Community Senior Citizens Club.

Wilson Daily Times, 7 June 1976.

This photo of members of the Community Senior Citizens Club was taken well after the period covered by Black Wide-Awake. However, it depicts a generation of elders — mostly born in the 1890s to the 1910s — who helped build the community we honor here:

Margaret Powell, Estelle Cooper, Mary Leach, Lula M. Hayes, Ernestine Shepard, Essie Corbett, Mabel Bennett, Elizabeth Faison, Nora Reid, Maria Delaney, Mena Bailey, Bertha Carroll, Ophelia Adams, Rossie Bryant, Mary Howell, Allie M. Harris, Sarah Bryant, Marie Owens, Naomi Hunter, Effie Battle, Lela Hilliard, Janie Mitchell, Menorah Rodgers, Eva Brooks, William Clark, Vicia Thompson, Millie Ellis, Louise Perry, Estelle Darden, Effie Dawson, Callie Darden, Rosa Lucas, William Taylor, and William Lane.

Plantation House Series: James Reddick Barnes house.

The James Reddick Barnes house, built between 1850 and 1860, stands well back off the road in Saratoga township, southeast of Wilson. It is not registered with the National Register of Historic Places.

In the 1860 slave schedule, James R. Barnes reported enslaving 41 people and controlling another 32 as trustee for minors. (Though unnamed in the census, those minors included the Isaac Scarborough heirs.) In June 1856, two people he jointly owned with others, Cate and Sherard, were sold at auction at a toll house on White Oak Swamp. As high bidder, Barnes was able to buy them back.

In 1950 and 1960, the Wilson Daily Times ran articles on historic Wilson County houses, most of which had anchored plantations. The James R. Barnes house was featured twice.

Wilson Daily Times, 10 January 1950.

Ten years later, the house’s history had stretched a bit. Now the claim was that the house itself, rather than the land, had passed through seven generations from John Barnes. However, Barnes died in 1789 and his grandson Reddick Barnes in 1835, and great-grandson James Reddick Barnes actually built the house. (Also note the incorrect suffixes added to the names of the owners, i.e. III, IV, and VI. They are the result of the reporter’s incorrect interpretation of the owner’s generation of ownership, as spelled out in the 1950 Times article.)

Wilson Daily Times, 8 January 1960.

 

Wake County mines historic data.

Launched in 2021, Wake County Register of Deeds Office’s Enslaved Persons Project culled the names of enslaved people from thousands of pages from Wake County deed books. As soon as that gargantuan task was completed in 2023, the Register of Deeds undertook a new project — cataloguing and mapping Wake County’s historic racially restrictive covenants. Using Optical Character Recognition to scan more than a half-million documents, the Register of Deeds Office, its partners, and volunteers identified 15,000 deeds whose terms shaped Raleigh in ways that persist to this day.

We’ve seen racially restrictive covenants in Wilson, where they were activated in the subdivisions that unfolded along West Nash Street in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Wilson did not rely on deed restrictions as heavily as Raleigh, but the impact of historic residential segregation patterns continues to resonate.

Wilson Colored High School awards its first diplomas.

“For the first time in the history of Wilson students of the colored high school will be awarded diplomas ….”

Wilson Daily Times, 23 May 1924.

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