Forestville: the village Wake Forest replaced, and what’s left to see

Drive south on S. Main Street and you pass through a place that used to be a town. Forestville was settled around 1760, which makes it older than Raleigh and older than Wake Forest, it had the railroad depot first, and it lost everything in a single 1874 transaction. It incorporated defensively in 1879, held that status until 1915, and was eventually annexed by the town that took its depot. This is the story of the village Wake Forest replaced, and what you can still see of it.

Older than the capital

Forestville's founding date is the fact that reorders everything: the community settled around 1760, predating both Raleigh, which was established as the state capital in 1792, and Wake Forest, whose college opened in 1834. When the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad was completed in 1840, it placed its depot at Forestville, which was the logical choice because Forestville was the established settlement. For roughly three decades that arrangement held, and Forestville was the place with the train, the commerce and the reason to exist.

1874: losing the depot

Wake Forest College's trustees had long wanted the depot closer to campus. The railroad declined to fund two stations so near each other, so the college paid to move it, a sum the town's records put at $2,000.03. The depot came north in 1874, and the consequences were immediate and irreversible:

• The college sold lots on the east side of the tracks and merchants built the stores that became White Street, the sequence covered in our short history of downtown and the railroad guide.
• Forestville, watching its economic center walk a mile and a half up the line, incorporated as a town in 1879 in what the town's own history calls a futile attempt to protect itself.
• The move split Forestville Baptist Church, where the college's professors and businessmen worshipped, badly enough that longtime pastor Rev. Williams Brooks resigned, keeping only his college professorship.
• Forestville held its incorporation until 1915 and eventually disappeared into Wake Forest, with the town board voting in 1984 to annex a substantial area.

Two settlements, one railroad, one decision. It's the cleanest case study in North Carolina of how thoroughly a depot determined which places became towns and which became addresses.

What's left to see

• Forestville Baptist Church, 1350 S. Main Street, is the village's great survivor and one of the finest antebellum buildings in the county: built in 1860 to a design by Jacob W. Holt in a Greek Revival and Italianate blend, on 2.3 acres, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 25, 1984. Standing in front of it, you're looking at a building constructed for a congregation whose town was about to lose its future, our churches guide has more.
• The church cemetery, which holds the village's families and reads as the burial ground of a community that no longer exists as a community.
• The street pattern and the corridor: S. Main Street through this stretch is the old route, and the relationship between the road, the rail line and the church tells you where the village center sat.
• Scattered older houses along the corridor, remnants of a nineteenth-century village now surrounded by twentieth- and twenty-first-century development.
• The Purefoy-Chappell House, listed on the National Register in October 2008 and designated a local landmark that December, whose one-acre lot James S. Purefoy bought in December 1837 at the corner of a common road, later Powell Road and now S. Main Street, and Front Street, now Friendship Chapel Road. It's a reminder of how the road names themselves record the change.

The name that stuck around

Forestville didn't disappear from the map so much as dissolve into the address system. The name survives on Forestville Road, one of the town's significant east-side corridors, which the Sanford Creek Greenway now passes under on its way toward Rolesville, per the greenway guide. It appears in church names, in real estate listings and in the mailing addresses of people who would be surprised to learn they live in a former town. That's the ordinary fate of absorbed communities, and it's worth noticing how many other names in this area, Wakefield, Rolesville, Youngsville, Franklinton, mark places that made different bets in the same century.

Researching it yourself

Forestville is a good subject for anyone who wants to try local history research, because the record is thin enough to be manageable and rich enough to reward the effort. The town's own history pages carry the incorporation and annexation dates, the National Register nomination files for the church and the Purefoy-Chappell House contain detailed architectural and family histories, and the Historical Museum holds photographs and documents from the corridor. Census records and Sanborn maps fill in the rest. What you'll find is a village of shoemakers, merchants, physicians and farmers that had every reason to expect it would still be a town today.

Reading the loss

Forestville is worth understanding because it's the counterfactual to Wake Forest. Both were small nineteenth-century settlements in the same few miles of Wake County. One got a college in 1834 and bought a depot in 1874; the other had the depot first and lost it. A hundred and fifty years later, one is a town of nearly 60,000 with its own bond referendums and a passenger rail project coming, per the growth guide, and the other is a church, a cemetery and a stretch of road. Infrastructure decisions compound, which is the argument worth carrying into every current conversation about where roads, stations and development go next.

Visiting the corridor

Forestville makes a short, satisfying add-on to a Wake Forest history morning. Drive or ride south on S. Main from downtown, stop at the church, walk the cemetery, then continue to the Purefoy-Chappell House and note where Friendship Chapel Road, the old Front Street, meets the corridor; Friendship Chapel Baptist Church and its cemetery, subjects of the town's recent preservation workshops, sit further out that road. Pair the trip with the historic markers tour for the northern half of the story, the lost landmarks guide for what didn't survive at all, and the Historical Museum, which holds the photographs and records that make a vanished village legible. Then have lunch downtown, on the street the depot built, which is either an irony or a monument depending on your mood.