A Short History of Wilson & Wilson County

Wilson is a railroad town that tobacco made rich. Before either one arrived, the ground under today's downtown was a Baptist meetinghouse, a few farms and a crossroads settlement in the part of Edgecombe County drained by Toisnot Swamp and Contentnea Creek.

Before 1840 Toisnot and Hickory Grove

The name Toisnot is older than the town. The Tuscarora held the country between the Tar and Neuse rivers until the Tuscarora War that began in 1711, and an essay on the City of Wilson's history page places a Tuscarora village called Toisnot where Buck Branch runs into Toisnot Swamp. The 1984 National Register nomination for downtown Wilson says the name "is said to be" taken from Tosneac, a Tuscarora town in the area in the early 1700s¹. Both are traditions written down long afterward, and they are given here as traditions.

The paper record starts with land grants. Historian Hugh B. Johnston's list of early owners, reprinted by the city, begins with a grant of April 9, 1730, to Lewis Conner of Norfolk County, Virginia, who apparently never saw the land. The first grantee known to have lived on his tract was John Thomas, who patented 300 acres on Toisnot and White Oak swamps in March 1741 (dated 1740/41 in the old two-year style of the period)².

The church came next, and the town grew around it. The downtown nomination dates the Toisnot Baptist congregation to 1759. On December 29, 1802, the heirs of Arthur Dew deeded one acre on the Tarboro-to-Smithfield road to the "Baptist Society," and the congregation moved there; the city's own history calls that deed the usual starting point for Wilson. The cluster of houses and shops that formed near the church, on what is now Tarboro Street between Barnes and Kenan streets, was called Hickory Grove. According to the nomination, Hickory Grove traded in naval stores, the tar and turpentine of the pine woods, shipped them out by way of Contentnea Creek, and sat on the post road between Raleigh and Greenville³.

1833–1840 The Longest Railroad

The General Assembly chartered the Wilmington and Raleigh Railroad Company on December 30, 1833. Two years later the company moved its northern end from Raleigh to Weldon on the Roanoke River, and the finished line ran 161½ miles, which made it the longest railroad in the world when it opened. It was renamed the Wilmington and Weldon in 1855⁴.

The tracks passed a short walk east of Hickory Grove. The railroad put its station where Barnes Street now crosses the line and named it Toisnot. James D. Barnes built a store at the crossing that later held the post office, with Barnes as the first postmaster, and the road to the depot took his name. A second small settlement, also called Toisnot, grew along that road between the depot and Hickory Grove⁵.

The sources do not agree on when the line was finished. The city's account says the track reached Toisnot in mid-1839, passenger trains ran to Wilmington from about mid-October, to Rocky Mount by Christmas Eve, and over the whole line in March 1840. The downtown nomination puts completion in April 1840 and the opening of the Toisnot Depot post office on April 29, 1840; the state's highway marker essay says the line opened in May 1840⁶. Every account agrees that by the spring of 1840 Toisnot had trains running north and south.

The depot drew merchants. The nomination names Jonathan and Moses Rountree, who opened a general store in 1846; Amos Battle, a Disciples of Christ minister who arrived in 1843 and opened the first hotel in 1852; and the families who ran the town for the rest of the century. In 1847 residents organized Toisnot Academy, the start of a reputation for schools that the town kept⁷.

1849–1855 A Town, Then a County

On December 20, 1848, Edgecombe senator Wyatt Moye introduced a bill to "incorporate Toisnot Depot and Hickory Grove in the County of Edgecombe into a town by the name of Wilson." It was ratified on January 29, 1849. The first commissioners were Joshua Barnes, John W. Farmer, James D. Barnes, Jonathan D. Rountree and Arthur Farmer⁸.

The name honored Louis Dicken Wilson, born in Edgecombe County on May 12, 1789. He served Edgecombe in the state House from 1814 to 1819 and in the state Senate for most of the years between 1820 and 1846, was one of the county's two delegates to the constitutional convention of 1835, and was Speaker of the Senate in 1842–43. When the Mexican War began he volunteered, was commissioned colonel of the 12th U.S. Infantry in 1847, and died of yellow fever at Vera Cruz on August 12, 1847. He left $40,000 for the poor of Edgecombe County. He had ties to the place before it bore his name: he was among the incorporators of the Hickory Grove Academy in 1831, and in January 1847 the Edgecombe volunteer company that had just elected him captain met at Toisnot Depot for a barbecue before leaving for the war⁹. He died about eighteen months before the town was chartered.

