Before East Wilson began to take shape as the historic heart of Wilson’s African-American community, the land just east of the railroad held small farms and, essentially, country estates like the one Rufus W. Edmundson offered for rent in November 1881. The seven-acre parcel at the east corner of Vance and Pender Streets contained a large six-room house with a well, fruit trees, and “all necessary” outbuildings. Only seven years before, the land had been “original forest.”
As we have seen, into the second half of twentieth century, Vance Street was a boundary between black and white neighborhoods. When Edmundson’s parcel was eventually sold and subdivided, the houses built on streets like Academy and Crowell were for white owners and tenants. These segregation patterns held into the 1960s.
Wilson Advance, 25 November 1881.
Great history….the story before the story.
I didn’t realize that that section east of Pender between Crowell and Gold Streets was white so late. My father told me he knew a guy who lived on a farm near what’s now Academy Street east of Reid, near the Community Center, and that kids used to throw rocks back and forth across the ditch behind the Center.