Qualla: Purefoy-Dunn Plantation

Purefoy-Dunn Plantation: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Purefoy-Dunn Plantation: The Twenty-Four

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Purefoy-Dunn Plantation: John Purefoy and a Baptist Education

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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Purefoy-Dunn Plantation: Samuel Dunn's Greek Revival

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 antebell...

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Purefoy-Dunn Plantation: What the House Remembers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 add...

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