Navigating the Lost Landmarks of a North Carolina City
I spent about three weeks last winter tracking down references to the old Moravian stone walls scattered around what is now Forsyth County. Most of them are gone. Not damaged. Not obscured. Completely demolished, sometimes by the very people who claimed to be preserving local heritage. I ended up sitting in the basement of the Old Salem Museum, cross-referencing 19th-century land plats with 1970s subdivision maps, trying to figure out where the west boundary of the Friedberg tract actually sat. A water tower now sits exactly where I expected a church cemetery to be. This kind of work is the closest thing most people ever get to what I mean by Overlooks From The Past A Journey Through Winston Salems Forgotten Histories. It is not a single published book with a ISBN. It is a working concept. Researchers and historians who focus on the area use it to describe the practice of piecing together vanished structures, renamed streets, and displaced communities from fragmented public records, private correspondence, and the occasional surviving physical marker. The goal is to reconstruct what existed before the suburban sprawl overwrote it.
Why Standard Sources Fall Short
The Winston-Salem Journal archives are useful, but they are selective. Major events get coverage. Everyday changes rarely do. The Forsyth County Register of Deeds is exhaustive but organized by legal description, not by landmarks. You can find a conveyance record showing that Lot 14 in Subdivision B was sold in 1952, but the record will not tell you that Lot 14 used to be part of a 40-acre tobacco warehouse district from 1898. That information lives in property tax maps that no longer have digital equivalents. The North Carolina Digital Collections site has scanned many historical maps. I have used the Sanborn fire insurance maps extensively. They are excellent for seeing building footprints and materials. Their limitation is coverage. Sanborn maps for Winston-Salem were created in 1887, 1904, 1923, and 1947, with significant gaps between. If a building was constructed in 1931 and demolished in 1939, it may not appear in any surviving Sanborn sheet. You have to go to city building permits, which are held at the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Planning and Development Services office. Those files are paper. They are not indexed well. Finding the right permit number requires knowing the approximate address and the year, and even then you may encounter files labeled with incorrect street names from old renumbering projects.
A Working Method for Recovering Lost Sites
Start with what is already documented. The Old Salem Museums & Gardens maintains extensive research files. The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public Library Local History Department has photographs and city directories that go back to the 1850s. City directories are underrated resources. They list occupants by address, sometimes with occupations, which helps identify whether a structure was residential, commercial, or industrial. The 1910 directory for the area around present-day Fourth Street shows several families listed at addresses that no longer exist because the street was realigned in 1936 during the Great Depression-era road improvement projects. Next, pull the tax revaluation maps. Forsyth County publishes historical revaluation maps going back to the 1970s in PDF format through the GIS department. The early versions are lower resolution but still readable for parcel boundaries. Overlaying a 1975 map with a 1995 map often reveals new subdivisions, removed wetlands, and filled-in creeks. I once identified the approximate location of a collapsed limestone quarry near Westfield Road by noticing a sharp boundary discontinuity between two revaluation years that matched up with a faint dashed line on an 1890 atlas. For anything pre-1900, the Moravian records are the most complete source in the region. The Plan of Salvation and subsequent land distributions created detailed documentation that most other North Carolina counties lack. These records are accessible through the Moravian Archives at Old Salem. They include lot assignments, boundary disputes, marriage records tied to specific properties, and burial records. The archive staff is helpful but slow. Expect to spend a morning just reading through microfilm reels for a single family line.
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Getting Into the Physical Record
There is a specific problem I encountered that illustrates why this work is harder than it sounds. I was trying to verify the location of the former Tanglewood Elementary School, which operated from 1928 to 1962 before being demolished. The address was listed as 1200 Tanglewood Drive in every document I found. Tanglewood Drive does not exist anymore. The street was absorbed into a larger thoroughfare during a 1965 annexation and road realignment. The new street name is Patterson Road. My first approach was to search the county parcel database using the old address. Nothing came up. Then I tried the old street name. Also nothing. The database only recognizes current legal addresses. I ended up going to the Forsyth County Board of Transportation archive, which holds historical street closure and abandonment records. There, I found a 1964 resolution showing that the segment of Tanglewood Drive between Hanes Boulevard and Peters Creek was officially abandoned and rerouted. The resolution included a hand-drawn sketch map with property corners. Following those corners on a modern parcel map led me to a vacant lot behind a strip mall off Patterson Road. A single brick pillar from the school entrance still stands there, painted over and nearly invisible. This is the practical reality of researching forgotten histories in Winston-Salem. The records exist. They are scattered across five or six different government offices, some of which have limited public access hours. The workaround is patience and a physical notebook. Digital searches fail frequently because place names change. Writing down every variant name you encounter and tracking when those changes occurred prevents you from hitting dead ends.
