In 1832 the North Carolina Baptist Convention bought the 615-acre plantation of Dr. Calvin Jones, in a sparsely settled stretch of wooded land people called the Forest of Wake, to build a teaching facility for young ministers. That became Wake Forest College. The town grew up around it, took its name from it, and kept that name after the college packed up and left.
The campus stayed. So did the stone wall, the oldest building, and the graveyard. What arrived to fill them was a seminary.
How the handoff happened
The medical school went first. In 1941 it relocated to Winston-Salem to affiliate with North Carolina Baptist Hospital as a teaching facility.
Within five years, business and cultural leaders in Winston-Salem were pressing the rest of the college to follow, backed by a substantial financial offer. In 1946 the college trustees and the Southern Baptist Convention approved the proposal.
Then the old campus was sold.
At its annual meeting in Chicago in May 1950, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to establish a new seminary in North Carolina. Pastors in Buncombe County had proposed the Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly in Black Mountain as a site. The Convention chose the Wake Forest College campus instead, and for an obvious reason: 480 acres with classrooms, housing, and administrative buildings already standing. Everything a new school needed, ready to occupy.
The Convention paid $1.6 million and arranged to share the campus with the college until the move was complete.
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary opened for classes in September 1951, the fourth seminary operated by the Southern Baptist Convention. Its first president was Sydnor L. Stealey, previously pastor of First Baptist Church of Raleigh and a professor of church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.
For its first five years the seminary was housed in a single building, the Music-Religion Building, now Appleby Hall, while the college wound down around it.
The new Winston-Salem site had been dedicated by President Harry Truman in October 1951, but wartime material shortages delayed construction. The campus was not usable until spring 1956. That year the college moved, and Southeastern took the rest of the grounds.
What is still standing
Lea Laboratory, built 1887-1888, designed by the Baltimore architect John Appleton Wilson. A two-story pedimented brick block flanked by one-story wings, blending Colonial Revival and Victorian detail. It is the oldest remaining building on the original campus and was among the first chemical laboratories built on a Southern college campus. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
The stone wall around the central campus, begun about 1885 by Wake Forest College President Charles E. Taylor and a man known as “Dr. Tom” Jeffries. It was rebuilt between 1990 and 1994 by Doug Buttram, a Southeastern graduate.
Wake Forest Baptist Church, organized in 1835, still occupying its building inside the campus enclosure.
Gore Gymnasium, opened May 1935 at a cost of around $150,000, home to Wake Forest Demon Deacons men’s basketball for twenty seasons before the move.
Walk the grounds and you are walking a nineteenth-century college campus that happens to house a twenty-first-century seminary.
The institution now
Southeastern enrolls more than 5,000 students from 44 countries and all 50 states. The current president is R. Scott Pace. Endowment runs around $43.8 million. Accredited by the Association of Theological Schools and SACSCOC.
The undergraduate arm is Judson College at Southeastern, established in 1994 and formerly called The College at Southeastern.
The school’s motto is Go Make Disciples, and its stated ethos is the Great Commission.
The 1987 turn
An honest account has to include this.
Southeastern’s founding faculty taught what the school’s own historians describe as an enlightened Christianity engaging the social questions of its time. The record of that era is specific: DuBois School students in 1950 came to the Wake Forest College campus to discuss segregation and school integration with students from the Baptist Student Union.
Stealey retired and was succeeded by Olin T. Binkley, who led the school from 1963 to 1974. W. Randall Lolley followed, serving until 1987.
That year the seminary changed direction sharply as a result of the conservative resurgence within the Southern Baptist Convention, a movement by self-described conservatives to counter what they saw as theological liberalization across the denomination’s institutions. Southeastern was one of the sharpest turns in that process, and Lolley’s departure marked it.
Whatever your view of that shift, it is a real part of the institution’s history and a large part of what the seminary is today.
Why the campus matters to the town
Wake Forest grew from 47,601 residents at the 2020 census to a Census Bureau estimate of 54,337 by 2023, and most of that growth lands in new subdivisions on the south and west sides.
The seminary campus is the counterweight. It is the physical reason this place is called Wake Forest, the ground the original college stood on for 122 years, and the reason a 1888 laboratory and a 1885 stone wall still exist a mile from the new construction.
The college took the name to Winston-Salem. The town kept the campus.
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest. sebts.edu