 He was postmaster of the small village that soon surrounded his land.The property was purchased by the North Carolina Baptist Convention in 1832 and became the first home of Wake Forest College.Wake Forest was part of an envisioned network of plantations across the South, including his second farm in Bolivar, Tennessee, named "Pontine", supposedly for the Pontine Marshes near Rome, or perhaps, for the pons network of the brain, representing his idea of network of plantations.