It was a small place. The Old Wilson nomination quotes an estimate of "probably 250" residents in 1854, and it identifies the oldest surviving house in Wilson as the former Wilson Female Academy, built after an 1853 call for bids and moved in 1905 to 200 West Vance Street¹⁰.

A county took much longer. Court days, jury duty and militia musters meant long trips to distant county seats over poor roads and unbridged streams, and J. M. Daniel Jr.'s account of the campaign, abstracted on the city's history page, traces bills and petitions for a new county back to 1787. They failed again and again: an 1830 amendment would have named the county Spaight, and an 1852 bill died by two votes, 39 to 37. In 1854, 873 people signed a petition for the new county and 813 Edgecombe residents signed one against it. The bill passed the House of Commons 72 to 23 on January 23, 1855, was ratified on February 13, 1855, and the first county court met on April 23, 1855. The county was cut from Edgecombe, Nash, Johnston and Wayne and named for the same Louis D. Wilson¹¹.

Becoming the county seat moved the center of town. A Gothic Revival courthouse went up in 1855 on Nash Street, on the site of today's courthouse, and Nash Street itself had been the route of an 1853 plank road to Greenville. Business drifted from the depot toward the courthouse, and Nash Street became the main street it still is¹².

1860–1865 Slavery and the War

The county's farm economy ran on enslaved labor. The 1860 federal census counted 9,720 people in Wilson County: 5,943 white residents, 281 free people of color and 3,496 people held in slavery, a little more than a third of the population. In the town itself, the East Wilson nomination reports 537 white residents and 32 free Black residents in 1860, with the number of enslaved people not separately reported; the free Black men it identifies worked as potters, shoemakers, carpenters and blacksmiths¹³.

No battle was fought at Wilson. Its war was the railroad, which the state's marker essay calls the "lifeline of the Confederacy" for the supplies it carried from Wilmington to Lee's army in Virginia, and a hospital. North Carolina's General Military Hospital No. 2 opened in the building of the Wilson Female Seminary under Dr. Solomon S. Satchwell, employed thirty-five to forty people, and was listed in 1864 among the state's twenty-one principal military hospitals. On July 20, 1863, when a Union force advanced toward the town, the marker essay says hospital patients and local militia stopped them by destroying the bridge over Toisnot Swamp. The dead from the hospital were later moved from a mass grave to the town cemetery. After the war the seminary reopened, and in 1872 it was chartered as the Wilson Collegiate Institute¹⁴. The date the hospital opened depends on the source: the marker essay says April 1862, the downtown nomination 1863.

Wilson's distance from the fighting also drew refugees from the coast, and some stayed. Mary Cleaves Seabrook Daniels, widowed in the war, came to Wilson and served as postmistress from 1866 to 1883, and her son Josephus Daniels bought the Wilson Advance in 1881, years before he owned the Raleigh News and Observer¹⁵.

1870–1919 Cotton, Then Bright Leaf

Cotton carried the county out of the war. The downtown nomination counts 3,012 bales in 1859 and 5,225 in the 1870 census. Alpheus Branch, who opened a private bank in 1872 that became the forerunner of Branch Banking and Trust, led the group that incorporated the Wilson Cotton Mills in 1880. Fires in the wooden business blocks led to an 1884 ordinance barring new frame buildings in the core of downtown, which is why the oldest commercial buildings that survive are brick¹⁶.

Tobacco barely existed here before the 1880s. The nomination's census figures run from 312 pounds grown in Wilson County in 1859 to 8,745 pounds on seventeen acres in 1879, and then to 232,966 pounds in 1889. Two things drove the change: cotton prices fell to about eight cents a pound for three straight years in the late 1880s, and local farmers who sold cured leaf in Henderson in 1884 reported getting about four times as much per acre as cotton paid. At first they had to haul it to markets in the Old Belt, such as Durham, Henderson and Oxford. To bring the market home, the town offered five years free of taxes to whoever built Wilson's first prize house, where cured leaf was packed into hogsheads¹⁷.

The Wilson Tobacco Market opened on September 10, 1890, in a warehouse on the old town cemetery lot at South Goldsboro and South streets, managed by the well-traveled warehouseman Edmund Martin Pace. The nomination calls it the first successful flue-cured market in eastern North Carolina. It also records two different first sales: its history section says the first lot sold the day before the opening, to Charles M. Fleming and Roscoe Briggs, while its building entry for their prize house says Fleming bought the first lot on opening day. Fleming came to be called the "Grandfather of the Wilson Tobacco Market," and experienced tobacco men from the Danville area and from the Virginia and North Carolina border counties joined him and the county's own natives in building the market¹⁸.

