Are you an active duty or veteran servicewoman?  American Legion Auxiliary Unit #187 would like to honor you at their second annual Salute to Servicewomen! On Sunday, March 29, the Auxiliary will welcome and honor servicewomen during an afternoon reception at the American Legion Post 187 in Wake Forest. If you currently serve or have served in the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard or National Guard, the Auxiliary wants to hear from you.  Please provide your name, address, email address, phone number, branch of service, and the years you served by email to: unit187alaux@gmail.com. You can also drop in at the Auxiliary’s monthly meeting held at 7 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month at the Post located at 225 E. Holding Avenue, Wake Forest. #

The Wake Forest Historical Museum is pleased to host a traveling exhibit created by the North Carolina State Parks and featuring the reproduced paintings of B.W. Wells. Born in Ohio in 1884, Bertram Whittier Wells came to North Carolina in 1919 to lead the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University. Wells devoted his career to the study and preservation of North Carolina’s natural environment. In 1932, he published The Natural Gardens of North Carolina, his most famous work. In 1950, Wells and his wife Maude Barnes Wells retired to a property on the Neuse River in Wake County known as Rockcliff Farm. Inspired by the idyllic setting, Wells taught himself to paint in the 1970s. Many of his paintings feature North Carolina landscapes like Rock Cliff Farm and Zeagle’s Rock, and Wells became well-known for his interesting painting techniques like using pine needles instead of traditional

The Town of Wake Forest is recruiting Adopt-A-Stream volunteers to help keep the town’s streams healthy. The initiative offers residents the opportunity to become involved in an environmental effort that helps protect our natural resources, therefore improving water quality and stream habitats. Anyone with an interest in healthy streams and the outdoors is invited to participate. To adopt a stream, individuals or groups agree to perform one of the following tasks on a section of stream for one year: water quality monitoring; stream clean-up; stream repair and planting; or drain labeling. Water quality monitors make observations and record what they see in their section of stream. Monitors work from a field data sheet and make monthly observations of algae, insect life, stream bank conditions, appearance of water, odors and stream flow. They also collect data using monitoring kits. Stream clean-up participants agree to organize at least two stream clean-ups in

The Town of Wake Forest is accepting applications for the 2020 Citizens Planning Academy through noon on Monday, March 2. The Citizens Planning Academy (CPA) is designed to educate residents of Wake Forest and its extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) about the Town’s planning processes and practices. CPA topics will emphasize public hearings procedures, legislative and quasi-judicial decisions, the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), transportation planning, historic preservation, architectural review and more. Applications must be completed and submitted online by visiting http://bit.ly/WFCitizensPlanningAcademy. Anyone without access to a computer is invited to complete the application by using a computer kiosk in the lobby of Town Hall, 301 S. Brooks St. Only residents of Wake Forest and the Town’s ETJ are eligible to participate. Academy participants will be expected to attend a total of three training sessions over a six-week period from April through May 2020. This year’s sessions are scheduled on the following Mondays: April

The latest list of legislative and quasi-judicial public hearings before the town board and planning board updated on January 28 by Jennifer Currin, manager of the Development Department, says the large Averette subdivision will be heard in March. This will be the second public hearing. The first was on Oct. 1, when the planning board voted seven to one not to recommend approval of the large project planned for 677 single-family homes and 288 townhouses on two-lane roads. Many neighbors objected to the plan. The town commissioners punted on Oct. 15, continuing questions about the annexation, rezoning and master plan until November. The applicant requested a new hearing in which they would submit revised plans. According to that new schedule, the planning board will also hear the request for the Cottages at Cardinal Hills and an amendment for the Everly subdivision on Stephen Taylor Road in Franklin County in March.

The following is a list of how organizations and individuals are working to assure people in and near Wake Forest have food on their table or have a place to get a meal. ** How you can help this month You can volunteer to help the Northern Community Food Security Team, the Society of St. Andrew and a network of Wake County partners for the 2020 Wake Forest Potato Drop. It happens at 8:50 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 29, in the parking lot of St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church, 520 West Holding Avenue, with a brief welcome and prayer followed by the bagging of a mountain of potatoes. Bagging potatoes – 40,000 pounds that will go to local food banks – is dirty work so wear washable clothing and bring work gloves. Everything should be bagged and all the leftover waste and dirt should be cleaned up by 10:30.

A few seats are still available for the Wake Forest Parks, Recreation & Cultural Resources Department’s Mother-Daughter Tea on Saturday, Feb. 22. This special occasion is scheduled from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at the Joyner Park Community Center, 701 Harris Road. Mothers and daughters (ages 3 and older) throughout Wake Forest are invited to wear their tea dresses, big floppy hats and best gloves – but none is mandatory! Enjoy tea cakes, little scones, bite-sized cookies and tea and enjoy a fun time of tea and bonding. The cost is $20 per couple for Wake Forest residents and $35/couple for non-Wake Forest residents, plus $5 for each additional daughter. To register, visit http://wakeforestnc.recdesk.com/recdeskportal/. #  

Forest Moon Theater will present “Prelude to a Kiss” Friday through Sunday, Feb. 21-23, at the Wake Forest Renaissance Centre, 405 South Brooks Street. Show time Friday and Saturday is 7:30 p.m., while the Sunday show time is 3 p.m. When Peter, a man from a broken family, meets Rita, an insomniac bartender with no faith in the future, only one thing can happen: they fall in love and get married. Then on the evening of their nuptials, an elderly stranger appears at the reception, bearing a kiss for the new bride. In this romantic fantasy, it is a kiss that tests the boundaries of the couple’s love. Advance tickets are $15 plus tax for adults and $13 plus tax for students and seniors. These prices reflect a savings of $3 per adult and student/senior on “day of” admission tickets. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.wakeforestrencen.org/tickets-events<http:// www.wakeforestrencen.org/tickets-events>. Prelude

There were 49 housing permits issued by the Wake Forest Inspections Department in January – 42 for single-family houses, six for townhouses and one for a mobile home. As you read this article, keep in mind that a survey last year by the U.S. Census showed that only 47.6 percent of current North Carolina adults were born in North Carolina. More of us came from somewhere else than were born here. If in your mind that is a bad thing, try to remember that we chose North Carolina. And if you wonder why you seldom see a familiar face in the grocery store, this is the answer. There were also two permits for commercial uses. Windsor Contracting will build a new office for Supremia Dentistry at 1704 South Main Street. The fees were $14,980.72, the new building will have 6,293 square feet, and the improvement value is $1,149,720. Foundation Building

Jonathan Jacobs, the town’s transportation engineer, provided the following information about some of the town’s street projects. *The state Department of Transportation has again pushed back the date to begin constructing the traffic bridge over the CSX tracks on Rogers Road to early 2021 when it was the fall of 2020. This project was put on hold when the 900+ projects with NCDOT were put on hold last year. They re-opened it fairly quickly, but it caused delays with right-of-way and utility relocations, Jacobs said. *What is the status of the connection of South Franklin Street to the bypass? Town staff is currently reviewing construction drawings for this work to be done by Holding Village. Holding Village’s schedule is to have it completed in the next 18 months. Since its completion is required based on number of occupied homes, this is a critical path for them to continue development in