Warnersville: The Neighborhood Freedpeople Built

In eighteen sixty-five, a Pennsylvania Quaker named Yardley Warner came to Greensboro carrying money from the Association of Friends of Philadelphia. The Civil War had just ended. Formerly enslaved people were free in a legal sense, and almost entirely without resources, land, or legal standing. Warner purchased thirty-five and a half acres just south of the city limits and subdivided it into lots.

He sold those lots, on extended terms, to Black families who wanted to own property. It was the first planned Black community in Guilford County where residents could own their own homes, run their own businesses, build their own churches, and educate their own children without depending on white institutions to permit any of it.

The community was named Warnersville, after the Quaker who had made the purchase possible. Harmon Unthank became its first significant leader, the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood in the eighteen seventies. Saint Matthews United Methodist Church was founded in eighteen sixty-four. New Zion Baptist Church was established in eighteen ninety-seven. Warnersville grew into a self-sustaining neighborhood of churches, schools, and small businesses that Black Greensboro residents had built with their own capital.

Urban renewal in the nineteen sixties demolished most of it. The federal program that the city used was the first federally funded urban renewal project in North Carolina, and it targeted Warnersville. The homes, the businesses, the churches that had not been absorbed into larger congregations, most of the visible fabric of the neighborhood, were replaced by public and private housing that residents had no hand in designing or governing.

Two structures survived: the J. C. Price School and Union Cemetery. In two thousand fifteen, Greensboro designated Warnersville its first Heritage Community. The designation acknowledges what was there. It does not restore it.