Recently the editor had occasion to meet someone new to town who asked if Wake Forest was an outgrowth of Raleigh. There are so many new people in town who really have no idea about our history, so the following is the start of the history of Wake Forest.
Long before Wake Forest College began in the house Dr. Calvin Jones sold to the North Carolina Baptist State Convention and long before Wake Forest became a town, Forestville was the major village in what was called the Forest District, now Wake Forest Township, in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
It may have grown up because it was on a major north-south path used by Indians and settlers on a ridge between Smith Creek and Richland Creek. Also, an early Wake County road, Forestville Road crossed that ridge and continued on to the community of Falls on the Neuse River, a very early settlement in Wake County.
All the land in the Captain’s District called the Forest District was in large corn plantations worked by slaves and oxen. Roads were dust in the summer, red clay bogs in the winter, and tree stumps still were a hazard to what traffic there was.
But the white landowners were, for the most part, literate and even learned, supporting academies for their children. By the 1820 what would become Forestville was a few buuildings at that crossroad. It supported a Masonic lodge, number 97, and the Macedonia Academy with
John Purifoy, Samuel Alston and William Alston on its board of trustees. There were stores and businesses such as Alston’s Store, named the first post office in the village in 1838, with William Alston as the postmaster.
The tax rolls for 1837 show that all property in the Forest District was in large tracts, but they were beginning to be sold for various reasons. William Alston and David Crenshaw sold four acres along what is now Friendship Chapel Road for the right-of-way for the state’s first railroad, the Raleigh & Gaston, and for the station and railroad houses.
The railroad began operation in 1840, and the depot was in the northwest corner of the intersection of the railroad tracks and Front Street, now Friendship Chapel Road. The train engineers stood on an open platform at the rear of the small wood-fueled engines; at first the engines and cars ran on wooden stringers topped with pig iron.
Raleigh newspapers reported the residents of Forestville held “quite an Entertainment” on March 19, 1840, when the railroad, built from north to south, reached the village.
From 1852 onward the Wake Forest College trustees tried to persuade the railroad’s owners to relocate the depot next to the small campus. Students and visitors had to alight from the cars in Forestville and walk the mile to the campus on a dusty road. Also, the mail came into Forestville where there was a post office, meaning most students walked down to watch the engines and get their mail almost daily.
Forestville Baptist Church was the first church building in the area, completed in 1860. Later, in 1874, the debate about moving the railroad depot from Forestville led to a rift in the church. Its first pastor and a college professor, the Rev. William Brooks, left the church as a result.
In 1872 the village of Forestville boasted at least eight nearby mills grinding corn and flour, six general stores, one liquor store, a shoemaker and the Masonic lodge.
In 1874 the college trustees finally succeeded in their efforts to move the depot. Dr. G.W. Paschal’s history of the college includes a list of expenses for the first half of 1873 that has $1,963.52 paid for “removal of depot.” They loaded the small wooden building onto a flatbed car and moved it bodily up the tracks to a site on the east side of the campus. A small brick building, the last depot, stands on the site now. That first building was later replaced by a very similar one; in the late 1800s a freight depot was built on the other side of the tracks where the town parking lot is now.
The move of the depot helped spark the town of Wake Forest’s economic growth. When the Civil War ended in 1865, there were no buildings east of the railroad tracks and only about 15 houses in what would become the town.
Forestville was incorporated as a town in 1879, a year earlier than the village up the street was chartered as the Town of Wake Forest College.
Among the Forestville enterprises were a hotel called Fort’s House and later a hotel or boarding house operated by J.A. Jones and his wife. John M. Brewer owned a general store there, and there is a long list of other men, including college professor W.G. Simmons, who owned stores. Liquor was sold in several stores, Arch Moore was a shoemaker and Mrs. C.C. Rogers was a milliner. There were restaurants and blacksmith shops.
Until 1879, when he moved the business to Brooks and Jones streets in Wake Forest, W.B. Dunn had operated the Dunn Plow Company in what was called “an old government shed in Forestville.”
James L. Phillips owned a large two-story general store that supplied other stores farther from the railroad, and he was also the postmaster for several years.
In the 1870s there were four physicians in the immediate Forestville area: Dr. Leroy Chappell (who was still practicing up through 1901), Dr. H.H. Harrison in the house next to Dr. Chappell, Dr. A.R. Vann and Dr. B.F. Harrison.
In 1879 Forestville had 116 residents and its area was a square a quarter-mile in each direction from John R. Dunn’s store house. That charter was repealed in 1885, but the town was re-chartered in 1899 and remained a town until 1915.
There was a part of Forestville history that said an old store building, destroyed in 1924, once held the one of the first, or maybe the first, printing press in Wake County, and that was documented a few years back when Barbara Branson, a granddaughter of James L. Phillips, found a book that had been printed in Forestville in the Duke University Library. It was written by George Purifoy, a preacher son of John Purifoy, and its subject was foot-washing, a practice highly debated at the time.
Next door there is still a well supplied by seven springs which never ran dry even during the worst drought.
Although there were several attempts during the years to add Forestville to the growing town of Wake Forest, it was not until 1988 after six years of court battles that the area was annexed.
Today all that remains of Forestville are two signs erected by the Wake Forest Historic Preservation Commission, Forestville Baptist and its well-kept cemetery, and three old houses. Now it is just a little jog in South Main Street.
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