The Glen Royall Mill Village: the other town inside Wake Forest

Most people know Wake Forest grew up around a college. Fewer know the town has a second origin story a few blocks northeast of downtown, where a cotton mill built its own complete world: houses, a store, churches, a school, and for forty years, its own incorporated town with its own mayor. The Glen Royall Mill Village is still there, streets and houses nearly intact, and it's one of the most rewarding walks in Wake Forest once you know what you're looking at.

A mill town built from scratch

The Royall Cotton Mill went up in 1899 and 1900, during a stretch when textile mills were opening across the South at a pace never seen before or since. The village was established in 1900 next to the town of Wake Forest to house the mill's operatives, and the mill grew into one of the state's leading textile concerns. The mill originally produced cotton muslin from locally grown cotton and later shifted to carded yarn.

Mill management understood a basic labor-market fact of the era: to attract dependable workers to the edge of a small college town, you had to give them somewhere to live. So the company hired contractor Benjamin Thomas Hicks to build the village housing, following plans drawn by mill superintendent John D. Briggs. The result was a planned neighborhood of worker housing in a handful of repeating forms: pyramidal-roofed cottages, "triple-A" cottages, and shotgun houses. The dominant house type is a four-room plan under a pyramid roof with a central brick flue, a shape you'll start seeing everywhere once you walk the district.

The village was deliberately self-contained. Workers shopped at the company commissary, and the community included a school and two churches, Glen Royal Baptist and the Church of God. The Royall Cotton Mill Commissary, built in 1900, still stands at Brick and Brewer Streets: a two-story brick building, 32 by 100 feet, with segmental arched windows and a stepped parapet. The store closed in 1934, and the building has since been rehabilitated into apartments. It earned its own National Register listing in 1991, eight years before the district around it.

The town of Royall Mills

Here's the detail that surprises even longtime residents: the mill village wasn't part of Wake Forest for most of its working life. In 1907 the area was incorporated as the Town of Royall Mills, with the mill's board of directors appointing the mayor, usually the mill superintendent. A company town in the most literal sense, one where the employer was also the government, the landlord, and the grocer.

The arrangement held through hard times. Economic realities of the 1930s forced the mill into bankruptcy, but it reorganized as the Royall Cotton Mill Company and kept running. The village community, meanwhile, fought off repeated annexation attempts by Wake Forest. Independence only wound down when company paternalism did: as the company divided its land into lots and sold the houses to the workers who lived in them, it asked the state in 1945 to repeal the town charter. Once workers owned their own homes, the company town had no company left to run it.

The mill itself outlasted its town by three decades. It operated until April 1976, when the industry's shift from cotton to synthetics finally closed it. The next year, Wake Forest annexed the Royall Mills area, and the two towns that had grown up side by side for 77 years finally became one.

Decline, rescue, and the National Register

Mill villages usually die with their mills. This one didn't, though it took work. The old company store was renovated into apartments, small groups built and restored houses a few at a time, and eventually the mill building itself was purchased, stripped of its accessory buildings, and converted into apartments. Individual homeowners kept repairing and renovating, and the neighborhood's reputation flipped from forgotten to sought-after. As the Wake Forest Gazette put it in its history series, finding a mill village house for sale became a real prize.

Official recognition came on August 27, 1999, when the Glen Royall Mill Village Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The district covers 45 acres and 82 contributing buildings constructed between about 1900 and 1949, and the town describes it as one of the most intact mill villages in Wake County, with most of the original housing stock surviving and the historic streetscapes unaltered. It's one of four historic districts in Wake Forest, three on the National Register plus the locally designated district on North Main Street.

Walking the village today

The district is roughly bounded by North Main Street, East Cedar Avenue, the CSX railroad, and the old Royall Cotton Mill, an easy add-on to any downtown or North Main historic district walk. Things to look for as you go:

• The house shapes. Count the pyramid roofs. The repetition isn't monotony; it's the original 1900 plan still legible on the ground, block after block.
• The commissary at Brick and Brewer Streets, the brick anchor of the old company world, now housing.
• The mill site itself, where the main building survives as apartments, a rare case of a Wake County mill outliving its industry.
• The churches, which grew up with the village and mark how complete the community was.
• The scale. Notice how the whole village sits a short walk from the mill. Nobody commuted; the town was the workplace's front yard.

For the deeper story, the Wake Forest Historical Museum keeps exhibits on the mill village, and the definitive account is R. James Cox Jr.'s book "A Common Thread: Life at Royall Mill and its Village, 1899 to 1996," printed in 1996 and reprinted for the Royall Mills centennial.

Why this neighborhood matters

Wake Forest tells its story as a college town, and fairly. But the mill village is the working-class half of that story: hundreds of families who spun cotton while the students up the hill studied Greek, who ran their own town for four decades, and whose houses outlasted the industry, the company, and the college itself, which left for Winston-Salem twenty years before the mill's last shift. The village survived because ordinary people kept living in it and fixing it up, not because anyone put a fence around it.

Walk it on a Saturday morning, then have lunch downtown. You'll have covered both of Wake Forest's origin stories before noon.