Joel Lane House

The Joel Lane House, also called Wakefield, is a restored eighteenth century house museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, built in 1769 and described as the oldest dwelling in Wake County. It takes its name from Joel Lane, a landowner and legislator remembered as the Father of Raleigh and the Father of Wake County, whose plantation manor stood on a small hill above the future city. The house hosted the colony's Council of Safety in 1776 and a session of the state General Assembly in 1781, and in 1792 the legislature bought 1,000 acres of Lane's land to found Raleigh as the capital. Moved a short distance in 1911, it was bought in 1927 by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in the State of North Carolina, which still runs it as a house museum. A 2019 restoration removed 26 layers of paint and returned the house to its original garnet red. The grounds also hold a detached middle-class house built about 1790, a formal city garden and a period herb garden.