St. Augustine’s University:A Raleigh HBCU in bankruptcy limbo

As noted in a recent previous post, I decided to try and to a photo profile of the St. Augustine’s University campus in Raleigh because I knew the school was closed after unsuccessful attempts to weather considerable financial difficulties. I also knew it was in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and I was hoping to get quality photos of the campus before it was allowed to fall into irretrievable disrepair. 

Alas, visitors are required to stop at a security checkpoint, where after telling the security guard why I was there, I was told in no uncertain terms that the school was closed and I’d have to turn around and leave. Which I did. 

I learned later that in the short time since on-campus classes ceased in May, there had already been some vandalism on the grounds. Learning about that tempered my initial reaction to being turned away at the checkpoint

I went on to photograph nearby Oakwood Cemetery and the Ruins of St. Agnes Hospital (see two previous posts), after which I doubled back to stroll down Oakwood Avenue and capture the St. Augustine’s campus pictures you see here, all taken from outside the property fence. I’ve been doing college or university campus photo profiles for more than 15 years, and this one is undoubtedly my least favorite. But it’s a historic site that might not have much time left, and I wanted to try.

St. Augustine’s was a private institution founded in 1867 by Episcopal clergy to educate formerly enslaved African American people. Through its years, it grew from a normal school to a junior college to a four-year liberal arts institution. In 1883, it survived a fire that destroyed all its academic buildings because white fire companies refused to fight the blaze.

Goold Hall and lawn, shown in the photo leading off the post, was a place for events and community gatherings at St. Augustine’s. It was named for Rev. Edgar Hunt Goold, who in 1916 became the school’s fifth principal and, in 1925, he became its first president. That same year, the school changed its name to St. Augustine’s College and offered its first courses for college credit.

The name became St. Augustine’s University in 2012 at a time it prepared to offer master’s degrees. But the school began to experience serious financial troubles in the 1990s just as it reached its peak enrollment of 1,918 in 1992. 

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accrediting agency placed the university on warning in late 2001, and on probation two years later. St. Augustine’s managed to eliminate its deficit and was removed from probation in 2004. But in 2013, an audit uncovered disorganized accounting and improper issuance of checks, and by 2016 the school was back on probation.

Once more the school dug out of trouble and was removed from probation in 2018 … until landing there again a third time in 2022. After appeals and litigation to retain its accreditation over the next few years, and a brief reprieve by an arbitration panel, the accreditation agency voted in 2024 to remove the school as a member, a decision upheld on appeal the following year.

St. Augustine’s entered bankruptcy proceedings in April of this year and announced it would cease on-campus classes in May, thereafter offering online classes for certificates and apprentice programs. It also said it would pursue a way to restore accreditation.

The Wikipedia entry for St. Augustine's gives a very thorough accounting of the school's history of difficulties if you're interesting in learning more.

There aren't any more quality images from the marginal photo shoot of the campus, but if you'd like to peruse images of the full shoot, follow the link in this sentence.   

Above and below: There was no signage to help me identify this building, but based on its location on a campus map, I believe this is the Taylor Wellness Center. 

  

Above and below: Again, no signage, but based on its place on the campus map, I believe this is the Tuttle Building used for ROTC training. 

The familiar stone slab (above) greeting visitors at the main Oakwood Avenue entrance. Below, just to the right of the stone slab is this access drive … and a security checkpoint in the white hut in the distance. 

Above: I believe this was the campus chapel, but I’m not sure. 

Above: I don’t know what this building is, and even though the small blue sign in the right foreground says Chapel, I’m pretty sure this building is not the chapel. It’s a sign intended for the building in the photo above this one. 

Above: This sign is on a median in front of the school but on the south side of Oakwood Avenue.

Ruins that deserve far better

On June 3, I traveled to the northeast fringe of downtown Raleigh hoping to do a campus profile of St. Augustine’s University, an Historically Black College or University. 

When I arrived at the campus, I had to stop at a security checkpoint, and after explaining why I was there, I was told I was out of luck because the school was closed. I was asked to leave. 

