The Wake Forest Cemetery: a walking history of the town’s remarkable dead

A town cemetery is a reading of the town, and Wake Forest's is unusually legible. Nearly everyone under these stones was connected to a college that left in 1956, the streets were laid out on land the college set aside, and two campus literary societies drew up the formal plans. Walk it slowly and you get the town's first century in the order it happened. Here's how to read it.

The founding logic

The cemetery exists because the college did. The North Carolina Baptists who selected Calvin Jones's six-hundred-acre plantation in 1832 as the site for Wake Forest College created a community that needed everything a community needs, burial ground included, and the college set aside the land and its streets. The town wasn't incorporated until 1880, and by then its primary business was still the college and most of its population was associated with it. That single fact explains the professors, ministers, students and college families you'll find here, and it's the through-line our town-versus-university guide follows to its 1956 conclusion.

The oldest stones

The earliest marked gravesite belongs to Charles R. Merriam, brother of Mrs. Samuel Wait, making him the second person to die within the young community and the first with a surviving marker, which ties the cemetery directly to the household of the college's first president. The next oldest sites form a short, specific list worth finding in order:

• James Edward Laughinghouse, 1842.
• Rev. John Purefoy, 1855, a surname that recurs across the town's early record and appears on the National Register listings of local houses.
• Rev. Benson Field Cole, 1856.

Standing at these four markers puts you in the 1830s-to-1850s layer of a settlement that had a college, a handful of streets and not much else, decades before the railroad depot arrived and made a commercial downtown possible, a story told in the railroad guide.

The literary society corner

The most distinctive feature here is one most visitors walk past. Two campus literary societies, the Euzelian and the Philomathesian, developed the formal plans for the cemetery, and a stone representing each society stands in the northeast corner with several smaller gravestones surrounding it. Nineteenth-century college literary societies were the center of student intellectual life, debating, oratory, libraries, rivalry, and the fact that they organized the burial ground says everything about how completely the college and the town were the same thing. If you visit for one specific reason, make it this corner.

Reading the rest of the ground

Beyond the founders, the cemetery holds the town's whole cast: college presidents, professors and their families, ministers, veterans of successive wars, merchants whose names still appear on downtown buildings, per the then-and-now guide, and the ordinary residents who make up the actual population of any burial ground. The town publishes a Cemetery Historical Listings document with information about people buried here and how to find their gravesites, plus a virtual tour covering notable residents, which turns an aimless wander into a directed one. Pair either with the historic markers tour and the Historical Museum, where many of the same names have faces.

The other burial grounds nearby

Wake Forest's cemetery is not the only one, and the ones around it complete the story:

• Olive Branch Baptist Church Cemetery, on both sides of Taylor Street near N. Taylor and E. Walnut, was formerly known as the Colored Cemetery. Olive Branch Baptist Church was organized in 1865 when the Black congregation departed from Wake Forest Baptist Church, with both meeting on the college campus until the Olive Branch congregation moved in 1879 to its current home at 326 E. Juniper Avenue. Rev. George W. Harris served as its first pastor from 1865 to 1879. The surrounding area is the historically African American community, sometimes called the East End or DuBois community, whose story continues in our Ailey Young House guide and the Alston-Massenburg Center guide.
• The Alston-Massenburg Cemetery sits within the same few blocks, a small burial ground tied to the same community.
• Family cemeteries, including the Sykes and Marshall plots, survive in the area as the remnants of the farm landscape the town grew over.
• Friendship Chapel Baptist Church Cemetery, at 245 Friendship Chapel Road, is another of the congregational grounds the town's preservation work has focused on, alongside the church profiles in our historic churches guide.

The preservation work happening now

This is a living preservation project, not a settled one. The Wake Forest Historic Preservation Commission received a Historic Preservation Fund Grant to conduct ground-penetrating radar surveys and host cemetery preservation workshops, with recent sessions held at Olive Branch and Friendship Chapel. Ground-penetrating radar matters enormously at historically Black cemeteries, where unmarked and lost graves are common and the technology can locate burials that no stone records. It's slow, unglamorous work that materially changes what a community knows about itself, and it's ongoing; watch the events page and the town's preservation calendar for public workshops and the periodic docent-led cemetery walking tours, which station guides at gravesites to tell the stories and hand out a children's version of the tour.

Visiting well

Go on a weekday morning, walk the perimeter first to get the layout, then work inward toward the oldest section and the literary society stones. Bring the town's historical listings on your phone. Treat it as the active cemetery it is: quiet voices, stay on the paths and grass lanes, no rubbings or contact with fragile stones, and give any service or family visit a wide berth. Parking is limited on the grounds themselves, and past public tours have used overflow parking at the funeral home on N. White Street, Olive Branch, and along N. Taylor and E. Walnut. The cemetery sits just north of the Ailey Young House on N. White Street, which makes the two an easy pairing, and the lost landmarks guide is the right companion read: in a town growing as fast as this one, per the growth guide, the cemetery is the one piece of the nineteenth century that isn't going anywhere.