Maps

Wilson County’s A.M.E. Zion and A.M.E. churches.

The earliest black churches in Wilson were Baptist, but African Methodist Episcopal Zion missionaries quickly established a foothold in the county. Saint John A.M.E. Zion is one of the oldest black churches of any denomination in Wilson County, and the first generation of college graduates emerged from its attendant private academy. The older African Methodist Episcopal denomination did not take root as quickly or as widely in North Carolina, but at least two churches were founded in Wilson County.

As far as I know, Evansdale mystery aside, no black United Methodist congregations were ever established in Wilson County.

African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches

Founded in 1868. Present site at Pender Street purchased in 1880. Wooden church replaced by current handsome brick structure in 1914. Associated with several high-profile pastors in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Rev. Joseph C. Price, Rev. Owen L.W. Smith, and Rev. R.A.G. Foster.

Second oldest active African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in Wilson. First sanctuary  built on land purchased in 1909 on Banks Street from Rev. Smith, former consul to Liberia and A.M.E.Z. presiding elder.

In 1903, Orren and Hancey Best sold trustees a lot in Grabneck community for construction of Saint Stephen’s. Also known as South Wilson Mission. Per the 1923 report of the Wilson District of the Cape Fear Annual Conference, a 22 foot by 32 foot church was built in 1922. Church is defunct, and precise location is not clear.

Founded in 1877. Presently active at 210 West Broad Avenue, Stantonsburg. Bethel’s original site was southeast of Stantonsburg on what is now Peacock Bridge Road. Its old cemetery marks the approximate site.

  • A.M.E. Zion, Black Creek

In 1886, A.M.E.Z. trustees bought a lot on “Avenue Street.” Location not now known. This was likely Hardy’s Chapel. Church is defunct.

Active in 1940s. No further information.

  • A.M.E. Zion, Wilson

The 1922 Sanborn fire insurance map of Wilson shows an A.M.E. Zion church at 312 Manchester Street, at the corner of East Suggs Street. The 1930 Sanborn map, however, shows this building housing a Christ Disciple Church. No other information is known.

Six miles from Wilson. No further info.

Eight miles from Wilson. No further info.

Perhaps: in 1910, the Colored Methodist Episcopal purchased a lot on Wilson Street, east of the railroad, in Elm City. No further information.

African Methodist Episcopal churches

  • Saint Luke A.M.E., Wilson

In 1906, trustees bought a lot on Suggs Street to build an A.M.E. church.  However, the church was not organized as Saint Luke until 1910. In the 1930s, the congregation moved to a storefront at the corner of Vick and Atlantic Streets and erected its current church building at that site in 1948.

  • Saint Paul’s A.M.E., Lucama

On 1 September 1903, the trustees for the A.M.E. Church of Lucama paid $25 for a quarter-acre lot on Main Street in Lucama. The exact location is not clear.

A.M.E.Z. or A.M.E.? (Or maybe C.M.E.?)

Shown in the 1913 Sanborn fire insurance map on South Lodge Street, across from Imperial Tobacco. No further identification.

611 and 613 East Nash Street.

The two hundred-tenth in a series of posts highlighting buildings in East Wilson Historic District, a national historic district located in Wilson, North Carolina. As originally approved, the district encompasses 858 contributing buildings and two contributing structures in a historically African-American section of Wilson. (A significant number have since been lost.) The district was developed between about 1890 to 1940 and includes notable examples of Queen Anne, Bungalow/American Craftsman, and Shotgun-style architecture. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

In the nomination form for the East Wilson Historic District, described 611 and 613 East Nash as: “ca. 1908; shotgun with double-pile main block and kitchen wing.” They were built as rental housing, and occupants changed regularly. Both houses, and a third shotgun at 615, have been demolished.

Until about 1921, the houses were numbered 612 and 614. In the 1920 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 612, Amos Johnson, 26, wagon factory laborer; wife Alice, 24; and daughter Elnora, 4.

The 1922 Sanborn fire insurance map of Wilson shows houses crowding the north side of the 600 block of East Nash Street. All are gone.

In Hill’s 1928 Wilson, N.C., city directory:

In Hill’s 1930 Wilson, N.C., city directory:

Wilson Daily Times, 23 August 1939.

Approximate location of 611 and 613 East Nash Street today, via Google Maps.

N.87-12-919-921, E. Nash, N. Side, 400 Block, 601-619 E. Nash Street, East Wilson Historic District, Wilson, Wilson County, Survey and National Register Branch, State Historic Preservation Office, Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and Records, Raleigh.

Map of the Town of Wilson, 1928.

Here’s a closer look at East Wilson. The streets north of Vance, except Lipscomb, were white residential, as were Railroad Street and Pettigrew Street (not labeled) south of Nash.

