Why Wake Forest University isn’t in Wake Forest: the full story

Every new resident of Wake Forest eventually has this conversation. Someone asks where they live, they say Wake Forest, and the reply comes back: "Oh, near the university?" No. The university is in Winston-Salem, more than 100 miles west. It kept the name and left the town, and the story of why is one of the more interesting chapters in North Carolina history. It involves a plantation, a tobacco fortune, a presidential visit, and a decade of hard feelings.

It started with a plantation

In 1832, the Baptist State Convention bought the 600-acre plantation of Dr. Calvin Jones, a physician and University of North Carolina trustee, in the forested area of northern Wake County. Two years later, in 1834, the school opened in the plantation buildings as Wake Forest Institute, with sixteen students enrolled on day one. By the end of that first academic year, 72 students were attending.

The early school was a "literary and manual labor" institution. Students spent half of each day working the plantation alongside their studies, though the manual labor requirement was dropped by 1838, when the school became Wake Forest College, a liberal arts college focused largely on educating Baptist ministers.

The town grew up around the college, not the other way around. The name Wake Forest referred to the forested section of Wake County where the campus sat, and the community that formed around it took the same name. Calvin Jones's house, where founding president Samuel Wait lived, still stands today as the Wake Forest College Birthplace, now a museum on North Main Street.

For 122 years, town and college were the same place. The law school was founded on the old campus in 1894, the medical school in 1902, and by 1949 the student body had grown to nearly 2,000.

The medical school left first

The unraveling began quietly. In 1941, the medical school moved to Winston-Salem to partner with North Carolina Baptist Hospital, where its students could train in a real teaching hospital. Winston-Salem's business and civic leaders liked what the school brought to the city, and within five years they were encouraging the whole college to follow, backed by an offer of serious money.

That money came from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, built on the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune. According to Our State magazine's account, the family offered 300 rolling acres and $350,000 a year on the condition that the college relocate to Winston-Salem. Charles Babcock and his wife Mary Reynolds Babcock, a daughter of R.J. Reynolds, donated land from the family's Reynolda estate for the new campus.

In 1946, the college trustees and the Baptist convention voted to accept. The decision wasn't unanimous in spirit. Some Baptists questioned whether a religious college should take that much tobacco money, and people in the town of Wake Forest were stunned. Edwin Wilson, who later became the university's provost, recalled the shock of the announcement: faculty who had built homes and raised families in the old town suddenly faced uprooting their whole lives.

Truman, construction delays, and the 1956 move

The new Winston-Salem site was dedicated by President Harry Truman in October 1951, a measure of how big a deal the relocation was considered at the time. Postwar material shortages slowed construction, and the campus wasn't ready until spring 1956. That summer, under president Harold Tribble, the college packed up and moved.

The scale of the project was enormous for its era. Between 1952 and 1956, fourteen Georgian-style buildings went up on the Reynolda campus, including Wait Chapel, named for the founding president. The Winston-Salem community itself, including the Reynolds and Hanes business families, donated around $1.5 million toward the academic buildings, on top of the foundation's ongoing support.

In September 1956, classes opened in Winston-Salem. In 1967, Wake Forest College became Wake Forest University. The Demon Deacons, the name, the history, all of it now lived a two-hour drive from the town that shared its name.

What happened to the old campus

Here's the part outsiders rarely know: the original campus never emptied out. The old grounds were sold to the newly formed Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, which moved in as the college moved out. So the town of Wake Forest still has a campus, the same one, with the same historic buildings and magnolia-lined walks. It just trains ministers now instead of undergraduates, roughly the mission the college started with in 1834.

That continuity is why downtown Wake Forest still feels like a college town. The seminary campus anchors the north end of the historic district, its chapel spire is visible from the trails at Joyner Park, and its lots even serve as overflow parking for downtown festivals. Visitors can walk the grounds, and the Wake Forest Historical Museum across the street tells the whole story, including a permanent account of the move itself.

Why the name never changed

The university kept the name because the name was the brand: over a century of alumni, athletics, and reputation were attached to "Wake Forest." The town kept the name because it was the town's name first, taken from the forest district and the college community that formed there in the 1830s. Neither side was going to blink, so North Carolina ended up with a university named for a town it doesn't occupy, and a town named for a college that left.

The relationship today is cordial and mostly historical. The university's ties to the Baptist convention loosened in 1979, and its identity is thoroughly Winston-Salem now. Back in the original town, the birthplace museum, the seminary campus, and a state historical marker on South Main Street keep the memory in place.

Visiting the history

If this story interests you, the sites are easy to see in an afternoon. Start at the Wake Forest Historical Museum and the Calvin Jones House on North Main Street, walk the seminary campus next door, and finish with the historical marker on South Main. The whole loop sits within the historic district, a few minutes from the shops and restaurants on White Street.

The town lost its college nearly 70 years ago, and it turned out fine. But the next time someone asks if you live near the university, you'll have a better answer than "no."