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

Some history lives in museums. Some lives on a street corner that never stopped being used. The southeast corner of North Taylor and East Juniper streets in Wake Forest's Northeast Community is the second kind: one small piece of land that has served the community in one form or another since 1865, holding a school, a volunteer fire company, the neighborhood pool, and today a community center, a playground, and a spray ground. Learn this corner and you learn a century and a half of the town. Here's the whole story, and what's there for your family now.

First, a school

The site's public life began early. A public school appears at this corner on the 1915 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, at what were then called Cemetery and Church streets, and oral tradition holds that grades one through seven or eight were taught there. This was the neighborhood's public school in the era before the community built its larger institutions, the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School and later the DuBois School, whose stories we've told in our Ailey Young House article. The corner sits directly across North Taylor Street from Olive Branch Baptist Church, one of the Northeast Community's historic congregations, which tells you what this intersection was: the civic crossroads of the neighborhood.

Then, Fire Department No. 2

The chapter most residents have never heard: on May 7, 1942, the site became home to the Colored Volunteer Fire Company of Wake Forest, also known as Fire Department No. 2, staffed by African American volunteers who ran the station until 1979, with the department officially merging into Fire Department No. 1 in 1982. A 300,000-gallon elevated water tank stood on the site.

The town's own history page does something unusual and right: it names the men. The volunteer roster included Robert "Buster" Alston, Edward Alston, James Brodie, Anderson Forte, Joseph Gill, Lewis Hampton Jr., Herman Harris Sr., Raymond Harris Sr., Arthur Hayes, the Jeffereys and Jefferies men, William Herbert Lucas Sr., Lonnie Mangum Jr., four Massenburgs, Edward Mitchell Jr., McKinley Mitchell Sr., Jesse Rumsey, James R. Smith, Oscar Smith, Matthew Williams, and Woodrow Williams. For nearly four decades, these neighbors protected their own community as unpaid firefighters during segregation, an act of service the town formally honored only later.

Then, the pool

In 1950 the town opened Taylor Street Pool at the corner, and for decades it was the center of the Northeast Community during the summer months. In the segregation era, this was the community's pool, the counterpart to the whites-only Holding Park pool downtown, and generations of Northeast Community kids learned to swim here. The pool closed in 1993 and was filled in the following year; a basketball court replaced it and was later relocated to the nearby W.E.B. DuBois campus.

The center and its two names

The old pool house survived the pool, barely. Neglected for years, it was renovated with a Wake County grant in 1986 and rededicated as the Alston-Massenburg Center, honoring two of the community's most upstanding citizens: Edward Alston, who served his neighbors throughout his life in the Northeast and as chief of Fire Station No. 2, and George Massenburg, who worked as an electrician for the town for 43 years and served in the fire department. Both names come straight off that volunteer fire roster, which is the site honoring its own history.

Today the center at 416 N. Taylor Street works as a town community facility and, fittingly, as a heritage venue. The Wake Forest Historical Museum has used it as the starting point for its monthly historical walking tours, which cover the Historic District, the Glen Royall Mill Village, downtown, the Northeast Community, and the seminary campus, and the town has hosted events like a Black History Expo there, displaying a local collector's artifacts from the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s. Free Black History Month walking tours of the Northeast Community also stage from here; the town and museum calendars carry the dates.

The park today

The recreation never left the corner; it just changed shape. Adjacent to the center sits Joey McCrea Wiggins Park, a one-and-a-half-acre park with swings, a sandbox, an X-wave, a spiral slide, green space, a picnic shelter, and a spray ground. The spray ground is the headline for families: on a July afternoon it's the free, walkable cooling-off spot for the surrounding neighborhoods, the modern descendant of the 1950 pool doing the same job on the same ground. The town has continued investing here, running a playground renovation project at the site, and the newest Dunn Creek Greenway phases route through nearby Ailey Young Park, tying the whole Northeast Community into the town trail network.

Standard park rules apply: open dawn to dusk, dogs leashed, no alcohol, no personal grills.

Visiting with the history in mind

The corner rewards a short, informed visit. Stand at Taylor and Juniper and run the layers: the 1915 schoolhouse, the 1942 fire company and its water tower, the 1950 pool and its summer crowds, the 1986 rededication, today's spray ground. Look across the street at Olive Branch Baptist, still active. Then walk the few blocks to the Ailey Young House and the Northeast Community historical marker on North White Street to complete the picture, or better, time your visit to one of the museum's walking tours and let a guide connect it all.

Wake Forest is getting steadily better at telling this half of its story, from the restored Ailey Young House to the new historical marker to the names published on the town's own park pages. The Alston-Massenburg Center is where that story is easiest to touch: a building that was a pool house, named for a fire chief and an electrician, on a corner that has served the same neighborhood for 160 years and counting. Take the kids for the spray ground. Stay a minute for the rest.