The Ailey Young House and the Northeast Community: Wake Forest’s other founding story

On North White Street, between Spring Street and the town cemetery, stands a small two-room house on stone piers. Most people drive past it without a glance. It's arguably the most important building in Wake Forest that almost nobody can name: the Ailey Young House, considered the oldest remaining African American historic building in town, and the doorway into the story of the Northeast Community, the neighborhood Black families built here after the Civil War. This is that story, and how to see it for yourself.

Simmons Row and the start of a neighborhood

The house began as rental property. Wake Forest College professor William Gaston Simmons, who taught chemistry and natural history from 1855 until his death in 1889, built it as part of a small row of rental houses that came to be known as Simmons Row. Built around 1875 in the "saddlebag" style, two rooms sharing a central chimney, raised on stone piers, it's a rare surviving example of Reconstruction-era African American housing.

Its first family gives the house its name. Ailey Ann and Henry Young, newly married, made their home there and raised twelve children. The 1880 census lists the Youngs at the North White Street location, and they may have been there as early as 1875. In 1895, Ailey Young purchased the house outright from Mary Elizabeth Simmons, the professor's widow, who after his death subdivided the surrounding land into small lots and sold them to African American families; the thirteen or so families who bought in formed the beginning of the neighborhood that grew into today's Northeast Community.

That's the founding fact worth sitting with: within a generation of emancipation, Black families in Wake Forest were buying land and homes a short walk from the college, building churches, and setting up institutions. The neighborhood that resulted covers over 315 acres in the town's northeast quadrant, bordered by Roosevelt and Wait avenues to the south and North White Street to the west, and many of its families today trace their roots directly to those original settlers.

Allen Young and the schools

The Youngs' oldest son, Allen, born in that little house, became one of the most consequential people in Wake Forest history. He taught in Wake County public schools until 1905, when he and others organized what became the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, the first private school for Black children in Wake Forest. The town's Northeast Community Plan credits its founding to Allen Young and Nathaniel Mitchell.

The school thrived. Through the 1910s it grew as a private institution, and in the 1920s and 1930s it drew boarding students from northern states, with enrollment topping 300. Young ran the school as principal while also founding a Presbyterian church for the Black community and operating a dry cleaning business serving Wake Forest College.

Then the community built a second school, and this part of the story deserves to be famous locally. Families held fundraisers and, with support from the Rosenwald Fund, which financed school construction for African American students across the South, the Northeast Community financed a high school that opened in 1939. The combined lower and upper grades became the DuBois School, named for W.E.B. DuBois, which served the area's Black students through the segregation era. The DuBois School's success gradually drew enrollment from Young's private school, which downsized until it closed in 1957, operating by then mainly as a preschool and kindergarten. Young died that same year at 82. The old campus buildings were rented, demolished, or used for storage until the last main building came down in June 1976. The former DuBois School site remains a landmark within the Northeast Community, and its alumni association keeps its legacy active.

The family's public service continued into a third generation. Allen's daughter Ailey Mae Young, named for her grandmother, made major contributions to education and public service, winning re-election to office in 1975; she died in 1992, and Ailey Young Park is named for her. She and her sister Maude built their home on Spring Street on the site of their father's school and lived there the rest of their lives.

The house's rescue

The house itself nearly vanished. It was abandoned in the early 1970s after a suspicious fire, and the town purchased the property in 1988, though the building sat largely forgotten. Its rediscovery came almost by accident: a 2008 historic resource survey identified the house, sitting on town-owned land, as its most significant find. It was added to the North Carolina Study List for potential National Register eligibility and designated a Wake Forest Local Historic Landmark. The fire had destroyed much of the attic and one side of the house, and the town has since completely rehabilitated it, with plans for it to serve as an African American heritage site celebrating the Northeast Community.

Recognition keeps building. The town has opened the house for tours during its Black History Month events, and a historical marker honoring the Northeast Community was unveiled on North White Street near the house, with the Northeast Community Coalition's Tilda Caudle calling it a day to remember the courage of the community's first settlers.

Seeing it today

The heritage sites cluster within an easy walk:

• The Ailey Young House on North White Street, north of Spring Street, with the Northeast Community historical marker nearby. Check the town's events calendar for open-house dates; Black History Month is the reliable window.
• Ailey Young Park at 800 E. Juniper Avenue, 15 acres with a ball field, basketball courts, grills, picnic tables, and a playground, marking the neighborhood's eastern edge. The Dunn Creek Greenway's newest phase runs a segment directly through the park, stitching the Northeast Community into the town's trail network.
• The historic churches, including Olive Branch Baptist and Spring Street Presbyterian, both still active, the institutional anchors of the neighborhood since its earliest decades.
• The Wake Forest Historical Museum, which has hosted forums on the Ailey Young House heritage and holds the deeper archive.

Wake Forest tells two founding stories well, the college and the mill. The third one, a freedmen's neighborhood that bought its own land, built its own schools twice over, and produced three generations of educators from one two-room house, is finally getting its markers and its restored landmark. Go stand in front of the little saddlebag house on North White Street. It's the biggest small building in town.