(Last week, we detailed Capital Area Preservation’s success in preventing the destruction of the boyhood home of I. Beverly Lake Jr. This week, we focus on another Wake Forest home — the Freeman house — a structure of equal or greater historical significance the organization was unable to save.)
On Rogers Road, heading out from Wake Forest, past the Harris Teeter, past the townhouses and cleared land is a small cemetery on the right side of the road. The path is overgrown, but the cemetery, containing a dozen or two graves, has been kept up and is enclosed by a cast-iron fence.
Inside that cemetery is as good a look of the inhabitants of the house that once stood across the road as any personal telling, for therein lie Robert Allen (R.A.) Freeman (1845-1914) and his wife Genoa Rox Hunter Freeman (1849-1905); F.A. Cheatham (1869-1943), his wife, Maude Freeman (1877-1963), Eleanor, daughter of F.A. and M.F. Cheatham (Dec. 17 1915-Nov. 12, 1916). Also, their infant daughter (Oct. 3, 1917), and two other daughters are buried there including Maude Katherine (1913-1980). There is an Adeline Upchurch (1842-1922); Oneida Barefoot (1881-1934) and Beatrice Barefoot (1908-1911); Jacob, son of R.A. Freeman (1875-1876) and Inevah, daughter (1871).
According to a survey conducted in 1994 titled The Historic Architecture of Wake County, the mid-19th-century house was the home of Allen and Mary Freeman who owned 900 acres and 24 slaves in 1850. “In that year,” the survey states, “the Freemans produced eight bales of hay and 1,500 bushels of corn, among other crops and livestock.”
The house was described as exhibiting “vernacular Greek Revival details, such as a low-pitched side-gable roof, six-over-six sash windows, and ashlar chimneys with freestanding sticks.”
There were also several outbuildings, including a smokehouse, wellhouse and “double-crib barn.”
According to the survey, when Dempsey Powell died in 1831, he left the house, 750 acres and 32 slaves to his wife, Polly. Members of the Hunter family owned the farm from the early 1860s until the 1950s.
A look inside
Capital Area Preservation’s (CAP) efforts to save the home date back to summer 2006, when surrounding property owners Jasper and John Rogers and Clellie Allen petitioned the town to rezone 19 acres of the property on the 4100 block of Rogers Road to allow Willfair Properties to build a 59-lot residential subdivision.
The rezoning was approved by Wake Forest Board of Commissioners on the condition that “no demolition or building permits be issued on the lots affected by the existing structures on the property until information is presented … regarding efforts to preserve the structures.”
But when CAP finally got inspectors inside to evaluate its condition, they found the house had so much termite damage it would probably collapse on its own if they tried to do anything with it.
“When we looked at it, it really had a lot of problems,” CAP president Gary Roth said. It was too far gone.”
“The termite damage is so severe, the house is beyond repair. It can’t even be moved,” CAP member, attorney and Wake Forest resident Kathryn Drake reported to town officials. “I am truly sorry we were unable to preserve this part of Wake Forest’s cultural heritage.”
Steeped in history
The history of the Freeman family is tied to the history of Wake Forest and Rolesville.
“My great-great-grandfather was R.A. Freeman,” Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said. Recently, as Stinnett was conducting a little spring cleaning, she found a box full of historic deeds, letters and memorabilia pertaining to the Freeman family.
Inside is a detailed background on R.A. Freeman, including a list of his children and whom they married, and information on his parents, descendants and other notes. For instance, parents Allen and Mary Thompson Freeman were married May 21, 1927. One of the witnesses was William Roles, for whom the town of Rolesville is named.
R.A. Freeman left the house in 1905 when his wife Genoa died, and moved into a house in Wake Forest that he had had built ahead of time. Genoa, it seems, was none too pleased at the prospect.
“Your papa has just gotten back from Wakefield with a load of timber. It is a long ways to haul it, but it is the best he can do. I think he will be sick of his job before he gets through with it. I can’t bear the thought of ever going to W.F. to live,” Genoa wrote to son Robert Herman Freeman, then a student at the Cary High boarding school.
