Photo: Historic marker for OBERLIN VILLAGE - at the northwest corner of the Historic Turner House, 1002 Oberlin Road, Raleigh, NC
There are at least 600 souls buried in Oberlin Cemetery -Historic Oberlin Village Cemetery.
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History of Oberlin Village
by M. Ruth Little, Longleaf Historic Resources, Raleigh, N.C.
May 2012
minor edits by RHDC staff November 2012
The earliest beginnings of the settlement along present-day Oberlin Road, about two miles west of
the State Capitol in Raleigh, have been attributed to the actions of a small group of white families at the
end of the Civil War, who sold home sites to former slaves. At this time Oberlin Road was a
“commanding ridge less than two miles distant from the State Capitol” known as the New Hillsboro
Road. It extended north-south from Hillsboro Road skirting the farmland of Paul C. Cameron (son of
Duncan Cameron, who died in 1854), whose house stood across from St. Mary’s College. The New
Hillsboro Road was renamed Oberlin Road in the early 1870s. According to oral tradition, the Camerons
gave home sites along this road to their emancipated slaves, who founded the Oberlin community. No
deeds from the Cameron family to early Oberlin settlers have been identified except for Morgan Latta’s
purchase of property along Parker Street in 1891 from Cameron heirs to establish his school, known as
Latta University.1 The last remnant of Cameron land was the 160-acre tract owned by Annie Cameron
Smallwood of New York City, purchased in 1947 by J. W. Willie York for the Cameron Village
commercial development.2
Raleigh merchant Lewis W. Peck is the first documented seller of lots to African Americans in
Oberlin village. His subdivision of his farm along the New Hillsboro Road, beginning in 1866, is easily
traceable in deeds. Local historian Elizabeth Reid Murray stated that Lewis Peck was among the first landowners to make building lots available in what became Oberlin Village, and that an early name for
the community was “Peck’s Place.” Murray called former slave James H. Harris “a strong promoter of
Wake County’s village of Oberlin.”3 Culture Town, an African American oral history of Raleigh
published in 1993, states that Oberlin village was established in 1866 on the former Lewis Peck farm by
former slave James H. Harris, but includes no documentation of this assertion.4
Examination of census records and a Civil War map indicate that the first village houses, churches,
school, and cemetery were constructed in the early 1870s. An 1865 Civil War map of Raleigh (Appendix
3) shows the boundaries of Peck’s farmland on both sides of the New Hillsboro Road, surrounded by vast
undifferentiated woodland between present-day Hillsborough Street and present-day Fairview Road.5 A
sample of deeds in which white Raleigh merchant Lewis W. Peck sells property to African Americans
includes the following transactions. Norfleet Jeffries paid $95 to Peck in March 1867 for 1.9 acres on
Oberlin Road (Wake County Deed Book 25, 183). Seth Nowell paid $43.75 to Peck in 1867 for 1 3/4
acres (Wake County Deed Book 27, 41). Nowell operated a public dray hauling business from the freight
depot. Thomas Williams, a carpenter for Thomas Briggs, bought a 1 ¾ acre lot for $90 at 317 Oberlin
Road, adjacent to Norfleet Jeffries’ property, in 1869 (Wake County Deed Book 27, 427).6 Henry Jones
purchased one acre from Peck for $50.7
A second tract, the William Boylan land, north of the Peck Farm, was sold in 1869 to various
developers. These included sheriff Timothy F. Lee, a Union soldier from Brooklyn who settled in Raleigh
after the war, and by the Raleigh Cooperative Land & Building Association (Raleigh CLBA), whose
president was James H. Harris. These entrepreneurs subdivided the property into lots and sold them to
African Americans.8 Many African American families purchased lots in the settlement in the 1860s and
1870s: by the mid-1880s some lots had been bought and sold multiple times. For example, in 1869 John
Dickerson signed a $400 contract with the Raleigh CLBA for a house and lot (Wake County Deed Book
27, 459). The property must have been foreclosed, since commissioners C. M. Busbee and S. F. Mordecai
sold it in 1882 to Andre Syme (Book 82, 586). Syme sold it the next year to Louise Gill (Wake County
Book 78, 13). George and Lucy Gill sold it to John Turner in 1886 (Wake County Deed Book 88, 619).
The earliest dated monument in Oberlin Cemetery is for John’s wife, Mary Dickerson (1826-1884) (No.
83).
James H. Harris (1829-1891), born a slave in Granville County, became Wake County’s most
prominent nineteenth-century African American leader. His apprenticeship to an English upholsterer
named Wagstaff in Warrenton taught him his trade, as well as how to read and write. Harris secured his
freedom and moved to Raleigh in 1849, where he plied his trade as mattress maker and upholsterer. To
escape racial oppression, he moved in 1856 to Oberlin, Ohio, where he studied at Oberlin College for
several years, then lived for several years in Canada aiding fugitive slaves who managed to reach freedom
through the “Underground Railroad.” In 1862 he spent a year in Liberia and other African countries. At
the end of the Civil War in 1865 he returned to Raleigh and worked to aid the freedmen of his native
state. For many years he served as a Raleigh city alderman. In 1868 he served on the State Constitutional
Convention, and was elected to represent Wake County in the state House of Commons in the same year.
From 1872 to 1874 he served in the State Senate.9 Harris aided the Raleigh freedmen not only through
governmental channels but through his own commercial ventures. He was a director of the Freedmen’s
Savings and Trust Company, which made loans to Negroes to purchase land and build homes. The
company’s president was North Carolina governor W. W. Holden. Harris founded the Wake Land and
Building Association and the Raleigh Cooperative Land and Building Association (Raleigh CLBA),
which loaned money to a number of black families in Oberlin village to build houses.10 The CLBA
operated for a decade before going into receivership. Other companies that loaned money to freedmen to
build houses in Oberlin Village were the North Carolina Land Company and the Wake County
Cooperative Business Company.11
Exact dates for the construction of the earliest dwellings in the village are not known, but some
early residents, including drayman Seth Nowell, John Dickerson, carpenter John Flagg, Daniel Green,
Norfleet Jeffries, James Morgan, and minister Wilson Morgan were still living in Raleigh’s East Ward, a
traditionally African American area, in 1870.12 Raleigh Township, the area where Oberlin village
developed, to the west of Raleigh’s West Ward, did not contain any concentration of black residents in
1870, although black laborer Daniel Green lived in the Raleigh township. During the 1870s Oberlin took
shape and by 1880 some 150 black households lived in a cluster in the Raleigh township. These
households include Norfleet Jeffries, Thomas Williams, John Dunston, Daniel Green, Plummer T. Hall

*Note: This is a thorough historical account about the history of Oberlin Village. Please click the link to coninue reading this history. thank you.*

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