Historic Method

Method, a southwest Raleigh neighborhood, evolved from a freedman’s village established in the 1870s. It was one of a dozen or so that surrounded the city in the years after Emancipation, when blacks moved from the countryside in search of work and housing. Of these villages, Oberlin and Method survived, were annexed into the city, and remain vibrant neighborhoods.

In 1872, half-brothers Jesse Mason and Isaac O’Kelly bought sixty-nine mostly wooded acres from William Ruffin Cox, who had been a general in the Confederate army. Mason and O’Kelly began selling multi-acre parcels to family and friends. In the 1870s and 1880s, the area was known variously as Planktown, Slab Town, and Save-Rent. The first two names described the simple log dwellings erected by the new property owners: one-story houses built with “planks” or “slabs” probably cut from the trees felled on site. The third name describes the transformational opportunity for land and home ownership that the place offered blacks.

The nascent village was also called Masonville or Mason’s Village, after Lewis Mason, who had convinced his father Jesse to purchase the land. Lewis bought some acreage from his parents and established a farm, growing cotton and keeping cows and chickens on about fifteen acres. He also wrote a brief history of the establishment of the village.

The community that developed was tight-knit. Several residents together established a grocery store, later purchased by Berry O’Kelly, who would become the village’s most prominent resident. Similarly, the store became an important landmark and social hub. O’Kelly got a post office established in the store, which raised the prominence of the shop and loaned its name to the whole village: Method.

In the twentieth century, Method grew from an agricultural village into a suburb that included a school, churches, and a small grid of residential streets. Those who owned large parcels of land subdivided it for sale or to pass on to heirs. The largest plat was the Method Subdivision, made in 1919 by Berry O’Kelly to divide roughly eleven acres into three blocks totaling sixty-nine parcels. The Lillie Stroud Rogers House on Method Road stands in the Method Subdivision; many other bungalows like this one once populated the platted area.

Churches established in the late nineteenth century remain in Method, including St. James AME Church, which maintains a 1923 Gothic Revival sanctuary. The Oak City Baptist Church has occupied the lot at the corner of Method Road and Ligon Street for a century. Finally, buildings associated with the Berry O’Kelly School still stand at the north end of the neighborhood, in the Berry O’Kelly Historic District. The Agricultural Building is a vocational education building erected in 1926 and expanded by 1950 as part of the school. The gymnasium likewise survives, but the school building was demolished in the 1960s. Berry O’Kelly’s grave and a monument are also in the historic district. Because of the opportunity for quality education that the Berry O’Kelly School offered blacks in Raleigh, the campus remains an important place in the history of Raleigh and Wake County.