The growth was fast. The first season sold about 1.5 million pounds through one warehouse; in 1900, five warehouses sold about 15.1 million. In 1919 the market handled 42,330,509 pounds at an average of 53.67 cents a pound, almost twenty-three million dollars to growers, and passed Danville, Virginia, as the largest flue-cured tobacco market in the country. Through the 1920s it averaged about 66 million pounds a year. For a few years Wilson also made cigarettes: the Wells-Whitehead company's "Carolina Brights" reached 92 million cigarettes in 1906 under American Tobacco Company ownership before the machinery went to Durham¹⁹.

The money shows in brick. The downtown district kept eight large brick auction warehouses built between 1890 and 1928, and the seven at its core, centered on Goldsboro Street, have roofs pierced by thousands of raised skylights that lit the sale floors. The nomination calls them, taken together, the most important collection of tobacco auction warehouses in the nation, and it calls the Imperial Tobacco Company plant beside the railroad the largest early industrial plant in eastern North Carolina²⁰.

1870–1940 East Wilson

After emancipation, Black families moved from the county's farms into town. The East Wilson nomination counts 264 Black residents of Wilson in 1870 and 1,131 by 1900, and it describes them settling more and more on the east side of the railroad, apart from the white neighborhoods and the business district on the west. The nomination attributes that pattern to a mix of causes: the wish to live near family, friends and churches, white hostility, and how little housing elsewhere in the city was open to Black residents. Most of the work available was in the tobacco stemmeries and redrying plants, hand labor in dust and poor light for low pay, while white opposition kept Black workers out of the textile mills and most skilled trades²².

The neighborhood built its own institutions anyway. Samuel H. Vick (1863–1946), principal of the Black graded school, was appointed Wilson's postmaster in 1889 through Congressman Henry P. Cheatham of the district called the "Black Second" and held the job again from 1898 to 1903. He became the largest landowner in East Wilson, named streets for his daughters Elba, Carolina and Viola and for Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee, and built rows of shotgun houses for rent on East Vance Street. Dr. Frank Hargrave, a Shaw University graduate, opened the city's first hospital for Black patients in a house on East Green Street in 1905 and then led the drive for the Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home, built in 1913 and later known as Mercy Hospital, which closed as a hospital in 1964²³. The downtown nomination adds the three-story Odd Fellows Hall of 1894, the Orange Hotel that Vick built in 1906 as the city's first hotel for Black travelers, and the Commercial Bank he founded in 1920 on East Nash Street, which failed in 1930. It also credits Vick, rather than Hargrave, with founding the 1913 hospital; the East Wilson nomination says Vick assisted. Both accounts are given here²⁴.

The houses tell the same story. The East Wilson nomination, dated 1987, counts about 1,200 buildings in the district, from one- and two-room worker houses, saddlebag duplexes and shotgun houses to the Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and bungalow homes of a Black middle class of ministers, teachers, doctors, barbers, morticians and tradesmen, many of them on East Green Street and North Pender Street. State preservation staff told its author that East Wilson held the largest collection of shotgun houses in any single neighborhood in North Carolina. The nomination also singles out Nestus Freeman, a Tuskegee-trained stonemason, for the stone houses he built in the district from the 1920s into the 1940s, including a round stone house of about 1945, and it rates the district of statewide significance as one of North Carolina's major intact historically Black neighborhoods²⁵.

1902–1929 College, Hotel and Neighborhoods

In May 1902 the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) opened Atlantic Christian College in Wilson with 107 students and one building, Kinsey Hall; on September 6, 1990, it became Barton College, named for the Disciples leader Barton W. Stone. The Old Wilson nomination says that building was the Kinsey Institute of 1897, which became the college in 1902 and was torn down in 1955, and that a neighborhood called College Park filled in around the campus with merchants' cottages and later bungalows²⁶.

Tobacco money also built the residential streets around downtown. West Nash Street became the address of the warehousemen and tobacconists who built the market, among them Ula H. Cozart and Selby H. Anderson. The Old Wilson district runs from a few surviving houses of the 1850s into the twentieth century and takes in Maplewood Cemetery, opened in 1876, and a large collection of 1910s and 1920s bungalows. The Broad-Kenan streets district grew from about 1890 to the Depression as a middle-class neighborhood, with more than sixty percent of its buildings bungalows by the city's count. Much of this was designed by three local architects, Solon Balias Moore and the brothers Charles C. and Frank W. Benton²⁷.

