was a substantial landowner who gave his name to a stream a half mile to the east of this lot, Kemp’s Spring Branch, mentioned in several later deeds. Through the years it has been shortened to Spring Branch. Kemp died shortly after selling the acre on March 17, 1838.
The Wake County tax rolls for the Forest District in 1838 was the first time Purefoy’s name appears. His property was listed without any value, just a squiggly line, and the tax assessed was 16 cents. At that time all the other landowners in the district, about 40, listed several hundred, even a thousand, acres.
By Jan. 1, 1839, Purefoy’s property was listed as one acre valued at $500 with two slaves and the tax was $3.40. The two slaves were a wedding present to Mary Purefoy, along with “one bed and stead and furniture, one bureau, one cow and calf and sow and pigs.”
It is obvious Purefoy had the house built during 1838, and it is most likely the actual construction was done by Foster Fort’s six carpenter slaves which he listed by name in his later will as well as all his other slaves and the slaves he had given to his married daughters, along with “a bed and stead” and livestock. Two other buildings were very probably erected at the same time as the house, the separate two-room kitchen house and the small smokehouse.
In the 1840 U.S. Census, James S. Purifoy [sic] was listed in the Forest District with his wife, three male children, one female child and one slave.
James S. Purefoy (Feb. 19, 1831-March 30, 1889) was born in the Forest District of Wake County, the youngest of three sons of the Rev. John Purefoy and Mary Fort Purefoy. He married Mary Fort in 1831 and the couple had three sons by the time the house was built. They would go on to have one more son and two daughters.
John Purefoy returned to Wake Forest after his second wife died, probably about 1853 when James Purefoy sold this house and moved to Wake Forest, probably to the new Purefoy Hotel James Purefoy had built at the request of the Wake Forest College trustees, of which he was one and would remain on the board until his death. He also built a general store next door, which his wife managed. They were the start of the substantial fortune he owned at his death.
The house built in 1838 at the corner of the later-named Powell Road and Front Street had three rooms – a large square main room with a staircase in the back corner leading to a bedroom of equal size with high knee walls under the roof. A shed roof covered the one-story room at the back, and there was a large roofed porch in front. The six slaves also built a two-room kitchen house – a large kitchen and a smaller dining room – about 12 feet behind the house and a separate smoke house which was expanded by a later resident as a workroom.
In 1853 and afterward the house had a succession of owners, beginning on March 31, 1853, when James Purefoy sold the house and one acre to Richard Ligon for $200. That deed reads: “Beginning at a Stake on the East side of the Road (and Southwest corner of the street running to the depot called Front Street) and running with the Road . . .” and used chains and links for the measure. That description is still in the deed held by the present owner. Front Street is now called Friendship Chapel Road. The present owners also have this deed and the deeds from the following owners.
It is unknown whether the Richard Ligon of the above transaction was the person referenced when Ligon Mill Road was named. Also, the location of the mill is unknown.
Three months later, on June 30, 1853, Ligon sold the house and the half-acre on which it stood to Peyton A. Dunn for $125. Ligon then sold the other half acre to an unknown person and it may have had several owners. A store was built there which later became a tenant house. It was still standing in 1967, and some of the timbers were used to repair the floors and rooms in the original Purefoy house.
Peyton Dunn was a superintendent for the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad and was the person who proposed the plan for the Forestville Baptist Church, which was built in 1860. However, it may be the plan for the church was drawn up by Jacob Holt, whose designs were used in the church. The pieces and doors came to Forestville by the railroad.
In the early 1850s, James Purefoy and Peyton Dunn were two of the leaders who established the Forestville Female Academy that was probably located on Liberty Street just south of Front Street. The school was still in operation in 1870, and the building remained standing for several decades later.
The house, meanwhile, was sold again. On Jan. 6, 1861 Dunn sold the house and its half acre to S.A. (Street) Taylor for $400. Taylor was a Wake County resident, but nothing else is known about him.
And he swiftly sold it again on November 21, 1862, to Dr. Leroy Chappell, who at the same time purchased a tract of land nearby, eight acres, all for $2,100.
