Oberlin Village Historic District
A tour of the Raleigh Historic Landmarks (RHL) located in the local Oberlin Village Historic Overlay District (HOD). Oberlin Village is the longest surviving and most intact Reconstruction-Era freedman's colony in Wake County and North Carolina.
Period of Significance: 1873-1970
Oberlin originated as a freedman’s village, established by blacks after Emancipation. Oral tradition holds that some purchased land from whites as early as the 1860s, others were given land by the families who had enslaved them. The new landowners may not have built houses until the 1870s, but by 1880, the area was home to roughly 150 black households. Most men worked as farmers, masons, shoemakers, tinners, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Five were ministers, and a few were politicians. Women were laundresses, seamstresses, cooks, domestic workers, and farm laborers.
The social heart of the village was along today’s Oberlin Road between Mayview Road and Bedford Avenue, where churches, small shops, and prominent houses were all found. The Wilson Temple United Methodist Church was established there in 1873 in a frame sanctuary; the congregation built the Gothic Revival-style church in 1911. Rev. Plummer T. Hall, an early resident, preached at an Oberlin church that became known as Hall’s Chapel and later as Oberlin Baptist Church. The nearby Queen Anne-style Plummer T. Hall House was a gift from Rev. Hall to his bride, Delia.
Three dwellings clustered on Oberlin Road are particularly notable for their two-story height; the ca. 1890 Willis Graves House, the ca. 1900 James S. Morgan House, and the ca. 1910 front addition to the John and Mary Turner House. Two-story houses were rarities for the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century black homeowners in and around Raleigh and the larger houses reflect the relative wealth and stature of the owners. Graves and Turner both ran grocery stores, but both had other business enterprises as well. Graves did masonry and carpentry work, and Turner opened a shoe store on Hargett Street in Raleigh’s black business district. Morgan was the son of Wilson W. Morgan, an early Oberlin settler and Reconstruction-era politician who also helped found the Colored Educational Association of North Carolina.
Geographically, the village spread mainly southwest of this stretch of Oberlin Road, on a street grid centered on Bedford and Van Dyke Avenues. Pyramidal-roof, single-story cottages were built into the first decade of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, as modest bungalows were built along village streets, Oberlin was annexed into the City of Raleigh. Growth continued and trends shifted. A couple of masonry houses have Tudor Revival-style details, like front-facing gable wings or façade chimneys. Cape Cod houses and simple dwellings with minimal Colonial Revival details were most popular after World War II.
Oberlin Cemetery, established in 1873, is at the site of a slave graveyard, according to oral tradition. The cemetery retains a rural appearance. Grave markers vary, ranging from fine marble and granite obelisks to plain stone markers with no inscriptions. Government-issue military veteran stones are also in evidence. The earliest death date on an inscribed stone in the cemetery is 1876.
Oberlin, like Method, another freedman’s village that survived to be annexed into the city, is essential to understanding the history of black settlement and home ownership in Raleigh.
Plummer T. Hall House
The picturesque one-story frame Queen Anne cottage was built for Plummer T. Hall, the first pastor of the Oberlin Baptist Church, as a wedding present for his bride. The house, which remains in the Hall family, has a turreted porch and bay window as well as circular and quatrefoil gable vents.…
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Willis Graves House
Willis Graves, an African American brick mason, built this two-and-a-half-story frame Queen Anne house soon after buying the land in 1884. The square corner turret and front bay window with roof pediment are placed on a basic I-house form. The house, with its wrap-around porch and stained-glass…
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John T. and Mary Turner House
The Turner House is an intact Neoclassical I-house in the African American community of Oberlin. The house was expanded by John T. Turner, Oberlin's major landowner, around 1900 from a three-room one-story house. While the I-house type is more often seen on agricultural landscapes, Oberlin was…
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James S. Morgan House
At the start of the twentieth-century, the once-rural freedman's village of Oberlin had grown into a tight-knit community of middle-class African American families. Oberlin had well-established churches, small retail shops, and the highest rate of home-ownership of all Raleigh neighborhoods.…
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Wilson Temple United Methodist Church
This Gothic Revival church, erected in 1910 to replace an 1873 wood-frame chapel, is the earliest and most prominent surviving institutional building in the once-rural freedman's community of Oberlin. The church sustained heavy damage from Hurricane Hazel in 1954 but retains its Gothic Revival…
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Oberlin Cemetery
Oberlin Cemetery is a 3-acre site within the Oberlin community, once a thriving African American village located on Raleigh's outskirts. According to oral tradition, the cemetery originally acted as a slave burial ground. As Oberlin grew through the late 1800s and early 1900s, the cemetery…
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Latta House & University Site
In 1892, freed slave and teacher Rev. M. L. Latta founded Latta University, a coeducational institution established to educate underprivileged and orphaned children in Raleigh's African American community. Located in historic Oberlin, the Latta property housed the university as well as Rev.…
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