Common Pitfalls for People Starting Out
The biggest mistake is assuming that a name appearing in one record means the same thing in another record. "Winston" and "Winston-Salem" are two different municipal periods. The city of Winston incorporated in 1849. Salem was founded earlier by the Moravians and remained a separate entity until 1913. Records before 1913 may list an address as being in Salem, which is now technically part of Winston-Salem. Google Maps will not show you a 1905 map of Salem. You need the Forsyth County Historical Atlas from 1905, which is available on microfilm at the public library and as a scanned PDF through the NC Digital Collections. The PDF version is adequate for street-level work. Another issue is the assumption that demolished buildings left no trace. Physical remnants often survive in unexpected places. Foundation stones, brick outlines, and old well shafts are common. I have personally used a metal detector to locate iron nail patterns in soil along the proposed route of a historic wagon road near the Saluda Gap. The nail concentrations, though sparse, confirmed the road alignment that appeared on an 1828 survey map but was completely absent from modern topographic maps. The key is knowing where to look and understanding that soil disturbance is evidence in itself. There are also limitations worth acknowledging. This type of research cannot recover everything. Some records were destroyed. The 1916 courthouse fire in nearby Raleigh affected state-level records for several surrounding counties, though Forsyth County's probate records survived relatively intact. Personal papers, church records from smaller congregations, and oral histories from displaced communities are often lost entirely. Black neighborhoods like East Winston and parts of Lawndale were systematically under-documented during the segregation era. Property records from those areas frequently list occupants only by surname and initial, with no full names or precise addresses. This is a gap that requires community-based research methods, such as contacting historical societies and collecting family records, rather than relying on official documents alone.
Practical Steps for Anyone Wanting to Do This Work
If you want to pursue this yourself, start by obtaining a current printed copy of the Forsyth County tax map for your area of interest. Visit the GIS department at 301 E. 5th Street in Winston-Salem and request historical map comparisons. They will assist you in pulling older versions. Budget two to three hours for this visit. Next, schedule time at the Local History Department of the public library on the second floor of the main branch. Request the city directory collection for your target decade. Read three to five consecutive years to track occupancy changes and street name corrections. Bring a camera. Photocopying is allowed but slow. Photographing pages is faster. For deeper research, plan a full day at the Moravian Archives if your subject involves pre-1850 properties. Bring a portable scanner if you need high-quality images. The microfilm readers are functional but produce grainy output. A personal scanner gives you usable resolution for later analysis. Do not expect the archive to do research for you. Staff members will help you locate reels but will not interpret the records. You need to read and transcribe the entries yourself. Finally, maintain a research log. I use a simple spreadsheet with columns for source type, date consulted, reference number, location described, current status of the location, and notes on discrepancies. This seems tedious. It is necessary. I once spent an afternoon chasing a lead based on a 1920 city directory entry that I had miscopied. The actual entry listed a different street entirely. A log would have caught the error immediately. Without one, I wasted three hours driving to a location that never existed under that name.
The material culture of Winston-Salem is layered. Each development period leaves distinct evidence. The Moravian grid pattern is still visible in Old Salem. The industrial zones established in the early 1900s around the R.J. Reynolds tobacco operations shaped the eastern part of the city. Postwar suburban expansion overlaid everything else. Understanding which layer you are examining determines which records to consult and which physical markers to expect. There is no shortcut around this distinction. Confusing a 1920s commercial district with a 1950s residential development will lead you to the wrong map series and the wrong archive collection. Pay attention to the time period before you begin. It saves roughly half the time otherwise spent correcting course.
