The Alston-Massenburg Center and Taylor Street corner: 160 years on one block

At 416 N. Taylor Street stands a building that has been a school, two families' homes, and a community center, and the block around it has held a segregated-era public school, a beloved swimming pool, a Rosenwald-funded high school campus nearby and the civic heart of Wake Forest's historically Black neighborhood. Very few buildings in this town carry as much layered history as this one, and almost none of it is visible from the street. Here's the whole story of a single corner.

The building's three lives

The structure began as a public school for the Northeast Community's children, one of the segregation-era schools that served Black students before consolidation. When the Rosenwald-funded school was built on what became the W.E.B. DuBois campus, the first public school on N. Taylor Street is believed to have closed. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps record the transition with bureaucratic clarity: in 1926 the building is labeled a public school, and by 1936 its two sections are simply marked "D," for dwelling. The footprint never changed. The purpose entirely did.

The building was converted into a duplex housing two families, and those two families gave the center its name. Robert and Mary Watkins lived in one side. George and Marie Massenburg lived in the other, and George Massenburg worked for the Town of Wake Forest as an electrician and served on the volunteer fire department. The Alston half of the name honors the same community's other founding family line. A school that became two homes that became a community center is about as literal a definition of civic continuity as a building can offer.

The volunteer fire department, named

One list preserved in the town's own history deserves to be read in full, not summarized, because it's the roll of the men from this community who volunteered on the fire department: Robert "Buster" Alston, Edward Alston, James Brodie, Anderson Forte, Joseph Gill, Lewis Hampton Jr., Herman Harris Sr., Raymond Harris Sr., Arthur Hayes, Alan Jeffereys, Charlie Jeffereys, Andrew Jefferies, Arthur Jefferies, William Herbert Lucas Sr., Lonnie Mangum Jr., George Massenburg, J.D. Massenburg, James O. Massenburg, Linwood Massenburg, Edward Mitchell Jr., McKinley Mitchell Sr., Jesse Rumsey, James R. Smith, Oscar Smith, Matthew Williams and Woodrow Williams. Local history is usually written about institutions. This is what it looks like written about people, and the surnames repeat across the neighborhood's houses, churches and cemeteries to this day.

The Taylor Street Pool

In 1950 the town opened the Taylor Street Pool at the corner of N. Taylor and E. Juniper Streets. For decades it was the center of the Northeast Community during the summer months, in an era when access to public swimming was anything but universal. The pool closed in 1993 and was filled in the following year. A basketball court went in on the site and was eventually moved to the nearby DuBois campus. Anyone who grew up in this neighborhood before the nineties has pool stories, and the loss of it is the kind of thing that doesn't appear on any historic marker but shapes how a community remembers its own good years. The town's current aquatic facility is covered in the Holding Park guide.

The DuBois School

A short walk away sits the W.E.B. DuBois School at 536 Franklin Street, a Rosenwald School building and campus complex built in stages in 1926, 1939 and 1942 to a Colonial Revival design by architect Frank B. Simpson, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 5, 1993. It has carried several names across its life, including Wake Forest Graded School (Colored), Wake Forest Colored High School and later Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School. The 1939 high school came from community fundraising combined with Rosenwald Fund support, and its success gradually drew enrollment away from the private Normal and Industrial School founded by Allen Young, which closed in 1957; that fuller story is in our Ailey Young House guide, and the school's demolished campus appears in the lost landmarks guide. The DuBois Center on N. Franklin now hosts the town's Juneteenth celebration each June, listed with the rest of the year in the events calendar.

The block today

The Alston-Massenburg Center operates as a town community facility and the neighborhood's gathering place, a role our spotlight on the Northeast neighborhood's gathering place covers in detail. It has hosted the Community Connections series of public history forums on the Northeast area, including the presentation and film screening about the Ailey Young House narrated by Allen Young's great-great-grandson. It's also one of the locations where the town distributes its annual wall calendar, which is a small thing that says something about how the building functions: it's where people actually go.

Within a few blocks sit the rest of the story: the Ailey Young House on N. White Street, Ailey Young Park's fifteen acres on E. Juniper, the Olive Branch Baptist Church cemetery straddling Taylor Street, covered in our cemetery guide and churches guide, and the Alston-Massenburg Cemetery nearby.

The block, stop by stop

• 416 N. Taylor Street: the Alston-Massenburg Center itself, school to duplex to community center.
• N. Taylor and E. Juniper: the Taylor Street Pool site, 1950 to 1993, now built over.
• Taylor Street, both sides: the Olive Branch Baptist Church cemetery, formerly the Colored Cemetery, plus the small Alston-Massenburg Cemetery nearby.
• 326 E. Juniper Avenue: Olive Branch Missionary Baptist Church, organized 1865, at this location since 1879, National Register listed in 2007.
• N. White Street, north of Spring: the Ailey Young House, likely built around 1875 and possibly the oldest remaining African American building in town.
• 536 Franklin Street: the W.E.B. DuBois School complex, Rosenwald-funded, built 1926, 1939 and 1942, National Register listed in 1993.
• 800 E. Juniper Avenue: Ailey Young Park's fifteen acres, named for Ailey Mae Young.

Every one of those sits within a walk of the others, which is the entire point of the next section.

Why one block holds this much

Segregation concentrated an entire community's institutions into a small geography, and that geography survived because it was overlooked, not protected. The school, the pool, the churches, the cemeteries and the homes all sat within a few blocks because they had to, and the result is that Wake Forest's Black history is unusually legible on the ground today. The town's recent work, the Ailey Young restoration, the historic marker unveiling, the ground-penetrating radar surveys at the community's cemeteries, the public forums at this center, reflects a belated but real effort to tell it. Walk the markers tour east of the tracks and the point becomes obvious: this corner is not a footnote to the college story downtown. It's a parallel founding, and for 160 years it has been happening on the same block.