The Cherry Hotel at Nash and Lodge streets shows how the rail and tobacco trade filled downtown. The six-story hotel, with about two hundred rooms, was designed by Charles C. Benton for R. A. Cherry; it served traveling salesmen and tobacco buyers, and its nomination describes Wilson as a midpoint for travelers between New York and Florida. Its date is uncertain: the hotel's own nomination quotes a longtime employee who said work began around 1917 and stalled when the money ran out, and it records a first directory listing in 1922–23, while the downtown nomination dates the hotel 1921²⁸.

Across Lodge Street the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad built a new passenger station in 1924 to a design by A. M. Griffin of Wilmington. The downtown nomination calls it Mission Revival; Amtrak's station history calls it Flemish, with Spanish terra cotta roof tiles. The station was restored in phases from 1996 and is still served by Amtrak's Carolinian and Palmetto²⁹.

1929–1985 Depression to the Bypass

The Depression hit fast. The Commercial Bank failed in 1930, and the First National Bank of Wilson and the Planters Bank both closed in December 1931. Tobacco revenues fell to a third of their late-1920s level in 1931 and 1932, and in 1933 Governor Ehringhaus shut the markets for three weeks while a delegation asked Washington for help. Federal work-relief money built the county library, a swimming pool and the municipal building in 1938. After the Second World War, highways drew travelers away from downtown hotels, and new auction warehouses went up along the bypasses south of town instead of in the old district. The city's population still grew, from 19,234 in 1940 to 29,347 in 1970³⁰.

Out in the county, a farm machinery repairman named Vollis Simpson was building something new. Born in 1919, he served in the Army Air Corps on Saipan in the Second World War, ran a repair business and moved houses on the side, and saved the salvage. After he retired at 65 he began building wind-driven sculptures forty and fifty feet tall from fans, bicycle wheels, pipe and old highway signs cut into reflective squares, in a field about eleven miles outside the city that drew visitors with no advertising at all. In 2013 the General Assembly made the whirligigs of Vollis Simpson the official folk art of North Carolina³¹.

2008–Present Fiber, Whirligigs and a Ballpark

The city also owns its own fiber network. Greenlight's history page says the city offered to buy the local cable system in 2001 and was turned down, connected its electric substations with fiber by 2005, and began building fiber to homes in 2007 over the opposition of the cable company. Service started in June 2008, and by 2009 every home and business inside the city limits could get it. A 2011 state law, H129, then held Greenlight to the Wilson County line, and in 2013 the network moved to gigabit service, which Greenlight describes as making Wilson North Carolina's first "Gigabit City"³². That is a city service, and the Greenlight chapter of the Triangle Commuter brief explains who can and cannot get it.

The whirligigs came to town in the same years. A plan announced in 2010 moved Simpson's sculptures from his field to a downtown block for conservation; Simpson died in May 2013 at 94, after seeing the first of them installed. The two-acre Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, at 301 Goldsboro Street South, holds thirty of them, and its pavilion was designed to echo the tobacco warehouses around it³³. It was dedicated on November 2, 2017; the public radio report on the dedication quoted a state press release saying the park had already drawn $25 million in private investment downtown, a figure from the state's announcement rather than an independent count³⁴. NCpedia's folk-art entry, written earlier, describes thirty-two restored whirligigs and an opening planned for November 2013; the park's own account and the 2017 coverage give thirty and 2017, and this page follows them.

The newest chapter is the ballpark on the same street, which opened in April 2026³⁵. The ballpark chapter of the Downtown Historic brief separates what is built from what is still only planned.

For Buyers What the History Means for a House

Much of this history is still standing, and some of it comes with rules. The City of Wilson has three local historic districts, Old Wilson, West Nash and Broad-Kenan, covering about 740 parcels where exterior changes go through the Historic Preservation Commission. East Wilson and the Central Business/Tobacco Warehouse district are on the National Register but, by the city's account, are not local districts and are not under the commission³⁶. Before you price a renovation, confirm which applies to the specific parcel.

• Which rules bind this house: the three local districts, the two National Register districts and the Certificate of Appropriateness.
• The pre-1940 house: what older Wilson houses have actually sold for, and how condition drives the price.
• Tax credits and renovation money: the federal and state historic credits and renovation loans.
• Living downtown: what the city line adds in fiber, utilities and tax.