Qualla: Wake Forest University

Wake Forest University: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jjazz76, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name doesn't fit the city. Wake Forest is in Winston-Salem, not in any wake or any forest. The college was founded on February 3, 1834, on a 615-acre plantation owned by Calvin Jones in Wake County, north of Raleigh, in a wooded area locals called the Forest of Wake. The new institution was called the Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute - the North Carolina Baptist State Convention's idea of how to make ministers and laymen out of farm boys, with students required to spend half of each day doing actual labor on the plantation. The manual-labor system was abandoned in 1838 when the school renamed itself Wake Forest College. A town grew up around it called, naturally, Wake Forest. Then in 1946 a tobacco heiress wrote a check that moved the whole school 110 miles west.

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Image: Jjazz76 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wake Forest University: The Babcock Gift

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matcasti, CC0. Mary Reynolds Babcock was the daughter of R.J. Reynolds, founder of the tobacco company whose Camel cigarettes had built much of modern Winston-Salem. In 1946, she and her husband Charles offered Wake Forest about 330 acres of their Reynolda estate - the same Reynolda where her b...

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Image: Matcasti | CC0

Wake Forest University: Layers of Quiet Change

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kyle tsui from Washington, DC, USA, CC BY 2.0. Wake Forest has always carried its history in layers. The first female undergraduates arrived in 1942 because the Second World War had drained the male student body. Konsukie Akiyama, a Japanese student, had become the first Asian graduate way back in 1909. Edward Reynolds, a tra...

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Image: kyle tsui from Washington, DC, USA | CC BY 2.0

Wake Forest University: Demon Deacons

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HangingCurve, CC BY-SA 4.0. Athletic teams at a Baptist institution called the Demon Deacons - the name itself is a joke about the contradiction. The school is a founding member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, has won eleven NCAA team championships, and its men's soccer program reached four consecutive Fi...

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Image: HangingCurve | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wake Forest University: Reynolda Lives On

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk south from the academic quad and you walk through what used to be a tobacco fortune's country estate. The Reynolda House, built in 1917 by Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband R.J., is now a museum of American art - Cassatt, Frederic Church's Andes of Ecuador, Georgia O'...

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Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0