Another document Stinnett unearthed included personal recollections of Claire Freeman, daughter of Robert H. Freeman.
She wrote about her grandfather’s participation in the Civil War at age 17 — he belonged to Company I of the 1st Regiment of North Carolina State Troops, known as the Wake Light Infantry. Freeman was wounded in action at Chancellorsville, Va., in May, 1863, again a year later at Wilderness, Va., and captured at Farmville, Va., April 6 1865.
A friend remembered
Perhaps more interesting is Claire Freeman’s account of R.A.’s boyhood companion and lifelong friend, a black man named Joseph Alston. The pair grew up together, and as boys, “spent many hours roaming the fields and woods.”
Alston later became a tenant farmer on the land, “rearing his family on the Freeman place and his children played with the Freeman children,” Claire wrote.
Joe’s daughter Mary became a nurse and took care of several Jones and Freeman family members, including Claire and her sister Doris.
“Mary Alston said that her father and our grandfather worked in the fields together. When the Freeman family left home, Joseph Alston always stayed in the Freeman house to look after things,” Claire wrote. “He was chief pallbearer at the funeral of his friend, Robert Freeman.”
According to Stinnett, R.A. Freeman, her grandfather Otis Jones and T.E. Holding opened Wake Supply Co., a general merchandise hardware and grocery store in downtown Wake Forest in 1906. It was later renamed Jones Hardware, which Stinnett ran until it closed. Stinnett’s maiden name is Jones.
And Stinnett said R.A. Freeman’s daughter Maude was the first female postmaster in Youngsville; that all of his surviving children attended college — medical and veterinary school for the boys and the Oxford Seminary for the girls.
Remains of the day
Todd and Clellie (Rogers) Allen bought the house and the immediate two acres in 1995, fully intending to live there someday. It had been Clellie’s childhood home, she said.
“We farmed that land,” Clellie said. “My dad had cows when I was a toddler — it really had a lot of sentimental value.”
But over the years, termites burrowed their way through beams and floorboards.
“Long before we acquired the property — the main support beam, you could take a screwdriver and push it right through it,” Todd said.
Clellie said her father had worked for years to termite-proof the house, but problems date back to the 1950s when additions were added.
The couple stayed in the house for three months waiting on a mobile home, which they located next door so they could work on restoring it on-site.
“We even discussed what paint colors would be allowable for that period,” Todd said.
Then they got the butcher’s bill: $300,000 to begin to restore it.
“The damage to the foundation was quite significant,” Todd said. “It was just too cost-prohibitive and the damage was too severe.”
Todd and Clellie now live in rural Wendell. One condition of selling the house was that as much of it as possible be dismantled board-by-board and brick-by-brick, for use in similar old properties that need restorative work, the couple said.
“They peeled away the layers and salvaged the old wash house” Clellie said.
After that was done, what was left was carted off.
As of a week or so ago, a backhoe was sitting in its place on a cleared lot.
The house is gone. The memories of it and the people who lived there remains.
Do what you can
“This really is a tale of two houses,” Roth said. “To look at it from the road, you think ‘Wow! What a great house!’ But [it was] in really bad shape. The Lake house is in great shape.”
Some day in the near future, where the Freeman house and land were, will be a new neighborhood, with houses and cars and inquisitive kids who shouldn’t be playing around falling-down buildings. And someday in the future, perhaps soon, there’ll be people living or possibly working in the Lake house in its new North College Street location.
The person or family agreeing to inhabit the house will have to abide by a preservation easement and rehabilitation agreement, guaranteeing the house will be preserved and kept up “in perpetuity,” Roth said, meaning no waiting for termites to tear it down.
Giving that house over to a new owner will free up Capital Area Preservation for its next project, wherever that may be.
“What we’d like to see (are) older buildings reused,” Roth said. “Our organization is not really interested in creating museums.”