Courtesy Andria Fields
The Graves-Fields House in its new location on Oberlin Road
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RENEW REMEMBER With its new headquarters on Oberlin Road, Preservation N.C. puts mission into practice by HAMPTON WILLIAMS HOFER photography by CATHERINE NGUYEN
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ndria Fields can still smell Sunday mornings at 802 Oberlin Road, the table brimming with plates of steak, fatback, country ham, grits and her grandmother’s famous pearl biscuits. “It was a beehive,” she says, of the Victorian-era house where she grew up, a social and political center of the thriving African-American community in Oberlin Village. “People would come 102 | WALTER
to sit on the porch in the chair—and on the coveted swing—to talk about the current events of the day. They would pass by the house just to look at my grandfather’s flowers.” But as Raleigh expanded through the 20th century, commercialization threatened the legacy of her family’s home and of the surrounding freedman’s community, one that had flourished after the Civil War. In the early 1950s, as Cameron
