Cameron Village’s name change may be the easy part. Now, the hard work of making it stick
West of downtown Raleigh, the name Cameron appears on more than a dozen signs: a nail salon, a public library, three apartment buildings and — until Thursday — the city’s oldest shopping center.
The name dates to Duncan Cameron: planter, banker, politician and once ranked among North Carolina’s richest men. But that wealth was based largely on slave labor.
Cameron Village has drawn Raleigh shoppers since the 1940s, when it opened on the family’s land. Now the shopping center’s owners have abandoned its namesake, renaming it Village District to cut ties with the name’s racist past.
But as Raleigh rethinks its history, taking down Confederate monuments and renaming its schools, the name Cameron Village may prove harder to shake.
Cameron and Oberlin: Two different histories
Cameron Village formed a central spot in a city that sprawled out in all directions, and newcomers learned to find it because it once had the only Harris Teeter inside the I-440 Beltline.
Dropping it from the city’s vocabulary, even for social justice reasons, may be as hard a habit to break among long-term residents as calling Coastal Credit Union Music Park anything but Walnut Creek.
“It is branded as Cameron Village,” said Daniel Coleman, who is Black and a community leader in Southeast Raleigh. “It has been branded as Cameron Village since 1940. How do you unbrand something in people’s mind? I don’t know. People like myself who grew up here, it will always be Cameron Village.”
Part of the sting brought by the shopping center’s name stems from the history of its neighbor, Oberlin Village, founded by free Black people and later eroded away largely by development pressures and gentrification.
The name Oberlin was an homage to the accepting spirit of Oberlin College and the town of Oberlin, both in Ohio, which in turn were named for John Frederic Oberlin, a French minister and social reformer.
Descendants of Oberlin Village residents are proud of the neighborhood’s history since its founding in 1866, and of the people who sprang from it.
Those included laborers such as the brick masons who helped build the shopping center, but also educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers and architects.
Sabrina Goode, a founder of the nonprofit Friends of Oberlin Village, who approached Regency Centers of Jacksonville, Florida, about changing the name from Cameron Village, said she would like to see the Cameron named dropped from every business and residential property in the area.
One reason, she said, is that it would make it easier for people to accept the shopping center’s new name.
Many people who have shopped at Cameron Village or lived in the houses and apartments built as part of Raleigh’s first planned mixed-use development have no idea of the Cameron family history in North Carolina.
For them, the name is a spot on a map: a street sign, a neighborhood, a place to shop for clothes or meet friends for lunch.
‘Erase Cameron Village from our minds’
But putting a name on a shopping center — or an office or classroom building, a stadium, a freeway — is intended as an honor, Goode said, and who gets honored that way is an important question.
For other longtime Raleigh residents, the change will be easy. Octavia Rainey, a Black community activist in the neighborhoods around St. Augustine’s University, has never referred to the area as Cameron Village. Always Oberlin.
“We should erase Cameron Village from our minds,” she said. “It was really Oberlin Village, a village for free Black people, and you only mention it when it’s appropriate? What’s important is telling the truth.”
Goode was one of many people who approached WakeMed last year after noticing the banners on the construction sites of two buildings the health care giant had underway along Oberlin Road.
The buildings, one a rehabbed former bank and the other a new structure on the site where the U.S. Post Office used to stand, both sit squarely inside the boundaries of the original Oberlin Village.
On the post office site once stood the home of Dr. Lovelace Capehart, a Black physician from the village. But when construction fencing went up, banners announced the coming of “WakeMed Cameron.”
Deb Laughery, vice president of marketing and communications for WakeMed, said Friday the company names most of its ancillary operations for the road they face or the area where they sit. But after hearing opposition to the Cameron name, the company changed plans.
“We listened,” she said.
One of the two buildings, a two-story, 10,500-square-foot space for urgent and primary care, opened last fall. The other, a 41,000-square-foot, two-story structure that will house medical specialty offices, is not yet complete. Right now they both are simply being called WakeMed.
Laughery said the company is working with neighborhood representatives on developing a small garden at the buildings that would somehow pay tribute to Oberlin Village history, including the use of historically accurate plantings.
Negotiations with condo developer
Goode continues to see the name Cameron attached to new development in the area where the shopping center and Oberlin Village meet, including on land that was once part of the historic neighborhood.
At the moment, Goode said, the Friends of Oberlin Village are negotiating with the developer of a condominium development there called 904 Oberlin, which added a street it named Cameron Manor Way.
Goode said the board of the friends group felt so strongly about the street name, it voted to pay for the permitting process to change the name as well as for the manufacture of a new street sign and, if necessary, even the cost of residents having to get new drivers’ licenses made.
Condos at 904 Oberlin are marketed on the company’s website as being “where luxury meets location ... in the heart of Cameron Village.”
A three-bedroom condo in the the development is currently being offered for more than $1.1 million.
Goode said she doesn’t know why Regency Centers decided not to incorporate Oberlin into the new name of the shopping center, or why other developers she has approached were willing to use the Cameron name but not the Oberlin name, even when they were on former Oberlin land.
Maybe it’s because naming anything after someone could be fraught with future danger.
“We don’t always know what skeletons are in people’s closets,” Goode said.
Name changes take time
Though Cameron Village is now Village District, it’s likely to take awhile for people to get used to the new name. Some examples of Raleigh spots sometimes still referred to by their old names:
▪ Seven Even store (now Peace Street Market)
▪ Walnut Creek (now Coastal Credit Union Music Park)
▪ Wellspring (now Whole Foods)
▪ State College (now N.C. State University)
▪ Downtown Boulevard (now Capital Boulevard)
▪ Darryl’s (now David’s Dumpling and Noodle Bar)
This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 7:04 PM.