So I moved on to plans B and C. Plan B was to do a walk-around in Oakwood Cemetery next door (see yesterday’s post), and Plan C was to make of photographs of the structure you see in the lead-off photo.

The structure is the former St. Agnes Hospital, which technically is on the grounds of the St. Augustine’s campus, but it stands separately on modest acreage between the closed university and the cemetery. 

I didn’t look up any of these landmarks before I drove out there; the trip was spur of the moment. So I didn’t know what I would be dealing with when I got there. (I don’t recommend this for photography enthusiasts; you should know what to expect if you invest time and travel to do a shoot of this sort).

The hospital ruins certainly surprised me; when I got home afterward and looked up its history, I was saddened, partly because of what has become of this historic facility, and partly — maybe even mostly — because of the city of Raleigh’s protracted indecision about what to do with it, if anything. 

St. Agnes was open for about 65 years, from 1896 to 1961, and it served as a hospital and a training center for physicians and nurse for African Americans. It initially operated out of a former college president’s residence on the school campus and didn’t move into this then-new building until 1909. Nurses took chemistry, sociology and psychology classes at St. Augustine’s College (the name it went by back then) as well as the regular nursing curriculum as part of their training.

In short order, the two other hospitals in the city that would treat African Americans — Rex Hospital and Shaw University’s Leonard Hospital — closed, leaving St. Agnes the only option for the community’s black residents.

St. Agnes struggled financially during almost its entire period of operation although various — and multiple — fund-raising campaigns helped sustain it through the years, including a particularly difficult period during the Great Depression. 

But the building eventually fell into disrepair, was condemned in 1955 and was closed six years later after Wake County opened its first public hospital, which treated patients of all races. 

In 1979, the city declared the building a historic landmark, which helps explain why it remains standing today. And it does so with the help of several steel support beams (the long orange-colored slabs of metal you see in the pictures).

Upon its closing, the land and buildings were transferred to St. Augustine’s, which used one of the buildings for housing of female students. In the interim, various plans and ideas for the site’s future have been discussed, to no avail. 

In the most recent development, a feasibility study was funded in 2022 to determine whether the ruins could be preserved or renovated. Nothing has come out of that that I know of. 

One thing I thought of was to make the building a museum for Raleigh area African American physicians, nurses, and their medical training and education. Perhaps students, alumni and/or faculty at St. Augustine’s as well as Shaw University and North Carolina Central University in Durham, two other HBCUs in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle, might be interested in participating or leading the way.  

Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh

In historic Oakwood Cemetery’s 140 years of existence, it should not be surprising to learn that the grounds are the final resting place for 22,000 people, among them seven former governors, five U.S. senators, eight North Carolina Supreme Court justices and four Civil War generals. 

And, oh, it also is the resting place of North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano (see lead-off photo) and Lorenzo Charles, who scored the winning basket for Valvano’s NCAA championship team of 1983. Valvano died of cancer in 1993; Charles died in an accident while at the wheel of a 2011 tour bus in which he was the only occupant.

They are buried in the Cedar Hill section along Locust Avenue. (If you want to visit the cemetery and find certain graves, it’s best to determine whose graves you want to find, then search online for their burial section. Once in the cemetery, consult a section map the cemetery provides online.)   

In fact, Lorenzo Charles’ grave (see first photo below) is a very short distance — perhaps 15 yards — from that of his coach. In the second photo below, you can see Valvano’s monument in the foreground with Charles’ monument (look for the NCSU red colors) left of Valvano’s in the distance just below the ridge. 

Being a sports fan, my primary focus was finding the Valvano and Charles grave sits. I spent a good two hours roaming the cemetery and its perimeter; I have to note the latter because it was difficult to find an opening to the grounds. And then once inside, it took another long while on foot to find a way to reach the largest section of the cemetery. I could have taken far more pictures if I’d known the layout ahead of time, but alas, I foolishly did not scout such things beforehand.

