Raleigh neighborhood name dispute resurfaces over Forest Park, Cameron Park

A North Carolina Business Court order in 2025 kept Raleigh’s Cameron Park name fight alive, identifying the defendant as the Cameron Park Neighborhood Association, doing business as the Forest Park Neighborhood Association, in a dispute over whether the neighborhood’s name change followed its bylaws. On maps and in city records, the area between downtown Raleigh, North Carolina State University and The Village is now Forest Park, but the old name still lingers in community memory and paperwork.

The neighborhood voted in October 2021 to change the name by 240 to 200, a narrow margin that showed how divided residents were over whether to keep the Cameron name or move on from it. After roughly a year of neighborhood input and a remote vote, the community settled on Forest Park in 2022. Raleigh’s planning page now says the Cameron Park Neighborhood Association renamed the neighborhood that year, but the National Register designation information has not been updated to reflect the decision.

That gap between the neighborhood’s chosen name and the paperwork around it helped fuel a lawsuit. Residents who challenged the change argued that the vote was not handled properly under the association’s articles and bylaws. The case was later dropped, but one person involved has said it could be refiled in a way that better reflects the latest information, leaving the dispute unresolved even after the neighborhood moved ahead with the Forest Park name.

At the center of the argument is the Cameron family’s place in Raleigh’s land and slaveholding history. UNC archival material describes the Camerons of Orange and Durham counties and Raleigh as among antebellum North Carolina’s largest landholders and slaveholders. NCpedia says Duncan Cameron’s plantations built wealth through the labor of more than 1,000 people he enslaved across the Southeast, while Duncan Cameron and his son Paul Cameron owned thousands of acres in North Carolina. NCpedia also says Paul Cameron and his siblings owned about 1,000 enslaved people by the time of the Civil War, and Stagville Historic Site notes that more than 900 enslaved people lived on 30,000 acres there in 1860.

The naming fight fits into a broader Raleigh reckoning that already changed another familiar address. The former Cameron Village shopping center, open since 1949, was renamed Village District in 2021 after its own ties to Duncan Cameron came under renewed scrutiny. In Forest Park, the debate now runs through neighborhood identity, legal filings and the question of who gets to decide when a name tied to slavery should stay or go.