Dr. Chappell was living in Kinston with his wife and first child, Leroy Norcross Chappell, and might have remained there except he wanted to escape from the Federal Army’s occupation, according to later family members. And he was born in Granville County and raised in Wake after his father, Edward, moved the family to some land that is now on Falls of the Neuse Road near St. Raphael’s Catholic Church. In front of the church there is still a Chappell family graveyard surrounded by a white fence.
Dr. Chappell had studied medicine with a local doctor, attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for a year, then set up his first practice in Shallotte, which was not successful, and then moved to Kinston.
It was there that he met his wife, Eliza Norcross, who moved to Kinston from Boston, Massachusetts to establish a music and art school. The couple lost two or three children, according to a family member, but then had Leroy and later in 1863 Henry Arthur Chappell. Son Leroy was educated at Wake Forest College, married and became a Baptist missionary in China with his wife. They are buried in the Forestville Baptist Church cemetery, along with all the family.
The house the Chappell family moved into and only left 100 years later was still the original three rooms with a separate kitchen house and smoke house. There certainly were other buildings through the years because the family also farmed, so there was a barn with pasture fir the cows and horses – Dr. Chappell would have driven a buggy to visit his patients – and the mules for the farm work.
But the first thing Dr. Chappell built was a two-room Georgian-style office building. He also bought the back half acre.
Although little is known about Dr. Chappell, he was regarded as a successful doctor and was Wake Forest College President Wingate’s physician when he died in 1879. Also in that year he was one of the town commissioners when Forestville was chartered as a town, a square a quarter-mile in each direction from John R. Dunn’s store. The charter was repealed in 1885, rechartered in 1899 and remained a town until 1917.
It would be 1900 or so – based on the style of the doors – when there were three generations living in three rooms that they added onto the house. The family added a hall, new staircase, and two bedrooms to the original house as well as full roofed concrete porches along the length of the back of the house and the front of the kitchen house.
Henry Arthur Chappell always lived in the family home and died there in 1926. He was a graduate of Wake Forest College and later earned a master’s in civil engineering and became involved in road building and surveying. He owned about 170 acres of farmland on Forestville Road just south of the family house. He married Bettie Reaves (who lived until 1961 and was well remembered by her grandchildren) and their son was Frank Chappell.
In his will Dr. Chappell, who died in 1913, left the house and land to Frank. Frank, according to his son, was a farmer and a plumber. He began driving a gas truck for Texas Oil Company and then began to do the plumbing for the underground tanks and finally became a company representative and installed underground tanks. (Which is why the scuppernong grape arbor in front of the doctor’s office was made of iron plumbing pipes. By 1970 the grapes had died but the arbor remained until the present owners remade it into a spacious deck.)
Frank married Celera, and their only son was Frank Junior. Frank died in 1964, and Celera sold the house and land to J. Nurney and Grace Bond late in 1965 and 1966. The Bonds intended to rent the unpainted house – it was whitewashed at some point – but then their daughter, her husband and two sons were relocating to Wake Forest. They sold the house and land to Jean and Robert McCamy in September of 1967 while extensive renovations were underway.
The house and kitchen house were connected, the kitchen house was redone, including the cooking fireplace, floors were replaced, the room behind the main room was divided to make way for a furnace and a small kitchen, original plaster walls were hidden behind thin wallboard and the house, inside and out, was painted.
The McCamy family lived here until 1970. The Pelosi family, relocating from a two-year stay in Arkansas, was looking for a home with character and they found it.
In the last 54 years, the house and land have seen several changes, all to the good. The 1950s barn is now fully usable, we have a deck for large celebrations and quiet conversations, and the back yard continues to be a gardener’s delight or despair. And, of course, we are still grateful we decided to build a large kitchen between the house and kitchen house.
Many of the panes of glass in the original nine-over-nine windows in the living room are still original, you can still see where the newel post for the first staircase was because it has a square plug of heart pine and upstairs the outline of the staircase remains filled in as it was in 1900 or so. When the original front porch was removed, the Chappell family simply filled in the space. The seven fireplaces remain though not used.
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