Happy Hill: Freedom's First Address

In eighteen seventy-two, a group of formerly enslaved men and women walked across Salem Creek and began to build a neighborhood. The Salem trustees had set aside land on the far side of the creek, land that had been the Schumann plantation, and offered lots for sale. They called it Liberia. The people who moved there called it Happy Hill, and Happy Hill is what it has been ever since.

For the people who created it, the name meant something real. Happy Hill was one of the first places in the post-Civil War South where freedmen and freedwomen could legally purchase land and build homes on their own terms. The African School had already opened nearby in eighteen sixty-seven, an early school for Black children in Forsyth County, on land provided by the Moravian Church.

The neighborhood grew steadily into the early twentieth century. Residents built churches, formed mutual aid societies, and lobbied the city for a footbridge across the creek so they could reach their workplaces in town. That footbridge, eventually built, is now part of the Salem Creek Greenway.

Happy Hill stood for nearly a hundred years before highway construction began tearing it apart in the nineteen sixties. Urban renewal, Interstate Forty, and US Highway Fifty-Two carved through the neighborhood, demolishing hundreds of homes and displacing families who had been there for generations.

Some of those families stayed. Today the neighborhood is recognized for its historic significance, and the city has made efforts at preservation, including programs to restore historic homes. One of the oldest Black neighborhoods in Winston-Salem still exists, if not as it once was.