Town limits ran just behind Darden (then Wilson Colored) High School at roughly today’s Blakewood Street; south roughly along today’s Wainwright Street to Nash Street (at Freeman Round House Museum); then at a diagonal across Finch, Lane, New Bern Streets, etc.

Note School Street (named for the Colored Graded School), which became Elvie Street.

Just west of the railroad were a working-class white neighborhood centered along Factory Street (which no longer exists) and a working-class black neighborhood, Happy Hills, centered at Banks and Lodge.

Town of Wilson (1928), Maps, Wilson County Records, North Carolina State Archives.

The division of the Nannie Kirby Richardson property.

In 1973, William Kirby‘s widow Nannie Shaw Kirby Richardson divided their land among their heirs — Roxanna Kirby Exum, Hobbie Lee Kirby, William Henry Kirby, Willie Kilmer Williams, Sarah Kirby Wiggs, Nettie Kirby Forsythe, Queen Kirby Newsome, and Harvey Isaac Kirby. Each received two lots, e.g. 2 and 2-A. The Kirby family cemetery is represented by the small rectangle at the top of lot 4. Much of the land remains in the hands of Kirby descendants.

Plat Book 13, pages 38-39, Wilson County Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

The purchase of land for Elvie Street School, part 1.

We saw this 1923 plat map of Daniel C. Suggs‘ property here.

Plat Book 1, page 215.

The plat map below shows that most of Suggs’ property was purchased by W.E. Batts. In 1925, a Durham auction house prepared a new plat for the Batts property.

Plat Book 3, page 17.

Here’s a present-day view of the area. New Street kept its name, but a truncated Hines Street is now Blount Street at its west end, and Elvie School Drive at its east. This map makes clear that the south end of the old Oakdale Cemetery (“colored cemetery” on both plats) lay under the circular driveway and front law of Elvie Street School [later M.M. Daniels Learning Center.] Its graves (or some of them, anyway) were moved to Rest Haven in 1941.

In 1946, to assemble land on which to build a replacement for the Sallie Barbour School, the Board of Trustees of Wilson City Schools began to buy up parcels in the property, also known as Suggs Heights and adjacent lots, including these:

  • on 26 May 1946, from Leon Powell and wife Carrie Powell — lots 12, 13, 14, and part of 11 [Deed Book 335, page 291]
  • on 12 April 1947, from W.E. Batts Jr. and wife Mildred C. Batts — block B, lots 5, 6, 15, 16, 29-36; Block C, lots 33-60; and Block E, lots 25-34 [Deed Book 333, page 256]
  • on 12 June 1947, from Sam Dixon and Evelyn F. Dixon (who had bought the lots from Hubert and Viola McPhail) — lot 14 and half of lot 13 [Deed Book 337, page 12]
  • on 8 July 1947, from Robert Lee Melton and wife Birt Melton — lot 11 and 6 1/4 feet of lot 12 of block E, facing Elmer [Elvie] Street, which had been conveyed to the Meltons by Lula Wynn on 28 February 1945 per Deed Book 295, page 461 [Deed Book 337, page 291]
  • on 25 July 1947, from Frank Norman and wife Elizabeth Norman — lot 13 and part of lot 12 of block E, conveyed by Wynn per Deed Book 295, page 465 [Deed Book 337, page 370]
  • on 28 July 1947, from Maggie Stokes and husband Turner Stokes — lots 9 and 10 of block E, purchased by the Stokeses on 20 January 1933 per Deed Book 202, page 465 [Deed Book 337, page 370]

Cemeteries, no. 38: the Joshua Barnes’ tenant cemetery.

I first mused about the cemetery on the old Joshua Barnes plantation here. As shown in this detail from the plat, the burial ground was in Lot 11 of the farm’s subdivision, a triangle of land between what are now London Church Road and Corbett Avenue. Was this where black tenants and laborers on Barnes’ farm buried, well into the 20th century? Did it start as a cemetery for the many dozens of people Barnes enslaved?

Last week, I stumbled upon a 1964 plat map of the former Lot 11, then named Raeford Rountree farm, which outlines the cemetery in greater detail and records its size as .73 acres.

This deed description comes from a 1983 quitclaim deed from Landmark Development Company of Wilson to a trustee for Living Faith Ministries, Inc. It makes clear that this cemetery was recognized for what it was.

Here’s a current aerial view of the property from Wilson County’s GIS website. I’ve encircled the rough location of the cemetery, which lies a short distance south of Impact Church.

There’s no sign of the cemetery now. (At least not from the road.)

Photograph by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2026.

The Barneses sell property to the School Board.

Plat Book 4, page 51.

On 30 September 1946, Dr. B.O. Barnes and his wife Flossie H. Barnes sold the Board of Trustees of Wilson City Schools a tract bordered by North Reid Street, East Vance Street, an unopened section of North Vick Street, and an unopened section of Crowell Street. Deed Book 326, page 43.

