For several years now I’ve enjoyed a fourth floor office in downtown Raleigh with a grand view of the North Carolina State Capital just across Morgan Street from my building. When I look up from my computer to stretch my neck and ponder some difficult aspect of my work for the state, I often glance out my window and watch the flags flapping on the Capital dome or the occasional demonstrators carrying their signs and bullhorns around the statues on the Capital grounds. Sometimes I glimpse the brown and white hawk that sits high up in the big trees surrounding the Capital eyeing the busy but scatter-brained resident squirrels. And then sometimes, as my mind relaxes and wonders, I gaze out the window past the Capital building just beyond the park-like Capital grounds to where the brown waters of the stately Neuse River flow by.
And sometimes in early spring I watch the shad fishermen on the banks of the Neuse, in the shadow of the state legislative building, pulling in scads of the bony fish and tossing them in wicker baskets. And then the telephone rings, I snap back to reality and my vision of the Neuse loses focus and then evaporates. I recall that shad can’t swim this far upstream because of all the dams across the Neuse blocking their way. And in any event, I have to admit that despite how much I wish it weren’t so, the commissioners meeting at Joel Lane’s house in 1792 did indeed change their minds at the last minute and, instead of selecting for the location of the state capital the lovely once-favored site on the banks of the Neuse, they voted for the riverless Wake Crossroads site where the Capital Building now stands in the center of Union Square in the heart of Raleigh. And fifteen miles away to the east, old man Neuse still flows, ponderous and majestic, on its way to the sea through the empty wooded countryside that might once have been Raleigh.
In its early years the North Carolina legislature would convene all over the eastern half of the state. It met at least once in Bath, Brunswick, Halifax, New Bern, Smithfield, Tarboro and Wilmington. But in 1788 the legislature met in Hillsborough and decided that North Carolina would have an “unalterable seat of government” and that it should be located “within 10 miles of the plantation whereon Isaac Hunter now resides”. Hunter owned a popular tavern in Wake County. In 1792, the legislature appointed nine commissioners to meet in Wake County and hammer out the precise size and location of the future capital. Some of the commissioners’ names might ring a bell with those familiar with the street names in downtown Raleigh, e.g., Blount, Dawson, Hargett, Jones, Martin, McDowell, Person.
In late March of 1792 the commissioners journeyed to Wake County to begin their work. They gathered at the home of Joel Lane, by all accounts the grandest house in the sparsely populated Wake County. Lane called his home “Wakefield”. The commissioners would stay at Wakefield for the next eight days, apparently traveling around the county examining various parcels of land during the days and retiring to Lane’s house at night to discuss what they’d seen and to recover their energy and spirit courtesy of Lane’s famous hospitality.
Today, if you drive past North Carolina State University toward downtown Raleigh on Hillsborough Road, after a couple of stoplights you’ll see St. Mary’s School and then St. Mary’s Road. If you turn right on St. Mary’s Road, in two short blocks you’ll dead-end onto West Hargett Street. And there on your right is Wakefield - the house Joel Lane built in 1760 and the very house where the commissioners met in 1792. It’s the same house but in 1917 it was moved a short distance from its original location. The original site of Wakefield is located about a block or so to the northeast of the house’s present location. The knoll on which the house was built is still discernible where Morgan Street dips downhill before its intersection with Boylan Avenue. In the late 1700s Lane owned several thousands of acres in Wake County - but he built his house to be close to the intersection of two major highways, one running north to south and connecting Petersburg and Fayetteville, and the other running east to west and connecting New Bern and Hillsborough. The highways intersected about a half mile east of Lane’s house, at a spot known as Wake Crossroads. It’s said that in 1792 travelers and drovers used Wake Crossroads as a place to camp and rest their herds of livestock during their dusty trips along these two great roads. Joel Lane owned Wake Crossroads and all the land surrounding it.
