By the 1860 federal census, twenty-four enslaved people lived and worked on this 500-acre farm outside Wake Forest. Their names are not recorded in the deed books or in the National Register nomination filed in 1988. The two-story L-shaped house with its low hipped roof and clapboard siding survives, and so do the names of the white men who owned it - John Purefoy, who built it around 1814 and helped found what became Wake Forest University, and Samuel Dunn, who bought it in 1838 and turned its modest farm into a substantial slave-labor operation. The people whose labor made the wheat and corn and cotton grow have been written out of the record. Telling the story honestly means writing them back in.
Samuel Dunn's 1860 census return lists twenty-four enslaved people working approximately 500 acres of the 1,500-acre property. They raised wheat, corn, oats, cotton, wool, and hogs. Their labor was the engine of the farm's prosperity. Tobacco cultivation in this part of the North Carolina Piedmont was relentlessly demanding work - planting, suckering, worming, harvesting, curing - and the wealth that allowed Dunn to remodel the original 1814 house in Greek Revival style during the 1840s and 1850s came directly from their unpaid labor. The 1988 National Register nomination describes the architectural features in detail. It does not describe what the workdays were like for the people who lived behind the main house, or what happened to them and their descendants after emancipation. Those stories existed. They survived in family memory and in the Black communities of Wake County. They are not in the deed books.
John Purefoy was born in Craven County in 1778, orphaned at twelve, and sent to relatives in Georgia, where he converted and became a Baptist minister. By 1809 he was back in North Carolina, paying taxes on 40 acres and two enslaved people - a man and a woman whose names do not appear in the records. He purchased the 400-acre tract near Forestville in 1814 and built the original house. Purefoy spent most of his ministry as a circuit-riding preacher in the Forestville-Wake Forest area, and despite never having been formally educated himself, he became a fierce advocate for schooling. In 1832 he joined three other men in buying 615 acres from Calvin Jones to establish what they called the Wake Forest Institute - which became Wake Forest College, and eventually Wake Forest University. He remained a trustee until his death in 1855. Three of his four sons became Baptist ministers.
In 1838 Purefoy sold the 429-acre farm to Samuel Dunn, a Wake County native whose father Benjamin had been a prominent planter and mill owner. Dunn added a two-story wing to the existing house and remodeled the whole structure in the Greek Revival style then sweeping the antebellum South - white clapboards, a low hipped roof, columned portico across the front (removed in the 1960s or early 1970s, though the rest of the architectural fabric remains). The mid-19th-century smokehouse beside the main house has survived as well. Dunn farmed at a scale Purefoy never did. The 1860 numbers - 24 enslaved people, 500 improved acres - made him a substantial planter by Wake County standards, though not among the largest. He prospered. The enslaved community grew the crops. The Civil War ended that arrangement.
After emancipation, the Purefoy-Dunn property passed through several hands. The North Carolina Joint Stock Land Bank of Durham held it until 1942, when Dr. Zebulon Marvin Caveness bought it and ran a dairy operation. His son William inherited it in 1955. The National Register added the property in 1988, recognizing the architectural integrity of the surviving Greek Revival house and the contributing smokehouse. The nomination did the standard architectural work - dates, materials, stylistic detail. It did not do the harder work of naming the enslaved community that built and sustained the place. That work belongs to the historians and descendants who are now slowly piecing together the human history of Piedmont North Carolina plantation sites. A Greek Revival house is beautiful. The people who made it possible were also real.
Located at 35.96°N, 78.54°W in northeastern Wake County, near Wake Forest and about 15 miles north-northeast of downtown Raleigh. The historic property sits in a still-rural pocket of the rapidly developing Triangle suburbs. Raleigh-Durham International Airport (KRDU) is 18 miles southwest, Henderson-Oxford (KHNZ) about 25 miles north, and Rocky Mount-Wilson Regional (KRWI) 40 miles east. From low altitude the surviving L-shaped house is visible as a white-clapboard structure with adjacent smokehouse, set back from the road in fields lined with the kind of hedgerows that mark old field boundaries.