As the Google Maps aerial below shows, the property is adjacent to land on which the former Vick Elementary School sits. (Vick had opened ten years earlier.) Ultimately, however, much of it was sold to developers who built a row of houses in the 800 block of East Vance Street.

Lane Street Project: the power pole easement revisited.

Y’all remember back in August 2023 when I requested information from the City concerning the placement of power poles in Vick and Rountree Cemeteries? Via Gabriel Du Sablon, an attorney in the office of City attorney James P. Cauley III, the City responded on 22 September 2023, and I call your attention to this declaration:

Funny, because look what I just found on the Wilson County Register of Deeds website — an easement deed, dated 4 August 1997, from trustees of Rountree Missionary Baptist Church to the City of Wilson. (And prepared by James P. Cauley III.)

Via this document, Rountree Church granted the City permission to “construct, install, inspect, operate, repair and maintain one or more lines and appurtenant facilities for the transmission of electricity …” on part of its land.

Including the right to install power poles (and alter or substitute them “from time to time ….”

The power pole in Rountree Cemetery, October 2025.

The easement began on Rountree’s western property line at the property line of Odd Fellows Cemetery, on the south side of Lane Street; ran the width of the property to a canal (Sandy Creek); then back 41 feet; then back across the cemetery; then back to the beginning, containing about .25 acre.

May I remind you that the entire southern portion of Rountree Cemetery comprises only one acre. 

For reasons that I cannot imagine, Rountree Church ceded a quarter of the main part of its old cemetery to the City. Worse, the City of Wilson plotted a power line corridor that demanded it. In 1997.

Page 3 of the easement continues the rights and privileges granted to the City by the easement.

The church gained no parallel rights, but can convey the land and easement. Nowhere in the easement is there an acknowledgment that this land is a cemetery.

And then there’s this attached plat map. It’s a little hard to make out, so I’ll zoom in on the pertinent part below.

Deed Book 1636, page 377, Wilson County Register of Deeds.

So, turned sideways, with Martin Luther King Parkway offscreen to the right, what we have is Lane Street (now Bishop L.N. Forbes) in red. (Note the narrowing as it passes the cemeteries.) In blue, Sandy Creek, which was channelized late in the 19th century as best I can tell. Yellow marks the boundary between Rountree and Odd Fellows Cemeteries. (I’d always believed it to be at the ditch shown left of the boundary, but the ditch is wholly in Odd Fellows.) The two halves of Rountree Cemetery are clearly shown. The top half is where the backhoe was roving late last year. The shaded area is the City of Wilson’s utility easement.

I repeat. There’s no mention that the City was securing a utility easement in a cemetery.

But maybe the City didn’t know, right? Here’s the pole again.

In the foreground, perhaps twenty feet away, is a pile of broken headstones, mostly belonging to an Ellis family. Another ten or fifteen feet further, the double-sided headstone of Daniel and Lottie Marlow, who died in 1918 and 1916. In 1997, when this pole was installed, the area was clear of brushy undergrowth, and these markers would have been plainly visible.

There’s no parallel easement recorded for Vick Cemetery. By 1997, the City had already confessed to owning the property and had recently cleared it of overgrowth and headstones, perhaps for this very purpose. And no recorded easement for Odd Fellows, which does not have a pole, but is crossed by the same power lines. In fact, graves in Odd Fellows were damaged just a few years later by heavy machinery brought into the cemetery for a line repair.

The repair sleeve on the middle line above Odd Fellows Cemetery. 

This is nasty work, folks.

Help for the road to the Negro cemetery.

In the aftermath of complaints by “prominent Negroes of the city” about the impassable condition of roads leading to Vick Cemetery, City Manager W.M. Wiggins appealed to the Wilson County Board of Commissioners to request the state highway commission to make “the road to the local negro cemetery” a state highway. The “town and state” had made some improvements to try to make the road passable in winter, and Wiggins believed the state would take over if asked.

…

Wilson Daily Times, 26 November 1937.

When I first posted about the complaints, I concluded that the road in question was what we now know as Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway/US Highway 264. I’m now revising my thoughts.

The eastward extension of Nash Street past town limits was already a paved state road by 1937 as shown on this 1936 Wilson County road map.

US 264 and NC Highway 58 were already 264 and 58. But there’s a tiny spur, a little dashed set of parallel lines, that represents the road that turned off 264 at Rountree Missionary Baptist Church and ran several hundred feet back to three cemeteries. This — now the eastern end of Bishop L.N. Forbes Street — was the muddy road to the Negro cemetery. It’s not clear whether City Manager Wiggins’ appeal was immediately successful, but a 1968 N.C.D.O.T. map labels this as S.R. (“state road”) 1546.

Is Bishop L.N. Forbes Street still a state road?