History tells us that the early votes of the commissioners during their sojourn at Wakefield favored locating the permanent capital on the north bank of the Neuse River on land owned by Col. John Hinton - a relative by marriage of Joel Lane. Some retellings of the events claim that even on the last night before the final decision, the Neuse site was still the favorite. But on that last night, Joel Lane served his guests his special, thirst-quenching drink called a “cherry bounce” (maybe some sort of brandy or cherry wine) and surely there was much grand conversation and good cheer at Wakefield that night. In the morning the commissioners made their final vote and decided to fix the North Carolina capital on the land owned by their host, Joel Lane, with its center on the campground known as Wake Crossroads. The commissioners agreed to buy 1,000 acres of Lane’s land for 1,378 pounds- approximately $2,756. Raleigh would be a riverless capital.
Lane deeded the property to the state on April 5, 1792. Surveyors laid out the new town of Raleigh into a rectangle of ten by eleven blocks with Wake Crossroads becoming Union Square just to the north of the rectangle’s center. Union Square and the nearby lots were reserved for the state capital and the other lots were auctioned off to raise money for construction of the capital building. The first state capital building was completed in 1796 but was destroyed by fire in 1831. Construction of the Capital Building that now stands in the center of Union Square began in 1833 and was completed in 1840. Until 1888 the Capital Building housed all three branches of state government: the executive branch on the first floor; the legislative branch on the second floor; and the Supreme Court on the third floor.
Sometimes after work on a hot summer’s day, I’ll leave the back door of my building and walk past the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh that stands at the north end of Fayetteville Street Mall. Sir Walter’s statue proudly looks north toward Union Square and the State Capital. Following his glance, I’ll cross Morgan Street and stride up the steps onto the grounds of the old drovers’ campsite, the former Wake Crossroads, now Union Square (and sometimes called Capital Square). The crossroads are still there. Fayetteville Street (now a pedestrian mall), the old highway to Fayetteville and Charleston, stretches southwards behind me. New Bern Avenue heads toward the coast from the eastern side of Union Square. Hillsborough Road begins in the middle of the western border of the Square, and to the north (now a pedestrian mall leading to the state legislature) is the path to Halifax and Petersburg, Virginia, shown on old Raleigh maps as Halifax Road.
Often I’ll circumambulate the capital grounds. I’ll stop at the first statue placed on Union Square - a statue of George Washington, on the south side of the Capital Building, placed there in 1858 and flanked by two cannon that were mounted at Edenton in the 1770s. I’ll pass by the standing stone U.S. Geodetic Survey markers (placed there in 1853) in the Square’s southeastern corner close to the state’s geographic center. On the eastern side of the Square I’ll walk by the three presidents monument and the two mortars used at Fort Macon during the Civil War. And just to the northwest of the Capital Building, I’ll walk by the statue of the on-rushing Henry Lawson Wyatt, the first North Carolina soldier killed in the Civil War - shot at the Battle of Bethel Church on June 10, 1861. Then I’ll walk past the spot where I once watched the Union Square hawk standing in the grass next to the sidewalk calmly munching on a squirrel as state workers carefully walked by. I’ll look up into the Square’s big hardwoods to see if the brown and white bird is standing sentinel over the Square but usually I can’t find him.
Then I’ll leave the park-like grounds of Union Square, reach my parking place, and head out on the old Hillsborough Road toward my home to the west. I’ll cross over West Street (the western boundary of the rectangle first surveyed in 1792) and then pass by the old site of Lane’s Wakefield on the knoll overlooking downtown Raleigh. But I won’t stop - even though I’m thirsty and I could use icy, cherry-flavored thirst-quenching refreshment. Maybe something like a drink called a cherry bounce - even if made with Wake County well water rather than river water from old man Neuse. But, I know, I’m a couple hundred years too late to place my order. So I’ll just keep going past Hargett Street. And I’ll pull in at the next Fast Fare and pick up a can of Cheerwine for the drive home.