Actually, I had a secondary (or primary?) purpose for heading to that part of the north Raleigh downtown fringe on Wednesday. I was hoping to do a photo profile of St. Augustine’s University, a former longtime degree-granting Historically Black College or University. 

That’s a story for a subsequent post, but for now, I’ll say that St. Augustine’s on-site operations have been shut down since going into bankruptcy, and private campus security would not grant me access to the interior campus. So the few campus shots I did make were taken from what I could access outside the school’s chain link fence surrounding the grounds along Oakwood Avenue.

Oakwood Cemetery covers 72 acres, 30 of which remain available for future graves, according to its website. Not surprisingly, it is part of the Oakwood Neighborhood, to which I was introduced recently when it turned out that one of my stately homes photographed while walking the Blount Street Historic District was just inside the Oakwood borders. 

I didn’t find the graves of any of the state Supreme Court justices or U.S. Senators, but I did come across the resting places of former Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock and former North Carolina Attorney General Bartholomew Figures Moore. And of the two, the monument for Moore (in the Battle Section) was far more extravagant (see first three photos below). 

Moore’s monument even contains a bust of the attorney general, often referred to as the “father of the North Carolina bar.” He is remembered for leading the legal team that compiled and revised the state’s statutes.

Aycock, whose monument is in the Beechwood Section and shown in the fourth photo below, today is a controversial figure in North Carolina history. He was championed for being “the education governor” because of his advocacy of improving public school education in North Carolina and for his post-gubernatorial travels promoting educational causes. 

But he had a reputation as a segregationist and has been singled out as the person most responsible for the horrific Wilmington Massacre, a November 1898 bloody municipal government coup in a city that had several African American political leaders. At the time, black residents also outnumbered white residents in North Carolina’s then-largest city. 

For the longest time, a statue of Aycock sat in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol Building as one of two honoring North Carolina notable citizens. In the early 2020s, amid the national Black Lives Matter movement, North Carolina replaced the statue with one of evangelist Rev. Billy Graham. 

And while I didn’t find any graves of specific military generals, I did find and photograph a section of the cemetery dedicated to the graves of Confederate Civil War soldiers. 

The remainder of my pictures were composed for landscape purposes, often focusing on interesting juxtaposition or collections of like monuments against open space or under trees. To view a full gallery of images from the shoot, follow the link in this sentence. 

Above and below: Photos of the Confederate Civil War dead in an (appropriately) southern section close to Oakwood Avenue. 

2 churches in different communities in the Triangle

On the northern fringe of downtown Raleigh, at 100 E. Peace St. across from William Peace University, stands Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

In an oddity of sorts, when I first set eyes on the church, it was from its east side as I strolled north on Blount Street while approaching the university. It was Sunday, May 17, and people were parking their cars in the nearby university parking lot (presumably with the university’s invitation and/or permission) and walking across the street to enter the church. 

But I’m jumping ahead. Back to first laying eyes on the church’s east side exterior … I was struck by the huge ornamental circle surrounded — or framed, perhaps? — by nicely trimmed ivy.. Plus there was the steeple ... so I knew I had a church photo profile opportunity once I reached Peace Street and turned west.

Because I had a lot on my agenda that morning, I didn’t try to get too many church photos. Besides, the church looked kind of boxed in to the west. So I took a handful of shots and moved on to the university. 

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The second church featured in this post is in the town of Fuquay-Varina, where I returned two weeks ago to do a photo profile of Trinity Episcopal, the church that in 1987 welcomed members of the town’s St. Bernadette Catholic to worship there while members of the latter congregation tried to put together a plan to build their own sanctuary. 

I profiled St. Bernadette here in late April, a post you can revisit by following the link in the previous paragraph. 

Trinity Episcopal, 1128 S. Main St., was smaller than I had expected. It is located on a plot of land also smaller than I had anticipated. 

But it’s a striking church from the outside, with a combination of red brick, a large white cross affixed to a white A-frame upper front panel, and has marble-colored steps. Perhaps its most attractive feature is the set of red doors that grab one’s attention when gazing at the edifice.