The Town of Wake Forest has begun to restore a stream in the Ailey Young Park, and of course is on its way to restoring the Ailey Young House. It seems a good time to remind ourselves about the man who had that house built.
Wake Forest College Professor William Gaston Simmons came from a wealthy family and was quite an entrepreneur throughout his life. In Elizabeth Reid Murray’s and Todd Johnson’s Wake: Capital Country of North Carolina, Vol. II: Reconstruction to 1920 we learn that W.G. Simmons had a store near the Forestville depot, which means that sometime between 1855 when he joined the faculty and 1874 when the depot was moved next to the campus, Simmons had another source of income than his college salary, and college salaries were notoriously low. That may have been one way he earned the $800 to buy 42 acres of land east of the railroad from John Brewer in 1866. John M. Brewer also ran a general store in Forestville and later in Wake Forest.
1866 was, of course, just a year after the Civil War ended, a time when the Southern economy was in tatters. It was not a time when most North Carolinians were buying land. After the war, too, and perhaps before, the Simmons family earned money by renting rooms in the North Brick House and serving meals to students, 14 of them in 1870.
Simmons kept on purchasing land to the east of the campus and railroad and owned most of the East End area by his death in 1889. He built rental property on at least part of the land and therefore collected rents regularly.
One of those rental properties was several duplex or barracks-type housing Simmons had built in about 1875 on what became to be known as Simmons Row. The houses were built in saddle-bag style with two dwelling units flanking a central chimney and were apparently rented to farmers like Henry Young, Ailey’s husband. He may have rented land from Simmons for his farm operation. In 1895 Simmons widow sold the duplex to Ailey Young. Henry and Ailey’s son, Allen Young, established the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, the first school for African-Americans in town or the area, which operated from 1905 to 1957, when he died. Young descendants inherited and lived in the house until 1967. It was purchased by the town in 1988 but forgotten for years.
Professor Simmons popped up in another context in Murray’s and Johnson’s book: as a weather observer. In 1887 the state Agricultural Experiment Station in Raleigh established two observing stations, one near the State Fairgrounds and one at Wake Forest College where Simmons was the volunteer observer. Among his other equipment were signal flags to indicate the daily weather.
