Just a little history: The railroad changed lives

The rail line through Wake Forest has had a number of names – CSX now, formerly Seaboard Air Line – but it began life as the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, chartered in 1836 to connect with a new railroad that ran from near Weldon in North Carolina to Petersburg in Virginia. It was the first chartered railroad in North Carolina but was completed shortly after the second railroad, which went from Weldon south and east.

It took four years to complete the 86 miles of track, described as “heavy wooden timbers laid parallel to form the track. On these timbers were spiked the flat iron rails, called strap iron.”

The first rolling stock included several freight cars, two coaches for passengers and four six-wheeled engines named Tornado, Spitfire, Whirlwind and Volcano.

As the tracks were built south toward Raleigh, the railroad company began establishing depots, and two of the first were at Huntsville (later named Neuse Station), a mile south of the Neuse River crossing, and at Forestville. Forestville at the time was the village in northern Wake County, home to several stores. A mile to the north, there was no town of Wake Forest, just the small college with its new brick building, the “Main” college building at the highest point in the 680 or so acres the North Carolina Baptist Convention had purchased from Dr. Calvin Jones.

The station or depot at Forestville was in the southwest corner of the intersection where the tracks crossed Front Street, now Friendship Chapel Road. Front Street always stopped at the tracks though it was obviously intended to be a main street.

It was reported that the residents of Forestville held “quite an Entertainment” on March 19, 1840, when the rail line was completed to that point. It was nowhere as elaborate as the three days of celebration in Raleigh when the first engine pulled into the capital city.

Everyone marveled at the speed of those little engines. Richard Griffin, who lived near Falls of the Neuse as a child, said, “I thought they flew right by me, they went so fast.”

The Tornado was soon maintaining 15 miles an hour carrying the mail, but the railroad’s chief engineer, Charles F.M. Garnett, urged the speed be reduced to 12 for the mail and eight for passenger trains, saying the six-wheeled engines on wooden rails were not as safe as the eight-wheeled engines on iron rails in other parts of the country.

The traffic was not terribly heavy. Griffin recalled: ‘They would advertise that the train would be due at a certain time if it didn’t rain. Sometimes the agent at Forestville would go off squirrel hunting half a mile from the station and they would have to blow the whistle for him to come back to meet the train.” Those early trains needed to make frequent stops to get more wood for the fire and water for the steam.

The Forestville depot was a point of contention for the Wake Forest College administration and townspeople in the following years as the town’s population grew and the college’s enrollment. They were finally successful in having it moved in 1874 after the college paid $3,000.02. It was a literal move. The small depot building was lifted off its piers, transferred to a flat-bed train car and hauled a mile to a site across Front Street from the campus.

That move was so controversial that it led to a split in the congregation of Forestville Baptist Church, then the church where Wake Forest professors and businessmen and their families worshipped. The longtime pastor, the Rev. Williams Brooks, resigned as a result although he remained a college professor.

There was no church building in Wake Forest when the Forestville church was built in 1860, and what would become Wake Forest Baptist Church was only a student congregation. The Black former slaves who were employed at the college and in professors’ homes also had a long-standing congregation that became Olive Branch Baptist Church.

(Much of the information for this came from Elizabeth Reid Murray’s “Wake: Capital County of North Carolina.”)

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