The corner of North Taylor and East Juniper has been serving the Northeast Community since 1865.
Not the building. The corner. The building has been six different things.
Every use, in order
A public school. The 1915 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map for Wake Forest shows a public school at what was then the corner of Cemetery Street and Church Street. Oral tradition holds that grades one through seven or eight were taught there. Almost nothing else is known about it, including how long it ran or who taught in it.
In 1928, the Rosenwald Fund helped finance a new school building between Franklin Street and North Allen Road. That school became W.E.B. DuBois High School in 1939. The Taylor Street school is believed to have closed when the Rosenwald building opened.
A house. After 1928 the old school was converted into a residential duplex. You can watch it happen in the Sanborn maps: in 1926 the building is labeled a public school, and in 1936 the same footprint is marked with a “D” for dwelling. Two families lived there. Robert and Mary Watkins and their family, and George and Marie Massenburg and their family. George Massenburg worked for the Town of Wake Forest as an electrician.
A fire station. On May 7, 1942, the site became home to the Colored Volunteer Fire Company of Wake Forest, also known as Wake Forest Fire Department No. 2. African American volunteers manned that department until 1979. It officially merged with Fire Department No. 1 in 1982. A 300,000-gallon elevated water tank and tower stood on the site.
The town’s own history page lists the volunteers by name, and the list runs long: 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.
Forty years of volunteers who protected a neighborhood the main department was not covering.
A swimming pool. In 1950 the Town opened Taylor Street Pool on the same corner. For decades it was the center of the Northeast Community every summer. It closed in 1993 and was filled in the following year.
A basketball court, installed on the site after the pool was filled and eventually relocated to the W.E.B. DuBois campus nearby.
A community center, which is what it is now.
The rescue
The pool house sat neglected after the pool closed. In 1986 a Wake County grant provided renovation money, and the building was rededicated.
They named it for two men.
Edward Alston is remembered for a lifetime of service to his neighbors in the Northeast and for serving as Chief of Fire Station No. 2.
George Massenburg worked for the Town of Wake Forest as an electrician for 43 years and served on that same volunteer fire department. He is also one of the men who lived in the duplex on this corner when it was still a house.
Two names on a building, both from the fire company, both from this block.
What the building does now
The Alston-Massenburg Center sits at 416 North Taylor Street, across from Olive Branch Baptist Church.
There is a large meeting space with a performance stage, theater curtains, and an automated projector and screen. Two smaller meeting rooms. A kitchen with a microwave, refrigerator, and double sink. Interior and exterior restrooms. Twenty-four folding tables and about 108 chairs. A game room.
Capacity runs 104 seated without tables, 72 with them.
It is open to the public Monday through Friday noon to 8, Saturday 8 to 4, and Sunday 1 to 5 from March through August. Rentals run Saturdays and Sundays in half-day or full-day blocks.
Joey McCrae Wiggins Park sits next door on an acre and a half, with swings, a sandbox, a spiral slide, picnic shelter, green space, and a sprayground.
A mural now covers part of the center, commissioned through the town’s Public Art Commission.
Why the history deserves the whole article
Because the alternative is losing it.
The Northeast Community’s institutional record is thinner than the rest of the town’s, for reasons that are not mysterious. The first public school on this corner left almost no trace. Nobody recorded who taught there. The fire company operated for 37 years and merged without much ceremony.
What exists is there because people worked to preserve it. The history on the town’s page was compiled by Michelle Michael and edited by Dianne Laws, drawing on an NC State Northeast Community History Project study and Carol Pelosi’s town history. The DuBois School’s student publications were digitized in partnership with the Wake Forest Historical Museum, Z. Smith Reynolds Library, and DuBois alumni.
Wake Forest grew from 47,601 residents at the 2020 census to a Census Bureau estimate of 54,337 by 2023. Most of the people arriving have never heard of Fire Department No. 2 or Taylor Street Pool.
A building that has been a school, a house, a fire station, a pool, and a court, on ground that has served the same neighborhood since 1865, is not a recreation facility with a plaque on it. It is the neighborhood’s own record of itself, still in use.
Alston-Massenburg Center, 416 N. Taylor Street, Wake Forest. wakeforestnc.gov